Quick Cuts -- Capsule Movie Reviews
Reviews by Bill Johnson
These capsule reviews offer a basic overview of what these Hollywood movies did (or didn't do) to engage an audience. They are not meant to convey a full review of the movie, or a scene by scene breakdown of story characters.
Caught Stealing
I was going to skip this movie as a generic action film until I saw the director was Darren Aronofsky. The main character is young man who missed a chance to play major league baseball because of a car accident that killed a friend. As the story opens he's a bar tender in New York with a great girlfriend who wonders if he'll ever be able to live in the present and not perpetually mourning the life he lost.
When a British punk rock apartment neighbor asks him to watch his cat for a few days, he finds himself beaten by a crew looking for the neighbor. The violence keeps escalating, with more deaths, and threats to his mother.
The movie has wonderful, gritty details of New York in 1998.
In the end, the young man realizes it's time to stop running from the accident and start his life again.
The hitman are a strange crew of odd balls.
Fun movie to watch.
I do wish it had a stronger, odd title. I didn't make the baseball connection in the title until the end of the movie.
Weapons
Unusual and thoughtful horror film. 17 of 18 grade school students all wake and leave their homes at 2:17 am. Destination, unknown. The boy who didn't disappear and his teacher are interrogated but offer no clues. Many parents believe the teacher is complicit.
She's the focus in the early film, as she tries to deal with the fall out of what's happened and connect with the boy who didn't disappear. She's warned to leave him alone, and just when she realizes something odd is happening at his house, she wakes to a nightmare of a clown-like figure on her ceiling.
Now we go back and meet a father, who paints the teacher's car, branding her a witch. We see many scenes from his point of view. Then the movie shifts to other characters.
What's unusual, there's almost nothing conveyed about the investigation to find the children. It's not the focus of the story or plot.
Eventually there's a revelation about what is happening. It's spooky, but didn't quite work for me.
The movie than builds to clever and violent scenes of the children getting vengeance.
The focus on the visual details on the screen always held my interest. The director was always in control of telling the story his way.
I had one small nit pick based on the film's ultra realistic tone. There's no media scrum on the sideway outside the young boy's house.
I love stories that create an unusual structure. I look forward to seeing more work by this director.
The Fantastic Four
This good-natured movie is quite up front that it's a story about family. The idea of family runs through every aspect of the movie, which makes it unusual in the super hero movie realm. The only such story I would compare it to is the early years of Smallville, when Clark's father serves as the moral center of the series.
There are special effects and action scenes, but they are secondary to the story.
I recommend the film to new screenwriters who would like a lesson about how to convey story in an action film.
Megan 2.0
The set up for the first Megan film was simple. A scientist creates a doll with artificial intelligence and programs it to protect her niece. When a bully comes along, we know what to expect. The movie is quirky fun.
Megan 2.0 is complicated and violent and features a beautiful young woman who is an A.I. bot assassin working for the FBI that goes rogue. Megan comes along about a third of the way in the movie.
Megan 2.0 is an action film with a high body count and some fleeting humor when Megan returns. Someone must have thought the violence would appeal to fans of action films. The niece barely registers.
28 Years Later
This is the sequel to 28 Days Later, a film about a rage virus turning most of the population of Great Britain into fast zombies.
28 years later, Great Britain is surrounded by a naval military quarantine to prevent any infected zombies from escaping and spreading the infection.
A small community survives on an island connected to the mainland via a causeway that is submerged at high tides. One aspect of the story is how the survivors try and hold on to pieces of their former lives while they create a new normal.
The main characters are a young boy, his father, and his ill mother. As the story opens, the father is taking the young boy onto the mainland to have his first experience killing zombies. It's a rite of passage. After the experience is being celebrated, the young boy learns that a doctor is still alive on the mainland.
The boy takes his mother to find the doctor. After many harrowing escapes, the doctor diagnoses the mother and the boy faces another rite of passage.
The scenes with the mother, son, and doctor develop a heart felt quality.
28 Years Later is an example of how a horror film can be thoughtful and have something to say about life.
The Phoenician Scheme
A quirky, fun, Wes Anderson film with his trade mark stylized acting and odd composition of shots.
An amoral business man decides to make a daughter/nun his heir and to help him navigate with five different people to save a huge project. He's survived many assassination attempts and near death experiences in heaven, but he knows his luck could run out.
The plot is straight forward and direct. Can he save the project by getting five people to agree to new terms for already signed contracts?
The story, about family, however, is thin. The business man has a stable of children from different mothers who live in a boarding house across the street from his mansion. The daughter accuses him of having her mother murdered. It also comes out the nun might not be his daughter.
But most of the family material is conveyed via dead pan humor. It's only at the end of the film when the now failed business man is a cook in a cafe that he runs with his now retired nun daughter (who also manages all his children) that it registers this is a story about a fractured family coming together. This is conveyed when the business man and nun play a game of hearts, which is a sly way of conveying the business man now has a heart and a family.
It just doesn't register clearly in the way the plot is clear and direct.
It's easy to enjoy the spectacle but to still want something more during the body of the story.
I loved the dead pan humor and the heavenly interludes.
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