Now streaming on: Sorry, Haters is a film that begins in intrigue, develops in fascination and ends in a train wreck. It goes spectacularly wrong, and yet it contains such a gripping performance by Robin Wright Penn that it succeeds, in a way, despite itself. To see great work is a reason to see an imperfect movie, and to observe how the movie loses its way may be useful even if it s frustrating. My inclination was to give the film a negative star rating, but that would mean recommending you not see this performance by Penn, and that I am unwilling to do.
Now streaming on: Push has vibrant cinematography and decent acting, but I m blasted if I know what it s about. Oh, I understand how the characters are paranormals, and how they re living in a present that was changed in the past, among enemies who are trying to change the future. I know they can read minds and use telekinesis to move things. I know they re a later generation of a Nazi experiment gone wrong, and the U.S. Army wants them for super-soldiers.
But that s all simply the usual horsefeathers to set up the situation. What are they
doing? The answer to that involves a MacGuffin that would have Hitchcock harrumphing and telling Alma, Oh, dear, they really have allowed themselves to get carried away. The MacGuffin is a briefcase. Yes, like in Pulp Fiction, but this time we know what s in it. It s a drug or serum that kills paranormals. And the Division desperately wants it.
James Bond has battled evil commies and megalomaniac madmen; perhaps it was only a matter of time until he faced off against a media baron the only sort of figure in today s world that actually does seek global domination. His enemy in Tomorrow Never Dies” wants to start a war in order to create headlines for the launch of his latest news channel. Just imagine what Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner would like to do to each other and imagine either one of them doing it to the Chinese, and you ll get the idea.
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Bond, played confidently and with a minimum of fuss by Pierce Brosnan, stumbles into the middle of the plot, masterminded by Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce), who owns newspapers, TV stations and a gigantic Stealth warship that s invisible to radar. Carver s plan is ingenious: He ll use his satellites to draw a British warship off course, sink it with the Stealth ship, steal its nuclear warheads, and fire one at China, which will think it is under attack from the W
Last Action Hero is about the same subject as almost every other feature film ever made: The possibility of blurring the line between the audience and the screen. We go to the movies so that we can vicariously live the lives of the characters who loom so glamorously above us, and the movies know that. Every moment of every shot exists with the full consciousness of the fourth invisible wall dividing the characters from their watchers in the dark.
Early in Last Action Hero, a small boy is watching a movie when suddenly a bundle of dynamite comes bouncing out of the screen and lands near him in the theater. He runs for his life, but there is an explosion, and somehow he is catapulted through the membrane between the audience and the actors. He is in the movie. More exactly, he is in the back seat of a speeding car in a chase scene, and the driver is Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger), his hero.