The View From The Mountain

When I first heard what Mortal Engines , the book series , was about--giant mobile cities that hunt smaller (also mobile) towns across a vast wasteland--I immediately thought about the skit in the Monty Python movie The Meaning of Life , where executives find their boardroom meeting interrupted by pirates who raid them from a building that sails right up next to theirs (it was meant to be a joke on the “corporate raider” mentality of the 1980s, but wound up being eerily prescient of the cold-hearted greed that the corporate elite had displayed in the years since). Despite having this silly image in my head, I still tried to keep an open mind about the film version of Mortal Engines , even after it became one of the big box office flops of 2018. And now after having seen Mortal Engines , I’m really glad I did, because I thought it was a superbly well-done movie. Taking place in a post-apocalyptic world that was ravaged a thousand years ago by a devastating war, Mortal Engines is indee...

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...

Warning: this review contains spoilers. Twenty years ago, back in 1999, The World Is Not Enough was released. The third James Bond film that starred Pierce Brosnan as 007, the internationally famous (or infamous, depending on your POV) British secret agent, TWINE has Bond trying to protect Elektra King, an oil heiress (played by French actress Sophie Marceau) from a terrorist named Renard (Robert Carlyle) who had kidnapped her years earlier. King had escaped from Renard’s captivity after shooting dead two of his men. But when Elektra’s father is assassinated by Renard, Bond suspects the terrorist is now coming after her for further revenge. TWINE was a different Bond film right out of the gate with the selection of Michael Apted as the director. Apted is most famous for the “7 Up” documentary series, which follows a group of British people starting from age seven and revisiting them every seven years onward. He’s also directed Sigourney Weaver to a Best Actress Oscar in Gorillas i...

Although we’ve already had a “final” Halloween film with a “final” confrontation between Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Michael Meyers over twenty years ago in Halloween: H20 , as well as having the first film been remade by Rob Zombie (complete with a sequel) over ten years ago, there’s still more money to be made in having a masked psycho from hell chasing them Strode gals! And so we have Halloween (2018 ), which is a direct sequel to the 1978 original. Ignoring all of the sequels and remakes that came in between, the ’18 Halloween manages to offer a bold new idea. This latest entry proposes the concept that Michael Meyers had been captured just after the end of the first film. And that he’s spent the last forty years in a mental institution. Despite this, Laurie Strode, now a grandmother who’s estranged from her grown daughter, has taken a page from the playbook of Sara Connor (the bad-ass protagonist from the first two Terminator films) and turned her cabin in the woods in...

Director Dario Argento is revered in his native Italy as being a master of suspense. Thanks to his intense thrillers, Argento has been referred to as being the Italian Hitchcock, and with good reason: his dark, stylish murder mysteries are vastly entertaining if lurid tales that grip the viewer right from the very first scene. Argento’s Suspiria , released in 1977, was a turning point for the director in that it was a supernatural tale involving a young dancer (Jessica Harper) attending a swanky dance school in Germany, only to discover that it’s the inner sanctum for a coven of evil witches. When word got out that there was to be a remake of Suspiria , many people were horrified at the idea, because not only was the original considered Argento’s best film, but it was also considered to be a classic of the horror genre overall. And while that’s usually my initial take to the announcement about an upcoming remake, I have to admit to being intrigued at the idea of a new version of Susp...

I was watching Doom on Netflix recently, and throughout the movie, I kept thinking of a much better take on the same material. Based on a video game, Doom starred Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a super Marine in charge of a team of super Marines who are sent to Mars when the interplanetary colony suffers a strange outbreak of videogame violence. Despite all the shooting and alien gore, Doom managed to be extremely boring, which made me reach for the OTHER “there’s trouble on Mars” movie, Ghosts of Mars . Released just a few years before Doom , Ghosts of Mars was helmed by legendary director John Carpenter and starred Ice Cube and Natasha Henstridge. Instead of a team being dispatched from Earth to solve whatever problem has arisen on the Red Planet, in Ghosts of Mars , it’s the Martian colonists who deal with the red menace. Henstridge plays a member of the Mars Police Force who is sent with a team of other officers to pick up the notorious criminal Desolation Williams (Ice Cube). Bu...

The House With A Clock In Its Walls is the latest attempt to jump-start a movie franchise that’s based on a series of children’s books. The only difference here is that the original book that this film is based on was written back in 1973 by the late author John Bellairs, and was illustrated by the late Edward Gorey, the writer/artist probably best known for his delightfully quaint ghoulish artwork as seen on the opening titles of the PBS Mystery! series. Another notable difference here is that THWACIIW (even the acronym for this is long) has been directed by Eli Roth, who’s better known for the first two Hostel movies, as well as The Green Inferno , all three movies being hard core horror flicks with stomach-churning gore. So does this House work? Yes, and quite nicely, too. As been noted in the DVD commentary for THWAC (I even have to cut down the acronym!), sometimes when you’re restricted, the restrictions can make you be even more creative. The PG rating doesn’t hamper Roth,...