Thursday, February 23, 2017
Thursday, February 16, 2017
Sunday, February 12, 2017
Penis Jokes
Sacha Baron Cohen takes aim at the British class system and action movies, roughly in that order. He's a welfare yob from infamously depressed Grimsby (a real city); Mark Strong is his long-vanished brother, a James Bond-type superspy. They team up to save the world from a nefarious scheme that will reach fruition at the (never-named because of copyright reasons) World Cup final. You know this is an unrealistic movie because England is playing in that final!
The grotesque comes hard and fast (that's what she said!) and without modulation or regret. Director Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk, Now You See Me) doesn't have the chops to accentuate the comedy at all times, which means that stretches of the movie play like the action movies it is parodying. Cohen manages a weird, almost Rabelaisian sweetness at times -- Nobby is a knob and a yob, but he loves his family and he's capable of self-sacrifice. Mark Strong plays off Cohen well as a straight man; more importantly, he's cinematically plausible as a superspy action hero. He's like a more self-aware Jason Statham.
I laughed a lot, so I guess I liked it. The elephant scene alone should really have nabbed this movie a Make-up Oscar nomination. Recommended.
Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016): written by Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone; directed by Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone; starring Andy Samberg (Conner), Jorma Taccone (Owen), Akiva Schaffer (Lawrence), Sarah Silverman (Paula), and Tim Meadows (Harry): The Lonely Island boys make a pop mockumentary (mock popumentary?) about a gormless pop-rap group and its even more gormless frontman (Andy Samberg).
As with Lonely Island's song and video parodies, it's too sweet to be blistering satire. In the Classics game, they'd probably call this Horatian. Nonetheless, while certain things wear out their welcome, there are a lot of laughs here, many of them riffing on real-world occurrences that include U2 releasing an album on all the iPhones in the world and a lot of real-world songs and videos by people that include Macklemore and One Direction.
It's no This is Spinal Tap -- what is? -- but it's a mostly fun 90 minutes with a lot of laugh-out loud moments in the songs and the scenes. There's also something refreshingly weird in a scene involving Samberg reluctantly signing a fan's penis. Recommended.
Friday, February 10, 2017
Buddies in Bad Times
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.
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.
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.
Friday, February 3, 2017
Monday, January 30, 2017
Man Vs. Hidden Hobo High-Rise
Man Vs. is a fairly enjoyable, straight-to-cable movie with an affable protagonist in Chris Diamantopoulos (a recurring bit on Silicon Valley as a the guy who 'invented' Internet Radio definitely shows that he has acting range). The revelation of the menace is a bit of a letdown, as these things go, though the climax manages to throw in a gratifying extra twist. But the movie does do a nice job of slow-burning the tension in its first 70 minutes or so. Recommended.
The film-makers turn the luridness of the colour up to 11 in an homage to exploitation movies of the 1970's and 1980's. The gore is often crazy, but framed in such ridiculous, parodic circumstances as to remove much of its shock value. I enjoyed this a lot -- it's a far better and more faithful nod to exploitation cinema that the two movies by Tarantino and Rodriguez that made up the bulk of Grindhouse. Rutger Hauer acts the hell out of his Hobo. He's utterly invested. Recommended.
A great cast of character actors helps elevate the movie, as do Claudia Christian's killer stripper, some extremely good creature effects, and a narrative that's lean and compact. Science-fiction historians can note the movie's extreme similarity to both Hal Clement's classic sf novel Needle and Michael Shea's 1980 novella "The Autopsy." Twin Peaks fans may note that MacLachlan's performance here seems like a practice run for FBI Agent Dale Cooper. Highly recommended.
It's not necessarily a fun two hours of cinema (though I did have fun), but it's a good one. The decision to stylistically evoke the era of the mid-1970's when High-Rise was first published extends to the apparent period of the film as well: it sure looks like 1975 in London, England. Well, except for Tom Hiddleston, who looks jarringly contemporary. I wonder if this was intentional.
In an experimental apartment building/ community, things fall apart. The decision to show the viewer the end of the movie in the first scenes of the film may be High-Rise's only misstep. Or maybe not. Certainly, all the loose threads and thwarted attempts at closure, sympathy, and exposition suggest a movie and movie-makers uninterested in a conventional thriller format. What you're given instead is a sort of comic, occasionally Grand Guignol comic inferno that often plays like an intentional parody of its most obvious literary forebear, William Golding's humourless allegory of Original Sin, The Lord of the Flies.
Hiddleston is excellent as our protagonist, and the rest of the supporting cast is also fine. There's something horrifyingly funny in a 1970's way about Luke Evans' (literally) shaggy character. Sienna Miller and Elizabeth Moss also do good work as a couple of Hiddleston's neighbours. There's even a recurring parking lot gag that gradually goes from Seinfeld to grindhouse. Given the times we live in, High-Rise doesn't seem particularly dated -- it's a horror-allegory with staying power. Highly recommended.
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