Category: Hollywood

Logan Lucky : The Review.

Who would’ve known, even Steven Soderbergh’s been bitten by the Game of Thrones bug.Logan Lucky is Steven Soderbergh’s return to mainstream cinema after a self imposed exile which he attributed to his disgruntlement with the Hollywood system but if you ask me, as a viewer Soderbergh’s gradual departure from conformity to the rules of Hollywood has been visible for a while now.The hiatus was only from feature films and during the time he had shifted his focus to the smaller screen.True to his indie roots, he has experimented relentlessly throughout his career with themes and treatment.In his comeback vehicle, Soderbergh has also taken on corporate Hollywood by opting to distribute the film directly.So its anyone’s guess that the director has an eye on the burgeoning streaming business and the home audience and it’s hardly surprising that he based an entire sequence during a prison riot sequence on one of the most successful shows of all time, Game of Thrones.The scene’s a riot, literally.

Logan Lucky is a smart film, like every other Soderbergh film to date.For a man who pulled off a heist trilogy with almost the same premise and cast, this must have been cakewalk indeed.Soderbergh has gone for the minimalistic approach here too but for a film that raised its budget by selling overseas rights Logan Lucky is deeply entrenched in the American South, i felt.The film takes its own sweet time to build up pace and is a thinking man’s heist movie with a sense of humor.Most of the delivery is deadpan and Adam Driver along with a bleached Daniel Craig contributes generously in that department.Channing Tatum, a Soderbergh regular of late appears determined to make a mark as an actor and play down on his hunk persona while he’s at that.

Having said that,the movie doesn’t look or feel like your regular holiday weekend caper, and that’s probably exactly how Soderbergh intended it to be.He has made a film on his own terms, with absolute creative control as he puts it, which is the primary reason why he locked horns with the big studios.With Logan Lucky at least, this approach works to an extent but in the same breath its one of those movies which would work better on a streaming network rather than in movie halls i can’t but help feel, and thats where Soderbergh’s headed as a filmmaker ultimately, if i am not wrong.Despite all the critical acclaim, this experiment by Soderbergh might end up with more takers at home rather than in movie halls.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard : The Review.

I don’t recall watching Samuel.L.Jackson kiss an actress on screen ever and when the end credits rolled for The Hitman’s Bodyguard, i think i realized why.He is not much of a kisser is simply why, though maybe its just lack of practice, on screen that is, or then again it could just be plain lack of chemistry between him and a jaded Salma Hayek.That was one of my only two takeaways from The Hitman’s Bodyguard which aspires to be an action comedy, but ends up with some success in the comedy department thanks to the lead pair and disappoints absolutely when it comes to the action scenes, which is where and why the movie let itself down, i think.

After escorting Denzel Washington to safety in 2012’s Safe House, Ryan Reynolds gets to play bodyguard to Samuel.L.Jackson’s hitman in this film which also has Gary Oldman playing an East European dictator sporting a look that, for some reason reminded me of his turn as Dracula in Coppola’s namesake 1992 movie.Was that a tribute by the director, considering Dracula’s east European origins?, I guess we’d never know.He doesn’t have much to do here though, apart from acting real mean like your average east European dictator is expected to .

Sam Jackson’s hitman is racing against a deadline and other hitmen with the Interpol looking on, to get to the ICJ in The Hague to depose as a witness against Oldman’s character and helping him out reluctantly is Reynolds, for the sake of nothing other than good old love.The only reason i could think of, for the makers to settle for this plot setting, brings me to my second takeaway.The Netherlands it seems, has a cash rebate and incentives programme for every movie shot on their soil and The Hitman’s Bodyguard benefited financially from this, the internet tells me. Interestingly,Dunkirk is one other movie which is said to have worked this incentive to its advantage.

The action sequences reminded me of Bollywood movies ranging from Kick to Shivaay, which were shot on location in east European countries with incentives and subsidies for filmmakers too.I couldn’t but help wondering if they used the same action crew as those Bollywood movies.Thats how mediocre the action was.Maybe the makers thought that they could save even more bucks and make up for it in the humor department.The film did draw a few laughs, thanks mostly to Samuel.L.Jackson but that keeps the movie afloat only barely.At the end of the day, its little more than another lost opportunity, considering the cast and the premise.

Dunkirk : The Review.

Us humans are weird. We inflict atrocities of every imaginable kind on each other whenever we engage in conflicts and once we are done, we look back, searching for moments that unveil the humane side of our nature as a species, those very aspects that make us human and epitomise our infallible spirit, amidst the trail of death and destruction we leave behind. We have done this with every major and minor wars we have fought, using every medium of expression at our disposal in the era they were fought, from art to literature to cinema. Of all these wars, the Second World War has proven to be the most popular source material for cinema, which is especially true for Hollywood. The recent Netflix documentary “Five Came Back” narrates the experiences of five major Hollywood directors who were enlisted to document WWII. Maybe this is one of the reasons why the war has been a prolific backdrop to countless war movies in the past seven decades or so.So it would have been a conspicuous absence in his repertoire in terms of genre if Nolan did not have a war film to his name. He “announced” a while back that he was coming our way with his take on the war and now he has arrived, and how.

Dunkirk is not a movie by Nolan, rather its nothing less than a military assault on the viewer by this master of the craft of filmmaking, if you ask me. Nolan drowned me, set me on fire, shot at me, let me fall from the sky and yes of course, bombed the hell out of me, to his heart’s content for a little over an hour and a half that it left me deeply disturbed and strangely hopeful at the same time, by the time the movie was over. Now I do not know if that was his intention, I can only speak for myself and this indeed was my experience and the movie wasn’t even in 3D, nor did I watch it on an IMAX .He followed up every moment of hope with another moment of deep despair that you almost ended up hating him for doing that to you, on a consistent basis.

The Sundowner,the original yacht on which the “Sea” part of the movie is based, ferried 130 people to safety and was captained by a 66 year old former second officer of the Titanic, his son and a teenage scout. Nolan relies entirely on visuals and music to retell this tale of one of the most poignant rescues in the history of human conflict. I can’t recall watching another war movie which has built up such tension on screen that the viewer’s heart rate matched the crescendo of the background music right from the word go to the final scene. In fact I think it would be unfair to call Hans Zimmer’s work in this film “background” music so to speak, the movie would be something else entirely, without it. Tom Hardy hardly gets to show his face or his body from neck down to be specific, still he is a major presence, throughout.Cillian Murphy, another Nolan regular shows up as a haunting character too.

To take a cue from Dunkirk’s dialogue, the men who are of the age to decide to send men who are of age to fight on the ground, to wars, should be asked to watch this film. There’s an off chance that we might end up with lesser news of death and destruction to wake up to every morning.But hey then again, as Ozzy sang, I’m just a dreamer.

Spider-Man Homecoming : The Review.

No other superhero movie has had as many reboots in such a short span of time as the Spider-Man franchise.In fact the 2002 Sami Raimi Spider-Man movie with Tobey Maguire marked the beginning of the superhero origin story trend in Hollywood which hasn’t died down even a decade and half later.Since then, we have had three actors playing the friendly neighborhood masked man with Tom Holland”s turn in the last Avengers movie setting the stage for things to come.

Marvel movies have always had a political undertone if you have cared to notice and Homecoming opened with the most explicit political statements of all in any of their movies till now when Michael Keaton’s character expresses his angst at the people who get paid to clean the very mess that they made.Micheal Keaton’s presence is significant in more ways than one and his character is almost a tribute to two of his most famous outings as an actor, Tim Burton’s Batman and the more recent Birdman, which ironically was about an actor who loses himself to the superhero character he played.

The Andrew Garfield spidey is a personal favorite because his quirky,neurotic Peter Parker reminded me of SRK for some reason, in the romantic scenes even more so.Though i have nothing against the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man, he brought a kind of emotional depth and air of melancholy to the character who has otherwise always been identified with mischief and irreverence, which took a toll on the charm of the character if you ask me.Tom Holland plays the youngest version of Peter Parker to have graced the screen i think and his own age helps him stay truer to the traits of the character, who was originally conceived as an adolescent superhero, for a target readership of that age group.The new Spider-Man is just as tech savvy as your average neighborhood teenager and shares his excitement about all things super-heroic in a video diary and thats just one of the reasons why more teenagers are going to identify and relate to this Spider-Man than his predecessors.Plus he’s more fun too and hardly listens to his elders which obviously adds to his appeal, i guess.

The movie rights for the Spider-Man franchise rested with Sony Pictures who spawned five movies in two reboots and it was only a matter of time before Marvel wanted its most famous superhero back, with its ambitions for the Marvel Cinematic Universe being more evident with every other Marvel movie since Iron Man.Though Marvel has no dearth of superhero characters they have a lot riding on Robert Downey’s Iron Man than they would like to admit and i would be lying if i say that I’m not curious to see how the Avengers would fare without Downey’s charm to keep them afloat.Spider-Man, as a character has had more popularity globally than any other Marvel hero including Iron Man and this could be a reason why the theme of The Avengers playing mentors to Spidey, just because he happened to be the youngest of the superheroes, never went down well with me at least. Well after all this is indeed the guy who figured out long back that, with great power came great responsibility, on his own.

Wonder Woman: Not a review.

If Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, what would it be like when Wonder Woman is scorned, i couldn’t but help feel curious. So here goes.
The weekend past turned out to be one of tough choices for the cinephile in me when i had to decide between a movie with a female super villain and one with a female super hero lead.At the risk of being branded a chauvinist and a misogynist i admit that i had held out from watching the latter for a week but when the going gets tough, the tough gets going and thats how i ended up going to a show of Wonder Woman at the multiplex around the corner and i swear that it had nothing to do with the fact that my wife wanted to watch it too.

The internet would have you believe that though DC has two of the greatest superheroes to ever don a cape in its camp, it took Wonder Woman to restore faith in the DC Universe and save it from sinking into oblivion cinematically.Though this is indeed the “post-truth”, so to speak, in these times of paid news, fake news and online promotions when even established media houses can’t tell a genuine story from an ad campaign,i couldn’t but help feel that something was rotten in the state of California,Hollywood to be specific.The kind of gushing reviews that are doing rounds were conspicuous by absence when a genuinely female centric film like Hidden Figures hit the screens.Yeah apples and oranges, i know but if you think i am exaggerating, the fact that DC had the clout to convince the United Nations to appoint Wonder Woman as an honorary ambassador for women’s empowerment last year is proof enough.Come to think of it, though UN withdrew the announcement after drawing considerable flak from all quarters, the timing of the declaration and DC’s campaign sounds more like an ambitious marketing ploy rather than a coincidence.

When i finally did got around to watching the movie, i realized that cinematic swindle that unfolded before my eyes was second only to what the makers of Twenty Twenty did to Mammootty, if you know what i am talking about, but then you don’t.Gal Godot’s Wonder Woman stays true the original comic strip character traits, making her an embodiment of innocence, honor and of course superhuman skills but she ends up using these mostly in the realm of fantasy fighting mythical villains while the real world is actually saved by Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor.
In fact you have to be ignorant beyond measure not to notice that its Steve Trevor who saves the day and in fact dons the thinking cap on more than one occasion.Though you could argue that i have gotten it all wrong and that the film is exactly how its supposed to be, for a character being marketed as a feminist icon, it did look more than a bit odd to me.

Patty Jenkins helmed Charlize Theron’s Oscar vehicle which i have watched in only bits and parts but i am familiar with her work in the remake of the scandinavian series ,The Killing, which again featured a female lead and was an engaging watch with some truly unique characterizations.The Swedes and the Danes have always been miles ahead of Hollywood when it comes to ground breaking concepts and breaking gender barriers on screen, The Millennium trilogy and The Bridge to name a few.
This may sound like a ploy of mine to win over the animal lovers now that i have invoked the wrath of feminists rather Wonder Woman fangirls, but i have to say that the honor for greatest no man’s land run on screen belongs to War Horse and not Wonder Woman.And if you think that no female lead has kicked ass in a movie like Wonder Woman did, you obviously haven’t seen Lisbeth Salander in action and she doesn’t need magical bracelets either.Pepper spray, she makes do with.

 

Logan : The Review.

Logan is to the X-Men film franchise, what the “The Dark Knight” is to the Batman films. James Mangold has an impressive resume already and he has delivered a Marvel movie which doesn’t look or feel like a Marvel movie and this film without doubt would definitely be counted amongst his best works. I would go so far as to say that this has to be the best X-Men movie to ever hit the screens, in fact it is one of the best superhero movies ever made, indeed.
It’s a welcome change from the mind numbing CGI action mayhem that has been fed to us of late by Marvel and DC. Of course this movie features some of the bloodiest and most gruesome action sequences I have ever seen in any superhero film but it plays out like a gritty action drama and not once do you feel that it’s an X-Men franchise film that you’re watching, well I may have exaggerated a bit there, but you’ll know what I meant when you go watch the film, yourself.

Logan is disturbing, dark and brooding not just for the sake of it and is a classic example of what good writing and visionary filmmaking can do to the most exhausted of themes. Mangold engages the viewer successfully and has managed to connect to an audience outside the cult fan base for the X-Men franchise here, I felt. There are quite a few lighter moments too which doesn’t feel forced at all and here again the credit goes to the writing.
Hugh Jackman plays “Old Man Logan” to the T while Patrick Stewart gets to play a Professor X who’s quite out of character, pun intended. The film does feature child artists in some extremely violent scenes and I wouldn’t be surprised if it does raise a few eyebrows, but why should movies be any different in a world where children are bombed in their homes and wash up ashore lifeless. I couldn’t help wondering if Mangold was silently delivering a message too with this film, presenting a “dystopian” future not too far ahead of our times, telling us where we are headed. The self driving trucks were the most obvious of indicators of how close we are to Logan’s world, at least to me.#logan

Split : The Review.

Manoj Night Shyamalan is back to doing what he does best in Split.He gave us a glimpse of the Shyamalan of yore in The Visit and here he assures us that he has got his groove back. Made on a budget of 9 million USD, Split has already raked in ten times that figure. The Visit was noticed for the fact that it cost 5 million and earned almost a 100 million at the box office. Has to be the Indian in him,i‘m tempted to say, considering the fact that his country of origin recently managed to launch a space probe successfully,to orbit the Mars on a budget lesser than what Hollywood spent on a movie set in space. It’s also a fact that the writer-director faltered more than once when he worked on bigger budgets.
The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs had established Shyamalan as a thinking man’s filmmaker but the mediocre stuff that he churned out for almost a decade and half since those films gave us an impression that the critics who were only too eager to write him off had a point indeed. Shylamalan finally has let his craft do the talking, proving his detractors wrong , with Split. While this film may not entirely win over his critics, it will definitely wake them up to the fact that the man hasn’t lost his touch entirely.

James McAvoy owns the screen in this film about a man with 23 personalities and the only two other actors who gets to share screen space with him, almost make up the entire cast of the film. Betty Buckley and Anya Taylor-Joy, who it seems is turning into permanent fixture in anything horror deliver gripping performances too. The tension and suspense that Shyamalan builds in a simple therapy session scene is worthy of Hitchcock, I would say and Shyamalan does indulge in his fascination with the supernatural, to a limited extent,here too. At a time when every other movie is about a Marvel or DC superhero and their “Universe”, Shyamalan hints at building his own universe in Split.Before Sam Raimi and Nolan kicked off the superhero origin story trend, it was indeed Shyamalan who gave us the thinking man’s superhero with Unbreakable, I think. And it’s anyones guess why Bruce Willis is a frequent collaborator, Shyamalan was 18 when Die Hard was released.

The Magnificent Seven: The Review.

Few other movies have inspired filmmakers the world over the way Kurosawa’s Seven Samuari and Coppola’s The Godfather did, to come up with their own versions and continue to do so even today.Kurosawa’s timeless classic found its perfect setting in the wild west of John Sturges’s Magnificent Seven and the source material was duly credited in the titles too.

Indian film industry also had its versions, Sholay notably, though Feroz Khan had his curry western Khotey Sikkey out an year ahead where he even wore a black shirt throughout, playing the Indian Yul Brynner.The plot was revisited by Rajkumar Santoshi later in China Gate with a bunch of veteran “character actors”, as they are labelled in our cinema.It’s when you watch these versions that you realise that they are all remakes of The Magnificent Seven and have little in common with Seven Samurai, the original except for the plot.

Denzel Washington dons the black shirt in Antoine Fuqua’s version of the Seven and he even spins and holster the gun exactly the way Brynner did too, if you care to notice.The western, as a genre lost its charm a while back and it’s been over two decades since even Clint Eastwood, the quintessential American cowboy hung up his boots and moved on.Fuqua relies on the action element heavily to keep the movie afloat and he borrows more than one dialogue from the original too.

Chris Pratt is supposed to fill the shoes of Steve McQueen in this movie, one gets a feeling and when Fuqua is looking for his seven, Ethan Hawke would be an obvious choice for sure.Vincent D’Onofrio plays a hairier version of his Daredevil role here.For the sake the diversity there’s a Korean actor, none other than Byung-hun Lee playing a “Chinaman” and giving him company is an Indian warrior and a Mexican outlaw.Finding replacement for the likes of Bronson and Coburn is not an easy task, one would agree.Peter Skarsgard’s crazed violence is hardly a match for Eli Wallach’s Calvera.But It’s not everyday that you get to see Denzel drawing a quick one atop a galloping horse which was reason enough for me to go watch The Magnificent Seven, i admit.

Snowden: The Review.

You have seen actors physically transforming into characters but in Snowden, Joseph Gordon-Levitt goes the extra mile and does a perfect voice impression too.The movie has been called a biopic,it switches to docudrama and almost into a documentary in the final scenes but the fact is it’s actually a horror movie that would make The Conjuring look like a musical.At least you knew that what you saw in Conjuring wasn’t for real.Facebook’s my bitch says the NSA hacker when he tells an uninitiated Snowden that he can access cams on shut laptops,in one particular scene and you feel a chill down your spine that you know is not the AC in the cinema hall.

The movie starts off pretty much like the Guardian article which describes his first contact as a whistleblower and some of the scenes are right out of the documentary Citizenfour.You feel that you’re almost in fact watching the making of Citizenfour in the first few scenes.Oliver Stone pays tribute to his magnum opus JFK in the form of portraits on walls, more than once.Stone expresses his dislike for the “military industrial complex” and it’s reach in the congress and policy making here too and I don’t think it was a coincidence that this was almost in the same scene as the JFK tribute.
From Nicolas Cage to Tom Wilkinson to Timothy Olyphant, a slew of actors make extended cameos in this film which is a Gordon-Levitt show at the end of the day.Offering him some semblance of competition is Rhys Evans who is one of the most versatile actors out there today and personally i believe that he deserved an Oscar for his turn as “Shakespeare” in Anonymous of 2011.

Stone takes you through Snowden’s journey from a true blue patriot and soldier who took orders without questions to a soul torn between his mentors,his values and of course love.America is a business, said Brad Pitt in Killing Them Softly, this is not about terrorism, this is about economics, the supreme power of your government and social control, terrorism is an excuse says Gordon-Levitt in this movie about the NSA whistleblower. And no Oliver Stone movie would be complete without a moving monologue by the lead actor,we watched Kevin Costner doing that in JFK and Gordon-Levitt gets his due here or, should i say Snowden?
#snowden##oliverstone#

Bridge of Spies : Thoughts.

“My name’s Donovan, Irish, both sides, mother and father. I’m Irish, you’re German, but what makes us both Americans? Just one thing, one, one, one, the rule book. We call it the Constitution and we agree to the rules and that’s what makes us Americans and it’s all that makes us Americans so don’t tell me there’s no rule book and don’t nod at me like that, you son of a bitch.”

This is the line that Tom Hanks’s character in the movie tells a CIA guy and this is where i started loving the movie, ah yes there’s the dinner scene too.This definitely has to be Spielberg’s most significant work after Schindler’s List , Saving Private Ryan and Catch Me If You Can, in terms of time frame but not necessarily in that order in terms of a fulfilling movie experience.
I guess Spielberg is in his true element when he gets inspired or deals with true stories.This movie could not have come at a better time either,when its anarchy or something that borders on it is all we see around us, to remind us of the values that bind us together as humans beyond borders.
Spielberg pays the perfect tribute to “The Lives of Others” too, by casting Sebastian Koch as the GDR man here.
Just don’t expect your James Bond spy stuff but,Spectre’s playing on the next screen if that’s what you’re looking for.Yeah this shit’s real !