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rstearns54
Reviews
Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)
Great googily mooglily, did this movie suck
The only reason I gave it 6 was because I have a huge crush on Gal Gadot. Maybe "had" after this debacle. I'll have to sleep on it.
47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019)
Turn off your brain, and it's actually a good movie
If you go into this movie looking for anything other than dumb, popcorn entertainment. Turn off your brain and don't think about the plot holes. I did, and I ended up really enjoying it. It was actually one of the scariest movies that I've seen in a long time. Let me start off by saying that I'm mildly claustrophobic and just the premise of being trapped in an underwater cave with the entrance blocked had me my skin crawling. But the jump scares were effective, too. And they didn't try to justify the silliness with science or anything else. They just leaned into it. I would suggest anyone seeing this movie do the same.
A Star Is Born (2018)
Near perfect movie
It was so good, it even made it look like Andrew Dice Clay seem talented.
Brightburn (2019)
Interesting premises
Well acted. And completely dull. It was like paint drying. An hour and a half long, the first half hour was the kid just being a kid and them being a big happy family. The movie didn't get moving until an hour into it. I'm familiar with the concept of a slow burn, but you need some suspense for that, and this movie didn't have any at all. Giant yawn.
Destroyer (2018)
This movie was great
Reading the reviews here, the main knock seemed to be that the plot was "too complicated." Don't listen to those the people writing them were just too simple. Best movie I've seen in a while.
Our Cartoon President (2018)
Awful
I despise Trump as a person and a President, but this show is terrible. It's worse than Lil Bush, which I didn't think was possible. Colbert produced this garbage, he should have loaned some of the writers from his late show to it.
Under the Skin (2013)
I made it all the way through Mother
And I waked out of this movie. The only other movie where I walked out of the theater was Son in Law with Pauline Shore, but I snuck into that one. This was easily one the top five worst movies I've ever seen. Slow doesn't begin to describe it. It took her a full minute to take a bite of cake, for God's sake, and that's not an exaggeration.
Kodachrome (2017)
It's like watching a summer rerun like when I was a kid (spoilers)
To paraphrase Syd Field, you can have a lot of things (acting, directing, etc.) turn a good screenplay into a bad movie, but none of those things can save a bad script and turn it into a good movie. That's the case here. This movie has a great cast (Ed Harris is one of the best actors of his generation, in my opinion) and a decent soundtrack. What is completely absent is an original thought in the entire movie. It had every chiche' imaginable. It was like the writers bought a book titled "How to Write a Road Trip Movie in Five Days" and got to work. I marked this review as having "spoilers", but honestly if you haven't figured out in the first ten minutes everything that's going to happen, then you should stick to coloring purple elephants from the refrigerator and eating paste. They used the same Saab convertible as they did in As Good As it Gets (In this movie it was red, Good As It Gets it was blue. And thank God they had the gratuitous sing-a-long with the Sudukis and Olsen, just before they fell in bed together.
Here's a brief synapsis of the plot - that Ed Harris's character, a legendary photographer, is terminally ill and wants his estranged son to help him hand deliver 4 rolls of early film to have it developed. They bond, the son sleeps with the attractive nurse, he and the nurse fight (completely fabricated reason, btw), father dies, the rolls of film are of the son as a little kid, showing that the father loved him all along (blatant rip off of People Like US), son and nurse reconcile for ... reasons. Again, I pretty much knew all of this within the first ten minutes of the movie, and I intentionally try to turn my brain off to try to avoid figuring out the entire thing at the beginning and ruining it.
Gotti (2018)
Not really a movie, more of a sketch show
There was no plot to speak of, more individual antecedents stuck together to try to resemble one. The only reason I gave this five stars is Travolta's performance was pretty good. That being said, Junior was right when he said that Travolta didn't have natural swagger.
Another big problem is that the movie is very shallow. They completely omitted anything about Gotti that would potentially make him look bad - the "activity" on the Ruggerio tapes was that they were dealing heroin. Gotti didn't whack Paul to save Angelo so much as himself. They skipped the part where he beat a man over a parking spot, and none of the multiple murders he ordered were mentioned. Also, everyone except Kelly Preston as Victoria Gotti and John Travolta were miscast.
The 1996 HBO movie with Armand Assante was much better.
Ingrid Goes West (2017)
Admittedly biased review
This movie was well made. It was well written and well acted. But I hated it. I hated it because both Ingrid and Taylor represented everything that I despise about our society today - style over substance, vomiting one's life all over social media, strangers who clamor to lick up that vomit, getting personal validation by how many complete strangers follow you on twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc., letting society dictate your worth based on the same criteria, thinking that every opinion that one has matters and should be shared with the world, etc. In short, social media. And in the end, nobody learned anything. Not even Dan (Played by O'Shea Jackson, Jr., and probably the best thing about this movie) learned his lesson. Nor did Taylor's husband. Nobody. They just kept living their sh**ty lives the same way they did before the movie.
Like I said, it was a technically well-made movie, but not a good one and not really funny, unless you're the type that thought it was hilarious when Carrie got drenched with pig's blood or laugh at the really horrible contestants on American Idol. It's the same kind of humor - mean spirited at the expense of people who are lonely and pathetic and are just trying to do the best they can to ease their pain.
I would have given this movie 3/10, but my personal rule is that anything starring Elizabeth Olsen is worth at least 5.