# Movie Reviews **See Also:** >[!info] >Some [[Reviews]] of movies I've seen. - [[Review of Terminator Genisys]]. - [[Review of Avengers - Age of Ultron]]. - [[I thought Inception's ending was cheap and insulting]]. %% TASKS - [ ] The reviews below should be refactored into their own notes. %% ## All of Daniel Craig's Bond Movies On 2022-07-02, I watched the Daniel Craig / Bond marathon, including the last one, on Crave. It gave me a unique chance to compare them all to each other. They were all iffy except for *Skyfall*, which for me struck a near perfect balance of satire, brash bravado, and plot advancement. There were multiple "little moments" that just happened and were left there for the audience to decide what to do with them. My favourite is when M and Bond escape from MI6 and Bond takes her to swap cars. You get a two second shot of the classic/original Aston Martin, with a simple *Daa-dum* of orchestra behind it. Nothing further need be said. The latest, *No Time To Die* was rather inept. It seemed too silly at times, and too tortured at others. Felix Leiter's death was utterly unnecessary and didn't seem to contribute anything to the plot. Ana de Armas's Paloma had lots of potential that went completely wasted. Bond's seduction of Madeleine Swan after declaring his love bordered on the inappropriate. The introduction of Safin as a villain powerful enough to kill Blofeld, yet foolish enough to be caught and killed in one movie - I cannot help but think that the character was just a MacGuffin to motivate Bond accepting death. Even Ralph Fiennes's M seemed to have had his whole cantankerous personality sanitized and made wooden, compared to the two preceding movies. ## In the Shadow of the Moon (2019) A cop tries to find a murderer, only to find that it's his grand-daughter, travelling backwards through time, trying to prevent a future civil war by killing people in the past (our present) who would propagate the *ideas* that would ultimately kick the war off. Though the movie kept me entertained — until the last 30 minutes or so — it was ultimately very disappointing. It's an impoverished, childish version of the completely awesome [Travelers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series)). That the whole movie should be reduced to a single bullet point: that some ideas don't deserve to exist — is puerile and superficial. It does no justice to any of the complex arguments both for and against free speech (however you define it), and it leaves the audience with intellectual blue balls. Some people have labelled this movie as being about "social justice", but it isn't really. If it was, they would have focused on that, and not on the murder and mayhem, nor would the lead have been a white male cop. This is 115 minutes you won't get back, ever. ## The Wandering Earth (2019) The Wandering Earth is a Chinese scifi extravaganza that involves moving the Earth to Alpha Centauri to avoid the sun's becoming a red giant star about 4 billion years prematurely. I don't get what all the fuss is about. This is just a ridiculous movie with great effects, terrible acting, painfully cliched character "development", a pathetic story, and a reckless disregard for even high-school physics let alone "science". It's great to see a non-Western take on these sweeping scifi extravaganzas, but I've seen it all before in virtually every B-rated Chinese SF movie I've seen. There are so many cultures on this Earth; I think it would be wonderful to have more truly international efforts. But this ain't it. I got so bored halfway through, I started playing games on my phone - and I *still* didn't miss anything. —2 June 2019 ## Annihilation (2018) ## Ghost in the Shell (live action, 2017) This was a weird chimera of a movie. I've seen almost all the anime series and enjoyed them all. But this live action extravaganza somehow missed the mark. I think the problem lay in the "joint" production - the Japanese and American influences simply clashed too hard and were not properly resolved. They did an excellent job of mimicking some of the most important scenes in various anime series. Indeed, several times, I had an intense sense of deja vu. But the whole thing didn't hang together well. Scarlett Johanssen tried hard to be a human in a robotic body, but I think the director, Rupert Sanders, pointed her in the wrong direction. She walked too artificially, and her odd posture was probably meant to mimic the Major in [Arise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell:_Arise) - but it didn't work. Major Motoko is, IMHO, supposed to *appear* confident and empowered, to hide her internal turmoil that comes out only as events play out. I think it was a bad move for them to make her seem so much more artificial. I won't comment on whether it was "culturally inappropriate" for Johanssen to play a Japanese person. I *will* say that a Japanese actress, with a Japanese history and Japanese sensibilities, would likely have created an experience truer to Masamune Shirow's original vision. The most significant story arc in the movie involves Major realizing that she's just as real as anyone else, regardless of the nature of her "shell". As such, a proper resolution to that arc was expected and quite frankly necessary. But it never came. This is unfortunate, because there is such a scene in the anime, in which Major is granted full autonomy by the government and by Section 9. Why they couldn't spare a few minutes for that scene, just before the closing scene where Major returns to work, is beyond me. I'm also pissed off about the "nude armour" thing. In the anime, for reasons I'm never fully understand, Major works best naked. Seriously, don't ask me. While there is probably a salacious element to it - this is Japanese anime after all - I always considered it a subversive and interesting idea to have this cyborg look so human and so vulnerable and so sensual also be so violent and so powerful. At no time in the anime are catcalls made or lewd looks offered. Instead, the other characters are either in awe of her power or scared shitless by her single-minded determination to overcome all the obstacles before her. In any case, the "nude armour" compromise was stupid. Either go all the way, or just eliminate the whole idea. What they did was a half-assed solution intended to maintain the movie's mild rating while providing a weird source of titillation for those movie-goers too young or too stupid to find pictures of Scarlett Johanssen nude on the web. And also - no Tachikoma?!?! What the fuck?!?! So, this 2017 live-action effort was ultimately disappointing even though it basically did almost everything right. — 12 May 2019 ## Gone Girl Horrible, insulting movie. I'm convinced that the popularity of this movie is primarily due to the general public's growing insecurity, their need to feel good about themselves by watching the stupidity, malevolence, and delusional sociopathy of others. It's global schadenfreude. Movies like this are successful because the movie-going audience is completely fucked up. All the principal characters are sick, useless, grossly unethical nutjobs. The story is an orgy of Western privilege and selfishness, duplicity and superficiality. The acting was great, but so what? Indeed, that just makes it worse that such talent was wasted on this tripe. Gone girl is 145 minutes you'll never get back. – 9 Nov 2014 ## Les Affamés Aka [Ravenous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravenous_(2017_film)), this is a Québécois art-house zombie flick. Yeah, you read that right. This film is, IMHO, fucking ridiculous. People just standing around, posing and glaring, even as the zombies attack, as if the whole thing were happening on a catwalk. The only thing missing is a low, masculine voice-over commenting on how perfectly their cologne goes with the zombie apocalypse. It's not even particularly gruesome. Some of the ~~high~~ low points include: We do learn that an accordion can be used to kill a zombie whilst making a silly little noise. I guess that's something. The movie opens at a rural, oval track car race, where a driver narrowly avoids being bitten. We don't see the driver again *at all* till the very end, when he rescues the accordion-wielding child-hero. Know what? I'll bet the whole race driver subplot was added late in production cuz the gits who made this disaster realized they had no ending, and they couldn't just kill off the [child](http://www.francoislegault.ca/resume/charlotte-st-martin/) survivor. And the zombies, disorganized and spastic as zombies usually are, manage to build a number of “artifacts” that dot the landscape. Some critics have noted that this hints at a zombie religion. Oy vay. They're just piles, really, but supposedly “surreal” piles - of stuffed animals, of chairs reaching dozens of feet into the air, of sundry electronics and appliances. And not once is any attempt made to explain them. The zombies do like to stand before them and stare, though. I guess that's where you get the religulous angle. Deep, eh? And then there's the pubescent boy named *Ti-Cul* who travels with a balding, older insurance salesman. I'll let you work out what *Ti-Cul* means on your own. Fortunately, *that* backstory is not explained. The saddest part? This waste of time [won Best Canadian Film at TIFF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravenous_(2017_film)#Critical_reception). Go home TIFF, you're drunk. If you need to kill some time (and some neurons), you can probably watch it on Netflix. – 14 June 2018 ## The Girl on the Train (2016) As opposed to [Gone Girl](https://www.notion.so/Movie-Reviews-cf38eb1e773148cebfa3c66a61b8e55c#0c4f20f8d07b47d88af14abaf1d7d440), which was an unmitigated disaster, I found [The Girl on the Train](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_on_the_Train_(2016_film)) engrossing. I view this movie not as a sweeping saga, or a story of momentous self-discovery, or as a revolutionary advance of anything social, technical, or cinematic; I view this movie as a careful, detailed study of the minutiae of one person's crisis. I found the sudden changes in perspectives and plot twists challenging but quite consistent with what I imagine it must be like to suffer mentally from alcoholism. Maybe I'm wrong; I don't know for sure. But when a movie makes brings me closer to understanding people who are different from me, then I think it's done its job. And if it manages to keep me hooked for the duration, then it's done its job well. Some have complained that this movie is predictable. So what? It's not a Sherlock Holmes mystery. It's a story about ordinary people. Cliché? You know why they're called clichés? Because they're common truisms. They are just what happens to people all the time. It's not about the clichés, it's about how typical people react to them, and what we can learn about ourselves by thinking of what we'd do in their places. Finally, I really saw this movie as a story about a woman victimized and revictimized, over and over, and nearly but never quite completely broken; a woman who, despite horrendous and unjust obstacles thrown before her, manages to come out the other end of it. And, most interestingly, she ***doesn't*** have to change. Sometimes, you just don't need "character development". She's just fine as she is; damaged and addicted though she is, she still is plenty good enough to get through it. I see this movie as asserting the **intrinsic** worth of women as persons; I see this as a good thing. — 24 Feb 2019 %% Notes to absorb ```dataview list from [[]] and !"Templates" and !outgoing([[]]) sort file.name asc ``` %%