Stoker

After India’s father dies, her Uncle Charlie, who she never knew existed, comes to live with her and her unstable mother. She comes to suspect this mysterious, charming man has ulterior motives and becomes increasingly infatuated with him.

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Director: Chan-wook Park

Writer[s]: Wentworth Miller, Erin Cressida Wilson (contributing writer)

Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman, Matthew Goode

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Stoker caught my attention with two different facts: this is director Chan-wook Park’s first English film. If you don’t know him, he is a pretty prolific and successful writer/director in Korea, and created what I think is one of the top 10 most influential films of this decade, Oldboy. I’d have to warn that it is an intense film with some mind-altering events, but it is also cinematic gold. The other fact: this film was written by Prison Break actor Wentworth Miller, and it’s his first screenplay. To attract a director like Park, the screenplay has to be pretty awesome.

Safe House

A young CIA agent is tasked with looking after a fugitive in a safe house. But when the safe house is attacked, he finds himself on the run with his charge.

IMDb [7.0/10]

RottenTomatoes [54% | 56%]

I’m pretty sure that if you put Denzel Washington [Training Day, American Gangster] and Ryan Reynolds [Buried, Green Lantern] together in a project, you’ve got appeal from pretty much every age and sex, especially the ladies. I’m not sure if a crime/thriller/mystery/action film is the best way to use that viewer appeal, but regardless, I think a lot of people would want to see this movie for that fact alone.

Matt Weston [Reynolds] is the CIA equivalent of a night-watch security officer. He doesn’t usually see much action, and he is close to being able to leave the job and move away with his girlfriend. But all of that changes when he is surprised by a call from his boss informing him of a high profile target coming in to his facility. Tobin Frost [Washington] is a former CIA agent who is infamous for both his incredible interrogation and his betrayal of the CIA, selling information about the organization. When Frost’s enemies come knocking at the safe house’s door, it is up to Weston to keep the target, and himself, alive.

Denzel Washington is a top tier actor, and watching him work is always a treat, even if the movie itself isn’t very good. Playing a mysterious bad guy, as he does in this film, is particularly fun, for he has a creepy calm yet intense tone. Ryan Reynolds is a different story. While I doubt he will ever earn an award or nomination for his acting abilities, he is no doubt an entertaining actor who has an enjoyable track record of films. It is certainly an interesting leading duo.

This is another project all about the actors, which you get several of during the first half of the year. Director Daniel Espinosa and writer David Guggenheim [not to be confused with Davis Guggenheim, producer and director of many tv shows, movies, and documentaries] are both rookies trying to show off what they’ve got, and they’ve got some okay ability shown off in this film. Nothing noteworthy, either good or bad. There are plenty of holes you can pick in the plot, and there isn’t much mystery for a movie that has been assigned that label.

My Rating

 2/4 – Safe House is exactly what you saw in its previews, and is carried by its cast.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Journalist Mikael Blomkvist is aided in his search for a woman who has been missing for forty years by Lisbeth Salander, a young computer hacker.

IMDb [8.0]

RottenTomatoes [87%, 79%]

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an extremely good novel. Published posthumously after Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson suffered a heart attack, this book and the two others have found incredible worldwide selling success. In 2009, Niels Arden Oplev directed the first movie adaptation of the book in Sweden, with actress Naomi Rapace receiving international recognition for her portrayal of Lisbeth Salander. So, Hollywood, being what it is, of course had to jump onto the bandwagon and make it’s own version. This was at first annoyingly predictable, and I didn’t look forward to it. But I found that David Fincher was on board, and then I jumped on the bandwagon as well.

The Killing [TV series]

Follows the police investigation of the murder of a young girl, tying together three interlocking stories as investigators chase a variety of leads.

AMC website

IMDb

AMC is the best television channel on the air right now. There, I said it. I’m a big fan of television dramas, and this is the home base of high quality dramatic shows. AMC is the home for Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Killing, The Walking Dead, and others. That is a monster line-up. And with their scheduling of only one or two shows running at once, there is always a high quality show to watch. Also, all of their shows are on Netflix. All of Mad Men, the first season of The Walking Dead, The Killing, and Breaking Bad is usually on there. I don’t know who runs this channel, but if I could hug a random person on Earth, it would probably be them.

The Killing is a murder mystery show. I know what you’re thinking: “there are dozens of these on the air right now, why is this one any different?” Well, the main reason is that the entire first season is based on one crime, one murder. Most of your murder mysteries do a central theme, but then they have a new crime to solve every episode. You get some character development and some depth and details in the crime cases, but that method is very limited in allowing the viewer to connect with all of the characters and invest emotionally in the show, something that a good drama should be able to do. The Killing’s episodes each take up roughly 24 hours each of the ongoing investigation of the murder, so we are really allowed to learn much about all of the people involved. And with this much time to spare, the show is able to add a lot more branches to the main plot, making the mystery deeper and our curiosity more intense.

The show stars Mireille Enos as Sarah Linden, the lead detective of the Seattle police department. She is set to quit and move to California with her soon to be husband Rick Felder and son, but in the last hours of her last shift, a body is found, and a murder investigation is opened. Working alongside Sarah is Stephen Holder, played by Joel Kinnaman, the new detective in to fill Sarah’s vacancy.

Also unlike other crime mystery series, this show’s production fits in line with it’s slower pace. The lighting is dark, meeting the usually gloomy, rainy conditions of Seattle. The music is slower, drawn out, and heavy. Most everything in this show is dark, drawn out, and heavy. There is a very serious tone, never any comedy or much action. It’s a little depressing, especially with the family of the slain girl being a main part of the story, their suffering well documented.

The acting, the production, the direction and the story are all really well done, and this is the only time I’ve invested time and interest into a murder mystery show.

Season one is available to stream on Netflix, and season two will air with a two hour premiere on April 1 of this year.

Movie Preview: Safe House [10/2/12]

A young CIA agent is tasked with looking after a fugitive in a safe house. But when the safe house is attacked, he finds himself on the run with his charge.

IMDb

RottenTomatoes

[54% All critics | 67% Top critics]

Director – Daniel Espinosa

Writer – David Guggenheim

Cast

	Denzel Washington	…	Tobin Frost
	Ryan Reynolds	…	Matt Weston
	Vera Farmiga	…	Catherine Linklater
	Brendan Gleeson	…	David Barlow
	Sam Shepard	…	Harlan Whitford
	Robert Patrick	…	Daniel Kiefer

This is a movie that I only recently caught onto, and I’m not sure why it took me so long. With the leading combination of Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds, I’d think this would be on my radar for a while. I think this type of role is one that Washington really thrives in, and the same goes for Reynolds, although not to the same caliber. The recent trailers that have come out make it seem like it could be a pretty entertaining movie. The rest of the cast solidifies that thought as well.

With newcomers directing and writing, however, I’m a little hesitant to get too excited for this movie. Such a cast could probably carry a poorly written and directed movie, but if the writing and directing can hold their own, than this will probably end up being a pretty decent movie.