‘Bumblebee’ isn’t actively offensive, which is apparently enough now

Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

4/10 It’s 2018. The Transformers series was met with poor critical reception pretty much on arrival, but last year brought with it the first indication that audiences might be growing tired of it as well. Franchise director Michael Bay, who has a history of sexualizing underage girls in his movies, could get #metoo’d at any moment. Paramount Pictures needs proof that its star franchise can successful without Bay and all that he brings with him, with a potentially different cast of characters and on a much smaller scale, proof that it can remain a reliable and more varied source of income going into its second decade of existence.

Enter Bumblebee.

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‘Aquaman’ gets big picture wrong, gets details wrong too

Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

2/10 Last year, The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro’s fairy tale love story about banging a frog person, won best picture, and I warned at the time to be ready for an influx of movies about sexy frog people.

Now, almost a year to the day after Shape of Water’s wide release, Warner Bros. has released Aquaman, its superhero spin on the classic frog person myth, starring Jason Momoa as the most conventionally sexy frog person that ever croaked. As with most movies crimping off an Oscar winner, Aquaman is pretty awful.

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Now is not 1964

Emily Blunt is practically perfect in every way, but this is also true in Sicario and Edge of Tomorrow. Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

3/10 The original Mary Poppins was a technical marvel, one that reinvigorated a dying genre and would be held unto this day as the crowning triumph of Disney productions. It was sold and resold and resold again on the strength of how timely and cutting-edge it was in 1964.

But now is not 1964.

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Clint Eastwood’s ‘Mule’ feels amateurish

Get off my blindspot! Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

1/10 After 37 movies in the director’s chair, not including ones he only produced or starred in, 88-year-old Clint Eastwood remains a cultural icon who commands the respect of his peers and viewership, but with every new movie he directs, it becomes more and more clear that somebody should take the camera away from him – or at least, take the chair away from him.

He makes a real ass out of himself in In The Mule, the new screwball comedy based on the story of Leo Sharp. In the movie, Earl Stone (Eastwood, who also directs and produces), a Korean War veteran whose horticulture business goes under in 2017 because it can’t compete with this newfangled Internet phenomenon, gets into drug running for the cartel as a way to make money for his family and community. An ideal mule because of his age, race and pristine driving record, Stone quickly becomes the cartel’s top man, but then some of the cartel members begin to resent him for reasons that are either unclear, stupid or both. Stone, who is estranged from his family because he consistently picked work over them to an insane, almost hilarious extent, is forced once again to pick between his cartel work and being there for the people he loves.

None of this connects in any way to the DEA investigation led by Colin Bates (Bradley Cooper).

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‘Spider-Verse’ a brilliant, beautiful collision of aesthetics, stories

Stills aren’t going to do this movie justice, but we’ve got a lot of them. Images courtesy Sony Pictures Releasing.

8/10 Given Sony’s recent history of desperate moneygrubbing, both in general and with Spider-man in particular, I was more than happy to skip Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The film’s premise makes it feel like a gimmick to kick-start the Spider-verse they’ve been talking about for four years now – it’s literally in the title – and right up until its release and amazing critical reception, I thought it was going to simply fizzle out of existence like the other solo-Sony attempt to compete with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

But after the late-cycle publicity blitz, the technical details became interesting enough to get me in the door for what turned out to be a wonderful movie.

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