Quarantine Movie Diary

Other than watching TV shows I also have watched movies during the quarantine so for the hell of it I'm doing some mini-reviews.

Midsommar:  This is one from last year that for some reason people, including critics, seemed to love but I found it so, soooo boring and predictable.  The main character is a girl who spends most of the movie ugly crying because her sister committed suicide and killed their parents.  She tags along with her boyfriend and his friends to a village in Sweden that has a creepy festival.  If you've ever seen Wicker Man--either the original 70s one with the Equalizer guy or the 2000s version with Nic Cage--then you already know pretty much what's going to happen.  It just takes a long, long time to get to that point.

Alita: Battle Angel:  A couple of people in a Facebook group said this was good so I watched this on HBO.  It was pretty good, but the android looks so fake with those big weird eyes and stuff.  I know they did that to make it more like the manga version, probably because of all the people who bitched about Ghost in the Shell, but it just looked weird, worse than that Robert Zemeckis stuff in Polar Express, Beowulf, etc.  Anyway, there was plenty of decent action and Christoph Walz is good as Alita's "father" while fellow Oscar winners Jennifer Connelly and Mahershala Ali cash a paycheck as the bad guys.  With a fourth Oscar winner in James Cameron writing/producing there was a lot of talent ultimately wasted on a movie that didn't do great box office, but especially if you have HBO (or maybe a free Redbox rental) then it's worth a watch.

Servitude:  This was a Canadian movie from about 2011 that's basically Waiting with less well-known actors.  The main difference in the story is Waiting was told from the POV of a kid just starting while Servitude is from the POV of a 20-something guy who's supposed to be quitting that night.  They do less gross stuff to customers's food, but otherwise it's the same kind of movie but still funny on its own, especially if you've ever worked in the food service industry (or maybe any service industry) to know what assholes people are.

Valentine: The Dark Avenger:  This is a superhero movie from Indonesia.  Amazon didn't tell me that when I started to watch, though I started to figure that out when I saw signs in another language.  The movie is I guess dubbed for the most part but it's not really terrible dubbing like old Godzilla movies.  Anyway, a guy wants to create a superhero movie and so decides to recruit someone to do superhero stuff that'll be filmed and put on YouTube to lure a production company to buy the rights.  He meets a waitress who knows some kind of Indonesian martial art and so she becomes Valentine, the dark avenger.  During her first mission at a convenience store she quickly proves that Incredibles adage:  no capes!  Ultimately she gets some better equipment and comes into conflict with "the Shadow" (not the 30s pulp hero) who's trying to disband the police force to get revenge on the corrupt chief.  The identity of the Shadow was pretty obvious about halfway through but if you like the non-Marvel superhero movies or kung-fu movies then it's decent.

Jay & Silent Bob Reboot:  I haven't really had any interest in Kevin Smith movies since Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back in 2001.  I watched the awful Red State and a few minutes of Cop Out that told me I was right to avoid his 21st Century movies.  But I was bored and this was free on Amazon Prime, so fuck it.  Like the CW's recent Crisis on Infinite Earth crossover, this was mainly fun to watch for the cameos.  A lot of the Kevin Smith regulars are present:  Dante, Jason Lee, Matt Damon, Joey Lauren Adams, and Ben Affleck.  Plus characters from Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back  like Shannon Elizabeth, Jason Biggs, James van der Beek, and Diedrich Bader.  And there are some new cameos like Supergirl's Melissa Benoist, Val Kilmer, and Chris Hemsworth.  Even the late Stan Lee has a cameo in the credits.  Unfortunately it's not just a parade of guest stars.  The actual story is that Jay and Silent Bob have their names taken away by a movie company that wants to reboot the Bluntman & Chronic comic based on them.  So they go on the road to stop this, which begins with an obligatory reference to Kevin Smith's incident with Southwest about being too fat to fly.  When they get to Chicago, Jay finds out he has a kid, who's unfortunately played by Smith's untalented, unattractive daughter.  I just basically tuned that whole middle part of the movie out.  It picks back up in Hollywood because again cameos.  Affleck has a really good speech about raising kids and how you think growing up you're Bruce Wayne when in the end you become Thomas Wayne--or Batman's mother...what was her name?  (For me that was the biggest laugh.)  If this had a stronger story and less nepotism then it'd be a better movie.  Otherwise there's no point watching unless you're a fan of the classic View Askew movies from the 90s.

Sharknado 3:  I saw the preview for this like 200 times during the live Rifftrax show of Sharknado 2.  Unfortunately there's not a Rifftrax version of this on Amazon or anything so I watched the regular version.  It was pretty craptacular, as you would expect.  After shark storms in LA and New York they up the ante with shark storms up and down the East Coast just as Fin's wife and daughter are at Universal Studios.  And it just gets dumber from there, culminating with a ripoff of Armageddon as Fin and his father (David Hasselhoff) spontaneously take a space shuttle into space to fire up some kind of Death Star laser to destroy the storms.  My favorite character was the F-4 Phantom Fin and Nova take from the world's fakiest air force base, but sadly it died while the horrible Ann Coulter was allowed to live--seeing her get eaten by a shark would have made the whole movie for me.  It's really amazing there were 3 more of these shitfests.