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Midsommar – Review

Yeah I like it, the end haha.

Ok yeah not the end erm. I went into this kind of weird because I loved Hereditary but I know lots of people hate it for some reason I can’t fathom. That movie was fucking great, it was the exorcist for the modern era, I loved every minute of it.

I guess a lot of people were split about this movie too, so I didn’t rush out and see it because it kind of got mixed reviews and I’m not a huge fan of the wicker man the movie this is obviously homaging.

I mean I like the wickerman but I’m not like obsessed with it, it’s a cool movie but I didn’t burn pictures of Nicholas Cage when he was in the remake haha.

Midsommar is a very entertaining movie, visually it’s great, the lighting and camera work is fantastic, the acting is great, the music and diagetic sound is great. The atmosphere of the movie is first class. Throughout the whole film I was in a state of almost a trance but I was also on the edge of my seat.

The movie sort of held me in a state of perpetually chill but also a state of unease, it’s not a scary film, but it’s just a constant unsettling feeling under your skin and it’s great.

Maybe that’s why people didn’t like it, they went in expecting a standard horror movie like the conjuring or annabel or texas chainsaw massacre and instead they got something that just gets under your skin. It has it’s occasional shocking horrific moments but it mostly just simmers in your subconscious.

Even though I let the ending get ruined for me because like an idiot I watched the red letter media review before I watched it, I still enjoyed it. Although I did skip the rlm review for hereditary which was a good choice. I’d definitely recommend that, watch it after definitely.

There isn’t much of a story, it’s basically about a girl who loses her family in a horrible way and her boyfriend is trying to give her the boot but then this tragedy happens and he can’t. And he’s got a trip planned to this basically religious cult to do his thesis on it for his university anthropology class.

Then horrible shit happens obviously haha. It wouldn’t be a movie if they just sat around singing kumbiya haha.

It’s really just effective and well done. I found it thoroughly entertaining throughout. The only gripes I had were when I compare it to Wickerman which is a high bar to set. My only problems were narratively because in the wickerman it’s very clear why they’re doing what they’re, the purpose of the horrible shit that happens is clear. In Midsommar it’s more murky, it’s explained less and I guess that adds to the mystery because you basically know as much as the main characters do. And in wickerman the main character is a policeman investigating and here it’s just a bunch of teens doing drugs and being retarde.

Also the weird kid with the messed up face is all over the trailers and I don’t know if that was cut or something but that kid is almost not in the movie. The amount they show him in the trailers compared to his actual appearance in the movie is weird. Makes me think some of that stuff was cut. It’s just weird that kid didn’t feature much in the movie after going through all the effort of doing the effect in the first place and showing it off.

I don’t have much more to say about it, I liked it, I was engaged, I definitely think it deserves a watch and maybe a rewatch to pick up on things you might’ve missed. I dunno people seem to like it on rotten tomatoes, the audience and the critics, I have no idea where I got this idea it had a mixed reception haha.

I really like Ari Astor as a director, he’s one to keep a close eye on certainly, I’ll definitely be following his work as he goes forward. In my mind he makes movies that deserve the praise Jordan Peele gets haha. Jordan Peele that guy who makes hacky schlocky garbage but gets praised as if it’s high art because he’s blackish and his movies are about hating white people usually or something along those lines haha. Ari Astor actually makes thoughtful well crafted movies with amazing performances and I feel like he gets sort of looked over.

Just go check it out, Midsommar, it’s on amazon prime right now so if you have that you can watch it for free.

See you…

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Dr Sleep – Review

I went into this movie totally unbiased, I like the original shining, not a huge fan of Stephen King though, I think his writing is hacky, ok well that’s an understatement I think his face should be next to the definition of a hack writer. I don’t even really like most of the film adaptations of his work, I’m just aware of them but I can’t think of many that are very memorable other than as memes. Like Misery is an ok movie but I wouldn’t watch it more than once, same with Pet cemetery and silver bullet, they’re ok movies but they’re not something you keep coming back to. In a lot of ways once you’ve seen one King movie you’ve sort of seen them. And after some tepid reviews on youtube I thought this was movie was going to pass me by.

But that being said I have watched the shining quite a few times and I could see myself watching this again and again but it was just such a fun, cool movie. I really unironically enjoyed every minute of it. It was fun, interesting, heartfelt, sad at times, shocking at others but it constantly kept me engaged and interested and had some real ‘hell yes’ moments which were surprising. It succeeds not only in being a sequel to a great movie but also in being it’s own movie entirely. This is to the Shining what Aliens is to Alien. It’s not copying the previous movie, it evolved from it into something new and all together interesting in its own right and I really respect that.

So the movie is set after the shining and the main character is a grown up Danny Torrence played by Ewan Mcgregor. Danny is tormented by the spirits of the dead and the death of his own mother and thus driven to alcohol and substance abuse which seems like a logical response. But as fate would have it he gets a second chance and finds meaning and friendship working in hospice care helping the elderly come to terms with death and it’s both really sweet and heart rending. Me and my brother joked that this could also serve as a weird sequel to Sixth sense haha.

But at the same time this is happening you’re also following a gang of literal fucking vampires as they trek across america in camper vans like Near Dark recruiting and turning other people who shine and brutally torture and kill children to suck out their shine which they call ‘steam’. Basically how this idea has evolved in the sequel is that shine is like a literal substance and I know what you’re thinking, star wars and medicloreans and yeah I thought the same (that and it being Ewan Mcgregor again haha) but this goes in a much cooler direction with it. Because it turns out that people like Danny have existed for a long time and you can live a long time if you drain this power from others like you. So this group of basically psychic vampires seek out children to drain of their essence. The reason they target children is because the steam is pure and untainted and the first time they do it they sort of cut away but the next time you see them do it they literally slice this kid to pieces torturing him because pain and fear purifies the steam.

Now the first part of the movie just with Danny putting his life together could be a movie on it’s own, it’s sweet and interesting and sort of horrifying, it could’ve just been a nice supernatural drama oscar bait movie but you add this second layer with the psychic vampires and it almost becomes a bad ass Carpenter movie. It’s such a cool direction to take it in.

I really liked the villains because they seem almost like anime villains like the vampires in Near Dark but also really normal at the same time. They don’t seem or look like monsters, especially the main villain but she’s a fucking psycho who takes pleasure in cutting up kids basically. They’re all sort of believable and understandable, they see themselves almost as forces of nature, not as good or evil or monsters.

You have this great dichotomy between Danny’s story and the villains and you’re just waiting for them to collide. It makes me miss this type of film making, any other film maker would show you the villain once and then you wouldn’t see them again for an hour but in this you follow them almost as much as Danny which I love because you’re really getting to know all the vital characters.

The story is pretty simple in that Danny basically becomes psychic pen pals with this really powerful little girl during the eight years he’s putting his life back together. But during that time the little girl has come onto the radar of the vampires after she psychically witnesses one of their murders so now they want her because she has more steam than they’ve ever seen before. Because there’s a plot line basically where they haven’t been eating very well lately, the steam is drying up, they’ve been living on scraps so they’re sort of desperate for a big score.

The little girl called Abra reaches out to Danny to help her against the vampires so this is where the movie goes from interesting and fun to fucking awesome haha. It essentially becomes a really cool vampire movie with psychic powers and of all the ways this could’ve been done it happens in the best way possible. This could’ve been really silly like a stupid comic book movie, I wont spoil it but the confrontations with the actual vampires are really cool and grounded and awesome and hard hitting and clever. The end fight puts a nice capstone on the first movie without shitty sequel bait.

The movie very tastefully uses things from the original shining, it borrows from it and references in a way that is very respectful of the original. Sure they use new actors to play his mother and father and Dick Halorann but the performances are very subdued and they’ve picked actors that look a lot like them and they’re used sparingly.

Now a lot of people me included would be forgiven for saying “The shining doesn’t need a sequel” and you’d be totally right and there are lots of old movies that get sequels nobody asked for that serve just to squeeze money out of an old franchise manipulating people with nostalgia. This is probably 99% of the time but there is the 1% that is exception to the rule and this and maybe the Blade Runner sequel (which is hotly contested) are sequels that add to the original movie but are entirely their own movies and are good in their own right. Doctor Sleep is that in spades.

Like I could watch Doctor Sleep never having watched the shining and still enjoy it. You could show someone who’s never read King or watched a single one of his movie adaptations and they will enjoy this movie. The acting is great, the story and premise are fun, the action is surprisingly good, the effects are decent. Now I’m not gonna bullshit you and say the camera work and cinematography are on the level of Kubrick but they emulate him slightly and are competent. It’s not trying to copy the original, only call back to it for context.

In summary there’s no reason you shouldn’t see this movie, if you like supernatural thrillers, if you’re a King fan or just like the Shining or even if you like Near Dark or Scanners and weird fun movies like that. Hell if you just like Ewan McGregor go see this movie, I can’t think of a single bad thing to say about, I kinda wish it was a tv show just so we could have more of it, it’s such a cool premise. But as a movie it’s a perfect package, made by people who know how to make movies.
To a lot of people this will feel like an older movie because it follows a proper formula, film makers today try to subvert story telling conventions thinking they’re above them but they can’t see those conventions are there for a reason and without them movies just feel like a sloppy unsatisfying mess. You will come out of this movie satisfied you watched a real movie. This is without a doubt my movie of 2019, go see it.

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Hellboy (2019) review – Future cult classic

If you didn’t like this movie fuck you, that’s all I have to say, end of review.

Haha ok no, might’ve been a little hasty there.

Yeah so like every other sentient being on this planet I saw this movie and I was just like ‘why does this need to exist?’ And it seems that that feeling has permeated to the core of the entire movie watching world so deep that they’ve forgotten how to actually enjoy a fun movie. In fact they wouldn’t even know one if it slapped them upside the head with a giant’s dong.

I’m one of these complete plebs that hasn’t read nor has any desire to read the hellboy comics so I wasn’t particularly interested in the Ron Pearlman movies. I thought they were kind of ok, they were watchable, like if they came on tv while I was cooking or something I wouldn’t turn them off because I liked the practical effects or whatever. They were ok, pretty much anything with like occult nazis and I’m interested but I was never really blown away by the movies. They were just sort of middling monster movies that were castrated for children, where all the gore became gunge or something. Not having read the comics I can’t attest to what demographic they’re aimed at but I hardly think a comic about a demon spawn killing monsters is aimed at kids.

Which is kind of ironic because the biggest criticism I see about this movie is that it’s a cynical cash in on the franchise during the superhero craze dying down now. But it’s not even aimed at kids, it’s a hard swearing gorefest hard R rating so which ones are the cynical cash grabs again? The ones made pg-13 to sell mcdonalds toys or the ones where hellboy cleaves a giants head in two with a sword the size of a minibus?

I dunno, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills here, and if you swapped the original hellboy movies with this one in terms of the time period it would be Ron Pearlman getting his dick knocked in the dirt.

What I’m trying to say is like me everyone cynical prick (me included) and their grandmother was ready to hate this movie because super hero fatigue has set in hard and it’s here to stay and people were more ready to give the Pearlman movies a fair shake because at the time we were only getting the tip of the cape shit fuckening that was to occur soon after leaving us all feeling sore and deeply ashamed as a culture.

Because I’m sitting here watching this movie, ready to hate it every moment of it (and the beginning bit sort of sucked) but this funny thing starts to happen about the time where hellboy is fighting three giants straight out of trollhunter or attack on titan mano e mano; I start to have this funny feeling, this tingling sensation that some scientists have called ‘having fun’.

The movie is just fun as all fuck. It’s balls to wall action and gore and just bad ass. There are bits of this movie that just had me reeling, it was just so gorey and awesome looking I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. It blends practical and digital effects really nicely and I think the tone is really cool, where it’s kind of light hearted but then it’s as  violent and as gorey as a horror movie, so you get almost a black comedy vibe from it.

The movie is a good two hours long but there’s so much going on it doesn’t feel like a slog and even when you reach the halfway point so much has happened the first half could’ve been it’s own movie. In some respects the plot is a little rushed and not amazing but it has a solid structure where at the halfway mark he’s confronting the main villain and not having what he needs to defeat her he has to go back and measure himself.

The main cast are passable, I don’t know what accent Daniel Dae Kim was attempting the girl is kinda bleh, and it kinda wreaks of diversity woke squad where the only white man on the team is red. But David Harbour is great in this movie. The worst part of the original movies for me was the hammy acting from Pearlman. I like him, I think he has a cool voice and someone thought he’d be a cool hellboy but I think he was too old to play hellboy even then and now it would be ridiculous. You need someone old enough to be a tough cool Ron Pearlman character but also young enough to be a kind of a punk  kid sometimes. The bits where Pearlman is acting like a brat in the original movies is so forced and lame and his self loathing just felt silly, like he was doing a rainman impression. I think Harbour is a lot more realised as Hellboy, he brings a lot more consistency and personality to the role, I just felt like his interpretation was a more three dimensional character instead of just Ron Pearlman painted red. I felt like his struggle with his humanity was more potent and less shlocky.

I think the villains could’ve been better, I loved the changeling pigman he was awesome, when you first meet him it’s almost stomach churning the level of unbridled carnage he wreaks on people. You really feel like if you encountered this thing you would shit your pants. But Milla Jovovich as a villain was unremarkable, it was just Milla Jovovich being herself, she didn’t look particularly interesting, she was sort of too likeable as villain. But I guess the point of the story is that Hellboy is his own worst villain so it kind of makes sense that his villains aren’t as interesting as he is. Because the battle is between himself, either he gives in to his demon nature and conquers the earth or he beats his demonself and saves humanity from… himself.

Overall it’s just a solid fun, no nonsense, not giving a fuck movie I think will be a cult classic. And I don’t think it’s a cynical cash grab I think someone saw deadpool and logan and were like “Why don’t we do the hellboy movie we want to do where people say ‘fuck’ and get torn apart by a giant pigman in the most grotesque way possible?”

It’s a no holes barred action gorefest like that isn’t possible today, legitimately I’m not being objective. I’m holding this movie up against the sterile cynical mass produced comic book prepackaged action shlock we get today like every marvel or in some regards even the John Wick movies that don’t really take any risks, they just set up action set pieces and then string them together with a loose plot no one cares about.

What I’m trying to say is I don’t think this movie was phoned in, I can tell when someone doesn’t give a shit and I can’t look at a single frame of this movie and say that someone didn’t love this. Even things as simple as the sets and some of the shooting locations I just had to stop and say it looked good. This movie looks good, it’s fun, it’s action packed, it’s not neat, it’s not clean, you can’t take your mum or your girlfriend to it, you can’t have soylent drinking thin bearded will wheaton ass motherfuckers soy smiling while they tell you how bad ass it is when thor was playing fortnite. There isn’t some forced shitty joke mandated by their corporate office to be instituted every ten minutes, this movie isn’t made in a factory. I think we’ve been so programmed by these factory farm movies coming out of the comic book industry we don’t know how to watch a movie not made in that mould. This movie fucking breaks the mould and takes a demon sized dump on it. Actually fuck it, I think I might start reading the comics just to see which was a closer adaptation. That’s how you know you watched a good comic book movie, where you actually want to go read the comics it’s based on. You literally can’t do that with marvel because there are like a million different versions of every character. You can’t walk into to a comic book store and just ask to buy a spiderman comic without spending a couple thousand hours on wikipedia first to decide which fucking spiderman in which timezone in which dimension.

Don’t take my word for it, watch it and make up your own mind, and I guarantee even if you didn’t like it, you’ll have fun with it. I’m looking at this through the lens of the previous movies and the castrated garbage we’re force fed daily from the comic book empires, and it looks good.

 

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Men in Black international review

This movie surprised me taking the lofty title of ‘most okayest movie ever’.

I didn’t really know what to expect when I went into this movie, I’ve seen all of the MIB movies but never been that impressed with any of them bar the first one and even then I just thought that movie was above average.

And then of course I stumbled on all the political bullshit surrounding this movie as it appears that Tessa Thompson is trying to topple Brie Larson from atop the totem of ‘most wokest person in hollywood’ which you’d think would be easy since she’s a woman and mixed race and is probably some made up gender she hasn’t fully made up yet (probably waiting on focus group testing for that one). But you’d be wrong, as nothing will top a huhwhyte wamen and her shrill white guilt from being the most woke person on earth nomatter how many african babies she has to adopt and then turn into some kind of gender experiment, looking at you Charlise Theron *shakes head*.

Yeah she was being a total nob and I guess trying to kick up controversy by saying it should be ‘People in black’ or something lame like that, you know just trying to ungender the language for some reason. When in reality ‘men’ is actually a neutral term which just means people and they added ‘wo’ to it to single out the distinction in people. Men classically is just a collective term for humans, you use women when you want to get specific on the type of human from the bog standard to the special one that creates other humans.

Putting the fedora away for a moment, that shit doesn’t really matter because facts never matter when you’ve got an agenda to push. But in all honesty the movie didn’t have a lot of politics in it, of course there were politics in it, can’t get a movie without it in these days in some form or another. It’s always there looming in the background of all movies in a way.

There are the odd subtle reference to immigration, well Tessa Thompson’s character at the start helps this cute little alien escape alien ice (MIB) and spoilers for this epic twist which is almost completely inconsequential to the rest of the movie and totally obvious to anyone five and above; the little alien is mildly relevant to the plot later. In that he’s like the enforcer to an alien arms dealer and because she helped him he helps her escape the arms dealer.

So I guess the moral of the story is you should help illegal aliens escape the law so when they become hired killers for other alien criminals they’ll maybe remember you and spare you when you end up in the clutches of said alien criminals. Not the best argument for immigration I’ve heard, but it’s up there.

Also not sure about this in the other movies but they referred to the aliens a lot as ‘refugees’. I don’t really get why alien refugees would want to flee to earth of all places when earth seems to be the focal point of a lot of alien fuckery and the first part of the movie is about how Hemsworth’s character has to take this alien dignitary around and show him some fun or his people will grind the earth into dust. So tell me again why it’s such an alien hot spot, of all the places in the galaxy why pick earth a planet where most of the people aren’t even aware of aliens? And also why aren’t people aware of aliens? What harm could it be to let people know that aliens exist? I mean aliens are aware people exist and they’re pretty chill about it, I don’t get why humans are the only people in the universe not allowed to know they’re not alone, it’s just levels of contrivance that shouldn’t be possible.
I was just thinking what would really change if people knew about aliens in this universe and the answer really is ‘nothing’. There’s a bit where they’re riding this alien hoverbike thing through the streets of morocco and they take the time to neuralise some of the people who initially see them but then they’re driving through the streets not bothering and I was like ‘so what was the point of neuralising those people if you don’t also subsequently neuralise everyone around you now?”. It’s just contrived and silly and like why bother neuralising people at all when there are supposedly aliens everywhere. It makes me think that people do know aliens are real but the MIB are just so stupid they don’t know everyone knows and people are just pretending they don’t know to humour these total retards who think camera flash bulbs erase people’s memories.

I get the whole point of it is to make us think that the MIB could be real and they’re keeping the existence of aliens from us but does that ever make it seem more real? Not really. I mean you had people planning to storm area 51 recently hoping to bone green women, do you think anything would surprise these people anymore?

Jesus fucking christ, I didn’t think I’d have anything to say about this movie and I’m already almost a thousand words in and haven’t said anything about it really haha.

Ok well, I kind of enjoyed it, I guess, it’s an ok popcorn flick to turn your brain off to, some of the jokes are ok, kind of post ironic humour bleh, but passable. The contrived origin story of Tessa Thompson’s character sucks though and I wish they’d skipped it, but it was thankfully very brief.

She’s just someone who saw an alien once and wanted to be in MIB and she’s ‘muh mary sue super wamen genius!’ and they have to let her in the MIB for reasons. She basically just shows up at MIB headquarters and they let her join for reasons. I thought it would’ve been more fun if they neuralised her and she had to remember and get back there. But this movie can’t be bothered with origin stories, because they have a bunch of other origin stories in a row to tell. Right after her origin story its Chris Hemsworth’s turn and then like a quarter of the way in it gets into the villains story. The villain was sort of bleh honestly. Just these two guys who looked like (and probably were) backing dancers in a *insert modern popstar idiot*’s music video.

But I expected Liam Neeson to be in it for like five minutes and he’s actually in it a lot longer than that. I liked some of the action, Chris Hemsworth is always pretty watchable and they actually cut some of the cringy stuff that was in the trailer which was great. Back to the political shit, there was a shit bit where the chick who is the leader of the U.S MIB is implying she’s trying to change the name to be more gender neutral and I don’t remember it being in the version I watched so that’s cool.

So the basic plot is Chris Hemsworth is basically 007 but goofier and with aliens and Tessa Thompson is his new rookie partner and they’re doing stuff. It’s not the best, the plot is mainly serviceable but it didn’t drag or feel poorly paced. I didn’t feel bored or unsatisfied. It’s length was just right in terms of it’s act structure, the characters were enjoyable, effects looked good.

Maybe I was just expecting it to be really bad and was just pleasantly surprised because I rather enjoyed it, it was just a fun popcorn movie. I’d probably never watch it again but I can think of worse ways to waste an afternoon.

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Alita Battle Angel review

Kinda went into this movie with no expectations, I don’t think I even watched a trailer and overall I can say it’s a very flawed movie, but altogether pretty good. I enjoyed it pretty much throughout although some niggling things stuck out to me.

The plot is pretty basic, and one of the biggest problems I had at the start is the start. It starts at the start and people are like ‘so, isn’t that where you’re supposed to start?’ yeah I guess but usually when you have a movie set in this completely alien anime world you need a lot of exposition and world building and that takes time and it can be a little boring to slog through which is why you don’t usually start your movie with that.

So the start of the movie is this weird twenty minutes of pretty boring exposition dumps and world building where Christoph Walz finds this robot head and brings it back to life and introduces it to the world and what not which is this semi fish out of water narrative. We’re introduced to the world by her experience of it.

It works but it feels like it’s rushing to get this exposition out but also there’s nothing actually happening. But eventually you get to an action sequence and it was pretty good, I like the action, the level of violence is pretty awesome and they get away with that and keeping it 12a I guess because it’s robots. Because if this was people it would be an 18 for sure because she straight up kills people. People are decapitated and maimed throughout and it’s pretty cool because even though they’re all cyborgs they have human faces and attributes so it’s not like that crappy robocop reboot where he’s just fighting faceless drones.

The thing is if I wrote this I’d have tried to put this action sequence at the start and then when you’ve got the audiences attention you subtly drop the exposition in flashbacks or something. Because setting the relationship at the start with Christoph walz’s character dates it. You see their relationship in real time and there’s no gap to fill yourself. If you left it to a flashback it implies they’ve known eachother longer so they can care about eachother.

The acting is ok, the writing is ok, the effects look alright, I have no real complaints with any of it, it was a solid if a little predictable. But predictability doesn’t make a movie bad if what you predicted is fun and interesting, which this movie most certainly is.

Honestly my biggest gripe with this movie is that it’s a movie.

I just got this niggling feeling that it would’ve worked so much better as a tv show on amazon. It wasn’t a particularly long movie but it felt like a lot of it was trying to cram as much stuff into one movie as possible and I feel like some of it was crunched and some of the scenes feel more episodic than in a typical movie formula.

A tv show would’ve really let the plot develop nicely and in a more organic way and it wouldn’t have left us with an ending which felt sort of flat. And it could’ve easily been converted to a tv show since most of the main cast are already relatively unknown television actors, you’d just need to snip the bigger names like Walz and Jennifer Connolly, two actors which if I’m being honest brought nothing of note that justified their casting. I could easily see their roles being played just as well by someone much cheaper and less well known to satisfy the budget of a tv show instead of a movie. I know people like Christoph Walz and I like Jennifer Connolly because I love rocketeer and the original hulk but are these really big names that put butts in seats? Not really.

Overall I liked it and I liked some of the cameos like with Jeff Fahey playing the awesome cyborg dog bounty hunter and Nova being played by Edward Norton. But these characters just make me want this to be a tv show even more. If this were a tv show that cyborg dog guy could get his own episode or even an arc not just a five minute scene. That’s what I hate about this movie, it has so much potential I feel like is being wasted just to cram it into this hunger games style movie template because that’s what they think will make the most money.

To be honest I think the hunger games model is played out since most those trilogies just sort of fizzle out and we had this slew of teen movies after which tried and failed to emulate that. I just want to watch a full real satisfying movie with a beginning middle and end and not have to watch a sequel or a trilogy or just a non movie. I really really want to not have the only real complete movie I’ve seen this year be about a talking yellow electric rat.

Yeah I know this movie was last year I guess, like I go to the cinemas anymore. If you go to the cinema these days you’re an idiot, there’s just not enough decent movies out there these days to justify it when you have streaming services. You pay once or a monthly fee and you get to churn through all this garbage looking for the hidden gem in the comfort of your own home, what’s not to love?

Genuinely not shilling haha.

I don’t have much more to say about except I really enjoyed it, the action was super cool, I liked all the characters and the feel. It has this weird cyberpunk nineties feel which I really liked. Even down to the main love interest guy, who has this nineties haircut that makes him look like the kid from Hocus Pocus.

At it’s heart Alita is basically a love story, and not a bad one honestly. The romantic stuff wasn’t cringy or forced, it just could’ve developed better over a series of tv episodes instead of in an already cluttered movie. But it’s refreshing to see a romance in a movie these days that doesn’t feel forced. I liked it, I liked the characters, I think it all worked well. The overall plot is bog standard ‘get to the place’, the plot is completely ancillary to the characters honestly because it feels like scene to scene is more episodic.

In summary just a fun, cool movie, might be a bit violent for kids but it’s worth a watch for sure and I hope it gets a sequel, I heard it did pretty well in china so it might be getting a few more.

 

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Us – Movie review

I actually watched this a while ago and didn’t really feel like reviewing it because it was just kind of ok. I didn’t feel strongly enough about it to do a review, it just sort of passed over my eyeballs without really grabbing me or me really hating it. It was a solid meh.

But due to this recent content drought do to my erratic work schedule and near constant writers constipation, desperate times call for desperate measures. Which includes but is not limited to poetry examining the uncomfortable truth of my existence and movie reviews about movies that did not wow me at all in being especially bad or good.

So Us, what’s Us about? Err, clones I guess *spoilers* except not really because it’s sort of revealed in the pointless bit at the start which ruined the whole movie for me. Sorry but it did.

It’s one of those movies that has this overly long pre-ambles where something happens before the movie starts proper. But it added nothing really and the story would have been more interesting/mysterious if they’d cut it shorter or left it out. With it in it bloats the first act and forces them to cut down the bits where you’re supposed to get to know the family so you can care about them. But don’t worry none of them die, oh yeah spoilers, except who cares?

They should’ve just started the movie at the fucking start, why do movies hate to do this now? Just have the family going on vacation, give us time to set up equilibrium and get to know the family and then gradually build the to the freaky shit.

If you read my blog, (which no one does haha) you know how I feel about this director and Get Out, if you don’t I think Get Out is probably the most overrated movie in history. It’s barely a movie, it’s an overly long episode of the tales from the crypt that won an oscar or something. But we all know why, if Jordan Peele were white and the movie wasn’t about racial politics nobody would’ve given a shit. But that’s the world we live in, a silly movie like Get out about white people wanting to suck out black people’s brains so they can steal their bodies wins oscars while nobody gives a shit about Hereditary because it was made by a Jewish guy and it wasn’t political, it was just good.

So really the problem here is hype, Jordan Peele is like seen as this genius when he just made an ok b/horror movie that he made political and people had to get on board with it or be labelled an ist or an ism or whatever. And now his new movie is still kinda political but it’s more subtle, so subtle it’s audience doesn’t really get it and it’s not being lawded with the same fan fare.

Honestly if I think about it I think I liked Us more than Get Out, only because it’s a more interesting concept and the movie was sort of more dynamic I guess, I dunno. It was more entertaining as an idea, more ambitious, less silly, even though under serious scrutiny it kinda makes no sense.

It’s a cool idea, it’s basically like there’s this underground society of clone people for some reason, and they like escape… for some reason and then want to kill their doubles… for some reason.

Yeah see what I mean? So we’re supposed to believe there’s some kind of facility cloning people and a little girl get down into it by accident and there’s no guards or scientists, the clones are just hanging around under there until one day they decide to murder everyone.

These are the parts that really bother me. It’s a cool idea but that’s all it is, it’s not very well fleshed out.

That’s it really, it has some cool bits, but it’s really just kind of a mess and it has no stakes or tension because Peele isn’t ballsy enough to let any of his characters actually die, in a horror movie.

Oh sure he lets the white family get slaughtered, that’s fine but his self insert character. They didn’t even seem to be that bothered that their friends were murdered. And neither do we because they weren’t developed to have any other character traits but being rich white assholes.

You could’ve at least killed the dad in the main family to add a level of suspense and danger, the families protector. But no, I mean if you cut out the gore you could’ve made this a pg13/12a. How can you convey fear when you know none of the main characters can die.

It reminds me of Hereditary *spoilers* that shattering moment when the little girl dies, it shakes the whole film. It’s heart rending and horrifying and it changes the whole film because you know if they can kill this little girl and in such a horrifying way, no one in the family is safe. *spoilers end.*

It’s just kind of like a safe bleh horror movie skating on Peele’s name, there’s no real substance to it, it has no real bite. I hate to compare it to Detective Pikachu but I feel like I’m going to be comparing every movie this to year to that movie about a little yellow electric rat that talks.

That movie had a satisfying pacing, a beginning middle and end. If you saw that in the cinema you’d feel like you got your moneys worth, like you’d gone on a journey. But Us just kinda feels like it didn’t have enough content or structure to be a film. It kinda gives me hope for his twilight zone show if it isn’t too woke. Because he has these good ideas but they don’t seem to have enough flesh on the bone to be films and they might work better as tv show episodes instead.

That’s all I have to say really, if Jordan Peele hadn’t been hyped up to be the second coming of fucking Hitchcock this probably wouldn’t be worth talking about. But I mean really, I’m harsh on the guy but what else is there in horror these days? Those shitty conjuring/annabelle/insidious movies that are just awful trash they keep churning out. Compared to those garbage movies Us is a fucking masterpiece.

So I’m not saying it’s bad, it’s just not great. Is it worth a watch? Sure, I think, so is Get Out, much more than Annabelle origins or whatever or the nun. But I’m much more looking forward to seeing Midsommar by the guy that did Hereditary, I think that’s going be my horror movie of the year. But I don’t want to get my hopes up.

 

 

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The Kid (2019) – review

Hey there,

I didn’t really want to review this because it was just sort of meh but I thought I needed to let people know that I didn’t die haha. Just been busy with work and trying to find a new job and stay sane.

I watched this movie for a couple of reasons, I liked Dane Dehann despite the shitty spiderman movies and Valerian being bleh. I really liked him in Chronicle and Place beyond the pines, those are amazing movies that really grabbed me and in the case of Place beyond the pines, really moved me.

So when I see his name I think it could be ok and then I saw Chris Pratt’s Ethan Hawke’s name in a western together and I get horrible magnificent seven flashback and full body shudders. If you haven’t seen the magnificent seven remake, keep it that way, you’re not missing anything.

That discouraged me a little but then I found out this movie had an R rating which peaked my interest again, thinking this would be a balls to the wall actionfest.

Turns out I was wrong about all these things.

Because at it’s heart this is a movie about absolutely nothing.

I don’t know why this movie was made, I don’t think even the people that made it know why it was made. It just exists.

The movie starts with this abusive father beating his wife to death and his kid kills him and they run away from their even more abusive uncle played by Chris Pratt and somehow run into Billy the kid for no reason.

I thought it started kind of slow but there was some gore so I figured the movie was just building up to the action like Open Range. If you haven’t seen Open Range, it’s this really slow movie that climaxes in this awesome gun fight for like the whole third act, really great Kevin Costner movie. In fact there aren’t many Kevin Costner movies I don’t like, yes even waterworld and the Postman. I actually liked Waterworld more than mad max, heresy right. I just think overall there are more bad max movies than good and the good ones aren’t that good.

See this movie is so shitty and boring I’d rather talk about mad max.

Ok so they meet billy the kid for reasons and then a bunch of talking and nothing happens until he eventually escapes with the help of this kid because his sister gets kidnapped by the evil uncle who steps in and out of the movie when it’s convenient for the script. I always hate that, I hate when a villain just steps in and out when it’s convenient and I always sight robocop as a movie that did it right. In robocop the main villain almost has his own arc, he has his own scenes just to establish him and you follow him almost as much as robocop, the same for robocop 2 actually, now that I think about it and the villains were really relateable. That was a good sequel, SEE, see this movie is so boring and uneventful I’m talking about robocop now.

Ok so his sister gets kidnapped and I guess the story is about coming clean, or his arc is about admitting he killed his father but no one really cares about that. So the kid wants to free billy to go after his sister, which would’ve been a cool story line, I mean I want to see that movie. Where a kid saves billy the kid and then billy the kid does some bad ass stuff and saves the girl and has like a redemption arc. Does that happen? No he escapes and then just dies in a really underwhelming way and then Ethan Hawke sort of becomes the main character I guess, although this movie doesn’t really have a main character. It sort of goes between billy, the actual kid and ethan hawke, but none are really that likeable or interesting. It’s like having three bowls of underwhelming luke warm porridge to pick from.

Then after billy dies, which me and my brother thought was a joke, and there would be like a tarantino-esque history bending, but no he’s just out of the movie. Then the kid confesses and entrusts ethan hawke to save his sister and he does, the end.

And is the gun fight at the end epic? No it lasts like three second and it’s really underwhelming and boring.

All that happens is Chris Pratt gets his third and final scene in the movie, he just reappears for the purpose of dying and establishing he’s really mean because he let someone rape his niece. I mean he didn’t rape her, that would be weird. And then you have this cringe scene like five minutes later when she shoots her rapist in the dick and we’re supposed to be like ‘”Yeah you go girl!” maybe not that obnoxious. But there was no emotional resonance because this all happened in like the space of ten minutes.

It’s like a movie that takes ages to do nothing then crams all it’s emotional plot into like ten minutes and we’re supposed to feel anything for these characters, why? The only emotion I felt while watching this was boredom and I don’t even think that’s emotion. I sat down expecting a blood soaked semi historical western and got absolutely nothing.

This movie is a big nothing burger, it’s not about anything, it stands for nothing it’s just nothing.

Westerns in the past, movies in general in the past had morals, they had messages, they told stories and parables, they were about something, they didn’t just exist to swallow an hour or two out of your life.

It just goes back to this feeling I have that people just don’t know how to make movies anymore and it’s sad that the only movie I’ve seen recently that feels like an actual movie is about a talking yellow electric rat voiced by Ryan Reynolds.

 

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Detective Pikachu – movie review

First thing I want to do is just register my disdain, this movie has no right being as good as it is, NO RIGHT!

It certainly has no right to be the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. I mean, I’m as surprised as anyone. I honestly wasn’t expecting much from this movie, it’s probably good that my expectations were so low and that the last movie I watched was captain marvel which almost made me stop believing there would ever be a good movie again.

I mean captain marvel was barely a movie, it was just a really fast slide show of stuff happening with splosions. And Shazam wasn’t much better.

So how does a movie about a talking yellow electric rat make them both look like garbage in comparison, how is that even possible? Also goes without saying this is better than deadpool 2 hands down. This is probably the best Ryan Reynolds movie I’ve ever seen.

It’s simple, it was an actual movie. It wasn’t political, it wasn’t a spectacle comic book movie, it was just a movie. It had a basic three act structure giving equal weight to be beginning the all important middle I rant about and the end. It wasn’t like shazam that had this bloated first and third act with no middle, it was just all ass and titties, you need some waist in the middle otherwise you’re just a blob of flesh.

You need some time in the middle where we get to know the characters and they go on a journey, if you just have a big opening and no middle we don’t care about the end.

I literally can’t think of a flaw with this movie. It looked great, the characters were great, the story was great, the acting was great. It has heart and real emotion, the emotional scenes felt real and believable and not heavy and tacked on. I genuinely cared about the characters and it nailed the tone right out of the gate. I think tone for a movie like this is really important. They could’ve gone super cartoony and silly or taken themselves too seriously. It could’ve been another dragonball or death note movie fiasco. But it nails it in the first scene. The characters are fun but they do a perfect job of making you believe this is just the regular world with pokemon.

That could’ve made or broken the movie, because if you can’t buy the idea pokemon exist or it’s done in a stupid way it just breaks the immersion and becomes cheesey. The director of this movie just gets it, he perfected the tone. We have fun and humor but we also have the emotional resonance that carries the plot.

Now the plot is nothing special, it’s sort of a hollywood plot. Guy is trying to investigate his father’s death and then mysteries happen. And I want to say the ending was predictable but it was good predictable, it was satisfying. It didn’t subvert my expectation into a pile of shit like last jedi. But it also did subvert my expectations a little bit but I saw some of the twists coming, but there were twists, more than one in a movie about pokemon.

I almost didn’t think movies like this could be made today, movies that actually feel like movies, that have that structure. It’s like film makers don’t know how to make movies anymore and they just copy everyone else around them. So maybe if this movie came out ten or twenty years ago no one would’ve cared but the sheer fact the standard for movies is lower and some brainless comic book movie can make millions and get a fresh on rotten tomatoes a movie as competent and entertaining as this is an instant classic.

What more can I say, I was entertained from beginning to end, I enjoyed every part of it. It’s my film of the year so far. Go watch this movie.

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Captain Marvel Review

This movie was two hours long, not ninety minutes, not a hundred minutes a full one hundred and twenty minutes of my life wasted on this garbage.

Predictably I hated but it kinda reminds me that I recently watched the Shazam movie and putting them side by side really makes Shazam look a head and shoulders apart from this tripe. Shazam was a movie, it made sense, it had likeable characters with believable goals. It had a cool interesting villain, great action and it started at the fucking start.

It was an actual movie, captain marvel is just a collection of scenes used as an excuse to put nineties songs over the transitions.

The story is nonsense, I watched it yesterday and I couldn’t tell what it was about, some scientist did a thing and then things happened then powers, then evil space nazis for reason want to wipe out space refugees for threatening their borders in space.
That’s right folks, there are borders in space, that’s how fucking dumb and on the nose this movie is.

It’s trying to slip in a really bad allegory to Trump and it just falls flat, it’s not clever, it’s not new and it’s not even trying. That’s the first thing that strikes me, Shazam was trying, this movie just doesn’t give a shit.

It starts like in the middle so you don’t know how she got her powers and the villain is like her mentor and then you find out through flashbacks as her memory comes back how she got her powers and that he’s really the villain, but I didn’t care. It was just boring and pointless and because they didn’t start at the start, there’s no journey so her powers just feel unearned.
This movie would’ve been ten times better if it had started on earth and not gone for a shitty twist that wasn’t exciting or interesting. Oh no Jude Law is the bad guy not that guy that’s always hired to be the evil straight white male villain in everything. No because in this he’s actually green and he’s a refugee and he just wants a home for his family, who are aboard some space ship for some reason. None of this movie makes sense, none of the scenes are really connected, I didn’t care about any of the characters, the dialogue is some of the cringest I’ve ever heard. I actually screamed I cringed so hard at some of it. It’s so bad, I started to think this movie wasn’t made by people but some weird algorithm coded to make cringe.

The fact humans made this movie both disturbs and disappoints me.

Just seeing now Shazam was also over two hours, but ask me why I don’t care, because that movie was fun and stuff happened in it and it had a story and likeable characters.

The only positive thing I can say about it is I like how shitty the sets look, which sounds like a weird positive. But I loved how nineties it looked, it was like they took their huge budget and intentionally tried to make everything look like a nineties sci-fi channel show.

There’s literally a part on a space ship where Larson is trying to quippy and having a fight and it’s cringe, she’s terrible but my brother was like, “that set looks like a laser tag zone”. And it really did. And the scene after Fury remarks that she’s dressed like she was doing lasertag and that was a pretty funny coincidence.

I don’t know what more I can say about this, the movie is just lazy on all fronts, no one is trying, you can see the phone in the hand of nearly everyone in this movie, including the camera men and the set designers and the writers. This movie could not have been more phoned in.

And it also decides to ruin the origin story of Nick Fury for the sake of a stupid joke because that worked out so well doing that with the madurin in iron man 3. That was so funny turning this awesome character into a stupid gag. Yeah Nick Fury trusted an alien cat and that’s how he lost his eye. What’s more to say at this point? This movie is garbage and I’m beyond sick of seeing super hero movies, I just want them to go away and not come back for maybe ten years if at all.

Oh I just remembered I have to watch the dark phoenix movie, someone please kill me.

Oh god, I long for death. I literally pirated this game and I feel ripped off, I can’t imagine how pissed I would’ve been if I paid money for this garbage.

I haven’t even talked about how obnoxious Brie Larson is in general, almost unbearable in this movie and just in real life. I think what annoys me the most about this movie is how disengenuous the marketing campaign was, putting aside the whole political girl power bullshit muh stronk indapandent wamens thing they marketed this movie as if you couldn’t see Endgame without this. They made it seem like she was essential to the plot of that film and that it would be a stop gap and fill in holes and be this big important movie.
And apparently that was all bullshit since the skrull and cri aren’t even in endgame and they didn’t know what to do with capt marvel and just made her go away for most of the film to come back at the end. So it was obviously retconned bullshit, it was nonsense, it was a lie to get us to watch this garbage movie and insert muh stronk wamens into the marvel universe to try and compete with DC’s wonderwoman which was terminally ok.
But I guess dc has been like “yeah well most of our movies suck and make no money but hey we made a stronk indapandent wamens movie that was sort of less unbearable than our other movies” and the execs at marvel were losing their fucking minds. So instead of just making a scarlet witch movie or black widow movie, which would make more sense they insert this totally generic female superman into their timeline really akwardly and somehow manage to piss off everyone, the other marvel actors includesd.
And it’s not an act, they actively hate her, every interview she’s in with them they look uncomfortable and there’s this body language expert that looks at them on youtube and they actually hate her. And I understand why, she’s a fucking carpetbagger. They’ve sunk years of their lives, blood, sweat and tears into these movies and then at the last minute this chippy with a flat ass just rushes to the finish line out of nowhere and on top of that is super obnoxious and trying to politicise a movie franchise which has managed to keep itself relatively light and fun and politics free. She is the fucking turd in the punchbowl.

So yeah, don’t watch captain gender studies, save your money and time and watch shazam or literally anything else, watch your dad hang dry wall, watch a giant snail eat a carrot on youtube, do anything but watch this shit. I did it so you don’t have to, please no medals.

See you…

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