Nacho Vigalondo directs Karra Elejalde, Candela Fernández and Bárbara Goenaga in this Spanish sci-fi thriller where a husband finds himself in a deadly time loop.
Decent one watcher. The obtuse morality lets it down. Our protagonist does some pretty repugnant shit to reset his world back. Are we supposed to take away he would do anything for his wife? Or that he has this casual evil in him and just needed a crisis to let it loose?
Kevin Booth and David Johndrow direct Bill Hicks in this stand-up comedy special where Bill performs a live stand-up show in Austin, Texas.
Whoever decided to overlay grainy black and white footage onto the performance needs to have a word with themselves. It detracts from the comedy and makes Bill seem like he is trapped in a Lynchian hellscape. The lack of slickness is often endearing though; walkouts, distractions, terrible camera angles. It feels like a truer document than what we get today. There are some god level perfect stand-up routines here. Searing, brutal, honest. Others are captured better in Revelations while the George Michael stuff has dated horribly.
8
Perfect Double Bill: American: The Bill Hicks Story (2011)
Simon Wincer directs Jason James Richter, Keiko and Michael Madsen in this kid’s animal movie about a foster kid who befriends a trapped whale at a failing aqua park.
A weird brew of anodyne and tough messaging. I was always going to be too jaded for this. Shares a dubious honour with The Shawshank Redemption and Carrie in that its most famous one-sheet poster was the ending of the movie.
4
Perfect Double Bill: Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home (1995)
Ridley Scott directs Michael Douglas, Ken Takakura and Andy Garcia in this fish-out-of-water thriller where two NYC cops transporting a Japanese prisoner back to Osaka lose him at the airport.
Plot wise this is standard product. A less serious tone and it could easily be Beverly Hills Cop Goes Japan. Douglas looks like he will fuck anything that moves (if only he had the time). Ridley clearly loves filming modern Japan. Neon, trucks, motorbikes, clean lines. He has a visual hoot. It is a quite loose, quite basic movie but when it hits a note it hits it with intensity. Some decent mid level action if you aren’t keen on the travelogue and brooding culture clash performances. Put into production when Japan was buying up American corporations and movie studios but it ain’t as xenophobic as you’d fear. Made for Saturday nights in.
Parker Finn directs Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt and Lukas Gage in this horror sequel where the smiling curse moves onto a pop star just as she is about to embark on a gruelling comeback tour.
Again, more a chiller than a horror with massive debts to Repulsion and J-Horror. The backstage of a world tour setting adds pageantry and pizazz. Naomi Scott heavy lifts for the bulk of the movie. She convinces as a world famous singing sensation, a mentally fragile diva and a doomed doll in a demon’s psychological toy box. Bloody and grinding in equal measure my only real beef with the ambitious but mainstream Smile movies is they stretch a nippy Twilight Zone hour over twice the runtime. They play like emotional marathons. Intentional maybe, but this is going to restrain me from rewatching regularly.
Bronwen Hughes directs Sandra Bullock, Ben Affleck and Maura Tierney in this road movie romantic comedy.
Let’s direct an aggressively anti-marriage It Happened One Night in an ugly world that looks like the fake reality from The Matrix? Will it have likeable characters? Will it have a happy ending? Ugh!
Ben Stiller directs Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke and Janeane Garofalo in this twenty something teen movie / romantic comedy / Generation X time capsule.
Forget Top Gun and Pulp Fiction. This has the Greatest Movie Soundtrack Of All Time! OK… maybe it’s neck and neck with Dazed And Confused’s OST. The movie itself is a little mercenary. Rather cack handedly trying to define an era as it was happening. While the plot is basically an update on Alcott / Austen / Brontë. Will our self aware heroine chose love or security… both choices come with a loss of independence, integrity and artistry. Both suitors are absolute states. And everyone else is insufferable too. Still, it is trying to be adult, cuter and edgier than Friends in passing. Winona feels like she is playing a human being who does shopping and laundry which was a rarity in the Nineties. There are some good laughs. The script has wit that rounds off the cliched tartness and those fool’s errand attempts to be seminal. And because it was marketed as THE Generation X movie, nostalgia now means it fulfils that destiny. We all know Before Sunrise is the actual Gen X movie that got things right. I kinda love Reality Bites in spite of itself.
Clint Eastwood directs Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette and J. K. Simmons in this courtroom drama where an everyman finds himself serving on a jury in a murder case where he not only believes the suspect to be innocent but he himself might be responsible for the victim’s death.
Somber and elegiac. Hoult reins it in with an internalised performance surrounded by a wonderful ensemble. What a brilliant sweet spot his career is in right now! It doesn’t go for the explicit thriller manoeuvrings of a Grisham but often it feels like knowingly playful update on 12 Angry Men. Much like Mystic River and A Perfect World this is an adult exploration of shared guilt and American justice hidden within a glossy morality play. Shame it didn’t reach a wide audience. 20 years ago it would have been THE Oscar front runner.
Len Wiseman and Chad Stahelski direct Ana de Armas, Keanu Reeves and Gabriel Byrne in this action spin-off where an orphaned girl trains to be a killer bodyguard within the John Wick universe.
There are an un-tally-able amount of moments of people getting walloped in the crotch in this. Knees, rubber bullets, actual bullets. Bad time for genitals. The “ballerina” aspect seems to be stop gap marketing idea from seven years ago never truly fulfilled in the finished movie. “Kikimora” would be the more apt title for the finished product. As that is what Ana de Armas’ pretty but sexless blank trains up to become. She is essentially a Gen Z Nikita and Anne Parilaud even has a blink and I missed it cameo according to the credits in tribute to that hit girl classic. Everyone is getting old. The action is very much more of the same… only the cuts are quicker to cover up de Armas’ heavily relied upon stunt doubles. If you got bored of the constant grappling and shooting and slamming in past entries, then this doesn’t offer much more variation than previous ones. Having said that, Ballerina does become at least a bit more slapstick and spectacular in the second half. There is a rumble through a workshop with grenades that feels excessively silly and the finale involving duelling flame throwers has certainly never been done before. Allegedly, series mastermind Stahelski reshot all these sequences after Wiseman’s cut got weak test scores. And that shows. The last act is way more involving, inspired and pulse raising than the rather lacklustre seen-it-all-before build-up. Of course it helps that Keanu crops up for a prominent reprise in the third act. If you like gun-fu, comic book world building and puce lighting, then this fifth trip out of The Continental does hit the spot. I guess I still do.
Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein direct Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Rya Kihlstedt in this legacy sequel to the horror accidental death franchise.
The teens at my library told me they snuck in to see this through the fire exit and I look like the guy who got his brains eaten up by a lawnmower! Not exactly a compliment but I’ll take it. Awesome prolonged Sixties-set opening at a doomed skytower restaurant. Some franchise high kills and teases. Likeable final girl. Tony Todd’s lovely final monologue of his career. Probably the best one yet.
Jonathan Entwistle directs Ben Wang, Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio in this intertwining of all the iterations of the Karate Kid series… “Two Branches, One Tree.”
Miyagi-Do is back and now… well… Now my wife wants to learn kung-fu. Super colourful. They make the sensible decision to give the kid the first half to himself before Jackie and Ralph can dominate the limelight. At one point he is training Pacey Witter. It can’t get cooler than that. Just a lot of good hearted fun. The tournament resembles an arcade game and there’s an alley fight sequence where Wang recreates all of Jackie’s energy and moves. What more could you want in a Sunday morning multiplex trip?
Two pleasant surprises that weren’t even on my radar a few months ago. Feeding nostalgia hunger pangs that I didn’t know I even had.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 