In Which I Briefly Review Movies

[909]

Ingrid Goes West (2017), directed by Matt Spicer

I said I was going to make sure to watch something I wanted to review, and that was a hell of a decision. After watching the kind of shit I had been watching, I really needed to watch something like Ingrid Goes West. I had been wanting to watch this for a while, but I didn't have Hulu until recently. Now I do. The best endorsement I can give is that if you haven't seen this movie already, you need to watch it instead of reading this review. I think that there's a strong possibility I was wrong about the comedy genre. Maybe this is not a dead genre. Maybe it's just that people in charge of these studios no longer understand what's funny and what isn't. Maybe funny movies like this one tend to fall through the cracks because of that. There were some last year that did not. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was extremely amusing. So was Knives Out. Those directors have cache though. They can get their movies made because they have an already established relationship with studios. This is not the Hollywood of the past. A movie like Animal House would never get made by Universal in this day and age. Times have changed, largely for the worse. Who knows what the film industry will look like by this time next year? You'd think they'd be even more cautious in deciding what to spend their money on.

Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza) is a woman from Pennsylvania, and she is clearly unstable. I laughed hard to the opening scene, where she was crying while hitting the like button on Instagram posts. It turns out that Ingrid is at a wedding, one she has not been invited to. The poor woman soon to meet the brunt of her rage is Charlotte. Charlotte seems to not even know that Ingrid exists. Ingrid thinks that Charlotte is her best friend. When Ingrid gets out of her car, she decides to walk up to Charlotte, call her a cunt, and spray her in the face with pepper spray. Yikes. I mean, I don't really know how I can follow up on that. Because of this assault, Ingrid is made to undergo a stay at the mental hospital. Of course, that will be done sans phone. When she gets out of the mental hospital, it turns out that clearly this woman has a social media problem that was not exclusive to Charlotte.

Social media addiction in a movie is very timely when you consider this premiered at Sundance in 2017. This, however, is not just addiction. Upon Ingrid's release, we also discovered that her mom has died and Ingrid has been given $60,000. Through Instagram, she becomes obsessed with an influencer, Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen). I laughed the whole way though this. Ingrid thinks that Taylor has the perfect life and she starts commenting on her posts, hoping that one of these days Taylor will say something to her. Eventually she does, responding to a comment Ingrid had made about Taylor's avocado toast. This inspires Ingrid to use the $60,000 in order to move to Los Angeles. Her intention is to become friends with Taylor, no matter how difficult this mission may be. She rents an apartment from Dan (O'Shea Jackson Jr.), a guy who wants to break into the movie business writing screenplays. In order to become friends with Taylor, Ingrid gets a makeover and starts following Taylor around the area based on her social media posts. There are also other things that Ingrid does...

Alright, so for once it was easy to find a cut off point. Maybe that's because this is a genuinely interesting movie. I have to give Ingrid Goes West major props for actually going for the hard ending that such a work truly deserves. It would have been just a little too far if Ingrid actually succeeded in her goal. To me, this feels like what a satire is really supposed to feel like. I laughed constantly throughout this film. I felt like this was sure to be a good movie the moment it opened with Aubrey Plaza crying over Instagram posts showing that she was not invited to the wedding these posts were emanating from. The Batman stuff in this movie is another thing that feels like something a movie could only get away with if it contained strong material. Honestly, I couldn't believe what I was seeing at times. Ingrid Goes West comes dangerously close to being too on the nose, but it seems that everyone knew exactly when it was time to back off and mix up the story. The introduction of a villain, and the choice and casting of that villain, was too good.

I'm sure everyony who watched this cringed constantly, because that's one of the only emotions someone can have while watching a work like this. Ingrid Goes West does have one big flaw though. The most important thing in a film cannot take place off-screen. I know that this movie exclusively follows Ingrid around, but still. I didn't like that. I do like how this movie portrays social media though. I like that Ingrid Goes West puts the toxicity of social media on blast. I would have liked if the sexual relationship (trying very hard to not spoil) had actually made sense, because it didn't make any sense for this to have turned into anything at all. Overall, this is a great comedy. Not just by the standards of now, either. Plaza is also great in this, and why this would lead to her being a supporting actor in a Chucky movie, I do not know.

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

 

[Hawk 34]

I’m glad after like three years ago when I left the theater and told you to see this immediately and you said you would and finally have, see what I mean man.

 

[Brocklock]

Yeah I've watched this movie a few times now and I would say it's one of the most underrated movies of the last five years.

If you thought Aubrey was weird in this, she's so much more bizarre in Legion. No idea why someone would watch most of het work and then cast her as the mom in a Chucky movie lol.

 

[909]

Christine (2016), directed by Antonio Campos

Alright, so Christine is about to bounce from Netflix, and I knew I had wanted to watch this movie, so I had to get on that real quick. As you might suspect, Christine is about Christine Chubbuck, the news reporter widely known for having killed herself during a broadcast. How does one talk about a movie like this? This is a strong effort on the part of the director, Campos. I had never heard of Campos and the only reason I'd even heard of this movie was because of the subject having such notoriety. Now, as for the film itself, Christine Chubbuck (Rebecca Hall) was 29 years old, working at a station in Sarasota. The way the film tells it through dialogue with her mother Peg (J. Smith-Cameron), Christine had some kind of incident when she lived in Boston that required her to live with her mother. Some of the screenplay is admittedly imagined, while others were just the facts and details about Christine that her living colleagues could remember. Christine had her own talk show on TV-30, which aired at 9 AM. This, however, is not quite enough for Christine. Like every other reporter, she feels the need to move up in the world.

In Christine's case, up in the world would be a move to Baltimore, which she wants. The station owner is going to start a network in Baltimore and needs to hire people to fill those slots. Before we get to that, let's talk about her current position. I said that Christine had a talk show, but she has problems with her boss, Michael (Tracy Letts). Their views on news do not align with each other. Mike believes that the news should be as it is now. Sensationalism will bring up ratings, which could also help him. Christine believes that news should be the actual news, and we know which side won that newsroom battle to decide what we'll watch for the rest of our lives. There are other issues at hand too. For one, she has a crush on the anchor, George (Michael C. Hall). She also has massive stomach pains, which eventually lead to her needing to have an ovary removed. Also, her relationship with her mom isn't the kind of relationship someone should have with her mom. She is entirely dependent upon her mom to be constantly present at their house and for her mom to be a sounding bag for her daily issues. This, needless to say, is a huge sign of mental instability that could spiral out of control.

I am rather surprised that this movie didn't even get one ounce of awards buzz for Rebecca Hall, who does a superb acting job that is entirely believable even though there's no way that she is this kind of person. While the film does show Chubbuck killing herself, and for some people that would be the draw of the movie, that isn't what the movie is really about. I think Christine is a movie that's about what brings someone to suicide. The filmmakers are also very capable of ensuring that the character who kills herself is not made out to be demonized into doing something bad. Nobody involved with the situation has ever said that anyone treated her badly, nobody said they thought she would ever kill herself. What they did say was that Christine Chubbuck had problems with self-confidence and an inability to see her own value in any context. Chubbuck was supposedly a virgin, she was a virgin who was also scared to ask anyone out and take some control over her situation. There's no reason that this should have happened. That's what makes this so hard to watch to its conclusion.

My own perspective was that it was frustrating to see that the character as presented in the film would invent arguments out of thin air because of frustration over problems entirely unrelated to those arguments. Ultimately, it also feels like she felt trapped in Sarasota, this is a film careful to ensure that the story told isn't one of someone only killing themselves because they were mad about their virginity. There is much more to it than that. There is a level of self-deprecation in this film that is very, very hard to stomach. Eventually, if you keep repeating bad things about yourself to other people, you'll certainly believe that they're true. This is a film that acknowledges that the 1970s were a sexist era. While that is the case, that is also not the reason that she had friction with the station manager. It is because they had different views about news. There are times when Christine feels like she has been screwed over when she has not been screwed over. The problem with her ovary is one of justified anger that is subsequently repressed.

As far as the footage goes, I am glad that the footage is not publicly available and/or does not exist. We don't need to see that. Knowing that this actually happened is another reason this is such a grueling view. I'm not the biggest fan of portraits of self-destruction to begin with. What makes this movie really hit is that I can't pinpoint why Christine Chubbuck killed herself, because the filmmakers decided to not try to make some bullshit up where she rationalized killing herself prior to the event. To think she should be promoted through the news business while believing that she had no self-value is a tough contradiction that is impossible for me to understand. This film contains a great performance, but I should note once again, Christine is a film that is very hard to watch.

7.5/10

 

[Brocklock]

That film hit me super hard when I saw it. I've actually watched it twice now, but I felt like shit both times. Can't believe Rebecca Hall was completely ignored by all the award shows when this came out.


I don't know if it's streaming anywhere, but a great companion piece to this is a documentary called Kate Plays Christine, which also came out in 2016. It follows an actress named Kate Lyn Sheil as she prepares to play Christine Chubbuck for a film. It follows her research into Christine and it both works as a doc about Christine Chubbuck as well as insight into the lengths actors and actresses will go to completely change themselves to play a person in a biopic.

 

[909]

Woman Walks Ahead (2018), directed by Susanna White

Woman Walks Ahead was an indie movie that came out during the summer of 2018, the premise sounded interesting and I thought I would see the film long before now, but I did not. This film kind of went over like a wet fart. There are very good reasons that happened. There are other reasons that make it very difficult to understand how this even got made. You would think that an actress with social awareness of any kind would know not to jump into a white savior movie. This is not any other white savior movie, this is a special one. This is one where a painter has to remind Sitting Bull how to lead his people. What an absolutely laughable concept that is. This feels like a movie that could have been made ten years ago, back when nobody cared about making a white savior movie, when everyone would immediately rush to defend such movies by saying that those movies were giving communities of people jobs. And, back then anyway, people would say that those people shouldn't complain. I think this is a film that could have been much better. Why Woman Walks Ahead turned out to be this? I don't really know.

Alright, so with a film like this one I'm going to cut to the chase as quickly as I can. First, here is how the film's story works. Caroline Weldon (Jessica Chastain) is a painter, freed from her marriage and setting off to North Dakota with the intention of painting Sitting Bull (Michael Greyeyes). This version of Caroline seems to know nothing of the Sioux, what she does know is that nobody has painted Sitting Bull and this is something she wanted to do after her abusive husband died. On the way to the Dakota Territory, Caroline meets some resistance in the form of Silas Grove (Sam Rockwell), a colonel in the United States Army. We all know what the Army did up there, right? The Indian agent at the train station, James McLaughlin (Ciaran Hinds), has already decided that Caroline is to be arrested and sent back to New York City where she belongs. They both assume that Caroline traveled up there as an agitator intent on riling up Sitting Bull. Man, New York City liberals, I tell ya. This may surprise you, but that's not what happens. Instead, she has to inspire Sitting Bull to lead once again.

Now, for the reality of it. Caroline was a painter who decided to go to North Dakota with her son, who was around 12 years old at the time. Caroline had inherited some money from her mother's death, and she'd divorced her husband. She decided that she was going to Dakota because she had recently become very interested in the problems of Native Americans and joined the National Indian Defense Association, and her new dream was to live with the Sioux. She wanted to help the Sioux fight against the Dawes Act, and she befriended Sitting Bull. While living there, the Ghost Dance Movement took place and spread across reservations. The Ghost Dance Movement was believed by Natives to reunite the living with spirits of the dead, and those spirits would subsequently fight on behalf of the natives and expel white colonists from their land. Caroline told Sitting Bull that if he participated in this, eventually the government would come to kill him. Sitting Bull subsequently turned against her, her son got sick, and she left the reservation, never to return.

To me, the latter sounds like a much more interesting film. After all, it is not shaded in countless falsehoods and liberal white female wishcasting. This film even presents the possibility that Sitting Bull and Caroline were sexually attracted to each other. I shit you not! I hate this kind of stuff. Fake history is usually reserved for conservatives, but in Woman Walks Ahead we have an entry from the other side of the spectrum. There is a scene where Silas apologizes for massacring Native American women and children. This. Would. Never. Ever. Ever. Happen. The vast majority of the things on screen in this film are offensively false, with little respect shown to the culture this movie is actually supposed to be about. How is this one of the only films made about Sitting Bull? I can hardly believe that. When a movie fucks up one or two times, gets one or two things wrong, I can accept that's going to happen sometimes. Woman Walks Ahead is literally full of these kinds of things. The climax of this film takes place at a vote, where Native Americans were supposedly allowed to vote on whether or not they accepted some kind of made up treaty between them and the American government. THIS. NEVER. EVER. EVER. WOULD. HAVE. HAPPENED.

There is surely nothing wrong with portraying the government as having committed genocide against Native Americans. This is undoubtedly true, but in Woman Walks Ahead, all you hear are words. The filmmakers also make a superficial attempt at trying to get their audience to understand that not all Native Americans felt the same way about everything, that there were distinct cultural differences, and that some people killed other people, but it is a superficial attempt at its core. This attempt is also about five minutes into the movie, when a train attendant tells Caroline that the Sioux killed his people. Why is this there? I don't know. Why does this movie even exist? Can't answer that. Woman Walks Ahead is also a film that either does not have the stomach or does not have the budget to show the American government committing atrocities. Woman Walks Ahead is also the kind of movie that shows the irrelevant painter much more throughout the film than Sitting Bull. This movie sucks hard.

There is, however, one saving grace. I would like to give this film a fucking zero. I can't do that, but I don't remember the last time I wrote a review this long so quickly. The performance by Michael Greyeyes is excellent enough to merit mention. At this point, Sitting Bull was powerless. The performance does a really good job of showing that. That they made up bullshit about how he died is classic. It really sums up this piece of shit. There is a narrative here that can shine through the excrement presented on screen, but the people involved are much too talentless to write or direct something to make that narrative more clear. I can't even say that I paid much mind to the other performances in the film, because they were based on lies. The story of Sitting Bull deserves better, and for some reason people who reviewed this gave the film middling reviews. Are they afraid to shit on something just because of the subject?

2.5/10

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. Woman Walks Ahead
139. The Happytime Murders
140. The Outsider
141. Slender Man

 

[909]

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot (2018), directed by Gus van Sant

I wanted to see Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot a few years ago, but I could not. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot is the kind of film that I would say fills an extremely small niche. The release of the film was also completely botched and this is a movie that should not have premiered at Sundance in the first place. If anything, this is the kind of movie that should have been released in awards season even if it was doomed to do nothing. Due to how small this niche is, there have been some complaints about the release, namely from Jonah Hill. If you haven't seen this movie yet, Hill says that this was the best acting he'll ever do. I don't even think he needed to say that because it's so obvious. I do not think this is a movie that could have been successful in any way at all. I'd also go so far as to say that the main reason people would watch this is because of a cast that is full of really good actors. I'm always surprised when movies like this one get made at all. Much like there are a lot of people who don't read, and therefore movies about non-mainstream authors are the sort that don't make any money, people really don't look at cartoons in the paper. There has to be some other sort of angle that appeals to people. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot has that, but it isn't a commercial angle at all.

This is a story told with shifting narratives. Everyone knows that I really don't like that, so I'm going to get rid of that when summarizing things. John Callahan (Joaquin Phoenix) was at one point a young man, an alcoholic who had no interest in anything other than drinking. He'd wake up, and it was time to immediately go to the liquor store and get something to drink. One day, he'd been asked by some women he knew if he would drive them over to a party. At the party, John gets bombed and he meets Dexter (Jack Black), a fellow drunk who tells him that there's a better party across town. Sounds great! On their way to that party, they stop at the strip club, at a bar, at a theme park, then it's finally time to go to this party. Dexter drives a VW Bug, and while John drove it for a little while it is now Dexter's turn to do so again. This is not a very sturdy car. When drunk guys do what drunk guys do, this car crashes into a pole at 90 MPH.

At some point, John wakes up. He learns that Dexter was able to walk away from the crash without anything but a scratch on him. John was not so lucky. He is now a quadriplegic with surprisingly good shoulder movement. This obviously would really fucking suck. I don't think I needed to say that. John has a long road ahead of him, and the guy is an alcoholic even still. That doesn't just end because you wind up in nursing care. Over the course of his time in nursing care, he meets Annu (Rooney Mara), who helps inspire him to improve his outlook and get out of the home sometimes. Once he finally really does leave, things aren't so good though. His caretaker Tim (Tony Greenhand) is a piece of shit who abandons him without helping. The person from health services, Suzanne (Carrie Brownstein), bothers him because he doesn't do all the things that he should be doing. But, in part because of all this, John is inspired to finally put down the drink. He goes to a meeting, and that meeting eventually leads to a group session. Donnie (Jonah Hill) generally runs the group sessions, which are attended by Mike (Mark Webber), Hans (Udo Kier), Corky (Kim Gordon), Reba (Beth Ditto), and Martingale (Ronnie Adrian). These people all help John to confront his demons, and ultimately become what he became, a cartoonist who had his work published around the country.

Alright, so I think if you're reading this review you can see the angle this movie has. Quadriplegic overcoming terribly destructive alcoholism. I think this is a film that would have made more money if it was made when Robin Williams wanted to make it. Obviously, Robin Williams was a huge star with real drawing power, but audiences when Robin Williams was making films were more apt to latch onto stories like this one, where something bad happens to someone and they come to grips with it and entertain people. I didn't think this was a very funny movie even though Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot is listed as a comedy-drama. The meat of the film is, absolutely without question, the scenes with Phoenix and Hill. This is a good film, but nothing in the film is even CLOSE to the quality of those scenes. I should also note that Hill is playing a gay character. This is an excellent performance, full stop. I cannot describe it, you should just watch it. Joaquin Phoenix, as you may already know, is the Best Actor. You see that I didn't say Best Actor winner, right? The Best Actor. In any performance of his it's clear what to expect.

This film really has a soul to it, but I strongly dislike that the narrative featured some time jumping stuff. I really, really don't see why that's necessary in any way at all. The story here is good enough to not need that. I should also note that this film is about John Callahan overcoming alcoholism. You do not overcome near complete paralysis. The film paints the picture that Callahan already had the disposition to accept being paralyzed and not want to kill himself. I haven't read his book though. Maybe he did want to kill himself, but I think that would have been shown. I also like that the movie was entirely centered around his battle with the bottle. Callahan died in 2010, but this has literally no relevance to the story at all. This is about two great performances, about someone completing the 12 Step program. There's some cornball shit here too, but this film also presents the harsh reality of the world. When you're paralyzed, people don't give a fuck that you're paralyzed. People are treated the same way or worse than everyone else. That the group didn't want to hear him feeling sorry for himself is something I appreciated. For the most part, nobody ever wants to hear people feeling sorry for themselves. That was a nice realistic touch.

7.5/10

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. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
36. Vox Lux
37. Bad Times at the El Royale
38. The Other Side of the Wind
39. Searching
40. Calibre
41. A Simple Favor
42. The Hate U Give
43. Unsane
44. Disobedience
45. Boy Erased
46. Bumblebee
47. Mary Poppins Returns
48. Creed II
49. Hold the Dark
50. The Land of Steady Habits
51. Halloween
52. The 12th Man
53. Upgrade
54. What They Had
55. Ant-Man and the Wasp
56. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
57. Blockers
58. Beirut
59. Roxanne Roxanne
60. Tully
61. Mary Queen of Scots
62. Aquaman
63. Ideal Home
64. Outlaw King
65. Overlord
66. Ready Player One
67. Ben Is Back
68. Monsters and Men
69. Colette
70. The Mule
71. On the Basis of Sex
72. Bohemian Rhapsody
73. White Boy Rick
74. Papillon
75. Game Night
76. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
77. Ocean's Eight
78. Alpha
79. Come Sunday
80. Instant Family
81. The Front Runner
82. The Predator
83. Apostle
84. The Oath
85. Uncle Drew
86. The Cured
87. The Commuter
88. The Angel
89. Tag
90. Beautiful Boy
91. The Nun
92. Operation Finale
93. The Equalizer 2
94. The Spy Who Dumped Me
95. Cargo
96. Yardie
97. Boundaries
98. Bird Box
99. 12 Strong
100. Venom
101. Skyscraper
102. The Meg
103. Assassination Nation
104. Adrift
105. Crazy Rich Asians
106. Backstabbing for Beginners
107. The Girl in the Spider's Web
108. Gringo
109. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
110. 22 July
111. Tomb Raider
112. Rampage
113. Hotel Artemis
114. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
115. The Little Stranger
116. 7 Days in Entebbe
117. Night School
118. The 15:17 To Paris
119. Den of Thieves
120. The Catcher Was a Spy
121. Peppermint
122. Mile 22
123. The First Purge
124. Hunter Killer
125. The Hurricane Heist
126. The Cloverfield Paradox
127. Breaking In
128. Welcome to Marwen
129. Second Act
130. Mute
131. Kin
132. Hell Fest
133. Action Point
134. Proud Mary
135. Robin Hood
136. Traffik
137. Tau
138. Winchester
139. Woman Walks Ahead
140. The Happytime Murders
141. The Outsider
142. Slender Man

 

[Brocklock]

I remember loving Jonah's performance in that movie and it's another one where I wonder why no award buzz. Jonah has been oscar nominated before and they usually like to give a nomination to guys they know. Looking at the actors up for Supporting Actor for 2018, his performance is better than any of the nominees except Richard E. Grant for Can You Ever Forgive Me and Sam Elliot for A Star Is Born.

 

[909]

Annihilation (2018), directed by Alex Garland

My new policy of posting reviews the day after watching the film is a good one, as Annihilation left me totally mindfucked and in a mood where I don't really want to discuss theories about the movie. I'm just not that kind of person anyway. I had been waiting to watch this movie for a while, because I knew that if I was going to watch Annihilation, I needed to be in some kind of mood where my thoughts would easily flow out of my head. That isn't working right now. I guess what I would say is that this movie is simple while it isn't, and I do understand why the film bombed at the box office. There's a lot going on here. Rather than get bogged down in the details, here is my rather simple look at things. This is what the world would look like if it got cancer. The world in Annihilation is one where cells replicate, the same way cancer grows and spreads through people's bodies. This is also a film that takes quite a while to get interesting, because entering that process is entirely necessary for anything in the film to actually matter. There's one thing that really creeped me out though, and it isn't an obvious thing. It's the way that the '8' tattoo spread from one person to another over and over again. Why? You know, well. Why?

Annihilation starts in a way that I've said many times over that I truly hate, but in this case I'm going to give it a pass. It's very easy to forget the details of this event. Lena (Natalie Portman) is being interrogated by Lomax (Benedict Wong). Why is this happening? We then jump back to the beginning of the film, or what should have been the beginning. Something comes down from space and hits a lighthouse, which starts glowing in a very strange manner. These scenes don't really matter though. Lena is a biology professor at Johns Hopkins. Her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) has been away on a mission for a very long time, and at this point Lena thinks he's dead. While painting her bedroom one weekend, Kane arrives at their shared house, startling Lena. He doesn't remember where he was, then he takes a drink of water and starts bleeding into that water. They call an ambulance, but on the way they're pulled over by some government agents, sedated, and kidnapped. When Lena and Kane come to, it turns out that Kane is near dead with complete organ failure, and they're at a compound founded by a government organization called the Southern Reach.

The Southern Reach apparently conducts expeditions into this area where the meteor has crashed into the lighthouse. That happened three years prior to the events of Annihilation. The meteor created some kind of zone that is now called the Shimmer, based on how the area looks. The Shimmer is also regularly expanding through the southern United States, and eventually given time, will take over the whole country. This movie isn't really about that, though. Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is a psychologist who is going to form an expedition to go out to the lighthouse and see what can be done about the situation. Kane's condition is specifically because he was on one of the previous expeditions. Lena wants to join up to go on this mission. She was previously in the Army, which is where she met Kane. Lena does however make the decision not to tell anyone that she knows Kane. The other three women going on this expedition are Josie (Tessa Thompson), a physicist; Anya (Gina Rodriguez), a medic; and Cass (Tuva Novotny), an anthropologist. They are all headed into this area with guns, not knowing what they may find. Except, Dr. Ventress and Lena know exactly what they're getting into. You see, Ventress has cancer. She knows she's not coming back. Lena also knows that her husband didn't really come back, but we know that she does come back. What do they find?

Annihilation is the kind of movie that starts off super slow, but because you know that Lena makes it out of the Shimmer, you know that you're going to get mind fucked. The mind fucking happens in the third act, which is indescribable. It is something that needs to be seen in order to be interpreted. There are things that I didn't like though, I'll get to that first. Annihilation does have a lack of fully fleshed out characters. This is the kind of film that has too much going on in the background or on screen to actually flesh these characters out. This film could easily have been ten minutes longer. This isn't as good as Ex Machina, which after having a lot of time to think about it was a film that I underrated. If you aren't paying attention, this is a film that will make very little sense. This is also an extremely loud movie. Perhaps that's a complaint for some, but not for this guy. I appreciated that, and there are too many films these days that are nearly impossible to hear.

When it comes to reviewing movies, I think what's most important is what a person feels after a movie rather than rationalizing and analysing the fun out of the subject. To this end, what I immediately thought after the movie were these two things. One was that the director really hit on this theme of self-destruction. You would have to be an idiot to not see the prevalence of this theme when it is literally spoken about during the events. Second is that this third act is utterly surreal and near perfect. Almost all of my complaints are related to things that happened in the previous acts. I have almost no complaints about the third act. How can I even describe this? The essence of someone else disintegrates, forms a glowing entity, and creates a clone. The scenes with the bear were awesome. The affair scenes perfectly illustrated why someone would sign themselves up for a suicide mission. In fact, why two people would sign themselves up for it. This isn't the best science-fiction movie ever, but it's pretty good. I guess the biggest problem with the movie, is that movies like this one are now proven to not make money. The only way we'll get movies like this is if some obscenely rich person who shouldn't have that much money decides to waste his money on those movies knowing they won't make money at all. I definitely see the problem with this. If Annihilation featured an alien that had to spell out every single thing to the audience, would this movie have been anywhere near as good? No.

8/10

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. Annihilation
23. Private Life
24. Climax
25. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
26. Mid90s
27. Lean on Pete
28. On My Skin
29. Eighth Grade
30. Sorry to Bother You
31. Suspiria
32. The Death of Stalin
33. A Quiet Place
34. Vice
35. The Old Man & the Gun
36. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
37. Vox Lux
38. Bad Times at the El Royale
39. The Other Side of the Wind
40. Searching
41. Calibre
42. A Simple Favor
43. The Hate U Give
44. Unsane
45. Disobedience
46. Boy Erased
47. Bumblebee
48. Mary Poppins Returns
49. Creed II
50. Hold the Dark
51. The Land of Steady Habits
52. Halloween
53. The 12th Man
54. Upgrade
55. What They Had
56. Ant-Man and the Wasp
57. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
58. Blockers
59. Beirut
60. Roxanne Roxanne
61. Tully
62. Mary Queen of Scots
63. Aquaman
64. Ideal Home
65. Outlaw King
66. Overlord
67. Ready Player One
68. Ben Is Back
69. Monsters and Men
70. Colette
71. The Mule
72. On the Basis of Sex
73. Bohemian Rhapsody
74. White Boy Rick
75. Papillon
76. Game Night
77. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
78. Ocean's Eight
79. Alpha
80. Come Sunday
81. Instant Family
82. The Front Runner
83. The Predator
84. Apostle
85. The Oath
86. Uncle Drew
87. The Cured
88. The Commuter
89. The Angel
90. Tag
91. Beautiful Boy
92. The Nun
93. Operation Finale
94. The Equalizer 2
95. The Spy Who Dumped Me
96. Cargo
97. Yardie
98. Boundaries
99. Bird Box
100. 12 Strong
101. Venom
102. Skyscraper
103. The Meg
104. Assassination Nation
105. Adrift
106. Crazy Rich Asians
107. Backstabbing for Beginners
108. The Girl in the Spider's Web
109. Gringo
110. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
111. 22 July
112. Tomb Raider
113. Rampage
114. Hotel Artemis
115. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
116. The Little Stranger
117. 7 Days in Entebbe
118. Night School
119. The 15:17 To Paris
120. Den of Thieves
121. The Catcher Was a Spy
122. Peppermint
123. Mile 22
124. The First Purge
125. Hunter Killer
126. The Hurricane Heist
127. The Cloverfield Paradox
128. Breaking In
129. Welcome to Marwen
130. Second Act
131. Mute
132. Kin
133. Hell Fest
134. Action Point
135. Proud Mary
136. Robin Hood
137. Traffik
138. Tau
139. Winchester
140. Woman Walks Ahead
141. The Happytime Murders
142. The Outsider
143. Slender Man

 

[909]

Will this topic ever have a real comeback? We shall see.

Sergio (2020), directed by Greg Barker

I figured I hadn't watched a movie from 2020 in quite a long time, so tonight was a good night to get back to that. Sergio was a film that looked like it might be good until it premiered at Sundance, and critics were notably divided on whether or not this was worth people's time to check out. I did. Maybe this was a bad idea and maybe it wasn't. My assumption was that Sergio would be an entirely different film than what it actually was. The thing is, Barker has also directed a documentary about the subject portrayed in this film. That documentary is also called Sergio, and it got really strong reviews and a fair amount of praise. Possibly this is a story best told by the documentary. Possibly the director decided that what he wanted to do was to complement his documentary. The fact is, I do not know. I haven't seen the documentary, so it's unfair for me to judge the film in that respect. So, I will not do that. What this movie is, is a movie about another life that was needlessly lost in Iraq when our country decided to illegally invade another.

Sergio is the story of Sergio Vieira de Mello (Wagner Moura), the United Nations' top diplomat in Iraq who had accepted an assignment in Baghdad two months after our invasion of Iraq. The stain of said invasion will forever be in our history, but the film is not about the invasion. The film is about Sergio. When Sergio arrives in Iraq, he makes the distinct decision to ensure that the UN and US are not seen as being in tandem. His seemingly most trusted allies are Carolina (Ana de Armas) and Gil (Brian F. O'Byrne). While Gil agrees with this decision, he is vehemently against Sergio's idea to decrease security that was provided by the US. Not long after this, Sergio meets with Paul Bremer (Bradley Whitford), a stooge that we had put in charge of a transitional government after Iraq's had collapsed. The two have some disagreements about what will happen, andy Sergio says that the next day he'll publicly denounce the occupying forces. Unfortunately, he does not make it to the next day, as a car bomb goes off, exploding UN headquarters in Baghdad.

Surprisingly enough, Sergio does not die in the initial blast, although many others do. However, he and Gil are trapped in rubble, awaiting rescue. While awaiting rescue, Sergio goes into his mind to think about the things most important to him. Where should I begin? First, I guess we'll talk about his two sons, who he feels that he has abandoned in pursuit of the greater good in his career as a diplomat. His career as a diplomat, you say? Prior to Sergio's stint in Baghdad, he served the United Nations in East Timor. Indonesia's occupation of East Timor received basically no media coverage in this country at any point in time. It was decided that after a prolonged occupation during which many Timorese had died, Indonesia and Portugal would have to broker a resolution. They had decided that there would have to be a vote allowing people in East Timor to choose between being an autonomous region of Indonesia or an independent nation. Indonesia very much did not like the results. That's where the United Nations comes in. Sergio was in East Timor to transition East Timor into being an independent nation with a new government. While in East Timor, he met Carolina. The two become lovers, and she wants him to get out of the diplomacy game. Clearly he does not.

Alright, so a movie like this should be pretty good in theory. You would think this is a movie entirely related to the diplomatic successes and failures of Sergio. This is not the case. The romance between Sergio and Carolina completely takes over what is otherwise a good movie. The romance in this story is not bad, but Sergio could have been a film about someone who had a lot to offer to the world, or in recapturing the moments that defined the man. The romance interferes with telling those stories. Perhaps that is more accurate than it is not, but I don't know. But, in doing just a little bit of reading about this diplomat, this is a person who spent time in every corner of the world that had problems. Instead of what we could have, we get a film that has really good moments mixed with decent sequences that shouldn't be featured in Sergio to this degree.

There are high points in Sergio, and the vast majority of them are related to East Timor. There is a scene where a refugee talks about how she no longer has anything, and wishes that she could just live where she used to live, like people in other countries. These kinds of scenes are jarring, and this particular story carries what feels like genuine authenticity. There should be more scenes like this. The man worked in Bangladesh, Sudan, Cyprus, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Kosovo, Fiji, Peru, and Lebanon. These were all major conflict zones at one point or another. It feels like there had to be something in his story that didn't quite make it into a film about the man. The film is techincally very solid as well. It is strange to see a piece of media portraying Iraq where the footage is not accompanied by a yellow filter. Unfortunately, because of the things that I've already complained about, Sergio is merely an okay film. Moura has a strong and convincing performance, but it feels like only half the story is told. These omissions make the film an average one.

6/10

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. Sergio
8. Sonic the Hedgehog
9. The Call of the Wild
10. Lost Girls
11. Underwater
12. The Rhythm Section
13. The Last Full Measure
14. Spenser Confidential
15. Like a Boss
16. The Grudge
17. Dolittle
18. Fantasy Island

 

[909]

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), directed by Rupert Wyatt

This isn't a rewatch or anything of the sort, I never got around to watching the reboot of this franchise. In fact, the only Planet of the Apes movie that I'd ever seen was the horrible film directed by Tim Burton. I remember going to see that in theaters on the first day. My dad really didn't like it. Fortunately, there were not more movies made during that effort to reboot the franchise, otherwise this series would probably not exist. It seems that everyone liked the three movies released last decade, so I thought I'd finally watch one of them. It seems to me that it would be hard to make one of these movies when some of the originals had such a good reception at the time. Also, much of the audience who saw those is now way too old to head out to the theater or they're dead. That's probably why it was decided to do this again. As for the movie itself, look. It's a franchise movie. I genuinely don't often have many things to say about movies like this one. I will say that if you're making a franchise, the way to start things is to make a movie like this one. You want it to be good, but you don't want to reveal all your cards the first time you get people in the theater. A lot of people running these failed franchises, of which there are countless tries, they don't really get that.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes decides to slow roll the viewers, a good decision if there ever was one. Will (James Franco) is a chemist at a biotech company called Gen-Sys. Gen-Sys is based in San Francisco, and at Gen-Sys they are testing a viral drug called ALZ-112 on chimpanzees. The reason? The company is attempting to find a cure from Alzheimer's disease, from which they would surely profit greatly. Will is to present the drug to his boss Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo), as well as the rest of the Gen-Sys board, but there's a problem. The chimpanzee that is to be presented has gone on a rampage, eventually crashing into the board meeting. This leads a security guard to shoot her to death, but after this happens, Will's assistant Robert (Tyler Labine) discovers that the chimpanzee was pregnant. Will is supposed to bring the newborn home for a few days, but that lasts much longer and the chimpanzee is named Caesar. Development of the drug is now dead. Will's father Charles (John Lithgow) particularly takes a liking to Caesar, so Will can't get rid of him.

We move forward a few years at a time, with some updates on Caesar's life. A few things of note happen. Charles, you see, he had dementia that was progressing towards Alzheimer's. Over the course of these events, we see that Caesar has had a heightened intelligence the same way his mother had. Not only does ALZ-112 help cure Alzheimer's, but it leads to a chimpanzee that is much smarter than human beings of comparable age. Caesar is also capable of communicating through sign language. Eventually, Caesar has an encounter with a human being that gets him a little hurt. Will takes him to Caroline (Frieda Pinto), a primatologist who gets him stitched up a little bit. Will and Caroline become a thing, and they take Caesar out to the redwoods to play and run around. While there, Caesar comes to wonder whether or not he's a pet. Not to spoil shit in case you haven't seen this, we'll move forward a little more. Will eventually presents his findings to Steven, and Steven is now receptive to creating a new, more powerful version of the drug. It is ALZ-113, but will this be safe? The chimpanzees they test this drug on will either make or break this cure. This is Planet of the Apes, though.

I said that I don't really like talking about franchise films, and this is certainly true as I struggled all day to finish this review. I thought the effects for the apes were very impressive, especially considering this was made nearly ten years ago. It is also interesting in that I was having a very hard time throughout the movie deciding which side was worse than the other. I landed on the side that thought humans were to blame for being pieces of shit. That aspect of the film is very interestingly framed. It is basically entirely up to the viewer. I also thought the humans in Rise of the Planet of the Apes were very boring and I didn't really feel anything for them at all. This movie is supposed to just be good fun, which I suppose that it is. Ultimately, if the apes in the movie aren't interesting beyond those effects, and if they don't have good characters, the movie is a big pile of nothing. Caesar is a really good character. He has heightened intelligence and actually acts like he does. Stupidity prevalent in complex characters is not part of the equation here. So, I liked this, but the other movies are probably quite a bit better. At least this wasn't Tim Burton's version.

7/10

 

[909]

Blaze (2018), directed by Ethan Hawke

Alright, so Blaze is a movie that got some really good reviews, but I'll come straight out with it and say that this film didn't resonate with me at all. This is the proverbial portrait of a struggling artist, but in this case one that refuses to be successful and is consciously making the decision to be the way that they are. Part alcohol fueled and part stubbornness, or commitment to his art, what have you, Blaze Foley (Ben Dickey) was a man who was what he was. Blaze is not a film that asks the viewer to accept that. It is a film that asks the viewer to commit to watching two hours of a talented person pushing the self-destruct button on their own list. I must point out that I do not know anything about Foley's music, or about Townes Van Zandt (Charlie Sexton), or any of that stuff. Because of that, this was a difficult film to view. Niche is perhaps not even the correct term for a film like this one.

Ethan Hawke is clearly a believer in Blaze Foley, someone who clearly respects the man for what he was and is fully committed to the concept of this film. In Blaze, we are given a film that has three timelines. One is the distant past, where Blaze is a young musician living amongst other artists in Georgia. While at this place, Blaze meets Sybil (Alia Shawkat), the proverbial love of his life. Maybe it's not fair to say that Sybil was the love of Blaze's life. Considering Sybil had a part in writing this screenplay, it's fair to say that she thought she was not. The love of Blaze's life was one of two things, as this film portrays it. Love of the bottle, or the love of writing music and performing it in front of nobody. Another timeline takes place during an interview with the aforementioned Van Zandt, and their other friend Zee (Josh Hamilton). In this interview, Van Zandt tells the stories about Blaze that he loved the most. These are woven together rather thinly.

I don't want to shit on a movie when I don't know enough about the subject to have built in respect for them, nor do I particularly care all that much to know about this subject. I did have one reason for watching this though. My grandfather was a musician in the 1950s, after he got home from his Air Force duty during the Korean War. He has a song or two out there somewhere that I could link, but I would prefer not to leave identifying information. I have to assume at some point, he made the choice to decide that he was going to have kids and stay at home with them. He never talked about his music, at least until I was 17 years old. I didn't see him again after that, so I don't know if he talked about it more or anything of the sort. What I thought was that in seeing this film, I could see what an alternative future would have looked like for my grandfather. Not such a good one. He also put down the drink at some point after this.

So, as for the movie itself. This was a good movie, although my lack of engagement with the subject made watching the film a little difficult for me. The thing is, when it comes to movies like this one, I find that often if someone doesn't care very much about the subject, it's hard to watch a whole movie worth of shit about them. Blaze is a movie that is fully committed to the idea that loving your own art and being able to creatively express yourself is what matters in the world. This doesn't surprise me considering that's exactly the kind of guy Ethan Hawke is. So, in that respect, this is a film about someone who fits Hawke's own mindset about life and art. You see why he'd direct this film now? I hate saying that I don't have much to add about a subject, but that's the case here. I think the film is lacking in having a true narrative, but at the same time, not every film needs to have one. What I have also learned tonight is to not be talking to other people while trying to watch a movie. In that case, some of the details can be missed. Lesson learned. I am not going to rate this at all because of that.

 

[Brocklock]

Blaze I didn't see because it seemed like a great 90 to 100 minute indie biopic stretched stretched out to 130 minutes.

 

[Cackling Co Pilot Kamala]

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is probably objectively speaking the second best PotA behind the original 1968 movie. '70s sequels are mostly at least somewhat entertaining but usually in a ham fisted and/or trashy way. Battle for the Planet of the Apes is the only one I hate besides the Tim Burton remake but at least that has John Huston and Paul Williams in ape suits.

I haven't seen the newest one with Woody Harrelson. I remember the sequel to Rise being an OK popcorn movie.

 

[Brocklock]

I'm in the minority cause I love Dawn the most and think it's the best Apes movie. The ape villain is particularly great. Action scenes are phenomenal and I love what they did with Caesar. Andy Serkis is Oscar worthy in all three movies tbh. Only problem is the humans are pretty boring and featured a bit too much, but War improves that aspect by replacing a family with a psychotic Woody Harrelson.

War is great as well. I did a new trilogy rewatch about a year ago and I think it's one of my favorite franchises in the last 15 years. They told Caesars story pretty perfectly.

 

[909]

The Painter and the Thief (2020), directed by Benjamin Ree

I wrecked my finger in a cart earlier today, so I cannot actually type very much about this. I will try to sell you a few paragraphs.

The Painter and the Thief is a documentary about two people based in Oslo. One is an artist from the Czech Republic, she is Barbora Kysilkova. Barbora finally had some success with her paintings and had an exhibition lined up. This exhibition could have led to a very large sale. Except, it did not. Karl-Bertil Nordland is a drug addict in need of another fix. He and some other robbers come across an art gallery, and they need the cash. They decide to go inside through the back door, and steal Barbora's paintings. It should be pointed out that Barbora's paintings are dark and presumably to the naked eye very valuable. At the trial, Bertil tells Barbora that he does not remember where the paintings are, because he was high. This, apparently, is the truth. So, Barbora asks him another question. Can she make a portrait of him?

This documentary is simultaneously the kind of movie you think it might be in the first twenty minutes, and at the same time it is most definitely not. There is great work at play here, and this is a documentary that is filmed as the events take place. There is very little backwards telling of the story here, except as it pertains to the younger lives of these two people. The paintings, such as they are, are utterly incredible. This is an absolute fact. The film does have a devilish trick though. You might think that this is a film where the entire focus is on Bertil, and that Barbora is the only one making observations. That is very much not the case. There are things here that I am incapable of understanding. This is a documentary which ordinarily should provoke much thought. Except, as it turns out, this was released by a company that had a deal with Hulu and not one with Netflix.

There's another thing that is not a spoiler for the documentary, and is something that I've been thinking since I turned it off. I was careful not to spoil much. It is rather haunting that it seems to me Bertil ends the documentary in a better place than Barbora does. I don't always review the documentaries that I watch, mostly because a documentary really has to provoke me into thought within the first twenty minutes of it. Otherwise, I can find myself being very uninterested in documentaries that have come to be critically acclaimed. Shirkers and Diego Maradona were two that I checked out in the last few weeks, and they both failed to capture me in the way that I described. Why? Who knows. I think in some respects, a documentary that has shock factor needs to come straight out with it before I find myself waiting for the story to develop.

I don't throw documentaries onto my yearly lists, but the way this year is going, I would be surprised if anything better got made before production shut down.

9/10

 

[909]

How It Ends (2018), directed by David Rosenthal

As everyone here knows, I like to break up good entertainment with some bad entertainment. Tonight's adventure into the Netflix algorithm leads me to How It Ends, a movie that had horrible reviews and fit the bill for this showing. It seems to me that Netflix has a habit of producing a lot of movies that are basically the same thing. Throw in some post-apocalyptic stuff here, throw in a big name actor there, perhaps some cyberpunk influence rather than something out of Fallout, and there you have a typical Netflix movie. There are literally countless examples of these movies. I think I have one on my list for next month. In fairness, it would be nearly impossible to not have one of these movies on my list. The way I think of them is as such. The Road wasn't a particularly great movie, but it was good and brought something to the table that a lot of the movies in this genre have failed to bring in following efforts. The fact is, we don't need many more of these movies. They jumped the shark when Sandra Bullock had to blindfold herself.

I feel like copying from the Wikipedia page, but I'm not going to do that. Will (Theo James) and Sam (Kat Graham) are a young couple living in Seattle. Sam is pregnant, and the two are wanting to get married. In order to do that, Will must travel to Chicago alone and meet with her father Tom (Forest Whitaker) and mother Paula (Nicole Ari Parker). Reason is? Will has to ask Tom for his blessing. That blessing is not coming. Not now, not ever. Tom is a hard ass who was in the Marines, and for some reason he lives in a high rise building, but that's the kind of logic we're getting from this film. He doesn't respect Will because Will was unemployed when he moved to Seattle, and Paula had set Tom off with a comment about how they would help pay for Will and Sam's new house. Trust me, I was very confused by all of this. The lack of logic is astounding, but How It Ends gets much better...before becoming much worse than it started in the first place.

After the dinner went really poorly, Will retreated to his hotel in anticipation of flying home the next day. He doesn't wake up on time, eventually receiving a late wake up call from Sam and heading to the airport. During the call, Will is disconnected as Sam is now scared and had said "something's wrong" prior to said disconnection. Upon arrival at the airport, Will sees that all the flights are cancelled. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE HAPPENING?? The fact is, nobody knows. Whatever it was, it started on the West Coast and seems to have been seismic in nature. After the news report is read, the power cuts out and so do communications. Will has nothing else to do, so he decides that he should go back to Tom and Paula's. At their house, it is decided that Paula is going to stay at a neighbor's house, while Tom and Will decide to drive all the way from Chicago to Seattle. Will this go well? Probably not.

I do have a lot of complaints, but picking which one to start with is difficult. First of all, the pacing of How It Ends is all wrong. The movie starts badly, it gets better the more time we spend with Whitaker's character, and when his character goes away this movie just dies on the vine. We're talking about a 3/10 first act, 6/10 second act, 2/10 third act. Brutal stuff there. Averaging that out will be difficult for me, I imagine. As far as the pacing goes, the main problem with the first act is that there is literally nothing in the film to hook a person into it. The characters are not initially engaging at all. It wasn't so easy to come to care about them, and other than one, I never did. You know what I think these characters are decided by? Algorithms. I'm totally serious. I think Netflix has product tested dialogue and perhaps scenes as a whole. They have access to all the data on the movies that we've watched on there, and they have access to whether or not we hit the like button when rating those movies. For who knows what reason, I get the feeling that a lot of young women have bashed said button on movies like this one. Good looking guy with girlfriend hardly shown throughout the film has to make his way across the country to find her. Is this cynical? Yes. It's also likely true.

There are issues with How It Ends beyond just that complaint, of course. The wear and tear on the places depicted in this movie is totally unrealistic for three days after a bad event. There's graffiti all over amusement parks that people went to three or four days before the events in this story. A lot of the criminals in this movie organized in a way that made it look like the apocalypse had happened weeks before, it just doesn't make sense. Perhaps my view of the film in this respect is tainted by literally what has just happened right now. I went to the grocery store the week that locking down started. There were about 300 people in there, that part's true. I didn't see any organized groups fucking shit up though. We still haven't seen that. Lastly, the ending of the movie is totally illogical. You cannot outdrive a volcanic eruption! Movie with this title doesn't even show you how it fucking ends, which is blatantly disrespectful and spitting in the faces of the people who watched this. Again, this is also likely product tested, and they assumed that enough people would speak up in favor of the film. They did not.

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. Annihilation
23. Private Life
24. Climax
25. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
26. Mid90s
27. Lean on Pete
28. On My Skin
29. Eighth Grade
30. Sorry to Bother You
31. Suspiria
32. The Death of Stalin
33. A Quiet Place
34. Vice
35. The Old Man & the Gun
36. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
37. Vox Lux
38. Bad Times at the El Royale
39. The Other Side of the Wind
40. Searching
41. Calibre
42. A Simple Favor
43. The Hate U Give
44. Unsane
45. Disobedience
46. Boy Erased
47. Bumblebee
48. Mary Poppins Returns
49. Creed II
50. Hold the Dark
51. The Land of Steady Habits
52. Halloween
53. The 12th Man
54. Upgrade
55. What They Had
56. Ant-Man and the Wasp
57. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
58. Blockers
59. Beirut
60. Roxanne Roxanne
61. Tully
62. Mary Queen of Scots
63. Aquaman
64. Ideal Home
65. Outlaw King
66. Overlord
67. Ready Player One
68. Ben Is Back
69. Monsters and Men
70. Colette
71. The Mule
72. On the Basis of Sex
73. Bohemian Rhapsody
74. White Boy Rick
75. Papillon
76. Game Night
77. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
78. Ocean's Eight
79. Alpha
80. Come Sunday
81. Instant Family
82. The Front Runner
83. The Predator
84. Apostle
85. The Oath
86. Uncle Drew
87. The Cured
88. The Commuter
89. The Angel
90. Tag
91. Beautiful Boy
92. The Nun
93. Operation Finale
94. The Equalizer 2
95. The Spy Who Dumped Me
96. Cargo
97. Yardie
98. Boundaries
99. Bird Box
100. 12 Strong
101. Venom
102. Skyscraper
103. The Meg
104. Assassination Nation
105. Adrift
106. Crazy Rich Asians
107. Backstabbing for Beginners
108. The Girl in the Spider's Web
109. Gringo
110. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
111. 22 July
112. Tomb Raider
113. Rampage
114. Hotel Artemis
115. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
116. The Little Stranger
117. 7 Days in Entebbe
118. Night School
119. The 15:17 To Paris
120. Den of Thieves
121. The Catcher Was a Spy
122. Peppermint
123. Mile 22
124. The First Purge
125. Hunter Killer
126. The Hurricane Heist
127. The Cloverfield Paradox
128. Breaking In
129. Welcome to Marwen
130. Second Act
131. How It Ends
132. Mute
133. Kin
134. Hell Fest
135. Action Point
136. Proud Mary
137. Robin Hood
138. Traffik
139. Tau
140. Winchester
141. Woman Walks Ahead
142. The Happytime Murders
143. The Outsider
144. Slender Man

 

[909]

The Two Popes (2019), directed by Fernando Meirelles

A revamp to this process is needed so that I'm not sitting here so long writing these reviews. So, here's an experiment. I have more to say about this subject for a lot of reasons, but ordinarily I think this will reduce the time spent on these reviews, which will allow me to keep easily doing them.

Reason for Watching: The Two Popes was nominated for three Oscars, and both lead actors have been in a ton of good work prior to this film. How could this possibly have gone wrong? I had intended to watch this movie a long time ago, but my mom wound up in the hospital and I put a delay on it until I was in a better overall mood.

The Two Popes has one of the most simplistic plots you could possibly imagine, and as a result I thought this was the perfect film to experiment with. The Two Popes kicks off in 2005, with Cardinal Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce) being called to Vatican City after the death of Pope John Paul II. As basically everyone with a brain knows, when a Pope dies or decides to leave the position, a conclave is called into order, Cardinals fly in from all over the world, and the College of Cardinals is to decide the new Pope. There are some rules that I won't bore you with, but the film is not entirely what I thought it would be. At this conclave, Bergoglio and Joseph Ratzinger (Anthony Hopkins) have a little interaction. The vote is somewhat split between them, with Bergoglio as a candidate who is believed to want to reform the Catholic Church, and Ratzinger as the candidate of the conservative sect of the Church. So, most of them. Obviously, the vote goes Ratzinger's way, with Bergoglio finishing second. Ratzinger takes the name of Pope Benedict XVI, and Bergoglio's hopes for reform are left for another time.

Seven years later, we all know the state of the Catholic Church. Sex abuse scandals that were repressed have now come out. More damaging to the Vatican itself is a scandal of leaked information that was not supposed to be exposed. It shouldn't surprise anyone that of the two scandals, the more damaging one would be related to money and corruption. There was a book published in Italy that consisted of personal letters between Pope Benedict and his secretary. I've never read the book, but I don't want to get into detail. The information was leaked by Pope Benedict's butler, who is not seen in this film. Bergoglio has attempted to write the Pope numerous times, he is seeking his resignation from his position as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. The Vatican has as of yet not responded, so Bergoglio has decided to fly to Rome to discuss the matter in person. At the same time, the Pope has summoned Bergoglio to Rome so that he can speak with him. Why? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Pope Benedict resigned from his post some time after the meeting in this film. The two have what are seemingly extreme differences. What could this film be about?

Netflix's release strategy in this case appears to have left a lot of money on the table. It seemed like this film had somewhat of a breakthrough upon release and was much discussed by people who seem to have the money to actually go to the theater. I don't understand why they do this. I watched one of their films last night and it was dog shit. This one was not. There is a huge disparity in the usual quality of Netflix's material. I am very surprised that Netflix sat on this film for so long, as well. Production occurred well in advance of the release. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The Two Popes is in seeing how much society has changed since 2005. The general public seems to have much lesser interest in Catholicism and the Pope. This isn't really shown in the movie, but there are scenes that made me think about this. The Two Popes showed some news footage from 2005, and the coverage of that conclave was much larger than when Pope Francis was chosen. I also remember growing up that people used to hang on the words of Pope John Paul II. Those days are gone. Sexual abuse is only one of the reasons why. The Church continuing to reject the trajectory of society is probably the main reason. It has finally been decided after many centuries that conservative religious thought should not have such a large place in first world society.

The Two Popes itself is shot in an exquisite fashion and appropriately portrays the splendor that exists in the Vatican. The recreation is incredible. Is the extravagance of the Vatican hypocritical? Immediately that is brought up by a character before you'd even have the chance to think about it. The performances in the film are also excellent. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out, just look at the cast list. A dialogue heavy movie with these two is nearly certain to be good. However, that isn't all that the film brings to the table. The Two Popes is largely about Pope Francis, and in order to understand Pope Francis, you need to know about his life. Pope Francis moved through the Church in a different fashion than his predecessor, who took a much more traditional path. It is fair to say that making a good movie with Pope Benedict as the lead character is probably not possible. Of course, very much of the film is fictionalized. Considering that everything said in these fictional scenes is also a matter of public record, I don't see any problem with that. Oddly enough, the credits scene where both men are watching the World Cup Final probably does the best job of humanizing them in my eyes.

Perhaps the film's greatest technical achievement is in the portrayal of said splendor, particularly considering the crew was not allowed to shoot at the Vatican. The recreation of these things is so difficult. But, you know, when you have Netflix behind you, and they get less than a million dollars from box office receipts while still spending a lot of money on new material, you can do that. As it relates to the performances, I'll finish up with one thing. The fact that Hannibal Lecter of all people is able to be such a convincing Pope Benedict is entirely shocking. Hopkins looks and acts almost exactly like him.

8/10

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

 

[909]

Come to Daddy (2020), directed by Ant Timpson

Reason for Watching: Heard from a friend that this was extremely funny. The experiment will continue going forward, and this review should be much smaller.

Come to Daddy is about Norval (Elijah Wood), a priviliged man who still lives with his mom in a Los Angeles mansion. Norval has received a letter from his father, asking him to come visit his secluded house in Oregon. Norval has not seen his father since he was five, and he is now 35, so he makes the decision to go up there via bus. His father Brian (Stephen McHattie) is happy to see him, at least until he's not. Over the course of their time together, we come to learn that Norval knows absolutely nothing about his dad. Brian is an angry drunk kind of person, and through some testy conversations, we come to learn that Norval is lying about himself in order to impress his estranged father. One of the afternoons he's there, Brian snaps and can't take it anymore. He decides that he's going to kill his son.

I was surprised when Brian decided to kill his son, but even stranger is the weapon he decided to use. A meat cleaver? Yeah, the meat cleaver. Brian takes some steps towards Norval, and Brian then has a heart attack. He's dead. What is an estranged son to do? Well, the most important thing I think someone in Norval's situation would do, is put the meat cleaver away. After Norval puts the cleaver away, he calls the coroner. The problem is, they can't come until the next day. Brian's house was...really, really far in the middle of nowhere. There's another thing. When the coroner does come, the body has to return to the house because they've ran out of room at the morgue. This is particularly interesting because the house begins to make noise. Like, a lot of noise. After this, the film actually gets good.

My initial reaction with Come to Daddy is that I was sold a false bill of goods. Come to Daddy isn't a particularly funny movie. I mean, I guess there's one scene that is. You'll probably figure out which one based on what I say later in the review. The movie is one of the slowest burns that anyone has ever recommended to me in any context. The second half of Come to Daddy is so much different than the first that this feels like it isn't even the same film. I had yawned many times and wasn't sure that I could actually survive the story had things not picked up. Fortunately, things do. There was something that I thought was at least somewhat predictable, but actually seeing it was a surprise. Again, this was a shit start to the movie.

I think, when someone is referring a comedy-horror to me, I should probably consider a few things. You see, my idea of good comedy is Dave Chappelle sketch stuff. It isn't seeing little guys like Elijah Wood act scared of their own shadow. I didn't outright hate Come to Daddy, but this wasn't a movie that really hit with me. As far as positives go, there is one particularly gruesome scene. I also appreciate that this is a movie that doesn't care whether or not the audience likes it. I felt like nothing was being spoonfed, and I'd either care for the film or I wouldn't. The second half worked, but the first half did not. I was simply not interested in anything that came to set any of these events up. Also, Come to Daddy features a guy who looks like Joe Son, and he hasn't killed or raped anyone. Bonus points for that. I hope the person who played that part goes on to have an amazing career. Anyway, this is B-movie...almost goodness. Doesn't quite get there for me.

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. Sergio
8. Sonic the Hedgehog
9. The Call of the Wild
10. Come to Daddy
11. Lost Girls
12. Underwater
13. The Rhythm Section
14. The Last Full Measure
15. Spenser Confidential
16. Like a Boss
17. The Grudge
18. Dolittle
19. Fantasy Island

Also, fucking wow man. That list for this year is seriously lacking. There were some movies I didn't see before theaters closed, but there's definitely an emptiness going on right now, the feeling that I need to do something and can't actually do it. I'm bored.

 

[Brocklock]

I didn't like that movie either and I've really liked a lot of Elijah Wood's weird post LOTR genre work.

 

[909]

The Lovebirds (2020), directed by Michael Showalter

Reason for Watching: Movie trailer looked funny when I saw it in theaters a few months ago. The Lovebirds was summarily sold to Netflix due to coronavirus. In need of a laugh in these rather insane times.

The Lovebirds was a movie with an interesting trailer, as already mentioned above. There are very few comedies worth anything these days. Jibran (Kumail Nanjiani) and Leilani (Issa Rae) are a couple that we initially see in their meeting stage, before the film sends us forward four years. The two seem to have grown to be very prone to arguments, about basically anything. So, you know they're a couple who has been together for four years. These arguments are never major, but one day they do turn more major. While driving to a dinner party, lots of pent up feelings come out, and the two break up. How do you go to a dinner party after that? Well, what if you never get there? Jibran subsequently runs a red light because he's angry, and he hits a cyclist. The cyclist refuses help, and leaves the scene because he's clearly running from something. Afterwards, a mustached guy (Paul Sparks) commandeers Jibran's car, and he decides to run down the cyclist. As you've no doubt seen in the trailer, two people call the police on Jibran and Leilani, who run.

The Lovebirds is an extremely short movie, I think it was 82 minutes. Those 82 minutes are about as long as the film should have been. This is a movie that I would say is mildly funny. There's a serious problem though, and it's that because the movie is so short, you basically get a sample from every scene in the trailer. This kind of thing really damages a film. When it comes to films like this one, one's opinion of such a project is entirely dependent upon whether or or not you care for the two leads in any way at all. If their comedy doesn't work for you, you won't like it. If it works, you will. I feel like their comedy worked, and at the same time, The Lovebirds is a very formulaic effort. It's strange because this director also directed The Big Sick, but there's an obvious difference in the two movies. I'll say one thing though. At least this is not a comedy that decided to bust the characters up in the third act. While the two never depart from each other, they have their meltdown right at the beginning.

While I liked this film enough, I've seen a couple better comedies this year. One featured Pete Davidson. One featured Hugh Grant and wasn't really a comedy. The other featured Martin Lawrence in 2020. You see? The hierarchy this year has been laid down already, and with nothing coming out, it's easy to follow those distinctions when writing things up. Another thing that leaves me ranking this where I did, is that the end of the movie is the most predictable thing...ever.

6/10

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. Sergio
8. The Lovebirds
9. Sonic the Hedgehog
10. The Call of the Wild
11. Come to Daddy
12. Lost Girls
13. Underwater
14. The Rhythm Section
15. The Last Full Measure
16. Spenser Confidential
17. Like a Boss
18. The Grudge
19. Dolittle
20. Fantasy Island

 

[909]

I, Tonya (2017), directed by Craig Gillespie

Reason for Watching: I had been needing to watch this for quite a while, and I finally picked up Hulu a month or two ago. Obviously, when everyone was younger, they paid attention to the Tonya Harding story to great degree. The thing is, the details are lost on me because that was such a long time ago. It also seems that those details were lost on the general public, and as a result I, Tonya made a surprising amount of money at the box office.

A movie like I, Tonya has to hit a lot of plot points the general public knows about, while ensuring that new information is gleaned from the subject. So, in the case of I, Tonya, we must start in Tonya Harding's (Margot Robbie) childhood. Tonya was forced to skate from an early age, at the behest of her mother LaVona (Allison Janney). LaVona, as you may have learned when this movie was being highly praised, was a very abusive woman. I should note that this film does have its own narrative on the subject that everyone knows Tonya Harding for. That being said, Tonya's childhood was filled with problems. Her father left her with her terrible mother, with the abuse that came with doing that. Tonya was pushed to the brink regularly, her coach Diane Rawlinson (Julianne Nicholson) was no true safe haven from that. Eventually, like everyone else, Tonya grows up. Things change a fair bit from that point.

At 15 years old, Tonya has become one of the best American figure skaters of her age. She has a problem with recognition due to her background, one of being white trash. There is no other way to put it, Tonya and her mother are white trash. Tonya had to make her costumes at home, and her routines were to the sounds of music that a lot of white trash listen to. Eventually, Tonya comes to date Jeff Gilooly (Sebastian Stan), an 18 year old. Jeff has big plans for his life with Tonya. Unfortunately, much like LaVona, Jeff is physically abusive towards Tonya. Regardless of that, the two still get married, which leads to LaVona and Tonya's relationship fully fracturing. Of course, what everyone wants to know about, is how Jeff came to attack Nancy Kerrigan. You see, Jeff had a friend, Shawn (Paul Walter Hauser). Shawn was Tonya's bodyguard. If you want to know exactly what their plan was, you need to turn this on and watch it. I won't help you with that.

I, Tonya is the very rare case of a story where someone who is genuinely lower class becomes famous out of nowhere. Tonya's trip to not quite the top was rather unique at the time, you know. There weren't a lot of stories about poor white people breaking through to success. There were two kinds of people in American sports. There were white people who either were solidly entrenched in the middle class or spoiled. Then, there were black people who grew up as poor as Tonya Harding did. There are some exceptions to this, as there is to anything, but there weren't many. The media didn't really know how to treat someone like this. Was her treatment by the media correct? I don't think it was, but at the same time, there was a lot of information that people were not privy to. It seemed like a very obvious connection to assume that Tonya knew of the attack. Now, based on everything that has been said in the years following that, she did not. She knew that something was up, but she says she didn't know exactly what Jeff and Shawn were talking about. Whether or not you can believe that, is up to you.

As for the film itself, I liked I, Tonya quite a bit. There's a couple reasons why. First, the performances by Robbie and Stan really make this film work when it could have been a mess. The screenplay isn't that great, but the direction, editing and performances sure are. The style of the movie I, Tonya is very similar to Goodfellas. Tonya regularly breaks the fourth wall in order to talk to the audience. There are also scenes presented as if they were pre-taped documentary comments, which is alright too. This is one of the last projects I thought would directly rip from Goodfellas. Also, no matter what he does, the guy who played the juggalo in Always Sunny is always going to be that guy in my eyes. This film is no exception. His performance as Shawn is extremely funny, and his best lines were taken from a real interview. I'm not sure exactly how to categorize I, Tonya. Is it a sports movie? Is it a crime flick? I suppose it's both. I also think that the comedic moments in this movie really work, but I don't particularly care for how some of the more abusive scenes turn into comedy.

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

 

[909]

Extraction (2020), directed by Sam Hargrave

Reason for Watching: Chris Hemsworth in a movie featuring classic Hollywood orange filtered foreign countries, signifying those countries are dangerous. Enough said.

Extraction begins without previously mentioned orange filter in Mumbai, which is a city that has frequently been given such lens filter in movies of the past. Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal) is a young man who goes to private school. Apparently, he is the son of an Indian drug lord, which we don't find out until about ten minutes in. I digress. Ovi has somewhat of a leash on his activities and is not allowed to do anything that Saju (Randeep Hooda) says he cannot do. Saju is one of his dad's henchmen, and he has been tasked with looking over Ovi. One night, Ovi sneaks out of his house to go to a club, and unfortunately he is kidnapped by some corrupt policemen. These policemen are working on behalf of a crime lord in Bangladesh, Amir (Priyanshu Painyuli). Why does Amir have Ovi kidnapped? That was legitimately unanswered. To make money, I guess. Unbeknownst to Amir, Ovi's father Ovi Sr. (Pankaj Tripathi) is not going to pay any ransoms. He doesn't have the money to. Instead, Ovi Sr. tasks Saju with setting something up to retrieve his son from Dhaka.

After that, we step over to the rescue itself. Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) is a suicidal, alcoholic mercenary plagued by past grief. I assume that you've seen a movie like that before. This is also an amusing name to give a character, I thought. Tyler was once an Australian soldier, and now he is being recruited by another mercenary, Nik (Golshifteh Farahani). Nik has heard about the contract Saju has placed on Ovi, and she thinks Tyler's the guy for the job despite his problems. To Dhaka they go. Tyler is tasked with scoping the situation out, taking Ovi to a boat, and fleeing Bangladesh. Things aren't going to be so easy, though. You see, Amir has a lot of pull in Dhaka. He has some control of the army and of police, he is obscenely rich. You've seen this kind of story before, this is how action movies work. The problem here? Saju set this up, but you know, paying? That's not an option. It also turns out that Saju is former special forces. Maybe he can use Tyler to do the hard part and swoop in himself.

After Extraction was released, I saw a lot of people talking about one group of scenes in particular. There is one 12-15 minute sequence that is presented as being a long take. This wasn't a long take, but it sure looked like one and the director was effective in disguising those cuts. Extraction definitely has good action scenes, there's no denying that. The story? It is what it is. Like I just said, I don't know the exact reason that Ovi was kidnapped to begin with. Probably for ransom, but that was never said. I don't know why these drug lords hate each other. This is also a movie that has some white savior stuff going on, but I will say that it's jarring there are only two white actors in this movie. That sounds like progress to me. Hemsworth is also obviously a convincing action hero for these days. You need someone like that in Extraction. The story demands that. The ending of the film heavily trades on Hemsworth's time playing Thor. It wouldn't mean anything if some random guy was playing Tyler, you can't do that.

The film does have negative spots, though. The previously mentioned orange foreign countries filter is really obnoxious here. I've never understood that technique either. When a director does that, they're making these countries look dirty and polluted. Good enough to set your movie in, but not good enough to make look like a decently clean place. Racism much? It's doubly strange because there's a scene set in Mumbai that does not have this. I did mention it once already, but the usage of actors in this movie is pretty interesting. Perhaps I'm too used to how things were always done. In past days, someone like Andy Garcia would be playing the Bangladeshi drug lord. That being said, is every movie where a white person does anything in a foreign country now a white savior movie? This is something I'm unprepared to answer. This movie is entirely reliant on its action scenes and doesn't care too much about anything else. Plot? There isn't much of that. This isn't a John Wick movie or anything, but it's solid. Extraction was a good distraction from the things currently going on. Also, this has the longest credits of any movie I think I've ever seen at home.

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. Extraction
7. Big Time Adolescence
8. Sergio
9. The Lovebirds
10. Sonic the Hedgehog
11. The Call of the Wild
12. Come to Daddy
13. Lost Girls
14. Underwater
15. The Rhythm Section
16. The Last Full Measure
17. Spenser Confidential
18. Like a Boss
19. The Grudge
20. Dolittle
21. Fantasy Island

 

[909]

Bushwick (2017), directed by Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion

Reason for Watching: BATISTA BABY I WALK ALONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNEEEEEEEEE

Alright, so what am I gonna do with a review of an extremely short action movie? Bushwick is a very simple film that introduces a concept it has no idea how to flesh out. Lucy (Brittany Snow) is a grad student leaving the subway in Brooklyn, accompanied by her boyfriend Jose (Arturo Castro). Obviously, given the title of the film, they are in Bushwick specifically. While leaving the station, they see that nobody's inside, but the worst thing they see is that a man on fire ran down into the station and onto the subway platform. Alarming, right? Jose leaves Lucy in the stairway while he takes a look outside, which leads to Jose dying in an explosion. Not so good. Lucy eventually runs out there herself, and is chased by two guys after seeing them murder someone. Lucy runs into a house, where the two corner her and threaten to rape and kill her. Very classy. Anyway, these guys are killed by Stupe (Batista), the owner of said house.

Stupe is a combat veteran, a medic in fact. He knows what to do to repair injuries, but his skill in combat remains in question. Stupe says that his wife and son are in Hoboken, so he'll take Lucy there if that's where she wants to go. On the way, they can stop at her grandmother's house. During this scene in his house, it becomes clear that there has been an invasion or occupation of some kind. Their mission is two-fold. One is to escape this occupation any way possible. The other is to scoop up the people they know along the way.

Bushwick doesn't even have enough meat on the bone for me to really dig in and write anything about the plot. This is a project that is heavily invested in the one take/one camera gimmick. A lot of time that is to the detriment of the story, the characters, and the action. The gimmick feels at its worst near the end of Bushwick when there's a big set piece that isn't easy to follow. The focus is far too much on the two lead characters, with no scene dedicated to the perspective of the bad guys/occupiers. There is plainly not enough information about this militant group until far too deep into the film, and it isn't like there's a lot of information given when that happens. The concept is also something that would have made more sense about two weeks ago. At this stage of society I can actually not see something like a secession of southern states happening. Particularly the ones that were chosen in this story. Those states are filled with people who have guns who would not tolerate that.

I usually don't notice fuck ups like this, but when Lucy's grandmother is shown dead, her grandmother is breathing rather obviously. The male character being a medic is an interesting wrinkle in these kinds of stories. There are a few good things in Bushwick though. One of the easiest to recall is a scene that features Orthodox Jews going buck wild on the militants. I very much enjoyed that. The visual really spoke volumes to me. The best scene, however, is one where Batista gives a full monologue about what happened to his family. This one scene is something that's far too good for the rest of this movie, as this is a movie that doesn't support scenes like this one. Overall, the script is bad, the concept is decent but improperly utilized, and there aren't enough good characters in the movie to make it worthwhile. The thing is, Batista is good in basically everything. He can carry a movie like this much further than you'd expect, but more humor is needed.

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

 

[909]

The Banker (2020), directed by George Nolfi

Reason for Watching: Had heard from numerous people that I should watch this. Plus, it came out this year and I've hardly seen anything from this year. This was on my list for months. I also do find it interesting that Apple was repeatedly asked to shelve this film, and they didn't even though the producer of the movie was accused of molesting his sisters back in the 1970s. I can see a rationale for releasing the film as this is an interesting story with different themes than a lot of similar movies.

The Banker is about Bernard Garrett (Anthony Mackie) and Joe Morris (Samuel L. Jackson), two real estate investors who eventually cane to own two banks. That goes without saying given the title of the film, right? Let's start this off. In 1954, Bernard moves from Texas to Los Angeles with his wife Eunice (Nia Long), having the intention of owning real estate in a large city. Bernard had done some things in Texas that went well for him, so he has money. Despite that, he and Eunice must live in her uncle's shed until things work out for them. It turns out that Eunice has once lived in Los Angeles and worked at a club, but we'll save that for a bit. Owning real estate while being black in the 1950s was not common. It was not easily possible. Bernard wants to own a housing building, but he is encountering some racism in the process of that. Despite that, Bernard eventually gets in contact with a business owner who is interested in selling a building to him. You see, Bernard is a mathematical genius and that kind of thing works very well on willing sellers. The problem is that he doesn't have enough money.

When someone who wants to have money to buy real estate doesn't have it, what do they do? They go get a loan. Bernard's ultimate intent is to de-segregate neighborhoods in Los Angeles while making a profit. Of course, he's black. You know how hard it was for a black man to get a loan? Eventually, Bernard invokes the name of the man selling the building to him, Patrick Barker (Colm Meaney). This leads to Bernard getting the loan after Barker agrees to sign papers as well. Barker sees that there's money to be made. The two start a business, buy up some stuff, and then Barker dies in his sleep. Barker's wife decides that it's time to screw Bernard over because Bernard couldn't be on the deeds of these houses, and he has to take 25 cents on the dollar as a settlement for each deed. Bernard has a plan, though. The club Eunice worked at is owned by Joe Morris, who I mentioned earlier. Joe had already invested in some real estate through his lawyer, but he and Bernard want far more. The two men are going to need a front guy to pull this off, though. Enter Matt Steiner (Nicholas Hoult), who has been working on these houses and buildings Bernard was buying and renovating. It's time to train him.

The first thing I need to say about the movie, is that there are major issues with using Apple TV+ on a web browser. Problems with the picture were sustained throughout the film. I also could not change to another web browser because one was not supported by their website. See the problems? When launching an app, a company can't have problems like this. I didn't think they would have an app for Windows, but it's an issue that they don't have one. As for the film itself, I would say The Banker is an interesting movie simply because this is not a success story. There is a hard dose of reality here and this is not a film that tries to wrap bad shit up into ultimately being positive. I would not describe the things that happened to the people portrayed in this movie as being particularly good. The Banker is also a unique story in that it is one that displays discrimination prior to the Fair Housing Act, and prior to the removal of Jim Crow laws. This film is also a bit dry simply as a result of its subject matter. It takes a long time to fully tell the story of this film, and some patience is required in waiting for that. Is that bad? No, but I need to state it.

Of course, because this isn't a commercially satisfying story, the film does end in a way that feels somewhat empty. This feels like some history that we should have known about, but we didn't. The performances of the three leads are strong, Nia Long's performance is good as well even though she isn't in the movie as much as it initially appeared she would be. Unfortunately, I can't talk about how the film looks or anything technical of the sort, because my picture was not good at all. I am actually really mad about this. All things considered, there haven't been many good movies this year as a result of the pandemic, and I'll take what I can get. The thing is, if you don't like movies about industries that need to be explained to you, you will straight out not like this movie. I didn't think I would at first. The Banker is like The Founder, but with real estate instead of Big Macs.

7/10

2020 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

Detroit (2017), directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Reason for Watching: I am desperately trying to finish 2017 and put all relevant movies in my rear view mirror. Hopefully I can accomplish that soon. I also thought Detroit was the right film to watch at this time. At the time this was made, I remember reading a lot of people questioning whether or not a white person could actually make a movie about this subject. Well, I found out tonight.

Detroit is a rare case of a movie that absolutely expects the viewer to have some kind of knowledge of what was going on in this country. Sometimes that is to its own detriment. Detroit is the story of riots, specifically those in 1967. It is not as much a story of those riots as it is something that happens at the Algiers Motel later on. The film presents matters as such. On a warm summer night, the Detroit Police Department raids an unlicensed club for the purpose of harassing black people who were celebrating returnees from the Vietnam War. That raid leads to some police brutality, police brutality leads to stuff being thrown, and stuff being thrown leads to looting. We have seen some version of that in the last few weeks. Pigs are pigs. When pigs cause looting, that leads to the National Guard being called in, and eventually LBJ decided to send in the Army. A few days later, a group of cops go looking for trouble. Philip Krauss (Will Poulter) takes it upon himself to murder someone with his shotgun when the man was running away from him. Want to hear some crazy shit? The homicide investigator tells Krauss that he's probably going to be charged with murder, and they send Krauss back to work anyway. WHAT?

After that bit, it's time to pop over to another group of people. Detroit is a film that attempts to make something of grand scope. The Dramatics are a professional R&B group trying to make it big in Detroit. Before they're to go on at the Fox Theatre, their performance is called off due to rioting outside. At this point, the film then centers around one performer, Larry Reed (Algee Smith) and his bodyguard Fred (Jacob Latimore). Larry and Fred decide that they're going to go to the Algiers, a motel away from the rioting. The room sucks, but you expect that from an $11 a night motel. After leaving the room to see what's up, they run into Julie (Hannah Murray) and Karen (Kaitlyn Dever), two white girls in a hotel full of people who aren't white. The two girls take Larry and Fred to a room full of people, including Carl (Jason Mitchell), Aubrey (Nathan Davis), Michael (Malcolm David Kelley), and Lee (Peyton Alex Smith). In this room, Carl decides to stage a prank, pulls out a starter pistol, and shoots it at his friend. This freaks Larry and Fred out, so they leave, as Julie and Karen bail to the room of Karl Greene (Anthony Mackie), a Vietnam War vet. That is...not the only thing that happens with that starter pistol.

I did not cover all the characters and in fact I left some out. This is a movie that has a massive amount of characters. All of them are easily differentiated from one another. The problem is that because of this, Detroit is a bit too long. I actually have quite a bit of complaints. The recreations of violence at the Algiers Motel are absolutely brutal on all levels. This is extremely uncomfortable viewing, much like other movies where you have to watch people undergo atrocity. In some respect I'm not sure if these kinds of movies are a good idea. Is this the best way to tell a story about how racism exists and is never changed? Will Poulter's performance is also too good. That's a problem. Ralph Fiennes was too realistic in Schindler's List. I do not think I like this. I also said that the film was too long, and I also feel that it doesn't properly explain why people were put on trial for what they'd done. Maybe it doesn't need to be explained to most people, but there was a story behind that and it needed to be told. I also think that the movie is in some respects just too daunting. How do you tell someone they should sit down and watch this?

At the same time, this is a good movie. Is that in contradiction with what I said? No. This is a story that needed to be told even though I would have told it in a miniseries that more thoroughly introduced the characters. Detroit really pissed me off. I've been pissed off for weeks. This feels like a movie that is directly telling the story of what's happening right now. Not knowing what happens makes this film an extremely intense experience. Who dies? Does it matter who they kill, because killing anyone is way too far and disgusting on the part of police officers? There's one scene where two of the other officers are getting their partner to mock execute someone. Except, they tell him so convincingly, and have been leaving him out of the loop with what they're actually doing, that the fuck actually goes in a room and shoots someone to death. I don't know if I'll get over this scene for a while.

Detroit is a story that needs to be told, and while it needs to be told more thoroughly, and while the film is too long, and while the things displayed in this film are brutal, this is a good film. It isn't perfect, and there are some things about it that would have been changed if I was making them. Even still, I can't say that this wasn't a really good movie. I was compelled entirely. This isn't something I'll watch again, but there are countless strong performances here. This is a film that drives me to anger.

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

 

[909]

Holmes & Watson (2018), directed by Etan Cohen

Reason for Watching: This is supposed to be one of the absolute worst movies from 2018. I have a few more, but I thought that after watching Detroit I should swing very hard in the other direction. This film and others like it are also a primary reason for shortening my reviews. These are easier to talk about now.

I've never been big on Sherlock Holmes stories, I don't know anything about how they're supposed to go or anything like that. Holmes & Watson is set in London, and has tons of things in the film that are supposed to remind you of the present. All that shit is terrible, by the way. Before that, we're shown some of Sherlock's childhood, where he is bullied and responds by doing goofy shit to get everyone expelled. Eventually, he befriends John Watson. Watson (John C. Reilly) and Holmes (Will Ferrell) grew up to be really stupid people who solve crimes and think they're smart. In this version, Holmes is a legendary bumbling detective. He and Watson are supposed to be at a trial for James Moriarty (Ralph Fiennes), but they barely arrive in time. At this trial, it is revealed that the person in the trial is not Moriarty, but rather an impersonator. Unfortunately for the people of London, people keep getting killed. That's really all I have to say about that.

I swung way too far in the other direction, so even though Holmes & Watson is a short movie, it was grueling and daunting just the same. I don't know why anyone would conceive a Step Brothers reunion based on this subject and with this script. This is like a shitty Chris Kattan movie from the early part of this millennium. The opening part with the kids is absolutely painful. Worst thing is that I didn't laugh until 47 minutes into this movie. Right after that, Bruce Buffer and Michael Buffer have terrible cameos. I've written reviews about other movies that are as bad as this one, and I say the same thing every time. I have no idea how people can debase themselves like this for a paycheck. This was an extremely painful experience I cannot recommend even for the purposes of simply watching a movie because it's bad. I laughed twice. TWO TIMES.

It's difficult to say there are any bright spots, because there genuinely are none. Holmes & Watson has a good cast too. A movie featuring Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Kelly Macdonald, Hugh Laurie, John C. Reilly, Rebecca Hall, and Ralph Fiennes should not be this bad. There's a serious lack of quality control here. Of course, there's one constant in extremely bad movies. I'm sure you know exactly who it is, too. Will Ferrell in any kind of movie is capable of dragging the whole thing down. The guy is not funny. He isn't a good actor either. I don't want to see him. He makes Adam Sandler look like Marlon Brando. Ferrell will never have any performance as good as Sandler's best performances. He isn't capable of it, and I can't see him as anything other than a fool. This is a movie for morons. Straight up. The stuff with red hats that say "Keep England Great" or some bullshit...man. Just, man. How could anyone have liked this?

1.5/10

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. Annihilation
23. Private Life
24. Climax
25. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
26. Mid90s
27. Lean on Pete
28. On My Skin
29. Eighth Grade
30. Sorry to Bother You
31. Suspiria
32. The Death of Stalin
33. A Quiet Place
34. Vice
35. The Old Man & the Gun
36. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
37. Vox Lux
38. Bad Times at the El Royale
39. The Other Side of the Wind
40. Searching
41. Calibre
42. A Simple Favor
43. The Hate U Give
44. Unsane
45. Disobedience
46. Boy Erased
47. Bumblebee
48. Mary Poppins Returns
49. Creed II
50. Hold the Dark
51. The Land of Steady Habits
52. Halloween
53. The 12th Man
54. Upgrade
55. What They Had
56. Ant-Man and the Wasp
57. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
58. Blockers
59. Beirut
60. Roxanne Roxanne
61. Tully
62. Mary Queen of Scots
63. Aquaman
64. Ideal Home
65. Outlaw King
66. Overlord
67. Ready Player One
68. Ben Is Back
69. Monsters and Men
70. Colette
71. The Mule
72. On the Basis of Sex
73. Bohemian Rhapsody
74. White Boy Rick
75. Papillon
76. Game Night
77. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
78. Ocean's Eight
79. Alpha
80. Come Sunday
81. Instant Family
82. The Front Runner
83. The Predator
84. Apostle
85. The Oath
86. Uncle Drew
87. The Cured
88. The Commuter
89. The Angel
90. Tag
91. Beautiful Boy
92. The Nun
93. Operation Finale
94. The Equalizer 2
95. The Spy Who Dumped Me
96. Cargo
97. Yardie
98. Boundaries
99. Bird Box
100. 12 Strong
101. Venom
102. Skyscraper
103. The Meg
104. Assassination Nation
105. Adrift
106. Crazy Rich Asians
107. Backstabbing for Beginners
108. The Girl in the Spider's Web
109. Gringo
110. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
111. 22 July
112. Tomb Raider
113. Rampage
114. Hotel Artemis
115. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
116. The Little Stranger
117. 7 Days in Entebbe
118. Night School
119. The 15:17 To Paris
120. Den of Thieves
121. The Catcher Was a Spy
122. Peppermint
123. Mile 22
124. The First Purge
125. Hunter Killer
126. The Hurricane Heist
127. The Cloverfield Paradox
128. Breaking In
129. Welcome to Marwen
130. Second Act
131. How It Ends
132. Mute
133. Kin
134. Hell Fest
135. Action Point
136. Proud Mary
137. Robin Hood
138. Traffik
139. Tau
140. Winchester
141. Woman Walks Ahead
142. The Happytime Murders
143. The Outsider
144. Slender Man
145. Holmes & Watson

 

[909]

Borg vs. McEnroe (2018), directed by Janus Metz

Reason for Watching: I'm almost done with 2017, and I'm going to finish that one up next month. It's time to finish 2018. I'm also interested to see if John McEnroe's outbursts are accurately portrayed here.

Borg vs. McEnroe is a film that may need introduction in this crowd, but to a hell of a lot of people this is a story they know pretty well. It's also a niche story at the same time. That's why I don't always understand how these movies get made. Borg vs. McEnroe is the story of Wimbledon 1980, which ended with Bjorn Borg (Sverrir Gudnason) and John McEnroe (Shia LaBeouf) facing off in a final of all finals. Throughout this movie, we see the story of how Borg came to be in this position in the first place. As a young, angry kid who could not control himself, Borg comes into contact with Lennart Bergelin (Stellan Skarsgard), the Swedish Davis Cup captain. Lennart sees that Borg has tons of untapped potential, and the main thing holding him back is his firey temper. The viewer comes to see how this process works, and we also see the happenings of the already mentioned Wimbledon tournament. The film caps off with the aforementioned final, and if you haven't seen the final before, this has some intrigue. The events are presented in a manner where it is reasonably in doubt who wins.

I realize that I'm cutting my usual review length by at least half here, but this is a rather simple sports film. There are things about this that are interesting, sure. McEnroe's outbursts have always been funny, and the perfect actor was chosen to have said outbursts. Borg's upbringing was interesting in that he was not a stereotypically spoiled tennis star. The way the film is directed, and the way the script is written, does not do the overall story any favors. We needed way more from McEnroe in this movie. Some of the tennis scenes could have been clipped for scenes explaining how he himself started. I found the scenes showing the sacrifices these athletes had to make to be quite intriguing. The problem is that there could have been so much more of them. Borg vs. McEnroe is just not as in depth as a movie about these subjects should really be.

The year before this, there was another tennis movie, Battle of the Sexes. That film digs much deeper than this one, in part due to longer run time. The story of Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs also had cultural relevance that Bjorn Borg vs. John McEnroe does not. The subjects are given the feeling of being more interesting even if they aren't. Let me tell you, none of these people is as interesting a subject as John McEnroe. They simply are not. Yet, he's a supporting character in this movie. That's how I feel, anyway. I feel like this movie is missing something. I can't put my finger on what, but there are scenes early in the film in Monaco that really resonated with me. There should have been more of this kind of thing to illustrate how alone athletes truly are. Athletes are not quite seen as real people, as we all know. There isn't enough of that in movies about athletes, though. These people are expected to sign shit for people until their hand falls off. Expected to take pictures until they fall down. When they don't do all that shit, they're an asshole and people out them in the media or on social media. Above all, they're expected to win all the time. Not so fun sounding to me.

6/10

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. Annihilation
23. Private Life
24. Climax
25. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
26. Mid90s
27. Lean on Pete
28. On My Skin
29. Eighth Grade
30. Sorry to Bother You
31. Suspiria
32. The Death of Stalin
33. A Quiet Place
34. Vice
35. The Old Man & the Gun
36. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
37. Vox Lux
38. Bad Times at the El Royale
39. The Other Side of the Wind
40. Searching
41. Calibre
42. A Simple Favor
43. The Hate U Give
44. Unsane
45. Disobedience
46. Boy Erased
47. Bumblebee
48. Mary Poppins Returns
49. Creed II
50. Hold the Dark
51. The Land of Steady Habits
52. Halloween
53. The 12th Man
54. Upgrade
55. What They Had
56. Ant-Man and the Wasp
57. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
58. Blockers
59. Beirut
60. Roxanne Roxanne
61. Tully
62. Mary Queen of Scots
63. Aquaman
64. Ideal Home
65. Outlaw King
66. Overlord
67. Ready Player One
68. Ben Is Back
69. Monsters and Men
70. Colette
71. The Mule
72. On the Basis of Sex
73. Bohemian Rhapsody
74. White Boy Rick
75. Papillon
76. Game Night
77. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
78. Ocean's Eight
79. Alpha
80. Come Sunday
81. Borg vs. McEnroe
82. Instant Family
83. The Front Runner
84. The Predator
85. Apostle
86. The Oath
87. Uncle Drew
88. The Cured
89. The Commuter
90. The Angel
91. Tag
92. Beautiful Boy
93. The Nun
94. Operation Finale
95. The Equalizer 2
96. The Spy Who Dumped Me
97. Cargo
98. Yardie
99. Boundaries
100. Bird Box
101. 12 Strong
102. Venom
103. Skyscraper
104. The Meg
105. Assassination Nation
106. Adrift
107. Crazy Rich Asians
108. Backstabbing for Beginners
109. The Girl in the Spider's Web
110. Gringo
111. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
112. 22 July
113. Tomb Raider
114. Rampage
115. Hotel Artemis
116. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
117. The Little Stranger
118. 7 Days in Entebbe
119. Night School
120. The 15:17 To Paris
121. Den of Thieves
122. The Catcher Was a Spy
123. Peppermint
124. Mile 22
125. The First Purge
126. Hunter Killer
127. The Hurricane Heist
128. The Cloverfield Paradox
129. Breaking In
130. Welcome to Marwen
131. Second Act
132. How It Ends
133. Mute
134. Kin
135. Hell Fest
136. Action Point
137. Proud Mary
138. Robin Hood
139. Traffik
140. Tau
141. Winchester
142. Woman Walks Ahead
143. The Happytime Murders
144. The Outsider
145. Slender Man
146. Holmes & Watson

 

[909]

Bad Education (2020), directed by Cory Finley

Reason for Watching: I heard a few weeks ago that this was the best movie to premiere this year. Yes, an HBO movie was supposedly the best movie of the year. Thank you COVID-19. Also, I don't skip movies that Hugh Jackman is in.

Bad Education is the story of Roslyn School District, located on Long Island. Roslyn was a corrupt district. This film will tell you how. Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman) is the superintendent of this district, and his assistant is Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney). These two are in the process of dragging Roslyn High School up from a supposedly lowly station to the best public school in the nation. They believe that with the construction of a skywalk, this will do the job of getting them up from #4 to #1. The performance of the school has also heavily boosted the area in general. These things go hand in hand. There are people on their school board who have other jobs in the community. Bob Spicer (Ray Romano) is a real estate agent, their auditor Phil Metzger (Jeremy Shamos) has other accounting business, you see where this is going. To have a great school in your area does great things for the value of your community.

Like many successful enterprises, the Roslyn School District has some skeletons buried in its closet. The skeletons in this closet are larger than most. The early things presented in this movie are Frank's attention to detail. This man is incredibly attentive and knows how to make sure people aren't asking any questions of his business. People have been buttered up everywhere. This buttering up allows him to evade questions of his personal life. While he says that he had a wife who died, he is a gay man who has a sexual relationship with a former student he met again many years later in Vegas. After we see how Frank pulls that off, we get an examination of how well Frank and Pam get along, then it's over to Pam's life at home. Pam is hosting a party with some friends, and during that party she has a conversation with her niece, Jenny (Annaleigh Ashford). During this conversation, Jenny asks for some money to buy her son a PS2. Pam tells her to just put it on the card. Doesn't take a genius to figure out what that means. After that, we go to the next day, where her son is buying all kinds of shit from Ace Hardware for home renovations. During this, we see that her son is paying for this shit with a school district credit card. You see the problem here?

Bad Education is a rare case of a movie that properly builds its narrative without treating the viewer like an idiot, without relying on editing tricks, without showing the viewer the end of the movie at the very start of the film. Thank fuck for that. There are more directors who need to make the conscious decision not to tell the viewer the end of the movie beforehand. This may surprise some people, but the world doesn't revolve around New York and I don't know all the scandals that happen in their fucking place. So, don't ruin a movie like this for me. I have a surprising amount to say about this that I had written down throughout the film. This is one of those movies that is only as good as its narrative. There is one particular liberty taken with the story, apparently. Just that one. There are ways in which this could have been a better film had the story been fictional, but true stories are only so fanciful.

For the first time I can remember, Hugh Jackman actually looked old. Some of that is makeup, but I don't remember him having a role like this before. This is such a good performance from him. Vanity is a very difficult thing to portray in a movie, particularly when the director makes the decision not to beat people over the head with facts. The way Tassone dressed was vain. His face lift was vain. I don't need to be beaten over the head with those scenes. Also, if I didn't tell you that the crazy white guy from Blindspotting played a very convincing gay guy, would you believe that shit? It's almost impossible to believe even though I just saw it. This is what you would call great acting. I noticed a few Sopranos actors in this as well. I haven't seen Little Carmine or Charmaine since the show. I particularly enjoy that Bad Education is a film that makes the conscious decision not to use editing tricks in order to make the film work. This is a straight up narrative. I did leave one particularly interesting part of that narrative out of this review though. When people are stealing taxpayer money, how do they get caught? Watch the movie.

I also find it to be absolutely bizarre to be living in a time when the best movie that I've seen was released on HBO. I think that's something that may become more and more prevalent. While the future of movies is in streaming, the companies that specialize in entertainment have not yet found a way to make this profitable. Inevitably, the huge conglomerates who own lots of services feel that they need will be the ones to reap the benefits of this evolution. I wonder how long Netflix will hang on. Apple, Amazon, Comcast, Disney, Sony, and AT&T have far more resources than the likes of Netflix. If theaters do die, those companies have the resources to maintain their own film divisions and ruin Netflix if they really wanted to. Netflix also has that built in problem of not knowing how to properly market their material in order to get people to watch it.

8/10

2020 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Bad Education
2. The Invisible Man
3. Bad Boys for Life
4. The Banker
5. The Gentlemen
6. Birds of Prey
7. Uncorked
8. Extraction
9. Big Time Adolescence
10. Sergio
11. The Lovebirds
12. Sonic the Hedgehog
13. The Call of the Wild
14. Come to Daddy
15. Lost Girls
16. Underwater
17. The Rhythm Section
18. The Last Full Measure
19. Spenser Confidential
20. Like a Boss
21. The Grudge
22. Dolittle
23. Fantasy Island

 

[909]

Trial by Fire (2019), directed by Edward Zwick

Reason for Watching: Yet another death row movie. This is one that I wanted to check out in theaters, except it never made it to mine. There was a rush of death row movies in the last few years, many of them were very good. The thing is, because there were so many of them, there is now an expectation of quality that I have from these movies. If it is not met, I won't like the movie.

Trial by Fire is another death row flick, as already mentioned, but in this case my expectations of quality were not met. Specifically, this is the story of Cameron Todd Willingham (Jack O'Connell), a man convicted of murdering his three daughters via arson. The way the story is told seems to be rather accurate to the events as they happened. Todd was married to Stacy (Emily Meade), and their marriage was rather tumultuous and unpleasant. Their daughters were obviously the exception to that. The film begins in a manner where we don't know anything about them, but we are given a glimpse at a neighbor's yard. From her yard, we see the Willingham house go ablaze. Todd's behavior as this is going on is very strange. First, he stands there seemingly entirely confused. After that, he goes over to push his car out of the driveway. You can see how a witness would be very confused by these actions. I would be confused too if a parent was doing that while his daughters were burning to a crisp.

Initially, it appears as if Todd may go uncharged. The problem is that the state of Texas has or had arson investigators who strongly believed they knew what they were doing, and they were convinced that Todd walked through his house, pouring a gas can everywhere. After finishing that, they believe he set a fire that killed his daughters. Unfortunately, as we know, when you're poor like the Willingham family, and you have the problems that they had, it's very easy to hang a conviction on the accused. The prosecutor is able to bring up countless witnesses who either hate Todd, believe that Stacy has told them things which either may or may not have done, and to cap it all off they even found an inmate in the county jail who heard Todd confess. Basically, he's fucked. The only person to testify in his defense is Stacy, and that goes nowhere. Public defenders for the poor are what they are, and Todd is convicted of capital murder. He is sentenced to death. Of course, what if he didn't do it? You already know that part's coming.

I want to make a bunch of fire related puns, but because this is a true story I don't think that's appropriate. Trial by Fire is a movie that never really comes to life. You'd think a movie with this much white trash shit could easily ignite a spark (sorry) and make the movie more interesting, except it doesn't. There are nowhere near as many white trash scenes as you think there could be. There's also an entirely different way to make this movie, and the director decided that there was enough information on its own to support a two hour film. There was not. The information is told in the fashion of a made for TV movie. There absolutely should have been flashbacks during the trial scenes, but there were not. Why was Todd being accused by so many people of beating his wife? I understand that when it come to a movie like this one, the filmmaker feels obligated to stack the deck against the death penalty. That doesn't mean someone should make a boring, dry movie.

There are so many directions in which this could have gone, but this shouldn't have been a movie that relied on so many cliches. The prison guard befriending the innocent guy is something that should genuinely no longer exist. The fucking guy pushes the buttons to kill him for fuck's sake. There are other things in Trial by Fire that are not given the attention they deserve. Laura Dern plays a character who comes into the film halfway through, and this character is very interested in Todd's story to the point she completely ignores her kids while their father is dying. Her kids are in the movie for two or three minutes at most. Overall, I feel like while this isn't a terrible movie, it's still a poorly made film. I never got to review Clemency, but I did see that movie. That's another movie where the prisoner is sentenced to death despite not having committed the crime they're accused of Clemency had better acting, a better story, more interesting side characters, and a more developed view of what the director wanted the film to look like. This film has four characters and two of them are classic prison movie cliches. Pass.

Also, I should note that the lead performance by O'Connell is good, particularly considering he's playing a Texan and isn't even from this country. Thing is, if you can't put in a good performance in a prison flick, you straight up can't act. Nobody gets extra points for that.

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