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thedullwoodexperiment

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Tag Archives: Michael Nyqvist

10 Reasons to Remember Michael Nyqvist (1960-2017)

28 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Actor, Career, Malmö Theatre Academy, Michael Nyqvist, Millennium Trilogy, Movies, Sweden

Michael Nyqvist (8 November 1960 – 27 June 2017)

Although he was born in Sweden, Michael Nyqvist’s interest in acting began when he was a teenager living as an exchange student in Omaha, Nebraska. He made several stage appearances while he was a senior in high school, but on his return to Sweden he was accepted into ballet school; he gave it up though after a year. When he was twenty-four he was accepted into the Malmö Theatre Academy, and his career as an actor began in earnest. But for a long while he appeared solely on the stage before he made his first appearance on screen in a TV movie called Kamraterna (1982) (as The Model). However, it wasn’t until the mid-Nineties that Nyqvist began to get regular work as an on-screen actor, and it wasn’t until he appeared in Lukas Moodysson’s Together (2000) that he really made an impression on audiences and critics.

From then on, Nyqvist made a number of Swedish movies that traded on his ability to portray fierce yet vulnerable male characters, and with a great deal of sincerity and intelligence. But it was his role as the journalist Mikael Blomkvist in the Millennium Trilogy – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009), The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009), and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2009) – that brought him to the attention of international audiences, and in particular, Hollywood’s casting agents. Two years later and he was making his English language debut in the sadly less than enthralling Abduction (2011). From there he combined working in Hollywood with working in Sweden, and maintained an integrity in his work that guaranteed good performances, even if the material he was working with wasn’t quite up to the standard required. Regarded unfairly perhaps as a “serious” actor, Nyqvist was always able to find the light and shade in most of the characters he played, and he was always a magnetic presence when on screen. In short, he was one of that select band of actors who always improved a movie they appeared in, and you could count on him to deliver a thoughtful, considered performance whatever the genre. For that, he will be sorely missed, and even more so for dying at such a relatively young age.

1 – Together (2000)

2 – The Guy in the Grave Next Door (2002)

3 – As It Is in Heaven (2004)

4 – Suddenly (2006)

5 – The Black Pimpernel (2007)

6 – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

7 – Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011)

8 – My So-Called Father (2014)

9 – John Wick (2014)

10 – The Colony (2015)

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Monthly Roundup – October 2016

31 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

400 Days, Action, Africa, Alexander Skarsgård, Christoph Waltz, Crime, David Yates, Documentary, End of a Gun, Greg Kwedar, Historical drama, John Dower, Johnny Simmons, Keoni Waxman, Louis Theroux, Malin Buska, Margot Robbie, Matt Osterman, Michael Nyqvist, Mika Kaurismäki, Monthly roundup, My Scientology Movie, Queen Kristina of Sweden, Reviews, Samuel L. Jackson, Sarah Gadon, Sci-fi, Steven Seagal, The Girl King, The Legend of Tarzan, Thriller, Transpecos

The Legend of Tarzan / D: David Yates / 110m

Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Samuel L. Jackson, Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz, Djimon Hounsou, Jim Broadbent, Simon Russell Beale, Ben Chaplin

the-legend-of-tarzan-movie-review

Rating: 3/10 – “meh”; woeful only just about covers how bad this movie is, from the wooden performances, to the haphazard scripting, to Yates’s casual engagement with the material, and all the way to the creaky use of CGI to simulate the African backgrounds – at no point does The Legend of Tarzan ever feel as if it has any intention of putting any real effort into things.

400 Days (2015) / D: Matt Osterman / 91m

Cast: Brandon Routh, Dane Cook, Caity Lotz, Ben Feldman, Tom Cavanagh, Grant Bowler, Dominic Bogart, Fernanda Romero, Sally Pressman, Mark Steger

400-days-movie-review

Rating: 4/10 – four astronauts are locked inside a chamber designed to simulate the timescale of a planned mission, and the psychological effects of such a journey, but as the simulation nears its finish, the quartet find that things aren’t entirely what they seem; a mystery thriller that doesn’t need its sci-fi trappings (and where the mystery is unengaging), 400 Days plays out like an old Outer Limits episode but without the succinctness that show could provide, all of which leaves the viewer trying hard to make sense of what’s going on, and trying equally hard to decide whether or not they should be bothered about it all.

The Girl King (2015) / D: Mika Kaurismäki / 106m

Cast: Malin Buska, Sarah Gadon, Michael Nyqvist, Lucas Bryant, Laura Birn, Hippolyte Girardot, Peter Lohmeyer, François Arnaud, Patrick Bauchau

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Rating: 5/10 – the story of Queen Kristina of Sweden (Buska), who in the ten years she ruled her country, did her best to bring enlightenment and peace for everyone, and who fought against her advisors’ insistence that she marry and secure her throne for the future; reminiscent of the Euro-pudding movies so prevalent in the late Seventies and throughout the Eighties, The Girl King lacks a coherent shooting style that isn’t helped by Hans Funck’s scattershot approach to the editing, but it does keep things admirably simple (if not too simple at times), and remains unexpectedly watchable thanks to Kaurismäki’s determined effort to convert Kristina’s reign (and her presumed lesbianism) into historical soap opera.

My Scientology Movie (2015) / D: John Dower / 99m

With: Louis Theroux, Marty Rathbun, Marc Headley, Tom De Vocht, Jeff Hawkins, Andrew Perez, Rob Alter

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Rating: 7/10 – Louis Theroux, intrepid (and annoying) documentarian turns his attention onto Scientology, and attempts to understand why the organisation is so litigious and defensive about its practices; Theroux teams up with ex-Scientology bigwig Marty Rathbun to learn about what goes on behind the scenes, but succeeds largely in having childish spats with one of the organisation’s “security” team (very funny indeed), while organising a filmed representation of a meeting where Scientology leader David Miscavage threw a major tantrum, all of which leaves My Scientology Movie feeling arid for long stretches and not quite as illuminating as Theroux might have hoped.

Transpecos (2016) / D: Greg Kwedar / 86m

Cast: Johnny Simmons, Gabriel Luna, Clifton Collins Jr, Julio Oscar Mechoso

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Rating: 5/10 – three Border Patrol guards find themselves in trouble with a Mexican cartel when they stop the wrong car at a checkpoint, and learn that one of them is in even deeper trouble than anyone knew; Transpecos makes good use of its New Mexico locations, and the opening twenty minutes point towards the movie being a tense, tightly constructed thriller, but sadly it soon degenerates into an unconvincing, meandering collection of scenes that are often dramatically inert, and which stretch the narrative in a variety of ineffective ways that it can’t recover from.

End of a Gun (2016) / D: Keoni Waxman / 87m

Cast: Steven Seagal, Florin Piersic Jr, Jade Ewen, Ovidiu Nicolescu, Jonathan Rosenthal, Alexandre Nguyen, Claudiu Bleont

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Rating: 4/10 – retired DEA agent-cum-“ghost” Michael Decker (Seagal) rescues a stripper (Ewen) from her abusive boyfriend (by killing him) and finds himself helping her steal €2m of the man’s money – which doesn’t go down well with his drug czar boss; another Romanian-shot quickie from Seagal that keeps his stunt double, his running double, and his walking double in gainful employment, End of a Gun is made bearable thanks to a good performance from Piersic Jr, and Waxman’s ingenuity when shooting low-budget shootouts, but otherwise it’s business as usual, which is to say, pretty awful (and the less said about ex-Sugababes member Ewen, the better).

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John Wick (2014)

15 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Action, Adrianne Palicki, Assassin, Chad Stahelski, David Leitch, Dead wife, Drama, Keanu Reeves, Michael Nyqvist, Revenge, Review, Russian Mafia, Thriller, Willem Dafoe

John Wick

D: Chad Stahelski, David Leitch / 101m

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Michael Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Willem Dafoe, Dean Winters, Adrianne Palicki, Toby Leonard Moore, Daniel Bernhardt, Omer Barnea, Lance Reddick, Ian McShane, John Leguizamo, Bridget Moynahan

Having lost his wife, Helen (Moynahan), to an unexpected illness, retired assassin John Wick (Reeves) receives a posthumous gift from her: a puppy called Daisy. They begin to bond, and Wick takes her with him when he travels anywhere. At a gas station one day, Wick encounters a trio of Russian gang members; their leader, Iosef (Allen) asks to buy his car but Wick rebuffs him. Later that night, the trio break into Wick’s home, beat him up, kill Daisy, and make off with his car. While he recovers, Iosef takes the car to a chop shop run by Aurelio (Leguizamo) but he refuses to have anything to do with Iosef or the car. Wick visits Aurelio and learns that Iosef is the son of his former boss, Viggo Tarasov (Nyqvist). When Viggo finds out what his son has done, he’s less than happy; he tells Iosef that Wick was the best hitman in the business, not the boogeyman, but the man you sent to kill the boogeyman.

Viggo attempts to placate Wick but has no luck. He sends a hit squad to kill Wick at his home but Wick despatches them all. Viggo then puts out an open contract for $2 million on Wick, and approaches Marcus (Dafoe), Wick’s mentor, directly; Marcus agrees to take the job. Meanwhile, Wick checks in to the Continental, a hotel run by Winston (McShane) that caters to assassins. Wick learns that Iosef is being protected at a nightclub called Red Circle. He goes there but is stopped from killing Iosef by the intervention of Viggo’s enforcer Kirill (Bernhardt). Wounded, he returns to the hotel where he is attacked by fellow assassin Ms Perkins (Palicki). Overpowering her, he forces her to tell him where Viggo keeps both his private papers and the bulk of his personal cash.

The papers and cash are in a church vault; Wick burns it all. When Viggo arrives, Wick ambushes him and his men, but Kirill uses an SUV to knock Wick unconscious. Taken to an abandoned warehouse and tied up, Viggo remonstrates with Wick over his idea that he could ever lead a normal life. He leaves Wick to be killed by Kirill, but things don’t turn out as he expects.

John Wick - scene

A revenge movie with a distinctive visual style, John Wick is a huge breath of fresh air in a genre that often feels stodgy and underwhelming, and which often relies on rapid cross-cutting and headache-inducing editing tricks to give energy to its action scenes. This definitely isn’t the case here, with directors Stahelski and Leitch’s background as stunt coordinators bringing an impressive edge to the fight sequences, as they bring a whole new meaning to the phrase “gun-fu”.

Even more impressive than the action is the world created by the directors and writer Derek Kolstad. It’s at such a remove from our own world that it seems to operate independently, with its own rules and hierarchies. The Continental is a case in point, an establishment that allows no “business” on its premises, and inflicts the severest of penalties if that rule is ignored. It’s a world where respect and a person’s reputation carry as much caché as money, and where John Wick has the most respect of anyone. It’s also a world that appears bleached of positive feeling, where people hide behind polite, expressionless façades but are quick to display fear, anger and mistrust. And it’s a criminal underworld that mixes old-fashioned codes of conduct with a modern disregard for them when necessary. Against this, Wick acts like an old time vigilante, dismantling Viggo’s business and men with grim determination and no shortage of inner rage. And even though he’s not as invulnerable as he once was, he’s still the ne plus ultra of assassins.

With the world he inhabits so clearly defined, Wick strides through it like a colossus, giving Reeves his most commanding role for years. After non-starters Generation Um… (2012), Man of Tai Chi (2013) and 47 Ronin (2013), it’s good to see Reeves back on form, playing Wick with a taciturn, single-minded demeanour that suits him perfectly as an actor. His brief scenes with Moynahan also show convincingly the other John Wick, the loving husband and all-round “normal” guy. It’s a great performance, and one that’s given more than adequate support by the likes of Nyqvist, Dafoe and Palicki, all relishing their roles and the wonderfully expressive dialogue Kolstad has provided them with. The cast are obviously having a great time with the material, and it’s not surprising that this helps boost the audience’s enjoyment as a result. The interplay between Wick and Viggo is particularly effective, operating on several levels at once, and imparting more emotion than would normally be expected.

As for the action scenes these are tremendously shot and edited, full of fluid tracking shots, and with Reeves in the thick of it all, punching, kicking and blasting away with vicious, yet detached intent, and shooting more people in the head than probably any other hitman in movie history. One extended sequence, at the Red Circle nightclub, is as inventive and as thrilling as any action sequence in recent memory. Using their experience as stunt co-ordinators, Stahelski and Leitch (who thanks to the Directors Guild of America isn’t credited on the movie), keep the fight scenes breathtaking and immersive, and there’s not one moment during any of them where the viewer isn’t fully aware of what’s happening and who’s doing what to whom (something that Taken 3, for example, avoids doing throughout its disheartening running time).

In keeping with the overall mise en scene, the production design by Dan Leigh helps to reinforce the idea of a separate world where all this takes place, and is gloriously lensed by Jonathan Sela. The action is complemented by a pulsing, propulsive score by Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard, and at times feels like it could be another of Wick’s opponents.

Rating: 8/10 – a modern day noir thriller that doesn’t pull its punches and has an emotional core that resonates throughout, John Wick is a wonderful surprise; with not an ounce of fat on it, and one of the tightest scripts of recent years, this is an action movie that constantly surprises and rewards in equal measure.

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