‘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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On ‘Christopher Robin,’ ‘Eighth Grade’ and parents making movies about children

Posted on September 5, 2018 by reelentropy

Images courtesy A24 and Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios.

2/10 Oh my shitting God, they killed Christopher Robin’s parents too.

Disney’s Christopher Robin starts with the title character (Ewan McGregor, Orton O’Brien as a child) being sent to dreary, grey boarding school and necessarily abandoning his fuzzy friends that he brought to life with drawing and imagination. No sketching allowed in boarding school, I guess. Then, Disney kills his parents – his dad, whatever – breeds him with Hayley Atwell and sends him to die in World War II.

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Yes, ‘Mission: Impossible — Fallout’ is really that good

Posted on August 26, 2018 by reelentropy

Mission: Impossible — Fallout has a way of ratcheting up the tension past where you think it could possibly go. Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

9/10 I came into Mission: Impossible – Fallout wondering, if these movies are so good, why can I barely remember any of them?

I won’t be forgetting Fallout any time soon.

In the film’s opening, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team loses enough plutonium to fuel three nuclear weapons. They are sent to retrieve them, but only under the supervision of CIA assassin August Walker (Henry Cavill and his glorious $3 million mustache), who is authorized to kill him for any false move. Hunt continues his mission trying to save the world from impending nuclear annihilation, but tensions mount between him and Walker.

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