10. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
9. Fresh
8. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
7. Barbarian
6. Turning Red
5. Pinocchio
4. The Northman
3. RRR
2. The Banshees of Inisherin
1. Everything Everywhere All at Once
You know what's up.
Crimewave
This is the only produced Coen brothers script that the brothers didn't direct themselves, though the duties were taken by their friend Sam Raimi. It combines elements of both of their careers in film, and combines them to create what might be best described as a live action Looney Tunes movie. The subject matter is darker, but the actual content of the film really isn't. When a man hires a couple of goons with silly voices to kill his business partner after finding out about his betrayal, they end up going on a rampage through the city, with one of the man's employees and a girl he meets getting caught up in it. It's a very strange and silly movie, with some very elaborate comedic setups, surprisingly exciting moments of action, and an entertaining appearance by Bruce Campbell. A bizarre film that you'll probably like if you're a fan of the filmmakers involved.
Dracula
It's always interesting to me how sterile and stately the horror films of the 20s and 30s are. Genre icon Bela Lugosi stars in his signature role, instilling Dracula with charm and menace as he moves from Transylvania to London in order suck a lot of blood. It's of course pretty toothless in comparison to modern vampire stories, but I mostly enjoyed the slow discovery by the other characters of what Dracula really is and their calm attempts to prevent him from killing or enslaving any more women. Heh, toothless.
One from the Heart
Post-70s Francis Ford Coppola continues to make absolutely no sense to me. One from the Heart tells the story of a couple in Las Vegas that finds their relationship falling apart, and their struggles to either resolve their differences and move on with their lives. What makes the movie different is its musical quality - the characters don't really sing, but the original music by Tom Waits pervades the whole thing, it frequently dabbles in an unreal sense of space, and the film is entirely and totally obviously filmed on elaborate sets at a soundstage. The movie's budget problems and failure at the box office cost Coppola a ton of money, and a lot of his career from then on can be attributed to continued financial problems. Was it worth it? Uh, not really. The movie is okay.
Witness for the Prosecution
A courtroom drama directed by Billy Wilder, based on a play, based on a story by Agatha Christie. Other actors get higher billing, but the star of the show is definitely Charles Laughton, an aging English lawyer who was recently released from the hospital and decides to take on the defense of a man accused of murder, against his doctors' wishes. The trial itself is pretty straightforward, until the characters start making unexpected choices and Laughton has to stay on his feet to deal with the changes and continue the defense to his best ability. The ending is so twisty that a voice actually advises the audience to avoid spoiling it to their friends so they can enjoy it too. It's a well-made and wonderfully acted legal drama that wraps up satisfyingly without letting anything come too easily.
Gods of the Arena is a prequel miniseries to last year's Spartacus: Blood and Sand that only exists because star Andy Whitfield was diagnosed with cancer and unable to play the part in season two. Based on that sentence you might think that it was doomed to be terrible, but I actually enjoyed it quite a lot. It had all the qualities that the regular series had found in its second half with none of the horrible growing pains from the first, and managed to tell an interesting swords-and-sandals tale while also filling in some unasked for yet still intriguing details about the lives of many of the show's characters years before they met its titular character. Maybe it didn't strictly need to exist, since they ended up having to recast Spartacus despite taking the year hiatus, but that doesn't mean it wasn't fun.
Five years before Spartacus showed up, the arena was ruled by another man named Gannicus. Batiatus still controlled the gladiators, but was watched by his overbearing father, and still trying to prove himself in the arena, long before he had political ambitions. Lucretia was less of a party girl, Doctore wasn't Doctore yet, and Ashur and Crixus were just untested recruits. Watching everybody slowly turn into the people they would be later is fairly compelling, and a lot of times the real explanation for something is more surprising than you might guess. It all fits together a bit too cleanly to feel like a truly organic story, but there's nothing wrong with tightly plotted action and intrigue. Also, there's lots of extremely bloody and stylish fight scenes and needlessly explicit nudity, which is just as fun to watch as it was before.
Not every little plot thread is as interesting as the others. A few characters feel a bit wasted, and a few things we probably didn't really need to know. But the writers and crew have honed the show's formula to a well oiled machine by this point, which actually makes me almost disappointed that that formula's probably going to be gone by the time the show comes back considering what has happened. Still, I'm definitely looking forward to what comes next. That's something I honestly wouldn't have guessed when the show started a year ago.
Also, here are my recaps for all the episodes of the show:
Past Transgressions
Missio
Paterfamilias
Beneath the Mask
Reckoning
The Bitter End
Unless something happens to save it, Legend of the Seeker is dead and buried. I'm not too broken up about it, although I can't say I won't miss it a little. The second season improved slightly on the first, with an additional main cast member that made the general episode-to-episode dynamic a bit more interesting and a better sense of continuity and purpose over the course of the year. It's a well produced show that's kind of hard to hate, and while I'm not dying to know what happens next, I'm a bit disappointed to see a capable fantasy show bite the dust.
Like I said, regular episodes are integrated into the plot a bit better, with events leading into each other more naturally and an obvious goal from the outset. Not everything's great such as the continued existence of last season's villain, Darken Rahl. There are few things more annoying to me in genre fiction these days than a bad guy who won't go away, and despite being killed in the first season's finale he seems to show up even more often in this go around. I still like Richard and Kahlan, although the magical forces keeping them separated were really starting to drag at a certain point, although luckily that was resolved just in time for it not to matter since the show's over. The new main character is Cara, a reformed villain. Not much about her is terribly original, but her addition to the show led to some new situations and she was nice enough to look at anyway. I might miss Zedd most of all - he wasn't always as smart as you might expect the wizened mentor to be, but he was really good at killing things with fire. Like the first season, the second ended with everything turning out just fine without even a hook for the future, which at least allows me to pretend that's the end of the story and close the book on a fun if less than amazing show.
One of the biggest surprises this year was watching this show slow transform from a laughably trashy and shallow mess in the pilot into a genuinely likable and decent drama by the season finale. It's still a bit excessive in the more adult elements, and takes probably a bit too much inspiration from 300 and Rome, but in the end I couldn't help but enjoy it for the most part. These 13 episodes cover the period in Spartacus' life when he was captured and made into a skilled gladiator, right up until his escape and the beginning of the revolt. For the most part it focuses on the arena and the villa of his owner, as things waver between livable and untenable for Spartacus and his fellow slaves. There are triumphs and failures, although it becomes clear as it goes on that it's only a matter of time before things go really bad. This comes to a head in the last episode, which is one of the best payoffs for a season long story arc I've honestly ever seen in a show.
Some stylistic stuff still bothers me about it though. The violence is pretty absurd in places. Sometimes it's fine if a bit too heavily focused on showing the brutality of the events in loving, slowed down detail, but there are bits where the computer blood is just terrible looking and all over the place and breaks the scene's credibility. It makes it feel really cheap. The constant sex is also probably a bit over the top, it's not that I minded seeing naked women but it often veered into near-softcore porn territory. And the dialogue sometimes tried too hard to sound smart and fancy, with characters referring to themselves in the third person and really just talking unnaturally. Just because it's a show about the old days doesn't mean people can never talk like people. These are all quibbles though in a show that's part guilty pleasure and part actually quality drama when it tries to be. This is the part where I'd normally say I'm looking forward to the next season, although unfortunately the actor who plays Spartacus was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and production has been delayed. They seem to be developing a short prequel series to keep momentum going during his recovery, although I can't say how interesting that would be. It could be good if it means more time for John Hannah and Lucy Lawless, two actors who have never been that famous but have always done solid work and were pretty good in this show as the owners of Spartacus and his fellow slaves. They got a significant amount of focus considering their temporary position within the overall story of Spartacus' life, and that stuff tended to be more stimulating than a bunch of nearly naked men swinging swords at each other. We'll see, I guess.
The third film in the Evil Dead series is so far from the first that it would be hard to tell they're even related except for the presence of Bruce Campbell, who carries the movie the whole way. Any horror elements have been limited to the grotesque appearance of the bad guys, as it's a mix of a slapstick comedy and a fantasy epic for the most part. Ash has been transported back in time, and must recover the Book of the Dead in order to save a small kingdom from the Deadites as well as return himself to his own time. It's a lot shorter and lower in budget than most films of its attempted scope, but succeeds because of its limitations as much as the quality of the humor and action. It's kind of funny to see how Sam Raimi squeezed every single drop of potential out of what he had to work with less than a decade before he took on one of the highest budgeted film series ever.
The film might have been built up a bit too much for me over the years, because I enjoyed it, but not as much as the first two movies. It's fun, but doesn't quite have the same edge. The gore is mostly gone, and the detour in the windmill where he gets terrorized by his own doppelgangers seemed to hurt the momentum, even if it was fairly entertaining. I did like the crazy contraptions Ash helped come up with to fight off the evil hordes near the end though, and while it's relatively tame, any time he uses his "boomstick" with authority is a good one. They've gone over the edge this time, as the gun only takes two shells but he can fire it like eight times in a row without reloading. He has enough one-liners and moments of badassness that you can never go too long without remembering that he's awesome. There's been talk for a while about possibly doing a fourth film sometime, and that's something I wouldn't mind seeing.
Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell got back together to make this sequel six years after the original, and it's obvious that their confidence in their own craft had increased greatly. Campbell has bloomed into a highly charismatic, drawing presence on the screen, and the character of Ash has transformed from a mostly normal guy to a more hardened person who may or may not be totally insane. Raimi matches his enthusiasm with a much more chaotic style of filming for most of the picture. It feels less homemade and much more stylized, although I hesitate to call it higher budget. It definitely is, but not in a way that comes close to what that concept usually means for sequels. The money shot is probably where whatever's behind the camera chases Ash again, but instead of stopping at the door it pursues him through the entire house as he scampers through every nook and cranny just running for his life. These movies are just filled with little touches that put you inside the mind of a disturbed individual.
Evil Dead II is part sequel to the first movie, part remake. The first seven minutes are a simplified recapping of the first part of the story, done because they didn't have the rights to show footage from the first film, and it's pretty clear that the subsequent events all take place afterward. Still, several elements of the plot aren't reestablished until after the recap, and the plot of several people trapped in a cabin overnight is pretty much exactly the same, so it's a somewhat unusual situation. The movie easily avoids feeling like a retreat though by the huge increase in Stuff Happening that is Totally Nuts. Ash's hand goes evil and he has to remove it. Gallons of blood pour from the walls. Objects in the house start talking to him. It's never quite clear if it's all in his head (besides the hand which is totally real), and the movie is more maniacal than scary at every turn. Eventually Ash and a fellow survivor find a way to possibly send the source of the evil away so they can get back to civilization, and the preparation scene where he gets his famous look is one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen. Things don't go quite as planned, and another sequel is set up. Except this time, it's in the Middle Ages! Wowee wow wow! So... yeah. Good movie.
This early work by a young Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell was filmed inventively on a shoe-string budget and put both of them on the map for cult horror fans. I generally don't consider myself a fan of the genre outside the occasional zombie or science fiction-themed movie, but I liked some of the more mainstream work by both enough to check it out. The film suffers a bit from things like the poor acting by the cast of unknowns, but it's genuinely spooky in places and the inventiveness of the effects combined with the increasingly manic tone made it a very entertaining use of 80 minutes.
If you don't know, Ash Williams is a college student I guess who goes into the woods to stay in a cabin with his his friend, their girlfriends, and his sister. In the cabin they find a strange book and a tape recorder of a man speaking about his findings on it, which unfortunately awakens some dark spirits that are able to animate the woods themselves, possess people, and chase them around in POV shots that never let us know what they're actually running from. The actual logic of what causes the book to take over people is a little vague, since they seem to be able to affect anyone who's been injured by them, but are content to merely horrify a beaten-up Ash the entire time.
As the movie goes on, all of Ash's friends turn into these monsters who torment and attack him, and you can see his sanity slowly drip away as he has to fight off his former loved ones and hack them to pieces to prevent them from continually returning. As soon as things go bad they get pretty gruesome, and that rarely lets up as he is continually drenched in blood and supernatural gore by the monsters. There's a scene near the end where Ash is pacing around with a shotgun they found, and the camera is used pretty inventively to convey how his world has been completely torn apart by an unbelievable, nightmarish evening. It's one of the more brilliant scenes ever done with just a camera and one guy, and it leads to the final splatter-fest, which would have been more effective without the choppy stop-motion animation but still ended up working. The sequels ended up skewing more towards humor than horror, but The Evil Dead is the beginning of a unique and entertaining series to be sure.
I didn't know this, but apparently cult favorite horror and Spider-Man director Sam Raimi has been involved with production of first-run syndicated fantasy series like Xena: Warrior Princess, and this is his latest project. I don't think it airs on any channels near me, but I found it on Hulu (where the entire first season can still be watched) when I was bored, and ended up enjoying it a reasonable amount. It's based on Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth book series, and while from what I've read that doesn't seem to be a particularly good property, it makes for entertaining escapism at the least.
The first season more or less covers the basic events of the first book, and has a fairly obvious story arc and conclusion to it despite the very episodic nature of it from week to week. It's a pretty basic fantasy tale, a young man turns out to be a chosen warrior who will wield the magic sword to defeat an evil king that has taken over a land beyond the humble home where he was raised in secret. I was glad to see them actually follow through on this instead of dragging it out as a main conflict behind the whole series, with no real resolution at any point. At least one more season is coming, so it will be interesting to see what direction they take it and what the new problem is. By the end of the season, they were reusing magical plot devices at an alarming rate, so I hope there's enough fresh ideas to mine from the books to keep it from total stagnation.
The show works week to week thanks to a pretty likable main cast of three and pretty darn good visuals for a syndicated show. It's filmed in New Zealand (just like The Lord of the Rings! (I love how this is mentioned every time the country is named on TV now, like it's a law or something)), and the nice looking vistas combine with decent computer work make it always pleasant to look at. The action scenes use a little too much Zack Snyder-esque speed ramping, but are pretty well done for TV, and most episodes have an enjoyable, unique hook. The two leads are adequate fantasy heroes, and have a nice chemistry together, although I hope they get over milking the "they love each other but can't be together" thing sometime soon. The crazy old wizard who accompanies them is pretty fun, played by that guy who kept popping up in the third installment of various major film series a few years ago, and keeps the other focused on the quest. Nothing in the show is particularly brilliant, just watchable enough to help me prevent any single moment in my life from feeling bereft of action. I like it.
Hmm. Spider-Man is my favorite super hero. I used to read some of his comics as a kid. I didn't know what was really going on, since the big story lines were spread over four books every month and I only read one. I still really liked the character though. Spider-Man is easily related to by a lot of people, because he isn't perfect. He starts out as a nerdy kid in high school. He has to deal with normal problems while fighting super villains who want to kill him. His entire career as a crime-fighter started when he made a mistake that led to his uncle's death. He's interesting because of his flaws as much as his ability to do good.
I loved both of the first two movies. I thought they were an excellent combination of story, character, humor, creative action scenes, and awesome special effects. My expectations were high for the third movie, but some things about the previews tempered them a bit. Three villains? The first two movies both did very well with just one. They were interesting because they weren't just pure evil, they had connections with Peter Parker and sympathetic in some ways. I'm fine with Harry succumbing and turning into the second coming of the Green Goblin, even if it seemed a bit soon with so many villains unexplored of yet. Sandman is pretty cool I guess, though I never saw him in a comic. But making him Uncle Ben's killer? What the hell? Part of what made Ben's death interesting and so important to Peter was that it was just a normal criminal that killed him who Peter could have stopped. That shame is what causes Peter to be who he is. The movie handles this situation somewhat satisfactorily, but it's still irritating. Seeing the black suit in the trailer, my thoughts immediately went to Venom. Obviously, you can't bring the symbiote to earth without Venom appearing eventually. My question was whether he would figure prominently in the story, or, as I hoped, merely be all set up for a sequel. It became clear though, eventually, that he would be fully featured as a third enemy. Why bring him into it, when Venom is so popular among fans that he could easily hold an entire movie, and you've already made preparations for Lizard to appear eventually?
It seemed overloaded, and maybe it was. Sam Raimi still does a pretty admirable job of handling all the threads, even if the plot ends up being a bit convoluted because of it. What irked me more than the excess of bad guys was the continued romantic problems Peter faces with Mary Jane. I thought the situation was pretty much set. They were together, she knew who he was, and it seemed all right. Whenever I read the comics, she was always there as a strong character supporting Peter when he struggled. She had her own things to do, but they had a strong relationship and lived happily. After I stopped reading they split up for a while, but since had made up and are happy again. Why over-complicate things when you already have this much stuff to juggle? It's fine for her to have something to do, but more friction is not what the movie needed.
Peter with the black suit was interesting. He gradually becomes more and more of a dick during the movie, but it was played more for laughs than actual story tension. It corrected itself when it needed too, but I thought that pretty much the entire thing could have been better if it was treated more seriously. It's funny to see Tobey Maguire dance like an idiot who thinks he's cool, but is it actually good for the film? No. That aspect of the movie just didn't work for me. Fortunately, the ship is righted in time for the final act. I won't say what happens, but in addition to being pretty damn fun to watch, the final conflict brings together all of the separate elements and concludes almost all of them in a way that eased most of my misgivings and made me appreciate the movie a lot more than I might have otherwise. I guess all's well that ends well. I liked Spider-Man 3, not as much as the first two films, but enough to recommend it to anyone who has any interest. We know there will be more Spider-Man movies, but we don't know who will be directing and starring in them. If Sam, Tobey, and Kirstin come back for the fourth, I'd be happy, as long as they reign it back in a bit. If they don't, then I'll come away from the first trilogy satisfied with what took place and how they handled it.
