The View From The Mountain

I was a huge fan of Jenna Coleman when she played Clara Osborn, the companion to the eleventh and twelfth Doctor Who (played by Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi, respectively). Doctor Who, a sort of mad magician who literally travels through space and time, can be an intimidating character, but Coleman more than held her own, plying an engaging performance that was self-assured without being too arrogant. Her time on the program, stretched across the better episodes of two of the Doctors, was extremely memorable for me. So when I heard that Coleman was starring in Wilderness, a mini-series for the Amazon Prime streaming service, I was more than happy to give it a shot. Of course, I waited until all of the episodes were up. I hate the trend with some streamers reverting to the old ’one episode per week’ tactic; I’d rather binge-watch the whole thing over a day or two, which was easy to do with Wilderness, seeing how it only had six episodes, overall. But the fi...

Back in January of this year, Netflix premiered Woman of the Dead , a crime thriller from Austria with slight supernatural overtones. I figured I’d give it a shot, since I was in the mood for a good Lifetime-type crime story. Do you know what I mean when I refer to these Lifetime TV movies? They’re goofy crime “thrillers” regarding soccer moms who become amateur sleuths that wind up being so silly that they’re more unintentionally funny than anything else. But within the first fifteen minutes of its first episode, Woman of the Dead proves itself to be more of a Hitchcockian thriller: a darker, high-brow, and sophisticated thriller that’s genuinely exciting. Anna Maria Mühe stars as Brunhilde Blum (everybody calls her Blum), an undertaker in a small Austrian mountain town where it seemingly snows all year round. Her beloved husband works as a cop with the local police force--until the moment when he gets savagely run down on his motorcycle by a black Range Rover that abr...

Zoë Kravitz, the future Catwoman, stars in Kimi, director Steven Soderbergh’s latest film. Kravitz plays an agoraphobic young woman who’s living through the pandemic in Seattle. She works for a tech company, fixing “bugs” that pop up in the code of Kimi, an Alexa-like computer assistant. Whenever Kimi mishears someone asking for something, or does something in error, it’s up to Kravitz’s character, Angela Childs, to make a note of what went wrong and how to fix it. This is a well-paying tech job that Angela does in her spacious, luxury apartment and she’s as happy as a clam. That is, until Angela hears something on a particular audio file, where Kimi was accidentally switched on while people were having a severe argument in the background. But as Angela cleans up the audio, she discovers to her horror that what initially sounded like an argument turns out to be a murder that Kimi had innocently recorded. Clocking in at just 90 minutes, Kim...

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...

It’s interesting that, just as I sit down to watch Ready Or Not , there’s a huge flare up in the media about how Royal lovebirds Meghan and Harry have made the decision to step back from their duties as members of the British Royal family, and will only stay in England part time from now on. As a fan of the democratic process, I was never a cheerleader of royalty, but when I heard that Meghan and Harry had basically said, “Thanks, but no thanks,” I was actually pleased to hear this. All through history, the British Royal family have proven themselves to be one of the biggest pack of scumbags to ever slither across the earth. The original thirteen colonies had a revolution just to get away from them, after all. And if Meghan and Harry really want to put some distance between themselves and these demented dipshits, all I can say is “Godspeed, kids, and keep running….” And I'm not the only one who feels this way. Some folks have taken this view even further. 2019 saw the release ...

When Serenity , starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway, was released theatrically earlier this year, it was ripped, bashed and completely trashed by reviewers, many of whom thought of it as being an insipidly stupid story that never should have seen the light of day. Some even criticized it for taking the name of a much better movie called Serenity (2005), the Joss Whedon-directed science fiction film that served as a magnificent capper to his equally marvelous TV series, Firefly (and I agree that the SF Serenity is superb). Naturally, I wanted to see this new Serenity , which dared to take the name of a beloved SF film, because I wanted to see if this new film lived up to the hype of being such a scathingly reviewed flick that has already earned its place on several “worst of” lists of 2019. McConaughey stars as a fishing boat skipper named Baker Dill who’s having some trouble keeping his grip on reality. He’s served in Iraq, and--as he freely admits--his tour in the milita...

Anna Kendrick stars as Stephanie Smothers, a prim and proper suburbanite living in Connecticut. A single mom, she still finds the time to help out at her young son’s school and run a cooking/arts & crafts vlog online. Stephanie is so proper that she never curses, nor does she get a chance to hear much cursing in her quaint, quiet life--at least until she meets Emily Nelson (Blake Lively), a worldly woman who drops the f-bomb every other word in her sentences. The extremely laid back Emily works at a high-pressured job in New York City, and doesn’t think of anything of having a martini (or two, or three) in the middle of the day. The fact that these two become fast friends despite their differences is a testament to the well-written script, as well as its two talented leading ladies. And if A Simple Favor simply stopped there and became a comedy/drama about this Odd Couple relationship between two women in the suburbs, it would still be an extremely good movie. But director Paul F...

Who knew that Noomi Rapace, who first played Lisbeth Salander back in the original Swedish film trilogy of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, would one day become the “Sean Connery” of her franchise? Just like how Connery, who first played James Bond, is still considered the best Bond even after several other actors have taken over the part, Noomi Rapace may well be viewed in the same light by film fans and historians regarding Lisbeth Salander. With the release of The Girl in the Spider’s Web , based on the superb book by David Lagercrantz (who picked up the series from the late Stieg Larsson) we now have three actresses who have played Lisbeth: Rapace, Rooney Mara (who was also good) in the 2011 remake of Dragon Tattoo , and now Claire Foy, the “queen” herself (best known from The Crown ). Lisbeth is sailing along in her life as a hacker/social warrior in Sweden when she gets a special request. Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant), who created a scary new program for the American-based N...

Harry Hole? Seriously? That’s the name of the lead character played by Michael Fassbender in The Snowman , a police thriller that’s set in the snowy landscape of Norway. It’s famously become one of the worst--if not the worst--movies of 2017, thanks in part to its own director, Tomas Alfredson, admitting that they were unable to film about ten to fifteen percent of the script, which led to large chunks of story that were missing when it came time to edit everything together. But even with some reshooting having been done after main production wrapped, The Snowman is still a mess. Harry Hole is a slovenly drunk cop who wakes up in children’s playground areas, among other places (and given the bitterly cold Norwegian winters, one wonders how he even manages to wake up at all), when he’s not pestering his ex-girlfriend. A series of disappearances begins in Norway, with the victims being young women who have children. The killer telegraphs his intentions by creating snowmen outside the...

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...

When it was released in October of 2012, Sinister was a smash hit that had proven itself to be the rarest of horror films: it was genuinely scary. Ethan Hawke starred as Ellison Oswalt, a bestselling true crime writer who had fallen on hard times financially. Seeking a story for another bestselling true crime book, he moves into the home of a family that had all been killed by hanging. The entire family--the parents and kids--were all hung by the necks side by side in a grotesque display from a branch of a tree in their own back yard. The mystery was not only who killed them and why, but what happened to one of the young daughters, who disappeared after the murders. Sinister was helmed by Scott Derrickson, who also directed the equally scary The Possession of Emily Rose , and who would go on to direct Doctor Strange for Marvel. With Sinister he provides a fascinating mystery, showing how Oswalt uncovers the truth about the family slaying, and how there were more victims--other fa...