Review: ‘Everest’

everest_ver4_xlg“Everest” is based on a true story of a mountain climbing expedition in the summer of 1996 that went very wrong, mostly because a storm came through that just kind of ruined everyone’s day, some more so than others, but of course this isn’t just a movie about the trevails and spiritual rewards of mountain climbing but instead is a story of survival, perseverance and personal sacrifice, as well as the possibly high cost of human hubris.

New Zealander Rob  Hall (Jason Clarke) is a pioneer in the mountain climbing world, as he took the previously impossible task of scaling Mount Everest and turned it into a full on enterprise, as people paid him tens of thousands per person to guide him to the top and back down Mount Everest. He started yearly expeditions, training amateur climbers over the course of several weeks to summit the world’s highest mountain, and it didn’t take long for other professional climbers to copy this business model, to the point in which the mountain was overrun by competing expedition teams in 1996, all of them jockeying for time on the mountain, causing massive delays in each other’s trips, and helping to exacerbate problems that would prove both burdensome and deadly at the most inopportune times.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Turbo Kid’

TurboKidPoster“Turbo Kid” is one of those throwback movies, an homage to a certain style of movie, in this case the post apocalyptic films of the 1980s, and the 1980s in general, done with the fervor of a child’s imagination set loose with gallons of fake blood, a fever dream of a movie about a “Mad Max” style wasteland ruled by a one-eyed tyrant and his insane and blood thirsty right hand man, in which a young kid all on his own tries to survive one day at a time.

The Kid (Munro Chambers) spends his days scavenging through the post-apocalyptic wasteland of 1997 (oh yeah, this movie takes place explicitly in the future…of 1997) looking for stuff to trade in for potable water. And every now and then he gets his hands on a comic book of a guy called Turbo Rider, who dispatched justice viciously with some sort of wrist-mounted laser beam. He then meets a girl named Apple (Laurence Leboeuf) who at first seems insane and dangerous but they of course become friends because it’s the apocalypse, what ya gonna do, turn away a smiling face?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Black Mass’

BlackMass_Poster“Black Mass” is the story of James “Whitey” Bulger, a small time Irish mobster in South Boston who used an unlikely connection through the FBI to become the biggest crime lord in the whole city. But really this movie is about how crime can be perpetuated from either side of the law and sometimes these supposedly opposite factions team up and cause some real damage. And of course it is always a matter of time before one’s sins catch up to them, but when they do, is it already too late?

Whitey Bulger (Johnny Depp) was just doing some small time stuff with his modestly sized crew when a friend from the old neighborhood got in touch with him. This friend was John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) and he just happened to be a special agent with the FBI, and having been assigned to Boston to stop the organized crime problem, he decides that he can enter into a mutually beneficial relationship with Whitey, convincing him to help find ways to ensnare Whitey’s Italian mafia rivals. Pretty much telling himself and his crew that the enemy of their enemy is their friend, this alliance starts some really bad stuff for everyone else around them.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Cop Car’

copcar_posterOf course movies with twisty plots and lots of surprises and out of left field decisions and choices can be very fun and exciting, almost all of us enjoy stories with lots of characters and little subplots that add up to a bigger story that seems like it took months and months to craft into something so ingenious. However it is equally delightful when a movie comes around that is simple in story and execution and still leaves us feeling exhilarated from what we saw, maybe even more, and “Cop Car” definitely fits this latter category, as it is a short, simple tale, yet one that is involving and so well done that is becomes very suspenseful as well as quite funny, so when it is all said and done it feels like a lot still happened.

“Cop Car” is the story of what happens when two young kids in Colorado steal a sheriff’s cruiser and take it for a joyride, and what that Sheriff (Kevin Bacon) does to get it back, as well as why he wants it back so bad (outside of it being his police cruiser and him being the sheriff and all that). And that really is it. We learn pretty early on that the two boys are runaways, though we don’t know what they are running away from or why, and we really don’t learn all that much about the Sheriff either. We are told just what we need to know, which is enough, and it works pretty damn well.

Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Visit’

 

thevisit_ver2From the writer/director of “The Village” and the producer of “Paranormal Activity” should tell you everything you need to know about M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Visit.” Sort of a “found footage” horror movie (elaboration on that qualification to come), here we have Mr. Shyamalan’s foray into this particular brand of low budget horror film making, working in a genre that has inherent low expectations both critically and commercially. Once known as the guy who might be “the next Spielberg,” now we’d just like to see if he can make something better than “The Gallows” or “As Above, So Below.”

In “The Visit,” teenager Becca (Oliva DeJonge) and her younger brother Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) are sent to spend a week with their grandparents at their remote farmhouse, and this particular visit is a little weird for them because they never met their grandparents before, as their mother (Kathryn Hahn) hasn’t spoken to them since before she had the kids. Meanwhile, Becca wants to be a filmmaker, so she brings two cameras and her lap top and makes a documentary out of the whole thing. And after they arrive at the farmhouse, they soon realize that not everything is at it seems with their Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie), and for a week they are stuck documenting and trying to figure out if everything is okay or not.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The End of the Tour’

teott-poster-gallery“The End of the Tour” is the exact kind of movie that people like to claim never get made anymore. Folks like to complain about superhero movies and blockbusters and spectacles and studios cranking out product instead of art, and the best is when they insist that nothing original gets made, oh woe is us, why can’t we get movies made for adults anymore, just people talking about ideas and the inherent drama that comes from different people coming together, why oh why can’t we get more movies like this? And then this movie comes along, and everyone is like “The End of the what? David Foster who? What Stone magazine? Just pass the Cheetos, will ya?” People, please, put down the fucking snack foods, shut off the reality television, get in your shitty car and go to the nearest theater showing “The End of the Tour” and do your part to support solid, well made, adult-minded entertainment.

Funny enough, “The End of the Tour” even goes a little into “good seductive entertainment,” the type of movies that DO involve action and spectacle and aren’t meant to change the world or even the way you look at the world (“Die Hard” gets specifically name dropped as an example) and this gets compared to eating candy and junk food and drinking soda, which is indeed pleasurable albeit not nutritious. We can consume this kind of middle of the road, for-entertainment-only type of movie (and television and music and literature and so on) but we can’t make it the basis of our diets, we can’t subsist on this alone and expect any sort of personal growth; on the contrary, we can only expect to die a very real death in a very meaningful way, which is how this movie describes what happens to a person when their primary sexual relationship is with their own hand and images on a computer screen as opposed to with an actual person. It all ties together in a way that asks basically what is this life all about and how can we all navigate this thing in the best way possible.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘American Ultra’

AmericanUltra_Poster“American Ultra” is “Cheech & Chong’s The Bourne Identity,” a mash up of genres and genre tropes, slammed together in a way that feels like an early draft of a screenplay that ultimately needs to be expanded and finished. It seems as if the filmmakers behind this thing thought that simply taking the “sleeper agent” government-trained killer storyline that we’ve seen a lot and adding a bit of marijuana use to the proceedings would somehow magically result in a movie worth watching, and while “American Ultra” isn’t bad, it never rises to the heights promised by the marketing and the concept.

Mike (Jesse Eisenberg) is a heavy marijuana user, often derisively referred to as a “stoner,” and he lives a simple, fairly shitty life in a small Virginia town where he gets harassed by the police and seems to be the only employee at an incredibly shitty convenience store. The only thing making his life bearable (besides the weed) is his live-in girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) and he is planning to propose to her, except that his can’t really get his shit together long enough to do so. Meanwhile, over at CIA headquarters not too far away, an agent (Connie Britton) finds out that her government trained super killer in hiding is about to be killed by a rival agent’s (Topher Grace) own super killer program, so she goes to Mike and “activates” him with a pass code. From that point forward, whenever someone tries to do anything to Mike, he knows how to get out of the problem and also knows how to kill people with whatever is on hand. The rest of the movie is the CIA trying to kill Mike and Mike trying to survive with Phoebe.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘No Escape’

no_escape_ver3_xxlg“No Escape” is a movie about the lengths parents would go to in order to keep their family safe. In a world filled with dangers and difficult decisions, this is one of the hardest and most stressful things a person could go through in normal day to day life, let alone in the middle of a war zone with imminent death around every corner.

Jack (Owen Wilson) works for a large American corporation, and his employer sends him to an unnamed Southeast Asian country to work on some sort of “clean water” project, which he sees as a noble endeavor. His wife Annie (Lake Bell) puts on a brave face but it is obvious that this whole situation is very stressful for her and their two little girls. Just the idea of moving to a foreign land and not knowing the language and customs is enough to make things difficult for them, so it doesn’t help that they have no idea that a rebel coup is underway just as they land in the country, and that while they sleep overnight, rebel forces take to the streets and essentially take over the entire country.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Hitman: Agent 47’

HitmanAgent47_PosterFrom “Super Mario Bros” to “Need For Speed,” we have been inundated with dozens upon dozens of video game movie adaptations for years, and if there is one thing that everyone can pretty much agree on, that thing is the fact that all of these movies range in quality from bad to worse to The Worst. There is no such thing as a “good” video game movie. Fun fact: “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” currently holds the highest Rotten Tomato score of any video game movie, and it is sitting at a lofty and seemingly insurmountable 36%. But surely here to save the day and reverse this trend is the latest entrant into this woe begotten genre of cinema, “Hitman: Agent 47,” and it couldn’t be that bad, could it?

Of course it can.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’

theManFromUNCLE_poster

Based on a popular television show from the 1960’s featuring spies doing cool stuff with nifty gadgets, teaming up to overcome a shady global terrorist organization, action mixed with comedy, and sex appeal galore, audiences this summer have been treated to the well made spectacle known as “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.”

We also got “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”

To be fair, “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” is not a bad movie at all, as it is actually quite an entertaining and fairly breezy romp. The preposterously named Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) is a CIA agent who is forced to team up with a Soviet KGB agent named Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer), and they are tasked with finding a kidnapped Nazi scientist who is likely helping someone create the world’s first nuclear bomb.

To get to him, they use his estranged daughter Gabby (Alicia Vikander) to try to track him down, and they get all wrapped in a big ole plot involving an Italian heiress and a fake engagement and faulty torture equipment and an old fishing boat, the whole time with the two agents trying to one up each other and also with Illya and Gabby maybe sort of falling for each other along the way.Continue Reading …