Back to the Future Part II

At least it's more exciting that the first. The acting is still awful and the makeup is just as terrible. I was ready for all that, but the new problem is that the plot is incomprehensible. The story is littered with plot holes and they totally have no idea how to make their time travel work. People can do things that they have no reason to know to do and things happen because, well, the plot needs them to happen. They do do a great job masking the fact that this movie came out four years later and they replace the actor for the dad and the actress for the girlfriend; I just watched the first yesterday and had I not read the IMDB page, I'd have had no idea that it wasn't the exact same scene from the end of Part 1 and this film wasn't filed back-to-back with Part 1. From there, everything else is just terrible. We finally get to go the the future, but we don't spend enough time there. I was intrigued when we were in 2015 (even though the CGI was really really bad), but as soon as we return, I just don't care anymore. Marty is still wholly unlikable and unconvincing in what they want him to be. There is some fun to be had at noticing the smaller references to the first film, but that's it. This film is boring and just not funny. Acting sucks, plot is a mess, the effects are awful, and there is zero reason for this film to exist except for the last two minutes of the first film. Even with all this, the absolute worst part of this movie is that it ends with a trailer for the third movie, plus it spoils way too much of the story. What kind of arrogance is it to end you film with "Oh, BTW next summer is the next film (which we clearly already have prepared), so instead of giving you a year of wondering 'What can they possibly do next?', we are going to show you everything you'd want to know even though it kills all anticipation for it!" It's not like they provided theaters with a trailer to play after the film; they literally have the trailer as part of the movie. I hate it.

Back to the Future

This has to be one of those movies you had to have watched as a child and now have nostalgia for to appreciate. Right out of the gate, the acting and makeup are terrible. Crispin Glover is awful, Lea Thompson is so subdued the entire time (and her "fat makeup" is easily the worst makeup job that I've seen in a feature film), and in no way do I believe Michael J. Fox as a cool guy. Christopher Lloyd does a good job, but his character is underwritten and so is his relationship with Marty. Why is a high school student (who doesn't appear to have any interest in science) hanging around with the town crazy? The writers are free to create whatever rules they want to time travel, but they don't seem to concerned with remembering how their own rules work. The story is fine, but nonsensical and the ending works to set up the sequel, but is very unsatisfying. There are tons of times that I sense MJF is trying to be funny, but the material is so bad and he's so unlikable that it ll just barely registers as an attempt at humor. Having Lloyd in the story more would have helped a lot, but Back to the Future just doesn't work. It's corny, terribly acted, and poorly written. Again, maybe if I had seen this when I was eight or nine, this would be a nostalgia thing, but it just isn't good on its own in 2020.

Birdemic: Shock and Terror

I refuse to believe that this movie was created with the honest intention to be a good movie. I don't care how genuine and naive the director comes across in interviews; this movie has to have been made with the express mission of being an awful movie. Much like garbage like The Incredible Bulk, Birdemic is exclusively comprised of terrible acting, very bad CGI, an incoherent story, and the worst sound design I've ever had the misfortune of experiencing. There is no possible way that James Nguyen thought his leads were good actors; it is not humanly possible to watch more than thirty seconds of their performance and still be able to make the claim that they are good (or even passable) actors. Almost every scene is full off clipped sound because instead of reshooting the scene, Nguyen just cuts the audio. The cinematography is disgustingly bad, with off center shots and a painful amount of shot,reverse-shot conversations. The CGI birds are just pasted on top of the movie and have no physical presence in the movie; objects just move right through them and the don't move close to or farther form the camera; they just hover there and occasionally flap their wings. The story is chock full of plot holes, plot conveniences, and nonsensical decisions. Why are they driving with the window down? Oh, because the camera is outside the van and the actors aren't miked; got it. If this store has been looted, why on Earth didn't anyone take the package of 24 bottles of water or the premade refrigerated sandwiches? Why are they just shooting wildly into the forest while the drive down the highway? Why is he motioning to the girl with the gun in his hand if she's already afraid? Birdemic takes 47 minutes to even get to the Birdemic. The first half is an uncomfortable romance between a man who's dream girl is smart, funny, beautiful and loyal and a woman who's ideal mate (these are the actual traits she lists) is loyal, ambitious and wealthy. A man who just started a new company and literally just received ten million dollars in funding and has decided that now is the time to take a few months off and a woman who says she is a model, but gets her professional photos done at a strip mall 24 hour photo place. It takes over 45 minutes (much of which is devoted to watching an entire performance by a soul singer in an Irish pub and watching the main guy drive around aimlessly) to actually get to the birds. If you even make it to the end, be prepared for one of the worst conclusions ever. If this movie was an honest movie that just turned out bad (like Troll 2 or Wish Upon) it would be one thing, but every single second of this "film" screams out loud that it was made with the intention of being a "so bad, it's good" movie. If you work hard and pour your soul into a movie and it turns out you just make really bad movies (Neil Breen) we have something to work with. If you decide to make a movie that is intentionally bad with actor doing their worst performances and clip art CGI that you are using because you know that it looks terrible, it feels dishonest. It's like Nguyen thinks he's playing a hilarious prank on us. I love good-bad movies, but I hate movies that try to be good-bad; it's not something you try to do, it just happens. Birdemic is garbage made to be garbage and it shows.

Troop Zero

Yeah, it's incredibly corny at times, there are some unnecessary scenes, and some of the acting isn't perfect, but Troop Zero is honest and it has a lot heart. Mckenna Grace is great for 13 and although her accent is hit or miss, you can tell that she's going to be a big presence in a few years. Overall, the child actors are are fine, not all are great, but all are serviceable. Viola Davis is perfect, but her character needed more development for how important it she is to the story. The cinematography is fine and the soundtrack works, but the only memorable bits were David Bowie songs. Really, I think this film would have worked better as a TV show or a mini-series, as we have to rocket through the plot and skip a lot of character development in order to get through the story. Give the story more time and let us get a real grip on these characters and Troop Zero could be a real classic. For what it is, though, Troop Zero is a fun family movie (although the language seems like an odd choice for what is certainly being marketed as a family film) that has a lot of emotion and heart, but doesn't come off a saccharine and cheesy.

Pokémon Detective Pikachu

From the opening scene of poorly animated Pidegy's flying in looking like PS2 game footage pasted over video of a town, you know exactly what you are getting. The CGI is awful and the character designs range from very plasticy too scary, monstrous versions of your beloved Pokemon. It look absolutely terrible. I don't know if other people were watching a different movie or what, but this movie does not have good CGI; it all looks terrible. Justice Smith is incredibly bland, but Kathryn Newton is so much worse. It's like she's plucked right out of a terrible 2010's Nickelodeon show. I'll take a boring actor over a bad one any day. The story is full of logistical holes and rarely makes sense. I guess hearing Ryan Reynolds voice Pikachu was fun for awhile, but he just can't carry the entire movie. Beyond the "Oh, I know that Pokemon!" experience, there is nothing here to enjoy. It looks bad, the acting is bad, and the story is bad. Just watch Pokémon: The First Movie instead.

Flushed Away

The entire time, I just felt the tension between Aardman and DreamWorks. I love Wallace and Gromit and could see the same kind of clever jokes and references I've come to expect, but then there is the incredibly lazy CGI that we see in every scene above ground. The opening sequence looks dreadful. The entire movie looks like garbage until we get "Flushed Away" and then for some reason they animate things better in the sewers. The story is fine, but played out and unoriginal. The voice acting is fine, but there aren't any stand-out performances. I did like how music was incorporated, but at times it felt too much like they just wanted a popular song to sell the soundtrack. I just want more of the Wallace and Gromit style of smart little jokes hidden in the environment or clever wordplay, but everything is kind of glossed with the DreamWorks style of prat falls and lazy gags. Give me more Shaun the Sheep and less Boss Baby.

The Lighthouse

The Lighthouse is flawless with its technical aspects and Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson are perfect. For the first fifteen or so minutes, the aspect ratio bothered me, but after the cabin fever comes in, it makes it feel really claustrophobic and it made sense. To be fair, I'm not 100% on exactly what happens in the film, as in what's real and what's not. Are the characters gas-lighting each other or are they gas-lighting me? Surely a lot of the film is purely allegorical, but it's left open to interpretation. I prefer movies to have a coherent surface level plot that you can choose to pick apart and analyze if you want to and my only problem with The Lighthouse is that the story doesn't work perfectly on the surface. There are far too many elements that work symbolically, but just don't mesh with the literal story of the film. That being said, I loved the acting and the cinematography was beautiful. I'm really not a fan of black & white as a stylistic choice and I feel like the Lighthouse would have worked just fine (if not better in color), but it doesn't work against the movie at all. Really, all of my issues are personal preferences; there is nothing objectively wrong with this movie. I could see some viewers being bit bored with the film because it is kind of slow and feels long for a movie that is under two hours. I watched it with my mother and sister and I think the lack of explanation kept them from getting fully invested.

Happiness

I don't know if I liked this movie at all; it's incredibly disturbing and I was uncomfortable the entire time. Every new scene is "Oh no, they wouldn't do that, right? This is a real movie that was distributed to theaters, there can't possibly be that kind of thing in a real movie that people saw at Mall Cinema 12!?!" Happiness is wonderfully written, shot, and acted, so that's good, but the story gets really disjointed with the constant flipping between characters (a few of which really don't have a reason to exist). It does an okay job juggling the multiple story lines, but some get more love than others and characters like Philip Seymour Hoffman's character are so tangentially related to the other characters that his story feels extraneous. That was the biggest issue for me, but for the average person, the controversial topics the movie includes will be the big turn off. Sundance wouldn't even exhibit the film because of it's themes. I imagine most people would immediately reject the movie is they read a synopsis. What I appreciate is that in 2020, most film makers would have had Happiness been a movie that runs solely on cringe, but Todd Solondz made a dark, dark comedy that still hits the emotional notes. There is definitely a cringe element (the lengthy conversations between father and young son about masturbation), but that's not what the film is about. Will I ever watch this movie again? Probably not, but I'm glad that I did and it's worth watching.

The Holy Mountain

I think just isn't a movie for me. It's like going to an art museum and walking through the modern art wing. I'll look at one painting and think "Okay, I feel like I get what the artist was going for" and then I'll move to the next painting and think "Well, It looks interesting, but I'm not picking up what they're putting down with this one" and the next painting I'll think "That's just pure shit. What the Hell is that supposed to be?". This was my experience with The Holy Mountain. It was a series of scenes of varying quality with no real through line. I love Alejandro Jodorowsky for his spirit and passion and there wasn't a single scene that I didn't feel those things shining through. I can tell each shot is meticulously arranged and has something to say. As a viewer, however, it never came across as a real movie. The Holy Mountain is nonsensical on the whole, but there are scenes where I can decipher the message he's trying to get across and far, far more scenes where I just get nothing. It's clear that there are levels upon levels of symbolism that require much more work to figure out than I am willing to put in. I'm seeing the tarot card on the back of the guy with no legs. but I don't know what that card means and I don't care enough to Google it out just to better understand this one scene. Jodorowsky put so much effort into what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it, but I don't think he was half as concerned with if his audience is going to be able to understand it. "It's not a movie hat's actually about the story;everything is symbolic and allegorical. It's about the message and the art!" Yeah, okay, sure, but you can do that in a actual story with understandable plot lines and real characters. Of the 115 minutes, I was enjoying myself for about 15 minutes total and spent the other 100 minutes utterly confused and lost. It is definitely a film with great cinematography and there are so many beautiful backgrounds and sets, but two days later all I can really remember are pictures and a few vague memories of jokes. I would have gotten just as much out of one of those big coffee table books The Art of <whatever film>. The Holy Mountain is great on every technical level and Jodorowsky's passion is smeared all over this film, but it's just not a good overall story and it's not much of a film. It is an entirely unique movie and there are tons of things to pull from it, but it's a case of being less than the sum of its parts. There is an audience for The Holy Mountain, but I can confidently say that most people are not in that audience.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

Why didn't they just make an anthology movie? You could use the frame of "kids find creepy book of horror stories", but then get through six or seven of the stories from the book instead of just doing a PG-13 version of that disappointing Goosebumps movie. Scary Stories is only produced by del Toro, so we get little flashes of his style, but that's about it. The creature design is a mixture of costumes, light saturation, and some CGI. As production stills, they look fine, but they don't look nearly as great in action. The entire appeal of the movie is seeing bits from the books come to life, so I won't spoil any of the creatures in the film, but I will say that most of them don't look life-like. There is a huge difference between the practical effects of The Thing, which look inhuman, and the ones in Scary Stories, that just look like costumes. They are well made and though out costumes, but none of them feel real or like anything other than an actor in costume. The story is clearly inspired by the 2015 Goosebumps movie, as it's story is very similar. Again, this would have worked so much better as a series of short stories (you know, like the book is) rather than a generic PG-13 horror movie in the two-thousand-somethings that runs of jump scares and a vaguely attractive cast that clearly weren't hired for their acting abilities. None of the actors are terrible, but none of them are are good. The lead actress is particularly lackluster, but it wouldn't have been as glaring had they not had her character cry so much, because that is here worst performance. I also really didn't like the shoe-horned politics in the film. There is no real reason for the story to take place furring the '68 election other than for the writers to take cheap shots at the Republican Party. I understand setting it in a pre-digital era can eliminate a lot of the "Why don't they just use their cell phones?" kind of issues, but a generic time zone would have worked fine, there is no story line reason for the politics other than that Hollywood seems to think they need some political bullshit or ham-fisted social commentary in all of their films. The only real enjoyment I got were the "Hey, I remember that!" and "Oh! That's the lady from the story in Book 1!". The Chuck character does have a few funny lines, but his character is so inconsistent that I never knew what to expect from him. Really, every character is about half developed and then they just act however the movies needs them to act for the "story" to progress. I hate for any movie to fail, but a part of me wishes this one did so that Netflix or HBO or whoever to reboot Scary Stories as a miniseries or so a major studio could do the books justice. Scary Stories is better than absolute garbage horror like Friend Request, Judas Ghost, and Hangover 2, but it's not good. There are no noteworthy things this film does right. Had del Toro directed and produced the film, his flair and talent could have fixed is, but what we got feels like a cheap cash-grab.