Tag: Paul Whitehouse

Ah spooks! A story about ghosts.

This movie is not to be confused with A Ghost Story, which came out last year, which I loved, which was very polarizing, and very indie.

No, this is Ghost Stories! Without the A article and the addition of the letter ´s´ things are quite different now. With this film, this British film, we are promised not one story, but multiple stories!

Maybe it is just two stories, maybe it is a hundred! With plurality, the sky´s the limit.

And of course, if this was called Ghosts Story, then it would be one story about multiple ghosts. Learn your grammar, folks.

This pair means two of them, although together, they may look like a single pear.

Professor Goodman (Andy Nyman) has a strange name, yes, but he is off to help people. How? By exposing liars! Liars and word thieves. You know, those who claim that ghosts are real, that want to deceive the public, or the ones that claim they can speak to dead loves, or even just psychics in general. Hell, he has a show to defraud them too, publicly, and has gotten himself famous.

He always dreamed of being this sort of researcher. Growing up he watched Charles Cameron (Leonard Byrne) on TV, who did similar things but more old school and subtle. However, he mysteriously disappeared at some point for decades.

Needless to say, sometimes the past comes back when you least expect it. And when it does, sometimes you are given three cases to look over and research, in order to really see if the supernatural exists and your exposing of frauds has been for naught. And sometimes your brain just wants to play tricks on you.

Starring Martin Freeman, Paul Warren, Paul Whitehouse, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, and Alex Lawther (who was in one of the best Black Mirror episodes, Shut Up and Dance).

This hole covers its whole face and doesn´t look too wholesome.

I will give one thing to Ghost Stories. First of all, it is well shot, it is framed, it feels very sexy. The three stories are relatively intense, have their own levels of spooks and frights, but there is something missing.

A reason for these stories to feel more super serious than any other story is very much lacking. And they explain that eventually, but without knowing it ahead of time, it was just a gnawing feeling on me each time. Just like the professor, we aren´t sure why any of this matters.

Like I said, eventually we see why it matters, and that reason ends up being extremely lackluster. The ending of this film is shit. It feels like a prank. Like an edgy high school student wrote it without experiencing anything original in their life. I cannot describe enough how shit this ending is.

And honestly, if it could have just tied the stories for a good explanation and not just gone for some quick scares, it might have been worth something. The rating given is given only because of it still looking quite nice, having some nice moments, and honestly, Freeman was a blast in this movie.

Josef Stalin was a dude who a lot of people respected, a lot of people feared, and lot of people hated. But at least he got the trains running on time in Italy, right?

Wait, that was Mussolini? And Mussolini was in Italy?

Stalin was in goddamn Russia? Oh, well, fuck, close enough. Communists are communists, am I right?

Either way, The Death of Stalin is a satirical look at his death, and the power vacuum that existed in the Soviet Union after the fact. A topic you (like me) probably know next to nothing about, and after you see a film like this, will assume you know a lot that is probably not true.

He peed his pants. That is smelly.

In 1953, in the Soviet Union, everything was nice and grand. People are alive, until they are not. People are living their lives normally, until their not. Josef Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) is a generous man who rules with an iron fist, sure, but hey, its a hard job being in the top. He has a big cabinet of faithful advisers, from Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin), and Lavrenti Beria (Simon Russell Beale).

He also has death/torture lists, that are frequently updated. You know, traitors and such. The army runs out, grabs them, imprisons them or kills them just because Stalin heard a whiff of untrustworthy behavior. Not too fun to be caught up in that.

And then? Well, then Stalin just had to go and die. And now, we have a group of men who all want to be leaders, while also want to be sure Stalin is dead before they take over the power vacuum. This cabinet of individuals has to try and work together to make sure their country doesn’t fall apart, and that they don’t backstab each other before the best man actually gets the job.

Also, while dealing with the religious fanatics, the normal people, the army, the special army, the prisons, and lists, and ugh, the family of Stalin.

Also starring Andrea Riseborough, Jason Isaacs, Olga Kurylenko, Paddy Considine, Paul Chahidi, Paul Whitehouse, and Rupert Friend.

If they all stand around the casket, then the only one that can backstab them is Zombie Stalin.

The Death of Stalin is a strange movie to come out, one that is really hard to describe. Because it is weird. It is sort of Monty Python-esque, sort of silly, while still maintaining a very strong and serious vibe. I am laughing out loud in the theater due to how absurd the whole thing feels and how awkward the characters are.

It is quite obvious that there is no way the events are accurate as shown in this movie. It is very wonky and similar to maybe the Three Stooges, with a bit less slapstick. At the same time, it still felt realistic and natural for these men to be freaking out and being awkward, given the situation they are in. They know everyone of them is ruthless. They have been living in a ruthless time. They are used to a period where people would die for saying the wrong thing, and when you want to be on top, you might end up saying the wrong thing.

Overall, this is not the sort of film that everyone would love. A bit bizarre, a bit funny, while also maintaining a lot of deadpanning and dry humor. And somehow, still, piss humor.

This film has definitely intrigued me about this moment in history and it has wanted me to learn more!

Let’s take a time machine back six years ago. The world was different, because not everything was in 3D. Only a few films tried out 3D, thanks to Avatar being the cash cow and visually stunning film that it was. This is when people still thought 3D was actually kind of cool if done right.

Then Alice in Wonderland came out, and it made a shit ton of money. Why did everyone rush to see it? Well, I guess Johnny Depp was a bigger deal six years ago, sure. But because it was released in 3D, so everyone went to see it thinking it would be as pretty as Avatar. It wasn’t.

And say what you will about the plot of Avatar, its story was miles better than the pile of refuse that they gave us with Alice in Wonderland. You would think making it into a bad story would be impossible, given the book. But no, instead they made a sequel to the original Alice in Wonderland, setting this one many years later, with Alice returning to Wonderland with a whole mess of new and awkwardly similar problems. It gave me problems, most of all calling the movie Alice in Wonderland, when it was a sequel to Alice in Wonderland. That is confusing.

But hey, Disney is on a live action kick. So they figured, let’s do a sequel. Alice Through The Looking Glass. This one will probably no be based on the book either, since it is a sequel to the surprise sequel. So who knows what they will fill it with hoping to be edgy. Let’s just say I am going in assuming the worst here, and that is based on a lot of precedent.

Clay? Rust? Red lava? Earthy minerals? Who cares, I am barely a geologist anyways.

The sequel takes place years after the original, Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is now a free girl, roaming the seas the captain of her own sailing vessel like her dad. She is exploring the new world and making trade agreements! It is actually quite fun. Unfortunately, when she gets back she is in a pickle. Hamish (Leo Bill), the man she turned down now runs the company. Her mom (Lindsay Duncan) has traded away the bill of her house for money, and the only way to get it back is for Alice to give up her boat and take a respectable job for a woman.

So, in the chaos, she runs through a mirror, following Absolem the butterfly (Alan Rickman) and returns to Wonderland! But things have changed. The entire gang is still friends, but the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) is now the Sad Hatter. He believes his family, killed by the Jabberwocky a long time ago. It is obvious what Alice must do. If you thought look for his family, you were wrong. No, she clearly should go back in time, save them from the Jabberwocky, and bring them to the present to make him feel better. Yeah. That.

But time is a person (Sacha Baron Cohen). And grabbing the Chronosphere can cause a lot of issues. But she does it anyways, because friendship and sets off on a journey to the past to fuck shit up.

The Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and White Queen (Anne Hathaway) return, Leilah de Meza with and Amelia Crouch playing their past selves. Rhys Ifans plays the Mad Hatter’s dad and Ed Speleers are regular unimportant dude.

Also returning, the voices of Tweedledee / Tweedledum (Matt Lucas), Bayard (Timothy Spall), Thackery (Paul Whitehouse), Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), Mallymkun (Barbara Windsor), McTwisp (Michael Sheen), and introducing Wilkins (Matt Vogel), a robot.

Time is a lot of things, and you will hear every last time pun I do decree!

First of all, Eye in the Sky is Alan Rickman’s real last film. This one is just voice work, and I swear, he maybe had three lines and no close ups. This does not get to count as his final film, I won’t allow it.

As for the actual movie, if you missed it this one deals with TIME TRAVEL. Time Travel is a scary subject matter. It is powerful and can make or break a movie depending on how it is adapted. I am not going to argue one theory of time travel is better than any other, because that doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that a film is consistent with their version of time travel. Alice Through The Looking Glass cares not at all, changing the rules on a whim, and makes an incredible hard to follow film without a satisfying reason for making it overly complicated.

This line might be a slight spoiler, because I just want to explain their time travel. Alice finds out that no matter what she does, she can not change the past, the events still occur. That is the time travel they have set up. Until later on in the film, a character is totally able to change the past. Fuck.

Alice goes back in time to three different locations. Why? Because the oceans of time are chaotic and once she learns information, she tries to go to a different time line to change different things. The plot is moved forward by consistently bad decisions from Alice, whom is supposed to be a strong smart female lead. Not only that, because Alice seems to make the same bad decisions, her actions feel repetitive and the films seems to drag when there are easy solutions everywhere.

The ending is an incredible mess. Wonderland is falling apart because of two separate events that somehow produce the same results. But it doesn’t make sense for them to do the same thing. I will try and explain it out without spoilers.

I hope you passed algebra.

For most of the film, Problem A is happening thanks to Alice and the world is slowly falling apart. Much later in the film, Problem B, a completely different problem occurs and actually sets about the end of the world. Problem A is seemingly forgotten about. However, once Problem A is “solved”, thanks to our protagonist remembering it, it somehow undoes all of the damage of Problem B. The issue with that is there is no justification whatsoever that it should work like that. There are no mentions earlier on that if Problem B happens, it can be fixed by X. On top of that, there was no reason for Problem A to even continue late in the film, except for the fact that Alice becomes incompetent.

Finally, Alice is seen as a strong, independent woman, which is mostly true in the real world scenes where she is chased by pirates, but they reduce her to a bumbling fool in Wonderland. All of her positive traits seemingly vanish just to move the plot forward. On its own, I guess it is okay for a character to be stupid, sure.

The real issue here is that her character does stupid things, but she is still being lauded as a smart and capable heroine the entire film. To me, that seems almost more dangerous than just having a weak lead. What we need in films are actual strong female characters, not weak ones that they tell us are strong with us supposed to them at their word.

This is a bad movie and one I cannot believe was green-light by Disney. The 3D is pointless, the visuals are only great in a few places, the acting is so-so. The plot is a mess, breaks its rules (which breaks story telling rules and shouldn’t be seen as a compliment to the Madness of Wonderland), and most of the events happen thanks to stupidity and not for good plot reasons. The only thing I enjoyed was the excessive time puns and Cohen as Time.

I wanted to see Mortdecai. Really I did, when it came out. But something came up and I wasn’t able to go to the screening.

So I went home and waited. I saw as the pages and pages of reviewers and critics talked about how bad the movie was. What? How can this be? I liked the trailer. I thought it would be amusing. But I still find some of the more quirky characters that Depp plays to be quite endearing.

I was even more excited to find that the movie was rated R. So it wouldn’t be some just zany family movie, “Oh teehee, look at my moustache!” or anything. We might get more creative and raunchy jokes.

So I waited even further. Still with the hope that maybe everyone would be wrong about Mortdecai, in my head. Much like they were wrong about The Lone Ranger.

Rumor has it that Depp literally sexually assaults all of the viewers of this movie.

Charlie Mortdecai (Johnny Depp) is an eccentric rich man. Or at least, he used to be rich. They are on their last legs and just putting up a false front now. He also has decided he wants to grow a mustache. It is a tiny thing. But all of his family in the past had them, and he wants one now! This mustache is more of the main plot than the art aspect of it all.

His wife, Johanna (Gwyneth Paltrow) hates the mustache and more or less refuses to interact with him throughout the film because of it.

A famous painting is stolen from a home by Emil (Jonny Pasvolsky), that is then stolen from another thief, and everyone is up in arms over it. So Inspector Martland (Ewan McGregor) comes to Mortdecai for help, due to his art knowledge. And yeah. You know. A comedy heist-esque movie about finding a painting and other secrets. Mortdecai also has a loyal man servant, Jock (Paul Bettany), who is great a sex and making sure Mortdecai doesn’t die.

And of course there is Jeff Goldbloom as an Art guy with his nymph daughter played by Olivia Munn. And Paul Whitehouse is in this movie, but I was sort of unsure of what his overall role was. Besides an art enthusiast/collector.

Ewan bringing back a pseudo mullet. I can’t say I approve. 😐

Fuckkkkkk. January movie gonna January I guess. Like I said, I thought it looked amusing. I thought it could have been great. I figured it would have earned the R rating, but it felt like a regular PG-13 by the end of it. Shit, outside of Mortdecai’s desire for sex and the sex references to his man servant, it felt like it oculd have been PG.

But that is also because I don’t remember a lot about it. At all. I just watched it and I am sitting wondering why I kept going. It wasn’t funny, it wasn’t sexy, it wasn’t even too original. Art movies in general tend to e pretentious sorts of things, and I believe it was attempting to mock that pretentiousness, but fuck even that failed.

I think I am mostly disappointed in the all-star cast giving me this overall dud. Maybe one recurring joke throughout made me amused, which involved Jock continually getting injured. But that is it.

Mortdecai is 107 minutes long, making it roughly 115 minutes of your time wasted. Added in extra for bathroom breaks and time thinking about actually w atching it.