Category: Movies

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Shmee Meets An Atomic Blonde!

On paper Atomic Blonde is perfect: it has the color and flair of the punk 80’s and the action of John Wick.  Plus, it features one of the greatest action stars currently working, Charlize Theron.  Mix in a little cold war era spy intrigue, and things get even better.  You look at everything Atomic Blonde has going for it, and you think it is going to be amazing, but sadly it falls a little flat in places, so it ends up being merely pretty good.  Watching a good movie should never make you feel let down, but when it had so much potential, it is hard not to be disappointed.

The hook for Atomic Blonde is fabulous.  You let Charlize Theron loose in Berlin just as the wall is about to come down, and she has to fight her way through every intelligence agency in town while trying to find some list with a bunch of spies’ names on it.  Can she trust the people she is working with?  Absolutely not, but we know she will claw her way to the top of the spy pile.

I was buzzing when I saw the first trailer for Atomic Blonde, and I was even more excited when I found out it was being directed by one of the guys that brought us John Wick, David Leitch.  Here is the thing, while Leitch did a great job bringing the style and filming the stunts, the spy stuff was all pretty by the numbers.  Sure there are the usual spy twists, but nothing that thrilling.  You just have to wait through it to get to the next fight sequence.

However, the fight sequences and the style do almost make up for the lack of an interesting plot.  I mean Atomic Blonde is so cool to look at, and you can feel every punch that gets thrown and every set of keys that get stuck is some dude’s face.  Theron was meant to be in movies like this.  I want to see her punch and kick everything and everyone.  I would faint if she and Keanu Reeves ended up in a movie together.

So where does this leave us?  With a movie that oozes style (and more than a little blood), and has some wonderful stunt choreography, but with spy-craft that is less than intriguing.  Hey, if you are just going in for the action, you will probably like Atomic Blonde, but if you were expecting a little more because of all the potential, it is hard not to be disappointed, so just temper your expectations, and things will be fine.

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Shmee Visits A Quiet Place!

I am sure when Jim from The Office started shopping around the idea of Signs, but everyone has to be quiet, there were not a lot of takers.  However, after a massive opening weekend Paramount must be glad they took a chance.  While the movie is far from original, though honestly what horror movie is at this point, A Quiet Place makes up for it with its spot on execution and amazing performances.

The quick setup for A Quiet Place is that in the near future the world is overrun by blind monsters with amazing hearing, and they kill anything that they can hear.  A family has learned to survive in this silent world, thanks in part to their hearing impaired daughter, giving them the ability use sign language to communicate.

As I said earlier, we have seen a lot of this before.  Obviously Signs used the hook of a family up against aliens, and just last year Don’t Breathe had everyone trying to stay quiet unless they wanted to get viciously murdered, but John Krasinski keeps everything so tight, tense and focused that the familiarity is not an issue.  Not to mention the family’s struggle to survive is so convincing that you can’t help but get swept away with what is happening on screen.

Obviously Krasinski’s directing wasn’t the only reason this family’s tale was so convincing, the actors get a lot of credit for that too.  A lot of times it is hard for real life couples to portray their real life chemistry on screen, but that did not seem to be an issue for Krasinski and Emily Blunt.  They don’t get all the credit though, their kids, played by Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe, also do a fantastic job.  Kids are always great for horror movies because with adults it ticks us off when they do something stupid, but kids, we believe that they will make bad decisions.

As you can tell, I really enjoyed A Quiet Place.  It is refreshing to see horror movies that are made with actual talent, and a will by their creators to make something good.  Instead of the usual dreck that gets made.  Even better, it might be the most family friendly horror movie made in quite some time, so if you have older kids, it is a movie you and the kids can get scared at together.  While not as good as last year’s Get Out, A Quiet Place is a fantastic way to start off the summer movie season.

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I Liked Half Of Pacific Rim: Uprising…

I was blown away by the first Pacific Rim.  It was big and dumb and I couldn’t stop smiling when I watched it.  Pacific Rim: Uprising is also big and dumb, but it misses the heart of the first movie.  Which is a shame, because the movie has a promising start, but then somewhere someone decided that the second half the movie had to be a pointless monster fight, and while Pacific Rim is a movie series about giant robots fighting giant monsters, apparently the writers must have had a contest for the dumbest reason for this fight because it defies all logical explanation.

Pacific Rim 2 takes place ten years after the events of the first movie, and the world has obviously changed.  People are rebuilding after the attacks, and the Jaeger program is struggling to continue to have relevance.  Meanwhile, Jaeger tech is booming on the black market as people try to build their own massive robots.  A post Kaiju world is an interesting one.  Sadly, the movie doesn’t continue to explore this, and instead has a series of increasingly dumb things happen until some robots fight some monsters.

I would have loved Pacific Rim: Uprising if had just extended the first part of the movie to a logical conclusion (or at least a more logical one).  While I may have suggested the writers had some sort of terrible contest to decide the ending, I am guessing there was actually more than a little executive interference that demanded a monster v robot fight like the one we got, and the writers had to figure out how to make it work.  Which is what makes this all so aggravating.  Had the whole thing been bad, I wouldn’t have been as upset, but there were some good ideas here that just got squandered.

I am guessing you can tell that I was disappointed with how Pacific Rim: Uprising turned out, but if you like the first movie, the second one is worth a rental, or if you are MoviePass subscriber like me, there are worse movies.  The robots and the monsters are still cool, even if the reason they are fighting is not.  Let’s hope Pacific Rim 3 learns the right lesson’s from Uprising.

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Shmee Befriends The BFG!

Considering The BFG was directed by one of the most celebrated directors of our time, Steven Spielberg, and it was based off a book written by one of the greatest children’s authors of all time, Roald Dahl, you would have thought it would have been a sure fire hit.  Unfortunately for Disney it was a major box office disappointment, and in just two short years it has been all but forgotten.  Thankfully its lack of success is not a measure of its quality.  The BFG is a fun family film, and one all ages should enjoy.

Like 99% of all Dahl’s books, The BFG is about an orphan.  In this case a young girl named Sophie (Ruby Barnhill).  She can’t sleep due to her insomnia, so she spends her nights taking care of her orphanage because the woman in charge of the establishment is incompetent.  One night after her rounds she sees something through the window.  It is a giant (Mark Rylance), and it snatches her away.  As you can guess by the title of the film it is probably not a spoiler that Sophie is just fine despite being kidnapped, and that she is probably better off with the giant than in the orphanage.  Even if all the other giants do want to eat her.

The BFG is quintessential Spielberg youthful adventure, and screenwriter Melissa Mathison (she also wrote E.T.) chose lighten up Dahl’s book, so the movie is more fun than scary.  Which is probably for the best, since Dahl’s dark take on the world doesn’t always transition well from page to screen, or at least without terrifying younger viewers.  With Mathison’s version, my three year old got a little nervous in a few parts, but for most part enjoyed everything she was witnessing, as did her parents.

This movie is pretty much about two main characters, Sophie and The BFG, and Barnhill and Rylance do a wonderful job.  Their chemistry is great.  Which is pretty amazing considering Barnhill is having to interact with a large CGI giant.  They must have had Rylance up on stilts or something so that Barnhill could interact with him properly.  Regardless of how it was done, kudos to a young actor for pulling off something so difficult.

Now to the one shortfall of this film.  The CGI.  While sometimes it is impressive, for the most part it just looks cartoony and falls hard in to the uncanny valley.  I am sure the trailers of the iffy CGI giant is one of the major reasons audiences didn’t show up for this film.  Which is a shame.  So few true family films come out, so it would have been nice for this film to succeed and encourage more movies like The BFG to be made.

The BFG is now on Netflix, and it is well worth watching on family movie night, or if you are standing in front of a Redbox wondering what to watch.  If there is one thing Spielberg knows how to do, it is direct a family adventure movie, and he doesn’t disappoint here.  It is not a hard hitting drama, or a massive spectacle, but it is sweet and fun, and for most families, that should be more than enough reason to watch The BFG.

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The Honest Trailers For Every Wes Anderson Movie Is Amazing!

Wes Anderson is kind of low hanging fruit for this sort of thing.  I mean he knows he makes movies with the same emotional beats, imagery, and story lines over and over, but we love him for it anyway.  It is just what he does.  However, Honest Trailers completely knocks it out of the park with this video.  It was all I could do to keep from crying I was laughing so hard.  Honest Trailers is usually pretty funny, but this is one of their best.  Obviously you will need to have seen a few Wes Anderson movies to truly appreciate it, but if you are fan of his work like I am, it is a must watch.