In Which I Briefly Review Movies

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Bodies Bodies Bodies, 2022, Halina Reijn, 7/10 - Bodies Bodies Bodies is a movie that really heavily relies on the performances of its actors, and either you thought they were good performances or you didn't and you didn't like the movie. It's kinda that simple. The movie is set during a hurricane party where everyone decided the best thing to do during said hurricane was lock themselves in a big house and do a lot of drugs. Most of these people are younger girls as shown above, but there's two guys there and a third who freaked out and ran away the night before. Anyway, one of them winds up dead after a lot of tension both sexual and physical, and that's when shit begins to go down. I would also say this is when I started laughing. A lot of the lines here are really on point and appropriately deal with the way a certain group of younger people have decided to treat the world. The huge house also helps to create that tension and it feels realistic all along that someone they don't know could be hiding in the house waiting to kill all of them for the fun of it. Anyways, Rachel Sennott is really funny and her scenes steal the movie.

 

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The Outpost, 2020, Rod Lurie, 7/10 - Okay so based on this picture I chose, anyone who doesn't know what this movie is, will immediately think this is a pro or anti-war movie. But what if it's neither? What if they're just telling the story of an outpost that shouldn't have ever been built? For some reason during the Afghan War, our military decided to build an outpost at the bottom of an extremely deep valley surrounded by mountains on all sides. It goes without saying that such an outpost was a major target for the Taliban. If you'd like to read more, the outpost was called PRT Kamdesh. Eventually the Taliban decided to attack en masse and the fight was on. This movie covers the ennui leading to this fight and the fight itself. Apparently the story as told here could be classified as being extremely accurate despite liberal use of time compression. The outpost supposedly looked exactly the same, so did the attack, the medical treatment room, etc. I think it would have been better timed for me to watch this movie immediately after the Afghanistan withdrawal, but the point remains the same. We shouldn't have been there so long. People in charge did a lot of things that got American soldiers killed, the Taliban are/were scum, and man, I don't understand why anyone would build an outpost in this spot. I don't know why anyone thought we could change this country.

 

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Day Shift, 2022, JJ Perry, 5.5/10 - I was feeling like this was a good 80s throwback until there were about 30 minutes left in the movie and things started to go to shit. I know Jamie Foxx can act so it was funny seeing him put in an absolute minimum effort during these family drama scenes. Day Shift is a story about a vampire hunter (Jamie Foxx). He kills the wrong bitch, they wanna kill him. There's stuff here that really works, like the two Armenian guys who act like the Terminator. It's way over the top in a good way. The Snoop Dogg segments work to a point and then they really don't but it seems like nobody involved was capable of realizing the character had limitations. The movie also starts off well with Jamie killing some old lady, but then the rules of the movie start to get more involved, and it makes everything worse when that happens. More vampire killing scenes may have shoved that to the side but there weren't enough of them.

 

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The Empty Man, 2020, David Prior, 7/10 - My initial reaction here was that I was surprised more people haven't seen this? This ticks all the right notes of a cult classic. Feels like a 90s movie because it's really long and not cheap feeling, and obviously there's not much hope for making money here so I was surprised someone was given those resources for this movie anyway. This movie isn't scary but it has a certain feel that I can't describe, and again, notes of a cult classic. I really dug how slowly everything was drawn out, and the opening set in Bhutan was pretty great too. There are questions I have but I don't have answers. One is that it seemed like Nora had pictures of Paul in her house? The ending here is really good too, but there are some scenes leading to it that probably needed a little more work. Regardless I very much appreciated this movie and felt like there was a real commitment to the process.

 

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Not Okay, 2022, Quinn Shephard, 5.5/10 - Not Okay is a movie fitting for the time but ultimately not funny enough and perhaps overdone as well. Danni (Zoey Deutsch) is a wannabe influencer who decides to take her bullshit up to another level. She thinks that faking a trip to Paris will help her get some attention, then it turns out there's a bombing while she's supposed to be there (but she's really shacked up in her apartment). So what does she do? Well, Danni decides that she should pretend that she was there for the bombing. Inevitably this spirals out of control and someone catches on as you'd expect. This is an anti-social media in an era where we already know all of this stuff and see it play out in reality every couple weeks or so. It's also more entertaining in reality. The filmmaking itself is also quite ordinary and we aren't reinventing the wheel over here.

 

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Horse Girl, 2020, Jeff Baena, 7.5/10 - Dude I was gonna write a longer review, but I wanted people to know that I watched this and that it landed way too close to home.

 

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Barbarian, 2022, Zach Cregger, 8/10 - It's better not to spoil this because I didn't remember anything about the trailer when I went in the room to see this. Perhaps as a result this was scary as shit and full of great jump scares. There's some big twists and turns here that I don't recall seeing in a good horror movie for quite some time. The horror movies I've liked recently don't really have those! Basically there's a lot of great shit here and not a whole lot of downside. I have some questions that hopefully are not answered by a sequel or prequel. We don't need it, I subscribe to that David Chase theory that the audience doesn't need to know everything that's going on during a piece of television or a movie, that's my deal. Again, we don't need more material related to this. Shit's wild.

 

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Unhinged, 2020, Derrick Borte, 4.5/10 - I don't know who got Russell Crowe to do this movie, but I have to admit that I found parts of this to be really funny. There's nothing breaking the mold here and everything's cliched, but Crowe was grotesquely overweight here and the little character intricacy of having him pop pills cracked me up. Unfortunately there's only so many directions you can take a character like this one. I mean, you expect that he's going to try to kill everyone but he's not going to do it differently each time because he isn't physically capable of doing it. Other problem here is that Rachel (Caren Pistorius) is annoying and has basically no concept of how to get through life, so every scheme she comes up with is more and more stupid. They're all pretty fun to watch though. So yeah, take this for what it is. It's garbage but it isn't boring.

 

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I'm No Longer Here, 2020, Fernando Frias de la Parra, 7/10 - This movie was nominated by Mexico as its submission for the Oscar foreign film category, and with good reason. This is a strong movie that made me feel stuff. I can't say I know what it's like to be the lead character but I understand how people like him think because I grew up around a lot of people like him. Ulises is a guy who dances to cumbia in Monterrey, he has a little gang that he's the leader of, but he has to leave Mexico. You can probably figure out why but it's better to not know all the details. Problem is, his new life in America is terrible and he doesn't want to be there, but he's stuck. This movie is both about how he got to NYC and how he had to live there. It's sad. There's things that we need to think about, that we need to be considerate of others with different experiences and learn more about people who we don't know. Anyways if you have a shitty life this is a very sobering film.

 

[Brooklyn Zoo]

I'm No Longer Here, 2020, Fernando Frias de la Parra, 7/10 - This movie was nominated by Mexico as its submission for the Oscar foreign film category, and with good reason. This is a strong movie that made me feel stuff. I can't say I know what it's like to be the lead character but I understand how people like him think because I grew up around a lot of people like him. Ulises is a guy who dances to cumbia in Monterrey, he has a little gang that he's the leader of, but he has to leave Mexico. You can probably figure out why but it's better to not know all the details. Problem is, his new life in America is terrible and he doesn't want to be there, but he's stuck. This movie is both about how he got to NYC and how he had to live there. It's sad. There's things that we need to think about, that we need to be considerate of others with different experiences and learn more about people who we don't know. Anyways if you have a shitty life this is a very sobering film.

I basically live in that area of Queens he went to. Few avs and streets away.

 

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Prey, 2022, Dan Trachtenberg, 7/10 - This movie is hurt by the circumstances in which people have to watch it. Prey is not a movie fit for home entertainment. That's really all I can think about while trying to write about this. My review is really late, so I can say the basics like this movie has great action, it's gory in the right way, but I don't really want to say the basics. Instead I would like to point out that once again fans of an older movie franchise kinda got screwed over because studios didn't really believe in the project they were making. I mean, at least we got this but it isn't like we got it in the best way it could have been. I also liked that they dialed things way back to a different stage of development on our continent. There's a lot of potential for the concept but it still has to be done right. For one thing if you're going to showcase the Comanche you have to showcase them as competent warriors and the Predator should have a harder time killing them. That's what happened! I also appreciate that this movie wasn't too long, that there were some things left in doubt (in some ways I was thinking another one might show up), and the technology the Predator had wasn't all the way evolved.

 

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Pearl, 2022, Ti West, 7.5/10 - Not often that I can find the most disturbing shot from the film and plug it in here, but there ya go. There are some people who liked this more than X, some who liked it a whole lot less, I'm in the camp who thinks it's slightly lesser than the previous film. Make no mistake though this is still really good. Of course this is the story of how the sex crazed old lady from X grew up and came to be this way. This isn't scary or some shit though, this bitch is just nuts. The film is also strangely set during the time of Spanish Flu, which of course evocates memories of two years ago, a time many people would say was the worst of their entire life. I do think this movie feels something like Wizard of Oz, if Dorothy's family was all fucked up and shit this is what it would be like. I would really like to know how her husband ignored all this shit when he eventually came home from WW1, but it seems those are answers that we're not going to get. Mia Goth is great here too, as is the direction itself, everything here doesn't necessarily fit into a Golden Age movie yet the way this is filmed makes it sure feel like one.

 

[RedJed]

Pearl was written within a two week quarantine for Mia Goth and Ti West, who wrote it together essentially in isolation. It's no shock, knowing that, how they incorporated many concepts and idea from the covid pandemic and rolled it into the spanish flu pandemic. I agree that I felt it was a tad less enjoyable than X, but it had its' moments. The pivotal multi-minute speech Goth did that was essentially a full descent into madness, plus the credits rolling stuff with her was like whoa!

I am with you also on the whole situation with certain films debuting on streaming, that really in the least should have a limited theatrical release same day. Honestly, I feel now that we are out of covid, the best approach would be to release most of the mainstream Hulu releases like Prey and also the upcoming Hellraiser reboot into theaters initially for even a few weeks before you put it on Hulu. I'll always pick a movie in a theater over a streaming service, really.

 

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Blonde, 2022, Andrew Dominik, 3/10 - I don't usually throw in with the crowd that screams from the rafters about a movie being over the line or something, but for once I agree with that group. This movie is sick and twisted. It took me three days to get through the film because of how dark the subject matter was, and the movie's length was some factor in that too, so it's fair to say I don't think this film has many redeeming qualities. How it's filmed and Ana de Armas' performance are really the only things to put in a positive category here. Again I must say this is filmed spectacularly. I've had complaints about previous biopics being boilerplate but this is not that. But I also should note that much of this is fictionalized even though it gives you the impression that these things actually happened. The things contained within can best be described as dehumanizing, but I think the director also straight up hates women or his subject. They gave Marilyn some lines here that make her out to be a total moron. Some of the fictionalizing also turns into lying. There's a distinct difference and you'll see if you watch this. I think part of the problem here is that making Marilyn Monroe out to be someone's victim is way offbase, the movie is entirely pulling in that direction, so I was never going to like it. I don't agree with that viewpoint in any way at all.

 

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Don't Make Me Go, 2022, Hannah Marks, 4.5/10 - This is supposed to be a sweet father-daughter roadtrip movie but something happens in the third act that is like, it's sick is what it is. I don't understand why anyone would write something like that! There are some scenes leading to this moment that start to drag the film more and more out of character, but I think one of the main problems here is that John Cho is not super sympathetic as 'father with brain tumor'. How is that possible? Well it just is. Unfortunately the ending also goes down a road that makes you think this movie is for teenagers, and I'm not one of those, so it would seem that perhaps I am just not the target audience for this kind of movie. But who is? When something's rated R and it's on Amazon I would think you're trying to bring in as large a target audience as possible. I would not recommend a single person to watch this because you leave the movie feeling downtrodden and run down.

 

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Don't Worry Darling, 2022, Olivia Wilde, 5.5/10 - In waiting so long to watch this I already knew that this movie was disappointing, but waiting too long to watch things is a mistake I'm not interested in repeating much this fall. So, there's been a lot of controversy about this movie and to some extent that doesn't really bleed over onto the screen, but the plot isn't that good here and there's some scenes that stretch the concept. There are also some reveals so big to the point I can hardly even talk about the movie. What I'm talking about isn't in any promotional material either. Florence Pugh is great, as in everything else, but the material here is very difficult for someone to make cohesive and sensible. Unfortunately a lot of the shit here both good and bad is also ripped from other movies. A more experienced director would probably have cleaned up some of the plot holes here, but well, that didn't happen and this is the movie we got. It was alright. On the other hand I heard a lot of people who didn't like the movie so take that for what it's worth.

 

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Amsterdam, 2022, David O. Russell, 6/10 - I am naturally predisposed towards liking a movie such as this one in the first place. It's very light hearted, addresses a minor historical event (Business Plot), and has a stacked cast featuring certain actors who I like watching. There are some problems here though as I'm sure you can tell from the amount of reviews that say this film has problems. One is that the movie is too long, the plot is all over the place and towards the end this gets awfully preachy and shit about love and happiness. But well, I gave this a 6 for the reasons that I said, and a couple more as well. Christian Bale is really good here, Chris Rock is too. This feels like it's supposed to be a caper, except it's not. The movie gets really historical towards the end but I have to admit that I don't see why some people have reviewed this and said the movie is too complicated. It's not complicated at all if you stay in your seat and don't play around with your phone. In addition they spend way too much time explaining things for a second time so that the most dense among us can understand the story. That's one of my biggest gripes here. Bad directing job with a lot of legwork done by the actors to make it work? That's what I'd call this.

 

[cobainwasmurdered]

the ads did this movie zero favours because yeah I thought this was a heist movie. I had literally no idea this was about the Business Plot or even anything remotely close to it. I'd have been much more interested in it if I had known that too!

 

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The Last Vermeer, 2020, Dan Friedkin, 6.5/10 - I thought I'd go from one movie set in Amsterdam to another, it's also convenient that this one took place in 1945 compared to Amsterdam taking place in 1919-1933. So it's like you move ahead in time or something. The story here is set right after Amsterdam is retaken by the Allies, there is punishment to be given out to people who cooperated with fascists and it is very much deserved. Captain Piller (Claes Bang) is set to investigate and have people be executed, and next up on his list is a Han van Meegeren (Guy Pearce). Han is an art dealer who sold Vermeers to the Nazis. Except you know, maybe he didn't. But how would anyone believe him? Well, when he's imprisoned it's time to start painting for his defense, and his defense is pretty good. When the trial comes up, you wonder if this guy might be a fascist or Nazi anyway, and I really don't have an answer. That's what's good about the movie though. You just don't know, and in my case I thought the movie was interesting enough to have captured my attention. This also turns into a courtroom movie about halfway through and those parts really shine.

 

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Halloween Ends, 2022, David Gordon Green, 3.5/10 - I feel like this is one of the worst movies I've seen in theaters and it only continues to get worse as I've put more distance between myself and seeing it. So I should probably wait an extra day to score this but I'm not going to. This was a horrendous movie that I would really rather not write a bunch of shit about, cause it was shit. I don't know why anyone would sidetrack the story of this trilogy so much, but I guess there was never a reason to care and as such I shouldn't. That being said I had a good time watching the second movie last year even though it wasn't good, so this evoked some of those memories and left me with a really sour taste given how awful it was. Trilogies can rarely get away with adding a new character in the third part, and this one goes way too far in making that character a focal point. It wasn't interesting.

 

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Run, 2020, Aneesh Chaganty, 6.5/10 - I wrote a few reviews for movies but they were eaten during the server move and I don't see them. Anyway Run is a movie about a girl in a wheelchair. Her mother is running game on her and making sure she can't get out of that wheelchair or out of her house. One day said girl finally discovers what's going on. This kind of subgenre has a lot of cliches that a writer/director could fall back on, they do fall back on some of them but this movie is entertaining as hell. Things are short and to the point, we're not beating around the bush with an extensive backstory, things are how they are. I kinda wonder how the girl never saw prior to this how any of this shit could be happening to her but I guess when you're a teenager at some point you have epiphanies about certain things. I know I did. I am looking at my list though and man I knew they didn't release much in 2020 because of the pandemic but man there's very little from that year that outright wowed me. Still getting around to the better movies though.

 

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Triangle of Sadness, 2022, Ruben Ostlund, 8/10 - This movie's Metascore is being dragged down by a few people who probably think this movie hits really on the nose and they can't cope with how it does. Just wanted to get that out there. Triangle of Sadness is a movie where the trailer doesn't give away anything and you'd have to see the movie in order to understand what it is and isn't. I also think it's better to not know too much about all this. There are parts here that I'd say classify as the hardest I've laughed in a theater in a really long time. This movie also features the best scene I've seen this year, where a Russian oligarch quoting Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher goes toe to toe with Woody Harrelson quoting the Communist Manifesto. This is all far better than I've just made it sound. Ostlund is a master of these kinds of comedies and Triangle of Sadness is no different. I do have some further analysis but I'll wait for other people to watch it or make such analysis elsewhere. I really dug that this film had three distinct acts, the ending is not super clear but I believe that's fine sometimes, and every actor here was quite memorable in their own right.

 

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Uncle Frank, 2020, Alan Ball, 7/10 - I'm trying and failing to think of a way to succinctly summarize my thoughts here. I can say its been almost twenty years since Ball made something else that I liked. You know how long that is in Hollywood years? Six Feet Under might as well be ancient, nobody binge watches it the way they watch other shows. It is now too old to do so even though SFU is a show I would pretty much consider essential viewing for big TV watchers. Uncle Frank only shares one similarity to SFU, the lead is a gay man who doesn't want to open up to his family about his life. This is a big commonality though. While I was watching this movie I was brought down to reality, I kept thinking 'what if my brother did something like this and didn't tell anyone?' 'If we were born ten years earlier maybe this is what his life would have been like.' That shit is a sobering thought, let me tell you. Uncle Frank isn't a perfect movie, I don't like the scene where Frank (Paul Bettany) hits Wally (Peter Macdissi) and is instantly forgiven because of the circumstances of his pain, I didn't think that was very realistic. But besides that, this movie hits. This is an effective examination of self-hatred, of what it's like to be young and gay when your father hates that you even exist.

 

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Black Adam, 2022, Jaume Collet-Serra, 5/10 - Based on this and a lot of the other superhero content that came out this year, I think maybe I'm finally starting to get fatigued of this genre. I will say on a positive note that Pierce Brosnan's portrayal of Dr. Fate is great, I dig Hawkman being here, and I thought the CGI was far superior to similarly budgeted Marvel content. The problem here is that, once again, and this is starting to not be just a DC problem, the plot here is razor thin. They introduced a ton of characters with no backstory or motivation, and it's all supposed to lead to something else which is getting super tiresome. Also, for a movie this long to not give even the slightest backstory for Dr. Fate or Hawkman, is totally ridiculous and stupid. When they make a movie with him and Superman hopefully someone else writes the script and directs because this story needs some work.

 

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Sputnik, 2020, Egor Abramenko, 6.5/10 - It's probably not the most popular thing in the world to tell people that you watched a Russian movie but I'm pretty sure this crowd doesn't care and why should you care? It's dumb to care. Anyway, the story here is pretty simple. Cosmonauts are on their way back down from space and they don't know exactly what happens. They crash land though, and only one of the two survives. He is taken to a base in Kazakhstan and people are tasked with figuring out what's wrong with him. Well, what's wrong with him is pretty obvious early on. They know, and everyone knows, that this guy has an alien inside of him. Moscow can't find out though, and they need some extra help. There's some shit here that's really interesting and better left unspoiled so that's exactly what I'm going to do. The Soviet party man here is a great character, he helps make the story unique and feel like something that couldn't just be made in another country, and of course there's been talk of an American remake even though theoretically that sounds impossible. Why be lazy and remake this when you can just watch it in Russian on Hulu?

 

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Till, 2022, Chinonye Chukwu, 7.5/10 - While I don't think this is the most interesting way to tell Emmett Till's story, I can't say that this kind of movie isn't long overdue. It's so far overdue that people didn't really turn out to see this, its been so long since the historical event that people have selectively chosen not to remember it or learn about it. I think it's ideal that this is a movie that doesn't show Emmett getting killed because that isn't necessary. The story is repurposed in a way to be about his mother's grief, to explain why she became an activist. Ultimately the thing that hurts is that nothing was ever done about Emmett Till. The fact you know this throughout the movie makes it more difficult to watch, it's more frustrating and it doesn't stop being frustrating. Danielle Deadwyler's performance as Mamie Till was great but I feel like this movie didn't have enough of Emmett.

 

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, 2022, Ryan Coogler, 8/10 - AND THAT'S ALL YOU GON GET.

 

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The Night House, 2021, David Bruckner, 6.5/10 - What I thought here was basically that Rebecca Hall's performance outdid everything that I thought was wrong with this movie. There's a lot of logic gap going on here even though it's a supernatural horror movie, but that's alright. The moment Hall's character starts walking around at night, the movie becomes so interesting that I found myself compelled to not do anything except put my head down and stare at the screen for a long period of time. That's hard to get me to do when I'm sitting at home. As for what Hall can't compensate for, this movie is one or two scenes too long. The movie is also really not that rewarding but I liked the dread they're trying to impose upon the viewer, and I liked that it turned out her dead husband really was a complete scumbag. For whatever reason I wasn't quite expecting that.

 

[Brocklock]

The Night House is pretty overrated in horror circles. Shudder included it in its 101 Scariest Horror Movie Moments list and I see fans on social media calling it one of the best horror movies of the last 10 years. I don't really get it. It was a fine to middling movie with a great Rebecca Hall performance.

 

[Mickey Massuco]

Based on this and a lot of the other superhero content that came out this year, I think maybe I'm finally starting to get fatigued of this genre.

fuckin finally fam