Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from June, 2024

The Fall and Get Back Up Guy

  The Fall Guy is a is hard movie to slap a genre on. It's an action film. It's a rom-com. It's an old fashioned star vehicle. The result is a very entertaining but niche $130 million love letter to the stunt community that leans hard on two insanely charismatic leads. In fairness, calling  Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt co leads is a bit of a stretch as it is really the story of Gosling's stunt man Colt Seavers. He begins the film loved up with camera women Jody Moreno (Blunt) before an accident at work causes him to lose confidence in himself and ghost her. Eighteen months later he gets a call asking him to come out of stunt exile to help on Jody's directorial debut but things don't work out as he hoped when Jody doesn't actually want him there and he is roped into tracking down the productions missing leading man, an ab flaunting, obnoxious idiot played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Gosling is in full movie star mode here, buffed up and charismatic even though ...

Horoscopes and Horror Tropes

  Catching a film like Tarot in the cinema in 2024 is weird. It feels like one of those horror films that just sort of appear on a streaming service. One you find deep in bowels of Amazon Prime, take a chance on and are pleasantly surprised to find is more or less fine. Up on the big screen it's still fine but its shortcomings are made very apparent. To its credit the film wastes no time in getting to the point. It begins with seven friends in a mansion they rented for one of their birthdays and within the first ten minutes main character Haley has read the group their fortunes from a cursed deck of tarot cards they find in the basement. Once they return home the friends begin to be picked off one by one courtesy of a ghost/monster taking the shape of whichever card was drawn in their reading. Exactly how they kill them is a bit muddled, at first it seems they are scaring their victims into "Final Destination" ing themselves but at other times they become more hands (or s...