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| EFC STATS |
| Movies Listed: |
30704 |
| Total Ratings: |
245892 |
| Total Reviews: |
27601 |
![[157279923 Hits]](/cgi-bin/gd.cgi?157279923)
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| ADVENTURERS, THE (2017) |
"Chinese crime, European scenery."
Jay Seaver says... "It's kind of fun to have a car chase with Shu Qi doing some reckless driving in Cannes near the start of "The Adventurers"; as big a star as she is in the China region, her biggest stab at the world audience was "The Transporter" fifteen years ago, and it's fun to have her outside the trunk for director Stephen Fung's stab at doing something like a Besson-produced medium-sized action movie, even if he's not quite enough to elevate this star-studded picture out of the time-passer category." (more)
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| MARJORIE PRIME |
"What seems like a poor simulation becomes worth close examnation."
Jay Seaver says... ""Marjorie Prime" doesn't seem like much to start (and seems misnamed to boot), a strange case featuring a director whose previous film seemed much more ambitious and a cast where many had been a big deal not so long ago only able to scrape together enough to do something that looks amateurish and flat. It never really escapes the shackles of its stage-bound roots - it even feels like the lights go down between acts - but by the end, that's something an audience may be willing to talk itself into as a positive, that a lack of filmic flourish allows the ideas to stand on their own." (more)
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| LOGAN LUCKY |
"Magic Mike Is The Bandit"
Peter Sobczynski says... "“Logan Lucky” marks the first time that Steven Soderbergh has directed a feature film since announcing his “retirement” in 2013 following the release of “Side Effects.” Now four years may not seem like that long of a “retirement”—there are people with active careers who take that much time between projects—but for someone who had been averaging a film or two a year for more than a decade or so prior to his departure, there must have been some concern on his part about getting back into the groove again that not even the extensive work he did for cable television during that time (which included directing the acclaimed film “Behind the Candelabra” and every episode of “The Knick” as well as producing a number of series that included an adaptation of his film “The Girlfriend Experience”) could completely alleviate. As it turns out, those worries were for nothing because within just a few minutes, it becomes clear that not only is Soderbergh back, he has returned in peak form with an utterly delightful riff on the caper film, a genre that he has had great success with in the past with the “Ocean’s Eleven” trilogy, that is one of the most sheerly entertaining works of his career to date." (more)
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| HITMAN'S BODYGUARD, THE |
"A.K.A. Two Guys, A Girl And A Really Shitty Movie"
Peter Sobczynski says... "I have always had a sneaking suspicion that if you took the films that Samuel L. Jackson has made throughout his career and counted up the number of times that he says fuck” in each one, you would find that in most cases, the higher the “fuck” count, the lower the overall quality. Granted, this isn’t always the case—Lord knows he drops one F-bomb after another in his various collaborations with Quentin Tarantino and those films are all pretty much aces as far as I am concerned. In the case of the Tarantino films, however, the scripts also contain interesting storylines, creative narrative approaches, fully fleshed-out characters and the kind of dialogue that is so wonderfully phrased and delivered that you want to savor every word, even those of the four-letter variety. Most of the time, however, these films tend to be dregs because they are utterly lacking any redeeming or memorable qualities to speak of and the filmmakers, with nothing left to offer, simply opt to have Jackson act like a Tourette’s victim in order to score cheap laughs from those in the audience who still find vulgar language to be inherently funny. A good case in point—though not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination—is his latest vehicle, “The Hitman’s Bodyguard.” a painfully wretched, gruesomely violent and artlessly vulgar action-comedy that is so devoid of genuine entertainment value that anyone not harboring a bizarre sense of nostalgia for the Brett Ratner oeuvre will find themselves wondering how it could have possibly gotten made in the first place, let alone attracted a number of excellent actors to deliver some of the most nondescript performances of their careers." (more)
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| TAXI DRIVER, A |
"Because you've got to get to the important moments and back."
Jay Seaver says... ""A Taxi Driver" ends with the traditional footage of a real-life person portrayed in the movie from many years later, and though it's a bit of a cliche, it also acknowledges that while the story may at times seem a little too good to be true, there's apparently enough to it to be worth buying into. There may be liberties taken in the making of this film, but there's more than a bit genuine at its core, and it's a quality film as well as an important true story." (more)
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| GOOD TIME |
"Title is accurate, even if it looks like it should be grim."
Jay Seaver says... "SCREENED AT THE 2017 FANTASIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: Whether the Safdie Brothers explicitly intended to make something that feels like 1970s cinema right down to the dirtier, more desperate side of New York taking the fore or whether the just got there naturally from starting from the same place with the same goals, "Good Time" manages the neat trick of seeming like a throwback to that era without ever coming across as an imitation. It's got a vitality to it that comes from not being so obviously controlled, but never gets so shaggy that it's not moving forward." (more)
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| DARK TOWER, THE |
"The Yawning Of The Audience."
Peter Sobczynski says... "Like many people, I am an enormous fan of Stephen King and his work—I consider him to be one of the key American authors of the last century and would cheerfully describe a number of his books as being absolute classics, both fiction (“The Shining,” “The Dead Zone,” “It”) and non-fiction (his great horror history “Danse Macabre” and “On Writing,” one of the best examinations of the entire writing process I have ever read). And yet, I have never successfully made it through a single book of his mammoth eight-volume series “The Dark Tower.” I have made a couple attempts over the years but my general antipathy towards the sprawling fantasy saga genre as a whole caused my eyes to glaze over after only a few pages every time. Of course, millions of readers out there have felt otherwise and over the years, a number of filmmakers have tried to figure out a way to bring the stories to the big screen that would do justice to the sprawling fantastical narrative King had created—at one point, there was talk that Ron Howard was planning a massive adaptation that would have begun with a epic film and continued with a mini-series before wrapping things up with another feature film. That take inevitably fell apart but now we finally have a film version of “The Dark Tower” at long last (with Howard as one of the producers) but after watching it, most people will wonder why anyone bothered in the first place. What was clearly an epic on the page, based on volume alone if nothing else, has been rendered distressingly puny in its screen incarnation and the end result feels like an almost random assemblage of footage from a much larger work that is destined to annoy fans of the books while leaving newcomers trying to figure out a.) what is going on at any given point and b.) wondering why they should care about any of it." (more)
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| BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL |
"All the blood and rage you'd want from an undying samurai."
Jay Seaver says... "SCREENED AT THE 2017 FANTASIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: "Blade of the Immortal" is being advertised as Takashi Miike's hundredth movie (looking at the IMDB, the numbers don't quite seem to align, but, hey, close enough), and I suspect that his biggest hit outside of his native Japan is his remake of "13 Assassins", which demonstrated that while he may be known as the guy who does the weird stuff, he's one of the best action filmmakers out there when you strip that away. He returns to big samurai action with "Blade", which gets to be even bigger and bloodier." (more)
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'SEEMS TO ME, CAP'N, THIS MISSION IS A SERIOUS MISALLOCATION OF VALUABLE MILITARY RESOURCES.'
- Private Jackson, Saving Private Ryan
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