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VIP

10

Could not take it seriously with the robots' abilities that don't even exist in the year in which this was set, let alone the slew of appliances with "PAL Chip installed" that could do completely ridiculous things. Not one of these devices should have been able to pose a threat, unless they were intentionally manufactured with features that would never apply to any intended use of the product.*

I can ignore little details that are embellished or ignored for the purpose of telling a better story, but when the entire premise of a film set in the present rests on impossible and unrealistic technology? Pass.

Even better, no one thought of just… finding another PAL retail store when the mall's router was destroyed with the upload at 98% complete? This film's entire spectacle rests on its characters' poor decision-making and lack of forethought—including the defective robots that join the gang and tell them about the solution.

I'll admit that the story is a bit heartwarming, but it's nothing new. It's also trying too hard regarding commentary on the influence of technology in today's world. Several lines of dialogue are extremely heavy-handed, as if the writers expect the audience to understand nothing and need to have the "moral" of the story handed to them.

Ugh. I wanted to love it. At least I can steal some playlist entries from the soundtrack.

* — See: Furbies that spit plasma beams, laptops that could close on your hands and crush them, refrigerators that walk… I could go on and on about that mall scene.

For the life of me, I can't figure out who provided the "Voice" (that's all the script says) for the lock to which the Ankh is the key. It sounds so familiar, but none of the cast list jumped out at me. Searching "who played the voice in logan's run" isn't exactly going to return useful results. So… If anyone knows the name of the actor, I'd love to find out! It's making me a little nuts.

As usual, I'm going to nitpick first, then get into the bigger picture. (How this became my review format, I don't know, but it works.) There are many things worth nitpicking, actually. The visual effects in this film were surprisingly underwhelming, considering it came out only a year before Star Wars (1977). Lots of small details seemed off, and the film's IMDB listing has a pretty fat "Goofs" page. But only these struck me enough to write them down while watching.

The Carousel ritual has a couple of oddities. The performers' wires are clearly visible, as are the attachment points on their costumes. (Allegedly, director Michael Anderson is rather emphatic in saying that no wires are visible in the DVD commentary. I do not have this commentary available, so I have to trust IMDB. They really are very obvious.) And, it looks like one of the flying participants is pregnant. I don't see that referenced anywhere in trivia sources I consulted, and perhaps my eyes deceived me as I watched the film, but it really does appear so.

It was awfully convenient that Logan forgot he had an Ankh of his own, so Jessica's could be fumbled into the water for Francis to find later. (Smells like contrived writing, born of having no better ideas on how to get Francis outside with them.)

The grates Logan and Jessica remove inside the seawater intake system seem awfully easy to dislodge. I wonder just how they've managed to stay put for so many years. With 6 generations (roughly) of 30 years, that puts the construction of the power facility about two centuries in the past. Pretty impressive, since no one is allowed outside the city. How do they maintain outside equipment, anyway?

I know I've already mentioned the visual effects, in the nitpick section above, but it bears repeating: The effects in Logan's Run were underwhelming even after taking into account the age of the film. From obvious matte paintings and miniatures to just straight-up bad double-exposure work, I found myself really struggling to ignore the technical side of the movie to focus on its story.

Broadly, the story is a good one. It's perhaps an overdone trope these days—a post-apocalyptic, dystopian society with arbitrary rules that one person finally feels must change—but I must imagine this kind of story was slightly rarer 40 years ago. And even now, it hasn't really gotten old seeing a future human civilization rediscover what it means to be human.

The single largest omission from the screenplay, I thought, was world-building. We almost learn more about what life is like for the old man, outside the city dome, than what it's like inside. There's a vague sense of how hedonistic life in the city can be. Jessica appears as Logan channel-surfs "the circuit", seemingly a way for city residents to offer themselves up for sex. Francis appears with two "screamers" (oh yeah, that's subtle) for a party shortly after. There is, of course, the "Love Shop" scene—shorter than originally intended, but probably as long as was necessary. But most of the "regular people" we see are swimming, shopping, working out… I have no clear sense of what people in the domed city actually do all day.

It's implied that children are raised by machine, perhaps. It seems parents do not exist. The city residents might even be sterile by design (perhaps a surgical procedure performed shortly after birth). They can have orgies every day and not worry about birth control. Conception of children may be regulated by the city computer, just as is the "termination" of those who have reached Lastday.

For all the statement it makes, having such a world, it still feels like an empty premise. The city computer, which seems to have an obsession with tracking down Sanctuary, has a distressingly small role in the story. Logan's "surrogates" have a bigger part than the computer does, practically. (And those visual effects were… weird.)

I guess what I really wanted was "more villain". Also a better ending (because the city exploding after Logan's report fries the computer made no sense to me). But it's not a bad film. It's enjoyable, even thought-provoking. Just not as much as I expected.

Mockingjay Part 2's biggest mistake is being completely faithful to the book, considering that it is the worst one of the trilogy. They had the chance to make the story better but chose to stick to what they had. Being the final chapter of the story, it has emotional bits, but miserably (and unfortunately) fails to sell them, rushing the scenes which we were supposed to remember the most.
— @aag's review (https://trakt.tv/comments/62697, and we need proper internal link markup on Trakt!)

Seriously. The big dramatic moments are unbelievably rushed—there's no time to dig into them. There's too much focus on bad CGI and not enough on characters. Basically every character is 2D at best, except maybe Katniss and Peeta. But that's also due to sticking true to the book. None of the characters in the books were particularly well fleshed out, either, as I recall (from reading them 3 ½ years ago).

I also found the story very predictable. Obviously there's some amount of subconscious influence from having read the books, but it's also just absolutely clear when the big surprises/twists are going to happen, and what they'll be. They end up not being surprising at all. (Not to belabor the point, but the book had this problem too.)

My other big issue—which applies to the whole series—is that we barely see anything that happens away from Katniss. I know it's quite common in YA novels to present a limited first-person perspective from the protagonist's point of view, but in a big political saga like this I feel like that severely limits the storytelling.

First Man is a decent foray into the history of space exploration, I guess. There were some bits and bobs that bothered me, though.

During the Gemini VIII malfunction, the increase and subsequent decrease in roll speed were matched by what sounded like a jet turbofan engine spinning up and down. That struck me as very odd—the only active propulsion system was a stuck maneuvering thruster (OAMS number 8), a rocket engine burning hypergolic propellants. In other words, it couldn't make the same noise as a turbofan, even if heard from inside the cockpit. It's doubly odd because the film goes to such great pains in the latter half to keep space scenes silent. Some exterior shots of the spinning Gemini VIII included the anomalous jet-engine sound.

Since watching the film this afternoon, I've done some more fact-checking—or rather, read up on other people's fact-checking. A number of events depicted in the movie were "wrong" somehow. Timings changed (the X-15 flight depicted happened in 1962, but the film states it was 1961); there were no apparent rescue attempts during the fire onboard Gemini I (in reality, ground crew tried to open the hatch, hampered by smoke and flames escaping the sealed capsule); the astronauts had clear views out the capsule windows during the Apollo launch (in the real Saturn V, the launch escape system covered most of the Command Module windows until later in the flight); and Neil Armstrong trained in the three-axis spin device (the Multi-Axis Spin-Test Inertia Facility, or MASTIF; in reality, it was ironic that Armstrong never trained in the device but was the only spacecraft pilot to experience the conditions it simulated on a mission). Numerous other, smaller details are incorrect, as well.

The big one I want to talk about, though, is how much bloody camera shake there is during any flight scene. By astronauts' accounts, riding the Saturn V to space was a very smooth, almost relaxing, experience. But in First Man every space vehicle seems to be trying to shake its occupants (and itself) apart during flight. I can't think of any reason for this, other than "it makes things look more dramatic". Unfortunately, the sheer intensity of the camera shaking makes useless the carefully framed extreme close-up shots of controls being actuated, as the button and switch labels are unreadable due to motion blur. It also makes it extremely difficult to tell who's who on screen, when faces are shown. So, aside from being unrealistic, the violent camera shaking actually hurts the narrative.

But enough nitpicking the technical stuff. I've spent 444 words on this nitpicking section, and I haven't even touched on the script yet!

Again, First Man is a decent foray into the history of America's space program. It definitely focuses on the man, not the machine. Or at least, it tries to focus on the man.

The biggest complaint I can level at the script is its pacing. Most of the film drags pretty badly. I have to admire Damien Chazelle for making such a pretty film—so many of the shots were breathtaking, both in space and back on Earth. The same cannot be said about Josh Singer's screenplay. Maybe the flaws in the script can be traced back to the book it was based on, which I have not read (nor even heard of before seeing this film).

At any rate, I find that First Man often glosses over the big picture to focus on seemingly insignificant moments. The characters (real people, but fictionalized) seem to remain the same over an eight-year period. That in itself is unrealistic—all people change over time, whether they realize it or not—but it is even more so in the face of such historic achievements.

I contend that the movie spends insufficient time on what happened after Apollo 11. Saying more would require the use of spoiler tags, and I don't want to go down that route—but the story felt somehow incomplete.

My score of 7 is rounded up from the rating I would give First Man if Trakt supported doing so: 6.5/10

It's a first effort at adapting Star Trek to the feature film format, and it shows. Pacing is very slow for most of the film, only picking up near the climax. The slowness is not helped by long, drawn-out shots of the ship—leaving spacedock, exploring new environments, etc. At the time, I suppose, the audiences probably loved getting to see such views of the ship they'd known up until then only on small television screens, but that's the only purpose these…let's call them "ship porn" shots…serve. Dramatically, they belong on the cutting room floor (or, more accurately, should never have been shot, given how much of the $43 million budget effects shots consumed).

There just isn't enough plot to fill the runtime of this film. It feels like a standard one-hour TV episode script stretched to fill 2+ hours with eye candy. Presented as an episode of the original TV series that ran from 1966-1969, the film's plot would likely have been quite at home. As a full-length feature film, though, it felt like a slog. For the first 90 minutes or so I found myself often checking the playback position, the movie-watcher's version of constantly asking Mom, "Are we there yet?"

That's not what you want your viewers to do when they watch your film.

Update from the future: In summer 2019, TrekMovie interviewed Douglas Trumbull about his work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, as a lead-up to the film's 40th anniversary and Trumbull's first appearance at a Trek convention. Read it here: https://trekmovie.com/2019/07/26/interview-vfx-pioneer-douglas-trumbull-on-how-it-took-a-miracle-to-complete-star-trek-the-motion-picture/

Is the plot original? No, we've seen this before. Disney does stories like this all the time.

But I don't care. Sometimes they fall down on the execution—but other times, they knock it out of the park. There are head-scratching moments in here, yes, and you have to just go along with them. What's great is that the film's vibe makes it really easy.

Sometime in the past week I'm positive a perfect quote about this floated my way, either in a video interview or a quote published in one of numerous film- and television-related articles I've read over that period. I couldn't find it again tonight, so I'll have to write my own "quotable" and apologize for not crediting whoever said the original that inspired me:

Movies only need a plot to get from A to B, but it doesn't really matter. If the film creates a feeling, that's what the audience will remember, and that's why they'll want to share your movie: So others can feel the same feeling.

Radio Rebel does that quite well, in my humble opinion. Forget the sociopathic principal who single-mindedly exterminates joy. This movie has a great feeling, and a great message, to share.

Also, this should be on Disney+ instead of Pluto and other random FAST sites. It's much better than most of the other DCOMs that have taken me down memory lane these past few weeks.

I must have caught just the last part of this in a hotel somewhere as a kid. Finally watched the whole movie to see what led up to the hockey scene I remembered.

Genius was a fine watch until the script had Charlie not explain the real reason he'd pretended to be Chaz. His silence on the matter undermines the whole message of the film that he just leaves the Franklin kids to think he did it as a social experiment, or to make himself feel superior. There was a great opportunity for him to confide in his new friends about always being an outcast until now.

Controlling the hockey players' entire bodies with one "microchip" affixed to a single skate didn't help, either. The graviton-assisted shenanigans aren't even internally consistent; sometimes the affected Rumson players act as if only the chipped skate is being manipulated, but other times their whole bodies follow the actions of whoever's controlling them from the lab. (A gag where two Rumson players were forced to kiss in midair would have distracted from the plot, so I'm sure the opportunity was intentionally ignored.)

Surely my opinion would have been different all those years ago. But I'm older and a little wiser now, for better or worse.

And speaking of watching this well after its release, I now have the ability to see that Emmy Rossum as Claire looks a lot like Nico Parker as Sarah in HBO's The Last of Us adaptation. Most viewers of Genius up to now will have had no chance at all to make that association.

Having chosen this at random, seeing how far down (well, far to the right) it was on Hulu's list of movie recommendations for me, I was surprised to recognize anyone in the cast. Margo Harshman was really not on my list of people I'd expect to see in, well, anything. When I revisited Even Stevens a while back (in which she played the recurring role of Tawny Dean), it seems like I looked at her IMDB credits and didn't see a huge number of roles. Finding her in something purely at random was cool.

Harshman aside, I was supremely impressed by the pacing and delivery from the film's leading men, Nicholas D'Agosto (Shawn) and Eric Christian Olsen (Nick, who should have traded character names with his costar). The plot might be predictable, and the jokes often obvious, but they are woven together very well and there's hardly a dull moment to be found anywhere in the film.

Maybe I wouldn't go so far as to say it's "infinitely rewatchable", but as something entertaining to watch once it's hard to beat a movie like this. There's even some truly clever humor thrown in there to make you switch your brain on a few times!

I don't understand why the ratings for this are so low across the board. The satire is extremely well observed, and the application of parody nearly flawless. The only place NATM really lost me was at the idea that "Janey isn't attractive with her ponytail and glasses". Honestly, her normal self is much cuter than "the new and improved Janey Briggs" who goes to the party and the prom.

Well, OK, I also see where some other commenters are coming from about "toilet humor" and such; some very over-the-top gags did temper my overall rating a little. (For example: The peeping toms falling through the floor along with the girl they were spying on was hilarious; the toilet spraying an absolute crap-ton of excrement at them afterward was unnecessary.) But those were such small parts of an otherwise superbly executed film that it doesn't seem fair to tank its rating because of them.

Including background and bit parts, there are tons of connections to (sometimes future) teen sitcoms, movies, and other media: Even Stevens' Coach Tugnut as the football announcer; How I Met Your Mother's Ted Mosby as the guy who introduces us to the school; The A-Team's Mr. T as… well, best not spoil that one. There are so many actor connections, tiny prop/costume details, musical references, and miscellaneous touches included, it's impossible for me to list them all. I could rewatch the film five times, taking meticulous notes each time, and still miss half of them.

Clearly I'm not alone in thinking this was a hilarious movie. Based on reading other people's reviews, I guess it's just one of those things you either love or hate, and I'm in the camp that loved it.

Alita, the character, is marvelous for so many reasons: Her hybrid anime/photoreal design, Rosa Salazar's captivating performances, the sheer fluidity of how she integrates with the live actors… Cliché as the statement was, I agree 150% with what Hugo said: "You're the most human person I have ever met." Stick Alita into any script you like, and I'll watch that movie ten times.

That said, it would be nice if that script builds on the woefully underutilized world shown in this film. My rating is tempered by the one-dimensional side characters and overall lack of resolution at the end, because this was clearly set up for a sequel. There's a lot more source material left to adapt, if Cameron can tear himself away from Avatar movies long enough to at least help get a sequel off the ground (and if the Mouse gives the green light to do it, considering they now own the rights to this franchise… :weary:). Jon Landau mentioned a sequel just a few days ago (https://twitter.com/DEADLINE/status/1600222727624790016), so that's a nice bit of news.

I will be very disappointed if there's no "Alita 2" coming, even if it takes another 20 years of development hell. (I say 20 years because the domain name battleangelmovie.com was registered way back in 2000. This project was clearly on James Cameron's mind for several years before anyone confirmed in 2003 that a script was being written.)

Presented last month as part of the 2022 Chicago Japan Film Collective, one of their few in-person screenings. This film eked out an audience award win against The Takatsu River and was presented via online screening at the festival's end to celebrate.

Going into this film, the summary did not prepare me for the real music genre. Calling the Seppuku Pistols "a taiko music group that carry on the traditions of Japan's Edo era" is pretty misleading. As their music was presented here, it's not my cup of tea. I'm restricting my rating and review to consider only the film, however. It's not fair to judge a live performance based on its presentation in documentary form, plus I think the style of said film is unfairly coloring my opinion of the music.

All that said, The Seppuku Pistols falls pretty flat as a documentary, to me. Subjectively, too much time is spent hopping from show to show; one gets the impression that the Pistols have only one song, thanks to how frequently similar moments are shown across many different performances. My ears are still ringing from Iida-san's "conducting" with the kane.

In a word, what's shown is redundant. We don't need to see the Pistols go through the same motions at each of half a dozen performances. Just because a film is a "documentary", or "non-fiction", doesn't mean it can't have a narrative arc. That was missing from this one. It starts out by introducing some of the key players, somewhat abruptly jumping through a random assortment of interview questions, then gloms onto one answer as a segue into the group's New York tour. What follows quickly becomes repetitive.

Frustratingly, the side story about Matthew's connection to the group feels like it comes out of nowhere, but that theme feels like it should be the through-line of the whole film. Most of the sound bites from random people at their shows don't say much beyond "they rock" or "they're awesome", and that's too bad. Even once I realized this wasn't about quite the kind of taiko I expected, it still could have drawn me in with the kind of human-interest that makes great documentaries more than just the sum of the facts they present. Instead, so much of the film became an overwhelming wall of sound that I had to resist repeatedly checking the time.

Structurally, it would have been better to choose one seminal performance to feature. With that picked out, go in one of two directions: 1) build to the show through interviews and backstory, or 2) intersperse interviews and backstory through clips of the show. In either case, show the audience (most of) a single performance instead of many overlapping clips from all over. Communicating the experience of a live performance art like this is easier if the audience is allowed to experience it. You want the viewer to feel like they've somehow gone to the concert and stood in the crowd, without leaving their seat. That feeling is simply very difficult to evoke while skipping from one show to another every few minutes.

Featured this week (end of May 2022) in digital screenings from Chicago Japan Film Collective.

This almost feels like an alternate-universe version of Your Lie in April to me. At least, enough elements are similar: high school, music, chronic disease, possible love polygon. The tone, however, is completely different.

But before I go on about the script, let's talk performances. Choosing this film—the one that brought CJFC 2022 to my attention—based on its two leads turned out to be a smashing decision. Yuzumi and Marin sold every one of their scenes, showing off every bit of skill they learned from years in Amuse's Sakura Gakuin group. It's too bad that music wasn't a larger part of this story. There was a point where I thought it was about to turn into a musical, and got excited, but that's not where the story went.

Speaking of which… If I could make only one complaint about this film, it would be that the script throws us too many unexplained curve balls. Starting with a nebulous illness that made Yuki skip a year of school didn't give us a great foundation. I don't especially like beginning a movie with a "Just… okay?" (with apologies to Barney Stinson), but that wasn't the last. Between Yuki losing her voice, the doctor losing his job at that hospital, Maki getting amnesia, and the police getting a confession out of Yusuke all in the space of one cut, it's just too much of the unseen for me.

To me, the film's actual message got lost while I was asking "But what about…?" and "He did what?" along the way. Which is too bad.

Featured this week (end of May 2022) in digital screenings from Chicago Japan Film Collective.

When choosing films to watch, I'm really bad about looking at what other works I might have seen by the same director. It's much more likely that I would notice a common actor—of course, because (usually) their faces are visible. So it wasn't until after watching My House, while looking for more background and marking it as viewed on my various tracking sites (there's a universe outside Trakt?!), that the title of another Tsutsumi film caught my eye: The House Where the Mermaid Sleeps (2018).* I happened upon that one while unable to sleep on a transatlantic flight not too long after it came out, so it was loaded on the plane's entertainment system. Mermaid was a superb choice for keeping me awake.

My House didn't pack quite the same emotional punch for me, but it's anyone's guess whether that's because I'm different, because Tsutsumi's style improved in the six years between films, some combination of both, or something else entirely. Still, it makes for a surprisingly compelling watch. Having seen Motofumi Hasekawa's Arano (2020)^ just a day before, the contrast is striking. Both films run at a pretty leisurely pace; but where Hasekawa seemed to stretch a limited narrative to fit a feature film's runtime, Tsutsumi took a complex interplay of social dynamics and distilled it down to the essentials that could be shown in just 90 minutes.

I won't say that My House has a satisfying ending—plenty is left open—but it certainly does make a lingering point.

* — https://trakt.tv/movies/the-house-where-the-mermaid-sleeps-2018
^ — https://trakt.tv/movies/arano-2020

Featured this week (end of May 2022) in digital screenings from Chicago Japan Film Collective.

Sedate pacing is a staple of Japanese cinema, as are stunningly gorgeous visuals. Arano turns both of those up to 11—with mixed results.

I haven't the words to describe this film's beautiful landscape shots. They could easily replace any tourism advertisement.

This script, however, felt stretched to fill a feature-film runtime. In between those breathtaking landscapes are a number of moments that simply drag on. Presumably this is so the viewer can spend more time with the characters and get to know them, but it didn't seem to work in my case. However, if the intent was for the audience to have ample time to study every single piece of set dressing in the background while the characters disappear off screen, that was successful.

In the end, I'm trying not to be too hard on this film. It begins with an unusual premise, upon whose strength I chose this film as one of five to view from the CJFC 2022 slate. What's hard to get past is the disappointment of knowing so little about these characters despite spending just over an hour with them. That starting premise did not yield as deep and rich a story as I'd hoped.

All right, this third installment of the Kingsman series indeed did not feature Eggsy. I was correctly informed back in 2018, when I reviewed the second. (https://trakt.tv/comments/200749)

I was pleasantly surprised, then, that this prequel format worked as well as it did. My concerns then about dumping the whole core cast were unfounded. In fact, the whole Oxford family (and staff) were quite good together.

Four-letter words are again on prominent display throughout this script—though not nearly to the same degree as in The Golden Circle—which bothered me again. But this time, it was down to believability for various combinations of time period and character, rather than a sense of lazy writing. (I'm still not sure what they were going for with Rasputin, the sex-obsessed priest, because the obvious gag seems too obvious.)

Perhaps most impressively, the writers actually noticed that the final battle created a slight problem, and included dialogue about it. I was wondering, "How will they get down?" from the moment Shola grabbed the lift rope. Said problem was, of course, hand-waved away by a scene cut, but fine. Whatever. The characters at least mentioned it.

This film certainly does not belong in the "disappointment" bin alongside its predecessor. It's reasonably fun, if a bit slow at times, and gives us a nice backdrop to explain why things work the way they do way back in the first film. As a bonus, many of the events are based on true history—which is a very nice touch.*

* — Except for Hitler meeting Stalin in the mid-credits scene. That didn't really add anything.

Spoiler-free summary: The Prestige is a compellingly-told story about two deeply unlikable magicians.

For Angier's part, his obsession is clearly unhealthy. Cutter tells him as much, as does Tesla. He appeared to be friendly with Borden before the incident, and I'm not sure his transformation into a revenge-obsessed Lord is believable. Of course his anger is believable, but where did he get such vast amounts of money if his magic career was struggling due to Borden's continuing sabotage?

Then there's Borden: Whether or not he could remember which knot he tied that fateful night, I place at his feet all of the blame for Angier's self-destruction. Alfred never comes across as sorry in the least for his possible role in Julia's death. Presumably at that point in time, he wasn't living "half a life" yet, because The Transported Man wasn't yet being performed, so it can only have been him on that stage. In the aftermath, he didn't even need to help Angier. Simply not sabotaging the career of the man whose wife he might have killed would have been enough to satisfy me.

They're both complete jerks to each other, and one might reasonably expect Victorian men to have more honor than either displayed. It's frankly a bit disgusting how much intrigue Nolan wrung out of these two hotheaded pricks.

Sometimes a film turns me off and I can't explain why. This time, thought, the reason is easy to put into words: It's too much like Fargo, another so-called dark comedy that made me tune out within the first half-hour. So I guess a good tl;dr would be: Watch this if you liked Fargo, and skip it if you didn't.

I've now noticed that my rating of that other film is far too high, but there's no way I'm rewatching it to assign a more accurate score. Since I don't like changing my ratings if it's been a while since I saw something, it'll just have to stay.

But back to A Dog's Breakfast. Aside from the immediately obvious parallels to another film I couldn't stand, this is just such a disappointment for anyone who, like me, saw Stargate Atlantis and wanted to see David Hewlett play someone other than Rodney McKay. Unfortunately, Patrick is Rodney, but with more neuroses and less intelligence. And sure, in the first few minutes I grinned a little at how similar the characters were, but the amusement passed quickly.

One could argue that I shouldn't even rate this movie at all, because I spent about two-thirds of it playing games on my phone to alleviate the tedium. Even I used to think that way until I realized that such behavior is a very useful hint, to be used when rating.

Having never truly seen the full movie until now, I was unaware that Wil Wheaton played a role in this. Not that he had much to do, but it's still neat that genius-boy Wesley Crusher was in this mad-scientist adventure, I guess. (Too bad his role here is no genius.)

Robin Williams carries the script, as one might expect. Most scenes with him are pretty great, despite an inexplicable blue light reflected in his glasses in nearly every closeup.

Overall, however, I don't think the script holds up very well. It's hard to put my finger on why, though it might be largely thanks to a cast of one-dimensional characters. We don't actually get to see much of Philip's relationship with Sarah; it's thrust upon us as a plot device, to give him a reason for all the silly stunts with the flubber later in the movie. Even Hoenicker is a walking, talking plot device—an excuse for that flubber-boosted "battle" in the library.

I'll just blame the script's many shortcomings on its age and origins. This is ultimately a remake of an adaptation, following a 1961 film (The Absent-Minded Professor) that was itself based on a short story from 1943. I'm not surprised at all that a 90-minute film based on a story from a 1940s magazine would have trouble presenting a compelling narrative. Certainly, it's been done, but it's hard. And in this case, there's an obvious "Disney remake" factor, too. That ol' Disney, always trying to make another buck off its own past material…

This film might not blaze any new trails in the "Disney movie" genre, but it certainly puts a unique Spin on things.

While I admit that there were multiple points during the story that made me roll my eyes and mutter, "Could you not use that cliché?", there's a gravity to this picture. Unlike many Disney productions, the main characters are believable. Little tidbits that seem thrown in to feel current (such as "Tik-Tacos") can't hide Avantika's acting skills—nor Meera Syal's, nor Abhay Deol's.

Most importantly, though, I think this came out at perhaps the best possible time in history. We're living in an era of unprecedented creative tools, widely (and often freely) available. The one thing I would change about the script is its subtle emphasis on equipment. Just by spending a bit of time in her school's media lab (surely they have one, given everything else we see), Rhea could have digitized everything and created her mix entirely in an audio editor, on the computer she already had at home. I realize that doesn't fit with the DJ theme, but her friends bringing over a bunch of gear so she can get started sends the wrong message—to say nothing of the brand-new setup offered as a prize at the Beatmasters competition.

To mitigate the focus on equipment, I think this movie should have shown a bit more use of school/public resources. Maybe not every high school or library will have music-production gear, but many do. This story's strongest element is the push to try creating things. Its target audience should see that the tools might be easier to find than they think.

Perhaps the most amusing part of this film is how we have, once again, a large (presumably underground) facility suspended in the middle of a deep hole in the rock with no safety rails. :joy_cat:

Honestly, this movie is great even though one could probably poke some gate-sized holes in parts of the story with a bit of determination. The only thing that could have made it better was more Teal'c, more O'Neill, and/or more Hammond (especially in light of Don S. Davis' passing shortly before release).

Well, I also would have liked to see the alternate timeline's Stargate Command facility at McMurdo before it was destroyed, but we can't have everything. That would have been a pretty major scenic construction expense for little story benefit.

For fun, I decided to see why Pluto TV's version showed up as 1h43m long, when IMDB and every other service (10 at time of writing) has a 1h38m cut. To do so, I put Pluto on a second monitor and muted it, starting both videos as close together as I could.

In doing so, I found the reason: Ads. While Roku Channel also has ads, Pluto is the only service to include the ads as part of the runtime. I've no idea why they do so, but maybe it means the ads are actually encoded into the video stream instead of being served separately. (Most ad-supported streaming services, including Roku's, fetch ads separately, presumably so they're easy to change depending on demographic targeting and/or which advertisers are willing to pay.) What an odd implementation decision…

The absolute cheek of Hulu calling this a "Hulu Original" when it was originally announced in 2012, got stuck in development hell at 20th Century Fox, then was planned to release under Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures, then the release was postponed, re-announced, delayed again before the film leaked a few months ago…

Hulu, you had nothing to do with creating this movie; please don't brand it like you did.

I'm also interested in any background on why the version Hulu released this week runs only 94 minutes, when IMDB indicates the runtime should be 100 minutes. What did they cut? I wonder…

I have to admit that it's fun. The characters are all pretty flat, even Roy, but the concept is cool enough even if Mel Gibson makes for a really lame villain with no depth whatsoever.

Where others objected to the title, I thought "Boss Level" was fairly apt. Roy's experience mirrors what a gamer might have to do in order to clear a particularly difficult level in a video game. That worked really well for me—much better than the characters.

You think Selina Lo ever got tired of saying, "I am Guan Yin, and Guan Yin has done this"? :joy:

Forgetting for a moment that the conviction of Nic Cage's character was based on a legal myth—which invalidates the film's entire premise of a paroled ex-ranger being "in the wrong place at the wrong time" during a coordinated escape attempt—there's still a lot of crap in this movie to write up. I'm not even going to nitpick; it's just too easy.

Maybe this is what I get for plopping movies onto my watchlist based on a passing mention in someone's tangentially related YouTube video (about the real "con air" service that shuttles prisoners around the United States) and a glance at the cast list. As excited as I was to see him in something else, Colm Meaney's role wasn't really big enough to make the whole thing worth watching.

This also gave me a nice glimpse into why I see so many jokes about Nic Cage's acting. Cameron Poe is absolutely the most generic player on screen for the entire almost-two hours. Steve Buscemi, Dave Chappelle, Nick Chinlund, John Cusack, Steve Eastin, M.C. Gainey, John Malkovich, and even Renoly Santiago (who barely had any screen time or dialogue) all managed to be play interesting characters than our hero. It's especially funny in Malkovich's case, as he was allegedly quite unhappy during production due to constant rewrites making it impossible for him to get a real grip on his role.

I could point out many mistakes in continuity, geography, physics, and other areas—but I promised not to nitpick. Suffice it to say, by halfway through the climax I was trying very hard not to roll my eyeballs all the way around. Are we absolutely sure that Michael Bay wasn't involved in this film's effects work? Jaysus (love you, Colm), every object that so much as tapped another seemed to explode in a ball of sparks and flames…

Enough said. These old, over-the-top action flicks are definitely not my thing. Someday I'll learn not to watch things just because an actor I like is listed as part of the cast.

At time of writing, this documentary is available for free on YouTube, published by DeepMind itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y

While true that this documentary doesn't go into very much depth on the technical side of things, it's quite effective at covering the human story. My inner geek would have liked more (and clearer) shots of the many monitoring displays showing AlphaGo the program's current state and operating metrics during the games, but that wasn't the point of AlphaGo the film.

Surely if I enjoyed watching this, as one who wouldn't even know where the valid moves on a Go board are, an actual Go player would get even more out of it because they would recognize the significance of Move 37, and Move 78, instead of leaning on the commentators (as I did) to glean some shred of understanding.

The reason I haven't awarded a perfect 10/10 rating, however, is that an entire thread is left loose: AlphaGo never, as far as we know, rose above its tendency to get "delusional" in the later stages of a game. This shortcoming, which played a big role in the "plot" leading up to the tournament in Korea, came up again later only in passing. Even if it was just one more text banner at the end, with the others about Lee Sedol, Fan Hui, and the worldwide Go board supply, addressing even plans to solve that one mandelbug would have made this documentary fully satisfying and complete.

One of the most blatantly paint-by-numbers films I've ever watched.

Audio throughout felt just a bit off in recording, editing, and dialogue delivery. So many lines had a distinct "punch-in" effect, where some background sound abruptly started and stopped around the words.

Some of the sound issues might have been forgivable if the script and cinematography had held up their parts… But since I've said that, it's obvious that I thought they failed to do so.

Right from the very first shot, all of the camera angles used to show the characters actually performing gymnastics—one might argue, the very point of watching a gymnastics-focused movie—made zero sense. Ceiling cameras pointed in weird directions, capturing an image that was often practically upside down, were the norm for this film… at least, when the camera wasn't focused on closeups.

I'm not sure what director Clay Glen was thinking. The closeups were fine, if a bit overused. I just don't understand why more "normal" shots of the gymnasts' performances weren't shown. Run-of-the-mill broadcast footage of Olympic gymnasts keeps the athlete's whole body in view, so the audience can appreciate all of their technique. Maybe traditional shots would have revealed that the performers were actually doubles? (The credits did list a lot of them.) Even so, I think the production could have done better with the camera work.

And finally, the script. It's really generic, despite attempts to add twists to Kelly's backstory. I will make a conscious effort to unlearn anything this film might have "taught me" about gymnastics or Australia, because everyone and everything seemed really stereotyped.

Not sure what's up with the runtime. IMDB says 93 mins, but Amazon's copy and the official blu-ray runtime both come to 96 minutes. So at time of writing, I spent about 3 mins longer watching this than my Trakt stats will reflect. My guess is something to do with PAL vs. NTSC frame rates. That's always a risk with foreign content, since so many more countries use PAL standards than NTSC.

First things first: What the f**k is up with the music choices?! The original tracks were fine, but I don't think a single licensed song fit the tone of where it appeared in the film.

Now then.

I'm awarding this 8/10 despite shortcomings listed below, because it still held my attention and got me to care about the protagonists. Hope springs eternal from the set-up for a sequel—I want to learn more about these people.

Someone needs a lesson in writing villains, though. One antagonist was just a one-note, power-mad asshole; the other just took whichever side the story required. Not much of a character, was he? (This could mean either of them, and I intended so.)

Nitpicking is more than I want to get into for this, but a couple things deserve it. First, tire tracks in the grass that shouldn't be there (before Andy & Booker enter Copley's house the first time). And second, get outta here with Merrick pointing a gun at Andy in the penthouse. Calling her selfish is just projection.

Broadly speaking, there are a lot of broad strokes in this script. The premise is intriguing, but the story doesn't really flesh it out—obvious sequel bait. The characters make lots of philosophical comments (some more "I'm 14 and this is deep" than actually philosophical, to be fair)—but that plot thread is pretty thin at best.

This being a Netflix production, I guess they decided it was OK to borrow some elements of their own series Sense8 (in that all of the "immortals" are kind of "linked" telepathically or something). Cool, I guess.

Ultimately, this isn't a bad film. It's actually quite enjoyable on the right occasion. But as much as I did enjoy it, I can easily see parts where it could have been better.

I was pleasantly surprised by the layers of parody and homage in the screenplay.

On the surface, this is Yet Another Animated Superhero Film. Deep down… well, it's still that. As it's targeted at younger audiences, the plot is neither complex nor filled with unpredictable twists. Older viewers like myself will see everything coming from miles away—but it's a fairly enjoyable ride.

Something about the vocal performances, and/or how they were tied into the character models, felt "off" the whole time, unfortunately. Other animation studios have a better handle on melding the elements of an animated character into one cohesive whole, but I should also cut DreamWorks Animation some slack on this ten-year-old film.

What makes this a solid 7/10 for me despite the predictable story beats and technical production values was the core of this story: Megamind's development as a person. In the end, he's the only important thing in the movie. Sure, the action sequences were pretty well done. Yes, Minion was a great (riff on the archetype of) sidekick. But if Megamind didn't grow and change as the story progressed, this would have fallen flat.

In a perfect world, the deus ex machina part of the ending when Metroman "came back" would have been real, but I'm nitpicking again.

Worth a watch. Maybe don't buy it for your permanent library, but Megamind is certainly good enough for some evening when you want something decently amusing to watch that won't require a ton of focus to understand.

When I impulsively added this seemingly obscure trucker film to my watchlist,* I had no idea it would turn out to touch on the civil issues of today's America. In the era of #DefundThePolice, this blast from the past seems a pointed commentary on the same police issues—overuse of force, abuse of power—still facing us over 40 years later.

Unfortunately I wouldn't call the script or its execution "stellar", but Convoy worked hard to earn my 5/10 rating by weaving the C. W. McCall song in through editing and managing a few good tugs of the ol' heartstrings. Without those regularly spaced positives, I think the level of flat caricature on display deserved considerably less.

A good villain is relatable, but Lyle "Cottonmouth" Wallace is merely a figurative goateed cardboard cutout, "evil" for one reason only: The story demands an antagonist. We don't know why he hates Duck.

Similarly, a good hero has flaws, but Martin "Rubber Duck" Penwald stands on a golden pedestal, a quintessential "hero". Why is he the hero? Because the story demands a protagonist. He always does the right thing, and never makes a single mistake. (This is debatable, I suppose, but so is my entire thesis here.) Duck is "perfectly rebellious in every way", to paraphrase Mary Poppins.

The side characters, too, are painted with only the broadest of strokes. Melissa, "Pig Pen"/"Love Machine", "Widow", "Spider Mike"… every one is a flat stereotype (or archetype) with no nuance. The romantic chemistry between Duck and either of the two women he gets (more "quintessential hero" material here) is just not there. It's even less believable than Sam Malone with Diane Chambers (Cheers), or even Chakotay with Seven of Nine (Star Trek: Voyager).

The nearly one-dimensional characters and shoestring storyline might be (somewhat) forgivable if the production values had been better. But it would be hard not to improve on the sloppy dialogue replacements, awkward editing, and awful fake-slow-motion stunt shots.

It was a good concept. It should have been better. Convoy really could have used another script rewrite (or two), and… I'd say "a bigger budget", but surely $12 million should have been enough for action shots that don't play back at half speed?

* — Bo Time Gaming on YouTube mentioned the film a couple times during one War Thunder match, and references to the song are peppered through the TBLF squad's tank battles when they all roll down streets together. I generally appreciate Bo's sense of humor and taste in media references, so giving Convoy a watch seemed like a good idea. It didn't sound all that different from Smokey and the Bandit—which I hoped this would match for entertainment value.

Pfft, maybe it was green screen footage matted onto an old photo, hmm? The hotel really isn't that big of a tell.

Gotta love how Simone's character editor conveniently hides all the right spots, when a real character editor hides nothing. Hollywood… Gotta keep those PG ratings, huh? Especially funny considering the in-dialogue comments about Simone doing nudity in her films.

Why does the trunk sink? That's not how physics, not unless it has holes in it (computer disks aren't that heavy.

I am 95% certain that floppy drives can't be ejected through software that way—especially the older type shown on this particular computer. Granted, I'm too young to have used floppies much (though my first laptop had a floppy drive built in), but that kind of physical turn-switch? Nah, that's not getting ejected by anything but the physical action of turning the lever back. (Also, Lainey pulled the ejected disk from the gap between a filler panel and the case, not a floppy drive slot.)

Also, apparently Lainey is a Wesley Crusher–level whiz kid. What a deus ex Lainey that was.

Goodness knows I can be critical of technical errors in visual media—maybe even overly so. But I'm certainly not unaware of the other elements. Though the execution of S1m0ne's premise might require suspending one's disbelief rather more than usual, from a technical-accuracy standpoint, the premise itself is interesting.

True, the characters tend toward flat caricatures—but ultimately, S1m0ne is a comedy. Comedies frequently take shortcuts instead of creating truly realized characters. This wholly expected shortcoming is worth a half-point deduction at most.

My nitpicks (above the break) aside, exploring society's attitudes toward celebrities in this way is perhaps even more thought-provoking now than it was when S1m0ne came out nearly 18 years ago. Since then, Yamaha's VOCALOID product line (initially released in 2004) has given us virtual singers. The popularity of many music producers' works using VOCALOID gave rise to entire concert tours featuring 3D-animated, pseudo-holographic avatars of the VOCALOID voice cast, played to thousands of fans at a time.

More recently, a number of "Virtual YouTubers" have gained popularity. While these animated characters are usually based on a real voice actor, and often take advantage of how much cheaper motion-capture technology has become—they amass fans in much the same way Simone does. The speed with which the production outfits behind such VTubers churn out new content would be difficult (or even impossible) to maintain if they aimed for photorealistic characters instead—character models and their costumes/props clipping through each other would break that illusion immediately for most current channels—but we definitely have the tech right now to pull it off in slow-paced environments like film production. Heck, we've had the tech for at least a decade. It's just a lot cheaper now than when James Cameron made Avatar (2009).

We must also note the fast evolution of deepfake video manipulation, real-time performance capture, video performance mapping, limited-sample voice synthesis, virtual reality, and so many more techniques & technologies based on machine learning. Niccol simply got some of the details wrong. The fundamental thesis of S1m0ne is sound, and we're closer to it than ever.

Watch it for the animation. But if you've ever seen a Shinkai film before, you knew that.

I'm guilty of allowing major holes in my familiarity with Makoto Shinkai's films. I've seen She and Her Cat, Your Name., The Garden of Words, and 5 Centimeters Per Second—which leaves the majority of his work unseen. However, those cover enough of a time range that I can see Shinkai both has and hasn't always made movies like this. (I know: "What does that mean?!" Keep reading.)

By that, I mean that he's basically always had a certain focus on three things: Stunning visuals, beautiful music, and teenage romance. If I was allowed one and only one critique of Weathering With You, it would be the awful English title translation that the film feels a little too much like Your Name. On the most basic, structural level, it goes through a very similar "false resolution" before getting into the true conflict. Both stories ultimately hinge on old legends made manifest, though in different ways. And if we get into the details a bit more, things like Taki and Hodaka both chasing after their respective love interests through physically demanding journeys across the landscape stand out.

Actually, I have to modify some of that. Weathering With You is not "too much like Your Name." as much as it is "not enough like Your Name. where it counts". The writing in this latest release feels insufficiently edited. It doesn't flow quite as well.

None of this is to say that the movie isn't worth seeing! It very much is. Just do your best not to get lost, and pay attention, because lots of things are only ever mentioned (or shown) once and you'll miss them if you so much as blink at the wrong time.

Actually worse than I expected. This is what I get for letting someone else pick a random movie when we decided to toss one on at 23:00. Some reboot films are merely disappointing, but this movie? I want my two hours back.

Well, not all of it, since I did have fun prying open a bunch of holes in the script. Even pissed off the one who picked this movie, who was trying to take it seriously (seriously?!) and get immersed in the story (what story?!?!).

But the special effects are a joke. I thought the computer-generated fire in The Last Ship's latter seasons was awful, but this movie snatched that crown away handily. So bad…

To top it all off, the "graphic nudity" promised by the MPAA's "R" rating was only an unnecessarily long joke about Zac Efron touching a dead man's penis. If I'm gonna sit through a clunker like this, the least I could get out of it is some pretty tits!

I honestly wonder why any of the actors in this reboot of Baywatch agreed to do it. There are so many big-name stars here, and the script is clearly shite. They (or their agents) must have known what they were getting into, and still did it anyway.