(Michael Gracey 2017)
PG the most riskè thing to happen was the glimmer of an affair and a *gasp* interracial relationship First Impression: Hugh Jackman is a much better singer than I expected him to be, but more on that later. I don't really like feel good movies. You know, the kind that focuses on someone who's "different" than everybody else, but really they're just special. I hate these movies. That makes me sound like such a scrooge but I've known so many people who are just so annoying and everything they do is based around "oh I'm not weird I'm special". You're not special, take a shower and stop screaming every three seconds. Ugh. I'm sorry to dump all this on you but I think you need to understand my bias. That being said I found this movie bearable. I wasn't perpetually cringing in my seat and the songs were pretty good. I think part of that was that the story was fairly shallow. Usually when they get into emotions and stuff is when I want to run out of the theater, but this actually avoided a lot of that. Which is good for me, but honestly the film probably needed some more depth. Every conflict was introduced and solved within one musical sequence basically. And it's actually kind of sad that in a movie focused on empowerment and diversity the only character development occurred in the two privileged white guys. So don't go into this movie expecting anything earth shattering, the songs are catchy and the cinematography is pretty, but it has got nothing going for it in the plot department. Similar to Guardians of the Galaxy, this movie is purely spectacle. The plot is shallow and so are the characters, but the music and choreography is very entertaining. Unlike most movie musicals, the songs are very pop oriented instead of classical musical theater like songs. Which kind of surprised me because the two main songwriters were also heavily involved in La La Land, which is kind of pop but doesn't fully venture into sounding like radio pop songs. The songs in this movie were good. That doesn't sound very enthusiastic I know, but it really is. You honestly don't even need to see the movie, you can get just as much from listening to the soundtrack. I expected another Ryan Gosling debacle but Hugh Jackman was a really good singer. A real Disney princess. I'm sure there are plenty of critics ripping this movie to shreds over the plot so I'm just going to leave it at that. It was entertaining, but nothing special. But I honestly don't think it was trying to be. Sure they could've gone into the moral complexities of running a freak show and whether it's really empowering or degrading, but that wouldn't align with the positive pop vibe they created with the songs. They had to choose one or the other, and they chose the music.
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(Dir. James Gunn 2017)
Rated PG-13 After the first Guardians of the Galaxy came out it took me a while to get around to watching it. I ended up watching it with my family, but I didn't play all that much attention to it. I think that's an issue me and watching superhero movies, unless it's in a theater it just doesn't catch my attention enough. Even movies that I really like when I see in theaters, like Wonder Woman, when I get them on DVD its just not the same. I think it's partially because so much of these movies revolve around spectacle and the theater adds to that. Maybe it's because I didn't see it theaters, but I never really got into Guardians of the Galaxy. I liked the second movie better than the first, but I still wasn't in love with it or anything. I think part of the reason is that in the second movies the characters were established and I didn't have to trudge through all the origin stories. That being said I thought the characters in this movie were just flat. There just wasn't much depth or change to them. The overall lesson of this movie was the characters realizing that the team was all the family they needed, and that was basically what the first one was. The movie was just so focused on the action that I think they missed out on a lot of character interactions. One thing that really bothered me in this movie was Drax. Maybe I'm just misremembering from the first but I felt like his character changed a lot with zero explanation or cause. In the first movie he was a humorous character, but that was more through his abject literalness than any real attempts on his part. In this movie it seemed like they were trying to make him a much goofier character. Also he seemed to just totally forget about his family most of the time. You know, the one he spent the entirety of the first movie trying to avenge. They get brought up in this, but most of the time he seems to have totally forgotten them until he gets real serious for a moment and then just drops it again. The main selling point of Guardians of the Galaxy is its visual and sound aspect. They've never been super deep in terms of plot, but with the music and action they're fun to watch. They lose a lot of character development to them, but man are the fight scenes cool. When Rocket is protecting the camp and they go through the scenes of all the defenses and people are getting launched around, I gotta admit it's pretty funny. The opening of the movie I think characterizes these films really well. Groot dances to well chosen music while there's chaos in the background. There's zero true character interaction, but it looks and sounds amazing. These movies are all about spectacle and I think they do that well. I just wish there was more substance to them. (Dir. Dan Trachtenberg, 2016)
Rated PG-13, this movie has a lot of really freaky elements, but it never becomes explicit. 10 Cloverfield Lane tells to story of a woman who awakens in a bunker after having a car accident. The man who brought her there, Howard, claims that there has been an apocalyptic event and the air is now toxic. What follows is a psychological thriller where the woman must decide what is real and what is a lie, but quickly realizes she must escape no matter what. **Spoilers** I have a lot of mixed feelings about this movie. I enjoyed the movie as I was watching it, but once I finished I started to wonder about some things. I'm torn between liking the way they made it turn out so that the end of the word threat really was real, and feeling like they should've just stuck to one genre. I thought it was kind of cool how they made the threat real, because that doesn't usually happen in these psychological thrillers. I liked even more how she still had to find a way out, because even if Howard was right about the external threat, he was still crazy. However, I went into this movie not knowing what Cloverfield (Dir. Matt Reeves 2008) was and I feel like that knowledge would've completely changed the movie for me. I can see it being a much different experience when you know exactly what is going on externally, because when I watched the threat outside was unknown. Even after I knew there was a threat, I didn't know exactly what was until about the very end. When I watched it I wondered why they didn't hold out longer before revealing there was a real external threat, but now that I know about Cloverfield I'm really glad they didn't. By not relying on that aspect to much I think it makes it appealing to people that have already seen Cloverfield. I do want to know more about the girl that Howard probably did actually kidnap, but I feel like that would've been hard to fit in so I'm not that mad about it. **End Spoilers** The acting was spectacular. John Goodman is amazing, of course. He did an amazing job of making his character seem intimidating and crazy, even when he wasn't directly threatening anyone. To be honest this was especially terrifying to me because I've grown up with John Goodman playing the good guy in Disney movies, so this was quite the switch. It's like watching David Tennant play the bad guy in Jessica Jones. The use of lighting in this also really added to the atmosphere. The unnatural lighting helped add to the claustrophobic feeling of the bunker and made an amazing contrast with the natural light whenever they were close to reaching the outdoors. |
Aubrey KirchhoffI'm just screaming into the void and somehow getting graded on it. Archives
April 2018
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