Susan Cooper (Melissa McCarthy), a self-effacing, overweight, desk-bound CIA mission controller, spends her days in a verminous CIA basement talking into the earpiece of her glamorous field agent coun­ter­part. When he's killed before her remote eyes and other field agents are com­pro­mised, she goes into the field for the first time and soon blossoms into a deadly agent.

I had never seen McCarthy in anything before and I assumed that Spy would be a dumb, gross-out comedy. It was better than I feared and genuinely funny at times. McCarthy inhabits several personas, ranging from the initial doormat of an …continue.

Jurassic World is an un­nec­es­sary retread of the Jurassic Park franchise. New, scarier, smarter monster Imperator Furiosa¹ breaks out of its enclosure and wreaks havoc, killing humans and dinosaurs for pleasure. Plucky kids—or are they darn, meddling kids?—aided by unlikely romantic couple—and by ve­loci­rap­tors and a T. Rex—manage to save the day. Meanwhile, greedy human villains plan to profit off the mess but get eaten before the end to audience applause. Chris Pratt delivers scruffy heroics while Bryce Dallas Howard runs around the entire movie in ridiculous heels without breaking either an ankle or a heel.

¹ …continue.

Ant-Man is a light­weight but appealing entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Decades ago, Hank Pym discovered the Pym Particle and invented the Ant-Man suit, which allowed him to shrink to the size of an ant. He buries the technology, believing it's too dangerous. Now his former protégé Darren Cross is close to perfecting the Yel­low­jack­et shrinking suit and selling it to Hydra. Pym and his daughter Hope recruit Scott Lang, a former burglar, to don the Ant-Man suit to stop Cross.

Much of the movie is played for laughs. Unlike Deadpool, these are PG-13 laughs. Paul …continue.

The United Nations wants to rein in the Avengers, after the huge damage due to their various battles, notably in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Tony Stark (Iron Man) is feeling guilty about the deaths they've caused and wants to go along. Steve Rogers (Captain America) has grown dis­trust­ful of government agendas and doesn't want to sign the Sokovia Accords. When his old comrade, Bucky Barnes (the Winter Soldier), is framed for a terrorist attack, Rogers and some friends end up outside the law and Stark and others try to stop them.

This …continue.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is a moderately en­ter­tain­ing action comedy set in the cold war, pos­tu­lat­ing a somewhat unlikely alliance between CIA agent Napoleon Solo and KGB operative Ilya Kuryakin, who team up to prevent a nuclear weapon falling into ex-Nazi hands. It's also the wholly un­nec­es­sary remake of the classic 1960s TV show.

There's decent chemistry between the three stars, Henry Cavill (Solo), Armie Hammer (Kuryakin), and Alicia Vikander (sci­en­tist's daughter), and the glamorous early 1960s are lovingly recreated. The plot, alas, is uninspired and unoriginal and falls rather flat.

Watchable.

In Kingsman: The Secret Service, “Eggsy” Unwin (Taron Egerton) is a fish-out-of-water recruit in Kingsman, an exclusive private in­tel­li­gence service. The young chav is taken under the wing of Harry Hart (Colin Firth), whose life was saved by Eggsy's father seventeen years ago. After spending half the movie trying to survive Spy Hogwarts, Eggsy goes out on his first mission to stop the mega­lo­ma­ni­ac billionare (Samuel L. Jackson) who is about to cull most of the world's population.

Stylish, hyper-stylized, and violent—as might be expected in a movie adapted from a comic book. The violence …continue.

We saw the “roadshow” edition of The Hateful Eight at the Cinerama, projected in 70mm as Tarantino and God intended. The eight pro­tag­o­nists are all as hateful and violent as you would expect given the title and the director. Tarantino is incapable of making a film without gratuitous violence and gore, but neither can he make a film without memorable characters who eviscerate with dialog. He continues to deliver both.

During one long day, some years after the Civil War, eight characters find themselves trapped by a blizzard in a remote inn. Two are bounty hunters, another …continue.

Deadpool is the role that Ryan Reynolds was born to play, the "Merc with a Mouth" anti-hero who breaks the fourth wall and breaks heads with equal facility. It's very funny, very twisted, and very violent, and it fully deserves its R rating.

Wade Wilson, a former mercenary, has terminal cancer. He undergoes a treatment that not only cures his cancer and renders him capable of re­gen­er­at­ing quickly from any wound, but leaves him horribly scarred. The treatment was actually intended to turn him into a super slave. Wanting both revenge and a cure for his dis­fig­ure­ment, he suits up and tracks down his former captors, leaving dozens of dead henchmen in …continue.

I came across this cartoon today; it reminded me that I've been meaning to write about the hit-or-miss nature of adapting books for the screen.

Books and video/film are different media, with different con­ven­tions and needs. Often the most-loved elements of a book are lost when it's adapted for television or film, upsetting fans.

As J.K. Rowling wrote about one of the Harry Potter movies:

"It is simply impossible to in­cor­po­rate every one of my storylines into a film that has to be kept under four hours long. Obviously films have re­stric­tions – novels do not have con­straints of time and budget; I can create dazzling effects relying on nothing but the in­ter­ac­tion of …continue.

Run Fatboy Run is a Simon Pegg comedy from 2007, which we just watched. I didn't have high hopes for it and it was better than I expected. Dennis left a pregnant Libby (Thandie Newton) at the altar five years ago. Now he's an overweight security guard in a London lingerie shop and she's found a new boyfriend who's everything that Dennis is not: Whit (Hank Azaria) is well off, handsome, and very fit. Somehow Dennis ends up promising to run in a marathon in three weeks' time that Whit is also running in. Much of the story revolves around his training, his desperate attempts to win over Libby, and …continue.