In Which I Briefly Review Movies

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Monos, 2019, Alejandro Landes, 8/10 - I went from very bad to very good here. Monos is the story of a small squad of borderline child soldiers affiliated with an unnamed group that you're supposed to assume is FARC. They have a prisoner, an American they keep referring to as a doctor. Their commanding officer is a dwarf who is very tough on them, but he only comes around once every few days. He also brings the squad a milk cow they're supposed to keep watch of and keep safe. They do not. That's all I have to say about this. I thought this was a great film. The way everything ends with a kidnapper suddenly being on a government helicopter surrounded by soldiers who may or may not deal with them is an interesting juxtaposition. It was not that uncommon for Colombian government forces to throw FARC guerrillas out of helicopters after capturing them. The plot here is great but this is also very well filmed. I can see why someone would think this is exploitation of a real problem (child soldiers), but I don't agree. The actors do a great job bringing their characters to life and the director is smart not to focus on the captured Doctora too much.

There are also things that aren't germane to the plot that I'm wondering about as well. Like for example how someone transported concrete for that bunker to what has to be an over 10,000 foot high mountain. The bunker was also quite old. The Andes always interest me though. Unlike in Europe, people had to build their shit in very high mountains. It's fascinating.

 

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Uncharted, 2022, Ruben Fleischer, 5/10 - I think this is a fair rating and not too harsh, I also don't think I'm being generous. This is a dead standard Hollywood action movie here. It's not too funny, but it is kind of funny. The action sequences are ridiculous but not quite at Fast level. Mark Wahlberg plays someone of bad character instead of being cast as a good guy, but Boston is shoehorned into the movie likely as a result of that. The issues I'm having here are fairly numerous. The games are better than this movie, the movie is heavily reliant on the games to make you care and uses them as substitutes for character depth. Clearly that's a problem. Uncharted is also clearly damaged by COVID in that green screens take the place of real filming locations in far too many cases. You can notice it if you're paying any decent amount of attention. There are some positives. The two villains are good. There aren't enough Indiana Jones ripoff movies. Sophia Ali is good. That's about it though, but this wasn't terrible and that's why I landed on a 5.

 

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No Exit, 2022, Damien Power, 5/10 - I think this is fair as well given the movie has bright spots to go with its numerous flaws. As far as flaws go, the most glaring one is that this is all too predictable. What is "this?" It's something like The Hateful Eight. A recovering addict needs to break out of rehab because her mom is dying. Problem is, there's a snow storm on her route and she has to stop for the night. At the rest stop, there's four people already there. One of them is the Allstate Guy. Everyone looks about how you'd expect and acts the way you'd expect, so this is all really predictable and it isn't surprising. As indicated in the picture above, someone is keeping a kidnapped child in their van. How do you find out who's doing it, how do you tell the others, what will they do when they're busted, etc. There's some gore here and I thought Dennis Haysbert was great in this role, that's about the extent of what this has going for it. No Exit is a middle of the road kind of movie that you'd watch on an airplane.

 

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6 Underground, 2019, Michael Bay, 4/10 - This was on my list for a while, but I haven't watched any of Bay's movies in a long time and I wasn't sure I wanted to. A person needs to be in a certain kind of mood for that, so last night was the night. It's bad. It's really bad but this isn't on the level of some of Bay's others that make you feel bad for watching them. The bad jokes are toned way down even though they still suck. I also think I hate Ryan Reynolds. Actually, I know I hate him, and this script doesn't do anyone any favors. There are good scenes here though. The stuff in Hong Kong is good even though Bay drags it out too long in his typical fashion. The gore here is hilarious. The yacht magnet shit is funny. As for the rest, it's all too far over the top and the politics of the movie are fucking backwards. This is supposed to be taking place in a Central Asian country where they celebrate Day of the Dead and call the villain El Presidente. Lol. So, you can see where I'm coming from here. It's a Michael Bay movie and whatever you think that is, 6 Underground is exactly that. The way this fucking guy (the hero) faked his death and abandoned his wife and son is classic too.

Laughed a lot.

 

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In Fabric, 2019, Peter Strickland, 8/10 - The fuck did I even watch? This is a great film first of all. Second of all I hate copying from what other people have written, but this movie really is a lot like Suspiria, down to the red. Yes, just like Suspiria, a lot of this shit doesn't make sense and there's no logic to it, but there's nothing wrong with that. I should do some explaining. This movie is about a cursed dress. Someone buys it, their mundane life gets some spice added to it, but again the dress is cursed. The store she bought it at is weird. It's like some hypnotism shit. The guy who owns the store (?) jerks off while blood flows out of mannequins, the workers seem like occultists or something and I'm not sure if they are, the movie doesn't answer any of this shit for you though. It's not even on the level of having to figure it out yourself. That's just how things are, period. The score is great, the cinematography is great, but there is a lull in the second half of the film and noticeably so. In Fabric is also hard not to laugh at, but in certain spaces that's what the director was going for. Fun movie.

 

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Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 2022, David Blue Garcia, 3.5/10 - This was almost one of the worst movies I've seen in a long time, but it is saved somewhat by its ending. Regardless, the movie is too glossy and too clean. As a result the copious amount of gore here looks stupid and the story doesn't do the action any favors. The story, by the way, introduces a lot of things like gentrification without actually making a commentary on them. It's tiresome. This TCM also feels like it could be just any other horror movie that's been made. You throw some people in there and this guy chases them around, he kills them, they think they kill him or whatever happened, etc. The gore that I already mentioned doesn't do enough to make up for any of these deficiencies.

 

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The Last Thing He Wanted, 2020, Dee Rees, 2/10 - I don't often give ratings this low, particularly for dramas. Problem here is that this is a movie that you can hardly call one. To say this is a big narrative fuckup would be a huge understatement. I don't know if it's fucked up because of the book this is adapted from, or because nobody knew how to write a movie, or because in the editing room it was clear there was no other way to put this all together, but I don't know. There is no amount of reviewing that I can do to make any of this make sense. There are characters you see in the first half who become prominent out of nowhere in the second, the third act is indescribable, the ending is frustrating. I gotta watch something more interesting tonight, but I will say that I was engaged the whole time because I had to try to understand what it is that I was seeing. Not sure how a piece of shit like this got funded and made.

 

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Charm City Kings, 2020, Angel Manuel Soto, 7/10 - Yes I am going to go back to 2019 but I'm just trying to get through this list any way possible right now. This is an interesting take on a coming of age movie even though the ending is a little goofy. Mouse (Jahi Di'Allo Winston) is a teenager in Baltimore. He's interested in inner city dirtbiking, but his older brother died while doing so. His single mother (Teyonah Parris) forbids his participation in the activity, but Mouse's friends are into it too, and he's going to do it anyway because that's what kids do. It's also the summer, so everyone in his neighborhood is doing it and that's who Mouse identifies with most. While getting into this activity, he meets Blax (Meek Mill), street bike legend in the area. Blax wants some help working on bikes to keep Mouse out of the street. It goes....how it goes and saying anything more would ruin the movie. I think a large reason this all comes together for me is that the older characters don't have all the answers for what kids should be doing. Meek Mill is great here, the director does a great job of bringing Baltimore to life without this feeling like a continuation of The Wire............but at the same time, if you say you weren't thinking of Season 4 while you were watching this, then I dunno what's wrong with you.

 

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Earthquake Bird, 2019, Wash Westmoreland, 5/10 - This movie has a lot of ingredients to be better than it is, but it just isn't worthwhile. That's the short version of this review. Lucy (Alicia Vikander) is an ex-pat living in Tokyo, working as a translator. When the movie starts, it is in the aftermath of a disappearance of her friend, Lily (Riley Keough). We are then taken to the past, where Lucy meets her future boyfriend Teiji (Naoki Kobayashi), she subsequently meets Lily, Lily and Teiji meet each other, and this turns into a love triangle. Other than the rather copious amounts of nudity this is just not that interesting, and this movie features two actresses who have been nude a lot in their careers, I am fine with that. Earthquake Bird is a thriller without any suspense or thrills. I also need to get this out there, movies featuring gaijin are not that interesting unless there's a lot of killing in them. But even then, it's hit or miss. I liked The Last Samurai but I hated The Outsider. Gaijin going to Japan and doing bad stuff is not a subgenre with a great track record even though it should be one.

As far as positives besides the nudity, I also like the touch of Lucy not wanting her picture taken by her photographer boyfriend, so that dude is gonna go get his rocks off somewhere else, with someone who does let him take pictures. That is very realistic in fact. It's too bad that this movie just isn't engaging enough, because the setting, cinematography, and score all feel right.

 

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The Nightingale, 2019, Jennifer Kent, 8.5/10 - Had to sit on this one for a few days. This is a very brutal movie, it presents harsh realities some people don't want to watch. And that's alright. I will say this before I start though, I think this is a scene or two too long. When a movie is a little too long and it puts the viewer through a portrayal of hell on earth, it can be rough. The full scope of the evils of colonialism are brought to play here. Of course, this is about the British Empire. Clare (Aisling Franciosi) is an Irish convict brought to Tasmania for punishment. She's forced to work as a servant for a Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin), a brute who rapes her not long after we're introduced to him. It is later made clear that he does this all the time. Rape is not uncommon in situations where power is imbalanced to this extent and this isn't the only time we see this loser rape someone. Now with that in mind, apparently a lot of people stopped watching this movie after the first or second rape and I bet during the third too. There's worse in here than just raping, but this is a story about Clare getting revenge on Hawkins.

As I said, this is rough. It's rough enough that I was having a hard time writing this all down. I don't judge anyone who didn't think this was a good film and I don't judge anyone who couldn't make it through. The scenes early in the film and with the Aboriginal woman are so far, and I mean they're so fucking far towards brutally depicting how these events actually turn out. It's very disconcerting but there's violence beyond just that, and it keeps going and going. It keeps going much like genocides do. I don't know what the fuck else you'd call it. The ease with which people could discard with Aboriginals and "convicts" is horrifying. You know what though? We don't address colonialism enough. It's not convenient, it doesn't make money, but sometimes works like these need to exist so that people understand. I wanted Clare and/or Billy (Baykali Ganambarr) to kill this fucking guy so bad, and the movie being too long in the finale dragged that out. Like I said, there's a few scenes that don't serve the plot well.

 

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The High Note, 2020, Nisha Ganatra, 5.5/10 - I wanted this to be good because it feels like a variation of Tracee Ellis Ross playing her mom, but this just is not that. The story here is that Maggie (Dakota Johnson) is Grace's (Tracee Ellis Ross) assistant. Grace is an international pop star of great renown, Maggie has to try to keep everything straight even though sometimes Grace treats her like complete shit. Grace's manager Jack (Ice Cube) also treats her like shit, and to me this doesn't seem like a very fun job. In fact I think the director may have gotten the intended tone wrong. They are so mean to Maggie throughout the movie that their treatment of her is what stuck with me more than anything else. Anyway, one day while at the grocery store, she meets this guy named David (Kelvin Harrison Jr.). David can sing. Maggie has been wanting to produce one of Grace's songs and this guy David is more than willing to let her do it, so things go well in that regard while Maggie continues to get treated like shit at work.

This movie is bland. I wanted to like it but I just couldn't get there. At the same time I can't say that it's bad because their treatment of Maggie is interesting and keeps things from tilting too far towards boring. The lesson here is also that the romantic aspect should have been dropped in favor of more interaction between Johnson and Ross. Also, that ending....hoo boy.

 

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Against the Ice, 2022, Peter Flinth, 5.5/10 - I hate giving movies the same rating one after the other, but I have to in this case. This movie is really bland and I gave it the extra .5 because I liked the subject matter. Set in 1909, Captain Ejnar Mikkelsen (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is sent on an expedition to Greenland to recover records from a Greenland survey that didn't end well for those doing the surveying. The first attempt doesn't go that well for Ejnar either and his second has to have his toes removed. But he's going to go out again and he needs a volunteer, and there's only one, a ship engineer named Iver Iversen (Joe Cole). I'm not one to post spoilers but they wind up being out there for an extremely long time. Anyway, this is a Netflix movie and in typical Netflix fashion of dealing with historical events, this is bland and formulaic just as I said. You can't even bring something extra to a movie where two guys freeze to death and go crazy?

 

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I'm not gonna be able to see The Batman until Sunday because of how long it is. Prior to that I was sick so...run of bad luck for me. Anyway

The Outfit, 2022, Graham Moore, 7/10 - It seems like less and less gangster movies get released, but the ones that do really suck. For once this is not the case. Leonard (Mark Rylance) is a suit maker who has moved from London to Chicago for reasons that aren't clear whatsoever. He's been in Chicago for a long time, he enjoys his job greatly it seems. His secretary Mable (Zoey Deutsch) really wants to get out of Chicago though. Every day, these two guys named Richie (Dylan O'Brien) and Francis (Johnny Flynn) come in and rifle through a drop box set up in Leonard's back room. They're obviously mobbed up, but that's something that comes up later. That's about all you need to know. This is a pretty good movie, the ending is a little flawed, but if you pay attention to what you're watching everything makes sense later on. I also dig one of the red herrings put in here. Of course, this movie is also well cast, there's not anyone more equipped to play a silent lead character than Mark Rylance, and he does a great job with the role.

That being said this is also one of those movies you can tell was filmed during the pandemic, so if that bothers you I dunno. Lots of great twists and turns here though.

 

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The Wandering Earth, 2019, Frant Gwo, 4.5/10 - I had a joke loaded up beforehand about how this was Chinese propaganda, but really it isn't so I can't make that joke anymore. It's not Chinese propaganda by my standard anyway. Set in the near future, the Sun is set to expand and explode. It's time for the Earth to get the fuck out of the Solar System because what else are we gonna do? Upon approach to Jupiter, things start to go wrong. I've been deliberately vague for my own amusement, but this movie is fine up to a point and then things go way off the rails. I like the concept. The CGI is way overboard and the director's use of distance between locations is wrong to put it nicely. You can't drive from Shanghai to Indonesia in a few hours, frozen sea or not. Regardless, the world building here is very solid and very interesting. I can't deny that nor would I want to. There are actually few movies that present such an interesting picture of our future world, but ultimately it's wasted and I found myself laughing at the ending for the wrong reasons.

 

[cobainwasmurdered]

I remember watching it part way through and dropping it but I can't remember why. Might have been the bad CGI or plotting. The central idea is fun though.

 

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I remember watching it part way through and dropping it but I can't remember why. Might have been the bad CGI or plotting. The central idea is fun though.

Once you get to the part pictured, it's probably better to drop it. I liked it until then.

 

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Luce, 2019, Julius Onah, 8.5/10 - Alright, now this is a good one even though there's a few bits of acting that I didn't think were very believable. Looking at Tim Roth's accent specifically. With that out of the way, this is a movie more people need to watch. Luce is the story of Luce (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a former child soldier from Eritrea. Luce was brought here by his adoptive parents, Amy (Naomi Watts) and Edgar (Tim Roth). They love him and all that like people should do, and the movie is kind of about that, but I gotta stop going down that road. Luce has a teacher he absolutely detests, Ms. Wilson (Octavia Spencer). You see, Luce is in a position where everyone tries to put him in a box. He's the former child soldier guy. That's what he's always going to be and because of that, you can't get out of that box. Ms. Wilson narcs on other students though and Luce doesn't like that shit. Eventually she tries to narc on him and it may or may not even be true. I honestly have no fuckin idea.

Not having an idea because you know all the characters involved are capable of lying or pulling some bullshit, that's the kind of shit I'm talking about. I love that kind of thing. How could you actually know? Luce is the kind of film audiences hate because they aren't given all the answers, but it's the kind of film that filmmakers want to make and too often can't get away with making. And there's also other points here. What would you do for the family you've chosen? How wrong is it to do some of the things Luce did here? Did he even do them? Was it his girlfriend? Some of the worst things here I assume he was incapable of doing and just can't see how it was possible, but the filmmaker does a fantastic job adding little touches that make you think it could have happened. Like, for example, Luce entering class late before Ms. Wilson's sister goes fucking nuts in the lobby. Could he have brought her there? I don't think so because I feel like the sister would have said something, but you know, you really don't know. The ending's great and I took it the opposite of most people it seems. What if that sexual assault wasn't even fucking real? That's also not an angry face, that's one of a scared kid who knows they got themselves into shit trying to fuck over the person who ruined one or two of their friends lives. They're scared cause they fucked with their own life and nearly ruined what was created for them when they left a fucked up country. But that's just what I think.

One unintended consequence here is that the movie wasn't popular enough for anyone involved in the making of it to come out and explain themselves, so you'll never know. I like that. Fuckin hell dude I don't even know what I think right now. All I know for sure is that Kelvin Harrison is a great actor. This is one of the all time mindfucks. At least people can figure out a lot of the other ones. I rushed here to write this instead of waiting until the morning, that speaks volumes.

 

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X, 2022, Ti West, 8/10 - I usually don't give horror movies ratings this high, so I think it does mean something that I did so. Everything about this is great. One guy wants to make an artistic porn movie and they head out into the Texas country to do so. It's foolish to say anything else because you don't need to know what's going on and it's better not to know. I loved almost everything about this, but there is a sex scene that I really did not want to see at all and everyone in the theater started joking about it. In fact my showing was enhanced by the people in my theater because people kept making jokes and all of them were funny. This is a naturally funny movie with a lot of gore. This also has tension, it's mostly what I want from a horror movie. Brittany Snow is great here too.

 

[Brocklock]

Luce is one of the best underrated gems in recent years. It's a hell of a movie.

 

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The King, 2019, David Michod, 6.5/10 - I came expecting battles and I got one battle. It's cool though. This movie is really slow and I bet there's a lot of people that feel really strongly about this movie one way or the other. I'm not one of those people. I have a very hard time buying Timothee Chalamet in this role. The film is also extremely historically inaccurate. On the other hand I easily buy Robert Pattinson in this role and I think he and everyone else do a great job in their parts. I realize that I'm piling on the negatives, but I'll stop now. I loved the combat here. It was raw, it was what I hope for in these kinds of movies, and it isn't sanitized. It's two groups of people forced to plunge metal into each other. While slow, I didn't find this boring. There's also good commentary here on how pointless these medieval wars were. Almost all war is pointless, but this isn't a movie about all war. It's about the stupidity and folly of killing people because it's some shit your dad would have done and someone wants you to do it because it's a job left unfinished when your dad dies. It's fucked up.

 

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Skin, 2019, Guy Nattiv, 5.5/10 - I tried to give this movie a fair shake, but this portrayal of white supremacy leans too far into showcasing rather than condemning the end result of such actions. I can't explain the difference because I'm not that smart. But I think you know it when you see it. The guys who do all that bad shit merely going to jail, that isn't enough of a penance for the actions in this film. This is inspired by real events, by conversions of former racists, but I just don't have sympathy for those kinds of people. I see the value in converting them but I don't see them in a different light just because they converted away from past horrible actions. It's not just words in this case, it's actions. Lots of them. The redeeming factor here is that they show how extreme racists are indoctrinated into that kind of organized lifestyle. The movie has to have some kind of value, otherwise it's just grief porn. Anyway, not the biggest fan.

 

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French, subtitles

Les Miserables, 2019, Ladj Ly, 8/10 - As I believe I've mentioned, and in case I haven't, I'm going through 2019 movies that either were or could have been nominated for awards. Maybe some of them should have been, there are some stinkers in there too, but I just want to set the expectation of what I'm watching. Anyway, this is not a Les Miserables adaptation despite the title, and this is also a movie that would have been an absolute classic were it ten or twenty minutes longer. This movie is great. Les Miserables is set in a Parisian suburb that has a lot of problems. We start with the 2018 World Cup win that was supposed to unify the country, except that's never what happens. Reality sets in fast. Throughout this film, we follow two groups. One of them is an anti-crime police squad (imagine what that entails) and a group largely consisting of French West African boys who either emigrated to France themselves or their parents did. Considering the extremely delicate balance of life in these kinds of Parisian suburbs, you might be able to see where this is coming from my short description. A musical this is also not. The short of it is that a boy stole a lion cub from a gypsy circus. Things spiral way the fuck out of control from there.

As for the movie, and why I liked it a lot, it's because the kids are easy to identify with as they're being fucked with for no reason in some cases. It's a Wire Season 4 scenario. The three police officers are also varying degrees of fucked up. I think sometimes people want movies like this one to do too much, and when they watch it they get frustrated because the film doesn't address x problem, but I think this movie really feels like a slice of life. Cops are a little cliche, but that's what cops are. Even though I said Les Miserables should be longer, that doesn't mean that I wasn't on the edge of my seat during the ending. I'm left to wonder if there's any way that all of this actually ends though. It's like time is a flat circle. We just keep repeating the same stuff over and over again.

 

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The Last Black Man in San Francisco, 2019, Joe Talbot, 7.5/10 - Okay so I am having a genuinely hard time figuring out why I should score this differently than the last movie I watched, but as I typed this out I realized one thing separates it. There are a few similar themes here in fact. One is the continuation of the cycle. Our housing policy does not work. We have lost our way. You can figure this out quite easily just by heading to San Francisco for a week or so. San Francisco is a great city that has decided the people who grew up there are not residents worth retaining. Like much everywhere else, this is a city that has decided property value is more important than people. The store here is that Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) grew up in a house in the Fillmore District. This is now a rich area because of the reasons I have stated above. Jimmie and his best friend Mont (Jonathan Majors) spend time wandering around, and in Jimmie's case he is fixated on this house that no longer belongs to his family. It hasn't belonged to his family for some time. One day, the couple living in this house has to jet because of family problems. What do Jimmie and Mont decide to do? Well, they're going to squat in this house. Over the course of these events, Jimmie's family situation and Mont's eccentricity comes to the forefront of the film.

I left out some shit deliberately, but even though there's pointed commentary on gentrification and the racism inherent within that, this film is also really nice. It feels like an indie movie from the early 00s. The point of the movie is still that it's hard to love something that doesn't want you. Like Jimmie says later in the film, you have to loved something to be able to say that you hate it. So with that being the case is it alright to say that I hated the ending? I don't like seeing Jimmie finish things by himself when it seemed the moral of this story was the exact opposite. The third act took a turn away from what I liked about the rest of the film. We moved away from the movie having a certain mood to a situation where characters are hit with a dose of reality. I appreciate that this wasn't a movie that featured any real grit, the third act does turn us towards that, but fortunately the screenplay doesn't go all the way there. This isn't me saying this isn't a great movie, but I think 2019 had so many great movies to the point where I feel like I have to score things differently and wish I'd done that from the start. I also still haven't seen a decent amount of the heavy hitters from 2019.

 

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The Contractor, 2022, Tarik Saleh, 4.5/10 - I really wanted to like this because this is absolutely not what you think it's supposed to be. Unless I'm an idiot I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be a critique of private military bullshit like this. The twists and turns here don't really matter, but I thought this was a surprising turn from what I had expected. A short summary of the plot is that Chris Pine's character is discharged from the military after steroid use in order to recover from an injury. Against his own wishes, he has to become a private military contractor. He goes to Berlin and their mission isn't what he thought it would be at all, it's bad. Unfortunately so is the ending and the movie makes way too many twists and turns that it didn't really need. I also find it interesting how much the director was willing to beat around the bush before sending the lead to Berlin. This is a LONG buildup. It's too long. The movie isn't even long, but still, the build is too long. Unfortunately, the critique of private military also subsides as the events play out, leaving us with a very mediocre film.

 

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News of the World, 2020, Paul Greengrass, 6.5/10 - I also wanted to like this because it's a Western and there aren't too many of them anymore. I did like this but I find it really weird there are people who said this was a great film. It was good, but only superficially so. And really, that's it. The movie is about a guy who travels Texas reading the news to other people. Not fake news but REAL NEWS and maybe you can see why people were going nuts over all this. Maybe people loved it because not all that much came out in 2020. I don't really know. I thought this didn't have emotional weight but for some, Tom Hanks being in a movie provides all of that for them and they're good. There's also only one shootout in the movie and it's really generic. What this does have is interesting subject material. Guy takes girl who can't speak English where they both need to get to. It's hard, arduous, and this makes for good entertainment. But that's all it is. There's no probing of any subject that matters, which is fine, but this could have been better.

 

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Morbius, 2022, Daniel Espinosa, 3/10 - This is a horrendous movie lol. I could just leave this review at that, but I feel like I need to elaborate a little bit. The Morbius character here is not rounded out in any way at all. Most of the movie is about whether he should go full vampire or not...but this is all really stupid and in the end he decides to do so long before he exhausted his supply of artificial blood. There are also enormous logic gaps about why this dude has a bat aquarium in his lab or how he could have gotten it into the small helicopter he arrived in Costa Rica with, but at some point I realized I just don't care. The third act also gets shoved into about a 5-6 minute sequence that fortunately ends really quickly. I was already way bored by this point and on the verge of falling asleep, I was also having left leg spasms which usually only happens when I'm in a recliner and I'm bored (i.e. at a bad movie). This is the kind of movie that makes me wish the blockbuster bubble would bust so that movies like this get axed prior to production. I guess the best way to sum things up is that I thought this was worse than the two mid90s Batman movies.

 

[RedJed]

I pretty much feel you on this one, I saw Morbius last week and it was so bad that I didn't really even know where to start. The post-credits scenes were kinda significant maybe on a certain level if this Morbius character will continue on in other films (highly doubtful) but otherwise, what a big cherry on top of the shit sundae with those scenes after the credits.

This was a huge abomination of a mess, and it was no shock this kept getting delayed and moved to a different date, etc.

 

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The Souvenir, 2019, Joanna Hogg, 7/10 - Like I said I need to scale things better, but I also think this is kind of an overrated film. It's a film about someone who becomes a filmmaker, it's about toxicity in relationships, so it isn't too surprising that this got extremely high ratings. My issue is that this is one of the slowest films I've ever seen. It's still good, but something this slow really tries my patience. This is a story personal to the filmmaker and I believe you can easily assume all these things actually happened. Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is a young filmmaker who has moved to London and wants to make a first film different to their own experience in life. She meets Anthony (Tom Burke), who claims to work in the Foreign Office. May or may not be true because we're never given any real proof. This guy is presumably charming but he's bad news all the way down. And that becomes clear the longer the film goes. My feeling of the film is different to critics. They think this is a masterpiece, I merely think it's good. Maybe it's because I've never had to be strengthened by a toxic relationship. I don't know. This movie is fucked up though, make no mistake about that. Anthony is an all-time scum.

 

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I Am Mother, 2019, Grant Sputore, 6/10 - This is more on the good side of average than the bad side, but I did appreciate how quickly they revealed the main mystery here. If you weren't paying attention you wouldn't have noticed it. If you were, you would have known what was going on ten minutes in. I do think that a lot of the reveals towards the end come too quickly and have less of an impact, but this is someone making their first film and that's about what we should expect. The story here is that there was an extinction event. In a facility underground, a robot was given the task of maintaining humanity somehow. There are 65,000 embryos down there, but the robot first needs to learn how to properly take care of a child before using more than one at a time. One day, a woman from the outside knocks on the facility door and the facade comes tumbling down.

There's an interesting wrinkle on AI here in that this one is in control the entire time, which is a rarity in things that I've seen. The AI is not under threat from humans even if the characters think that they are. I also found it interesting that the AI destroyed the world in order to make a more peaceful world for humans, and I don't really know what I think of that shit. This isn't the best thing ever and it isn't terrible either, so you decide if it's worth your time to watch it or not.

 

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Promising Young Woman, 2020, Emerald Fennell, 8/10 - Honestly, the way this started I wasn't sure if I was going to wind up liking the movie. Of course it turned out that I did. The start here felt like something that was trying really hard to be funny and awkward, and maybe the first sequence went too much in that direction. Cassie (Carey Mulligan) is a college dropout who goes to bars, pretends to be drunk, and 'wakes up' before anyone can sleep with her so that they can teach her a lesson. This is a pretty dangerous thing to do but it worked out so far, and it seems to scare guys shitless into not doing that anymore, so why not? Anyway, this is her life. She does this because her friend was raped. The rapist is getting married, and this spurs Cassie into further action. The third act kicks the film into a higher gear, and the rest is merely just a really good film I would say. This third act though, can't say I was expecting that even though I already commented on how risky this kind of activity was. Laughed really hard at the end. It doesn't hurt the film that some of these scenarios get more and more crazy while somehow not feeling entirely contrived. That's because of a good script and a great performance by Carey Mulligan. This is the first time in a while that I watched a movie that won an Oscar, after said Oscar. I watched Judy in very early February but prior to that, the last one was...I, Tonya. That was about two years ago.