In Which I Briefly Review Movies

[909]

Always Be My Maybe (2019), directed by Nahnatchka Khan

Everyone knows that romantic comedies are supposed to be corny, yes? With that in mind, the thing I always wonder about when it comes to a film like this, or rather the genre as a whole, is what makes a good romantic comedy. There are a few things that come to mind. When the drama hits and the two leads split apart, there must be a good faith effort by both parties to repair what went wrong with their relationship. The movie also has to be very funny as a whole, focusing more on the comedy than the romance, and Always Be My Maybe is a strong example of that. The film also needs some sort of hook to really make things work and pop. In the case of Always Be My Maybe, I am not talking about the diversity of the cast, but I am a firm believer that it is positive affirmation for people to see other people like them facing issues in their own lives. What I'm talking about is that the film's hook features the characters in different stages of growing up, these shared experiences lead to things working stronger than a romantic comedy where the two leads never knew each other or were never friendly with one another. You can usually tell within the first ten minutes or so whether or not you'll like a romantic comedy. It took my mom a little bit longer to warm up to this one because she wasn't entirely paying attention, but not to bury the lede, yes, I watched Always Be My Maybe with my mom. There's nothing wrong with that, is there?

Knowing this is a Netflix movie, there's some things I expected and some things I didn't, but those expectations were thrown out of the window at some point. Always Be My Maybe begins with Sasha Tran and Marcus Kim as kids, growing up next door to each other in San Francisco. Sasha's parents are Vietnamese immigrants who own a store, and as a result they aren't home very often. Harry (James Saito) is Marcus' dad, and he owns an air conditioning business, so he's home all the time. His wife Judy (Susan Park) eventually becomes a comfort to Sasha, who is regularly invited over for dinner. Judy teaches Sasha how to cook, and the two children continue to be friends as they get older, but something bad happens. Sasha (Ali Wong) is out with Marcus (Randall Park) one day, and they receive some horrible news. Judy has died, and now they're grieving. They have sex in the back of a very shitty car owned by Marcus, which leads to the bond being broken. They have a bad argument, that's the end of their friendship and the two do not speak to each other again.

After this, we jump forward sixteen years, with both Sasha and Marcus doing radically different things. Sasha is now a celebrity chef in Los Angeles and engaged to Brandon (Daniel Dae Kim), a restaurant magnate of sorts who seems like a huge douchebag. Marcus still lives at home with his dad in San Francisco, and continues to push on with his band that only plays at one club in the neighborhood. It is not particularly successful. His girlfriend Jenny (Vivian Bang) has dreadlocks and is very strange to put it nicely. Anyway, Brandon decides that he wants to put his wedding to Sasha on hold, which leads Sasha and her assistant Veronica (Michelle Buteau) back to San Francisco for another restaurant opening with no man in tow. Veronica is another childhood friend, she knows Marcus as well. Anyway, playing into this aspect, Veronica books Harry and Marcus to install air conditioning at the house Sasha is renting, and deep down, you know where this is all going to lead.

Everyone knows that Keanu Reeves has a spot in this film where he plays a caricature of himself, yes? This aspect of the movie enhances matters greatly, elevates Always Be My Maybe from being above-average into being a good film. His lines and the delivery of them are as excellent as always, but ultimately the film being watchable is going to fall on Park and Wong because they're on screen so much. I laughed quite a lot here and I don't always care for these kinds of films, I also suspect that Always Be My Maybe would have done better at the box office than the other comedies this summer. Maybe the fact that people talked about this too much is solely related to the Netflix release and the ease of accessing the film, but I don't think that's true. Always Be My Maybe also has a lot of great skits, some commentary on food related matters that drive me insane, and I thought that the token parent character here really made their mark too. Always Be My Maybe also has those moments that make a person like me cringe, the grand speech to win someone back is always painful, but those scenes aren't targeted at me in the first place. The scene does feel more authentic than others that I've seen, but this is what it is.

I'm sure a lot of people wrote some stuff about the genre and how this breaks through the norms of the genre, but I rarely watch romantic comedies in the first place. I watched one last week and it bombed with me because I couldn't find sense in the sequence of scenes leading to how the film finished up. That's not the case with Always Be My Maybe, everything made sense and this didn't present a thoroughly disappointing concept. I guess Long Shot was the last one of these I watched, and I very much enjoyed it, probably more so than Always Be My Maybe. It's okay to feel that way, I thought Long Shot had better side characters and that's all there is to the respective ratings. I did also like that Always Be My Maybe stuck around after the happily ever after ending to provide a good resolution and show where these characters are going. You don't always see that, but it's important. I just hope that there isn't demand for a sequel, because as I see it, this scenario was completed very well. I guess we can throw this on the pile of good movies from 2019, of which there have comparatively not been that many.

7/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Booksmart
2. Avengers: Endgame
3. Toy Story 4
4. Us
5. Gloria Bell
6. Arctic
7. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
8. The Beach Bum
9. Spider-Man: Far From Home
10. Rocketman
11. High Flying Bird
12. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
13. Captain Marvel
14. Long Shot
15. Shazam!
16. Paddleton
17. Late Night
18. Hotel Mumbai
19. Always Be My Maybe
20. Cold Pursuit
21. Shaft
22. Happy Death Day 2U
23. Ma
24. Annabelle Comes Home
25. Greta
26. Aladdin
27. Triple Frontier
28. Fighting with My Family
29. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
30. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
31. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
32. Brexit
33. The Dirt
34. Velvet Buzzsaw
35. Little
36. Alita: Battle Angel
37. The Kid
38. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
39. The Upside
40. The Dead Don't Die
41. Dumbo
42. The Hummingbird Project
43. Escape Room
44. Tolkien
45. Captive State
46. The Highwaymen
47. Pet Sematary
48. The Intruder
49. Child's Play
50. Yesterday
51. Brightburn
52. Anna
53. What Men Want
54. Men in Black: International
55. Unicorn Store
56. The Curse of La Llorona
57. Miss Bala
58. The Perfection
59. Hellboy
60. Glass
61. Dark Phoenix
62. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
63. The Hustle
64. The Best of Enemies
65. The Prodigy
66. Polar
67. Serenity

 

[909]

Stuber (2019), directed by Michael Dowse

Featuring 2019's absolute laziest film title, we have Stuber, a movie that simultaneously made me happy and slightly disappointed at the same time. On the subject of the title, I cannot imagine anyone would give that name to this movie, but it is inspired by the nickname of one of the characters. In that case, if they insist, I suppose I can handle it. It seems that people are reading into the flaws of the movie the wrong way, the point was to make an 80s comedy with those outdated tropes. Some of the jokes land and others don't, that's the nature of comedy, but I think critics are absolutely determined to kill the genre. If you're thinking "not this again" right now, I have no intention of mentioning that again. The fact is that if you like Batista and Kumail Nanjiani, you will certainly like the film to some extent. If you like buddy cop movies, you may like this as well. If you're hoping for strong logic in your comedy movies, this won't be for you and I'd never suggest that it would be. Every movie doesn't need to be a buddy comedy, but there aren't very many of them anymore, and that's why I find some appreciation of them when they exist. That doesn't mean they're all good, there needs to be a combination that interests me enough for me to care. There are deep issues with Stuber, but I think they're outweighed by the positives. Just slightly. What the film really needed in order to take those feelings beyond merely slightly, is for the characters encountered along the journey to have been more memorable. You'll see what I mean when you watch the film.

Stuber kicks off doing something that I said leads to a worse movie when I wrote a movie review last night, the characters are as separated as could possibly be. Vic (Dave Bautista) is a LAPD detective and Sarah (Karen Gillan) is his partner, these two are not Guardians of the Galaxy in this film. Instead, they are on a case and have tracked a drug trafficker to a downtown hotel. Oka Teijo (Iko Uwais) seems to have a lot of people on his payroll, it is not very easy to capture and arrest him. After some fighting between Vic and Oka, Oka escapes the room and decides to take the quick way down a massive amount of floors. Vic gives chase, but his glasses were knocked off and he cannot see. Sarah gets there first, and the chase continues, culminating outside of a Clippers game. There are a lot of fans outside and Oka knew to wear a Clippers shirt, which helps him blend in. Eventually Sarah does catch up to him, but that doesn't end so well for her. Oka shoots her in the stomach and kills her, leaving Vic partnerless and on the hunt to find Oka for six more months. This was a two year case and it has not gone well. When things jump forward six more months, Captain McHenry (Mira Sorvino) tells him that the case is going to be turned over to the feds. So, as far as this investigation goes, that will be that.

On the other side of the city, there's Stu (Kumail Nanjiani). Stu works at a sporting goods store with Richie (Jimmy Tatro), the son of the man who owns the store. Stu is also an Uber driver (no shit), he has a new Nissan Leaf that he leased for this purpose, smart move seeing as he wouldn't have to pay for gas. Anyway, Stu's first fare when we meet him is of course Richie, which is the kind of cliche that I actually like. We learn that Stu is struggling and that's why he's driving an Uber, but he also has a plan to go into business with Becca (Betty Gilpin). Becca is also his crush, they had sex together one time and nothing really came of it. While that's going on, Vic is getting LASIK surgery and needing to be driven around by his daughter Nicole (Natalie Morales). Nicole makes clear that Vic is too concerned with his job than caring about his family, and that she's not really going to put up with very much of that shit anymore. She also has an art showing that Vic needs to go to, but he can't drive. So, she has him install the Uber app. Is this one big commercial for Uber? Not entirely. Of course, Vic needs a driver for later, but he's called by a confidential informant and told that he needs to get down to Koreatown. You might have figured out that Vic gets on the Uber app and finds Stu. The important thing to remember here is that Vic is also blind from surgery.

This is a rather standard buddy comedy, full of violence and jokes that either land or don't. There was one routine that I found just died on all levels, but the rest was alright or really good. On some level I'm surprised this was released in theaters at all. When it's an action-comedy, you have the expectation that there will either be great action or great comedy on screen. With Stuber, we have some good action at times, and a lot that underwhelms. One of the scenes has one of the worst cases of Kevin Dunn level production that I've ever seen in a theater. The comedy overall is merely good. Take all this for what it's worth as well, because people react differently to different comedic personalities and the kinds of jokes they are known for telling. The overall angle with the Uber star rating does become tiresome as well, and I'm surprised that we have an Iko Uwais appearance where he isn't doing a ton of martial arts. If you want to talk about strange casting, this is a hell of an example. The side characters don't really pop the way they should, but the jokes ring stronger with me because of who was telling them.

Stuber is also a rather short film, so other than the star rating jokes, I didn't find anything to really overstay its welcome. The bad routine I mentioned earlier, to say it was bad would be an understatement, but I don't want to spoil the movie. It has something to do with Ryan Gosling and that's all I need to say. This movie is also nicely violent, I'm not bitching about that even though I saw some people having a rather strange reaction to the amount of violence in the film. Those same people probably didn't say anything about the last John Wick movie, and they were both rated R so that shouldn't be an issue. The movie is simply alright, but I did laugh at one goofy moment when the characters were supposed to be driving to Long Beach while the camera was showing them going the other way across that bridge to San Pedro. The Vincent Thomas Bridge is the only bridge of any consequence we have in that area, so that being goofed was really strange and somewhat inexcusable. You know, I've seen movies with bigger problems though. I laughed, I enjoyed this just enough, but not having good side characters is an enormous issue.

6/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Booksmart
2. Avengers: Endgame
3. Toy Story 4
4. Us
5. Gloria Bell
6. Arctic
7. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
8. The Beach Bum
9. Spider-Man: Far From Home
10. Rocketman
11. High Flying Bird
12. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
13. Captain Marvel
14. Long Shot
15. Shazam!
16. Paddleton
17. Late Night
18. Hotel Mumbai
19. Always Be My Maybe
20. Cold Pursuit
21. Shaft
22. Happy Death Day 2U
23. Ma
24. Annabelle Comes Home
25. Greta
26. Aladdin
27. Triple Frontier
28. Fighting with My Family
29. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
30. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
31. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
32. Brexit
33. The Dirt
34. Velvet Buzzsaw
35. Stuber
36. Little
37. Alita: Battle Angel
38. The Kid
39. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
40. The Upside
41. The Dead Don't Die
42. Dumbo
43. The Hummingbird Project
44. Escape Room
45. Tolkien
46. Captive State
47. The Highwaymen
48. Pet Sematary
49. The Intruder
50. Child's Play
51. Yesterday
52. Brightburn
53. Anna
54. What Men Want
55. Men in Black: International
56. Unicorn Store
57. The Curse of La Llorona
58. Miss Bala
59. The Perfection
60. Hellboy
61. Glass
62. Dark Phoenix
63. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
64. The Hustle
65. The Best of Enemies
66. The Prodigy
67. Polar
68. Serenity

 

[909]

Midsommar (2019), directed by Ari Aster

The year in film prior to Midsommar was bad enough that I was careful not to get my hopes up prior to going to the theater today. This was probably a good idea because of how long the film was, but I would have been rewarded for getting my hopes up if I had done so. Unlike practically everyone else who went to see Midsommar, I have not seen Hereditary and as a result of that I didn't really know what to expect. Even if I had seen Hereditary, how could anyone know what to expect? Films like this one don't exactly grow on trees, there's only one coming to mind at the moment and it's the original version of The Wicker Man. Even then, that much older film is nowhere near as extreme in its content, it is very easy to understand why the producers had a hard time getting this film an R rating. Have you ever seen a movie where some guy has a bloody boner and runs around while it's like that? Yeah, I thought not. There's far more to Midsommar than simply that, this is a slow building movie that decides not to go for consistent shock value. Everything here has its purpose, there is lots of meaning to everything that you see and some of what you don't see. One thing I would recommend is that someone watching this does not pause the film if at all possible. This is the kind of spell you would not want to break, one needs to be fully immersed the entire time in order for the events to have maximum impact. For me, they absolutely did have maximum impact. Midsommar is a great film.

Dani (Florence Pugh) is a college student with severe anxiety and other assorted mental problems. They're going to suddenly get a whole lot worse. Her sister has even worse mental problems and still lives at home with their parents, it is also the cold of winter and nobody can go outside. This does have some relevance. Dani has a boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), and he's studying anthropology at their university. His classmates Josh (William Jackson Harper), Mark (Will Poulter), and Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) have been telling Christian for a while that he needs to break up with Dani, but Christian cannot bring himself to do it. It is important, even though it may not seem important, to point out that Josh is black. I will continue. One night, when Mark is going hard trying to convince Christian to break things off, Dani received some e-mails from her sister. In those e-mails, it was basically stated in so many words that her sister was going to kill herself and their parents. Guess what happens from there? She's going to do that. Christian is absolutely obligated to stay with Dani after this happens, because what kind of scumbag can dump their girlfriend after something like that happens? It should be noted that Christian would not have been wrong to dump her in the first place. A personality like that, male or female, brings other people down with them and a person can only handle that for so long.

When we come forward a few months, Dani is still grieving and Christian is still attempting to escape. He tries to bail to go to a party, but she tags along with him and hears some stuff that she doesn't want to hear. Christian intends to travel with his friends to Sweden because Pelle has invited them to a celebration at the commune where he grew up. Josh, for what it's worth, is absolutely obsessed with this subject and paganist traditions related to it. Mark just wants to get laid, and Christian doesn't know what he wants to do with any of his life. The guy is a follower and not a leader. Christian invites Dani to Sweden after a small argument, assuming that she won't go, but Pelle has other ideas. He absolutely does want her to go and says a lot of things that could push a fence-sitting person into going ahead and doing something. When she goes, she has misgivings on the plane and all that, but after landing in Stockholm, it's time to make the drive up. The drive is about four hourse to Halsingland, and the commune referenced by Pelle is not merely a commune, this is a full blown cult called the Harga. The Harga live in an area where during summer it's hardly dark at any point of the day, this serves a purpose during their festivities. The group from America are also not the only people invited, Pelle's brother Ingemar (Hampus Hallberg) has invited Connie (Ellora Torchia) and Simon (Archie Madekwe), a couple he knew from London. It is for the best that I do not describe anything that happened after this point.

To get this out of the way, the reason I pointed out that Josh was black was because of the racism inherent in a paganist European culture, this was something I noticed immediately and thought would have an impact on the story. I do not believe Connie was white either, but she's a side character and isn't focused on at any point. I am trying so hard not to spoil this story, but in some respects it's rather impossible. Midsommar is filled with things prevalent in paganism and viking culture, it fully revels in all that stuff and one's enjoyment of the film is at least somewhat related to how interesting they would find things like that. Midsommar is extremely slowly paced, it should be noted. When things happen, they HAPPEN. You experience them, they matter in the grand scheme of things and you do not forget them. I cannot forget a single thing that I watched this afternoon. Greater wordsmiths than myself can probably better encapsulate what everything in this film means. I know the significance of just about everything and would prefer not to talk about it because it spoils the film. There is a very interesting examination of a failed relationship that is still going because neither party has the courage to break it off, or to find themselves something better than what they've decided they deserve to be stuck with. The distance between the two is rather haunting and unhealthy, is is also unsettling in its own way.

Midsommar is unsettling beyond the relationship of course, that's the entire point of the film. This isn't a movie that seeks to scare you, and that's probably why I liked this so much. The film is a big nothing without the performance of Florence Pugh. You have to be able to believe in her emotional state, in the character's arc, and believe that they could find themselves to be in a proper place at the end of the film because they've lost touch with reality. While I did feel that Midsommar was a little too long, the length of the film allows everything to have a much larger impact than it otherwise would if the events were jammed in. Visually, this film is super pleasing. Not just because it's outdoors in very bright sunlight, you'll have to see what I mean if you really want to know. The matriarchal cult is what really gets me here, though. You don't figure that out for some time, and I think that's the only thing I've really spoiled so far. Anyway, overall, I think this was a hell of a movie and a great effort. Maybe some things don't land for some people, but you can't deny the ambition of making this kind of film. I thought of putting Midsommar in my #1 spot, but I changed my mind after considering the differences in ease of access between this and Booksmart. Others may feel differently and not even consider this to be a good film, which I can't agree with at all. I will remember this one forever.

9/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Booksmart
2. Midsommar
3. Avengers: Endgame
4. Toy Story 4
5. Us
6. Gloria Bell
7. Arctic
8. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
9. The Beach Bum
10. Spider-Man: Far From Home
11. Rocketman
12. High Flying Bird
13. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
14. Captain Marvel
15. Long Shot
16. Shazam!
17. Paddleton
18. Late Night
19. Hotel Mumbai
20. Always Be My Maybe
21. Cold Pursuit
22. Shaft
23. Happy Death Day 2U
24. Ma
25. Annabelle Comes Home
26. Greta
27. Aladdin
28. Triple Frontier
29. Fighting with My Family
30. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
31. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
32. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
33. Brexit
34. The Dirt
35. Velvet Buzzsaw
36. Stuber
37. Little
38. Alita: Battle Angel
39. The Kid
40. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
41. The Upside
42. The Dead Don't Die
43. Dumbo
44. The Hummingbird Project
45. Escape Room
46. Tolkien
47. Captive State
48. The Highwaymen
49. Pet Sematary
50. The Intruder
51. Child's Play
52. Yesterday
53. Brightburn
54. Anna
55. What Men Want
56. Men in Black: International
57. Unicorn Store
58. The Curse of La Llorona
59. Miss Bala
60. The Perfection
61. Hellboy
62. Glass
63. Dark Phoenix
64. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
65. The Hustle
66. The Best of Enemies
67. The Prodigy
68. Polar
69. Serenity

 

[909]

The Ballad of Lefty Brown (2017), directed by Jared Moshe

When it comes to Westerns, I already full well know that I need to go back and watch the classics I haven't seen. I'm not going to do that yet, I'm trying to cut off the flow of new things that I haven't seen before. Indie westerns are something I've been watching a little bit recently, and I actually have a few more to check out this month. I poorly structured the way I was watching things, but what I was thinking about is the way that this genre petered out. I don't like it, I'm never going to like it, but the idea that comic book movies are going to do the same thing is patently ludicrous. There is an interesting little twist on the way westerns usually work, I will eventually talk about it at some point of my review. I'm caught in between two minds when it comes to The Ballad of Lefty Brown. On some level I found the film to be intriguing, but as things were moving along I thought the story had some problems with pacing and a lack of action. A western that doesn't have action isn't an immediate death knell, so in that case a film in this genre heavily relies on featuring characters that really pop. I'm not sure if these ones did or didn't, with the exception of one who I liked very much. Fortunately, this one was also the lead, not a side character, and as a result The Ballad of Lefty Brown gets a passing grade from me. I did also very much like that The Ballad of Lefty Brown was shot on film. That isn't something that always matters, but when it comes to a Western, I think it does. Digital just doesn't look the same in that instance, I can't describe it.

The Ballad of Lefty Brown doesn't feature a film synopsis or anything, so there's nothing to jog my memory and I tried to write this out as quickly as I could. Edward Johnson (Peter Fonda) and Lefty Brown (Bill Pullman) are partners, I think it was outright stated that they were lawmen. Edward is moving onto a new path in life though, he has been appointed to the US Senate by the Montana Governor, James Bierce (Jim Caviezel). You see, Montana was a new state, and at this point in our union, the people who ran the states still appointed people to the Senate to cast those important votes. The voters had no say in that, and a lot of people would like to put this system back in place. I am obviously not one of them. When Edward is leaving for Washington, he wants Lefty to accompany him some distance along the way. First, they stop at Edward's house, where he lives with his wife Laura (Kathy Baker). This serves to introduce us to the characters and all that, and in a conversation it is made clear that Laura doesn't much care for Lefty. You see, Lefty is best described as a bumbling idiot. He has a limp, can't see all that well and he can't shoot too well either. He's also not the brightest sort. This is not someone I would want escorting me to a destination in the Old West. I would do anything to avoid going with this guy, but Edward likes Lefty and appreciates him after years of friendship. So, they set out on their horses and get to moving.

Of course, you know...and I mean you KNOW the trip isn't going to go all that well. When coming around a bend, Edward is shot and killed by Frank Baines (Joe Anderson), there is no motivation given as to why this would happen. After this scene, Lefty brings Edward's body back to the house and tells Laura that he's going to go get that no good son of a bitch, because of course he is. Frank, on the other hand, is a rather wily sort. There's other issues too. For starters, the Governor went down to Edward's house to give condolences, during which he was begged by Laura to fix Edward's will so that she could inherit his ranch. The laws of those days were rather different. In addition, he brought Tom Harrah (Tommy Flanagan), another law man intent on stopping Lefty from doing harm to himself. Lefty is old in addition to the other things I've stayed. While Lefty's out there, he comes across a kid, Jeremiah Perkins (Diego Josef). They get in a good little shootout, and these things being what they are, the kid is going to tag along with him. The intent, of course, is to kill or capture Frank Baines. There is far more to this story though, as I'm sure any fan of the genre is well aware.

I think I did well summarizing that without anything to remind myself of what happened. This is a really standard western without any frills. I thought there was an interesting twist on the usual kid usage in this movie, where the kid doesn't need to be taught much of anything and already knows what they're doing. It's also nice to see a western that takes the lead perspective of the bumbling idiot, and while Lefty isn't as stupid as I thought, he's pretty stupid. The story is ultimately about Lefty Brown needing to clear his name, so I think you can see where things go from there. I would say that this doesn't have any great direction or a great script, there's an inspiring performance from Bill Pullman and that's about it. The ensemble is very much lacking, it is what it is. I did see that The Ballad of Lefty Brown was shot in just 20 days at a Montana state park, so my expectations were quite low from that point on. How good can a movie be when you put it together in 20 days? Even Victoria, which was filmed in one take, ultimately took longer due to how difficult it proved to be to produce something like that. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's also a film where a lot of the intrigue is maintained by doing it in one take, and the director had already made other features. that wasn't the case with Jared Moshe, and as a result we have a film just above average.

6/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Phantom Thread
3. The Shape of Water
4. Get Out
5. Good Time
6. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
7. Mudbound
8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
9. Logan
10. Baby Driver
11. The Post
12. Wonder Woman
13. The Big Sick
14. Lady Bird
15. Wind River
16. Thor: Ragnarok
17. Logan Lucky
18. The Beguiled
19. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
20. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
21. Brawl in Cell Block 99
22. John Wick: Chapter 2
23. The Disaster Artist
24. The Lost City of Z
25. First They Killed My Father
26. A Ghost Story
27. Darkest Hour
28. Spider-Man: Homecoming
29. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
30. Sweet Virginia
31. It
32. Battle of the Sexes
33. Stronger
34. Brad's Status
35. Okja
36. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
37. Kong: Skull Island
38. It Comes at Night
39. Crown Heights
40. Split
41. 1922
42. Personal Shopper
43. Landline
44. Beatriz at Dinner
45. Chuck
46. Atomic Blonde
47. Shot Caller
48. Brigsby Bear
49. Wheelman
50. The Lego Batman Movie
51. Megan Leavey
52. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
53. Marshall
54. Menashe
55. Walking Out
56. American Made
57. Annabelle: Creation
58. Beauty and the Beast
59. Imperial Dreams
60. Gifted
61. Murder on the Orient Express
62. The Zookeeper's Wife
63. The Glass Castle
64. Free Fire
65. Win It All
66. The Wall
67. Life
68. My Cousin Rachel
69. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
70. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
71. Breathe
72. The Man Who Invented Christmas
73. Maudie
74. Patti Cake$
75. Sleight
76. Alone in Berlin
77. A United Kingdom
78. Trespass Against Us
79. The Mountain Between Us
80. War Machine
81. Happy Death Day
82. Lowriders
83. Justice League
84. To the Bone
85. Ghost in the Shell
86. Wakefield
87. Bright
88. The Hitman's Bodyguard
89. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
90. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
91. The Mummy
92. The Greatest Showman
93. Rough Night
94. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
95. Sand Castle
96. The Circle
97. American Assassin
98. CHiPs
99. Death Note
100. 47 Meters Down
101. The Belko Experiment
102. The Great Wall
103. Fist Fight
104. Baywatch
105. Snatched
106. Wilson
107. The Dark Tower
108. Queen of the Desert
109. The House
110. Flatliners
111. Sleepless
112. All Eyez on Me
113. The Book of Henry
114. The Space Between Us

 

[909]

Wonderstruck (2017), directed by Todd Haynes

Wonderstruck is a movie I've had on my list for two months or so, I'd initially removed it due to the PG rating and put it back two weeks ago. I'm not automatically averse to watching movies with a PG rating, but the IMDB page for this looked strange to me and I considered giving this a pass. After I'd considered it, I saw that Todd Haynes directed this, and I really enjoyed Carol. So, you know, I couldn't pass on the film given that. I can't bring myself to do certain things, that's one of them. With that in mind, I had to enter the film with an open mind. I didn't know what this was about, I just knew that it had something to do with wonder, which implies that there's a journey of some kind, which it turns out that there damn well is. Sorry, maybe that isn't the best word to use in a review about a PG movie, but none of my reviews are PG. Wonderstruck isn't a movie that really made me think about much of anything, and that's why I'm not going to be overly effusive in praise. It is a good movie, but it is also one that I can see being very difficult to become invested in. This is adapted from a book and shows in how awkward the shifts from one timeline to another are. The visual aspects though, there's things in the film that I was not expecting, almost all of which are pleasing, and finding out where some of them actually come from made me pretty happy. But, did I learn anything? I absolutely did not. That's something a person needs to think about when presented with a movie trying to make the viewer feel certain things, that kind of lesson wasn't garnered from the events. That's cool though, this was a good movie.

As already alluded to, Wonderstruck is a film with two timelines. I will have to try to describe each of them. In 1977, there is a boy, Ben (Oakes Fegley). Ben is suffering, currently living with his aunt, Jenny (Amy Hargreaves). The reason why he's living with his aunt, it's not such a good one, his mother Elaine (Michelle Williams) died in an accident. Elaine was a librarian in their small town up in the north of Minnesota, and Ben never knew his father for reasons that were never revealed to him prior to her death. Ben, of course, would really like to know about his father and not knowing anything is eating him up inside. One night, there's a storm, and during that storm there's another accident while he's using the phone. There's a lightning strike, and the result of it is that Ben is deaf and can no longer hear anything. He can still speak in a normal sounding, raised voice, but it is unclear if his hearing will ever return. I presume not. When he is taken to the hospital, he sees that his room is outside of the bus station in Duluth. Duluth isn't the largest town in the world, but there is still a common thread between smaller towns and the rest of the country. It exists, but less people use it. This being 1977, more people use it, so the kid gets the right idea in his head to travel to New York City. The reason? He wants to find his father and he knows where his father is supposed to be.

Featuring much less of David Bowie's "Space Oddity", we have the other timeline set in 1927. Rose (Millicent Simmonds) lives at home with her father Dr. Kincaid (James Urbaniak), and she hates it. Rose is deaf, so there is a high emphasis placed on lip reading during these parts. You could say that Rose is abused, actually I would outright say it. Now, Rose has her own reasons to want to run away. As it turns out, her brother Walter (Cory Michael Smith) lives in New York City, while Rose lives across the Hudson in Hoboken. Rose likes to go to the cinema in her spare time, watching silent films of course, but that is not to last forever. The one she was watching featured an actress named Lillian Mayhew (Julianne Moore), who she liked very much. Outside, there are signs announcing that speakers are being installed, the silent films will turn into ones with speaking, and that leaves Rose without a place to understand what's going on during a movie any longer. This spurs her to leave. She goes in search of her mother after chopping off all her hair, crossing the Hudson on a ferry. It's a different time and all that, it will be very difficult to actually find her because she'd run away. After crossing the river, she goes into Manhattan and finds a studio, at which point the viewer is made to realize that the actress in the movie is her mother. Her mother does not want her for many reasons, the greatest one being that if Rose is found in her custody, she will be punished. Again, it's a different time. This leads Rose in search of Walter, in search of a home where she will be loved and appreciated.

I should have pointed out that the scenes in 1927 were filmed in black and white, giving the proceedings some added authenticity as well as allowing the extras not to have to wear complete period clothing. You just can't tell. Anyway, I was interested in why the theater had talkie movies for the first time in 1927, as well as the accuracy of that scene. The Jazz Singer was the very first one, it was an Al Jolson movie that featured him in blackface, but I've never watched it before. Still, the mere mention of blackface carries with it the strongest likelihood that the film is offensive when viewed through a modern lens. Wonderstruck is definitely not that kind of movie, but much of Todd Haynes work has been controversial within small circles, because those small circles are the only people watching the films. I'm sure for long-time fans of his it was strange to see him make something far more sanitized. I suppose this would be considered a movie for kids, although I'm not too sure very many kids would want to watch it. In that way, Wonderstruck may have failed in its goals, but this still very much feels like a kids movie with children going on a journey of wonder not knowing what they may find. I did like the movie and find it interesting, but I am struggling with what the end goal of the story was supposed to be.

The recreation of New York City in the 1970's was rather excellent, I'm always a big fan of this in film and Wonderstruck was no exception. I am puzzled as to how this received a PG rating considering the content in some of those scenes, but that's a subject for a different time. This feels like it's supposed to be a Steven Spielberg movie, except for the fact that it isn't one, but I appreciate the way the two stories are woven together. Julianne Moore has a nice double role here, I wasn't expecting to see her later in the film and by even mentionining it I've just spoiled a massive amount of the story. Oh well. The cinematography is what really stands out more than anything else, and the use of models in the last scenes of the film really worked for me too. This was adapted from a book, and you can tell. I liked this, please don't take everything I've said the wrong way, but I thought I needed to explain some of the issues with the film. The story is still spot on.

7/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Phantom Thread
3. The Shape of Water
4. Get Out
5. Good Time
6. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
7. Mudbound
8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
9. Logan
10. Baby Driver
11. The Post
12. Wonder Woman
13. The Big Sick
14. Lady Bird
15. Wind River
16. Thor: Ragnarok
17. Logan Lucky
18. The Beguiled
19. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
20. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
21. Brawl in Cell Block 99
22. John Wick: Chapter 2
23. The Disaster Artist
24. The Lost City of Z
25. First They Killed My Father
26. A Ghost Story
27. Darkest Hour
28. Spider-Man: Homecoming
29. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
30. Sweet Virginia
31. It
32. Battle of the Sexes
33. Stronger
34. Brad's Status
35. Okja
36. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
37. Kong: Skull Island
38. It Comes at Night
39. Crown Heights
40. Split
41. 1922
42. Personal Shopper
43. Landline
44. Beatriz at Dinner
45. Chuck
46. Atomic Blonde
47. Shot Caller
48. Brigsby Bear
49. Wheelman
50. The Lego Batman Movie
51. Megan Leavey
52. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
53. Wonderstruck
54. Marshall
55. Menashe
56. Walking Out
57. American Made
58. Annabelle: Creation
59. Beauty and the Beast
60. Imperial Dreams
61. Gifted
62. Murder on the Orient Express
63. The Zookeeper's Wife
64. The Glass Castle
65. Free Fire
66. Win It All
67. The Wall
68. Life
69. My Cousin Rachel
70. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
71. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
72. Breathe
73. The Man Who Invented Christmas
74. Maudie
75. Patti Cake$
76. Sleight
77. Alone in Berlin
78. A United Kingdom
79. Trespass Against Us
80. The Mountain Between Us
81. War Machine
82. Happy Death Day
83. Lowriders
84. Justice League
85. To the Bone
86. Ghost in the Shell
87. Wakefield
88. Bright
89. The Hitman's Bodyguard
90. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
91. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
92. The Mummy
93. The Greatest Showman
94. Rough Night
95. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
96. Sand Castle
97. The Circle
98. American Assassin
99. CHiPs
100. Death Note
101. 47 Meters Down
102. The Belko Experiment
103. The Great Wall
104. Fist Fight
105. Baywatch
106. Snatched
107. Wilson
108. The Dark Tower
109. Queen of the Desert
110. The House
111. Flatliners
112. Sleepless
113. All Eyez on Me
114. The Book of Henry
115. The Space Between Us

 

[909]

The Tribes of Palos Verdes (2017), directed by Emmett Malloy and Brendan Malloy

My review of The Tribes of Palos Verdes is very likely to be one of my new patented short reviews, in some part because the film doesn't merit a long review and in some part due to the film being rather short. The Tribes of Palos Verdes is one of those rich people melodramas, the kind that make a person laugh when the director is not quite able to pull off the seriousness that a film like this needs in order to be good. There are reasons that The Tribes of Palos Verdes isn't a good film, there are also reasons that it isn't completely terrible to a ridiculous extent. I will go through as many of the ones that I can think up while writing this. Of course, when I told some people that I was watching The Tribes of Palos Verdes, nobody had any idea what this movie was. It turns out that sometimes there's a good reason for poor brand awareness. I see exactly what this film is attempting to achieve and I also see how it doesn't work, there aren't enough flashpoints that lead to bombastic arguments or turns in the story. As a whole, The Tribes of Palos Verdes turns out to be rather boring as a result of those flaws. The film is also adapted from a book, so I'm uncertain as to how much latitude the directors and writer actually had to make the film.

Phil (Justin Kirk) and Sandy (Jennifer Garner) have made the decision to move their little family to the rich Los Angeles suburb of Palos Verdes. Phil is a cardiologist, so they can afford it. The Masons have two kids, twins in fact, they are Medina (Maika Monroe) and Jim (Cody Fern). The parents, as you might suspect, only care about themselves and this is a fact made clear throughout the events of the film. It is a wonder they are still married at all considering that Phil enjoys his social life while Sandy would prefer to stay inside wearing her bath robe. Sandy has mood swings and some kind of personality disorder, and coupled with or as part of that she would prefer not to get to know anyone in the area. Of course, Phil, that guy is going to fuck around on a wife like that. I would have bet on it. It's hard to deal with someone like that, but they should have the courage to leave first. Sandy suspects Phil of having an affair and smells perfume in his car, so it's inevitable that the truth will come out. He has found love with Ava (Alicia Silverstone), their real estate agent. He wants to leave, he's going to move out and live with Ava, and nobody's going to do anything about it.

I got so wrapped up in talking about the parents, that much like these parents, I have forgotten about their kids. Medina and Jim are high school age, 16 years old and interested in having fun like anyone else that age. Jim would prefer to be popular and Medina would prefer to do her own thing. They have something in common though, something anyone living by the beach would want to do. They want to surf. There are the typical kinds of gatekeeping surfer bros at these places, they don't want anyone surfing at their beach and stealing their waves. Jim's ticket into that group, into surfing at that beach, is weed. These people are not a good influence at all, Jim goes down a bad path. Medina is torn and sees her mother's narcissism for what it is, her father's selfish behavior for what it is, and realizes that she's basically been abandoned. For that matter so has Jim. When Phil comes to the house to tell them that he's leaving, he and Jim get a fight that culminates in Jim punching his dad in the face. This, obviously, is not good, but it also cements Jim's belief that his father doesn't care about him. So, he turns to his crazy mother and they become more close, which isn't going to lead anywhere good.

This is a coming-of-age story of sorts, but it's also a divorce drama. I'm not sure the filmmakers knew what they really wanted this to be. The dramatic impact of the ending had absolutely no impact on me because I had thought Jim was bringing his sister down with him to begin with. I also thought the story was boring as a whole, lacking punch. Jennifer Garner put in a good performance in an attempt to liven things up, but that's about all that happened. The script just isn't there to make this a good film. I did enjoy some of Garner's meltdowns, and there's nice scenery to look at, but that's all I can say about an average movie like this one was. I did read in a review once I was nearly done with this one, that the book features Garner's character overeating and gaining a ton of weight as a result of the impending divorce, but someone decided that wasn't to be done with this film. A wasted opportunity to be sure, but when a movie like The Tribes of Palos Verdes decides to commit to being average in the first place, maybe one of the leads should not put on a fat suit and embarrass themselves. It's still a good performance. Anyway, this just doesn't work for me and felt like an average film. I also started laughing near the conclusion, which doesn't happen very often.

5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Phantom Thread
3. The Shape of Water
4. Get Out
5. Good Time
6. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
7. Mudbound
8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
9. Logan
10. Baby Driver
11. The Post
12. Wonder Woman
13. The Big Sick
14. Lady Bird
15. Wind River
16. Thor: Ragnarok
17. Logan Lucky
18. The Beguiled
19. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
20. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
21. Brawl in Cell Block 99
22. John Wick: Chapter 2
23. The Disaster Artist
24. The Lost City of Z
25. First They Killed My Father
26. A Ghost Story
27. Darkest Hour
28. Spider-Man: Homecoming
29. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
30. Sweet Virginia
31. It
32. Battle of the Sexes
33. Stronger
34. Brad's Status
35. Okja
36. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
37. Kong: Skull Island
38. It Comes at Night
39. Crown Heights
40. Split
41. 1922
42. Personal Shopper
43. Landline
44. Beatriz at Dinner
45. Chuck
46. Atomic Blonde
47. Shot Caller
48. Brigsby Bear
49. Wheelman
50. The Lego Batman Movie
51. Megan Leavey
52. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
53. Wonderstruck
54. Marshall
55. Menashe
56. Walking Out
57. American Made
58. Annabelle: Creation
59. Beauty and the Beast
60. Imperial Dreams
61. Gifted
62. Murder on the Orient Express
63. The Zookeeper's Wife
64. The Glass Castle
65. Free Fire
66. Win It All
67. The Wall
68. Life
69. My Cousin Rachel
70. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
71. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
72. Breathe
73. The Man Who Invented Christmas
74. Maudie
75. Patti Cake$
76. Sleight
77. Alone in Berlin
78. A United Kingdom
79. Trespass Against Us
80. The Mountain Between Us
81. War Machine
82. Happy Death Day
83. Lowriders
84. Justice League
85. To the Bone
86. Ghost in the Shell
87. Wakefield
88. Bright
89. The Tribes of Palos Verdes
90. The Hitman's Bodyguard
91. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
92. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
93. The Mummy
94. The Greatest Showman
95. Rough Night
96. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
97. Sand Castle
98. The Circle
99. American Assassin
100. CHiPs
101. Death Note
102. 47 Meters Down
103. The Belko Experiment
104. The Great Wall
105. Fist Fight
106. Baywatch
107. Snatched
108. Wilson
109. The Dark Tower
110. Queen of the Desert
111. The House
112. Flatliners
113. Sleepless
114. All Eyez on Me
115. The Book of Henry
116. The Space Between Us

 

[909]

The Foreigner (2017), directed by Martin Campbell

Have you ever wanted to watch a movie where Pierce Brosnan and Jackie Chan play against type as best as they possibly can? If so, regardless of the quality of the film itself, The Foreigner might be just for you. There are some issues with the story, but I remember that for a long time people wanted to see Jackie Chan do something different instead of play the same part over and over again. You know, to some extent, this is a similar part. It is a much darker play on that though, and I have never seen Jackie Chan be so serious in a film before. When the film was going to make its debut, I remember that people were talking about how strange the trailer was and how these guys appeared to be doing something different. It was seen as a comeback film for them both, in Chan's case he had not done anything live-action in the English language for seven years. Brosnan works all the time and people simply don't watch it, his star has waned very much and I'm not sure that's going to change. I was going to watch The Son, then I didn't, then it was cancelled. It's not my fault, but it shows that people are no longer watching Brosnan's work. The key here, of course, is that the film has Jackie Chan and as a result it should have made money, which it did. As soon as the movie started, I realized what I was getting into, and I was wondering if an IRA drama was still appropriate viewing in 2019 when we know the damage that was done during the Troubles. The Foreigner is not set during the Troubles, but I am wondering about stereotypes and how they play into a film like this one.

Ngoc Minh Quan (Jackie Chan) is a restaurant owner in London, with one daughter and no wife. It turns out that his other two daughters died in circumstances you find out as The Foreigner plays out, and his wife died some time after he'd arrived in England. He picks his daughter Fan (Katie Leung) up from school so that she can go dress shopping. The problem is that someone else has other ideas for that storefront. A man with a motorcycle parks his bike for a moment and heads off, then it's time for a fight over a parking spot between Quan and someone else. They get in a collision, and as the man gets out to confront Quan, a bomb goes off and destroys the entire dress shop. Afterwards, a news station receives a call from a group calling themselves the Authentic IRA, leaving a code word of phoenix with the news desk. The station tasks people with trying to find out more about the bombing, and Ian (Rufus Jones) heads out to the store. At this point we learn that Fan is dead, and Quan has been sitting there holding her body since the bombing. After this scene, the film moves to the bombers having a discussion about where they should stay in the aftermath of what they've done. They decide that staying at the safe house is their best move. I am curious about this and have always wondered whether or not detection of these terrorist cells comes from their movement out into the world after the bombing. You would think that if these motherfuckers stayed at home afterwards it would be easier to evade the police.

Over in Belfast, there's some panic. The Deputy Minister Liam Hennessy (Pierce Brosnan) was a former IRA leader, such as happens in politics in Northern Ireland. He has attempted to repair the damage that he and others have done. I wouldn't compare his character directly to Gerry Adams, but you know, kind of. He's in bed with his mistress Maggie (Charlie Murphy, not that Charlie Murphy) when he receives a phone call from his wife Mary (Orla Brady) about the bombing. The bombing in London killed 12, and not long after this call he is called again by a British politician, Katherine Davies (Lia Williams). After this, Liam heads over to a meeting where he demands to know who killed civilians, he says that peace is for the best, and it is subsequently stated that the people who did this were probably young. There's an issue though. He is not the only one who wants to know who the bombers were. Scotland Yard's commander is very much interested, plus there's the matter of Quan. You know, Quan isn't just some guy who owned a restaurant in London. It turns out that he's a Vietnam War veteran with US Special Forces training. This is a guy who would know how to deal with terrorists and how to speak to the people he wants to speak with. Knowing that Liam is a former leade rof the IRA, he's going to head over to Belfast to talk to that guy. Nothing is going to stop him from getting what he wants, and he wants the names of the bombers regardless of how that must happen.

The problem with The Foreigner isn't one of lazy storytelling, or of anything else that usually bothers me with a film, this is a foreign complaint for me. My issue is that the film is too complicated. The first case of this I noticed was that I could not tell Liam's mistress and wife apart, and The Foreigner isn't the kind of film to hold the viewer's hand, so I struggled from scene to scene at times. Some of the men also look too similar, and this isn't a deliberate attempt to mislead or confuse the audience, these are scenes told from an honest perspective that don't work due to these issues. It's tough to watch a film that does things like that. Martin Campbell has directed some good films though, and I would say The Foreigner is almost a good film. The Foreigner almost makes that jump forward to being a rather good terrorist intrigue thriller, but the characters looking too similar to one another does not help matters. The film is also rather generic as a whole and it isn't hard to figure this out. Some would call it tasteless, others would say that Chan is miscast in this role. On the contrary, I found Jackie Chan to be rather believable as a grieving father intent on taking his anger out on those he believed did harm to his family. You can't be one of those people who complains about him never being taken seriously in an English language movie and go on to complain about him taking seriously. Maybe the issue is that people have expectations of him that are not met.

Where the film really works, is with Liam and his cadre of IRA thugs and goons attempting to keep Quan from killing anyone. The action scenes, as you might expect, are good. Jackie Chan and good action scenes are a minimum expectation. The way they are directed and filmed is also nice, the choice in shots allows you to see Chan doing his thing without a lot of goofy cuts or shots that feel too close. I enjoyed this movie, but I am obligated to point out that adapting an IRA story to modern times proves very difficult. The scenes work, the story has hiccups due to making such a story modern. I still enjoyed the movie a fair bit, but I am cognizant of these realities. The fact is that if you don't like Jackie Chan being serious and trying to fucking kill someone, I don't know. The guy makes bombs and shoots machine guns. This is the kind of seriousness I always wanted from him even though it's far too late in coming. This movie is cool, and I thought the use of the IRA as the terrorist organization at play was neat. You don't see that very much anymore, it's easier to simply plug some Arabs in there and make a racist story. The Foreigner is not a racist story. Ronin was another good IRA movie, if you could call it that, but the action in it was far superior to an incredible extent. So, this was fine, but it ain't that.

6/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Phantom Thread
3. The Shape of Water
4. Get Out
5. Good Time
6. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
7. Mudbound
8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
9. Logan
10. Baby Driver
11. The Post
12. Wonder Woman
13. The Big Sick
14. Lady Bird
15. Wind River
16. Thor: Ragnarok
17. Logan Lucky
18. The Beguiled
19. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
20. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
21. Brawl in Cell Block 99
22. John Wick: Chapter 2
23. The Disaster Artist
24. The Lost City of Z
25. First They Killed My Father
26. A Ghost Story
27. Darkest Hour
28. Spider-Man: Homecoming
29. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
30. Sweet Virginia
31. It
32. Battle of the Sexes
33. Stronger
34. Brad's Status
35. Okja
36. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
37. Kong: Skull Island
38. It Comes at Night
39. Crown Heights
40. Split
41. 1922
42. Personal Shopper
43. Landline
44. Beatriz at Dinner
45. Chuck
46. Atomic Blonde
47. Shot Caller
48. Brigsby Bear
49. Wheelman
50. The Lego Batman Movie
51. Megan Leavey
52. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
53. Wonderstruck
54. Marshall
55. Menashe
56. Walking Out
57. American Made
58. Annabelle: Creation
59. Beauty and the Beast
60. Imperial Dreams
61. Gifted
62. Murder on the Orient Express
63. The Zookeeper's Wife
64. The Glass Castle
65. The Foreigner
66. Free Fire
67. Win It All
68. The Wall
69. Life
70. My Cousin Rachel
71. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
72. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
73. Breathe
74. The Man Who Invented Christmas
75. Maudie
76. Patti Cake$
77. Sleight
78. Alone in Berlin
79. A United Kingdom
80. Trespass Against Us
81. The Mountain Between Us
82. War Machine
83. Happy Death Day
84. Lowriders
85. Justice League
86. To the Bone
87. Ghost in the Shell
88. Wakefield
89. Bright
90. The Tribes of Palos Verdes
91. The Hitman's Bodyguard
92. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
93. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
94. The Mummy
95. The Greatest Showman
96. Rough Night
97. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
98. Sand Castle
99. The Circle
100. American Assassin
101. CHiPs
102. Death Note
103. 47 Meters Down
104. The Belko Experiment
105. The Great Wall
106. Fist Fight
107. Baywatch
108. Snatched
109. Wilson
110. The Dark Tower
111. Queen of the Desert
112. The House
113. Flatliners
114. Sleepless
115. All Eyez on Me
116. The Book of Henry
117. The Space Between Us

 

[909]

Suburbicon (2017), directed by George Clooney

Suburbicon was one of 2017's biggest box office bombs, a film that I was interested in seeing when I viewed the trailer, but after seeing the various scores out there for the film I decided to stay at home for. The concept of someone adapting a long buried script of the Coen brothers is very appealing, this was written in 1986 though. The Coens wrote a lot of scripts, I think the number is in the hundreds, and not all of them were produced. There is a reason that they were not produced. I am having difficulty describing the issues with Suburbicon, but I must talk about some of the reviews. There were some reviews that came out in the aftermath of Suburbicon that were completely glowing. I cannot on any level see how someone would enjoy this movie. There are times when I can see the opposing viewpoint and times that I cannot. I just cannot see how someone could enjoy a lifeless bore such as Suburbicon. It's a boring, piece of shit film, masquerading as a Coens film when George Clooney is absolutely clueless as to how to make the script come to life. How does a movie like this even exist, how can a studio not see there are issues with the adaptation of this script? Perhaps Paramount knew, and perhaps it was too late. Perhaps George Clooney is not the kind of star that a studio wants to piss off. Maybe they thought they'd recoup the budget anyway due to the people starring in the movie and the film's director, but they did not. Mashing genres together with aspects of this being the end result is hilarious once the film is over, but there was hardly anything in Suburbicon that I found funny while I was watching it.

The premise of Suburbicon is as such. It is nearly the 1960s, and Suburbicon is a community that was created for people to live in, the picture-perfect ideal neighborhood of the time. This means there are not supposed to be black people living there, as the film tells it. The Mayers move in, and the whole neighborhood is very much disrupted as a result. Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) is their neighbor, and he lives with his paraplegic wife Rose (Julianne Moore), their son Nicky (Noah Jupe, and Rose's sister Margaret (Julianne Moore). Suburbicon has been good enough to them and they are rather happy even though Rose is in a wheelchair. One night, these two robbers break in and have plans to take what belongs to the Lodge family. Sloan (Glenn Fleshler) is the leader of these two, and Louis (Alex Hassell) is his partner. They intend to ransack the house while drugging everyone in order to ensure they can't immediately call the police. When doing so, they use a lot of chloroform on Rose, and this leads to Rose dying. It could not possibly be more easy to see where Suburbicon is going from that point forward. At the funeral, we are introduced to Mitch (Gary Basaraba), the uncle of Nicky and brother to Rose and Margaret. He is displeased with what's happened, and wants to rip the murderers apart from their assholes.

So, with that being said, let's push on to the rest of the film. The case is being investigated by an officer, Hightower (Jack Conley). Hightower finds the death suspicious after another person dies in a car accident and it is discovered that person is connected to the Mafia. He had something written down that heavily alluded to him needing to make a pickup of money owed to him by Gardner Lodge. This would explain how Gardner needs money. I should also mention that Margaret is beginning to transform into Rose, everything except the wheelchair coming into play. She has fully moved into the house, begun sleeping with Gardner, and dyed her hair to look like Rose. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Gardner and Margaret hired those two guys to kill Rose. When they're called into the police station to identify some guys who were picked up, Gardner and Margaret refuse to acknowledge that the murderers are right in front of them. They maintain that even when Nicky barges into the room to look at what's going on. Sloan and Louis, they want their money. In order for Gardner to get it, he's going to need a good insurance payout. His self-owned business is completely floundering, he hasn't payed the mortgage on his house. Bud Cooper (Oscar Isaac) is the insurance agent, and brother, he thinks there's something very fishy going on here.

I noticed as I was watching Suburbicon that I will probably associate Oscar Isaac with Mojave for the rest of my life. There are worse bad films to associate a great actor with, that's for sure. Anyway, Suburbicon doesn't really come to life until his character is introduced, which I believe doesn't happen until the last half hour. It takes some doing to make a "satire" that bombs entirely and has no humor at all. I think I laughed at one part, which was also in the last thirty minutes of the film. It was also not a satirical part in the least and featured a person killing someone else. Suburbicon is an extremely boring movie that I found to feature poor direction. The Coens write dry films, but there is the matter of how those films are framed, how they're scored. There is a touch that is lacking from this film. Alexandre Desplat is a great composer, not one of my absolute favorites, but his music and a Coens script? I'm not a very big fan of this. You'll just have to see what I mean if you want to know, because you notice the issue almost instantly. The music is also barfed onto the events by George Clooney. I cannot state enough how much I did not like this film. It isn't one of the worst I've seen, but it bothers me. Not any sucker can adapt a script written by the Coens, but there's also an inherent issue when they don't want to make this script themselves, you have to wonder how strong it is in the first place.

I'm really struggling to think of positives when it comes to Suburbicon, so I'm probably not going to post any at all. There are some, let's be clear about that, but that's no fun. I'd rather continue to talk about what I want to talk about. The scenes with the black family have absolutely no place in this film and are borderline offensive. These scenes, and Clooney's outrage over the way black families were treated, is dropped into this film and onto characters who are given no life or personality. They exist merely for Clooney to drop a social justice plot into a bad crime story. The two stories never come together in any way, and in some ways I think this confirms something I've long thought. There is a reason that some white directors should not attempt to tackle these kinds of heavy stories. They simply do not know how to do so in a coherent manner that gives that plot line the respect it deserves. The black characters in this film exist so that George Clooney can show suburbanites saying horrible things about them. It is egregiously terrible. When you realize that these stories are never going to come together, and that he has marginalized those characters to this extent, I cannot believe that Suburbicon even exists. The largest issue with the film is that these two plots should not run in combination with each other. A great director would not be able to balance them, an average one like Clooney goes down in flames attempting to do so. I am now going to point out that the story where white people treat black people like shit with no comeuppance did not exist in the Coens script. It was added into this already rather shitty movie, which leads to it being a completely shitty movie.

You could not on any level understand what I am speaking of with this second plot unless you watch this movie. I dare you to. Suburbicon is a strange case of a film where the director does not even try to properly illuminate characters that take up a decent portion of the film. It is because they can't, because they don't know how, because they have absolutely no business making a film with that story included in it. Just look at what I ranked above this. It's a nice lesson that even though I enjoy someone's acting, that doesn't mean they know how to write a feature film and direct it. What is the message I was told when watching Suburbicon? I wish I could say, but I still haven't figured it out yet. I did my best though.

3/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Phantom Thread
3. The Shape of Water
4. Get Out
5. Good Time
6. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
7. Mudbound
8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
9. Logan
10. Baby Driver
11. The Post
12. Wonder Woman
13. The Big Sick
14. Lady Bird
15. Wind River
16. Thor: Ragnarok
17. Logan Lucky
18. The Beguiled
19. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
20. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
21. Brawl in Cell Block 99
22. John Wick: Chapter 2
23. The Disaster Artist
24. The Lost City of Z
25. First They Killed My Father
26. A Ghost Story
27. Darkest Hour
28. Spider-Man: Homecoming
29. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
30. Sweet Virginia
31. It
32. Battle of the Sexes
33. Stronger
34. Brad's Status
35. Okja
36. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
37. Kong: Skull Island
38. It Comes at Night
39. Crown Heights
40. Split
41. 1922
42. Personal Shopper
43. Landline
44. Beatriz at Dinner
45. Chuck
46. Atomic Blonde
47. Shot Caller
48. Brigsby Bear
49. Wheelman
50. The Lego Batman Movie
51. Megan Leavey
52. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
53. Wonderstruck
54. Marshall
55. Menashe
56. Walking Out
57. American Made
58. Annabelle: Creation
59. Beauty and the Beast
60. Imperial Dreams
61. Gifted
62. Murder on the Orient Express
63. The Zookeeper's Wife
64. The Glass Castle
65. The Foreigner
66. Free Fire
67. Win It All
68. The Wall
69. Life
70. My Cousin Rachel
71. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
72. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
73. Breathe
74. The Man Who Invented Christmas
75. Maudie
76. Patti Cake$
77. Sleight
78. Alone in Berlin
79. A United Kingdom
80. Trespass Against Us
81. The Mountain Between Us
82. War Machine
83. Happy Death Day
84. Lowriders
85. Justice League
86. To the Bone
87. Ghost in the Shell
88. Wakefield
89. Bright
90. The Tribes of Palos Verdes
91. The Hitman's Bodyguard
92. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
93. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
94. The Mummy
95. The Greatest Showman
96. Rough Night
97. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
98. Sand Castle
99. The Circle
100. American Assassin
101. CHiPs
102. Death Note
103. 47 Meters Down
104. The Belko Experiment
105. The Great Wall
106. Fist Fight
107. Baywatch
108. Snatched
109. Suburbicon
110. Wilson
111. The Dark Tower
112. Queen of the Desert
113. The House
114. Flatliners
115. Sleepless
116. All Eyez on Me
117. The Book of Henry
118. The Space Between Us

 

[909]

This review makes me realize that at some point I am going to have to make the full progression to spoiling every movie I watch, probably at the start of next year. Be ready for that, I guess.

The Art of Self-Defense (2019), directed by Riley Stearns

When I first saw the trailer for The Art of Self-Defense, my initial reaction was one of great relief and joy. "FINALLY, I MEAN FINALLY someone made a martial arts movie, there aren't very many of these anymore, and it looks like it will get released!" Then, I come to find out that this is rather satirical. My excitement wanes a little bit. Once I realize what this actually means, my excitement kicks back up. I see the cast, see another longer trailer. I'm ready to see the movie. I'm supposed to see it last Friday, get kicked all the way until Wednesday. No big deal. The excitement still lasted this whole time, which is surprising because I rarely get excited for anything I go to see. Franchise movies are just about it these days, the people who create original movies don't wow me enough with their promotional material. A rare exception, like The Art of Self-Defense, will get me in to see that before I check out The Lion King. Simple as that. Now, the question I'm sure everyone wants to know the answer to, is whether the film has artistic merit and if it's a good film. There is an easy answer to this, it is that The Art of Self-Defense is a good film. I have been wondering if Fight Club held up from the same perspective that The Art of Self-Defense is a strong effort. I do not know the answer to that, it's something I'm actually going to have to watch Fight Club to figure out. What I do know is that The Art of Self-Defense really worked for me on all levels, it is original and it is ambitious, the story stands alone on its own even though I have already made a comparison.

Casey Davies (Jesse Eisenberg) is a man with a feminine name, as I'm sure you can tell, and Casey is not a man who fits in with the people he works with. For that matter he doesn't fit in with much of anyone. He is a weak man in need of strengthening, but that is not going to happen where he works. Casey lives at home with his dachshund, he has forgotten to get food in it and has to go out at night in an unnamed city where people are not supposed to be going outside at night. When he goes out to get the food, this also seems like some sort of dystopia in general, but I don't know if or how I should read into that. On the way to the store, he is asked by a motorcycle gang if he has a gun, and Casey says no. After getting the food, he walks back the same way, and the motorcycle gang gives chase this time. They brutally attack him, putting him in critical condition, after which there is a news announcement suggesting that people not go outside at night. If they must, take a weapon or a gun with them. Sounds like a great place, wherever this city is. When Casey needs time to recover, he is told by his boss that he has accumulated enough vacation to take practically all the time that he needs, so he's going to do that. Casey also wants to purchase a gun for protection, but there's the usual waiting period in order to ensure that the buyer has no intention of buying the gun and immediately killing someone.

While walking home from the gun store after receiving news of the waiting period, Casey comes across a karate dojo and decides to walk in. He knows absolutely nothing about any of this stuff, but is told that he can take a trial class by Anna (Imogen Poots), the children's instructor. When arriving for a day class, he meets Sensei (Alessandro Nivola), and that's the only name we're given, so he's Sensei. Sensei recognizes the inherent weakness in Casey, of which there's a lot. He is in need of being made into a man, and Sensei is the guy to do it. Casey also befriends Henry (David Zellner), a blue belt who he takes day classes with. The day classes alone are enough to keep Casey involved in karate, and eventually he does start becoming more of a man inside the dojo. Outside of the dojo, you know, not so much. Sensei has some ideas though, he wants to make Casey into a real student. The first progression in doing so is to go from the day classes into night classes. The difference in day and night classes, that's something you'll have to watch the film in order to find out. There's a big difference, and everything gets much more weird than it already is.

Very rarely am I stumped for words after watching a film, but I'm having a hard time with figuring out anything I can say here. The Art of Self-Defense is a very dark comedy, a takedown of masculinity, or really whatever it is that you want the film to be. I find that it's rare for a dark comedy not to fall apart in the closing stretches, but I didn't find that to be the case with this story. It simply got more amusing as things played out. I cannot, and will not say anything that happens late in the film. I have seen some very poor reviews of this, and they brought down the film's Metascore by a massive amount, which is their right. I do not agree with them at all, but it's the same thing prevalent in other bad reviews I've noticed lately. There are complaints from people about how they reacted to the content of the story rather than what the content actually denotes. This is becoming more and more of a trend over the last few years and I don't like it. People also complained about Midsommar the same way, and they can fuck straight off. If we have gotten to a point where violent content in a film like Midsommar is going to offend people to the point where they discourage people from watching the story, film as we know it is over. That particularly relates to films where the violent content is meaningful and not pointless. Anyway, I think it's clear where I stand on this film. The movie rolls along from one scene to the next, they are all rather interesting viewing.

Another observation I have made is that the extreme majority of poor reviews come from men who may be offended for reasons beyond their initial complaints, as this is a rather strong takedown of masculinity as a whole. The characters do things that I do not want to comment on, all consistent within themselves. Anna is the lone female character and is treated literally exactly how you'd expect when the trailer paints Jesse Eisenberg's character as being a weak man. I would struggle with the idea of actually making this film had I worked on it, because everything is so deadpan serious and at the same time funny enough that you can't imagine someone reading these lines and refraining from laughter. The Art of Self-Defense has little weaknesses, but there is one particular subplot that I found to go too far. This is still an excellent movie that I would recommend to just about anyone. The funny thing is that I just watched a satrical film in Suburbicon, which completely failed on absolutely all levels. This contrast between a quality satire and a poor one could not possibly be more stark when watching these two films close together. It also shows that it isn't the actors that lead to a satire working. I prefer the actors in Suburbicon, but the material wasn't good and wasn't filmed properly either. That isn't the case with The Art of Self-Defense, everything is done right, and the third act was absolutely nothing I ever expected to see.

8/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Booksmart
2. Midsommar
3. Avengers: Endgame
4. Toy Story 4
5. Us
6. Gloria Bell
7. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
8. The Beach Bum
9. The Art of Self-Defense
10. Arctic
11. Spider-Man: Far From Home
12. Rocketman
13. High Flying Bird
14. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
15. Captain Marvel
16. Long Shot
17. Shazam!
18. Paddleton
19. Late Night
20. Hotel Mumbai
21. Always Be My Maybe
22. Cold Pursuit
23. Shaft
24. Happy Death Day 2U
25. Ma
26. Annabelle Comes Home
27. Greta
28. Aladdin
29. Triple Frontier
30. Fighting with My Family
31. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
32. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
33. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
34. Brexit
35. The Dirt
36. Velvet Buzzsaw
37. Stuber
38. Little
39. Alita: Battle Angel
40. The Kid
41. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
42. The Upside
43. The Dead Don't Die
44. Dumbo
45. The Hummingbird Project
46. Escape Room
47. Tolkien
48. Captive State
49. The Highwaymen
50. Pet Sematary
51. The Intruder
52. Child's Play
53. Yesterday
54. Brightburn
55. Anna
56. What Men Want
57. Men in Black: International
58. Unicorn Store
59. The Curse of La Llorona
60. Miss Bala
61. The Perfection
62. Hellboy
63. Glass
64. Dark Phoenix
65. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
66. The Hustle
67. The Best of Enemies
68. The Prodigy
69. Polar
70. Serenity

 

[909]

Only the Brave (2017), directed by Joseph Kosinski

When it comes to firefighter movies, I must admit that I have watched probably none at all. Does that actually matter? There aren't a hell of a lot of them, but I had seen in previews two years ago that this looked interesting enough. On some level, a person's interest in a biographical film about firefighters is similar to one about trapped coal miners, you know that the only reason you're following the subjects is because something bad happened to them. For some people, that is a difficult ask, and that is the reason that people don't often go to watch these sorts of films the way that producers and studios believe they will. Only the Brave is one of those kinds of movies where people are supposed to learn to appreciate the trade and what people who do these jobs go through in order to keep people safe. What we have here though, is a movie where the characters have enough chemistry to keep things moving in spite of how corny the film could become, and because this is based on a true story it gives the feeling of credibility that another film would lack. Whenever there are issues with a biographical film, specifically the ones that I had, I can only attribute them to the story itself. It isn't the fault of the filmmakers, or you know, of anything. When people die, they die, and that's how life goes I suppose. It's certainly part of that job, but even though people say that a person could get killed while fighting a fire, nobody actually expects that to happen until it happens.

Only the Brave kicks off with one of the largest fires in the history of Arizona, the Cave Creek Complex Wildfire. Eric Marsh (Josh Brolin) is the superintendent of a fire and rescue crew in Prescott, Arizona. His crew are municipal firefighters, they do not get to make the major decisions in dealing with such fires. His recommendation is ignored by a hotshot crew from California, and the neighborhood he would have saved is subsequently destroyed. At this point I should explain what hotshot crews actually are. They are elite firefighters, trained for dealing with all problems. They uphold high physical standards and are tasked with traveling around the country to deal with major problems that need resolved. Their deployment is a hard job, they are rarely home and these situations have a major impact on their home life. Eric is married to Amanda (Jennifer Connelly), and Amanda wants to have kids. Eric does not, he is gone too much and would be an absentee father. This is a cause of conflict in their marriage. Eric wants to take things a step further with his firefighting crew too. He wants them to be hotshots, and talks to the Prescott's fire chief, the guy who can make it happen, Duane (Jeff Bridges). Duane wants the crew to commit to a longer working season and Amanda hates this, but men are going to do what they want to do and this one wants to work.

At the same time, there's a story revolving around Brendan (Miles Teller), a Prescott local with a serious drug and delinquency problem. Brendan is thrown in jail and kicked out of his mother's house, he also has a baby on the way with Natalie (Natalie Hall), his ex-girlfriend. She wants nothing to do with him though. So, with that in mind, and when Brendan is thrown in jail and gets out, he decides that he needs to do something important with his life. He walks into the firehouse where Mike is with his crew, and decides to interview even though the others are staring holes through him. The most important of the other firefighters are Jesse (James Badge Dale), the second in command, and a guy who gives Brendan no end of shit, he is named Mac (Taylor Kitsch). When I write sentences like that, I feel like I need an editor. Anyway, Brendan goes out on a run with them, and even though he's a junkie, Mike wants to hire him and train him into a firefighter. There is a reason for this, but more than anything else Mike thinks Brendan needs structure in his life. There is going to come a time that they're evaluated for their hotshot certificate, it just takes a fire to come for that to happen. Are they going to pass and is Brendan going to make it to that point, leaving his junkie lifestyle behind?

This is the kind of movie that you'd think Republicans would like, that you'd think they would turn out to see, but they did not. That isn't to say that I don't think this was a good movie, because it was, but it was merely good. It is very difficult to believe that the fires filmed for Only the Brave were not real. It is also difficult to believe that someone besides Peter Berg directed this, but in doing so the film has a different tone than it otherwise would have had. Only the Brave is also long enough that the viewer comes to understand exactly how this job works if they're paying attention to the movie. Overall, when I say this is a good movie, everything in the movie is functionally good, but it is limited by the facts of the events. I do not know how it could have been much better because it is one of those films about firefighting and to me, that's only so entertaining to begin with. The conclusion of the film is rather sad, and I don't understand why or how these people died when they were so experienced, but unfortunately they did. The main performances are all strong, but I wasn't ever expecting to see Jeff Bridges in an unrecognizable role like this one. The film does leave out a little wrinkle though, it probably isn't so little in the grand scheme of things. The city tried to completely fuck the families of the firefighters who died, denying their families benefits because shitty red cities believe they should do something like that in an attempt to limit government spending. That's something that should have been covered in this film.

7/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Phantom Thread
3. The Shape of Water
4. Get Out
5. Good Time
6. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
7. Mudbound
8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
9. Logan
10. Baby Driver
11. The Post
12. Wonder Woman
13. The Big Sick
14. Lady Bird
15. Wind River
16. Thor: Ragnarok
17. Logan Lucky
18. The Beguiled
19. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
20. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
21. Brawl in Cell Block 99
22. John Wick: Chapter 2
23. The Disaster Artist
24. The Lost City of Z
25. First They Killed My Father
26. A Ghost Story
27. Darkest Hour
28. Spider-Man: Homecoming
29. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
30. Sweet Virginia
31. It
32. Battle of the Sexes
33. Stronger
34. Brad's Status
35. Okja
36. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
37. Kong: Skull Island
38. It Comes at Night
39. Crown Heights
40. Split
41. 1922
42. Personal Shopper
43. Landline
44. Beatriz at Dinner
45. Chuck
46. Atomic Blonde
47. Shot Caller
48. Brigsby Bear
49. Wheelman
50. The Lego Batman Movie
51. Megan Leavey
52. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
53. Wonderstruck
54. Only the Brave
55. Marshall
56. Menashe
57. Walking Out
58. American Made
59. Annabelle: Creation
60. Beauty and the Beast
61. Imperial Dreams
62. Gifted
63. Murder on the Orient Express
64. The Zookeeper's Wife
65. The Glass Castle
66. The Foreigner
67. Free Fire
68. Win It All
69. The Wall
70. Life
71. My Cousin Rachel
72. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
73. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
74. Breathe
75. The Man Who Invented Christmas
76. Maudie
77. Patti Cake$
78. Sleight
79. Alone in Berlin
80. A United Kingdom
81. Trespass Against Us
82. The Mountain Between Us
83. War Machine
84. Happy Death Day
85. Lowriders
86. Justice League
87. To the Bone
88. Ghost in the Shell
89. Wakefield
90. Bright
91. The Tribes of Palos Verdes
92. The Hitman's Bodyguard
93. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
94. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
95. The Mummy
96. The Greatest Showman
97. Rough Night
98. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
99. Sand Castle
100. The Circle
101. American Assassin
102. CHiPs
103. Death Note
104. 47 Meters Down
105. The Belko Experiment
106. The Great Wall
107. Fist Fight
108. Baywatch
109. Snatched
110. Suburbicon
111. Wilson
112. The Dark Tower
113. Queen of the Desert
114. The House
115. Flatliners
116. Sleepless
117. All Eyez on Me
118. The Book of Henry
119. The Space Between Us

 

[909]

The Lion King (2019), directed by Jon Favreau

The Lion King was probably the most anticipated non-Marvel film of the year, and for good reason. The Lion King was an amazing cartoon back in 1994, you would think that someone would remake the movie and in doing so remove some of the plot holes that existed in the original story. That is not what happened. What we have in this year's The Lion King, is a movie that reminds me of Gus van Sant's Psycho in the worst ways. That isn't to say the film is as bad as that version of Psycho, but the manner in which it is made reminds me of that. I've seen a lot of good reviews, and a lot of reviews with bad scores, but I made sure to read none of them and decide for myself. After all, this could be Dumbo or it could be Aladdin. One I didn't like, one I did. It's going to be difficult for me to illustrate how I feel about the film without saying something that I'm sure someone else has already said. What I can say is that The Lion King is around 30 minutes longer without doing anything different than the other film, and I can't figure out how that even happens or why. I do have a lot of complaints, but ultimately the story isn't bad. It's still a good story, so anything bad I've been thinking is unrelated to that. A film does not need to be remade if it doesn't bring anything unique to the table, and The Lion King is certainly no exception to that.

Everyone knows the story of this film, right? I'll spare you the details. Let's talk about the voice actors. Simba is voiced by Donald Glover, we have Pumbaa voiced by Seth Rogen, Chiwetel Ejiofor takes a turn as Scar, Sarabi (Simba's mother) is voiced by Alfre Woodard, Timon is done by Billy Eichner, Rafiki is voiced by John Kani, and Zazu's voice is done by John Oliver. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly to some, James Earl Jones reprises his role as Mufasa's voice, and Beyonce takes over as Nala's. Now, what I should immediately review is the voice acting, which is quite hit or miss. My brother was watching the original animated film on TV when I was at his house on Sunday, and I was instantly struck by how well Jeremy Irons was able to voice Scar. I thought, as my brother said, that the voice would not be done so well. That was not the case in this film, but I should have known that the most accomplished actor in this cast would be able to do a great job with their role. The one that really stuck out as being poor was Beyonce's voice acting. I mean, it was fucking bad, felt like someone reading from a sheet of paper without any emotion. So, that's what it was. I was rather floored by how stupid some of the lines sounded as she was reading them and thought this shouldn't have been left in the film this way. Unfortunately, it was.

The Lion King is a photo-realistic remake, for lack of a better term and maybe that's even a wrong term. This has its positives and its negatives. The Lion King does feel like a soulless remake lacking in originality. All of these Disney films have to some extent, but I liked Aladdin the most and that's still the case. I am unsure as to why Disney wanted exact recreations of their animated films. I also thought that The Lion King needed to have more animals on screen most of the time, and that making a hand-drawn film is one thing, a CGI film is another. The expectations for what is in front of you from scene to scene increase massively. The songs also do not have what the original film had. Some are still as good or better, others are not. They lack originality all the same. There is something to be said for hearing or seeing something for the first time, and The Lion King doesn't have that. There is only so much that a person can say in a positive sense about a work like that. The animation is one of those things. It is incredible to say the least. The character design is excellent on all levels. I can see why kids were scared and crying as this movie was playing out. While that may not fit with Disney's ideals, I rather enjoyed this...except for hearing kids cry and scream. That wasn't so fun.

The character design being so realistic probably contributes to the voice acting being so strange, this is not The Jungle Book to say the least. I don't know why it isn't, the films were made by the same person and The Lion King was a better cartoon, but it just isn't. I think there's some disconnect with the cast as well. You have to wonder why Donald Glover is in the cast only to do a generic Simba voice. The only authentic feeling characters are Timon and Pumbaa, both of whom seemed to have ad-libbed lines that they were clearly in the same room to provide the voices for. This is not the case with all characters, or so it seems. There are a lot of people who will tell you that you can't argue with how much money The Lion King is going to make, and I think that's fair to a point. The point when it isn't, is when you think about all the original movies that Disney could have made based off of a Lion King story and how much money those films could have made. Then, I consider the lack of ambition in taking this route instead of doing something unique, and I've come to the conclusion that this is a very average film. It's unfortunate because this could have been more.

5.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Booksmart
2. Midsommar
3. Avengers: Endgame
4. Toy Story 4
5. Us
6. Gloria Bell
7. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
8. The Beach Bum
9. The Art of Self-Defense
10. Arctic
11. Spider-Man: Far From Home
12. Rocketman
13. High Flying Bird
14. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
15. Captain Marvel
16. Long Shot
17. Shazam!
18. Paddleton
19. Late Night
20. Hotel Mumbai
21. Always Be My Maybe
22. Cold Pursuit
23. Shaft
24. Happy Death Day 2U
25. Ma
26. Annabelle Comes Home
27. Greta
28. Aladdin
29. Triple Frontier
30. Fighting with My Family
31. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
32. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
33. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
34. Brexit
35. The Dirt
36. Velvet Buzzsaw
37. Stuber
38. Little
39. Alita: Battle Angel
40. The Kid
41. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
42. The Upside
43. The Lion King
44. The Dead Don't Die
45. Dumbo
46. The Hummingbird Project
47. Escape Room
48. Tolkien
49. Captive State
50. The Highwaymen
51. Pet Sematary
52. The Intruder
53. Child's Play
54. Yesterday
55. Brightburn
56. Anna
57. What Men Want
58. Men in Black: International
59. Unicorn Store
60. The Curse of La Llorona
61. Miss Bala
62. The Perfection
63. Hellboy
64. Glass
65. Dark Phoenix
66. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
67. The Hustle
68. The Best of Enemies
69. The Prodigy
70. Polar
71. Serenity

 

[909]

Hostiles (2017), directed by Scott Cooper

I will come straight out with it and admit that I had not watched Hostiles yet because of how long the film appeared to be. It turns out that a decent chunk of that is credits, but the point ultimately remains. Hostiles is a rather long film that does happen to feel long. Is that bad? Not always, not necessarily either. You have to think about whether or not the events deserved to be of that length to begin with and whether or not the characters in the film actually matter. The answer, to me anyway, is that they do. Of course, I should note that the length of this put my dad straight to sleep. Think about that for a moment, and my dad is not the first person who fell asleep or became straight out bored by watching Hostiles. I don't think this is an amazing film, but I feel just about exactly the opposite. It's a strong effort, when the action comes it matters very much, but the other scenes do as well. This is a film that revels in forcing the viewer to be patient, it is deliberately slow and features very strong performances. I have seen interesting complaints about how this film has a race issue, but that's very difficult for me to accept when the National Congress of American Indians has lauded the film for its treatment of native matters. I am past the point in my life where I'm going to get offended on behalf of people who are not offended. Hostiles could have used a greater perspective on one side of the people involved, but that would have made the film a hell of a lot longer, and very likely more people would have complained that this story dragged too much.

Hostiles starts in 1892, with Rosalee Quaid (Rosamund Pike) out on a ranch with her husband and three children. She's teaching them as her husband is going to make improvements to the house, but this isn't going to go well. A Comanche war party is out and looking for trouble, they kill and scalp her husband while shooting all of her kids. The last of her kids was a baby, and the baby was shot instead of Rosalee, who is able to escape. The film pans over to New Mexico, at a fort where Captain Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale) has just rounded up an Apache family and brought them back for imprisonment. I think everyone in the world knows how fucked up that is, but Joe has a bad reputation for killing natives. He says that it's his job, but what he's done is a lot worse than merely a job. Slaughtering is the name of the game as far as he's concerned. His sargeant, Thomas Metz (Rory Cochrane), he's gone along with Joe the whole way and participated in the exact same things. The way he tells it, he's done a lot worse and isn't ashamed to share that with other people. Joe is called to the office of Col. Biggs (Stephen Lang) because there is a mission, one that he really doesn't want to do. He has been directed by President Harrison to escort a dying Cheyenne war chief, Chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) all the way to Montana. Their tribal lands are now a reservation, or they're going to be, so Yellow Hawk and four members of his family need to go back.

Joe, as you might suspect, is furious. There's no other way to put it, and he's forced to take the mission as he'll lose his pension should he not. After they're done with the mission, Joe is supposed to head over to a fort and muster out back East as he is going to be done with the military. Joe is able to pick his detail at least, and of course Thomas is first along with him. Corporal Woodson (Jonathan Majors) is Joe's aide and will also join, then straight from West Point we have Lieutenant Kidder (Jesse Plemons). Lastly, Biggs decides to add a French kid, Pvt. Desjardins (Timothee Chalamet). Desjardins can hardly speak English and he's very new to the Army, it's obvious what's going to happen to this guy. Along with Yellow Hawk, the other natives are Black Hawk (Adam Beach), his son; Elk Woman (Q'orianka Kilcher), Black Hawk's wife; Little Bear (Xavier Horsechief), their son; and Living Woman (Tanaya Beatty), Black Hawk's sister and Yellow Hawk's daughter. I hate having to describe all the cast members in this manner, but there's no choice this time. Anyway, it's time for them to set off on their journey, and after they're away from the fort Joe decides to have the two grown native men put in chains. Of course, the group comes across the destroyed Quaid house and subsequently across Rosalee. The problem beyond her grief, is that those Comanche who attacked are still out there. They want to kill everyone.

The action scenes in Hostiles, when they do come, are horribly violent and rather intriguing as a result of that. I will also admit that I found the story rather unpredictable and didn't know what was going to happen next. The film could have used more of the Cheyenne viewpoint, but it's actually rather clear from my perspective. White people came and took their land while killing people, the Cheyenne killed some too, but they white men had prisons and power they could use against the Cheyenne. There's your perspective. This is the third movie of Scott Cooper's that I've seen, the third one that's good, but also the third one that I felt could have been even better. Cooper is a little too deliberate with his time and pacing and could use these scenes to ensure we see a fully realized perspective of every character. Instead that focus goes on the lead character, which in this case is played by Christian Bale and as a result fully realized because of his talents. The cinematography by Masanobu Takayanagi is as great as you could ever ask for. The scenery is amazing, so that doesn't hurt. Rosamund Pike is another great actor, and as you can see in my cast listing, this is a great cast in general. I've held back on one or two names as well. The film is still missing something that you'd have to see in order to fully understand.

I think what the film is missing is a great script. What we have here is a script intent on creating great, memorable characters. That is fully accomplished. The story itself is not so great as a result of that, because the narrative thread is lacking. This is a film where someone is not inherently trying to redeem themselves, but they realize as the events play out that they are redeeming themselves. I still think this movie is almost great to a much stronger extent than Out of the Furnace and Black Mass. The movie is too damn long and there isn't enough focus on the chief, those are the things I would ding the story for. I still very much enjoyed the movie regardless of that, but I would like it if one of these modern Westerns (as in made in the last five years) would attempt to address genocide against Native Americans head on. I mean, really head on. Pull no punches and hold nothing back. There are stories to be told in this genre, and now there are streaming services that don't care about making money. One should step up to the plate and give the world the story that we need. Now, back to Hostiles, there is another series of rather entertaining scenes that badly obscures what should have been the focus all along. It feels like a detour, and I can't give that kind of movie a really amazing grade, but what I'm giving is quite strong in the first place. It's Christian Bale, and it's a Western.

7.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Phantom Thread
3. The Shape of Water
4. Get Out
5. Good Time
6. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
7. Mudbound
8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
9. Logan
10. Baby Driver
11. The Post
12. Wonder Woman
13. The Big Sick
14. Lady Bird
15. Wind River
16. Thor: Ragnarok
17. Logan Lucky
18. The Beguiled
19. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
20. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
21. Brawl in Cell Block 99
22. John Wick: Chapter 2
23. The Disaster Artist
24. The Lost City of Z
25. First They Killed My Father
26. A Ghost Story
27. Hostiles
28. Darkest Hour
29. Spider-Man: Homecoming
30. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
31. Sweet Virginia
32. It
33. Battle of the Sexes
34. Stronger
35. Brad's Status
36. Okja
37. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
38. Kong: Skull Island
39. It Comes at Night
40. Crown Heights
41. Split
42. 1922
43. Personal Shopper
44. Landline
45. Beatriz at Dinner
46. Chuck
47. Atomic Blonde
48. Shot Caller
49. Brigsby Bear
50. Wheelman
51. The Lego Batman Movie
52. Megan Leavey
53. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
54. Wonderstruck
55. Only the Brave
56. Marshall
57. Menashe
58. Walking Out
59. American Made
60. Annabelle: Creation
61. Beauty and the Beast
62. Imperial Dreams
63. Gifted
64. Murder on the Orient Express
65. The Zookeeper's Wife
66. The Glass Castle
67. The Foreigner
68. Free Fire
69. Win It All
70. The Wall
71. Life
72. My Cousin Rachel
73. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
74. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
75. Breathe
76. The Man Who Invented Christmas
77. Maudie
78. Patti Cake$
79. Sleight
80. Alone in Berlin
81. A United Kingdom
82. Trespass Against Us
83. The Mountain Between Us
84. War Machine
85. Happy Death Day
86. Lowriders
87. Justice League
88. To the Bone
89. Ghost in the Shell
90. Wakefield
91. Bright
92. The Tribes of Palos Verdes
93. The Hitman's Bodyguard
94. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
95. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
96. The Mummy
97. The Greatest Showman
98. Rough Night
99. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
100. Sand Castle
101. The Circle
102. American Assassin
103. CHiPs
104. Death Note
105. 47 Meters Down
106. The Belko Experiment
107. The Great Wall
108. Fist Fight
109. Baywatch
110. Snatched
111. Suburbicon
112. Wilson
113. The Dark Tower
114. Queen of the Desert
115. The House
116. Flatliners
117. Sleepless
118. All Eyez on Me
119. The Book of Henry
120. The Space Between Us

 

[909]

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), directed by Quentin Tarantino

I have written lots of reviews here, as everyone well knows. There are very few times that I watch something so good that I cannot find a way to formulate my words for a very long period of time. This is one of those times. By the time you'll read this, it will have been nearly a day since I actually watched the film. That's the kind of enjoyable film this is and the impact it had on me. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has disarmed me, left me pleased with everything. The best way I can describe the film is that it is to films for adults the same way that movies like The Lion King are for children. I do want to watch this again, and I probably will when I can buy the film on Blu-Ray. I cannot honestly tell you the last time I bought something on Blu-Ray, but this is an exception. It is an exception because Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a movie I would like to have the ability to watch whenever I want, a rarity in modern times. I do not remember the last time I enjoyed watching something as much as I enjoyed watching this yesterday. In theaters, there certainly hasn't been anything since I started going a year ago. Keep that in mind when you read this. There is one critique that I find does have merit, the use of Sharon Tate as it relates to the film, but I don't think this was a movie about Sharon Tate. I'm easily able to brush that critique to the side because of how the film ends. I don't really want to spoil anything, but it's inevitable here. What is Once Upon a Time in Hollywood really about, anyway?

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood takes place in 1969 Los Angeles, Hollywood to be specific. I'm sure you already knew that. To say that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has a story would be somewhat untruthful, this is a movie that does not entirely have a story. Rather, it follows three people over the course of their day on two separate occasions. One is in February and one is in August, but there are a lot of flashbacks triggered by the events of those days. We start off with one, with famous actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) being interviewed on the set of Rick's show, Bounty Law. This was back in the 1950s. Now, times have certainly changed. Rick is an alcoholic who can't keep a role anymore. He was in movies, was the lead on Bounty Law, but those days have long passed. He takes a meeting with Marvin Schwarzs (Al Pacino), a powerful person in Hollywood, and Marvin tells him that he can either continue to follow the same path he's following or go to Rome and make spaghetti Westerns. The choice, such as it is, is Rick's. I should also point out that Cliff's career goes as Rick's does. He lives in a trailer at the back of a drive-in theater in Van Nuys, his pitbull Brandi is the only real company that he has. There are rumors about Cliff that have followed him for his entire life, but Rick trusts him to be his gofer and stunt double. That's all that really matters. So, he spends his day driving Rick around and doing for Rick what Rick wants him to do. Cliff is also a war veteran, if that matters, which it does. The overall point is that this dude can handle himself.

I'm having a hard time figuring out how I get from that to the next part of the film in a way that seems coherent. Anyway, Rick made the decision to buy a house in the Hollywood Hills, based on some advice he was given earlier in his career. Either you live in Hollywood or you aren't really Hollywood, and this real estate has given him a nice opportunity. You see, Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) live next door to him, and all he really needs to do in order to get ahead, as he sees it, is meet them. The thing is, he sees it himself, he's a has-been. Washed up, done with. Good for guest starring in television shows and that's it. He has a pilot coming up, a new series called Lancer. Yes, this movie really does use old television shows in order to make things feel more authentic. He's supposed to play the villain in the pilot, lose as always happened in those shows, and that's it. That's what Marvin told him not to do anymore. There is also Sharon Tate's perspective on her day, which I am going to leave a secret as you should really watch this anyway. Cliff, on the other hand, has to fix Rick's antenna as it blew down while Rick was extremely drunk the night before. Booth has been pondering his failures in life the same way Rick has been, and this is the point where I must depart. I can't bring myself to start spoiling these films until next year, when I said that I would.

It's tough to unpack the film considering the amount of appearances and great scenes in the film itself, but one thought prevails throughout and no amount of logic is shaking me from this. Cliff Booth is one of the best characters I have ever seen in any film. People will be talking about this one for ages. I left out a huge amount of details, but those details help to define the character and test whether or not you're actually committed to enjoying the film. Or is Cliff telling the truth? You don't actually know, that mystery is crucial. This isn't just one of the best characters ever, obviously it has to be one of the best performances that I've seen too. The question I have for myself, and one I don't think I can answer, is how much do I actually like this film? Is it better than Pulp Fiction? I'll have to check that out again to know. I didn't post this for a day because I needed time to think about what I watched, but my thoughts a day later are the same as they were immediately after viewing the movie. Hardly anything I've seen this year has felt so fresh and fun, it is pretty much everything people would have wanted from the film. I know that I already mentioned Cliff Booth, and how strong the character was, but Rick Dalton wasn't a bad one either. The story of a failing actor always gets to me, and the film spends a ton of time with him on a pilot shoot. You would think that when I say one of the characters was so memorable, that the other lead would feel like a drag when the film focuses on them. That is not true at all.

There has been much focus given to what Tarantino has done wrongly in his career, and that's perfectly fine, but this has led people to project their own personal feelings onto a film that contains none of these issues. Basically, you can tell who did and didn't watch this based on what they've written, and failing that you can tell who came to watch the film and shit on it no matter what was in it. I laughed a lot, as you can tell. If it was up to me there would be a commentary track on the BR disc with both leads in character, I'd like that even more than the usual with the director. I'm going to wrap things up from here because I don't want to spoil the movie, but I'm not too sure people will read this unless they've watched it, so I've caught myself in a bind here. The fact is that if you like anything about old Hollywood, you must watch this. Even people I know who don't like Tarantino liked this film. I don't know if this was an attempt on Tarantino's part to make a statement on the era as a whole, I didn't really see things that way, but there is so much here. You also have some of the best conceived violence to ever be in a film, not that there's very much of it in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to begin with. Everyone in the theater was so happy, and laughed so hard. This was a film that I couldn't imagine bringing myself to hate on any level at all.

10/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
2. Booksmart
3. Midsommar
4. Avengers: Endgame
5. Toy Story 4
6. Us
7. Gloria Bell
8. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
9. The Beach Bum
10. The Art of Self-Defense
11. Arctic
12. Spider-Man: Far From Home
13. Rocketman
14. High Flying Bird
15. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
16. Captain Marvel
17. Long Shot
18. Shazam!
19. Paddleton
20. Late Night
21. Hotel Mumbai
22. Always Be My Maybe
23. Cold Pursuit
24. Shaft
25. Happy Death Day 2U
26. Ma
27. Annabelle Comes Home
28. Greta
29. Aladdin
30. Triple Frontier
31. Fighting with My Family
32. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
33. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
34. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
35. Brexit
36. The Dirt
37. Velvet Buzzsaw
38. Stuber
39. Little
40. Alita: Battle Angel
41. The Kid
42. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
43. The Upside
44. The Lion King
45. The Dead Don't Die
46. Dumbo
47. The Hummingbird Project
48. Escape Room
49. Tolkien
50. Captive State
51. The Highwaymen
52. Pet Sematary
53. The Intruder
54. Child's Play
55. Yesterday
56. Brightburn
57. Anna
58. What Men Want
59. Men in Black: International
60. Unicorn Store
61. The Curse of La Llorona
62. Miss Bala
63. The Perfection
64. Hellboy
65. Glass
66. Dark Phoenix
67. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
68. The Hustle
69. The Best of Enemies
70. The Prodigy
71. Polar
72. Serenity

 

[909]

Ready Player One (2018), directed by Steven Spielberg

Reviewing a Steven Spielberg movie is probably one of the easiest things to do regardless of the content in any given film. The themes are largely the same, there's an expectation from these movies that Spielberg is often keen to fulfill because that's his thing. Ready Player One is not an exception to this in any way, the amount of special effects and the source material do not change this, and for all I know the source material was chosen by Spielberg because it fit his usual themes. The ending, as you might expect, is also very much a Spielberg thing and that's weird in a Hollywood climate where films don't usually end in this manner anymore. I should point out that Ready Player One takes a long time to get to that point, this film is far too long even though there is only so much condensing a person can do to material coming from a novel. This film also has more special effects than perhaps any other that I've watched. Obviously, this is not Spielberg's best movie and I think anyone can see that simply from viewing the trailer. It's also not one of his better movies. It's still a good movie. All those things can make sense in combination with one another, but I find one thing about Ready Player One to be really strange. How do you make a movie about pop culture in the 80s and 90s and leave out almost all of your own work? This decision is really weird, and it's something you notice as Ready Player One goes along, nearly to the point of becoming a distraction. At least he put the T-Rex from Jurassic Park in this because I would have lost it had he not.

In 2045, life has gone to shit somehow even though it is not explained at any point in the film. People seek escape from their shitty lives by playing one single video game, a virtual reality universe called the OASIS. The OASIS is something that can hardly be described in sensical fashion, but once a person puts on those googles and optionally a suit, they can leave their old lives behind and be who they want to be in the video game. OASIS was created by James Halliday (Mark Rylance) and Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg), the latter of whom left Gregarious Games after a dispute of some kind with Halliday. In Columbus, there's a split between societies as things have changed far too much. Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) lives in a trailer park which has been stacked up to create room for everyone, with his aunt and her abusive boyfriend. Their life sucks, just like everyone else's does. Unfortunately, one of these things is not explained so excellently, so I'm going to do the best that I can. On the other side of the tracks, you have someone like Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the CEO of IOI. IOI is a company that wants to control the OASIS any way possible, using indentured servants and their employees. It doesn't matter how it must be done, but they have to do it. OASIS, it should be pointed out, is something that drives the economy at this point. I believe it was said that Gregarious Games is the the most profitable company in the world.

Now, how this all relates to the plot? Halliday has died at the start of this film, and a pre-recorded message left by his character has announced a game. Ownership of OASIS, and the fortune that comes along with, will be given to the first person that finds the Golden Easter Egg. The Egg is locked behind a gate that requires three keys, and the first person to get that last one wins. Anyone can get the other two keys at their leisure and swoop on in for that last one, but IOI is going to prove very difficult to beat. They have thousands of people working towards finding that third key. Eventually someone working for them will see how to get the other two, so that isn't the priority. Wade's avatar is Parzival, who is best friends with a virtual mechanic named Aech (Lena Waithe). The two don't know each other in real life at all, but they're very close. One day, when everyone is racing to be the first person to get that first key, Parzival meets Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), someone else intent on finding the keys for their own reasons. You see, Wade wants to win so that he can become rich and escape his shitty life in the trailer park stack. Art3mis, on the other hand, wants to make sure that IOI does not gain ownership over the OASIS and destroy everyone's life that way. There is a lot riding on this Easter Egg hunt. We are talking about half a trillion dollars here and ownership of something that everyone is doing. There are also many, and I do mean many more characters that take part in this.

I already said this is a Spielberg movie, so that's taken care of. I don't know anything about the source material and I'm not going to read it either. The reason I said this movie is merely good is because the amount of special effects, and the portrayal of the video game world itself, leads to some detachment from the characters and their emotions. There are also scenes near the end of Ready Player One that straight out don't make any sense. The amount of pop culture here is great and at the same time completely ridiculous. None of the scenes featuring it are capable of comparing to the scene with The Shining, but I think everyone knew that would be the case while this was being made. Ready Player One also has some of the best special effects to ever come to the screen, the CGI is nothing short of incredible. There is an issue though with the presentation of this and the real world, and you have to wonder why the characters weren't putting any of their energy into improving reality. It is also weird for a famous director to make a film with such a strong basis in video gaming, material that is usually handled without care and like it is trash.

I'm not sure if this was the film that Spielberg was actually shooting for, in the sense that I'm sure the use of cameos was not supposed to completely overshadow his work, but it all does. When you have Gundam facing Mechagodzilla, shouldn't someone expect that? It's one of the only things I can think of after a night's sleep. One has to wonder if someone was feeding Spielberg these things the same way that Ben Mendelsohn's character had to get lines from his employees in order to say much of anything of value. Who knows? I could be a pretentious bastard and talk about all the things the film made me feel, but I think the best word to use is that I was pleased. Ready Player One is a film that has pretty much no downtime, moves as quickly as possible, and jams multiple huge special effects set-pieces into the two hours plus running time. That's a dangerous balance that has to play out as well, either the film is going to be good or all the action will fail to land, but it was good enough here. I also struggle with the ending in the scenes that it seems cruel for someone to shut the OASIS off twice a week to force people to spend time in a horrible, dystopian reality. Perhaps in doing so, reality wouldn't be so horrible? Spielberg doesn't do a good job explaining that.

7/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. Widows
6. First Man
7. BlacKkKlansman
8. Blindspotting
9. Leave No Trace
10. Black Panther
11. If Beale Street Could Talk
12. The Sisters Brothers
13. A Private War
14. Avengers: Infinity War
15. Stan & Ollie
16. Green Book
17. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
18. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
19. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
20. On My Skin
21. Private Life
22. Climax
23. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
24. Mid90s
25. Eighth Grade
26. Sorry to Bother You
27. Suspiria
28. Vice
29. The Old Man & the Gun
30. Vox Lux
31. Bad Times at the El Royale
32. The Other Side of the Wind
33. Searching
34. A Simple Favor
35. The Hate U Give
36. Unsane
37. Disobedience
38. Boy Erased
39. Bumblebee
40. Mary Poppins Returns
41. Creed II
42. Hold the Dark
43. The Land of Steady Habits
44. Halloween
45. Ant-Man and the Wasp
46. Blockers
47. Beirut
48. Roxanne Roxanne
49. Mary Queen of Scots
50. Aquaman
51. Ideal Home
52. Outlaw King
53. Overlord
54. Ready Player One
55. Ben Is Back
56. Monsters and Men
57. The Mule
58. On the Basis of Sex
59. Bohemian Rhapsody
60. White Boy Rick
61. Papillon
62. Game Night
63. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
64. Instant Family
65. Alpha
66. The Front Runner
67. The Predator
68. Apostle
69. The Angel
70. The Commuter
71. Beautiful Boy
72. The Nun
73. Operation Finale
74. The Equalizer 2
75. The Spy Who Dumped Me
76. Yardie
77. Bird Box
78. 12 Strong
79. Venom
80. Skyscraper
81. The Meg
82. Assassination Nation
83. The Girl in the Spider's Web
84. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
85. 22 July
86. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
87. The Little Stranger
88. Tomb Raider
89. Night School
90. The 15:17 To Paris
91. Peppermint
92. Mile 22
93. The First Purge
94. Hunter Killer
95. The Cloverfield Paradox
96. Mute
97. Kin
98. Hell Fest
99. Proud Mary
100. Robin Hood
101. Traffik
102. The Happytime Murders
103. The Outsider
104. Slender Man

 

[909]

The Fate of the Furious (2017), directed by F. Gary Gray

I'm just about spent on material for these reviews now that I've watched and reviewed eight of these films. I'm also going to watch the ninth one before the end of this week, so we're going to see how much I struggle with tonight's review. The Fate of the Furious can best be described as the kind of film that you get when the person directing the film is new to the franchise, which F. Gary Gray was. Perhaps it is also the kind of film that you get when the writer is out of ideas, and the writer has been replaced for the as of yet not officially titled Fast & Furious 9. There was a lot of talk prior to the release of this film that Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel don't get along, and now they aren't scheduled to appear together in any of the two upcoming films. They also weren't on screen together for more than a few seconds in The Fate of the Furious, so the beef is probably real and they probably can't work together. How that relates to the future of the franchise, and the conclusion of it, I don't really know. The fact is that the story needs to conclude with them both in a film, with scenes together, and that'll be that. Everyone knows that these movies are intended to be over the top, but this one was too much so. I think what we have here is a film that I like, but I'm not going to be effusive in praise and this rates exactly where the fourth film does. That is to say, before these films got entertaining in the first place. Of course The Fate of the Furious is entertaining, but I think you know what I mean. The quality control seems to have slipped a little bit here, and I think that requires an explanation on my part.

You know all about these fuckers, right? Nearly all of them are back, Brian (obviously) and Mia are not. Family is most important, but Dom will not have the two people he trusts most to get him through the events that follow. The film starts in Cuba, with Dom (Vin Diesel) and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) on their honeymoon, doing their honeymoon thing as people do when they're on their honeymoon. You get the point? Their honeymoon. Anyway, the day after some classic franchise street racing, Dom is approached by a cyberterrorist who has some serious blackmail material. She is Cipher (Charlize Theron), and Cipher has been pulling the strings on all this terrorism stuff the entire time. You don't see what the material is until later, but when you do, I thought this was the only unexpected thing in the entire film. Of course, after that, there's talk of another attack and Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) is tasked with bringing the team back. Dom brings Letty, Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Tej (Ludacris), and Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) with him to Berlin, their goal is to retrieve an EMP device before Cipher can steal it. They do that, but there's a problem. As anyone can tell, Dom has been turned by Cipher in some way, and now he's a traitor. Her intention is to launch a nuclear weapon and hold the superpowers accountable for their wrongdoing. Nothing's going to stop her, and she has the best leverage against Dom that a person could have. She has his son. In order for THE FAMILY to stop Cipher, they will need to turn to Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham). You know, the terrorist from the last film? Yeah, that guy.

The Fate of the Furious has major problems as a result of Johnson and Diesel's feud, but that's only one part of the puzzle and the problems go beyond that, preventing the film from being as good as it could be. The concepts of the action scenes, as well as the writing surrounding a few of them, is not all that great. I did also notice that is Johnson and Diesel were sharing a scene, they were obviously not filmed at the same time. The issue is apparently because Diesel doesn't show up on time for filming and leaves everyone standing around, and you know, I'd feel the exact same way as Johnson. This issue with the two shows up worst in the Berlin sequence. It was poorly acted, far too short, basically everything about it sucked on every level. Due to the storyline, and because everyone knows Dom doesn't want to do any of these scenes, The Fate of the Furious is entirely too predictable. Being predictable isn't a problem as long as the action scenes deliver, which with the exception of the Berlin scene, they did. It doesn't matter that the scenes don't make sense, you expect that. The Hobbs & Shaw spinoff could be worse, but the bar it needs to clear is not that high here.

The Fate of the Furious isn't a bad film or anything, but it felt like a wasted opportunity from a director who should have done better. This is not the only time that happened with this guy though. Men in Black: International was a massive pile of garbage (which I rated too highly at the time), The Fate of the Furious isn't quite that, but it's not great. When you have a cast full of these remaining characters, with nobody else having left the franchise, making an average film is rather inexcusable. The Fate of the Furious is also way too long and not that funny. I'm starting to get the feeling that if this was about anything else, with a different cast, that I would absolutely hate this movie. That's probably true, but there's also lots of joy here. Jason Statham on the airplane is excellent. The NYC scenes are all great without exception, and they take up a rather large portion of the film. The stuff inside the jail was a lot of fun too. It's just that the connective tissue doesn't really hold things together that well. I will say one thing though, I'm glad a villain in this franchise actually got to do some seriously bad shit and live on. However, the way that everyone seemed to forget about Deckard killing Han, with that never having been mentioned at any point in the film, that's a case of bad direction that I cannot forgive. That's why this goes on the average pile.

6/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Phantom Thread
3. The Shape of Water
4. Get Out
5. Good Time
6. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
7. Mudbound
8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
9. Logan
10. Baby Driver
11. The Post
12. Wonder Woman
13. The Big Sick
14. Lady Bird
15. Wind River
16. Thor: Ragnarok
17. Logan Lucky
18. The Beguiled
19. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
20. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
21. Brawl in Cell Block 99
22. John Wick: Chapter 2
23. The Disaster Artist
24. The Lost City of Z
25. First They Killed My Father
26. A Ghost Story
27. Hostiles
28. Darkest Hour
29. Spider-Man: Homecoming
30. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
31. Sweet Virginia
32. It
33. Battle of the Sexes
34. Stronger
35. Brad's Status
36. Okja
37. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
38. Kong: Skull Island
39. It Comes at Night
40. Crown Heights
41. Split
42. 1922
43. Personal Shopper
44. Landline
45. Beatriz at Dinner
46. Chuck
47. Atomic Blonde
48. Shot Caller
49. Brigsby Bear
50. Wheelman
51. The Lego Batman Movie
52. Megan Leavey
53. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
54. Wonderstruck
55. Only the Brave
56. Marshall
57. Menashe
58. Walking Out
59. American Made
60. Annabelle: Creation
61. Beauty and the Beast
62. Imperial Dreams
63. Gifted
64. Murder on the Orient Express
65. The Zookeeper's Wife
66. The Glass Castle
67. The Foreigner
68. Free Fire
69. Win It All
70. The Wall
71. Life
72. My Cousin Rachel
73. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
74. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
75. The Fate of the Furious
76. Breathe
77. The Man Who Invented Christmas
78. Maudie
79. Patti Cake$
80. Sleight
81. Alone in Berlin
82. A United Kingdom
83. Trespass Against Us
84. The Mountain Between Us
85. War Machine
86. Happy Death Day
87. Lowriders
88. Justice League
89. To the Bone
90. Ghost in the Shell
91. Wakefield
92. Bright
93. The Tribes of Palos Verdes
94. The Hitman's Bodyguard
95. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
96. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
97. The Mummy
98. The Greatest Showman
99. Rough Night
100. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
101. Sand Castle
102. The Circle
103. American Assassin
104. CHiPs
105. Death Note
106. 47 Meters Down
107. The Belko Experiment
108. The Great Wall
109. Fist Fight
110. Baywatch
111. Snatched
112. Suburbicon
113. Wilson
114. The Dark Tower
115. Queen of the Desert
116. The House
117. Flatliners
118. Sleepless
119. All Eyez on Me
120. The Book of Henry
121. The Space Between Us

 

[HarleyQuinn]

If you had told me way back in 2001 that the Fast & Furious movies would be the franchise equivalent for 2 movie watching generations of over the top 80s action cop movies or action 90s thrillers but with cars, I would've laughed so hard. But damn if each film just goes for it in a way that somehow works, from the plot to the acting to the stunts, even though by most measures it probably shouldn't.

 

[909]

A Vigilante (2019), directed by Sarah Dagger-Nickson

A Vigilante is a film that was premiered around a year ago, but it wasn't released until around March, I believe the film went straight to on-demand. There is a reason for that, and this will be a rather short review. A Vigilante is a short film itself, made with a singular purpose, more precise in its focus with no illusions of making a grand statement of any kind. It's easy to see why this was a film released straight to on-demand because it does not do that, and because the film is so hellbent on doing what it set out to do. The film, as such, only has one real performance of note. It has a villain, at a point, and the story is singularly focused on the heroine escaping that villain and/or killing him. As such, what we have here is a better version of a television movie, and by better, I mean way better. The performance is what matters in this revenge film, because there's hardly anything else to A Vigilante. The excessive violence is pretty damn good too, I must say. Death Wish this is not.

A Vigilante is a film about Sadie (Olivia Wilde), a woman focused on finding and killing her husband after the abuse that he committed towards her. She's doing other things too, honing her craft, and learning how to take care of abusive pieces of shit. When I say she's going to take care of pieces of shit, I mean that she's going to fuck up their whole life. Sadie doesn't want to kill anyone, but there's a restoration of balance needed and she's not going to stand by when hearing women tell their stories. She goes to a support group and hears everyone talk about their problems, and she has her own, but I appreciated the way that she would react to them. Sadie spends her time in motels, partially out of necessity, she doesn't know that her husband's dead for sure and she's been hunting him. Of course, the film is inevitably going to come down to that. The first case of Sadie's involvement with a domestic abuser, it ends in an extremely satisfying way. This is not the norm for this movie, and it does get far worse.

A Vigilante, as I already said, is focused on this storyline and there is nothing extra at all. One's enjoyment of the film is entirely related to how much they come to care about the plot and about Sadie. It's a revenge movie and a pretty good one, with just one or two twists. Olivia Wilde does an excellent job, and the film is well directed as a whole. Her grief, and turmoil, and all of that stuff is handled and performed about as strongly as an actor could possibly perform such things. This is a small movie and you can tell, but it's a very good one regardless of that, and I liked the film a lot. I'm just struggling with providing further commentary because of the material. It's a movie where someone wants to get back at domestic abusers and does so with extreme prejudice. The justice is not reserved only for me, there's also a scene where Sadie beats up a very abusive mother who was working over her child. I thought this was rather cathartic, and in some ways quite enjoyable even though this was heavy subject matter.

7/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
2. Booksmart
3. Midsommar
4. Avengers: Endgame
5. Toy Story 4
6. Us
7. Gloria Bell
8. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
9. The Beach Bum
10. The Art of Self-Defense
11. Arctic
12. Spider-Man: Far From Home
13. Rocketman
14. High Flying Bird
15. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
16. Captain Marvel
17. Long Shot
18. Shazam!
19. Paddleton
20. A Vigilante
21. Late Night
22. Hotel Mumbai
23. Always Be My Maybe
24. Cold Pursuit
25. Shaft
26. Happy Death Day 2U
27. Ma
28. Annabelle Comes Home
29. Greta
30. Aladdin
31. Triple Frontier
32. Fighting with My Family
33. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
34. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
35. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
36. Brexit
37. The Dirt
38. Velvet Buzzsaw
39. Stuber
40. Little
41. Alita: Battle Angel
42. The Kid
43. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
44. The Upside
45. The Lion King
46. The Dead Don't Die
47. Dumbo
48. The Hummingbird Project
49. Escape Room
50. Tolkien
51. Captive State
52. The Highwaymen
53. Pet Sematary
54. The Intruder
55. Child's Play
56. Yesterday
57. Brightburn
58. Anna
59. What Men Want
60. Unicorn Store
61. The Curse of La Llorona
62. Miss Bala
63. Men in Black: International
64. The Perfection
65. Hellboy
66. Glass
67. Dark Phoenix
68. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
69. The Hustle
70. The Best of Enemies
71. The Prodigy
72. Polar
73. Serenity

 

[909]

Crawl (2019), directed by Alexandre Aja

Is 2019 finally starting to turn the corner in terms of quality films? That seems like a strange question to ask in the aftermath of viewing an alligator horror movie, but the fact is that this alligator horror flick was far better than I expected. Was it great? Well, no, that's far too much to expect from this sort of movie. Did I get scared? Yes. That's what made Crawl worth the time, and knowing that the film actually delivers on all of its promises of alligator related gore is also rather nice. This is not your typical posession horror where nothing other than mental trauma happens to any living human being, this is the real deal and I liked it very much. I was thinking this could be as awful as Anaconda, but this was not quite that. I am a bit surprised that Crawl hasn't made more money, but I should consider the reality that people are actually terrified of something like this happening to them. There's an element of films like It, or The Exorcist where people know this won't happen to them, but alligators are a real thing on the Atlantic coast. A lot of people cannot handle them at all. Have you ever seen these big motherfuckers at the zoo? They're absolutely terrifying. I remember when there was a news story here in LA, where some guys in the South Bay had raised an alligator illegally and released him into the wild. I would absolutely shit bricks if I lived in a house next to that small lake the gator was released into. That kind of thing, you know, I see why everyone in my row was freaking out as these events were taking place.

Haley (Kaya Scodelario) is a swimmer at the University of Florida, we are given a scene that shows her in a bathing suit for the purpose of showing her swimming ability, and I think you know why else. Anyway, while at practice with a hurricane about to hit Florida, she receives calls from her sister Beth (Moryfydd Clark) informing her about said hurricane, which is going to be a Category 5. Sounds great, doesn't it? Beth is also concerned that their father Dave (Barry Pepper) has not been answering his phone. Beth has called Dave around 20 times, but she lives in Boston and cannot check on him. So, Haley is tasked with making the drive two hours south, to what I can only assume is a fictionalized version of Tampa. I'm sure someone out there is making the very same drive as we speak. I am fortunate to not have been to Florida, so I cannot speak as to how realistic the following events actually are. Even though there's an evacuation order and the roads are blocked, Haley has a Jeep, which doesn't exactly need roads as the branding will tell you. She's going to check in on her father no matter what, nothing's going to stop her.

Since Haley's mother and Dave got divorced, Dave has been living in a condo with his dog Sugar, but once Haley arrives she sees that Dave is gone and Sugar is not. She knows that her dad wouldn't leave the dog in the middle of a huge storm, so she's worried about another possibility, that he went to their family lakeshore house. The house was supposed to be sold, but it wasn't. Haley and her father don't really speak in the aftermath of her parents divorce, so this situation is what it is. She can't find him in the house, so what the hell's going on? I know the answer to all this, obviously. You see, there's an overflow drain in their crawl space that goes out to the lake. Alligators had broken the gate and crawled into the space beneath the house, two of them having trapped Dave in the crawl space. That's not all. Dave wasn't merely trapped in the space under the house, he was mauled and has a compound fracture to his leg as well as a huge wound on his shoulder. He can hardly move, and this space isn't exactly large, but there are two fucking alligators in this crawl space and the hurricane has started to come in. The place is flooding, there are a lot of unmentioned variables in question, and all of these things come together to create what I thought was a good horror film.

Unmentioned variables will remain unmentioned for the purpose of doing so, but this is a hurricane film where you immediately see that Dave lives across from a gas station. There are only two actors of note in the film, and they aren't the sister up in Boston, so I think a film like this is entirely reliant on a few things. The first job of the director is to make you care about these two characters and feel bad for them. Making people feel bad for someone trapped by alligators isn't so hard, but there has to be even more than that. Hence, we have Dave's compound fracture. The second thing is to project the feeling that these alligators are real and something to be taken seriously. There's definitely that! The expectation from an animal attack movie is for there to be lots of blood and for some stuff to be chewed up. That's enhanced by the technology available to the filmmaker. This is not a B movie with horrible CGI. What matters is that the film scares the people watching it, which I think this did. There's also the matter of the story actually making sense, which it does. Crawl is a very short film, one of the shortest features I've ever seen in fact. It was unintentional that I reviewed two relatively short films in such a short span of time. I understand why someone wouldn't enjoy Crawl, but the minimalist story and scare factor really worked well with me. As I was leaving the theater I found that I was a bit freaked out, which has not been so common this year. I think I would only recommend around the top 25 of my list for everyone to give a look.

7/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
2. Booksmart
3. Midsommar
4. Avengers: Endgame
5. Toy Story 4
6. Us
7. Gloria Bell
8. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
9. The Beach Bum
10. The Art of Self-Defense
11. Arctic
12. Spider-Man: Far From Home
13. Rocketman
14. High Flying Bird
15. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
16. Captain Marvel
17. Long Shot
18. Shazam!
19. Paddleton
20. A Vigilante
21. Late Night
22. Crawl
23. Hotel Mumbai
24. Always Be My Maybe
25. Cold Pursuit
26. Shaft
27. Happy Death Day 2U
28. Ma
29. Annabelle Comes Home
30. Greta
31. Aladdin
32. Triple Frontier
33. Fighting with My Family
34. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
35. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
36. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
37. Brexit
38. The Dirt
39. Velvet Buzzsaw
40. Stuber
41. Little
42. Alita: Battle Angel
43. The Kid
44. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
45. The Upside
46. The Lion King
47. The Dead Don't Die
48. Dumbo
49. The Hummingbird Project
50. Escape Room
51. Tolkien
52. Captive State
53. The Highwaymen
54. Pet Sematary
55. The Intruder
56. Child's Play
57. Yesterday
58. Brightburn
59. Anna
60. What Men Want
61. Unicorn Store
62. The Curse of La Llorona
63. Miss Bala
64. Men in Black: International
65. The Perfection
66. Hellboy
67. Glass
68. Dark Phoenix
69. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
70. The Hustle
71. The Best of Enemies
72. The Prodigy
73. Polar
74. Serenity

 

[909]

Geostorm (2017), directed by Dean Devlin

If only this picture remotely resembled anything what Geostorm is actually like. That's what I wanted, and that's what I did not get. Dean Devlin apparently wrote both Independence Day films, the latter of which should have made clear this guy had absolutely no idea what he was doing. That's not all, though. Devlin also wrote 1998's Godzilla, one of the greatest examples of butchering a great character if I've ever seen one. They real key here is that Devlin had never directed a film prior to making Geostorm. For some insane reason Warner Bros. gave him a huge budget, let him write the script, and sent him on his way to make the film. This was obviously not a good idea. Geostorm is probably best described as a political thriller with the occasional lightning storm, tidal wave, or tornado. There's a little more too, but I think you get my point and what I'm trying to say. This is not the trashy disaster epic that I was hoping to watch. Of course, this should have been expected all along and I'm not surprised that WB tried to sit on this impending flop for so long. The film was first shot in October of 2014, there were reshoots in December 2016 because they could not figure out a window in which to release this absolute pile of garbage. You know how bad it is when you have to release a movie like this on a weekend with four other films? That's pretty bad! There were so many other features out at the same time as well, and when WB spent $15,000,000 on trying to fix the film, it's fair to say that didn't work at all. I knew what I was getting into when I watched this and I was relatively pleased with how bad the film actually was. Geostorm just didn't go far enough, so the score is going to be extremely bad.

Geostorm presents 2019 as being a bit different than it is currently, with many huge natural disasters causing a shift in the dynamic of how the world treats climate change. The way the world does things is going to lead to a climate solution being rather drastic, but this one is not entirely realistic. As Geostorm presents things, the world comes together to create a climate controlling system called Dutch Boy, this stabilizes the climate on our Earth by covering our atmosphere with weather modifying satellites that bring things back to the way that they were in each location. Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler) is the man who put this program together, he has been sent to a meeting after Dutch Boy stops a typhoon in Shanghai. Apparently, Jake acted without authorization in his role, and this means that he should be fired even though he saved lives. He has been replaced with his brother Max (Jim Sturgis), who tried to tell him to lay off beforehand. Even though the Secretary of State (Ed Harris) wanted Jake in this job, he couldn't follow those instructions and that's it.

We bring things forward a few years, to Afghanistan where a group of UN soldiers has discovered a frozen village. It turns out that the satellite covering the Registan Desert has malfunctioned in a horrible way, killing everyone who lived there. How is this not a massive deal? It just isn't. Geostorm doesn't have any depth that would allow us to see the ramifications on society of that actually happening. Makmoud is an Indian engineer working on the new International Climate Space Station, he has copied data from the Afghan satellite onto a hard drive in an attempt to make clear what has happened. This does not go well for him. Someone has clearly hacked into the station somehow, and Makmoud is ejected into space. After this incident on the station, President Palma (Andy Garcia) is persuaded by Max to conduct an investigation. Of course, as part of that investigation, Jake is going to come back to space to work on the ICSS. There's more though, the satellite over Afghanistan is not the only one that was malfunctioning. Cheng Long is the head of the Hong Kong department and he's on the ground there, but the satellite busts, causing gas explosions that nearly kill him and kill a shitload of other people. This leads to Jake centering his investigation on the malfunctioning satellites, but he needs a team. The current station commander is Ute (Alexandra Maria Lara), and the rest of the crew consists of Eni (Adepero Oduye), an engineer named Al (Eugenio Derebez), a computer tech named Duncan (Robert Sheehan), and Ray (Amr Waked). Ray is a guy who walks around carrying a gun for no reason at all. Most of these roles are there to show that this station is truly a world effort, but the fact is that one of these people has created a virus that is causing this sabotage. Jake has to figure out who.

You mean to tell me the only shown computer technician onboard is the guy who hacked the system and is causing people on Earth to die? No way. That's what kind of film this is though. Everything in Geostorm is bad to varying extents. The special effects are not particularly good, everything in the film looks fake and the scenes have no tangible meaning. This becoming a politics related thriller was about the most boring turn that could have happened. There are not anywhere near enough natural disasters for my liking here. That's probably for the best, because other than the tornadoes, none of them looked particularly realistic to begin with. If you ever wanted to see heat destroy places like Moscow, or ice freeze the beaches of Rio, perhaps this is the kind of film for you. I mean, you'd have to turn your brain off, but you could watch it. The audience for these kinds of films has dwindled massively over the last decade or so. The disaster genre is dead because it's increasingly difficult to get people into a theater to watch inherently bad movies with bad stories. The bad story, for me anyway, is part of the appeal. Maybe I'm in the minority here and I just don't understand why someone could ever say that one of these movies made sense. They just don't. We do have a climate change problem, but the film is dumb as fuck. The most insipid part is that Geostorm was piggybacking onto a real problem in order to get people to spend their money on popcorn.

The movie could be more watchable if it wasn't so boring, but it really is. I didn't time this out because I would never subject myself to that, but Geostorm took a very long time for the mooted idea of a Geostorm to actually take place. As the film presents it, a Geostorm happens when the entire world is under siege as a result of what humans have done to the planet prior to manipulating the weather on it. Apparently all these things can happen over the course of an hour or so. The movie is very fucking dumb, for lack of a better word. Geostorm also features horrendous acting. 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. There's another interesting thing I have to bring up before I leave. The one way in which the CGI for Geostorm actually matches up is when they straight out jack scenes from Gravity. Of course, I'm talking about the way that the space station breaks up. The difference between the two scenes, on the other hand, could not be more stark. There is no lasting impact of the massive amount of damage that results from this moment. The score is garbage and Gravity doesn't have that problem. The choice of shot and presentation of the scene in Gravity is far better. The effects are still the same, but this has great impact on Gravity. Perhaps most importantly, the lead character is actually worth caring about and isn't a complete idiot. A movie with the kinds of functional issues that Geostorm has is not even worth my time. Not sure why I even wrote this much. The film is fucking boring.

2.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Phantom Thread
3. The Shape of Water
4. Get Out
5. Good Time
6. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
7. Mudbound
8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
9. Logan
10. Baby Driver
11. The Post
12. Wonder Woman
13. The Big Sick
14. Lady Bird
15. Wind River
16. Thor: Ragnarok
17. Logan Lucky
18. The Beguiled
19. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
20. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
21. Brawl in Cell Block 99
22. John Wick: Chapter 2
23. The Disaster Artist
24. The Lost City of Z
25. First They Killed My Father
26. A Ghost Story
27. Hostiles
28. Darkest Hour
29. Spider-Man: Homecoming
30. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
31. Sweet Virginia
32. It
33. Battle of the Sexes
34. Stronger
35. Brad's Status
36. Okja
37. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
38. Kong: Skull Island
39. It Comes at Night
40. Crown Heights
41. Split
42. 1922
43. Personal Shopper
44. Landline
45. Beatriz at Dinner
46. Chuck
47. Atomic Blonde
48. Shot Caller
49. Brigsby Bear
50. Wheelman
51. The Lego Batman Movie
52. Megan Leavey
53. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
54. Wonderstruck
55. Only the Brave
56. Marshall
57. Menashe
58. Walking Out
59. American Made
60. Annabelle: Creation
61. Beauty and the Beast
62. Imperial Dreams
63. Gifted
64. Murder on the Orient Express
65. The Zookeeper's Wife
66. The Glass Castle
67. The Foreigner
68. Free Fire
69. Win It All
70. The Wall
71. Life
72. My Cousin Rachel
73. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
74. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
75. The Fate of the Furious
76. Breathe
77. The Man Who Invented Christmas
78. Maudie
79. Patti Cake$
80. Sleight
81. Alone in Berlin
82. A United Kingdom
83. Trespass Against Us
84. The Mountain Between Us
85. War Machine
86. Happy Death Day
87. Lowriders
88. Justice League
89. To the Bone
90. Ghost in the Shell
91. Wakefield
92. Bright
93. The Tribes of Palos Verdes
94. The Hitman's Bodyguard
95. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
96. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
97. The Mummy
98. The Greatest Showman
99. Rough Night
100. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
101. Sand Castle
102. The Circle
103. American Assassin
104. CHiPs
105. Death Note
106. 47 Meters Down
107. The Belko Experiment
108. The Great Wall
109. Fist Fight
110. Baywatch
111. Snatched
112. Suburbicon
113. Wilson
114. The Dark Tower
115. Queen of the Desert
116. The House
117. Flatliners
118. Sleepless
119. Geostorm
120. All Eyez on Me
121. The Book of Henry
122. The Space Between Us

 

[KOAB]

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.

 

[909]

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

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. Widows
6. First Man
7. BlacKkKlansman
8. Blindspotting
9. Leave No Trace
10. Black Panther
11. If Beale Street Could Talk
12. The Sisters Brothers
13. A Private War
14. Avengers: Infinity War
15. Stan & Ollie
16. Green Book
17. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
18. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
19. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
20. On My Skin
21. Private Life
22. Climax
23. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
24. Mid90s
25. Eighth Grade
26. Sorry to Bother You
27. Suspiria
28. Vice
29. The Old Man & the Gun
30. Vox Lux
31. Bad Times at the El Royale
32. The Other Side of the Wind
33. Searching
34. A Simple Favor
35. The Hate U Give
36. Unsane
37. Disobedience
38. Boy Erased
39. Bumblebee
40. Mary Poppins Returns
41. Creed II
42. Hold the Dark
43. The Land of Steady Habits
44. Halloween
45. Ant-Man and the Wasp
46. Blockers
47. Beirut
48. Roxanne Roxanne
49. Mary Queen of Scots
50. Aquaman
51. Ideal Home
52. Outlaw King
53. Overlord
54. Ready Player One
55. Ben Is Back
56. Monsters and Men
57. The Mule
58. On the Basis of Sex
59. Bohemian Rhapsody
60. White Boy Rick
61. Papillon
62. Game Night
63. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
64. Instant Family
65. Alpha
66. The Front Runner
67. The Predator
68. Apostle
69. The Angel
70. The Commuter
71. Beautiful Boy
72. The Nun
73. Operation Finale
74. The Equalizer 2
75. The Spy Who Dumped Me
76. Cargo
77. Yardie
78. Bird Box
79. 12 Strong
80. Venom
81. Skyscraper
82. The Meg
83. Assassination Nation
84. The Girl in the Spider's Web
85. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
86. 22 July
87. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
88. The Little Stranger
89. Tomb Raider
90. Night School
91. The 15:17 To Paris
92. Peppermint
93. Mile 22
94. The First Purge
95. Hunter Killer
96. The Cloverfield Paradox
97. Mute
98. Kin
99. Hell Fest
100. Proud Mary
101. Robin Hood
102. Traffik
103. The Happytime Murders
104. The Outsider
105. Slender Man

 

[909]

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

 

[909]

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

1. Dunkirk
2. Phantom Thread
3. The Shape of Water
4. Get Out
5. Good Time
6. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
7. Mudbound
8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
9. Logan
10. Baby Driver
11. The Post
12. Wonder Woman
13. The Big Sick
14. Lady Bird
15. Wind River
16. Thor: Ragnarok
17. Logan Lucky
18. The Beguiled
19. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
20. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
21. Brawl in Cell Block 99
22. John Wick: Chapter 2
23. The Disaster Artist
24. The Lost City of Z
25. First They Killed My Father
26. A Ghost Story
27. Last Flag Flying
28. Hostiles
29. Darkest Hour
30. Spider-Man: Homecoming
31. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
32. Sweet Virginia
33. It
34. Battle of the Sexes
35. Stronger
36. Brad's Status
37. Okja
38. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
39. Kong: Skull Island
40. It Comes at Night
41. Crown Heights
42. Split
43. 1922
44. Personal Shopper
45. Landline
46. Beatriz at Dinner
47. Chuck
48. Atomic Blonde
49. Shot Caller
50. Brigsby Bear
51. Wheelman
52. The Lego Batman Movie
53. Megan Leavey
54. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
55. Wonderstruck
56. Only the Brave
57. Marshall
58. Menashe
59. Walking Out
60. American Made
61. Annabelle: Creation
62. Beauty and the Beast
63. Imperial Dreams
64. Gifted
65. Murder on the Orient Express
66. The Zookeeper's Wife
67. The Glass Castle
68. The Foreigner
69. Free Fire
70. Win It All
71. The Wall
72. Life
73. My Cousin Rachel
74. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
75. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
76. The Fate of the Furious
77. Breathe
78. The Man Who Invented Christmas
79. Maudie
80. Patti Cake$
81. Sleight
82. Alone in Berlin
83. A United Kingdom
84. Trespass Against Us
85. The Mountain Between Us
86. War Machine
87. Happy Death Day
88. Lowriders
89. Justice League
90. To the Bone
91. Ghost in the Shell
92. Wakefield
93. Bright
94. The Tribes of Palos Verdes
95. The Hitman's Bodyguard
96. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
97. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
98. The Mummy
99. The Greatest Showman
100. Rough Night
101. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
102. Sand Castle
103. The Circle
104. American Assassin
105. CHiPs
106. Death Note
107. 47 Meters Down
108. The Belko Experiment
109. The Great Wall
110. Fist Fight
111. Baywatch
112. Snatched
113. Suburbicon
114. Wilson
115. The Dark Tower
116. Queen of the Desert
117. The House
118. Flatliners
119. Sleepless
120. Geostorm
121. All Eyez on Me
122. The Book of Henry
123. The Space Between Us

 

[Brocklock]

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.

 

[909]

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019), directed by David Leitch

For some time, I was curious to see how Hobbs & Shaw was going to turn out. After all, this isn't a particularly easy thing to do, to spin off a franchise where all the other actors in the franchise are furious this is being spun off into its own thing to begin with. In the aftermath of the film's release, Tyrese Gibson had made comments about how Hobbs & Shaw had bombed and not done so well at the box office. Of course, these people don't really get along with each other, and it doesn't make any sense, so as a viewer you have to roll with it. I think we'll really find out what the box office draw is in this franchise once the 9th main film is released without the two leads here. I am partial to thinking that it's the cast as a whole and not these two characters, but ultimately time will tell. Anyway, I'm glad that Hobbs & Shaw finally released so that I no longer had to watch the movie trailer. I have probably seen the trailer 30-40 times, and that's not an exaggeration. Of course, the question of a spinoff is whether or not the film justifies its existence, which Hobbs & Shaw certainly did. I did not expect to like this film all that much, I assumed that the trailer was blared out so much in an attempt to compensate for how bad this was and to sucker people into the theater. That was obviously not true. At least it seems that the people making this movie understood that their film was something of a joke, that it shouldn't have been taken seriously, and people went into the theater to have a good time.

Hobbs & Shaw kicks off in London, of course, with a group of MI6 agents attempting to retrieve a new virus. The virus is called Snowflake, and it can be used to kill millions of people if not more. It has previously been controlled by an organization called Eteon, a group of people who have serious dark money funding to the point of owning news networks, but their private face is pretty different than that. Brixton (Idris Elba) is their operative, a man with a cybernetic implants and an artificial spine that allows him to do very crazy things, and withstand a hell of a lot of damage in the process of that. Of course, he arrives when MI6 is attempting to take care of this and retrieve the virus, but one woman is able to live. She is Hattie Shaw (Vanessa Kirby), and Hattie is able to escape by injecting the virus into her hand. Now she carries the virus, and there's no more of it for anyone else, so she can leave. Brixton is left unable to kill her as well. This is when we learn about Eteon's power, as they frame Hattie by blasting her picture all over media and presenting her as a terrorist, which she is obviously not. This leads to Hattie having to go on the run, obviously.

When this happens, of course, it's time for Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) to enter the picture. Of course, Deckard is Hattie's brother, so he's very much interested in what's going on. They are informed by the CIA that there's a virus missing and are asked to work together in order to track it down. They don't want to do that, so they go their own separate ways. Deckard wants to go to Hattie's house to see what she's been up to, and Hobbs has a more easy time of finding her, eventually bringing her into the CIA office. When our trio finally units in the office, here comes Brixton, who apparently has been shot and killed by Deckard before. Now we see the rub, and the coincidences continue to pile up through the movie as just happens to be the case in most action films. Then, there's a car chase and all that, but Deckard, Hobbs, and Hattie really need to do something. They need to find the creator of Snowflake, a professor called Andreiko (Eddie Marsan). He tells them that they have two options. One is to kill Hattie and burn her body so that the virus cannot spread after her death. The second is to go to Moscow to retrieve a machine that can extract these intact pills from her arm. What do you think Hobbs and Shaw are going to do? You already know.

I'm sure the question on everyone's mind is how much Roman Reigns is in this flick. I will tell you that I didn't hear his character even get a name, but he was in the film some. Hobbs & Shaw is exactly like all the other Fast and the Furious movies, but this one has a bit of a science-fiction bent. It's quite welcome to see a profitable franchise add some science-fiction into this, with a guy that has success using futuristic technology in an attempt to take over the world. You know, at some point, films have to move forward even when society is not. I thought Hobbs & Shaw was a funny action movie, and I also thought it was good, but I don't have any major praise or criticisms of it. The film was a little too long, and some of the major moments were too ridiculous to be real, but that's alright. If you went to see Hobbs & Shaw and didn't expect the Rock to take a 200 foot bump off a cliff, you're doing this way wrong in the first place. The action scenes have a little bit of snap and better choreography in the instances of hand-to-hand combat, that's what Hobbs & Shaw needed to go over the top and be a satisfying film. The post-credit scenes were absolutely ridiculous, and so were the cameos, but I didn't want to spoil those cameos. Anyway, the movie does drag a little bit and that's fine too, but the enjoyment level was never as high as John Wick: Chapter 3 and it's very easy to compare the two films. In doing so, Hobbs & Shaw is lacking just a little bit, so I'm sorry uso but this is not a great movie.

7/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
2. Booksmart
3. Midsommar
4. Avengers: Endgame
5. Toy Story 4
6. Us
7. Gloria Bell
8. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
9. The Beach Bum
10. The Art of Self-Defense
11. Arctic
12. Spider-Man: Far From Home
13. Rocketman
14. High Flying Bird
15. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
16. Captain Marvel
17. Long Shot
18. Shazam!
19. Paddleton
20. A Vigilante
21. Late Night
22. Crawl
23. Hotel Mumbai
24. Hobbs & Shaw
25. Always Be My Maybe
26. Cold Pursuit
27. Shaft
28. Happy Death Day 2U
29. Ma
30. Annabelle Comes Home
31. Greta
32. Aladdin
33. Triple Frontier
34. Fighting with My Family
35. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
36. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
37. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
38. Brexit
39. The Dirt
40. Velvet Buzzsaw
41. Stuber
42. Little
43. Alita: Battle Angel
44. The Kid
45. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
46. The Upside
47. The Lion King
48. The Dead Don't Die
49. Dumbo
50. The Hummingbird Project
51. Escape Room
52. Tolkien
53. Captive State
54. The Highwaymen
55. Pet Sematary
56. The Intruder
57. Child's Play
58. Yesterday
59. Brightburn
60. Anna
61. What Men Want
62. Unicorn Store
63. The Curse of La Llorona
64. Miss Bala
65. Men in Black: International
66. The Perfection
67. Hellboy
68. Glass
69. Dark Phoenix
70. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
71. The Hustle
72. The Best of Enemies
73. The Prodigy
74. Polar
75. Serenity

 

[cobainwasmurdered]

ROMAN'S NAME IS USO #2 YO!

 

[909]

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

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. Widows
6. First Man
7. BlacKkKlansman
8. Blindspotting
9. Leave No Trace
10. Black Panther
11. If Beale Street Could Talk
12. The Sisters Brothers
13. A Private War
14. Avengers: Infinity War
15. Stan & Ollie
16. Green Book
17. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
18. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
19. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
20. On My Skin
21. Private Life
22. Climax
23. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
24. Mid90s
25. Eighth Grade
26. Sorry to Bother You
27. Suspiria
28. Vice
29. The Old Man & the Gun
30. Vox Lux
31. Bad Times at the El Royale
32. The Other Side of the Wind
33. Searching
34. A Simple Favor
35. The Hate U Give
36. Unsane
37. Disobedience
38. Boy Erased
39. Bumblebee
40. Mary Poppins Returns
41. Creed II
42. Hold the Dark
43. The Land of Steady Habits
44. Halloween
45. Ant-Man and the Wasp
46. Blockers
47. Beirut
48. Roxanne Roxanne
49. Mary Queen of Scots
50. Aquaman
51. Ideal Home
52. Outlaw King
53. Overlord
54. Ready Player One
55. Ben Is Back
56. Monsters and Men
57. The Mule
58. On the Basis of Sex
59. Bohemian Rhapsody
60. White Boy Rick
61. Papillon
62. Game Night
63. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
64. Instant Family
65. Alpha
66. The Front Runner
67. The Predator
68. Apostle
69. The Angel
70. The Commuter
71. Tag
72. Beautiful Boy
73. The Nun
74. Operation Finale
75. The Equalizer 2
76. The Spy Who Dumped Me
77. Cargo
78. Yardie
79. Bird Box
80. 12 Strong
81. Venom
82. Skyscraper
83. The Meg
84. Assassination Nation
85. The Girl in the Spider's Web
86. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
87. 22 July
88. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
89. The Little Stranger
90. Tomb Raider
91. Night School
92. The 15:17 To Paris
93. Peppermint
94. Mile 22
95. The First Purge
96. Hunter Killer
97. The Cloverfield Paradox
98. Mute
99. Kin
100. Hell Fest
101. Proud Mary
102. Robin Hood
103. Traffik
104. The Happytime Murders
105. The Outsider
106. Slender Man

 

[Big Papa Paegan]

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

 

[909]

Never Grow Old (2019), directed by Ivan Kavanagh

Have you ever wanted to watch a Western featuring a fat John Cusack? If the answer is yes, Never Grow Old might be just for you! I seem to be in stark contrast to practically everyone else who watched this film, the story being such that I could absolutely not handle the ending of the film. I thought it was amusing that Never Grow Old was obviously not filmed on this continent, as a start. I thought that could lead to a different take on a Western, which is absolutely what happened. I should probably tell the story of Never Grow Old as well. Never Grow Old was filmed back in 2018, some distance after Emile Hirsch pled guilty to beating up a female Paramount executive. Unsurprisingly, this is a film that went straight to VOD. I don't know how anyone could be surprised given the two actors I just mentioned. I did see that this had a decent Metascore, and it was just brought to Prime Video, so I thought I'd give it a look. Simple as that. When a film isn't released for as long as this one, even though it was acquired in early 2018, you have to wonder why that's the case. It turns out that the ending of the film did not do it for me on any level, to the extent that I found myself feeling very ambivalent about the movie. In the end, I think I will not give the film a good grade.

Never Grow Old is about an Irish family who have settled on the trail to California, making their way through life as best as they can. Patrick (Emile Hirsch) is an undertaker who lives with his wife Audrey (Deborah Francois) and their two children. I should have been more specific, Audrey is French and Patrick is Irish. This is important enough. Not all that many people die in their super religious town, which is effectively run by the preacher, a man named Pike (Danny Webb). Everyone else is absolutely incompetent or part of his flock, and effectively they've been able to ban anything a person could classify as being sinful. The sheriff gives no fucks about anything, but this is killing the town because nobody has money as a result of all these things. Everyone knows it, but nobody will do anything. Patrick and Audrey would like to leave, but it isn't like they can afford to do it, and the frontier is a wild place. This film is set in 1849, for what it's worth.

One day, things change for everyone. A man named Dutch Albert (John Cusack) comes into town with a group consisting of Sicily (Camile Pistone) and a man with no tongue named Dumb-Dumb (Sam Louwyck). These guys are trouble, they're looking for a man named Bill Crabtree (Paul Ronan), and they're going to find him. Dutch says that Bill stole something from him, and because it isn't there to give back, he's just going to kill him. We learn this because Dutch pulls up to Patrick's house and demands to be taken to Bill's house. Bill has been gone from said house for a year, so Bill's wife is met with those threats instead. Dutch is clear in stating that Bill will die, and that will be that. He also wants to befriend Patrick, who is clearly terrified of him. Patrick is forced to bring the trio back to his house again for a late supper, and we see that Dumb-Dumb is interested in Audrey. This is something important as well. You see, Dutch wants to do some other stuff too. He wants to re-open the saloon in town and bring things back to the way they used to be, and because he's the only one not cowed by the preacher, he'll reap all the benefits and make some good money. Ultimately, everyone better fall in line, including the undertaker. Someone has to deal with the dead bodies that come with having places of bad deeds, after all.

When I said that the ending left me feeling all kinds of ways, I meant that I thought the turns in the story were very sloppy. The ending was also botched in the sense that Patrick turned on Dutch after Dutch killed someone who murdered tons of people by lighting the saloon on fire. I think there were better ways to go about that, and that isn't the kind of story telling I like at all. To some extent this is balanced by the subplot with Dumb-Dumb having been interested in Audrey before Patrick had killed him. Never Grow Old is filmed largely in darkness, which sometimes is too much and others is exactly what the film needs. When the saloon is going to be lit on fire and it's pitch black in the entire background, of course that's going to be quite the sight. Never Grow Old is also a very bloody Western as was pointed out to me when I was watching it. Unfortunately, there's that ending. I almost tuned the film out instantly, and perhaps the ambiguity in Patrick and Dutch turning on each other was deliberate, but I'm not a very big fan of that. John Cusack's performance here was good, but this is the kind of movie that could leave people feeling differently from one person to the next. I did not like it, but my mom did. Take that for what it's worth.

5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
2. Booksmart
3. Midsommar
4. Avengers: Endgame
5. Toy Story 4
6. Us
7. Gloria Bell
8. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
9. The Beach Bum
10. The Art of Self-Defense
11. Arctic
12. Spider-Man: Far From Home
13. Rocketman
14. High Flying Bird
15. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
16. Captain Marvel
17. Long Shot
18. Shazam!
19. Paddleton
20. A Vigilante
21. Late Night
22. Crawl
23. Hotel Mumbai
24. Hobbs & Shaw
25. Always Be My Maybe
26. Cold Pursuit
27. Shaft
28. Happy Death Day 2U
29. Ma
30. Annabelle Comes Home
31. Greta
32. Aladdin
33. Triple Frontier
34. Fighting with My Family
35. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
36. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
37. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
38. Brexit
39. The Dirt
40. Velvet Buzzsaw
41. Stuber
42. Little
43. Alita: Battle Angel
44. The Kid
45. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
46. The Upside
47. The Lion King
48. The Dead Don't Die
49. Dumbo
50. The Hummingbird Project
51. Escape Room
52. Tolkien
53. Captive State
54. The Highwaymen
55. Pet Sematary
56. The Intruder
57. Child's Play
58. Brightburn
59. Never Grow Old
60. Yesterday
61. Anna
62. What Men Want
63. Unicorn Store
64. The Curse of La Llorona
65. Miss Bala
66. Men in Black: International
67. The Perfection
68. Hellboy
69. Glass
70. Dark Phoenix
71. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
72. The Hustle
73. The Best of Enemies
74. The Prodigy
75. Polar
76. Serenity

 

[909]

Them That Follow (2019), directed by Britt Poulton and Dan Madison Savage

You know when I know a film isn't going to be good? It's around the time when I know this is coming out, I know that it features someone who won Best Actress last year, and when I see absolutely no marketing about the film whatsoever when I live in Los Angeles. This is the film capital of the world and I did not see one single commercial even when these flicks are released in the most minor of theaters and always have an ad somewhere. Those also don't have Olivia Colman in their cast. So, you know, I knew that this wasn't going to be good, but I was incorrect in assuming the reason why it wouldn't be. I understand that directing one's first feature film has to be very difficult, but there are lessons to be learned from this one. I also shouldn't have been surprised that the film was bad in this specific way when it was filmed in October of 2017. Once again, that's a long time between production and release. You have to know as a viewer what you are getting into if you're really going to complain about a movie. The people sitting behind me, as soon as they walked out of the theater, I'm not sure I've ever heard more harsh criticisms about a film before in my life. Someone talking about how much they despised a film is not something that happens frequently. While I wouldn't say that I despised Them That Follow, I didn't like it. Some explanation is required and I'll give it, but with a cast like this, I'm having a hard time understanding why this would be the film a person would make.

Them That Follow is, to be frank, focused on the wrong characters. Mara (Alice Englert) and Dilly (Kaitlyn Dever) are friends who live somewhere in Appalachia, amongst religious nuts that teach their children to be just like them. Mara and Dilly are both like the adults in their community, let's put it that way. Mara has a secret though. She has been with child for a little while, uncertain of it at first but eventually left with no doubt. Augie (Thomas Mann) is the boy in question, but this is a Pentecostal community and the two are not married nor will they ever be. This in itself would be unacceptable, but there's more to the equation than that. You see, Hope Slaughter (Olivia Colman) is an elder of sorts in this community, and she's Augie's mother. She is also tasked with ensuring that the girls in this area wind up marrying the people who they're supposed to. Augie is not a good Pentecostal boy and does not often go to church, he has the intention of getting out of there and never looking back like anyone with a brain would do. His mother is not able to be partial to him in this area, nor does it seem that she would be even if allowed to. Anyway, there's much more to the story than this of course.

You see, this wouldn't be a good pregnancy drama unless Mara was related to someone important, which she is even though this isn't a good pregnancy drama. As I was saying, this was not at all what I was expecting. Lemuel (Walton Goggins) is the preacher, the man who believes people can be saved or judged through the handling of serpents, one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard in my life. The thing is, we know there are people who actually believe this shit. So, Lemuel is ultimately the one who everyone in the community looks to for guidance. The night in which we join the story, there's a sermon. After the sermon, Lemuel talking with Garrett (Lewis Pullman) and we hear that there has been an incident before with the snakes having bitten a parishoner. The person apparently died, and the cops don't want anyone fucking around with snakes anymore. Religious people being what they are, they're still going to do it anyway. It also turns out that Garrett wants to marry Mara, and Lemuel has taken somewhat of a liking to him. It's going to happen, even though Mara is carrying a child that isn't his, even though these people are inevitably going to be jailed for messing around with snakes and getting someone hurt. The question is, when?

The answer to the question I posed above, is that the film doesn't really have any life until there are around 15 minutes left. 80 minutes is a very long time to wait for a film to finally bring something to the table. I remember when the Sundance lineup was released and I was going through the list of films thinking about what was likely to be a good watch. I was convinced that Them That Follow would be one of those movies. I was wrong because the people who wrote and directed this movie made something so boring, so dead and uneventful that I could not handle it. There's a part in this movie where Jim Gaffigan is holding a snake while praying over someone, it was about an hour into the film and it was the first time I heard anyone say anything. It wasn't supposed to be comedy, but the film being so slow and labored in its pacing led to everyone laughing at this scene. How could you not? The trailer presents itself as being a religious drama that revolves around Lemuel and his use of the snakes. When you don't get that, and you're watching two teenage girls talk about a pregnancy for such a large portion of the film, your enthusiasm is sapped rather quickly. I feel like I was suckered into watching After, or some other teen trash that I have absolutely no interest in.

For some reason, there are a lot of people who liked this film very much. I'm not usually one to judge, but I just don't see how that's possible. Them That Follow is such a slow film. The movie should have been about Lemuel and his impact on other people, what the snake handling brings to the community, and what these kinds of preachers bring to the world. I don't think anyone here feels that these guys bring anything, which is why Them That Follow should have been about that. We are never told at any point how Lemuel came to be this way, or why Dilly was abandoned by her mother. Even in looking at the movie in the context in which it wants to be judged, the finished product feels like the result of an uncompleted screenplay. The idea is clearly not fully fleshed out the way that it should be. The movie is short and yet too many people are in it, they are also underwritten, and I think you get my point. This kind of movie should have brought some sort of shock factor to the table, but I found myself in mild amusement at best. Walton Goggins tries so hard to make this whole thing work, but he just can't do it. There's no logic given, not enough background as to why the people in the community cannot contact a doctor. It is too hard to believe and I don't feel like that would happen, but if it would happen, some explanation is required. We don't even get that. This isn't very bad, it's just fucking boring.

4.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
2. Booksmart
3. Midsommar
4. Avengers: Endgame
5. Toy Story 4
6. Us
7. Gloria Bell
8. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
9. The Beach Bum
10. The Art of Self-Defense
11. Arctic
12. Spider-Man: Far From Home
13. Rocketman
14. High Flying Bird
15. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
16. Captain Marvel
17. Long Shot
18. Shazam!
19. Paddleton
20. A Vigilante
21. Late Night
22. Crawl
23. Hotel Mumbai
24. Hobbs & Shaw
25. Always Be My Maybe
26. Cold Pursuit
27. Shaft
28. Happy Death Day 2U
29. Ma
30. Annabelle Comes Home
31. Greta
32. Aladdin
33. Triple Frontier
34. Fighting with My Family
35. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
36. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
37. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
38. Brexit
39. The Dirt
40. Velvet Buzzsaw
41. Stuber
42. Little
43. Alita: Battle Angel
44. The Kid
45. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
46. The Upside
47. The Lion King
48. The Dead Don't Die
49. Dumbo
50. The Hummingbird Project
51. Escape Room
52. Tolkien
53. Captive State
54. The Highwaymen
55. Pet Sematary
56. The Intruder
57. Child's Play
58. Brightburn
59. Never Grow Old
60. Yesterday
61. Anna
62. What Men Want
63. Them That Follow
64. Unicorn Store
65. The Curse of La Llorona
66. Miss Bala
67. Men in Black: International
68. The Perfection
69. Hellboy
70. Glass
71. Dark Phoenix
72. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
73. The Hustle
74. The Best of Enemies
75. The Prodigy
76. Polar
77. Serenity