‘Creed II’ continues to modernize, improve franchise

Posted on December 23, 2018 by reelentropy

Image courtesy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

8/10 Flawless and intense, Creed II is one of the better boxing movies I’ve seen.

Three years after the events of Creed, Donnie Johnson-Creed has won his way to a fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. After earning the title, he is promptly challenged by Vikto Drago (Florian “Big Nasty” Munteanu). Drago’s father, Ivan (Dolph Lundgren), killed Johnson-Creed’s father in the ring in Rocky IV 30 years earlier, a fact the younger Drago constantly uses to taunt Johnson-Creed. With Johnson-Creed clearly outmatched by the 6’4 monster but unable to back down, trainer Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone, who also produces), who blames himself for Creed’s death, must watch helplessly as history repeats itself.

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Ralph breaks the mold for animated sequels

Posted on December 23, 2018 by reelentropy

Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

8/10 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph released near the end of a period of experimentation for Disney Animation studios after its parent company bought its chief rival, Pixar, in 2006, only to maintain Pixar as a separate studio that continued to outperform Disney Animation in the same target demographic.

It was around this time that Disney Animation finally followed Pixar’s lead and moved to primarily computer-generated animation for its movies, but we also see in this period a distinct trend toward mimicking Pixar’s emotional complexity, to varying degrees of success. Wreck-It Ralph was OK, but as with most attempts to mimic Pixar, it feels like an attempt to mimic Pixar.

The sequel, on the other hand, feels much more on the mark.

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The Möbius strip- Animated Spider-Man swings to top of box office, Oscar discussion, ‘The Shining,’ ‘Jurassic Park’ inducted into National Film Registry

Posted on December 18, 2018 by reelentropy

Image courtesy Sony Pictures Releasing.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse opened at no. 1 with a solid $35.4 million, which is the largest opening all time for an animated movie in December. Fellow new release The Mule was a distant second with $17.5 million, followed by Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch and Ralph Breaks the Internet in their sixth and fourth weeks of release, respectively. The weekend’s other new release, the $100 million-budgeted Mortal Engines, suffered a catestrophic $7.6 million debut- Box Office Mojo

As Into the Spider-Verse has catapulted into the conversation for Best Animated Feature, here’s a look at how producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller broke the rules of animation to create a moving comic book- Indiewire  

Mortal Engines is, conservatively, on track to lose more than $100 million at the box office- Variety

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Re-examining the backlash against ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ one year later

Posted on December 18, 2018 by reelentropy

Most images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi celebrated its first birthday last Saturday, though it feels like we’ve been living under its shadow for ages – time moves strangely in the era of American fascism.

Criticism of the film exists at a complicated and troubling intersection of grand artistic ambition, valid criticism, fan entitlement and zit-faced urchins who don’t want women or brown people in their movies or country. There have been several attempts to lay out the various aspects of this intersection, and this piece is going to lean heavily on the work of others, but with a year’s hindsight, I want to at least try and put everything in the same place.

The story of audience response to The Last Jedi is a story that transcends this individual film and several different groups of films. This is a story about how our culture processes media in the late ‘10s and how the political divisions most prominent in this era cross over into other facets of American identity. Let’s get started.

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What is ‘Widows’ even about

Posted on December 10, 2018 by reelentropy

Everybody thinks she’s the greatest, but how weird would it be at this point to see Viola Davis playing a character who isn’t absolutely horrible to everyone around her? She’s gotten pretty one-note lately. Images courtesy 20th Century Fox.

4/10 I’m still not actually sure what happened in Widows.

The plot is simple enough – I mean, it’s incredibly needlessly complicated, but I at least understand its contents. Renowned heistmaster Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) is killed on the job, along with his crew. Their prize, $2 million in cash stolen from local crime boss Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), burns to ash in the process. That was Manning’s seed money for a campaign to be alderman of Chicago’s south side, and he demands that Rawlings’ widow, Veronica (Viola Davis), pay him back.

Anybody else want to talk about how campaign finance laws are still quite strict, and Manning was already headed for a world of trouble if he was financing a campaign with money that, at any point, had to be stockpiled in a large stealable block of cash? No? I’m literally the only person in the world who cares about that? OK, glad we cleared that up.

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