The View From The Mountain

Despite coming out thirty six years after the first film, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice , once again directed by Tim Burton, wound up being vastly entertaining, adding lots of pleasant surprises, like the use of stop-motion animation. The sequel takes place within the same real-life time frame, with Lydia Deetz, played with wry humor by Winona Ryder, now the host of a ghost hunting show. She’s also the mother of Astrid, a teenager played by Jenna Ortega. They live with Delia Deetz (the always great Catherine O'Hara), Lydia’s step-mother and Astrid’s step-grandmother. After the death of Charles--Delia’s husband and Lydia’s father--during a bird-watching accident involving sharks, the Deetz ladies must go back up to the creepy house in Winter River, Connecticut for his funeral. This is the same place where Lydia first encountered Beetlejuice all those years ago, and she is understandably reluctant to even mention his name, lest she accidentally calls forth Beet...

Director Guy Ritchie is making a lot of movies, lately. Ritchie will make a big-league film--like Aladdin , for Disney--and then go off and make a mid-budget movie immediately afterward. And this is a good thing. Because the more Guy Ritchie films, the merrier. His latest, Operation Fortune: Ruse De Guerre , stars Jason Statham as Orson Fortune, a cool, suave, James Bond-type agent who does special missions for the British government. Cary Elwes plays Nathan, his long suffering handler, who constantly has to explain Fortune’s maverick antics to Knighton, their tedious boss at MI6 (well-played by long-time Ritchie collaborator Eddie Marsan). Fortune is called upon once more when an experimental weapon known only as “the Handle” has been stolen from a secret lab. Tracking the theft to international arms dealer Greg Simmonds (Hugh Grant, who seems to be having a lot of fun here), Fortune must stop Simmonds before he can sell the Handle to a buyer. Fortune is...

I avoided seeing Ghostbusters Afterlife because the 2016 remake of Ghostbusters wasn’t very good. Neither was the 1989 sequel to Ghostbusters--and, admittedly, I wasn’t a huge fan of the original 1984 Ghostbusters, either. I didn’t hate the original movie, but I was never caught up in the wave of adoration for it that swept through the country back then. I guess you can say I’m not a Ghosthead, one of the rabid fans of the franchise, and the subject of a very well-made documentary that you should see, especially if you really enjoy the movies. But I eventually saw Ghostbusters Afterlife because--well, why not? I assumed beforehand that I would dislike it, but that it wouldn’t matter, because I’d only watch it once, and just forget about it, just like I did with the other Ghostbusters films. But something interesting happened: I would up enjoying Ghostbusters Afterlife a great deal. The new Ghostbusters film tries to be the true sequel to the original film, despi...

It’s easy to see why Free Guy did so well financially. It was a refreshing blast of fresh air for pandemic-weary audiences who desperately needed a good laugh. Ryan Reynolds stars as Guy, a NPC (Non-Player Character) in an open-world video game who goes through a monotonous daily existence as a bank teller over and over--until he abruptly becomes self-aware and starts subtly changing his routine. When Guy takes the sunglasses off of a criminal who tries to rob his bank, the sunglasses shows him a side of his world that he had literally never seen before, like video game rules and aids being presented to him. This is reminiscent of John Carpenter’s They Live, where a pair of special sunglasses shows the hero in that film how the world really works, as well. And just like in They Live, once he keeps wearing the sunglasses, Guy also starts to see his world for what it really is: a violent arena ruled by sadistic psychopaths (video game players), where Guy and his fellow NPC...

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood , Quentin Tarantino’s ninth (and, according to him, his second to last film) is a really groovy trip through the Hollywood of 1969. Starring Leonardo Decaprio as Rick Dalton, a fading TV star who’s desperate to keep his career going, and Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth, his friend and stuntman, whose career is also circling the drain. Rick was the star of a popular western TV show before it got cancelled, and now he’s doing guest starring parts on other TV shows--which Rick thinks is beneath him. Even meeting with a movie producer (Al Pacino), who wants him to star in Italian-made westerns, drives Rick into further despair. Decaprio does a great job in creating this worry wart who’s constantly obsessing--as well as whining and crying--over whether he’s doing the right thing every waking moment. In sharp contrast is Pitt’s cool as a cucumber Cliff, a rough and tumble type who just lives for the moment (and who may have murdered his wife). But while Cliff may be...

“Broke into the wrong goddamn rec room, didn't ya, you bastard!” I was reminded by a Twitter post that the movie Tremors just recently celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. I had seen this movie back when it first came out (in the olden days when we went to the video store to rent movies on VHS), and had enjoyed it very much then. Seeing that Tremors was playing on Netflix, I decided it was time for a re-watch. And I was very glad I revisited the little town of Perfection, Nevada once more. Tremors is a great, remarkably smart horror/comedy about a pair of handymen named Earl and Valentine, superbly played by Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon, respectively, who come across massive killer subterranean worms under the dirt of their one-horse desert town. If this sounds silly, it is. But the movie works so well because it leans into the goofiness of its situation and characters by playing up the humor of the eccentricities on display. However, the film (well-directed by Ron Underwood--...

You can tell, right off the bat, that there’s a problem with Men In Black International ( MIB:I ) from the way the movie opens. We get a flashback scene of the two MIB:I agents H (Chris Hemsworth) and High T (Liam Neeson) fighting aliens at the Eifel Tower in Paris. After watching this sequence--which falls flat with lame humor--we then flashback even further, to when a young Molly (Mandeiya Flory) watches her parents get zapped into forgetting their alien encounter by two MIB agents. But Molly herself retains her memory, and when she grows up (her adult role taken over by Tessa Thompson), she begins a rabid search for this mysterious organization, until the day she finds them and tries to bluff her way into their headquarters. Personally, I felt that MIB:I would have been a much more enjoyable movie had they begun it with little Molly watching her parents get zapped, and continued onward from just her POV. Just show us the fleeting glimpses of the MIB organization that Molly see...

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...

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...

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...

Director Ben Wheatley is so far known for Kill List , High Rise , and Sightseers , as well as a load of television work (including two episodes of Doctor Who ). His latest is Free Fire , a pretty simple story about a gun deal between two gangs that goes horribly wrong in an abandoned factory in Boston back in 1978. Cillian Murphy ( Dunkirk , Peaky Blinders ) stars as the buyer of the guns, a shipment of M-16s that he hopes to deliver to his countrymen back home in Northern Ireland for use against the British. But the seller, Vernon, a wily South African perfectly played to the wild-eyed hilt by Sharlto Copley ( District Nine , The A-Team ), delivers a set of completely different machine guns. While not happy, Murphy’s character buys the guns, after trying one of them out right in the abandoned factory (a well-done set that Wheatley actually designed while using the Minecraft video game). But just when it looks like a potential problem may have been averted, two of the men from each o...