Classic Movie Review Blade Runner

Blade Runner (1982)

Directed by Ridley Scott

Written by Hampton Fancher, David Peoples 

Starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Darryl Hannah, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos 

Release Date June 25th, 1982 

Ridley Scott’s sci-fi epic Blade Runner is one of my favorite films of all time, mostly for the unique, lived-in look, and bleak futuristic setting. Blade Runner is an eye-catching mind-blower that, if it skimps on character development a little, more than makes up for character deficits with incredible visual artistry. It’s unquestionably Ridley Scott’s finest work and with the sequel, Blade Runner 2049, being released soon, it’s as good a time as any to look back on Sir Ridley’s masterpiece.

Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a retired cop living in Los Angeles, circa 2019. Having given up his gig as a so-called Blade Runner, a cop who hunts and kills futuristic slave robots called "Replicants," Deckard is not pleased about being called to his former boss’s office and being pressed back into service. According to the Police Chief, six "Skin Jobs," as he derisively describes the Replicants, have escaped an interplanetary transport, killed dozens of people, and are now on Earth. It will be Deckard’s job to find the Replicants and "retire" them.

The first stop on Deckard’s investigation is the shady Tyrell Corporation where one Replicant has badly wounded another Blade Runner and disappeared. Hoping to gain insights into how to find these dangerous replicants, Deckard sits down to administer what Blade Runners call the Voight-Kampf Test, intended to determine whether the person being interviewed in the test is a human or a replicant. The V-K test works by gauging the emotional responses of the subject to a series of very odd questions—some nonsensical, others with a specific moral center.

The replicant that Deckard interviews, at the behest of the creepy Dr. Tyrell, is Rachael, played by Sean Young. Rachael is unaware that she is a replicant. Tyrell has programmed Rachael to have memories that he implanted into her brain that she believes prove that she is human. Whether or not Tyrell included a life limit of four years into Rachael’s coding is unknown, but we do know that most replicants have only a four-year life span and that Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), the most dangerous of the replicants Deckard is looking for, is determined to find a cure for his short life span.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal.

Movie Review The Stray

The Stray (2017) 

Directed by Mitch Davis 

Written by Mitch Davis, Parker Davis

Starring Michael Cassidy, Sarah Lancaster 

Release Date October 6th, 2017 

The Stray is one ridiculously terrible movie. This family adventure about a family that takes in a stray dog that they name Pluto opens with a nearly deadly lightning strike and only gets weirder and more bizarrely bad from there. The film purports to be a true story written and directed by Mitch Davis about his own family dog. However, there doesn’t appear to be any truth that was actually captured in this silly, unrealistic screenplay filled with characters who are like aliens enacting human emotions.

The Stray stars Michael Cassidy as Mitch Davis, a wannabe screenwriter who works as a script assistant at a Hollywood studio. Mitch’s long hours of reading and noting other people’s screenplays has distanced him from his family to the point where his wife, Michelle (Sarah Lancaster) is worried that they won’t be able to keep their family together. An incident where their two-year-old daughter wanders off while Mitch is reading scripts is the final straw leading them to leave Los Angeles for Colorado.

In Colorado, Mitch is supposed to be writing screenplays but the families recently acquired stray dog Pluto gets much of his attention. Mitch and Pluto run together, wrestle and generally bond while the dog seems intent on bringing Mitch and his son Christian closer together. When father and son finally agree to spend time together on a hiking trip, it’s a natural that Pluto would join them, but when tragedy strikes, well, you will have to see for yourself.

Where do I begin to tell you about the infinite horrors of The Stray? For one, Sarah Lancaster is a professional actress. She was on the television series Chuck, and she was really good. What is she doing here? She’s, at the very least, the least stilted performer in the movie. Sadly, she is a supporting player and spends most of her scenes playing a stereotypically nagging wife. Considering the charisma-free talents of co-star Michael Cassidy, you will be thinking a lot about Lancaster’s all too brief performance.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal

Movie Review Battle of the Sexes

Battle of the Sexes (2017) 

Directed by Valerie Faris, Jonathan Dayton

Written by Simon Beaufoy 

Starring Steve Carell, Emma Stone, Andrea Riseborough, Sarah Silverman, Bill Pullman, Alan Cumming

Release Date September 22nd, 2017 

I’ve spent a few days wrestling with why I don’t love the new, true life drama Battle of the Sexes from two of my favorite directors, Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton. The directors of the wonderful Little Miss Sunshine and the sublime Ruby Sparks have delivered a solid effort in Battle of the Sexes, but there is just something lacking. It’s not the performances either, as both Emma Stone and Steve Carell deliver standout takes on real life counterparts Billy Jean King and Bobby Riggs. So just what’s wrong with Battle of the Sexes?

Battle of the Sexes tells the story of the 1972 tennis match-up that pitted women’s liberation, in the form of female tennis champion Billy Jean King, versus the self-proclaimed champion of male chauvinism, Bobby Riggs, himself a former tennis champion from some years earlier. King had recently left the American Lawn Tennis Association to help launch the new Women’s Tennis Association after a fallout over equal pay with ALTA’s leadership, headed up by Howard Kramer (Bill Pullman).

It was a huge moment for women’s tennis as King and her manager, Gladys Heldman (Sarah Silverman) risked everything to take the world’s top female tennis stars out onto their own tour with the goal of proving they could earn just as much money as male tennis champions. It was an even bigger moment for King as the new tour also found her in a new relationship, as she began to find her sexuality for the first time by falling in love with a hairdresser named Marylin Barnett (Andrea Riseborough). All the while she’s married to her devoted husband Larry (Austin Stowall) and could lose everything if people found out about her affair.

Complicating Billy Jean’s life further is Riggs, who challenged King early in 1972, just after the launch of the WTA and after she ignored his pleas, challenged fellow women’s champion Margaret Court just as Court was coming off a recent upset win over Billy Jean. Court would go on to lose to Riggs and force Billy Jean to be the one to challenge Riggs in order to save face for women’s tennis and their potential earning power.

As you can tell from that description, there is a pretty terrific and dramatic story in Battle of the Sexes. So why doesn’t it work? Much of the problem comes from Academy Award-winning screenwriter Simon Beaufoy’s script, which fails to parse the parody-level male chauvinism with the actual sexism that Billy Jean King was up against. Beaufoy’s script renders Bobby Riggs as a lovable conman who used chauvinism as a way of marketing and not the cruel dismissal of women tennis players it actually was.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal 

Movie Review Flatliners

Flatlines (2017) 

Directed by Niels Arden Oplev

Written by Ben Ripley 

Starring Elliot Page, Diego Luna, Nina Dobrev, James Norton, Kiersey Clemons, Kiefer Sutherland

Release Date September 29th, 207 

Flatliners is a remarkably bad movie. I love Elliot Page; he is a very compelling and charismatic actor. Why has he been marginalized so much that he felt she needed to make this bizarrely dumb movie? What compelled him and the very talented director Niels Arden Oplev, director of the Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to think this movie was a good idea? Why did anyone think that remaking a movie as bad as the original Flatliners was a good idea? The Joel Schumaker directed 1990 Flatliners is a terrible movie and somehow this version manages to be worse than that. I’m baffled.

Flatliners stars Eliot Page as Courtney, a medical student who is plagued by the memory of the death of her younger sister in an accident that was her fault. Nine years after the accident Courtney has become consumed by the idea of knowing whether or not there is an afterlife where she might atone for her sin. Wanting to know about the afterlife she conceives of an experiment where she will have fellow med students stop her heart and let her die for a few minutes before bringing her back with the secrets of death.

Joining Courtney for the experiment is Sophia (Kiersey Clemons) and Jamie (James Norton) a trust fund kid who Courtney assumes is just reckless enough to go along with the plan. Dragged into the experiment are Ray (Diego Luna) and Marlo (Nina Dobrev) who jump in when Sophia and Jamie struggle to bring Courtney back to life. If you bought into the idea that Courtney might not come back after her first Flatline you might just be the audience for this movie. The complete lack of suspense in this scene doesn’t prevent lots of heavy breathing and forced tension.

Of course, Courtney must come back to life because her subsequent hallucinations are the source of most of the film’s jump scares. Courtney decides to keep the jump-scare-itis she contracted from flatlining to herself and when Jamie sees her thriving, answering difficult questions, relearning how to play the piano, as if her brain has been rewired by flatlining, he decides he must do it next. The film again must give us the forced fake tension of whether he’s going to come back or not. He does and then it’s party montage time because the last thing this movie needs is to do anything we can’t predict.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal

Movie Review Logan

Logan (2017) 

Directed by James Mangold

Written by Scott Frank, James Mangold, Michael Green 

Starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Richard E. Grant, Hal Holbrook, Stephen Merchant 

Release Date March 3rd, 2017 

When I first saw Logan, the latest spin-off of the X-Men franchise, I was not impressed. There was so much hype, so much discussion about how the R-Rating would finally allow Wolverine to be Wolverine. Then I saw the film and found it to be as conventional as any of the other X-Men movies with a little bit of gore tacked on for fan service. So, what’s changed for me since March of this year? Why was watching Logan at home on a DVD screener from the studio so different from watching the film in theaters earlier this year?

Logan once again stars Hugh Jackman in the role of Logan aka Wolverine. When we see him, he’s sleeping in the back of a fancy stretch limousine and gang members are trying to steal the tires. Logan tries to convince the men to leave peacefully but they prefer to attack him. In defense of his expensive vehicle, and with little care for his own well-being, Logan launches into a grisly battle and leaves several of the thieves’ dead.

From there we travel across the border to Mexico where Logan is hiding the debilitated Professor X (Patrick Stewart). With the help of another mutant named Kaliban (Stephen Merchant), Logan cares for Professor X by doping him up with medication to keep his powers neutralized and to keep him from remembering that he was responsible for killing a lot of people when he suffered a seizure several years ago that led the government to consider his mind a weapon of mass destruction.

The tiny, insular world that Logan has built for himself is upended when he meets Gabriella (Elizabeth Rodriguez). Gabriella wants to hire Logan to drive her and a girl she claims is her daughter, Laura, (Daphne Keen) to North Dakota where a group of fellow mutants is expected to help them cross the border to a place they call Eden. Unfortunately, Gabriella is being hunted by Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), the low-life leader of a group called The Reavers. It’s Pierce’s job to eradicate mutants that won’t fight for the evil Transigen corporation.

The plotting of Logan is simple and straight forward and I failed to give the film credit for that simplicity in my original review. Keeping things clear and easy to follow in the complex and desperately crowded super-hero genre is surely something to be praised. Logan has a clear and simple goal, get out of the country alive at all costs and if unable, make sure you die, and take as many Reavers with you as possible. The motivation is clear, and all the action is linked strongly to that motivation.

Find my full length revie in the Geeks Community on Vocal 

Movie Review American Made

American Made (2017) 

Directed by Doug Liman 

Written by Gary Spinnelli 

Starring Tom Cruise, Domnhall Gleeson, Sarah Wright Olsen, Caleb Landry Jones 

Release Date September 29th, 2017 

American Made stars Tom Cruise as Barry Seal, a real life character who was at the center of the drug, guns, and South American contras controversies of the late 70s and 80s. Barry was just an airline pilot for TWA until the CIA caught wind of his trafficking in Cuban cigars. Sensing that Barry has just the kind of moral flexibility that the CIA needs, Agent Shaffer (Domnhall Gleeson) recruits him to run reconnaissance missions in South America, spying on supposed communist outposts.

Barry graduates to the drug trade when he is kidnapped by the Medellin cartel during a stopover in Columbia. They’ve caught on to Barry’s kamikaze missions and figure he’s the man who can help them get their product into America. Barry is eager to agree and becomes the first American welcomed into Pablo Escobar’s inner circle. Meanwhile, the CIA willingly looks the other way on Barry’s drug trade as long he’s willing to fly illegal guns to the Contras in Guatemala for their supposed fight against the Sandinistas.

This is all pretty crazy stuff and, as directed by Doug Liman, the absurdity starts almost from the beginning and never seems to let up. Barry Seal has no business being at the center of the biggest intelligence and drug controversies in American history and yet here he is, thrust onto the stage with only a giant grin and his moral flexibility to keep him from being killed. Indeed, nothing seems to phase Barry, whether it’s the potential of being shot out of the sky, being shot on the ground, getting arrested, or trying to find places to stuff the millions of dollars in cash his new lifestyle has awarded him with.

Much of the story of American Made has the bizarre atmosphere of my favorite American history podcast, The Dollop, with comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds. As I watched the film, I could not help but imagine the extraordinary comic spin Dave and Gareth would put on this story. One scene in particular has the perfect level of insanity that The Dollop lives for. In this scene Barry is attempting to avoid military planes that have been sent to guide him to a military base to arrest him.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal 

Movie Review Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer

Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer 

Directed by Joseph Cedar 

Written by Joseph Cedar 

Starring Richard Gere, Lior Ashkenazi, Hank Azaria, Steve Buscemi, Michael Sheen, Dan Stevens 

Release Date April 14th, 2017 

As a critic, it’s hard not to get tired of seeing the same kind of movie over and over again. Conventional three-act stories with stock heroes and predictable villains or simple romances with happy endings get tiresome after a while. It’s really nice to experience a movie with a different style, even if that movie isn’t entirely satisfying. The new movie Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer is, at the very least, a nice departure from the norm.

Norman Oppenheimer is rather strange and kind of pathetic. He is the type of man who insinuates himself into the business of others. When we meet Norman, he is accosting the assistant of a high-powered New York financier and attempting to finagle a meeting that he hopes might make him some money. Norman’s business isn’t much of a business, you see; he considers himself a consultant whose job is to connect one person to another person in hopes that each will give him something for making the connection between the two.

We get no sense of how successful Norman is as a ‘consultant’ but he has a nice suit, and when he meets an Israeli politician who he sees as a business opportunity, he’s able to drop a big bucks present on him, though not without wincing at the price. Norman hopes to get the politician, Micha Eshel (Lior Ashknazi) to attend a dinner being held by another New York big shot in hopes that making the connection will create opportunities for himself.

Three years after this scheme fails, we find that Norman and Micha have remained friends and for once Norman’s schmoozing has paid off. Micha is now the Israeli Prime Minister and when he spies Norman at a New York fundraiser, he welcomes him as if he were family — family he doesn’t speak to regularly and does not return phone calls to, but still family. Norman’s new connection, no matter how tenuous, remains lucrative to him as the financiers who would not meet with him before are suddenly eager to do business.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community