Change Your Image
Scarefish
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Hazbin Hotel: Hello Rosie! (2024)
Worst episode
More so than any other episode, this one feels completely skippable and predictable, and almost seems to be deliberately wasting time stalling for the finale. Charlie literally won't shut up about how Vaggie betrayed her, and lied to her, and was dishonest, and didn't tell the truth, and didn't tell her who she really was, and, literally says to another that this makes her feel angry. This is disasterous for a show that has already shown it can delve into substantive, dark subject matter, but chooses now to string the viewers along with contrived melodrama. Not to mention, this episode features that awful discount-Shakira song that goes "For LooooOOOOooooOOOOoooove." Just a very lazy episode that does little to push the ball forward. I don't come to Hazbin Hotel to get My Little Pony with occasional F-bombs thrown in.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
quANTuMANia
Well, they've finally managed it.
The first Ant-Man nearly had good character moments, it crippled itself with the ever-so-apparent "funny problem" that has been plaguing Marvel's films for many years now. The sequel had much better spectacle - it was genuinely stunning at times; it's nearly enough to let me ignore the heavy Flanderization of all of our established characters. Now we have the third movie, and somehow we've ended up with the worst of both worlds.
The characters have lost all sense of individuality and urgency that they had in the first film, or what little of it they had back then. The ensemble plays off as that of a mid-day American sitcom, and not one of the ones that anybody really emjoys sitting down and watching actively. Full scenes dedicated to Scott's asides are not even the least bit funny as every joke is incredibly obvious and surface-level, oddly sandwiching the film with an incredibly cringe-worthy opening and ending that feel entirely useless. I don't think I have been so disengaged with any piece of media since I saw The Emoji Movie, though there are some sequences where this film at least creeps up to just being plain bad rather than abusively lazy. Scott has pics taken with peoples' dogs, he gets mistaken for Spider-Man, and he has a Hollywood-style panic attack that ends in an anti-climax that thinks it's much funnier than it is. These are the most memorable bits of the story due to their placement at the most crucial sections of the film, and that plays a huge role in sinking this movie's rating for me. It's like they wanted to numb viewers going into the film's first act, and then Sucker Punch them right at the end. This film is creative anaesthesia.
Somehow, with so much special effects and so much money dumped into it, this film manages to be the ugliest film in all of the MCU. I'm sure the special effects actually made the film worse. They spent countless resources ruining their sub-par film to turn it into one of the worst films I've seen in years. M. O. D. O. K. Is shocking; there was a time when Marvel was churning out visually stunning films back-to-back. Even if the other elements of the films were lacking, you could at least rely on popcorn entertainment, but not here. For the first time in the MCU I'm replused by the special effects more often than not - this was trending with some underbaked effects in Black Panther and Black Widow, but I didn't expect it to get to this point so quickly. This feels more like a low-budget TV film managing to seem bigger than it should be through clever effects, but it's a huge big-budget Hollywood film that's crippled by sloppy effects and messy environments through the vast majority of the film. I can only imagine this is due to a lack of cohesive, or decent, artistic direction; the incredibly poor money management on display here is insulting. I've never seen a better example of how bloated film budgets are on the verge of destroying the film industry as a whole, and by this point I'm almost hoping for it to happen already. After the pandemic we just got out of, the last thing we need are thousands of unincredible films that think they're worth our time. At a certain point I just have to say enough is enough and file for a divorce from corporate films.
Quantumania turns the infinitesimal quantum realm into a busy mess nearly as sloppy as its slapdash script.
I guess the team behind Quantumania just didn't quite understand what "less is more" really means.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)
Gets better as it goes on
Star Wars: The Clone Wars is a show that I struggled through for a month plowing through the painfully childish episodes of the first season, but after I overcame that initial slump the rest of the episodes flew by like nothing. The switch between seasons one and two is night and day and I was pleasantly surprised that a crowd of rabid fans turned out to be right about something for once. I'm usually not a fan of prequel or midquel content, and I especially didn't expect much potential out of a series making sense of Star Wars characters that we seemed to have exhausted a long time ago, but I found myself incredibly attached to Ahsoka and her journey throughout; she is easily one of the most interesting and complex characters that this franchise has ever produced, and the finale left me wanting more, leaving at its peak, which I think was the right move, artistically.
One thing I found strange with the series, however, was its treatment of the battle droids. They simultaneously cutesy up their designs and humanize their personalities here while also upping the physical gags involving them which has an incredibly paradoxical effect of making me feel bad for what should be emotionless evil droids. At times it feels like the heroes are relentlessly bullying harmless, cute, funny robots and I wish they had not gone so hard with their irreverent slapstick humor. These bits would probably be more appropriate as skits in Robot Chicken or something parodying the show. Frustratingly, they tease development some way through the series by repurposing droids to fight for the good guys, and they still don't treat them with any more dignity than the bad droids even though the show had gotten very mature by this point. This show clearly had a big effect in popularizing the battle droids in fanart communities, so it succeeded on that front, but then to also crank up the cruelty towards them just genuinely made me feel bad. It's probably a minor thing for most people, but if you binge the show it really is relentless with such gags.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
Disappointing ending
Stylish, dense, and emotionally effective, Across the Spider-Verse is a great sequel whose only incomprehensible flaw is its frustrating cliffhanger ending. It's almost like a modern-day Empire Strikes Back, but with an overly telegraphed twist ending it fumbles at the most crucial moment of any film, leaving me to wonder if this series should have continued via a show rather than additional films.
It has less tricks up its sleeve in its presentation, but it does a fantastic job at deepening the character of Gwen while adding a somehow-fresh sympathetic villain in a subgenre that seemed to have exhausted all of its creative ideas years ago. The multi-verse itself is a concept that has been done very poorly in most cases, but this use is possibly the best yet; It introduces a conflict that works directly with the plot and main themes of sacrifice and loss rather than using the trope as a tool to cheapen the world.
A rather serious technical gripe I had was with the audio mastering. I'm fairly certain if you switch between random moments in the film, you will find that the audio levels arbitrarily change from scene to scene. Late into the film one of the dialogue scenes got so quiet that it became hard to even hear characters having a normal conversation in a quiet apartment. At first I thought the music was poorly mixed and overwhelming the action scenes, which it often is, but it seems to go well beyond that: the levels just didn't make sense at all to what was happening in the movie. It just seemed that no one with a keen ear caught onto the issue, which is bizarre for a movie that is visually so stunning. It goes to show that all elements are important to develop rather than pushing just a single element to its peak.
That being said, the movie was still mostly understandable thanks to compelling performances from its actors. This one might have been a 9/10 if the audio didn't undercut its impact just a bit.
Promising Young Woman (2020)
It's good until the dialogue goes on and on and on
While Promising Young Woman was largely a pleasant surprise overall, it was also surprisingly sloppy in for a film with such critical acclaim.
A few rants and monologues throughout the movie drag on for a bit too long and come across only as self-indulgent and preachy. There are times where the writers could have realized that less was more and could have allowed subtext to carry scenes, but they spend time re-iterating and hammering in the obvious message that rape is bad, and I don't think that was the actual target for the movie in the first place. I think the real utility in this sort of story is for the normies who'd rather not think about rape in their everyday lives, who allow rape to happen regularly. Really, the dialogue is a mixed bag. I get that the film is a dark comedy, but even a dark comedy should have dialogue that is fully believable and well-performed within the world of the movie from start to finish - Bo Burnham in particular seems to have gotten the short end of the stick. While he's great at being a chill guy in the movie, when he's called to emote or show worry his dialogue collapses into what feels like first-draft material. He doesn't do great at showing us anything, but rather telling us things, overtly, and I think this is more the fault of the writers than the actor. There are numerous times where characters stop being characters and become devices in a script. This isn't to say that the dialogue is atrocious, but it's certainly a mixed bag ranging from good to just sloppy and obtuse.
That being said, where the movie really saves itself for me is in its style. It's well-shot, it's rather funny most of the time, it has a decent and fitting soundtrack throughout, and it has just enough twists to subvert expectations and skirt being entirely predictable. The pacing, again, is a bit of a mixed bag as the movie hits the right beats in a general sense, but the punchiest moments aren't punchy like they really should be - they're dragged out to the point where they lose their impact. The climax of the film, for instance, goes on for about five minutes and is reminiscent of a much faster scene from Gone Girl. This isn't an entirely fair comparison as the two movies have two entirely different goals, but something faster like Gone Girl would have made the climax more shocking and great.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022)
I need Knuckles to do a deep dab in Sonic 3 and Knuckles if they want a 10/10
For the first 20 minutes, Sonic 2 is a very basic and stale children's sequel relying on childish gags and unnatural on-the-nose dialogue to get its recycled messages across. The film takes a turn for the better once the human main characters get sidelined, and takes another dive when they return as the focus later on. This isn't to say the film starts awful, gets good, and then gets awful again - for the most part it gets the majority of its lame, but industry-enforced tropes out of the way before delving more into general fan-service that thankfully embraces the campyness of its source material while tweaking it just enough to make an enjoyable film-going experience.
It was a bit of a red flag when Sonic and Tails ended up in a bar in the middle of nowhere. I've seen this in many movies before and it always seems to be filler content. The sequence was enjoyable and amusing thanks largely to Ben Schwartz' fantastic performance as Sonic; he nails the attitude and joy of the character, and I wouldn't expect him to be so fantastic given his one-note performances in Jake & Amir and Parks and Recreation as a vastly different character. Ultimately, there were better routes the film could have taken here; at 122 minutes the entire sequence could be cut entirely and none of the story would suffer.
The overall plot is hardly the main drive of the movie anyway; the characters are mostly what people are going to be engaged by, and they're a mixed bag with high highs and low lows. Jim Carrey makes a fantastic Robotnik and it seems he knows how to chew up the scenery in just the right way to play off the silliness of the world and the character he's playing; if anything, he's better here than in the first movie, seeming to now be much more comfortable in the role. Tails is pretty much completely in-character, though his fanboyishness is a bit much at times and the film seems to struggle with deciding how much they want him to be in the movie as an integral character; he really should have shared the spotlight and the glory with Sonic more given the whole friendship message of the film, and this is a misstep present in the games' writing as well. The re-characterized and decidedly differently-voiced Knuckles might be odd to fans of the series, but it does still work, even if he seems a bit derivative of Guardians of the Galaxy's Drax. I appreciated that Knuckles' stupidity was tweaked into more of a naivety here. Like Sonic in the games, Knuckles is meant to be cool first-and-foremost and his character comes second, so I don't really demand much faithfulness to the character. The non-Robotnik human characters, unfortunately, remain the weakest here and possibly to a greater degree than in the original, despite having less screen time. Every moment in which the film focuses on Wade or the wedding people or Tom it feels like the pacing takes a massive hit; these characters are simply not entertaining and are only marginally engaging when they're playing off of the more wild characters in the film. Wade is 'the dumb one,' Tom is 'the American sitcom dad,' and Agent Stone is 'the pathetic villain sidekick' - still. None of these characters have depth or gain any through the course of two films to this point and they remain far too prominent in the story.
The writers seemed to really lean in to the cringe-worthy elements of Sonic and the previous film and they double-down and call back in ways that feel charming rather than obnoxious. Somehow Robotnik talking in unfitting gangsta-speak and flossing had me cracking up every time they did that sort of thing throughout, and a part of that was great comedic timing throughout the movie.
The dialogue was weak overall, and I imagine this is due to a weak screenplay. There were odd grammatical mistakes here and there which don't seem to serve a narrative purpose; Sonic switches between tenses mid-sentence and characters occasionally leave out conjunctions in their lines. More is expected out of film dialogue.
The action sequences are better than Marvel, but at this point that hardly means anything anymore. They really capture that shonen Dragon Ball-knockoff energy. Even though it's predictable at least the cinematography is nice, the action sequences are well-animated and well-paced, and the special effects are mostly fantastic, aside from some rather flat-looking explosion gifs during a rotating slow-mo shot.
This is a very light 7/10. It takes a bit more of a walk-up than I would like, but eventually gets to a point in which I found myself watching an entertaining and satisfying film.
The Curse of La Llorona (2019)
La-la-la La Llorona!
The Curse of La Llorona is a film that's best enjoyed with the volume cranked down so low that you can't even hear the dialogue and the speed cranked up so high that the thousands of jumpscares throughout its 20 minute runtime act more like punchlines to a tongue-in-cheek horror-comedy, and even then you'd be much better served watching The Cabin in the Woods instead.
The Purge: Anarchy (2014)
The Worst Purge
I can only assume this film was made during some sort of writers' strike as it feels like it was whipped together in a single night by a college frat boy with a Bacehlor's Degree in Keepin' It Real. None of the underlying themes survive the script of this film as all of the issues and theories one could have had with the first are made clear and obvious with this film. You don't even have to use sight and sound together to get this film. Pick one or the other and you will understand the plot just as well as someone who watched this movie normally, if not better. If only we could have purged this film from existence, then perhaps we wouldn't be continually punished to this day with additional Purge films.
The Purge: Election Year (2016)
The Purge: Propaganda Edition
What looked to be a tongue-in-cheek change of pace for the Purge series turned out to be the most derivative and pandering pieces of propaganda yet from the franchise, and I feel stupid for expecting anything more out of the series by this point. It was always going to be the story that rich executives think will pull money out of the pockets of lower-to-middle-class American families.
Garbage (2018)
Hence Title
Garbage is an exploitation movie that thinks it has an immensely powerful message. It doesn't and it's not worth anyone's time, and if you need this movie to teach you morals then you're probably already too far gone. I can't seem to voice many more thoughts on it without my review getting rejected, so I'll just leave it at that.
The Equalizer 2 (2018)
The Equali2er
This film sure loved boasting how it managed to drag Denzel into it when no other film he's been in has managed to bring him back for a sequel. I'm sure a large chunk of that $69 million budget has something to say about it, as the filmmaking is not that of a $69 million film.
There is a scene in this movie of two characters in a room talking, and it's shot out of focus. This film spent over $69 million and couldn't even bother to have its cameras set up correctly. I don't know if anything better epitomizes a film's mediocrity than bad cinematography. You really have to focus to know that this film's terrible or your brain will tell you it's simply mediocre.
The pacing is also bunk. There are solid moments and arcs and characters throughout this film, surprisingly, but much of the film's goodwill is undone by the half-way point in which it stumbles into its final act and sacrifices sensibility and nuance in favour of dumb action setpieces, generic villains, and long, bloated action sequences that needed much more work from an editor to be even remotely acceptable. I'm not for a second believing that Snipey McSniperson would be thrown off when shooting at a literal fish in a barrel by a simple blown tire when his vantage point was some 200 meters in the sky on a tower right next to said barrel of fish.
Let's not make an Equaliz3r, please. And please don't call it that.
Ant-Man (2015)
Ant-agonizing
The Marvel movies have proven to be terrible re-watches so far with each of the issues apparent on first viewing only being more pronounced with a second viewing, and many more flaws cropping up along the way. If you're looking for decent special effects, then give this one a shot, but if you're looking for even acceptable filmmaking then look elsewhere as this film and its sequel are in the lower echelon of MCU films with the likes of Age of Ultron and Thor: The Dark World.
This film polarizes me greatly as there are moments that are great that are completely ruined by excessive and wholly inappropriate instances of tonal whiplash and embarrassing dialogue. Pym and his daughter have a very well-acted emotional exchange that is absolutely slaughtered by a lazy one-liner from Scott Lang. This is the most egregious bit of the film and it vastly overwhelms any other key moment the movie tried to have. Whenever I'm to think of Ant-Man, I'm brought back to this scene and I remember how great Michael Douglas is and how Marvel so aptly undercut and undid his efforts in these movies.
Bad movie.
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)
The Devil Made Me Watch It
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It is another unconvincing "true story" about a murderer who people think of in high regard for superstitious reasons, and it's the eight instalment in the incredibly vapid and over-rated Conjuring universe. While there may be substance here somewhere, it's hard to find it under all the jumpscares, which are littered throughout the film more densely than the ad-rolls in a YouTuber's apology video. I believe I saw my first shot-reverse-shot jumpscare in a film, but I can't be too sure since my brain stopped functioning half-way through the film. I think a character screamed at the camera, which turned to Ed and Lorraine I think their names are, then turned back and the character screamed again in the exact same manner. It was literally a game of peek-a-boo for the movie-going audiences.
Why do people keep watching these films? Why do people keep talking about how excited they are to see The Conjuring each year? You saw the past seven films, surely by now you should know better. This is the same derivative Conjuring film we've come to expect and I shouldn't even have to type this review. You should have known by the title that this one was not worth your time, or anyone else's for that matter.
"You love it, don't you? Keep watching our trite movies and shoveling that popcorn down your gullets." <-- That's what they're thinking as you continue to support these absolutely embarrassing excuses for films. They don't view you as a person when you watch these films. You're merely data, and they think they're entitled to your time and money.
Thankfully it's a step up from The Nun, The Curse of La Loorona, and Annabelle, but unfortunately it's not good enough to earn a 1/10 from me. Except on these sites where 1/10 is the lowest I'm allowed to rate such moist trash.
Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
The Ships Have Dongs
The Rise of Skywalker struggles to pull this trilogy together following the derailment of The Last Jedi, and what results is a lackluster finale that wastes plenty of time literally piecing together the broken remnants of a setup that was never promising in the first place. What is pretty epic though is that our boy JJ included some phallic imagery to remind us of how the patriarchy keeps us down even to this day. The imperial star destroyers now have giant "underbelly cannons," if you catch my drift. They're hung like horses for sure. Psst, they're the new death stars, again, in case that trope wasn't tired after Return of the Jedi.
It's hard to pinpoint one aspect that really sucks about this film, as it's more a culmination of thorough mediocrity. I can't really appreciate that this film tries re-railing the plotthreads in the previous film if the ultimate product is still a trainwreck just because it minimized the damages. I was out of hope in the trilogy by the end of Last Jedi, and by the end of this I feel I've been proven right. In a way this film is worse because it's not even fun to look at - many scenes are downright hideous, especially the abysmal sky battle towards the end with the dark ships fighting at night-time in the middle of a massive storm. I would sooner rewatch Last Jedi five times than watch this once more despite this film being ten minutes shorter.
Firstly, I feel JJ Abrams is a massively overrated director. His recent films, which are probably his best, feel like knockoff Spielberg without the emotional resonance or character depth, so probably akin to Ready Player One Spielberg rather than Jaws Spielberg. While he's not incompetent to the degree of Michael Bay, his films come off as if they think they're clever than they actually are, and this is most apparent in the dialogue. Now, JJ is only one of four writers, but as a director he's in charge of making his vision come to life, and a massive part of that is in the characters. These characters don't feel distinct. If they were all clones of each other, I wouldn't bat an eye. There's a scene where jetpack troopers prompt three of our heroes to respond "They FLY now?" in succession, which doesn't even make sense as a surprise anyways. Jetpack technology existed back as far as Attack of the Clones, if not earlier. There are many attempts at quips throughout the film, and very few land. In a way, the attempted humor is more cringeworthy than the childish writing of The Last Jedi, and that film had a "your mom" joke in it.
Going back to The Force Awakens, the film was essentially a soft reboot of the franchise with the mindset of "out with the old and in with the new" while retreading the same ground as A New Hope. What resulted was exactly that, with this trilogy macking off of the original trilogy and killing off the majority of major characters and replacing them with our new cast. In a way, Force Awakens was a brilliant movie, giving people a taste of what the original Star Wars was with modern day visual effects. I'm not a fan of it, but I can understand how it can be entertaining. Rise of Skywalker has more story and originality to it, but it is so bland and unrefined that it isn't even entertaining at its surface level. Action sequences seem to start at their best towards the beginning of the film and progressively get worse as the film goes on, and an abundance of long talking sequences in between heavily weigh down a hopelessly lost trilogy. My favorite shot in the whole film is a short sequence of Rae running from Kylo's ship, and doing a backflip and cutting one of the wings with her lightsaber. It was well-paced, well-composed, and well-lit, and it thematically fit as a "Star Wars" force moment. Later on, she has a duel with Kylo in a storm, and while the fight was largely tense, the scene frequently stalled with acrobatics and was much less clear than the earlier sequence. The rest of the sequences take place at night, and in a cave, where only occasional lightning strikes and blaster shots and lightsabers light small areas of the scenery. The space battle is too big to focus already, much like the chaos in The Phantom Menace, but the combination of poor lighting and dark ships make the whole experience thoroughly unenjoyable.
The story, right from the fundamental title crawl, comes across as weak fan fiction. "The dead speak!" I guess no one's ever really gone. At only 68 words, this is the shortest title crawl of the franchise. What it establishes is that Palpatine's back, Rey's training, and Kylo's searching for Palpatine. And then we're shown all of these things as is. I don't even understand what they were going for with Rae. She's such a frustrating character through this movie. She's so unfocused and stubborn in her training that she frequently gets her friends into bad situations by simply pursuing her own ambitions constantly.
Princess Leia was handled likely as well as possible here. The use of unused footage wasn't too jarring, and gave the character an acceptable ending. C-3PO was fine, though his use as a MacGuffin seems tacked on, and R2-D2 and Rose are nearly non-existant in this film. Dio, the little conehead robot, offers nothing more than some unnecessary character development for BB-8. As far as dibbies go, this is one of the most extrenuous, and they try to feign purpose into him by making you feel bad for him essentially being an abused puppy-robot. It's the definition of manipulative and it stalls the plot.
Bringing back Palpatine is the ultimate sign of creative bankruptcy here. I would almost rather having a time jump at the start of this film and starting fresh to juxtapose the immediacy of the previous film and to distance itself away from that story altogether, but Palpatine is easier because he's an established character that we understand, though he really should be dead. This is essentially retconning the original trilogy and trying to bring in some sort of hook for some of the people pushed away by the conclusion of The Last Jedi. This is compounded by a massive upscaling of his capabilities. Palpatine is now able to cast lightning on what seems to be thousands of ships at once, and Rae has to match him, which results in essentially two gods fighting with their insane superpowers, and in that way there's no tension because it's incredibly easy to turn it at any point to let the underdog hero win without much explanation, which absolutely happens here. The power of friendship overcoming baddies is really lame. Kylo is redeemed and dies, much like Vader, and there's even a sort of awkward nod to the incestuous kiss from the original trilogy in the form of Rae and Kylo.
Towards the end of the film I was met with what I felt was the most obvious misstep, and it foreshadowed it so hard that it was all the more frustrating. A woman asks for Rae's last name, and what it felt like the film was leading into was for her to respond "Palpatine," as her ancestry doesn't define her as a person. She was able to overcome the dark side of the force in spite of Palpatine's claims. Nope. She looks off into the distance and sees Luke and Leia's force ghosts and responds with "Skywalker." There was a milder case of this earlier with General Hux. It seemed like the film was setting up another high-ranking baddie as the traitor, but it turns out that Hux was the traitor, and the other guy shoots him dead and reports that the traitor has been found. What immediately came to mind here was having Hux's lie actually be true in this scene, and have his execution be a cover for the executioner actually being the spy. It seemed like this is what JJ meant when he said "**** it" in that interview. Yeah, use Hux as a very minor plot device and discard him immediately after because whatever. It felt like more of a Rian Johnson approach, to just drive things into the ground just because he can, and hopefully surprise some viewers in the process.
JJ Abrams says he felt beholden to Star Wars with The Force Awakens, and while I think it's much better to try to be creative I really don't think he's a good fit for large stories. His best film is 10 Cloverfield Lane which involves three characters trapped in a small bunker. The more characters and elements in it, the more there is that can go wrong, and if he just plays it safe it ends up being slow, boring, and uninspiring. At this point I'd rather let AI write these Star Wars movies.
JJ seemed to pick up bad habits from Rian Johnson as well. Abrams takes the force connection thing to another level by allowing our two rivals to interact with each other's environments through this connection despite the physical distance between the two. Keep it simple. No reason to keep adding inexplicable abilities into the series.
Thank JJ for not giving answers that he promised he'd give answers to. Would you expect anything else from the guy behind Lost?
I feel like this is probably going to be the most poorly resonating Star Wars film of them all, so I'm just going to slap it with a 1/10 ahead of time to keep it simple. Though I probably won't watch the others multiple times anyways, I can almost guarantee I will never watch this one again of my own volition. You'll have to Clockwork Orange me to make me rewatch this. A dull ending to an awful trilogy. It's shocking how sloppy this film is given how safe it attempts to be, and it's unbelievable how frustrating this film manages to be as a result. It's nearly as insulting as The Last Jedi while being more dull than Attack of the Clones. Think about where this trilogy started, and think about where it ended up. Palpatine gets killed again. If you want a wordier review, I'll post it on my Letterboxd as there's a character limit on imdb.
Yakusoku no Neverland (2019)
Hereditalia
My feelings for The Promised Neverland are very mixed. I was told this series is unique and tense, but what I got was a well-polished nothing. Yes, things technically happen, but there's a whole lot of nothing for the sake of building tension and dropping jumpscares, and the plot elements which are of value are so poorly revealed and executed and paced that they lose a lot of their intrigue the moment they come into play. My guess is that this series gets away with a lot of this due to its physical beauty and polish.
A few minutes into the first episode, I was interested to unravel the show's mystery, only for the show to spoil it near the end of said episode. These orphans are being raised so demons can eat their big, yummy brains, and I guess the other 11 episodes are meant for them to devise and execute an escape plan. The shark got jumped so hard and instead of a well-paced and well-rounded show, we get a janky roller coaster ride that can't decide which elements are important to making the story compelling. Compared to Hereditary, possibly one of the greatest horror films of the decade, the mystery is built up through the first two acts of the film, and the reveal doesn't really hit until the very end. The fun is in guessing where the plot is going and what the explanation to the madness is, but when it's revealed 20 minutes into the series I can't help but feel robbed. I feel like the series thinks I'm too stupid to "get it" unless they show me and explain it, or it simply doesn't care about mystery what-so-ever, even though the show constantly hints that there's mysteries abound. Really, it's all quite straight-forward, and as a result it is very dull. There's simply not enough time given to make any reveal feel special to any degree. It's bizarre that the show manages to feel like it's rushing while at the same time feeling like it's loaded with filler that almost manages hollow moments of tension, but kills it with over-the-top anime tropes that pull you out, like having a wacky creepy lady who doesn't so much provide comic relief as she does pull me out of the scene and remind me that I'm watching an animated product produced by a Japanese company in 2019. Ooh, scary, but also lol funny and weird. It's the same problem Us had where you couldn't take the horror elements seriously and the comedy is too j-j-jaded to be funny. It tries to be unique, but it feels as anime as anime gets.
The premise doesn't really make sense. Why do these demons want these children to be smart in a way where they'll thwart them? Is there some sort of a sport to them harvesting these young, defenseless children somehow? Certainly they would plant red herrings, or maybe encourage them to be more intelligent in skills that aren't useful for their survival in this setting. Maybe load up the orphanage on books on astronomy, art, and literature rather than "inadvertently" training these children to escape. Maybe they're cocky? The area is surrounded by a cliff after all. But shipments come in and out - It's not impossible for children to escape, and once they get to an age ripe for eating they're smart enough to question these things. Either way, this is an incredibly common contrivance in these sorts of shows where the bad guys are taken down due to their arrogance. They set up their own weakness and the good guys capitalize. In this type of setup, there's few ways the story can deviate, and it makes the story incredibly predictable. The only way the show can surprise you is with "gotcha" moments - moments so incredibly unbelievable that no one in their right mind could ever reasonable consider them as a possibility beforehand. One moment that comes to mind is Ray's attempted self-immolation. The audience is led to believe that Ray has lit himself on fire, but it is later shown that his suicide attempt was interrupted and then an impromptu plan was devised, though said plan is barely different than Ray's supposed plan, just it involves an extra step where somehow they trick Isabella into trying to save a burning Ray who clearly isn't there. Why did Ray decide to try to end his life? It was so Emma could have an emotional moment with him, and when it's so blatantly obvious that convenience in writing is the reason it becomes hard to appreciate the emotional impact of the moment in question. As a matter of fact, it renders the moment completely ineffective, because it isn't earned, and it doesn't come naturally.
There's also other tropes at play here. There's a sort of edgyness to the whole series as it involves children literally being harvested to be eaten by demons. Though the jump scares aren't quite as bad as the average Western horror film, they are still there and as forced as ever. I was hoping for a more nuanced product, like Hereditary. One that deals with dark subject matter, but does so in a tasteful, non-exploitative way. The horror is the gritty reality of these kids trapped in this house, and the feelings of despair, not so much the BOO! Scary demons!
Between a lot of meandering and tonnes of missed opportunities at greatness, The Promised Neverland is a hot mess. It's absolutely gorgeous to look at and it's somewhat deep and innovative if you wear your head backwards, but ultimately it falls short in a large number of ways. Plot contrivances galore and illogical villains and gotcha moments combined with pacing issues and a complete disdain for giving potentially intriguing mysteries time to breathe. What results is a thoroughly disappointing experience.
Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
Not ResonAnt
Marvel's had a good run of films that are visually stunning and overall fun. Unfortunately, neither of these two factors are necessary in making a film stand the test of time, and nothing better epitomizes this than Ant-Man and the Wasp.
Where Ant-Man came close to emotional moments that are upended by excessive comedy and a lack of faith in the writing, the sequel fails to have likeable characters in the first place. The main cast has been completely Flanderized. Hank Pym goes from being a grumpy man with heart to being an almost malicious entity. He lacks any compassion or empathy in this movie for the most part, and it's played for laughs because the audience is just supposed to think Scott's this generic dumb TV dad at this point even though he was clever and talented in the first movie.
Speaking of bad characters, I cannot sympathize with the antagonist at all. Well, sure, I can at first before she goes sicko mode. The climax of the film is incredibly contrived and there's no reason for the villain to act so villainous at this point, and at this point she doesn't deserve the redemption she's granted at the end of the movie.
The special effects are nice, sure, but I don't watch movies for their special effects. We all know bad effects can pull you out of a story, but for me good effects cannot fix a terrible story. I'm tired of people praising these films for their effects. It should say something that no one praises this film for its writing.
Only watch this film if you are an Ant-kin.
Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood (2019)
Excellent
Quentin Tarantino's supposed ninth film (Not separately counting the two volumes of Kill Bill) shows that there's plenty of stories yet to be told, in some of the most surprisingly simple places. Whether it be a journey to space to stop baddies from destroying the good guys, or a crew of strong folk stopping a purple alien from using a MacGuffin to destroy the universe, I find myself instead more interested in whatever that new film from that weird guy who does things just because "they're so much fun." Certainly there's an important place for routine and predictable in any business model, but so long as I have my small selection of "nuanced, yet anything but pompous" products to flap my lips about I'll continue to enjoy my pursuit of creative works.
Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood is certainly not Tarantino's best film, but that's merely a testament to how talented the man truly is to produce such reliably fantastic products seemingly effortlessly. Tarantino's certainly flexing his knowledge of classic films and television in this feature in particular, and as such I could only imagine my enjoyment of this film growing in the future with consumption of such products myself. While the film-within-the-film gimmick is anything but new, its execution in this film feels exceptionally genuine and offers much insight into the goings-on of filmmaking and more than ever before allows me to understand the problems and the struggles of those in the entertainment industry, be they of varying degrees of success. What results is essentially Quentin Tarantino's BoJack Horseman. There's a riffing segment akin to something out of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and though it's brief, it feels like Tarantino's got a vast understanding as to successful formulas and why they were proven successful as well as how to implement them into his projects if only to pay homage and show he's incredibly versatile.
This may not be the most dramatic film of the year, but it could very well be the funniest and the most suspenseful. While horror films typically struggle making superpowered and supernatural monsters scary, Tarantino manages to make simple human beings intimidating and terrifying simply through his vision and direction. While horror films rely on scare chords and cliché violins, Tarantino's audio tracks build tension within the scene to sell the brilliant performances from his peculiar, yet perfectly fitting casts. The film also manages to nearly constantly subvert expectations in the most cleverly excusable of ways. While Rian Johnson will stop at nothing to surprise the audience and M. Night Shyamalan gives out the surprises that everyone has come to expect, Tarantino's films are truly exciting unlike any others. Watching many films, and all Tarantino films, there are many expectations that come with each setup in this film given the often eerie music and the suspicious framing at times, and it always comes as a surprise, even in the rare chance that the film does exactly what you had predicted, and I find myself shocked to realize that I didn't lose immersion once, like a magician pulling off a stunning misdirection. Say what you will about Tarantino as a person, but when it comes to making a film the man's a brilliant magician. To then work back through the film in my head, I would find the real magic is that it all makes sense, and the resulting product feels organically unpredictable, like a particularly crazy day in anyone's life. I'm further impressed to find myself unable to recall a decision that was made reminiscent to any silly moments present in several of Tarantino's previous films. This feature is decidedly more careful and subdued than previous ventures, and while Tarantino's staples are not absent they serve more as a garnish rather than a main course in and of themselves this time around. Once Upon a Time... may not be exciting like Django or Kill Bill, or as impactful as Pulp Fiction, but it has a surprising maturity to it that, while not paving much new ground, can set it alongside some of the great classics of the era it is set in.
Skeptics may be pleasantly surprised by the acting performances. While this certainly is an all-star cast, others may find Pitt or DiCaprio to be over-rated pretty boys with limited acting ranges, which may be somewhat true, but I might question how much of this is due to talent and how much is due to typecasting and direction. From watching numerous films, I find direction to be much more important than innate acting talent, as one might say Margot Robbie stands out in comparison to her costars in Suicide Squad, but such a statement isn't enough to make a respectable performance, otherwise she might have been considered for such an award. I've never seen this vulnerable side of DiCaprio until Tarantino brought it out in this film, because this is really the first time a DiCaprio role has demanded it, and it's truly welcome and though DiCaprio isn't the most fantastic dramatic actor, he certainly provided more compelling melodrama than I would have expected going in. I would still pit Will Arnett's performance as BoJack Horseman much higher for such a similar character, but for someone who has made a career in a very different department, DiCaprio certainly does better than "good enough." Brad Pitt's performance, while being somewhat one-note, plays off of DiCaprio's very well. Pitt's character, Cliff, while being twisted and somewhat pathetic is an oddly intriguing sidekick, giving the pessimistic yet thoroughly better off Rick Dalton some much needed support while allowing two completely different yet similar characters for the audience to latch onto while maintaining their individual personalities throughout the film almost to a fault, where character development feels much more like a slight adjustment rather than a Hollywood-style epiphany.
The tie-ins with real-life events and people are somewhat surreal and intriguing in a way only Tarantino could pull off, much like he managed with Hitler in Inglorious Basterds. Being one who wasn't too familiar with the details of the Manson Family murders, I found myself fascinated with the characters' appearance in the film and importance in the main story. There are certainly many creative liberties taken as the main duo manage to kill three of these maniacs towards the climax of the film in a hilariously grotesque sequence akin to the most graphic moments of John Wick: Chapter 3. There's another scene in which Cliff kicks Bruce Lee's ass for running his mouth about being able to beat Ali in a fight, and though the many impersonations are somewhat unprofessional, they are incredibly charming and fit with the comedy-drama tone of the film. Tarantino has a knack for making twisted comedy out of real life tragedies without it coming off as terribly tasteless as the material is taken very seriously when it needs to be, even if it manages to be awkwardly funny or silly with some alternate reality stuff thrown in the mix at times.
I can understand that this is not a film for everyone. Casual moviegoers and perhaps teenagers might be bored by the subject matter and slow, methodical pacing of this film, but I found it to be thoroughly engaging and fascinating. As I've said before, it's similar to BoJack Horseman with a twist of Tarantino (who was parodied in the show, oddly enough. Perhaps he caught wind of the series this way.). If you go into this without the expectation of a Tarantino film you'll perhaps be more likely to enjoy this film for what it is, but it's certainly more of a substance over style film. There are few special effects compared to today's blockbusters, and much of the story is about the nuanced elements rather than a complex web of plotlines. The lives of celebrities are explored in ways that I haven't seen explored in film, but given the beefy 161 minute runtime, Tarantino finds the time to explore these aspects from several people's perspectives without any of it feeling glossed over or useless. One might not get the point of the focus on Sharon Tate's self-obsession in a ten minute sequence focused on her going to see a film she starred in to garner approval from a movie-going audience, but the narcissistic aspect of stardom is certainly an aspect which is at least touched on even though Dalton's ultimately the main focus of the story and Sharon's quite literally a background character up until the conclusion of the film. If it were notably botched at any point, I might see her character as extraneous, but she ultimately added to the experience.
The setting is beautiful and this may be one of my favorite throwback type films. From the retro Taco Bell to the 60s fashions and automobiles, it's all incredibly immersive. There was what appeared to be a single exterior shot of a CGI airplane at one point, but outside of that the film successfully brought me into the world as it was when the story is meant to take place. The acting outside of the acting-within-acting at times felt silly, but the acting-within-acting was so on-the-nose cliché for the most part that it seemed that Tarantino truly understood the reality of the matter. The fake scenes you are shown within the film feel authentic to classic television and film and they all have a similar disingenuity to them that we have grown to love from cheesy action films. Certainly, the acting is obviously acting, but were it realistic, it might come off as lazy, which at times it does in this film, which makes it feel more authentic. In other words, sometimes thinking too hard and trying too hard negatively impacts films, especially nowadays where we've come to shut our brains off at cliches lest they be shown in a context where they make sense, as they are in this film.
All in all, I adore this film and would recommend it to most people, more so than perhaps older Tarantino flicks as this one is a bit more relaxed and careful than prior films. In other words, grandma [...]
Unplanned (2019)
0 Pieces of Children Out of 10
It's current year, and that means it's time to act like a simple cheesy low-quality film is controversial in some way.
This film is perhaps done by a team that was passionate about telling a message rather than producing a quality film out of love for the medium itself. There is somehow a thick layer of ingenuity in every performance despite this film's characters supposedly being real people who exist on the planet Earth. While the fundamental elements are in place for a film, they come across as a pale imitation of the thousands of dramatic films and shows that preceded it. Lead actress Ashley Bratcher is even dolled up to look like Julianne Moore in Still Alice without an understanding of how it was the great acting performances made that film intriguing. Shots are flat and sloppily attempt to follow rule of thirds most of the time, and there's an abundance of shot-reverse shot and people talking for ages, which is a major problem when the film lacks any seasoned veterans. Though this isn't the most painful Christian film I've ever seen, it certainly seems that there's a lack of passion for the art of filmmaking in the community.
I found myself almost being sucked into this film at times only to immediately dip out mentally as not a single line is delivered with sincerity. Everything is exactly as is - a bunch of people saying lines that were written by someone else. I'm not going to claim this team is money-hungry, because this is obviously not the route to go, but it's more like they wish to have their cake and eat it too. The film was destined for inadequacy when the team decided their message was more important than the performance, the writing, or even the viewers. It would not be hard to make a great film out of this as it hits hard on the emotional level and there's truth to it that's blown out of proportion and rendered wholly unbelievable due to amateurish directing and a good-enough mentality.
Abortion should be taken seriously, regardless of one's beliefs. It's a serious medical procedure, and there are many people that clearly treat pregnancy very lightly. Is having surgery or taking Misoprostol really better than practicing safe sex? That's perhaps the most frustrating thing about this film. There are great themes and great discussions at play here, but the execution is painful to watch in all the wrong ways and thus the dramatic moments are difficult to take seriously. It's not even so bad it's good, as it is cheaply imitating better films before it, and as a result it's incredibly dull all around. When people make films like these, they should realize, others are not going to look at it in the same light that they do. When someone disagrees with you, preaching to the choir does nothing but drive them further away. This film certainly didn't sway me on the subject as I may be now more neutral than ever before, but then again I'm a rather tough person to convince. Even still, it's a poor argument as it offers nothing for the opposing side to latch onto. I know the intention was for Abby to be the latching point, but the film practically opens with the turning point for our character, thus avoiding acknowledgment of the arguments for pro-choice.
Also, what's the deal with the trial scene? With such a bare-bones plot, you'd figure the obvious choice would be to focus the film on the trial as several of the most beloved films center around a trial. These are always long processes that films can never do justice for, and it's preposterous for the trial to be skipped over in its entirety. They consult a lawyer, and then in a smash-cut to "You guys DO know we won, right?" and the heroes cheesily tell off the one-dimensional baddies in the film. But I skipped over one part: a fakeout so obvious that it's not even worth mentioning, because you already know it.
The film then ends with a dig at Planned Parenthood. Yeah, of course you didn't get permission from them to make this movie, because you don't need permission to criticize under fair use. It's hardly impressive or brave. Imagine if Spotlight ended with a disclaimer that they didn't receive the Pope's blessing to make their film. It just sort of cheapens the message.
Truly, we live in a society.
Black Mirror: Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too (2019)
Is it as cringe as they say?
Black Mirror had an excellent start diving deep into dark themes relating to technology in a near-futuristic setting with plenty of sharp criticisms to make about today's society and tales of technology going too far.
This episode starts off excellent. It's certainly lighter in tone than any other episode right from the start, but it still fits as a story in this universe and it is kind of refreshing to see a departure from the typical here. There is practically no social commentary, which while often implemented tastefully throughout the series felt like too much of a driving force as a whole. This episode is simply focused on the pop music industry and it doesn't hold back for the most part. Just about everything works at at least a 7/10 level for the first half an hour of the episode - up until the part where the doll screams, and from that point the writing takes a serious nosedive.
The tragedy here though is the main themes throughout the entire episode and the plot points could easily be written into something interesting and thought-provoking - perhaps not to the levels of White Bear, but certainly much better than this, and I feel a major problem is the dialogue. Characters begin openly stating their feelings rather than simply showing them in their performance, and the comedic dialogue feels like unused Deadpool jokes. What results is two Disney girls teaming up with an obnoxious robot to save Miley Cyrus from the music industry which has now replaced her with a robot which will never call in sick and can be streamed in hundreds of locations at once, earning them much more revenue. Or that would be the case, were it not for those meddling kids. Then the episode abruptly ends with another pop-parody of a beloved Nine Inch Nails song, which turns out to be the most memorable running gag of the episode, but not charming enough to undo the negatives throughout the second half.
There are a couple of other less than stellar episodes of Black Mirror, but this one is most certainly the worst of the lot, but not by too much. It is certainly watchable, but by the standards of Black Mirror it might as well be a 1/10. The second half of the episode feels like an edgy reboot of Hannah Montana or something, which I suppose is the point, but I would then point to USS Callister, which is a clear parody of Star Trek, but still maintains the twisted feel of Black Mirror while showing respect to the original sources. This episode comes off more as a knock-off rather than a heart-felt homage, and the quality really suffers as a result. If you made the robot funnier, it could sell the obnoxious dialogue, and if you hired savant child-actors rather than pretty ones then the acting would hold up to that of the rest of the series as well. Very weak season finale as this would certainly be more appropriate as a mid-season filler episode.
Pokémon: Detective Pikachu (2019)
Pokeyman: Detective Pikachu in the shower.
This movie, right from when they step foot in the city, is a Zootopia ripoff, having many of the same shots and gags, and even a similar setup except they're detectives instead of police officers this time around. Zootopia, however, was much, much better.
A lot of this films issues come from inappropriately hiring talented individuals who don't fit with the themes of Pokemon. RJ Palmer is a talented artist who managed to make incredibly realistic (and creepy) looking Pokemon back in the day, and somehow some people thought it would be a good idea to hire him to do the art for the first live-action Pokemon film and to make the vast majority of the Pokemon look creepy and unsettling. This is coupled with John Mathieson, cinematographer of Gladiator and Logan, who did an excellent job for those movies but is horribly out of his element for a Pokemon movie. What we get is numerous poorly lit scenes and a dark vibe that counters the light-hearted nature of the script. Mathieson went as far as to say the reason Detective Pikachu is so much better than Sonic the Hedgehog is because it was shot on film, as it makes it easier to make the Pokemon look like they belong in the world, which shows he really can't see the forest for the trees. Hey Mathieson, next time you want to brag about cinematography, maybe next time you could start with the lighting.
Some of the Pokemon looked surprisingly okay while others looked awful. Pikachu looked just about perfect, which shows they at least had some of their priorities in order. Mr. Mime was surprisingly good in this movie as well, considering he's one of my least favorite Pokemon from the first generation. Bulbasaur looks fairly accurate to the cartoony design, and Psyduck looks proper. The worst design by far has to be Charizard, as his scales are way too big in his model and look more like scars than a lizard's scaly body. If the scales were simply smaller, they would have given him a bit more of a sleek look which would have been in line with the cartoony character design we recognize. Gengar was another uncanny one, though only appeared for a few seconds anyways. Jigglypuff somehow goes from being the cutest Pokemon to being the creepiest in this rendition, and Greninja looks downright horrific, which may have been in part to play along with the nods to Alien when they're introduced. The scaling is all wrong, as an Eevee evolves into a Flareon and both are the same size despite Flareon being canonically about double the size of Eevee.
The dialogue is surprisingly good, especially from Ryan Reynolds. It feels like a PG Deadpool at times, along with a couple of jokes which may be a tad inappropriate for a kids' movie, such as one moment where Pikachu alludes to not being the kind of Pokemon that invites strangers to their apartment at night, or Justice Smith saying "Oh sh-..." Mr. Mime is the best thing about the movie, but unfortunately most of his moments are shown in the trailer, as are most of the other funny jokes in the movie. One additional funny scene involves the revelation that the cool quiet chick with the sunglasses was using said sunglasses to cover her beady Ditto eyes, which is also incredibly creepy, mind you.
The story is abysmal. There's a double-twist which is incredibly predictable and there's a lot of undoing plot elements as soon as they're revealed. So Ryan Reynolds is the kid's dad and was in Pikachu the whole time because Pikachu survived the car crash and Mewtwo put Ryan Reynolds' mind into the Pikachu with consent. And then Mewtwo revives Ryan Reynolds at the end of the movie. Why didn't he just do that from the start? What a coy jerk. Also, evil businessman isn't actually evil, but actually is. Come up with something original, guys. There's a scene where Pikachu kinda dies when a giant boulder misses him, but a tiny pebble from it breaks off and donks him on the head, and it is hilarious, but then the characters are weeping over Pikachu's corpse for five minutes until God-Mewtwo revives Pikachu. It's bizarre and it goes on too long and they've done this in every Pokemon movie to date.
All in all, this film's a masterpiece compared to other Pokemon films, but as its own movie it falls flat in numerous places and without the nostalgia goggles there's not too much to enjoy this movie for. If you set the bar very low you'll be blown away, but if you expect to be blown away you'll be greatly disappointed.
Game of Thrones: The Bells (2019)
Visuals mean nothing without a story
This whole season has been built up for nothing from madmen who thought they could do better than an actual passionate creative writer. In the previous episode we had a major plothole where a dragon was killed by being shot in the neck, rather than a one in a million shot to the eye, only to have the last dragon in this episode be untouchable even though these were presumably the underdogs leading up to this episode. With so many characters and so many sideplots, you'd figure they could come up with something better in 6 episodes, but the first two are merely slow buildup that immediately becomes irrelevant. It all leads up to this, and out of nowhere Daenerys has become the new mad queen within two episodes time despite seven seasons of character development contrary to this. In this episode, the heroes win, but they weren't the heroes all along because they killed tonnes of innocent people, and hearing Sidey McCharacter comically quip "I'm the man that killed Jaime Lannister" doesn't make up for how little the show accomplished and how much it has undone in it's constant goal of fabricating surprises Rian Johnson style by making characters act in ways so foolish that no viewer could logically predict anything to come. Jon Snow goes from hero to bumbling idiot, Bran has been entirely useless this season despite being built up as this all-knowing mastermind, and Cersei's string of impossibly good luck which has shown her benefiting from moronic decisions throughout the past few seasons with no repercussions comes to an end as poor writing turns out to betray her in the end, leading to her and Jaime's demise. I guess Jaime had some character regression too, because last I'd heard he had abandoned Cersei. Oh well, I guess the ever useless Sansa is going to kill the new big baddie Daenerys in the last episode, because the writers only care about relentless gotcha moments as they didn't get the memo that no one cares for M. Night Shyamalan nowadays.
There's no reason to defend the visuals here as Game of Thrones was never meant to be about the spectacle, but rather the rich world and expansive epic story. If you want a spectacle, you can get more of that from a Michael Bay movie, but if you want quality all you need is good writing and good pacing. What we have here is a rushed mess which shows us major characters dying left and right with no rhyme or reason because it's the second last episode anyways so every character has worn out their usefulness for a team so void of creativity that they had to cut down the final season to a mere six episodes with two of which being complete filler and the other four being a violent mess of nonsense and randomness that is bound to have all but the least demanding of viewers clocking out as soon as the opening sequence finishes.
Now we've got a situation like the original run of Fullmetal Alchemist where we'll be seeing a far superior remake once the books have finally been finished. If they were going to take so much time to make such a weak product, they might as well have just stopped production entirely as these past three seasons have dropped the show's quality drastically, effectively undoing all the good it had done up to that point.
Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Avengers: Mehgame
While Endgame is a competent enough film with satisfying conclusions to many of the characters, it is also an incredibly frustrating film due to a number of fundamental issues. Also, I could have spoiled the title of this film after I saw Infinity War if I didn't know any better to think the callback to Doctor Strange's quote was gauche
The film starts up with Hawkeye losing his entire family, and then with Tony and Nebula being saved in the middle of space by Captain Marvel, and once he is brought back to Earth he scolds Captain America for essentially causing half the universe to be wiped out for his freedom, when really it's equally his fault for not running off to work with Captain America. And Captain Marvel acts arrogant as usual as the Avengers call her out on it, leading me to believe that the film is true to the real animosity behind the set towards Brie Larson's attitude to her coworkers. Anyways, she brings them to where Thanos is and Thor kills him like the chump he is because I guess using the infinity gauntlet has tenderized his meat enough for him to be decapitated this time around. Captain Marvel then immediately leaves after saying there's thousands of other planets going through the same thing, even though Earth is the only one presumably working to undo the destruction of half the universe's population, which is possibly more important than Captain Marvel helping an elderly alien cross a street.
Fast forward five years, and Scott is brought out of the quantum realm thanks to a rat stepping on the control panel, working both as an excellent cheap joke and as a deus ex machina. Scott has a character moment with his now teenaged daughter briefly before teaming up with Avengers and explaining how time travel is a possibility if one could navigate the quantum realm, which is now a possibility. But prior to this Captain America tries to teach people to look on the bright side. Scarlet Johansen manages emoting effectively for the first time in her entire acting career.
Tony Stark has started a new life with Pepper, and the two now have a daughter. The team gives Tony a vial of Pym juice and explain their hopes of time travel and undoing Thanos' snap, but Tony mocks them for being so ridiculous given that he is the only one on the team who has lost nothing out of the whole ordeal, and he refuses to help. The team tasks Bruce for the job, and he has now managed to control the Hulk and the two work in unison now. Instead of creating time travel, they manage to push time through Scott, aging and de-aging him before returning him to normal and playing the whole discovery off as a joke rather than what it actually is; the key to immortality. Tony, in mere seconds of screentime, uncovers the secret to time travel and the team is off to the races. New Asgard is a run-down mess with the few Asgardian survivors, and worse yet, Thor has become a morbidly obese drunkard due to PTSD, and this is a running joke throughout the movie. Black Widow recruits Hawkeye as he cosplays as her in the live-action Ghost in the Shell film, slaying criminals in cold blood, I guess. This is a short interaction despite these being two of the most important characters in the film. I guess it's more important for Black Widow to be making the same jokes about Rocket Raccoon throughout the film rather than explore her character more, but I suppose they have to save material for the upcoming Black Widow film.
They plan out their time travel shenanigans. They have only enough Pym juice for a round trip each, until they conveniently grab more later from the past, however, since this is an action film, it would be unacceptable for this to be treated as a heist, and instead there has to be huge mistakes in each part of their plan in sequences that are so disparately linked that the brisk pace becomes jarring and awkward, and scenes stop flowing together the way they did in Infinity War. Many interactions occur between characters which would have been impossible without this time travel, one of which being an encounter between Tony and a 70s version of his father, which might be satisfying if it weren't so contrived. There are many nods to previous films which are mostly charming, but unfortunately similar to Terminator: Genisys. Captain America has an interesting fight with himself, with younger him mistaking present him as Loki in disguise. But Captain America says "Bucky is alive" to distract younger Captain, which seems a bit too reckless if time-travel logic were taken with any form of sincerity in this film. Nebula and Falcon knock out Star-Lord from the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy, which might possibly even lead to his death considering what happens after this moment in the original film. The most infuriating of all has to be when Black Widow and Hawkeye learn they must sacrifice someone they love to get the soul stone, which is knowledge Tony should have, as he was within earshot of the conversation of Gamora's death in the previous film. I guess Stark has no respect for a man who has lost his family, and was sending Hawkeye there to die, but instead Black Widow sacrifices herself. Even worserer, Nebula gets hacked via what appears to be a crossed wifi signal and Thanos learns of the plans, and a switcheroo is done for past Nebula to infiltrate the Avengers' base. On a positive note, Hulk has a great interaction the Ancient One in which we learn that Doctor Strange gave Thanos the stone willingly just to convince her to give Hulk the stone at that moment, which is perhaps the only intriguing use of time travel in the film.
Anyways, Hulk does the snap and it nearly kills him despite being nearly immune to gamma radiation, yet Thanos faired better with killing half the universe and then destroying the stones with their own power which was possible apparently. And then the team gets ambushed by Thanos and nearly die, even though they should all be dead considering they were blasted before all but one of them realized the threat, which leads to another big fight with Thanos, where literally everyone who was snapped away comes back and has their moment to shine kicking Thanos' ass for a couple seconds before being shown to be a chump.
Captain Marvel shows up to save the day about twenty minutes into the fight to decide the fate of the entire universe, and takes out Thanos' battleship in mere seconds, but this is the kind of thing that thousands of planets across the universe are going through all the time and they don't have a regular guy with a powersuit to help them with it thus Captain Marvel was too busy to defeat Thanos I guess, even though according to Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige she's stronger than Thanos, which, much to Anita Sarkeesian's dismay is disproven as Danvers is taken out with a single punch from vanilla Thanos, just like everybody else on the team. Somehow 2014 Thanos feels stronger than Thanos was with all of the infinity stones, which makes sense if you also consider that Danvers became stronger than all of the infinity stones by being blasted by the energy from a single infinity stone. What I'm trying to say is the MCU has become knockoff Dragon Ball Super with a massive powercreep problem in which all of the heroes are now so powerful that the enemies have to be even more powerful to maintain the underdog feel, and it's a confusing mess that you might as well turn your brain off for. Whatever, Captain America says "Avengers assemble" so rule of cool I guess.
Anyways, there's a nod to an upcoming all-female superhero flick which reminds me of the Ghostbusters reboot. And then Tony tricks Thanos by doing a bait and switch and states "I am Iron Man," then snaps the army away, and he somehow lives long enough to have a moment with Pepper and Spider-Man.
Iron Man gets a pretty decent funeral and a post-mortem moment with his family via a pre-recorded message. Then Captain America goes back in time to return the infinity stones, and ends up spending his life with Peggy, which I suppose means he was her unnamed husband from the past in the previous films. He returns old and passes his shield on to Falcon. The time travel from the Incredible Hulk has greater implications than one might think. The problem is Hulk has essentially discovered immortality, though it's brushed off as a joke and a terrible mistake. There's another major problem with this; we've brought back alternate Gamora from 2014 and killed 2014's Nebula, doing a switcheroo, but we end up with both, essentially undoing Gamora's death from Infinity War. We can undo all other permanent deaths by bringing the deceased from alternate timelines into this one.
By the way, several dead-dead characters are back despite still being considered dead, which doesn't make the switcharoo feel like any less of a cop-out. Quill is left with a Gamora who hasn't experienced anything with him, but that will certainly be sorted out in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
While Endgame is a relatively competent film, it has many positives and negatives which can make it a polarizing experience for fans, plebs, and snobs alike. There are numerous moments which are both memorable and satisfying, but there's others that are wholly unimmersive and disappointing. While Tony Stark's death was wholly expected, Black Widow's feels bizarre. The heroes' capabilities now are so grand that they together are almost omnipotent, and yet somehow vanilla Thanos was still able to beat them in a fight without the infinity stones despite Thor kicking his ass in Infinity War when he had all the stones. Basically, the MCU has become Dragon Ball Super, and what with their super safe approach we can expect a whole lotta fan service for fans of each individual character regardless of what their power levels should be. Ant-Man expanding inside Thanos would have made for a much better climax.
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019)
How To Train Your Dragon 3: Toothless Gets Laid
This installment fails to overcome the temptations of going the generic sequel route, opting for cutesy imagery over a compelling plot and characters. While 1 and 2 weren't afraid to go dark with their violent subject matter, 3 reels it back significantly, going with a more cartoonish villain and a plot stuffed to the brim with filler. There is very little in this film in terms of story of character development. The villain is supposedly a genius who is able to predict everyone's every move based on just about nothing as he isn't shown on screen to be intelligent, but is somehow all-knowing. The characters around the villain simply act dumb to make him seem more intelligent. I would say the film is a rollercoaster ride if that rollercoaster had a lot of plateaus in it, thus making it unexciting and ultimately disappointing as well as feeling rather misguided and confused. It feels like a romance film that feels the need to copy and paste the core elements from the previous two films as an afterthought, and the spirit of a nature documentary under the guise of an animated fantasy film.
The clear point of this film is marketing and merchandise. The paper-thin plot takes a backseat to provide many long sequences of Toothless flirting with the light fury. Basically what you get is dragons based very clearly off axolotls imitating real life mating dances of various animals. Certainly it's nothing new for artists to try to emulate realism in an unreal way, but it feels like a lot of money and work hours went in to creating a very mundane film with little thought put into pacing or other tried-and-true conventions of filmmaking. I'm sure a herpetologist would love this film and appreciate the work put into it, but it fell flat for me. In 2, I felt Hiccup was a frustrating character, but this time around it's flipped where I found it kind of hard to believe Toothless would be so initially aggressive to Hiccup at the end of the film after years of them being separated just because Hiccup grew facial hair. Though I'm sure this is somewhat accurate to real animals, I sort of expect the dragons in the series to be a bit beyond the regular pets we have in our everyday life. The villain even calls out Hiccup for treating dragons as equals but the film makes a point to portray them more as dogs than mythological creatures to an extent beyond the previous two installments.
I felt bored out of my mind until about half way through the movie once somewhat compelling things began. Up until this point all there was was a very generic threat to our heroes which could have been literally anyone, which is emphasized when Hiccup makes a big speech pointing this out like it's self-aware writing or something, but it doesn't make it any more compelling. Half way through, things finally started getting done with some sort of reasonable pace, but even still nothing long-lasting or meaningful truly happens until the last 10 minutes of the film where they release the dragons to live freely and safely in The Hidden World, and both Toothless and Hiccup start their own families and then meet up again before the credits roll. Just about everything else in this film is inconsequential, being introduced and solved within the same film. Ultimately the movie feels like it wants to be a cutesy romance film but still feels the need to rehash elements from the previous two films in order to cater to those expecting more of the same, but this time around there's much less enthusiasm and life in each action sequence. There is simply no suspense throughout the film due largely to cringey comical moments constantly pulling tension out of each scene, and the timing isn't even done well. Everything flows at a very casual pace even at the most intense action scenes, and there's hardly any pause, providing a very consistent homogeneous watching experience. The film seems to be insecure with its ability to entertain children and panders to them with constant noise and flashy visuals in specific scenes and then barely any flair in more mellow sequences, amplifying the pacing issue and making the film feel like two ideas spliced together like a horrible Frankenstein's monster.
This may be a visually stunning film, but the bland story and shallow characters might prove challenging for more demanding viewers to find entertainment in. If you have young children who can simultaneously have enough patience to sit quietly through the boring parts of the film, this may suffice. There were certainly numerous exclamations of awe throughout the film, so if you're already largely interested then you'll probably enjoy this film, but I feel the first is vastly superior of the trilogy, and the third is vastly the weakest. This film perhaps would have been better suited as a lower-budget little kids' show. Though 2 wasn't a great movie, I still feel it's worth a watch and brought enough new to the table, but despite being a full 180 in large part, 3 doesn't seem to bring anything new to the table. There are simply too many underdeveloped elements put into the film with no passion or vision for me to really view the overall product with much positivity. Incredible visuals can only pull a film so far, and as it turns out it isn't very far at all. Great, compelling writing is more enjoyable and economical, and I just wish film companies would realize this by now. They've had a century to figure this out, after all.
Alita: Battle Angel (2019)
Critics got this and Captain Marvel backwards
Alita: Battle Angel is a pleasant surprise in lieu of bottom-of-the-barrel live action adaptations, namely Ghost in the Shell and Death Note. Battle Angel Alita is actually a series I know very little about, but from what I have read this film is a lot more faithful to its source material than most adaptations, changing only a few things to better fit the structure and pacing of a film whilst retconning a few elements to make the overall product feel a bit more thoroughly realized. Part of this review is based on what my roommate has told me about the comic and how he feels the film stacks up, and from what he says it seems the original is a bit dated and a number of my gripes are that not enough was done to make the story more substance over style or to flesh out characters more, especially the love interest character who is apparently abysmal in the manga.
The main characters, Alita and Dr. Ido are fantastic and are the main crux of the story. It's refreshing to have a character like Ido who appears suspicious but doesn't maliciously hide information from Alita, and Alita's naivity and juvenile nature are adequately explained even if she is a bit frustrating at times. Ido is an incredibly reasonable person and I felt myself sympathizing with him a lot throughout the film. Alita is incredibly overpowered, but fortunately her charming and heroic personality allows her conflicts to be enjoyable all the same. Alita is the most powerful, but she is constantly biting off more than she can chew, allowing for actual tension in the action sequences despite the fact that you know she'll make it through by the end of it. The comic relief at times is impeccable, especially in the pub scene where Alita gives an inspirational speech to only be ridiculed immediately. In this sense, the spirit of the manga is also retained as in many aspects the manga was a comedy-drama. Desty Nova seems to be quite overpowered in this iteration and seems to have less character depth than in the manga, but I'll have to wait for the sequel to really determine how much of a mistake this change is. He just seems like a generic all-powerful villain by the end of this first film.
The visuals are surprisingly refined given how odd I found the first trailer. The main reason I was so excited to see this film was to laugh at the bizarre anime eyes and all the mistakes they would make like in Ghost in the Shell, but I found myself getting past the odd visuals within the first ten minutes and was able to enjoy the film for what it was. It is a bit of a style-over-substance film, but there is enough character and enough of a story with twists and turns and conflict to keep it engaging even if only at a primitive level. Alita: Battle Angel might not make you think quite as hard as the original Ghost in the Shell, or the anime Ergo Proxy, but it is entertaining nonetheless, and its polish allows it to be very easy to digest and combined with the superb pacing there's not really any particular moment in the film that stands out as filler.
I would recommend Alita: Battle Angel. It feels like what Ready Player One was to most people, though I hated that film and enjoyed this one a lot. I wouldn't quite say this is a great film, but it's quite a well conceived product that pays enough respect to the source material to justify its existence.
Larry Charles' Dangerous World of Comedy (2019)
Shallow social commentary.
Larry Charles starts off strong by covering dark comedy from war veterans and murderers in the first two episodes, providing a compelling view on comedy that is rarely covered in such detail. It can be incredibly uncomfortable, but it's handled respectfully and if you can stomach the horrible war crimes, footage of people being murdered, and some seriously depressing moments, you get some very heartfelt moments as well. Unfortunately all of this emotion is sucked out entirely by the start of episode 3 as the following two episodes cover "Race" and "Gender" respectively. What starts as a politically incorrect dark comedy series suddenly becomes focused with social justice and it's not only incredibly jarring, but comes across as very forward and ham-fisted from a series that started with a surprising amount of nuance. The ends seem to justify the means as they bring up examples of far right extremists twisting the facts to justify their own twisting of the facts in the opposite direction in these episodes. "White people" are blanketed as whiny racists who constantly play the victim card with a few examples of abnormal people who fit this narrative with the scale of it being inflated. Race went as far to strongly imply that Black Lives Matter has not caused violence, which fails to mention the group who kidnapped that autistic man and tortured him with a knife and livestreamed it. If you're going to make a political documentary, try a little harder to provide an unbiased presentation of the facts.