TV Review

Agent Carter 1.4 – “The Blitzkrieg Button”

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In this episode Peggy Carter is given the all-enviable task of taking the lunch order at the S.S.R. precinct, and the fourth hour of Agent Carter only sporadically raises the excitement level above that low threshold. The sentiment was more or less the same during the previous episode “Time and Tide”: with only eight episodes in total, is there really enough time to spend on lunch order gags and Stan Lee cameos?

The good thing is that the executive producers of Agent Carter did confirm that the show is not a miniseries after all, despite that being the impression nearly everyone was under up until this point, and that a second season is a possibility. If so, a slower approach can certainly work. Still, though, even as each episode is full of stuff to like, it seems as if Agent Carter is less interested in telling a cohesive story and more interested in tying everything back to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

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Almost Famous (2000)

Sex, drugs, and rock & roll. This is what Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous is about, although it’s mostly rock & roll. If you enjoy music, particularly classic rock bands such as Zeppelin, The Who, The Stones, Dylan, Hendrix, and plenty of others, I can near guarantee that you will fall in love with this film.

Also, I can near guarantee that you will fall in love with Kate Hudson, playing Penny Lane, or Lady Goodman. Aside from the fact that she is absolutely gorgeous, Hudson portrays one of the single coolest females of all time in her character. She is a die-hard rock lover, and a simply down to Earth, kind and generous person. Undoubtedly wife material. While the acting in this film is not necessarily something that jumps out at you, Hudson turns in a really enjoyable and fun performance that helps establish a strong emotional connection to her character.

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Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)

How badly can two brothers mess up a supposedly simple robbery? Apparently, very, very badly. This is what we learn in Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead when Hank and Andy try to rob their parents’ jewelry store to cure some financial woes and, well, it doesn’t go according to plan, which is to say their plan did not involve botching the actual robbery and leading to six deaths, including their own mother, in just a few days. Definitely not good.

At the very least, I can say that the movie is done much more pristinely than the brothers’ plan, but, like the attempted robbery, it certainly could have been executed better. Before I get to any of my problems with the film, I must first admit that the acting is superb. The late Phillip Seymour Hoffman is fantastic as Andy, the older brother pushing for the robbery. Then there’s Ethan Hawke (who just loves being in movies that start with “Before”, as he’s been in four such movies) who plays Andy’s younger brother Hank, a loyal, but non-custodial parent (Boyhood, anyone?), behind on child support. Hawke, as he has been known to do, truly captures the role.

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Director Series: Peter Weir

Fearless (1993)

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The Peter Weir we have today is one that seems to take his time releasing new films. It’s been four years since The Way Back, more than ten since Master and Commander, and nearly twenty since The Truman Show. Those most recent films of his are pretty great across the board, and perhaps the time and care taken with each is a major reason why. This wasn’t always the case with Weir, though: he released five films in the 1980s alone (Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously, Witness, The Mosquito Coast, and Dead Poets Society), all of which were fantastic, and he had a pretty productive early ’90s too.

The film that forms the divide between super-productive Weir and less-so Weir seems to be Fearless, a 1993 drama starring Jeff Bridges as a plane crash survivor. For whatever reason, Weir took more time off following Fearless than he had since he first started directing (although one might find it hard to believe it was truly “time off”). From then on, a new Weir film would be all the more cherished for the infrequency now associated with it.

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Somewhere (2010)

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I’ve always been spectacularly underwhelmed by anything within a ten mile radius of Stephen Dorff. He is in a ton of stuff I haven’t seen, to be fair, but then again most of those seem like instantly forgettable action flicks with airy titles relating to crime (Felon, Officer Down, .45) or cars (Brake, Carjacked) or just ambiguously intense shit (Heatstroke, Riders, Deuces Wild). Maybe there’s an unseen masterpiece buried in there somewhere. The things with Dorff I’ve had the distinct pleasure (ahem) of enjoying (ahem) have been Blade, in which he plays the most annoyingly puerile vampire this side of Twilight; Immortals and The Iceman, which I had to look up to make sure he was actually in because I don’t remember him at all; and, of course, those stupid ads for Blu Cigs. To boot, I mix the guy up with Skeet Ulrich, and that’s never good.

And yet Johnny Marco from Somewhere is a categorical douche, and wouldn’t you know it? Dorff is actually a great choice for the part. After he breaks his arm falling down the stairs at a party, Hollywood actor Johnny spends a few weeks at a high-price resort in the Hills getting pampered and watching strippers flail around in his room. He drinks and smokes. He sits. He orders room service and opens another beer and returns to the couch to smoke and sit some more. Every now and then his phone buzzes, receiving texts from a private number that say things like You’re a fucking asshole and You think you’re such hot shit, don’t you? and Johnny hardly manages a shrug as he lounges around his room.

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Director Series: Ron Howard

Night Shift (1982)

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The upgrade in quality from Ron Howard’s directorial debut Grand Theft Auto to his sophomore effort Night Shift is pretty remarkable. Howard did direct a string of TV movies in the interim (Cotton Candy, Skyward, and Through the Magic Pyramid) and had directed a few shorts prior to Auto, so it wasn’t like Night Shift was only the second time he touched a camera. He was also doing this really weird thing called “acting” on occasion.

Regardless of where it falls, Night Shift is a surprisingly hilarious addition to Howard’s early canon. Auto relied heavily on Happy Days cast members and members of the Howard Family to round out the cast and crew, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but could be a bit distracting at times. Speaking of distracting, Auto also had a funk-bass-porno soundtrack that served to bolster the overall feel of the thing as hastily-made. And most importantly, the character motives in Auto just didn’t make a whole lot of sense across the board.

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News

Film & TV News: February 2

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News

–The Imitation Game won the 2015 USC Scripter Award this past Saturday, which honors both screenwriter (Graham Moore) and original source author (Andrew Hodges). The other nominees were Gone Girl, Inherent Vice, Wild and The Theory of Everything.

-The Sundance Film Fest Awards were announced, with Me & Earl & the Dying Girl taking a Grand Jury Prize and Robert Eggers collecting the Directing Award for the horror film The Witch.

-In casting news, Rose Byrne will be returning for X-Men: Apocalypse after having sat out for Days of Future Past, the American remake of Sleepless Night announced Jamie Foxx and Michelle Monaghan as leads, and Matthew McConaughey joined Born to Run. Aside from that, it was a fairly uneventful week for casting.

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TV Review

Agent Carter 1.3 – “Time and Tide”

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Not exactly a rock ’em sock ’em hour for Agent Carter in the third episode “Time and Tide”, which is a shame considering the season/series is only slated for eight episodes in total. That’s not a lot of time to gather a head of steam, and while Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. took a solid fifteen episodes before really breaking interesting ground Agent Carter has no such luxury. It’s fortunate, then, that Hayley Atwell and James D’Arcy remain so watchable in this otherwise droll episode.

Following the death of the mysterious Brannis at the end of “Bridge and Tunnel”, Peggy is left with a partial symbol and a whole host of questions regarding the theft of Howard Stark’s inventions. The symbol kind of looks like a heart, and so Peggy goes digging. She consults the Book of Symbols on her bedside (sigh) and makes a shocking discov — oh, no, sorry. This doesn’t seem to lead anywhere. Okay. Move along.

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Film Review

Good Will Hunting (1997)

I would like to start off this review by stating plainly that this is my all-time favorite film. I would never go to such lengths as to suggest that this is the “best” film ever made, but rather that it contains all the things that I truly care about in a movie — simply good writing, good acting, and an enlightening theme. I put a lot of emphasis on a film’s ability to speak to me in an emotional and personal way. Good WIll Hunting brought me to tears; it wrenched my gut with laughter; it inspired me, and it made me want to go out into the world searching for something special to call my own. This film won two Oscars in 1998, one for Best Original Screenplay, accepted by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and one for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, awarded to Robin Williams. I would like to dedicate this review to the memory of this remarkable man, whose passing, even months later, pains me deeply. We love you, Robin.

It is no surprise that this film spends a lot of its run-time focused on Will’s (Matt Damon) therapy sessions with Sean McGuire (Robin Williams), considering that a major theme of the film is about overcoming the obstacles that we make for ourselves within our own minds. Will has serious difficulty with allowing new people into his life in any real and significant way because the first people that were meant to love him, his parents, deserted him. This is why Will hangs up on Skylar (Minnie Driver) after running out into the rain to call her on a payphone; this is why he simply cannot bring himself to say that he loves her, even though he wants to, even though it breaks her heart that he won’t. This is an issue that nearly all of us deal with to some degree or another. The complete desire to do one thing, but to be so inhibited from doing so because of various psychological dilemmas is undeniably a common and quite frustrating problem. Will goes further, masking his issues by adopting the persona of an aloof, no-shit-giving punk. He’s a janitor who evenly divides his time between batting cages and bars.

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Never Say Never Again (1983)

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The next Bond movie will be Spectre, which will mark the fourth outing for Daniel Craig’s modernized James Blonde and the second for director Sam Mendes following 2012’s Skyfall. Mendes won’t be the first to return for another helping of 007, and in fact the trend since Dr. No has hewed closer to “we’ll ask you back if your movie doesn’t suck” than anything else. The math, for those of you struggling here: Skyfall doesn’t suck = Mendes returns.

But Spectre will also mark the return of…well, SPECTRE. The evil organization (SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) has been absent from the Bond franchise for the past eleven films, at least according to Bond purists. According to everyone else, the last time SPECTRE plotted against MI6 was in 1983’s Never Say Never Again, the only Bond film not produced (or sanctioned) by Eon Productions, a film that saw the valiant (ahem) return of Sean Connery to the James Bond role. Never Say Never Again pits this 53-year-old version of the spy against SPECTRE as the organization counter-intelligences, terrorizes, revenges and extorts all over everybody’s ass. Math: SPECTRE = evil.

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