134. The Final Destination (2009) - May 14th
This is still my kind of trash, but calling this more of the same is too much of a compliment; I would've preferred watching any one of the previous entries in the series. The kills are far less insanely inventive, the movie relies ways too much on the 3D gimmick that plagues all too many horror sequels, and the humour is largely either missing or poorly conveyed in comparison to the first three. The only interesting thematic implication is in a character failing to commit suicide because death wants to take the guy himself, but that's not explored or really thought about. The film almost won me back with how silly it got with its meta stuff, but otherwise this is easily the worst entry in the series so far, somehow a significant step down from the "quality" of the first three. - 3.5/10
135. Final Destination 5 (2011) - May 14th
After a disappointing part four this series finishes off with a significant return to form. As opposed to adopting the camp of parts two and three, Final Destination 5 actually tries to improve on the technique used for its insane deaths. It's still the same nonsense that I unashamedly love for how silly it all is, but here there's a real sense of tension not seen before; its like the series has been doing this long enough that it comes right back around to what worked the first time, following the series' structural formula to the letter, but actually doing it well. Some (but thankfully not all) of the farcical macabre humour is lacking here, but its made up for by more effective horror techniques. Scenes like the initial premonition on the bridge, or the gymnastics death, come to mind. In the case of the former, we get a much headier scope that sweeps across the whole disaster, the long, drawn out sequence packed with action and a lot of big shots, shock and awe and gore on full display. For the latter, we're back to the hilarious formula that constantly toys with expectation, but it's played tighter, more viscerally, the sick laugh backed by caught breath as the film actually works towards genuinely surprising or playful death. The themes of the series as a whole actually drive the plot here, with additional (facile, but still) discussion of the deserving or undeserving nature of death that plays well in to the concept of fate versus control over life (assuming you can dig a guy going so far off in the deep end that he believes killing someone will give you more years of life, not the first time the series has done that). As the final entry in the series, this also has a lot of fun with its Easter Eggs and tying the overarching story back together, lots of references to other entries in the series and the world the series exists in, as well as the welcome return of Tony Todd, wonderfully sinister as the coroner who's also the embodiment of death, not as hammy as he was in 2, but playing perfectly for this slightly darker take on the whole affair. Overall, it's fitting that the film that ties the series together also brings the quality of the series full circle. - 5/10
136. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) - May 16th
These are still really damn well made, but by this point are getting a little sterile. Every action setpiece is so skillfully crafted, but I can't find a significant emotional connection to any of it, largely because even after all this time the film series is mostly devoid of consistent theme apart from 'Tom Cruise' and in this particular film adoption of aspects akin to the other action juggernaut The Fast and The Furious series (mainly even more far-fetched stunts and 'friendship' as a substitute for 'family'). The inane ridiculousness and hammy 'family is what you make of it' stuff works in that series because it fits the tone of the movies; here there's less humour wrought from the ridiculous nature of what happens, and breaking suspension of disbelief and as well as all sense of tension with that silliness is less effective, largely because the Mission: Impossible series got away with most of its action in the past by making it just credible enough to remain tense. There's still quite a lot of moments in the film that succeed in doing this, but as the series tries to take itself less seriously that tension that made it successful in the first place goes out the window. I suppose it's telling that the series wants to go in a direction that returns it to its more ridiculous roots, but I'm reminded of when Spectre did this, trying so hard and not really succeeding at finding the middle ground between the old camp people used to love and the more serious direction the series has taken since its reboot. Rogue Nation is more successful at this because it uses its camp sparingly, but it still leaves a dissonant taste when the film pulls the old face mask trick after leaving it on the shelf for so long, or puts the characters in a situation that should have so blatantly killed them that them walking away without injury takes you out of the movie. However, aside from the tension breaking moments and lack of emotional investment, it's still a very competently made film in terms of the design of its setpieces. There's an art to making a movie worthy of a gasp of excitement, and Bird continues to exercise his skill in that area here that he so liberally demonstrated in Ghost Protocol. - 6.5/10
137. Deadpool 2 (2018) - May 17th
This was exactly all it purported itself to be, merely a sharper, more cynical, slightly less obnoxious version of the first film, which in itself was an ultra-violent sugar rush. My full review can be found here. - 7/10
138. Soldier (1998) - May 19th
This movie is a bit of a waste. A waste of a good premise, good theming, a good set, a few good actors; Soldier really just does very little with the ideas inferred by its world and merely uses them as an excuse to make Kurt Russell not act in front of a series of explosions. It's not without charm or theme, but the fact that there's a good movie couched clearly within the wreckage of this doesn't stop this from being a bad movie. Commentary on the dehumanising nature of the military is there, but its sting is lost when juxtaposed against the mixed messages of what that means. It's a shame, too, because there were good threads introduced about the toxicity inherent in valuing people only by their ability to brute force kill, and the importance of valuing the softer things like nurturing life and child-rearing, and how the latter can improve the former, but the film gets messy when it awkwardly tries to cut a half-way mark, wanting to condemn the brass that make the soldiers and not the soldiers themselves but suggesting that the tenets they have been raised with hold value that can be passed on; I appreciate that it goes for the grey area and wants the soldiers to become more than they are without abandoning who they are, trying to find an identity that encourages both strength and tenderness, but the execution is way off. It's largely in the fact that the movie is also big action movie, so regardless of how the themes of the first two acts suggest a better outlook on life can be found in qualities the movie deems as more human, the third act requires a big dumb explosion-fest that sees Russell shooting, punching, or blowing up everything as an answer to his problems and the problems of his people. There's not an in-between introduced, just the suggestion of the possibility, so any problems that can't be solved by a lighter touch has to be solved by a soldier's answer. The movie might still be ok if this inevitable action were actually good, but it's quite boring and uninspired; not a lot of truly bad work, just not any hint of real style or grit to accentuate exactly what director Anderson is going for. As a last note, Kurt Russell is completely miscast here; he has no chance to flex that smarmy smirk of his that makes his characters so endlessly watchable, instead playing a role more suited to the type of thing Dolph Lundgren is known for. - 4/10
139. The Lady from Shanghai (1947) - May 19th
This one kind of blew right through me, so any and all things I say about it should be taken with more than a few pinches of salt because I actually forgot I watched this until fifteen minutes before I had to post this journal. This is Orson Welles getting a little weird with it, experimenting as he always did, and while it doesn't work quite as well as some of this other works (see: Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, F for Fake) largely due to its strangely convoluted script that has all the melodrama needed to make a good noir and Welles' immutable style to back it up, but also complicates itself a few more times over than necessary, and makes some strange directorial choices (largely with the framing of bizarre, almost Ozu-esque closeups between shot-reverse shot conversations, as well as the direction of certain performances like Glenn Anders' Grisby) that don't always pay off, largely because they feel out of step with the rest of the movie or even come off as poor. That said, this movie starts with Welles waxing with an Irish brogue, so it's not as if the film really wants you to feel at ease. - 8/10
140. Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995) - May 20th
After a little more than forty years of existence spanned across twenty two films, Toho decided it was time for Godzilla to die (look how well that stuck, we have over thirty films now). While it only took five years (and one really bad American adaptation) for them to take another crack at the old atomic dinosaur, for the moment in which it happened it was a big deal that, for the first time since his initial appearance, Godzilla would actually die; not get defeated only to return for another day, not destroy all in his path and roar triumphantly before disappearing over the horizon to get ready for the next movie, simply die at the hands of the embodiment of the only thing ever capable of truly defeating him and have that be the end of him. The series still leaves and opening for continuation with his son, assuming success and/or demand, but they really did design this to be the end of Godzilla at the time if it had to be. It's fitting, then, that the last monster Godzilla faces in this series' run is a creature born from the very first thing to actually defeat him: Destoroyah is made from several prehistoric creatures mutated by the oxygen destroyer that killed the very first Godzilla, and combined together to make one gigantic monster that looks like the lovechild of the devil and a lobster. As a creature, Destoroyah works as well as any of the other monsters that can fight Godzilla one-on-one, but fits more thematically, especially as part of the larger whole that is the Heisei era's meta commentary on the impact of Godzilla upon Japanese culture. The movie lays out everything with a skill that's fairly standard of the Heisei series overall, and then executes its finale with an extended back and forth between the two titans that has a real ebb and flow to it. As an emotional peak to the franchise, this is solid, giving Godzilla a sendoff he deserves that feels earned by how tough his final fight is, and with the hope of a future in his offspring. - 6.5/10
Re-watches
32. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005) - May 16th
The best of the prequels by a long shot, Revenge of the Sith is a really good story told really poorly. The actual strokes of the story are excellent, with a lot of heated melodrama fueled by tragic irony, classical stuff like bringing about a fate you sought to avoid, and an impressive number of links to the actions of the characters in the original trilogy. Unfortunately, for all that, it's still a movie where the acting is as flat and wooden as a board, where the dialogue is so obnoxiously on the nose that it would be a bit much even on the stage, and where effects are used to make up for a lack of realised substance. It's not a bad movie, in fact when considering how much it draws from the style of old sci-fi radio dramas and how much it works to connect the prequel trilogy with the original, it's actually quite good at points, but there's a reason that so many moments in the film have been turned in to text-based memes; the film doesn't tell its story with its visuals, it fails to even try and convey ideas without dialogue, and it becomes difficult to deal with when the dialogue itself is usually bad and sometimes atrocious. So much of the movie is character flatly telling each other the conflict within them and not actually trying to emote so as to express that conflict visually; the final conflict between Anakin and Obi-Wan is the culmination of three movies worth of build-up, an ideological battle between two best friends wrought out of the differences between the Jedi and the Sith and the failure to reconcile them, stacked on top of the fact that Anakin is in the processing of fulfilling his greatest fear through his own action, which is in turn the most consistent flaw of his character and seals the tragic nature of the prequel trilogy, and yet all of that is significantly offset by the fact that none of this is left up to the audience to figure out and all of it is expressed through dialogue, that dialogue is in turn hackneyed and stilted, and it is spoken with the least possible of emotion or expression by the two characters involved. It's such a bizarre mish-mash of really good and really bad, the skill of the concept at odds with the lack of effort in the execution. Still, to suggest that the film lives or dies entirely by this is to ignore what it does right, and while concept alone isn't enough to balance out the poor execution, the sheer spectacle is, to an extent, as well as one performance in particular. The action in the prequels is still really solid, lacking a little in weight due to its over-reliance on complete CGI, but still bombastically and acrobatically choreographed with a lot of simply dashing aplomb; it's all a bit silly and over the top, but when combined with the epic nature of the music, it all moves and feels just right, even if it doesn't always carry the weight of context. Finally, Ian McDiarmid's performance as Palpatine is easily the best of this movie, and probably the whole trilogy; he's the only one who turned in something that wasn't flat and lifeless, offering something far more excessive and entertaining, actually playing in to the melodrama and the tragedy of it all with maximum cheese. Every line he drops is dripping with this energy, and even if he has no one who'll return it, he keeps giving it a good effort and having fun with it. - 6.5/10
33. Hitman (2007) - May 17th
Roger Ebert once said that "Hitman stands right on the threshold between video games and art. On the wrong side of the threshold, but still, give it credit." I'm inclined to agree. The film falls short in key areas, primarily its plotting and dialogue, as well as tone, but it's held up by the very reason that I'm watching the film in the first place: its lead performance. As far as plots go, it's a good example of how convoluted not being the same as complex, with multiple groups all with different interests all working in various capacities for or against the two main characters, and a lot of "predictable, but only because it would be the stupid thing to do" plot twists that only serve to weigh down an otherwise potentially slick story. A lot of this is probably to do with how it's presented; the film opens with an unnecessary and over-stylised exposition dump (not the worst way to present an exposition dump, but certainly the most obnoxious, and an exposition dump is the worst way to tell a story), and no turn or sequence can go without being preceded or followed by too much expository dialogue. This is a shame too, because the film manages to capture some of the spirit and cleverness of its source material now and then, with some neat attempts at subterfuge that are all too often perforated by bombastic action. It doesn't help that the dialogue is largely inane; plot-related talking is as elaborate as it is extraneous. A lot of plot points are reinforced and overtly repeated through dialogue, which only serves to highlight how silly it all is while actually explaining very little of significance that we didn't already know and still don't care about. Like the plot, there are moments of cleverness, but they're not significant enough to circumvent the weak nature of the whole. The tone is inconsistent; the film largely takes itself far too seriously (save for one extremely meta joke moment), and it makes the only moments where humour could be found feel at odds with the rest of the movie. Elevator music over an image of a massacred elevator feels like it's supposed to be a joke, but its stark contrast with the broodingly intense action that precedes and follows it makes it that much stranger. That said, most of this stuff isn't truly awful (most, mind you), just the regular kind of bad you can expect from the more poorly made blockbusters, and this movie has one prominent aspect in its favour. Timothy Olyphant is a truly great character actor, and he brings a lot to the character of Agent 47, a man who is otherwise supposed to be a literal blank slate. A character like this can be taken in basically any direction in film, but Olyphant gives the character a sense of a tortured soul, an inhuman creature with a human being buried somewhere deep below the surface. The film doesn't do nearly enough to accentuate the character, all too focused on the plot and offering very little for how he changes, but Olyphant sells just about every minute of his work, with always the right intensity and a serious humanity that suits the tone the film (usually) goes for. It's a shame that this movie isn't good, because Olyphant's performance is. - 5/10
34. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) - May 19th
This is the point where I tell you that The Two Towers, and indeed The Return of the King, will also get 10/10 ratings from me as Fellowship did. While neither of the sequels are as tightly told as the first, they are all so inextricably a part of one another that a rating for one is a rating for all three of them. Plus, for any ways in which you could potentially fault this movie in comparisons to its predecessor, I'd simply contend that Gollum and the battle at Helm's Deep are enough to make up for the more drawn out aspects of the build up to Helm's Deep and the lack of The Shire. Seriously, these movies are so dense that if I tried to nail this one aspect at a time I'd be here for hours, so instead I'm going to link to Lindsay Ellis' discussion on the movie here, suggest you go watch it, and quickly remind everyone that Andy Serkis was robbed of an Oscar, because it's been a long week and I need a rest. - 10/10
Published May 21st, 2018
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