Tag: Nonso Anozie

Live action remakes are of course all the rage nowadays, but Pan is not necessarily just another film in that trend. The Peter Pan story is older than Disney, so anyone can do anything they want with it. In fact, Disney plans on eventually doing their own live action Peter Pan movie within the next decade already, so you might as get used to it.

But Pan on its own can be something different. After all, we had Hook in the early 90’s, a very diverse film, both in its cast and how people took to it. A modern Peter Pan story, with a grown up Peter Pan! How dare they! I personally loved it and thought the film had a lot of heart.

So we have Pan, which has a similar naming scheme to Hook, going the opposite way and making a Peter Pan prequel. Peter when he was just a regular boy who couldn’t fly. People love Origin stories right?!

Especially if they have thousands of costumes and beards and make up.

Peter (Levi Miller), like every good Orphan, is left as a wee little baby on the steps of an orphanage by his mother Mary (Amanda Seyfried). And he never sees from her again. Now he is about…I dunno, 11. World War II is of course happening, so London occassionally gets bombed. Peter’s life is spent defying the nun (Kathy Burke) with his friend Nibs (Lewis MacDougall).

Next thing Peter knows, he is on board a flying pirate ship. The ship goes to Neverland of course! And the ship has been stealing Orphan boys around the world for ages. They are to be free and to live their lives as awesome people, as long as they can work for it. Namely, Captain Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman) wants them to mine for Pixie Dust for some secret reason.

Yadda yadda, Peter meets James Hook (Garrett Hedlund), with both hands, they find out her can fly, and eventually they escape with one Sam Smiegel (Adeel Akhtar) to get back home. However, Peter thinks his mom might be out here, so he wants to stay and look for her. This gets them to meet the natives. There they meet the Chief and Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara) and a great warrior Kwahu (Tae-joo Na) and find out that Pan is supposed to be some Chosen One Jesus figure to lead a revolt against the pirates and free Neverland.

Yay fun! Peter just wants to find his mom though, so…

Also featuring Nonso Anozie as Blackbeard’s muscle and Cara Delevingne as a mermaid, apparently.

At some points this does feel like an Indian Jones clone though, so watch out for snakes.

I just remembered. Almost no one likes origin stories. That is the biggest complaint about modern super hero films. Every new person seems to need an origin story. Even if we have already seen it many times before in film. We get shit like Fantastic Four where over half the film they don’t have any powers.

Technically no one knows about the origins of Peter Pan, but that is because no one cares. Peter Pan before he was a pirate fighting flying bad ass, was what, none of those things? So we get a story about a regular boy? I am not saying that regular boy stories are boring, because there is a shit ton out there, but knowing he eventually becomes someone like Peter Pan kind of ruins it a bit.

Pan is a strange film that doesn’t seem to know what it is. It is all over the place in terms of story. Blackbeard as the main villain seems strange, but not as strange as Hook being Peter’s BFF older friend. Sure, you might be thinking a Peter Pan origin story means we get to see a Captain Cook origin as well. We get to see that crocodile bite his hand off, fear of clocks, all of that. That could be fun! Well we get about jack and shit of that. The movie ends with them taking some boys off to Neverland, all happy. They have a few references, but no, we don’t get any of it. They want to save that for some futuristic Pan 2 that now will never exist.

See, that would have been a good story. To see what happened to Hook to make him a bad guy. What ruined their friendship. But we get nothing from this story and it is a lot more wasted potential.

Speaking of none of that, there was a lot of hullabaloo about the song choices in Pan. For some reason, large crowds in Neverland (set in World War II) are singing Smell’s Like Teen Spirit and Blitzkrieg Bop. I didn’t mind how they sounded months ago, but the problem is they have NO CONTEXT at all in the movie. They don’t fit the events around them, the lyrics don’t match anything, they make absolutely no sense. They are terribly added to the film, so they should definitely be mocked endlessly.

Pan. Wasted potential. All spectacle. Not even Jackman was good in this one. I feel a bit bad for Mara. At least has Carol.

Alright, fine. Disney is going full money grab. Disney Princess line is a success. Frozen has made multiple billions from sales and merchandise. They have bought Marvel and Star Wars. They want all the money on the planet, that is the only way to describe them right now.

Because if they keep making live action movies of their animated classics, they get to print even more stacks of cash out, keep up any copyrights they have (totally researched argument, this could be a false statement), and re design the character as see fit. After all, most of the early princesses are pretty passive people and terrible role models for women. They can make all of these women stronger independent ladies. They can make the movies more exciting or just tell a better story.

The first attempt was Maleficent, which I thought was terrible. The changes they made (all of it) were terrible, and instead of getting a bamf villain, we got a misunderstood fairy who spent a third of the movie just watching a girl grow up. We are getting Beauty and the Beast which I already have issues with casting wise, but I will tease and not talk about it until that review comes out in 2016 or whenever.

So now we have Cinderella, which for the most part, looks to be the exact same story. Maybe some more details, but exactly the same story with all of the same songs. Wait, what, no songs?

We are just getting fancy dancing? WHO WILL SERENADE ME?

Ah little Ella (Lily James). Living on her slightly big house with servants and shit. A loving family. Her dad (Ben Chaplin) is a merchant w ho goes on trips a lot, leaving her with just her mother. Did I say mother? Just kidding. She died. She told her to always be good and nice to people, because that was her gift.

Eventually the dad was feeling a bit lonely and he also wanted to be nice. So he heard about a lady who needed help, who was also now a Widow with two daughters. He wanted to marry her and move them in so that Ella would have friends and a family again.

Hah. Just kidding. New mother is a bitch (Cate Blanchett). New sisters are whiny bitches (Sophie McShera, Holliday Grainger). And of course her dad kicks the bucket too while he is out on a trip. Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

So they are poor now. They have to let go all their workers leaving just poor old Ella to make the food, clean the dishes, and help her “family” have some sort of luxury. She is too gosh darned nice.

So when the local Prince (Richard Madden) is going to have a ball to find a wife before the King (Derek Jacobi) croaks. Of course Ella can’t go because of bitches. Then we have a fairy godmother (Helena Bonham Carter), transformations, glass slippers, running, big search, and maybe some more shenanigans you don’t even know about.

Also with Stellan Skarsgård as a Duke and Nonso Anozie as a captain! Wait, no, his name is officially Captain it looks like.

Yep, none of them are blonde, therefore they are all evil.

It turns out, Cinderella doesn’t have a lot going on with its plot. I mean, in its basic form, girl is living with step family, doesn’t get to have fun. Some magic happens, she gets to have fun, and a Prince saves her and they live happily ever after. Not a whole lot going on for Ella. She just cleans a lot and is really nice. Fuck, so many times watching the movie, I was just thinking that she should just lock her fucking house doors when they go out to town and be done with it all.

But her niceness meant she just had to get shit on for years or months or however long the time line happened? Man. What a beta.

Okay, boring character aside. Boring plot aside. They don’t really change anything at all from a story sixty five years ago. They have a bit more back story and some more late game scheming, but literally nothing new and so it isn’t a surprise.

The only people who seem to have any amount of personality are the bad guys!

But despite all of it, is is indeed a pretty movie. Visually stunning, outside of one terrible CGI scene involving the pumpkin to carriage (it was gross and the humans looked fake during it), it was just an incredibly beautiful film. They really did great work in the costume and make up department, so you can expect an Oscar nomination there. Overall though, just too much filler and time wasting, especially at the ball.

Also, I feel uncomfortable with Skarsgård having a biggish role in a PG movie after seeing Nymphomaniac.

Hey look, a movie based on a book! You know. Like most movies.

But this isn’t any book. This is Ender’s Game. A very famous sci-fi novel from the 1980s, that is required reading in some/many schools now! So, that can mean a few things. It can mean angry mobs of book fans when the movie of Ender’s Game turns out unfaithful, or it can just mean a buttload of money.

That’s right. Buttload. Not even getting into the personal thoughts and opinions of the author, Orson Scott Card, but there are 20 separate books/collections/short stories that he has published in this story. Ender’s Game was the first one to get published, but it is now like, the middle book. Jeez.

Apparently his games just involve very large octahedra dice.

In the future, shit is all bad. Big alien force came and killed a lot of people, but a hero was able to think on the fly and saved the day for everyone. Hooray!

Well now, almost fifty years later, the alien forces are building again and the threat of a new attack is high. They have begun to train children to become their new generals and commanders. Due to growing up with realistic war video games, they are not as afflicted by things like morals or death or killing. Heck yeah!

Our hero is Ender Wiggan (Asa Butterfield), third born from his family, and taking a stab at joining the academy. Well, he is good. He just has to march through rank after rank, school after school, to be deemed good enough to eventually, finally, maybe, go against an actual alien fleet. But until then, it is really just a series of…games.

Harrison Ford is a commander, Viola Davis some sort of…officer. Abigail Breslin is Ender’s sister, Nonso Anozie a sergeant, and a bunch of other kids are played by Aramis Knight, Suraj Partha, Moises Arias, and Hailee Steinfeld. Hailee, who of course starred in True Grit and was called a supporting actress back then! Whoa.

Yes of course Ben Kingsley is in this movie. Just in the last third.

I decided to sleep on the analysis part of the review, and not write it all in one sitting like usual. After watching the movie, I still had so many questions. Ones I would bring up here, but I can’t spoil them because I am not a dickface.

I am really surprised this movie was under two hours, because it felt a lot longer. Here is why. Most of the movie is Ender training at consecutive harder and harder levels. He has to go through a fleet academy thing, he has a break down, then battle school, then battle school at the next tier, he has a break down, then battle school leading his own group of “soldiers”, then he has another break down, then he has to go to commander school, then another breakdown, then his final test.

Just. So many god damn tiers. It felt long because I knew that even though the beginning felt super rushed, the ending confrontation with the evil bug aliens would also have to be potentially rushed. So it felt like a lot of waiting to me.

Outside of that annoyance, and certain inconsistencies near the end that really had me confused, I did enjoy many parts of this movie. It dealt with emotions and morals that are very important and need to be discussed, but it didn’t delve on them as much as I would have liked. Aka, it was just quick, like a lot of the movie. Nothing really felt dealt with, and I don’t want to wait for another movie for things to be dealt with. Probably won’t happen. It didn’t make a ton of money, and Thor 2 is next week. Sooo, yeah. Probably going to be considered a flop, unfortunately, because acting was good.

I am sure that if I read the book a lot more would make sense. Presumably a lot was left out, and I hate it if I have to read a book to fully understand what a movie is trying to convey.

Dubbed “one of the first great movies of 2012” by one of my friends, it took me quite awhile to watch The Grey. Not even sure why. I generally like Liam Neeson. Everyone loves Taken. I hated Unknown. I feel like I’d never give a movie of his a 2 out of 4, always in the extremes. Extremes are scary.

They are like a box of chocolates, and what not.

This journey aged him. Or that is just snow.

John Ottway (Liam Neeson) is a hunter, working for an oil drilling team. His job is to kill the wolves who get near the team. He is pretty good at it, kickass gun and all that. Well after they leave in the plane, their job done, fucking snow storm happens and they crash into the ground. Yep, that sucks. Lot of people die from the initial crash, leaving about 7-8 guys still alive and wondering what to do.

Initially the plan is to stay with the plane crash, the most likely place to be found for a rescue. But with all the bodies around, the wolves are attracted to the area, and they are way too out in the open to defend themselves properly (From the elements / wolves) and have no food source. So Ottway suggests they go to the woods, where they can better defend, prepare weapons and begin to look for civilization. One asshole doesn’t like the thought of Ottway as leader, Diaz (Frank Grillo) but they all reluctantly decide to do it, and bring the wallets of the dead with them.

The rest of the survivors, Dermot Mulroney, Dallas Roberts, Nonso Anozie, and Joe Anderson, also attempt to survive the elements, from sudden blizzards, jumping large heights, and just general wolf pack attacks testing their survival.

But when they are tested at every moment for survival, the true question is if anyone can make it out alive from the wilderness.

Sometimes you gotta tape broken bottles to your fist and just go to town.

Hey look a polarizing movie! Hooray!

Generally, most people like 98% of the movie. But hate the last scene. I can see why. Spoilers? It is one of those sudden go to black scenes. Just ends the movie, potentially before all the plot is “finished”. So if you hate those, then definitely stay away.

They did have a scene after the credits to help answer it, but still leaves it up for some interpretation. But still, the bleakness remains.

What we have in this movie is a group of men, all with flaws and bad back stories, yet all become potentially likable, even dick characters, as they bond together to fight for survival. Which is all this movie is about, by the way. People just trying to survive. Maybe they all do! But you know people are going to die. Could have easily went a more horror route with the wolves, but kept it to drama/action, making it more enjoyable for me.

Still some fear though. Those wolves be scary, yo.