The Avengers (1998)

zero stars
This review is for the 1998 film based on the British T.V. show and not for the Marvel series.

If I were to come up with a new way to market The Avengers, I'd say put copies of the movie in the pharmacy next to the sleeping pills. This disastrous film would probably make more money that way than it did in the theaters. I woke up on a Friday morning after a good night's sleep, and a trip to the movies sounded like a great idea. After halfway through The Avengers, I was ready for a nap.

Game Night (2018)

★★★
Jason Bateman has always been a good comedic actor. I remember watching him on the sitcom The Hogan Family, where his comic timing and delivery were put to good use. He also appeared on Arrested Development, but would his knack for comedy translate to the big screen? Early on he seemed like an actor who would work primarily and prolifically on television. In the mid-2000s he sneaked up on movie audiences and displayed his strengths to a wider viewership. His bit role in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story paved the way, and supporting roles in Juno and Hancock showed that he could make the transition to theaters (notwithstanding his early failed appearance in 1987’s Teen Wolf Too).

All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records (2015)

★★★
I lived in Hawaii in the mid-‘90s and there was a Tower Records store in Pearl City. I only went there a few times. I remember the wide selection of music. There was even a section for video rentals, where I rented and watched Last House on the Left for the first time. (I saw a copy of Edward Penishands on the shelf, though I declined to watch it.) I never purchased any music and the store never became a hangout spot for me. I was a budding film buff, and music held nowhere near the interest I had for movies. Indeed, my musical tastes are still stuck in the early ‘90s when I was in high school in Pennsylvania, in a rural area with no Tower Records stores nearby (the local mall had a National Record Mart). I would have had to travel to Pittsburgh to visit one, but that was too far out of my reach and video games held my attention anyway. My brief stop in Hawaii was the only time Tower Records and I crossed paths.

Touching the Void (2004)

★★★½
A camera crew did not follow Joe Simpson and Simon Yates up and down the west face of the Siula Grande (in the Peruvian Andes) in 1985, yet Touching the Void is every bit as compelling as the real thing. Their story has become legendary in the sport of mountain climbing, or so the opening caption tells us. During that extraordinary week in 1985, the two men scaled the enormous mountain. That was a difficult feat alone, since the mountain has many vertical planes and the wind chill factor goes well below zero degrees. Going back down proved even more difficult.

Payback (1999)

★★★
Payback is a movie with many twists, intersecting plot threads, characters that exit unexpectedly and a protagonist who lives up to the tagline “Get Read to Root for the Bad Guy.” Mel Gibson bulldozes through all of this with a fierce determination, motivated by a relatively small amount of cash that baffles his enemies. A more recent movie character, John Wick, went to war over the killing of his dog. That Mel Gibson’s Porter would take on the city’s Outfit over what began as a personal matter is perfectly in line with that kind of story. Take a character and show him commit a disproportionate amount of vengeance against his offenders, and you’re in for a wild ride. Payback would make for a good triple feature along with John Wick and Denzel Washington’s The Equalizer.