Films Make A Post: When the kidding stops...the killing starts!

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014): The second and fortunately last of the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man films – again directed by Marc Webb – doubles down on most of the flaws of the first film. So there’s a screenplay made out of many bits and pieces that very often go nowhere and bloat the film to a run-time of nearly two and a half hours for no good reason whatsoever, character motivations that egregiously follow the needs of the script, surprisingly mediocre special effects for a film of this type and budget, so many nagging details that either just don’t work or don’t work in the places where the film puts them, too many villains for the thin script or Webb’s personality-deprived direction to handle, and so on and so forth, until the whole thing turns into a confused slog.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014): Doug Liman’s adaptation of Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s brilliantly titled “All You Need Is Kill” is good enough to satisfy even the needs of a Tom Cruise hater like me. It does help that the old placenta eater is teamed up with the generally and specifically lovely Emily Blunt, as well as that the film early on uses Cruise’s slimy image for its own needs for a bit. Liman also gets a decent performance out of Cruise, even managing to put a lid on the actor’s often distracting vanity (cinematically useless heroic poses usually being to Cruise what vaseline on the camera lens was to aging Joan Crawford).

The script uses the good old time loop (not invented by Groundhog Day, by the way, as much as I like all parts of that film not Andie McDowell) structure for a fun, fast, in the early proceedings darkly funny military SF adventure of highest entertainment value. The old SF reader in me wants to decry the lack of actual substance, and my politics the film’s inability to even think of any way to solve problems but violence. However, that’s really asking of what at its core is a clever and fun adventure movie with CGI monsters to be something it isn’t trying to do while ignoring it is rather brilliant at what it does do.


Atomica (2017): Dagen Merrill’s – nominally SF – thriller is certainly well meant: it is pleasantly serious in tone, obviously believes in character as the basis for plot and clearly tries very hard. Unfortunately, it’s just not very effective at being a thriller. There are few actual surprises, and while the writing certainly is serious and character-based, it is also just not very interesting and never becomes gripping or exciting in any way, shape, or form. Visually, the film suffers from pretty bland warehouse-style sets, and direction that never chooses anything but the most obvious way to shoot any given scene. It’s certainly not a bad film, but I find it hard to find much more than theoretical praise for it either.

Three Films Make A Post: Quick on the Draw - And He Always 'Gets' His Man!

Soldiers of Fortune (2012): Despite a perfectly great idiotic action movie plot idea about rich people getting their kicks in a warzone, and an absurdly overqualified cast including Christian Slater, Sean Bean, Ving Rhames, Dominic Monaghan, James Cromwell and Colm Meaney, this is not the joyful return of Cannon-size action cinema dumbness. Instead, this is one of those action films that thinks it is a good idea to keep all its better action sequences for the final twenty minutes or so, instead trusting on bad characterisation and boring back and forth to keep its audience awake. Director Maxim Korostyshevsky does at least make the film look slick but he never really goes all out on the kind of crazy a film needs if it wants to sell Slater as a former special forces operative or Meaney as his evil nemesis. It’s all much too blandly realized for how stupid it is, making neither that part of its audience happy that might have gone in expecting a serious action film, nor those (like me) expecting entertaining crap.

The Bishop Murder Case (1930): The only Philo Vance adaptation starring Basil Rathbone (quite a few years before he became the iconic Holmes with the worst of all possible Watsons) falls into the difficult time period when most Hollywood filmmaking was still very much transitioning into sound film. Consequently, half of the actors involved mug like your worst idea of silent movie acting, others shout as if everyone around them were deaf, while only one third of the cast – thankfully including most of the major players – has already assumed the more workable idea of screenacting that would dominate screens for the next fifteen, twenty years. That’s a liveable enough quota, but unfortunately, directors David Burton and Nick Grinde fall into that early – and quite avoidable – talkie style of stiff, unimaginative visuals full of characters set up into stiff, unnatural tableaus, declaiming much of what they have to say visibly into the direction of the camera. The mystery at the film’s core is actually pretty okay if you like this sort of thing but thanks to the visual blandness and the general sluggishness of the affair, using the word “entertaining” to describe the film would be rather too much unless you are a much more patient soul than I am.

I’d say it might still be interesting for historical reasons, but then there are early talkies in the genre that are actually fun too watch, so why not watch one of them instead?

The Legend of Barney Thomson (2015): Robert Carlyle’s debut as a feature film director – he does take on the title role too – is rather fun if you like Douglas Lindsay’s source novel (and sequels), like our humour on the macabre side, or just want to hear people say all those dulcet sounding curses the Scottish are known and loved for. It also happens to be rather funny, showing off Emma Thompson and Carlyle himself in particularly good form. The film does a lot of clever stuff with the quotidian grotesque (Scottish gothic?) and uses stereotypes in a way that’s actually funny instead of lazy.

3 Films Make A Post: The Marsupials

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009): Fox continues to crap all over one of my favorite parts of pop culture. On the bright side, while Brett Ratner's unbelievably bad and disrespectful (of the first two movies, of the comics, his audience and possibly humanity at large) third X-Men film nearly had me in tears of pain, at least half of this masterpiece of unintentional humor produces tears of laughter. The other half unfortunately is the pure teeth-gnashing annoyance that results when you let robots who have been fed a diet of all the wrong action film clichés and are now eagerly ticking the action film ticky boxes one by one write your film, instead of actual human beings.

 

I Sell The Dead (2007): This comedy about the misadventures of the two body snatchers played by Larry Fessenden and Dominic "I was in Lord of the Rings and Lost" Monaghan who specialize in graverobbing the undead started out a mite slow, but soon won me over through a difficult to achieve mix of playfulness, genre homages and humor I for once did find funny. It also works as a love letter to all poor proletarian bastards who ever had to pay their rent through work done for madmen and mad scientists, making this some kind of low class horror fan feelgood movie, as if one of those British social realist filmmakers had suddenly developed a sense of humor and met a member of the working class he's always going on about.

The only thing I didn't like about it was Ron Perlman's oirish accent, if mostly for reminding me of the dreadful Mutant Chronicles.

 

The Hills Run Red (2009): The basic premise of an obsessed film student and entourage trying to track down a copy or at least the production traces of the single, infamous and lost horror film of a disappeared filmmaker and landing in a backwoods horror movie has the possibility to make for an intriguing, even intelligent film. Too bad that director Dave Parker just trots out one bad horror movie cliché after the other without ever doing anything interesting with any of them. Instead, we get groan-worthy characterization, mostly dreadful acting and the sort of script that bases its view of the world and psychology exclusively on other movies that themselves didn't have much of a clue about anything to begin with. Adding some Scream-like laziness hidden under the veil of "irony" just means adding insult to injury.

 

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