Category: Theaters

I heard a lot of things about Dunkirk before going to the theater and watching it: It was inspired by silent films; It got events and names of soldiers wrong; It starred that kid from One Direction, but most of all I heard that it was excellent, and guess what? All those things are true!  While it may be slightly historically inaccurate, and it does give Harry Styles his first starring role, Dunkirk is 106 minutes of gripping cinema!

Most war movies are all about the action.  You are either down in the trenches/foxholes with bullets flying by, or up on the battlefields while men are giving heroic speeches to other men before they to charge headlong in to combat.  Not so with Dunkirk.  The battle is lost before the movie starts.  This movie is just about 400,000 men trying to get home while being harassed by Nazi Germany.  That is not to say there is no action in Dunkirk, but for the most part it is different.  Guys just trying to keep their heads down and not get shot.  Though Tom Hardy’s fighterpilot sequences are a little more straight forward.

Speaking of straight forward, Dunkirk’s stories, there are three main plots, all happen at different times, so that was a little jarring at first, but once you get the pacing down it all makes sense and comes together nicely in the end.  Also all of the stories are great.  There isn’t one where I felt that Nolan lingered too long, or conversely didn’t develop the thread enough.

Dunkirk is a Christopher Nolan film from frame one.  The sound, the color, all of it exudes his style.  If that is a turn off for you, I think Dunkirk is still worth watching because at least all of his style is still working with a story worth telling.  Dunkirk is the best war movie to come out in a long time, and I am sure that it will get some talk around award season, though I am not sure that it will win (we have to wait and see how the indies fair this winter).  Dunkirk was a movie made for theaters, so do yourself a favor and go see it before it leaves your local multiplex in a week or two.  It is well worth your hard earned cash.

It is hard to resist the siren’s call of a good blockbuster.  Let alone the remake of a TV miniseries that was a rite of passage for a lot of children.  If you were born in the 80’s it was almost a guarantee that at some point you would have to watch It, and even if you didn’t see It, all your friends no doubt filled you in on all the details.  Sharing with you their new found fear of sewer dwelling spider-clowns.  Which is why a lot of people questioned the wisdom of redoing a ‘classic’ (if you watch the original now, it isn’t that good, aside from Tim Curry), but let me tell you, director Andy Muschietti and crew made a film that more than lives up to how terrifying we remember the original It being.

At this point I am guessing we all know the basic plot to It.  Kids in the town of Derry are going missing, and just about every other kid in the town is being tormented with visions of a creepy clown (Bill Skarsgård) and whatever else they fear most.  After the disappearance of his brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott), Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) decides to get the bottom of what is going on with the help of his friends in ‘The Losers Club’.

Man, they made this movie so delightfully creepy and unnerving!  And It is not a slow burn either.  This movie is out to get you from the first fifteen minutes.  Not many films flaunt their monster the way It does, but Skarsgård is so good as Pennywise it would have been a shame if they hadn’t.  It is one frightful set piece after another.  I don’t think I ever sat in my chair properly.  The movie kept me propped up at strange angles.  It was as if my body was trying to find a configuration that could better process what I was seeing.

The Losers Club was great.  In a post Stranger Things world, all horror media involving kids in the 80’s is going to be compared to that show, and It compares very favorably.  The kids are snarky, funny and loveable.  It is easy to root for them.  While I am not a fan of putting kids in danger, I will say a horror movies about kids always makes more sense.  When adults make dumb horror movie choices, you roll your eyes.  When kids make dumb horror movie choices, it is understandable.

I never thought there would be a Pennywise that creeped me out more than Tim Curry, but Bill Skarsgård managed to do it, and now I don’t like to stand in dark rooms by myself.  It was scary even though I knew what was going to happen, and It will replace It as a horror classic.  If you are somehow still employed as a clown, you should retire now, because It is here to scare a whole new generation, and that generation is going to hate clowns even more than my generation did.  Which is saying something.