STOP ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE
Jul. 26th, 2012 12:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogI watch new movies. Sometimes I watch them on airplanes if they have a decent-quality personal seatback entertainment system. Or if I’m really bored.
Haywire
Steven Soderbergh takes on the action-thriller genre with mixed-martial artist Gina Carano as Mallory Kane, a covert operative for a private company outsourced by the US govt to do unofficial jobs.
The plot is pretty standard for this kind of film– a straightforward op goes (yes) haywire after Kane is double-crossed, forcing her to go underground to find out who set her up and exact revenge. Also par for the course is the fact that, like a lot of real-life martial artists turned actors, Carano is a lot more convincing during the action scenes.
On the bright side, the action scenes are very well done, and its non-linear story structure helps keep an otherwise standard plot interesting for its 90-minute running time. If nothing else, it makes a good case for the notion that you don’t need gobs of special effects and OTT action spectacles to make a decent spy thriller.
The Awakening
British horror film set in 1921 in which Florence Cathcart, a woman who makes a living exposing supernatural hoaxes (to include fraudulent séance operations) is asked to go to a boarding school allegedly haunted by the ghost of a dead student.
You can kind of see where it’s going to go from there, and that’s the chief flaw with this film – you know that Cathcart is going to find out the hard way that ghosts are real. On the other hand, I did like the angle of a female hoaxbuster. And points for director Nick Murphy relying on suspense over CGI to tell a ghost story, which at least kept me interested despite the overall predictability.
Shame about the ending, though – the eventual “explanation” for the manifestations is something of a copout, and not a very convincing one.
Wide awake,
This is dF
Haywire
Steven Soderbergh takes on the action-thriller genre with mixed-martial artist Gina Carano as Mallory Kane, a covert operative for a private company outsourced by the US govt to do unofficial jobs.
The plot is pretty standard for this kind of film– a straightforward op goes (yes) haywire after Kane is double-crossed, forcing her to go underground to find out who set her up and exact revenge. Also par for the course is the fact that, like a lot of real-life martial artists turned actors, Carano is a lot more convincing during the action scenes.
On the bright side, the action scenes are very well done, and its non-linear story structure helps keep an otherwise standard plot interesting for its 90-minute running time. If nothing else, it makes a good case for the notion that you don’t need gobs of special effects and OTT action spectacles to make a decent spy thriller.
The Awakening
British horror film set in 1921 in which Florence Cathcart, a woman who makes a living exposing supernatural hoaxes (to include fraudulent séance operations) is asked to go to a boarding school allegedly haunted by the ghost of a dead student.
You can kind of see where it’s going to go from there, and that’s the chief flaw with this film – you know that Cathcart is going to find out the hard way that ghosts are real. On the other hand, I did like the angle of a female hoaxbuster. And points for director Nick Murphy relying on suspense over CGI to tell a ghost story, which at least kept me interested despite the overall predictability.
Shame about the ending, though – the eventual “explanation” for the manifestations is something of a copout, and not a very convincing one.
Wide awake,
This is dF
