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| EFC STATS |
| Movies Listed: |
31677 |
| Total Ratings: |
248028 |
| Total Reviews: |
28001 |
![[170978409 Hits]](/cgi-bin/gd.cgi?170978409)
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| WILDLIFE |
"Another family falls apart with some nice details."
Jay Seaver says... ""Wildlife" is a sort of anti-blockbuster, almost to a fault, the sort of thing that is real and honest but in a way that can seem just as generic as the fantasies on the other end of the spectrum. Just looking at it, one sees that director Paul Dano cast a pretty Paul Dano-looking kid to play the main part, while Carey Mulligan often seemed to be playing Julianne Moore playing her character. It's a very familiar indie rite of passage, this sort of collapsing marriage period piece." (more)
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| HALLOWEEN (2018) |
"Boo!"
Peter Sobczynski says... "You know that a horror franchise has been going on for a long time when the producers announce that the next film in the series is going to deal with the numerous substandard sequels and desperate plot twists thrown in to prop up interest by doing a metaphorical clearing of the decks that eliminates all of those followups from the continuity and going back to doing a straightforward continuation to the original. You know that a horror franchise has really grown a little long in the tooth when the producers make that announcement and you realize that this is the second time in the legacy of the series where they have made just such a maneuver. That is what has happened with “Halloween,” John Carpenter’s mercilessly effective 1978 breakthrough that revolutionized the genre, made a star out of then-unknown Jamie Lee Curtis, introduced Michael Myers into the pantheon of legendary horror characters and remains one of the most stylishly made and genuinely effective horror films ever made. After becoming one of the most successful independent films ever made when it came out, it inspired an increasingly convoluted string of lackluster sequels that threw in new characters, killed off old ones who could no longer be lured back into the fold and which were utter indistinct from most of the ripoffs and retreads that it inspired in the first place. (The only good one of the bunch was “Halloween III: Season of the Witch” (1982), a standalone effort that told a completely unrelated and fairly crazy story that enraged fans when it first came out but which has gone on to become a cult favorite of its own.) Having spit the bit on all of the sequels save for the middling “Halloween II” (1981)—the series later killed her off off-screen in order to explain her absence—Jamie Lee Curtis made a grand return to the series that helped put her on the map with “Halloween: H20” (1998), a ostensibly serious-minded film meant to tie in with the 20th anniversary of the original that would ignore all of the sequels after “Halloween II” and find Laurie Strode, now a nervous wreck with a drinking problem and an uneasy relationship with her slaughter-aged child, coming face to blank face once again with the monster that didn’t kill her but did destroy her life." (more)
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| LOST, FOUND |
"Missing kid and focus."
Jay Seaver says... "Though the listings suggest that "Lost, Found" is a drama built around divorce, it's actually a thriller that becomes a social-justice story, and it's just as confused as it sounds. It plays like the filmmakers only realized who the interesting characters were halfway through and had a heck of a time giving them the focus they deserved while also making the film they originally set out to make." (more)
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| FIRST MAN |
"One Shot"
Peter Sobczynski says... "Anyone planning on making a film about the life and achievements of astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, has to acknowledge two potential hurdles large enough to send even the most ambitious filmmakers scurrying away. For one thing, there is the fact that pretty much every potential ticket buyer knows the particulars of the story, or at least the particular of how it turns out. For another, there is the knowledge that the so-called space race that America took part in during the Fifties and Sixties has already spawned a number of exemplary films running the gamut from narrative features like Phillip Kaufman’s genuine epic “The Right Stuff” (1983) and Ron Howard’s exemplary “Apollo 13” (1995) to documentaries like Al Reinart’s “For All Mankind” (1989) and that any new film on the subject would inevitably be compared to them. In other words, Damien Chazzelle probably could have found a slightly easier project to do for his first film since the Oscar-winning musical hit “La La Land” (2016) and no one would have given him any static about it. Instead, has given us “First Man,” an Armstrong biopic based on James R. Hansen’s best-selling biography “First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong,” and not only does he overcome those obstacles, he soars above them as Armstrong himself once did, with a thrilling, surprising and sometimes deeply moving look at the person at the center of one of mankind’s most widely-known and celebrated accomplishments." (more)
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| BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE |
"Things to Do In California/Nevada When You’re Dead"
Peter Sobczynski says... "When Drew Goddard’s directorial debut, the meta-meta horror-comedy cult favorite “Cabin in the Woods,” arrived in theaters in 2012, it was after having spent more than two years sitting on the shelf as the result of delays caused by the financial collapse of its original distributor. For his long-awaited follow-up, “Bad Times at the El Royale,” Goddard seems to have deliberately chosen to one-up himself, at least symbolically, with a film that feels at times as if it had been sitting on its own shelf for at least 22 years, right around the time when the vogue for films aping “Pulp Fiction” was at its apex and one could hardly go to a multiplex without encountering at least one twisty tale involving talkative criminals, ironic violence, unusual time structures and colorful dialogue chock-full of pop culture references galore. If it had actually come out around them, it probably would have gone down as one of the better examples of that particular mini-genre. The problem is that, despite its occasional virtues, it eventually reveals itself to be a film that is simply too long, too overblown and not nearly as witty or clever as it clearly thinks itself to be." (more)
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| MONSTERS AND MEN |
"A worthy notion."
Jay Seaver says... "I'm trying to get better about not judging movies exclusively on how effectively they tell a story, since the medium can do more, as well as just trying to absorb when shown things outside my own experience, no matter what the medium. It's a hard habit to break, or even bend, because "Monsters and Men" still had me fidgeting, like there's not much to it. It feels well-intentioned but unfocused, like the filmmakers had an idea but not a hook for the audience." (more)
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| HEAVY TRIP |
"Heavy Metal Hilarity"
Jay Seaver says... "SCREENED AT THE 2018 FANTASIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: Though the "trip" part of the movie only includes a fiercely funny last act, that's no disappointment; this Finnish heavy-metal comedy is pretty much a delight throughout, mostly because our never feels like its characters being both big metalheads and lovable dorks is any sort of conflict that has to be resolved. The filmmakers are well aware that some parts of this type of music (and almost any hobby) are kind of ridiculous even if very serious, but doesn't disrespect it for that." (more)
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| VENOM (2018) |
"Someone Needs To Rescue Michelle Williams."
Peter Sobczynski says... "Years from now, when Michelle Williams is fully ensconced in her position as one of the most gifted American actresses of her generation, future film scholars will look back on her body of work and no doubt ask the same question that I have been asking for the last couple of months—what in the hell is she doing in the likes of “Venom?” Face it, as an actress, she tends to gravitate towards more serious-minded fare (though she is equally adept at comedy, as her hilarious turn in the underrated “Dick” will confirm) that is not aiming for blockbuster success and when she does turn up in a film that becomes a big hit, as she did last year with “The Great Showman,” it is more of a fluke than anything else. I mean, I know why she presumably signed on—she probably got paid enough money to finance three or four Kelly Reichardt films all by herself with plenty left over—and I certainly don’t fault her for that. My question is, of all the would-be franchise projects out there that presumably had roles to offer her, what was it about the utterly nondescript part she plays in “Venom” that made the producers think of her for the role and what was it about it that caused her to finally sign on for her tent pole debut. Actually, most viewers will probably find themselves contemplating this question since the film, an adaptation of the Marvel comic book (and not a remake of the weird 1982 thriller of the same name in which Oliver Reed and Klaus Kinski put on a scenery-chewing clinic for the ages) is such a complete garbage fire of a movie that they will want to distract themselves with something while waiting for it to come to its merciful end." (more)
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'SHE'S PRETTY, BUT I DON'T HATE HER. THAT'S IMPORTANT TO ME. I CAN SEE HOW GUYS LIKE HER. SHE'D PROBABLY PLAY FOOTBALL WITH THEM.'
- Vanessa, On Meg Ryan
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