<n>Read the explanation of method, madness, and <b>spoilers</b>.<fn></n> <ol> <a href="#Ultron">Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2395427/">7/10</a> <a href="#Shanghai">Shanghai Knights (2020)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0300471/">7/10</a> <a href="#Cowboys">Cowboys and Aliens (2011)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0409847/">5/10</a> <a href="#Element">Fifth Element (1997)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119116/">10/10</a> <a href="#Assassin">Assassin's Creed (2016)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2094766/">5/10</a> <a href="#Haunting">The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt10970552/">9/10</a> <a href="#wick">John Wick 4 (2023)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt10366206/">8/10</a> <a href="#Disturbia">Disturbia (2007)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0486822/">8/10</a> <a href="#Split">Split (2016)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4972582/">9/10</a> <a href="#Platform">Platform 2 (2024)</a> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt27729779/">3/10</a> </ol> <dl dt_class="field"> <span id="Ultron">Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2395427/">7/10</a> <div>I don't have much to add to my <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=3188">review from 2017</a>. I watched it in German. <iq>Die Sonne steht ganz schön tief.</iq></div> <span id="Shanghai">Shanghai Knights (2020)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0300471/">7/10</a> <div>There a fight scene in Rathbun's (Aiden Gillen) castle that looks very much like the one from <i>Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade</i>, although pressing the statue's breasts to rotate the fireplace came from <i>Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom</i>, as did Chon's (Jackie Chan) trick of discovering a secret passage by feeling the wind. The movie is an homage to that style of action film. Chon Wang's friend is Roy O'Bannon (Owen Wilson), who calls him "John Wayne", mispronouncing his name. What's Roy O'Bannon like? <bq><b>Prostitute:</b> I'll give you a discount. <b>Roy:</b> That's the most romantic thing a woman has ever said to me.</bq> This movie is so much better than it has any right to be. It's just goofy and fun. There's a pillow fight. It kind of serves the plot, but it's mostly an <i>Airplane</i>-style scene that starts with a <i>Blazing Saddles</i> callback. The whole plot is basically that Chon's father (Kim Chan) has been killed by Rathbun, who has stolen the seal. Chon wants to get it back. There are homages everywhere. The kid's (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) name turns out to be Charlie Chaplin (another homage). A final homage is to two more films: <i>Back to the Future</i> (hanging on the clock), and Chan's own <i>Rush Hour</i>, when they escaped the clock by jumping onto a banner and tearing their way down.</div> <span id="Cowboys">Cowboys and Aliens (2011)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0409847/">5/10</a> <div>My <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=2608">review from 2012</a> is unchanged, except that maybe I appreciate Paul Dano's initial grandstanding a bit more. He and Harrison Ford are still just cashing paychecks, though. This time around, I recognized Sam Rockwell and Clancy Brown as well, doing a decent job.</div> <span id="Element">Fifth Element (1997)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119116/">10/10</a> <div>I love everything about this movie. Jean Luc Besson dreamed, wrote, and directed an absolute masterpiece that was luckily written in an age where no-one wanted to write a sequel to everything and people didn't write every movie with the hopes of writing a sequel. He started writing it at 16 years old and filmed it 14 years later. There is a great scene where Thai Kim (Kim Chan) pulls his gravity-defying junk up to Korben Dallas's (Bruce Willis) apartment window. I loved everything about that then and I still love it now. The attention to detail in Korben's apartment and in the city is right in my wheelhouse. The cast is great. Zorg (Gary Oldman) is possibly one of Oldman's greatest roles. There's the monk Cornelius (Ian Holm) who is trying to so hard to save the world for the good guys that he doesn't mind stepping over the line a bit, even though he knows that it makes him a not-so-good guy but at least he's not as bad as the ball of ultimate evil that is approaching the Earth to consume it whole, which is totally why he's doing little bad things, because we need to stop that thing at all costs, even if we have to cash in a little bit of our own humanity and principles. There's our Fifth Element Leeloo (Milla Jovovich, who is absolutely lovely and enchanting and convincingly otherwordly and powerful. There's Ruby Rhod (Chris Tucker), which is also the role of a lifetime for him, where you wonder how much he improvised and how much was scripted, although it doesn't matter because he's fabulous. There's President Lindberg (Tom Lister Jr.), who was a cool black president long before Obama and who, with his shifty wall-eye, was still convincing as a president of Earth (the Galaxy?) who was trying to actually do the right thing. Do they save the galaxy/universe? You betcha. I watched it in German this time.</div> <span id="Assassin">Assassin's Creed (2016)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2094766/">5/10</a> <div>This movie starts off with a bunch of scenes to "set the story". Scrolling text tells us that the assassins are pledged to prevent the Knights Templar from acquiring the seeds of Eve's Apple because...reasons. Then we see a bunch of assassins pledging in Spanish to uphold this goal. This all looks wicked CGI-rendered. The next scene is of a young boy chasing after an eagle, then ending up at home to find his mother dead, stabbed, having bled all over the floor. His father stands next to the TV and says something cryptic. This also looks all CGI-rendered, as it were in the Unreal engine (sorta like <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=5051#Tribes"><i>Tribes of Europa</i></a>). Next, we meet Cal Lynch (Michael Fassbender), about to be executed by lethal injection. He is executed. He wakes to Sofia (Marion Cotillard), who informs him that he is dead to the world but is being rehabilitated somewhere in a futuristic-looking facility in Spain so that he can help save humanity from itself. This all looks CGI-rendered as well, like, really, really wooden and clunky. So, time to get to work, Cal. In Sofia's experimental chamber, Cal is picked up by a machine that syncs with his mind to send him back 500 years to, presumably, Spain. There's another eagle flying around, which I suppose we are to believe is Cal? Or something? Or he's mind-synced with an assassin there? Cal seems to be driving the assassin in the past, like playing a video game. He manages to save the prince but gets knocked out. Rikkin (Jeremy Irons) watches from above. He meets with Ellen Kaye (Charlotte Rampling), who's the head of the shadowy Templar organization. Rikkin's and Sofia's experiment is being shut down. They are trying to awaken Cal's genetic memory to do ... something, probably get the apple or the seeds or whatever. Ah, wait, they want to control human society, to get rid of violence through top-down societal control. <iq>Violence is a disease, like cancer.</iq> Gotcha. Cal meets Moussa (Michael Kenneth Williams), who claims to have been dead for 200 years. The whole room looks like it's full of prisoners but they're all conduits to other assassins? Or they are trying to hinder the Templars? Or ... what? The cast is ostensibly great, but they're underutilized in this weird video-game adaptation. The fighting and action are so muddy and are filled with so many quick cuts and odd transitions that it's hard to follow in any meaningful way. The music plays quickly and stuff happens. It keeps cutting back and forth between Cal and the guy from the past and between that guy and his female partner. At one point, she rolls up from the floor but the next cut is him popping into place, which isn't at all what was meant (like, they aren't interchanging or anything), but it's just messy choreography and editing. Now Cal's talking to Joseph Lynch (Brendan Gleeson), who is apparently the assassin who'd killed Cal's mother many years ago, but didn't kill Cal. He's trying so hard to be mysterious but ends up saying things like, <bq>You're your mother's son. The blood that flows through you is not your own. It belongs to the Creed. Your mother knew that. She died so the Creed may live.</bq> He lends it Gleeson-esque gravitas but it's just weird. Cal is pretty jacked in this movie, much larger than he is in other films. He definitely spends a lot of time with his shirt off. Maybe that's why he made the movie? Or is it possibly just the many millions in salary that attracted him to the role? I just realized that I don't even remember how this damned thing ended. I just <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin%27s_Creed_(film)">looked it up</a> and, apparently, Cal got the apple but then lost it, but then got it, but then became a real-life assassin, but then pissed off Sofia and they parted ways in what was a laughable hope that there would be a sequel.</div> <span id="Haunting">The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt10970552/">9/10</a> <div>This series has little kids in it who are occasionally obnoxious but in a way that serves the story. Everybody's a little weird and all will be explained in due time. The story is also told all out of order and it revisits scenes from different characters' perspectives but it manages to sew it all up, in the end. If you let 'em cook, you'll be rewarded. We start at what appears to be a wedding reception, where a woman (Carla Gugino) begins telling a real stemwinder. The story starts off with nearly comically stuffily British Henry Wingrave (Henry Thomas) recruiting nearly comically chirpily American Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti) as the nanny for his niblings Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) and Flora (Amelie Bea Smith). The two poor orphans---and they are literally orphans---have an entire staff, catering to their manor and to their every whim. There's chef Owen (Rahul Kohli), housekeeper Hannah Grose (T'Nia Miller), and gardener Jamie Taylor (Amelia Eve). They're all a little off, but you can't really tell which ones are off because they're possessed, because they're ghosts, or because they're just traumatized from their horrible pasts. In several flashbacks, we discover that the children's parents Dominic (Matthew Holness) and Charlotte (Alexandra Essoe) Wingrave were in business with Henry. Dominic spent a lot of time on the road and, well, Henry kind of looked like him, so Charlotte tripped over a carpet and fate did the rest. You would think that this would be the canker that would fester into a ghostly possession but you'd be wrong. That is what we in the business call a "red herring." No, instead, there's this guy who works for Henry named Peter (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). He is what I believe some writers would call raw-boned. He is ruggedly handsome and driven by an impecunious upbringing to strive for more and more and more. He is funny, though, and he smokes. Miles is quite taken with him. Peter, on the other hand, is quite taken with the nanny who preceded Dani: Rebecca Jessel (Tahirah Sharif). She wants to be a barrister but, being black and not of noble blood, she's got a bit of an uphill climb there. Peter thinks that he can get Henry to help her out. Rebecca's round heels betray her as well and they gallivant all over the closed-off parts of the manor---the ones where all of the orphans' parents stuff is still kept in situ in a very creepy manner (again: red herring; also: no pun intended)---with Peter giving Rebecca things that he steals from those rooms. Dani is also not without her baggage. She keeps seeing a round-eyed ghost-monster in every mirror, even before she moves to the manor. We unspool her backstory as having befriended and fallen in love with a shy young boy who eventually proposed to her. She accepted but regretted it. She didn't know how to to tell him but finally does, shattering him. He can't stay in the car with her, so he rashly whips the door open and steps right out in front of truck. Dani's guilty conscience conjures up his phantom, who follows her everywhere. So, with all of the red herrings laid out, who's responsible for all of the creepiness? There are wet footprints that everyone pretends is the children going out at night, even though the footprints are just way too big---and barefoot. There is also the matter of Flora's dollhouse showing the movements of the house's inhabitants, both earthly...and not. There is also the matter of those nearly faceless creatures trudging around the manor, mostly in the closed-off rooms but also, more than you'd like, in Flora's room. We travel centuries back to meet Viola (Kate Siegel), who, along with her sister Perdita Willoughby (Katie Parker), inherited the manor from their father, who had no sons to whom to leave the manor. The sisters managed to hold onto the manor, as long as they pretended to be considering suitors. Eventually, Viola marries one of their distant cousins Arthur (Martin McCreadie), on whom Perdita was also sweet. Viola bears a daughter Isabel but falls ill soon after. Sheer bloodymindedness keeps her alive. She refuses to let go for years and years and years, long after the priest would have administered her last rites. She refuses to allow them to sell any of her jewels or dresses---they're for Isabel---despite the increasingly desperate financial straits into which Arthur's mismanagement brings them. Viola is really a right mess but clings to life. Perdita has finally had enough, smothers her, and marries Arthur herself, adopting Isabel. Out of respect---call it fear---they leave Viola's trunk of dresses and jewels in the attic. As their finances continue to crumble over the years, Perdita finally decides to crack the trunk. Viola's ghost pops out and chokes her to death (a pants-shitting scene). Arthur throws the trunk in the lake, thinking that it's cursed, unknowingly pinning Viola's ghost to the manor, to terrorize it for the ensuing centuries. Ok, so that explains who the lady in the lake is. It explains the muddy footprints. It explains who killed Peter. It explains who killed Rebecca. We already knew they were dead because they were ghosts, hanging around the manor, occasionally possessing the children, which totally explains their odd behavior over the first several episodes. Peter inhabits Miles while Rebecca inhabits Flora. No-one else in the manor really liked Peter, so they're immediately suspicious when Miles begins to act like him, and even begins sneaking cigarettes. As Peter, Miles even pushes Hannah down a well, which explains why <i>she's</i> so odd---it's because she's also a tenacious ghost, refusing to go to rest. She's a good ghost, though, and just wants to be close to Owen, with whom she'd fallen in what would remain unrequited love. So Dani confronts the Lady in the Lake while chasing Flora, allowing her spirit into her own body, immediately freeing all of the other souls trapped in the manor over the centuries. Dani and Jamie, who've fallen in love, move to America together. Years and years later, she begins to see snatches of Viola in mirrors, much as she once saw her fiancé's ghostly visage in every mirror. She fears that Viola will strengthen and kill Jamie. Viola really doesn't have much else on her mind, to be honest. Only a lust for vengeance against whoever's handy remains. Dani and Jamie meet Owen and everyone else at his restaurant in France, to learn that the children don't remember anything of those times. Dani wakes one night up to find herself choking Jamie and realizes that she will have to put Viola to rest. There is but one way---she drowns herself in the lake at Bly Manor. Jamie dives into the lake to find Dani, perfectly preserved and resting at the bottom of the lake, the love of her life having sacrificed herself to save everyone else from Viola's mindless, relentless, and bloodthirsty rage. We return to the storyteller, who, it turns out, is an older Jamie. They are at Flora's wedding reception at Bly Manor. Later, in her hotel room, Jamie waits with a bottle of wine. She feels Dani's hand on her shoulder just as she's nodding off. The end. </div> <span id="wick">John Wick 4 (2023)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt10366206/">8/10</a> <div>John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is still being pursued by the mysterious and all-powerful High Table, to which an entire world of criminals are enslaved by utter fear of its unstoppable retribution. Only a few dare to rebel against them, including the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), who wears the scars of his punishment by the High Table with pride and who eagerly continues to help Wick get his revenge against them. Charon (Lance Reddick) is only briefly in this film, because he both died in real life and also in the film, falling to the petty mercurial whims of the Marquis (Bill Skarsgård), who takes the role of the Arbitrator from JW3, who was as much an annoying, all-powerful, <i>Deus Ex Machine</i> in that movie as the Marquis is in this one. He has <iq>all of the resources of the High Table at his disposal</iq>, which means he can basically perform magic, conjuring armies---and dispelling police---in any city in which John Wick happens to be. Winston (Ian McShane) plays a large role, also helping Wick, but more obliquely, as he angles to get his Continental Hotel restored and back into his hands. <bq author="Winston">How you do anything is how you do everything.</bq> Caine (Donnie Yen) was wonderful as a blind friend of Wick's who'd also thought that he'd retired from the employ of the Table only to find them blackmailing him once again---dangling his daughter Mia (Aimée Kwan))---this time into taking on John Wick himself. Yen's light style and slight frame contrast wonderfully with Reeves's more deliberate style of martial arts. I mean, you can definitely tell who's been doing it his whole life (Yen) and who learned it as an adult (Reeves). Tracker (Shamier Anderson) was kind of an odd character, seemingly there to glue some scenes together ... but he was never really explained. He had a dog, a Belgian Malinois. Shimazu (Hiroyuki Sanada) was wonderful as was his daughter Akira (Rina Sawayama). Caine would end up reluctantly killing Shimazu, while letting Akira go. A post-credits scene showed that he very likely wasn't going to have very much time to regret this. <bq author="Shimazu">Friendship means little when it's convenient.</bq> <bq author="Shimazu">Fools talk, while cowards are silent. Wise men listen.</bq> I liked seeing Clancy Brown as the Harbinger, a role he made so much his own that it's impossible to imagine anyone else playing it. Aesthetically, the movie looked and felt more like Max Payne than any of the predecessors. There are a lot of Russians in it, but there were a lot of Russians in the first one, too? My partner noticed that the Russians were crossing themselves differently and it turns out that this is accurate! Russian Orthodox crosses from right to left. The plot was reasonably interesting, if a bit hackneyed. It got us from point A to point B. The movie was altogether too long because the fight scenes were interminable. I know that's what people come for but those scenes should be <i>saying something</i> instead of just <i>taking up time</i>. The choreography and film-work are top-notch but it's just too <i>long</i>. There's too much shooting. There are too many variations on the throw/lock/headshot/reload to keep up the interest. It was also pretty brutally violent. My viewing partner had to cringe away a few times. It's also unclear why John Wick had to become literally super-human. He's not Neo. He's not Captain America. Why can he fall three or four stories, banging off of girders before crashing face-down into concrete or a truck (visibly denting it) but then gets up and keeps fighting? How does he never get a concussion? None of this is ever explained. Hell, in the finale, he tumbled down all of the stairs to Sacre Coeur. Really? All the way back down the stairs? Like, all of the stairs? It was like a joke. He seemed to be throwing himself down them. What is he? Eisenstein's baby carriage? I gave it an <b>extra star for Yen's Caine</b> and Fishburne's Bowery King.</div> <span id="Disturbia">Disturbia (2007)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0486822/">8/10</a> <div>Kale (Shia LaBeouf) lost his father in a car accident. A year later and he's a terrible student, still unable to concentrate. When his Spanish teacher provokes him by naming his father and saying that he would have been disappointed in him, Kale hauls off and decks him, pummeling him to the ground. He's sentenced to a summer of house-arrest, with an ankle bracelet. His mother Julie (Carrie-Anne Moss) isn't as sympathetic as you'd think, locking him out of his X-Box and Apple iTunes, despite him having no other contact with the outside world. He begins to spy on the neighbors, sharing what he's learned with his best friend Ronnie (Aaron Yoo). Together, they drink in the beauty of Kale's new neighbor Ashley (Sarah Roemer) and scare themselves with stories about his other weird neighbor Mr. Turner (David Morse). Kale starts reading the newspaper and watching the news, learning about a series of killings of young women that have the hallmarks of a serial killer. The car they mention matches Mr. Turner's car. The damage on the left-front fender is the same. Is Kale going mad? Is Ronnie helping him do so? They pull Ashley into their lunatic orbit and increase their investigations, with Kale sending Ronnie to Turner's house and car to find more evidence. Turner comes home with Julie one day, menacing Kale, letting him know that he knows that Kale thinks he knows something and that he'd better just forget everything that he thinks he knows. He doesn't come right out and say this, of course, but he lets Kale know all the same. Kale turns out to have been right all along, as Julie disappears into Turner's house and Turner feels he has to "stop those meddling kids" and hauls off on Ronnie with a bat to the head, then tries to kill both Kale and Ashley. They eventually manage to get the police's attention---Officer Gutierrez (Jose Pablo Cantillo) takes his sweet time responding to the call because the Spanish teacher that Kale had punched is his cousin. They eventually find a basement full of bodies in a <i>Silence of the Lambs</i>-style slaughterhouse, they find and rescue Julie, and they manage to dispatch Turner into a filthy pool of corpse-filled water. This movie had a solid story with a great cast. I would definitely watch it again. LaBeouf is one of my favorites.</div> <span id="Split">Split (2016)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4972582/">9/10</a> <div>My <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=3576">review from 2018</a> is a bit sparse, but the rating absolutely stands. James McAvoy is mesmerizing in his role as a patient with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). One of his three kidnap victims is Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy) who, like Kevin Wendell Crumb / Patricia / Dennis / Barry / Hedwig / Orwell / Jade / The Beast, also has a history of abuse. We see several flashbacks where she is hunting with her father (Sebastian Arcelus) and Uncle John (Brad William Henke). It is Uncle John who wants her five-year-old self (Izzie Coffey, excellent in her role) to "play" with him in the woods, <iq>animals don't wear clothes, right?</iq> The Beast finally arrives and he is something ... more than human. It truly seems that Kevin's various personalities <i>do have</i> unique physical and biological characteristics that they others do not. Jade has diabetes. The Beast is larger, more muscular, and has a skin hard enough to not only deflect a blade, but to cause it to break off. He takes two point-blank shotgun blasts from Casey that barely penetrate the the skin. I found this movie to be riveting, with excellent acting from both McAvoy and Joy.</div> <span id="Platform">Platform 2 (2024)</span> --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt27729779/">3/10</a> <div>I'm not going to bother with a recap of this movie; you can get that on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Platform_2">Wikipedia</a>. It was a muddy, incoherent mess of a film. The plot was at-once inscrutable and simplistic: you were pretty sure you got what they were trying to say, but it was disappointing. There was nearly no development of characters, other than through exposition, which was wooden and felt like reading. All of the characters kind of looked the same, in certain lights. The final, pitched battle was a gigantic mess wherein you just kind of waited to see who was left standing at the end. I just didn't care about any of the characters and found myself not making any predictions about how the film was going to turn out. It turned out very poorly. It ended in an even more confused heap than it started, with some sort of bizarre story about saving children. I watched the first part in Spanish, but then switched to English because it was so bad that I wanted to just finish watching it while eating and I kept missing subtitles: this was important because none of the story was told visually.</div> </dl> <hr> <ft>These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the <i>genre</i>, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid <b>spoilers</b>. Links are to <a href="https://www.imdb.com/user/ur1323291/ratings">my IMDb ratings</a></ft>