{"id":14742,"date":"2021-12-30T20:00:49","date_gmt":"2021-12-31T01:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=14742"},"modified":"2021-12-30T18:48:09","modified_gmt":"2021-12-30T23:48:09","slug":"the-last-ten-minutes-vol-25","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/14742","title":{"rendered":"The Last Ten Minutes vol. 25"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I watched the endings of some movies, during the brief period of time when amazon prime was working fine on my laptop.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<br \/>\n<strong><em>The Tomorrow War<\/em> (2021, Chris McKay)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The sci-fi thing that opens with Chris Pratt falling out of the sky.  Two hours later, someone&#8217;s gonna have to blow this ship manually.  Gunner JK Simmons is saved from dreadful-looking CG wolfoctopus beasties by a soldier with a chainsaw.  Post-splosion, it&#8217;s up to Pratt, his dad Simmons and Chainsaw Guy to track and kill the mother alien.  Comes down to melee weapons, a hard-won triumph, and Chainsaw Guy missed the whole battle.  Lot of self-sacrifice talk, a very lame home reunion scene, Pratt having been fighting aliens from the future to protect his perfect suburban family.  Wonder if Pratt&#8217;s &#8220;dad&#8221; is actually Pratt from the future?  Chainsaw Guy is Sam Richardson from <em>Werewolves Within<\/em>, which I rented this SHOCKtober but didn&#8217;t get around to watching.  The director&#8217;s background is <em>Robot Chicken<\/em>, and the writer did that Ethan Hawke movie in <a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/12778\">volume 23<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<br \/>\n<strong><em>The Electrical Life of Louis Wain<\/em> (2021, Will Sharpe)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Another true story of an eccentric artist, but we&#8217;ve run out of artists to biopic, so this is a guy who painted psychedelic cats?  1925, it&#8217;s in 4:3 in Dr. Cook&#8217;s asylum, where inspector Adeel Akhtar (<em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/9822\">Four Lions<\/a><\/em>) recognizes a washed-up Wain (Benedict Cumberbatch with Mark Twain hair).  &#8220;I have failed,&#8221; cries Wain, then narrator Olivia Colman leads us to a much nicer asylum where Wain can see cats again, and HG Wells (NICK CAVE) gives him a shout out on the airwaves.  Reportedly only the Claire Foy sections were good, and she&#8217;s gone by &#8217;25, but we get a brief flashback to her dying.  The director also made a Colman miniseries with David Thewlis this year, cowriter Simon Stephenson worked on <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/14500\">Luca<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<br \/>\n<strong><em>The World Is Not Enough<\/em> (1999, Michael Apted)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Picking up where I left off in <a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/6623\">volume 007<\/a>.  These things are complicated, so checking the wikis to see what they&#8217;re about before jumping into their last ten&#8230; Pierce Brosnan is supposed to protect rich girl Sophie Marceau from nuclear-armed villain Robert Carlyle, ok.  Bond and the baddie and Denise Richards are on a sinking submarine!  The action and acting look not so hot &#8211; did Carlyle and Brosnan have in their contract that they&#8217;re not allowed any realistic fight scenes?  Exciting music plays as Bond has to hold his breath for a really long time.  Bond plugs a hose into a socket which shoots a rod through a cavity, I think it&#8217;s a metaphor.  Cleese and Dench, a high-tech sex joke and a Y2K reference, nice.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<br \/>\n<strong><em>Die Another Day<\/em> (2002, Lee Tamahori)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Another billionaire is involved, and it&#8217;s one of those twisty triple-cross mole movies so I won&#8217;t expect to know what&#8217;s going on.  Something extremely explodey is happening while Rosamund Pike is threatening Halle Berry at swordpoint on a plane and Pierce fights large-mouthed villain Toby Stephens.  Halle and Pierce both make good kills with nice 90&#8217;s kissoff dialogue, but the action&#8217;s a hash and the slow-mo photography and CG flair are laughable.  Why&#8217;d they cast Michael Madsen as a good guy?  The smarmy dialogue seems forced as they fall from the plane in an escape helicopter.  High-tech and low-tech sex jokes.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<br \/>\n<strong><em>Casino Royale<\/em> (2006, Martin Campbell)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Prequel time, new Bond Daniel Craig, whose job is to bankrupt yet another rich guy so he can&#8217;t finance evil stuff, ok.  Movie long as hell, so I&#8217;ll give it eleven minutes.  A more grounded movie, no crashing vehicles, Bond is a guy with a pistol using ingenuity to save Eva Green from eyepatched baddies.  I spoke too soon &#8211; the Venice building itself is collapsing\/sinking as a stand-in for <em>World&#8217;s<\/em> submarine.  Since it&#8217;s a 60&#8217;s throwback, women can&#8217;t fight &#8211; all Eva can do is commit suicide-by-elevator.  Wait a second, Bond&#8217;s using a Vaio laptop and Ericsson phone in the postscript, so it&#8217;s a prequel set in the present, and sponsored by Sony?  I think all the major actors were already dead, so I missed Isaach de Bankol\u00e9 and Jeffrey Wright and Mads Mikkelsen.  This looked much more decent than the last couple, but still not approaching <em>Mission: Impossible<\/em> quality.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<br \/>\n<strong><em>Quantum of Solace<\/em> (2008, Marc Forster)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In which Bond stumbles upon another rich terrorist whilst avenging the death of Eva Green.  The action&#8217;s a hash again, but that&#8217;s because Bond is fighting an axe-wielding Mathieu Amalric, and you gotta shake the camera a lot to make that look convincing.  These things always feature guys outrunning explosions, and a gun dropping down some metal stairs out of reach.  Bond and Olga Kurylenko escape a lot of fire and abandon Amalric in the desert, then he chases down a Quantum agent and has closing dialogue with Judi Dench in the snow, Bond not having much film-end luck with the ladies ever since the movies killed his best girl.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<br \/>\n<strong><em>The Aeronauts<\/em> (2019, Tom Harper)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Out of Bond movies I can watch for free, this is the Eddie Redmayne ballooning movie.  Their hot air balloon is falling from above the clouds, so they toss lots of heavy objects from a great height, probly not killing anyone below since populations were sparse in 1862, then Eddie cuts loose the basket so the balloon will act as a parachute, which drags poor Felicity Jones through a field.  They are two cheesy handsome youths, and both survive for narrator Felicity to run around giggling while Eddie presents his scientific findings to an all-bearded-men conference.  From the director of <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/13273\">Wild Rose<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<br \/>\n<strong><em>Vivarium<\/em> (2019, Lorcan Finnegan)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Watched the opening scene on a wiki tip that it featured baby birds, then plunge into the sci-fi dystopia.  Poots attacks her neighbor with a pickaxe, but he&#8217;s a skittering insectoid from a subterranean hellhouse, and she keeps quicksanding through the floor into color-coded Charlie Kaufman realms.  The alien baby-man buries Poots, I guess Eisenberg is the other bodybag in the hole.  Cool looking set, anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I watched the endings of some movies, during the brief period of time when amazon prime was working fine on my laptop. &#8211; The Tomorrow War (2021, Chris McKay) The sci-fi thing that opens with Chris Pratt falling out of the sky. Two hours later, someone&#8217;s gonna have to blow this ship manually. Gunner JK [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[572,1118],"class_list":["post-14742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-james-bond","tag-last-ten-minutes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14742"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14749,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14742\/revisions\/14749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}