‘Free Fire’ a major disappointment

Posted on April 24, 2017 by reelentropy

Free Fire mostly wastes a terrific cast, headlined by Larson. With reaction shots not where the should be and lines getting muffled at random, in most cases, they’re simply not allowed to perform. Copely is the only one who really rises above it. Images courtesy A24.

4/10 After a blockbuster-a-week March, April has mostly been quiet, with studios giving a week’s deference to The Fate of the Furious and two weeks to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, sure to be two of the biggest movies of the year. While Fate was the month’s highlight for casual moviegoers, most of the excitement for cinephiles was around Free Fire. It had recent Oscar winner Brie Larson backed up by Armie Hammer, Sharlto Copely and Cillian Murphy, A24 distributing, Martin Scorsese attached as executive producer and a trailer that looked like that group having all the fun in the world-

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Also go see ‘Your Name.’

Posted on April 20, 2017 by reelentropy

Image courtesy Toho.

7/10 A week after a major Sony investment became a flop in part because of a white-washing controversy, the highest-grossing anime movie of all time quietly expanded to American theaters.

It deserves a much noisier reception.

Your Name. is an enchanting love story about rural Japanese woman Mitsuha Miyamizu (Mone Kamishiraishi) and brash Tokyo boy Taki Tachibana (Ryunosuke Kamiki). Under the tail of the Tiamat Comet, they begin to intermittently Freaky Friday into each other’s bodies for days at a time. Together, they nourish Tachibana’s budding office romance and bring Miyamizu closer to her family.

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Go see ‘The Boss Baby’ if you haven’t

Posted on April 20, 2017 by reelentropy

It really is a shame that it was Dreamworks and not Pixar that ended up making this extended play sequence of a movie — the superior studio’s fabled attention to detail is sorely missed. Image courtesy 20th Century Fox.

8/10 Remember Ghost in the Shell? Just three weeks later, it’s probably slipped everyone’s mind, but it was a pretty big deal to Sony. They were real proud of that movie, and thought it was going to be a bit of a gravy train.

It face-planted over its March 31 debut to the tune of just $18.7 million. The $110 million movie has made just $37.1 million over three weeks, and has already been dropped by more than 1,300 theaters.

But that wasn’t the only shocker of the weekend. Expected to finish behind Beauty and the Beast, the unheralded Boss Baby came out of nowhere to score a $50.2 million opening and retain the no. 1 spot until Fate of the Furious came out. It’s brought in $116.8 million to date.

So, is this surprise heavyweight any good?

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‘Fate of the Furious’ is solid

Posted on April 14, 2017 by reelentropy

Images courtesy Universal Pictures.

7/10 Remember when these guys were just stealing Playstations?

In Fate of the Furious, after 30 disposable minutes of honeymooning and little league soccer, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel, who also produces) inexplicably betrays his team, stealing an EMP device and landing Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) in German prison. The gang learns from their super-secret government buddy, Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell), that Toretto is now working with a super-dooper-secret cyberterrorist called Cipher (Joe Pantoliano Charlize Theron). They band together with the last movie’s villain, Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), to take Toretto down.

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Anime adaptation a generic ‘Ghost’ in a switched-up ‘Shell’

Posted on March 31, 2017 by reelentropy

Johansson, for her part, looks mostly bored in the role. Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

5/10 Boring. Risk-free. Done to death.

White-washed, and not just in the controversial casting decisions. Ghost in the Shell is a uniquely Japanese property, and much needed to be changed for it to translate from late ’80s Japanese audiences to mid ’10s global audiences. But instead of identifying how to do that while maintaining its potency, producers simply extracted everything from the movie that isn’t in the current American mainstream, which is almost everything that makes the property unique, and replaced it with essentially nothing. Such is the sad destiny of Japanese media in Hollywood.

In the future, more than 70 percent of the population uses cybernetic augmentations. Major Mira Killian (Scarlett Johansson) uses cybernetic prosthetics for almost 100 percent of her body after the one she was born with was mangled in an accident. With her new highly tactical shell, she leads Japan’s Section 9 counter-terrorism unit.

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