Sean’s movie thoughts

Fighting with My Family is based on the career of WWE diva Paige. How true to life it is, I am not sure. I did enjoy it. Paige comes from a family of wrestlers and she gets her shot at the WWE but her brother doesn’t. Florence Pugh stars as Paige. She is good, I don’t think I have seen her in anything else and I am not really familiar with Paige, so maybe that helped me buy Pugh as Paige. Pugh is likable as Paige and relatable when she is a bit less likeable. Vince Vaughn aughn plays the talent scout/drill sergeant who runs the training program for the WWE. He has some experience with being a drill sergeant after Hacksaw Ridge. Dwayne Johnson has a nice cameo but this is not his movie. Don’t let the poster fool you. Fighting with My Family might be worth re-watching before the end of the year.

The Razzies are the Golden Raspberry Award for cinematic failure. These awards go back to 1981. Do they matter? Do they have power? I don’t think they matter and I do not think that they have power. The Academy Awards have power, winning one can help a person’s career. I don’t think winning a Razzie really hurts a person’s career. Brad Miska is the co-founder of the Bloody Disgusting website, which I look at from time to time, and he tweeted about the Razzies today. He said he would like it if film journalists wrote positive things about Razzie Winners and how he would like the Razzies to lose power. I don’t think they have power. Here are the complaints I have heard about the Razzies 1)they pick on obvious targets 2)Some of their award categories or award winners don’t make sense (Showgirls won for best sequel but it was not a sequel) 3)the whole notion of the Razzies is mean-spirited. https://www.mandatory.com/culture/942899-easy-targets-razzies-pick-year#LWWkuOBHDvy3xX32.9...

I know that Queen produced some great music and that the band has a legacy. I mean no disrespect to the band but the Bohemian Rhapsody film might be terrible. I say “might be” because I tried to watch it and lost interest after maybe 35 minutes. I guess the movie could have gotten better. I am going to Fighting with My Family tomorrow, I hope it is good. I have heard good things. It is based on the real life of WWE wrestler Paige. I hope it is more memorable than Atila Battle Angel. I am surprised the Lego Movie 2 semi-bombed. It might not be as good as the first one but it is still good. Maybe people/families were more interested in the new How to Train Your Dragon movie.

This movie is not as bad as I thought it might be, so I guess that is something. Jaime Fox is better in this than he was in Amazing Spider-man 2, so maybe when people do a career overview of Fox this film won’t be mentioned as one of his worst. It is okay, I probably won’t want to see it again.  I never lost complete interest and considered ending the film early but maybe lead actor’s (Taron Egerton) next film Rocketman will be better and more memorable. For a movie with as many action scenes and stunts as this one, you’d think it would be more exciting. It is under two hours, and  Egerton’s lead performance is decent but I am not sure that is enough to recommend this one. Critic David Ehrlich panned it  https://www.indiewire.com/2018/11/robin-hood-review-2018-1202022262/  and I think the review was fair.

Rosa Salazar is really good in Battle Angel Atila. She plays Atila in motion capture and she is good/likeable as the cyborg. Salazar was also in the Maze Runner series. This movie is based on a Japanese comic. Honestly I have seen this movie before (or at least I have seen movies like this one), it is fine. The villains aren’t interesting, the visuals are good, but none of the other performances are good as Salazar’s. No one is awful. Did I buy the love story? Maybe not completely. The actor playing her love interest is not bad but maybe the love story could have been downplayed. Maybe they could have been just friends.(I probably have seen worse love stories or romantic subplots in films.) I guess it is a bit of a bummer that the movie ends setting up a sequel that might never happen. I could make a list of movies that set up a sequel that never happened. I think there are at least five since 2015. I saw this the same day as Happy Death Day 2U, and that film is better.

Happy Death Day 2U is pretty good. It had some emotional moments I was not expecting and Jessica Rothe was really good as Tree. (These moments involve Tree’s mother.)  I am even more disappointed now that the Valley Girl remake she was in has been put on a shelf to rot. I am not going to spoil anything, so I won’t go over the plot in detail. Basically this movie reveals the origin of the time loop from the last movie. Tree, Carter, Ryan (Carter’s roommate), and some of Ryan’s science student friends try to figure the situation out. Technically this is a horror movie but it is more of a comedy than a horror movie. Even some of the deaths are played for comedic effect. It helps if you have seen the first movie but I think people who didn’t see that movie can enjoy this one. The end of the film hints at another sequel. Maybe Israel Broussard’s Carter could get a bit more to in  the third movie, if there is one.

I don’t have Franchise Fatigue or Superhero movie fatigue. At least I don’t think I do. However there are some signs that I could be developing X-men fatigue and maybe Dwayne Johnson fatigue. I am surprised about the X-men fatigue. I don’t feel excited about the new X-men movie. I might go see Dark Phoniex but I might not. Maybe I be more excited if it was a different storyline, the Dark Phoniex storyline was part of X-men 3. I am curious about the New Mutants movie but not very curious. I don’t think I have re-watched X-men Apocalypse. I might be okay with the franchise taking a few years off after this year. I like Dwayne Johnson but he makes a lot of movies. I did not like Baywatch at all. (I gave that movie at least 2 chances and have written about it.) I don’t feel excited by Hobbs and Shaw (his team up movie with Jason Statham). I am kind of glad his Doc Savage movie is not happening, I am not sure he was the right choice for Doc Savage.

The Lego Movie 2 is okay. It might be better than that but it is not as good as the original. The original was really good. The new movie still looks good. Tiffany Haddish is the big new voice star in this movie. She is good. The returning cast is good too. I think maybe Alison Brie’s Unikitty could have more to do and maybe Batman, since he has his own films, could have less. The movie takes place years after the first one and now Bricksburg now looks like something out of Mad Max. Things seem bleak but Emmet is still cheery. Wyldside thinks he needs to toughen up and there are aliens invading. (This ends the plot break down.) I guess there will be a third one but maybe it would be just as well if there is not a third one. Maybe the first one and the Lego Batman movie were so good that I expected too much. (The Lego Ninjago movie was fun.) Maybe this movie will seem slightly better on re-watch. I did not hate this by any means but I hope the new How to Train Your Dragon is bet...

I use the term Comedic Fastball, comparing the ability to be funny to the ability to throw a fastball. Pitchers, no matter how good, reach a point where the arm breaks down and they can’t throw a fastball like they once could. I think that nobody can be funny forever. There is probably a better comparison but this will do, for now. People who might have lost their comedic fastball Will Ferrell Vince Vaughn Ben Stiller Owen Wilson Judd Apatow Can any of them get it back? Maybe. Ferrell’s last two or three movies were pretty bad (and at least two bombed). Vaughn might be moving to more dramatic roles. Owen Wilson might be moving into dramatic roles too. Aptow is a special case because he is a writer/director but not performer. He has had some bad reviews for his films recently but he might only have one bomb in his films.  It was a relative bomb. Oddly enough Apatow was criticized for something people used to admire about his work.

Shakedown holds up. Peter Weller and Sam Elliot play a lawyer and a cop investigating police corruption. It is not subtle but I did like the cab driver, who passed his citizenship test, insisting that Weller’s character has a right to his day in court. It feels a bit odd to buy movie tickets in advance but better that than to get to the theater and find the movie sold out. I only bought mine (a ticket to the Lego movie 2) a few days in advance. It is not like I bought it weeks in advance. I remember seeing Baywatch tickets on sale three weeks early (I guess the studio had high hopes). I haven’t seen a Star is Born but I did buy it digitally. I am not the biggest fan of Bradley Cooper, so maybe I won’t watch it. Maybe I will give it a shot. A friend told me he found Lady Gaga distracting or that she couldn’t act. (Or it could have been both.) Woody Allen is suing Amazon for breaking their contract and shelving his last film. His last movie was about a man having an affair with a 1...

The Night Strangler TV movie holds up. This was the sequel to the Night Stalker but this time Kolchak is in Seatttle. He starts to investigate a series of murders that seem supernatural and runs afoul of the police and the management of his paper. This is in a lot of ways the same movie as the Night Stalker. I have no problems with that. Daren McGavin returned as Carl Kolchak and Simon Okland returned as Tony Vinchinzo, the editor. They are both very good in this and their scenes together are fun. The supporting cast includes John Carradine as the owner of the newspaper. Richard Anderson, prior to his days on th Six Million Dollar Man, is the villain. He is a bit more sympathetic than the villain in the Night Stalker.

This movie needed more Patrick Stewart. Of course, the movie did not promise a lot of Patrick Stewart as Merlin. It is not like I expected a lot more Patrick Stewart than I got. I think this was the best movie I wanted to see (or had not already seen) at my theater. In England a 12 year old boy Alexander finds Excailbur and is told by Merlin (who looks like a teenager sometimes and an old man some other times)that Morgana Le Fay is going to return to conquer the world. It takes a while for Alexander to accept that he has Excalibur. He gathers some knights and they prepare to fight.  It is fun. Performances are good/acceptable even if I would have liked more Patrick Stewart. The battles are good and the demon knights or undead knights look good. The battle at the school was fun.  I am not sure if I would want to see it again but I don’t regret seeing it. 

Cobra is a Sylvester Stallone movie about a cop trying to stop a serial killer. However it turns out he is facing a gang of killers. It has a bad critical reputation. It is bad. Stallone has been better, this might be his worst performance. He is hard to understand at times. (He might have been overdoing the tough guy voice.) The supporting cast is not terrible but it is not good enough to redeem the film. The villains are not interesting, and the action scenes might be average at best. I think this was supposed to be Stallone’s attempt at Dirty Harry or a tribute to Dirty Harry.  It might be Stallone’s worst movie of the 1980s. He might have made a worse movie or two in the 1990s. If you have not seen this in a while, I’d advise not rewatching it. If you have not seen it, maybe that is a good thing.

Father of the Bride, the Steve Martin one, is still good. This is one of the three or four classic movies Martin made. Martin Short’s wedding planner is a little over the top maybe but he is not insufferable. Also it helps that he is a supporting character. The animated movies Prince of Egypt and Joseph King of Dreams are good. Maybe the Prince of Egypt is a bit better but there are both enjoyable. I had not seen either one in a while, so it was nice to  re-watch them. The Dark Universe is officially dead. I liked the Mummy (2017) but it had problems and it was not enough of a success to launch a franchise. There will be(or there could be) a new Invisible Man movie by Leigh Whannell (creator of the Saw franchise and the writer/director of Upgrade). That could be good. I say could be because Whannell has been hired to write and possibly director an Escape from New York remake. There was an early review of the third How to Train Your Dragon franchise that complained about too m...

Harrison Ford plays the President (and ex soldier) in this film and Air Force One is hijacked. He fights back against the terrorists while staff in the White House try to figure out if they can get the plane back. I had not seen this in a few years, I was a little disappointed. I enjoyed a lot of it but I remembered it being better. Ford is fine and Gary Oldman is good as the lead terrorist. The supporting cast is good too. I guess it was a bit long for me and I would have cut maybe 10 minutes out of the film. I felt the movie reached an ending but it kept going. I think it is still worth seeing.

I think it is safe to say that Halloween the Curse of Michael Myers is a confusing film. I think it is also safe to say it is Paul Rudd’s worst film. It was Donald Pleaseance’s last film and he deserved better. There are 2 cuts of this movie. I watched the Producer’s Cut, which is considered the better one. I might have seen the original cut at some point but I don’t remember it. The Producer’s Cut was not officially released for nearly 20 years. This movie reveals that Michael’s strength, drive to kill, and durability come from a rune on his arm. There is apparently a cult behind him who cursed him with this rune. Why the cult did this and what they hoped to gain by doing it is not well explained or just makes no sense. Perhaps it would have been better not to do this plot. Paul Rudd is not bad in this movie. Some other performances are decent. This movie features one of the least likeable characters in the series history. It was a relief when Michael killed him.

I liked the two John Wick movies but sometimes I feel like I am supposed to love them. They are good and I am probably going to the third one. Other people seem to love the films and there are articles like “John Wick redefined the action movie” or “new movie in the John Wick style...” like the movies are more than just good. I saw a review/retrospective of Quantum of Solace and it might be the worst James Bond of the Daniel Craig era. However it is not terrible. In the overall franchise I am sure there are three or four worse movies. The trailer from the Fast and Furrious spin-off Hobbs and Shaw came out. It looks okay but not great. Maybe I have seen a lot of movies with Dwayne Johnson lately but I just don’t feel that interested in this movie. Could I have Dwayne Johnson fatigue? (Heh.)