‘Movie Corner’ Archives
“High-Rise”
BY HOWARD MCQUITTER II Howardsmoviecorner.com                                                  howardmcquitter68@gmail.com *** of Five Stars Action/Sci-Fi/Drama From the beginning of Ben Wheatley”'s “High-Rise,” the signs of a disturbing venture are in store for the viewers. Just minutes into “High-Rise,” the setting backs of three months earlier when a doctor Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) after recently losing his sister moves into a spacious apartment on the 25th floor of this futurist high-rise (would be in the 1970s here). (J.G. Ballard”'s 1975 novel adapted to silver screen by Ben Wheatley with the same title.) Laing goes on to say he feels he”'s living in the future that has already taken place. Whether or not, Laing is aware of what is [...]
“Hail Caesar”
“Hail Caesar” **** Comedy/Mystery PG13 Our beloved Minneapolis (St. Louis Park, exactly) native directors, brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, bring forth “Hail, Caesar!”, another off-the-wall comedy, screwy, boisterous similar to their other comedies “The Big Lebowski”(1997), “O Brother, Where, “Burn After Reading” (2008). Like an old-school western, the Coens”' “Hail, Caesar! “rewinds the clock back to the Hollywood of the 1950s. What “Hail, Caesar!” does for me”“at least”“in the nostalgic sense, when I was a boy sitting in a theater (one screen) watching the fullness of CinemaScope, the new larger than life invention in 1953.There”'s a lot here that more than meets the eye, I mean, in “Hail, Caesar!”, especially for a baby boomer like myself. To start off, Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is the head of Capitol Studios with his loaded hands of keeping a struggling studio [...]
“The Embrace of the Serpent”
“The Embrace of the Serpent” Colombian ***** 2015 Adventure/Drama/History Not Rated “The Embrace of the Serpent” is filmed in black and white (except for a few emblazon moments), a film that takes us to the Amazon with haunting, remoteness and mysterious pace. Director Ciro Guerra”'s film is unique in every sense of the word, in the sense he depicts genocide of indigenous peoples of North and South America through the eyes of an indigenous person rarely done by Western filmmakers. The film”'s first character is shaman Karamakate (as a young man played by Nilbio Torres) comes across a sick German ethnographer named Theodor Koch-Grunberg (Jan Bijvoet) looking for yakruna, a plant said to have healing powers, and Karamakate may be the only one that knows where it is. This is in 1909, at a time European industrialists and missionaries, wittingly or unwittingly, are destroying the forests by cutting trees for rubber or forcing religion down [...]
