Aspiring franchise-starter ‘Mile 22’ trips at the starting line

Posted on October 3, 2018 by reelentropy

Again, this Option 3 – still very much military. Images courtesy STXfilms.

2/10 Mile 22 is from director/producer Peter Berg and star/producer Mark Wahlberg, the creative team that has dedicated itself recently to hyper-jingoistic movies like Lone Survivor and Patriots Day, and they aren’t all that bad. Deepwater Horizon in particular is a stunningly effective – and not particularly political – film. Besides, fascy movies can be good. Look at 300 – that movie’s fascist as shit, and it’s great! And in Mile 22, they add Iko Uwais to the cast, the golden god of silat who made the Raid movies possible.

So I came into Mile 22 with fairly high hopes.

They weren’t met.

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‘Crazy Rich Asians’ is terrible

Posted on October 3, 2018 by reelentropy

Chu and Young spend so little time together it’s genuinely difficult to find screenshots of the two of them without specifically looking. Images courtesy Warner Bros.

2/10 In the late August dead zone, which this year was filled with some fairly interesting releases, Crazy Rich Asians spent three weeks at the top of the box office, including Labor Day weekend, a run that included an astonishingly low drop of 6 percent in its second weekend. It’s been met with critical acclaim, and a sequel is on the way.

Also, it’s absolutely insufferable.

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‘BlacKkKlansman’ too focused on its fiction

Posted on October 3, 2018 by reelentropy

Dis joint is based on some fo’ real, fo’ real shit. Images courtesy Focus Features.

5/10 BlacKkKlansman opens on footage from Gone with the Wind, a famous crane shot of Scarlett O’Hara (Vivian Leigh) tending to wounded Confederate soldiers after the Battle of Atlanta. It then cuts to an extended scene of Dr. Kennebrow Beauregard (Alec Baldwin), a fictional ‘50s politician, arguing vehemently against integrating black Americans into schools as footage from Birth of a Nation plays over his face, stumbling over every sentence.

Clearly, this has been going on a while.

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Only official ‘Slender Man’ movie is the worst ‘Slender Man’ movie

Posted on October 3, 2018 by reelentropy

This character was completely cut out of the final film. Images courtesy Sony Pictures Releasing.

1/10 And now to dissect Slender Man, the movie its own studio didn’t want you to see.

In rural Massachusetts, four bored teenagers summon the Slender Man. They do this by watching a video on the Internet straight out of The Ring, but one with quickly flashing images that lead theaters to post epilepsy warnings. Each of the cohorts are affected differently. Katie Jensen (Annalise Basso) quickly disappears, and Chloe (Jaz Sinclair) goes mad. Of the remaining characters, Wren (Joey King) frantically searches for a solution while Hallie Knudson (Julia Goldani Telles) spends the majority of the film in denial, which in hindsight I think is meant to be the central conflict. At a certain point, the movie just ends.

The central issue with Slender Man is obviously not the movie itself, which anyone who was paying attention knew up front was going to be pretty bad. But before we get into the real-world problems, we need to stop on that point, because it’s really, really bad.

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‘Meg’ measures up to sharks’ giant film legacy

Posted on October 3, 2018 by reelentropy

Oh man I do not like sea monsters. Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

8/10 I was perfectly fine skipping The Meg. Every five years or so, some shark movie comes along to pick the cartilage of Jaws, and I didn’t think this one would be anything special. But then it made a ton of money, and after checking out, it’s actually pretty fun.

Above the Marianas Trench in the west Pacific, a research team funded by Jack Morris (Rainn Wilson) is preparing to examine what they believe to be an even deeper part of the trench concealed under a thermocline cloud of hydrogen sulfide. Researchers discover a whole new world underneath the cloud, but one containing an ancient monster – a megalodon, a species of gigantic shark thought to have been extinct for 2.6 million years. The team escapes, but unleashes the leviathan in the process. The team, lead by rescue diver Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham), commits to hunting the beast down before it irrevocably alters the ecosystem.

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