I thought this was going to be a blatant ripoff of Harry Potter and The X-Men, but turned out to be more of a ripoff of, well, all the terrible movies featuring teen heroes from the past decade or so. Kids are smart, adults are idiots, and the new kid who should be killed right off the bat turns out to be smarter and more powerful than everyone else. On the plus side, I did kind of like it. This is a Grade A turn off your brain while you watch it film-nothing makes any sense. And I mean, Nothing.…
Category: movie review
Bridget Jones’s Baby
At first I found Renée Zellweger’s looks and Hugh Grant’s absence a bit distracting. But McDreamy does a good job standing in as Bridget’s other love interest, and Renée still sounds like Bridget. It’s not that she looks old, it’s that she looks so different. We’re talking Darrin 1 and Darrin 2 from Bewitched different here. Anyway… We find Bridget a bit bummed out about turning 43 and still being alone. One of her younger and hipper friends takes her to a Festival, where she meets a love guru played by Patrick Dempsey. Since it’s a movie, they hook up…
Arrival
Yeah, that was good. Movies like this normally have a long putting-the-team-together opening like Oceans 11 or The Core, but not here. The team is mainly Amy Adams and it doesn’t take her long to get on board. Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker are the other familiar faces trying to figure out how to talk to some mysterious aliens who have parked in twelve spots around the world. Arrival is a great movie. It works on both the global level, where the end of the world is a real possibility, and on a personal level, where the loss of a…
Doctor Strange
I’m not all that familiar with Doctor Strange, so for once I needed the Origin Story that takes up the first part of Doctor Strange the movie. Our hero is a egotistical jerk who, like Doctor House, only treats people whose cases he finds interesting. Being a surgeon, when he finds himself in a car crash, naturally it’s his hands that are damaged. No longer being able to preform surgery, he decides to follow the path of enlightenment. He ends up in Nepal and meets an immortal. This person is a lot like Tyler Durden from Fight Club. All Doctor…
Suicide Squad
Was This Trip Really Necessary? No, No It Wasn’t. Spoilers. Ok, when two of your Big Bad Villains are Gods, you can’t kill them with a couple of bricks of C4. You just can’t. And when you let your main pure evil, murdering scumbag, Government Employee get away in the end, well, you can’t do that either. Suicide Squad wasn’t quite as bad as Ghostbusters, but that’s not saying a hell of a lot. This was easily the most over-hyped film of the year and just as easily one of the worst films of the year. We start off with…
Ghostbusters 2016
Yeah, that sucked. 1984’s Ghostbusters is the only film I ever paid to see twice in a first run theater. The acting was good, the special effects were pretty damned amazing, and the story was compelling. It had it’s funny moments, but Ghostbusters was played straight. Our heroes were real scientists trying to understand something that couldn’t be understood. My favorite scene was the one where the ghosts break containment and flood the city as some wonderfully funky and scary music plays in the background. These were some scary ghosts that go on a murder spree. 2016’s Ghostbuster cost a…
Captain America: Civil War
Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Superheroes. Most superheroes started out as slightly above average people who spent their spare time tracking down muggers and bank robbers. Captain America started out fighting the Axis Powers during World War Two. Somewhere along the line, fighting crime became a little too boring. Superman could catch every criminal in the world if he really wanted to, so we have to throw something bigger and badder at him. Captain America: Civil War takes the easy way out. Who are the only people who can challenge superheroes? Other superheroes, of course. It’s the same path of least…
Dead Poets Society
The Good Old Days Weren’t Always Good. I remember loving Dead Poets Society when I first saw it about a million years ago in 1989. It’s a movie I see once in a while, but not so often that I have the whole thing committed to memory. I just re-watched it and I have to say that it’s just as brilliant as it was when I first saw it. We start off in this fantasy world of 1959 where the sons of rich men are sent off to boarding school to ensure a prosperous future. Such silly ideas as happiness or pursuing…
Zoom
We find ourselves in the middle of three different stories which are intimately connected to each other. All three feature creatives telling a story. The first story we see is set in a sex doll factory. Over sexualized torsos hang from hooks like the bodies in a horror movie or meat in a slaughterhouse. For some reason I was expecting more from these dolls, I thought they were going to turn out to be like the robots in A.I. Or Surrogates. But no, they are just life sized dolls. Two of our heroes are turned on by working around these sex…
Florence Foster Jenkins
Near the start of the film, we find Florence and her husband St Clair taking in a performance at Carnegie Hall in 1944. They watch a young woman singing opera. Florence weeps at the beauty of the singing. It’s clear at this moment that she can tell good singing from bad singing, and yet, throughout the rest of the film, she carries on as if her own singing merely needs just a bit of polishing to be perfect. Her singing is remarkably bad. But what she lacks in talent she more than makes up for in wealth. Her husband tells…