Ex Machina

Robo Sexbot: the Movie.

"What happens to me if I fail your test?"

Hello my dear friends and imaginary new readers, welcome back to another thrilling trip down Tagline lane. Today I'm going to take a break from time travelers who speak poor English to talk about non-time travelers who use their position as the head of notgoogle to create robots. So it's sort of the reverse of what they were trying to do in Terminator Genisys, which was try to blow up notgoogle before they invent Skynet. I'm talking about Ex Machina, the April sci-fi suspense film that asks the question "well can I fuck the robot?" with a resounding "of course." Ex Machina stars Domhnall Gleeson (who I guess is also going to be in the new Star Wars) as Caleb, an employee of the fictional Google stand-in Blue Book. He is invited by the company's reclusive but brilliant founder Nathan (Oscar Isaac, also in Star Wars go figure) to his middle of nowhere hyper secure and high tech home/research compound, so that he can participate in Nathan's research. We discover that Nathan has created an AI housed in a lifelike human frame, named Ava. Caleb's job is to evaluate her, and see if she passes their modified Turing test, to qualify as a truly self-aware AI.

Taken 2

Badideas.com

"They want revenge, They chose the wrong guy."

Now there is a true Tagline. Hi folks, welcome to the Tagline, where I needed to take a break to actually watch some damned movies so I could go back to REVIEWING those same damned movies. Today I'm going to do what I do best, and talk about a movie where a guy kills a whole bunch of other guys. Think back a ways, to 2008, and you'll remember Taken, a film where Liam Neeson plays former CIA operative turned private security Bryan Mills. One fine day his daughter goes on an unsupervised trip to godless and lawless Europe (France specifically) where she is abducted by sex traffickers. That probably seemed like a great idea to them, but Bryan happened to be on the phone with her when it happened, and despite the taunts of her kidnapper (who only says "good luck") he DOES in fact have good luck. See sometimes you kidnap a girl and her father is a professional murder man. As a no frills action/vigilante revenge fantasy movie, Taken was wildly successful, grossing well over 200 million worldwide on its 25 million dollar budget. As such, they could hardly be expected to risk making a sequel (or two actually). Taken 2 brings us back into the world of Bryan Mills, trying to be a less shitty dad while still doing security on the side. This film opens as Albanian mobsters, relatives and associates of the MANY people Mills killed in the first film, commend what's left of their friends and family to the earth, and swear revenge on the man who put them there. Now, if you've seen the first movie, this probably instantly strikes you as a not awesome idea on their part, but hey, they're used to having it good and probably don't know any better. But they're going to learn.

Nightcrawler

Red car seems like kind of an eyegrabber.

"The City Shines Brightest at Night"

Hello all, welcome to a new month with the Tagline! Today I said I'd finally put down the horror for a few minutes, but that doesn't mean that I promised not to horrify you. As such, we will be looking straight into crazy land and talking about Nightcrawler today, a movie featuring Jake Gyllenhaal as Lou Bloom, a nobody lowlife living in LA, stealing fencing and copper pipes to try and turn a buck, when he stumbles over a new means of generating income: taking photos and video of dying people at crime scenes and selling them to TV stations. That is the setup that leads us into this film, as much about the darker side of life as it is about the darker side of human impulse. Nightcrawler follows Lou as he uses his spooky wacko personality and singular drive to go from street level no one to slightly higher street level no one. After witnessing some guys (mostly Bill Paxton) filming a fiery car crash, Lou gets it into his head that he could make some serious scratch by doing the same thing, and so steals a bike and sells it so he can buy a handheld camera and start filming crime and accidents. Naturally this starts out kind of rough, because it's a rough job that requires you to be a heartless shithead, but eventually Lou starts to find his footing, and becomes singularly obsessed with obtaining success as a crime scene photographer, freelance of course. This isn't really a one man job though and so using all of his bullshit spinning powers Lou hires the desperate loser/near hobo Rick to be his navigator and extremely underpaid assistant on his nightly prowls for shocking happenings worthy of the news.

Snowpiercer

Captain America: The SUPER Winter Soldier

"Fight your way to the front."
Hello friends, I've delayed the inevitable crapocalypse to bring you more good movies today, although in doing so I have ushered in the actual apocalypse, because today's movie is all about the world after we fuck up the environment in a new, unexpected way. Normally it is in an effort to annihilate one another that humanity ushers in an ice age and then is nearly wiped out entirely, but in Snowpiercer, today's feature presentation, it is in an effort to repair the environmental damage mankind has already caused that they usher in the end of life as we know it. The basic premise is that in 2014 scientists engineer some chemical or particle that will allow them to cool off the Earth, and thus counteract the ecological devastation mankind has wrought. Well they're right, and the particle lowers temperatures. As you might guess from the title, the particle lowers those temperatures waaay wayyy down, and soon everything is trapped in a frosty ice age, and everyone is dead. Almost everyone that is. A small population is sustained on the Snowpiercer, a 100ish car long train that is run by a perpetual motion engine, and that travels in an unending circuit around the frozen world. Some people are lucky and live up front, where its a nonstop masque of the red death style party/orgy while others in the tail live in the most abject and miserable kind of squallor imaginable. The whole operation is overseen by Wilford, the enigmatic and reclusive overseer, who watches the engine and ensures its continued function. This system, as you can no doubt imagine, isn't super great for the people at the back of the train, who live in cramped conditions and survive off of disgusting protein bricks, that I won't tell you what they are because THAT'S HALF THE FUN MAN COME ON.

3 Days to Kill

Wyatt Earp pose.

"From the Planet that Brought You Waterworld" (I made this tagline up because there were none)

Hey folks welcome to a new week and more thrills from the Tagline! As I had subtly threatened last week, I'm going to start off this week right, with some Kevin Costner action. As many of you know, I have on at least one occasion been an apologist for a Kevin Costner movie  (and I stand by my position, people need to get a fucking grip) but that doesn't mean that I think every movie he's in is cinematic gold. That said, I do regard him as a trustworthy, father-figure who makes the most of sometimes very bad situations, and that is I suspect what happened with 3 Days to Kill, one of the more perplexing movies I watched this month. This film stars Mr. Costner as Ethan Renner, a CIA Cleaner (that's code for person killer) who is assigned as part of the team cornering and eliminating "The Wolf." Renner's part of this job is to kill a creepy dude with no hair or eyebrows called the Albino, so you know he's a bad guy. We get to watch him crush a lady's head under an elevator car too, so that cements his bad guy status pretty firmly, I mean look how weird and evil he is! Anyway, Renner's kicking this dude's ass into next Tuesday when he suddenly collapses. He wakes up and is told he has like hyper-cancer or something, and that he has only a few months left to live. The CIA gives him a cheap looking watch and tells him his pension is on the way, and then tell him to piss off. Deciding that he needs to make the most of the time, Ethan returns home to Paris, to try and make amends with his estranged wife and daughter. Just as he is awkwardly trying to do that, he is approached by Vivi (Amber Heard, stringing together cinematic disasters one-after-another but hey at least she's pretty right?) a super-sexy assassin that wants Ethan to help her take out The Wolf, because he is the only person who has ever seen him. To try and entice him into this job, Vivi offers a Mcguffin: a experimental magic drug that will help him live longer. naturally, with such an enticing and totally ridiculous reward on offer, Ethan is obliged to accept, if only to get more time to spend with his pathological liar daughter (Hailee Steinfeld, who you can see also in True Grit and Ender's Game). Who would want to miss out on that.

Red Dragon and Manhunter

So 80s man.

"Enter the mind of a serial killer... you may never come back."

"Before the Silence, there was the Dragon"

Hello everyone, welcome to a new week filled with creepy murderers and their half-eaten victims! Today I'm going to be doing something a little bit different, and instead of talking about a single movie I will be talking about two different movies that were both adaptations of the same novel. The first is Manhunter, released in 1986, and the second is Red Dragon, which was released in 2002, as the third and last film in which Anthony Hopkins portrayed Hannibal Lecter. While based on events from the same novel, the two present very different takes on the same plot, in terms of theme and overall tone. This is partially because they were made during very different time periods (the mid 80s have cinematically essentially nothing in common with 2002) but also due to the context in which they were released. Manhunter was released simply as an adaptation of the novel Red Dragon, whereas Red Dragon was released as the third "Hannibal Lecter" movie, and the cultural import of that character had a real impact on the way the movie's plot was framed and presented. Both concern special agent Will Graham as he is brought back on with the FBI in an attempt to stop a serial killer being called "The Tooth Fairy", due to the distinctive bite marks he leaves on his victims. To help him get into the mind of the killer and prevent further victims, Will seeks the insight of Hannibal Lecter, who was the killer behind Graham's last case, before he went into retirement, due to the strain of assuming the mindset of killers to deduce their motives. Lecter of course is a genius and a madman, and has his own motivations for assisting Graham. Now that the basics are established, let's compare and contrast!

Veronica Mars

CAMERA ACTION

"She thought she was out."

I'm sure we've all thought that once or twice, but let's face it, you never really get out do you? That sure seems to be the case for Veronica Mars, and maybe fans of the show as well. How's it going folks welcome back to The Tagline. Today I'm going to be giving my thoughts and impressions of the recent Veronica Mars movie, which has a neat story behind it before I even get to the actual movie part. So let's talk about how a Veronica Mars movie even happened to begin with. If you aren't familiar, Veronica Mars was a show that ran for three seasons, from 2004 to 2007, about a teenage girl who becomes a private investigator in her rich meets poor hometown of Neptune, CA. If this sounds ridiculous... well it kind of is, but she's only sort of an actual PI, see she works for her dad, who actually IS a licensed private investigator, so that gives her the in to the biz (I don't know how much you know about it, but to be a private detective in most states you need to either have worked under another PI or have been a cop for a pretty substantial amount of time). After three seasons of struggling to keep themselves on the air despite flagging ratings, Veronica got the ax from the CW so they could fit in more reality TV (I'm not even making this up). Despite not having a huge viewer base, what Veronica did have was a really hardcore fan segment, and they were raring for more V Mars man. So Kristen Bell and director Rob Thomas (not the singer for Matchbox Twenty a different guy) started a kickstarter. Their goal was to raise more than 2 million dollars. Point in fact they ended up raising something closer to 6 million dollars (5,702,153 according to the page) which I think expresses in clear green numbers with dollar signs just how badly people wanted to see Kristen Bell being tough on crime like Scruff Mcgruff only much hotter (this sentence is like a runaway train I want to get off but I can't). Anyway that weirdness aside the point is thanks to fan support, the movie was made, and I got to see it.

Jack Reacher

Gotta kind of wonder what he's looking at.

"The law has limits. He does not."

Hello everyone, welcome back! Today I'm going to be talking about the (relatively) recent film Jack Reacher, a movie based on a character from a series of novels, written by Lee Child. This movie in particular deals with the events of the novel One Shot, where a man is arrested and being charged with the random murder of five people in a park. This is all done from a parking garage across a river, and afterwards the police have little trouble pinpointing that the murders were done by James Barr, a former sniper for the Army, who had previously been exonerated for a similar crime during his tour of duty. Around this time, Jack Reacher sees the news, and then arrives to see Barr, who has been beaten into a coma while in holding. Initially, investigators believe that Reacher has arrived to defend Barr, but in fact he reveals that he has arrived to confirm his guilt and then see to it that he is convicted. Barr is defended by Helen Rodin (played by Rosamund Pike) who is the daughter of the district attorney. As nearly as I could deduce, the movie seemed to indicate that she was doing this to stick it to her dad, who is renowned for never failing to convict, which seems like a really bad policy, as I would presume not everyone who is tried is guilty, because that is literally the whole point of a trial. The law is scary. Anyway as Reacher and Rodin continue to look into the circumstances surrounding the shooting, it becomes clear that there's more at work than a simple case of guy-goes-crazy-and-kills-everyone. The people really responsible are not super excited that Jack Reacher has showed up to scrutinize the situation, and that's when stuff starts to get interesting.

The Net

SPECIAL DVDITION.

"Her driver's license. Her credit cards. Her bank accounts. Her identity. DELETED."

Hello Tagliners, welcome back, this week I decided that I'd greet this fine new year by taking a look back. But then I couldn't STOP looking back, and I just looked further and further and eventually I was all the way back in 1995 and I had no way of getting back to the present and instead had to watch old cyber thrillers. That's right, today we're going to take a look back at the internet as imagined by the brain trusts of Hollywood in 1995. This crack team of geniuses produced The Net, a film where Sandra Bullock stars as Angela Bennett, a computer programmer who works remotely, and has no friends in the real world. I think that covers most people in the world now, but in 1995 I guess it was a pretty novel concept, anyway Angela stumbles into some kind of conspiracy, because this is the 90s, and then her entire identity is erased and she can't prove who she is and everyone thinks she is a hooker and they want to kill her. I'll explain more but I mean the real great thing here is that Angela Bennett is such a recluse, that there are literally TWO people in the world who even recognize her by her face. Now that is some pretty epic hermit action. I mean granted they didn't have Facebook for her to post selfies to all day long but still, I think most people probably have at least THREE others who would recognize them and be able to vouch for them not being a prostitute who was in Mexico.

Abduction

I'm not even sure what's happening here,
like, is he hanging there like Spider-Man?
This does not happen.

Hey everyone, it's Monday night, soon to be Tuesday, and I decided that I wanted to hurt myself last night, so I did it the best way I knew how, by watching Abduction. For those not familiar, while Taylor Lautner had some free time between Twilight movies, and so thought that he would be in another movie. Taylor had made perhaps the understandable mistake of believing that he was a real actor, what with the money he was doubtless receiving for his just FANTASTIC work as abusive boyfriend numero dos for Bella (If you've somehow evaded all knowledge of Twilight, Taylor Lautner plays Jacob in the Twilight movies). So Abduction was made, a film he stars as Nathan, a sort of bro-ish dope who lives in upper-middle class suburbia, and has a crush on a girl with just...wild eyebrows. Like whoa (more on that later). One day, while doing a project with her, they find a picture on a missing persons site that looks just like him, as a little kid. They contact the person running the site, and then people come to murder his parents. He flees with his almost girlfriend (her name is Karen, she's played by Lily Collins) and tries to figure out why men with guns are chasing him, and also the CIA apparently. While he does that, I try to figure out why I possibly give a shit.

Seeking Justice

Remember: always either whispering or shouting

"Would you cross the line for vengeance?"

Hey gang, you're most of the way to the exits for the week, and I'm here with the Tagline to ease the transition with a movie where Nicholas Cage seeks revenge etc. etc. you've heard this story before. Mr. Cage is a high school English teacher in New Orleans named Will Gerard whose wife is brutally raped by a stranger on the way home one night. Will is then approached by a man named Simon, claiming to represent a group of 'concerned citizens' willing to 'take care' of the man who raped Will's wife, by 'murdering him' with a 'gun' (they're a shadowy group of vigilantes okay?). After waffling over it for a little while, Will agrees to make a deal with this suspicious man he has never met who works for a group of shadowy criminal murderers. This seems like a good idea for exactly 0 seconds. It isn't long before Simon is back, looking to have Will do some favors for him. For starters its just dropping off a letter, and other cryptic instructions, but soon after he asks Will to push a guy off a bridge into traffic.