Photo caption: Michael Fassbender in THE KILLER. Courtesy of Netflix.
In The Killer, a professional hit man (Michael Fassbinder) goes about a revenge quest silently, but we, the audience, hear his constant interior thinking. Directed by David Fincher, the thriller aspects are superbly executed, but the novelty here is the protagonist’s nonstop patter, some reminding him of the basics of his craft and some wittily snarky observations of others.
The one brilliant note is that the hit man is constantly using false identities to transverse the globe, and he has chosen the names of iconic tv characters and the actors who play them. Very funny (and no spoilers from me).
Still, this is an ultimately empty film, and, although I enjoyed it, it’s very, very minor Fincher (Zodiac, Se7en, The Social Network, Gone Girl, Mindhunters).
Fassbinder is very good, as is Tilda Swinton, who elevates her turn in this genre film.
Prometheus is a striking and well-acted sci fi adventure with a horror film tinge. What you want in a sci fi movie is cool alien worlds and cool alien creatures – and, for that, it’s hard to top director Ridley Scott, who made the classic sci fi thrillers Blade Runner and Alien (as well as Gladiator, Thelma & Louise and Black Hawk Down).
In Prometheus, there is a space mission to find out if a species of aliens created us and returned to their world in another solar system. The mission successfully finds the answer, finds the aliens and finds some terrifyingly lethal space monsters.
Don’t think too much about the premise. The movie is a little ponderous when it drills down to the existential questions here. We’re far better off enjoying the cool visuals and just rooting for the good guys to escape the space monsters. And the space monsters are damn scary. The final sequence, however, makes the inevitable sequel all too obvious.
If you’re looking for a girl that can take a licking and keep on ticking, you can’t do any better than to cast Noomi Rapace, the star of the Swedish The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. As the lead scientist on the mission, Rapace needs to survive a an impressive series of perils, including an alarming self-surgical procedure.
Michael Fassbinder is even better as an android with punctilious correctness and insincere charm, which some reviewers have compared to the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Idris Elba (The Wire) is also notable because he plays the commander of the spaceship more as a tugboat captain than Captain Kirk. Guy Pearce plays the elderly mogul who is financing the mission; distractingly, he is apparently wearing the same makeup as Dustin Hoffman did to play 121-year-old Jack Crabb in Little Big Man.
Sci fi is not one of my favorite genres and I won’t recommend it as a “must see” to a general audience, but if you’re a sci fi fan, then by all means, see Prometheus.
3D or not 3D? If you’re gonna see Prometheus, I’d recommend forking over the premium and seeing it in 3D, especially for some scenes in which Fassbender’s android activates some floating holographic images in the alien HQ.
A Dangerous Method is David Cronenberg’s telling of how Carl Jung became first Sigmund Freud’s disciple and then his rival. It’s an interesting story, chiefly because Jung was treating a patient who then became his lover and a psychoanalyst herself.
What keeps A Dangerous Method from being a really good movie is that Michael Fassbinder really can’t find a way to play a reserved and repressed character in a way that is really interesting (even when he has strapped Keira Knightly to the bed for a good spanking). Fassbender isn’t bad, he just plays Jung as a stick-in-the-mud who reacts those around him.
And there’s plenty to react to. Who knew Viggo Mortensen could be so funny as a sly Freud? Vincent Cassell is hilarious as a psychoanalyst-turned-patient who espouses having sex with many many people as possible, even one’s own patients.
And then there’s Keira Knightly, whose uninhibited performance as a patient of Jung’s has gotten much attention, some positive. I’m not sure what she could have done differently, given that she plays a character initially afflicted with hysterical seizures and finally able to relish a heavy dose of masochistic sex. But a viewer tends to sit and say, “Look! There’s Keira Knightly spazzing out and writhing and grunting!”.
Still Cronenberg kept the story moving along, and it’s worth a viewing just for Viggo and Vincent (and voyeuristically for Keira).
First-time actress Katie Jarvis plays Mia, a damaged and angry young woman from the British lower class. Her party-girl mom is the second-worst mother in recent films (after Mo’Nique’s role in Precious). Can Mia use her passion for dance to escape her grim surroundings? Mom brings home a new boyfriend and everything changes. Michael Fassbinder, starring soon as Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, is great as the mother’s boyfriend in Fish Tank.
