MJC_42 Reviews

Thanksgiving (I) (2023)

Amusing enough, but you'll most likely wish more characters died, and the killer couldn't possibly have been who it was

[5/10 · 14 March 2024]

Some of the kills were decent, especially when there was some Thanksgiving theming to them, but for the most part they weren't all that interesting or creative. Most of the characters in the movie are annoying, so you're glad to see them bite it, but some of the annoying characters make it.

The thing that bugs me the most is that the killer (I won't say villain because all of the victims had it coming) could not possibly have been who it was revealed to be. It's not that the person isn't an obvious suspect, but there were multiple instances where the killer literally would have had to have been in two places at once in order to accomplish some of the things that they did. It just makes no sense at all.

While I enjoyed the movie well enough, you've seen this a million times before.

The Platform (2019)

Half of a good idea that they couldn't quite stick the landing on

[7/10 · 19 April 2023]

Most of the movie was great. I feel as though they were going for some kind of grand allegory with the prison being a metaphor for society, especially with how the platform works and how the distribution of food works. However, I'm not clear on why inmates were moved each month and why they were moved to specific levels. It seems to be completely random that a person could be on a high level one month, a low level another, and a medium some other month. I don't think society is quite so random. In the real world, someone at the top and someone at the bottom are rarely going to shift around like that.

Another thing that they didn't really make clear was why the woman was looking for the child and why the child was there. Also, given how the platform moves, it would be very easy to get to the very bottom in a single day if one so chose, so shouldn't this woman have found the kid the very first time she went looking? Or was she waylaid every month and somehow couldn't get down there? And with the kid, was the kid always at the very bottom, or did she shift around? How did she survive? Was she magical, and she was just waiting for someone to choose to go to the very bottom and send her back up?

It felt to me like they had no idea how to end this movie, so they just kind of ended it. And if I was supposed to get some kind of meaningful message regarding this child (is she supposed to represent salvation or Christ or sin or what?), they didn't really do a good job making that message decipherable, and they ended it before providing any kind of resolution to what was going to happen to Goreng or the kid. Maybe they thought that leaving it to our imaginations would be best, but I feel as though they didn't really know what they wanted to do or say, so they used this as a cop-out.

All in all, a good movie that, unfortunately, doesn't have any sort of satisfying conclusion. It just ends.

The Great British Baking Show: The Professionals (2016– )

Like every other review here, the hosts, particularly Tom Allen, are terrible

[5/10 · 2 March 2023]

If you're a big fan of the British Baking Show, as I am, you may have seen this title appear on Netflix and figured this would be pretty similar to that other show. Unfortunately, you would be wrong.

First of all, if you've never appreciated what a host brings to a show, you will when you watch this one because you will see how much a bad host can ruin the experience. The writing is terrible, but the two hosts make it even worse, especially Tom Allen. Liam is not good, but I don't find him particularly grating. Tom, on the other hand, has a horribly annoying voice, and his personality is like nails on a chalkboard. I honestly can't fathom why they hired him or why he was allowed to stick around for more than one season. Every review seems to come to the same conclusion.

I noticed that some people also do not like the judges. I do, but they are not as warm as Paul and Prue or Mary Berry. Granted, they are also not British. Benoit is French, and Cherish is from Singapore, though she honestly makes me think of some kind of German BDSM dom. Anyway, I find them enjoyable in their own way, but I can understand some people not finding them as approachable or possibly a little more harsh and direct with their critiques.

The show itself has a different format. Instead of individual bakers out for themselves, there are six pairs. Each episode, they do two desserts, and one pair gets eliminated. When they are down to three pairs, they set them aside and start over with six new pairs. When three have been eliminated, they combine the two sets of three pairs and start over again with six. They then go back to eliminating pairs until a finale, where they have a winning pair.

I don't mind the format, but I do prefer what happens in the regular British Baking Show.

Outer Banks (2020– )

I came for a treasure hunt mystery, but all I found was a collection of cliches

[5/10 · 27 February 2023]

The premise sounded interested to me, so I checked it out, but I found it pretty disappointing. This is just one cliche after another, starting with a warm locale filled with haves who are a-holes and have-nots who are also a-holes but have chips on their shoulders. You have a cast that is too old for the parts they are playing, including a lead actor pushing 30 who is supposed to be a teen on the verge of being sent to foster care due to a lack of a guardian. And no, he does not remotely look like he could pass for a high school student. You even get your rich girls slumming it with the poor boys, and let's not forget all of the plot driven by hotheads and bad decisions.

Basically, if you like CW-type teen-without-any-teens-in-it melodrama, this may be for you. For anyone else, this probably is a pass.

Fall (I) (2022)

Good concept and visuals, but movie is marred by making the characters morons

[5/10 · 26 February 2023]

The idea here is that there are two women and one man who are climbing a mountain at the beginning of the movie. The man is married to one of the women. He falls to his death. How this happens should have clued me into how dumb this movie was going to be, or rather how dumb the characters were going to be.

The woman who was married to the dead guy spends the next year essentially in a drunken stupor and is completely incapable of breaking out of her depression. Cue friend who was with her and her husband when he died. She's basically makes money running a daredevil Youtube channel and wants her sad friend to come with her to climb this abandoned 2,000 foot radio tower in the middle of nowhere so that she can film it for her channel.

Sad girl repeatedly says no, but, and this will be a continuing theme, daredevil girl pushes her to do it and won't take no for an answer. Granted, it doesn't take a lot of pushing because sad girl repeatedly gives in - every single time.

They go to the tower, which is rickety and rusted. A rung on the ladder falls off at one point, but this does not deter our moronic heroes. Also, they never tie themselves to the tower. They have a 50 foot rope. That's it. This tower is 2,000 feet tall, and there's one stretch that is 200 feet, but they only brought 50 feet of rope. In addition, they tie themselves to each other with the rope instead of tying themselves to the structure. If one of these women falls, there is zero chance that the other would actually be able to prevent them both from falling.

After occasional bouts of brow-beating whenever the sad girl loses her nerve, they eventually make it to the very top. They do some stupid stuff, and then they start to descend. Well, the ladder at the top falls apart, and they end up stuck at the top. About 58 feet below them, is the backpack with a drone and a single bottle of water.

They spend a couple of days stuck on the top of this tower on a small platform. They never tie themselves to the structure. They just sit there and somehow don't fall off. They eventually come up with various plans, one of them having a tragic, but hilarious result.

I don't want to spoil how the movie resolves itself, but there's a lot of stupid. Even when the characters have good ideas, they execute them in the dumbest ways possible. For example, there's a part where the rope needs to be lower and in a different spot for someone to reach it. Instead of untying the rope and moving it to a better location, they leave it as-is, and the person has to literally jump for it. There's another part where they use the drone, and, well, I won't say that the plan was a smashing success.

The premise is good, and the movie looks fantastic and will probably occasionally make you a bit queasy in a good way. The problem is that the two characters are not likeable at all, and they are incredibly dumb as it relates to climbing and preparation and just making good choices. This is frustrating. A little tweaking and I think this movie could have been really good. As it was, I just did not find myself rooting for these characters to succeed.

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)

Rich, self-absorbed drug addicts that all hate each other break down during a storm when something bad happens

[3/10 · 4 November 2022]

Maybe the idea is that you're supposed to hate all of these characters that you spend 90+ minutes with, but that isn't something I consider fun. Maybe it would be entertaining if each of these execrable people succumbed to hilarious karmic judgement, but that's not what happens.

The basic idea here is that Bee takes an trip with her girlfriend, Sophie, to visit Sophie's old friends who are spending time at the house of one of them, David (played by Pete Davidson), whose parents are super wealthy, though they mostly all come from money. These are your typical rich brats who spend a lot of time drinking and doing coke. There is nothing likeable about any of them.

They decide to play a game called Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, which is a bit like Among Us in that someone is supposed to go around murdering the other people. However, if a body is found, they turn on the lights, and they vote someone out who they think is the murderer. Shortly after they voted out David, they get ready to play another round, but the power goes out, and then David turns up with a slashed throat.

Everyone freaks out and assumes he's been murdered, and they all start pointing fingers, first at the easy target, Greg, and then eventually at each other. As they break down, everyone's secrets come out, and it turns out that all of these awful people actually really just hate each other and don't mind doing terrible things to each other. Bee, an outsider, is mostly an exception.

Eventually, almost everyone ends up dead, though it's largely a self-fulfilling prophecy as the twist in the end reveals. Not that you can't see this twist coming a mile away.

I really don't understand the good reviews for this movie. Who wants to spend 90+ minutes with a group of self-absorbed, drug-addicted, rich, entitled pieces of crap who are mean and awful and who don't even get what's coming to them in a satisfying way? Maybe I'm too old for this garbage. Maybe if you're a teen this will somehow speak to you. I can't imagine I'd want to spend any time with anyone who would actually enjoy this terrible waste of time.

Body at Brighton Rock (2019)

Woefully unprepared moron who's afraid of her own shadow and has an overactive imagination gets lost in the woods and finds a body. Nothing happens.

[3/10 · 22 October 2022]

Nothing happens in this movie. They try to fake you out a bunch and make you think there's possibly a murderer or creep or werewolf, but it all comes to naught. It's just a woman alone in the woods who happens to be extremely skittish and afraid of everything imagining stuff happening, but none of it actually happens except for the very end when a bear comes upon her and mildly attacks her. I really hope this character got fired and the character who allowed this moron to go off in the woods by herself completely unprepared also gets fired.

Literally the best part of the movie is when this idiot sucks in a bunch of bear spray that she sprayed at nothing because there was nothing there but her overactive imagination. Given all of the stuff she sees as though it were completely real and in front of her and the fact that she literally has a conversation with a person who wasn't actually there, she should get some psychiatric help.

The Last Descent (2016)

Rescue movie that mostly focuses on imagining John's mental state and barely focuses on the rescue attempt

[2/10 · 18 September 2022]

On the plus side, this movie gets to the point where John wedges himself upside down in a cave pretty quickly. The problem is that this movie isn't really focused on the attempt to rescue him. There are bits here and there where they mention some of the technical challenges involved, and we see a couple different people interact with John, but we barely spend any time with those attempting the rescue, nor do we see much of their efforts to try and rescue him.

Instead, this movie takes that situation and builds a whole story around what John could have been imagining while stuck, and we learn about his childhood and relationship with his family, and about his Mormonism, and how he met his wife and wooed her.

This is more of a cheesy love story and tribute to John with a rescue as a backdrop. As a rescue/survival movie, this is one of the worst, if not the worst, that I've ever seen. The writing and acting are pretty bad, and way they go through all of these hallucinations is just poor movie making. This is a very amateurish movie, poorly made from pretty much every way you look at it unless you need a heartfelt, Lifetime movie about Mormon love.

Everyone is pretty much insufferable as they put John on this weird pedestal. There's a part in the movie where John is dating Emily, and she goes away for 4 months. It's not entirely clear to me how long they were dating before then, but it did not seem like very long. He was obsessed with her and needed her to be his wife. After she got back, he made this big show of proposing to her. She turned him down (rightly, given that it seemed like they hadn't been together that long), and it seemed to crush him. Apparently his family took her rejection of him (she did not break up with him, merely said no to the proposal) hard and vilified her. They wanted him to dump her and find someone else. He persisted, but gave himself a fairly short timeframe to try and convince her to marry him. I guess it worked. This whole thing came off pretty gross to me. I pretty much hated that family.

The ending is pretty terrible. I don't want to spoil it, but there's a whole Benjamin Button, cheesy watching over you nonsense to it all.

This is just a bad, bad movie that pretends to be one kind of movie but is actually something completely different. If you want a heartfelt Mormon tribute to this guy's life and aren't really interested in a rescue/survival movie, maybe this would work for you.

Halloween Kills (2021)

Everyone in this town makes the dumbest choices possible

[4/10 · 15 October 2021]

The movie takes place immediately after the events from 2018's Halloween. I imagine that if you liked that movie, you'll probably like this one as well. I'm sure you're familiar with the drill. Michael Myers kills a bunch of people, the end.

Here is my problem with this movie. For things to happen as they do, every single character in this movie must do the dumbest thing possible. People are literally throwing themselves into Michael Myers' path to be murdered when they could easily avoid it. People go off, alone, in a house to go looking for him. They never have a chance. When they have the opportunity to call for backup, they don't. When they have a gun that they can use to shoot him, they don't even try to get a good shot and just shoot wildly. Even when they are like two feet away, they can't hit him. They are worse shots than the stormtroopers from Star Wars. Even when they do have an opportunity to take him out, they totally blunder it by letting up and by getting in close to fight, one by one. This movie even goes back in time to come up with new scenes showing people making the dumbest choices possible. Michael Myers just keeps going about his business, and all of these people go out of their way to get murdered by him. Everyone in this town is a moron. So, if you're looking for a movie that isn't remotely scary involving Michael Myers walking around slaughtering people dumber than livestock with occasional scenes of Jamie Lee Curtis screaming wildly for no real reason, you will probably like this.

Army of the Dead (2021)

Mostly entertaining but failed to stick the landing so hard that it completely ruined what came before.

[4/10 · 23 May 2021]

The basic premise is that the Army was holding a super zombie in a container and was transporting it. After a collision on the highway, the (poorly built) container popped open, and the super zombie started killing people. This was just outside Las Vegas, so Las Vegas became zombie-infested. The city was walled off, and the government plans on nuking it.

A rich dude talks to a down-on-his-luck soldier and makes him a deal. There is $200 million in a safe in a casino. If he puts together a team and collects the money, he and his team will split $50 million.

Added to this team is a guy representing the rich dude. We know he's shady and will betray them because there's something else the rich dude actually wants, and the team knows he's shady and will betray him, but for some reason they do not immediately murder him and go about their business. If they had, it's likely that everyone on the team would have survived.

On top of this, the main character has an estranged daughter. He asks her to help them get into a volunteer camp area outside of the walled city. She had a friend in the camp who had two kids. Her friend wanted to go into the city in order to try and steal some money. She does and goes missing. The daughter of the main character insists on joining the team so that she can find her friend.

As you can imagine, this daughter is the worst, just the absolute worst. Not only is she the worst character in the whole movie, but she just sucks. Lots of movies have these characters who are total morons and insist on doing something really stupid despite everyone saying it's really stupid and despite the likelihood that their stupid actions will hurt others. I so very much hate that this character is in the movie. It's so damn lazy and annoying. And guess what? Spoiler alert: She's only character to survive.

Before they go into the city to get to the safe, they are told that they have a certain amount of time before the nuclear strike. As they are in the process of trying to get the safe open, they discover that they will have 24 hours less than expected, which gives them 90 minutes to open the safe (which is expected to take 30 minutes), collect the money, and get on the helicopter and leave. There's time to do it, but not a lot to spare.

After they get the safe open and start collecting the money, they discover that the daughter ran off. That's right. Without telling anyone at all and with a very short bit of time available, she leaves to go to another casino where she suspects her friend might, if she's lucky, still be alive. How exactly she expected to make it through the zombie-infested area to the other casino, which is also infested with zombies, rescue her friend, make it back to the first casino and get on the helicopter in time and without any help is anyone's guess.

At this point, all Hell breaks loose because of the shenanigans of the double-crossing guy, so everyone is fighting zombies, and some people are getting killed. The main guy, who is not carrying hardly any money at all for some reason, goes after the daughter. He is able to find her and rescue her. Now, he has an opportunity to take out the zombie leader or at the very least trap it in a room, but he fails to do that, and they just run. So this guy, his stupid daughter, and her stupid friend, make it to the roof where they eventually board the helicopter. As they are leaving, the zombie lord jumps into the helicopter and fights with the main character and eventually bites him. His daughter sits there, useless. Although her friend boards the helicopter, it's unclear what happens to her as we never see her alive. The helicopter crashes, and the pilot is dead, and the dad is lying there dying, and this stupid woman has barely a scratch on her despite a violent helicopter crash and not even having been strapped in. Again, who knows what happened to her friend. She ends up shooting her dad and survives.

There was another guy who got locked into the safe. He was fighting a zombie with another guy, the safecracker, and the safecracker through him into the safe to protect him and closed it before getting killed. Uh, how exactly was he expecting this guy to ever leave the safe? But hey, he did get to leave the safe! I don't know if the door could be pushed open from the inside, or if it cracked open as a result of the nuclear bomb, but he makes it out with a ton of money. He finds a car and drives to an airport and gets himself on a private plane. Sounds good. Oh wait, he was bitten, and apparently this is the slowest-activating bite in zombie history. Most of these people turn within seconds, maybe minutes. It must have been hours at least for this guy.

So yeah, a fun and entertaining movie ruined by having the absolute worst character be the only survivor. This was some seriously sadistic crap. This could have been an entertaining and satisfying zombie heist movie, but instead it turned out to be someone's sick joke where he gets to torture us with this horrific ending.

I Care a Lot (2020)

Not a satisfying story - some characters too competent, others not competent enough

[3/10 · 7 March 2021]

The movie actually starts off well enough, setting the stage for what would hopefully be a satisfying tale of a villain getting their comeuppance. Rosamund Pike plays a professional guardian who supposedly helps those who are unable to care for themselves. She arranges for them to be put in care facilities while she manages their affairs and finances. She, of course, liquidates their assets and steals their money.

At the beginning of the movie, we see her in family court where the son of one of her marks is trying to get his mom out from under her care. She expertly talks the judge into siding with her and also preventing the son from having visitation rights.

Later, she is talking with a doctor who offers up a particularly good mark - a wealthy woman with no family and showing early signs of memory loss. Pike's character and the doctor go to family court and argue that this woman, Jennifer Peterson, should be remanded to her care. The judge is convinced. The woman had not been informed of the hearing and had no representation. Pike's character then visits her house, shows her the paperwork saying that she's now under her care, and she's taken away and basically imprisoned in a facility while Pike and her crew sell off the woman's assets. Pike even finds her safety deposit box, which has millions in diamonds.

It turns out that this woman is the mother of a Russian mob boss. Both have fake identities, so Jennifer Peterson is not really Jennifer Peterson, which is why no relatives turn up.

So, we have here a situation where a truly repugnant woman, one who is also extremely smug and sees herself as a lion who never loses, has, unbeknownst to her, picked a very bad mark. In the real world, the mob boss would probably torture and murder Pike's character, either before or after getting their mom out of this facility. In this movie, however, things do not happen that way.

First, the mob boss sends his lawyer to Pike, requesting that the mother be released, though he doesn't tell Pike who he works for. He also makes oblique references to her being tortured and murdered if she doesn't comply. She is unconcerned. He then offers her a briefcase of money. She refuses and demands much more. Now, a person in the real world would probably realize by this point that maybe they screwed up and would probably take the money and release the woman. Not this lioness, though. She doubles down. She visits the woman in the facility and asks her who she is. The woman tells her that bad stuff is going to happen to her. Pike doubles down again and has this woman confined to her room and given reduced care.

For whatever stupid reason, the mob boss sends 3 goons into the facility to kidnap the mom. This fails spectacularly because they are incompetent, and somehow Pike happens to be there with a baseball bat. I can't think of any logical reason for why the mob boss would have done this. Why not go directly to the guardian? If she wouldn't accept money, maybe she's accept keeping all of her fingers and toes.

Later, the doctor who lied to the court is murdered. Even this does not persuade Pike to change tactics. She keeps digging deeper. Eventually, the mob boss has her kidnapped and her girlfriend beaten and left in their house with the gas on. The mob boss has a conversation with Pike. She demands $10 million. He tells his goons to kill her but make it look like an accident. So, they drug her, put a bottle of alcohol in her hands, stick her in her car, and have it drive off a cliff. Somehow, while the car is speeding toward the cliff, Pike's character wakes from being drugged and is immediately alert and is not in any way mentally or physically impaired. The car goes off the cliff and into a lake or reservoir, but Pike is able to escape the car and walk to a gas station. She wasn't even injured when the car crashed into the water. She eventually finds her way home and discovers her girlfriend on the floor in the kitchen with the place filled with gas from the stove. Pike turns off the gas and drags the girlfriend out of the house. Moments after they leave, the house explodes. So these two failed murders demonstrate both an unrealistic level of incompetence from the mob boss's goons, but I guess it's not their fault when they clearly did enough to kill these two but the plot demanded that they survive, and the writers didn't think to at least make the situations realistic enough where it made sense for them to survive. I guess they figure that dumb luck at just the right moment was good enough.

These two ladies decide to hatch their own plot. Pike had memorized the license plate of one of the mob boss's vehicles. Her girlfriend has a connection at the police dept. who provides them with the address of the owner, which happens to be the mob boss's driver. They follow the driver to an office building. Pike goes into the office building and sneaks into the executive garage. There, she incapacitates the driver and the mob boss's bodyguard before drugging the mob boss so that she can kidnap him. Really? Where did this woman get the stuff she used, and how did she have the skill set to incapacitate these two men that should have some skills of their own?

She drives the mob boss to some random location, drugs him enough to make him OD but not enough to kill him, strips him, and leaves him there. He's brought to a hospital and saved, but he's a John Doe. Pike, meanwhile, was granted guardianship of him because he was a John Doe, and apparently she's able to just lie to the court and say that he should be in her care and that there's nothing he can do about it.

She demands that he give her $10 million. If he does, she'll release him and his mother, and give him back the diamonds. He agrees but makes her an offer. They should go into business together and start a nationwide chain of care facilities where they can grift billions. He'll be behind the scenes, and she'll be the face of the company. She agrees. Everything goes according to plan. She's living the high life and rich.

At the very end of the movie, the son from the beginning of the movie comes up and shoots her dead. The End.

Yeah, this movie was just not satisfying at all. I'm OK with them making me root for a mob boss since it's the only way to make this awful woman pay for what she's doing to people since the legal system, in this world, is completely ill-equipped. However, she never really comes to any realization that she screwed up, and she never wishes she had done something differently. She inexplicably beats the mob boss throughout the ordeal, constantly doubles down on her terrible choices, and she never pays a price for any of that. Instead, she is rewarded for it. The mob boss and his goons apparently have no core competencies, so I don't know how they got to be in the positions they are in because they're constantly making stupid, inefficient choices and not at all being ruthless. This movie should have been over 20 minutes in. Pike's character didn't outwit the mob boss either. She succeeded due to dumb luck, stupid opponents, and having a skillset that defies reason. Yeah, she dies at the end, but that wasn't nearly satisfying enough. I like the people involved, but this movie just irritated me.

Artemis Fowl (2020)

Not only a terrible adaptation, but a wholly incompetently-made film on every level

[1/10 · 13 June 2020]

I was extremely impressed by this movie. What impressed me was just how terribly and thoroughly they managed to botch this movie. Instead of trying to figure out what people liked about the books, it felt as though they took a bunch of random pages from the books and completely reinvented the characters to fit some random scriblings. A lot of the names are there, but the characters are off, especially Artemis. The movie version of him isn't even a pale facsimile of the book version.

Now, it is entirely possible to adapt a book and completely change everything about it and still stay true to the spirit of the books or to at least make a good movie even if it's nothing like the books. However, this movie fails just as a movie. It is an absolute mess. It felt as though they took a 4 hour movie and randomly removed 2.5 hours from it. We go from Holly wanting to do terrible things to Artemis to being best buddies with him in like 5 minutes for no reason at all. Character development and motivations are just tossed. There is no coherent flow to this movie.

On top of that, we get this really terrible narration by Josh Gad doing his best Batman impersonation (Judi Dench does hers as well). The problem with the narration is that it is extremely transparent that it's there to tell us what is going on and why and who these characters are because otherwise we'd have no idea that Butler is supposed to be a big badass (never shown in the movie) or that Artemis is this criminal mastermind/genius (not really shown in the movie either - Artemis is significantly more of a passive participant than he is in the books where he's a driving force of action) or any of a bunch of other things that could have been relayed to us in a more interesting way. I also can't help but think that maybe they thought the target audience was filled with morons and needed things spoon-fed to us.

As a family, we listened to these books while driving to and from Glacier National Park a couple years ago. My son, who is 12, was so excited for this movie. It was a major reason why we signed up for Disney+. I knew beforehand that this movie had significant issues, so I tried to gently tamp down expectations. He said he enjoyed the movie, but I have no doubt that he was both disappointed and confused as to why this movie only superficially bears any resemblance to the books.

It is stunning to me that they managed to make such an incompetent movie, especially when you had someone experienced like Kenneth Branagh at the helm. A truly missed opportunity as this could have been a great movie series. Hopefully it gets rebooted in a few years, maybe as a TV show.

The Willoughbys (2020)

They put too much focus on one character, and that character is the least likable in the movie

[3/10 · 26 April 2020]

WARNING: Lots of plot spoilers

This movie is based on a book by Lois Lowry. I haven't read the book, so I can't compare this movie to that. It's essentially about 4 children who grow up in a strange, old house in the middle of a city, and they apparently never leave the city. They have two parents who absolutely detest children to the point of gross abuse and neglect. They don't feed the kids, always yell at them, and the oldest is often tossed into the coal room. The story is supposed to be darkly comic along the lines of A Series of Unfortunate Events. One night, a orphaned baby is left on their doorstep, and the kids are all kicked out of the house until the rid themselves of the baby. They end up leaving it on the doorstep of a candy factory. This ultimately gives them the idea to make themselves orphans. They propose to do this by convincing their parents to take a wildly dangerous adventure vacation, literally hoping that the parents die at some point on it. The parents go on the adventure, but they don't want to leave the kids alone, so they hire what they believe is a cheap, terrible nanny. The nanny turns out to be kind and wonderful. The parents fail to die on their adventure before they run out of money. In order to keep adventuring, they decide to remotely sell their house. They tell the nanny to do whatever with the kids. This ultimately leads to a situation where the kids are declared orphans and taken into custody, where they are separated into different homes, though all of the homes seem to be very nice and loving. In order to be permanently reunited, they need their biological parents, so after they escape their homes, they build an airship and go rescue them in the Swiss Alps. The parents steal the airship and leave the kids to die, though they are ultimately rescued and live happily ever after.

The story is narrated by Ricky Gervais who plays a cat.

The movie looks great, and the voice cast is great, and I think there was a lot of promise in this plot. I think this story could make for a fantastic movie. This movie, however, is not fantastic. First, the narrator is unnecessary and doesn't really add anything to the story, certainly not the charm or whimsy or whatever that they were looking for. Second, I think that in order for this story to work, you need all of the children to be interesting and quirky and likable. You need to feel sorry for them but also impressed by their cleverness. The parents need to be over-the-top terrible but not too scary. Unfortunately, that is not what we have here. The biggest problem, by far, is that the story heavily focuses on the oldest child, and I absolutely detested this kid. He is annoying, stupid, a buzzkill, bossy, and just so unlikable. The movie doesn't let the other children really shine, so we get some surface-level quirks, and that is about it.

There are some good scenes, especially of the parents on their vacation, and of the children trying to scare off potential house buyers, but I really loathed this movie. I didn't ask what my kids thought of it because I didn't want to talk about how much I disliked it, but they did watch it all of the way through and didn't say anything negative about it, though they didn't say anything positive either. The younger one is 7, and she didn't seem scared or put off by the darker elements of the story, so I think it's probably fine for most kids.

Another Life (2019–2021)

Idiocracy...in Space

[2/10 · 11 August 2019]

I think by now it's pretty well-known that this show sucks. One of the biggest complaints involves the crew sent out on an important interstellar mission. An alien artifact lands on Earth, blah blah blah. There are scientists on the planet trying to figure out what this thing is and maybe try and communicate with it, led by some dude who has a kid with Starbuck, who has mellowed in the 10 years since her mission on Battlestar Galactica ended. Motherhood will do that, I guess. Or maybe not. What do I know? Anyway, Starbuck is pulled out of...retirement? maybe, to lead a crew that was previously captained by her former XO, who she trained. Now, if it were me and I wanted to send a crew out in space to make first contact with an alien species, I'd send my best and brightest - people who knew what they were doing and could continue to work together even when disagreements arose, people who were emotionally stable and mentally tough. The government of this Earth...chose another path. The crew members have the maturity of high school students, are extremely impatient, and are either bullying hotheads or cowards, and would literally rather risk dying in a fiery explosion than spend a few extra months traveling in space. I cannot fully express how stupid and irrational these characters are or how much I loathe them. They actually mutiny, and do so ridiculously quickly, because Captain Starbuck chooses to not risk killing them all in a potentially dangerous maneuver just to shave off a little time. For the life of me, I could not figure out why anyone would send this pile of garbage into space for any purpose, let alone for a mission of actual importance. But then it hit me. This isn't our Earth. This is the Earth from the movie Idiocracy. On that world, these are, in fact, the best and brightest. By our standards, they're moronic losers that should be excised from the gene pool as soon as possible, but in this world, they are all people who managed to dress themselves without putting on their clothes backwards, and they seem to be capable of eating food without it all getting in their hair. So when I look at it that way, that it's a form of satire, it's actually kind of funny. Probably not worth watching for 10 episodes funny, but it's something to hang your hat on if, for some reason, you're forced to watch this drivel.