Election week arthouse binge part 1: Desierto

Posted on November 7, 2016 by reelentropy

This is what most of the movie consists of. Image courtesy STX Entertainment.

Weeks ahead of potentially electing a bewigged narcissist whose central campaign promise is building a wall on the southern border, Alfonso Cuarón’s son, Jonás, makes his American writer/directorial debut — a film about a Mauser-toting psychopath who will kill anyone trying to cross the southern border.

Desierto follows Moises (Gael García Bernal) — there are just some minor, barely noticable religious themes at play here — one of about a dozen Mexicans packed into a truck crossing into the U.S. The truck’s engine fails, and they are forced to trek the rest of the way across the badlands. There, Sam (Jeffery Dean Morgan) discovers their tracks. He stalks and exterminates them.

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‘Hacksaw Ridge’ is OK, I guess

Posted on November 6, 2016 by reelentropy

Image courtesy Summit Entertainment.

Whenever I watch a World War II movie, I spend the entire time asking myself whether or not I should be watching Band of Brothers instead. Hacksaw Ridge is a movie split in two, and has two answers — “yes, definitely” and “No. Well, yeah, probably.”

Hacksaw Ridge tells the story of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), who became the first conscientious objector to win the Medal of Honor after dragging 75 wounded men to safety* while under artillery fire during the Battle of Okinawa. The first half is tough to get through, covering Doss’ insistence on joining the military and the boring courtroom drama that ensued, him meeting his boring wife, Dorothy (Teresa Palmer), a primer on his boring upbringing and all the boring abuse that he took during basic training. The back half, covering his heroics on the ridge, is pretty kick-ass.

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‘Doctor Strange’ and the Origin Story Blues

Posted on November 4, 2016 by reelentropy

As many jokes as this movie’s got, the only ones that land come from the conscious cape. Images courtesy Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios.

At long last, the wait is over. After a grueling campaign stretching more than a year back, it’s finally time for the most talked-about, hotly anticipated event of 2016.

I’m talking, of course, about the year’s sixth guaranteed smash-hit comic book movie, Doctor Strange.

The film tells the tale of Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), who starts the movie as a top global neurosurgeon. However, while texting and driving on the world’s most dangerous road, Strange careens off the edge of a cliff, shattering his hands and leaving him unable to return to surgery. Strange bankrupts himself trying to cure the nerve damage, and spends his last pennies going to Nepal chasing a miracle that had cured a former patient’s (Benjamin Bratt) severed spinal column. There, he meets the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton), who introduces him to magic.

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The Open Bar Review – Wes Craven

Posted on October 31, 2016 by reelentropy

In this week’s Open Bar Review, for Halloween we put together a career retrospective on Wes Craven, who died in August of last year. Rhiannon returns triumphantly to tell us all about it.

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Inferno is one third of a great movie, then it gets boring

Posted on October 28, 2016 by reelentropy

Images like this of Tom Hanks in Hell, seeing people punished in the manners Dante described while mysterious women in plague doctor masks walk through the chaos, lend an intensity to Inferno. Unfortunately, they cut off completely about a third of the way through the film. Images courtesy Columbia Pictures.

Oh, that’s right, Sony owns the rights to this series. That explains it.

In Inferno, the third film adaptation of Dan Brown’s novels, Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) returns to bring more obscure Catholic conspiracy theories into the mainstream. This go around starts with Langdon waking up in a hospital in Florence, Italy after suffering major head trauma and unable to remember the past two days. Soon after he comes to, a policewoman arrives at the hospital to kill him, and his doctor, Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones), takes him to her apartment for safekeeping. Langdon discovers he’s already embroiled in a desperate chase to find a virus engineered by the late billionaire psychopath Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster), which will release at midnight and wipe out half the human population. For laughably stupid reasons, Zobrist set the virus on a timer and left behind a series of clues to the its location themed around Dante’s Inferno.

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