Sean’s movie thoughts

Matt McCoy stars as Preston, a man who has been partially paralyzed in a rock climbing accident that killed his wife. He comes back to his cabin as a form of therapy. (It is not his idea.) He notices odd things happening and it turns out that a monster in the woods is killing people. Preston contacts the cops. However the head cop thinks that Preston is still traumatized by the death of his wife, and ignores Preston’s message. Preston tries to contract the women in the other cabin to warn them. (It is a bachelorette weekend.) This is a good movie, I think it was originally shown on the Sci Fi network or whatever it was called in 2006. It has been restored and some of the special effects have been updated/refreshed. The musical score is good and there are some good actors like Jeffrey Combs and Dee Wallace Stone in small supporting/cameo roles. Matt McCoy is really good in this movie. He might be best known for a supporting role on Seinfeld. The rest of the cast is fine but it is ...

I am not sure what the subtitle means, if it means anything. It sounds kind of nice and I guess it looks better on the poster than Jurassic World II. Maybe Justice Smith needs a new agent. He is a likeable actor, he can do more then he was allowed to do in this movie. It was nice to see him again after Paper Towns. In this sequel, Claire and Owen go back to the island to save the dinosaurs. The volcano is going to explode. They are hired by a guy played by James Cromwell, who probably shot all his scenes in two or three days. (If adds for this movie are showing a lot of Cromwell, they are are being misleading.) Of course the plot is more complicated than that and there are human villains. Musical score is good and the dinosaurs look good. Chris Pratt and Dallas Howard are good. (I am not sure where Pratt’s character Owen learned to fight in between films.) Toby Jones has a supporting role, and it is good to see him. There is a plot point that I am not sure what the point of it ...

Rampage has problems. Three animals are exposed to strange chemicals and become monsters and go on a rampage. The chemicals were designed to make animals bigger and more aggressive. They make  their way to Chicago because of a odd noise that attracts them and makes them even more aggressive. I liked parts of it and I am glad that Jeffery Dean Morgan was on hand for this movie. He seemed to be having fun. If he is doing the same thing he’s doing in the Walking Dead, I don’t care because I don’t watch the walking dead. Dwayne Johnson is supposed to be playing a miserable or hateful person or at least bitter person in this film. (Maybe bitter is the right term.) His character relates more to animals than to people. His performance just did not work for me. It is not terrible but I have seen a lot of cities wrecked on films in the last few years and maybe this is just an average movie. Some movies are good, some are bad, and some are average. Maybe if I re-watch it in six months ...

I miss Roger Ebert. It has been over five years since he died and no film critic has really assumed his role as the most prominent film critic in America. I wonder what he would think of some of the movies being made and how franchises dominate. Franchises were pretty important before he died but franchises seem even more dominant now. Marvel announces like four films at a time or DC/Warner Brothers announces six or seven movies at a time. I like Ebert’s work. Even if I did not agree with his view on a film, I enjoyed how he wrote his reviews. He expressed himself well. His most infamous review is his review of the movie North which he hated. (I think he used the words hate or hated over a dozen times in his review.) Sometimes I wonder what he would think of the decline of the romantic comedy or about his reaction to the third actor to play Spider-man on the big screen.

Get Smart was a TV series in the 1960s that spoofed James Bond. It was created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. It stared Don Adams and Barbara Felton. It used to be on Nick at Night and it might still play on some cable channel. Steve Carell stars as Maxwell Smart, agent of Control. He starts off the film as an analyst but it is promoted to agent after the rest of agents’ identities are exposed. He is a bit of a bumbler. He is teamed with Anne Hathaway’s agent 99. They have a nice chemistry. Dwayne Johnson has a costarring role. Terence Stamp is one of the villains. His organization is called KAOS. He is fun. He treats the people who work for him very poorly and some of the thing he says to them are kind of funny. There is a hulking henchman in the vien of Jaws on hand. This is a fun movie. There are a lot of good jokes and some of the jokes are unexpected. There is a fun dance sequence with Max and a woman at a party. The movie has a cameo from a member of the original show’s cast...

Have you ever heard people talking about a movie and they really like it or love it, and you at most kind of like it? Have you ever looked at film websites and they have list of best comedies since 1990 and you look at the list and think “that movie, are you kidding me?” This is how I feel about Anchorman. People, mostly men, seem to love this movie but I don’t. I don’t hate the movie but if I never see it again, I would be okay with that. I might watch it on some rainy day if I am flipping through the channels and it is on but I don’t plan on seeing it again anytime soon. I am not going buy any new special edition Blu-ray edition of the film. I think Will Ferrel has made better movies and so have Paul Rudd and Steve Carroll. It is not Paul Rudd’s worst movie, hopefully that will remain Halloween VI. (It is pretty bad from what I’ve heard. If I have seen it, I might have only seen it once but that has been at least ten years ago.)

Pacific Rim Uprising is a good movie and I might have liked more on a second viewing. It opens 10 years  after the first movie and the Kaiju have not been back. The son of Stackard Pentecost, Jake, meets a young girl who has built her own Jaeger (robot for fighting Kaiju) and they both get drafted into the Jaeger corps. (Jake was not mentioned in the first film.) Meanwhile a Chinese company is working on drones to make the Jaeger corps obsolete. A rogue Jaeger attacks and it turns out that some Kaiju are coming through the breech. Battles ensue. The human villain is revealed. This movie is better than Independence Day Resurgence. The two films have very similar endings hinting at a storyline for a possible sequel. It seemed better on re-watch. Maybe I expected too much the first time. John Boyega is a likeable hero. Maybe I was too harsh towards Scott Eastwood when I first saw the film. The young recruits seemed likeable but they didn’t get a lot to do. This movie is not a...