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A_Different_Drummer

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1267 reviews in total

The word on the street was that this was a riff on one of my all-time favorite films, Forbidden Kingdom 2008, so I could not resist checking it out.

(Word to the wise, if you have not already seen FK, and you like MMA and/or Wushu and/or Fantasy and/or Adventure, check it out. FK has humble beginnings, features two of the greatest cinematic martial artists of all time - Jackie Chan and Jet Li -- a killer script, great scenery, and solid performances. Some reviewers, including this one, think it is one of the best of its kind ever done.)

Let's start with what Warriors Gate was intended to be, and work from that.

The production team clearly thought they would "improve" on FK by adding more "teen humor." Presumably they also felt this would more than compensate for the film's considerably lighter "feel" and the awkward void formed by not having ANY famous film martial artists at all.

Also, Forbidden Kingdom had a certain edge of malice and unpredictability in the script which, oddly, only increased its impact and its fan base. This film lacks those features as well and, on its best day in its best suit, comes across more as "Forbidden Kingdom Lite," or perhaps even a Disney knockoff of the original.

Which is not to say it is not worth a watch. A lot of effort was put into the humor aspect (as explained above) and this does keep things moving along.

(For example -- if you are film buff, you will remember fondly the famous tag line from Airplane 1980 - "Don't call me Shirley" which became a sort of iconic inside joke for years afterwards. This script contains a number of attempts to mimic that sort of dialog, my favorite being -- "KILL HIM! -- slashing noise -- "NO, NOT HIM. HIM.")

Bottom Line: One hour and 45 minutes of reasonable entertainment. However, it suffers from the "curse" common to all knock-offs. Unless you see the original, you will never know what you are missing.

The IMDb rating is too low.

As a simple rom-com, it is almost flawless.

Sweet, entertaining, well-written, funny, interesting, it basically checks all the boxes.

But when you also consider this was a breakout film for Nia Vardalos, who not only starred but wrote, it gets even better. The script is tight, yes, but the performance of Ms. Vardalos is even tighter.

Have seen the film three times now and each time I marvel at how precise her comic timing is, her asides, her micro-expressions. A vastly under-rated performance.

(For students of film, which is most of us, also worth noting is that once again we have Toronto streets being represented as a US city.) Highly recommended. Unfortunately cannot say the same for the sequel.

An absolute joy to find a film of such quality that lives up to its own title.

The story? One tribe/clan attacks another, takes prisoners back to their kingdom/empire. It is iconic and for good reason. It is the story of all of us. Everyone one of us, if you go back far enough in time and history, has an ancestor who experienced it.

But one lone man escapes the capture and seeks to rescue his people. This too is a common story. Most recently it formed the basis for Gibson's astonishing Apocalypto 2006.

War of the Arrows takes the tale one step further, doing more for the myth of archery than, frankly, any film I have ever seen, including all the versions of Robin Hood in the west and all the superhero films that use arrows (which oddly is quite a few.) Exhilarating, brilliant, pulse-pounding and with an ending that even Sergio Leone would approve of.

Highly recommended.

In western culture movies become iconic quickly. For example, entire generations who missed the original Star Wars film can nonetheless recite dialog from it. Horrow films fit the same mold. The tropes, tricks, plot arcs and even to a large degree the SFX become familiar over time because they are part of the overall experience you expect.

But what happens when a horror fan experiences a film from a different culture? Are the building blocks the same ... or different? One of the clearest exponents of this issue is this film, a modern "horror" film produced in an Islamic country that is known neither for its horror films nor really for its interest in films at all.

Which is what makes UNDER THE SHADOW SO REMARKABLE.

It is good enough to stand on its own as a horror piece. In fact, it's only possible failing -- that it builds so slowly and gradually -- can in fact be considered a major strength. It may well be that, in the west, film-makers who lack the skill to "layer" their suspense raise the temperature far too quickly? However when you consider the obvious incorporation of allegory and metaphor to overlay the plight of the heroine in her real life against her plight in the supernatural realm .. the film gets even more intriguing. Not preachy. Just interesting.

Recommended.

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

For the record, I have top-rated this show (one of my faves) and reviewed about a dozen individual episodes here on the IMDb.

Overall an extraordinary production that starts GREAT and just gets better and better.

I remember watching the "parallel earth" segment (with "Walternate," one of my favorite all time TV characters) and thinking to myself, wow, how can they top this? Which is the point of this review. They can't. And they don't.

In the history of TV, a lot of great series struggle with finding the best way to wrap up. Sometimes they nail it. And sometimes they don't.

This reviewer, who is also a fan, feels that the creative team might have gotten a bit carried away with the entire S05 arc and maybe, just maybe, forgot what made the show so great in the first place? Which was FUN. In the first four seasons, no matter how crazy the story was, you had a sense that the cast and the characters were having FUN. Which meant you the viewer were having FUN too.

In the shortened and final S05, the fun is gone, the joy is gone, and with it went a lot of the charm of the series. Even the catchy theme music no longer seems "appropriate' for the Trip Thru Hell that is Season 5.

If you are new to the series and want the complete experience, watch it all. If on the other hand you are willing to take some advice from an old-timer, I can tell you it is OK to stop at the end of S04 and you will have missed nothing.

And a simply wonderful throwback to the 1970s when horror was, well, horror -- and not based on gimmicks like "found footage" but rather genuine scene-setting, story building, audience engagement, and full-tilt creepiness.

Probably destined to become a classic.

Brian Cox is this generation's Donald Pleasence, that is to say, a character actor who could not give a bad performance if he tried yet is destined to never actually stand out in any single production because that is his style.

Director André Øvredal is one of those rare finds -- an auteur with (so far) a small body of work who is producing better and better films. This suggests that over time he will probably give us bigger and better treats to come.

And while Ophelia Lovibond does not get a lot of screen time, the exposure she does have will only add to her fan base. An American accent so natural you would think she was trained by Hugh Laurie and a performance so sweet you might not even recognize her (unless you looked twice) as the very same actress that underpinned an entire season of Elementary.

Recommended? This is a must-see!

Apologies for the late review but I wanted to rewatch this before jumping in.

I have now seen the film 9 times, top to bottom.

Conclusion: the film overall is an 8, that is, it has a hard time finding direction; it does some strange things with the traditional character arcs; and AS PER USUAL the entire Lex Luthor arc is a mess.

(For the record, and I am fairly strong-minded on this, the only Superman story to ever come close to making Lex interesting and not a stick figure is Smallville, which, in its 10 year run, had great writing, Michael Rosenbaum, and, whenever the plot waned, Kristin Kruek).

The biggest problem -- and this is problem I have never seen before -- is that the first big "set piece," the plane scene -- is not merely good, it is brilliant.

Let me be clear -- the falling plane is not only one of the most perfect special effects I have ever seen anywhere, anytime, but it is also the first time anyone has explored the issue of what if even Superman has to deal with an object so big and clumsy that even he can't control it ...

After the first 5 viewings or so, I reached the point where I would fast-forward through almost all the Lex Luthor stuff but the plane scene I could watch over and over and over. It is exhilarating.

Pity that the rest of film did not keep pace. The "savior" theme as a foundation for a completely unresolved love story is ambitious; the secondary arc involving Lois's son is equally ambitious but as a unified whole the story never really gels.

It is a good film. It could have been great.

The other reviewers have done an excellent job deconstructing this episode. So I will simply repeat what I said in my review of the opener, that THIS is indeed TV 3.0, almost a technological leap into a new era of TV where every single one of the secondary arcs is so good you could almost build an entire series on each.

Never saw that before, but it exceeded my already high expectations.

But the point of this review is to draw attention to the way an already-superb episode leaps into hyperspace every time Hopkins or Harris comes into frame.

Make no mistake -- these are not ordinary actors. These are Hollywood A-listers who were making hit films back when most of the audience for this series were still learning their ABCs and listening to Kermit sing.

The key is to remember that Hollywood remains one of the vainest "theme parks" on the planet; and in that theme park, just like in Westworld, the "hosts" (actors) are discarded after a certain age.

That is why the producers were able to snag these two for a TV series. And that is a reminder to Hollywood that age is not always the determinant of an actor's ability to work his craft.

A difficult review.

99% of the time a film is "about" entertainment. No matter how horrible the topic, how wretched the narrative, the argument has always been that, if viewers wanted reality, they would watch a documentary.

So this production would have seen major headwinds going in, and, when you consider the historical record, the topic, and the potential for emotional bias by both those who made the film and whose who see the film, I think overall they have done an admirable job.

The script is tight, so tight you can almost sense the constant rewrites required to make it that way.

The performances are stellar. Rachel Weisz, an actress of remarkable range with a much wider body of work than most realize, takes a lower key than she usually does because the story requires it. One applauds her restraint.

Fortunately Tom Wilkinson and Timothy Spall (the latter literally played a rat in a Harry Potter film) had no such constraints. Both are brilliant but Wilkinson, one of those many top-tier British actors we take for granted, arguably gives the performance of his life, a performance that could hold its own with any actor in any courtroom drama in the history of British cinema.

To the credit of the writers, although it seemed an impossible feat given that the story was based on known, historical fact, at the 1:35 timestamp they successfully managed to inject suspense into the story by playing on a tricky legal concept known as belief vs. intent. And it works.

The film. like the events it records, is more geared to the historical record than light entertainment.

For those looking -- and I apologize for the carefree use of words -- for an "entertaining" story of the Holocaust, perhaps something to show children, I point to the astonishingly brave film intended for teenagers, The Devils Arithmatic 1999. Worth a look.

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

If you watch a lot of movies -- please check out my 1250+ reviews -- you tend to have low expectations for Indies. On the other, die-hard movie buffs are a lot like the story of the little boy who finds a room full of manure and smiles ... because he figures, with so much manure, there has to be a pony around somewhere...? And the truth is, it is Indies just like this one that make reviewers feel like that little boy ... finally something new, refreshing and interesting that somehow managed to swim upstream to the viewer, defying all odds, and avoiding the Hollywood cookie-cutter franchise and deal-making system.

Superficially, this is a police procedural about a deal gone wrong in a small border town that no one has ever heard of.

But, it in fact, it is no such thing. And if you approach Hollow Point purely on the basis of the story, you might end up disappointed.

What it actually offers is a fun ride through a series of almost-disconnected events, events that only have in common the skill of the director and the art of his actors constantly trying to keep you interested and entertained.

For example (one of many, to make the point) there is a scene where the local sheriff forthrightly is questioning a local car dealer who, presumably, he knows and has no fear of. The car dealer, sitting behind his desk, offers the sheriff a drink, and then makes an offhand, ambiguous, comment along the lines of "I can see you have already made up your mind" -- and next proceeds to shotgun said sheriff with a hidden (trick) weapon built into the desk. The camera then switches to the POV of the victim, the sheriff, and slowly fades to black. The viewer ASSUMES the character is gone to his greater reward ... until the same character pops up in a later scene unharmed, and the viewer has to put the pieces together and deduce the character had a bullet proof vest all along.

IT IS THAT KIND OF FILM. A film more interested in entertaining the viewer than in preaching or making a point or even in telling a story. And it works.

Director Gonzalo López-Gallego has a great career ahead, his work is flawless. Ditto for the cinematography. Patrick Wilson and Ian McShane are both mainly character actors here elevated to starring roles -- and they are more than up to the challenge.

THE JOURNEY, NOT THE DESTINATION.

Fun. Entertaining. Recommended.

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