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jamesginortonblog · 5 years ago

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He's just broken the nation’s hearts as the tragic anti-hero of BBC One’s Sunday-night sensation The Trial Of Christine Keeler – but James Norton’s next role has made the heartthrob actor “proud to become an honorary Welshman”.

In the title role of new film Mr Jones, Norton – already a favourite with bookmakers to be the next James Bond – takes on one of the most challenging projects of his career, playing a real-life yet forgotten hero from Wales who dared to combat and uncover one of history’s most shameful episodes of “fake news” from nearly a century ago.

James Norton at the Mr Jones screening at the London Film Festival

“Playing Gareth Jones was sometimes a tough call,” says 34-year-old Norton, known to millions from small-screen hits Grantchester and Happy Valley.

“In fact, when I first got the part and they told me it was going to be a Welshman who spoke both fluent Welsh and Russian, and all of it in a Welsh accent – that felt a bit scary!”

He needn’t have worried. As Gareth Jones, the mild-mannered young Western Mail reporter who travelled to Russia in 1933 and ended up blowing the whistle over the appalling truth about Stalin’s “Utopian” regime – and a hushed-up famine that killed untold millions – Norton presents us with a charming, softly-spoken hero with just a hint of a refined Welsh lilt.

It’s a million miles from those cliched, grating attempts at Welsh accents so often taken on by other English actors. ( Stephen Graham’s DCI “Taff” Jones in ITV’s White House Farm, anyone?).

Reports have emerged this week of Gareth’s great-nephew attacking the film for having “invented multiple fictions” – but as far as Norton is concerned, he feels the film stands as an honest and heartfelt reflection of Gareth’s character and incredible yet fatefully short life.

“We decided it was important to respect and honour Gareth’s journey – this Welshman from a small coastal town who ended up on this huge, bizarre and brave mission taking on one of the pillars of the 1930s political landscape in a very dangerous, pre-war Communist Russia,” says Norton, who worked with two Welsh dialect coaches to perfect his accent.

“So it made sense that Gareth would have maybe intentionally softened his Welsh accent, having been educated at Cambridge, in order to ingratiate himself in the community and then travelling the world. We wanted to keep it there without making it too distracting.”

Nevertheless, Norton – London-born but raised in North Yorkshire – was still required to speak Welsh in a few scenes, and Russian as well.

“I’ve never spoken either language before and I’m not a linguist – so I had my work cut out,” says Norton, who can also currently be seen on the big screen in the Oscar-nominated hit movie Little Women.

“But for those few months, I was very proud to become an honorary Welshman. My scenes with Julian Lewis Jones as my dad – when Gareth goes home to Barry – were challenging, but Julian was amazing helping me with my Welsh.

“Julian occasionally texts me in Welsh now, which is hilarious, as I think he’s forgotten I don’t actually speak a word!

“It’s pretty nerve-racking doing scenes where you’ve got to speak in a particular accent opposite someone who’s completely fluent in that language, so to have Julian put his hand on my shoulder and say, ‘You’re doing good, kid!’ was so reassuring.”

Learning dialogue for his Russian scenes was even harder.

“I had to learn all the Russian phonetically – it’s like learning music,” he explains. “I’d spend hours walking around wearing earphones and I’d look like a crazy person talking to myself, repeating phrases animatedly. But now I have Russian people coming up to me in the street, speaking Russian at me!

“Weirdly, I’ve done three jobs where I needed to speak Russian – War And Peace, McMafia and now this. I seem to have become the go-to guy for English-speaking Russian roles!”

The new film Mr Jones, directed by internationally-renowned Polish film-maker Agnieszka Holland, begins with Gareth Jones gaining fame in the early 1930s after his report on being the first foreign journalist to fly with Hitler.

Gareth, who’d graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1929 with a first-class degree in French, German and Russian, has also landed the job of foreign affairs advisor to former Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

With the Russian “utopia” all over the news, Gareth is intrigued as to how Stalin is financing the rapid modernisation of the Soviet Union and in March 1933 he decides to travel to Russia in an attempt to get an interview with Stalin himself.

However, on hearing murmurs of a government-induced famine – a secret carefully guarded by the Soviet censors – Gareth travels clandestinely to Ukraine, where he witnesses the atrocities of man-made starvation, as all grain is sold abroad to finance the Soviet empire’s industrialisation.

Deported back to the UK, it’s the Western Mail that publishes Gareth’s article revealing the horrors he has witnessed, but the starvation is denied by Western journalists based in Moscow, all under pressure from the Kremlin. As death threats mount, Gareth has to fight for the truth – and, meeting a young author called George Orwell, Gareth shares his findings... helping to inspire Orwell’s great allegorical novel Animal Farm.Gareth’s great-nephew Philip Colley made headlines recently, accusing the film’s scriptwriter of “inventing multiple fictions”, including wrongly suggesting he was an accidental cannibal.

Colley told the Sunday Times: “In the film, they have got [Gareth] up a tree eating bark, eating human flesh, tripping over dead bodies. They’ve made Gareth a victim of the famine, rather than a witness.”

Norton, however – interviewed prior to Colley’s remarks – says he received plentiful support from a number of Gareth’s surviving relatives, who came to early screenings of the film.

“They were all lovely in their support and they gave us their seal of approval, which was very touching,” recalls Norton.

“Our film’s screenwriter, Andrea Chalupa, was in touch with a lot of them early on. There’s so much literature and academia about Gareth’s work as a journalist, but Andrea found out some lovely titbits about his more private character.

“For example, when he went home to Barry he’d love being with his nieces and nephews and he became a big kid. His great-aunt told Andrea about one day when he came back home and he was rolling around with them like a labrador. That kind of story was invaluable to me.

“He wasn’t just this very earnest, principled man, there was a childlike, playful quality to him and he was almost a little bit gauche, a little bit awkward. You also want to honour his memory for his family.”

The main source of the film is a biography of Jones entitled More Than A Grain Of Truth, written by Gareth’s niece Dr Margaret Siriol Colley (Philip’s mother) and his great-nephew Nigel Colley (Philip’s brother), both of whom share a credit as the film’s historical advisors.

The book sparked Chalupa’s interest and she started corresponding with Margaret Colley soon after its publication. When Margaret died in 2011, aged 85, Chalupa remained in contact with her son Nigel, who became “heavily involved” in discussing ideas for the film. Nigel died in 2018.

Filmed predominantly in Poland, homeland of Warsaw-born director Agnieszka Holland, Mr Jones does contain some breathtaking snowbound scenes shot in Ukraine, where Gareth gets first-hand sight of the horrendous famine.

“We filmed in a tiny little place called Doch, which is three hours north of Kiev, in the middle of nowhere,” says Norton. “We’d drive for hours on these very unsafe roads, jangling your bones around. It was freezing cold in the snow.

“It was so remote that we had to put the word out to local farmers to come along as extras and we had a strict cut-off time – we had to wrap up at 5pm because they all had to go back and feed their animals!”

When it came to filming the scenes in Wales – notably Barry and the Western Mail’s offices in the film’s gripping finale when Gareth’s whistle-blowing scoop hits the presses – Norton reveals: “I’m really sorry to say they’re all filmed in Scotland! About an hour north-east of Edinburgh. A lot of those villages there have a quality of that small fishing town, for the Barry scenes.

“The other reason is that the film is partly funded by Creative Scotland and there’s that responsibility you feel to film there. But I think it worked well. It was a shame not to film in Wales, but we had a fantastic collection of Welsh players there, including Julian, so it felt home from home.”

Agnieszka Holland, of course, is not the first female director to work with Norton. He acted under the helm of Greta Gerwig on Little Women and with a largely female crew on the six-part TV drama The Trial Of Christine Keeler, which finished last Sunday, earning him rave reviews for his heartbreaking performance as Stephen Ward, the tragic scapegoat figure in the Profumo affair which brought down the UK government in the early 1960s.

“I’ve not gone out of my way to work with female directors, but I have great agents who always look for the best projects – but I really hope it’s a sign of the times,” he says. “The Christine Keeler story has never been properly told from a female perspective before, so that was the real attraction. Agnieszka, meanwhile, is the best of the best – the fact that she’s a woman is almost irrelevant.”

How does he feel about the fact that Greta Gerwig has been denied a Best Director Oscar nomination for her lauded version of Little Women, in which Norton plays eligible suitor John Brooke to Emma Watson’s Meg March?

“I can stand as witness to Greta’s brilliance and the fact that Little Women is up for Best Film and Screenplay is testament to her brilliance,” says Norton. “She singlehandedly redefined the story for a modern generation and it would have been wonderful to honour that in the nominations for direction – so it’s a horrible and unfortunate omission.”

It was while starring in McMafia, the gritty 2018 BBC1 thriller series with scenes of him bow-tied and gun-toting, that Norton’s name was first added to the list of contenders to play James Bond when Daniel Craig retires from the role after the next 007 movie No Time To Die. Remind him of that now and he laughs it off.

“It’s very humbling, it’s lovely and bizarre to be included in that conversation, but beyond that it’s all very speculative,” he says. “I think at the moment everyone’s concentrating on Daniel Craig in his final Bond film – for me, he’s a fantastic Bond and I’m sad he’s retiring.”

Right now, however, it’s Mr Jones and the legacy of that film’s largely unsung Welsh hero that are uppermost in Norton’s agenda. Tragically, Gareth Jones’ life was cut short on the eve of his 30th birthday in 1934, when he was allegedly shot by Mongolian bandits while travelling in Japanese-occupied China on a fact-finding tour.

“There’s much speculation about Gareth’s death at such a young age and there was a lot of evidence suggesting that it was orchestrated by the Soviet forces as revenge for his blowing the whistle on the hidden famine,” says Norton.

“His stories in the Western Mail were incredibly important. The more we can learn about Gareth Jones and recognise his extraordinary legacy, the better. And the fact is that right now, as politics becomes more polarised, we need more people like Gareth – investigative journalists to uncover the truth, with no ideological agenda attached.

“If this film encourages any future young Gareth Jones, then that’s fantastic. It’s a crime we don’t know more about these forgotten events and hopefully this film will remedy that.”

#James Norton #Gareth Jones #Mr Jones #interviews #article

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grigori77 · 5 years ago

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2019 in Movies - My Top 30 Fave Movies (Part 3)

10. HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD – while I love Disney and Pixar as much as the next movie nut, since the Millennium my loyalty has been slowly but effectively usurped by the consistently impressive (but sometimes frustratingly underappreciated) output of Dreamworks Animation Studios, and in recent years in particular they really have come to rival the House of Mouse in both the astounding quality of their work and their increasing box office reliability. But none of their own franchises (not even Shrek or Kung Fu Panda) have come CLOSE to equalling the sheer, unbridled AWESOMENESS of How to Train Your Dragon, which started off as a fairly loose adaptation of Cressida Cowell’s popular series of children’s stories but quickly developed a very sharp mind of its own – the first two films were undisputable MASTERPIECES, and this third and definitively FINAL chapter in the trilogy matches them to perfection, as well as capping the story off with all the style, flair and raw emotional power we’ve come to expect. The time has come to say goodbye to diminutive Viking Hiccup (Jay Baruchel, as effortlessly endearing as ever) and his adorable Night Fury mount/best friend Toothless, fiancée Astrid (America Ferrera, still tough, sassy and WAY too good for him), mother Valka (Cate Blanchett, classy, wise and still sporting a pretty flawless Scottish accent) and all the other Dragon Riders of the tiny, inhospitable island kingdom of Berk – their home has become overpopulated with scaly, fire-breathing denizens, while a trapper fleet led by the fiendish Grimmel the Grisly (F. Murray Abraham delivering a wonderfully soft-spoken, subtly chilling master villain) is beginning to draw close, prompting Hiccup to take up his late father Stoick (Gerard Butler returning with a gentle turn that EASILY prompts tears and throat-lumps) the Vast’s dream of finding the fabled “Hidden World”, a mysterious safe haven for dragon-kind where they can be safe from those who seek to do them harm. But there’s a wrinkle – Grimmel has a new piece of bait, a female Night Fury (or rather, a “Light Fury”), a major distraction that gets Toothless all hot and bothered … returning writer-director Dean DeBlois has rounded things off beautifully with this closer, giving loyal fans everything they could ever want while also introducing fresh elements such as intriguing new environments, characters and species of dragons to further enrich what is already a powerful, intoxicating world for viewers young and old (I particularly love Craig Ferguson’s ever-reliable comic relief veteran Viking Gobber’s brilliant overreactions to a certain adorably grotesque little new arrival), and like its predecessors this film is just as full of wry, broad and sometimes slightly (or not so slightly) absurd humour and deep down gut-twisting FEELS as it is of stirring, pulse-quickening action sequences and sheer, jaw-dropping WONDER, so it’s as nourishing to our soul as it is to our senses. From the perfectly-pitched, cheekily irreverent opening to the truly devastating, heartbreaking close, this is EXACTLY the final chapter we’ve always dreamed of, even if it does hurt to see this most beloved of screen franchises go. It’s been a wild ride, and one that I think really does CEMENT Dreamworks’ status as one of the true giants of the genre …

9. TERMINATOR: DARK FATE – back in 1984, James Cameron burst onto the scene with a stone-cold PHENOMENON, a pitch-perfect adrenaline-fuelled science fiction survival horror that spawned a million imitators but has never truly been equalled. Less than a decade later, he revisited that universe with a much bigger and far bolder vision, creating an epic action adventure that truly changed blockbuster cinema for the better (or perhaps worse, depending on how you want to look at it), but, with its decidedly final, full-stop climax, also effectively rendered itself sequel-proof. Except that Hollywood had other ideas, the unstoppable money machine smelling potential profit and deciding to milk this particular cash cow for all it was worth – on the small screen, it was the impressive but ultimately intrinsically limited Sarah Connor Chronicles, while on the big screen they cranked out THREE MORE sequels, Sony Pictures starting with straightforward retread Rise of the Machines and following with post-apocalyptic marmite movie Salvation, while Twentieth Century Fox then tried a sort-of soft reboot follow-up to T2 in Genisys. These were all interesting in their own way (personally, I like them all, particularly Salvation), but ultimately suffered from diminishing returns and whiffed strongly of trying too hard without quite getting the point. Cameron himself had long since washed his hands of the whole affair, and it looked like that might well be it … but then Skydance Productions founder David Ellison thought up a new take to breathe much needed new life into the franchise, and enlisted Cameron’s help to usher it in properly, with Deadpool director Tim Miller the intriguing but ultimately inspired choice to helm the project. The end result wisely chooses to paint right over all the pretenders, kicking off right where Judgement Day left off, and as well as Cameron being heavily involved in the story itself, draws another ace with the long-awaited ON-SCREEN return of Linda Hamilton in the role that’s pretty much defined her career, hardboiled survivor Sarah Connor. I’ll leave the details of her return for newcomers to discover, suffice to say she gets caught up in the chase when a new, MUCH more advanced terminator is sent back in time to kill unassuming young Mexican factory worker Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes). Of course, the future resistance has once again sent a protector back to watch her back, Grace (Blade Runner 2049’s Mackenzie Davis), a cybernetically-enhanced super-soldier specifically outfitted to combat terminators, who reluctantly agrees to team up with the highly experienced Sarah in order to keep Dani alive. Arnold Schwarzenegger once again returns to the role that truly made him a star (of course, how could he not?), and he for one has clearly not lost ANY of his old love or enthusiasm for playing the old T-800, but revealing exactly HOW he comes into the story this time would give away too much; the new terminator, meanwhile, is brilliantly portrayed by Gabriel Luna (probably best known for playing Ghost Rider in Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD), who brings predatory menace and an interesting edge of subtle, entitled arrogance to the role of Rev-9. Ultimately though, this is very much the ladies’ film, the three leads dominating the action and drama both as they kick-ass and verbally spar in equal measure, their chemistry palpably strong throughout – Hamilton is as badass as ever, making Sarah even more of a take-no-shit survivalist burnout than she ever was in T2, and she’s utterly mesmerising in what’s EASILY her best turn in YEARS, while Reyes goes through an incredible transformative character arc as she’s forced to evolve from terrified salary-girl to proto she-warrior through several pleasingly organic steps … my greatest pleasure, however, definitely comes from watching Mackenzie Davis OWN the role of Grace, investing her with an irresistible mixture of icy military precision, downright feral mother lion ferocity and a surprisingly sweet innocence buried underneath all the bravado, thus creating one of my favourite ass-kicking heroines not just for the year but this past decade entirely. Unsurprisingly, in the hands of old hand Tim Miller (working from a screenplay headlined by Blade and Batman Begins scribe David Goyer) this is a pulse-pounding thrill ride that rarely lets its foot up off the pedal, but thankfully the action is ALWAYS in service to the story, each precision-crafted set piece engineered to perfection as we power through high speed chases, explosive shootouts and a succession of bruising heavy metal smackdowns, but thankfully there’s just as much attention paid to the characters and the story – given the familiarity of the tale there’s inevitably a certain predictability to events, but Miller and co. still pull off a few deftly handled surprise twists, while character development always feels organic. Best of all, this genuinely feels like a legitimate part of the original Terminator franchise, Cameron and Hamilton’s returns having finally brought back the old magic that’s been missing for so long. I’d definitely be willing to sign up for more of this – such a shame then that, thanks to the film’s frustrating underperformance at the box office, it looks like this is gonna be it after all. Damn it …

8. DOCTOR SLEEP – first up, before I say anything else about this latest Stephen King screen adaptation, I HAVE NOT yet got round to reading the original novel yet, so I can’t speak to how it compares. That said, I HAVE read The Shining, to which the book is a direct sequel, so I DO know about at least one of the major, KEY changes, and besides, this is actually a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s MOVIE of The Shining, which differed significantly from its own source material anyway, so there’s that … yeah, this is a complicated kettle of fish even BEFORE we get down to the details. Suffice to say, you don’t have to have read the book to get this movie, but a working knowledge of Kubrick’s horror classic may at least help you get some context before watching this … anyways, enough with the confusion, on to the meat of the matter – this is a CRACKING horror movie by any stretch, and, for me, one of the strongest King horrors to make it to the big screen in quite some time. Of course it helps no end to have a filmmaker of MAJOR calibre at the helm, and there are few working in horror at the moment with whom I am quite so impressed as Mike Flanagan, writer-director of two of this past decade’s definitive horrors (at least for me), Oculus and Hush, as well as a BLINDING TV series adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House for Netflix – the man is an absolute master of the craft, incredibly skilled with all the tricks of this particular genre’s trade, and, as it turns out, a perfect fit with King’s material. Following on from The Shining, then, we learn what happened to the kid, Danny Torrance, after he and his mother left the Overlook Hotel in the wake of his father’s psychotic break driven by monstrous apparitions “living” in the cursed halls, following him from childhood as he initially shuns the psychic gifts (or “shine”) he was taught to use by the hotel’s late caretaker, Dick Halloran. It’s only in later years, as he fights to overcome his alcoholism and self-destructive lifestyle, that he reconnects with that power, just in time to discover psychic “pen-pal” Abra Stone, an immensely powerful young psychic. Which leads us to the present day, when Abra, now a teenager, becomes the target of the True Knot, a group of psychic vampires who travel America hunting and killing young people with psychic abilities in order to consume their “smoke” (basically the stuff of their “shines”), thus expanding their already unnatural lifespans – they’re tracking Abra, and they’re getting close, and only her “Uncle Dan” can save her from them. Ewan McGregor is PERFECT as the grown-up Dan, delivering one of his career-best turns as he captures the world-weary seriousness of someone who’s seen, felt and had to do things no-one should, especially when he was so very young, the kinds of things that colour a soul for their entire life, and he’s clearly DESPERATE not to become his father; newcomer Kyleigh Curran, meanwhile, is an absolute revelation as Abra, bringing depth and weight far beyond her years to the role, but never losing sight of the fact that, under all the power, she’s ultimately still just a child; there are also excellent supporting turns from the likes of Cliff Curtis as Dan’s best friend and AA sponsor Billy Freeman, Zahn McClarnon (Longmire, Fargo season 2) and Emily Lind (Revenge, Code Black) as True Knot members Crow Daddy and Snakebite Annie, and Carl Lumbly (Cagney & Lacey, TV’s Supergirl), who beautifully replaces deceased original actor Scatman Crothers in the role of Dick. The film’s tour-de-force performance, however, comes from Rebecca Ferguson as Rose the Hat, leader of the True Knot – they’re an intriguing bunch of villains, very well written and fleshed out, and it’s clear they have genuine love for one another, like a real family, which makes it hard not to sympathise with them a little bit, and this is none more true than in Rose, whom Ferguson invests with so much light and warmth and intriguing, complex character, as well as a fantastic streak of playful mischief that makes her all the more riveting in those times when they then turn around and do some truly heinous, unforgivable things … as horror movies go this is the cream of the crop, but Flanagan has purposefully kept away from jump scares and the more flashy stuff, preferring, like Kubrick in The Shining, to let the insidious darkness bubble up underneath good and slow, drawing out the creepiness and those most unsettling, twisted little touches the author himself is always so very good at. Intent can be such a scary thing, and Flanagan gets it, so that’s just what he uses here. As a result this is a fantastic slow-burn creep-fest that constantly works its way deeper under your skin, building to a phenomenal climax that, (perversely) thanks in no small part to the differences between both novels and films, pays as much loving tribute to Kubrick’s visionary landmark as the original novel of The Shining. For me, this is Flanagan’s best film to date, and as far as Stephen King adaptations go I consider this to be right up there with the likes of The Mist and The Green Mile. Best of all, I think he’d be proud of it too …

7. SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME – summer 20019 was something of a decompression period for fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with many of us recovering from the sheer emotional DEVASTATION of the grand finale of Phase 3, Avengers: Endgame, so the main Blockbuster Season’s entry really needed to be light and breezy, a blessed relief after all that angst and loss, much like Ant-Man & the Wasp was last year as it followed Infinity War. And it is, by and large – this is as light-hearted and irreverent as its predecessor, following much the same goofy teen comedy template as Homecoming, but there’s no denying that there’s a definite emotional through-line from Endgame that looms large here, a sense of loss the film fearlessly addresses right from the start, sometimes with a bittersweet sense of humour, sometimes straight. But whichever path the narrative chooses, the film stays true to this underlying truth – there have been great and painful changes in this world, and we can’t go back to how it was before, no matter how hard we try, but then perhaps we shouldn’t. This is certainly central to our young hero’s central arc – Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is in mourning, and not even the prospect of a trip around Europe with his newly returned classmates, together with the chance to finally get close to M.J. (Zendaya), maybe even start a relationship, can entirely distract him from the gaping hole in his life. Still, he’s gonna give it his best shot, but it looks like fate has other plans for our erstwhile Spider-Man as superspy extraordinaire Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) comes calling, basically hijacking his vacation with an Avengers-level threat to deal with, aided by enigmatic inter-dimensional superhero Quentin Beck, aka Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), who has a personal stake in the mission, but as he’s drawn deeper into the fray Peter discovers that things may not be quite as they seem. Of course, giving anything more away would of course dumps HEINOUS spoilers on the precious few who haven’t yet seen the film – suffice to say that the narrative drops a MAJOR sea-change twist at the midpoint that’s EVERY BIT as fiendish as the one Shane Black gave us in Iron Man 3 (although the more knowledgeable fans of the comics will likely see it coming), and also provides Peter with JUST the push he needs to get his priorities straight and just GET OVER IT once and for all. Tom Holland again proves his character is the most endearing teenage geek in cinematic history, his spectacular super-powered abilities and winning underdog perseverance in the face of impossible odds still paradoxically tempered by the fact he’s as loveably hopeless as ever outside his suit; Mysterio himself, meanwhile, frequently steals the film out from under him, the strong bromance they develop certainly mirroring what Peter had with Tony Stark, and it’s a major credit to Gyllenhaal that he so perfectly captures the essential dualities of the character, investing Beck with a roguish but subtly self-deprecating charm that makes him EXTREMELY easy to like, but ultimately belying something much more complex hidden beneath it; it’s also nice to see so many beloved familiar faces returning, particularly the fantastically snarky and self-assured Zendaya, Jacob Batalon (once again pure comedy gold as Peter’s adorably nerdy best friend Ned), Tony Revolori (as his self-important class rival Flash Thompson) and, of course, Marisa Tomei as the ever-pivotal Aunt May, as well as Jackson and Cobie Smoulders as dynamite SHIELD duo Fury and his faithful lieutenant Maria Hill, and best of all Jon Favreau gets a MUCH bigger role this time round as Happy Hogan. Altogether this is very much business as usual for the MCU, the well-oiled machine unsurprisingly turning out another near-perfect gem of a superhero flick that ticks all the required boxes, but a big part of the film’s success should be attributed to returning director Jon Watts, effectively building on the granite-strong foundations of Homecoming with the help of fellow alumni Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers on screenplay duty, for a picture that feels both comfortingly familiar and rewardingly fresh, delivering on all the required counts with thrilling action and eye candy spectacle, endearingly quirky character-based charm and a typically winning sense of humour, and plenty of understandably powerful emotional heft. And, like always, there are plenty of fan-pleasing winks and nods and revelations, and the pre-requisite mid- and post-credit teasers too, both proving to be some proper game-changing corkers. Another winner from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, then, but was there really ever any doubt?

6. US – back in 2017, Jordan Peele made the transition from racially-charged TV and stand-up comedy to astounding cinemagoers with stunning ease through his writer-director feature debut Get Out, a sharply observed jet black comedy horror with SERIOUS themes that was INSANELY well-received by audiences and horror fans alike. Peele instantly became ONE TO WATCH in the genre, so his follow-up feature had A LOT riding on it, but this equally biting, deeply satirical existential mind-bender is EASILY the equal of its predecessor, possibly even its better … giving away too much plot detail would do great disservice to the many intriguing, shocking twists on offer as middle class parents Adelaide and Gabe Wilson (Black Panther alumni Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke) take their children, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex), to Santa Cruz on vacation, only to step into a nightmare as a night-time visitation by a family of murderous doppelgangers signals the start of a terrifying supernatural revolution with potential nationwide consequences. The idea at the heart of this film is ASTOUNDINGLY original, quite an achievement in a genre where just about everything has been tried at least once, but it’s also DEEPLY subversive, as challenging and thought-provoking as the themes visited in Get Out, but also potentially even more wide-reaching. It’s also THOROUGHLY fascinating and absolutely TERRIFYING, a peerless exercise in slow-burn tension and acid-drip discomfort, liberally soaked in an oppressive atmosphere so thick you could choke on it if you’re not careful, such a perfect horror master-class it’s amazing that this is only Peele’s second FEATURE, never mind his sophomore offering IN THE GENRE. The incredibly game cast really help, too – the four leads are all EXCEPTIONAL, each delivering fascinatingly nuanced performances in startlingly oppositional dual roles as both the besieged family AND their monstrous doubles, a feat brilliantly mimicked by Mad Men and The Handmaid’s Tale-star Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker and teen twins Cali and Noelle Sheldon as the Wilsons’ friends, the Tylers, and their similarly psychotic mimics. The film is DOMINATED, however, by Oscar-troubler Nyong’o, effortlessly holding our attention throughout the film with yet another raw, intense, masterful turn that keeps up glued to the screen from start to finish, even as the twists get weirder and more full-on brain-mashy. Of course, while this really is scary as hell, it’s also often HILARIOUSLY funny, Peele again poking HUGE fun at both his intended audience AND his allegorical targets, proving that scares often work best when twinned with humour. BY FAR the best thing in horror in 2019, Us shows just what a master of the genre Jordan Peele is, and it looks like he’s here to stay …

5. KNIVES OUT – with The Last Jedi, writer-director Rian Johnson divided audiences so completely that he seemed to have come perilously close to ruining his career. Thankfully, he’s a thick-skinned auteur with an almost ridiculous amount of talent, and he’s come bouncing back as strong as ever, doing what he does best. His big break feature debut was with Brick, a cult classic murder mystery that was, surprisingly, set in and around a high school, and his latest has some of that same DNA as Johnson crafts a fantastic sleuthy whodunit cast in the classic mould of Agatha Christie, albeit shot through with his own wonderfully eclectic verve, wit and slyly subversive streak. Daniel Craig holds court magnificently as quirky and flamboyant Deep South private detective Benoit Blanc, summoned to the home of newly-deceased star crime author Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) to investigate his possible murder and faced with a veritable web of lies, deceit and twisting knives as he meets the maybe-victim’s extensive and INCREDIBLY dysfunctional family, all of whom are potential suspects. Craig is thoroughly mesmerising throughout, clearly having the time of his life in one of his career-best roles, while the narrative focus is actually, interestingly, given largely to Ana de Armas (Blade Runner 2049 and soon to be seen with Craig again in the latest Bond-flick No Time To Die), who proves equally adept at driving the film as Harlan’s sweet but steely and impressively resourceful nurse Marta Cabrera, whose own involvement in the case it would do the film a massive disservice to reveal. The rest of the Thrombey clan are an equally intriguing bunch, all played to the hilt by an amazing selection of heavyweight talent that includes Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette and It’s Jaeden Martell, but the film is, undeniably, DOMINATED by Chris Evans as Harlan’s black sheep grandson Ransom, the now former Captain America clearly enjoying his first major post-MCU role as he roundly steals every scene he’s in, effortlessly bringing back the kind of snarky, sarcastic underhanded arrogance we haven’t seen him play since his early career and entertaining us thoroughly. Johnson has very nearly outdone himself this time, weaving a gleefully twisty web of intrigue that viewers will take great pleasure in watching Blanc untangle, even if we’re actually already privy to (most of) the truth of the deed, and he pulls off some diabolical twists and turns as we rattle towards an inspired final reveal which genuinely surprises. He’s also generously smothered the film with oodles of his characteristically dry, acerbic wit, wonderfully tweaking many of the classic tropes of this familiar little sub-genre so this is at once a loving homage to the classics but also a sly, skilful deconstruction. Intriguing, compelling, enrapturing and often thoroughly hilarious, this is VERY NEARLY the best film he’s ever made. Only the mighty Looper remains unbeaten …

4. CAPTAIN MARVEL – before the first real main event of not only the year’s blockbusters but also, more importantly, 2019’s big screen MCU roster, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and co dropped a powerful opening salvo with what, it turns out, was the TRUE inception point of the Avengers Initiative and all its accompanying baggage (not Captain America: the First Avenger, as we were originally led to believe). For me, this is simply the MCU film I have MOST been looking forward to essentially since the beginning – the onscreen introduction of my favourite Avenger, former US Air Force Captain Carol Danvers, the TRUE Captain Marvel (no matter what the DC purists might say), who was hinted at in the post credits sting of Avengers: Infinity War but never actually seen. Not only is she the most powerful Avenger (sorry Thor, but it’s true), but for me she’s also the most badass – she’s an unstoppable force of (cosmically enhanced) nature, with near GODLIKE powers (she can even fly through space without needing a suit!), but the thing that REALLY makes her so full-on EPIC is her sheer, unbreakable WILL, the fact that no matter what’s thrown at her, no matter how often or how hard she gets knocked down, she KEEPS GETTING BACK UP. She is, without a doubt, the MOST AWESOME woman in the entire Marvel Universe, both on the comic page AND up on the big screen. Needless to say, such a special character needs an equally special actor to portray her, and we’re thoroughly blessed in the inspired casting choice of Brie Larson, who might as well have been purpose-engineered exclusively for this very role – she’s Carol Danvers stepped right out of the primary-coloured panels, as steely cool, unswervingly determined and strikingly statuesque as she’s always been drawn and scripted, with just the right amount of twinkle-eyed, knowing smirk and sassy humour to complete the package. Needless to say she’s the heart and soul of the film, a pure joy to watch throughout, but there’s so much more to enjoy here that this is VERY NEARLY the most enjoyable cinematic experience I had all year … writer-director double-act Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck may only be known for smart, humble indies like Half Nelson and Mississippi Grind, but they’ve taken to the big budget, all-action blockbuster game like ducks to water, co-scripting with Geneva Robertson-Dworet (writer of the Tomb Raider reboot movie and the long-gestating third Sherlock Holmes movie) to craft yet another pitch-perfect MCU origin story, playing a sneakily multilayered, misleading game of perception-versus-truth as we’re told how Carol got her powers and became the unstoppable badass supposedly destined to turn the tide in a certain Endgame … slyly rolling the clock back to the mid-90s, we’re presented with a skilfully realised mid-90s period culture clash adventure as Carol, a super-powered warrior fighting for the Kree Empire against the encroaching threat of the shape-shifting Skrulls, crash-lands in California and winds up uncovering the hidden truth behind her origins, with the help of a particular SHIELD agent, before he wound up with an eye-patch and a more cynical point-of-view – yup, it’s a younger, fresher Nick Fury (the incomparable Samuel L. Jackson, digitally de-aged with such skill it’s really just a pure, flesh-and-blood performance). There’s action, thrills, spectacle and (as always with the MCU) pure, skilfully observed, wry humour by the bucket-load, but one of the biggest strengths of the film is the perfectly natural chemistry between the two leads, Larson and Jackson playing off each other BEAUTIFULLY, no hint of romantic tension, just a playfully prickly, banter-rich odd couple vibe that belies a deep, honest respect building between both the characters and, clearly, the actors themselves. There’s also sterling support from Jude Law as Kree warrior Yon-Rogg, Carol’s commander and mentor, Ben Mendelsohn, slick, sly and surprisingly seductive (despite a whole lot of make-up) as Skrull leader Talos, returning MCU-faces Clark Gregg and Lee Pace as rookie SHIELD agent Phil Coulson (another wildly successful de-aging job) and Kree Accuser Ronan, Annette Bening as a mysterious face from Carol’s past and, in particular, Lashana Lynch (Still Star-Crossed, soon to be seen in No Time To Die) as Carol’s one-time best friend and fellow Air Force pilot Maria Rambeau, along with the impossibly adorable Akira Akbar as her precocious daughter Monica … that said, the film is frequently stolen by a quartet of ginger tabbies who perfectly capture fan-favourite Goose the “cat” (better known to comics fans as Chewie). This is about as great as the MCU standalone films get – for me it’s up there with the Russo’s Captain America films and Black Panther, perfectly pitched and SO MUCH FUN, but with a multilayered, monofilament-sharp intelligence that makes it a more cerebrally satisfying ride than most blockbusters, throwing us a slew of skilfully choreographed twists and narrative curveballs we almost never see coming, and finishing it off with a bucket-load of swaggering style and pure, raw emotional power (the film kicks right off with an incredibly touching, heartfelt tear-jerking tribute to Marvel master Stan Lee). Forget Steve Rogers – THIS is the Captain MCU fans need AND deserve, and I am SO CHUFFED they got my favourite Avenger so totally, perfectly RIGHT. I can die happy now, I guess …

3. JOHN WICK CHAPTER 3 – needless to say, those who know me should be in no doubt why THIS was at the top of my list for summer 2019 – this has EVERYTHING I love in movies and more. Keanu Reeves is back in the very best role he’s ever played, unstoppable, unbeatable, un-killable hitman John Wick, who, when we rejoin him mere moments after the end of 2017’s phenomenal Chapter 2, is in some SERIOUSLY deep shit, having been declared Incommunicado by the High Table (the all-powerful ruling elite who run this dark and deadly shadowy underworld) after circumstances forced him to gun down an enemy on the grounds of the New York Continental Hotel (the inviolable sanctuary safe-house for all denizens of the underworld), as his last remaining moments of peace tick away and he desperately tries to find somewhere safe to weather the initial storm. Needless to say the opening act of the film is ONE LONG ACTION SEQUENCE as John careers through the rain-slick streets of New York, fighting off attackers left and right with his signature brutal efficiency and unerring skill, perfectly setting up what’s to come – namely a head-spinning, exhausting parade of spectacular set pieces that each put EVERY OTHER offering in every other film this past year to shame. Returning director Chad Stahelski again proves that he’s one of the very best helmsmen around for this kind of stuff, delivering FAR beyond the call on every count as he creates a third entry to a series that continues to go from strength to strength, while Keanu once again demonstrates what a phenomenal screen action GOD he is, gliding through each scenario with poise, precision and just the right balance of brooding charm and so-very-done-with-this-shit intensity and a thoroughly enviable athletic physicality that really does put him on the same genre footing as Tom Cruise. As with the first two chapters, what plot there is is largely an afterthought, a facility to fuel the endless wave of stylish, wince-inducing, thoroughly exhilarating violent bloodshed, as John cuts another bloody swathe through the underworld searching for a way to remove the lethal bounty from his head while an Adjudicator from the High Table (Orange Is the New Black’s Asia Kate Dillon) arrives in New York to settle affairs with Winston (Ian McShane), the manager of the New York Continental, and the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) for helping John create this mess in the first place. McShane and Fishburne are both HUGE entertainment in their fantastically nuanced large-than-life roles, effortlessly stealing each of their scenes, while the ever-brilliant Lance Reddick also makes a welcome return as Winston’s faithful right-hand Charon, the concierge of the Continental, who finally gets to show off his own hardcore action chops when trouble arrives at their doorstep, and there are plenty of franchise newcomers who make strong impressions here – Dillon is the epitome of icy imperiousness, perfectly capturing the haughty superiority you’d expect from a direct representative of the High Table, Halle Berry gets a frustratingly rare opportunity to show just how seriously badass she can be as former assassin Sofia, the manager of the Casablanca branch of the Continental and one of John’s only remaining allies, Game of Thrones’ Jerome Flynn is smarmy and entitled as her boss Berrada, and Anjelica Houston is typically classy as the Director, the ruthless head of New York’s Ruska Roma (John’s former “alma mater”, basically). The one that REALLY sticks in the memory, though, is Mark Dacascos, finally returning to the big time after frustrating years languishing in lurid straight-to-video action dreck and lowbrow TV hosting duties thanks to a BLISTERING turn as Zero, a truly brilliant semi-comic creation who routinely runs away with the film – he’s the Japanese master ninja the Adjudicator tasks with dispensing her will, a thoroughly lethal killer who may well be as skilled as our hero, but his deadliness is amusingly tempered by the fact that he’s also a total nerd who HERO WORSHIPS John Wick, adorably geeking out whenever their paths cross. Their long-gestating showdown provides a suitably magnificent climax to the action, but there’s plenty to enjoy in the meantime, as former stuntman Stahelski and co keep things interestingly fluid as they constantly change up the dynamics and add new elements, from John using kicking horses in a stable and knives torn out of display cases in a weaponry museum to dispatch foes on the fly, through Sofia’s use of attack dogs to make the Moroccan portion particularly nasty and a SPECTACULAR high octane sequence in which John fights katana-wielding assailants on speeding motorcycles, to the film’s UNDISPUTABLE highlight, an astounding fight in which John takes on Zero’s disciples (including two of the most impressive guys from The Raid movies, Cecep Arif Rahman and Yayan Ruhian) in (and through) an expansive chamber made up entirely of glass walls and floors. Altogether then, this is business as usual for a franchise that’s consistently set the bar for the genre as a whole, an intensely bruising, blissfully blood-drenched epic that cranks its action up to eleven, shot with delicious neon-drenched flair and glossy graphic novel visual excess, a consistently inspired exercise in fascinating world-building that genuinely makes you want to live among its deadly denizens (even though you probably wouldn’t live very long). The denouement sets things up for an inevitable sequel, and I’m not at all surprised – right from the first film I knew the concept had legs, and it’s just too good to quit yet. Which is just how I like it …

2. AVENGERS: ENDGAME – the stars have aligned and everything is right with the world – the second half of the ridiculously vast, epic, nerve-shredding and gut-punching MCU saga that began with 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War has FINALLY arrived and it’s JUST AS GOOD as its predecessor … maybe even a little bit better, simply by virtue of the fact that (just about) all the soul-crushing loss and upheaval of the first film is resolved here. Opening shortly after the universally cataclysmic repercussions of “the Snap”, the world at large and the surviving Avengers in particular are VERY MUCH on the back foot as they desperately search for a means to reverse the damage wrought by brutally single-minded cosmic megalomaniac Thanos and his Infinity Stone-powered gauntlet – revealing much more dumps so many spoilers it’s criminal to continue, so I’ll simply say that their immediate plan really DOESN’T work out, leaving them worse off than ever. Fast-forward five years and the universe is a very different place, mourning what it’s lost and torn apart by grief-fuelled outbursts, while our heroes in particular are in various, sometimes better, but often much worse places – Bruce Banner/the Hulk (Mark Ruffallo) has found a kind of peace that’s always eluded him before, but Thor (Chris Hemsworth) really is a MESS, while Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) has gone to a VERY dark place indeed. Then Ant-Man Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) finds a way back from his forced sojourn in the Quantum Realm, and brings with him a potential solution of a very temporal nature … star directors the Russo Brothers, along with returning screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, have once again crafted a stunning cinematic masterpiece, taking what could have been a bloated, overloaded and simply RIDICULOUS narrative mess and weaving it into a compelling, rich and thoroughly rewarding ride that, despite its THREE HOURS PLUS RUNNING TIME, stays fresh and interesting from start to finish, building on the solid foundations of Infinity War while also forging new ground (narratively speaking, at least) incorporating a wonderfully fresh take on time-travel that pokes gleeful fun at the decidedly clichéd tropes inherent in this particular little sub-genre. In fact this is frequently a simply HILARIOUS film in its own right, largely pulling away from the darker tone of its predecessor by injecting a very strong vein of chaotic humour into proceedings, perfectly tempering the more dramatic turns and epic feels that inevitably crop up, particularly as the stakes continue to rise. Needless to say the entire cast get to shine throughout, particularly those veterans whose own tours of duty in the franchise are coming to a close, and as with Infinity War even the minor characters get at least a few choice moments in the spotlight, especially in the vast, operatic climax where pretty much the ENTIRE MCU cast return for the inevitable final showdown. It’s a masterful affair, handled with skill and deep, earnest respect but also enough irreverence to keep it fun, although in the end it really comes down to those big, fat, heart-crushing emotional FEELS, as we say goodbye to some favourites and see others reach crossroads in their own arcs that send them off in new, interesting directions. Seriously guys, keep a lot of tissues handy, you really will need them. If this were the very last MCU film ever, I’d say it’s a PERFECT piece to go out on – thankfully it’s not, and while it is the end of an era the franchise looks set to go on as strong as ever, safe in the knowledge that there’s plenty more cracking movies on the way so long as Kevin Feige and co continue to employ top-notch talent like this to make their films. Eleven years and twenty-two films down, then – here’s to eleven and twenty-two more, I say …

1. THE IRISHMAN (aka I HEARD YOU PAINT HOUSES) – beating smash-hit superhero movies and unstoppable assassin action-fests to the top spot is no mean feat, but so completely blowing me away that I had NO OTHER CHOICE than to put this at NUMBER ONE is something else entirely. Not only is this the best thing I saw at the cinema this past year, but I’d be happy to say it’s guaranteed to go down as one of my all-time greats of the entire decade. I’ve been an ardent fan of the filmmaking of Martin Scorsese ever since I first properly got into cinema in my early adolescence, when I was first shown Taxi Driver and was completely and irrevocably changed forever as a movie junkie. He’s a director who impresses me like a select few others, one of the true, undisputable masters of the craft, and I find it incredibly pleasing that I’m not alone in this assertion. Goodfellas and The Departed are both numbered among my all-time favourite crime movies, while I regard the latter as one of the greatest films of the current cinematic century. I’ve learned more about the art and craft of filmmaking and big-screen storytelling from watching Scorsese’s work than from any other director out there (with the notable exception of my OTHER filmmaking hero, Ridley Scott), and I continue to discover more about his films every time I watch them, so I never stop. Anyways … enough with the gushing, time to get on with talking about his latest offering, a Netflix Original true-life gangster thriller of truly epic proportions chronicling the career and times of Frank Sheeran, a Philadelphia truck driver who became the most trusted assassin of the Northeastern Pennsylvania crime family and, in particular, its boss (and Sheeran’s best friend) Russell Bufalino, particularly focusing on his rise to power within the Philly Mob and his significant association with controversial and ultimately ill-fated Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa. It’s a sprawling epic in the tradition of Scorsese’s previously most expansive film, Casino, but in terms of scope this easily eclipses the 1995 classic, taking in SIX DECADES of genuinely world-changing events largely seen through Sheeran’s eyes, but as always the director is in total control throughout, never losing sight of the true focus – one man’s fall from grace as he loses his soul to the terrible events he takes part in. Then again, the screenplay is by Steve Zaillian (Schindler’s List, Moneyball, Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), one of the true masters of the art form, with whom Scorsese previously worked with on Gangs of New York, so it’s pure gold – tight as a drum, razor sharp and impossibly rich and rewarding, the perfect vehicle for the director to just prep his cast and run with it. And WHAT A CAST we have here – this is a three-way lead master-class of titanic proportions, as Scorsese-regular Robert De Niro and his Goodfellas co-star Joe Pesci are finally reteamed as, respectively, Sheeran and Bufalino, while Al Pacino gets to work with the master for the first time as Hoffa; all three are INCREDIBLE, EXTRAORDINARY, on absolute tip-top form as they bring everything they have to their roles, De Niro and Pesci underplaying magnificently while Pacino just lets rip with his full, thunderous fury in a seemingly larger-than-life turn which simply does one of history’s biggest crooks perfect justice; the supporting cast, meanwhile, is one of the strongest seen in cinema all year, with Ray Romano, Bobby Canavale, Anna Paquin, Stephen Graham, Harvey Keitel, Stephanie Kurtzuba (The Wolf of Wall Street), Jack Huston (Boardwalk Empire) and Jesse Plemmons among MANY others all making MAJOR impressions throughout, all holding their own even when up against the combined star power of the headlining trio. This is filmmaking as high art, Scorsese bringing every trick at his considerable, monumentally experienced disposal to bear to craft a crime thriller that strongly compares not only to the director’s own best but many of the genre’s own other masterpieces such as The Godfather and Chinatown. It may clock in at a potentially insane THREE HOURS AND TWENTY-NINE MINUTES but it NEVER feels overlong, every moment crafted for maximum impact with a story that unfolds so busily and with such mesmerising power it’s impossible to get bored with it. The film may have received a limited theatrical release, obviously reaching MOST of its audience when unleashed on Netflix nearly a month later, but I was one of the lucky few who got to see it on the big screen, and BELIEVE ME, it was totally worth it. Best thing I saw in 2019, ONE OF the best things I saw this past decade, and DEFINITELY one of Scorsese’s best films EVER. See it, any way you can. You won’t be disappointed.

#how to train your dragon the hidden world #terminator dark fate #doctor sleep #spider-man far from home #us #us movie #knives out #Captain Marvel #john wick chapter 3 #avengers endgame #the irishman #2019 in movies

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wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 6 years ago

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Michael in the Mainstream: Captain Marvel

Captain Marvel is one of the MCU’s most powerful characters right now, one of the few heroes who can even have a hope of defeating Thanos, so of course she needs to have a movie. Throwing in a bunch of heroes into an ensemble film without properly setting them up is what amateurs do, and at this point Marvel is no amateur; they know how to properly set up heroes… kind of. You see, Marvel Studios has a bit of a problem when it comes to origin films: they’re all very, very similar, very formulaic, and sometimes even predictable. That’s not to say they’re bad, far from it! Films like Black Panther, Ant-Man, and Doctor Strange are all rather formulaic but they all have interesting twists to the formula that makes them feel fun and exciting. Marvel is a lot better with quirkier fare, ensemble movies, and sequels than they are with solo origin films, Iron Man notwithstanding, but they usually find a way to make things feel fresh.

Captain Marvel… does and doesn’t achieve this. Captain Marvel is probably the most “Marvel” Marvel movie yet made; it feels like a film they would have released a decade ago, during Phase 1 or Phase 2. And there is actually a good reason for that; this movie has been in the plannig stages for a long, long time, but racist, sexist, cheapskate CEO Ike Perlmutter wouldn’t let this film be made because he didn’t think non-white, non-male leads could sell (a laughable sentiment when looking at superhero films nowadays), only relenting to let the film be made if Kevin Feige made an Inhumans movie, which fell through when Feige managed to get rid of the meddler and get him exiled to the Marvel TV department. This film has been a long time coming, and it feels like it.

But I can’t say the film is bad; it’s most definitely not, and there’s a lot to love in the film. At the same time though, it’s easy to see why someone might not find themselves sucked into this; it’s a film coming out in Phase 3 that feels like it belongs in Phase 1. Where it would have been one of the best Marvel films of the early phases, it struggles a bit to stand out in the current MCU where the past few films have been nothing but home runs, and competing superhero cinematic universes have also been producing quality films, with Spider-Verse and Aquaman in particular bringing a lot of new stuff to the table. It just feels like Captain Marvel is almost irrelevat in the current landscape aside from introducing Carol Danvers to the MCU.

And yet… this is still a good, fun movie, because it delivers exactly what it promises, and it does the one thing I consider the saving grace of any film that would otherwise be average: it is wholly, unabashedly cheesy.

So let’s talk about what I loved first. The Skrulls are easily the very best part of the film, particularly Talos. Talos is one of the most interesting and complex antagonists in the MCU so far, and there’s a lot more to him than it initially seems. Just the fact that in general the Skrulls are now part of the MCU is absolutely delightful, as it seemed for so long they’d be exiled from continnuity due to Fox owning the rights to the most famous Skrull, Super-Skrull, due to his close ties to the Fantastic Four (though this is no longer a problem). To say much more about what makes the Skrulls so great would be to spoil one of the few genuinely good twists the movie has to offer, but it is a pretty neat twist on what you’d expect from Skrulls.

Carol herself, as played by Brie Larson, is a mostly enjoyable character. I think Carol is a bit shaky right now, having to deal with the tired amnesia plot and not getting to use her powers all that much, but for the most part she’s an enjoyable hero. I think she’ll fare a lot better in ensemble films and sequels, because Larson does a really good job, it’s just that so much of the movie is spent with her being limited. However, this is mitigated by the fact that she has great chemistry with Samuel L. Jackson, and pretty much every scene with Fury and Carol interacting is amazing. Speaking of Jackson, the effects used to de-age him are nothing short of stunning; you can’t even tell its CGI, it’s that good. Far better than the de-aging effects used in films like Rogue One, that’s for sure

The soundtrack is pretty good, though sometimes it’s a bit too on-the-nose. The usage of “Come As Your Are” is so literal it hurts, and the usage of “Just a Girl” is so utterly cheesy. But I think stuff like this helps add to the film’s charm, as does the fact that this movie is honestly, genuinely funny, especially due to the aforementioned banter between Carol and Fury, as well as the presence of Goose the cat, who Fury dotes over and who plays quite an amusing and cool role in the film, shockingly enough. Goose might be one of the best characters in the film honestly, which is not often something you hear about a pet cat.

Of course, not everything is perfect. A lot of the action is nauseatingly shaky and weirdly poorly choreographed, with the exception of the final battle and perhaps Carol’s escape from the Skrulls near the start. For a superhero movie, having such wonky action is inexcusable, though thankfully there’s not too much fighting… or not thankfully, since again, this is a superhero film, the sort of film where you expect superhero action. It’s not all bad, but when it gets bad it gets really bad.

There’s also the underutilization of characters. You know how the return of Ronan and Coulson was hyped up? Well, unfortunately for everyone, both of their screentimes are incredibly limited to the point they are essentially cameos, though Ronan feels like a cameo moreso than Coulson. Korath, too, is a bit wasted, though he at least gets a little more prominence with him being part of Carol’s initial squad, though he’s still not exactly focused on to any great extent. It just feels so pointless to have these actors come back to these roles if they’re essentially playing meaningless bit parts, especially in the case of Korath and Ronan, seeing as we know they end up dying anyway. It just seems like a huge missed opportunity to do something with these characters.

And of course, the whole amnesia plot kind of holds things back. Not that it’s done poorly, but it is a tired trope that is tricky to pull off, and considering Carol’s amnesia holds back the plot and holds her back from using her powers to any great extent, it does feel like more of a burden than anything that leads to interesting developments. It doesn’t help that most of the stuff revealed over the course of her rediscovering who she is is stuff that you could easily figure out on your own from nothing more than promotional material and the obvious hints throughout the film; it just feels like a contrivance to keep Carol in a weakened, vulnerable state instead of letting her let loose. Say what you will about Superman movies, but he at least gets to be Superman for vast swaths of the film in his origin story movies. Here, Carol’s big Captain Marvel moments really only come at the end, though I can’t stress enough that the final battle is a pretty cool sequence.

Still, nothing in this movie is done excessively poorly; there’s nothing here as bad as the Iron Man sequels or Thor: The Dark World. On the other hand though, there’s nothing here as innovative or impressive as in Thor: Ragnarok, Infinity War, Black Panther, or Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, with the exception of the Skrulls. There’s a lot of good elements here, obviously, but most of the stuff really just doesn’t elevate this movie to greatness; it’s merely a good, even very good film, but not as great as it should be nor as bad as some make it out to be. And this isn’t entirely the film’s fault; as I said, Perlmutter’s meddling did keep this on the backburner for a long, long time, so it’s frankly amazing the film is any good at all.

Really, whether you love or hate this is going to boil down to how much you can tolerate cheesiness. I live and breathe cheesiness, I have been exposed to cheese since I was young, so of course I’m pretty fond of this film. I’m also a huge fan of Skrulls so it’s a given I’d like a film with them in it. But if you don’t like this film, if you just don’t connect, well, it’s hard to blame you. It’s not an amazing or groundbreaking film, and really that’s a shame, because it could have and should have been. But on the other hand, not every film needs to exist to break new ground, not every film needs to change the world… sometimes films can just exist and be good.

Captain Marvel is a film that has attracted a lot of controversy, vitriol, and debating over it, making it one of the most controversial superhero movies in recent memory. Beyond that sentence I’m not going to even bother addressing any of that, because it is all the most idiotic drivel I have seen in regards to film in years. This is an utterly harmless superhero movie through and through, and any argument otherwise is just pointless drivel.

I really wish this could have come out years ago, because this would have been a game-changer back when superhero films were first breaking through. In this day and age? It’s just a good, fun movie, nothing less. I have faith Carol’s next outings, in Endgame and her inevitable sequels, will be a lot stronger and more polished and full of interesting developments, but her first outing is simply a fun time before the inevitable heartbreak and mindblowing that Endgame promises. I’m kind of okay with that; it’s nice to have a little calm before the storm.

#Michael in the Mainstream #review #movie review #Captain Marvel #MCU #Marvel #superhero movie #Brie Larson #Samuel L. Jackson #Nick Fury

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trashartandmovies · 4 years ago

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Berlinale Film Festival 2021, Industry Event, Final Day

There was an added bonus to our originally scheduled plan for five days of press streamings. On the weekend following those five days, the winners of the Competition program would be available on Saturday, and the winners of the Encounters program would be available on Sunday. Winners from Generations and the Shorts programs would also get a second screening.

Since I’d made a point of seeing the Competition films, I decided to focus on the ones from the Encounters lineup that I hadn’t got a chance to see. (In case you’re wondering: here are the lists of award-winners for Competition, Encounters, Generations and Shorts.

First up was Lê Bảo’s Vị (TASTE), a film that cites six countries in helping with the production: Vietnam, Singapore, France, Thailand, Germany and Taiwan. It won the Special Jury Award in the Encounters program, and it’s not hard to see why. The film is legitimately striking; a bold visual poem about a Nigerian who comes to Saigon to play football, breaks his foot, and begins working a mysterious job with four middle-aged Vietnamese women. There isn’t much more plot than that, very little is explained, there’s hardly any dialog, but the film evokes a lot of different feelings through its artfully staged tableaus of bodies at motion and at rest. The color palette is severe — greys, blues, whites and rusty earth tones — but also beautiful. There is the periodic burst of sunshine that enters in through a window or doorway, and small splashes of color that come from the ingredients of the food they spend a lot of time preparing. But mostly, we’re in a chilly underground location that has little else besides a few beds and an old television.

It’s difficult to parse out the meaning of TASTE, but I’m not sure such an endeavor isn’t foolish. You could say there’s something about worker exploitation here, but if you squint and tilt your head, there could also be a message about the transcendence of work as well. Ultimately, this is an art film. It wouldn’t feel out of place in the halls of MOMA or wherever else you find eager minds for the abstract. One of the appealing things about the film is that it is freely open to interpretation and can be read in different ways. The only thing that’s for certain is that TASTE is about connections, those we make with our surroundings, our food, and those we work with. It’s about the ceremonies we create to forge those connections and help us through our days.

It’s not easy to make a film that truly feels like a dream. Sure, TASTE has a lot of unresolved mystery to it, but as a foray into dream logic, it is comfortably consistent in its mood and atmosphere. This is a plus and a minus, because TASTE is also quite effective in lulling you into a kind of heavy-lidded hypnosis. It taps into a very different part of your brain than the average movie.

The last feature film I caught up with was the newest film by Ramon Zürcher, this time co-directing and co-writing with his brother Silvan Zürcher. Ramon’s previous film, THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT, was a hit on the film festival circuit back in 2013. I still need to catch up with that one, and I will, even though I found little to enjoy in the Zürcher Brothers’ THE GIRL AND THE SPIDER.

The set-up is pretty interesting. Lisa, a young woman, is moving to a new apartment and leaving behind a few roommates. One of those roommates, Mara, isn’t taking it so well. In fact, she seems to be rather heartbroken and bitter — and maybe a little self-destructive. But mostly she seems to be intent on making barbed, passive-aggressive comments at Lisa and everyone who has the misfortune of getting close to her. You see, Mara is like a spider. She’s alluring and mysterious enough to draw you in, but once you get close, you just become trapped in her abusive mind games. As I mentioned, pretty solid set-up for a tricky, dark relationship movie. There’s something to it, and the movie kicks around the idea of lonely hurt people hurting other lonely hurt people, but we don’t get very far.

One problem is that as the movie goes on, and we meet the other roommates that Lisa is leaving behind, we start to get the idea that maybe Mara has always been this mean manipulator. Maybe her heartbreak over Lisa leaving isn’t that much of a motivator. Maybe her other roommates are also passive-aggressive emotionally damaged loose cannons. Why can’t anyone say what they mean? Must everyone be so aloof? Must every line of dialog cryptically dance around true feelings? Why must someone be eavesdropping behind a door during every other conversation? To me, it just comes across as sub-par writing. Before long, it felt like the only reason these people were talking this way was because if anyone spoke honestly the movie would be about 15 minutes long. Instead, it slowly drove me crazy over a very long 98 minutes.

Now, some of these choices are understandable. I’ve lived with roommates. I know that these situations can be passive-aggressive nightmares where no one feels comfortable enough to say what they really feel. This too, is a good set-up for a movie, with plenty of interesting angles to explore. But again, we only dance on the surface. None of the characters open up, everyone’s motivations are fuzzy. In the end, these people remain more or less as we found them. Mara comes closest to revealing a little bit about herself, but it’s all very frustrating. On a few occasions, the film takes detours, cutting away to visualize a story being told. Sometimes it involves an elderly eccentric neighbor in the building, other times it’s a fantasy about the previous owner of the piano that sits in the apartment. Immediately, the protagonists of these stories become way more compelling than the dreary twenty-somethings that we’re stuck with the rest of the time.

Aside from my issues with the writing, the movie looks great. The Zürcher’s have a good eye and they know how to observe misery while luxuriating in icy detachment like, say, Michael Haneke. There are also good rhythms going on here. From the little I know THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT, it would appear that Ramon Zürcher is still interested in capturing the details of interiors, and paying attention to the animals that are running around people’s feet. Scene’s often end with still-life portraits of items on tabletops, knocked over bottles, subtle signs of life and little punctuations upon the preceding scene. It’s a nice touch. I only wish those scenes told a more engaging story.

Thoroughly exhausted, with the last remaining hours of the streaming schedule dwindling away, there were a few award-winning shorts left to watch. Feeling like animation might be a nice change of pace, I went for EASTER EGGS, a Belgian/French/Netherlands production, written and directed by Nicolas Keppens. In some ways, it was a perfect little finale.

Even though EASTER EGGS could be a contemporary story, it feels like a tender look back, maybe some twenty years ago, at a painful teenage moment. It’s a story about two kids, Kevin the bully and Jason the enabler, and their woefully unhealthy friendship. There’s a vague plan to capture some valuable birds that were left behind when a local Chinese restaurant closed down — and there are some laughs to be had — but mostly it’s achingly sad to watch Jason pine for Kevin’s attention and approval, while Kevin just walks all over him. But given the gentle hand that this story is told with, that sadness is more poignant than depressing. Keppens shows a love and sensitivity for these characters. They’re way more than just some Belgian Beavis and Butthead. They represent something many of us have gone through in our youth — longing for friendship and someone to share your imaginative, ambitious plans with. It’s not exactly a feeling that goes away, which is why EASTER EGGS still carries a lot of weight.

Let me just add a few more thoughts to this First Round of 2021’s Berlinale Film Festival. Despite my longings for more time to spend with such a quality lineup of films, I’m impressed that everything went so smoothly. The streaming platform worked incredibly smoothly (even if it was a bummer I couldn’t cast that stream onto my TV), and the quality of the films was excellent — both in picture and sound as well as moviemaking craft. It wasn’t ideal, but it was great to be a part of. I’ll also take a sentence here to recommend visiting the Berlinale Meets page, as well as the video section, where there is an impressive collection of conversations with this year’s filmmakers for more viewing enjoyment.

While there’s a lot from this festival that I’m still hoping to see, judging from the Competition and Encounters films that I have seen, this was an exceptionally strong year for female voices and female-led stories. This was clearly one of the most impressive things about the 2021 Berlinale. PETITE MAMAN, A COP MOVIE, MEMORY BOX, I’M YOUR MAN, HERR BACHMAN, WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY, BALAD OF A WHITE COW, BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONEY PORN — each of these films, which are just from the Competition section, were either directed by a woman or told stories about women. In the case of WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY, there were three stories and three female protagonists. (You could probably make a case for adding WHAT DO WE SEE WHEN WE LOOK AT THE SKY?, but I digress...) And you know what, those were the best films in the main lineup. I’ll also throw in the strong entries in the ENCOUNTERS category, Dasha Nekrasova’s THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST and the best film winner of the category Alice Diop’s NOUS (WE). Personally, I especially liked the connections between PETITE MAMAN and MEMORY BOX, which both dealt with making connections between mother and daughter in unique, cinematic ways. I hope this level of representation continues in the years to come.

Now, let’s keep our fingers crossed for Part Two of the Berlinale, the Summer Special. See you June 9th.

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lynchgirl90 · 8 years ago

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Kyle MacLachlan and David Lynch excited to collaborate again in the return of 'Twin Peaks'

For Kyle MacLachlan, it was all about the suit.

More than a quarter of a century since “Twin Peaks” ended its brief but influential run on ABC, the actor is reprising his signature role as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, a man whose appreciation of cherry pie and a “damn fine” cup of coffee knows no bounds, in a long-anticipated revival premiering Sunday on Showtime.

MacLachlan has been through quite a lot since the early ’90s, when the mystery of who killed beauty queen Laura Palmer captivated viewers.

The 58-year-old, his hair graying ever so slightly at the temples, has endured wild career swings, gotten married, become a father, and even started a wine business.

Dressed in head-to-toe black, he's seated in an office at Showtime's headquarters in midtown. A dozen stories below, city buses bearing sepia-tone images of him as an older, but still dashing, Cooper chug down Broadway

Luckily the suit still fit.

“The suit pretty much sets it for me — my whole being starts to transform,” says MacLachlan, moving his hands as if grasping an invisible pole to suggest Cooper’s ramrod posture. “And also just David’s presence. When David’s there, I’m Cooper.”

That would be David Lynch, who co-created the original series with Mark Frost and co-wrote and directed all 18 episodes — or “parts,” as he prefers to call them — of the revival. Announced with much fanfare in October 2014, the limited series premieres Sunday and is shrouded in a layer of secrecy that makes the NSA look like amateurs. (Even seemingly benign details about Cooper’s suit were deemed too spoiler-y for print.)

The series marks the return of not only one of the most admired cult series in television history but also the creative partnership between Lynch and MacLachlan, whose most recent collaborations were the 1992 prequel film “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” and a series of “Twin Peaks”-themed Japanese coffee commercials from the same era.

Their relationship dates back to the mid-1980s when MacLachlan, then an unknown actor fresh out of the University of Washington, was plucked from regional-theater obscurity to play the lead in “Dune” (1984), Lynch’s first foray into big-budget Hollywood filmmaking. The adaptation was a notorious commercial and critical failure, but it marked the beginning of a dynamic period of collaboration between the actor and director.

“Blue Velvet” (1986), was the antithesis of “Dune” but a precursor to “Twin Peaks” in its warped view of small-town life and flashes of deadpan humor. MacLachlan starred as Jeffrey Beaumont, a college student whose discovery of a severed ear in the grass leads him on an adventure that plays like “The Hardy Boys” on bad acid.

Cooper was conceived as “a grown-up Jeffrey Beaumont,” says Lynch in a phone interview.

“He’s a magical kind of detective,” explains the director, whose plainspoken quality somehow makes him more inscrutable. “He’s got way more energy than most people. He’s always wide awake and alert and he’s always happy.”

Though Cooper is first introduced a full half-hour into the pilot episode of “Twin Peaks,” he makes an immediate impression, enthusing about the local evergreen trees in the first of many tape-recorded messages to the never-seen Diane.

“That scene very much encapsulated the range of things Kyle can play,” says Showtime President David Nevins. “He’s stalwart and subversive at the same time, which is hard to do.”

MacLachlan still considers the pilot, which he rewatches from time to time, “an extraordinary piece of filmmaking.” It debuted in April 1990 to enormous ratings and ecstatic reviews, with critics praising the singular blend of horror, soapy melodrama and quirky humor. But once the central mystery was resolved, viewers fled. Despite organized protests from fans, ABC canceled the series after 29 episodes, immediately cementing its status as a cult classic.

The part earned MacLachlan two Emmy nominations, a Golden Globe Award and countless free cups of coffee from admirers over the years.

“‘Twin Peaks’ is still the [project] people respond to more than others,” he says, pausing for a beat, “certainly more than ‘The Doors.’” (In case you’d forgotten, he played keyboardist Ray Manzarek in the Oliver Stone film.)

“Twin Peaks” is a surreal puzzle of a show whose influence is evident in shows from “Stranger Things” to “True Detective.”

Wisely, though, few have attempted to imitate its eccentric yet pure-hearted protagonist. Cooper is, on one level, an old-fashioned Hollywood hero marked by boyish enthusiasm and unflagging moral rectitude, a point driven home in the series pilot when he’s mistakenly called Gary Cooper. This is a character who once proclaimed “I would very much like to make love to a beautiful woman who I had genuine affection for” while lying near death on the ground with a gunshot wound in his stomach.

And yet beneath the clean-cut G-Man exterior beats the heart of an oddball. Cooper relies on dreams and visions as much as physical evidence, communicates with dancing dwarfs from alternate dimensions and is drawn to Eastern spirituality. In the series’ second episode, he famously eliminated suspects by throwing stones at bottles from a distance of 60 feet — a technique inspired by his love of Tibet.

“He seems to be secretly listening to radio waves from the zodiac, through the fillings in his teeth,” wrote critic John Leonard in his New York Magazine review of “Twin Peaks.” “He’s a wonder, a puzzlement, a Boy Scout from Sirius the Dog Star.”

Between bites of a ham sandwich, MacLachlan puts it more simply. “You feel like he’s come through darkness, but he’s been able to keep it in place. It doesn’t drive him.”

The series concluded with one of the most heartbreaking series finales in TV history. After a harrowing journey through the mysterious Black Lodge — a.k.a. that room with the red curtains — Cooper was possessed by the malevolent spirit known as Bob. What’s happened to the agent since then — did he take to murdering young girls, like Bob-possessed Leland Palmer before him? — is easily the biggest question hanging over the revival.

MacLachlan hit a rough patch in the years that followed “Twin Peaks,” epitomized by a Razzie-nominated role in "Showgirls" that involved an unintentionally hilarious pool sex scene. But he eventually found a niche of sorts in parts that, like Agent Cooper, played in tension with his classic good looks. In “Sex and the City,” he portrayed Charlotte’s seemingly perfect first husband, Trey MacDougal, a WASPY cardiologist with deep-seated mommy issues and a pesky case of erectile dysfunction. And there was Orson Hodge, Bree’s lying, philandering, would-be plumber-murdering husband on “Desperate Housewives.”

What he didn’t do was return to work with Lynch, who made films with other dark and handsome types, like Justin Theroux (“Mulholland Drive”). MacLachlan has theories about why. “I’m Cooper for David,” he says. “That’s it. I’m Cooper and I live in Twin Peaks.” (Lynch gently disputes this: “If another role came along that he was right for, I would know it and I would be very happy for him. It just didn’t ever happen.”)

However, the pair did see each other regularly. MacLachlan has a home in the Hollywood Hills, just up the road from Lynch. When in town he’d often “just take the parking brake off the car and roll down the hill” for a cup of coffee — yes, coffee. Their conversations would inevitably turn to “Twin Peaks.”

Lynch would usually dismiss the idea of a revival, even though “it wasn’t ever dead,” he says. “The stories continue in one’s mind.”

Eventually, MacLachlan got an urgent phone call from Lynch: He had something to discuss but couldn’t talk about it on the phone. “I said, ‘I hope it’s nothing health-related,’” MacLachlan recalls.

It was not. In New York, Lynch pitched him the new “Twin Peaks” and asked if he’d be interested in reprising the role of Cooper. “I said, ‘I’ve never not been interested,’” says MacLachlan, who was “seduced by the challenge” of reviving “Twin Peaks.” The series arrives amid a wave of ’90s revivals taking over the small screen, including “Fuller House,” “The X Files” and “Will & Grace.”

But this continuation is not driven by nostalgia, insist those involved. If anything, Lynch, who was less involved in the show’s second, uneven season, seems motivated by a desire to course-correct and return to the vision laid out in the pilot. “In my mind the series drifted away from what I thought of as ‘Twin Peaks,’” he says. “It was tough to watch for me.”

Co-writing and directing 18 hours of television — after more than a decade away from full-time filmmaking — was a feat of stamina for Lynch, who also returns in a supporting role as Cooper’s boss, Gordon Cole. “I was a major stud before I started, and now I can barely walk,” he jokes.

For Showtime’s Nevins, Lynch and Frost’s hands-on involvement was essential. “I was only interested if I knew it was going to be the real thing,” he says. The executive describes the revival as Cooper’s “odyssey back to himself” and an exploration of relevant themes of national identity.

“I find Kyle such a quintessentially all-American actor, and I think that’s what David likes about him. It’s really interesting revisiting this character and this world in a moment in American history where we’re trying to figure out who we are, and what it means to ‘Make America great again.’”

MacLachlan is less inclined to elaborate, but does let it slip that — spoiler alert — his professional chemistry with Lynch returned instantly. “That’s something that came back like that,” MacLachlan says with a snap of his fingers. “We do a great dance together.”

link (TP)

#Twin Peaks #LA Times #Kyle MacLachlan #David Lynch

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mrmichaelchadler · 6 years ago

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Home Entertainment Consumer Guide: October 25, 2018

9 NEW TO BLU-RAY/DVD

"Ant-Man and the Wasp"

Quick, what's the most recent Marvel movie? It feels like a lot of people would say "Avengers: Infinity War" or maybe even "Black Panther," forgetting that there was a sequel to "Ant-Man" released this Summer. Marvel has become so dominant that even one of their successful, well-liked tentpole movies can be considered relatively minor. Having said that, "Ant-Man and the Wasp" mostly works. It's under two hours (unlike a lot of MCU movies) and provides a fun diversion. In fact, it's got an element that I wish more Marvel would copy in that it's practically a one-off, tied into the rest of the MCU for sure but also working with its own mythology and characters to satisfy viewers THIS TIME instead of merely planting seeds for the future. It also has one of the best ensembles in the standalone MCU, all the way down to scene-stealers like Michael Pena and David Dastmalchian.

Buy it here

Special Features Director's Intro by Peyton Reed Making-of Featurettes: Back in the Ant Suit: Scott Lang A Suit of Her Own: The Wasp Subatomic Super Heroes: Hank & Janet Quantum Perspective: The VFX and Production Design of "Ant-Man and The Wasp" Gag Reel and Outtakes Deleted Scenes

"Creepshow"

It's that wonderful time of year when Shout Factory's genre banner known as Scream Factory releases special editions of horror classics, complete with new transfers and special features. There are three such releases in this edition of the HECG, and, believe it or not, two of them are anthologies. One of the most famous such films of all time is this George A. Romero and Stephen King classic, which comes in a gorgeous box set with a booklet and a quote from Roger's review on the back. It's also LOADED with special features, including a new audio commentary, interviews, and a round table discussion, along with all of the imported archival features. "Creepshow" is an inconsistent but really fun movie. It's nice to see it get such a lavish treatment.

Buy it here

Special Features BRAND NEW 4K REMASTER SOURCED FROM THE ORIGINAL CAMERA NEGATIVE, with color correction supervised and approved by director of photography Michael Gornick NEW Audio Commentary with director of photography Michael Gornick NEW Audio Commentary with composer/first assistant director John Harrison and construction co-ordinator Ed Fountain NEW Terror and the Three Rivers – a round table discussion on the making of CREEPSHOW with John Amplas, Tom Atkins, Tom Savini and Marty Schiff NEW The Comic Book Look – an interview with costume designer Barbara Anderson NEW Ripped From The Pages – an interview with animator Rick Catizone NEW The Colors of Creepshow – a look at the restoration of CREEPSHOW with director of photography Michael Gornick NEW Into The Mix – an interview with sound re-recordist Chris Jenkins NEW Mondo Macabre – A look at Mondo's various CREEPSHOW posters with Mondo Co-Founder Rob Jones and Mondo Gallery Events Planner Josh Curry NEW Collecting Creepshow – a look at some of the original props and collectibles from the film with collector Dave Burian Audio Commentary with Director George A. Romero and Special Make-Up Effects Creator Tom Savini Audio Interviews with director of photography Michael Gornick, actor John Amplas, property master Bruce Alan Miller, and make-up effects assistant Darryl Ferrucci Tom Savini's Behind-the-Scenes Footage Horror's Hallowed Grounds – a look at the original film locations hosted by Sean Clark Deleted Scenes Theatrical Trailers TV Spot Radio Spots Still Galleries – Posters, Lobby Cards and Movie Stills Still Galleries – Behind the Scenes photos Optional English SDH subtitles for the main feature

"Eighth Grade"

Bo Burnham's directorial debut is one of the most quietly beloved films of 2018, often appearing on lists of films from this year that you really should see before you do any year-end consideration. It really is something special, capturing what it's like to be an 8th grader in the '10s better than any film to date. Not only is Burnham's writing and directing surprisingly sensitive, he found something incredibly special in Elsie Fisher, who gives what is quite simply one of the best performances of the year. So many young actresses in movies "about teenage life" feel like they're making a statement instead of embodying a character but Fisher is always real, and inevitably heartbreaking. This is a wonderful movie.

Buy it here

Special Features Audio Commentary with Director Bo Burnham and Actress Elsie Fisher "You're Not Alone: Life in Eighth Grade" Featurette Music Video Deleted Scenes

"Hotel Transylvania 3"

I'm including this one for my kids and because the market is kind of dry right now for family films. Could you do worse than the latest Adam Sandler riff on the Universal monsters? Sure, but these movies started on low ground in terms of quality and have only sunk into the muck. Trust me, I've seen this one a bunch as my boys are somehow obsessed enough with this franchise for repeat viewing. Kudos, I guess, to Sony for timing this release for Halloween marathons for the little ones who can't quite do actual horror movies yet and before the superior "Teen Titans" and "Incredibles 2" hit the home market.

Buy it here

Special Features Three All New Scary-Oke Sing Alongs: Sing along to three Hotel Transylvania 3 inspired songs with your favorite characters! "Dennis Had a Giant Dog" – Sung by Dennis & Winnie "Monsters Like to Party Down" – Sung by Johnny "Oh These Wolf Pups" – Sung by Wanda Werewolf Plan Your Own Spook-tacular Sleepover: This feature will give you all details on how to make your own sleepover spook-tacular! From snacks to crafts to games and more, follow these steps to create a Hotel T sleep-over with your friends and family, the perfect setting to binge watch all 3 Hotel Transylvania movies. Vampire Make Over: Mavis and Drac Tutorial: Learn how to turn yourself into your favorite Hotel Transylvania 3 characters. Behind the Screams – The Voices of Hotel Transylvania 3: Step behind the "screams" with the returning stars and hilarious new cast to see how these characters are brought to life in the recording booth. Johnny's Home Movies (Franchise Recap): Johnny brings viewers up to speed on what's happened in the Hotel Transylvania franchise so far. "I See Love" Monster Dance Party Dance Along: Get up and get moving to this haunting monster mash. Drac's Zing-tastic Read Along: It's storytime with your favorite characters have a silly tale about Drac's search for a Zing! Read along or sit back and enjoy! Two Mini Movies (rated G): Two mini-features that will have you howling. Puppy Goodnight Mr. Foot

"House on Haunted Hill"

William Malone's remake of the Vincent Price classic is a mixed bag, to be kind. The 1999 launching pad for Joel Silver's Dark Castle production banner, this gory flick has some great moments, including a brilliant set-up that allows Geoffrey Rush and Famke Janssen to wonderfully chew some scenery. For about an hour, this twisted tale actually kind of works. They just forgot to write a coherent ending. Just fall asleep or turn it off before that point and you'll be happier.

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Special Features BRAND NEW 2K REMASTER from the original film elements NEW interview with director William Malone NEW interview with composer Don Davis NEW Interview with visual effects supervisor Robert Skotak Never-Before-Seen storyboards, concept art and behind-the-scenes photos courtesy of visual effects producer Paul Taglianetti Audio Commentary with director William Malone A Tale of Two Houses – vintage featurette Behind the Visual FX – vintage featurette Deleted Scenes Theatrical Trailer TV Spots Movie Stills and Poster Gallery Optional English SDH subtitles for the main feature

"Shampoo" (Criterion)

The best Criterion release of the month is this classic that always crosses my mind when I think about films that caught performers at their most charismatic. You know what I mean. Some movies find stars at exactly the moment it needed to find them. There's an element of this in the current success of "A Star is Born," which wouldn't work the same without Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga being exactly where they are in their careers in 2018. Same goes for Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn in 1975's "Shampoo" (along with Julie Christie and Lee Grant, for that matter.) One of Hal Ashby's best films comes with a great 4K transfer but a relatively, for Criterion, slight collection of special features. The new conversation between Mark Harris and Frank Rich is excellent, however.

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Special Features New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray New conversation between critics Mark Harris and Frank Rich Excerpt from a 1998 appearance by producer, cowriter, and actor Warren Beatty on The South Bank Show PLUS: An essay by Rich

"Skyscraper"

Did we get a bit too much of The Rock in too short a period of time? For a period of time there, it looked like Dwayne Johnson may be the biggest star in the world. (And he may still be). With the success of the "Furious" movies and the phenomenon that was "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle," he entered 2018 on a high, but both of his films this year, "Rampage" and "Skyscraper," were domestic disappointments. (Both did much better overseas.) Perhaps worse than their box office fates, they just weren't very good. This one is particularly dispiriting, coming off like the bland "Die Hard" retreads we got so often in the '90s. Come on, Dwayne. If you're gonna be our #1 star than we need you to pass on junk like this.

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Special Features Deleted Scenes with Commentary by Director Rawson Marshall Thurber – Go behind the scenes with Dwayne Johnson and the rest of the cast of Skyscraper. Extended Scenes with Commentary by Director Rawson Marshall Thurber Dwayne Johnson: Embodying a Hero – Go behind the scenes to see what it took for Dwayne Johnson to bring the intense character of Will Sawyer to life. Inspiration – Meet real life amputee and motivational speaker Jeff Glasbrenner, the inspiration for Dwayne Johnson's role of Will Sawyer. See how Jeff's consultations helped inform Dwayne's character from day one. Opposing Forces – There's no holding back as the women of Skyscraper get in on the action. Now, see first-hand what it took for Neve Campbell and Hannah Quinlivan to be fight ready. Friends No More – When Dwayne Johnson and Pablo Schreiber met face to face, they immediately knew what they were up against. Witness first-hand the making of the intense apartment fight between two former on-screen friends, Will and Ben. Kids in Action – In Skyscraper everyone gets in on the action, even the Sawyer children. Go on set with Noah Cottrell and McKenna Roberts to discover the moves behind their stunts. Pineapple Pitch – Hear first-hand from Dwayne Johnson how writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber pitched him the idea of Skyscraper. It may be a little fruitier than you think. Feature Commentary by Director Rawson Marshall Thurber

"Sorry to Bother You"

The closer we get to the end of the year, the more I think Boots Riley's debut is one of its best films. It's certainly one of its most unforgettable. I've already written about the film twice (Sundance and theatrical) so I don't have much more to say, but let me throw in with my other Gotham Awards committee members who nominated Lakeith Stanfield for his fantastic work here, giving an incredibly physical and committed performance. So much of "Sorry to Bother You" feels like "Boots Movie" but it wouldn't work at all without someone so completely on the same page as the film's creator as Stanfield, who has quietly become one of the most interesting actors of his generation. I hope he continues to do challenging, fascinating work such as what he delivers here.

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Special Features Beautiful Clutter with Director Boots Riley Audio Commentary with Director Boots Riley Gallery The Cast of Sorry to Bother You The Art of the White Voice

"Trick 'r Treat"

Horror is still the only genre that can truly produce word-of-mouth, home market hits, such as this anthology flick that never even played in movie theaters. Anywhere. And yet it became an instant hit when it was released on DVD in late 2009. So much so that Scream Factory has given it one of their most lavish Halloween season Collector's Edition treatments. It's a fantastic release for what's a really solid flick, a clear child of "Creepshow" with smart writing and direction. Hopefully it will spur enough interest to get the long-delayed sequel finally off the ground.

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Special Features BRAND NEW 2K REMASTER OF THE FILM supervised and approved by director Michael Dougherty NEW Tales of Folklore & Fright: Creating Trick 'r Treat – including interviews with writer/director Michael Dougherty, conceptual artist Breehn Burns, and storyboard artist Simeon Wilkins. NEW Tales of Mischief & Mayhem: Filming Trick 'r Treat – in-depth interview with Michael Dougherty on the making of the film NEW Sounds of Shock & Superstition: Scoring Trick 'r Treat – including interviews with Michael Dougherty and composer Douglas Pipes NEW Tales of Dread and Despair: Releasing Trick 'r Treat – a look at the release and fandom with Michael Dougherty and writer Rob Galluzzo Season's Greetings – NEW 2K scan of the original 16mm elements – a short film by Michael Dougherty with optional commentary by Dougherty NEW Storyboard and Conceptual Artwork Gallery NEW Behind the Scenes Still Gallery NEW Monster Mash – a story from the TRICK 'R TREAT graphic novel NEW FEARnet.com Shorts Audio Commentary with director Michael Dougherty Trick 'R Treat: The Lore and Legends of Halloween featurette Deleted and Alternate Scenes with optional commentary by director Michael Dougherty School Bus FX Comparison Theatrical Trailer Optional English SDH subtitles for the main feature

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