The Kid who would Be King is written and directed by Joe Cornish and this is his second film after 2011’s Attack the Block, the story here concerns Alexander (Louie Serkis, son of Andy) a young boy who one night while running away from some local bullies discovers a sword in a stone which is also none other than Excalibur itself meanwhile the wizard Merlin (Angus Imrie and Sir Patrick Stewart) tells Alexander that the evil sorceress Morgana (Rebecca Ferguson) will come in a number of days to claim the sword for herself and take over a leaderless world.
The Kid who Would be King is good fun and I had a lot of fun watching the film myself, Mr Cornish has definitely learnt not only from his experience making Attack the Block but also from his colleague Edgar Wright and some of his long time talent behind the camera (Marcus Rowland, Bill Pope and Paul Machliss and Jonathan Amos) also worked on this movie and they did a good job Mr Pope in particular does great work as cinematographer and makes the British landscape look very appealing.
As for Cornish’s direction it is good though there is a lot of digital effects in the film and at times it made the overall film look a little soft while the performances are also quite good, young Louie is very much his fathers son as there are times I thought he looked a little bit like his dad and has a lot of his charisma as well, Mr Imrie is very funny as the young Merlin while Sir Patrick is his usual loveable self even if he is walking around in a Led Zeppelin T-Shirt and Ms Ferguson is a great choice to play Morgana even though she doesn’t get as much to do in the film.
If I have a complaint though it’s the length, the film runs about 2 hours long and it could’ve lost about 10 or 15 minutes without hurting much of the story and the length is definitely felt in the end battle which is fun but the digital effects feel very obvious during that climax.
And so that was my review of the Kid who Would be King and it’s a fun time at the movies which is worth seeing, 3 out of 5.
Saturday, January 19, 2019
Tuesday, January 8, 2019
Film Review - How to Train your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019)
How to Train your Dragon: The Hidden World is the third and final entry in the HTTYD trilogy and the story here sees Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) looking for a mysterious hidden world said to be existing at the very edge of the human world but in the meantime his kingdom of Burk is under attack from Dragon Hunters and on top of that his loyal Dragon toothless may have another Nightfury in existence.
How to train your Dragon 3 is a lot of fun for those of us like myself that have been fans of this series since it began with the first film in 2010 (March 2010 to be precise) and firstly the story builds off of the storytelling tracks the first 2 films laid down very well and when you begin to picture all 3 films as one big piece as I did in my head as I was watching it you can see it all come together as almost one big film with 3 parts where each part makes sense and each story makes sense.
And I will say it is awful nice to see a story with a proper ending as it increasingly feels like that that has been forgotten nowadays.
And also this is a very nice looking movie visually, all 3 films have had great visuals to them and this one is no exception be it the beauty of the hidden world, the dark colours of the villains or the soaring skies where the Dragons fly supreme that has never gotten old since the first film came out.
And so that was my short and sweet review of How to Train your Dragon 3 a good finale that wrapped up the series well with good visuals and a good story, 3 out of 5.
How to train your Dragon 3 is a lot of fun for those of us like myself that have been fans of this series since it began with the first film in 2010 (March 2010 to be precise) and firstly the story builds off of the storytelling tracks the first 2 films laid down very well and when you begin to picture all 3 films as one big piece as I did in my head as I was watching it you can see it all come together as almost one big film with 3 parts where each part makes sense and each story makes sense.
And I will say it is awful nice to see a story with a proper ending as it increasingly feels like that that has been forgotten nowadays.
And also this is a very nice looking movie visually, all 3 films have had great visuals to them and this one is no exception be it the beauty of the hidden world, the dark colours of the villains or the soaring skies where the Dragons fly supreme that has never gotten old since the first film came out.
And so that was my short and sweet review of How to Train your Dragon 3 a good finale that wrapped up the series well with good visuals and a good story, 3 out of 5.
Sunday, December 30, 2018
2018 in Film Part 2: The Best and Worst
Well my main thoughts on 2018 in Film are done and now the time has come to reveal my main lists of my favorite and least favorite films of 2018 and well what better way to start with the worst of the year, those 5 films that took 2 hours out of our lives that we’ll never get back and I always enjoy writing these lists because you get to do one more shot at these films and do them all slowly.
5. Deadpool 2
Now this will be a surprising choice for many but I decided to put it here as I hated watching this sequel in cinemas back in May and I was a fan of the first Deadpool film with Ryan Reynolds and directed by Tim Miller though this time David Leitch of Atomic Blonde takes the directorial reins.
I hated this movie because I felt its storyline was a mess, juggling a couple of plotlines in terms of this little boy played by Julian Dennison, the introduction of X-Force and a continuiation of Deadpool and Wade Wilson’s character and if the first Deadpool reminded me of the first Robocop film albeit not as good in my eyes then this one reminded me in bad ways of Robocop 2.
And that film like this one brought in all these storylines that didn’t really work, it went for a more serious tone that it didn’t earn as I wasn’t really that invested in it, the little boy annoyed me an awful lot and Ryan Reynolds who Miller knew when to let him off the leash but also rein him in here just sounded like a goddamn parrot talking endlessly in nearly every single scene and after a while I just thought to myself “Will you Please Shut Up, you sound like a fucking Parrot.”
Hopefully next year’s Detective Pikachu will use Reynolds’s vocal riffs a lot better but we’ll have to wait and see.
4. Mute
Mute was a Netflix production directed by Duncan Jones who’s last film was Warcraft and concerned an Amish private eye played by Alexander Skarsgard as he went searching for his missing girlfriend.
And boy oh boy was this a fucking bore to sit through for 2 reasons firstly the whole look of the film not only looked really cheap like shot digitally cheap but it was such a riff on Blade Runner with its neon signs everywhere, flying transport, dark skies and funky nightclubs and robots around the place that it feels old hat now to do this kind of homage especially when this came only a few months after Blade Runner 2049 hit cinemas.
And also Alexander Skarsgard who was not yet won me over like his father Stellan Skarsgard has and it isn’t helped that his performance is the kind of expressionless blank performance that stoic performers like Ryan Gosling can do although that has grown tiresome now given the weak performance of First Man in cinemas but the central mystery he’s trying to solve isn’t really that interesting and after a while I got really bored of it.
3. Sicario: Day of the Soldado
Now I quite liked the first Sicario directed by Denis Villenuve, it had a good script, Emily Blunt was great as this Clarice Starling esque character going into Mexico and it had a great supporting performance by Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin almighty Thanos, Blunt didn’t return but Brolin and Del Toro did.
And boy oh boy is this movie a mess for one very clear reason: The script, this thing feels like 2 separate movies one being Brolin’s character and his attempts to work with US officials and the other being Del Toro trying to get this young girl to the border as if he was in a rip off of Logan.
And neither one of these plotlines feels like they mesh together as one coherent film a lot of the time I felt like I was watching 2 separate films spliced together to make it one film and even the presence of Josh Brolin who was pretty much the main reason I saw this movie couldn’t do anything to save it.
2. The Happytime Murders
Boy oh boy oh boy was this a pure and utter stinker of a movie for three reasons.
The first was that the central mystery simply didn’t work, it was one of those where it was blindly obvious who the killer was and at one point one of the Muppets does a homage to Basic Instinct which was really really bad and even the reveal of the killer just felt very silly.
This leads me to my second issue the tone is all over the place on the one hand it wants to be a Roger Rabbit type world with the Muppets and Humans living together and this hard boiled detective trying to solve a mystery yet on the other hand it tries to go for that MA15 style comedy with sex jokes, bonking in the office and really really obnoxious humour that Melissa McCarthy just shouts a lot of the time and I’m a big fan of hers.
And the comedy is my third issue this movie isn’t funny it tries to go for these big laughs that films so rarely in my experience capture as they only really work when you see the film with a big audience but rarely did I ever laugh and I like a good comedy but this just went down like a deflating Muppet that’s lost its stuffing.
But as bad as those films were those weren’t as bad as my worst of 2018 which is:
The Predator.
Now I was very excited for this movie as I had rewatched the original film directed by John McTiernan in 4K which was great and Shane Black who was actually in the original film playing Hawkins was co-writing and directing this new film and I thought “This could work.”
Alas it did not and the more I thought about the film the more it broke my heart and that feeling was very prelevant in my mind when I walked out of the film for as great as the MA action violence in the film was this new Predator failed at the very things that McTiernan’s original made work.
The first of those was the characters not once did I really give a flying fuck about any of them all they ever seemed to talk in was script language where every line coming out of their mouth was a cheap attempt at a one liner or a cool phrase and it really didn’t work and the film even goes so far to almost make light of Tourette’s Syndrome a very serious condition and Autism a condition many people live with today and doesn’t get talked about anywhere near as much as it should do.
And secondly the story was very very weak a new Predator comes to Earth and then a whole bunch of other Predators come and after a while it just turns into a repeat of the original where their in a Jungle environment and hunting the creature and I wish that had been the case in the first place put a bunch of guys somewhere, have a Predator come and then KABLAMO you have your movie but No we got a whole bunch of other storylines and stereotypes that really weren’t needed one little bit.
Ah now I can breathe a sign of relief as the Turkey’s have been thrown out and writing that is making me think of Selina’s Turkey sound she used to play on the Radio show so I’ll just pretend that’s here.
Now comes the best films of the year and it was a struggle to get it 5 as there were 4 that I loved and 2 or 3 others that I really liked but in the end I’ve gone with 5a and 5b so without further ado here we go:
5b. First Man
Damien Chazelle’s follow up project to his Oscar winning film La La Land was a biopic of Neil Armstrong that also showed the perilous journey of US Astronauts to the Moon.
And this was also a movie that I really got into even though I could see some of the problems people had with the film in terms of the lack of emotional resonance but the main thing I really liked about it was the showing of that journey to the moon, all of the trail and error and the lives that were lost along the way.
Also the film was a visual treat with its grainy 60s look and many closeups and the sound design was very impressive from the sound of the engines to the silence of space plus there were great performances particularly by Claire Foy and Kyle Chandler, it might not have worked for some but it definitely worked for me.
5a. Bohemian Rhapsody
Yes the story of the late great Freddie Mercury and the band Queen which was directed by Bryan Singer with additional filming by Dexter Fletcher who finished the filming when Singer was fired in late 2017 was uneven at times but when it works it is electrifying, delivering an emotional charge to every sense I could ever have be it sadness, smiling, laughter and SINGING and those empty Drink Bottles made for great pretend microphones.
One reason is simply Rami Malek’s extraordinary performance as Freddie and there were times looking at him in the movie from certain angles I thought I was looking at the real Freddie reincarnated as he captures not only the extraordinary showmanship that had crowds in his hands like glue but also the loneliness and the directness of the private man plus most of the actors deliver great performances in particular Gwilym Lee who looks a lot like Brian May that he must have done the mind time travel trick from Days of Future Past to send his younger self to be in the film and Lucy Bonyton as Mary Austin who does a great job as Freddie’s long time companion and friend.
But also this movie’s concert scenes are exhilarating and sounded great on a big cinema screen with the booming sound system the Live Aid recreation in particular has been the single best scene I’ve seen in any movie this year as it was such a charge of electricity to my heart that I was walking around the Warnambool Plaza still with a huge buzz inside, I can’t wait to do it all again in a sing along session one day with a packed crowd.
4. A Quiet Place
A Quiet Place was director John Krasinki’s Sci-Fi Horror film that was simply terrific to watch, this was a world where everyone had to be very quiet (shhhhhhhh) otherwise the creatures that have invaded Earth would hear them, hunt them down and kill them and as someone who has not been a big horror fan I really enjoyed that.
This was a horror film that was also built on a great idea and it was the kind of horror idea that made you go “How would I act in this situation?” and a lot of horror films for me don’t really have that kind of strong idea driving it too often there’s a reliance on blood and body parts and jump scares to terrify its audience and very very very rarely does that work as all ti does is either bore the audience and leave them feeling disgusted.
This film also had some great performances by Emily Blunt who is really one of her generation’s finest actresses (the scene in the bathtub still gives me the willies when I think about it.) and Millicent Simmonds who is a young deaf girl whose entire world is sign language and silence and it helps to add to the films terrific sound design, editing and mixing and I really hope it sweeps the sound Oscars in 2019.
3. Mission Impossible: Fallout
Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie re teamed for their second Mission Impossible film after 2015’s Rogue Nation and it was well worth the wait when I got to see it as I was very hotly anticipating this movie.
And this film purely as an action film is the kind of adrenaline rush thrill ride that we so rarely see in today’s action films, everything you see for the most part is done for real with Tom once again putting his mind, body and soul on the line for all of those amazing stunt set pieces even breaking his ankle during filming and learning to fly a helicopter for the films climactic chase and all of those scenes were fantastic.
But also Christopher McQuarrie proves that he is becoming a good director in his own right along with his gifts as a screenwriter and though this story could’ve easily fallen apart it’s a testament to those writing gifts of his that he keeps the story going and gives each character a moment to shine even though the story is about Ethan Hunt and his purpose as a hero, it was great to see Rebecca Ferguson again after Rogue Nation and both Simon Pegg and Alec Baldwin also made welcome returns along with Ving Rhames.
This movie also had a great performance by Henry Cavill as well who I feel is a worthy successor to Christopher Reeve as Superman and watching him and Tom go at it was so much fun as was Sean Harris as Solomon Lane and if the James Bond series ever recasts Blofeld he would be a great choice.
2. Avengers Infinity War
This was easily my most anticipated movie of 2018 as it was not only the culmination of 10 years of Marvel Studios and the coming together of the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy but also finally the coming of Thanos as played by Josh Brolin.
And boy oh boy was I not disappointed in the slightest as this was everything I had hoped it would be and dreamed it would be but not in a way that I ever expected but more importantly it was special again like the first Avengers film was and it also highlighted how bitterly disappointing Age of Ultron was.
But why was it special again?
Firstly the storytelling here was very sound and it takes full advantage of not only the 149 minute runtime barely wasting a minute of it but also wrangling the huge number of characters the film has both sets of Avengers plus the Guardians get ample amounts of screen time and play the parts the script needs them to do very well and it also helps that we’ve had 10 years and many movies of these characters so their use is well served by that long journey.
But this movie for me is really Thanos’s movie and Josh Brolin did an excellent job playing him, the cold calm demeanour he always portrays as he seeks to eradicate half the universe makes him all the more effective as a villain as he barely raises his voice and with the power of the Infinity Stones lays the smackdown on our heroes and using him as the spine of the storytelling structure was what helped to wrangle such a large case, I wish X-Men Apocalypse had done a similar thing with En Sabah Nur/Apocalypse himself his name was the title of the film and he should’ve been much more centre stage in his own film.
But now we come to my number 1 film of 2018 and not one movie has come within cooee of this movie when I saw it all the way back in January (yes it was that long ago) and it is:
The Post
Yes folks, Steven Spielberg’s The Post is my number 1 film of 2018 even though it opened only 2 weeks into the year but why has no other film come close to it on my list well there are 2 reasons.
The first is that I really got to rethinking my feelings about Spielberg as a filmmaker as when I was 22 back in 2008 I was very sniffy about him and a lot of his movies feeling that they were too sentimental, to sweet and too sugary for my taste I preferred the harder edge and the bite of people like John McTiernan, George Miller, James Cameron and Paul Verhoeven among others but after watching this movie I got inspired to revisit several of his back catalogue movies and I now think of him as one of the grand masters of movie making.
And secondly this movie came out in Australian cinemas not that long after I got given the marching orders from the Radio station and watching this movie made me think of all those wonderful friends I had made during my time there and seeing people like them doing what they did on the big screen was a very moving experience for me and there was even one shot of Tom Hanks with his back to camera that instantly made me think of Stuart from that Office.
So yes this was that film like Dunkirk or the Accountant where my Head and my Heart were in perfect sync as compared to the other 4 films where my Head or my Heart were the dominant feelings that justified their presence.
And so that was my list of the best and worst of 2018 and with that the year is done even though I still have a couple of films left to see but the end of this year has been crazy and its left me behind the 8 ball on new releases even more than usual.
And now we come to 2019 the year of Blade Runner no less and January has my top 2 most anticipated films of the year in M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass and Dragon Ball Super: Broly a new Dragon Ball movie on the big screen which I have to see the moment it’s out.
There’s also Avengers: Endgame and the Secret Life of Pets 2 and Detective Pikachu and Godzilla: King of the Monsters to look forward to as well but Glass and Broly are my top 2 most anticipated of 2019 and whether they deliver the goods only time will tell but I can’t wait to find out.
5. Deadpool 2
Now this will be a surprising choice for many but I decided to put it here as I hated watching this sequel in cinemas back in May and I was a fan of the first Deadpool film with Ryan Reynolds and directed by Tim Miller though this time David Leitch of Atomic Blonde takes the directorial reins.
I hated this movie because I felt its storyline was a mess, juggling a couple of plotlines in terms of this little boy played by Julian Dennison, the introduction of X-Force and a continuiation of Deadpool and Wade Wilson’s character and if the first Deadpool reminded me of the first Robocop film albeit not as good in my eyes then this one reminded me in bad ways of Robocop 2.
And that film like this one brought in all these storylines that didn’t really work, it went for a more serious tone that it didn’t earn as I wasn’t really that invested in it, the little boy annoyed me an awful lot and Ryan Reynolds who Miller knew when to let him off the leash but also rein him in here just sounded like a goddamn parrot talking endlessly in nearly every single scene and after a while I just thought to myself “Will you Please Shut Up, you sound like a fucking Parrot.”
Hopefully next year’s Detective Pikachu will use Reynolds’s vocal riffs a lot better but we’ll have to wait and see.
4. Mute
Mute was a Netflix production directed by Duncan Jones who’s last film was Warcraft and concerned an Amish private eye played by Alexander Skarsgard as he went searching for his missing girlfriend.
And boy oh boy was this a fucking bore to sit through for 2 reasons firstly the whole look of the film not only looked really cheap like shot digitally cheap but it was such a riff on Blade Runner with its neon signs everywhere, flying transport, dark skies and funky nightclubs and robots around the place that it feels old hat now to do this kind of homage especially when this came only a few months after Blade Runner 2049 hit cinemas.
And also Alexander Skarsgard who was not yet won me over like his father Stellan Skarsgard has and it isn’t helped that his performance is the kind of expressionless blank performance that stoic performers like Ryan Gosling can do although that has grown tiresome now given the weak performance of First Man in cinemas but the central mystery he’s trying to solve isn’t really that interesting and after a while I got really bored of it.
3. Sicario: Day of the Soldado
Now I quite liked the first Sicario directed by Denis Villenuve, it had a good script, Emily Blunt was great as this Clarice Starling esque character going into Mexico and it had a great supporting performance by Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin almighty Thanos, Blunt didn’t return but Brolin and Del Toro did.
And boy oh boy is this movie a mess for one very clear reason: The script, this thing feels like 2 separate movies one being Brolin’s character and his attempts to work with US officials and the other being Del Toro trying to get this young girl to the border as if he was in a rip off of Logan.
And neither one of these plotlines feels like they mesh together as one coherent film a lot of the time I felt like I was watching 2 separate films spliced together to make it one film and even the presence of Josh Brolin who was pretty much the main reason I saw this movie couldn’t do anything to save it.
2. The Happytime Murders
Boy oh boy oh boy was this a pure and utter stinker of a movie for three reasons.
The first was that the central mystery simply didn’t work, it was one of those where it was blindly obvious who the killer was and at one point one of the Muppets does a homage to Basic Instinct which was really really bad and even the reveal of the killer just felt very silly.
This leads me to my second issue the tone is all over the place on the one hand it wants to be a Roger Rabbit type world with the Muppets and Humans living together and this hard boiled detective trying to solve a mystery yet on the other hand it tries to go for that MA15 style comedy with sex jokes, bonking in the office and really really obnoxious humour that Melissa McCarthy just shouts a lot of the time and I’m a big fan of hers.
And the comedy is my third issue this movie isn’t funny it tries to go for these big laughs that films so rarely in my experience capture as they only really work when you see the film with a big audience but rarely did I ever laugh and I like a good comedy but this just went down like a deflating Muppet that’s lost its stuffing.
But as bad as those films were those weren’t as bad as my worst of 2018 which is:
The Predator.
Now I was very excited for this movie as I had rewatched the original film directed by John McTiernan in 4K which was great and Shane Black who was actually in the original film playing Hawkins was co-writing and directing this new film and I thought “This could work.”
Alas it did not and the more I thought about the film the more it broke my heart and that feeling was very prelevant in my mind when I walked out of the film for as great as the MA action violence in the film was this new Predator failed at the very things that McTiernan’s original made work.
The first of those was the characters not once did I really give a flying fuck about any of them all they ever seemed to talk in was script language where every line coming out of their mouth was a cheap attempt at a one liner or a cool phrase and it really didn’t work and the film even goes so far to almost make light of Tourette’s Syndrome a very serious condition and Autism a condition many people live with today and doesn’t get talked about anywhere near as much as it should do.
And secondly the story was very very weak a new Predator comes to Earth and then a whole bunch of other Predators come and after a while it just turns into a repeat of the original where their in a Jungle environment and hunting the creature and I wish that had been the case in the first place put a bunch of guys somewhere, have a Predator come and then KABLAMO you have your movie but No we got a whole bunch of other storylines and stereotypes that really weren’t needed one little bit.
Ah now I can breathe a sign of relief as the Turkey’s have been thrown out and writing that is making me think of Selina’s Turkey sound she used to play on the Radio show so I’ll just pretend that’s here.
Now comes the best films of the year and it was a struggle to get it 5 as there were 4 that I loved and 2 or 3 others that I really liked but in the end I’ve gone with 5a and 5b so without further ado here we go:
5b. First Man
Damien Chazelle’s follow up project to his Oscar winning film La La Land was a biopic of Neil Armstrong that also showed the perilous journey of US Astronauts to the Moon.
And this was also a movie that I really got into even though I could see some of the problems people had with the film in terms of the lack of emotional resonance but the main thing I really liked about it was the showing of that journey to the moon, all of the trail and error and the lives that were lost along the way.
Also the film was a visual treat with its grainy 60s look and many closeups and the sound design was very impressive from the sound of the engines to the silence of space plus there were great performances particularly by Claire Foy and Kyle Chandler, it might not have worked for some but it definitely worked for me.
5a. Bohemian Rhapsody
Yes the story of the late great Freddie Mercury and the band Queen which was directed by Bryan Singer with additional filming by Dexter Fletcher who finished the filming when Singer was fired in late 2017 was uneven at times but when it works it is electrifying, delivering an emotional charge to every sense I could ever have be it sadness, smiling, laughter and SINGING and those empty Drink Bottles made for great pretend microphones.
One reason is simply Rami Malek’s extraordinary performance as Freddie and there were times looking at him in the movie from certain angles I thought I was looking at the real Freddie reincarnated as he captures not only the extraordinary showmanship that had crowds in his hands like glue but also the loneliness and the directness of the private man plus most of the actors deliver great performances in particular Gwilym Lee who looks a lot like Brian May that he must have done the mind time travel trick from Days of Future Past to send his younger self to be in the film and Lucy Bonyton as Mary Austin who does a great job as Freddie’s long time companion and friend.
But also this movie’s concert scenes are exhilarating and sounded great on a big cinema screen with the booming sound system the Live Aid recreation in particular has been the single best scene I’ve seen in any movie this year as it was such a charge of electricity to my heart that I was walking around the Warnambool Plaza still with a huge buzz inside, I can’t wait to do it all again in a sing along session one day with a packed crowd.
4. A Quiet Place
A Quiet Place was director John Krasinki’s Sci-Fi Horror film that was simply terrific to watch, this was a world where everyone had to be very quiet (shhhhhhhh) otherwise the creatures that have invaded Earth would hear them, hunt them down and kill them and as someone who has not been a big horror fan I really enjoyed that.
This was a horror film that was also built on a great idea and it was the kind of horror idea that made you go “How would I act in this situation?” and a lot of horror films for me don’t really have that kind of strong idea driving it too often there’s a reliance on blood and body parts and jump scares to terrify its audience and very very very rarely does that work as all ti does is either bore the audience and leave them feeling disgusted.
This film also had some great performances by Emily Blunt who is really one of her generation’s finest actresses (the scene in the bathtub still gives me the willies when I think about it.) and Millicent Simmonds who is a young deaf girl whose entire world is sign language and silence and it helps to add to the films terrific sound design, editing and mixing and I really hope it sweeps the sound Oscars in 2019.
3. Mission Impossible: Fallout
Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie re teamed for their second Mission Impossible film after 2015’s Rogue Nation and it was well worth the wait when I got to see it as I was very hotly anticipating this movie.
And this film purely as an action film is the kind of adrenaline rush thrill ride that we so rarely see in today’s action films, everything you see for the most part is done for real with Tom once again putting his mind, body and soul on the line for all of those amazing stunt set pieces even breaking his ankle during filming and learning to fly a helicopter for the films climactic chase and all of those scenes were fantastic.
But also Christopher McQuarrie proves that he is becoming a good director in his own right along with his gifts as a screenwriter and though this story could’ve easily fallen apart it’s a testament to those writing gifts of his that he keeps the story going and gives each character a moment to shine even though the story is about Ethan Hunt and his purpose as a hero, it was great to see Rebecca Ferguson again after Rogue Nation and both Simon Pegg and Alec Baldwin also made welcome returns along with Ving Rhames.
This movie also had a great performance by Henry Cavill as well who I feel is a worthy successor to Christopher Reeve as Superman and watching him and Tom go at it was so much fun as was Sean Harris as Solomon Lane and if the James Bond series ever recasts Blofeld he would be a great choice.
2. Avengers Infinity War
This was easily my most anticipated movie of 2018 as it was not only the culmination of 10 years of Marvel Studios and the coming together of the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy but also finally the coming of Thanos as played by Josh Brolin.
And boy oh boy was I not disappointed in the slightest as this was everything I had hoped it would be and dreamed it would be but not in a way that I ever expected but more importantly it was special again like the first Avengers film was and it also highlighted how bitterly disappointing Age of Ultron was.
But why was it special again?
Firstly the storytelling here was very sound and it takes full advantage of not only the 149 minute runtime barely wasting a minute of it but also wrangling the huge number of characters the film has both sets of Avengers plus the Guardians get ample amounts of screen time and play the parts the script needs them to do very well and it also helps that we’ve had 10 years and many movies of these characters so their use is well served by that long journey.
But this movie for me is really Thanos’s movie and Josh Brolin did an excellent job playing him, the cold calm demeanour he always portrays as he seeks to eradicate half the universe makes him all the more effective as a villain as he barely raises his voice and with the power of the Infinity Stones lays the smackdown on our heroes and using him as the spine of the storytelling structure was what helped to wrangle such a large case, I wish X-Men Apocalypse had done a similar thing with En Sabah Nur/Apocalypse himself his name was the title of the film and he should’ve been much more centre stage in his own film.
But now we come to my number 1 film of 2018 and not one movie has come within cooee of this movie when I saw it all the way back in January (yes it was that long ago) and it is:
The Post
Yes folks, Steven Spielberg’s The Post is my number 1 film of 2018 even though it opened only 2 weeks into the year but why has no other film come close to it on my list well there are 2 reasons.
The first is that I really got to rethinking my feelings about Spielberg as a filmmaker as when I was 22 back in 2008 I was very sniffy about him and a lot of his movies feeling that they were too sentimental, to sweet and too sugary for my taste I preferred the harder edge and the bite of people like John McTiernan, George Miller, James Cameron and Paul Verhoeven among others but after watching this movie I got inspired to revisit several of his back catalogue movies and I now think of him as one of the grand masters of movie making.
And secondly this movie came out in Australian cinemas not that long after I got given the marching orders from the Radio station and watching this movie made me think of all those wonderful friends I had made during my time there and seeing people like them doing what they did on the big screen was a very moving experience for me and there was even one shot of Tom Hanks with his back to camera that instantly made me think of Stuart from that Office.
So yes this was that film like Dunkirk or the Accountant where my Head and my Heart were in perfect sync as compared to the other 4 films where my Head or my Heart were the dominant feelings that justified their presence.
And so that was my list of the best and worst of 2018 and with that the year is done even though I still have a couple of films left to see but the end of this year has been crazy and its left me behind the 8 ball on new releases even more than usual.
And now we come to 2019 the year of Blade Runner no less and January has my top 2 most anticipated films of the year in M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass and Dragon Ball Super: Broly a new Dragon Ball movie on the big screen which I have to see the moment it’s out.
There’s also Avengers: Endgame and the Secret Life of Pets 2 and Detective Pikachu and Godzilla: King of the Monsters to look forward to as well but Glass and Broly are my top 2 most anticipated of 2019 and whether they deliver the goods only time will tell but I can’t wait to find out.
Saturday, December 29, 2018
Film Review - Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018)
Ralph Breaks the Internet is the sequel to 2012’s Wreck it Ralph and this time Ralph (John C Reilly) and Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) log onto the Internet when Vanellope’s racing game breaks and a new steering wheel part must be found but when you come from the Net your format as Game Sprites could see you lost on the Net.
Ralph Breaks the Internet is an okay sequel that I found to be a bit forgettable that doesn’t make it a bad film just one that I didn’t really get into but before I delve more into that I loved the world building on display here and like 2016’s Zootopia also co directed by Simpsons director Rich Moore there are plenty of visual details to see such as how people are represented, how they get around and how they use the various sites us users use every day in the real world.
There are also some fantastic references to Disney itself and the various properties it owns including some very memorable moments with the Disney Princesses who for decades served as a cornerstone of the Disney brand before Marvel and Lucasfilm came into their midsts.
As for the overall storytelling I wasn’t as fond of it as it felt like the typical friend wants to move on but other friend doesn’t want them to go story and I thought it was okay for the most part as some of us do feel that way in our own lives even though it is for the best but outside of that I never really got into that much and again it doesn’t make it bad but just not for me.
And so that was my review of Ralph Breaks the Internet and it’s a fine animation that will do well in the holidays but I found it pretty forgettable, 2 out of 5.
Ralph Breaks the Internet is an okay sequel that I found to be a bit forgettable that doesn’t make it a bad film just one that I didn’t really get into but before I delve more into that I loved the world building on display here and like 2016’s Zootopia also co directed by Simpsons director Rich Moore there are plenty of visual details to see such as how people are represented, how they get around and how they use the various sites us users use every day in the real world.
There are also some fantastic references to Disney itself and the various properties it owns including some very memorable moments with the Disney Princesses who for decades served as a cornerstone of the Disney brand before Marvel and Lucasfilm came into their midsts.
As for the overall storytelling I wasn’t as fond of it as it felt like the typical friend wants to move on but other friend doesn’t want them to go story and I thought it was okay for the most part as some of us do feel that way in our own lives even though it is for the best but outside of that I never really got into that much and again it doesn’t make it bad but just not for me.
And so that was my review of Ralph Breaks the Internet and it’s a fine animation that will do well in the holidays but I found it pretty forgettable, 2 out of 5.
Film Review - Aquaman (2018)
Aquaman is the newest entry in the DC film universe and concerns Arthur Curry aka the Aquaman (Jason Momoa) as he seeks the power of the King of Atlantis’s Trident as the current ruler King Orm (Patrick Wilson) seeks to unite the Seven Seas in a war against the Surface World though Mera and the Grand Vizor Volko (Willem Dafoe) are convinced the power of the Trident can unite both the Ocean and Surface Worlds.
Aquaman comes at a time where I have been endlessly frustrated with DC on film and that frustration goes all the way back to the very beginning with Richard Donner’s Superman the Movie in 1978 where Donner was fired from the franchise and then Tim Burton’s Batman movies pretty much ended up the same way as this current DC incarnation where Warner Brothers has panic attacks over a dark film, orders a change of direction and then gets so light that the bottom falls out of the franchise and it crashes at the box office does Aquaman sink to the bottom of the sea or does it swim to the top like 2017’s Wonder Woman.
Well it does a bit of both as I am very much in the middle on this movie firstly director James Wan’s eye for spectacle and visual effects is on full display as this movie looks fantastic on a big cinema screen as there is lots of variety to the various kingdoms of the Seven Seas and the way Mr Wan realises these and the huge underwater battle scenes is great and I was never bored watching those scenes.
Where I was bored was in the overall storytelling as it feels like a very generic semi origin story where the hero must prove his worth and go on the quest and save the kingdom from complete doom and it isn’t helped in these moments that both Wan’s direction can’t seem to nail any kind of menaningful emotional response and that Jason Momoa’s overall performance has the same snarky tone that so many lead performances in these big superhero films I mean you could swap him for Robert Downey Jr or Chris Pratt and you would barely notice any difference.
I did however in the performance front like Amber Heard as Mera even if at times it feels like she is mimicking Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow and Nicole Kidman as the Queen of Atlantis her story arc was probably my favorite of the entire film as it reminded me a lot of a show I loved called ReBoot and when its lead character Bob was lost in the Web.
As for the villains well the Black Manta was really cool though badly underused while Wilson was kind of foppish as Orm and that character is a great one in the Aquaman 2 part episode of the Justice League animated series but here I thought Momoa would squash him lickety split.
And so that was Aquaman and it’s a middle of the road entry for DC there’s still a long way back for them in my eyes and with Wonder Woman 2 now coming in 2020 I won’t hold my breath for Shazam or Joker next year, 2 and a half out of 5.
Aquaman comes at a time where I have been endlessly frustrated with DC on film and that frustration goes all the way back to the very beginning with Richard Donner’s Superman the Movie in 1978 where Donner was fired from the franchise and then Tim Burton’s Batman movies pretty much ended up the same way as this current DC incarnation where Warner Brothers has panic attacks over a dark film, orders a change of direction and then gets so light that the bottom falls out of the franchise and it crashes at the box office does Aquaman sink to the bottom of the sea or does it swim to the top like 2017’s Wonder Woman.
Well it does a bit of both as I am very much in the middle on this movie firstly director James Wan’s eye for spectacle and visual effects is on full display as this movie looks fantastic on a big cinema screen as there is lots of variety to the various kingdoms of the Seven Seas and the way Mr Wan realises these and the huge underwater battle scenes is great and I was never bored watching those scenes.
Where I was bored was in the overall storytelling as it feels like a very generic semi origin story where the hero must prove his worth and go on the quest and save the kingdom from complete doom and it isn’t helped in these moments that both Wan’s direction can’t seem to nail any kind of menaningful emotional response and that Jason Momoa’s overall performance has the same snarky tone that so many lead performances in these big superhero films I mean you could swap him for Robert Downey Jr or Chris Pratt and you would barely notice any difference.
I did however in the performance front like Amber Heard as Mera even if at times it feels like she is mimicking Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow and Nicole Kidman as the Queen of Atlantis her story arc was probably my favorite of the entire film as it reminded me a lot of a show I loved called ReBoot and when its lead character Bob was lost in the Web.
As for the villains well the Black Manta was really cool though badly underused while Wilson was kind of foppish as Orm and that character is a great one in the Aquaman 2 part episode of the Justice League animated series but here I thought Momoa would squash him lickety split.
And so that was Aquaman and it’s a middle of the road entry for DC there’s still a long way back for them in my eyes and with Wonder Woman 2 now coming in 2020 I won’t hold my breath for Shazam or Joker next year, 2 and a half out of 5.
Film Review - Bumblebee (2018)
Bumblebee is the first Transformers spin off and also the first not directed by Michael Bay this time Travis Knight the head of Laika Animation takes the helm and this story is set in 1987 when Bumblebee crashes to Earth from Cybertron and is found by Charley (Hailee Steinfeld) in an auto yard, little does she know that there is more to her new Beetle car than meets the eye.
As a long time Transformers fan I was so so happy to finally see a good Transformers movie and not having Bay in charge makes a big difference for these reasons:
- Firstly there is an awful lot of heart in this movie as writers Christina Hodson and Kelly Fremon Craig really do a lot to develop the relationship between Bumblebee and Charley and it harkens back to the boy and his car motif that Steven Spielberg tried to bring to the first live action Transformers movie in 2007 before Bay took charge with his own style but this movie takes that idea and does a much better job with it as it feels front and centre as opposed to an idea that kicks off a film that felt tone deaf in so many ways.
- Secondly the film has a far smaller scale to it than the previous Bay movies and sure there is plenty of Transformers action in the film but it all feels smaller, more personal, more connected to the characters and the storytelling and their also shot wider so you can actually see what the heck is going on and on top of all that the Autobots are not completely useless robuts who constantly get their butts kicked but I’ll stop there about those points this is a simpler story that allows the characters to come back to the focus and I am very grateful for that.
- And lastly the Transformers fan service here is fantastic, the opening scene set on Cybertron was terrific and I thought to myself “There’s Soundwave, There’s Shockwave and Starscream and Thundercracker and Skywarp” and then Ravage came out of Soundwave’s Chest and Optimus was being his noble badass self and I was a very very happy boy though if Megatron had made a cameo in the film I would’ve lost my mind (There was a scene with him in the film but it was very wisely cut.)
And also the way the Cybetron War scenes are used throughout the film it is a little reminiscent of the Future War scenes in the first Terminator film.
However if I have one complaint and its really only a minor one its John Cena and his role as Agent Burns of Sector 7 he does a good job in the role but the way the character is written it feels like a bad knockoff of the Bay style from the previous films and a lot of the scenes feel like a shaggy sideplot but hey when the rest of the film is as good as it is I won’t complain much.
And so that was my review of Bumblebee and it is about fucking time we had a great Transformers movie this has been a long time coming and I hope people go see it, 4 out of 5.
As a long time Transformers fan I was so so happy to finally see a good Transformers movie and not having Bay in charge makes a big difference for these reasons:
- Firstly there is an awful lot of heart in this movie as writers Christina Hodson and Kelly Fremon Craig really do a lot to develop the relationship between Bumblebee and Charley and it harkens back to the boy and his car motif that Steven Spielberg tried to bring to the first live action Transformers movie in 2007 before Bay took charge with his own style but this movie takes that idea and does a much better job with it as it feels front and centre as opposed to an idea that kicks off a film that felt tone deaf in so many ways.
- Secondly the film has a far smaller scale to it than the previous Bay movies and sure there is plenty of Transformers action in the film but it all feels smaller, more personal, more connected to the characters and the storytelling and their also shot wider so you can actually see what the heck is going on and on top of all that the Autobots are not completely useless robuts who constantly get their butts kicked but I’ll stop there about those points this is a simpler story that allows the characters to come back to the focus and I am very grateful for that.
- And lastly the Transformers fan service here is fantastic, the opening scene set on Cybertron was terrific and I thought to myself “There’s Soundwave, There’s Shockwave and Starscream and Thundercracker and Skywarp” and then Ravage came out of Soundwave’s Chest and Optimus was being his noble badass self and I was a very very happy boy though if Megatron had made a cameo in the film I would’ve lost my mind (There was a scene with him in the film but it was very wisely cut.)
And also the way the Cybetron War scenes are used throughout the film it is a little reminiscent of the Future War scenes in the first Terminator film.
However if I have one complaint and its really only a minor one its John Cena and his role as Agent Burns of Sector 7 he does a good job in the role but the way the character is written it feels like a bad knockoff of the Bay style from the previous films and a lot of the scenes feel like a shaggy sideplot but hey when the rest of the film is as good as it is I won’t complain much.
And so that was my review of Bumblebee and it is about fucking time we had a great Transformers movie this has been a long time coming and I hope people go see it, 4 out of 5.
Tuesday, December 25, 2018
2018 in Film Part 1
Well its that time again boys and girls, another year in movies has pretty much come and gone and the time has come to write about it and reveal my lists of the best and worst of the year.
But all of that fun is for later as for right now it is time to write about my thoughts overall on the movie year as a whole and it was an interesting one for me to start off with as this was the first full year of movie going for me since 2013 where I wasn’t doing my Radio show with Selina on ABC South East SA that having come to an end in December of 2017 sadly.
And if I was to have one regret with that ending in the way that it did it is not getting to review Star Wars: The Last Jedi with her as we had been talking about it in the last 2 or 3 shows before its December release date and indeed the day my Radio days ended was the opening day of that film so to not pay that off is very disappointing but alas these things happen and nothing lasts forever.
But getting back on track I will actually say that this year movie wise was actually pretty good and certainly better than 2016 and 2017 were and those years I was on Radio, I thought there was a nice mix of great genre cinema and independent type films and a lot of the times I went to the movies I actually enjoyed being there and maybe part of that is because I wasn’t rushing around so much to have reviews of films done by a certain date so I could do that Radio show review but I digress.
The other big film related thing I did this year was make the leap to 4K Ultra HD and it is fantastic especially with the older films I love such as Rambo, Predator, Die Hard and the Hunt for Red October to name as examples all 4 of those films looked and sounded great and made me feel like I was sitting in a Village or Hoyts or Greater Union cinema back in the time of their original release year and that 35mm print was playing in front of me for the first time.
First Blood in particular felt like I could practically smell the film grain in the print and it makes me want to see more older films make the leap to that format such as Lethal Weapon and Back to the Future but with streaming so dominant right now I won’t hold my breath.
Well that being done that was Part 1 of my look back at 2018 film wise keep an eye out for Part 2 I reveal my best and worst of the year so stay tuned.
But all of that fun is for later as for right now it is time to write about my thoughts overall on the movie year as a whole and it was an interesting one for me to start off with as this was the first full year of movie going for me since 2013 where I wasn’t doing my Radio show with Selina on ABC South East SA that having come to an end in December of 2017 sadly.
And if I was to have one regret with that ending in the way that it did it is not getting to review Star Wars: The Last Jedi with her as we had been talking about it in the last 2 or 3 shows before its December release date and indeed the day my Radio days ended was the opening day of that film so to not pay that off is very disappointing but alas these things happen and nothing lasts forever.
But getting back on track I will actually say that this year movie wise was actually pretty good and certainly better than 2016 and 2017 were and those years I was on Radio, I thought there was a nice mix of great genre cinema and independent type films and a lot of the times I went to the movies I actually enjoyed being there and maybe part of that is because I wasn’t rushing around so much to have reviews of films done by a certain date so I could do that Radio show review but I digress.
The other big film related thing I did this year was make the leap to 4K Ultra HD and it is fantastic especially with the older films I love such as Rambo, Predator, Die Hard and the Hunt for Red October to name as examples all 4 of those films looked and sounded great and made me feel like I was sitting in a Village or Hoyts or Greater Union cinema back in the time of their original release year and that 35mm print was playing in front of me for the first time.
First Blood in particular felt like I could practically smell the film grain in the print and it makes me want to see more older films make the leap to that format such as Lethal Weapon and Back to the Future but with streaming so dominant right now I won’t hold my breath.
Well that being done that was Part 1 of my look back at 2018 film wise keep an eye out for Part 2 I reveal my best and worst of the year so stay tuned.
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