I’m not that interested in animated stepmothers and wizards and whatever, so I haven’t seen much Angelina Jolie lately. Thus, it was nice to have her back in a movie for grownups, even if one of the main characters is a kid. In fact, Finn Little admirably performs a lot of heavy lifting as the teen target of government-enabled hitmen in “Those Who Wish Me Dead” (2021). The action mashup of gunfighters and firefighters has Jolie as a smokejumper suffering from PTSD when the aforementioned teen parachutes into her fire tower, so to speak. Huge plot holes, but fun action.
Archives for posts with tag: Nicholas Hoult
Pain is not required to create art, nor does all pain result in art. But there is an in between – a Middle Earth? – where imagination distilled through pain yields a hard-earned magic. J.R.R. Tolkien was able to somehow filter boyhood fantasy through the gruesomeness of war to create one of the most memorable series of fantasy stories ever written. “Tolkien” (2019) imagines us back through that process, and in so doing becomes a bit of poetry in and of itself. While its told-in-flashback style is becoming overused by filmmakers these days, Tolkien’s personal story is well worth hearing and seeing.
You know what would be truly ironic? If an English professor (Who was an actual, English, professor, get it?), heartbroken over a lover’s death, decides to kill himself (in a very proper English way – funeral clothes laid out and everything), but he keeps having epiphanies throughout the day that bring him back from the brink (He keeps having a change of heart, get it?). And then, when he finally decides that life is worth continuing, he drops dead of a heart attack (A heart attack, get it?). When it comes to movie irony, “A Single Man” (2009) is cinematic hemochromatosis.
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