In Which I Briefly Review Movies

[BruiserBrody]

Have you seen/reviewed Carnal Knowledge?

 

[909]

Nope

 

[909]

The Red Sea Diving Resort (2019), directed by Gideon Raff

This is going to be a tough one. How does a person tackle a movie like this one. Part interesting, part pro-Israeli propaganda, part entertaining, and part cliche is probably the best way I can describe The Red Sea Diving Resort. There is no surprise that this film was sold off to Netflix because the subject and treatment of that subject is a massive landmine. The film was also shot back in the middle of 2017, so I think everyone knows exactly what they'd done. So, with all that in mind, I don't know how to jump start things from this point. I guess I'll start with the facts of the story. The director, for whatever reason, decided that they wanted to start the events far earlier in time than they actually happened. Because I said this is somewhat of a propaganda flick, I think you can tell why. The movie is more focused on the effort to rescue people from a horrible situation than it is the lives of the people who were suffering from that horrible situation. There is a story to be told here and it is certainly not of the rescue, but I understand that this is supposed to be a propaganda movie. Any movie that decides to make the Mossad agents the priority over Ethiopian refugees, I think you can figure out how that works. The only thing keeping me from giving this a truly horrible rating are the variations on some cliched scenes in these sorts of rescue dramas, and the performances of actors who I actually like. The director-writer, however, is clearly very fucking bad.

The Red Sea Diving Resort should be about Kabede Bimro (Michael K. Williams), an Ethiopian Jew who worked with a Mossad agent, Ari Levinson (Chris Evans). The story, however, is about how Ari Levinson put together a team of agents to rescue Ethiopian Jews with the assistance of Kabede. In truth, the way the story is told, this should be more of a two person job with Kabede's efforts being much more difficult, but that isn't fun and doesn't suit somebody's agenda. The film starts, for example, with Kabede having rounded up a lot of people for rescue. Ari has brought Sammy (Alessandro Nivola) with him, and we learn that Sammy is a Mossad field doctor. When someone doesn't make it to the truck on time, Ari rescues the kid and dupes the Ethiopian military so that he can take everyone to safety. Safety is a relative term, as the Gadaref Refugee Camp looks anything but safe. Upon arrival, Ari and Sammy are followed and arrested. In the end, they are bailed out by a CIA Agent, Walton (Greg Kinnear). The reason they're bailed out by him is pretty simple, Ari has an American passport and is going by the name of Guy Thomas. Given his backstory, maybe this is the man's actual name. It doesn't matter.

Upon arrival in Israel, Ari has to debrief his boss, Ethan (Ben Kingsley). Ethan is displeased with how things went and no longer wants to be part of Ethiopian refugee operations. Sammy doesn't either, as he went back to practicing at a clinic. Ari, of course, has other plans. This is Captain America we're talking about here, after all. The characters are rather similar as I'm thinking about it. Ari's plan that he presents to Ethan is extremely complicated, but it sounds good. He wants the Israeli government to lease a Sudanese coastal hotel through a shell company and run it so that they can move refugees out of the country on to Israel. The hotel is abandoned, well away from anything of any consequence, so the plan is sound. They should be able to evade detection. Of course they can't, but anyway, they need a team. The entire team of Mossad agents are field operatives, but Rachel (Haley Bennett) is effectively the front of house for this hotel, Max (Alex Hassell) is an assassin who makes for a good security guy, Jake (Michiel Huisman) will make for a good second driver and 'diving instructor', Sammy makes for the doctor as before, and Ari is the money man for the front company. After all, this is an Islamic country, and you need a man in charge. The hotel is supposed to be nice, but in reality it is not. The plan is also not as good as they think it is and there are unforeseen complications, like the local staff and foreign tourists. Mostly, it's one Col. Ahmed (Chris Chalk). As the film presents it, the UN gives Sudan a stipend for refugees, and the more that disappear to Israel, the lower the stipend becomes. He is supposed to make sure they don't disappear.

The fiction in this film speaks for itself, does it not? The cast was obviously chosen with the intention of picking a GQ cover type group, some of whom are Jewish and others are not, so the casting is rather absurd. The fiction here is so strong, and you feel it the entire time and know that it exists. The film is still entertaining and interesting despite this, but there's only so far that should go. It goes without saying that a person should not make a movie like this, because there's an enormous lack of care given towards the refugees displaced by these problems that aren't even properly explained. Michael K. Williams does his absolute goddamn best with the small amount of time that he's given, I will say that. This is just a standard ass film though. These actors are too talented to be in this, and they fucking try. They try hard, and that's all I can really say. The director has no idea what they're doing, and obviously attempts to tie this to the current refugee crisis, but fails in doing so. It is said many times in the film that we're all refugees, and certainly that speaks to some people, but I am not one of them. The hardships of people that found their home are not more important than those in need of one, but the film treats it that way. I don't see the need to say much, but this is very literally a White Savior film.

The Red Sea Diving Resort isn't a good movie, and the director doesn't have a large amount of common sense other than in a few instances. One of them is the way that the characters approach a random blockade of two trucks. I am so sick of the way that some of these movies present those blockades way the hell out in the desert where nobody else even is. It is about time that a person drives a truck straight through the other trucks and keeps on going. I've waited a while for that. There is no reason for a person to stop when they have a truck full of refugees 50 kilometers from civilization or for that matter anyone besides those two guys manning that blockade. It's about time someone either killed the soldiers at the blockade or drove straight on past them. The funny thing about The Red Sea Diving Resort, and there should be nothing funny about this movie, is that I could imagine people 10 years ago absolutely loving this film. Even though I probably should hate this movie, I don't. I just don't think it's any good and the story is extremely misguided. What I am curious to find out, is if Netflix is ever going to stop buying these kinds of movies and just let them drown? Someone who would take a good sized budget and produce this does not deserve a bailout. I only gave this a 4.5 because I hated The Perfection and everything else lower on this list SO MUCH MORE.

4.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019), directed by Richard Linklater

Where'd You Go, Bernadette is one of Richard Linklater's most poorly reviewed films, which in a recurring theme should not be that surprising as this was filmed in the summer of 2017 and released last week. That kind of delay is never good. The thing is, when Linklater makes something that doesn't get great reviews, I always take that with a grain of salt. He would be on the list of directors that I would be willing to give a free pass to. I do not think Where'd You Go, Bernadette is a bad movie that someone should have to be given a free pass for. Other people disagree and that's fine, but I was holding back laughter at points during this simply because other people weren't laughing. I don't think this subject is exceptionally handled or anything like that, but I think some of the negative reviews come as a result of the film's story not matching that of the book. That's perfectly fine, the differences in what I've read on the internet and what I watched on the screen are genuinely enormous. How does this happen, you may ask? The book, such as it is, is completely unfilmable. The amount of twists and turns that it contains are totally ludicrous and better left off the screen, but the overarching story of the lead character still belongs. So, that was left in and the rest was changed around a little bit. I'm obviously in the minority as this has a 51 Metascore, but I liked the film and will make no apologies for it.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette, as I already said, is not the same thing as the book, but nobody has written a plot synopsis and I am going straight from memory here. Let's give it a try. Bernadette Fox (Cate Blanchett) was an architect who lived and worked in Los Angeles with her husband Elgin Branch (Billy Crudup). The key here is that they lived in Los Angeles and no longer do. Elgin owned a company that was absorbed by Microsoft, which led to he and his wife moving to Seattle. At the same time as this happened, Bernadette had an incident with one of the houses she had built and decided that she wanted to become a mother. Becoming a mother was very difficult, and at the end of all that, she decided that she was done with being an architect entirely. Everything she did in life would revolve around her daughter, Bee (Emma Nelson). That's that. As a result of these decisions, Bernadette and Elgin live in a giant house in Seattle, it is not fully repaired but everyone seems to not have a huge problem with that. Or, maybe they do. At the start of the film, which is rather abrupt, Bee tells her parents that she has lived up to a promise they have made, that she could have anything she wanted if she had a perfect report card over the course of many different years. What does she want exactly? Bee wants to take a trip to Antarctica, and her parents promised, so they have to do it.

The alarm bells start going off as it pertains to Bernadette around the time that she has a personal assistant even though she sits around at home all the time. The personal assistant is Manjula and she's from India, she does everything that Bernadette wants in the time that she wants it done. Bernadette also has some other issues, largely related to the other parents at school whom she does not like. The main feud is with Audrey (Kristen Wiig), who is also her next door neighbor. Another one of the parents is Soo-Lin (Zoe Chao), and Elgin hires her at his work not knowing that there's a problem with Bernadette and the parents, so there are potential issues looming everywhere. The largest of those potential issues, of which there are many, all tie back to the same thing. Bernadette's mental state can best be described as having slipped. Most of the information in the first paragraph is derived from a video that Bernadette was watching about herself after being unnerved when someone recognized her in public. She is extremely anti-social and has a hard time getting along with pretty much anyone. Her mental state has slipped so much that she was having blackberry roots taken out of a hillside during an extremely rainy winter. Not the best decision. In giving over so much of her information to Manjula, who may or may not be real, who knows if Bernadette is of sound mind to really do very much of anything. How could this happen to someone so brilliant?

Linklater isn't as great with the why of the situation as he is with how these things happened, but I think that it was a good decision to remove some of the more extremely melodramatic and stupid things from his film. I approve of this even if some think that in doing so, you lose the soul of the book. This isn't the best film in the world or anything, but I thought Cate Blanchett was extremely convincing in this role to the point where I became invested in her journey of regaining herself. This is a strong performance, I think I've made that clear. If someone else feels differently, good for them. The start of the film and the ending of it are a bit too abrupt, to say the least. I would also say that what Where'd You Go, Bernadette really needed was for someone to play the role of having been a piece of shit, although not to the extent described in the book. Elgin does that to some extent, but it's easier to relate to the film when there's a force outside of Bernadette's home trying to actively hold her down. The film is more touching than I'd expected as well, and I'm no sap, but I liked this stuff anyway. The humor, as already mentioned, made me laugh. It did, however, ONLY make me laugh, so take that for what it's worth. There are also other little things here, like the exposition dump in a YouTube video that may prove problematic for some, but not for me.

Anyway, this is a film that features a complicated woman doing many weird things. Some of them are grating and they're supposed to be, others are rather endearing. Your mileage may vary on this one, but I enjoyed the film and left the theater quite happy. The way the film started and ended though, I do have to hold that against this to some extent. It was like being dropped from the sky into someone's house and being plucked out of a potential scene that may have had great meaning, but I guess we weren't supposed to see it because it was obvious what would happen. There are also short bits here from Steve Zahn, Megan Mullally, Judy Greer, and Laurence Fishburne. Fishburne doesn't say much, but his scene really stands out above the rest of those people. This is the first film all year that I've ranked some lengths above where critics have rated it, but I've also thought that some movies were far worse than critics thought they were. I am allowed this one, yes?

7/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

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

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

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

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

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

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

6.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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. Thank You for Your Service
47. Beatriz at Dinner
48. Chuck
49. Atomic Blonde
50. Shot Caller
51. Wheelman
52. Wonder
53. Brigsby Bear
54. The Lego Batman Movie
55. Megan Leavey
56. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
57. Wonderstruck
58. Only the Brave
59. Marshall
60. Menashe
61. Roman J. Israel, Esq.
62. Walking Out
63. American Made
64. Annabelle: Creation
65. Beauty and the Beast
66. Imperial Dreams
67. Gifted
68. Murder on the Orient Express
69. The Zookeeper's Wife
70. The Glass Castle
71. The Foreigner
72. Free Fire
73. Win It All
74. The Wall
75. Life
76. My Cousin Rachel
77. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
78. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
79. The Fate of the Furious
80. Breathe
81. The Man Who Invented Christmas
82. Maudie
83. Patti Cake$
84. Sleight
85. Alone in Berlin
86. A United Kingdom
87. Trespass Against Us
88. The Mountain Between Us
89. War Machine
90. Happy Death Day
91. Lowriders
92. Justice League
93. To the Bone
94. Ghost in the Shell
95. Wakefield
96. Bright
97. The Tribes of Palos Verdes
98. The Hitman's Bodyguard
99. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
100. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
101. The Mummy
102. The Greatest Showman
103. Rough Night
104. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
105. Sand Castle
106. The Circle
107. American Assassin
108. CHiPs
109. Death Note
110. 47 Meters Down
111. The Belko Experiment
112. The Great Wall
113. Fist Fight
114. Baywatch
115. Snatched
116. Suburbicon
117. Wilson
118. The Dark Tower
119. Queen of the Desert
120. The House
121. Flatliners
122. Sleepless
123. Geostorm
124. All Eyez on Me
125. The Snowman
126. The Book of Henry
127. The Space Between Us
128. Daddy's Home 2

 

[909]

47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019), directed by Johannes Roberts

The idea that there's going to be a 47 Meters Down cinematic universe is absolutely ludicrous, but perhaps that's how things are going to be and that's what we deserve. On the other hand, perhaps it isn't what we deserve. After all, this sequel isn't exactly blowing the doors off the box office, and odds are that this won't leg out to anything great in the long run either. I suppose the 47MDCU is not to be after all. The thing is, the sequel is far better than the original film in pretty much every way. That isn't to say 47 Meters Down: Uncaged is great, because it most certainly is not. It is a different kind of movie though. 47 Meters Down takes place largely in the cage, largely at the bottom of the ocean. 47 Meters Down: Uncaged is set in a different location entirely, a similarly confined space but one far more dangerous in theory. I have no idea if anything in this film is scientifically true, and in truth it doesn't matter. When you watch a shark movie, what you want is for a shark to do certain things, you want to watch them eat people and you want to be jump scared a little bit. Or, maybe even more than a little bit. What you get from 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, basically, is exactly what you want. The story doesn't make sense and the acting isn't particularly great, the movie is barely full of enough depth to graft out an 80 minute run time. Plus, isn't everyone scared of getting eaten by sharks or stung by jellyfish? If you can't make a movie out of that, you have some problems.

47 Meters Down: Uncaged starts with anything other than a shark attack, which is pretty much what you'd expect from a movie like this. Instead, it begins with Mia (Sophie Nelisse) being shoved into a pool by a school bully, Catherine (Brec Bassinger). You see, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged is a movie set in the Yucatan Peninsula, but it isn't about Mexico or Mexicans, it's about people who live there for reasons related to work. Mia is the daughter of Grant (John Corbett), a diver who explores Mayan ruins. He has just stumbled upon a discovery inside of a cave, and he's going to have archeologists flown in to examine it. Now, what I did not yet mention is that Mia has a step sister, Sasha (Corinne Foxx). Sasha has been clear about two things as it relates to Mia, even though her mom Jennifer (Nia Long) wants her to feel differently. Sasha says that Mia is not her sister and is not her friend. So, take that all into account with a shark movie and you know what kind of movie this is actually going to be. There was an activity planned on the weekend with Grant, but he cannot do it with Mia and Sasha. So, they are being sent on a shark watch where a group of people are lowered into the water in a submersible viewing station of sorts, which is not something I would want to be doing. A guy throws chum in the water, and the group gets to watch sharks eat and swim around them.

When Sasha and Mia are dropped off at the dock by Grant and his team consisting of Ben (Davi Santos) and Carl (Khylin Rhambo), they encounter Catherine again. This time, Sasha and Mia are just going to do something else with Sasha's friends, Alexa (Brianne Tju) and Nicole (Sistine Stallone). After this point, they go walking through the jungle and find water to dive in, at which point this movie almost resembles softcore pornography. Almost. I found myself laughing at this scene and being extremely uncomfortable, but I also noticed that there's a heavily tattooed high schooler in this movie. You can pretty much decide on this movie from the last few sentences if you so choose. Anyway, Alexa has apparently been seeing Ben and she has a bright idea. The day before, Grant found a very old shark tooth in the cave, but that never enters anyone's mind. Alexa wants to go diving in the cave that Grant found, look around and turn around after they've seen what they wanted to see. After some cajoling, everyone else agrees to come along and check the Mayan ruin out. Who wouldn't want to do that? The problem is that the group is blissfully unaware of the danger below. There are going to be sharks, and I'm confused as to why Grant wouldn't ensure that the cave was clear in the first place prior to calling in archeologists to look at a potential finding. These sharks, due to the lack of light in these caves, are also not normal sharks.

The softcore porn seeming scene aside, I liked this for the most part even though the film is almost entirely lacking in logic. There is no way that some of these scenes could possibly resemble reality in any way at all. The difference between this film and the last is that the scenes actually feel like they have some significance, the lack of realism isn't staring you in the face quite as badly, and the dilemmas that this film brings to the table seem to have more meaning and purpose. The randomness of the shark attacks also has validity in this film's reality if not the real one. The scenes that actually set up the shark stuff can best be described as being beyond awful. There's about 27 minutes of that and this film runs for only 80 minutes. There are positives and negatives to this approach. Obviously, the film does not overstay its welcome and for that matter neither do the sharks. The bait and switch at the end is ludicrous, but I cannot emphasize enough how bad the scenes leading to the shark stuff were. We're talking a 3/10 blended with a 6.5/10. So, rating a film like this can be quite difficult. I don't know what to make of this director and don't know if he can make a good film, but the scenes directed underwater are actually impressive.

I seem to be in the minority in thinking this film is better, but this is a minority that I am very proud to be in. 47 Meters Down: Uncaged is a film that features sharks chasing people through caves and eating them. 47 Meters Down is obsessed with the amount of air that its two leads have in their tanks, with the characters disobeying everything that the captain tells them, and all of those orders would have sufficed to save their lives. The endless swimming around the ocean floor is also ridiculous. There is none of that here. So, you can say what you want about the girls in 47 Meters Down: Uncaged being annoying, because without question they are. I cannot relate to them at all, but the scenes with the sharks are all good. Even though this is a PG-13 flick, it borders on an exploitation movie with the way that things play out. You'll have to see what I mean, if you really want to. I should also point out that if you're looking for logic and cohesion in a fucking shark movie, you're wasting your time. There is one thing I very much would have wanted from this though. At the end, someone should have been pushed in the goddamn water.

5.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

mother! (2017), directed by Darren Aronofsky

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

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

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

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

8/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

Blinded by the Light (2019), directed by Gurinder Chadha

It was time to see another film that was a favorite at this year's Sundance Film Festival, and I had been looking forward to seeing Blinded by the Light for some time. The preview looked goofy, and I couldn't see the film instantly, but the reviews were excellent. Not many films this year, if you've been paying attention anyway, have gotten good reviews. Even less of those have been wide releases. Blinded by the Light is a film that probably better pertains to England, so I'm surprised it was released here at all. On the other hand, it's a movie that seems to relate to Bruce Springsteen in a way. It certainly does relate too. When I see that Gurinder Chadha has directed very little of value in the last 17 years since Bend It Like Beckham, I'm confused as to why that is. That movie made money, a lot of people liked it a lot, and it provided good insight into communities that aren't often covered in the media. Even still, there's been no real breakthrough where the general public is able to learn more about the communities of people they live near. This kind of thing has effectively led to bigots informing the general public via Facebook, using outright bigotry in a way that has silenced a lot of those who know better and can't deal with the stupidity. This standoff approach has destroyed society in a lot of ways, and Blinded by the Light doesn't do anything to rectify that because it can't. This is a film that should have been made a while ago. I must admit something before I continue. I really, really liked this movie until the end of it. On some level, this movie hit me and I can't really explain how or why, but I'll try my best.

Coming of age movies are often tough sledding, but when the director does a good job of making you feel the problems of the person, it's much easier. Set in 1987, Javed Khan (Viveik Kaira) and his family are unfortunate enough to live in Luton. His father Malik (Kulvinder Ghir) and mother Noor (Meera Ganatra) emigrated from Pakistan and have three children, the already mentioned Javed, Yasmeen (Tara Divina), and Shazia (Nikita Mehta). At the start of the film, we see that Javed is best friends with Matt (Dean-Charles Chapman), and they are all now grown up so things are different. Matt has a synth band that Javed writes music for, and Javed is also interested heavily in poetry. Not too much of a surprise there. Javed is also the political sort. You see, in England during this time period, they had a huge problem with the National Front. Margaret Thatcher did not exactly do a lot to help with this. Of course, the NF is another anti-immigration, racist group. Javed and his family are immigrants. Matt doesn't really care for his lyrics because they don't pertain to his problems, but rather Javed's. He just doesn't have any original thoughts of his own. The Khans have a big set of problems as well. Malik works at Vauxhall Motors, which is going to lay half their staff off. When he loses his job, the rest of the family has to make up for that in some way.

Javed is getting closer and closer to university, and he's off to a new school as this story is playing out. There's only one other South Asian student at the school, he is Roops (Aaron Phagura). Roops is an enormous fan of Bruce Springsteen, but Javed doesn't know that for a while. This kid, he just doesn't fit in. His father has not done a whole lot to help with that. He wants his son to keep his head down, to be Pakistani and proud, believing that his son will never be British. While in school, Javed wants to be British, that much is clear. He has the ability to be away from his family and just needs to break out of his shell. He winds up developing a crush on Eliza (Nell Williams), an activist with two extremely conservative parents. The racism, of course, is also prevalent and Javed cannot escape it. His teacher, Ms. Clay (Hayley Atwell), believes strongly that Javed needs to find his voice and unleash it upon the world because he has something to say. One night, not to spoil the film, but he decides to throw all his poems in the garbage after being rejected as a writer by the school paper. When he gets back inside, he puts the Springsteen tapes he was given by Roops into his Walkman and immediately feels things that he hasn't felt before. He feels like Bruce's lyrics speak to him and to the working class situation that his family is in. The kid still needs to find himself, and his parents aren't exactly helping with this.

The way that Blinded by the Light deals with the National Front problem of the time, is something that I wasn't expecting heading into the film. I was pleasantly surprised. I thought this would merely be a standard coming of age movie, but it isn't and there's a lot of things here that seem to come out of nowhere. The father-son dynamic reigns supreme in terms of what shines through the most as the film plays out, but there's so much other stuff here to make the most of the film. Blinded by the Light is supposed to be a corny movie and at the same time just cuts straight through things and puts the viewer on the spot. Either you'll like this, or you won't. It's straight out as simple as that. The film doesn't hit peak corny until the end, and that part I didn't really care for, but the rest was very nicely balanced. Like I said, it's hard to explain how this film really hit the spot. I think this is a good opportunity to bring up something I complained about when I saw Yesterday. Blinded by the Light is not the kind of movie that just spits something out at you without being able to explain to you why someone's music was important and reached so many people. Bruce Springsteen's music, and why it mattered, are explained here in great detail. Blinded by the Light is able to tell you the why this happened, as well as how this happened. More to the point it tells you why working class people care for the guy. You can't get much more in detail than that.

I did read a review on another forum where someone complained about the content in Blinded by the Light, and after watching this movie I realize that person is probably a racist bastard based on what they said. A movie like this one does a great job of weeding those people out so that you can ignore them for the rest of your life. This was a movie that I liked quite a bit, I can't lie. I've taken time to try to look at this objectively, but in doing so I realize that I actually cared for this film and thought it was great in showing people how to understand what it feels like when someone is met with racism. I can see why someone wouldn't like this film for its content, but the specific criticisms a person can make would really expose them. The recreation of the 1980s is also incredible, it must be said. The fashion, the malls, everything is exactly the way that it was. This is also not a film that shies away from criticising ridiculous conservative thought, so maybe that's another reason for borderline hateful criticism. I did also like learning that this was a somewhat truthful story, inspired by the life of a journalist who absolutely loves Bruce Springsteen. The choice in Springsteen's music for the film is also a lot better than I thought it would be. I think I'll leave it at that.

7.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

Tully (2018), directed by Jason Reitman

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

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

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

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

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

7/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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. Tully
50. Mary Queen of Scots
51. Aquaman
52. Ideal Home
53. Outlaw King
54. Overlord
55. Ready Player One
56. Ben Is Back
57. Monsters and Men
58. The Mule
59. On the Basis of Sex
60. Bohemian Rhapsody
61. White Boy Rick
62. Papillon
63. Game Night
64. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
65. Ocean's Eight
66. Instant Family
67. Alpha
68. The Front Runner
69. The Predator
70. Apostle
71. The Cured
72. The Commuter
73. The Angel
74. Tag
75. Beautiful Boy
76. The Nun
77. Operation Finale
78. The Equalizer 2
79. The Spy Who Dumped Me
80. Cargo
81. Yardie
82. Bird Box
83. 12 Strong
84. Venom
85. Skyscraper
86. The Meg
87. Assassination Nation
88. The Girl in the Spider's Web
89. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
90. 22 July
91. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
92. The Little Stranger
93. Tomb Raider
94. Night School
95. The 15:17 To Paris
96. Peppermint
97. Mile 22
98. The First Purge
99. Hunter Killer
100. The Cloverfield Paradox
101. Mute
102. Kin
103. Hell Fest
104. Proud Mary
105. Robin Hood
106. Traffik
107. The Happytime Murders
108. The Outsider
109. Slender Man

 

[909]

Winchester (2018), directed by the Spierig Brothers

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

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

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

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

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

3/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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. Tully
50. Mary Queen of Scots
51. Aquaman
52. Ideal Home
53. Outlaw King
54. Overlord
55. Ready Player One
56. Ben Is Back
57. Monsters and Men
58. The Mule
59. On the Basis of Sex
60. Bohemian Rhapsody
61. White Boy Rick
62. Papillon
63. Game Night
64. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
65. Ocean's Eight
66. Instant Family
67. Alpha
68. The Front Runner
69. The Predator
70. Apostle
71. The Cured
72. The Commuter
73. The Angel
74. Tag
75. Beautiful Boy
76. The Nun
77. Operation Finale
78. The Equalizer 2
79. The Spy Who Dumped Me
80. Cargo
81. Yardie
82. Bird Box
83. 12 Strong
84. Venom
85. Skyscraper
86. The Meg
87. Assassination Nation
88. The Girl in the Spider's Web
89. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
90. 22 July
91. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
92. The Little Stranger
93. Tomb Raider
94. Night School
95. The 15:17 To Paris
96. Peppermint
97. Mile 22
98. The First Purge
99. Hunter Killer
100. The Cloverfield Paradox
101. Mute
102. Kin
103. Hell Fest
104. Proud Mary
105. Robin Hood
106. Traffik
107. Winchester
108. The Happytime Murders
109. The Outsider
110. Slender Man

 

[909]

Good Boys (2019), directed by Gene Stupnitsky

I believe this is a much anticipated review, I have made people wait weeks in order for me to learn what I thought of this. It wasn't deliberate that I did so, it was just a fact of reality that a person can only watch so many movies at a theater in a week, and I had no intention of paying for a movie ticket. Anyway, if you weren't super tired of this movie trailer and its ads, there's something wrong with you. These things permeated through society and you could not escape them, this was one of the worst cases of an ad campaign that I can remember. Everyone here was not looking forward to this film and was more interested in my review. Now, I should point out that I was also not looking forward to this and on some level, the reason I watched this was because I am committed to watching and review everything that I can. This means that new releases get pushed back sometimes, especially if they're going to be in theaters for a while. It is what it is. I am not mad about waiting, especially for this movie, as long as I have the chance to see as many films as possible over the course of the year. Now, as for the film itself, look. It's a comedy that attempts to provide shock value, and the film is very cognizant of that. The story was written and directed by people who took part in the production of The Office, and for that matter you can tell. Their attempt to meld shock value with plot works to a point, but that point signifies Good Boys becoming bogged down in plot. Things deteriorate quickly from there.

Good Boys is about a trio of friends who call themselves the Beanbag Boys, they are Max (Jacob Tremblay), Thor (Brady Noon), and Lucas (Keith L. Williams). These kids are rather unique in their own way. Max is the kid who has crushes on girls, in this case one named Brixlee (Millie Davis), who he thinks he's going to marry when he gets older. Lucas is the kindest of the three, but he learns that his parents are getting divorced and has a difficult time coping. Thor isn't like a Thor at all, this kid wants to sing when he gets older. Thing is, he also wants to be the bad kid and wants to be cool, and singing doesn't really go with that kind of self image. In what feels like a trend, Good Boys is rather short and the plot of the film is easy to explain. Max's dad (Will Forte) is leaving for a few days and tells Max not to mess around with his drone for any reason. Thing is, the Beanbag Boys have a reason to mess with the drone. Through Max, they were all invited to a party where there's going to be kissing. Of course, they don't know how to do any of that or pretty much anything else. There's an incident where they're supposed to drink beer, and Thor can't do it, which leads to him being called a pussy and other things of that nature. He doesn't want to have a bad reputation and desperately wants to be at this party, as does Max because Brixlee is supposed to be there.

When the group doesn't know how to do something, that's where the drone comes in, they need to spy. Hannah lives on their block, and Benji (Josh Caras) is her boyfriend. When Hannah's with her friend Lilly (Midori Francis), Benji gives them molly and has a freakout incel moment after the fact, which leads to Benji and Hannah breaking up. After this, the drone is busted and the kids didn't get to see anything that would lead to them learning how to kiss. When Hannah and Lilly get the drone, it's pretty simple and straight forward. They want to punish these little morons for fucking with them, and they're not going to give back that drone. That would lead to Max being grounded and nobody being allowed to go to the party, which can't happen. Fortunately, they have something that belongs to Hannah and Lilly, but making a trade will prove difficult. In the end, a trip across town needs to be made, and the boys have never been this far from their own. Who knows what kinds of stupid things these kids will get into?

The thing that bothered me about Good Boys wasn't the jokes, and it wasn't the kids, it was the attempt to turn this into a more serious story that I found to be totally unnecessary. These kids were annoying as shit, but some of the things they were saying were pretty funny. Not all of the gags were in the trailer, that's for sure. The problem is that I had literally zero interest in seeing these little shits mature. I think that was a complete misread of what this film actually brings to the table, and those scenes should never have been in it at all. A movie like this has to fully commit to its concept, to ride it out the entire way. When that starts to wane, so does my interest, and I can only barely say that I liked this film. Barely is also probably a little bit generous, but I think the film's serious turn didn't last all that long. To be clear, it's not funny because the kids were saying bad things, but because of what they were saying. You'd have to see this in order to understand, or you know, not see this at all.

There are people who think the humor is what hurts this and that this should have been a more serious story, but I don't know where that opinion is coming from at all. The reflection, their journey, none of that matters at all. I wanted more stupid humor and to see things play out as I felt they should have. I have the feeling that Good Boys may get a sequel, even though I'm really hoping that it doesn't because there's no more meat on the bone for this concept. When they get older, they're teenagers and nothing about their naivety is remotely funny. There is a good point about how children grow up in different stages than their peers, but that's not what I came to see. I wanted to laugh, the jokes stop as the film gets more serious, and that's not cool. I'm probably being generous here as well, but I thought the performances of the child actors were authentic and that the film was focused on them the way that it should have been. The viewer should only have seen the parents two times at the most, and that's what we got. This could have been better.

6/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

The Hurricane Heist (2018), directed by Rob Cohen

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

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

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

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

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

4/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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. Tully
50. Mary Queen of Scots
51. Aquaman
52. Ideal Home
53. Outlaw King
54. Overlord
55. Ready Player One
56. Ben Is Back
57. Monsters and Men
58. The Mule
59. On the Basis of Sex
60. Bohemian Rhapsody
61. White Boy Rick
62. Papillon
63. Game Night
64. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
65. Ocean's Eight
66. Instant Family
67. Alpha
68. The Front Runner
69. The Predator
70. Apostle
71. The Cured
72. The Commuter
73. The Angel
74. Tag
75. Beautiful Boy
76. The Nun
77. Operation Finale
78. The Equalizer 2
79. The Spy Who Dumped Me
80. Cargo
81. Yardie
82. Bird Box
83. 12 Strong
84. Venom
85. Skyscraper
86. The Meg
87. Assassination Nation
88. The Girl in the Spider's Web
89. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
90. 22 July
91. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
92. The Little Stranger
93. Tomb Raider
94. Night School
95. The 15:17 To Paris
96. Peppermint
97. Mile 22
98. The First Purge
99. Hunter Killer
100. The Hurricane Heist
101. The Cloverfield Paradox
102. Mute
103. Kin
104. Hell Fest
105. Proud Mary
106. Robin Hood
107. Traffik
108. Winchester
109. The Happytime Murders
110. The Outsider
111. Slender Man

 

[909]

The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019), directed by Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz

I believe I've told some of you how I feel about Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump is one of the biggest piece of shit movies that exists, a lazy story made better to some because of its use of American history and nostalgia. The movie also is one that presents the notion that a person can become rich in this country, no matter their IQ or happenstance, as long as they work hard on their way to the top. Forrest Gump is also a movie that presents American history in a baby-boomer friendly form, lacking in hard truths and more concerned with making people happy with Forrest's life at the end of the film. The film is horrible trash, 100%. The Peanut Butter Falcon is not that kind of movie. It is more based in hard realities, although it doesn't go too far in making those clear. I am uncertain as to what year this film is supposed to be set in, and that seems to be rather deliberate. The problems of the character are not solved by anything that happens in the movie. His Down syndrome is not cured. Life, unfortunately, must push on. I am fully aware that this film is supposed to be a Huckleberry Finn story, but it's much more comparable to a Forrest Gump type of story. That's what I think, anyway. Of course, in a story like that, you actually have to care about the characters. The filmmakers are able to accomplish that, and the film is nowhere near as predictable as I thought it was going to be. If you like wrestling, there's definitely something here for you...

Zak (Zack Gottsagen) is a man with Down syndrome who lives in a retirement home in North Carolina, even though he's only 22 years old. His roommate in the home is Carl (Bruce Dern), who is beginning to get tired of Zak's habits. You see, Zak has a video tape of the Salt Water Redneck (Thomas Haden Church), a wrestler from the 1980s who has a school on the Outer Banks. Due to having watched this tape so many times, and having seen guys like Ric Flair throw each other around, Zak wants to be a professional wrestler. He attempts to escape one day, but doesn't make it very far. Once that's done, we learn that his family couldn't take care of him anymore and that's why he's in the retirement home. His caregiver Eleanor (Dakota Johnson) has to have him labeled as a flight risk because he's now attempted to break out two times, and they don't intend for there to be a third. Bars are put on his windows in order to prevent his escape, but it's difficult to do that when Carl wants to help the kid out. Carl also does not want to watch the wrestling video. So, out goes Zak into the world even though he's only wearing his underwear. He makes his way through the small town and finds the docks, at which point he gets in a boat and stows away for the night as it sits there.

We have another plot going on before these two guys come together as well, and it features Tyler (Shia Labeouf). Tyler's brother Mark (Jon Bernthal) has recently died and we aren't sure why, but this has brought his life into a tailspin. Tyler now tries to steal crabs from other people's pots in order to get ahead, but he's rejected from selling them because he doesn't have a license to be fishing for them in the first place. Duncan (John Hawkes) and Ratboy (Yelawolf) are some other fishermen, the ones that Tyler stole from in particular. They're pissed off, so they kick his ass. I suppose that was coming. In retaliation, Tyler decides to burn all their equipment, which is quite expensive and will most certainly ruin their lives. The impetus for stealing from them in the first place is apparently because only so many commercial fishing licenses are given out every year, and when Mark died his passed on to the next man in line, that being Duncan. After Tyler lights this stuff on fire, they give chase, which leads to a boat pursuit. After the boat pursuit, Tyler discovers Zak in his boat. He's not happy, of course. He also wants to leave him behind, but that proves difficult in the end of things. Tyler subsequently says that Zak can come with him as long as he doesn't slow him down, and promises to drop Zak off where he wants. You know where Zak wants to go? The wrestling school.

If I remember right, there's a scene in this movie that comes straight out with it and has Tyler mention Mark Twain, which is quite on the nose. Ordinarily I wouldn't like that, but it's very obvious to a point where only a fool wouldn't notice. Obviously, that is somewhat derivative, but everything is derivative and there's a point at which that has to end. In this case, it does. Anyway, this film really worked for me. It's funny when it needs to be, and it isn't an offensive kind of humor where they're shitting on the subject. The chemistry between Gottsagen and Labeouf made all of this work. The way that the latter talks to other people when it comes to Zak, that's very realistic and something seemingly written by a person with experience in this field. There are good appearances from Jake Roberts and Mick Foley that I don't want to spoil, but the stuff with the Salt Water Redneck is almost perfect. There was a point where it was hard to believe what I was watching, and that was that point. This movie sounds pretty stupid if you decide to break everything down into a summarization of what this actually is, but I did my best to avoid doing that because this isn't a stupid movie.

The role of Zak probably could have been played by anyone, but it is important that the character was played by someone who actually has these problems. It's a point in favor of representation for other people to play those roles. It doesn't hurt that this is a good film, because representation without quality still ends with people not caring about the story. The story itself is very much enhanced by its subplot with Duncan giving chase to Zac and Tyler, but there is a bit of a logic leap in the way that they are actually able to track them. Absolutely nothing I know about reality should lead to that happening. This is easy to ignore because of the importance of Zak and Tyler's journey, because it is inevitable that Zak will have to go back to a home of some kind and leave these kinds of things behind. That is a sad way for someone to be treated, for someone's life to effectively be ended. Surely there's a better way, except that for almost everyone there is not. Society treats the elderly and infirm like complete shit, nothing could be worse than being old or disabled. I was also thinking about how the movie is also driven by the characters being poor, but that's more something I was thinking than something laid out by the film itself. I enjoyed The Peanut Butter Falcon, obviously, and I think most people would.

7.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

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

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

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

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

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

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

8.5/10

 

[909]

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

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

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

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

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

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

4.5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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. Tully
50. Mary Queen of Scots
51. Aquaman
52. Ideal Home
53. Outlaw King
54. Overlord
55. Ready Player One
56. Ben Is Back
57. Monsters and Men
58. The Mule
59. On the Basis of Sex
60. Bohemian Rhapsody
61. White Boy Rick
62. Papillon
63. Game Night
64. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
65. Ocean's Eight
66. Instant Family
67. Alpha
68. The Front Runner
69. The Predator
70. Apostle
71. The Cured
72. The Commuter
73. The Angel
74. Tag
75. Beautiful Boy
76. The Nun
77. Operation Finale
78. The Equalizer 2
79. The Spy Who Dumped Me
80. Cargo
81. Yardie
82. Bird Box
83. 12 Strong
84. Venom
85. Skyscraper
86. The Meg
87. Assassination Nation
88. The Girl in the Spider's Web
89. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
90. 22 July
91. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
92. The Little Stranger
93. Tomb Raider
94. 7 Days in Entebbe
95. Night School
96. The 15:17 To Paris
97. Peppermint
98. Mile 22
99. The First Purge
100. Hunter Killer
101. The Hurricane Heist
102. The Cloverfield Paradox
103. Mute
104. Kin
105. Hell Fest
106. Proud Mary
107. Robin Hood
108. Traffik
109. Winchester
110. The Happytime Murders
111. The Outsider
112. Slender Man

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

 

[909]

Backstabbing for Beginners (2018), directed by Per Fly

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

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

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

5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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. Tully
50. Mary Queen of Scots
51. Aquaman
52. Ideal Home
53. Outlaw King
54. Overlord
55. Ready Player One
56. Ben Is Back
57. Monsters and Men
58. The Mule
59. On the Basis of Sex
60. Bohemian Rhapsody
61. White Boy Rick
62. Papillon
63. Game Night
64. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
65. Ocean's Eight
66. Instant Family
67. Alpha
68. The Front Runner
69. The Predator
70. Apostle
71. The Cured
72. The Commuter
73. The Angel
74. Tag
75. Beautiful Boy
76. The Nun
77. Operation Finale
78. The Equalizer 2
79. The Spy Who Dumped Me
80. Cargo
81. Yardie
82. Bird Box
83. 12 Strong
84. Venom
85. Skyscraper
86. The Meg
87. Assassination Nation
88. Backstabbing for Beginners
89. The Girl in the Spider's Web
90. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
91. 22 July
92. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
93. The Little Stranger
94. Tomb Raider
95. 7 Days in Entebbe
96. Night School
97. The 15:17 To Paris
98. Peppermint
99. Mile 22
100. The First Purge
101. Hunter Killer
102. The Hurricane Heist
103. The Cloverfield Paradox
104. Mute
105. Kin
106. Hell Fest
107. Proud Mary
108. Robin Hood
109. Traffik
110. Winchester
111. The Happytime Murders
112. The Outsider
113. Slender Man

 

[909]

It Chapter Two (2019), directed by Andy Muschietti

In August, there was a lot of movies that I wanted to see, but nothing that I felt like I absolutely had to see. It Chapter Two changes that, it was nice to finally get over to September where that wasn't a problem. What we have in It Chapter Two is a movie that is best watched after watching the first film, because this is a miniseries in film form. Once you accept that, it's easier to tackle the movie as a whole. As I'm sure everyone here knows, It Chapter Two is a very long film that does feel very long to some extent. I think the reason it felt long, at least to me, was because I had forgotten the ending as written in the book and a few other details. It Chapter Two is a film I would describe as very thorough, it is also only somewhat faithful to the books. I was disappointed in the ending because of this, but I was happy with the other changes throughout the film and thought they enhanced the events. So, you can take all that for what it's worth. This would probably be better consumed as a five episode show, but I'm sure that people who went straight from seeing the first movie to the second feel differently and are satisfied. I can also admit that I straight out forgot a lot of the things from It. The thing is, this film is still pretty good despite everything that I've said above. The performances are good, they really are. The bits where the actors are on their own for a very long portion of the film are all excellent without exception. It Chapter Two is far more ambitious, for better or worse, and it seems that everyone seemed to be well aware there was no way to wrap this up in a rational way. They did their best.

It Chapter Two makes the decision committed to in the first film, that the story must be set in 2016 and conclude in modern times. 1986 was modern times when the book was written, but the events have to be changed in a manner befitting current technology. So, we head back to Derry where Adrian (Xavier Dolan) and Don (Taylor Frey) are a couple harassed by anti-gay bigots. The harassment turns into a beating, and Adrian is thrown off a bridge into the river below. Don goes looking, and he thinks that Adrian will be fine, but he's not. When Adrian is saved by Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard), Pennywise bites his heart out and kills him. After this, if you haven't read the book or watched the miniseries anyway, you learn that Mike (Isaiah Mustafa) was the only one of the Losers to have stayed in Derry this whole time. With that, you know that Mike is going to have to bring everyone back to defeat Pennywise.

Of course, things changed a lot in the 27 years between these two movies. The Losers who left Derry have almost entirely forgot the events of their childhood, and there's a reason for that. Bill (James McAvoy) has become an author and screenwriter who takes a lot of criticism for the endings of his novels. Even his wife doesn't like the way they end. Beverly (Jessica Chastain) is a rather successful fashion designer, but her husband is abusive and beats her. Ben (Jay Ryan) is no longer fat, but he's deeply lonely despite that. He does have memories of his time in Derry because he kept a yearbook page in his wallet, but he's the only one who remembers everything. Richie (Bill Hader) is a standup comedian, and a thriving one at that. He's doing his bit in front of an auditorium when we see him. Eddie (James Ransone) has graduated from his mother controlling him to his wife now doing the same thing. He's a risk analyst, exactly the kind of job you'd think he'd have. Stanley (Andy Bean) is now a partner at an accounting firm and has a lot of money. There's a bit of irony in the person who stayed in the small town having a shitty life, but that's the point. The fact is, they have to come back to fight Pennywise and put a stop to all this nonsense. The thing is? They don't all come back. They don't all live through the movie either.

I'm going to be more free with spoilers because I've ceased caring about this aspect of my reviews, so now you know. Anyway, where the film's strengths lie is when the characters are alone in discovering their past, but these scenes also feature a fair bit of CGI, and you should be warned of that. In these scenes, they morph back to their time as children and the unique set of problems that each of them had. I did like this sequence very much. The epilogue of the film is also drawn out too much, and I still don't know what to make of this ending. I wasn't asking for a gangbang or any of that, but the town not collapsing upon itself is quite weird. Some of the other changes, like the absence of the turtle, it is absolutely necessary to do. I'm not mad about that and all and I'm glad that kind of crap wasn't left in the film. It's rather obvious in the aftermath of watching this, that the director and writers were trying to establish the idea of Pennywise as a bully, but in this context it's weird to see the bully defeated by a group bullying them even harder. At the same time, that's somewhat true to life in my experience. I'm not sure if that's even the intention here. I did think it was also interesting that nobody in my audience seemed to really be feeling the length of the film. Applause continued throughout, but there is a point at which it all becomes too much. This isn't as good as the first film in large part for that reason alone.

When thinking about the film as a whole, I am left with the feeling that in some respects it is carried by three performances. Without these three performances, the film wouldn't hold the same weight at all. I'm thinking of Bill Hader, James Ransone, and Bill Skarsgard here. Hader was an absolutely perfect representation of Richie, and if this movie was better I think there would have been a huge campaign for him to get nominated for an award. It just doesn't hit that level as a horror film where people will feel that way though. James Ransone, he FINALLY has a role other than Ziggy Sobotka that I can associate with him. It took fucking years for this. Appreciate it while you're watching it. Of course, Skarsgard is so great in this role because of his ability to be deeply unsettling. In the first film he does things that are more unsettling, and in some part that's because you aren't as familiar with the character, but he has some scenes here that are really fucked up. There are one or two scenes in It Chapter Two that took me out of the moment a bit, but I won't spoil those because people deserve for me to not spoil something.

I think this is faithful enough to the book, and does enough things that I don't often see in horror films that I have to give this a good grade. What I mean by that is, this film actually has the balls to show kids getting killed and make you feel that shit. When it isn't on screen, you don't really feel anything. I liked the movie, although I thought it was around 20 minutes too long. You can't really cut Henry Bowers out of this, but if I was going to cut something, that's where I'd start. Those scenes are still good, but we're talking about a movie that ran for two hours and 45 minutes. The deadlights are awesome and you can't get rid of those, and this movie's overly indulgent, but I don't care all that much. It's a Stephen King story and that's what those are. The film is absolutely batshit insane, and some people will like that while others do not. Coinciding with that, there are music selections and strange editing decisions that don't belong in this film, but at least we had a giant naked grandma. That kind of shit you aren't going to get very often at a movie theater.

7/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

I also might like this way more in the aftermath of it, because on some level this was funhouse horror shit that was scattered all over the place and I don't see movies like that very often.

 

[909]

American Factory (2019), directed by Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert

In the aftermath of American Factory being released on Netflix, there were a lot of people talking about how important this film was. My initial, snap reaction was that it was probably bullshit for people to be saying that, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that wasn't true. How often is this subsection of America really covered in media? Writers like to interview working class people, but they don't particularly care to make documentaries about them so that we can understand. It's very, very hard to understand their plight if you aren't one of them. The thing is, American Factory does everything it can possibly do to make you understand their plight. You are given a wide variety of stories, and at the end of the film you have the ability to make your own conclusion based on your own background and beliefs. I know that this was called the first movie the Obamas produced for Netflix, but that is not entirely true. It is one that they bought at Sundance and put on their production label. When you watch the film, you see exactly how and why they would want their names attached to it. This is a great documentary that is full of contradictions, with two groups of people that are diametrically opposed to each other in most ways, and similar in only a few. Yet, in the name of profit, and in the name of other things I'm going to get to, they all need to work together. Funny how that works, and the ending of American Factory takes the film over the top into being extremely timely.

American Factory is almost definitely going to be nominated for some documentary awards next year, but I should describe what it is. Fuyao is a Chinese glass company, they had decided to make a plant here in the United States. The motivations of doing this are rather unclear until the end of the film, but the simple reason of doing so is that there are a lot of cars to be built in this country and they need glass. There is a lot of profit at stake. Cao Dewang is the Chairman of Fuyao, and he had a dream to make a factory here that would unite Chinese and American workers. His dream is of course profit driven, and at the end of the film he does some reflection on that. I have no idea why this man would let cameras into his factory to begin with. Here's how it goes. The site where the new factory is, it used to be a General Motors plant outside of Dayton in Ohio. At the plant, workers made $27 an hour and life was good. The problem was that the cars they made were not so good, because General Motors was a shitty company and that starts from the top. The plant closed in 2008, and those jobs vanished never to be seen again. Even though Fuyao is bringing the plant back, those jobs are absolutely gone. $27 an hour? Try $13. You want to know something else? It's time for all the American workers in the plant to have a boss that came from the parent company in China. Funny how all this works, the jobs are there, but the pay isn't the same. To boot, it's a non-union shop. So, suck it.

The way that non-union shops work, particularly when people haven't had decent work for three or four years, is that people are happy to have the job when they first get it. In the end, that's not going to last. The pay isn't what it was and it isn't even good. The workers are treated like shit and told what to do by people who don't understand them and who they don't understand. There is also no forward movement in their jobs. After some of these scenes, we are taken back to China where Fuyao has their headquarters. This is one of the most honest pictures of China that we have ever gotten, and to say that the Fuyao company atmosphere is like North Korea would not be an exaggeration. I'm not saying they torture people, but the propaganda is unrelenting. Some of the American workers are taken on a trip to their headquarters, with there being an attempt to show those workers how to be truly efficient and to bring that back to the States. One of the Chinese employees talks about working harder and in true fascist fashion, one of the younger Americans with little life experience decides that he believes efficiency should be taken to the next level. His wish is that the workers had their mouths taped shut so they couldn't talk. This is how Nazism started, older people propagated a myth and a group of younger people took it to the next level. It's staring you right in the face here. The American guy's idea is so crazy that the Chinese guy looks straight at the camera with a deadpan Jim Halpert face.

When I say that this is a true portrait of China, I really do mean it and in this respect the film holds literally nothing back. Do rich people walk the factory line speaking in Chinese, talking about how they're going to get rid of certain workers that are standing right in front of them? Hell yes they do. Do they fire the white guy because they believe he's hostile to Chinese people, and replace him with a Chinese supremacist? Yes, they do that too. When the Chinese supremacist is speaking it becomes clear that most Chinese people truly believe to their core that they are the master race, much like fat white people in this shitty country of ours. It doesn't matter that the Chinese person is an uneducated dumb fuck working in a factory the same way that white supremacists are uneducated dumb fucks that work at Walmart. This is a truth that perhaps can be applied to every society on this planet. I do, however, get the feeling that Chinese supremacy is a far more commonly held position in China than white supremacy is here. I digress. This kind of insight into all subjects is something I find to be invaluable.

American Factory eventually gets to the natural subject that all films related to factories have to get to, the subject of unionization. Once it does, the film picks up even more from the high level that it's already at, and becomes a great documentary. The push and pull between the bosses and workers is very interesting to say the least. It's obvious that something is going to have to give, and in the process of that, there will be huge collateral damage. I have decided not to name any of the workers specifically because I'm a very big believer in unionization, in worker solidarity, and in the collective unit that should apply to those who work blue collar jobs. One of them is a forklift driver who knows they're getting dicked on their wages. They also live in their sister's basement and they desperately want out. But, it's hard to be dicked when you worked at GM for years for so long, when you know you aren't getting what you're really worth. The person decides to become part of the labor movement at the factory. They are summarily fired and that is something companies are just allowed to do. These firings are very easy to justify. Fuyao claims that the factory isn't making money, which I think is bullshit. Fuyao also believes that someone else will slide into the job. Solidarity, it seems, is something that no longer applies. The labor movement at the factory is crushed via vote.

I already explained the way that this film hits me, but I think I also need to make something clear. This is not an anti-Chinese film, it is a film about people and their struggle against those who have a lot more money than them. American Factory is a strange film because it actually shows the perspective of the rich, and we just don't get that very often either. Nobody has the balls to go on camera doing any of the things that are done in this movie, but the Chinese are different people. The bosses believe to their core that they are better than Americans, it's as simple as that. The workers, on the other hand, although it's true some of them also believe in Chinese supremacy, others do not. Others know their circumstance and that they're in the same boat as the Americans. They are both working for way less than they're worth. The thing is, this is where the two cultures collide. In China it is their duty to work and a lot of people believe that is their purpose in life. There is a huge propaganda system in place to ensure that employees remain robots. It is very difficult to do that in America. America is a country of rebels, and that's a problem in some ways and not others, but to our core as a society we are rebellious. Even the religious right has not been able to take that out of people even though they've tried. They want everyone to submit to their religion the way that Chinese companies want people to submit to their work. It's the same thing. Because of the natural collision between those two cultures, one wonders if a joint factory like this can actually work. It's profitable, but that's only one way in which you can measure success. Will either group of people ever understand the other? That's not likely, and one signs the checks of the other, so there's always going to be a struggle. I measure success by happiness. Are the workers happy? Absolutely not.

The little bit at the end that addresses oncoming automation while all this push-pull is going on, is icing on the cake. I cannot believe there has not been an introduction of legislation that would prevent companies from destroying their workforce in order to replace it with robots. The working class is being failed at all levels. No matter what anyone will tell you, this isn't an impossible problem, but there are structural issues that this country faces and people need to be able to live near the coasts. There is a massive need for engineering works in order to allow this to happen and nobody is giving a single shit about building anything that will allow people to live. There are jobs to be had in constructing those things. People will need to move. Communities will need to be built in those areas. This needs to happen in order for this country to keep working.

9/10

 

[909]

Ready or Not (2019), directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett

What is up with so many of these movies being directed by duos now? I am interested in why this is, and need to do some of my own research in order to find out. I don't see how it would be helpful for a film to have two voices like that, but it seems clear that a lot of people in the industry do see the wisdom in it even though I do not. A lot of people have tried to tie this movie into being another story about rich people gone wild, and while that's obviously true, it's a horror movie with a lot more at play beyond their riches. Ready or Not is also a very funny movie even though it does everything that you'd think a movie like this would do. This is a film that wades straight into cliched waters and revels in it, but that isn't always a bad thing and being cliched itself is not always bad. I know that this is a horror movie, and there's no dispute about that, but Ready or Not is not a film that I would call scary. That's just not the point. There isn't a single jump scare in the film, but that's not what anyone was attempting to accomplish. There is a goal, the bad people set out to accomplish that goal, and the person they're hunting is trying to stop them. In some ways this is more comedy than anything else though. If you aren't laughing at the things that happen here, it's probably because you want this to be more socially biting, but I'm glad that this is not that kind of film.

I think everyone gets the gist of Ready or Not from the trailer, but I have to talk about it in this section. The Le Domas family is a gaming empire, they have parlayed their success with board games into further riches, so on and so forth. At the start of the film, we are shown a scene from the 1980s where two kids are running through a large house. The kids continue to run through the house until a guy comes running into them and asks for help. That is not what the guy gets. Instead, one of the kids shoves their brother in a closet and shouts that the guy is there, after which a group of people come into the room and shoot him up with arrows. After that, the man is taken into a room and it's time for us to go to the main story. We push forward to one of those kids, Alex (Mark O'Brien) at the house, getting married to Grace (Samara Weaving). It doesn't take a genius to know what's going to happen, but Grace is obviously clueless because she didn't watch the trailer for this film. At midnight, she is supposed to undergo an initiation and draw a card from a wooden box, which will determine what game she plays with the family on her wedding night. But first, I must introduce you to the Le Domas family and explain why they have so much money.

I already introduced you to Alex, who is the son. His father is Tony (Henry Czerny), and he has helped expand the wealth of the family through buying sports teams before they exploded in value. Becky (Andie MacDowell) is his mother, who married into the family not knowing about the initiation or anything like that, but it happened and that's that. Daniel (Adam Brody) is Alex's brother, and he is married to Charity (Elyse Levesque), who everyone else thinks is a gold digger. There's also Emilie (Melanie Scrofano), who is Alex's sister and a drug addict with two children that she has brought to the house after the wedding. Her husband is Fitch (Kristian Bruun), and this movie is not above making Fitch the Bitch jokes. There's also Helene (Nicky Guadagni), and we very quickly learn that it was her husband who was killed on their wedding night 30 years prior to the events of this film. She is a very nasty woman. Now, how did the Le Domas family get their money and how is this pertinent to the initiation? Tony tells the story, that their great-grandfather had made a deal on a boat, with a man called Mr. Le Bail. Le Bail said that he would make the Le Domas family rich as long as they established the following tradition and it did what they were supposed to. The tradition is that there will be cards put in that box on the wedding nights of family members. Sometimes they will be normal games. Other times they will not. When the game on the card is hide and seek, this is a game where the family will attempt to murder the person joining the family. In this case, that's Grace. They believe that if they're unable to do it, they will die at sunrise.

The first thing to get out of the way as it relates to Ready or Not, is that this is a very gory film to an extent that is nearly laughable. I'm obviously okay with that, it helps to enhance the comedy ever-present here. This movie is very much off the walls, there is something taken away from it because you know what's coming the whole time, but it's fun anyway. The unique personalities of the family members also help the movie a great deal. Many of these actors are experienced, but they are also Canadian and as a result I haven't seen them in very much. I think that's something a lot of people can say. Of course, what really matters is that the lead actress is convincing in a role where she has to scream and cry a lot, and Samara Weaving is exactly that. Screaming and crying, it seems, are exactly what she likes to do. It's also a very endearing attribute for an actress to convincingly do that. The story is also good enough that the viewer doesn't become solely focused on what the lead actress is doing, and the scenes that don't have her in them are also very good. The social comedy here is not as prevalent from my viewpoint as a lot of people say that it is, it's funny that they're rich and this is happening to them, and there's the implication people have sold their soul to be rich, but that's basically it.

For a 90 minute horror-comedy, Ready or Not is very satisfying and delivers in basically every way that it needs to. The ending is beyond ludicrous, almost too much so, and that's why I'm not going to score the film any higher. I thought people would drop dead at the end, not do that. The revenge inherent in the film is all pretty good, this was very easy to enjoy. I will also say now that August is complete, there's been enough good films released this year with certainly many more to come. We need many more if this will reach 2018's level. Also, the hide and seek song is the best part, by far. I'm going to post it below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKmTMrsfUWQ

7/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

Breaking In (2018), directed by James McTeigue

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

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

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

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

4/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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. Tully
50. Mary Queen of Scots
51. Aquaman
52. Ideal Home
53. Outlaw King
54. Overlord
55. Ready Player One
56. Ben Is Back
57. Monsters and Men
58. The Mule
59. On the Basis of Sex
60. Bohemian Rhapsody
61. White Boy Rick
62. Papillon
63. Game Night
64. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
65. Ocean's Eight
66. Instant Family
67. Alpha
68. The Front Runner
69. The Predator
70. Apostle
71. The Cured
72. The Commuter
73. The Angel
74. Tag
75. Beautiful Boy
76. The Nun
77. Operation Finale
78. The Equalizer 2
79. The Spy Who Dumped Me
80. Cargo
81. Yardie
82. Bird Box
83. 12 Strong
84. Venom
85. Skyscraper
86. The Meg
87. Assassination Nation
88. Backstabbing for Beginners
89. The Girl in the Spider's Web
90. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
91. 22 July
92. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
93. The Little Stranger
94. Tomb Raider
95. 7 Days in Entebbe
96. Night School
97. The 15:17 To Paris
98. Peppermint
99. Mile 22
100. The First Purge
101. Hunter Killer
102. The Hurricane Heist
103. The Cloverfield Paradox
104. Breaking In
105. Mute
106. Kin
107. Hell Fest
108. Proud Mary
109. Robin Hood
110. Traffik
111. Winchester
112. The Happytime Murders
113. The Outsider
114. Slender Man

 

[909]

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

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

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

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

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

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

7/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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. mother!
18. Logan Lucky
19. The Beguiled
20. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
21. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
22. Brawl in Cell Block 99
23. John Wick: Chapter 2
24. The Disaster Artist
25. The Lost City of Z
26. First They Killed My Father
27. A Ghost Story
28. Last Flag Flying
29. Hostiles
30. Darkest Hour
31. Spider-Man: Homecoming
32. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
33. Sweet Virginia
34. It
35. Battle of the Sexes
36. Stronger
37. Brad's Status
38. Okja
39. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
40. Kong: Skull Island
41. It Comes at Night
42. Crown Heights
43. Split
44. 1922
45. Personal Shopper
46. Landline
47. Thank You for Your Service
48. Beatriz at Dinner
49. Chuck
50. Atomic Blonde
51. Shot Caller
52. Wheelman
53. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
54. Wonder
55. Brigsby Bear (I would bump a few of the movies below this to 6.5)
56. The Lego Batman Movie
57. Megan Leavey
58. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
59. Wonderstruck
60. Only the Brave
61. Marshall
62. Menashe
63. Roman J. Israel, Esq.
64. Walking Out
65. American Made
66. Annabelle: Creation
67. Beauty and the Beast
68. Imperial Dreams
69. Gifted
70. Murder on the Orient Express
71. The Zookeeper's Wife
72. The Glass Castle
73. The Foreigner
74. Free Fire
75. Win It All
76. The Wall
77. Life
78. My Cousin Rachel
79. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
80. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
81. The Fate of the Furious
82. Breathe
83. The Man Who Invented Christmas
84. Maudie
85. Patti Cake$
86. Sleight
87. Alone in Berlin
88. A United Kingdom
89. Trespass Against Us
90. The Mountain Between Us
91. War Machine
92. Happy Death Day
93. Lowriders
94. Justice League
95. To the Bone
96. Ghost in the Shell
97. Wakefield
98. Bright
99. The Tribes of Palos Verdes
100. The Hitman's Bodyguard
101. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
102. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
103. The Mummy
104. The Greatest Showman
105. Rough Night
106. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
107. Sand Castle
108. The Circle
109. American Assassin
110. CHiPs
111. Death Note
112. 47 Meters Down
113. The Belko Experiment
114. The Great Wall
115. Fist Fight
116. Baywatch
117. Snatched
118. Suburbicon
119. Wilson
120. The Dark Tower
121. Queen of the Desert
122. The House
123. Flatliners
124. Sleepless
125. Geostorm
126. All Eyez on Me
127. The Snowman
128. The Book of Henry
129. The Space Between Us
130. Daddy's Home 2

 

[909]

Official Secrets (2019), directed by Gavin Hood

You know how I said that on some level I'm addicted to these political thrillers? Once again, I'm drawn back into that genre with Official Secrets. It seems that I cannot help myself. Official Secrets was not supposed to be released in my specific area, but once it was, I jumped straight on before it could be taken from theaters. I was surprised that so many people showed up to watch the film considering that this could best be described as an extremely minor release. At least the people who went to see this were more lucky than some others at my theater, who had their projector break on them and were sent to less full auditoriums or given free tickets for later. Sucks to be them, but that's never happened to me. How that could not have happened to me by now, I do not know. Anyway, I'm sure some are wondering why I didn't rush straight out to review something like Hustlers. There is a reason why. From now on, the first thing I'm going to review are the movies I don't anticipate being in the theater very long. There will be some exceptions, of course. So, this week I'm going to review Angel Has Fallen because I haven't yet seen it, and I'm going to see Brittany Runs a Marathon. I also want to make sure that I'm not having any weeks where I only see one movie, and there's a possibility that could happen near the end of this month and start of October. I do not want that. Sometimes I will have to make decisions that mean I don't see a shitty movie, or I don't see a good movie for four weeks, and I'm fine with that.

Official Secrets is about Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley), and if you don't intimately know her story the film is a lot more easy for someone to watch. I did not know her story, and if you're interested in watching the film, turn around here. Katharine was an employee at GCHQ in 2003, far prior to Mission Accomplished. Her mission, such as it was, is to translate Mandarin into English for the British government. She was a spy, simple as that. She also has a delicate situation at home. Her husband Yasar (Adam Bakri) is Kurdish, his application for asylum was rejected until Katharine had married him. She knew Yasar well in advance of that, but considering what it is that she did, it is certainly something to be held against her in the future. One day while at work, she receives an e-mail from an NSA employee, Frank Koza. In the e-mail, Koza asks for the British to help him in a secret operation to bug the UN offices of Angola, Pakistan, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, and Guinea. Those were six of the ten non-permanent members of the UN Security Council at the time, in bugging them this would enable the United States and Great Britain to go to war with Iraq. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the United States wanted to bribe these countries or use some other form of leverage on them.

When Katharine receives this memo, she is appalled. Every other employee receives the memo, but nobody voices much of an opinion or anything like one. The operation described in the memo is completely illegal, for starters. Katharine just can't help herself and feels compelled to take action. After copying the memo to a floppy disk, Katharine prints it and decides to send it out to an anti-war activist. Somehow, it winds up in the hands of Yvonne Ridley (Hattie Morahan), who has Stockholm Syndrome or something like it, but I digress. From Ridley it goes to Martin Bright (Matt Smith), and it's time to investigate this as a story. Martin wrote for The Observer, a paper which was edited by Roger Alton (Conleth Hill). The Observer is stated as being a pro-Iraq war paper, but this memo is a doozy. Before even taking the memo to Roger, Martin and Peter (Matthew Goode) decided that they need to do some investigating. An extremely liberal reporter named Ed (Rhys Ifans) is basically laughed out of the newsroom for daring to suggest that the war is bullshit, so you can understand why Martin and Peter would investigate. The facts are this. The reporters need to learn whether or not the memo is real. Then, there's the matter of publishing the thing and risking their own credibility as the British government is hellbent on going to war. Katharine has risked much more than that, though. She's risked the immigration status of her husband and her own freedom. In leaking that memo, she has violated the Official Secrets Act. The act? No releasing fucking state secrets. Period.

It should hardly be surprising what this movie is about considering the trailer gives a lot away, but what I didn't know about was the end of the film. It was a rather genius gambit played by Katharine and her lawyer Ben (Ralph Fiennes). They may not have realized while they were doing it, but in pleading not guilty, the government would have to divulge state secrets themselves, and that was something they were not willing to do. The legality of the war in Iraq was a much bigger deal overseas than it was here, I should note. The war was deeply unpopular there before it had even happened. Now that we know the fallacy of the war itself, the question is whether or not a film has grounds to inform the public in some kind of way that actually matters. I think this is a good film, but I'm not sure it truly meets that burden of existence that I've just laid out. The director was probably not as heavy handed in making his point as he could have been. This film does show, however, exactly how far a government would go to ensure that their lies do not get out to the public. We all already know this though. I think I've made my point.

Of course, a film like Official Secrets is very heavy on exposition, so you need some actors who can carry their end of the film in order to make that entertaining. Keira Knightley sticks out as being very believable, but Rhys Ifans as the anti-war renegade reporter really makes this thing work. He's not in the film much, but his part is definitely memorable and needed to be played exactly how it was played. His responses to everything were making it very difficult to hold in laughter. Conleth Hill is the same way, as anyone who watched Game of Thrones would know. A film like this needs to have heavyweights in order to elevate it above the pack. I would say that this is merely a good political thriller/journalism movie. Stories about whistleblowers are naturally entertaining, but they work best when the whistleblower is revealing something that leads to them being at risk of being murdered or worse. The Insider is a good example of this. If Russell Crowe's character had told the truth at an earlier point in history, he would have eaten a bullet. Katharine, in this case, was waiting for her trial date. I think you can see what I mean. Anyway, whistleblowing is goddamn important and we should not forget that, but we should also not forget that government can destroy lives wantonly if it so pleases.

7/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

Angel Has Fallen (2019), directed by Ric Roman Waugh

I'm at a bit of a loss for how to review Angel Has Fallen. It's rare that I don't know what I'm going to say beforehand, but it's difficult to tackle a franchise like this one. What can you say? This is one of the worst franchises in Hollywood, and that's not even in dispute. The second film was one of the worst franchise entries ever made, as offensive as it could possibly have been, but the director is Iranian himself and it is difficult to call him out for being racist. So, everyone said the movie was horrible and left it at that. Angel Has Fallen is not anywhere near as horrible as London Has Fallen. I mean, it's not even close. What we have in Angel Has Fallen is a film that actually could have been good. I can't believe I'm saying this. There are reasons that it isn't, and over the course of this review I'll get to that, but there are some great moments here. Almost all of them are provided by Nick Nolte, and again, I'll get into that. The rest of the film simply can't match that, and the climax of the film features some of the worst use of CGI that I've ever seen in my entire life. At least, I suppose, this is not a film that dives head-first into racist tropes.

As with every other film in this series, Angel Has Fallen follows Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), the greatest Secret Service agent in the history of the Secret Service. That's how these movies make it seem, anyway. This movie starts off at a privately contracted military facility, which is run by Wade (Danny Huston), a friend who Mike served in the Army with. They go through their exercise and all that, after which Wade suggests to Mike that he needs help with a contract. The contract will apparently allow Wade to get his company, Salient Global, out of the red. The best comparison is that Salient is supposed to be like Blackwater. Mike tells Wade that he'll do what he can, but there's more to the story than that. The President is now Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman), and he doesn't believe in using private military contractors in any context at all. Mike has been recommended for the position of Secret Service Director, he is going to be replacing a Mr. Gentry (Lance Reddick). So, to be clear, this film is introducing new characters to the franchise and clearly will be disposing of them once the film is over. Anyway, Mike neglects to tell the President that he is suffering from some severe physical problems, namely concussions, a screwed up neck, and insomnia. If he isn't in the field anymore, his job would be easier, so I suppose that's his reason for not saying anything.

After the meeting at Salient, Mike invites Wade to his house, and after the visit he tells him that he will probably decline the Director's position when it is offered to him. They recast his wife (Piper Perabo) for some reason, and made her a bigger part of this movie, but there's some talks that they need to have after he returns from a trip with the President. The trip is one of the fishing variety, because the President wants to get out of Washington and bring about 50 security people with them to do so. The thing is, this is a goofy series where weird stuff happens, so it's time for a terrorist attack. All of a sudden, armed drones appear and take everyone out except for the President, and for that matter Mike too. Both are unconscious when transported to the hospital, and Trumbull is in a coma for a little bit. Because of that, the Vice President (Tim Blake Nelson) is sworn in and now we have a new man in charge. Over the course of the following few minutes, we learn that Mike is being charged with murder and attempting to assassinate the President. The reason? None of the drones attacked him, and someone had a van with his DNA placed all over it. Nobody's alive to dispute his account except Trumbull, and he's in a coma, so it's time to haul Mike off to jail. Who could have set him up?

Everyone knows that one of the newly introduced characters set him up, but it's most obviously Mike and the film doesn't do very much to hide that. The reason I'm saying this could have been good, is largely because Nick Nolte should have been in the film more as Mike's dad. The story is oddly easy to figure out as well, when in these films it usually isn't. That's not what's wrong with Angel Has Fallen at all. You know what is? How about some horrible usage of CGI smoke? It was so bad I couldn't believe that I was seeing it, because this is the kind of thing that should be in a very cheap TV movie and not a $40 million feature. I don't really want to go crazy talking about this and I've already said most of what I wanted to say. Everything in this movie is not as ridiculous in the other movies, but that only takes the film so far. Much of the premise is blatantly ripped off The Fugitive in one way or another, even though there's no assassination in The Fugitive, the template from scene to scene is still the same.

5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

Uncle Drew (2018), directed by Charles Stone III

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

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

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

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

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

6/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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. Tully
50. Mary Queen of Scots
51. Aquaman
52. Ideal Home
53. Outlaw King
54. Overlord
55. Ready Player One
56. Ben Is Back
57. Monsters and Men
58. The Mule
59. On the Basis of Sex
60. Bohemian Rhapsody
61. White Boy Rick
62. Papillon
63. Game Night
64. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
65. Ocean's Eight
66. Instant Family
67. Alpha
68. The Front Runner
69. The Predator
70. Apostle
71. Uncle Drew
72. The Cured
73. The Commuter
74. The Angel
75. Tag
76. Beautiful Boy
77. The Nun
78. Operation Finale
79. The Equalizer 2
80. The Spy Who Dumped Me
81. Cargo
82. Yardie
83. Bird Box
84. 12 Strong
85. Venom
86. Skyscraper
87. The Meg
88. Assassination Nation
89. Backstabbing for Beginners
90. The Girl in the Spider's Web
91. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
92. 22 July
93. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
94. The Little Stranger
95. Tomb Raider
96. 7 Days in Entebbe
97. Night School
98. The 15:17 To Paris
99. Peppermint
100. Mile 22
101. The First Purge
102. Hunter Killer
103. The Hurricane Heist
104. The Cloverfield Paradox
105. Breaking In
106. Mute
107. Kin
108. Hell Fest
109. Proud Mary
110. Robin Hood
111. Traffik
112. Winchester
113. The Happytime Murders
114. The Outsider
115. Slender Man

 

[909]

Come Sunday (2018), directed by Joshua Marston

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

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

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

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

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

6.5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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. Tully
50. Mary Queen of Scots
51. Aquaman
52. Ideal Home
53. Outlaw King
54. Overlord
55. Ready Player One
56. Ben Is Back
57. Monsters and Men
58. The Mule
59. On the Basis of Sex
60. Bohemian Rhapsody
61. White Boy Rick
62. Papillon
63. Game Night
64. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
65. Ocean's Eight
66. Alpha
67. Come Sunday
68. Instant Family
69. The Front Runner
70. The Predator
71. Apostle
72. Uncle Drew
73. The Cured
74. The Commuter
75. The Angel
76. Tag
77. Beautiful Boy
78. The Nun
79. Operation Finale
80. The Equalizer 2
81. The Spy Who Dumped Me
82. Cargo
83. Yardie
84. Bird Box
85. 12 Strong
86. Venom
87. Skyscraper
88. The Meg
89. Assassination Nation
90. Backstabbing for Beginners
91. The Girl in the Spider's Web
92. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
93. 22 July
94. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
95. The Little Stranger
96. Tomb Raider
97. 7 Days in Entebbe
98. Night School
99. The 15:17 To Paris
100. Peppermint
101. Mile 22
102. The First Purge
103. Hunter Killer
104. The Hurricane Heist
105. The Cloverfield Paradox
106. Breaking In
107. Mute
108. Kin
109. Hell Fest
110. Proud Mary
111. Robin Hood
112. Traffik
113. Winchester
114. The Happytime Murders
115. The Outsider
116. Slender Man

 

[909]

Zombieland (2009), directed by Ruben Fleischer

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

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

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

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

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

7/10

 

[909]

Rampage (2018), directed by Brad Peyton

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

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

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

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

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

5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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. Tully
50. Mary Queen of Scots
51. Aquaman
52. Ideal Home
53. Outlaw King
54. Overlord
55. Ready Player One
56. Ben Is Back
57. Monsters and Men
58. The Mule
59. On the Basis of Sex
60. Bohemian Rhapsody
61. White Boy Rick
62. Papillon
63. Game Night
64. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
65. Ocean's Eight
66. Alpha
67. Come Sunday
68. Instant Family
69. The Front Runner
70. The Predator
71. Apostle
72. Uncle Drew
73. The Cured
74. The Commuter
75. The Angel
76. Tag
77. Beautiful Boy
78. The Nun
79. Operation Finale
80. The Equalizer 2
81. The Spy Who Dumped Me
82. Cargo
83. Yardie
84. Bird Box
85. 12 Strong
86. Venom
87. Skyscraper
88. The Meg
89. Assassination Nation
90. Backstabbing for Beginners
91. The Girl in the Spider's Web
92. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
93. 22 July
94. Tomb Raider
95. Rampage
96. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
97. The Little Stranger
98. 7 Days in Entebbe
99. Night School
100. The 15:17 To Paris
101. Peppermint
102. Mile 22
103. The First Purge
104. Hunter Killer
105. The Hurricane Heist
106. The Cloverfield Paradox
107. Breaking In
108. Mute
109. Kin
110. Hell Fest
111. Proud Mary
112. Robin Hood
113. Traffik
114. Winchester
115. The Happytime Murders
116. The Outsider
117. Slender Man

 

[Kahran Ramsus]

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

 

[909]

I spoiled while leaving out SOOOOOOOOOO many details.

Ad Astra (2019), directed by James Gray

It doesn't take a genius to realize why the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is so bad after having seen Ad Astra. People thought they were getting something that they were not, something more basic and easy to understand than what this was. That sentence is not to say that Ad Astra is difficult to understand. The simple fact is that James Gray somehow got Fox to fund him making an art movie. It appears that he did so to the tune of $100 million dollars. I can see why a studio would do this, particularly after Interstellar did what it did, but there are key differences in the two films. One is that Interstellar is more exciting while Ad Astra is heavily character focused. Interstellar also has far grander scope, and is more sad as a whole. It is also far more unrealistic. The thing is, I'm not sure which of these two movies I liked more. I'm genuinely unsure that I'll ever be able to tell people. To go back to what I said about an art film, the thing I'm talking about is that this story is not just character focused, it's singularly focused. Perhaps most importantly we have a space movie that lacks in aliens and still presents space as being an extremely dangerous place where bad things could happen at any given time. There are some scientific errors as there are in any space movie, but in this case I think I can ignore them. I do not think extreme realism is the point of these kinds of movies. Instead, I think the point is about the journey that humans can find themselves capable of enduring, and in some cases those they cannot. Ad Astra is pretty much exactly about that.

Ad Astra is set in the near future, and there's some stuff said at the beginning of the movie that I won't mention in order to make this easier. Humanity has taken to the stars, because that's probably what's going to happen in the next 200 years. Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is on the International Space Antenna, doing repairs of some kind and perhaps even climbing back down to Earth. I could not tell. He's wearing a parachute, but while this is going on there's an incident. The antenna is effectively destroyed at the top by a power surge, and fortunately the power below is cut off by Roy before he is ejected off the antenna. He is able to parachute down to the planet below and survives, after which he is called in for a debriefing. A debriefing, they say? Sounds like bullshit both to me and to Roy. He heads in, at which point we are treated to some features of the film that would be very common. Roy and everyone else who is part of SpaceCom (US Space Command) is supposed to undergo mandatory automated psychiatric evaluations. Technology has advanced enough that this is now possible, and if the soldiers do not pass those evaluations, they are not fit for duty. This is a rather routine process, it seems. Another thing is that Roy has an ongoing internal monologue, or he narrates the movie. You can decide which it is.

After surviving the incident with the antenna, it turns out there have been power surges across the globe and for that matter in our solar system. This is the first hint we get that there is something else out there, but I've already blown some of the plot by stating there aren't aliens. SpaceCom has called Roy in not for a debriefing, but another mission that only he can do. SpaceCom has come to the determination that these power surges have been traced to the Lima Project, which was created to search for intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy, using Neptune as a launching point for probes and/or data gathering. When you aren't expecting this, it's mindblowing, and there's no reason to expect that because it isn't in the promotional material. It turns out that Roy's father Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones) was in charge of this project, and SpaceCom believes there's a possibility he may be alive. Simply put, Roy is tasked with traveling to Mars in order to try and establish communication with his father. On this mission, he will be accompanied by a Colonel Pruitt (Donald Sutherland), a man who has had some sort of relationship with Clifford. I have left out a lot of the best details of the movie, but I'm going to mention some below.

The revelation that the Moon and Mars have both been colonized is something that I found great, but that would have been ruined had I seen the second trailer. It's a good thing I did not. What we have here is a film that combines technical brilliance and a great script, even though some of the things in the film aren't scientifically realistic. I found myself barely caring. It's hard to care when the first event off of Earth features a Moon that is quite colonized, and the revelations keep on coming from that point as the events play out from step to step. For lack of a better word this kind of thing is awesome. When I don't expect something prior to heading into a movie, and it delivers so far beyond my hopes, this is the kind of feeling I'm left with. That's without getting into the specific details of things, which I'm trying not to do. The existential quality of Ad Astra also hangs out in the background, it's always there but there are other things happening that lead the viewer to forget about what's most important until the filmmaker wants to bring it back up. This, I found, ensured that people shouldn't be overwhelmed by a one note plot. This is also something that viewers are in vehement disagreement with, crowds do not have patience for films like this one.

The question why viewers don't want to watch movies like Ad Astra is something I suppose I can't answer, because I genuinely don't have an answer why that is. I suppose because it's slow. The thing is, Ad Astra has some of the best cinematography and set construction that exists. It poses the question of space colonization in conjunction with the overwhelming likelihood that we will never encounter intelligent life. Ad Astra also does make the assertion that people will ultimately have to come to terms with what can or cannot be found. The pace of the movie is somewhat slow as a result, but there are scenes here that are unforgettable. I'm not the average person though, I have my own wants and desires. I love space movies of all kinds, but when the content is thought provoking like this, I love it even more and can't help but remain intrigued. I haven't even gotten into some of the other aspects of the film that I liked, but I've pretty much covered what I disliked. Ad Astra is a bit slow and does have the limitation of ensuring that people could possibly feel very badly about the film based on one of its plot points. Gray's last movie was The Lost City of Z, which had its own existential questions about adventurism, but I think Ad Astra is a fairly large improvement on that. I did very much like both these films, but the visual aspect of Ad Astra is just fucking amazing. I don't know what else to say and I cannot believe someone agreed to make an uncommercial film like this with such a large budget.

I almost forgot to say something about Brad Pitt, who should absolutely be nominated for both acting Oscars and should certainly win Best Supporting Actor for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. There is nothing that's going to come close to that. As for Best Actor, time will tell on that one. The range shown in these two performances is ridiculous, like watching two entirely different people...except you aren't.

9/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

I made an adjustment to this list because movies like Midsommar, Ad Astra, and The Farewell made me feel way more than Booksmart. The two of those that I watched a while ago, they're going to stick with me for a long time.

Also, I do promise to catch up, I have just been extremely busy.

 

[BlackFlagg]

Booksmart (2019), directed by Olivia Wilde

What we have in Booksmart is a movie that more people should watch, but I'm not sure people will even though I and many others have recommended that they should. 2019 has been a bad year for film so far, but Booksmart is one that stands out above the rest as being an unabashedly great film. The story is such that I know I will eventually watch the film again, and I don't rewatch anything. The pace, the humor, just everything here works on a level that I cannot describe. This is also a little strange from a first time director. There are sequences that would feel twee in someone else's hands, and I'm sure people who saw this know exactly what I mean, but this moment where we go out of the story also works. On some level, I'm not sure I'll be able to get over this film for a while. There are no good comedic duos anymore, and this won't be made into a sequel, so we probably won't get anything like this again. I'm a little bummed out. This was a great script, well directed, very funny, made total sense, I don't have anything else to say. If you didn't enjoy this I think you might have a sexism problem, I only wish I had more words to describe how much I liked what I watched. I do wonder how long it will take for something to surpass this on my list. My suspicion is that it will be at least a month or two, if that. I'm not saying this will hang around enough to be in award conversations, but it's definitely memorable.

9/10

Just got done watching this and absolutely loved it. Probably one of the best High School, coming of age movies in I don't even know how long. I think it's one that will stand the test of time for many reasons, one of which i the use of pop culture references was about as minimal as it could be which will help keep it from feeling dated and let's it focus on the characters in a way that allows all to identify with them, past, present or future generations.