Tag: Carice Van Houten

Whoa whoa whoa, hold up. This movie Race is about a true story, inspirational sports figure, and it ISN’T made by Disney? They are dropping the ball!

Whoa whoa whoa, a second time. This is about Jesse Owens, famed Olympic runner, and he isn’t being played by Chadwick Boseman? I thought he had the monopoly on super famous Black historical figures now, what with Jackie Robinson, James Brown, and T’Challa, prince of Wakanda.

And hey, that title, Race. It is about a runner. But he was also black. Dare it…might it… be about his skin color as well?

A double entendre! And neither side is sex related! A movie miracle here, folks!

The only film that has made me care about the state of Ohio.

Early life be damned, let’s talk about Jesse Owens (Stephan James) in 193. This man was college bound. He is headed to The Ohio State University, land of the Buckeyes and people too ignorant to cheer on Michigan. He turned a few heads during a high school track meet in Chicago, breaking records left and right. So he was able to get a scholarship to attend. He isn’t a simple boy either. He has Ruth (Shanice Banton), who is working at a beauty salon, and a 3 year old girl he has to support. Sure he is going to college to run on the track team, but he also wants an education and a way to support his family, so he can marry Ruth and live a good long life with her.

Well, Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis) doesn’t have time for all of that. He doesn’t care about skin color, he just wants to win, like he did when he went to Ohio State. Almost went to the Olympics too!

And um. You know. Watch Jesse train, work, and make mistakes. He breaks many records, which the movie goes into, and qualifies for the Olympics! The Olympics that were being held in BERLIN, GERMANY, in 1936 before World War II (although they didn’t know it at the time).

So we also have the side plot of America maybe protesting and not going to the Olympics. Avery Brundage (Jeremy Irons) wants us to go, so he heads to Germany ahead of time to make sure there aren’t big human rights issues. Jeremiah Mahoney (William Hurt) leads the Olympic Committee and wants America to not compete.

Also starring Eli Goree and Shamier Anderson as fellow Black American racers. In Germany is Joseph Goebbels (Barnaby Metschurat), leader of the Olympic games, Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houten). director who wants to film the games, and Luz Long (David Kross), the best European racer.

That’s not him, he is Swedish, not German! But that is Jesse.

Race is 145 minutes long, telling the story of Jesse Owens, the fastest man in the world and winner of multiple Gold Medals. Kind of a lot of time for a guy who didn’t take a long time. It also tells the story of the movie Olympia, which depicted the games and was directed by a woman director. It also tells the story of Avery Brundage, a rich architect, who might have had bad dealings with the Nazis.

Race is crowded and too long. The other side stories are a little bit interesting, but they can get the fuck right out of here. It seems messed up for someone like Owens to finally get a biopic, and have to share it with a scumbag and a German director. Similarly, Owens had to face a lot of racial pressure. The NAACP didn’t want him to go, protesting Germany’s shitty human rights laws and compare them to the USA. So if he went, he could let down his race. If he didn’t go, he could let down his race. It was intense.

But this is also a true story. We know he went. We know he kicked back. The third or fourth time we had to see him threaten to stay home got ridiculous. Repetition only helps build the character so much.

It is a shame too. James acted great in this, and so did Sudeikis. I thought I had seen him as a coach before, but it was just a long commercial playing a Football coach. Check it out. They are the story here and you can tell they both care about the subject matter.

Race is just too bloated to tell the best possible story.

I definitively had Repo Men on the shelf for over a year before finally watching it. Why? Because I thought the plot would be obvious. I thought it would be lame action.

I also knew that the Repo! The Genetic Opera had also existed, even though I hadn’t seen it yet. Just didn’t like two movies having similar dystopian futures, despite their (now knowing) very different plots.

But hey. Lets not judge it before we watch it. That’d be horrible.

But the action does look quite shocking.

Jude Law is a repo man! Not really too scary, but he does you know, go collect organs from people who are behind on their payments by a certain time. He is required to ask them if they want an ambulance, but normally doe when they are knocked out. Not that it matters. If they are losing their heart, an ambulance wont really be able to help. His wife, Carice van Houten, wants him to stop (because its kind of mean) and move to sales. Yes, switch to giving the organs (and bad contracts) versus taking them. Pay is worse, but at least hours are stable.

Either way, on his supposed last extract before he was going to switch, a crazy explosion happened and left him badly hurt. So something happens, can you guess? You can totally guess. He gets a new heart from the company. Yet has the same exact guidelines as a normal person, thanks to Liev Schreiber, his boss. This pisses him off, and thinks it is a death sentence. His partner, Forest Whitaker, tries to get him back on the job and collecting, but Jude can’t will himself to kill others anymore.

Knowing his time is up soon, Jude finds himself in a colony of people hiding out with organs. He meets John Leguizamo, who i a surgeon himself, but only takes away the organs from other people. He also meets Alice Braga, a girl who has been on the run forever, and has dozens of expired organs. Once his time is up, needless to say none of his former workmates want to go after him, but in the end it has to be Forest.

What then occurs is their attempts at both escape from the country and clearing their organs from their record book, so they can escape to a foreign beach and live carefree for the rest of their days.

Not to mention some intense ass-kickery.

Despite the kind of obvious turn of events, I was still thinking it was a pretty decent movie. But the last twenty or so minutes? That shit was amazing. The action was intense, the drama was intense. The ending? I was definitely surprised by it, and made the movie much better. It answered all of my questions, and was not at all what I was expecting.

Well done ending. Pretty sure its worthy enough to be the only reason to watch it.

One of the central plots in The Invention of Lying was that the main guy was a writer/actor whatever, and in their world, all they did was read about the past for their movie. He got assigned the shitty years apparently, and the only event he had to work with really was the Black Plague. As they constantly joked in that movie, you can’t make a good movie about the Black Death!

When I heard that I called BS. Who wouldn’t want a nice movie about the Black Death? Shit was crazy! Disease, dead people, more diseases, populations wiped out. No real war I guess…probably some accusations of black magic. Maybe that is it. But you know?

Looks like SOMETHING is about to happen.

So obviously this movie is about disease. And one village that is getting destroyed by it hears rumors of another village that has not been plagued. Sean Bean, all knightly, wants to go investigate. He gets a group of people, including the priest monk dude Eddie Redmayne.

The journey takes awhile and then eventually they find the village! Lead by a woman, Carice van Houten, who might be a necromancer? What? She has apparently brought someone back to life. Oh shit, they aren’t Christians!

And yeah. The plot is basically that. They try to figure out if the woman really has powers, are trying to find out why the village has had no plague, and you know, not get killed in the process. But that plan also goes poorly. People get locked up, and maybe sacrificed.

The movie had a lot more pretty brutal violence than I was expecting, almost reminded me of Saw levels, just in action movie form not horror. So that torture porn stuff might be relevant.

She’s a witch! Burn her!

And yeah. I think I know what the movie was overall going for. Closer to the end the themes were a bit better to pick up on, and what might have been occurring with the main characters. BUT. It just took way too long to get to that point. By then I could barely find myself interested in the movie. I was actually turned off by the amount of violence in this movie, if you can believe that. So it wasn’t really the type of experience I was hoping for a Black Plague movie. But then again, not sure what kind of experience I’d expect.