Tag Archives: Alexander Skarsgård

Godzilla vs. Kong

If nothing else, Legendary Entertainment and Warner Bros. Pictures have been surprisingly persistent in trying to make their MonsterVerse into a successful franchise. This is the fourth film they’ve released since 2014’s Godzilla reboot, and as the title boldly announces, this is the one where the new version of Godzilla meets the new version of King Kong. Of course, by “meets”, I mean “fights to the death in the middle of a bunch of skyscrapers”.

Like the previous films in the MonsterVerse, Godzilla vs. Kong is exactly as advertised. It is essentially plot-free, because that would get mean less time for the monsters to try to murder each other. And monster fights are why this film exists. In between fights there is a small amount of filler in the form of serious science-talk about the origins of these monsters and the “hollow earth”, but feel free to ignore it as I did. Because all the science-talk in the world won’t explain why these giant monsters are saving the environment through killing each other, or why the hollow earth is as bright as day when it is literally the centre of the earth. And the next monster fight is just around the corner anyway.

No one will ever mistake Godzilla vs. Kong for a good movie, but it is a movie that you have to respect if only for its self-confidence. This movie is just so damn sure of itself. So damn sure that you have paid to see monster fights and so damn sure that you do not care about plot or character development or anything else that a normal movie contains. And at least in my case, it was right. I did not miss that other stuff one bit. If you have read this far and still want to see this movie, it will not disappoint. Just pick your favourite monster, sit back, and enjoy the show!

Sundance 2021: Passing

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This film is based on the electrifying 1920s novel by Nella Larsen depicting two former friends who run into each other randomly in New York City. Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga) were friends in high school but haven’t seen each other since. Both women are biracial; Irene lives in Harlem with her husband and sons while Clare lives in Chicago with her own husband and child. The major difference being that while Irene lives authentically, Clare is passing for white. Even Clare’s husband John (Alexander Skarsgard) believes her to be white. In fact, needs her to be white, since, as he tells us, the only person who hates Black people more than he does is Clare herself. He’s even given her a “cute” racially-charged nickname that he loves to boast about. Clare lives deep, deep under cover. Irene sees the danger in the situation and resolves to stay away from her, unwilling to keep denying her own race to hide Clare’s.

However, when Clare and John move to New York City themselves, the two women reignite their friendship, despite Irene’s reluctance. Clare has been desperate for the unique comfort of being among her own people, but Irene is terrified of John, and of what might happen should he find out. But a mutual obsession grows the more time Clare spends in Harlem; they seem almost unable to untangle from each other even as their friendship threatens their carefully curated Truths.

Passing isn’t just about race. It takes on gender, sexuality, and importantly, class. Clare’s constructed identity revolves around her passing as white, but Irene’s identity is more wrapped up in her status. As the wife as a doctor, she strictly maintains her middle class boundaries, going as far as to isolate herself in order not to be mistaken for someone of a lower class, while Clare is much more comfortable straddling the lines and treating class as more fluid. Writer-director Rebecca Hall paints a beautiful portrait in which these two women exist, and develop, and she allows Negga and Thompson the space to explore who their characters are and why. Through lenses of happiness, jealousy, security, fear, and desire, we come to know these women and what guides them in their choices.

This is a fertile character study where psychology and motivation are layered in richness and depth. With its deliciously ambiguous ending, Rebecca Hall honours the masterful source material while also creating something impactful of her own.

The Hummingbird Project

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Not that the world needed another ode to American greed, but here goes.

Vince and Anton are cousins who work in high-frequency trading for Eva Torres. Eva (Salma Hayek) is interested in finding an even higher frequency: on the stock market, traders who could get into the best deals even a fraction of a fraction of a second faster would ultimately have a huge cumulative advantage worth billions of dollars over time. Vince (Jesse Eisenberg) thinks he can one-up her, so he leaves, taking coder cousin Anton (Alexander Skarsgard) along with him.

Their scheme involves digging a fiber-optic line in a straight shot between Kansas and New Jersey. And I do mean straight: through mountains and rivers and Amish country if necessary. Their plan means buying land and thwarting government agencies and raising millions in funding from greedy investors. It also means staying one step ahead of ex-boss Eva, but don’t think for a second she’s going to let them get away with this.

Alexander Skarsgard is nearly unrecognizable as a socially inept, worrywart brainiac who must be micro-managed by his bolder cousin. Jesse Eisenberg continues his one-note symphony, bringing the same manic chipmunk energy he brings to everything because he literally can’t do anything else. And to be honest, not only am I over it, I don’t have room in my life for being bombarded by a neurotic asshole. It’s too much.

The script isn’t doing much for me either. It’s single-minded in its pursuit of success, and boring as hell. All this wheeling and dealing: haven’t we seen this a hundred times before? And it ain’t exactly subtle. For every shot of aggressive drilling and invasive construction, there are literal scenes of both amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties. You can practically feel an anthem swelling somewhere. But the characters are in fact caricatures: Vince is the hyper-achiever, Anton is the Beautiful Mind, and Eva is the Bond villain.

There is no such thing as cinematic drilling. Or fascinating drilling. Or interesting drilling. It’s just drilling. So unless you’re into some weird engineering porn, this movie is really not suitable for viewing. I think there might have been some potential for satirical commentary buried deep in there somewhere, but in this one case they didn’t drill deep enough. The Hummingbird Project is ultimately shallow, and you only wish its runtime was operating at a higher frequency so you could put this one to bed already.

TIFF18: Hold The Dark

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Three children have gone missing from a small, very small, very isolated community in Alaska, snatched by wolves. One of the grieving mothers, Medora (Riley Keough), hires wolf expert and writer Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright) to track and kill the wolf or wolves responsible.

But the wolves are not the villains of this story.

First, the Alaskan landscape. It’s frozen, much colder than what cold passes for MV5BODYwNTY5MDcxMl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNjAzNDQxNjM@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,1487,1000_AL_ anywhere else. It’s unforgiving. It’s unknowable. It’s remote. There are only 5 hours of daylight at midday. It’s a blank canvas, a blanket of white, relentless and renewing, where even your own footprints are quickly snowed in and covered over; one wrong step can mean the difference between life or death. It’s no place for a novice like Core, but he’s got some demons of his own that keep him from making better judgments.

Second, the village. Or rather the villagers. They’re an insular tribe and don’t take kindly to outsiders. The environment is hostile in every sense of the word. They don’t cooperate with the law.

Third, the grieving parents. Grief makes a person crazy. Some people were crazy to begin with. Medora was on her own when her son went missing, her husband Vernon (Alexander Skarsgard) away at war. Injured, he gets sent home to a probably-dead kid and a mentally disturbed wife. There aren’t a lot of times when war is the preferable scenario, the kinder one, but I think this it.

I read the novel upon which this is based (by author William Giraldi) but this screenplay is adapted by the twisted mind of Macon Blair, so I know I’m in some sort of trouble. He’s beefed up the part of Vernon for Skarsgard, sure, and he also makes sure every bit of violence is as graphically gory as possible. What else do we expect from a Jeremy Saulnier movie? The man loves to taunt us with threatening, ominous images and then leave us exposed to whatever chaos may come. It’s an exceptionally tense way to watch a film, but if Saulnier isn’t throwing you into minor cardiac arrhythmia, he feels you aren’t getting your money’s worth.

Saulnier is a master of making you shit your pants, and if anything, Hold The Dark is a little lighter on the anxiety-ridden dread. But while we buckle up for a movie about wolves and wilderness, it’s actually humanity who shows itself most vicious, and that’s all Saulnier. There are so many twists in the tundra it can be hard to keep them all straight, and you’re never quite sure just what kind of movie you’re watching, but it’s a bloody, vengeful rampage and it will not have a happy ending.

Mute

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mute For me, the most memorable scene in Mute was a few-second long callback to director Duncan Jones’ debut, a marvelous little movie called Moon, starring Sam Rockwell, that you should track down immediately if you haven’t seen it yet. Apparently, Mute is intended to be the second entry in a very loose trilogy, an approach that Netflix seems to be very keen on at the moment (as evidenced by The Cloverfield Paradox along with Mute). Come to think of it, we saw this same thing happen with Split not so long ago, where two movies really have nothing to do with one another except that they happen in the same “shared universe”, with that link often seeming to constitute a big reveal.

I have asked before and, thanks to Mute, have to ask again: why is it becoming a thing to tie movies together in this way? What is the point, when Mute is a totally separate story not at all influenced by the events in Moon (and vice versa)? Why does it matter that these movies occur in the same world at the same time if the events of one film do not impact the other in any way? Why are we even mentioning this link and including a scene with Rockwell in Mute (other than the fact that he is so hot right now)? sohotrightnow Are people being drawn to Mute because it’s related to Moon? Did anyone choose to watch Mute because of that link who otherwise would not have? Is Rockwell such a big box office draw that his inclusion got Mute off the ground? I have a hard time believing this one little throwaway scene helped Mute and yet, why else even bother?

Really, the only benefit of Rockwell’s inclusion was that it made this review easier to write, because Mute is otherwise forgettable even as you are watching it. Visually, it is for the most part a shameless ripoff of Blade Runner only it’s bereft of any philosophical discussions about anything meaningful, with the only takeway being that parents should not make friends with pedophiles, a point which, much like the movie itself, did not really need to be made.

War On Everyone

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Two buddy detectives (Michael Pena, Alexander Skarsgard) are corrupt as hell and enjoy bashing skulls together as they extort the hell out of any vague criminal sort that crosses paths with them. But that’s a really good way to meet some really bad people, and eventually, they do.

woe_firstlook-2-1024x716 It takes all of 4 minutes to realize that this movie is not going to live up to even modified expectations. The dialogue is surprisingly bad, perhaps because writer-director John Michael McDonagh, capable of Calvary, is instead treating this like he’s writing on spec for straight-to-Netflix Adam Sandler.

The good news is that both Pena and Skarsgard look pretty darn good in three piece suits. The fault is not with them – I don’t think anyone could survive this kind of sloppy writing. I think I see what McDonagh is aiming for: salty, quippy, something like Apatow meets Tarantino. Not only does it fail to live up to either of those names, it’s forgettable even as you’re watching it. It may as well never have been made. And it never justifies itself. 97 minutes later, I still can’t even account for the 70s porn music that unironically accompanied random car chase scenes, and I definitely can’t decide which of the villains is most laughable. I guess you might find it passably enjoyable if you’re in the right mood, but I am decidedly not. This shit just feels tone deaf.

The Legend of Tarzan

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Say what?

I’ve seen dozens of Tarzan iterations over the years, but I was still confused trying to follow this one. What I think happens is that we start out meeting Tarzan as a gentleman in England, living as Lord Greystoke, the jungle far behind him. But then his government asks him to go back to the Congo to act as some sort of diplomat, and his beloved wife Jane follows him. Then we start with the flashbacks – to his infancy when his parents are lost and he becomes an adopted beast of the jungle, and also to his first wild meetings with Jane.

Things go badly for Lord Greystoke during his comeback tour. Evil Christoph Waltz is embroiled in slavery and blood diamonds, determined to make his 01-tarzan_w529_h352 monarch extremely wealthy. To get to Tarzan, he of course kidnaps Jane. Christoph Waltz has played versions of the same character over and over since he won the Oscar for it in Inglorious Basterds. It doesn’t work here and hasn’t worked in a while, but he’ll keep getting typecast, and we’ll keep suffering. But there’s a trade-off: Samuel L. Jackson is our comic relief, and he’s almost too good at it, stealing scenes from Tarzan himself.

It seems like this Tarzan movie wants to modernize somewhat, with a social conscience, which is good, or at least would have been had Tarzan not been inevitably cast as the great white saviour, swinging from the trees.

It also wants to be a superhero movie with proper villains and ultimate fight sequences – but with Tarzan’s superpower and only weapon being his amazing 8-pack abs. People love to talk about those abs. Poor Alexander Skarsgard worked out 6-7 days a week for months while consuming 7000 calories a day, and then UPPED the workouts to fourteen times a week while drastically cutting his caloric intake. Sounds brutal. I would be having veritable taco hallucinations. But that’s 6 months or more perfecting his physique (and what was wrong with it to begin with, I wonder? He wasn’t exactly known for being a slouch), and maybe 10 days of memorizing his lines, and that’s “acting.” To be fair, Skarsgard isn’t really the problem here, but he’s also not much of a help. He’s surrounded by 2 Oscar winners and 2 more nominees. If Tarzan is the weak link in your Tarzan movie, your Tarzan movie’s got a problem. And as pretty as he looks, I did wonder how it was that Lord Greystoke, so long removed from the jungle, still had that amazing King of the Jungle body. Jane’s cooking must really suck. Were there even gyms in 1880s England?

I never stopped being frustrated by the hazy flashbacks – why does this feel like a sequel to a movie that was never made? And Skarsgard never found his footing. And Robbie remains a damsel, even though script writers covered their asses by pretending she was a little more feminist, the reality is that she spends most of the movie tied up. It’s too bad it’s not a better movie, but there’s never been a really good Tarzan movie, so why start now?