Revolver: utterly worthless, incomprehensible, and pretentious to boot. Someone has probably described this as ‘Tarantino-esque.” It ain’t. Is it a horrible pastiche of movies, sampling Usual Suspects, the anime scene in Kill Bill volume 1, and every other crappy movie Guy Ritchie has made. At the end, over the credits, you have video of real psychologists (plus Deepak Chopra) discussing the role of the ego and the super ego. What was Ritchie thinking?
Thanks for falling on that sword, Chris. That said, I was probably not going to walk within a thousand yards of that sword, but… still, I’m glad you and Arnab are there for this, for War, and for reviewing the hundred other craptaction films I think I might someday watch on Spike TV, when VH1 doesn’t have a celebreality show playing.
Wanted: good, god. It’s not like I had high hopes, but what was James McAvoy thinking? Surely Timur Bekmambetov can do better than this? There are maybe two decent action sequences, but the stupidity of the plot and the gratuitousness of the blood splatter are astonishing. You simply can’t pull a movie of this kind off unless you maintain a sense of play. There is none here.
Vantage Point: I slept through a third of this but I am still pretty confident that it’s crap.
Worst of all, I saw a preview of ‘Death Race’ that appears have Joan Allen in the role of evil prison warden staging NASCAR-type events among the inmates for entertainment. Say it ain’t so Joan.
ooh, i was hoping you would get to wanted before me. now i will happily wait for it to come to dvd.
Yes, thank god yet again for Chris’ willingness to throw himself to the cinematic wolves. Now I can hang on Wanted, too.
If you think Joan Allen is feeding her wallet with roles in tripe, check out the trailer for Pacino and De Niro’s Righteous Kill….
chris, please go see hancock this weekend.
Just back from it. Will post later. I liked it so it can’t go in this thread.
I just saw Wanted and I’m reeling from the experience. I just wonder how much Jolie and Freeman cashed in from their “performances.” I’ll say more when I get my thoughts sorted out.
Hmmmm…. Okay, I liked Wanted, and found even the gratuitous blood and torture quite wonderfully loony. It ain’t gonna make my year-end, or probably even month-end, list, but it was fun, for the most part….
…so now I await Michael’s promised thrashing of the film.
I don’t know whether it’s worth it. After thinking about Wanted a bit more, I’d say that the action is compelling enough, but the storytelling leaves a lot to be desired. Even “over the top” movies should maintain some internal consistency and make their twists compelling, rather than simply gratuitous (as mainly another easy means to unleash some more action sequences). After recently seeing Hancock and Get Smart I think I see a trend in tremendously sloppy screenwriting–storylines are merely the most tenuous excuse for action sequences, which, in the case of Get Smart become tediously prolonged and overwhelming. Hancock gets by on its charismatic leads (and, yes, how about that Charlize Theron–wow!) but the story is plain stupid and the last half hour or so was sloppy even by current blockbuster standards. You could slap that crap together in about a weekend—er, he’s a superhero, he lost his memory, and then…..
Max Payne: an incoherent mess. Worse, a boring, incoherent mess. I didn’t expect much by the way of plot or acting, but I did expect action and there was very little of that. The movie broadly follows the plot of the video game with Max’s wife and child killed by drug dealers and him then finding their killers. The murky plot has to do with a drug called Valkyr, produced by the pharmaceutical company his wife worked for, that makes people feel invincible and surrounded by winged monsters (which, I suppose, are valkeries). Poor old Mark Wahlberg grimmaces his way through the role, women wander around a snowy New York in thigh-high boots, and Beau Bridges is the only one having any fun.
My first visit to the multiplex in more than a month would have been a bust, but I got to see trailers for Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie (looks horrible) and the new Bond (for which I have ridiculously high expectations — sort of like Obama), and also some awful country song advertising the National Guard. While some oaf repeatedly screams “an American warrior” you see images of US helicopters buzzing generic muslim villages, and a friendly national guardsman in cool shades kicking a soccer ball back to child whose heart and mind is immediately won over.
No doubt I will be stupid enough to see Max Payne anyway. and I’ve also seen that awful National Guard promo many times. The oaf is Kid Rock, and Chris, you forgot to mention that there is some kind of parallel between Nascar racing and retrieving soccer balls for wide-eyed A-rab kids…golly, war and occupation, is like totally in my face, poochie!
You betcha! ;D