I know that horrifying looking dolls are like their own thing. Maybe back in them Victorian days kids were delighted by these tortured looking tiny people. This was back in the days when they had playrooms though, and the ghoulish staring eyes of the nightmare being wouldn’t be burrowing into you as you tried to sleep. I’ve them dark childhood memories of lying awake at night when the shadows turned even the friendliest toys against me.
See I guess it goes like this. David Leitch co-directs John Wick (uncredited though) with Chad Stahelski. Around the same time Charlize Theron is coming off filming Mad Max: Fury Road and now she got the hard proof of her action chops she moves into production of an adaptation of The Coldest City, a passion project that she’d been chasing for a while. She poaches Leitch from John Wick 2 and the two projects start shooting within basically a month of each other. They’re like legitimately, duelling pictures.
Is it Fox who have the monsters universe going on now? It’s not Universal because theirs in the Dark Universe, Warner got all that DC stuff and Disney owns every other brand under the sun. Gotta be Fox.
When I left the screening of Detroit I felt sick. Katheryn Bigelow’s exploration of the killings in the Algiers Hotel during the Detroit race riots of 1967 seems pretty much designed to do that. It’s so unflinching and brazen in its depiction of the brutalisation and murder of its characters that it just pulls a reaction out of you. It ain’t hard to feel emotional and exhausted when a film puts you against the wall for two hours with a gun to your back. It ain’t hard to generate empathy when the faces of these great actors are slick with blood and tears. It harder to turn that into something, make the sorta film that’ll turn that empathy into meaning.
Somewhere downhill, a short distance away, the men are talking. Their voices tickle the edge of our comprehension. “What are they talking about?” someone asks, “Were you told?” “They’re talking about whether to hang Stephen Meek.” A slight pause, the women on the bluff go back to collecting their kindling. The camera lingers on this image for a while. Later on, we will find out how that discussion in the valley went, one of the men will relay proceedings to us, and we trust that he is being truthful. For now, there’s work that needs doing.
In 2008 two films came out, big important films by established visionaries given a lot of money to tackle popular, established licences. Both were positioned to take the reins, be cinema’s shining light, dictate the course of filmmaking for the next ten years. One of them did.
I’ve been struggling to start my review of The Emoji Movie. It’s bad. It’s reeeaaaal bad. It’s so fucking bad. And I think that would probably be the cool way to approach it. You shouldn’t watch the The Emoji Movie because it’s shit. It’s a bad story, incredibly poorly told. It features some of the most grating and uncharismatic voice acting you’ve ever heard in one of these things. It is profoundly, profoundly unpleasant to look at for any long period of time. And despite the fact that it steals it’s every idea from a panoply of better movies not a single gram of their greatness rubs off onto it.
