Letterboxd — Your life in film

Oh, so, predictable, but I wasn't expecting anything more and you can cut the obviousness with a spoon. Seriously though, three Iron Man movies in now and they're very indistinguishable. There's some fun pulpiness to this one, most RDJ quirks that hit, some miss. They'll never get CG debris or ocean water to work. The kid was kinda lame, the Avengers callbacks were eye-rolling and easy but Kingsley was inspired with his limited screen time. Again, the pulp characterizations are…

Much time has been spent comparing Paul Thomas Anderson's films to Scorsese and Altman, but less is said about similarities with the films of John Huston. It's obvious that Huston is the top-billed influence in There Will Be Blood and The Master. The chief correlation being the theatrical and ostentatious acting style evident in Wise Blood, Huston's followup to the great Man Who Would Be King.

Brad Dourif proves himself one of the underrated geniuses of his generation as the…

It's the little things that add up in the big picture of this Middle Earth adventure. The dwarf snoring in the moths, the sticky sap in Radagast's hair, the goblin king with a tumor-chin, the infinitely charming quirks of Martin Freeman. These things go a long way in lighting the heavy load that the exposition sometimes becomes. The humor in general has always been a savior when the Middle Earth politics become too explicative in the series. Audiences can forget…

Bring to mind every 80s and 90s sci-fi film and there's a good chance Sphere is derivative of it in one way or another. The frustrating thing is that there are boatloads of great ideas in here. By here, I mean Crichton's novel, which I am going to to assume is an engrossing read. Right up my alley, I must say, and I plan on picking it up in the near future.

So what went wrong? My finger-wagging middle finger…

Classic in every sense and totally ripe for a remake. I smell big bucks down that direction. This story is ready for a detailed and expensive retelling. Not that John Huston doesn't go all out with depicting reality, but it is obviously limited to 1950s resources. Gregory Peck defines ham and I'd like to see Jeff Bridges take on the character. Rooster Cogburn and a piss-drunk Bridges comes to mind, but Ahab ain't no alcoholic, he's drunk on that unattainable…

Peter Hyams has an interesting career. He's like a sponge, this guy, soaking up all the tropes of the times. His first big screen break after TV work was the underrated sleaze-fest Busting from '74, a laid-back buddy caper that really personified the times and is a solid time capsule of how dirty they were. Capricorn One came a little later, then his absolutely weird 80s sci-fi outings, Outland and 2010 before returning to the buddy cops with this in…

It's 48 minutes in until the story actually begins. Not that Brando doesn't command the screen, but huge portions of the grieving young Kent bits are a true slog. It's 45 minutes until Reeves comes in and an hour until Hackman shows up. To say Superman is a poorly paced film is undeserved, though, for there are a ton of characters to introduce, and I had taken for granted the monstrosity of acting talent that was acquired. So many respected…

"Listen. The only reason I came back to this craphouse was to find out who did it, and I'm not leaving until I do. You understand?"

It's already an hour into the movie when Jack Carter utters this promise to a slovenly whore as his hands tighten around her arms and his jawline extends with menace. He's had enough traversing down the seedy underbelly of non-answers to his brother's murder and is at a breaking point. From moment one, it's…

As the lines between fact and fiction fall apart into a Peckinpah bloodbath climax, all I could wonder while I slowly lost interest is how badly I would have preferred a Teddy Roosevelt-centered biopic. Brian Keith as the president is without a doubt the best thing to watch. He gets some juicy dialogue and mannerisms to play with that are sadly pushed to the sidelines as Sean Connery masquerades around as an unconvincing Berber. I'm a proud apologist of the…