3:10 to Yuma
What Mangold wants is similarity to the classics that have gone before. It’s all supposed to feel familiar, but more modern by being bloodier and by letting all the characters express their feelings.
Tag: R
200 Cigarettes
200 Cigarettes is wrong for so many reasons that I will just put as many as I can on paper before I get mad and have to go punch one of the neighbor kids.
28 Weeks Later
I suppose the gore and zombie shit is done well. I mean, the film is all grainy and the scenes are made up of tons of fuzzy jump cuts.
25th Hour
If I’m going to spend a night in Manhattan with a worried guy, I’d rather it were Griffin Dunne in After Hours, but The 25th Hour is pretty good.
15 Minutes
This is a bad, expensive movie. Get off your high-fucking horse, Hollywood. If you want to make a message, have some fucking clue what it is, and some conviction that is stronger than your slutty desire for cash.
13 Ghosts
The plot drags itself along like a man who just had his legs bitten off by sharks. It flops, stumbles and leaves a trail of blood to the spot where it finally dies and all I can think is, why didn’t someone put it out of its misery quicker?
Waking Life
It’s worth seeing, it’s fan-fucking-tastic to look at. But it’s a God damn shame Linklater didn’t have enough imagination to see the ideas come to life.
Velvet Buzzsaw
Velvet Buzzsaw is the sort of movie first-year art students might really, really love, because they believe Gilroy. They might quote bad lines from it as though they were now in on the secrets too. When they grow up, though, they’ll realize how stupid they sounded, and how little knowledge they had.
Upgrade
Upgrade is like an Ayn Rand convention, where everyone thinks they’re much more clever than they really are. On an almost scene by scene basis this movie undercuts its own logic in a rush to get to its big, dumb-ass obvious climax.
Under the Silver Lake
What was it that guy who used to host America’s Top 40 used to say? “Keep reaching for the stars.” People forget, though, that he also urged caution. I believe the entire message was, “Keep reaching for the stars, but don’t be a fucking moron about it.”