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Asteroid City (2023)
Makes Stanleyville look like an epic.
I really enjoyed Grand Budapest Hotel.
Asteroid City, on the other hand, looks like something thrown together by somebody who believes they can do no wrong. The critics will love it because it's me, right? Quirky is one thing but this movie is unbearable, twee, self indulgent, and annoying. If there were any subversive themes to it, or any reason to believe anything was supposed to represent any idea other than "look at me, I am eccentric ", it would have been fun to watch. As it is, it was just a case of watching a bunch of big stars play parts in an extended in-joke that leads precisely nowhere.
The Suicide Squad (2021)
When does the fun happen?
Lots of spoilers here. Be warned.
As in all live action comic book movies, CGI replaces any plot or character development. Just blowing simulated stuff up is enough for this audience.
(Eventually in some Marvel/DC movie, a bad guy will grab the moon and beat a good guy to death with it. Of course the good guy will cough twice and then recover.)
How many cliches can you pack into a film?
- Band of misfits with character flaws that will doom the mission? Check.
- Government Conspiracy? Check.
- People with no reason to trust each other, trusting each other? Which ends badly? Check.
- Gang meets in a strip club? Check. Geez, that's one from cop movies in the 80s...
OK, on with the comments:
There's plenty of gore, lots of swearing, and yet the strip club has no nudity. Americans love guns 'n gore, but nudity? No way, man.
They kill off the most interesting characters in the opening act, and they don't come back.
The whole caper is to cover up an embarrassing secret US government conspiracy. The suicide squad can reveal it but they don't, because that would be Bad For America. Hunh?
The last scene should have been Idris Elba calling Viola Davis the worst insult in the english language (the one the Brits use casually but only Samantha Bee can summon the courage to use over here), then he presses the "play" button to broadcast the incriminating video globally, while she simultaneously blows up his head remotely.
Nothing that interesting happens.
How much was Nathan Fillion paid to be in this thing?
Ad Astra (2019)
What was this intended to be?
Hey, man, I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it was, like, too deep for me. I loved all the slo-mo moving in space bits, and the long distance voyage stuff, and the killer apes at the beginning were awesome! But I didn't understand the message, and there weren't any cool explosions or gunfights. So I put some pirates on the moon, and then I shifted the killer apes to a lab in outer space, and I reduced the whole cosmic quest stuff down to "How can I impress my dad and make him love me?"
So we have a collection of cliches and plot bits taken from 2001, Gravity, 28 Days Later, and Hallmark movies, all put together by macramé so there's more hole than cloth.
I do not understand why critics gave this movie so much credit, but the fans know better.
Woody Woodpecker (2017)
You know it's a bad movie when
The ONLY joke appears in the cast list. The father's name is Lance Walters, a play on Walter Lantz, the creator of Woody Woodpecker.
I paid $1100 for my ticket, but it did come with a flight to Rio. I should have slept.
The movie is another fine example of why offering tax credits for making movies is immoral. I feel, as a Canadian taxpayer, as if I personally approved the production of this movie. I didn't. Woody Woodpecker is apparently (and inexplicably) popular in Brazil, to whom this movie is targeted.
I used to watch Woody Woodpecker reruns as a college student. They were a source of ironic laughs because they were pretty crappy ripoffs of Bugs Bunny, but with a singularly unappealing lead character. Where Bugs was a jerk to people who imposed on him, defending his turf from people who wanted to pave over his rabbit hole or eat him or shoot him or whatever, Woody was just a jerk.
This movie gives him a sympathetic cause with a green environmentalist tinge, but it is bereft of any creativity. There is the troubled father son relationship, the bullied kid, every cliche you could possibly imagine. And Woody? He does fart and poop jokes, because the people responsible have no ability to come up with anything the slightest bit interesting. It would be as offensive a treatment of a beloved childhood character as what Jim Carrey did to the Grinch or Mike Meyers did to the Cat in the Hat, except for the fact that the original Woody was never beloved. He was just a jerk. So who cares? Well, the taxpayers of Canada should.
The Lego Batman Movie (2017)
They said Butt-mobile.
That is what my 12 year old said, with an eye roll that Anderson Cooper would have envied. Then we gave up on this movie somewhere around the half way mark. We had not laughed once. The Lego Movie had some original ideas, and made a pile of money. This sequel seems to have been made by a bunch of MBAs who were old enough to see the original Batman TV series. They sat around in piles of money getting drunk or baked and making jokes that only they might understand. Which means their grandchildren, the people who are expected to pay money to see this movie, will have no idea why they are supposed to laugh. It has made a boatload of money, so another one is certain to be on the way. But seriously, folks, if you're going to make ironic fun of the genre, you should make at least one funny joke in the first hour of the movie.
Deadpool (2016)
Best for 15 year-olds sneaking into their first R rated film
By ten minutes into it I wanted some bad guy to kill Deadpool just to shut him up. The writing is terrible. They are so thrilled with the "R" rating that they sound like kids trying out swear words in the school yard at recess. The sex is terrible. Not erotic at all, what with all that smirking. The plot is, um, missing. The acting is what you would expect when you make a movie using 100% green screen/CGI. And here's a secret, and a major spoiler: oxygen does not explode. Oxygen does not even burn. Woah! Try to wrap your head around that while you munch another hash brownie. It's like, wow, man, does water float? If you light a match in 100% oxygen, the match will burn quickly and brightly until the wood (ie the FUEL) is exhausted, and then the fire will go out. No fuel, no burn. Doesn't matter how much oxygen there is.
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
In a world...
where Mad Max (1979) was just a fun peri-apocalyptic romp and a genre movie that garnered no awards, who can explain this mess winning six Oscars®? Every single aspect of this film is a travesty compared to the original. The plot, the acting, the costumes, the dialogue, the soundtrack, the action, the pacing. It's all bombastic over the top nonsense. And loud. Very very loud. I have never come across a film that so disappointed me from the opening scene. I watched it unfold and thought, "Oh for crying out loud, what is this? Surely it can't all be this bad!" But no, it starts off ponderous and loud, and gets no better. Disappointment turned to frustration and anger. There's even the cliché of a female character gradually losing her clothes that's from 1980s teen slasher films and parodied in Galaxy Quest. And did I mention some guitar playing that seems to be taken directly from Todd and the Book of Pure Evil? George Miller should have had two DVDs to consult while making this film, and watched them every night after shooting: A green box with a copy of the original Mad Max, labelled MAKE IT MORE LIKE THIS ONE, and a red box containing Waterworld and labelled MAKE IT LESS LIKE THIS ONE.
The Good Dinosaur (2015)
Gorgeous CGI background, nothing on top of it.
The computer generated scenery is gorgeous. Colours, clouds, textures, all stunning. And then laid over it are creatures rendered by kids in the fourth grade who like dinosaurs. Why? Why would you do something so jarring? Manipulative, plot-less, meandering, trite, cliché ridden cinematic junkfood. My kids were predicting the plot within minutes of the start of the film. "His Dad's going to die." There are too many inconsistencies to enumerate, and too many glaring impossibilities in the concept of talking agrarian dinosaurs who would have evolved if only the comet hadn't hit. But why does every dinosaur have to have an accent like a 1950s southern US dirt farmer? Is it the Disney management or just the inevitable decline of organizations that makes Pixar bereft of ideas and able only to come up with vacuous stuff like this, and Inside Out?
The Muppets. (2015)
A shadow of its former self
Yes, I'm a grumpy old troll, but the new show exhibits none of the charm of the original. I get that they are trying for a more grown up feel, but adding sexual innuendo to the Muppets is kind of creepy. I mean, would you really want the cast of Leave it to Beaver to explore the double entendre? And there is an undercurrent of meanness to many of the jokes. The old show would centre around one human guest star, often somebody obscure or forgotten, which was part of the fun. I mean, who the heck is Wally Boag? Nowadays you pull out your iPad and look him up on, say IMDb, while you watch. Back in the day you had to call your dad or grandfather to find out! The new show also has an insider/star worshipper (there's a shorter word I'm not using, for obvious reasons)/name dropper thing which has been done ad nauseum. I don't want The Muppets Meet Entourage! I do like the joke hidden in the name of the fictitious show they all work on.
Descendants (2015)
You can smell the fear
It's a lightweight Disney flick extrapolating Disney stories in a bewildering, irrational way, starring pretty young girls from the Disney stable, plus some guy named Booboo. The real story is that hare Disney was asleep while tortoise Mattel was discovering the Internet. Ever After High (and Monster High) have made Mattel boatloads of money on a shoestring budget. You can watch all the episodes for free on Youtube, then rush out and buy the toys. Production cost? Minimal. Advertising cost? $0. Profits? Priceless! This movie smells of fear, and fear = failure. A bunch of Disney accountants wrote the script one morning, having been woken up at 3AM by a panicked exec. At least that's what I surmise since the plot, dialogue, and characters are as appealing as sitting through a 3 hour conference call about the latest quarterly report. There are two jokes that made me laugh, but I promise not to spoil it for you. The few people I recognize are completely wasted in this flick, so I hope they got a few house/boat/car payments out of it.
Inside Out (2015)
Who Likes This??
This movie is Breaking The Waves for kids. An hour and a half of ever deepening misery is not mitigated by a two minute happy ending. Wrap it in Christmas paper and call it "It's a wonderful life Jr." Why would you drag yourself over emotional broken glass for this long in the hopes of a positive resolution? Do you find joy in hitting yourself on the head with a two by four, because you know that eventually the pain will stop, like when you pass out? We watched this thing and got two, count 'em two laughs. Not belly laughs, not guffaws, just mild chuckles. The rest was a harrowing, bewildering slide down into the depths of despair while trying to comfort children who were showing more and more signs of emotional distress. A waste of time and a waste of the talents involved.
It just plain sucks.
Big Hero 6 (2014)
Meh
The movie seems to have had nobody in charge, just a committee with a checklist of popular trends and plot clichés.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs / Big Bang Theory- lets have science nerds! check!
Boy and dragon? Let's have boy and robot! - check!
Pathos a la Bambi - check.
The script was written in minutes, you can see the scotch tape holding the plot pieces in place. There is no attempt to make anything believable, we just have a lab full of magicians doing sciencey stuff and talking gibberish. The characters that are nominally Japanese have been drawn without any effort to make them look Asian, either from timidity or carelessness.
Spoiler alert: 500 degrees Kelvin is 440F, not as hot as your oven when you heat up frozen pizza.
Pacific Rim (2013)
21st Century Johnny Sokko - only the budget has changed
I heard the director talk about this film, which is why I am writing this review. He seemed to think he was making a story of valiant underdogs struggling against the odds. I can suspend disbelief and enjoy a movie fantasy as well as the next guy, but even for mindless entertainment, this is mindless. A hundred million dollars buys a lot of computer generated imagery, but that seems to be all it bought. The dialogue is just plain dire, a string of clichés, including the required "noooooo!". The acting is wooden, but with a script like this you can't expect much else. I just don't get how you can be given so much money for a project and produce something with so little impact. Hollywood has got to get past its green screens and start writing some stories to go with all the CGI.
Hoodwinked! (2005)
Completely charmless waste of time and CPU.
It's like watching TV and movies made in the 80s when everybody in the credits was on cocaine. Even stoned, who could find this appealing? The animation is a CGI version of really bad claymation. The dialogue is at times ponderous, other times bewildering. The plot makes no sense. The characters are unappealing. The jokes are either laboured and obvious or they're just plain unfunny. When you listen to the characters it's as if they hired people and asked them to sound like somebody more famous and more expensive. And yet they made a sequel but without Anne Hathaway, the only name in the cast recognizable by anybody under 50.
What the...?
Legend of Frosty the Snowman (2005)
Makes "Frosty Returns" look like a classic!
The John Goodman program was pretty awful, but this thing just plain stinks. The one and only thing in this mess that made me smile was recognizing the voice of Patrick Starfish as Frosty. The story is hopeless, written by somebody who has garbled memories of childhood rebelliousness but has never gained any adult sense of perspective in the intervening years. Paranoia rules the dark world that these characters inhabit. Everybody is unpleasant, and for no reason. The plot is predictable but the show lurches from one inexplicable, unconnected scene to another in such a pointless way there is no fun in watching it. The worst thing is nobody in the production crew seems to have ever seen snow!
The Polar Express (2004)
Big Waste of Time
I don't see the point. It's ponderous. The animated people are creepy (look up uncanny valley). Scenes go on and on and on for very little purpose. The plot is skeletal and must be padded out with lots of meaningless dramatic, screaming roller coaster rides, as if Disney or Spielberg were planning an amusement park ride based on the movie. Most of the characters are annoying and unlikeable. Some of them keep showing up as if they will have something important to add to a climactic scene. They don't. They just vanish with no lasting impact. Somebody summed it up as "if you don't believe in Santa Claus, you'll be kidnapped on a train on Christmas eve." That pretty much sums it up.
America's Sweethearts (2001)
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
In fact, it never was. I'm not sure why Billy Crystal wanted to recreate a 1940s screwball comedy. What a vacuous shambles! None of these people come close to a Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, etc, and anyway, today's audience isn't as receptive to this facile muck. Writing is trivial. The hackneyed plot is razor thin and obvious. The chemistry between the leading characters is non-existent. It's interesting that Julia Roberts seems to think she's a reincarnation of some big star from the "golden age of Hollywood", whenever that may be. It's an effect she tries and fails to attain yet again with Richard Gere in Runaway Bride.