Mercy is a movie constructed of shameless copaganda and gross A.I. apologia. It’s no wonder that Jeff Bezos -whose Amazon owns MGM- is ultimately behind it. It is also little surprise that Chris Pratt, whose personal conservative proclivities have come out more and more frequently in recent years, is its central star, though spending much of the movie sat in a chair. The film is directed by Timur Bekmambetov, of Wanted and more appropriately last year’s disastrous War of the Worlds adaptation and uses a similar dependence on storytelling through screens here -a gimmick that was once neat and interesting when something like Searching was a one-off, but has become increasingly dull and repetitive a conceit. How many times do we need to zoom in on a new tab or window opening? At least this one lets us see into Pratt’s immediate surroundings. Extremely faint praise though and about all that this movie deserves as it seems to exist as the Devil’s Advocate for artificial i...
Train Dreams is the kind of movie that only makes you more frustrated with Netflix. The film had the smallest of theatrical runs before dropping on the streaming service to no fanfare until some people started noticing it and it gained some awards season traction. But it is the kind of movie in visuals and narrative scale that is made for the theatrical experience -it’s setting and atmosphere would resonate so well in that context, its power of immersion would be stronger. It’s a good movie to watch in any case, but at home it is just clearly the inferior version. That said I wouldn’t quite compare its natural cinematography by Adolpho Veloso to the work of Terence Malick, as has been stated by some, though the tone of the piece is certainly similar. Directed by Clint Bentley and written by him and Greg Kwedar (the two collaborated previously on Sing Sing -with Kwedar directing from a script by him and Bentley), the storytelling of Train Dreams is fairly minimalis...