Month: November 2018

Venom

/ skoce / 1 Comment

Venom is a big dumb mess of a movie. Yet for some reason, I found a smile on my through most of it. Most of that is due to how hard Tom Hardy is committing to everything. No matter how ridiculous or stupid what he is doing or saying is, he goes all in. It doesn’t fix the movies numerous flaws, but it does turn a mess into a watchable mess.

Venom does a decent job of creating an origin story for the character minus the comic origin’s primary character. Everyone knows that Venom is a Spider-Man character, but Spider-Man was not available for this movie. So they had to excise him from the origin. That actually works decently well. It gives room for Venom to the be the protagonist, though they try to shove a villain turns hero arc in there that doesn’t work at all. Here, Venom is a alien organism that was found by a privately funded space shuttle. They brought back several samples, but the shuttle crashes and one of them escapes. The owner of the shuttle, played by Riz Ahmed, begins research on the aliens. Meanwhile, Eddie Brock (Hardy) gets ready to interview Ahmed on his news show. He confronts Ahmed with unsubstantiated information about his dangerous experiments and manages to lose both his job and his fiance. Six months later, while called to investigate Ahmed again, Brock ends up bonded with one of the alien parasites, which takes over his body.

The plot is pretty clear, but it is also nonsense. Brock just happens to be able to perfectly bond with the symbiote. It is killing him, until its not. It wants to destroy the world, until it doesn’t. It wants live food. Or tater tots? The villains’ motivations are more clear. At least partly. One character is already pretty villainous for no given reason. There is an escalation that is not really shown, he goes from ignoring regulations to out and out murder.

I’ve heard some people praise the action, but aside from one decent car chase, I found it to be pretty incomprehensible. I guess there are rules or limits to Venom’s powers, but other than a very specific weakness he seems immune to pretty much everything. So the action is just a black CGI blur throwing dudes around and having bullets bounce off of him. Sometimes it two CGI nothings whaling on each other to little effect.

The only thing that keeps this movie watchable is just how hard Tom Hardy commits to all of this nonsense. He goes full force into Eddie Brock, overcommitting to his investigative reporter schtick, then to him in his fallen state and then to him being possessed by an alien parasite. His performance is the one thing in the movie that completely entertaining. It is bonkers and weird, but it is completely watchable.

Venom isn’t the worst superhero movie I’ve seen. It has one genuinely entertaining performance amidst a generally pretty poor movie that sets it above a lot of the dreck from about decade or so ago. I can’t in good conscious recommend it to anyone, but I don’t regret seeing it.

**

A Star is Born

/ skoce / 1 Comment

A Star is Born is one of the most earnest movies I’ve seen in a long time. It is a big showbiz tragedy done without any irony. It isn’t a new story, this is the fourth version of A Star is Born, but it is incredibly well told.

Bradley Cooper directs and stars as Jackson Maine, an aging alcoholic rock star. One night after a gig he stops at the nearest open bar, which just so happens to be where Ally, a struggling singer played by Lady Gaga, is performing. The two of them spend the night together and Maine invites Ally on the road with him. At one of his concerts, he brings her onstage to sing with him, jump starting her career. But as her career takes off, his starts to come down. This is accelerated by his drinking. Still, they love each other and get married. But eventually, Maine’s demons catch up with him, leading to a tragic end.

I don’t really feel like I’m spoiling the story much, as this is the fourth version of this movie and they all follow the same arc. This movie is just incredibly well made. Gaga is fantastic as Ally. Her performance feels very natural. Cooper is likewise excellent as Maine. He is doing something with his voice that really shouldn’t work, but it somehow does. The supporting cast, namely Sam Elliott and Andrew Dice Clay (!?!), are great as well. Elliot, playing Maine’s much older brother, is especially good.

This is a movie about two musicians, so for the movie to work the songs they sing have to up to snuff. With one exception, that is a real strength of the movie. The big number is “Shallow,” a duet the two of them sing the first time Ally is on stage, but there are several other memorable songs spread throughout.

There are really only two things in the movie that come up short for me. The first is that it seems like Cooper’s character gets the bulk of the attention. The movie is called A Star is Born, but we see more of one fading than of the other being born. It’s not that the middle section of the movie, when this is happening, is bad; it just makes her feel like a secondary concern rather than a driving force in the movie. The other is that the ending song is kind of bad. There are a lot of good songs on this soundtrack, but the one Ally sings at the end is easily the worst. That moment needed to land and the song really didn’t work for me.

I’m not going to lie, I teared up during this movie. It wasn’t during any of the Ally/Maine stuff though. It was the last interaction between Cooper and Elliott as Cooper tells him that he’s always looked up to him and Elliott desperately backs his car out of the driveway fighting back tears. Stuff with brothers always works on me and this was good stuff.

****1/2