This is a repost of a review I originally wrote back in 2006.
In yet another case of a movie not quite living up to the hype, X-Men: The Last Stand (aka X-Men 3) mostly delivers on the visuals but underperforms on the story.
In X-Men 3, a “cure” has been found for the “mutant gene” dividing the mutants into two camps. One camp, lead by Magneto (Ian McKellen), wants the cure destroyed and the mutants left as-is. The other, lead by Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), wants to take a “live and let live” approach, allowing the mutants themselves decide their own fates.
Whereas the fight scenes between the mutants are awe inspiring, the story is paper thin with major holes and dialogue that’s shoddy/cliché. Characters motivations/actions seem to be driven by moving the plot forward rather than how those characters would normally act.
One would suspect that when a movie costs a reported $200 million to make at least some of that money would be spent on developing an excellent script, but apparently not.
Most frustrating of all, many of the major twists and turns in the movie seem to be driven more by contract negotiations with the actors than by servicing the plot.
This is a repost of a review I wrote back in 2006.
In The Proposition (2005), the brother’s Burns are some of the most wanted criminals on the Australian Outback. When Charlie (Guy Pearce) and Mikey (Richard Wilson) are captured after a shootout, they’re presented with a ghoulish “proposition” by their captor Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone). If Charlie goes out into the wild and kills their older and more vicious brother Arthur (Danny Huston), both he and Mikey will be released. If he refuses or cannot carryout his task, Mikey will be hung on Christmas day.
The Proposition has great cinematography, good acting and a good story. But what hurts the film is a second act that drags on a bit too long. I’m not sure if it’s the script or editing, but The Proposition almost comes to a complete stop during that second act and doesn’t start back up again until the near the end of the movie.
The Australia in The Proposition is something I’m not sure has ever been seen before on film. The stagecoaches are lead by camels and Aborigines have replaced the Indians. And though the brother’s Burns look and act much like outlaws we’ve seen before in other westerns, they speak with Irish accents and follow Irish traditions.
At once this Australia is one of the most violent places on Earth (people die in some of the most inhumane ways) while at the same time people like Captain Stanley are doing their bit for “Queen and Country” to bring a bit of “civilization” to the place. (Even if while at the same time he murders Aborigines while flying the British flag.)
It’s a familiar and alien world at the same time.
The Proposition is worth seeing. It seems to me that writer Nick Cave and director John Hillcoat tried to push the bounds of the western to the next level. And for the most part that’s exactly what they’ve done, though just be prepared for the movie to drag a bit. (8/10)
The third season of one of Halt and Catch Fire is set to debut this Tuesday (8/23) with two episodes beginning at 9(E) on AMC. The series about the personal computer explosion in the early 1980s, then the first attempts at networking and the internet, has consistently been one of the best things on TV even though the ratings for Halt and Catch Fire have been dismal. Just that AMC has so far given us three seasons of this series is a bloody miracle that should be celebrated ever year like Christmas and New Years.
The A Word – Grade: B+
This Sundance Channel series that’s an import from the UK follows an extended Scottish family as they come to terms with the youngest son’s autism diagnosis. The A Word stars Morven Christie (Twenty Twelve) and Lee Ingleby (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World) as the boy’s parents and Christopher Eccleston (Doctor Who) as his grandfather.
I enjoyed this series a great deal, especially the dynamics within the Hughes family. All this felt very real to me. Where I think the series went a little askew for my tastes was that while it was doing all these clever bits with the family story, it was also checking all the typical “boxes” that need to be checked in a family drama. There’s adultery, ‘check’, first sexual experience, ‘check’, the grandpa who at times says inappropriate things…
Still, that’s a minor quibble at best and I genuinely liked The A Word from start to finish.
Comics
Garth Ennis Presents: Battle Classics Vol 2: FIGHTING MANN
The collected comic Garth Ennis Presents: Battle Classics Vol 2: FIGHTING MANN is set to be released this Tuesday (8/23). The first series simply titled Garth Ennis’ – Battle Classics is a collection of comics writer Ennis’ favorite comic stories from the British 1970s comic series called Battle Picture Weekly. And it was wonderful, though decades years old those stories stand the test of time and were gripping and disturbing and amazing all at once. This second edition collects two new stories, one set during the Vietnam War and the other WWII and is something I’ve been dying to read ever since it was announced ages ago.
Movies
The Nice Guys (2016) – Grade: B+
I was really excited when I first heard about Shane Black’s movie The Nice Guys. In the last few years Black has written and directed Iron Man 3 and it was recently announced that he’ll be writing and directing the upcoming Doc Savage movie too. But he’s also written one of the best buddy-cop movies of all time, Lethal Weapon and wrote and directed one of my favorite movies of all time too Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
So to say that I was interested in The Nice Guys would be an understatement. The minute it was available on digital I bought and watched it. And while there are some very good moments in The Nice Guys, I’m not sure the movie holds together enough as a whole to be considered as good as anything Black’s done in the last few years.
Set in a late 1970s smog shrouded LA, The Nice Guys stars Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling as Jackson Healy and Holland March respectively. Healy is a bruiser who makes his living giving lumps to those who deserve it and March is an ex-cop private detective who’s decent enough at his job when he can stay away from the booze. Healy is hired to give March a beating in order to chase him off of a case of a missing girl, but afterwards ends up hiring him to look for the same girl he originally was there to warn him off when Healy finds himself in over his head.
What follows are Healy and March chasing down leads, March getting hilariously drunk a few times and the two along with March’s daughter Holly (Angourie Rice) getting in and out of various underworld scrapes in hysterical fashion.
I think what threw me with The Nice Guys is that I never quite understood the plot of the movie — or maybe it was because elements of the plot were so odd that things never really made sense. Part of the film deals with the porn industry and a film in particular that threatens to bring down Detroit and the auto industry. But hiding the evidence in a porno seemed so far fetched and unbelievable it stretched the bounds a bit of the movie for me.
Even if the evidence were in a porno who would anyone ever believe it since it’s in a porno!?
Still, other than the case Healy and March are working on The Nice Guys is pretty great. I loved Crows and Gosling’s characters, especially Gosling who’s playing a version of a detective I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. He doesn’t play the role in a stereotypical “heroic” detective way. He screams like a baby when he’s hurt and cries, and when he’s drunk makes big mistakes.
And time and time again Healy and March’s bad luck keeps them out of trouble, onto the next clue and stumbling towards success.
Reportedly The Nice Guys was originally set to be the pilot of a proposed TV series before Black reworked the script in order for it to be a feature film and I can see that. The movie essentially ends with the setup to the next story which I’d love to see.
The Arrival trailer
“We need to make sure they understand the difference between a weapon and a tool.”
This is a repost of a review I originally wrote back in 2005.
To call Kiss Kiss Bang Bang “brilliant” would be an understatement. To put it simply enough, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is one of the finest movies to be released in quite some time and one of the funniest as well.
In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, bumbling crook Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) is shot running from a toy store burglary, leaving his partner behind worse for wear in an ally. Harry only escapes police pursuit by ducking into a random door, which happens to be hosting a movie audition. Harry aces the audition, about a crook that leaves his wounded partner behind, by really getting into character, crying and screaming. The producers think he’s using “Method Acting” to get into character but in fact he’s simply reacting to that night’s events.
Harry finds himself out in L.A. to audition for studio executives and meets “Gay” Perry (Val Kilmer), a private detective hired to coach Harry on his upcoming audition who, as his name/nick-name so quaintly says, happens to be gay.
Harry accompanies Perry on a case observing a cabin in the woods where the two stumble across the murder of a woman locked in a trunk of a car driven into a lake. It quickly becomes apparent that the whole thing’s a set-up meant to pin the body on Harry and Perry. And when the sister of a woman Harry met at a party whom Harry knew as a child in Indiana turns up dead via suicide, everything starts to make sense. Or does it?
In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, character Harry narrates the movie at times literally stopping the action in its tracks, skipping around in time and scene spouting lines like, “How ’bout it, filmgoer? Have you solved the case of the – the dead people in L.A.?” At other times, Harry breaks the fourth wall commenting on the movie as it plays out on the screen. Harry remarks that he hates tacked on Hollywood endings where people who should be dead from their wounds turn up alive at the end of the movie, and that why doesn’t everyone who died in the movie come back? With that, the door of Harry’s room opens and every character killed during the preceding two hours walks in as if they were at a family reunion. Then, to cap it all off, an actor wearing a very bad Abe Lincoln costume walks through the door, then Elvis…
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang feels as if the movie Lethal Weapon were written by someone who had worked on the television series Arrested Development – it has that sort of irrelevance for the genre as well as letting the audience in on the joke. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang isn’t a send-up of the genre like a Naked Gun or Airplane; it’s simply a take on it.
In fact, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was written and directed by Shane Black, writer and creator of the Lethal Weapon franchise. In the movie, Black takes the characters and concepts he first introduced nearly twenty years, dissects and twists them into something new, funny, unique and brilliant. (10/10)
I watched the fifth Mission Impossible movie, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, this weekend. It was a good movie, I’d give it a B. It does suffer from some dicey story moments where things happen that feel fake but need to be there to keep the story moving — but overall this wasn’t too bad.
I’d rate the Mission Impossible movies best to worst:
Mission Impossible (1996)
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)
Mission: Impossible III (2006)
Mission: Impossible II (2000)
It seems like the structure of these movies is to come up with an overall story and hang this off of three or four big action scenes. Which for Rogue Nation and it’s $680 million + box office seems to be working well.
In X-Men 3, a “cure” has been found for the “mutant gene” dividing the mutants into two camps. One camp, lead by Magneto (Ian McKellen), wants the cure destroyed and the mutants left as-is. The other, lead by Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), wants to take a “live and let live” approach, allowing the mutants themselves decide their own fates.
This Sundance Channel series that’s an import from the UK follows an extended Scottish family as they come to terms with the youngest son’s autism diagnosis. The A Word stars Morven Christie (Twenty Twelve) and Lee Ingleby (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World) as the boy’s parents and Christopher Eccleston (Doctor Who) as his grandfather.
What follows are Healy and March chasing down leads, March getting hilariously drunk a few times and the two along with March’s daughter Holly (Angourie Rice) getting in and out of various underworld scrapes in hysterical fashion.
I watched the fifth Mission Impossible movie, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, this weekend. It was a good movie, I’d give it a B. It does suffer from some dicey story moments where things happen that feel fake but need to be there to keep the story moving — but overall this wasn’t too bad.