It’s a muscular and charismatic performance, and undeniably the most interesting thing that Kate has to offer. Be it through a small, shuddered breath or a perfectly timed scream of rage, the actress ensures that everything Kate does feels emotionally motivated and authentic, even when she’s firing bullets into the hundredth unlucky henchman sent her way. This character is tired and angry - and for good reason - but Winstead never lets Kate become an emotionless killing machine. She invests in the character so heavily that it becomes impossible to look away from her performance, which becomes more layered and human as Kate’s body is ravaged by the poison slowly killing her. Coming off her recent, similarly dynamic and vengeful performance as The Huntress in last year’s Birds of Prey, Winstead proves her mettle as a legitimate action star with Kate. It’s during this extended sequence that Kate is at its most thrilling, visually controlled, and inventive.įrom long Steadicam tracking shots that follow Kate as she infiltrates the facility to aerial shots that pivot and whirl in time with Kate’s movements and spins, Nicolas-Troyan employs a number of unexpected camera angles and cutting techniques throughout, investing the scene with an energy and style that the rest of the film largely lacks.Īll that said, it’s Winstead’s lead performance that ultimately lifts Kate out of total mediocrity. Mary Elizabeth Winstead storms in, shades ready, in Kate. That includes a fight at a Japanese restaurant/social club, which sees Kate single-handedly taking down an assortment of yakuza bosses and goons across a series of identical, black-and-white rooms and corridors. Indeed, while Winstead’s Kate approaches each of the film’s action sequences with equal ferocity, only a few set pieces stand out. The film, directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan ( The Huntsman: Winter’s War) from a screenplay by Umair Aleem ( Extraction), delivers on that promise, albeit to varying degrees of success. It’s a simple premise, opening the door for Kate to follow its titular protagonist through an unending stream of gunfights, chases, and massacres. Armed with a desire for revenge, several doses of heavy painkillers, and a hankering for lemon soda, Kate sets out on a quest across Tokyo in search of the yakuza boss she believes sentenced her to death. Played in the film by a surprisingly ruthless and enraged Winstead, Kate is the last person you can imagine crossing. But if you’re Kate, you’re going to spend those precious final hours on a blood-soaked rampage, in search of the person who poisoned you. Most of us would probably opt to spend it with our families or do one thing we’ve spent years wanting to try. Let’s say you’ve been poisoned and have 24 hours left to live: What do you do with your last day? It's truly amazing to see animations that would have otherwise been lost for the majority of the population, considering first, that they were designed to be enjoyed by one person at a time in the first place, and second, are old and were forgotten at flea markets.Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the titular assassin in Netflix’s Kate. The viewer would look through the slit (depending on the device,) and be able to see the illustrations animate.īalzer, no doubt seeing the similar packaging, began turning these short animations, some of them dating back 150 years, into GIFs and posting them on his Tumblr. These devices were either illustrated with pictures on a disc or a strip, and then animated by spinning the device. These toys, in fact, were the very early rumblings of a cinematic revolution that was about to spring forth. Behold - 19th century GIFs.Īccording to an article from The Verge, Balzer began collecting magic lanterns, phenakistoscopes, praxinoscopes, and zoetropes - all sorts of optic toys that we used in the 19th century. Don't think so? Well, you might change your mind once you see Richard Balzer bring these 19th century animations to life using the technology of the 21st century. I mean - what is a GIF if not a digital reproduction of early animations created in devices that utilized the same persistence of vision principals we use today? Right? In other words, GIFs are phenakistoscopes, praxinoscopes, and zoetropes for the 21st century. I'm sure that when the awesome people who brought us GIFs like "Cupcake Dog" or Kate Upton doing the Cat Daddy, they had no idea that they were participating in cinema's earliest attempts at filmmaking.
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