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Movie Time 2.0: TT mini reviews

Last night was Cube, which I liked a lot better as a concept than as a movie, but boy did everything about the premise work for me.

Everything about the fact that the Cube itself was just… built by accident, and any explanation for why or what it was made for got lost in a bureaucratic shuffle, but nobody wanted to admit that the government wasted a lot of money on a shapeshifting murder-maze, so might as well make some use of it really works for me as a concept; no malice just ignorance.

That being said it was 90 minutes of four people walking through the same room, and some stuff that feels kinda iffy 30 years later; like the mentally challenged man with magical trap detection prescience. Despite being a movie from the 90s, there was only one r-slur and that came from the villain.

I’m kind of interested in the sequels to see if they’re improved any but I don’t feel the need to glean this cube again
 
Apparently one is a prequel and, man, that's exactly what I don't want.

I want nobody to know why there's a gargantuan, shapeshifting murder-box
 
The Incredible Shrinking Wknd - An indie film clearly made with no budget (and originally in Spanish) that I watched because it’s got a time-loop. It’s...not great. It tries to hit the beats from Groundhog Day (in a cabin the woods) but doesn’t give the audience enough information and doesn’t actually give the protagonist enough character or enough growth. There are also random events that don’t figure into the larger story or actually pay off—two of the friends kiss her at random points but nothing comes of it; she gets a nail in her foot (and it’s established that her body doesn’t re-set with the loop) but goes on long hikes in subsequent loops. This wasn’t a winner, unfortunately.

Boss Level - Frank Grillo gets caught in a Groundhog Day loop where ridiculous assassins sent by his ex-wife’s boss kill him. Fortunately, he’s former spec ops and is well-trained at murdering them back, especially when he gets to practice every day. This doesn’t take itself particularly seriously and the science is the usual nonsense, but it’s at least internally consistent nonsense. And overall this is a fun, vaguely video game-themed action movie with lots of explosions and a moral about the true meaning of family.

Venom: The Last Dance - Wow, what a goddamn mess of a movie. Our best guess was that there were at least three writers, one who wrote the Eddie/Venom buddy comedy dialogue (delightful!), one who came up with cool CGI action sequences (Venom horse!), and one who wrote the framing story about Knull and the Codex (really, really stupid!). Why did Dr. Paine even appear in this movie and why did she have so much backstory, when she did nothing of importance? Why bother with a stinger about Knull when 1) Venom won so he’s still sealed away and 2) It’s not like they’ll have any sequels to use him in. Who’s going to fight him? Madame Web and Morbius? If you liked the previous two movies, you can enjoy this by fast-forwarding through any scene Eddie isn’t in.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice - This was fascinating, especially having rewatched the original movie recently, because it’s much more reliant on the intervening decades of which characters became breakout fan-favorites than on the plot of the original movie. The Maitlands (remember them, the main characters of the original?) barely get a line about what happened to them and Beetlejuice gets a LOT of screen time. That said, they packed this with too many subplots that end up barely mattering and filled the rest with fanservice. It’s too busy a movie for how little actually happens, if that makes sense. Oh, and the “MacArthur Park” sequence at the end is way too long and does not, in fact, recapture the magic of “Day-O.” I support Winona Ryder getting a paycheck at every opportunity; but frankly this was mostly only worth it for Catherine O’Hara and William Dafoe chewing scenery.

Transformers One - This was fun! How well does the continuity work? Who cares! There are no squishy humans, everything is brightly colored so you can tell what’s going on, there are awesome Transformer battles, and it remembers that it’s both a call-back for us middle-aged fans but also a cartoon for kids.
 
Beowulf said:
Venom: The Last Dance - Wow, what a goddamn mess of a movie. Our best guess was that there were at least three writers, one who wrote the Eddie/Venom buddy comedy dialogue (delightful!), one who came up with cool CGI action sequences (Venom horse!), and one who wrote the framing story about Knull and the Codex (really, really stupid!). Why did Dr. Paine even appear in this movie and why did she have so much backstory, when she did nothing of importance? Why bother with a stinger about Knull when 1) Venom won so he’s still sealed away and 2) It’s not like they’ll have any sequels to use him in. Who’s going to fight him? Madame Web and Morbius? If you liked the previous two movies, you can enjoy this by fast-forwarding through any scene Eddie isn’t in.
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It seemed pretty clear to me that there was an original draft of this that was primarily about the Science Ladies, and that whole plot line was first on the chopping block because yuck, two women talking!? Get that out of here! It's also clear that someone, seeing that this was the last one they were going to get to do, just went into full on panic mode about how vital it is to get absolutely every other Venom-related character on screen at least a little regardless of how there was neither remotely enough time for that to be at all feasible, nor is that something anyone in the audience had any interest in at all (not having gotten the hint somehow that nobody is here to see Venom make like big swinging blade whips or whatever, we're here to see Venom make awkward dinner reservations and margaritas which the second movie especially leaned all the way into).

And yet somehow they managed to save the time for like a 15 minute opening serving only to undo a post-credits gag scene that was only there to set up a gag in some Spiderman movie I don't even known if they even got around to doing? Such a shame.

Beowulf said:
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice - This was fascinating, especially having rewatched the original movie recently, because it’s much more reliant on the intervening decades of which characters became breakout fan-favorites than on the plot of the original movie. The Maitlands (remember them, the main characters of the original?) barely get a line about what happened to them and Beetlejuice gets a LOT of screen time. That said, they packed this with too many subplots that end up barely mattering and filled the rest with fanservice. It’s too busy a movie for how little actually happens, if that makes sense. Oh, and the “MacArthur Park” sequence at the end is way too long and does not, in fact, recapture the magic of “Day-O.” I support Winona Ryder getting a paycheck at every opportunity; but frankly this was mostly only worth it for Catherine O’Hara and William Dafoe chewing scenery.
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Michael Keaton making it a point that he'd only come back for this if Beetlejuice had, at most, as much screentime as he did in the original (like, 15 minutes?) would suggest it only felt like a lot, but he IS discussed quite a bit. I figure we got no Maitlands for the basic logistical reasons that you'd need to get both actors as a package deal, Baldwin was dealing with the whole... being the hand on the trigger in what feels like an elaborate murder mystery scenario in real life and associated stress and trauma, Davis was actually starring in something else for the first time I'm aware of in forever, and they've both aged noticably which is weird for ghosts to do. It is still weird it was such a casual handwave though yeah.

Past that, it really very much felt like the first 4 episodes of a scrapped TV series cobbled together and sold as a movie... which I don't THINK is what actually happened, but two of the three writers came off the original Beetlejuice and went straight into episodic TV, and the third had a similar arc, so, they might have just all been in that episodic sorta headspace? I thought the end result worked weirdly well though honestly.
 
Purple said:
Michael Keaton making it a point that he'd only come back for this if Beetlejuice had, at most, as much screentime as he did in the original (like, 15 minutes?) would suggest it only felt like a lot, but he IS discussed quite a bit. I figure we got no Maitlands for the basic logistical reasons that you'd need to get both actors as a package deal, Baldwin was dealing with the whole... being the hand on the trigger in what feels like an elaborate murder mystery scenario in real life and associated stress and trauma, Davis was actually starring in something else for the first time I'm aware of in forever, and they've both aged noticably which is weird for ghosts to do. It is still weird it was such a casual handwave though yeah.
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Funnily enough, Michael Keaton looks just fine for the part 35 years later.
 
I mean he's got a LOT of makeup here, but generally speaking, yeah, he's kept himself in pretty damn good shape over the years.
 
Yeah I don't think the Maitlands would work. Beetlejuice was already grody and of indeterminate age with all the makeup in the first one, so it's easy enough to buy him as just the same guy. The Maitlands would just look incongruously old. Unless they brought them in with de-aging tech (ugh) I don't think they'd work well.

And yeah, I agree it felt a bit cobbled together. I was amused, it was fine, but like almost all contemporary Burton projects I've seen (like Wednesday) it trades heavily in "ooooh look how scaaarrrrryyy and creeeeppyyyyy" without actually being at all scary or creepy for real. Missing a spark. And it's not like the original Beetlejuice was very much either, but it was sharp in a way this didn't feel.
 
Beowulf said:
Venom: The Last Dance - Wow, what a goddamn mess of a movie. Our best guess was that there were at least three writers, one who wrote the Eddie/Venom buddy comedy dialogue (delightful!), one who came up with cool CGI action sequences (Venom horse!), and one who wrote the framing story about Knull and the Codex (really, really stupid!). Why did Dr. Paine even appear in this movie and why did she have so much backstory, when she did nothing of importance? Why bother with a stinger about Knull when 1) Venom won so he’s still sealed away and 2) It’s not like they’ll have any sequels to use him in. Who’s going to fight him? Madame Web and Morbius? If you liked the previous two movies, you can enjoy this by fast-forwarding through any scene Eddie isn’t in.
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Oh wow, Knull is actually in the movie? I think I need to see it sometime, just to tell all my Swedish friends "I watched a movie with Knull yesterday."

("Knull" means "fuck/fucking" in Swedish. I'm very mature about this fact.)
 
Honey Don't! was kinda... pointless? It really didn't go anywhere, the reveals and conclusions weren't particularly interesting, none of the characters were very compelling. After Drive-Away Dolls I had moderate hopes for this one but they were dashed upon the rocks.
 
Just finished The Substance.

My thoughts
1. Should *not* have watched this while eating
2. It’s not a horror movie so much as a really, really, really gross psycho drama
3. Nothing about the first 120 minutes prepared me for the last 20
 
My 15-yo took me to see Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc this evening. Outside of Studio Ghibli movies, I do not engage with anime. I think the last time I watched any kind of serialized or action-oriented anime was before Toonami was even a thing, before anime really landed in the U.S., so it's been...a bit. Knowing nothing about the property, and simply assuming there would be chainsaws, I'm somewhat amused to report that I was entirely 100% whelmed by the movie. It's definitely one of the animes of all time.

Not sure I'm the brand of geek that would get anything from this. I don't have the...uh... cultural context, let's call it. It was...fine? I laughed at some parts, I was bummed about others, and it's certainly a spectacle. Just not sure I got anything from it beyond quality time with my teenager, which is its own reward, so I can't be too critical of the experiencel.
 
I saw a couple of movies during downtime on vacation.

Paul le Fou said:
Watched Death of a Unicorn and it just wasn't very good. Pretty much a bog-standard monster flick where the monsters happened to be unicorns. Predictable. A waste of Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega.
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This is 100% my opinion on Death of a Unicorn. Honestly, mostly due to the presence of Jenna Ortega, my first thought was that it was just as dumb as Wednesday or Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, but not remotely as nuanced. And, yes, I am saying Death of a Unicorn is not as interesting as a couple of shows that could have followed Buffy the Vampire Slayer when it was on UPN. It wasn't bad, there just wasn't much of anything there once it was established how everything was inevitably going to go down.

Say something nice: any characters introduced for the purpose of later being garroted more than earned their fate within three seconds of introduction.

Octopus Prime said:
Just finished The Substance.

My thoughts
1. Should *not* have watched this while eating
2. It’s not a horror movie so much as a really, really, really gross psycho drama
3. Nothing about the first 120 minutes prepared me for the last 20
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I cannot imagine eating during The Substance.

This one is... complicated. On one hand, I really love how it is "over directed": practically every scene is stylized in a way that makes it unmistakably unique. After so many movies that are aping the nothing-style of Marvel films or alike, this is a feast for anyone that ever wanted to see a few pounds of shrimp transformed into the most disgusting thing you have ever seen. That said, this is also "I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards": the movie. To get into the details of what happens: I have, in my 40 or so years on Earth, never once worked with "Hollywood", or the production of any kind of film or show on a greater scale than a local commercial. However, I somehow know the inner-workings of Hollywood (as presented by Hollywood) thanks to roughly 70,000 movies, tv shows, and memoirs that recount how the business works. And even if I had missed that, I am pretty damn sure I understand that many businesses/fields treat women like crap, only value them for their looks, and lose interest the minute they get older than 25. I feel like so much effort went into this film that has the general moral of "Wow, how society, media, and men in general treat women is fucked up, and literally causes anyone that is the focus of that attention to go insane." And, like Death of a Unicorn, the absolute minute the rules are established, you know Sue is going to start feeding the gremlins after midnight as if checking off boxes on a to-do list. The whole thing is obvious to the point of parody, which undermines the very real, "has been a problem for centuries" lesson of how this is not how the world should be. The finale is vaguely unexpected for the sheer level of horror it achieves, but it is also a weird kind of "the only way it could go" from the moment everything starts getting The Picture of Dorian Gray. Her audience and executives had to have a bad time because of the twisted choices of our protagonist, and that was about the "best" we could get.


All that said, I really liked the movie. I felt like I was being moralized like I was a toddler, but it was a fun ride.

THE BAD: (spoilers for a particular scene): There was the bit where Sparkle meets the other Substance-subject at the diner, and they take what felt like a million years to establish that he has all the signs of having been substance'd before he reveals that he is another substance user. You didn't have to do that! It was obvious from the first second!

THE GOOD: (spoilers for the whole movie): The film starts with our aerobics-instructing hero telling the audience that they do not want to look like a jellyfish on the beach. And she ends her journey as a spineless blob washed up on her star. GET IT!?!
 
For me The Substance was a movie where the "what it's about" was pretty obvious, but the "how it's about it" was absolutely dazzling. And that's ultimately what matters to me more as a movie viewer, just speaking personally, so I ended up liking it a lot. I felt the same way about Weapons.
 
My reading was that The Substance wasn’t about “man, men are pigs with their sexist standards” at all, getting that out of the way immediately - I took the first gross boss eating shrimp scene to be basically “yeah, you know this, we know this, we all accept it, now we’re moving onto the actual topic”.

In my mind it was more about “independent and confident women who are well aware of and despise said sexists and bullshit standards are nonetheless susceptible to absorbing the same standards and torturing themselves over them”, as I saw it. A lament for self-destruction that even foreknowledge doesn’t prevent.

While also acting as a very strong addiction allegory. Cycles of the hungover self’s hating the drunk self’s overindulgence, and separation of responsibility and self-perception between the two. The overeating scenes seemed to kind of reflect that too.
 
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Watched The Shining for the first time. Guess what, it's good.

Feels like I'd already seen like 80% of it by volume from the sheer ubiquity of references and homages in basically all media for the past several decades.

Also, I never realized how much of Jim Carrey's facial expression repertoire is just Jack Nicholson's from this movie amped up to 11.

Also also, I've been to Timberlyne Lodge (actually in Oregon on Mt. Hood) a ton of times growing up, so that was fun to recognize (it was used for all the exterior shots; the interior is totally different). There is not, however, a hedge maze out back.
 
I actually saw the miniseries with the dude from Wings first and we were so grumpy about him not saying “Here’s Johnny” that we watched the original immediately afterwards and applauded during the scene.
 
Sister Midnight was an interesting Indian movie that's hard to categorize, and it's the kind of movie you don't want to say too much about/go in knowing too much about, but it's kind of a Wes Anderson-like horror comedy. I don't know how much I liked it, but it's still sticking with me a couple days later, so that's gotta be worth something.
 
Avatar: Fire and Ash. Each Avatar movie feels like the last Avatar movie: conflict between humans and Na'vi escalating to a final battle. Fire and Ash does not break the mold. The dialog is often cringe worthy.

On the positive side, I really liked Varang the new Na'Vi villian. She is a very fun baddie! She also has a drug hallucination sequence, which I was not expecting in a mass market PG-13 movie.

The star of the show is still the cutting edge FX and the visual designs. The FX work in this movie is gorgeous and for me, worth the price of admission.

I will probably go back and see it again in the theater. The Avatar movies to me are 3D theater experiences.

Rating (Out of 5): 🔥🔥🔥🔥
 
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Like most horror movies, Together has a pretty obvious metaphor at its heart that it beats you over the head with and yells “I AM TRYING TO BE ART!”

In this case, that metaphor is “Do not drink the goo you find in a big tentacle-hole”.

Anyway, there was, like, five minutes that had fun with the premise of becoming people-glue for your spouse.
 
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