Tag: Cameron Britton

Cinema Dispatch: Mickey 17

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

Mickey 17 and all the images you see in this review are owned by Warner Bros Pictures

Directed by Bong Joon-Ho

This has been a tough year for a lot of people, least of all me, as I’ve been severely unmotivated to keep things going around here. This ennui is not helped by the less than stellar slate of movies we’ve gotten so far, some of which I’m gonna try and knock out a few reviews for when I’m feeling up to it, but even amidst the fog of banality, there was a ray of sunshine on the horizon with this latest feature by Bong Joon-Ho starring one of my favorite actors today. With so much going wrong in the world, can this prove to be a bright spot to make things feel a little bit better? Let’s find out!!

Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is not living his best life on Earth, and like many of us, decides to travel to try and find himself. Well, that and escape debt collectors with chainsaws, but in any case, he and his buddy Timo (Steven Yeun) queue up to get onboard the Nifilheim which is a ship intended to colonize a distant ice planet run by the overtly sinister Mr. and Mrs. Marshall (Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette) who seem to have given up on making Earth Great Again, and are looking for a do-over in their own little fiefdom in space. Timo gets a spot for being a decent pilot, but since Mickey’s only skill is his desperation to escape, he signs up to be an Expendable; basically a worker bee whose DNA is kept on file and gets printed out whenever the current version of him dies. I suppose dying of solar radiation and maintenance blunders is better than getting a chainsaw to the face, but after four years and sixteen dead copies behind him, he’s found himself in a bit of a rut; especially when the planet turns out to have a bunch of creatures on it that is hindering their colonization efforts.  Still, at least between his immortality and his new girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie), he’s managed to find some stability in his life. That is until he comes back from a particularly nasty day out in the snow and realizes that the crew already declared him dead and printed out the eighteenth Mickey. Not only is this new Mickey kind of a jerk, it’s also against protocol for more than one Expendable to exist at the same time, which could mean his Get Out of Death Free card will be revoked; probably via a bullet to the head or a tumble into the engine’s exhaust pipe. Can Mickey and Mickey work together to keep each other alive and out of sight from the ship’s wrathful captain? What is the Niflheim’s ultimate plan for this new world, and what would it mean for the native species whose home they are invading? I suppose this is the best Mickey could hope for, given who’s in charge. After all, who needs health insurance when you’ve got the ultimate 3D printer?

“The best is that we’ve already killed you so now OSHA standards don’t apply! It’s called Double Jeopardy!”     “Oh yeah, I like that movie. Hey, are my eyeballs supposed to be burning?”
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Cinema Dispatch: The Girl in the Spider’s Web

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

TGITSWCD0

The Girl in the Spider’s Web and all the images you see in this review are owned by Sony Pictures Releasing

Directed by Fede Álvarez

A bit of context is perhaps in order before we get started.  I haven’t seen the Fincher film or the Swedish films, but I have read the first book and got a bit through the second one and enjoyed them both.  I don’t actually KNOW if this is based on one of the books or the post-humus stuff that Stieg Larsson had written down somewhere (probably could have looked that up before going to see this) and where exactly this is supposed to “exist” as far as some sort of continuity, so the phrase of the day is CAUTIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC.  I do think that Lisbeth Salander is an interesting character and the idea of making more or less standalone movies with her is a solid idea.  However, this still seems like a pretty big gamble across the board, what with David Fincher no longer being involved, this more or less being the third iteration of the franchise in a decade, and frankly I don’t know if anyone is really still talking about Stieg Larsson’s books anymore to warrant another film about this character.  However, all that is kind of outside my wheelhouse as a critic since I’m here to tell you if the movie is good and not how much money it’s gonna make.  What’s REALLY important is if this version of the movie (with a heavily slashed budget) can capture what made these books and this character so compelling in the first place, or if this is just a brazen attempt to squeeze a few more bucks out of an obviously dead horse.  Let’s find out!!

Lisbeth Salander (Claire Foy) is a computer hacker in Sweden who’s gone through some TERRIBLE abuse in her life that may or may not have been covered in the books (it at least takes place after the first one but I have no idea if it incorporates the other two), but there’s really no need to go into it in detail.  She’s a vigilante hacker, she helped the reporter Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) solve at least one mystery in the recent past, and she occasionally takes on jobs that pique her interest.  One such job comes to her from SUPER COMPUTER PROGRAMMER Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant) who worked for the NSA and begs her to steal a program he wrote for them which would allow the user to more or less take control of all the world’s satellites and therefore take control of all the nukes… I think.  I mean it sure SOUNDS scary enough, so Lisbeth agrees to steal it and manages to do so with very little effort and at the consternation of Frans’s successor at the NSA Edwin Needham (LaKeith Stanfield) who travels to Sweden to try and get it back.  He’s not the only one after the program however because very soon after she steals it her SUPER HACKER WAREHOUSE is attacked by dudes in masks who work for a very illusive crime organization that may or may not have some connection to Lisbeth’s past.  With total nuclear annihilation now on the table, Lisbeth is adamant to get the program back which involves finding where Frans and his young son August (Christopher Convery) have run off to in the ensuing chaos, avoid the attention of Swedish Secret Service agent Gabriella Grane (Synnøve Macody Lund), and get Mikael involved once again to see if his SUPER JOURNALISM SKILLS can make sense of all this.  Will Lisbeth Salander save the world from nuclear devastation and stop whatever EVIL organization has their eyes set on using it?  Can she protect everyone she cares about from whatever is that seems to be targeting her, or will she lose whatever few connections she still has left to the rest of the world?  How does she manage to look so bad ass even with that Moe Howard haircut!?

TGITSWCD1
“Why I oughta!”

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