Kaos' way behind movie reviews

[Snakebite]

You dry this July?

Dry July for this guy. July started on 7/8 this year for me, if I’m being completely honest.

[Snaggletiger]

Dry July for this guy. July started on 7/8 this year for me, if I’m being completely honest.

Yeah, you'd better come clean.  We got the beach pics to prove otherwise. 

[Kaos]

 

Wrong board.

[Snakebite]

Wrong board.

Sorry, K.  Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

[Snaggletiger]

Hey, we will not drink wherever we damn well please. If we want to not drink in the Basketball Forum, you can't stop us. 

Come on, Snake.  Let's go not drink in a Culinary Forum thread.

[Kaos]

What’s wrong with Batman and Batman Returns

Still laid up.  Watched them both. 

They are the grandfathers of the Batman films that came after.  Still good. But both have flaws.

One of the biggest is Burton’s view of Gotham and his almost absurd costuming of every side character.

The most egregious flaw, however, is that in both films he killed a major, long-term Batman nemesis.  Joker and Penguin both dead after one film. That’s not how Batman works.

[GH2001]

Longlegs

Not going to do any spoilers here but......this movie is, ummmm, different. I couldn't say after whether I "liked" it or not. I think I did? But it's touchy subject matter. Family Murder/Suicides, some gore, Satanic/Occult stuff abounds. Nick Cage apparently produced and directed it, and plays the lead titular weirdo. I will give him credit here - it was not cookie cutter, and was well done. More than I can say about most of the others these days (Ed and Lorraine Warren Arc movies, Blumhouse, etc).

[Kaos]

The Family Plan

I saw this bounce across the options a while back and then it disappeared. Ran across it the other day and flipped it on mainly because I like Michelle Monaghan. 

It was a better movie than I expected, even if some of it was trite and contrived. 

Marky Mark as a dutiful, boring family man who's hiding a secret past as a killer for hire. When his secret is about to be exposed, he takes his unsuspecting family on the lam.

Michelle is really great. She always is. Although the kids are somewhat caricatures, they aren't grating and annoying. They actually have some real kid characteristics which most movies fail to capture. The baby, who's Mark's co-conspirator, is pretty good too.

It's an easy watch.  There's a good mix of action and family-friendly comedy.  It's the kind of non-Satanic, non-profane, family-style movie that SHOULD make bank. That it didn't is kind of sad.

It's not going to make you think. But it's a decent enough movie that it deserved a better fate than to just disappear from mind.

[Kaos]

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

I’ve heard the complaints. Nothing but nostalgia, etc. I’m one of the few (I think) who felt the prior film and the cast were worthy successors to the original. 

I still feel that way. There were things I didn’t like about Frozen Empire. I wish it had been a little more fun. That’s what made the original great.  It was at its heart a comedy.

Frozen Empire would have done better to remember that.  It lingered too long in the “I’m almost 18 angst” and the “maybe I’m a lesbian ghost” meanderings of Phoebe.

It didn’t get enough out of dickless.

All in all though, I felt it was a good mix of old and new.  As a long time Buster fan (other than the Fatty and the Fembocats version) I’d be okay if the series continued with Gooberson and the Spenglers without the continuous callbacks to the past. 

It was good to see the originals together again in the first.  Didn’t have the same impact in the second. 

I enjoyed the movie.  I may be alone in that sentiment though. 

[Kaos]

Land of Bad

Russell “Fat” Crowe as a drone pilot and Non-Thor Hemsworth in a “caught behind enemy lines” action film on Netflix.

I’m not paying for flix or I would drop it, FWIW.

Lots of tension.  Decent action.  Enough violence. 

What was funny to me was that all these AF dudes were Tennessee basketball fans.  Showed the Vols playing Auburn in a game Auburn won handily but they pretended UT won a spot in the Elite Eight. 

Crowe is kinda chunky. He really didn’t fit the role. But it wasn’t so bad as to be distracting. 

Other than that? It was a good film. Kept things moving. 

[Kaos]

IF

For a movie that stresses from the beginning the story you should tell, this film from The Office’s Jim is surprisingly adrift story wise. 

Jim is the dad of a headstrong and creative daughter who loses her mom at a young age.  As he’s struggling with a health issue she starts to see imaginary characters. 

They are Imaginary Friends (IF’s) who have been forgotten by their children.  They live under a carousel at Coney Island in what’s basically a retirement home, each of them longing for a new kid. 

She sets out to match them back up.

And that’s where it unravels.

Jim Halpert tried really hard to yank at the heartstrings but there wasn’t enough story there to find the right resonance. 

I didn’t hate it.  The film was beautifully shot.  The acting was good.  Ryan Reynolds kind of lazed his way through it but the voice actors — Steve carrell, Louis Gossett Jr., and more were quality enough. 

During the scene at the IF nursing home there’s one of the better bits of CGI that I’ve ever seen. 

That couldn’t save the film though.  The story it wanted to tell just didn’t happen. The story just didn’t work. 

That’s a shame.  Halpert meant well.

[GH2001]

Also kind of sad Gossett Jr passed away right before IF was released.

[Kaos]

Also kind of sad Gossett Jr passed away right before IF was released.

I want your DOR!

[The Six]

Longlegs

Not going to do any spoilers here but......this movie is, ummmm, different. I couldn't say after whether I "liked" it or not. I think I did? But it's touchy subject matter. Family Murder/Suicides, some gore, Satanic/Occult stuff abounds. Nick Cage apparently produced and directed it, and plays the lead titular weirdo. I will give him credit here - it was not cookie cutter, and was well done. More than I can say about most of the others these days (Ed and Lorraine Warren Arc movies, Blumhouse, etc).

Cage did not direct but he was a producer and really liked what writer/director Osgood Perkins (Tony's grown up kid) was doing with the subject. A good companion piece is Perkins' 'The Blackcoat's Daughter' which also operates in the slow-burn, evil lurking in the shadows motif. 

[GH2001]

Cage did not direct but he was a producer and really liked what writer/director Osgood Perkins (Tony's grown up kid) was doing with the subject. A good companion piece is Perkins' 'The Blackcoat's Daughter' which also operates in the slow-burn, evil lurking in the shadows motif.

I'm oddly ok with Cage making this turn to weirdom. It suits him better than attempting to take himself too seriously as some classically trained Grammy winner wannabe.

[CCTAU]

I'm oddly ok with Cage making this turn to weirdom. It suits him better than attempting to take himself too seriously as some classically trained Grammy winner wannabe.

Bull$hit. Cameron Poe would stick his golden globe right up your...

[GH2001]

Bull$hit. Cameron Poe would stick his golden globe right up your...

That accent was so cringe man.

"Goin back home to Alabammuh to see muh dawwwtah"

"Put tha bunny back in tha bowxxxx"

I think we all know Cyrus the Virus made that movie go round.

[Kaos]

The Beekeeper

Boilerplate Jason Statham "one man takes on an army" films. 

Retired operative Statham keeps bees.  He's part of a secret group that apparently keeps or kept bees. Gets his dander up when neighbor Claire Huxtable, who liked his honey, suicides after being scammed out of her life savings.

His singular mission is to bring the scammers down.  There are lots of them, all armed.

Jeremy Irons is slumming it in this one. Josh Hutcherson - from Hunger Games - shows he cannot act a single lick - not a lick, Andy - and is the worst part of this film.

Throw in a fat and sassy black cop who's related to Claire, the worst representation of the FBI I've ever seen on film, and an eye-rolling "just go on ahead, killer" ending?  That about wraps it up.

If you like the single man improbably mowing down hundreds when he should have been killed 10,000 different times? Put this on your list. There's plenty of that and plenty of action. 

It just gets old after a while.

[CCTAU]

That accent was so cringe man.

"Goin back home to Alabammuh to see muh dawwwtah"

"Put tha bunny back in tha bowxxxx"

I think we all know Cyrus the Virus made that movie go round.

That was my first introduction to Buscemi also. I looked for anything he was in. Dude was insane. In Armageddon he really did go insane.

[Kaos]

Tarot

We’ve seen the “play stupid games, suffer deadly consequences” horror trope before.  Ouija, escape rooms, truth or dare, that creepy hand, and many more followed this same format.

Doesn’t mean there isn’t room for another if it’s done well. This one is.

It’s not The Exorcist or Omen level great but it’s enjoyable enough. 

Out on a birthday weekend a group of college age kids find a box of tarot cards, make the mistake of using them to do a reading and then get knocked off one by one in ways that match the horoscopes that are read.

There are some enormous logic gaps, the ever present “how would you explain that to the cops” problem, and a mixed bag of acting (some good, some high school play level). 

Still… it was a decent watch.  Good for what it was.