The Sixth Sense. I didn’t remember this one being as good as it was, but it holds up pretty well for most of the story. Don’t love how it wraps up, but hard to hate the journey there.
Tag: brucewillis
The Fifth Element
The Fifth Element. Just delightful. Even when it’s not always working, it’s refreshing to see them go all-out.
Armageddon
Armageddon. Ebert summarized it correctly (“Here it is at last, the first 150-minute trailer.”), but I enjoyed it more than he did. Some terrible writing and comedy hasn’t aged well, but the melodrama and spectacle holds up. I’d totally forgotten about the hyper-idealized middle-America nostalgia in there.
Looper
Looper. Solid scifi. Just take a nugget of a concept and let it spool out around a handful of people. It makes movie sense in the moment even if it doesn’t later. I love this vision of a possible future. Dystopic, but not totally dire. Just worn out. Good job with the makeup, and especially how Gordon-Levitt takes on some Willis mannerisms. I love Jeff Daniels’ character. There is some violence that a certain demographics won’t take to very well, but I appreciate that he did it anyway, it fit the story, and that it wasn’t over-the-top exploitative. It was sad. I also liked some of the audio editing and they he played with the sound stage. There’s too much leeenns flaaare. But good movie! Rian Johnson knows his craft. Makes me want to watch Brick again.
Moonrise Kingdom
Moonrise Kingdom. Wes Anderson is simply not my director. When I wrote about Bottle Rocket, I had the thought:
I wonder if I’d like his movies more if I’d seen them as serials?
I wonder about this because the structural repetition really wears on me over the course of a movie. Repetitive framing, symmetry, truck here, pan there, dolly now and then. It’s like a slideshow sometimes. I respect the precision and fastidiousness, but for most of it I just couldn’t sustain an emotion beyond “that’s kinda neat”. Because I have no heart, basically. Or I don’t function well with magical realism. Or because the script is on the bad side, and while there’s invention, there are no surprises. Everything tidy, labeled, anticipated. It’s not terrible, though. Just frustrating. I did LOL on multiple occasions. And using The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra to open the movie, and then mirroring that work, was clever. Kids run away (main theme), then we follow reactions by the group of scouts, the scout leader, the cop, the parents, and social services (variations). My rankings for Anderson’s films that I’ve seen:
- The Darjeeling Limited
- The Royal Tenenbaums
- Moonrise Kingdom
- Bottle Rocket
- Rushmore
Die Hard
Die Hard. Excessive law enforcement buffoonery aside, it’s fun fun fun. Great movie. I got inspired to watch it after BLDGBLOG’s post on Die Hard as an architectural film.
There’s going to be a movie version of The Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis (see my review of The Surrogates). I really, really liked the comics, especially because I haven’t found a lot of decent scifi. Very cool book—I hope those Hollywood folks treat it kindly.
By the by, the publishers of The Surrogates, Top Shelf Productions, is having a nice little seasonal sale until the end of this month.
Mark Larson 