Thoughts on movies, comic books, life, and other nonsense, by someone who should know better
I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Sherlock Holmes, but I’ve enjoyed a few adaptations of the character over the years. I won’t regurgitate these musings, but they can be found in my review of the Ian McKellen movie Mr. Holmes, a movie which is as untraditional in its approach to the world’s most famous literary detective as this latest version, a buddy comedy starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly – only better.
14 years is a long time to wait for a sequel, especially for such a beloved movie as The Incredibles, but when you think about it, the pressure to deliver a worthy sequel isn’t of the same variety as the normal two-year gap between franchise installments where everything is still pretty fresh in the old Gulliver. Only a few 18 year-olds would remember seeing this in the cinema if they ever saw it at all, and for those that did, the passing of time likely watered down the enthusiasm. I speak mostly of the feelings I had when I first heard of the sequel: about time, and it better be good. I enjoyed the first movie a lot, but it didn’t achieve greatness for me – this one didn’t either.
Hey, I’m no movie snob. I love some independent movies, and I favour character-driven stories over soulless plot-driven crap, but I’m not THAT guy at the party who only talks about that Chechnian 30 minute short about life on a pig farm as if it was the greatest piece of cinema in history. Despite my feeling that both Captain Fantastic and A Ghost Story are going to chart really high on my 2017 Best Of list, I remain a huge fan of populist movies. Pitch Perfect 3 is not one of them.
Back in 2010, I saw The Room. By then it had started to gather a head of steam as “the worst movie ever made” (and there’s a compelling argument for that, not just hype), and the beginning of the cult following that fills theaters these days. In those days it wan’t so much the event movie it is today, where everyone attends thinking they’re the next ironic comedy genius, riffing as the movie unreels. I don’t normally watch movies like that (though when Star Wars:TOT was rereleased in the late 90s, a friend and I got ejected for riffing on The Empire Strikes Back. Mea culpa, mea culpa …), I love and respect the medium too much to do that. The Room is, to me, simply a piece of shit movie.
I’m not ashamed to admit, I’m a fan of Tom Cruise movies. Not a fan of Tom Cruise the person, I should add, having never met him, but I have enjoyed his screen presence for about thirty years now. I think he’s a pretty decent actor too, when he tries – something he hasn’t done a lot of in a long time. Having watched his last offering The Mummy fall on the critics’ sword, and mostly fail to capture the imaginations of the paying public, his career badly needed a shot in the arm. It so happens that American Made, his second cinematic release of 2017, does exactly that.
AT THE FOOTHILLS OF MADNESS 