Nerves, belly laughs from brilliant debut ‘Sorry to Bother You’

Posted on July 31, 2018 by reelentropy

Stanfield carries the film, but he’s surrounded by a low-key cast of all stars in Tessa Thompson, Terry Crews, Danny Glover, Armie Hammer and the voices of David Cross and Patton Oswalt. Image courtesy Annapurna Pictures.

9/10 Sorry to Bother You is a special, special film.

Cassius “Cash is” Green (Lakeith Stanfield) is an impoverished Oakland resident living out of his uncle’s garage. He starts the film by getting a call center job, which gets him nowhere fast until he starts using his “white voice,” a nasal imitation of a wealthier white salesman (voice of David Cross). Elsewhere, millions of Americans are escaping poverty by signing up with WorryFree, a new company that directly provides housing and food instead of wages on a lifetime contract.

With the power of his white voice, Green quickly rises through the ranks at his call center, and is soon promoted from the basement selling encyclopedias to the top floor, where he sells arms and cheap labor from WorryFree.

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‘Skyscraper’ good at times, needed a plotscraper

Posted on July 31, 2018 by reelentropy

This is it. This is the whole movie. Images courtesy Universal Pictures.

4/10 Skyscraper’s got everything. It’s got The Rock, it’s got a 1.1 kilometer tall building, it’s got everything. The most ironic thing it has, though, is junk. There’s too much junk in this movie.

Skyscraper follows Will Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson), an FBI agent-turned security contractor after a hostage situation gone wrong left him with one leg severed below the knee. The movie opens on him evaluating security at The Pearl, the newly completed vertical city in Hong Kong that stands as the tallest building in the world by almost 800 feet. After Sawyer gives it the green light, a gang of international terrorists de-activates the building’s sprinkler system and sets it on fire. With him a kilometer away and his wife and children locked above the blaze, Sawyer must find a way back inside the building.

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Second time is more charming, but still lacks that special something

Posted on July 31, 2018 by reelentropy

I’m not sure how I feel about the supersuits for some of the newer Avengers. These are a perfect blend of cartoonish and feeling like they’re necessary to the characters, but I almost feel like that should go one way or the other. Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

8/10 Ant-Man and the Wasp is wonderful. Unfortunately, because I’m pathologically incapable of enjoying Marvel movies, it still leaves me wanting.

The film joins The Avengers’ size-shifting wonder Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) at the end of his long house arrest sentence following his actions in Captain America: Civil War. He dreams he receives a message from Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), the wife and mother of former associates Hank Pym and Hope van Dyne (Michael Douglas and Evangeline Lilly) who was lost in quantum space decades ago when she sacrificed herself to stop a missile. They drag Lang out of his home in the hopes that he can help them recover Janet, but their search is harried by Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), a former SHIELD assassin whose body is disintegrating and needs quantum energy to preserve her life.

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‘First Purge’ is the first great purge movie

Posted on July 30, 2018 by reelentropy

This is some of the cheekiest shit I have ever seen. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

9/10 The Purge movies continue to baffle me with cultural staying power that outsizes their box office numbers. What started as a cut-rate home invasion movie with an elaborate premise has captured the American imagination, fitting like a glove onto economic and racial anxieties that have only grown worse since the series’ debut.

But The First Purge immediately becomes the only entry that I would call “good.” It might even be great.

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‘The Dark Knight’ 10 years later

Posted on July 18, 2018 by reelentropy

Images courtesy Warner Bros.

It’s the Citizen Kane of superhero movies.

That comparison gets thrown around a little more often than it should, but it’s completely appropriate in this case. Citizen Kane in 1941 was really the movie that alerted mass audiences to the fact that movies are, in fact, art, and a host of imitators followed immediately in its wake – there’s more to it than this, but basically every film noir released in the coming decade, and even up to today, owes its existence to Citizen Kane.

The Dark Knight is one of only a handful of films in history that truly had a comparable impact. It brought with it this sudden inescapable realization that comic book movies, these pulpy crowd-pleasing things, could be art. Not just art, they could be the pinnacle of their format.

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