Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Anya Taylor-Joy’

SHORT TAKES: “Flow,” “The Gorge”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 15, 2025| Leave a Comment »

“FLOW” My rating: B+  (Apple TV +)

85 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

There is not one word of dialogue in the  Czech animation feature “Flow,” which is up for Oscars in both the Animated Film and International Feature categories.

Which means a viewer has to pay attention.  No looking out the window and expecting the soundtrack to carry you along.

Happily, concentrating on “Flow” is no problem, since creator Gints Zilbalodis packs his feature with so much intoxicating visual information and so many interesting characters and situations that our attention never wanders.

The film unfolds in a vaguely Asian landscape.  There are bamboo huts and Ankor Wat-style temples and even an exotic city.  These speak of human habitation, but we never do see an example of homo sapiens.

Instead we find ourselves on a grand adventure with a cat who initially survives a tsunami that floods the jungle, then hitches a ride on a drifting boat to be carried wherever the current takes him (or her).

Our feline protagonist is accompanied by a small menagerie of other animals seeking refuge from the waters. Among them a shuffling capybara (think large groundhog), a pack of dogs who put aside their cat-hunting proclivities for the sake of mutual survival, a magisterial crane, and a lemur obsessed with collecting items (he becomes frantic upon discovering one of his precious finds is missing…I call him Gollum).

We get to know them not from what they say (again, no dialogue) but by their actions, which have been brilliantly envisioned to be both sentient and animal.

“Flow” has no plot. It’s a series of episodes. There’s  no explanation of the disaster that befalls the characters, no clue as to where all the people have gone.  The movie doesn’t so much end as drift away.

So if you’re looking for a tidy package wrapped up with a bow, you’ll be frustrated.

If, however, you’re ready for something you’ve never seen before, dive into this brave new world.

Miles Teller, Anya Taylor-Joy

“THE GORGE” My rating: C+ (Apple TV +)

127 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13)

“The Gorge” has a nifty premise and a really solid opening 40 minutes. 

After that it’s a bit of a mess.

Sniper Levi (Miles Teller) is tormented by the many people he has killed, both as a Marine and more recently as a paid mercenary.  Looking for a change, he’s intrigued by a offer proffered by an obviously high-ranking government mover and shaker (Sigourney Weaver).

How would Levi like to spend a year in isolation, getting his head together while employing  his skills as a marksman?  

It’s all very mysterious, and after a long plane ride during which he was drugged Levi ends up in a concrete sentry tower overlooking a vast fog-filled chasm.  His job is to use the resources he’s been given — long-range rifles,  explosive mines dangled over the precipice, automated machine guns — to keep whatever is making eerie noises down there from getting out.

Oh…and about a mile away on the other side of the canyon is another sentry tower, this one occupied by Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), who like Levi has enjoyed a career of long-distance assassinations…albeit her employers were Eastern Bloc types.

Despite orders not to fraternize, the two snipers begin communicating via binoculars and messages written on big sheets of paper.   It’s kind of a chaste courtship…at least until Levi uses a bazooka and metal cable to string a zip line above the roiling clouds.

So far so good.   But the meet-cute romance that develops doesn’t convince (these two are too hard core to get their kicks dancing to ‘80s pop) and the mystery of just what is happening down below is a whole lot of nothing.

We’re talking about a long-ago government experiment that went south, creating an environment filled with mutant creatures (kinda reminds of the Skull Island sequence in “King Kong”).

Teller and Taylor-Joy are both fine performers, but Zach Dean’s script and Scott Derrickson’s direction give them little to work with.

Production  values are solid, but “The Gorge” suffers from the great gaping hole that afflicts so many sci-fi/horror entries — a great buildup to a mediocre reveal.

| Robert W. Butler

Read Full Post »

SHORT TAKES: “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” “Horizon: An Ameran Saga – Chapter 1″

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on August 25, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Anya Taylor-Joy, Tom Burke, Chris Hemswoth

FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA”  My rating: B (Max)

148 minutes | MPAA rating: R

For millions of Marvel geeks around the globe Chris Hemsworth will always be Thor, superhero/god/party animal.

His best performance, though, may very well be as the heavy in “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.”  

In this prequel to “Mad Max: Fury Road” Helmsworth plays Dementus, the latest in a long line of desert-roving barbarian gangster-kings who for four decades have populated writer/director George Miller’s post-apocalyptic landscape.

The difference is that Helmsworth’s Dementus — while just as brutal as any of these other troglodytes  — seems to have been a PhD candidate before the collapse of civilization.

He’s witty. Erudite. Appreciates irony and sarcasm. 

In short, he’s a hoot.

Of course, “Furiosa” isn’t really his story.   As played by Charlize Theron in “Fury Road,” Furiosa was a sort of female trucker/gladiator with one metal arm, a shaved head and a feminist’s disdain for the testosterone-fueled circumstances in which she finds herself.  This latest film chronicles her early years.

It begins with Furiosa as a young girl (Alyla Browne) living in a rare green paradise.  She’s kidnapped by marauders led by the muscled Dementus; when her mother is savagely executed after a failed rescue attempt, the girl starts laying plans for revenge.

It’ll take 20 years and the first hour of the movie before the role is taken over by Anya Taylor-Joy, who is given almost no dialogue but gets a lot out of her androgynous slow burn.

To be honest, I found the first 20 or so minutes of “Furious” to be a bit sub-standard.  The crude, one-dimensional villains are interchangeable; even the stunt work and special effects struck me as unconvincing.

But after a while things improve (or I finally clicked into the movie’s wavelength) and “Furiosa” comes to life with several extended action sequences that’ll have viewers rubbing their eyes in disbelief.

Several characters from “Furiosa” appear here in slightly younger incarnations (they’ve got great names like Fang, Smeg, Scrotus and Rictus); new to the scene is Tom Burke as Praetorian Jack, a leather-clad teamster who teaches our heroine how to drive those iconic big rigs.

“Furiosa” is a very elaborate revenge melodrama. But it’s done with such visual and, surprisingly, verbal aplomb that I could happily watch it again.

Kevin Costner

“HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA – CHAPTER 1”  My rating: B- (Max)

181 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Only weeks after it flopped at the box office, the first of Kevin Costner’s four “Horizon” films is streaming.  It’s not bad.

Which isn’t to say it’s good. Not yet, anyway.

Watching Part I of “Horizon” is like reading the first few chapters of a novel and then losing your copy. It introduces characters and sets up potential developments…but feels scattershot and incomplete.

May I suggest that it never should have been planned as a theatrical release, that it would be much better served (and easier to digest) as 12 one-hour episodes on some streaming service?

Well, here’s what we’ve got so far.

The Horizon of the title is a town in Arizona. As the film begins in the late 1850’s a surveyor and his family are laying out the parameters of their proposed burg.  The local Apaches have other ideas.

Indeed the action highlight is a nighttime raid on Horizon — little more than a collection of tents — that leaves all but a handful of settlers dead and scalped.  

One of the few survivors is the newly widowed Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller), who after the raid must be dug out of a collapsed escape tunnel from her family’s cabin. Her rescuer is Lt. Trent Gephart of the U.S. Cavalry (Sam Worthington); a romance may be in the works.

Another plot thread:  Old hand Hayes Ellison (Costner) finds himself protecting a young prostitute (Abbey Lee) and an infant who are being sought by the child’s murderous stepbrothers (Jon Beavers, Jamie Campbell Bower).

Meanwhile a wagon train wends its way across the prairie, with the wagon master (Luke Wilson) frustrated by a young woman from the East (Ella Hunt) whose entitled attitude threatens the survival of the entire party.

A teenage boy who lived through the opening massacre (Hayes Costner, the director’s son) ends up riding with a seedy bunch of scalp hunters led by a scuzzy killer (Jeff Fahey). Their M.O. is to raid Indian villages while the warriors are off on hunts; each scalp can be redeemed for cash.

Finally, we spend some time with Apaches warriors (Owen Crow Shoe, Tatanka Means) who disagree on how to deal with the white tide breaking over their lands.

That’s a lot of narrative elements, none of which come close to being resolved in this initial three-hour movie.  New characters are introduced with head-spinning regularity (Jena Malone, Danny Huston, Will Patton, James Russo); we barely get to know any of them.

This means what while “Horizon” is crammed with visual wonders (the cinematographer is J. Michael Muro) it has very little feeling beyond the terror of an unpleasant death.

Only a couple of times does the script (by Costner, John Baird and Mark Kasden) strike a satisfying emotional note.  One of these is delivered by Michael Rooker, the heavy of countless movies and T.V. shows, who has a brief, quietly heartbreaking moment as a crusty-but-kind Army sergeant recounting the death of one of his offspring.

As director, Costner gives us many a pretty picture but not a lot of narrative coherence.  He borrows freely from the John Ford playbook — there’s a community dance (a staple of just about every Ford Western), an army outpost and dozens of flat-topped mesas that evoke the Monument Valley outcrops so iconic from “The Searchers” and other titles.

But there is simultaneously too much story here…and not enough.

At this point Costner has already finished the second film and is working on the other two.  Indeed, “Horizon – Part I” ends with five minutes of scenes from the upcoming installments.

I’m looking forward to seeing them in quick succession. Perhaps then Costner’s master plan will become clear.

| Robert W. Butler

Read Full Post »