Dec 19 – Jan 5 2021 Peninsula (2020) – This time it’s Escape from Busan. And it plays like a more emotional Carpenter movie. Where Snake Plissken is a pure noir character, a man with a name but enigmatic past, Jung Seok is the millennial verson of a tough hero, carrying a bag of emotion turmoil over his …
Author Archives: jmayhall77
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Dec 1 – 18 The Social Dilemma (2020) – There’s a fictional domestic story intertwined in this documentary about how our lives are basically simulations. A family struggling with the addictiveness of social media on our phones. It’s not a reenactment. Not now, anyway. Maybe in the future it will be viewed that way. Or maybe, …
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Nov 14 – 30 Midnight Special (2016) – Close Encounters with the Hidden Dimensional Kind. Headed Southeast instead of Southwest. And the requisite religious nuts follow with a brutal efficiency. This is Spielberg without the light heart. Sub Jimmy Carter for Obama-era surveillance paranoia and you have this fever pitch millennial nightmare. In children we find …
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Oct 25 – Nov 12 Exiled (2006) – There’s a door spinning in the air. Put there by the wonky gunplay of three individuals. It’s Hong Kong Heroic Bloodshed at its wonkiest. Brotherhood and redemption are front and center. The duty and honor part gets fudged and messed with in a crisscrossing criminality of Coenesque proportions. Of course, …
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Oct 4 – 23 Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019) – The notion that nothing is real goes down a deep, dark well in this movie. The questioning of one’s own reality gets a meta-stamp in the form of a super-hero movies that leans heavily on computer generated surroundings and action set-pieces shot against green screens. It …
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Sept 18 – Oct 3 I’ve stolen this idea from Film Comment. The only thing that’s different is that I’m not a known filmmaker giving you a list of the last ten movies I’ve seen. 48Hrs (1982) – “I’m a ragtop man, myself.” Nolte’s Jack Cates says this at the end to Murphy’s Reggie Hammond in …
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Sept 1 – 16 I’ve stolen this idea from Film Comment. The only thing that’s different is that I’m not a known filmmaker giving you a list of the last ten movies I’ve seen. Dial M for Murder (1954) – Ray Milland is a smarmy, controlled, uncaring creep in this somewhat of an English-murder-by-numbers-chamber-piece. He has everything figured …
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Aug 4 – 28 I’ve stolen this idea from Film Comment. The only thing that’s different is that I’m not a known filmmaker giving you a list of the last ten movies I’ve seen. 7500 (2019) – Never leaving the cockpit in a hijacked-plane movie is a novel idea. Tensions abound. But it grows nauseating and …
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July 16 – Aug 3 I’ve stolen this idea from Film Comment. The only thing that’s different is that I’m not a known filmmaker giving you a list of the last ten movies I’ve seen. The Old Guard (2020) – They’re not very good assassins for having so many years and so much practice at it. …
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June 24 – July 16 I’ve stolen this idea from Film Comment. The only thing that’s different is that I’m not a known filmmaker giving you a list of the last ten movies I’ve seen. Friends with Money (2006) – Frances McDormand’s character at one point, lies in bed, depressed. Her and her husband are …
