These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of over 900 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV.
Kath and I went to see this in an actual theatre, complete with 3D glasses and everything. We’d read the book on which it is based waaaaay back when Jon Krakauer’s telling of that summer of 1996 on Everest came out in 1997. The movie stayed quite true to this story, although they did take a few digs at Krakauer, making him out to be an unhelpful chickenshit. Given the conditions, it just made him look smart, but he apparently took issue anyway.
That has nothing to do with the movie, though, which was quite lovely and did a great job of conveying the sheer cold and inhospitality of Everest. What came through for me, though, was that, while some people—the amateurs—had a very tough time with Everest, there were plenty of people around who could handle Everest with aplomb, going back and forth between camps, from 5500M to 7800M to 8300M, carrying large loads of oxygen bottles while their clients struggled to go up just once. It’s not easy by any stretch of the imagination, but there are some people who are much more adapted than others. Jake Gyllenhall played well, though he was restricted by a smaller role; Jason Clarke was very good as Rob Hall. The visuals were lovely and the CGI imperceptible. The 3D didn’t really impress, except in a few places, like zooming in on the tents in the large camps. Within the tents, at close quarters, however, it was more of a distraction. Recommended.
I liked this 10-part series. The acting was very good (Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman, Allison Tolman) as was the dialogue and the story. Netflix is really producing some high-quality entertainment.
Spoiler alert: The show ends in a murder, an extra-judicial killing of an unarmed and incapacitated man. America loves this kind of vigilante justice, though. It doesn’t even occur to most people that people don’t deserve killing: they deserve to be brought to justice. And the guy who murdered the man in cold blood gets a citation for bravery and his wife—an otherwise commendable police officer—is “proud of him” instead of pissed that she couldn’t question the guy who’d committed so many murders. A happy ending all around, justice American-style.
Recommended.
Paul Walker’s last ride looks a lot like several other of Paul Walker’s rides, but I guess you don’t mess with a formula. The cast fits well together, with the exception of Jordana Brewster, who’s been hollow and weak in all of the other movies, as well. Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez were phoning it in worse than the other movies. Ronda Rousey was not needed in this film. However, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, , Jason Statham, The Rock, Nathalie Emmanuel (Missandei from Game of Thrones) and, of course, Walker all do a good job with what has become nearly its own genre.
The best scenes are really the ones where they’re driving; the fisticuffs are OK, but too drawn-out and waaaay too over-the-top. They’re not superheroes, but nothing seems to hurt them. Crowbar to the head? Not even a mark. I’m prepared to suspend disbelief for one thing per movie. In these movies, it’s cars. The indestructability of the characters constantly lifts me out of the moment.
Seriously, though, there are some sweet action set-pieces here, although some of those go beyond what would be needed as well. At 02:20, I thought it was a bit long. Enjoy, if this is your thing. Despite its well-choreographed but finally frustrating fight scenes, it gets an extra point because most of the cast is endearing.
This is a super-campy effects-laden movie about a fallen group of Shaolin monks who form a soccer team and excel with their amazing and zany Shaolin powers. This movies is absolutely as insane as it sounds but if you’ve seen any of the director Stephen Chow’s other movies, this shouldn’t come as a big surprise.
The plot is the same as for every other sports movie ever made. The team is terrible until they believe in themselves (find their Kung Fu in this case), then they kick unbelievable amounts of ass, until they meet the evil team in the finals. They’re down and nearly out by half-time, including their heretofore impenetrable Bruce-Lee lookalike goalkeeper (he actually shows up in the yellow suit from Game of Death).
It has it’s moments and it’s quite goofy and funny and feels more like live-action anime, but gets a lot of tropes of the genre right, mixing the melodrama of Chinese movies with over-the-top but good effects as well as a lot of the gags associated with movies like Airplane. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re not ready for how goofy this movie is, you’ll turn it off nearly immediately, but some of the actors—especially the star, Stephen Chow—are quite charismatic. You don’t want to miss the power of Iron Leg’s final kick. Just carnage. You can guess the end.
This is a Korean film about a movie director/cinema professor. It’s a simple movie, mostly dialogue-driven, but there are some nice subtleties. For example, when Oki meets the photographer (his future wife, it turns out) in the park along the river, she enters the frame with her back turned to us. She stays that way nearly throughout the scene, turning to profile only once or twice and only briefly, at that. The director did this a few more times.
This was a difficult movie to follow because it jumped around in time over about five years (I think) and the narrator kept changing and the pieces were out of order. The final segment of four was interleaved with two very similar visits to the same park, with different lovers, one year apart. I saw it in Korean with English subtitles so there was a lot of culture and language to bridge for me, and I don’t think I quite made it. I’m not sorry I saw it, but I don’t think I got as much out of it as the creators put into it.
I followed up Oki’s Movie with this movie by the same director. This one is again heavily dialogue-driven, with the same somewhat awkward conversational style between relatively innocuous characters. It is again winter in Seoul, this time filmed in black and white. This movie was made in 2011, but depicts a world in which a mostly not-famous film director meets some young fans in what looks like a much-older restaurant—the black and white helps, of course, to make it look like it happened in the 60s, but the young guys don’t even mention StarCraft once, which is odd.
This movie is easier to follow: the young guys mimic their idol, the director and he, in his drunkenness, flips out at them. As in Oki’s movie, drunkenness plays a large role. As does stalking, because the director next heads to the apartment of an old flame. As in Oki’s movie, there are recurring themes—there are multiple segments, the group ends up at the same bar at the end of several of these, the group (regardless of composition) drinks a lot. Again, I might be missing something, but this feels like the South Korean version of a Mumblecore/Millenial movie about film students and actors and petty human foibles. Or maybe it’s a Korean Woody Allen movie.
But despite that, it grew on me: the people are concerned with sadness and insecurity and love, but in a less superficial and perhaps more philosophical way than in the movie I watched next (Side Effects, reviewed below). Also I’m starting to get used to the director/screenwriter’s zooming in for effect and his use of repetition of tropes and entire scenes with different dialogue. The repetition layers “what if?” scenarios and plays out the same handful of scenes again and again—hinted at only once or twice that they even (or least “he”) even notice. I’m sure I still missed a lot (the cultural and language barriers I mentioned in my review of Oki’s Movie above), but it was more interesting than I expected it to be from the first ½ hour. Some themes even recurred from Oki’s Movie (like him meeting a photographer and not liking to have his picture taken). Recommended.
Rooney Mara plays the young wife of Channing Tatum, an executive/trader who went to prison for four years for insider trading. She’s depressed, even after he gets out, and tries to commit suicide. Jude Law is her new psychiatrist; a stunning Catherine Zeta Jones is her former psychiatrist. I also saw David Costabile (Gale from Breaking Bad).
Everyone is beautiful and rich and depressed and addicted to quick fixes for becoming happy. It’s ostensibly a thriller but there were really no twists or turns to the plot—or at least none that you couldn’t see coming a mile away. The actors played well, but the script was kind of boring, maybe because I didn’t end up caring about any of the people at all, especially once these mostly stupid people started inelegantly examining the ideas of consciousness, responsibility, etc. but they get stuck on their own raging egos and making sure that they themselves are in the clear.
Law plays quite well, as usual. It was also a bit long for the material that they had, lingering over details that were obvious in the first few seconds. Perhaps the contrast to The Day He Arrives was too great, because while I wouldn’t rave about that film, at least it didn’t feel overly slick and designed-by-committee like this one. The final twist is decent, but a bit predictable and under-acted. Not recommended.
This is the story of a down-on-his-luck cab-driver from China, whose wife has left him after he gave up all of their savings for her travel visa to Korea. He is left behind and drowns his sorrows in Mah-Jongg debt. Out of nowhere, a man, Myun, approaches him and offers to buy off his debt if he’ll travel to South Korea to assassinate a man for him. He crosses the eponymous sea in a boat with other illegal immigrants. While in Korea, he not only scopes his target, but also looks for his wife.
This is a well-crafted movie in a thoroughly modern style. It’s interesting to see the themes offered by well-made movies from other cultures. Here we learn that the theme of immigration—and illegal immigration—is universal. There are always those desperate enough to make the trip. There is always gambling and drinking and infidelity and violence. Gu-nam is also told to wear a hat because his hair marks him as a foreigner, which is strange because they keep calling him Joseonjok, which is apparently what they call Koreans who live in China. I was wondering how he was able to speak Korean (not that I’m great at detecting the difference between the Asian languages).
This movie is so modern that it overuses the shaky-cam, going especially nuts and visually incomprehensible in the chase sequence in the middle of the film. The chase scene comes about because the “hit” goes wrong six ways to Sunday. It’s typically divided, in that the first half is much slower and builds a curiosity about the simplicity of the story, which the second half destroys with revelations about undercurrents that you’d only guessed at in the first half. Here the movie is what I would call standard action plot: sad-sack gets involved in something much bigger than the crime he’d intended; cops and criminals shake down immigrant elements. He digs deep and becomes a Jason-Bourne–level fighting machine.
The only difference is that the cops are much more reluctant to use their guns, if they even have them. The criminals also generally don’t have guns—instead their knives and hatchets are far more brutal. They make guns look like the sissy’s way out. The lack of guns changes the whole tenor of the movie—the contrast to American movies where guns are popping off everywhere is stark. It changes how the story is told, and I like it better without guns.
The main gangster boss, Myun, is a relentless force of nature. Gu-nam is no slouch, either, especially for a cab driver. It’s nice to watch a movie that wants to be good without worrying about a sequel: the ending is Shakespearean and Gu-nam keeps his promise.
The violence is visceral; the brutality and fiery destruction unvarnished. The plot was more standard than Old Boy but it reminded me a bit of that, which is a good thing. A bit long and not for the faint of heart, but recommended.
This is a very bizarre and surrealistic Yakuza thriller about a young Yakuza who’s instructed to drive his mentor to the site of said mentor’s assassination. When the mentor appears to have died en route, the young Yakuza is even more surprised to discover that the corpse has disappeared from the convertible where he left him while he ate lunch in an utterly surreal café. He calls his boss to inform him, but the boss is quite busy with other tasks and misses the point entirely.
The focus on bizarre characters and the disjointed screenplay remind me a bit of early Lynch, but the overarching vision is hard to pinpoint.[1] I’m only about ¼ of the way through and the poor guy’s been handed off from a phantom-of-the-opera type guide through the underworld to a hotel proprietress who’s quite forward and armed with her own bizarre peccadilloes. And the weirdness doesn’t stop: the dumb, bald guy is a fake medium, the hotel owner has an unreal fetish with her own breast milk, which she is mysteriously able to continue producing, despite her age.
Then the eponymous Gozu (literally “cow’s head”) shows up and licks our poor hero’s face all over while he’s peering into the bedroom where the hotel proprietress is being milked by her purported medium. Now we’re in a factory/laundromat where people’s skins are hanging like cleaned coats. What. The. Hell. And now his “brother” is back, but as a woman (more Lynchian notes, now with body-changes). This paves the way for the next level in their relationship—although first he has to overcome that (A) the girl is his former mentor and (B) her anatomy is haunted. They persevere, though in what starts off as a touching scene, but ends badly—which I predicted—but there’s no way you could predict how it actually ends. Well, maybe David Lynch could. Or David Cronenberg.
Disjointed and odd and hard to understand. I give it an extra star for effort and because there’s got to be something I’m missing, but I cannot recommend it and watching it once was enough.