In Which I Briefly Review Movies

[909]

You Were Never Really Here (2018), directed by Lynne Ramsey

For whatever reason, reviewing You Were Never Really Here is proving difficult to tackle. I have had this file open for over two hours now, and I don't know what I should say. While I knew this movie was raw and violent, I suppose I wasn't prepared for just how far this movie would go. I don't want to be prepared, but you know how that goes. I am very surprised that this film wasn't released in 2017 or 2018's awards season. I would think that Amazon would sit on this one and launch it during a period where they had very little in terms of potential award winners. Obviously, they did not. Amazon usually has pretty good movies, but they never release them in a way that is beneficial towards the film and its awards chances. This might be my favorite of the movies that they've released. I'd also say it's better than Manchester by the Sea. So, why do movies like this not get the publicity that the people who see them believe that those films deserve? I can't answer this. This film is also one that disputes the long held idea in Hollywood that women can't direct violent movies, or movies with action. I believe this is something that came up when Black Widow was in production. Imagine being so idiotic that you think women can't direct a certain kind of anything. Yet, three years after You Were Never Really Here premiered at Cannes, things in Hollywood seem to be pretty much the same. You know, with the exception of the whole coronavirus thing.

You Were Never Really Here is a very short film which is very easy to sum up. Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is a hired gun who specializes in retrieving kidnapped girls from those who stole and trafficked them. Joe is very good at his job, but he's also traumatized from his past serving in Iraq and working for the FBI. Suicidal thoughts are a regular part of his day. He usually imagines suffocating himself with a bag, or actually does it just to see how far he can actually go. He doesn't go all the way, or there wouldn't be a movie at all. When we meet Joe, he's on a job in Cincinnati during which he brutally deals with a problem. After returning to New York City, we see that he lives with his mom (Judith Roberts). His mom needs help as she's quite old. Anyway, Joe is what we would call adequate help as he's too damaged do very much. Except, we learn that the thing in Cincinnati was a job. Joe prefers to have a middleman, and in this case his is Angel (Frank Pando). There is an issue though. For one, Angel knows his address. The second thing is that his son Moises (Vinicius Damasceno) sees Joe one day when he's walking in. So, Joe wants this middleman ditched for another one.

In order for that to happen, we have to see Joe's actual boss. John McCleary (John Doman) seems to be a handler of sorts, and everyone knows this is who you go to if you need to deal with a kidnapping and don't want the police to do it. Joe's next job is dealing with a New York State Senator, Albert Votto (Alex Manette). Votto has told Joe that his daughter Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov) has been kidnapped and forced to work in a brothel. Votto is running for re-election, so this needs to be handled very quietly. Or, in Joe's case, very brutally but in a way not involving the police. The thing is, when there's this kind of Jeffrey Epstein shit going on, a lot of people can be involved. When Joe's done retrieving Nina, it's clear that one of them could knock on his door at any moment. They may, for example, track him down to a hotel and locate the clerk. They also may shoot that clerk and murder him right in front of Joe. What happens after that?

You Were Never Really Here is a movie that can be described as an assault on the senses, and it is another movie where Joaquin Phoenix performed better than he did in Joker. I think there are one or two more in that category. Some of the things in this movie go so goddamn far I could hardly believe what I was watching. Everything here is going right for the viewer and making them care. Only really good filmmakers are able to accomplish that. There is a particularly devious scene near the end that actually bothered me as it was going on. The film's editing and sound also does the entire project a great service. I find that You Were Never Really Here is the kind of film I really look forward to watching, and it is also the kind of film I wish I had been able to watch sooner once I actually get around to watching it. I cannot reiterate enough that this is a very strong performance. The movie is also entirely about Phoenix's character and everything else barely rates. His motivations are spelled out and made clear. The story is uniquely focused on him and not extraneous factors.

I don't think this is truly a movie for everyone, but I believe it is a movie made for way more people than those who actually bothered to see it. There's a scene at a lake that doesn't really do anything for me, but other than that it feels like You Were Never Really Here was a film made for me.

The scene pictured above, by the way, is a perfect way to film violence in this century. We've seen it all before, but this is a different way of looking at things. If you haven't watched this already, you should.

9/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. You Were Never Really Here
6. Widows
7. First Man
8. BlacKkKlansman
9. Blindspotting
10. Leave No Trace
11. Black Panther
12. If Beale Street Could Talk
13. The Sisters Brothers
14. A Private War
15. Avengers: Infinity War
16. Stan & Ollie
17. Green Book
18. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
19. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
20. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
21. On My Skin
22. Private Life
23. Climax
24. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
25. Mid90s
26. Eighth Grade
27. Sorry to Bother You
28. Suspiria
29. The Death of Stalin
30. A Quiet Place
31. Vice
32. The Old Man & the Gun
33. Vox Lux
34. Bad Times at the El Royale
35. The Other Side of the Wind
36. Searching
37. A Simple Favor
38. The Hate U Give
39. Unsane
40. Disobedience
41. Boy Erased
42. Bumblebee
43. Mary Poppins Returns
44. Creed II
45. Hold the Dark
46. The Land of Steady Habits
47. Halloween
48. Ant-Man and the Wasp
49. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
50. Blockers
51. Beirut
52. Roxanne Roxanne
53. Tully
54. Mary Queen of Scots
55. Aquaman
56. Ideal Home
57. Outlaw King
58. Overlord
59. Ready Player One
60. Ben Is Back
61. Monsters and Men
62. The Mule
63. On the Basis of Sex
64. Bohemian Rhapsody
65. White Boy Rick
66. Papillon
67. Game Night
68. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
69. Ocean's Eight
70. Alpha
71. Come Sunday
72. Instant Family
73. The Front Runner
74. The Predator
75. Apostle
76. Uncle Drew
77. The Cured
78. The Commuter
79. The Angel
80. Tag
81. Beautiful Boy
82. The Nun
83. Operation Finale
84. The Equalizer 2
85. The Spy Who Dumped Me
86. Cargo
87. Yardie
88. Bird Box
89. 12 Strong
90. Venom
91. Skyscraper
92. The Meg
93. Assassination Nation
94. Crazy Rich Asians
95. Backstabbing for Beginners
96. The Girl in the Spider's Web
97. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
98. 22 July
99. Tomb Raider
100. Rampage
101. Hotel Artemis
102. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
103. The Little Stranger
104. 7 Days in Entebbe
105. Night School
106. The 15:17 To Paris
107. Den of Thieves
108. The Catcher Was a Spy
109. Peppermint
110. Mile 22
111. The First Purge
112. Hunter Killer
113. The Hurricane Heist
114. The Cloverfield Paradox
115. Breaking In
116. Mute
117. Kin
118. Hell Fest
119. Proud Mary
120. Robin Hood
121. Traffik
122. Winchester
123. The Happytime Murders
124. The Outsider
125. Slender Man

 

[HarleyQuinn]

Was waiting for you to tackle that one. It received a wide release in late April but I think it would've gotten buried if it were released during the Awards season. It made a hair under $11 Million worldwide as it was.

November alone had Bohemian Rhapsody, Dr. Seuss' The Grinch, Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald, Creed II, and Ralph Breaks the Internet. Then December had Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, Mary Poppins Returns, Aquaman, and Bumblebee.

As great a movie as it was, it's also kind of hard to market to audiences so I think that also hurt it. I only watched it on Prime after it was recommended to me for Phoenix's performance.

 

[909]

Lean on Pete (2018), directed by Andrew Haigh

I made a decision a few months ago that I would delay on watching some movies until I had more time in a day to do it, and now that time has come. Lean on Pete was in that category. I also delayed in part because this seemed to be a movie about horse racing. The thing is, if I had known what this movie actually was, I may not have watched it at all. I feel like I did not need this kind of downer in my life today. This was a very good film, but again, I was not ready for this shit. I have just had too much shit going on to have watched this right now. In its own way, this is a compliment. For a movie to hit hard, almost everything in the film needs to pull in the right direction. You'd probably also think from the film's description that this is a corny movie. It is definitely not. I think it also should be mentioned that this is a rarity, a film that reflects on the current state of humanity and being poor while not going overboard in doing so. This is a film that is also more bleak than I can possibly illustrated with my comparatively limited grasp of the English language.

Lean on Pete revolves around Charley (Charlie Plummer) a 15 year old who has just moved from Spokane to Portland. He lives with his father Ray (Travis Fimmel), and it seems that his father is an absentee kind at best. Ray works as a mechanic and has apparently been sleeping with the secretary, Lynn (Amy Seimetz). Lynn has told Ray that she is separated from her husband, who is a hot tempered Samoan guy. One day, Charley is out running through Portland and comes across a horse racing track, which he is inspired to tell his dad about. The kid knows nobody and has nothing but a tiny television. He deserves better. So, with that in mind, Charley decides to approach a trainer at the race course, Del (Steve Buscemi). Del is not a particularly good guy, but this isn't that surprising. Charley is just desperate for something. The start of his journey with Del takes him to a random farm where some people are having a horse race. Del's horse Lean on Pete is getting up there in years, but he's a good quarterhorse at this point. Lean on Pete wins the race, but this is done in a fashion that makes the viewer think perhaps the whole thing is shady.

After the race, Charley is to stay the night in Del's truck bed before they drive back to Portland. Upon arrival, he's paid 50 bucks, and Del tells him that he would like Charley to come back throughout the week. It's summer break, after all. Ray isn't particularly sold on this, but Charley shows him that he made money and everything gets smoothed over. That night, or the next night, things do not go well. While Charley's sleeping, the aforementioned Samoan guy shows up at Ray's house. He is not happy. The altercation ends with him throwing Ray through a glass sliding door, which causes a huge cut in Ray's bowels and leads to him being hospitalized. Like any other kid his age, Charley now no longer wants to be at home, so he decides to sleep at the stables. There are more and more adventures, which start to include a jockey (Chloe Sevigny), and these are pretty good scenes. The issue is that Charley is becoming attached to an older horse that is nearing being unfit to be raced. His father is also in the hospital for quite a long time, but when one night Charley shows up to visit, he learns that Ray went into sepsis and has died. He never told Del about any of this, but the kid is not able to take what's happened.

I divulged a lot of information about the film, but I wanted to make clear what kind of movie this is should someone decide they want to check something out from this topic. Unless you want to be really bummed out, I tell you now that you should probably not watch this. I'm the kind of person that watches movies like this when I'm already feeling depressed like this, but I wasn't feeling that way and as such the feelings I've gotten from this movie are rather jarring. The scenes here carry emotional weight, but I felt like I liked the film much more when the three actors were taking their horse caravan around the Pacific Northwest. The added depth from the other scenes is not inherently a strength, but it isn't a weakness either. The way the film shifts is still rather strong and this is a very good movie. It just isn't what I found myself wanting after the first thirty minutes or so. There were some interesting scenes with the kid and the horse. A lot of movies about horses like to play things out as if the horse is attached to the person they're with. In this case that isn't true, there's very little attachment on the end of the horse. In that sense this is a rather realistic film. I also noticed that Charley became attached to the horse in large part because he had nobody else to talk to. Both of the chances he did were with Del and Bonnie (Chloe Sevigny). Del told him not to ask so many questions, and he told Bonnie and Charley to stop talking to each other because they were talking too much. So, there went that.

Lastly, I found myself being very frustrated with the things that happen after Charley's dad dies. These are things that are no fault of anyone except the person who murdered his dad. This is a portrait about how people find themselves in situations they just can't shake. Charley could not have done anything else. His life was ultimately controlled by his dad, who didn't care all that much. He tried to get a job working with someone, and if they found out Charley was living in the stables, that would have been the end of the job. I left out some pertinent details for the sake of making the film worth watching, because this is a film worth watching. However, if you do so, you better be ready to see some very emotionally heavy scenes. I was not expecting this.

8/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. You Were Never Really Here
6. Widows
7. First Man
8. BlacKkKlansman
9. Blindspotting
10. Leave No Trace
11. Black Panther
12. If Beale Street Could Talk
13. The Sisters Brothers
14. A Private War
15. Avengers: Infinity War
16. Stan & Ollie
17. Green Book
18. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
19. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
20. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
21. Private Life
22. Climax
23. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
24. Mid90s
25. Lean on Pete
26. On My Skin
27. Eighth Grade
28. Sorry to Bother You
29. Suspiria
30. The Death of Stalin
31. A Quiet Place
32. Vice
33. The Old Man & the Gun
34. Vox Lux
35. Bad Times at the El Royale
36. The Other Side of the Wind
37. Searching
38. A Simple Favor
39. The Hate U Give
40. Unsane
41. Disobedience
42. Boy Erased
43. Bumblebee
44. Mary Poppins Returns
45. Creed II
46. Hold the Dark
47. The Land of Steady Habits
48. Halloween
49. Ant-Man and the Wasp
50. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
51. Blockers
52. Beirut
53. Roxanne Roxanne
54. Tully
55. Mary Queen of Scots
56. Aquaman
57. Ideal Home
58. Outlaw King
59. Overlord
60. Ready Player One
61. Ben Is Back
62. Monsters and Men
63. The Mule
64. On the Basis of Sex
65. Bohemian Rhapsody
66. White Boy Rick
67. Papillon
68. Game Night
69. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
70. Ocean's Eight
71. Alpha
72. Come Sunday
73. Instant Family
74. The Front Runner
75. The Predator
76. Apostle
77. Uncle Drew
78. The Cured
79. The Commuter
80. The Angel
81. Tag
82. Beautiful Boy
83. The Nun
84. Operation Finale
85. The Equalizer 2
86. The Spy Who Dumped Me
87. Cargo
88. Yardie
89. Bird Box
90. 12 Strong
91. Venom
92. Skyscraper
93. The Meg
94. Assassination Nation
95. Crazy Rich Asians
96. Backstabbing for Beginners
97. The Girl in the Spider's Web
98. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
99. 22 July
100. Tomb Raider
101. Rampage
102. Hotel Artemis
103. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
104. The Little Stranger
105. 7 Days in Entebbe
106. Night School
107. The 15:17 To Paris
108. Den of Thieves
109. The Catcher Was a Spy
110. Peppermint
111. Mile 22
112. The First Purge
113. Hunter Killer
114. The Hurricane Heist
115. The Cloverfield Paradox
116. Breaking In
117. Mute
118. Kin
119. Hell Fest
120. Proud Mary
121. Robin Hood
122. Traffik
123. Winchester
124. The Happytime Murders
125. The Outsider
126. Slender Man

 

[909]

The Oath (2018), directed by Ike Barinholtz

Nearing the fall of 2018, I saw the preview for The Oath many times while sitting in the theater. I also saw a cardboard ad. For whatever reason, this movie did not ever play in my theater and as a result I didn't watch it. After watching The Oath, I know why this movie drew nothing at the box office and never made it to my theater. This is a movie that is inherently divisive to some while amusing to others. I did find this movie somewhat amusing even though I couldn't understand some of the decisions made with this story. Not all of the comedic scenes land either. I still appreciate when there are movies that attempt to do something that is very difficult to do, and in this case that's especially true. You know how hard it is to make a comedy about our current political environment and the way that people treat each other at the dinner table? It definitely isn't easy, and I wasn't expecting a few of the caricatures presented in The Oath. Usually, when someone attempts to make a movie about Thanksgiving, this type of person is ignored. In reality they are often the most important part of a Thanksgiving dinner. As a host, and particularly a host that feels this way, the entire mood of the occasion falls on how they're feeling. It was ballsy to make this the lead character.

The Oath is set in the very near future, or rather now if you'd prefer because all of these things could happen now. Americans are asked, but not required to sign a loyalty oath to this great country. They have until Black Friday on the next year to do so. One of the things people will get if they sign the oath is a tax credit, so it isn't surprising that a lot of people have gladly chosen to sign this oath. Chris (Ike Barinholtz) is not going to be one of the people who signs this oath. He is married to Kai (Tiffany Haddish), and they have a daughter, but this is one oath that will absolutely not be signed. You see, Chris is one of those kinds of liberals. The social justice warrior kind who lets politics completely run his life. He checks his phone all the time to see the latest news, he's always watching the news, he just can't help it. You know, one thing about this coronavirus crisis is that I hope people learn to stop being outraged all of the time. We have to learn how to properly allocate our time and attention.

Chris and Kai live in the suburbs of Los Angeles, and it's time for Thanksgiving. Chris has invited his extended family to travel from their homes around the country, and some of these people may or may not disagree with him. The viewer is left in suspense as far as this goes, but I need to fill out my review. First to arrive are Abbie (Meredith Hagner) and Pat (Jon Barinholtz), the latter of whom is the brother of Chris and the former is Pat's girlfriend. Next up are Chris' parents, Hank (Chris Ellis) and Eleanor (Nora Dunn). These two seem to be very socially conservative and do not like cursing. Lastly to arrive are Chris and Pat's sister Alice (Carrie Brownstein) and her husband Clark (Jay Duplass). Clark has the flu and winds up being holed into a room all weekend. It turns out that Alice is Chris and Kai's sole ally, but inevitably the weekend comes to revolve around the oath. The oath is a big deal. People are getting arrested and shot over the oath. People have been protesting the oath. In restaurants, people freak out when someone is talking about the oath in a way they do not agree with. It turns out that all of Chris' extended family members have signed the oath. He cannot handle this shit, because as I've already told you, he's one of those kinds of liberals.

These scenes are funny even though Chris is a caricature, but I think he's an accurate caricature. Everyone knows someone like him, who can't help but talk about politics all the time. They don't understand there are times when nobody wants to hear it. I may be considered one of these people myself, but there's a time and place for everything. People need to know when to read the room, but more importantly people need to know to not bring up certain subjects when around people they know they'll wind up arguing with. Now, I will say another thing though. It always surprises me when people decide how much familial loyalty should play a part in their life once they become an adult. You could say that someone doesn't have a choice who to have Thanksgiving with. Thing is, when I watched this movie, one of the negatives about it is that I couldn't understand why someone would invite their family to their own house and act like a piece of shit. You would think that a reasonably successful person would spend the holiday in a way that would make them happy? I know that it has to be this way for the purposes of the film, but when people have problems at Thanksgiving, I envision those things as being a problem that people endure for the sake of traveling to see one or two of their ten family members. Or, in some cases, people who have literally no choice because they're poor, they aren't independent, and they have to do it or are dragged there by their spouse.

The dichotomy of this movie is that this is a comedy that inspires a lot of conversation about politics and how we live our lives. While this is a reasonably funny movie, in some way that gets thrown to the side because anyone who watches this movie will feel a different way about the first half of this movie. I say the first half because the second half is a completely different kind of film. I don't think that the oath is something that will happen here, but it is something that could happen here and that's why the film has some power. It shows the inherent problem with the addiction to politics that some people have, and by that I'm talking about the people who would want fealty pledged to this country. We all know what kind of people those are. For whatever reason, this movie takes a strange turn towards violence and this doesn't really work for me, but for the most part I'm focused on the first part of the movie and I liked that section. Some of the lines Barinholtz gave himself are very funny. Problem is, I would have liked this movie more if there had been some focus on why people wind up reinforcing their own opinions in the ways that they do.

6/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. You Were Never Really Here
6. Widows
7. First Man
8. BlacKkKlansman
9. Blindspotting
10. Leave No Trace
11. Black Panther
12. If Beale Street Could Talk
13. The Sisters Brothers
14. A Private War
15. Avengers: Infinity War
16. Stan & Ollie
17. Green Book
18. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
19. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
20. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
21. Private Life
22. Climax
23. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
24. Mid90s
25. Lean on Pete
26. On My Skin
27. Eighth Grade
28. Sorry to Bother You
29. Suspiria
30. The Death of Stalin
31. A Quiet Place
32. Vice
33. The Old Man & the Gun
34. Vox Lux
35. Bad Times at the El Royale
36. The Other Side of the Wind
37. Searching
38. A Simple Favor
39. The Hate U Give
40. Unsane
41. Disobedience
42. Boy Erased
43. Bumblebee
44. Mary Poppins Returns
45. Creed II
46. Hold the Dark
47. The Land of Steady Habits
48. Halloween
49. Ant-Man and the Wasp
50. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
51. Blockers
52. Beirut
53. Roxanne Roxanne
54. Tully
55. Mary Queen of Scots
56. Aquaman
57. Ideal Home
58. Outlaw King
59. Overlord
60. Ready Player One
61. Ben Is Back
62. Monsters and Men
63. The Mule
64. On the Basis of Sex
65. Bohemian Rhapsody
66. White Boy Rick
67. Papillon
68. Game Night
69. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
70. Ocean's Eight
71. Alpha
72. Come Sunday
73. Instant Family
74. The Front Runner
75. The Predator
76. Apostle
77. The Oath
78. Uncle Drew
79. The Cured
80. The Commuter
81. The Angel
82. Tag
83. Beautiful Boy
84. The Nun
85. Operation Finale
86. The Equalizer 2
87. The Spy Who Dumped Me
88. Cargo
89. Yardie
90. Bird Box
91. 12 Strong
92. Venom
93. Skyscraper
94. The Meg
95. Assassination Nation
96. Crazy Rich Asians
97. Backstabbing for Beginners
98. The Girl in the Spider's Web
99. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
100. 22 July
101. Tomb Raider
102. Rampage
103. Hotel Artemis
104. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
105. The Little Stranger
106. 7 Days in Entebbe
107. Night School
108. The 15:17 To Paris
109. Den of Thieves
110. The Catcher Was a Spy
111. Peppermint
112. Mile 22
113. The First Purge
114. Hunter Killer
115. The Hurricane Heist
116. The Cloverfield Paradox
117. Breaking In
118. Mute
119. Kin
120. Hell Fest
121. Proud Mary
122. Robin Hood
123. Traffik
124. Winchester
125. The Happytime Murders
126. The Outsider
127. Slender Man

 

[909]

Upgrade (2018), directed by Leigh Whannell

I thought it would be interesting to start a new month with Upgrade considering the last movie I saw in a theater was Whannell's last film, The Invisible Man. The Invisible Man was a movie that already made great profit and was proceeding to that point where every studio would be over the moon. Upgrade is not that. Upgrade is a different kind of horror movie that doesn't really become a horror movie until much later on in the story. As a result, and in part due to marketing and the budgets of the respective films, Upgrade was not a smash hit the same way The Invisible Man was. I don't think it would have been anyway, to be clear. Upgrade can best be described as a very good B movie. That's what it seems like everyone was shooting for, and it seemed like everyone thought this may be a straight to VOD movie, but it's too good to be that. I don't really know what to compare this movie to because I haven't quite seen anything like the lead character, but the story of the film is something I feel like I've seen many times before. I guess it's a good twist on that formula, and the movie is good as a result. What I'm wondering right now is if there will be a sequel.

Upgrade is about Grey (Logan Marshall-Green), a mechanic who lives with his wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo) in a cyberpunk, futuristic world. The setting made me wonder why we don't see this more. Asha is not a mechanic, she works for a tech company that helps out soldiers who have had trauma while on duty. She has a futuristic car that drives itself, while Grey prefers to drive real cars from the 70's. Their house is also very futuristic and has robotic arms that can create food. So, on the day this movie begins, Grey is going to deliver a Trans-Am to Eron Keen (Harrison Gilbertson), a tech innovator in the vein of someone like Elon Musk. I think that was the point, anyway. When they get to Eron's house, he decides to show them both his newest innovation. This is STEM, an implant that Eron says has unlimited potential. It can control someone's limbs, can effectively take over their mind and body, it can do anything. On the way home, Grey and Asha's self-driving car is taken over by something. Afterwards, it crashes, and they are attacked by four guys. Fisk (Benedict Hardie) is their leader, and he murders Asha while crippling Grey. Well now.

The title of Upgrade gives away what happens from this point, so I'll continue. A few months later, Grey is finally able to return home even though he cannot move his limbs. His mom Pamela (Linda Cropper) has had to move in, and shortly after that trip home they both go to the police station. At the station, Detective Cortez (Betty Gabriel) tells Grey that they cannot identify the attackers because good criminals are able to hide themselves from the drones that patrol the skies above this unnamed city. Eventually, Grey decides to kill himself, but this does not succeed. Grey is then visited by Eron, who is easily able to convince Grey to have STEM implanted in his body so that he can walk again. Of course, Grey regains control of his limbs, but he is also forced to sign a confidentiality agreement which stipulates he can't tell anyone about this. Of course, that means he can't get busted walking around outside. The thing is, it turns out that STEM can talk. STEM can do a lot of things. When Cortez drops off some evidence for Grey to look at, he watches a drone video that STEM is able to use in order to find out where one of the murderers lives. You think Grey's going to go there? You bet.

Upgrade is the kind of movie that is intent on making the audience creeped out by the lengths to which technology may go, and for the most part that stuff works. The fight scenes in this movie feature said technology and are pretty good. I still don't know what to make of the lead character deciding to act the character out like a robot, and the story of this movie doesn't make too much sense, but the film is entertaining enough that most viewers are glad to play along. The end of the film is also a nice twisted bit. I was glad that they did not take the route of this all being a dream inside his head. One thing I was thinking as the film was playing out is that this would have been better as a television series. Perhaps the gimmick would wear out given more time, but I don't think it would have. Where the inconsistencies come into play is with the police investigation. Much of this stuff just does not make sense at all. The cop never did shit the entire time Grey was in the hospital. I'm in the camp that initially would have thought an AI controlling my body to do that kind of shit would be pretty cool. It turns out that it is not cool.

If the action in this movie wasn't so cool, I'm pretty sure nobody in the world ever would have watched the film. So, it's good that it was and I found some of those action scenes to be darkly humorous. Overall, this is a fun movie. For whatever complaints I have, those are greatly overridden by the positives.

7/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. You Were Never Really Here
6. Widows
7. First Man
8. BlacKkKlansman
9. Blindspotting
10. Leave No Trace
11. Black Panther
12. If Beale Street Could Talk
13. The Sisters Brothers
14. A Private War
15. Avengers: Infinity War
16. Stan & Ollie
17. Green Book
18. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
19. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
20. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
21. Private Life
22. Climax
23. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
24. Mid90s
25. Lean on Pete
26. On My Skin
27. Eighth Grade
28. Sorry to Bother You
29. Suspiria
30. The Death of Stalin
31. A Quiet Place
32. Vice
33. The Old Man & the Gun
34. Vox Lux
35. Bad Times at the El Royale
36. The Other Side of the Wind
37. Searching
38. A Simple Favor
39. The Hate U Give
40. Unsane
41. Disobedience
42. Boy Erased
43. Bumblebee
44. Mary Poppins Returns
45. Creed II
46. Hold the Dark
47. The Land of Steady Habits
48. Halloween
49. Upgrade
50. Ant-Man and the Wasp
51. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
52. Blockers
53. Beirut
54. Roxanne Roxanne
55. Tully
56. Mary Queen of Scots
57. Aquaman
58. Ideal Home
59. Outlaw King
60. Overlord
61. Ready Player One
62. Ben Is Back
63. Monsters and Men
64. The Mule
65. On the Basis of Sex
66. Bohemian Rhapsody
67. White Boy Rick
68. Papillon
69. Game Night
70. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
71. Ocean's Eight
72. Alpha
73. Come Sunday
74. Instant Family
75. The Front Runner
76. The Predator
77. Apostle
78. The Oath
79. Uncle Drew
80. The Cured
81. The Commuter
82. The Angel
83. Tag
84. Beautiful Boy
85. The Nun
86. Operation Finale
87. The Equalizer 2
88. The Spy Who Dumped Me
89. Cargo
90. Yardie
91. Bird Box
92. 12 Strong
93. Venom
94. Skyscraper
95. The Meg
96. Assassination Nation
97. Crazy Rich Asians
98. Backstabbing for Beginners
99. The Girl in the Spider's Web
100. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
101. 22 July
102. Tomb Raider
103. Rampage
104. Hotel Artemis
105. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
106. The Little Stranger
107. 7 Days in Entebbe
108. Night School
109. The 15:17 To Paris
110. Den of Thieves
111. The Catcher Was a Spy
112. Peppermint
113. Mile 22
114. The First Purge
115. Hunter Killer
116. The Hurricane Heist
117. The Cloverfield Paradox
118. Breaking In
119. Mute
120. Kin
121. Hell Fest
122. Proud Mary
123. Robin Hood
124. Traffik
125. Winchester
126. The Happytime Murders
127. The Outsider
128. Slender Man

 

[909]

Uncorked (2020), directed by Prentice Penny

By the time I went to watch a movie tonight, it was already pretty late. I decided to go with a short, light film because of that. I was also looking on Netflix a few days ago, saw an ad for this movie, and decided that by my standards I definitely have to review this. I bet that basically nobody in the world has watched Uncorked yet, and they probably never will, but that's alright. It says a lot about this country that people would rather watch Mark Wahlberg act a fool once again than turn on a movie that isn't a complete piece of shit. While I've just said that, I understand why this hasn't been reviewed by many people for one reason alone. This is an extremely specialized subject. I've also just outright ignored that Uncorked was supposed to premiere at SXSW, and because the festival was cancelled it did not. Now that isn't ignored. Anyway, I won't in good conscience say that you have to see this movie or anything like that. This is a good TV movie though. Hoping for more isn't on the menu and expecting worse would not be either. The film is what it is.

Elijah (Mamoudou Athie) is a young man who lives in Memphis, working two jobs like many young people had to do in our pre-coronavirus society. One is at a liquor and wine store and the other is at a Memphis BBQ restaurant owned by his dad Louis (Courtney B. Vance), which was passed on from Louis' dad. You might be able to see where this is going. Elijah has had a long running fascination with wine, he seems to not want to work at his father's restaurant for the rest of his life. Elijah's mom Sylvia (Niecy Nash) understands this, but Louis does not. Louis is still holding a candle in hopes that Elijah will take over the family business and ensure that their legacy lives on. In the first scene of the film, Elijah meets Tanya (Sasha Compere) at his liquor store job. He impresses her with his knowledge of wine and eventually earns a date, and shock of shocks they become boyfriend and girlfriend. Tanya is very supportive whereas Louis is not. What Elijah really wants is to become a master sommelier. He is obsessed with wine, but again, his father is much less supportive, and this drives a wedge through their relationship.

I was able to easily summarize the film in one paragraph, which leads to my next point. Uncorked is not a film with a lot of depth. It is about one person and their journey from point A to point B, even though there may be things that set them off course. Maybe they won't even get to point B? This is a well acted film and it is easy to believe that Athie is truly this interested in wine, and the same can be said for Vance and Memphis BBQ. Louis is a character I do not think I've seen very much in any form of entertainment. Successful black business owner who is expanding their business and doesn't have to overcome any obstacles set upon them by other people is, again, not something I've seen very much. That says a lot about the entertainment industry. This is supposed to be a light family drama until the point that it isn't, and this change in tone isn't truly welcome because I don't like seeing bad things happen to good characters, but I will say that I didn't think the movie was that funny prior to that. Uncorked seemed as if it was supposed to be funny, too. Like I said, this is a movie that ultimately throws to the side a lot of the stereotypes that you see about black characters in the American entertainment industry. There is no melodrama here. The goal is to establish four characters and create friction amongst two of them. To this end, while the movie does lack in depth, it is a successful film.

I also think Uncorked would have been a better film had one character not left the family fold.

6.5/10

2020 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. The Invisible Man
2. Bad Boys for Life
3. The Gentlemen
4. Birds of Prey
5. Uncorked
6. Big Time Adolescence
7. Sonic the Hedgehog
8. The Call of the Wild
9. Underwater
10. The Rhythm Section
11. The Last Full Measure
12. Spenser Confidential
13. Like a Boss
14. The Grudge
15. Dolittle
16. Fantasy Island

 

[Brocklock]

Logan Marshall Green will forever get the Tom Hardy jokes and comparisons, but he carried that movie on his back and has been giving some really good performances like in The Invitation to differentiate himself from Hardy. His strange performance as lead and the action and fight scenes made Upgrade very entertaining to me. Leigh Whannel showed a ton of growth in The Invisible Man though and I think he will continue to get better as a director.

 

[Big Papa Paegan]

Upgrade was a favorite of 2018, a really slick nod to the cheesy Albert Pyun-style flicks I grew up on through video store rentals.

 

[909]

Lost Girls (2020), directed by Liz Garbus

Alright, so I sat on Lost Girls for a little bit, and when I needed another 90 minute movie it was time to check out this Netflix release. Garbus has released a lot of documentaries and it is likely that most people here have seen at least one of them. I think this is the first narrative movie that Garbus directed, but it is also a movie that I think is much better suited to a documentary. This is a film that would always be very difficult to make, and as I believe I've said before, some stories just can't be adapted into a narrative film. What this is, is certainly a story about real people. It may be sanitized because one of the people in this movie went on to murder their mother. I'll get to that eventually. Maybe it is the simple fact that none of their problems are really our business. The articles that I have read after watching this movie are far more interesting than this movie was. That's one of those things where I felt like it was a good thing that Lost Girls was only 90 minutes long. The aftermath is arguably more jarring than the film itself. Because, after all, who could murder their mother?

Lost Girls is about Shannan Gilbert, a sex worker who was later found dead in a marsh a year after her disappearance. An independent autopsy eventually found that her death was consistent with strangulation and that she was likely murdered. The process to get to that point is not quite so simple. Mari Gilbert (Amy Ryan) is her mother, who works as many jobs as it takes in order to put food on the table. Her two other daughters are Sherre (Thomasin McKenzie) and Sarra (Oona Laurence), and Mari has another daughter that is not depicted at all in this film. Sarra has some mental problems while Sherre is largely ignored. Mari still treats Shannan kindly even knowing what she's doing for a living, and in fact she asks Shannan for money. That is, until the day that Shannan disappears after telling her mom that she would come by. After Shannan no-shows, the next morning a doctor calls Mari's house and wants to talk about her daughter. Mari thinks this is a prank call or bill collector of some sort and hangs up. Big mistake.

One day turns into another, and that day into the next, and now Mari is worried. She hasn't heard from her daughter and her daughters haven't heard from their sister, so it's time to file a missing persons report. The three Gilbert's all haul their way down to Jersey City, where they talk with a detective and subsequently Shannan's boyfriend, Alex. At this point we learn that Alex has beaten Shannan before and he also knows what she does for a living, because he tells them to talk to her driver, Michael Pak (James Hiroyuki Liao). Michael tells the Gilbert's that after she went to a john on Long Island, freaked out and ran into the woods. He didn't see her again after that nor could he stop her. Now it's time to get police on Long Island involved. Their commissioner is Richard Dormer (Gabriel Byrne), who did...not do a very good job. In the process of not doing a very good job, some cop stops on the side of the road so their dog can take a shit. The dog shits and smells something after that, leading to the dog running off the road and finding some bodies. Four of them. None of them are Shannan though. You think her mom was mad before?

As already stated, the aftermath I found doing my own research was more interesting than the film itself. This is probably a bad take because in doing so I am diminishing the case where a sex worker was murdered. Also, this is the point of the film, that everyone tends to do this because it is very easy to do this. However, it is not my fault that a daughter depicted in this movie as kind and only slightly mentally unstable was full out crazy and killed their own mom. That kind of thing is an attention grabber. There are problems with the film beyond that though. There is the reality that a murder like this could only happen if nobody in the community cared at all, and if someone important was in on it. Lost Girls does not go far enough to this extent. Instead, towards the end, all that matters is that she's found and there's some text stating nobody has been charged with these murders. Justice has not been had. Also, one of the daughters in this movie murdered their mom. This gets two sentences. Does anyone else not see the issue with this? It's so blatantly staring me in the face that I can't help myself. The fact that there was a serial killer on Long Island should have been intriguing enough, but it genuinely was not. The police end of the film is not remotely grabbing and engaging enough.

There's touch required for a film like this, and while the filmmaker does have that, there's almost too much. The story that plays out on screen is only part of the story. The death of Sarra's sister ultimately leads to Sarra murdering her mom. The film is incomplete. The film also does its bit of pinning guilt on someone the people involved with making the film have decided is guilty. I have mixed feelings about this. The marsh Shannan was found in was near his house. Unfortunately, this is one of those cases that I can see never being resolved. As already mentioned, for this many people to be killed and dumped in the same area, and for nobody to ever have noticed...it is interesting. I will say that.

5.5/10

2020 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. The Invisible Man
2. Bad Boys for Life
3. The Gentlemen
4. Birds of Prey
5. Uncorked
6. Big Time Adolescence
7. Sonic the Hedgehog
8. The Call of the Wild
9. Lost Girls
10. Underwater
11. The Rhythm Section
12. The Last Full Measure
13. Spenser Confidential
14. Like a Boss
15. The Grudge
16. Dolittle
17. Fantasy Island

 

[909]

Hebrew, subtitles

Foxtrot (2017), directed by Samuel Maoz

How many Israeli movies have I watched? I believe the answer is that I have not watched any. When one of these movies gets praise I automatically assume that it's about Israel/Palestine, and while this one is, I probably shouldn't assume that. Honestly, this isn't that much about Israel/Palestine. Which, I must admit, is good. The issue is that I do not understand all of the nuances of this movie. I do not understand how the society in question works. I am left to take everything at face value. When doing so in the case of this movie, I have to assume that if anything in this movie was not a true depiction of Israeli society, this film never would have been made or received praise. Other countries are not like this one, where we have alternate realities and all that kind of shit. It's great to be an American. When it comes to a movie like this one, I will admit that the poster is jarring. I thought this would be a war movie. Which, I guess it's a realistic one. I assume that there were people who really did not like the way this depicted the IDF. That's fine. This isn't a perfect film, but it's a good one that's very easy to understand and draw the proper conclusions from. There are metaphors here though, so...

Foxtrot is a movie with three very distinct acts, but I can't talk about anything other than the first one. The first act begins with Michael (Lior Ashkenazi) and Dafna (Sarah Adler) learning that their son Jonathan has died in the line of duty. This is handled in very robotic, non-emotive fashion by the IDF soldiers who come to tell the Feldmans what has happened to their son. Dafna has to be drugged because she's so distraught, and Michael is handled with a distinct coldness and lack of care. He is a man, of course. We are not allowed to show emotion, and in Israel everyone has to serve in the military, so this is doubly expected of their men. Michael has to tell his mother, who has dementia and can't remember anything. When he returns to his Tel Aviv home, unfortunately this did not go the way he had initially planned. He didn't want anyone to be there, but his brother was unable to prevent that. Dafna's sister had come as well, and eventually more soldiers come with more news for Michael. They tell Michael that there has been a mistake. There is another Jonathan Feldman and it is not Michael's son who has been killed. Michael is extremely pissed to say the least, and he starts making demands that his son must come home so he can be sure that his son is actually alive.

For the second act, this film kicks over to where Jonathan (Yonathan Shiray) is actually stationed, in the Seam Zone of West Bank running a border check. You might figure how that kind of thing works on a daily basis. I don't want to go into details about that. The thing that was obvious to me while I was watching this was how detached the average person is from the way that their country treats people. It's easy for me to realize this because that's the case here too. It will always bother me that people are so divorced from the actions of their country. Yet, I don't really know what can actually be done about it. The thing going on right now is the first time that the average person who doesn't live in an oppressed war zone has had to live like someone who can't do all the things they want to do. This has been very difficult for the average person to stomach. The director isn't exactly subtle in terms of trying to get people to notice this either. There is an animated section before the third act that depicts Michael as having a black X taped over his eyes. Doesn't that say it all?

There are aspects of the film that I have to admit I don't understand. Maybe the sinking container is a metaphor for Israel's involvement in Palestine. Maybe I've just figured that out for myself and that's actually probably what it is. The characters aren't exactly subtle, I'm just not sure that I actually get it. "One day we'll just be sunk" sounds exactly right. I think the film is also too slow. The third act is not as interesting as the first two, both of which were admittedly glacially slow. The average viewer may really hate this film and not see what the big deal is. Foxtrot was Israel's submission to the Academy Awards and also won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. So, yeah, a lot of people really liked this and saw all the metaphors for what they were.

The thing about foreign movies is that they provide a glimpse into the unknown, a life unfamiliar from yours, and people that you hope to learn to understand over the course of two hours or so. Sometimes this works and sometimes it does not. There was a movie I watched a little while ago that was not in this category. I didn't review it, it was called Happy End, and I gave the film a decent score because the ending made me laugh. I couldn't bring myself to review it, so it wasn't that interesting and I didn't get much of a glimpse into anything. I'm sure there are people who don't understand why other people watch foreign movies, and some people here might feel that way, but I wanted to explain why I'm one of the people who watches them.

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

 

[909]

Gringo (2018), directed by Nash Edgerton

Yesterday I watched a documentary about the Armenian Genocide, which I chose not to review because I didn't want that taking up any more of my thoughts over the course of today. Maybe you can understand why I'd watch a goofy movie like this one is. I don't know how this movie was able to attract a good cast, I assume that it bombed massively as a result of this. Look, any movie called Gringo is going straight for B movie or parody territory, the way I see it. I think this is a movie that doesn't go quite far enough at all. the plot is meandering, we go from one scenario to the next, and at the end of the day this feels like a movie that I didn't need to watch. One thing that did make me laugh was the way Mexico City and Veracruz were interchanged as locations throughout the movie. These two places are 180 miles apart. So, yeah. Attention to detail might not be the calling card of this story. Unfortunately this is also a movie that feels like it belongs having been made at least ten years ago. The body jokes here do not land. This feels like a film that could have been so much better. Again, the cast is there. The concept is there. The execution of the story and the story itself just does not match up to what Gringo should be.

Gringo is a movie that comes to center around Harold Soyinka (David Oyelowo), an employee at a pharmaceutical company based in Chicago. I hate when movies do this, but the film starts with his bosses Richard (Joel Edgerton) and Elaine (Charlize Theron) recieving a call from him. Harold is screaming and saying that he has been kidnapped and his kidnappers are demanding a ransom of $5,000,000. It is then time to tell the story of how things came to be this way. Harold lives with his wife Bonnie (Thandie Newton), and after leaving for work that day he goes to meet with his accountant. His accountant tells Harold that his wife's side business as an interior decorator is bleeding money and that she needs to downsize her office into their house, but Harold doesn't really want to hear that. Harold, you see, is a push over kind of guy. It isn't likely that he'll stand up for himself. He goes to work, and over the course of some conversation, he comes to realize that his company is going to merge with another. This may lead to him being out of a job. Richard and Elaine both deny the merge entirely. Doesn't sound so good to me.

The three are slated to travel to Mexico, where they meet Sanchez (Hernan Mendoza), who runs the plant owned by Promethium Pharmaceuticals. Harold is closed out of the meeting, and it turns out that Sanchez has been working for Richard and Elaine on the side. You see, Promethium specialized in a medical marijuana pill that was being passed onto drug cartels so that they could make the money they needed to fund mass production of such a pill. In order to get their merger through, they want Sanchez to stop. You can't just stop giving product to drug cartels, you know. Later that evening, Harold goes out to dinner with his bosses. While taking food to someone, he records his bosses conversation. In the process he learns that he will lose his job and that the merger rumor was true. Upon retiring to his room, he learns that Bonnie is having an affair and now wants a divorce. Harold is now very upset, and decides to flake out of his hotel and disappear. Upon arriving at another motel, he convinced the two guys who run it to help him stage a hostage call. This, of course, takes us back to the start of the film, but we now know Elaine and Richard hate him. So, now what? Also, in a terrible tacked on subplot, we have Miles (Harry Treadaway) and Sunny (Amanda Seyfried) heading down to Mexico presumably to pick up some of these pills.

The last thing, I decided to give that no space because that never should have been included in the film at all. I see how the concept could work though. Medical marijuana pill. Guy who created it hates his life and is treated like the McDonald's janitor. Doesn't have money even though he's created something like this. Work from there. I don't know who wrote this, but I mean, come on. There are lots of things like this throughout the story that could have been greatly improved. There are still a few bright spots though. The cinematography and action scenes are good or good enough. David Oyelowo is actually very funny once his character gets the stick out of his ass. Unfortunately this film has too many characters and is jumping between locations too much. This prevents Oyelowo from really livening up the film the way it needs. For once I also found myself really not caring for one of Charlize Theron's performances. The vapid bitch character does not fit her and feels too much like a character. This isn't an outright terrible movie, but I can't believe that such a good cast was used in this film. The film is also nowhere near as focused on the medical marijuana pill as it should be. Of course, some of this focus is instead put on two characters who don't belong in the film at all. You can probably understand why I don't like Gringo, I found myself actually enjoying the movie very few times. One was the car chase near the end, but this alone made me like the movie more than Hotel Artemis, which was similar in terms of my not understanding why the cast is in this project.

5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. You Were Never Really Here
6. Widows
7. First Man
8. BlacKkKlansman
9. Blindspotting
10. Leave No Trace
11. Black Panther
12. If Beale Street Could Talk
13. The Sisters Brothers
14. A Private War
15. Avengers: Infinity War
16. Stan & Ollie
17. Green Book
18. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
19. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
20. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
21. Private Life
22. Climax
23. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
24. Mid90s
25. Lean on Pete
26. On My Skin
27. Eighth Grade
28. Sorry to Bother You
29. Suspiria
30. The Death of Stalin
31. A Quiet Place
32. Vice
33. The Old Man & the Gun
34. Vox Lux
35. Bad Times at the El Royale
36. The Other Side of the Wind
37. Searching
38. A Simple Favor
39. The Hate U Give
40. Unsane
41. Disobedience
42. Boy Erased
43. Bumblebee
44. Mary Poppins Returns
45. Creed II
46. Hold the Dark
47. The Land of Steady Habits
48. Halloween
49. Upgrade
50. Ant-Man and the Wasp
51. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
52. Blockers
53. Beirut
54. Roxanne Roxanne
55. Tully
56. Mary Queen of Scots
57. Aquaman
58. Ideal Home
59. Outlaw King
60. Overlord
61. Ready Player One
62. Ben Is Back
63. Monsters and Men
64. The Mule
65. On the Basis of Sex
66. Bohemian Rhapsody
67. White Boy Rick
68. Papillon
69. Game Night
70. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
71. Ocean's Eight
72. Alpha
73. Come Sunday
74. Instant Family
75. The Front Runner
76. The Predator
77. Apostle
78. The Oath
79. Uncle Drew
80. The Cured
81. The Commuter
82. The Angel
83. Tag
84. Beautiful Boy
85. The Nun
86. Operation Finale
87. The Equalizer 2
88. The Spy Who Dumped Me
89. Cargo
90. Yardie
91. Bird Box
92. 12 Strong
93. Venom
94. Skyscraper
95. The Meg
96. Assassination Nation
97. Crazy Rich Asians
98. Backstabbing for Beginners
99. The Girl in the Spider's Web
100. Gringo
101. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
102. 22 July
103. Tomb Raider
104. Rampage
105. Hotel Artemis
106. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
107. The Little Stranger
108. 7 Days in Entebbe
109. Night School
110. The 15:17 To Paris
111. Den of Thieves
112. The Catcher Was a Spy
113. Peppermint
114. Mile 22
115. The First Purge
116. Hunter Killer
117. The Hurricane Heist
118. The Cloverfield Paradox
119. Breaking In
120. Mute
121. Kin
122. Hell Fest
123. Proud Mary
124. Robin Hood
125. Traffik
126. Winchester
127. The Happytime Murders
128. The Outsider
129. Slender Man

 

[909]

Adrift (2018), directed by Baltasar Kormakur

There's one reason, and one reason alone that I watched Adrift. Eventually I'll get to that, but I'm going to be going with the short review format here. Adrift is about Tami Oldham (Shailene Woodley), who spent 41 days on a wrecked sailing yacht after it was inadvertently sailed into the path of Hurricane Raymond. Hurricane Raymond was a 1983 storm in the North Pacific Ocean, which did not quite make it to land after developing near Mexico. The film uses literally my least favorite narrative style, featuring two stories that converge into one. I can't say "the first of these" as it doesn't apply to either, so I'll just pick one to talk about first. At the start of this movie, Tami awakes on a sailing yacht that is not Richard's. She has been knocked out, and she is on the boat all alone. This ship has been destroyed by Hurricane Raymond, which is not made clear to the audience until about 70 minutes or so into the film. In other words, way too long into the film. There is no land or ships in sight, and Tami is clearly in pain from what has happened. She finds that all the electronics on board have been ruined, so she can't call for help. There is food on board, which will be used in order to get herself to land. Most importantly to Tami, she sees Richard on a lost dinghy. He is near death, but at least he's there.

The filmmaker decides that what this story really needs is the dual narrative. Therefore, five months before the hurricane, Tami arrives in Tahiti and enters the island with hopes of moving on from there to travel across the world. Not long after arrival she meets Richard (Sam Claflin), who has sailed to Tahiti on a boat that he personally made while working at a boatyard. During a dinner that Richard has invited Tami to, he talks about experiencing hallucinations while sailing alone for days if not weeks at a time. It is apparently rather difficult to live with one's self on a boat at sea. This is the most blatantly obvious foreshadowing I have seen in the movie for some time. These two become friends, lovers, etc. Eventually, they are both posed with an idea by the owners of the Hazana, a luxury yacht. The older married couple offers Richard and Tami a lot of money to sail the yacht to San Diego, and Richard accepts because Tami is going with them. So, now we know how they got on this boat.

It should be mentioned straight away that the ultimate point of this movie is to put two popular actors from young adult material into a film where they fall in love with each other and make teenage girls sad the world over. I did not know this was going to be the case when I turned this on. My thought process was simple. The guy who directed Everest made a movie featuring a hurricane. Are the special effects going to be an accurate representation of a hurricane? The answer to that question was yes, so I'm satisfied in that way, but this movie was completely boring until that point. Due to the way the story is told, the hurricane itself is pushed to the end of the film. I fully understand the three act structure and all that. The thing is, when the narrative is split, this does not work very often for me. For some reason when I'm thinking of how a movie could be ruined by this structure, Lion is coming to mind. Lion is a movie that made a lot of money, so I think this is a relatable example. Imagine if Lion played out in a way where you knew that Dev Patel's character left India, but the nuts and bolts of that story aren't revealed until 10 minutes before the end of the film. That kind of shit SUCKS. Then, just to carry it out, after you learn that, Saroo goes back to see his mother and that's the end of the film. I do not think this is how films should be made.

Lion isn't the best film ever, but it is moving. In part because of the storytelling, Adrift is not. This movie has a good score on Rotten Tomatoes, but the drama in the movie isn't there for me. With the huge telegraph that Richard has also had hallucinations, and knowing the eventuality of what the hurricane will do, I don't find the film very interesting at all. What this movie most makes clear to me is that these kinds of narratives are something that I always hate, and it takes a great performance or hook in order for me to get over it. Another thing of note is that I thought the two leads were...not as authentic on screen with each other as a romantic drama should be. I'm giving some marks for the hurricane, and the end of the film when Woodley comes out of her stupor, but the rest was really not worth my time.

5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. You Were Never Really Here
6. Widows
7. First Man
8. BlacKkKlansman
9. Blindspotting
10. Leave No Trace
11. Black Panther
12. If Beale Street Could Talk
13. The Sisters Brothers
14. A Private War
15. Avengers: Infinity War
16. Stan & Ollie
17. Green Book
18. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
19. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
20. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
21. Private Life
22. Climax
23. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
24. Mid90s
25. Lean on Pete
26. On My Skin
27. Eighth Grade
28. Sorry to Bother You
29. Suspiria
30. The Death of Stalin
31. A Quiet Place
32. Vice
33. The Old Man & the Gun
34. Vox Lux
35. Bad Times at the El Royale
36. The Other Side of the Wind
37. Searching
38. A Simple Favor
39. The Hate U Give
40. Unsane
41. Disobedience
42. Boy Erased
43. Bumblebee
44. Mary Poppins Returns
45. Creed II
46. Hold the Dark
47. The Land of Steady Habits
48. Halloween
49. Upgrade
50. Ant-Man and the Wasp
51. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
52. Blockers
53. Beirut
54. Roxanne Roxanne
55. Tully
56. Mary Queen of Scots
57. Aquaman
58. Ideal Home
59. Outlaw King
60. Overlord
61. Ready Player One
62. Ben Is Back
63. Monsters and Men
64. The Mule
65. On the Basis of Sex
66. Bohemian Rhapsody
67. White Boy Rick
68. Papillon
69. Game Night
70. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
71. Ocean's Eight
72. Alpha
73. Come Sunday
74. Instant Family
75. The Front Runner
76. The Predator
77. Apostle
78. The Oath
79. Uncle Drew
80. The Cured
81. The Commuter
82. The Angel
83. Tag
84. Beautiful Boy
85. The Nun
86. Operation Finale
87. The Equalizer 2
88. The Spy Who Dumped Me
89. Cargo
90. Yardie
91. Bird Box
92. 12 Strong
93. Venom
94. Skyscraper
95. The Meg
96. Assassination Nation
97. Adrift
98. Crazy Rich Asians
99. Backstabbing for Beginners
100. The Girl in the Spider's Web
101. Gringo
102. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
103. 22 July
104. Tomb Raider
105. Rampage
106. Hotel Artemis
107. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
108. The Little Stranger
109. 7 Days in Entebbe
110. Night School
111. The 15:17 To Paris
112. Den of Thieves
113. The Catcher Was a Spy
114. Peppermint
115. Mile 22
116. The First Purge
117. Hunter Killer
118. The Hurricane Heist
119. The Cloverfield Paradox
120. Breaking In
121. Mute
122. Kin
123. Hell Fest
124. Proud Mary
125. Robin Hood
126. Traffik
127. Winchester
128. The Happytime Murders
129. The Outsider
130. Slender Man

 

[909]

Calibre (2018), directed by Matt Palmer

Calibre is the kind of movie that if you saw it listed on Netflix, you would think literally nothing of it. No marketing, no name actors from this country, no anything. It was just dropped onto a streaming service two years ago in hopes that people may notice it while looking at thousands of other things. This kind of strategy is really stupid, I don't know who came up with it. Seems like a hell of a way to waste money on movies that probably can't get released in theaters. I don't know. In the aftermath of this film, most of what I've been thinking is that it's a shame good movies are released this way. This is probably not something that anyone thought would happen when they were working on this film. Or, maybe it was and I'm wrong. This is the kind of story that we have seen before, just not from a country like Scotland. Much more often this story is set in America, with two city guys going to a redneck location and running afoul of those who spend their time there. Calibre is a little bit different than that, but a lot of the same tonal notes are there. What I like about this film is that the instances that seem minor come back as the story plays out. This is a good thing.

Marcus (Martin McCann) and Vaughn (Jack Lowden) are two lads from Edinburgh, heading up to hunt for a weekend in the Scottish Highlands. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Marcus is a businessman and Vaughn has a pregnant fiancee at home. Leaving her seems to be something that Vaughn didn't particularly want to do, but he did anyway. They drive up and we learn that Vaughn has never hunted before, he merely shot a gun on a range. Marcus, on the other hand, has done this many times. The two check into a small inn, and subsequently they have a night on the town. In the process they meet Iona (Kate Bracken) and Kara (Kitty Lovett), the latter of whom seems to be the girl who gets around the small town. Iona and Vaughn nearly kiss, but Vaughn tells her that he has a fiancee and that she's pregnant. So, nothing happens there. I should also point out that Vaughn and Marcus were very frequently warned not to go messing with Kara. Marcus did.

The next morning, rise and shine, Vaughn is extremely hungover. For whatever reason, Marcus is not. Vaughn observes that Marcus has probably snorted some coke, but it's time to get to hunting. Vaughn has also forgotten his hunting rifle. It should be mentioned that this being Scotland and all, there are heavy restrictions on firearms. Using somebody else's gun is illegal, but they aren't going to drive all the way back to the inn. Eventually, Vaughn comes across a deer. He wants Marcus to go ahead and shoot it, but instead Marcus insists that Vaughn does. When Vaughn goes to shoot, the doe raises its head. Standing behing the doe was a little boy, who has now been shot in the head and killed. Obviously, this is not what Vaughn or anyone else would have wanted to happen. He puts down his gun and rushes over there, but the boy was not alone. His father was with him and they had a camping sack, so they weren't out there just trying to mess around or anything of the sort. Maybe they were from the town and maybe they weren't. The man subsequently picks up the gun. Maybe he'll avenge his son, maybe he doesn't want to. Marcus is behind him and about 100 yards away. He shoots, killing the man. Now what the hell are these guys going to do?

I didn't want it to be totally obvious what would happen, because if there's anything this movie is, it is not completely obvious. The way that things going is haunting yet pleasing in the sense that this movie doesn't bullshit people with some phony kind of conclusion. Of course, we have seen the tone of this movie before. A small town is very hostile to two outsiders who came into the town and bit off more than they could chew. Even not considering they killed two people, they did that. A perfect film this is not, the resolution is too weird for me to say that. The likelihood of things going properly after that is something I cannot understand. Other than that one minute, this is a good ride though. I've seen some movies in the last few weeks that really bored me, that made me want to go on my iPad to look at news. This was not one of those movies. That it wasn't one of those kinds of movies, is the exact reason I actually had content to write about in my first paragraph. Calibre was just a barely over 90 minute film, but there's nothing wrong with that. The story is satisfying and feels complete even though the film was this short. The nice thing about a limited cast is that this can happen.

Ultimately, again, this is a movie that's too good for Netflix's release strategy. I don't know if there even is a strategy, but this is a movie I would have thought more people would watch. I bet they didn't.

7.5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. You Were Never Really Here
6. Widows
7. First Man
8. BlacKkKlansman
9. Blindspotting
10. Leave No Trace
11. Black Panther
12. If Beale Street Could Talk
13. The Sisters Brothers
14. A Private War
15. Avengers: Infinity War
16. Stan & Ollie
17. Green Book
18. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
19. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
20. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
21. Private Life
22. Climax
23. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
24. Mid90s
25. Lean on Pete
26. On My Skin
27. Eighth Grade
28. Sorry to Bother You
29. Suspiria
30. The Death of Stalin
31. A Quiet Place
32. Vice
33. The Old Man & the Gun
34. Vox Lux
35. Bad Times at the El Royale
36. The Other Side of the Wind
37. Searching
38. Calibre
39. A Simple Favor
40. The Hate U Give
41. Unsane
42. Disobedience
43. Boy Erased
44. Bumblebee
45. Mary Poppins Returns
46. Creed II
47. Hold the Dark
48. The Land of Steady Habits
49. Halloween
50. Upgrade
51. Ant-Man and the Wasp
52. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
53. Blockers
54. Beirut
55. Roxanne Roxanne
56. Tully
57. Mary Queen of Scots
58. Aquaman
59. Ideal Home
60. Outlaw King
61. Overlord
62. Ready Player One
63. Ben Is Back
64. Monsters and Men
65. The Mule
66. On the Basis of Sex
67. Bohemian Rhapsody
68. White Boy Rick
69. Papillon
70. Game Night
71. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
72. Ocean's Eight
73. Alpha
74. Come Sunday
75. Instant Family
76. The Front Runner
77. The Predator
78. Apostle
79. The Oath
80. Uncle Drew
81. The Cured
82. The Commuter
83. The Angel
84. Tag
85. Beautiful Boy
86. The Nun
87. Operation Finale
88. The Equalizer 2
89. The Spy Who Dumped Me
90. Cargo
91. Yardie
92. Bird Box
93. 12 Strong
94. Venom
95. Skyscraper
96. The Meg
97. Assassination Nation
98. Adrift
99. Crazy Rich Asians
100. Backstabbing for Beginners
101. The Girl in the Spider's Web
102. Gringo
103. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
104. 22 July
105. Tomb Raider
106. Rampage
107. Hotel Artemis
108. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
109. The Little Stranger
110. 7 Days in Entebbe
111. Night School
112. The 15:17 To Paris
113. Den of Thieves
114. The Catcher Was a Spy
115. Peppermint
116. Mile 22
117. The First Purge
118. Hunter Killer
119. The Hurricane Heist
120. The Cloverfield Paradox
121. Breaking In
122. Mute
123. Kin
124. Hell Fest
125. Proud Mary
126. Robin Hood
127. Traffik
128. Winchester
129. The Happytime Murders
130. The Outsider
131. Slender Man

 

[909]

Colossal (2017), directed by Nacho Vigalondo

Colossal is a movie that I would have thought made more money than it actually did. The premise is a solid one, the story is full of twists and turns that I didn't exactly see coming, and the film ends in a way that I find commercially viable. So, what gives? Maybe it's that movies where men punch women in the face are not commercially viable anymore? I don't know. Perhaps these kinds of things are too much for the general audience to handle. There are sequences in the film that truthfully do not make sense. One plot hole in particular is so big that it does hurt the film the more I think about it. It seems like anyone with a brain would have more easily filled this plot hole, but they could not. Still a good film. Is that a weird thing to say? I don't recall any other movie in the last little bit where a plot hole has been so obvious to me, and I wound up liking it anyway. I'm trying really hard to think about one, but I'm usually not the kind of person going out and looking for plot holes in the things that I watch. Who knows, maybe I'm wrong? But, it seems that critical consensus is that this is a good film despite that plot hole. So there.

Colossal is about Gloria (Anne Hathaway), once a writer and now a washout alcoholic who can't get a job in her profession. Gloria lives in New York City, and things don't go well for her one morning when she returns home. Her boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens) is done with her shit, and decides that it's time to break up with her and kick her out of their apartment. This isn't good for anyone without a job, obviously. Gloria decides that she needs to return to her hometown and move into the house that her parents have failed to rent out. While walking down the street to the store, she runs into a childhood friend, Oscar (Jason Sudeikis). Oscar runs a bar, which isn't what Gloria needs, but it's a job and she needs money. She takes the job, but this makes her alcohol problem much worse. Usually she drinks all night, hangs out on a park bench until the morning, and heads home after that. This is a really destructive way to live, and I wouldn't want to be living any kind of life like this.

One morning when Gloria wakes up, she learns that a reptilian monster has appeared in Seoul, killed a hell of a lot of people, and destroyed quite a few buildings. While this is going on, Oscar has been giving her stuff for her house to make her more and more comfortable. It seems that Gloria has no intention of putting down the drink, nor of leaving New Hampshire, any time soon. Oscar has two other friends, Joel (Austin Stowell) and Garth (Tim Blake Nelson). Garth is a classic talker, while Joel is a guy who Gloria may want to have sex with. Anyway, these guys usually hang out with them every night getting drunk. Not exactly a stable and functioning lifestyle. Gloria is also learning something else from watching the television, and she wants to try it out. So, at 8:05, which is the same time the monster always shows up in Seoul, these four people head to the park Gloria usually sleeps at. Gloria decides to have the other three turn on a stream of the Seoul monster. It turns out that she is somehow in control of this monster. Gloria quickly tells her friends, of course, but people are fed up with this fucking monster. A helicopter starts shooting missiles at the monster, and Gloria gets mad from the pain, which resembles a spider bite at best. She swats the helicopter away unwittingly, then realizes what she's actually been doing and what she's responsible for. So, she passes out. When she comes to, she sees that Oscar has manifested in Seoul as a giant robot. Now what?

Colossal is a hard movie to explain unless you've seen it. I realized that while writing the two previous paragraphs. There's a prologue at the start of the movie that can best be described as bizarre, but this is a weird film as a whole. I dig it. Yes, there are twists and turns as described, and these lead to good performances. I think this movie is good enough that I shouldn't describe them to everyone here. This is an absolutely ludicrous premise and it seems that the people acting in the movie are not entirely aware of that, they are great at selling the viewer on the premise and getting them invested in the eventual outcome. There are some obvious metaphors here for those who have watched the film. I don't need to point them out, I think anyone who searched the film out would know what they are. The already mentioned plot hole is two-fold. One is that Gloria should have stopped going to the park when she realized what was happening. I get that she wanted to redeem herself by apologizing, but still. Another is that you would think people in Seoul would have fled to the mountains or suburbs because there was a monster destroying their city. I guess not.

Those two things bother me, and it will be reflected in the rating of this movie. There's a lot in this film besides that, and it works really well. The roles are nailed. The reason all these things work is sound. Surprising movies are usually full of bad surprises, but this is not a movie that features bad surprises.

7.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

Welcome to Marwen (2018), directed by Robert Zemeckis

Oh boy. Welcome to Marwen is a movie that bombed so hard that I couldn't even head out to see it in the timeframe that I had to do so. I said that I would eventually watch the movie and finally I am, so I'm keeping my word. It was not easy to make it through this film though. Seemingly everyone involved with this project had the intention of making a second Forrest Gump. The problem is that nobody wants to see another movie like that. In my case, I fucking hate Forrest Gump. I hate the character, I hate everything about that stupid movie. In the case of Welcome to Marwen, I don't really hate anything, but this movie is so misguided. I can't say there's a way that it could ever have been a good movie because that's not true. I just have a hard time understanding the tonal changes throughout the movie. Almost all of them seem completely counter-productive, and because of that, the live-action scenes can often be extremely weird. I don't know how else to put matters. Welcome to Marwen is also based on a true story, and there's a documentary called Marwencol should you rather learn about that story than put yourself through this film. I do not think that's such a bad idea. I also feel like, as I think I've said before, Steve Carell is wasting his career in these kinds of movies. It is very frustrating.

Welcome to Marwen starts in Mark Hogancamp's (Steve Carell) world of World War II toys. Seemingly, a doll representing himself is in a World War II plane. It is hit by enemy fire and crashes, which leads to the pilot's shoes being burned over the course of the landing. The doll then puts on women's shoes, and if this wasn't a story based on something that happened to someone, I'd have thought the people making this movie were deliberately making a fucking joke. The German soldiers eventually catch up to this doll that very much looks like Steve Carell, and they taunt the doll for wearing women's shoes. Unfortunately for them, a bunch of female dolls come to the male pilot's rescue and save him from inevitable death. If you're reading this, I know exactly what you're thinking right now. I was thinking the same thing. After the rescue, the film pans out to the real world where Mark is creating this scenario as a way to deal with PTSD. You see, Mark was attacked by some white supremacists, after making an off handed comment to them about wearing women's shoes. In the process of that attack, all of Mark's memories were beaten out of his head, and he is now brain damaged.

The scenario, we learn, is in a town that Mark has created, and the fictional town is called Marwen. Mark has imagined that the dolls are alive and he photographs them doing the things that he wants them to do. You see, Mark used to be an artist, but now he can no longer draw and has issues writing his name. So, photographs it is. The dolls also correspond to people that he knows. Anna (Gwendoline Christie) is Mark's caretaker, she stops by whenever she needs him. Oddly, she only stops by once in this movie. Seems like an oversight. Carlala (Eiza Gonzalez) is Mark's coworker at a bar where they both work in the kitchen. Julie (Janelle Monae) is a social worker who helped Mark when he'd first gotten attacked. She lost her leg in Iraq, but was still able to train Mark to walk again. Roberta (Merritt Wever) is Mark's friend who works at the hobby shop where he buys all this stuff. There's also Suzette (Leslie Zemeckis), a porn actress who Mark has only seen on TV. I shit you not, that's really in this movie. Lastly, we have Deja Thoris (Diane Kruger), a Belgian witch in the fictional town. For some reason, this does not represent anyone. On the day the audience meets Mark, we learn that he will soon have to make a statement at a sentencing hearing for his attackers. Nicol (Leslie Mann) also moves into the house across the street from Mark, and as I think I made clear above, if Mark knows a woman, they get a doll and go into this fictional town.

It's really difficult to write anything about a ludicrous movie like this one. I did my best. Welcome to Marwen was obviously a tough sell and nobody wound up going to see it, and in these two paragraphs it's easy to see why. The premise is too absurd. This is also a bad movie that seems to poke fun at its subject. The direction of this movie makes it seem like the director does not consider the subject to be a real person. Steve Carell, credit to him, did his fucking best. He was trying not to be a Rain Man and trying not to be Forrest Gump. Welcome to Marwen isn't all that interesting, on top of everything that's bad about it. The end point of the film isn't that well defined, and merely testifying at a sentencing hearing isn't the resolution that I think a film like this deserves. There's also a thrown in story bit where Mark is addicted to pills. This kind of thing has to be handled with care and it seems that Zemeckis is incapable of doing it. This guy has made a lot of movies in his time and most people who take time to talk about movies have seen a lot of them. This is such a catastrophe, and it's easy to understand how this could have happened. Zemeckis has made so many hits, and some of those shouldn't have even been hits, that it's easy to see why a studio would play ball on a $35,000,000 budget. The small budget is actually impressive considering the effects contained in the movie.

The budget, of course, leads to a certain amount of trust in the filmmaker that is in this case not merited. It appears that he was allowed to do whatever he wanted. While the effects are solid, I also found that they completely destroyed the story that was being built around the main subject of this thing. It's such a jarring tonal shift to be going from his lowest lows to immediately seeing toys shooting guns at each other on screen. I really don't like this at all. Welcome to Marwen isn't quite a dogshit level movie, but it isn't good, and with anyone less capable in the lead role this would have been one of the worst movies I've seen in the last few years. I found that this movie effectively debased the subject in an attempt to make another Forrest Gump. Anyone who would write and direct this kind of movie is simply out of touch. The things in this movie that seem like they're supposed to be charming, like Mark's obsession with Nicol, or the porn actress being made into one of his dolls, that kind of shit is creepy and seems like the wrong way to deal with this kind of movie. Welcome to Marwen is also the kind of movie that should probably not exist.

3.5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. You Were Never Really Here
6. Widows
7. First Man
8. BlacKkKlansman
9. Blindspotting
10. Leave No Trace
11. Black Panther
12. If Beale Street Could Talk
13. The Sisters Brothers
14. A Private War
15. Avengers: Infinity War
16. Stan & Ollie
17. Green Book
18. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
19. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
20. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
21. Private Life
22. Climax
23. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
24. Mid90s
25. Lean on Pete
26. On My Skin
27. Eighth Grade
28. Sorry to Bother You
29. Suspiria
30. The Death of Stalin
31. A Quiet Place
32. Vice
33. The Old Man & the Gun
34. Vox Lux
35. Bad Times at the El Royale
36. The Other Side of the Wind
37. Searching
38. Calibre
39. A Simple Favor
40. The Hate U Give
41. Unsane
42. Disobedience
43. Boy Erased
44. Bumblebee
45. Mary Poppins Returns
46. Creed II
47. Hold the Dark
48. The Land of Steady Habits
49. Halloween
50. Upgrade
51. Ant-Man and the Wasp
52. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
53. Blockers
54. Beirut
55. Roxanne Roxanne
56. Tully
57. Mary Queen of Scots
58. Aquaman
59. Ideal Home
60. Outlaw King
61. Overlord
62. Ready Player One
63. Ben Is Back
64. Monsters and Men
65. The Mule
66. On the Basis of Sex
67. Bohemian Rhapsody
68. White Boy Rick
69. Papillon
70. Game Night
71. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
72. Ocean's Eight
73. Alpha
74. Come Sunday
75. Instant Family
76. The Front Runner
77. The Predator
78. Apostle
79. The Oath
80. Uncle Drew
81. The Cured
82. The Commuter
83. The Angel
84. Tag
85. Beautiful Boy
86. The Nun
87. Operation Finale
88. The Equalizer 2
89. The Spy Who Dumped Me
90. Cargo
91. Yardie
92. Bird Box
93. 12 Strong
94. Venom
95. Skyscraper
96. The Meg
97. Assassination Nation
98. Adrift
99. Crazy Rich Asians
100. Backstabbing for Beginners
101. The Girl in the Spider's Web
102. Gringo
103. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
104. 22 July
105. Tomb Raider
106. Rampage
107. Hotel Artemis
108. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
109. The Little Stranger
110. 7 Days in Entebbe
111. Night School
112. The 15:17 To Paris
113. Den of Thieves
114. The Catcher Was a Spy
115. Peppermint
116. Mile 22
117. The First Purge
118. Hunter Killer
119. The Hurricane Heist
120. The Cloverfield Paradox
121. Breaking In
122. Welcome to Marwen
123. Mute
124. Kin
125. Hell Fest
126. Proud Mary
127. Robin Hood
128. Traffik
129. Winchester
130. The Happytime Murders
131. The Outsider
132. Slender Man

 

[909]

German and Norwegian, subtitles

The 12th Man (2018), directed by Harald Zwart

Tonight a foreign war movie was on the agenda. It isn't any of the ones that some people may hope I'd watch, but I had heard good things about this movie recently and decided I should give it a look. The 12th Man is the story of Operation Martin, an attempt by the Allies to destroy a German airfield control tower in Nazi occupied Norway. The other primary objective of said mission was to organize secret military resistance groups. It turns out that there already were resistance groups in Norway, so while the mission failed, through the soldier who escaped, everyone was able to be made aware of that fact. This is not a film about the Norwegian resistance, it should be noted. Inevitably, the film comes to center around one person, and one person alone. This is also a movie that can be described as being like a World War II version of The Revenant. It is unbelievable that this person was able to remain alive for such a long period of time. While the film is a little too long, The 12th Man does have power, largely centered around the main character and not knowing whether or not he'd live.

The 12th Man is about one person, and really solely one. Jan Baalsrud (Thomas Gullestad) is a man who was part of a resistance group organized by the Allies. Baalsrud, as he describes later in the film, was forced out of Sweden and made to travel to England. Once he came to England, he joined said group and was sent to Shetland. In Shetland, the Allies organized for a group of 12 men to board a fishing boat with 8 tons of TNT. They were to cross the North Sea, and hook up with a contact they had made in a random Norwegian village resting on one of the fjord's. Baalsrud was effectively enlisted as a spy, but there was a problem. When they got off the ship and onto a boat, when they rowed into the village they learned that their contact was now dead. The person they had spoken to also believed the approach of Jan and his friend to be a test organized by the Germans. So, this person decided to contact the police, and word came through to the German military.

As a result of this, a German warship found the Norwegian ship and opened fire. The resistance spies knew that their cover was blown and it was time to take measures. They jump into the water near their fjord, while the ship explodes with whatever material they'd brought. The film now takes creative license with the story. Kurt Stage (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is the leader of the local SS, he is at the site where these 12 Norwegian spies have been found. Or, rather, 11 of them have been found. Baalsrud was fortunate enough to find himself a rock to hide behind. While 10 of the 11 men are brought back to the local Nazi headquarters, this only happens after Baalsrud decides to make a run for it. In the process of that, Baalsrud is shot in the foot and made to swim across from one fjord to the other. It is assumed that Baalsrud is dead, because conceivably nobody could possibly do that. Eventually, in typical Nazi fashion, Stage decides to put this theory to the test himself. While the other 11 spies are executed over the course of a period of time, Baalsrud is not. Further creative license kicks in, and Baalsrud's escape is depicted as Stage vs. Baalsrud. Baalsrud must reach Sweden, he does not know how to get there, nor whom to speak to in order to get there.

This isn't a perfect film of course. The creative license here is in many ways too much. There are some other movies like this one where a person is escaping from a group of people and those people are getting highly upset. That isn't new ground. New ground is when the character is given a knife and there's a scene where they cut two of their toes off. The movie has suspense because I'm not Norwegian and because I'm not Norwegian I have absolutely no idea what happens to Baalsrud. I believe that Baalsrud was some sort of a national hero and with good reason. The 12th Man is a good film, but I don't understand the need for making up stories. Baalsrud's unit was assumed to be killed in the ensuing blast. The Nazis didn't hunt for him because they had no idea he still existed. Baalsrud certainly was trying to avoid the Germans, because he had no reason to be in any of the places that he wound up in. How would he explain anything? There's no way to know because the film decides not to go down that road. That is a mistake.

The survival scenes in The 12th Man, as well as Baalsrud's actual story of survival, are just so hard to believe. I believe some of them are actually worse than how the film made it sound. From what I've read, he had to cut off all his toes. That isn't depicted here. I should also note that this is not the first film made about Jan Baalsrud's story. Nine Lives was a movie made in 1957, it was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. This film also decides to have Baalsrud engage with a Nazi, but in this case the story was true. He killed one German while rushing out of freezing cold water. Nine Lives was once voted the greatest Norwegian film ever made, so in that respect I'm confused by there being another version of this story. What do I know though. The film is genuinely shocking, and that alone makes this worth a watch. But, if you've read this, I've spoiled the entire thing for you already.

7/10

2018 Film Rankings

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. You Were Never Really Here
6. Widows
7. First Man
8. BlacKkKlansman
9. Blindspotting
10. Leave No Trace
11. Black Panther
12. If Beale Street Could Talk
13. The Sisters Brothers
14. A Private War
15. Avengers: Infinity War
16. Stan & Ollie
17. Green Book
18. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
19. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
20. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
21. Private Life
22. Climax
23. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
24. Mid90s
25. Lean on Pete
26. On My Skin
27. Eighth Grade
28. Sorry to Bother You
29. Suspiria
30. The Death of Stalin
31. A Quiet Place
32. Vice
33. The Old Man & the Gun
34. Vox Lux
35. Bad Times at the El Royale
36. The Other Side of the Wind
37. Searching
38. Calibre
39. A Simple Favor
40. The Hate U Give
41. Unsane
42. Disobedience
43. Boy Erased
44. Bumblebee
45. Mary Poppins Returns
46. Creed II
47. Hold the Dark
48. The Land of Steady Habits
49. Halloween
50. The 12th Man
51. Upgrade
52. Ant-Man and the Wasp
53. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
54. Blockers
55. Beirut
56. Roxanne Roxanne
57. Tully
58. Mary Queen of Scots
59. Aquaman
60. Ideal Home
61. Outlaw King
62. Overlord
63. Ready Player One
64. Ben Is Back
65. Monsters and Men
66. The Mule
67. On the Basis of Sex
68. Bohemian Rhapsody
69. White Boy Rick
70. Papillon
71. Game Night
72. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
73. Ocean's Eight
74. Alpha
75. Come Sunday
76. Instant Family
77. The Front Runner
78. The Predator
79. Apostle
80. The Oath
81. Uncle Drew
82. The Cured
83. The Commuter
84. The Angel
85. Tag
86. Beautiful Boy
87. The Nun
88. Operation Finale
89. The Equalizer 2
90. The Spy Who Dumped Me
91. Cargo
92. Yardie
93. Bird Box
94. 12 Strong
95. Venom
96. Skyscraper
97. The Meg
98. Assassination Nation
99. Adrift
100. Crazy Rich Asians
101. Backstabbing for Beginners
102. The Girl in the Spider's Web
103. Gringo
104. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
105. 22 July
106. Tomb Raider
107. Rampage
108. Hotel Artemis
109. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
110. The Little Stranger
111. 7 Days in Entebbe
112. Night School
113. The 15:17 To Paris
114. Den of Thieves
115. The Catcher Was a Spy
116. Peppermint
117. Mile 22
118. The First Purge
119. Hunter Killer
120. The Hurricane Heist
121. The Cloverfield Paradox
122. Breaking In
123. Welcome to Marwen
124. Mute
125. Kin
126. Hell Fest
127. Proud Mary
128. Robin Hood
129. Traffik
130. Winchester
131. The Happytime Murders
132. The Outsider
133. Slender Man

 

[909]

Colette (2018), directed by Wash Westmoreland

You guys already know that I don't care whatsoever for literature, so in this case, a short review is incoming. The main reason I watched Colette is because I had read that my man Jimmy McNulty was in the film a lot, and the film also didn't seem to be very emotionally taxing. Both these things turned out to be true. It also may not surprise anyone that I had neglected to see this film in theaters because I simply didn't have any interest in it at all. Nothing has really changed since then, but this is a movie that had good reviews. So, there you go. When it comes to filming a costume period movie like this one, I'm always curious in the effort it takes to effectively portray the period. How long does the production company need in order to procure the materials for the costumes, or for the costumes themselves? What planning goes into cordoning off areas so that the look of the film can remain accurate? Does the dialogue need to be coached into the less prominent of the actors displayed in this film? There are other questions I have, but nobody here can answer them.

Gabrielle (Keira Knightley) is a young woman living in a rural French area, right before things turn from the 19th century to the 20th. At the beginning of this film, she begins an affair with Willy (Jimmy NcNulty), a bachelor who lives in Paris as a writer. Once the two get married, Gabrielle relocates to Paris, at which point we learn that Willy can be described as somewhat of a hedonist. This seems to be a surprise to Gabrielle, who has to hear a few times that people are surprised someone like Willy would get married. I would not want to be hearing this. We also learn that Willy has financial problems, which have now been extended to his wife. Willy also has issues with being faithful. So, there's that. Eventually, in part due to how broke they are, Willy decides that he should dig an old manuscript out of a desk that is being repossessed. The manuscript was written by Gabrielle, who had been asked to write something up about her early life. Willy had rejected it, but times are tough. Eventually, this manuscript is published, and it is a wild success. Gabrielle then changes her name to Colette, and her life changes as she and her husband both embrace their freedom to do what they wish. Or do they?

It's harder to write a short review about a decent movie than I'd previously assumed. One rule to go by is that if it's challenging to shove everything into three or four paragraphs, the film was worth the time it took to watch it. If it's easy, then it is not. There is a line earlier in the film from Willy where the character outright states that watching boring theatre is something that will make a person want to gouge their eyes out. This is a statement that I find to be one that judges the work itself. If the film actually sucked, the statement is something I would not forget. The director is rather bold. Willy was also wearing what looked to be an incredibly uncomfortable fat suit. Alright, so that's out of the way. This is a solid film, but because I don't care about literature, it is a little difficult for me to get invested in the story. I have reviewed some movies that were about writers and I don't recall ever loving one of them. This may turn out to be something that I just can't get past. Not now, not ever. I think I wrote a review about Capote and shit all over it even though it wasn't really about writing. I also think that Keira Knightley's performance in this film is better than Philip Seymour-Hoffman's performance as Capote. It seems unfair that Seymour-Hoffman would win an award for the performance of his that I liked the least.

I know what I'm getting bogged down in when I say this, because now I'm not talking about the movie, but I don't really identify with the struggle of the artist. In this case, while I don't identify with that struggle, I do appreciate the story and what it is trying to accomplish. This movie is about Colette breaking free from societal norms and doing whatever she wants to do. The novels were written by Colette and published in Willy's name, so she had no ownership of them. The investment in the story is in seeing someone do what they wanted to do without having to worry about some guy locking them in a room and making them write. That happens in this movie! The way I just phrased it, makes things sound way worse than they actually are. What's different about this movie is that the lead character merely goes from being married and monogamous to not monogamous and sleeping with women. This is not a big deal. It just happens. That is what progress in film sounds like to me.

7/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. You Were Never Really Here
6. Widows
7. First Man
8. BlacKkKlansman
9. Blindspotting
10. Leave No Trace
11. Black Panther
12. If Beale Street Could Talk
13. The Sisters Brothers
14. A Private War
15. Avengers: Infinity War
16. Stan & Ollie
17. Green Book
18. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
19. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
20. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
21. Private Life
22. Climax
23. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
24. Mid90s
25. Lean on Pete
26. On My Skin
27. Eighth Grade
28. Sorry to Bother You
29. Suspiria
30. The Death of Stalin
31. A Quiet Place
32. Vice
33. The Old Man & the Gun
34. Vox Lux
35. Bad Times at the El Royale
36. The Other Side of the Wind
37. Searching
38. Calibre
39. A Simple Favor
40. The Hate U Give
41. Unsane
42. Disobedience
43. Boy Erased
44. Bumblebee
45. Mary Poppins Returns
46. Creed II
47. Hold the Dark
48. The Land of Steady Habits
49. Halloween
50. The 12th Man
51. Upgrade
52. Ant-Man and the Wasp
53. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
54. Blockers
55. Beirut
56. Roxanne Roxanne
57. Tully
58. Mary Queen of Scots
59. Aquaman
60. Ideal Home
61. Outlaw King
62. Overlord
63. Ready Player One
64. Ben Is Back
65. Monsters and Men
66. Colette
67. The Mule
68. On the Basis of Sex
69. Bohemian Rhapsody
70. White Boy Rick
71. Papillon
72. Game Night
73. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
74. Ocean's Eight
75. Alpha
76. Come Sunday
77. Instant Family
78. The Front Runner
79. The Predator
80. Apostle
81. The Oath
82. Uncle Drew
83. The Cured
84. The Commuter
85. The Angel
86. Tag
87. Beautiful Boy
88. The Nun
89. Operation Finale
90. The Equalizer 2
91. The Spy Who Dumped Me
92. Cargo
93. Yardie
94. Bird Box
95. 12 Strong
96. Venom
97. Skyscraper
98. The Meg
99. Assassination Nation
100. Adrift
101. Crazy Rich Asians
102. Backstabbing for Beginners
103. The Girl in the Spider's Web
104. Gringo
105. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
106. 22 July
107. Tomb Raider
108. Rampage
109. Hotel Artemis
110. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
111. The Little Stranger
112. 7 Days in Entebbe
113. Night School
114. The 15:17 To Paris
115. Den of Thieves
116. The Catcher Was a Spy
117. Peppermint
118. Mile 22
119. The First Purge
120. Hunter Killer
121. The Hurricane Heist
122. The Cloverfield Paradox
123. Breaking In
124. Welcome to Marwen
125. Mute
126. Kin
127. Hell Fest
128. Proud Mary
129. Robin Hood
130. Traffik
131. Winchester
132. The Happytime Murders
133. The Outsider
134. Slender Man

 

[909]

Action Point (2018), directed by Tim Kirkby

Alright, so I know that I'm not the only person on this forum that could be described as at one point having been a huge fan of Jackass. Action Point is not quite Jackass. DC Carver (Johnny Knoxville) is a grandfather paying a visit to his grand-daughter, watching her while her mother is at a wedding. Over the course of this movie, we are sent back to DC's past for very long sequences, and jolted to his present for rather short ones. Apparently DC's grand-daughter does not know that DC once ran an amusement parking. A long time ago, seemingly in the late 70's, DC was the owner of a park called Action Point. Action Point was what you could call a very seedy amusement parking. All the attractions were dangerous, everything was cheaply made, and it didn't cost much to get into this park. The staff, by the way, has no experience at all and doesn't really give much of a shit about their job. One year, another amusement park opened in the area, and this park stole almost all of Action Point's business. This leads to DC being pushed to sell his land by Knoblach (Dan Bakkedahl), a local real estate agent. DC also has a loan out for far more than what the park could possibly take in.

In the summer this year, DC's daughter Boogie (Eleanor Worthington Cox) arrives from New York City. Summer at the amusement park sounds fun, right? Well, her dad doesn't really have any money and there's only so much that a person can do at a shabby amusement park. Still, she gets to have a summer job and make some friends. One night, Action Point is in need of some lumber and everyone decides to break into their competition in order to steal some for themselves. They nearly get caught, until they don't. After this, DC comes to the conclusion that his amusement park needs to have some kind of hook that will allow them to compete with '7 Parks'. This is a lazy movie, obviously. I couldn't believe that was the name of their competition. Anyway, DC decides that his park shouldn't have any restrictions. No brakes on the rides, no safety. It's the 70s and nobody should sue him for anything that he decides to do at his park. So, that's what he and his brother Benny (Chris Pontius) do to everything. But will they be able to deal with their $100,000 loan?

Look, even though I'm a big Jackass fan, I know that this is not a good movie. Here are some reasons why. There's a scene where someone breaks into a TV studio, and the host comes back to the studio with his girlfriend. While the intruder is hiding, the TV host nuts and it drops onto the intruder's hand. It isn't even hard to make this sound like a shitty movie. There's another part scene where Benny and DC nonsensically chase a bus only to randomly give up and just turn around. The worst offender is probably when two dogs fuck and the camera lingers on the male dog pulling out. Alright, so now you know why this movie fucking sucks, and you can assume the rest for yourself. But, I think everyone knew that this would not be a truly good movie. Does anyone expect a good story from a Jackass movie? That's basically what this is. The stuff I posted just now is too gross though. It's gross enough that it ruins the cinematic experience one would get from a Jackass movie.

The few things that the movie does well, are largely related to the location chosen to film this movie. I read that this was filmed outside of Cape Town, which turns out to be a great stand-in for the more rural areas of Los Angeles. I watch a lot of movies, and this one is predominantly set outside in hills that resemble our hills. I could not tell the difference until about twenty minutes before the end of the film. I also noticed that the extras were more diverse than I remember the 1970s being in all depictions of the era. South Africa would be the reason for that. The stunts, such as they are, are still quite entertaining. There are numerous instances where Johnny Knoxville had to have really fucked himself up. In the blooper reel near the end, I saw that the worst one was done by him, and he did get very fucked up. The guy basically took a bump flying down a hill. Here's another thing that I've said about movies though. The last movie I watched that actually had a blooper reel, was The Happytime Murders. I said that the blooper reel cannot be better than the movie itself. In this case it was. The more I think about it, the more gross I think those scenes I listed above really were. That kind of stuff just isn't funny.

I know that Jackass movies are for people who want to remember when they were kids and liked Jackass. You see, the difference is that Jackass is full of so much shit that you're bound to like a lot of it even if you also hate a lot of it. But what happens when the movie is entirely full of dumb shit? You have Action Point. I do want to see another Jackass movie, and before coronavirus, I had read that there was going to be one. The thing with a movie like Action Point is that the jokes have to land. In this case they do not.

3/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. You Were Never Really Here
6. Widows
7. First Man
8. BlacKkKlansman
9. Blindspotting
10. Leave No Trace
11. Black Panther
12. If Beale Street Could Talk
13. The Sisters Brothers
14. A Private War
15. Avengers: Infinity War
16. Stan & Ollie
17. Green Book
18. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
19. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
20. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
21. Private Life
22. Climax
23. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
24. Mid90s
25. Lean on Pete
26. On My Skin
27. Eighth Grade
28. Sorry to Bother You
29. Suspiria
30. The Death of Stalin
31. A Quiet Place
32. Vice
33. The Old Man & the Gun
34. Vox Lux
35. Bad Times at the El Royale
36. The Other Side of the Wind
37. Searching
38. Calibre
39. A Simple Favor
40. The Hate U Give
41. Unsane
42. Disobedience
43. Boy Erased
44. Bumblebee
45. Mary Poppins Returns
46. Creed II
47. Hold the Dark
48. The Land of Steady Habits
49. Halloween
50. The 12th Man
51. Upgrade
52. Ant-Man and the Wasp
53. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
54. Blockers
55. Beirut
56. Roxanne Roxanne
57. Tully
58. Mary Queen of Scots
59. Aquaman
60. Ideal Home
61. Outlaw King
62. Overlord
63. Ready Player One
64. Ben Is Back
65. Monsters and Men
66. Colette
67. The Mule
68. On the Basis of Sex
69. Bohemian Rhapsody
70. White Boy Rick
71. Papillon
72. Game Night
73. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
74. Ocean's Eight
75. Alpha
76. Come Sunday
77. Instant Family
78. The Front Runner
79. The Predator
80. Apostle
81. The Oath
82. Uncle Drew
83. The Cured
84. The Commuter
85. The Angel
86. Tag
87. Beautiful Boy
88. The Nun
89. Operation Finale
90. The Equalizer 2
91. The Spy Who Dumped Me
92. Cargo
93. Yardie
94. Bird Box
95. 12 Strong
96. Venom
97. Skyscraper
98. The Meg
99. Assassination Nation
100. Adrift
101. Crazy Rich Asians
102. Backstabbing for Beginners
103. The Girl in the Spider's Web
104. Gringo
105. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
106. 22 July
107. Tomb Raider
108. Rampage
109. Hotel Artemis
110. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
111. The Little Stranger
112. 7 Days in Entebbe
113. Night School
114. The 15:17 To Paris
115. Den of Thieves
116. The Catcher Was a Spy
117. Peppermint
118. Mile 22
119. The First Purge
120. Hunter Killer
121. The Hurricane Heist
122. The Cloverfield Paradox
123. Breaking In
124. Welcome to Marwen
125. Mute
126. Kin
127. Hell Fest
128. Action Point
129. Proud Mary
130. Robin Hood
131. Traffik
132. Winchester
133. The Happytime Murders
134. The Outsider
135. Slender Man

 

[Big Papa Paegan]

That movie was so lazy that they took elements of the real life Action Park, which was eventually run out of business by Six Flags, and changed just enough to not have to pay licensing fees. Of course, they also skim over all of the deaths and lawsuits, but hey, we saw a bear get drunk, right?

 

[Cackling Co Pilot Kamala]

Jackass 4 was confirmed for Summer 2021 release yesterday.

I think there is an awesome dark comedy to be made about Action Park but this was obviously not anything close to that. It felt like something I would rent with Out Cold and Idle Hands at a video store in 2002 and think was lame even as an adolescent

 

[909]

If you read this, you will get spoiled in some kind of way. The movie deserves better. I suggest you watch it.

French and Wolof, subtitles

Atlantics (2019), directed by Mati Diop

I waited to watch this and some other Netflix movies for long enough. It is time to space them out and watch them in a way that ensures I am not watching great movies every single day. First up was Atlantics, a Senegalese film that premiered at Cannes and was renamed from Atlantique to a more Western appealing name. This was probably for financial reasons. A lot of the foreign films to come out last year are not yet on streaming services that I have and would not have to pay extra money for, so such as it is, this is only the second or third foreign movie I've watched from last year. That's alright, I'll definitely catch up. The thing about foreign movies, and especially the case with this one, it is sometimes impossible to decipher where the plot is going to go. Sometimes that's the case because of cultural reasons. Sometimes it is because the director has a trademark of doing something and I just don't know what it is yet. In this case, we have a first time director. Certainly the reason for not knowing where things will go is more related to cultural reasons. But, you know, I'm not sure there's any other movie like this one. Nobody could have expected this.

Atlantics is seemingly about a man named Souleiman (Ibrahima Traore), a construction worker on a gigantic futuristic tower in Dakar, which is the capital of Senegal. Dakar lies on the Atlantic coast and is an area notorious for heavy surf, which plays into the story later on. The construction workers at this tower, Souleiman included, have not been paid for three or four months. When Souleiman is headed back from work, we get a glimpse into what Dakar daily life may be like. The city is not the cleanest. Roads are not paved. Yet, people seem to be happy with what they have even though someone has built a gigantic tower for seemingly nobody who could afford it. When Souleiman crosses the train tracks, we encounter his girlfriend, Ada (Mame Bineta Sane). Ada is a very young girl who is enamored with Souleiman. No shit, right. Anyway, when they depart for the day, Souleiman gives her his necklace. Initially, I thought literally nothing of this gesture.

One night, catching all the girlfriends in the area by surprise, the construction workers have decided to leave to Spain. The Atlantic Ocean is right there, after all. In Spain, they might get paid. Maybe they'll make enough to go back home, if they want. Maybe they'll send some money back. Perhaps, they'll eventually find a way to bring their girlfriends with them. Of course, all the girlfriends are devastated, particularly Ada. Her friend Dior ran the club everyone would go to. Nobody knows if they'll remain in business now. Fanta is Ada's other best friend. She isn't quite as bothered as the rest. Mariama is Ada's sister, and she doesn't care whatsoever that anyone has went off to sea. Such is life in Senegal. Anyway, it so turns out that Ada was supposed to get married to another man, Omar. Omar is a wealthy man and Ada's mother really wants her to do what she is supposed to do. Thing is, this movie takes a turn. This movie takes a fucking turn you could never see coming. After this turn, the police are brought into the equation. A man, Issa, he is tasked with investigating this case. I have no idea how to summarize the rest of the movie without ruining it.

As the refugee crisis has shown, there are people who want better lives, who are capable of providing themselves with a better life, who are stuck in countries that are incapable of doing so for the people who live in them. There are a host of reasons why. Corruption is seemingly the main one. After all, in this film, the workers have not been paid for four months of good work. They have what should be good jobs. The government is not going to ensure they get paid. I think every rational person can see why people would want to leave those countries. These people are also quite literally powerless to actually do something about it, unless they leave. Anyway, when I say this movie took a fucking turn, Atlantics took a turn the likes of which I am literally speechless to describe. It is not that I don't know how to do it. It is that it is shocking enough that I don't want to ruin the movie. The allure of the film is in large part related to this thing. Atlantics is full of surprises. It is about a culture which barely anyone knows anything about. This is the kind of movie worth watching.

I don't know if, for what I've said, that Atlantics is a satisfying movie that concludes in the way I would have liked. It does, and at the same time it does not. The story is told, but the ramifications unexplored. The fascination that West African culture has with mysticism is explored though. It is explored in a way that I wasn't expecting. Senegal is a very Muslim country, it is also a secular one with long held traditions that have made their way into mainline religion. The long held traditions on display in this film don't really jive with the way that society is heading. It is clearly the view of the filmmaker that many young people in Senegal, potentially half or more, have an increasingly liberalized view of religion. The rest have an increasingly conservative idea of what religion should mean in their daily life and in government. While a secularized society, we can see what this means for Senegal and other similar countries. There are two sides pulling society in different directions. I think the most convincing thing I can say in terms of my belief in this being a good film, is that I felt like reading the Wikipedia page the entire time. I was having major anticipation issues and had the hardest time keeping myself from reading the rest of the story, because I wanted to know so badly.

While Atlantics ends with a lot of loose threads that aren't resolved, this is a great movie. Part of that is the examination of foreign culture that comes with watching such a film. That is what this film is supposed to make you do. Most importantly is that the story is good. The surprises are not the strongest things about the story either. The romance in this movie isn't even on screen that much, but it is the drawing card. At this point there have been literally hundreds of thousands of romances broken up by similar circumstances. The need to go to Europe, or to North America, is for many people a necessity that those around the world have come to realize is a decision that they need to make for their well being. It isn't because our countries are so great, because they certainly are not. It is because theirs are so bad, and it is an upward trade to exchange the problems of their country for our problems. What we tend to forget, or really not even think about, are those left behind in those countries that citizens have decided to depart. This is something that has disproportionally impacted women for numerous reasons. In many of the countries, men have backwards views of women. They believe they are not capable of undertaking such a journey, or of thinking rationally. Many believe that women will not allow them to leave. So, like Souleiman, they simply do not tell them. This has happened countless times. Atlantics is worthwhile because it is specifically focused on those abandoned by such actions.

8.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
2. Parasite
3. 1917
4. Midsommar
5. Ad Astra
6. The Lighthouse
7. Waves
8. The Farewell
9. Knives Out
10. Uncut Gems
11. Atlantics
12. Booksmart
13. Avengers: Endgame
14. Queen & Slim
15. Toy Story 4
16. Joker
17. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
18. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
19. Clemency (had some stuff happen, couldn't review)
20. Us
21. Ford v. Ferrari
22. Gloria Bell
23. The Beach Bum
24. Just Mercy
25. The Art of Self-Defense
26. Dark Waters
27. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
28. Arctic
29. Spider-Man: Far From Home
30. Rocketman
31. High Flying Bird
32. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
33. Paddleton
34. Richard Jewell
35. The Peanut Butter Falcon
36. Honey Boy
37. Doctor Sleep
38. Hustlers
39. Blinded by the Light
40. Captain Marvel
41. Jojo Rabbit
42. Long Shot
43. Shazam
44. Ready or Not
45. A Vigilante
46. Late Night
47. Crawl
48. It: Chapter Two
49. Hotel Mumbai
50. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
51. Zombieland: Double Tap
52. Harriet
53. Hobbs & Shaw
54. Official Secrets
55. Always Be My Maybe
56. Cold Pursuit
57. The Laundromat
58. Where'd You Go, Bernadette
59. Shaft
60. Happy Death Day 2U
61. Ma
62. Terminator: Dark Fate
63. Annabelle Comes Home
64. Greta
65. Jumanji: The Next Level
66. Aladdin
67. Triple Frontier
68. Fighting with My Family
69. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
70. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
71. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
72. Brexit
73. The Dirt
74. Velvet Buzzsaw
75. Stuber
76. Little
77. Alita: Battle Angel
78. The Good Liar
79. The Current War: Director's Cut
80. The Kid
81. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
82. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
83. Good Boys
84. The Upside
85. The Lion King
86. Dumbo
87. The Hummingbird Project
88. Escape Room
89. 47 Meters Down: Uncaged
90. Brian Banks
91. Tolkien
92. The Dead Don't Die
93. Captive State
94. The Highwaymen
95. Bombshell
96. Pet Sematary
97. The Intruder
98. Child's Play
99. 21 Bridges
100. Gemini Man
101. Brightburn
102. Never Grow Old
103. Rambo: Last Blood
104. Midway
105. Angel Has Fallen
106. Black and Blue
107. Yesterday
108. Anna
109. What Men Want
110. Them That Follow
111. Unicorn Store
112. The Curse of La Llorona
113. Miss Bala
114. Men in Black: International
115. The Red Sea Diving Resort
116. The Perfection
117. Hellboy
118. Glass
119. Dark Phoenix
120. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
121. The Kitchen
122. The Hustle
123. The Best of Enemies
124. The Prodigy
125. Polar
126. Serenity

 

[909]

Tau (2018), directed by Federico D'Alessandro

For the first time in a while, I have come across a film that I outright loathe. Tau is a film set in the distant future, and assumedly this would make matters worth watching. That is not the case. Julia (Maika Monroe) is a young woman who steals things for a living, and apparently not stealing enough of those things in order to make a lot of money. When she turns in the things grabbed from seedy nightclub owners, that's what she's told. The film goes almost immediately from that to the story that makes up the rest of their film. Julia is abducted from her home in the middle of the night, and she wakes up in a jail cell with two other people. That's not all. Her mouth is covered by some kind of mask, and she now has a glowing implant in the back of her neck. It is made somewhat clear what this thing is for over the next few scenes. Apparently her memories are being mined out of her head for some kind of experiment, the likes of which someone would only be doing if they were forced to undergo it. This is an experiment that Julia is forced to undergo many times. But, you may ask, by who?

One of these days, Julia gets really tired of dealing with these experiments. She is a rather resourceful woman as evidenced when she was stealing all that stuff from other people. Julia attempts to destroy the cell and make a run for it. Of course, this is more difficult than anticipated. When she destroys the cell, there are many other problems. The largest of those problems is that this house is extremely high tech and built to keep people inside. They are not intended to get out. Unfortunately, there is also a robot in this person's house. It is a security robot of sorts, called Aries. This thing Aries kills the other two inmates like they're absolutely nothing. Sad for them as they never wanted to make a run for it, but such is their life. Aries is also about to kill Julia, but her captor Alex (Ed Skrein) arrives and prevents that. Alex is apparently torturing Julia for a reason, because he is creating an AI project. There is an AI in his house, Tau (voiced by Gary Oldman). Tau is also controlled by Alex, of course. But how far will these experiments really go?

I hate this movie, as I previously said above. I have no idea how or why these three actors signed on to participate in trash like this. This was also initially not supposed to be a straight to streaming movie. I would think that such a movie being created was impossible, but it is not. There is an amount of creative bankrupty that exists in a movie like this one. Julia's Stockholm syndrome towards Tau at the end of the movie is something that greatly bothers me. There is a scene where Julia sees that Tau's memory is erased. She comes back into the house when she can make a run for it. The idea someone would actually do this is completely illogical. I did also just watch a movie featuring an AI, which also came out in 2018, so it is easy to compare this to Upgrade. The two movies could not be more different in how they utilize their AI and hold the people prisoner. This movie has absolutely no action bar the beginning and end of the film. There is about a 60-70 minute block of nothing, where Julia cozies up to the AI so that she needs in order to get out of the house. She then doesn't leave the house.

I really have a strong dislike with these kinds of movies to a point where I hate even writing anything down about them. There is nothing to this movie at all. The antagonist is supposedly super-intelligent but I found nothing to be intelligent about this movie at all. The antagonist also has a massive amount of money, yet cannot pay anyone to be his test subject. He must drug them, hold them captive, and potentially even kill then. I think you can see how stupid this is when you read what I just wrote down. This is such a steep decline for Gary Oldman too. The dialogue he is given to read is shockingly stupid. This was surely an easy way to make some money, that's the only explanation. The amount of bad shit in this movie, it's too much to list but I hated the movie enough that I don't want to do it. Does that make sense? Imagine if we created AI and it was really this stupid.

2.5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. You Were Never Really Here
6. Widows
7. First Man
8. BlacKkKlansman
9. Blindspotting
10. Leave No Trace
11. Black Panther
12. If Beale Street Could Talk
13. The Sisters Brothers
14. A Private War
15. Avengers: Infinity War
16. Stan & Ollie
17. Green Book
18. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
19. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
20. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
21. Private Life
22. Climax
23. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
24. Mid90s
25. Lean on Pete
26. On My Skin
27. Eighth Grade
28. Sorry to Bother You
29. Suspiria
30. The Death of Stalin
31. A Quiet Place
32. Vice
33. The Old Man & the Gun
34. Vox Lux
35. Bad Times at the El Royale
36. The Other Side of the Wind
37. Searching
38. Calibre
39. A Simple Favor
40. The Hate U Give
41. Unsane
42. Disobedience
43. Boy Erased
44. Bumblebee
45. Mary Poppins Returns
46. Creed II
47. Hold the Dark
48. The Land of Steady Habits
49. Halloween
50. The 12th Man
51. Upgrade
52. Ant-Man and the Wasp
53. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
54. Blockers
55. Beirut
56. Roxanne Roxanne
57. Tully
58. Mary Queen of Scots
59. Aquaman
60. Ideal Home
61. Outlaw King
62. Overlord
63. Ready Player One
64. Ben Is Back
65. Monsters and Men
66. Colette
67. The Mule
68. On the Basis of Sex
69. Bohemian Rhapsody
70. White Boy Rick
71. Papillon
72. Game Night
73. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
74. Ocean's Eight
75. Alpha
76. Come Sunday
77. Instant Family
78. The Front Runner
79. The Predator
80. Apostle
81. The Oath
82. Uncle Drew
83. The Cured
84. The Commuter
85. The Angel
86. Tag
87. Beautiful Boy
88. The Nun
89. Operation Finale
90. The Equalizer 2
91. The Spy Who Dumped Me
92. Cargo
93. Yardie
94. Bird Box
95. 12 Strong
96. Venom
97. Skyscraper
98. The Meg
99. Assassination Nation
100. Adrift
101. Crazy Rich Asians
102. Backstabbing for Beginners
103. The Girl in the Spider's Web
104. Gringo
105. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
106. 22 July
107. Tomb Raider
108. Rampage
109. Hotel Artemis
110. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
111. The Little Stranger
112. 7 Days in Entebbe
113. Night School
114. The 15:17 To Paris
115. Den of Thieves
116. The Catcher Was a Spy
117. Peppermint
118. Mile 22
119. The First Purge
120. Hunter Killer
121. The Hurricane Heist
122. The Cloverfield Paradox
123. Breaking In
124. Welcome to Marwen
125. Mute
126. Kin
127. Hell Fest
128. Action Point
129. Proud Mary
130. Robin Hood
131. Traffik
132. Tau
133. Winchester
134. The Happytime Murders
135. The Outsider
136. Slender Man

 

[909]

The Rider (2018), directed by Chloe Zhao

Is this how movies are supposed to look? Don't bother answering that. The answer is yes. I had been intending to watch The Rider for some time, both for reasons of subject matter and interest in the director. I am very interested in such subject matter and I haven't watched many movies in this setting for the last little while. As relates to the director, I was surprised that someone would go from directing a very highly acclaimed indie film to directing a Marvel movie with the scope of The Eternals. I can't say that I know how that will work out, because ultimately the Marvel/Disney formula is required in order to make the movie. A movie like The Rider is one where the director has the power to do literally anything they want. It will be very interesting to see how things go for Zhao in the future. What I also know is that fortunately she directed another small movie, Nomadland. This one will feature Frances McDormand, who is pretty good. We all know that. The Rider is not any of those movies though. This is a film that features people who are effectively playing themselves. I don't know how this was decided, but it was an excellent decision. The story is based on things that actually happened to the lead, not entirely based on reality, but things are done in order to make a movie. This is the kind of film that you watch and can't believe that more people haven't talked about it.

Brady (Brady Jandreau) lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in poverty like so many of the people who live on reservations. His father Wayne (Tim Jandreau) and sister Lilly (Lilly Blackburn) all live in a trailer that hasn't been paid for in months, Lilly has autism and Wayne cannot hold a job. In fact, neither of these men has a real job. Wayne does things that people who live on reservations tend to do. When you shoot a deer, you sell the hide. Maybe you have a horse that you can train and sell. Maybe you train someone else's horse. Perhaps you can build something. What Brady did was ride at the rodeo. That is, until Brady fell off his bronco and got stomped on by it. This caused Brady what seems to be a fair amount of brain damage, but matters could be much worse. He has some issues with brain to hand coordination. Sometimes, he throws up. He may also have worsening seizures should he not follow the instructions of his doctor. Most importantly, he is told not to get on his horse.

You see, it turns out that Brady has basically nothing he can do other than get on his horse. Breaking in other people's horses is an option for him, something he needs to do for financial reasons. He as able to get a job at a grocery store, but this can be humiliating. Due to his fame as a rodeo cowboy, people do recognize him from time to time. They tell him not to give up on his dreams. Sometimes, he has to make up stories to hide his humiliation. Brady also regularly visits a friend, Lane. You see, Lane was a cowboy who had a similar accident and is now severely brain damaged. In reality, Lane was in a horrible car accident. But, in this film, the accident was riding bulls. Lane can now only communicate with spelling out letters via sign language, he cannot control any part of his body, and is permanently sentenced to a life where his brain just does not work. This is something that Brady would seem to not want for himself. Eventually, there are two things that come into play. Wayne sells their horse, Gus. They need the money and can't become homeless. This leads Brady to consider whether or not he wants to ride once again. With money he has saved, he wants to buy a new horse. Is this a good idea, though?

The Rider is a film that poses the existential question that people either ask themselves on a daily basis, have decided that they don't care, or are simply too stupid to know this is a question. Is it right to continue to do something that we know is bad for us, that will lead to dying sooner? That's something that people should consider when doing something as simple as picking up a can of soda. It is another question what someone is thinking when they are already brain damaged and simply have few other avenues for ways to live their life. In reality, Jandreau has decided to continue training horses. I do not know the real severity of his brain injury and what could happen as a result of this. I only know what's in the film. There is a certain amount of authenticity to strive for in these movies, and I found that everyone involved knocked the thing out of the park. This is a movie about the real issues the American working poor face. It is directed by someone born in China. This shows a great ability on Zhao's part to learn and adapt a story like Brady Jandreau's to the screen.

From the picture I chose, it may not surprise you that this is a beautifully filmed movie. The long takes where Brady is training these horses alarmed me because I didn't want anything to happen to the character. I didn't know what would happen to the character. My assumption was that the film would end with Brady deciding that he wasn't going to ride horses anymore. How the filmmaker gets to that point, is something the viewer should never be able to expect. This was not something I expected. The Rider is a movie simultaneously about so many different things. The abandonment of people on reservations is emotionally crippling for those people. Brady clearly feels that he is unable to live up to his role as a man, unable to follow his dreams. Betrayed by his body, or by the horse that bucked him off. While I wish we knew whether the latter was true, again, we are talking about someone living up to their role as a man. Talking about your problems is something that we should do, but it is not something many of us do. In one or two cases I even thought Brady said too much, but this is somethign that a very young man would do.

Anyway, this is just a fucking good movie. It is enthralling throughout, a movie I never lost focus on for one second. That has happened a few times recently with some of the movies I have given terrible reviews. The Rider is nearly perfect, with extremely few weaknesses and nothing but moments that really got to me. See, I have had things taken away from me too. Because of what has happened to me, I no longer have the energy to run for more than a couple hundred yards. Lifting weights and working out is an extreme chore. Perhaps it is my identification with this character that led me to like this movie so much. However, in my case, it isn't a choice and there is no internal struggle. I merely can't do these things. Brady could, at a cost. Seeing that struggle play out on screen was intriguing to say the least.

9.5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. The Rider
3. A Star Is Born
4. First Reformed
5. The Favourite
6. You Were Never Really Here
7. Widows
8. First Man
9. BlacKkKlansman
10. Blindspotting
11. Leave No Trace
12. Black Panther
13. If Beale Street Could Talk
14. The Sisters Brothers
15. A Private War
16. Avengers: Infinity War
17. Stan & Ollie
18. Green Book
19. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
20. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
21. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
22. Private Life
23. Climax
24. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
25. Mid90s
26. Lean on Pete
27. On My Skin
28. Eighth Grade
29. Sorry to Bother You
30. Suspiria
31. The Death of Stalin
32. A Quiet Place
33. Vice
34. The Old Man & the Gun
35. Vox Lux
36. Bad Times at the El Royale
37. The Other Side of the Wind
38. Searching
39. Calibre
40. A Simple Favor
41. The Hate U Give
42. Unsane
43. Disobedience
44. Boy Erased
45. Bumblebee
46. Mary Poppins Returns
47. Creed II
48. Hold the Dark
49. The Land of Steady Habits
50. Halloween
51. The 12th Man
52. Upgrade
53. Ant-Man and the Wasp
54. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
55. Blockers
56. Beirut
57. Roxanne Roxanne
58. Tully
59. Mary Queen of Scots
60. Aquaman
61. Ideal Home
62. Outlaw King
63. Overlord
64. Ready Player One
65. Ben Is Back
66. Monsters and Men
67. Colette
68. The Mule
69. On the Basis of Sex
70. Bohemian Rhapsody
71. White Boy Rick
72. Papillon
73. Game Night
74. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
75. Ocean's Eight
76. Alpha
77. Come Sunday
78. Instant Family
79. The Front Runner
80. The Predator
81. Apostle
82. The Oath
83. Uncle Drew
84. The Cured
85. The Commuter
86. The Angel
87. Tag
88. Beautiful Boy
89. The Nun
90. Operation Finale
91. The Equalizer 2
92. The Spy Who Dumped Me
93. Cargo
94. Yardie
95. Bird Box
96. 12 Strong
97. Venom
98. Skyscraper
99. The Meg
100. Assassination Nation
101. Adrift
102. Crazy Rich Asians
103. Backstabbing for Beginners
104. The Girl in the Spider's Web
105. Gringo
106. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
107. 22 July
108. Tomb Raider
109. Rampage
110. Hotel Artemis
111. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
112. The Little Stranger
113. 7 Days in Entebbe
114. Night School
115. The 15:17 To Paris
116. Den of Thieves
117. The Catcher Was a Spy
118. Peppermint
119. Mile 22
120. The First Purge
121. Hunter Killer
122. The Hurricane Heist
123. The Cloverfield Paradox
124. Breaking In
125. Welcome to Marwen
126. Mute
127. Kin
128. Hell Fest
129. Action Point
130. Proud Mary
131. Robin Hood
132. Traffik
133. Tau
134. Winchester
135. The Happytime Murders
136. The Outsider
137. Slender Man

 

[909]

What They Had (2018), directed by Elizabeth Chomko

There were two reasons I decided to watch What They Had, which looked like a drama made specifically for old people. One of those reasons is Michael Shannon. You can count on his lines in any movie being delivered more convincingly than anyone else's lines. Hopefully at some point he gets what he really deserves, which is a lot of money for another bullshit part in some blockbuster. The second reason I watched this was because the film had good reviews. I don't think I had a lot of choice on this one. Anyway, what I was thinking about as I was watching this movie, was that they don't really make movies for old people anymore. Except ones that go straight on Lifetime or Hallmark. I can't think of any and in looking at my lists for the last few years, I don't see any. Maybe Stan & Ollie was for old people. I don't fucking know. I guess what I'm saying is that this movie is seemingly geared towards an older audience. Except, it is not. Whether through poor marketing or non-existent marketing or sending the wrong message to people, What They Had is probably a film that didn't reach the audience it wanted. You know, most people with aging parents don't want to consider the possibility that their parents will have something bad happen to them. So, I get it. That's who this movie is for.

What They Had is a story about four people. Two of those people are the aging parents of a brother and a sister, both of whom have their own share of problems. Ruth (Blythe Danner) is the matriarch of this family, and Norbert (Robert Forster) is her husband. Norbert and Ruth have a very happy marriage, but things are starting to happen that are not so good. On Christmas Eve, Ruth wandered out into a Chicago blizzard and did not return home. Norbert tried his best to find her, but he could not. He calls his son 'Nicky' (Michael Shannon) for some help, and Nicky panics and calls his sister 'Bitty' (Hilary Swank). Bitty lives in Los Angeles with her husband Eddie, who we don't see in the movie until much later. Anyway, she has to fly to Chicago to help Nicky, but there's more to it than just that. When Ruth is found at the hospital, she is clearly losing her mind. What's worse is that Norbert seems to be in denial about this. At least, that would be, if you haven't seen someone dealing with this before.

When everyone returns back to Ruth and Norbert's home, we learn more about the problems of their children. Bitty brought her daughter Emma (Taissa Farmiga) with her to Chicago, and these two have a mother-daughter relationship that is basically non-existent. They don't get along, but more than that, they just straight out don't talk to each other. This is done in a way that isn't overboard at all. Nicky also owns a bar, this is also a bar that he sleeps in. So, things aren't the best. To bring things back to what I said about Ruth having Alzheimers, it isn't that Norbert is in denial. It is that he is in denial about actually having the capability to care for Ruth. Nobody, and I do mean nobody, has the capacity to care for someone like that all on their own. What if she disappears again? What if she can't even remember who her kids are? Worst of all, what if she can't remember that she's married and who she lives with? These kinds of things are dangerous, but this isn't the kind of corny ass movie that you think it might be.

Due to having Michael Shannon in this movie, and how good he is as a performer, there were routes What They Had could go to ensure that this movie wasn't the downer that it initially would have seemed like. Some of the stuff that his character says is very funny. The movie would be dead in the water if this performance wasn't in the film. It isn't realistic to expect people to sign up to watch 95 minutes of pure downer. Fortunately, this is not. This is a good movie that I think ends way too quickly. There is something that hits really hard. A death that I completely didn't expect. Now, the movie ends way too quickly after that and gets wrapped up in a way that I didn't think was satisfying at all. The movie basically zoomed to the end after building up a lot of tension. Is that how life ends? You know, it kind of is. Was that the point of the filmmaker? I don't know.

Michael Shannon's character was more of an asshole than me, but I found myself identifying with this character a whole lot. As some of you know, like his character, I find myself doing things for my parents that I don't really think are things that I should be having to do. This impacts my life greatly. I also took care of my mom almost solely when she had throat cancer. So, I see why people like this character become assholes. I know better than anyone else why this is the case. It is hard for that to not happen to yourself. The reason why this is merely a good movie and not a great one, is because he gets the fuck out of the situation like most people who aren't doormats eventually tend to do. Once that happens, he isn't in the movie as much for obvious reasons. This is really good while he's in it though.

7/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. The Rider
3. A Star Is Born
4. First Reformed
5. The Favourite
6. You Were Never Really Here
7. Widows
8. First Man
9. BlacKkKlansman
10. Blindspotting
11. Leave No Trace
12. Black Panther
13. If Beale Street Could Talk
14. The Sisters Brothers
15. A Private War
16. Avengers: Infinity War
17. Stan & Ollie
18. Green Book
19. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
20. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
21. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
22. Private Life
23. Climax
24. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
25. Mid90s
26. Lean on Pete
27. On My Skin
28. Eighth Grade
29. Sorry to Bother You
30. Suspiria
31. The Death of Stalin
32. A Quiet Place
33. Vice
34. The Old Man & the Gun
35. Vox Lux
36. Bad Times at the El Royale
37. The Other Side of the Wind
38. Searching
39. Calibre
40. A Simple Favor
41. The Hate U Give
42. Unsane
43. Disobedience
44. Boy Erased
45. Bumblebee
46. Mary Poppins Returns
47. Creed II
48. Hold the Dark
49. The Land of Steady Habits
50. Halloween
51. The 12th Man
52. Upgrade
53. What They Had
54. Ant-Man and the Wasp
55. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
56. Blockers
57. Beirut
58. Roxanne Roxanne
59. Tully
60. Mary Queen of Scots
61. Aquaman
62. Ideal Home
63. Outlaw King
64. Overlord
65. Ready Player One
66. Ben Is Back
67. Monsters and Men
68. Colette
69. The Mule
70. On the Basis of Sex
71. Bohemian Rhapsody
72. White Boy Rick
73. Papillon
74. Game Night
75. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
76. Ocean's Eight
77. Alpha
78. Come Sunday
79. Instant Family
80. The Front Runner
81. The Predator
82. Apostle
83. The Oath
84. Uncle Drew
85. The Cured
86. The Commuter
87. The Angel
88. Tag
89. Beautiful Boy
90. The Nun
91. Operation Finale
92. The Equalizer 2
93. The Spy Who Dumped Me
94. Cargo
95. Yardie
96. Bird Box
97. 12 Strong
98. Venom
99. Skyscraper
100. The Meg
101. Assassination Nation
102. Adrift
103. Crazy Rich Asians
104. Backstabbing for Beginners
105. The Girl in the Spider's Web
106. Gringo
107. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
108. 22 July
109. Tomb Raider
110. Rampage
111. Hotel Artemis
112. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
113. The Little Stranger
114. 7 Days in Entebbe
115. Night School
116. The 15:17 To Paris
117. Den of Thieves
118. The Catcher Was a Spy
119. Peppermint
120. Mile 22
121. The First Purge
122. Hunter Killer
123. The Hurricane Heist
124. The Cloverfield Paradox
125. Breaking In
126. Welcome to Marwen
127. Mute
128. Kin
129. Hell Fest
130. Action Point
131. Proud Mary
132. Robin Hood
133. Traffik
134. Tau
135. Winchester
136. The Happytime Murders
137. The Outsider
138. Slender Man

 

[909]

Boundaries (2018), directed by Shana Feste

Man, this is going to be a test of my ability to stretch very few words into a lot of words. I think I won't try. This is another movie that I suppose is one that could be considered as being made for older people. If you've seen one road trip movie where the three characters in the film had rather frayed relationships, you've seen nearly all of them. Boundaries is yet another movie in that group that doesn't add a lot to the genre. Laura (Vera Farmiga) is the mother of Henry (Lewis MacDougall). Laura generally has a very difficult time setting boundaries in her life. At work, she gets walked on by her boss Sofia (Dolly Wells). As Laura discusses during a therapy session, she also has a hard time setting boundaries with pets. Laura is the kind of woman that enjoys picking up stray animals and making them into her own. She also immediately sleeps with her dates for similar reasons. But, perhaps most importantly, she has a hard time setting boundaries with her father Jack (Christopher Plummer). Jack, you see, he's a pot dealer even at his geriatric age. Laura knows this.

What Laura does not know, is that when Jack gets kicked out of his nursing home for those reasons, is that Jack has loaded about $200,000 worth of weed into her car. Does this make sense? No. Is it possible? I don't really think so. While this is all going on, Henry has been expelled from his school. Henry is the kind of kid who likes to draw very creepy pictures of the people he knows. In this case, he drew one of a faculty member bending over. That, as they say, is that. Laura is also in the middle of planning a party for her boss, but her dad is taking up an outsized space in her life. Because of her inability to say no, Laura has agreed to drive him from Seattle to Los Angeles, where Jack can live with his other daughter, Jojo (Kristen Schaal). Unbeknownst to her, Jack and Henry have made a little agreement at the first place they stop. Jack brought all that weed, right? It's time to sell it along the way. Henry needs money to go to private school for kids who have emotional problems, and Jack is perfectly willing to use the money they make for that purpose. Laura can't know though.

You see what I mean about this being like any other road trip movie? There are some highlights though. Christopher Lloyd and Peter Fonda also make appearances here. This is a good cast. Why doesn't the movie work? The script is to blame for that. While Plummer always puts in an inspired performance even in his old age, the material he has to work with is kind of bad. There are a lot of repeated jokes in here about his adult diapers. Very little variation on those jokes. Not so good. Every other character follows the patterns that you come to expect from these movies. In a way, the entire movie rests on Plummer's shoulders. This movie is really not that great, but I did find myself smiling and laughing when Plummer was on screen. This means enough for me to have gotten some enjoyment out of a really lame kind of movie. The material still is what it is and it's easy to see why this was an indie movie that didn't make any money. The actors in this movie are too good for this.

5.5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. The Rider
3. A Star Is Born
4. First Reformed
5. The Favourite
6. You Were Never Really Here
7. Widows
8. First Man
9. BlacKkKlansman
10. Blindspotting
11. Leave No Trace
12. Black Panther
13. If Beale Street Could Talk
14. The Sisters Brothers
15. A Private War
16. Avengers: Infinity War
17. Stan & Ollie
18. Green Book
19. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
20. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
21. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
22. Private Life
23. Climax
24. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
25. Mid90s
26. Lean on Pete
27. On My Skin
28. Eighth Grade
29. Sorry to Bother You
30. Suspiria
31. The Death of Stalin
32. A Quiet Place
33. Vice
34. The Old Man & the Gun
35. Vox Lux
36. Bad Times at the El Royale
37. The Other Side of the Wind
38. Searching
39. Calibre
40. A Simple Favor
41. The Hate U Give
42. Unsane
43. Disobedience
44. Boy Erased
45. Bumblebee
46. Mary Poppins Returns
47. Creed II
48. Hold the Dark
49. The Land of Steady Habits
50. Halloween
51. The 12th Man
52. Upgrade
53. What They Had
54. Ant-Man and the Wasp
55. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
56. Blockers
57. Beirut
58. Roxanne Roxanne
59. Tully
60. Mary Queen of Scots
61. Aquaman
62. Ideal Home
63. Outlaw King
64. Overlord
65. Ready Player One
66. Ben Is Back
67. Monsters and Men
68. Colette
69. The Mule
70. On the Basis of Sex
71. Bohemian Rhapsody
72. White Boy Rick
73. Papillon
74. Game Night
75. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
76. Ocean's Eight
77. Alpha
78. Come Sunday
79. Instant Family
80. The Front Runner
81. The Predator
82. Apostle
83. The Oath
84. Uncle Drew
85. The Cured
86. The Commuter
87. The Angel
88. Tag
89. Beautiful Boy
90. The Nun
91. Operation Finale
92. The Equalizer 2
93. The Spy Who Dumped Me
94. Cargo
95. Yardie
96. Boundaries
97. Bird Box
98. 12 Strong
99. Venom
100. Skyscraper
101. The Meg
102. Assassination Nation
103. Adrift
104. Crazy Rich Asians
105. Backstabbing for Beginners
106. The Girl in the Spider's Web
107. Gringo
108. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
109. 22 July
110. Tomb Raider
111. Rampage
112. Hotel Artemis
113. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
114. The Little Stranger
115. 7 Days in Entebbe
116. Night School
117. The 15:17 To Paris
118. Den of Thieves
119. The Catcher Was a Spy
120. Peppermint
121. Mile 22
122. The First Purge
123. Hunter Killer
124. The Hurricane Heist
125. The Cloverfield Paradox
126. Breaking In
127. Welcome to Marwen
128. Mute
129. Kin
130. Hell Fest
131. Action Point
132. Proud Mary
133. Robin Hood
134. Traffik
135. Tau
136. Winchester
137. The Happytime Murders
138. The Outsider
139. Slender Man

 

[909]

The Bad Batch (2017), directed by Ana Lily Amirpour

Sometimes I wonder if I'm watching a totally different movie than the critics who wrote their reviews. In the case of The Bad Batch, I wonder if people were allowed to criticize the movie or not. To put it bluntly, The Bad Batch is a bad fucking movie. This shouldn't be a bad one, it just is. This is a film that was incapable of committing to what it should or should not be. The Bad Batch starts in a way that is heavily misleading to the viewer and does not set the tone for anything that follows these scenes. The Bad Batch also features one of the most boring stretches in a film that I think I've ever seen. There are enormous periods in the film where absolutely nothing happens. To put it bluntly, I think I would rather set myself on fire than subject myself again to the grueling pace this film lays down. Let me just point this out. There is no dialogue in The Bad Batch for 19 minutes. I can't tell you why the movie is this way. I can simply tell you that I don't want to see it again because of that.

The Bad Batch is set in Texas, seemingly in a dystopian future. People are exiled from Texas and sent to a lawless, dry desert hellscape. This area is now fenced in, and undesirables are tattooed and sent to this place, never to return. Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is a young woman who was sent there for reasons unknown, and to be honest I don't really think they matter anyway. This is possibly the only unexplained thing that I thought didn't need to be explained. Arlen is nearly immediately kidnapped by two women who were driving a golf cart. When she wakes, she is chained up and drugged for very bad reasons. A woman cuts her right arm and leg off, and out she goes once again. Later that day, or some other day, Arlen is able to escape. She tricks one of the women into unchaining her, kills her, and soon finds out that the people at this place eat human beings. Somehow, Arlen is able to escape into the desert on a skateboard.

In the desert after escaping, there is absolutely nothing. When sent into the desert, Arlen had found a paper stating that people should look for Comfort. What is Comfort? We soon find out, but I'll continue on. Comfort is led by The Dream (Keanu Reeves), and Comfort is a place people are able to come and live a somewhat normal life in the madness of the wasteland. Seemingly, all may enter. Arlen gets to Comfort as a result of being rescued by a mute (Jim Carrey), after which we move forward five months. Arlen now has a prosthetic leg and a house in Comfort, but this is not enough for her. Remember, she was deemed undesirable enough to be thrown in the wasteland. A criminal. She decides to walk out into the desert with a gun. When she finds the second of the two women who kidnapped her, Arlen shoots the woman dead on the spot. The woman had also brought a little girl with her to this dump. Summarily, the little girl is taken by Arlen back to Comfort. Unbeknownst to her, this girl has a dad. He is Miami Man (Jason Momoa). He is a cannibal. He is coming to get his daughter back.

The movie absolutely goes off a cliff once Arlen escapes from her captors. It is actually unwatchable. There are so many questions I have about how this society actually works, none of the ones that you'd think should be answered are answered in any way. The Bad Batch was much better when this seemed like it was going to be some Texas Chainsaw Massacre shit. The romance angle in this movie really wrecked me and killed my interest in the film to the point where I was browsing on my phone. Someone going back to help someone who ran a place that took her limbs and ate them? Nah. The cannibal angle was also what I watched the movie for. It is not as prevalent as I thought it would be. I thought that there would also be some kind of explanation for the cannibalism on display in this movie. There is not. People are hungry, I guess.

What my problem with this movie is, is that I don't understand the point of it. I feel that the director did not do a good enough job ensuring that there was a point. Also, when her movie decides to spend so much time on introspective scenes for her lead character, I find that I need to know more about the lead character than what I know right now. There are a lot of ideas here, but I can't tell you where they were going. The opening sequence of the film is great, and the rest is not. The thing that really gets me, that made me hate this movie, was that the climax of the film came to rest on two characters finding a little girl. This was not what I felt was promised to me when I turned this on.

3.5/10

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

 

[Big Papa Paegan]

100% with you on Bad Batch. I appreciated the mid 90s indie deep to it, but when they established an actual villain and there was a reason for a legitimate plot to form it just...didn't. Such a waste.

 

[Brocklock]

Yeah I hated The Bad Batch. I liked Momoa's performance, but not much else. Total disappointment after I really liked the director's first movie A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night.

 

[909]

Not going to do a real review, but I just watched Quincy, which is a documentary on Netflix about who else, Quincy Jones. I mean, really. Who else could it have been? There aren't that many documentaries that are simultaneously pleasing and not as introspective as I would have liked. The depth of Quincy Jones' life required far more than just a two hour documentary. It requires more than just the few lines I'm writing right now. The problem is that the depth in his life completely leaves me at a loss for words as to what I'd want to talk about. There's just too much. There isn't enough time spent on basically any aspect of his career. I would have liked to know what compelled him to specifically compose these songs, his thought process. That's not there. The strength of the documentary lies in the footage we have not seen. Quincy Jones produced the opening of the National Museum of African American Culture, and there is a lot of footage showing him putting together the lineup of guests and performances for that opening. I just wish I would know more about him after having watched this.

6.5/10

 

[909]

Second Act (2018), directed by Peter Segal

My goal tomorrow is to watch a film that I actually want to write about. Second Act is, needless to say, not that kind of movie. I can't really explain why I even watched this. Did I want to watch trash? I guess. I thought Second Act would be far more interesting than it actually was. I'm glad this is a genre that has died in recent years. This kind of flick really is its own genre, too. "Woman lies or is pushed into doing something they've always wanted to do, eventually they wise up or have a change of heart, where they learn their own self worth and grow from it. But they're hiding something all along." I guess this happens with men in movies too. This is a genre that absolutely has to go. I saw a few of these movies last year, but there aren't that many of them anymore. It used to be that such movies would be among the highest grossing films in any given year. I never like this kind of shit. Thing is, this movie has Jennifer Lopez in it. And...

So, that's good enough reason.

Maya (Jennifer Lopez) is an assistant manager at the grocery store she has worked at for fifteen years. Sales have drastically improved, customers are happy, and new ideas were introduced to the store by her. On a day when an executive is to arrive at the store, Maya expects that this is effectively an interview for a promotion to a managerial position. Unfortunately, this is not to be. She has been passed up for Arthur (Dan Bucatinsky), a guy who graduated from Duke with an MBA. This movie initially goes for blatant "pesky men are getting in our way" energy. Bear with me though. Her boyfriend Trey (Milo Ventimiglia) is saddened, and her best friend Joan (Leah Remini) just can't believe that her coworker has been passed up for this job. After all, she knows all the good that Maya does. The executive also decided to make the point that Maya only has her GED and no college education. This is why she did not get the job.

There is a point to be made in Second Act, that real experience should matter as much as a degree. This point is very poorly made. For some absolutely insane reason, Joan's son Dilly (Dakton Harrod) has an idea he springs on Maya the day after her 40th birthday party. For whatever reason, Dilly decides to make Maya a fake Facebook and apply her for jobs she isn't qualified for. This is so wrong. What's even more wrong is that Maya decides to accept this help and go to a job interview. Franklin & Clarke is a skincare company, and the CEO, Anderson Clarke (Treat Williams) has decided to meet her personally. Maya does a good job in this interview. What she doesn't know is that Dilly puffed that Facebook up with all kinds of false information. Maya is now a prisoner to this madness, and when offered a job, she takes it. To be clear, this is a job as an executive consultant. Lots of money, lots of perks. It also turns out that Maya is going to be in competition with Anderson's daughter, Zoe (Vanessa Hudgens). In another movie, there is a twist that could be very good and could have been handled very well. But, this is not that movie. There is way more to Zoe than you could possibly think.

Now, to get back to what I said about there being a point to be made about real life experience. There is one. The people who made this film decided that the way to tell that story was for their lead to lie about their experience and get a job based on those lies. I don't understand this kind of filmmaking at all. The dialogue in this movie is also terrible for such long portions of it, and man, I really don't want to write about this movie. I don't have much of anything good to say at all. This isn't outright terrible, but I have a hard time dealing with movies that make me feel as if I'm above that movie. We know that Jennifer Lopez can act based on her performance in Hustlers. I now know that this material is beneath her and doesn't do anything for anyone. Also, in a modern society, this kind of movie is totally unreasonable and not plausible at all. Anyone would be able to find out anything they want to know about Maya. This is set in 2018. Is this Lopez's worst movie? I wouldn't quite say that.

I also think that the person who wrote this movie should consider never writing another movie. You know there's a part where a tree from Hiroshima is used in order for Maya to create her skincare product? If anyone cared about this movie, it would have been a big deal. Nobody cared. The twist with Hudgens and Lopez could have been the basis for a better movie. Not a good one, but you know, a better one. That didn't happen.

3.5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. The Rider
3. A Star Is Born
4. First Reformed
5. The Favourite
6. You Were Never Really Here
7. Widows
8. First Man
9. BlacKkKlansman
10. Blindspotting
11. Leave No Trace
12. Black Panther
13. If Beale Street Could Talk
14. The Sisters Brothers
15. A Private War
16. Avengers: Infinity War
17. Stan & Ollie
18. Green Book
19. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
20. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
21. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
22. Private Life
23. Climax
24. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
25. Mid90s
26. Lean on Pete
27. On My Skin
28. Eighth Grade
29. Sorry to Bother You
30. Suspiria
31. The Death of Stalin
32. A Quiet Place
33. Vice
34. The Old Man & the Gun
35. Vox Lux
36. Bad Times at the El Royale
37. The Other Side of the Wind
38. Searching
39. Calibre
40. A Simple Favor
41. The Hate U Give
42. Unsane
43. Disobedience
44. Boy Erased
45. Bumblebee
46. Mary Poppins Returns
47. Creed II
48. Hold the Dark
49. The Land of Steady Habits
50. Halloween
51. The 12th Man
52. Upgrade
53. What They Had
54. Ant-Man and the Wasp
55. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
56. Blockers
57. Beirut
58. Roxanne Roxanne
59. Tully
60. Mary Queen of Scots
61. Aquaman
62. Ideal Home
63. Outlaw King
64. Overlord
65. Ready Player One
66. Ben Is Back
67. Monsters and Men
68. Colette
69. The Mule
70. On the Basis of Sex
71. Bohemian Rhapsody
72. White Boy Rick
73. Papillon
74. Game Night
75. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
76. Ocean's Eight
77. Alpha
78. Come Sunday
79. Instant Family
80. The Front Runner
81. The Predator
82. Apostle
83. The Oath
84. Uncle Drew
85. The Cured
86. The Commuter
87. The Angel
88. Tag
89. Beautiful Boy
90. The Nun
91. Operation Finale
92. The Equalizer 2
93. The Spy Who Dumped Me
94. Cargo
95. Yardie
96. Boundaries
97. Bird Box
98. 12 Strong
99. Venom
100. Skyscraper
101. The Meg
102. Assassination Nation
103. Adrift
104. Crazy Rich Asians
105. Backstabbing for Beginners
106. The Girl in the Spider's Web
107. Gringo
108. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
109. 22 July
110. Tomb Raider
111. Rampage
112. Hotel Artemis
113. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
114. The Little Stranger
115. 7 Days in Entebbe
116. Night School
117. The 15:17 To Paris
118. Den of Thieves
119. The Catcher Was a Spy
120. Peppermint
121. Mile 22
122. The First Purge
123. Hunter Killer
124. The Hurricane Heist
125. The Cloverfield Paradox
126. Breaking In
127. Welcome to Marwen
128. Second Act
129. Mute
130. Kin
131. Hell Fest
132. Action Point
133. Proud Mary
134. Robin Hood
135. Traffik
136. Tau
137. Winchester
138. The Happytime Murders
139. The Outsider
140. Slender Man