In Which I Briefly Review Movies

[909]

The Mountain Between Us (2017), directed by Hany Abu-Assad

The Mountain Between Us is something I literally only watched because the Lakers win over the Thunder ran a bit longer than I'd expected, but in the end, it wasn't such a bad idea. I assumed from the poor reviews the film received that there would be nothing to this, I was wrong. It's actually quite rare that actors are given the opportunity to work in this sort of scenery, so I shouldn't have been so quick to rush to judgment. The movie is interesting, but it's not great. The cast carries this about as far as such a weak script could possibly go, and by cast, I should say a duo rather than a cast. It's really just two people here. When I saw the previews for The Mountain Between Us, I assumed this was going to be quite a bit different. I also thought it would be rated R, so imagine my surprise when at the end of those commercials, that PG-13 rating is blaring in my face. How does one make a survival film with no goddamn gore? This, as well as some other questions I had, were answered as time went on. There also aren't too many romantic dramas that I get around to watching these days, so I think I picked the perfect time to delve into this genre for a night. After all, the Lakers won, didn't they? I was in a good mood. I am surprised at who directed this, considering their past in foreign films, but that isn't a critical statement and merely one of interest. If interested, read on.

Trapped in Idaho at the airport, we have Ben (Idris Elba) and Alex (Kate Winslet). They both need to get to different parts of the East Coast, Alex to New York for her wedding, and Ben to Baltimore so that he can perform surgery on a child. Ben is a neurosurgeon from London working in the States, and Alex is a photographer working for the Guardian. She has had a photoshoot with some skinheads, not the most fulfilling of work to be certain. I do not remember what Ben was doing in Idaho, but I'm sure it was related to his profession. That I can't remember is not the best sign. After trying to get tickets at the airline counter, hoping they can get over to Denver and make their way to the East Coast somehow, it just isn't going to happen. They can't get a rental car as there are none, so it seems inevitable that they'll miss their chance to get home. Eventually, Alex gets the bright idea to head into an airplane hangar and hire a private pilot. Walter (Beau Bridges) is quite an old guy, and speaking honestly, I immediately knew where this was going. They get in his plane to head to Denver, along with Walter's dog, and it looks quite stormy ahead.

After a conversation in which we learn all that information I just told you guys, we encounter said stormy weather. Walter makes an attempt to divert the flight to Salt Lake City, but it's too late. Reason being? Surprisingly, the weather does not bring our flight down, it's Walter's health instead. He has a stroke and the plane begins to go down, clipping a mountaintop, which leads to the tail being removed from the rest of the fuselage. Of course, the plane is actually going to go down, and crashes very hard into some winter snow. Ben wakes up first, a bit shocked by the events but undaunted. He sees that the dog is alive, and that Walter is not. Alex is also badly injured, her leg maimed. Ben has some gouges in his side, but nothing too bad, he'll be able to push on. After using his medical skill to take care of Alex's wounds and injuries, and after burying Walter, he hunkers down and takes inventory of their food. Walter didn't bother to file a flight plan, he was weird and just got in his plane like a dumbass to fly these people over some mountains. So, there's very little chance of help coming along, unless the beacon on the tail of the plane is intact. Once Alex wakes up, she realizes what's going on, and can't believe that they'll be rescued. Ben feels otherwise, and the two will forge forward with that information left in your mind.

There are some good twists and turns, much of which are related to things that happen to the shockingly stable Ben. He's stable for a reason, he's a control freak and has his shit together because of that. Of course, no story with anyone stranded will leave people entirely unscathed, and while I knew that, the times at which these things happen are quite surprising. The script being as standard as it is, it's the direction that leads to these events being surprising. Rest assured that the narrative of the story remains the same, and that the ending of The Mountain Between Us is exactly what you would think it is. There are a few reasons I'm going to edge this film to the positive side, though. Despite being PG-13, there's much more nudity than I'd expected. How this got through? I don't know. Maybe someone at the MPAA got bored. If not for Elba, Winslet, and the director, this is certainly the quality of a TV movie in every way imaginable. The budget of this film being $35,000,000 seems to have no impact in my belief that this could have been a film headed straight to HBO. There's just not a lot to this, no hard questions about survival, and cerainly not any grand moral statement. Cannibalism or eating the dog are subjects never broached.

I'm not saying some shit like "I wish they'd talked about eating the dog," but I'm making the point that this film lacks grit. The film does seem to revolve a bit around the idea that Ben should leave Alex and her maimed leg on the mountain, but while Elba's character is certainly undaunted and a very stereotypical headstrong surgeon, this is something that would have been far beyond reasonable for his character. So, it did not happen. Knowing that there's no gore, no grit, or anything like that, this is a limited film that I think one's feelings of are entirely based upon whether or not they care for the two actors. Very rarely have I watched a two hour film with such little depth, but I do care quite a bit for these actors and was rooting for them to succeed. With all that in mind, there are many things I would have liked in this movie that I didn't get, and I'm a bit surprised that these actors would be in a film with such lack of depth. Or, for that matter, that the director who put together Paradise Now would sign up for this.

5.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Get Out
3. Logan
4. Wonder Woman
5. Thor: Ragnarok
6. Logan Lucky
7. The Beguiled
8. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
9. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
10. The Lost City of Z
11. First They Killed My Father
12. Spider-Man: Homecoming
13. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
14. Okja
15. Kong: Skull Island
16. Split
17. Personal Shopper
18. Atomic Blonde
19. Megan Leavey
20. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
21. American Made
22. Imperial Dreams
23. Free Fire
24. Win It All
25. The Wall
26. Breathe
27. The Man Who Invented Christmas
28. Alone in Berlin
29. Trespass Against Us
30. The Mountain Between Us
31. War Machine
32. Justice League
33. To the Bone
34. The Hitman's Bodyguard
35. Sand Castle
36. Death Note
37. The Great Wall
38. Fist Fight
39. Sleepless

 

[OldSchoolWrestling]

Good review. I am also a fan of both actors but really disliked the characters they played. I understand they were in a highly stressful situation, but they both came across as unlikeable. Kate would have been better suited playing it more like Titanic, instead she made me wish bad things on her in the movie. Idris was also kind of annoying in blaming her for talking him into taking the flight. I rooted only for the dog to survive by eating them.

 

[909]

Spoilers, obviously. A lot of them.

Glass (2019), directed by M. Night Shyamalan

Even though Glass is destined to make shitloads of money, it's possible that I have never been disappointed more by a film in my entire life. I have been looking forward to Glass for months, I was convinced that a film with this concept and these characters would not be a mistake. Rarely before does such a concept seem so likely to succeed prior to the release of the film. However, I suppose, I did forget about the most important piece of the puzzle. As much as television is about the quality of the writers, film is the realm of great directors. There are countless directors who partake in acts of self-sabotage because they cannot help themselves. Sometimes, their inability to help themselves creates films like Unbreakable and Split. Glass is not one of these films. Even though it inhabits the same universe as those two works, Glass is a film that arguably shouldn't even have been made but for Shyamalan's ability to create a big box office on a relatively small budget ($20,000,000). This is something that was unquestionably created and filmed much too quickly, with no opportunity for Shyamalan to change his mind about pretty much anything. I have read that he started writing the script just a month or so after the release of Split, so this finale (if it is one) could not have been something conceived long ago. This was clearly rushed. You know what the worst thing about Glass is? It's fucking boring.

Boasting one of the best concepts for a comic movie ever, Glass takes place just three weeks after the events of Split, the story remaining set in Philadelphia. David Dunn (Bruce Willis) is back, he works with Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark), who is now his adult son. David has fully embraced his superpowers and uses them to protect people, just as Unbreakable suggested would happen. His alias is "The Overseer", and along with Joseph, they are intending to hunt down Kevin Crumb (James McAvoy). Kevin is still suffering from disassociative personality disorder and has been locked away by his other personalities/The Horde, all of whom seem to appear throughout this film. So, if you're here for that, you'll get exactly what you want. The Horde has captured a group of cheerleaders, this time inside of a warehouse and not at the Philadelphia zoo. David is on the hunt for The Horde, hoping that he's able to touch him and have some kind of vision. Once he does, David heads into a warehouse and frees the girls, at which point we have the confrontation we've all been waiting for. The fight between David and The Beast is great, it's one of the only things in Glass that I don't have a complaint about.

Unfortunately, we are not treated to many more confrontations throughout the rest of Glass. The police are able to capture David and The Beast, which leads to them both being institutionalized. We also learn that Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), otherwise known as Mr. Glass, has been placed in this facility for many years. The hospital's head doctor is an interesting woman, Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson). Dr. Staple is entirely convinced that this concept of superheroes is complete bullshit. She specializes in working with patients who say they have special powers, and her remit is to find out what kind of people these really are. Dr. Staple's main form of doing so is to tell these three special individuals that they have a mental illness, that there isn't anything great about them and that regular people could do things similar to the things they do. Throughout this part of the film, we are introduced to...all of Kevin's personalities. David is held in a cell that could be flooded by a water tank, so he can't leave. In Kevin's case, there are lights placed by the door, and when one of his crazy personalities shows up as he walks towards the door, the lights come on and Kevin changes from one personality to the next. So, with all that in mind, we wait to see if Dr. Staple will perform surgery on these three. In the case of Elijah, he is very heavily sedated and can't do anything.

Now I'm going to leave some lines where you could turn around.

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I did already say that this movie is fucking boring, and it sure is. The film is super high concept, as you can tell, but it lacks punch and excitement. The joyless second act completely dooms the film, and truthfully, at that point I had made up my mind on how I felt about Glass. Nothing could save matters at that point, but the conclusion of the film just further solidified my opinion. Glass is dull. There's no other way to put it. What's worse than dull is that the ending is unsatisfying. Perhaps the boring second act is a result of the low budget, or perhaps the budget was a result of the script being written this way. I don't really care. There's also commentary on Shyamalan's career as a whole, but I couldn't find a way to care enough to write about that. I am very, very disappointed. The film makes attempts to redeem Elijah and Kevin, as you'd expect. As a result, we see the two characters attached to them either by blood or circumstance. Elijah's mother (Charlayne Woodard) and Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) do make appearances, but in the case of Casey, this appearance feels very wrong and misguided. It's absolutely necessary to see the first two films in this trilogy in order to understand anything that's going on here, but I wish that I'd left matters with those two films and never went to see this one. The performances, as well as our clash between The Beast and David at the start of the film, are our lone positives. McAvoy's ability to act out these personalities is always a joy.

The point of joylessness that really sticks with me, the thing that I keep thinking of whenever I try to write a sentence, is the matter of the narrative revolving around a character questioning the abilities of three people who we know have them. The characters have been introduced to us already and we do not need to have their credentials questioned, but that happens for 40-50 minutes. It is a very frustrating and painful exercise to be put through this. The problem with Glass is that it's quite clear to me that Shyamalan either didn't know how to close out his trilogy or that he shouldn't have been allowed to. The message the film departs with is absolutely mystifying, and the constraints of the psychiatric hospital turn matters into something that feels like a bottle episode of Star Trek. We are never really given what we want, and what we should have had was a film with many of these elements placed in entirely different positions. David should have been hunting down Kevin the whole time. The problem is that there's no real way to get to that point within the series, and I think what we have here is a group of characters whose stories never could have been meaningfully concluded. Such is life. I'm really bummed, though. There's nothing any of our three superpowered characters bring to the table that we didn't already know about in the first place. It was all those years and still David had no answer to his water weakness, there's no element of true surprise here. From a filmmaker noted for his insane twists, I can't think of anything more perfunctory than how Glass turned out.

I didn't read any other reviews before or after going to see this, but I suspect that a lot of reviewers harbor deep disappointment over how this turned out. I could easily have rated this lower, but I can only imagine what it would have been like to have watched Unbreakable 18 years ago and for this to be the follow-up. Like, for real. Holy shit.

4/10

 

[909]

Spoilers.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), directed by the Coen brothers

I do not believe I've watched or reviewed an anthology film like this before. As a result, this feels quite foreign to me and I don't really know how to address the events of the film. I'm always interested in seeing what the Coens do, without exception. I need to go back through their catalogue and watch everything, which I suppose will happen over time, but it seems like a necessity. I'm actually very interested to see what the Coens do after making something like this. It's different, so much so that I don't know what to make of some of these stories. The film is really uneven as a result of this, with some stories needing more time and some less, so I think I'll score every story one by one. I did watch this last night, I didn't think it was possible to finish the review until today, so keep that in mind if I'm forgetting things. I thought this was a neat look into the West, both satirical and morbid from story to story, certainly inspired and not lacking fresh ideas. I thought one of the stories was absolute garbage, but I can't deny that it's different. It's also nice to see a film set in an older time period that isn't filmed as if it belongs in an older time period. This is shot like a modern film and that's something impossible to ignore throughout the events. Overall, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs brings a hell of a lot to the table. Is it great though?

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is an anthology, as I already said, with six distinct stories.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs centers around Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson). Buster is a singing outlaw, so his foes don't think he's an outlaw at all. I genuinely hated this story and don't really want to talk about it that much. The positives here are few and far between, and this is basically a musical. Take that for what it's worth.

The movie picks up during Near Algodones, the story of a young cowboy (James Franco). The cowboy intends to rob a bank, but the teller (Stephen Root) doesn't know that. The teller tells a story about when he was robbed, and inevitably Franco's character gets down to business. This story was extremely short and the result of it is pictured above, which isn't too surprising. Business picked up here.

Meal Ticket is a story about an older man (Liam Neeson) who has a wagon which he uses to put on shows. His subject is Harrison (Harry Melling), a man who has no limbs. They travel from town to town and Harrison talks about these things, and surprisingly some people pay them. This doesn't last very long, and the older man's money dwindles as they go from one mountain town to the next.

All Gold Canyon is by far my favorite story, nothing else comes close. A prospector (Tom Waits) arrives in a valley and decides to dig for gold. In these scenes, there is a lot of talking to himself. It's fantastic.

The Gal Who Got Rattled is about Alice Longabaugh (Zoe Kazan), a woman who is on her way to Oregon with a wagon train. Her brother claims that Alice will be able to marry someone in Oregon, the problem is, he dies of cholera not long after they set off. If you know anything about the West, you know the dangers of the wagon train. Another very good story.

Our last story is The Mortal Remains, which focuses on five people riding a stagecoach. We have a trapper (Chelcie Ross), a Frenchman named Rene (Saul Rubinek), an older wife (Tyne Daly), and two strange fucks opposite them (Brendan Gleeson and Jonjo O'Neill). Where are they going? Who knows.

This format of stories in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is something that should have been a TV series, with all episodes registering in at around 30-45 minutes. Instead that wasn't the case. I think I appreciate the Coens ability to present six stories, all of them feeling unique, but I couldn't stand the first one and it left me thrown off-guard for too much of the rest of the film. I did also think it was incredible how easily the Coens were able to create sympathetic characters. Through the wonder of casting they were able to do so practically instantly. The Coens have made better films, there's no question about that, but this is just as unique as the rest. I did find it strange that despite the numerous appearances of Native Americans throughout the film, they did not have their own story in the movie. However, despite that, this is a very violent film with no character remaining free from such issues.

I thought that despite how bad I thought The Ballad of Buster Scruggs story was, I was able to find solace in the performances across the rest of the film. There are no shortage of great ones, but the real standout is Tom Waits as a worn out prospector. I thought his was one of the best performances of the year in one of the most difficult roles to pull off. A lot of people, for what it's worth, seemed to not care for All Gold Canyon at all. I think they're wrong but I wanted to point that out, it's possible people here felt that way and in that case you're wrong too. There are some little touches I didn't care for though. The storybook thing is far too twee for my tastes, and some of the meaning of the stories, like with The Mortal Remains, just aren't strong enough for me to actually pay attention to them. I also was annoyed by one of the background shots in the first story, where it looked like Buster was riding his horse through a landscape with a poorly made representation of the sky crafted as a backdrop. I think people who've seen this may know what I mean.

I think the Coens wanted to make this project because of the short stories allowed them to do whatever they wanted with their film without having to worry about maintaining a plot for two hours, but I would have appreciated The Ballad of Buster Scruggs much more if some of these stories were longer. As things stand, I would call this a very good film, especially considering that the part I hated was only ten minutes long. It may have been even less. Ultimately, a lot of credit needs to be given to the cinematographer, Bruno Delbonnel. The way everything was framed, the choice in lens, and the decision to shoot this digitally, well, all of these things made the film look quite nice. I do believe some of these stories were based on other works, but I think the public at large doesn't really know any of those stories. Because of that, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is something that feels fresh, even though it's possible you may not have liked this at all.

8/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. Widows
6. First Man
7. BlacKkKlansman
8. Blindspotting
9. If Beale Street Could Talk
10. The Sisters Brothers
11. A Private War
12. Green Book
13. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
14. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
15. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
16. On My Skin
17. Private Life
18. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
19. Mid90s
20. Eighth Grade
21. Sorry to Bother You
22. Vice
23. The Old Man & the Gun
24. Suspiria
25. Vox Lux
26. Boy Erased
27. Bad Times at the El Royale
28. The Other Side of the Wind
29. Searching
30. A Simple Favor
31. The Hate U Give
32. Bumblebee
33. Mary Poppins Returns
34. Creed II
35. Hold the Dark
36. The Land of Steady Habits
37. Halloween
38. Mary Queen of Scots
39. Aquaman
40. Outlaw King
41. Overlord
42. Ben Is Back
43. Monsters and Men
44. The Mule
45. On the Basis of Sex
46. Bohemian Rhapsody
47. White Boy Rick
48. Papillon
49. Game Night
50. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
51. Instant Family
52. Alpha
53. The Front Runner
54. The Predator
55. Apostle
56. The Angel
57. The Commuter
58. Beautiful Boy
59. The Nun
60. Operation Finale
61. The Equalizer 2
62. The Spy Who Dumped Me
63. Bird Box
64. 12 Strong
65. Venom
66. Skyscraper
67. The Meg
68. Assassination Nation
69. The Girl in the Spider's Web
70. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
71. 22 July
72. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
73. The Little Stranger
74. Tomb Raider
75. Night School
76. The 15:17 To Paris
77. Peppermint
78. Mile 22
79. The First Purge
80. Hunter Killer
81. Kin
82. Hell Fest
83. Proud Mary
84. Robin Hood
85. The Happytime Murders
86. Slender Man

 

[909]

Good review. I am also a fan of both actors but really disliked the characters they played. I understand they were in a highly stressful situation, but they both came across as unlikeable. Kate would have been better suited playing it more like Titanic, instead she made me wish bad things on her in the movie. Idris was also kind of annoying in blaming her for talking him into taking the flight. I rooted only for the dog to survive by eating them.

That's what I hoped for until Winslet showed the titties. Then I hoped for more titties.

 

[909]

Happy Death Day (2017), directed by Christopher Landon

With Happy Death Day 2U coming out next month, I thought that I better get around to watching this as soon as possible. I didn't know what to expect in part because I've completely forgotten the trailer for the sequel. You know how sorry a trailer has to be for me to forget it like that? I've seen it tons of times by now. With that in mind, that should let everyone know, there's a very strong chance that I wouldn't care about this film whatsoever. That was, at least, until I bothered to turn this on. I have different feelings now than I did beforehand. While I don't think Happy Death Day was a great or even good film, it did bring something to the table. I thought that the concept was clever enough, but the ideas here also have some deep flaws. Fortunately, this isn't a movie that takes itself very seriously, and all one should expect from material like this are some good laughs. The problem is, at the same time, while one's expectations shouldn't be high, it goes without saying that I wanted something more. A film like this really needs to be rated R, needs some gore to make the killings matter, but that isn't here at all. This was a bit disappointing, but the question I wanted to have answered was whether or not this merited a sequel.

Our story begins with on a fictional college campus, the sort reminding me of films from a time long gone by. Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) has gotten drunk the night before, and she wakes up in the dorm room of a classmate, Carter (Israel Broussard). She ignores a phone call, treats Carter like shit, and makes her way out of the room. She gets to her sorority house and throws a birthday cupcake from Lori (Ruby Modine) into the trash, then she goes about her usual day on campus. Apparently she has an affair going with her married professor, Gregory (Charles Aitken). Gregory's wife walks in, so nothing happens, and Tree goes to a party later that night. On her way there, she winds up in a tunnel, and gets murdered by a figure wearing a baby mask, which is apparently the campus mascot. The Bayfield Babies? What kind of stupid shit is that? I guess it's supposed to be a satire.

Of course, this has to have some kind of twist, and it is...Tree wakes up in Carter's bed once again. She relives the day, but this time she decides not to go down the tunnel on the way to her party. Everything before that played out the same, including an encounter with another sorority member, Danielle (Rachel Matthews). Anyway, back to not going down the tunnel, it appears that everything is fine. She goes to her surprise party, encounters some guy, winds up in his room. The problem is, the masked killer has followed her. Down she goes again. This time when she wakes up, she stays in her own room. Doesn't matter, the killer hides there, and she's dead again. So, what's up with all this? I think it's obvious. Tree has to get rid of her killer to break this time loop, and once she does, she'll live on to another day.

Obviously, Happy Death Day is a weird film, but it's very similar to other teen horror movies from the 1990s. I'm not going to say that we need a return of that era, but it's so different that I couldn't help but have positive feelings of the movie for a large portion of it. Unfortunately, the positivity does wear off due to the nature of the repetitive plot. There's no way for a film like this one to not be repetitive, it's the nature of it. I also thought that the film was entirely carried by Jessica Rothe's performance. Nobody else does anything memorable at all, even though quite a few of these people are on screen for a decent amount of time. I didn't know that there was a younger actress out there who could play Kaitlin Olsen's roles. This is quite a good attribute, of course. Movies like these have to be carried by someone, or they're just terrible. This is an average film, but that's okay.

None of the deaths are too inventive as a result of the PG-13 rating, which prevents gore and other things that...would be interesting. Taking this film for what it was, I was glad with what I saw. I was having some major issues with video quality as this was continuing, to the point where I was considering shutting the film off after about ten minutes. I'm glad I didn't do that, but this wasn't as good as I thought it would be. I am interested to know how Tree wound up in the time loop in the first place, and hopefully it's something answered in the second film. However, I can almost guarantee that when it is answered in the second film, a lot of people will complain about it. Perhaps I'll be one of them! I think this was a film for younger viewers, and most of them probably haven't seen Groundhog Day, so in the end this was definitely a good concept for a different generation. What, you think young people are going to watch something as "old" as Groundhog Day? I doubt that shit. Does it offend you if they don't? Admittedly, that does bother me, but this film really needed a bit more character depth with the other roles for me to say it was a good show. In some ways this also feels like a missed opportunity.

5.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Get Out
3. Logan
4. Wonder Woman
5. Thor: Ragnarok
6. Logan Lucky
7. The Beguiled
8. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
9. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
10. The Lost City of Z
11. First They Killed My Father
12. Spider-Man: Homecoming
13. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
14. Okja
15. Kong: Skull Island
16. Split
17. Personal Shopper
18. Atomic Blonde
19. Megan Leavey
20. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
21. American Made
22. Imperial Dreams
23. Free Fire
24. Win It All
25. The Wall
26. Breathe
27. The Man Who Invented Christmas
28. Alone in Berlin
29. Trespass Against Us
30. The Mountain Between Us
31. War Machine
32. Happy Death Day
33. Justice League
34. To the Bone
35. The Hitman's Bodyguard
36. Sand Castle
37. Death Note
38. The Great Wall
39. Fist Fight
40. Sleepless

 

[909]

Ben-Hur (2016), directed by Timur Bekmambetov

Hollywood's obsession with remakes is well known by now, but perhaps there is no more egregious example than the 2016 remake of Ben-Hur. I almost never say this, but did anyone really ask for this shit? The first sign this would be a bad idea should have been went Paramount went into casting for the film. When they couldn't attract any star leading man, they should have known it was a mistake to try to make this film. My understanding is that nobody else really wanted to do the film, and it appears to have taken ages to cast this thing. Bekmambetov was first tabbed to direct Ben-Hur back in 2013, it took until late 2014 to get casting going, andthey began filming Ben-Hur sometime in 2015. As I said, casting the film was difficult, they should have done that first and clearly they didn't. You shouldn't make a film like this without a leading man signed on before development. Unfortunately, Paramount and MGM don't care about those things, and they decided to make a remake that simply could never measure up to the original in the first place. What's more is that there were creative decisions made that effectively take focus away from the title character, pretty much the dumbest thing that anyone could do. Perhaps the worst part, is that in casting their lead hero, the producers cast someone who is best known in this country for a show where they had a mask covering one side of their face. Yikes.

Our film begins with Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) and his adopted Roman brother Messala (Toby Kebbell) racing horses in a field. Judah cracks his head and Messala carries him back to their home, a scene that shows how strong the bond is between the two. Their paths, of course, must diverge. Messala has interest in Judah's sister Tirzah (Sofia Black-D'Elia), but this isn't going to amount to anything. Messala wants to travel the Earth fighting for the Roman Empire, and he's going to do exactly that. Judah is romantically interested in his family's slave Esther (Nazanin Boniadi), and when her father decides to marry her off to a wealthy Roman, Judah decides to state his case and woos her back to marry him. Such is life in Jerusalem under the Roman Empire, I guess. Meanwhile, Jesus (Rodrigo Santoro) makes very random appearances through this film, doing things that you would expect Jesus to do, and at the same time taking up too much focus in a story that isn't about Jesus remotely to that extent.

Some years later, Messala returns as a Roman officer. He's had a tough time of it in places like Persia and Egypt, but he's much acclaimed. While he's returning, the Zealots are taking root in Jerusalem. Historically, the Zealots were people who desired to incite a rebellion in the Roman Empire. You could call these terrorists or freedom fighters. They were violent, and the film does make that quite clear. Of course, they have good reason, Romans don't belong there and were oppressing their people. Judah, however, makes a very big mistake. He decides to help a Zealot, a kid named Dismas (Moises Arias) who has been wounded. This alone isn't the mistake, but it's one due to the things Judah has to deal with at the same time. Messala and Judah have their runion, and during it, Messala asks Judah for information about Zealots, should he have it. Judah refuses to do so, and in response Massala says that a new governor, Pontius Pilate (Pilou Asbaek), is going to be riding into Jerusalem. Massala has a request, but it's more like a demand, for Judah to ensure that Pilate arrives in Jerusalem without any hitch. There are hitches, you can probably figure out that Dismas did something Judah would not have wanted him to do. Massala is put to the test and Judah is blamed for the attack, which leads to Massala...killing Judah's whole family and sending Judah off to row a galley.

I know this sounds similar to the original, but I assure you it's not. The gamut of emotions Jack Huston is able to display in comparison to Charlton Heston, it's actually incredible these two played the same roles. The passion Judah displayed in the 1959 film is not shown here at all, and the relationship between he and Massala is also different in the two films. Someone in charge of this remake just could not bring themselves to treat Massala's character the way it deserved, and whoever did that was more interested in reconciling the brothers than giving the story the depth it deserves. There's only one thing I think is better in this film, it's the way the galley events were treated. Hell, it's the only reason I'm not giving this film a completely brutal rating. There's something wrong with you if you don't see it this way, too. Instead of go the route of the 1959 version, Bekambetov decides that he's going to make Judah Ben-Hur one of those figures that is actually treated like a slave instead of some hokey adoption shit. The boat is full of these sorts of characters, this scene has lots of crazy moments and gruesome deaths (especially for a PG-13 film). There's much value in this, I thought it was an effective presentation.

The effective presentation is limited to this scene, however. The chariot race borders on boring, we've seen things like it in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. So, to be honest, even with the update in special effects, I couldn't care less. The movie also could not be more stupid once the chariot elements are introduced. We have Morgan Freeman as a chariot owner who knows nothing of chariots and horses. He wants to enter the race but seems to have little concept of how a person could even raise a horse to get to that point. The Jesus storyline is also out of place here, considering what the film decided to become about halfway through. I find little value in Jesus having a continued relationship with Judah and Esther, I don't need any of these scenes. Mark Burnett had some influence as a producer on this film, and these scenes almost assuredly were there because of him. It's not Jesus being in the film I have a problem with, I have a problem with these scenes taking away time for our lead character to develop. This just isn't good, I mean, it's not. Jack Huston has absolutely nothing that Charlton Heston did, the things he says carry no weight, and at times the character feels like a pussy. There's no other way to put it, this casting ruins a film that was going to suck anyway. They picked people who've never won awards in Hollywood to direct a story like Ben-Hur, and they really should have known people would never take to that. The quality and attention to detail is lacking in the extreme here. In one of the first shots of the film I swear I saw modern housing in the background of it. That's all you need to know, isn't it? I will also leave you guys with this bit from Wikipedia.

Producer Mark Burnett stated that films like Ben-Hur, which are centered on faith and the messages of Jesus Christ, need to feel like epic summer blockbusters in order to attract younger and secular audiences.

Isn't this a film about fucking Ben-Hur? If you want to make a good Jesus movie, go do that, I'll probably watch it. Don't smash two stories together like this.

3.5/10

 

[Kahran Ramsus]

I'm not sure what is so hokey about the adoption stuff in the original. Judah saves Arrius' life and Arrius ends up being credited with a great victory and he adopts him out of gratitude. That's a very Roman thing to do.

I never saw the new version.

 

[909]

The Upside (2019), directed by Neil Burger

Before I got to the theater, I was anticipating writing a review about how this was yet another unnecessary remake, following the unnecessary remake I reviewed last night. The problem with this opinion is that clearly it was necessary considering how many people have gone to see it in comparison to its budget, in combination with the amount of laughter I and others were eagerly participating in. Of course, this is a flawed film, and you might be able to expect where I'm going with this, but with these sorts of stories there's always an undercurrent of black people and white people from different backgrounds being able to get along with each other. I should note that I don't think think this is the worst thing in the world, but it seems that the film industry is convinced these stories need to be told. The Intouchables wasn't the first instance of this, and I think everyone knows that this kind of movie is super corny, but at the same time, there are ways to give it the material a bit of a boost. I thought Green Book did so with the exception of one or two particular scenes, and for the most part, The Upside did this as well. I also saw that there were some tweaks from the source material, and I think this is for the best. That being said, I think everyone knows that the formula of a black person making a white person care about life again is getting very tiresome. As long as it's funny though...

Our film begins with one of those things I detest, a flash forward. I'll spare you from that part of the story because I really hate that shit. Anyway, Dell Scott (Kevin Hart) is a parolee with a very rough background. He's been robbing people, pulling guns on people, apparently for quite a long time. He doesn't really want to get a job, but at the same time, he's desperate. You need signatures if you're on parole, signatures that prove you're looking for work. He doesn't have enough of them, and the jobs he's forced to go for are really shitty. His son Anthony doesn't really care about him after years of neglect, and his ex Latrice (Aja Naomi King) wants nothing to do with him. In a moment when Dell has nowhere to stay, he's told by Latrice to get out of her project house. Fortunately, he has received a job opportunity, even though it's one that he'd certainly rather not do.

Phillip Lacasse (Bryan Cranston) is a very rich older man, he's also a quadraplegic. Dell arrives at his place assuming that he's going to interview in the janitorial field, which is something befitting of his talents after the wrongs he's done and lack of willingness to do anything with his life. Yvonne (Nicole Kidman) is Phillip's executive, and over the course of the film we learn that Phillip got rich by investing in bad businesses and turning them around. He's also written books on this subject, letting people know about his ideas on business theory. Phillip's day is obviously very difficult for everyone, most of all him. He can only move his neck, so there are a host of qualified professionals wanting this position. Dell wants a signature from Yvonne or Phillip so that he can move on to the next thing, but it turns out that Phillip wants someone unqualified so that the next time he has a health crisis, he can just die. Even though Dell didn't want this job on the first day, after Latrice gave him the big boot, he doesn't have much of a choice. So, Dell signs up, cashes a big check, and takes on the job of doing everything for Phillip. The most important thing seems to be to get Phillip the hell out of his penthouse.

The film is very careful not to show Phillip's complete redemption, which is what saves this from being a brutal fantasy of a movie. Instead, I thought this was funny due to who they chose as cast members. Obviously, this was predictable, cliched, all of that shit. It's still funny and there are some great gags. It isn't just Kevin Hart, but Cranston is more than capable of holding up his end. I haven't seen the original film, but I'm pretty sure nothing about my opinion would change. I understand the original got better reviews, but I feel how I feel about this kind of story. There are good ones and bad ones, but they aren't great. This film was shelved for so long because the Weinstein Company collapsed, but I think this was a film that needed to be shelved anyway. Green Book came out, and this is a cliched story as I already said. I'm surprised this was ever made, but people need their English-language remakes, don't they? The Upside is a funny film, I won't deny this. I actually laughed a lot, but it plays things quite safe. Again, the laughs go back to the casting and in having someone like Cranston in the wheelchair, there's a good foil for Kevin Hart to play off of.

Obviously, I think whoever decided to make this film again decided that they would rather see Kevin Hart in the role Omar Sy played, and I guess that's alright. This is a bromance movie to the core, it's also a movie that has to balance a thin line due to how much it makes one think that all a rich white guy needs to be happy is someone from the hood to balance them out. But, I don't really go against crowd reaction nor do I go against my heart, and I liked this. I thought there were issues with the visual quality of the projection in my theater, though. There was too much blue shading, and I also thought that some of the production in general was a bit goofy. The ending of the film seems to run on for far too long, and I don't really care about the redemption story of either character. What I was there for was to have a good laugh, see what would happen, and hope that the two guys had some good adventures. There's nothing wrong with that, is there?

6/10

 

[909]

The Light Between Oceans (2016), directed by Derek Cianfrance

After The Place Beyond the Pines, I'm sure a hell of a lot of people were looking forward to Derek Cianfrance's next effort. Did they expect that he would make something like this? The Light Between Oceans is a less ambitious film than his previous work, which isn't too surprising given that The Light Between Oceans is adapted from an Australian novel. I don't want to say I was disappointed because this was a good film, but it wasn't The Place Beyond the Pines. What could be, anyway? I shouldn't have high expectations like that. Those two films certainly have thematic similarities, that much was clear to me. It's nice to see something so different than the films I usually watch, but I was hoping for something with more intensity. While that was lacking from The Light Between Oceans, I thought this was solid melodrama. I also think that perhaps this is material best left in a book. Adapting a book with this many twists and turns has some problems, the largest of which relates to the end of the film. In the end, we are left with an ending I didn't want, one twist too many, something sad and still quite unsatisfying. The film was always going to end in sadness, but I was hoping for something else.

Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) is a man who has been through the grinder during World War I. He is clearly bothered by the things he's seen, unable to express his emotions. What Tom needs is a clean slate, something that will get him away from the world and allow him to tend to himself. The solution is to be hired as a temporary lighthouse keeper at Janus Rock, which is quite far off the coast of Western Australia. The previous keeper had been suffering from mental problems related to his isolation from the world. His wife had died two years before, yet he was seeing her attempt to flag down ships. He was taken away, and Tom takes his position. After some time at the lighthouse, he comes to town for a break and sees Isabel (Alicia Vikander) throwing food to seagulls. It turns out that he's going to dinner at the house of her father, and during dinner he learns about the previous lighthouse keeper's predicament. On another break sometime later, he is told that the permanent keeper decided to kill himself. Tom is subsequently offered a position as the permanent keeper for three years. He enjoys the work, so he accepts.

On his breaks into town over time, he becomes more acquainted with Isabel. She requests to be allowed to join him at Janus Rock, but he tells her that only the lighthouse keeper's wife and family can join him there. They are both desperately alone, Isabel in large part because he brothers died during the war. After the two send letters to each other, they decide to marry. They are very happy with each other and return to Janus Rock, continuing on with their life and having the intention of starting a family. Once Isabel becomes pregnant, they are both overjoyed. It's like a storybook. Unfortunately, things don't stay so nice for very long. Isabel has a miscarriage, they are forced to have a burial on the island. They decide to try once again, the same thing happens. Another marker, another burial. A couple days later, Isabel has clearly cracked and is entirely despondent, there is no escaping this depression. At least, that is, until Tom sees a rowboat in the distance. He shouts for Isabel and they come running to the boat. Inside, there's a dead man and a baby in the boat. I'll cut to the chase. In Tom's position, he is obligated to log the events pertinent to the lighthouse. His wife's miscarriage was not logged as it doesn't belong in the book. This, on the other hand, it has to be. Isabel is overjoyed as it seems her prayers have been answered by this child. What will Tom do though? Can they bear such a secret?

The answer to the last of my questions, at least in the case of Tom, is that he cannot. I was thinking about similar torment on someone's conscience as in The Place Beyond the Pines. I seem to remember Bradley Cooper's character being around when bad shit happens, and he couldn't handle it, but he used the events to get himself ahead. That's a film I think I need to revisit at some point in the next year or two, but that's just one of the similarities I noticed. Another was Cianfrance's willingness to let his stories play out over an unbelievably long period of time. The last coming to mind is his introduction of new characters well into the film, and the important placed upon them is similar to his prior movie. Unfortunately, the story he has to tell is one that works against him come the end. I thought the last few scenes were absolutely ridiculous nonsense, all of which happened far too fast over too long a span of time. We are essentially cheated out of seeing what happened to all of these characters, only seeing two of them. This part sucked.

I did like this movie, and I was wrapped up in the events, but I am very annoyed with how the film concluded. Regardless of that, I thought it was strong work. The story itself is quite tragic, although again, the finale does some work to undo that. The scenes on the island prior to the arrival of the child, when Tom's guilt consumes him, all of these scenes carry emotional weight. The introduction of Rachel Weisz's character into these events does the same thing, it's clear to see this is only going to end in painful fashion. The performances in this film from all three name actors are very strong, everyone's motivations laid out on the table. The ending, however, just absolutely kills me. I can't shake it, and I was going to rate the film higher, but as I'm typing these things out, it bothers me that much. The Light Between Oceans is a good film with a pernicious ending that serves to destroy all of the building blocks Cianfrance has created. This isn't his fault as it's an adaptation, but this alone shows that not all material merits being adapted into something else. If he couldn't do enough to make me forget about the ending, I'm sure that absolutely nobody could. I think Cianfrance is a great filmmaker and would like to see more work from him, and I think he has some projects in the pipeline. I think this would have been complete garbage without him and the performances he was able to draw from his cast.

5.5/10

 

[909]

I'm not sure what is so hokey about the adoption stuff in the original. Judah saves Arrius' life and Arrius ends up being credited with a great victory and he adopts him out of gratitude. That's a very Roman thing to do.

I never saw the new version.

In comparison to the way Judah escapes here, it is hokey. Do not bother to watch the new version though, it's terrible. Pretty bad that was the only thing I could think of to place above its predecessor.

 

[909]

The Lego Batman Movie (2017), directed by Chris McKay

When I saw that they'd made a Lego Batman film, that was the first time I was interested in an animated movie for a long time. Probably since Toy Story 3, so I'd decided that when this was expiring on HBO, I'd finally get around to watching it. That's the case now, and if you want to see this and haven't, and if you have HBO, you should get around to it. My recommendation for people to get around to it isn't a recommendation of the film itself, but I'm trying to say that there's an easy way to watch this if you can. I didn't know exactly what to expect of this, but I thought that with this being an animated movie and all, it was a certainty that this wouldn't only be about Batman. Obviously, it isn't. I am still surprised that the budget wasn't even larger considering the absolutely massive amount of voice actors in this film. There's an enormous list that I won't be posting. What's really important to the audience I'm writing this review for, is whether or not this is too much of a kid's movie? I don't think it is, but at the same time, some of the choices in voice actors and characters is extremely annoying. That's not too harsh a critique, is it? I do think it was a smart move to take the best character from The Lego Movie and make a movie about them, though.

Of course, after The Lego Movie, it's time to delve into other Lego universes. The first I have even the slightest interest in would be DC's, and as the title tells you, we'll start off with Batman (voiced by Will Arnett). Batman is the same here as he was in the other film, no real difference...at the beginning at least. Batman is on a mission to stop the Joker (Zach Galifianakis) from taking over Gotham City, as is always his remit. He does so, and in the process tells the Joker that he isn't as important to Batman as he seems to think he is. Of course, that means Joker is going to seek revenge in a way Batman has never seen before. The next day, Alfred (Ralph Fiennes) is helping Bruce get ready for a gala celebrating the retirement of Commissioner Gordon. Gordon is slated to be replaced by his daughter Barbara (Rosario Dawson), something that I wish would happen in a real movie, but I'm sure it never will. Anyway, she has a plan for Gotham, and it includes getting rid of the need Batman. Such is the way these things go. Bruce, of course, is displeased. This is a cartoon movie, so imagine the kind of displeasure you'd get in that kind of thing.

While Bruce is voicing his displeasure, along comes the Joker, accompanied by every minor villain he could find. His goal? To surrender. Why would he do that, well, it's the Joker. Why else would he do something like that. The Joker drags every other minor or major Batman villain down with him, and they all wind up in Arkham Asylum. Again, this is what you'd expect. With that being the case, Batman doesn't know what to do with himself. While at the gala, Alfred and Bruce seem to have made the assumption that he's adopted a child. This doesn't make any sense at all, but that's how we get Dick Grayson (Michael Cera) into the mix. Dick is eager, wants to know more about Bruce, and Alfred invites him straight into the Batcave. Batman has a plan to actually get rid of the Joker, but the likelihood of completing it is quite slim. His intention? To put Dick in the Robin costume and enter Superman's Fortress of Solitude. Batman wants to send the Joker to the Phantom Zone, where all other villains from this Lego universe appear to have been sent. Who that brings into the movie? I guess you'll have to watch.

The Lego Batman Movie isn't as good as The Lego Movie, because it attempts to accomplish way too much and makes the mistake of throwing too many characters out there with no development other than that of Batman. Is that so bad though? Also take into account that the stupid stuff with Will Ferrell and his kid, or any other human beings for that matter, was completely removed from this story. I also think that the novelty of a movie with Lego characters is kind of destroyed by franchising things out like this, and I'm sure that this won't be the only one. I know they did the same thing with Lego video games too. As I already alluded to, the voice cast is too large, and the amount of characters in the film disallows for character development. Sans Batman, of course. I do think Batman's character development is good, and I also think that Will Arnett does a great job voicing him. It was an inspired decision, and I did laugh a fair bit, but not as much as I thought I would.

I'm actually left with not too many thoughts about this movie, because the animation style is basically the same and all that. There's not much to discuss here. I should point out that I really, really hated Robin here. I'm not a fan in general, but the voice and look of the character really bothered me here. I did, on the other hand, really enjoy the use of numerous other Warner properties in this film. I also thought the movie was geared towards those who already had knowledge of DC properties, yet at the same time, the film is a bit too childish to really cater to those like us. Or is it? I don't really know the answer to that. Lots of comic book fans love watching that cartoon shit. Overall, I think this movie moved at far too quickly a pace, but that's just my feeling, and truthfully it isn't much worse than The Lego Movie. As far as the appearances from other properties go, I probably liked Sauron (Jemaine Clement) the most. That was completely unexpected.

7/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Get Out
3. Logan
4. Wonder Woman
5. Thor: Ragnarok
6. Logan Lucky
7. The Beguiled
8. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
9. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
10. The Lost City of Z
11. First They Killed My Father
12. Spider-Man: Homecoming
13. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
14. Okja
15. Kong: Skull Island
16. Split
17. Personal Shopper
18. Atomic Blonde
19. The Lego Batman Movie
20. Megan Leavey
21. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
22. American Made
23. Imperial Dreams
24. Free Fire
25. Win It All
26. The Wall
27. Breathe
28. The Man Who Invented Christmas
29. Alone in Berlin
30. Trespass Against Us
31. The Mountain Between Us
32. War Machine
33. Happy Death Day
34. Justice League
35. To the Bone
36. The Hitman's Bodyguard
37. Sand Castle
38. Death Note
39. The Great Wall
40. Fist Fight
41. Sleepless

 

[909]

Serenity (2019), directed by Steven Knight

Ah, January. Finally I come across one of these films that was obviously dumped here because the studio knew that it was a bad idea to release something like this when people were paying attention. I wasn't able to find the time to see Replicas before it was yanked from theaters, so this has to suffice as my first experience with a January dump. I wonder how films like this one are made in the first place. There are tons of reasons why Serenity shouldn't have been made at all, and it's going to take everything within me to not spoil the film's huge twist. This is a twist that's so bad that once you see it, you'll never forget it. I laughed constantly once this happened, and there were other people in the theater who were not, so I have no idea what they thought. To call Serenity ambitious would be an immense understatement, but I'm convinced that this will be considered one of the year's worst films. Serenity is also a very critically divisive movie, it appears. I was looking at Metacritic and saw Richard Roeper had given it an 88 (yikes), and that the Washington Post's reviewer gave the film a 12. I think you can easily decipher which of those two streets I'm on. I will say one thing though. The horrendous twist helped to liven up the film when it was in danger of becoming very boring.

Serenity takes place on an island seemingly in the Caribbean, a fictional place called Plymouth Island. In reality this was filmed in Mauritius, quite the amazing and exotic place to film a movie. No wonder they attracted a great cast with a horrible script like this one. I would love to go somewhere like this. Anyway, the film begins with Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey) out on his fishing boat with his first mate Duke (Djimon Hounsou). These two are guiding some tourists through sport fishing. While out there in the beautiful Indian Ocean waters, they get a bite from a gigantic tuna fish, the kind which these tourists paid to try to catch. Dill has different plans though. His intention is to catch the fish himself, and if you don't know about sport fishing, the scene with him putting on a harness and all that is highly amusing. Dill pulls a knife on the fat tourists to get them to back off the fishing rods, but even though he's done that, he's unable to catch the fish himself. After this, we learn that Dill keeps a log of notes on this fish, and we also learn that he's struggling financially. When he can't catch anything to make money after selling it, he goes and dicks down Constance (Diane Lane), a local woman with an adult son working in Miami pumping gas. At some point, Constance would like her son to work on Dill's boat. In the meantime, a man named Reid Miller (Jeremy Strong) is attempting to get in contact with Dill for some reason. We consistently see a man in a suit, the only such man on the island, and he'll walk through water in order to get to Dill. How odd.

These things I described above took up about ten minutes of the film. Dill has these visions of him with his son Patrick back in the past, but he's out on this boat now and it's time to dick down or get to fishing. Duke and Dill both have monetary problems in part because of this chase for the big tuna, and they're getting close to a point where Dill could lose his boat for non-payment of loans. Dill lives in a shipping container himself, the island life is no easy life for him. One day, Dill is met with a dose of his past, when Karen (Anne Hathaway) arrives in the only bar on the island. Karen has a request of Dill, one that will help him out quite a lot. It also turns out that Patrick is their son, and that Dill really wants nothing to do with her. It appears that Karen ran off in the past with a man named Frank (Jason Clarke), an abusive alcoholic with a penchant for sport fishing. Frank is also quite rich. Frank is not yet on Plymouth Island, but Karen has a request. Karen desperately wants Dill to save her from her marriage, save their son, all that stuff. If he does what she asks, she will give him ten million dollars. His mission is simple. He needs to forget about catching the big fish and kill Frank. And on top of that? I guess Dill's name isn't Dill? I don't know why this matters.

I cut things off before getting to the twist in this film, which was so bad that I will not write anything about it other than how bad it was. It's the kind of thing you need to see for yourself. There is nothing I could say that would prepare you for it, as the twist is completely incomprehensible trash. I did laugh a ton after said twist, I just couldn't help myself. Again, nothing really prepares you for this. The actors seemed to either know exactly how bad this twist was or leaned all the way into their characters. Jason Clarke is the best example of this. To say that he hammed it up would be an understatement, and there were times I thought McConaughey was doing the same thing. Other actors, like Diane Lane, weren't in the film enough for their contributions to matter. The early introduction of her character in combination with her lack of importance to the plot despite constant appearances, makes me think her scenes were left on the cutting room floor. I am left at a loss as to how such a film could even be made, or picked up after being made. Aviron had to have bought the rights at a pittance as nobody should have thought this was good after watching a screener, but it seems that some people really do believe in this film. I can't figure out why.

With my reticence to spoil the film's twist, I must wrap things up as best I can. I am only not spoiling it because it is genuinely the worst twist in a film that I have ever seen and I think people deserve the opportunity to see that without being spoiled. The twist does make this fun, I must admit. This is camp in the extreme, I thought it was gone but it really isn't. A movie like this couldn't possibly feel more like trash than this does. There's a scene where Dill is going to take his ex-wife from behind after treating her like shit, he sees the marks on her back from her being beaten with a belt, pumps away for a little bit and just stops. Nothing about this makes sense, but at the same time, I have to recommend it. If you want to have a fun time watching a very bad film, go no further than this. It's an assault on your senses, it's very difficult to hold in your laughter, and best of all it isn't boring. The film is also nice to look at in the background, with Lane and Hathaway being no exception, but the film is so singularly focused on McConaughey and you see a lot of him sweating and looking like a disgusting pig. If this was only a neo-noir about someone trying to catch a tuna, I have no idea what I'd think, but it's much more than that.

3/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. The Upside
2. Escape Room
3. Glass
4. Serenity

 

[909]

Florence Foster Jenkins (2016), directed by Stephen Frears

I had some reticence to ever list Florence Foster Jenkins, but I decided to do so because Meryl Streep was nominated for an Oscar and I don't think I can not watch something that was nominated for an Oscar. That, I suppose, is the standard that I've set now. I also said at some point that I needed to go through Meryl Streep's list of films and start doing major damage on them, that not seeing her great performances is quite inexcusable. I do think this was a very strong performance, but probably not for the reasons anyone would expect. I don't think people really actually knew what this film is about. The commercial for Florence Foster Jenkins is actually very confusing and makes someone think this is a film about an eccentric singer. That is not what this is. Instead, Florence Foster Jenkins is a film about the way in which others will save their loved ones from embarrassment in an attempt to indulge their wishes. The commercial does not properly advertise this movie, and you'd really only understand it if you've seen the longer trailer. That strikes me as a major problem and because of that, it's no surprise the film bombed in the United States. On the other hand, shouldn't a studio have expected that? After all, we are talking about a period movie without violence...

Florence Foster Jenkins (Meryl Streep) was a very rich New York socialite who'd inherited a lot of money from her land-owning family in Pennsylvania. Apparently this gave her the means to do whatever she wanted. As this film tells it, she founded the Verdi Club to celebrate her love of music, and her husband St. Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant) managed her career as best he could. The gimmick of the film is unfortunately revealed far too soon, it's that Florence Foster Jenkins was a horrendous singer. We also learn that she has syphilis, and unbeknownst to her, the apartment she thinks Bayfield lives in alone is also inhabited by his mistress, Kathleen (Rebecca Ferguson). Kathleen is well aware of the situation with Florence and Bayfield, but Florence is not and this could present real problems. However, at the time anyway, it does not. Florence has not passed syphilis on to Bayfield as they have not entirely consummated their relationship, with them both being well aware of this. They love each other though.

Anyway, due to Florence having syphilis, she frequently becomes very fatigued and cannot handle much exertion. She decides that she wants to start singing again, though. Florence hires a talented pianist, Cosme McMoon (Simon Helberg), and he's hardly able to tolerate her horrendous singing. He knows that this is a better way to live than working in a bar or restaurant, so he keeps on while stifling his laughter. Carlo Edwards (David Haig) is Florence's singing coach, he seems to have no such problems with laughter. He knows beyond doubt that Florence can't sing, but he's able to keep his composure, he's more professional and he's older. When you get older, you're willing to do pretty much everything for the money you can get. Bayfield arranges a recital and tries to fill it with Florence's friends, assuring that Florence will not receive criticism. The problem is that some others are invited in, McMoon can barely keep his mouth shut, and this seems like a situation that could turn out pretty badly. But, Bayfield seems to know his abilities quite well, and perhaps he's enough of a man to really protect his wife when he knows she needs it.

This isn't a great film, but I was very surprised by Streep's performance in projecting a complete inability to sing. You know how hard it is for someone to sound that bad? That takes some effort on her part, but the movie is just as much about Bayfield as it is her. I think to some extent Bayfield is the lead character here, and to that degree I think Hugh Grant's performance was a major surprise. This was his kind of character, though. He has faded quite a lot over the last few years, so I guess it's fitting that he would return with a big performance in something like this. It's right in his wheelhouse and there are rarely films like this one made these days. I think there are some major issues with the timing of this story, though. People are more likely to be interested when they have base knowledge of the subject, but Florence Foster Jenkins has been gone for an extremely long time. Nobody who went to see this, or almost nobody, could have actually experienced her singing as part of their childhood. That's the mistake in this film, it's something that should have been made many years ago even though it's too niche. I was also amazed at the ability of her husband to keep her shielded from criticism.

I did some reading and found that the performance shown at the end of this film was done when the actual Jenkins was 76 years old, but it makes an odd suggestion that Florence Foster Jenkins died because she saw criticism and couldn't handle it. I don't consider that a flaw of Florence Foster Jenkins, but the film is flawed for different reasons. I addressed one above when talking about how long ago these events were, but I also think that the film is quite thin as a whole and doesn't make the best use of its cast. A few of the roles, such as one played by Nina Arianda, steal the spotlight in the very little time they have. Others simply don't make any impact at all. Ultimately, this is a film that's carried by the performances of two people. I see why Meryl Streep was nominated for a Golden Globe in the Musical or Comedy category, and I thought that she was very funny here. I wasn't exactly expecting that, I thought her nomination was one of those cases where she was thrown into a category at the Globes just because they didn't have room in the Drama category. So, I was wrong. Florence Foster Jenkins does have good laughs, but I think it's too generic and doesn't take risks with the subject matter. It's a milquetoast presentation on someone's life, but if you're cool with that and if you want to laugh at bad singing, perhaps this is for you.

6.5/10

 

[909]

It (2017), directed by Andy Muschietti

When you read books as a kid, you hope that somehow, someday, you'll be able to see these things as movies. At least that was what I thought when I was a kid. The ABC miniseries did not quite do It justice, so it was time to keep on dreaming. Sometimes, when you actually get what you want, it's even better than you thought it would be. That's where I'm at with It, a story that isn't yet completed, but one that I need to see out. I feel like I'm inherently biased in favor of this story, that I can't look at it objectively, and with that in mind my review should be taken for what it is. I was hoping that the film was able to capture moments from the book, although I didn't quite expect the movie to do much in maintaining its themes. One of the issues with the film is how much we've seen this kind of story done, but the source material is...the original version of the story. One of the best versions of the story. I think I've made clear that I've made up my mind. I do think there's another issue with how many times we see Pennywise, but besides that, this is one of the most faithful Stephen King adaptations that exists. This also feels like a time capsule, like another 80's movie, which there aren't enough of.

Our film begins exactly the way it should, with Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) giving his very young brother Georgie a paper sailboat. These events take place in 1988. Georgie sails the boat down a rainy street, and it goes into the storm drain. Once he goes to get it out, he encounters a timeless villain, Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard). Pennywise is a clown who inhabits the sewers, he's friendly to kids, or at least you'd think so for a little bit. Once Georgie comes closer to get his sailboat, Pennywise does the kind of thing that it turns out Pennywise does. He bites Georgie's arm off, then when Georgie is crawling away, shows incredible reach in dragging Georgie down into the sewers, killing him. The film continues the following summer, with Georgie long gone. Bill and his friends Richie (Finn Wolfhard), Stan (Wyatt Oleff), and Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer) spend their time heavily avoiding bullies which are led by Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton). Henry is absolutely insane and it's clear to see that bad shit's going to happen when he comes around. I should describe the other characters too. Richie talks a lot, Stan is a Jewish kid who doesn't care as much about his religion as his family thinks he should, and Eddie is a hypochondriac who is encouraged by his mother to be this way.

When these four kids run afoul of bullies, it isn't very good. Bill finds out that his brother's body may have washed up in a wasteland called the Barrens, and he wants his friends to investigate. At the same time, a fat kid named Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor) discovers that their town in Maine has a history of strange disappearances and mishaps. They occur at a far higher rate there than anywhere else in the country. Ben, of course, is also targeted by bullies. After something that happens in the Barrens, our group nears completion. They encounter Beverly (Sophia Lillis) at a pharmacy, when in need of supplies to stop Ben from bleeding out. She's able to easily distract the perverted pharmacist, she's also been torn apart by awful bullying due to rumors about her sleeping with all her classmates. Lastly, in perhaps that character whose story gets cut the most, we have Mike (Chosen Jacobs). Mike is the lone black kid both in the group and for that matter in the whole movie. Obviously, that puts a large target on him, and it's the 1980s, and the bullies in Derry are demented. Here's how things go from here. They are terrorized and need to find out what Pennywise is, what they can actually do about it, and how to stop Pennywise from killing anymore kids. But the things that happen to them before that are all pretty bad, and in some ways this becomes a movie that sees how long you can last before wanting to shit your pants.

I think on some level, It is supposed to be the kind of horror movie you would want to bring a 10 year old to so that you can scare the shit out of them. Considering that's around the age I read the book, I think I would have let a kid watch this. I don't have any kids so nobody needs to call Child Services on me. Anyway, the film does have a hard break in the middle of it, which is another one of the flaws I mentioned here. The break comes and everything rapidly comes back together, which is a problem I suppose. Another are the scenes with children in their underwear. I don't care for these, I never will, and that's why I said this was a movie I think you were supposed to be able to bring your kids to. The box office reflects the possibility that a lot of people did bring their children to watch something they knew about when they were younger. I think the movie is properly scary to this end, there are numerous good jump scares. The scene where Pennywise pops out of the projector would have made me shart if I was younger. I also thought that the director did a good job of presenting the things that scared each child, this was also a difficult task. These things happen without any scenes in between to break them up, so someone may like this or they may not. I liked the change of pace and how quickly things came about.

Because of my attachment to the story, I can't really give this a fair analysis. I did hate the score as well, but all these things are overriden by the atmosphere of It. There are numerous scenes that are going to stick with me, it's a timeless story. I didn't just read the book once, I read it two or three times. So many of these presentations are very unsettling, particularly the one with Pennywise dancing in his lair. The performances of the kids vary in quality, but Beverly, Eddie, and Henry Bowers seemed to stick the strongest. In the end, it's all about Pennywise. The film nearly entirely rests on someone's ability to portray Pennywise, to carry off the feeling that Pennywise could be many things. We know that the being kills kids, but whether or not it's a pedophile, or how much it toys with the children before finishing them off, that's something we aren't going to find out. When you see that face, you wonder. I also think it takes some balls to actually go through with a film opening where the villain has to kill a child in gruesome fashion. This one did not disappoint in any way. Despite my critiques, most of them are small, but I have a feeling I could feel differently if I gave this a repeat viewing. So, I won't do that for a few years. It is something I'm going to have to keep in mind going forward, there are no real shortage of memorable scenes.

The Lois Lane line, by the way, is properly disgusting. I think one of the goals in the film is to make human villains seem as bad as the supernatural. Mission accomplished with that scene, or with the things Henry was doing. Yikes.

7.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Get Out
3. Logan
4. Wonder Woman
5. Thor: Ragnarok
6. Logan Lucky
7. The Beguiled
8. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
9. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
10. The Lost City of Z
11. It
12. First They Killed My Father
13. Spider-Man: Homecoming
14. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
15. Okja
16. Kong: Skull Island
17. Split
18. Personal Shopper
19. Atomic Blonde
20. The Lego Batman Movie
21. Megan Leavey
22. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
23. American Made
24. Imperial Dreams
25. Free Fire
26. Win It All
27. The Wall
28. Breathe
29. The Man Who Invented Christmas
30. Alone in Berlin
31. Trespass Against Us
32. The Mountain Between Us
33. War Machine
34. Happy Death Day
35. Justice League
36. To the Bone
37. The Hitman's Bodyguard
38. Sand Castle
39. Death Note
40. The Great Wall
41. Fist Fight
42. Sleepless

 

[Big Papa Paegan]

I'm in the minority with Buster Scruggs, I guess, because I loved all of it. It may actually be among my favorite Coen Brothers works, actually. The titular short was like a gritty mockery of Tex Avery cartoons with some love toward 50s westerns, and anything featuring Tim Blake Nelson deserves love.

 

[909]

Stan & Ollie (2018), directed by Jon S. Baird

Perhaps more than any year in terms of awards recognition, 2018 was one where biography movies reigned supreme. One just needs to look at the lack of award nominations for original acting performances to know I'm telling the truth here. In fact, none of the Best Actor nominees performed in an entirely original film. With that in mind, I am very surprised that Steve Coogan was not nominated for his performance in Stan & Ollie. I think his was a performance much better than some of the other nominees, and he would have been totally deserving of winning an award for it. But, such is life, and that's not my grand takeaway from the film. I should admit that I don't really know anything about Laurel and Hardy, or at least I didn't before I saw the film today. The film is very effective in educating its audience while ensuring that people who already know the story are entertained. Stan & Ollie also walks the line between being too sad or too pleasing in a very effective way, and considering what the story entails, it's certainly difficult to do that. While some of Laurel and Hardy's comedy is massively outdated by modern standards, that seemed to not matter as the film went on, and these characters are about as sympathetic as in any in a film all year.

The beginning of our film takes place in 1937, but we'll revisit this scenario at various points in the film. Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan) and Oliver Hardy (John C. Reilly) are the famous comedy duo that everyone at least has name recognition of. In those days, they were some of the most famous people in the country. While making Way Out West, Stan has a blowout argument with studio head Hal Roach (Danny Huston). Stan correctly believes that Roach is not maximizing the global appeal of Laurel and Hardy, not giving them the financial awards they really deserve. Stan and Ollie have separate contracts, though. Ollie is still attached to Roach, while Stan wants to go with Fox and do their own thing. He's quite convinced they can make a lot more money and take care of their respective problems. Ollie is supposed to meet with Fox and sign a contract, but he does not, and this leads to Stan feeling betrayed and bitter. After all, he thought Ollie was going to stay his friend for good, that they'd continue to make movies for years and years. That doesn't happen. Instead, Ollie continues to make movies for Roach and does so with a new comedy partner.

Those scenes happen at various points of the film, but I thought it was essential to lay out the situation prior to the following events. One of the only problems I have with the film is that they didn't do this. Many years later, Stan and Ollie are headed on a trip to revitalize their career, with the intention of gathering funding for a Robin Hood film that Stan is desperate to make for them both. Their trip? They're going to head around Great Britain on a theater tour put together by Bernard Delfont (Rufus Jones), a very shady seeming promoter. I kept waiting for him to screw people over, but that didn't happen. The tour is very grueling, and at the start of it anyway, the audiences aren't so big. Their lodgings are also not the best. Delfont is far more interested in his up and coming British star, he didn't really put much effort into this tour. One example of that is how people in Glasgow thought this was a tour where people were playing Laurel and Hardy, not those two doing so themselves. So, what's the deal and what's the drama with all this? Ida (Nina Arianda) is Stan's wife and Lucille (Shirley Henderson) is Ollie's, they are to join their husbands when the tour gets to London. This creates problem as tensions the two men have with each other comes to the surface, and they still haven't heard back from the producer of their proposed film.

The performances in this film, I think they speak for themselves. They are both very accurate representations of the subjects in terms of their looks, with John C. Reilly wearing a fat suit you have to see to believe. There's a scene where Ollie is in bed with his wife, and he takes up nearly the entire bed. The way this is filmed is fantastic in illustrating this and it's obviously the point. I thought Stan & Ollie was a film that accurately describes the struggle comedians and other entertainers go through when their career is on a downward slide to nothingness. We also are given a presentation of how money is often a deciding factor in these kinds of splits, they just happen due to finances and nothing can be done about it. Both pairings of actors have chemistry here, and if you haven't already figured it out, there are multiple scenes with Ida and Lucille together on their own. This is a strong comedy duo in and of itself. The confrontation between Stan and Ollie is also deeply cutting without being vulgar, an argument befitting of such a good film. The characters are both so good and so interesting.

I said that the scenes of Stan and Ollie in the 1930's are ill-placed, this is not an understatement on my part. I think the underlying tension between the two may have been better if the audience was aware of the entire story before the film got well and truly underway. However, these things are completely overshadowed by the costumes and appearance of John C. Reilly as Oliver Hardy. The makeup job, fat suit, all of that stuff looks incredibly realistic. I also thought the ability of the actors to perform Laurel and Hardy's shtick is quite incredible to me, that isn't exactly an easy thing to do. This could easily have looked very bad and awful, it did not. Also, it should be pointed out that there were lots of scenes of this, in fact nearly the whole movie is full of this stuff. Overall, Stan & Ollie is a film that makes me happy, it seemed to make everyone else happy too. It was touching at the conclusion of it, and if you didn't like this, I don't really know what you're thinking. One may vary on whether or not they think this is a good or great film, but I unapologetically loved this. Not much else to be said.

8.5/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. Widows
6. First Man
7. BlacKkKlansman
8. Blindspotting
9. If Beale Street Could Talk
10. The Sisters Brothers
11. A Private War
12. Stan & Ollie
13. Green Book
14. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
15. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
16. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
17. On My Skin
18. Private Life
19. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
20. Mid90s
21. Eighth Grade
22. Sorry to Bother You
23. Vice
24. The Old Man & the Gun
25. Suspiria
26. Vox Lux
27. Boy Erased
28. Bad Times at the El Royale
29. The Other Side of the Wind
30. Searching
31. A Simple Favor
32. The Hate U Give
33. Bumblebee
34. Mary Poppins Returns
35. Creed II
36. Hold the Dark
37. The Land of Steady Habits
38. Halloween
39. Mary Queen of Scots
40. Aquaman
41. Outlaw King
42. Overlord
43. Ben Is Back
44. Monsters and Men
45. The Mule
46. On the Basis of Sex
47. Bohemian Rhapsody
48. White Boy Rick
49. Papillon
50. Game Night
51. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
52. Instant Family
53. Alpha
54. The Front Runner
55. The Predator
56. Apostle
57. The Angel
58. The Commuter
59. Beautiful Boy
60. The Nun
61. Operation Finale
62. The Equalizer 2
63. The Spy Who Dumped Me
64. Bird Box
65. 12 Strong
66. Venom
67. Skyscraper
68. The Meg
69. Assassination Nation
70. The Girl in the Spider's Web
71. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
72. 22 July
73. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
74. The Little Stranger
75. Tomb Raider
76. Night School
77. The 15:17 To Paris
78. Peppermint
79. Mile 22
80. The First Purge
81. Hunter Killer
82. Kin
83. Hell Fest
84. Proud Mary
85. Robin Hood
86. The Happytime Murders
87. Slender Man

 

[Kahran Ramsus]

I need to see that movie. I grew up watching old Laurel & Hardy films.

 

[909]

I need to see that movie. I grew up watching old Laurel & Hardy films.

You'll be stunned by their ability to pull these scenes off then. Doesn't feel inauthentic in the least.

 

[909]

A United Kingdom (2017), directed by Amma Asante

I'm actually left at a loss for words after watching a A United Kingdom, an overly sentimental look at what became an independent Botswana's first ruling couple. I was hoping for more from this film, but I really should have known better beforehand. I took it upon myself not to look at any reviews, simply went by the expiration date and description, and gave this a shot. This wasn't a bad film, but I'm not sure I should have done this. It feels like I've seen this exact kind of historical film so many times before, and I have more on my list for next month in fact. I may change things up though. It isn't that I can't handle watching these kinds of movies because I could watch them all day. What I need is for a film to bring something extra to the table, and A United Kingdom simply doesn't have that. It's one of those things you know when you're watching something, but the most glaring example of this is that the film has the cinematic sheen of a television show. This is the kind of thing that even when a film is much better than this one, I have a hard time getting over. The other thing that I thought about this story was that it desperately needs the South African boogeyman to present itself in a form of a real character, simply mentioning it or using a British government official didn't effectively pull that off. Want to see how? Read on.

Obviously, A United Kingdom is based on a true story, one regarding the heir to the throne of Bechuanaland (pre-Botswana), Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo) and Ruth Williams Khama (Rosamund Pike), the woman who would go on to marry him. Seretse is in London after World War II, where he meets Ruth for the first time. He goes on to marry her, but the beginning of this film is extremely focused on the problems that come with such a marriage. Obviously, Seretse is black and Ruth is white, but there's more than that, the British government is very concerned about how this will impact their relationship with South Africa. Despite what you might believe, apartheid South Africa still had gold reserves, and ultimately that ruled over human rights concerns. Alistair Canning (Jack Davenport) presents this picture throughout the film, he's the British representative in Southern Africa. South Africa itself is terrified about the prospect of a black king marrying a white woman and how this will inspire their system to be overthrown/prevented. Ruth has her own problems though, those with her father George (Nicholas Lyndhurst), who hates blacks. He threatens to disown her after Seretse's proposal, but she goes through with it anyway.

After Seretse and Ruth marry each other, there are other problems brought into the equation. As you may suspect, the King of Bechuanaland would not actually have absolute power in the country, that role was done by white overseers. Seretse's uncle Tshekedi (Vusi Kunene) is the Regent, handling the duties of the thrown until Seretse is prepared. That day had come. Problem is, Tshekedi is demanding that Seretse divorce Ruth and marry a Bamangwato princess. As you might suspect, Seretse rejects this, but this leads to enormous problems as the British use the situation to drive a wedge between the two men. The British subsequently argue that the marriage is causing unrest in Bechuanaland, and make moves against Seretse to heavily restrict his power. When Seretse discovers that the British are looking into mining the country, he wants to ensure that the resources of the country go into the hands of his people, not into those of the British. The situation, of course, must come to a head. Ruth is called to London at a time when she's finally become close to Seretse's sister Naledi (Terry Pheto). The three of them realize that Seretse needs to go instead of Ruth. Problem is, what happens when the British decide to banish a king from his own country?

I've addressed most of the flaws I found in this film, but the one I didn't say anything about was the way in which the story was told. It's told in a way that, well, is highly simplistic and almost entirely through dialogue and not actions. We also see that people have problems with the ruling situation, but their concerns are entirely sanitized. People died in rioting over Seretse's exile, there is no scene of this in the film at all. The opening of the film that relates to Ruth and Seretse's courtship is also quite bland and cliched. I do think that the film is effective in presenting many aspects of the political situation, but it doesn't do as strong a job in pointing out that the marriage wasn't the sole reason the British were against Seretse's return to the country. Bechuanaland was an important location for the British, another bulwark against potential Communist thought on the continent. It was also rich in resources as this film makes one clear of. I believe Botswana now ranks 30th on the democracy index, it is a prosperous economy by most standards, and isn't a corrupt nation at all. The British wanted to keep some kind of hold on these resources and keep the region close to their vest.

I was more interested in the political aspects of the film than anything else, but I think it's really quite a standard film as a whole. I think it's effective in ensuring that people do understand the problems with colonialism, but I think the film could have gone further in doing so. There are some good scenes showcasing how Clement Attlee (Anton Lesser) got in bed with the South Africans over their gold resources, and another that shows Winston Churchill was a piece of shit like the rest, but I would have liked there to be more to this. I think the film lacked the anguish that happens when couples are separated like this, and I also think there was a great story to be told here if it was done properly. However, obviously I don't think this was done properly, and while there are strong contrasts shown between like in Africa and life in Britain, the film needs a little bit more driving force. Some explanation is required to explain why Churchill would campaign on ending Seretse's exile and change his mind after the election. There's none here. I would have liked something a bit more raw than this turned out to be, I thought A United Kingdom was lacking heart and passion. I hate to say that about a romantic film because of how bad it sounds, but it is what it is.

5.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Get Out
3. Logan
4. Wonder Woman
5. Thor: Ragnarok
6. Logan Lucky
7. The Beguiled
8. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
9. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
10. The Lost City of Z
11. It
12. First They Killed My Father
13. Spider-Man: Homecoming
14. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
15. Okja
16. Kong: Skull Island
17. Split
18. Personal Shopper
19. Atomic Blonde
20. The Lego Batman Movie
21. Megan Leavey
22. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
23. American Made
24. Imperial Dreams
25. Free Fire
26. Win It All
27. The Wall
28. Breathe
29. The Man Who Invented Christmas
30. Alone in Berlin
31. A United Kingdom
32. Trespass Against Us
33. The Mountain Between Us
34. War Machine
35. Happy Death Day
36. Justice League
37. To the Bone
38. The Hitman's Bodyguard
39. Sand Castle
40. Death Note
41. The Great Wall
42. Fist Fight
43. Sleepless

 

[909]

Wakefield (2017), directed by Robin Swicord

Does a thought provoking film always have to be good? Wakefield is something that really tests whether or not that's the case, it's a movie that I actually have a strong feeling of distaste for. I know that's also the point. I don't think it's necessary to have a likable character as the lead in a film, but in this particular case it's very frustrating the way things turned out. I think at some point, a lot of people have felt like the lead subject in Wakefield. They've wanted to retreat from the world, but actually doing it is unconscionable, something most people do not want to inflict on their loved ones. Others have good reasons for retreating and decide to cut their family out for good, which is totally reasonable. Some kill themselves to get out of a bad situation, but that isn't what the deal is here. What we have here is someone who wants to remain involved at the periphery of the lives of their family members, but doesn't want to have real relationships with them and would rather they not know he even still exists. This character is so odious, so far beyond the pale, that I can't in good conscience say that this is a good film. I almost hate it and may have derived the incorrect emotions from watching this.

Howard Wakefield (Bryan Cranston) is a successful attorney in New York City, married to Diana (Jennifer Garner) and living with her and their twin daughters Giselle (Ellery Sprayberry) and Taylor (Victoria Bruno) out in the suburbs. On his way home from work, there's a power outage, so he returns home very late at night. A raccoon heads into his detached garage and winds up in the attic, but Howard's able to get that thing the hell out of there. He subsequently decides to look through the window and is able to see perfectly inside the house, where his family is eating dinner. For whatever reason, he decides to ignore calls from his wife and starts getting happy about her distress, but Howard really gets mad when she walks outside and throws his dinner plate into the garbage. In order to avoid fighting, he sits down with the intention of going into the house later, but he falls asleep. The next morning, Howard decides to narrate some of the details of his life. Diana and Howard decided to start flirting with other people in order to add spice to their sex life, but Diana hates it and can't stand Howard's persistent jealousy. Who could? After all, that's what he wanted and now he's whining like a fucking bitch.

This, unfortunately, is not the first time Howard whines like a bitch. When he wakes up that next morning, he believes that Diana will accuse him of having an affair, so he decides to wait for her to leave for work before heading into the house. The problem with that is, she's not going to leave for work for quite a while. When she sees that his car is in the garage, she realizes that Howard didn't leave her, and it's time to call the police to report him missing. Howard feels terrible about this and decides to go inside, but Diana's mom Babs (Beverly D'Angelo) shows up at their house. Howard hates Babs with every part of his soul, he will absolutely not go in that house while she's there. Eventually, everyone leaves and he goes inside, but this is when he has a major breakdown. After he goes inside, he realizes that Diana is carrying on with her routine without him, and he just can't have that. He thinks that his disappearance is a blessing in disguise for her, or that she's relieved, because she probably thinks she married the wrong guy. So Howard, in his infinite wisdom and consistently laughing at his wife's difficulties, decides to head back into the attic, with no intention of ever leaving, while spying on Diana the entire time.

The main flaw in this film is something a good director never would have revealed, and it was so easy not to do it. She just couldn't help herself. There is a scene where one can see that it's possible for any of to have seen Howard if they'd looked at the attic window while walking out of the house, and I think that's completely inexcusable. We are talking about Howard being in that attic for around 9 or 10 months without getting busted by any family members, that doesn't hold up under any level of scrutiny. I said something earlier about how I got the incorrect emotions from this film, and what I meant was that I found some glee in seeing Howard push the self-destruct button on his own life and effectively turn himself into a loser bum. There's also some joy in everyone being able to move on the longer that Howard stays gone, but this is something I also think is unrealistic unless it really was the case that Howard was a black cloud on their life as he seems to believe. This could also be considered a portrait of someone having a nervous breakdown, which he clearly was. I just find some deep disconnect with the reality of what would happen and what did happen in this film.

There's certainly some artistic merit to the film, I would never argue otherwise. In fact, it's the only thing keeping me from saying this was outright bad. I did have a ton of interest in seeing a story about someone who withdrew from life to this extent, but I think the story is ultimately too much and that anyone besides Cranston would not have been able to pull off the weight of this role. The problem is that his character is scum to the degree that only murdering or raping characters have been able to feel as low as, I had no sympathy for him at all. The character also has thoughts that are frankly insane, and all of these are narrated to the audience. There's a scene where Jennifer Garner has pretty much no clothes on and all he can manage to do is complain about her outfit. What the fuck? I just can't get behind this kind of character at all, this is super bizarre and I hated this character beyond all rationality. Towards the end of the film, once he decided to snap out of it, I did feel a bit bad for him. Problem is, I remembered that he abandoned his children and had only had thoughts about them a grand total of one time, and he enjoyed seeing them go through pain at the beginning of his disappearance. Fuck this guy.

5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Get Out
3. Logan
4. Wonder Woman
5. Thor: Ragnarok
6. Logan Lucky
7. The Beguiled
8. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
9. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
10. The Lost City of Z
11. It
12. First They Killed My Father
13. Spider-Man: Homecoming
14. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
15. Okja
16. Kong: Skull Island
17. Split
18. Personal Shopper
19. Atomic Blonde
20. The Lego Batman Movie
21. Megan Leavey
22. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
23. American Made
24. Imperial Dreams
25. Free Fire
26. Win It All
27. The Wall
28. Breathe
29. The Man Who Invented Christmas
30. Alone in Berlin
31. A United Kingdom
32. Trespass Against Us
33. The Mountain Between Us
34. War Machine
35. Happy Death Day
36. Justice League
37. To the Bone
38. Wakefield
39. The Hitman's Bodyguard
40. Sand Castle
41. Death Note
42. The Great Wall
43. Fist Fight
44. Sleepless

 

[909]

Miss Bala (2019), directed by Catherine Hardwicke

Do we really need an English-language remake of a Mexican movie when the target audience seems to be Mexican-Americans? This is an existential crisis of sorts, I'm not sure this is a film that should even exist, but I went to see it tonight because I genuinely could not remember the last time I went to see an action film in a modern setting where people shot at each other. I am struggling to think of any possibilities, so I did a search and found that the last time was The Girl in the Spider's Web, which wasn't particularly good. I also saw that way back in the middle of November, many months ago. Oddly enough, both these films were released by Sony, both of them weren't particularly good. They're of similar quality, with one distinct difference between the two. One is a straight remake of a film that was acclaimed and therefore has no excuse to feel so uninspired. I must admit that I'm not familiar with the director, only with our lead actress, who I like very much. I think that this is a film that doesn't bring much to the table at all, and I thought that if there were any messages in the first film, they were certainly lost in a remake that entirely lacks messaging and any semblance of a theme at all. Instead, we have a movie where someone is simply trying to find out where their friend is, and will do anything in order to pull that off. Yawn.

Miss Bala is about Gloria Fuentes (Gina Rodriguez), a makeup artist from Los Angeles who wants to make something more of herself. Her boss at a random fashion show ignores her, but she's on her way to Tijuana anyway. Her reason? She wants to visit her friend Suzu (Cristina Rodlo), who lives with her kid brother in Mexico. It turns out that Gloria also once moved to Mexico, but she was born in the United States and eventually came back. The main impetus for Gloria's visit is because she's going to be the makeup artist for Suzu, who wants to enter the Miss Baja California beauty pageant. Suzu is pretty and all, but some of the scenes where Gloria is treated as if she looks like shit defy explanation. Anyway, Suzu and Gloria decide to go out at a club. We are subsequently introduced to the police chief, a man named Saucedo (Damian Alcazar), and apparently he holds some swing at the pageant. Suzu tells Gloria that the winners wind up sleeping with him, and I puke because this guy is disgusting. Anyway, while Gloria's in the bathroom, in come some guys through the vents. They have guns, and they have a plan. They also want Gloria to shut the fuck up. So, they go in there to try to kill Saucedo, but it doesn't go so well, and Saucedo's able to escape. In the aftermath, Suzu and Gloria are split up, and Gloria's unable to find her friend.

The next morning, after Gloria sleeps in a cafe, she's desperate to find out what happened to her friend. She goes up to a police officer and tells him about the guys who shot up the club, which is pretty much the stupidest thing she could have done as the guys told her not to. Not only that, but people like those guys have connections, right? Apparently one of them is the police officer, who subsequently takes Gloria to meet with the gang's leader. These guys are called the Estrellas, and led by Lino Esparza (Ismael Cruz Cordova). Lino lived in the States for some time himself, but he was deported at a young age and never really fit into either society. Lino, as you might suspect from a cartel leader, is a bad guy. He decides to threaten Suzu's brother in the process of all this, and he wants Gloria to bomb a DEA safehouse. Gloria just wants to get find her friend, but this is going to become an extremely large problem. Another example is the fact that the DEA knows all about her and wants to get to know her better. Brian (Matt Lauria) is a supervising agent with a big file on Gloria. His intention is to get her to place a tracking card into Nino's phone which will allow the DEA to arrest or kill him.

This movie is extremely formulaic, and I don't think I need to say anything more than I already have about the plot. It seems like it would be clear to everyone that this is standard popcorn fare. There are some good laughs, but the intermittent mixing of Spanish language into these jokes (sometimes without subtitles) shows me that the market audience for this is...people who very well could have watched the original film. Gina Rodriguez does her absolute best with the material, direction, and lack of inspiration in the script. I'm not sure if this is a shot for shot remake or what, but I know that I need to watch the original Miss Bala. At some point I definitely well. The action scenes are alright I suppose, they scratched the itch I was trying to scratch. I just wanted to see something where people shot at each other. This worked to that end, but I was displeased by some of the narrative decisions here. The DEA thing seems to oddly go by the wayside, and I would say the conclusion of the film bordered on sequel bait. Was not expecting that at all.

I feel like there's so much more to this story that was never explored. At the end of the film, one of the characters says that Gloria was a survivor...and yeah, except the part where she got another woman killed and didn't say anything, yeah, I guess she survived. This scene is one that turns me on the film almost completely, one that destroyed my opinion of Gloria, and I just couldn't stomach the film much after that. I've done my absolute best to rein in some of my tendencies to overrate movies in the moments after viewing them, and with that in mind, this was very much not good. One of the descriptions of the film is that Gloria takes power of her situation, and that's certainly one bogus as hell way to describe these events. Unfortunately, the PG-13 rating neuters Miss Bala massively. These kinds of movies have to be rated R, like Sicario. Truthfully, this is no Sicario and for me to compare the two of them is absolutely terrible, but I feel like it's essential to show how one story works and the other doesn't. There is literally nothing in this that is as good as anything in Sicario. There are a few decent action scenes, but that's pretty much it. I'm glad I didn't have to pay to see this, but I think the disconnect in this is movie is best shown by the film's villain. There's things he does that I can't imagine a cartel member actually doing with someone he's forced into captivity, and that's all that needs to be said about this.

4/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. The Upside
2. Escape Room
3. Miss Bala
4. Glass
5. Serenity

 

[909]

CHiPs (2017), directed by Dax Shepard

I think there are two things I should get out of the way as it relates to CHiPs, a reboot movie clearly intending to launch a franchise. The first of those things is a question rather than anything else. Is it terrible to relaunch something that was never that good in the first place? I don't understand the outrage from those who thought this shit on a horrible television series, and that's truly what it was. Maybe it's that this continued the CHiPs tradition when people were hoping for something more? I don't know. One of the reasons I watched CHiPs tonight was because I heard someone the other day say that they ran into Erik Estrada, and that sounded like a good enough reason to me. The other problem with the film is that I can't stand Dax Shepard. This is probably related to the fact that my dad watched Let's Go to Prison no less than ten times and would regularly rewind the movie to go back and laugh at his favorite parts. So, yeah. That's where I'm at here. I also have absolutely no idea how he was able to land a gig directing a studio comedy like this one. I'm not alone in thinking he's done nothing to deserve that, right? It turned out that in the end, Warner Bros. got exactly what they deserved.

Shepard's film has a very different story than what CHiPs was in the first place, which could be part of the problem to begin with. FBI Agent Castillo (Michael Pena) is undercover with a crew of bank robbers as their getaway driver, helping to evade police in Miami. He changes vehicles and torches the car they were in to begin with, then he reveals that he's an undercover agent and helps the FBI arrest these guys. While that's going on, a former X-Games motorcycle guy named Jon Baker (Dax Shepard) has joined the CHP Academy. He really wants to be in our highway patrol because his marriage to Karen (Kristen Bell) has all but dissolved, with his glory days long gone it has been very difficult to keep his wife's interest. Jon fails nearly all the tests, but he can ride a motorcycle better than everyone else, and that leads to him being graduated on probation. He has to be a good officer in order to keep his job, or he's going to get canned. These scenes happen in around the same amount of time that it would have taken anyone to read the first two paragraphs, which sets the tone for a movie that is paced too quickly. I should also mention that Castillo is a sex addict and Baker is a pill popper.

Now, our impetus for the two officers coming together is that there's dirty shit going on in the California Highway Patrol. An armored van has been attacked by motorcycle riders, and their leader goes by the call name of "LT" (Vincent D'Onofrio, and if you can't instantly tell you're an idiot). Anyway, LT accuses the armored guard and a helicopter pilot named TJ of stealing from him, and they're boyfriends. TJ decides that given the choice of LT killing his boyfriend or TJ killing himself, TJ will do the deed. So, TJ jumps from his helicopter to his death. Now, Castillo is informed by his boss Peterson (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) that he's going to go into a new job, working as a CHP officer with a cover name of Francis Llewellyn Poncherello, or as everyone knows that name, Ponch. Ponch is supposed to go in and claim that he was transferred from Redding, and his new partner is going to be the village idiot, you guessed it (if you even care), the new guy Baker. We are subsequently introduced to numerous characters, including officers Lindsey Taylor (Jessica McNamee), Ava Perez (Rosa Salazar), Lt. Raymond Kurtz (Vincent D'Onofrio), the CHP Captain Jane Lindel (Jane Kaczmarek), and Castillo's supervising FBI officer, Clay Allen (Adam Brody). Castillo and Clay have some history, at the beginning of the film Castillo shot Clay on accident.

Movies that rely on gay panic to this extent can very rarely be good, but the moment I knew this wasn't going to be an exception to the rule was when I looked at my notepad and remembered that the scenes that were filmed in "Miami" were really filmed here at the port. I could tell instantly and I don't know why anyone would attempt to pass that off as the bridges are too obviously an LA landmark. More to the point of why this doesn't work, even though I enjoyed how much the film traversed across Los Angeles, very few of the gags in CHiPs land. The ones that do are more of the variety that is hard to even believe those things are being filmed, the bathtub gag being the worst of those. I'll save you guys the details on that one, and if you aren't interested in seeing how bad a movie can really be, you shouldn't watch this. One of the series of jokes that did land was a fight through the house of the widow whose husband killed himself. I was waiting for that to happen because Shepard took the creative decision of ensuring the audience would know that would happen, and even though I hated that part, the fight was very good. There's also a few funny things with Baker being a willfully blind cuck, and I can't help myself when it comes to that stuff. I think it's amusing. The film is also horrendously cast with multiple actresses given roles beneath their talents. One example of this is the way Rosa Salazar moved on to a big tentpole film like Alita: Battle Angel. That one may not be so good either, but surely it's better than this?

Unfortunately, or perhaps rather fortunately as I would rather there not be a series of these movies, this was quite terrible. Terrible enough in fact that there's no way there could ever be a sequel. The changes from the television show are all unanimously not good. I didn't understand why it was decided for Ponch to become an FBI agent, or why he'd tell Baker almost instantly about his real job, but anyway, that doesn't really matter to me. None of this did. I wanted to get this bad movie out of the way because I had a few more this month, but I do think CHiPs achieved its goals. I assume everyone in it got paid somewhat nicely, and this was a motorcycle chase movie. Motorcycle chase movies can really only be so bad, and a lot of these chases were quite good even though the end results of them were completely predictable. This is way too goofy, and I didn't think there would be such prolonged discussion of analingus in this film, but I guess I should have known better. There were many reasons this had bad reviews, but I feel an incessant need to find these things out for myself. I think there's an increasingly smaller market for films like this one, though. Nothing in it is truly unique, and even though I'm always down for motorcycle chases, I don't know what to think of this. It's a movie directed with no flair or anything at all. The comedy genre is basically dead and CHiPs is just another example of that.

If anyone cares about the list placement of this, I'll justify it. Recoiling at bad jokes and laughing a few times is a hell of a lot better than being unable to pay attention due to how boring a film is, or having a lead character who I hated so badly I wanted to see them die for the entirety of the story.

3.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Get Out
3. Logan
4. Wonder Woman
5. Thor: Ragnarok
6. Logan Lucky
7. The Beguiled
8. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
9. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
10. The Lost City of Z
11. It
12. First They Killed My Father
13. Spider-Man: Homecoming
14. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
15. Okja
16. Kong: Skull Island
17. Split
18. Personal Shopper
19. Atomic Blonde
20. The Lego Batman Movie
21. Megan Leavey
22. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
23. American Made
24. Imperial Dreams
25. Free Fire
26. Win It All
27. The Wall
28. Breathe
29. The Man Who Invented Christmas
30. Alone in Berlin
31. A United Kingdom
32. Trespass Against Us
33. The Mountain Between Us
34. War Machine
35. Happy Death Day
36. Justice League
37. To the Bone
38. Wakefield
39. The Hitman's Bodyguard
40. Sand Castle
41. CHiPs
42. Death Note
43. The Great Wall
44. Fist Fight
45. Sleepless

 

[909]

Chuck (2017), directed by Philippe Falardeau

I think almost everyone in this country is at the least somewhat aware of Chuck Wepner, right? Chuck should have done a lot more to capitalize on this, but instead it appears that not very many people were aware of this film at all. You could barely call this film's release in theaters a real release. I didn't even know this existed until a few months ago, even though Chuck boasts some actors and actresses that I really enjoy. That's just a bad promotional strategy. Part of the other problem is that the film is only merely quite good. This is one of my favorite stories, though, and it's one that refuses to sanitize its content for anyone. Chuck Wepner had a hard life, he fucked up, and his local celebrity status did absolutely nothing to help him at all. The cast of Chuck is slightly too large, and there's some inconsistency with the story in terms of how characters fade in and out, but perhaps this is all quite truthful. I am getting a little tired of these kinds of biographies, which is a problem considering how much of the film landscape is littered with them, but I did enjoy this one. Of course, a biography about Chuck Wepner is a hell of a lot different than one of someone whose life we know more about. In the case of Wepner, we only know about 15 rounds against Muhammad Ali, and the rest is somewhat of a secret. At least until now.

Chuck is the story of Chuck Wepner (Liev Schreiber), a boxer best known for fighting Muhammad Ali (Pooch Hall) in Cleveland. Chuck was never a world champion, but he was tough as fuck. You don't get a nickname like the "Bayonne Bleeder" unless you can take some huge punishment and brawl. However, this story is about before and after the fight, with some huge emphasis placed on afterwards. Chuck is married to Phyllis (Elisabeth Moss), and they have a daughter. The problem is that Chuck can't keep it in his pants, and this gets a lot worse the more famous he becomes. Chuck's day job is one as an alcohol salesman, which puts him in contact with some strange people, and he likes to have fun. Unfortunately, one of the times he's having fun, Phyllis sees what's going on and decides to move out of the house with their daughter. Chuck is seemingly undeterred in his hustle, and it turns out that he's top ten in the world after years of club fighting. His manager Al (Ron Perlman) has a proposal from Don King, who wants a racial war kind of fight as Don King always really wanted. After the Rumble in the Jungle, Chuck will get a shot at the winner. Sounds great, right?

Chuck subsequently heads off to a training camp in the Catskills, the first time he's ever done that and the first time he says he's done anything like a real professional. Chuck narrates this film of course, because otherwise a lot of the events in it wouldn't make sense. I was reminded of Liev Schreiber's time on HBO boxing, narrating their 24/7 programs, it's a pleasant memory. Anyway, Chuck and Ali finally have their press conference showdown, this turns into a race thing, and what's done is done. However, the point of this film isn't the Ali fight, it's the downfall that came afterward. Chuck found some real positives in his fight with Ali, even though he came away battered and bruised. He was a real celebrity in New Jersey now. Of course, as you might suspect, overnight celebrities always do bad shit. There's drugs, and oh yeah, there's women too. It turns out that he'd entirely forgotten about his brother Donny (Michael Rapaport) for years, his best friend John (Jim Gaffigan) starts hanging around again too, and that he's interested in a bartender named Linda (Naomi Watts). Marriage will certainly not deter this man in his quest to destroy his life.

This is a slightly unique story in that I didn't find any redemption in the presentation of Wepner's life, and perhaps that's what I appreciated most here. Instead, there's an evaluation of the things that lead someone to ruin themselves after one moment of fame. There's not much to say about someone going on cocaine binges, womanizing, or thinking they're too big to be around other people. All of this applied to Chuck Wepner as the film presents it. I think to this end, Liev Schreiber was great casting. I would also like to see him play Jake Roberts at some point, not that I think that's going to happen, but the likeness when he grows out a handlebar mustache is uncanny. I think Chuck does make some mistakes in covering too long a time span in too short a film, but there are good performances from everyone throughout the film. Elisabeth Moss has one good series of lines when she catches Chuck about to start cheating on her, I thought this was one of the best parts of the film. Another is a scene where Wepner is watching the Academy Awards all by himself in hopes that his story portrayed in Rocky would win, and even though he celebrates he finds out that nobody cared.

There aren't enough stories about what happens to those who are unable to handle even the most minor of fame, and trust me, this certainly was minor fame. Getting destroyed by Ali shouldn't have made anyone super famous, but Chuck seemed to think that it did and that everyone should have cared about him. He was wrong. I think the weaknesses of the film lie in the fact that the plot does meander, if you can even call it a plot. Wepner is also a relatively minor subject, and if you don't care about prizefighting, you may not care whatsoever about this film. Ultimately, this is a film that I would consider to be a good ride at best, possibly boring if you don't care about the subject, but I think everyone can say there are strong performances here. Of course, this is yet another modern boxing film without much boxing in it. That presents some problems as well, I don't really care for that. The point of Chuck was that Chuck had some charisma and he ruined his life. The director does fall a bit in love with his subject, but I thought this film was similar to The Wrestler. When someone's past their prime, thinks they're famous, and there's nobody to go home to, some bad shit is going to happen. There are very few exceptions to this in reality, and I was glad that the film didn't pull any punches. Falardeau was clear to show that Chuck Wepner wound up in prison, many films would not, and I appreciated that.

7/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Get Out
3. Logan
4. Wonder Woman
5. Thor: Ragnarok
6. Logan Lucky
7. The Beguiled
8. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
9. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
10. The Lost City of Z
11. It
12. First They Killed My Father
13. Spider-Man: Homecoming
14. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
15. Okja
16. Kong: Skull Island
17. Split
18. Personal Shopper
19. Chuck
20. Atomic Blonde
21. The Lego Batman Movie
22. Megan Leavey
23. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
24. American Made
25. Imperial Dreams
26. Free Fire
27. Win It All
28. The Wall
29. Breathe
30. The Man Who Invented Christmas
31. Alone in Berlin
32. A United Kingdom
33. Trespass Against Us
34. The Mountain Between Us
35. War Machine
36. Happy Death Day
37. Justice League
38. To the Bone
39. Wakefield
40. The Hitman's Bodyguard
41. Sand Castle
42. CHiPs
43. Death Note
44. The Great Wall
45. Fist Fight
46. Sleepless

 

[909]

Velvet Buzzsaw (2019), directed by Dan Gilroy

It's very difficult to talk about a film like Velvet Buzzsaw, because it's attempting to bring a lot to the table and remain fun at the same time. But is it really trying to bring a lot to the table? I thought Velvet Buzzsaw is supposed to be a film mocking the art world, and to that end it certainly achieved the goals aspired to. Nothing could possibly be more of a giveaway that this is a satire than the names given to each of the characters here. I am eagerly anticipating naming and describing all of them. Let's put it this way. The movie is eagerly goofy, you have to realize that from the moment you turn it on, and admittedly it's also nice to look at. The actors all get their turn to go full bore into their role, and while those roles don't often turn out to complete characters, I thought this was a lot of fun. My enjoyment of Velvet Buzzsaw is derived from the fact that I think this was supposed to be a comedy. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but Dan Gilroy thinks the same as I do. The point was to skewer the art world, to do so in an entertaining way, and he wrote his script based on that stuff. Now, see, that's something I really like. I was in awe for the most part as it came to watching this film, because there were definitely a few bad scenes and some that were more than good. The mannerisms, the vehicles, the costumes...all of that stuff just feels right, and I couldn't hate this movie.

How do you describe something that defies description? Morf Vandewalt (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a bisexual art critic who decides to attend an exhibition in Miami with his friend, Josephina (Zawe Ashton). Josephina is a stereotypical posh Brit with an inflated opinion of herself, but at the beginning of the film, she's been cheated on. So, the situation changes a little bit. In Miami we are fully introduced to our cast of characters, so I'll roll with that. Josephina works for an art gallery owner named Rhodora (Rene Russo), and Rhodora was in a band called Velvet Buzzsaw. Trust me, it's pertinent. Piers (John Malkovich) is a former artist himself, Gretchen (Toni Collette) is a curator who makes deals with various galleries, and Jon Dondon (Tom Sturridge) owns one of those competing galleries. Rhodora's gallery is called Haze, and she's going to run a show with a new artist who had previously specialized in street art, a former homeless man named Damrish (Daveed Diggs). In addition, we have two other people who work at Haze. There's the receptionist/assistant Coco (Natalie Dyer) and a blue collar working man who does all their shitty jobs, a guy named Bryson (Billy Magnussen). Bryson obviously has a crush on Josephina and Coco, but he's a working man and they seem to not give a shit about him. Now, with that in mind, I should transport the scene over to Los Angeles.

Back in Los Angeles, there isn't much going on other than the usual art world dealings. We learn that Morf hates his love life with his boyfriend, so eventually he starts a relationship with Josephina. Josephina herself goes home and finds a dead man named Vetril Dease in her apartment building. She sees a piece of art in his house and can't help herself, so she walks in and discovers a ton of paintings. Naturally, with Josephina not in the best financial position and her position in this world not entirely secure, she decides to steal the paintings. She fabricates a story, and with the help of lawyers she comes to the determination that she found these in a dumpster after Vetril died. Morf and Rhodora are completely entranced by these works and see a huge opportunity to sell the pieces, with Morf wanting to write very positive reviews. In return, Morf gets to write a book and it seems that everyone will make a huge amount of money from this. Now, to skip over some details in order to not spoil the film, let's talk about what happens when one of these characters decides to transport these pictures. The person opens a crate with the intention of stealing a picture, then they crash into an abandoned gas station out in the Angeles Forest. When they head into the gas station, they are subsequently attacked by a painting of monkeys working on a car, and the character goes missing along with the paintings they were transporting.

Do you see now how goofy this film is? There really isn't anything I can say to properly illustrate how much this is the case. Vetril's paintings are deliberately formed in a way where you can't tell if they're good or not, but that's the goddamn point of the film. This movie is goofy, the point is that art being good or not is entirely subjective and that the things people say or do as it relates to that art is very funny. Once the movie gets as serious as it could possibly get, I thought Jake Gyllenhaal really went nuts with his performance. Going all in is just one way to describe his performance, I thought it was similar to the one in Okja while remaining distinct enough and not completely goofy. I also think it's interesting for a film like this to be released so early in the year, but that's really the only time for it. I believe Netflix gave Velvet Buzzsaw a $21 million budget, I can see why. The movie is filmed very nicely and clean, similar to The Neon Demon even though there's a very distinct difference in quality between the films. Still, there are lots of great scenes with Gyllenhaal that carry this. One where he can't get hard, ostensibly because Josephina is a woman, that really cracked me up.

I also thought there was some interesting commentary on what people do with artistic works once an artist has died and given instructions that are never followed by those who carry out their wishes. Art can truly not die with the artist. Of course, this manifests itself in an interesting way, for lack of a better term. There's also some stuff with the artist being a murderer and people being completely willing to sell their work anyway, which as we know is the way things are. This commentary is merely superficial though. I think it's a neat twist that some dead guy's art inspires artwork to start killing people, but even typing out that sentence you can see how ridiculous this film is. Ones enjoyment of this is entirely related to the amount of ridiculous concepts they can tolerate, and in my case it appears there are a whole lot. I thought it was interesting the way Velvet Buzzsaw approached the way some facets of elite society work, but this is still a flawed film. The concept is so far out there that one cannot possibly conceive of another way to bring all these ideas together, but the ideas themselves are quite dark. In other words, that's right up my alley.

The pretentious attitudes of these characters are off the charts to an extent I've rarely seen, but I need to go back and look at Gilroy's last work. In any case, I think this is a worthy followup to Nightcrawler although the film is not of similar quality. The emphasis on how important money corrupts an industry just isn't as nicely woven through the film. I think calling this a horror movie would be a mistake in that nothing is seemingly intended to make the audience scared, and I also thought that Josephina was a poorly constructed caricature and given focus that wasn't commensurate with what the role brought to the table. Still though, this was fun, I think Roger Corman would be a fan of this.

6/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Velvet Buzzsaw
2. The Upside
3. Escape Room
4. Miss Bala
5. Glass
6. Serenity

 

[909]

Wilson (2017), directed by Craig Johnson

I didn't initially know what to make of Wilson, because when I first ran a search to see if this got positive reviews, there were a fair amount of positive and negative ones. I also looked at the cast, and I saw a fair amount of interesting actors who could make for a good film. I don't want to write a long list or anything like that, but there's quite a few. I did see that Wilson was an adaptation of a graphic novel, one which I actually won't look into to see if it was faithful or not. I don't think it cares. My take on the film is that it whiffs massively, I didn't laugh hard for about 38 minutes. This was a film that I'm surprised was ever made, and even though the roles were perfectly cast, it didn't resonate with me at all. How am I going to fill out a review for a short, not good movie that left me without too many thoughts? I haven't quite figured that out yet. I think Wilson was desperate to play on Woody Harrelson's celebrity and likability to create an asshole character...and it just didn't work at all. There are things about Wilson that I liked, and in some ways this is a good concept, but I didn't like it. It's fair to say Woody Harrelson should not be doing the same kinds of comedy gags that Clint Eastwood does about our culture.

Wilson (Woody Harrelson), as I already alluded to, is a man that seems to think there are lots of things wrong with what the world has become and none of them are his fault. He hates comptuers and all that stuff, like you'd expect from one of those kinds of characters. The anti-millennial shit comments are endless from this man and none of the gags are amusing, so it's fair to say that I never would have had a fondness for this character like I did Clint Eastwood's in The Mule. Wilson is an older white guy who thinks everything's wrong with the country, and that's how we got Trump, so yeah. There's not a hell of a lot I can say about this. We're introduced to him at a point where lots of things are leaving his life, and his friends are moving off to Missouri for whatever reason. He also routinely drops his dog off with a sitter, Shelly (Judy Greer). Surprisingly he doesn't try to hit on her, and instead he shoots his sights far lower. Ugly lady coming out of the pet store? Of course, that's Wilson's kind of thing. His way of getting her phone number is to try to rear end her, so this is the kind of guy that isn't exactly mentally balanced on any wavelength at all.

One day, after immense life failures, Wilson decides that he wants to contact his ex-wife who he hasn't seen in a very long time. Her name is Pippi (Laura Dern), and Wilson thinks all kinds of disgusting bad shit about her. I don't know if it's true and that isn't the point of the film. It turns out that they take a liking to each other again, and Wilson talks about an abortion that Pippi once had. She didn't really have it. Instead, their daughter was put up for adoption and is now 17 years old, she's named Claire (Isabella Amara). I don't see a good way to cut to the chase from here, but I'll do my best. Wilson essentially forces Pippi to go with him to the Mall of America to surprise Claire, and after many conversations, it turns out that Claire is not living her best life. She's bullied constantly, thinks that nobody cares about her, and she doesn't have any friends. Are Wilson and Pippi good enough influences to become her friends? The answer is obvious, of course they aren't.

The humor is hit or miss, but I could see someone really enjoying how dark Woody's material is here. It's the kind of movie that I can't ever recommend, but who knows? The thing is, speaking only for myself, I thought this was terrible and painful. It wasn't only the sketches, but the entire concept of the movie grated on me so badly. I'm usually not hyper critical of comedies, I just want to laugh. I didn't laugh at all though! This is supposed to be an examination of Wilson's life, but there's no explanation of his job situation or how he can afford to do anything at all. Even the scenes with Cheryl Hines and Margo Martindale don't bring anything to the table. This turns into a family comedy at some point, then it's a prison movie, and I just hated this shit, I really did. The prison movie line isn't a joke either, but I don't want to say how that happens. Wilson is a complete mess, I'm considering cutting things short here before typing another paragraph. It is genuinely that bad, but some people loved it. I am quite convinced that nothing could have made me like this, I hated it almost immediately. Wilson is the kind of guy who would walk up to you at a urinal and start talking to you, then the film actually shows him doing that, and I just couldn't handle it at all.

It isn't that Woody Harrelson and Laura Dern give bad performances, the problem is that they are unable to transform the material into something cohesive. The director was also working against them in this way, there's nothing tying most of these scenes together. It's presented like an episode of Always Sunny with none of the same charm? I don't really know how to describe a movie where it seems to me that everything falls apart. I found no value in Wilson's redemption as he was such an enormous piece of trash before that point, and I'm kind of over those redemption stories to begin with. The movie is goofy, but that's really all it is. What it should be is an examination of why people with that kind of attitude fail in life, but we didn't get that. As a whole, I'm giving this one a full burial job, I have never seen anything with a cast I liked so much that I hated as much as this. This is comedy gone bad, the director should be banished too. I didn't like A SINGLE SCENE and hated this more than Fist Fight, that says it all.

3/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Get Out
3. Logan
4. Wonder Woman
5. Thor: Ragnarok
6. Logan Lucky
7. The Beguiled
8. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
9. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
10. The Lost City of Z
11. It
12. First They Killed My Father
13. Spider-Man: Homecoming
14. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
15. Okja
16. Kong: Skull Island
17. Split
18. Personal Shopper
19. Chuck
20. Atomic Blonde
21. The Lego Batman Movie
22. Megan Leavey
23. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
24. American Made
25. Imperial Dreams
26. Free Fire
27. Win It All
28. The Wall
29. Breathe
30. The Man Who Invented Christmas
31. Alone in Berlin
32. A United Kingdom
33. Trespass Against Us
34. The Mountain Between Us
35. War Machine
36. Happy Death Day
37. Justice League
38. To the Bone
39. Wakefield
40. The Hitman's Bodyguard
41. Sand Castle
42. CHiPs
43. Death Note
44. The Great Wall
45. Fist Fight
46. Wilson
47. Sleepless

 

[909]

Men in Black (1997), directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

I am fully aware that it makes zero sense for me to never have seen Men in Black, and after watching the film I understood this even less. There's no real excuse as this was a movie that was regularly on television in my house for years, but I never bothered to watch it for myself. So, with that in mind, I guess today was the time. I was thinking throughout Men in Black that this was a film made in an era long past, one when Hollywood was still very focused on creating movie stars. Of course, Will Smith was supposed to be that guy for a very long time. I suppose that he was, but those days are now over. There should be an examination into what created the end of the Hollywood movie star system, but I'm not the person to write about that. After all, how could I? Look at the amount of things I haven't seen before. While it's a shame that I've never seen Men in Black prior to today, and I probably would have liked it more when I was a kid, I thought this movie still held up to a greater extent than I'd expected. I also still have two more of these to go. Overall, this was what I hoped it would be, and featured one acting performance that I found quite surprising.

Our film begins with a scene out in the desert, with a man driving immigrants across the border. Of course, he's paid for that, but he has no idea what's coming. He's stopped by Border Patrol, but along come some men in suits. Agents K (Tommy Lee Jones) and D (Richard Hamilton) decide to interfere with the stop and test some of these people being transported, with the intention of learning things about them. They find that one of them doesn't speak Spanish, and doesn't really say anything at all, so they take the man out into the desert. The rest are ordered to get back in the van and continue into the US. Over in the desert, there's a rather amusing problem. The illegal alien is an actual...alien? K and D take care of the problem, but in the process of doing so, D decides that he's too old to keep doing this job. It turns out that K has just the solution for that, he has a metal stick he can take out of his pocket and use to remove someone's memories. It's called a neuralyzer, on it goes, and away goes D's memories. Afterwards, K starts looking for a new partner.

Enter the next sequence, focusing on James Edwards (Will Smith). James is an officer with NYPD who gets in a foot chase with a very athletic suspect, too athletic in fact to be a human. Now that we already know about the alien problem, there's no real suspense with this, but after some cryptic comments, the alien leaps to his death. Afterwards, James is at the station, and all of a sudden in comes Agent K once again, interviewing James this time. After their conversation, and after another funny alien scene, James is neuralyzed and left with a business card that has an address on it. The reason? Agent K wants to find someone to join Men in Black, a secret organization that answers to no part of our government. They protect Earth from alien threats, monitor the existing alien population on Earth, and use those neuralyzers to ensure that alien activity is kept secret. Men in Black was established in 1961 when an alien ship landed in New York City, it was subsequently converted into a World's Fair exhibit, but an organization was needed to handle alien refugees. Enter MiB. The poster straight out gives away that James joins the organization, he is assigned the name of J. Meanwhile, in upstate New York, an alien crashlands on Earth and kills Edgar (Vincent D'Onofrio), a verbally abusive farmer. This alien is a violent one, and covers its body with Edgar's skin. His goal? Watch the movie I guess.

The performance I was referring to when saying someone had a great performance was that of D'Onofrio. I was impressed with the prosthetics, but even more than that, his ability to carry out the role was incredible. I haven't watched an alien related science-fiction movie set on Earth in a hell of a long time, I guess since Venom? I don't think that should even count, but it probably does. I'm naturally forced to compare the two films on some level, but there isn't much of a comparison. This was more of a comedy than anything else, and it was a funny movie overall. I still don't know why I never watched it before, and this is the kind of thing I'm going to keep thinking about for a while. I wouldn't say Men in Black was obviously a film intended to launch a film franchise, but you can tell that this was supposed to be rolled out in a way that would allow Sony to make a pile of money from this. Obviously, that worked out well for them and that's why this is continuing, but the film succeeds because it's a self contained story. Unlike, for example, Venom. See the need for me to draw a comparison?

I think the thing that may not stand up under scrutiny are the CGI special effects, but I thought they weren't anywhere near as bad as I expected. There's some other things related to computer technology, but you know, you should expect that from an older film. By the standards of the time, the effects were great. I don't know how modern audiences would react to them if they were seeing the film for the first time, though. The partnership between Smith and Jones makes this a winner, but I'm not going to be overly effusive in praise. It would be very difficult to mess this up, but I see that the second entry in the series has some bad ratings, so I'll get to see how. Some of the in jokes and references to this kind of science-fiction are lost on me, but this was fun and I laughed a lot. If I do have any complaints, it's that Men in Black is almost completely lacking in character development, I felt like I knew nothing about these two guys after watching them for 90 minutes. That's acceptable I suppose, but I didn't really appreciate it, and the end of the film didn't do too much to redeem that. I'll watch the second movie sometime next month, I'm interested in seeing how badly that went wrong.

7/10

 

[909]

Gold (2016), directed by Stephen Gaghan

As I believe I've said before, I don't have too many more of these recent Matthew McConaughey performances left to watch, but it seems like he's going to keep churning them out as often as he can. The one after this is going to be The Beach Bum, which I have no idea what to think of, but the last one I saw was a horrible film in Serenity. As I said when I reviewed it, there are no words. I think McConaughey's ability to pick bad projects is unmatched, every performance he gives is far above the quality of the actual films. I think Gold is perhaps another example of that, which him hitting a few notes here that I don't think I've ever seen him do before. Oddly enough, I actually bought a ticket to see Gold once before and got a refund before showtime. Keep in mind that I didn't go to the theater at that time. The concept was interesting enough to me, and the trailer did a hell of a job getting this over. This looked like yet another adventure movie through the jungle. Of course, it wasn't exactly that, but I think the film may have been about the wrong character. I felt myself far more interested in how these things were pulled off, and how a character was able to pull the wool over the eyes of his partner, but that wasn't examined here at all. That's a mistake and one that ultimately dooms this film.

Gold starts in 1981, with Kenny Wells (Matthew McConaughey) running a prospecting company with his father, who dies on the same day that we meet him. Times were good at Washoe while Kenny's father ran the company, not so much while Kenny was doing it. We fast forward seven years, with his father long gone and with it their nice office building. Kenny is broke, their business is broke, and his employees work out of a bar to keep expenses down and in part because they have no other job to go to. Kay (Bryce Dallas Howard) is quite the dutiful girlfriend to someone who doesn't really deserve her, and once Kenny lost his house, he moves in with her. Kenny is a huckster, there's no other way to put it. This is something one can see from a mile away, but he had a dream. In this dream, he was led to Indonesia to meet up with a geologist, Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez). Mike had previously had a copper strike there, so Kenny makes his dream a reality and flies out to Jakarta. Kenny is able to convince Mike to go into business with him, and he's able to raise some of the money he promised to finance their mining operation. About one-third of it or so.

Mike and Kenny are the embodiment of true believers, they're convinced that their mine is going to get them both rich. The film is based on a true story though, of a mining company called Bre-X. Once you know that, some of the intrigue dissipates, and that's why I said the film should have followed a different character. Anyway, the mine is a bust, it doesn't work out at all. The mine fails to show any gold and the workers know this, so they bounce back to their villages in the jungle. Working for free is not in their life plan. Mike, on the other hand, he has a plan to get them back out there. He promises fresh water so that people won't get sick, but Kenny gets a bad case of malaria and goes down for the count. So, while Mike's getting water filters and while Kenny's sick, the workers come back to the mine. Once Kenny finally comes out of it, Mike tells him that they've struck gold and have a real gold mine. The reports are extraordinary, so Kenny opens the office building back up in Reno and they are approached by Wall Street with some plans. Mike comes up with a proposal of his own, to bring some bankers out to Indonesia to show them the mine for themselves. The goal? If the bankers are convinced of the viability of the mine, that it goes hand in hand with the reports they've read, they're willing to fork over millions in investment dollars. Kenny and Mike could be rich.

Of course, this is based on a mining scandal as I've already said, and therefore I would have liked the film to focus on the individual accused of duping investors out of millions of dollars. In this case, that would be Mike. Mike was the man with the plan, he wasn't going to fail at striking gold, he was convinced it was there. Once it wasn't, he would do whatever it takes, they were going to make money off some fucking gold. The film should have been focused on him, and I'm called to think of War Dogs, which had a similar focus and came out the same year. At least in that film, which I thought was a fair bit better, the two characters were on screen together doing bad shit for a hell of a lot of the running time. In this case, the story is focused on Kenny, and even though this was a great performance I think that was a mistake. I also don't care for the twist in these kinds of movies where characters often get out with some amount of the illegal profits, but it's becoming so common that I better just get used to it and score films accordingly rather than whine about it.

I don't understand how someone could make Syriana and follow it up with Gold, because these two films are in such distinct contrast to one another. I think that Bryce Dallas Howard and Edgar Ramirez are extremely underused, and I have left out some details of the story but there are a few surprise appearances I felt the same way about. There are some good cases of storytelling here, particularly when it comes to Kenny being a narrator. McConaughey's transformation and performance are great, but ultimately they don't fit into a film that doesn't deserve them. Any attempt to make a moral turn with a story like this can't have the character walk away with millions of dollars at the end, I know I've already said this but I need to reiterate it. Kenny becoming rich is not a story told with any kind of meaning beyond the superficial, but I thought this is a story that could have gone much further. After all, a ton of the details were changed and that should have given Gaghan the license to do whatever the hell he wanted. Instead, this is another Reagan era tale where people attempt to get rich off the backs of others, this time in a foreign country where they practically use slave labor, but this is a poorly told variation of that story. After all, unlike American Made, nobody's banging it out while flying jet planes.

I should point out that this was merely a slight whiff. I did find the events quite entertaining on their face, but a film like this needs to be taken for what it is even when it looks nice. Let me clarify. Even when it looks nice while featuring one of the ugliest character transformations I've seen in a while. Hopefully I won't ever have to see McConaughey play a fat ass again and have a nude scene. That was brutal, I wasn't expecting that. With a better focus and a different touch, this could have been a hell of a hard hitting film, but instead we didn't get that. Gold just doesn't go far enough.

5.5/10

 

[909]

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), directed by Peter Jackson

This was the first time I've ever went to the theater to watch a documentary, and They Shall Not Grow Old seemed like the perfect time to actually go do this. I wasn't sure exactly what the focus of this documentary was, but the trailer looked good! I think most people were in the same boat as the trailer doesn't really elaborate on the focus of the documentary, but I did find the subject matter quite welcome. Comparatively there is a dearth of footage for World War I, a fact Peter Jackson is clear to make people well aware of at the end of the film. Perhaps the best part of this documentary is the half hour Jackson spends after the credits explaining how this project came together. He was sure to point out that he wasn't trying to offend anyone by colorizing the footage, and certainly this isn't a case of a sanitized product. Some of the footage here is very gruesome, this is a raw experience. It's also not quite what I expected, but that's great. Did I want to see something else explaining the origins of World War I? No, I did not. That territory has been covered too many times, so instead Jackson gives us something different.

Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old focuses on the lives of infantry soldiers during World War I, supplemented with some footage and photographs of their experiences. These pictures are mostly colorized, there was sound added to the film, and some lip readers were used to give re-enacted voices for the soldiers. If you didn't know they used voice actors, you genuinely couldn't tell. The documentary is ridiculously spot-on in this way. As I already stated, some of the footage is super gruesome, and there are numerous pieces of footage taken before entire units would have died. The film is also narrated by soldiers who took part in the war, but I'm not sure if any of the soldiers on camera had also provided audio commentary all those years ago. Jackson got his footage and narration from the Imperial War Museums, there was plenty of it. He said there was 100 hours of video footage and even more audio commentary (600 hours), the latter of which his team had to go through entirely in order to decide what video footage to include.

Choosing what to include had to be an extremely hard task, but Jackson's crew decided to visually restore all the footage they received, so in theory there could be more documentaries like this one. I do not know if they colorized all this footage though. I thought this wasn't the most interesting documentary in the world in part because this is subject matter routinely covered in books, but there are lots of important facts people may not have been aware of. This is, however, one of the most incredible documentaries ever made. World War I isn't something I had any real picture of in my brain other than black and white ones, but these pictures have been completely usurped by the ones in this film. I did also laugh at learning that part of the colorization process required Peter Jackson to reveal that he had a ton of World War I memorabilia. He never answered the question of why he had it, but that was something nice to learn as well.

They Shall Not Grow Old is an amazing technical achievement on every level, enough so that in many ways I'm lacking the words I need to describe it. Jackson wanted this to be an understanding of what it would be like to be a British soldier on the Western Front, and this succeeded in so many ways. There is numerous commentary one would laugh at, some that are absolutely horrifying, and the images on screen fit in both categories as well. There were so many dead bodies and faces of soldiers Jackson said went on to die in the immediate moments afterward that these images are going to be burned into my brain. I was thinking that this felt like a project Peter Jackson really wanted to make, regardless of whether or not there was any money in it for him and it turned out that there wasn't. I also think They Shall Not Grow Old is a film that needs to be viewed, so I decided not to say too much about the details and the order in which they occur. You can probably figure it out for yourself. I decided never to put documentaries in my lists, but if this had been eligible for awards it would have won a lot of them.

9/10

 

[909]

Black Panther (2018), directed by Ryan Coogler

With my viewing of Black Panther tonight, that concludes my time watching 2018's Best Picture nominations. I do not believe I will go back to revisit these anytime soon, so my opinion on this and those other films shall stand for a long time. I think with that in mind, that in something that is a little surprising to me, I found Black Panther to be a worthy Best Picture nominee. But it's Marvel capeshit? Yeah, it's capeshit of the best kind since Nolan's Batman movies, and the reason why is because Ryan Coogler is a director who knows the appeal of a Marvel film is in how a director can utilize their ensemble cast. Numerous directors have failed to accomplish something like this. This film is bold on so many levels and feels like something unique, something that could launch these films forward. Of course, the latter of those things is because the technology used by the characters in this film will launch the Marvel Cinematic Universe forward in allowing other characters to use those ideas. Whether or not they will is something that remains to be seen, but I think you'd have to be a goof to not have enjoyed this. Black Panther was a success in part because this is a formula we haven't seen before, executed better than almost every other way in which we've seen it.

Our film begins with a short origin story to Wakanda, with an explanation of the scenario that leads to one having Black Panther's superhuman abilities. I won't lean into the details because this is a film that requires far too much explanation for that. The point is, the things that happened when the meteor struck Africa led to tribes uniting to form the nation of Wakanda. Wakanda uses the vibranium from the meteor in order to develop advanced technology and hide themselves from the world. The film outside of this story starts in 1992, with Wakanda's king T'Chaka (John Kani) visiting his brother N'Jobu (Sterling K. Brown) in Oakland. N'Jobu is in Oakland on an operation, but T'Chaka accuses him of assisting arms dealer Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis) with stealing vibranium. It turns out this is true, and that N'Jobu has been spied upon. We move forward a little bit to T'Chaka's death, with T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) becoming the King of Wakanda. His first job prior to being crowned is for he and a special forces agent named Okoye (Danai Gurira) to extract his ex Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o for her to join T'Challa's family members at his coronation. Ramonda (Angela Bassett) serves as Wakanda's Queen Mother, and Shuri (Letitia Wright) is T'Challa's sister. Let's continue.

T'Challa is challenged for the throne by M'Baku (Winston Duke), leader of the one tribe that never unified when Wakanda was created. The rules are that one is allowed to do that and the throne is no certainty for anyone. Unsurprisingly, Black Panther wins and we continue on with our story. It turns out that Klaue now has an accomplice, a younger guy named Erik Stevens (Michael B. Jordan). Erik and Klaue had a plan to steal a Wakandan artifact from a museum, and what do you know, they pull it off. Of course, T'Challa finds out about this, and his friend W'Kabi (Daniel Kaaluya) wants him to bring Klaue back alive so they can kill him. Did I mention that W'Kabi and Okoye are lovers? I guess I did now. I should also mention that Zuri (Forest Whitaker) is T'Challa's uncle and had crowned him after the combat challenge, and that Erik...is really named N'Jadaka. He's also N'Jobu's son, and he has plans of his own. This man has been trained to make things happen. In addition, while our favorite Wakandans are off in Korea, there's the introduction of a CIA Agent, Everett Ross (Martin Freeman). Who knows what this guy's really up to, and I was hoping that the Red Hulk would make an appearance, but we aren't ready for that it seems.

I don't want to say a lot of the shit (very truthful shit, I should add) that people have already said about Black Panther, so my focus is going to be on Marvel's inability to create other films like this one. I should also add that this is one of the most reviewed films I've ever seen and so I think I should avoid the beaten path. Everyone knows I agree with the beaten path anyway. I don't understand how with their resources that they weren't able to woo directors like Taika Waititi and Ryan Coogler far sooner, instead using uninspiring Hollywood plug-and-shoot type directors that had no unique outlook on these properties. I think on some levels this policy was an incredible policy and that it shouldn't have taken so long for Marvel to create films on this level. It shouldn't have happened like that. I would also say that this film worked for me because the villain actually got to kill some characters who seemed like they were going to be important. Who would've thought? In addition, the visual effects were spectacular, and using an Asian city for a car chase was an inspired decision. The lighting factored into that decision, of course. The car chase was incredible, and while I'd seen a very short clip of part of it before, I wasn't expecting that.

The ideas used here were spectacular across the board, none moreso than the use of costumes and the atmosphere in Africa to create things like...WAR RHINOS! The goddamn war rhinos would have been my favorite thing in practically every other movie, but not this one. Winston Duke had a great performance as M'Baku, his was another that would have been my favorite part of practically every other movie. Not this one though. Instead, my favorite parts were the complete usage of the ensemble, of the ancestral plane, of Rachel Morrison's cinematography, and Ryan Coogler's vision to compose all of these things together. It's one thing after the next that created a project that went far beyond what anyone's expectations should have been. I am resistant to talking about things other people covered better than myself, but I thought this was a great example of presenting a futuristic city in a way that felt realistic and genuinely plausible. The people in that city kept their humanity, it was just that some of the things in that city changed. This was what I was hoping for.

When wrapping this up, now I should focus on a few of the actors. Obviously Michael B. Jordan has received a lot of credit, but I also think that to some extent his performance is a bit overblown considering what was out there last year. The role was far more crucial than his performance, it was perfectly written and no good actor would have messed it up. I also thought that it was nice to see Andy Serkis get an opportunity to act without having to wear a motion capture suit. His ability with those suits has led to him wearing them for pretty much the entirety of his career, and I don't know if that would suck or not. I think it would. Ultimately, this is a movie that feels fresh even though it really isn't, that introduces so many interesting characters in a ridiculously short period of time, and one that makes quite a few good political statements. That's more than I hoped for and I think this was one of the best films of 2018 in the end. Granted, I'm still not all the way caught up, but this should land in my top 15 no matter what.

9/10

2018 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Roma
2. A Star Is Born
3. First Reformed
4. The Favourite
5. Widows
6. First Man
7. BlacKkKlansman
8. Blindspotting
9. Black Panther
10. If Beale Street Could Talk
11. The Sisters Brothers
12. A Private War
13. Stan & Ollie
14. Green Book
15. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
16. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
17. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
18. On My Skin
19. Private Life
20. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
21. Mid90s
22. Eighth Grade
23. Sorry to Bother You
24. Vice
25. The Old Man & the Gun
26. Suspiria
27. Vox Lux
28. Boy Erased
29. Bad Times at the El Royale
30. The Other Side of the Wind
31. Searching
32. A Simple Favor
33. The Hate U Give
34. Bumblebee
35. Mary Poppins Returns
36. Creed II
37. Hold the Dark
38. The Land of Steady Habits
39. Halloween
40. Mary Queen of Scots
41. Aquaman
42. Outlaw King
43. Overlord
44. Ben Is Back
45. Monsters and Men
46. The Mule
47. On the Basis of Sex
48. Bohemian Rhapsody
49. White Boy Rick
50. Papillon
51. Game Night
52. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
53. Instant Family
54. Alpha
55. The Front Runner
56. The Predator
57. Apostle
58. The Angel
59. The Commuter
60. Beautiful Boy
61. The Nun
62. Operation Finale
63. The Equalizer 2
64. The Spy Who Dumped Me
65. Bird Box
66. 12 Strong
67. Venom
68. Skyscraper
69. The Meg
70. Assassination Nation
71. The Girl in the Spider's Web
72. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
73. 22 July
74. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
75. The Little Stranger
76. Tomb Raider
77. Night School
78. The 15:17 To Paris
79. Peppermint
80. Mile 22
81. The First Purge
82. Hunter Killer
83. Kin
84. Hell Fest
85. Proud Mary
86. Robin Hood
87. The Happytime Murders
88. Slender Man