Fantastic Planet

Fantastic Planet is incredibly ambitious in many ways, but is surprisingly half-hearted in others. Right out of the gate, the visuals are divisive, as individual stills look beautiful, but the actual animation is very choppy and unnatural. If you pause the movie at any time, you'll get see an incredibly alien landscape populated with a litany of grotesque and confusing creatures and plants, that are all strangely compelling. However, as soon as you press Play, the woefully under-animated movements create a big scar over those beautiful stills. Even for 1973, the actual animation is poorly done and it feels like they need three times as many frames as they have in order to fix it. There are even scenes where they don't even bother making character's legs move and instead they just float along the ground. The story of Fantastic Planet is purposefully confusing, but I feel like it takes it a step too far. We experience the film from two different lenses, that of the Draags (the giant blue creatures) and that of the Oms (their name for the humans). Our narrator, Terr, is an Om so we see most things from his point-of-view which leaves us as clueless about the Draags as he is. It's a novel concept, but when reached the ending, I felt like I was missing an entire layer of knowledge that was necessary to understand what was going on. Hearing the Draags teach their children about their planet using alien terms that we have no concept or understanding of was kind of cool, but that's on a micro scale and the ending is very macro. I watched Fantastic Planet with the original French audio and English subtitles and the voice acting is easily the worst part of this film. No one seems to understand what their role as a voice actor is, as no one is putting emotion into their lines and everyone sounds nearly identical. I love the world building that we get (especially considering how short the film is), but nothing feel fully realized; the entire film feels like a rough draft. Everything about this movie needed a more experienced person with an attention to detail working on it. I hate remakes, but Fantastic Planet could be a great candidate for a remaster. Touch up the animation and rerecord the audio with trained, professional voice actors and Fantastic Planet could be a classic. As it is, this film is unique and strangely compelling, but it's missing a real hook and how sloppily it was made leaves a lot to be desired.

Cruel Will

Cruel Will has an interesting premise that it thoroughly butchers in execution. The acting is absolutely terrible (except Harry Lennix) almost to the point where is it comically bad. The story is very repetitive, which makes the 85 minute run time feel like ages, and the ending is incredibly anticlimactic and confusing. There aren't many effects, but they clearly have no idea how blood spatter works. What bothers me the most are how careless they are with the many stupid little mistakes. A character is cutting vegetables with a chef's knife on a cutting board and somehow cuts her palm, when the knife was no where near her palm and the cutting motion she was doing would only risk chopping off her finger tips, not gashing open her palm. Another character drops a glass of cola, but when he goes to pick up the broken glass, there is a clear liquid on the floor, even though we watched him poor brown cola. There are tons of little mistakes that show how little attention was paid to any of the details in this film. Again, the general plot description of the film has potential, but clearly no one knew what they were doing.

Doom: Annihilation

There are definitely things to appreciate here, but they are far outweighed by the negatives. The cinematography offers some really cool shots and the tent pole scenes are packed with the raw, animalistic energy that the book captures so well. Much more important though is how hard it is to look past the terrible acting from the entire cast. The chemistry was there between the kids, but they just have zero acting ability. Even the rhythm of the conversations is stilted and unnatural; most of the time there is like a couple of seconds delay before the kid remembers that it's their turn to say their line. 100% the issue is the casting, which seems to have been "Congratulations on coming to your audition. You're hired!". Even the best baker can't make a wedding cake out of clam juice and magnets.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Only Lovers Left Alive isn't a vampire movie. I feel like I need to throw that out there right of the bat. What this film is is two hours of talking broken up by the occasional little nugget of plot, then returning to more talking. This movie is incredibly dialog heavy, to the point where the plot almost becomes "two vampires talk" more than anything else. There are a few minuscule plot lines that they pick up and drop just as quickly, but there is very, very little plot on the whole. The acting is fine, the cinematography can be interesting at times, and I liked the color pallet, but beyond that It's really an almost boring slog from conversation to conversation. By tomorrow morning, I doubt I'll be able to remember anything aside from Anton Yelchin. There were a few funny bits, but I was never sure if they were supposed to be funny or if I was just laughing out of the sheer awkwardness of the scenes. The two leads are interesting, but their relationship is barely explored and I wasn't getting any real chemistry between the two. If you ever wondered what Bella and Edward chatted about on the way to Target, Only Lovers Left Alive can offer that. If you were hoping for a comedy or action movie of any kind, there is nothing here to see.

The Funhouse

For a movie that sells itself on being about escaping a funhouse, I'm kind of pissed that that section of the movie is only the last 25-or-so minutes. The rest is terribly acted bumbling around in a fair/circus. For the most part, The Funhouse is no fun; it's very boring and we don't even get any fun kills and the effects are awful. I guess it was shot okay, but there is nothing else positive worth noting. It's incredibly forgettable and deserves to be forgotten.

A Simple Favor

I was very excited to see the movie the trailers for A Simple Favor showed. What I got was a very Paul Feig version of the premise. If we split the movie into thirds, the first third is exactly what I wanted, the second third was way off base, and the last third was just wrong. Blake Lively is great and her character adds the perfect kind of dark humor to stop this movie from feeling too much like Gone Girl. The issue here is that Paul Feig refuses to just let this movie be an exciting thriller/drama; he just has to make it goofy. Anna Kendrick plays Anna Kendrick, which means her character is incredibly unlikable with her constant quirky, goody-two-shoes shtick and it's way too much. Even if we put her character aside for a moment, the rest of the film is just way too goofy. Lively's character has a lot of fun dark humor, but everyone else is constantly chirping in with the dumbest middle school jokes. A Simple Favor with anyone else at the helm could be a perfect film, but Feig insists on dumbing it down. The humor here is like if you told a pre-teen Disney star to be edgy. "Uh oh, that lady said a bad word to her child! HAHA! Now she's wearing a shirt with giant pompons on it!" As much as I hate remakes, this would be a great story for a better producer & director to pick up in ten years, long after everyone has forgotten that this film even existed.

Shrek the Third

Rewatching the Shrek Series hits a big road block at Shrek the Third. The story feels way too similar to the previous two movies and it's starting to feel really old. None of the new characters add anything and the more interesting side characters they've drug along aren't getting enough screen time. I'm kind of over Shrek going through the same character arc and Donkey doing nothing other than comic relief. Shrek the Third still has some good humor, but I think it's less funny and less fun that Shrek 2. The animation hasn't improved, but the great voice acting kind of covers it. The previous installments had licensed songs, but this time it's a little to obtuse. There is a pretty funny and clever use of Immigrant Song but I think the Fergie cover of Barracuda cancels it out. Shrek the Third shows the series was beginning to run out of gas, just as I did when we get Prince Charming trying to take over the kingdom again.

Ratatouille

Ratatouille has the trademark Pixar charm, but it's visually disappointing and isn't as fun and comical as I've come to expect. The story line is fine, but it's leaning a little too much towards saccharine and none of the characters other than Remy feel real. Alfredo has unclear goals and the fact that he never even gives Remy a name (and instead calls him "Little Chef") further hollows his character. For a Pixar movie, the animation was pretty good for almost everything, but the character models look awful. The rats aren't terrible, but they are much more reminiscent of a Dreamworks animated feature than a Pixar. The human's look terrible, though. Comparing Ratatouille's humans to Andy from the first Toy Story highlights how lazy and ugly Ratatouille's character models are. The story isn't exactly novel and I think they paid too much attention to their ham-fisted message and not enough to the actual story elements. This is the first Pixar movie where I never found anything funny and honestly struggled to find what they though would be funny. The voice acting is good and the audio quality was great, but Patton Oswald plays Remy far to hammy. If it wasn't Pixar, Ratatouille would be a perfectly okay, if bland, animated movie, but knowing what Pixar is capable of and had given us prior to this film, I was very disappointed. The story feels Pixar-ish, but the animation doesn't hit the bar and it's lacking any fun and whimsy.

The Empire Strikes Back

I understand why audiences weren't thrilled with Episode IV back in 1980. The Empire Strikes Back is like Avengers: Infinity War in that it 100% can not stand alone and only serves as a volley for the next film. I did find Empire a lot more interesting and there is a lot more plot, but we barely move from where we start and mostly just spin our wheels in scenarios that don't matter in the end until we get to the ending where we are left feeling hopeless about what's to come. The acting is still great and I enjoyed the scenes while they were on, but as soon as they were over they no longer have any relevance. The entire sequence with Luke and the Wampa serves no purpose other than to explain away Hamill's facial scars. Luke's training with Yoda is just a pit stop that is forgotten as soon as it's over. Speaking of Yoda, he is a terrible character here. I haven't watched the original trilogy in over a decade, so I am very hazy on plot details, but re-watching it this time his character doesn't make any sense. His first "test" is wholly unrepresentative of what he's trying to measure and totally unfair. Plus, he looks awful. The puppet is terribly made. The biggest issue I have with Empire is that almost nothing that happens matters. If you went from A New Hope to Return of the Jedi and only watched the last twenty minutes of Empire in-between, you wouldn't be missing anything. What separates it from The Last Jedi, which has the same issue, is that I enjoyed the pointless scenes in Empire and I actually like the characters. The effects in Empire are much worse, but I like the battle on Hoth and I had fun on Bespin. The Last Jedi's pointless scenes were frustrating, nonsensical, and poorly written. Plus, Empire treads water for two hours and Last Jedi spends two and a half hours undoing the previous movie and wasting our time.

Sleeping Beauty

It's Snow White,if you replaced the dwarves with witches. The audio sounds awful, with a couple of characters sounding like their lines were recorded through a tin can, and they keep playing the same song over and over. The animation looks awful. Why does their world look like Minecraft? All of the trees are square and all of the hills and bluffs are inexplicably squared off. There is very little characterization for any of the characters and the villain has no motive other than "You didn't invite me to a party that I didn't really want to go to anyway" and the way magic works makes no sense. Why is it even called Sleeping Beauty when she's only asleep for about seven minutes? Sleeping Beauty is a messy fairy tale with characters that have no personality and a very weird surrealist animation style. There are no memorable characters, songs, or antics. It just doesn't hold up.