This was... fine, I guess? I think I would have preferred more of a "Death of Stalin" treatment than outright satire, because when you see characters like the POTUS act like outright idiots, it takes away some of the bite. Although, the idea that they could have averted disaster but decided not to because there was a business opportunity was really excellent.
I thought the central moment of the "Don't Look Up" political movement, was sadly poorly executed. I think maybe because the idea was WAY too outrageous. It's one thing to hurt yourself and your country because you feel it will hurt the other side more, but it's another to, like, not look up at the sky.
Ultimately, with this film, either the satire doesn't land, or it lands with a crowd that already believes in climate change, and thus, people for whom the satire is facile. It also avoided very clearly exploring political lines (for instance, by making the POTUS some kind of female Clinton but with Trump-like nepotism) so it lost a lot of its verisimilitude by trying to not take political sides.
I don't know if there's a better way to explore this idea. Perhaps this was the best story possible for this exact idea.
This may very well be the quintessential "so bad it's good" movie. It's over the top, cheesy, and filled with moments that will make you gape in disbelief. Plus, it's got a smoking-hot Denise Richards showing just how much she wanted a Hollywood career by giving the best performance she possibly could under the circumstances, and a young Paul Walker who quickly gets replaced by a robot dinosaur once a lion mauls him. It's also got stuff like a T-rex doing charades, so yeah.
Honestly, it's absolutely a B movie, but its plot moves at 100 mph and is never boring. I've watched recent Hollywood blockbusters that held my attention far less.
This is a tone-perfect adaptation of Herbert's novel, but even if it weren't, I could watch brutalist architecture take off and land all day. An absolute visual triumph.
A killer concept with a very bland execution. Featuring Ryan Reynolds in the daring role of Ryan Reynolds.
What really hurts this movie is the way the real-world game concepts take second seat whenever the plot needs something to happen, and no amount of stupid Twitch streamer reaction shots can save the verisimilitude. There's also a really bland romance subplot shoehorned in that brings nothing to the story and is so blindingly obvious its resolution feels more like relief than payoff.
Also, those Disney "Easter eggs" were dinosaur-sized. Disney really, REALLY didn't want you to miss them.
That being said, Taika Waititi makes a really excellent Disney villain, even when his material kind of sucks.
This is very much a one-joke indie SF film that doesn't really end. I thought the girl's performance was great, and some of the writing around two clueless Millennials trying to disconnect was fun, but overall the movie was a big waste of time. One thing that stands out to me, though, is how genuine the relationship between the leads felt. It really felt like they loved each other despite their mutual limitations.
Can't say I recommend it, though.
The comparisons to John Wick are inevitable, and they're not in this movie's favor. John Wick is just a tighter, more stylish, more visceral version of this story. That being said, Bob Odenkirk is fantastic, and arguably better than Keanu Reeves. Not a bad way to spend a hour and a half.
Marketing really dropped the ball on this one by letting everyone assume it was "Nicolas Cage as John Wick but with a pig." It's a smart, forlorn, reflective character piece about a broken man who deeply cares for something authentic in an empty world. I'd say this is Nicolas Cage's best performance since Adaptation, but honestly, this understated and quiet film blows everything he's done out of the water.
Do NOT go into this one expecting an action flick. This is a slow indie film with a relentless focus on its main character. The most unclassifiable movie I've seen in a long while, and one that stays with you long after the credits roll.
I didn't expect to like this one as much as I did. In structure, it's a paint-by-numbers rom-com, but the humor is genuinely funny, and the characters behave in ways that are true to their character instead of chasing script beats. It's still a stretch that Theron's character would fall for Rogen's, but it's a minor gripe because they have actual chemistry on screen. It also shows that Rogen has something to actually say about politics, and so his character's arc feels genuine instead of just required for the movie to reach its conclusion. I'm not saying it's a deep thinker of a movie, but it has more authenticity than I've seen in similar movies before.
Oh, and Theron is mesmerizingly beautiful AND hilarious in this.
This movie features the most ludicrous and absurd scientific concepts and the most pointless and annoying human characters in recent memory. That makes it the Godzilla movie that's the most faithful to the spirit of the Japanese originals, and I say that as a huge kaiju nerd.
Lots of satisfying fights makes this one an easy recommendation for Godzilla fans, though I have to admit I still highly prefer the rubber suit and the original Godzilla attack music. Something about the over-expressive Godzilla face and the small, beady eyes makes this one kind of disappointing to watch, though I love the way he moves.
So the first Wonder Woman movie was a fluke and DC is back to making mediocre movies. Good to know.
That was... fine? Not amazing. Sure, the core message is cute and meaningful, but something about the execution leaves much to be desired. This is nowhere near the brilliance and depth of Coco, nor does it have anywhere near the emotional catharsis of Inside Out. Still better than most animation movies out there, clearly, but not one of Pixar's best.
Well, that was pretty terrible. Emma Thompson's character is an awful human being without any redeeming value, and Mindy Kaling plays a bubbling woman whose defined by exactly two traits: 1) she's a woman of color, and 2) she loves the boring, unfunny show the story is about.
What's particularly egregious about this movie is how dumb it is with its politics. It REALLY wants to make a point about diversity and the domination of white men, and it does so with the subtlety of a Buzzfeed top ten list. It's just awful.
This was... great?!? I thought it would be a cheap nostalgia grab, but I couldn't have been more wrong. A fun, often hilarious movie that shows a hell of a lot of heart and does justice to the movies before it. Great feel-good movie, and just what the world needs in 2020.
Very cool concept, halfway between Matrix and Inception. Cool visuals. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't know what to do with its setting and ends up in a very disappointing place.
This is very much the most boring and predictable story you can tell about the Singularity. Big meh.
The idea is cute: a boy of mixed Jewish/Muslim heritage reconciles the two sides of his family with food. Unfortunately, the story is very much paint-by-numbers, and the beats are ultra-predictable. The cultural conflict is also presented in a pretty patronizing way. Additionally, the entire movie rests on Abe's parents being extremely tone-deaf to the interests of their kid, and said kid unabashedly lying to them about going to work for an adult on the other side of town.
Noah Schnapp was pretty good, though, aside from the forced teenager lingo. #FellowKids
I do NOT get why this movie gets so much love.
I get that it's not meant to be a historical movie. It's a revenge exploitation flick set in WWII, and the bad guys being the target of revenge here are the Nazis. I get that. At the same time, there's something so utterly morally corrupt about creating an unrealistic fantasy where badass Jews torture Nazis. It's the kind of thinking that has led to America using torture on captives: ultimate evil requires an equal response. It's so much against the ethos of the survivors of the Holocaust that it's embarrassing to watch. It's misguided revenge porn.
Ah, but if only the story that was being told was better. As it is, it's not so much a story as much as a sequence of masturbatory dialogues where Tarantino gets to feel clever about himself. People talk and talk and talk, and although there is an overlying sense of tension, it's so predictable every time it becomes tedious. There's just so many times we can watch a Nazi being passive aggressive with an undercover Jew before the shtick becomes boring, and each of these last so damn long... You get twenty whole minutes of a Nazi talking racist shit until the inevitable violence happens and Tarantino gets his money shot. We're talking porn-levels of sophistication, here, except it's about murdering evil Nazis.
It's well-directed for sure, and Christoph Waltz and Mélanie Laurent do an amazing job, but man, that script is a big pile of self-indulgent crap. And I say this as someone who loves early Tarantino.
A naturalistic French film about an astronaut who must deal with the anxiety of being separated from her daughter as she's about to go to the ISS for one year. This movie is NOT an action movie, and not sci-fi in any way. What it is is a wonderful character study on the demands of parenthood in the context of a high-pressure career. The acting is understated yet powerful, the astronaut stuff feels super-realistic, and Eva Green is amazing in every scene she's in.
I love Jon Stewart and I'm definitely a Liberal, but this movie was just awful. It's Democrat America lost in the wilderness of the Trump years, looking for where they've gone wrong and unable to figure it out. Preachy, tone-deaf, and condescending.
A decent film, but it doesn't rival Tarkovsky's 1972 adaptation.
This version benefits from a much cleaner emotional arc. The characters make more sense, and the relationship between Kelvin and Rheya is much easier to grasp. Emotionally, the story makes more sense and is more rewarding. Still a haunting meditation on memory, grief, and loss.
What it lacks from the 1972 version, though, is this sense of utter alienness and dread. The planet Solaris feels a much smaller concern here, and the world itself is distant, not really a looming presence in the story. That was the one thing that made Tarkovsky's version so powerful, and it was truer to Stanislaw Lem's novel because of it.
I saw this film as a kid when it came out, and again recently. Objectively it's not a good movie with a bad script and abysmal science, but there's just something so compelling about it to me.
Could be the strange mix of Disney-like robots and oppressive darkness of the story made a strong impression on me; all I know is that, for me, The Black Hole has this unique quality to SF that you can find, say, in Tarkovsky's Solaris: a mix of dread and awe at the unknown, a sense that the universe is more dangerous and vast and wondrous that you can possibly imagine.
That, plus Maximilian the robot is such a fantastic villain.
What a weird, incoherent movie that was. Starts off great with great characters and a sense of mystery, devolves into a pseudo-Lynchian laboratory affair, and ends with a poor man's X-Men ripoff. Pacing is all over the place, story makes no sense, the twists (Area 51 and NOMAD/Damon) were dumb as hell.
Ending was kind of cool but felt out of a different movie altogether.
A movie that falls absymally short of its lofty ambitions. The script SERIOUSLY needed a polish pass to tighten everything and even correct typos and misused words. I think it's the first movie I've ever seen where that happens, and it did at least four times. Not sure why the actors couldn't tell the director his script was wrong, but I digress.
The film is wordy, and it features a lot of people talking at the camera as an exaggerated shaky cam films them at an odd angle. It feels like an episode of The Office without the jokes. Some of the acting is just godawful and on the nose, and the film's structure is a mess. What little tension there is at the beginning gets lost in the movie's own fascination with "Humans Two-Point-Zero" (come ON, people would say "Two-Point-Oh," for God's sake), then it devolves into a weird Cosmos pastiche without any proper payoff.
Too bad this script didn't get some more major polish time, because there were a few cool ideas and visuals in there.
Two hours of mind-numbing badness redeemed by 20 seconds of Nicolas Cage completely losing his sh*t at his car.
I watched episode 7 of the Mandalorian today, so "The Rise of Skywalker" isn't even the best Star Wars I've watched in the last 24 hours.
The story doesn't win points for originality, but wow, this turned out pretty great. The use of Vovinam (Vietnam's martial art) makes the action sequences fluid and dynamic, and Veronica Ngo kills it as Hai Phuong, bringing a guilt-ridden desperation to her performance. (And yes, she was totally wasted on The Last Jedi.) Not a groundbreaking action movie, but it's fresh and interesting.
Oh, wow, that movie was truly terrible. Like John Wick's stupid, mean, and lecherous younger brother. Tries so hard to be cool yet just comes off as corny as hell.
I really, REALLY liked it. It does something that's at the basis of my life-long enjoyment of giant monster movies really, really well, and some of the scenes had me bouncing in my seat with joy.
That being said... It's not a movie built along the lines of a modern blockbuster, at least not entirely, and for that I think it's not gonna be a huge tentpole success. People are gonna complain about character choices or dialogues or characterization. It's much more in line with the classic Godzilla formula, and THAT it does really well.
One of the big challenges of a monster movie is always to have a good balance of "monsters fighting" and "humans talking" in a way that builds tension and action, and this one, more than almost any other Godzilla movie, and more than 2014's take, was right on. Monster fights always had clear stakes, and the puny humans buzzing around had clear objectives (even if often it was just 'try and survive in the shitstorm of the century') and felt in their place as supporting characters in the monster drama.
So, in short... If you wanna see a pure, slick action movie, go see John Wick 3. If you want some of that designer-drug concentrated dose of entertainment you expect from a tentpole, you got Endgame. But if you ever felt a thrill watching Godzilla melt the rubber face off of another giant monster, you're in for a hell of a treat.
Well, damn.The reviews for this were good, but even by keeping my expectations in check I still ended up disappointed.
It's really a kids' movie, and not a very good one at that. It's not, say, The Incredibles where you can indulge in the fantasy as an adult and stll enjoy it... It's the kind of kids' movie that condescends to its audience. The Wizard and the bad guys are just terrible, barely on the level of a Scooby-Doo villain, and the entire conflict at the heart of the movie makes no sense.
There's a bit of humor in having a teenager in an adult superhero body, but most of those jokes were shown in the trailer or don't amount to much more than predictable humor. Worst, there's no attempt at all by Levi to act as if he's Billy Batson in Shazam's body... The two characters may as well be completely different people. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle this ain't.
A hard pass as far as I'm concerned.
Better action movie than Endgame. Fite me.
