Tag: Tuva Novotny

Fuck.

I missed the Annihilation pre-screening, and I felt bad, because I want to support independent science fiction films. Then I found out about all the drama with it and Netflix. Netflix had streaming rights for every country except for the USA and China. You see, Paramount wanted to sort of dump it because they didn’t think it would be successful. So you know, they didn’t put it in any theaters and couldn’t be successful.

The deal with Netflix would be that it had to wait 17 days after being in theater in those two countries before it could be on the program.

Fine, I would just watch it before then and review that bad boy up. And I did!

I just forgot about the review thing. And it isn’t that I forgot to review it. I knowingly just kept pushing it back and back and back, for reasons I will explain at the end. Needless to say, here is a review, two months after I planned to release it.

Blame it on the patriarchy.

For a few years, a shimmering glowing force has appeared in a remote part of the world. It is hard to fathom just what is going on in that area, but it definitely is growing over time. In fact, it has been there for three years, and everyone basically has no fucking clue what is going on. Because no one has ever returned.

Well, one guy did. Kane (Oscar Isaac). He is a special forces member of the Army. He is pretty messed up. He has returned home to his wife, Lena (Natalie Portman), who the story is actually about. You see Lena is also a soldier, or at least she used to be. She is now mostly a professor of cellular biology. Smart and strong.

After some plot reasons, she is brought to one of their bases around this field area, where she meets others who are planning to go in. For whatever reason, communication always shuts off, and they don’t really understand what is going on inside this aura.

But Lena ends up joining a team of all women to go in and hopefully, this time, report back with what is going on. And this vague synopsis is both meant to keep it spoiler free, and also try to recall everything that happened.

Also starring Benedict Wong, Gina Rodriguez, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sonoya Mizuno, Tessa Thompson, and Tuva Novotny.

She is thinking of getting into animal dentistry as well.

Annihilation, by any standard, is not a dumb movie. Which is one way of calling it a smart movie, but I am not fully committed to that line. It is above average, and after watching it I did have to speculate about it for awhile. So it is a thinker film.

A thinker film with scares, sci-fi weirdness, and pretty darn good acting. It also has a few flashbacks, questions about humanity, questions about evolution, and this one fucking ape scene that is like, omg.

Either way, I started thinking too much about the thinking movie, so I pushed back my planned review. Then I stopped thinking about it, and figured I couldn’t write it at that point because I forgot some information, and that is why we are two months late at this point.

I believe my conclusion to this movie is that I liked it, and disliked it. The ending was interesting, but not at all what I craved. This is a film that really begs for multiple watches, and the theater experience will really add with the sounds this film gives.

This is not mindless entertainment. This is entertainment that can drive your mind to uselessness and eventually forgetfulness. What a strange review ending this has become.

What is the deal with this surge of tennis movies? This year we have Borg vs McEnroe, at some point there is that documentary Love Means Zero, and last year had the Battle of the Sexes.

But it isn’t just a two year trend. Don’t you remember two years ago, that HBO miniature film? It was called 7 Days in Hell, and that one was a parody piece and about fictional rivals. Somehow that 45 minute feature led executives to put out two real tennis match movies relatively close together. Are people just running around buying out the rights to intense matches?

Then before this gets to the point of no return, then can we get someone to quickly film the Isner-Mahut match from a bit ago? That would be a marathon film if any. And don’t fill it with flashbacks. Start with the match. Then give us the night time breaks to get some other characters/story/anxiety in there.

The real reason for the film is to create this hair.

Set in 1980, history in Wimbledon was about to be made. Björn Borg (Sverrir Gudnason) was the sexiest man alive, if sexiest man alive meant extremely skilled at Tennis. How can Borg, only 24, be the greatest Tennis player? Well, when he was 23, 22, 21, and 20, he won Wimbledon. That is four times in a row. And no one had ever won it five times in a row. Could he be that first person? He is young, he is strong, he is accurate. And hey, he keeps his emotions in check. He is so goddamn stoic, before, after, and during matches, he is like a robot. They went on to name the Borg hive race in Star Trek after him due to that personality.

So what is stopping him? Well, a younger up and coming athlete, John McEnroe (Shia LaBeouf), who, like all great rivalries, was basically the exact opposite. He was 22 at the time, American, and like America, he was rash, angry, and people didn’t like him across the seas. He was a firecracker, he yelled at the judges, he unnerved his opponents and was a thorn in the professional tennis world.

And they would meet at Wimbledon. If Borg wins, he makes history. If McEnroe wins, it dawns a new era of primadonna shit head tennis players.

What world do we want to live in!?

Also starring Stellan Skarsgård, Tuva Novotny, and Scott Arthur.

Really they are both rock stars if you think about it.

I have a general fondness for Tennis movies. I really can’t imagine one I really disliked. To be fair, outside of the ones I tagged up there, the only ones I remember right now at Wimbledon itself and…that’s it. And I liked Wimbledon.

It is a sport that definitely allows itself to be filmed in a way to really show the struggle between two athletic individuals. It doesn’t focus on nameless team players that are just background bodies, or shenanigans. Just playing some tennis balls.

Both LaBeouf and Gudnason give very strong performances as people with their own issues to deal with. The use of flashbacks really worked in this movie. We got a lot of flash backs for Borg in particular, to see how he developed into that type of player and why (hint, some bad stuff happened). And similarly, what McEnroe had to deal with, even as one of the top players of the world, how he never seemed to get his respect.

I kept the truth of the ending a secret from myself, which paid off big time. Real stories are cool, and they are better if you don’t know the final outcome.

Definitely a solid dramatic tennis movie. I’m talking acrylic court solid here.