Knives Out

Knives Out (2019)

Written and directed by Rian Johnson

Stars: Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, Jaime Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, LaKeith Stanfield, Noah Segan, Katherine Langford, Riki Lindhome, Jaeden Martell, and Christopher Plummer

Being familiar with Rian Johnson's filmography, I was hesitant in looking at this. I was spoiled a bit about who done it, but the clues were there if you picked it up. Now, that the atrociously named sequel in coming out soonish on Netflix. This whodunit was good, but long in the tooth.

On the day of his 85th birthday, Harlan Thrombey (Plummer) is found dead in his study. Private Investigator Benoit Blanc (Craig) along with Lt. Elliott (Stanfield) and Trooper Wagner (Segan) question all of the members of the Thrombey family where something sinister is waiting to bubble up.

Can we get this out of the way? Daniel Craig's accent. What is that? I deduced that it was either Louisiana, because of the French name or it was South Carolina with that thick drawl. My assumption in the latter. It was something. Could have had a generic American accent, but when the exaggerated accent are there, you have to take pause.

Johnson did a similar style film with Brick that I didn't care for that much. This felt like a better attempt at the whodunit. I felt like there were some pacing issues. There is a scene where you see what happened and you have to sit through another hour of movie. The last twenty minutes of the movie were good with the reveal, but then you go back and find holes in plot. It kinda ruins the expierence.

I enjoyed the movie. Some characters could have been cut or combined into one character. Some characters were very one-dimensional.

Rating: 8/10

The Gray Man

The Gray Man (2022)

Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo

Screenplay by Joe Russo and Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely

Based on the book by Mark Greaney 

Stars: Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Regé-Jean Page, Jessica Henwick, Billy Bob Thornton, Julia Butters, Dhanush, and Alfre Woodard

Going into this movie, I heard that it was not well received. With that in mind, I thought that the action would keep it afloat. How can a movie that has plenty of action set pieces be incredibly boring?

"Six" (Gosling) is an assassin that works the top secret Sierra Six program of CIA. On an assignment in Hong Kong, he hesitates to kill a mark. The mark tells him that his boss, Carmichael (Page) wants the Sierra Six programs gone by killing all the agents. Knowing this, Six goes on the run and reckless former CIA agent, Lloyd Hansen (Evans) is on the hunt to eliminate Six.

This movie cost $200 million dollars to make. Where did the money go? Chyrons? Those "sweeping camera shots?" Billy Bob Thornton's wigs? It looked like The Russo Brothers wanted a lot of money on spectacle. I believe it was a distraction technique to keep your eyes away from the boring action sequences.

The biggest problem with the movie is way the screenwriters and the characters dealt with the female characters. They treated them like inconsequential people. This is prevalent with the Lloyd character. He seemed like the kind of douchebag that will mansplain everything through his gross mustache. 

There was no Gray Man in the film. The filmmakers wanted it to be Six, but his moral compass was on the side of good the whole time. Where was his dip to the dark side? There was none. That's when the movie failed. It seems they took parts of the book and translated it into a formulaic, cheesy 1990s movie that doesn't work.

Rating: 2/10

What's Your Number?

What's Your Number? (2011)

Directed by Mark Mylod

Screenplay by Gabrielle Allan & Jennifer Crittenden

Based on the novel, "20 Times a Lady" by Karyn Bosnak

Stars: Anna Faris, Chris Evans, Ari Graynor, Blythe Danner, Ed Begley Jr, Heather Burns, Eliza Coupe, Kate Simes, Tika Sumpter and Joel McHale

Being that I am home-bound because of a certain eye infection, I need to have something to watch so I chose What's Your Number? I wanted to see a shitty movie with some eye candy. The movie was OnDemand for months now and I chose it. That's basically what it is.

Ally (Faris) is a marketing executive that is canned by her pervy boss, Roger (McHale) that loves her own smells. Trying to find her way in the world, she sees an article in a woman's magazine about the number of sexual partners the average woman has. The average is 10.5. What the fuck is the half? A dwarf? She recounts her partners which was 20. One of her friends suggests that after 20 chances are that she would not get married. She goes on a crusade to track down every guy that she has slept with to see if they were the one that got away.

Let's cut the bullshit here. As with every cookie cutter romantic comedy there a guy in this case the man slut next door neighbor, Colin (Evans) and the romantically challenged girl that they have some contrived instances that will not make them hook up immediately. One person is love with a third person or that they would have some emotional love block. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

You want to know my number? My number is 106. 106 minutes taken from my life. Why waste my time with a movie that everybody and there mama knows that boy and girl are gonna get together at the end? Cut the filler. Watching this movie plot along was excruciating to watch and tedious to my psyche.

Show the audience something different, Hollywood. We are getting fucking bored of the same premise with interchangeable parts.

My Rating

Captain America: The First Avenger

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

Directed by Joe Johnston

Written by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely

Based on comic book, "Captain America" by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby

Stars: Chris Evans, Hugo Weaving, Hayley Atwell, Sebastian Stan, Dominic Cooper, Stanley Tucci, Neal MacDonaugh, Derek Luke, Kenneth Choi, JJ Feild, Bruno Ricci, Toby Jones, and Tommy Lee Jones

As I previously stated in my Avengers review, I did not see The First Avenger to prepare myself for the movie. There were some things about the film that I had questions that were answered by watching this film. I know the general lore of Captain America and his journey. I can say for certainty that this movie is better than Thor.

There was some hesitation about letting lead actor Chris Evans take over the role of Steve Rodgers, because he previously played a Marvel superhero as The Human Torch in the Fantastic Four films.

The setting of the film follows almost exactly were the comics left off. Rodgers was a skinny kid that possibly weighed 110 pounds soaking wet when he is repeatedly rejected by the Army in the middle of WWII. His childhood friend, Bucky (Stan) tries to dissuade him from joining the army. A chance encounter from Dr. Abraham Erskine (Tucci) changes his life forever. Erskine recruits him to a top secret operation to create a new breed of super soldiers to fight the Nazis. Most importantly to help stop the tyrannical Red Skull (Weaving) and his HYDRA army from taking over the world.

For me, I wish that Marvel would have concentrated more on these "origin" movies as well as The Avengers. I think that Iron Man 2, Thor and this movie all suffer from having to tell the back story of the characters that are going to make up this superhero team. It seems the quality of film suffers, because it has to be filler to see how this component of the Avengers came from.

There were some aspects of this movie that I didn't like, but that would be spoilers for people who are not familiar with the lore of Captain America. Chris Evans was fine here. He was not bad or good. I thought that the character presented on screen was brave and stupid. When Steve becomes Captain America, he doesn't listen to reason that his actions has consequences. Steve is supposed to be this tragic hero, but comes across as being over-confident to a point where you want something to happen to him. The action scenes were okay. Nothing remarkable here.

I have to stay Tommy Lee Jones as Colonel Chester Phillips was great. He was chewing the scene with his one-liners. Weaving was solid as Red Skull. Steve's sidekick, Bucky was very charismatic on screen. The love interest for Steve, Peggy Carter, played by Hayley Atwell was strange. I wondered if she was interested in him before he got taller and buffer. What if he stayed the scrawny toothpick?

I had a couple of issues with the plot. How comes the shield is supposed to be indestructible, but the shield has wear and tear on it? Would you think that a massive faculty like HYDRA would have been trounced by  a lone man in a loud red, white and blue getup? I didn't understand how the hell the Terraset ended up in a lockbox in Norway? If Steve Rogers meets Iron Man's father who built the device that made him, did he acknowledge that in The Avengers? I could be nitpicking. Somebody help me out.

My Rating

The Avengers

Marvel's The Avengers (2012)

Directed by Joss Whedon

Written by Joss Whedon

Story by Zak Penn & Joss Whedon

Based on the comic book series by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby

Stars: Robert Downey Jr, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johannsson, Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, Jeremy Renner, Mark Ruffalo, Clark Gregg, Cobie Smulders, Stellan Skarsgård and Tom Hiddleston

Currently #31 of the Top 250 Films of All Time on IMDb (as of this posting.)

Can I just say that I love being a geek? I love being a geek. I have getting into comic books in the past couple of years. I know the lore of the Marvel and DC characters. When I heard that The Avengers was coming. I literally had a nerdgasm. Further, when I heard that Joss Whedon was directing the film, I shouted, "Hallelujah." I will make this claim that Joss Whedon is God to me. There I said it. Being that I was busy with my unpredictable work schedule, I had time to watch the film yesterday. I made me giddy like a schoolgirl.

I wanted to say this upfront, I did not see Captain America before seeing this film. I knew the lore already and I didn't want to be disappointed in the lead up to this movie like I did with Thor or Iron Man 2. Going into the movie I did not want to be spoiled by anything that happened in the movie. I avoided the internet, review shows, anything. I wanted to go into this movie drawing my own conclusion.

Here is the setup, after Loki's (Hiddleston) defeat by the hands of Thor (Hemsworth) he is sent to deep space where he tries to harness the powers of a magical cube called the Tesseract that would lead a race of alien warriors called the Chitauri to destroy the Earth. In order to do that Loki teleports to S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters to take it with the help of controlling Hawkeye (Renner) and Dr. Erik Selvig (Skarsgård) to make his escape. Nick Fury (Jackson) determines that it is an act of intergalactic war. He needs to reinstate the Avengers Initiative which would be Earth's mightiest heroes together for the defending our planet. Black Widow (Johannson) and Agent Coulson (Gregg) search the planet to bring together, the egoistical genius Iron Man (Downey Jr), the demigod Thor, the Hulk (Ruffalo) and the First Avenger Captain America (Evans).

My honest opinion is that this movie is awesome. I would say that it was like the first Iron Man movie where my mouth was open in awe. There were some cool things that happened in this movie that I can't give away, but you'll know them when you see them. The team had there moments to shine and everybody had a purpose to be there. I'm glad that Loki was more evil in this movie than he was in Thor, because he was a whiny idiot that cried about being in Thor's shadow. He became heartless against humanity. The movie is almost two and half hours long. I thought that there were some moments that could have be cut out. Other than that, I had a blast with the movie. The small tease after the credits go me going about what will happen next.

My Rating: