Saw The Bone Temple and thought it far better than the first movie. No, I'll go further: in my book the best by far 28...Later movie to date. No, I'll go even further; best film of the entire franchise, and yes I haven't seen the as yet nonexistent third installment-- calling it here and now, a year or so early.
No-- backtrack. I'll go even further than that: Bone Temple is the first movie in the entire franchise that I actually like.
Movie begins with Cruise climbing an impossibly sheer cliff. He slips; he recovers; he hangs ten several thousand feet off the ground. This being a John Woo film, credibility is not a very big issue, but “cool” is--as it turns out, the entire elaborate rock-climbing sequence was staged just so Cruise can rendezvous with a pair of telecommunicating Ray-Bans, shot at him via rocket launcher from a hovering helicopter. The shades instruct Cruise on what he is to do for the next two hours…which, come to think of it, pretty much sums up how Cruise has handled his acting career to date.
Run, Ethan run!
Gotta hand it to Tom Cruise: he took a nifty little TV series about a group of low-key intelligence operatives that work together as a team to solve near-impossible problems and turned it into a gigantic one-man showcase where a star-producer reportedly risks his life again and again on bigger more elaborate stunt setpieces, in gargantuan productions that, y'know, celebrate the beauty of self-sacrifice and teamwork.
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Some folks may find it hard to believe (having trouble myself) but The Meg and its present sequel Meg 2: The Trench are adapted from a pair of science-fiction novels by Steve Altern, with a possible six more books if this installment makes money (indications suggesting it will). Adapted by three writers no less, which raises the question: can you even tell?
(Warning: plot twists and story discussed in explicit detail)
Heard the feedback: Worse Halloween ever. Slow and boring. Where's Michael? Who's the new guy?-- and I agree. Worse Halloween ever, not much of a slasher film.
But what it is as it turns out is a pretty interesting David Gordon Green film.
Dear diary
6:10 PM
Fear is a tool. When light hits the screen it's not just the movie's start, it's a warning. Only who's being warned-- the bad guys on the big screen or us sitting here? Maybe you, reading this? Confused now.
Sat down to watch Matt Reeves' The Batman. A hundred and seventy-six minutes to go.
Need I remind you? NARRATIVE AND PLOT TWISTS TO BE DISCUSSED IN EXPLICIT DETAIL.
Moving on.
Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King concludes what may be the single most massive production shoot in recent cinema, a $900-million, four-to-five-years-in-the-making, nine-hour-plus adaptation of the works of one shy Oxford don. With all those numbers, all the love and excitement generated by fans, all the hosannas heaped at its massive perfumed feet, one might feel churlish pointing out dents in the gleaming suit of armor. Still--
Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers picks up where Fellowship leaves off-- with Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) mano-a-mano with the Balrog (huge, bat-winged creature with whip and sword and severe attitude problem)--and, if anything, ups the ante. Fellowship focused on a band of brothers, Towers divides into three threads: Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) off to see the wicked (Sauron's One Ring of Power) tossed into the Crack of Doom (insert ass joke here); Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd), kidnapped by nasty Uruk-Hais (upgraded Orcs) and rescued by Ents (perambulating hardwoods); kingly Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) and the rest of the Fellowship holed up at Helm's Deep, waiting for Saruman's ten-thousand-strong army to fall on them like rain.
The film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is a massive undertaking-- 270 million on three pictures approximately three hours each, with thousands of extras, hundreds of locations, endless digital effects… you get the idea. And it’s by Peter Jackson, director of both the exuberantly gross Dead Alive and lyrical at times harrowing Heavenly Creatures, an event we’ve waited for all of last year, freshly arrived in its first installment. And how is it?
(Warning: plot points of both the 2018 Halloween and 2021 Halloween Kills discussed in explicit and gory detail)
"I come to bury Caesar not praise him," Marc Antony once said standing over Caesar's corpse, making brutal appreciation of his former friend; I know how he feels. Lay David Gordon Green's Halloween Kills across the autopsy table and you're forced to agree with most critics: this is not a pretty sight. I mean--long character expositions sutured to grotesque murders of said characters; loud thumping music stretched to cover entire missing sections of narrative and huge gaps in logic; conventions from different genres stuffed like so many makeshift organs into the film's carcass in the hope that the mess will come to life, rough thread punched in and out of festering leather in a parody of stitching. If this unholy assembly ever manages to lurch off the table and stumble across the bloodslicked floor the audience will shriek--more at the sheer gracelessness of the filmmaking, I imagine, than any violence actually depicted.
(Plot twists and story discussed in explicit detail)
Latest of a longrunning franchise, last to feature latest Bond Daniel Craig. Best of the lot tho I'm not a fan of of the series from Roger Moore onwards. Craig I'll admit is one of the better actors in the role, second to Connery (who didn't do his best work in this series). I trust I make myself clear as mud.
Alienated
Trek is dead; long live Trek. Early in this latest movie Spock (Zachary Quinto playing the emo version) gazes at the picture of his dead alternate-universe self (the more equanimous Leonard Nimoy) and ponders mortality, the past, probably the future.
Last hurrahBryan Singer's X-Men: Apocalypse is easily his worst received superhero film yet, earning 52% on Metacritic and even worse in Rotten Tomatoes--a considerable comedown from Days of Future Past, which managed to tell a chronologically complicated storyline and combine the cast of both adult and adolescent X-Men pictures in a way that enhances that film's complex (if shallow) view of history.
