Category: Movie Reviews

All movie reviews

Watchmen (2009) – A Science Fiction-Fantasy Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , , , , ,

Watchmen is a movie based on a DC Comics comic book series from the 1980s written by Alan Moore and directed by Zack Snyder.  Moore is a self-identified “anarchist” (read weirdo) and the fictional world of this story reflects his hatred of anything conservative (read normal).

The story takes place in an alternate reality of 1985 where Richard Nixon is in his fifth term and a band of “superheroes” called the Watchmen have been disbanded after they were used for such actions as winning the Vietnam War for the Americans.  Apparently, people became afraid of their impact on society.  The movie starts with one of these retired heroes; the Comedian being murdered by another extremely powerful masked individual.  He is thrown through the window of a Manhattan skyscraper.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

We are introduced to the former heroes.  By the way I recognized none of the actors.  I’m sure some of them would be familiar to anyone who has gone to the movies much in the last fifteen years.

Except for Doctor Manhattan who is some kind of god-like being with psychic abilities and atomic power that can destroy cities, the rest of the heroes are just humans who are strong and trained as fighters.  Doctor Manhattan got these powers while he was working in the American nuclear weapons industry.  He is able to become enormously large, teleport to Mars at will and able to invent whole new power sources for Earth’s future.

When the Comedian is murdered the other Watchmen suspect that someone is trying to kill all of them.  When an assassin tries to kill another one; Adrian Veidt (AKA: Ozymandias) they get the gang back together and look for the killer.  There’s all kinds of action and adventure.  But in the final act we find out that Ozymandias is responsible.  He stages an atomic attack on New York City, London and a couple of other cities and the leaders of the world assume it was Doctor Manhattan that did it as a warning against nuclear states (like the US and the USSR) threatening nuclear war.  This brings the countries of the world together out of a sense of common defense against Doctor Manhattan.  And Doctor Manhattan approves of the peaceful result of the hoax so the secret is maintained.  But one Watchman; Rorschach objects and has to be killed by Doctor Manhattan to keep the secret.  Rorschach’s friends are angry but agree to keep the secret for the sake of world peace.  At the end of the movie, it appears that Rorschach was able to leak the secret before he was killed.

Okay, so what did I think of this movie?  To start off we have Richard Nixon in his fifth term pretty much as evil incarnate.  So, there’s that.  The movie has a dose of sex and violence so this isn’t a kid’s superhero movie.  So, there’s that.  The story itself and the characters have interesting moments.  The question comes down to, is it worth the time to watch it?  I’ll have to qualify this.  If you like comic book stories there is a decent chance you’ll like this movie.  The effects and the acting aren’t bad.  The plot isn’t reasonable but it is clever.  If you don’t like comic book stories, you won’t like this movie.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 08MAY2025 – More Dune

photog Guest Contributors, Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews, Tregonsee , , , , , ,

The fever dream that is David Lynch’s Dune owes far more to the earlier Jodorowsky attempt at a Dune Movie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune#Background ) than to Frank Herbert’s novel. These things include

  • Stunt casting Sting mirrors Jodorowsky’s intent to cast Mick Jagger for Feyd Rautha
  • The art work in the Lynch version is greatly affected by both Jodorowskys use of H.R. Giger (then mostly unknown) and Jodorowsky’s use of Moebius (of Heavy Metal Comic book fame) to help create the cinematics and layout
  • The bizarre ending involving the Weirding Modules and Rain on Arrakis steals from the Jodorowsky ending (though doesn’t go QUITE so acid trip as Jodorowsky) and totally diverges from the Dune Module

I did see it in the theater when it came out. It has some good points ( Patrick Stewart as Gurney Halleck, the overall look) but it is of its time and strongly affected by the Jodorowsky work which is NOT what a Dune originalist would like. Here, 41 years on it seems very dated and of its time. Of the three attempts at Dune that got to the screen it is probably the weakest.

Guest Contributor – Arthurincali – 08MAY2025 – Review of Dune

photog ArthurinCali, Book Reviews, Guest Contributors, Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews, SF&F Movie Reviews

ArthurinCali has put together a review of David Lynch’s 1984 motion picture adaption of Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune.

For you Dune fans go over to his substack and see what he has to say about both the book and this movie version.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Coalescence of the Not-Stupid

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, Movie Reviews, Music Reviews, Reviews , ,

So, what if it’s true that Hollywood as an industry is more or less done?  Suppose that there won’t be ten or twenty somewhat-good movies coming out every year anymore.  What if instead there are a couple of decent mini-series by Netflix and Amazon and maybe one or two summer “blockbuster” fantasies and all the rest is just low budget dreck?  How would that affect the entertainment habits of the population?

Well, let’s think about what the population is.  Currently the populace is divided into several different divisions.  But overall, there is a demarcation into two larger groups.  First there are the boomers and GenX contingents.  They both grew up when entertainment was big business and they are used to paying for entertainment that they consider “good.”  They would go to a good movie or buy a music album if they consider it worthwhile.  These are the people who are most distressed by the current state of American entertainment.  Someone my age looks at television or what is currently considered good cinema or popular music and is horrified by the low quality and overall stupidity of the art.

The second grouping is everyone younger; millennials and the Zoomers.  For the most part these people don’t buy music or pay for movies.  They stream everything and are willing to watch and listen to low quality content if they can pay next to nothing for it.  Not being part of this group I’m not completely sure whether this strategy is a byproduct of their poverty or whether they simply don’t care what kind of entertainment product they consume.  Nevertheless, the outcome either way is that the future will be determined by this paradigm.  Entertainment businesses will not be making the kinds of profits they made from the boomers and GenX from the new kids.  Okay, that’s what we are seeing.  Entertainment will become mass marketing of the lowest common denominator at the lowest price.  In other words; garbage.

But that will not be the whole story.  The bell curve is a fact of nature.  Most of humanity is very average, and lately that average seems to have sunk a bit.  But the right side of the curve exists.  There is a segment of the population that is intelligent and they need entertainment that isn’t always the lowest common denominator.  And they tend to be more prosperous than their less intelligent brethren.  And whereas they will join with everyone else to celebrate whatever moronic pop star or whatever mindless video game happens to be in vogue this month, they will occasionally need something more nutritious for the mind and soul.  And how will this work?  After all there isn’t a pipeline for intelligent entertainment.

What I think will happen is organizations; whether corporate or individuals, will spring up to curate what’s out there and arrange for venues and opportunities for these people to enjoy this better entertainment together.  Now maybe the “together” isn’t physical.  Maybe they’ll be doing this over the internet with chat functions used to allow the patrons to share their reactions to the content.  But I think renting a theater to play old movies (or new movies that have been made expressly for a specialized audience) would make perfect sense.

The power of the internet to connect smaller but focused groups is already very well known.  What still needs to happen is for a larger group of intelligent people to coalesce around a commercial entity that is willing to provide them with entertainment that exceeds the lowest common denominator on a consistent basis.  But I think it will happen.  Some day soon, the not-stupid will band together and find out just how strong they are.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019) – A Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, Reviews , , , ,

When I watched and reviewed the earlier chapters in the John Wick “saga” I noted that the number of bullets and kills had increased orders of magnitude between the first and second installments and if that trend were to be continued into a third movie it would be necessary for Mr. Wick to slaughter whole sectors of the galaxy to provide the sheer numbers necessary.

Well, I was wrong.  In this third movie, John Wick is still only killing gangsters within the confines of the borough of Manhattan.  Well, except for a short sojourn to Casablanca to get some help from Halle Berry in finding a mystical Arab mafioso who requires John to cut off a finger Yakuza style and rededicate himself to “The Table.”  While there, he barely kills anyone at all, less than a hundred.

Okay, forget about plot.  It’s entirely too stupid to even mention.  Suffice it to say that John Wick is fighting and killing assassins so quickly and continuously that he must have single-handedly used up all the ammunition on the planet.  He even depleted all of the armor piercing rounds on Earth.

On a personal note, Keanu Reeves is looking very old.  It’s clear that all this fighting is taking a terrible toll on him.  And it’s no surprise.  Without a serious count I’ll say conservatively Mr. Wick was hurled through several dozen panes of glass, thrown off a four-story building, shot a half dozen times, stabbed several times, crashed his motorcycle into a building, had a finger amputated then cauterized, he was branded and punched close to a thousand times.  That’s got to take it out of fellow.

Look I get it.  These movies provide a video game-like environment where the audience experiences the adrenaline rush of a non-stop first-person shooter experience.  And looked at from that point of view John Wick 3 gets the job done.  There are knife fights, endless gun fights, fist fights, dog fights, karate fights, there are even fights on motorcycles.  Some of the assassins even turn out to be fans of John and tell him during the battles that they really admire him and killing him isn’t personal, it’s just business.

And the end of the movie isn’t really an end.  It looks like just the end of round three.  But I’m not sure there will be a round four.  The net profit from the movie was only $89 million.  And as blockbusters go that’s small potatoes.  So, this might be the final installment of the adventures of John Wick.

As far as recommendations, see the first John Wick movie.  It’s the best one.  Unless that movie strikes you as incredibly fun don’t bother with the sequels.  Neither of them materially improves on the action and as far as storytelling they lack the emotional rationale of the first film.

One little interesting cinematic moment in the film is where an homage to the spaghetti western, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” is included.  Wick is in a gun store looking for a gun to defend himself with and he takes components from several revolvers and matches them together and listens to the gun’s action to see if the composite is smooth operating.  Of course, he barely has time to use the gun before abandoning for the next scene so it is purely a staged moment in the film.  But I still liked it.

This Happy Breed (1944) – A Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, Reviews , , , , , ,

This Happy Breed is a fictional portrayal of life in working class England from the end of the First World War to the eve of the Second world War.  I won’t give any spoiler warnings because it’s not that kind of movie.  It’s an intimate look at a family in suburban London between the wars and all of the important and trivial things that make up human life.

Frank Gibbons (played by Robert Newton) returns from war to his family; wife Ethel (played by Celia Johnson), his teenage son Reg, his daughters Vi and Queenie, his mother-in-law Mrs. Flint and his sister Sylvia, all living under his roof.  His next-door neighbor Bob Mitchell is a war buddy and becomes Frank’s best friend.  And Bob’s son Billy will eventually become Queenie’s boyfriend.

Over the course of the twenty years that the movie covers we watch the children grow up, navigate the troubled economy of Britain between the wars, fall in love, marry and in one case die tragically.  Children rebel against their parents’ expectations and mores and come out the other side older and sadder and much like their parents.

The movie is a slice of life in three acts and a total of nine scenes spread across those twenty years.  I guess what I liked about the film is the feeling of believability about the characters but at the same time the likeability of most of them.  Even though they were Brits and from a time period before I was born, they felt strangely familiar.  And I was invested in their stories.  You could actually care how things turned out for them because they were decent people trying to muddle through their lives during a period of history when England was still reeling from the loss of a generation of young men in World War I and staggering under the global economic changes that would reduce them to a poorer nation.  Frank and Ethel love their family and try their best to steer their children in the right direction.

There are moments of pathos and humor.  And the acting is top notch without any flashiness or highbrow dialog.  Just simple people living their lives.  I’m not sure who I would recommend this movie to.  First remember that for Americans the British locale might make it a little strange.  But actually, I didn’t think it was off-putting.  Events like the death of their king or the 1926 General Strike might seem unfamiliar but not mysterious.  If the description I give here doesn’t sound interesting then give this a pass.  But I consider it a gem of a film that I’m surprised I never saw before.  Highly recommended.

The Steel Trap (1952) – A Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, Reviews , , ,

The Steel Trap is a crime/suspense thriller starring Joseph Cotton as Jim Osborne an assistant bank manager in Los Angeles who is tempted to steal a million dollars from his bank.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Jim has become bored with the slow plodding progress in the career of a bank manager and realizes that his bank has close to a million dollars of cash in its vault every Friday at closing which will not be missed until Monday at about 8:30 am.

He quickly and uncarefully concocts a plan to steal the cash and fly to Brazil with his family before the theft is discovered.  From the very beginning holes in his plan appear.  The upcoming weekend is the last time the bank won’t be open on Saturday until next year so the theft has to be tomorrow.  This means getting passports for himself and his wife will have to be expedited.  His wife Laurie balks at bringing their young daughter so a babysitter has to be located for the “two weeks” that Jim tells Laurie he’ll need to be in Brazil on the bank’s business.  He didn’t know that plane flight reservations to Rio De Janeiro are booked weeks in advance and now he’ll have to chance getting cancellation seats.  And he’ll have to fly first to New Orleans and then connect to his flight.

And all the things that can go wrong do.  His wife isn’t in time to get the passports while the Brazilian embassy is open so Jim has to break in after hours and is caught by a building security guard and only some luck with an embassy worker who vouches for him saves him from arrest.  The one-hundred-and-fifty-pound suitcase full of cash catches the airline’s attention and they have a customs agent open it and find the cash.  Jim has to tell a bunch of unlikely stories about how the bank needs cash to transact a business deal in Brazil and barely survives the calls to his boss when it turns out he’s on the golf course.  But eventually all of this is for nothing when the cancellations on his flight never materialize.  Now Jim is faced with catching a flight on Monday after the bank has discovered the theft.

At this point Laurie has put two and two together and figures out that Jim has stolen the cash in the suitcase and confronts him.  When he admits to it, she refuses to continue with the plan and goes home to her daughter.  Meanwhile back at home Jim’s work friend dropped off a present at Jim’s home and hears about Jim making an unscheduled “business trip” to Brazil.  Finding this strange he tries to get in touch with Jim’s boss to get the details on the trip but has trouble reaching him.  Meanwhile Laurie reaches home and finds out about Jim’s friend hearing about their trip so she calls him and makes some excuse about how it wasn’t a business trip but a story they used to disguise a surprise for their daughter.

Early Monday morning Jim calls up Laurie at home and tells her he realizes he’s made a terrible mistake and says he’s going to try to get the money back in the vault before anyone knows it’s missing.  He flies home and reaches the bank right after the security guard has opened it.  He manages to get the suitcase to the vault and the money back in and hide the suitcase just as the opening team reaches his position outside the vault.  At this point the actual strain of the deception overcomes Jim and he sinks to the floor.  His colleagues think he’s been struck with a flu and tell him to go home.  In the last scene Jim reunites with Laurie at their home in an embrace that shows their relief at the end of the nightmare.

Now this must sound like a ridiculous story.  And it is.  It’s absurd.  But it’s also enormously suspenseful.  Jim Osborne has done such a poor job of anticipating the multitude of things that need to be coordinated for a successful theft of this type that he’s left himself open for an almost endless series of problems that provide suspense.  His bad humor and fear grow from minute to minute and alarm his wife because they clash with his normally friendly and calm attitude.  The tension is ratcheted up throughout the movie.  I was surprised just how much I enjoyed it.  Highly recommended.

Even Barabbas Couldn’t Dampen This Day

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, Movie Reviews, photog's Corner, Reclaiming the Family, Reviews , , ,

Such a good day.  Camera Girl cooked up a storm.  Beef and pork roasts, vegetables, mashed potatoes, biscuits, gravy, stuffed mushrooms and more.  And then the desserts. At my insistence there were five different flavors of ice cream.  That’s because I know the kids crave it (well me too).  But she also made eclairs, tiramisu, ricotta cheesecake, chocolate cake (for the kids) and pineapple upside down cake.  I never even got to the pineapple cake.  I was too stuffed.  And the coffee was hot, strong and good.

The kids were busy with all kinds of silly games and gadgets.  But they were good.  When they started to get bored, I put on the original “King Kong.”  The family Godzilla aficionado was unimpressed with King Kong’s susceptibility to fifty caliber machine gun bullets.  He informed me that a real monster is unkillable with anything up to and including a thermonuclear warhead.  What could I say?  I pointed out that he did manage to kill a T Rex and also a Manhattan elevated subway train.  But apparently Godzilla is so incomparably superior to actual dinosaurs that conquering them is as nothing in the context of what Godzilla can do.  I was made aware that if Godzilla needed to, he has a mode called “thermonuclear” whereby he can emit the equivalent of a fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb against his surroundings.  This I was informed would utterly consume everything within a forty-mile radius around him.  I confessed defeat and asked if we could still watch the end of the movie where Carl Denham tells the cop that “It was beauty killed the beast.”  He rolled his eyes at the screen and shook his head.  Well, anyway, I still think Fay Wray is pretty good looking.  I don’t blame old Kong for carrying her off twice.

After they went home, I watched Barabbas.  That’s an old Dino DeLaurentis swords and sandals epic from the 1960s with Anthony Quinn as the title character who in the Bible is released instead of Jesus for the Passover clemency.  I’ll say with no hesitation that this is one of the worst biblical epics hands down.  Quinn is playing the same part he plays in Zorba the Greek and many other Mediterranean dramas.  His struggles in a Jerusalem prison, a Sicilian sulfur mine and the Roman Coliseum all seem self-inflicted and by the end of the movie I had to wonder if even St Peter wasn’t ready to kick his butt up and down the Roman jail.  Because Barrabas mistook Nero’s blaming the Christians for the burning of Rome with a real Christian plan to “burn the old world” Barabbas gets caught torching an oil warehouse and claims he’s doing it because he’s a Christian.  So, because of this St Peter and the rest of the real Christians are crucified by Nero.  What a genius!

As Barabbas is hanging on a cross at the end of the movie making what seem to be fairly meaningless comments, it seemed to me that the whole movie was absolutely pointless from every perspective; artistically, religiously, even logically.  As spectacle it was borderline ridiculous.  Quinn has a showdown in the Coliseum with Jack Palance in a chariot and himself on foot.  I’ve never seen a less convincing, more boring fight sequence.  At the end of the battle even the actor playing Nero looked like he wanted to be somewhere else but just couldn’t escape.

I also watched an old film noir called “Steel Trap.”  That was much more satisfactory.  I’ll review it soon.  Well, this will have to do for today.  A good day and a busy day.

She-Hulk X

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, OCF Classic Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , ,

I was watching the 1930s King Kong movie yesterday and thought, “That was a damn good idea for a motion picture.”  It had a love story, a damsel in distress, prehistoric monsters, an ocean voyage to a tropical island, a battle scene involving the latest weapons technology of the time, a strange culture, a scantily clad pretty woman and the capitol city of the world as a backdrop.  It was a fantastic story and considering the special effects technology of the time it must have been a truly exciting movie to watch.

Now I compare this to what passes for adventure movies today and what have we got?  Most of what is out there are superhero movies.  One or more characters dressed up in spandex running or flying around battling each other to cause or prevent mayhem to the human population around them.  And after two hours of this, usually nothing much has happened.  Some space jewel or other has been found or lost and some bad guys have been captured or chased off.  But to all intents and purposes nothing substantive has been achieved or lost.  For the most part no one even dies.  It seems rather pointless.

I think something has been lost from the art of storytelling.  Now this isn’t completely the case.  There are still movies with a beginning, middle and end.  I guess a decent example would be Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.  Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises; beginning, middle and end.  We see why Bruce Wayne became Batman.  We see him defeat his greatest adversary and we see him walk away when he can do no more.  It’s not Shakespeare but it is decent story-telling and effective spectacle.

Now compare this to the Marvel “Avengers” series.  There have been dozens of these movies if you count all of the sequels, spin-offs and television productions.  Each “hero” has a sequence of movies and then there are the ensemble films and basically nothing meaningful happens.  And now they’ve gotten to the point where they want to swap out the older white male heroes with black and female successor heroes.  The most laughable one I’d say is “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.”  I have to assume that if she loses a case she hulks out and rampages through the court building until her client can escape the pulverized masonry.  Basically, these people have no conception of story-telling and are just building boring envelopes that they can fill with CGI effects.

Even something as absurd as the John Wick movies is better than this.  At least it started with an original movie that had a character and a plot.  Granted the character is a cartoon and the plot is as simple minded as any imaginable but there is an arc to the story and things definitely happen; mostly flying bullets and dead Russian mobsters but within the confines of the story it keeps your interest mostly.  Now it is almost unbelievable that they’ve been able to turn this into a series.  The body count in the first movie was in the high two figures.  In the second movie, which was the last one I watched, the action was so frenetic I couldn’t even tell how many people he killed.  The automatic weapons fire was almost continuous for ten minutes at a time.  I don’t even know how we’re supposed to believe that the guns don’t start to melt from the heat.  But even this absurdity is preferable to the boring Marvel movies.

I understand that Hollywood is solely driven by return on investment and pumping out sequels to existing intellectual property like the comic book characters is one of the only allowed pathways to getting a film made.  The exception is someone like Christopher Nolan whose reputation for success will allow him to make a movie like Oppenheimer.  But you can count those trusted movie-makers on the fingers of one hand.  And they’re getting old.  What happens when they’re gone?  She-Hulk II or III or X?

Critical Drinker Re-reviews “Falling Down”

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, Reviews , ,

The Critical Drinker is a movie reviewer who provides a very entertaining product.  He’s a younger guy but he’s actually quite astute.  I like the movie “Falling Down” and I like this review for the insights he brings to it from his point of view as a foreigner (Scot).

I think I’ll rewatch it and review it myself.