‘Parabellum’ step down for story, step up for franchise

Images courtesy Summit Entertainment.

8/10 John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum is absolutely everything you’ve ever wanted out of an action movie. It is a pants-on-head insane celebration of stunts and choreography, an asylum of guns, knives, gothic noir landscapes, hounds of hell, classical literature, blood oaths, blood sacrifices, shattered glass, crimes, punishments and neon lights. It is a sendup of traditional filmmaking in which as much as possible is shot in-camera, a glorious carnival of everything that can be done with gleefully dismissive attitude toward the question of what should be done.

And that’s the first half hour of Parabellum. The rest is, I mean it’s not bad, it’s just different.

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Visually creative ‘Tolkien’ failed by fundamentally poor storytelling

Tolkien is notable as the first Fox film distributed after the Disney acquisition. Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

3/10 With the rate at which boring, inaccurate and horrendously bad biopics win awards, Tolkien could easily have been a formulaic Oscar grab. Instead, the creative team has gone in a different, much more ambitious direction, trying to recreate the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s life through the eyes of someone who wrote like he did. The brave attempt is undermined by its basic storytelling failures.

Tolkien follows the title character (Nicholas Hoult and Harry Gilby) through the first 25 or so years of his life, focusing on a handful of relationships and locations that would directly inspire plot elements in his Lord of the Rings books.

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‘Detective Pikachu’ an adoring, vibrant journey into the Pokemon World

It’s a photorealistic pikachu! And it’s fuzzy and it’s got a magnifying glass and a deerstalker cap! Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures!

9/10 So they’re finally making a live-action Pokemon movie. I guess that’s all right. Guess the real surprise is that it took this long. Honestly, I’ve only got one request – don’t do it halfway. Don’t make some movie-product meant to be advertised for more than it’s meant to be consumed. Just make it real.

They made it real.

In the Pokemon World, Tim Goodman (Justice Smith), who once aspired to become a champion trainer, never left his hometown. When his police detective father dies, Goodman is called to settle his affairs in Ryme City – a new metropolis where battling is outlawed and man and wild pokemon live side by side. In his father’s apartment, Goodman meets Detective Pikachu (Ryan Reynolds), a miraculous mouse who can speak English, but only to Goodman. The pikachu has no memory, but describes himself as a world-class detective and resolves to find Goodman’s father.

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2016 election fan fiction piece ‘Long Shot’ is existentially disgusting

Images courtesy Lionsgate.

2/10 February 2017, Hollywood- Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg share their 14th bowl of the day on the friend-of-a-friend’s couch they’ve been crashing at for a period of time they still refer to as a handful of months, but has stretched past the year mark. Decades of marijuana-induced creativity had already crippled them. At this point, Goldberg needed at least three ounces to come up with a decent password, and even then, it was mostly just “asdf” with different letters capitalized. The easily distractible duo’s thinking had been further bogged down by the 2016 presidential election, which, to its credit, had perfectly captured the kind of absurdism they’d only ever blown smoke at.

As the grass dwindles with the subtle signs of their near-impenetrable tolerance holding staunch, that fresh dank smell fading so much more rapidly than it used to, the munchies now saked by only a couple bites of Pop-Tart, the high that now takes so long to hit that during every session each of them at some point for some moments thinks, “this is it, it’ll never come, I’ll never be high again,” Rogen suddenly has the idea that had eluded them all this time, the golden dream that will carry them off of the friend-of-a-friend’s couch and back into an at-least one-bedroom apartment for at least a few months or so. He turns to Goldberg, breathless.

“What if Hillary, but hawt?”

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A fitting ‘Endgame’ for the MCU

Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

8/10 Maybe I would like all of these movies more if they were three hours long.

Avengers: Endgame follows in the immediate aftermath of Avengers: Infinity War, which ended when a failed philosophy undergrad named Thanos (Josh Brolin) wiped out half of the universe with six all-powerful infinity stones. At first, Earth’s mightiest heroes try the obvious – grabbing the stones back and using them to reverse the situation. Doesn’t work. The remaining avengers are forced live on in a new world mired not only in bereavement and regret, but in the stink of their personal failure.

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