I got to the seasonal entry for the start of winter for what's coming up in the next six months, which once again saves me for lacking another subject. So, let's see...
For December, we already have a release that normally wouldn't be in my area of interest: "Godzilla Minus One" or using its original name "Gojira -1.0". There are two reasons that made me stop to this title: the reviews that got out until now are quite promising and the fact that this is not made in Hollywood = here we have the Japanese alternative to the American version, for which I skipped the last installments. As I said, "monster movie" is not really part of the genres I watch, but for this I'll probably make an exception.
In January we have a light action with some nuance of comedy: "Role Play". The recepy of the wed couple where one (or both) has a secret life is not a new one, but I don't see any other more promising title for the beginning of the year. At least this one has some "fun to watch" potential.
I didn't stop easily in February at a movie with the Marvel logo attached somewhere in its credits, but I've been expecting already for some time to see a better version of what "Next" with Nicolas Cage was (originally a short story by P.K. Dick), and this is something I finally seem to get in "Madame Web". Out of the trailer looks like that the super-hero context, if present, at least won't be dominating this. Hopefully...
The most expected release in March is the second part of "Dune" postponed from November, which I checked on the previous previews list, so let's move directly to April. Unfortunately it's not a month with many released trailers, and the only I can pick is the US replica of the title we started with = "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire". And like that, I ended up having two "monster movies" in this list. Now, everybody can choose which to pick...
I'm going to end with May when we'll have the "Furiosa" prequel, by George Miller to his "Mad Max" reboot from 2015. I wasn't very confident back than in how the movie will end up, but it was a nice surprise. I'm not very confindent now either. So...
I'm going to move quickly over the last part of the title = the 16 years of age of the probably most unread blog with such an age, which is, however, connected to how I got to the current topic. I've seen I think only three movies this year in cinema (unlike 16 years ago, when the average was at something like 2 per month). Still, I made an effort to get to the final screening of "Killers of the Flower Moon", because I did expect to reach the point of an anniversary entry without having a decent subject for it, and I needed a backup. So, here we are. Luckily, Scorsese still delivers...
What we have here is inspired by a gruesome story, happened in the Osage County, forgotten mostly in the '20s press until a more thorough documenting by a journalist, David Grann, who wrote a relatively recent book, the base for the current movie. In brief, following the oil discovery on the Indian territory during that time, the native American people got rich over night from the exploitation rights they obtained over the land. Obviously, the opportunity to drain their money along with the oil didn't go unnoticed by the white population in the area, who started finding all sorts of means of doing this, from official guardians to administer the obtained income, to businesses based on the overpricing of goods, up to marriages of convenience. In this landscape there was the particular case of a rich farm owner, William King Hale, exerting a major influence in the politics of the area, who put together an intricate plot for increasing his fortune. Among different "mechanisms" like cashing life insurance policies for friends died in suspicious circumstances, his system apparently had a strong root also in marrying some of his relatives with the native people, followed by their deaths due to mysterious diseases and inheriting the rights for the land. And to get more rights, the mysterious disease had to hit first the relative of the final victim, passing their fortune further. In brief, a pyramid of killings, thought in such way that the last one to claim as much as possible from the succession chains in the deceased's final will. The scheme got stuck, however, when the recently established FBI started looking into the matter and also due to the resentment of a Hale's nephew, the consequence being the conviction of the two along a couple of their accomplices. This, unfortunately, after many deaths.
As most of Scorsese's movies, the actors shine more than the technical part, although honestly Di Caprio as the nephew of W.K. Hale seemed to me a bit overacting here, and actually who steals the show is surprisingly not De Niro, but Lily Gladstone as the native American wife. On the technical side, the score, the last in Robbie Robertson's career (who passed not so long ago), is probably the best in his collaborations with Scorsese over the years ("The Irishman", "The Color of Money", etc.). The cinematography is good, there are some nice variations of lights and chromatics sometimes. It deserves a big screen watching, but I don't think I can call it something exceptional. To make a comparison given the setting, "There Will Be Blood" is the first it comes to mind now, and I can say I have more scenes shot there stuck in my mind than what we got here. What's more impactful is the editing, where we have the usual pair made by Scorsese with Thelma Schoonmaker, resulting in an essential part that alleviates the effect of the movie's extended length. Periodically, there are some short insertions, but effective for getting you a bit out of the narrative line, either by placing in a scene with an owl announcing the end of someone's life, or the scene of meeting others passed ones after the end of the life, or others. The most consistent sequence is at the end as a setup of a radio show, presenting us an epilogue of the life of the main characters in the story, closed at the mic by Scorsese himself.
The movie is not the best, not the worst, and at least from the IMDb's statistic 3 minutes shorter than "The Irishman", so neither the most lengthy of Scorsese's :) But still... is a very long one, at its almost 3h30. And you can feel it, but you can also feel the director's experience in this. Meaning that you can have a long movie without obvious lenghts, so it doesn't drag a lot. And for this part I think he got it better than "The Irishman".
Since I lowered my frequency of blog entries, I'm trying for the few I'm posting to close these with a rating above average. This means finding a movie that deserves recommending. And this is the reason why I was very close this time to turn back again to a South-Korean title from the 2000's, but finally the "payback" urge for two hours lost with "The Creator" won. So...
What we have here is a SciFi set in a future where the Western world banned AI, apparently guilty for a nuclear blast that swiped Los Angeles. The Eastern World doesn't really agree with the general opinion that AI is bad, the result being some sort of war targeting an android population made in Asia, persecuted by the US army through incursions within the enemy territory. In all this context we have a romance between an US sergeant and the daughter of the main mysterious AI architect. Long story short (and it is short, because there's not much else), she dies in an attack, he gets back home, and after some years he's sent back to get "the weapon" - some device developed by the AI camp, which would be capable to disable the entire armed power of the West. As we find out from the trailers, the weapon is a child, and from here onwards we have a couple of predictable mini-twists, which I'll leave aside to keep something left for watching.
The humanity vs AI conflict is a SciFi theme since the notion of AI emerged, meaning decades. In cinema this theme catched traction mostly by positioning AI on the negative side: Terminator, Matrix, etc which is probably the simpler perspective = it's more natural for the average person watching a movie to empathize with the man than with the machine. "The Creator" wants the opposite, and probably attempts to build up on the ongoing trend where we have AI everywhere. I'm not saying that good AI vs bad people is something to be excluded, having elements of this kind in SciFis like "Blade Runner" or "I, Robot", or more precisely in the classic writings which these are based on, by P.K. Dick and Asimov, respectively. But there the story is much, much more nuanced than what we get here. What we receive in this movie is just some pale recycling of bits like the robotic laws where the android is not capable to commit murder, but that's something quite selective which we find out in the end. What we really do get in the movie is the Hollywood standard from the last years thrown over this shallow base of SciFi, transforming everything in a very politically correct class fight, where the AI become an actual social category ostracized by others and demanding its rights. Everything is one-side and black and white. It's probably enough for a public used to not bother anymore with thinking about the grey nuances in a story, preferring to get some shooting and explosions VFX instead. But well... maybe you can't expect from Gareth Edwards (director + screenwriter), who started from VFX in his career, to be an Asimov.
Probably someone could argue against the above, saying that we have the main character who's the good human, capable to understand that AI is not evil. Well, the problem is, if I would compare John David Washington with Arnold Schwarzenegger from the 30 years old Terminator 2, I don't think there's any doubt who of the two characters brings more balance. The acting doesn't help at all, and I really don't want to comment on what could be the reason behind the casting, but after all the script is still the root of all evil. The rigidity of T-800 that changes slowly over the course of Terminator 2 gives a much more human and credible side to the killing machine there, than the hysterical sergeant who moves here suddenly from extremes of threatening with a "shut down" to others with scenes drowned in tears. Add to this a terrible dosage of comic relief that's limited to the start of the movie followed by a continuous, totally opposed, tragedy feeling towards the end. The clip I added besides the trailer is relevant, despite the praising regarding the director's capacity of empathic infusion (didn't catch for me, sorry). All this is garnished with an editing including some flashbacks that are breaking the developing action thread and could've very well be placed in the normal chronological order. The only part that saves a bit what we get here are the visuals and the production desing, which indeed give a feeling alternating between a dystopic setting a la "Blade Runner" and bits of "Star Wars". Moreover, this looks like somehow trying to tell you, despite everything else, that if you had a different script and directing, the movie could've been actually good. But it's not.
Considering that I'm in a writer's block on technical writing = what I should do right now, and noticing that I reached the last day of the month without a blog entry, I decided for a quick context switch. However, I don't have anything recent as a subject, so I'll just pick an older movie which I've watched during the summer. As a side note, 2006 keeps coming back to my attention periodically, and I think it probably was one of the best years for cinema in this century - a look over this list (the entire one, not just the box-office) confirming that the yearly average quality of today's movies is far below of what it was, if we just count the titles that move you enough to remember after more than a decade. Anyway, "A Dirty Carnival" is not on that list, being a South Korean production. Also, it's probably not a movie I'd like to remember, although it will be...
If I'd have to look for an Asian equivalent of "Goodfellas" or "Casino", "A Dirty Carnival" would come up as a main contender. The story is pretty much in line with "Goodfellas", following the ascension of a small gangster up to nearly reaching the position of a partner in the businesses of the crime boss. The brutality is closer to "Casino", where it's probably better to skip the details, leaving this as a warning. You shouldn't forget that we have a Korean movie here, where when there's violence it doesn't really have a rating barrier, and the context is after all different from the romanced stories of the italo-american mafia. Unfortunately, it's a context that seems much more grounded into reality, which is emphasized by a side story care converging with the main thread. A young director, former school mate of the main character, decides to ask him for advise on a gangster movie, in return arraging him to reconnect with a girl he was friend of during school years. The context switch between the "peaceful" interactions in which the main character wants to show up as somebody who's living a normal life, adding the attempt on a romantic relationship, it makes even more hard to digest the episodes from the other life. The ending that gets quite predictable, is not a happy one, and it's hard to not leave you with a bitter taste.
"A Dirty Carnival" is part of a select category of movies, about which I can't say I enjoyed or I'd like to watch again someday, but I can definitely say it's a good movie. Starting from the perfect acting, up to the script that introduces in some places notes of sad humor, which are very particular, the impact the movie has on the viewer is clearly above average of today's Hollywood productions.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 (subjectively, objectively would be probably higher)
It's probably a bit late for this review, but I'm not used anymore to jump up to watch a box-office title in its first day of release. Actually, for a few years already, I'm more like avoiding these. "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" was an exception, but one still far from exceptional. The perfect artificial rejuvenation of Harisson Ford in the beginning of the movie is pretty much the single memorable thing about it. Besides that, you can still appreciate that it's a bit above the common superficiality found in most summer movies. But not with much.
The above appreciation stems from the story the movie offers. Not spectacular, but it's pretty consistent. The object of the quest this time, is a mechanism, Antikythera, fictitiously conceived in the movie by Archimedes and capable to predict temporal fissures. The reality about the artifact is obviously a different one, but let's move over it (you can Google it). The nice part in the movie, especially if you didn't have much of a vacation, is that it gets you through a classic quest moving between various touristic locations, until the tangled puzzle is completed. After which, finally (spoiler) we also have a brief travel back in time to the ancient Greece.
Initially the movie seems catchy, throwing at you familiar facts and faces from the Indiana Jones universe, the end of WW2 introducing the villain - a nazi physicist, the return of Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) - migrated from the first movie's Egypt to New York, the tour of an exotic location - Morroco in this case, the well-known melodic line by John Williams, and others. But slowly, this starts to drag, and the action becomes somehow dull. What saves it, more or less, is the time travel element in the end, but the fact you know from the start where the quest goes, doesn't make it a surprise anymore. Unlike, for instance, "Raiders of the Lost Ark", where you have no clue up to the end what exactly happens when the ark will open. Here, the final feeling, after more than two hours of movie, is somehow similar to the main character who being at the age of retirement complains that he doesn't fit anymore in such a story - the movie's sort of meeting the base expectations through its background elements, but seems a bit too "tired" to deliver enough impact. Even so, compared with the precedent exaggeration atempted by Spielberg in 2008 for reviving the character, what we got here seemed to me more in tone with the Indiana Jones I remember from when I was a kid.
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