As usual, over Christmas break, I watched as many movies as I could squeeze in between shopping, wrapping presents, eating, sleeping, visiting family, and walking the dog. It was the usual combination of new films in the theater, catching up with movies on disc that I missed during the year, and streaming a few mystery films just to see what they were all about. I will discuss a couple of the movies I watched at greater length in the next couple of weeks, but for now, here is my annual post-holiday round up, eight movie reviews in four minutes:
Life of the Party:
If you like Melissa McCarthy’s usual brand of ridiculousness, this absurd but
familiar fish-out-of-water tale of a newly divorced mom following her daughter
to college is more of what you already enjoy. It is a dumb, clumsy movie, but
at the same time, there are at least a couple of brilliant comedic moments that
made me laugh in spite of myself. Feel free to turn your brain off and laugh at
this one.
Please Stand By: A
quirky indie movie starring Dakota Fanning, Alice Eve, and Toni Collette.
Fanning plays a mildly autistic woman who leaves her group home in San
Francisco to hand deliver her 450 page script for a Star Trek movie to
Hollywood. Its slow pace, high B-list stars, and muddy tone all scream indie
project, and your enjoyment will vary depending on your tolerance for slow
moving quirkfests.
Mission Impossible:
Fallout: Tom Cruise has been playing Ethan Hunt for 22 years and while
Fallout is an enjoyable action outing, it’s mostly because of Henry Cavill
turning up as an unexpected, brutish, mustachioed opponent. At 56, it will be
interesting to see how much longer Cruise thinks he can play the hero.
Pacific Rim: Uprising
is not as good as Guillermo Del Toro’s original film. It lacks the epic-sized,
rococo craziness, but hey, it’s still about giant robots beating up giant
monsters, so really how bad can it be? It’s an excellent Saturday afternoon,
folding the laundry film.
The Dressmaker is
an Australian film featuring Kate Winslet as a skilled dressmaker who returns
from Europe to her tiny, gossipy, scandal-ridden outback hometown to settle
scores and find resolution. The whole thing looks like it was filmed through a
deep-fried Instagram filter and Kate Winslet never even really tries to
approximate an Australian accent, but there are some enjoyable light moments
and the dresses Winslet’s character constructs for her various friends and
enemies really are something to behold.
Sierra Burgess is a
Loser is a Netflix original movie that, like most Netflix projects, is a
nice effort but generally misguided. It’s trying desperately to be a
gender-flipped John Hughes teen movie brought into the 21st century,
but basically, it’s just the story of a lonely girl catfishing an unsuspecting
guy but it’s okay because…I don’t know?
Bird Box: It’s an
Internet sensation, it’s Netflix’s biggest success, it’s the film that launched
a thousand memes – it’s also a joyless, grimy dishrag of a movie. The more I
think about it, the more I wish I had those 124 minutes back. It’s A Quiet
Place with blindfolds but without the heart, script, or performances that made
a Quiet Place worth seeing.
Jurassic World: Fallen
Kingdom. I sat through this entire film saying, “That’s not how this works.
That’s not how any of this works.” Admittedly, it is about cloned dinosaurs
running amok, so it’s not exactly a documentary, but even the human characters
act like poorly CGI’ed creations. The plot, dialogue, character motivation, and
last minute “surprises” all seem to be written by a team of 14 year olds locked
in a room with a week’s supply of Monster and Axe body spray. If you have been
fortunate enough to avoid Fallen Kingdom
so far, keep that going in 2019
Happy New Year everyone!
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