The View From The Mountain

Warning, there are spoilers in this review. Please wait until you have seen The Last Jedi before you read this. I went to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi feeling pretty confident that it would be good. This latest chapter in the (hopefully) neverending Star Wars saga was directed by Rian Johnson, who also did the superb Looper and The Brothers Bloom --the latter being one of my favorite films, and not just because Rachel Weisz co-stars in it. I was hoping Johnson could deliver a new Star Wars film with this sequel that would be more satisfying by simply not being another stealth remake--like what the last third of The Force Awakens turned into (don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed that film, though). But, having now seen it, I can say that The Last Jedi was far more than satisfying. It was magnificent. The great thing about The Last Jedi is that Rian Johnson takes whatever preconceptions the viewer has and flips them right over. Just when you think a character or a scene is...

Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olson are probably best known for their roles in the Marvel superhero movies as Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch, respectively. But they team up again in Wind River to play more down to earth characters in an earnest drama that’s set in the wintry mid-west--and it turns out to be a riveting thriller, as well. Renner plays Corey Lambert, a veteran tracker with the Fish and Wildlife Service. Whenever a wolf, a bear, or any kind of predator gets too close for comfort with human society, it’s Corey’s job to track it down and kill it. This is what he’s doing in the mountainous, snowy terrain of Wyoming when he comes across the body of a young Native American woman. When he calls the authorities, they call in Jane Banner (Olsen), a rookie FBI agent who’s normally stationed in Las Vegas. The victim turns out to be a teenager whom Corey knows, a girl named Natalie who was the best friend of his deceased daughter. The autopsy shows that Natalie had been sexually assaulte...

Twenty years after the release of his The Fifth Element , director Luc Besson regales us with another imaginative science fiction film. But where The Fifth Element was from his own fertile imagination, Valerian and the City Of A Thousand Planets is based on a French comic book series that’s been running for half a century, now, making it older than Star Wars , and almost as old as Star Trek . Valerian was a big bomb when it was released this past August--but unlike most big-budget tent pole films that underperform at the box office, Valerian didn’t deserve to be ignored by audiences. Starring Dane DeHaan and Carla Delevingne as a pair of interstellar space agents, Valerian is visual eye candy in the best sense of the word. Opening on the beaches of an alien planet, with a fully realized alien civilization lounging by the ocean until a cataclysmic event ruins their day, the viewer is immersed in this imaginative science fiction universe that’s just as vividly created as the Star W...

I have to admit that A Cure For Wellness slipped right under my radar when it was first released earlier this year. Mainly because the movie didn’t do very well, and quickly slinked out of theaters due to the bad box office. When I discovered that it had been directed by Gore Verbinski, I didn’t want to see it because I wasn’t a big fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean films that he made (granted, the first Pirates film was an enjoyable piece of fluff, but its countless sequels are a real slog to get through). But I was reminded that Verbinski also directed The Lone Ranger reboot, which I really liked (and I’m probably one of five people who do so), and he also helmed the superb remake of The Ring , starring Naomi Watts and a really scary videotape. A Cure For Wellness recalls The Ring in that it’s a horror movie with a burning mystery at its center. Verbinski pulls you in slowly, showing an office worker keeling over from a heart attack while working late one night. It turns out ...

I first saw the original Murder On The Orient Express back in the late seventies, maybe early eighties, on the then nascent cable TV, which was still pretty much unknown and struggling for viewers. My mother was an early subscriber, having been lured in with the idea of watching movies uncut, uninterrupted--and usually very late at night, which was when the cable channels would air the more racy, adult-themed stuff. Watching Murder On The Orient Express back then was my introduction not only to its hero, Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, but to his creator, Agatha Christie. And the movie imbued in me a deep fascination with the character that led me to seek out the Poirot books. The new film, which stars Kenneth Branagh as Poirot (and was directed by him as well), is extremely faithful to the original story--which meant that I knew going in who the killer would be. But that did not bother me; I was never one of these people who gets overly bent out of shape over spoilers. Because, ...

Thor Ragnarok is the third in the Thor series of superhero movies. Thor, the God of Thunder, was always a strange idea for a superhero. But director Kenneth Branaugh ( Henry V , Much Ado About Nothing ) did a great job at humanizing this character and making him relatable in the first Thor movie, by pumping up the Shakespearean aspects of the character. And while the second Thor film has its detractors (and understandably so) I still enjoyed it--despite the fact that it lacked the charm of the first film. For the third Thor flick, director Taika Waititi ( What We Do In The Shadows ) was brought in to bring a different take to the end film in this trilogy. And he did this in spades. He made a comedy. Thor: Ragnarok refers to the end of the world--namely the legend which refers to the end of the enchanted land of Asgard, Thor’s home, which falls under the domination of Hela, the goddess of death who is very well played by Cate Blanchett. Clad in a creepy/cool outfit that sprouts an...

The description for The Blackcoat’s Daughter on Amazon states that it’s a mystery thriller about two young students who must deal with the supernatural while staying over at their empty boarding school during the winter break. It sort of makes it sound like Nancy Drew meets Scooby Doo, and I wasn't too sure about seeing this. Imagine my pleasant surprise when, instead of a family-friendly mystery that Disney would have aired on its Sunday night show way back in the day, I receive a truly scary horror film about demonic possession that’s directed by the son of Norman Bates himself. The Blackcoat’s Daughter --which was originally called February , because that was when the story takes place--is the directorial debut of Oz Perkins (credited in the film as Osgood Perkins), one of the sons of the late Anthony Perkins, who was best known for his role in Hitchcock’s dark masterpiece Psycho . Oz Perkins has fashioned a genuinely creepy tale here about two students at an all-girls boardi...

Way back in 1981, when dinosaurs still walked the earth and only the birds tweeted, my father and I went to the movies as sort of a father and son type of bonding experience. The film we saw was Saturday the 14th , starring the husband and wife acting team of Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss, who play a couple with kids who inherit a creepy old mansion that just happens to be cursed. In short, the movie was awful--it was an ineptly made film that tried to be a spoof of the horror movie genre that had just exploded at that time, with Friday the 13th (from which Saturday got its title) being chief among them. Recently we observed a Friday the 13th, and it was while viewing all of the customary Friday the 13th memes online that I was reminded of this film, and decided to watch it the next day. While there’s an inspired moment, when Prentiss is attacked by bats in the same manner as the classic scene that took place in Hitchcock’s The Birds , watching Saturday the 14th on Saturday...

Despite a title that reminds me of Oscar-bait movies (you know, those earnest, “serious” dramas that nobody remembers or gives a damn about a year after they win their awards), I wanted to see Life because it was a science fiction/horror hybrid, much like how the Alien films are, and they’re among my favorite in that sub genre. Life deals with the crew of the International Space Station, which is a real thing, floating up there yonder right above your head now. Life is going by routinely for the six astronauts stationed on the ISS, until they are called to capture a wayward probe. The automated probe, sent to collect dirt specimens from Mars, has suffered some damage on its way back to Earth and has gone haywire, and it’s up to Jake Gyllenhaal to “catch” it using the station’s mechanical arm. He does so, and when the probe’s contents are examined and experimented on by Ariyon Bakare, playing one of the station’s scientists, he manages to revive the long-dormant cells, proving tha...

After one postponement after another, Star Trek: Discovery finally premiered on September 24, with the first episode showing on the CBS broadcast network, and the second episode on CBS All-Access, the struggling streaming service that CBS owns. But I guess it’s safe to say that CBS All-Access struggles are now over, thanks to the multitude of people signing up just to see the second half of the saga that began on broadcast TV. And speaking of that saga, Star Trek: Discovery takes place ten years before Captain Kirk takes off on his legendary journey. Yep, like Star Trek: Enterprise before it, Discovery is yet another prequel, another lame attempt to latch onto a popular version of Star Trek --the Kirk era--instead of taking off with a completely different version of it, like what Gene Roddenberry did with Star Trek: The Next Generation . But I have to admit that, five minutes into the first episode, “The Vulcan Hello” , I was engrossed with the goings on. That’s mainly because o...

The Mummy , the 2017 version of the classic Universal monster, crashed and burned at the box office this past summer (although it did extremely well at the overseas box office). It strived to be a far more vibrant and exciting version of the Boris Karloff version of the Mummy that was released in 1932, to which this film was often compared to in its promotional and publicity materials. And yeah, the Karloff Mummy is very dated and creaky--with the exception of a still-chilling sequence of an expedition member going insane with horror at the (off-screen) sight of the Mummy making its way out of its tomb. Yet Universal seems to have forgotten its other Mummy remake, the superb film that was released in 1999 with Brendan Fraiser and Rachel Weitz that--unlike the Tom Cruise version--was such a hit that it spawned two sequels. The Fraiser version had a sense of fun and high adventure that effortlessly blended humor and horror into an extremely enjoyable package that stands up to repeat...