mack moulin

This was a movie that was so lacking in soul, so devoid of personality, so empty and heartless it almost defied imagination. For one Claire Voy has been the weakest protagonist to date within this series. Both Naomi Rapaci and Rooney Mara did a much better job. There were so many leaps of faith in this film that it required an actress with far more gravitas to convince us that she was capable of a fraction of what she did. The plausibility factor in this film was the lowest of any in the series. The direction was poor, the soundtrack was vapid, and there was nothing about this movie that was compelling. Spoiler alert - after she did not kill the bad guy halfway through the movie it was very difficult to stick with the remainder of story. Cue much rampant Nordic plottiness and whizzing mayhem in and around Stockholm. Weirdly, halfway through a car chase there is suddenly snow on the roads. It's all shot by director Fede Álvarez through a frosty monochromatic filter. The monochrome has seeped into the characterisation of all the characters. Zero humanity. Claes Bang, so nuanced in The Square, and Vicky Krieps, mesmerising in Phantom Thread, get by on the thinnest gruel. As for Lisbeth, she is a rare combination of thug and geek, who can amply thwack and cattle-prod but also crack through airport’s firewall with a nifty clickety-click. But, she does not convince. Not for a moment. Despite having a female boom buddy, a soft spot for old journo buddy Mikail Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) and the whole sibling problem, there's almost no hinterland for Foy to work with. Some affecting last-minute tears are not enough to spring this Lisbeth from the cryo-chamber. Yikes. Save 2 hours of your life and watch something decent, this is cinematic garbage.

This movie is a great personification of the reason why the Democrats lost the election in America. It is a movie that is partly about a subject that very few people care about. I don't want to sound overly insensitive but probably less than 1% of the worldwide population cares about the trans issue, we're being forced to care about it, we're being compelled to care about, it's being shoved down our throats, but we just don't care. This was a potentially good film, but the trans story barely worked for me, and why on earth did they have to make it into a musical? I had to skip through it every song in the movie which was about 3/4 of the movie. The story was quite good, Zoe Saldana was great and the performances in general were excellent, but it was watered down by an overly woke agenda and the musical numbers. Meh.

This is a very mediocre show that is being compared to Yellowstone. I find that quite amusing, first off Yellowstone is very well written, and very well directed. In addition to that it has a compelling soundtrack, great cinematography and a wonderful cast of actors, a great deal of character development was put into the show and it is really paid off over the course of five seasons. Territory and the other hand has underdeveloped characters, very few characters with any redeeming qualities whatsoever, an erratic plot, very contrived circumstances, and very unlikable people. There is very little about the show that's compelling, and halfway through the season I'm finding myself bored to tears. It feels more like a bad soap opera. Despite having six episodes at their disposal, the only theme that sort of makes an impact is the “capitalism is bad for the environment” stuff. The rest is just so cliche and bland that it’s a chore to sit through. Romance is a motivating factor when it comes to character decisions in the shows, but the twists and turns are so contrived that it’s tough to care about those relationships. And amidst all this, the murder mystery element goes for a toss and is brought into the limelight right at the end, as if it’s an irritating obligation. No thanks. I have much better things to do with my time.

Clocking in at 2 hours and 20 minutes, Megalopolis is about 20 minutes of plot and two hours of bloviating, a film that takes itself so seriously it comes out the other side as laughable. Adam Driver is Cesar Catilina, an architect and head of the Design Authority, apparently a city-sanctioned department tasked with reimagining the city of New Rome, New York, a metropolis facing stark divisions among its citizenry and a battle for the ages over power and control at the top of city management. Megalopolis is, for lack of a better way to put it, a movie. Coppola throws everything at the wall in the hopes some of his heavy-handed preaching might stick, and he has the clout and position in the industry to be yes-manned into whatever this film is now that it's out in the world. (A mess. It's a mess.) The crafts team on the film at least appears to have had a good time, as set design, makeup and costumes are all wildly impressive for a movie that's otherwise just plain silly. Togas are the trend of the day, and not even the men's button-down shirts are average or understated. Coppola wanted to go big, and he took his whole team with him. The production itself was quite astonishing, and the film was quite a spectacle. The problem is that despite being the spectacle that it was it just induced boredom bordering on vertigo, and it became such a labor to watch due to an incredibly incoherent plot, if there really was a plot at all, and just a legendary amount of self-indulgence on the part of Coppola. You do have to go all the way back to Tetro which was 15 years ago for the last film he made that was watchable. And prior to that the Rainmaker was 27 years ago and that was the last film that was good. So even though he did have in a streak genius 30- 45 years ago, that just doesn't seem to apply anymore. I always say that a lot of directors have a certain number of great films in their tank and he had a half a dozen, and then who knows what the hell happened. I can think of a lot of amazing things he could have done with that 120 million dollars, besides this absolutely bizarre abomination.

Michel Gondry leads the pack in this Tokyo-based three chapter film, with his yarn about a young filmmaking couple who come to the city to find their fortune. They intrude, temporarily they promise, on a friend, a young woman with a tiny apartment who, being polite, invites them to stay. With no prospects of work or an apartment, the couple’s presence soon turns things tense. Then, things get weird as one character turns into a chair. But, the weirdness is intriguing. A decent story. Leos Caras is second up with his Godzilla allegory about a troll-like creature that lives in the sewers of Tokyo. Without warning, anytime and anyplace, the beast rises from a manhole and proceeds to terrorize the citizens of the city. The authorities arrest the odd little man. Played by Denis Lavant, who delivers an astonishing performance which is nearly unforgettable. No one can understand him – except for one other. The trial of the century takes place, after this bizarre character discovers a cache of grenades underground, and lobs them into a crowd on the street, creating much carnage. Caras’s invention of a new language for the troll is very clever. It is a truly unique story, one that is both maddening and utterly fascinating. And it can only be interpreted in an allegorical fashion. B. Bong Joon-ho finishes the triple play with the story of a man, a hilkomori or hermit, who has secluded himself for 11 years without eye-to-eye contact with another soul. This changes, one day, when two things happen – a pretty pizza deliver girl shows up at his doorway and an earthquake hits. This one-two combination brings out an odd little story where pushing someone’s buttons can be a good thing. The last of the three chapters, and a great finish. In total I found the film remarkable, every once in awhile you come across something that is so utterly unique, so completely singular in its vision, that it really surprises and astonishes, and that always comes as a wonderful source of pleasure. If you like films that are very well written, chock full of wonderful performances, very tightly directed with a real sense of place, this is a film for you. Excellent work. Kudos all around.

The issue that I had with this movie is that it took far too long to really get going, and the first hour of the film was just a melodrama of a couple that were in a really bad, very unsatisfying, extremely unfulfilling marriage. The husband was a particularly dour and a highly indifferent personality, and he just played a very clueless man who had grown tired of the marriage a long time ago. He sort of gets involved with this actress on the set of a film that his daughter is starring in, and he desperately clings to the possibility that there might be something there as an alternative to his very unfulfilling life. The problem was that it is a very difficult first hour to sit through, there really wasn't much going on, the young girl was absolutely adorable, Daisybwas excellent, but the infant was ridiculously annoying and they should have given you a little bit of a payoff earlier on. The ending was great, but it came far too late in the film.

Absolution is a slow, sad, somewhat suspenseful drama. Memory and identity are inextricably bound, so as Thug forgets he is increasingly a haunted character, slipping into his own world and prone to worrying nightmares. (There are a few dream sequences in Absolution — odd and unexpected, but interesting.) His unravelling is emphasized further by his encounters with a woman he likes (Yolonda Ross). The film’s various elements do not quite meld, and despite a few strong performances, none of the characters feel fully three-dimensional. There isn’t enough going on to call this one an action movie, and not enough delving into the human condition to call it a character study, either. It feels like it wants to be an art film, it's definitely not an action film, and most of the characters in the film are fairly pathetic, with the exception perhaps of his love interest. Some of the storyline does not really make sense especially towards the end where his actions are perhaps motivated by a sense of guilt, but the issue with the film is poor writing, poor direction and in essence it was barely a mediocre film. Let us hope this is Neeson's last attempt at an action film.

This was a very generic paint by numbers production, they relied too much on two very charismatic leads who obviously have a good relationship and therefore the banter between them was reasonably believable. However the problem was the film just wasn't well written, so what was supposed to come off as comedy just wasn't funny and there's nothing worse than a comedy that's not funny. This film really felt like a project that was done without passion, no fault of Pitt or Clooney, they did what they could to save this turkey, but they just didn't have much to work with and in the end the story just felt silly and contrived. And it was boring too. Yikes. Granted, it wasn't nearly as bad as Bullet Train, Pitts last turkey film, but it was pretty bad nonetheless. Much of the banter between the two stars is intended to be funny but would come across as whining if delivered by actors like Paul Giamatti or Dennis Franz. It becomes grating if you close your eyes, as I did, and listen to the dialogue. Supporting characters like Amy Ryan, Clooney’s BFF Richard Kind, and the always wonderful Poorna Jagannathan from Never Have I Ever fare much better in their minor comedic roles.

I would have expected the reviews to be quite a bit higher on this film, the production values were outstanding, the direction and editing were excellent, the historical aspects of the film were fascinating, Guy Pearce was as good as he's been in a very long time, and the rest of the cast was superb. Virtually all of the Maori Warriors were a joy to watch, and my guess is that some people might have been put off by the intensity of the violence, or perhaps the anti-politically correct story of tribal people fighting each other. The ancestors of Māori arrived on canoes from Pacific islands before 1300 CE. Settling first on the coast, they hunted seals and moas. They also began to grow food, and some moved to the forests. They lived in small tribal groups, with a rich culture of spoken stories, and strong traditions of warfare. Their ancestors, and the gods of the natural world, were very important. The arrival of Europeans from the early 1800s had a major effect on these early communities. Among the newcomers were missionaries, and many Māori became Christians. They learnt to read and write and began trading, especially in pigs and potatoes. I really don't know why the lackluster reviews, but this is a really excellent movie, and it has stayed with me since I watched it, which is always a signal that I viewed something of great substance. I highly recommend this film.

I'm just happy that I didn't see it in the theater so that I was able to fast forward through the most some of the most obnoxious parts. I guess I'm not a particularly good judge of contemporary American trash films, I just don't understand how this kind of stuff gets made. The dialogue was so horrific, the writing was so poor it felt like it was written by an 11-year-old. The voice for the narration was all together wrong, and everything about this film was annoying and obnoxious. I know that this is not the kind of story that's meant to be believable but you can only stretch ridiculousness so far, and at that point it just becomes pure annoyance. This was likely meant to be funny, but it was less funny than Letterman was. Please Hollywood, try a little bit harder, I know you can do better than this.