Movie Reviews

Avengers 2 – Well, it’s pretty good. Like, 80% of the movie is pretty great. Fun fights, pretty funny, engaging, all that stuff. The amazingness of seeing comics coming to life is wearing off, which means you really gotta be good now. And jokes about Banner’s face falling into Black Widows cleavage… aren’t. There were at least a handful of really low brow stupid jokes in here. It felt very sitcomey and lame and my biggest fear for what will become of the Marvel movies. Lame jokes, flat characters, interspersed with bad ass fights. You know, Transformers. The first Avengers movie, plot wise, was boring, I don’t care about Loki or alien invasions. But it was the biggest most successful (in every way) comic book movie ever, so it got a pass. I don’t care about Ultron either, honestly I’m not that much of an avengers person at all. But since the X comics have been relegated to the fox ghetto, and those movies aren’t nearly as good, I’ll takes what I can gets. Still, don’t care about Ultron, so this is just filler to me. I really need them to make Infinity Gauntlet before all this goes to shit. And I’m sure it will, you just can’t put out as many movies as they are planning to put out and not have them go to shit, it’s some sort of fundamental law. So, please, please, get to Dr. Strange, and get to the Infinity movies. Make them amazing, and then the rest can blow, and I will feel happy.

The Imitation Game – This is quite good. This is the one about Turing cracking Enigma. I really like pretty much everyone’s performance. I don’t know how it matches to reality. I know, on a technical level, some of the things they threw out like Heil Hitler and the problem of Enigma are accurate. But historically I don’t really know. Aspergers/Autism is the new… I don’t know, thing that was popular a little bit ago. So this emphasizes that quite a bit, but I’m sure it’s accurate. The gay aspect is horrendous and I’m glad they didn’t shy away from addressing it, it’s sad and depressing and it happened and you should face it. He won’t be the last important person or genius to be destroyed by people being despicable.

Big Hero 6 – This is a lot of fun. I didn’t realize it was a super hero comic, I thought it was a robot comic. I guess it’s both, but I like both parts. It’s very funny, sweet. Not sure if I’d go read the comic, I think the movie is enough, but it’s cool.

Expendables 3 – I guess. I liked the first one, as stupid as it was. The second one was just too much, too stupid. This one they seemed to learn that they aren’t very good writers or funny or anything except explosions. But that’s good news. The fights are over the top and ridiculous, but entertaining. I like how in the end when everyone is fighting, they don’t even pretend to have the good guys start to lose each battle and then come back and win. They just beat the living shit out of everyone from beginning to end, fun stuff. They few times they try to be funny it’s horrible, but the rest of the time it’s fine.

Top Five – This isn’t as bad as I thought it would be, I had a strong sandler feeling going in. It opens with Rock literally just doing stand-up, pretending it’s a conversation. That happens many times, and it’s terrible (it’s pretty bad comedy, but it’s terrible shoehorned into a movie). The plot is… meh, pretty boring, pretty standard romance underneath a layer of realty show parodying. There are some funny parts, more than I expected, but still not great.

Lucy – No. Just, no no no. For fuck’s sake no. This movie is shockingly dumb, astonishingly dumb. When will people learn. If you want to have super powers, make some bullshit up. Call it an x-gene, call it midichlorians, call it a heisenberg compensator. Do not propagate a bullshit myth about our brain capacity and act like even if it was true you could somehow see wavelengths our eye is not capable of seeing, or interact with electromagnetic waves (even “simple” ones, whatever the fuck that means), or make computers work faster just because your HANDS FLOP ON THE KEYBOARD REAL FAST. Jesus christ. Literally the worst movie I’ve seen in a very long time.

Storage 24 – Rando monster movie. People trapped in a storage facility. Crazy monster starts killing. Nothing much to say about it. Feels kind of like a TV movie, but it’s not bad, it just doesn’t have anything different.

4:44: Last Day on Earth – So, through the king of all mcguffins, the word is going to end in a few hours, due to global warming, at exactly 4:44. That’s pretty dumb, on many levels, but it’s a setup for what would people do with their last day. Turns out, not much. They do it a little, they cry, they yell at each other a lot. They don’t act very well or have very good scripts, apparently. It feels kind of like a play, very localized, meant to be a character study, except the characters are kinda obnoxious so who gives a shit.

The Book Of Life – This is an animation based on Mexican cultural stuff surrounding death. I’m not sure how much it’s based on real stuff, except that there is a day of the dead. It sounds like La Muerta is kind of real, but is more of a grim reaper. And Xibalba is a place, not so much a dude, so…. But anyway, it’s loosely based on all that. I thought it was pretty great. It has a handful of faults, chief among them the very gendered character design of the main people, both men and women. That’s frustrating. But the character design everywhere else is actually awesome. The whole look of the movie is fantastic. The story is nothing fancy, kind of standard cartoon story in mexican clothing, but still good enough. I thought it was pretty funny too. All in all, pretty good.

Dracula Untold – Meh. Not bad, I guess, but really uninteresting. I guess it’s kind of cool, the way they motivate Dracula’s origin. But that’s only kind of cool, and the rest of the movie is pretty plain. There’s some neat fighting with this dracula powers, but not too much.

John Carter – Also meh. I guess it could have been ok? There are some creative stuffs in there. I like the idea that he’s badass because of gravity or whatever, but it doesn’t hold together in any logical sense. I like the alien design and factions, but it doesn’t end up mattering a lot. In the end is a pretty average scifi action movie. If it didn’t have the notoriety of being a flop, I’d think it was just random.

Into The Woods – Not good! What the crap, why does everyone love this? There’s, like, one good song in this entire movie. Literally, when it happened I said “Hey, I actually like this song”, because it was the ONLY TIME! I like the idea behind the movie, and the structure is fine enough, though I’m not so sure about the last 30 minutes. But it’s a musical, and a musical full of songs that suck…. sucks.

Whiplash – Pretty good movie. Kind of insane, especially because I’m told it’s not so crazy off of real life. Can’t imagine people being so nuts, but I guess it happens. Besides that, it’s really well done. It’s mostly about the two guys just acting at each other the whole time, and they do a pretty good damn job. No complaints.