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Capone (2020)
Endurance Contest
Capone wets & craps himself, has a hallucination & collapses, has a hallucination & collapses, has a hallucination & collapses. Then he dies.
Chi-Raq (2015)
Chiraq is Chicago
I tend to like and dislike the opposite of what Spike Lee does. I rented "Do The Right Thing" and had to turn it off halfway through. I saw "Old Boy" and "Inside Man" and liked them a lot. "Summer Of Sam" was also very entertaining.
"Chiraq" was good. People say it's not Chicago. I've lived here for almost half a century and, yes, it is like that. People say it's BS but the BS is true to what people say and think in Chicago.
When the Father Pfleger cartoon says something like "It's easier to buy a computer than a gun" or "It's the NRA's fault black people does what they does" of course it's crap. But it's basically how Pfleger lies and panders to the dumb community which fills his political action hall every Sunday.
Pictures of Cheney, H.W., Rice, W. and Rummy hang on the wall of racist General King Kong's wall. The last time Chicago had a Republican mayor was two years before Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion. Again, complete garbage, but typical of Chicago's scapegoats.
The movie ran a little long but it was a creative tour de force.
The Visit (2015)
Alzheimer's Is Scary
"Paranormal Activity" worked on the premise that unexplained noises and long, dark hallways are creepy & scary. "The Visit" worked on the premise that old people who act weird are creepy & scary. I think that works on a certain level because we're not just observing this scary behavior but one day we'll also be engaged in it.
I could have done without the white kid rapping (that stopped being funny 30 years ago) and the schmaltzy, feel-good, "tinkly tinkly" music ending. I might also have preferred a supernatural ending, but it was worth it to get the plot twist.
It's good to see M. Night make his first worthwhile movie since "Signs."
Europa Report (2013)
Thread-bare material
This movie has been done a thousand times since "Alien." I forgot about it 10 minutes after I left the theater.
****** SPOILER ALERT ****** It's a squid. Under the ice, in the water, there's a squid and we only see it in practically the last frame of the movie. That's the plot. In space...there's a monster hiding! How original.
In the preceding hour and a half we're treated to cliché scenes of astronauts losing their lives in space repairs, emergency landings, survey trips, etc. Half of it is presented in "interviews" with the actors. What a waste of film.
Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay (2012)
Misses the mark
I can see the director's problem here. Ricky Jay doesn't have much to say about his family, left home young, got a job bar tending which led to magic act bookings. Please exit at the rear of the theater. Not much to work with there so we get into the figures he grew up with. When he was young he hung out with his grandfather Max Katz (insert biography here, show vaudeville photos.) He introduced Ricky to Cardini (insert biography here, show vaudeville photos.) Then he hung out with these other two sleight of hand greats (insert biography...you get the idea.) I guess in the end we learn that Ricky Jay has an interesting talent but an entirely uninteresting life. The coverage of the other magicians is so overpowering that this can hardly be called a Ricky Jay biography. This may have played better if it were about all of these past talents with Ricky Jay as the host, rather than pretending he were the center of the film.
Quantum of Solace (2008)
"Casino" was the height of the franchise, "Quantum" was the pits.
Stephen King was going to name "Casino Royale" as his second favorite Bond movie behind "Goldfinger." For the purpose of the article he was writing he re-watched "Goldfinger." He came back to the article and decided that "Casino" was the best instead.
I, too, loved "Casino Royale". Craig made me believe he was a professional killer, which no other Bond actor has ever done. Practical, cold, exacting, properly motivated. The screenwriter and the director homed in on those stylistic elements that made Bond fascinating to watch, eschewing gadgets in favor of the potency and novelty of Bond himself and keeping the action sequences at least reasonably within the limits of suspended disbelief.
None of these qualities were present in the mess that was "Quantam of Solace." It becomes apparent within the first few minutes that this movie was made by a different, inferior director. The suspense, the spy fetishism, the coolness factor of "Casino Royale" just weren't there. The film consists of only three relevant parts. The first, we find out the boring fact that Mr. White isn't the head of a SPECTRE-like org, he's just a pawn of it. Then we get a tidbit about Vespa's boyfriend. 40 minutes of routine, seen-it-before, Jason Bourne-ripoff crap later, we get closure on Mathis' role from the first movie. Another 40 minutes of cookie-cutter plot and then we get a sleepy resolution to the Vepsa sub-plot from the first movie.
The plot revelations are unstimulating and uncreative. The rooftop foot chases and boat races are unoriginal, the antique propeller plane vs. modern fighter w/skilled career pilot nonsense is predictable and an insult to the intelligence and attention span of the audience. The shaky-camera routine is a poor substitute for skillful editing and direction, just as the last Bourne movie was. M is demoted from an implied seasoned, ex-spy cum agency head to a befuddled, subservient student of Bond.
I understand that the studio pushed back the movie as long as it did because it didn't believe it had enough time to come up with good script. They obviously didn't push it back far enough.
The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
So bad that five people walked out of the theater
The Bourne Ultimatum is only the third movie I've ever walked out on in my life and, in fact, four other people in the small, weekday matinée audience walked out before I did.
The movie begins with an endless series of the same cookie-cutter sequences we've seen in the first two movies. Intelligence agency suits being briefed while an aide runs after them, watching them as they pace and recite clichéd lines like "We need cameras, people", "Tap his line, people", "Why aren't we following him, people." You could edit these scenes interchangeably between all 3 movies and not tell which scenes belong to which film.
One of the first major plot devices is that this post-9/11, super-CIA agency, which can apparently tap into any security camera in the world, is caught off guard by Bourne's use of an obscure, cutting-edge piece of technology known as the "prepaid phone". The mega-intelligence agency with unlimited funds and a license to kill is confounded by this! It would be one thing if Vosen, the CIA mastermind character, snapped his fingers and said "Damn, of course, he's using an untraceable phone" but the guy practically double-takes and says "a prepaid what??" as if the audience is to believe this is some incredibly ingenious spy trick. And of course, this comes after Bourne foils their wiretapping of the London newspaper by calling the reporter on another reporter's phone. Guess the security budget didn't allow them to tap the whole office? OK, so the rave reviews for this movie never claimed it was a *clever* thriller, I say to myself. It's being billed as the best action movie in years, maybe I should take it as that.
A blurry view of an assassination and close-quarters combat scenes shot so tightly, in such dark shadows, with such choppy editing and shaky filming that you can't even see what's going on. I guess the audience is meant to fill in the scenes with their imagination rather than actually seeing the Jason character put down the brilliantly choreographed fight moves that made the first two movies enjoyable? If these are the action elements of the movie, it just does not work as an action movie.
By the time Jason got to Madrid and more of the numerous cell phone call scenes played out, I predicted what was coming next. Jason yells "No no it's a trap", the bomb goes off, Jason hits the deck, and rather than meeting with his contact and learning the truth of his identity, which of course would end the movie early, we move on to the next unoriginal spy movie sequence. One flat, boring, car explosion later, this predictable scene had played out exactly as I saw it coming. I grabbed my hat and became person #5 to walk out of the theater.
Some might argue that I missed a dynamite second half of the movie, that the action or the plot became better in the following hour. Whether that's true or not, it could not possibly make up for the first hour. And the audience shouldn't have to pay for it by being forced to sit through the repetitive, intelligence-insulting, meat grinder movie-making of The Bourne Ultimatum's first half. The fact that this movie has been so highly rated by so many baffles me as much as a prepaid cell baffles Noah Vosen and the CIA.