Goose

Enemy (2013) A man discovers his doppelganger in a movie he watches one night. He becomes obsessed and decides to track him down, with unexpected consequences. This was a challenging, baffling, yet incredibly well made and interesting picture. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Adam/Anthony, giving a very different yet equally strong performance as both characters. It's a slow moving story, and there are metaphors galore that I could recognise, but went completely over my head. Despite this, I found it gripping almost from the start to the very bizarre end. The music built up the tension brilliantly and really kept things on edge - even the simplest words or actions. The meeting in the hotel room was fraught and the finale, switching between the scenes, was very well done. The film looked amazing as well, with dark rooms, washed-out daylight and some wonderful cityscapes. Strong supporting cast from Melanie Laurent and Sarah Gadon too. While it is quite different to the other Denis Villeneuve movies I've seen, you could still see his style in there. I can't imagine this is for everyone, and I'm not sure that I enjoyed it, but it was impressive film making, an interesting plot and a truly odd finale. A fascinating, all but one of a kind film.

The song was fine, but the performance wasn't great - and wasn't helped by two dancers stroking the Judge's head while he accompanied the band on the piano. I almost want to do an 80 From the 80s style article on the movie!

Nothing But Trouble (1991) A financial publisher, a lawyer and two Brazilian millionaires take a trip through the wrong town and get busted for running a stop sign. They're put on trial, presided by the monstrous Judge Alvin and look to be lucky to escape with their lives. I remember seeing this advertised on Cinemattractions back in the day. I know it flopped at the time and it has all but been forgotten. Then last night I noticed it was new on Netflix so I thought I'd give it a go this evening. How bad could it be? Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Demi Moore and John Candy. This may be one of the most unfunny, horrific and downright awful movies in the history of cinema. Chase and Demi are a seriously mismatched pair who get done for speeding. They're in the car with the great Taylor Negron and Bertila Damas. Chase is initially Fletch, with a few good lines. Moore is pretty bad all the way through and gets no better. Both actors seem shocked and embarrassed that they're in this movie - and perhaps baffled as to how bad it is. John Candy is seriously wasted in not one but two parts - as a cop and as the judge's granddaughter. He's largely absent for the last third of the movie, appearing as the mute Eldona. Then we come to a heavily made-up and truly gross-out Dan Aykroyd, who also wrote and directed this disaster, in a story written by his brother. The character of Judge Alvin is utterly repugnant, offensive and a monstrous creation. And not in any kind of good way. There are no redeeming features whatsoever for this character. When you think he can't get any worse, he removes his nose to reveal a flesh wound or eats a disgusting looking hot dog covered in sauce, that's so sickening I thought I was going to vomit. The whole tone of the movie is just as bad. It goes from snappy one-liners to gross out to what can only be described as a PG-13 Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Seriously, the dinner sequence would rival TCM or House of a 1,000 Corpses in its bizarre outlandishness. It gets worse and worse. People are randomly minced, Chase and Moore discover the Judge's brand of justice has been killing for decades. The house is full of traps, skeletons and bizarre contraptions. And about the time you're ready to give in, they introduce a pair of giant man-babies that look like big versions of the melted Emil from Robocop. There is no plot apart from the leads are going to Atlantic City for a meeting about some property. Any semblance of backstory is gone within minutes. Moore's character makes no sense and this might rate as her worst ever performance. The rest of the picture is them trying to escape from the Judge's clutches. The end. I think I laughed once, at one of Chase's lines near the start. I sat stony-faced for the rest of the picture, becoming more incredulous at what was on the screen as the running time wore on. For a 90 minute movie, it dragged on and on - the first 20 minutes alone felt like an hour. I was really hoping it'd get better but it didn't, it got worse and worse, more embarrassing and ridiculous, right up to its stupid finale. The only saving grace was the set design, which was a cross between The Munsters and something Del Toro would come up with. Rooms full of doll's heads, bats, contraptions and bones. There were no other positive or redeeming features. A musical interlude with a hip hop band (featuring a young Tupac Shakur) was terrible and woefully out of place. I'm baffled how this made it past the story stage, let alone a script, greenlight and talented cast. Apparently it cost $40M to produce, which I hope helped everyone sleep at night. I have no idea what anyone was thinking. A shockingly bad movie, and an absolute criminal waste of so much talent.

There's been some fantastic acting this season, but I really feel that Delores has been the weakest link in it all. Her path has seemed very one sided and I think that's robbed her of a lot of what made her so good in season 1.

Yarden (2016) a.k.a The Yard A failed poet and critic loses his job when he reviews his own book. Without a source of income, he ends up taking a job at a harbour car yard in order to support himself and his son. A Swedish movie which avoids every single Swedish stereotype or pre-conceived notion of what Sweden is like. There's little reason this couldn't have been set in the former Eastern block or similar. This is an odd movie that doesn't really have a great deal to it. The lead is initially likeable enough and puts up with a fair bit with little to no reaction. He loses his job as a critic, a life we see almost nothing of. He's a scuba diver in his spare time and no one wants to buy his poetry. He gets a job at a car yard, moving and cleaning new cars around. He saves a guy's job and you think they'll become friends, but little more happens. I'm not sure if it's a portrait of a life of drudgery, a look at the way immigrants are treated in Sweden or a metaphor for something else. There's not a great deal of dialogue and we get lots of shots of the lead travelling to work, at work, and going home to his quite thankless son. Life grinds him down slowly, but he tends to not be all that bothered. There's a few interesting shots but there's very little to it all. By the end, his short journey is complete and the film simply finishes. A curious picture that plays more like a Sunday night drama.

Well...**MAJOR SPOILERS**

So shareholder meeting today? What happens if Levy etc don’t show? i mean, he’s probably busy packing and shipping all those Vega devices.

Burn After Reading (2008) An analyst loses his job and sets about writing his memoir, which then falls into the hands of a couple of gym workers, who think it's classified data. Elsewhere, the analyst's wife is having an affair with a man who is being followed. Blackmail, secrets, plastic surgery and more. I didn't quite get on with this to begin with, it seemed to jump around a fair bit and I wasn't sure if it was going for serious or comedy. Then things settled down, probably around the time Brad Pitt and Francis McDormand turned up. The plot was nicely woven together by the Coens, masters at this kind of thing and the cast were all strong. Even the smaller, incidental parts (JK Simmons, David Rasche) were very good. Tilda Swinton was suitably mean while George Clooney was charming but fairly clueless. I think the highlights were Pitt and McDormand, both well out of their depths but trying so hard. They both had an innocence about them that I liked. A mention for Richard Jenkins too, as McDormand's love sick boss. A great ensemble cast with a pretty decent and fun plot. As mentioned, the only real criticism was that it seemed to take some time to find its feet and settle into a tone. Once that was done, it was away. Good too that it didn't descend into slapstick or farce, which in other hands, it most likely would have. I was a bit shocked by the violence in one scene mostly because it came out of nowhere. Good cast, all working well together, with solid writing and directing. Enjoyed this one a lot.

It's not a good film, but still scares the living daylights out of me - Event Horizon.

Anon (2018) In the near future, privacy is obsolete. Thanks to a device called The Mind's Eye, people are under constant supervision, with the ability to record their own memories and see those of other's. When a series of murders occur, the evidence is 'erased'. Detective Sal Freiland is tasked with finding a killer who does not exist. I really liked the first hour of this. It played like a clean, more modern version of Strange Days, mixed with Minority Report and the game Watchdogs. The way the Mind's eye was implemented, with screens of overlayed data worked very well. It wasn't (initially) too outrageous; while obviously future tech, it didn't seem that different from the early experiments with augmented reality. Clive Owen plays the detective tasked with finding the hacker/killer who doesn't want to be found. Amanda Seyfried plays 'The Girl', a hacker with the ability to erase other people's saved video memories, seemingly allowing her to exist and erase her appearance from other people's lives. The technology was integrated very well and added lots of potentially interesting ideas and questions about privacy. The idea of an anonymous killer who could remove themselves from the crime scene also made the investigation a little different to the normal police procedural thing. Owen is good in the role, while Seyfried is fine, but seems...out of place? Not sure. I was quite surprised at the amount of sex in the picture, and the violence is mainly short and sharp. It's highly stylised yet quite low budget, with only three or four main locations. Yet it looks like it cost a lot more. The amount of detail in the augmentation was impressive. Plus points too for not having ridiculous hacking sequences. But then as it enters the third act, it's like the film makers lost their nerve. They start introducing hallucinations and for a while the picture gets a bit daft. Things pick up again in the last 15 minutes but then the film stumbles with its wrap up and need to explain things (while being quite obtuse). I wasn't surprised to see that Andrew Nicholl had written and directed it. I enjoyed it a lot for the most part, had some very clever ideas and visuals, but just fell short. An interesting thriller for certain. Would also make for a good TV show pilot.

Live Wire (1992) Danny O'Neil is an FBI bomb specialist, but when a senator literally explodes, he's baffled by the cause of the crime. When another senator is killed, and a third targeted, it's a race against time to stop more deaths. This wasn't a great movie, but it was quite enjoyable tat. Pierce Brosnan plays O'Neil, a grizzled, angry and annoyed bomb expert, who is still mourning the death of his young daughter, while coming to terms with the fact that his wife is having an affair - and the whole town knows about it. He's essentially a slightly classier Bruce Willis from The Last Boy Scout. Ben Cross plays the killer, and comes with a group of low-rent henchmen. The cast is rounded out by Ron Livingstone (doing his best to look like Andy Garcia) and Lisa Eilbacher as O'Neil's estranged wife. The plot isn't up to much but Cross has a lot of fun threatening the senators as well as the people who work for him. There seems to be a much bigger terror plot that gets jettisoned about 2/3 of the way through, but no one really notices. This is pure 90s entertainment, with a loud guitar string soundtrack, big suits, saxophone sex scene and a finale in which Brosnan concocts all manner of bombs from your standard household materials. There's even a sidekick who's got a bomb analysing robot! The plot veers from one thing to another, spending a decent amount of time tracking Brosnan's grief and his issues with his wife, before swinging back to someone else exploding. His accent is all over the place but he seems to be enjoying playing a bit of a bastard. Livingstone does his best slimy impression, and Ben Cross has a couple of good one liners, becoming almost comic foil by the start of the third act. It's trashy entertainment, a time waster that doesn't take itself too seriously, while trying its best to be serious.

True Crimes (2016) a.k.a Dark Crimes A Polish police officer re-investigates a brutal murder when he discovers striking similarities to the crime in a new novel. Jim Carrey plays Tadek, a troubled officer who's resigned to working his days out without trouble after an event only alluded to. It's an interesting performance, completely straight and committed. It's a shame the effort Carrey put in wasn't reflected in the overall picture. Charlotte Gainsborough plays the fractured Kasia, a stark performance that again, deserved a much better story. The film gets off to a fairly shocking start, and while it doesn't wallow in nastiness, there's an air of grime over everything. Everyone is flawed, broken, with secrets of their own. There's a very good sense of time and place, likely late 1980s, but the picture does well not to make this front and centre. Apart from the technology (mini cassette players, video tapes) things are kept fairly timeless. But there isn't a great deal to it all. You feel like you're on the edges of the story, with things mentioned or hinted at, that we're never really privy to. The verbal sparring between Carrey and suspect Kozlow (played with relish by Marton Csokas) is nicely done but again, not much of anything. I felt like I'd missed something when in actual fact, not a great deal was explained. The wrap up, while not unexpected, was disappointing and didn't really make me feel anything for any of the characters involved. Gainsborough seems to be in the picture just to get manhandled, and there's a couple of nasty scenes with her character. There's a subplot that spills over into the main one, and there's constant hints that Tadek should walk away before something happen to him. Some strong performances lost in a murky plot. Good sense of time and place, and Poland makes for a good change from Chicago or New York. Sadly, the story doesn't support all the effort put in.

Shimmer Lake (2017) A robbery gone bad and its subsequent investigation is told in reverse. Starting Friday, the story moves back through the week, to the fateful event on Tuesday night. This was a well made semi-serious thriller, with an interesting, if not quite original, concept at its heart. Shimmer Lake tells the story of a bank robbery, starting at the end of the story, we see how things got to the state they're in. Nothing is quite as it seems and while it is possible to figure out what's really going on, it still made for an interesting ride. There are lots of little details and incidental jokes, that initially make no sense, but as the story unfolds we see why someone was angry for simply being asked to take a back seat in a car, or who really shot that person and for what reason. The picture keeps on adding the layers, and you know something isn't quite right, someone is surely playing someone else. Benjamin Walker takes the lead, as the local sheriff. He's supported by Rainn Wilson as his brother and John Michael Higgins as the local judge and owner of the robbed bank. There's also small roles for Rob Corddry and Ron Livingstone as a couple of FBI agents brought in to help with the investigation, but seemingly quite happy to take the back seat. Everyone plays their part well and even the small incidental roles have something to them. The film plays out in four chapters, each focusing on the day's events and the aftermath of the robbery, with each chapter having some crossover or explanation for something that happens in the next or previous. The concept works well and does its best not to get too complicated. Most will figure out the ending (or beginning) before it is all revealed, but it's not a bad journey anyway. A decent mystery, with a streak of black humour running through it.

Motherfucking Leon S Kennedy!

Mind blown. Really well done episode. I hope the character continues to be on the show.