Month: February 2018

With Fifty Shades Freed coming out, it makes it the second trilogy to end in 2018 already, and it is only halfway through February! The other one was of course Maze Runner: The Death Cure, which was also complete shit.

I don’t know a lot about the point of this trilogy, but looking at the ad spots online, on youtube, on Hulu, the one thing I realized is that whatever the plot was, they certainly did not want to show it to the viewer. They just wanted us to see people being rich, doing some sexy stuff, and being rich. Rich, sex, rich.

Maybe that is the main point of the movie? Maybe they expect the plot to just maintain “oh, their relationship!” and it be an okay story overall.

Is the wedding the climax, or just the beginning?

The movie begins with the saying of I do from our leads (Which is answers that question). After all, he proposed at the end of the second film, we don’t need to see them planning for it and all that shit. Let’s just see Anastasia become Anastasia Grey (Dakota Johnson) and Christian (Jamie Dornan) stays the same. Which is one of those plots about the movie, him staying the same.

Now we can watch them traveling the world, honeymooning, sexing, being rich. You know. But some guy goes and steals some data from Grey’s company, cutting it short! Oh snap! Now we have some man, or some lady, trying to do bad things to them, and he has “no idea at all why!”. Security is beefed up and some things are a little bit less sexy.

But don’t worry, we still have time to deal with other issues. Like how they never even talked about when they would want kids or if they wanted kids at all. Perfect thing to do post marriage. On that note, that weird ex mistress of his that taught him all of his kinks? You’d think that would be important, but in this movie, it is basically just dealt with in a single scene and ignored the whole way through after it. Yay!

These people are in this movie: Brant Daughtery, Bruce Altman, Eloise Mumford, Eric Johnson, Hiro Kanagawa, Kristen Alter, Luke Grimes, Marcia Gay Harden, Max Martini, and Rita Ora.

Will the SeaDoo scene be the new boat scene from the previous film?

This film is shit, and everyone knows it is shit. The people who put it out know it is shit. The reason the plot is hard to tell is because there is no discernible plot in the whole movie. Bad plot reasons for man to be bugging them. Characters act stupid and don’t understand what is being told to them, and intentionally characters put off obviously important information until it is too late. We have a couple who still doesn’t make sense together, who just get really kinky around each other I guess. Whatever happens never really looks like love.

We have a main character male who is emotionally and physically abusive at times, yes still in this movie. We have a cartoon bad guy. We have a scene where someone gets slapped twice and kicked in the stomach causing a short term coma, some how.

The infamous boat scene was recreated almost with a house they go to in Colorado. Watching the car go up the driveway, we then see several angles around the house, switch switch switch. It is still full of romantic (maybe? hard to tell when it all sounds the same) pop music, to fill any sort of space they might have for character growth.

And just in case you forgot the other films, near the end, we get to see a long montage of the first two movies, of their romance scenes and travels. Yes, we still see that damn boat again in this film. They did it just to troll me.

And then at some point the movie ends, without resolving one of the major plot issues their relationship had with his ex mistress lady he couldn’t ever stop confiding in. Hooray!

Phantom Thread does not have any stories about magically cutting out an actor and replacing him a month before release. It is not relying on controversy with its casting decisions or pay decisions at all. Hell, it barely has any actors.

It only has one bit of PR buzz going for it. Daniel Day-Lewis, famed character actor has announced it will be his last film. He already mostly keeps to himself, coming out every few years to give an incredible performance before presumably hibernating for another two years. What would a man like this do with his retirement?

Get into metal music? Get into painting? Start murdering hobos on the streets of Chicago?

Who knows! I just know that DDL is capable of doing anything he puts his mind to, so we should all watch out for him in the future.

My money is on murdering hobos. Secretly of course.

Reynolds Woodcock (DDL) is a dress maker and pretty good at his job. He makes the best dresses, is super rich, and everyone in London loves him. Not his exes, because apparently he can be a dick. But everyone else.

His sister (Lesley Manville) runs the day to day operations of his business. But he still feels alone and often distant.

Well, one day he meets Alma (Vicky Krieps). A country waitress. He takes an interest in her, invites her to a date, and sure enough they hit it off. Once she moves in with him, she finds out that she is going to be treated like all the other ladies he brings home. She will be abused emotionally while he uses her as a muse, demanding of her more and more.

Well Alma is not the type of girl to just roll over and take it.

He basically invented the trope about making a women feel bad to fit her into a dress.
Wait is that a thing?

I will be honest from the forefront. Phantom Thread put me to sleep.

Paul Thomas Anderson I can readily admit is a fantastic director. He has his visions, he writes his films, and he puts it on camera. He can usually get wonderful acting performances out of it too, hopefully telling a story others will care about.

But it was really hard for me to care about Phantom Thread. His last movie, Inherent Vice, really turned me off, being hard to follow along with not capturing my interest. But hey, I was fine with The Master. I was fine with There Will Be Blood. But his last two pictures were hard for me to care at all.

The acting performances on the main two fronts were really strong of course. DDL always delivers, and it was good to see Krieps, who I have not seen before, match his level. That is the saving grace of this movie. Acting wise, sure, it should be considered great.

This might be one of those films that takes multiple views to really appreciate. But I just know I probably will not ever go out of my way to try to watch it again. I know the twists, I know the oddities, and now I reluctantly say the only thing I got out of it is a few notches on my “watch all the things nominated for Oscars!” list.

Here we are, the epitome of strange film franchises.

Cloverfield was brilliant with its advertising, although it did leave a lot of people pissed off at the final product. 10 Cloverfield Lane came out of nowhere, announced about a month before it was released, and then ended up being pretty stinking good, thanks to great acting performances.

And The Cloverfield Paradox, originally was supposed to come out in April, got pulled from the release schedule. It then got bought by Netflix. And as we all found out on Superbowl Sunday that yes, it had a release right after the game, with only rumors released earlier the same day that it might happen. And of course a 30 second advertisement letting the viewers note that its release date was very soon.

It was brilliant, but again, it was dropped from the calendar and sold to Netflix for a reason. I knew that going in, I knew that I shouldn´t expect much. And I also knew that the fourth film in this franchise is coming out sometime in October, so no matter how bad this one ended up, it wouldn´t kill the franchise.

No matter how many times these characters scream, no one will hear it in a theater.

Aboard the Cloverfield space station, we have a team of international scientists working together to try and save the Earth. From what? From a global energy crisis. They have a large particle accelerator up in that space station to hopefully figure out how to get some sort of permanent, renewable, energy source that can save the world.

And they do not have a lot of time. Countries are ready to go to war for the limited resources left, and they only have three shots left of fuel to get things right. We have scientists from all over ( ) working to just make this thing work.

But wait! It finally reaches the good levels before shutting itself off! Did they solve the crisis? Maybe. Something still went wrong, and when they look around they notice that the Earth is completely missing. Did they move to a different part of the galaxy? Did the Earth disappear due to their science? Their compass is broken too, so they find themselves lost in space, where strange events start to take place on their space ship. People appearing, items missing, and a lot more paranoia.

Starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Daniel Brühl, David Oyelowo, John Ortiz, Chris O’Dowd, Aksel Hennie, Ziyi Zhang, Elizabeth Debicki, and Roger Davies holding himself together on Earth.

You got to hand it to this scene, it really strong arms the point.

I want to say that The Cloverfield Paradox is a film with a good idea and bad execution, but in reality, maybe it was a bad idea as well.

It is very obvious that this film was never intended to be connected to Cloverfield. More so than the previous film. Basically, everything on the space station was a different movie, but we had a character they added on Earth to communicate occasionally with, which connected the film to the previous Cloverfield. That and the last 30 seconds or so. So for the most part, this is just a space ship thriller movie.

But it did not do a good job of really deciding what it wanted. Was it a thriller? A drama? A strange comedy (Which was mostly O´Dowd. And his jokes/puns got annoying quickly, unfortunately)?

It featured a scene very early on of a news report that felt like a flashing neon sign letting you know what the movie was about to do, a very weak plot device. It then had our characters running around, coming up with solutions to problems that are never really fully explained. The viewer can understand the main problem, but most of the problems that happen in the film are just plot devices and never feel natural.

This film spent most of its time trying to set up something and just failing to deliver over and over again.

It was pulled from theaters for a reason, and put on netflix with no warning for a reason. Everyone everywhere has now seen it (Which is why I did not rush the review out) and it is a clunky, lame mess. Not even the several high caliber actors could save it. Instead, this film is more likely to be remembered for its stunt, not for adding anything valuable to what is turning out to be a very stupid franchise idea.

Strong Island came out on Netflix sometime in 2017 and honestly, I never noticed it. I never would have noticed it unless it was nominated for an Oscar.

This one was a big surprise to me that it was nominated, as I expected a few other bigger titles in the documentary world to get praise. Netflix is no new girl to the Oscar world when it comes to documentaries, as I feel they have gotten 2 or so the last few years. Documentaries can really thrive in the Netflix world.

But still, I never would have even heard of it without this sudden announcement, which beings my surprise. About a murder, a small murder that only affects the family involved. No one famous, no big news articles, nothing. However, it obviously affected those in the family a shit ton. It basically destroyed their family at the injustice they found in the criminal justice system. In their neighbors, in their community, and in all of America.

Yes, time for you to get some sad feels.

Yance Ford‘s older brother was murdered outside of their home, due to an argument between their family and an auto shop. An accident occurred, it was not the Ford’s fault, and the other family offered to fix up the car for free as long as it was not reported to the authorities.

The auto shop took a long, long time though. It started to anger people, it started to piss them off. The auto shop was a white family, and the Ford family was black, new to the Long Island community in one of their newly built black areas, for fake diversity.

And the white man took a shot at Yance’s brother, as a threat to his life, killing him. The cops didn’t arrest him on the spot, they said it would have to go to trial, and the family had to wait for the trial to come. Just waiting. No way they would be ignored. Except first a grand jury had to indict, and the grand jury did not indict the culprit, not enough evidence, thinking it was self defense, blah blah blah. And you know they were white.

This is Ford’s journey, decades later, trying to get to the bottom of it. Trying to talk to the prosecutors, the legal team, find out what the hell happened, why they called it self defense, what lies were told to let her brother’s murderer go free.

And just how her family felt about the whole thing.

Strong Island is a powerful and a personal story. It is one that takes awhile to really kick off, but ends with tears. It is just one of the many stories out there about injustice against black families across the year that are ignored and swept under the rug because racism totally ended in the 1960’s.

It is the type of documentary one should be able to watch and realize that if it happened to this one, technically insignificant family, it had to have happened to a lot more just because they could get away with it.

These are the stories that need to come out for people to realize just how little has progressed over they ears, and I can both hope that more of these do come out, and also wish that they don’t because I can’t imagine that amount of injustice.

There is a lot going wrong in Syria, and shit, it definitely sucks. It sucks a lot and is still being ignored by regular media. Well, in America it isn’t ignored, but its focus is wrong. It is on ISIS and the the other large forces fighting in Syria, including Russia and America. It is on refugees, but rarely in a positive light. And it is almost always never on the regular Syrian citizens, brought into this war against their wills and fighting for their lives just to exist in the home they have known all their lives.

That must be why there are so many documentaries about it. Hell, we had City of Ghosts come out in 2017 as well, I reviewed it halfway through the year. It was the true story about the Syrians who became journalists to reveal the problems with ISIS to the world, the torture and brutality of their regime.

It was amazing.

And two years ago we had The White Helmets, which was nominated for and won Best Documentary Short. It was about the civilian group of volunteers, The White Helmets, who run to blast sites to check for injuries, look for survivors, and help those who were hurt. They are heroes!

And this movie, Last Men In Aleppo is about…um, The White Helmets again.

Yep, white helmets alright.

For real. This documentary ends up following along members of The White Helmets, as they hang out with their family, as they save other families, and as they put their lives on the line and die to help others.

It is a life of messes and chaos and sadness. And yet, unfortunately, I have already seen it all before.

Thanks to the docuemntary short, this group is already known. They won a goddamn award for it. And this documentary just told more of their story. It didn’t give me really new information, just new people doing the same things.

And maybe that is a bad way to grade this. Doesn’t matter though. I want to see documentaries to learn things, and this one didn’t really let me learn anything.

Urine has always been an attention grabbing headline. Whether it relates to the president peeing in some sexual act in Russia, or R. Kelly peeing on a fan who isn’t at the age of consent to be peed on.

People love hearing pee stories, because people generally love peeing, it makes sense.

But people were quite upset at Lance Armstrong when his pee story hit the news. Everything was a lie, nothing was sacred, and all of those drug tests he passed could not detect his doping problems. Fuck.

What now? Are all professional dopers just waiting to get caught? (Yes). And should we care? (Eh, maybe not?). Bryan Fogel, who you definitely do not know, is an amateur bicyclist who went and did a big hard race in France that lasted only a short amount of days. His goal was to top 100 and he ended up in the top 20, but he was playing against basic machines. People who should have been pro.

So he wanted to find out if he could beat the drug tests, if he should take steroids since “Everyone does it” and if it was known out there how to do it. He didn’t call it Icarus for that reason, but for the other reasons that will maybe be made apparent.

It took him some time to find someone to help him, but eventually he found Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, a Russian scientist. He was very interested in doing tests with Fogel, telling him exactly what to do, when to pee, and how they might try and beat the system. And then, a lot more started to happen.

Look at all this urine! Hooray science!

You see, Dr. Rodchenkov was in charge of the Russian center for testing for drugs for their athletes. He had a long storied career, working around the world, and he was in charge in Russia for a bit now. And it was coming out, rumors, that the entire Russian Olympic program was doping, sponsored by the Russian government. Oh shit!

This is news that would affect the 2016 Olympics! And other programs. But it didn’t happen, and Rodchenkov was feeling breathes down his back in Russia. So he got out of town, joined Fogel in America, to go into basic hiding. He then told his story to the New York Times and the FBI. And the rest is history.

Just kidding, the rest is still getting started, what with the Russian ban in the 2018 Winter Olympics and all.

Fuck! I love the Olympics, and it is crazy that something like this can actually come to the forefront after all these years. I am talking decades, especially when there was talk of them doing it when they were the USSR. All of my pop culture knowledge has brought me to this moment and it just makes since. We had to know it from Rocky IV, right?

This is one of those documentaries that just feels so lucky. Fogel started it with one purpose, and it grew into something so much larger. It is just so goddamn lucky. It starts off strong with good ideas, and builds into something so complex and politically wonderful. In fact, we need an Icarus 2 in some years just to see what came of everything. Solid documentary, overall.

The year of 2017 wasn’t great for me and watching documentaries. I didn’t do it as often as I used to (as I used to force one a week for review). I decided I needed them to come more naturally, to see what I wanted, what looked interesting, and sure, some that didn’t look interesting.

But still, I didn’t see too many. So I had been keeping track of the movies on the Shortlist for Oscars Best Documentary. I saw titles that seemed interesting and plots that I couldn’t wait to see. I was trying to guess what might be the top five picked.

And then Faces Places was picked. It was one of the ones on the shortlist that I just did not expect overall. The documentary just felt like something that could be a one season show on The Travel Channel, and not something that might change the world, like some of the titles on the list.

Yep, I see many faces and…wait, what’s that in the background?
Oh yeah, that’s a place.

Agnès Varda is a really old woman, but a famed director in her country of origin. She has directed many films and has had a wonderful, personal career. JR is a photographer, much younger, and a bit eccentric. The two met and decided to work together on this documentary project.

Basically, they were going to travel the French countryside, small villages and towns, meet people, hear their stories, and enhance their community through their faces. They drove around in a vehicle with a large camera on the side. You could go in, get your picture, and a large picture would print out that you could put somewhere.

They decorated the sides of homes, monuments, to honor individuals and make unique artwork for the folks who lived there.

And it was cute, it had some interesting moments, and overall, it just felt…pointless. I am not saying there is no point to bring niceness to the world. It is just that there are so many documentaries that bringing up untold stories, important political and social events, that this one just feels off in its own little happy world.

I wish the world didn’t have so much fucked up shit in it. And really, the rating comes from these two individuals who just wanted to make people happy and increase their own happiness. The relevance and importance of the documentary is just less than others.

Faces Places will probably be on Netflix, eventually. And it isn’t even one you can sort of put on and half ignore to just see moments of happy, given the subtitles.

I can’t imagine this one winning anything. I hope I still get around to watching Kedi.

When America shit itself economically, back in 2008, I didn’t know a whole lot about money. I knew I didn’t have a lot of it, and I wanted more. Ten years ago me and current me are very similar in that regard.

I knew that the banks were bailed out, that people were angry about this, that people occupied Wall Street, and eventually I got to see The Big Short. The Big Short was, at the time, my favorite film of that year, but since then it has been surpassed by Steve Jobs.

But I still only knew a little bit, just what some movies told me. I did learn enough from the movie to give me the buzz words and sort of explain what everyone was doing to cause it.

That leads us to Abacus: Small Enough To Jail.

Shit, all those boxes, he must be hiding something. A ton of tiny somethings.

Abacus was a small bank located in Chinatown in NYC. It had a staff of Chinese Americans, it served the local Chinese community and little else. They didn’t bar other people, but other people just generally didn’t come to them for banking needs.

The founder made it to be able to help members of his community, by providing them loans to start their businesses. These businesses would strengthen their community, increase everyone’s revenue, and bring the bank revenue as well. A win win win. However, at one point they found out that one of their employees had been lying on loan forms for mortgages in order to get loans out to people.

So the bank fired him, wiped their hands clean of the situation. It wasn’t until later, during the financial crisis, when anyone cared. That employee became an informant, and Abacus was brought to court. In fact, they were seemingly trying to blame the entire financial crisis on what a few of their employees were doing!

Needless to say, this documentary is about their trials, the trial itself, and how the government tried to make an example of these Chinese Americans, and perhaps why they were made the target.

Overall, it is a wonderful story, and one that folds out very nicely on the camera. It has some legal drama, some race drama, a lot to make a good, and possibly tragic story. I didn’t know how it would end, but it captivated me the whole way.

It did feel a bit “made for TV special” at times, so an increased in production value would have made it bigger. I have to assume when it was made it was not sure how big this story would blow up or what it would mean for America.

Definitely a story worthy of being told as a documentary and one that is worth a watch.

Oklahoma! is an old famous musical about the state above Texas. People love Oklahoma.

Oklahoma City is the capital of Oklahoma, and it has more mixed reviews when compared to the old musical about the state.

The Oklahoma City Bombing is a tragic event that took place in the 1990’s. It has very strong reviews that are not favorable at all towards the events that took place. Some people like it, but those people are assholes.

And this documentary, Oklahoma City, is not just about the bombings that people really disliked, but events that led up to the bombings, where the people involved got their ideas and the big events that made these people take action.

And apparently there are a decent amount of people you may not know anything about!

The reason I wanted to see Oklahoma City was because I was very young at the time of the bombing attack. I heard about it occasionally, the name Timothy McVeigh was one on my subconscious. I definitely remember it being a big deal when he was executed, although I still didn’t fully understand why. And then 9/11 happened later that year. It sort of took over the world in terms of disasters by terrorists, and the OKC bombings were just not important news anymore.

So due to all of this, my knowledge was lacking, so why not a documentary to not only catch me up, but tell the entire story and make me very well informed. After all, the event is done, it has been fully investigated, there isn’t anything new anymore to learn.

We can find it all in one condensed documentary place!

And it definitely had a lot of information, but information that just seemed all over the place, in my mind. We started way back, getting a lot of information about people I had never heard about before. It just took so long to finally feel connected to the bombings themselves and to McVeigh.

If the documentary had done a better job relating these previous events, like Waco, to OKC, then it might have felt more coherent. Unfortunately, it told a very linear story (which I admit, totally makes sense). It just started so far away that I was quick to learn interest.

Shit, I want to know about McVeigh’s life in particular, and his youth, and then introduce these other characters. And these other events.

But instead, this just felt like a history lesson. A lesson where you even knew the end goal, but totally still felt lost along the way.

I think I just need to really read a Wikipedia page to get the information I wanted. That will make me feel content.