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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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Once upon a time in Hollywood – review

First thing I have to say about this movie is that it’s basically not reviewable, it’s not reviewable because it’s basically not a movie.

So you know this is gonna be a short review haha.

Movies generally have a beginning middle and an end and this movie has none of those. It’s like a weird documentary slice of life of a made up person. It’s a what if history moment that asks this odd questions that is basically along the lines of ‘What if the manson family went to the wrong damn house’ haha. An interesting question but evidently not enough to make a movie on. Because the movie is like 99% unrelated filler garbage that has nothing to do with anything other than just Tarantino jacking off his love for movies and like 1% the actual idea the movie was based on.

You don’t even get a lot of time with the manson family because it’s not really about them, they’re just sort of there.

So what is the movie about? Nothing, it’s sort of about this ageing movie cowboy and his life but there’s no message or theme with that, it’s just filler. It’s just like one unrelated scene after the other until the ending. And there’s so much in it that is just pointless and boring and I’m watching this movie and I’m thinking ‘Why does this have to be like two hours forty minutes? Why am I watching Margot Robbie go see a movie she’s in? What is this adding to the movie?’ The answer is nothing, it’s just filler. It’s just stuff that Tarantino put in his movie and an editor didn’t have the balls to tell him to cut it. Because this movie is just peak Tarantino self indulgence and he’s reached a peak in his fame where no one can give him advice so boring scenes that add nothing will stay in whereas in his earlier movies they would’ve been cut and improved the film significantly. But this movie is just 99% fluff, if someone was allowed to cut this movie you’d probably just be left with the last ten minutes and maybe the Bruce Lee fight and that would be it.

But that’s pretty much how this movie works, because I was cheering at the end of the movie like most people but most people wont stop and analyse why they were cheering. Most people will just cheer and then assume that the other two hours and thirty minutes that lead up to this point were building up to this so it was good and worth it. I don’t think that, I think the movie is almost intentionally boring us to make the last ten minutes seem better out of relief. We’re so desperate at that point for something to happen and we know it’s been building to this point so when something eventually does happen we’re hit with a wave of euphoria and relief that colours our opinion on the film overall when really it’s only the last ten minutes that are getting this response.
This is less a movie and more a hostage situation where a creepy foot fetishist film nerd is holding us hostage boring us with movie trivia and then at the end he lets us watch ten minutes of a cool movie and lets us go.

We’re not actually enjoying the movie or the ending we’re just relieved that the torture is over, we’re relieved that we’re no longer bored. It’s like literal torture, when torture is over you feel euphoria, when pain ceases you feel good, not because you actually feel good but because you’ve stopped feeling bad. This movie doesn’t entertain you, it just bores you so much that when something does happen it’s like the best thing ever. It doesn’t entertain as much as it ceases to bore, as much as a torturer doesn’t give you pleasure as much as he ceases to cause you pain.

Notice I haven’t mentioned anything actually about this movie, I can’t comment on it’s story because it doesn’t have one, I can’t really comment on the characters because there really aren’t any. I mean it was an ok movie, the ending was fun but is it worth the two hours forty minutes of your life it’s asking, not really.

I mean it’s a Tarantino movie where no one was able to tell him ‘No’ so it’s just self indulgent to the point where you question what you’re even watching and by the time the movie is over you’ve forgotten most of the film. I can maybe describe like three scenes including the ending in that.

It’s a tough recommend for sure haha. If you’re a Tarantino cultist you’re going to see it regardless but is it a good movie? On every technical level it’s a no because it literally isn’t one but is it enjoyable, I mean sure, some of it is, but not really enough to justify your time and money.

Those are the big stinkers I watched over christmas I also watched Zombieland 2 but it’s pretty unremarkable, not really worth a review it was just ok.

 

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Joker – Review

If you’re friends with me on facebook you’re probably well aware of my feelings on this movie. Been really busy over christmas but my brother hooked us up with his usual piracy and we watch Joker and a few other movies only one other I want to review the others were just ok, not worth reviewing. I only review stuff I really love or really loathe.

So yeah guess which one Joker falls into.. ah… I fucking hated it haha.

Kinda surprising because this should’ve been right up my alley, I love the character, I love the movies it’s basically copying/pastiching. This should’ve been another Logan here and honestly it could’ve been and that’s what really pisses me off about this movie. All the elements are there for this movie to have been the next Logan or even the next Falling Down or Taxi Driver/King of comedy but the writing and the direction and maybe just the editing are so weak it can’t pull it together.

All anyone talks about is Phoenix’s performance and yeah it’s pretty good but is it good enough to carry a really weak pathetic script and the director of the fucking hang over movies? No it is not. He’s almost the only character in this movie, or the only one that’s trying, every other person in the movie seems to be barely there, they have almost no development, not even Robert Deniro’s character who is supposed to be sort of the titular antagonist. He barely gets any screen time for the audience to decide if he’s a hero or a villain.

Honestly that’s kind of how I feel about the Joker in general. I feel like the entire movie is walking this line with his character where it wants him to be this pathetic character who then becomes a strong anti-hero in his mind but really he’s a villain. And the trap there is if you do that wrong he’ll just become a hero and then you’ve fucked up and made batman’s greatest villain an anti-hero instead and lost everything that made his character fun. But the script is so fucking juvenile it’s like he’s not likeable/relatable enough to be an anti-hero like D-fens in Falling down or Travis in Taxi and he’s not really evil enough to be a straight up villain like the actual Joker. He just wallows in this pathetic obese of nothingness the whole movie punctuated by a pretty weak speech at the end which boils down to “People are mean” basically a fucking tumblr post before he throws a ballistic tantrum. If you compare that to the scene it’s copying from the dark knight returns comic you can see everything that’s wrong with this depiction of the joker.

He’s kind of pathetic and not smart or calculating or amoral at all. He basically puts on this cool evil Joker persona at the end but it’s just guise, it’s not really him and it kind of comes out of nowhere. I didn’t feel invested in his downfall, it doesn’t feel very organic or interesting and every.
This is not a Joker that could ever be a threat to Batman, they basically turned the joker into an impotent pathetic school shooter and it’s not a good look. I just never liked this Joker, I never felt invested in him and I felt like I was watching a movie, it never sucked me in. It’s not gritty or intriguing, it’s just maudlin and sort of boring. Like there’s so much in this movie that just feels like padding that could’ve been about another character like I dunno… Batman. There’s a shocking idea, put Batman in a Batman movie haha. But obviously the way this movie is written and the time its set wont allow for that but there’s just so much dead air in this movie it only ever feels like it starts when he becomes this movies idea of the joker and then it ends.

I kinda could’ve seen this movie working if it was part of another movie but on it’s own it’s fucking boring. The story of the movie is just ‘he sad goes mad’ it’s not a story, its just a bunch of stuff happening, stuff mostly stolen from older better movies. It just doesn’t feel like it goes anywhere or does anything with it’s time and it pretends like it has something to say but it’s like some kid trying to make a speech just falling over itself having no idea what to say and how to say it. The message in this movie is so weak, it’s so noncommittal and safe, it’s like “err, fuck rich people, I guess, people are mean!” and it’s almost like the director knew it was being too safe and just threw in random acts of violence and the ending to spice it up and it seems to have won over most people but to me this movie was just garbage wrapped in tinfoil.

The themes of the movie are sort of shitty and uninteresting because what basically happens that starts this weird like faux 99%er rally is he *spoilers* shoots and kills these white wallstreet guys who are drunk riding the subway just being generally annoying. I mean yeah you know how it is, you get off your job on the wallstreet and then you get drunk and harass random people on the subway for kicks, I mean it’s like the purge kind of except not interesting or realistic.

I feel like the main premise of the movie is apologising for the start of the movie where he basically gets beaten up by a group of ethnic children. That was their only source of edginess and they used it up in like the first ten minutes. And then the rest of the movie is him taking revenge on white rich people to apologise for being beaten up by poor ethnically diverse people haha. I mean if he was really a villain he would’ve gone after those children, just saying haha.

I can’t really get into more without going into major spoilers but the movie is just not very good, there’s nothing really in that makes it stand out in any way. I didn’t feel anything while watching it except sad and bored.

I really think the hype behind this movie is just because it’s the Joker and it’s Jaquin Phoenix playing him. I think if this movie was called “The Jester” and it was played by some no name actor no one would give a shit, this movie would hit some streaming service and no one would even know it existed. It’s being carried by memes and the title and a strong performance and nothing else, it’s emperor’s new clothes shit. Literally because I got people on my facebook saying “Bro you just don’t get it bro” to which I obviously asked “Ok bro, well explain it to me, what don’t I get” which of course either doesn’t get a response or gets a response like “Ok bro you’re just too retarded to get it”. People don’t know what this movies about because it’s not about anything, it’s made by the guy who made the hang over movies, this isn’t David Lynch, this is a stupid comic book movie edgy enough to impress fourteen year old boys and idiots but it’s not entertaining in any way. I don’t even really like comic book movies but I would much rather watch any other comic book movie than watch this ever again.
I think the last comic book movie I watched was Spiderman far from home and that movie wasn’t amazing but it was fun, it’s what you expect, it wasn’t this pretentious mess, it knew what it was.

Ok well to stop me going around in circles I’m just gonna leave it there haha.

All I can say is I know they’ll probably do a sequel of this and I can’t wait to see how they fuck it up haha.

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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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John Wick 3 review

IT WAS OK.

I find it hard to review these movies, which is probably why I didn’t review all the others haha. I dunno because I enjoy them but I can’t help feeling like I enjoy them ironically. Like I’m watching a school play version of an eighties action movie and it kind of resembles those movies but it’s a cartoonish self-referential post irony abomination.

And bare in mind I enjoyed this movie, but I can’t help think that if this came out in the eighties or early nineties people would laugh at it, it would be a blip. Rather than being something interesting with a unique spin on eighties/nineties action movies like The Guest or Upgrade (see these movies, they’re fucking awesome), it’s just a kind of an amalgam of that and a kung fu movie I guess where the weakest aspect is always the world building. The difference being those movies are usually set in the real world.

Whenever I’m watching a John Wick movie I have to take special care to ignore the stupid world building. Why the fuck wasn’t this movie just based in the real world? Why do you have to set it in this cartoony parody world where everyone and their nan is an assassin? It’s just totally immersion breaking and lame. It’s just fucking silly and makes the world kind of goofy and it takes away from a lot of the gore and violence because it just makes the whole thing a great big cartoon. I mean what’s so special about these magical coins and all this nonsense? What does it add to the non-plot?

I mean yeah these movies are meant to be dumb, there’s not a scrap of storyline you could cobble together from any of the films, the world building is weaker than in the Wanted movie where they get their assassination targets from a fucking sewing machine (which is less silly than the comic I might add). And it’s all set in motion by a dead doggo.

They’re less movies, than they are action set pieces strung together with light plot elements. And don’t get me wrong the action is awesome, the fight scenes and effects are masterful. Especially in regard to their use of physical and digital effects. They seem to use them seamlessly, where you have real squibs and then digital over the top for the more fucked stuff like stabbing people in the head. But it’s really just mindless violence without a plot holding it together.

So what’s this one about? Well John Wick has to survive or something, and I dunno Halle Berry is in it for some reason and she has lots of doggos and there’s like more really shit world building (ye-yaayy). Where he has to go see this ‘Elder’ who’s literally a guy that looks the same age if not younger than Keanu Reeves and do some stuff which he sort of doesn’t do and there’s another hook for a sequel. Which is fine, I’m glad they broke out of the trilogy bullshit. I was half convinced they’d do that stupid bullshit where it turns out someone killed his wife for reasons and tie it back to the first movie for a shitty conclusion.

I expected in this movie for John Wick to tear down the whole shitty house of cards world they’d built up which he doesn’t do but it makes me feel like they’re setting up for him to do that in the next movie and that makes it ok, I guess.

Again I enjoy John Wick movies, I just cringe everytime we have to cut to a room full of tatted grannies dressed like greasers working a switch board for assassins. So it’s like a world where everyone is an assassin, like surely we don’t need that many assassins? This is like anime logic, if everyone from the people who shine yours shoes to the people who make you sushi are assassins surely being an assassin is pretty mundane. It’s like someone who works as a waiter talking about his screenplay. “Oh yeah so I work here but my real dream is being the worlds top assassin, just waiting for my big break ya know.”

Every time I’m just like why? Why not just set it in the real world? It’s like trying to make it the matrix for assassins where it’s half in the real world and half in a shit anime and I’d almost like these to be a weird matrix spin off where neo and morpheus choose to re-enter the matrix as new people. Just remembering how bad those sequels were and retracting that statement.

And every fucking character he meets just imposes back story on him and is like “I’ll never forgive you for x thing that you did at y time, I’m really mad and you owe me or I owe or plot plot plot”. It’s tiresome, it’s like the movie is so aware how it has no story so it’s trying really hard to convince you to meme you into writing it in your head and you just can’t be bothered you just want him to shoot more people over a dog. So the John Wick universe could be amazing if only you could use your imagination and will it into being but you don’t because you’re shit and hollywood already stole all your imagination and sold it back to you as a snappy t-shirt.

It’s basically like the John Wick movies are a reboot to a once great franchise that doesn’t exist and expects you to make up in your head. So John Wick is basically skipping a phase, you’re supposed to make a series of popular movies before you make the shitty soulless cash grab reboot, this is just starting with the shitty reboot fanservice and expecting you to work backwards and think on fondly of a series of films that doesn’t exist in a genre that sort of doesn’t exist either anymore.

Because let’s face facts, action movies as a genre are pretty much dead, that’s why these movies are so popular because the only alternative are these neutered sterilised cucked capeshit movies where they can’t show blood and can only say ‘fuck’ once not in the context of actual fucking. And we get the odd throwback to when all big movies weren’t made exclusively to sell happy meal toys with Logan and to a lesser extent those garbage deadpool movies (yes they’re garbage, and if you like them your opinions are garbage and belong in a dustbin with all the other garbage, in fact why don’t you live in there with your garbage opinion?). But it’s not the same.

So again, I have to say I like these movies, I just have to add a caveat, you have to switch your brain off, you have to give this movie a pass on how fucking dumb it is, you have to watch it with beer goggles and just not notice the shit world and the stupid/non-existent plot.

These movies are like an exercise in learning to enjoy things. Just look at Keanu Reeves nice face and watch him brutally murder people because of a doggo and don’t think about it too much. CONSUME PRODUCT, GET EXCITED FOR NEXT PRODUCT.

Of course I’ll watch the next one predictably, but only because I like Keanu Reeves and it would make him sad if I didn’t. (Which is also why I’m going to watch the new Bill and Ted movie and force myself to like it, if it actually can meme itself into existence.)

 

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Dragged Across Concrete review

I really don’t know where to start with this movie, I went into it expecting the unexpected and it still managed to wow me.
I just don’t know how to even classify Zahler’s movies, they’re like if David Lynch and Tarantino had a baby raised by David Ayer. His movies sit in this weird place between cartoony violence and absurdity verging on surrealism and gritty hyper realism.
Somehow he manages to catch this almost like documentary level of gritty realism in his movies which is done purely so that he can hit you with a sledge hammer of goofy shit in the third act and it works so well that three movies in I have no idea what to predict from this guy.

It’s film making that just leaves me thunder struck nonstop and I can’t even think to react, I can’t tell if it’s just really good slocky nonsense like Taratino or genius levels of nonsense like Lynch.

His movies just leave me at a loss for words because I’ve just never really seen anything like them before and that’s high praise alone.

This is Zahler’s third movie as I’ve said, I think he did a puppet master movie but I couldn’t give a fraction of a fuck about that. I tried to get into the puppet master movies but even me, someone that loves shitty horror movies couldn’t get into it, the series is pure garbage. They’re just movies made because someone made some cool puppets then thought it would be cool to make a movie about them. None of them have enough stories to fill an episode of tales from the crypt and the characters are just garbage. They’re awful movies and I really tried to like them, I watched like four of them before I just gave up on the series.

Although if anyone can make them good it’s Zahler, so I might have to watch his version.

So his other movies are Bone Tomahawk, which is like Open range meets the hills have eyes, I’m not kidding. It turns from a totally realistic western into a campy grindhouse horror movie and it’s awesome, Kurt Russel, Patrick Wilson and Mathew Fox from lost was especially great in this movie.

Then there’s the instant cult classic Brawl in Cellblock 99, hands down his best movie. Vince Vaugn plays a stone cold mountain of a man bad ass who goes to prison and has to save his family from gangsters from behind bars. Starts off as a gritty crime/prison drama turns into a fucking grindhouse videogame by the end and it’s awesome. Like more awesome than you would think possible in this current generation. Hands down the best action movie for ten years because there’s almost no competition except marvel cape shit and fast and furious and John Wick and those movies don’t really count in my mind. They’re more like post ironic spectacle movies as opposed to actual movies. They’re self referential to the point of parody.

Is it time to discuss this actual movie now? I think so, yeah so I liked it, obviously, The end.

Ok so seriously, it’s a slow boil movie and its pretty long, I see people complaining about that but honestly it could’ve been three hours and I would’ve been fine with that, it uses it’s length really well, it never feels like it drags and you know the pay off is going to be something special, because that’s just a Zahler movie. Long build up to epic pay off, and he doesn’t disappoint.

The story is about, well it’s about three stories colliding (technically four). So the first is about this ex con who gets out of prison and I guess he’s supposed to be the main character because we’re introduced to his story first. But the guy is pretty unlikeable honestly and there was more time spent on the other characters. He’s sort of meant to be a thug with a heart of gold but he just came off as a total asshole to me haha. From one total asshole to the other.

But I guess all the characters are sort of flawed, I just identified more with the flaws of the other characters.

Obviously it goes without saying Mel Gibson is the best character, it’s fucking Mel Gibson, you put him in anything, he’s gonna be the best thing in it hands down. And he’s sort of going through a bit of a resurgence right now in the action genre, between this and Blood Father, he’s doing pretty good and I hope to hell he keeps it up. I personally want to tear down heaven and earth for the travesty of not casting him in fury road over political bullshit cuckery. I don’t give a shit what the dude says when he’s drunk you don’t just take a shit on your movie franchise to avoid ‘bad press’. Obviously dumb people still liked it because it had ‘big splosions and fire breathing guitars’ *soyboyopenmouthsmile.jpeg. I just thought it was ok and Tom Hardy just delivered his standard ‘I’m here for my cheque’ performance tippified in venom. But I mean I was never a huge fan of Mad Mad anyway, there’s like one good Mad Max movie in a list of four, it’s hardly good odds.

Mel plays an embittered old cop who’s been passed over for promotion over and over because he’s too much of an un-pc loose cannon who doesn’t know how to ‘play the game’ of politics, more acquainted with ass kicking than ass kissing. And Vince Vaugn plays his suffering partner, honestly I still want a Brawl sequel, I don’t care, bring motherfuckers back from the dead haha.

Mel gets caught on someone’s phone being a little too rough with a gentleman of colour and he’s suspended. But he’s living in shitty neighbourhood full of dark skinned gentlemen who are harassing his teenage daughter. I mean if anyone is gonna have a teenage daughter pushing sixty it’s the immortal Chad Mel Gibson. The only man to portray my favourite book character with any justice (it still wasn’t perfect but he made it his own, he was ‘Porter’ not Parker), don’t talk to me about Jason Statham’s Parker, he just turned it into a generic action movie like all his others.

He needs money and he stumbles upon plans for some kind of robbery and decides with his partner they’re going to rob the robbers. So that’s the movie basically. I mean fuck, can you imagine making a movie with this premise in 2019. Fuck imagine casting Mel Gibson as a cop suspended basically for manhandling brown people who wants to rob people so he can live away from said brown people, this is anti political correctness they couldn’t get away with in the seventies. Even Charles Bronson had to shoot some white muggers in Death Wish. I mean come on.

So just imagining the set of balls it took to  make this movie has me at a loss. And it’s all delivered in a way that makes me feel like it’s not really trying to push a message either way or just trying to be edgy for the sake of it. It just seems matter of fact. The ending was also slightly infuriating, which I won’t spoil.

My main criticism of the movie is that I think it could’ve been longer honestly. I think the bank robber characters were well set up but didn’t have a very satisfying pay off. I wanted them to have more screen time, it just feels like that part was rushed a little and more could’ve been done there with their characters.

Ok well *spoilers* Mel Gibson dies at the end which sucks, it sucks double because the sort of unlikeable main character gets all the money and tosses his family a few gold bars to say like “sorry I killed your old man for basically no reason lol”. But it isn’t delivered in a punitive way. The movie never takes a moral position, he’s not being punished for being a naughty racist which he kind of is and isn’t. He just wants his kid to not be harassed and live in a shitty neighborhood, he never uses the gamer word or comes off particularly prejudiced. But I mean what is Mel Gibson famous for other than Mad Max and Lethal Weapon, it’s for saying crazy racist stuff while drunk off his ass haha. So you have to think his casting and in particular this role is for a reason.

He’s not playing this cuck who has to suck black dick like in some gay Tarantino cuck movie about racial vengeance, he’s just a guy trying to get some money for his family. So I never felt like the movie was political, it’s just a fun cool hard hitting movie that pulls no punches.

I really could talk about this fucking movie for days, there’s just so much there, there’s layers upon layers from the weird fucked up scene with Jennifer Carpenter to the awesome ending shootout. There’s just so much I can get into and I can already see this stretching to the 2k mark so I’ll leave it there and just say, see this movie asap.

See you…

 

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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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