NoWo's Reviews
Good overall
Somewhat tight (despite the runtime) thriller around the chase for Bin Laden, as seen from the spook side.
Chastain is a solid actress, and still easy to look at in her mid-thirties, which is fortunate considering the amount of screen time she gets, and what little action or growth she show during.
Visuals are very good, but the script could have done with some tightening.
Bigelow apparently caused some controversy at the time by "glorifying torture". Yeah. Right. Cause clean wars sure are a thing. And better escalate into large-scale, civilian-mowing kinetic conflicts than assassinate a few bad agents.
Funny that the muppets touting this luxury belief are usually the same crowd that ad nauseams "by any means necessary" and "if it only saves one life".
Bunch of tossers.
Pratt is in the movie, but hasn't found his stride yet. Also, a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo by Scott Adkins.
And to (somewhat) address a previous comment, Bigelow does not delve into geopolitics here, so yeah, OBL was the publicly designated target at the time.
Created: 12-07-2024
I am not entertained
I am still a fan of Scott’s. Well, was, until very recently. I even trudged through Prometheus. And Covenant. I’m a masochist. I deserve a good spanking.
Scott’s always had a situationship with historical accuracy, at best; see Last Duel, Napoleon. But now he’s gone and ghosted it. And slept with its mother. In its own bed. Live-streamed on Twitch. Because why not.
Female legionnaires? Zombie baboons from Hell? Gladiators riding rhinos shouting lasers out of their arses? (whose arse is up for debate). Football? Seriously?
To be fair, female gladiators had been a (rare) thing, because why not? Gladiator games, especially into the 3rd century, were pretty much American wrestling, if a fair tad bloodier, but mostly kayfabe. So, yeah, women, for the same reasons.
Except by the purported time of this movie, they had been banned because morality.
Washington is a pro, as usual, but out of place. The real-life Macrinus did manage to briefly claw his way into power despite his non-noble birth. But he couldn’t have done it with a black skin.
Pascal plays himself, as usual, so, Eternal Eunuch. Despite the hefty run time, his balls don’t drop. Also, why is he everywhere when that kind of money could hire an actor? And he’s a Roman general, too; who were well-known for general foppishness. General of the Emo Empire.
Maximus Redux is, well, present. He does a fairly good job of shouting while looking like a wet, miserable dog. And breathing, also. He breathes. That about wraps it up. But his character benefits from Chosen One Powers. Surprisingly, he’s not female.
The rest of the cast is better than Pascal, which is neither difficult nor enough.
So yeah, black-washing, female empowerment, so-called progressivism, and heavy recycling of the previous plot.
As anything with Pascal in it, it’s anti-male, smash-the-patriarchy, and much ado about nothing (literally; in Shakespeare’s time, ‘nothing’ was slang for an absence of dick). Polar opposite of the original.
Seats were stiff. Popcorn was crap. An evening wasted.
Edit: regarding the omnipresence of xir Pascal (no gender assumed), rumour apparently has it that it owes to his overt political pandering for the Party of the Ultimate Good (PUG?), but also to his checking of diversity boxes (ie: non-white, non-male) while being "white-passing".
The sheer and very literal racism of the morally superior never ceases to amaze.
Created: 11-18-2024
Could have been good, but lazy
I like Adkins, in a Van Damme kind of way, but let's be honest, he's even less able to carry a movie on his acting chops alone.
The whole movie feels cheap. Sometimes in a clever way, as in the constrained settings, but mostly in a, well, cheap way.
Adkins is pushing 50 now, and it feels as though he's not trying that much anymore. Eve used to be a smoke show, but that was 20 years ago; she's still apparently too expensive to actually appear in more than one scene, though.
Photography is competent if uninspired, music is absent, it could be an OK movie, but the script needs so much tightening!
Characters feel flat, artificial, cookie-cutter, and the actors feel jaded. Except for the actress playing Mona, she gives it an honest try.
The dialog-to-brawling ratio is very unfavourable for Adkins, who also looks fairly awkward handling firearms. The script has more holes than plot, but could have been rather easily fixed, which is all the more frustrating.
Giving Adkins the John Wick training is probably expensive; proof-reading a 50 pages script is probably affordable.
Oh well, Adkins has done worst in the past.
But not often.
Created: 11-13-2024
Over-rated in my opinion
Missed this in the hey-days of MTV, finally got around to checking what the hype was about.
The first runs do a pretty good job of a suspenseful, dialog-less, condensed narrative, with each episode being under 5mn. And the main characters dies before the end of each episode. Music is different and appropriate.
The last season is closer to the norm: 22mn and dialog. And far less interesting.
Still, I couldn't get over the art style, and the pervasive sexual fetish imagery.
I can see how it could serve the underlying discourse, but I find it complacent, and thus gratuitously degenerate.
Not woke per se, but definitely proto-edgelordy of the time.
A miss for me.
Created: 11-11-2024
The secret to this game is to never take your eyes off the ball
A whiff of Garp, a dash of Candide, and an eager, sort-of average American caught up in the country’s turbulent and rambunctious history, short as it is. Forrest in a way is John Q. Public, caught up in and thus blinded to his own destiny unfolding at breakneck speed.
Whatever the man has done and said since, Hanks did deliver a stellar performance in this. From his weird Southern boonies accent to the awfully literal approach to everything, he made Forrest into an immediately recognizable and endearing character.
Sinise is simply outstanding, and never quite got the career he deserved in my opinion. Fantastic George in Of Mice And Men. It seems Lt Dan led him to a good life, though, so there’s that.
I’m more on the fence about Wright, whom I’ve always considered the weak link in great movies, but I might be influenced by her character, and the borderline abusive relationship she nurtures with Forrest.
Then again, heartland America has had an abusive relationship with its coastal self-professed progressive, so-called elites, so, truth in art.
The music is nostalgic, sometimes innocent, sometimes bittersweet and always relevant. Perfect.
Being from the mid 90S, this movie only had access to primitive woke tech, such as the brave single mother (husband’s fate unknown, presumed ‘deadbeat’), female as permanent victims, rich white male ‘stepping up’ after languishing in unrequited adulation.
Maybe not woke, but definitely focused on male sacrifice and female irresponsibility.
Doesn’t mean it doesn’t make for a good story. Just that the premises are fine for fantasy, but flawed for reality.
At least it gets something right: the most obvious leftist character is a selfish, confused, broken white woman from an abusive home. At least she has excuses, but then again, it’s fiction.
The social commentary is actually pretty fair, and does not look at the past with rose-tinted glasses.
I do not condone its message of unity, though, as ‘unity’ and ‘divisive’ are and have always been leftist euphemisms for ‘submission’ and ‘independent’.
I’ll still rate this at 0 woke, and leave it at misguided, left-leaning, sentimentalist zeitgeist. Brain awry, but heart not in a bad place.
Created: 10-30-2024
Not a fan of the genre, but it's very good
Not a fan of Mann and his brand of urbanized modern Western, hence being 30 years late for this one.
But I have to admit, the bloke sure knows his way around a camera. The movie is tense, gripping and tight, despite the run time.
The much hyped street shout-out scene is, well, still a little Hollywood, but yeah, it's good. Furthermore, it's _legible_. Here, the multiple alternating shots and point-of-views do not create a voluntary mess as a cover for a badly choreographed scene, and one can easily make tactical sense of the fight's progression.
Characters are consistent, cast is stellar, pacing is near perfect.
I'm very much impressed.
Created: 10-30-2024
Where’s the dichotomy?
Batman is supposed to be ambiguous: is the Batman Bruce Wayne’s alter ego, or vice versa?
This iteration of the character is pure Bat, with Wayne but a thin veneer that he seldom wears.
Also, shirts and socks. He seldom wears them. Because toxic female gaze, I suppose.
By the same token, the villain(s) are supposed to be flesh-out, engaging characters, that in their own way highlight the darkness of the protagonist. Here, Catwoman is just a feline-in-distress, the Penguin a walk-on role, and the Riddler absent for 2/3 of the movie. At least he does his job in the end.
Both the script and the photography remind me of Fincher’s Se7en, which is a good thing in many ways, but also feels generic in a way, or possibly just too realistic. The movie does not bear the mark of the Bat, the slight touch of insanity that has been the hallmark of previous movies, even the bad ones. All dark and orange simply lacks flamboyance.
As another example, fight scenes: they are neither cartoonish (Burton), nor overly brutal (Snyder, Arkham videogames, although they do angle towards that in the end). Here they’re tepid and uninspired. Neither Pattinson nor Kravitz can produce convincing physicality.
This Batman’s voice just doesn’t do it for me either. Too smooth. No grit. The Bat is supposed to growl “I’m Batman”, not croon that he is sorry at someone’s sob story.
The music too often sounds like William’s Imperial March or Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters. Originality is hard.
As for wokeness: pretty subdued for current day Hollywood. Yet another black female Mayor, all white males are corrupt (and I mean all, let’s deconstruct icons), hence Gordon’s race-swap, and female saviour. Catwoman hasn’t looked like Michelle Pfeiffer in decades (and Kravitz definitely is not Pfeiffer), and this Selina Kyle is aggressively, well, woke, as is each and every single black female according to Hollywood. She gets a pass for girlbossing, cause that’s part of Catwoman.
Created: 10-28-2024
Stallone is not intellectual but intelligent
The 80s fashion of deriding Stallone as a muscular moron, well, was justified by the subsequent Rambo movies, I guess.
But this one has more depth than meets the eye, with an engaging if somewhat awkward script, Stallone trying his honest best (he got better with age), and an outstanding Dennehy.
Created: 10-28-2024
Classic documentary about the 21st century.
A 90s reductio ad absurdum of political correctness results in a pretty accurate description of current date, current time.
Beyond the meme potential, this movie is just stupidly enjoyable from beginning to end.
Stallone is at his best as the straight man (in the comedic sense, although quite likely also), and Snipes is just brimming with inspiration. And joyful madness. And possibly unlicensed pharmaceuticals. The incarnation of genial evil.
We still have a few years to wait to solve the mystery of the 3 shells.
Created: 10-28-2024
Blade has finally ice-skated up the hill...
... that it could die on.
The addition of a Scooby gang wasn't the best idea.
21-yo Biel and 26-yo Reynolds are fantastic as cheese-cake and beef-cake, but Biel is not the greatest thespian ever, and Reynolds' brand of comedy is somewhat tonally at odds with the Blade universe.
Purcell and Posey are definitely brilliant, though.
I probably wouldn't rate it this high without the prior installments, though.
Created: 10-28-2024
