tantry1 Reviews

Apex (2021)

It's bad but in a fascinating way

[5/10 · 27 November 2021]

Bruce Willis is only kind of in this film. He is never in frame with any of the other actors. Even when they have scenes together it's very clearly always a stand in opposite him or the other actors have the back of the head of a bald man comically younger than Bruce. He's only barely in one of his two "action" scenes, the other you never see his face and again the hands are of a much younger man. For a fair stretch of the movie they inter cut Bruce Leaning On Tree Feeling Emotions shots that barely line up with what's happening in the film. I swear they must have shot those on an afternoon before the script was written and just did what they could with what they had.

It's kind of impressive. And the craziest part is... McDonough and Large, the two actors with the most actual screen time, both do good work with what they're given.

It's a bad movie. In many ways, almost all ways, a lazy movie. But the writing is probably the best of the barely on set crap Willis has been churning out lately and McDonough and Large carry it well. They pull something watchable out of it.

In Search of Darkness (2019)

Talking heads quickly summarise movies and say they're good

[5/10 · 22 July 2020]

Sadly that's really all it is. It's great to see some of the faces but they don't really have anything interesting to say.

They give a quick intro on what the 80s was like and then 7 minutes in they start listing movies, giving a short description and saying they like them over alternating shots of talking heads and clips from the movie.

The first movie is The Fog. You get 3mins, 5secs of talk about The Fog. This is a transcript I made for you. -----

John Carpenter: After Halloween I had a deal with AVCO Embassy to make two films and the first one turned out to be "The Fog". It was a ghost story conceived on a trip to England and Stonehenge. I said to Debra Hill, man it's really amazing here. And a fog bank at the time was off in the distance. "I wonder what's in there?" we said. I was gonna get hired for horror films, that's what was gonna happen, 'cause that's where I had a hit. So off we went.

Tom Atkins: You know, it's kind of an old-fashioned ghost story. It's not big, gory, scary stuff.

Carpenter: The Fog was shot up in Point Reyes, California. It was a beautiful area.

Atkins: My dear friend Adirienne Barbeau, she spent the entire time up in that tower and so we were never ever on screen together. Jamie Lee: she's hitchiking and the first thing she says when she gets in the car is "Are you weird?"

-brief clip of the Are you weird? moment-

Atkins: Then I offer her a sip of beer and then they cut and there we are in bed. Just like that. It's that easy 'cause I'm smooth. Hah! I don't think it bothered her to get on that scream queen path as long as she thought she might be able to get off of it. And she did.

Nick Castle: The Fog has Nick Castle as the lead! That's the name of the character in it! I also remember that very fondly because as you pan across inside Adrienne's room she's holding a baby and that's my son.

Atkins: The guys that come out of the fog at the end, into the church, take Hal Holbrrok to heaven. Or hell. Somewhere.

Andre Gower: The seaweed dudes: did not like. Did not like the seaweed dudes at all.

Atkins: They look great in their seaweedy ooky outfits. Big box fans and fog machines at the end of a street trying to make enough fog to look eerie and creepy, threatening, the slightest breeze took it all away and then... to start over again, to build it up and get it going...

Carpenter: That was re-vamped after we finished it as it didn't work and the script was changed.

Atkins: It didn't get going quick enough, somehow.

Carpenter: I was... that was a nightmare. I don't ever want to do that again.

-----

And that's it. That's the level of insight you can expect. Hell, I'd say you get a bit more from The Fog than most of them - they hint that there's an interesting story about post production. They don't tell you anything about it but you know something interesting happened so that's something. And they don't waste a tonne of time telling you how much they like The Fog, something that happens on a lot of the other films.

The Timber (2015)

A story that's muddled by attempts to extend it's length

[4/10 · 14 December 2015]

This ~73 minute movie (not counting the opening and closing credits) has a fair few scenes and characters that seem irrelevant to the plot and the characters are all very simple and have basically no internal conflicts. They throw in coincidences, mysticism and events to simply pad the running time.

The core plot of the movie is a banker trying to get two brothers off their land by tricking them into paying their debt/mortgage by collecting a bounty when it's just a ruse to evict them unfairly because the land is valuable. That plot takes up maybe 10 minutes.

The movie gets bogged down heavily in unnecessary side plots and issues, all of which are amazing coincidences and none of which seem important to the plot.

There's a father no-one seems to care about positively or negatively that they just kill at the end, a soldier who burns some screen time doing very little and then dies, possibly- psychic dreams, a cannibal wild man and random attackers all seem inconsequential.

The only consequence of all that stuff is they seem to be trying to deliver the deep message of the film: random people you don't know are bastards. It's all in these convoluted coincidence driven scenes that I think are meant to be kismet to teach this one brother that really obscure lesson.

Parallels (I) (2015)

Sliders in the style of a The CW show

[6/10 · 2 March 2015]

It's pretty much Sliders. Timed jumps to other worlds, no (known) way home.

Only it's been TheCW-ed up. In Sliders you had a goofy looking gangly giant, Gimli (middle-later aged bearded professor), a middle-later aged black dude and a petite woman (some replaced later). In Parallels you have four attractive twenty-somethings. In Sliders there's techno-babble and problem solving. In Parallels you just run from stuff and have dramatic moments, usually involving your family. Sliders uses a fixed camera and dolly and whatnot. Parallels uses good ole Shaky- Cam where the camera operator has to deliberately do a bad job, even on tight shots during an exposition scene because that's just the style now.

That said, it's fine. The CW model is simple and it works well enough. And I'm a sucker for a sci-fi premise. The dialogue and situations are cheesy but not cringe inducingly so. Ronan's triangle wasn't good enough to actually put someone to sleep but hey, you could tell what they were going for. It's fine. It's totally fine.