Similar to conversion camp com-drams like But I'm A Cheerleader and The Miseducation Of Cameron Post, this is sweet, charming and funny with a bunch of strong performances, but so mild as to only really have anything to say to tweens/early teens.
Rating: Good
This movie is charming, evocative and stylish, but it's also a jumble of ideas that never quite coalesce into a cohesive story so it's hard to settle in and enjoy it. It spends a lot of time setting up Inside Out-style rules and layered metaphors - all of which are a lot of work to get to the message 'appreciate life' - while regularly swerving into classic Pixar grumpy/enthusiastic buddy comedy or slowing down for Ratatouille-style appreciation of jazz or pizza or whatever. Nice enough, I preferred it to Coco, but it's not as good as Inside Out and I probably won't ever be tempted to watch it again.
Rating: Pretty Good.
This looks gorgeous - all the design work is fantastic, from the live-action production design through costume and make-up to the giant VFX cities. The direction's not bad either, though it has that 'visual effects artist's directorial debut' feel, all impossible angles and moves for the VFX shots, and locked-off medium and close-up shots for any other scene. Unfortunately, the script is dreadful. It's full of clunky exposition, the structure is a complete mess, and the characters at their most believable are walking collections of hackneyed cliches and tropes but don't even hit that a lot of the time.
I gave up on it halfway through; I may go back to it, but when I've already seen full-tilt sequences of giant walking cities battling and eating each other in the first twenty minutes, is it worth shrugging through more of this story in the hope that there'll be more city fight sequences that somehow up the ante?
Rating: Bad.
Slick but soulless, the latter surprisingly so from the director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hulk.
The storytelling is enjoyably lean in the first half, then frustratingly anaemic in the second. The action is exciting and well-choreographed if a little floaty and uncannily fast. The de-aging effects are mostly very solid (I imagine that if there was only the one, de-aged Will Smith in this movie then someone who had never heard of him could quite easily get through most of it without realising he was a visual effect). The acting is competent all-round, though they barely have anything to work with and Owen's accent wobbles a lot.
Outside of technological interest, not much stands out here. Certainly not as good as The One or Face/Off.
Rating: Fine.
Just watched this and not really sure what I think. It looked good, came up with some striking imagery, but I don't know what it was trying to say. It feels like a bunch of gritty real-world themes (mental illness, the economic divide, political riots) thrown at a comic book character without any sense of cohesion or thesis. It's just 'look how crazy and weird this guy is, look how angry people are, look what arseholes the rich are'. If anything, it seems very misanthropic - people are either arseholes or sheep in this movie. But again, I don't know if that's the intent of just the result.
Perhaps I'll now go read some amazing interpretation of the movie that convinces me it's genius, but until then I'm putting this down as a muddled style exercise.
Bet-hedging score: Fine.
Drew Barrymore's equivalent of a Happy Madison or Expendables picture - an excuse for her and her mates to have fun without really worrying about things like story or playing characters. There is almost zero conflict throughout this entire movie, it's inexplicably 1hr50m long, the derby scenes have very little sense of impact or speed, and all the Hurl Scout scenes feel like the business, staging and dialogue was figured out 5 minutes before they rolled. A good chunk of the excessive runtime is devoted to a pointless, dull post-Juno, post-Garden State romance where Page and some indie band guy absorb retro culture and have incredibly impractical underwater make-out sessions together.
Rating: Bad.
A clunky adaptation of the first two Discworld novels. It looks cheap, from the cinematography through the costumes and production design to the visual and special effects. It's mostly miscast, it fluffs every single comic and dramatic beat, and it fails to capture the 'hitchhiker's guide to high fantasy' feel of the original books. It needed to trim out unnecessary narrative to become a picaresque, episodic tale of Rincewind and Twoflower crashing through various situations, meeting fun characters and slowly becoming friends, with a heaping of wry parody on the side. Instead, it spends far too much time on the dull Unseen University story thread and rushes past the good stuff.
Rating: Bad.
Pretty much just copy-pasting my tweets here:
Tremors - stone-cold classic, full of great dialogue, nifty characterisation, Spielbergian setpieces....
Aftershocks - obviously cheaper but effects still pretty good, exactly the right amount of self-aware and cleverly builds on the original.
Back To Perfection - cheaper still, to its detriment (v ropey effects here), feels like a re-run of Aftershocks, takes too long to get going and doesn't tie its character threads together as nicely, but charming throughout and the last 40 mins or so are really strong.
The Legend Begins - the setting is a nice change-up, Gross gives a great performance (Drago is also cool) & the digital film makes it looks crisp. But it also looks holodeck fake (everything is so clean!) & the narrative is utterly flat. Nice fan-service but weak overall.
The Series - It's pretty bad. Painfully low budget and the stories/dialogue are too dull to make up for it. Also, it re-cast Nancy, Mindy and Jodi which is a shame as otherwise they're sticking to canon and it was really nice to see the original actors return in 3. Ah well, at least there's still Burt and Melvin (that little turd).
5 and 6 - I didn't tweet about these, but they were shit. Original creative team completely gone (except Michael Gross), bad creature redesigns, just tacky budget-basement creature features.
Shrieker Island - I have reviewed separately elsewhere on this blog.
(Really surprised this franchise hasn't had a sturdily-budgeted video game yet: it has such well-defined rulesets, mechanics & atmosphere. Would work perfectly as either a Telltaler or a sandbox surviver.)
Carries over the previous films' flaws - dreadful dialogue, paper-thin characters - while becoming increasingly cartoonish and repetitive. Gidorah's design is the first of the titans to feel more like an anime monster than a real giant creature, there's an ex-military Brit terrorist running around, and the titans stop to pose in front of extreme weather conditions every few minutes like they're getting their portraits spray-painted onto the side of a van. Granted it looks gnarly, but it's also a little cheap. Where Godzilla 1 and even occasionally Skull Island managed to convey a sense of grace and awe, here the titans feel more like pokemon and the overall tone is that of a Resident Evil movie.
The old Godzilla movies became progressively cheesier, of course, but they were also fun. Here, the endless cycle of 'monsters fight with bright lights going off', 'goody monster is taken down', 'human is nearly killed by baddy monster but then saved at the last second by recovered goody monster' is just tiring.
Rating: Bad.
The translation of 2D pokemon to 3D characters here is convincing and well-designed, they integrate into the live-action well, and the whole thing is well-directed with gorgeous locations and cinematography. Unfortunately, the story isn't up to much - the human protagonist is unlikeable and the rest are barely sketched in, there's no actual detection and the mystery is obvious, and the world-building is confusing (this may be because I've never consumed any Pokemon media before, but I felt the human-pokemon relations on a personal, citywide and global scale were unclear in themselves and in their relation to each other). A few of the more intimate action/comedy setpieces work well (e.g. the underground battle, the mime interrogation) but the movie has a tendency to slip into MCU style bland, noisy action. Also, Reynolds is on charm autopilot here, which is fine but never wonderful or hilarious and in fact a little wearing at times.
Rating: Meh.
Clunky, rudderless, empty. It's like it never got out of the scriptment stage, all clunky story beats and placeholder dialogue, and an ill-conceived ending where the circus claims to no longer have captive animals before showing a bunch of them (horses, monkeys and fish count!), the girl wows people with her scientific wonders which consist solely of a zoetrope that would have been old news twenty years earlier, and the boy's happy ending is getting to ride a dog.
Mostly comprising flat, medium shots, it has all the directorial verve of a tv advert. And the performances are professional but joyless. Even Dumbo himself is charmless - he has an utterly unexpressive face, and his huge baby-blue eyes do not work when framed with photoreal wrinkly elephant skin. He's not half as cute as, say, a real baby elephant.
Rating: Awful.
SPOILERS BELOW
I started watching Supernatural when it first came out and enjoyed it immediately. As the show continued to improve exponentially through the first five seasons, I grew to love it. Immediately after the creator, Eric Kripke, stepped down as showrunner once his 5-season plan had come to a satisfying close, however, the show took an immediate dip and got progressively worse. I watched it until around season 8 or 9, before having to give up on it. I later heard reports that around season 12 or so it had picked up again, and finally this year it got a planned ending with season 15 (despite COVID hitting when they had two episodes left to shoot, causing a long delay and presumably some compromises). So I've decided to do a re-watch, and post some brief thoughts per season on here, updating as I go.
Seasons 1 - 5: I've watched these probably 3 or 4 times now, and they're still great. Okay, so the first season has its share of anonymous episodes, but it never dips below solid. Overall, these seasons manage an impressive and successful mix of humour, horror, action and emo drama. It intertwines the MOTW episodes with the arc plot in clever ways and is always trying new things. And it may steal from a few places (Preacher, American Gods etc) but its lore, especially regarding demons and angels, is really cool. It even manages a satisfying ending!
Season 6: This season is, of course, faced with a satisfying ending that it has to move on from. Unfortunately, it doesn't do a great job - instead of building up slowly, within the first half of the first episode, Sam is back from the dead, as is Samuel, and Dean is out hunting with them again. There's also a whole family of hunters introduced, along with the whole 'alpha hunting' plotline. It's too much, too fast. Meanwhile, Lisa and Ben - Dean's happy ending - are perfunctorily swept aside and eventually are, in essence, retconned from the show (they have their memories wiped and Dean and Sam decide to never mention them again under penalty of nose-breaking). Where it should have taken its time to rebuild, and embraced the trickier remnants of S5, S6 does the opposite. It's not helped by the fact that a lot of the episodes are rather dull. There are a handful of standouts (though some of those feel a little derivative of previous seasons' hits), but the arc plot is leant on too heavily most of the time. Even that arc plot, while holding some interesting ideas, is rushed. Whereas Azazel wasn't even properly introduced until a little way into S2, here we've got civil war in Heaven, Eve, Crowley as King Of Hell, soulless Sam, Samuel, the alphas, and Purgatory, all jostling for position and being rushed through on the way to something else. Adding Eve/monsters/Purgatory as a counterpart to Lucifer/demons/Hell and God/angels+humans/Heaven is a really clever idea to tie all the random monsters into the overall lore and introduce a new big player, but it's rushed. Heavenly civil war and Castiel's god complex is another cool idea, but it's mostly done offscreen with Cas popping once an episode to say 'it's really bad up there you guys!' which is very unimaginative and unsatisfying. Not awful, but a very bumpy journey back towards the status quo.
Season 7: The episodes are, I think, a little more satisfying as individual pieces here than in S6, but again it wastes some good ideas, and feels repetitive. The Evil-God-Castiel cliffhanger is binned within half an episode and then Cas is sidelined for most of the season, the leviathan are just another type of human-possessor with some big weaknesses, and it's a cool idea to have Bobby show us ghost lore from the other side but it doesn't actually add anything to the story at all. Plus as always we've got Sam with some addiction type problem, Dean burying his anger, and Dean getting sent to an afterlife (which, judging from the standard pattern, he'll be back from in episode 1 of the next season). The overarching issue is that the show has lost some energy - not only are ideas getting mishandled and repeated, but a lot of the fun has gone. No more Impala, rock music, prank wars, silly disguises, high-concept episodes. Not bad just, like a hunter, grimly carrying on with a fake smile because that's the job.
Season 8: More of the same grim serialised trudge, though this season doesn't even come up with its own ideas to waste. The big mistake they make is to go the usual 'here's what they were doing the past year' flashback route - Purgatory isn't interesting in 2 minute low-budget chunks, and Sam's year of dogsitting is even worse. The 'Sam wants to leave, Dean has been through some shit' arcs are stale too. There are some tantalising steps further into the the 'ethically grey monsters' realm with the Benny stuff - this show is so close to being the Game Of Thrones of horror, where each species has its own shit to deal with and they all interact in interesting ways - but it's not quite there yet. Later on it re-runs the 'Sam is trying to achieve something huge and it's breaking him down' and the 'evil Castiel' plots. There is the occasional good episode but mostly it all feels very rigid - as well as the repetition, everyone's stuck in place. Sam and Dean are in the Men Of Letters bunker (which is another potentially cool slow-burn idea that instead got rushed through), Kevin is on the boat, Crowley is in Hell, and Castiel is an occasional guest. Demons and angels are now easy to kill, torture, etc. The tablet macguffins are just another version of the 'passage in an old book' that they've been finding since S1E1. Everything has become rote.
Watch-through note: I believe this is where I gave up the first time through. And I don't think I heard murmurings of it getting good again until S11 - I can only hope it picks up before that!
Season 9: more of the same. Some fun change-ups of the status quo - Crowley getting emotions and joining the Scooby gang, Garth becoming a werewolf - alleviate the drudge but they don't last for long. Having Sam and Dean decide to adopt a cold, professional relationship is a dreadful choice, even worse than the regular 'they've got secrets, one of them has a supernatural grimdark addiction' beats (which are also still here!). And we finally get an on-camera angelic civil war but it's painfully unimaginative.
Season 10: This season feels like the show spinning its tires, getting near to some good stuff but not committing to it. Instead of dealing with the Demon-Dean cliffhanger and the current Dean/Sam angst head on, it gets wiped away in 2 episodes, but then slowly built up again through the season. Likewise, Crowley's human side is kept in a holding pattern in a dreadful Dark Shadows-level sub-plot about his mum. (What they should have done is make Dean the season villain and have him hang with Crowley, and meanwhile team Sam up with Cas.). There are some good ideas (musical theatre, Cas' daughter, Charlie's return) but they get fumbled one way or another - they're missing the finesse in execution of the first 5 seasons. They do at least make a purposeful, welcome return to low-angst MOTW episodes - it's good to see goofy age-change spells and possessed power cords again - but these are still drowned out by an increasingly messy, nonsensical, dull arc plot.
Season 11: A high number of legit S1-5 quality great episodes (e.g. Baby and What We Imagine) compensate for a lot of sins. The arc plot starts off dull and messy (lots of laborious side-switching etc, and it still drowns out a lot of other stuff) but it gets a lot better as it goes along - the return of Chuck, Lucifer, and Metatron, Misha Collins' superb Mark Pellegrino impression, and the concept of the Darkness (if not the dull 'sexy sociopathic lady in a small dress' embodiment) are all executed really well - and Sam & Dean have some positive changes, laying some of them down as explicit new rules that could have come straight from a frustrated fan blog like this one - no supernatural addiction or ailment, less fighting, fewer secrets, more effort into saving innocents, promising to accept each other's death for realsies. They even remember to use licensed music effectively! Now if only they could either bin or fix Crowley's mum...
Season 12: A return to the serviceable but aimless style of S10. Almost completely serialised now, yet barely doing anything with most of its threads - Mary, Crowley and Lucifer are all dull, and while the British MoL change things up a bit they're incredibly cheesy. The finale is a complete mess and totally wastes Castiel and Crowley's deaths (end as you mean to go on in the latter's case, I guess - I don't think Crowley has really had much to do at least since the end of S6 if ever). Plus the score has changed to some weird dance-rock thing that sounds like it's from 2002. Oh well, at least they killed Rowena.
Season 13: Predictably enough, Rowena's back. Thankfully she's less annoying this time round, but it's symptomatic of a growing problem with the show. Deciding they've run out of ideas for one-off episodes and pretty much going all in on serialisation is potentially a solid move (though it loses a big part of the show's charm and character), but not when they make classic comic-book mistakes like character deaths losing all impact and being reversed with weak or zero explanation, continuity errors about things like power levels (e.g. Lucifer inexplicably gets his grace back), and Shepard Tone character arcs where someone will seem to be constantly going dark or getting depressed but never actually get there. And worst, the serialised plots are just dull - when I've come to write up these last two seasons I've struggled to remember what their arcs actually were. I guess the main one here is the alternate universe, which has potential but is massively underused until right at the end. They should have had the guts to set the entire season here - it would have made it memorable, provided them with new monsters and alternate versions of existing ones to do MOTWs with, let them play more with returning guest stars. To be blunt, they could have stolen all Fringe's best moves. (There's also Jack, who is likeable enough, but doesn't amount to much other than a half-hearted gesture towards the old 'battle for influence over a powerful young man's soul' set-up.) This one also, rather than building to a satisfying crescendo, goes through a bunch of fake endings before finishing with the most laughable wire-work fight I've ever seen and then showing another evil Dean in one of those stupid flat caps they seem so fond of with a look to camera, eye flash, freeze frame and fake zoom in. Along with the awful recent change in musical score, it all feels like a YouTube parody video.
Embarrassingly, the best episode is Wayward Sisters, the failed backdoor pilot. The combo of female secondary characters feels fresh, it's got some new monsters with nice make-up design, and it finally gives us a giant monster! (I know it's tough on a budget, but the endless line of monsters that are just humans with a couple of facial appliances has been worn thin since they called some nightclub bouncer types with glowing eyes 'dragons' and made leviathans human-sized rather than, y'know, leviathan.)
Season 14: People die, they come back, they die again, blah blah blah. Plotlines are abruptly thrown away or forgotten, actors are brought back for the sake of it (Pellegrino) or wasted (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Ineffectual.
Season 15: Chuck's flip to full-on villain may have been a bit sudden, but it certainly clears out the cobwebs in a similar way to how his return did in S11. And while the 'writer's room as big bad' conceit can sometimes get a little too Brechtian for this show, and is occasionally mishandled (the 'Sam and Dean lose their plot armour' episode is mostly funny and clever but occasionally loses track of its own ideas and of course the score treats it like a Looney Tunes episode. (I finally looked into this and apparently the show has had the same two composers throughout, so I have no idea why it has become so inconsistent in the final few seasons.) A good example is the Radio Shed scene - an overt riff on The Matrix Reloaded's Architect scene, with Chuck in front of a bunch of monitors talking about alternate Winchesters and about how this incarnation is 'the one'. On the one hand, it's a funny, ballsy choice, it's well executed and it cheekily promises the opposite of the Architect scene - Chuck declares his intention to simplify the continuity by clearing out all the alternate realities, failed spin-offs etc, a tantalising concept for many a stalwart Supernatural viewer. On the other hand, it fails to show why this Sam & Dean are any more special than the others; this combined with the lusty post-modernism creates that Brechtian distancing effect, making the same mistake as the Architect scene by leading the audience to care less about the characters and the outcome.
Generally, though, while still falling prey to the same serialised storytelling traps as most post-5 seasons, 15 at least has some palpable energy, some invention - you can feel the writers having fun.
Watch-through note: I'm currently at episode 13. Thanks to selfish people on the internet, I've gathered that Castiel gets killed or similar towards the end. This apparently has upset people because he's coded queer, specifically with Dean, so it's a case of Bury Your Gays (as well as general queerbaiting because they never come out). Halfway through the final season, I feel confident in saying this is complete nonsense. Castiel is asexual for the majority of the show, and when he does have sex it's exclusively with women. Dean is clearly straight, and no, a girl getting him to wear her underwear once and him liking it does not make him gay. The two barely have a friendship through the show, never mind romantic or sexual energy. Dean's motto is 'no chick-flick moments' and Castiel has muted emotions to say the least - even when they openly acknowledge each other as brothers or family it's still to little or no fanfare and frankly not even that convincing. There's only been one scene in the entire series where their dynamic has felt like anything other than that of a badly-trained dog trying to please its owner, halfway through the final season where they're in Purgatory trying to get the blossom. It's not enough to justify a queer reading of the relationship, and it's certainly not enough to justify spoiling the show for me because you want to cry that the writers didn't legitimise your bullshit shipping. All too often, shipping is just another avenue for toxic fan entitlement, attacking creators and each other because reality doesn't match the fantasies in their heads.
Aaaand finished. The second half of the season wasn't as good as the first half, the Chuck ending was a little weak (this may have been to do with COVID-19 - if so, I feel like they should have waited another six months rather than have one of their most important episodes be small numbers of people talking while socially distanced on big sets) though I liked his fate. The finale episode was excellent. Self-indulgent and soppy as hell, but that's the Supernatural way and it was absolutely the right decision to dedicate an entire episode to a coda, rather than having a big face off ten minutes before the end then rushing to wrap up. Honestly, I'll still be sticking to my S1-5 recommendation in the future, but maybe with the addendum that the curious could try out 11 and 15 too.
I watched the new Borat and actually enjoyed it quite a lot. It's fixed a lot of the issues in that it spends more time going after prejudices and showing up bigots and sleazebags, and the new character of Borat's daughter helps the movie expose aspects of the patriarchy that Borat couldn't really get to himself (see the feminist scene in the first one, which just falls apart because the feminists see right through him - here they can go after debutante balls and Christians who purport to be women's groups but choke on their tea at the mention of masturbation). Also, the choice to make it more politically-driven narratively not only lends itself to sharper set-ups but also repositions Borat as an ironic stereotype held up as a mirror rather than the plain stereotype for its own sake that he had become.
(Sadly, I have to report that the Giuliani scene has been hugely over-hyped. He's moderately creepy, but he genuinely is just tucking his shirt back into his trousers after the honeypot interviewer pulls it out to remove his microphone. I've seen people say this will be the end of his career, and that's just nonsense.)
Rating: Good.
I recently re-watched the first Borat, for I think the first time since I saw it on release. The thing with Borat (and Cohen's other characters) is that they started as fake interviewers who were designed to show up the interviewees' prejudices and assumptions and how easily they bought into these horrendous walking stereotypes. When Cohen makes a film of them with a fictional narrative and so on, it loses that satirical aspect and just becomes a comedy film with a horrendous stereotype at the centre of it. Even with the sections where he interacts with real people, there are a few moments where you see some Americans being patronising or openly bigoted (and this is a lot less shocking to see, to me at least, in 2020) but mainly they act pretty reasonably - it's more Jackass than Brass Eye.
Rating: Fine.
SPOILERS BELOW
Okay, so the original wasn't actually that good, but it at least had some charm and some cool effects. This sequel is just as sloppy with its writing, but has also switched to 'space army vs CG migraine' and is overpacked with characters who are obnoxious racist smarmballs, cannon fodder or just non-existent. It wheels out all the old white dudes from the first movie to float around not affecting the plot (Robert Loggia literally sits silently in the back of one scene), while binning or unceremoniously killing the female and/or black legacy characters (except for Whitmore's daughter, who is re-cast from Mae Whitman to a more conventionally attractive actor). Scientist #3 from the first movie gets a noble tragic death scene, Vivica Fox just gets dumped into some fire!
It doesn't even manage a proper ending, it just steals the 'they're like bees, there's a giant queen' Aliens bit, then sets up a (probably never going to happen) sequel.
Utterly unsatisfying.
Rating: Awful
(Watched 17/05/2020)
A nice mix of whimsy and low-key character drama. Lovely production and costume design, lots of warm, intimate performances. It sometimes feels rudderless and like it wants to go full-whimsy but never makes the leap, though these things actually fit well with the themes and mood of a movie about how to keep magic in your life while making real connections.
Rating: Good
Nice enough, but predictable and rather toothless.
Rating: Fine
(Watched 14/02/2020)
Superbad meets Mean Girls with a little Election sprinkled on top. Really fun, great performances, sweet, stylish.
Rating: Good
(Watched 26/01/2020)
Pretty awful. There are glimmers of what could have been a fun story, but instead Smith spends half the movie trying to make a touching drama and going on about how wonderful having a kid is, and the other half making extended references to his other movies and various other people's as well (and yes, this is his Askewniverse bread and butter, but he does it a LOT more here and clunkier).
Rating: Bad
(Watched 22/01/2020)
Attempts at cheeky Carry On style charm fall into a horrible misogynist, racist mess, as a rapist is forced by female military nurses to drug and rape fertile women before rescuing a harem of sex slaves from a bunch of reptile stand-ins for Arabs/Native Americans. All that aside, the film's not much cop in the acting, story or action stakes. The creature make-up is pretty cool.
Rating: Awful
(Watched 07/11/2019)
Very slight crime romantic comedy thing where not very much happens at all and none of the characters know each other by the end of the film. Pretty cool to see all the League Of Gentlemen AND Armstrong And Miller pop up, though.
Rating: Bad
Cool ideas and some neat low-budget design, but very slow with barely any characterisation or acting to speak of.
Rating: Bad
Very well-made - performances, direction, production design etc - but I suspect my knowledge of American history isn't strong enough for me to fully appreciate what is a pretty long film about political wranglings over a (hugely important, obv) constitutional amendment.
Rating: Good
(Watched 06/11/2019)
Fun but cheesy Black Mirror type story that runs about 15 minutes too long, gets into some unbelievable areas - an online game which is at once super-secret and insanely popular, silly-to-the-point-of-magic hacking - and wraps up a bit too neatly.
Rating: Fine
(Watched 05/11/2019)
Retains the charm of the first movie, but it's overstuffed. You've got:
Whiplash
Hammer
The government cracking down on Tony
Anton Venko
Tony's alcoholism/hubris
Tony's relationship with Pepper
Tony's paladium poisoning and search for a new element
Fury and Romanov
Those last two could be lifted out without affecting the narrative.
The entire first half hour tells you nothing that isn't repeated again in a couple of lines of dialogue anyway, that could be taken out too and used to strengthen the remaining elements.
Still full of fun stuff, but the bloat means it's not as rewatchable.
Rating: Good
A biopic from the writers of Ed Wood (and The People Vs Larry Flint, Man On The Moon, Big Eyes) about a stand-up who made a blaxploitation film. Eddie Murphy and Wesley Snipes in particular are great, though there are loads of great actors in it, it's funny and perhaps most importantly makes you want to watch the real movies. There aren't any huge surprises in it, but it's a fun watch.
Rating: Good
(Watched 25/10/2019)
Fine. One of those 'based on a true story' films that sticks close enough to the story that there isn't much of a structure so it has to make do with charm and style. It has both of those things, but not much else.
Rating: Fine
(Watched 24/10/2019)
SPOILERS BELOW
Quite enjoyed this. There's a lot of cool design and ideas going on, but it's hella slow, including the drip-feed of reveals/twists. One of those films that you're fan-editing in your head as you watch it.
Also, various things don't seem to make sense. If the Tet was able to send out thousands of Cruise clones programmed to kill humanity, why did it bother with all the memory-wipe fake story bullshit for the mop-up crew? Why did the Tet leave the space capsule floating around after using its crew for cloning?
Rating: Fine
(Watched 11/04/2013)
I forgot to review this at the time of watching and now can't remember my opinions on it, which I suppose is telling. It was okay; rather cliched and flat, but good performances make the most of those clichés and create little ups and downs where the script doesn't think to.
Rating: Fine
I'll just post my live-tweets of watching this movie from a few years ago (back when we were only allowed 70 characters per tweet!):
Promising motion comics titles, then straight into clunky exposition for first 5 minutes. Cool villain intro then, though
Not sure about a New Yawk Tank Girl in her mid-30s. Should be an English (Aussie at a push) teen really. Plus she's only been called Rebecca so far
Talking seductively to her scissors as she sensuously cuts holes in her tights
Music is awful and direction pretty flat - makes it feel cheap in the way the best low-budget films avoid
Giving a shit about her mates getting killed feels wrong too. Maybe this is the tragic past that will make her into Tank Girl proper
Actually that makes sense as it's 20mins in and we haven't seen her tank yet. Ugh, the comic didn't need an origin
Sexy slo-mo sand shower scene with a Portishead track! I'm sensing a 'Tank Girl is sexually attractive' subtext here
How to disgust a rapey prison guard into leaving - force a lesbian kiss on your fellow female inmate in front of him!
They captured the comics' barely-existent illogical plot, but forgot that it's like that to make room for fun, interesting stuff
Good soundtrack. Just got to the 1st animated bit - immediately 100 times better than the preceding 40mins!
Movie Tank Girl is a much more annoying character - think it's cos she's 'zany' & movie doesn't know like comics do that she's a bit of a prick
James Hong always ace though
Jesus Christ, sped-up fancy-dress montage. What is this, The Sweetest Thing?
Oh, an impromptu cringeworthy musical number. This IS The Sweetest Thing!
Is it just me or was comic Booga kind of sexy? The film one looks like The Grinch's in-bred cousin
Wait, in the film they're not mutant 'roos, they're humans injected with 'roo DNA as part of a super-soldier programme. Jeeez.
Tank Girl infiltrates weapons plant by pretending to be fashionista photoshoot director. This is some sub-Bugs Bunny, TMNT 2:Secret Of The Ooze-level shit
Hey, this Full Throttle-y action sequence with models and mattes and shit is pretty cool! (The game Full Throttle, not the Charlie's Angels sequel.)
And now it's back to doing things like mercilessly lampooning beatniks. Catch that zeitgeist, Tank Girl! Second dance sequence. Like Zion from Matrix Reloaded but with 6 guys in kangaroo outfits doing the macarena, one of them dry-humping Naomi Watts
Man, why couldn't 1995 Peter Jackson have written-directed Tank Girl? :'(
Phew, thank fuck that's over. Could possibly be edited down into a cool 5 minute fan-short
Most of the director's initial cut doesn't sound much of an improvement, but the opening sounds TONS better: http://www.twisted.org.uk/tg/movie.cut.html
Technically impressive, with game performances from the humans, and a few funny moments. But the story is a plothole-riddled, dull collection of tropes, most of the humour falls flat, the world-building doesn't make sense and worst of all the movie never makes the most of the puppets. Where Who Framed Roger Rabbit is jam-packed full of giant set-pieces and little moments from its toons, the puppet acting here is strangely lifeless.
More Bright than Roger Rabbit.
Rating: Bad
(Watched 18/09/2019)
Touching intimate drama. Great performances and detailed setting,
There's a slight dissonance in that the four leads are cast young and only Reilly has heavy prosthetics to overcome this in conveying his advanced years.
Rating: Good
Very enjoyable and interesting but the story and allegory sometimes tripped over each other (something that mother! avoided despite most likely being destined to be maligned where Us is praised).
Rating: Very good.
(Watched 30/03/2019)
Manages to be by far the best of the modern Transformers movies by having: empathetic characters; readable, tactile, interesting robot design; well-choreographed and directed fights; and some really nice transformation animations/effects.
This is a low bar, though, and the narrative has far too many plot strands (the usual Transformer war stuff, government agency allegiances, Iron Giant-esque kid/robot bonding, awkward - yet jarringly attractive - nerd teen drama) which all end up feeling underdeveloped, and (again, from what I remember) it does by necessity repeat a lot of the LaBoeuf/Bumblebee stuff from the first movie.
Not bad, but not The Iron Giant either.
Rating: Good
(Watched 14/09/2019)
Nice gentle dramedy. Good performances, never pulls a punch but doesn't wallow in the dark areas either. Only criticism really is that it's rather slight and a bit tropey.
Rating: Good
(Watched 12/09/2019)
The most bland, toothless archetype of a romcom.
Rating: Bad
(Watched 29/07/2019)
Staggeringly terrible. Boring, badly-written goofy fan-fic bullshit. Yet another film to be deleted from my mental Alien canon.
Rating: Awful.
Rubbish. Smug, boring, no empathetic characters, and full of those creepy-looking CG-kids that only The Incredibles has managed to avoid.
Rating: Awful.
SPOILERS BELOW
One of those movies that is so illogical and derivative that it feels like it was written and directed by a predictive algorithm, this is a confused, dull entry in the Tremors franchise that throws in elements of Jurassic Park and The Most Dangerous Game.
The first 40 minutes are spent introducing a nonsensical jumble of bland archetype characters and explaining the graboids to an audience who are 7 movies in and a bunch of conservationists who somehow after 30 years are unaware of this huge zoological discovery, and the next 20 explaining their new genetically engineered abilities to the people who engineered them (and apparently didn't bother to check what the results were). The rest is a collection of people looking scared while things shake, running in slow-motion or getting eaten by CG blurs.
Perhaps its worst sin of all is giving Burt Gummer such a boring, humourless death. He sacrifices himself pointlessly to kill a single Graboid (slightly bigger than the usual ones, apparently, though it's hard to tell with the poor direction), dying when he misjudges his jump and disappears into a CG mouth, all topped off with a funeral scene, maudlin song and montage of some clips from the older, better movies. It's for the best that they kill him off - Gross waddling his way through action scenes is rather embarrassing now - but there are a million better ways to do it than this.
Rating: Very Bad
All the flaws of the first film (overworked story, superficial character arcs), but now wholly rather than mostly unfunny and with the added issue of being repetitive. The action scenes are a little better, I think.
Rating: Bad.
SPOILERS BELOW
So frustratingly close to being a good film - the direction, editing and cinematography are all great, giving it a bunch of energy without feeling like a two-hour music video, unlike Suicide Squad (though it's still over-reliant on needle-drops); the fight scenes are generally well-executed and fun (though the finale misses the invention and clarity that, say, Jackie Chan would have achieved with such a setting); Robbie and MacGregor have their charisma at full-steam.
Unfortunately, it's all scuppered by a dreadful script. It's needlessly convoluted both in narrative and structure, cribbing from every post-modern action-comedy going (Guardians Of The Galaxy, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Deadpool, Kill Bill etc) but lacking their wit and economy, with an irritating, pointless voiceover, and it doesn't bring the Birds together until the 80 minute mark (and then it's only for 5 minutes before returning to the Harley show). The Birds are painfully under-written, while Black Mask is a mess of too many concepts (is he a misogynist who wants to own and humiliate women, a mask-wearing face-peeling psycho, or a pretentious arty type?). Harley is intermittently charming but often irritating in a very Tank Girly more-is-less way (Robbie does more with a single look or a giggle than the script can manage with ten awful quips), and she has some extra colours added with her more human moments such as her messy post-break-up phase and her psychological expertise but she's also given various half-hearted attempts at character arcs that don't really go anywhere.
(Also, in a movie directed, written and led by women that makes some nods towards feminist themes, it's a shame to see so many revealing outfits, and crotch and cleavage shots.)
One of those movies where I can't help but plan a fan-edit while I'm watching. (For future reference: cut out as much of the Birds, Black Mask and the voiceover as much as possible, trim Harley's dialogue, put the narrative in chronological order, maybe do a little 'previously on' set-up and fiddle something to actually show Joker breaking up with her at the top, call it "Harley Quinn".)
Rating: Bad But So Close To Good!
Zemeckis as usual is brilliant at creating spectacle and jumping between countries and time periods while always making it feel integrated rather than indulgent. It looks great, has a strong performance from Cotillard and a solid one from Pitt with a good supporting cast, and it's exciting and tense throughout. The main issue is that the structure is bottom-heavy - what is essentially (very entertaining) set-up takes up the first half of the film, and then there's 40 minutes to deal with the main conceit and 10 mins to wrap things up. It ends feeling a little deflated.
Rating: Good.
