Serenity

serenity_

All Wet

“There’s some weird stuff going on right now,” drawls Matthew McConaughey in Serenity.  He doesn’t know the half of it.  McConaughey plays Baker Dill, a fisherman on the picturesque, ambiguously-located Plymouth Island.  Baker spends his days taking lazy tourists for chartered fishing trips while obsessing over a particular tuna that has evaded him multiple times.  His first mate Duke (the always-charismatic Djimon Hounsou) worries about Baker’s deteriorating mental state, as well as the pair’s dwindling funds. Continue reading

Destroyer

destroyer

Nicole Un-dimed

“[Actor] as you’ve never seen him/her before” is a movie marketing cliché I’ve grown to hate, but damn if Destroyer doesn’t earn it.  As burnout LAPD detective Erin Bell, Nicole Kidman looks, in a word, rough.  The beautiful actress is borderline unrecognizable here, sporting the face of an “after” picture in an anti-meth PSA.  Erin’s hair is brittle, her teeth are gray, and her blue eyes – her one intact feature – are sunken.  Her clothes hang off what appears to be a scarecrow-thin body.  It’s an amazing makeup job, is what I’m getting at, and one that never distracts from the core of the movie. Continue reading