Tag Archives: Carla Gugino

Gunpowder Milkshake

Spoiler alert: I’m pretty sure the milkshake’s actually just vanilla.

Public safety notice: Don’t eat gunpowder. It’s not delicious and it also might set your toots on fire.

Friendly piece of advice: Chocolate beats vanilla. Peanut-butter-brownie’s even better. Salted-caramel-pretzel is the best.

Movie premise: Sam (Karen Gillan) is abandoned as a child by her assassin mom after a bloody diner gun-battle. Sam grows up to be a hitman herself, working for The Firm, led by a greasy guy named Nathan (Paul Giamatti). Sam’s last hit has gotten her into some hot oil: despite merely doing her job, she happens to have killed the son of a very important, and very vindictive man, who has sworn revenge. Even The Firm is upset with her, sending her on a mea culpa mission to recover stolen money, which she learned belatedly (ie after shooting the guy) is intended for ransom to save the dude’s young daughter. Sam takes it upon herself to rush the guy to the hitman hospital, and herself to the rendez vous point to try to save the kid, but at every turn Sam’s only making more enemies, and it’s increasingly unlikely she’ll get out of this thing alive.

My verdict: Derivative. The best parts of the movie are copied directly from other movies. Parts not directly plagiarized flag a bit. Director Navot Papushado is not a needle drop savant; I’ve seen some directors brilliantly and subversively pair an unexpected song with an action sequence, but Papushado is never going to be one of them. The action sequences are actually pretty fun (especially when “librarians” Carla Gugino, Michelle Yeoh, and Angela Bassett get in on the action), but the terrible music trips them up and tempers our enjoyment. Not really worth the watch unless you’re desperate for some action – or unless you’re trying to convince a producer that a librarian spinoff would be a much more intriguing idea.

The Space Between Us

8 Replies

An astronaut behaved irresponsibly and went on the first mission to Mars pregnant. Never mind that they won’t even do surgery on me without double checking that I’m fetus-free, somehow they let this woman go into space without peeing on a stick and they blame HER. Even when she dies in childbirth. It’s such a shameful scandal that they decide to keep her pregnancy and the resulting baby a secret from everyone watching on Earth…which means they raise her kid on Mars and no one outside a select few astronauts even knows he exists.

The kid, Gardner (Asa Butterfield), now in his teens, has lived entirely on Mars. He’s only MV5BZjhjMjFjNzctOGE0OC00NmM1LWEzOWQtOTczOTEzNmNmNWVmL2ltYWdlL2ltYWdlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjk0NDk2ODc@._V1_.jpg met about a dozen other people, all astronauts colonizing Mars, including Kendra (Carla Gugino), the woman who is quasi-raising him. He’s smart, as someone raised by a team of scientists would tend to be, and he finds a way to have secretive chats with Earth-girl Tulsa (Britt Robertson). She doesn’t know who he really is, and wouldn’t believe him anyway. But when he shows up at her school (after a months-long journey of course) she is still keen to go on a father-finding adventure with him, while he marvels, mouth agape, at all the wonderful Earthy things he’s only read about in books. Kendra and program director Nathanial (Gary Oldman) chase after him, knowing his organs cannot withstand Earth’s atmosphere.

You might think that the teen romance genre and the sci-fi genre are not natural bedmates, and that’s a fair worry, but it’s not what troubles the movie. The movie failed way before that. There’s actually not much space between the leads, who spend more of the movie sharing a truck cab than on two separate planets. But what we really need to be concerned about is the excruciating nonsense between them. The uncomfortable schmaltz between them. The insane leaps of logic between them. The unforgivable cliches between them.

The movie just doesn’t know what it wants to be. It’s not even charming as a fish-out-of-water story because there’s little time between them to stop and smell the roses. This movie is a time-waster at best – not a memorable one, and not an entertaining one. If it was titled The Waste of Space Between Us, at least you’d know what you were in for.

San Andreas – not the Rock’s fault!

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I just liked the title, it’s not a knock on this movie. San Andreas was actually surprisingly enjoyable. I am biased because as you may know I like when things blow up. Well, the sheer amount of destruction on screen here probably tops 2012 (the movie not the year). Which of course was centred around the Mayan apocalypse. This is just two little states getting smashed, but my god, so much smash!

I go into these movies expecting cliches and this movie has all of them. Including one I could have done without, the scuzzy new boyfriend of the ex of the male lead. And he is super scuzzy, Mr. Fantastic he is not. I felt like he was included just so we could get behind some of the disaster, like maybe if he dies it will be easier to forget the thousands more that are swept away with him. You be the judge I guess. For me, I always just assume everyone else died at the end of these movies, even though they tell us in cliched news footage that most were okay. In San Andreas, it did not seem like anyone except the Rock and his family were walking away at the end. The other CG rag dolls just added to the triumph.

I liked it. Every ludicrous minute. Critics drive me nuts when they give a movie like this a one star review. You know what? This is not Oscar material. We came here to see some shit get torn up. And San Andreas delivers to a fault!!!!

I give it a score of 31,250 atom bombs out of 40,000.