Posts Tagged ‘Richard Jenkins’

Short Take: Entertaining, clever, and original. Not a combination that comes around often

Director: Drew Goddard

Screenwriters: Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard

Cast: Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford

Length: 1h 35m

Synopsis: Five painfully typical college students escape to a cabin in the woods for a weekend getaway, where they are helpless to and unaware of the manipulations of a secret organization that’s trying to orchestrate their deaths at the hands of supernatural evils. The cabin itself rests on a secluded plot of land that is cut-off from the outside world, and underneath it is where the horror waits to be unleashed. Through various means the organization encourages the nubiles to break the appropriate genre rules so as to warrant their imminent deaths, which come at the hands of a randomly selected terror. The peculiar thing about all of this is that the puppeteers of the organization do not bother with such elaborate plotting for their own twisted amusement. Indeed, they do it for a much greater cause. But what on Earth could that be?

Read the rest of this entry »

Short Take: Amusing and apropos, but lacking in substance

Director: Bruce Robinson

Screenwriter: Bruce Robinson; Hunter S. Thompson (novel)

Cast: Johnny Depp, Aaron Eckhart, Giovanni Ribisi, Amber Heard, Michael Rispoli, Richard Jenkins

Length: 2h

Synopsis: American journalist/aspiring novelist Paul Kemp (Depp) is desperate for a job, so he takes one at a small fledgling newspaper in Puerto Rico as an odd job reporter and amateur horoscopes writer. The decade is the 1950s and the island of Puerto Rico is in political flux, with locals constantly protesting about one issue or another and big wigs working to capitalize on hotel properties and U.S. government contracts. One such big wig, named Sanderson (Eckhart), stumbles upon Kemp and decides he’s the man with the suitably buttery words needed for a PR campaign needed to sell the proposition of building several new island resorts. Kemp accepts the offer, but a complication arises by the name of Chenault (Heard), Sanderson’s mistress. Meanwhile, Kemp struggles to focus on assignments for the bogus paper, seemingly incapable of averting his attention from booze, his roommate Sala’s (Rispoli) insanitary nightlife, or Chenault’s under-table flirtations. Such distractions consequently lead to problems with Sanderson, but more importantly they serve to actually awaken Kemp to bigger problems within and about his surroundings, as well as his own life.

Read the rest of this entry »