The Misfits (2021) - Movie Review

This production is something of a meeting-of-the-minds for two creatives attached to some of the first films I ever reviewed on here. There’s director Renny Harlin, who gave us the raw forgettability of The Legend Of Hercules (and is also the guy who helped kill pirate cinema as a mainstream genre until Jack Sparrow showed up), and then there’s co-writer Kurt Wimmer, who managed to make the Point Break remake even more dated than the original, and who specialises in aggressively style-over-substance action flicks. This review is more a matter of curiosity than anything else, but even knowing their respective histories in the business, I still wasn’t prepared for just how atrocious this team-up would turn out.

Hardcore Henry (2016) - Movie Review

Video game movies are hardly anything new in today’s day and age. We’ve had video game adaptations like Need For Speed and Warcraft, films centred on video games like Pixels and The Wizard, even films that take place within a video game like Wreck-It Ralph and Tron. However, even with that precedent, this film expects to be of a different breed than all of those. This is a film that incorporates video game tropes as a form of cinematic storytelling. Now, the success of any video game-related film is rather sporadic; adaptations are rarely if ever good and films set in and about video games often just translate into watching others do what we would rather be doing ourselves. So, with this step into a new direction, how does it fare?

The Hateful Eight (2016) - Movie Review

No other singular person in the world of cinema has given more credence to the importance of the screenwriter than Quentin Tarantino. He’s basically an alternate reality version of Randal from Clerks who decided that, rather than bitching about how shit movies are nowadays, actually did something about it and began making his own. After starting off his career with a loud bang with the festival success of Reservoir Dogs, he continued to carve a name for himself with his unique approach to character writing and his homage-heavy fan-boy sensibilities as a story-teller. Unless we’re talking about the film-about-nothing Death Proof or the comedic abomination that is It’s Pat, you’d be hard-pressed to find a film in his filmography that is abjectly bad. So, naturally, when news hit about his latest release, weather reports also came in of a tidal wave of fan-boy drool that threatened to destroy the world. Then there was news of Tarantino taking the film on a roadshow screening tour of Australia, in crisp 70MM film stock. Would probably lose my buff card if I didn’t attend something like that, so bear in mind that everything that follows may differ from the traditional theatrical release as the version I watched was an extended cut. This is The Hateful Eight.

Selma (2015) - Movie Review

It forms a lump of coal in my stomach to admit this, but we live in a world where statements like this still need to be said: There are very few things in this world uglier than racism. The actions people will commit under the flag of protecting one’s own ethnicity against all others can enter into the truly stomach-churning and, while we have definitely made some progress beyond our past actions, such things are still an open wound for most nations if not all. However, it is a common thought in the creative world that our darkest moments can give birth to our brightest works of art. In the last few years, especially during Oscar season, we’ve gotten the lion’s share of film exploring racial themes: 12 Years A Slave, The Butler, Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom, not to mention the numerous war movies set in World War II like Fury and The Monuments Men; most of which are well-done or at the very least well-intentioned. Given how today’s film falls along similar lines, let’s see just how bright this turns out if at all.