by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 34: Michael Shannon edition

Fahrenheit 451 (2018, Ramin Bahrani)

Evil Philosopher Cop Michael Shannon is arresting Michael B. Jordan, who turns the table and burns some guy to death, racking up likes on a big screen (is this The Running Man?). Sofia “Climax” Boutella takes MBJ to the suburbs where he saves a starling (it’s a big year for cinematic starlings) then Shannon makes a big tormented face as he murders MBJ in a burning barn. I’m seeing him sing R.E.M. songs next week – here’s hoping he makes that same face during “Fall On Me.” I can’t be mad at a movie that ends on a murmuration.

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Superman (2025, James Gunn)

Backed up more than ten minutes so I wouldn’t miss Warboy Lex Luthor. Is this a cartoon? Soup fights an airborne army of boba fetts. There are other super-people around, and also the Bunk for some reason. It’s very snappy and JamesGunny and there’s a CG dog, and they glue the split-apart city back together then party with some second-rate heroes (incl Nathan Fillion). Lois is The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Soup is from We Own This City, it closes on an Iggy Pop song, and this overall looks good, it’s just that I’ve reached a certain age and you’re not gonna trick me into watching any more Superman movies.

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The Flash (2023, Andy Muschietti)

Backed up too far but this time by accident – HBO’s interface isn’t all that. Various Flashes and Supermen and Batmen are getting killed in a fiery time-loop by Evil CG Michael Shannon, pulling together the previous two movies into a Fahrenheit Multiverse. “We Need To Talk About” Ezra has a little argument with himself – Flash isn’t even fast in this, he just fights with glowy knives, and the villain is a version of himself who stayed awake during The Jaunt. Ah fuck, it’s Haunted Chris Reeve and CG Nic Cage, now I remember why people were mad. In the obligatory wrap-up, Ron Livingston is his dad, the girl from Hearts Beat Loud his love interest, and George Clooney as Batman would’ve been a good bit if they hadn’t awkwardly bungled it. Muschietti also directed It, which also nobody liked but they all watched anyway.

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Jonah Hex (2010, Jimmy Hayward)

How is this movie only 81 minutes? Civil War Thanos and his girl Jennifer Fox are taken captive by Evil Malkovich. I don’t see Michael Shannon, but he’s in this movie and there are also flamethrowers, making this part of the Fahrenheit Multiverse. I do see Lt. Cedric Daniels for some reason, then the movie starts flashbacking really hard until the bad guy explodes. The director is a former Pixar animator and musician who is friends with Tool and Primus and Mastodon, and the writers made Crank and Gamer, so this bomb was a bump in the road for a bunch of otherwise cool guys.

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The Lego Batman Movie (2017, Chris McKay)

I missed Will Arnett in Jonah Hex, so here’s his Christian Bale impression in a frenetic cartoon which is admittedly cool-looking (from a Robot Chicken guy). Nice shark-spray callback. It’s fun for everyone that the comic corporations get to make big expensive self-serious superhero movies and big expensive silly parodies of the same, less fun that something called The Lego Batman Movie tries to wrap up by getting weepy about family.

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Assassin’s Creed (2016, Justin Kurzel)

I also missed Michael Fassbender in Jonah Hex, so let’s check out his second-worst movie. Jeremy Irons is presented with a treasure chest while Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Rampling look on, wow this is a heavy cast for a video game movie. Irons is going to enslave mankind or whatever, seems very calm about it, while Omar is brandishing knives in the crowd. Fassbender arrives in a robe and joins the serious-whisper acting cavalcade then makes his move, assassin-wise. The whole thing feels like a real drag.

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Knox Goes Away (2023, Michael Keaton)

Speaking of assassins, I missed Michael Keaton in The Flash so here’s his aging-hitman thing. Oh wow, a shaggy Al Pacino rats on Keaton to some nerd cops who were talking about security footage anomalies. After a brain-damaged Keaton takes the place of his son Cyclops in prison, a closing montage of each major character looking meaningfully at different objects.

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Suicide Squad (2016, David Ayer)

Back into the superhero multiverse, this supposedly has Ezra “Flash” Miller, but hundredth-billed so I don’t expect to see him here. I expect to see supervillains teaming up to fight Gozer. Will Smith shows all his teeth in closeup then blows up the stargate to the demon dimension. The guy from John Woo’s Silent Night gets his wife back from the dead, or from the stone lion she was trapped inside, but the team of killers is no match for an angry Viola Davis, who sends them to prison until Jared Leto’s Michael Morbius breaks them out. I was gonna close with the latest Joaquin Phoenix Joker thing and Watchmen, but that’s quite enough of these things.

by ·Comments Off on Spotlight (2015, Tom McCarthy)

The very definition of a great ensemble cast, each character given similar tasks throughout the investigation but with different personal connections to the church and the case. Hulk Ruffalo and Michael “Birdman” Keaton are joined by Rachel “Passion” McAdams, John “Iron Man’s dad” Slattery and a gentle mustache named Brian James under new boss Liev “brother of Wolverine” Schreiber as reporters investigating a pattern of sexual abuse in the catholic church.

D. Ehrlich: “earns comparisons to Zodiac and All the President’s Men, but is also more modest and anonymous than either… less sticky. still, builds an immense momentum with its earnestness.”

M. D’Angelo: Thoroughly enjoyable, but the only aspect of it that wowed me was Liev Schreiber’s deliberately off-putting performance; I imagine McCarthy repeatedly telling him “Let’s try that again, but give me more absolutely nothing this time.”

M. Harris:

I know some people think that Tom McCarthy’s direction is utilitarian; I couldn’t disagree more. His steady medium shots and groupings of men (mostly men) in conversation in offices, behind overcrammed desks, in restaurants, clubs, doorframes, and well-appointed sanctuaries are not the product of lack of visual imagination but of serious thought about how best to tell a story of journalistic process and the uneasy co-functioning of big urban institutions (church, paper, courthouse). The empty weekend office in the film’s final sequence, with Liev Schreiber’s Marty Baron at work in the distant background, has stayed with me as much as any shot from any movie this year.

by ·Comments Off on Jackie Brown (1997, Quentin Tarantino)

Haven’t seen this in 18 years, so I’d forgotten most of it, and didn’t realize it contains The Definitive Samuel L. Jackson Performance.

Sam Goody:

Shot by Tarantino buddy Robert Rodriguez’s cinematographer Guillermo Navarro – close-ups galore and terrific acting. Part of a mid-90’s cinematic Elmore Leonard craze, between Get Shorty and Out of Sight. Grier, Forster and Jackson got various awards and nominations. Only Forster made it to the oscars, though… jeez, it was an all-white year at the oscars except for a 4 Little Girls documentary nomination.

Keaton, the year after Multiplicity. De Niro shortly before he turned to self-mocking comedy in Analyze This and never looked back. Bridget Fonda apparently retired after 2002. Jackson would continue the 1970’s references with his Shaft remakquel. Chris Tucker’s Fifth Element costar Tiny Lister appears as Forster’s employee at the bail-bond place.

Unfortunately Pam Grier’s follow-ups don’t look so good: Chris Elliott comedy Snow Day, Fortress 2, Snoop Dogg’s Bones, Ghosts of Mars, and finally the career-killing Adventures of Pluto Nash. I assumed Jackie Brown was a comeback for her, but it looks like the movies she made the year before were better than any that came after: Mars Attacks, Escape From L.A. and Larry Cohen’s Original Gangstas.

by ·Comments Off on Batman Returns (1992, Tim Burton)

The best Christmas movie we could find on netflix at the time. Katy had never seen this, did not know the joys of a flipper-fisted Danny DeVito and leather-suited Michelle Pfeiffer and fright-wigged Christopher Walken and Burton’s light-and-shadows pop-color photography and Elfman’s huge soaring music all stealing Micheal Keaton’s own superhero film out from under him. Batman has an undeveloped love interest in Pfeiffer, some last-minute heroism (diverting DeVito’s city-destroying rocket penguins into the zoo), obligatory Batman/Bruce identity crisis, but no major personality or emotion or story developments. And that’s fine with me – Batman movies could’ve gone on forever like this.

Totally missed noticing Paul Reubens as Penguin’s father, damn. Doug Jones (Abe Sapien in Hellboy) played a clown, and Jan Hooks (just-deceased SNL actress) Penguin’s mayoral campaign handler. Happy to see Michael “Tanner ’88” Murphy as the mayor and the great Vincent Schiavelli as Penguin’s monkey man.

Also watched the first 15 minutes of the first Burton Batman movie. Forgot that Jack Palance plays the crime boss who sends Nicholson into the Joker-backstory factory. Billy Dee Williams plays Harvey Dent, who does not get two-faced in this one.

by ·Comments Off on Birdman (2014, Alejandro González Iñárritu)

I’d like to steal Vadim Rizov’s opening sentence: “Having barely survived Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams when it came out, I was inclined to stay away from his filmography for the rest of my life.” But how could we stay away from a Michael Keaton-starring, Emmanuel Lubezki-shot movie called Birdman? I’m sympathetic to Rizov’s entire “five points of contention” article for Filmmaker Magazine, praising Edward Norton before wondering, among other things, why the single-take illusion was necessary. But I appreciated the single-take (and the wonderful arrhythmic drum score) as an enjoyable distraction, making the movie fun to watch before the inevitable post-film discussion of what point it was trying to make (??) and whether all its characters are unredeemed assholes (they are).