Movies

What I Watched in June 2017

/ skoce / Leave a comment

Movies

War of the Worlds – This was a Spielberg movie that I hadn’t seen. It seems a lot like working through 9/11 trauma, but it is also some solid science fiction spectacle. I don’t think this is one of Spielberg’s best, but it is pretty good. ****

Wonder Woman – read review here. *****

Fire & Ice – A Ralph Bakshi rotoscoped fantasy movie based on Frank Frazetta drawings. I like Frazetta, but I am fairly certain at this point that Bakshi is just not for me. **

Revenge – The late Tony Scott directs and Kevin Costner stars in this mediocre and heavy movie. There are solid points and some great shots, but it is mostly just slow and painful. **1/2

Harlock – Decent looking, this new take on Space Pirate Captain Harlock seems determined to downplay really interesting things in favor of tired clichés. It was so close to being so much better. **

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides – read about it here. It is fine, I guess. It lacks the spark of the first three but isn’t completely terrible. ***

The Good, the Bad and the Weird – This is an utter delight. Like the title suggests it is a take on the Leone classic, but it is also very much it’s own thing. A thief and a killer are after a supposed treasure, followed relentlessly by a bounty hunter. It may be set in Asia, but it is absolutely a western and one with some pretty terrific shoot outs. It is just a blast from start to finish. ****

Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift – I know I rated this with the rest of the series a few months ago, but this was the first time I actually watched it from start to finish. It’s okay. It is not really the black sheep of the series some people make it out to be, but neither is it on the level of something like Fast 5. ***

The Hollow Point – I watched this for Patrick Wilson and he’s fine, but this is a really dark new western that really doesn’t have much to recommend it. Other than Ian McShane’s performance, which is delightful. **

Kung Fu Killer – Following Fthismovie’s Junesploitation, I needed a Kung Fu movie to watch and this Donnie Yen vehicle was one of the ones I hadn’t seen that was on Netflix. It is pretty good. It is kind of a police procedural that follows a martial arts master as he helps the police track down a serial killer that is targeting other martial arts masters. There are several good fights and a decent mystery. It is a lot of fun. ****

Shimmer Lake – A heist movie shot in reverse. It is occasionally entertaining and compelling, but the twist seemed obvious to me pretty early and there wasn’t enough else there to really pull me in. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. **1/2

In the Shadow of Iris – A French thriller about a fake kidnapping that appears to go horribly wrong. The big problem with this movie is that all of the characters look alike. That turns out to be a plot point for two of them, but the other two just look too similar for no reason. Also, the subtitles on Netflix leave the screen faster than I can read them. Still, it’s not badly made. ***

Joshua: Teenager vs Superpower – This is framed at an uplifting look at a young person making a political stand against a great power, but it ends with his dreams mostly being crushed and China doing whatever it wants with Hong Kong. Still, it is a well-made film about an interesting piece of history. ***1/2

The Jungle Book – This is the 1994 one directed by Steven Sommer and starring Jason Scott Lee and Cary Elwes. I loved this movie as a kid and it kind of holds up. There are some really bad effects, and the questionable casting of a Chinese/Hawaiian man as an Indian, but it is also a solid adventure. It isn’t as good as Sommer’s The Mummy, but I still enjoyed it. ***

The Ghost and the Shadow – A movie about the true story of some man eating lions that can’t decide if it wants to be a drama or Jaws on the savannah. It is fine. **1/2

Nobody Speak – a close look at the Gawker v Hulk Hogan lawsuit that turns into a chilling look at threats faced by the free press in America. While I am sure it was compelling while they were making it, it seems all the more vital when the shitbag in chief is working to further attacks on the press. ***1/2

Counterpunch – a look at the state of American boxing, both amateur and professional. It is a pretty solid documentary about a subject I don’t really care about. ***

iBoy – a kind of pseudo superhero movie where a young kid get a cell phone smashed into his head and gets special powers. I found it incredibly dull if not particularly poorly made. **

You Get Me – Fatal Attraction for teens, but it is kind of a mess and completely unable to make its characters seem relatable or human. *1/2

Okja – review coming soon *****

Baby Driver – review here. *****

TV

GLOW – This show is a near perfect dramedy. It is even caught between drama and comedy in episode length, with each episode running slightly longer than the usual comedy half hour, but not as long as an hour long show, even figuring on the 46 minute running time of most network dramas. Here is a show about making a show about wrestling. It stars Allison Brie and Marc Maron, but other members of the ensemble start to flesh out their characters before the all too brief run of episodes is over. This show is just completely watchable. It does pretty much everything right.

Fargo S3 – I wanted to write a full post about this, but I don’t know that I can. This is the weakest season of the show, but that doesn’t mean it is bad. Season 2 of Fargo is an out and out and masterpiece and Season 1 is really good. Season 3 takes some big swings, and not all of them pay off. While I found it enthralling moment to moment, it didn’t really add up to a coherent experience. Some of the thematic threads took too long to make themselves evident and others only somewhat paid off. There is a deliberate coldness to this season, with the characters, and Carrie Coon’s Gloria Burgle especially, isolated from the others. We don’t really get the showdowns between the good guys and the bad guys, at least not until the last couple of episodes. A lot of that was very deliberate. Season 2 was a Western and played out like it, this season was something else. Something slower and more contemplative. The show spends most of the season wrestling with the nature and importance of truth, but it can’t quite pull it all together in the end. Maybe I’ll think differently of this season when I rewatch it, but right now I consider it a brilliant failure.

Baby Driver Review

/ skoce / 3 Comments

Baby Driver is the best movie I’ve seen this year. It might also be my least favorite Edgar Wright movie, though that is far from fair since at least two of his movies count among my all-time favorites. In what has been a rather dull summer so far, Baby Driver is an unmatched shot of adrenaline. It does everything right and is pure fun from start to finish. And while it never quite breaks out of genre conventions, it still contains a few of the most surprising moments I’ve seen in a movie in years.

Ansel Elgort stars as Baby – B A B Y Baby – a young man who has gotten entangled with some nasty dudes. He owes a debt to Doc, played by Kevin Spacey, who is forcing him to pay it back by being the getaway driver for the heists he masterminds with an ever rotating crew of thieves. Baby is constantly listening to his iPod and all of his driving is synchronized to specific songs. Once he has paid Doc back, Baby intends to go clean. His newly formed relationship with diner waitress Debora makes this an even more enticing proposition, but as tends to happen he is pulled back in for one more job and everything goes to hell.

The various bank robbers that join Doc’s crews are a lot of fun. Jon Hamm plays Buddy, whose friendliness hides barely contained menace. He is married to Eiza Gonzalez’s Darling, who is a little more playfully nuts than Buddy. The stand out other than Hamm is Jamie Foxx as Bats, who doesn’t even pretend to hide the menace like Buddy. He is a danger not just to those who get in his way, but also to his own partners. He is just straight up scary. Baby, meanwhile, is charming and quiet, either so cool nothing fazes him or doing his best to hide how scared he is of the crazy murderers he is forced to work with. The characters aren’t as layered as the ones from the Cornetto Trilogy, but they are still strong.

Wright’s usual perfect editing is on display in this movie, as each of its action set pieces are set to a particular song. It works perfectly, turning Baby Driver into essentially an action musical. The characters don’t sing, but all of their shooting and driving become highly choreographed dance numbers. The best one is likely the one that opens the movie, set to “Bellbottoms” by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. It is also filled with clever foreshadowing and call backs, making for a movie that will surely reward repeat viewings.

Baby Driver is an excellent movie. It is tense and buoyant and touching and the perfect antidote to a lot of the stale franchise movies clogged up theaters over the last few months. It is hard to get further into what makes it great without spoiling a turn about midway that was one of the most surprising things I’ve seen on a movie screen this year. I don’t know if Baby Driver is a perfect movie, but it is one that I am eager to revisit as much as possible.

*****

Looking Back at the Pirates of the Caribbean Series

/ skoce / Leave a comment

When watching the completely watchable new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, Dead Men Tell No Tales, I was reminded that there was a fourth movie in that series that I never watched. This was odd, because if you had asked me, I would have somewhat sheepishly replied that I was a fan of the series. It seems like the sort of movie I would have seen at some point in the 5+ years since it was released.

While I’ve gotten more into going to the movies over the last few years than I was in 2011 when it came out, even then I was not the kind of fan to skip an entry in a series I liked.  I not only skipped On Stranger Tides, I had all but forgotten it existed.  The generally accepted opinion is that after the first movie, the quality of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies dropped off of a cliff.  I would not have been the only person to check out after that first trilogy had ended.  However, even though I hadn’t watched any of the movies, aside from catching stretches on TNT or something, since 2009, I had fond memories of all of the first three movies. If I liked the first three movies, why had I not seen the first?  I thought the question worthy of an investigation that involved watching the 4 Pirates movies to see how they hold up and, in the case of On Stranger Tides, if they are any good to begin with.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl is, if not a masterpiece, than at least a damn fine adventure movie. Like all of these movies, it is absolutely gorgeous. The two leads, played by Kiera Knightley and Orlando Bloom, are thin characters.  Knightley especially is given nothing to except be a captive for most of the runtime.  Bloom is doing a perfectly serviceable Errol Flynn impersonation that gives the move on solid piece to build off of.  Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow deservedly got a lot of attention in this movie.  His entrance, perched atop the mast of a sinking little sailboat, is among the best character introductions I’ve ever seen.  He is a complete wild card, though he shows very early on that deep down he is on the side of the angels by saving a drowning woman. Much like the rest of the series, Jack Sparrow would never again be as good as he was in this movie. The three heroes line up nicely with the Star Wars set up, with Sparrow as Han and Will and Elizabeth as Luke and Leia.  That is a perfectly good trio of heroes, but they don’t work without a villain and fortunately this movie has Geoffrey Rush as Hector Barbossa.  He gets softened when he returns in later movies, but here he is as effective of a villain as I’ve seen in some time.  Every part of this movie just works.

Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End are two parts of a whole. They do function as individual movies, but they are very dependent on each other in some ways. While the Jack show starts taking over, these movies also give enough time to both Will and Elizabeth. Those two characters go on their individual journeys and there is real tension that by the time they are back together physically they will have moved apart emotionally.  Jack, meanwhile, is stuck playing the wild card.  His goals seem to generally be removed from the goals of everyone else.  In Dead Man’s Chest, the deals he’s made to become Captain Jack Sparrow come due and he does all he can to avoid paying.  That movie also features Will’s education in being a pirate, realizing that his straightforward pursuit of his goals makes him easy to manipulate, while Elizabeth forces her way into the action.  To replace Barbossa, the movie introduces two new villains in the fish faced Davy Jones and the perfectly banal head of the EIC.  Dead Man’s Chest is not as tight a movie as Curse of the Black Pearl, but it is more ambitious, even if it can’t always realize its ambitions. Keeping the Kraken off the screen was a smart move from a dramatic standpoint, but also likely from an effects standpoint as well.

At World’s End is even more ambitious than Dead Man’s Chest, and the movie starts to collapse under its own beautiful weight before too long. It returns Barbossa to the series, which is great, and expands and fills in the pirates’ world. That is both good and bad.  It really does expand the world, bringing in Asian pirates in Singapore before hitting the rest of the pirate stereotypes at the big meeting. However, in filling in those gaps, it also limits the possibilities going forward.  It gives it a sense of including everything, but that is everything, you’ve seen all it has to offer.  The movie ends up going too big and doing too much, leaving little time for anyone new to leave an impression. It also wraps up the story of quite a few side characters.  At World’s End is, for all intents and purposes, an ending for the series.

 

I think that is why the series dropped so far off my radar after that third movie. It wasn’t that I didn’t like any part of the trilogy, but it felt like a complete story.  It is the end of Will and Elizabeth’s story, an ending I never liked.  It ends like a romantic tragedy, but that wasn’t the story I believe I was watching. That moment felt false.  The thing is, though, that no matter how entertaining Jack Sparrow may be he is not the protagonist of the story.  His shtick requires not quite knowing what he is up to, which makes it hard to build a story with him at the center.  While At World’s End does end with an obvious set up for more adventures, it really felt like the end of the series in most respects.

That problem of building around Jack is very apparent in On Stranger Tides, which I finally watched.  It is a perfectly okay movie, though one that Jack and Barbossa have clearly been grafted on to.  It is a movie with no center.  Or more accurately, it is a movie with several possible centers that sticks to the one character least able to fulfill that position.  Jack is the character with the least going on in the movie, and knowing his motives all the way through robs him of a lot of his charm.  Especially when there are at least three other characters that could take the protagonist role and things would work more smoothly. That is Penelope Cruz’s Angelica, and it could be a story about her quest to connect with her unfeeling, villainous father.  Or it have twisted it around and made Barbossa the lead, focusing on his quest for revenge on Blackbeard.  Or maybe on Sam Claflin’s Philip and his love story with the mermaid. Any one of those-I personally favor the Barbossa one-with Jack playing the spoiler, would have been a better movie.  Instead the most focuses almost exclusively on Jack, to the detriment of everything.  It also helps explain how the fifth movie starts the way it does. On Stranger Tides could have been a reorienting of the series, but it feels like a one off side-story. If they were going to continue this series, On Stranger Tides needed to introduce characters to replace all of the ones whose stories ended in At World’s End and it just didn’t.  It ends right where it started.

After watching all four of these movies one after the other, it was made very clear to me that this series ended with the third movie. It was all resolved at that point, all that was left for the fourth movie to go on was a character that was already feeling tired by the end of the third movie.  The fifth movie made the only move possible by bringing back Will and Elizabeth. It not only gives viewers the happy ending denied them at the end of the third movie, but it brings back the heart of the franchise, making its possible future (with $605 million and counting worldwide at the box office, I suspect the series has a future) brighter than it’s been since 2007.

"PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES"<br /> Captains Barbossa (GEOFFREY RUSH) and Jack Sparrow (JOHNNY DEPP) find themselves in the skeletal company of the long dead explorer Ponce de Leon in the ruins of the Santiago while searching for the silver chalices necessary to complete the ritual at the Fountain of Youth.<br /> Ph: Peter Mountain<br /> ©Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Each of these four movies has its charms. Maybe they just tickle me because I am a fan of fencing and swashbuckling in general. While Jack Sparrow may be the flagship character, Barbossa is the character that kept me coming back.

 

Movie Index

/ skoce / Leave a comment

I have been working on this for some time, but I think it is finally ready to go up.  I have made an index of all of my movie reviews.  They are ordered from the highest score to lowest, which means I had to go back to a bunch of my early reviews and add star ratings to them.  And if I was going to go back and star ratings to movies, it didn’t make sense to not do a little editing while I was in there.  So I fixed some typos and other mistakes. I’m not much for proofreading, apparently, so there were a lot of little mistakes for me to fix.  I’m sure I still missed plenty.  That process was time consuming.  So time consuming that I actually first made this Index in late 2015 and by the time I got it ready to go I had a year and a half of new reviews to add to it.  Now it is finally finished.  I will hopefully keep it updated with new reviews as they go up.  Soon this should be joined by a video game index, though that is a long way off, as it is going through a similar process.

While doing this proofreading I reread, or in the case of some read for the first time, many of my reviews.  Though I am generally filled with disgust at reading my own writing, I thought it worth highlighting some of my reviews I found least bad.  Reviews like The Man from UNCLE, Flash Gordon or Porco Rosso.  Maybe give those a read. I know I tend to rate highly, but I usually only see movies I expect to like in the theater. The stuff that I am iffier on I tend to catch later and not take the time to write full reviews.  And while I’ve already said that I don’t intend to go back and change what I wrote, how I felt about the movies then is how I felt about them then, there are some movies I think worth reevaluating a few years after I first saw them. The ones I want to take another look at include War Horse, Jupiter Ascending, Robin Hood and Prince of Persia, but if any readers have any movies they think I should reconsider, tell me in the comments and I’ll do my best.

That’s all.  The index is here or on the header.

Wonder Woman Review

/ skoce / 4 Comments

I hoped Wonder Woman would be good, but I almost expected it wouldn’t be.  It is hard for a superhero movie to really surprise almost 20 years into them showing up regularly. Wonder Woman, though, was shockingly good. It wasn’t perfect, but it was such an earnest and sincere take on the genre that it was hard not to be swept away in its enthusiasm.  It was likely the most I’ve enjoyed seeing a movie this year.

The plot isn’t anything special; it is mostly a standard superhero origin story. Diana was raised on Themyscira, a Mediterranean Island created by the Greek Gods as a home for the mythological Amazons.  Diana is the only child among them, the daughter of Queen Hippolyta, who is reluctant to have her trained for combat. So Diana trains in secret with her aunt, Antiope.  Her training ends when WW1 pilot and spy Steve Trevor washes up on their shores.  Against her mother’s protests, Diana returns to the modern world with Steve to fulfill the Amazons’ duty to fight Ares, the God of War and end the war.

From there is combines scenes of Diana dealing with the modern world and even just parts of life with which she is unfamiliar, like children or snow, with war scenes.  It all works together, with Diana learning about the world without ever losing her optimism.

The movie works without Warner Bros merely copying what has worked for Marvel.  While it does bare some superficial similarities to the first Captain America and Thor movies, Wonder Woman maintains its own tone. The tone of the MCU movies, for better or worse, has been set by the sardonic voice of Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man. Recent DC movies have set their tone to Zack Snyder’s operatic earnestness.  Wonder Woman doesn’t abandon that, but it manages to find some levity with the sincerity, resulting in something that is wholly enjoyable.  Its tone is more like that of the original Superman or Spider-Man movies.  It revels in the emotion of its story instead of undercutting them for a laugh.

The movie works in large part thanks to the performances of Chris Pine and Gal Gadot.  Gadot is radiant as the lead, able to play both the character’s naivety and strength with equal skill.  She is truly believable as all facets of the character, helping to make Diana a rounded character and her growth believable. This is a star making performance.  Chris Pine also carries a heavy load, playing both the second lead, the love interest, and the comic relief.  He shines without ever taking the focus off of the title character.  Their chemistry together is great.  The rest of the cast is great as well, especially Robin Wright as Antiope.

There are flaws, especially at the end when it falls into the same sort of trap that many superhero movies, like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, do. For most of its runtime it is fresh and enjoyable, but its final battle descends into incoherence and pointless CGI.  It really isn’t any worse than the ends of similar movies, but the fall is further.

It is frankly ridiculous that it took this long in the modern superhero era to get one starring a woman.  (Yes, I know Supergirl exists, but it is far from modern, while Catwoman and Elektra are far from heroes) It is not like there haven’t been opportunities, with Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow being the glue that holds together a lot of the MCU but never getting her own starring role.  It has also been positioned as the savior of the critically floundering DCUE.  That put a lot of pressure on Wonder Woman to succeed and I am glad to say it did. It is a very good movie without any knowledge of outside factors, knowing those factors only makes its success all the sweeter. Wonder Woman is likely not the best movie I am going to see this year, but it was very good.

*****

What I Watched May 2017

/ skoce / Leave a comment

Movies

Baywatch – read review here. **

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales – read review here.  ***

War Machine – A satire of the US’s handling of the war in Afghanistan that can’t maintain a consistent tone. Still, there are scenes when it is spot on; the movie is just too inconsistent. **1/2

Guardians of the Galaxy 2 – read review here.  ****1/2

Small Crimes – I kind of really hated this movie.  It is a bleak look at bad people doing bad things until it costs them.  Like a Coen Brothers movie without the humor.  *1/2

The Handmaiden – A mind bending thriller with a couple thieves looking to steal an heiress fortune, but who’s conning who?  It is amazing. *****

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery – read reviewish thing here.  *****

Coin Heist – a group of private school kids plan a heist to save their school after the Superintendent embezzled all the schools money.  It has a decent sense of character and plot, but it isn’t anything mind blowing.  ***

Casting JonBenet – Kind of a strange documentary that covers the death of JonBenet Ramsay by pretending to cast for a movie about the killing and asking local residents what they know or think about it.  It is an interesting experiment at the very least. ***

Take the 10 – Two punky young men do whatever it takes to go to a concert. I guess it is a comedy, but I never laughed.  *1/2

Handsome: A Netflix Murder Mystery – This feels like a TV movie, in a good way.  It is the simplest premise; it is just a murder mystery comedy. It is a detective investigating a crime, with jokes and the mystery given equal weight.  I loved it. ***1/2

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword – read review here. ****

Tramps – A nothing kind of indie movie about small time crooks doing a very small time crime and maybe falling in love.  Ehhh. **

Mindhorn – This was a fun one. In the 90’s Richard Thorncroft was the star of a popular detective show, Mindhorn, but since then his star has fallen. When a delusion murder suspect wants to talk to Detective Mindhorn, Richard tried to use it as a springboard to return to fame. It is mostly jokes about how forgotten and delusional Richard is. I found it very charming. ****

Sahara – A middling animated movie about a couple of snakes. A rich snake girl and a snake boy from the wrong side of the tracks. The rest is as interesting and original as that.  **

Blame! – A 3D anime movie about the far future when humanity has created a super-advanced city but that city stopped recognizing them as residents and killed most of them. A couple of newcomers to an enclave of survivors starts a desperate attempt to wrest control of the city back.  It is fine.  ***1/2

Burning Sands – A ponderous look at hazing in specifically black fraternities, though it doesn’t seem especially different from any other fraternity.  I did not like or enjoy it, but I am not sure it is bad. It is just not for me.  **

The Most Hated Woman in America – This is a biopic about the life, and mostly the death, of Madeline Murray O’Hair, the woman who got prayer banned in school.  It is tonally all over the place, playing large parts for comedy in a movie that ends (spoilers for real life) with her and her son and granddaughter being murdered.  It’s just not very good.  *1/2

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl – Still a genuinely great swashbuckler.  It works some kind of miracle and gets just about everything right. I’ll have more to say in the near future.  *****

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest – Much more ambitious than its predecessor and it starts to sag under that ambition.  Still, it is a largely enjoyable affair.  Again, more soon.  ****

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End – There is something in how just go for broke this movie is that I can’t help but enjoy it.  Again, more soon. ***½

TV

The Crown – This is a sumptuously produced Netflix show that doesn’t really have a point. It shows the early years in the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. It is all well done, but the story being told is simply not all that interesting.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt S3 – Kimmy Schmidt is still generally really great, though its problems remain consistent. Every episode still feels like a 30 minute episode designed to be edited down to a 22 minute one. Each episode has some dead spots or jokes that miss, keeping it from ascending to the lofty heights of greats like 30 Rock or Arrested Development. Still, the show remains hilarious.

Master of None S2 – One thing holding me back from loving this most recent season of Kimmy Schmidt is that it hit Netflix just after this. Master of None’s second season might be the best season of a TV show I’ve seen this year. It is still funny, but show creators Aziz and Alan Yang also brought the heart this season. It deals intelligently with real issues and layers on references to various film genres while still telling jokes. Episodes like “Religion” and “Thanksgiving” are some of the best of any show I’ve seen this year. This show is just so good.

Fargo S3 – I still have faith that Noah Hawley will bring this altogether in the end, but so far this series has felt a little slight compared to the last two. Thematically interesting, well-acted and well shot, but it seems to be moving at a snail’s pace. Up until this last week it still felt like we were in the rising action, even though we are past the middle of the season. I love to watch this show set up dominoes, but I also love to watch them fall down. It feels like we are running out time. Still, each episode has been really good.

Riverdale – The first season of this came to a close and it was very good. Real nonsense, but highly enjoyable nonsense. It does a great job of capturing the Archie characters and putting them in a heightened reality where the strange is more than possible. It is the perfect kind of trash.

Superhero Shows – I’ve got a full post about this year’s superhero shows coming up soon.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales Review

/ skoce / 1 Comment

I still have a little affection for the Pirates of the Caribbean series from how pleasantly surprised I was by the first movie. That, plus a general love of swashbuckling adventures, was enough to get me to go see this unnecessary seeming fifth installment of the series. It turns out there is still plenty of enjoyment to be had with these pirates, even if in the end the movie feels unsatisfying.

Dead Men Tell No Tales is something of a reset for the series after On Stranger Tides, which I haven’t yet seen. It brings back Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow and Geoffrey Rush’s Barbossa, but it places equal focus on newcomers Henry and Carina. Henry is on a quest to free his father from a curse and Carina, an orphan, is searching for a connection to her family. Their separate quests have them looking for the same artifact, the Trident of Poseidon, and leads them to the same place, or more specifically the same person: Jack Sparrow. Unfortunately, Sparrow is now ship-less and crewless. He is in no shape to deal with his own problem, being chased by the ghost of the Spanish pirate hunter Armando Salazar, let alone help them with theirs. From there is moves to the standard Pirates formula of ancient sea curses, supernatural monsters and constant double crosses.

Most of the movie works, and works quite well. The new characters are charming enough and Carina at least adds something new to the series’ dynamic. As they lay out their plans and set up their double crosses it all works well. Having old guns Sparrow and Barbossa there to play against the very young newcomers is a solid dynamic. Javier Bardem’s Salazar is a lot of fun. The problem is that while it has excellent build up, nearly all of the actions scenes are a letdown, especially compared to those in the earlier movies. The two best ones are early in the movie, as Jack attempts to steal a safe from a bank and ends up stealing the whole bank, Fast 5 style and then during an attempt to stop Jack from being executed. Even that second one, though, has some disappointment. There are a few very interesting shots, but the whole thing is largely played for jokes. At no point is there anything that matches any of the first movie’s sword fights or the second or third’s ship battles.

Dead Men Tell No Tales nails the banter and feel of the series, but the whole endeavor ends up feeling rather empty. It starts with some theoretically interesting themes, like playing with the idea that Jack is washed up and Barbossa’s lack of satisfaction in his success, but those don’t really come to anything once the train starts movie. It isn’t offensively bad or anything, just somewhat unsatisfying. This is a movie that is trying to rejuvenate a dying series, but it plays more like an attempt at a greatest hits. I didn’t dislike this movie, but it really felt like the adventures of Jack Sparrow have really run their course.

***

Baywatch Review

/ skoce / 1 Comment

The trailers for Baywatch made it very clear what the film makers were trying to do, which is replicate the formula that lead to the success of 21 Jump Street. This should have been a success. Dwayne Johnson is always charming and Zac Efron has underrated comedic chops. Director Seth Gordon has turned in fine work before, like pleasantly surprising Horrible Bosses. While the cast is largely fine, the movie they are trapped in is a complete mess.

Baywatch proves unable to pick a tone and stick with it. It works best when the Baywatch team, led by Johnson’s Mitch Buchannon, is completely oblivious to the fact that lifeguards don’t investigate crimes. The team soldiers on, oblivious to the inherent ridiculousness of the situation. Less effective are the jokes about balls or the numerous slo-mo running jokes. Or anything involving the nerdy trainee played by Jon Bass. There are three or four tones going on and the only one that even kind of works is the played straight buddy cop movie that Baywatch sometimes wants to be.

I went in really wanting to like this movie. I love The Rock. He is frequently enough to get a movie over just on his charm. That is what this movie has going for it. Him playing a superhumanly competent lifeguard is fun, and funny enough that this movie didn’t need the wealth of terrible jokes, including some that just seem mean spirited for the sake of a few gross out moments. Zac Efron can be fun as a dimwitted foil for The Rock, but this movie has him play both the goof and the straight man, making neither work. Alexandria Daddario has nothing to do, nor do bit players like Rob Huebel, Hannibal Burress and Oscar Nunez. Priyanka Chopra has fun as the villain, but she doesn’t get enough time to play off the rest of the cast.

The movie just feels like a missed opportunity. This is a formula that can work, they have the right cast. But they are stranded completely by a lackluster script, assuming that there was a script. That is the biggest reason the humor falls flat; there are no funny jokes here. There are funny premises, but they are not taken advantage of for any real comedy. The action stuff works better, but it is still second banana stuff in what should be a comedy.

Baywatch is a bad movie that barely keeps it head above water thanks to an all-around charming cast.

**

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword Review

/ skoce / 1 Comment

This has become a surprisingly hard review to write.  I can’t think if a time when my personal opinion of a film was more divergent from relatively object measures of its quality.  Because I kind of loved King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, but I also think it is mostly a bad movie.  It has proven somewhat difficult to untangle my feelings toward.  

This is not a case like John Carter or Guy Ritchie’s previous movie, The Man from UNCLE; those were movies that, though they bombed, I thought and still think are excellent films.  King Arthur is undeniably kind of a mess.  Its different parts don’t mix together well and some of its biggest moments fall completely flat.  But I still greatly enjoyed watching.

Charlie Hunnam stars as Arthur, who grew up in a brothel after his uncle, King Vortigern, overthrew and killed his father using black magic.  Growing up in the brothel, Arthur has become a streetwise hustler and grifter.  He learned to fight thanks to the local, Medieval Londinium Kung Fu master and he knows which wheels to grease to keep things running smoothly.  That is until the sword in the stone is found and the prophecy of the born king triggers unrest in the kingdom.  Arthur is forced to take up the sword and fulfill his destiny as King.

There are two movies at war in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.  There is a ponderous fantasy epic in the vein of Willow or Hercules or, if you squint, Lord of the Rings.  Then there is the Guy Ritchie crime movie, him doing his low level criminals getting in over their heads sort of movie like Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.  These two separate kinds of movies never successfully combine. Neither one subsumes the other, either.  When Jude Law is the focus, it is the most serious sort of fantasy movie.  When it turns to Hunnam and his ragtag knights, it goes full Ritchie.  I like both kinds of movies here, and I enjoyed the juxtaposition. There are a few scenes that mix the two, the highlight being a quest to the completely undefined “dark realm” that is done almost entirely to loud music and quick cuts.  It is barely comprehensible, but that is the point. It is a strange, revelatory adventure in an unknown place.  It is purposefully disorienting. And since there is little drama in wondering if the title character will survive a mid-movie adventure, it is gotten through with quickly.  Unfortunately, the two different movies can’t be bridged at the end, when it should all come together.

The best parts are the one that lean into Ritchie’s filmmaking idiosyncrasies.  The bits with Arthur telling a story or laying a plan that are accompanied by shots of how things are exactly like he says/are the exact opposite of how he says. It is the same kind of fun stuff that made Snatch such a delight.  It is hard to ramp that up to a more traditional epic showdown, which this movie has and it is a big letdown.  

As much as I enjoyed this movie, which was a lot, I could never shake the feeling that things just weren’t working.  The movie skips over things, sometimes to streamline not particularly interesting yet necessary plot points, sometimes it makes things appear to happen out of nowhere.  The situation that leads to Arthur’s rise is never really shown, just assumed.

In the end, what matters to me is that I enjoyed this movie. I caters directly to my tastes.  I enjoy every ingredient found in this movie’s recipe, even if the end result is less than the sum of its parts.

***1/2

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 Review

/ skoce / 3 Comments

The first Guardians of the Galaxy is one of my favorite Marvel movies in large part for how different it is from the rest of them.  There are definitely certain beats that it hits that are similar, but it is not just the same origin story we’ve seen a dozen times now.  Its combination of action, humor and music made for an perfect theater going experience and James Gunn voice was apparent throughout. Its sequel, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, doubles down on the things that made the first movie great.  Instead of trying to go bigger than its predecessor, it digs in deeper with its characters to make an unusual and wonderful sequel.

I won’t deny that Guardians 2 gets kind of messy at times.  There is plenty of convenience in the plot and characters have a habit of just flat out saying the themes in dialogue, tt splits the cast up into several smaller groups for most of the movie, limiting their ability to play off each other, and the final fight scene gets a little incoherent for stretches.  None of that did much to lessen my enjoyment of the movie.  

The plot involves giving the team exactly what they want, from Star-Lord meeting his dad to Rocket managing to push everyone away.  But like in nearly all fiction, maybe the things they wanted are not what they needed.  So obviously, things go awry.  That is true for returning supporting characters as well.  Nebula plays a big role again, with her allegiance shifting from being a villain to something more like a nemesis. Yondu, also sees a bigger role and reveals his true colors as the movie goes along.  At the end, you really feel like you know these characters better than you did before.

The balance between characters isn’t perfect.  Drax has little to do besides be nearly perfect comic relief and Rocket gets largely sidelined after the midpoint.  New character Mantis’s role is small and very little about her is revealed.  The movie also continues Marvel’s villain problem, with this movies bad guy ceasing to be interesting at all once his villainy is revealed.  I don’t know that these are really problems. The movie is stuffed as it is, I don’t really see how much more they could have done with Rocket or Drax or Mantis without adding significantly to the movie.  

The soundtrack, a big part of the first movies charm, is maybe even better here.  This movie features some deeper cuts, and a does a little more work to call attention to itself, but it all works in context.  It also retains the humor from the first movie.  My two biggest complaints are about jokes that just absolutely didn’t land for me, but those are small problems in the deluge of moments that did work.

It also, to my complete delight, further embraces the acid trip weirdness of Marvel’s cosmic characters.  We actually see the face on Ego The Living Planet. Yondu gets his full mohawk.  It is just overall more willing to get weird with things, and that is what I love about comic books.  I am glad to see them be rewarded for embracing this stuff rather than trying to sand it off.  We’ve come a long way from the X-Men refusing to wear yellow in their first movie.

Maybe I am still just riding a sugar rush after watching this movie, but I loved it unreservedly. I haven’t really felt that way about one of these since the previous Guardians of the Galaxy, I guess.  In some ways it is the perfect example of more of the same, in others is wonderfully different.  I liked all of it.

****1/2