today-is-a-good-day
Friday, March 29, 2024

Tag: Emily Blunt

Huntsman: Winter’s War, The (2016)

Title: The Huntsman: Winter’s War
Rating: PG-13
Directed by: Cedric Nicolas-Troyan
Written by: Evan Spiliotopoulos and Craig Mazin
Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Charlize Theron, Jessica Chastain, Emily Blunt, Nick Frost, Rob Brydon, Sheridan Smith and Alexandra Roach
Release Date: 4/22/2016
Running Time: 114 minutes

Official Site
IMDb

The fantastical world of Snow White and the Huntsman expands to reveal how the fates of The Huntsman Eric and Queen Ravenna are deeply and dangerously intertwined. Chris Hemsworth and Oscar® winner Charlize Theron return to their roles in The Huntsman: Winter’s War, an epic action-adventure in which they are joined by Emily Blunt and Jessica Chastain, as well as director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan. Producer Joe Roth (Maleficent, Alice in Wonderland) once again leads the team in a breathtaking new tale nested in the legendary saga.

Long before the evil Queen Ravenna (Theron) was thought vanquished by Snow White’s blade, she watched silently as her sister, Freya (Blunt), suffered a heartbreaking betrayal and fled their kingdom. With Freya’s ability to freeze any enemy, the young ice queen has spent decades in a remote wintry palace raising a legion of deadly huntsmen—including Eric (Hemsworth) and warrior Sara (Chastain)—only to find that her prized two defied her one demand: Forever harden your hearts to love.

When Freya learns of her sister’s demise, she summons her remaining soldiers to bring the Magic Mirror home to the only sorceress left who can harness its power. But once she discovers Ravenna can be resurrected from its golden depths, the wicked sisters threaten this enchanted land with twice the darkest force it’s ever seen. Now, their amassing army shall prove undefeatable…unless the banished huntsmen who broke their queen’s cardinal rule can fight their way back to one another.


What did you think of this film?

During Credits? No

After Credits? No

Note: During the credits the background shows an arrow shot in slow motion at Sara’s necklace.

Dedication: Dedicated to my mother Jocelyne – The strongest woman I know.


Sicario Review – 3.5 out of 5 Stars

SicarioPoster
A couple of weeks ago, I accused director Scott Cooper of destroying a seemingly infallible subject with his ugly, childish crime drama Black Mass. Now, I come to you with an opposite statement for director Denis Villeneuve and his new thriller Sicario. The plot is derivative, the characters are flat and the dialogue is artificial. That said, Villeneuve is such a brilliant filmmaker that he has basically taken a dead on arrival screenplay and given it substance and depth that writer Taylor Sheridan couldn’t have even fathomed. Sicario is an example of a film where everyone on board is trying there damnedest to breathe life into something that probably shouldn’t have even been saved in the first place. You’ll leave the film impressed by a lot of elements but unfortunately it isn’t quite good enough to deserve a repeat viewing or something beyond being called a solid piece of entertainment.

In Sicario, FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) becomes the witness to a horrific, grisly crime scene in Chandler, Arizona. In the hopes of finding the men responsible, she joins a group of elite agents run by the charismatic if deadly good ol’ boy Matt (Josh Brolin) and a mysterious, quiet man with a hidden past named Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro). As she digs deeper into the case, she finds that the line between who’s a hero and who’s a villain might not have been as simple as she originally thought.

SicarioStill1

I’m fairly shocked and disappointed at how muted my praise is for this film. This was easily one of my most anticipated films of 2015 for multiple reasons. The film is Denis Villeneuve’s real follow up to his 2013 movie Prisoners, an energetic and spectacular psychological thriller that was my number one movie for that year. Sicario brings together the same composer (Jóhann Jóhannsson) and the same cinematographer (Roger Deakins) that made Prisoners so captivating and it also features three of my favorite actors working today. At best, this was going to be yet another terrific thriller that managed to tackle dark, haunting ideas about human nature in an inventive and exciting way. And to Villeneuve’s credit, he delivered on that promise…sort of.

All the performances are fantastic even if they’re being contributed to weak characters. As I’ll get to later, I had a lot of problems with the script. This major flaw in the movie affects everyone in the cast in a way that ranges from mildly irritating to fatal. Emily Blunt is the one negatively affected the most by the script and it’s a shame because regardless she’s the one giving the best performance. Blunt is quite down to earth as this person who’s slowly becoming caught in the violence and terror going on across the border. The film has these excellent moments of quiet where they’ll be focused on the faces of the people involved and you can see the nervousness and the anxiety in her eyes as she desperately tries to be the voice of reason in this war that has no real end. She’s especially great in the scene near the start where she is reacting to this horrific discovery that has been at the house they’re raiding.

Josh Brolin is unfortunately being tied to a very contrived character that doesn’t ever require him to step outside the box. Once again, he’s been asked to play the funny but stern macho guy. You can tell that he’s trying but I think it says something that his best performance in 2015 was in Everest, a film filled with wasted performances by great actors. The performance other than Blunt’s that stands out is Benicio Del Toro as Alejandro. Like Brolin, I don’t think Toro’s doing something that’s especially different but I also think Toro is the person least affected by the script and it shows. In comparison to the other characters, Alejandro is this quiet guy who speaks only sparingly. In that sense, he doesn’t suffer the awkward dialogue and it makes his character feel much more complete and memorable than anyone else. To Toro’s credit, he’s doing what he does best in the best way possible and he’s very intimidating and unsettling in every scene he’s in without saying that much. In the final 25 minutes, Toro pretty much becomes the main character and the film goes to places with him that are terrifying to see unfold. This moment at a dinner table is one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen happen in a film in recent memory and it’s one of the few moments of brilliance in Sheridan’s script.

Of course the real stars of Sicario are the ones working behind the camera. The movie itself is mediocre but this film is perfectly directed. There is not a single aspect of the film simply from a direction standpoint that feels off or imperfect in any way. Villeneuve takes this fairly average crime film and transforms it into this visual journey into a psychological wasteland. The sound design allows for you to hear every movement of a car, every sudden gunshot and every distant uncertainty of the setting. The movie starts off with a bang and it makes sure that you’re worrying about what’s going to happen next for every scene.

He shoots the city, the people of both sides and the violence with the grace and the intimacy of a documentary. The best moments in the film are the ones where he is simply holding on these people from all these different angles living there lives. There’s a part where they’re interviewing a crowd of immigrants and it’s performed so honestly that you could take a shot from that scene and I wouldn’t be able to tell you if it was something from a movie or something done by Time Magazine. We get a glimpse of the vendors selling their products to people in their cars during traffic. We get this quiet moment of Kate dancing to country music with another man in a western bar. A scene with an important conversation pans down to see Brolin’s character wearing sandals during it. These tiny points are scattered throughout the entire film and they come together to create this world filled with a loneliness and an intensity that goes far deeper that you would expect.

There’s a scene where Kate’s car passes by these decapitated bodies hanging from a bridge. Most directors would zoom in on this and make a big deal about this type of violence but the way its shot here is very subtle and treated like some normal thing that happens on a day to day basis. This silent moment is a million times more disturbing than anything Depp did to show off in Black Mass. By the ending scene, it becomes clear in some way that Villeneuve has made the movie in this way to show that the horrors are being allowed to go on in the background of these people’s lives. The US is allowing the crime to continue and the citizens are so numb that they’ve become used to seeing things like that. You ultimately get used to it or you die trying. Sicario excels when it detaches itself from telling a story and it allows the viewer to get lost in these very detailed images of people following a routine because they have to.

SicarioStill2

I can’t give all the credit to Villeneuve though. Roger Deakins is one of the best cinematographers of all time and his work here is no exception to that statement. The aerial shots of Juarez that show the city from a distance carry the weight of walking into a dark, upsetting new world. He’s clearly the one responsible for why the film looks so raw but otherworldly at the same time. I adored how the film looks in the dark. Every shot in the third act looks incredible. From Kate going down a tunnel to a wide shot at a dinner table, the movie looks visually terrifying. The dark of night finally gives way to the full, untamed act of crime that is going on underneath it all.

Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score is equally effective in creating abstract horror. There’s this one line of music that gets used throughout the film and it becomes more and more foreboding as the movie draws nearer to its climax. Not bad for the guy who made The Theory of Everything sound like a Hallmark film. I have nothing but praise for this movie for its direction. This movie gives so much life and meaning and soul to its material through cinematography, music and where the camera gets pointed. Sicario’s best weapon is what made Prisoners so magnificent, it can reflect on the darkness of life by dragging you into this landscape that you can’t help but allow yourself to be dragged entirely into. Villeneuve allows you become this ghost traveling place to place, experiencing all that this world has to offer.

I have given this movie nothing short of praise so far and I’ve tried to give the movie as much as I could before I admit the awful truth that keeps me from calling Sicario great film. When you simply look at Sheridan’s script, Sicario is a very poorly written movie. I hate to throw a guy under the bus like this but the simple fact is that everything in this movie is operating at a ten and this screenplay is operating at around a four. It’s a very quiet film that allows for the actions to take over most of the time and in some ways it makes the screenplays flaw a bit more forgivable. But then I look back on Mad Max: Fury Road, a stunning blockbuster that came out this summer that featured very little dialogue. Despite being more focused on actions rather than conversations, you can still tell that that film had a smart script. The characters don’t usually talk but when they do, they have compelling and fascinating things to say. Like Fury Road, Sicario is great when it’s focused on the environment but unlike Fury Road, whenever its characters open their mouth, it’s embarrassingly easy to find heavy flaws.

The movie has two settings when it comes to its dialogue, lifeless exposition and uncomfortably fake character development. The way people explain things in this movie comes off as so void of emotion. You never get the sense that these are real people explaining what is going on but rather a writer using people as one sided devices to tell the audience his story. An example of this is a scene near the end where Matt reveals something to Kate about Alejandro’s past. This should be this big, shocking moment but the way Matt discusses it features no subtlety and you feel ultimately detached from what is going on with them.

I can sort of forgive dry exposition, what I can’t forgive are the cringe worthy scenes where the writer tries to make the characters seem more human and relatable. The movie makes multiple attempts at comedic relief and none of them resemble anything other than something pathetic. There is this running joke with bras between Kate and her best friend that I don’t think would even make it onto a light CBS crime procedural. The ways the story explains things lacks subtlety so it’s jarring and unbelievable to see Sheridan attempting to capture their reactions to things.

The best example of this is when Kate has returned from this quick, abrupt shootout during a traffic jam. It was quick, grotesque and it resulted in Kate being forced to kill. To Villeneuve and Blunt’s credit, her shock and horror is captured quite well when he is doing these close ups on her quiet reaction to what just happened. The camera lingers on her shaking while lighting a cigarette, a sad attempt to soothe what she has just witnessed. But once Kate gets back to base and gets into a fight with Matt, the dialogue feels so blunt and generic that it ruins whatever sense of dread the last scene created towards the character of Kate.

If most of the characters are there to explain the story, Kate is there to say a small list of lines on repeat that you’ve seen used multiple times in multiple movies. “This is not what I signed up for!” “You can’t do that, that’s illegal!” She might as well be wearing a shirt that tells us that she’s the naïve, relatable one. In two hours, Kate doesn’t succeed at a concept that was done far better by Terrance Howard’s character in Prisoners. Like Kate, he was the sympathetic, kind hearted person forced into doing a horrible thing; the difference being that despite being a smaller character, his arc stills makes far more sense and contains much more heart than Kate’s. Her character is so repetitive and empty that her ultimate conclusion in the finale feels weak and chosen by the writer less to tell a realistic story and more to bring home the message.

This is just one of the cases where I find Prisoners to be much better than Sicario. The experience can best be described as what Prisoners did with better direction, a less ambitious story and less interesting characters. Sicario’s final message about the darkness of humanity, while widely different from most mainstream movies we see today, still feels like a more contrived version of the things that made me fall in love with Prisoners. I will definitely recommend this movie with even the full ticket price because the film is so well made that it still deserves to be soaked up on the big screen. Unfortunately, everything meaningful about Denis Villeneuve’s direction and Blunt and Toro’s performances feels slightly wasted on a project that could’ve easily been done by a far less competent group of people. Sicario confirms Villeneuve as one of the best directors working today but I can’t help but wish this level of brilliance was going towards material that was also on his level.

Rating:(3.5/5)

Review by: Ryan M.

Release Date: 10/2/2015

Rating: R

Cast: Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro

Directed by: Denis Villeneuve

Screenplay by: Taylor Sheridan

Sicario (2015)

SicarioPoster

Title: Sicario
Rating: R
Directed by: Denis Villeneuve
Written by: Taylor Sheridan
Starring: Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro
Release Date: 10/2/2015
Running Time: 121 minutes

Official Site
IMDb

An idealistic FBI agent is enlisted by an elected government task force to aid in the escalating war against drugs at the border area between the U.S. and Mexico.


What did you think of this film?

During Credits? No

After Credits? No


Into the Woods Review – 3 out of 5 Stars

IntoTheWoodsPoster
You can say that I’ve seen a lot of three star movies this year. To the credit of Into the Woods, this is the best movie that I’ve given three stars to in a while. This movie has aspects that are amazing and has songs and performances that I loved yet there are problems with the movie that are too big for me to ignore. Still, this is an entertaining film and should be seen even if my rating for the film is disappointingly low.

For those like me who didn’t know about the beloved Stephen Sondheim Broadway play walking in, Into the Woods is a musical that connects most of the famous Brothers Grimm fables into one story. A Baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt) want to have a baby but a witch (Meryl Streep) has a curse on the Baker’s family that keeps him from having a child. To have the curse reversed from the witch, they have to find a red cape, a golden slipper, a white cow and golden hair.

IntoTheWoodsReviewStill2

When I was hearing about this movie, a lot of people were calling Steven Sondheim a genius and we’re praising how great the music is. Having seen it, Into the Woods truthfully has some of the most impressive numbers I’ve seen in a musical maybe since the 60’s. Stephen Sondheim has an extreme talent in writing catchy as hell songs and lyrics. Don’t be worried that most of the story is told in song. Unlike Les Misérables, all the songs here feel necessary in moving the story forward and revealing character and they don’t come off as cluttered and lacking in atmosphere. I had no problem with the story being told with music and the movie soars when it’s doing just that. All the actors maybe with the exception of Lilla Crawford do an exceptional job singing the songs and Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt are especially on their A game. Whatever problems I had with Into the Woods aren’t the problem of the music and you should look beyond that if that’s the things that keeping you from checking this out.

This is a movie that seems to have had a lot of people working on it in the technical field that clearly cared about the material. All of the areas like the production design and the costume design do a good job getting a classical fable tone to the setting with the houses look and especially with what different characters are wearing. The make-up is top notch and what they did to Meryl Streep in particular is awesome in making her go from a very hideous witch to a beautiful witch. As with most musicals, you have to admire the sound design because they have to mix together what is happening in the scene, the singing of the performer and the music throughout. Seeing how stable this musical was in comparison to others I’ve seen as of late, this makes the sound design that much more worthy of praise.

I mentioned above that the cast is really great and I stay with that statement. I think Meryl Streep is extremely talented but she has been doing a great job in fairly mediocre films for some time. While her character is the messiest, she still is given a lot more here and she delivers her best performance since Doubt. The witch has the most memorable songs in the movie and Streep rises to the occasion whole-heartedly. She is putting her heart into every note and it’s a perfect mixture of dedication and sheer fun with the part she has to play. The Last Midnight song is probably my favorite scene and that part alone makes it one of the best supporting actress performances of the year. Meryl Streep will get an Oscar nomination and for once it’ll be in a role that challenged her and showed a different side of her acting chops. Meryl Streep isn’t the only great actor in the films ensemble. Emily Blunt shines every time she’s in it and much like Streep she seems to be putting her heart into it. Chris Pine as Prince Charming and Anna Kendrick as Cinderella both have moments where they get to show off their acting and singing chops. I haven’t seen James Corden in a lot but between this and Begin Again; he shows a charisma and confidence that shows the potential of a future strong leading man. And while they’re the weakest singers, Lilla Crawford and Daniel Huttlestone both give strong enough debut performances as Little Red Riding Hood and Jack. I didn’t even mind Johnny Depp as The Wolf. This is coming from a guy that thinks Depp one of the weakest actors working in Hollywood today. You get the sense that it’s made up of actors who really enjoyed the source material and wanted to present it in the best way they were able. This kind of enthusiasm from an entire cast is rare and really nice to see every once in a while.

IntoTheWoodsReviewStill1

From the first chunk, you’re probably curious why I’m giving this such a low score. My praise comes from a genuine love I had towards a lot of things about Into the Woods. For the first maybe 90 minutes or so, this movie is around a 4 star rating. It’s this huge, epic blend of music, story and performances and it does a great job mixing together these different ideas and showing the different morals these people learned and how they are all connected. You have a lot of fun but at the same time it can be serious and it can say things about responsibility and ambition. There are a lot of sympathetic characters and it’s one of the quickest sits this year. All this movie needed to do was stick the ending and it might even have made my top ten. Unfortunately the film doesn’t end well…oh boy does it not end well.

There’s a point where the director obviously wants you to think that it’s going to end soon. And when they’re just about to conclude, something big happens and it doesn’t end for another thirty or so minutes. I’m not saying that some of the themes and ideas it tries to express in these final thirty minutes aren’t valid. In a better scenario, I can see some of the stuff it brings up being used brilliantly to show a contrast between the lighter first half and a much darker second half and how life really is. In the actual play, the stuff in the last thirty minutes makes up part two of the two part play. I haven’t seen the play, but from this you can assume that equal time is spent on these areas. Here’s the gigantic error with the film, 90 minutes are spent on the first act and a measly 30 minutes are spent on the second act. This stuns me that they even thought they could make a stable, well-paced play in going this route. I don’t care whether it was them trying to keep from making a three hour movie or whether it was them trying to keep it PG, it doesn’t matter and the fact remains the same. Act two is a complete train wreck.

I shouldn’t even have to explain why this didn’t work, you’re trying to tell this deep, powerful message and you’re jamming everything together in a very short amount of time. Important characters die in the most rushed and confusing ways possible and the other characters aren’t given enough time to fully react to what has happened in way that makes the audience care. Whatever chances are left of giving The Witch a solid character arc are gone and the way she exits the story makes no possible sense. You’re given all these things that are meant to mean something but I got so much whiplash from what was happening that none of it affected me or felt very successful in being impactful. Whatever momentum was built by the first act collapses in this cluttered mess of a second act. If the first act is 4 stars then the second act is probably around two stars. The sad part is that the music gets even better in the second act and you can see how in a three hour play these songs would be awe inspiring, here they just feel wasted. It fascinates me why they did this and why they would throw away what had for a while been a true return to a once proud genre.

There are plenty of things that are amazing about Into the Woods like the performances and the A+ music. The first act alone is definitely worth a watch. Sadly, to imitate one of the most famous song lines of the musical, I wish they hadn’t tried to squish an epic, big second act into a short period of time. Into the Woods isn’t just a disappointment for what it could’ve been but also for at a point what it actually was.

Rating:(3/5)

Review by: Ryan M.

Release Date: 12/25/2014

Rating: PG

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Meryl Streep, Chris Pine, Daniel Huttlestone, James Corden, Emily Blunt, Christine Baranski, Tracey Ullman, Lilla Crawford and Johnny Depp

Directed by: Rob Marshall

Screenplay by: James Lapine

Into the Woods (2014)*

IntoTheWoodsPoster

TITLE: Into the Woods

RELEASE DATE: 12/25/2014

RATING: PG

A witch tasks a childless baker and his wife with procuring magical items from classic fairy tales to reverse the curse put on their family tree.

What did you think of this film?


Official Site

IMDb


During Credits? Yes

Click to see whats: during the credits

 

After Credits? No

Is this stinger worth waiting around for? Vote DownVote Up (-16 rating, 42 votes)

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

EdgeOfTomorrowPoster

TITLE: Edge of Tomorrow (aka. Edge of Tomorrow 3D, Edge of Tomorrow: An IMAX 3D Experience & Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow)

RELEASE DATE: 6/6/2014

RATING: PG-13

An officer finds himself caught in a time loop in a war with an alien race. His skills increase as he faces the same brutal combat scenarios, and his union with a Special Forces warrior gets him closer and closer to defeating the enemy.

What did you think of this film?


[wpolling id=”4″ ]


Official Site

Amazon

IMDb


During Credits? No

After Credits? No

Wind Rises, The (2013)

TheWindRisesPoster

TITLE: The Wind Rises (aka. Kaze tachinu)

RELEASE DATE: 2/28/2014

RATING: PG-13

A look at the life of Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II.

What did you think of this film?


Official Site

IMDb


During Credits? No

After Credits? No

NOTE: A tribute to Jiro Horikoshi and Tatsuo Hori.


Arthur Newman (2012)

ArthurNewmanPoster

TITLE: Arthur Newman

RELEASE DATE: 6/14/2013

RATING: NR

A story of a man who fakes his own death and assumes a new identity in order to escape his life, who then moves in with a woman who is also trying to leave her past behind.

What did you think of this film?


Official Site

Amazon

IMDb


During Credits? No

After Credits? No


Looper (2012)

TITLE: Looper

RELEASE DATE: 9/28/2012

RATING: R

In 2072, when the mob wants to get rid of someone, the target is sent 30 years into the past, where a hired gun awaits. Someone like Joe, who one day learns the mob wants to ‘close the loop’ by transporting back Joe’s future self.

What did you think of this film?


Official Site

IMDb


During Credits? No

After Credits? No


Your Sister’s Sister (2011)

TITLE: Your Sister’s Sister

RELEASE DATE: 6/29/2012

RATING: R

Iris invites her friend Jack to stay at her family’s island getaway after the death of his brother. At their remote cabin, Jack’s drunken encounter with Hannah, Iris’ sister, kicks off a revealing stretch of days.

What did you think of this film?


Official Site

Amazon

IMDb


During Credits? No

After Credits? No


Follow Us!

1,858FansLike
66FollowersFollow
112FollowersFollow
681FollowersFollow
37SubscribersSubscribe