Breakfast All Day Podcast 9/6/22
Don’t worry darling — Breakfast All Day is back. And Alonso is recovering and feeling perky just in time to talk about whether Harry Styles actually spit on Chris Pine at the Venice Film Festival. Also in news, we discuss the movies premiering at Telluride, new trailers for “White Noise” and “Empire of Light,” accusations against Arcade Fire’s Win Butler, and Rob Schneider saying he’ll toss away his career for his beliefs, whatever that means. We also catch up with a review of the satire “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.,” featuring excellent performances from Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown. And over at our Patreon, we finally recap the season 2 finale of “Only Murders in the Building” as well as episodes 2 and 3 of “She-Hulk.” Thanks for your patience!
Check out “Carter” on Netflix. It is a Korean action movie that apparently cost 30 billion Won ($20+ million). It is totally bonkers. Sure, the plot is totally incoherent. But that’s not surprising in movie with this much action. That said, even by the low, low standards of action movies, the plot in this movie is totally incoherent and unbelievable.
But how about the action? Except for a few mercifully short expository scenes, it’s non-stop action. It’s set piece after set piece, all of them totally over the top. Bundle all the set pieces from all the “Mission Impossible” movies together into a single continuous sequence. That represents about ten minutes of this movie.
The set pieces all go on far too long. But the dialog scenes are so painfully bad that they make you long for the action to resume. The film is cut together so that it appears to be composed of long continuous takes. And each take consists almost entirely of bonkers over the top action. Any one of the set pieces, if slowed down and presented in a less frenetic manner, would be the highlight of a good action movie. But these are so over the top and so relentless that they punish you.
As one example, remember the guys on poles in “Mad Max: Fury Road”. This film tops that by a mile. It has multiple guys hanging from wires underneath multiple helicopters. And the helicopters are battling amongst themselves, so they are doing wild loops and turns. At one point one helicopter does a barrel roll while a bunch of guys are climbing all over it fighting.
Is this a good movie. Hell, no! It’s terrible. But the action sequences demand to be seen. They defy description in their sheer audacity. But be warned. Watching this movie may ruin you when it comes to any other action-heavy movie. Action wise, they will pale by comparison to this extravaganza.
And it is the ability of this movie to cram so much “how did they do that” action into just over two hours that makes this movie required viewing for any serious student of action cinema.