Movies I wish I had skipped. This could be for any number of reasons: the film was made sloppily, the narrative didn’t engage me, or I simply could not connect with the film in any way for whatever reason.
I scrawled this note—thin and chicken scratched—in my notebook about an hour into J.A. Bayona’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the sequel to Colin Trevorrow’s smash-hit 2015 film Jurassic World (itself being a soft reboot of the Jurassic Park franchise envisioned by Steven Spielberg).
Action Point is like Jackass, in that it contains dangerous stunts and people finding humor in harming the human body. It is also far removed from Jackass, in that it is a narrative film. This is to say that, you know, it has a narrative.
This is the first misstep that Action Point makes. The plot goes about its business, setting up set pieces and montages that show off the back-breaking stunt gags. It does this fine. Sure, it can be funny the first or second time that Continue reading Action Point (2018) Movie Review→
Driving home from the theater last night, I saw something really quite lovely. Turning down a curved street, and entering my line of vision for no longer than a second, I saw two people in conversation sitting on a ledge outside of a hotel. The pair—one a man, his back to me, and the other a woman, a warm smile on her face and a soulful tenderness in her eyes—each sat with their legs pulled up to their chests, almost as if they were mirrors of each other.
They were experiencing a genuinely human moment, captured through the film of my windshield. It was a silent movie. It ran for 1.5 seconds or less. But that snippet had more life, energy, and emotion than every shot in Solo: A Star Wars Story put together.
Now, you may be thinking: what do two people sitting on a ledge in real life have to do with a multi-billion dollar franchise’s sequel/prequel? In execution: nothing.
The HBO film Fahrenheit 451, adapted from the book by Ray Bradbury, begins with a quote attributed to the Bill of Rights: “It is better to be happy than free.” The attribute is erroneous. It’s fake news. (See what they’re doing here?)
Ramin Bahrani adapts the Bradbury novel to address new media, and this fake quote encapsulates the central mission statement of the vague government body in the film. This is a government who tasks fire fighters with burning books instead of putting out fires, the aim being to Continue reading Fahrenheit 451 (2018) Movie Review→
Deanna (Melissa McCarthy) and her husband Dan (Matt Walsh) are dropping off their daughter Maddie (Molly Gordon) at the sorority house for her final year of college. Maddie isn’t out of the car more than a minute before Dan informs Deanna that he wants a divorce and is selling the house.
This instigates Deanna to go back to school and finish her degree, which she had to abandon 20 years earlier when she got pregnant. Now she will be attending college in the same graduating class as Continue reading Life of the Party (2018) Movie Review→
I have very little to say about Breaking In. My main takeaway is that it is the definition of average. A conventional home invasion movie that takes itself more seriously than a home invasion movie of this sort ought, there is little to chew on here.
The story is thin enough that the runtime can be graciously under 90 minutes, but it is also thin enough to make 90 minutes feel too long. Shaun Russell (Gabrielle Union) takes her two children to a hideaway estate in upstate Wisconsin. It is the high-security home of her deceased father, who had some vague ties to criminal Continue reading Breaking In (2018) Movie Review→
In Overboard, Kate (Anna Faris), a mother of three who is working two jobs in order to support her family and pay her way through nursing school, is hired to clean the yacht of a spoiled, wealthy man who has never worked a day in his life. The man is Leonardo (Eugenio Derbez), and he is about to take over his ailing father’s business.
You know what? If you like Super Troopers, then you might like Super Troopers 2. If you’re a die hard Broken Lizard fan, then you’ll probably find it uproarious.
I enjoy Super Troopers just fine. It’s the best thing I’ve seen from Broken Lizard when it comes to feature length affair. And Super Troopers 2 is better than a film like Club Dread, which left me baffled.
I Feel Pretty takes on a familiar cinematic conceit—think Big or body-swap comedies—where a woman named Renee (Amy Schumer) hits her head in an accident during SoulCycle and wakes up in the body of a perfectly gorgeous woman. At least, that’s what she thinks in her head.
Through the endless minutes of exposition at the front-end of The Titan, we hear a lot of what we have heard before in dystopian science fiction. Population is rising, while resources are dwindling. Pressures for survival have lit up violent conflicts across the world. Scientists and military personnel are desperate for a solution. Terraforming Saturn’s moon, Titan. Biogenetic enhancements to survive such a move. Medical trials gone wrong. Yadda yadda.
Rick Janssen (Sam Worthington) is one of these test subjects. A military man who was once thought MIA while in the Syrian desert, it is this incident that convinces the government that he is Continue reading The Titan (2018) Movie Review→
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