I watch a lot of movies, mostly kids’ movies and Hollywood action blockbusters, but in principle I’m willing to watch anything that isn’t horror. I’m keeping a list of the movies I’ve seen. Read these posts for my reactions and plot summaries, many of which are in the form of a beat sheet as described in Blake Snyder’s book Save the Cat.
Watching Ant-man was fun, but it would probably have been more fun in a theater where there would have been lots of people there to laugh at the absurdities scattered throughout.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/ant-man/id1012788984
See below for a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.
This M18/R-rated movie carries a warning about “violence and coarse language”. You might think that’s standard boilerplate for any action movie, and maybe it is, but in this case, they’re really not kidding.
In case you missed the first Deadpool movie, Deadpool is a basically immortal, literally scarred super-anti-hero in a skin-tight red-and-black suit that, like Spider-Man’s, covers his whole head and eyes, and unlike Spider-Man’s, has two long swords attached to the back. Deadpool’s human name is Wade Wilson. The name “Deadpool” refers some kind of bet about who was going to die soonest, which turned out to be not Wade, obviously.
Deadpool spews a steady stream of pop-culture references, curses, and insults, often talking directly to the audience about how he’s in, like, the mother of all superhero movies. The Deadpool movies are thus not just violent, coarse fantasy/action movies, they’re parodies: each one is a sustained self-reference joke, complete with ironic use of 80s light-rock hits. (The 80s are so trendy these days!)
The second Deadpool movie, as Deadpool himself tells us, is not for kids, but is nevertheless “a family movie”. As becomes clear towards the end of the movie, he’s not talking about the genre of the movie, he’s talking about the theme of the movie. The movies in the Fast and Furious series were also “family movies” in this sense: the characters consider each other family because they derive their identity from their strong bonds with each other.
What group of people/mutants could Mr. Pool possibly belong to? Is he talking about starting a literal family with his girlfriend (who will never not look like Inara from Firefly to me)? Is he joining the largely but not entirely absent team of X-Men? Is he forming his own superpowered vigilante crew? How about all of the above? Yeah, kinda!
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/deadpool-2/id1382445641
Here’s an article about the entirely irrelevant official plot summary. See below for my plot summary (with SPOILERS) in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.
Work hard, believe in yourself, and your artistic dreams will take flight… Great idea, poor execution. For a movie about poise, it’s not very well balanced.
Arguments can be made that every “follow your dreams” movie is unrealistic. I enjoy the well made ones, but Ballerina stretches the imagination too far. The ballet lessons Felicie weasels her way into, even combined with extra training, don’t span enough time for a real transformation from total beginner to top of the class. Passion is not a substitute for experience.
Worse, perhaps, the story was not emotionally well modulated; for example, the song at the very beginning is triumphant rather than wistful. A character who starts off confident has nothing much to learn.
Do you like subplots? For antagonists, we’ve got two different people who run the orphanage, the ballet rival, and the rival’s mother. There are two helpers: the mentor and the ballet teacher, plus the inspiring deceased mother in the backstory. Then there are two romantic interests: the childhood friend, and the Parisian. Got that?
Don’t watch this movie if you’re afraid of heights. I’m not bothered by flying contraptions or people walking on roofs: I think that stuff is great—even if it’s just as unrealistic as learning ballet in a week. Go figure.
Having watched The Grand Budapest Hotel at the behest of at least one fan of Wes Anderson, I decided I was not also a fan of Wes Anderson. Maybe a different movie (a stop-motion canine dystopia set in Japan) would change my opinion?
Nope. Still not a fan of Wes Anderson.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/isle-of-dogs/id1363298490
Vulture: “What it’s like to watch Isle of Dogs as a Japanese speaker”
The writer shares some thoughts about language, setting, and the possibilities and pitfalls of cultural appropriation, adding thoughts from several Japanese speakers.
The New Yorker: “What Isle of Dogs gets right about Japan”
The writer considers the film’s use of Japanese language and culture to be thoughtful and nuanced, and says, yes, actually there are Japanese in-jokes as well as a lot of culturally accurate details. Personally, I agree that the American in the story is not a “white savior” because although she rebels, she’s ultimately ineffective.
The New Yorker: “Isle of Dogs is a stylish revolt against (American) political madness”
“Thrust into situations of utter degradation, places of utter ruin, and fates of utter despair, these [canine] victims unite in resisting the forces that would destroy them and, in the process, tap into a latent sensibility and forge a sublime style of their own….. The movie looks closely at deportation, internment in a prison camp, and the threat of extermination—all from the perspective of the victims.” Welp, now I feel silly taking the story at face value. Of course it’s all a political metaphor.
Vulture: “Isle of Dogs: Did you fall asleep?”
The writer explains some reasons why Wes Anderson, or at any rate, this film of his, is not for everyone: Anderson is deadpan, the visuals are precise, and there’s a lot of dialog in Japanese.
The Atlantic: “The beauty and sadness of Isle of Dogs“
The writer says this fable about evil, told with “magnificently deadpan humor”, is “filthy and fetid, yet somehow utterly gorgeous”. Personally, I don’t see how something can be disgusting and beautiful at the same time. And that’s my biggest problem with the film: I kept wanting to look away.
I’m thinking I should go see more movies during the opening week or weekend because when I watched Infinity War, I enjoyed people’s reactions to the movie as much as I enjoyed the movie itself. People gasped and laughed and went “WHHHHOOOAAA” in large numbers. One girl in the audience actually screamed when one of the characters got stabbed. At one point I heard the audience collectively go “SHHH***TTT”.
I’m reminded a bit of the time I went to see a WWF match: the audience was really into it, for some of the same reasons: people like to see a champion fight an enemy, and they love it when the champion delivers a particularly cool attack. I was also reminded of what it was like seeing the first Harry Potter movie in a really big, really full theater when it first came out: people loved the characters and felt invested in their world, and couldn’t wait for the chance to enter that world with them. Marvel has built a visually and, yes, emotionally rich alternate reality.
Before I saw the movie, I heard that this Marvel movie was “different”. I assumed that maybe meant it had an even bigger cast of characters than before, or that it was better than Age of Ultron, which people thought was kind of lame. That wasn’t what they meant. They were talking obliquely about the ending, which I will not talk about until you scroll down quite a bit further.
For some reason I thought “Infinity War” referred to the galactic scope of a war, or maybe to a war that gets stuck in some kind of time loop as in Doctor Strange. Nope. The war is named after the stones that the bad guy, Thanos, is looking for. When the movie begins, Thanos has one of the infinity stones already, the power stone (purple). He has attached it to a golden gauntlet on his left fist, which would look ridiculous if he weren’t an immense and very ruthless villain.
Thanos is looking for the remaining five stones. He is missing the space stone (blue), the reality stone (red), the soul stone (orange), the time stone (green), and the mind stone (yellow). If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve seen these stones in other Marvel movies. For the sake of the universe, we hope they stay hidden.
See below for a summary with SPOILERS. I’ve done a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, but the sequence may be a bit weird. The movie cut back and forth between the different sets of characters more than my summary does, so things are a little out of order.
Continue reading Avengers 3: Infinity War (2018)
After Rachel of the Hungry Hundred Book Club chose The Remains of the Day for April 2018, I decided I was going to skip out on reading it. I read it half a lifetime ago, and remembered enough not to want to read it again. (It’s poignant, not my preferred mood for fiction.)
Among the DVDs I bought second-hand from a neighbor over a year ago was a copy of the 1993 Anthony Hopkins / Emma Thompson film version, so I figured I could just watch the movie instead of reading the book. (Normally that’s cheating, but like I said, I already did read the book. Also, it was a particularly well-made movie.)
I remembered that the book was about a butler who passed up his opportunity for love because he was too busy doing his job, and that there was something wrong with his master’s politics, such that the butler’s devotion was somehow even more thoroughly wrong-headed than it would have been otherwise.
The wistfulness of looking back on a wasted lifetime is nicely captured in a poem by Edgar Lee Masters called “George Gray”. Even more succinctly: A ship in the harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-remains-of-the-day/id540710212
Although I did not re-read the book, and in some ways found the movie painful to watch, I very much enjoyed the book group meetup. See below for some of the themes and scenes we discussed.
The things people are saying about this sequel sound like the kinds of things they could safely say without ever bothering to watch the movie: it’s just a loud, boring mess because it doesn’t have the benefit of Guillermo del Toro’s creativity like the first one, which wasn’t even all that popular. Fine. Even the kindest reviews say the sequel is only an echo of the 2013 original.
What I think is NOT fair to say (and a review at Roger Ebert agrees with me) is that Uprising is as bad as Michael Bay’s Transformers movies. I only watched the first one. That, now that was loud and boring. And crass! I am not a Transformers fan, but I am still mad at Michael Bay for somehow being able to mess up a movie about sentient cars, because that is such a cool concept. (I’ll stick with Herbie, thanks.)
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/pacific-rim-uprising/id1358451634
See below for a shorter-than-usual plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.
Welp, I’ve checked another Robin Hood adaptation off the list.
I can only recommend it if you are trying to watch every movie the esteemed Alan Rickman has ever been in, or if you, like me, are interested in tales of the popular folkloric hero Robin Hood regardless of how well they’re told. (In this case, not very.)
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/robin-hood-prince-of-thieves/id560715672
Parts of this version reminded me of the much happier and tamer 2006 Robin Hood television series.
The Wikipedia list of film and television adaptations includes quite a few more versions, including a new movie scheduled for this year.
Jumanji is based on a creepy-looking picture book by Chris Van Allsburg that’s also called Jumanji.
It’s an expensive, high-tech movie, but the plot (perhaps unsurprisingly) ends where it starts (in the past), and all the accumulated damage is reversed.
I have trouble believing the giant crocodile was ever convincing, and the effects team admits to basing the monkeys on no monkey in particular, but the plants were pretty cool, and the stampede was amazing.
The running gag with the car was hilarious, and it was fun to see Robin Williams act the part of the man-child from the jungle. He’s awfully good at being silly and yet serious, as he is in Hook (which I liked better).
The rebooted Tomb Raider, like its bizarre 2001 predecessor, is an archaeological action-adventure movie based on a video game starring a feisty, attractive young woman named Lara Croft.
There is much that you’d expect: a mysterious ancient text, an exotic locale, booby traps, and of course a plunge off a cliff into a river that flows towards the inevitable waterfall. However, although the waterfall itself is no surprise, the scene where Lara barely escapes going over the edge of it has to be seen to be believed. It isn’t quite like any other.
It’s not just the details that are different; the backstory is new, too. In the 2001 movie, Lara is rich and lives in the family mansion like some kind of female Bruce Wayne. In the 2018 movie, she’s a penniless hipster who refuses to take possession of her inheritance because it would mean giving up hope that her missing father will return.
I enjoyed it. The consensus seems to be that although the leading actress (Alicia Vikander) did a great job, Tomb Raider was disappointing. Sadly, this origin story was obviously intended to make way for a sequel—one that may never materialize.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/tomb-raider-2018/id1348879664
