Wonder

Wonder is almost exactly what you'd expect it to be, the only difference is that they'll switch to a B-character's POV for fifteen minutes before t hey are inevitably sidelined to focus on the main character again. I guarantee, that if you read the plot synopsis you can predict scene-by-scene 80% of the movie. To get it out of the way, the acting is all fine (some of the tertiary child actors are iffy, but Jacob Tremblay is WONDERful (I promise I'm only going to make that very obvious joke this one time)), the soundtrack is like what you'd hear if Kindergartners ran an independent Seattle coffee shop, and the cinematography and directing are overtly generic. Okay, now I can complain about how Wonder has exactly zero subtlety and every scene is written with a MAC truck of saccharine melodrama. Wonder is obviously a movie that is going to hit a lot of emotions, but there are tons of films about similar issues with equal or greater levels of emotion that don't let the emotions drive the entire movie. Wonder the book was a Middle School age novel, but Wonder the movie feels like it was written for first graders. We don't need every scene to tell us how to feel. I've heard that calling this film manipulative is a cheap declaration, but it is a 100% true criticism. Every character has to have a very black and white sob story to run with and every sob story has to be running at full magnitude. There are no named characters that aren't just dripping with melodrama. Tremblay is an amazing actor, you don't need the script to demand him yell and scream and cry every fifteen minutes; all Tremblay needs is to give us one look and we know what his character is feeling. I hate Julia Roberts, but she is more than capable of conveying her character's emotions without giving her five minutes of lines detailing why she's sad or mad or whatever. Again, it's like they think their audience is just first graders who need to be told how to feel. Anyone older than that is going to feel (at least a little) that this movie is almost condescending and patronizing. Even less good actors in this movie understand how to convey emotion without dialog; we don't need every single character to tell us how they feel so that we know how to feel. There is so much unnecessary melodrama and so many scenes that only function to make soccer moms cry because "What is my little Braxton was born like that? Why are kids so mean?!?". I'm not going to spoil it, but there is a death in the film that serves absolutely zero narrative purpose. It only happens to get a few cheap tears. If you've seen the movie, I guarantee you know exactly what I'm talking about. I also have a huge problem with the multiple perspective element. I do appreciate that we get different view-points, but they give these characters arcs that they have no intention of ending in any sort of fulfilling way. We get fifteen minutes of the main character's sister's former BFF for no reason. Her only importance to the story is to isolate the sister, but Wonder thinks we care about her and want her redemption arc, so they shoe-horn her in for a total of three more minutes at the end. Stop. I just barely became invested in your main character, stop trying to give tertiary characters story arcs. This movie is almost two hour long and it has no right to be. None of the other characters are given enough respect to validate giving them their on POV scenes. I love the sister, but her scenes don't make the movie better, they don't add anything. Wonder has two very large problems, it has no idea how to appropriately write emotional scenes without smacking you in the face with it and they try to give way too many characters things to do and then don't have them do anything worthwhile. I can easily cut out an hour of fluff and dead-end characters in this film. I'm going to say it again, Wonder thinks its audience is stupid and needs to be told how to feel. Anyone beyond first grade can read the scene well enough that you don't need Augie to tell us that he's sad, we can fucking see it on Tremblay's face, just let the actors to their jobs.

Hacksaw Ridge

The first third is really slow and sets up for a very melodramatic cheese-fest, but then we watch a bullet go straight through a dude's head, blood flies everywhere, and all of a sudden we are in a much different movie. I'm not entirely sure what message this movie was aiming for, because it takes wild shots in multiple directions. It never really felt preachy to me, but it certainly felt manipulative for most of the first half. I get that this is based on a true story, but the pacing is pretty bad with the first half being 75% corny drama and the last half being nonstop action and an unexpected level of gore. One of my things is that I really hate when war movies are trying to show how awful war is, but then all of the violence is implied, off-screen, or PG-13. Hacksaw Ridge has a crazy amount of fun gore, which sounds really bad when we are talking about a true story and real people were actually shot and blown apart in WWII, but it's hard not to detach the cinematic experience from its real life source material and not get a little excited when you see someone's leg fly off. The gore and effects were actually pretty great and the acting was pretty great too, although I'll never really not be surprised when Vince Vaughn is playing a serious role. There is an odd amount of humor, but it's never forced nor does it deflate the tension. For a WWII movie, Hacksaw Ridge does have a different spin and it feels a little more authentic than the average one.

Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)

The Harley Quinn Movie (and the destruction of DC characters for the enjoyment of edgy 12 year-olds) is worse than I expected and I had really low expectations. The script is awful with so many unnatural dialog sequences, plot lines just disappearing, and terrible pacing and story structure. To be fair, I'm no comic expert, but unlike most people, I've actually read quite a few DC comics. Everyone in this movie is entirely untrue to their real character. Harley Quinn was okay in Suicide Squad, but that's probably because she wasn't 90% of the story; here she gets incredibly annoying unbelievably fast. This movie was written, directed, and produced by adults, so why is the humor so juvenile? "Oh, she loves her sandwich and talks to a taxidermy animal!" "Haha! She kicked that man in the balls! 10/10!". The worst part is the story structure. For a movie called Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), the movie is 90% Harley doing a terrible job narrating the story out of order, constantly flashing back to scenes that don't matter and sequences that only serve to waste time (like a dream sequence musical number). Maybe 15 minutes is Birds of Prey, but it's pushing it to call their versions of Black Canary, Huntress, and a random cop the Birds of Prey. Every action sequence and fight seems to happen in a vacuum. Harley starts blasting people and throwing guys through windows in the police station, but no one hears. There will be a huge fight in a building, but as soon as we leave the building, there are no repercussions from the fight and it is never referenced again. Some of the acting is fine and I kind of liked Huntress, but the biggest story line in the movie is basically carbon copied from Deadpool 2, to the point where as soon as the actual plot of the movie begins (and it takes almost half of the movie to do) you can guess the rest of it. Birds of Prey, isn't the worst super hero movie since Captain Marvel, Ant-Man (and Ant-Man and the Wasp), Amazing Spider-Man 2, and Thor: A Dark World exist, but it's pretty bad. I think I'd rather watch Suicide Squad again. They don't do anything well (especially the most important parts), but I spent more time bored than mad, so I guess that's something.

The Great Dictator

Aside from being too long and having a rushed ending that is incredibly anti-climactic and overly ham-fisted, The Great Dictator is perfect. Charlie Chaplin's brand of humor and story telling is timeless.

Joker

I enjoyed every stylistic choice, but there were too many plot discrepancies and there was no real reason for it to be a DC film. If you take out every reference to the Wayne family and just let Joker be the Taxi Driver/King of Comedy remake that it so wants to be, the film would be so much better. Phoenix is amazing and I loved how it explored contemporary issues through the extreme lens of a super-villain. The pacing was too stop-start and they relied too much on cringe value, but if you can survive that, Joker has a few things to say. I wasn't impressed with De Niro (honestly, I have never been) and I wish the ending was more grand.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

A beautiful color pallet and competent cinematography can only drag this movie so far. The story has potential, but it really drags for the first two-thirds and is often pretty boring. There really isn't a lot of plot for a 90 minute movie and what we do get is poorly paced and not particularly engaging. Everyone other than Guy and Geneviève's mom have questionable motivation and are wildly underdeveloped. Especially with Geneviève, it's very hard to tell what she's thinking or try and validate her decisions; she just flips around on a whim with no discernible reason. It's at least partly the acting, but I don't think the script is well written. The selling point of this movie is obviously the gimmick, but it's a huge detriment to the film. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is not a musical; there are no songs. Every single line is said in a singsong voice, but nothing amounts to an actual song. The lines have no rhythm, rhyme scheme, or cadence; it's the equivalent of taking regular dialog and poorly auto-tuning it. I'm kind of glad that it was in a language that I don't speak so that I had to focus on the subtitles and "read" the movie instead of suffering through the incredibly awkward singing. The cast are pretty good singers, but they aren't given anything to work with. They aren't good actors though. Geneviève's mother is the worst, as she doesn't seem to understand the emotion and connotation of her lines. She'll be talking about how deep in the shit they are about to be, but she's smiling and singing like this is "Walking on Sunshine" or something. The very nature of singing all of the dialog means that facial expressions are much more important and no one is really selling anything worth buying. I honestly don't know if Roland Cassard ever has any emotions at all; he has a dead expression the entire time. Guy and his aunt are okay, but everyone else leaves a lot to be desired. This film would be much better without the gimmick, but as it is, I can compliment how beautiful everything is and the occasional cool shot, but that's it. I'm not sure who this movie is made for: fans of musicals aren't going to have any new show tunes to add to their Spotify playlist, cinema fans are going to be disappointed with the acting, and the average movie goer is just going to be confused.

Adam

There were very clear emotions that they were going for and they missed them all. The acting is hit or miss, but the script is easily the biggest issue here. This film is overflowing with cringe. The relationship at the heart of the movie is irresponsible, unrealistic, and impossible to understand. It's one of those movies where you have to just let everything go and try and pretend that you are buying what they're laying down, but it's just not possible. The pacing is uneven and for a movie titled "Adam", we see very little character development for Adam and focus on an unrelated court case that is only vaguely explained, yet takes up an inordinate amount of time. This is the epitome of a Hollywood "feel-good" movie that has nothing real to say and tries to fly by with vaudevillian, ham-fisted scenes that really want you to believe that their relationship could possibly work in a real world scenario. I've seen movies that are more boring, more poorly acted, and with a much worse script, but Adam manages to be the second worst movie I have ever sat through. It's so inauthentic, manipulative, and hollow that I'd rather watch The Emoji Movie three times in a row than have to suffer through this again.

Upstream Color

There is a very distinct difference between not holding the audience's hand and purposefully neglecting them for the sole purpose of confusing them. Upstream Color isn't totally the latter, but it's very close. Even knowing the basic plot outline, I was still left constantly wondering "what is the purpose of this scene?", "Who is that? Are we supposed to know them?, and "Where are we? Is this real?". For an hour and a half long movie, Upstream Color feels like so much longer, mostly because it's simultaneously full of filler and extremely lacking in meaningful plot development. The first twenty-ish minutes are a series of 30 to 60 seconds scenes that only make any sense in a re-watch. Really, the entire film feels like what a big scale show like Game of Thrones puts together to play before the first episode of a new season to remind us what's happened so far, except this is a stand alone movie and you have to try and piece together what the movie is. Again, I can appreciate the movie not "holding my hand", but this goes way beyond that. It feels purposefully vague and unfinished for the sake of confusion. I don't think the acting was particularly noteworthy and the cinematography wasn't anything beyond generic. I know "film buffs" hate it when you call a movie pretentious, but Upstream Color really hits that for me. The plot is very interesting and I could see myself enjoying it if almost any other director made the movie, but Shane Carruth just didn't work for me.

Waves

I implore you not to read any plot summaries or spoilers for Waves; going in blind is the best experience. I really want to say as little as possible about the story, because it is such an emotional experience. The acting is perfect (except for Lucas Hedges who is just a black hole) and I can relate to every character in a way. This is really like a short and it's sequel, with each one being completely unique in how it i presented. The cinematography, soundtrack, and tone in each part are perfect, but totally different. I like the first half more, but that's mainly because of how well Trey Edward Shults has the score, cinematography, and color palette play with each other. It feels like nothing I've ever seen before. We are constantly getting this amazing shots that almost feel musical with how quick and fast we cut from scene to scene and angle. I wish the pacing was quicker in the last half and Hedges's character really doesn't bring anything worthwhile to the story, but beyond that, Waves is close to perfect. It's certainly not a movie for everyone, but that is mostly because of the near constant gut punches and not the film making.

Grave Encounters 2

We open with a menagerie of review clips of the first movie. They are real life reviews (I only know because Shawn C. Phillips is one of them and I'd watched the review), some positive, but mostly negative ones pointing out how bad the effects were. Grave Encounters 2 is one film student's quest to prove that Grave Encounters wasn't just a movie, but was a real set of events. The movie is only about an hour and a half and it takes half an hour to actually get to the hospital from the first movie. I can appreciate that they put the effort in to create a more compelling story for a sequel than just throwing essentially the same movie at us again, but it takes up far too much time. Pairing with that, the fact that most of those first thirty minutes is just character establishment for characters that are all unlikable. I don't give half a crap about any of these people; they are all annoying jerks and the actors aren't particularly great either. Am I really supposed to care about Dylan Playfair? Am I supposed to care about the love angle between two of our leads? No one is likable and the only person who did an acceptable acting job was Richard Harmon. I'm not sure why they thought bringing up how bad the effects were in the first movie was a good idea if they weren't going to make them any better in t his film. They are smart enough to only show the worst effects through the night vision camera, but even then it's still pretty awful. The plot for the first movie was pretty messy, but this sequel is a disaster. Without spoiling anything, they make some real leaps in logic and try some outrageous ideas. There are many, many movies that are much worse than this one, but Grave Encounters 2 didn't learn anything from the mistakes of the first film and actually makes the same mistakes at a worse level in addition to making new ones.