Tag Archives: Ciaran Hinds

Fright Club

Fright Club: Skeletons in the Closet 2022

Leave a comment

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Yes, each spring we get to dig around Oscar nominees’ closets to find the bad horror lurking behind those glittery ball gowns. And this year it’s a fine season!

Here are five of our favorite bones from Oscar nominee skeletons.

5. Aunjanue Ellis (Best Supporting Actress, King Richard): The Resident (2011)

Ellis alone is reason to see King Richard. She’s breathtaking. But she hasn’t always had such luck with roles. In Antti Jokinen’s lifeless voyeur horror The Resident, she gets little to do but be the supportive bestie while a slumming Hilary Swank struggles with her new landlord.

Christopher Lee makes an appearance in what might be the only interesting thing about the film – not his performance as much as his presence. This was one of Hammer Studios modern releases, reuniting Lee with the studio that made him (or was it Lee who made the studio?).

Other than that, Jeffrey Dean Morgan misses the mark, Swank degrades herself and Ellis goes underutilized.

4. Ciarán Hinds (Best Supporting Actor, Belfast): The Rite (2011)

Veteran character actor Ciarán Hinds gets his first Oscar nomination this year for Belfast. No stranger to horror, Hinds has starred in the good (The Woman in Black), the bad (Mary Reilly) and the underseen (The Eclipse).

He does what he can to class up Mikael Hafstrom’s pedestrian 2011 possession flick The Rite.

Hoping to help a seminarian find his faith, Hinds’s Father Xavier sends him to learn exorcism from the best: Hanibal Lecter. No, it’s Anthony Hopkins as Father Lucas Trevant, but they know what you’re thinking.

Hopkins hams it up, trying to resuscitate Michael Petroni’s script with as much bombast as he can muster. It doesn’t work. Hinds is wasted, but so too are Rutger Hauer, Alice Braga and Toby Jones.

3. JK Simmons (Best Supporting Actor, Being the Ricardos): The Snowman (2017)

If we were weighing by disappointment, The Snowman would be #1. Tomas Alfredson followed up Let the Right One In and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with this Norwegian crime thriller and he packed his cast with heavy hitters: Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Val Kilmer, Toby Jones, Chloe Sevigny, and 2022 nominee for Best Supporting Actor in Being the Ricardos, JK Simmons.

Why does it feel like there are gaping holes in the plot? Because the film was released, but they didn’t shoot the entire script. Who needs all the pieces to a mystery, anyway?

The actors do what they can, but the source material trades in darkness for misogyny and nonsense. Gainsbourg, Sevigny and Ferguson all play thankless roles while Simmons’s character appears, seems like a bad guy, disappears and never makes a dent in the storyline.

Nonsense.

2. Kirsten Dunst (Best Supporting Actress, The Power of the Dog): The Crow: Salvation (2000)

Sure, we could have gone with fan-favorite Interivew with the Vampire because, after all, it was not very good. Kirsten Dunst, Oscar-nominated this year for The Power of the Dog, was great in it, though.

She’s the best thing bout The Crow: Salvation, too, but that’s not saying a lot.

The third installment sees a surprisingly stacked cast (including Walton Goggins and Fred Ward) conspire to let a scapegoat die for their sins. He comes back as the single blandest Crow ever.

Dunst is the victim’s sister and she does what she can, but the writing is god-awful, the makeup is laughable, the staging, action, set design and direction are all just sad. It made us sad she took the role.

1. Kristen Stewart (Best Actress, Spencer): Twilight: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012)

Before we start, we want to point out that, like her Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson, Kriten Stewart has proven to be a dependable, remarkable talent. She’s shown adaptability and range across a ton of great indie films, some of them very solid genre efforts. We were thrilled to see her nab her first nomination for Spencer.

But before all that, there was Twilight. This series could be the whole podcast. Do you know why? They SUCK. Shiny vegetarian vampires? Mopey, special teens? YA fodder with the most profoundly backwards, disempowering message? Yes to all four films, so which is the worst?

The last one is the worst one because of 1) that creepy baby, 2) the imprinting. The CGI on that fast-growing Renesme is diabolically bad, but not nearly as heinous as the plotline where a grown man chooses an infant for his future spouse and that infant’s parents are good with it. So wrong.

New In Theaters, Slider

One Vision

Leave a comment

Zack Snyder’s Justice League

by George Wolf

No matter what you thought of Justice League 1.0, the mere arrival of this “Snyder Cut” is fascinating on multiple levels.

It’s more than the Everest of fan service. There just isn’t any way Snyder’s DCEU epic – this version of it anyway – would exist without the Snyder/Whedon mashup mess of 2017.

It’s four freaking hours, people! You think Snyder’s gonna get that (and the extra millions for reshoots) without the whole hashtag campaign? But while the extended time and money giveth, they also taketh away, meaning that first JL debacle can take some ironic credit for all that’s better – and worse – about round two.

But it is indeed better.

More than anything, it’s a singular vision. The first was nothing if not a super-sized compromise, but this is Snyder unbound, no compromises. The 4:3 format is enriched with greatly improved CGI, specifically the “armor of scales” appearance of Steppenwolf (voiced by Ciaran Hinds), the underwater depths of Atlantis and the complete absence of Superman’s (Henry Cavill, again a perfect Clark Kent) distractingly altered upper lip.

The character development – as you would hope with this run time – is much more satisfying, especially with the two justice leaguers we know the least: Flash (Ezra Miller) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher).

And while truly important moments (Superman’s death and rebirth, for example) get the extra time they need to resonate, Snyder can still linger too long (those mini music videos, ugh) when he could be moving on.

Ben Affleck reminds you he’s a fine grizzled Batman, Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman gets more badass moments and fewer leering camera angels, and at its core, the basic plot remains the same. Steppenwolf is seeking to unite the three “mother boxes” that will conquer another world for his master Darkseid (voiced by Ray Porter). But with the nurturing of return characters and the welcome appearance of new ones (like Darkseid), the chaptered storytelling feels more natural and complete.

Yes it is dark and brooding, and this League may hold the mother lode of daddy issues, but it never becomes tedious. And while you can’t quite call it fun, it is super, and heroic, and sometimes thrilling.

The stinger (actually an epilogue)? It’s a humdinger (nothing rhymes with epilogue), one that will more than satisfy the die hards while setting a major hook for more justice, darkly served.

New In Theaters, Slider

Strike a Pose

Leave a comment

Justice League

by George Wolf

Fair or foul, each new superhero film release spurs a check of the scorecards: Marvel vs. DC. Last year, Wonder Woman finally put a solid check in the DC column, one that Justice League only leaves frustrated and alone.

Nearly every facet of the film not only betrays a few promising avenues left undeveloped, but also its basic superhero tenets that are bettered by similar films (including the underrated Batman v. Superman). These friends aren’t super, they’re awkwardly forced and often helpless against some distracting CGI.

Perhaps even more than superpowers, big screen heroes need memorable villains, and the newly formed Justice League offers none. Instead, they have Steppenwolf.

Steppenwolf is a mass of weak computer graphics (voiced by Ciaran Hinds), born to be wild but currently in search of the three “mother boxes” he needs to unleash “the end of worlds” and send everyone back to the Dark Ages.

With Superman (Henry Cavill) still dead, Batman (Ben Affleck) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) recruit the surly Aquaman (Jason Momoa), the young Flash (Ezra Miller) and the brooding Cyborg (Ray Fisher) to join the cause.

They have the bodies. What they don’t have are characters worthy of investment.

Director Zack Snyder has them pose, trade overly dramatic declarations, and then do some additional posing while you may be checking your watch.

Comparisons to the first Avengers film are inevitable, especially with Joss Whedon on board as a co-writer, but Justice League just cannot get any resonance from the darker tone of the DC franchise. The push to be heavy and meaningful is an empty suit, despite well-meaning lip service to refugees and the importance of science.

Ironically, as the Marvel films continue to lean more comedic, the humorous moments in Justice League, usually courtesy of Miller and Mamoa, are among the film’s best. Rather than undercutting any dramatic tension, the humor here feels more logical and organic, similar to the highly effective funny bone in the recent Spider-Man: Homecoming.

And, with Gadot back on board, the difference in Wonder Woman through a male director’s lens is hard to miss. Yes, she gets some bad ass moments that she’s more than earned, but she also gets a more sexualized, less earnest presentation.

There are two extra “stinger” scenes to send you out discussing who the JL is fighting next, but perhaps the lasting impression of Justice League is just how behind-the-curve it all looks. Steppenwolf seems lifted from an old gaming commercial you might find on that VHS tape still lurking in your basement, while Cavill’s digitally-altered mouth (to remove a contractually obligated porn ‘stache he had during reshoots) sits there proudly like a new zit on prom night.

There is substance to be gleaned from DC, Wonder Woman was proof of that. But for now, Justice League is two tired steps back.