Stop Frame

I was home, brought low by a head cold, and while perusing Netflix discovered that the 2014 remake of the brilliant 1987 Robocop was available. Since I didn't have to expend any additional funds, or even much effort, I watched it. Let's not beat around the bush: Jose Padilha's Robocop is awful. It is lifeless, soulless, and utterly lacking any reason for being. This is ironic in that Paul Verhoeven's original film, while being a dark and biting satire, also explored definitions of life and the human soul. Apparently all of the production forces at work in the remake thought those things were excess baggage. At an unspecified time in the future, America apparently rules the planet. Omnicorp, the leader in the production and worldwide distribution of autonomous combat robots, wants to bring its wares to the US, only that's illegal. Seeking a way to sway public opinion, the vile corporate dogs hatch a plan to put a man in a machine, thus creating Robocop. See, that m...

For me, director Matthew Vaughn is racking up quite a track record. While not all of his films are great, they're always at least good and enjoyable. Kingsman: The Secret Service is one of his great films. Eggsy is a lad from the wrong side of London town who finds himself invited to apply for a job with Kingsman, a private spy organization that for decades has discretely and covertly helped maintain world peace. There's only one opening, so he'll be competing with others and may the best man (or woman) win. Meanwhile, Valentine, a multi-billionaire tech titan is scheming to destroy the world because man causes global warming and global warming is bad so man must die die die. An amazing amount of violence ensues. I was startled to find that the film had a plot straight out of a Tom Clancy novel (specifically, Rainbow Six ). Environmentalists, at least the more militant of the anthropogenic catastrophic global climate change crowd, do not come off well in this film. That th...

The Sprierig Brothers' last film, 2009's Daybreakers , was good but it had issues. It started strong, had kind of a muddle in the middle, and wobbled completely off the tracks by the end. Their latest film, Predestination , is almost exactly the opposite and I enjoyed it tremendously. Based on the short story "All You Zombies—" by Robert A. Heinlein (who, as an aside, is my all-time favorite author), Predestination starts with a bit of a wobble, muddles into coherency in the middle, and has a spectacular conclusion. The Spierigs almost slavishly adhere to Heinlein's story while at the same time adding a new subplot that allows the it to effortlessly expand to become a feature-length film. Ethan Hawke plays a temporal agent, a time traveler, working as a bartender in an alternate reality version of New York City. In comes the "Unmarried Mother," a man who writes for a woman's confessional magazine. Only he started life as a she and so the story goes....

I am seldom, if ever, kind to Keanu Reeves. I have often described him as a human two-by-four, an actor who defines "stiff," etc. If someone's performance is really bad, it's not unusual for me to say he makes Reeves look Oscar-worthy. I am not kind. Yet, it is equally true that Reeves has a certain range and ability that serves him well in many roles. For example, he's utterly perfect as Neo in The Matrix . And while it was a silly role, he was very good as the pointless white man in 47 Ronin . (I also applaud his documentary Side by Side , chronicling the development of digital cinematography; see it, it's great.) Now he's in John Wick and he's damn near sublime, as is the entire film. I love a story with a simple plot that is well told, and John Wick is all of that in spades. Reeves plays the title character. In the opening minutes of the film, we meet Wick, his wife, his wife becoming ill, dying, and leaving Wick a dog as an anchor for his humani...