In Which I Briefly Review Movies

[909]

Miss Sloane (2016), directed by John Madden

The name of John Madden always throws me off when it comes to the director, with this film being more opposite than anything I think the REAL John Madden would be interested in. I knew I wasn't entirely done with 2016 yet, there were remnants I had to go back to see, and I intend to stick with that. Anyway, I like Jessica Chastain and that's all the reason I really needed. There aren't too many movies out like this one anymore, and the box office failure of it is one of the reasons why. I saw that this rated as one of the worst opening weekend per-theater averages at the time, and it's not too hard to figure out why that is. A talky political movie that's rated R? There's no market for that anymore, as The Front Runner shows. Being topical is the aim these days, and lobbying has faded into the background at this point in time. In the past, this may have made decent coin, although I'm not sure people would have considered a powerful female lobbyist to be interesting at that point in time. I also think the ending of this film is also more suited to a time in the past, with how ridiculous the twists and turns begin to become. One thing's for sure though, I did think the female lobbyist was enthralling despite Miss Sloane's warts, of which there were quite a few.

Our film begins at a congressional hearing chaired by a senator, Ronald Sperling (John Lithgow). In front of Sen. Sperling, he has called Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain) to testify. The issue in question is whether or not she violated Senate ethics rules while working for a very powerful, fictional Washington D.C. lobbying firm; Cole, Kravitz & Waterman. Liz is counseled by her lawyer (David Wilson Barnes) that she should take the fifth amendment over and over again, regardless of what she is asked by Sperling. Things become personal and she cannot continue to repeat herself, which means she is now compelled to testify or be held in contempt of Congress and sent to prison. Will she testify? You have to wait until the end of the film to find that out. We snap back three months, back to when Liz is working for Cole, Kravitz & Waterman. She is in the midst of a battle related to Indonesian palm oil, one where her clients are the Indonesian government. While dealing with that, she is called into a meeting by her boss George Dupont (Sam Waterston), they are scheduled to meet with a "gun rights" representative named Bill Sanford (Chuck Shamata). They did everything they could to not say the letters NRA. The meeting does not go well and Liz does not want to represent the gun lobby. It seems that she actually has conviction on this issue, and Sanford's idea was rather patronizing, to have her lead up the fight in shorting up the female pro-gun vote. Although Liz laughs him off, George says that she absolutely must do what Sanford says

Liz is not going to do what Sanford says. After a fundraiser, she is approached by Rodolfo Schmidt (Mark Strong), the CEO of a liberal lobbying firm, Peterson Wyatt. Schmidt wants Liz to lead the charge in favor of a bill called Heaton-Harris, this bill being one that will expand universal background checks to all gun purchases. Liz cannot resist this and says yes. Her motivations are never made clear other than to say that she loves a challenge and really wanted this win. The next day, Liz goes to work and decides that she's going to quit on the spot and ask which of her staff would like to come along with. Pat Connors (Michael Stuhlbarg) is either above her or her equal, that isn't clear, but he will not leave. Neither will Jane (Alison Pill), her very trusted assistant. Liz gets very mad and basically tells everyone that those who stayed will have to eat shit. Once Liz gets to Peterson Wyatt, she befriends an existing staffer at the firm, Esme (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). Esme is the survivor of a school shooting and Liz becomes aware of this quite quickly, and anyone with a brain can see that she's going to use this to her own benefit. Here's the deal from here. The two firms need to get undecided votes any which way they can. They will both go to extreme means to do so, and they're now in competition. Liz already said what would happen should they be in competition, so it's going to get very nasty.

The casting in this scenario is perfectly fitting for this kind of movie, but some of the twists and turns near the end of the film are absolutely ridiculous nonsense. Jessica Chastain does a great job of ensuring that said nonsense doesn't feel as bad as it actually is, but make no mistake that her character's plans are completely absurd. In fact if you listen to what she says at the beginning of the film, you can see everything coming. This is a mistake and I don't know why any filmmaker would do this other than to make people think "omg I paid attention and she actually did that lol." We don't need any of that. Of course, a movie like this needs to have a moral compass, and the character of Esme is very fitting here. I also thought that it was nice a movie like this wasn't so cynical that they would have the devious lobbyist use the diversity of her staff as a bonus point in her favor. Of course, such a film is a good statement against the system of lobbyists that we currently have, but I think politics in this country has gone beyond the point of lobbying. Sure, lobbyists do have their impact and I wouldn't deny that, but the lines in the sand are fucking drawn. The party line is what it fucking is and none of that's going to change anytime soon, even though some of those things really should.

I don't think Miss Sloane is a masterpiece of anything like that, but it's functional and good. I do think it's amusing this was timed to come out literally right after the election, which had an outcome I'm sure nobody saw coming and as a result some of the things in this feel really weird. The glass ceiling was shattered in some ways and not in others, but I think everyone's now aware that women can play very evil politically oriented characters. I wouldn't say that Liz is good even though her cause certainly is. The way the film presents things, she's a very bad person. But, stories about very bad people can be good, and in some cases even fun. I think Miss Sloane is fun even though the trappings of the film are totally ludicrous from one hatched plan to the next. I think I love this shit, in all honesty. I watched House of Cards for a while, but I don't think I can finish it after Kevin Spacey was outed. I did finish The West Wing, two times I should add. No regrets there. I have a need for stories like this and I'll probably seek one out to watch on television at some point in the next few months, that's just how I am.

I didn't intend to watch The Hummingbird Project and Miss Sloane back to back like this, but I thought that Miss Sloane was something different than what it actually was. In reality, they both feature a small team of people fighting against a crooked system fueled by massive amounts of money, so these are companion movies in a way. I wouldn't say that I felt bored watching Miss Sloane even though I now realize how similar the two are, though. There's actually a decent contrast and I see what makes one of these movies better than the other. The outlandish things in Miss Sloane, even the ones that are more realistic, are something lacking in The Hummingbird Project. Miss Sloane has just enough substance and plenty of style, enough for me to have a decent opinion of the film. The Hummingbird Project has substance and the style is nothing that I really care for at all, so we have these two different feelings here. I don't think either of the films was trying to make a grand political statement at all, they were attempting to be good entertainment. One achieved and one nearly did, but they both have artistic merit. Jessica Chastain is given so much more than Alexander Skarsgard though.

7/10

 

[909]

I took the leap and watched The House mainly because Mantzoukas was in it.

Not sure why I didn't enjoy it exactly. It has a lot of people I find funny in other things in it but it just felt so shallow.

I think it's too bland and goes nowhere near far enough. Beyond the premise, the house casino itself feels really cheap and the idea is unexplored. The stolen money angle also sucked.

 

[909]

The Highwaymen (2019), directed by John Lee Hancock

I was looking for the right point at which to finally tackle The Highwaymen, and I'm not sure this was the actual right time for me to watch the film. I feel very tired after doing so, but I think this was also a function of the film itself. The Highwaymen is not a terribly exciting film, this is a a dad movie that requires an extreme amount of patience. I would have hacked this thing to pieces rather than let the events play out as filmed. I think the director may have been influenced by Zodiac, and I hate to say this, but this could not have failed in a more miserable fashion to view. You know what bothers me? This is a film that should actually be pretty good, but it isn't. It's too long, and very much of the drama is removed by the way this is filmed and the fact that everyone knows the characters don't die. So, sorry to spoil that point, but this is a true story and people shouldn't have false expectations. What really bothers me is that this is something that could have been a very good film, it just isn't executed to my liking at all. So, take that for what it is, but I think I've seen enough movies recently for my opinion to matter a tiny bit. I thought that a movie with Woody Harrelson in this role was guaranteed to be good and I thought wrong.

Our film begins with a prison break, something I wasn't expecting to watch tonight from the perspective that said prison break is from. In this case the action follows Wade McNabb (Josh Caras), a prisoner working on a farm in Texas. All of a sudden, Bonnnie and Clyde (played by unknowns, oddly) show up to rescue him and others. Wade is unable to make it to the car in time, but Bonnie and Clyde leave with their associates. there has to be a response of course, so the governor, "Ma" Ferguson is tasked with figuring one out. The Department of Corrections Chief (John Carroll Lynch) suggests that she hire someone who can track Bonnie and Clyde down and kill them on the spot as there isn't going to be any arresting them. Chief Simmons suggests that Ma brings a former Texas Ranger, Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) out of retirement. The FBI is already tracking the outlaws, but clearly this is not working, so Ma acquiesces. Hamer himself does not really want to upset his family, but his wife knows that he wants to do this and she gives her permission after a shootout in Missouri that ends with Bonnie and Clyde killing some people.

Hamer does need a partner, of course, and he has one in mind. Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson) is another retired Ranger, one living a much harder life as a result of the Great Depression. Hamer doesn't approach Maney though, it turns out that Maney approaches him after Hamer went to a gun shop near him. Hamer bought an entire arsenal, which they very well may need. The pair decide that Bonnie and Clyde are going to head to Dallas, so they go there as well. They are convinced that something's going on, as even with such a large operation trying to find Bonnie and Clyde, they continue to get to places in Texas that they want to go, killing along the way if they feel they need to. Eventually, things do come to a head. The Rangers are only supposed to be in Texas as they only have jurisdiction there, but they follow the trail up to Kansas because they think there's going to be a stop for supplies. While Maney's taking a leak, he spots them sitting in a car. Apparently so do a lot of other people, which creates a scene with enormous crowds. Eventually the Texans give chase, but the gang is able to get away from them outside of town. Now what?

The last scene I mentioned was the second action scene in the movie and took about an hour to get to that point, so I think you can see how I feel about this film just from that. The Highwaymen is literally as dry as a movie about Bonnie and Clyde could be. All of the scenes with Bonnie and Clyde are filmed from a detached perspective of a witness and never feel exciting or intriguing even though said scenes feature them killing people. The only real redeeming parts of the story being told from this perspective are the old man monologues and their investigation tactics. I thnk that's really all this brings to the table on any level and I have much more negative things to say about the film than I do positive ones. However, I should continue with the few positives and point out that the film is visually pleasing, and nothing here is outright bad. It's just a matter of what this could have been as opposed to what it is that really rankles me. Again, the movie is far too long and there are numerous scenes someone could have chopped from this. Kathy Bates also should have been in this film more than she was, but this is a film where there are basically no supporting characters at all.

As far as negatives go, I said plenty already, but I think this film makes one thing quite clear. Bonnie and Clyde were the ultimate winners in the eyes of history and their pursuers were not. The story of their pursuers is also nowhere near as interesting as Bonnie and Clyde's, the best way to deal with things was to make a movie where they dovetail, but this isn't that. There are some funny lines Woody has, but overall I think this is just boring. There's also some stuff here about how good ol' hard work can defeat technology, and I guess that's true, but this is presented in such a weird way. The director clearly intended to present Bonnie and Clyde as being subhuman, that's part of the reason they're hardly in the movie, but with that so goes most of my interest. Ah well. You know it's a problem when it's a film this long and I can't think of all that much to say about it.

5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Us
2. Gloria Bell
3. Arctic
4. High Flying Bird
5. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
6. Captain Marvel
7. The Beach Bum
8. Paddleton
9. Cold Pursuit
10. Happy Death Day 2U
11. Greta
12. Triple Frontier
13. Fighting with My Family
14. The Dirt
15. Velvet Buzzsaw
16. Alita: Battle Angel
17. The Kid
18. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
19. The Upside
20. Dumbo
21. The Hummingbird Project
22. Escape Room
23. Captive State
24. The Highwaymen
25. What Men Want
26. Miss Bala
27. Glass
28. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
29. The Prodigy
30. Polar
31. Serenity

 

[909]

XXX: Return of Xander Cage (2017), directed by D.J. Caruso

I decided to make sure that I watched something bad tonight, something ridiculous and not particularly good. I didn't quite know how ridiculous XXX: Return of Xander Cage was going to be, but I really should have known. This was a rare case of a franchise I thought I'd completed, but for whatever reason someone decided many years later that there needed to be a third XXX film. Why? I can't answer that, I genuinely don't know why. I thought XXX: Return of Xander Cage had to be a film that became self-aware and was in on the joke, but what if it wasn't? What if the director though they were making something that actually made sense? To be extremely clear, XXX: Return of Xander Cage does not make sense on any level at all. The film also features some of the more ridiculous things all year, and it's not good. You know what though? I think I loved it. I can't really explain why, but when a movie goes full bore into being as ridiculous as possible, it's quite endearing. Also, in the case of XXX: Return of Xander Cage compared to some of those other kinds of movies, there are no annoying characters. Just one ridiculous person after the next, making the film what it is. The stuff here is totally insane and stupid, watch it at your own peril.

If you need anything to jog your mind, and you probably do, Augustus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson) is an NSA agent, and he's in Brazil eating Chinese food with Neymar. Why? He's trying to recruit Neymar as an agent, which is totally stupid, but the movie pushes through that. If you need a further refresher, Augustus is the constant in the series, the only character who appeared in both films after Vin Diesel decided he was not doing a sequel. While eating, a satellite crashes in Brazil that kills both Neymar and Augustus. Huh? After that, a team of four consisting of the leader Ziang (Donnie Yen), Talon (Tony Jaa), Hawk (Michael Bisping), and Serena (Deepika Padukone) decides to infilitrate a CIA office in New York City. Their mission is to retrieve Pandora's Box, a device which is supposed to be capable of controlling satellites and causing them to crash. How could anyone not see this twist coming? The team accomplishes their mission, then we pan out to another group. Jane Marke (Toni Collette) is a CIA agent who needs someone to learn more about Pandora's Box. Her target? Xander Cage (Van Diesel), who fakes his death after the first film and went to live in the Dominican Republic. I am presenting some of these things as dryly as possible so that I can actually type them out without laughing as much as I did when I watched this. Xander is somehow convinced to return to active service, and so it goes.

Xander needs to put together a team of his own of course, otherwise nothing's going to go well for him. Enter Adele (Ruby Rose), a sniper; Tennyson Torch (Rory McCann), their driver who keeps count of how often he crashes; Becky (Nina Dobrev), a weapons specialist who is assigned by Jane in the first place; and Nicks (Kris Wu), who is just a guy. I have no idea why this character is there at all. The team's intention is to find out how to locate Xiang and his team, and we learn that they're hiding out in the Philippines. So, there we go. After a long sequence that I found to be the only boring part of the film, we come to learn that Xiang and Cage have goals that aren't very dissimilar at all, but they don't know that. So, from there, on the movie goes and things get more and more ridiculous as they go. Did you think this would be the film that had an anti-gravity gun battle on an airplane? If you did, you win a prize. That's here and there's so much more.

XXX: Return of Xander Cage is quite short, so my ability to summarize things sputtered out once I got further along in the story. There have never been more ridiculous things filmed by a major Hollywood studio, I think. Did you ever want to see someone ski through a jungle? How about crash a plane into a satellite that's falling to Earth? If you do, you just need to watch this and turn your brain off for a while. I have not even been remotely comprehensive here. Some of the stunts are just bonkers. I also thought that the style in which this was filmed was absolutely horrible. This movie has what I like to call "video game entrances." You know what I mean by that? Character appears, quips, and there's an overlay screen that comes on summarizing these people's accomplishments. Absolutely none of these overlays are funny at all. There's also a lot of stuff here that's really lame, and I guess you could say that all of it is, but I think that's the charm. They don't make movies like these anymore and that's true, but it's also good that they don't. At the same time, when they do come along, I think they're funny as hell. So take that for what it is.

It's not just the action and introductions of characters that are ludicrous, but Vin Diesel is ludicrous himself. This character is a parody of some kind. I think Michael Bay would be proud, but he's better at creating side characters. This film does not do such a good job, even though the amount of cameos made me laugh. I already mentioned Neymar and Michael Bisping, but Tony Gonzalez? I don't know how this cameo was even conceived nor do I want to know. Admittedly, I think XXX: Return of Xander Cage is a guilty pleasure. I do feel guilty, I know this is a bad movie, yet I paid attention to everything with the utmost. There are so many logical issues with these events, I don't have it in myself to point out all of them. Perhaps my favorite was when Vin Diesel's character gets shot and not killed as a result of wearing body armor. The person who ordered him to wear body armor was the one who shot him, and forgot that he had protection. See what I mean? Totally stupid, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, but even if it was or wasn't, it's just not good. If you like movies where people front flip over moving cars, I do recommend watching this.

4.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. The Shape of Water
3. Get Out
4. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
5. Logan
6. Wonder Woman
7. The Big Sick
8. Thor: Ragnarok
9. Logan Lucky
10. The Beguiled
11. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
12. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
13. The Lost City of Z
14. First They Killed My Father
15. Darkest Hour
16. A Ghost Story
17. Spider-Man: Homecoming
18. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
19. It
20. Battle of the Sexes
21. Okja
22. Kong: Skull Island
23. It Comes at Night
24. Split
25. 1922
26. Personal Shopper
27. Chuck
28. Atomic Blonde
29. Wheelman
30. The Lego Batman Movie
31. Megan Leavey
32. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
33. Menashe
34. American Made
35. Beauty and the Beast
36. Imperial Dreams
37. Murder on the Orient Express
38. The Zookeeper's Wife
39. Free Fire
40. Win It All
41. The Wall
42. Life
43. Breathe
44. The Man Who Invented Christmas
45. Sleight
46. Alone in Berlin
47. A United Kingdom
48. Trespass Against Us
49. The Mountain Between Us
50. War Machine
51. Happy Death Day
52. Lowriders
53. Justice League
54. To the Bone
55. Wakefield
56. The Hitman's Bodyguard
57. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
58. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
59. Sand Castle
60. CHiPs
61. Death Note
62. The Belko Experiment
63. The Great Wall
64. Fist Fight
65. Snatched
66. Wilson
67. Queen of the Desert
68. The House
69. Sleepless
70. All Eyez on Me

 

[Mickey Massuco]

(Van Diesel)

lol

 

[909]

LIRL

 

[909]

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8425058/

I watched this Brexit movie on HBO, but I can't bring myself to bother to write a review because I think Brexit is the stupidest thing in the fucking world and this was a TV movie. I'm going to give it a 6/10 and stick it in my list for the year though.

The film makes the case that what happened in public isn't why the Brexit referendum succeeded, but rather the ability companies have to mine data from people and target them so easily. Benedict Cumberbatch's performance is great, but the film needed to be a bit longer as the events don't bother to show how they affected potential voters bar one focus group scene. It is a TV movie though, so keeping that in mind, it's effective enough.

 

[909]

Unicorn Store (2019), directed by Brie Larson

I put this off about as long as I could, because I both committed to watching these Netflix movies as fast as I could and I was busy in the days since the release, like everyone here. Wait no longer. I didn't know what to expect of this other than that I found Brie Larson's movie was getting heavily brigaded on reviewing sites by people who hadn't seen it, the IMDB user base chiefly among them. No wonder people don't pay attention to the internet and their wishes anymore. Anyway, in the face of such brigading I'm left with the question that really matters. Is the movie any good? Failing that, what does it bring to the table? That's what I wanted to know and that's what I was going to find out. There are a lot of interesting variables when it comes to this film. One is that it first premiered at Toronto in 2017, which was some time ago as I'm sure you can tell. Another is that this is the first film Brie Larson directed and she also starred in it. Filming took place back in 2016, so she was a lot younger and this film was shelved for a very long time. When watching it, I can see why it was shelved. That's one of my least favorite things to say about a movie, and yes, that does automatically mean that I thought it wasn't good. What matters is, why wasn't it good? I have managed to pinpoint that, but another question beckons. Does Unicorn Store bring anything to the table? The answer is yes.

Unicorn Store is about Kit (Brie Larson), a young woman who has too much going on to sum it all up in one sentence. She is an artist who has gone to school, in the process of doing so she has also failed. Nobody liked her art, which leads to Kit having to move back in with her parents. Kit has subsequently visited a temp agency and taken a job at an office run by Gary (Hamish Linklater). This may or may not be a good thing for Kit, because Gary is more than a little weird himself. On the subject of weird, so is Kit and so are her parents, Gladys (Joan Cusack) and Gene (Bradley Whitford). I don't really understand what happened to Kit to make her this way, but the film for whatever reason decides not to explore this. Dropped on her head? Spoiled? Home schooled? She's too innocent and approaches nothing like a normal adult would do. Emotionally she just isn't fit to be a grown up. As for her parents, there is the possibility that they've neglected her in favor of their job. Gladys and Gene run a therapeutic camp for teenagers with their own problems, and that's obviously a time-extensive job. The likelihood they have been there for Kit is quite small.

Kit, of course, is still into her art even though she's failed. She lives in the basement, which is strange because houses in Los Angeles usually don't have them, but I suppose this one does. In said basement, she has the kinds of arts and crafts that a girl would have had when they were 12. The only things missing are Lisa Frank books. Anyway, one day while doing her job at the copier, Kit has a letter delivered to her with her name on it. The letter has an address for a store, which she goes to of course. What's the deal with this store? She takes an elevator downstairs, and there we have a salesman (Samuel L. Jackson) dressed as goofy as Kit is. Indie movie? You bet. The store seems to be a place that sells people what they need, and the salesman has a proposal for Kit. He wants her to own a unicorn, but first she must complete some tasks. The first is to build a stable, but she's going to need some help. Enter Virgil (Mamoudou Athie), a guy who works at a hardware store. It sounds like Kit's paying, so this is help. Second, she needs to find a way to create a place where love flows through her heart. After all, a unicorn can't exist where there isn't any of that. At work, unrelated to this, Kit also has a task. She needs to create a presentation for a vacuum ad which may turn her temporary position into a more permanent one.

What I thought about Unicorn Store is that more than anything else, this script was really poor and didn't utilize anyone's talents to the extent they should have been. That being said, ultimately film is the medium of the director more than the writer, and therefore the blame lies with Brie Larson for not presenting some of these ideas in a more obvious way. The sexual harassment bit is horrible, by the way. It doesn't belong in this film at all, and it's one of the things I really didn't like here. Now, that being said, there's a lot of nostalgia and considering I just told you about this only lacking Lisa Frank related things, you might think I fucked with those. I did not, my brother did, and that's why I always thought he was gay. I was proven correct. Unicorn Store just doesn't land, and it doesn't have any real audience that I could decipher to be enjoyed in something like this. There are things in the movie that don't belong, so you can't show this to kids, but this isn't a movie for adults either. I guess that's where my own interest comes in, that because I'm a completist I'm the only kind of person that would watch the film? I think that might be true. I think Unicorn Store is a horrible miss that throws out some harebrained ideas without actually considering their implications or attempting to finish them off with a statement that feels like it matters.

I wish I had the ability to further describe how strange this film is, but I don't. I do think, however, that there are some good parts in spite of the story. The vacuum presentation itself I found to be very funny, and I do like the idea that Kit is forced to do things that cramp her individuality. This movie is too weird though. The only part at which things don't feel strange, where the film actually feels like it might be for me, is once we come to the ending of it. There's a decent amount of heart here, I will admit. I'm a pretty cynical person, but I found it interesting that the lack of growth throughout most of the film manifested itself in a few very strong scenes come the end of it. Isn't that how life goes? It usually takes one event that flips a switch in someone's mind, or at least that's how it is in my experience. That gives the film some semblance of reality, but the film as a whole is very much not. The costume designer for Brie Larson should be given some kind of badge of honor as her outfits were all totally ridiculous, but that's the only thing that really matches the performance of its star. Larson tries her best, but this is a horrible script and I've said that for a reason. HORRIBLE. I'm not surprised the film was shelved so long as a result of its qualities and its much larger deficiences, but I'm glad someone released it for those last few scenes. Beyond the script, this is still missing something else. I think it's that Brie Larson's direction either lacks the imagination or the budget it needs, I know if I was making a movie like this one, there would be a surrealist scene with neon unicorn logos floating over her head at some point. Believe that shit.

4.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Us
2. Gloria Bell
3. Arctic
4. High Flying Bird
5. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
6. Captain Marvel
7. The Beach Bum
8. Paddleton
9. Cold Pursuit
10. Happy Death Day 2U
11. Greta
12. Triple Frontier
13. Fighting with My Family
14. Brexit
15. The Dirt
16. Velvet Buzzsaw
17. Alita: Battle Angel
18. The Kid
19. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
20. The Upside
21. Dumbo
22. The Hummingbird Project
23. Escape Room
24. Captive State
25. The Highwaymen
26. What Men Want
27. Unicorn Store
28. Miss Bala
29. Glass
30. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
31. The Prodigy
32. Polar
33. Serenity

 

[909]

Mudbound (2017), directed by Dee Rees

Immediately upon finishing Mudbound, and just a few minutes before I started this review, I was left with the thought that Mudbound was heavily snubbed for major award nominations. I was also left with the thought that this is one of the best films I've seen that didn't manage to win one of the big awards in any category whatsoever. Why though? I think the most easy explanation is that this is a Netflix movie and those nearly always are shafted. It took one of the best films I've ever seen for Netflix movies to actually get recognition, but even then, it wasn't quite what the film deserved either. I don't think it's fair when great films are ignored because they debuted on a platform people do not care for. So, with that in mind, let's talk about Mudbound some. This is a much different racial drama than much of what I've seen, in no part thanks to the presentation of it, this film deciding that it would present the reality of the situation as best as the director and cinematographer are able to do so. The location used for this film is also spectacular, with the title being what it is in large part due the amount of mud in the area. There's still something more to it than that, and there are changes from the novel that I am keenly aware of, but I thought this was a great film. Did I say that enough?

Our film begins with something that leads to a flashback presenting the entire story, which I've already mentioned is something I absolutely hate. Henry (Jason Clarke) and Jamie McAllan (Garrett Hedlund) are brothers, they clearly live on a farm of some kind with a lot of mud. They attempt to dig a hole before a rainstorm comes, but they aren't able to complete matters. The next day, the coffin is too heavy for them, and Henry has to ask a black family passing by in a horse and wagon if they will help him lower the coffin into the hole. There's obviously been some kind of problem, and that's where we head back. Before World War II begins, Henry begins a courtship of Laura (Carey Mulligan), who narrates the way things turned out. The things she says indicate that the love between them is in question, but it doesn't take a genius to figure that as Carey Mulligan is a great actress who can portray emotion with her face very well. The two are living in Memphis, but Henry has a dream and he's very much the old type of husband who will make orders and his family will listen to them. One day, he comes home and says that Laura and their two daughters will be moving to a farm he's bought in the Mississippi Delta. He says that his father Pappy (Jonathan Banks) will also be coming to live with them. Pappy is an incorrigible racist fuck, that is of no consequence to Henry and he doesn't care. So, down to Mississippi they go, but Henry is also stupid. He did not ensure his family had a decent house to live in, so they live on the farm in a very nasty house.

At the same time, the Jacksons are a family in Mississippi. They are black, the parents are Hap (Rob Morgan) and Florence (Mary J. Blige). Their lot in life is not so great. They are sharecroppers, which is just fucking horrible. They dream of owning their own land one day, and they have a large family, but dreams are merely just that. The idea that the Jacksons will ever come to own their land is just that, an idea. The war had begun by the time to McAllans moved to Mississippi, and that impacted everyone. Ronsel Jackson (Jason Mitchell) is the oldest of the Jackson family, he had enlisted in the Army. Ronsel now commands a Sherman tank, and while in Europe prior to the absolute end of the war, he had a relationship with a German woman. Racism is not something that affects him to the same degree anymore, but the fact is, wars end. People have to go home. Things in Mississippi aren't so good, but the McAllans also have someone in the war, it's the aforementioned Jamie, who had disappeared from the story for a while. Jamie is a captain who flies B-25's, his journey in the war has not been so good. Again, wars end. Eventually everyone must come home, but there are some problems with the situation. As mentioned, the Jacksons want their own land, and Henry has never run a farm before. He has no idea what he's doing, he's also harsh, and still a racist. Just not to the same extent as Pappy. Pappy, now there's a fucking problem if I've ever seen one before.

Something sticking with me after watching Mudbound is that films like Mudbound shouldn't have needed to be made because these things all shouldn't have happened, but the fact is that they did happen. Racism is a fucking stupid thing, but I don't think people are entirely capable of understanding how far these things really went. So, on that level, of course Mudbound needed to be made. Beyond that, I thought this was a good story that built up to the ending in a way that a film should do. There are payoffs throughout the story, however small they are, but the ending really delivers and carries massive weight. I'm not going to say anything about how people need to watch this because the people who need to watch it most either never will or they'll sympathize with the wrong people, that's something I think a lot of people need to understand. Beyond racism, the reason I watched and thought Mudbound was a great film because the utilization of dramatic moments worked to incredible effect. I found myself interested in the fates of all the characters although there isn't delivery in some cases. Of course, Laura would be forced to stay married even though she didn't love her husband, but a lot of people would never pick up on that or realize it without that being thrown in their face. I think there's something to be said for how slowly the story is told here, and on that level I can understand why people wouldn't find Mudbound to be a great film. I also find some of the things where people say "THIS IS THE MOVIE WE NEEDED FOR THIS TIME IN OUR HISTORY" to be totally stupid, so you'll never see me say that again if I ever have.

Of course, one can't write a review about Mudbound without talking about the performances and technical aspects, so that's how I'll finish things up. The cinematography by Rachel Morrison is excellent and not for the first time, I read that she was given a lot of freedom to shoot this as she wished. The results are fantastic and I just want more of this. The sets and the mud all feel period correct as they're supposed to as well, this is in large part because of the cinematography and choices made filming each scene. Jason Mitchell and Mary J. Blige have great performances too, but I wasn't surprised by that. Carey Mulligan was no slouch either. The film is long enough that everyone is given the time they need to craft their characters and bring them to life. I have read that this was Tamar-kali's first attempt at taking a shot as the lead composer, and yeah, it's good man. It's something that immediately stands out. The script and story are pretty good too, but I won't be overly effusive in praise because after all this is a book adaptation. That being said, adapting books is pretty hard. I feel bad in saying I liked a film with the ending Mudbound has, but I thought this was an excellent example of maintaining tension until the payoff point. Lots of filmmakers aren't good at doing so, but perhaps Dee Rees is. I think I will need to see more from her before coming to a final judgment, but this was really strong work.

I could write more but I'm trying very hard to stop droning on, so I'll leave it at that.

9/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. The Shape of Water
3. Get Out
4. Mudbound
5. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
6. Logan
7. Wonder Woman
8. The Big Sick
9. Thor: Ragnarok
10. Logan Lucky
11. The Beguiled
12. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
13. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
14. The Lost City of Z
15. First They Killed My Father
16. Darkest Hour
17. A Ghost Story
18. Spider-Man: Homecoming
19. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
20. It
21. Battle of the Sexes
22. Okja
23. Kong: Skull Island
24. It Comes at Night
25. Split
26. 1922
27. Personal Shopper
28. Chuck
29. Atomic Blonde
30. Wheelman
31. The Lego Batman Movie
32. Megan Leavey
33. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
34. Menashe
35. American Made
36. Beauty and the Beast
37. Imperial Dreams
38. Murder on the Orient Express
39. The Zookeeper's Wife
40. Free Fire
41. Win It All
42. The Wall
43. Life
44. Breathe
45. The Man Who Invented Christmas
46. Sleight
47. Alone in Berlin
48. A United Kingdom
49. Trespass Against Us
50. The Mountain Between Us
51. War Machine
52. Happy Death Day
53. Lowriders
54. Justice League
55. To the Bone
56. Wakefield
57. The Hitman's Bodyguard
58. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
59. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
60. Sand Castle
61. CHiPs
62. Death Note
63. The Belko Experiment
64. The Great Wall
65. Fist Fight
66. Snatched
67. Wilson
68. Queen of the Desert
69. The House
70. Sleepless
71. All Eyez on Me

 

[909]

Shazam! (2019), directed by David F. Sandberg

I had delayed watching Shazam! to this point because I was mega busy and I'd rather have watched Liverpool play Southampton and Porto, but today was time to finally get to the theater and give this a look. I will admit that I did not think Shazam! would be this good, and I also didn't understand why WB was so driven towards making a Shazam movie. I still don't really understand why even though I obviously enjoyed this, but I bet there are a few nerds more than displeased that this film follows the New 52 origin story for Shazam instead of any of the others. I mean, how dare they? I don't know what other people thought of this film other than that it made a lot of money very fast, before I could even have a chance to go see it. So, with that in mind, let's talk about my own affinity for Shazam prior to this film. ...I don't have one. I never really took to Shazam for a lot of reasons, chiefly among them being that Shazam's story is one that largely appeals to children and not someone like me. At least, that's what I thought, and I guess I still do think that, but Shazam! did a nice job of refuting that notion. There are some nice moments here and overall the story is quite good, keeping in mind that I don't usually enjoy origin stories. I accept what this brings to the table.

Shazam! start off in 1974, with a family driving in Upstate New York. Thad is the youngest of the three, he appears to be regularly bullied by his brother Sid and his father (John Glover). Thad has a Magic 8 ball, and his dad seems to encourage Sid bullying him and trying to take the toy away because Thad needs to act like a man. Anyway, Sid is unable to hold onto the toy completely, at which point the thing appears to be glitching out. Subsequently, everyone disappears except Thad, and Thad is magically transported to the Rock of Eternity. The Rock of Eternity is a magical temple hidden in another dimension, it is inhabited by Shazam (Djimon Hounson), a very old wizard in search of his successor. At the temple also rest his enemies, the Seven Deadly Sins. The Sins are now statues, but they can speak. Shazam is trying to find a new champion who is pure of heart, someone who can take his place and his power. The Sins tempt Thad with their own promises, and it turns out that Thad is not pure of heart at all. Shazam sends the kid back to the car like nothing happened at all, which leads to Thad freaking out and causing his father to start driving erratically. After they spin out, before they can get going again, they are t-boned by a truck and the father is thrown out of the windshield. Sorry that I keep saying "the father," but no name is given for this guy. The father winds up paralyzed, and Sid blames his brother, which brings us to the present.

We're in Philadelphia, following Billy Batson (Asher Angel), a very persistent foster kid who continues to leave his group homes in search of his mother. Billy lost his mother at a carnival when he was a kid, because he'd dropped something and went to find it. When he went back, she was gone, and that was that. Billy is eventually caught outside of someone's house, and he is played in a group home run by Victor (Cooper Andrews) and Rosa (Marta Milans). Rosa and Victor have taken in a lot of kids, and it's listing time. Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer) winds up becoming Billy's best friend, Darla (Faithe Herman) is the youngest of the bunch, Eugene (Ian Chen) is a kid who is very interested in hacking, Pedro (Jovan Armand) can best be described as the big guy, and Mary (Grace Fulton) is the oldest who has the intention of leaving Philadelphia to go to school here in California. Seemingly the first day at school, Billy saves Freddy from some bullies and needs to run away. He makes it into the subway and sits down, at which point...he is summoned by SHAZAM. Shazam no longer has any time to find someone perfect, but Billy is good enough, and Billy is transformed into the next champion, becoming SHAZAM (Zachary Levi). Billy doesn't know how to transform back to himself, but that comes eventually and he must deal with the consequences of bringing such powers back to a group home. In the meantime, Thad has grown up and become Dr. Sivana (Mark Strong). Dr. Sivana has been trying to find the Rock of Eternity for a very long time, and it isn't so that he can take the power of someone pure at heart, that's for sure.

The first thing to mention in this section, I suppose, is the mid-credits scene. That's the last thing I saw, but I did see the ending scene when I got home. I REALLY liked the mid-credits scene as they introduced a character I never thought would be in something like this, so that alone would have made me happy with the film. There's more to it than that, though. The story nicely weaves the familiar (to me) New 52 origin together with other things, which prevented me from becoming bored by watching something I already read a few years ago. To that end, I thought the scenarios Billy/Shazam were placed in really worked for me, and I thought they were quite amusing. That's the main obstacle in the way of making a successful movie about Shazam, the humor and whether or not the director can actually make it work. If the jokes bomb, the movie sucks and there's no movie worth watching at all. When they land, it's pretty good, although there is a natural ceiling to how good a Shazam story can actually be. The movie also largely rests upon whether or not the performance of Shazam is any good, the same can be said for whoever is decided to play the villain in this movie. Mark Strong and Zachary Levi do great work to that end, and the direction of some of Strong's scenes only enhances this feeling, with the cutting away from his monologue being one of my favorite parts of the film.

Overall, this film is light, and I do mean very light. That's good though, I wasn't really up for anything super serious and DC has regularly failed at achieving this, with examples that I don't need to name immediately coming to mind. Of course, Shazam! isn't a perfect movie, it does have some weaknesses. I also said it has a natural ceiling in that featuring a cast with so many children disallows the story from developing truly strong supporting characters, that's true throughout the film even though I found those stories engaging. I have always wondered why Shazam and Superman are so similar, and I still can't answer that, but I think WB/DC has been given a stroke of luck now that Henry Cavill has been canned. Do they really need to use Superman again so soon? I don't think so. The shorter version of everything I just wrote is that this film is well directed and well written, quite funny, and this feels like a film from an era long passed. Why do I say that? This is a bonding story after all, and it culminates in the characters fighting some goofy, 80's style demons. There's also stuff that takes place in a mall, and you know what, I'm just gonna stop right there. I don't want to spoil anything, but I do recommend this.

7.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Us
2. Gloria Bell
3. Arctic
4. High Flying Bird
5. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
6. Captain Marvel
7. Shazam!
8. The Beach Bum
9. Paddleton
10. Cold Pursuit
11. Happy Death Day 2U
12. Greta
13. Triple Frontier
14. Fighting with My Family
15. Brexit
16. The Dirt
17. Velvet Buzzsaw
18. Alita: Battle Angel
19. The Kid
20. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
21. The Upside
22. Dumbo
23. The Hummingbird Project
24. Escape Room
25. Captive State
26. The Highwaymen
27. What Men Want
28. Unicorn Store
29. Miss Bala
30. Glass
31. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
32. The Prodigy
33. Polar
34. Serenity

 

[909]

The Cloverfield Paradox (2018), directed by Julius Onah

I remember when in the moments leading up to this film's release, that I was eagerly anticipating it and made plans to pound straight through 10 Cloverfield Lane as soon as possible in order to watch this and have it make some sense. I remember when I was watching the Super Bowl and saw that Netflix bought the film, which left me with mixed feelings. Was this so good and so weird that Paramount thought the movie couldn't possibly make any money? Was it merely the latter of those two things, that it was just weird? Did Netflix buy this because Paramount knew it was trash and Netflix themselves have absolutely no taste? When reviews began to trickle in, I knew which one of those scenarios that it really was, so I made the decision to wait on this film until I'd watched more Netflix trash. The day to finally watch The Cloverfield Paradox was now, and I did know what I was getting into. I don't really know if they're going to continue this franchise, but I do think this film should be disregarded. It opens up too many...paradoxes, I could say. The film just does not make sense and I don't know how a franchise could continue after what I just watched unless it was decided to disregard the entire venture. Would they do that? I hate to say it but this film was trash and needs to be treated as such, and with the cast this had, I have no idea how anyone could make something so bad. Is it the case that each Cloverfield movie takes place in a different dimension? The things in 10 Cloverfield Lane suggest they do not. I don't want to deal with stupid shit though, I shouldn't have to think about things to this extent.

It's 2028, and this Earth is suffering from a global energy crisis, with no sign of an inter-dimensional or alien invasion. The space agencies have made a pact to test a particle accelerator called the Shepard, they know this is the only chance for the human race to survive and prosper. The Shepard is supposed to provide infinite energy for the planet, and it is on the Cloverfield Station, which is orbiting Earth. There are some conspiracy theorists, quite similar to Alex Jones in fact, and they say that the Shepard could in theory create a paradox and open portals to alternate universes. Nobody knows what the particle accelerator is truly capable of doing, people are quite cautious. We are first shown Ava Hamilton (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who is struggling with her decision about whether or not to be part of this project. She is married to Michael (Roger Davies), who encourages her to take part. They had children who died as a result of Ava attempting to steal power so their family could push on, but Michael seems to not blame her. Of course, Ava goes on the station. The crew also consists of Jason Kiel (David Oyelowo), the American station commander; Ernst Schmidt (Daniel Bruhl), the lead physicist from Germany; Monk Acosta (John Ortiz), the doctor from Brazil; Gordon Mundy (Chris O'Dowd) and Sasha Volkov (Aksel Hennie), the engineers from Ireland and Russia respectively; and lastly Ling Tam (Zhang Ziyi), the engineer responsible for working on the particle accelerator and Schmidt's girlfriend. That was a mouthful.

Anyway, the crew is about to take on their first attempt at activating Shepard, and of course it goes badly. So do many others, and what do you know it, it's two damn years later. The situation on Earth is getting worse and worse, the crew is left to find a solution. They think they have one and activate Shepard, and it seems that they'll have a good beam, but it turns out that they do not. The accelerator overloads and that leads to a power surge, which everyone works to fix as quickly as possible. Once power is restored, there's some weird shit going on here. I'm going to do my best not to spoil things too much in case someone cares, but here's what's important. Earth has vanished from the view of the station, and the gyroscope that allows Cloverfield Station to be navigated properly is missing for some reason. Volkov is experiencing some weird stuff going on with his face, and things are strange overall. Want to know how weird? The crew finds a woman in the wall, her name is Mina Jensen (Elizabeth Debicki). For some reason she has been fused with the wires inside of that wall, and it turns out there's something going on with her too. When she wakes up enough to speak, she tells Ava not to trust Schmidt, as she believes beyond dispute that Schmidt is a spy sent by the German government to prevent Shepard from working. To make a long story short, it turns out that when Shepard did work, it sent the station to a parallel universe, and because they aren't supposed to be there, things that aren't supposed to happen are happening.

I just really can't try to make heads or tails of how this all fits in with the other two Cloverfield movies, but the bit at the end with the giant monster now being large enough to peek through the crowds, I'm gonna say that's a no from me. This movie also straight out copies many other things from other films, which is the opposite of the other two. I hate when movies do this kind of thing. For lack of a better word, The Cloverfield Paradox is a trainwreck. There's so much stuff going on and very little of it I actually enjoyed. I thought the set design was nice and as always, I enjoyed that there was a movie at least related to space as I need more of that, but this wasn't good. I cannot accurately describe how disappointing a film this is, but I do think it's funny that people ran to watch this immediately after the Super Bowl. What a waste of time that sounds like. I think the film has too many problems to say, "this is the greatest problem with The Cloverfield Paradox," but there are some things that come to mind. One is that I didn't care about any of the characters, all of whom were quite boring and not fleshed out. The one who was, I didn't care for her at all. The Cloverfield Paradox also has issues with specific scenes where people have to walk into space and do things that just don't make any kind of scientific sense. The idea that people can jump from one part of a space rig to another without using any kind of tether sounds like ludicrous bullshit that I would rather not entertain any possibilty of being realistic.

I fucking hate this movie as you can tell, and I don't know why anyone allowed this to be made at all, but Paramount has made a lot of absolute garbage in the last few years. Their studio head got sick and died, which probably played a large part in that, but it seems like their new one is doing a slightly better job. Of course, someone would have to release all those shitty movies, and this is one of them, so it takes time to turn around a sinking ship. To have received $50 million for garbage like this is genuinely incredible and sounds impossible, but it isn't impossible because we know it happened. What made the Cloverfield franchise interesting to me was the way those films were loosely tied together and very well tied together as well, but The Cloverfield Paradox destroys that. I don't know how someone could even make a good Cloverfield movie from here, and I guess what I really wonder is why anyone would truly want to? Originality is very difficult in the film business, a lot of people can't pull it off, but we see here that someone tried to expand this film universe and failed entirely. Could it have been expanded at all? I don't know how to answer that, because nothing about this makes any sense at all and this shouldn't have been made.

3.5/10

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

 

[909]

Hotel Mumbai (2019), directed by Anthony Maras

So, it's time for another one of these real life disaster movies. I made comments about seeing this after Patriots Day, and it did take a while to get to this point, but now it's time. Here's the thing with Hotel Mumbai. The attacks at the Taj Hotel were much more prolonged than those in Boston, therefore there is going to be more focus on what the terrorists did, and now we have the question of whether or not something like this should be made. Once again, I do not know how to answer this. As I said in the previous review, as a Westerner, I did not know all of the details of the attacks and this film does have informative merit. I do think this comes as close as a movie could ever come to being terror porn without crossing the line. I also think Hotel Mumbai is a film that shows the merits of securing important locations to ensure that these things don't happen. In this case, however, it probably would have happened anyway. When someone really wants to do something like that, they're just going to do it. The logistics of these terrorists traveling for all that time when leaving Karachi, that's absolutely ridiculous. They were somehow never caught on the way there, so you know, even when two countries have a very heated history with one another, terrorists can still get into the neighboring country and destroy the fuck out of it. This movie being made is strange in that context, it doesn't try to make any grand message, but presents the events to you as they happened. This shit is very raw.

Hotel Mumbai begins with the morning before the attacks, as you may suspect and always happens in these kinds of movies. Our main guests that will be followed throughout the film are from very different places, of course. Arjun (Dev Patel) is an impoverished waiter who works at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, he works under the head chef, Mr. Oberoi (Anupam Kher). Oberoi is somewhat demanding, and Arjun forgot his shoes, leading Oberoi to send him home. Instead, Arjun takes some shoes from Oberoi that don't fit and continues on with his day. Imagine if he'd left. At the same time, there are some important guests at the hotel. Vasili (Jason Isaacs) is an ex-Spetsnaz operative with money, he uses it to bang prostitutes in his suite after having nice dinners. There's also a family of very wealthy people, with Zahra (Nazanin Boniadi) being a heiress from an Iranian-British family, David (Armie Hammer) being an architect from the states, their nanny Sally (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), and their infant son. This is not a place I would want to have brought my infant son. Sometime during these introductions, the beginning of the attack is shown, with the terrorists leaving their speedboats and boarding taxis. They continue to speak to a man who throughout the film is called the Bull, and he is coordinating the attacks in some way. I'm not sure anyone knows how to this day, which is quite unfortunate. This was obviously extremely well planned, done by a military or an intelligence service. Make no mistake about that. The leader on the ground is a man named Abdullah (Suhail Nayyar), he seems to be the oldest as well and keeps the terrorists focused on their tasks, all of which are not good.

There were ten terrorists, but I'm not going to list all of them because that's fucking stupid. They didn't immediately go to the hotel as a lot of people think, instead they split up. Some went to the train station, went into the bathroom and decided to walk out where they could kill as many people as possible. Others threw grenades into a cafe and walked in to shoot the people eating there, and some spread out to offices. In the end, though, they all attempted to come back to the hotel. Once they did, as you might be aware of, some very bad shit happens. David, Zahra, Arjun, and Vasili wind up trapped in one of the restaurants at the hotel, and Sally is in the hotel room with Zahra and David's son. While that's going on, the terrorists absolutely mow down a lot of people, and this is grueling and gruesome viewing. Eventually David leaves the restaurant in search of his son, and at that point we learn that there's no real help coming for the guests at the hotel. They need special forces to arrive, they're in New Delhi, a grand total of 875 miles away. What they really need to do is find a place to bunker down and hope for the best, and hopefully a few police officers will come into the building and try to save them. Luckily, Oberoi knows just the place, but certainly this is not going to go well.

I think this movie, much more so than Patriots Day, can be accused of focusing too much on what the terrorists actually did. It isn't glorifying terrorism, that's for sure. The film also doesn't push a revised version of their motives either. This was terrorism committed by an Islamic extremist organization and they say the things you would expect these people to say when they kill their victims. That is not good. This film isn't entertaining, but I admit there were one or two parts that felt like the good kind of levity and made me laugh. I also saw that this was the director's first attempt at making a feature film, and considering that, he did a great job. This film carries an immense ammount of tension because the audience already knows a lot of people died, yet the usual bits that introduce someone to the characters in the film feel better fleshed out than other films are able to accomplish. I think this is the kind of movie that also helps the audience to understand what these terrorist attacks entail, but I have previously criticized 22 July for doing the same thing. I think the difference is that the film from last year makes the mistake of giving Breivik's views too much air time, and he's not killing people while saying these things, so there is a difference as small as it may seem. The second half of 22 July is also not very good. Hotel Mumbai does not suffer from those problems and the tension is sustained throughout the entire film. It takes a good director to accomplish that.

Hotel Mumbai isn't without its weaknesses, largely because the material is so gruesome and harrowing, but beyond that there's also an issue with whether or not this is exploitation. I can't help myself here and it constantly comes to mind for a reason, because these movies kind of do exploit tragedy. There are still lots of big moments in this film, but it's weird the way the movie decides to largely focus on the hotel. The obvious reasons are because it's a nice building to look at, and because there are lots of Westerners who stayed there. But, this isn't a movie full of white people, there are just some of them and they're treated the same as everyone else is. I do wish that they wouldn't make movies like this one anymore because I have some concerns that a terrorist could use something like this as a blueprint for a repeat of the attack that's being re-enacted here. I can't be the only person in the world who thought this either, but the film has its merits and it is a pretty good film. I think the greatest lesson to be taken away from this is that special forces need to be stationed in large cities and be ready for such a moment. It shouldn't matter how much it costs or if those special forces never do anything, but as a society we shouldn't have a situation where some terrorists are able to hang around at a hotel for two days killing as many people as they want. At the same time, we have our own lessons to learn here in America, where we have people rent a hotel room and shoot up a country music festival, hitting 480 people with his bullets. That's right, 480. People only think about those who died, but in the case of these attacks in Mumbai, it was reported that 166 people were killed and 293 wounded. That's insane.

I probably should have talked more about how the film nicely paints the Indian staff members as the true heroes, deciding to stay when they easily could have left. In not talking about them I feel like I really fucked up, but all of those people are in a socio-economic class stratospheres away from that of the hotel guests and helped anyway. Colonialism is similarly a non-factor in their thinking. When it comes down to brass tacks, people are either good like them or evil like the terrorists. Simple as that.

7/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Us
2. Gloria Bell
3. Arctic
4. High Flying Bird
5. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
6. Captain Marvel
7. Shazam!
8. The Beach Bum
9. Paddleton
10. Hotel Mumbai
11. Cold Pursuit
12. Happy Death Day 2U
13. Greta
14. Triple Frontier
15. Fighting with My Family
16. Brexit
17. The Dirt
18. Velvet Buzzsaw
19. Alita: Battle Angel
20. The Kid
21. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
22. The Upside
23. Dumbo
24. The Hummingbird Project
25. Escape Room
26. Captive State
27. The Highwaymen
28. What Men Want
29. Unicorn Store
30. Miss Bala
31. Glass
32. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
33. The Prodigy
34. Polar
35. Serenity

 

[909]

Rough Night (2017), directed by Lucia Aniello

Being a completist, as it turns out, can be a complete bitch when it comes to having to watch films like this one. I'm going to watch Girls Trip as well, but that has much better reviews and as a result I don't feel so negatively as I did after watching this film tonight. It turns out that Rough Night has negative reviews for a reason, and I'm resisting the urge to make puns here, but this was for me as the title would indicate. Surprisingly for a comedy, there are numerous reasons this didn't work. Often enough, there's only a few and they're all really bad, but I actually have a lot here. I think it may turn out that television is a better medium for comedy than film, and that probably has a lot to do with why comedy is dying at the box office. I'm just guessing, I don't really know why it is, but I do know that it's happening. Perhaps it's that people just don't know how to make good comedy movies, but I do really think it's what I said about television. Usually, the people who write these movies now come from television and have to learn to make a story stretch far longer than it does on the small screen. Obviously, it doesn't work, and I'm just rambling on at this point. I would say that Rough Night is bad, but it's not that bad. I've seen a whole lot worse, but I expect more from a movie like this one.

Rough Night starts off in 2016, with Alice (Jillian Bell) and Jess (Scarlett Johansson) playing beer pong at George Washington University. Naturally, they win, and head back to their room where their other friends Frankie (Ilana Glazer) and Blair (Zoe Kravitz) are currently...sitting? I don't remember what they were doing. After some jokes, we fast forward a decade and everyone has moved on with their lives. It turns out that Frankie and Blair were in a relationship, and now Frankie is a professional protester while Blair is a high powered real estate agent who had a child and is getting divorced. Jess is attempting to run for her state senate, and lastly Alice is now a teacher. I feel bad for those kids. Jess has problems with relatability, and pretty much resembles Hillary Clinton in a TV spot that made me chuckle. Anyway, the four are scheduled to fly to Miami, the reason being that there's a bachelorette party for Jess. At the same time, her fiance Peter (Paul W. Downs) is going to have a bachelor party with his friends Tobey (Bo Burnham), Jake (Eric Andre), and Joe (Hasan Minhaj). The guys plan to do a wine tasting, which sounds unbelievably boring and is something I don't want to do at any point in my life. Visions of Sideways come to mind here.

Once the group of women arrive in Miami, they are joined by a friend Jess made in Australia while there for a semester, her name is Pippa (Kate McKinnon). Pippa, as you may suspect, is very fucking weird. The group meets her at a restaurant, and Frankie procures some coke from one of the busboys. So, it's time to have fun and they go to a club, Alice falls down like a goof, all seems good. They get back to the house they've rented on the beach, and I left out that they had weird swinger neighbors, Pietro (Ty Burrell) and Lea (Demi Moore). The neighbors are not home. That's good considering what happens next. Frankie hires a male stripper named Jay (Ryan Cooper), and he says some stuff that Jess didn't like. When Jess moves away, in comes Alice, who jumps on the poor bastard and kills him. I laughed. Anyway, Peter calls Jess right after this happens and she says that her friends hired a prostitute, then her phone gets smashed right as she's screaming "NOOOOO" into it as Peter is asking if she still wants to get married. The panic also leads to Blair confiscating everyone's phones, and they need to make their next move. They've moved the body in attempts to hide it from other people, so they're already screwed, but I'm going to get to the point. What could become a real problem is that Peter has decided to travel to Miami in an attempt to win Jess back, but the girls don't know that. They also need to get rid of the body as this has become a Weekend at Bernie's scenario.

The premise of this movie is totally stupid, and doesn't really flesh things out to the extent that it should in order for any of these scenes to really matter. I did laugh at Kate McKinnon though, and I also said I laughed when the guy died. Those scenes were genuinely funny. There are some others that get light chuckles, but yes, only light ones. I do find it interesting that Rough Night and Girls Trip were released in the span of a month and one movie made a lot more money than the other. I am not an expert enough to figure out why that is, but when I watch the latter film, maybe I'll know. What I thought was that Rough Night was too light and nowhere near as dark as it really should have ben. A movie like this needs people to become pieces of shit, and we just don't really have that here. Nobody goes far enough in order to get rid of the body, and the scenarios are rather PG-13 even though this is rated R. I will admit that I don't really know any of Ilana Glazer's comedy, or that of the director and writer, but I didn't find this to be particularly funny. I think we as an audience need so much more than this, and there are even minor misses in terms of the story. There's a scene where Blair has to have a threesome with the weird neighbors, and it turns out that there was no reason for her to do so because the security cameras didn't work. Why didn't they work a situation where the other girls had broken into the house only to find that out themselves and not say anything until a point later in the film? I don't know, it's a missed opportunity though.

Not everything here falls flat, but this is a film with other missed opportunities and I found myself wishing that other things had happened. I'm not the kind of person that thinks "DURRRRR WOMEN AREN'T FUNNY," but this isn't a great example of a funny movied helmed and driven by women. It's much more the jokes on parade here than the cast members, exhibited by one scene where someone goes to buy adult diapers to the tunes of "The Next Episode." Yeah, this is trash and revels in it being trash, but some of the cast members do a better job of making their horrible material work, like Kate McKinnon does, and others simply just can't. What we have here is a good outline for a story, but there's nothing to fill it out. I can't believe I'm going to make a weird food analogy because I absolutely never do that, but this was like when you buy a taco and they forget to put the meat inside. There's no meat here, and that's all there is to it. As already stated, a film like this needs to go over the top rather than play things straight and normal, this just doesn't do any of that.

4.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. The Shape of Water
3. Get Out
4. Mudbound
5. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
6. Logan
7. Wonder Woman
8. The Big Sick
9. Thor: Ragnarok
10. Logan Lucky
11. The Beguiled
12. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
13. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
14. The Lost City of Z
15. First They Killed My Father
16. Darkest Hour
17. A Ghost Story
18. Spider-Man: Homecoming
19. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
20. It
21. Battle of the Sexes
22. Okja
23. Kong: Skull Island
24. It Comes at Night
25. Split
26. 1922
27. Personal Shopper
28. Chuck
29. Atomic Blonde
30. Wheelman
31. The Lego Batman Movie
32. Megan Leavey
33. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
34. Menashe
35. American Made
36. Beauty and the Beast
37. Imperial Dreams
38. Murder on the Orient Express
39. The Zookeeper's Wife
40. Free Fire
41. Win It All
42. The Wall
43. Life
44. Breathe
45. The Man Who Invented Christmas
46. Sleight
47. Alone in Berlin
48. A United Kingdom
49. Trespass Against Us
50. The Mountain Between Us
51. War Machine
52. Happy Death Day
53. Lowriders
54. Justice League
55. To the Bone
56. Wakefield
57. The Hitman's Bodyguard
58. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
59. Rough Night
60. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
61. Sand Castle
62. CHiPs
63. Death Note
64. The Belko Experiment
65. The Great Wall
66. Fist Fight
67. Snatched
68. Wilson
69. Queen of the Desert
70. The House
71. Sleepless
72. All Eyez on Me

 

[Big Papa Paegan]

So they remade Very Bad Things but took most of the darkness out? Sounds as awful as it looks.

 

[909]

Hellboy (2019), directed by Neil Marshall

We're now rebooting things that came out 15 years ago, although in the case it wasn't going to continue unless it was rebooted and people wanted it to continue. I must admit that I haven't seen the other Hellboy movies, nor am I going to anytime soon, but I probably should have done so before I decided to see this. I also have to bring something else into this, I knew about all the bad reviews for the movie before I went tonight, and I didn't understand how this could have been all that good considering something else I saw either. I learned that Hellboy had a budget of $50 million. I didn't understand how, and I still don't know how that's possible, but one way in which it may have been is that the cast is relatively small. It isn't fair to leave people in suspense, so I'll come right out with it. This film is not good. I do, however, think that it could have been good. The reason why it wasn't is probably obvious, this is a reboot that throws too many concepts at the viewer all at once, it gets boring for a stretch and only recovers near the end, then there's a rush of sequel bait to cap things off. It would have been so much easier if this was bad and if there weren't things I had to explain, but I must explain! There are plot points that I actively enjoyed and will admit to such, and this is rather entertaining for the most part...but I must explain how this sets up.

I wish I could say this is similar to Hellboy (2004) in one way and another but I can't, I haven't seen it. So, our film starts with Dad (Ian McShane) narrating the events that will set up our story. This Hellboy is only slightly disguised as another King Arthur story, and you already know how I feel about those. I don't mind the fantasy part, but you know, King Arthur? Come on. Nimue (Milla Jovovich) is the Blood Queen and this is around 500 AD, she is betrayed by her coven before destroying humanity. After the betrayal, Merlin (Brian Gleeson) and King Arthur (Mark Stanley) piece Nimue up, put those parts in separate caskets, and send some knights to ride to the corners of England where she will not be found. Of course, they're found. Before that, we snap over to the present day, with Hellboy (David Harbour) in search of an agent who disappeared in Tijuana. Hellboy pulls up to a lucha libre event (how could I hate this as much as I'm supposed to?), finds him there in the ring cutting a promo, and the agent challenges Hellboy to a fight. Hellboy doesn't want to, but he fights the guy and finds that he's facing a vampire. Hellboy is able to impale the vampire on the ring post even though he didn't want to, and at the same time there's a creature who looks like an overgrown pig seeking help from Baba Yaga. I'm telling you man. Baba Yaga tells the pig, named Gruagach (voiced by Stephen Graham), that he needs to find Nimue's body parts and resurrect her.

After the incident with Hellboy and the vampire, he returns to the BPRD and has a talk with the already mentioned Dad, who sends him to England to help the Osiris Club hunt three giants. While there, Hellboy is told of his origins and how he was summoned by Nazis, and that all these people including his adopted father Trevor were there and decided not to kill the demon when he came out of hell. These people tell Hellboy that he'll bring about the end of the world, so surely enough, they attack him. At the same time, Gruagach is finding those body parts, and after Hellboy fights with some giants, he is rescued by a young woman. The woman is Alice (Sasha Lane), who he rescued from fairies when she was a baby. The fairies had placed the already mentioned Gruagach in her crib as a changeling, but I bet a lot of people in the audience may not have picked up on this. While at her house, Hellboy is introduced to Ben Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim), an agent who works on supernatural matters across the pond. These two must find a way to stop Nimue from being resurrected, but Daimio is working his own game. He has acquired a bullet made of all kinds of weird shit, and it should kill Hellboy by shooting him in the heart. There you have it.

Hellboy isn't a particularly long film, so I described quite a lot of it in an attempt to tell you how much shit is going on here. There's also way more than that, but anyway, this isn't a good film even though I did find it somewhat entertaining. I do not think it's deserving of such a low score on Rotten Tomatoes, but at the same time, I can't tell you how anyone could possibly think this was a very good movie. I've already seen the worst film of the year and nothing will contend with it, but this wasn't so hot either. I know there's others that were released and I wound up skipping due to lack of time, I'll catch up with them. This has too much going on, I hate King Arthur stories, and the amount of origins in this film are absolutely fucking incredible. The film is jammed with them. I can't compare this to the other Hellboy movies, but I will tell you that I thought David Harbour had a good performance. I also though that, while overboard, some of the gore was quite amusing and unexpected in how far the filmmakers actually went. The parts with Baba Yaga are a similar laugh, I certainly wasn't expecting a house on stilts. That's another example of why I don't understand the budget and how it was possible to deliver a film like this at that cost. Maybe the budget is bullshit.

As a whole the film is way too much and doesn't establish characters other than Hellboy, which isn't good seeing as Daimio and Alice are around Hellboy for nearly the whole duration of the film's second half. The action scenes are too numerous and the film really could have done with some slowing down time to enhance those characters, but we didn't get it and that's that. This is not how you launch a franchise, but at the same time, now that it's out of the way, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for it to continue on with a different director. It has been said that Hellboy was a troubled shoot, with too many cooks in the kitchen, but those problems can be solved with a decent director. I don't know why a decent director would jump into that mess though. Back to what I was saying though, now that too many characters have been introduced, one could make a film introducing one or two villains and have a much easier time of it. I would watch it, but I don't have terribly high hopes. I think when making a reboot, there's only one chance to make a good impression and they failed. There's probably not going to be any coming back from that, and I don't know how this film would make enough money. They would need around $90 million from foreign markets to even consider it, and I don't think that'll happen. This was a wasted opportunity and showed why Guillermo del Toro should have been allowed to direct his vision of the third film.

4/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Us
2. Gloria Bell
3. Arctic
4. High Flying Bird
5. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
6. Captain Marvel
7. Shazam!
8. The Beach Bum
9. Paddleton
10. Hotel Mumbai
11. Cold Pursuit
12. Happy Death Day 2U
13. Greta
14. Triple Frontier
15. Fighting with My Family
16. Brexit
17. The Dirt
18. Velvet Buzzsaw
19. Alita: Battle Angel
20. The Kid
21. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
22. The Upside
23. Dumbo
24. The Hummingbird Project
25. Escape Room
26. Captive State
27. The Highwaymen
28. What Men Want
29. Unicorn Store
30. Miss Bala
31. Hellboy
32. Glass
33. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
34. The Prodigy
35. Polar
36. Serenity

 

[909]

Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer (2017), directed by Joseph Cedar

Talk about a mouthful of a title there, the original title of Oppenheimer Strategies was much better. Anyway, I must admit that I believe I've only seen one of Richard Gere's movies before. I can't explain how or why it is, I just think it's true when I look at what he's done. That's pretty weird, but in any case, it isn't like Gere's done very much in the last ten years. So, if anyone cares, they shouldn't and I'm just going to move on. Norman is the kind of movie that I'm a little surprised even exists, but I found it to be quite amusing. This was described as a thriller, and I would suggest that it really isn't? I found this guy to be so fucking obnoxious that I can't believe anyone would even be forced to be around him. In that, I found quite a lot of humor, and I also thought that this film really brought something to the table. It's nice when a film leaves the viewer with questions, and that's also very hard to do, so when I see something like that I'm quite satisfied. I also thought this is the kind of movie best viewed at home, which I don't often say. It's quite slow, and with that in mind, I probably wouldn't recommend it to everyone here. Anyway, what's this all about? Read on.

If I knew someone like this, I think I would smack their head in, but fortunately I don't. At least I don't anymore. Norman Oppenheimer (Richard Gere), if that is his real name and if he's even what he presents himself to be, is certainly in question come the end of the film. Norman is one of those professional bullshitters. He has a business card even though he doesn't have an office, and his company is called Oppenheimer Strategies. Norman fashions himself as a fixer, he makes connections with people and sticks them together with one another so that good things happen. The film starts with him spinning a trash ass investment opportunity in the Ivory Coast as an excuse to get two people in the room. He'll use other people for whatever reason, and he says that a Harvard graduate named Philip (Michael Sheen) is his nephew, but I don't know if I believe that either. He uses Philip in an attempt to set up a meeting between a deputy Minister of Energy in the Israeli government named Micha Eshel (Lior Ashkenazi), and a businessman in New York named Arthur Taub (Josh Charles). For whatever reason he thinks these two will make great business associates. He buys Micha a pair of shoes and assumes that he'll come to the dinner at Arthur's house, which I should point out Norman invited himself to, but he did not. Arthur is dejected, but the pair of shoes was so expensive that Micha feels the need to call him later that night and apologize. They have a conversation, it turns out Norman does some small favors for Micha along the way, and we have a friendship.

The film moves forward a few years, and it turns out that Micha has become the Prime Minister of Israel. A bullshit artist like Norman is very pleased with this. There's a convention of some kind in Washington D.C., and Norman goes there to see Micha again, who remembers him. Now I don't know if Norman did those favors or not, but in the process of this meeting, he gets reingratiated with the PM and meets a ton of people. Obviously, for someone like Norman, this is fantastic and he's going to be able to spin more yarn. Norman's ability to name drop is unmatched, and he does his best to portray himself as setting up connections between two people who don't really need him. Now, on the way home, he gets on the Amtrak back to New York City and winds up sitting next to a justice official working at the Israeli consulate, Alex Green (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Alex initially pays Norman no mind, and once she ignores him, this sets him off into dropping the most knowledge he can possibly drop in order to get her attention. What seems to get her is when he asks questions about her personal life, and these questions lead to her asking how he knows the Prime Minister. You know exactly what a guy like that would do in order to get her attention. At the same time, Norman is also seeking to be in further contact with Micha, and there's a problem with finding a donor for his synagogue, which is run by Rabbi Blumenthal (Steve Buscemi). I can't really describe these schemes to any of you, but they all intertwine delightfully. They are also going to explode, make no mistake about that.

The first thing I noticed about this film's cast was that all of the Americans in the more prominent Jewish roles are not Jewish. This is clearly on purpose, I don't know what the director's humor is because I haven't seen any of his other movies, but there's something going on with that. I think the cast for such a film is also quite strong, and that this was quite nicely made overall. Rarely do we have a portrait of someone with this affliction of being an insane liar, it was strong enough that I don't know what to make of it. I'm loathe to pass judgment on people or characters who don't deserve it, but I was left with the feeling that lying so much is a mental illness rather than a sure sign of someone being such a bad person. If you watch the film you'll see what I mean. There are some logic gaps in the story though, for starters I don't understand how a person like this can even afford to survive. Norman's consulting services aren't those that earn money, instead they inflate his social standing as a result of being connected to all these people. It also makes him feel like he's needed by the people who he actually hangs around because he can drop names in an attempt to get his actual friends out of a jam. I don't know what to make of this shit. I can only assume that someone who lies this much has a painfully low opinion of their own worth and value to the world.

Now, there's no movie like this without a character coming near to the equal of Norman, and while the Israeli Prime Minister is not quite that, he's a good one. He's visited by an American lobbyist or congressperson of some kind, and when the American asks him what his message while touring this country is going to be, Micha goes on a very long rant about his own standing in the world and what it means for him to be the Prime Minister. He wants peace and says that there's two ways it could go, that God put him there to take all the credit or he doesn't understand why God put an incompetent like him in such a job. Either way it feels like he puts no bearing on his own part in the process of creating a peace treaty and if he fails, it isn't his fault. That kind of bizarre narcissism manifests itself so well at the ending of this film. I was going to rate this a little lower, but as I summarize the events of Norman, I find myself liking it more and more. You know how often I feel that way about a film after the fact? It isn't a regular thing for me, but I'm thinking about how Steve Buscemi was playing a rabbi, and how Richard Gere was lying about absolutely everything, and this worked for me on almost all levels. It really did, and I didn't realize how much I liked the movie until I started to write about the character Hank Azaria played, who was a younger guy doing the exact same things Norman was doing. The look on Gere's face when he encounters this guy is incredible, and this was a pretty good film with lots of neat touches like that. Things just take a while to pick up.

7.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. The Shape of Water
3. Get Out
4. Mudbound
5. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
6. Logan
7. Wonder Woman
8. The Big Sick
9. Thor: Ragnarok
10. Logan Lucky
11. The Beguiled
12. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
13. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
14. The Lost City of Z
15. First They Killed My Father
16. Darkest Hour
17. A Ghost Story
18. Spider-Man: Homecoming
19. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
20. It
21. Battle of the Sexes
22. Okja
23. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
24. Kong: Skull Island
25. It Comes at Night
26. Split
27. 1922
28. Personal Shopper
29. Chuck
30. Atomic Blonde
31. Wheelman
32. The Lego Batman Movie
33. Megan Leavey
34. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
35. Menashe
36. American Made
37. Beauty and the Beast
38. Imperial Dreams
39. Murder on the Orient Express
40. The Zookeeper's Wife
41. Free Fire
42. Win It All
43. The Wall
44. Life
45. Breathe
46. The Man Who Invented Christmas
47. Sleight
48. Alone in Berlin
49. A United Kingdom
50. Trespass Against Us
51. The Mountain Between Us
52. War Machine
53. Happy Death Day
54. Lowriders
55. Justice League
56. To the Bone
57. Wakefield
58. The Hitman's Bodyguard
59. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
60. Rough Night
61. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
62. Sand Castle
63. CHiPs
64. Death Note
65. The Belko Experiment
66. The Great Wall
67. Fist Fight
68. Snatched
69. Wilson
70. Queen of the Desert
71. The House
72. Sleepless
73. All Eyez on Me

 

[909]

Pet Sematary (2019), directed by Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer

I don't understand why this year's Pet Sematary needed two directors, that's something that just won't make sense to me on any level. Anyway, I think that's something I would say about Pet Sematary as a whole. This is not one of my favorite movies of the year, that much is already obvious. For a movie to market itself as a horror movie and be this amusing is not a good sign at all. I didn't find anything here even remotely scary, and I was also thinking that the people who marketed this made a major mistake. The trailers give the entire film away, but the ending is a neat twist that I wasn't expecting. I think that's a problem, and the inability to maintain anything remotely scary with the proceedings, that's a huge failure. So why have so many people gone to see Pet Sematary? The box office take is going to easily be over $100 million, so maybe I'm not in tune with the general public. The overall reception to Glass showed me that I'm not, and that's okay. I think this film misses the mark as much as a movie possibly could, but at the same time, is it all that bad? Is this a case of expectations being something that couldn't be met? Maybe that's true, I didn't think the film was completely terrible despite what I've already said. Expectations for everything, even Avengers: Endgame, should not get too high.

Louis Creed (Jason Clarke) is a doctor from Boston, and why he has such a bad name, I don't know. Thank Stephen King for that. Louis is moving out of Boston to Maine with his family because he no longer wants to work the graveyard shift. Those shifts take a toll on someone's family as we all know, he just can't handle it. Louis is married to Rachel (Amy Seimetz) and they have two kids, Ellie (Jete Laurence) and Gage. Gage is a little guy. They also have a cat, Church, named after Winston Churchill. When they arrive at their house in Maine, it looks nice, but something's just a little bit off. Ellie goes out to explore the woods behind their house, and she comes across a ritual procession of some kids wearing masks while taking their dead dog to the cemetery to bury it. Yes, there's a pet cemetery on their property, and it is misspelled to give you this title. Jud (John Lithgow) is their neighbor, and he informs the Creed family about this area. It turns out that he's had his own pets die and be buried there as well, he's lived in this town of Ludlow for his entire life. For whatever reason this thing with the children is never explored again. Anyway, it turns out that once they arrive in Ludlow, Louis and Rachel start having visions about bad things that happened in their past. Rachel had a sister who was born with spinal meningitis, and it turns out that Rachel also accidentally killed her.

Louis has a seemingly easy job as a doctor at a university, but something bad happens on one of his first days there. He is tasked with saving the life of a student, Victor Pascow (Obssa Ahmed). Louis is unable to do so, Victor was hit by a car and is too far gone. The next night, he has a dream where he sees Victor, and Victor tells him to not venture beyond the back of the pet cemetery. When Louis wakes up, he has mud and dirt on his sheets, there's much more to this than it simply being a nightmare. On Halloween, Louis is supposed to take his kids trick-or-treating, but he's encountered by Jud on the way to the car. Unfortunately, the cat has been run over by a diesel truck on the road, but Jud thinks that Ellie really needs this cat and doesn't want her feelings to be hurt. Jud is not entirely wrong. He takes Louis to the pet sematary, but they have a discussion and instead he leads Louis to an ancient burial ground that seems as if it isn't on Earth at all. He tells Louis that the cat can be brought back if buried on this ground, but the ground is apparently not good ground. The cat comes back home alive but he is now extremely aggressive. This leads to Louis confronting Jud, and Jud says that it is believed the graveyard is inhabited by a spirit, that there was a legend from a long time ago and quite a few people believed it. Jud also says that an old man tried to help him do this with his dog when he was younger, but the dog came back with bad behavior. He assumed this was because the dog wasn't any good in the first place, but he was wrong. THE GROUND...IS BAD.

The trailer gives away everything else, I won't waste your time with any of that. As I said, I found this movie to be quite funny. There is an enormous logic gap with what Louis does when one of his children dies, particularly considering that the cat came back and acted like a shit cat. There is no commentary made on Louis having a psychotic break or anything of the sort. I think part of people's affinity for this film is that they have attachments to Stephen King, otherwise I admittedly do not understand at all. I tried very hard to take this film seriously and found myself completely unable to do so. I haven't seen the film from 30 years ago and now I don't know that I ever will, but this is missing something. The lack of scare factor permeates throughout the entire film and is likely the biggest problem Pet Sematary has, a movie like this has to be scary on some level and this is not. John Lithgow's performance here, I will admit, is quite strong. He's still John Lithgow and people should have expectations of him delivering, so that isn't a surprise. Everyone else does a decent job and no worse, but not too much better than that either. This film is just missing a soul, it doesn't have one. The things shown on screen here should never be so funny, but Pet Sematary shows that it takes talent to direct a good film.

On the subject of the directing, the choice in music starting the film off reminded me of a corny 90's movie. I don't know if that was the point, but I found that funny too. Perhaps it's too much to ask that a horror movie has genuine shock factor and surprise? I don't think it is. My review here is short because the film is very short, which I think I would consider to be another positive. Let me be clear here, I did not like this. Lithgow's performance was good, and that's the only reason for the score I'm giving. I admit I haven't read the book, but I don't understand why Louis walked over to Jud's house to randomly have a drink after his child died. The death of his child is also largely Jud's fault, and I don't really know what to say about this. I don't know how Pet Sematary got such hot reviews at SXSW, the movie sucks. It just doesn't suck as bad as some of the other stuff I've watched lately.

5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Us
2. Gloria Bell
3. Arctic
4. High Flying Bird
5. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
6. Captain Marvel
7. Shazam!
8. The Beach Bum
9. Paddleton
10. Hotel Mumbai
11. Cold Pursuit
12. Happy Death Day 2U
13. Greta
14. Triple Frontier
15. Fighting with My Family
16. Brexit
17. The Dirt
18. Velvet Buzzsaw
19. Alita: Battle Angel
20. The Kid
21. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
22. The Upside
23. Dumbo
24. The Hummingbird Project
25. Escape Room
26. Captive State
27. The Highwaymen
28. Pet Sematary
29. What Men Want
30. Unicorn Store
31. Miss Bala
32. Hellboy
33. Glass
34. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
35. The Prodigy
36. Polar
37. Serenity

 

[909]

Strong Island (2017), directed by Yance Ford

I thought that it had been a long time since I watched a documentary, and I also thought that I'd put Strong Island off for long enough. I knew that this would be a difficult watch, because these crime documentaries do affect me. That's why I don't watch them very often and that's why I've never spoken about watching a true crime documentary series. My documentary reviews are always short and with good reason, I believe that documentaries are something that people have to watch in order to gain full understanding from what's in front of them. Films like this one are the greatest example of that, they hit very hard. I wasn't quite expecting exactly how hard some of this would hit, I thought this was going to be an investigatory documentary, but I was wrong about that. Strong Island feels very different in that way, it is more a reflection of what happens to a family in the wake of such tragedy. This film is just different, it really is. People need to learn why it isn't acceptable for others to die because someone says that they're scared. Merely saying that one is scared appears to be enough to justify anything. What is there to be scared of? In the case of this film, it sounds like there was nothing to be scared of, and certainly nothing that should lead to a life being taken too soon. This documentary is so personal, so raw and real.

Strong Island tells the story of the Ford family, and specifically of the killing of William Ford, a 24 year old black man from Long Island who was shot dead by a mechanic, Mark Reilly. Ford had gone to pick up his car from a chop shop after they'd smashed into the car while he was driving and they'd made a deal to fix it at the shop. When the accident had happened, Reilly had said something about Ford's mother. Ford saw Reilly at the shop, he followed Reilly to speak to him or for who knows what, and Reilly shot him with a rifle at intermediate range. Not close range. The case was investigated, or rather "investigated" and brushed aside. Ford's murderer was never even brought to trial, exonerated by a grand jury of 23 men who thought the killing was justified because they'd argued at the shop some time before. Self-defense, whatever that means, was the determination. The district attorney effectively worked against Ford in order to prove Reilly's innocence, the way that these things have always happened, but some people want to believe this is a more recent phenomenon. This murder occurred in 1992, the killing has haunted the filmmaker and his family since then. Guilt, regret, and stress has done horrible damage to them.

The Ford family starts with two people, the father, William Sr., and the mother, Barbara. The two had left the Jim Crow South in hopes of a better life, thinking that if they played by the rules of America and did everything they were supposed to do, things would be just fine. For a long time they were. They had children, three of them. William Jr. was the oldest, a somewhat short and stocky young man. Yance was born a woman, is now a man. Coming to terms with himself was very difficult. The youngest sister, she tells her story, but in truth she seems to have been protected. There is a reason the film centers around the director and his mother, and you'll need to watch it if you want to know why. The story Barbara tells where she says she regretted telling her children to judge people by their character instead of the color of their skin, that was a sad moment that could be perceived in many ways. It was clear to me what she meant, which is the sad fact that white people can't handle black people getting mad at them when the white person does something wrong. There are many stories told in this documentary, but the overall point is as such. If an institution is intent on pretending a black death did not happen, that's exactly how it's going to be. White society has made it acceptable to ignore those who do not share our background and pretend that their problems do not matter. If you can't hear them, it didn't happen. If you do hear them, they're talking too loud about it and need to do it the right way. That's how it is.

I actually don't have much to say about this film beyond what I've already said, I think I've made my feelings clear. I think as far as a documentary goes, this is put together in expert fashion, presenting things in a chronological order. I did not feel anything was left out, it seems some people on the internet disagreed. A person getting mad and picking up a car door a week or two before that is no reason to take life, that's a reason not to try to fuck someone over as it appears this chop shop was doing. I thought it was an excellent piece of filmmaking to leave out two details related to Ford's life until they came about chronologically. The first one was that William was a witness in a trial where someone had shot an assistant district attorney in the process of robbing them. William had tackled the gunman and prevented him from escaping. The other story was about how William was attempting to become a corrections officer. His appeal had been granted weeks after he died and he would have been one had he not been murdered. The case that people can play by the rules, die anyway, and nobody will do anything about it? That sticks with me, it always has, and when I watch something like this, I do understand why it's acceptable. It's because the people who have the power to do something (read: white people), are content to do nothing because they found something out about the victim they did not like. In the absence of that, they just fall back to the lamest card in the book. The person was scared and therefore they can do anything they want. Bullshit.

8.5/10

 

[909]

Gifted (2017), directed by Marc Webb

I was putting together my list for this month, and I went down the list of expiring movies on Cinemax and saw Gifted. After seeing it, I checked IMDB to see what it was about and who was in it, and I saw that this had an incredibly high IMDB rating for a film I'd never heard of. I learned immediately why the film had such a high rating. I think it was good enough, but the story is such that neckbeards around the internet would flock to proclaim this as being a perfect film. I find that very amusing. I also think that for the most part, such stories are no longer made anymore unless they're religious films, so certainly this is a unique kind of film where such things aren't pushed on people. Is that why this film had a decent box office or is it because Captain America played the lead? I don't know the answer to that, but we'll find out if Captain America is a real box office draw soon enough. Anyway, about the movie itself. Movies featuring children in these kinds of stories are not my thing. That's double the case when it's a custody battle like in I Am Slam. That stuff isn't for me at all, I don't find them particularly enjoyable, and I hate that movie. I hate it so much in fact that I can guarantee I will never rewatch and review that film in any way, not even when these reviews shorten in the future.

Frank (Chris Evans) and Mary (Mckenna Grace) are the Adlers, they live in a small house somewhere in St. Petersburg, down in Florida. Frank is Mary's uncle, and Mary is six or seven years old. Mary came to live with Frank when her mother committed suicide, and Frank believed that his sister Diane would have wanted him to become the guardian of her child. In his previous life, he was a philosophy professor in Massachusetts, but those were different times. He now repairs boats, which is a job that allows him to stay close to his niece as it isn't particularly intensive and she can join him on those boats. Anyway, when the film begins, against the wishes of Frank's neighbor Roberta (Octavia Spencer), it's time for Mary to head off to school. Roberta is also Mary's best friend, for reasons that will become apparent as I continue writing. On that first day, her teacher is Mrs. Stevenson (Jenny Slate), and Mary does not treat the teacher the same way the other children do. Why? Because she's not like them. Mary finds the curriculum to be far too easy, and she doesn't like the children her age, which explains why Roberta is her friend. Frank is displeased with Mary's initial behavior as he wanted her to blend in and not show off, because they'd had an agreement for that not to happen.

Eventually, there are problems with the principal, Mrs. Davis (Elizabeth Marvel), because she thinks Mary belongs in a school for gifted children. She's not entirely wrong with that, but Frank thinks the same things I do. While the world works because of gifted children who had their minds nurtured, there are other kids who don't do so well with that. Most children with extreme intelligence do not have a normal life because people put expectations on them. Anyway, when it's show-and-tell time, Mary starts to become a little more acclimated to school. She brings her one eyed cat Fred, and there's also an art assignment that culminates in her defending someone from being bullied. The problem with Mary's defense is that she broke the bully's nose, and this springs the principal into action. After much searching, she finds Mary's grandmother, Evelyn (Lindsay Duncan). Frank and his mother have an estranged relationship, that much is obvious. There are reasons why, the one I can most easily bring up is because Frank has resentment over how his sister was treated by their mother. Once Evelyn is found and springs to action, all bets are off. She's driven to ensure that her granddaughter is given an absurdly restrictive education, regardless of if that's what a child needs. So, Evelyn sues for custody, and you see why this film has a high IMDB rating, because a man has to TAKE HER ON IN COURT.

Gifted is a very cliched film, that's no surprise and anyone can see how that would be the case. I really don't have much to offer beyond basics here. I find that when there are films like this one, my enjoyment of them is related to the questions they pose to the viewer. In the case of Gifted, there's an easy answer to whether or not this poses questions. It doesn't. A lot of people really loved the film despite that, and that's cool, I'm just not one of those kinds of people. I will say that the actors here do have very strong chemistry. Evans does with everyone, and for that matter so does the child actress, I was a little surprised by this. It's really disconcerting now when there are child actors near their teen years that were born after I became an adult. I'm not ready for any of that. I think this film is merely adequate as a whole, and I'm going to wrap up the review from there. There are some moments where I did feel the script had emotional weight, this is a big difference from the ridiculous aspects of I Am Slam. Have you figured out how much I hate that movie yet? There's one glaring flaw in Gifted, one which prevented me from talking about the movie more. Mary, Evelyn, and Frank are rarely on screen at the same time, and the trio needed to be much more so that we could understand more about Evelyn's motivations beyond the fact that she wants to create another genius mathematician. The film doesn't give us that, so...

6.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. The Shape of Water
3. Get Out
4. Mudbound
5. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
6. Logan
7. Wonder Woman
8. The Big Sick
9. Thor: Ragnarok
10. Logan Lucky
11. The Beguiled
12. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
13. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
14. The Lost City of Z
15. First They Killed My Father
16. Darkest Hour
17. A Ghost Story
18. Spider-Man: Homecoming
19. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
20. It
21. Battle of the Sexes
22. Okja
23. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
24. Kong: Skull Island
25. It Comes at Night
26. Split
27. 1922
28. Personal Shopper
29. Chuck
30. Atomic Blonde
31. Wheelman
32. The Lego Batman Movie
33. Megan Leavey
34. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
35. Menashe
36. American Made
37. Beauty and the Beast
38. Imperial Dreams
39. Gifted
40. Murder on the Orient Express
41. The Zookeeper's Wife
42. Free Fire
43. Win It All
44. The Wall
45. Life
46. Breathe
47. The Man Who Invented Christmas
48. Sleight
49. Alone in Berlin
50. A United Kingdom
51. Trespass Against Us
52. The Mountain Between Us
53. War Machine
54. Happy Death Day
55. Lowriders
56. Justice League
57. To the Bone
58. Wakefield
59. The Hitman's Bodyguard
60. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
61. Rough Night
62. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
63. Sand Castle
64. CHiPs
65. Death Note
66. The Belko Experiment
67. The Great Wall
68. Fist Fight
69. Snatched
70. Wilson
71. Queen of the Desert
72. The House
73. Sleepless
74. All Eyez on Me

 

[909]

The Best of Enemies (2019), directed by Robin Bissell

The thing that came to mind when I first saw the trailer for The Best of Enemies was one I'm sure a ton of other people had. "Here we go again." On this subject, I feel how I fucking feel. These are not the stories about race that need to be told. This is probably even more true when the person is directing their film esn't have experience in such a role. That balance of such a movie could prove to be quite off. In the case of The Best of Enemies, the balance certainly is off. These kinds of movies, I already said, should not even exist. I feel that so strongly, there's no limit to how strongly I feel about it. I gave Green Book a good review because I thought it was a good film with two great characters who were performed by actors with great chemistry. The film also had balance where this one does not. Now, when I gave that good review, I didn't realize the film was written by someone who wouldn't be out of place at a Klan meeting. That's not my fault. The Best of Enemies is another movie where the audience is asked to watch a racist be converted by the good deeds of another. When are we going to see one of these films feature a racist getting their head beaten in with a shovel? That's what I really want to see, I think that's what the audience deserves. These people constantly get off so light, and very rarely are they ever given the treatment they deserve from the characters they've treated so badly. I am going to start judging these movies much more harshly, it's 2019.

Our film starts off in 1971, it's Durham in North Carolina. Ann Atwater (Taraji P. Henson) is a civil rights activist attempting to get someone's apartment fixed by a terrible landlord. At the end of the scene, she is instructed by Carvie Oldham (Bruce McGill) to attend the city council meeting. Subsequently, we head over to the other side of town, or tracks if you will. C.P. Ellis (Sam Rockwell) is the president of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter. He and his deputy Floyd (Wes Bentley) help to run things, and they've established a local youth chapter to infect the minds of young white children with the disease of racism. The way it's presented here, it's not like the Klan would need any help with that. It is made clear over the course of the film's opening stretches that many of the city council members, including Mr. Oldham, are in league with the Klan and other like minded individuals. After the meeting Ellis attends, he and some other members go to shoot up the house of a white woman with a black boyfriend. This is so goofy, and I have to remember to go back to this point later in my review. I hope people read this because it seems clear that everyone needs to be educated on whether or not these sorts of films pass the smell test. Anyway, to make a long story fucking short, Atwater has two daughters, and Ellis has three children with his wife, Mary (Anne Heche). His oldest child Larry has Down Syndrome and lives in a psychiatric hospital.

So, I guess I've properly set the rest up. One day, while Atwater's children are at the black school, an electrical fire starts that leaves the school destroyed. The white school on the other side of the city does not have the same problems. This leads to a contentious city council meeting where it is announced that the black children must return to their school, it was made of brick so it did not burn to the ground, and people can work on it while they're there. The NAACP shows up to file an injunction, and the judge doesn't want to grant it entirely, so he comes up with a compromise solution. Bill Riddick (Babou Ceesay) is what can best be described as an arbitrator or moderator, and he calls a charrette. A charrette, as this film presents it, is a place where people in the community gather and come to solutions that should benefit the needs of the area. At this charrette, Ellis and Atwater are asked to be co-chairs, and at the behest of other people in the city, they accept. Then, along comes more leaders, a man named Garland Keith (Nick Searcy) who presents himself as a leader of a white citizen's group, and there's Howard Clement (Gilbert Glenn Brown), a representative from a black solidarity movement of some kind. These people have to agree to take eight other persons from the community in order to have votes on whether or not schools will be integrated, as well as make recommendations on other subjects related to education.

This film is hard for me to describe in the above paragraphs because the events portrayed are total bullshit and none of this stuff actually happened. The courts ordered the schools desegregated and there was never a vote on that, but the people did vote on other things. Of course, if you don't have the vote on school integration, the way a film studio sees it is that you don't have a film. We shouldn't have had a film. I have frequently stated that I don't mind minor manipulation of a story, but this is all wrong and totally false. There are greater issues beyond that as well. The story as presented by the director paints Ellis in a much more sympathetic light than Atwater, and I also noticed they only showed the KKK doing bad things to other white people. That was the point when I knew I didn't like the film at all, and I didn't react to anything else while I was sitting there. If you watch this movie, I'm sure you'll see it the same way as me. What should have been a portrait of Atwater turns into one of Ellis and his friends, and I'm sure you can tell how I feel about that. There are numerous scens where Ellis is meeting with other Klan members, there is not a single one where we see the housing conditions that black people in East Durham were complaining about. For that matter, we see Atwater's daughters a grand total of two times and learn nothing about her life beyond activism. This is garbage, I tell you. I cannot believe anyone would make a movie about a Klan leader without showing a Klan member doing anything violent towards a black person. It blows my fucking mind.

I can admit that Henson has a strong performance even though I don't like the film, and I did find the way she was treating those pieces of shit to be righteous. The best way to describe The Best of Enemies is that it is a racism story presented from the side of racists who change their mind. I know that C.P. Ellis went on to do very strong things, so I do feel bad in saying that his part of the story shouldn't have been told, but it shouldn't have. The lack of accuracy is absolutely incredible, and one thing that does stick with me is the way this film completely erases how the reality of the situation (read: not what was in this movie) was tied to organized labor. Of course a film would delete that, organized labor is something that is to be stomped on these days. Doesn't matter if a lot of people believe in it to their core, like I do. Sam Rockwell tried really hard, I will say that, but this isn't a part that does him any favors. The perspective of the film is borked, and Hollywood has got to stop making these racists look sympathetic. There's a part where we see how poor C.P.'s family is, it is said that it is because he doesn't pump gas for black people, then there's a scene where we're supposed to feel bad for him not having money. Fuck this movie, that's what. That guy deserved to be poor and I'm supposed feel bad for him? I don't think so.

This movie is also ridiculously long, well over two hours in fact. There are other white characters who are important to the story and I did not mention them, but there is not a single black character other than the three I said who are given any characterization at all. In fact only two of them are really given scenes to work with. The Best of Enemies is a shitty movie and I do not recommend it. The true story of the matter happened because of the AFL-CIO, and organized labor is HEAVILY important in reducing racism, which is probably the reason why Republicans have tried to destroy it. Go figure.

3.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Us
2. Gloria Bell
3. Arctic
4. High Flying Bird
5. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
6. Captain Marvel
7. Shazam!
8. The Beach Bum
9. Paddleton
10. Hotel Mumbai
11. Cold Pursuit
12. Happy Death Day 2U
13. Greta
14. Triple Frontier
15. Fighting with My Family
16. Brexit
17. The Dirt
18. Velvet Buzzsaw
19. Alita: Battle Angel
20. The Kid
21. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
22. The Upside
23. Dumbo
24. The Hummingbird Project
25. Escape Room
26. Captive State
27. The Highwaymen
28. Pet Sematary
29. What Men Want
30. Unicorn Store
31. Miss Bala
32. Hellboy
33. Glass
34. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
35. The Best of Enemies
36. The Prodigy
37. Polar
38. Serenity

 

[fazzle]

Yeah this movie really bugged me too, for a lot of the same reasons you described. Historical inaccuracies aside, it focuses almost entirely on what happens WHEN RACISM GOES WRONG and it starts to affect white people as well, and how it makes those white people feel. The black people are very incidental to the whole story of this movie

 

[909]

The Curse of La Llorona (2019), directed by Michael Chaves

Have you ever seen a movie trailer that let you know the film in question would be bad while also ensuring that you would likely enjoy it? That's how I felt about The Curse of La Llorona when I saw this trailer a few months ago. There was never any question that I was going to see it, but I was wondering how long it would take for this review to be posted. The answer was apparently the next day. I do not understand the need to continue expanding the Conjuring universe, but I do now know that considering the director her is also directing The Conjuring 3, that the future of this franchise is going to be to continue to make trash such as this. These kinds of films are guaranteed to make money, but that doesn't mean they're guaranteed to be good. Someone is going to have to take hold of this franchise and put a stop to the things that plagued both The Curse of La Llorona and The Nun. Yes, I am saying that they are both very similar, and its only been around seven or eight months since the latter was released, so this is not a good formula. I will say that the theater was full last night, so we can't say that nobody cared about this movie at all. I think it would be better had this film not been connected to the others, but there was no option once Annabelle showed up as a flashback in the film. Oh yeah, there's definitely some of that. At least in making a bad movie, the awfulness of limited as it did not violate my cardinal rule. The Curse of La Llorona was never, ever boring.

The Curse of La Llorona begins with the obvious, with La Llorona (Marisol Ramirez). La Llorona is a Mexican legend, and the story is that children who behave badly are hunted down by a spirit bitch who drowned her children. Oh yeah, that's exactly what it is, and if you dare tell anyone that telling your kids that story sounds like child abuse...good luck with that. Anyway, in this story, La Llorona starts as a normal person who takes a necklace from her youngest son. The boy closes his eyes and looks for his parents, seeing his mom drowning his brother to death. He tries to run away and I guess that happens to him too. The story moves forward to Los Angeles in the 1970s, focusing on a family whose patriarch has died. Anna Tate-Garcia (Linda Cardellini) is a social worker with a son and daughter, Chris and Sam. She is given a job to investigate the disappearance of two children, their mother being Patricia Alvarez (Patricia Velasquez). When Anna arrives at their house for a welfare check, she searches the house and is told by Patricia not to open a closet door. When she knocks on the door, Patricia attacks her like a nutjob, but Anna gets the key and opens the door. Inside are Patricia's sons who had been missing school, and there you have it. The kids want to be kept in the room so they can be protected, but this is rather vague and Anna gives them to the police anyway.

After these scenes, it's time to be introduced to Anna's family more than was done earlier, which is when we learn about her husband. Anyway, nobody cares about that, so let's get to it. Patricia's kids are now in a shelter, but clearly they ware not safe. One of the brothers is standing in a doorway, he is clearly in a trance of some kind. The other brother follows and points to a mirror where we see...LA LLORONA. This all happens really fast, so I can't say "we finally see" or anything of the sort. The mirror cracks, La Llorona disappears, and we learn that she dragged both the kids to the LA River and drowned them. Anna is called again to investigate the scene of this drowning, and when she arrives, she sees Patricia there. Patricia is accused of murder, and she starts screaming about Anna being responsible for her kids being murdered. Patricia also says that she tried to stop La Llorona, but now Anna's family is to be cursed. When they go home, guess what happens? They're fucking cursed. I laughed hard. They need the help of Father Perez (Tony Amendola), who refers them to Tuco Rafael Olvera (Raymond Cruz), a mystic man who may know what it takes to get rid of this curse.

As I already said, I know this movie isn't good, but I did find it enjoyable. The stuff that happens here is more comedic than anything else, the greatest cases being how Patricia keeps telling Anna that La Llorona is coming. Sorry, I couldn't take those scenes even remotely seriously and laughed hard at them. I also thought that once Tuco appeared, this movie jumped over the shark if it hasn't already. Like, seriously? A bunch of people outright laughed during his first scene, once they realized who it was. There are some television parts that type cast a person for life, where you can't shake their character at all, and that's what Tuco is for me. The Curse of La Llorona is ridiculously reliant on the jump scare, there's absolutely nothing else to this film at all. I think this did no job at all of introducing characters properly or helping the viewer understand why they are the way they are, this is as formula as a movie really gets. The jump scares are to the point of being highly amusing, especially when you have a woman sitting next to you freaking out and grabbing you every time something happens. It was very hard not to laugh loudly at this. I will also admit that some of those jump scares are extremely well executed, but the disalogue leading to them can be far too corny and stupid. I assume that nobody cared about the quality of how this was made.

Now, what a horror film really needs to be effective, is to establish dread and impending doom, but that isn't here at all. There's absolutely nothing to The Curse of La Llorona, that'll be clear to everyone if/when they get around to watching it. The film is ultimately saved by how goofy it is, and because of how much Tuco seamlessly fits into the plot and makes everyone laugh. He doesn't make jokes, but that seems not to matter. I still don't understand why or how The Curse of La Llorona turned out like this, but I don't have too much to say about the film beyond what I've said. Everything here is workman-like, but the film has absolutely no substance and needs to be treated as such. I'm keen to point out when there aren't enough movies featuring a group of people, and I did say that about how few films about Mexican stories there were when I sat down to watch Lowriders. Said stories need to be better than this, though. Again, I did laugh a LOT, and that's why I'm giving this a better rating than I initially thought I would.

4.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Us
2. Gloria Bell
3. Arctic
4. High Flying Bird
5. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
6. Captain Marvel
7. Shazam!
8. The Beach Bum
9. Paddleton
10. Hotel Mumbai
11. Cold Pursuit
12. Happy Death Day 2U
13. Greta
14. Triple Frontier
15. Fighting with My Family
16. Brexit
17. The Dirt
18. Velvet Buzzsaw
19. Alita: Battle Angel
20. The Kid
21. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
22. The Upside
23. Dumbo
24. The Hummingbird Project
25. Escape Room
26. Captive State
27. The Highwaymen
28. Pet Sematary
29. What Men Want
30. Unicorn Store
31. The Curse of La Llorona
32. Miss Bala
33. Hellboy
34. Glass
35. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
36. The Best of Enemies
37. The Prodigy
38. Polar
39. Serenity

 

[909]

Fast Five (2011), directed by Justin Lin

I had heard people say many times that this franchise was turned into capeshit, but I didn't understand exactly how far that went until I decided to rent this movie. This was clearly a good decision. It would have been a horrendous mistake to make another film in this franchise without bringing something unique to the table. Doing a heist that goes so far beyond anything realistic is the best way to deal with that problem. I know that everyone thinks this is so much better than the other movies and I agree, it is better than them. I particularly enjoyed the scene where Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson have a steroid handshake like in Predator, that's the point when I realized that everyone was totally in on the joke. Fast Five is a film that smashes your brains in, overloading your brain with so many different things at once that the viewer is stunned into going along with everything. That's the way it should be, right? The decision to make this a heist franchise is one of the best that a Hollywood studio has ever made, both in terms of finances and my own entertainment. I'm sure there are a lot of people who didn't like this for some of the very obvious reasons, the largest one being that Brazil is presented as being a corrupt hellhole. To that I say, well, you can't argue with the facts. The image of Brazil is what it is for a reason, so in that way, this was exactly the right place to set a huge motion picture like this one. I cannot fault anything this imaginative and wish I'd seen it in a theater.

How can anyone possibly summarize this properly? Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) is being transported to prison at the start of Fast Five, during which his sister Mia (Jordana Brewster) and friend Brian (Paul Walker) show up to save him by causing the bus to violently crash. Somehow this frees Dom instead of killing him, but that's cool, we have a movie ahead of us. The three of them somehow escape to Rio de Janeiro, but their arrivals are a bit staggered. Mia and Brian join Vince (Matt Schulze), he hasn't been in one of these since the first. Vince has created his own life in Rio, he now has a child and he also has needs that come along with that. Vince presents a job to Mia and Brian, they are to steal three very expensive cars from a train for some easy money. He knows some guys, so they'll have a crew. Along with the other participants finally comes Dom, who sees that one of the criminals, a man named Zizi (Michael Irby), is only interested in the GT40 on board. To be fair, that's what I'd be interested in too. Dom then tasks Mia with stealing the car, which leads to a fight and to Zizi killing the DEA agents who are supposed to make sure the cars are transported properly. To cut a long story short, Dom and Brian are then captures by a man named Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida), who seems to be a drug lord of some kind. He wants the cars, but Dom and Brian escape so they can get back to their hideout.

Upon arriving back in the favelas, the GT40 is examined to find out why it matters so much. Vince shows up after a long delay, and goes straight for a computer chip on the car. He's busted and admits to attempting to sell the chip to Reyes, then he's made to leave. When Brian looks at it, he learns that it contains where Reyes keeps all his cash, well over $100 million. Then, as that's all going on, it's time to introduce another big character. You guys have seen this before I'm sure, and it's time for a worthy adversary in Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson). Hobbs works for the Diplomatic Security Service, he has been given a target, he takes no shit from anyone, and he will do what he needs to do. He wants a local officer who isn't corrupt, so he's looked at files and decided on Elena Neves (Elsa Pataky) as his translator. Elena is deemed to be not corrupt because her husband was killed in the line of duty. Now, back on the other side, it's time for a plan. Dom, Brian, and Mia are going to get that $100 million and disappear. In order to do so, they're gonna need some help. A lot of help. You ready for almost everyone from the other films to come back? I sure was. There's Han (Sung Kang), Tej Parker (Ludacris), Gisele (Gal Gadot), Leo (Tego Calderon) and Santos (Don Omar) from the Dominican Republic, and perhaps most importantly...ROMAN PIERCE (Tyrese Gibson) CAME BACK. They have to steal that $100 million, but Reyes and Hobbs are each looking for them because they have something they aren't supposed to.

I left out so many details just for the sake of doing so, but the climactic scene of Fast Five is one of my favorites ever and it is hard to judge the movie fairly as a result. I also mentioned the steroid handshakes, right? There's more than just the one. The film is totally ridiculous and the ability of the team to survive makes no sense at all, so I'd rather not think about that too much. This is just everything I need from a movie, I don't know how else to describe it. The next thing they need to do is go to the fucking Moon. I demand that shit happen somehow and the way this is going, I wouldn't be surprised if Universal went through with it. I have seen the trailer for Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, and that's pretty much science-fiction. More of that please, I won't complain at all even if it makes no fucking sense. I also think that the way this was made is a great case of direct fan service leading to something ultimately very pleasing. The viewer is rewarded more by Fast Five if they've watched all the other movies. If they haven't, it doesn't really feel the same. I was initially a bit put off by the run time, but I didn't feel any of that as I was nearing the conclusion. The credits were also really long, but the mid-credits scene was quite interesting itself. I learned not to question, simply to watch, and that's how a person needs to approach this series.

In the end, I think we as a society need films to be like this one. I need to turn my brain off, yet still waatch something funny that does have a cohesive plot even though the surrounding elements are nonsense. Even the more stupid scenes got a laugh out of me, and I thought the main action pieces were brilliantly executed and filmed. The stuff with the vault is incredible, I don't know how much is real and how much wasn't, but I also found myself not caring. The villain here is an absolute nothing, and I accept that. The task at hand is what needed to be most important and that's the way it happened. I still don't understand how a series about stealing TV/VCR combos turned into this, but I accept it and am very happy with it. As far as negatives go, there are just a few, and I think I'll only mention one more. The scene where Gal Gadot has to obtain a handprint by having someone put their hand on her ass? That's way too ridiculous for me, but besides that, I don't have many complaints at all. As far as action movies go, this is as good as it gets. Tossing the street racing in favor of trying to steal something big, that's what it's about. I'll watch one of these a month until caught up.

8/10

 

[909]

My Cousin Rachel (2017), directed by Roger Michell

I don't really make a habit of watching movies like this one, but I needed some list filler and decided to watch this. I also really like Rachel Weisz, that's all the reason I needed to give this a look. I knew before going in that My Cousin Rachel is an adaptation of a book that was already made into a film with Olivia de Havilland, but I do not know if either of these are faithful adaptations to the book or if the film is a remake of the first film. I don't read, so that's why I don't know. I probably won't ever start reading fiction either, I find it rather boring. Yes, I really just said that. I said that it's boring because the really good works are going to be adapted to the screen anyway, and it's very time consuming to read a novel. I made the mistake of reading all of the books and spoiling Game of Thrones for myself, trust me, that shit was dumb. I wish I hadn't. That was the last time I followed my brother's recommendation to do something like that, it turns out that I get no joy out of knowing the events before they're shown on screen. I know that I won't do that again even if encouraged to by anyone. So, sorry for those who encouraged me, I won't go through with your ideas. Anyway, back to the film. I don't know why anyone would be so driven to make a film that was already done by Olivia de Havilland, that seems like a dumb idea. Some things just shouldn't be done. Now, all that being said, I thought this was a perfectly acceptable film.

My Cousin Rachel starts with a summing up of some events, explaining how we got into this situation. Philip (Sam Clafin) was once a young boy who was adopted by his older cousin Ambrose, and Ambrose raised him as a son on his estate in England. There were no women in his house, so Philip had a bit of a strange upbringing, but he was fine with this. Ambrose eventually leaves his estate for Florence, which sounds awesome to me. Philip is then left with his godfather Nick (Iain Glen), and over the course of letters, Philip learns that Ambrose has met his widowed cousin Rachel (Rachel Weisz) and married her. Ambrose previously didn't care about women and there are conversations indicating that he may have liked boys, but anyway, things aren't going so well in Florence for him after the marriage. He has sent some letters saying that he doesn't trust his medical care, and later on in the film we learn that he thought his wife was poisoning him. Philip heads off to Italy, but he learns from a man named Rinaldi (Pierfrancesco Favino) that Ambrose has died. He is very mad, even when learning that Ambrose willed Philip his estate. Philip then makes the decision to threaten Rinaldi and is convinced Rachel killed Ambrose.

Eventually, Rachel comes to England and Philip has every intention of confronting her. He makes comments about how fat she must be, what a bad person she is, all this stuff that I'll address later. He is convinced that Rachel is a bad person. At the same time, while this is going on, he's somewhat interested in Nick's daughter, Louise (Holliday Grainger). I think I'd be into her more than Rachel, but this guy is kind of weird. When Rachel arrives and Philip knows she's there, he goes up the stairs and sees her. He finds that she isn't the demon he believes she is, but he's overly infatuated. Infatuation leads to some bad things, and with this bloke never having been around women on a regular basis, he's dumb. Really dumb. When Rinaldi comes to visit, there's a strong possibility for explosion. At the same time, Nick has been looking into this woman, and when Philip wants to give Rachel some of his inheritance, Nick will certainly have something to say about it.

What I thought about My Cousin Rachel was something I'm sure a lot of people considered the whole time, that the lead character had a very typical virgin reaction. I did enjoy the idea that maybe this was all in his head, maybe he was just experiencing that virgin paranoia people have when they've had sex with someone and that person doesn't want to spend the rest of their life with them. I think everyone's heard of that, right? My perception was that Rachel was coyly manipulating the young man into doing what she wanted, but I'm not sure she was poisoning him. There's obviously no way to know and that remains in question. I will say as to the film as a whole, the lead character is also overmatched by Rachel Weisz and therefore much less interesting. Was this the best choice for the Philip character? I don't think it was. The latent misogyny present in Philip did make me laugh, I must admit. It's not that I find it naturally funny, but when he's going around asking about how fat his guardian's wife was, come on with that. It's hard not to laugh. The virginal obsession though, that stuff is hilarious and something I enjoy seeing in a movie.

Now, the grand question of whether or not Philip was being poisoned remains unanswered, and as such I will judge the film appropriately. I see no reason for the viewer to be left in the dark, so I didn't like that. Even if all the characters don't get an answer, I think there is a bit of an obligation to the audience to do so. The letter does not quite go far enough in absolving anyone. I would also say that the events in this film are a little too tasteful for me as well. I'm apparently not the only one who felt this way, the events don't play out ridiculously enough. My Cousin Rachel is a bit bland, and I also thought that the beginning when we learn about Philip's childhood was interesting enough to overshadow some of the events of the film. I was also naturally comparing this to The Favourite while watching it, and there's no real comparison at all. That's where most of my complaints are born from though, both films are set in a time period long gone by, and one is simply much more extravagant and interesting than the other. The inherent problem with the film is that Philip is a sorry character, I never felt bad for him at any point and found myself detesting him. Not all acclaimed books will have a strong film adaptation, and I guess this is one of them. I did find the movie decent enough, as I already said, and that's because I didn't quite know where the story was going from one scene to the next.

6/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. The Shape of Water
3. Get Out
4. Good Time
5. Mudbound
6. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
7. Logan
8. Wonder Woman
9. The Big Sick
10. Thor: Ragnarok
11. Logan Lucky
12. The Beguiled
13. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
14. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
15. The Lost City of Z
16. First They Killed My Father
17. Darkest Hour
18. A Ghost Story
19. Spider-Man: Homecoming
20. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
21. It
22. Battle of the Sexes
23. Okja
24. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
25. Kong: Skull Island
26. It Comes at Night
27. Split
28. 1922
29. Personal Shopper
30. Chuck
31. Atomic Blonde
32. Wheelman
33. The Lego Batman Movie
34. Megan Leavey
35. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
36. Menashe
37. American Made
38. Beauty and the Beast
39. Imperial Dreams
40. Gifted
41. Murder on the Orient Express
42. The Zookeeper's Wife
43. Free Fire
44. Win It All
45. The Wall
46. Life
47. My Cousin Rachel
48. Breathe
49. The Man Who Invented Christmas
50. Sleight
51. Alone in Berlin
52. A United Kingdom
53. Trespass Against Us
54. The Mountain Between Us
55. War Machine
56. Happy Death Day
57. Lowriders
58. Justice League
59. To the Bone
60. Wakefield
61. The Hitman's Bodyguard
62. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
63. Rough Night
64. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
65. Sand Castle
66. CHiPs
67. Death Note
68. The Belko Experiment
69. The Great Wall
70. Fist Fight
71. Snatched
72. Wilson
73. Queen of the Desert
74. The House
75. Sleepless
76. All Eyez on Me

 

[909]

Men in Black II (2002), directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

Continuing franchises I haven't finished has proven to be quite hard, I think I may have some kind of mental block that prevents me from doing so. I was supposed to watch Men in Black II last month, then I decided to put it off until now. I also waited nearly this whole month to watch it. I do intend to watch the third one next month before the series is restarted, but after seeing crowd reactions to the trailer, I suspect that the series doesn't need to be restarted and will bomb hard. Nobody has ever reacted to the trailer whatsoever. With all that being said, I don't think Men in Black II was particularly good. A movie with Will Smith is always going to have something to it, but very rarely are they actually good and that rule applies here too. Even though Men in Black II isn't good, I did laugh quite a bit. There are some things here that I found would destroy a more serious franchise, but this is not a serious franchise and is intended to be an amusing one. The first film is more surprising because the rules of the universe are not established to the viewer, and as a result the film is more entertaining. The first film also has a better story, but it's missing one thing the second one is not. Does Men in Black have Michael Jackson in it? No, it doesn't, and that's a big difference. I am surprised this part has not been edited out yet.

We moved forward quite a few years as the gap between films was large, and it's five years to be exact. Men in Black still exist, still monitoring and regulating alien life. Agent J (Will Smith) has a new partner, Agent T (Patrick Warburton). It seems that things are alright. The film starts with us viewing a video of a supernatural mysteries type show, where a man is talking about the Men in Black and something that happened in the 70's. He says that leaders of Zartha fled their planet to escape the Kylothians, particularly Serleena. They brought to Earth the Light of Zartha, a very powerful object. Subsequently the Men in Black were tasked with hiding it, but things actually turned out that the Zarthans escaped with the object while Serleena was detained. After that, we move over to Central Park, with a spaceship landing on Earth and seeming to make a very big landing. It turns out that the ship was quite small and just turned up some dirt. When it's time for the thing on board to disembark, a bug like creature is deposited on the ground, and a dog is scared away by the tentacles that begin to spread. There's a magazine in the grass, the wind flips the pages open to a Victoria's Secret ad, and the creature turns into Lara Flynn Boyle. When someone tries to rape her, she eats the man and seemingly vomits his bones back out. Sounds fun, right? I thought this was the best part of the film.

After that scene, we finally see our agents, both of whom I have already mentioned. They see a flower coming out of the sidewalk, but it turns out that it isn't a flower and rather an enormous alien worm. The worm is violating an arrangement, but that's of no consequence. There's a scene that follows and after it's over, T starts crying and J decides he should send him back to his old life. Good idea. It's difficult to deal with the way this film keeps flipping back and forth, but Serleena eventually decides to rendezvous with someone who has contacted her, a two headed called Scrad (Johnny Knoxville). His other head is called Charlie, but it doesn't matter. These two are fucking idiots. At this point, we learn that Serleena is seeking the Light of Zartha from earlier, and Scrad has tracked it to a guy who may have it. At the pizza place, there's the owner Ben (Jack Kehler) and his best employee, Laura (Rosario Dawson). Serleena breaks in and grabs Ben by the throat, demanding information about the Light of Zartha. We get some exposition and all that stuff, Laura hides. After it's over, J goes to the headquarters and is given a new dog partner, Frank (Tim Blaney). He gets to the pizza place, it turns out he likes Laura and doesn't neuralyze her, but here's the deal. The only person with information about the Light of Zartha is Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones), and his memory has been wiped. Both sides need to bring him back somehow.

I feel like I described literally the entire movie, which is no good. The setup for the scenario takes so much longer than the events that follow, which is a pretty big issue. I also think that once the filmmakers peel back the curtain and show even more aliens, the amusing things in the first film are no longer so interesting. The talking dog is also unbelievably stupid, and honestly, I don't think the actors making this movie really cared about what they were doing. The twist ending is ridiculously predictable and you'd have to be a fool not to notice it, and to this end, the film is so short that they don't even present another option as being the Light of Zartha. It's pretty ridiculous, and the length of the film makes absolutely zero sense to me. Who makes a blockbuster that's only around 85 minutes? It's strange, I don't get it, I would like to know why it happened. I did do some reading and found that filming ended very shortly after 9/11. That seems like something that would lead to the film being much shorter.

All in all, as far as Men in Black II goes, I don't think I really cared. There's some good jokes and the film is relatively funny, but the plot is too thin and doesn't have any real threat. If you've seen as many blockbusters as I have, you've seen this even if you haven't watched it. I would have liked this more had there been consequences that felt more real and pressing, but neither the actors nor the director made it feel like THE WORLD IS ACTUALLY GOING TO END. The film is the definition of a cash grab. So, with that in mind, I'll cut myself off here.

5/10

 

[909]

The Mummy (2017), directed by Alex Kurtzman

I wish I could explain to you why Universal wanted to reboot The Mummy, but that's going to take a long time. The shortest way I can explain it is by saying they don't have their own comic universe, therefore they don't have a gigantic guaranteed profit generating machine. So, because of that, they're going to keep trying to make things into a universe. I don't know when they'll make another monster movie like this one, but it's a certainty they'll try again. Something, somehow, is going to be turned into a universe. In any case, it is clear to me after watching 2017's The Mummy that this will not launch any franchise. There are quality related reasons this lost money, but beyond that, I don't think anyone wanted to see this. Someone should have ensured that the budget was kept down somehow, that's all they really needed to do. Apparently Universal decided to let Tom Cruise do everything he wanted and that ballooned the budget. If you want to know how that worked out for them, just read this. The Mummy is a rather bland film, there are some decent moments and that will explain my score, but I thought the film was lacking in imagination. Most of those decent moments are horror related, with the film featuring more of that than I'd expected, but that alone is not enough to save The Mummy from the abyss of failed franchise launches.

The Mummy kicks off in London, with construction workers discovering a crusader tomb that has a ruby of some sort inside of it. This must have happened a very long time ago. Afterwards, we continue the things that don't make sense, a list that piles up very rapidly as the film goes along. Sgt. Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) and Cpl. Chris Vail (Jake Johnson) are in Iraq, doing fuck knows what. I guess they're treasure hunting, and last I checked, there isn't an Army division for that. They're looking for treasure, and after calling in a huge airstrike, they discover the tomb of Princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella). Ahmanet had attempted to summon an Egyptian God called Set, she was caught and mummified while alive. There is a lot of mercury in this tomb, unbeknownst to everyone before they go in. Before Nick and Chris climb down, they are encountered by an archaeologist named Jenny (Annabelle Wallis). Jenny apparently had a map stolen from her by Nick, so these guys are clearly outstanding citizens. When they head down into the tomb, Nick is compelled to shoot something that's keeping Ahmanet in her prison, and up goes the coffin. Col. Greenway (Courtney B. Vance) is the superior officer to these two soldiers, I don't know why he or they are there, but he's going to airlift them out with the coffin. They have to beat a sandstorm, but of course, this is a Tom Cruise movie and they're able to do so.

The Mummy oddly boasts a small cast, I'm only leaving one character out until it's convenient to me. While they were in the tomb, Chris was bitten by a spider, but now they're on the plane. He is not feeling so good. Greenway approaches him because he's standing too close to the coffin, so Chris stabs him and kills him. He continues on to trying to attack everyone else, and initially Nick doesn't want his friend to die, but he shoots him three times anyway. After that, the flight to London continues, but crows attack the plane, going into the cockpit and destroying the engines. So, they're going down. We get one of those things where Tom Cruise does a stunt, and Jenny is given a parachute as the plane goes down. Everyone dies except for Jenny, but later that day, Nick is in the morgue and wakes up. When he wakes up, the Ghost of Chris appears and tells him what's going on with Ahmanet. Here's the deal. Ahmanet is going to escape from her coffin and is going to try to find that ruby in London. She wants to turn Nick into Set. At the same time, there's a secret society in London that deals with supernatural threats, which is how Jenny got the map in the first place. Their leader is Dr. Jekyll (Russell Crowe). Need I say very much more?

I can admit that even though this isn't a very good film, the horror scenes I found to be quite effective. I also have really wanted to see Jekyll and Hyde in a film, and I've missed absolutely everything that those characters appear in. I know exactly how stupid it is, but I'm telling you, it's true. Those scenes ensured that I wasn't going to hate The Mummy too much, and that's how I felt. I don't see the purpose for this film at all, but it's nowhere near one of the worst films of the year. I think people are beginning to have blockbuster fatigue and this is a casualty to that, but people also really don't like Tom Cruise and just need a reason not to go see his films. If one of them gets middling reviews, they're going to swerve it just enough for the film to make dick at the box office. A $90 million loss, even for a studio like Universal, is a pretty big loss. I think the largest problem I have with this film is that a different Mummy story was told more effectively by other people. Taking the story out of Egypt is also an absolutely ridiculous decision that deprives people of getting what they want. I think people have certain expectations of The Mummy and one of them is not the characters galvanting around England and London. I don't know who decided that was a great idea, but they should have been fired the moment they suggested it.

The Mummy is simply bland, there's not a lot else to say beyond that. I thought Tom Cruise was terribly out of place here and that almost any other actor could have done what he did. Casting him obviously cost the production a ridiculous sum that could have been put to more important things. Like, for example, a story that made sense and was set in the right place. The obsession that Ahmanet has with Nick feels completely out of place here, I simply don't like it. If it's up to me, they will remake this again as a straight horror movie. I've seen that Universal is partnering with Blumhouse to make The Invisible Man, which sounds like an excellent decision. Certainly these ideas don't need to be left in the hands of people who don't know what they're doing, and in this case, they absolutely did not know what they were doing. I think making these films as horror flicks is a nice guaranteed cash cow, but nowhere near as accessible as a movie like this, so we'll see how long that lasts. This never could have been good even though it has many parts I like, enough that I didn't want to turn it off until it was finished.

4.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. The Shape of Water
3. Get Out
4. Good Time
5. Mudbound
6. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
7. Logan
8. Wonder Woman
9. The Big Sick
10. Thor: Ragnarok
11. Logan Lucky
12. The Beguiled
13. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
14. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
15. The Lost City of Z
16. First They Killed My Father
17. Darkest Hour
18. A Ghost Story
19. Spider-Man: Homecoming
20. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
21. It
22. Battle of the Sexes
23. Okja
24. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
25. Kong: Skull Island
26. It Comes at Night
27. Split
28. 1922
29. Personal Shopper
30. Chuck
31. Atomic Blonde
32. Wheelman
33. The Lego Batman Movie
34. Megan Leavey
35. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
36. Menashe
37. American Made
38. Beauty and the Beast
39. Imperial Dreams
40. Gifted
41. Murder on the Orient Express
42. The Zookeeper's Wife
43. Free Fire
44. Win It All
45. The Wall
46. Life
47. My Cousin Rachel
48. Breathe
49. The Man Who Invented Christmas
50. Sleight
51. Alone in Berlin
52. A United Kingdom
53. Trespass Against Us
54. The Mountain Between Us
55. War Machine
56. Happy Death Day
57. Lowriders
58. Justice League
59. To the Bone
60. Wakefield
61. The Hitman's Bodyguard
62. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
63. The Mummy
64. Rough Night
65. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
66. Sand Castle
67. CHiPs
68. Death Note
69. The Belko Experiment
70. The Great Wall
71. Fist Fight
72. Snatched
73. Wilson
74. Queen of the Desert
75. The House
76. Sleepless
77. All Eyez on Me

 

[909]

Little (2019), directed by Tina Gordon

I was debating whether or not I would actually go see this in person or wait until it was at home. I decided, fuck it, why not? It's not like I had anything better to do today. If you need to know I have no shame, just look at everything else I've seen over the last year or so. Little, I will say, is a fair bit better than what I expected. I am careful to call comedy good, my scores for comedy films are based on two things. The first one is, how much did I laugh? The other is a more minor expectation, that the plot makes some semblance of sense. These kinds of movies usually have a fantasy element of some kind, but I found that the one in Little wasn't too overbearing, so I can give the film a pass on its plot. The thing about this particular movie is that the people executing the jokes do a much better job than I expected, even though I feel like I literally just watched this movie when I saw What Men Want. Given that the script for both were done by the same person, it makes sense that I would find them so comparable to each other, but I would hope that I don't have this problem again. Yes, it is definitely a problem and that seems to be one plaguing Hollywood. Nobody needs to see the same movies over and over again, written by the same person who doesn't have any different ideas.

Little starts off when Jordan Sanders (Marsai Martin) was a 13 year old, doing her project for a talent show. It's a wrecking ball, she is initially positvely received by her classmates, but in the end someone catches the ball that could not have reached Jordan and throws it at her. When the ball hits Jordan, she flies backwards into some stacked up boxes and breaks her arm. While being wheeled out of the hospital by her parents, they tell her that she won't be bullied forever and that one day she'll be big. Of course, Jordan gets the idea that once she's big, she's going to bully these people first. Of course, we move forward to when she's a 38 year old, and Jordan (Regina Hall) has certainly grown up. She treats everyone like shit, never lets her guard down, not even for the people she casually sleeps with. It's just not gonna happen. Jordan's assistant April (Issa Rae) is the main target of her wrath, I can only imagine what it would be like to work for a person like this. It turns out that Jordan has become extremely successful and rich, running her own self titled tech company. While at work one day, she's off on one of her rampages and abusing everyone, April being the majority target. Preston (Tone Bell) is April's crush, he pays Jordan no mind, but Jordan has an important client in her office. The client is their biggest and he wants to leave their business, his name is Connor (Mikey Day). This guy is obviously a douche and won't give them the time of day, but they have to make him a pitch in an attempt to regain his business.

After that meeting goes so poorly, and with April not presenting her idea to Jordan because she's terrified of her, but Jordan turns her attention the wrong way. She ridicules some kid who was doing bad magic tricks in the parking lot, and the kid pulls a magic wand out of her head. The kid subsequently tells Jordan that she wishes Jordan was little, and there we have our movie. Jordan wakes up the next day, back as a child, and she needs some help. She can't drive or drink wine like she loves to do, so she's going to need April's help. While continuing to be a bitch to everyone around her, Jordan is presented with another problem as a result of that. Someone decides to call child services because they know Jordan doesn't have a child, which leads to Agent Bea (Rachel Dratch) heading down to Jordan's downtown Atlanta high-rise apartment. April shows up around that time as well, and Bea drops a bomb of sorts on both of them. April has had to present herself as Jordan's aunt, but that gist of what's going on is that Jordan needs to be enrolled in school. While at school, it's back to the way things were before, and she meets four kids who are just like her.

I laughed very hard at some of the things in Little, and before a 20 minute stretch of the film I was thinking that this film was quite underrated. In the end, I still think some people have been too harsh on it, but certain aspects of comedy aren't for everyone. Little stays away from making shit jokes and other cracks about bodily fluids, so I found things quite easy to tolerate even during the scenes I did not care for. The other simple fact is that as far as child actors go, Marsai Martin does a great job and keeps things grounded when they could easily spiral into being extremely boring, or even worse inauthentic. Little is obviously a film with an anti-bullying theme and I wasn't surprised that someone brought their kid to the movie for that reason. All the other body swap movies that I'm aware of are about white people as well, so this is different in that way too. The thing is, this genre is extra exposed and everyone is aware of the events that exist in this kind of film. Of course, the lead character must learn a lesson, but the way Little deals with that is simply to ensure that there's not much time given to actually reversing the spell. It all happens so fast, but that's for the best.

I did find it interesting that the two people who bullied Jordan at the beginning and middle of the film were played by the same child, but I'm sure that was the point. This basic essence of this movie is that Jordan needs to learn how to deal with being bullied better than she did the first time. There's one scene that's totally out of place and bad though, when Jordan and April randomly start singing a Mary J. Blige song while at a restaurant. I don't get that, couldn't wrap my head around it, but I guess someone really wanted to do it and it got in the movie because of that wish. I don't know what to say about this other than that you'll either find the humor funny or you won't. I laughed hard a few times, more than I can say for most comedies these days, and because of that I feel compelled to give the film a decent rating. Even when there are scenes that feel goofy or out of place, including that song performance scene, something happens in them to recover the overall tone of the movie. I liked this just enough, I don't know if it'll make enough at the box office to make money, but I've seen far worse.

6/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Us
2. Gloria Bell
3. Arctic
4. High Flying Bird
5. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
6. Captain Marvel
7. Shazam!
8. The Beach Bum
9. Paddleton
10. Hotel Mumbai
11. Cold Pursuit
12. Happy Death Day 2U
13. Greta
14. Triple Frontier
15. Fighting with My Family
16. Brexit
17. The Dirt
18. Velvet Buzzsaw
19. Little
20. Alita: Battle Angel
21. The Kid
22. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
23. The Upside
24. Dumbo
25. The Hummingbird Project
26. Escape Room
27. Captive State
28. The Highwaymen
29. Pet Sematary
30. What Men Want
31. Unicorn Store
32. The Curse of La Llorona
33. Miss Bala
34. Hellboy
35. Glass
36. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
37. The Best of Enemies
38. The Prodigy
39. Polar
40. Serenity

 

[fazzle]

The biggest fantasy element of Little is the idea that Regina Hall was in middle school in 1993.

Overall though, I felt like the movie was a victim of having it's best material be in the trailers.

 

[909]

The Greatest Showman (2017), directed by Michael Gracey

I have never seen a greater whitewashing of bad deeds than what I saw when I watched The Greatest Showman. P.T. Barnum is far more interesting than the way this film made it seem, but absolutely none of that is covered in detail here. I usually start my reviews off with other things, but I'm going to get straight to tearing down this movie. The Greatest Showman is a movie sanitized for public holiday consumption, one which isn't very interested in facts or anything remotely related to the truth. Instead, The Greatest Showman shows people that P.T. Barnum organized some downtrodden members of society and made them feel good about themselves. Exploitation is not on the menu today. This movie is quite surreal, I'm not sure what exactly it is that I even watched. I am not sure I've seen anything in a very long time that was this lacking in plot. However, I will also state that The Greatest Showman does have its moments. I wish I knew how to properly summarize a film like this one, where everything feels like some sort of corny fever dream. Never before have I had to attempt to do so. I guess what should be said is that this entire film is fiction and nothing in it should be taken remotely seriously. It's still difficult to put my thoughts into words because P.T. Barnum is someone who deserves a serious movie or television series made about their life.

Almost everything of value in The Greatest Showman is shown via song and musical bit, so this will be short-ish. Our film starts with P.T. Barnum (Hugh Jackman) and his group performing at the circus, then it's time for a flashback to his childhood. Barnum and his father work for the Hallett family, and Barnum gets a major crush on their daughter Charity after making her laugh. The Hallett patriarch (Fredric Lehne) slaps the fuck out of him, this is not going to stop him from getting what he wants. The two children keep in touch through letters, and eventually Charity (Michelle Williams) meets P.T. again, which leads to their marriage and the birth of two daughters. Even this is fudged as they actually had four daughters, but whatever. Barnum takes a job working for a shipping company, but they go broke. This leads to Barnum running a fraud scam on a bank because he's somehow acquired the deed to his employer's sunken ships, using those ships as collateral to acquire enough money to buy Barnum's American Museum in New York City. The museum showcases wax figures, but Barnum wants so much more. This leads to him finding circus freaks, and the rest is history.

The people he found consist of albino twins, a tattooed lady, a strongman, Siamese twins, a dwarf named Charles (Sam Humphrey), a bearded lady named Lettie (Keala Settle), a snake dancer, voodoo twins, a three legged man, a dog boy, and a trapeze duo consisting of W.D (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and Anne (Zendaya), brother and sister respectively. There are others, but those are the ones that immediately come to mind, and they're more important if they're named. The circus receives horrible reviews from a reporter (Paul Sparks), but this circus train is going to keep on rolling. Barnum can't help himself, he still wants more even though he's created a successful circus. He meets Phillip (Zac Efron), who has written some famed plays, and he convinced Phillip to join the circus. Phillip seems to really care for Anne and that's probably a factor in his joining, but Barnum's Circus acquires fame really fast, leading to a trip overseas to England. On that trip, Barnum meets Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson), a famous Swedish singer with great looks and obviously a great voice. He wants to become her manager, break down the aristocratic walls, and make a real name for himself among the elite in New York City.

I've probably done a shitty job explaining things, but that isn't my fault. This isn't a very good movie and it doesn't do a good job explaining things either. The plot beyond what I've mentioned is incomprehensible garbage, simply put. I do not know how to describe any of the events leading up to the finale because some of them happen with no buildup at all. I will say that I found the scenes with Barnum going around looking for talent to be very good. One thing I would never accuse The Greatest Showman of is being a bland movie, it's simply made for a different audience that I am not part of. I don't find much value in Broadway shows and this was something that felt as if it was on Broadway and shown to a wider audience. Musicals like La La Land are a lot better to me than this was. I do think that part of one's enjoyment of a musical is heavily dependent upon whether or not they find the music engaging. The last musical I watched was Mary Poppins Returns, which I did find very engaging. The songs brought me back to a more simple time when I was a kid, it was a very strong piece of cinema in that way. I didn't care for a few of the characters, but that's beside the point. The songs in The Greatest Showman are not engaging or whimsical at all and therefore I was bored. One of the musical numbers made me cringe, that's not good.

I think I've made clear where I stand as it relates to musicals, I need to feel engaged with the story and I didn't get that from The Greatest Showman. Everyone's different and all that shit, but I've heard similar from family members who told me they didn't care much for the film. The outright falsehoods are something that came to mind as I was watching this, but I'm not lying in saying they had no impact on how I felt about the film. Making up shit is just that, making up shit. The story can be good even with made up shit or it may not be good at all. This film isn't much for story. I did think the choreography and use of color is great, but The Greatest Showman is totally fucking ridiculous. Take that for whatever it's worth. I don't find that to always be a bad thing, but when a movie is entirely lacking in plot, it drives me crazy. The film feels like it isn't long enough even though I'm not sure I could have handled the film being any longer. Hugh Jackman's performance was quite strong and believable, I think that goes without saying. I don't like this film, but that doesn't mean I don't care for the genre even though I'm a straight man. I have seen some musicals I liked and will give musicals the credit they deserve if I liked them. I don't know how I never made this connection before, but Chi-Raq used poetry to an extent I guess you'd be forced to call it a musical. I also REALLY enjoyed that film and wish there were more like it. The Greatest Showman doesn't measure up. Now someone please give me a real P.T. Barnum movie.

4.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. The Shape of Water
3. Get Out
4. Good Time
5. Mudbound
6. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
7. Logan
8. Wonder Woman
9. The Big Sick
10. Thor: Ragnarok
11. Logan Lucky
12. The Beguiled
13. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
14. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
15. The Lost City of Z
16. First They Killed My Father
17. Darkest Hour
18. A Ghost Story
19. Spider-Man: Homecoming
20. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
21. It
22. Battle of the Sexes
23. Okja
24. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
25. Kong: Skull Island
26. It Comes at Night
27. Split
28. 1922
29. Personal Shopper
30. Chuck
31. Atomic Blonde
32. Wheelman
33. The Lego Batman Movie
34. Megan Leavey
35. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
36. Menashe
37. American Made
38. Beauty and the Beast
39. Imperial Dreams
40. Gifted
41. Murder on the Orient Express
42. The Zookeeper's Wife
43. Free Fire
44. Win It All
45. The Wall
46. Life
47. My Cousin Rachel
48. Breathe
49. The Man Who Invented Christmas
50. Sleight
51. Alone in Berlin
52. A United Kingdom
53. Trespass Against Us
54. The Mountain Between Us
55. War Machine
56. Happy Death Day
57. Lowriders
58. Justice League
59. To the Bone
60. Wakefield
61. The Hitman's Bodyguard
62. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
63. The Mummy
64. The Greatest Showman
65. Rough Night
66. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
67. Sand Castle
68. CHiPs
69. Death Note
70. The Belko Experiment
71. The Great Wall
72. Fist Fight
73. Snatched
74. Wilson
75. Queen of the Desert
76. The House
77. Sleepless
78. All Eyez on Me

 

[909]

The biggest fantasy element of Little is the idea that Regina Hall was in middle school in 1993.

Overall though, I felt like the movie was a victim of having it's best material be in the trailers.

I got a good laugh out of that too.