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War for the planet of the apes review (y tho savagery)

OK this is a weird one because this movie definitely isn’t new and it isn’t one that should catch much controversy, I just felt I had to get out my feelings about when I could much better be using my time to write poetry amirite haha?
It’s because I really liked the first two that I feel I have to get out my utter disappointment with this movie. I mean I was never super hyped to watch it because I waited this long to watch it but I was sort of saving it as a solid movie to watch when I was sick of watching the trash they put out these days and pass for good content.

And I’m watching it and getting into it and it’s all good then the main plot kicks in and it’s kind of predictable, a standard sort of revenge movie set up oh and Woody Harrelson is in it, like he’s in fucking everything these days.

He’s actually one of the big problems I have with this movie, not him personally I watched him in that three billboards movie made by the guy who did seven psychopaths and that’s probably the best movie I’ve seen all year, that and Blade Runner 2049, fantastic movies.
No my problem with him is he can’t carry a movie. He works great in in true detective bouncing of Mathew Mconahay (I don’t care how his name is spelt haha) or alongside Jessie Eisenberg in Zombieland. Harrelson as part of an ensemble cast slips right in perfectly.
But in this movie it’s literally just him and Andy Serkis. I mean wtf did you really run out of money from the first two movies? The first two movies are literally brimming with excellent actors delivering fantastic performances and each film has at it’s heart a human story.

What’s the human story in this movie? Oh there isn’t one because humans are evil and war like and should just all die.
The other two movies have progression, you follow each character as the plot unfolds and they’re paced really well, they feel like journey’s and have satisfying conclusions and you feel like something has been learned on both the human and ape side.

But that’s the main problem with making movies that are prequels, we all know the people are going to basically go extinct and become the classic planet of the apes. On the other hand these movies really didn’t follow the lore very closely so I could have seen a twist coming where that didn’t happen. It just seems like they wanted to wrap it all up in these movie- humans all die now. It felt sort of forced.
The pace was bad there weren’t enough set pieces. Caeser is in his cave then badness happens needs revenge, goes to place where bad guy is, bad stuff happens, bad guy dies. There really isn’t enough there, there aren’t enough characters or story to sink your teeth into in comparison to the other two films. There isn’t a single likeable human character aside from the little girl who totally pointless spoilers is called ‘Nova’ a character in the original movies there’s no way she could be because those movies are set hundreds of years later haha. So I guess that was just dumb fan service that maybe a handful of people would get.

I really just struggled to identify with the apes, I know shocking. I like Caeser as a character, I liked following his arch in the previous movies but he seemed very two dimensional in this movie and Woody Harrelson was also a two dimensional non-villain.
Also whereas in the previous movie the messages were subtle and you could sort of compare the apes to a number of groups in terms of metaphors this movie is totally on the nose about it.

They’re literally using the apes as slaves and whipping them – ok then.

It just came off as disingenuous and dumb and tacky.

Moreover I didn’t like the movie because it tries to make you celebrate the death of the human race. I’d always hoped these movies would have been more optimistic and maybe changed the outcome. But by the end of the movie they’re expecting audiences to cheer as all the humans who are just faceless soldiers are wiped out. It just didn’t sit right with me.
Because you’re supposed to be like ‘well now that those evil humans are gone the apes are free to create a totally peaceful society of their own’ when anyone who’s seen the original movies knows they go back to basically feudalism and it’s totally chaos and there are wars between the various factions of apes constantly. So they’re not only not an improvement on humans they’re literally worse.

I dunno, I just see all the praise for this movie and it’s just shocking to me because it was such a step down from the previous two. I just had to get my thoughts out.

Venting complete haha. And I know I’m not just a wanker who can’t enjoy anything because I literally loved Blade Runner 2049 and I thought I would hate it and I watched a movie called the ritual last night which was pretty great so….

See you…

 

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A quiet place – Review

I wasn’t really planning to review this movie but then I saw all the insane buzz around it and my contrarian senses were tingling and I had to get it out. Honestly I didn’t hate it, it was just like ‘bleh’ it was a nothing burger of a movie for me. Tired re-used ideas done before, better and worse a hundred times and it really didn’t work for me. But fuck me if rotten tomatoes aren’t sucking the sweat from this movies balls.

It’s disturbing, and I don’t really get why. I understood why they were fanning get outs balls, it was the same reason black panther negative reviews were deleted, it was the race angle. But for this I have no idea why everyone has to like it, are deaf kids the new black guys?
I watched it with my brother who is an avid pirate arr and I just couldn’t get into it. The movie seems to never get going then it ends. I remarked to him that it was kind of like tremors meets it comes at night but not as fun or interesting as either. Actually this movie really makes me appreciate it comes at night more, despite the fact nothing actually comes at night the movie could have been half an hour longer at least. But it was suspenseful and interesting and did the end of world scenario in a fresh interesting way.

A way this movie doesn’t do. This movie is basically the road without the road, it’s stakeland without the land. It’s I am legend without the legend, can I stop this now?

I’m not going to get bogged down in the lazy/non-existent world building or sperg out about the many many plotholes and inconsistencies, if we did that we’d be here all day and all we’d have to show for it would be a headache.
The main problem I have with this movie is there’s no journey, there’s no attempt at a story or an arc or a goal. And it’s so easily done. The whole movie is centred around Blunt’s character having a baby so maybe there are complications and they need to find a doctor, or they hear a radio frequency about a settlement or something, anything but nothing like that happens. The movies plot could fit into an episode of tales from crypt, farmhouse attacked by sound monsters the end. Nothing happens the whole movie is just a circular mess of chasing around this farmhouse and pointless filler to get to the main beats of the bath scene and the *spoilers* dad’s death sequence *spoilers end*. And that whole scene is sad but it feels unearned and shoe horned in to a point that it makes the rest of the movie seem pointless.

The bath scene particularly I didn’t find tense at all because I knew she’d be fine, I knew none of the kids could die because they already made a big deal about killing one of their kids in the opening of the movie. So it’s completely without tension because I know none of these characters can die and there aren’t any other characters around them to act as monster fodder.

So there’s no story but movies like this can get by with no story as long as there’s a tense character drama like Cloverfield lane but there’s no character drama either because no one can talk. There are only four characters, beard shooshing dad, pregnant mom, deaf kid, none deaf kid. Emily Blunt and Krasinski are married in real life and they have a lot of chemistry during interviews but in this movie they’re playing a couple with little to no chemistry there’s no levity or romance. You’re supposed to believe these people care about eachother but their kids are running around a corn field with sound monsters that somehow took out the entire of america’s military and they’re like ‘they’ll be fine the script says so’.
The deaf kid is ok as long as it said in the script to do your best Dustin from stranger things pretending to be a fish impression, then she was spot on, the other kid is just a non-entity.

The main beats of the movie are painfully predictable, when the thing with the earpiece came up as a plot device for defeating the monsters my brother turned to me and said “Swing away” and he nailed it, it was just like that. It was a stupid Shamalamamadingdong premise, oh the sound monsters don’t like weird frequency noises, no one in the whole of america thought of using sound weapons on monsters that hunt by sound, wouldn’t it be awesome if we had something like sound cannons. Yeah that’d be great.
It was painfully dumb and I think honestly it’s just because I’ve seen too many movies I can just work out every beat of the movie and see the structure. This movie’s structure is mess, it’s a circle, they don’t go anywhere, no story is progressed, there’s no arc, we’re supposed to feel like they’ve been on some epic journey by the end when they’re on their front lawn.

By the end of the movie where the epic plot twist is that the monsters are powerless without their heads I turned to my brother and I said; “Emily Blunt is going to cock the shotgun and then the credits will roll” and would you guess that’s exactly what happened.

And we couldn’t believe it, that was the cheesiest and worst ending I could’ve imagined to this movie that was going for this serious grounded tone, it suddenly becomes aliens. I almost burst out laughing. It was so cheesey and unselfaware yet all the critics at rotten tomatoes are totally drinking the coolaid.
I mean is it as bad as Tom Hanks on like an actors guild video saying Get out is the greatest movie ever? Not really, it’s pretty bad but not that bad. I was talking about that to my brother and I said ‘Can you imagine if he was talking about It follows, people would laugh in his fucking face’ and It follows actually was a really clever horror movie with great atmosphere and genuine scares but no one would dare elevate it to the level of get out because it wasn’t directed by a half black guy and it wasn’t about racism, or whatever the fuck that movie was about.

I mean Quiet place isn’t bad, it’s just derivative and unoriginal and really unsatisfying, just watch the road or stakeland or war of the worlds, they’re the same movies but ten times better. People actually have arcs and they do stuff and go on a journey, there are characters and dialogue and goals and emotions not just people signing “I love you” at eachother. Fuck it ignore the critic group think behind this movie and just go watch Tremors, it’s like a quiet place if it was any fun.

See you…

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Death Wish (Current year edition)

This is one of those movies people say ‘you just couldn’t make that today’ and those people were right.

I was just trying to see when this came out and I made the mistake of going on rotten tomatoes and getting thoroughly triggered by the reviews whining about gun control and ‘muh drumpf’ just lame basic bitch takes, the movie sucks, we get it, you don’t need to insert your limp dick political opinion into- he says about to insert his throbbing hard dick political opinions into it.

Yeah so I pirated this movie because why the fuck would I pay money to see someone ruin a cult classic I happen to be a big fan of. I’m a massive fan of the original Death Wish series, they are the ultimate in guilty pleasures every single one of them.

But the fact of the matter is movies like that just can’t exist today without some ironic filter over them, we live in a post irony society where any satire on crime and violence has to be handled with kid gloves. There’s no other way than to say we live in a ‘pussified’, what do I mean by that?

Well the crux of this movie is basically about a guy who’s wife is raped and murdered by ‘gang members’ and I knew before this movie even started that they would not have the rape angle, or even mention it. I want to say the tone was wrong from the start but the point of the original is that his life was perfect and he lived in this shitlib bubble where he could avoid the draft by being a conscientious objector and have this idyllic life that couldn’t be destroyed by the world around him and how hard he fell down from that when the worst does happen. And it’s not some grand plot or scheme it’s just run of the mill evil.

And then he has to confront the fantasy world he’s been living in and do something about it, and the something is going on the streets of new york and shooting black peop- I mean muggers.

I’m not saying I love rape, I just think it’s telling that we’re trying to remake this movie about the gritty reality of crime and evil on the streets of new york and instead of getting these lowlife ‘gang members’ instead it’s these like high agency professional burglars who shoot someone basically because she was a fucking idiot and decided to throw boiling water at someone with a gun when there are three other guys with guns.

Actually looking at the rotten tomato charts makes me want to review Annihilation because it’s fresh as fuck on there and that movie was terrible haha.

It’s just seems like a totally unnecessary remake and probably one of the most phoned in phoned in Bruce Willis performance’s I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s like he phoned it in from the other side of the planet. In the original Charles Bronson doesn’t show a lot of emotion (well in any movie) but they don’t try to force it. He’s like this analytical architect. He’s more like this autistic spergy guy who instead crying and blubbering he becomes cold and calculating and methodical and does something about it. He sets out to murder people like he’s making a technical drawing and it’s really cool.

But in this they expect Bruce Willis to cry and give some heart and it just doesn’t fit. The original movie is dark as fuck (in more ways than one wink wink) but this movie has that sort of ironic wink wink nudge nudge levity that is nice but it doesn’t really fit. And the gore while cool is just over the top and silly and it just behoves me that you can show a man getting his head crushed by a falling car so his brains splatter all over the floor but you can’t see a woman simulating rape.

Or like in the walking dead where someone can be decapitated but they can’t swear or show any tits, fucking americans, amirite?

Ok now it’s time to address the elephant in the room, the bit you’ve all been waiting for, we’re going to talk about race. Trigger warnings start now people, if you’re easily offended… what the fuck are you even doing here? I write stories about zombie furries and samurai clowns killing transvestites.

Now if you’ve seen the original death wish movies it’s basically about a dude killing criminals in new york and if you were to take a side glance at the crime stats of new york you’d notice the majority of said offenders tend to be a certain shall we say ‘hue’. So you’d be forgiven for assuming most of the people Bronson guns down and in fact the people who rape and murder his wife are of said persuasion.

He goes around shooting random blacks, is that clear enough? He literally goes to like restaurants flashes cash around and walks around at night waiting for minorities to jump him so he can blast them.

See what I mean, not a movie that could be made today. But they did it anyway and it’s honestly pretty fucking laughable.

Not to say there weren’t white criminals in the death wish series, there are loads of them, the best lines of the second movie are where he’s killing that white christian guy haha.

“You believe in jesus?”

“Yes sir I do”

“Well you’re gonna meet him”

BLAM

Best bit in the movie haha. But the majority are black and hispanic which the crime stats bare out, in later movies not so much, I think in 4 and 5 it’s mostly white guys but I can’t remember. Despite making no sense because as most people know criminal gangs are almost always racially homogeneous, shock horror, criminals don’t care about meeting diversity quotas. Crime, the last bastion of meritocracy haha. So if this was a white gang there probably wouldn’t be any black or hispanic people and likewise if it was a black or hispanic gangs they’re not going to mix at all. There aren’t like honorary white members of the crips or ms-13, it just doesn’t happen, those fucking racists amirite haha?

But the funny thing about this movie is how desperately it’s trying to side step the race question. The majority of the criminals in this movie are white, and there are literally token minority criminals. I honestly expected there to be at least one black main villain a as token but nope. There’s like one mexican guy who dies in a car crash completely unrelated to the vigilante stuff, the gimmick in this movie is he’s a doctor not an architect so this guy is in a car crash and he recognises him somehow as this valet who takes his address from his car and then they go to rob him but that made no sense to me, why do they need this dudes address? Why not just go to the rich areas and rob them, does Bruce Willis just look like a pussy in this movie, I dunno maybe they tell him they’re going on vacation or something but they don’t and they get murdered.

Not his daughter of course, well not until the sequel which isn’t coming thankfully haha.

And then there’s one black drug dealer and it’s basically filler, he just goes up to him and shoots him and then there is like a mixed pair of assholes one mexican, one black who beat him up in an alley for reasons but they don’t die or reappear at all after that.

Almost all the doctors and nurses and cops and emts are black or women or mexican though haha. It just starts to be laughable at some point. Even the idea of professional burglars who also work in an autoshop is just dumb. Does this movie think criminals have a day job?

So all I can really say about this movie is it’s just totally hamstringed, it’s so fucking safe and so afraid of it’s own shadow it can’t accurately represent the world or tell a good story. It’s so afraid of triggering feminists and race hustlers it just becomes a fucking mess. And the ironic thing is the critics are still calling it racist when he kills like one black person in the whole movie while mowing down literal swaths of white people.

It’s representative of the social climate and it’s fucking clown world, it’s really sad actually that even a movie like this made by Eli Roth of all people is totally without balls.

Even aside from the political stuff, the basic bitch pro gun narratives which are fine and I’m sure still trigger shitlibs, the movie is kind of a mess. It’s all over the place with pacing and tone and it really isn’t a satisfying movie to watch really. The action isn’t really that remarkable honestly.

It makes me think of Taken and how awesome the action in that movie was and how edgy by current standard that movie is. Because it’s basically a dude killing a bunch of muslims to get his daughter back. Because he’s throughout the whole movie fighting the albanian mob who are people traffickers and albania is a muslim country and then a shakh buys his daughter.

It’s sad to think that even that movie couldn’t have been made today. Because it represents things and people that actually exist. There are muslim people traffickers in europe and this actually happens but if you draw attention to it or the crime stats in chicago you’re a racist because reality is racist.

It’s just totally pathetic and makes me sad haha.

That’s enough of that I think.

See you…

 

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Black Panther – Review (meh-tier savagery)

As always I’ve been a naughty pirate and late to the party as usual but not having paid for it makes me less angry. Because if I paid money for this utter pile of garbage I would have asked for it back and made everyone uncomfortable.

So yeah I didn’t want to like this movie no not because I’m an evil racist bigot- well there’s that, come on guise, one of my best friends is black *sweats profusely*. Just my usual loathing for stuff everyone likes and fauns over and my building disdain for marvel movies. And sometimes I eat crow and have to concede that the thing everyone likes is actually good and I liked it despite not wanting to. But this time I get to bask in the deliciousness of being totally justified in hating this dumpster fire of a movie people are hyping up purely for political reasons.

It is the newest of the emperors new clothes, an empty invisible nothing burger of a movie. Boring, badly acted, poorly written, with sloppy cheap looking effects it all in all comes off more like a bad panto than a blockbuster comic movie.

The movie sort of just starts, fuck, it was so boring and unimportant I’ve actually forgotten how it starts and I literally just watched it the other day haha. Just some boring unimportant fight scene to introduce a pretty pointless character that is kinda meant to be a love interest but now that I think about it there’s literally no romantic subplot. There’s just a girl there, that’s it. “Hey here’s that girl you loved and still do” Then pretty much nothing for the rest of the movie.

The story is about the main character (not attempting to spell his name so from now on I will refer to him as ‘Timmy’) … Timmy and he’s taking over being the black panther and ruler of wakanda from his dad…

What is wakanda you ask, well it’s basically a super high tech african secret village that mastered some magic space rock and they’re super advanced but still decide who their king is by fighting with spears naked- ok.

So he goes through this whole process to strip his powers to fight his challenger and of course he wins blah blah vision quest blah blah generic south african villain blah blah blah maguffin. Jesus christ this movie is almost too tedious to review. How much money did this movie make ten billion squillion dollars – fuck people are stupid, this planet is doomed.

So they go to korea for some reason to do some stuff and then they do some stuff and there’s a really boring action sequence with spears and a magic metal car that’s bulletproof.

Oh I forgot to mention there’s like a james bond q sequence where he gets these stupid gadgets, I think one controlled a car and then it was his suit and that was it. They couldn’t even imitate james bond in an interesting way. It’s just middle of the road, so run of the mill. It’s dull and paint by numbers and one thing that really irked me is accents.

I’m actually from africa, I can tell different african accents and for being an insular secret city with alien level technology they sure do seem to have a slew of different accents even spanning the same fucking family. Timmy clearly has something like a piss poor like west african accent like some interpretation of nigerian or ugandan trying to sound like Eddie Murphy from coming to america but his own blood relation sister has a South African accent. How is this fucking possible??? It just completely took me out of the movie, destroyed immersion for me or at least it would have destroyed immersion for me if the concept of wakanda hadn’t completely decimated it already.

I get it, super magic metal make technology… good. But the levels of tech in this movie are so stupidly advanced they might as well be magic. I mean you get that in sci-fi, but it usually always skirts the line between tech and magic, this just jumps over and might as well be a fantasy movie. You have magic plants that give people super powers and magic beam spears and space ships and did I mention magic blankets that shoot blue force shields?? Did a five year old write this? Also giant war rhinos. I checked out long before they showed up though.

The story is pointless, entirely throwaway and in fact it doesn’t even start until a good hour of time wasting into the movie. ‘Your father killed my father now I’m mad’ wow.

And I’d heard reviews shitting on this movie praising Michael B Jordans performance as Killmonger but I just thought he was a generic thug. His back story and character felt rushed (probably because he was at the start and then disappeared for an hour to reappear when the filler villain died). This whole movie I felt like these people are just on a stage pretending, this is panto, it feels fake, the accents, the fights, the costumes, the sets, the conflict, I’ve never been more aware I was watching a stupid marvel movie before this.

I never really felt any emotional drive from any of the characters. Killmonger just wanted to rule wakanda and take over the world I guess, generic bad guy stuff. Send black people magic guns to liberate them from their ‘oppressors’ whoever they are. Pretty sure if they’re in african countries their oppressors will be other black people, maybe chinese now.

And there’s this constant trope of having the main villain in a marvel movie just being the main hero but evil; Ironman/ironmonger, thor/loki, antman/locust? And I’m fine with that as long as they’re distinct. When they have the same or similar powers it’s tense because they’re on equal footing and they need to be smart or lucky to win. They pull ahead with heart and guts.

But in this movie their costumes don’t even look distinct, Ironmonger was atleast a giant cool looking iron man suit. Killmonger’s suit is literally just black panthers suit but with a gold trim and it’s all cg anyway so who gives a shit? The end fight is boring and looks bad because it’s just two identical cg guys fighting over nothing. And there’s this ‘big battle’ going on outside between the bald chick and the blanket shield guys with rhinos which starts ‘because movie’ and then ends ‘because movie’.
Nothing is earned, nothing is worked for in this movie, even the end fight between panther and killmonger, panther just wins ‘because’ movie. Ironman beat ironmonger because his suit was better tested and he out smarted him with the icing problem on the suit. Panther just wins because it says so in the script.

It’s a lazy stupid arrogant movie, which I could forgive if the acting were good or the action were entertaining but it’s not. I can say I enjoyed parts of Batman vs Superman because of the action and some of the visuals while still panning it as ultimately uninspired. It still took some risks, black panther is just mindless, a bubblegum movie lacking in any nutritious content with a trite sickly sweet message at the end that felt tacked on.

I’d say save your money but you already done spent it, it’s just another marvel movie that serves no other purpose but selling action figures and happy meals and pushing sequel bait and this just the latest and laziest entry in that pile of movies that history will ultimately forget.

See you…

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Wonderwoman (Kinda, not really savage)

So I watched this movie recently, no I don’t pay to watch comic book movies unless I have to, I mean they’re all the same, they’re garbage, they’re nice looking dolled up garbage and no and then you get a good one like Logan and at a stretch Deadpool (totally over rated imo, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it). But these movies are always the exception to the rule. The bulk of comic movies have become this stale mass marketed pile of shit and you disagree with me meet me behind the bike sheds after school and I’ll make you eat that fucking flash t-shirt.

I thought it would be kind of funny to review this because I watched Justice League over christmas and I was just like ‘eh’ and then all this hype around black panther being this fucking amazing movie no one is allowed to criticise because ‘muh racism’.

So I watched Wonderwoman recently and it was ok.
Thanks for checking in folks, same time next week.

No so seriously, I thought it was passable, it had everything you need from a comic book movie, bit of action, bit of story, bit of romance, a bit of drama. It felt like a solid movie with decent villains, Diana is kind of boring but I mean you can’t have everything. It felt a little like the first captain america movie I guess.

What I’m saying was it was enjoyable but unremarkable, it shines only as much as penny can in a pile of horseshit that is comic book movies. It’s the best modern dc comic book movie meaning it didn’t piss and shit itself and start crying as soon as it got out on stage.

It held together, it had a cogent plot, with decent actors and decent heroes and decent villains. It wasn’t a total tonal, narrative mess like the others. It wasn’t boring and over morouse and dark a la Schneider, it was sort of fun and light without being too cheesey.

It worked and I think Chris Pine did a great job distracting from the fact that Wonderwoman is probably the most boring Dc hero. She literally has no personality but ‘Kill aries’ or ‘I’m a fish out of water’ the whole movie. But I liked the fish out of water stuff, the romance was nice and didn’t feel horse shoed in, it felt very natural and not too cringey.

The setting was really good also, I don’t know who thought about using world war one but that was a great idea in terms of pulling it out of the generic sludge of comic book movie doldrums.

But as I said, all in all it was just an ok movie, if you would compare it to the Nolan Batman movies, it’s luke warm at best but compared to the Schneider stuff it’s really the only thing going for DC right now.

Still my advice to Marvel and DC and Disney would just be to PLS STAHP!
Just stop making movies, it’s like someone shitting in a blocked train toilet, just adding to a pile of shit. Just stop, but I know they can’t because they’re like the mcdonalds of movies right now, just garbage chemically designed to get the most money for the least work and effort and expenditure, saying that I ate mcdonalds yesterday so I guess that makes me the idiot.

So yeah the only successful DC film warner bros have come out with is based on the character designed by a weird sex fetishist cuck, so there’s that haha.

Now I was just thinking I bought the game Kingdom come deliver and I should have reviewed that because it’s fucking excellent, oh well.

See you…

 

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Bright review (Medium level savagery)

Ok well while I try to stay active between working myself to death and recovering over the christmas period and getting ready for my trip I watched Bright on christmas day and it was alright.

Err ok well I wouldn’t even be writing this if I didn’t want to tear it apart and of course I do. I only really write about a movie if it does something so horrible it has to be recorded. Although we did watch Krampus after that and that was actually a great all round christmas movie. It looked great and was a lot of fun and had a hauntingly nice semi-happy ending. I thought it was the best movie I watched over christmas. For reference me and family, all we do over christmas is eat and drink starting as soon as we get up and watch movies christmassy or otherwise.

This year we watched Justice league (yawn), the snowman (we turned it off not even halfway through) Paddington 2 (through the magic of piracy) and Bright.

Now straight out of the gate I’m a semi-fan of Max Landis and David Ayer, that meaning I’ve enjoyed movies they’ve both done individually before. And I think I went over this in my suicide squad review, Ayer makes these tight tense little thrillers that really work and when he tries something big like with suicide squad it just gets away from him and blows up in his face.

But with Bright I thought because he wasn’t writing and directing it might be a little better, a little less scattered and since it wasn’t this huge cast of characters the narrative would have been less all over the place.

Honestly, I went into this movie ready to love it and right away I really did based on Will Smith alone really, he really carries this movie just by being Will Smith, I don’t know how else to put it. He’s just one of those guys who basically plays himself and that works and when he doesn’t a la suicide squad and after earth it kind of goes wrong.

For those unfamiliar with the plot, it’s basically lord of the rings two thousand years later. So it’s like a world where their creation myths are straight out of tolkien. So it’s modern day with faeries and elves and orcs and wizards. It’s basically end of watch meets the shire.

I honestly loved the premise, the characters were fun and funny, the action was great the world building was ok, there wasn’t really much of a story but what movie does these days?

Now for the criticism; first out the door, the racial narrative is kind of dumb honestly, I mean I like that it wasn’t too much in your face but orcs are black people I guess, but Will Smith is a black guy and there are hispanic gang members in it and centaurs that never show up and elves are basically your rich wasps/I dunno magic assassins I guess.

Other than that it’s handled ok, the problem really is with the world in general, it sets up this great big fantasy sandbox for them to play in but it doesn’t do anything with it really. You see a dragon flying over l.a and you never see it again. The whole movie is talking about the ‘dark lord’ and *spoilers* he never shows up, instead it reverts back to the standard buddy cop narrative of saving your partner from a burning building.

It just doesn’t really go anywhere or really take any risks. The reason end of watch and training day and harsh times are such gripping movies is because you realise the main character could and probably would die at the end or it could happen at any moment. But I never got that sense from this movie I knew exactly what was going to happen at the end. And if you didn’t well just fuck you haha. I mean it couldn’t be more obvious, an idiot M.Night Shymalan fan could have worked it out.

But I remember watching it and really enjoying it for the action and the one liners and Will Smith returning to his funny action stick, that was a lot of fun and I really liked the villains until I realised they were the only villains.

Because this whole time I’m watching these bad ass assassin elves tearing shit up like equilibrium or a pointy eared neo and I thought they were really cool but in the back of my mind I thought these were like enforcer villains building up to the dark lord…. who never shows up. So these villains were great as what I thought were just place holders, so I judged them as like mid level villains but then when I realised they were it and they were killed pretty easily I was like ‘Oh’.

It was just dissapointing, it builds up this great world and does all this forshadowing with Smith holding a sword and I was thinking, Will Smith is going to be sword fighting the dark lord by the end of this movie with a dragon and it’s going to be dope af but it just never happens , it just sort of fizzles out.

It has all this potentional it wasted. Basically I saw Ayer wanting to challenge himself but he didn’t rise to the challenge he just took his boiler plate movie template and added faerie tale shit. And all the time it lacks any tension because beat for beat it’s attempting to be a blockbuster and have sequels so I’m fully aware none of the main characters are allowed to die.

So all in all it was just this toothless mess of a fun movie.

After all that I would recommend this movie if you’re a Will Smith or Ayer fan and I probably will watch the sequel if and when it comes out to see if they can build on the world and actually have something interesting happen.

Seriously, why not just have the dark lord show up and kick their ass and escape. You get your ‘realistic’ ending and set it up for a sequel while having the pay off. The movie doesn’t even seem aware it blue balled us not having the dark lord show up in any form, it just ends like ‘Welp that was fun guys thanks for all that money’.

I heard there’s a sequel in the works but I don’t see why it should get one when we still haven’t gotten one for Dredd despite it holding a 78% on rotten tomatoes and this film only got a 30% but the audience seems to like it I guess, lord of the rings for people who wear their sunglasses on the back of their heads is pretty popular haha.

It’s kind of a silly tone deaf movie but it’s a fun ride, what more can you ask for these days honestly?

See you…

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Star Wars Rogue Y Tho?

Ok so evidently I wasn’t too hyped about this moving leaving it until now to actually watch and not spending any money to do so. And really my first thoughts are just; Why? Why does this exist?

Like seriously, I think this is the first time I’ve been watching a film and been like ‘Why am I watching this? Why would someone make this?’

The answer is obvious to anyone, it’s just money, but that makes me really sad.

The fact that this movie even exists is just so cynical and I can’t help watching it and thinking about how it feels like it was literally constructed in a board room. Even before I get down to the bare bones of why I didn’t like it, I just think it didn’t need to exist. The movie is soulless and aimless. It just exists for the sake of it. With it’s beniton advert cast with it’s token chinese person, gotta grab that chinese market there and it’s token evil white guys and cg Tarkin which was also needless.

I mean that should be your first red flag, if you need to revive not one but two people with tv voodoo you probably should just leave it alone. I know people made excuses for it but come on, it looked like crap. They could have just left him out of the movie or replaced him with a guy who just never turned around and it would have looked better than this videogame character/animated corpse. It was just wrong and anyone that says otherwise is just making excuses.

Honestly I went into this movie wanting to hate it, I really did, but any hate I could have had was overshadowed by my supreme indifference towards it. I can’t hate it because there’s nothing really substantive enough in it to hate, it’s sort of a nothing burger of a film, it’s not even really there. The characters that you’re supposed to like and care about *spoilers* and subsequently watch die are bland and uninteresting.

I couldn’t help comparing it to the magnificent seven trying to work out why that worked and this didn’t because in a way I felt it could be compared. Because you have this rag tag band of people drawn together and each person gets their own little bit where they do something brave and then die, like in magnificent seven (despite some living). But the thing about the magnificent seven is it uses it’s two hour plus screen time to build up these characters and make them distinct enough to care about them in varying degrees. I know I was more upset when Charles Bronson’s character died than I was when Red died despite the fact I liked Red but they both had their moments, their own little arcs and to see it close was meaningful and significant. It felt like a whole person died as apposed to a character or in this case a market, a buying demographic.

You don’t get that in this and what really pissed me off the most I have to say and it’s not the boring fights or the sort of stunted lame story but it’s the fact your biggest grossing actors in this case Forrest Whitaker and Mads Mikkelsen are literally in it for about two minutes collectively. And this is despite Whitaker being on the box art and promotional material.

This genuinely pissed me off because first off you see him for like a second younger when he finds, shit I was about call her Rey haha. Shows how distinctive and memorable she was as a character. Gin, he find gin and then he comes back years later with metal legs and looks like a total badass but does he get in a fight? Does he fuck, he literally gets vapourized by the death after like a minute of exposition. So that was my first red flag.

Actually no, my first red flag was why is Mads Mikkelsen in this film and why is he playing a mild mannered scientist and not some bad ass villain or sith? I mean you get one chance to use this actor, the guy who literally played hannibal and a bond villain and you use him to play some nothing character that gets killed off pointlessly and spends his like two minutes of screen time cooing over the daughter he spends all of like two seconds with.

What a waste of two great actors. You can never use either of them again now, they could have been awesome bounty hunters or assassins but no, now they’re just two dead boring guys unless they’re gonna make a prequel to this shitty movie, which I hope to christ they don’t.

That’s the main thing that really annoyed me. The casting choices just seemed to be token, just trying to find the biggest names they could get and casting them as anyone.

The other characters are ultimately forgettable even the guy who played ipman, he’s just a sort of boiled down version of any character from any kung fu movie really and he’s only there to try and make money on the chinese market. (Which they failed to do)

I didn’t care about their deaths and this is a long movie, so you had all this time to make me care about these characters and I still don’t. And this movie is actually longer than magnificent seven.

Ok onto the main character, of which her backstory fits into all of the two minutes before Forest whitaker is vapourized. So she’s the daughter of this science guy and then spends sometime off screen where she becomes the best of this guys soldiers at sixteen. Which says a lot about the rebel alliance, if their best soldier is a sixteen year old girl, you’ve got problems.

So instant Mary sue badass that everyone loves and respects and would die for check. There’s not much more I can say really, the movie is just sort of bleh, it’s cookie cutter and it was made in a board room not someone’s heart.

Gonna rant a little about the ending and the decline of hollywood and I’m out.

Right so one thing I’ve noticing about hollywood and it’s painfully obvious in this movie is the step away from moral story telling and romantic plot lines. Don’t get me wrong the romance in the prequels was cringey as fuck but to not have one in this movie was a little glaring, like why not? It’s a movie. I mean that sounds dumb, I mean just because there’s a hot guy and a hot girl in a movie doesn’t mean they should hook up. But I dunno it just made it sort of awkward at the end when they’re about to be obliterated by an orbital death lazer for them to have  a platonic hug. I was like, dude got friendzoned hard #Deathstarred.

I mean it was so odd my brother swears he remembers them kissing but they did not. It just strikes a queer note. That it would have been relatively easy to inject a moral or romantic plotline but it was purposefully left out. So this movie was more preoccupied with making a bad ass woman getting money from chinese people and signalling to fans of the original franchise than having a romance or making the female character human in anyway.

Now onto the signalling, a lot of memes I see and even my brother made a big deal about this and what we’re talking about is the end sequence when Darth Vader has a bit of a fight. I say he has a fight when it’s really just him murdering a bunch of dudes in a cool way. And yeah it was cool and I spent those brief seconds of that action thinking “Wouldn’t it be cool if the other two hours of this movie was like this?”. It was a nice little treat, like a cherry on top of a bland creampie full of empty calories.

That’s whats so bad about this movie, because it hints at the other films, you get to see the pigfaced guy from the bar scene before he gets his arm cut off and it has a little cameo from r2 and 3po and vader and tarkin but they’re not actually in the film. They don’t have an impact on the story, they’re just little extras, little titbits, window dressing, little reminders of the film you actually liked, which isn’t this.

It’s just so pathetically try hard, it’s like I’m watching a sad fan film. This is the movie equivalent of halloween harley quinn cosplayer. “Hey look at me, I’m that thing you like”. But there’s a difference between those films we liked and this film that takes the time to vaguely reference those films without having any of the memorable characters or action or story. “Hey remember those films you liked, I’m pointing at some of the characters that were in that, like me please!”

It’s just pathetic honestly. And I don’t know what’s sadder the fact the movie industry is cynical and greedy enough to roll the corpse of this franchise out into this boring nothing of a film or that audiences nevertheless pay money to watch it and will defend just because it vaguely reminds them of the films they liked but in a way that’s akin to the murderer of their grandmother wearing her skin and making you peanut butter sandwiches. It’s not your grandmother, it just looks like her sort of and that isn’t peanut butter.

I mean honestly, what next? Are they going to make a movie about c3po working on jabbas pleasure barge? Are we going to get a movie about guido shooting first? If this is the standard what can’t they make a movie about at this point?

I’d heard that these guys would be recurring as the knights of ren, this order of non-force using villains which would have been awesome. If the tone of the movie was to set up a band of villains for Rey and the gang to fight in the new movies that would have given the movie purpose and gravitas, but that seems unlikely.

It genuinely adds nothing to the star wars universe, it creates characters we don’t care about only to then kill them off with no overarching moral message or parable that makes the whole message hollow. The movie doesn’t need to exist. I mean I could understand if some of them recurred in the main arch but they all die, so what was the point? Oh right, money. I mean all my gripes with the force awakens it atleast adds new characters and plots lines to the franchise. I only really like one of them but at least it added something, this is just a completely pointless film that serves only to waylay you of your time and money in exchange for one decent Darth Vader scene.

Ok rant over haha.

 

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Ghost Garbage fire go!

Ok so I actually got off my ass and pirated me a copy of this trash and watched it with my mum. Tbf she actually liked it but there’s no accounting for taste and she has none haha.
To be honest I didn’t think it was that bad at the start, it seemed fairly entertaining, it looks good, the effects are ok, it’s not shot badly. I actually liked some of the ghosts which I found surprising, some of them looked pretty good.

The problems start early though, all the jokes are fart or poop or ass or front ass related, it’s so cringey it’s almost unbearable and it’s not funny beyond like a single pity guffaw.

I heard people talking about this pringle ad during the first ghost encounter scene and I was like ‘so she’s eating pringles, who cares?’. But whatever you heard it’s much worse, I mean it’s not like a one second shot, those pringles are in shot almost through that scene and she draws attention to them a few times and I was like ‘Seriously?’ it was shameless and it completely took me out of what should have been the first pivotal moment of the film which just turned into a silly gross out gag.

Seriously this movie is not funny, the funniest jokes in this movie were made by the editor when he was putting this together, every joke in this movie does not land, period. I saw a lot of reviews where people were saying Kevin, Chris Hemsworth’s character, the dopey secretary, was the saving grace in the movie. And I think they’re dead. His jokes were just as terrible if not more terrible, some of the jokes I was told were funny had no context, he just said them randomly with no setup. He was just saying dumb things, if any movie needed a laugh track it was. What’s so funny about his character exactly? He’s dumb, like monumentally ‘how has he stayed alive this long, seriously how does he feed himself dumb’ that’s it, that’s not a joke. What’s more its ‘offensive’ Janean (no fucking idea how to spell her name) wasn’t dumb, she wasn’t a scientist but she wasn’t a mouth breathing idiot, so why they thought about including a dopey male secretary as a gag I have no idea because there is no romantic sub-plot at all. They don’t even attempt one.
I think the worst part of this movie is that none of the characters seem like real people, they all seem like cartoon characters, every character apart from Charles Danse is just a walking talking silly gag. It’s just tiring and it makes you very aware you’re not watching a movie that has any intention of taking itself seriously so can have no drama or tension or engaging plot at all.

Ok on to the controversy bullshit, I honestly think having women ghostbusters made no difference, there isn’t a cast on earth that could have made this movie work, you could have re-united the old cast bring Harold Ramis back from the dead and they couldn’t have made this movie watchable. So really it has nothing to do with them being women and everything to do with the writing and direction being lacklustre.

On the whole the cast was probably the only thing about it that was any good, I’m not a big McCarthy fan but her character was probably the most interesting I guess. Kristin Wiig is great but she was pretty much the boring straight man. The other girl who was supposed to be Egon was terrible, beyond ridiculous. Lesly Jones was probably the most real character in the movie despite the stupid forced loud black woman jokes that made the world cringe. She was probably the most consistent character throughout.

But the problem really was that there was no chemistry, it was just a bunch of zany characters shoved together whereas the original film felt like a group of friends doing a dirty job for not much pay. It worked, they meshed, these new ghostbusters did not. They didn’t feel like real characters so I couldn’t care about their relationship.

The story didn’t make a whole lot of sense and it didn’t have a pleasing flow, it felt empty. It wasn’t a very satisfying film to watch because there wasn’t really a big arc or any characters you thought were central. It didn’t feel like a cohesive movie, it felt like an overly long and unfunny SNL skit, I know everyone is saying that, but they’re goddamn right.

Overall it wasn’t so bad it was good, but it wasn’t horrible, it was lame, a wet fart of a movie and a pitiful start to a franchise that seems like it’s already dead.

I mean we knew it would suck, it was marketed by idiots who remade a classic movie and intentionally alienated the original fans of the franchise failing completely to secure a new audience, so of course it flopped. This is what you get when you push ideology over actually creating things people will like, which is your job as a content creator. That being said there wasn’t any really overt political or feminist messages in the movie, so I can’t fault it for that.

But still I give it two raspberries out of five.

 

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Star Wars the force just needs ten more minutes

It’s s been like a week since I saw the latest star wars movie and of course I thought this would be perfect timing to do an informal review when I’ve pretty much forgotten most of the movie and everyone and their great aunt has reviewed it already and moved on to talking about the patriarchal oppression of monopoly sets.

It’s just been awhile since I’ve done an off the top of the head kind of blog and I wanted to see if I could still spit free style nonsense.

Ok my first impression from the trailers was mixed, it looked cool, like a back to form sort of cool. But the way the trailers were shot was a little too in my face in regards to the race and the genders of the main characters. It looked a little needy to me, maybe that’s just because of the year we had in regards to all this social justice nonsense polluting everything but it seemed a little like it was pandering to that demographic of self congratulatory modern day yuppies.
It’s not something I thought was that relevant when I watched the movie, there was no hammy speech made by Rey or Finn on the necessity of diversity or women in the rebel (Sorry ‘resistance’) work force. But it seemed like JJ felt like he needed to apologize for slave Leia and Darth Vader turning out to be white by pushing a woman and minority character to the forefront for a much needed pat on the back from the diversity police as a way of saying ‘Thanks for not including anymore white men’. As I say I didn’t think it too relevant at the start but apologetics seemed to become a more relevant overall theme as it went on.

I don’t really feel like going into great detail about the main characters just yet because I feel like they’re characters that will grow with the new series. But in a nutshell there’s Finn an ex storm trooper turned shit talker, an ex scavenger turned super Jedi Mary sue Rey and an Ex member of Hanson turned emo sith Cadet Kylo Ren.

I didn’t really have much of an issue with them and in fact I rather liked them despite their characters being a little stale, I thought Finn needed more dialogue, I liked his arc, I just don’t think the story was big enough to make room for him and Rey and Kylo and everyone else. I felt like he got sidelined a little.
Rey is probably the most annoying character and I’ve already heard people describe her as a Mary sue and she is kind of a Mary sue. She’s basically good at everything and never fails at anything, and spoilers she like out jedis Obi Wan without any training whatsoever and beat a sith captain who was probably trained since birth by Luke Skywalker himself without ever having picked up a lightsaber before. It really pissed me off because it just begs belief, it swerved a little too far into ridiculousness.

But I don’t feel that annoyed because I think all these characters are growing and their arcs will get deeper and more interesting in the later films (fuck I sound like an apologist).

Ok ok I saved my favourite until last; yeah predictably my favourite character was Kylo Ren. I can’t really put my finger on it, but at the start he’s sort of the generic Vader copy but then when he takes off his mask he takes on a depth of character of his own that I think really pays off throughout the movie.

I think Driver’s performance was perfect, I know people are calling him this emo fag or whatever and I even compared him a little to Haden Christenson’s shockingly bad portrayal of Anakin Skywalker myself. But I just can’t put my finger on it, Driver brings a level of intensity and angst that really sells it and it’s almost like he succeeds at what Christenson was aiming for and just missed the mark of. That troubled dark man child with a sword in his hand and I think it really worked, he didn’t induce cringes, he really sizzled and was sort of creepy and likeable at the same time.
This was the difference between him and the heroes, we’re used to Star Wars being a little cringey and especially after the shockingly bad prequels but he wasn’t the least bit cringe worthy, he really nailed it and I can’t wait to see how his character develops later into the trilogy. He’s one of these characters that makes me sad that all heroes have to win in the end and life is just so two dimensional like that, and skewed so that reality has to bend to the will of good always winning.

Another thing that is so different and sets this film apart from all the others is the action. The action is something never before seen in star wars, we’re used to this heavily choreographed amazing acrobatic lightsaber duels. We don’t get any of that; it’s all gritty balls to the wall lightsaber street fights almost. Untrained amateurs hacking away at each other with deadly glow sticks. I sound pissed, but I think it was a lot less flowery and way more intense. It looked less like a dance and more like an actual fight.

Now the crux of the matter with this movie is that the internet is split between singing its praises just for not being the prequels and hipsters saying it’s the emperor’s new clothes. And as it usually is the case, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Yeah it was hardly the most original film ever, the formula is pretty much a recreation of a new hope but I don’t really begrudge that, history repeating itself is a common (maybe lazy) theme in lots of movies. And it wasn’t the most spectacular movie, it wasn’t perfect but neither was new hope or any of the star wars movies. But bottom-line I enjoyed it.

There was never a moment I was bored or just cringing so hard I couldn’t open my eyes like the prequels.
But that I think is the biggest problem with this film, its ‘safe’.

Say what you will about the prequels but they took risks, they fell flat on their face but that’s taking risks for you.
The Force Awakens is paint by numbers star wars movie but what it lacks in originality it makes up for with a higher calibre of acting and compelling characters and action.
But to go back to what I was saying about this being an apology. That’s what I feel was going on here, a solid movie piggybacking on the original trilogy that didn’t stray into prequel territory. No matter what people say about the originality, we wanted a star wars movie and that’s what we got.
I’m being honest with you when I say, I really wanted to be a total hipster douche and shit on this movie to protect the honour of the original trilogy but I can’t. It’s a solid, very entertaining film with fresh new characters that will grow with us as an audience.

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