In Which I Briefly Review Movies

[909]

Landline (2017), directed by Gillian Robespierre

When I was making my way through Amazon Studios movies they'd made earlier this decade, I initially skipped Landline. I was waiting until a later date, but part of it was that I wasn't sure I was ready to see a movie that had middling reviews. I did see that this was listed as a comedy, and by that standard Landline had good reviews, so I decided I should go back and give the film a look. This was a good decision, which I realized a few minutes into the film. This feeling was persistent throughout, and that's what I was hoping for. There's lots of comedies that just can't keep momentum going on any level at all, but when the tone shifts into being more of a drama, the film works too. I usually don't come out so strong in favor of a film in my opening paragraph, but I liked this even when I found those flaws to be apparent. Landline didn't make money and there's no real surprise in that regard, I didn't know this even existed until I made my way down a lit. That's often the problem with these Amazon and Netflix releases. The overall awareness of them is not all that great. So, what is Landline actually about? It seems that this film cannot decide which theme it wants to fully commit to, so it decides to give what the writer-director things are insights into those things. In some cases they are insightful and in others they aren't, but in any case, I think I appreciated what I watched until a point. I will leave you hanging on what that point actually is.

Landline begins with Dana Jacobs (Jenny Slate) having sex with her fiance Ben (Jay Duplass) out in the woods, and at this point I wasn't exactly sure what I'd gotten into. After they finish, everyone piles up into a car and they're on their way. It seems like the Jacobs family has a house outside of New York City. Pat (Edie Falco) and Alan (John Turturro) are husband and wife, Dana is their daughter, and they have a younger daughter named Ali (Abby Quinn). Obviously, they're going back to New York City, and it works out that Dana and Ben live together, while the other three live in their own house. So, Ali is that age, the age where she wants to do everything and still has to come home to deal with her parents. She wants to go raves, doesn't want to go to school or do her tests, and more than anything else, she wants to get high. Sounds like a good life to me. Pat and Alan have a weird relationship that often happens with older couples, one becomes disinterested in the other and seems to hate them. This is the case with how Pat behaves towards Alan and it's impossible to explain why this is unless the person says why it is, but that's never stated in this film. It just is how it is, people behave how they behave. Dana and Ben have a pretty good relationship by the standards of this film, I'd say.

While they have a good relationship, the way this film works is that you know it won't be the case forever. One day at a party, Dana runs into a former ex-boyfriend, Nate (Finn Wittrock). It turns out that she is enamored once again with Nate and decides to take off work to go to a record store, where she runs into him. Oh, I left something out. This is 1995, so those record stores still matter, and so do a lot of other things. Nobody has a cell phone, which I suppose matters. I don't know if it really does. At the same time, Ali returns from a rave one night and finds a bombshell, that her dad has written love notes on a floppy disk that she popped in to try to find some files on. The notes are written to a woman dubbed as "C," and they're vulgar, and Alan definitely wrote them. Ali is confronted about going to raves some time after that, but she hasn't said anything about what she knows. She goes with her boyfriend to her family's house outside New York City, but Ali has tried to escape Ben and Nate there as well. Will the two tell each other what they know? To this point of the film anyway, they have been very distant and like to make fun of each other.

So, the director is inspired by a list of things that seemed obvious to me, the largest ones being her commentary on marriage, on cheating, and on being sisters. I actually...don't have any experience with doing either of those things, so I am unqualified as a reviewer to deal with Landline. What I do in a situation like that, is that I don't really deal with it and let the movie speak for itself in those regards. I enjoyed how we had a film with these secrets, but the secrets are only kept from three people who don't know what everyone else knows. Of course, a movie like this one where someone is supposed to get married and they're having a hard time dealing with that, there's a lot of routes the story could go. I think I prefer this one. Ben is a fucking boring guy, and when women realize that they're dating boring guys, this is how some of them react. Men react the same way too, that's human nature. The parental relationship is also an example of what happens when people don't address their incompatibilities prior to getting hitched. The arguments when these things finally come to the forefront are what I would call good cinema, but they aren't great. Great is what happens when you watch "Whitecaps", but the dramatic impact of that moment is simply lacking from this rather short film.

As far as flaws go, even though the movie is set in the 1990s, there are few statements of culture in the film, so I'm confused why this was set in the 1990s in the first place. I also didn't care for the ending lacking true resolution to Alan and Pat's story, but we're left for that being what it is. This also doesn't feel like a film in that the story is extremely intimate, doesn't do anything that shocks you to your core, and that's why Landline isn't a great film. It's merely a good one, but being good is perfectly acceptable and welcome in these times. I'm not familiar with the director at all, but if she creates more work I'll check it out. I thought the family dynamics were very nice and that the sisters felt like complete characters rather than caricatures. That is something I don't see every day.

7/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu (2019), directed by Rob Letterman

I waited a week to see Pokemon: Detective Pikachu due to how busy I was, but it was probably better this way with less people in the theater. I think almost everyone here had some experience with Pokemon when they were younger, but perhaps people here were just slightly too old for that. I remember going to see the first movie, I remember going to buy cards, but I also remember trading those cards away for a Playstation Memory Card. It goes without saying that I really needed that memory card and I have no regrets, I wouldn't have gotten the same enjoyment out of those cards. My brother, on the other hand, he still plays the video games to this day (insert Deontay Wilder clip here). I don't know why he does, but he may just not be able to help himself. It's probably like how I can't stop watching WWE even when I read affidavits about how Vince McMahon made someone not disclose their rape to anyone because it would harm the military. When it comes to something like Detective Pikachu, there's a few things that I feel like everyone would have hoped for when going to see this movie. The first for most adults is probably that their kids enjoyed it, but that doesn't apply to me. I decided to see this so I could review it, but I also wanted to see as many Pokemon as possible from when I was a kid and how they would be incorporated into a story with real people. I guess you could say that I found Detective Pikachu to be funny enough, that it served its purpose, but the film has some problems. It is, however, also good enough to stand on its own and kept me from wishing I was doing something else.

This is set in an entirely fictional universe, where people may live in one big country or they may not, I do not know. Tim Goodman (Justice Smith) is a young insurance salesman who grew up wanting to become a Pokemon trainer, but this was not his lot in life. His mother died and his father Harry went to be a police detective, so Tim lived with his grandmother. He's out with a friend one day trying to catch a Pokemon, but it doesn't go that well. After that, he has some voicemails and upon listening to them, he learns that his father has died in the middle of an investigation. This leads to Tim traveling to Ryme City, which is a huge city that outlaws Pokemon battles and pushes propaganda where Pokemon and humans should coexist with each other and be friends, or like pets. Tim's goal there is to collect Harry's things, and he's sent to Harry's place by another detective, a Mr. Yoshida (Ken Watanabe). Upon arrival, he's greeted outside the door by a young reporter, Lucy Stevens (Kathryn Newton). Lucy is tired of writing crappy blog posts and thinks Harry died in a more mysterious way than Harry's son believes. While Tim's in the apartment, there's an intruder. He's confused, pulls out a stapler and threatens to use it, all that kind of stuff. There's a Pikachu (voiced by Ryan Reynolds) inside as the picture above shows you. It turns out this Pikachu can talk, and nobody knows how this can be possible, but that's what's happening.

I have left out a lot of details about Pokemon cause I find it childish to even write that stuff down, so forgive me. After Tim encounters the Pikachu, he accidentally releases a purple gas which is later referred to as "R". The gas causes some other Pokemon who weren't originals, and as a result I don't know what they are, to start acting crazy and attack Tim. When Tim runs, eventually the gas wears off, and he's able to find a cafe with Pikachu. At the cafe, Pikachu tells Tim that he can't remember anything, but he was Harry's police partner and also a detective. They were investigating a case and Harry disappeared in the previously mentioned accident, which was a car crash. Pikachu does not think Harry is dead and neither does Lucy, who has been doing her own investigation. The thing is, there's also a father and son duo who have made Ryme City into their project, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that they might not be so noble. Howard (Bill Nighy) is a disabled man who dreamed all this stuff up, and Roger (Chris Geere) is his son, who runs the news channel in Ryme City. There is absolutely nothing that could make you think Harry was not involved with these two people, because the filmmakers aren't going to introduce a villain with no build. Or are they?

Detective Pikachu largely goes as you think it would, but I went to see this in 3D so I have an added perspective. I thought the 3D was good but not even close to as great as in Aquaman, but those are the only 3D movies I've seen and I shouldn't judge the film harshly based on that. Maybe the effects in Aquaman are the best ever, I just don't know. As far as the film goes, I would have preferred more original Pokemon from when I was a kid. There weren't very many of them, but that's the rub of the film that I had to remember, this movie is more oriented towards young kids now. So, to that end, there are a lot of newer Pokemon. The older ones made me laugh a few times though I was surprised that I was laughing at some of the things I laughed at, and I'm having a hard time thinking of many better video game adaptations. Of course, almost all of them are absolute garbage, so that isn't the highest praise. I also thought it was smart to make the plot as simple as possible to avoid confusing anyone who may not be familiar with all the intricacies of this stuff, and I'm referring to myself here. Detective Pikachu is accessible more than anything else, and I don't think it would lead to parents asking their kids questions they'd receive too many answers to. The human characters are also tolerable, which is a lot better than what Justice Smith was in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. It is hard to believe this was the same person in both films.

Detective Pikachu does have some problems as I already alluded to though. The film isn't very long, but there are points in it where there are less Pokemon, and those parts tend to drag. The villain is also very weak, but I don't think there's much of a way to get around that in a franchise opening movie such as this. That is, if this becomes a franchise. I don't know if it will. Granted, perhaps this is an overreaction but we're past the second weekend and Detective Pikachu has merely doubled its large budget worldwide, more is needed in order for the film to have a sequel. Time will tell on this. The film also makes the goofy error of not having battles between Pokemon even though that's the thing that the video games and cards are literally built upon. The plot is also pretty ridiculous, but you know, that doesn't really matter. The point of the film is to get these Pokemon on-screen with human characters and deliver something amusing and entertaining. Detective Pikachu achieves that about as well as could possibly be done as the first entry of a series. The Mr. Mime and Ditto parts were also very good, and I also thought these characters were extremely well animated. That's hard to do, I don't think people quite understand what goes into making a film like this, but I liked it well enough. The effort is very apparent to me, they did their best to create a story that people would enjoy even if they didn't think it was great, and I'm not sure any Pokemon story can actually be great in the first place.

6.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

Baby Driver (2017), directed by Edgar Wright

I had a few more films with great reviews to watch over the course of the rest of this month, and it was time to watch Baby Driver tonight. When I turned this on, I was a little cautious because I'd just watched John Wick: Chapter 3. I was curious to see how the action in the two films measured up with each other, but I now know the answer to that. No, I do not intend to dive right into that subject. Much like John Wick: Chapter 3, Baby Driver is a movie where you often experience sensory overload, but in this case it is a very pleasurable thing. One thing I am taking away from Baby Driver is that I need to return to a time when the movies I watch have greater tonal and thematic differences, so I'm going to plan out my schedule much more studiously going forward to avoid that. It can be hard to watch one movie after another with the same stuff in it, I know I'm not alone in that. What I thought was that this was a mash of different things, there were moments that felt like True Romance, others that felt like Ronin, or even like Reservoir Dogs. This was an homage to movies in the genre while at the same time remaining unique, even surpassing those three films I decided to list. The highs are higher, the lows aren't as low, and in the end this is a heist film that can be compared to Heat. The key to making this work to the extent that it does is a matter of care, of time to think about these plot twists long before actually committing to them. I am not surprised at all that Edgar Wright had been ruminating on this for years.

How does one describe the first scene of this film? I don't even know. I guess I won't. Doc (Kevin Spacey) is a crime boss, a man who runs game on various jobs throughout Atlanta. If you want to do something big, he's the guy to figure it out. Doc doesn't use the same exact crew on any job, but he does have one constant who he trusts very much. That's the driver, Baby (Ansel Elgort), a guy who used to hijack cars. Baby simply looks like a kid although he is not, and our heist is with a crew consisting of Griff (Jon Bernthal), Darling (Elza Gonzalez), and Buddy (Jon Hamm). Buddy and Darling are married, so you can see how this duo goes, they are supposed to be like Bonnie and Clyde. Griff is simply a thug, but he's smart. The opening scene plays out as it does, and t is almost as good as the opening scene from John Wick: Chapter 3. I didn't spoil that scene either, that's just how I deal with these things. During this scene, it is made clear that Baby likes to listen to music, and as the film plays out it is stated that he has tinnitus after a car accident that killed his parents when they were arguing. Doc pays Baby out after those scenes I'm not divulging, and he is told that he's one more job away from paying off his debt. After doing that, he goes back home to take care of his deaf foster father Joseph (CJ Jones), and that's pretty much how his day goes. Job, home, stash money underneath the floor.

Baby also has other things he does. Apparently he goes to a diner regularly, a place called Bo's. While there, he meets a waitress, Debora (Lily James). They both like music, they like each other, they both have good lines. Typical True Romance kind of deal, but we never go that far with it. Speaking of which, I haven't watched that awesome Drexl Spivey scene in a while. Going to do that right now. Anyway, both of them want to leave Atlanta, but Baby's work is not yet finished. His last job, if there ever is a last job, is going to be with Bats (Jamie Foxx), JD (Lanny Joon), and Eddie (Flea). Bats is fucking insane, and this is Jamie Foxx's best performance in a very long time. Maybe ever! The last job is going to be doing an armored car, something that's never going to go well. Bear in mind that this is Atlanta, after all. There are probably going to be "good guys with guns" who shoot them all over the place not caring if they hit anyone else. Plus, Bats is just crazy. It doesn't take a genius to figure out where Baby Driver goes from here. These two scenes in combination with each other are excellent, but they're hardly the only big scenes in the film. There's more. So much more. Just because Baby wants out, doesn't mean he'll get out, or even get to the point where Doc will let the debt be paid.

Alright, so with all that said, my format means I can't talk much about the scenes specifically. I said that those two opening scenes were great, and I meant that. They hooked me instantly. Even when the film slows down, those slower scenes are really strong, and overall I've seen a whole lot worse. I'm trying to think of things that would have made me like the film more, and I almost want to say that it's the romance plot being cut out, but that plot is essential to making Baby into a complete character. The ending of the film is also quite drawn out, but it doesn't really diminish any of the things that came before that. Even still, it feels like the director just didn't know when it was time to end the story. This is just fun, it really is. I'm not one for social commentary when it comes to films, but I did see there were some criticisms to that end about the characters here. They can blow it out their ass for all I care, I didn't notice anything wrong with the film like that. I think it goes without saying that there are parts of Baby Driver that are really goofy, but that's the point, isn't it? The way Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm make their mark here is laudable, and I was able to ignore the elephant in the room (Kevin Spacey) as a result of their work.

The practicality of the car chases is what really makes the film work, but this is another case of a film best enjoyed in theaters, so I didn't get the full experience that I should have gotten. The way in which certain characters won't go away is one of my favorite parts of Baby Driver, it is used to a great extent but is also not remotely boring. This trope does not overstay its welcome here. I wish more directors had the vision to make a film like this one, because these films are needed in place of boring, trite garbage. Unfortunately, not very many filmmakers do have the ambition and the smarts to pull a film like this one off, I thought this was an excellent film. I do not think it's as good as Heat even though it is now in the same conversation, it is also one of the only films I've heard people talking about when leaving the theater a year or so later. Baby Driver is the kind of film that stuck with people, it seems. It's a film that younger generations will compare following car chase movies to, and that's an accomplishment in and of itself. There has to be something like The French Connection for every generation, and hopefully a film like this one inspires people to go back and look through film history for a car chase movie that stuck with their parents and the people before them.

I will say that I thought a lot of people could have played the lead character though. That's why I'm not giving this the same score as Heat, it's just missing that little extra thing where the lead actor goes fucking crazy in front of the camera. This one relies on the supporting actors to do it for him, which is good, if they weren't there it wouldn't quite have been the same. The film is getting such a high score because it made me feel something, that's the standard by which I do that. Most of the films I score under an 8 don't make me feel anything at all, but when I give out the score I'm giving now, it means I felt SOMETHING stronger. Something is unquantifiable, it could mean anything, it could be me clapping in front of my screen or at the end of the film, or wishing something happened or didn't happen. I don't know how to explain it. The higher the score, the more I felt, the higher on the list, the more I felt. You can see how this works for yourself by looking at any of my three lists.

8.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

Disobedience (2018), directed by Sebastian Lelio

I considered writing the creepiest review of Disobedience that I could imagine, but in the end, I didn't feel like writing anything childish. Disobedience has been on my list for a few months, but I decided to shelve it for a little bit because I had watched Lelio's Gloria Bell and wanted to make sure the films didn't feel similar in any way. Of course, when it comes to this film, all everyone talked about for months was the sex scene. I don't blame anyone for that, I'm just saying that's how it was. There's simply more to the film than that though. I know a lot of people don't care about a movie like this beyond the sex scenes, so that is what it is. In some respects I think Lelio didn't go far enough with this story, but this is apparently not his story at all. Once again we have a book written based on a novel, so the story is constrained for those purposes, and looking at the director to blame for problems with it is a mistake. What I got from this is that I need to watch at least one of Lelio's other notable works, I don't think I can watch Gloria as I already saw that plot and it might bore me. One thing's for sure though, Rachel McAdams being this character is very strange. Ultimately I found that this was a story focused on challenging traditions that don't fit into our world, and for good reason they don't fit into our world. The restrictive qualities of these things that were done for thousands of years, things that are merely continued because people always did them, are harmful to one's personal growth and I find them to be immoral.

Disobedience begins in a synagogue, with the Rav Krushka (Anton Lesser) giving a sermon about personal choice to his Orthodox congregation in London. During this sermon, the Rav collapses and dies. His daughter Ronit (Rachel Weisz) is contacted in New York City while she's doing a photo shoot, she is clearly not an Orthodox Jew, and with that bit of information the viewer should know she and her father were not close. She flies to London and goes to the home of her friend, Dovid (Alessandro Nivola), and Dovid is his father's student for lack of a better word. Dovid is a grown man and a rabbi, and members of the synagogue are at his house paying respects to the Rav. When Ronit arrives, she isn't like the other people there, and it's very awkward. The degree to which this is awkward is up to every individual viewer, but I thought this was rough viewing. Dovid insists that Ronit stay with he and his wife, but Ronit didn't know that he was married. There's a lot of things Ronit didn't know. For starters, her father was very sick and she wasn't there to care for him, but she didn't know. When Dovid introduces his wife Esti (Rachel McAdams), Ronit seems disappointed, and if you didn't read any of the numerous things written about this movie, you know something's up. How could you not have read anything about this film? I don't understand how that's possible.

The next day, or maybe it isn't the next day, it's Shabbat. Ronit, Dovid, and Esti are going to go to a dinner at her aunt and uncle's house, they are the Hartogs. Fruma (Bernice Stegers) is kind to Ronit even though she doesn't adhere to these traditions, Moshe (Allan Corduner) is a dickhead. I don't know any other way to put it. Their friends are the Goldfarbs, both of whom are rabbis and I found them to also be rude. There's an argument of sorts, Ronit can't handle these people nor should she, and she excuses herself to walk home. Dovid follows and Esti has the intention of catching up, and as we know, these religious rules are totally ridiculous. When Ronit breaks down to Dovid, talking about her father, he can't hug her and that's just how it is. The next day, Ronit has the intention of talking about her father's house with Moshe, and the Rav left the house to the synagogue. So, that's that, no financial freedom for Ronit. We also learn that Esti is a school teacher at an Orthodox school, which of course is something Ronit doesn't like when she finds out about it. Esti enjoys her job, but the fact is, she doesn't like her life or her marriage. She doesn't love her husband like that. You guys already know that Ronit and Esti have a sex scene, right? Fill in the rest yourself.

I wanted to say more about the way Disobedience is about breaking the bonds of tradition, but I already did so above, so I'm at a little bit of a loss with what I'm going to say here. What I'm thinking about now is that the extreme majority of people who live in the West do have a choice to participate in these things, even though they may not like the consequence of making that choice and what may happen to their life, they do have the ability to exit those communities. Or, maybe they don't? I'm going to watch a documentary about ex-Hasidic Jews next month, that will give me more insight although I won't be an expert even when I watch that. It just seems that this film is set in London, the married couple doesn't have children, therefore they do have a choice. This isn't a perfect film, the plot isn't the best, but the characters and performances win out and grab my attention. I wasn't aware that Rachel McAdams had this level of range, but her co-star obviously does and shines throughout. There are things about this film that are rather weird, but they're fitting. Disobedience is not a nice film to look at. The houses these people are in are by no means decorated, but as befits their religious community, they are plain. The only thing in this film that isn't plain is Ronit (deliberate) and the big sex scene (also deliberate). That stands out so much that even I noticed it.

What I meant about the plot not being the best, is the way that Ronit circles back from the airport when it is so hard to believe that she ever would have done that to Esti again as a full grown adult. I really, very strongly did not like this part of the film. I also don't care much for the visual style of this. It goes against what I think a great film is supposed to boast, I have a history of giving weaker films a better score because they pop on screen, but this deliberate blandness is way too far for me. It's one thing when the characters are in a very small defined space, but this was London and I couldn't take it. I don't care if that's a fair criticism. Overall, I do think this is a strong film, a very good one. If the visual style suited me more, I would have been effusive in praise, but the visual style of this story was a requirement. The plot problems also go beyond what I've already said. The narrative absolutely dies once Ronit heads off to the airport. Esti stated what she wanted to do, the man has the option of granting her freedom, but there's no doubt that she's going to do what she wanted to do even if he doesn't do it. Thus, the film hits a bit of a wall, and what I thought was building towards a bombastic finish does not quite provide that. That's okay, because this is very good. I liked it, and when the characters did things I really wanted them to do to break free from these shackles, I enjoyed it. With changes from the novel, this could have been an Oscar nominated film.

7.5/10

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. Disobedience
38. Bumblebee
39. Mary Poppins Returns
40. Creed II
41. Hold the Dark
42. The Land of Steady Habits
43. Halloween
44. Ant-Man and the Wasp
45. Beirut
46. Mary Queen of Scots
47. Aquaman
48. Outlaw King
49. Overlord
50. Ben Is Back
51. Monsters and Men
52. The Mule
53. On the Basis of Sex
54. Bohemian Rhapsody
55. White Boy Rick
56. Papillon
57. Game Night
58. Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado
59. Instant Family
60. Alpha
61. The Front Runner
62. The Predator
63. Apostle
64. The Angel
65. The Commuter
66. Beautiful Boy
67. The Nun
68. Operation Finale
69. The Equalizer 2
70. The Spy Who Dumped Me
71. Yardie
72. Bird Box
73. 12 Strong
74. Venom
75. Skyscraper
76. The Meg
77. Assassination Nation
78. The Girl in the Spider's Web
79. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
80. 22 July
81. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
82. The Little Stranger
83. Tomb Raider
84. Night School
85. The 15:17 To Paris
86. Peppermint
87. Mile 22
88. The First Purge
89. Hunter Killer
90. The Cloverfield Paradox
91. Kin
92. Hell Fest
93. Proud Mary
94. Robin Hood
95. The Happytime Murders
96. Slender Man

 

[909]

The Hustle (2019), directed by Chris Addison

I don't post my schedule any more as it is now subject to change, but if you were hoping that I was going to subject myself to The Hustle, your dreams do come true. The Hustle is a remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which itself was a remake of Bedtime Story, but I do not think this story will be remade again anytime soon, if ever. On the other hand, there may be a sequel to The Hustle, which made decent money worldwide. One has to wonder why someone would remake Dirty Rotten Scoundrels in the first place, I don't quite understand why. Was anyone really clamoring for it, was there some new twist on the story where new technology would enhance the film? No, there was none of that, but it seems that a lot of people in other countries have watched the film, so its existence is justified. This, however, is extremely bland in terms of direction, the jokes stop landing once we hit a certain point of the film, and all in all I think there was also a very bad casting decision made here. I'm not talking about Rebel Wilson either. In any case, what we have in The Hustle is a movie that just doesn't click, where the premise just doesn't work and may never have worked. I haven't seen Dirty Rotten Scoundrels so I don't know what I'd think of it, but knowing that they're so similar I now won't for a very long time. When the laughs die in the theater, that's some validation of my opinion if I've ever seen it.

Our film starts with two narratives before the two women collide, which I thought was hardly surprising. The first is about Josephine (Anne Hathaway), a woman living on the French Riviera trying to find men to take money from. There's a guy with a gambling problem, he's trying to get rid of his wife's $500,000 necklace. We learn that Josephine has a cop of some kind on her payroll, Brigitte (Ingrid Oliver). This is very poorly explained as well. With her help, they are able to steal the guy's necklace and replace it with something shitty. The film then snaps over to an unnamed American metropolis, which is a bit strange although I'll allow it. Penny (Rebel Wilson) is a con artist who has pictures of hot women on her phone. She says that she's the woman's sister, the guy gives away money to fix the woman's breasts, or cleft pallet, or whatever it is that Penny says is wrong with them. Of course, in order to get to that point, she has to catfish them in the first place. I did laugh at this part, I must admit. When she's in the middle of this, some guy runs in to accuse her of doing the same thing to him, and she has to run. Fortunately her dress looks like a garbage bag, so she escapes. In the most lazy piece of writing this year, she steps on a magazine turned to a page advertising France, so guess where she's going?

Upon arriving in France, Penny decides to work her little scams on the train, eventually encountering Josephine. Josephine realizes that another con artist in the area isn't so good, so she sends some friends over there to get Penny to wind up disembarking the train in a different town. This, unfortunately, does not work. While she's planning a scam, Penny shows up with a rich Russian guy she's bilked out of money, which leads to Josephine's cop friend throwing Penny in jail. Of course, this is going to lead to more scams and cons, and while Penny and Josephine aren't going to be friends, Josephine has a plan of her own to let Penny down nicely. It's so hard to read into the motivations of the characters in this film because there's absolutely nothing that would explain their actions. It's one sketch to the next instead of that. Josephine has a really good con planned one day, their target is Thomas (Alex Sharp). I have been super vague and haven't said everything because I don't want to spoil this for anyone who really wants to watch it. Thomas is a tech geek, and Penny is going to compete with Josephine to see who can scam him the best. The film dies once this scene happens.

When I say that the film dies, I mean that it goddamn dies and ceases to be funny in any way. Yes, Anne Hathaway is nice to look at, that's literally all The Hustle has to offer once things move to this stage. I don't recall seeing anything before where Rebel Wilson was a major part of the film, and it turns out that's a good thing as I found her humor to be incredibly inconsistent. So many times I see films now strive to give a real location even when it makes no sense, so when both locations of the film were fictionalized, I realize how stupid a complaint this is but it bothered me. That is an early matter in the film, but I thought the first part of the film was okay and that they made me laugh a few times. The way in which things go downhill from there is awfully hard to describe. The Hustle has horrible direction and really bad jokes, Hathaway's delivery of them is also extremely painful. There is no point to any of this, sketches that aren't good, a film entirely made due to gender reversal regardless of whether or not those moments would be any good. The best way to put it is that this was blatant pandering.

Sometimes pandering movies like this aren't the worst thing in the world, but I need some material that I can really sink my teeth into. Conning some geek out of all his money while both actresses only have horrible gags to utilize just doesn't do that for me. The Hustle is straight out stupid, I felt broken at the end of this and didn't know how I was going to get out enough words to write a review. When you have to watch someone eat a french fry that was dipped in toilet water, what can you even say about something like that? Nobody kept laughing once this scene was over, I don't think anyone particularly cared for The Hustle. If they did, they have extremely poor taste. I don't understand how this got any good reviews at all considering the content of the film, none of these scenes are woven together in any way and this drags hard once the big con comes into play. The ending is also beyond stupid, not funny at all, and I didn't like this.

3.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

Fast & Furious 6 (2013), directed by Justin Lin

I got the feeling once I finished Fast & Furious 6 that my review was going to be free of recency bias, and I thought that recency bias would be a very big deal when it comes to something like this. When there's a series with big stunts, people can't often help themselves and are immediately led to instantly say "this was the best entry of the series yet." With the benefit of very recently having seen very crazy films, and with just having watched Fast Five, I know that it isn't. Most people who want a refresher before heading into the theater to see a movie will have already seen the previous film once before. That means they will know what they didn't like, what they thought wasn't so great, and they will watch it all over again. What I find to be even more harmful in that regard is that the great stunts lose their edge once you've seen them more than once. A person wants something new, they easily jump into saying "this was their favorite." For the general public, it is their favorite, it's usually because they've only seen the movie once, and recency bias has kicked in. With that in mind, Fast & Furious 6 is a film that has great stunts. Some of them go way too far and are unrealistic, which is not the case with Fast Five. Fast Five keeps the superhero stuff to a minimum and Fast & Furious 6 does not. The question is whether or not the unrealistic aspects of Fast & Furious 6 can still lead to a good film. The answer is yes. I enjoyed this very much.

After their heist in Brazil, what I would refer to as THE FAMILY has spread around the world and is living a great life in places they cannot be extradited from. Dom (Vin Diesel), Elena (Elsa Pataky), Mia (Jordana Brewster), and Brian (Chris Walker) have all split to the Canary Islands, a place I would certainly want to live. Gisele (Gal Gadot) and Han (Sung Kang) are in Hong Kong, seems like they're still stealing things and having fun. Roman (Tyrese Gibson) is a jetsetter and so is Tej (Ludacris), the two Dominican brothers are gone to the wind, we won't see them again. Or will we? Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) is still an agent, kicking ass, and he has a new partner, Riley (Gina Carano). I barely recognized her. They are investigating an incident in Moscow where a man named Owen Shaw (Luke Evans) has destroyed a convoy in an attempt to acquire components that will allow him to create a device that will allow him to shut off power in an entire region. This device would be very valuable, would go for a lot of money. You see, at the end of Fast Five, when Hobbs had those papers about Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), this is who she was running with. Owen Shaw is a bad seed, a former soldier, he's very tough and Hobbs just can't bring him down. Fortunately for Hobbs, he knows just the people to find who he can make a bargain with in order for them to do his bidding.

Of course, Hobbs first tracks down Dom, who wasn't very difficult to find. Once Dom sees the pictures of Letty, he can't help himself and he has to know what happened. This leads to Dominic making some demands, because he's no idiot after all. If he does this mission for Hobbs, a mission where he takes down Owen Shaw for him, THE FAMILY can get pardons and return to the United States. Sounds like a plan if you ask me. Some of these people have to be brought in from their locations, but in the end, everyone travels to London and sets up a base. One of Shaw's men was captured and interrogated by Hobbs, he has to give information on where Shaw is hiding out. Shaw is no dummy though, he knows what's coming. The trick is that he wants the police and any of Hobbs' people to go to his hideout, his crew has something else in mind and is breaking into a building in another part of London. After a chase, Shaw flees, and it is clear that he has everyone outmatched. They're going to need more equipment, they're going to have to get to know Shaw's people better, and everyone has their own jobs to do. Oh, I see that I left something out. During the chase, Dom encounters Letty and gets out of the car to try to talk to her. When he does, Letty shoots him right in the shoulder and jets, leaving Dom quite confused. What Dom does not know, although he may surmise, is that Letty has lost her memory and remembers nothing of anything prior to encountering Shaw. Great!

The unrealism of Fast & Furious 6 is something I can't help but think about, because that scene where Vin Diesel flies out of his car, diving across a bridge to catch someone is really sticking with me here. I just, you know, it's absolutely ridiculous and I can't help but think about it. I'm trying not to, I'm doing my best. That's hardly the only unrealistic thing here, but when hit with that commitment to being unrealistic, I can accept it. That is what the film is, it is consistent in what it is doing and it is also very fun. I was a little surprised that Dwayne Johnson was in this film a bit less than I'd expected, but I guess that this wasn't yet his franchise. The actors still don't think it's his franchise, but it kind of is. The spinoff film this year will do huge numbers at the box office to prove that. Everyone involved in making these films seems to realize at the point of this sixth movie, that creating as many memorable moments as possible is the way to go. There are a lot of them, but the plot isn't as good as the previous entry. Everyone does their best to try to bolster the plot and the characters, so we feel more attached to them because we know more about them, but in the end, it's hard to work with a plot like this one.

The twists near the end could not possibly have been more obvious, but that's something I'm fine with giving a free pass to. I do like that the producers of this film are willing to bring characters back from the dead as well. When the actor isn't dead themselves, it seems appropriate to play around with the timeline a little bit and fix what was a bad decision in the first place. There were two of them, the ones with Han and Letty, but unfortunately there's no way to completely fix Han's death, and we know it's coming at some point. This little restriction with Han makes matters difficult, but I do think that was very nicely handled. Everyone knows Jason Statham shows up in a mid-credits scene and kills him, so I'm not spoiling anything. This was a wise choice, something that I could not possibly have avoided knowing prior to watching this film. The car chases here are a tad bit acceptable, I wouldn't go so far as to say they were great or good. Other films in this series have had great car chases, but the one set in Spain that really took place in Tenerife wasn't the absolute best. I liked the tank, but there's some element of fuckery that will go into things because cars cannot stop a tank. It is what it is. Until I see otherwise, Fast Five is the standard of this series, but I'm going to watch the other two films in the next two months. I assume that things get more science-fiction like if the spinoff's trailer is any indication.

7/10

 

[909]

The Glass Castle (2017), directed by Destin Daniel Cretton

The Glass Castle was one of those movies I was going to skip, I swear! The problem with this was that I turned around while watching something one night and saw my dad watching this. When I gave it a look, I saw that Woody Harrelson was in this doing his thing, and I was sold. I had assumed this was some small part, but it was not. That, I guess, is how a film can get my attention. I knew before I turned this on that this was based on the memoir of a journalist who had a very shitty life while they were growing up, and I think some aspects of that don't quite carry over to the film if I'm being honest. Perhaps that's why The Glass Castle didn't make as much money as I would expect a long-running New York Times best seller to make once adapted to the screen. This was not exactly booming at the box office. The impression I was left with at the end of The Glass Castle was that the film has a very bad ending, one which nearly cripples my feelings of the film as a whole, something I didn't want to see once this was over at all. I also thought that perhaps the film was a little too long, but all of these scenes serve a purpose to enhance the story. I know that this director also directed Short Term 12, but I haven't watched that yet. I swear I'm going to! What this movie is about, is when a set of parents abuses their kids without physically harming them, all done in "the best interest of their children". In those cases, they wind up destroying their children and making it very difficult for them to emotionally develop.

Our film has two narratives running throughout, and these serve as explanations for why characters feel a certain way from scene to scene. When I watch films like this one, sometimes I have a hard time remembering which narrative starts first. Jeannette Walls (Brie Larson) writes a gossip column in New York City circa 1989, and she is at dinner with her fiance David (Max Greenfield) in order for him to close deals with his clients. David is a financial analyst, into all that kind of shit, and I know nothing about that life. When the subject of Jeannette's family comes up, she talks about how her mother Rose (Naomi Watts) is a great painter and how her father Rex (Woody Harrelson) is working on a breakthrough in coal technology. Of course this is not true. On the way home, there's a drunk man in the middle of the road, and we see that it's Woody Harrelson, so we know it's her father. We also see Naomi Watts diving in a dumpster, so we know that's her mother. Afterwards, she calls to talk to Lori (Sarah Snook), her sister, and she tells her about the incident. Then, I'm pretty sure because Wikipedia is telling me so, it's time to snap back to Jeannette's childhood and time spent with her family. The question is, what happens when she is forced to encounter Rex outside of that taxi? Everyone knows it's coming.

Once things flash back, Jeannette is now very young, just 8 years old. These scenes don't last long so I'm not going to list the actors just yet. She and her family are basically nomads, they squat from house to house or make deals with people, but either way they're always on the move. One day, Rose is being lazy and is more focused on her art than taking care of her family, as always. Of course, she thinks this art is going to take her places, but it won't. The kids don't go to school, and with Rose being what she is, Jeannette has to make hot dogs for everyone while only being 8 years old. Her dress catches on fire, she gets burned up very badly, and winds up in the hospital. She's visited by a social worker because that's what really needed to happen, but Rex shows up and scares them off. Afterwards, he uses his son as a distraction, and breaks Jeannette out even though she has burn marks all over her torso. Rex tells his daughter about building the "Glass Castle", which is a house made of glass as it sounds, but this is obviously bullshit. Eventually the film snaps forward some, and Jeannette (Ella Anderson) is 11. Her sister Maureen is 3, brother Brian (Charlie Shotwell) is 9, and Lori (Sadie Sink) is 13. They have moved to West Virginia near Rex's parents, and they are extremely poor. Food is hard to come by, and Rex is content with drinking himself to death.

The strengths of a film like The Glass Castle are obviously Woody Harrelson's and Brie Larson's performances, with Woody's really standing out in spite of the script having intricacies that led me to believe the film wasn't that great. I thought the child actors also did a rather good job, but Naomi Watts wasn't given a whole lot to chew on here. The story does feel authentic, as a movie based on someone's life should feel. My dad was telling me about how his dad lived in Ohio's coal country when he was a kid, about the abject level of poverty and drunkenness in those communities, and about how it was so hard to get food. This is addressed well in The Glass Castle, but there's a problem when one of those storylines is introduced and not followed up so that the viewer can learn what happened. Unfortunately, with those kinds of stories that my dad told me, I know that the way the dual narrative works is not going to properly disguise anything to lead to a mystery. At least, I think it was supposed to be a mystery. It's clear to see how Jeannette and her father would become estranged, and the film doesn't do anything unconventional in terms of telling this story. The Glass Castle does have good cinematography, but the directing and editing is not my favorite thing in the world.

The script leading me to believe the film isn't great, although I do intend to give it an average score, is the ending. The ending is absolute garbage. After seeing two people abuse their children like this, I don't find any happiness in the ending where Jeannette goes to see her dying parent. I know that I would not have done so, but this is spun as being a grand reconciliation and I don't like it. There's not many other ways to resolve the story I suppose, and it is someone's memoir, but I don't have to like that aspect. I also thought some of the worst parts of the abuse and poverty were glossed over. In the memoir, it says that eventually Maureen got so tired of people's shit that she tried to stab Rose. There were also snakes in their house, which is rather frightening. Lots of these incidents are not mentioned at all, and there's far worse than what this film shows. I'm left to think of other movies that feature strange families, and The Glass Castle doesn't quite measure up to those. Again, I cannot handle the ending of this, and when they're trying to tear jerk you for some douchebag who got drunk all the time. Anyway, this was decent enough, I found it to be an accurate portrayal and thought it was worth my time investment although it was rather long.

6/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

Aladdin (2019), directed by Guy Ritchie

I wanted to open this review by talking about Aladdin and the cartoon version, but first I have to talk about something a little personal. I hope these people somehow find out what I've said. I went to see Aladdin at 7:30 PM on Friday, sat in seat E18 next to the two smelliest motherfuckers I have ever encountered in my life. I wanted to move so badly, but there was no open seat, so I suffered as I didn't have time to go home and make this up at a later date. I wish somehow that these people could get a message from me where they would learn how to take a shower, wash their asscrack, fix their crotchrot, or whatever the hell was their problem. I don't know what to say about people like that. So, Aladdin. The cartoon was an entertaining kids movie that has not aged particularly well. The short version is that it is full of racism to an incredible extent. I don't know if it reinforces racist thoughts in the heads of children, that's an examination I will have to undertake some other time. One day I'll watch it again and review it, but this isn't about that cartoon, and therefore I'll leave that there. The remake of Aladdin goes to some lengths to address those concerns of Orientalism, but of course the tale itself is rooted in that. So, at that point, the commentary I can give about the film relates to specific matters. Does this portray Arabs as ugly savages? No. I think the strangest thing about this is that Bollywood style costumes and choreogaphy are placed in this film, but I have a more simple test that this film passes. Seeing as this is not a telling of a true story, does this project give lots of people of color acting jobs where they aren't asked to play terrorists? Yes. It passes the smell test. I probably won't address this again, so if you want more, I'm sorry.

I'm not going to follow my usual review pattern because unlike this year's Dumbo, this is not a unique story and is rather faithful to the good aspects of the original cartoon. It is also not very faithful to the aspects which are not so good. Aladdin (Mena Massoud) is the street rat and thief, as we all know, and Jasmine (Naomi Scott) is the princess whose heart Aladdin wishes to win. The Genie (Will Smith), as everyone also knows, comes out of a lamp found in the Cave of Wonders, a lamp which allows its owner to make three wishes the Genie must grant. I laughed so hard at the reaction to Will Smith as the Genie. THE SANCTITY OF OUR RACIST CARTOON HAS BEEN SULLIED BY WILL SMITH! Navid Neghaban is the Sultan, and for the first time I can ever remember, played someone who was not a terrorist, a freedom fighter, or a person whose life has been destroyed by terrorism. I feel like pointing out that Massoud broke into the entertainment industry by playing a guy called 'Al Qaeda #2.' So, this is where inclusion is going.

Jafar (Marwan Kenzari) does his best to make you understand why he's the villain, and in this case doesn't need ugly guys with goofy looking swords to help him out. Iago is voiced by Alan Tudyk, this role is trimmed down a bit, and far less annoying. Aladdin also introduces three new characters and a fair few new songs, this playing out more like a musical than I'd expected. Prince Anders (Billy Magnussen) is a white man from a fictional kingdom, trying to win Jasmine's hand in marriage. His scene is rather amusing on a PG rated level. There's also Hakim (Numan Acar), Jafar's right hand man until things get a little too evil for his tastes. Most importantly, there's Dalia (Nasim Pedrad), Jasmine's handmaiden and best friend. She did not appear in the original film as you can tell, but when the Genie stops being blue and starts being human, she has a major crush on him. I was surprised by this character as it was well disguised in the trailer, which didn't give anything new away at all.

I think a lot of the negative reviews feature people caping up in defense of the previously mentioned racist cartoon, so I think people should take that shit for what it is. I'm not saying this is a perfect Aladdin, it is rather flawed in fact, but I thought the film was good enough. I've also only ever heard that much applause at the end of a film after Avengers: Endgame. So, take that for what it's worth. I liked the changes for the most part, I also thought that Guy Ritchie added some nice touches. He also added bad ones. The good should come first, and I thought that Massoud and Smith had dialogue that was similar to that in other Ritchie movies. It seemed that people were not entirely familiar with this and found it extremely funny. I wouldn't quite go that far, but it was nice. The choreography of the parade scene was also incredible. I also thought that it was a smart decision to remove Iago's lines in favor of having Jafar talk more. This Jafar needed to talk more, that's what I was thinking as the film played out, he would have lacked depth. As far as the bad goes, I hate the way Ritchie and other new directors who worked as actors on his projects like to play with slow motion and speeding up the frame. I hate it more than I can properly put into words. You can also tell that Ritchie doesn't know how to direct a musical as these parts were rather THROWN IN if you'll pardon the capitalization. That's how it felt though.

I think when considering that this was remaking a racist cartoon, and that a lot of people just won't ever understand why things like this are remade, that this was better than most people probably expected. That's not going to carry over to critical reviews as a lot of those people are attached to and blind to the problems present in the cartoon version. I'm sorry, but if you don't see the major racism there, you're just a fucking moron. I'm not saying this was fucking fantastic, but I did like this. Will Smith made a very good Genie, his own spin was on this, but it fit with how the Genie is supposed to be. It's too bad that nobody will give a shit about his performance because it wasn't the Genie from their racist cartoon. I was kind of bummed out that Jafar doesn't turn into a cobra or do his evil song, but you know, there were a lot of songs in the film by that point and I accept that there didn't need to be more of them.

I think there are many problems present with adapting these cartoons, and I don't really know how to get around some of those issues. There's the problem that these don't have enough original scenes, or in some cases that they go too far and don't hold onto what made the original story good in the first place. Some of them are actually better than the cartoons, but if you tell someone that, they're going to get mad. I think The Jungle Book and now Aladdin are in this category. The cartoons that are rife with racial stereotypes, like this one and Pocahontas, I don't really know why anyone would want to take the task on of remaking them. I don't think Pocahontas can be remade at all actually. That's one that simultaneously has problems of racism and is a rarity of the time in that it presents the facts of English settlement, that the people who settled here were human garbage who killed tons of people in order to make this land their own. But, yeah, I feel how I feel on this one. 2019's Aladdin is better than the cartoon version, I laughed more and I didn't think that some of the scenes were extremely outdated and bigoted. Period.

6.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Avengers: Endgame
2. Us
3. Gloria Bell
4. Arctic
5. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
6. High Flying Bird
7. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
8. Captain Marvel
9. Long Shot
10. Shazam!
11. The Beach Bum
12. Paddleton
13. Hotel Mumbai
14. Cold Pursuit
15. Happy Death Day 2U
16. Greta
17. Aladdin
18. Triple Frontier
19. Fighting with My Family
20. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
21. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
22. Brexit
23. The Dirt
24. Velvet Buzzsaw
25. Little
26. Alita: Battle Angel
27. The Kid
28. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
29. The Upside
30. Dumbo
31. The Hummingbird Project
32. Escape Room
33. Tolkien
34. Captive State
35. The Highwaymen
36. Pet Sematary
37. The Intruder
38. What Men Want
39. Unicorn Store
40. The Curse of La Llorona
41. Miss Bala
42. Hellboy
43. Glass
44. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
45. The Hustle
46. The Best of Enemies
47. The Prodigy
48. Polar
49. Serenity

 

[909]

Shot Caller (2017), directed by Ric Roman Waugh

After a very long time of not watching prison movies, with Death Race being the only one related to that subject I can think of, it is time for me to watch three prison movies over the course of the next month or so. It also turned out that I could not get through a Sunday without watching something with a person from Game of Thrones in it. Perhaps I will attempt to keep that going? I don't know. Anyway, apparently this is part of a prison trilogy of sorts where the director continues to direct films related to prison in some kind of way. I haven't seen the other two, so I don't really have any awareness of what those films contain. Shot Caller is a movie that went straight to video on demand, so in theory, this should suck. I wouldn't go so far as to say it sucks. Shot Caller is a film with some issues and flaws, but it's also one that requires the lead actor to give a very strong performance, a very interesting film, and nicely made. It's also the kind of film that explains why people do certain things when they become incarcerated and why it is hard to break the cycle, you can't break the cycle of going to prison when the things you have to do to get through prison follow you to the outside. A lot of people like to talk about how this aspect of the prison system is dramatized, but I think most people in California know that's bullshit. It's definitely not dramatized here, not from anything that I've ever heard from relatives who worked in prisons. They should know better than anyone else, after all. I guess the thing I most wanted to know about Shot Caller, was what it was actually about?

Our film starts with a man being released from prison on parole, sent on a train to Los Angeles, where he encounters some people in a parking lot. The man is called Money (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), the people are Shotgun (Jon Bernthal), Howie (Emory Cohen), and Chopper (Evan Jones). These people are very obviously white supremacists, as you see the white pride tattoo on Money's back before this scene and I merely neglected it. They go to a party full of other white supremacists, and this is the point where I realized these people were Aryan Brotherhood, so I shouldn't have been surprised by anything that happens next. Their party gets shot up by some people who are allegedly crips, and when everyone leaves, Money decides to drive around downtown. The reason? We snap back to his past, when Money is Jacob and he's a stock broker who lives with his wife Katherine (Lake Bell) and their son Josh. After dinner with his wife and their friends Tom (Max Greenfield) and Jennifer (Jessy Schram), his whole world is rocked. While drunk, he runs a red light and gets his friend killed, which leads to his future imprisonment. He is advised to take a plea deal that could lead to him doing 16 months, but Jacob has problems with other people. When his lawyer told him to stand his ground in prison, he took that shit too seriously and beat the hell out of a black inmate when provoked in the yard.

As people know, when you get in a fight with someone of another race while in prison, or really a fight with anyone, you're pretty much fucked. Keeping to yourself is one, very difficult way of getting through prison unscathed. Violent offenders (especially those who commit manslaughter) are housed together and if you've done something violent, it can be hard to stick things out. After some time, he is released back out onto the yard and has caught the attention of Bottles (Jeffrey Donovan), a white supremacist who is friends with the already mentioned Shotgun. Bottles says some stuff later in the film that explains the how and why these things happen, but I'm sure everyone's heard it in other material. The fact is this. Money had to make his way through prison, no matter what. He has angered a black gang member who was disrespecting him and there is no way around this anymore. As we already know, he made it through prison. But, the important thing is, what is he going to do when he's out of jail. We flash in and out of Money's past throughout the film, but his present is rather simple. He has to deal with his parole officer, Kutcher (Omari Hardwick). Kutcher wants to be in contact with him quite regularly because he knows Money's past. What Kutcher also knows is that Money and Shotgun have a major deal of some kind planned out in the desert. We also know that Katherine and Josh no longer speak to Money. You find out why as things go.

The film is effective and realistic in terms of presenting the prison system to the viewer, but Shot Caller is lacking very much in the way of having a protagonist. There is no protagonist here. We have a bad guy doing bad things because he has no choice, because his family will be killed by the Aryan Brotherhood if he does not continue down this past. It is easy for a person to justify their actions in his case because in their mind, they are doing it to other bad men. Of course, when someone turns on a prison movie, they know exactly what they're getting into and that this is the genre. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is very convincing as an American white supremacist gang leader, but this is no surprise to fans of Game of Thrones. He can pull off anything and make the viewer believe just about anything. The lone solace in his character is that you don't hear the character spouting that ideology, this is a prison gang story to the core. The transformation of himself is also quite effective and good viewing. The main problem with the film is that the other characters do not match up to Money in any way. The performances there are lacking. The tension is also lacking during the prison scenes because we already know that Money made it out of prison with his family secure. A linear narrative would have done this film a rather great service. There only needed to be a scene at the start showing him killing someone.

Shot Caller doesn't have any great shootout or fantastic action scenes, but that aspect lends itself to realism. The realism I'm talking about is the way that when someone gets shanked in prison, they keep getting shanked without much back and forth. Getting stabbed is a motherfucker. I would give this a higher score, but the events at the end of the film were pretty ridiculous and lacking in common sense. I'm sure nobody's seen this, but his actions border on unjustifiable because he has no idea what the other gang members have ordered, or whether or not they believed him going into the dramatic conclusion of the film. I'm slightly confused as to why a film featuring Jamie Lannister wasn't released in theaters when it has this hard-boiled subject matter, that's going to be something I just can't explain. The film is good, but when lacking in action scenes and when so full of detestable characters, there's a ceiling to matters and I can only go so high with a score. The family drama also whiffs here because it isn't as important as everything else is. I know those scenes serve to ground the lead character, to justify his actions, but no. It's far more interesting seeing someone like Keith Jardine screaming for someone's head to be ripped off, or for those prison gang alliances to be explored further.

7/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

Booksmart (2019), directed by Olivia Wilde

I was trying to get out to see Booksmart on Sunday so that my ticket would be counted with the weekend box office total, but life got in the way. I'm not surprised at all that this isn't doing huge at the box office. I think comedy is dead, but releasing this at the same time as a musical-comedy like Aladdin was a bit shortsighted. You'd think the two films don't have an overlapping audience, but on the contrary I think that they do. People who would have wanted to take this would have to leave their kids at home, but there were a lot of adults at Aladdin, I do think there's the potential for Booksmart to have a good second weekend. Time will tell. Anyway, it's tough for me to explain why this got great reviews, all I can do is explain why I agree with those reviews. What we have here is a film that more people should see, a film directed by someone in their first try with their own unique perspective, and almost everything in this lands. I can't quite figure out why it took so long for someone to make a high school graduation film that fit this era so well, but now that it's here I'm not going to complain. Before I get into the nuts and bolts of this, I would like to point out that I don't think I've ever heard laughter to this extent in a theater before. Granted, look at what I saw last year in theaters and consider that there hasn't been many good comedy films in the last few years or so. The genre is dying, this is an attempt to revive it, one that worked for me.

Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) are best friends, they are also high school seniors and they are going to graduate. I'm not sure how to describe Molly and Amy's personalities. They're more woke than you or me? Molly wants to become a Supreme Court Justice, has pictures of Michelle Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her room, and listens to motivational speeches to get herself ready for school. Amy and Molly are going to Columbia and Yale respectively, they are very proud of this. Amy drives a Volvo station wagon with lots of amusing bumper stickers on it. When they get to school, Molly (who is the class president) crashes the principal's (Jason Sudeikis) office to talk about the school budget. That is just how they are. The other kids at their high school, or rather they're young adults by that point, don't really care for Amy and Molly and in some senses seem to hate them. The class scene they show after the one with the principal is incredible. Amy came out of the closet some years ago, and she has a crush on Ryan (Victoria Ruesga), a girl who has never told anyone she's gay, but she rides a skateboard in the quad on campus so it might be true? Molly encourages her to ask Ryan out, but this is never going to happen. Molly herself winds up in the restroom, and while in there she hears some of the other people making fun of her. Not all of them are doing so, I should note.

After Molly flushes the toilet and heads on out, it's time to confront them. She asks them where they're going to school in an attempt to get one over on them, but she finds out that the three people are going to Stanford, to work at Google, and to Yale as well. Like, what? This revelation rocks Amy and Molly's world, they can't handle this. The film I should note, does a great job of setting up all these characters, but I don't want to rob anyone of that experience. The kids who partied still got into good colleges while Amy and Molly had sworn off fun in the name of ensuring they got into the best schools they could go to. This seems like a waste of time, and that's how Molly and Amy take it. Molly and Amy have a heart to heart, and even though Amy doesn't really want to go, it's time for them to go to a party. Nick (Mason Goodling) is the class vice president who Molly believes only did this because he wanted to plan the school dances, and he's throwing a party to celebrate their graduation the next morning. Molly wants to go, she's going to go. The problem is that they don't know how to get there and Molly did not charge her phone very well prior to leaving the house. Dead phone? That's definitely a problem in 2019.

I apologize if what follows is lackluster in any way, but I've been trying to tackle this review and failing to formulate a way to illustrate how good this story was. I mean, I've been trying to do this for four hours. All of the side characters were great without exception, I was laughing constantly. I think this is a movie that did a great job of encapsulating what it means to be a teenager in a good area of Los Angeles. There are so many things woven together throughout Booksmart that I struggle with how well they all came together. This isn't supposed to happen. Humorous films are supposed to drive the same gag over and over into the ground until you want them to stop doing it. That does not happen here. Everything in Booksmart was something I wanted, the film is true to itself to a fault. To a fault, I mean there are copious amounts of scenes with white people doing stupid shit to hip-hop music. That is okay though. You know how hard it is for me to write this review when I'm trying to adhere to a lack of spoiling? The plot developments that lead to the big fuck off event at the end of the film, all that shit is fantastic. Billie Lourd is probably the standout as a supporting character here, but the two leads have incredible chemistry and made me laugh constantly.

What we have in Booksmart is a movie that more people should watch, but I'm not sure people will even though I and many others have recommended that they should. 2019 has been a bad year for film so far, but Booksmart is one that stands out above the rest as being an unabashedly great film. The story is such that I know I will eventually watch the film again, and I don't rewatch anything. The pace, the humor, just everything here works on a level that I cannot describe. This is also a little strange from a first time director. There are sequences that would feel twee in someone else's hands, and I'm sure people who saw this know exactly what I mean, but this moment where we go out of the story also works. On some level, I'm not sure I'll be able to get over this film for a while. There are no good comedic duos anymore, and this won't be made into a sequel, so we probably won't get anything like this again. I'm a little bummed out. This was a great script, well directed, very funny, made total sense, I don't have anything else to say. If you didn't enjoy this I think you might have a sexism problem, I only wish I had more words to describe how much I liked what I watched. I do wonder how long it will take for something to surpass this on my list. My suspicion is that it will be at least a month or two, if that. I'm not saying this will hang around enough to be in award conversations, but it's definitely memorable.

9/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Booksmart
2. Avengers: Endgame
3. Us
4. Gloria Bell
5. Arctic
6. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
7. The Beach Bum (changed)
8. High Flying Bird
9. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
10. Captain Marvel
11. Long Shot
12. Shazam!
13. Paddleton
14. Hotel Mumbai
15. Cold Pursuit
16. Happy Death Day 2U
17. Greta
18. Aladdin
19. Triple Frontier
20. Fighting with My Family
21. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
22. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
23. Brexit
24. The Dirt
25. Velvet Buzzsaw
26. Little
27. Alita: Battle Angel
28. The Kid
29. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
30. The Upside
31. Dumbo
32. The Hummingbird Project
33. Escape Room
34. Tolkien
35. Captive State
36. The Highwaymen
37. Pet Sematary
38. The Intruder
39. What Men Want
40. Unicorn Store
41. The Curse of La Llorona
42. Miss Bala
43. Hellboy
44. Glass
45. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
46. The Hustle
47. The Best of Enemies
48. The Prodigy
49. Polar
50. Serenity

 

[909]

Documentary.

One of Us (2017), directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady

Orthodox Judaism is a subject I seem to have been exploring over the last few months, but I swear that this is unintentional and merely a result of going down lists that are already made, that I attempt to adhere to. What I'm saying is that this was not a conscious choice, and I'm not trying to compare anything I do to this documentary in any way, but this is a documentary where the state of play for the people involved was not a conscious choice for them. The lack of a conscious choice to become a Hasidic Jew is made clear throughout the film, the case of the people involved is very well stated. I have also read things in recent weeks that make it more clear to me why the oppression of this community is not reported on the way that it could be. The most obvious reason is that these works further enforce anti-Semitic stereotypes. I cannot disagree with this idea, we know that a lot of people believe anti-Semitic things and that these beliefs are becoming stronger again. Another reason is that people don't exactly understand this community in the first place and could be poorly informed by simply listening to or reading one work related to it. The last thing that sticks out is that people in the community do not want to be filmed. Many of them do not believe in it, the Hasidic community has fostered these feelings against outsiders for a very long time, and with good reason. After all, these feelings are a result of the Holocaust, that's a perfectly logical reason not to trust other people. The problem with the logic of this community is that they use tools to keep people from leaving it, the law helps them do these things as well. I suppose I will have to explain.

One of Us follows three subjects who are in various stages of leaving Hasidic Judaism, all of whom are fully committed to what they intend to do or have already done. Ari Hershkowitz is the youngest, and admittedly the least interesting subject as well. He grew to leave this community for many reasons, chiefly among them childhood sexual abuse and the way in which this community attempts to control the thoughts of children and the environment they grow up in. Ari is a young man who came to feel this way because of the internet, which was banned for use in this community, but when someone wants to do something, they're going to do it anyway. Luzer Twersky is an actor who left the Hasidic community many years before. He had questions that could not be answered, he wanted to be free. The secular world is something he'd always wanted to live in. When he turned 18, as is customary, he was obligated to find a wife and create his own household. He had two children with his wife, but he has moved on and not seen them in years. This is the way the world works. Etty Ausch is a woman who was forced to marry at 18 years old, this has had a much greater impact on her than it did on Luzer. She was forced to have seven children even though she did not love her abusive husband. Now that she wants a divorce and has an order of protection against him, the Hasidic community is bonding together in an attempt to deny her custody of her seven children. From what we know about Luzer, this will surely succeed.

The reason the mother is not allowed to retain custody of the children even though they lived in a religiously oppressive marriage, is explained in this documentary as being due to status quo laws taking effect in custody. The mother of the children wanting to leave the religious lifestyle her children were also engaging in, is a change in the status quo of their lives. Hasidic children have to go to religious school, there are standards in their life that must be upheld regardless of whether or not these things should be allowed. This is a country that believes in religious freedom to a fault, this is one of those faults. When a married person wants a divorce and they want to leave their oppressive community, the law works against them and forces them to abandon their children. This is why Luzer did so without a fight, there was no point to attempting to take the children with him. It is not possible. The point of all these restrictions is in order to ensure that people do not leave this community, that's the point of all this. The documentary tackles that as best as is humanly possible. The part where Etty is explaining to her support group the situation with how she has to leave her children in order to end this fight and at least ensure some modicum of visiting time (one supervised hour a week) makes for devastating viewing. I could hardly watch this part.

One of Us is unable to give a balanced viewpoint because the other viewpoint would not get in front of the camera, so the viewer is obligated to take these things at face value. Fortunately, I have no reason to doubt a single thing that was said in this entire documentary. The directors shot 300 hours of footage and made their decision on what to include, what could easily be found if fact checking, and this is all very well done. The question I would ask anyone questionining whether or not this is true, is why you would doubt this story in the first place? This is a rather haunting description of religious oppression, it should bother everyone that this is taking place. The problem with questioning it, as the directors describe it, is that the Holocaust will come up rather quickly in conversation. It comes up during this film and Luzer gives what he thinks is the reason for the entire system of ostracization and why these children are born into the world for this purpose. This is also not the director's first attempt at making a movie about religious people who take things too far. They also directed Jesus Camp, which I have not yet seen. I thought it was very interesting how the directors decided not to show Etty's face until 42 minutes into the film, I would like to know why they did this.

I think everyone would like to see a documentary where the religious people give their reasoning for these ideals and their systems, but I don't think we're going to get that. If one exists, I would like to know. There is a section of this movie where a rabbi is giving a speech about the ills of the modern world. That is as close as we're going to get I'm afraid. I did find there to be one huge flaw in One of Us though, one that knocks the film down a fair bit. For whatever reason, the directors decided to ignore the part where Etty had decided to come out as a lesbian. While this would have made no impact whatsoever on the child court case, it seems as if Etty was very mad about this and with good reason. I don't like the idea of making a documentary where a person can decide to leave such an important piece of knowledge out of the film. It helps further explain her impetus to leave the community. I think it's also a bit ironic to make a film about people leaving an extremely oppressive community only for aspects of their journey to be removed. That doesn't really sit right with me. I have also read that this was Netflix's decision and not that of the directors. Why? Who the hell knows. The fact is that we learn a lot about why these insular communities thrive and are successful when it just doesn't make any sense in the first place, and for that reason alone One of Us is worthwhile.

7.5/10

 

[cobainwasmurdered]

I haven't been commenting on these in the thread since we talk about them in chat usually but I try to read most of them even when I don't say anything. Keep it up!

 

[909]

Brightburn (2019), directed by David Yarovesky

When I first saw the trailer for Brightburn, I had a few interesting reactions that I would like to share. The first one was that I thought this was some kind of joke. The second was that now with Elizabeth Banks directing movies and all, she is far above this that I can't believe it even exists. None of these thoughts changed at all once I bothered to go to the theater today to check this out. I think James Gunn and his family members putting their stamp on a film is no indication at all that it will be any good. The Belko Experiment is the most obvious case of that, or at least I should say the only one I watched, and it was quite terrible. Brightburn does not reach these depths, but it does not reach the heights of pretty much anything else either. I think my problem with Brightburn is that the premise is not explored to the extent that I would have really liked it to be. With that being said, Brightburn is also rather interesting in certain respects. The gore here is quite strong. Bolstered by the audience I saw this in, full well knowing this is not a good film, I had a good time today. It didn't hurt that someone brought their kid who couldn't keep quiet. The way the kid was asking their parent who was knocking on doors and stuff helped keep things light and somewhat enjoyable. Was the film enjoyable on its own? No.

Brightburn starts in 2006, with a married couple, Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle (David Denman) trying to get pregnant and start a family on their farm in Kansas. They have failed to conceive so far and things are not going well, but they seem happy enough. Before getting busy, there's a shake, and suddenly something crashes into the woods behind their house. It's a spaceship, as everyone in the world probably knows, and they discover a baby boy they name Brandon. Some years later, Brandon (Jackson A. Dunn) is now going through puberty, his life is a good one. It's getting close to his birthday, but there are some matters in his life to deal with first. It turns out that he isn't very popular at school and he's bullied, but that's pretty much the extent of what we're shown about Brandon's life. After the bullying, he is comforted by a girl named Caitlyn who he obviously has a crush on. Of course, his parents have their friends, but it's a small town. There's Tori's sister Merilee (Meredith Hagner) and her husband Noah (Matt Jones), but that's basically it. Kind of ridiculous. Anyway, one night, Brandon starts hearing voices in his head. It turns out that he is being called by the spaceship, and he does not know what it's telling him, but rest assured that he's going to find out.

Over the course of the days after that, Brandon begings to learn things about himself. He has indestructible strength to the point of stopping a lawnmower blade with his bare hands without getting hurt, he can also fly. While at a birthday dinner, he receives a rifle as a gift from Noah, but Kyle doesn't want him to have that because he's only 12. Brandon gets extremely angry and is asked to leave, but Kyle can't move him. His family goes camping soon after and this trip isn't so great either, with Kyle having to give him the sex talk due to some things he found in Brandon's room. After this talk, Brandon gets the wrong message. He has urges for Caitlyn as I've already said, and he flies over to her house. The problem is that he is just too creepy and now she thinks he's a pervert. At school soon after, he does a trust fall exercise and Caitlyn doesn't catch him. This leads to Brandon breaking her hand as shown in every advertisement you can find. When Brandon isn't punished for this, I checked out of the film a little bit. This time he walks into the barn, he is going to get to that spaceship, it is going to speak to him, and he is going to figure out what it is telling him. This is a bad seed, as all the previews tell you. Have I stated that enough? The previews tell you absolutely everything.

As already alluded too, this film has some great gore, but that's the only thing truly great about Brightburn. There are some good moments though. The one ringing in largest with me is that there's nothing shown of Brandon ever being a good kid and the film jumps in right when he starts becoming bad. Another is that I always wanted to see the premise of Clark Kent coming out of that craft and not being a good kid after all, which is exactly what this is. This is different in that these kinds of movies always show how a kid has split personalities or whatever, which this one does not. It's also funny to see Brightburn come out at a time when all we get are superhero movies where they're all undoubtedly good people working towards a common goal. This is a bad kid working towards causing anarchy on this world. The negatives are numerous and I really didn't care for the way Brandon creeps on a younger girl. I don't see what the purpose of all that was in the end. The film is also decidedly not scary, but the gore I'm talking about is really good or I wouldn't have mentioned it for a third time.

I've mentioned pretty much everything I wanted to Brightburn, but there were a few stragglers. The bass in the theater for this movie was totally ridiculous and I enjoyed it. Unfortunately, the story just doesn't measure up. For starters, I couldn't fully buy into the scenario because the two grown men in this are married to women very far out of their league. I also just didn't understand how a spaceship could crash in 2006 and it not be investigated by some sort of authorities. There's also no logic to why Brandon wants to act out in this way and it is never stated or explored at any point. Everything important in this film is in the long trailer, you aren't really missing anything if you decide not to watch the film. I guess you could say that you're missing out on a lot of bad dialogue if you don't check Brightburn out. If you do watch the film, it isn't the worst thing I've ever seen, nor will it be the worst that you've seen. Sorry for the short, disjointed review, but this was a very short film and I could not get in the flow of writing about something like this. It's hard to do so because the film is rather scatterbrained and illogical in the first place. The reason for its spot on the list is because the previews gave absolutely everything away and left nothing to the imagination, and that's also part of what makes a film good or not.

5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Booksmart
2. Avengers: Endgame
3. Us
4. Gloria Bell
5. Arctic
6. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
7. The Beach Bum
8. High Flying Bird
9. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
10. Captain Marvel
11. Long Shot
12. Shazam!
13. Paddleton
14. Hotel Mumbai
15. Cold Pursuit
16. Happy Death Day 2U
17. Greta
18. Aladdin
19. Triple Frontier
20. Fighting with My Family
21. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
22. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
23. Brexit
24. The Dirt
25. Velvet Buzzsaw
26. Little
27. Alita: Battle Angel
28. The Kid
29. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
30. The Upside
31. Dumbo
32. The Hummingbird Project
33. Escape Room
34. Tolkien
35. Captive State
36. The Highwaymen
37. Pet Sematary
38. The Intruder
39. Brightburn
40. What Men Want
41. Unicorn Store
42. The Curse of La Llorona
43. Miss Bala
44. Hellboy
45. Glass
46. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
47. The Hustle
48. The Best of Enemies
49. The Prodigy
50. Polar
51. Serenity

 

[cobainwasmurdered]

the premise seemed interesting when i heard about it (although its been done a lot in comics and apparently far better) but the more i saw of the trailers the less and less interesting it looked. Not sure I'll even bother seeing it at this point.

 

[909]

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

I put off watching this last Lanthimos English-language movie in hopes there would be another announced by the time I wrote this review, but none has yet initially been announced. There are rumors that Lanthimos is working on adapting a Western book, to which I say I cannot imagine how exactly that would work. I also can't wait to see how it works if that's what happens. One thing I noticed in the aftermath of The Favourite was that some people were comparing him to Stanley Kubrick. I will admit that I did not see that when I was in the theater, but now that I am aware of the comparison I should probably give The Favourite another look. Even after seeing The Killing of a Sacred Deer, I think The Favourite is probably Lanthimos' best work, but I now do see the comparison to Mr. Kubrick. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a fever dream of sorts, the way in which this is filmed is incredible. The feeling is that this is something that would have been made in the 1970s, except for the fact that we know it isn't. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a disturbing piece of work, one that made me cringe to the maximum, which made me feel as uncomfortable as I think I could feel. The problem with a devilish story like this is that the viewer is also unable to look away. In not looking away, in not wanting to turn this off because you want to know what happens, it is a tacit admission that you really enjoy something like this. Oh yes, if you watched this and finished it you enjoyed the film even if you can't admit it. And it's dark. It's so dark.

Steven (Colin Farrell) is a man who works as a cardiac surgeon, this is his specialty and he is very good at it. He finishes an open heart surgery as this film begins, it is a very gruesome scene that sends a person straight into the deep end. Once he's done, he goes to a diner and meets a teenage boy, Martin (Barry Keoghan). The way in which this story is told, if you don't know the premise and you're flying completely blind, you may think that Steven is a pervert. The thought certainly crossed my mind because I wasn't understanding this as it played out. Lanthimos does not give anything away. After this meeting, Steven returns home to his wife Anna (Nicole Kidman) and their children, Kim (Raffey Cassidy) and Bob (Sunny Suljic). Kim and Bob have kid issues, Bob needs a haircut and is a bit of a wild child, and as Steven tells his friend, Kim has had her first period. This is information that seems unimportant, but it seemingly explains some of the things that follow. Or it fucking doesn't. You can make of it whatever you want. Steven and Anna have a strange sex life, I don't know what to make of that either, but they seem happy enough. Eventually, things are made clear and Anna is told by Steven that Martin's father died in a car accident some years before, that Martin's father was a patient of his, and that Martin is going to come over for dinner. Much less nefarious than I thought. Or is it?

When Martin comes over for dinner, the scenes without Steven in them, as well as some of the ones Steven takes part of, make clear this kid is a creepy fuck. He is interested in Kim even though he's 16 and she just had her first period, he's fascinated with body hair and his lack of it, and most importantly he just won't leave Steven alone and that's how things got to this point in the first place. Martin contacts Steven the very next day, he suggests that they go to Martin's mothers house for dinner. Steven wants to leave, but Martin insists that they watch Groundhog Day. During the film, Martin heads upstairs because he's tired, leaving Steven with his mom (Alicia Silverstone). His mom instantly tries to make a move on Steven, but Steven is happy at home and that's not going to happen. So, he leaves. In the meantime, Martin is attempting to become close to Kim, while Steven is entirely ignoring his phone calls. Steven is just done with this guy. One morning, Bob can no longer feel his legs. He is paralyzed. When they go to the hospital things are alright, but when it's time to leave, he falls down again and he's done. Can't move anymore. The next day, Martin is finally able to get some time with Steven, and he breaks the situation down for him. When Steven killed his dad on the operating table, he fucked up. Doesn't matter how this happened, but there is balance required because Steven destroyed his family. Steven must kill one of his own family members. They will all get sick in a four stage process, they will lose their ability to walk, then they won't be able to eat, then they will bleed from their eyes, and shortly after that they will die. Better make a decision fast, but does Steven believe this?

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is exquisitely crafted as a Lanthimos film should be, I shouldn't have been this surprised but my jaw dropped at some of the shots here. What I was left thinking as this film was going on was that that this is one of the most underrated films I have ever watched. I do not understand what people were missing when they watched this. Is the concept too morbid? Arguably, but the concept is also unique and this is an amazing revenge film. But how can anyone not see the filmmaking talent that goes into creating a unique story like this? The performances are off the charts, with Keoghan leading the way. I thought his role was totally ridiculous, yet all of it works without exception. The absurdity of the scenario, the way in which every little thing is framed, you just don't see stuff like that. The score is excellent as well, I have a hard time believing everything that was in this. Nothing is out of place, the mere limitation on the film is how good the concept can be. That's how a film should be, the stuff in this film isn't quite beyond compare but it's about as good as a film can be with the morbid restrictions that are placed on the concept. Finding out every little detail has emotional weight of some kind, I couldn't help but react to everything here.

When a film leaves me engaged like this, as I said before, that's what it required for me to unequivocally say that I thought something was a great film. You just have to watch this to see what I'm talking about. The film feels like something Kubrick made, where even if you don't like the content, the level of control and commitment given to every single scene is something that everyone would appreciate. The decision itself, you know it's coming, and once it does, as a viewer I was entirely ready to see how it would play out. I so badly don't want to spoil The Killing of a Sacred Deer at all, I've done my absolute best here not to do so. The problem is that I don't think people are going to watch this film or that it even has much of a streaming life. Once The Killing of a Sacred Deer gets to Netflix, which it will, we'll see. That Netflix exposure brings light to all kinds of subjects. I do think The Favourite is barely a better film than this, but again, I'm now curious to find out if that film carries the same kind of Kubrick feel. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is so much morbid than I thought, I was a bit surprised by the Metascore and that's why I saved it for so long, but this was STRAIGHT UP MY FUCKING ALLEY. INJECT ALL OF THIS INTO MY VEINS.

There are also some thematic things that I could discuss, but I'm often a bit out of my depth when I try to do so. I think in that sense, the point is that one's actions can come back to haunt them and that the universe does require some level of balance. Perhaps that is the director's take on things, but I would need to listen to a commentary in order to be sure. I also thought that Martin was one of the strangest characters I've ever seen in a film, one of the characters I will absolutely never forget for the rest of my life. A film does not often leave those marks. One might think this is a film that's too morbid, but the way that very famous actors lean into the material assuages those concerns from my perspective.

9/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

The Dark Tower (2017), directed by Nikolaj Arcel

Quick admission here, I have not read any of the Dark Tower books, I've hardly read any Stephen King, so I do not know what to expect here. I do, however, know exactly what The Dark Tower gave to me and I know that I did not like it. The Dark Tower is a project that kicked around Hollywood for absolute ages, apparently with good reason. It is clear that this could not be adapted as a film because it is too difficult to understand, because a film isn't where a story like this should be told. This story belongs on television where there is room for grand exposition, where I will not be bored to tears as I was when I was watching this. I must reiterate that I have never been more bored watching anything that I have reviewed. I am trying, and failing to come up with a way to summarize this film as I usually do. The way I guess I'm going to put things is this. The Dark Tower is a film that reminded me of bad science-fiction in the way that the sets all felt so low rent. The plot is completely incomprehensible to a point where I didn't understand what I was watching, and I paid attention to everything and hit the rewind button if I thought I needed to. You know how bad a movie has to be where I don't understand the plot and can't be bothered to look any of the details up? This is a big problem. The movie is shit.

The Dark Tower starts off with a camp full of children in a land that clearly isn't Earth. There are weird looking people strapping them into machines, which are overseen by Walter (Matthew McConaughey), the Man in Black. A girl subsequently sends a blast towards a tower, and I don't understand a fucking thing that I've just watched, but apparently this was a dream. The dreamer is Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor), who is 11 years old and takes up far too much of the film, ruining it with his presence alone. He experiences visions of a Man in Black who is seeking to destroy a tower and destroy the universe as a result, but he is opposed by a Gunslinger. I do not understand very much of this at all because it is never explained properly, and the things that are explained are nowhere near as important as the fundamental driving point of the film. The dream takes place in the middle of an earthquake in New York City, which is where Jake lives with his mother Laurie (Kathryn Winnick) and stepfather Lon (Nicholas Pauling). Lon and Jake seem to hate each other. Jake has to see psychologists because of these dreams, which are said to be related to his father's death. They are not, obviously. Jake has another dream of Mid-World, this one being of the Gunslinger, Roland (Idris Elba). Roland is with his father Steven (Dennis Haysbert), but they are attacked by Walter and Steven is killed by him. Roland, for some reason, is immune to Walter's magic and he can escape.

The dreams continue, of course, because there's not much of a film without those dreams and they're used in place of giving us a cohesive plot. Jake dreams of an abandoned house and finds a picture of it, which leads him to ask on an online forum if anyone knows of the place. Someone does. At the same time as he learns someone does, Lon has planned to send Jake to the mental hospital. Jake sees that there's a scar on someone's neck, which means they are using fake skin in order to cover up whatever kind of creature it is they are, so he asks to use the restroom. When he does that, he bails out the window, and it's off to Brooklyn where this house is. At this house there's a portal to Mid-World, and Jake hops in not knowing where it leads. Jake walks through the desert and eventually encounters Roland, who thinks Jake is working for Walter. The film is a complete mess and there's no context given to why any of this would be the case. In any case, eventually Roland calms down and is able to explain the situation to Jake. Walter is trying to use kids with "shine", which is a special power that allows them to see into someone's past (I guess?), in order for them to destroy the Dark Tower. If Walter brings it down, as Roland said, monsters will be able to come into Mid-World and Earth. Roland and Jake can't let that happen.

I know that a lot of people say the book series is great, that the source material is too good to give this treatment to, but I'm never going to read the books. What I do know is that a book series cannot possibly be this incomprehensible. It took until 30 minutes in for me to even have a modicum of understanding what The Dark Tower was about on any level whatsoever, but I still don't understand the purpose of the tower or the purposes of Roland and Walter. When a person doesn't understand a movie like this one, when there isn't action to suffice in the absence of understanding, I'm left with one emotion. The Dark Tower is a fucking boring film. This is a fantasy movie that lacks fantasy in the filmmaking, everything in this is so bland. There is no reason that a movie with Idris Elba as a Western hero should ever have these kinds of problems. The film simply lacks in far too many things for me to find this acceptable at all. I'm not going to go through all of them because I'm bored. The plot is lame and the dialogue really sucks outside of one of McConaughey's scenes with chicken. I'm sure you know the one if you've seen this. The inability for the film to have lengthy exposition is a problem, but the movie is also so short. I don't think this would have been good with more exposition, but it would have been better, and I strongly question someone's filmmaking ability when they make a 90 minute film that needs more exposition in order for an audience to understand it. That sentence is illogical in every way.

The problem with making a film like this one where a person decides to distill a book series into one movie, is that I don't understand what the gunslingers are or any of that shit, so it just doesn't work. I don't understand who the audience for this film was. Anyone who read the books wouldn't like this, people who don't know about the books like myself are lost completely. I guess this is why the project kicked around Hollywood for so long, there was no way to produce this in a way that would make people happy. Is that true though? You could try to work this into a film series, but even then, that feels like a bastardization of what are rather long books in some cases, not too long in other cases. I bet Stephen King drives people nuts with how he releases these too. We have a series going since the 80s which is not yet complete, I already know how people feel about that from George R.R. Martin. Maybe people are different though. I don't know what the TV series on Amazon will consist of, but I have seen that they've done some initial casting and I intend to check it out. That's probably the best way to dive into something like this without reading the books, which I will repeat, I do not intend to ever do that. Anything would be better than this weak attempt at a film though. It's tough figuring out where I want to rank this because I've already watched so much junk from 2017. This is the 100th thing listed, and I chose The Dark Tower tonight for that specific reason. I knew it wasn't going to be good but I didn't expect it would be like watching paint dry.

3/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

American Assassin (2017), directed by Michael Cuesta

I remember seeing the commercials for American Assassin on television. I think I know what the people who went to see this in theaters were thinking. "HELL YEAH, IT'S TIME TO GIVE THOSE ARABS WHAT THEY DESERVE," or some variation of that over and over again. If one really gets enjoyment out of cliched anti-Arab films, this one is for them, but it's even more the case if they really enjoy anti-Iranian films. Iran is all the buzz now, of course our current dumbshit is being cajoled into going to war with them because very powerful people want to sell more weapons, and seeing this in a film is a little bit of a problem to me. At least the filmmaker did the right thing and the terrorist was the white guy who wanted the bomb for himself, but that's the most minor "at least" I could ever give as it comes to a film like this one. The reality of things is that this is the kind of trash that Hollywood used to make in the 1980's, with the exception of a few inspired scenes that also reminded me of something made in the 1980's. I should make clear that this is not much of a compliment. I should also make clear that Michael Keaton is not the main character here. American Assassin would be an average film at best if he was, but instead a younger actor takes his place. That younger actor is not that great, but the script just destroys any chance he has to give the character depth beyond the few lines he receives and repeats over and over.

Mitch Rapp (Dylan O'Brien) is a guy on vacation with his girlfriend Katrina (Charlotte Vega) in Ibiza. Great place to vacation, that's for sure. The vacation is because Mitch has the intention of proposing to her, which he does and she accepts. Moments later, terrorists arrive on the beach, you can guess that they're Arab, and they start shooting up people with assault rifles. Eventually they get around to killing Katrina, Mitch is wounded a few times, and it's time for our story to move forward. About a year or so later, Mitch has decided to learn Arabic and starts training in kickboxing, wrestling, Brazilian ju-jitsu, learns how to use assault rifles. It obviously is not because he wants to join a terrorist cell. He goes on a message board and makes comments about wanting to join in jihad, leading to a chat with a real terrorist. He is quizzed on history facts important to that specific terrorist, which leads to Mitch taking a trip to Libya. Mitch has the intention of killing all these guys, but he cannot because he has been tracked by the CIA. The Special Forces kill everyone in the room besides him, and he is carted off to Langley for a 30 day debriefing. Oh yeah, he stabbed the terrorist who killed his girlfriend when the guy was dead. Many times.

During the debriefing, Mitch is offered a chance to become legitimate. The logic that the deputy director Irene Kennedy (Sanaa Lathan) uses is totally backwards and idiotic, she theorizes that he doesn't have to be unwound from any time in the military and won't have to get over his bad habits because he shouldn't have any. He doesn't have any bad habits? I think infiltrating a terror cell with no help and no real plan is a pretty fucking bad habit. Irene then decies to send Mitch off to a black ops unit called Orion, which is led by Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton). Stan's goal is to teach Mitch and other recruits about unconventional warfare, including hand to hand combat, how to assess risk and targets in a specific area, who they should shoot and who they shouldn't. Of course, the main thing is, this job is not personal. Same shit you see in basically every other movie. The difference between this and most other films of this kind is that the training scenes are actually good. For the first time in the film I felt engaged. The problem Orion is facing relates to a man named Ghost (Taylor Kitsch), who Stan trained and he decides to keep that fact from Mitch because it isn't important to the mission. I can't believe some of these sentences I'm writing. Orion needs to find out why Ghost is trying to sell weapons grade plutonium to Iranians, so it's off to Turkey where the Americans have an agent on the ground already, Annika (Shiva Negar).

I cut myself off at the end of the last paragraph, because fuck it. Like, really. Just fuck it. American Assassin is a bad film, not the worst I've watched recently, but pretty bad. Everything here is so cliched and so boring with the exception of a few things, which I should address from the top. The training scenes, as I already stated, are fun. There is a torture scene that I thought was acted out in a way that I had a hard time not laughing because of it. I will spoil this film because I don't think anyone cares, but the nuclear weapon does go off and this leads to a ridiculous scenario where aircraft carriers are not capsized by an absolutely enormous wave. Maybe that happens in reality and maybe it doesn't, but it was hilarious. The last thing I was expecting from a cliche fest like American Assassin was for the bomb to go off. This is particularly disappointing because Michael Cuesta has a decent track record directing good TV shows and Kill the Messenger, but that seems to not matter at all. The film is shot on location in Rome and takes absolutely no advantage of that. Most everything is indoors, and that's just how it is. I don't understand why someone would make a film in another country and do this when they were allowed to film in that country, but there you have it.

I explained clearly how the film was so full of cliches, and that was my main problem with it. American Assassin is also extremely violent, but that's strange because this feels like it's supposed to be a character study of Mitch, except for the times when it isn't. The tonal inconsistency of this film drives me nuts. The fact is that the film is also about the wrong assassin, I don't think anyone would have wanted this. The story is adapted from a book series, which is just laughable and yet another example that not all books work on screen. The trainee is more interesting on paper than they are in reality. I also think that, beyond the criticisms of the film that I've already had, that these films are made for a bigoted audience that I don't want to be part of. Yes, I watched the movie, I did not pay for it and I did not enjoy it. I am not part of the target audience. The last year or so has been a lot better about not making these bigoted, boring movies. I guess that's the real sin for some people, isn't it? The latent bigotry in the story is a problem because this is not a true story and it's something that a person made up. It's also a problem because the movie is really fucking boring. This just wasn't for me at all, and the lead was too boring to make things click on any level. I did like some of the scenes that related to character growth and not trying to track down these caricatures of terrorists.

4/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

Rocketman (2019), directed by Dexter Fletcher

I knew, as I'm sure everyone else does by now, that Dexter Fletcher directed Bohemian Rhapsody once Bryan Singer left the project during production. I'm sure everyone here knows that I did not much care for Bohemian Rhapsody, so this film presented somewhat of a problem for me. I was thinking that Rocketman would be similar in presentation. That assumption was incorrect, although there are some similarities in the third acts of both films which fortunately culminate in a dissimilar ending. What I was hoping for was to see a film with good musical performances and at least the outline of Elton John's life story, which is what this should be considering that the singer was still alive to dictate things his way. I cannot testify to the accuracy of the events in Rocketman, but there is a feeling of authenticity that Rocketman has when other films do not. It isn't merely that the actor sings the songs, it's that the film shows Elton John doing very bad things. The biggest problem with Bohemian Rhapsody is that Queen's surviving band members projected all these things onto Freddie Mercury, didn't show the facts of his life, and didn't have any interest in showing the problems in their own lives. That is something that is very difficult to get past and that film is only saved because of Rami Malek's captivating performance. Fortunately, there's more to Rocketman than that, the supporting cast stands out where other music films cannot accomplish that. How good is Rocketman though?

Rocketman begins with Elton John (Taron Egerton) crashing into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in full costume, clearly he has hit rock bottom and in need of getting some things off his chest. The things he needs to get off his chest are the events of his life, but fortunately there is no narrator and these things are given to us in various ways. We snap back to his past, to when he is just a little boy. This is done in a musical scene, and it is barely alluded to in the trailer that this is even slightly the kind of music movie that will have those musical scenes. I was not expecting this. Elton John was Reggie Dwight, his mother was Sheila (Bryce Dallas Howard) and father was Stanley (Steven Mackintosh), two more opposite people there perhaps has never been. Stanley was serving in the Royal Air Force doing who knows what while Sheila was doing who knows who and living with her mother Ivy (Gemma Jones). Reggie sits in front of a piano one day and we find that he has the ability to do so, which leads to his life becoming what it is. What's important in these parts is that Sheila cheats on Stanley with Fred (Tom Bennett). Stanley moves in and Fred moves out, as Reggie gets a piano tutor and begins studying at the Royal Academy of Music. Reggie also becomes interested in Elvis in large part because Fred is too, which leads to what he becomes in the future. I should point out that Stanley does not contact Reggie again as this story tells it, and Sheila apparently had a more tenuous relationship with her son than this depicts. Granted, this is pretty bad.

One day, the boy becomes a man, and is very interested in playing piano in local pubs. This spirals into more musical scenes, which I thought were pretty good. He joins Bluesology, which is now best known as the band that did nothing with Elton John playing piano in it, then he decides that he really needs a boost of some kind. The first step is for Reggie to change his name to Elton John, and he links up with Dick James (Stephen Graham), a music publisher. His manager is then Ray Williams (Charlie Rowe), and there you have a process of getting a record made. Ray introduces Elton to Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell), because Elton wasn't putting words to his music, and there you have it, that's Elton John. The songwriting process is not easy and Dick insists that the two move in together, but that's not something that lasts forever. The way the process works as depicted in this film as in reality, is that Bernie writes the songs and Elton figures out the music to put to them. That's that. Eventually, they make "Your Song", and that's the one that gets things really jumping. Elton is sent off to the States to perform at the Troubadour, and when Bernie encounters a woman at a party, in swoops John Reid (Richard Madden), the man who would become Elton's manager. Reid seems to know all the bad buttons to push, and we know that Elton hits rock bottom. It's definitely going to have something to do with that.

The usual music stories are in this, particularly in the terms of the artist hitting rock bottom, but Rocketman takes a different approach and cuts out the comeback after someone hits rock bottom. When they finally get around to that, he gets over his drug use and that's that. In reality he did not go to rehab, but some of the events in this film are rearranged and I don't think anyone would find any cinematic joy in seeing him locked in a hotel room in London. Instead the unloading of his baggage is more cathartic. I thought the musical format allowed the filmmaker to get more creative with how they were telling the story, and it was to great benefit. There are fantasy elements during some of these sections, and they're all very much out of place and not aired in any career order whatsoever. There is no attempt to present this as being a movie where you learn the entire career of Elton John in order or any of that guff. This is how a person eliminates continuity problems. Bohemian Rhapsody just straight out ignores them and presents everything as solid fact anyway. Rocketman will certainly be seen as a more groundbreaking film because it presents a gay sex scene, but I'm afraid to inform people who may go see this specifically because of that, that it is quite tame. I think this is basically certain to win an Oscar for Best Costume Design unless it turned out that Elton saved all his costumes and left them to be used in this film.

On the subject of how the film is acted out, I remember seeing Taron Egerton in Robin Hood and I thought that was absolute garbage, so my assumption was that this would not be the best portrayal of Elton John someone could do. I think I was wrong about that, and I thought that the scenes when he had to sing were believable. People who vote on awards fucking love musicals and we'll probably see his name more as the year plays out. I need to reiterate that I must prefer this presentation of a music movie in the case of Elton John than I would have if this was a straight forward, boring biography. The early parts of Elton's life just don't have the seasoning for this to play out differently than it does in this film. The reason I am not going to give this a super high rating is because the third act has problems with the depths that Elton reaches, the path to the bottom is a very long one and he definitely hits that bottom. Egerton does a great job of portraying this slide and it is very, very effectively done. I still have a hard time reconciling those depths with the earlier tone of the film. The first two acts are so fun, full of great moments that I won't forget. I think this is a film that more than anything else is major Elton John fan service. I do not think it will make the same money as Bohemian Rhapsody because it isn't a very soft R, I may have initially overestimated what they would pull in. I think that's strange as well because the critical reaction to Bohemian Rhapsody was so much worse. I liked this, but Rocketman was absolutely not an examination of how Elton made his music or anything of the sort.

8/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Booksmart
2. Avengers: Endgame
3. Us
4. Gloria Bell
5. Arctic
6. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
7. The Beach Bum
8. Rocketman
9. High Flying Bird
10. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
11. Captain Marvel
12. Long Shot
13. Shazam!
14. Paddleton
15. Hotel Mumbai
16. Cold Pursuit
17. Happy Death Day 2U
18. Greta
19. Aladdin
20. Triple Frontier
21. Fighting with My Family
22. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
23. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
24. Brexit
25. The Dirt
26. Velvet Buzzsaw
27. Little
28. Alita: Battle Angel
29. The Kid
30. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
31. The Upside
32. Dumbo
33. The Hummingbird Project
34. Escape Room
35. Tolkien
36. Captive State
37. The Highwaymen
38. Pet Sematary
39. The Intruder
40. Brightburn
41. What Men Want
42. Unicorn Store
43. The Curse of La Llorona
44. Miss Bala
45. Hellboy
46. Glass
47. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
48. The Hustle
49. The Best of Enemies
50. The Prodigy
51. Polar
52. Serenity

 

[909]

Annabelle: Creation (2017), directed by David F. Sandberg

Once I see the third Annabelle film later this month, that will be the last of these Conjuring franchise films that I watch for some time. The most frustrating thing about these movies is that only one of them was particularly good, that being the first one. It's strange that there have been so many of these yet I can clearly say which was the second best of these films, and it was this one right here. I don't know how to bring myself to write a full review tonight because I don't have the attention span, so I'm not. I just don't have it in me tonight. I'm simply going to tell you that after watching so many of these, this one was alright. The director is clearly more talented than most of the jabronis who direct these, so he has that going for him. The film also makes up for the horrible first Annabelle movie.

6.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

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

 

[909]

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), directed by Michael Dougherty

I know that when I watched Godzilla last month, I was thinking that there weren't enough monster battles and that the film was far too focused on what the humans were doing. Also, keep in mind that in that film, the human lead had no real focus for a long portion of the film beyond getting back to San Francisco where they acquired said focus, but that alone was not good enough for me. There are some obvious similarities, but I think the difference may be that to me the human actors are more palatable. That may not be the case with everyone else, but the point that I'm trying to get over is that I don't want people to be a main focus in this kind of film. Instead, the focus is placed on the monsters, so I thought this was a slightly better film than the first one. It seems I may be in the minority here, but what I wanted was for a huge monster wrestling battle to happen over and over again. The film delivered on that front. What I thought was that Godzilla: King of the Monsters was the most overloaded film I have ever watched. There are no dull moments at all, which is what I want from something like this, but there are also some absolutely absurd concepts that don't make sense at all. That's what I want, and actually what I hope for from a Godzilla movie. The idea that these things can exist in a modern world, they just don't make sense at all to me. Let's future some shit up, shall we?

Godzilla: King of the Monsters begins with a flashback to 2014 in San Francisco, when Godzilla and the MUTO's ran absolutely wild across the joint destroying everything. While that was going on, there was a family of paleobiologists in San Francisco getting their shit ruined. Emma (Vera Farmiga) and Mark (Kyle Chandler) have two children, a son and daughter, and their son dies while all this destruction is going on. We move forward to China, where Emma is currently living with their daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown). Emma and Mark have gotten divorced, they both at one point have worked for Monarch (the monster organization) and Emma still does so. They have been studying Mothra, an enormous larvae that is going to be unleashed soon as it has been receiving radiation. When it wakes up, Emma has a device called the Orca, which is able to emit audio frequencies that these large Titans (as they're called here) can hear. Mothra initially freaks when woken, but is calmed down as all of a sudden some terrorists led by Alan Jonah (Charles Dance) attack the Monarch base. They kidnap Emma and Madison, and they wanted Mothra too, but Mothra escapes and cocoons under a waterfall in the nearby rainforest. As you might guess, the terrorists took the Orca too, which leads to Monarch enlisting Mark to find the Orca. Mark, along with his wife, are the ones who created it. The moment when I knew Godzilla: King of the Monsters was going to be a goofy movie was when Mark said it was destroyed and Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) said that Emma recreated it.

Dr. Serizawa and Dr. Graham (Sally Hawkins) take Mark to their base in Bermuda, which has grown massively since the first film. It seems that the operation has absolutely exploded on all levels. At the base there are an assortment of different scientists. Dr. Rick Stanton (Bradley Whitford) tracks Godzilla through sonography, Dr. Coleman (Thomas Middleditch) is the director of technology, Dr. Chen (Zhang Ziyi) is a mythologist who tries to decipher what these Titans may actually do, Col. Foster (Aisha Hinds) is their special forces leader, and Jackson Barnes (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) is the soldier who just so happens to have the camera on him the most. Anyway, their goal is to find Godzilla because they know that these terrorists have something bad planned and Godzilla is naturally going to follow that Orca to wherever it's calling in order to fuck some fucking monster the fuck up. It turns out that the terrorists have gone to Antarctica, with the intention of freeing a Titan called Monster Zero. Monster Zero is Ghidorah as anyone who saw a preview of this film could tell. Jonah's team attacks the Monarch soldiers attempting to secure their base, and it's time for the monster to be awoken. The additional problem is that Emma and Madison weren't exactly kidnapped. Emma decided to go along with this because she has a stringent belief that the monsters will regenerate the planet and bring back what we've ruined.

Trust me, I know full well that this is a stupid fucking movie, but I liked it. I didn't even go into detail with how stupid that it really is, but all this kind of stuff and the full out assault on my sensations was very welcome. This movie is ridiculously loud, and the special effects are amazing, this is exactly what I wanted. I will not fault anyone who thinks this is too stupid for their admiration. That's up to them, but the film delivers so hard with its kaiju battles. I am able to ignore how horrible the plot is because of that, it's what I wanted. The issue for some is largely down to the fact that in some ways, the constant battles lead to the monsters being devalued and feeling less important because they're on screen so much. I don't see it that way though. The problems with the plot are due to a lack of inspiration, I think. The people who write these movies know that people don't want to see the human characters very much, they know that the humans should be a vehicle that leads to the monsters trying to kill each other. When that happens, they don't exactly put a lot of effort into making a cohesive plot. The Atlantis stuff, by the way, is one of the most absurd things I've ever seen placed in a movie like this one. I will give them some credit because I remained engaged while all these stupid things were happening between the huge battles.

The unfortunate thing about this is when you see all these actors you like from television, and you see them have to read these stupid lines, and that the plot isn't really up to their standard. It's a bit disheartening. Everyone here is above this material, but at the same time, I guess someone has to be there to read lines and explain why things are happening the way they're happening, but I thought this was ridiculous at points. You have to be paying attention to absolutely everything that's said in order to have a modicum of understanding of what this plot actually is. That's a problem, but I don't think I care. The film is visually excellent, completely stupid, and that's exactly what I wanted. I don't know if it's possible to make a "good" Godzilla movie, but I would have liked for a lack of heroic sacrifices and for a bit more humor. Bradley Whitford was the only guy who was saying anything funny at all. In the end, I appreciated that the filmmakers decided to give me a Godzilla movie that was devoid of thought, devoid of anything other than these things bashing into each other over and over. I will also point out that this runs a little long and that's something I was thinking during the closing scenes in Boston, and I wish that some of the characters would have been given the...deaths that they deserved. I guess that's how I'd put it.

6.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Booksmart
2. Avengers: Endgame
3. Us
4. Gloria Bell
5. Arctic
6. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
7. The Beach Bum
8. Rocketman
9. High Flying Bird
10. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
11. Captain Marvel
12. Long Shot
13. Shazam!
14. Paddleton
15. Hotel Mumbai
16. Cold Pursuit
17. Happy Death Day 2U
18. Greta
19. Aladdin
20. Triple Frontier
21. Fighting with My Family
22. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
23. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
24. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
25. Brexit
26. The Dirt
27. Velvet Buzzsaw
28. Little
29. Alita: Battle Angel
30. The Kid
31. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
32. The Upside
33. Dumbo
34. The Hummingbird Project
35. Escape Room
36. Tolkien
37. Captive State
38. The Highwaymen
39. Pet Sematary
40. The Intruder
41. Brightburn
42. What Men Want
43. Unicorn Store
44. The Curse of La Llorona
45. Miss Bala
46. Hellboy
47. Glass
48. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
49. The Hustle
50. The Best of Enemies
51. The Prodigy
52. Polar
53. Serenity

 

[909]

Sweet Virginia (2017), directed by Jamie Dagg

Sweet Virginia is the kind of name a person gives to a film when they have no idea what to call their film. That's just how it feels anyway. I tried to watch this last night, but my internet was cutting out on me and as a result I could not, but at least I hadn't really gotten started. I absolutely hate watching any parts of films over again in a short span, and I hate it even more when I have to break up the viewing of a film into two days. That's why I never do it. I was a little busy tonight so I decided to restart with Sweet Virginia as it was rather short and I only got a minute or two into things the first time. The first two minutes of the film give one absolutely no idea what this is going to be, but the poster features someone with a gun in hand and that's always going to be good enough for me. There's only been a few films like this to come out in 2019, so I'm by no means burned out on this sort of thing. What is it actually? You'll have to keep reading to find out. Sweet Virginia is quite an interesting film in that it follows a character who is truly detestable and disturbed, but surprisingly this is a character who does not do disturbing things to the extent that other characters have done in assorted films. I recommend watching this because I bet most people haven't heard of it, but I'm trying not to give that much away.

Sweet Virginia kicks off with three men in a bar playing poker, doing the things that men just happen to do. Tom, Mitchell, and Lou are at Lou's bar, and a man we learn later is named Elwood (Christopher Abbott) asks to be served. The bar is closed, he does not like hearing that. Eventually Elwood calls Mitchell out by name, then gets up and goes to get his gun. Not good news there. He comes back and kills all three of them before robbing the place, so in the end this looks like a robbery gone awry. We snap forward to the next day with Sam (Jon Bernthal) dreaming about being a bull rider. Sam runs a motel called Sweet Virginia's, which explains the name, but beyond that he's obviously from Virginia. He's made his way to Alaska as a form of escapism from something, but in truth it could be many things. There's a picture of a woman and child in his room, and he has physical problems from injuries that he got while doing the rodeo. His right arm doesn't work and he limps when walking, so those days are long gone. There's a bit of a rhythm to this film where everything has purpose, and he starts off his day by responding to a disturbance in room 128. This does not go that well for him and he's told to fuck off. At the motel, there's Maggie (Odessa Young), who obviously is supposed to remind him of his daughter. He watches over her because her dad is a piece of shit, such is life.

Anyway, after we're introduced to these things, Tom's wife Bernadette (Rosemarie DeWitt) is having a gathering at her house for her now dead husband. Lila (Imogen Poots) was Mitchell's wife, and she's there talking to her about stuff. Bernadette is being very, very loose with her words and not paying much attention to any of the information that she's putting out there, but I guess there's some level of trust between the two. Sam arrives at the gathering, and Bernadette asks him if she can come by, which lets us know that they had been having an affair of some kind. Sam tells her no, but in the end, those wishes do not matter. There's much more to the story going on here, but all Bernadette can talk about is her husband and Sam seems to be feeling bad about this whole situation. The realization that you might be a bad person doing bad things comes on you quick. At the same time as this is going on, Lila is doing some bad things of her own. You know how her husband died and shit? We are shown a scene of Lila meeting Elwood and asking him why he killed Tom and Lou instead of just killing Mitchell. Elwood doesn't really give a fuck, but it's time for him to get paid. He wants $50,000 as they'd agreed, and if he doesn't get it, some really bad shit is going to happen.

Of course, when a movie has a threat like that, some bad shit is going to happen. Chekhov's Gun is a thing when it comes to films like these, or at least it should be. There are no questions and everything here is answered except one thing. There's a part where Bernadette has a dream where her husband comes home beaten up, but I doubt Sam is capable of doing that, so I'm curious to know if that was merely a figment of her imagination and guilt. I'm sure nobody will answer that question because I'm sure nobody knows the answer to it and this was a small film in the first place. Every other little piece of information is important though. When these people come into contact with each other, it is interesting to find out what will happen next. This is the kind of slow-burn film that's right up my alley. Christopher Abbott's performance here is quite strong, these scenes when he's talking to himself are a great picture of how mental problems can lead to someone becoming so violent. Maybe he was violent all along, but that's not the kind of information the film gives out without it meaning something, therefore it is not here. This question is one of the film's negatives, but I think the answer is that people do not just decide to become hitmen. There's a buildup to that, but I don't know how common real hitmen actually are. Doesn't matter to me, his performance here is good.

It's also strange to see Jon Bernthal as a lead actor when almost everything else he's in is a part that doesn't last particularly long. Some of them are memorable, like Baby Driver or Wind River, and stuff like Rampart is not. I am hoping that Ford v. Ferrari is like this, a larger part that I am not expecting. What if I tell you that he's playing Johnny Boy Soprano and nobody's talking about it yet, DO YOU BELIEVE THAT SHIT BECAUSE YOU BETTER. Talk about something I can't wait for, that's a project that I absolutely need to see and need to be good. I have to get around to watching the Marvel stuff on Netflix as well. Overall, obviously I do very much like this quite minimalistic movie. It's up to each individual viewer to decide whether they can handle how slow this is, and I assure people that it really is quite slow. There are some great twists here, most of which come out of nowhere. The ones that are more predictable are rather good too. The small town gives Sweet Virginia the feeling of being a Western where the people in the town all know each other, but the focus is on such a very small amount of people. I really wish there was a little more to this, and because there wasn't that's what keeps this from being a great film.

7.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Phantom Thread
3. The Shape of Water
4. Get Out
5. Good Time
6. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
7. Mudbound
8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
9. Logan
10. Baby Driver
11. The Post
12. Wonder Woman
13. The Big Sick
14. Wind River
15. Thor: Ragnarok
16. Logan Lucky
17. The Beguiled
18. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
19. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
20. John Wick: Chapter 2
21. The Lost City of Z
22. First They Killed My Father
23. A Ghost Story
24. Darkest Hour
25. Spider-Man: Homecoming
26. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
27. Sweet Virginia
28. It
29. Battle of the Sexes
30. Brad's Status
31. Okja
32. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
33. Kong: Skull Island
34. It Comes at Night
35. Crown Heights
36. Split
37. 1922
38. Personal Shopper
39. Landline
40. Beatriz at Dinner
41. Chuck
42. Atomic Blonde
43. Shot Caller
44. Wheelman
45. The Lego Batman Movie
46. Megan Leavey
47. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
48. Marshall
49. Menashe
50. Walking Out
51. American Made
52. Annabelle: Creation
53. Beauty and the Beast
54. Imperial Dreams
55. Gifted
56. Murder on the Orient Express
57. The Zookeeper's Wife
58. The Glass Castle
59. Free Fire
60. Win It All
61. The Wall
62. Life
63. My Cousin Rachel
64. Breathe
65. The Man Who Invented Christmas
66. Maudie
67. Sleight
68. Alone in Berlin
69. A United Kingdom
70. Trespass Against Us
71. The Mountain Between Us
72. War Machine
73. Happy Death Day
74. Lowriders
75. Justice League
76. To the Bone
77. Ghost in the Shell
78. Wakefield
79. Bright
80. The Hitman's Bodyguard
81. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
82. The Mummy
83. The Greatest Showman
84. Rough Night
85. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
86. Sand Castle
87. The Circle
88. American Assassin
89. CHiPs
90. Death Note
91. The Belko Experiment
92. The Great Wall
93. Fist Fight
94. Baywatch
95. Snatched
96. Wilson
97. The Dark Tower
98. Queen of the Desert
99. The House
100. Sleepless
101. All Eyez on Me
102. The Book of Henry
103. The Space Between Us

 

[909]

Flatliners (2017), directed by Niels Arden Oplev

I didn't bother to watch the original version of Flatliners, and to be truthful after watching the remake I do not see the point. The original is a film without great reviews but it's one that has a more high powered cast whereas this remake has very little punch at all, and it also has far worse previews. I knew that before, but one of the reasons I was watching this is because I was specifically asked to so I could tell someone whether or not this was any good. The answer is that it was not, but the answer they are going to receive is that Flatliners was a good film that is well worth their time. That's the best thing I could ever tell someone after they forced me to sit through such an enormous pile of garbage. This isn't the worst film of 2017, but it's pretty close and in an elite category few could hope to reach. I would never watch this again for the rest of my life, no matter what. There are other bad films that I cannot say the same thing about, which is what makes Flatliners so uniquely awful. From reading Wikipedia, it seems like a lot of the things in the original film were changed, because the events in this one give off the feeling of being far more sanitized. You know how bad it is when a weaksauce psychological horror movie feels sanitized? Just watch this for two hours and you'll see how.

Courtney (Ellen Page) is a medical student in Toronto who is obsessed with what happens when people die or during their near-death experiences. Flatliners begins with her driving her younger sister and getting into a car accident when she gets distracted. When they fall off the bridge, her sister drowns and dies while she lives. The film comes forward nine years to her residency, and we are shown some of how they work with a bit of Kiefer Sutherland sprinkled in as a nod to the original film. Courtney has an idea that she really wants to work on, but first we have to meet her team. The characters are not initially given, but we have Marlo (Nina Dobrev), Ray (Diego Luna), Sophia (Kiersey Clemons), and Jamie (James Norton). These are the young doctors we have been blessed with the ability to get to know, and this is the film that we get. Courtney's idea requires Jamie and Sophia to head down into the basement, which is a setup for something so much worse than this seems to be. Her experiment requires her brain to be recorded while she uses a defibrillator to stop her heart, then she is supposed to be revived after 60 seconds. When Jamie and Sophia object, she tells them they will not be responsible for whatever it is that happens. I know when someone tells me I'm not going to be responsible for killing them, I just go ahead and do it based on that alone.

When they begin the experiment, Courtney has an out of body experience where she floats out onto the roof of the hospital when she'd never been there. The problem is that nobody can revive her and after a minute this could lead to potential brain damage, but there's actually none of that in this film. Eventually Ray is called down there and so does Marlo, and Courtney is revived. That night, she's rather euphoric, and the next day her intelligence has increased massively. Of course, you know what this means for the rest of the film, all of her friends are going to flatline and go through this for themselves. Ray does not do this because he has common sense. Of course, there would be no film if there wasn't a negative effect of doing this, so we continue on from there. The negative effect is that everyone sees visions from their past that are haunting them. Courtney's are obviously of her sister, Marlo has visions of a man she accidentally killed and fudged the autopsy report of, Jamie is bothered by an ex-girlfriend he pressured to get an abortion, and Sophia is haunted by a girl who she decided to spread nude pictures around of to her entire high school. Isn't that child pornography or some shit? That doesn't matter to this film at all, nothing makes sense. The fact is that these hallucinations are going to get far worse, and when the hallucinations manifest themselves in some ways, this is absolute trash.

I don't know how to compare this to the other film so I won't do that again, but Flatliners can basically be distilled into a movie where most of the people (except Courtney) are haunted by bad things they did and didn't feel bad about until they were haunted by them. The production of Flatliners looks absolutely ridiculous on its face, pretty much passing for any television show set in a hospital, and the film can simply not overcome that even when it leaves the hospital. Flatliners looks cheap, the script is cheap and ripped off of something else, and this is why people lacking inspiration should not remake movies from the past. The actors don't bring anything to the table and the most interesting, and rather only sympathetic character is killed off for seemingly no reason. This decision has no emotional impact even though this character is the only one in the film who is motivated by learning something good. The rest of these either don't want to learn anything or are genuinely bad and vain people. In any case, I can't really drone on about this very stupid movie. It's poorly produced, the script is poor, the acting is rather uninspired. Diego Luna and Ellen Page are way above this and shouldn't have been in a project like this one, but I guess the allure of a film someone watched when they were younger was too strong to pass up. Or the money was.

I should also point out that Flatliners was only successful to begin with because the people in it came to be more popular. That's not going to happen with the remake and therefore the point of making it is completely beyond me.

2.5/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Phantom Thread
3. The Shape of Water
4. Get Out
5. Good Time
6. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
7. Mudbound
8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
9. Logan
10. Baby Driver
11. The Post
12. Wonder Woman
13. The Big Sick
14. Wind River
15. Thor: Ragnarok
16. Logan Lucky
17. The Beguiled
18. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
19. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
20. John Wick: Chapter 2
21. The Lost City of Z
22. First They Killed My Father
23. A Ghost Story
24. Darkest Hour
25. Spider-Man: Homecoming
26. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
27. Sweet Virginia
28. It
29. Battle of the Sexes
30. Brad's Status
31. Okja
32. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
33. Kong: Skull Island
34. It Comes at Night
35. Crown Heights
36. Split
37. 1922
38. Personal Shopper
39. Landline
40. Beatriz at Dinner
41. Chuck
42. Atomic Blonde
43. Shot Caller
44. Wheelman
45. The Lego Batman Movie
46. Megan Leavey
47. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
48. Marshall
49. Menashe
50. Walking Out
51. American Made
52. Annabelle: Creation
53. Beauty and the Beast
54. Imperial Dreams
55. Gifted
56. Murder on the Orient Express
57. The Zookeeper's Wife
58. The Glass Castle
59. Free Fire
60. Win It All
61. The Wall
62. Life
63. My Cousin Rachel
64. Breathe
65. The Man Who Invented Christmas
66. Maudie
67. Sleight
68. Alone in Berlin
69. A United Kingdom
70. Trespass Against Us
71. The Mountain Between Us
72. War Machine
73. Happy Death Day
74. Lowriders
75. Justice League
76. To the Bone
77. Ghost in the Shell
78. Wakefield
79. Bright
80. The Hitman's Bodyguard
81. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
82. The Mummy
83. The Greatest Showman
84. Rough Night
85. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
86. Sand Castle
87. The Circle
88. American Assassin
89. CHiPs
90. Death Note
91. The Belko Experiment
92. The Great Wall
93. Fist Fight
94. Baywatch
95. Snatched
96. Wilson
97. The Dark Tower
98. Queen of the Desert
99. The House
100. Flatliners
101. Sleepless
102. All Eyez on Me
103. The Book of Henry
104. The Space Between Us

 

[HarleyQuinn]

I haven't been commenting on these in the thread since we talk about them in chat usually but I try to read most of them even when I don't say anything. Keep it up!

Right there with CWM. Also enjoy seeing your takes and how they (sometimes) differ from mine in relation to various movies. Best is seeing you cover stuff I've seen e.g. Disobedience but also covering dreck like Book of Henry that I'll never bother with.

 

[909]

Brigsby Bear (2017), directed by Dave McCary

Have you been waiting for me to get weird? This is one of the most strange and most offbeat films I've watched in a while, but most importantly this is also a film that also achieves its goals in feeling uplifting and sentimental. These kinds of things just aren't made very often anymore. A film like Brigsby Bear has hardly been made at all at any point. The film follows a unique character in a unique situation, doing things that hardly anyone in the real world has ever had any experience with. The concept is great, but pulling it off is rather difficult and the filmmakers do a good job of bringing that concept into reality. Prior to the release of this film, the plot was so guarded that of course there was hardly any interest in the film to begin with, which is rather foolish all things considered. Will Brigsby Bear become a cult film over time? I doubt it, we don't seem to live in that world anymore. I don't watch Saturday Night Live very often anymore, so I'm a little surprised that the people who are part of that were able to give us something like this. That's weird! So, why is there a film made with what can best be described as what looks like a pedo bear? Read on if you really want to know.

Brigsby Bear is a movie with a plot that can best be described as bizarre and rather sad. James (Kyle Mooney) lives in an underground bunker somewhere in Utah with his parents Ted (Mark Hamill) and April (Jane Adams), he is not allowed to go outside. Sometimes Ted leaves with a gas mask on, but the presumption is that the air is toxic and James cannot leave for that reason. Ted also makes clear that the outside world is dangerous beyond that, so things are what they are. James spends his days watching a show called Brigsby Bear, he owns every episode, all the memorabilia, and talks about it on a fan forum. One night he decides to go outside with a mask on and sees multiple police cars coming, which gives up that something's going on here. When the police go into the bunker, we see that Ted and April are arrested while James is not, and as such we can surmise that James was abducted at some point. James is devastated as he believed these were his parents, that there were people talking to him about Brigsby Bear, but this was not true. It was either Ted or April doing so. I should point out that James is so strange that he's only ever seen one girl near his age, she was on the show at some point and it isn't explained how until very much later.

As happens when someone is saved from their abductors, James is brought to the police station where he meets Detective Vogel (Greg Kinnear). Vogel breaks things down for James, saying what I've already said, but he says even more. Brigsby Bear was not a real show and was made by Ted specifically for James, that Ted disappeared in the 80s and was tracked down from the studio he was making this in order to find the bunker. James is then introduced to his real parents Greg (Matt Walsh) and Louise (Michaela Watkins), and it turns out that James has a sister, Aubrey (Ryan Simpkins). It's hardly surprising that everyone thinks James is weird, but James was abducted and never introduced to the outside world. When James is told about things in the real world, all he can talk about is Brigsby Bear. That's just the way things are. One night, Aubrey decides to break that pattern by taking James to a party, where he meets Spencer (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.). James starts talking about Brigsby Bear, and surprisingly the other people are interested, which leads him to feel he has something he really needs to do. What is it? The Brigsby Bear series has not been completed due to Ted and April's arrest. James wants to complete it with a movie, and Spencer is going to advertise it by uploading episodes of the show to YouTube so more people can watch them.

The viral aspect of other people viewing these videos is completely ridiculous, but I think that was the point. Due to how old the lead character is, the film is even more bizarre because we're seeing someone actively enjoy something like Teddy Ruxpin. It is all completely sincere, and because of that the film has meaning and purpose. In not playing anything for laughs, even though I don't think this is a great film, it feels quite authentic. The concept on its face is totally ridiculous, but the execution of it just doesn't feel that way. The lead performance is quite strong and I'm surprised someone was able to deliver these lines at any point without breaking, this is quite an accomplishment. The film is also well cast, and it doesn't overstay its welcome by kicking around for too long. It's short, sweet, and to the point. I think there's some interesting commentary on what happens to people who become all too obsessed with things that exist solely in their bubble, but I am not the person to wax poetically about that. The obsession in this case was placed in by his abductors to keep him from realizing the reality that he was trapped, and that leads to a very uneasy feeling for the audience should you be unable to ignore that fact. I could not.

There are many different tones someone could have decided to take with Brigsby Bear, but the one that it settled on was clearly correct. It was also different. It doesn't hurt that the show within the movie is patently absurd and worthy of being given this sort of treatment. I didn't laugh very hard, but I did think this film was rather amusing and touching. I can't explain why I thought it was touching for an abduction victim to become an adult and remain obsessed with this show, but it was. The ending of Brigsby Bear is also very nicely done, and it's clear as I write this out that this was a very good screenplay. Ultimately, the Brigsby Bear stuff leads to the guy finding his own place in the world, and he does so without hurting anyone else. It's hard for me to hate something like that. Now, on the other hand, there are some negatives of the film and they are largely related to the idea someone would be obsessed with this show when they leave a bunker to find a world that was beyond their imagination. The experiences one is robbed of, those have always been clearly stated by experts and those who have experienced being abducted. This is a good film though. The originality of it, how awkward the film is, the tone and deadpan humor, that material really worked for me.

7/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Phantom Thread
3. The Shape of Water
4. Get Out
5. Good Time
6. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
7. Mudbound
8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
9. Logan
10. Baby Driver
11. The Post
12. Wonder Woman
13. The Big Sick
14. Wind River
15. Thor: Ragnarok
16. Logan Lucky
17. The Beguiled
18. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
19. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
20. John Wick: Chapter 2
21. The Lost City of Z
22. First They Killed My Father
23. A Ghost Story
24. Darkest Hour
25. Spider-Man: Homecoming
26. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
27. Sweet Virginia
28. It
29. Battle of the Sexes
30. Brad's Status
31. Okja
32. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
33. Kong: Skull Island
34. It Comes at Night
35. Crown Heights
36. Split
37. 1922
38. Personal Shopper
39. Landline
40. Beatriz at Dinner
41. Chuck
42. Atomic Blonde
43. Shot Caller
44. Brigsby Bear
45. Wheelman
46. The Lego Batman Movie
47. Megan Leavey
48. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
49. Marshall
50. Menashe
51. Walking Out
52. American Made
53. Annabelle: Creation
54. Beauty and the Beast
55. Imperial Dreams
56. Gifted
57. Murder on the Orient Express
58. The Zookeeper's Wife
59. The Glass Castle
60. Free Fire
61. Win It All
62. The Wall
63. Life
64. My Cousin Rachel
65. Breathe
66. The Man Who Invented Christmas
67. Maudie
68. Sleight
69. Alone in Berlin
70. A United Kingdom
71. Trespass Against Us
72. The Mountain Between Us
73. War Machine
74. Happy Death Day
75. Lowriders
76. Justice League
77. To the Bone
78. Ghost in the Shell
79. Wakefield
80. Bright
81. The Hitman's Bodyguard
82. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
83. The Mummy
84. The Greatest Showman
85. Rough Night
86. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
87. Sand Castle
88. The Circle
89. American Assassin
90. CHiPs
91. Death Note
92. The Belko Experiment
93. The Great Wall
94. Fist Fight
95. Baywatch
96. Snatched
97. Wilson
98. The Dark Tower
99. Queen of the Desert
100. The House
101. Flatliners
102. Sleepless
103. All Eyez on Me
104. The Book of Henry
105. The Space Between Us

 

[909]

Dark Phoenix (2019), directed by Simon Kinberg

With Disney's impending purchase of Fox some months ago, I know that nobody wanted to see this film even though it was inevitable it would have to be released anyway. Now that the purchase went through, nobody seems to care at all because they know the franchise will be rebooted, which is frankly what this needs. Make no mistake, regardless of what I say now or later, this is a horrendous film. I am largely putting this down to remind myself. I don't understand the tone or the purpose of this film, I do not know why we are still rehashing the mutant question this many films into the franchise, it seems pointless and with Dark Phoenix ending the way that it does, it sure feels pointless. I should also point out that the last X-Men film was atrocious and that it should have been the end of this for the time being in the first place. I guess what I'm trying to say is that nobody asked for the last movie in the franchise to be this story once again. In some ways that aspect is better executed than X-Men: The Last Stand. In most other ways, particularly those related to characters who are not Jean Grey, it was not. While the film is streamlined and doesn't feature more characters than it needs to, the fact is that none of those characters are particularly interesting or developed and as a result this is a waste of my time. This is a complete failure the whole way around, and this is the second time that the Phoenix Saga has completely undone the X-Men franchise to a point where I didn't want to see these actors in these roles ever again.

Dark Phoenix starts in 1975 with a flashback to Jean Grey's (Sophie Turner) childhood, when we learn how she separated from her parents. Jean was barely in X-Men: Apocalypse, but she's the main focus here even though it feels as if the audience has no relationship to the character. When Jean was a kid, she used her telekinetic powers to accidentally cause a car accident that killed her mother. Afterwards, she was taken to Charles Xavier's (James McAvoy) school so that she could learn to refine her powers and use them for good purposes. Xavier also decided to make sure that Jean had no knowledge of these memories. This is important later. After this part of the story, we jump forward to 1992 where the timeline now sits, but this is a film that has no nostalgia whatsoever. Dark Phoenix just does not feel like a movie that had the care and time put into it to make sure people liked it. The X-Men are sent on a mission, their team consists of Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), Jean Grey, Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), Beast (Nicholas Hoult), Storm (Alexandra Shipp), Nightcrawler (Kodi-Smit-McPhee), and last but not least there's Quicksilver (Evan Peters). Did I make clear that none of these characters are given any of the treatment that they deserve and are merely there to further the Jean Grey story?

The mission itself is to safe space shuttle Endeavour, which has been damaged by a solar flare while on its own mission. There is now a relationship between Xavier and the President, which allows for the mutants to live a life free of harassment and collective punishment. The team I detailed is sent up there to rescue the astronauts, but there are issues with the solar flare and this is no mere solar flare. The X-Men are able to rescue everyone, but Jean is left behind and Jean absorbs the solar flare into her body, thus absorbing the Phoenix powers. No spoiler there, nothing in the film would make sense if that wasn't the case. The Phoenix powers, as you may know, are very unpredictable and the user could have some bad things happen to them in the process of unlocking the potential of their mind. Or, something like that. At the same time, the D'Bari have crashed to Earth. They are shape-shifting aliens who have decided to take the form of local people, the leader of whom is Vuk (Jessica Chastain). Vuk knows the origins of these powers and had the intention of finding the person who acquired them. As we know, that's Jean Grey, and her psychic powers have gone massively into overdrive. If not for the preview showing you exactly what happens, when she finds out her father is still alive, you'd be curious to find out where things go from there.

The largest problem with Dark Phoenix is its singular focus on Jean Grey to the point where it compromises all of the characters and their own stories. The stories of these characters, as well as all their signature moments, have been eliminated from the film or breeze by much too quickly. This is indefensible from where I stand. I didn't think that the film would do this, and I figured some of the complaints reviewers would make were more related to the Phoenix story itself, but this sucked. The script and the directing style are brutal, this is a person who should not be allowed to direct anything else in the future. If you really want to laugh, this is also the person who wrote the last Fantastic Four. How someone like that gets to direct a film is beyond me. One of the most harsh things a person can say about a comic book movie is that it's boring, but this one is boring. The audience should not have to wait so long for a big fight scene and a film like this should not have a main villain that does not fight. This movie was just sad on all levels, I thought. To have a cast like this and create something so boring is an enormous mistake, I don't know how that's even possible. To give an example of what I mean, Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is only in this to further Jean's story. He's on an island with other mutants but there is literally no explanation given as to why or as to who these other mutants are. It's like the director did not even try to do this properly.

The performances in this are what they are, I have seen some praise being given out for them but I cannot really agree with them. I thought Turner kept slipping in an out of her American accent, and the film as a whole is so boring that I could not overcome those feelings. The constraints of the story make it impossible for Dark Phoenix to get in any kind of cohesive rhythm, and I think this is a saga far beyond the capabilities of most filmmakers. I would prefer that it not be made again. This is just the same kind of shit that we've always seen from an X-Men movie and it felt like the actors weren't even trying. This wasn't fun and I don't understand how anyone could have gotten enjoyment from it. I guess I didn't have expectations so I'm not disappointed, but at the same time I feel like we were robbed of a goodbye to these actors playing these characters. There is no real finality to the franchise, and I guess that's what X-Men deserves in the end, doesn't it? Neither iteration of these stories has closed in even a moderately interesting way. Nobody knows when Disney is going to reboot this, or rather if they even are, but I think it would be for the best to shelve this concept for 5-10 years. They've told around 6 X-Men stories with them as a unit, two of the movies were basically the same, but the next one will have to properly introduce new actors and the characters themselves with a grander vision in mind. Bearing in mind that I never watched the Fantastic Four movies, this is the worst comic movie I have watched. The film lacks motivation and a purpose.

3.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Booksmart
2. Avengers: Endgame
3. Us
4. Gloria Bell
5. Arctic
6. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
7. The Beach Bum
8. Rocketman
9. High Flying Bird
10. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
11. Captain Marvel
12. Long Shot
13. Shazam!
14. Paddleton
15. Hotel Mumbai
16. Cold Pursuit
17. Happy Death Day 2U
18. Greta
19. Aladdin
20. Triple Frontier
21. Fighting with My Family
22. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
23. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
24. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
25. Brexit
26. The Dirt
27. Velvet Buzzsaw
28. Little
29. Alita: Battle Angel
30. The Kid
31. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
32. The Upside
33. Dumbo
34. The Hummingbird Project
35. Escape Room
36. Tolkien
37. Captive State
38. The Highwaymen
39. Pet Sematary
40. The Intruder
41. Brightburn
42. What Men Want
43. Unicorn Store
44. The Curse of La Llorona
45. Miss Bala
46. Hellboy
47. Glass
48. Dark Phoenix
49. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
50. The Hustle
51. The Best of Enemies
52. The Prodigy
53. Polar
54. Serenity

 

[909]

subtitles, Korean

Mother (2009), directed by Bong Joon-ho

I think, although I cannot be certain of this, that this is the first South Korean film that I have ever watched. I haven't watched many foreign films in the first place, although when I catch up to where I started going to the theater, this is going to change in a hurry. Even though I haven't seen South Korean films, I have been fortunate enough to see one of Bong Joon-ho's projects before, the eccentric and strange Okja. Mother is nothing like that and is entirely different, it's fair to say this was the right time for me to watch a film like this one. The rather devilish twists and turns seem to fit with a longstanding ideology that I've always felt to the core, that many mothers will look to protect their child regardless of what they are accused of doing. This film is so much better when you don't know what happens, so if you're reading and have the intention of seeing this, I encourage you not to continue. Mother is the kind of film cinephiles will watch for years, not the least because other cinephiles will consistently recommend something like this when recommendations need to be made. There is one thing I need to know though. Is it remotely acceptable to have laughed at anything in this movie? I ask because I did laugh a few times, and I do think that's one of the flaws with the film. The storytelling can be very unclear at times, but this is something that ultimately works to the benefit of the story. Mother is on Netflix until the 13th so if you want to watch the film, you better get to it.

Mother (Kim Hye-ja) is a woman who lives with her mentally handicapped son Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin) in seemingly rural, small town South Korea. Mother has problems beyond her son's issues. She does unlicensed acupuncture, which is apparently a big deal, and she's extremely protective of her son because of how he is. Do-joon has been taught by his mother to attack anyone who makes fun of him for being what he is, and this is something prevalent throughout the film because other people cannot help themselves. Do-joon does have a friend, Jin-Tae (Jin Goo), and this guy is not a good seed to put it nicely. One day, they're hanging out across the street from Mother's herb store, and Do-joon is hit by a car. He and Jin-Tae give chase and eventually hail a cab, the cab follows the Mercedes to a country club because as Jin-Tae says, where else would they be going. They catch up to the car in the parking lot and Jin-Tae kicks the mirror off the door. To say that Do-joon is mentally handicapped is somewhat of an understatement, he has a horrible memory, can't read, and can't make sense of pretty much anything in the world. Eventually the two friends attack a group of professors who were out golfing, and it was their car, which leads to everyone being hauled into the police station. While there, Jin-Tae blames the broken mirror on Do-joon, and this leaves Mother to pay Do-joon's expensive debts.

Mother and Do-joon are poor, this is made clear. That same night, Do-joon is supposed to meet with Jin-Tae and Jin-Tae never shows up. On the way home after getting plastered, he follows a high school girl, Moon Ah-jung (Moon Hee-ra) onto a pathway. She's scared of him of course, and she throws a rock at him to scare him away. This works, Do-joon is scared of everything, and that's that. He crawls into bed with his mom and that's how his day went. The next morning, Ah-jung is discovered dead on a rooftop with her head having been busted open. The police are keen to arrest Do-joon, he's an easy suspect, too stupid to defend himself, and someone has placed a golf ball signed by him at the scene of the crime. The police easily trick him into signing a confession and lock him up. Although there will be a trial, finding a lawyer is difficult and measures must be taken. Mother is determined to clear her son's name, she wants to do her own investigation. She knows that her son is simply too unintelligent to do anything like this, she is going to clear him even though she doesn't have any money. The thing I liked most about this is that her name is never given, and her attempts at detective work are entertaining the whole time.

The key to this film is that all of the twists and turns are entirely unexpected as some of the rules of formulaic cinematic storytelling are broken. Important characters are introduced later in the film. Seemingly important characters disappear. The film easily shifts point of view from one character to the next. Mother also ensures that we have a complete character description for many of the people involved. The movie builds slowly with no obligation to the audience to speed anything up. The big moments of the film are genuinely shocking and seemingly come out of nowhere. There are conventions that need to be busted in order for a filmmaker to create something spectacular, and the opposites of all things mentioned are not present. Mother is not a perfect film, but it's a great one. I did not mention the entire picture, but regardless of how it actually ended, I do not think I would have seen it coming. There are so many events in this that I didn't really have time to think about who killed the girl. I was attempting to process everything that I was seeing. The little moments here make everything work, and there are things left in question about the backstories of these characters. I really want to know some of these questions as well, but the answer will never be given.

The tricks here, of which there are many, suit the story so well and some of them made me quite happy. The only one I can actually talk about concerns the grandmother of the victim. The framing of the shot leads the viewer to believe that she is going to take a header down a cliff. That is not what happens. It's one of those things better seen than described. The overall point I've been trying to make is that this resonated with me strongly. There were numerous times that I audibly reacted, and that's when I know a murder mystery has truly made its mark. The viewer is rewarded for sticking with the slow buildup, and I will also point out that I thought one of the characters was one of the most evil that I've ever seen. There's a difference between an evil, well-rounded character and an evil caricature. There are plenty of evil caricatures out there. If you want to know the difference, watch this and see what you feel. It is taking everything inside of me not to spoil this, so I'm going to stop. If you haven't seen this, make time to see it. I'm telling you now. Every character is important and what we have here is a great piece of work. I will probably be thinking about this for a while.

9/10

 

[909]

Spoilers.

Ma (2019), directed by Tate Taylor

Ma is probably one of the best movies for our time, one fitting of the current culture in which we live, where we laugh at things that shouldn't be laughed at. We have been thoroughly desensitized and it is amazing, as I do not believe this would have been released by any major studio some years ago. I do not think this is a great film, but I do think it is very entertaining even when it does not make sense. If you didn't get some enjoyment out of Ma, there is something deeply wrong with you on a human level. Does it make sense? Not even. If you're focused on that rather than what you're watching, you should take the stick out of your ass. I will also say that Ma is a film with quite poor direction and writing, but I didn't care at all as this was going on. Inevitably this will be something everyone watches and I'm curious to know what they think. The comedy in this movie, unintentional or not, is ridiculously amusing. I was not the only person who found myself laughing constantly. The prosthetic penis was just one of those moments if you're curious to know what kind of things there are in this. Ma is quite similar to Greta now that I think on it, but one of these films I liked slightly more than the other. You will have to read on and scope my list if you want to know.

Maggie Thompson (Diana Silvers) is a teenager who is moving with her mother Erica (Juliette Lewis) from California to Sandusky, Ohio. The reason? Erica's husband left her from another woman, so she decided to pack up with her daughter and move back to her old hometown. Erica has to take a job at a casino as a waitress, while Maggie is headed off to finish school in town. She makes friends on the first day, Andy (Corey Fogelmanis), Chaz (Gianni Paolo), Haley (McKaley Miller) and Darrell (Dante Brown). They want to go drink under a pile of rocks somewhere at night, so that's what they're going to do. The problem is that they cannot buy alcohol as none of them are 21 years old. Erica is gone at her shift at the casino, so nobody's around to stop Maggie from doing what she wants. It's pretty much as simple as that. Eventually it comes to be Maggie's turn to ask adults to buy alcohol for them. At some point, along comes Sue Ann (Octavia Spencer), and she's interested in helping. She buys what they want her to buy, but she also notices the security logo on their van. The van belongs to Ben (Luke Evans), Andy's father. After Sue Ann does some research into the teenagers, she calls Ben, who then called the police, but the responding officer hated Ben in high school and lets the kids leave.

Obviously, drinking outdoors next to a rockpile that everyone goes to is going to lead to people eventually getting arrested. This may have been Sue Ann's plan. One day she meets up with the group and invites them to drink in her basement, which they do. All of a sudden Sue Ann's house becomes the spot in town for everyone at high school to get their drink on, and Sue Ann adopts the moniker of Ma. The problem with Ma is that she's too aggressive, she cannot help herself. There are also flashbacks to her childhood that indicate why this may be the case. One day, she decides to start following Erica around to see what Maggie's home life is really like. Or is that really why? Watch the movie to find out. Anyway, Ben has a girlfriend, Mercedes (Missi Pyle), and they're at the casino one night when Ma is hiding behind a slot machine. Mercedes gets into an argument with Erica while drunk, and I guess this was supposed to establish that Mercedes is a piece of shit. The thing is, again, there are these flashbacks. The flashbacks make clear that there may be a reason why Ma is so aggressive, which she wants to be popular, and why she may have problems with popular teenagers. Her job isn't the greatest either. She works as a veterinary assistant for Dr. Brooks (Allison Janney), an abusive piece of work who may actually be right about how much time her employee spends on the phone. If you treat people like shit, they may lash out, but the key point here is that she has access to drugs. Lots of drugs.

Everything in this film is ridiculously obvious in coming, but that's part of why I liked it. I do think there are issues with the way the story does not go anywhere near far enough. You would think that Ma would actually kill one of the teenagers, but she does not. I desperately wanted the film to lean all the way into this, it is nowhere near far enough. She constantly hits on one of the kids and doesn't do anything to him when she has a chance. I'm not begging for this, but I'm saying that the movie should have had more edgy material. There is a reverse side to that though. If the film leaned into it, Ma would have been incredibly dislikable the entire time. At least, that is, to some. I think there were people who liked her and sympathized with her, but I was not one of them, and the inherent issue with the flashbacks is that they are an attempt to make you feel bad for someone who drugs kids when she gets mad at them. I didn't really care for those, obviously. I laughed pretty hard when Ma was going crazy though, and the lines Octavia Spencer gets to deliver are rich. I loved that shit and was laughing constantly. The dancing scenes, the stuff when they first go down into her basement, all of it. Spencer obviously loved to get some The first act of Ma was probably the best, it's clearly above the rest of the material and has a great fake out moment.

The film consistently delivers in the important moments when you want something funny to happen, because that's damn well what you're going to get. The cast is also great beyond Spencer, even the smaller characters are played by good actors who know how to dig into the small amount of material they receive. There is another major problem with this movie though, the presentation of the flashbacks as a catalyst for someone being a bad person. I think the movie is so crazy that nobody noticed it, but at some point in the future once the hype has died down, there will be articles about it. I want to talk about Ma more, but this isn't a well edited or directed film, and it's so fucking goofy that I cannot take this seriously. There's a scene at the end where a character is posing for a picture with a bunch of people, and I just died. How do you possibly conceive something like that and film it? How do you get the actors to film this scene without cracking? With a different actress, this would have been impossible to believe in totality, the entire thing would have collapsed upon itself. The movie is absolute trash and I liked it. I have rarely been more happy when leaving a movie theater than I was today. Take that for what it's worth. The answer, by the way, is that Greta is a slightly worse film than this one. The ridiculousness in Greta goes nowhere near this far, and Ma surpassed my expectations by quite a bit.

6.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Booksmart
2. Avengers: Endgame
3. Us
4. Gloria Bell
5. Arctic
6. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
7. The Beach Bum
8. Rocketman
9. High Flying Bird
10. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
11. Captain Marvel
12. Long Shot
13. Shazam!
14. Paddleton
15. Hotel Mumbai
16. Cold Pursuit
17. Happy Death Day 2U
18. Ma
19. Greta
20. Aladdin
21. Triple Frontier
22. Fighting with My Family
23. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
24. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
25. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
26. Brexit
27. The Dirt
28. Velvet Buzzsaw
29. Little
30. Alita: Battle Angel
31. The Kid
32. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
33. The Upside
34. Dumbo
35. The Hummingbird Project
36. Escape Room
37. Tolkien
38. Captive State
39. The Highwaymen
40. Pet Sematary
41. The Intruder
42. Brightburn
43. What Men Want
44. Unicorn Store
45. The Curse of La Llorona
46. Miss Bala
47. Hellboy
48. Glass
49. Dark Phoenix
50. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
51. The Hustle
52. The Best of Enemies
53. The Prodigy
54. Polar
55. Serenity

 

[909]

Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017), directed by S. Craig Zahler

Obviously, I have been waiting to watch this film for quite a long time. Everything in it seemingly straight up my alley, but I thought I would work my way towards the end of 2017 before I finally turned this on. Bone Tomahawk was a strong debut film, but the time I had between watching both of these enabled me to forget about how gory that previous film really was. This, it turns out, was not so good. Being prepared for the gore in Zahler's films is a necessity when you watch them, because if you aren't ready the stuff in them is going to shock you. Anyway, I wish I'd remembered. Brawl in Cell Block 99 is the very definition of a grindhouse exploitation movie and almost all of it is so good, it is unpredictable to its core, it is exactly what I wanted. When someone said that Vince Vaughn kicks ass in this movie, I laughed but now it is obviously true. The best way to describe Brawl in Cell Block 99 is as a movie where someone kills their whole way through prison. Although the film has flaws, and I will get to them, there's a part of me that can easily handwave them away. Who really cares, after all? When a filmmaker gives the audience what they want, it is easy to accept and embrace the movie for what it is.

Bradley Thomas (Vince Vaughn) is a former boxer who is, obviously no longer a boxer, and at the start of this film he works at an auto repair shop. He goes into work and is fired almost immediately, laid off because they don't have work for him to do. So, he's mad. Bradley heads home in his shitty Pontiac Firebird Formula, which is to say that he drives a really fucking old car that isn't classic. When he gets home, he sees his wife Lauren (Jennifer Carpenter) talking to someone on her phone, and he knows something's up. He's mad, sees a hickey on her neck, and when he hears from her that she's been seeing someone else, he goes fucking crazy. I don't want to say what he does because that defeats the purpose of watching this. Bradley and Lauren talk about their failed relationship, and Bradley wants to do much better. He forgives Lauren and decides that he's going to become a drug mule again, working for Gil (Marc Blucas). Things go well with Gil for some time, and Brawl in Cell Block 99 fast-forwards 18 months to a life where Lauren is pregnant and Bradley has bought a nice house. They have nice things now and life is very good.

After a delivery where we see how Bradley gets shit done these days, he is introduced to Eleazar (Dion Mucciacito), a new supplier who will take care of some of the issues Gil and Bradley have with their heroin and crystal meth supply. Bradley seems to have problems with the way this is going to work out. He doesn't trust Roman (Geno Segers), a really big guy who won't listen to him and seems to not respect his authority. The fact is, this has to go well, so Gil makes some promises to his employee. So, Bradley takes Roman and another guy out on a trip with a boat, where they have to retrieve a trunk from the water. When they get back, Bradley thinks they're walking into a trap and throws the bag in the water, but there are two more and the two other guys have them. They ignore him and start shooting at the police, but the film establishes rather early on that Bradley is a patriot who just might believe in that Blue Lives Matter shit. Plus, he was pretty clear in not wanting to hurt anyone. When he attacks Roman and the other trafficker, this leads to Bradley getting caught. As was already established, he was headed into a trap. Once arrested, he's told that he will get four years and serve all of them for drug trafficking, but that was bullshit. He's getting seven years because the court system pulls that stuff on people, but it's not as if he doesn't deserve it. He is a drug trafficker after all. Now, if you want to know what Brawl in Cell Block 99 actually means, you'll have to watch this because I'm not saying anything else.

Obviously, like basically everyone else, I really enjoyed Brawl in Cell Block 99. The guy who doesn't believe in violence being forced into doing very bad things to save his family is often a good story, but not often to this extent. The level of the violence and the lack of music during those scenes is what makes them. I do have some things to say that may feel like complaints, but they're actually strengths. For starters, the film is too long. The thing about Zahler's films is that when they're too long, it's because he wants to round out the characters as much as is humanly possible. You can see this when he gives interviews because he does the same thing when answering probing questions. I accept the length of the film because it works, because it allows us to understand what it would be like to go into prison, or to have these things happen to you. The length of the film makes the violence more palpable, every scene has a point and Vince Vaughn is completely convincing while doing this. This is someone who has done a lot of bad comedy movies, yet the funniest line of his career is in this film. I have a feeling that I will revisit Brawl in Cell Block 99 at some point. The film is a very slow burn, but that suits me fine and I feel like I had the opportunity to enjoy the characters. Don Johnson's role here is fantastic too.

There's one thing about the film though, or at least one that people keep talking about when it comes to Zahler. There's the matter of a lot of people with bad political beliefs also enjoying his films to a great extent. What exactly does, and what should that mean? Should that mean you should feel bad for enjoying the film? This film and the last, are for people who wanted a western horror movie or a jailhouse combat flick. I do not understand what's wrong with enjoying that just because some bad person also does. Granted, I have not continued on yet to the most controversial one, but I'm a person who judges things once I watch them and not before that. Do I think he's a racist? I don't know, but I do know that he's great at writing characters who bring something realistic to the table. Some of those characters are racist and some are not. I don't believe that a person who writes a blatantly racist character should be automatically judged for doing so, as if those beliefs reflect on their own feelings. Their actions outside of that script are what matters. I do think this film could have been trimmed, which would have eliminated a lot of these lines, but they all do a job to explain why the characters think what they think.

I need more films like this one where characters do bad things, where their motivations are explained along the way as in Shot Caller. Of course, both of these are prison films, but they couldn't be more different from each other if they tried. I think there are some issues with Zahler's approach in the sense that any given scene can be interpreted by the audience however they want, and he's talked about that before, but it's also rather different and quite welcome. I don't always like things being laid out in a film to the extent where everything is spelled out for you, where you are made to feel a certain way and can feel bad for not thinking that way. Again, the film is too long, but this is one of the greatest displays of ass kicking I have ever seen, and as such it would be impossible for me not to enjoy it. The way all these fights were framed was like something straight out of my brain.

8/10

2017 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Dunkirk
2. Phantom Thread
3. The Shape of Water
4. Get Out
5. Good Time
6. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
7. Mudbound
8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
9. Logan
10. Baby Driver
11. The Post
12. Wonder Woman
13. The Big Sick
14. Wind River
15. Thor: Ragnarok
16. Logan Lucky
17. The Beguiled
18. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
19. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
20. Brawl in Cell Block 99
21. John Wick: Chapter 2
22. The Lost City of Z
23. First They Killed My Father
24. A Ghost Story
25. Darkest Hour
26. Spider-Man: Homecoming
27. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
28. Sweet Virginia
29. It
30. Battle of the Sexes
31. Brad's Status
32. Okja
33. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
34. Kong: Skull Island
35. It Comes at Night
36. Crown Heights
37. Split
38. 1922
39. Personal Shopper
40. Landline
41. Beatriz at Dinner
42. Chuck
43. Atomic Blonde
44. Shot Caller
45. Brigsby Bear
46. Wheelman
47. The Lego Batman Movie
48. Megan Leavey
49. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
50. Marshall
51. Menashe
52. Walking Out
53. American Made
54. Annabelle: Creation
55. Beauty and the Beast
56. Imperial Dreams
57. Gifted
58. Murder on the Orient Express
59. The Zookeeper's Wife
60. The Glass Castle
61. Free Fire
62. Win It All
63. The Wall
64. Life
65. My Cousin Rachel
66. Breathe
67. The Man Who Invented Christmas
68. Maudie
69. Sleight
70. Alone in Berlin
71. A United Kingdom
72. Trespass Against Us
73. The Mountain Between Us
74. War Machine
75. Happy Death Day
76. Lowriders
77. Justice League
78. To the Bone
79. Ghost in the Shell
80. Wakefield
81. Bright
82. The Hitman's Bodyguard
83. XXX: Return of Xander Cage
84. The Mummy
85. The Greatest Showman
86. Rough Night
87. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
88. Sand Castle
89. The Circle
90. American Assassin
91. CHiPs
92. Death Note
93. The Belko Experiment
94. The Great Wall
95. Fist Fight
96. Baywatch
97. Snatched
98. Wilson
99. The Dark Tower
100. Queen of the Desert
101. The House
102. Flatliners
103. Sleepless
104. All Eyez on Me
105. The Book of Henry
106. The Space Between Us

 

[909]

Olympus Has Fallen (2013), directed by Antoine Fuqua

There is another one of these films coming out in August, so I felt the need to watch them all even though I'd never started or had any particular interest in this. There was a reason I'd never had any interest in this. One time I turned around and my dad was watching White House Down, and I always thought it was Olympus Has Fallen, but it wasn't. The movies are so similar and I can't believe anyone would release the two one after the other like this. In a sane world, the release date for White House Down would have been booted down the road. Maybe they could've fixed the film while they were at it. While Olympus Has Fallen isn't quite as bad as that was, this is a film that is profoundly stupid. There are very few people who have been in as many bad theatrically released movies as Gerard Butler has been. Olympus Has Fallen is actually on the upper end of his scale, but that's not a compliment of any kind. I do not know how someone can pick as many bad scripts as he has chosen. That would seem to be impossible, but it is clear that anything is possible after all. The film basically rips off of every other similar subject that you can think of, does so gladly without any thought as to whether or not those scenes even work. The crux of the film is incredibly stupid, the large concept that allows all these people to get in a room with each other is absurdly flawed. The greatest sin is probably that the terrorists are beyond incompetent.

Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is a former Army Ranger turned Secret Service agent, he is in charge of the President's (Aaron Eckhart) detail. They are at Camp David on a snowy night, where President Asher is with the First Lady (Ashley Judd) and their son Connor (Finley Jacobsen). It's time to drive to a campaign fundraiser, but the car shouldn't be on the road in the first place and everyone knows that. This shows you the level of detail in the script. Anyway, a bridge falls off a tree and hits a car, which leads to a collision in the motorcade, and the car with the First Family crashes while on a bridge. It's about to go over, and while Banning is able to pull the President out of the car, the First Lady dies when the car falls onto the frozen river below. Their son also makes it out of the car, but I don't remember or could not figure out how. Take your pick. Of course, in the aftermath of such a thing where Banning is unable to save the First Lady, he's given the boot and now works at the Treasury. The film kicks forward eighteen months, and I have no idea why this matters, but Banning is a married man with a wife who works as a nurse, Leah (Radha Mitchell). I don't get the inclusion of this at all and her scenes are rather strange. Now that I've established the way things worked out with Banning, I have more work to do.

The President is meeting with the South Korean Prime Minister, but it turns out that South Korea is a really incompetent country in the world of Olympus Has Fallen. His government detail has been infiltrated by a North Korean terrorist organization, to the point where nearly everyone in his group was part of this operation. The organization is led by Kang Yeonsak (Rick Yune), who reveals himself after some of the things I'm going to describe. The start of the attack features a plane flying over Washington D.C. with the intention of causing as much havoc as possible, opening fire on civilians and obviously the White House as well. Down into the bunker they go, with the President, the Secretary of Defense Ruth McMillan (Melissa Leo), the Vice President, and Dave Forbes (Dylan McDermott), a former Secret Service agent who works for the South Korean PM now. That just doesn't sound right to me. Anyway, in the bunker, it turns out that the PM's trusted adviser is Kang, who shoots him in the head. Forbes joins in on the fun and he's part of the terrorist organization as well, they are seeking to bring famine and devastation to the United States. First, they must capture the White House, the most important key of which is Connor, who they need for...reasons. The way things play out, the Director of the Secret Service (Angela Bassett), the Army Chief of Staff (Robert Forster), and the acting President Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman) are tasked with getting the situation under control. Their ace in the hole, of course, is Mike Banning.

At its core, this feels like a 90's movie in terms of the tone, the violence, and the plot. The plot is razor thin, this is a very standard terrorism movie, but one of the things I liked about it is that there were no goofy political messages of any kind. The villains are also not those prone to rampant stereotypes, North Korea is a joke and therefore they're free game. Olympus Has Fallen does boast some good action scenes, I will admit. Some of them are also overkill. An example of a good one is the way Mike deals with advance weaponry. The worst is the way the terrorists take the White House in the first place. That scene felt like Call of Duty, the amount of people getting mowed down was completely ridiculous and I didn't see the point of executing the scene in this way. The film as a whole seems to not have much a reason to exist and I don't understand why these kinds of films were so popular. They no longer are and don't make money, but I'm confused about the appeal of this. The film is very obviously not filmed in anything that even attempts to look like the White House, the interiors are all awful without exeception. The story doesn't make sense and the plot revolves around getting a code out of the President when he'd already been unable to withstand seeing people get hurt. The logical answer is that the terrorists would keep torturing those people, but apparently not!

One thing I was pondering on was that the world has changed a lot since Olympus Has Fallen was filmed in 2012. This is apparent when watching the film today. The technology is very outdated, the cars in the opening scenes are as well, and so is the CGI. The CGI being dated is actually a major problem. Olympus Has Fallen was heavily reliant on using that CGI to recreate Washington D.C. because they did not film in Washington. When the initial attack is happening, it's outdoors during the day, and it completely fails from where I stand. I just could not believe in what I was watching. Olympus Has Fallen is also rather long, and I'm sure you can tell that I am not going to give this a good rating. It turns out that I now know what I want from my action movies. I want well choreographed, long take hand to hand combat without camera cutting. I do not want people brainlessly shooting each other unless there is some ingenuity in the filming of it. I think it's for the best that action films have taken the turn they've done. I would rather see the genre be unable to draw money without creating something great than for there to be more films like this one. I do intend to watch the other two, and I'm sure the one coming out this year will bomb very hard, but I think Mr. Fuqua made a lot of uncharacteristic mistakes. This thing stunk and the humor in it wasn't any good, which is a rather fatal flaw. Levity and common sense are crucial and Olympus Has Fallen lacks both those things.

4/10

 

[909]

Men in Black: International (2019), directed by F. Gary Gray

I can see that this is going to be the weekend of movies that didn't really need to have sequels. I'm sure everyone's seen a review for Men in Black: International by now, and all of them are saying the same thing for a very good reason. The problem with these reboots is that the people who make them think that merely swapping the cast is enough to justify the existence of the film, but it is not. The tone, the premise, everything needs to be changed. There are issues with this sometimes though. There's problems with Men in Black: International in the sense that they entirely break the established rules of the franchise. This wouldn't have been the biggest deal if all the roles had been recast. They were not. This kind of thing bothers me quite a bit, and there's also the issue that the people who put together Men in Black weren't making a great movie in the first place. The standard is not that high for a filmmaker to come along and claim the franchise for themselves. Unfortunately this was not to be, and what we have here is a film that is not particularly good. I don't think it's terrible, but I think it's not what people expected. I also think that the script was really bad, and I think that's what people should expect when the people who wrote classics like Punisher: War Zone and Transformers: The Last Knight are given the opportunity to continue plying their trade. After all, when I want someone to write a franchise relaunch, that's exactly who I'd turn to.

The start of the film is another case of bad writing, where they pretty much give away the ending of the film in a very ineffective way. It involves a portal, with two Men in Black agents from London being dispatched to the Eiffel Tower to stop the invasion of The Hive, a group of aliens that may or may not be able to shape-shift into human beings. These two are Agent H (Chris Hemsworth), and High T (Liam Neeson). They obviously repel the invasion or we wouldn't have much of a film in the first place. We move backwards in time a little bit, 20 years in fact, to when the genesis of a new agent begins. Molly Wright is a kid, her father saw an alien when he thought it was going to be a raccoon in the garbage can. Obviously it was no raccoon. When the Men in Black showed up, unbeknownst to everyone, Molly was not asleep. Therefore, when the Men in Black were going to erase the memories of her parents, they did not erase that of their daughter, and we have an enormous plothole where there are probably thousands of people who this happened to. Yet, when we kick forward around a year after the incident in Paris, Molly (Tessa Thompson) is a computer technician who wants to join the FBI, CIA, or really any government agency. The reason? She wants to be like those Men in Black who investigated alien stuff, because that's her thing. It wouldn't be cool to stop her from her dreams.

While at work one day, Molly had been tracking a potential anomaly, and what do you know, it's an alien that crashed in New York City. When she enters the containment area, she sees what's going on, and tasks a cab with following the motorcade back to its base. Molly is rather intelligent, so she has the attire on, but she's spotted in the elevator and taken down below for questioning. Agent O (Emma Thompson) makes another appearance in this franchise, she is the head of the New York City branch, and Molly is able to impress her enough to be accepted for training. Let's fast forward a little bit more to the premise of this film. The shape-shifters are real and they've crashed on Earth too. They take the shape of twins (Laurent and Larry Bourgeois), and we know they have a goal, although what it is remains in question for some time. Molly becomes Agent M and is sent to London, which leads to her being teamed with Agent H. High T has become the head of the UK branch in the time between the beginning of the film and Agent M's story, and Agent C (Rafe Spall) is a man who is quite suspicious of Agent H these days. The agents mission is to safeguard an important alien who is stopping on Earth, on his way to planets beyond. He has something he wants to tell Agent H, the twins know that he's there, and this situation is simply not going to be good.

When I was typing all of this out, I realized how much of a disjointed, badly written mess this all was. The alien comic relief (Kumail Nanjiani) doesn't appear in the film for a long time, which is possibly the greatest example of incompetence here. The chemistry between that character and the two agents saves the film to great extent, I thought. Overall, there was no reason to make Men in Black: International. This was Will Smith's thing and there was no new imagination here. The aliens are as absolutely generic as you could ever expect. Do they ever get to kill anyone important in these movies? Don't answer that, I already know they don't. This is the definition of a cash grab, plain and simple. I actually do not think I can fill five paragraphs tonight the way that I usually do. The filmmaking style here is so boring, the plot is pretty bad, but the three important characters do save this to some extent. That's all you really need to know, I don't know why anyone would make this. The novelty of the aliens is one of the best parts of these movies, but they aren't given any scenes of value and are therefore less important. I don't know what else to say, but this franchise is cooked. There is no reason to ever make another one of these, and while not completely terrible, this film lacks a soul. I do not understand why Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson would do this.

I think this is going to bomb so hard, and that's what it deserves. This year has been quite terrible for film so far as my list no doubt shows. There's been two classic films so far this year? That's pretty shit. The quality of film last year on average was so much higher.

4.5/10

2019 Films Ranked

Spoiler

1. Booksmart
2. Avengers: Endgame
3. Us
4. Gloria Bell
5. Arctic
6. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
7. The Beach Bum
8. Rocketman
9. High Flying Bird
10. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
11. Captain Marvel
12. Long Shot
13. Shazam!
14. Paddleton
15. Hotel Mumbai
16. Cold Pursuit
17. Happy Death Day 2U
18. Ma
19. Greta
20. Aladdin
21. Triple Frontier
22. Fighting with My Family
23. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
24. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
25. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
26. Brexit
27. The Dirt
28. Velvet Buzzsaw
29. Little
30. Alita: Battle Angel
31. The Kid
32. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
33. The Upside
34. Dumbo
35. The Hummingbird Project
36. Escape Room
37. Tolkien
38. Captive State
39. The Highwaymen
40. Pet Sematary
41. The Intruder
42. Brightburn
43. What Men Want
44. Men in Black: International
45. Unicorn Store
46. The Curse of La Llorona
47. Miss Bala
48. Hellboy
49. Glass
50. Dark Phoenix
51. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
52. The Hustle
53. The Best of Enemies
54. The Prodigy
55. Polar
56. Serenity