I was really into this for the first hour or so. Soderbergh-esque fast-talking (and casting) meets a very specific type of early-mid-2000s stylization (whether appealing or deterring) made for an unmistakable carnival ride of a film about a '60s game show creator turned '70s game show host who claimed in the '80s to be an assassin for the CIA (!), before less than a year later recanting (?).
The cast listing for this movie is excellent but unfortunately often underutilized.…
This is actually exactly what I thought Maximum Overdrive was going to be about the first time I watched that movie (with no context): a semi truck as a stand-in for a Yul Brynner-esque antagonist.
I loved the camera-work in this, which is made all the more impressive given this was a made-for-TV movie; this might be the most cinematic-looking TV-movie I've ever seen. The action is thrilling, the stakes are escalating, the runtime is clean - I really enjoyed…
No way Roland Emmerich put dust Venom in the moon. And no way dust Venom was actually a millenia-old bio-threat to a rip-off version of the Terminator Genisys AI, that made a prehistoric version of the Interstellar utopia uninhabitable. (Reader, if you've never in your life even heard of this film before, your guess about the plot is as good as mine.)
I'm honestly not really sure how to rate this, because the first hour isn't even that bad. If…
This movie looks like a living painting. The sets/locations and costumes look phenomenal. The makeup on Tatsuya Nakadai (Lord Hidetora Ichimonji) was kind of mesmerizing. All the performances are great, with Mieko Harada (Lady Kaede) being a standout. An epic, I'd always thought the plot structure/basis (at least in part or outline) was derived from Hamlet; turns out it's actually King Lear.
Who the hell am I (bi-quarterly identity crisis incoming 3...2...) to rate this any lower than a 5/5 anyhow?
Film Lodge Scavenger Hunt Week #20: Watch a Japanese film
Love the part where Tommy Lee Jones looks dead into the camera and says "What are we, some kind of no country for old men?"
