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Reviews
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)
Gross off-putting and weird in not good ways
Cronenberg inspired but not in a good way. This film is so gratuitously violent and the Missouri of how deserves to live and die seems very arbitrary.
The script is a huge mess and the villain plays like a captain planet cartoon.
I felt really bad for the kids in the audience because this movie is basically a hard R on violencs and gore and animal torture and mutilation. This was nightmare fuel for kids with faces getting ripped off and anyways having their arms pulled off. Very odd choices by James Gunn.
Marvel is really losing it these days. They have to cram too much in and have too many characters have something to do. Having said that Cosmo was a good addition. Chris Pratt really phoned it in. He seemed bored.
The Deep End (2022)
I can't believe she let this film crew have this access
What a narcissist. They didn't even get into her self proclaimed psychic powers or superhuman abilities or just how much she tries to make people think they were abused as kids.
She is very scary and very cold. I feel so bad for the vulnerable people she preys on in their weak moments. I hope Blake films something with all the dirt on her. She's like a high school bully.
Dune (2021)
Surprisingly bad acting and terrible score. Very visually pleasing though
I can't handle one more BWWAAHOOWWW bass rumble sound effect in a movie. You know the one, the sound used in every trailer for 10 years now. And the Hans Zimmer score was so predictably boring and tells you how to feel about every little interaction. For such a fresh looking movie I feel like a more contemporary composer would have brought something extra to this. The acting is so either over the top or way too understated and was oddly similar to the Lynch directed 1984 version.
I am a fan of Chalamet but found his acting too un-natural for this role. I appreciated that he looked young and out of his depth but his emoting just didn't work. I couldn't care about this character and what happened to him. And then Jason Mamoa and his big goofy machismo was just clownishly over-played. Same with Brolin being the archetypal commando.
I don't really understand how the common movie going public would connect with the characters without having some interest in the book already.
Married at First Sight (2014)
Outdated ideas of marriage and relationships
The pastor and sociologist are pretty conservative. And for some reason they haven't had a gay couple on yet.
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)
The Con Juring
Another movie about these con artists who helped prop up the Satanic Panic of the 80s. I feel like this stuff along with q anon is helping bring the satanic panic back and people are going to get hurt.
I actually enjoyed the first 2 movies before I found out about how to grow the Warrens were.
Isle of Dogs (2018)
Ugh, how do you mess up a story about dogs?
I adore Wes Anderson's films, yet I will admit Fantastic Mr Fox is perhaps my least favorite; something doesn't translate to animation for me. I was expecting to be transported or at least pleasantly entertained but a lot of the film irked me and thinking about it more afterward it bugged me even more. This is a beautifully animated movie and the visuals are pleasing as punch. However, the story seems to mean nothing and the characters are all flat.
Here are some of my random complaints:
1. The concept of having one of the main characters only speak in Japanese with no translation felt distancing and we only see one short scene of him bonding with his dog he supposedly loves enough to risk everything for.
2. Women are an afterthought in this movie. They exist only as a nearly silent assistant (the tragically underused Yoko Ono!), a sexualized trophy wife dog (Nutmeg played by ScarJo), a pregnant dog with no lines, an interpreter with only 1 line of her own dialogue. The only female character with any kind of agency is the white foreign exchange student who is A HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR WHO FALLS IN LOVE WITH 12 YEAR OLD BOY SHE HAS NEVER MET!
3. The story is pretty brutal and realist about death, suffering and euthanasia and animal experiments but it told so flatly and matter of fact that it had no impact for me. Maybe I'm thankful they don't use the music and characters to really pull at your heartstrings since for the first half of the movie I was already questioning why I wanted to sit through a movie with so many dogs being tortured. Pretty bleak stuff.
4. The dialogue and characters have the Wes Anderson autistic flat affect where everything is delivered with the least amount of emotion as possible but taken to the extreme. This made me not really care about the kids or the dog.
5. Deux Ex Machina to save the day at the end. The trials and tribulations of the main characters almost had no bearing on the resolution.
6. Cats are given a pretty short end of the stick here. They are somehow benignly evil and there was something interesting to be uncovered there but the film just had them as background. I thought it was trying to avoid the cat vs dog cliche...but it didn't. The evil clan are the cat people.
7. The had some real potential for dramatic adventure scenes but I never felt worried about the characters despite their head injuries, broken teeth, chewed off ears, missing limbs, etc. I'm usually a sucker for animals in danger but these characters all seemed to have the same personality.
8. I love Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum and almost all the rest of the cast but they weren't allowed to really show off their voice acting talents. All the voices blended into one as the dogs were so dead pan.
9. And it did feel pretty white washed to have the cast be primarily white actors with the Japanese actors being untranslated. I wonder if in Japan they will subtitle or dub the dogs.
In regards to the supposed political statements the film makes, they seem weak. Now he had set this in a more realistic version of say the Dog Meat Festivals in modern day China or had this be a story more closely analogous to refugees that would have been pretty bold.
I can understand people enjoying this film but for me I just didn't understand what it was trying to say and it felt gimmicky and not like a Wes Anderson film. I read somewhere he directed the film in absentia, just emailing his notes for the animators and was pretty hands off for this film (unlike his auteurism on his other films).
Annihilation (2018)
I don't even know if it was good, but it kept me intrigued and I'm still thinking about it
It's like Arrival, Interstellar, and Tarkovsky's Stalker spliced together.
Natalie Portman gives a great performance. Such deft expression without needing a lot of words, it's all in her face and delivery of the sparse lines.
I enjoyed the questions it left me with. Is it an allegory for human caused environmental degradation? perils of gene editing? love? I don't know. It's not an easy film.
The bear scene rivals any horror video game and the scene in The Revenant.
Derren Brown: Pushed to the Edge (2016)
I get the point but it's kind of sick in its execution
I do think most people are compliant to the point of going along with some nasty business. I believe the Milgram Study was very important. I don't think the concept of this show is ethical. It seems like a recipe to make someone want to kill themselves. If I was convinced to 'murder' someone in a setup I would be shaken to my core. In the movie The Experimenter (2013), it shows Milgram's subjects being interviewed after the study. Some were incredibly mad or disturbed due to his fake torture/murder experiment.
I haven't seen Derren Brown's other controversial films but what would they do if they actually drove someone to a nervous breakdown, would he care?
At the very least I think these people are going to have PTSD and nightmares as they thought it was real when it was happening. I can't believe they agreed to be on this show after the experiment was over. I hope they got paid really well.
The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005)
Pretty sick religious propaganda
The true story this is based on is brutal and the way these filmmakers chose to change it is crass and cruel to people who suffer from physical and mental health issues. I don't understand a culture that thinks that demons could possess a young woman and denying her medical care while using Catholic magic powers would cure her.
If you haven't read up on the true story behind the film of the exorcism of Annelise Michel in Germany I highly recommend you look into it and then see if this exorcism needed to be defended. Or any other exorcism done on a mentally ill or "disobedient" young person.
Beyond that the film is cliché and dull. It's also not scary at all despite some good acting by the woman who plays Emily Rose. I'm disappointed Laura Linney did this film.