@curiosity-inc
Movie Curiosities: Emily the Criminal
August 15, 2022 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Emily the Criminal comes to us from writer/director John Patton Ford, here making his feature debut. What we’ve got here is a straightforward rags-to-riches crime thriller premise, as the eponymous Emily (played by producer Aubrey Plaza) is stuck in a professional rut and turns to a life of crime for lack of any other way to make money. We’ve certainly seen no shortage of films with a similar premise, but this one’s got more than enough brains and teeth to stand out from its peers in this lane. Let’s take it from the top. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Bodies Bodies Bodies
August 14, 2022 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
This weekend brought the release of Fall, in which a couple of adrenaline junkies climb 2,000 feet to the top of an abandoned radio tower and find themselves stuck up there. I don’t want to review that. The premise alone is enough to turn me away, as I have very little sympathy for characters who make their own problems. Precious little gets stuck in my craw like a story about characters who are getting along perfectly well and have no reason whatsoever to go looking for trouble, then they go and make perfectly avoidable trouble for themselves.
Instead, I chose to review Bodies Bodies Bodies, a slasher horror starring a cast full of rich entitled coeds who make their own trouble for no reason whatsoever. Goddammit. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Prey
August 8, 2022 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Let’s talk for a minute about the term “Mary Sue”. It’s a term thrown around with increasing frequency in film discourse, most especially with regard to female characters in genre works with toxic fandoms. An especially prominent recent example concerns Rey, the character played by Daisy Ridley in the three most recent Star Wars films. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Bullet Train
August 7, 2022 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Bullet Train is the latest from 87North Productions, though I expect I’ll keep calling them Team John Wick for convenience’s sake. The very same people who raised the bar for mainstream action filmmaking and they keep on looking for new ways to outdo themselves. This time, they’ve staged a film on a Japanese bullet train with the task of utilizing the setting and everything on it in creative action-oriented ways. Even better, our protagonist is a gun-for-hire (code-named “Ladybug”, played by Brad Pitt) who refuses to handle a firearm and he’s actively working with his therapist toward a more peaceful life. Again, this means the filmmakers have to find more inventive and less straightforward means for our lead to beat people up. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: DC League of Super-Pets
July 30, 2022 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
I want to open this review with a very simple question: How do you feel about watching the Justice League — namely Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Cyborg, Aquaman, and Green Lantern — get their asses kicked by a bunch of superpowered guinea pigs? Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: The Gray Man
July 29, 2022 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Oh, Netflix. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
July 24, 2022 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
I had no firsthand knowledge of Marcel going into this, but the character was apparently a viral sensation about ten years back. The whole thing started with a collaboration between Jenny Slate and filmmaker Dean Fleischer Camp, in which Slate voices a sentient seashell with a mouth and one eye, standing on a pair of shoed feet at one inch tall. It sounds utterly ridiculous, which is probably why the original 2010 short film — plus the two subsequent short films — quickly racked up millions of views on YouTube. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: NOPE
July 23, 2022 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
As we’ve come to expect from Jordan Peele flicks, NOPE quickly established itself as a black-led horror film with an opaque premise and a comically vague title. But the more we learned about this movie, the more it seemed to buck the traditions previously established in Get Out and Us. To start with, the heavy reliance on UFO imagery suggested that the title might be an acronym for Not Of Planet Earth (which is why I’m keeping the title capitalized). For another thing, while Peele’s earlier films have worked as allegories for systemic racism and racial trauma, it wasn’t entirely clear where that theme was going to fit with the premise of two siblings out hunting for UFOs. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
July 19, 2022 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris was adapted from “Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris”, the 1958 novel written by Paul Gallico. Put simply, it’s the story of an old English widow who goes to Paris so she can buy a Dior dress. Somehow, a novel with this premise begat three sequels, in addition to three made-for-TV adaptations and even the “Flowers for Mrs. Harris” stage musical adaptation that premiered in 2016. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: After Blue
July 16, 2022 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
For this one, we’ve got a French film that doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page. What’s more, I can only find one theater in all of Portland that will screen it (Shout-out to the incomparable Hollywood Theatre!), and it only screened the film a grand total of ONCE. I wanted to review it specifically because I only had one showtime on one evening to catch it. I know I tend to say this a lot, but we’ve got a WEIRD one tonight, gentle readers. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: The Sea Beast
July 15, 2022 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
The Sea Best is a CG-animated kids’ movie in a fantasy setting vaguely resembling some classic setting in history (namely the Golden Age of Piracy). Our narrative takes place within a society built entirely around the hunting and killing of giant monsters who have in turn been hunting humans for longer than anyone can remember. But as the plot unfolds, our human misfit protagonists are befriended by an especially powerful monster — arguably the most powerful of its kind — and they come to learn that the monsters are in fact merely misunderstood. Thus our main characters have to learn how to broker peace, flying in the face of accepted common knowledge and centuries of established tradition. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities — Thor: Love and Thunder
July 10, 2022 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
As of this typing, Chris Hemsworth is well on his way to breaking Hugh Jackman’s record for the longest continuous tenure in a superhero franchise. (Eleven years and counting versus 17 years, if you’re keeping score.) In fact, depending on how you count, it’s entirely possible that Chris Hemsworth might achieve the longest continuous tenure of any actor playing any one role, second only to Harrison Ford and Indiana Jones. Read the rest of this entry →
