wolfkin

Whoooo Doggy.

This'll probably be the last place I explain this but I used to be one of those guys who hated Megan Fox. I refused to watch Jennifer's Body in part because of that (and in part because it looked TERRIBLE, in retrospect of course it was a Spring Breakers level of reversal). That said I watched Jennifer's Body and as I said in that review it blew. me. away. With how excellent and funny and interesting it was. Between that and Lindsey Ellis' video on Megan Fox in Transformers[2] and that video with Jimmy Kimmel coming around yet again only this time it finally clicked. I've basically done a 90 degree turn on Fox. I'm basically neutral. I'm perfectly willing to accept her as an actress in movies I want to see. I've been rather eager to see what she does next.

Then I heard about Rogue. At first I hear she was leading a mercenary crew to rescue yada yada yada and honestly I didn't like it. Fox is still a petite, super attractive woman. I'm actually perfectly willing to see her in an action role even one where she isn't a sexy demon beast or whatever but this is one of the few roles I wouldn't have picked for her.

Then I saw the trailer and it was basically everything I was worried about. She's like a model in fatigues. But hey I've definitely watched much much much worst movies for less. I figured I'd give it a shot.

Honestly the first thing I compare Rogue to is Hustlers. Hustlers was a movie about strippers from the strippers perspective that was so well crafted, so well written and acted and framed that even in a movie that gave me Jennifer Lopez looking like she's at the top of her game oozing sex in a way that for whatever reason didn't come off cheap. Popped Lizzo's big girl behind in a thong throwing all that weight around. It's a fantastic movie. Just good film making. And in spite of that I never for one second buy in that Constance Wu the main character is a stripper. She screams it in literally every scene she's in... not a stripper. Someone pretending to be a stripper. And yet.... I don't care. It never bothered me. I never saw her as a stripper but the movie is so good I never needed to.

Rogue is kinda like that, but in reverse. Rogue is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. I will watch this movie again just so I can point out all the stupid insane dumb things that happen CinemaSins style. None of these characters make sense. From the moment they casually tossed one of their own mercenaries out of a moving car when he got killed to when it happened literally twice. The bad guys[1] are just SO dedicated to hunting these three girls that no matter how many of them die, they're still running guns up to die. The hostages who were literally kidnapped from school, beaten (but not raped?) and kept in cages and pick the worst battles in history. In the middle of an escape one refuses to wade into a river crying about how she needs a break. Do you not understand what they're going to do if they catch you? Everyone else went across the calf deep water why would you demand to stop? Of course the movie tries to justify this by having her actually get eaten by a gator but gator would have left her along if she was with the group and thematically doesn't make any sense to the themes of the movie. When one of the mercs is bleeding they demand to know what's going on in full Karen effect. Ladies you're teenagers not medics. You don't even know or like him why would you get to know what's going on with his triage? They don't trust the man who saved their life because he admits he used to work for the bad guy. Everyone is just SO STUPID. I haven't seen this level of stupidity since Avenue 5 which is a hilarious comedy about a Space Gilligan's Island with one intelligent person and a shipfull of people at 3 different levels of stupid. It's worth watching for that one episode alone. It's so macabre and funny.

And yet, my worries about Megan Fox were justified. She can't pull off military gunner that well. She doesn't have the body for it. That said she tries. She's the only character who actually seems like she's taking anything seriously. There's an unnecessary "she's a GIRL?!? and military!??!?" dialog at some points. It serves no purpose the movie isn't about her being a girl with a gun. There's no reason for anyone to not trust her character's bona fides as the leader of this mercenary group. But again Megan Fox showed up on set to WORK. She goes seriously, not overly cheesy but with some snark when needed. She can relate to her men without trying to "be one of the guys". She's not one of the guys. She's the boss and she acts like it. She gives orders well, she controls the rescuees well. Megan Fox is the only one in this movie that makes any sense. It's a shame the movie can't manage to warp around her. Everything else BUT her is so bad including the closing tag trying to tell us that captive lions are an issue which has nothing to do with the plot and most will call hypocritical in light of the real lions used (at the end) of the film.

Rogue is a bad bad movie but it does still leave me interested in what Megan Fox does next.

[1] (hmm actually at one point they DO suggest an amount of religious zealotry)
[2] Framing Megan Fox: Feminist Theory Part 3 | The Whole Plate: Episode 7 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKyrUMUervU]. Highly recommend it completely changed my perspective on the characters in Transformers. It's still a terrible movie but wow apparently for that first one the writers were at least trying and Michael Bay really went hard ruining it.

It wasn't bad. But honestly I'm very very disappointed this isn't a TV show. I misread the trailer and wasn't expecting a movie. I think this would have been amazing as TV show. It could have done what the True Lies tv show failed to do. It would have done what I expect the upcoming Mr and Mrs Smith show will fail to do. Kaley did a solid job as an action character. She's no Megan Fox in Rogue (2020) [awful movie but Fox was excellent] but she was solid. I'm not her biggest fan but I don't hate her and, respect where respect is due, her acting was more than okay. David however, like the plot, was under-fulfilled. I think he could have done more with his character of the straightman muggle husband. The script just didn't give any room for it. They did have more chemistry than I expected they would. I saw the trailer and in no way did I think I would buy them as a couple 100%, I was expecting maybe 60% buy in, but I kinda do.

Antagonists Bill Nighy and Connie Nielsen were enjoyably bad. Though Connie was under written. I didn't really get that slightly psychotic character from her the way the script seemed to want me to.

The tone of the movie was uneven. You're never really quite rocked out of the mood of the movie, but you've never sitting comfortable in it either. Mr. and Mrs. Smith the movie was very much a sexy spy "kill a bunch of guys" movie with likes of whiplash pans. True Lies the movie was very much an Arnold comedy with a bunch of one-liners and amusing growls. There are others that are more about the romance like say Mr Right or This Means War. Which are all very much comedic spy stuff with a heavy heavy dose of RomCom. The ingredients were there to make this the variation that focused on Romance with a capital R. I haven't seen one of those in a while and like I said they had the chemistry for it. But the movie wants to be an R-rated comedy so it tries to have it's cake and eat it too.

Almost every problem I had with this would have been resolved if it had been a full season length. Heck I might have even bonded with the kids. They could be given personalities and then maybe I'd care when their health is threatened.

As the many professional reviews I read afterwards suggest, Fatman is a movie that doesn't live up to it's promise.

Fatman has a great premise about a gruffy slightly gritty Santa, a boy-child that feels wronged with his lump of coal and a Santa-obsessed hitman hired to kill him. I even think for the most part that tonally it mostly works. It's not overly gritty and it's not overly serious for most of it's runtime. It strikes that nice balance of casual surrealism.

The problem is that the movie knows what it wants to tell you and doesn't have any patience or subtlety in getting there. All the dramatic tension you expected from the trailer when you hear Mel Gibson's Santa yelling to the hitman about "You think you were the first to come for the Fatman?" the movie doesn't actually have much Fatman hunting. There's no series of hide and seek where we see that Santa is capable of defending himself. Even the tension the movie decides to try to generate of the Hitman even trying to FIND Santa in the first place isn't really tension. It's just a road trip without all the fun aspects of a road-trip movie. No interesting stops, No interesting road people. The movie just walks a straight lines from Point A to Point B. Nothing you see even really matters. Santa goes by Chris in this movie. In this small down he knows everybody and everybody knows him. There is however no payoff for this. He saves a woman from going home with a married man by casually reminding him of his wife and kids but while we see her again and she's clearly a friend there's no payoff. It's like a failure of the Chekhov's Gun trope.

There's a semi interesting plot line about Santa being underfunded and having to take a military contract to be able to pay his workers. In retrospect this entire plot line fails to have any narrative purpose other than world building Santa as a factory owner. In spite of their presence all over the final fight scenes these military security personnel plan next to no role in the violence. There's an even smaller plot line about Chris/Santa being grumpy because of his commercialized depictions compared to this underpaid status and while I like the characterization there it serves so little point to the plot that it feels kinda wasted.

Wasted is unfortunately the only way to describe this whole movie. I went into this hoping for a darkly humorous film with a bit of violence and while a lot of the scenes sans context imply that, this is no Ladykillers (either one).

It was good. earnest still which is great. Gail Simone said she cried three times and I can see it. It has some very successful emotional scenes that don't feel manipulative. The soundtrack was missing TIna Guo's electrio cello which were so distinctive in the last movie. I don't like Kristen Wiig and yet I enjoy everything she's in. It's a weird dichotomy and while I think they went a little hard on the "oh she's unsexy because she's wearing baggy clothes" I think Wiig does an admirable job of being the schlubby Dr. Minerva and being the empowered Cheetah.

I've heard there are negative feeling about the movie but I can't imagine where. The final fight between Wonder Woman and Cheetah looks good CGI wise (RIP Black Panther) though it lacks in choreography. It's directed well enough I never lose track of where WW and Cheetah are in the space but I have no idea why if WW is trying to get into a facility she's spending so much time going in essentially big circles dangled on her lasso. There's a hilarious scene in the white house fight between them where Pine's Steve Trevor is fighting some guards in the background and you can see them essentially dancing as the camera focuses on the main combatants.

I liked the final fight with Max Lord they clearly didn't have the studio force a CGI fight on the movie like with the original movie with Aries. But this was a fight of earnestness and sincerity which is what Wonder Woman is all about. The fact that a TV transmission doesn't count as touching to the point where even the President says "it's just a phrase" made me laugh. I'm willing to buy that he can take your wishes over the TV. I'm not wiling to buy that he's limited to physical contact and this special TV signal counts. I feel like the movie was leaning in the right direction when Max took the TV slot from the faith leader. I figured this would be the start of his I can take your wishes over the TV and it would have snowballed easily.

I think the homage to the invisible Jet was fun and when she learned to fly that was as I already hinted earlier super emotional. The stinger nod to Lynda Carter was excellent.

This is a parody of rom-com and a good parody imo will maintain genre. it's stupid easy to make a comedy parody of everything. See things like Epic Movie and Date Movie. But a good parody of horror films will also itself be a horror film see Scream and Happy Death Day both excellent horror films that lampoon aspects of horror films. I think what sets this movie apart from other parodies is that it does a very effective job at being a romcom. It doesn't take itself seriously which is what you expect but there's a level of sincerity that you don't expect.

It's super hard to pull off a song and dance number in a movie and not have it be super cheesy. Few films do this that aren't all about singing or dancing (Step Up, Pitch Perfect). But the number in this movie manages to be legimately fun which surprised me. Rebel Wilson is Rebel Wilson most people hate her I find her charming enough. Hemsworth plays a one note character that's on screen enough to be funny with his constant "You're beguiling" but not so much that you get annoyed with him. If I had known Priyanka Chopra was going to be in the movie I might have skipped it. I'm not a fan of her as a person. Also I learned she looks terrible in extreme close ups. When you pull out just a little bit she shines. She's a good looking person, a mostly decent actor and she has a top notch voice.

If I cared about Adam Devine personally I'd be scared for his career becoming one note but here he's pretty toned down. Which helps him a lot.

Plotwise I have a big problem with the opening scene after the prologue where Nat has to get a note off her door and give it to her neighbor. It's filmed so badly you can barely tell what's going on. WHich is that he's hot and girls are constantly leaving note for him but they don't know which door is his so she ends up with notes on her door. It's a weird problem that makes no sense but at least they do a callback to explain it at the end. But beyond that the plot doesn't try so hard to make sense. Which is a good thing. It's just walking the path of the romcom you the audience (more than Nat) try to figure out which tropes are going to make it in and which ones will get left out.

It was a fun ride that didn't overstay it's welcome. A light airy movie that didn't leave you empty. Congratulations we have a date movie.

Wow what a ride. An excellent entry for the predator franchise. Fantastic pacing. This movie takes you from setpiece to setpiece without dragging or rushing. Every beat felt like it was right on time. This was a perfect movie to just get immersed in. I'm glad I both watched it in Comanche and blacked out my other monitor and other RGB.

The Prey title obviously can be interpreted many way but for my money the most interesting (if not the most obvious) is that the Predator considers itself Apex and only hunts predators. It saves a mouse to kill a snake. It saves a rabbit to kill a wolf. It saves Naru to kill a bear. Naru is a compelling protagonist in a classic if possibly overdone situation of being a women who wants respect in a man's world. I'm not as familiar with Comanche history and culture in this day. Maybe women struggled to be hunters. But that aside the predator has an interesting dynamic. It's an older more raw version of the predator than we've seen before. And yet for a creature that comes from a society that respects "the hunt" they are as one character points out eventually "cheaters". They don't fight far they have superior technology that they abuse. They follow their rules when they feel like it. Naru takes every advantage to grow and prove herself until the climatic conflict where she's forced to use everything she's learned about the predator to try to survive.

There's a lot of reviews that seem confusing to me. They act like our hero arm-wrestled the predator. She spent a lot of time outsmarting the creature which was the whole point . You'll never out power a predator. If Arnie couldn't why would anyone. You have to be smart and think fast and that's what Naru does.

The biggest negatives were the animals. CGI animals never move right. I just have a hard time thinking these creatures especially the bear would fight like that but it's certainly handwaveable.

It's been so long since I've seen a styling masterfully directed movie from Guy Ritchie. This is far from the best movie of all time. Not even my favorite Guy Ritchie or Jason Statham film. But it's a movie that's told with such verve. This is a crew that isn't trying to do new experimental story telling at this point. They know exactly where they want to go. The tension and the pacing are prepared like a chef whose done this 100 times before. In the wrong hands you'd wonder why the narrative goes back and forth all the time but in Ritchie's hands this only serves to help the tension build.

This is your mother's pie, it's comfortable and delicious in all the ways you hope it would be. But there are misses here as there are in any film. Mostly in the writing. I like Statham and I think his presence carries the perfect amount of menace. There are a few poorly explained plot points like H taking pictures of employee badges (I think this was to do research on all of their names a point that leads absolutely nowhere). I understand H and I empathize with his motivation but I don't care about him. He's almost too much menace. A good Statham role is about 50-70% menace and the rest English bad-boy charm. H is about 90% menace leaving not enough room for anything else to matter. His previous characters have been meticulous and precise almost to a fault and you get to revel in his mastery but here we have that character interrupted forced to forgo the planning we know him for and in it's stead just a continuous forward progression. The rest of the cast is filled with characters that should have been fun. They have great names, solid backstories. In a John Wick style movie this cast would be amazing but here we could have used more of Ritchie's telltale dry gallows humor. For such a full cast filled with actors who could really chew the scenery they didn't get a lot to do. Taking everyone here and transplanting them in something like Boss Level would be perfect. Those characters were almost too cartoonish. I would have loved to see these actors get more to do.

A fun sex comedy that has survived better than most others. Denis is a brainiac, who tells the entire school, that he loves Beth Cooper, local hottie and dream girl to whom he has never spoken. Beth and her fellow hot-girl friends decide to follow up on this and take Denis out to a party. Thus begins a crazy graduation night, that involves parties, nudity, bullies and beer aka all the requisite ingredients for a teen sex comedy.

With Beth dragging Denis along to all the stops, while driving like a maniac, she has the perfect mixture of ingredients to be a manic pixie dream girl. I actually will not fight anyone, who thinks she is just another MPDG. That's perfectly fair. I think, however, she subverts in some interesting ways even if others might argue that maybe it is not enough. The whole point of this movie is that Beth isn't a dream girl. She's a real person. She drives like a maniac, not because she's quirky but because she's a bad driver. She makes bad decisions (that ostensibly she might need to be rescued from), but she feels trapped in her role as the hot girl everyone wants. She's even got personal family life issues that affect her outlook and perspective.

The opening of the movie is about Denis coming out of his shell but the rest of the movie is about him learning that Beth Cooper is more than the girl on his ceiling poster.

There's a side-plot that I hate. One that showed up in 1997's In and Out that I, again, absolutely despise. It was nearly subverted here, but the plot point is if someone calls you gay, it's because you're gay. No matter how you act or what you say or how you feel or what your life has been. They are never wrong. If someone calls you gay in act one by the end of the movie you will be gay. Rich, aside from the "Let's sword-fight with our boners" flashback isn't really that gay. Yet for some reason people look at everything he says as if it's really gay but most of it wouldn't be looked at twice if not for the speech and the non-digetic history. It would have been a better movie if Denis had been wrong on all of his speech subjects. The graduation speech would have needed to be a little bit different. But it would have given the movie a stronger point rather than just fleshing out Beth it would have shown that Denis was the one with blinders on. But hey maybe next time. Guess in 2009 we weren't there yet. Or at least that's what I might say if 2006's John Tucker Must Die didn't exist. There's an aspect of this movie that like it's main character puts Beth Cooper on a pedestal and now I suppose it serves as an archival representation of a collective way of thinking that isn't as mainstream anymore.

Hayden and Paul have solid Beauty and the Beast chemistry. I think there's a lot of stylistic choices the movie makes that I like. Unfortunately while it's certainly not as bad as some sex comedies I've rewatched from my younger days this one isn't nearly as great as i remembered it and this wasn't top tier in my rose tinted perspective to begin with.

Skylines aka Skylin3s is a bad movie. Just like Skyline and Beyond Skyline before it. Skyline was a movie directed by special effects guys that looks like a special effects demo piece. But between Beyond Skyline and Skylines they've managed to do the unthinkable. They've created potential. I don't walk away from Skylines thinking about how bad it is. My first thought isn’t about how bad it was that an effects-based movie will randomly and for no reason suddenly have CGI so bad that it looks like I myself made the movie. I'm not walking away thinking about the bad underdeveloped flat characters and sub-par acting. I left this movie and somehow my first feeling was disappointed. Disappointed that after flipping the genre 3 times no one made anything of ANY of them, the effect film wasn’t good, the action film wasn’t good, the sci-fi heist film wasn’t good.

Beyond Skyline took off from plotless movie (Skyline) and spend half of its own runtime setting up the last half of its runtime, which was an action set piece. It was even a fun action set piece. I liked a lot of it actually. But I was still mid headache from realizing that I spent half the movie watching things not happen. It was almost as bad at Pirate of the Caribbean 2. Beyond Skyline even sets up cliffhanger sequel bait that was, dare I say, compelling. I legitimately wanted to see what came next and considering the quality of the movies up to that point, I remain shocked.

Somehow Skylines, which opens in the first three minutes by completely skipping over that giant space battle/opera that was setup in the last movie, does the most to setup the world. It has the biggest and most interesting world to play in. And yet it fails on EVERY level to do anything with it. I mean for crying out loud there are human brains in alien machine bodies and none of this is explored. Do they still age? How long do they last? Do they have a unique culture? There's a hint that the hybrids were accepted as human but what does that look like? Do people have new relationships with these hybrids? Do they engage in old ones? Yet the movie then forgets all of that complexity in spite of the fact that the bad guy is represented as bad in part because he is prejudice against the hybrids in a world that we’re told completely accepts them. In the last third the film sets up the hybrids as killing fodder and so it is with zero remorse or thought they're slaughtered in fight scenes. There's no exploration of prejudice which must exist in this scenario. It can’t just be our main bad guy. After all it’s shown that he has help. His project is way too big to have done it himself. It's just a mish mash of ideas. Many of the ideas presented are good and interesting some of them would even make compelling dramatic sci-fi pieces all by themselves but in the Skyline franchise they're just completely empty of fleshing out. In spite of what the characters will say nothing matters and no one cares. The movie has two main hybrids Trent and Violet and they’re interesting. They’re actually interesting and unique characters. Violet is hardcore pro-rebellion even getting her tank body spray painted. Trent is the only hybrid we’ve seen created that’s still alive. We saw him as a human and saw him as a hybrid. We know what he was like as a human, we can imagine him transformed into this hybrid. And yet somehow the human characters are even more flat than them. We have a bad guy, we have a minor bad guy, we have the guy who hates Rose for what happened in the prologue, we have the specialist it’s all so rote and uninteresting set in a world that is teaming with interesting things the movie just doesn’t want to talk about. Like why do these aliens harvest brains only to refuse to use them what purpose do the brains serve the the bodies don’t? Why is the earth human relations the way they are? There seems to be a human government and yet there are encampments? Why? Who rejects humans? Why is Rose so hunted when she is clearly so despised? And that’s just shooting from the hip. In the corner of every scene is something interesting something that could flesh out the people or the world and the movie just doesn’t have time for that.

I can see why people might enjoy this one but it's just sad how much it could have been. The creature designs are solid, the alien voice isn't annoying. The main character is unique for reasons that aren't explained or explored. The bad guy is just the right kind of bad to be enjoyable except he's bad for no reason. There are baits and switch but it's hard to care about them because I don't care about the characters. As soon as you see the setup of a heist on an alien planet you know it's bad when you're mostly wondering which one will be sacrificed on the altar of "this is really dangerous. . see Person X just died". Our main character has so much potential for complex motivations and the movie skips over all of them. Rose hesitates to fire on the alien ship, and it could have been a moment of learning about the aliens about her about anything and instead it's only referenced in a throwaway motivational monolog. Skylines is the movie that couldn’t. Shame.

Ok wow that was good. Like really good.

Man just a lot of fun.

So plot wise this is a movie about two people both of whom are bad people. They meet happenstance and find out they're both going to the same destination wedding. Lindsay is the former fiance of the groom (he left her) and Frank is his half-brother. They both hate the groom Keith but it barely unites them as they both just hate everything.

This plotline sounds familiar because it's basically all you need to know to watch FX's absolutely excellent You're the Worst. But this is just a movie version of that pilot. So what you really look for in this movie is not so much the plot which we all know (Boy meets girl, ... , They get together), but the chemistry and how they get together. Ryder and Reeves have EXCELLENT chemistry and the writing was top notch. Which it had to be because this movie is 90% Lindsay and Frank riffing off one another. It doesn't feel improvy or forced. But the sheer endurance of the back and forth between them is impressive. They should be together based on that alone. But Keanu plays a character that in other people's hands would feel lazy and dull. I love Bruce Willis movies but ever since I learned he has a rider that says he films his parts in like 2 days and then collects his money and they film the rest of the movie. It suddenly clicks what is wrong with his performances lately. It's that he's not performing. Reeves does the oppsite here. He takes a character that is written as lifeless and stiff and he performs that stiffness. Ryder's Lindsay on paper is pathetic. Keith broke off their engnagement like a dick but she sues him and is still coming to this Destination Wedding performatively instead of saying no and sparing herself the pain. Ryder infuses her with pain and anger and spite. Yet she's develops a hesitant but honest and open affection for Frank that keeps her interesting.

This is exactly the sort of movie I would buy just to have on tap when I need something to watch that's entertaining but not stupid.

It was a pretty smooth affair but honestly I'm not sure I understand the difference between this any 90% of the MCU films. It's by that calculation a generic action blockbuster. I hear a lot of people saying this movie doesn't deserve to be this good with barely suppressed glee. I just don't see it. I'm a fan of science fiction and fantasy. I sporadically watched the D&D cartoon as a child. I enjoyed to an extent the previous D&D movie.

I just don't see anything in this movie worth getting overly excited over as someone who isn't steeped in D&D lore. That said this movie is like an MCU movie if it wasn't stuck with the framework of having to fit itself into a (at this point fairly rigid) context. It doesn't have to account for Captain America or give a nod to Marvel's Captain Marvel or have cameo by photograph of the Hulk or have Shield logo on some paperwork. This is an MCU movie if it wasn't beholden to the rest of the MCU. I mean there's a bloody hulk smashing scene at the end. Everyone loved that scene in The Avengers. it gets referenced every 5.8 MCU films. Here we have the fantasy version. It's still funny it's just.... well I've seen it before.

Maybe if you were into the D&D modern lore this might feel different. There were certainly nods I recognized by name only and certainly things I felt certain were nods I didn't understand. Unlike say Dune where I can understand how important a sandworm must be to this story even without reading it. I don't care about displacer beast. Looking back that was probably an audience clap moment. I was more impressed with the mimic myself.

But it's fun enough. I call it generic. I imply it's reductive but walking out of the movie I was very satisfied. Not the best thing I've ever seen. Not even the best blockbuster I've ever seen. But as a movie it was good and effective. I'd even watch it again. Even if it does have an overly-perfect-dead-wife trope.

This a pretty solid example of a movie that starts off the test with a 70% and then just never gets any pros and every con is just unopposed.

On the proside this movie has a plot that works. It's not the most original for sure but it doesn't need to be in order to be a good movie. It's just a solid good plot. The problem with this movie isn't the TERRIBLE CGI animals. That is a problem for sure. Hippos are huge and monstrous and somehow that one in this movie looked small on top of being fake. The acting is subpar but it's perfectly serviceable. The chemistry is average. The choreography is as uninspired as the weapons are silly.

The real problem is these movies follow an established order and the writing here is so bad it doesn't work. You really want Mason and Rina to have sexual chemistry. That it makes sense he fights so hard to protect her. Everyone talks like that's what's happening but we never see it. There wasn't ample time for it and what time they did have didn't work. Rina is a mob wife but she's feisty it's not unreasonable that as someone who works with bad guys all the time might appreciate and respect her for that but we never see it and it's a missed opportunity to justify this movie.

I read something in a review or a blurb that suggested this movie was better when it wasn't trying to be scifi and when I watched the first half of this movie I didn't understand but now having seen the back half. That's just the first of things wrong with this movie. I thought the initial time travel and technology from the future weren't bad. Until they get to Act 3 then it gets.... Marvel bad. Like every Marvel movie ends in a CGI fight scene that's always set at night so they can hide how imperfect the CGI is. It's ridiculous and it ruins the best movies like Black Panther and even Wonder Woman. That's utter disappointment you feel when that final fight in the dark comes. That's how I felt at the end of this movie. The third act is a cartoon. I have my issues with Act 1 and 2 but the end of the movie just ups the silly to ridiculous proportions.

The biggest non ending problem in the movie is the child actor. Walker Scobell is a perfectly fine child actor. I'd totally watch him in other movies but whoever wrote his dialog needs to be punched in the mouth. Repeatedly. Then allowed to heal. Then punched in the mouth again. It's AWFUL. This kid talks like he's Ryan Reynolds. It's literally pure Ryan Reynolds sarcasm and swagger but coming out of a preteen. If Ryan Reynolds talked like that he'd be bullied so hard he wouldn't have made it to adulthood. People write children terrible in general but this is one of the worst examples I've ever seen. It's not cute. It's bloody annoying. No kid has the confidence of an adult Ryan Reynolds especially not a bullied kid who gets literally beat up every day at school. At THIRTEEN? it's just stupid. It drags down the entire movie.

That said if they ever do a movie where Ryan Reynolds gets trapped inside the body of a teenager. This kid has his reel already prepped. He would absolutely destroy that role. He'd kill in some sort of Freaky Friday thing.

Anyway, outside of the kid and the constant grating dialog given to him. I was actually having a solid time. It's no blockbuster but it's a solid action movie with a fun cast and decent special effects and a story you can follow with minimal effort. It's a bit overly simplistic. But hey I don't need every time travel movie to be intricate. It is pretty violent though. For such a "fun" escapism movie they certainly do a lot of murder. Like i mean most of the people don't come off as "evil" but there's just so much casual murder. Didn't really seem necessary but it does let them use their fun disappearing body special effects. This just reminds me of the fact that vampires turn to dust in Buffy the Vampire Slayer because it made everything more tidy when dealing with dead bodies.

a solid thriller. Sigourney Weaver does a pretty fantastic job as the profiler who got damaged.

There's this copaganda storyline that I think pads the movie too much on top of the fairly solid police drama. Kyra Sedwick, I mean Holly Hunter has this thing about being in control. More specifically her partner is a loose canon. In the opening scene they're doing a training exercise and this killer cop in the making kicks in a door, shouts "Police Freeze" and then IMMEDIATELY fires 15 shots one after another in to a training dummy, then pauses looks at Holly Hunter's MJ and then fires a 16th shot. His shots aren't precise they're all over the place as MJ criticizes rightly it's an insane amount of bullets and given that the subject would have had zero time to react it's... just insane. The guy has a screw loose. This guy is also our love interest. He's the only cop who treats MJ the lady cop like a person he doesn't use terms that even in 1995 were still sexist and old fashioned. He looks at Sigourney's Helen Hudson as someone who is sweet rather than as everyone else, including Helen, sees her, a broken dickish person. I thought the precision setup was going to be left alone. I thought it was just about establishing some reparte. It was effective in setting up MJ as a no-nonsense cop who deserved to be leading the case. It was enough imo. But there's a scene of random violence in Chinatown and the debate from the opening between MJ who thinks you should shoot enough to put the villain down and Ruben who thinks you should shoot enough to make sure they never get up is settled by the movie showing MJ use her technique in a picture perfect manner. She hits a hostage taker right in the shoulder as she said she would, He even drops the gun as she says he would and yet still for reasons that aren't explained don't make any sense and defy logic, this villain who has taken a cop hostage in a police precinct, has taken a bullet to the brachial nerve and is lying down in a police station filled with cops who were watching him can use his other hand reach across his own body pick up the gun just to shoot the hostage anyway. That hostage? Ruben Goetz and the lesson is learned. MJ's methods don't work. It was wrong to be concerned about killing people by accident, about worrying about the investigation, about showing lack of impulse control, about considering whether someone is surrendering, about whether you might get sued for wrongful death, about the karma of killing someone. None of this matters in the movie because she was "wrong" and a cop got killed. No matter that her superiors try to tell her she did the right thing and just got the wrong outcome. That's true but the movie isn't interested in that. No the movie wants our main character to have learned her lesson. This is her punishment for choosing not to kill. Which is why in the final confrontation she doesn't hesitate. She pops one in the shoulder and then keeps shooting, somehow this superman after taking 4 bullets is still capable of aiming his weapon and so we get to see the satisfying headshot with accompanying triumphant score to seal the deal.

Now there's no need to consider the practicality of shooting the subject in the shoulder to aim for hitting a specific nerve cluster. That's mostly movie nonsense the real considering is about restraint. In real life police are trained to shoot someone so they go down. The real restraint is about when to pull out your weapon and when to fire. But the copaganda of this movie is that cops that show restraint lead to dead cops.

Outside of this ridiculously over the top plotline I liked this movie. Sigourney as I said basically killed it. I didn't recognize Holly Hunter doing her best Kyra Sedwick's The Closer imitation (yes I'm aware this movie came out much earlier). I liked both our main female characters and i think even Ruben was interesting. I think more could have been done to enhance their relationships. The sorta gay but never confirmed, but he was attacked in the gay serial killing scene Andy was almost fleshed out enough for a secondary character but I would have liked to see HOW Helen relied on him and what their relationship was like a little more. There's a hint that Ruben is a playboy and MJ suggests he's into young bimbo types which didn't jive with his flirtatious relationship with Helen. You have to really work hard to infer whether Ruben and MJ were more than work partners or if it was just her jealous ex-boyfriend, also a cop in their department, Nico being paranoid. I think there was room to cut out the jealous ex-boyfriend who you work with storyline entirely and that would have left some runtime for flesh out the rest of it. I mean we already have her tough as nails boss Lt. Quinn who barely respects her as a woman. It felt a bit excessive at times to watch Nico try to mark territory too.

It's hard to imagine films not giving you 80% plot in their trailers but there was a time when movies like Catfish, The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, The Matrix, even Super8 to an extent were advertised based on their mystery. These were films that you didn't talk about until your friends had seen it. Sort of a pre-"spoiler culture" spoiler. Of course in 2010 while social media was around it was a different beast than it is today.

If you're familiar with Catfishing, and it's 2020 now so it'd been about 10 years since this movie popularized the term so you probably are, then you can guess the outline of this movie. It might even seem ridiculous now to make a whole documentary-style film about it when it's now the storyline of b-lines in animated sitcoms or the backstory of a character in a reality show about love.

But while misrepresenting yourself online wasn't new in 2010. Catfish represented a sort of inflection point the basic understanding of how far someone would be willing to go both to engage with someone and to find out who they are, really.

The movie was compelling at the time. Both in ways that probably hold up and in ways that would probably be offensive now. Which isn't to say the movie itself is offensive. It's always hard to remember the details that far back but the things you enjoyed about watching this salacious story aren't necessarily the things you would enjoy in a more modern setting.

I still hate Red/Blue Harley. I much prefer Red/Black. That said I like her costuming MUCH better in this movie than Suicide Sqaud. Somehow between the costuming and the framing there's a LOT less "Look how sexy and skimpy Margot Robbie is dressed like a slutty Harley Quinn". I'd only seen one teaser video and I thought Harley looked stupid in her outfit. However on screen it worked a lot better than I thought it would. A lot of my biggest issues with the movie are weird shots and framing and the uninspired soundtrack. I mean I like Barracuda but I wish the score had more signature to it. Just generic pump up music and generic heartfelt music etc etc etc. The soundtrack need not be filled with covers of songs done better when they aren't slowed down RnB remixes or acoustic pop remixes. The James Brown joint (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H77fRz1rybs) was okay but honestly why not go full girl power out there. Why not give me a Spice Girls cover like maybe "Viva Forever". That would be interesting and in a movie with (level of violence) a little girl getting her face sliced and then ripped off maybe some of that creative energy could be spared to the music choices. I mean I hate Ariana Grande but women love her maybe a version of "Dangerous Woman" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnyBfSXdcTQ) would have been more fun and interesting or maybe Amy Winehouse who has choice jams beyond "Rehab" such as "You Sent Me Flying" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfZj2h1t0Jc) or "I Heard Love is Blind" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMM3HqKw9JA) and she has tons of club remixes for the fight scene rehash.

But there are inspired sequences in Birds of Prey like when Harley breaks into Gotham PD. It's a fun romp even if some of the physics completely break verisimilitude. The Breakup with Joker was great. Not seeing Joker was fine, and then roller derby. I liked how no one at roller derby really cared about Harley's level of violence. They just considered her weak for going back with Joker so many times. The eponymous Birds of Prey don't really have the character work that Harley has but they don't really need it.

When Huntress came on screen i didn't like her. I wasn't feeling this dark comedy take on Huntress but very soon I was flipped on that as well. Rosie Perez is still cute. Ali Wong was fine. I still don't see Ewan McGregor, man that guy's face has changed a lot. But everyone is good. The character are fun. The ones I complain about are the guys actually Zsasz was kinda odd, Black Mask is still confusing as a character. I don't know him, I don't understand why he has his mask or when he wears it. I thought it might be related to his gloves but we never really learn. Harley was mostly good. I think her best fight scene was when she had a bat though. That was some creative, interesting fighting that felt like Harley's character. It fit. I wish it was edited better with longer and/or wider shots. But uninspired fight scenes are a staples of action movies now and Harley Quinn is of no particular exception to this.

The funniest part of the movie was everyone staying to the end credits scene to get trolled. It was beautiful. The guy in front of me was literally upset "I wasted 3 minutes of my life for that". I say stay for it though just for the giggles. Birds of Prey is something the DC universe needs more of. Fun. It's dumb, there's scenes that don't make any sense. Bad guys standing around waiting to be hit but in the end.. it's just got fun. Genuine fun like Wonder Woman had genuine sincerity (as opposed to constant sarcasm). Well worth the price of admission even if it doesn't have Oracle.

Dang. That was a good time. I had such low expectations. The trailer was boring in spite of the fact that it features an actress I enjoy. I wasn't seeing advertising for it when I saw it in theatres so i skipped it. Now however it's getting featured status so I figured I'd give it a shot. I was bloody impressed. I thought it would be a cheesy film about a girl losing weight by doing a marathon. But I like everyone so much. Brittany was so heartfelt.

This is the second movie based on a real person I've seen this year (Blinded by the Light) and both times I'm not sure I knew it was based on a real person. They both managed to impress me. It's just a lovely thing both movies. I also liked the supporting cast. They really filled out the world and her relationships even though as a character Brittany tends to shut people out I really kept rooting for her to eventually let them in. Even Catherine who is an on and off character managed to endear herself. There's heartache and heartbreak as a viewer watching Brittany go through her ups and downs. Highly recommend everyone check this out if you can.

ok so the first thing to really be aware of when approaching this movie is This isn't Get Out. And that means from a number of angles. Get Out was Jordan Peele's dream movie. He's had it in his head for a long time. He's been working it out over and over and over in his head. Presumably when he got approval to make a movie he had pretty much the entire film plotted out. We also know it was affected by the environment. Specifically the ending which was changed because of the social environment. I happen to like the ending we got better and while it might not have been the original vision it's entirely possible Peele likes it better as well. Also for a guy who really really loves horror this movie didn't really fit into the horror genre which is why he sorta made up the genre for it "social thriller". I think that very very accurately captures what happens in Us.

Now Us captures a very very different feel. I would suggest that any similarities to Get Out are more due to having the same director than being the same type of film. They're not the same type of film. In no way would I call Us a social thriller. It's more very clearly a horror film that Peele wants to see. In spite of the many many interpretations and symbolism that people see. It's not as surface level as Get Out instead it's more aligned with what you might normally see in a slasher horror film where symbolism is often attributed to horror fans watching too many horror films rather than clear inspirations from the film itself.

At this point the two important things I need to say are that 1) I hate horror movies. I took a big risk with Get Out because I didn't want to see it but the way Peele kept calling it a social thriller gave me enough pause because I do enjoy thrillers to say maybe I will give it a shot. I'm glad I did I loved Get Out. 2) I liked this movie. It's a great movie. I might even watch it again having already seen it. But it's everything I feared Get Out would be. I might not watch another Jordan Peele movie after this because I find horror movies functionally unethical. Which is a shame because horror films always have the most interesting premises and stories when I read up on them but I don't like being scared. That's not my fun.

You can watch the hundred thousand think piece videos and essays and video essays about Us some of it I buy like the sub theme that suggests maybe the that men shouldn't be leaders. I saw a very intersting tweet that pointed out all the men/fathers fail their families. Gabe doesn't take Adelaide's advice and fear seriously, the white guy gets his family killed because he dismissed his wife and even Adelaide's father drunk and implied cheater loses his daughter by not doing what his wife asked which kicks everything off. and some of it I don't There's a theme that impies the young boys were switched like their mothers. I don't believe it but in fairness to those that do (and this is generally what all the "the twist you didn't see" videos are about) there's a lot of evidence to suggest it like 1) he's not making castles he's making tunnels 2) he doesn't know what the trick is 3) "he hasn't been the same since grandma died" 4) "I don't know where the bat is" - there's a healthy handful more but that's just a taste.

There are plot holes that I don't consider plot holes there's no barrier stopping the Tethered from going up so what's been keeping them there until now for any number of reasons and then there are questions that occured to me after the movie where and why on the uniforms? I sorta get why she wanted them all looking the same because unity for the hands across or whatever but where they all get jumpsuits? But here's a fun fact that a lot of people might have missed i certainly did until I saw a video with Peele. Three ideas: Thriller T-shirt, Red, One glove. . But I liked the family they did realistic things and that was fun.

The actors were all fantastic because I believed both sides. The scared nearly out of their minds true family and the psychotically violent red family. Lupita especially was incredible. I've always said I would love to see Lupita in a movie I want to watch. This was almost it. In Non-Stop she was a secondary character but fun. In Black Panther she was good but so so outshined by Danai Gurira's Okoye. The rest of her movies I haven't been interested in. I'm SO looking forward to her heist film with Rihanna. Here I finally got to see Lupita shine and she's magnificent. She went all the way for this film and it shows. Winston Duke's Gabe was an excellent "everyman" Dad who actually kinda does look like Jordan Peele cosplay. I actually liked Shahadi Wright's Zora/Umbrae they were both pretty darn good. I'd totally watch her in more thrillers.I actually walked away from the movie with no real questions. But after reading a few articles, watching a few videos I think I could dig a little more into the movie. I would certainly enjoy it for it's oververt entertainment value if nothing else.

Alright so how to talk about Miss Bala. First of all let's talk about how it's a remake of a Spanish film by the same name. I don't know how I missed that for so long but it would explain why I felt like I knew this movie when I saw the first trailer and it would explain why I thought I had mandala moments regarding it. I think I've seen the trailer for the Spanish film. It doesn't change a lot of my opinion of this film (neither does my personal opinion of Ms Rodriguez).

My first thought is that when you make a remake of a film you should have something to add. And I left the movie theatre thinking they didn't really add anything. Again it's important to note that I haven't seen the original. It just felt like there was something missing in the movie.

But that said it's a very entertaining movie. There's the always laughable scene where a girl and her hot friend go to a beauty pageant and the hot friend is told "you clearly aren't going to be entering... are you?". It's a compelling setup. There are just areas where the narrative feels unexplored. After Miss Congeniality it's hard for me to see a beauty pageant as something that doesn't take weeks of time to even fake it. Even though it's such a small part of the story it feels like it could have been more. Which is such a shame because what is there is so compelling. Gloria is a great character I kinda wanted more intrigue from her the trailer seemed to hint that she would play both sides against each other. That she would be a double or triple agent for ICE/FBI/CIA whatever. But it's so simplified. What i expected to just be the first strokes to making the twisted alliance ended up being the straight forward whole movie. I expected her to be doing whatever it took, not because she couldn't get out, but because she couldn't leave behind her friend. Instead her friend is missing for the whole movie. I thought at one point she might be dead and another girl would be the girl she 'couldn't leave behind' but that didn't pan out that way either.

I have other small nitpicks like it felt like there wasn't enough Spanish oddly enough. There's a scene where she has to remove something from a phone. But the phone is in a container of 10 identical phones. Instead of removing it she moves it to another phone. Which was interesting. Except she had to dig through three phones just to find the correct one. After which she dug through the bag looking for a phone before putting it in one seemingly at random. But .. why dig? They're all identical? And why bother putting it back? I sorta mentally linked back to the "mole" BUUUT. There was a 1 in 10 chance she puts it in HER phone. What then? It's not like she could tell which phone was hers and she avoided that one. It was just a weird scene that was tense enough but didn't make sense.

I can say I've seen it. I can say I laughed uproariously. Because holy wow is this movie awful. Front to back, start to finish. It's so bad you sometimes forget it's offensive too. On purpose.

One of the first gags is that after failing to inspire his new youth male team. He dismisses them reminding them not to steal his catalytic converter. After being called out for it by the black player. The black player drops a saw used to steal catalytic converts. In the next scene he doesn't have a catalytic converter.

There's not so much acting as there is setting up punchlines whether they're awful verbal jokes or pointless (and often too long) visual gag montages. I was going to say something about the imitation indie music and wanna be Karate Kid soundtrack but the credits were still rolling and the song section came up. All the songs are by William Boreing. I don't know if that's Jeremy's son or whatever nepotism nonsense but the music was uninteresting. It wasn't sonic garbage just... boring.

You could spend an hour debunking all the nonsense assumptions the movie makes erroneously. But for my money even from a conservative Daily Wire standpoint most of the movie is just dumb and pointless which is a problem because the movie's only saving grace is supposed to be it's messaging. It's like a Christian Faith movie in that way. Christian Faith movies are awful but they're awful because they don't care about anything other than sending the right message. The art of storytelling doesn't come into it. The only one that matters is the root story. That a team of men's washouts could dominate in women's sports. Ironically basketball is a poor choice for this because the gender differences aren't THAT big. And physical mass isn't everything like you see in the movie. Not when you're playing comparable teams. The women's teams are practiced active teams and our ladyballer are again some washouts who are hanging out just to do this. It's so casually done you never see them practice which is both a reflection of how much this isn't a sports movie and a reflection of what the movie thinks about female players. You see what it thinks at the end of the movie when it has grown bulked out basketball players playing with girl-children.

No one expects a vanity project to be perfect. But just because it's a vanity project doesn't mean you get to by pass every narrative concept. Me, You, Madness is awful. This is worse. But that one PRESENTS as a vanity project. This presents as a movie with something to tell through humor. It's not JUST lazy. It's not JUST offensive. It's not funny either. There's just scenes that you know the DW found funny. Scenes that they were dying laughing while they were writing it. But in the end on the movie are just... "ehh oh i see what they were trying to do".