Predator

You know exactly what kind of movie you are getting when the movie poster is just Schwarzenegger holding a gun with his arms bare. You don't cast Schwarzenegger is acting is a priority; you hire him to flex his biceps and say corny one-liners. He delivers a standard Schwarzenegger performance; it sucks but he looks like a bad ass. Predator is full of explosions and gore. It's comedicaly unrealistic, but Predator is the dumb fun you want. The issue is that that is all there is. Predator has a plot as simple as go here, do this, go here to get home. There is nothing more. That would be fine if it did all of that well, but I think they spent all their effects budget on pyrotechnics, because the definitely skimped on the CGI. The Predator sees in heat vision (My brain isn't pulling out the right words here, he only sees body heat or whatever heat there is), he has a cloaking device his uses often, and her has glowing green blood. For 1987, I guess the cloaked effect is okay. There are a few times where you can tell that they didn't use a guy in a green suit and went full on CGI and it looks bad. The heat sensor vision doesn't seem to accurately represent what the actual body heat would be. The clearly didn't use a heat cam and just painted on an estimation of what some guy though it should be. The worst is his glowing blood. Had they just left it nuclear green, it wouldn't be so bad, but they fuzz up the edges to make it look like it's glowing. It looks like something out of Ghostwriter. There are also a few scenes (most notably where a character takes a tumble off a cliff into the water) where the video quality suffers a huge downgrade. Everything looks fine (for an 80's film) except for a handful of scenes where they either used a different camera or were zoomed in from far enough away that everything is blurry and pixelated. Predator is a loud, dumb, exciting 107 minutes of generic Schwarzenegger and blood and explosions.

The Matrix

Oh boy. I first watched The Matrix in 2000 or 2001 and it was way not as cool as I remember. The Matrix has a great idea at its heart and I can tell that love and effort went into the film but there are some key details that just don't work. Right away, The Matrix is dated. Apparently, when future people get to wear whatever they want, they all choose black leather and black sunglasses and Laurence Fishburne dresses for the job he wants, selling pistachios in a commercial during The Talk. The CGI definitely looks like it's from 1999. The effects are pretty bad. Even the practical stuff has problems. There is a throwing knife and had a matte grey blade and is obviously a cheap fake. They don't show the whole scenario, so how hard would it have been to have the guy have a metal, or at the very least lustrous, blade sticking out of his stomach? The fight scenes are too long and repetitive and really don't look nearly as cool now as they did twenty years ago. I can forgive a certain amount of bad CGI just because old, but The Matrix has far too much CGI to overlook entirely. What gets no pass is the terrible acting. Laurence Fishburne was good and Marcus Chong gave a strong performance. Keanu Reeves is a total blank slate. I don't buy "but he's the avatar for the viewer" crap, because even when he's supposed to be displaying emotion, he's blank. He has no emotions. He's monotone, robotic, and lethargic. Carrie-Anne Moss is almost as bad. I at least believe that she was trying, she just can't do it. She suffers a pretty big loss and reacts with a half-hearted "no" or whatever and then moves on. She's instantly over it. I've seen her in other things and she was okay, so maybe they told her that her character is a block of wood? You can probably chalk some of my disappointment to me being ten or eleven when I first saw it, but The Matrix is like brick GameBoy with the green screen. You can recognize how cool it was when it came out, but eight bit isn't cool anymore. Black and green squares look bad. The characters needed better actors and a movie where CG is so essential needs good CG and this stuff just doesn't hold up.

Jaws

Jaws is listed as either a horror or a thriller, but I got a lot more comedic value out of it. I can't even remember the last film that had me laughing at the intended points. Yeah, Jaws knows how to build anticipation, but it's humor worked so much better. The rest of the film was fine, but every time we built the suspense and anticipation, it climaxes with the shark and the shark was terrible. When we just see it swimming along, it looks okay, it doesn't quite move right, but it's fine. The problem is when the shark does anything else. In the first half, they show a shark strung up on the pier and it is very obvious that its eyes are painted on and the way its skin wrinkles is unnatural. It looks terrible. Of course, if it was remade today they'd insist on making the shark CGI and it would look worse. Aside from the shark, I had some issues with the pacing. The acting was less than stellar in some places, but it was never a huge issue, but the pacing left a few slow spots that killed the tension. The story is timeless, but the effects and acting leave a lot to be desired.

The Sixth Sense

If you have somehow managed to do the impossible and not have the ending ruined for you, I encourage you to see The Sixth Sense as soon as you can. Even though I wasn't lucky enough to get an unsoiled experience, The Sixth Sense was a masterpiece of storytelling. Being marketed as a horror movie is certainly a disservice to this film. It's a beautiful drama that happens to have some horror elements. The acting is perfect, except for Willis who I have yet to see deliver an above average performance. The biggest surprise was how well Haley Joel Osment was. After I disentangled Osment from Johnathan Lipnicki, I really only had AI to go on and that was a much different performance. I bought everything that Osment was selling. He was 11 when this was filmed and his performance isn't just good for a child actor, it's legitimately amazing. The other standout performance is Toni Collette. I didn't recognize her, probably because I had only seen her in Hereditary which is twenty years after this film, but I should have as the characters have quite a few similarities. I'd even argue that Collette is better here, as her performance was a lot more grounded. The only things stopping The Sixth Sense from being a perfect movie were Bruce Willis and some obvious logistical issues that one would pay more attention to on a rewatch. Although they do well with their "rules" there are things that characters just wouldn't know. It's a minor thing that the average amount or suspension of disbelief would cover, but that and Bruce Willis's unconvincing performance bothered me too much. I had pretty low expectations for The Sixth Sense, but it masterfully hit all the right notes and the film actually affected me, which is rare. I may have shed a tear in the last fifteen minutes and it's hard to get that out of me.

Annie Hall

Pretty quickly, I realized that Annie Hall just wasn't for me. It begins like a smart episode of Family Guy, constantly cutting to vignettes, but then it got so much worse. Allen constantly breaks the fourth wall to make a little quip, says something at full volume that apparently no one else can hear, has imaginary conversations with strangers, and revisits past events by taking his current companions to the actual moment like in A Christmas Carol. I hate all that, but if it was funny, I could deal with it. I just don't find Woody Allen funny. Although the relationship arc is realistic, Allen's character is not. He's like a dry, Jewish Deadpool. He rarely has actual lines or dialog, he mainly just does stand up. Everything he says is like the little stand-up bit at the beginning of a Seinfeld episode, except that it's being said by a character in dialog. There is a moment where Allen tells a girlfriend that he hasn't been the same since he stopped smoking. She asks him how long it's been and he replies 15 years. She stares at him saying she doesn't get it. He hasn't been the same for 15 years? He quit smoking 15 years ago and hasn't recovered? Is he serious? Is this a joke? That's how I felt about the entire movie. I couldn't tell if what he was saying was actually being said or if it was in his head. There are entire conversations that may not have happened; I have no idea. I feel like it takes the first ten minutes to figure out if Annie Hall is for you. It's not a bad movie, it just isn't for me. I never found it remotely funny and was bored and annoyed for an hour and a half.

2001: A Space Odyssey

I really wanted to love 2001: A Space Odyssey. The story is right down my alley and the visuals are awe inspiring. Kubrick is a master at framing shots and using lighting to do so much more than just light the sets. Oh, and the sets! 2001 is from 1968 and I still feel like everything looks futuristic (except the control panels, which look like shitty Atari games). If some one would have had the balls to reign Kubrick in, 2001 could easily be five stars. The issue is that 2001 lingers in every scene. We start out with a blank screen and the score slowly growing louder. When we finally get to a scene, it goes way too long. I don't want it to sound like my issue is that 2001 is a long movie; the issue is that it wastes time. Every scene just keeps going and going after the action is done or they make the action take so long. If this was made in 2019, I would assume that they were trying to make a movie for people who compulsively check their phone. We spend like fifteen minutes watching people in monkey suits (they look okay sometimes but the monkey sounds sound like they are being played through a tin can) hop around. The purpose of the first section of the movie is very simple and could have been done in three minutes, but it feels like they wanted to play the whole song in the score, so they bloat the scene to elongate it. There are tons of Space shots and they all feel like they are as long as they need to be to play the entire song. The score frustrated me too (to a lesser degree); it's all classical music or a choir making a warbling sound that got really annoying really quick. If we cut half of the movie out, it would be so much better. I recognize that 2001 is a very influential movie and that it revolutionized cinema, but that doesn't make it a better movie for me. I respect how important it is, but it just kills me that it plods along like it has all day to get where it's going. I get that you move slower in Space, but they milk it too much. My only strong issue with 2001 is how much extra time they spend on scenes that do not need it. It's not a "slow burn", it's six minutes just watching planets. The ending is needlessly complicated and confusing (and of course too damn long and drawn out), but I don't mind having to unpack a story. My only real issue is how much of my time is wastes. I know it's not a popular opinion, but I just can't look past the issue.

Mulan

Maybe it's just that Mulan is over twenty years old or maybe Mulan just isn't a great movie. To give it credit, I was impressed by the animation. It's been a long time since I've seen 2D animation that didn't try to have the illusion of 3D, and Mulan actually looks pretty good, even by 2019 standards. The problem is that everything else is entirely forgettable. I literally just finished watching the movie five minutes ago and all the songs are already gone. This area of Disney animation is supposed to be bolstered by this big catchy musical numbers, but Mulan just doesn't have any. It seems stupid to complain about plot holes, inconsistency, and realism in an animated kids' movie (I really don't think it qualifies as a "family" movie) that features ghosts, dragons, and a cricket that can keep pace with a horse and communicate with it, but Mulan really pushes it. The number of soldiers in Mulan's crew is sometimes about thirty and other times is five, including Mulan. Where did everyone else go? The final battle has a completely unrealistic attack from the Huns that not only makes no logistical sense, but is impossible to have worked unless all of China is incompetent. Mulan makes it pretty clear that it is much more focused on its message than its story. The actual character of Mulan is surprisingly well written. Although she (and her entire troop) go from garbage people to super soldiers unrealistically fast (a better montage could have easily fixed this), she has a legitimate arc that never went full saccharine. Her character was really the only one that works. Everyone else is a ridiculous caricature dogeared with two or three character flaws to distinguish them. Everything is too slapstick and all of the "humor" comes from people running into things and falling down. Being an animated movie, the voice acting is a huge component and I just don't get what Disney was trying to do by casting two voice actors for the major characters. Why can't you hire one actress that is a good voice actor and can sing? It's most glaring in the grandmother who has a completely different sound and tone between the two voices. If I closed my eyes, with Mulan, I could probably guess that the singing voice is Mulan, but with the Grandmother, the singing voice sounds a good thirty years younger. Li Shang is voiced by BD Wong, except when he sings, then he's DONNY FUCKING OSMOND! Those aren't remotely close. The normal voice actor for Mulan isn't great to begin with. Most of these voices are unknowns anyway, why not cast a total package instead of paying two people to do one job? Even between different characters, it's jarring that some characters got voice actors with Chinese accents and others didn't. I get why Eddie Murphy is the dragon, but why is Yao voiced by Harvey Fierstein from New York with Eastern European Jewish ancestry? I don't give a fuck about "white washing", but if we are in China and everyone is Chinese (except the Huns) it really makes the American voices stick out when they are in a dialog with Soon-Tek Oh. Jackie Chan did Li Shang's voice in the Cantonese, Taiwanese Mandarin and Mainland standard versions, why couldn't he do the American version? Ideally, either everyone should have accents or no one should. Mulan is a beautiful movie with a sub-par everything else. While it is certainly better than some of Disney's more recent outings and it has aged better than some of Disney's older ones, Mulan is incredibly forgettable. Vanilla.

Dr. No

I know I'm risking my Man Card here buy admitting that that Dr. No is only my second 007 film (I saw The World Is Not Enough like 15 years ago). Starting with the first James Bond film, I had low expectations for a 60's action film and Dr. No was better than I expected. Watching it in 2019, obviously the visuals have been remastered and look better now than they did in 1962, but beyond the muted color palette, Dr. No looks better than some films I've seen from the past decade. What doesn't look great is the effects. Right out of the gate we get gunshots. A character is getting into his car when he's shot. At first, I though someone slapped the hood of the car, but then the guy falls and when he's flipped over he has what definitely looks like red paint (and not any sort of fake blood we would use now). I don't know what film making was like in 1962, but they obviously used ADR in the movie (there is a scene where a band is playing and although the song they are "playing" has vocals the entire way, the band's vocalist doesn't start singing until halfway through the song), so I can't excuse the terrible gun shot sound effect. Most of the pyro and explosions are real and are all convincing except the car chase scene (you'll know it when you see it), but at the end, there is a set of explosions that are obviously superimposed. Anytime Bond is driving around, the background is obviously a separate video than Bond in the car. It's clearly added in post. There is a death in the second half of the movie that is very unrealistic and looks terrible. But, considering that this film is from 1962, only the gunshot sound and blood took me out of the film. The story is kind of bland and the pacing leaves a lot of lulls, especially in the first act, but I was never bored. I am confused as to why Bond is told that a Chinese man owns Crab Key (the island that Bond has to get to), but when we finally met said Chineese man, it's Canaidan Joseph Wiseman, a clearly white man. Everything was okay, nothing was great or impressive, but I wasn't really disappointed in anything except on particular character. In general, the acting was okay and I guess the characters are sort of developed. There is one outlier and I'm sure I'll get a lot of disagreement here, but Sean Connery is a problem. He's okay as long as he isn't talking and we don't see his face. Connery is Scottish and instead of just having James Bond have Scottish accent, Connery does a terrible English accent that sounds like he's three bottles of Jack Daniels into the night. Words are slurred and he has these distracting facial distortions when he tries to be English. The facial expressions weren't just related to his shitty accent. I can never tell whether Connery is smiling or grimacing. Honestly, most of the movie he looks like he's in pain. I can buy Connery's "suave" actions, but his face refuses to sell. It's like he's constantly fighting back his Scottish accent that his hiding right behind his lips. Dr. No is fine; it's okay. It's watchable and the beginning of an important film series, but I don't think that makes it a better film.

Overlord

Overlord feels like the original intention was for the whole Nazi zombie thing to be a twist and a surprise and the trailer company said "No one wants to see another WWII movie. That Call of Duty Zombies shit is popular, let's make it clear that's what we're doing." The entire first half is pure WWII war film, with the soldiers tasked with taking down a church tower so that the Normandy invasion could have sufficient air support. As the trailers (unfortunately) make it clear, things at the church base are not what they appear. Had the Nazi zombie angle been a surprise, it would have worked a lot better. With things being as they are, I just didn't get enough of the Nazi zombie stuff. The war stuff is fine and I dig WWII films, but it's being pitched to the audience as a zombie horror and there just isn't enough of either. Putting that aside, the rest was okay, but nothing really impressed me. I had high hopes for the film after seeing the trailers and I was really let down. The acting was actually pretty great and the characters felt authentic, but the pacing was off, the story takes too long to unfold, and the CGI gets pretty bad at parts. In the very beginning, we get a shot of a handful of planes flying through clouds. The clouds are fine (although I feel like CG clouds are pretty much clip-art level effects now) but the planes look terrible. The blood often looks suspect and there is scene in the later half where (keeping it vague enough that it won't spoil anything, but you'll definitely know when you see it) the main antagonist goes through a physical change where it straight up looked like a shot from a shitty 2000's comic book movie. That scene is made even worse by a super obvious, tacky, manipulative score. I want to love Overlord, but it just doesn't work like it should. I know we hate remakes, but give this to a better director, a more creative writer, and keep JJ Abrams far away and we could have a great film. I wanted Zombie Wolfenstein, but a generic war movie that becomes a generic monster movie.

Paranormal Activity 2

Paranormal Activity 2 isn't so much a standard sequel as much as it's a companion piece to the original. Our main crew is Kristi and her family. Kristi is the sister of Katie from the first Paranormal Activity and this film is essentially a prequel that leads into the original. I like the link and while it doesn't explain anything from the first film it does flesh the mythology out a little more. As it's own film, I did enjoy PA2 more but it's still not great. The acting from this cast is much better. The only one that wasn't great was the toddler, who I can't fault because he's a toddler, but the main issue is that he laughs at inappropriate times, but since the camera feed is often very blurry and we can't see his face anyway, they could easily have fixed it in post. In general, the sound mixing is a huge issue. I always watch movies with subtitles anyway (just in case they mention things I didn't pick up or offer the only translation of a foreign language) but they were borderline necessary for PA2. I had my volume up twice as high as I usually do and still 80% of the time the subtitles said "Thud" and the character reacts to the alleged sound, I heard nothing. The dialog is usually pretty audible and clear but anytime someone is talking to the toddler at night, the audio is way too low. The cinematography is what it s because the gimmick limits how creative they can be, but there were little things that bothered me. In the first twenty minutes, a character sets a handheld camera down on a bed facing a baby monitor, but the angle isn't quite right, so after the character has walked away, the camera tilts up just a little to better frame the monitor. I'm sure the kayfabe reason is that a ghost/demon moved the camera, but, why would it give a fuck if the monitor is in frame and would the demon/ghost have even checked the camera? I say it every damn time with these paranormal movies, but I have to do it again. Since, ghosts aren't real, every writer and director gets to decide how they work in the world of their movie. However, why would ghost/demon be invisible but have a shadow? What's the purpose of the demon/ghost taking the pool Roomba out of the pool every night? I don't really have as many nit-picky things as I usually do for this kind of movie, but there is a different issue; PA2 is kind of boring. With the whole found footage genre (I guess this isn't really "found" footage but it works the same) whoever (in the word of the film) is assembling the footage picks out moments to show us for specific reasons; every scene is important and necessary to the overall story. PA2 has way too much extraneous bullshit that really doesn't need to be there. Even spooky paranormal stuff doesn't always feel important or even really make sense for a demon ghost to do. There are a few things like the pool cleaner robot that just don't make sense for the ghost/demon to do. For the most part, PA2 does things better than the last time, but the bar was so damn low that it would be hard not to have done better. I hated the first Paranormal Activity, but I didn't hate this one. It still just feels lazy, rushed, and amateur. One thing that I do wish they had carried over from the first was how they tried to make is seem like it was a real thing that happened. PA2 has a lame little card at the beginning thanking the friends and family of the characters and the local police department, but the first PA had the actors playing themselves with their names. Micah Sloat played Micah (small thing, it's always pronounced My-kah the entire movie except for when his own wife calls him ME-Kah) and Katie Featherston plays Katie. Still, PA2 is a big step in the right direction, but it's just a couple steps up the stairs from the basement; there is still a long way to go before it's a decent film.