Can You Ever Forgive Me?

I’m a photographer and every once in a while a movie will get my attention with a particularly beautiful shot. This image of Melissa McCarthy sitting alone at the end of a long bar as her character’s world reaches one of its many low points is a great shot. I like everything about it. The leading lines, the strong shadows, the darkness of the bar while the world outside the windows is clearly light. The different tones from the light shadows to the subtly illuminated bottles. Great imagery. Of all the great actors on Gilmore Girls, Melissa McCarthy was not…

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Wreck It Ralph 2:Ralph Breaks The Internet

Wreck It Ralph was a surprisingly good movie. It was a classic Hero’s Journey and there was no need for a sequel. So naturally, Wreck It Ralph 2 is not that great. But it was still fun. The premise was a little thin to start with. An old guy runs a video game arcade where the game Wreck It Ralph, a kinder, gentler version of Rampage, has been sitting for thirty years. Ralph is a bad guy who learns that being bad doesn’t define who he is. We flash forward about six years and discover that the arcade still has…

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Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

I never read the Harry Potter books, I just watched the movies. The last three or four Harry Potter films suffered from a serious case of taking themselves too seriously. What started off as a somewhat silly story about a boy living in a cupboard who discovers he’s really a wizard turned into this totally silly story about that boy saving the world. The first Fantastic Beasts was kind of fun. It was like the first couple of Harry Potter films, where Harry could worry about House Points and walk around with a stunned look on his face all the…

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BlackKklansman

Set in the early 1970s, but very much about right now, BlacKkKlansman tells the story of a black man who becomes a cop in a time when black men were not cops. This is not a docudrama. This is a film inspired by real events, but not based on them. Spike Lee is plainly preaching to the choir. Klansmen are vile and evil mouth breathers who are clearly incapable of rational thought. Black people, the only group shown to suffer from the klan’s attentions, are uniformly beautiful. The men are well spoken and well dressed. The women have perfectly spherical…

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A Quiet Place

We start off with a black screen that says Day 89. A family of five is quietly sorting through the contents of an abandoned pharmacy in standard post apocalyptic fashion. We see that one girl has a cochlear implant. There is a small boy who walks quickly through the store, searching for toys. An older sister followers him and stops him from making noise. The boy finds an electronic toy, the kind with flashing lights and beeping noises. His father panics and his eyes go wide. He gets the toy from the child before it can make any noise and…

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Solo A Star Wars Story

Solo, a movie no one wanted made, telling a story no one wanted to hear. It could have been worse. It could have started with Han Solo being born in a dingy back room or in a dark alleyway. Instead, we start with a heist gone wrong. Han and his never before mentioned One True Love are stealing fuel, or something like fuel. This led to encounters with a lot of CGI. In fact, there is so much CGI in this film that I’m not entirely sure that there were any real people involved in the production at all. Lots…

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Ready Player One Movie

I read Ready Player One a few years after it came out. It was filled with pop culture references from the 1980s. the heroes were uber nerds that played video games, listened New Wave music, and could recite every episode of School House Rock. In short, this book was written for me. when word came down that Steven Spielberg was going to make the film adaptation, well, who better for the job? No one, that’s who. Ready Player One is a simple Quest story. Our hero spends most of his time in The Oasis, a virtual world along the lines…

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Annihilation

Annihilation was an odd film. Much like Inception, the most lasting impression is the incredibly annoying music. A little of this alien thumping goes a long way, and it was pretty much constant. Annihilation tells the story of a woman whose husband has gone missing. He’s in the military and a year or so ago he went off an on a secret mission. She tries to find out what happened, but no one will tell her. Until one night when said husband appears at home. At first she is overjoyed to see him, but then she is a little nervous,…

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Netflix’s Mute

Mute is a Science Fiction show that has no reason for being a Science Fiction show. It’s a simple revenge story. The kind that Charles Bronson made in the 1970s and Liam Neeson still makes today. But for some unknown reason, the story is set in some Sci Fi future with flying cars and giant billboards. A sci fi setting does not make a sci fi story, for that, you need some element of the story that has to do with, you know, science. Blade Runner is Science Fiction because it is about cyborgs, a futuristic bit of technology. If…

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Ghost in the Shell

If you like CGI, this is a movie for you. Every frame is chock full of special effects. It looks good. It looks really good. But, well, it isn’t very good. The Anime Ghost in the Shell from 1995 cost around $10 million. The shinny new Hollywood version cost around $110 million. It was not money well spent. American movie goers, for the most part, like the Aristotelian model of story telling. That is to say, a beginning, a middle, and an end. Anime doesn’t always follow that model. The anime Ghost in the Shell seemed like a bunch of…

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