It's that time of year where all the important or lucky librarians get sent off to the American Library Association's Annual Conference. The rest of us get left behind. Gotta do something, so why not go to the movies?
The end of a movie is like desert to a dinner. Some of them make you shit the bed.
Jason wakes up in a world without a sky. Check out this cliche story that by the end will have you wondering.... Wait, are we still in a dream? SHARED DREAM: It'll make you SLEEPY.
For the last few days, I've been on an audio book binge on Nick Cutter. If you don't know the name but like horror novels, boy howdy you're about to get excited.
Three episodes down in this season and we might, might get a fight soon. Mostly everyone is postering and blowing smoke up each other's asses. For the most part, though, this episode is all about leadership and the eternal question of who has the power and who deserves it.
Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and Captain America all got an entry when talking about the two and a half hour Avengers: Infinity War in past blogs. Now I'm gonna zone in on the two areas that, for me, formed what is wrong and right about the movie: Guardians of the Galaxy and Thanos.
More Avengers talk as we dive into Captain America and why he’ll totally die next time. Plus some other thoughts on people that didn’t really matter that much.
Avengers: Infinity War reviews are fun to write because there's just so much. Over the last few days, I covered that I don't like spoilers, that Iron Man learned that fighting back was useless, and that Thor unlearned everything he had learned from his movies. Now we're gonna get into Bruce Banner and his alter ego Hulk and really learn that this movie is kinda unreviewable.
Thor really didn’t learn a damn thing when his daddy died, huh?
The review so long that I split it up. Here we have an overview of my feelings on spoilers, Spider-Man, and Iron Man’s portion of the film. More to come!
Everybody's setting up someone on this episode of fantasy geopolitical camp. Tyrion's teaching school in King's Landing while Theon and Arya are learning lessons. Let's travel around and see what everybody learned.
Look, I'm gonna say it so nobody else has to: people like to watch animals fight. Man vs Man is the most common of our movie going experiences, but the wide world out there in real life pits man against beast, chicken versus chicken, dog versus dog, and tortoise versus hare. With Rampage, we see a full acknowledgement of this with The Rock versus Flying Porcupine Wolf, Warthog Alligator, and Big Ape.
Secrets are being spilled, plans are being made, and a lot of people are finding out who they really are in this episode of Game of Thrones. We're kinda all over Westeros with a cursory check in with Dany. For the most part, Tyrion is taking his job seriously while Theon is learning his pirate nature.
I'll admit it, I laughed out loud at the opening to this flick. It's in the trailer, sort of, so spoiler alert or whatever but when that kid got ate I put out a nice loud "ha!" I'm not saying I'm not damaged, I'm just saying that shit was funny after a dozen trailers of build up. It's nice to be surprised once in awhile.
Historic dramas have always been money in the bank. Get some well known actor, cover him in old looking stuff, and tell a fake story involving true people. Drama ensues because that's what people make. Get two or more people together and they shit themselves with drama. Historic comedies, though, are super rare because nobody wants to make people important enough to talk about into a bunch of raging assholes, aka real people. Death of Stalin doesn't mind so much.
A group of criminals with a plan find themselves in problem solving mode when everything goes wrong. That's the definition of most heist movies. The leads are charismatic, the side characters are quirky, and the plot often leads with a slow clap. That's how they did it, you say, and walk from the theater thinking if only you could be that cool. Dog Day Afternoon is what would happen if you actually did try a heist.
It's really hard to keep a group of friends together, you know? You hang out all summer, working hard at that chicken finger job, and when school starts you all pledge to do it again next year. But really, look around. You're all a bunch of dipshits with no honor and your oaths mean nothing, unlike this episode of Game of Thrones where everyone's honor is held high and oaths mean everything.
When the Muppets came back with the big movie that won music awards and had Amy Adams in it, I had a hell of a lot of hope. They were my touchstone from childhood that over the years kinda became that thing I used to like. When Jason Segel and the crew came back, they filled it with heart and joy that I remembered from before Henson left us. Then those creative people left and we got the corporate mandated Muppets Most Wanted.
Horror often gets its balls cut off. Many of the entries in the genre are just this side of comedy, relegated even to jokes like the Chuckie scene in Ready Player One. True horror, the existential dread of life, seems to have been pushed aside in favor of jump scares and cheering when teenagers get hacked apart. Few movies contemplate a horror like the Autopsy of Jane Doe.
Most stories are about secrets being uncovered. They have an engine, something that drives the story that might be a secret all its own, but at the end of the day audiences are a bunch of nosy bastards who want to know all a character's secrets. Get enough characters together and a lot of hidden blood will be spilt.