The Meg

This is a movie where Jason Statham is the lead character and the antagonist is a terribly done CGI shark and the studio was really banking on Chinese audiences making the budget back. None of the actors can act (other than Rainn Wilson, but he just doesn't mesh with his character), most of the effects look terrible, and the story is repetitive ad unoriginal. It really does feel like a what we would get if a SyFy Channel movie was given a $150 million budget. Rainn Wilson's character has invest millions of dollars to create what looks like an oil rig in the middle of the ocean, but I'm not sure what he was ever hoping to get out of it that would make him any money? The lead scientist believes that what we have always assumed was the bottom of the Mariana Trench is actually just a layer of hydrogen sulfide and that there is an entire new ecosystem bellow it. Okay, where is the money in that? The maiden crew get attacked by something and Jason Statham is brought in to rescue them. Again, this feel like a made for TV movie with a much. much bigger budget: the story is stupid, the acting is awful, and the effects are bad. It is a kind of fun movie and for awhile it's exciting, but we just keep hitting the same notes again and again hoping that we'll get something new soon. This biggest issue is that everything cool that you'd expect from this movie is where they skimp on things. I wanted tons of action and gore and explosions and adrenaline, but all of that was toned down. The movie is about a giant shark and we get exactly zero fun gore scenes or blood baths. The scene depicted in the movie poster should have been the highlight of the movie, but it's actually the most disappointing. I wanted a big dumb action movie where I could just turn my brain off and watch a bad ass shark chomp some people in half, but all I got was a big, dumb movie that had its brain turned off.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation

The only good things about this movie are Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger's performances. Everything else is an incoherent mess that is kind of hard to get through. Every other actor is terrible and the script it just awful. To be fair, I absolutely hated the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and this one was a little better, but it is just because of the sheer lunacy that unfolds. Everyone is just yelling for no reason, there are tons of pointless little plot bits that get zero explanation and have no real reason to exist. The core plot is basically the first movie all over again, the only difference is that they try and throw a little twist at the end that just doesn't work on any level. The whole movie has this general feeling of being stuck with your little cousin who still thinks it's funny to just scream as loud as he can out of the blue and throw pickle slices at the TV. On some level, the chaos is entertaining, but it's mostly just loud and annoying. Nothing makes any sense and there doesn't seem to be any attempts making it make sense. Hard, hard pass.

Now You See Me

Now You See Me is a fast paced thrill ride that unfortunately doesn't return you to the station at the end, but instead ends with you locked in your seat and forced to watch Catwoman before you can go home. The premise of the movie is incredibly stupid, but incredibly unique with tons of unexpected reveals and the pace is so fast that I watched the extended edition, clocking in at about two hours, and I was prepared to be about thirty minutes in when I paused it the first time and discovered it had already been an hour. There are some very bad effects and ADR (mainly in the first show) and Ruffalo and Laurent are hit or miss with their acting, but it's really easy to overlook and just get drawn in by the spectacle. The whole time, I'm telling myself how stupid this movie is and every scene is overflowing with happenstance, but I was so on board that I'd have rode this movie right into a wall, which is exactly what happens in the last fifteen minutes. As many other reviews have mentioned, the ending and final "twist" is a game-breaking mess that opens hundreds of plot holes. It makes no sense (certainly no logical sense) and undoes the other hour and forty-five minutes. As much as I loved Woody Harrelson and Dave Franco (the best Franco), nothing could possibly make up for that ending. It's not just confusing and illogical (/impossible) but it's anger-inducing. If you make the world's best plate of spaghetti and then take a crap on it, it's no longer delicious Italian food; it's just crap. An amazing movie with a terrible ending just leaves you with a bad taste.

Shortbus

I understand why Shortbus is a hard movie for people to swallow and the incredibly graphic (and unsimulated) sex scenes are way over the top, but the heart of the movie is amazing. John Cameron Mitchell points out correctly that America's only real exposure to sex on film is pornography and he wanted to change that. The issue is that it comes at the expense of the film. It certainly helps everything to seem uncomfortably real (because it is real-life sex) and every actor gives an amazingly real performance, but the almost gross level of sexual activity overshadows everything and makes the movie feel dirty. It's a shame, because the story is beautiful, the cinematography is good and, (again) the acting is wonderful. The symbolism and themes are up for debate and I think everyone is going to read this movie a little different and I'm sure that as a straight guy, there are things that I'm not picking up on and just can't relate to, but there are universal messages about belonging, acceptance, and understanding that everyone can appreciate. On some level, the sex is symbolic but it the movie would be better without it. I get that it's kind of a gimmick designed to create controversy and we all love controversy, but It's like if I opened a restaurant and before you order you need to give a karaoke performance for all the other diners. Sure, I have great, 5-Star food, but how many potential customers am I going to lose right away because they have stage fright? How many people will refuse to embarrass themselves and get turned away? I get what JCM is trying to do, but you isolate far too many people from the rest of your movie when you open with a naked guy urinating in a bathtub. Shortbus is equally hilarious and heartbreaking and it has a lot of messages and themes that we could really use in 2020, but how many people are really going to be willing to have to sit through some of the over-the-top graphic sex scenes that happen later in the movie in order to get them? 80% of this movie is amazing and the other 20% is actively trying to stop you from seeing it.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things

I'm thinking of ending this movie early. To get the positives out of the way, the acting is great and the cinematography is good. Everything else is just awful. I'm fine with movies being allegorical, but they have to still work on a surface level. This movie is about 90 minutes of faux-psychological conversations and 30 minutes of "plot". I'm really going to try not to spoil anything, but most of the plot details will edge far too close. This movie is purposefully obtuse and works very hard to go out of its way to confuse and mislead the audience and honestly it feels like it works equally hard to bore the audience. The surface story is packed with long scenes where we get nothing but inane dialog. One character spends like seven minutes reciting a poem and later spends even longer over-analyzing an almost 50 year-old movie. If you were hoping for a movie where you have to extrapolate every line and were just watering at the mouth at the idea of deep-diving into metaphors and looking up William Wordsworth poems and anything else you see on the shelf in the background of one scene, then this movie is a buffet. I'm seeing comparisons to Hereditary (which honestly I think are just because Toni Collette is in both), but Hereditary is just a complex movie. Hereditary is a little confusing, but you can work it out with the information provided and a little determination. I'm Thinking of Ending Things expects you to make these huge leaps that really fly in the face of other things we've seen in the movie. Even after watching multiple "Explained" YouTube videos, even though I can understand what people think the movie really is about, there are far too many things that still just don't fit into place. Also, there are a few technical issues that I'm sure some people are going to say are purposeful and actually are just big metaphors for whatever, but they really don't seem like it to me. The biggest one for me is the terrible make-up. Again, keeping things as spoiler free as possible, there is a scene in a highschool auditorium where the entire audience is in the worst elderly make-up I've ever seen in a real movie by a real studio. We keep getting close-ups of one character and we can see that his hair is spray painted grey because we can see his real hair color underneath. They show us another lady in the audience and it's clear that the wrinkles on her face are drawn on in marker because they look like when people try to do Borderlands cosplay and have to make themselves look cell-shaded. Our female lead goes on a prolonged rant and I started to notice an accent that was never there before and never was again. Is it supposed to be symbolic and purposeful, or did the Irish actress just slip into her natural voice and they didn't want to re-shoot a scene where she rants for seven straight minutes? Toni Collette is an amazing actress, so I know she's playing her character exactly how she is supposed to, so whatever she's is doing is what she's told to do, but it doesn't make any sense to have her wildly overact everything to the point where is becomes almost a caricature of an over-dramatic high school play. It's really hard not to put spoilers in here, but even after you understand what the movie is trying to do, there are still so many things that I chalk up to error and arrogance that I'm sure defenders will say are done on purpose because the very nature of the story isn't supposed to make sense. In my opinion, this movie is two hours of masturbatory levels of pretentiousness that is supposed to confuse you. Kaufman wants you to have no idea what is going on. This isn't like a Christopher Nolan movie where people just aren't used to having to pay this level of attention to what's going on to understand, this movie is a 1,000 pieces puzzle that has printing on both sides, but for each side, the pieces fit together differently than the other side and sometimes you have to throw away a couple of pieces and draw your own on little bits of cardboard and cut them out to finish the puzzle and even though you've got a 1,000 piece puzzle completed in front of you, there are still 300 pieces in the box that you are pretty sure go to a completely different puzzle, but KaufmanFan6969 says that you are an idiot and those pieces are supposed to intersect the exiting puzzle on the y-axis and you are just too damn stupid to have figure that out, even though there is no opening for these pieces to go through and it's a puzzle of a giraffe and these left over pieces are tie-dye and and you're pretty sure that a couple of them are from a Digimon puzzle your grandma got you for your 12th birthday because she didn't quite understand what Pokemon is. I'm all for having to unpack a movie and work through some stuff to get to the chocolaty, nougaty center, but not if I need 2x4's, a jar of mayonnaise, and 14 purple index cards to get there and I'm not even sure the center is edible.

Ken Park

This is what would happen if a talented teenager tried to make a "Teen Boner Drama" instead of a comedy. It's still pretty pretentious at times, feels very angsty, and has quite a very scenes that feel like their only value is shock value. Despite this, the acting is pretty great and even the guys that are kind of awful at least feel very authentic. Stephen Jasso is the best example of this. Every one of his lines is stilted and awkward and feels like a fourth grader reading aloud in class, but I still believed everything he said, so it's a weird scenario. Ken Park is four stories bookended by the short story of the titular Ken Park. Each story is very uncomfortable and disturbing with a mixture of the three teen movie tent-poles: sex, drugs, and hating your parental figures. Some are better defined than others, but none really get enough time to feel like a whole story. I am never scared during horror movies, but Kent Park (which Wikipedia calls a "erotic drama") had me constantly on edge, dreading what comes next. It's like Happiness, but without the humor. It's incredibly dark and beyond the few scenes where James Ransone's ass-holery has an uncomfortable humor, there isn't anything other than bleak. At no time was I enjoying the movie and other than being impressed by a few performances (Wade Williams in particular) I wasn't really getting anything out of the film making either. The script is underwritten, every character needs more development, and it's unclear exactly what this movie is trying to accomplish. Ken Park is technically well made, but the plot is lacking and the acting is hit or miss.

Despicable Me 3

I can appreciate what they were trying to do with the story, but it just doesn't work. Gru's brother has no set character and his motivations fluctuate from scene to scene. Gru and Dru's relationship is the most confusing as the get close and pull apart randomly. The animation is the same as the other Despicable Me movies and the character designs are still bad, but I'm more hung up on why on Earth they would let Pharrell do the soundtrack again. There are a few licensed songs that are okay, but everything else feels like Pharrell just trying to get his friends a paycheck. These songs do not match the tone of the scene and are kind of inappropriate for a kids movie when you listen to the lyrics. It's like all he understands is "slow song goes here" so he calls up his bro for any slow song in his catalog. Looking at the credits, most of the worst songs were his own songs (go figure). I really didn't care for the movie and found it pretty boring really, but Pharrell's abysmal soundtrack is easily the most offensive part.

First Blood

Imagine, if you will, a fifth grader coming home from school with a note from the principal; he's been suspended for fighting. The parents automatically ground him indefinitely and he pulls out an axe and hack them to bits before running through town assaulting any officer who tries to take him in. We eventually find out that his "fighting" suspension was really some Zero Tolerance BS and he punched out the bully who been kicking the crap out of him. Okay, clearly we are supposed to feel bad for the kid, right? He's only acting out because of extenuating circumstances. Sure, but what about all of the innocent people he's crippled and possibly killed? Am I really expected to still be on his side when he escalates a three out of ten scenario to a nine because he has issues? First Blood is basically that movie. Rambo is walking through town when an officer picks him up and drives him out of town because Rambo looks like a vagrant and that's not the kind of person the sheriff wants in his town. Yeah, the cop is a dick, but Rambo quickly turns what would have been a night in jail into a reverse Predator scenario where he's running through the Oregon forest laying traps for the officers tasked with bringing him in after he escapes the police station while injuring numerous officers. Are we supposed to like Rambo? I get the whole "he's just misunderstood" thread and the PTSD is ham-fistedly shown, but Rambo stabs a guy and tries to shoot others. For this to work, Rambo has to have some other traits to draw us to his side, but the character is written for Stallone, so he has zero charisma and there is no attempt to humanize or develop his character. The movie is only about 90 minutes, but it was such a chore to get through because the action isn't exciting and I couldn't give half a crap what happens to Rambo. I guess there is a little bit of fun in seeing a jerk get some comeuppance, but it's like watching a litterbug get lit on fire; it's far too much and quickly becomes uncomfortable. I'll credit everyone other than Stallone for providing a decent performance, but Rambo needed to carry this movie and he just can't. If you were hoping for an action packed explosion party, you'll be disappointed. If you were looking for a dramatic look at the real effects of PTSD after Vietnam, you are going to be so let down. What is this movie even trying to do? It's a very shallow movie with a protagonist that has nothing to offer other than a dead face.

Despicable Me 2

Despicable Me 2 is a perfectly fine follow-up to the original. The story is much more streamlined and I think the Minions were used appropriately to bring a little levity to the movie. Even if you hate the Minions, they are an actual plot point so they do have a reason to be there. The story itself is pretty standard and predictable, but the new additions were fine and we do get to see a different side of Gru. The soundtrack is absolutely awful, however, but that is what happens when you let Pharrell do that part. The character model are still really weird and top heavy hitting a really weird place between trying to look realistic and trying to look exaggerated and cartoony. Really, this is Despicable Me 2 and it's a good Despicable Me movie, but not a great movie otherwise. If you like the first, this one is a good sequel. If you hated the first movie, you'll hate this one too. It's an okay movie that is watchable and while it's not really funny for adults, it's kind of cute and it gets a few chuckles.

The Hangover

This movie got hyped past the moon when it came out, so my first viewing in 2009 was a huge let-down. Over a decade removed from its release, The Hangover is a fun, stupid comedy that you wouldn't be able to make today. 90% of the humor is pure shock value, "Wait, what? moments with 10% being actual structured jokes. It did get a lot of chuckles, but most are things that won't hold up on a re-watch. I had over ten years between viewings, so everything old was new again. If I watched it again tonight, there really aren't a bunch of moments that are going to be funny again so soon. The story is simple and the movie really doesn't have anything to say, so it's pure comedy and there just isn't as many actual comedic elements as Airplane or even Old School. The acting is fine, although we get more caricatures than characters. I will note that although it definitely didn't bother me at all, depending on how much you enjoy recreational outrage, there are a few jokes an gags that aren't 2020 PC approved. A comedy movie really has to either have something bigger or deeper to say or be packed with humor and The Hangover isn't either. It's an enjoyable, fast-paced dude-bro comedy, but it's not something that I can see watching again before another couple of years go by and I forget everything again.