After Christopher Nolan’s fabulous trilogy of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises, I was sure we wouldn’t see The Caped Crusader in a standalone film for a long time. Nolan’s series was pure perfection. Whichever director attempted to bring, arguably, the most storied superhero in comic book history was already behind the eight-ball before a script was even imagined. With its 29% Rotten Tomatoes score, 2016’s Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice was far from what we all hoped it would be. 2017’s Justice League (39%, 68%) didn’t help much. However, However, Zach Snyder’s 2001 director’s cut, while chalking in at over four hours, faired much better (71%, 94%). Matt Reeves’s (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Cloverfield) The Batman is a darker, more mysterious take and is the perfect movie to bring the iconic superhero back to the big screen in his own story.
Category Archives: Robert Pattinson
High Life (2019)
2001: A Space Odyssey, Moon, Prometheus, The Martian, Interstellar, Life, First Man, Passengers, Solaris, Alien, Apollo 13, Gravity, it is not. Claire Denis (Chocolat, Friday Night) ambitiously ventured into outer space territory, a territory she had previously not explored, and found herself with a movie that was hard to appreciate, very difficult to enjoy, and left you with a million burning questions, most of which you would never care if they were ever answered or not. I give Denis credit for ambition, just as I gave Alex Garland credit for in Annihilation, a movie that if you enjoy, you might also enjoy High Life. But much like that movie, its plausibility was tossed out the window from the start, and its uneven semblance left you looking at your watch more than it did trying to find answers.
The Lost City of Z (2017)
The Lost City of Z was a movie that had all of the makings of a movie I should love. I love a good adventure movie, and the idea of floating down a wooden raft in the Amazon River sounds like something I’d enjoy. I’m a big fan of John Grisham novels, but most of us law thrillers (with the exception of ones like A Time to Kill or The Firm, which were adapted into films) often tend to blend. That is, with the exception of The Testament, a novel that was equal parts big city courtroom as it was Amazon Jungle adventure. I find something about the Amazon intriguing, almost like I can’t get enough of it, especially when it’s displayed onscreen as a true adventure story. This is exactly what James Gray’s (Two Lovers, The Yards) is. Despite not knowing anything else about this movie, I was intrigued by this one-sentence plotline and the fact that it had an 87% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of its release. Unfortunately, this movie did not live up to my lofty expectations. At 140 minutes, it was often too slow and meandering. But at the same time, it was not long enough to tell the entire story. There was too much to tell and the cuts between the various events happening. There were so many moving parts of this movie that it needed to be longer. Yet, at the same time, the movie felt like it was way too long to begin with. It was one of those “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenarios. I don’t know if it ultimately failed. But it certainly did not succeed.
Continue reading The Lost City of Z (2017)