It's more stuff I watched. Hooray. Since football season has started, I have watched fewer cheap action movies on Hulu and so forth. Lucky for Phantom Readers...who will never read this anyway.
.jpg)
Wes Anderson regular Adrien Brody is one of the stars as a sleazy Hollywood director in London to adapt The Mousetrap, a play adapted from one of Christie's books. The play has run for 100 shows and shows no sign of slowing down, which is bad for the movie, which can't start production until the play is done. During a party, Brody gets into a fight and later turns up dead in the theater. Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell doing a passable British accent) is called in to investigate along with Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) who is perky, ambitious, and eager-to-please while Stoppard is more world-weary and hungover. We soon see that Stoppard is not as brilliant as Poirot but not as dumb as Clouseau either. They interview suspects, follow leads, and take a few wrong turns before the big finish.
I really enjoyed it. One of my Facebook "friends" was less impressed. A lot of it probably depends on how much you like those Agatha Christie books. I thought it was fun and actually better than Anderson's recent Asteroid City or David O Russell's Amsterdam, which both have a similar vibe but were longer and more ponderous. Ronan is brilliant and Rockwell is really good as well, though I had to go to IMDB because I didn't recognize him with the mustache and accent. It's only like 100 minutes too so not very long. (4/5)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem: I don't know by now who has more cinematic reboots: Batman or the Ninja Turtles. This is at least the 4th attempt and the second animated one after the largely forgotten TMNT earlier in the century. There was the first live action one in the 90s and then the Bay-produced live action reboot in 2014. This time around it's Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg writing and producing and using animation like Sony's Spider-Verse movies.
In this rejiggered origin story Baxter Stockwell isn't turned into a fly but instead spills the ooze into the sewer to create the turtles after some shady company tries to steal his work. There's a 15-year jump to when the turtles are teenagers and have been trained to fight via YouTube videos mostly. As far as that goes, the origin of Splinter and them becoming ninjas is pretty flimsy. They could just as easily become boxers or wrestlers or MMA fighters. Eventually they meet a young reporter and try to stop a criminal known as "Superfly" because he's, you know, a fly.
The movie's message of tolerance and working together is hammered home pretty obviously. The individual personalities of the turtles isn't really made that clear; when Leo says that Donnie has read a ton of comic books it basically comes out of nowhere because it wasn't really established that clearly. It really relies on what you know about the characters from previous incarnations.
It's not a bad movie, especially for younger viewers or maybe those who aren't overly familiar with the previous versions. It's fun, turn off your brain popcorn entertainment with a good, albeit obvious message. (3/5) (Fun Facts: the cookie scene promises that Shredder will appear in the next movie, which was already greenlit though since this didn't break a bunch of records and probably won't win an Oscar, I'm not sure if they'll really go through with that. Besides writing/producing, Seth Rogen voices Bebop the mutant warthog; he previously voiced Pumbaa the warthog in the 2019 Lion King so he's kinda typecasting himself.)
Hypnotic: This came out in theaters in June I think but flopped and so was on Peacock a couple of weeks ago. The movie is by Robert Rodriguez, who made his name in Mexico with El Mariachi and then crossed over to America with Desperado, neither of which I ever watched and then those lame Spy Kids movies and teaming up with Quentin Tarantino on Grindhouse. More recently he did Alita Battle Angel and The Book of Boba Fett but anyway, this stars Ben Affleck as a detective whose daughter went missing. Or did she? There's a bad guy (William Fichtner) who comes after Affleck and a "psychic" who teams up with him. The title comes from these people with essentially the superpower to create "hypnotic constructs" that are basically like the Matrix only without needing a computer. The whole thing tries to be like The Matrix and Christopher Nolan's Inception and maybe Tenet but it ends up about as lame as Mark Wahlberg's Infinite on Paramount+ last year or so. It tries twists and twists and twists within twists but instead of exciting it's mostly just tedious. (2/5) (Fun Facts: Jeff Fahey of Lost, Lawnmower Man, Darkman III, and Rodriguez's Machete has a small part near the end. A cookie scene involving Fahey sets up a sequel that will probably never happen. If you don't have Peacock, the movie will probably go to Amazon Prime in a couple of months. If you don't have that maybe just use a Redbox rental--a free one if you get one.)
The Wrong Mans (Season 1): This is basically like if Edgar Wright had adapted one of those Alfred Hitchcock "ordinary man is wrongfully accused of something and goes on the run" movies like North by Northwest. Which, why hasn't that happened yet? This Hulu original action comedy series from 2013 features Sam (Matthew Boynton) and Phil (James Corden) as a discount Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. After witnessing a car accident, Sam finds a phone. When he answers it, a voice tells him they have his wife and if he wants to see her again he'd better pay. But Sam hasn't got a wife. He's the wrong man--get it? Soon Sam and Phil are stumbling into an international plot involving Chinese gangsters, Russian gangsters, Russian spies, and MI5. It's pretty funny in how out of their depth they are but it's not stupid funny. There are also a few serious parts and plenty of violence. Like most British series there's only 6 episodes in the season. (3/5) (Fun Facts: the Chinese gangster is played by Benedict Wong, aka Wong in the MCU, and one of his henchpeople is played by Christina Chong, aka La'an on Strange New Worlds, though she only gets like 2 lines or so. I had no idea James Corden had been in anything before he started hosting late night TV; he's actually not bad in this.)
The Wrong Mans (Season 2): At the end of season 1, Sam and Phil were in Phil's mom's car and it was shown to have a bomb planted on it. Season 2 starts with them "dying" and being put in sort of Witness Protection in Texas--actually South Africa. When Phil finds out his mom is sick, he and Sam start trying to get home, which involves a Mexican cartel, a stint in prison, a French secret agent, and more! There are only 4 episodes and the 4th episode wraps everything up pretty quickly. Really this could have just been a movie since it's less than 2 hours. In the end it's all a bit silly and completely unbelievable at this point. Not that it's bad; it's still pretty entertaining. But it's probably just as well there wasn't another season. (2.5/5)
Assassins (2023): This cheap movie featuring Bruce Willis is more sci-fi than action. Basically imagine if instead of going back in time, Quantum Leap had Sam jumping into people and then murdering other people. A woman named Alexa's boyfriend fries his brain doing that and so she's recruited to go undercover as various people to try to kill a bad guy. Bruce Willis is her boss who of course doesn't do a lot. It's the kind of thing that would be better if it had more money for better actors and effects. But I'm definitely going to use the concept for a gender swap story. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: Dominic Purcell of Prison Break, The Flash, and Legends of Tomorrow plays the bad guy.)
The Ritual Killer: A cheap thriller on Hulu starring Cole Hauser and Morgan Freeman. An African killer (former NFL star Vernon Davis) is killing women and children in Mississippi to give their power to rich people. It's kind of gross and dull. The attempt to give Hauser a tragic backstory is muddled. There's something about a daughter with seizures and a wife maybe and suicide or something. Morgan Freeman is a college professor whom Hauser goes to and later gets more involved, which is also muddled. To justify the Italian financing there's also a detective in Rome investigating women the killer has abducted and killed. I'm not really sure why a South African businessman is in Clinton, Mississippi except it's cheap to film there. The whole thing was a pretty dull affair. The end involving Hauser eating a pair of eyes really makes no sense; it's the kind of tacked-on ending someone probably just thought would be cool. (1/5) (Fun Fact: If I had been one of the eight or so people working on the script I would have had a potential victim, probably a young girl, escape and find Cole Hauser and while working to find the killer they bond and help him get past the death of his daughter. It's not an original idea but less muddled.)
The Lion King 1 1/2: I came across this one night while browsing the Disney+ catalog. It's a 2004 movie (probably straight-to-video) that retells the 1994 movie from Timon and Pumbaa's perspective. We get a little background on Timon's family, but not Pumbaa's, because that would be too tragic I guess. A lot of it is only slightly less annoying and terrible than the Timon & Pumbaa series I watched a few episodes of. There's a lot of the same thing where Timon is just a total jerk to Pumbaa, who is clearly the smarter and more sensitive one; he just lacks Timon's confidence. If you're over 8 this probably isn't that entertaining. (2/5) (Fun Facts: Most of the original 1994 cast returns except James Earl Jones or Jeremy Irons so they don't use Mufasa or Scar or for obvious reasons Jonathan Taylor Thomas as the young Simba. Julie Kavner of The Simpsons and Jerry Stiller of Seinfeld play Timon's mother and Uncle Max. Periodically Timon and Pumbaa stop the movie and we see them sitting in front of the screen as silhouettes like Joel/Mike and the bots on Mystery Science Theater 3000, though they don't make any commentary while the movie is running.)
My Dog, The Thief: When I was browsing the Disney+ catalog, I came upon this 1969 Wonderful World of Disney TV movie. I was only interested in it because I've liked St. Bernards since watching Beethoven in the early 90s. This is a forerunner to that as it involves a St. Bernard but the story is more like Turner & Hooch in that the dog is sent to live with a bachelor who has his life turned upside-down by Barabbas the St. Bernard. There's also a crime involved as Barabbas inadvertently steals a valuable necklace from a couple of dimwitted crooks. Corny, badly-acted mayhem ensues! Besides the lovable, huggable St. Bernard there's not a lot to like about it unless you really want something silly and forgettable. (2.5/5)
Rehearsal: This 2015 movie--or TV movie?--was recently added to the Movie House app so one night I watched it. It's surprisingly not bad. A British theatre director (Bruce Greenwood) is doing a production of Chekhov's The Seagull to save a dying theater. To secure funding, his partner Clive--partner in both senses--agrees to let action star Blaise Remington star in it. He also gets casting approval, which he uses to cast a former high school drama teacher who only came to escort her roommate. Blaise and the director butt heads while Blaise gets close to his co-star and has to choose between Hollywood and the show. If you thought Birdman was too existential and weird, then you'd probably like this as it's more mainstream but hitting many of the same points. (3/5)
No comments:
Post a Comment