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Reviews
The Bricklayer (2023)
A disappointing waste of time
The point of an action movie is to have good action sequences. There's always a leggy girl (Nina Dobrev is super pretty) and a damaged, tough exterior but soft hearted hero (Aaron Eckhart is craggy but needs a shave for most of this). There's likely to be a double cross too, but I'm not sure I'll be able to get that far in this movie. The fight sequences are brain meltingly poor, with super rapid jump cutting from cameras that have no logical position and are frequently at different heights and angles so the spaces are not clearly defined and you can't actually follow what's happening. It's the worst hyper smash cut editing I've ever seen. The director also seems to think that smashing people into the scenery and breaking a spit ton of sugar glass (along with a hugely OTT score) constitutes a fight scene. There is also the problem of the hero's shifting abilities. In a gang fight our boy is John WIck levels of awesome, taking out 15-20 goons with one punch or judo move as well as disarming them and popping the mags out of their guns (because the bad guys haven't chambered a round). But when it's one on one the hero suddenly becomes Ed Norton in Fight Club, pummeled for 3-4 minutes before just managing to overcome the goon, even when it's one of the goons he just took out with one punch 5 minutes ago in a bar fight. A disappointing waste of time.
Shame on me I watched it to the end. Further thoughts: Mr Eckhardt leans fully into the 21st century macho whisper, where he almost never speaks in a normal speaking voice (I believe this was pioneered by Keifer Sutherland in 24 but it might have been an animated Batman thing first) so you kind of need the subtitles given the volume of the SFX and score throughout. Oh, and Director Harlin hired 150-200 pretty girls in skimpy dresses to dance in the 2 minute nightclub scene and 12 extras to act like 2 different protesting crowds in the rest of the movie. You will get dumber if you watch this movie.
If You Were the Last (2023)
Imaginative, charming, sexy, romantic
Zoe Chao is electric and Anthony Mackie is studly in this sizzling dance movie set mainly in space. Expressive set design, including an emoting 8-bit computer screen, brilliant other-worldly use of light and colour, and a dash of home-made charm make a surprisingly robust aesthetic that supports the dancing conversations between the two leads. If you're wondering whether a romance movie has a love scene, it certainly does (why else get Anthony Mackie, who can do with his pecs what it took Rock Hudson a whole torso?), one that goes to great length and to a few surprising places. Also, featuring the fabulous Natalie Morales as a super hot state governor who rues the day she chose politics over dance class.
Dead for a Dollar (2022)
Directionless, Misguided
The last line in this movie is given, weariedly, by balding bounty hunter Christoph Waltz, who has pointedly refused alcohol during the film: "I need a drink." Truer words were never spoken from a movie screen. After however many minutes of having your eyeballs blasted sepia by the uncanny palette, you too will crave something to numb the brain. The few high points of this movie are few. There is, and this is amazing, a bull-whip fight, but it is edited like a fight for Lee Majors Six Million Dollar man, eg beefy man-cake waves whip around, sound effect, quick cut to REACTION, ouchie. Most of the main action sequence consists of shots of Waltz jogging back and forth across the screen with a fully cocked rifle, in what has already been established with many a flourishing drone shot to be a pueblo with one street, while occasionally stuntmen on horses rush out from behind corners and fling themselves off horses to various sound effects and practical blood squibs. Meanwhile a murderous Rachel Brosnahan is busy making it all about her when really it's all about her hair and wee girl, how do you make all those little plaits look like a lace doily without a full time hair assistant. Even if it is a wig, her hair is doing a lot of lifting and pulling her face into this slightly sour expression, like she's having to hold a lot back. The final twist in the script when Willem (Bill) Dafoe doesn't want his fun spoiled, must have been breathtaking on the page, and his final lines are delivered with all of his professional grace and class, but the gulf between the rest of this cinematic dross and what it ought to have been had the action and dialogue been given a bit more polish and direction. I mean, it's an action movie and the main hench guy, the extravagantly moustachioed bully in the bull whip fight, doesn't even get his own comeuppance death shot, he's just in a line of bad guys who go down in a hail of gunfire from (counts) 1 rifle, 2 pistols and a derringer with one shot and two bullets. This does result in one of the few highlights of the film though, Diane Villegas as the Hotel Proprietor finishing off the bandidos by pumping bullets from her 45 into their twitching bodies and calling them Cabrones.
Panhandle (2022)
Sweet spot
This show is aiming for a very niche audience: our, 'detective with a burden' is battier than Monk, drunker than House, smarter than Sherlock, and doesn't seem to have a gun, although the charming Leslie Ann Warren playing his mother loves guns and is seen cleaning and oiling a vast collection of antique muskets and rifles which she uses to deter the advances of our tec's giant pet alligator. Our grounded sidekick with their own life is a single mom who is also the cop in charge of collecting enough speeding tickets to balance the city budget. A previous reviewer took issue with the scene where Bellwether (of course that's his name, but most folks call him Bell) smokes Toad but it's a bravura bit, and the show spent a bunch of FX money animating the horns and flies and stuff. As for the niche bit, it's written with the headiest post-peak-tv dialogue imaginable - "Do you prefer hefeweizen or muscadet with oysters?" is used as a distraction - and the metatext is the application of therapeutic practices in the damaged lives of our subjects, and how they are both going to make each other better people. Catch it now, there's no way in hell anything this far up my alley is going to be renewed.
Magnezja (2020)
Dark
A bleak story about unpleasant and irredeemable people doing horrible things. I am adding this review because this film is way better than the two previous 1 star reviews. The look and feel of the movie fully evokes the Polish/USSR border in the 1920s,: despair, poverty, corruption, racism, mud and dirt. The conjoined twins at the centre of the story about dueling crime gangs add another layer of unease too. Shocking and disturbing throughout.
Good Girls: Frere Jacques (2020)
They should....
They should have called this show Breaking Sad, amirite?
Get Shorty (2017)
Perfect hate watch
Chris O'Dowd, a very tall Irishman, has beautiful soft puppy eyes that reach out through the screen and demand sympathy. The character he plays, Miles, is a skeezy scumbag who is lying to himself and everyone around him about his true motivations. The only person in his orbit he hasn't completely so far is his 13 year old daughter, and he keeps trying to mess up her life too. I am halfway through season 2 and am continuing to watch because I want someone to stab Miles 27 times with a rusty screwdriver and then for him to die of rabies from a skunk bite. And then the blow torch thing.
Counterpart (2017)
Stellar performances outstrip muddled plot
This show had an excellent conceit, parallel worlds except there's a door, but lost it's way by trying to delve into the hows and whys of the portal instead of just leaving it as pure McGuffin. The idea that we ("the people") need to have our narratives tidy and closed is the greatest obstacle to innovative storytelling, and meant that instead of letting the freak flag fly this story had to have neat narrative arcs, all within a framework of placing the nuclear family unit at the peak of the aspirational pyramid, even more important than wealth or notoriety or recognition or ability, family comes first, because they're who broke you. Like every investigation of doubling since Cronenberg's Twins there is tons of meat here for the leads to play with and in their doubled roles, and state of the art digital wizardry whenever someone met their other, but the plotting broke down terribly, starting with the trivial investigation of the political treatment of the two worlds as though it was post-war Berlin and they were operating Checkpoint Charlie and swapping samizdat or rock and roll records instead of interrogating the far greater commercial forces shaping modern political realities. Still, JK Simmons was reliably excellent and Olivia Williams (when she came out of season one's coma) got several strong moments. On the bright side, since the writers were so keen to leave no loose ends or even frays this will remain a solid 20 hour binge for those keen to experience a parallel world spy sci fi with JK Simmons
The Tick (2016)
Spoon! Highest number of spoons!
Wonderful story-telling, please make another season. It is sad that season 2 has been out a month or so and is getting no love in the media. Hollywood is so supersaturated with superheroes that the big blue bug hasn't raised a single eyebrow, while Shazam is either the best or worst superhero movie this month. Anyway, Season 2 is an emotional reset, from the Destiny is calling believe in yourself arc in the first season to an interrogation of the bonds of family, friendship, species and state involved in the creation of a hero, or a hero class. All the characters from season 1 except the Terror get a chance at a heroic trajectory, and we get some well-observed new characters like Supernumerary (who seems to be a blend of 2 characters from The Venture Brothers) and Edge-Lord: the entire cast demand more screen time and eat up every chance they get. Peter Serafinowicz as the Tick makes not just brave choices, but stupendous choices, such as choosing Love over Fear or prechewing purple starfish.
Accident Man (2018)
Nice fights
Modern punch 'em up movies often have terrible fight scenes, but this film's fight choreographer (apparently Tim Man) has clearly watched a bunch of classic Hong Kong fights. The punches look as hard and heavy as early Sammo Hung, the in-camera editing is as crisp as Yuen Woo-Ping's, and the overall stunt work is up there with Jackie Chan. This is high praise indeed, but as it turns out Tim Man has experience on Ong-Bak and the Mad Max reboot. There's no shaky-cam, the space for each fight is coherent and readable, overall it's a feast for action buffs. The plot was as good as one of those classic HK movies too: Revenge? Revenge! Kick punch.