St. Whatever

 

If you wish to, you might watch an appropriate flick. I probably will, before the day is over.

Hey Campers! It's COLD Out There!

"It's like deja vu all over again." - Yogi Berra

You can have sportsball. I know what I'm watching today.

Deadpool 2

If you were thinking of seeing this, it's everything you were expecting. Everything.

Maybe a hair less satisfying than the original, but more than makes up for it with laugh-out-loud funny. By the yard. The too-spot-on running commentary by RR/Deadpool throughout the film is outright hilarious.

My rating:
Two thumbs way up.

The 15:17 To Paris

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it." - Ferris Bueller

Clint Eastwood's latest film is a docu-drama, wherein three childhood friends on a once-in-a-lifetime tour of Europe were in the right place, at the right time, to beat the crap out of a jihadi bastard, and save the lives of hundreds of strangers on the eponymous train. And they did.

As a story, it's great stuff, both enhanced and somewhat hindered by the heroes in question (certified as such by awards of the French Legion of Honor, and various US medals and awards as well, awarded to all three, two of whom were active-duty US military members on leave) playing themselves.

As a dramatic piece of art, it's fair to middling. Taking nothing away from the enormity of the actions of the central figures (for crying out loud, dude charged an AK-47 leveled at his chest, and won), it's a five-minute episode, crammed into an hour and a half of film.

And to be fair to the guys in question, and Eastwood, that's probably all you could do with it. If you knew the story before you saw it, WYSIWYG. The five minutes surrounding the incident is the whole movie. Trying to gin up a lifelong backstory is a herculean effort, and in this case, simply beyond the abilities of even a director like Clint, which is to say it probably couldn't be done by anyone, unless you wanted to Hollywoodize everything, and make up everything.

Which is exactly what he didn't do, and didn't want to do. For which, many thanks.

And proof of Eastwood's power in Hollywood, there are flagrant and repetitive Christian religious themes and references, and in a good light. That this is so jarring in any movie not released by Mel Gibson or the Sherwood Baptist Church of Albany, GA is a measure of how depraved the medium has become.

If you're inclined, go see this, if only to piss off Leftards.
And to thoroughly enjoy the moments when the flick's Mohammed Imawannajihad gets pistol-whipped and butt-stroked repeatedly in the face with his own weapons.
(The minute someone makes a gif loop of that, it will replace the Moldylocks Punch as my new favorite endless clip.)
But this isn't Flags Of Our Fathers, American Sniper, or even To Hell And Back.

What it is, is a vivid reminder that, just like in Eastwood's last pic, Sully, your entire life may come down to one fleeting moment, and be forever after summed up and remembered for what you did once, in 208 seconds, when opportunity met preparation and the willingness to act.

There are worse ways to spend $10 and an hour and a half, and few better reminders that life happens, come-as-you-are, and there aren't any warning notices.
 

Sometimes, even the French remember they're as much Lafayette as they are DeGaulle.

And on that day, nous étions tous français.

Thor: Ragnarok

While we're talking movies, (because hey, it's the weekend) if you're any shade of Avengers fan, go see this one.
I caught it last Monday, but didn't get around to doing the review until now.

When I see a movie (particularly in this utterly atrocious year of dungball films) that's packed (which in itself is a minor miracle) at dinnertime on a weekday, and the audience is laughing out loud at the funny parts - and there are a lot in this film - and sitting in rapt attention at the exciting parts, the makers of the flick have nailed the effort.

The third Thor film does that handily, continuing the Marvel Group as the world-record holders at most movies made without a clinker, and handily surpassing Peter Jackson's seven-flick streak with LOTR/The Hobbit. (Even if Marvel had to rotate directors through like a minor league pitching coach.)

It helps that a comic book is essentially a movie storyboard, leaving you with only the necessity of filing in the script and finding $200M or so to make your movie, but so far, Marvel's got the hang of it, while Warner Bros. DC version continue the hit-and-miss (mostly miss) attempts stretching back to the 1970s.

This one really is a lot of fun, plays out the expanding Marvelverse saga nicely, and consistently entertains, which is a claim so few movies make this year as to be noteworthy.
And as I noted yesterday with MotOE, AFAIK, no one involved with this one is under accusation or indictment for an egregious lack of humanity or criminal predations on women or children, which in Hollywood these days should probably become a new award category.

So once again, if you're looking for a fun flick worth your hard-earned dough, this one fits the bill.

My rating:
It's Marvelous.
And like Thor himself, the folks who wielded this one are truly worthy.

Murder On The Orient Express (2017)

As a rule, sequels are a bad idea. Like someone doing an impression of someone else, they steal a little of the magic from those who do a much better job in real life, and effortlessly, and the truly awful ones make you wish for a handy weapon. And there are few folks even remotely talented enough to justify any attempt to pull one off.

Going back to the dawn of motion pictures, I can count the worthy re-makes on my fingers*, while the god-awful atrocious ones would need an abacus and reams of paper.
And a handy weapon.

This movie is the exception that proves that rule.

The 1974 version was directed by film legend Sidney Lumet, and received six nominations for Academy Awards, winning one for Ingrid Bergman for Best Supporting Actress. (It was only up against Godfather II and Chinatown, nominated for 11 Oscars apiece that year.)

If you never saw the earlier version, you'll like this one.

If you watched the earlier version (as I did, a couple of days ago, for comparison) you'll like this one.

Today's premiere is produced by Ridley Scott, directed by Kenneth Branagh and with himself in the starring role as Hercule Poirot.
The 1974 version had scads of talented name stars with oodles of Oscars and nominations.
The 2017 version has scads of talented name stars with oodles of Oscars and nominations.
There are times when that really matters. This flick is absolutely one of those times.
Daisy Ridley without a light saber in this one bodes well for her future after the Star Wars sequels have all finally played out.

This time out, more time is spent setting up Poirot's backstory, which sacrifices some time in the earlier version given to character and plot development, but Branagh's Poirot is eminently watchable throughout. The plot is therefore a bit more truncated, and spiced up a bit dramatically and physically this time around, but nonetheless making for a satisfying experience, and hitting, eventually, all the plot points necessary. I actually wish they'd simply added the scenes they didn't in order to do this, but it wasn't my $100M to spend, or my flick to edit, so you get out of the theatre maybe fifteen minutes faster.

If you don't know anything about either version, I ain't telling you whodunit here.
The reveal at the end is everything you'd want, and this version adds a touching epilogue to scratch an itch and pay off an earlier dialogue scriptease. (And if that isn't a word, I have dibs on it from here on out.) They even managed to set up the possible sequel, which one might even hope for, provided it's another Scott/Branagh vehicle as well.

It's one of the (sadly few) decent movies to go see this year, doubly so in the current climate of well-earned Hollywood-bashing. And AFAIK, no one in this flick is currently under indictment or accusation by the current (and overdue) Committee On Purging Rapists and Molesters From Hollywood.

So if you need something to do this weekend while you're continuing your boycott of the National Felony League, plunk your money down and see what movies used to be like when people told a good story to earn your ticket price.

My rating: Four stars.
Catch This Ride. It's First Class all the way to the end of the line.

Oscar bait? Hell, yes, it is, especially in this utterly dreadful year of mostly craptastic dungheaps fit mainly for burning.
Come nomination time, I expect you'll see this one again.





*(Off the top of my head, The Three Musketeers with Oliver Reed and Michael York was as good or better than the Gene Kelly version - and the 1990s Disney attempt sucked poop; Ben Hur with Heston surpassed the silent attempt, The Four Feathers with Beau Bridges and Jane Seymour beat the pants off any versions before or since; Beatty's Heaven Can Wait was much better than Waiting For Mr. Jordan; and Spielberg's Always was superior to A Guy Named Joe. Note the talent involved, and see if you can figure out the key to getting over the bad sequel hurdle. That you'd struggle to find six more major examples in the 51,000 or so movies the MPAA has stuck numbers on since only 1934 proves my point about "counting them on my fingers" and the low-percentage odds in attempting a sequel, especially of an already-good movie.)

Flick Pick: Treasure Island

An apropos flashback:

Treasure Island
(Turner, 1990)

Ted Turner has certainly pulled some bonehead cinematic moves in his day. (Colorizing Casablanca, for instance.) But he's more than made up for that sort of general jackassery with the creation of no small number of excellent productions. Treasure Island is one of the best of those, made for US cable, and released in theatres abroad. There have been several film versions of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic pirate adventure yarn. (Nineteen, in fact, and nine teleplays, covering either the exact story, or derivatives of it. Including by the Muppets.) Skip all the others. This one is bar none the best yardstick by which to judge every other attempt, and leaves the other versions in the dust. Opening with Oliver Reed coming ashore as Billy Bones, and moving to Christopher Lee as Blind Pew, it only gets better as it goes. Christian Bale, then but 16, stars as Jim Hawkins, and the story and dialogue hew faithfully to Stevenson's work. And midway through the piece, Charlton Heston, aged 67 years when this was filmed and with a full and legendary career behind him, swaggers onscreen as the best, truest, and most swashbuckling Long John Silver ever to play the role, and carries the tale and the role magnificently from then until the closing scenes of the film. Shot mostly on location in Cornwall England, and on board the recreated Bounty II, originally made by MGM for Marlon Brando's 1962 version of that tale, the film is well-directed by Heston's son Fraser, with a wonderful Celtic-influenced seagoing score by Paddy Moloney, and played by the Chieftains. It thus satisfies historical purists, delights the ear, and engages the mind with this telling of a longtime favorite tale.
One of Turner's other boneheaded moves (or even Warner Bros.', take your pic) is that a lot of the Turner Productions catalog hasn't been made available for years. This one was only released in September of 2011. I jumped on it, lest it disappear again. So if you fancy this tale, and like it well-told, by all means get a copy of this flick before it's gone for another 20 years. If you don't, somebody's liable to hand you a Black Spot, and we're not sure what happens to you after that.

UPDATE: Somehow I missed putting this one up on September the 19th the first time I posted it. Sink me. Error rectified. And it's still the best version ever filmed.

  

And when the sun sinks below the yardarm tonight, there'll be no points guessin' what's goin' into the panopticon herabouts, in 70-inch UHD glory.

Pirates Of The Caribbean V: Dead Men Tell No Tales

Trailer #1:

(no spoilers)

BLUF: It's about time.

After the descending spiral of craptacity of II, then the truly abysmal III, and the shamefully unfulfilled promise of IV (squandering Ian McShane as Blackbeard was a mortal sin, hear me God), Disney/Bruckheimer finally found someone who could write a screenplay worthy of the original, and POTC V: DMTNT is it.

It pays off numerous leads from the prior three mostly forgettable placeholders, forges new ground of its own, comes with any number of rousing set pieces and flashbacks, and ties the entire series thus far into a wonderfully satisfying and well-tied ribbon bow.

It's not the best movie ever made, but it's worth seeing first-run if you're a fan of the series, and seeing at all if you just like a good flick. If it fails anywhere, it's that despite its running length of 2:33:00, I would have been happier with more (any way you'd care to parse that word) of the talented and truly delightful Kaya Scodelario.

Beyond that, with a budget of $230M, and the talents of Oscar winners Geoffrey Rush and Javier Bardem, it's hard to screw up any movie so talent-heavy with a decent script.
It is, and they didn't.
If anything, they burned out a lot of fan love from the fantastic and nigh-untoppable original film with the prior three mediocre sequels, and this flick is still financially sucking wind after a pack-leading (but still disappointing) box office last weekend.

Ignore that: this one is another pirate ghost story for which it's worth shelling out your doubloons, or at least a matinee rate of a few pieces of eight.

If they can keep writing them this good going forward, and they manage to trim the budget back down a bit closer to reality, they could pull this series back from the pit, and get it back on course.

And I'd probably get to see more of Kaya Scodelario.

That'd definitely be a two-fer.

My rating: Two hooks up! Set sail on this nearly three hour tour. It's buried treasure, for the taking.

Movie Review: Hacksaw Ridge

 

In case anyone was wondering, I did go to the movies yesterday, as promised, due to the ongoing suspense of what turned into yesterday's epic liberal-spanking tsunami.

I saw Hacksaw Ridge.

And I offer the following in-depth review.

Gibson just outdid Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan with a tale from reality instead of fiction, and outdid Eastwood's Flags Of Our Fathers/Letters From Iwo Jima bookends with a story more hopeful than either of his.

This movie, screened at Cannes, received a ten-minute standing ovation when it concluded. The French may not know much, but they know great cinema when it smacks them in the face.

My take?
Best Picture nominee.
Best Director nominee.

Get thee hence, and see this.
Now.

That is all.


Update: Well, whadya know? The Academy pulled their heads out, and I nailed it.
Don't expect it to win either award, but wonders never cease to amaze me.

13 Hours

This is a damned good flick.

The last time you saw something done this well was Blackhawk Down by Ridley Scott (funny how most American military misadventures always seem to have a Clinton's sticky fingerprints somewhere around the body count).

Michael Bay avoids going completely over the top with effects, and restrains himself with making what is simply an outstanding men-under-fire study. Shot in Malta, which provides a great stand-in for Libya without any of the ISIS problems, it feels right and looks right. And former Seal/associate producer Harry Humphries kept things from going too Hollywood.

Bay doesn't pull any punches, but he also didn't trot out and club you to death with shots of HopeyDopey nodding off during his intel briefing, or Shrillary saying "F--- 'em!" in the WH Sit Room as our guys died, but he doesn't have to: characters noting that the Pentagon had the same video they had in real time, JSOC ninjas sitting on the ground in Italy, and American F-16s sitting idle on the ramp told a thousand words of that story with single pictures.

You won't see this one up for any Oscars next year, because it damns all the wrong sorts of people, and upholds all the right virtues.
But this 2 hours and 20 minutes of cinema will do as much to put the final nail into Shrillary's presidential aspirations as the multi-count indictments will.

Even aside from that, you should go see this movie for its own sake, because it's that good, and not just to rub Hollywood's nose in what it should have been doing onscreen for the last 20 years, by supporting movies that set liberal jackholes' teeth on edge. That'll just be icing on the cake.
Buying a ticket to see this one is like getting a coupon for one free hippie punch.

Flick Pick: Ace Ventura, Pet Detective

Ace Ventura, Pet Detective
(Warner Bros., 1994)

The first of three films that made 1994 The Year Jim Carrey Owned (one of the others featured yesterday), Carrey went big-time in this breakout hit that made him a comedy superstar, managed to make Sean Young look unattractive (no small achievement at the time), and raked in a paltry $100M for a modest $15M in budget. This is how actors get callbacks. Still works for me, especially today, when I could really use a laugh.






Today marks the 366th Flick Pick, concluding my selection of a year's worth of Movies You Should Watch. (I threw in a bone for future leap years.) It is 100% perfectly correct in describing my 366 favorite films, in no order. Though in no small number, both the general public and the Motion Picture Academy all seem to agree. If you found some new ones you liked, I'm happy to have helped.
If you disagree with any or all of them, the beauty of ice cream is that you get to pick your own flavors.
Rock on with your bad selves with my blessing, because it's still (mostly) a free country.
Future movie reviews will be of more current fare, in the increasingly desert-like environment that feature films have become, assuming I can find one either worth my nickel and yours, or worth the effort to thoroughly skewer to save you a buck.
Feel free to click the Movie Of the Day label to find them all. Maybe in late December/early January I'll post the entire list for reference purposes.
Now I'll have to go back to finding something else to write about every day, which was what made it a great blog-writing discipline to do, but the payoff now is I can watch anything else I like, which wasn't always the case given my time constraints over the past year.

Motion pictures are a uniquely American art form, and IMHO, one of the greatest and most incredible forms of both pure entertainment and cultural expression in human history. Whether you go to see them for high-brow or low-brow reasons, or both, the important thing is that you see them. I don't care if you see them at the Cineplex, on your living room big screen, iPad, smartphone, or have them streamed into your optic nerve, as long as you aren't bootlegging pirated copies from China. (In which latter case, I hope your thieving retinas rot out, and you get dick cancer. Just saying.) People both good and evil work long and hard to make them for you, and the only thanks that's really necessary is that you paid for a ticket, and if it was worth it, maybe told a friend. My small and very ancillary part thus far in the industry has nonetheless managed to feed me and keep a roof over my head for a notable span of my life, due entirely to the kindness of strangers who still enjoy sitting in a room full of other people and seeing what we've created. For that support, and your continued interest in the medium, my sincere thanks.

See you at the theatre, seven rows up from the back row, center.

Flick Pick: The Mask

The Mask
(New Line, 1994)

One of three films that put Jim Carrey over the top, took screwball comedy to new levels, and introduced the world to Cameron Diaz as an instant starlet. The effects were enough to get an Oscar nomination, Carrey's comedic sense was the equal of the effects, the retro soundtrack was marvelous, and the box office was unbelievable. The film is a cult classic as well as children's favorite, not least of which because it has more in common with Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry than it does with pure adult drama. It works in no small part because everyone in the movie, including Carrey himself as Stanley Ipkiss, plays straight-man to the lead character throughout the movie, all of them to perfection.

Flick Pick: The Barefoot Executive

The Barefoot Executive
(Disney, 1971)

Nothing brilliant here, just a harmless and enjoyable little flick from simpler days, with Kurt Russell almost before he was shaving, a lot of fine character actors, and a promising new kid named John Ritter. It was a gentle reminder that the media moguls on their best day could be replaced by chimps with no one the wiser, and even they know it. It's even funnier and more ironic now, with Disney/ABC being one of the largest media conglomerates on the planet, rather than just a little family business in Burbank, as they were when this was made. Funnier still when you realize that ABC once had the opportunity to buy Disney outright in the 1960s, and turned it down because they didn't think it had much future. So instead, 30 years later, Disney bought ABC. "Hollywood genius" is almost always an oxymoron, something this flick illustrates sweetly.

Flick Pick: Ice Station Zebra

Ice Station Zebra
(MGM, 1968)

Reportedly one of Howard Hughes' favorite movies in his sunset years, and definitely one of mine anytime. One of a number of adaptations of great Alistair MacLean's novels into movies, and a superb bookend for his Guns Of Navaronne, this is great cold war spy/thriller. Directed by John Sturges, it's the utter antithesis of a chick flick: there's not a single woman in anywhere in the story or cast. The lack goes unnoticed in such a movie as this. I would advise anyone to watch it, if only to have something to compare it to when Warner Bros. undertakes what will likely be a totally botched remake, now somewhere in development. Accept no substitutes for the genuine article.

Flick Pick: Murder by Death

Murder By Death
(Columbia, 1976)

Hit comedy mystery from the mind of Neil Simon, beautifully sending up the most beloved fictional detectives of literature and film via a cast of absolute maestros. This one hits on all cylinders, and the characterizations are perfection both as written, and as enacted. I never get tired of watching this film, and it's just as good now as it was nearly 40 years ago.

Flick Pick: Red River

Red River
(United Artists, 1948)

Howard Hawks classic western with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, and one of the best westerns of all time. Wayne's performance is noteworthy, alongside Clift in his first major film role (though The Search premiered earlier in 1948, Red River had been shot in 1946, when film rookie Clift was then 26). The score by Dimitri Tiomkin was every bit as epic as the vistas in the movie, and the film had all the classic Western elements: cattle drives, a stampede, gunfights, Indian attacks, wagon trains, and vast expanses of the wide open American West. The only thing it lacks at all is being filmed in a panoramic format, and in color. But for a post-war film, and any kind of Western, it has everything needed and more.

Flick Pick: Enemy Of The State

Enemy Of The State
(Touchstone, 1998)

The late director Tony Scott was many things, including given to flash over substance, substituting jump-cut action for dialogue or plot development, and much more, but he unquestionably had an eye for arresting imagery, and he was always, in his movies, about ten minutes ahead of the world. Enemy Of The State demonstrates all of that in spades, and more. The awkward buddy-pairing of Gene Hackman and Will Smith, played dramatically straight, was casting genius. The number of credited and uncredited actors appearing in supporting roles is a pretty good Who's Who list in itself. But the story, which embarrassed the NSA at the time, turned out to be uncomfortably paralleled by real-life developments 15 years later, with revelations of the NSA spying on the Congress, the press, and every single citizen, and Tony Scott took the world there back in 1998. And with visual flash, jump-cut action, and an unsuspected amount of prescient substance, all wrapped up in tightly wound flick.

Flick Pick: The Sands Of Iwo Jima

The Sands Of Iwo Jima
(Republic, 1949)

One of Republic's top-tier premiere productions, notable at the time for including a lot of actual combat footage from the battles described, and given a fairly comprehensive amount of cooperation from the post-war USMC, this one is an excellent tribute to those portrayed, and was obviously no small part in showcasing the lifelong cinematic power of John Wayne. This movie was the first time in his career he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar (though not winning this time); the only other time he was so honored was 20 years later for True Grit, when he did win. For someone falsely painted by critics for being a two-dimensional one-trick pony his whole career, this movie stands as one of many obvious counter-examples, showing the considerable range and depth of his talent, such that his fellow actors could easily recognize what many of those critics never would. A great performance, in a great genre, and a great movie by any standard. 

Flick Pick: PCU

PCU
(20th Cent. Fox, 1994)

Everything on my list can't be superlative artistic masterpieces. Some of them are just good entertainment. This cute little effort was just that. It's not a perfect movie, and was a box office flop, but it's absolutely loads of fun, and if anything, way too light on the whole PC problem, which did nothing but metastasize society-wide ever since. Locking a faculty dinner inside a room with Starland Vocal Band's Afternoon Delight on endless autoplay alone was wry genius. A little bit more polish and better writing could have made this a worthy successor to movies like Animal House, but as it is it still manages to make lists for the Top Ten College Movies without breaking a sweat, and continues to be at least a personal guilty pleasure movie, if not so much a universal one.

Flick Pick: The Matrix

The Matrix
(Warner Bros., 1999)

A smorgasbord of cinema styles rolled into one of the great dystopian sci fi films ever made, certainly the best of its era, and all sprung from the mind and vision of the brothers Wachowski. With explosive Western action, Hong Kong martial arts, and bleeding edge cinema, this one swept critical praise, worldwide box office, and technical Oscars to land on top of the heap as great fun, utter cool, and visually iconic at the same time, and made the Wachowskis cinematic rock stars. Spawning an unfortunate slew of sequels that missed the mark set by this first one, this film is nevertheless worth watching just for itself, with all the lead actors, particularly Hugo Weaving as the chief villain, giving career high-water performances. Won Oscars for Best Film Editing, Visual Effects, Sound Mixing, and Sound Editing, and earned a megablockbuster $463M overall. And it's cool as hell.