Director: Joe Johnston (Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Jumanji)
Budget: $140million
Box Office: $370million
- This entire movie is basically a prequel for Avengers.
- You know who could have played this role just as well as Hugo Weaving? Raul Julia. If it wasn’t for him dying in 1994.
- “and the Fuhrer digs for trinkets in the desert” Personally? I’d have thought he would be busy with nazi stuff like killing, being racist, and making tea by putting milk in first.
- “even Little Timmy is doing his part”, I hate little Timmy
- Yeah, I know I mock films, but I generally don’t do it whilst the film is playing in the cinema, and I definitely don’t do it to newsreel footage of soldiers fighting nazis. “boo, stop killing one of the most evil dictatorships of this century and get back to playing Yankee Doodle Dandy”
- Side note: a film called “Yankee Doodle Dandy” not only exists but has an oscar to its name? Wow.
- “just start the cartoon?” Wait, this is about a cartoon? And about 50 years before pixar? So he was this excited about seeing f*cking Bambi?
- Wait, so nobody else decided to stop this asshole from mocking the army?
- Guy introduces himself by using his own full name. I, [insert name here] Jr., think that’s ridiculous.
- Damn this film is beautifully shot. It’s just wonderful, even a still shot makes it seem like it’s from the 1940s.
- “there are already so many big men fighting this war, maybe what we need now is a little guy”. So you inject a small guy with super serum to make him a big guy? If you really want a small guy, call Ant-Man, not Paul Rudd, Hank Pym, was he around this time? I dunno, I can’t remember the timeline.
- “Dr. Zola”, see, I don’t like that name as it just reminds me of the old Chelsea footballer so is too hard to take seriously. It would be like if in 10 years there was an evil guy in a film called Dr. Beckham or Dr. Rooney.
- “what’s with the accent Queen Victoria? I thought i was signing up for the US Army”, says an english actor with a terrible American accent.
- Stupidest criteria ever. Why pick the guy who needlessly kills himself at the first opportunity by jumping on a grenade that wouldn’t hurt anybody else because they had done the sensible thing and run away? This would be like stopping someone getting hit by a car by jumping in front of a car, whilst the car was in no danger of hitting anybody.
- “he’s still skinny”, yeah but you’re going to inject him with totally-not-steroids anyway so what does it matter.
- “he and Hitler share a passion for the occult”, wait, what’s evil about liking diary products?
- Oh wait, that’s Yakult.
- “good becomes better, bad becomes worst”, so in this universe it’s not only hammers who make judgement calls, it’s also serums. I said yesterday how it would suck to have Hitler with a hammer, but this film is set in the 1940’s, so that’s a genuine concern in this.
- Guy shares heartbreaking back story, he’s definitely going to die.
- “I got beat up in that alleyway, and behind that diner, and in that park”, then maybe the problem is you.
- “somebody get that kid a sandwich”, someone get me a sandwich
- See, told you he’d die.
- So he just walked out of that crash completely fine? Bullshit.
- Two moments with shields in the first hour? F*ck you movie.
- You know he’s evil because he throws a kid in the water. Only way they could make him more blatantly evil is if he did a nazi salute. Which in this film is an actual possibility.
- “cut off one head, two more will take it’s place” then why is your slogan one head with many tentacles? You’ve got that backwards. Your logo is bad and you should feel bad.
- “you think this is about appearances?” Yeah, do you think Hitler’s racist or something?
- Wait, this war was funded by kids buying comics? Dark.
- “who’ll kick the Krauts to Japan”. There’s so much wrong with that sentence.
- Dane Cook auditioned for the lead in this film. As did two of the Jonas brothers. Oh thank god they didn’t get it.
- That shield is way too bright to make it a viable option for sneaking in.
- Wait, there’s like zero guards there?
- “Yeah, I’ve knocked out Adolf Hitler over 200 times”. He does know that wasn’t the real Hitler, right?
- Oh, so THAT’S why he’s called Red Skull. Because he has a red skull.
- We’re only an hour into this movie, so does anybody really buy that they killed the main character?
- “captain Rogers”, wait, they made him an actual captain? I though that was a fake name bestowed upon him like Private Stash or Major Gunns.
- “I’d like to surrender myself for disciplinary action” ooo sexy.
- This is a waste of Natalie Dormer.
- Still not as wasted as Idris was in Thor though.
- “you still don’t understand women” of course he doesn’t, he’s from the 1940’s. If this was period accurate he’d consider “punching in the stomach” an acceptable pregnancy prevention.
- So after 80 minutes we finally get Captain America, and then only in montage.
- His name is Zola, he lives on the second floor.
- Still a better train journey than southeastern.
- Random fact: Sesame Street was banned in Mississippi because it showed black children and white children living together in harmony. This was in the 1970’s, AFTER they supposedly fought a war to stop racism. I know this has nothing to do with this film, I just think more people should know this, fuck Mississippi, you backwards racist bastards.
- Considering that the guy was likely to be German, that could almost be a literal Wilhelm Scream.
- Why did they trust Captain America again? Yeah he’s strong and brave, but he hasn’t had any actual military training in terms of preparation and planning.
- Red Skull literally just stood there for 20 seconds, he had plentiful time to shoot people as they were coming in.
- Side note: soldiers crashing through the window, this is why bond villains have underground lairs.
- Oh thank god only nameless people have died, they totally don’t have family back home waiting for them so we shouldn’t feel sad or mourn them, or even talk about them ever again. No, the true sad thing is that his friend went missing.
- Captain America attempts to kiss Agent Carter in the tunnel, brave move for a first option.
- It’s lucky soldiers can only shoot what’s directly in front of them so that nobody shot Captain as he was running beside them.
- Yeah, just stand up in the car that’s teetering over the edge, don’t attempt to climb out or anything.
- Wait, he labels his missiles? Huge giveaway.
- Captain finds a bunch of missiles with names of major cities written on them, but only reacts to the one that says “New York”. Because who gives a shit about Chicago or Boston, right? Not as though people live there.
- “i have seen the future, there are no flags”, then what do people wave at Donald Trump rally’s?
- Wait, so Thor, Odin, none of the Asgardians etc, noticed this HUGE display of energy? They’re not gods, they’re idiots.
- So they happened to pick one of the few baseball games he was actually at? Could they have not done the simple thing and just, I don’t know, picked another game. One that happened after Captain was frozen. I think they still had baseball games after 1945 but I’m not certain, I haven’t checked.
- I love these closing credits, so artfully done.
combined with his veneer of a can-do attitude, echoes many promises the recession generation were educated on, but didn’t have delivered. Showing how ruthless someone really has to be to achieve the ever elusive American dream.
manipulative, and downright evil at times. “If it bleeds, it leads” as is repeated multiple times in the film, with Rene Russo giving a chemical turn as the News show runner, clearly taking inspiration from 1996’s Network, with the satirisation of the ultra-violet media being the focus of that film, but as I haven’t seen it, can’t comment further.
Gyllenhaal, giving still a career best performance in an already well versed one, dropping 20 pounds and digging deep to portray a mere reflection of a real man. The other being Dan Gilroy’s dark, clever and witty script; both married perfectly to fully realize and bring this character and story to life, and give us a sociopath for the digital age. (Move over Sherlock)
Behind the camera Dan Gilroy does a clean job of making the L.A. nightscape a very cold and isolating place, reflecting its lead character, and sharing many shades with Michael Mann’s Collateral, which was clearly an influence. It’s a high-class and pristine looking film, especially for a directorial debut, having a gorgeous neo-noir style; and his motifs of focusing on camera screens to establish how the camera sees things – instead of exactly how they actually are – works as a great and sometimes surreal effect.
anything wrong with the direction, just compared to its other elements. It doesn’t seem like it pushes the envelope as much, and has left me wondering how the film would have turned out in the hands of a David Fincher or a 
Richard Linklater and animated dystopian science-fiction; not a combination even the stoners from Dazed and Confused would think of, let alone guess it would be one of the highlights of the genre; but this list is titled thus for a reason. Adapted from Phillip K Dicks novel, it depicts a group of drug addicts, formed of Robert Downy Jr, Woody Harrelson, and led 
by undercover cop Keanu Reeves in a totalitarian America, where the only thing they have more of than drugs is cameras: Big Brother is always watching. Linklater sticks very close to the text, adapting the films dark themes of drug abuse just as effectively as its constant bursts of dark and surreal humour. But what really makes this film something else, is that its rotoscoped (animation done over live-action footage), a style that not only makes it timeless, but adds a toxic physicality to the labyrinth of confusion and paranoia the story revels in; capturing imagery from the material like no live-action film ever could.
A 30’s set period dramedy, a love letter to the stage (which clearly inspires Linklater’s writing, though ironically he didn’t write this), and a personal favourite of mine: I find this film is unfairly overlooked as a Zac Effron vehicle (who fits the period like an old glove), as at the time he was in the heights of his High School Musical fame. But in actuality it’s a genuine showcase of his talents, as it is a delightfully charming and fascinating film that looks at the friendship between a young man with theatre dreams and a pre-Citizen Cane Orson Welles, as he and his famous Mercury troop put on their career making performance of Shakespear’s Julius Caesar.
Filmed over twelve years, from May 2002 to October 2013 (almost my own exact adolescence), using the same cast, Boyhood follows a boy and his broken family through his life, on their journeys to adulthood and everything else.
Troubled Productions 