A Review: The Bourne Legacy

"Who the hell is he?!"

Yes. Just who in the hell is Aaron Cross? Why is he a white man, with medium build, short brown hair and hard stare? Because this is America, we're assholes and these are our heroes? An international agency with global operatives and this is the best we can come up with to separate ourselves from Jason Bourne? And why is he towing around a white brunette who looks scared and needs saving again? (Sans Euro-accent, points for that) Why, did the man who crafted the scripts for first three films, feel the need to keep the two new leads so close to the formula of the original trilogy?

Why not Idris Elba and Penelope Cruiz? Or Adrien Brody and Kerry Washington? Joseph Gordan-Levitt and Kate Mara or a Christina Hendricks type? (Reaching, maybe, but it's not entirely stupid) Just, totally new and fresh faces, anyone else but these two--as great a pair of performers as they are with film legacies and history behind them set. And that's not the point of these opening paragraphs either. Their fine, but not for material that needs distance from it's predecessor literally in need of a face-lift.

Lord knows after Clayton, Gilory has his pick of actors. How do you think he got Edward Norton and Rachel Weisz in this picture?

A Review: There Will Be Blood

"I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. . .  I hate most people."

                                                                                                                                                  --Daniel Plainview

Daniel Plainview has done whatever it took him to get to the top of the oil business, to do deals with others to attain his wealth, success and seclusion. Although I won't say he wasn't an honest, hardworking businessman who took all the (nearly) legal steps to get to where he is by the end. Eventually spending his days shooting his rifle at random objects inside the halls of his mansion.

Drunk, dark, wobbly, and greasy. But alas, this is we feel, the payoff he has been working his whole life for. To do what he wants, inside his own walls, with only himself.

The two scenes that follow that introduction to Old Man Plainview are both, powerful, darkly comic and quite simply an astonishing show of an acting Grandmaster, who essentially, is just not acting anymore.