One of the podcasts I co-host, the SugaBros, has just completed its third season.
If you are not familiar with the show, the conceit is that my friend Nemo and I review every song the Sugababes released. We have just finished reviewing their third LP, Three.
If this strikes your fancy, you can catch up with all three seasons at the links below.
ONE TOUCH (2000)
Super spy (Ryan Gosling) realises his employers are dirty.
Evil CIA people (Regé-Jean Page and Jessica Henwick) send a bad guy with an annoying haircut (Chris Evans) to kill our anti-hero.
To give him some weakness, Evil Moustache kidnaps a young girl (Julia Butters) Super Spy is friends with.
Cue many people dying and s*** blowing up.
A 200 million dollar attempt at a new spy action franchise, The Gray Man has plenty of bells and whistles.
Headlined by Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans, written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, and directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, The Gray Man is intended as an all-star vehicle for Netflix.
Instead it is a case of the Emperor has no clothes for its makers.
There is something lifeless about The Gray Man which I could not shake.
The characters and plotting have been done before.
There is no time to breathe - big set piece moments pass in seconds (while stuck atop a train, Gosling kills a baddie by using a passing reflection from a building window to aim).
Nothing about this movie feels exciting.
The flashbacks to establish Gosling’s humanity are so familiar it gets annoying in its predictability - it is yet another ‘heartless killer bonds with a child’ story, but with nothing new to add.
Gosling underplays so much he is rendered inert.
Chris Evans chews the scenery but his villain feels like the bad guy from a million action movies.
Billy Bob Thornton and Alfre Woodward collect pay checks.
Ana De Armas has found a film that gives her nothing to do beyond shoot and kill things.
The people I watched it with enjoyed it but even they pointed out how familiar the final showdown was.
The movie has a big budget but there is nothing about it that sticks.
Production designer Dennis Gassner - veteran of the James Bond franchise - lends the film some modernist flare (the club in the beginning is eye catching), but it all gets blurred into the background by the pacing and the muddy cinematography.
Like Ambulance, The Gray Man makes a lot of use of drone shots in place of camera movement, but to no real effect.
Increasing the sense of repetition, Henry Jackman’s score comes off as a series of variations of the same chords played on percussion.
What is infuriating is that there is little to differentiate The Gray Man from the dozens of DTV action movies that share its plot. Most of those movies are probably more fun to watch than this bloated mess.
If you are interested in watching an action movie about a one-man-army murdering people to rescue a child, there are better examples than The Gray Man.
Just re-watch The Nice Guys.
For centuries, bands of sailers known as hunters have scoured the seas, at war with the giant sea beasts who live within their depths.
Maisie (Zaria Angel-Hator) is a young orphan who is determined to follow her parents and become a hunter.
Stowing aboard a ship, she ends up thrown overboard during a battle.
Marooned with hunter Jacob (Karl Urban) and confronted by the formidable sea beast Red, Maisie comes up with a radical idea to get them home and, maybe, change the course of history…
Netflix is a gift and a curse.
A gift for discovering new movies I would not otherwise watch.
A curse because it has become a black hole where movies disappear.
The Sea Monster (directed by Chris Williams, one of the co-directors of Moana) feels like a movie that should be on the big screen.
I remember the shorts for this playing on Netflix’s Home Screen and I dismissed it. But then the reviews dropped and I had to check it out.
There is something wonderfully knowing about The Sea Monster. Yes, it is a monster movie, but it is also a movie about conservation, in a manner reminiscent of the more empathetic kid-saves-an-animal movies that came out through the nineties.
On top of this, it ends up being a story about the ways in which history is shaped to uphold empire.
This is not subtext - this is explicit through the film and is articulated by the characters.
It is also just a lot fun.
There is a cute animal sidekick who joins our heroes, but other than that The Sea Beast is all about living up to its title.
This movie is clearly an excuse for its filmmakers to live out their fantasies of monsters, swashbuckling and other seafaring derring-do.
If this movie came out when I was between 7-10, it probably would have been my favourite movie.
Alongside Big Red, we get a kraken, a giant crab and various whale-like entities.
The action is intense and well-directed - the camera emphasises the size and scale of its creatures from the perspective of its human characters.
We get some shots of Red’s facial expressions, but otherwise the filmmakers always view her and the other sea beasts with a human character to create a sense of their size.
Because the virtual camera stays earthbound, it actually feels like characters are in peril.
The cast also contribute to the movie’s grounding.
Zaria Angel-Hator is winning as Maisie. Enthusiastic but clear-eyed, she wants to be a hunter and the movie charts her journey to realising her dream was based on a lie.
Karl Urban is also good as Jacob, a veteran hunter who gets a meaty arc as Maisie helps him begin to reckon with the perspective of the creatures he has dedicated his life to destroying.
Because of her youth, Maisie is not as entrenched to the propaganda of the hunters, and she is able to get a
The standout of the supporting players is Jared Harris as Captain Crow, an Ahab-like captain who is obsessed with killing Red. He gives the character a conflicted sense of honour and vengeance that prevents the character from coming off as a simple villain.
What really marks the movie out is its unwillingness to treat its characters in purely black and white.
The movie is defined by its empathy - one of the key images of the movie is the countless harpoons sticking out of Red’s back.
This movie is built for the biggest screen possible - the set piece with the Kraken; the battle between the giant crab and Red; even the beautiful shot of our heroes watching the luminescence of the jellyfish as they swim past.
It never feels like it is talking down to its audience, with the weight of its ideas, but it is also in love with showing monsters smashing props, scenery and other monsters.
The Sea Beast works however you want it - it is a genuine four-quadrant movie.
The story of Elvis Presley (Austin Butler), as related by his vampiric manager Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks).
This movie is way more fun than I thought it would be.
I think a few things were working in my favor:
Based on the hyperactive trailers my expectations were lowered. I have enjoyed some of Baz Luhrmann’s past work but I mostly find it overheated in its style and primary color emotions.
I am skeptical of most biopics, and a few days before Elvis I watched Milos Forman’s take on Andy Kaufman, Man on the Moon, which summed up my problems with the genre: an attempt to take on all the key events without a clear focus or throughline. It also felt like the film failed to remold the genre to suit its subject.
Anchored by a scorching performance from Austin Butler, Elvis careens through its central character’s life, attempting to mirror the sensation of his rocketing popularity - and his inevitable fall.
One thing I loved about the movie was how it energized key moments of recognition - the two I noticed were a young Elvis becoming enraptured by both blues and gospel within the course of a single scene, and Colonel Parker’s first sighting of Elvis’s effect on audiences.
Those scenes carry a charge that the movie never really reaches again. There is an energy of discovery, of inspiration, of transformation.
As the title character, Austin Butler is great. He has a solid handle on the familiar voice, but he never feels like an impersonator. His on-stage presentation carries a physical energy and sensuality that creates a visceral sense of Elvis’s star persona. Butler is so convincing that the scenes of lust and affection from audiences feel totally justified.
In his debut as a villain, Tom Hanks may have a wonky accent but otherwise it felt like perfect casting. You need someone incredibly likable to get under Elvis’s skin for so long, and Hanks’s projection of decency is the perfect cover for Parker’s hold on the rock star.
The movie is framed by Parker as an unreliable narrator, attempting to absolve himself of responsibility for Elvis’s demise.
While this is an interesting conceit, it does mean the movie falls afoul of the biopic’s key stumbling block - apart from a few moments, we are onlookers at Elvis. We never really get a sense of what he is thinking.
Maybe because the movie is based around a musician, and Luhrmann’s strength is audiovisual, Elvis works as a jukebox version of Elvis’s life. It is long but it never feels repetitive.
One underlying issue with the film is that it is the Cliff’s Notes version of Elvis’s life. Scenes where Elvis interacts with the black artists who built the genre he rode to stardom (including BB King, Big Mama Thornton and Little Richard) feel like missing scenes from the musical biopic parody Walk Hard. The movie highlights the effect Black music had on Elvis as a kid, but that is about it. The movie does include key snippets from across his life where he talks about the history of the genre, but it feels cursory.
The movie does try to bring up the subject early on, when it contrasts Elvis’s performances with the outrage of the white public and government representatives, but the movie loses any sense of Elvis’s place in American society and culture as soon as he is shipped off to serve in the Army. Just like the real-life figure, the movie loses what little edge it had.
Speaking of edge, if you are expecting the film to deal with Elvis’s relationship with a teenage Priscilla, forget about it.
It is omissions like this that make Elvis satisfying as anything other than a fun highlight reel of Elvis performing his songs.
It is a good time, but it is ultimately just a souped-up version of the familiar Elvis story.
Criminals are dying and Dirty Harry (Clint Eastwood) is not the perpetrator. Who is?
I remember watching scenes from this movie when I was younger. For some reason it was always on some TV channel, and I would catch another scene, and it was always the scenes featuring the motorcycle cops massacring people.
I know I saw more but those images of dark glasses beneath white helmets are very effective. Terminator 2 has really taken the iconography of the motorcycle cop, so there may have been some influence.
I watched Dirty Harry later, and while Magnum Force is not as good as that movie, it is pretty compelling.
Ted Post is the credited director, although apparently Eastwood held a tight leash on the production. Post is no auteur, but he has directed a couple of sequels which are memorable for their bleakness and violence.
While it might not be to the level of Peckinpah or Clockwork Orange, the violence in Magnum Force is still disturbing
There is an excessive quality to the movie - the set pieces are bigger, more people die, and the manner in which they do feels more unnecessary(?)
While Dirty Harry is considered an early action movie, Magnum Force feels closer to the real form - it’s story is pretty simple but it is mostly a collection of set pieces.
We even get the cliche of a villain killing someone in a despicable way so that we hate him more
Does the movie want us to identify with the cops, or Harry?
The movie is a reaction to the first movie, by having Harry against a group of cops who are more arbitrary in their execution of criminals.
The differences are threadbare, but the movie makes no real attempt to explore how Harry and the cops are similar or different. The reveal of the vigilantes identities does not lead to any greater conflict for Harry.
Magnum Force is a pretty sloppy movie, but the filmmaking and Lalo Schifrin’s score ensure it moves past the narrative bumps
The scenes of the vigilante cops are the selling point - as a daylight horror movie, Magnum Force is really good
Post/Eastwood frame the cops with tight closeups of their helmets or over their shoulders.
- the shots recall the looming close-ups of the highway patrolman Marion Crane runs into in Psycho, only more depersonalised. With Schifrin’s martial theme, they feel like robots coldly executing their mission.
These scenes pop the most in the movie - there is a care and attention to composition that the movie does not sustain in the other sequences.
There is a sense of focus and tension to Don Siegel's original that this movie cannot reach.
But in its own scattered way, Magnum Force retains a certain power - there is plenty of memorable moments and it benefits from the action genre's propensity for excess in the number and variety of action sequences.
If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour.
You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Thor (Chris Hemsworth) returns to Earth on the trail of a new threat: the god-slaying Gorr (Christian Bale).
After Gorr kidnaps the children of Asgard, Thor, Korg (Taika Waititi), Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and his former flame Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) join forces to rescue them.
Watching Black Widow, I felt like I had hit a wall trying to write about Marvel movies.
If you liked Ragnarok like I did, there is much to enjoy in Love and Thunder.
The biggest problem I had with it was that nothing had stuck in the brain. The story is kind of a combination of a couple of promising threads, but when it was all over it felt like nothing had happened.
For a good portion of the first act it feels like a rerun of the previous movie’s jokes. That’s great if you loved Matt Damon and Sam Neil’s appearance as actors - they are back.
I was looking forward to Natalie Portman’s return - she is great but like everything in the movie it felt like she was barely in it.
The movie’s plot is also odd. Christian Bale plays a man betrayed by his gods who is determined to slay all the deities in the universe. Maybe because the threat is so focused on godlings I felt no real stakes.
The film tries to make the threat stronger by having Gorr kidnap New Asgard’s children but they just feel like a plot device. The threat is also diminished by the humor and the fact that Thor keeps interacting with them via a psychic link.
One issue I have with the film is that I do not think it threads the needle between the dramatic component and its comedic sensibility.
The humour is poking fun at the ludicrousness of Thor juxtaposed with everyday reality but so much of the movie takes place in formless cosmic spaces. Ragnarok benefited from being set in one place (that was represented by physical sets).
The story also feels like a different movie from the tone.Neither tone nor content fully negate each other, but they feel at odds throughout the movie, meaning that big emotional moments do not connect.
It is a pity because I think there is some potential here.
The way Jane is dealing with her cancer is interesting - it is nice to see a character who is not treating it as a death sentence. Jane wants to carry on living.
I could not help having the sneaking suspicion that Jane’s plotline was the filmmaker’s way of giving Portman something weighty to chew on.
Portman and Hemsworth work well together and it is a pity that the movie around them feels so formless. I feel like the movie would be more interesting without the villain or his scheme. A looser plot structure would have served Jane and Thor’s story more effectively.
As is, it feels like we have been dropped into a single issue where a thousand different plots are happening.
Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie is dealing with being the king of New Asgard - she is basically reduced to a supporting role. Waititi’s Korg also returns, but he feels like a callback to the last movie.
I have seen some criticism that these later Marvel movies lack a sense of an overarching arc. I am glad they do not, but it feels like this movie could have lost the need to hit all of the tropes.
Ragnarok felt like such a breath of fresh air and so it is disappointing that Love and Thunder feels more rote - it feels more like a traditional comedic sequel, with repetition of a lot of jokes, familiar bits (if you enjoyed ‘Immigrant Song’ in Ragnarok, you get a medley of 80s metal songs here, to lesser effect) and a few celebrity cameos.
As with almost all Marvel movies, the bad guy role is thankless. Christian Bale joins the list of heavyweights who have appeared in the franchise and made almost no impression - he is good but he is barely in the movie.
A few beats stick in the mind - Thor’s tense relationship with his ex Mjolnir and current weapon Stormbreaker is hilarious - but overall Love and Thunder is not as memorable as its title would suggest.
Imprisoned for an arranged marriage with an evil nobleman (Dominic Cooper), the Princess (Joey King) has to draw on her warrior skills to escape her tower prison and save her family.
Released on Hulu, The Princess is my kind of genre movie. I am a fan of action movies and thrillers that take place in a confined location. I also like genre fare that is stripped down to the essentials. It is also 94 minutes long.
This is a very simple movie.
It is so simple and narrow in focus, I am not sure it would work on the big screen. But on its own terms, The Princess is a fun time.
Joey King is great in the lead - she brings a convincing physicality and some real emotional weight that adds to the stakes.
With its minimal dialogue, the movie feels more like a silent movie, and, King, with her large eyes and open face, feels like a silent movie performer - the movie lives and dies on her performance, and she conveys a lot without saying anything.
The movie is directed with a cheerful focus on narrative and spatial economy. There are some visual effects work but most of it is exteriors and backgrounds. I have seen some criticism of them but for me the slightly fuzzy environments and sky added to the sense that this takes place in a fairy tale setting.
Director Le-Van Kiet is most well-known for Furie, a solid action film starring Veronica Ngo.
Ngo appears here as the Princess’s mentor and friend Lin - she gets some great showcase moments, but not as many as Furie. I didn't love that movie but she is worth seeing it for.
The best thing about The Princess is its confidence in its concept - there are no jokes poking fun at the scenario or the fairytale trappings.
It also has such a strong handle on what the movie is, that the filmmakers are willing to give up some potential standout scenes. The biggest example of this is that it cuts away from the fight between Ngo and Olga Kurylenko’s whip-yielding henchwoman, Moira.
The cast are all solid, but this is a movie about momentum and action. The best I can say is that they all buy in and play it earnestly.
Because the scenario is so slight, pacing is important. To its credit, every time it feels like the action is about to get repetitive, a new variable or environment is introduced that keeps the story moving.
If The Princess has a weakness, it is a familiar one - the third act is a bit rote and the final fight is not the best one. To its credit, that fight is very brief.
