they exit the saloon doors one after another like a fashion show, or open functions on an AS400
or ants, out of woodwork marching vertically along split trenches of bark, their petite outlines shadowed by the street lights of the car park. i don’t know how much time has passed. i wasn’t keeping track, and i’m almost hooting ash.
when do i have to go back? so it looks more like i’m smoking
and less like a jackass? it’s a great excuse, to be so old-fashioned you’d rather you lived in an era you were able than every five minutes having to excuse yourself from the table.
Remember in “Back to the Future”, when Marty is auditioning for the Battle of the Bands and Huey Lewis tells him he’s “too darn loud?” So quiet & subdued 80% of “Kraven The Hunter” was, that I could clearly hear the shakey leg of the phobic teenager sitting in the row behind me with their 10-person family entourage. They wanted to be anywhere else, too.
Let’s draw the same comparisons every other review is: between this & Chris Nolan’s “Batman Begins”. While their narrative direction differs, Batman’s opening salvo is tightly edited, dynamically paced, and Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack effectively ‘mickey-mouses’ every scene.
After Kraven’s prologue (freely-available to view on YouTube), there’s a twenty-minute passage with no music, no action, and non-stop dialogue. Aaron Taylor-Johnson eventually bites someone’s cheek off in a fountain of CGI gore, but it segues to another long section with tedious exposition, and Aaron’s incessant fourth-wall mugging.
Legacy director Quentin Tarantino says there are no more movie stars in modern Hollywood, and Aaron is a good thesis. He’s handsome, charismatic, and clearly committed to the role (physically-speaking), but the self-awareness of his line readings betrays the serious tone of the rest of the picture – particularly in Russell Crowe & Alessandro Nivola’s sobering villains. A dozen buffalo are graphically killed by poachers, but all Aaron has for them are poster quips.
Kraven betrays its audience in more overt ways than merely contemptuous acting & a lack of trust. Poor pacing may be covered-up in post-production, but bad timing is entirely a director’s fault, and J.C. Chandor (“A Most Violent Year”) has no clue how to stage action for the mainstream. At one point, a phase-shifting antagonist appears behind someone to shoot them, but when we cut to the reveal, it’s a full beat before the trigger is pulled. Why wait so long? Why is a ten-second throwaway bar shootout halfway through framed clearer than a climactic scene in a monastery? Why is a CGI cutaway of Aaron jumping out a thirty-floor window the most exciting single sequence?
Kraven’s two hours are only passingly engaging, no one looks like they’re having a good time except Aaron (and at the viewer’s expense), and Chandor is more concerned with pretentious drama than Christmas entertainment for the masses. I wanted to like it, but Kraven is lifeless, and not loud enough.
Movie poster sourced from impawards.com.What do you think? Are you glad the Sony-verse of Spider-Man villain origin stories are over, for now? Do you think Aaron’s smugness will play better should he be hired as the next James Bond? Did you like Kraven’s CGI fuzz (including a tank of a lion, an inquisitive eagle, and a very hairy Russian bear) as much as my wife & I did? Leave your comments below, and Happy Holidays!
After an underwhelming ‘series finale’ in 2015 (with creepy-guy Doug Hutchinson as the villain), that “CSI” we like came back in style with a standalone, limited-series revival in 2021. It was pretty good, too: cozy returning work from William Pedersen, Jorja Fox, and Paul Guilefoyle; a straightforward serial; and the successful casting of Paula Newsome (“Chicago Med”) as the department’s new supervisor.
I didn’t connect with the other new actors, but those secondaries weren’t the focus: there’s only so many episodic stories you can tell before details overlap, and CSI’s adroitness – from the 15 seasons of the original series to its various spin-offs – was the slow dishing of its characters’ personal info, only ever noting those beats as they pertained to the caseload.
Flash-forward, and – like all good things – executives misread the positive ratings as audiences wanting more. Pedersen, Fox, and Guilefoyle all left, with Marg Helgenberger & Eric Szmanda chosen to represent the old guard’s new bequest. Weeks would go by without fresh episodes, suggesting that focus-group proposals (including dumping an older, tired Szmanda after only three chapters) were being implemented in real-time: always a bad sign.
And both sequel seasons of “CSI Vegas” were pretty bad: staff writers just couldn’t get their priorities straight. Too much time was dedicated to Newsome’s recovery after an assault, and not enough to Lex Medlin’s Beau’s rehabilitation after getting spooked in the field. Helgenberger, like Szmanda, looked tired, and was only in half the episodes. Scribes instead pivoted to Matt Lauria’s Folsom and his poor decision-making (a three-way office romance; avenging his mother’s murder then having to regain the team’s trust), but Lauria played him without irony: his line readings were surface-level gruff, opposed to finding the Warrick-style pathos.
Season 3’s back-end was spent investigating a cyborg factory, which devolved into Newsome having one-way conversations with the suspected robot antagonist in her office. Catherine being a mentor to Sarah Gilman’s Penny was forgotten. And I would be remiss to not mention episode 2-06 (“Here’s the Rub”) as one of the worst-edited forty minutes of television I’ve ever watched – odd, since established director Mario Van Peebles’ filmography suggests a comfort with the TV format.
Relentlessly disappointing from-a-point and contemptuous toward longtime fans, CSI Vegas is now six-feet underground in the grave it dug itself.
RIP 2024
Poster sourced from thetvdb.com c/o Zeferovic. What do you think? Do you agree that Vegas peaked with its first season, or were you a fan of all three? Was it disrespectful of the original series’ legacy – particularly its treatment of Catherine and disregard for her history with Sam Braun – or have you never been a supporter of the CSI franchise? Let us know in the comments below!
My 2007 grip & gaffing instructor Dave Gordon used the term “Golden Topping Land” (after the artificial popcorn butter) to denote a cinema audience’s suspension of disbelief, so long as nothing dumb happens in the story, or a microphone dips into the shot. It’s to “Subservience’s” credit that it had me in Golden Topping Land its whole duration, save two key points: trying to pass a black Tesla off as an electric Mustang, and Megan Fox’s lack of neck make-up.
I’m a chauvinist: there I was the morning after watching, recommending it to someone as “the Megan Fox sex-bot movie on Netflix”. Yes, Megan pretty-much shows as much of her body here that a R-rating & no-nipple clause will allow. But Subservience has more up its sleeve than mere sleeze, not the least of which its three leads: all of whom put out intense performances like they’re out to prove something.
It’s been easy to write off Megan’s acting career as ostentatious, but she does try serious work when & where the industry will allow (“Passion Play”; “Midnight in the Switchgrass”) and she presents great value to the role here, despite it being a robot, and another vessel in a filmography defined by transfixing the male gaze. Her gender-swapped body double Michele Morrone (“365 Days”) is here as well, playing Megan’s stooge, and Madeline Zima as Mike’s terminally-ill wife. Madeline shocked me since, growing up with “The Nanny,” I wasn’t prepared to see little Gracie fully grown & fully naked. She puts on a persuasive show, though, and could find work in more erotic thrillers moving forward, if that’s what she decides.
The most pronounced flaw is in the film’s otherwise-strong script, which introduces dynamic world-building that plays a passive second to the movie’s main focus, which is Megan usurping the family. A subplot about a construction crew being replaced raises valid questions about the world’s future labour force, but it doesn’t go anywhere narratively except to illustrate that Megan has murderous tendencies, when the same point is already proven in her attempts to kill Madeline.
Subservience’s on-the-nose dialogue about modern relationships is compelling enough without being overcomplicated by empty lore, or its two endings. Producers could have saved some money, too, had they just concentrated on the sex-bot in the house. That part of the movie is good, for reasons other than solely Megan, Michele, or Madeline’s smokey stares.
Poster sourced from impawards.com.I never thought I would say this, but Subservience’s broader strokes may have played better had the film been a limited series instead. What do you think? Why are the surgeons’ mouths sealed shut? What is the social structure of a society where all labour is replaced by automation? Just ‘what’ were those things on the soles of Megan’s shoes? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!
Some may read “Gladiator 2” (aka. G2) star and newcomer Paul Mescal’s story about his first-day interaction with director Ridley Scott as a stormtrooper’s royal rejuvenation, and others as the exclamation of a stubborn octogenarian: Mescal was nervous, and Sir Ridley came up to him brandishing a cigar and bellowed, “Your nerves are no good to me!”
I was in the latter camp. I’ve argued before that the 86-year-old’s recent output – in a career that has dipped into every genre other than musicals & animation – has felt like a sell-out when contrasted against the era of “Alien” & “Blade Runner 1″. These new projects have released too close together and are a roller-coaster of inconsistent quality (2021’s “House of Gucci” is 2 stars at most, while the same year’s “The Last Duel” is borderline 5). On top of that, he’s been talking about rehiring creepy-guy & Kremlin-espouser Gérard Depardieu to redub “1492”: a sign the auteur is experiencing some revisionist blues in his autumn years.
But G2 is so good, it made me rethink my pessimistic opinion toward Scott’s oeuvre. Director-of-photography John Mathieson was ‘misquoted’ in an interview, calling Scott “lazy” because he rushes through takes & shoots multi-cam. Surely, Scott has just uncovered the Grand Unifying Theory of filming quick & cheap on the studio’s dime: something the turbulent, cash-hemorrhaged industry post-COVID has been foraging for. All that’s left is Steven Soderbergh editing backstage and your $300-million historical epic will be done in a wisp.
Without taking away the throwback CGI & some script revisions, G2 could be a straight remake of the 2000 original. It’s huge in scope but easy to follow, with enough grue to satisfy my masculine desire, and a motley crew of supporting actors (Peter Mensah; Tim McInnerny; Matt Smith) who made me happy to see working.
The half-star deduction, believe-it-or-not, is predominantly against Denzel Washington. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to see he’s enjoying his semi-retirement, but for a character who’s so integral to the movie’s denouement, Washington plays him superficially guileful: listen to how he pronounces “power” & “politics” at key points. And don’t get me started on that stupid monkey, and the one-too-many speeches at the tail-end.
Otherwise, from a technical perspective, Gladiator 2 is flawless. Film-stock purists should be documenting Scott’s methods for staying on-schedule & on-budget instead of deriding them: it’s the future.
Poster sourced from impawards.com.What do you think? Was a “Gladiator” sequel pointless, or justified? Are you impressed that it went from script-to-screen in a year (not including the 23 it took to develop)? Were the flashback clips alienating, or a handy reminder? Was Tim McInnerny the one Denzel was talking about when he said he kissed a guy “full on the lips”? Do you think Peter Mensah’s role will be expanded in the inevitable Director’s Cut release? And, possibly most important, do you think we’re headed for a period when, finally, we won’t have to hear about Pedro Pascal for at least a year, or do you think his MCU casting ensures he’ll dominate our screens into the foreseeable future? Leave you comments below!
theory of a daskeman 