Friday, April 21, 2017

Two Paragraph Review: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - Areal Shots Wars

Copyright: Walt Disney Studios
Gareth Edwards is a guy that was clearly captivated by aerial shots throughout his career. In Monsters, they worked quite well, where he used them to show something terrible, impressive and barely knowable in the distance, but they failed in Godzilla, where we already knew what was lurking there and we wanted to see more of it, not less. Now, in Rogue One, this approach works somewhere in the middle, making a not too shabby, but also not too great of a film.

The only live-action, stand-alone film in the Star Wars series opens in a very complex and hard to follow manner, jumping around both in terms of time and space. But then, Edwards creates his merry crew of suicidal rebels and other characters who will do anything to get some blueprints. This takes them right into the heart of darkness, here located in a tropical paradise with some really lacking security measures. Also, Ben Mendelsohn was great like he always is and the film felt better to me than Star Wars: Force Awakens.

Friday, April 14, 2017

Two Paragraph Review: Anthropoid (2016) - That Czech-English though

Copyright: Bleecker Street
Aside from touching upon the horrors of the Nazi occupation pretty much anywhere, Anthropoid delves deep into the issue of western actors struggling with a Slavic accent that is not Russian. Here, people like Cillian Murphy and Toby Jones work with local stars as they try to figure out that particular brand of Slavic English and end up sounding strange (at least to me).

Apart from that, the film showcases the assassination attempt of Reinhard Heydrich who got a back full of fine automotive leather along with grenade fragments for his contribution the Third Reich, dying a painful and slow death that is never shown on screen. What is shown is the slow buildup to the attack and then a prolonged war-themed torture porn segment featuring the assassins and resistance members being hunted down and killed in Prague.