Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022) Review

Time: 117 Minutes
Age Rating: Violence, cruelty & content that may disturb
Cast:
Ewan McGregor as Sebastian J. Cricket
David Bradley as Master Geppetto
Gregory Mann as Pinocchio
Burn Gorman as the Priest
Ron Perlman as the Podestà
John Turturro as the Dottore
Finn Wolfhard as Candlewick
Tim Blake Nelson as the Black Rabbits
Christoph Waltz as Count Volpe
Tilda Swinton as The Wood Sprite and Death
Director: Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson

A father’s wish magically brings a wooden boy to life in Italy, giving him a chance to care for the child. However, the two of them have to struggle to find a place for themselves as Italy becomes embroiled in fascism.

For a bizarre reason, there were 3 Pinocchio movies released in 2022. One was called Pinocchio: A True Story which quickly became a laughing stock after the first trailer was released, and then there’s the live action remake from Robert Zemeckis which wasn’t received that favourably either. However, there was a third Pinocchio adaptation helmed by Guillermo del Toro, which was a stop motion animated film. While I didn’t watch the first two Pinocchio adaptations, I’m pretty confident that this is the best of those films from this year.

This movie tells its captivating story well, there is so much love and passion on display here. There is a good tonal balance between being sweet and uplifting as well as being darker and emotional. The core of the store is childlike, and has the sense of wonder that’s in del Toro’s other movies. However, the story is surprisingly complex, heavy and unafraid to get dark, which you can quickly pick up on when you learn that the story is set in fascist Italy under the rule of Mussolini. This is another movie Del Toro movie which has his signature exploration of socio-political themes including grief, religion, war and morality, and they are well handled.

There is a large voice cast assembled for Pinocchio, and the voice acting really is strong. Gregory Mann excellently embodies the character of Pinocchio excellently. However the standout for me was David Bradley, who brought so much pain and emotion to Gepetto. Other standouts include Ewan McGregor, Christoph Waltz, Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton, while the rest of the cast including Ron Perlman, Finn Wolfhard, Tim Blake Nelson, Burn Gorman and John Turturro also deliver in their roles.

Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson directed this, and their work is truly fantastic. The stop motion animation is gorgeous and stellar, everything looks like a work of art, and the movements are flawless. The creature and character designs are great, and the set pieces, backgrounds and production design are wonderful with so much detail. The score by Alexandre Desplat is good and fits the movie well. The songs and the singing sequences are decent and fit well into the movie, but honestly aren’t that memorable.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a mature, charming, magical and wonderfully crafted film, with stellar voice performances, and fantastically stunning stop motion animation. Even if you are familiar with the classic Pinocchio story, I highly recommend checking this one out. Strong contender for the best animated film of this year.

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Watcher (2022) Review

Time: 91 Minutes
Cast:
Maika Monroe as Julia
Karl Glusman as Francis
Burn Gorman as Daniel Weber
Director: Chloe Okuno

As a serial killer stalks the city, a young actress who just moved to town with her boyfriend notices a mysterious stranger watching her from across the street.

I knew only a little about Watcher, just that it was a thriller about Maika Monroe being stalked by someone. While the movie doesn’t have many surprises, it nonetheless works very well at what it sets out to do.

Watcher is a psychological and paranoid thriller which takes its time as a slow burn. It leans more into subtle and nuanced storytelling and is powerfully effective as it slowly builds its suspense. The tension unfolds slows and there is a real sense of dread and paranoia. Storywise its pretty standard, straightforward and simple, and it doesn’t really surprise at any point. However I was nonetheless riveted and interested to see how it would play out. The added element of the protagonist being in a different country with a language barrier does add a lot to it; it helped to make the lead character played by Maika Monroe feel more isolated even before she finds someone stalking her. In terms of any actual criticisms outside of its familiarity, I thought that the ending was a little abrupt.

One of Watcher’s biggest strengths is Maika Monroe as the lead character who is being followed. She effectively conveys the isolation, struggle and helplessness of her situation in a very believable performance. She is great and one of the highlights of the film. The rest of the actors are fine but nothing special and there’s not much to say about them. The exception is Burn Gorman who plays the stalker (or titular Watcher). We see glimpses of him before seeing his face and even after the film shows his face, it’s a while before we hear his voice. Without saying or doing much, Gorman is great at conveying this unsettling aura about him.

Chloe Okuno directed Watcher very well, this is a very impressive debut for her. The cinematography is slick and well done, and I particularly like how it captures the stranger, initially obscuring him and putting you in the protagonist’s position. That combined with the quieter moments, and the unsettling sound design and the eerie score from Nathan Halpern help to make you feel unnerved.

Watcher is a great paranoia and psychological thriller. Despite its familiar setup, its directed strongly and is led by an excellent and convincing performance from Maika Monroe, making it worth checking out.

Pacific Rim (2013) Review

Time: 132 Minutes
Age Rating: Violence
Cast:
Charlie Hunnam as Raleigh Becket
Idris Elba as Marshal Stacker Pentecost
Rinko Kikuchi as Mako Mori
Charlie Day as Dr. Newton ‘Newt’ Geiszler
Ron Perlman as Hannibal Chau
Robert Kazinsky as Chuck Hansen
Max Martini as Hercules “Herc” Hansen
Clifton Collins Jr. as Tendo Choi
Burn Gorman as Dr. Hermann Gottlieb
Director: Guillermo del Toro

The government assumes the Jaegers, robotic war machines battling the Kaijus, to be ineffective. However, Stacker Pentecost’s (Idris Elba) team believes that only the Jaegers can save the world from destruction.

It had been a while since I watched Pacific Rim, I remembered liking it when I watched it previously. Having re-watched many of del Toro’s movies more recently however, I decided to revisit it. It is quite a different movie from Del Toro, a large scale blockbuster, even larger than the Hellboy movies. Pacific Rim isn’t great, but it is far better than it had any right to be, with it being quite entertaining and well made generally.

The story itself is pretty predictable and by the numbers for this genre, and a lot of the characters are typical and I wasn’t really invested with them. I will say that to the movie’s credit, there was character development and depth and at least they made an effort with them (although not enough to make the characters great). Also while the story isn’t anything special, the story is not overly complicated and is straight forward enough, while also having subplots which fit into the rest of the story quite well. When watching Pacific Rim, live-action anime was what really came to mind, and from what I can tell they really pulled it off. It really is a solid harmony between sci-fi and monster movies. The movie is undoubtedly silly, but it fully embraces its silliness. The movie is self aware, and some of the dialogue is cheesy yet awesome at times (Idris Elba’s “We are cancelling the apocalypse” comes to mind). Del Toro knew exactly what movie he was making and that really works to its benefit. At the same time, it doesn’t feel like a cash-grab or lazy blockbuster, it’s clear that a lot of love and effort was put into making this movie.

The cast I’d say are probably decent at best but most of the problems goes to the characters, for the most part there isn’t quite enough material for the actors to be great. Charles Hunnam is a decent actor and he’s okay in the leading role here, albeit quite bland. However his character doesn’t have much to him, the only thing I remembered about him is that he was played by Charlie Hunnam and his brother dies early in the movie. The two performances that stood out the most in the movie for me were Rinko Kikuchi and Idris Elba. Charlie Day and Burn Gorman play over the top eccentric scientists, and Ron Perlman is also entertaining in his few scenes. The rest of the cast I don’t really remember, they don’t really leave much of an impression.

Guillermo del Toro is the reason why Pacific Rim was as good as it was, it would’ve been a lot weaker without his direction. It is visually stunning, with some beautiful cinematography, great use of colour, as well as detailed production design. The spectacular visual effects have held up quite well even over 7 years later, with the CGI being near perfect. The action sequences are among the parts that stand out the most, and those scenes are really great. The action is very large and does well at showing off the scale and designs of the two opposing forces. It would’ve been so easy for these moments to look like a mess, but with Pacific Rim, you can really get a good look at everything that’s happening on screen. The battles during the night-time are particularly look great. There’s a battle that takes place at night time around halfway through and that’s where it really where the movie took a step up for me. The monsters were greatly designed and detailed (as you can expect from del Toro).

Pacific Rim is definitely a silly action movie, however it is nonetheless an entertaining blockbuster that knows what it is. Even with the dumb moments and less than stellar characters, it’s directed quite well and generally keeps you watching for the visuals alone. It’s definitely in the lower section of Guillermo del Toro’s filmography but his work here is still impressive. I think it’s worth a watch at the very least, if you haven’t seen it already.

Layer Cake (2004) Review

Time: 105 Minutes
Age Rating: Violence, offensive language, drug use and sex scenes
Cast:
Daniel Craig as XXXX
Colm Meaney as Gene
Kenneth Cranham as Jimmy Price
George Harris as Morty
Jamie Foreman as the Duke
Michael Gambon as Eddie Temple
Marcel Iureş as Slavo
Tom Hardy as Clarkie
Tamer Hassan as Terry
Ben Whishaw as Sidney
Burn Gorman as Gazza
Sally Hawkins as Slasher
Sienna Miller as Tammy
Director: Matthew Vaughn

An unnamed mid-level cocaine dealer (Daniel Craig) in London makes plans to step away from the criminal life. Before he can cut ties, the dealer’s supplier Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham) draws him into a complicated pair of jobs involving kidnapping the teenage daughter of a rival gangster (Michael Gambon) and brokering the purchase of a large shipment of ecstasy pills from a dealer known as “the Duke” (Jamie Foreman), leading to a series of elaborate double-crosses from all corners.

Layer Cake was Matthew Vaughn’s first movie, before then he produced some of Guy Ritchie’s movies. It was very well received and put him on the map as a director to watch, with him very nearly directing the third X-Men movie afterwards. Although I saw it already years ago, I wanted to check it out again, since I was already rewatching some of Matthew Vaughn’s movies recently. It’s even better than what I remembered it being from my first viewing.

Layer Cake is written by J.J. Connelly, adapting his book of the same name for the big screen. It’s a pretty standard British crime thriller, albeit a very good one with some twists and turns. One could compare this to Guy Ritchie’s crime movies (especially seeing as how Vaughn was involved with Ritchie’s early movies), although there are some similarities, there are plenty of distinct differences between them, especially when it comes to the tone. Vaughn’s other R rated movies generally has a lot of dark comedy to it, Layer Cake on the other hand is more serious, more like a crime thriller and doesn’t have as much comedy. It for sure has some brief dark comedy at points however. It’s actually pretty riveting over the hour and 45 minutes runtime. I think the main reason that this all works really well together though is because of the lead character, which I’ll get into in a bit.

As good as a bunch of all this is, Layer Cake wouldn’t have been as great without Daniel Craig, who honestly makes this movie. Craig is outstanding as the unnamed lead character (not exactly sure why his name is never revealed), who in this movie is more of a businessman than a gangster, in fact he hates gangsters and violence. He also shows a very wide range of emotions as he’s thrown into so many situations that he’s struggling to keep alive in, and through his performance you can really root for the lead character. You can definitely tell why Daniel Craig was picked for James Bond, there’s a lot of Bond that you can see in his performance here. One of Craig’s best, if not his best performance. The rest of the cast also played their parts really well. The rest of the cast including Colm Meaney, George Harris, Michael Gambon, Tom Hardy, Ben Whishaw and Sienna Miller all play their roles very well. Gambon in particular was great as a ruthless and villainous sort of character, quite different from other roles that he’s had.

For a debut, Matthew Vaughn did a great job, it doesn’t look like his first movie at all. It’s all filmed and edited very well, the music choices were also perfect, he’s got a real great handle over the whole movie.

Layer Cake is an outstanding directorial debut from Matthew Vaughn, a well written and directed crime thriller, with Daniel Craig’s great lead performance really making the movie. It’s an underrated little flick that definitely deserves a lot more praise and really worth a watch if you haven’t seen it already.