and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about San Andreas (2015) is the way Rock has to cope with losing one daughter in a rafting/drowning incident, with losing his wife to cowardly millionaire architect scumbag Reed Richards, with his other daughter getting lost in an earthquake-hit San Francisco and hooking up with Constable Hugh and drowning and coming back from the dead, and with having to navigate in various vehicles through a devastated California and through every cliché in The Boys’ Great Big Bumper Book of Clichés, and yet – like the San Andreas fault responding to the mere presence of California – he just shakes it off, shakes it off…
Category: One-sentence reviews
Ex Machina (Alex Garland 2015)
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Ex Machina (2015) is that, having expositioned all that stuff about the Turing Test and then bromanced it into irrelevance over geek/hipster beers, the film then doubles down by making it clear that the way the Test really works is that if you give your robot boobs then you can determine whether or not she is human not by her occasional hints that she possesses agency outside your bullshit patriarchal compulsory heterosexuality but by how long it takes ‘her’ – like all human women in movies – to betray you…
Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder 2011)
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Sucker Punch (2011) is that after unintentionally outing himself with the gay soft-porn classic 300 (2007), Zack Snyder set out to make a tawdry, anime- and game-inspired women-in-cages, women-in-their-pants fantasy action movie but instead went the full Vincente Minnelli by making a melodrama about female suffering (with camp gothic overtones) crossed with a backstage musical (albeit with the song and dance numbers removed)…
Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman 2014)
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Edge of Tomorrow (2014) is not the way in which the DVD marketing finally admits that Edge of Tomorrow is a shit title that is nowhere near as good as the tag-line Live. Die. Repeat. and now pretends that the film is actually called Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow, nor is it Emily Blunt, although she is usually the best thing in anything she is in and would be the best thing about Edge of Tomorrow were it not this other thing, no, the best thing about Edge of Tomorrow or whatever the hell we are supposed to call it now is the simple beauty of watching itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny action star Tom Cruise dying horribly over and over again – for most things in life there is Barclaycard, but some things really are priceless…
Snowpiercer (Bong Joon Ho 2013)
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Snowpiercer (2013) is not the endless arguments about how implausible it is that those two kids could survive in the snowy landscape after the crash as if the ecology of the metaphorical train they have been riding for the last seventeen years made any kind of rational sense, nor is it Tilda Swinton’s decision to play the villainous Mason as some kind of bizarre cross between Janet Street-Porter and Mary Whitehouse (and pull it off), nor is it John Hurt’s half-assed Long John Silver look, but the way in which Bong carries over dystopian elements of our present world into the post-apocalypse, so that – having survived the end of the world – Olivia Spencer’s Tanya, the main black character, is still killed by a white cop, and so that the middle classes still feel free to go to the back of the train and bray their nonsense at the top of their irritating voices as if the rules and etiquette of the quiet carriage somehow do not apply to them…
Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg 1973) – restored version
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about the newly restored version of Don’t Look Now (1973), which incorporates some footage cut at the request of Stephen Murphy, chair of the BBFC, is not the fresh emphasis it places upon Donald Sutherland’s pre-emptive bid to become the new Doctor Who after Jon Pertwee’s departure the following year by dressing up as much like Tom Baker as possible, but the shocking and totally unexpected revelation of who Roeg initially intended to unveil as the diminutive Venetian serial killer…
Space Station 76 (Jack Plotnick 2014)
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Space Station 76 (2014) is not Patrick Wilson’s utterly wasted career-best performance – he really is far far better in this intermittently amusing spoof on 70s era space TV than anyone needs to be – nor is it the spot-on scripting and performance of the robot psychiatrist, nor is it the cunning way in which Matt Bomer still gets away with not acting because he has really pretty eyes, but the way the movie takes the bold and devastatingly pointed step of criticising old TV shows for having just one character of colour who basically gets to appear in the background, saying and doing nothing of consequence, by including one black guy (Victor Togunde) who appears in the background, saying and doing nothing…
Under the Skin (Glazer 2013)
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Under the Skin (2013) – the dreary-with-nice-landscapes arthouse remake of Species (Donaldson 1995) that ultimately fails in it valiant attempt at comedy greatness by not crassly letting the dog who caused all the drownings survive after the parents and the Czech guy and the toddler die, though it comes close when the radio news announces that the father, a professor, was reported missing by his university when he failed to turn up to work on Monday morning – is not the perfect casting of blank-faced affectless Scarlett Johansson as the blank-faced affectless alien, nor that you can spend the last part of the movie correcting the typo in its title by chanting Undo the skin! Undo the Johansskin! but the fact that you can spend half the day reading articles that not only praise the film for subverting the male gaze and thus opening up towards otherness but also complain about all the Glaswegian accents…
The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino 2015)
and so anyway it turn out that the best thing about The Hateful Eight (Tarantino 2015) roadshow version is not the intermission, because that would be too easy a joke, nor is it every single frame of QT’s yappy remake of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) in which no one is speaking because it is all just so gosh-durn pretty to look at (though it is), nor that QT enables you to wile away the hours trying to figure out which precise combination of the characters the title refers to (unless it is self-deprecating joke about his oeuvre) but just the fact that someone at long last has dared to bring to the cinema an adaptation of the very best but least successful series of novels by Enid Blyton….
Creed (Ryan Coogler 2015)
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Creed (2015) is the moment when, after Rocky Balbao falls sick and is forced to drop out of training Adonis Creed, and after Clubber Lang and Ivan Drago step up to help Adonis prepare for his title shot, and after Adonis is forced to drop out because of a hand injury, Rocky himself puts on the gloves and stars-and-stripes shorts for one last shot at glory…
Mark Bould 