Author Topic: In Which I Review Movies Part II (Read 3049 times)

Cool, Bad, & Handsome · « **Reply #200 on:** August 03, 2019, 11:15:53 AM »

Quote from: Firmino of the 909 on August 03, 2019, 04:32:08 AM

Why is an uncharismatic guy like Andy Garcia the President? That kind of question I cannot answer because there isn't an answer. Garcia is the kind of actor you get to do a movie when nobody else wants to do it. He's been in one good franchise and that's just about it. It's fitting that he's in a film starring Gerard Butler. These two are the same kind of actor.

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #201 on:** August 04, 2019, 06:11:19 PM »

Cargo (2018), directed by Ben Howling and Yolande Ramke

Someone, at some point, is going to have to answer to me why there is now so much zombie related material. I cannot only be because The Walking Dead was once popular, because now that it isn't, that rationale does not hold up. This zombie thing is now an obsession that studios now truly believe we all want to watch material about. Possession flicks are in the same boat, too many of them are being made, and at some point it has to stop. Of course, Cargo is only a Netflix entry, which means my expectations for the enterprise were naturally lowered a fair bit. After all, Netflix did not commission the production of this film. They saw it, liked it, and bought it to put on their service. Cargo is a film with some entertainment related issues, I would say. The film isn't completely terrible or anything of the sort, and it isn't bad, but I think my accusation that Cargo fails to entertain holds some merit. Because of that, this is an average film, and it certainly feels like it, but there are more inventive aspects than I was expecting. The story, for example, is completely abnormal for these zombie horrors and I cannot think of anything specific to compare it to. The other issue is that I would rather have seen how the Aboriginal tribe depicted here dealt with these problems than to know how the lead character did. Take that for what it's worth, of course. Apparently the directors had already made Cargo as a short and had decided to enhance the movie a little bit.

Cargo takes place in the Australian Outback, in a world overtaken by an epidemic as tends to happens in these zombie films. In this one, when people are bitten they turn into zombies around exactly 48 hours after the bite. There are no exceptions to this and nothing can be done to stop it. Our film follows a family, consisting of Andy (Martin Freeman), his wife Kay (Susie Porter), and their baby Rosie are trying to make a life in this horrible world. Food, obviously, is a concern. This family lives on a boat and is beginning to run out, the houseboat is in a river somewhere and they have been there for quite some time. Life is safe enough, but in these worlds, the living humans are dangerous too. There is a family on shore that Andy is interested in approaching, but the man has a gun and brandishes it. That's not going to happen. Andy sees a sailboat a bit downriver and goes to inspect it, retrieving a lot of supplies in the process. He's stoked with what happened, but Kay is too excited. She goes back to look for even more, but there was something in the bathroom of the sailboat the entire time. It's roused by her noise and bites her, so her life as she knows it is over. Kay accepts this, but Andy cannot, and he knows they have 48 hours. He intends to abandon the houseboat and seek help. Big mistake, of course.

At the same time, we are shown an Aboriginal girl named Thoomi (Simone Landers). Thoomi is trying to keep an infected man alive, and it's obvious that this is her dad. She feeds him stuff and keeps him locked up so that her mother doesn't kill him, because she believes that his soul can be restored to his body. Obviously, it cannot be. Andy and his family leave the houseboat at the same time as this, looking for a hospital. Thoomi's father wanders into the road while they're driving, and they crash very hard into a tree, which impales Kay and kills her. Andy falls asleep, and when he wakes, he's bitten while getting Rosie out of the car. Andy then notices that the zombie from the road is still wandering around, but Thoomi appears and prevents him from killing her father. Of course, he must push on regardless of what happened to his wife and himself, but he is now going to die. His quest is to find a home for Rosie before the 48 hours expire, before he's a zombie that would eat her. Andy arrives at a school and meets a teacher, but she's older and clearly has cancer, so he's going to push on again. When he finds a truck, he encounters Vic (Anthony Hayes), a lunatic who has shelter and seems to have a wife, Lorraine (Caren Pistorius). The issue is that Lorraine is not his wife, first of all. Second of all, Vic's trapped and enslaved Thoomi in a cage as bait to kill zombies with. His idea is that when the world goes back to normal, he'll have a lot of valuables to trade for things that actaully matter. Clearly Rosie can't stay there either, but they're running out of time.

There are some questions I have that remained unanswered, most of which pertained to the orange marmalade that would seep out of the people who have been bitten. Even though I have those questions, I thought Cargo was alright. The performance by Martin Freeman isn't particularly spectacular, he's outdone by the Aboriginal girl to name one, but the story entirely revolves around him. This creates an issue with my ability to enjoy the film, and the same can be said for the relative lack of action in this zombie movie. I hesitate to call this a horror because it really is not. There's nothing overly scary about Cargo and the film is about the placement of Rosie into a new home before the father meets a disappointing end to his life. I struggled massively with the pacing of this film more than anything else. Cargo is properly nasty to look at, the way it should be, and the zombies looked and acted the way that they should. The stuff with the zombies digging their heads into the ground is a neat touch. I can't quite figure out what that means, but it was interesting to see. The problem is that even though there's good in the film, even though the story is strong, I turned on a zombie movie to see someone mowing them down. I'm not going to lie at all, this wasn't what I wanted to watch tonight. Cargo has what I'd consider to be a heavily inflated Rotten Tomatoes score, and you know, meh. This was okay at best. The lack of true resolution with Vic was also a problem.

5.5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #202 on:** August 05, 2019, 06:18:09 PM »

Cuba and the Cameraman (2017), directed by Jon Alpert

What we have here is a rather simple documentary. Such documentaries usually follow a very narrow track and there's only so much that can be said about them. Cuba is the kind of country that leads Americans, and for that matter other people around the world, to think about the nation in one of two lights. There is little room for nuance when it comes to this subject. Cuba and the Cameraman is a documentary that to some extent provides exactly that. The thing is, because of what the subject actually is, it's also possible to leave the film feeling like your mindset has been affirmed. You may believe that Cuba is the way it is because other forces have interfered in order to ensure that was what happened. You may also feel that Castro is the reason that Cuba is this way in the first place, that he did things to economically destroy Cuba and ensure people there were impoverished as a result of his policies. Cuba and the Cameraman does not outright seek to provide that middle ground, but it still does so because an examination of the Cuban people is just going to do that. It's clear that I'm not entirely familiar with people who create documentaries, so I am unable to provide any insight about Jon Alpert. Apparently he has been nominated for Academy Awards before. After seeing a documentary filmed in this style, I can see exactly how that would be the case.

The way Cuba and the Cameraman works, was that Jon Alpert had decided to start visiting Cuba at some point in the 1970s. Through some good fortune he had been in an interview room for one of Castro's interviews, after which Castro spotted Alpert toting around his video equipment in a baby carriage. The man was intrigued, and this led to Alpert accompanying him to New York City and interviewing him. There is some footage of Castro in this section that can best be described as one of a kind. That's not all though. Jon Alpert makes the decision to befriend some people along his way. There are three brothers, farmers in rural Cuba who were quite old when he first met them, they persevered past their 90th birthday before dying. Cristobal, Gregorio, and Angel, they'd seen it all. From the start of La Revolucion, to successful times farming in the 1970s, to the 90s when the island was incredibly impoverished. In the 90s, their oxen were stolen so that other people could have food, the men were rendered unable to till their fields and forced to suffer. Alpert is able to follow them, to some extent anyway, all the way to their death at a very old age. This kind of journey is something I would love to have the opportunity to take on and document, something that a person could never forget. This path spans so much of Alpert's life as well.

That's not all, of course. There's quite a lot of footage depicting the Mariel boatlift. Alpert was able to capture numerous men stating that they'd come straight from prison and been told to leave the island. There were Cubans beaten in the street by their fellow man for seeking asylum via the Peruvian embassy in Havana, there's footage of that as well. Alpert also did not merely follow those four brothers. There's Luis, a man Alpert decides to follow who is eventually imprisoned for trading black market goods. He also meets a family in Havana, one which eventually fractures, with the little girl becoming the matriarch and heading to the United States to provide for her adult children. Such is life in Cuba, as Cuba and the Cameraman presents it. The 1990s were clearly a very terrible time for all Cubans, and Alpert is able to get some footage where Castro explains to him exactly why he feels this to be the case. The people depicted in Cuba and the Cameraman can best be described as salt of the Earth, real people with real problems, there is not anything else I know that gives such a strong insight into the life of the average Cuban. Cuba and the Cameraman is not a perfect documentary either. Alpert's kindness towards Castro, some would describe it as sympathetic or even being fond of him, creates an issue with the objectivity of the journalism in the scenes where Castro himself is speaking. That, however, is how one gets to make a documentary like this one.

I can't say if Alpert was nice to Castro in hopes of making this documentary, there's no way for me to answer that. His lack of agenda and interjection of his own political beliefs allowed him to make this documentary, but many of the Cubans he encountered made obvious their feelings. They did not care for living with Castro and thought the country was bullshit. The people who encountered Alpert saw that he had no agenda of his own and said as much as one could possibly say to a person they hardly knew. As time passes on, one can easily see the problem with Cuba as a whole, and if they haven't made up their mind already this film will certainly help someone do so. The problem is clearly that the blockade has disallowed Cuba from modernizing. The Cuban approach to this problem hasn't helped either, when you hear about how people selling bullshit to tourists make more money than doctors, all you can really do is laugh. The worldwide approach to communism did not give Cuba much of a chance to create a viable country after the Berlin Wall fell, but you can see that may not have mattered anyway. At no point after Alpert's visit in 1979 did Cuba look like a thriving country. The stories of the people who lived in said country, that's who made this documentary worthwhile. It's fair to say that the American public has never had a true depiction of anything related to Cuba. This sort of insight is invaluable.

7.5/10

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #203 on:** August 06, 2019, 06:19:35 PM »

Last Flag Flying (2017), directed by Richard Linklater

Clearly it was time for another one of Richard Linklater's films. Linklater has another one coming out in a few weeks, it is Where'd You Go, Bernadette. I don't know if that's going to be any good, because it was delayed numerous times and it seems like people have decided not to watch his movies. I don't know why people haven't watched his last three efforts, but it's clear that they aren't. In the case of Last Flag Flying, I really don't understand because what we have here is a strong trio of actors. I'm sure that I'm not the only guy who wants to see Steve Carell stop playing these roles where he has to be extremely serious, but I'm fine with seeing him do anything and can live with the idea that he may not ever return to being goofy. Anyway, about the film itself, this is a rather strange movie. It's one I liked, and one I'm not going to say bad things about, but it's different. We have a film focused on people who aren't often focused upon, directed by a filmmaker who does not always know when to leave ideas that bombed out of his movie. I think if you've seen Last Flag Flying, you may know exactly what movie I'm talking about. This can best be classified as a sad road trip flick that made me laugh even though it was sad. This isn't one of Linklater's best films, but it's a strong effort from where I sit. Some people disagree and that's fine, but this is a movie about what happened to your brothers long after they departed a combat zone. When the roles are played by some of my favorite actors, it proves very difficult to remain impartial. I'm not sure that I want to be impartial.

Last Flag Flying is set in 2003, the height of the Iraq War, when the mission was still unaccomplished and immediately after the Bush Administration dared to make such a stupid claim. The mission was so accomplished in fact that our countrymen continued to die in a country they never should have been sent to in the first place. Larry "Doc" Shepherd (Steve Carell) has decided to go on a trip from his home in New Hampshire, visiting the bar of Sal (Bryan Cranston), a Marine that he served with in Vietnam. You see, Doc was also in Vietnam, but he was in the Navy and served time in the brig for things that he'd done. Those things are revealed to you as the film plays out. Anyway, the brig was in Portsmouth and that's where Doc stayed afterward, deciding not to live. Doc and Sal set out from Sal's bar at Doc's behest, with Doc telling Sal that he has a surprise. Does he ever. His surprise is their old buddy, another former Marine, Richard Mueller (Laurence Fishburne). You see, Richard, he's changed. Everyone else remained the same, but he isn't. Doc is still a good guy regardless of what happened in Vietnam, he's quiet and reserved just the same. Sal is boorish and has to talk about everything, he's also an alcoholic who can't hold his liquor in the least. Richard, on the other hand, he's become a preacher. He has a congregation and he has a wife, life is good for him, and the things that happened in Vietnam are in his past.

The thing is, Doc came to find Sal and Richard because there's a taste of Vietnam in his life, because he needs something from them and cannot ask anyone other than those he served with before being given the boot from the Navy. Doc had a son, he joined the Marines as well. The thing is, he was killed in a firefight and Doc needs his friends from the past to go with him to his son's burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Richard doesn't want to go as he feels his time in Vietnam represented a very dark period in his life, and he doesn't really want to get involved with his old friends again. His wife insists, though. So, these three guys decide to push on to Arlington, and we find out that Doc did not quite understand where he was supposed to go. He was not supposed to go straight to Arlington, he was supposed to go to Delaware where his son's body was being transported to. Along the way, we are given a glimpse of the group dynamic, and I had a very difficult time not laughing at this even though one of the people was grieving. I think that my high score for Last Flag Flying is directly related to how funny I thought these scenes were. The official story that Doc was told about how his son died, that's not true though. It's very, very much not true. Sal and Richard are told the real story by Larry Jr's best friend, LCpl. Washington (J. Quinton Johnson). As is often the case in this film, Sal and Richard are at odds. Sal wants to tell Doc the truth, but Richard does not and think it's better to leave things as they are. One of them will get their way.

Last Flag Flying isn't Linklater's best film, but it's strong in large part because of the group dynamic. The events don't quite hit me as hard as they probably should, but I found that Linklater's meandering style didn't bother me in large part because of that dynamic. This film absolutely does meander, that's not something I'd find to even slightly be in question. The thing is that the film hits really hard when it needs to do so. The moments in a road trip movie are rarely all good, and Last Flag Flying is no exception, but the story regarding Doc's trip to the brig really hits hard. The film, of course with the roles I've already laid out, is largely about people who are long forgotten by society. The military has had an tremendous impact on their lives and is still continuing to do so, their role in this machine is obviously placed into question. They had done things, their time passed on and other people were sent to do those things, and the machine keeps on moving as though nothing actually happened to this country at all. There were things that we could have had instead of these wars, but those were things that we were never going to have had in any case. The only people impacted by the wars are those in other countries and those who are sent off to go fight in them. This is clearly difficult for people to accept. Pulling this off in the context of a film is very difficult, but it works. Sal actually comes out with the lines that explain what this film is actually about.

Of course, a film like Last Flag Flying is nothing without its performances, and in the case of this film we have three actors with a very strong screen presence. Some of the gags, like the thing with the U-Haul truck, do not land like Linklater probably expected that they would. That's okay. His film has so much merit beyond that, that it is quite easy to forget about the problems his story has. I already mentioned the conclusion of Doc's Vietnam related story, but there's also the end of the film itself with Larry Jr's funeral. The father knowing what the son would really have wanted is something that rings strong with me. Carell's performance is a particular standout, but Cranston was so different in this role that my mom could hardly recognize him. Apparently this is a sequel to The Last Detail, which I have never seen, but it features Jack Nicholson so I am now quite interested. For me, this film as a whole is one where the positives greatly outweighed the negatives. The period gag with Eminem was when I realized I was probably going to like this film no matter what, and in the end that was true. Even though I liked Carell's performance, I still have a major problem with him taking these roles and find it heavily distracting at best, a detriment to the quality of a film at the worst (Beautiful Boy). This is still well worth your time should you decide to give it a look. Moral questions were presented all over the place.

7.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Bladelock · « **Reply #204 on:** August 07, 2019, 02:21:24 AM »

Last Detail is a great film that is worth watching and it is definitely of the same vibe. Cranston is kind of doing a Jack impression in this and the two characters are very similar.

I also want Carrell to go back to doing goofier performances, but I think he is great in this movie. If he is going to continue to do depressing roles, I'd prefer if he'd wear heavy make up and be unrecognizable like in Foxcatcher. Larry Fishburne probably steals the movie for me. He gets some funny lines.

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #205 on:** August 08, 2019, 02:06:48 PM »

Tag (2018), directed by Jeff Tomsic

Tag was on the list of movies I was going to see when I started going back to the theater without paying for each ticket, but I decided it had already been out a few weeks. That meant I would save it, it turns out I didn't see Tag for another year, and here we are. If I really thought Tag was going to be great, I obviously wouldn't have waited so long. I did, and that's in large part because of Ed Helms. Doesn't everyone hate Ed Helms? Why is he the lead of a movie and how could anyone think he's appealing as a lead? Apparently some people did, but I can't figure out how, and don't know why a studio would do this. Anyway, Tag is a movie that is apparently inspired by a true story, and for proof of that there's video footage at the end of the film showing old guys playing tag with each other. I suppose that last year was the year of comedies that featured adults playing games. I don't know how this started, but I did see that both Game Night and Tag were produced by New Line. The likelihood is that some executive thought this was a hell of an idea and commissioned both films on the spot. I am just guessing though. What's next? A Monopoly movie? You have to think that is, but I would expect another rated R comedy and there apparently isn't one. Warner Bros. is all in next year on stuff like Barbie and a Scooby Doo movie. So, you know, that really sucks. Or does it? I probably won't watch those, but it's likely something else will be released and I won't feel like I'm watching nothing.

Tag is obviously about a game of tag, but what I didn't realize was that it was about five people who were playing the same game of tag since they were nine years old. The rules of the game are rather simple. You tag someone in the month of May, and they're it. When the month ends, the person is it for the rest of the year, and they're a loser until the game starts again the next May. It turns out that Hogan (Ed Helms) was the last one tagged the year before, and he has a plan to start things off. He's going to tag Bob (Jon Hamm), and Bob is now the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, so Hogan has to crash an interview. Rebecca (Annabelle Wallis) is a reporter with the Wall Street Journal and she's writing a profile of Bob, but this whole charade that kicks things off is more interesting than her original profile of Bob to begin with. So, it's time for Rebecca to tag along, but she can't play tag with the boys. They have a rule long standing since they were nine that girls weren't allowed to play with them.

After that, it's time for Hogan and Bob to pick up the rest of their crew. Coming along with them is Hogan's wife Anna (Isla Fisher), who also isn't allowed to play because of said rule, and the rule hasn't been overturned because she is far too competitive. They head to Denver first, where they encounter "Chilli", otherwise known as Randy (Jake Johnson), but Randy is a shitty name. That's when we also meet Anna, and they tag him after a long chase, which leads to a true. Afterwards, it's time to jump over to Portland, where Kevin (Hannibal Buress) lives. He's had a hard time with his marriage, but he's always up for tag and this is no exception. Last, they have to go to their hometown of Spokane. Why Spokane? It isn't just their hometown, the last of their group still lives there. Jerry (Jeremy Renner) is a gym owner in the area, he is the guy who has never been tagged. It is an obsession with not getting tagged to the point where he didn't invite any of these people to his wedding. He is a professional at this and knows exactly how to get away from this group of goofs. He has his own ideas though. His fiancee Susan (Leslie Bibb) has been sure to write up a contract for everyone to sign, ensuring that they won't mess up the wedding. Jerry also knows that Bob and Chilli have always had a crush on Cheryl (Rashida Jones). So he's just going to invite her to distract them both. Time to find a way to see out the rest of the month.

A movie like this one, where the premise is so stupid sounding, is entirely reliant on the actors to ensure that people laugh throughout. With the exception of Ed Helms, who has never been funny to me at any point in my life, I thought everyone did a pretty good job with this. I do understand what the point of this film is, it's about having life long connections with your friends, but it's rather difficult for most people to relate to that. I don't have any friends that I had when I was that age, and I'm sure most people are in the same boat. The ending comes a little bit out of nowhere near the end, and I'm not sure that I cared very much for it. These movies always have to try to bring some drama into the third act, and I hate it. I'm so sick of it that I cannot even describe how sick of it that I really am. Of course, some is better than others, but nobody is going to make me feel sorry for Ed Helms. Tag is a rather generic comedy movie and there's no reason to mince words about it. There are some good concepts here, more so than there are bad ones. I also thought Isla Fisher went some degree to reducing how bad this could actually have been.

6/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Avid Warehouse Enthusiast · « **Reply #206 on:** August 09, 2019, 01:08:55 AM »

The best parts of that movie were the end credits and the Predator references at the golf course.

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #207 on:** August 10, 2019, 06:33:08 PM »

The Cured (2018), directed by David Freyne

After what I've watched in the last week, I must admit that it is a little strange I would watch another zombie film. One, after all, was only slightly better than the other, but the two were about extremely different perspectives. Can there be two different perspectives on a potential zombie apocalypse? I suppose so. The Cured is a film that blatantly leans into sequel bait at the end, this is an independent movie someone thought would get strong distribution and a good box office. Of course, that did not happen and we now know that, but this is an interesting case of a movie. This does not happen very often where an independent movie takes that on with that amount of ambition. Is the film good beyond that? I mean, it's good enough and features a good concept, but the ending is so hackneyed I could hardly believe it. Of course, to talk about the movie it is essential to write an explanation, because the title does not go to any lengths to describe what kind of movie this really is. When watching a movie like The Cured, and when the characters do such baffling things that bother me, it's often very difficult to succinctly describe my thoughts. I'll try my best.

The Cured takes place in a different society, and this is not post-apocalyptic at all. There is a title screen that describes the situation and I will do my best. There was a plague called the Maze Virus, it swept through Europe and affected Ireland worst of all. The virus created a horrible situation that led with much of the country evacuated and the rest economically destroyed, but there's more. Of course, this being a zombie movie, the virus transformed the infected into zombies that ate the things they came across, but the Irish were fortunate and their country was not entirely wiped out. A cure was eventually discovered, which separated the country into three groups. There were those never infected, those cured, and those still infected that could not be treated. The latter group consists of 25% of those who were initially infected. Obviously, some people were simply killed. The disease has been ravaging the country for five years, and some of the Cured were Infected for that long as well. It goes without saying, or maybe it doesn't, that the general population is very fearful of the Cured and hold lots of prejudice towards them. They also think that the Infected still living in hopes of another cure that reaches them is a dangerous proposition that could lead to another outbreak.

Now that I've explained the situation, I can start talking about the film itself. Senan (Sam Keeley) is an Irishman who is one of the Cured. After being quarantined, he is set to be released to the car of his sister in law, Abbie (Ellen Page). Abbie is not Irish as I'm sure you can tell, but her son was not born in the US, and as such they aren't allowed to move overseas. So, stuck in Ireland is what they are. Senan is troubled after being released, and there's another wrinkle I haven't mentioned yet. The Cured can remember absolutely everything that happened while they weren't in control of their bodies. Conor (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) is someone who has been presented as a person Senan met while in quarantine, but this is absolutely not true. You have to understand that this cure, such as it is, affected everyone who needed it in different ways. Some of the people who were Infected have kept their predatory instincts, others cannot get over what they've done, and there are some who stick to the pack mentality that afflicts the Infected. Conor has major influence over Senan and it is clear as the film plays out that those things are the reason why. As far as those who believe the Cured cannot be integrated into society, this element of the population is rather large and holds considerable influence. Some of them will treat the Cured like shit. What's really at play here, is what happened while Senan was infected. It's also important to note that a lot of the Cured are fighting to get their rights back, to get back what they've lost after being bitten. Going from working as a lawyer to being a janitor, that's not going to suffice for some.

Of course, with a zombie movie, there are some concerns that I already addressed in my review of Cargo. One is how much gore the film contains. There needs to be quite a lot. There's a lot. The film has far more elements of horror, but it's slow in the same way that Cargo is. The overarching story, on the other hand, that mark goes to The Cured. It's far superior. The problem is that the end is really not, and it's difficult to decipher the motivations of characters both named and unmentioned. The sequel bait is what it is and I've largely made the decision to ignore that. The ending is bad enough on its own. Regardless of that, there's still motivation for the viewer to stick things out and see what happens because the ending is not an inevitable one. There are many routes that the story could have taken, and they don't end with an already bitten character dying after you know that they're going to die for an hour. The director was desperately trying to create something unique, something about reintegrating people into society in Ireland. I don't think I need to tell you what the Cured and Infected are allegories for, if I do need to then you need to pick up a history book. Everything, as far as that goes anyway, could not posisbly be more blatantly obvious. I thought the film was fresh, but I didn't think it was particularly great. There's some good drama, but the ending got me so badly, and I couldn't give my endorsement to a movie with an ending like this one. Regardless of that, as focused on the story as it is, The Cured definitely has its moments and may be worth a look.

6/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #208 on:** August 12, 2019, 07:08:56 PM »

Thank You for Your Service (2017), directed by Jason Hall

When Thank You for Your Service was released, I remember a lot of disappointment because people were expecting a movie that "honored our heroes" and it wasn't to their liking. Apparently it is not honoring our heroes to actually tell the stories of the struggles that they go through. We must show them being Rambo in order for these movies to feel like reality for some people, even if that reality does not exist. I wasn't sure how I'd feel about this film myself. I think it's hard to make a movie about PTSD without it feeling like exploitation of this problem, and it is a major problem that is still largely unignored. There are scenes with real poignancy here, but this is also the kind of film that should have been made 10 years ago and not just now in 2019. That being said, you know, no studio would have dared to do that. We've seen movies like this one, but they're largely related to the physical disabilities that a soldier may encounter, not about this specific subject. We aren't talking about a fantastic movie, but it was good and I found myself invested in the characters. One in particular, the one with a physical disability, absolutely steals the movie away from the lead. Does this really hit new ground though? I'm not sure if it does, but I'm also not sure that's required of a film in order for me to say that it's good.

Thank You for Your Service is about three men who returned from Iraq after their deployments. All three of them were in a different stage of their life. PFC Billy Waller (Joe Cole) is headed home after deployment, looking to get married, but it seems that he's going to push on with the army and head back once again. SSG Adam Schumann (Miles Teller) is on his last deployment, looking to leave the military once he's done. He has a wife, Saskia (Haley Bennett), and two children, one of whom was born while Schumann was overseas this last time. This was his third tour. Specialist Tausolo Aieti (Beulah Koale) is a lifer, at least until he isn't, he's no longer allowed to go back. With a wife at home and baby on the way, there's a problem, he has suffered a traumatic brain injury. Their humvee was blown up by an IED while Schumann was not in it, a fact which he blames himself for. He was not in it, someone else was in his spot, and he died. Aieti is now very much damaged, and for that matter so is Schumann. There's more too. At the start of the film, Schumann was tasked with rescuing another shoulder from a building under fire, after they were shot in the head. Somehow Emory (Scott Haze) did not die from the shot, and he did not die when Schumann dropped him either. Instead, Emory is a cripple and Schumann blames himself for dropping him, but there's also an unspoken element that is not revealed until much later.

Thank You for Your Service does not have a complicated plot, or a huge group of characters, or really anything that would lead to a very long review. It's a movie about post traumatic stress, about traumatic brain injuries suffered in war and the things that could result from that. Solo Aieti forgetting everything was extremely frustrating to say the least, but it was very true to the character and his problems. This is a movie that I feel is perfect for a lot of people to watch and know that others go through the same problems as them. A lot of the families of veterans go through these issues and never receive any help, or the help is too long in coming. I thought that Solo was a character who completely stole the movie away and I was more interested in his scenes than anyone else's. That's a flaw of sorts, I suppose, but it speaks to the level of his performance, or rather how I saw the construction of the character. Thank You for Your Service is a heavy-handed movie, but that's because the subject matter requires it to be one. This is a movie that people who decide to take soldiers off to war really need to watch, it's one that they never would because it doesn't fit into their idea of masculinity. Masculinity, to the people in the White House who've never been off to war, doesn't equate to coming home with mental issues as a result of what happened overseas. Of course, we have a shitty country and that goes without saying, this is one of the reasons it's a shitty country.

The film's heavy tone is welcome, considering what I've watched in the last few weeks. What I was thinking was that I was glad this was relatively free of humor, with only one funny scene coming to mind at this time. The direction of Thank You for Your Service isn't great, the story here is good enough that I could imagine this film being a lot better with a different director. The cinematography and everything like that, it's lacking more than you'd think. The script, which was written by the director, is really strong though. It's not like the film would have a different director when the person wrote it to begin with. It's also crazy that we still haven't removed our troops from the Middle East, not in the context of this film, but when they throw things back to 2007 the viewer is made to realize that we're still there. Anyway, this almost felt like a documentary, and if it had been one, that wouldn't be too shocking either. The scenes at the VA building are very realistic, to say the least. Those places are some of the most depressing on this entire planet. They're full of people who are lied to by our country, given orders to do things they should not have to do, to be a peacekeeping force when that wasn't their role in being sent to foreign countries in the first place. How to deal with that? I don't even know.

Sorry if this feels like a sloppy review, but I am burning myself out a little bit.

7/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #209 on:** August 13, 2019, 05:46:10 PM »

Daddy's Home 2 (2017), directed by Sean Anders

I cannot guarantee that you're going to get the full greatness from me right now. I have a story to tell. There once was a time I watched Daddy's Home with my dad. This was one of the most excruciating experiences, but it paled in comparison to trying to write a review. That was the first, and to this date only time that I have been too disgusted with what I watched to write a review of any length down. There have been others where I didn't write much, but that had nothing to do with the quality of the film itself. I wrote about two paragraphs and trashed it because I could not compel myself to write more. It was making me sick. Now, if you really want to know what sick is, you should watch Daddy's Home 2. I am forcing myself to write this, and I'm just going to post the end result once I get too fed up to continue. I do not think I've ever watched something where I hated all the characters more than I did while watching Daddy's Home 2. Mel Gibson's character was contemptible as well, but when I found myself in a situation where his scenes were the only thing getting me through this, I don't know if there's anything I can say that would help everyone understand this atrocity. Almost nothing I've seen before could possibly compare to a movie where I was hoping for all the characters to get in a plane crash and die at the end of it. All of them.

I don't know how to talk about this, and it was ten minutes between the time I started writing this paragraph and finishing the last one. I'm just going to set this shit up as best as I can. Brad (Will Ferrell) and Dusty (Mark Wahlberg) were feuding step parents in the previous film, and now they're not. These guys are co-dads, they act fucking stupid together, and all that. Dusty has married Karen (Alessandra Ambrosio), and Brad is still married to Sara (Linda Cardellini). Once it's Christmas time, all the kids have to come together in order for things to go more smoothly. Dusty and Sara had their two kids, Sara and Brad have their one kid, and Karen had a kid with Roger (John Cena). Kill me now.

With this being Christmas and all, family has to fly in so that everyone can be happy. We are given the pleasure of meeting Dusty's dad Kurt (Mel Gibson) and Brad's dad Don (John Lithgow). Kurt thinks that his son has turned into a bitch, and Don pretty much is a bitch. Kurt makes the decision to rent everyone a cabin for Christmas, and at this point I realized that everyone traded living in New Orleans for living in Boston, and it is completely unmentioned throughout this piece of shit. Anyway, Kurt's reason for renting the cabin is to stir up some shit, to see everything explodes. He knows what he's doing, I guess. Our journey features gags that don't land, with the exception of one or two that land for the wrong reason. We are subjected to this for around 90 minutes, give or take. This is hell.

The thing that gets me about films like this one, is something I'm sure bothers everyone else. I don't understand how or why someone would debase themselves to this extent for a paycheck. It doesn't even matter how much of a paycheck this is, it couldn't have been that much. The whole thing is embarrassing. The worst part is that Will Ferrell produced the movie, so there's a chance that he just FUCKING LIKED IT. Imagine that shit. I know after one of Ferrell's last movies, it was decided to split his shared production company with Adam McKay, and I can only imagine that it's somewhat related to this movie. The Wikipedia page is telling me that associating with Will Ferrell is very bad for business. There's one bomb after the next, and one very bad movie after the next. All of these movies have bombed and these two guys couldn't possibly have so much money that they could continue to fund them. I hope we are spared of a third Daddy's Home, but I can tell you right now that I am not going to go into a theater and watch that shit if there is one. There's another movie with John Cena that comes out later this year, it's called Playing With Fire and has one of the worst trailers I've ever seen. I'll put myself through watching that, but not in front of other people. There are limits, and I would feel shame.

As for Daddy's Home 2 itself, what can I really say? I think I've said all that there is, because there aren't words for how bad these gags are. I found myself completely turning on John Lithgow, who is a great actor, but this was just embarrassing. That there are people who actually liked this, and they must have considering the box office tuned up a nice $180.4 million total, is an absolutely sickening thought. There is hardly anything in this that a non-mentally handicapped person should be laughing at. If it wasn't for my rule about not turning off movies like this one, I think I would have turned it off about 20 minutes in. The funny part is that this franchise is chock full of toxic masculinity, of cuckery, but in the second film there's no statement made about any of that stuff. There has never been a worse franchise in the history of cinema, that I am sure of. This was such a painful experience. I think I am done with my review because I just can't do more, but I must depart with this. Even people who should have great taste sometimes do not.

https://www.vulture.com/2017/06/sofia-coppola-calls-daddys-home-one-of-her-favorite-movies.html

FUCKING WHAT

1/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Harley Quinn · « **Reply #210 on:** August 13, 2019, 11:15:30 PM »

I legit never thought I'd see you give you a 1/10 towards a movie... bah gawd the review thread has been broken in half! Caveat: I have never seen either Daddy's Home movie and have no intention to ever bother.

Bladelock · « **Reply #211 on:** August 14, 2019, 02:43:44 AM »

Will Ferrell's shtick gets really sad as he ages. I can't watch his movies anymore unless he sprinkles in some dramatic stuff like Sandler does.

"Looks at IMDB and sees"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6314510/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_2

Okay, he's worst than Sandler.

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #212 on:** August 14, 2019, 04:09:38 AM »

Yeah, he's worse. At least Sandler has his dramatic performances to look forward to. Other than Step Brothers and the first Anchorman, I think I could do without Will Ferrell having ever existed.

Harley Quinn · « **Reply #213 on:** August 14, 2019, 05:01:32 AM »

Quote from: Firmino of the 909 on August 14, 2019, 04:09:38 AM

Yeah, he's worse. At least Sandler has his dramatic performances to look forward to. Other than Step Brothers and the first Anchorman, I think I could do without Will Ferrell having ever existed.

No love for his performance in Stranger Than Fiction or Elf? I find those 2 the ones I tend to like most, aside from Anchorman, from his film discography.

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #214 on:** August 14, 2019, 05:03:59 AM »

Don't like Elf, haven't seen the other.

Brooklyn Zoo · « **Reply #215 on:** August 14, 2019, 05:07:29 AM »

I think his best performance is in “Everything Must Go.” He should do more like that.

Actually saw “The Farewell” yesterday, glad the director didn’t compromise her vision. Agreed that the movie is relatable for many different reasons and white washing it would’ve damaged the authenticity.

Bladelock · « **Reply #216 on:** August 14, 2019, 05:12:37 AM »

Quote from: Firmino of the 909 on August 14, 2019, 04:09:38 AM

Yeah, he's worse. At least Sandler has his dramatic performances to look forward to. Other than Step Brothers and the first Anchorman, I think I could do without Will Ferrell having ever existed.

He was great in the SNL context and I like him on The Office a lot. Weirdly enough he was probably the best part of Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back, but that might've been his best use. As a weirdo that you can throw in as a funny supporting character rather than make the lead where you have to deal with that for 90-120 minutes.

Avid Warehouse Enthusiast · « **Reply #217 on:** August 14, 2019, 06:31:13 AM »

Will Ferrell hate and not a single mention of Bewitched?

Fall of Epic · « **Reply #218 on:** August 14, 2019, 06:35:39 AM »

Farrell peaked over a decade ago and has been on a steady decline since. His best comedies were helmed by Adam McKay and even during that period he was in shit like Bewitched, Land of the Lost, and Semi-Pro.

His best performance was "A Night at the Roxbury" and I will not hear otherwise.

And speaking of Sandler, he had Punch Drunk Love and the (underrated) Reign Over Me.

Bladelock · « **Reply #219 on:** August 14, 2019, 07:20:33 AM »

Sandler was really good in the recent The Meyerowitz Stories and is also in the next film by The Safdie Brothers who made he awesome movie everyone should see called Good Time.

La noche del terror ciego · « **Reply #220 on:** August 14, 2019, 08:49:10 AM »

Quote from: Bladelock on August 14, 2019, 07:20:33 AM

Sandler was really good in the recent The Meyerowitz Stories and is also in the next film by The Safdie Brothers who made he awesome movie everyone should see called Good Time.

"Good Time" was my favorite movie of 2017 (the other two were "Get Out" and "Brawl in Cell Block 99.")

Sandler actually did a decent job hosting SNL last season. I can't remember if it was the last season or the one before, but I remember really hating Ferrell last time he hosted.

Brooklyn Zoo · « **Reply #221 on:** August 14, 2019, 08:56:22 AM »

We need a Good Time thread. Feel like it’s mentioned here and there and we all love it. Should be Good Time thread that turns into the Lighthouse thread.

The Art of Rasslin' · « **Reply #222 on:** August 14, 2019, 10:25:15 AM »

Quote from: Harley Quinn on August 14, 2019, 05:01:32 AM

film discography.

LMAO

Ferrell hasn't made anything good in a while but in his prime he was good or great in:

Roxbury (One of the most underrated comedies of the past thirty years)
Ladies Man
Zoolander
Old School (GOAT scene with comedy chat legend SWS)
Anchorman
Ricky Bobby
Stepbrothers

I like all those movies too, though some are barely likeable to me. Also his stuff as James Lipton was hilarious, NBC makes it hard to find that stuff online outside of their site though.

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #223 on:** August 14, 2019, 10:28:46 AM »

Roxbury is good too, legit forgot about that. The rest? Trash pile.

strummer · « **Reply #224 on:** August 14, 2019, 10:50:35 AM »

Quote from: YEAAAAAH, WE DID IT AGAIN! on August 14, 2019, 08:49:10 AM

Quote from: Bladelock on August 14, 2019, 07:20:33 AM
Sandler was really good in the recent The Meyerowitz Stories and is also in the next film by The Safdie Brothers who made he awesome movie everyone should see called Good Time.
"Good Time" was my favorite movie of 2017 (the other two were "Get Out" and "Brawl in Cell Block 99.")

Sandler actually did a decent job hosting SNL last season. I can't remember if it was the last season or the one before, but I remember really hating Ferrell last time he hosted.

Ferrell hosted in the 2017/2018 season

Thought Sandler was fantastic as host this season. By far my favorite episode of the season. He got an Emmy nod for it.

Unfortunately he's now shooting a terrible sounding movie called "Hubie Halloween" with Kevin James

The Art of Rasslin' · « **Reply #225 on:** August 14, 2019, 11:25:25 AM »

Quote from: Firmino of the 909 on August 14, 2019, 10:28:46 AM

Roxbury is good too, legit forgot about that. The rest? Trash pile.

hating on will ferrell sonning james carville smfh

Bladelock · « **Reply #226 on:** August 14, 2019, 11:32:32 AM »

Old School I remember loving when I was 15 but I haven't seen it in 10 years or longer. It seems very of the time with appearances from Andy Dick and my main man the SWS.

Brooklyn Zoo · « **Reply #227 on:** August 14, 2019, 11:35:43 AM »

Quote from: Firmino of the 909 on August 14, 2019, 10:28:46 AM

Roxbury is good too, legit forgot about that. The rest? Trash pile.

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #228 on:** August 15, 2019, 03:06:50 PM »

Ocean's Eight (2018), directed by Gary Ross

Did you ever want to see a reboot of Ocean's Eleven with a completely different cast? Those movies are so sacred to some that they couldn't handle the idea of a cast completely featuring women, which is absolutely absurd and ridiculous. It is not surprising that some people would freak out over it though. Ocean's Eight isn't a gimmick, I wouldn't say that at all. It is, however, simply not as good as two of the films in the trilogy. There are reasons why and they have absolutely nothing to do with the cast, which is rather strong. Direction is one of those things that is lacking. The fact is, Ocean's Eight didn't have Steven Soderbergh to call on because he's never going to do anything with a large budget ever again. The man has still continued to make heist movies, because it's hard not to do so. Ocean's Twelve was a huge whiff, but the rest of these have all been good to various extents. I'm not overly effusive with praise, it's one of my goals in life to turn that down a little bit, but I liked Ocean's Eight well enough. I also thought this was the perfect movie to watch with my mom on her birthday. I was correct in that assumption. I don't think it's my perspective that's warped here when I say that these films are not sacred, in fact none of them are. I think people need to accept at some point it is time to stop holding works of entertainment dear to one's heart, and it is time to push on in life.

Of course, when there's a film called Ocean's Eight, someone shouldn't be surprised to see that the spinoff is going to create a character related to Danny Ocean. Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock) is his sister, and she has been in prison for five years. Attempting to gain parole is nowhere near as difficult as you'd think it would be for a felon, but she has a plan and knows exactly how to con people. She got in prison in the first place because she became involved with the wrong guy, a man named Claude Becker (Richard Armitage) who framed her for a crime that he committed, but he sure as hell wasn't going to go down for it. Anyway, when she gets out, it's time to put together a crew almost instantly. Ocean's Eight has build, but it isn't the kind of build where you get a bunch of meaningless character shit before diving straight into the heist and planning of it. Debbie's intention is to rob the Met Gala and steal a $150 million necklace from Cartier, but there's a lot that goes into planning such an operation. Fortunately, she's had five years to think about all this and run through every possible scenario. Not just every scenario, but every way in which this could go wrong. As far as making a heist film goes, that creates somewhat of a problem.

So, the crew. Gotta start talking about that as soon as I can. Lou (Cate Blanchett) was her partner-in-crime, and there's a good flashback scene where they see how this is. It made me laugh quite a bit. In order to pull this off, specialists are needed. You have a hacker, Nine Ball (Rihanna); a pickpocket, Constance (Awkwafina); a jeweler who doesn't like her current job, Amita (Mindy Kaling); a fence named Tammy (Sarah Paulson); and lastly, perhaps most importantly, there's the bankrupt fashion designer, Rose Weil (Helena Bonham Carter). Why would a heist team need all these things? Well, you need a mark. The mark is Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway), a famous actress who doesn't have anyone designing her look for the Met Gala. So, you know, there's a window there for some idiot to unwittingly help them steal something. The thing is, this necklace is so expensive that Cartier has a security team with the necklace at all times. It also goes without saying that there will be unforeseen issues, but Ocean's Eight is a movie where things slide into place, where these very talented women are able to steal something specifically because they're women and aren't expected to pull anything off.

While the premise in Ocean's Eight is solid, the way that the team doesn't meet any true resistance is an enormous problem. A similar problem is that James Corden has a role in the film, which takes me out of things instantly. Sorry, he and Jimmy Fallon should go away. The heist team does pretty well and has good chemistry, but the movie is more goofy than it is serious, and once I reached the point at which I realized everything was going to come off without a hitch, that made for difficult viewing. The movie's fun, but I think it should have been more than that. The characters, fun as they are, are a little bit underutilized. Sarah Paulson's character gets more screen time than Rihanna and Awkwafina do. I have no idea why that is and I can't even think to answer that issue. There should be a sequel though. When the team doesn't encounter anything difficult, when the job goes well and everyone is shown to be professional and very capable at doing their job, it doesn't make for the best film in the world. I actually forgot that I had to finish writing this, that's how much of a merely above average movie this was.

6.5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #229 on:** August 15, 2019, 06:26:41 PM »

The Snowman (2017), directed by Jonas Alfredson

What we have here, and what we've continued to have almost the entirety of this week for myself, is one bad decision after the next when it comes to which films I'm watching. I need to space my trash out a little bit better, it seems. After Daddy's Home 2, there's no way it could get worse, that's something I've never been more sure of even after watching The Snowman. The rate at which characters appear and disappear from this film despite being part of a strong cast, with a director who has made some good films, is rather shocking. I have read some complaints from the director about the production schedule, saying that they didn't film the entire screenplay, Val Kilmer had throat cancer and couldn't talk, and the last thing I can think to mention is that they went into production right after getting their budget. Basically, Alfredson says that none of this was his fault and it was entirely due to the production company/studio. So, alright. That's not a good enough explanation. There were things in this movie that weren't right, bad scenes that didn't seem to be filmed in a way where I could understand them, and an absolutely incomprehensible screenplay that would not have been fixed merely be more additional scenes. Alfredson has made a complicated film in a good way before, but this is a film that never should have seen the light of day. The last scene is also a hilarious attempt to make people interested in a sequel, a second case if you will. This film did have characters that should have been interesting, but I am absolutely not interested in another film.

The Snowman begins sometime in the past, in an area of Norway with seemingly no people, a family quite isolated. A woman confronts a man about their son, saying that she is going to tell his wife that this older man has fathered a child with a much younger woman. When the son overhears this, he runs outside to make a snowman, and the man leaves as well. The woman and son give chase, lose him in the snow, and the mother decides to kill herself in a frozen lake. The son departs, and we kick forward to present times. Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender) is your typical, cliched excellent cop with a troubled past and present. In this case, his troubles are related to the drink, a bottle he wants to put down he has not yet met. Harry works in Oslo as a murder investigator and it is made clear that he needs to get his act together, but it has been difficult. He's broken up with his girlfriend Rakel (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and their son Oleg doesn't know (Michael Yates) that Harry is his father as a matter of choice. Why someone would withhold that information, I can't yet figure out. Anyway, Oleg mentions to Harry at one point that his mother refuses to let him search for his father. I think you can see how stupid The Snowman is going to be based on this one storyline alone. I will continue though.

One day, Harry receives a letter signed with the drawing of a snowman, and he is paired with a new recruit, Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson). The Snowman is a movie that has not met a cliche that it didn't like. There's a reason Katrine is searching for the person they're searching for, and I don't want you to watch the movie, but it's probably the reason you'd think. Dropped in throughout this investigation are clips of Gert Rafto (Val Kilmer), in the midst of investigating a killer, which we come to find out are one and the same. Katrine is his daughter. Anyway, they're assigned to a missing persons case, and another, and another. It is clear there is a serial killer roaming around Norway, and Katrine seems to think that it's Arve Stop (J.K. Simmons). The reason she believes so, is because he's a business magnate of some kind. He's also very powerful, and I can't really tyell you what other point this film is trying to make because it's indecipherable.

I don't understand how The Snowman was made to begin with, but I suppose that this is based on a series of novels, of which there are twelve. THERE ARE TWELVE BOOKS ABOUT HARRY HOLE. I don't really know what to say about that, but I have to talk about how boring this was. I think this may have been the most boring film I have ever watched. It is not because The Snowman isn't goofy, because it is, but because the subject matter is so dry that it isn't anywhere near goofy enough. The plot is incomprensible and it's hard to actually follow the film. When I saw Chloe Sevigny playing two different characters, and I saw that it being treated like a big nothing, I don't understand what this film was even supposed to be. The serial killer using snowmen as his calling card is properly goofy, but it just isn't played that way. It isn't played for laughs at all, it depends what the viewer is thinking at the time they see the scene. There are also a lot of things in the trailer that don't exist in the film at all. You have to wonder how difficult this movie really was. Why would the director sign on to direct a film with this script? I can't figure that out. The worst thing, and I can't figure out if this is true to the books nor do I give a fuck, is that they just up and killed one of the characters before the end of the film. It's like it was nothing.

If you want to know how bad The Snowman is, let me put it to you this way. Thelma Schoonmaker is Martin Scorsese's editor. She's edited a lot of great films. There is clearly no way in which someone with her talent could edit this film into anything resembling a good cut. You know how bad that is? It's laughable. The scenes where Val Kilmer's voice is dubbed over isn't even the worst. I'm fairly certain there's a scene where the killer is talking and his audio is edited out. I cannot tell you why this would happen, I'm just making clear what kind of movie this is. Piece of shit movie? Absolutely. It's also horribly made to say the least, but the content in it could have been much worse. Films like The Book of Henry and Daddy's Home 2 are so laughable that I could hardly make it through them at all. I was thinking for the entirety of those pictures that I wanted to shut them off. With The Snowman, I was thinking about how I could make it through the film before falling asleep. As you can see here, I didn't fall asleep. The film is just lacking anything that makes a halfway decent murder mystery. The basics are not here.

2/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

The Art of Rasslin' · « **Reply #230 on:** August 16, 2019, 12:01:46 AM »

damn it was running a 3 rating, what made you drop it another full point?

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #231 on:** August 19, 2019, 06:18:27 PM »

Wonder (2017), directed by Stephen Chbosky

Have you ever sat down to watch a movie and felt like you were being emotionally manipulated? I'm sure that's true for everyone, but how many times that you watched a movie like that did you actually feel the way that the director wanted you to. Certainly I wasn't going through Kleenex while watching Wonder, and in truth I can't even tell you the last time that I cried while watching a movie. Wonder was a novel written by an author who had an incident while out in public, where their son had noticed a girl with a severe facial deformity and started to cry. The author subsequently tried to leave the place but the situation got a lot worse. Some of the details in the book are different in order to make things easier for people to understsand and not to overwhelm, but Wonder is one of those movies where you have one character say the title of the movie. Because, of course it is. I was going with this until around that point, but fortunately that point was near the damn end of the movie. I cannot properly illustate how much that bothers me. Even though the film does brazenly mess with your emotions, and make you think about things as you're watching the film, it's not all that bad. There are things I was thinking about my own time in school, and I'm certain that was what the director was intending to achieve. At least this isn't a movie that is actively bashing you over the head with moments that are supposed to make you feel bad.

A person should bear in mind that Wonder is rated PG, and the point is supposed to be for parents to watch the film with their children. Auggie (Jacob Tremblay) is a 10 year old who lives in Brooklyn with his mother Isabel (Julia Roberts), father Nate (Owen Wilson), his sister 'Via' (Izabela Vidovic), and their dog Daisy. Life should be happy, and most of the time it is, but some of the time it isn't. Auggie was born with Treacher Collins syndrome, which can best be described as a genetic disorder that leads to someone being born with a messed up face. Auggie has had 27 surgeries, they've fixed his face the best they can do, and he's been home-schooled for five years now. With fifth grade upcoming, his parents have decided to enroll him in private school. The kid needs to have friends, and his mother can't home school him forever. That isn't healthy. Before the school year begins, he meets with the principal, Mr. Tushman (Mandy Patinkin). It seems clear that the school is going to do everything they can to protect Auggie. He is to take a tour with three other students, Jack (Noah Jupe), Charlotte (Elle McKinnon), and Julian (Bryce Gheisar). It is also very quickly made clear that Julian is going to bully Auggie, and that some other students may do the same. On goes the astronaut helmet.

Wonder goes an interesting route in that the entire story is not focused on Auggie. The viewer is forced to think about the impact that Auggie's disability has on everyone else. Via, as already mentioned, is Auggie's sister and she's in high school as this plays out. Miranda (Danielle Rose Russell) was her best friend, until she wasn't, and Via does not understand why things are this way. Via meets a boy, Justin (Nadji Jeter), and he inspires Via to sign up for Drama Club. Thing is, Miranda signed up too in an attempt to do something different, and Miranda doesn't have the heart to tell Via what the issue is. As this is going on, Auggie is acclimating better and better to school, eventually making a friend in Jack. At least, that is, until Jack says something when Auggie is dressed in his Halloween costume and unrecognizable. Then, they aren't friends. It's time to go back to wearing the astronaut helmet that he was wearing when he first arrived at school and went out in public. As far as Via's story goes, and how it relates to Auggie's disability, the viewer is presented with the reality of being the ignored child. Auggie's problems are more important than everything else, and this is very difficult ground for a teenage girl.

There are two routes that a film like Wonder could have gone, and both are realistic. You have the route where the other children adjust to Auggie's disability and aren't bothered by it. Then, you have the story where the chidren don't ever adjust to his disability and the child becomes a pariah for the rest of his life. Both those things happen, I think the latter is somewhat more likely to happen, but I don't know what mileage there is in a film about that. So, with that in mind, you have to take Wonder for what it is. Wonder is an anti-bullying story, but again there are two different ways of telling one of those. This is not a perfect film though. The actors playing the parents, famous as they are, actually have little impact on the film as a whole. The structure of the movie is a great strength that makes up for this flaw, the chapters and insight into the background of the other kids allow the story to be fleshed out more than the parents are able to do so. Another flaw, of course, relates to one of the parents. We are never shown or told what Owen Wilson does for a living, he's just Auggie's dad and I guess that's all that matters. Is that accurate and true to the reality of a ten year old boy? Yes, sometimes they don't know.

I did like this movie, and I'm going to give it a 7, but most of what I've posted is praise. I need to explain something though. In fifth grade, bullies are a hell of a lot worse than this. I wasn't a bully, but if someone was bothering me, or trying to pull some shit on me, I know that I sounded a lot worse than this when I was 10 years old. Of course, I'm not everyone though. I also got in a lot of trouble for this. It takes the bully in this film nearly the entire story to get in trouble, without talking a lot of shit. Bullies know how to avoid getting in trouble and the person caught cursing back at someone will get in trouble instead. The film is true to life in this way. Ultimately, take it for what it's worth, the movie is a straight forward story about a disabled kid trying to make it in the world outside of his house. His sister has had her life destroyed by his problems, and no focus placed on her development as a result of this. That the film doesn't neglect that issue, and that part of growing up, is somewhat of an achievement. It's also funny that the film focuses more and more on this as it plays out, this is not a film limited to its disabled subject. As someone who has disabled family members, and someone who lives with them, I was surprised that this story seemed to reach me on that level. I get it, I really do, I know exactly how a person feels in that situation. It is very authentic, actually. A person who doesn't understand that may think Via is being selfish, in which case it is hard for me to accept their review of the film.

7/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #232 on:** August 19, 2019, 06:19:23 PM »

Quote from: The King of Trash on August 16, 2019, 12:01:46 AM

damn it was running a 3 rating, what made you drop it another full point?

When there's a closing fight scene and the filmmaker can't even show you what's actually happening, where you can't even understand how one of the people attacked the other one, and there's a shitload of other inexplicable scenes like that...that'll drop a movie a point at least.

Brodypedia · « **Reply #233 on:** August 21, 2019, 01:09:46 AM »

Have you seen/reviewed Carnal Knowledge?

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #234 on:** August 21, 2019, 03:54:43 AM »

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #235 on:** August 22, 2019, 06:39:04 PM »

Roman J. Israel, Esq. (2017), directed by Dan Gilroy

I believe this is the only time that I've completely went through someone's list of films they directed. Good for me, I suppose, but there were only three. This is a rather dubious accomplishment. Perhaps more than any other film with Denzel Washington in a lead role, Roman J. Israel, Esq. is one that features him doing things and acting in a way that I am generally unaccustomed to seeing Denzel Washington behave. The viewer, ultimately, hangs onto this film because of Washington and because of him alone. Everything else is secondary, and there is absolutely no exception to that at all. I remember that when people had first viewed this at film festivals, there was some talk that the movie was a complete mess. In some respects it is a mess saved by the star, the character is in complete opposition to what he is forced to do as part of the realities of our current time. The director is unable to properly draw those lines, and Roman's turn on his own idealism is exceedingly difficult to believe at all, but this film is a good ride while it lasts. I wouldn't say that I love it more than most, because some people really loved this film, but I don't hate it the way that some apparently did. I can't grasp how or why anyone would actually hate this film, but I am left to wonder if Nightcrawler was a fluke for Gilroy. Does he have anything in his arsenal that can replicate that? To date, the answer is clearly that he does not, but it's hard to make a film that compares to something so uniquely unsettling.

Roman J. Israel (Denzel Washington) is a lawyer who works for a small criminal defense firm in Los Angeles, making what can best be described as not enough money to even live in Los Angeles. This fact can throw the entire film into question, but I simply ignored it and took it for a quirk that was what it was. Roman's firm is owned by a William Jackson, a professor and lawyer who specializes in courtroom appearances because Roman cannot handle them. Roman, his use is in the office preparing briefs, or giving legal advice and focusing on the civil rights of defendants. He has spent time writing a brief that he believes will bring social reform to the process of plea-bargaining, but the brief is not ready yet, and he's at a loss for how to finish it. Roman can also best be described as anti-social, and intelligent as he may be, this can create some problems. On the first day we are introduced to Roman, Jackson has a heart attack, which forces Roman to take control of court cases and we see how abrasive he actually is. The first one leads to an interesting argument between Roman and the prosecutor, and the second leads to him being fined for contempt of court when he can't shut up. Unfortunately, we later learn that Jackson's heart attack left him in a permanent vegetative state, his practice is over and Roman is left in turmoil.

When this happens to Jackson, the practice is done because Jackson is absolutely broke. The will left George Pierce (Colin Farrell) in charge of closing the firm. Pierce was Jackson's former student who had started his own criminal defense practice, with four offices and sixty employees across the area. George admired Jackson, but the situation is what it is. He is not the kind of lawyer that Roman is. George subsequently makes clear to Roman the situation at the firm, that he kicked down cases to Jackson when his firm didn't have the time or the desire to handle those cases, and that was how Jackson and Roman made their money. Roman really doesn't like George's approach as a whole, he believes that George is a greedy lawyer and does not want to work at George's own firm when offered a position. He turns it down even though his raise would be exponential, because he believes in social justice and cannot accept working for someone like George. So, Roman is left to hit the pavement in search for a job. He meets Maya (Carmen Ejogo), and she's in charge of a local activist group. Roman prostrates himself in hopes of getting a job as a paid attorney for this group, brings all of his history to the table, but the fact is that money and social justice do not go hand in hand. With inflation, and everything else that goes into living, there's hardly any room for people like Roman anymore. This is true too. She cannot give Roman a job, which leads to him to come back crawling to George. Can Roman do anything the way that a corporate lawyer would want him to do, and can he be social enough to play well with others?

I have absolutely buried the crux of this film, and it's probably a good thing that I did. Anyway, this is a movie that features Denzel Washington spouting off all kinds of philosophical things. You think that it's even slightly possible I didn't like this? Unfortunately, I only liked it and couldn't find it in myself to think this was a great film. There's a point where the babble becomes way too much, but a larger problem is that the script as a whole cannot contain a character like this one. This is the kind of movie that makes a person wish Roman Israel was tasked with defending Jake Gyllenhaal's turn as Lou Bloom. If only this could actually happen, if only someone could have conceived this and brought it to life, but they did not. The problem inherent in the film is that it's just hard to believe someone so principled would do the thing that Roman actually winds up doing. Washington, to his credit, goes a long way to make someone believe. You can believe that he is poor and tired of having to live the way that he lives. You can see the excitement that takes place once he actually does this thing and is freed from some of these problems. The issue is that there is no real catalyst that suffices as enough explanation, no taste of an improved lifestyle that leaves him wanting more. He just does what he does, and that's it. This kind of motivation in a character, when the film is a character study like this one, is hard to accept.

Even though I've just said all that, I have a hard time railing against this movie. There are a few strong visual positives in favor of the film. The attention to detail, with posters of Angela Davis and Bayard Rustin in Roman's house, those are things that a real social justice warrior with real accomplishments would have in their house. The cinematography is similarly excellent, but that's hardly surprising. Robert Elswit has a talent to even make garbage look good. The essence and soul of Los Angeles are captured here. The character is extremely complicated and Washington does his best to realize the character, to behave in ways that we have not seen Denzel Washington behave. It is absolutely bizarre to see him traipsing through ocean waters, to devour food in moments of sheer joy, and generally to act as strangely as this character behaves. If you do not get some amount of joy from Roman J. Israel, Esq., there is something wrong inside your soul. I could not hate this even though the final act went some degree towards making me attempt to do so. I cannot understand why the film would end this way unless Gilroy believed that this was how he could attract Denzel Washington to this film. I am merely speculating, of course. The success in Nightcrawler is that the tone of the story remains evil until the very end. Nightcrawler is a film that impressed upon me to the extent that I know I need to watch it again. Roman J. Israel, Esq. is not that, and it never will be that, but I will remain forever impressed by Washington's performance. This is a good story with some serious thematic and character flaws, but also one people could feel all sorts of different ways about and I wouldn't have a problem with it.

6.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #236 on:** August 24, 2019, 07:20:39 PM »

mother! (2017), directed by Darren Aronofsky

How does a person even review a movie like mother!? All the hot takes someone could possibly make are long out the window, there is nothing fresh that I could possibly say. Perhaps there is nothing that really needs to be said. mother! is probably the most unsettling film I've seen since Climax, which is something you should watch if you're into this sort of thing. I'm not saying that you should be into this sort of thing, and of course I understand why someone would have a problem with Aronofsky's movie. I also don't agree with them. I'm in the camp that wants to be unsettled, I want to watch something that challenges my brain to figure out what the film is even about. Until a certain point, mother! does that, but after that point the subtlety is gone and that's when a lot of people started to get mad. Of course, when a foolish brain finally comes to comprehend what they're looking at, a lot of people can't handle it and come to grips with their own thought process. That isn't to say that the only people who disliked this were fools. But, if you didn't understand what you were watching and had to turn the movie off, maybe you are one. I do not know how I can possibly talk about this movie, how to write anything about it and encapsulate my thoughts at all. I'm going to try, that's for sure. At least the director made clear his thoughts, most of which were similar to mind. The final scene of the film, I can't really get my head around though.

mother! starts in the burned remains of a very large house, with Him (Javier Bardem) placing a crystal piece on a pedestal in his study. In his study, he writes poems, when he writes poems he is happy, but he is lacking inspiration. Once the object is placed, the house is no longer ruined, it is built and the ground around it is plentiful, green, and lush. When the house is built, Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) wakes up and wants to know where her husband is. She is his inspiration for writing, it's still so hard though. When you're a writer, there's times you feel like you're unable to do the things that you want to do. Mother renovates the house, and while doing so she begins to visualize a beating heart inside of the house. The job also never is complete. One day, a man (Ed Harris) turns up at the house and asks for a room. He is given a room even though Mother is rather reluctant, but during his time in the house he starts coughing and is clearly dying. He also has a wound of some kind. After Mother sees the wound, a woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) arrives and we learn that she is the man's wife. They are fans of Him's work, but they don't listen to anything that they're told. They are told not to touch the crystal object, but they cannot help themselves. When they touch it, it breaks, and Mother kicks them out of the house. He boards up his study so that guests can no longer come in, and that's it for his work place.

I don't want to talk about where the film goes, I've already said enough if you haven't watched this. If you have watched mother!, you don't really need for me to say anything else. This is an extremely ambitious movie made with no care given to the feelings of other people, and I'm a big fan of that to say the least. The ending of the film, as in the very last scene, is somewhat difficult for me to accept even though the way Javier Bardem acts it out is perfect. The rest, I understood as it was playing out and it didn't surprise me that when Aronofsky said what this film was supposed to mean and what the events represented. The yellow powder, on the other hand, is completely unexplained and I do not get it. The scenes leading to the end of the film are unsettling even by the standards of this film, a film where everything is meant to unsettle you and often does. If there were people not leaving my house the way that happened here, a gun would have been gotten. Let's put it that way. I think the scenes are intended to be over the top as well, there's no intention of anything being subtle. You are supposed to get it if you're paying attention and the director is trying to make you understand. If you don't understand what people are shouting while the baby is in the air, and the significance of all the events in tandem with that, I don't know what's wrong with you.

As it relates to what else needs to be said about the film, there's the cinematography. All of this leads to the film being as unsettling as it is, to everything being even more absurd. It's similar to how Climax is unsettling in large part because of Noe's use of long takes. The audience is manipulated to feeling how the director wants them to feel, and this idea of strangers invading your house is far too much. It was making me nervous as I was watching this. The performances of the actors also help. This idea that Jennifer Lawrence should be nominated for a Razzie for this performance is misogynistic bullshit. I don't understand what someone could even base that on. If you didn't find her performance convincing, even if you didn't like the film, there's something wrong with you. Javier Bardem, at the same time, he projects a level of intensity that is very difficult to match. These are his best kinds of performances, but he's good in pretty much any kind of role and we've seen that over the years. Some moron nominated him for a Razzie too. What does a person even say to some shit like that? Do we take these seriously? We shouldn't. I read that Aronofsky wrote this screenplay in five days, which is absolutely hilarious. More hilarious is that a large studio made this and gave it a wide release. The reaction to this film may have set arthouse movies back a few years, and now studios are less willing to take chances, but I still believe you can get people in theaters to watch a movie like this one.

8/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #237 on:** August 28, 2019, 06:30:32 PM »

Tully (2018), directed by Jason Reitman

I made the mistake of reading Metacritic and seeing a huge line of green scores prior to writing my review. I see as it relates to Tully that I am in the minority, but I would still give the movie one of those fancy green boxes. There's only one way to talk about this film and that's to give you the straight dope, so I will as I continue to write this thing. Jason Reitman has made some duds in the last few years, but I wouldn't say this is one of them. I also cannot figure out why he would make another Ghostbusters movie as the franchise is really toxic and there's no way to bring that to the screen without an extreme backlash of some kind. I didn't hate the last Ghostbusters, but any mistake is going to lead to a massive amount of shit and we all know this. Anyway, the stuff he's made in the last few years, with the exception of Tully, wasn't so good. With that in mind, I wasn't even sure that Tully would be good. I was guessing, and I was hoping. Where Tully succeeds is in its first and second act, but certainly not in the third. There is a very good story to be told here, and Reitman tells Diablo Cody's script as best as he can, but there's a point at which a director has to intervene and it seems he does not. There's a twist at the end that made me pretty angry and very much negatively affected my feelings about the film, but otherwise I thought this was good. The question is, is there a much better film buried inside of this one that simply doesn't come to fruition for reasons beyond that twist?

Tully is about Marlo (Charlize Theron), a mother of two who can best be described as drowning in her life. As I typed that out, I was wishing the film was about Marlo Stanfield. Anyway, she is pregnant with a third child and soon to deliver. The child was not planned, but that is what it is and there's nothing a person can do about that. She is married to Drew (Ron Livingston), and Drew is very busy with work. For that matter, Marlo was too, but she's on maternity leave. Good times. Sarah is their daughter and Jonah is their son, the latter of whom has a developmental disorder and can be described as a kid that is the source of a lot of problems. You know, it is what it is, and it isn't the kid's fault. It's just hard. She tries sensory integration therapy because they don't have the money to do differently, but that doesn't work and it sounds like bullshit from what I just read. Marlo does have a brother, Craig (Mark Duplass). Craig is very rich. He offers to pay for a night nanny as a baby shower gift, but his sister says no.

It seems that Marlo has either forgotten the struggle of having an infant while taking care of other children, or she just doesn't want anyone to do what she perceives to be solely her job. She gives birth to a daughter, Mia. After this birth, we are shown a very funny montage of the mundane struggle that comes with having children. Again, such is life and people have to do their best. Unfortunately, Jonah is having more problems in school and the principal recommends that he's placed in a different school. This is a nightmare, and Marlo has a huge meltdown both inside and outside of the school. Of course, the night nanny is going to enter her mind at this point. She hasn't been sleeping, hasn't been able to do much of anything that constitutes living a normal human life. The night nanny comes, and she is named Tully (Mackenzie Davis). Don't know how anyone could be surprised by that name. Tully is different, not what Marlo is used to, all of that stuff. Can Tully help her out?

My response to the question I posed above is that Tully is not real, but this figment of Marlo's imagination does help her out enough to push on. This twist bothers me greatly as it exposes the movie's journey as a fraud, which makes me feel like the entire thing was a waste of my time on some level. Fortunately, I am not the only one who feels this way. I'm glad not to be alone. There are victories here though. Tully is a good case of a movie that covers what it's like to be a mother in the real world, where people don't make all kinds of stupid money and have the ability to do everything they want. There aren't a lot of movies that cover the less shiny and nice parts of being a mother. When you realize that Tully is merely a younger form of Marlo's self though, that really hurts the movie. I hate to keep harping on it, but the twist engulfs the entire movie like a huge wave does a good sand castle. Some of it will still be left, but the structure of the creation is broken and what makes it whole no longer exists. I cannot understand on any level what would compel someone to write this out. I feel like I've been cheated of a great ending.

Of course, for me to feel cheated in the first place, there has to be something to the whole thing. That something is in the performances of Theron and Davis. They have great chemistry, and the reason I found myself buying the movie was in large part because of that. But, before Davis even shows up, there are some great building blocks here. I thought Theron's exasperation with her situation was great and true to life. For once, I also appreciated the lack of side characters this film has. There aren't many of value at all. This leads to the drama, or the comedy as it were, becoming more focused on the characters who actually matter. The film is short as a result of that, but I haven't figured out if the length made the ending sting even more. I don't know the answer to some of my own questions. In the end I just can't ignore the twist and feel like there really is a great movie buried somewhere inside of here. When it comes to a story like this, the authenticity is stripped when pulling the wool over the eyes of the audience like this. This was a good film, but I don't like it.

7/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #238 on:** August 29, 2019, 06:15:59 PM »

Winchester (2018), directed by the Spierig Brothers

The question I'm left with in the aftermath of having watched Winchester, is if this is the point in Helen Mirren's career where she decided that the movies she was making don't matter anymore. It seems like Winchester is a movie someone would do for fun, knowing that nobody is going to get a paycheck and knowing how terrible the movie actually is. There is no other way for me to take this, because I can't even understand why this film exists. You could say that Winchester is a film stocked with actors accustomed to appearing in horrible material, and when it comes to Jason Clarke there's no doubt that's true. Talk about a trash man if I've ever seen one. There's not much middle ground with him, I find. Either I really like what he's in or I don't, and sometimes the movies he was in a while ago sounded so bad that I didn't watch them at all. Perhaps that's too bad and perhaps I really need to commit myself towards watching trash like this. Time will tell if I do! The best way to describe Winchester is in saying this is the worst version of a Conjuring movie that you could ever watch. The Curse of La Llorona was bad, Winchester is far worse than that on a level that's actually rather easy to explain. Instead of Tuco fighting demons with his cross and other magical type shit, you have Jason Clarke doing it with an axe and his gun. That's really all that I need to tell you, isn't it? Winchester was a financial success because the film had a near microscopic budget, but it's hard to believe even $44 million was able to be drawn from this stone.

Winchester is about Sarah Winchester (Helen Mirren), of course. She was the widow of the man who started the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, one of those institutions of society that was complicit in killing a hell of a lot of people. The last time my brother went to San Francisco, he took a detour and hit up the Winchester Mystery House. I don't know how many people are familiar with this place, but it's a house that begun construction in the 1800s, and Sarah Winchester had a lot of time and money on her hands. Over the course of some years, she put about 161 rooms into this crazy looking house. It was said by some that the mansion was haunted by the ghosts of people killed with Winchesters. So, what do you think this movie's going to be about? Unfortunately, the story chosen is pretty much the lamest one that a person could possibly choose, but this story isn't in the hands of anyone capable of making a good film. Sarah believes that she is cursed by the ghosts of the people who died, and that's what her life is largely based around. Her niece Marion (Sarah Snook) and her son Henry live in the house with her, and at nights Henry is possessed by a ghost of some kind. Or a spirit. I don't even care.

While this is going on, the Winchester board is plotting to have Sarah removed so they can hoard more riches for themselves, and get rid of her controlling interest in the company. Their plan to do so is based on having Sarah ruled mentally incompetent, but they need someone to go along with their plan. Enter Dr. Eric Price (Jason Clarke), a drug addict grieving the loss of his wife Ruby (Laura Brent). Price is also in debt, which explains why he would take an assignment paying him way more than its actual worth. His job is to go to the house and make an assessment of Sarah's state of mind, which any layman would see is not all that great. When he arrives, he has a vision that he thinks is a side effect of laudanum, which he has been taking for quite some time. At the same time, there is some reality to the things he's seeing that he cannot dispute. Price leaves his room on one of the first nights and sees Henry jumping from the roof, but miraculously Price is there to catch him and keep the kid from dying. After that, he starts his assessment and Sarah tells him everything, which he does not believe. It seems that the good doctor is going to give the board what they want and tell them that Sarah has mental problems. Except, maybe she doesn't?

The words that I should use to describe Winchester are rather succinct. This movie is totally fucking stupid. Everything about it is low rent, and I don't know why the actors would have signed up to do it at all when the money on offer can't have been that great. I will say that the directors did the best with a $3.5 million budget that directors could possibly do. There were only a few sets, and you could definitely tell, and the CGI was also garbage although not too much so. The failing in the film is its use of the genre and inability to make a decent ghost story out of this material. It seems that they did not understand how to scare people, so we're inundated with scares from the very start. Maybe after so many people went to see Conjuring movies, this is exactly what we deserve. The story is called into question as well, even though this was something that people actually believed. The idea that the ghosts of people killed by weapons would come back to haunt the woman who was married to the guy who created those weapons is too ludicrous to take seriously on any level at all. Unfortunately, the material is taken seriously and that's why I didn't care for this film.

When it comes to a horror movie like this, you don't expect to see Helen Mirren slumming it in a film with such a bad and tired concept. Unfortunately, she did, and it's going to be hard for me to see her differently. I expect her co-star to be in movies like these, but this is not okay! At least the experience of watching Winchester was rather short, but that's faint praise. I was getting so bored that I was having a hard time paying attention, and that's not a criticism I often level at a film. Trust me when I tell you that you never want to watch this. The ending is so dumb, the haunted house isn't scary, and the directors have no clue how to make any of these things work. Take a hard pass. I don't watch movies this boring very often.

3/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #239 on:** September 02, 2019, 06:24:43 PM »

The Hurricane Heist (2018), directed by Rob Cohen

With Hurricane Dorian approaching potential landfall in this country, I thought this was the perfect time to watch a trash movie like this one. Is The Hurricane Heist exploitation on behalf of the filmmaker? I don't think so. Instead, what we have here is a trash pile the likes of which only a few directors and writers could possibly conceive. The director is the man who made the first Fast & Furious movie, where people were stealing TV/VCR combos in order to make their way in life. All that stuff is probably worth $50 today, but the lesson seems to have been learned. Go way bigger. I don't really know how this movie was even made in 2018, knowing what's in it and what other movies have been successful at doing in the last few years. There's no way to describe some of these things. How do you address a movie that gets the location of the city wrong, placing it in a state that it isn't even in? The competence, or lack thereof, is absolutely appalling. There are very few films as stupid as this one, but one's enjoyment of such material is entirely subjective. To me, this was enjoyable enough that I can't say this was one of the worst movies of 2018. It really wasn't, it's too goofy for that and made me laugh too many times. Let me provide you guys with another example. When a filmmaker decides to have a car chase through a completely dry countryside that has supposedly been ravaged by a hurricane, and when the Gulf of Mexico supposedly has mountain ranges that aren't far from the coast, the quality of the filmmaking here is certainly in question for the duration of the film. Did they think people wouldn't realize this was filmed in Europe? Just to be exact, it's Bulgaria. Haven't heard of hurricanes making landfall there.

The Hurricane Heist starts off in 1992, set in Alabama during Hurricane Andrew, which in reality did absolutely nothing to Alabama. I have no idea how this was in the movie, but let's continue. Will and Breeze Rutledge were evacuating from the hurricane, with their dad driving the car. Their dad has to avoid a tree that falls into the road, and he gets stuck on a rock. The kids head into a nearby house that has been evacuated while dad tries to save the truck, but winds blow over a water tank that crushes their dad and kills him. After all that, we jump forward to present time, with a storm called Hurricane Tammy coming to wreck Alabama once again. Will (Toby Kebbell) and Breeze (Ryan Kwanten) have grown up, they are no longer kids and they remember that their dad died. Breeze decided to become a repairman and Will is a meteorologist who no longer lives in Alabama, but he's in town because of the storm and has a job to do. The storm is projected to be rather small, but Will sees it differently because of course he does. He can't just be a meteorologist, he has to be the one that's right. Not a huge fan of that. Anyway, at the same time, we have another plot going on because we have to have one. Of course, it's the heist.

Casey Corbyn (Maggie Grace) is a treasury agent on a delivery, driving with her co-pilot Connor (Ralph Ineson) to the US Mint so that they can shred some otherwise good paper bills. Apparently this is something they do very frequently, even though it's a shit route. People have to work. Apparently something happened to Casey in Utah, so now she has this job, but the movie isn't good at explaining pretty much anything. Anyway, once they arrive at the facility, we see exactly how things work. Bills go in, get shredded, rinse and repeat regularly. There's a vault where the bills are taken, and Casey's job is to offload in the vault. Oddly enough, there's been a problem with the shredder for a few weeks, and there are a lot of bills stocked up that need to be gotten rid of. The boss of the place is Randy Moreno (Christian Contreras), and he's had to hire some tech specialists in order to fix it. They are Frears (Ed Birch) and Sasha (Melissa Bolona), who seem to be doing hacking of some kind. NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG HERE. With the hurricane coming, the power goes out and the generator does not work, so Casey needs to go find Breeze so that he can repair it. The thing is, people are going to steal money. An inside man is needed in order to pull this off, and Connor is the inside man. Their problem is that Casey had changed the vault code because she suspected that something stupid was going on. You want to know how all this goes together? Turn on this bad movie right after you read this.

This would be one of the worst movies of last year if it didn't amuse me so much, so some explanation is needed as to why I was so amused. How about every British actor attempting to do a shitty Southern accent? What about the ludicrous things that I mentioned in the first paragraph? The shit where people get sucked out of the mall like a vacuum is impossible for me to understand on any level at all, and the motivation of the meteorologist is just as stupid. The man's dad died from a hurricane and this has apparently motivated him to try to stop them, but any meteorologist knows that is not possible. This isn't as bad as Geostorm or anything, because The Hurricane Heist actually delivers on its premise. The movie could be a lot worse, the easiest way to do so would be for there to be no hurricane the same way there was no geostorm. That kind of thing sets me off very quickly. The cast is also largely terrible in the sense that they don't have anything to do, and their motivations remain rather unclear. I hope that some lessons are learned from this and that certain directors aren't allowed to make movies anymore. The lack of logic in the chase scene at the end absolutely blew my mind on all levels.

Now, that being said, there's more to this movie than I've already mentioned. The movie has a major gun fetish, yet pushes other political beliefs on you too. Like, for example, the fact that man made climate change does exist and does power these storms. This movie is a major trash pile, and it also cost a fair amount to make. $40,000,000 for this? That's a joke of some kind. There's no thought given as to the logistics of robbing $600 million. It's put in a truck in almost no time at all, the plan is actually impossible and that's shown as the film plays out, and everything in the film is functionally ridiculous to a fault. You know, that's part of why I don't hate this film though. The incompetence in making the film is so far off the charts that I almost appreciate it. The CGI in The Hurricane Heist is also really, really bad. The Hurricane Heist is also basically a comedy, for lack of a better term. I think it's unintentional, but one never can be sure anymore.

4/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #240 on:** September 03, 2019, 05:43:33 PM »

Last Men in Aleppo (2017), directed by Feras Fayyad

I'm not sure how, or even if I should actually review Last Men in Aleppo. Half the time I watch documentaries, I make the decision not to review them. Sometimes, it's because the documentary makes me hate myself of hate the state of the world. Others, it's because I don't think the documentary really hit me the way that it should have, so I decide not to write anything because I'm not sure I can fill out a space. Last Men in Aleppo is a documentary that corresponds more to the first reason I decide not to review those kinds of films. I just don't know what to say about something that has the content that this has, and that has the ending that it does. I feel very low after watching this, but the documentary is not about me. It is about the work that the White Helmets did and do in Syria, work that should not be something that any person has to do. I was left in awe of the ability of these people to push on with their work regardless of what happened from day to day. These people, the ones who lived anyway, will certainly be scarred for life. This isn't the first time I've watched something like this though. City of Ghosts is another documentary that addresses some of this material, but is more focused on the impact of ISIS on a city not allowed to be filmed. As humans, it is clear that we have made terrible mistakes in allowing this sort of thing to happen. I think, after watching this anyway, that I hate this planet.

Last Men in Aleppo is about the White Helmets, in this case specifically about those in Aleppo. This group in Aleppo responds to bombings and search and rescue. The documentary, of course, is not pretty at all. Last Men in Aleppo follows two subjects, Khaled and Mahmoud. Khaled is older, has a family with three children and had been considering evacuating and heading to Turkey. What awaited in Turkey, he did not know and that was why he didn't do it. Mahmoud, on the other hand, is much younger. His brother Ahmad has followed him to do this, but they've both not told their parents who are old, in bad health, and have already left for Turkey. The balance in such a life, as we see with Khaled, is impossible. He doesn't see his children for days on end, and the job speaks for itself. Pulling people out of collapsed buildings that have been bombed by Russian and Syrian planes is physically and mentally draining. This, more than anything else, should be a lesson to Westerners. We should appreciate what we have and stop calling from our nice houses and our great life for people to kill each other in the name of freedom or anything else. This is ultimately the end result. Dead innocents are strewn across Aleppo, these scenes hurt as they play out on screen in front of you. Perhaps none of them really prepares you for the ending of the film, which features Khaled being killed during a rescue operation when a building had collapsed on him.

The ending of Last Men in Aleppo fucking hurts, just a bit more so than the rest. As a viewer, I felt like we got to know the person who was one of the subjects in this documentary, and imagining the impact on his family is rather devastating. Whether the person is a hero, a father, a mother, a child, an infant, it seems not to member. These bombs do not discriminate and kill wantonly as they were intended to do. I do not know the political beliefs of everyone bombed over the course of this movie, or the religious beliefs of all the people who saved them. That is the point. The movie does a great job of presenting the full picture of a day in the life of being one of the White Helmets. One rather sobering scene is with Mahmoud, who had failed to save nearly an entire family, but was idolized by the child he did manage to save. The child did not understand all that had happened, and for Mahmoud this seemed to be a source of shame. It is impossible for most to know what this feels like, but a search for understanding is required. I was not entirely prepared for what this film was going to show, and thought this would be easy until a certain point. The point at which this becomes difficult is nearly instantly, and that is the point. Nothing here is lingered upon, but you are shown what happened and can see for yourself the impact of these conflicts. I also wish I'd known prior to watching this that Khaled had died. It was reported in the media, but I didn't know anything about it and was not ready for some of the feelings that I had.

Despite what some will tell you about how the Syrian regime has begun to consolidate their power around the country, that is not even true. This will probably never be over, in fact. The people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time will be punished for the rest of their lives. Whether they had to flee the country as refugees, their status in the country they fled to will always be in question. The politics of the situation, to be blunt, are fucked for refugees. In the end, many of them will be returned, forcibly or not. Returning is an option nobody would want, as punishment is on the table for those who do return. There are laws that will allow refugees to be stripped of their property, rumors that those who return will be conscripted in order to prove their loyalty, or thrown in prison instead. They might as well be the same thing. The Syrian economy is irreparably ruined, the country is certain to remain heavily sanctioned even when the conflict is over and refugees are returned. The country is also unable to be lived in, beyond destroyed. The hurricane damage that you can see in photos tonight is common in Syria, entire large cities destroyed by bombs and fighting. There are ruins everywhere. The Syrian government will never have the capacity or ability to rebuild the country so that people can live in it, and it's uncertain whether or not they'd even want to do that.

Unfortunately, the evidence is pointing in the direction of the aftermath of the war in Syria being worse in some respects than the war itself. There will probably always be some level of insurgency in addition to what I've already mentioned. This isn't entirely related to Last Men in Aleppo, except that it is because my mind naturally wanders to what is going to happen to all these people. There are a countless number of refugees outside the country, who as I already said, will certainly not be allowed to stay in their new countries for political reasons. This was a problem with the Bosnian War as well, but it was a different time and the conflicts had different roots that don't allow for a similar result. Bosnians who wanted to live in Bosnia were displaced, but Syrians who wanted to live in a free Syria or have a safe home will not be getting what they want. When I saw Khaled's body at the end of this film, knowing that he wanted to live in a free Syria, the last two paragraphs are what I thought about. The same thing goes for the children killed by bombs. This is going to remain a conflict, it is not going to be over and there will still be an insurgency. At the point where there is not an insurgency, collective punishment is coming. We know this, the world has decided not to do anything about it. On some level I'm unsure what could actually be done. Someone is going to wind up being punished no matter what happens. This place is a disgrace.

8.5/10

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #241 on:** September 04, 2019, 06:50:55 PM »

7 Days in Entebbe (2018), directed by Jose Padilha

I had previously referenced 7 Days in Entebbe when reviewing The Last King of Scotland, and I'd said this was terrible merely on the basis of the review scores. I had not watched the film yet, but I needed to. I have learned since writing that review last year that I shouldn't judge anything before watching it. Even if that pre-judgment turns out to be right, when someone does that I don't think it's fair to the film. People wind up talking about things in the film that may or may not exist, and I try not to take part in that. I think some of the criticisms I have are the same things I complained about with The Red Sea Diving Resort. The film is focused on the wrong damn people! What is the compulsion of Hollywood to go and do this? What's more is that this is a director from Brazil, who largely made films in Brazil, and they should know better than that. One of the many problems that 7 Days in Entebbe has is that it attempts to give a viewpoint to all sides, and in doing so that leads to the focus falling onto the wrong group of people. There's another thing here that drove me absolutely insane, and I don't understand why it's even here. What I think a lot of people may not understand about this operation is that it was a resounding success. The film does not make that clear at all, in this case it is up to the viewer to do their own research. That approach to the film is not what I want either, so what we mostly have here is a movie about a subject I'm interested in that features nothing I should be interested in.

7 Days in Entebbe is about the hijacking of Air France Flight 139, which was traveling from Tel Aviv to Paris with a stop in Athens along the way. The film presents these things in a way that I absolutely would not have, but here goes. Brigitte Kuhlmann (Rosamund Pike) and Wilfried Bose (Daniel Bruhl) are radical left wing revolutionaries from Germany. They have the intention of hijacking this flight along with two Arabs, and that's exactly what they do. After this hijacking, we are sent into the past so that we can understand their mindset and how things got to this point. Wilfried is more of an idealist, I believe he said exactly that during the hijacking and ensuing hostage situation. Brigitte, on the other hand, is determined to do whatever it is that she believes must be done. One of their accomplices had died in prison, this pushed her towards these events. She is determined, and even though their friend Juan Pablo attempts to both Germans to abandon this mission, they will not. Being told that they will both look like Nazis for capturing and imprisoning Jews is not enough of a critique to dissuade them. The film also heavily sanitizes Brigitte's participation in this terrorist event. The anti-semitic slurs she apparently bombarded the passengers with are non-existent in 7 Days in Entebbe.

I've tried not to bore people with details of the operation, but after the hijacking the terrorists stopped in Benghazi to refuel, after which they pushed on to Uganda. Uganda was led by Idi Amin (Nonso Anozie) at the time, and we all know about Amin. If you don't, read my review of The Last King of Scotland. Anyway, once they get to Uganda, they are also met by the ringleaders of the whole thing, Jaber (Omar Berdouni) and Haddad (Ehab Bahous). These guys are in the film nowhere near as much as you'd think. Over in Israel, they're keenly aware that this plane has been hijacked and that's it's full of Israeli citizens, because that's obviously the case when a plane leaves Tel Aviv. Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashkenazi) is the Israeli Prime Minister, and he's between a rock and a hard place here. The Israeli policy is to not negotiate with terrorists, but Uganda is also very far away. Launching a mission is rather unrealistic. Shimon Peres (Eddie Marsan) is the Defense Minister of the time, a non-soldier who specialized in dealing arms and creating Israel's nuclear program. This was how he got into this position, his logistical ability was sound. Motta Gur (Mark Ivanir) is the IDF Chief of Staff, and ultimately whatever plan that Peres comes up with has to be endorsed by him. If that doesn't happen, there won't be a mission. In the most foolish subplot of the bunch, we have Zeev (Ben Schnetzer) and Sarah (Zina Zinchenko). Sarah is a surrealist dancer whose dancing montages are for some insane reason pushed into scenes with gunfire. Zeev is going to be sent on the mission to Uganda. Does this film have too much going on? You know it.

Keeping in mind everything I mentioned in the two paragraphs above, it is very difficult for me to make sense of what this film actually is. Two of the most important components are also largely absent from the proceedings. The Palestinians who came up with this operation and were ultimately in charge of executing it, their viewpoint and their motivations are largely window dressing. The film takes their audience for granted here and assumes that people are acutely aware of details they may not be. Worse than anything else is that the fate of the passengers is treated as a fait accompli, there is very little focus given in the back half of the film to any other than the aircraft's pilot. The film is more focused on trying to explain why the two Germans would participate in the attack, but at the same time sanitizes some of their ideas in a way that I find odious. At least some portion of the film is dedicated to the planning of the rescue and the decision to actually commit to it. 7 Days in Entebbe has redeeming qualities, but they are largely related to that alone. The subplot with the dancer and her boyfriend is one of the most ridiculous things I've seen placed in a film like this one. You have to be kidding me with that shit.

One last problem, perhaps the largest, is that the film fully commit to demonizing any specific group. It is afraid to paint these specific terrorists the way they actually were, and at the same time it's hard not to see a bias when you consider all of the things as a whole. When it doesn't commit to a side, it does so in a way where the hostages and the terrorists from Palestine are seemingly unimportant, the side we see is effectively the side of the Israelis with no recognition given to the Palestinians at all. Or, for that matter, the consequences of the actions taken by the Israeli government and how those things affected the Israeli hostages who were on that plane. There is no justification for a lot of the things that happened over there, but 7 Days in Entebbe attempts to provide justification for a lot of characters, and I can't handle it. The terrorists were fucking terrorist, the Germans specifically were absolute human garbage with a terribly warped thought process. One of the Palestinian characters finally speaks and makes this clear near the end of the film, but the damage was long done. The cast as a whole is also too good to be in this film. Bruhl and Pike both have a propsensity to wind up in stinkers, but their talent is also undeniable. I can't explain why they wind up in a lot of shitty movies, but it happens I guess. It's kind of laughable, but this isn't a movie that should ever have been about their characters. Anyway, I really don't recommend watching this movie. It isn't comprehensive enough in terms of describing the rescue, doesn't show much of what happens in the terminal once the IDF soldiers arrive, and the scenes with the dance troupe I found to be rather offensive. Lior Ashkenazi and Eddie Marsan do a very good job with their scenes though.

4.5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

I also wanted to say that, as I'm looking at my list anyway, the difference in quality of films from 2018 and 2019 could not be more large. I still have a hell of a lot of trash from 2018 to get around to, but I also have some good films I need to watch. I don't think it's just my perception either, this year fuckin sucks.

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #242 on:** September 06, 2019, 08:42:22 AM »

Backstabbing for Beginners (2018), directed by Per Fly

I think everyone knows how I feel about these political thrillers, particularly when they relate to true events in a far off land. I cannot help but watch them regardless of what reviews say or their content actually is. The reviews for Backstabbing for Beginners are not all that great, but my mom also wanted to watch the movie once she saw that Ben Kingsley was in it. So, there's that, and that's enough for me to review something I may have decided to watch and bury like I've done with a few documentaries. I have considered not reviewing everything I watch for the simple purpose of being able to watch even more, but I don't think we're at a point where I should do that yet. Some of the names in the story are changed from reality, and I don't know the purpose of it given that these things actually happened, but perhaps that allows for a little more creative license in an attempt to liven up the film. What we have here is ultimately a misfire. This is a film that would have been very difficult to liven up in any meaningful way. As I've also said before, not all stories can be adapted to the screen, and it seems that Per Fly does not have the ability to adapt this one. Admittedly I have never even heard of this director before, but that makes sense because I am not Danish. It is likely I will not hear of him again.

Backstabbing for Beginners is about Michael (Theo James), the son of a diplomat who died in Beirut when Michael was young. His last name has been changed to Sullivan for the purposes of the story, but the person who wrote these memoirs is Michael Soussan. Michael has always wanted to be a diplomat, but prior to applying for his job at the United Nations, he was a lobbyist. Leaving that world behind is best for him, he says. His job interview doesn't go very well, but Pasha (Ben Kingsley) is the head of the Oil-for-Food Programme. He's going through files and looking at applicants, and he sees Michael, whose father he later claims to have known. The reason he wants to hire Michael is actually very easy to decipher. Michael is a young idealist who he believes is easy to manipulate to do what he wants to do. Oil-for-Food was an absolute disaster on many levels, but the fact remains that the program did keep some Iraqi citizens fed when they otherwise wouldn't have been. Anyway, Pasha and Michael have a job to do over in Baghdad. They are supposed to meet with Christina Dupre (Jacqueline Bisset), who is in charge of writing a report to the UN about Oil-for-Food. Dupre has every intention of putting down in her report that the program is corrupt and needs to be shut down. Pasha intends to stop that, and Michael is a pawn in this game that can be easily manipulated into doing what Pasha wants.

I left out a lot of details because I can't bring myself to do a huge review for this film, so it seems I've figured out which kinds of films can have their reviews easily chopped up. Backstabbing for Beginners is a movie that takes someone's memoir and drive a sledgehammer through it, but this is a memoir that is more interesting on paper than on screen. There is an attempt to show how devious diplomacy can be even when there's a motivation to help people, and while I do think that's the case, this film just isn't good enough as a whole. There's an easily definable reason for that too. You put Theo James and Ben Kingsley on the same screen at the same time, and the performances have such a stark difference in quality that it is heavily distracting. James is an absolute nothing while Kingsley is reveling in his role, this kind of thing ultimately ruins the film. Kingsley's performance needed to be matched, but I can imagine what this would be like if his performance level was lowered, and I think it would be really bad. The film also fails in explaining what happens to a a Russian fixer by the name of Rasnetsov, and fails as a whole in making everything very easy to understand. When you know that the program was shut down, there's also a lack of tension that permeates throughout the film, and I found that I didn't care for it.

5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #243 on:** September 10, 2019, 06:40:55 PM »

Breaking In (2018), directed by James McTeigue

I think you can guess everything about this review beforehand if you've happened to see this movie before. In the end, you'd probably be right. What I'm interested in, is how someone goes from directing V for Vendetta to directing a movie like this one. Judging by the other movies he's directed, the guy is clearly not a good director at all and doesn't really know what he's doing. So, that settles that. I have also noticed that my scores for films tend to resemble the Metascore of them. I do not ever look at those first, so it isn't on purpose or anything. I guess I'm just an average fucker who winds up following the consensus unwittingly. I can't really do a lot of work here in order to make the review longer. This is a home invasion movie, and if you've seen one of those you've seen a hell of a lot of them to be sure. These movies are often extremely similar, the quality of them is usually determined by the performances that the invaders give. A good lead who has their house invaded is not good enough to make the film on their own. You have to be enthralled by someone like Dwight Yoakam or Alan Arkin. If you aren't, well, this isn't going to be all that good. What we have here with Breaking In is a more comical movie than I thought it would be, with some of the performances being hilarious caricatures of how people would truly act. In this case I thought it was funny enough to not be completely terrible.

Breaking In begins with a scene to set up the entire movie, where a man named Isaac is run over in the street and has his head kicked in. Of course, he dies. Now, Shaun Russell (Gabrielle Union) has to head up to Isaac's lake house to sell it. Shaun was his daughter, and she also brings her two kids along with her. They are Jasmine (Ajiona Alexus) and Glover (Seth Carr), two little shitheads who ultimately seem to be good kids. I noticed, like I'm sure everyone else did, that the actress who played Jasmine looked a lot like Gabrielle Union. Anyway, at the house we see that this is not a normal house. It is filled with all kinds of technology, and when the family arrives the security system is offline. Alarm bells ring instantly for normal people, but I suppose not for people in movies. Of course, there are people inside. Peter (Mark Furze) is an alt-right looking safe cracker, Sam (Levi Meaden) is a tweaker, Duncan (Richard Cabral) is a hardened criminal, and Eddie (Billy Burke) is the guy that came up with this plan. The plan, you say? The plan is to rob $4,000,000 from this very secure house now that Isaac is dead. Isaac was being investigated and liquidated all his assets (why?), storing them in a safe inside the house. Now they have hostages.

The idea that someone would liquidate everything while under investigation is totally ludicrous because of how suspicious that really is. Breaking In is a movie full of those sorts of logical inconsistencies. My least favorite one was how the police didn't show up 90 minutes after the phone lines had been cut the way that the security in the house dictated that it would. This kind of movie drives me insane. Also, when someone orders pizza out to a house that is shown to be tens of miles from anything? Nope. Can't handle that either. The kids are also familiar with the layout of the house even though they're supposed to have never visited. I'm also annoyed by how Isaac was a criminal and that it was never explained, nor was it ever stated whether or not Shaun was acutely aware of whatever it is that her father did. The film is pretty shitty, but I will give some credit where it's due. Gabrielle Union tries her hardest to save this, but everything else about this is just a sorry effort. Like I said, these movies only work when the bad guys bring something to the table, and these ones do not.

The obvious motivator for making a movie like this one is money, but at $6 million I'm unsure how much the lead actress or director got for making it. That's a small budget for what Breaking In brings to the table, but you can see that it's small in the quality of the filmmaking as well. The script is bad, but you can see that this is solely a Gabrielle Union star vehicle and that absolutely nothing else matters. Clearly, to some extent it worked. They hauled in $51.4 million for this rather poor effort, and when a studio can get that kind of return for what they put out, they'll take it. The problem is that this is way too similar to every other home invasion movie that exists. It also isn't as funny as some of the bad movies I've seen from 2018 or really any year at all. Breaking In is also VERY similar in my mind to Traffik, which came out a month beforehand. Don't know how or why such similar movies premiere right next to each other.

4/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #244 on:** September 11, 2019, 05:53:02 PM »

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017), directed by Jake Kasdan

When it was first announced that Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle was going to be a thing, I swore that I would never watch it. HOW DARE THEY take something away from Robin Williams and give it to someone else? First of all, I didn't realize when I said that what this movie was actually going to be. I thought it was a straight remake instead of rebooting things. I did not expect that as this was going on, I wouldn't even be thinking about the first film in any way at all. Comparison is not something I was interested in doing. I will say that I think this is better than the original. The original suffers from a rapid ending to the board game itself, the film is poorly paced and it feels like that comes to an end much too fast. Jumanji also has a lot of other stuff going on that leads to the board game section being compressed. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle doesn't really suffer from that, they decided to make the film a little bit longer and not have much downtime. This is how that could be avoided. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a different kind of film on many levels, this is a straight out action-adventure. It's exactly what a second Jumanji film really needed to be. I do, however, have my doubts that the third film will be as strong as the second. They're bringing everyone back, for starters, and we've already seen enough of the people in this movie that it would do the film franchise well to move on. Film franchises, however, can never move on.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle kicks off in 1996, right after the Shepherd's would have tossed the board game in the ocean after they'd played it. Instead of going over to France, it stayed in New Hampshire, and was picked up by a man wanting to bring a board game home to his son. Alex Vreeke (Mason Guccione) wasn't interested in board games and said as much, but this revelation enabled Jumanji to morph into a game for the Atari. The Jumanji drum beats woke Alex up and enticed him, which leads to Alex putting it in the machine. After picking his character, the game sucked him in, and he has been gone for around 20 years. Meanwhile, in the world present in 2016-17, there's a group of teenagers who go to Brantford High School. Spencer (Alex Wolff) is a nerd who helped 'Fridge' (Ser'Darius Blain) cheat on a paper because he needed some help. Fridge is more focused on football and girls than on school, and the way films present society now, someone's always willing to help out. Martha (Morgan Turner) is another nerd, a little bit more critical of those who get on her nerves though. Lastly, there's Bethany (Madison Iseman), who is very self-centered and focused on her own image. What do all these kids have in common? They're sent to detention.

Upon arriving in detention, Fridge discovers the video game system that once belonged to Alex, and of course a Jumanji cartridge is locked in. I should point out that in the town, it is assumed that Alex disappeared and was killed or something. Everyone doesn't want to do what they're tasked with doing in detention, and they aren't supervised, so they're going to grab a controller and get to playing. Everyone goes to pick their character, but the first one is not able to be selected. Nobody thinks anything of these selections, but they sure do once they're teleported into the jungle. Spencer has become Dr. Smolder Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson), an explorer and archaeologist. Fridge has become a zoologist, Mouse Finbar (Kevin Hart). Martha, at least she received something better than Fridge, she is Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan), an ass kicker for lack of a better word. Unfortunately, Bethany got the worst of all this, and has become a cartographer, Professor Sheldon Oberon (Jack Black). All of these characters have their strengths and weaknesses, but the gist of the game is this. They are tasked with preventing Van Pelt (Bobby Cannavale) from regaining the Jaguar's Eye, a magic jewel that allows its holder to control the animals of Jumanji. Van Pelt had stolen the jewel and needs to have it back. The group needs to put the jewel back where it belongs, and they need to find 'the missing piece' in order to do it.

I will be the first to admit that 'the missing piece' was rather disappointing. You would think that when building up something like that, you'd get an actor befitting of being a missing piece. Preferably an older one like Arnold. The film is good enough despite that. I wasn't surprised at all that this was more of a comedy than it was anything else, because if you're putting the Rock, Jack Black, and Kevin Hart on a screen at the same time, that's absolutely what you're going to get. Jack Black, obviously he has the most difficult or perhaps even easiest part of the bunch to play, and has a hell of a lot of fun with it. I remember a lot of people whining about The Last Jedi at the time, and I don't think Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is better, but I can see why some people got so mad they could easily believe this rather surprising film was better. This is a movie that was supposed to be terrible and somehow it wasn't. That's hard to digest! The movie also works because of how focused it is on the actors who play the characters inside the video game. There were many ways to mess this up by taking the audience outside of the video game over and over, but that's not what happened. This would also be a rarity in that I would classify Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle as being a good video game movie. It isn't adapted from a video game, but this is a video game.

Of course, this isn't a perfect movie, I would say that I liked it just enough. Some of the CGI can best be descrived as being very bad. The story prior to entering the video game also dragged for me, because it's more targeted at teenagers and I'm no longer one of them. I hardly care at all about the teenagers, in fact. If there was a way to make this any better, it would be for the adults to have played against type out in the real world and found their way into Jumanji via mobile game. That's how I see it anyway. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is still a better film than Jumanji. It just is, because it isn't as reliant on special effects even though the ones that are here aren't so good. The jokes are funny, I was interested in seeing how the film ended, and probably most importantly this featured Jack Black as a teenage girl who found herself stranded out in the jungle. You don't get something like that every day, and not every film has to be great.

7/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #245 on:** September 16, 2019, 06:09:41 PM »

Uncle Drew (2018), directed by Charles Stone III

I believe Uncle Drew was the last of the movies I could easily have seen in theaters right at the point when I started going, but I chose to wait for HBO instead. One year later, or over a year later at that, it's time to watch and review Uncle Drew. Look, I cannot remain remotely impartial when it comes to this movie. The thing is, I wanted to like this so much more than I actually did. This could have been better, but that isn't to say that the film isn't entertaining. What we have here is a movie that I can't believe was made in the first place, a movie that did make a little bit even though it was supposed to make more. It just couldn't do that because it's a niche film. It would be very difficult to get someone who doesn't know anything about basketball to get into this film. There is one thing I really would have liked though. If this film could have avoided the scene where the characters have to argue in order to become closer, if they had focused on basketball players from my childhood cosplaying as old men and having a good time, that would have made the film better. It was what Uncle Drew really needed to be. Instead, Uncle Drew is nearly what it should have been. I liked it anyway, but when it comes to a movie like this one, everyone has their own ideas of how to make it better and ultimately that works against the movie too.

Uncle Drew starts with a 30 for 30 type of deal, where famous basketball players that everyone here should know talk about Uncle Drew (Kyrie Irving), a street ball legend who was supposed to play in the Rucker Classic only to not show up at all. You aren't told why he didn't play at Rucker until much later, but the film kicks over to the present. Dax (Lil Rel Howery) is the coach of Harlem Money, which he intends to enter into the Rucker Classic. Their star player is Casper Jones (Aaron Gordon), who plays exactly like Aaron Gordon, so I'm confused as to why he didn't get to keep his own name. Dax is trying to keep Casper on his team because there's a $100,000 prize for winning the tournament at Rucker Park, and it's clear why he's so focused on money in the first place. He has a gold digging girlfriend, Jess (Tiffany Haddish), and he was also an orphan who had wanted to make something of himself. Instead, his shot was blocked by Mookie (Nick Kroll), and Dax stopped playing basketball when he was a kid because he was humiliated. Sounds like a shitty existence if you let your life be determined by a minor event like that one.

After this, we also learn that Dax works at Foot Locker, and Casper walks in to demand new shoes from him. Jess pays for half under the condition that she gets half of the Rucker prize money, but there isn't going to be any for Dax. You see, Dax humiliates himself again during a confrontation shown on SportsCenter, where Casper quits the team and decides to join Mookie's instead. So, Jess dumps him and has him carry his clothes out in trash bags. Eventually, one thing leads to another and Dax encounters Uncle Drew. Uncle Drew is not just a legend, not just a story, he's real and he's old and he can ball out. Dax decides to recruit Uncle Drew, deciding to leave out that there's prize money because he wants it all to himself. Thing is, Uncle Drew wants control of the team. They're all going to be old. First, you have Big Fella (Shaq), who runs a karate dojo these days; 'Lights' (Reggie Miller), who is legally blind; Boots (Nate Robinson), who is in a wheelchair and can't get up; and lastly Preacher (Chris Webber), who is obviously a preacher. Thing is, Preacher's wife Betty Lou (Lisa Leslie) really does not want him to go. So there's going to be problems.

There are groups of the cast that are pretty much the only reasons to watch a movie with a script like this one. The script is a failure, we should be clear. This is a super corny movie, the script is uninspired, but the cast keeps driving this forward even though a movie with this many non-actors shouldn't be any good. You can tell that someone wanted Kevin Hart to be the lead in this movie, and that Lil Rel was obviously a second choice, but he did a good job of making me feel sorry for him. Shaq, Chris Webber, and Kyrie Irving were the best of the non-actors in that order. Shaq's presence sort of engulfs the movie, but that's what Shaq does to stuff. The guy is so charismatic that it's completely unavoidable. Chris Webber, on the other hand, I wasn't really expecting that. He was pretty funny. I have to get a hate on somewhere though, and Reggie Miller is probably target number one. I understand why he's in this, but he was super hard to believe in this role and didn't make me laugh all that much. Neither did Tiffany Haddish, for that matter. I don't think she's completely terrible or anything, but this isn't the first time I've felt like she can't read lines at all. She needs to improv everything in order to be funny, or the script just isn't tailored to her ability. I don't know, I'm just pointing out what I saw.

So, as far as basketball movies featuring a cast full of NBA players, this is one of them. I haven't watched Space Jam in at least 20 years, and nobody makes movies with NBA players anymore, so this is very difficult to compare to anything else. I guess you could compare it to Eddie. Uncle Drew has a gimmick the same way that Eddie does, and both movies are totally unrealistic in every way, but I haven't seen Eddie in a long time either. I should note that Uncle Drew is also far better. Sports movies usually die a hard death at the box office, so they just don't get made unless someone is trying to win awards, and you can't win awards using real players. So studios no longer make them. It's a bummer that they don't considering that this one turned out pretty well, but money and the potential to earn it decides everything now. On the subject of sports movies dying that hard death, I am interested to see what Ford v. Ferrari does with their near $100 million budget. Can a sports movie with a very high budget and strong critical reviews come even close to making money? I doubt that shit. That comes out a week before Frozen 2, and Disney wouldn't dare to release a money maker before one of their golden franchises. We'll see. Uncle Drew isn't great, but it worked for me.

6/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #246 on:** September 17, 2019, 05:55:48 PM »

Come Sunday (2018), directed by Joshua Marston

In many ways, this is exactly the kind of review that I am attempting to condense. So, yeah, I'm going to do just that. No opening spiel here.

Come Sunday is a film about Carlton Pearson (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a preacher based out of Tulsa who was connected to Oral Roberts (Martin Sheen). For those who don't know, Oral Roberts was a huge scum that was largely responsible for this idea that you get from God what you pay to the church. This is otherwise known as seed-faith, which is one of the most sickening things that people could preach to the poor. Yet, people do exactly that every day. Carlton could be best considered as a good preacher who does things the way that his peers would want him to do. He has grown his congregation as best he can, to the extent where his church had become one of the largest churches in Tulsa. The Higher Dimensions Evangelistic Center was one of the first places that black and white both felt comfortable going to in Tulsa, and they did so because Carlton knew how to preach the gospel, or so this film says. The church is very, very prosperous. His sermons were often televised, and there was strong demand for him to preach around the country, which is exactly what he felt that he was called to do. I don't know what it would be like to be someone like Carlton Pearson. The power that comes with having that position is one thing, but as the movie tells it, the reality is that you only get that power and that position if you do very specific things that allow you to be successful.

One day, Carlton was asked to travel to San Diego, where his uncle Quincy (Danny Glover) was imprisoned. Quincy had asked Carlton to come there because he needed saved, to be freed from an eternity in hell. The issue is that Carlton cannot bring himself to believe that Quincy is ready to do that. When he returns home to his wife Gina (Condola Rashad) and their two kids, he says nothing as he always does, because this is the way that Carlton works. For whatever reason, his family is entirely secondary to his life as an evangelist. This is the way that most of these people operate when they should not. Unfortunately, Quincy decides that he cannot spend six more years in prison, and Carlton didn't help him out by sending a letter to the parole board. So, Quincy hangs himself. When Carlton hears the news, he is devastated, and in combination with a news report about the Rwandan genocide, this sets off a crisis of faith for him. Without telling anyone, including Oral Roberts or his right hand man Henry (Jason Segel), Carlton arrives to church one day to explain his epiphany. He says as a result of this epiphany, that he no longer believes in hell and that God has told him all people on Earth can go to heaven, even if they are not saved. The reaction at his church, to say the least, is very much not good. The only people who stand with him are his wife, his assistant Nicky (Stacey Sargeant), and the band leader Reggie (Lakeith Stanfield). Simply put, Carlton does not know what to make of what he said God told him, and cannot continue to preach anything that he's preached before.

Come Sunday is entirely reliant on Ejiofor's performance and his crisis of conscience, the inability to reconcile what he believes now with what he's told thousands if not millions of people. This is a biopic, but it's set in 1993 and all this stuff was before my time. It's impossible for me to say how famous this preacher actually was, I don't know the answer. I think the film fails in one particular respect though, the struggle between Carlton and the church is not so clear as it certainly was. It was ultimately concluded that he was a heretic and he was shamed. In the film, this is shown through scenes of his congregation dwindling down to nothing and the church being foreclosed upon. There should have been more scenes and more emphasis put on his ideas being heretical even though they were humanist in nature. There really isn't anything wrong with what he thinks and everyone is entitled to their opinion. The idea, however, that poor people who have never heard of God should receive the same privilege as rich people in Tulsa, is simply too much for people to bear. You can make of that whatever you want, but there is a way that you should make of it.

Come Sunday also does have a strong subplot, but perhaps one deserving of a little more focus although doing so would have made it very difficult to create a cohesive film. The already mentioned Reggie was gay, and Carlton had preached to him that being gay and doing gay are not the same thing. This is very difficult to reconcile and it's no surprise that someone in 1993 would say something like that. The subplot does culminate in a scene much later in the film that I thought was rather rewarding and very well performed. Reggie is intent on the idea that the church can save him from his sexuality, and is full bore invested into this concept. I guess that's why I'm giving this film a decent rating in the end. Ejiofor has the capability of making anything serious into a believable performance. That's just what he does. He did it in the film of his that he directed this year (The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind), and that's just what he does. I found myself drawn in and able to believe in the performance, and perhaps most importantly I didn't find anything in the film to be disgustingly melodramatic or overwrought. That, I think, is probably what matters most in a film where the director is asking you to take their concept seriously.

6.5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #247 on:** September 23, 2019, 06:24:47 PM »

Zombieland (2009), directed by Ruben Fleischer

I was thinking if it was going to be possible for me to explain why I haven't seen Zombieland before. The answer is clearly that I cannot, but I do think I've been clear in stating that I watched basically nothing for a very long time. With the sequel to Zombieland coming up, it's clear that I needed to finally get around to this. For whatever reason, I haven't seen this trailer all that much in theaters even though the movie is coming out very soon. I do need to address something else though. The reason for the lack of reviews of late is because I had felt like I was getting burned out. I needed a break. Now I'm fine and they'll keep coming, but the format does need to change in some kind of meaningful way. I just haven't figured out how to do it. One of these days I will, and everyone reading these will obviously know that. Anyway, it would seem that a sequel ten years after the initial release of a movie is not all that smart. At the same time, there's definitely room for a new release and it's not like the filmmakers overly saturated the market with ripoffs and sequels prior to the upcoming film. I wasn't sure if the humor in Zombieland would hold up, but ultimately I found that it did and that this film wasn't anywhere near as dated as I thought it would be. Instead, it is rather clever and features an actor who I will find forever timeless.

Zombieland is this, best as I can explain it. It is the United States, renamed by Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), a college student who has somehow survived two months after the zombie apocalypse. In this case, the zombie apocalypse was triggered by a person eating a hamburger infected with mad cow disease, which became mad person disease and mad zombie disease, leading to nearly everyone becoming zombies. The reason Columbus is Columbus is largely because people have decided not to use their real names anymore as they now die so quickly, so he uses the city he initially came from. In this case, Columbus is also attempting to get back to Columbus so that he can find out if his parents are still alive. He was in college at the University of Texas, so that's a rather long trip. As the movie starts, Columbus is all alone and explaining his rules to the viewer, because he also serves as the narrator. Unfortunately, there's an incident and he winds up crashing his car into a flower shop, so that's the end of that scene and the end of him having a car. For now.

For a while, he has to walk on the highway, where for whatever reason there are few zombies. He has a shotgun, so it should be alright, and from the casting I've mentioned you can tell this guy is a damn dork. Anyway, while walking he comes across Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a guy who really wants to kill a lot of zombies as often as he can. Tallahassee doesn't really like people, but he's willing to have Columbus travel along with him. At some point you figure out why. He has a reinforced Escalade, so theoretically they should be safe. The guy really wants to find a Twinkie, that's pretty much his motivation in these two months since everyone has started killing each other. On the road, they spot a grocery store and head inside, but there aren't any Twinkies there. Eventually they come across Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), two sisters who claim to need help because Little Rock has been bitten. Nobody's been bitten. If you're living under a rock like me and haven't seen this, I'll spare you all the details, but here's what's what. In the end, these four are headed to Los Angeles and Pacific Playland, because it's supposedly free of zombies and Wichita said that her sister would get to go there. What could be found along the way?

This movie is short, and by short I mean super short. This allows the viewer to get their fill and for it to end before people get tired of anything repetitive, but it's clear that people did want more and that's why we're having a sequel. The stuff with Columbus and his list, I thought that was only alright, but pretty much everything with Woody Harrelson was great. How could anyone be surprised by this? All four of these actors have strong chemistry, the zombie kills are very amusing, and so was Bill Murray's portion of the film. If you haven't seen this I think you should figure that out for yourself, but I liked it. I will also point out that I can see why horror fans wouldn't really care for the film. It's more funny than it is anything else, but as I'm writing this out I now do think there's something to the idea that this movie would have been perceived by me as being better ten years ago. It's hard when you've heard so many times that a movie is worth watching and it was ten years since it was released, so it turns out that I've been hearing that all along. Zombieland wasn't a particularly scary movie or anything, it's funny, and as I get older I'm finding less and less value in comedy. I can't really explain why that is although at some point I do hope to do so. It might be related to my personal situation now and all that stuff, I don't really know. I'm sure by the end of the year I'll be able to articulate this thought.

I am making a list for some of these years gone by, but I'm not going to post them until they're more complete. Anyway, what I noticed about those lists is that the vast majority of movies I've watched from past years are either average or straight out trash. I thought that was funny.

7/10

Firmino of the 909 · « **Reply #248 on:** September 24, 2019, 06:31:27 PM »

Rampage (2018), directed by Brad Peyton

I have no idea if this is even true, but I'm going to ask this question anyway. Is Rampage the first movie made based off of a video game series that hardly anyone played? Perhaps I'm wrong about the Rampage series, but I don't think that I am and I believe there's a reason there hasn't been a video game in it released since 2006. 2006 is a very long time to go between a video game and a movie as entries in the series, but based on what I've read it would seem that Rampage is perhaps something best done in film form to begin with. The issue with Rampage (the movie) is that it isn't very good and has a story that completely lacks in common sense. Rampage could have been great, except that it isn't great, and in thinking about the film I'm left to wonder if the Rock just does too many movies. He churns them out at an unsustainable rate that seems to be leading to an inability to draw monster sized box offices. Or maybe it's just that people will turn out for quality and his films are lacking in it. I can't really tell you for sure what is or isn't the reason that some of these movies are barely making what the studios want them to make, but everyone can judge for themselves. In this case I think it is because Rampage entirely lacks in common sense and is too similar to King Kong. I guess it's even more weird in this case that the last Kong movie and Rampage were distributed by the same studio.

Rampage jumps off at a space station called Athena-1, which is owned by Energyne which is in turn run by the CEO, Claire Wyden (Malin Akerman) and her brother Brett (Jake Lacy). Energyne is a gene manipulation company that has been conducting their research in space so that they can avoid regulation, but there's been an incident on the station. Dr. Kerry Atkins (Marley Shelton) is the only living human on the station, because it has turned out that their lab rat mutated and decided to destroy everything. Atkins wants to leave, but she is ordered by Claire to retrieve the work from the station or die on it with everything else. Once Atkins does retrieve said work, she's able to get in an escape pod and jet from the station. The problem is that the window cracked while she was attempting to eject the pod, and re-entry doesn't allow for such deficiencies in space craft. Or, maybe it does and the science in this movie just sucks. When the pod disintegrates, it turns out that the container carrying the work does not, but there were multiple canisters inside of it. There was a hole in the container that let debris off all over the US, and I'll get to what happened to said debris down below.

Davis Okoye (Dwayne Johnson) is a primatologist who was once US Army Special Forces, and he works at the San Diego Zoo handling gorillas. His team turns out to be absolutely irrelevant, so I won't mention them. He has befriended an albino gorilla named George, and this is the kind of lazy movie that will tell you Davis doesn't get along with people and that's why he likes George so much. There's a problem with that though. Even though the two communicate with sign language, these canisters went all over the place. One heads to Wyoming and is inhaled by a wolf, the other to the Everglades and eaten by an alligator, and the last of the three goes to San Diego and is inhaled by, you guessed it, George. The film is focused on George for the most part, so we get a look at what happens to George step by step. Thing is, he grows. A lot. He also becomes very aggressive, but the destruction of the space station is also now national news. When Dr. Kate Caldwell (Naomie Harris) sees where this canister went, and that one isn't all that far from her home, she decides to head down to San Diego. She has a story of her own that you can watch the movie if you want to know. Anyway, everyone has their own motivations here, but most importantly is that George and the other very large animals need to be stopped before they fuck shit up.

What I found while watching this, was that Rampage was the kind of movie for someone who could turn their brain all the way off and not think about any of the scenes unfolding in front of them. I cannot always do that, I need to have some investment in the monsters. Let's present an example of what I'm talking about here. Godzilla: King of the Monsters similarly makes no sense. The difference is that the monsters are monsters that I actually care about. Their capacity for destruction is unmatched and everything in Rampage pales in comparison to what happens in Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The actors in the latter movie are also more entertaining for me and I'm somewhat attached to them from other works they've done. Rampage attempts to be large in scope while not being large enough in scope, but considering the money this film did not make, that was probably for the best. The movie just isn't as fun because it doesn't have monsters I care about. Like, at all. You also have the Rock running around on the ground while these monsters are fighting each other and attempting to participate. Not a fan. At least the lead characters in other movies know to get the hell out of the way or to sacrifice themselves for the good of others.

I was feeling basically no way about Rampage at all for quite a large portion of the film, but a few things happened that swayed me towards the negative side of things. First was how quickly Joe Manganiello's character ate it. I'm saying this because the guy basically gets to do nothing anymore and has roles pulled out from underneath him all the time. He dies very fast here, and I didn't like it. Second was the way they had Jeffrey Dean Morgan act exactly like Negan while playing a government agent. I don't hate his performance as Negan, but that performance came at a time when The Walking Dead had already played so many cards that I couldn't care about the show anymore. What I do care about is when characters from TV shows I stop caring about start to leak out into the performances of the actors who play them. In this case I found it particularly offputting because it was like a neutered version of Negan doing shit for the government. No thanks. They also have my guy Plop as a stupid evil villain? This isn't working for me. Monsters wrecking a massive amount of shit is what works, but they don't wreck enough shit and the plot around them just isn't good enough.

5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler: show

Kahran Ramsus · « **Reply #249 on:** September 25, 2019, 11:10:03 AM »

I loved playing Rampage back in the 80s. Great mindless fun in the arcades. I don't think it really works on modern home consoles (too simplistic), but could have success if they relaunched it as a mobile game.

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