I’ll say this for the movie — it’s got style. Images courtesy Warner Bros.
3/10 GOOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING, SKULL ISLAND!
In 1973, just a day after saying goodnight to Saigon, top-ranking government official Bill Randa (John Goodman) gets the green light for an expedition to Skull Island, an uncharted land mass surrounded by a perpetual storm system revealed by the government’s new satellites. Randa rounds up Air Force lieutenant colonel Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackman) and his team to fly to the island, ex-British special forces captain James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston) to navigate once there and photojournalist Mason Weaver (Brie Larson), who brings her camera to shoot the landscape. The crew begins by bombing the island to see if it has any caves, which draws the ire of comrade King Kong, the massive ape that rules the island, who swats their choppers down like flies. From there, the team is split between Packard, who wants to dig in deep and shoot on sight, and Conrad, who wants to not leave in plastic as a numbered corpse. With a refueling rendezvous scheduled in three days, the group’s only hope is to fight their way to the north end of the country island.
Images courtesy 20th Century Fox.
4/10 After 17 years and nine movies, comic book die-hards are finally getting the Logan they always wanted — the warrior-poet who curses like a sailor as he graphically dismembers other characters, barely in control of his feral rage.
Too bad he’s too old to do any of that.
In Logan, mutants suddenly stopped being born years ago, and by 2029, they are all but extinct. Logan (Hugh Jackman) works as a limo driver in El Paso, Texas, to take care of a dementia-stricken Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart). Unable to escape his violent past, Logan is sought out to protect Laura (Dafne Keen), a young clone/child of him, from Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) and his band of cybernetically enhanced Reavers.
Photo by Chris Pizello, AP.
Presenters shocked the world last night by presenting the Academy Award for Best Picture to the wrong movie due to a clerical error. While no one wanted this onstage situation, in which La La Land producers were asked to physically hand their Oscars over to Moonlight, it’s nice to have such a wonderful visual representation of what essentially happened behind the scenes.
Reel Entropy 