Category: Home Video

If you have followed my site, you know that I have a giant soft spot for stop motion animated movies, and Laika in particular brings me more joy than any one animation studio should.  That being said, Kubo and the Two Strings might be my favorite movie of theirs yet.  I just watched it, but I already want to watch it again.

The movie is about a young boy named Kubo (Art Parkinson) who has to find his father’s magical armor.  He will be joined on this quest by a talking monkey (Charlize Theron) and a beetle samurai (Matthew McConaughey).  He is armed only with his mother’s magical shamisen (kind of like a Japanese guitar).

There is so much to Kubo and the Two String’s story, but I don’t want to give any of it away.  It is simple in its premise and plot, but it excels in its execution.  It is sad, scary, funny and hopeful in just the right amounts.  The movie is an hour and forty minutes long, and none of that time is wasted.  It is fantastic story telling.

The look of this movie is flawless.  There are always incredible things to see.  I haven’t had this much fun just looking at a movie in a long time.  It is truly candy for the eyes.  It makes other films dull by comparison.  Even if I have a bias towards stop motion, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe me when I say Kubo and the Two Strings is a visual feat.

Another bias I have is Charlize Theron, so you will just have to trust me that she was great anyway, and she brought the monkey to life with her voice perfectly.  McConaughey and Parkinson also did amazing jobs.  With their talents it is easy to forget that you are looking at little models in front of a green screen.

Kubo and the Two Strings is so good that if it was a blanket I would wrap myself up in it and never take it off.  Sadly (thankfully?) it is not.  One word of warning, Kubo can be a tad scary, so if your kids are easily frightened you might want to wait until their are older.  Other than that, Kubo and The Two Strings is a great film for the whole family, and one I wholeheartedly recommend.

There are a lot of really good ideas in Jupiter Ascending: a girl on a Wizard of Oz adventure through space, ancient humans leading Anne Rice style houses, and generic modification just to name a few, but those ideas just never come together.  Which is a shame because I am always on the look out for good original Sci-Fi.

The story follows a young woman named Jupiter (Mila Kunis) who finds out that she is the exact genetic copy of the most powerful person in the universe.  Turns out that in space if you are the exact genetic copy of someone and they die, you get all their stuff.  Of course a lot of powerful people do not want some random person rising to power, so it is up to Caine (Channing Tatum), a dog person, to keep her safe while she completes the paperwork necessary to become the ruler of the galaxy.

There is just too much going on in this plot to allow for a coherent story.  Someone needed to take a hatchet to just about everything and then streamline this movie on the one or two best ideas.  Sadly that did not happen, so we don’t get to spend enough time with what is important,  and then waste time watching a bunch of random other stuff.  This probably would have made an interesting TV show because then they could have expounded on everything.

Much like the plot, the actors all seemed lost in this movie as well.  Mila Kunis tries her best, but her script must have just read, “act confused”.  Channing Tatum tries to channel an action hero, but I was too distracted by his odd fake flesh colored beard.  I know it was supposed to mimic dog fur or something, but it just looked odd.  Despite the fact Eddie Redmayne won a Razzie for worst supporting actor for his role, his over the top performance at least added interest.

The special effects and makeup could have saved parts of this movie, but they all looked cheap and dated (fake flesh colored beard anyone?).  Had I not known the movie’s budget I would have thought that The Wachowskis ambition outstripped their funds, but it turns out that the budget for this movie was north of $170 Million, so there is no excuse for everything to look as bad as it did.

I wanted to like Jupiter Ascending, but it ended up being boring mess.  A fun mess I could have respected.  The Wachowskis continue to have interesting ideas for their films, but they need someone to come in and help them edit them.  Though after three large box-office bombs in a row, I am not sure how many more chances they will get.

This summer we finally got a new Ghostbusters movie, and audiences largely ignored it.  The losses for this film are an estimated $70 Million dollars.  Was it because the movie was bad?  No it is pretty good in fact, but it was because the movie studio didn’t listen to its fans and made a movie they didn’t want.  A warning other studios would be wise to listen to.

Ghostbusters is a complete reboot of the Ghostbusters franchise.  The equipment, “science”, and setting are largely the same, but the characters are new and have different motivations.  Though in the end they pretty much play gender swapped versions of the original cast, and if you are just going to play different versions of Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson that comparison is not going to end well for you.

I think the lack of originality was the main problem with this movie.  You can tell that they wanted to do something different, but then they just kept re-doing things from the older movies, and what we learned from Star Trek Into Darkness is that it is always better to do something original instead of re-doing the classics.  You will never be able to make those classic moments better.

I have kind of been hard on this movie, but Ghostbuster’s saving grace is its fantastic cast.  Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon are all hilarious.  Especially Kate McKinnon.  Instead of being a bad copy of Egon she decided to go full blown crazed super scientist, and I loved every scene she was in.  She and Leslie Jones provided most of the laughs.  Which kind of left McCarthy and Wiig to be the straight women which is not their strong suits.  They were still good, but I think they all should have followed McKinnon’s lead and found some way to change up their characters.

I laughed a lot with Ghostbusters, but it just couldn’t live up to the original.  Not that I am condoning the sexist things that were said about this movie, but sometimes the fans are right, and maybe this franchise should have been left alone.  Still, if you are looking for a decently funny movie to watch you could do worse than the new Ghostbusters.

Alone one night I had the hankering for a good, sweeping rescue movie so I started up The Finest Hours on Netflix.

The film stars Chris Pine, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, Holliday Grainger, Eric Bana, and a host of other familiar faces. Chris Pine’s Bernie Webber is a Chief in the Coast Guard who failed to rescue the crew of a ship and that haunts him a little. At least Pine plays it that way and dialog tries to tell us that’s the case, but since this happens before the film I had no way to relate. He also starts a relationship with Holliday Grainger’s Miriam who is strong and independent, but fearful of the career Bernie has chosen. The film focus on this relationship at the beginning, before showing us the tragedy aboard the S.S. Pendleton that has shorn in half, trapping 32 members of the crew.

Eventually Bernie’s CO orders him to take small ship across the bar, which everyone knows is impossible, but I don’t because you haven’t shown me yet. Still it is an exciting scene and is fairly exciting. The rest of the rescue is fairly paint-by-the-numbers and then it ends, snatching a lot of the emotion from the part of the story.

The Finest Hours got me interested in the real story it is based on, but the film itself  failed to capture the excitement, uncertainty, and character of such a daring rescue. While flat, the film it isn’t terrible, so the Finest Hour is something I suggest you watch when you’ve got nothing else to watch.