Category: Movies

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Shmee Is Engulfed In The Infinity War!

It has taken ten years to get here, but Marvel’s Cinematic Universe has finally all come together to take on its biggest bad guy yet, Thanos.  The fact they were able to pull something like this off on this kind of scale is incredible, and the fact it still manages to be a fairly focused movie and not some muddled mess is a minor miracle.  Of course you will have to wait for Infinity War 2 (or whatever the title of May 2019’s Avengers movie is going to be) to get the closure you were hoping for.

Avengers: Infinity War is the movie where Thanos actually does something, and he does it quite well.  For the most part I have never enjoyed overpowered comic book villains.  They are generally just massively powerful so that the comic book has a reason to cram in every hero known to man, and honestly Thanos isn’t any different, but Josh Brolin brings him to life perfectly.  He actually has a character of his own, and while his reason for wanting to kill half of all life in the universe, to stave off overpopulation, is iffy, you at least believe he believes it.  Even though if he hired a population expert, they would have pointed out that Earth, for instance, was at half its current population a little less that fifty years ago, meaning if he succeeds in his dark task it doesn’t buy the universe a lot of time.

The biggest problem for Avengers: Infinity War is that it feels a little like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.  It has epic battles and cool villains fighting heroes we love, but then it ends before it crosses the finish line, and there are two more Marvel movies we will probably need to watch before we can cross that line a year from now, but if this movie is yet just another setup movie, at least it was a good one.  It shows that Marvel has so far been the only studio capable of doing anything like this, and I am guess next year’s movie is going to be something special.

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The War For The Planet Of The Apes Proves There Are No Bad Ideas!

At this point you have either seen the Planet of the Apes prequels, or you are not interested in seeing them, but here is the deal, they are way better than they have any right to be.  War for the Planet of the Apes continues this trend, finishing the trilogy off perfectly.  Though it makes no sense by itself, so if you haven’t watched Rise and Dawn yet, than you really need to because War is the best of the three.  Somehow beating the curse of the third movie.

Since it is hard to review the third movie in a series were they all build on one another, I am instead going to use it to prove a point: For the most part there are no bad ideas.  If someone a decade ago would have come up to me and told me that some of the most thoughtful and well constructed blockbusters of the next ten years would be prequels to the old Planet of the Apes movies, I would have laughed at you.  What a terrible idea, but instead Rupert Wyatt (Director of Rise) and Matt Reeves (Director of Dawn and War) have created something wonderful.  How? By working hard and elevating the material.  Finding ways to explore humanity through the eyes of apes just gaining their sentience, continuing to find new and interesting ways to explore a being’s fight for survival, and the universal importance of family.

That can be true for all movies.  Movies with terrible premises can teach us and entertain us in all sorts novel ways, while movies with the best setups can be utter bores, or slapdash in their execution.  Wyatt and Reeves went the extra mile for movies that most people wouldn’t have given a second thought to, and they were fantastic and should be lauded for that.  All this to say, that I am still not sure I would greenlight a Planet of the Apes prequel if I was sent back in time, but at least it is good to know there are people out there who can make an outrageous idea like that work.  Plus, I am sure having Andy Serkis around always helps too.

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Shmee Is Ready As Player One!

While Ready Player One was a fine book, I doubt it will go down in history as a literary classic.  It was regurgitation of pop-culture that people either loved or hated.  It got even more backlash after all the Gamergate nonsense because in the book only certain people could be thought of as true “gunters” (egg hunters) if they knew enough 80’s trivia.  Which mirrored the ideas of Gamergaters’ who insisted that only certain people were true geeks.  Everyone else was just posing.  With all of that in mind, I was interested to see how the movie was going to deal with all that baggage, not to mention turn the book in to something filmable.  I am happy to report that Steven Spielberg and Co. did a pretty good job.

The movie Ready Player One changed pretty all of the major set pieces of book, and it cut out a lot of the book’s over the top nostalgia mining moments.  I mean there is still more than enough nostalgia to go around, but no one is reenacting War Games.  Though the movie does still follow Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) and his friends as they try and find James Halliday’s (Mark Rylance) Easter Egg in his virtual world The Oasis, and if they find it, it will give them control of the company that owns the game.

I was pleasantly surprised with all the changes that they made.  Usually I prefer movies that stick closer to the source material, but in this case the source material was pretty thin anyway, and a lot of it would have been downright unfilmable.  Not to mention the film rights for a lot of the stuff would be way to expensive to secure.  Ready Player One the film is a streamlined adventure tale, but with video games and comic books instead of Egyptian hieroglyphs and ancient manuscripts, and it is better for it.

The actors are all fine in Ready Player One, but I don’t remember any standout performances, but what I do remember was all the wild spectacle that Spielberg was able to put up on the screen.  None of it really matters, but it can be breathtaking.  While it may be quite a bit different from the book, it is the same in that it is a large dose of nostalgic action packed explosive cotton candy, but this time it is injected in to your retinas via large format technicolor.

Ready Player One is a fun movie, but it may not be for everyone.  If the thought of large action sequences involving Batman and the Iron Giant excite you like a ten year old playing with his toys, you will like Ready Player One.  If that sounds like nonsense, it is, and this isn’t the movie you are looking for.  I, on the other hand, quite enjoyed myself.

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Shmee Enters The Wild Wild Country!

It is always amazing how quickly things are forgotten.  It turns out that when I was very young there was a cult that tried to take over Wasco County, Oregon, and that they poisoned over a hundred people in The Dalles with salmonella.  They wore bright colors and meditated a lot, and they tired to assassinate the Attorney General of Oregon.  It seems like it would have been such a massive happening that people would still be talking about it, but until I watched Wild Wild Country on Netflix, I had never heard a thing about it, or if I had it must not have been talked about with any importance.

Wild Wild Country is a docuseries that interviews all parties involved with setup of Rajneeshpuram, the commune created for the followers of Rajneesh. Those who made it happen, and those that tried to make it go away.  It is an amazing tale, and all I could do is watch in disbelief as I heard of some of the things that went on out in the middle of nowhere Oregon.

The documentarians do a good job of leaving their voices out of this series, and letting all the people have their say, so it ends up being surprisingly nonjudgmental.  You can see both sides up to a point, and that point is obviously committing several Federal crimes.  Then you realize some terrible stuff was happing out on their ranch.

Wild Wild Country was fascinating to watch.  It is so crazy, I can’t believe this was the first time I really heard about all this.  If you are like me, and have never heard about any of this, it is must watch, or if you do remember it, but want all the info it is still worth your time.  Obviously due to the subject matter it is rated TV MA for a reason, so it is not a history lesson for young kids, but if you are of age, it is a mind trip worth taking.

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Season Two Of Jessica Jones Is Both Better And Worse Than Season One

Season One of Jessica Jones was pretty dang good, and it had one of the best villains in the MCU (which they keep insisting the Netflix Marvel shows are a part of).  While season one kind of explained why Jessica was a grumpy drunk, they really didn’t get in to it.  Season two takes a deep dive in to Jessica’s past.  Since her memory is sketchy at best, we figure out her origins with her as she investigates them.  It is not a happy trip down memory lane.

Had they just stuck to the Jessica stuff, things would have been excellent, but sadly season two has an irritating Trish Walker ‘B’ story that is aggravating to watch.  Every time she is on screen she is doing something dumb.  Which was true in season one as well, but they really amped up the annoying for her this season.  Additionally, Netflix has this strange need to make their Marvel shows thirteen episodes long, and this season would have been much better had they cut out at least three episodes.

Figuring out where Jessica is from makes Jessica Jones Season Two well worth watching, unfortunately the show takes a dive almost any time she is not on screen.  Good side characters are a requirement for a long running series, and so far almost all the Marvel Netflix shows have no one other than the main character we care about, and this is becoming a problem.  Maybe they can just clone Foggy or something.  Regardless, I still enjoyed season two quite a bit, and it had some of the series’ greatest moments, but it is bogged down by all side stories.  I hope they can figure this out for future seasons.