peteg's blog

Reservoir Dogs

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I saw this a long time ago. It never really appealed to me, perhaps because it is so clear that Tarantino's budget didn't stretch to any interesting settings. Tim Roth's sequence in the middle rescues things somewhat.

Deadpool

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16.05 session at Galaxy Cinema on Nguyễn Du, HappyDay Tuesday, 55,000 VND. Some fun bits, though many of the references in Ryan Reynolds's relentless patter passed me by. The action was annoyingly vacuous; the central one-on-many battle merely riffed on the far earlier ones in Terminator 2 and The Matrix. The origins story here makes a mess of Wolverine's, oops. #63 in the IMDB top-250, but surely not for long.

Manohla Dargis. Richard Brody.

Following

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Nolan's first feature, a decent black-and-white suspense in the flashback/forward style he perfected in Memento.

Slow West

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An attempt to get a Fassbender fix. He produced this and I didn't figure out why. Some classic Spaghetti Western cinematography and direct lifts from better buddy movies like Dead Man can't save this from amiable vacuity.

Stephen Holden.

Macbeth (2015)

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A Fassbender fix. Watched over a couple of days. Apparently I saw a production of Shakespeare's play, from which this is derived, quite a while back in Sydney. Lush, and would have been improved by a steadier camera more often. I always thought this had more to say about Lady Macbeth (here Marion Cotillard). Good to see David Thewlis, but as with all the Shakespearean kings I can remember, his character is a bit of a tool. Sean Harris can't quite steal a scene from Fassbender but does from everyone else.

Manohla Dargis.