Tag: Johnny Flynn

I do love me some double meaning titles in movies. They literally carry me through life. Without them, I would be a lost little shell of a man, who has no friends, no family, no love, and of course, no double meaning titles.

Last year we got CODA, which was brilliant, and already this year we now have The Outfit. The Outfit is a nickname given to the Chicago mafia specifically, and it is pretty well known. And this movie is also going to involve a tailor? A suit maker? Someone who literally designs outfits?

Sign me up. But only if the movie includes actual tailoring and suit crafting knowledge and teaching. I don’t want it to be about someone who looks like they are faking it, or the movie doesn’t know the subject matter. Teach me, or else I riot.

No, get out of here with your guns. I want to learn about tailoring and suit making!

Leonard (Mark Rylance) is an older gentleman, who runs his own suit shop. By appointment only, he will design all of the way a fresh suit for whoever will buy one, and it will be of the highest quality. But he is NOT a tailor. That is just a bitch who can sew. He is a cutter. He is a trained cutter. He demands that title respect too. He also has a receptionist (Zoey Deutch) who dreams of traveling the world some day, and collects snow globes to put in their shop window.

And sometimes, when he is working, with or without customers, men in suits come in to put envelopes in a lock box in the back room. Very suspicious. Leonard ignores them. And apparently at the end of the day, two mobsters (Dylan O’Brien, Johnny Flynn) go to the lockbox to retrieve the envelopes, and go back off into the night.

Looks like Leonard is a safe house for the mob, but he tries to not get involved in their antics. Does he do it for protection? For survival? Is he a former mobster? Who knows!

But once a note gets out that there is a rat in the organization, it turns out his closed shop is going to be almost ground zero for betrayal, backstabbing, and just regular amounts of death.

Also starring Simon Russell Beale, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Alan Mehdizadeh.

Yessss, this is the content I have come here for.

Did I learn how to be a tailor cutter? No, not really. But I did learn a little bit about it, which is more than I have ever assumed I would in my life, so that is a plus. Rylance’s narration reminded me a bit about Michael Caine‘s narration in The Prestige. No, I won’t go into specifics, for potential spoiler reasons, but they seemed to have the same overall goal. Also, Caine’s name in The Prestige was actually Cutter. Is that a coincidence? Yes, probably.

I loved The Outfit for sure. The entire thing takes place inside of the shop, which is wonderful. I love it when movies get Bottle Episode-y.

There were twists and turns in the film, some expected, some not. I certainly wasn’t sure the entirety of who the rat was by the end. I wasn’t sure who would live or die either. It was very slow moving at points, but the sitting and waiting really helped make me feel more uncomfortable, which is a good thing. I don’t want a mystery to feel pointless. You don’t want a mystery to feel pointless.

I think all of the actors involved did a swell job, but extra shoutout to Johnny Flynn. First, he is the actor with the most mobster like name in real life. But I was really impressed with his attitude, and accent, for being the fourth biggest name on the main cast list. I don’t know anything about him, but his character was magnificent.

The Outfit won’t likely do well in the box office, but from this critics mouth, it was a great movie, and one I can imagine watching even more than once.

4 out of 4.

The Dig is the next of these big movies that Netflix plans on releasing weekly. The one I very recently did before this was The White Tiger, and there was also Pieces of a Woman, and damn it Netflix. Where are the shit films?

Well, despite this being an intro, I can technically say this is the shittiest new to Netflix film this year that I have seen, but the film is not inherently shit. One of those strange situations.

I shouldn’t have to wait for The Kissing Booth 3 to get something potentially bad though. Maybe they are hiding the bad movies from me. Yes. That must be it.

Picture: A woman and her hole. 

In 1939, Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan) is wealthy and owns a good chunk of land in Great Britain. And she is a widow. And on her land are a few interesting mounds that she believed, along with her late husband, to maybe hold some great old architecture or burial site. And now that he is gone so early and tragically, she wants to hurry and carry out a dig of the site to find out if there is anything down there.

She wants to hire a guy known by reputation and not by official degrees, Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) to survey and dig her land, and apparently at a higher than normal rate, because he is allegedly a great archaeologist.

And now it becomes a meticulous race to dig. Racing to finish before WWII gets bigger. Racing to finish before the British government decides to take the find for themselves. Racing to finish before they get old and just die, I guess.

Also there are subplots. And starring Johnny Flynn, Lily James, Ben Chaplin, and Ken Stott.

Picture: A dirty old man creeping on a young widow. Surprise! The Dig is a true story, and it is really just a specific time frame bio of Basil Brown, which is most certainly an Archaeologist whom you have never heard about before. Which I guess can be a reason for the movie to exist.

Apparently in the area he was known as being amazing, and they showed that in one scene because he was sought after. But due to his lack of credentials, it took awhile, even for things he helped dig up and discover, to mention his name as part of it.

And well. Sure, okay. It is an okay story. It has fine acting done from the two leads. But this is a film that also seems to need the sub plots purely to pad the length of time of this movie, to give us more characters to care a bit about. But honestly, a non-real love triangle, because of a character hiding their gayness, and someone being sent off to fight in the war, and all of that, have nothing to do with our main two characters. They are just other people on the dig. Are they even real? I forget if the end told me that. It just feels so indifferent to the story.

It is good for side characters to have small arcs and growth as well, and not just be two dimensional. But these stories took away from the main story, which admittingly could not stand on its own legs. It needed more. Or, maybe, it just needed a lot less, with a shorter run time.

2 out of 4.

Okay, so. Listen up. Emma is a book made by Jane Austen. It is likely not one of her most famous books, because it doesn’t feature alliteration in the title and is only one word.

Emma. with a period is a movie version of that book, of which we have already had movie versions, just not in a while.

One of the last times this was done as a movie was, of course, the movie Clueless! Oh you didn’t know it was based on Emma? Most people didn’t. I technically did not. I knew it was based on something but I kept forgetting what book that was. I read that fact several times, and you know what? In one ear and out the other.

But hey, now I saw a movie called Emma. so I can finally remember the Clueless fact.

Bold move to get an Ed Sheeran looking guy for the lead.Emma (Anna Taylor-Joy) is a woman with a lot of time on her hands. Tons. She has no schooling to keep her busy, she has not siblings in her home. She lives in it alone with her older father (Bill Nighy) who doesn’t really want her to leave. He views the marriage of his eldest daughter as a mistake, and their house is empty without her now, so he is fine with Emma just staying around, not looking for a husband.

Emma doesn’t have time for a man right now. She is rich, so she has very few people who could really help her station in life, so she makes her own fun. For example, she really likes to play match maker with people in the village. She really feels like she knows these villagers, poor and rich, and can find those star crossed lovers who would never have met without her help.

Her current plan? To match her friend, Harriet (Mia Goth) with the big eared but sort of cute priest (Josh O’Connor) in town. Her neighbor, a George Knightley (Johnny Flynn) thinks that Harriet should marry a local and honest farmer instead, so they both attempt to lure her in various directions, regardless of her own thoughts on the matter.

As for Emma? She might find love some day. Maybe Frank Churchill (Callum Turner) someone who is actually more wealthy and mysterious, who continuously does not visit their town because he is often “busy.” Yes, she should focus on him and no one else. That is the best bet.

Also starring Myra McFadyen, Rupert Graves, Gemma Whelan, Amber Anderson, Miranda Hart, Tanya Reynolds, Isis Hainsworth, Vanessa M. Owen, and Suzy Bloom.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Drama food. If you don’t think you would like this movie, just go ahead and ask yourself if you like’d Clueless. If you did, you might enjoy watching this movie just to compare it to Clueless to see how Clueless handled this old book. That is fun by itself.

Another pro for this movie is the colors and costumes. It is draped in decadence for the time period. The costumes pop, the outfits are awesome, and it makes me want to go to a Victorian era ball again in my life.

Music was also a strange highlight that I didn’t expect. They use very time appropriate music as the backdrop, much like a modern film might. As a scene transition. And yet it feels so strange, just having it going on in the back like it is a pop song that helps with a scene transition. It fascinated me, and I thought for sure, eventually, they’d show that church choir or whatever belting out these tunes, and they never appeared. It was a weird feeling, but a weird feeling I enjoyed.

The story itself doesn’t feel like it has the biggest amount of structure beneath it. It is obviously not a new story, given its old source, so that is one big reason why it will feel outdated. However, even taking that into context, the love story isn’t the strongest love story and a story that is a bit of a downer. I didn’t believe their love enough. Needed more time to grow it.

Hope they don’t get divorced a year after marriage. Anyways, now I am going to rewatch Clueless.

3 out of 4.