The Nice Guys (2016): written by Shane Black and Anthony Bagarozzi; directed by Shane Black; starring Russell Crowe (Jackson), Ryan Gosling (Holland), Angourie Rice (Holly), Matt Bomer (John Boy), Margaret Qualley (Amelia Kuttner), and Kim Basinger (Judith Kuttner): Writer (Lethal Weapon) and occasional director (Iron Man 3) Shane Black really loves buddy movies. And movies set in Los Angeles. Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling are the unlikely duo here as hired muscle and private eye, teaming up to solve a missing persons case tied somehow into the American auto industry. Did I mention it's 1977? It's 1977.
Black gives Gosling's character a much less foul-mouthed version of Bruce Willis' daughter in The Last Boy Scout and a much less gay partner than Kiss Kiss Bang Bang's Val Kilmer in Russell Crowe. Crowe, unshaven and lumpy, looks like he's auditioning to be a young John Goodman. And he's great! The movie is violent, quippy fun, a throwback to buddy movies that were actually violent, quippy fun. Recommended.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005): written by Brett Halliday and Shane Black; directed by Shane Black; starring Robert Downey Jr. (Harry), Val Kilmer (Perry), Michelle Monaghan (Harmony), and Corbin Bernsen (Dexter): Violent, quippy, twisty fun from Shane 'Iron Man 3' Black. Val Kilmer is surprisingly light and funny as the LA Private Eye everyone calls 'Gay Perry.' Robert Downey, Jr. is also light and funny as a thief who stumbles into a case involving suicide, murder, and missing persons. And Michelle Monaghan makes for a great gal pal who may also be a femme fatale. The movie's 'chapters' all use the titles of works by Raymond Chandler, first famous chronicler of LA PI's. Like most great PI stories, it's narrated (by Downey's character). Unlike most of them, people keep correcting the narrator's grammar. Terrific cult fun. Highly recommended.
The Hateful Eight (2015): written and directed by Quentin Tarantino; starring Samuel L. Jackson (Major Warren), Kurt Russell (John Ruth), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Daisy Domergue), Walton Goggins (Chris Mannix), Tim Roth (Oswaldo Mobray), Michael Madsen (Joe Gage), Channing Tatum (Jody), and Bruce Dern (General Smithers): I'm glad I didn't see the Director's Cut 'Roadhouse' version of The Hateful Eight because this version is already too long and that one is 25 minutes longer.
On the bright side, there's a great 95-minute movie buried inside The Hateful Eight's repetitive bloat. On the dark side, The Hateful Eight's repetitive bloat. Tarantino's homage to John Carpenter's The Thing is very much in love with Tarantino's dialogue because, well, it's written and directed and at points narrated by Quentin Tarantino. If nothing else, it suggests that the on-screen love affair between Tarantino and the 'N' word that first bloomed in Reservoir Dogs has only grown more impassioned over the intervening two decades and change.
The actors are all fine. The action, when it comes, has the power to shock with both surprise and grue. The landscape is white and menacing. The characters never shut up. And a recurring bit with a door that won't close may have seemed funny on paper, but it surely does wear out its welcome quick. I'd have liked more from Bruce Dern and Michael Madsen and a whole lot less from Walton Goggins, an actor I like but not particularly in this part. Tarantino's threat to stop making movies after this one... yeah, I'm fine with that. Because no one's ever going to edit down a Tarantino movie to a length that works. It's a lot more likely that his next project would be a four-hour remake of The Car entitled N*gger Car. Not recommended.
Hidden Figures (2016): adapted by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi from the non-fiction book by Margot Lee Shetterly; directed by Theodore Melfi; starring Taraji P. Henson (Katherine Johnson/Goble), Octavia Spencer (Dorothy Vaughan), Janelle Monae (Mary Jackson), Kevin Costner (Al Harrison), Kirsten Dunst (Vivian Mitchell), Jim Parsons (Paul Stafford), and Glen Powell (John Glenn): How does Taraji P. Henson not get a nomination for this? Oscar noms for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer) and Best Adapted Screenplay have been given to this fine docudrama. Does it play fast and loose with the facts, especially in compressing 15 years worth of events into two years? Well, yeah. So, too, so many other docudramas and biopics.
But Hidden Figures presents the Space Race as a thrilling exercise in math, engineering, and race relations. How great is that? The acting is superb, from Kevin Costner's (composite character) team leader of NASA Langley's mathematicians striving to put an American in space and in orbit to the aforementioned Henson as pioneering NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, the African-American mathematician who helped put Americans into orbit and on the Moon. Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae also do terrific work as an African-American computer-team leader and engineer, respectively. It's a movie about the thrill of intelligence and lofty aspirations, dominated by women. Highly recommended.
Last Action Hero: written by Shane Black, David Arnott, Zak Penn, and Adam Leff; directed by John McTiernan; starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (Jack Slater/ Arnold Schwarzenegger), Austin O'Brien (Danny Madigan), F. Murray Abraham (John Practice), Art Carney (Favourite Second Cousin Frank), Charles Dance (Benedict), Tom Noonan (Ripper/ Tom Noonan), Robert Prosky (Nick the Projectionist), Anthony Quinn (Tony Vivaldi), Mercedes Ruehl (Irene Madigan), Ian McKellan (Death), and Bridgette Wilson (Whitney Slater/Meredith Caprice) (1993):
Much-maligned action-satire when it came out, hilarious Hollywood satire now (and then). Last Action Hero's main problem was that it bit the hand that fed it. If nothing else, it seems to show that action-movie fans are too sensitive to fully support a movie that savages action movies and their fans, albeit with a certain amount of affection.
Last Action Hero may be uneven and even ragged at times (some of that seems to come from rewrites and reshoots ordered by a nervous studio), but it's really funny when it's on. And its Mad-magazine approach to crowded humour in foreground and background rewards careful viewing and careful listening. Some of the physical gags are great slapstick or maybe techno-slapstick, as so many of them involve the destruction of cars in hilarious ways, sometimes as throwaway background gags.
The cast is thick with cameos, but much of the heavy lifting is done by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Dance as the villain, and Austin O'Brien as the kid who loves action movies. They're all great, though O'Brien takes awhile to grow on one. That some of the movie's more developed gags involve Hamlet (a parody that seems to be poking Mel Gibson's 'action-Hamlet' of a couple years earlier) and Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal may be one indicator of why it bombed. The world inside the movie universe ends up being as complicated and metafictional as Toontown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and almost as fun at times. Whiskers, where the Hell were you? Recommended.
A Most Wanted Man: adapted from the John LeCarre novel by Andrew Bovell and Stephen Cornwell; directed by Anton Corbijn; starring Grigoriy Dobrygin (Issa Karpov), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Gunther Bachmann), Rachel McAdams (Annabel Richter), Willem Dafoe (Tommy Brue), and Robin Wright (Martha Sullivan) (2014): Mournful spy procedural follows a covert German anti-terrorist agency led by Philip Seymour Hoffman in his second-last screen role.
Hoffman's small group is after a seemingly charitable Muslim leader in present-day Hamburg, Germany who may have as-yet-unproved ties to Al Qaeda. The movie looks great -- worn and lived in -- and the acting is all high-end, though Rachel McAdams struggles a bit with her on-again, off-again German accent. As this is based on a John LeCarre novel, you can expect betrayal and ruthless competition among the various intelligence organizations involved. Hoffman is superb as a man who's seen too much but nonetheless goes on because he genuinely wants to protect people. But whether or not they need to be protected from terrorists or from the anti-terrorist governmental agencies or from both -- well, there's the problem. Recommended.
The Man Who Could Work Miracles: written by H.G. Wells and Lajos Biro; directed by Lothar Mendes and Alexander Korda; starring Roland Young (Fotheringay), Ralph Richardson (Colonel Winstanley), Ernest Thesiger (Maydig), Joan Gardner (Ada), Sophie Stewart (Maggie), and George Zucco (The Butler) (1937): Whimsical, comedic fantasy turns into a socialist polemic at the end. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
An argument about humanity's potential among three gods (or perhaps angels) leads one of them (The Giver of Power, who likes humanity) to give an English store clerk the power to do pretty much anything except control human minds. What follows is a deceptively light-hearted story of escalating stakes, as the clerk initially uses his powers for minor tricks before seeking out others for advice on what do -- and then finally deciding to make his own decisions. I suppose it's the thinking person's Bruce Almighty.
H.G. Wells adapts his own short story. The performances are all fine, especially those of Roland Young as newly super-powered Fotheringay and Ralph Richardson in heavy make-up as a blustery, upper-class twit of a Colonel. Fotheringay's epiphanic speech toward the end anticipates the concluding speech of Chaplin in The Great Dictator, among others. The visual effects are extremely well done for the time, especially a great bit involving the miraculous destruction of a mansion and subsequent erection of a much larger palace. Recommended.
Brazil: written by Charles McKeown, Terry Gilliam, and Tom Stoppard; directed by Terry Gilliam; starring Jonathan Pryce (Sam Lowry), Robert De Niro (Harry Tuttle), Katherine Helmond (Ida Lowry), Ian Holm (Mr. Kurtzmann), Bob Hoskins (Spoor), Michael Palin (Jack Lint), and Kim Griest (Jill Layton) (1985): What's left to say about this scabrous, bleak, and jaunty sideways look into a dystopian future that looks a lot like the past? I don't know. Don't watch the studio's recut 94-minute version, for sure, with its bizarre happy ending.
How about the role of Christmas in this dystopia? Everyone's celebrating it throughout the movie, funny enough given the paranoid, joyless state of the State. Secret policemen carol in the basement of the Ministry of Information Retrieval (which is to say, the Torture Ministry). Everyone's got stacks of gifts on their desks to hand out to anyone who comes in. Everybody's shopping. Keep consuming, and put on a happy face, even if you need plastic surgery to do so.
This is Gilliam's masterpiece, filled with great performances by almost everyone (Kim Griest as the love interest is a bit weak, but she also doesn't have a lot to do). Jonathan Pryce, with his Stan Laurel face, makes a terrific bureaucratic Everyman, his daydreams making him also Walter Mitty in Oceania. Robert De Niro is amazingly loose and funny as a renegade duct repairman (there are a lot of ducts and tubes and pipes in the world of Brazil).
The whole enterprise gives us a burned out, crummy future in which the incessant terrorist bombings are really just another control method of the State. Weird motivational posters appear everywhere in the background. The mined-out countryside hides behind endless billboards covered with scenes of verdant nature. Pryce's daydreams give him a way out, but his fears of the State invade even them from time to time. Is there any escape from this particular Inferno? Highly recommended.
Iron Man Three: written by Drew Pearce and Shane Black; based on comic-book material by Stan Lee, Don Heck, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Larry Leiber, Warren Ellis and Adi Granov; directed by Shane Black; starring Robert Downey Jr. (Tony Stark), Gwyneth Paltrow (Pepper Potts), Don Cheadle (James Rhodes), Guy Pearce (Aldrich Killian) and Ben Kingsley (The Mandarin) (2013): Much better than the woeful second Iron Man movie, mainly thanks to co-writer/director Shane Black, of Die Hard fame. The whole movie seems to have been constructed around the problem of having Iron Man armor and Robert Downey Jr., unarmored, appear on camera as much as possible. The solution really boils down to Iron Robot and His Amazing Controller, Tony Stark. The movie is probably the campiest big-budget superhero movie since Batman & Robin, though here the lines are a lot funnier. Lightly recommended.
Klute: written by Andy and David E. Lewis; directed by Alan J. Pakula; starring Jane Fonda (Bree Daniels), Donald Sutherland (John Klute), Charles Cioffi (Peter Cable), and Roy Scheider (Frank Ligourin) (1971): Melancholy character study/film noir about a private detective (Sutherland's Klute) and the prostitute (Fonda's Bree) who may know something about the disappearance of Klute's businessman friend. Fonda deservedly won a Best Actress Oscar for her work here. Sutherland is also very good as the stoic, laconic Klute. Alan J. Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis construct a film world occasionally dominated by looming shadows and a sort of run-down crumminess out on the streets of New York. Recommended.
