The new Robocop is a kinder gentler Robocop. Oh, he’s still a bloodthirsty killing machine, but he doesn’t make near the mess that his 1987 counterpart made. The orginal Robocop was so hyperviolent and the characters so vile and evil it left me shaken for weeks. Well, maybe I was just much more of a wuss back in those days. I liked the new Robocop, even if it makes Detroit look better in the future than it looks today. I liked the logo for Omnicorp, which looked a lot like the logo for the Umbrella Corporation and the Dharma Initiative.…
Category: movie review
HER
Spoilers and such. In a world much like our own, where everyone walks around in a daze talking to themselves like morons, we find our hero Joaquin Phoenix. He has a job as a Letter Writer, where he sends heartfelt handwritten letters to and from people who can’t be bothered to write themselves. He lost a better job about a year ago when he also separated from his wife. He’s kind of a sad sack who mopes around thinking about the good old days with his wife. He has odd phone sex and fantasizes about having sex with a pregnant…
Mr Nobody
There used to be this cool bit on the Carol Burnett show about a writer. The stage would be set and we would watch a scene being written. But then the writer would change his mind and instead of a gun, the man would pull out a knife. Instead of killing the woman, he would kiss her. And so on and so forth. The idea has been used recently in a series of commercials for voice recognition software where a kid writes a story about a pirate with an eggbeater for a hand. I’ve always liked to play this game…
Captain America The Winter Soldier
One or Two Spoilers. There was a lot of action, a lot of stuff blowing up, and a lot of sharp shooting bad guys who could only hit Captain America’s impenetrable shield. The movie was fun and it was nice to see Robert Redford again. My favorite Robert Redford bit was when he opened his fridge and it had a jar of Newman’s Own inside. Captain America II was standard Superhero fare, for the most part. Now I know that the Bad Guys are Bad Guys, but during the opening scenes and throughout the movie, our heroes flat out murder…
Authors Anonymous
Author Anonymous tells the story of a handful of would be authors who aren’t very good writers. A Vet tells war stories no one cares about. A cheating wife tells stories about cheating wives. A pizza delivery driver tells stories about a guy who delivers pizzas. One fellow has only written three pages, but he keeps tweaking those three pages until they are as close to perfect as possible. Then there is a cute girl who gets an agent, a book deal, and a movie deal in rapid succession. The conflict in Authors Anonymous is about how the other members…
Dallas Buyers Club
The story of a lowlife who banged every woman he could find and then was shocked to discover he had AIDS. He starts out as your usual stereotypical redneck homophob, but once he gets AIDS, his view of the world shifts when everyone starts to call him names and runs away from him. . He’s not the kind of man who wants to lay in a hospital and die, as one of the many heartless villains in the story wants him to when he is first diagnosed. He’s a proactive sort and looks for ways to get the drugs that…
Nymphomaniac Vol. I & II
Nymphomaniac or NYMPH()MANIAC as it reads on the One Sheet, is a very long film of about four hours. It’s been broken into two parts, as has been all the rage since Kill Bill. We open with a very average looking man walking to the store to buy some milk and tea. He walks past an alley where a woman lies bleeding. On the way back, he notices her and offers her his help. He takes her to his apartment where she proceeds to tell him her life story. Cue the endless voice overs and sexually explicit flashbacks . Nymphomaniac reminded me…
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
I liked The Secret Life of Walter Mitty more than I thought I would. Part of the problem had to do with Walter’s job. He worked as a Negative Asset Manager, a job title from so far in the past that it is virtually meaningless. I thought he was in charge collecting delinquent debts. Turns out he does something with film negatives, part of an antiquated method of photography that used a chemical process to capture a photographic image. This sort of makes sense since he works at Life Magaizine, which ranks right up there with Look Magazine and The…
Snowpiercer
Yet another bleak view of the future where everything we know and love is dead and gone. Snowpiercer is the story of life on a train that has been making its way around the world for the last eighteen years since some unknown something plunged the world into a complete ice age. We start off in the Back of the Train, where all the lowlives live. Our hero is a rare man with two arms and legs whose goal is to reach the Front of the Train. He meets many obstacles in his quest and loses many companions along the…
Divergent
Like The Hunger Games, Logan’s Run, and The Road something happened about a hundred years ago in Divergent and the survivors create a New World Order that everyone follows to the letter. Add a bit of Huxley’s Brave New World division of labor and mix with some teen angst-viola! The bulk of Divergent feels like Ender’s Game, where we have a group of nasty evil people teaching children how to be nasty and evil. There’s a lot of running and jumping and shooting and knife throwing. All of this takes place in what’s left of Chicago and there are some…