Post by Emperor on Nov 7, 2022 23:03:22 GMT
I've watched an excessive amount of films in the past 10 days, most of them on a plane, so instead of my usual one long wordy review, here's many short reviews.
Death Of A Telemarketer (Khaled Ridgeway, 2020)
The lead salesman in a telemarketing team, known for being an incredible liar, bullshitter, and false charmer, gets some undue comeuppance when an angry customer breaks into his office with a gun. It's a dark comedy. The dialogue in the first act of the film is particularly amusing, especially the way he talks to his girlfriend. He's full of shit but incredibly charming and funny about it, he's a hard to resist man even if you can see right through him.
Once he is taken hostage naturally the tension ramps up and the tone of the movie changes. It's still funny in places but mostly a well-executed tense thriller. Lamorne Morris plays the telemarketer in question and he does a fantastic job as his character goes through the plot's twists and turns. Solid film, worth a watch. 7/10
All My Friends Hate Me (Andrew Gaynord, 2020)
Social Anxiety Horror. I did not enjoy this horror-comedy at all. Not because it's bad, but because it's brutally effective. Pretty much my worst nightmare brought to life. I found it difficult to watch.
The protagonist, Pete, celebrates his 31st birthday by reuniting with his old university pals. Turns out that he's grown up but every single one of his friends has kept the immature student maturity level. The banter and the drinking games and the mean-spirited jabs disguised as jokes take a mental toll on him. He tries to play along but is really struggling. It's not funny to him anymore, but it's funny to everyone else. The plot plays a really clever game to make it seem like his friends are conspiring against him or crafting an elaborately awful prank, particularly given the title of the film. They treat him horribly and seem to be oblivious to his feelings, while acting offended whenever he tries to banter back. I was begging him to just drive away.
It all comes down to a tense scene where he directly accuses everyone of conspiring against him, reaches his breaking point and smashes a guy with a vase, and of course all his friends are horrified and Pete is the horrible person. Turns out his paranoia, and my paranoia, was unjustified because there was no conspiracy, his friends are just insensitive buffoons. There's no happy ending either. He drives home with his fiancee, who found out he was intending to propose. He gets cockteased once more (she says "no", lets him stew for a bit, and then says "yes"). The final line of dialogue is "You really can't take a joke, can you?" Absolutely brutal.
To quote a review, the movie "hysterically mines that evil portion of our paranoid, insecure brains that make us take the most innocuous comments as slights or passive-aggressive attacks." I suppose this film could be funny to the late-teens-early-20s students, but not at all funny to a man whose personality is exactly like poor Pete's. Like I said, difficult to watch, because of how damn good it is.
Memory (Martin Campbell, 2022)
Ever since Liam Neeson struck gold in Taken, he's become Hollywood's leading old man action star. Problem is every film he's done since then is a terrible Taken imitation, including the direct sequels. Memory is no different. The old man part of the character is taken to a new level since the gimmick of this movie is that Neeson's hitman character has amnesia. This has no bearing on the first three quarters of the film and only a minimal impact on the conclusion. Besides that it's a rather generic and uninteresting pseudo-Taken. It's slick and stylish, but there's no substance there. 3/10
Death On The Nile (Kenneth Branagh, 2022)
Death On The Nile is over two hours long. I had to wait over an hour for the first death. Very very disappointing. They try to make up for it by cramming in four more deaths in the remaining time, but the damage was done.
If I can be serious for a moment, I've read several Agatha Christie books (not this one), and I find her style of murder mystery more engaging in book form than in film form. The scene-setting and character development was pleasant enough, it's acted and scripted very well, but by the end when Poirot does his big reveal, it was nowhere near as satisfying as the equivalent book scenes. It all felt very rushed and was a let down. Overall it was a reasonably entertaining watch but I'll stick to Christie books rather than screen adaptations.5/10
21 Jump Street (Phil Lord, 2012)
The oldest film I watched in this collection. And one of the best. PW rates this film very highly, and now I know why. An absolute riot, laugh a minute stuff with a great cast and a great plot. Not laughed at a comedy this much in a long time. Mostly inward laughing and smirking because I was on a busy plane, but you get the drift. Only thing I didn't like was the angry shouty black police captain, but he wasn't around for too much of the film, so not a big problem. 10/10
Is the sequel just as good?
Kimi (Steven Soderbergh, 2022)
Another home run. The first film I've seen set in a post-pandemic world. The main character, Angela (played beautifully by Zoƫ Kravitz), is a socially awkward blue-haired woman who helps to develop a fictional voice-activated AI service called Kimi (think Alexa, Siri). She has a chronic phobia of leaving her apartment, exacerbated by the lockdown. This phobia is not explained and it doesn't need to be.
While listening to anonymised streams as part of her job, she hears a crime, most likely a murder, and is forced to leave her house to go to the office to report it. It all escalates from there. I won't spoil the details, but I love it. The plot and dialogue are really tight, not a single wasted moment or word, every bit of foreshadowing is paid off in wonderful fashion, and has a brilliant climax. Well played to everyone involved. 10/10
Black Adam (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2022)
Talked about this in the Black Adam thread. Easily my favourite DCU film, which isn't saying much, but if it were an MCU film it'd be in the top half. Black Adam is a more prominent and funnier version of Drax. Solid story which asks some interesting, if not entirely original, moral questions. Dwayne doesn't have to stretch his acting muscles (does he ever?), but he is great in this understated role. 8/10
Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021)
Not subtle at all, but sometimes satire doesn't need to be subtle, this is a sledgehammer to the face, reminding us of the post-truth world we live in by taking the climate change discussion (and perhaps COVID too) to a slippery-slope logical conclusion. I was entertained, went a bit too long but never lost too much momentum. I'm glad they didn't cheap out of the ending. It did feel like some of the many big names in the cast were underutilised or reduced to one-dimensional caricatures. Especially Jonah Hill. 8/10
Metal Lords (Peter Sollett, 2022)
Randomly came across this while browsing on Netflix. A comedy about metal music? Instant sell. Fortunately it delivered the goods. Not quite as funny as 21 Jump Street but close. But besides the great humour, it's a terrific tribute to the metal genre with some fantastic montages of classic metal songs - Sabbath's War Pigs being the highlight - and the original track written for the film is excellent as well. Does everything very well. Comedy, heavy metal, coming-of-age drama, pacing, acting. All top notch.
There's also a really incredible scene featuring some special guests from the heavy metal world.10/10
Dark Waters (Todd Haynes, 2019)
I love Spotlight, so an investigative journalism film starring Mark Ruffalo seemed like a good idea. It wasn't. Not an awful film, it just kinda meandered along, never being too boring for me to stop watching, but not reaching any great dramatic heights either. The most haunting thing about the story is that it's mostly true, and in that sense the generally dreary, exhausting, frustrating tone of the film, captured perfectly by Ruffalo and the rest of the cast, is completely appropriate. A bleak look at how shit humanity/big corporations can be. 5/10
Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)
I didn't know the plot of this film going in, turns out I watched my second murder mystery in the span of a week. It was...alright. The most interesting part of the film was seeing Daniel Craig and Chris Evans act outside of James Bond and Captain America respectively. Both guys did wonderfully, but Ana de Arms steals the show as the protagonist Marta Cabrera.
The murder mystery is very intriguing and Christie herself would have been proud of the twists and turns and the big reveal. The reveal was certainly better executed than Death on the Nile, yet overall I felt somewhat underwhelmed by Knives Out. It has a unique charm, sort of like Wes Anderson films, but not one that completely connected with me. I'd take this over DotN but not by much. 6/10
Wrath Of Man (Guy Ritchie, 2021)
I was at the height of my long flight exhaustion when this film was playing, maybe that's why I didn't think much of it, or maybe it's just not that good. Jason Statham is the lead and his character will not shock you. He's like Clint Eastwood: there's a type of character he plays, and he does it well. In a sense the Statham action hero is a modernised Eastwood Western hero. He has a perpetual grimace. Never smiles. Says as little as he can. Extremely good with a gun. You could transport this film to the Wild West, replacing cars with horses and pistols with revolvers, and not much would change.
Wrath of Man is a mix of a revenge thriller, a heist thriller, and some pure action porn. All of these are done very well but I felt the connective tissue wasn't there. There's all kinda of time jumps. The Statham character isn't defined at all, he seemingly has no motivation or rhyme or reason. In that sense it's analogous to the Eastwood film and character Pale Rider, which I also felt was lacking in depth. Maybe this isn't kind of plot device that works for me.
I can't say the film didn't do what it set out to do, but I was left with an overwhelming feeling of meh. 5/10
Interesting bit of trivia I read after typing this up: Clint Eastwood's son Scott Eastwood plays the main villain, in a film with many villains. He does a great job.
Death Of A Telemarketer (Khaled Ridgeway, 2020)
The lead salesman in a telemarketing team, known for being an incredible liar, bullshitter, and false charmer, gets some undue comeuppance when an angry customer breaks into his office with a gun. It's a dark comedy. The dialogue in the first act of the film is particularly amusing, especially the way he talks to his girlfriend. He's full of shit but incredibly charming and funny about it, he's a hard to resist man even if you can see right through him.
Once he is taken hostage naturally the tension ramps up and the tone of the movie changes. It's still funny in places but mostly a well-executed tense thriller. Lamorne Morris plays the telemarketer in question and he does a fantastic job as his character goes through the plot's twists and turns. Solid film, worth a watch. 7/10
All My Friends Hate Me (Andrew Gaynord, 2020)
Social Anxiety Horror. I did not enjoy this horror-comedy at all. Not because it's bad, but because it's brutally effective. Pretty much my worst nightmare brought to life. I found it difficult to watch.
The protagonist, Pete, celebrates his 31st birthday by reuniting with his old university pals. Turns out that he's grown up but every single one of his friends has kept the immature student maturity level. The banter and the drinking games and the mean-spirited jabs disguised as jokes take a mental toll on him. He tries to play along but is really struggling. It's not funny to him anymore, but it's funny to everyone else. The plot plays a really clever game to make it seem like his friends are conspiring against him or crafting an elaborately awful prank, particularly given the title of the film. They treat him horribly and seem to be oblivious to his feelings, while acting offended whenever he tries to banter back. I was begging him to just drive away.
It all comes down to a tense scene where he directly accuses everyone of conspiring against him, reaches his breaking point and smashes a guy with a vase, and of course all his friends are horrified and Pete is the horrible person. Turns out his paranoia, and my paranoia, was unjustified because there was no conspiracy, his friends are just insensitive buffoons. There's no happy ending either. He drives home with his fiancee, who found out he was intending to propose. He gets cockteased once more (she says "no", lets him stew for a bit, and then says "yes"). The final line of dialogue is "You really can't take a joke, can you?" Absolutely brutal.
To quote a review, the movie "hysterically mines that evil portion of our paranoid, insecure brains that make us take the most innocuous comments as slights or passive-aggressive attacks." I suppose this film could be funny to the late-teens-early-20s students, but not at all funny to a man whose personality is exactly like poor Pete's. Like I said, difficult to watch, because of how damn good it is.
Memory (Martin Campbell, 2022)
Ever since Liam Neeson struck gold in Taken, he's become Hollywood's leading old man action star. Problem is every film he's done since then is a terrible Taken imitation, including the direct sequels. Memory is no different. The old man part of the character is taken to a new level since the gimmick of this movie is that Neeson's hitman character has amnesia. This has no bearing on the first three quarters of the film and only a minimal impact on the conclusion. Besides that it's a rather generic and uninteresting pseudo-Taken. It's slick and stylish, but there's no substance there. 3/10
Death On The Nile (Kenneth Branagh, 2022)
Death On The Nile is over two hours long. I had to wait over an hour for the first death. Very very disappointing. They try to make up for it by cramming in four more deaths in the remaining time, but the damage was done.
If I can be serious for a moment, I've read several Agatha Christie books (not this one), and I find her style of murder mystery more engaging in book form than in film form. The scene-setting and character development was pleasant enough, it's acted and scripted very well, but by the end when Poirot does his big reveal, it was nowhere near as satisfying as the equivalent book scenes. It all felt very rushed and was a let down. Overall it was a reasonably entertaining watch but I'll stick to Christie books rather than screen adaptations.5/10
21 Jump Street (Phil Lord, 2012)
The oldest film I watched in this collection. And one of the best. PW rates this film very highly, and now I know why. An absolute riot, laugh a minute stuff with a great cast and a great plot. Not laughed at a comedy this much in a long time. Mostly inward laughing and smirking because I was on a busy plane, but you get the drift. Only thing I didn't like was the angry shouty black police captain, but he wasn't around for too much of the film, so not a big problem. 10/10
Is the sequel just as good?
Kimi (Steven Soderbergh, 2022)
Another home run. The first film I've seen set in a post-pandemic world. The main character, Angela (played beautifully by Zoƫ Kravitz), is a socially awkward blue-haired woman who helps to develop a fictional voice-activated AI service called Kimi (think Alexa, Siri). She has a chronic phobia of leaving her apartment, exacerbated by the lockdown. This phobia is not explained and it doesn't need to be.
While listening to anonymised streams as part of her job, she hears a crime, most likely a murder, and is forced to leave her house to go to the office to report it. It all escalates from there. I won't spoil the details, but I love it. The plot and dialogue are really tight, not a single wasted moment or word, every bit of foreshadowing is paid off in wonderful fashion, and has a brilliant climax. Well played to everyone involved. 10/10
Black Adam (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2022)
Talked about this in the Black Adam thread. Easily my favourite DCU film, which isn't saying much, but if it were an MCU film it'd be in the top half. Black Adam is a more prominent and funnier version of Drax. Solid story which asks some interesting, if not entirely original, moral questions. Dwayne doesn't have to stretch his acting muscles (does he ever?), but he is great in this understated role. 8/10
Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021)
Not subtle at all, but sometimes satire doesn't need to be subtle, this is a sledgehammer to the face, reminding us of the post-truth world we live in by taking the climate change discussion (and perhaps COVID too) to a slippery-slope logical conclusion. I was entertained, went a bit too long but never lost too much momentum. I'm glad they didn't cheap out of the ending. It did feel like some of the many big names in the cast were underutilised or reduced to one-dimensional caricatures. Especially Jonah Hill. 8/10
Metal Lords (Peter Sollett, 2022)
Randomly came across this while browsing on Netflix. A comedy about metal music? Instant sell. Fortunately it delivered the goods. Not quite as funny as 21 Jump Street but close. But besides the great humour, it's a terrific tribute to the metal genre with some fantastic montages of classic metal songs - Sabbath's War Pigs being the highlight - and the original track written for the film is excellent as well. Does everything very well. Comedy, heavy metal, coming-of-age drama, pacing, acting. All top notch.
There's also a really incredible scene featuring some special guests from the heavy metal world.10/10
Dark Waters (Todd Haynes, 2019)
I love Spotlight, so an investigative journalism film starring Mark Ruffalo seemed like a good idea. It wasn't. Not an awful film, it just kinda meandered along, never being too boring for me to stop watching, but not reaching any great dramatic heights either. The most haunting thing about the story is that it's mostly true, and in that sense the generally dreary, exhausting, frustrating tone of the film, captured perfectly by Ruffalo and the rest of the cast, is completely appropriate. A bleak look at how shit humanity/big corporations can be. 5/10
Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)
I didn't know the plot of this film going in, turns out I watched my second murder mystery in the span of a week. It was...alright. The most interesting part of the film was seeing Daniel Craig and Chris Evans act outside of James Bond and Captain America respectively. Both guys did wonderfully, but Ana de Arms steals the show as the protagonist Marta Cabrera.
The murder mystery is very intriguing and Christie herself would have been proud of the twists and turns and the big reveal. The reveal was certainly better executed than Death on the Nile, yet overall I felt somewhat underwhelmed by Knives Out. It has a unique charm, sort of like Wes Anderson films, but not one that completely connected with me. I'd take this over DotN but not by much. 6/10
Wrath Of Man (Guy Ritchie, 2021)
I was at the height of my long flight exhaustion when this film was playing, maybe that's why I didn't think much of it, or maybe it's just not that good. Jason Statham is the lead and his character will not shock you. He's like Clint Eastwood: there's a type of character he plays, and he does it well. In a sense the Statham action hero is a modernised Eastwood Western hero. He has a perpetual grimace. Never smiles. Says as little as he can. Extremely good with a gun. You could transport this film to the Wild West, replacing cars with horses and pistols with revolvers, and not much would change.
Wrath of Man is a mix of a revenge thriller, a heist thriller, and some pure action porn. All of these are done very well but I felt the connective tissue wasn't there. There's all kinda of time jumps. The Statham character isn't defined at all, he seemingly has no motivation or rhyme or reason. In that sense it's analogous to the Eastwood film and character Pale Rider, which I also felt was lacking in depth. Maybe this isn't kind of plot device that works for me.
I can't say the film didn't do what it set out to do, but I was left with an overwhelming feeling of meh. 5/10
Interesting bit of trivia I read after typing this up: Clint Eastwood's son Scott Eastwood plays the main villain, in a film with many villains. He does a great job.
