The View From The Mountain

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...

Even as a kid, I was never that crazy about werewolves. A monster that only appeared during the full moon seemed like a pretty easy creature to beat. Just like how sharks stayed in the ocean, rendering them impotent as long as you stayed out of the water, werewolves could also be easily avoided just by staying inside during nights of the full moon. It didn’t matter what the werewolf movie was--from the original Wolfman, to An American Werewolf in London--werewolf movies never really held an allure for me. But then The Howling was released. Director Joe Dante’s Little Werewolf That Could was released in 1981, and in honor of it being released in 4K this month, I decided to revisit The Howling. I first watched it on video (VHS!) back in the day, and enjoyed it. The main reason was because it was the first werewolf film that I saw that presented the big, furry bastards with a twist: they could change into a wolf any time they wanted; to hell with waiti...

Hey, Venom’s back, and he brought Carnage with him! The first Venom film snuck up on me, despite the fact that I was never a huge fan of the character. It was Tom Hardy’s deft performance, along with the generous dash of humor, that won me over with the first Venom film. But the inclusion of Woody Harrelson in a scene at the very end, along with the hint that he would be Carnage, was so tantalizing that I wished that had been the main storyline of the first film. Well, Carnage--a villainous version of Venom in red--takes center stage in this sequel, as Woody Harrelson’s deadly alter-ego runs rampant over San Francisco, aided by his girlfriend (well-played by Naomi Harris, who played Moneypenny to Daniel Craig’s James Bond), who can kill people with a blast of her ear-shattering shriek, sort of like Marvel’s villainous version of DC’s Black Canary. With two fine actors as these playing baddies, it’s a shame they’re not on screen for very long to be really e...

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...

Daniel Craig exploded onto the scene as James Bond in 2006’s Casino Royale. And, after four 007 adventures, he calls it a day with No Time To Die, a film that was supposed to have been released back in 2020 but was pushed back for a year and a half, thanks to the pandemic. Apple and Netflix made multi-million dollar offers to the 007 people to air NTTD on their streaming services, but the Bond producers held out for a theatrical release, which they finally got in the fall of 2021. The irony here is that MGM, which releases the Bond films, was bought out by Amazon, which owns its own streaming service. James Bond is happily retired from spy craft and happily living with Madeleine (Léa Seydoux) in Italy--until their extended honeymoon is disrupted by the usual assassins who come out of the woodwork gunning for Bond. It turns out that Spectre, the criminal organization that Bond previously tangled with, is still very much active--and it looks as if Madeleine aided i...

When I was a kid, my G.I Joe figures were twelve inches tall, and they came with an assortment of vehicles, many of which I had. I was a kid back in the 1970s, and G.I. Joe then was mainly an adventurer, he was an Indiana Jones-type of explorer several years before Raiders of the Lost Ark had even been released. When the G.I Joe resurgence happened in the 1980s, I was too old to be playing with G.I. Joes, having given my old figures away to my younger cousins. Besides, I really didn’t care for the whole 80s craze of having the cartoons be nothing more than half hour commercials for the toys. When I heard they were making Snake Eyes, I originally thought it was going to be a remake of the Brian DePalma film starring Nicolas Cage as a cop trying to uncover a conspiracy during a hurricane in Atlantic City. In other words, I really had no knowledge of the “new” G.I. Joes--one of which is a dude dressed in all black who goes by the handle of Snake Eyes. But when I went in ...

Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley team up for Chaos Walking , a science fiction film that’s based on the book The Knife of Never Letting Go by author Patrick Ness. Ridley plays Viola, an astronaut who crash-lands on an alien planet that’s already been colonized by a first wave of settlers from Earth. The only problem is, she winds up in a settlement that consists only of men, with the women having vanished years before. And all of the men have a strange affliction where their thoughts can literally be seen and heard in the air around their heads. Holland plays Todd, the youngest member of the colony who comes to Viola’s aid--although it becomes an equal partnership as Viola and Todd fight to survive in a world gone mad! Chaos Walking was directed by Doug Liman, who’s done some pretty good films in the past (Edge of Tomorrow, Go), and it runs with its interesting premise of how all of the males’ thoughts on this planet are an open book (women’s thoughts remain ...