What wuz the most recent movie(s) you have seen?

[j7wild]

The Alamo (1960)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053580/



Produced and Directed by John Wayne, starring John Wayne as Davy Crockett.

This movie is a joke.

For being a movie about a historical event, it never explains the cause of the Texas Revolution and why the Battle of the Alamo took place.

The running time is 2 hours and 47 minutes.

The actual total running time for the battle sequences is about 12 minutes.

Most of the rest of the movie is John Wayne's dominating the screen time and being comical or preaching his personal and political views and beliefs that have nothing to do with the history of the Battle of the Alamo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Al...film)#Politics

An insult to everyone who fought and died on both sides at the Alamo and in the Texas Revolution.

This movie is evidence what happens when movie studios give an over-rated second rate actor who thinks he is an A-list actor (John Wayne) too much artistic and creative Carte Blanche!

I can't believe this insulting trash was nominated for Best Picture!!

I did some research:

the defenders at the Alamo were outnumbered 10-1.

Their weapons were gun powder muskets and gun powder handguns and a few cannon.

In 1836, when this event took place, the following weapons were not invented and/or available yet:

the 6 shot Revolver that used a self-contained metallic cartridges rather than loose powder, pistol ball, and percussion caps (1854), the Winchester repeating rifle (1866), the Gatling gun (1860), the Howitzer cannon (1859).

If the Alamo defenders had those weapons then, it would had been a different story for the Mexican Army.

1/5

[j7wild]

King Kong (1933)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024216/





Version watched:

the full 104 minutes restored uncut version in 1080p, which includes the following scenes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_K...d_restorations

I have never seen this.

The first time I've heard of King Kong was in 1976: the Dino De Laurentiis remake starring Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange and Charles Grodin.

People were fascinated with Jungle movies and movies depicting Apes and Primates back then? Really?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_K...lm)#Background

Amazing what they were able to do back then with movie making still in its infancy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_K...lm)#Production

This was made PreCode:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood

Fay Wray was definitely the original Scream Queen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scream_queen

Produced on a budget of $687,000 ($12 million by today's dollars), it set a record of grossing almost $90,000 ($1.7 million by today's dollars) in its first 4 days of theatrical release, with ticket prices ranging from 35 cents to 75 cents.

It went on to earn $2 million ($38 million by today's dollars) total in its first theatrical run.

This film is often credited for saving R.K.O. Pictures from bankruptcy and R.K.O. Pictures re-released in 1938, 1942, 1946, 1952 and 1956, each time with financial success.

In 1991, it was deemed "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

5/5

[j7wild]

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023238/





Another Hollywood PreCode production, starring Fay Wray (King Kong 1933) and based on an award winning short story by Richard Connell.

Filmed on the same jungle movie set that was later used for King Kong 1933, it tells the story of a self proclaimed Count living on a desolate Pacific Ocean island who hunts human beings as they were wild animals.

Leslie Banks as the Count is creepy looking and he reminds me of an early cross between Vincent Price and Bela Lugosi and Count Dracula.

A creepy, macabre and eye opening view of human nature and how the line between our nature as civilized man and our animalistic instinct to kill is very easily crossed.

This is the first and indubitably the best of numerous film adaptations of the story which include the 1956 Run for the Sun with Richard Widmark, the 1993 John Woo's Hard Target with Jean-Claude Van Damme, 1987 Predator and 2010 Predators, Battle Royale, Westworld, The Hunger Games and The Running Man.

The story was also inspiration for TV episodes of Get Smart, Lost In Space, Gilligan's Island, Fantasy Island, Bonanza, The Simpson, Law and Order: SVU, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Game Of Thrones and many others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mo...ame#Television

5/5

This movie's copyright lapsed into public domain in 1960 before it was renewed for home video in 1999.

[j7wild]

Annihilation (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2798920/



Most of the positive reviews I've read online about this movie have one thing in common: it's visually stunning i.e. as in pretty but pretty does not make a movie good.

It's the story that makes a movie good and the story in this movie is asinine right from the part where the government send Natalie Portman and 4 women (a psychiatrist, a physicist, a geomorphologist and a paramedic) to go into an anomaly not from this world and investigate it.

Now keep in mind that several fully trained military teams have entered that same alien anomaly before and only one of them have returned barely alive at first and now in a coma near death.

So here we have 5 women, one of them with prior military training having served in the U.S. Army for 7 years and the rest, well no military training at all - and they are all given firearms and no military escort.

Plus how the hell is a paramedic qualified to investigate and research something that's not of this earth?

The rest of the movie just makes no sense. It's supposed to be a sci-fi movie but there is nothing sci-fi about it.

Then there are the plot holes, so many of them you'd wonder whoever wrote the script didn't bother to have anyone read it and check it for continuity and mistakes and logic before the actual filming began.

Some of the reviews online said: amazing, thought provoking, unique.

What the heck? Were these reviewers paid by the studio to said those things?

Yes, it was amazing. An amazing waste of Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Yes, it was thought provoking. It provoked me to think the many different ways the 5 characters on screen could hurry up and die so the movie would hurry up and end.

Yes, it was unique. A unique piece of stupidity that should never had been made.

I can't believe this is from the same director who gave us the great film Ex Machina in 2015.

It's easy to see why this was released to Netflix: the audiences at test screenings didn't like it. The studio wanted the final cut changed with reshoots and rewrites and a new ending. The producer and director refused.

The studio, Paramount, decided to not take the financial risk to give it a wide domestic theatrical release and gave it to Netflix after it was in limited number of theaters for only 2 weeks.

This movie also reminds me of another recent aliens coming to Earth movie that gotten good reviews but was actually another piece of turd:

https://www.movie-list.com/forum/sho...-seen&p=238948

2/5

[j7wild]

Tomb Raider (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1365519/

Version I've watched:

XD RealD 3D Dolby Atmos

It was also available in IMAX but only in IMAX 2D.

The producers chose not to film it in IMAX 3D.





Nearly 14 years and 8 months after Lara Croft, portrayed by Angelina Jolie, last appeared on the silver screen, the Tomb Raider movie franchise has been rebooted with new actress Alicia Vikander taking over as the world famous Tomb Raiding Adventuress.

This is the origin story of how Lara Croft became a Tomb Raider.

There are scenes that looked like they were lifted frame by frame from the 2013 Tomb Raider video game reboot and its 2015 sequel Rise of the Tomb Raider.

It's easy to see why. This movie is co-produced by the same publisher of those 2 video games: Square Enix.

Miss Vikander bring a level of freshness and youthness into the character of Lara Croft and she does a decent debut as Lara Croft.

She is very athletic and physical like Lara Croft is in the video games. There were 2 scenes that left me breathless after watching them: I felt like I just ran the triathlon or I just spent a whole hour on the lifecycle at the gym.

As far as the story goes, there were a few familiar set pieces we have seen before in a Tomb Raider, Indiana Jones, National Treasure and Mummy movie.

But hopefully the next installment will feature a bigger, more daring, more adventurous, more polished story allowing Miss Vikander to grow and mature into the role of Miss Croft.

The ending left the door open for a sequel but of course wether there is a next movie or not, it all depends on how well this film does at the box office domestically and internationally.

3.5/5

[j7wild]

I binge watched over a 3 days period, all 9 episodes of the Dutch TV mini-series

Tabula Rasa

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5197860/






What a fantastic and suspenseful horror show.

Every episodes has clues meant to either give you pieces of the puzzle to solve the big mystery or to throw you off.

Each time a major revelation is unveiled, I didn't see it coming and I would never had guessed it.

When everything is revealed in the 9th and final episode, I still didn't get anything correctly and I am usually good at solving puzzles in mystery movies.



It's now available on Netflix.

5/5

[j7wild]

Death Wish (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1137450/





In 1974, a movie about an ordinary New York man turned vigilante after his wife and daughter were attacked by criminals took the world by storm.

The timing of that film was perfect at the time when New York city was the epitome of high violent crime rate, when most people in the USA were fed up with the system especially after the turmoil and chaos of the 1960's while this country was still looking for a way out of the Vietnam War and to heal from the causes and effects of it.

It was a dark social criticism of the way things were then.

Fast forward 44 years later, someone decided to remake the film starring Bruce Willis.

That someone is director Eli Roth, known for the Saw and Hostel horror franchises.

The premise of the movie is the same as the original, but the times have changed and the timing of this movie's release, originally scheduled for November and pushed back until now is horrible - at a time when this country has been affected by mass shootings after mass shootings and heated national debates rage on on how to solve this country's problem of gun violence.

In the original film, Charles Bronson's Paul Kersey was a New York city architect.

In this remake, Bruce Willis' Paul Kersey is a Chicago surgeon.

After seeing so many action films in the past 30 years starring Bruce Willis as the hero (or anti-hero) who easily dispatches the bad guys without hardly any effort, it's difficult to take Willis seriously.

Heck! This could had very easily been a Die Hard movie with a smaller body count:

if the title card was changed from Death Wish to Die Hard 6, you would not had known the difference.

Also how many similar movies with similar "Vigilante Revenge" premises of one person taking out a lot of bad people single handedly have we seen since 1974?

Too many!

The Taken franchise, Denzel Washington's The Equalizer, Jodie Foster's The Brave One, Robert De Niro's Taxi Driver and many others including Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2 have sort of desensitized us and made us impervious to the impact of such movies.

2/5

[j7wild]

This review contains SPOILERS if you have not seen this movie!!

Stand By Me (1986)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092005/



This movie based on a Stephen King's novella was released in 1986 and I have never seen it.

But for the last 31+ years, I have constantly heard about how it's one of the best Stephen King's movies ever.

Seems like each time there is a new movie based on a Stephen King's novel, the reviews will always find ways to compare it to Stand By Me.

Now that I have seen it, I have to disagree.

What is so good about it?

It's about 4 kids in a small town whom on the last day of Summer, [in the USA that day is always] Labor Day weekend in 1959, decide to walk 30 or so miles, following the railroad tracks that lead out of town, to go see the dead body of a kid that went missing.

Along the way they talk about stuff that kids talk about: cartoons, comics, food, school, teachers, parents, girls, etc.

The movie is 1 hour and 29 minutes long including credits. For over an hour they walk and walk while they talk and bicker and argue and fight: the usual things 12 years old kids do together back in the days before electronic entertainment devices kept kids indoors and they get into some shenanigans like climbing the chain link fence to enter a junkyard where they just sit around and throw rocks at an aluminum can.

When they finally arrive at their destination and find the missing kid's dead body that has been decomposing in the woods for days, that part was pretty tame as in "oh so that's what a dead body looks like!"

I am not trying to be morbid but being this is a Stephen King's movie, that scene should not have been so tame. If it was just any movie not based on any Stephen King's novel, sure let it be tame and boring.

There is a subplot involving the town bully (played by a very young Kiefer Sutherland) and his gang of hooligans, one of them just so happen to be the brother of one of the 4 kids and they also have some sort of a connection to the missing kid's dead body.

The 4 kids are played by River Phoenix (R.I.P.), Corey Feldman (probably best knowns for The Goonies, Gremlins and The Lost Boys), Wil Wheaton (Will Crusher on Star Trek The Next Generation) and Jerry O'Connell (who has been in just about every TV series and movies imaginable in the past 31 years and who grew up to marry hottie blue Rebecca Romijn. Lucky Bastard!!)

They do a very good job in their roles being such young and inexperienced actors at the time and I give them kudos for their performances but not only does the movie pretty much doesn't go anywhere and furthermore it leaves an issue that arises from the final dramatic scene unresolved.

I did some research. Since 1976, starting with Carrie, there has been 68 movies, TV series, TV mini-series and short based on works by Stephen King plus 2 more that are currently in the works.

Sure some of them were pretty bad and not even worth watching if you haven't seen them or worth a second viewing if you'd already seen them.

But even if you took the worst Stephen King's movies like Thinner, Sleepwalkers, Riding the Bullet, The Mangler and Children of the Corn, their stories are still more interesting and eventful than the one in Stand By Me.

2/5

[j7wild]

This review contains SPOILERS if you have not seen this movie!!

The Commuter (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1590193/

A guy (Liam Neeson) rides a commuter train in NY/NJ for 10 years.

One day during the afternoon commute home, a woman stranger sits down across from him and offers his $100,000 to find someone on a train - someone with a bag that she said doesn't belong to that person.

He has until the train makes the final stop in the early evening to find that man.

Then the woman gets up and steps off the train.

The train is 6 passenger car long with each car able to hold about 60 passengers.

I am only 34 min into the movie and well we have a problem: it's absurd!!

The woman is no longer on the train but she seems to have enough people on there to see everything that Liam Neeson character is doing including hearing what he said to any other person on that train, regardless of whether that person is another passenger or a train ticket taker or a conductor.

She also has the resources and power to be able to call up the cell phone belonging to anyone on the train and tell them: "hey, I need to speak to that guy that looks like Llam Neeson character, please pass him the phone" so she can give him further instructions or warn him that he is breaking the rules by calling the police when he made a cell phone call to the police.

Yes I understand movies are make believe and I am aware we sometimes have to suspend our sense of disbeliefs to enjoy a movie: i.e. the hero can outrun machine gun fire and not get hit once or survive being in a car being engulfed by a fiery explosion while plunging down the side of a 300 foot cliff or jump out an airplane without a parachute and not die.

But this is just too ridiculously far fetched and idiotic for me.

So instead of me continuing to watch so I may find out 1. why the woman wants Liam Neeson character to find the person with the bag and 2. what is in that bag and 3. how is she able to be able to keep tab on him and call every cell phone belonging to anyone and everyone on the train, while the train is stil making stops every few minutes with existing passengers leaving the train and new passengers getting on the train, I am not watching this anymore.

Now if they'd only worked as hard in polishing the script and not making it so cliche' and full of annoying nuisances as in the effort they put in in making some very nice posters for this film, maybe it would had been more watchable:

[j7wild]

Ready Player One (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1677720/









Steven Spielberg.

When you hear that name, you think of who he is and how much he has given to the world.

A director, producer and writer whom for over the last 4 decades has been synonymous with some the best escapism on the silver screen and on the TV screen.

His early work Duel on TV in 1971 and The Sugarland Express on the big screen in 1974 proved that even back then as a first time director, he had range and potential and he was destined for something bigger than himself.

His next big screen work Jaws invented and coined the word Blockbuster and started the cultural phenomenon of the Summer Blockbuster movies.

Jaws was followed by the science fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind which made the world ask "are we really alone in the Universe?"

Then Spielberg made his two biggest blockbusters to date:

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

2 movies which made movie studios take notice and realize that to make money in Hollywood, you have to give the audience what they want:

multi-million dollars budget, quality scripts, lots of action and excellent special effects.

Spielberg followed those 2 hits with more hits: 2 Gremlins movies, 3 Back To The Future films, 2 sequels to Raiders Of The Lost Ark, 2 Jurassic Park movies and two science fiction films named Minority Report and Artificial Intelligence;

plus several very successful TV series while at the same time trying his director's skills at more serious grown up oriented films including winning two Best Director Academy Awards for Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List.

By the early 2000's Spielberg decided to do more serious films.

Ready Player One is Spielberg's first forage into escapism and fantasy films since his 2008 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which wasn't very good.

This is his first film in 10 years aimed at the same audience E.T., Back To The Future, Jurassic Park were made for: the pre-teen and teenage movie audiences.

This movie has over 100 cultural and visual references to films, television shows, toys, and video games from the 1970's to 2010's.

It's visually impressive, the cultural references are nice to look at if you can spot them out.

Some are obvious, some are not and they go by so quick on the screen, most of them in a quick flash, you will need to wait for the DVD and replay the movie in slow motion to spot them all.

Also not all of them are in visual form. Many of them are embedded in the dialogue that you have to pay attention to.

Now on to the story which is very simple:

in the year 2045, when they are not sleeping, eating, working and taking bathroom breaks, almost everyone is living in a virtual reality world named OASIS accessible only while wearing virtual reality goggles - not much different than today where almost everyone is on a tablet or smart phone posting selfies on Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram and other social network.

The creator of OASIS has left an Easter Egg in this constant changing never the same virtual world twice.

The person who finds this Easter Egg through a quest that need to be complete will become the sole owner and controller of OASIS.

That is all I can tell you about the story but the problem with this film, as visually stunning as it is, there is not much substance to it.

There were many times I didn't really care if the main character finds the Easter Egg or not.

The character has not been developed enough for me to care about him.

Unlike in E.T. where we really cared that Elliott stayed one step ahead of the Feds so he can make sure his little out of the world buddy goes home safe;

or in Raiders Of The Lost Ark where we cheered for Indiana Jones to find the Lost Ark before those pesky Nazis do so the world can stay free;

or in Back To The Future where we really want Marty to get to his parents in time back in 1955 to make them kiss each other so he and his sibling won't disappear into thin air in the future;

or in Jurassic Park where we were actually rooting for the 2 annoyingly spoiled kids to run fast and hide quick enough so they don't become a snack for the T-Rex;

or finally in Minority Report where we really wanted that crazy guy to get caught by the Pre-Crime Police and put away for good for a murder he hasn't committed.

In those films we truly cared about the fate of the main characters.

In Ready Player One, I could care less.

Even the bad people in this did not feel at all menacing to me unlike the Nazis in Raiders or the T-Rex in Jurassic Park.

Let me put it in another way that everyone can understand:

Who cares who control OASIS as long as when I put my VR goggles on every day, it's there ready for me to play in it.

Same as today who cares who controls Apple or Google or the internet as long as it's there every time I get online.

Sorry Steven, you and I have been buddies for a long time, but better luck next time:

next time being 2020 when you bring us the next Indiana Jones movie and I surely do hope it will be better than the last one.

2/5

[j7wild]

Den Of Thieves (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1259528/



This is a by the number bank heist movie that just doesn't live up to its own ambition due to several inherently mistakes and faults with it:

1. at 2 hours and 20 minutes including ending credits, it's too long;

2. there are subplots in it that don't bring anything to the story, don't develop the characters, that appear here and there and then disappear without continuation and/or closure which could had been left out and would not had affected the story one bit while making the running time more bearable;

3. the good guys are a bunch of Los Angeles Sheriff Department Major Crimes cops lead by a drunken, rude and not very honest cop played by Gerard Butler, who comes across as a creep that makes you not care if he catches the bad guys or not.

You'll almost wish him dead. Well, I did. I was hoping for him to catch a couple of bullets before the movie's halfway mark and die;

and

4. we've seen this movie before!! It's called

Michael Mann's Heat

Same story: a criminal crew out to make a big bank heist score and a law enforcement crew out to catch them.

But unlike the 1995 movie where the bad guy is played by Robert De Niro and the good guy is played by Al Pacino and they are both likable characters that you would find yourself rooting for both of them:

you wanted the good guy to catch the bad guy but at the same time you also wanted the bad guy to get away.

in this movie you don't care about either characters. They are both not likable and the actors who played them are forgettable with weak screen presence.

Then there are several scenes that are like pieces to a jigsaw puzzle that conveniently fall into their places on their own.

Like the one scene where the cops are driving down the streets of Los Angeles and they see a black SUV with all blacked out side and back windows about a quarter mile ahead driving at normal speed and following traffic laws as to not draw attention to itself.

The only information the cops have is that the bad guys are somewhere in the area and from that distance they knew the SUV contained the bad guys???

Geee... Do all criminals in Los Angeles drive black SUVs or is there some kind of SUV profiling going on in the Los Angeles Sheriff Department? That is just poor and lazy script writing. Is that a plot device by definition? I am not sure but it sure it's absurd and it insults my usually open minded sense of disbelief.

Oh by the way, there is a sequel confirmed in the works. Please don't!!

1/5

[j7wild]

Hostiles (2017)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5478478/





In 1892, in an army fort in New Mexico, U.S. Army captain Blocker (Christian Bale) just weeks from retirement is given one last assignment:

to safely escort a dying Cheyenne War Chief (Wes Studi) and his family of 4 from New Mexico to his tribal land in Montana where he will be allowed to live out his remaining days there.

Blocker refuses the assignment because many years earlier during the war between the Cheyenne and the White Man, that same War Chief was responsible for the deaths of many of his friends and fellow Army troopers.

Blocker is told by his superior if he doesn't perform this last assignment, which comes down from the President of the United States and it's also been widely covered in the newspapers, his pension and retirement will be forfeited and he will face a court martial.

Blocker reluctantly takes the assignment and during the many days long horse ride journey to Montana, he and the War Chief and the soldiers in their armed escort detail come across murderous Comanche indians, armed criminals and a woman (Rosamund Pike) who is recently widowed.

This is a powerful film with an intellectually poignant story containing deep and rich human characters who are smartly given intelligent dialogue.

Beautifully photographed in New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado and accompanied throughout by a melancholy musical soundtrack, this is an Oscar worthy movie with the following message:

no matter who we are, what race we are, what higher power we worship to, we all have the same destination at the end of this arduous journey of ours that we call life: Death.

But before that time comes for every one of us, what we do in the time that is given to us, how we grow and learn during it and how we are remembered by those we meet along the way and those we leave behind will always be what defines us.

This is a movie worthy of:

Best Picture
Best Director and Best Screenplay (Scott Cooper - who also directed and wrote Crazy Heart and Out Of The Furnace)
Best Photography (Masanobu Takayanagi - The Grey)
Best Editing (Tom Cross - nominated for La La Land and won for Whiplash)
Best Actor (Christian Bale)
Best Actress (Rosamund Pike - Die Another Day and Gone Girl)
Best Supporting Actor (Wes Studi)
Best Supporting Actor (Rory Cochrane - Master Sgt. Thomas Metz who has served with Captain Blocker for over 20 years)

Even the young actor, Xavier Horsechief

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm9214428/

who plays the War Chief's grandson Little Bear, does an excellent acting job considering the very few lines of dialogues he had.

So why was this film snubbed this year at the Academy Awards nomination?

Is it because it portrays American Indians as human beings and not as the savages that Hollywood and the history books have done so for so long and continues to do so?

Is it also because it portrays the White man as the murderer of many Native Americans and the cause of the suffering that still exists nowadays for many of them?

This movie is easily 10 times better than that stupid The Shape Of Water which should never have been nominated for Best Picture, much less won.

Even the other films that were nominated for Best Picture, The Finest Hour and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri were much much better than The Shape Of Water.

Just the final 60 seconds of this movie before it starts to fade out into the directorial credits frame will make you cry and think about your journey of life.

5/5

[j7wild]

You Were Never Really Here (2017)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5742374/



How dare they even compare this pretentious trash to Taxi Driver?





Joe, a veteran who suffers from PTSD, is currently employed to help find and rescue runaway and missing girls, many of them the victims of human trafficking.

A premise that could had been good if told correctly but this movie sucks so bad!

The narrative is so messy and the exposure so unintelligible with quick frames of Joe's violent flashbacks which in turn takes away the pacing and momentum of the story and at the same time, destroying any little suspense and tension the movie itself was trying to create for the viewers.

Why did this movie receive

87% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes
84% approved on Metacritic
7.1 on IMDB
75% of the Google Users who've seen it liked it

and get these reviews???

*Writer-director Lynne Ramsay's masterful thriller turns the "hitman movie" genre on its ear with a fractured, impressionistic style that matches Joe's jumbled mind.

*"You Were Never Really Here" is a powerful assault of a film.

*Ramsay is at the height of her filmmaking powers here, maximizing the impact of her brutal story. Phoenix is ideally cast as a force that's unstoppable until the big case breaks his momentum.

*Director Lynne Ramsay has created an unnerving and aggressive cinematic experience.

I think this review is more fitting:

*We do not deserve Lynne Ramsay.

No we don't !!

This woman doesn't know how to direct a suspenseful psychological thriller.

I don't have anything against women film directors.

Some of the best directors working today are women like Kathlyn Bigelow, Patty Jenkins, Sofia Coppola.

This is director Lynne Ramsay resume:

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0708903/#director

I have never heard of her before tonight nor have I ever seen any other films she had previously directed.

Do yourself a favor and run, don't walk, run far and far away from this movie.

1/5

[j7wild]

Red Sparrow (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2873282



Director Francis Lawrence, who previously directed Jennifer Lawrence (no relation between them two) in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and The Hunger Games: Mockinjay Part 1 and 2, adapts the acclaimed spy novel Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews to the screen, starring Jennifer Lawrence in the title role.

The story is very simple:

Dominika Egorova, or "Red Sparrow", is a former Russian ballerina who is forced by her uncle to undergo espionage training for the Russian government at the Sparrow School, where people are trained to seduce their targets.

Her mission is to identify a high ranking official inside the SVR RF, the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation formerly known as the KGB, who is also a double agent working as a CIA mole.

Jennifer Lawrence gives her usual wooden performance in the title role accented by her perpetual bug-eyed deer in the headlights facial expression.

The supporting cast composed of Joel Edgerton, Charlotte Rampling, Matthias Schoenaerts, Ciarán Hinds, Jeremy Irons, Mary-Louise Parker and many others come across even more wooden and disinterested than Lawrence.

The narrative of the story here tries to be more in the fashion of great spy thrillers film such as John le Carré's The Little Drummer Girl, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Russia House than the more action oriented spy thrillers such as the James Bond or Jason Bourne films but even at that, it doesn't deliver.

Why?

Because the movie itself fails to create any tension, thrills, chills and sense of dread due to an inept shallow screenplay that have taken the content of its source novel and chopped it up into a 140 minutes over long slower than molasses film made up of different set pieces:

some of those just felt forced, unnecessary and unrelated to the whole, resulting in a final cut being devoid of any action which is okay if the rest of the whole was interesting and intelligent but it's not.

Furthermore this was also supposed to be a smart and sexy spy thriller but there is nothing smart nor sexy about it when it equates brutal violence to sexiness.

By the time the identity of the mole is revealed and the climactic scene is shown, a scene which I won't spoil but I will say it's the only thing in this long not very hot mess that gave it anything sense and identity vaguely resembling a spy thriller, you'd want to ask yourself why did you waste nearly 140 minutes of your life watching this drivel without any redeeming social value.

The final frame before the ending credits left this open for a sequel.

Will Red Sparrow become another film franchise for Jennifer Lawrence?

I sincerely hope not!!

Heck, if the command and operational procedures and techniques shown in this fim is really how the Russian intelligence agencies operate, I can clearly see why they lost the Cold War!



2/5

[j7wild]

Skyjacked (1972)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069278



Decent thriller with good acting on the part of both Charlton Heston as the Captain of the hijacked Boeing 707 and a young James Brolin as the hijacker.

It features all the cliched characters you will come to expect in a standard 1970's disaster film:



the U.S. Senator who is on a secret mission for the President and he just happens to be on the wrong flight;

the young lovers couple: 20 year old Susan Dey's first movie role, she went on to play in the Partridge Family and in L.A. Law;

the expectant mother who is not due for another month but of course, excitement and tensions in a movie like this will always induce early labor;



the airliner co-pilot who is in love with the Head Stewardess and hoping she will fall in love with him;

the Head Stewardess who is having an affair with Charlton Heston's Captain character, who is of course married.

Heck! You can't get any better than this bunch of God Forsaken paper thin characters!



I do have a complaint about the accuracy of this film when the hijacked airliner is diverted into restricted Russian airspace before landing in Moscow.

That's not a 1970's Russian jet fighter and Russian soldiers don't use those automatic rifles.







4/5