Blade Runner On a Train

The Girl On the Train (2016): adapted by Erin Cressida Wilson from the novel by Paula Hawkins; directed by Tate Taylor; starring Emily Blunt (Rachel), Haley Bennett (Megan), Rebecca Ferguson (Anna), Justin Theroux (Tom), Luke Evans (Scott), and Alison Janney (Detective Riley): 

Based on a best-selling psychological thriller, The Girl On the Train is neither thrilling nor psychologically believable. Unpleasant pretty people do unpleasant things. Someone gets murdered. Whodunnit? Who cares! Emily Blunt's portrayal of an alcoholic probably merits inclusion in the Hall of Fame for Unintentional Funny Bad Performances by Otherwise Capable Actors. Not recommended.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017): based on characters created by Philip K. Dick; written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green; directed by Denis Villeneuve; starring Ryan Gosling (K), Dave Bautista (Sapper), Robin Wright (Lieutenant Joshi), Ana de Armas (Joi), Edward James Olmos (Gaff), Sylvia Hoeks (Luv), Jared Leto (Niander Wallace), and Harrison Ford (Rick Deckard): 

A slow-burn fever dream of a movie, and a worthy successor to the cult-favourite original. Ryan Gosling is pitch-perfect, while the visuals are marvelous. It doesn't quite equal the original because Jared Leto as the new 'Tyrell' is terrible in that specifically Jared Leto Hambone Way. More operatic scenery chewing from Rutger Hauer, or someone like Rutger Hauer, would have helped give the film more drama. Nonetheless, it's a haunting work at points, one that stays in the memory. Highly recommended.

Spoiler-heavy thoughts on Blade Runner 2049

VIVA LAS VEGAS

1) Ryan Gosling's character is called 'K' and then 'Joe', which seems pretty clearly a nod to Franz Kafka's THE TRIAL . But I also wonder if K was chosen for Sir Kay, adoptive brother of King Arthur, with Deckard and Rachel's child being the Arthur figure for the replicants.

2) My meta counter-reading of Jared Leto's character goes like this: he's a parody of Ridley Scott and his belief in the loopy, overcomplicated scenario in which Deckard is actually a replicant in the original movie.

For one, BR 2049 does not answer the question 'Is Deckard a replicant?'

Instead, Jared Leto's character, when he meets Deckard, hypothesizes a ridiculously complicated plot in which Deckard is a replicant who was programmed to fall in love with Rachael and procreate with her, thus creating the first natural-birth replicant who can also reproduce naturally. 

Deckard's look of 'WTF?' during this scene can be read as commentary on Harrison Ford's oft-stated disdain for Scott's belief that Deckard is a replicant. 

And this plot makes even less sense than previous 'Deckard is a replicant' explanations, given that Tyrell could simply, you know, have had the Deckard replicant have sex with Rachael rather than programming it to believe it's a Blade Runner and send it on a mission to catch other replicants (all with the cooperation of the police and gov't) so that in the course of events it would meet Rachael, fall in love with her, have its life saved by her, and run away with her.

So if Jared Leto (whose character is blind and sees with the aid of several flying cameras deployed around him at all times, basically making him the Director of his own film crew) is Ridley Scott, Jared Leto's character makes way more sense and is actually a great piece of commentary on Ridley Scott.

Hitchcock, Affleck, and Ford

Lifeboat (1944): written by John Steinbeck and Jo Swerling; directed by Alfred Hitchcock; starring Tallulah Bankhead (Connie), William Bendix (Gus), Walter Slezak (Willi), Mary Anderson (Alice), John Hodiak (John), Henry Hull (Rittenhouse), Heather Angel (Mrs. Higley), Hume Cronyn (Stanley), and Canada Lee (Joe): Hitchcock's 'Bottle Show' movie remains a surprisingly prickly delight to this day, with terrific performances and tense direction. The survivors of a U-Boat attack on a freighter are stuck in a life boat with a survivor from the U-Boat, also sunk during the exchange. The set-up is a lot like the earlier Stagecoach, if you couldn't get off the titular stagecoach without drowning.

Various class issues play out, as do issues of bigotry and vengeance. People die. The dialogue crackles, especially when spoken by Tallulah Bankhead in one of her rare film appearances. She's a quick-talking female reporter who could be played by Rosalind Russell a la His Girl Friday. Lifeboat defies current Hollywood stereotypes and plot points by not killing the black guy first: nope, Lifeboat kills a baby first. A baby! And the black guy turns out to have the warm family life that all the white characters lack! Good old Hitch. If only we had more like him now. Highly recommended.

Presumed Innocent (1990): adapted by Alan Pakula and Frank Pierson from the novel by Scott Turow; starring Harrison Ford (Rusty Sabich), Brian Dennehy (Horgan), Raul Julia (Sandy), Bonnie Bedelia (Barbara Sabich), Paul Winfield (Judge Larren Lyttle), Greta Scacchi (Carolyn Polhemus), John Spencer (Det. Lipranzer), and Bradley Whitford (Kemp): Veteran screenwriter Alan Pakula's turn as a director wowed people in 1990 with this courtroom thriller. The heavyweight list of actors helps a lot, with stand-out turns from Raul Julia, Paul Winfield, and Brian Dennehy. Harrison Ford is fine, though his haircut is weirdly ridiculous.

Presumed Innocent succeeds or fails on the basis of how well it plays 'Whodunnit?' with the audience. Accused of murdering a colleague he'd had an affair with (Greta Scacchi), Harrison Ford's Chicago-based Assistant District Attorney has to survive a wealth of circumstantial evidence. Or did he do it? Scacchi's ADA Carolyn Polhemus is about as distilled a version of a femme fatale/career-bitch as one ever gets, while Bonnie Bedelia gets stuck with the role of the weepy, wronged wife of Ford's ADA.

The movie holds up pretty well, though it would hold up better if the film-makers had kept the novel's coda, which contextualizes the ending in a way that makes logical sense and adds depth to certain performances. Of course, the movie leaves everything in that leads to this coda, so you can just pretend the coda is there once you discover what it is. Recommended. 

The Accountant (2016): written by Bill Dubuque; directed by Gavin O'Connor; starring Ben Affleck (Christian Wolff), Anna Kendrick (Dana Cummings), J.K. Simmons (Ray King), Jon Bernthal (Brax), Cynthia Addai-Robinson (Agent Medina), and John Lithgow (Blackburn): Ben Affleck plays an autistic accountant who's also a super-assassin philanthropist. Basically, he's BatRainman. The Accountant is a competent, entertaining thriller. Don't ask more of it. Lightly recommended.

Sports and Spectacle

42: Written and directed by Brian Helgeland; starring Chadwick Boseman (Jackie Robinson), Harrison Ford (Branch Rickey), Nicole Beharie (Rachel Robinson), Lucas Black (Pee Wee Reese), Alan Tudyk (Ben Chapman) and Hamish Linklater (Ralph Branca) (2013): Enjoyable biopic of Jackie Robinson -- the player who broke major league baseball's colour barrier in 1947 -- stays mostly faithful to the facts. Other than a bit of swearing, 42 could have been made in the early 1960's by Stanley Kramer.

Chadwick Boseman is fine as Robinson, selected by Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey to become the first African-American major leaguer of the modern era in part because his character suggested that he could take the stress that would result without beating the crap out of somebody or breaking down himself. And Harrison Ford probably deserved an Oscar Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work as Rickey -- he's very good in a movie for the first time in a long time. Alan Tudyk also shines as the virulently racist manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, and Nicole Beharie is also solid as Jackie's wife. Recommended.

Monsters University: written by Dan Scanlon, Daniel Gerson, and Robert L. Baird; directed by Dan Scanlon; starring the voices of Billy Crystal (Mike). John Goodman (Sullivan), and Helen Mirren (Dean Hardscrabble) (2013):

What's apparently the first prequel from Pixar (to Monsters, Inc.) is a fairly breezy, light-hearted affair that isn't the equal of Up or Wall.E in terms of emotion of inventiveness, but is nonetheless a much more enjoyable and smoothly engineered movie than Brave or any of the Cars movies. A relative lack of engagement in what happens to anyone led me to a number of moments in which I spent more time scrutinizing the animation than engaged with the characters, but the animation is terrific, so as an aesthetic experience, Monsters University doesn't disappoint. Why Disney doesn't have Pixar do a Marvel movie is beyond me. Recommended.



Thor: based on characters and situations created by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Walt Simonson; written by J. Michael Straczynski, Mark Protosevich, Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz, and Don Payne; directed by Kenneth Branagh; starring Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Natalie Portman (Jane Foster), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Anthony Hopkins (Odin), Stellan Skarsgard (Erik Selvig) and Colm Feore (Laufey) (2011):

One thing we inadvertantly discover during the first Marvel Thor movie is that the movie's Asgardian gods/super-aliens/whatever have apparently never read any of Earth's mythology about them. If they had, the plot of this film would be about 20 minutes long. Oh, well. On TV, Thor plays like a handsomely mounted made-for-TV movie, the movie style of Marvel Studios movies being that there's almost no style at all. The actors are all quite likeable, Odin is as dopey here as he is in the comic books (and as prone to going into regenerative comas at the worst possible moments), and the whole thing goes down smoothly. Lightly recommended.

White House Down: written by James Vanderbilt; directed by Roland Emmerich; starring Channing Tatum (John Cale), Jamie Foxx (President Sawyer), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Agent Finnerty), Richard Jenkins (Speaker Raphelson), James Woods (Walker) and Lance Reddick (General Caulfield) (2013):

Holy Moley, is this movie 40 minutes too much of an action movie. There are more false climaxes than a dozen porn movies. The dominant structure is Die Hard; scenes and shots are synthesized from more films than I can think of. I bet you never thought you'd see an homage to Nick Cage's emergency flag-waving in Michael Bay's The Rock. Well, you will. Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx do a lot of work to sell this, and it's certainly interesting, if only as a look at some of our current action-movie obsessions and their larger real-world implications. Also, tucked in amongst the 2+ hours of sturm-und-drang is a really bizarre use of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Lightly recommended.

Cowboys & Idiots

Cowboys & Aliens, written by a committee, directed by the guy who directed Iron Man, starring James Bond, Indiana Jones and the hot woman from House, M.D. and Tron: Legacy (2011): Intermittently enjoyable though repeatedly frustrating. With that title, it should be a dizzy romp. It isn't. It's really sort of a slog, strangely self-serious and numbingly dumb. It was written by a committee, and as with a lot of committee end-product, the good seems to have been thrown out in favour of the bad and the mediocre.

Harrison Ford's performance could have earned the movie the title Dead Man Walking: it's one of Ford's worst late-career sleepwalks. Though Harrison Ford would be a very angry sleepwalker based on his performance here: he pretty much alternates between looking constipated and looking like he wants to kill everyone on the set, possibly because they're on his lawn.

Giant alien leprechauns come to the American Old West in the 1870's to mine gold and kidnap people for insidious experiments aimed at determining how best to eradicate humanity. Daniel Craig plays a stagecoach robber who's lost his memory and now has an alien wristwatch/energy weapon attached to his wrist. The aliens kidnap a bunch of townsfolk. Craig and angry-granpa rancher Ford lead a ragtag group against the aliens, aided by an alien from a different race who's currently cosplaying as Olivia Wilde.

Thankfully for humanity, these aliens are even dumber than the aliens in Skyline. Also, they belong to the gigantic sub-category of advanced interstellar races who are also nudists (see: Skyline, E.T. , The War of the Worlds, Independence Day, ad infinitum, ad nauseum) who despite possessing devastating energy weapons prefer to get it on like a man and beat you down with their hands and bodyslam you in the Wild Wild West! Not recommended.