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In: 2018, Hot Take

Hot Take: Like cat nip for critics. They’re going crazy over it but you can’t really figure out why. Funny, farcical satire that is better than average but falls short of the greatness some have bestowed upon it.

On paper, you can look at The Death of Stalin and instantly determine how it will be received. Critics will love it. It’s a historical satire with a hot writer/director (Veep creator Armando Iannucci) and the ensemble cast is loaded with critical darlings. Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor, Simon Russell Beale, Jason Isaacs, Paddy Considine, Rupert Friend and Michael Palin all score bonus points whenever they’re attached to a film. Well, maybe not Jeffrey Tambor so much anymore but everyone else. While critics will love it, audiences will like it but not reach the euphoric level of excitement the critics will. And while critics will love it and the audiences will like it, the film will essentially be box office poison outside of a small art house release. In its initial weeks, The Death of Stalin lit up box offices with a decent opening on 4 and then 32 screens. Now that it has reached 484 screens, the reception is cooling off. So, maybe it’s unfair to call a film of this pedigree that has already generated $4 million at the box office poison but it’s not going to require additional resources to count all the cash it rakes in, that’s for sure.Read More →

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In: 2018, Hot Take

Hot Take: This nostalgia stuffed adaptation of Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel can be fun at times but sometimes feels like the movie equivalent of a greatest hits album from one of the best directors of our time. Like a greatest hits album, it’s fun to experience but feels all too familiar to be anything better than good.

The trailer for Ready Player One is enough to tell you if you’re going to enjoy the full-length film. The 2 hour, 19 minute glimpse into a fictional dystopian future where the world has gotten lost inside a virtual world known as the Oasis is also an opportunity for director Steven Spielberg to flex his science fiction muscles which he’s not done much of in recent memory. Expectations for this film were indeed high and, in some ways, it delivered but, overall, Ready Player One falls short of greatness as the pop culture references and not the characters or the plot are what keep you entertained. By the third act, when the characters and the story become what’s most important, Ready Player One‘s shoddy stitching can no longer be hidden underneath all that nostalgic fabric layered over top of what essentially is a generic flick featuring a Mary Sue of a protagonist in Wade Watts and a relatively derivative storyline that not only borrows its references from pop culture but blends up some of the classic storylines we’ve seen in Sci-Fi and serves it up as freshly squeezed. Is that a hint of The Matrix that I taste?Read More →

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In: 2018, Hot Take

Hot Take: It’s exactly what you’d expect from a YA romance in the same vein as a Nicholas Sparks film. The leads are charismatic enough to overlook some cheesy dialog and there’s even an unexpectedly good performance from Rob Riggle. 

If I’m being honest, I have a soft spot for the cheesy, fatalistic romance genre. Last year, I was especially high on Everything, Everything. The year before it was Me Before You. Midnight Sun is yet another one of those films. Driven by charismatic performances from Bella Thorne and Patrick Schwarzenegger (son of Arnold), Midnight Sun features a flimsy plot about a girl name Katie (Thorne) who has xeroderma pigmentosum, also known as XP, which is a disease that makes the ultra violet rays from the sun deadly. She can’t leave the house in the day, home schools with her widowed father as her teacher and basically has one friend (Quinn Shephard) as the rest of her community barely knows she exists. She’s obsessed with one of those community members, Charlie (Schwarzenegger) and when she runs into him at the train station one night soon after graduation, her life is forever changed. Read More →

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Hot Take: A mildly entertaining reboot that establishes Alicia Vikander can basically do anything including kick some serious ass. Outside of some pretty sharp visuals, the latest Tomb Raider doesn’t add much to the genre, though.

I’d talk about the latest Tomb Raider in terms of how good of a video game movie conversion it is but the bar is so ridiculously low for such a thing that it wouldn’t mean much. I’d talk about it in terms of treasure hunter/archaeological adventurer films but now you’re comparing it to the Indiana Jones saga and, since this is an origin story, this is less about Lara Croft’s desire to find artifacts and more about finding her father who has been missing and presumed dead for 7 years. Instead, the best thing to focus on here is Alicia Vikander and her establishment as a potential female action star taking over the role of Croft from Angelina Jolie who originally played Tomb Raider‘s heroine for 2 films in 2001 and 2003. Vikander not only proves that she can look the part (but in a very different way than the sexed up Jolie portrayed Croft back at the turn of the century) and can kick major ass but Vikander was able to add a depth to the character that wasn’t previously present in the Jolie version. It’s Vikander who helps propel this somewhat generic action flick to a slightly above average generic action flick. After seeing this reboot origin story, it would be perfectly acceptable for news of a sequel as long as Vikander is re-signed to portray the role again.Read More →

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In: 2018, Hot Take

Hot Take: If you’re not under 8 years old, this is pure torture. If you’re under 8 years old, you’re probably wondering why Gnomeo said, “Don’t call me Tiny D.”

Punny doesn’t always mean funny. If you need proof, check out Sherlock Gnomes, the unnecessary but inevitable sequel to 2011’s Gnomeo & Juliet (thanks to a worldwide box office of nearly $200 million). Better yet, save yourself some time and money and take my word for it. Instead of sticking with the Shakespeare theme, it was another classic writer’s work that would get the gnome treatment as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s world of Sherlock would join forces with the existing gnomed-out Shakespeare world. Sounds brilliant, doesn’t it? A writing team of just one (Ben Zazove) managed to bring Sherlock Gnomes to the big screen while Gnomeo & Juliet needed an entire baseball team to make it’s way to the big screen. Usually, a team of writers is bad news but maybe Ben could have used some help in tightening up his pun-filled, occasionally racist, frequently Elton John referenced (he’s the executive producer after all) script which has about as many laughs as John’s Candle In the Wind. Sherlock Gnomes is so bad, it gives 2017’s The Emoji Movie a run for its money for worst kid’s film in the last 12 months. That’s saying a lot since The Emoji Movie is one of the worst kid’s film of the last decade.Read More →

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In: 2018, Hot Take

Hot Take: It’s way too early to say Movie of the Year but it’s never too early to say Movie of the Year so far! Treating gay as normal as any movie I can remember, Love, Simon is one of the best “coming of age” and “coming out” films I’ve seen in recent memory.

There was a time when John Hughes ruled the box office. His wheelhouse was the high school drama and especially the high school romance. Hughes passed in 2009 and his style went out of fashion well before that but it’s proven that if you make a good, entertaining high school flick, audiences will watch. Case in point is Love, Simon which feels a little bit like a Hughes film but pulls off the restraint necessary to make an ordinary “coming of age” flick about a young gay high school student struggling with the idea of coming out to his family and friends. In it’s normalcy comes brilliance and nuance seldom seen in such a film. While it’s easy to dismiss the film’s accomplishments since many episodic television high school dramas have managed to pull off the same feat, Love, Simon doesn’t have the luxury of hours to build a compelling character worthy of winning over the audience to the point where you’ll be rooting for a happy ending for the titular character rather than just expecting one.Read More →

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In: 2018, Hot Take

Hot Take: Experimental doesn’t always mean excellent. Scripts matter. Unsane fails on so many levels to deliver something coherent and if someone other than Steven Soderbergh were to have been behind this mess, it would not be as well received.

I’ll be blunt about Unsane, the latest effort from Steven Soderbergh which experiments with the idea of shooting completely with the iPhone, I hated it. The last time I left the theater this angry about a movie was 2016’s Mother’s Day. While many critics are fawning over Steven Soderbergh’s B-movie shot entirely with an iPhone 7 Plus, this particular moviegoer can’t sign off on the finished product hampered by a terrible screenplay written by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer, the masterminds behind classics such as Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector, Max Keeble’s Big Move, Just My Luck and The Spy Next Door. The resulting product is a slickly directed bad movie featuring a gimmicky device that would have worked to add realism to a more plausible film but here, thanks to some sloppy, insulting choices by the writers who most think all audience members won’t care if nothing makes sense, it just makes it a novelty act. Most other directors would have been stuck with taking some of the heat for an incoherent and unintelligible storyline but Soderbergh’s pedigree allows him to get off the hook for these poor choices. Read More →

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In: 2018, Hot Take

Hot Take: Want to watch an impressive cast make a mediocre action comedy? The sad part is with a little bit of quality assurance, a leaner Gringo (about 20 minutes too long) could have made all the difference.

It didn’t surprise me to learn that Gringo, though released in 2018, was filmed in early 2016. With so much time between shooting and release, someone could have done a better job tightening up what could have been a decent action comedy. Instead, Gringo is more of a cautionary tale of what happens when you waste a talented cast on a promising concept but fail to deliver a tighter, more cohesive finished product. A cast featuring David Oyelowo, Charlize Theron, Joel Edgerton, Amanda Seyfried, Thandie Newton, Sharlto Copley and bit parts for Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Paris Jackson (Michael Jackson’s daughter) in her feature film debut deserves a better fate than what we’re given with Gringo. Poorly paced and muddled, Gringo is what happens when a good idea is executed sloppily. Just good enough to escape a January release, Gringo doesn’t fully earn it’s place outside of “dump month” with it’s best quality making you long for better films from the same genre which we were treated to throughout the ’90s.Read More →

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In: 2018, Hot Take

Hot Take: A dark, crafty psychological teen thriller with two breakout stars that has the ability to become a cult classic a la Heathers. A brilliant debut from writer/director Cory Finley.

Thoroughbreds is not a film made for the average moviegoer. That’s okay. They’re likely off seeing Black Panther for the second or third time or watching the Avengers: Infinity War trailer on repeat. It is the quintessential critic/film school flick though. Nowhere near as prevalent as these types of films were in the ’90s, Thoroughbreds is a refreshingly unique but thematically familiar teen thriller featuring Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy in breakout performances as two teens who used to be friends growing up but drifted apart. Amanda, played by Cooke, feels nothing and has been shunned by the community for euthanizing her horse with a knife and Lily, played by Taylor-Joy, feels everything and has been paid by Amanda’s mother to tutor and spend time with Amanda. Eventually, the two rekindle their friendship and Lily reveals that she hates her stepfather (Paul Sparks) which opens the door for Amanda to propose that the pair arrange to have her stepfather killed.Read More →

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In: 2018, Hot Take, Uncategorized

Hot Take: Filmmaker Ava DuVernay says A Wrinkle In Time is for kids or the kid in you, if you still have a kid in you. I hope you do because I’m still able to find that and A Wrinkle In Time was an amazing adventure.

It’s unusual how you remember some things from your childhood. I remember seeing The Neverending Story for the first time when I was 8. For a while, it was favorite movie of all time. (At that age, my favorite movie was the last movie I saw that I really enjoyed.) There was so much great about it: Atreyu, Bastian, The Childlike Empress, Falkor, The Rock Biter. It was one of the moments of clarity that I knew I’d be watching a lot of movies if the experience was anything like that. A decade later, a more cynical teenage version of myself tried to watch The Neverending Story again. It didn’t work out too well. What was wrong with 8 year-old me that I like such a kid’s movie. Having not been to the movies in quite some time thanks to a cruise to Mexico, Honduras and Belize, A Wrinkle In Time was the first film I had seen since coming back. I had heard the DuVernay commentary about the film being made for the kid in you and decided to take that approach walking in. While it’s easy to be cynical right now, leaving all of that baggage outside the theater can be helpful and, in this case, it might be necessary. A Wrinkle In Time is essentially a movie for children but it doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyed by adults. The visuals are stunning, the story is whimsical and there are enough strong, meaningful messages (at any age not just children’s age) to make this version of A Wrinkle In Time a  successful adaptation of the “unadaptable” children’s book.Read More →