Champions (2023)

A drunk driver (Woody Harrelson) is court-appointed to coach "The Friends", a basketball team made up of intellectually disabled youths, which is a position that he thinks hardly compares to the work he usually does with national league teams, but you know at the outset of this comedy-sports movie that he will fall in love with his work, fall in love with a woman with whom he initially grates, and come to better appreciate himself and his charges over the course of an easy - and on a couple of occasions emotional - watch.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Doc Hollywood (1991)

The appeal of this comedy escaped me when I was in high school and all around me were lauding its praises, and now, having watched it again in 2023, I feel vindicated - again left cold, not amused by a city doctor's court-ordered stint in a rural backwater where he prattles with only personality-free hicks and embarks on a brittle romance. 

★★☆☆☆

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Triangle of Sadness (2022)

We meet a male model and his model girlfriend having dinner at a swanky restaurant and an argument starts between them over paying the bill; from there this dry comedy moves aboard a ship offering cruises to the rich and famous and hell breaks loose there, too, offering more sharp commentary about privilege and control in a modern world of poor freeloaders, rich hoarders, those in service and those who wantonly wield power.

★★★★☆

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Natural Born Killers (1994)

Just what Oliver Stone intended with this wafer-thin heavy metal video clip - all symbolism, zero realism, and seemingly a grand thesis of one simplistic note - I don't know but it is loud, long and monotonous: a two-hour fight scene that plays out as though everyone is making it up as they go along, with one-dimensional characters screaming their way through one long unlikely situation, with the chaos of mass murderers Mickey and Mallory's "deep love" affair (read occasional "dry humping" and tongue kisses) and violent crime spree spliced meaninglessly with cartoon clips, black and white photography and - in a last-ditch attempt at relevance - media clips of actual celebrated tv crime reports. 

★☆☆☆☆

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

Some of these superhero cartoons feel especially lightweight, like an eight-page comic that is opened, flipped through, closed and discarded in almost one motion, like this sequel to the original Venom featuring a villain who is vividly brought to life by an oddly-wigged Woody Harrelson but only for a few moments — a moment involving chickens, one about a dinner date, and a sfx-laden car-ride moment — before he is dispatched in a climactic sfx spectacle, chomped by Tom Hardy's symbiot (investigative journalist Eddie Brock and his cartoony, toothy alien parasite, Venom, who leaps out from between Brock's shoulderblades) and then the credits roll, before we learn anything interesting — or anything at all —about Brock, about Venom (he eats chickens), about that villain, or about Brock's three "in-the-know" allies: a shopkeeper, a former lover, and the former lover's new man. 

★★☆☆☆

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True Detective (Season 1)

True Detective Season 1 (DVD)

True Detective Season 1 (DVD)

Two cops, Matthew McConaughey's Rustin "Rusty" Cohle and Woody Harrelson's Martin Hart investigate the ritualistic killing of a prostitute in this gritty eight-episode police procedural that distinguishes itself with its bleak view of human psychology - as bleak as any of its Louisiana backwater crime scenes - and with the false promise of its title: that this has anything to do with pulpy True Detective-style magazines or tells a crime story that is even slightly realistic. 

★★★★☆

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Now You See Me 2 (2016)

That huge ensemble of characters from number one, all deeply earnest about their craft - magic - which unites them in a fraternity as boysy, ridiculous and self-important as the Illuminati, reunites for this preposterous sequel that pits the Four Horsemen in a magic war with a tech wizard, except this is cinema magic, not magic magic, so there is no 'reveal' to justify the movie's long tangled string of events and you can't possibly care about what happens given the "anything goes" nature of the plot and the fact it all goes on in a one-note bombastic patter and that everything, even years in jail, might simply, quite ridiculously, be part of the slow burn.

★★☆☆☆

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The Hunger Games (2012)

If in your mind Big Brother evictions and "rose ceremonies" lack a little bloodspill and need, say, a few more snapped necks and some more arrows to the contestants' eye sockets, you'll enjoy this movie based on the first of Suzanne Collins' books about young Katniss Everdeen selected to participate in a televised fight to the death, but personally I fail to see why this series is so popular given its charmless and unnecessary extrapolation of the tenets of reality tv to their most violent extreme.

★★☆☆☆

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White Men Can't Jump (1992)

A mismatched pair of grifters good at shooting hoops takes advantage of racial stereotypes to hustle money from streetball players who assume Woody Harrelson's ex-basketballer, Billy Hoyle, a white man, can't play, in this shrill, shouty and strangely very popular sports comedy drama from 1992.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

The three billboards that goad local police into taking more action in a cold murder investigation are the strategic efforts of a bereaved mother whose daughter was raped and killed, but progress in the case is slow, God may not exist, Life may be meaningless - certainly this movie is meaningless - and so it ends up being through blackly funny, shocking, increasingly violent anarchy that the mother and several of the townsfolk seek resolution.

★★★★☆

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Now You See Me (2013)

David Copperfield-esque magicians perform an Oceans Eleven style grift and arouse the interest of police and from there, over a series of subsequent grifts, this entertaining romp escalates the stakes to preposterous levels, particularly when real danger arrives in the form of car chases and carelessly fired guns, surely not in balance with the magicians' endgame, you'll think, even before you know what that is...

★★★☆☆

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