Mini Reviews: 6/18/14

Dead Fall: 2012 crime drama directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky and starring Eric Bana, Olivia Wilde, Charlie Hunnam, Kate Mara, Sissy Spacek, and Kris Kristofferson.  Addison (Bana) and Liza (Wilde) are siblings on the lam after a casino heist, and when their car crashes and a run-in with a state trooper goes sour they decide to split up and meet in Canada.  So Addison heads off into the frozen woods, and Liza is picked up hitchhiking by Jay (Hunnam), who has just been released from prison.  Sparks fly, and suddenly Liza’s creepy attachment to her brother/father figure is thrown into question.  Meanwhile, state troopers are closing in on both siblings, and a confrontation looms.

                  It was decent.  I was drawn to it for the Hunnam and the Spacek and the Mara of it all, and they did not disappoint.  I still don’t get why everyone is so nuts about Olivia Wilde, but she was fine.  There were no major twists, a few unbelievable but forgivable turns, it didn’t annoy me, and dear god Charlie Hunnam.  Just damn.

Iron Man:  2008 action movie directed by Jon Favreau and starring Robert Downey, Jr., Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Shaun Toub.  Tony Stark, the charismatic head of the defense contractor Stark Industries, is in Afghanistan showing off some fun new missiles when he’s kidnapped by the terrorist group Ten Rings.  He’s injured in the process, and a fellow prisoner grafts an electromagnet to Stark’s chest to keep shrapnel shards from penetrating his heart.  When he’s well enough, Ten Rings demand he build weapons for them.  Instead he creates this fancy arc reactor for his heart and a suit of robotic armor, escapes, and wrecks all their shit.  When he returns home he decides to shift his company away from the arms trade, much to his partner’s chagrin.  He retires to his personal workshop and improves the suit, just in time to fight another battle with Ten Rings, but now he has an angry board of trustees and the U.S. government on his ass.  Being an entrepreneurial genius playboy must be so tiring, right?

                  It’s pretty cute; a serviceable action movie with good exposition and impressive action sequences.  The chemistry between RDJ and Paltrow rings true and the character of Tony Stark is sufficiently charming yet vulnerable enough to keep one engaged when things start to drag.

Iron Man 2:  2010 action movie directed by Jon Favreau and starring Robert Downey, Jr., Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sam Rockwell, Mickey Rourke and Scarlett Johansson.  It’s six months later, Stark has come out as Iron Man, the Armed Forces are salivating (and holding congressional hearings) over the thought of getting their bureaucratic hands on the technology, the palladium core in the arc reactor that’s keeping Stark alive is also slowly poisoning him, and a Russian with terrible hair has a serious vendetta and is looking for a robot-suit-on-robot-suit showdown.  Plus ScarJo.

                  Second verse, same as the first.  I think I liked this one a little more.  Rourke pulls off the scheming, crazy scientist thing rather well, Johansson is a badass, and I was surprised but not disappointed with the Cheadle-Howard switcheroo.  If you liked any of the Avengers-related movies then give both of these a shot.

Child’s Play 2:  1990 horror movie directed by John Lafia and starring Alex Vincent, Christine Elise, Brad Dourif, Gerrit Graham, and Jenny Agutter.  In the first movie, a dying serial killer transferred his spirit into a doll, which young Andy Barclay then received as a gift from his mother.  The Chucky doll goes on a murderous rampage, set on transferring his spirit again into poor Andy.  The first movie ends (SPOILER!) with Chucky getting shot and theoretically killed by one of his former accomplices.  The sequel begins with Andy (Vincent) being adopted - his mother was locked up in a mental ward after testifying that Chucky was real.  He’s settling into life with his foster parents and new stepsister Kyle (Elise) when Chucky returns to exact revenge and start that whole spirit-transfer nonsense up again.

I haven’t seen the original since I was a kid, but I feel like this is fairly similar.  At this point the Child’s Play franchise takes on it’s slightly more comedic bent, so keep that in mind if you have strong feelings about the comedy horror subgenre.  I liked it, but largely because I liked the first movie and very much enjoy Christine Elise, who you may remember from such TV programs as Beverly Hills 90210 (Emily Valentine 4-EVA!) or ER.

Darkness Falls:  2003 horror movie directed by Jonathan Liebesman and starring Chaney Kley, Lee Cormie, and Emma Caulfield.  The sleepy Eastern Seaboard hamlet of Darkness Falls is home to the legend of the Tooth Fairy, a woman who was murdered by an angry mob and now returns as an angry ghost whenever a child in the town loses a tooth.  If you catch a glimpse of her you are cursed, and she will hunt you down with no regard for collateral damage.  When Kyle (Kley) was a teenager, he was unlucky enough to look upon her creepy visage and in her rampage the Tooth Fairy killed his mother.  Twelve years later, Caitlin (Caulfield) tracks Kyle down because her little brother has suddenly developed a severe phobia of the dark, and didn’t . . . wasn’t there . . . something about Kyle being carted off to a mental institution because of a similar thing?  Kyle reluctantly returns to Darkness Falls and discovers that young Michael (Cormie) has also been marked by the Tooth Fairy, who has been waiting to exact her vengeance on them both.

                  I realize that attempting to apply logic to a supernatural horror film is a fool’s errand, but there was a lot of stupid happening in this movie.  I don’t get the Tooth Fairy’s whole deal.  Does she just leave after she kills a kid who sees her?  And if Kyle has eluded her for this long does that mean she’s been hanging around for a decade?  Does she travel, or can she only kill within county limits?  And the whole threat in this movie (her ability to kill only in the dark) seems to be possible only due to the convergence of a thunderstorm and this town’s shitty wiring.  It’s fine, but a little boring.  I mostly watched it because I love Emma Caulfield.  It might be nice to revisit around Halloween if I need something mindless to watch.  Maybe don’t go to great lengths to seek it out.

Mini Reviews: 6/11/14

First Circle:  2010 documentary about the American foster care system directed by Heather Rae.  It centers mostly on children being removed from homes with meth labs in Idaho.   It was interesting, but perhaps too narrow in focus.  There was a lot I didn’t know about the foster care system – babysitters and sleepover require background checks, and even haircuts have to be approved – but it felt like just dipping a toe in.  I wish there had been more, but it was decent.

The World’s End:  2013 sci fi comedy directed by Edgar Wright and starring Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan, Rosamund Pike, and Pierce Brosnan.  As teenagers, Gary King and his chums attempted and failed at an epic 12-stop pub crawl known as the Golden Mile.  Now in his late 30s, Gary hasn’t really moved on – I mean, he’s still wearing his Sisters of Mercy T-shirt – while the other boys have grown into responsible, relatively sober adults.  He convinces/guilts the old gang into taking another shot at the Golden Mile, but when they arrive back in their hometown it seems a lot has changed.  The townsfolk seem strangely . . . robotic?  Soon their pub crawl turns into a night of reopening emotional wounds, revisiting past crushes, and, you know, fighting for survival.

            It was really good, but my least favorite of the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy (the other two being Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz).  The acting is brilliant – Frost and Pegg continue to impress me.  And Eddie Marsan is just fantastic; he’s been given smallish roles in blockbuster movies like the Sherlock Holmes redux with RDJ, but he shines brightest in smaller films like this.  The scene where he’s confronted by his former bully was an emotional sucker punch and it just made me so happy to see him with enough of a role to stretch his legs.  Anyway definitely see it, but be prepared for it to fizzle out at the end.

The Grey:  2011 thriller directed by Joe Carnahan and starring Liam Neeson, Frank Grillo, and Dermot Mulroney.  John is a solitary, melancholy hunter at an arctic oil drilling site, literally keeping the wolves at bay while working side by side with guys he describes as “men unfit for mankind” – fugitives, roughnecks, drifters, and the like.  During a flight back home the company plane crashes, and he has to get his fellow survivors organized if they're going to make it back to civilization and fend off the wolf pack that's closing in on them.

It wasn’t what I had expected.  At all.  There’s a lot of waxing philosophical about death, religion, and family.  It was better than I thought it would be, but not amazing and fairly predictable.  Maybe give it a shot if you’re looking for an action movie filled with bearded men scrapping in the hinterlands and talking about atheism.

The Last Days of Disco:  1998 dark ensemble comedy directed by Whit Stillman and starring Kate Beckinsale, Chloe Sevigny, Chris Eigeman, Mackenzie Astin, Matt Keeslar, Jennifer Beals, and Robert Sean Leonard.  Alice and Charlotte are twenty-something’s in early 1980s New York, working at a publishing house together, living in an apartment together, going to awful clubs together, and secretly competing with each other while surrounded by Wall Street assholes and Studio 54 assholes and whatever.

I kind of hated it.  Charlotte (Beckinsale) is an insufferable human being, and Alice (Sevigny) has no personality and no spine.  Was I supposed to empathize with these people?  I only kept watching because I hoped something awful would happen to them.  But instead I had to sit through a series of endless speeches delivered flatly by shitty characters.  Eigeman as the lady-killing scoundrel Des is the only redeeming part of this movie, and only because he provided occasional comic relief.  It was depressing and pointless and you shouldn’t bother.

I can't even look at you in that dress.

 

Tonight You’re Mine (a.k.a. You Instead):  2011 romantic comedy directed by David MacKenzie and starring Luke Treadaway, Natalia Tena, Mathew Baynton, and Gavin Mitchell.  Adam and Morello are lead singers in two bands performing at T in the Park, a Scottish music festival. When their initial meeting immediately turns into a tiff, a passing preacher decides it would be cute to handcuff them to each other.  Now they have to get their bickering in check long enough to find someone who can remove the handcuffs, all while dealing with their significant others, performing, and handling band conflict and drunk managers.  Will they learn to cooperate?

            Despite my aversion to music festivals (too hot, too loud, too many people) and the fact that it’s REALLY predictable, I still liked it quite a bit.  Tena, who you may recognize from her role as Nymphadora Tonks in the Harry Potter movie series, is always a delight.  And the skinny indie electropop front man character suits Treadaway nicely.  Give it a try.