Tag: movies

Quick Movie Reviews

Terminator: Genisys

I had very low hopes for this movie after Terminator: Salvation but this movie has resurrected the series for me.  Salvation was a slog through a plot that didn’t really matter since we already knew about the human looking terminators and that Skynet would be defeated someday.  Genisys takes the story back to what was good about the first two movies: traveling through time to kill Sarah Conner.  It doubles down on that by introducing two more plots to kill her and a guardian terminator called Pops.  What could have been a confusing mess is handled well enough to be fun action movie.  Rating 4/5

American Ultra

This movie was much more violent than the trailer led me to believe.  I expected a bumbling stoner clerk with “super spy” abilities.  What I got was closer to Kill Bill than Clerks.  Still not a bad movie.  Story runs on over the top action but still delivers some comedy and drama. I really liked the dynamic between Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart.  Rating 3.5/5

Interstellar

This movie is a hard science fiction movie in the same vein as 2001: A Space Odyssey but with a bit more action.  Set in a future, year unknown, that doesn’t look too different from our own a man stumbles into a secret NASA project to find a new home for humanity in a distant galaxy.  I like that movie is almost purely driven by science.  The NASA robots were a surprise.  They look like the monolith from 2001 but coated in polished aluminum, with two small monitors for a “face” and very human sounding voices.  Completely nonhuman looking but still very humanized.  Rating 4/5

The Giver (movie) – Review

So, The Giver has been on Netflix for a couple of months and it keeps showing up in my “Top Picks”.  I’ve never read the book so I didn’t have any nostalgia for the story nor did I have any real idea of what the story actually was.  I had seen a trailer before the movie came out and the fan outcry that the movie was in color but that was it.

The story is pretty average for a YA dystopian novel.  After a great war/cataclysm society has been rebuilt around the idea of “sameness” and everyone has forgotten the past and takes daily injections to suppress their emotions.  Jonas is chosen to be the Receiver of Memory.  A job that entails receiving memories of the past from The Giver.  There is a minor romance subplot with Jonas’s childhood friend but the main plot concerns how the memories of the past effect Jonas.

Most of the movie is shot in black in white with color added once Jonas begins receiving memories.  This lack of color to express the “sameness” the community was built around was well done.  I liked how color is introduced slowly into Jonas’s pov instead of the movie suddenly wiping to full color like The Wizard of Oz.

There’s nothing really new in the movie.  It shares a lot of tropes with other dystopian movies.  An emotional suppressed populace like in Equilibrium.  Constant surveillance, lack of privacy even in one’s own home, and the erasure of history like in 1984.  I also noticed a stylistic resemblance to Pleasantville with the black and white suburban imagery representing the “ideal” society and color used to show characters “awaking” to some truth.

The Giver is well made and the acting is fine but you’re not missing out if you skip it.

Rating: 2.5/5

 

 

Quick thoughts on Roadhouse

So I just watched Roadhouse for the first time(? I might have seen part of the beginning several years ago).  I thought I had seen it before but as I got further and further into the movie I realized no I had not.

The rich guy extorting and controlling the town was not a plot I expected but it unfolded in an enjoyable manner.

The fist fights are almost painfully slow by modern standards with clearly telegraphed punches and kicks.  They are easy to watch since the camera isn’t constantly shaking or cutting to a new angle every second.

There is plenty of nude women as one would expect from a movie of this era.  Swayze also has his share of shirtless scenes and butt shots as well.

Overall I’d say it’s worth watching at least once for 80’s and Swayze nostalgia.

 

LGBT Movie Night: “Do I Sound Gay?”

I went to a LGBT movie night hosted by the local Unitarian Universalist church.  Quite a few of the regular members are LGBT so it’s a pretty accepting church.  I went for a while but I’m not one for getting up early on my days off when I have Sundays off but I’m still friends with a lot of them and show up to events.

We watched “Do I Sound Gay?” which is about a gay man investigating why some gay men have what most people identify as a gay sounding voice.  Also, throughout the movie he is talking to speech therapists to try to change his voice to sound less “gay”.  I kind of didn’t like how the movie was framed around him not wanting to sound “gay”.  I wish it had just been about what sounding “gay” was and how gay men related to it, instead of framing it as a bad thing from the start.  Besides that it was an entertaining film.

As a trans woman I have a complex relationship with my own voice.  I’ve gone from not caring to hating it to accepting it.  I still have days when I don’t like my voice but I accept that it’s what I sound like.  I’m lucky to not have a super deep voice but I do get sired on the phone.  It’s too much to really unpack in this post.

I would love to see a film called “Do I Sound Like a Woman?” about trans women and how we relate to our own voices.  Not from the point of view of someone trying to change their voice though.  Just interviews or round table discussions about how we have or haven’t changed our voices.

Thoughts on The Turman Show

I just got done watching it and it doesn’t quite hold up.  It’s still a great film but the tone is more comedic than I remember.  In my memory, there was a build up of things going wrong and Truman beginning to notice the patterns of the extras around him leading up to his ‘father’ returning.  At which point the backstory and setting are revealed in the interview with the director.  I know the idea of The Truman Show wasn’t really a reveal but it could have heightened the tension in the beginning if it wasn’t shown right away.

This probably less the movie not being what it could be and more my own views of reality changing over time.  I’m sure the first time I saw the movie I thought it was funny that Truman was living in a manufactured sitcom world.  Now I watch it and I can’t help but feel horror at his situation.  To discover that everyone he knows; his best friend, his wife, his neighbors, his mom, the guy he buys his newspaper from, the woman that passes him on the street; is lying to him is horrific to me.

The Truman Show is a good movie but I would like to a version of it that abandons the tv viewer pov and keeps to Truman’s pov.  The movie often switches to “hidden camera” shots to remind the viewer that Truman is always being watched but I feel like it distances me from Truman.  It’s another layer between me and Truman when I want to be right there next to him.  I want to see him find the cracks in his false world.  I want to see him question his reality. I want to see everyone around him insist he’s crazy.  I want to see him break out of his cage.  And I want to see him pull back the curtain and show us the man pulling the strings of his world.

 

Hardcore Henry trailer

Yesterday I saw the trailer for this movie on Hulu.  I have actually been skipping it over on Youtube for like a week because I was confusing it with a tv show that I have no interest.  Today I saw the trailer on the big screen in front of Deadpool.

Hardcore Henry is about a man who was killed/horribly injured somehow but his wife has brought him back with the help of super advanced prosthetics she made.  An evil corporation, I guess, breaks into the lab to steal her work and kidnaps her.  The rest of the movie looks to be a series of over the top action scenes leading up to her rescue.

This is all fairly standard scifi action movie boilerplate.  The twist is the movie is shot from Henry’s pov.  First person movies are not new thing.  Most found footage movies are basically first person.  This movie looks to have nuch smoother camera movements than your typical found footage movie though.  Also in the trailer it’s established that the main character is mute.  First person perspective, action shooter, mute protagonist.  Yeah, this movie is very much in the style of first person shooter games.

There isn’t much in the trailer that makes me want to see this movie but if I did, I would want to see it in the theater.  There’s a scene in the trailer where Henry flips end over end as he falls off an overpass. Watching this on my tv I was not impressed.  Watching it on the theater screen I felt a lot more “in the action”.  A couple other scenes also gave off that vibe.  It’s the same effect you get from watching first person roller coaster footage.  This is going to be the reason to see this movie in the theater.  Not the story or effects but the “first person action experience”, which I don’t think will translate to the small screen.

Overall I’m not interested in another generic action movie about a man rescuing his wife even with the first person gimmick.