The first fifteen minutes of this movie are noteworthy for accurately depicting what it’s like to be a touring punk rock band. Sleeping on floors. Scrounging for gas money. Playing for nobody in the middle of the day. The rest of it is a thriller in which the band needs to figure out how to get out of a deadly situation involving a calculating club owner and his neo-nazi followers.
Not that it matters, but the title of this film has nothing to do with what happens on the screen. There are maybe two seconds where we see the killer on the phone but it is just a throwaway moment. I wanted wicked taunts and heavy breathing! I assume the Italian producers were just trying to cash in on a 70s telephone-based murderer craze? In any event, this is a mystery thriller which is pretty light on the thrills and very heavy on the talky bits. Despite this abundance of dialogue, Telly Savalas is underutilized having maybe three lines. He spends most of his screen-time just leering at his victims and smoking cigarettes. Still, this is a fairly entertaining story of a woman who is struggling to regain her memory of the events after her lover’s death. There’s a good twist which really should have been hyped-up much more leading to the reveal. Also, lots of J&B Scotch drinking and an unnecessarily slow death of the killer.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. This game is the epitome of bland first person shooters and Id Software should know better. They still seem not to know that there are colors beyond brown. There are no attempts at originality here. The post-apocalyptic setting is like a colorless, un-fun Borderlands. The barely-there plot is a rehash of the Fallout fish out of water structure. The driving sections are a bore and you are forced to do win all these tedious races. I guess the shooting and A.I. is acceptable but you are constantly back tracking to the main hub to get new missions. This game is not worth the five dollar sale price I paid.
Pulpy science fiction about a remote planet on which the inhabitants are convinced exists a super-computer that could solve all their problems. The characters search for it, and, in the process, build a thriving planetary economy.
I went into this having avoided the trailers or anything that could potentially spoil this for me. Despite its flaws I really liked The Force Awakens and was excited to see the story continue. For the most part I enjoyed The Last Jedi, but the plot was extremely clunky. There’s a whole section where Fin and annoying girl go to space Monte Carlo and rescue space horses. The entire fin plotline could be removed from the movie without consequence. The Ren/Ray stuff was good, and Mark Hamill didn’t embarrass himself. Overall good, but the tone was drifting a tad into prequel territory at times… like that final scene… barf.
This classic Studio Ghibli cartoon is about the horrors of war. But it’s really more about the horrors of a teenager who is too much of a stubborn jerk to get help for himself and his toddler sister.
A memoir of what living in The Soviet Union was like in the 60s and 70s. Bukovsky spent most of that time in prison camps and mental institutions. His big contribution was exposing the use of psychiatric evaluations to label dissenters as mentally unfit for trial. Despite being the harrowing nature of his predicaments, he makes it seem like routine daily life in the U.S.S.R.
I’ve never actually seen a Buster Keaton movie until this. Holds up very well and has some great scenes of Buster trying to outrun boulders and a mob of angry brides.
This starts as an engaging thriller and then tricks you by turning into a teary drama. A lot of the movie relies on an underwear-clad child actor and Brie Larson’s zits. Both do outstanding work.
This was a movie that I really wanted to see. It’s directed by Ben Wheatley, who made the gangster-hybrid stunner, Kill List. The premise is great: a gun deal goes bad in the first fifteen minutes of the film and what follows is one gigantic standoff with bullets flying and dialogue shouted from behind cover. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite live up to expectations. The characters aren’t particularly interesting and neither is their cross-talk. In the hands of Tarantino this could have been a masterpiece. As it is, it’s fairly entertaining but the direction gets confusing and there’s no sense of the tiny space in which the action takes place. You never really can tell who’s shooting from where.
