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Filtering by Category: movies
David Harbour is the new Ron Perlman in Hellboy, also starring Sasha Lane. (Mark Rogers)
It's a shame about Hellboy (Neil Marshall, 2019). But we'll always have Hellboy (Guillermo del Toro, 2004). My NPR review of the former is here. None of these movies is as rewarding and reading Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics in bed, if you ask me.
Zachary Levi and Jack Dylan Grazer in an enthusiastically punctuated superhero comedy.
I had a nice time joining the Pop Culture Happy Hour crew this week to discuss Shazam!, a lighter, brighter DC Comics movie that is also… a nice time. Doubtless I got invited on this episode because of the profile I wrote for the Ventura County Reporter waaaaaay back in January 2003 of Shazam! star Zachary Levi, a Local Boy Made Good for whom God has opened many doors, such as co-starring with Bob Newhart and the modern rhythm-and-blues singer Sisqo ("The Thong Song," peak position No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100). He admires men of integrity like Tom Hanks and Mel Gibson. The Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Three, friends.
Shazam! is the polar opposite of The Shield, the early-aughts post-Sopranos, pre-Breaking Bad cop show I’m currently revisiting, which is what’s making me happy this week and shall be for many weeks to come, because I bought the big doorstop blu-ray set with all 88 episodes.
Colin Farrell and some kids in Dumbo. (Disney)
No critique of a long-lived artist is lazier or more boring than “I liked the early shit.” What can I say? I’m enough of a partisan of enough of the movies Tim Burton made back in the prior century that I’m always rooting for him to get his groove back. Alas, his new Dumbo shows no evidence of groove restoration. It’s fine, but any number of hacks like the ones who make Dwayne Johnson vehicles might’ve made this movie for all the personality it’s got. My NPR review is here.
Rosa Salazar is Alita, an amnesiac cyborg super-soldier in the 26th century. (Twentieth Century Fox)
Panzer Kunist is, as I’m sure I need not tell a cinephile and aesthete as refined and discerning and educated as you are, an ancient cyborg martial art that has largely died out by the mid-26th century. More importantly, Panzer Kunst has the satisfying hard consonants of words that were forbidden on 20th century television. It seems like it could work as any part of speech, which makes it especially panzer to kunst as kunst as possible. Panzer Kunst!
On the new Alita: Battle Angel. My full review is here.
Mackie and Rodriguez get down to hot-brass tacks.
Wherein Gina Rodriguez makes a run at the Reluctant Hero Midwinter Action throne, Ismael Cruz Córdova makes eyes, and Anthony Mackie makes a shockingly brief appearance.
“Remember when we were in Interstellar together? That movie was underrated.”
Serenity is a soapy, dopey thriller from Steven Knight, who's made some very good ones. Nolanesque ambition, Shyamalanesque skill. With Matthew McConaughey as Baker Dill, a fisherman/tour guide/gigolo who lives in a shipping container and dreams of tuna. Here’s my review.
Not Acting Enough, Acting Too Much, and Acting Just Right (Universal)
I am chuffed to be back on the iHeartRadio Podcast Award-nominated Pop Culture Happy Hour this week to discuss Glass, fallen auteur M. Night Shyamalan's joint sequel to 2000's Unbreakable and 2017's Split. It isn't very good, but the movie has an anachronistic quality that's sort of... sweet. While it's made explicitly clear—every damn thing in this movie is explained and re-re-re-explained—that Glass is set 19 years after Unbreakable, Shyamalan acts as though superhero comics haven't become Hollywood's No. 1 source of grist during the back half of that period. (In the years since Unbreakable, we've seen three different A-list actors play The Incredible Hulk, for chrissakes.)
A goodly portion of those films have featured Samuel L. Jackson, who, to be fair, looks like he's having at least as much fun sitting in a wheelchair staring into the middle distance in Glass as he does when he's cashing another check as Nick Fury. After his brief return to acting in both Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom and Rian Johnson's Looper back in 2012, I'd hoped maybe Bruce Willis would deign to open his eyes again, but no such luck. And the movie's top-billed star continues to perform his solo show Scares Ahoy with James McAvoy.
Peter Jackson oversaw the restoration and conversion to 3D of century-old footage from the Imperial War Museum. (Warner Bros.)
I was moved by Peter Jackson's World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which uses digital wizardry to conjure empathy, not spectacle. I didn't have space to go into it in my NPR review, but I wondered how J.R.R. Tolkien's experience of the war might've shaped Jackson's sense of it. Jackson did spend a sizable chunk of his career adapting Tolkien's novels, for better and for worse.
