Kaos' way behind movie reviews

[Kaos]

Ooooo sick burn...just another fifth grade bully who never grew up.

I did seriously want to know if you were on crack. That wasn't a shot. I think you are on something.

THIRD grade.  Don't overestimate. 

You need to see a dermatologist.

[Snaggletiger]

THIRD grade.  Don't overestimate. 

You need to see a dermatologist.

I saw a Proctologist last night.  He had a lab coat on with a stethoscope around his neck, so he looked legit anyway.

[Kaos]

I saw a Proctologist last night.  He had a lab coat on with a stethoscope around his neck, so he looked legit anyway.

Is that you, Mr. Babar?

[Snaggletiger]

Mooooon Riveeerrr

[Kaos]

Mooooon Riveeerrr

That’s the kind of quality that keeps me coming back.

[Kaos]

Returning to regularly scheduled programming...

The Silent Hour

Joel Kinnaman is now two-thirds of the way through his "hear, speak, and see no evil" movie tour.  We got 'speak no evil' when he played a mute dad out for vengance in Silent Night.  Here, in The Silent Hour, Kinnaman covers 'hear no evil' as he takes on the role of a detective who suffers an injury that renders him deaf. Here's hoping he can pick up the trifecta. Anyone out there with a script featuring a blind detective out for vengeance? Send it to Joel. Let's make this happen.

Other than the deafness angle, there's not much else here. It's kind of a cookie cutter "dude against corrupt people in his circle" type of movie we've seen eleven billion times. It's honestly fairly predictable.

He's dragged into a case because his deafness gives him a communication advantage with a hearing impaired woman (who's attractive in a relative way). Of course she knows some big secret, they team up, have some sort of attraction, and deal with the bad guys who come after them. 

It's pretty routine. But that familiarity makes it endurable.

The cast includes Mark Strong (good in Sherlock) and Mekhi Phifer (8 Mile and I thought he had died or something). Kinnaman might have a decent career, but after he finishes the three-fer and plays a blind guy, he's got to step out of this pigeon-holed role.  It's kind of like "oooh, Neeson's too old now for this formulaic stumble through the fight, let's get Kinnaman."

Don't really have a ruling on it.

[Kaos]

Fly Me to the Moon

Better than I expected "what if" story about the 1969 moon landing. Did we? Or was it all shot on a backlot soundstage.

We've had serious movies about this before. Capricorn One featuring future murderer OJ Simpson (as well as Thanos' dad, Bosley from the Angels, Kojack, Jack McCoy, Mark Twain, Reuben Tishkoff, and more), for instance. This is the first time the story's been played as a romantic comedy, however.

Scarlett Johannsen is a glib and duplicitious advertising dynamo plucked by Woody Harrellson (kinda representing the Nixon administration) to make sure the moon landing goes off without a hitch, whether it actually goes off or not. Channing Tatum plays a (chowder brained) NASA engineer charged with making the actual landing happen.

While he's working on the real thing, she's along beside him - without his knowledge building a full set and training actors to broadcast the live event. Woody wants it to go smoothly - for no other reason than he wants to let America see us beating the Russians on live TV.

Like all goofy romantic comedies, there's that moment of misunderstanding and the "why did you lie to me" confrontation before there can be any potential reconciliation. 

Johannsen is actually pretty decent here. Slipping in and out of (sometimes bad) accents to charm the right people at the right time to keep the moon project (both real and fake) going when it looks like patience, money, interest is flagging. Didn't hate her performance. Tatum is - as always - a flat lump of regurtitated oatmeal who always looks like he's having to quash a turd when asked to deliver actual dialogue. Comedy I think he can do. Playing a dumb guy? Yeah. It's a stretch to make him an engineer here although there is one, singular, maybe ten-second-long moment where you can see that there might be something else in there, but he just doesn't know how to get it out. Harrellson is his usual self, good without meaning to be.

I enjoyed it more than I expected to. It's light, neon-bright, breezy piffle and the cast - especially Johansnsen and excluding Tatum - looks like they had fun making it.

Watching the rocket take off was actually great for me. It stirred a kind of patriotic nostalgia that I'd forgotten. That was a fantastic, extremely proud time for America and even though I didn't appreciate it (being a tiny child) in the moment, it was still fresh enough even by the time I got to school that it had strong resonance. A member of NASA (from Huntsville) came to our school when I was in first grade and brought a collection of items used in the landing (gloves, tools, boots, helmet). He also had a rock from the moon that each of us got to touch briefly.  It could have been a rock from the parking lot, I know, but don't piss on the memory. 

It's also a reminder of a different political time. The moon was Kennedy's dream but it was Nixon who got us there. Today?  If Trump had the vision and desire to put a man on Venus, the next democrat behind him would drop his pants and defecate on the idea.

So for me, this AppleTV entry is a definite play if for no other reason, the nostalgic return to that era (and its cars).

[Kaos]

CopShop

Not to be confused with Copland or Robocop or Mall Cop or Kindergarten Cop.

Gerard Butler and the Grillo guy from Purge face off in a mob/jailhouse/police station gun battle. 

A lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. It started out looking like it was going to be an irreverent, fun type film (maybe reminiscent of The Nice Guys with Russell Crowe) but then it quickly veered into something completely different. The opening scene was just a feint. What it turned into wasn't great on the whole, but it did have one good performance.

Grillo's a mob "fixer" who goes against the mob and gets himself arrested in an effort to avoid his pursuer. (The first of many really stupid story arcs).  Butler is the guy after him - who gets himself arrested and incarcerated at the same dusty desert police station.

A nearly bald black lady cop is the smartest person in every room and starts digging into the mob guy and trying to figure out what the story was. That puts her on the radar of the mob. There's a really dumb crooked cop angle that gets wedged in there. And then - the only good performance in the entire show (Toby Huss, who you'll know but nor from where, he's one of those guys) shows up. Looney tunes mob killer, there to clean things up by making a huge mess. He's at least fun and harkens back to the misleading opening scene.

From the time he shows up, though, the film devolves into the most improbable rain of bullets that rarely hit anybody you've ever seen. Thousands of rounds.

Meanwhile, the smartest black person in the room stupidly wounds herself with her own gun. For the last third of the movie she alternates from being a half-breath from dying to clear-eyed and rampaging. It literally makes no sense. It defies logic and sensibility. She's one of the ones that rains bullets and has bullets rained upon her without much impact.  Hundreds and hundreds of rounds. 

The ending is equally idiotic. After another resurrection from barely able to draw a breath, super black is back and she's clear-eyed; full of piss and vinegar.

It was just so stupid and unbelievable it was impossible to get over. Butler wasn't as bad as he usually is, but he's played similar roles like 450 times. It's tiring.

Not much to recommend here. 

[Kaos]

Longleg

Not what I expected. Extremely strange movie.

Maika Monroe proving she can do dour, sour, and mopey (see also Watchers, It Follows .. might just be the natural state of her face?), Nicholas Cage proving he can do really bad makeup (Dad of Mask?), Kiernan Shipka proving she can look ugly (which is a little surprising), Alicia Witt proving maybe she's just a D-Girl after all (right Chrissy? What did we ever see in her?), and Blair Underwood proving he looks pretty good for a 60 year old and probably should have had a better career (where has Jonathan Rollins been since L.A. Law, anyway?).

Weird story about a serial killer who uses props to get others to do his dirty work, the people who help, and the motivation behind it. Not sure why the name 'Longleg' was chosen, had some questions about the herky-jerky camera choices, had some questions about some really problematic directorial decisions - not the least of which was the back-and-forth-in-time trope. 

Without giving away too much - in case you watch it - here are a few from the first few minutes that bugged me.

Dour face goes on a door knocking "manhunt" with a randomly assigned FBI partner (and you knew he was expendable like a Star Trek red shirt almost instantly). She intuits where the bad guy is, he gets his face blown off after knocking at the door, and she..... backs up against the flimsy window of the apartment.   This isn't back to the wall stuff, the bad guy could have shot right through the window into her head and ended the film in that instant. She doesn't "call it in" despite moments earlier saying they should call it in, instead she goes into the house to search for the guy, only to find a Dexterish panapoly of plastic sheeting.

Then she goes back to the agency (hello Mr. Clinton) and is questioned by her boss about how she knew the bad guy was in that specific apartment.  BASED ON WHAT?  The red-shirt partner eschewed "calling it in."  Who was aware that she "knew which apartment" other than her? What did she do, go back and say "yeah, I knew which one he was in, so...."  and that was just accepted at face value? 

I had a lot of problems with the script and the directoral direction. A LOT of problems.

It's a low budget film (does Cage do anything else these days) and it has a moment or two, but overall.... just didn't care for it. It was slow, it was bleak, it made little sense at times, and it left me flat.