shawkins

Movie Roundup

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Triple 9

This was an interesting heist film. The director, John Hillcoat, is probably best known for Lawless and The Proposition, which I liked. Hillcoat also directed The Road, which bored the hell out of me. The cast (Chiwetel Elijofor, Aaron Paul, Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, that guy from Walking Dead) was stellar. I thought Kate Winslet was an especially interesting choice for Russian mafia boss. There were a couple of good Heat-esque heist scenes.

I feel like I got my rental’s worth, but it didn’t quite come together well enough for me to give it an unreserved recommendation.

 

The Witch

Oh hell yes. Now I want an evil goat.

In fairness, opinions are divided on this one for a reason. The pacing is deliberate, but you can get away with that in a 90 minute movie. It’s also more of an atmosphere-y horror than a stuff-jumping-out-at-you horror. If you go in expecting The Craft or a puritan-era Friday the 13th you will walk out disappointed.

Probably not for everyone, but I quite liked it.

 

The Boy

This was a good 90 minute movie. Unfortunately, as released it ran 110 minutes. It had a nice payoff, but I thought it took too long to get there. Rainn Wilson was good, and David Morse is good in everything. Most of the movie showcased the kid, and he did a fine job as well.

There was a tad too much roadkill for my taste, and I thought it crossed the line from “deliberate and atmospheric” into “get to the point already.”

 

 

X-Men Apocalypse

Slight spoilers: I think it was Last Action Hero (or maybe McBain?) where the hero got all vengeful because they’d killed his third cousin. X-Men Apocalypse has a similar scene. There’s only so many times you can go to that particular well, guys.

There was absolutely nothing new or interesting about this movie. Normally I’m a sucker for this stuff, but I’d say skip this one altogether.

 

The Wind Rises

Even by Studio Ghibli standards, this is an absolutely magnificent film. It’s anime, yes, but not the sort of thing where people fight robots or shoot each other with rays (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

It’s a kinda-sorta biopic about the lead engineer for Japan’s main fighter in WWII, the Zero. That’s less dry than it sounds. There’s a fantasy element and a romance subplot. I don’t want to say too much about the fantasy bits for fear of spoilers, but I thought that part in particular was absolutely brilliant.

I’m not a huge anime fan myself, but I absolutely loved this one.

Robert Burrows

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Robert Burrows (a.k.a. NoCuddleTime), is an L.A. artist who did the epic portrait of David back in December that I used as the angel on top of our Christmas tree. He sent me another in the series this week. Margaret (!!!). This would be in her bedroom. As with the David, it is absolutely perfect. I especially love the little tiny hint of light from the lighter—really nice touch, Rob.

It also turns out that Mr. Burrows is himself an author, creator of the surrealist comic Riot District. I’ve read it over a couple times now, and loved it. There’s sort of a Cronenberg / Phillip K Dick vibe to the story, and the art is phenomenal.

www.riotdistrict.com

 

1 MARGARET – All That’s Really Left Is the Smell

I think I already put the David pic up on Facebook, but I don’t remember if I blogged it. I’ll include it here as well, possibly for a second time.

2 DAVID – The Slave of Murder

Huffington Post Interview

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A couple weeks ago I had a nice email chat with the Ilana Myer, herself a 2016 debut novelist (the excellent
Last Song Before Night, which everyone should read immediately). We talked about influences, the process of developing Mount Char, and my idiot dogs.

The interview is up now at Huffington Post if you’re interested. It’s kinda spoiler-y, but if you’re reading my FB posts that probably isn’t a huge problem.

Reddit Book Club Q&A

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As a reminder, I’ll be doing a Q & A (AMA, in reddit-speak) tomorrow, January 29, starting at around noon EST. Hope to see you there!

Movie Reviews

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When I woke up last Sunday I just couldn’t face another day in front of the keyboard, so I spent the day watching pay-per-view. A lot of it was not stuff that would have been my first choice, but there were a couple of pleasant surprises. Since it looks like half the U.S. is going to be snowed in this weekend, I thought this might be a good time to do a movie roundup. I waded through 10+ hours of crap so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.
Bone Tomahawk
Holy crap, this movie was amazing. Kurt Russell’s epic moustache starred in two westerns last year, and Hateful Eight (though very good) was not the best of the them. The screenplay for Bone Tomahawk was brilliant in a lot of ways, but the first third was an absolute gold mine of deadpan one-liners. I think the reason it didn’t make a zillion dollars is that the third act was a bit too bloody for the general public. Even if you can’t stand gore, you should watch the first hour and a half—it’s that good.
The writer/director is a guy named S. Craig Zahler. He is now on my “watch whatever he does next, no questions asked” list. Actually, in researching this blog post I found out he’s a novelist as well. There’s my weekend, sorted. Anyway, my understanding is that he got Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Fox, and Richard Jenkins (among others) to appear in a movie that had a budget of something like $1.50 and sandwiches, which should tell you how good the script was.
Highest possible recommendation.
The Last Witch Hunter

This was not the best fantasy movie that I’ve seen, but it was much better than I was expecting. Admittedly, some of that might be because the movies I watched before and after were pretty godawful. I did legitimately enjoy it though.
The look was pretty darn good–it had a kind of Gaia-earth-mother thing with all the witches that I thought was pretty cool, the fights were decent, and the CGI didn’t make me want to kill myself. I wouldn’t recommend it unreservedly, but there are worse ways to spend your time.
The Final Girls

This one’s kind of a love letter to 80s horror. A bunch of movie buffs get magically transported into a (thinly veiled) Friday the 13th and have to figure out how to survive. I liked it okay, but I’m not sure it deserved all the love it got on the festival circuit.
Howl

This was a British movie about a train that gets stuck in werewolf country. I watched it last Sunday and that’s all I remember, which hopefully tells you everything you need to know.
400 Days

A bunch of astronaut candidates are spending four hundred days in an underground bunker to test their resistance to the stress of long isolation. They more or less fast forward straight to day 373, at which point something unexpected happens. It had a very Twilight Zone feel and, honestly, might have been better served in a 40 minute format. It wasn’t unwatchable, but neither was it anything I’d recommend.
Oh, and while we’re at it:
The Revenant

I’ve heard this movie compared to The Thin Red Line, and I’d say that’s pretty accurate in the sense that everybody but me seemed to like it. For reference, The Thin Red Line was the movie that caused me to change my policy was to never walk out of a movie, and is currently number two on my “least enjoyed” list, right after August Rush.
I did hate The Revenant deeply, but not quite that much. There was some action, but if you’ve seen the trailer you’ve seen literally everything that happened in the entire ~300 month run time. Which reminds me–you may have heard a rumor of bear rape. I don’t believe that actually happened, but I can see where an audience member, desperate for some sort of stimulation, might have dreamed it. By about hour nine I was amusing myself by looking for shapes in the goop on DiCaprio’s lips.
There were some interesting bits–I thought it was a bold decision to have Tom Hardy deliver his lines in a dialect that no human has ever spoken, particularly as he was the only one who had any lines. The gamble paid off in the end though. By the time the credits rolled—at, I think, the middle of Month 287–we in the audience had all become fluent speakers. The two children born in the mezzanine during the second act (Sebastian, now 6, and dear little Courtney, age 4) grew up speaking it as their mother tongue.
Recommended for terminally ill patients who wish to leave the earth with relief in their hearts.

Pitch Black Humor

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I’m pretty sure that He Never Died is going to turn out to be the funniest movie I see in 2015. I hadn’t heard of it before yesterday, but we couldn’t get Star Wars tickets and Heather has a thing for Henry Rollins, so blah blah blah we caught a matinee.

I am sooo glad we did.

It’s a pretty simple setup. Henry Rollins stars as a guy who can’t die. A couple minutes into it he attracts the attention of some violent gangster types. Hijinks ensue. It’s played as more of an action / horror movie with laughs than a straight comedy, but it’s funnier than any comedy I can recall seeing in recent decades.

The humor is absolutely pitch black, but if you’ve got a taste for that sort of thing I can’t recommend it strongly enough. A couple times I was laughing so hard I thought I might pass out.

HOWEVER,

YOU’LL ENJOY IT MORE IF YOU DON’T WATCH THE TRAILER. If Henry Rollins plus lolz isn’t enough for you to make up your mind, you can watch the trailer up to about the 1:30 mark and still be okay. Also the movie isn’t going to be absolutely ruined if you watch the whole trailer, but I do think they gave away too much.

I saw it in the theater, but it’s also available on-demand (amazon, iTunes, …).

For comparison. the last movie I laughed at as hard as He Never Died was Whiplash (2014). That one is more of a serious, Oscar-bait kind of thing about an aspiring jazz drummer and his mentor. If memory serves, J.K. Simmons (the mentor) did, in fact, win an Oscar.

Craig Ferguson’s “I’m Here to Help” standup show (available on Netflix streaming) is damn good too.