movie reviews

Chris Knight's avatar

There is likely no disputing that Christopher Nolan is king of high-concept cinema.  With Tenet I am wondering if maybe he went for TOO high-concept.  It was ten years ago this summer that Nolan gave us Inception: a movie that I have watched many times since and continues to enthrall.

Tenet however, I might watch once or twice again.  Three times tops.  Just enough to try to figure out what the heck is going on.  Because there is some Grade-A gray matter warping at work in this movie.  The publicity for it has been clear that it’s NOT a film about time travel.  Instead it’s about “inversion”.  Reversing the entropy of an object – or people – so that it appears that they are going backward when instead from the perspective of the object… say, a bullet… time is progressing forward linearly.  And I can understand that much.  But ...

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There is a tradition I never fail to keep: whenever I get snowed in and can’t go anywhere, I turn down the lights and crank up the sound and watch the 1982 movie The Thing.  Maybe that says something about my baseline state of mind.

John Carpenter’s now-classic film of horror and paranoia at an Antarctica research base might not be appropriate viewing for when one is tempting real-life cabin fever.  But if Die Hard is a Christmas movie, then The Thing is the perfect wintertime follow-up.  And it’s a darn nearly perfect movie in every other possible way: the story.  The casting.  The pacing.  The practical effects (which still hold their own against any CGI today).  The cinematography.  That score by Ennio Morricone.  And that building-up of tension as the men of Outpost 31 grow increasingly mistrustful of each other…

So yeah, I’m a huge fan of The ...

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George MacKay in 1917

This won’t be so much a detailed review as it is a gut reaction to something barely prepared for.  1917 isn’t a movie you’ll want to read too much of warm.  Just go into the theater and for the next two hours be assaulted by the horrors of hell as few things have done in recent cinema history.

But it hit me on the drive back from the theater tonight: that the two most technically innovative films that I’ve seen over the course of the past year or so, have each been about World War I.  Maybe They Shall Not Grow Old will prove to have sparked a renaissance of interest in the Great War: an event that resonated harder than many might appreciate and indeed still resonates with us today (the ongoing morass in Iraq being but one example).  World War I has long been ...

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Now look, I waited decades… decades… to be able to say that I have seen “Episode Nine”.  It became like a lifelong hope that someday, as the Plaid One promised in that Reader’s Digest article in 1982, there would be nine of the Star Wars movies and I wanted to see all of them.  ‘Course, Lucas was referring to the core “Skywalker Saga” at the heartmeat of the saga, and had no idea about the other works that would come (like Rogue One, or The Mandalorian which gets better and better with each new episode).

So yeah.  I haven’t been saying “The Rise of Skywalker” these last several months.  Almost every time I’ve mentioned seeing “Episode Nine”.  And wanna know a cold hard truth?  There are a lot of Star Wars fans, better than I’ll ever be, who didn’t make it this far.  Life in this world can ...

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So let’s get the obvious out of the way first:

YOWZA!!!!  Maybe the greatest Star Wars trailer in all of history.  But ahhhh… will the movie deliver the goods come next month?  No other way to be honest about it: some days I find myself loving The Last Jedi and others, I find it sorely lacking.  There’s just more that could have been done with the sense of pacing and time.  And spending that much time looking for one guy in a casino on the other side of the galaxy (which makes NO sense given the Resistance fleet’s situation) should have been excised completely from the script.  But, it is what it is.  And this far along in the game I’ve gotta be loyal to the end.  The tickets for opening night of The Rise Of Skywalker were already in virtual hand two hours before the trailer premiered.  Bought
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Two matters have persisted in my mind during the past several months leading up to Spider-Man: Far From Home.  The first, obviously, is “How the heck does any Marvel movie follow up on the heels of Avengers: Endgame?”  Those three hours were a staggering symphony of cinema, made all the more magnificent in that they wrapped up eleven years and twenty-some movies of what had come before.  Did Disney and Sony and Marvel seriously believe that a Spider-Man movie could raise the bar on that?!


But for me, the bigger issue was this: “When the heck do we finally see Spider-Man’s little world explored and fleshed out on this canvas?”
Because Far From Home represents Tom Holland’s fifth outing as the web-slinger.  And still by the time of this latest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe chronology we have yet to see Peter Parker’s unique and classic sphere
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Well, they sure showed me.

Toward the end of Solo, there is a brief scene with Emilia Clarke’s character Qi’ra.  And maybe it shocked the audience and made jaws hit the floor but for me it was much more upheaving.

Without spoiling for anyone who hasn’t seen this movie yet, let’s just say that one of the reasons I haven’t written anything about the Star Wars animated series The Clone Wars and Rebels is because I have seen very little of them.  Not only because there was lack of time to adequately invest myself into those shows but primarily that I hadn’t taken them seriously at all.  And at the heartmeat of the matter is one character.  No offense meant to Dave Filoni but the moment they announced this person was getting injected into The Clone Wars I lost all interest in that show and then again in
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It was a Friday afternoon in the spring of 2008.  A friend was running for state office in North Carolina and I had been serving as his campaign treasurer.  And at a rally in Chapel Hill he had been given the hearty endorsement of then-presidential candidate Ron Paul.  Meeting Dr. Paul was a great honor and I was feeling pretty good about things.  So en route back home, just on a whim I decided to take in a movie that was just released that same day.

Said movie was Iron Man (read my review here).

Ten years later, dozens of movies and many television spinoffs later (and maybe someday we’ll see those intersect with the main films… I mean how hard is it to get Peter Parker into the offices of Nelson and Murdock for legal advice?!) and what seems to me like two or three other lifetimes,
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Okay, it’s not a “perfect” movie.  I for one would have appreciated more of Ultron’s legendary Oedipus complex between himself and his “father” (who in the Marvel Cinematic Universe continuity is Tony Stark).  But those little problems aside, Avengers: Age of Ultron is a gob-smockingly powerhouse of a ride comin’ at ya, and in this viewer’s opinion it’s more than the ideal movie to kick off a summer season.

So we caught it last night during its preview showings (it officially opens today).  “We” being longtime friend/artistic collaborator Melody Hallman Daniel who’s been visiting here for the past week, her service dog Sasha, and Yours Truly.  After what seemed like a dozen trailers (alas! the Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer was not one of them, and if it had been I was going to stand up wave my hands frantically while screaming “YES YES YES!!”).  The film starts with ...

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I can’t decide if Warm Bodies is a zombie movie with romance and comedy or if it’s a romantic comedy with zombies. Either way, I enjoyed it.

(Yeah I’m making two posts in a row about zombies. I’ll refrain from overkill by stating here that we also saw the trailer for World War Z and it looked much better than that ad that ran during the Super Bowl“big game”.)

Warm Bodies is something I haven’t been familiar with before: a zombie movie from the zombie’s point of view. R (played by Nicholas Hoult) is a recently undead who wanders around the ruined shell of an airport. The shambling corpses are split into two varieties: the “regular” zombies who continue to shuffle along in mimicry of the patterns of their former lives. And then there are “bonies”: those zombies whose decomposition has brought them too far gone to be helped. ...

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