Category: Movies

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Shmee Meets Tonya!

For us kids of the late 80’s and mid 90’s, we remember the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan incident vividly.  Low class villain Tonya Harding tried to get ahead by bashing in the knee of her main rival, America’s Sweetheart, Nancy Kerrigan.  Of course that isn’t quite what happened.  That is just the way it was reported, and thus how we remember it.  In all actuality Tonya’s ex-husband hired some guys to scare Kerrigan, and they went a little rogue.  According to him anyway.  The movie “I, Tonya” explores all this, and it does its best to get across all the wildly different stories about what happened.  It is an interesting and funny film, but sometimes the tone doesn’t quite jell with the content.

“I, Tonya” follows the life of Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) from her early life to her trial and judgement just after the 1994 Winter Olympic Games.  It is also partially told through re-enactments of interviews with Tonya, Tonya’s Mother LaVona (Allison Janney), and Tonya’s Ex Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan).  Gillooly and his crew are rubes of the highest order.  So much so that the movie is more comedy than drama.

The main problem with film, other than the fact it is told by very unreliable narrators, is that its comedic tone often clashes with the violent and verbal abuse that is directed at Tonya by LoVona and Gillooly almost nonstop.  We will be laughing at the idiocy of Gillooly’s goons one minute and then see him punch Tonya in the face the next.  It is jarring to say the least.  The juxtaposition happens so often that you almost feel like the movie wants us to laugh at it, but the director Craig Gillespie and the actors made clear in interviews that we are not.  They were just going for that whiplash effect.  I am just not sure it is always successful.

As with all character movies, they are only as successful as their characters, and the lineup for “I, Tonya” is fantastic.  Allison Janney makes everything better, and Margot Robbie and Sebastian Stan more than keep with her.  The side characters are all wonderful too.  It is a real acting showcase.  It is no wonder that Janney won an Oscar and that Robbie was nominated.

“I, Tonya” is streaming right now on Hulu, and it is well worth spending the two hours to watch it.  The abuse may be hard to watch, and the language is rough, but it was insightful to finally get Tonya’s take on the scandal.  Plus, the actors are all great.  “I, Tonya” is not your average sports movie, there are no heroes, and nobody wins the gold, but I enjoyed being introduced to Tonya Harding.

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Shmee Checks In To The Hotel Artemis!

Hotel Artemis is the second movie in a row I have seen to place itself in a near cyberpunk setting, and I am all for it!  Of course besides its setting, Hotel Artemis shares very little in common with Upgrade.  Upgrade is an over the top action revenge movie, and Hotel Artemis, despite its advertising, is a quirky character flick that if it were a little more stylized could have easily been directed by Wes Anderson.  Which is to say, I liked it.

Hotel Artemis is a hospital in the near future where criminals can get patched up in safety away from the prying of authorities.  The type of place John Wick would totally know about and have a membership to.  The movie takes place on a busy night where the hotel is full up with crazy characters.  It is up to the head nurse, Jodie Foster, and her orderly, Dave Bautista, to keep everyone from killing each other.

I think the trailers for Hotel Artemis do the film a disservice.  They bill it has a full tilt action movie, but besides a quick shootout in the intro to setup the movie, a couple of crooks get shot and need a place to get patched up, and the third act where the pot boils over so to speak, this movie is just about the cast bouncing off of each other.  Not in an outright funny way, but like I said before, in quirky way that will make you smile, so if you were expecting one cool action sequence after another, you might be disappointed.  I, on the other hand, was pleasantly surprised.

Obviously character movies don’t work without good characters.  That is why Wes Anderson uses the same cast over and over.  In Hotel Artemis’s case it is hard to beat: Jodie Foster, Dave Bautista, Sterling K. Brown, Charlie Day, Sofia Boutella, Zachary Quinto, and Jeff freaking Goldblum.  They all make their characters quite a delight to watch, so Drew Pearce’s casting director knew their business.

Hotel Artemis is smart enough not to outlast its welcome.  Its ninety-five minute running time (okay now it has two similarities with Upgrade) was a perfect fit.  A quick setup, the characters get to chew on each other for forty five minutes, and then the whole thing descends in to chaos.  It was very enjoyable ride.  It is not for everyone, but I had a lot of fun, and if you like funny (not ha-ha funny) little crime movies, you probably will too.

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Shmee Ponders Getting An Upgrade!

Thanks to John Wick the old school late 80’s early 90’s action revenge genre is making a comeback, though it is getting a few tweaks along the way.  Upgrade stays truer to the formula than John Wick does, but it mixes in a cyberpunk setting and some horror elements for flavor.  While its story will not blow you away, its great fight choreography and gruesome practical effects might.

Upgrade’s plot is basic: happy man and wife get attacked, wife gets murdered, and then man goes out and takes his revenge.  The difference in Upgrade is that the man, Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green), becomes a quadriplegic, so he undergoes an experimental surgery that implants a cybernetic computer, STEM (voice by  Simon Maiden), on to his spine to move his limbs for him.  Then when he allows STEM to have complete control over his body he turns in to a cyborg killing machine.

What is great about this movie is that it understands what the audience is in the theater for: cool fights, and they are a ton of fun.  Watching Grey watch what his body is doing without his control with a combined look of horror and amazement on face is quite funny, and Marshall-Green’s ability to make his movements look unhuman while making those facial emotes is uncanny.  Then because Upgrade is billed as a horror movie, the ending to those fights are shocking.  With really well done practical effects to sell what you are seeing on screen.

While no one is going to win any acting awards for this film, like I said before Marshall-Green really grounds this movie.  His ability to make not quite robotic movements and still give his character some emotional depth is worth recognition, and Upgrade needs that good central character because there is almost no other character of note in this movie.  Except for maybe STEM.  Everyone else is just a roadblock to justice.  Roadblocks that do some great stunt work.

Upgrade is barely over an hour and a half long including its ending credits, so it doesn’t outlast its welcome, and sophomore director Leigh Whannell does a fabulous job keeping it running at a fast clip.  You can tell he reveled in bringing his horror background to the action genre, he wrote and co-created the Saw and Insidious franchises.  While it won’t win any new fans to the action revenge genre, existing ones should find plenty to like in Upgrade.  It is quite literally a bloody good time.

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We Finally Get Look At The LEGO Movie 2!

This is a pretty long trailer for a movie that isn’t coming out until February, but I am excited!  It is a pretty epic looking apocalypse, and I am on board!  Not to mention there is a pretty great Guardians of the Galaxy joke in there, so at least we know the tone of the movie is on point.

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Deadpool 2 Delivers Exactly What You Would Expect

In 2016 Deadpool delivered something audiences had never seen, a foul mouthed jerky “superhero” that made fun of all the other superhero movies out there.  It was the self satire that the genre needed.  While Deadpool’s shtick is still funny, it lacks the shock and awe that it had two years ago, but if you are looking for more Deadpool, Deadpool 2 delivers.

Deadpool 2 starts soon after the end of the first Deadpool, and things are at first going great for the Merc with the Mouth (Ryan Reynolds), but then tragedy strikes.  To make things even worse Cable (Josh Brolin) comes from the future causing chaos, so Deadpool has to get a team together to stop him, the X-Force.  Queue zany hijinks and over the top action sequences.  Maximum Effort!

They way they tried to change things up was to make this a more personal story for Wade Wilson.  To give it a little more heart, but the problem is that it undercuts itself to tell more jokes.  Which to be fair is why the audience is there in the first place, but it makes it feel like the writers were trying to have their cake and eat it too.  By making this a standard emotional superhero movie, and then turning around and making fun of all those movies.  Thankfully most of the jokes land the way they were intended.

We all know that this was the superhero role that Reynolds was meant to play, but Brolin’s Cable is spot on too, and Zazie Beetz as Domino is fantastic.  Even better the rest of Deadpool’s excellent cast all return, and they continue to be hilarious, even if they are used to a lesser degree.

It is strange to be a little let down that Deadpool 2 gives us more of what made the first film so good, but I was kind of hoping they would try new things, maybe even find new genre’s to make fun of.  However, the action is still explosive, and the jokes are still funny, so it is still worth watching.  I just hope that they find something a little different to tackle with the upcoming X-Force movie, and don’t just use it as an excuse to turn Deadpool in to just another X-Man.