These are back-to-back, but Laplume actually did them weeks apart and just with the A to Z Challenge and stuff I could do them on back-to-back blogging days. Anyway, this one isn't all that long. I don't think Laplume did as many and about half of them I hadn't seen. Like I said in the last entry, between all the new streaming options and Pluto TV and generally not wanting to waste time and money going to movie theaters, I watched fewer newer movies. Even some of the big franchise ones I didn't watch because I didn't care. So here's what's left!
Joker (Laplume)
rating: *****
review: Opinions range from brilliant to apathy, depending on how invested the viewer is in the legacy of the character. The stairway sequence alone makes the results iconic, and Joaquin Phoenix a worthy successor to Heath Ledger.
Me:
Trying to find a review is really difficult and I'm not sure if I really did one. Anyway, it was OK for what it was. It's basically something more akin to Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy than a superhero movie. There is a forced reference to Bruce Wayne and the death of his parents. Mostly if you hadn't called it Joker it would be a fairly cliché movie about a loser who inadvertently becomes a hero to the masses by going against the system. (3/5)
Star Wars - Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (Laplume)
rating: ****
review: At this point you were either onboard with the sequels or had already dismissed them. I found the conclusion of Rey's journey, her relationship with Kylo Ren, to be perfect, a response and the antithesis to how things played out in the original trilogy (and even the prequels), daring to believe in hope in a most cynical age.
Me:
Rise of Skywalker: It tried hard to clean up after its predecessor and Make Star Wars Epic Again, but does it with needless plot complications: Chewie "dying," C3-PO not being able to translate Sith to them, and that whole dagger thing in general. Trying to give Rey an epic destiny and bring in a new Big Bad just makes things more of a mess. A well-intentioned mess but hardly a satisfactory conclusion. (2/5)
Terminator: Dark Fate (Laplume)
rating: ****
review: Ever since the second one, this franchise has been hellbent at sabotaging itself. Dark Fate was the rare instance of everyone sort of agreeing to trust the results. I've generally enjoyed every film, but this one was a cut above.
Me:
Dark Fate: Maybe you'd consider it ironic or something like that that bringing James Cameron back to the franchise didn't really help. Of course Cameron was only one of like 20 people involved in the story and "produced" it, which I imagine him sitting in a chair counting his money like Gus Van Zant in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. The other irony is people didn't like the third movie, so...let's pretty much do the same thing as the third movie only worse. So...we still have Judgment Day only now SkyNet is "Legion" and since John Connor is killed in 1998, there's some Mexican girl named Dani who's going to lead the resistance. And we have a Terminator sent to kill her that's part liquid metal with an old-school Terminator underneath--just like the third movie! Though it's like a Transformers Pretender in that the outer "shell" and inner robot can completely separate to create two attackers. This time instead of a normal human or a Terminator to protect John Dani, we have an "Augmented" woman from the future to defend the girl. Plus there's a geriatric Sarah Connor to provide life lessons like put your phone in a potato chip bag so the government (or Terminators) can't track you. It's kind of funny that in this future you have robots who cover themselves with flesh and humans who implant themselves with metal--so we're kinda meeting in the middle to where if both sides didn't kill each other they might become indistinguishable. (2/5)
The Lighthouse (Laplume)
rating: ****
review: Robert Pattinson has been keen to find oddball projects, and this was perhaps his most successful at getting the mainstream to notice. Personally I need to watch it a few more times, since I find his performance to be unusually showy, but I guess others didn't.
Me:
Another where I can't find a review I wrote here so maybe I just said something on Facebook. Anyway, it's kind of slow but you're always wondering where it's going to go. Like The Shining or similar movies it's really about how isolation causes these two guys to slowly go mad and of course they end up taking it out on each other. (4/5)
The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot (Laplume)
rating: ****
review: The movie with the most ridiculous title ever is absolutely worth experiencing, especially the tense first half, which leads to getting to just spend time with Sam Elliott, since the actual climax isn't worth as much.
Me:
The Man Who Killed Hitler & Then the Bigfoot: From the title this movie wants you to think it's weird and maybe fun. It's not really either of those things. I mean it's not early Tim Burton or David Lynch or Richard Kelly weird. The core of the story is pretty good, even if a lot of it is cribbed from Legends of the Fall, a favorite of my late sister and probably some other movies. Sam Elliott is an old man who left his sweetheart to join the army in WWII and went undercover to kill Hitler--at least A Hitler; the implication being there were multiples. Which makes sense when you consider how other despots like Saddam Hussein had a double (or more) to serve as decoys. By the time he gets back, his sweetheart is dead. Years later, he's recruited by the governments of the US and Canada to kill a Bigfoot creature that's poisoning all life in an area. And he does so, obviously. And then it just kind of peters out. The Bigfoot part really seems to serve little purpose. I mean does it redeem him for losing his sweetheart? No. (We don't really know how she died let alone whether he could have saved her or anything.) Does it bring him fame or glory? No, it's a secret mission. Does it help him connect with anyone at all? Not really, though he does later go see his brother. So other than adding some zing to the title, it doesn't contribute much. Earlier the young him gets a shave from a mystic Russian, who cuts him with the razor and says he will succeed in his mission (killing Hitler) but will be cursed the rest of his days. So maybe him not dying and killing Bigfoot was to show how he's cursed or something. I would have liked something more conclusive. (2.5/5) (To explain my Legends of the Fall reference, in that movie Brad Pitt and his younger brother join the army in WWI and when the younger brother is killed, Brad Pitt slaughters a bunch of Germans and then spends years traveling the world, unable to live with the guilt. By the time he gets home, the girl he loves has married his older brother, Aidan Quinn. Some of this was parodied on an episode of Archer with his valet Woodhouse in the Brad Pitt role.)
Captain Marvel (Laplume)
rating: ***
review: Nothing wrong with it, except there's no way it can validate the hero's claim to icon status, which is the one thing it really needed to do.
Me:
Captain Marvel: This might be higher (or lower) if I'd seen it more than once. Marvel had ample chances to be the first one to do a big female superhero movie, but they didn't come up with this until after DC's much better Wonder Woman. It's too little, too late, much like the forced "girl power" scene in Endgame. And turning Nick Fury losing his eye into a joke was pretty lame after 11 years of movies. (2.5/5)
The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (Laplume)
rating: ***
review: Can't really compete with the poignant twist at the end of the first one.
Me:
Ugh, another I apparently didn't write an entry here for? Like a lot of sequels it isn't as good as the first part. I completely agree with Laplume that this couldn't match that poignant twist between father and son in the first movie. So this time it tries to have a twist featuring the boy and his sister. But that doesn't even ring true in my experience; my sisters never wanted to play Transformers & GI Joe with me and my brother and we never wanted to play Barbie or My Little Pony with them. Maybe that's because there were two of us and two of them? If it's just one and one maybe there's more incentive to cross the gender line?
Anyway, they throw more stuff at you but not really better stuff. (2.5/5)
Dark Phoenix (Laplume)
rating: ***
review: Kind of ironic that the end of the Fox franchise proper circles back to the point everyone thought killed it in the first place.
Me:
I wrote a long review comparing the comic book story and the movie so I'll just kind of summarize.
Like this year's Shazam Fury of the Gods, the movie was basically knee-capped by its own studio when the Fox-Disney deal put an end to the Fox X-Men universe. What's the point of a franchise movie when everyone knows the franchise is dead? From my long review:
The book is better on the whole, but the movie has its moments. A few. It's definitely not a great movie but it's not Wolverine Origins bad at least. And a little less stupid than Apocalypse was. I mean you don't have Jean and Magneto putting a house together like it's made of Legos. And Magneto only kills a few people, not thousands. So that's something.
On its own the movie has the same problem as a lot of the X-Men franchise in squandering some of its characters. Storm and Nightcrawler really have no character development; the former just does weathery stuff and the latter mostly is a teleporting taxi service. The Cyclops-Jean love story that had years and years to build on in the comics feels rushed and hollow in the movie. And Xavier's kind of a dick most of the time. What happened to Moira Taggart? Were they still a thing? Maybe that's why he's such a dick.
Anyway, it wasn't great and it wasn't terrible. As essentially the end of the franchise it's kinda going out with a whimper. (2.5/5)
Avengers: Endgame (Laplume)
rating: ***
review: I was thoroughly underwhelmed by the whole Thanos experience. They just didn't know what to do with him, so fittingly, he's barely in this one. This is the definition of the MCU's villain problem.
Me:
You can read my long, grumpy review; this is more of a summary from my ranking the Meh-CU entry:
Avengers: Endgame: But now we have to fall back on that deus ex machina of time travel to fix things because otherwise how could we? Another long, dreary slog with the forced death of Iron Man and the even more forced departure of Steve Rogers. Some people have probably seen it fifty times by now, but once in the theater was enough for me. And that was largely to avoid spoilers. (2/5)
Alita: Battle Angel (Laplume)
rating: ***
review: Nothing wrong with this one except it feels like small potatoes compared to most of the other things from the year.
Me:
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. (3/5)
Shazam! (Laplume)
rating: ***
review: As it turns out, if people keep saying your movies are too grim, it's not the appropriate response to make a movie that features a kid in the body of an adult. The results aren't bad, but keeping them disconnected from everything else is definitely the wrong move.
Me:
Shazam: Like Deadpool, this was as much a comedy as an action movie. A lot of it is basically like if in Big the kid had turned into Superman instead of Tom Hanks. It took a character most people hadn't cared about since the 50s and made it a success. (3.5/5)
Gemini Man (Laplume)
rating: ***
review: I have a full review with a much different rating (I'm pretty sure), but this one's more accurate to relative results. I guess I really would rather watch Men in Black without Will Smith than two Will Smiths. This is '00s Smith rewarmed. He'd already moved past this kind of material.
Me:
Again I can't find a review I wrote here but I know I watched it. I would agree with Laplume in that this was kind of a throwback for Will Smith. I guess trying to recapture the magic of Independence Day and Men in Black back in the 90s with kind of an old-school sci-fi action movie. The twist was there were two Smiths, one his present (at the time) age and a younger clone or whatever. I think in the end it was a serviceable movie but not really great and any progress it might have made for Smith's career was washed away by the infamous Oscars slap. (2.5/5)
Spider-Man: Far From Home (Laplume)
rating: ***
review: I just wasn't a fan of the MCU Spider-Man, until he was joined by the other Spider-Men in No Way Home (which like Far needlessly belabored the title of the first one).
Me:
This would probably be lower if not for the cookie scene with J Jonah Jameson--played by JK Simmons even! Between that and actually making Peter and MJ's relationship more like Peter and MJ's traditional relationship it felt more like a Spider-Man movie even with the globetrotting. Mysterio was actually a better hero than villain, but the callbacks to Civil War and Iron Man were neat--the latter featuring Ralphie from A Christmas Story! Still not as good as the first two Raimi movies. (3/5)
Hellboy (Laplume)
rating: **
review: I was never the biggest fan of the original films. This one is a marked step down from them.
Me:
I don't know how so many movies didn't get written about on this blog. This is another one. Sad. This was another of those where they tried to be more faithful to the comics than the previous movie but it didn't really make it better. Overall I agree with Laplume, though I might say at best it was a step sideways.
Here was my comment on Facebook: Like The Amazing Spider-Man it's OK but doesn't really feel like an improvement over the original unless you really like gore and gross stuff.
(2.5/5)
Midsommer (Laplume)
rating: **
review: Florence Pugh is the golden child of critics these days (she also starred in Fighting with My Family, which is probably the only reason it was taken seriously by them). And mostly, I just don't get it. This was one of her breakout movies. I found it needlessly impressionistic. Because it's really just one of those weird movies that desperately wants to be profound but isn't. The exact opposite of the movie at the top of this
Me:
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. (1/5)
2020 Movies!
Reading Laplume's capsule entry of the first pandemic year, I realized I had only watched a paltry 6 of them. So I figure I might as well just post them here. A lot of this is of course because so many movies got postponed with theaters closed during the pandemic. Marvel pretty much sat out the year and the final James Bond movie starring Daniel Craig got bumped to 2021. Meanwhile Star Wars was only on TV that year, so not a lot of big franchises. Anyway, here we go!
WW84 (Laplume)
rating: ****
review: Everyone went gaga over the first one, but I instantly preferred this one, which was a better overall showcase for Wonder Woman, and had a memorable villain or two besides. The opening sequence alone is a classic, and I guess I'm a sucker for ones showcasing someone in a cathartic flying experience, since I loved that best about Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, too.
Capone (Laplume)
rating: ****
review: I can think of very few actors who without the benefit of some scandal have garnered such undeserved scorn from critics as Tom Hardy. For anyone else this would've been hailed as a genius showcase.
Me:
Rightly or wrongly Josh Trank took most of the heat for the dumpster fire that was Fant4stic. Now he's back with this trippy look at Al Capone's last year. I'm not really sure what the point was except for us to see what a pathetic state he was in after dementia and strokes. I like Tom Hardy but since they didn't do a lot of flashbacks to Capone's younger days, why not just hire an older actor instead of doing fake-looking prosthetic makeup? Anyway, it's OK but one glad I got "free" on Amazon. (2/5)
Sonic the Hedgehog (Laplume)
rating: ****
review: The hedgehog is entertaining, but for me it's a hugely welcome spotlight and return to form for Jim Carrey after years of exile.
Me:
Another I can't find a review of on here so I probably wrote it on Facebook. Anyway, I liked this movie a lot more than I thought I would. I never really played the video games since I didn't have a Sega so I was not really a target audience. Still, it really shook off the video game movie jinx by managing to be fun and yet poignant, like a Pixar movie only mostly live action. Jim Carrey hams it up but in a movie like this it was OK. (3.5/5)
Bloodshot (Laplume)
rating: ****
review: An attempt at jumpstarting a new cinematic superhero universe for most viewers, even before the pandemic, was instead a nonstarter, with Guy Pearce gamely trying to rub off whatever remaining Memento magic he had on Vin Diesel. But Vin Diesel never really has fans outside of the Fast & Furious movies, alas, even if he makes decent action movies out of the concepts driving them.
Me:
I can't find a review of this either but I remember watching it and thinking it was not that great. The start of it makes it seem like one thing but then there's a twist. Overall it wasn't that good. (2/5)
The New Mutants (Laplume)
rating: ***
review: Holds the dubious distinction of being the last of the Fox productions of X-Men movies, with a troubled release date history that no doubt benefited from the pandemic for finally happening. Not a bad movie by any means, but its existence in a vacuum is disappointing given how most of the other films in the franchise went out of their way to provide some tangible link to the rest of it, usually with a throwaway cameo or two.
Me:
The New Mutants: This movie got kneecapped twice by circumstances beyond its control. First there was the Fox-Disney merger that essentially made this a lame duck franchise movie like Dark Phoenix. And then there came the pandemic that delayed the release until 2020 and even then it was only when theaters started opening so it had almost no chance of being a success.
Eventually the movie came to Disney+ and much, much later I remembered I'd put it on my watchlist. Overall for what it is, it's not bad. It's a pretty small movie in that it's pretty much all in one old religious school or hospital or whatever it used to be. Five teenagers are under the "care" of a Dr. Reyes, who is supposed to be helping them control their powers. Maisie Williams of Game of Thrones turns into a wolf (I think), Anya Taylor-Joy of The Northman can enter a limbo world she created with a neat sword and stuff, Charlie Heaton of Stranger Things can launch kinetic energy, another dude can turn to fire (yawn), and then Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt of...not much) is the new girl whose power is unknown and starts messing with everyone, including her. There's a little lesbian making out and some OK CGI action and stuff. Mostly if this had been given the budget of a big movie and not cut down by circumstances, it could have been built up more instead of running only about 90 minutes. And not surprisingly there are no credit scenes. (3/5) (Fun Fact: Dr. Reyes is played by Alice Braga who was in The Suicide Squad.)
Fatman (Laplume)
rating: **
review: Mel Gibson has been pumping out b-movies. They're not all terrible. In fact he's made some brilliant choices! But this Santa Claus thriller ain't necessarily one of 'em.
Me:
Fatman: I probably could have watched this last year on Amazon Prime, but this year it's free with commercials on Peacock. If you're a fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld the premise is similar to his holiday novel Hogfather in that an assassin is hired to kill Santa. But in this case it's more of a straight-ahead action movie instead of a clever light drama. A rich boy who got a lump of coal in his stocking calls up the hitman he has on speed dial to hire him to kill Santa. Like in Hogfather, the assassin has actually been toying with this idea and is willing to take a crack at it for real. In this case he drives to Alaska to track down the old fat man--Mel Gibson--who to stay afloat has leased his elves to the government to make parts for a fictitious jet fighter. (In today's world, making drones would probably be more appropriate.) And so then there's a showdown and all that. It was amusing even if Pratchett's version is better. (3/5)
Some disagreements there. And some not. Huzzah. If Laplume ever does 2021 I think there'd be more than 2020 by virtue of the Marvel movies and last James Bond and probably some other ones.
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