10 for 10: I Need a Catchy Title?

10 for 10... that's 10 movies which we give ourselves 10 minutes apiece to write about.  Part of our problem is we don't often have the spare hour or two to give to writing a big long review for every movie or TV show we watch.  How about a 10-minute non-review full of scattershot thoughts? Surely that's doable?

[2019, May Update -- this was still in Drafts? Let's finish it off. Which should be interesting considering it was ... 2017 ?!?!]

[2019; August Update... jeebus, just finish already, format or not]

[2019; SEPTEMBER OMG !]

In This Edition:

The November Man, 2014, Roger Donaldson (Dante's Peak) -- Netflix
iBoy, 2017, Adam Randall (Level Up) -- Netflix
Volcano, 1997, Mick Jackson (The Bodyguard) -- Netflix
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, 2016, David Yates (The Legend of Tarzan) -- download
The Void, 2016, Jeremy Gillespie, Steven Kostanski (Father's Day, Manborg) -- download
Colossal, 2016, Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes) -- download
Paradox, 2016, Michael Hurst (Room 6) -- Netflix
2:22, 2017, Paul Curie (One Perfect Day) -- download

aaaand Go.

Netflix still often feels like the corner video store, where there are a hand full of first run movies at the front, but most of the place is filled up with Straight To movies and delete items. The November Man is a Straight To flick for the Bourne crowd, or probably more precisely the fans of the British spy procedurals.

Pierce Brosnan is Devereaux, an ex-MI5 operative. Or is it CIA? Which is in vogue these days? I still get this flick mixed up in my head with the John Snow MI5 movie I previously rushed through a post. So yes, CIA. He was a hit man, but he's old now; ex-CIA black ops kind of guy in retirement. He is convinced by an old boss to help him extract a... what's the standard word... asset from Russia. The asset is about to get caught and she has good intel on a Russian general. Devereaux agrees but things go south, as they always do, and the asset (who turns out to be his old paramour) dies... at the hands of Deveareaux's once-protegee. But not before she gives him the Next Clue. So, now Devereaux is angry and upset at the CIA and his ex-protegee but still wants to help out the Next Clue, played by Olga Kurlenko.

Standard convoluted plot of espionage and revenge, which happens to be based on a popular adventure book series. Its not all that original and Donaldson spends far too much time recreating Bourne style scenes, but the acting is all committed and the locales are generously exotic. Brosnan is probably stuck with playing B-rate ex-spies of many sort and he does it deftly enough. This was definitely sitting on sofa checking Facebook fare, though. [9:36]

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iBoy is a wonderful Netflix Original from Britain, not perfect but a lot of fun. It's your classic 80s inspired technology magic super-powered tale sourced from people who understand a bit about technology, but depending on you to not know a lot. In other words, much of what happens is not at all possible. But with some decent effects, it still makes for engaging fantasy.

Pretty much all technology based fiction.

Tom lives in a rough part of London, those classic towers you see in all the movies -- run down, cramped and ridden with gangs. He has a crush on Lucy and on the night when he was finally going to confess his feelings, he finds her gang raped. The movie almost lost me there; I am in the camp where I am tired of that being the impetus for most fiction heroic males. But at least it was able to move past it quickly enough. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Tom has to run from the gang members, and in turn shot in the head and (I forget exactly how) ends up with parts of his cell phone embedded in his brain. Boom! Magic technology powers, that makes him kinda of like Besson's Lucy (not the character in THIS movie) in that he can see and interact with technology "waves". And soon after, he realizes he can manipulate them, and control mobile devices and data.

From there it runs as a typical revenge / vigilante drama, but the play on technological powers is charming enough. Eventually he reveals himself as the iBoy, and discovers the core leadership of the gang that hurt Lucy. But at a cost. There is always a cost. The weird thing about the movie is that it keeps on dancing between the goofy scifi powers based stuff, and the darker plot elements around the rape and the balance of power of those who committed it versus those who manipulated them. It wants to be deeper than it is, but only succeeds half way.

Still, Maizie Williams is always worth watching. [9:36]

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Volcano goes into my list of favoured disaster flicks, but not enough to be added to The Shelf. Like the movies about asteroids looming down on us, there were two volcano movies that season. This is the Tommy Lee Jones one, the one where a volcano grows in central LA and the emergency management guy has to pull out all the stops in order to reduce the loss of life. Anne Heche is along as the scientist who has to convince people of the Bad Stuff About to Happen.

Basically, IIRC, something is happening with the fault line (its always San Andreas' fault, ba dump bump) which is sending magma flowing under LA. Things are heating up and geologist Heche, and her trusty side-kick, are trying to figure out why. I remember being horrified the first time I saw the cute, bespectacled sidekick get devoured by an unexpected eruption of magma. Once this event happens, a proper volcano soon emerges and all hell breaks loose. Do you really expect me to NOT use cliches when it comes to remembering disaster flicks?

At the time, Jones was already (click click...) 51, at which point I should be saying "too old to break out as an action star" but remember Liam Neeson's kickoff with Taken ? But that seems what they were trying to do here -- make him the sexy, leading man with against Heche, saving LA from all the stupid people who didn't believe her. But remember, we didn't know Heche was leaning in the direction of women at that time. Still, Jones never  really did reach Action Man status.

And I still did get utterly chilled at the most heroic act in the entire movie, by some rather nameless subway worker, who jumps into flowing lava to save a woman, and dies as lava absorbs him -- but not before he tosses her into the arms of horrified workers. It wouldn't have gone that way in reality, but .... disaster flick. [10:24]

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Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the latest, or first, in the new Harry Potter cinematic universe. This is supposed to take us in two directions: to America and trundling along with Adult Wizards. Eddie Redmayne, the chameleon actor of our current age, plays bumbling, nerdy, stumbling and innocuous British wizard Newt Scamander who has come to America to... oh, I don't remember, but he has a bag (of holding) full of monsters. In his mind, they are not monsters, just misunderstood beasts from myth and magic. But really, dude some of these things are truly beastly, horrific things that would kill people given the chance. What I was disappointed in, in the representation of the monsters, were that so very few of them were mythological. They were basically just alien creatures that the wizards of the world either destroyed or manipulated reality to hide from us. That has to be it right? How else could such a plethora of creatures never have been heard of before?

Anywayz, when one of his creatures gets free he gets caught in a mystery about how muggles (non-mag in the US) interact with magicians, a notorious Bad Guy and some usual HP politics. But the best bits were actually between no-mag baker Jacob Kowalski and Newt, as Jacob gets drawn into a world he is really not supposed to know anything about. Think about it, these magicians never really any cook or bake anything, they just wave a wand and it appears or assembles or something. But Jacob knows, through instinct and skill, what those spells would have drawn upon for the first time. It made me wonder whether there are magicians out there creating new spells that would require non-mag's to provide the base ingredients. What a scandal that would cause.

But the movie never really caught me beyond the interaction of those two. The rest just seemed... forced. [9:31]

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The Void is one of those Lovecraftian flicks that was probably adored by the horror movie film fest circuit. I wonder whether and how it would have played at FantAsia in Montreal. Remember though, this is a lowish budget movie I saw in 2017, something I saw running on the movie / specfic blogs that looked interesting enough. Basically anything Lovecraftian, cults and summoned monsters and transformation and tentacles, can attract my attention. I wonder what that says for me. I remember liking it, but not loving it.

A couple of people are on the run from ... someone. They end up at a mostly abandoned hospital, which recently suffered a fire, and is on a downturn in use. They drag in the survivor and almost immediately things begin to go wrong, with a nurse killing a patient, her face ripped off by ... something. The Good Guys kill her, but she comes back, all tentacly and gross. From there things get all the more convoluted and creepier, connecting the people on the run to a cult that is summoning something from the namesake.

In another era this would have been done by John Carpenter. The over-use of vomit inducing practical-effected monsters and devolving people & creatures was probably the only boon to this movie, for the ideas it was trying to depict just faded away in the over-troped, over-used, not very creative scene to scene "plot". [6:31 because I don't really have much more to say about it, with this faded lingering impression left]

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[full disclosure; i just deleted Noroi as i don't recall a single thing about it]

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Colossal is just a movie of the current era, a time when kaiju are not just coming back ironically or in homage, but also in tangentially referential ways. We have a movie whose sole premise is a presenting traumatized woman who channels a kaiju on the other side of the world. Or is it that he kaiju channels her? Well, whatever she does, the kaiju does as well. She swings her arm, its swings its arm. She walks, it walks and crushes Seoul. It only happens while she is in a certain point, and she cannot see through its eyes, but via the wonders of the Internet, can can see what's going on.

While this is a fantastical premise, this is not a genre movie. This is a classic indie emotion and interaction movie. Gloria (Anne Hathaway; The Intern) is a drunk of trainwreck. She has to escape to her hometown and is sleeping on the floor of the empty family house. Of course, she ends up at the local watering hole and connects with the bar owner Oscar (Jason Sudeikis; Horrible Bosses).

At first things are amiable between Gloria and Oscar, but as they explore this extraordinary phenomena, a really dark side comes out of him. I am not even sure of what is darker, that he seems to be so disconnected from the damage he can cause when he manifests his own kaiju (giant robot), or that there was a dark past situation that created this whole turn of events. Oscar is a horrible person and doesn't seem to be bothered by who is hurt, either lone Gloria who stands before him, or the countless nameless Koreans who he only sees on TV screens.

[kent's view]

[8:30]

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[full disclosure; i just deleted Gambit (2012) & Paradox (2016); AGAIN I don't recall a single thing about them]

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But I do remember this one, albeit slightly. Not quite time travel, more a romantic touch of synchronicity and a bit of time looping, this one was small budget and not thoroughly thought through (i love those three words together) but I rather liked it. I admit, I am rather charmed by Michael Huismann, who we first got to know on The Treme, but you might know better as the second Daario Naharis in Game of Thrones.  And I really like Teresa Palmer. So, I can at least enjoy watching two beautiful people fall in love. Add in some time hijinx and...

Dylan is experiencing something. He keeps on seeing innocuous events repeating: drops of water, flies, car horns, etc. Through chance, he gets connected with Sarah (he gets distracted at 2:22pm almost guiding her plane and another into collision; he's an air traffic controller).  Events and things out of time keep on colliding, focused around an event at 2:22pm and connecting the two new lovers.

Its not easy to explain where the movie goes, and how, and mainly/frankly because it doesn't entirely make sense. Suffice it to say, the lovers are connected through time and via the energy of a dying star from 30 years prior. I just rather liked the execution.

[7:41]

Wow. Cleaned out. And yet, I am not really sure WHY. I mean, I basically ignored the content of almost an entire year's worth of movies seen. Oh well, who I am to define my brain and that war going on in there.