Thor: The Dark World

 Thor: The Dark World (2013)

Starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Eccleston, Kat Dennings, Stellan Skarsgård, and Rene Russo

Directed by Alan Taylor

Click here for my Letterboxd review

The RyMickey Rating:  D

Click here for my previous RyMickey Rating review

Thor

 Thor (2011)

Starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Stellan Skarsgård, Kat Dennings, Idris Elba, Rene Russo, and Anthony Hopkins

Directed by Kenneth Branagh

Written by Ashley Edward Miller, Zach Stentz, and Don Payne

Click here for my Letterboxd review

My Previous RyMickey Review

The current RyMickey Rating:  B

Velvet Buzzsaw

Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)

Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Toni Collette, Zawe Ashton, Tom Sturridge, Natalia Dyer, Daveed Diggs, Billy Magnussen, and John Malkovich

Directed by Dan Gilroy

Written by Dan Gilroy

Click here for my Letterboxd review

The RyMickey Rating: B-

Movie Review - The Intern

The Intern (2015)

Starring Robert DeNiro, Anne Hathaway, Rene Russo, Anders Holm, JoJo Kushner, Andrew Rannells, Zach Pearlman, Christina Scherer, and Adam DeVine

Directed by Nancy Meyers

As part of an outreach initiative, Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway), CEO of the popular fashion e-commerce website About the Fit, creates an internship program to bring in senior citizens to counter the youthful vibe of the workplace.  Recent widower Ben (Robert DeNiro) applies and earns an internship as Jules's assistant.  Despite her initial reticence, Jules soon finds Ben's demeanor and attitude to be a comforting and soothing aspect to her hectic and crazy life as she attempts to balance her work life with her home life being a wife to Matt (Anders Holm) and mother to young Paige (JoJo Kushner).

Writer-director Nancy Meyers' The Intern is full of clichés and silly side characters who bear no import to the overarching storyline, but at the center of the film is Robert DeNiro and Anne Hathaway who create a chemistry-filled dynamic that is irresistibly charming.  Color me surprised, but there is humor and heart in the father-daughter, mentor-mentee relationship that Meyers creates and DeNiro and Hathaway imbue.  While it's obvious where the seasoned, elderly Ben is going to lead the fresh, younger Jules from the very outset of the film, we in the audience don't really mind because of the interaction between the two characters and actors.

While the secondary characters are amusing in their own right, the film doesn't really know what to do with them.  Sure, they play into certain scenes during which the relationship between Jules and Ben flourishes, but in the end they can't help but feel superfluous.  Still, because of the dynamic between the two leads, The Intern manages to be a better, more watchable film than it probably deserves to be, so kudos to both DeNiro and Hathaway for achieving this.

The RyMickey Rating:  B-

Movie Review - Nightcrawler

Nightcrawler (2014)

Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed, and Bill Paxton

Directed by Dan Gilroy

Despite a great performance from Jake Gyllenhaal, the tale of a bug-eyed scrap metal thief who discovers a penchant for becoming a freelance videographer on the streets of Los Angeles that is Nightcrawler doesn't quite have the bite to fully embrace its obvious attempt at criticizing the news industry's incessant need to shock for ratings.

Gyllenhaal is at his best as Louis Bloom, trimmed down significantly so that his gaunt look stands in juxtaposition to his character's headstrong nature.  Fast talking and quite manipulative, Gyllenhaal's Louis makes us feel uneasy while watching him much as he makes those around him a tad uncomfortable too.  By far the best part of Nightcrawler, Gyllenhaal is impressive here fully embodying the character and making the film worth watching for him alone.

Unfortunately, screenwriter Dan Gilroy's directorial debut doesn't match Gyllenhaal's talent.  As a director and in terms of visual aesthetics, Gilroy actually presents a rather fascinating look at the underbelly of a industry and he does so with success in terms of creating a dark and grimy atmosphere.  His screenplay, however, falls a bit short.  First, I never quite bought the concept that a news station would actually purchase and air the rather disturbing images Louis brings to them.  Funnily enough, after watching the film, I've paid much more attention to stories on the local news and none of them have come close to matching the horrors that Louis brings to the newsroom of Rene Russo's Nina, a producer of an early am local news show in LA.  I simply didn't buy into the critique that the film seemed to be selling about local news pushing the envelope.  Had this been a cable news station or perhaps some online news organization, the concept may have been a bit more plausible to me.  I admit that this may seem like an odd fault to find in the film, but not "believing" what it was trying to pitch to me made it more difficult to get behind the flick's premise.

Second, while Louis is a well-conceived (though freaky) character, the rest of the film is inhabited by one note personas that can't hold a candle to Louis's idiosyncrasies.  Russo, in particular, is wasted here, given essentially only reaction shots to Louis's craziness.  Desperate for stories that can keep her job relevant to her bosses, I just couldn't buy into the fact that she would sell her soul (essentially) to Louis to keep her job secure.

Despite my qualms, however, I think Nightcrawler has more pros going for it than cons.  It's a bit slow moving, but Gyllenhaal's presence is so intriguing that you oftentimes forget that not much is going on around him.  It's a decent flick, but not one into which I could completely buy the premise it was selling.

The RyMickey Rating:  B-

Movie Review - Thor: The Dark World

Thor: The Dark World (2013)

Starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Eccleston, Kat Dennings, Stellan Skarsgård, and Rene Russo

Directed by Alan Taylor

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but 2011's Thor is my favorite Marvel comics movie (not including some X-Men co-productions...for some reason I don't think of them [or Spider-Man] when I think of "Marvel" movies).  There was something about the fun that director Kenneth Branagh brought to the flick that made the sheer ridiculousness of the title character and his hammer wielding an enjoyable summer romp.  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Thor: The Dark World which feels like a heavy burden to sit through lacking any modicum of the fun and excitement that was found in its predecessor.  Quite frankly, this one is probably the worst film to come out of the Marvel/Disney pipeline in part because of an awful screenplay and direction that can't really compare to Mr. Branagh's in the first Thor. 

What the sequel really boils down to is this:  Two species in space -- one of which is Thor's people and one of which is someone else -- fought with each other a long time ago.  Thor's people won and buried this other people's energy source (or something) deep in the earth.  Thanks to wormholes (which played a prominent role in The Avengers) this energy source has been found by Dr. Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) who has been sitting around in London depressed since Thor (Chris Hemsworth) left her at the end of the last film.  This magical energy source somehow gets transferred into Jane which causes the bad guys to chase after Jane only to have Thor help her.

It's all so ridiculous...even more ridiculous than a guy from space coming down to Earth and fighting people with a magic hammer.  Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman look bored out of their mind in this with Portman in particular a blank slate whenever she appears onscreen (and, unfortunately, she's onscreen a lot in this one).  Tom Hiddleston injects a little bit of pizzazz into the mix, but even his Loki isn't able to overcome the inanity of the plot.

The one advantage the Thor flicks have going for them is that they do seem to understand just how silly their plots truly are.  There are jabs here and there about how ridiculous the goings-on are and I do appreciate that.  However, Thor: The Dark World is such a huge step down from the original that I don't think I'll be looking forward to the next one at all.

The RyMickey Rating:  D

Movie Review - Ransom

Ransom (1996)

Starring Mel Gibson, Rene Russo, Brawley Nolte, Gary Sinise, Delroy Lindo, Lili Taylor, Donnie Wahlberg, and Liev Schrieber

Directed by Ron Howard

***This film is currently streaming on Netflix***

Not that the trailer for Ransom in and of itself is all that amazing, but in 1996, Mel Gibson's uttering of the film's somewhat classic line, "Give me back my son!", was played seemingly ad nauseum in theaters and on tv.  It's a simple line, but in that one line reading from Mel, the primal, guttural instinct of a parent who has had a child kidnapped shines through and Gibson shows why everyone loved him prior to his late aughts breakdown.  As far as the film goes, despite it's completely generic nature and its by-the-book direction from Ron Howard, Ransom does the job required of it, continuously ratcheting up the tension until the rather silly, although plausible climax.

There's no need to go into any plot summaries here as the film doesn't deviate from any standard kidnapping flick.  Rich parents get their son kidnapped and the abductors demand a significant ransom for the return of the child.  Sure, there are slight turns along the way, but there's absolutely nothing new brought to the table either by the writers or by the director.  

Nevertheless, the film does exactly what it needs to do in order to be entertaining.  In part, all the actors really step up to the plate.  From Gibson and Rene Russo as the distraught parents to Delroy Lindo as the FBI agent helping to track down the kidnapper to Gary Sinise as a troubled cop, the acting lifts up all the generic roles to a degree higher than what they likely deserved.

Yes, I find myself criticizing the film above, but I also was thoroughly entertained throughout Ransom.  I'd seen this upon its release and remembered liking it back then and wasn't disappointed upon the rewatch.

On a completely unrelated note, I find it quite odd that I've now watched two kidnapping movies in the span of four days...slightly odd how that happened.

And on another completely unrelated note (one that I've said before), I miss Mr. Gibson as an actor.  

The RyMickey Rating:  B