Skip to main content

Archive - R



Featuring:

Red
Red Hill
The Red Shoes
Righteous Kill
Rio
The Road
Rock'N'Rolla
Role Models
Run Fatboy Run

Red
(2010)

Bruce Willis actioner. Good fun for the first hour, with John Malkovich on particularly fine form ("They fed him LSD every day for 11 years"). It becomes a bit run-of-the-mill in the latter stages but you still get Helen Mirren with a big gun.

***

Red Hill
(2010)

Watchable but desperately unoriginal Aussie revenge thriller from Patrick Hughes (who definitely has a promising career ahead as a director, not so much as a writer). 

 True Blood's Ryan Kwanten plays a cop on his first day of work in a backwater town who has to deal with dark secrets when an escaped criminal returns home. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith's Tommy Lewis plays the convict, who has an elemental, Michael Myers-ish presence as events unfold.
**1/2

The Red Shoes
(1948)

A ravishing, spellbinding film from Powell & Pressburger, in the midst of a dazzling decade of productivity. On the acting front, Marius Goring and Moira Shearer are excellent but I was particularly impressed by Anton Walbrook's svengali.

*****

Righteous Kill
(2008)

Heinous cack. The only noteworthy aspect here is that there is some surprisingly effective misdirection (only because I expected the misdirection to be about as smart as this film gets when the actual reveal shows it to be even stupider). 

 Nothing is remotely convincing here; a hackneyed, Z-grade script and a number of decent and not-so decent actors going through the motions. Jon Avnet is generally a fairly humdrum director so none of this should be surprising.

**

Rio
(2011)

Aside from Scrat, the Ice Age films haven't been terribly impressive. One of the directors of those, Carlos Saldhana, delivers a warmer climate here and a story with more momentum to it. 

 This doesn't make up for the “by committee” nature of many of the plot elements and characters, but it does feel as if he actually wants to tell this story. Having a good villain helps considerably, and Jermain Clement brings in many of the laughs as the Shere Khan-esque Nigel.

***

The Road
(2009)

Grimly atmospheric, but there’s nothing really groundbreaking in this apocalyptic fare adapted from Cormac McCarthy's book. John Hillcoat does a grimy job (his The Proposition is superior) but the most affecting scenes are the flashbacks to life with Mortensen and his wife in their house in the face of the unnamed event.

***

Rock'N'Rolla
(2008)

The sooner Guy Ritchie stops writing his own scripts the better since this is never less than visually accomplished (there's an outstanding foot chase about halfway through) but is predictably tricksy and unengaging in plotting. Mark Strong, Idris Elba and Tom Wilkinson are all good value.

***

Role Models
(2008)

This starts off well enough, with Paul Rudd endearingly misanthropic and Sean William Scott playing Stiffler for the 35th time. But it quickly becomes a nauseating blend of crudity and sentiment that has blighted US comedy since Judd Apatow's reign began three or four years ago.

**
Run, Fatty, Run
(2007)

I prefer Jonathan Ross' title for Run, Fatboy, Run. An average, straight-to-video quality romcom elevated by Pegg's easy charm and, mostly, Dylan Moran's hilariously dour input from the sidelines. 

**1/2  

Labels:

Comments

Post a comment

Popular posts from this blog

You're not only wrong. You're wrong at the top of your voice.

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
I’ve seen comments suggesting that John Sturges’ thriller hasn’t aged well, which I find rather mystifying. Sure, some of the characterisations border on the cardboard, but the director imbues the story with a taut, economical backbone. 
Post a comment
Read more

She was addicted to Tums for a while.

Marriage Story (2019)
(SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.
Post a comment
Read more

She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…
Post a comment
Read more

It's a trip I won't forget, Avon.

Blake's 7 4.11: Orbit

Robert Holmes’ fourth and final script for the series is a belter, one that combines his trademark black comedy with the kind of life-or-death peril that makes some of his more high stakes scripts for Doctor Who (The Deadly Assassin and The Caves of Androzani for example) stand out. 
Post a comment
Read more

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…
Post a comment
Read more

So you made contact with the French operative?

Atomic Blonde (2017)
(SPOILERS) Well, I can certainly see why Focus Features opted to change the title from The Coldest City (the name of the graphic novel from which this is adapted). The Coldest City evokes a noirish, dour, subdued tone, a movie of slow-burn intrigue in the vein of John Le CarrĂ©. Atomic Blonde, to paraphrase its introductory text, is not that movie. As such, there’s something of a mismatch here, of the kind of Cold War tale it has its roots in and the furious, pop-soaked action spectacle director David Leitch is intent on turning it into. In the main, his choices succeed, but the result isn’t quite the clean getaway of his earlier (co-directed) John Wick.
Post a comment
Read more

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.
Post a comment
Read more

You must find the keys for me!

Doctor Who The Keys of Marinus
Most of the criticisms levelled at The Keys of Marinus over the past 50 years have been fair play, and yet it’s a story I return to as one of the more effortlessly watchable of the Hartnell era. Consequently, the one complaint I can’t really countenance is that it’s boring. While many a foray during this fledgling period drags its heels, even ones of undeniable quality in other areas, Marinus’ shifting soils and weekly adventures-in-miniature sustain interest, however inelegant the actual construction of those narratives may be. The quest premise also makes it a winner; it’s a format I have little resistance to, even when manifested, as here, in an often overtly budget-stricken manner.

Doctor Who has dabbled with the search structure elsewhere, most notably across The Key to Time season, and ultimately Marinus’ mission is even more of a MacGuffin than in that sextology, a means to string together what would otherwise be vignettes to little overall coherence…
Post a comment
Read more

It always seems a bit abstract, doesn’t it? Other people dying.

Game of Thrones Season Six
(SPOILERS) The most distracting thing about Season Six of Game of Thrones (and I’ve begun writing this at the end of the seventh episode, The Broken Man) is how breakneck its pace is, and how worryingly – only relatively, mind – upbeat it’s become. Suddenly, characters are meeting and joining forces, not necessarily mired in pits of despair but actually moving towards positive, attainable goals, even if those goals are ultimately doomed (depending on the party concerned). It feels, in a sense, that liberated from George R R Martin’s text, producers are going full-throttle, and you half-wonder if they’re using up too much plot and revelation too quickly, and will run out before the next two seasons are up. Then, I’m naturally wary of these things, well remembering how Babylon 5 suffered from packing all its goods into Season Four and was then given an ultimately wasted final season reprieve.

I’ve started this paragraph at the end of the eighth episode, No One (t…
Post a comment
Read more

I take Quaaludes 10-15 times a day for my "back pain", Adderall to stay focused, Xanax to take the edge off, part to mellow me out, cocaine to wake me back up again, and morphine... Well, because it's awesome.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Along with Pain & Gain and The Great Gatsby, The Wolf of Wall Street might be viewed as the completion of a loose 2013 trilogy on the subject of success and excess; the American Dream gone awry. It’s the superior picture to its fellows, by turns enthralling, absurd, outrageous and hilarious. This is the fieriest, most deliriously vibrant picture from the director since the millennium turned. Nevertheless, stood in the company of Goodfellas, the Martin Scorsese film from which The Wolf of Wall Street consciously takes many of its cues, it is found wanting.

I was vaguely familiar with the title, not because I knew much about Jordan Belfort but because the script had been in development for such a long time (Ridley Scott was attached at one time). So part of the pleasure of the film is discovering how widely the story diverges from the Wall Street template. “The Wolf of Wall Street” suggests one who towers over the city like a behemoth, rather than a guy …
Post a comment
Read more