Sean’s movie thoughts

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, a Netflix movie, is based on a novel by Jenny Han. Lana Condor stars as Laura Jean, a girl who wrote letters to her crushes but never intended to send them. One day the letters get out. Then she starts a fake relationship with Peter, one of her crushes. Lana Condor is really good in this movie. It would be nice to see her play this character again (Han wrote two other sequels to the novel this movie is based on). Noah Centineo plays Peter and he is good too. Israel Broussard has a supporting role and Laura’s father is played by John Corbett. Maybe the plot is predictable but aren’t all romantic comedies kind of predictable? Also the plot moves at a good pace and the characters are likable. It is nice to see a romantic comedy again after Set It Up. Maybe Netflix will be the home of the genre.  Maybe Han’s other novels might come to Netflix.

BlacKKKlansman was good. Adam Driver and John David Washington were good. Supporting cast was good too. I heard this was inspired by true events and a book about those events published in 2014. It is a little creepy at times. It is set in the 1970s. Peppermint opens in a few weeks. This time a woman is out for revenge after her family was murdered. (I guess this is fair.) Jennifer Garner stars. It might be terrible but maybe it won’t be terrible. People did not flock to The Happytime Murders. I am not too surprised. It looks pretty bad.

I thought the Wedding Ringer would go the whole movie without make a short joke about Kevin Hart. It didn’t. It did go over half the movie without making a short joke. In this movie Kevin Hart plays a man who pretends to someone’s best friend/best man. Apparently there are enough men getting married who don’t have a friend who can be their best man to make this job work. (I doubt anyone in real life has such a job.) Josh Gad plays the man getting married who needs a best man and seven groomsmen. Gad and Hart are fun together. There is a nice dance sequence with them. Hart is more likable here than I have seen him in a lot of movies. He shouts a bit less often than he does in other movies. This is not great but it is likable. There is a touch football game scene/sequence that could have been removed without harming the film. Kaley Cucco stars as the bride to be and her character is not likable at all. I am not saying she was bad, she was not. There is a side character who is pre...

I like Action Point. It is a movie about a man running a wild amusement park in the 1970s and dealing with his estranged daughter. Someone wants to buy the park and there is a competing park nearby. It stars Johnny Knoxville of Jackass fame. The actress playing his daughter is good, she might pop up in other things.  Knoxville is in old man makeup for some scenes, not great makeup, telling the story to his granddaughter. I am not sure why this movie needs the segments of Knoxville in old man makeup but the scenes with his granddaughter are kind of sweet. Also I guess the movie would be too short without them. I should not give the movie too much credit for being under 2 hours but I like a short movie occasionally. There is also some nice music on the soundtrack. I like some of the stunts and Knoxville is pretty likeable in this movie.

This movie is about a trial of a gun maker after one of their guns is used in a mass shooting. (The gun was bought legally and then quickly resold illegally. This seemed to happen a lot.) A jury consultant is taking to help the defense and stack the jury in the defense’s favor. Someone sends a note to the lawyers and the jury consultant  saying that they can swing the jury for a price. John Cusack and Rachel Weisz co-star as the couple manipulating the jury. He is on the inside, she is on the outside. Cusack is likeable as always. Gene Hackman is good as the jury consultant and Dustin  Hoffman is good as the plaintiff’s lawyer. This is a good movie but it is not realistic. The jury consultant has people working for him doing illegal things. Also the defense lawyer almost seems to work for the jury consultant.

Warlock came out in 1991. It was completed in 1989. The special effects are dated now (and might not have been great at the time either) but the movie still holds up. Julian Sands stars as the Warlock and he wants to collect the pieces of the grand grimorie and destroy the world. He is really good in this role. Richard E. Grant stars as the witch hunter Redferne who comes out of the past to fight the Warlock. Lea Thompson stars as Kassandra a modern woman who gets mixed up in this. This feels a bit like a supernatural Terminator. The three main actors are all good. There are a few funny moments where Redferne encounters 20th century things. There was an unexpected comment about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers that made me laugh. I remember liking the first sequel but I have not seen it in a long time. I might have seen the second sequel but I don’t remember it.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe Thor is not the Thor I grew up reading about in Marvel comics. In some ways they are the same character but there are differences. MCU Thor is more jokey and less regal than the comic book Thor. This is okay and it is similar to how the Batman from the 1980s comics is different than the Batman from the current comics or current movies. I am not sure about the new Predator movie. I guess it could be good but I am not expecting too much. Maybe it will be a surprise. I never saw Predators or if I did it made no impact on me, so maybe it is time again to see the Predator on the big screen. Joel Mchale is in the naughty puppet movie, the Happytime Murders. It looks bad or desperate or both. (Maybe both.) Maybe it is not as bad as it looks. Maybe I will wake up tomorrow being able to sing like Josh Groban and draw like John Romita jr. I wish McHale had a better movie career, he is a talented guy. Oh well, he will probably be back on tv soon.

Rob Riggle is a actor/comedian. He has a rare dramatic role in Midnight Sun. He stars as a father whose only daughter Katie(Bella Thorne) has a rare disease that prevents her from being out in the sun. He has tried to give Katie a good life. I thought Riggle was good here, as good as I have ever seen him. Katie is doing as well as can be expected. She has one close friend Morgan. Katie likes to write songs. One night she goes to the train station to play her music and meets a teen boy named Charlie. Later they start to date but Katie doesn’t tell him a about her sickness. Bella Thorne is much more likeable here than she was in the Duff. (People who compare the Duff to John Hughes’ movies overlooked the fact no character in a John Hughes movie is mean as Thorne’s character in the Duff). This is pretty good.

Deadpool 2 holds up okay. There is a version on video with 14 or 15 extra minutes of footage. The new footage is okay but I am not sure it adds much to the movie. I am not sure if I feel this way because I hadn’t seen the movie in theaters. There has been more news about TJ Miller being hateful or a jerk (or worse) between the movie playing in theaters and it coming to video. The news impacted my viewing of the movie a bit. Miller won’t be back in any sequels or spin-offs. If there is an X-Force movie, it will need a new cast. That is a bit of a shame. It would have been nice to see more of Terry Crews’ Bedlam.

Timothy Dalton had 2 chances as James Bond. It might have been nice if he had a longer tenure as Bond. This time, James Bond is fighting a conspiracy involving a KGB general and an arms dealer. The gadgets are, except for the car, a bit more plausible than in previous James Bond movies. I think Dalton is a good Bond. He is a bit harder edged than Roger Moore was in some of his later films. There are nice fight sequences, even a few that don’t involve Bond, and the opening sequence has something to do with the plot. (In other James Bond movies the opening sequence often had nothing to do with the plot.) The villains are good but not great. Dalton would return in License to Kill. That movie is better than this one.

I guess I never figured out what I wanted to say about re-watching Bowling for Columbine. I think it was worth re-watching and I did also re-watch Capitslism a Love Story. I thought I would have more to say about Bowling for Columbine. Michael Moore made some interesting films. I wonder if I should consider Set It Up for one of the ten best movies of the year? Traditionally I only include movies seen in theaters for that list. Netflix is calling it a movie and there was not an option for me to see it in a theater. I did enjoy it. Top 5 movies seen in theaters in 2018 Mission Impossible Fallout Black Panther Avengers Infinity War Deadpool 2 Blockers

I can’t review Baywatch, I did not finish it. I tried to watch it twice and lost interest in less than half an hour each time. I am still sure that it is Dwayne Johnson’s worst movie since 2014 (or 2013). The movie is smug. As bad as the Dark Tower movie is, I still kind of like it. It is also at least bad in interesting ways or it is interesting to think about how the movie could have worked. I skipped the Darkest Minds movie. I did not miss much if reviews are to be believed. Too bad, previews looked decent. Maybe I will catch up with it later. Or maybe not. How big or broad and tall is Armie Hammer? Henry Cavill is like a walking tank in Mission Impossible but Hammer seemed so much bigger than Cavill in the Man from U.N.C.L.E (that movie was pretty good). Cavill is a better actor than Man of Steel allowed him to be. I think he was better in Justice League.

I’d like a sequel to American Assassin. I might be in the minority in this but I am okay with that. Maybe my familiarity with the book series helped me enjoyed the movie. Dylan O’Brien stars as Mitch Rapp and after a tragedy he trains himself to fight terrorists and is pulled into the CIA. I enjoyed the film and I thought Dylan O’Brien and Michael Keaton were good in their roles. Keaton was really good as the CIA trainer. It was nice to see Scott Adkins on the big screen. I thought the training sequences were fun. I am not saying it was good as any of Daniel Craig’s James Bond movies because it is not. I think it was better than the last Bourne movie though. For some reason the last Bourne movie made enough money that a sequel seems likely for it but American Assassin did not.

Skyscraper is better than Baywatch. Baywatch might be Dwayne Johnson’s worst movie since 2014. He makes a lot of movies, so that ‘worst since 2014’ does mean something. Johnson stars as a security consultant and he is in China to inspect a new building. He is missing part of a leg because an explosion during his career as a FBI agent. However thieves/terrorists want something that the owner has and set fire to the building. (The villains are using some chemicals that resist the buidling’s fire control system.) Johnson’s family is in the building and he has to save them. Neve Campbell co-stars as Johnson’s wife and she has a few nice moments. Also she is age appropriate to be Johnson’s wife. I would say that it is always good to see her but I don’t think I have seen her in anything lately.  The villains aren’t special. Diehard had better villains. I just saw this movie and the only villain I remember is Johnson’s former co-worker. This is not as good as Mission Impossible Fa...