Category: Movies Watched

Peter Jackson presents a world unlike any you’ve seen. A young woman leads a band of outcasts to stop London, a predator city on wheels, from devouring everything in its path. There’s a great movie here under and behind all the world building and unnecessarily overwrought plot elements. There was a point where they were layering yet another bit in with a cyborg that I just rolled my eyes. I get that this is based off a book series that has a ton of back story, but the movie really didn’t need those extra elements. Additionally I was somewhat confused...

It’s been five years since everything was awesome and the citizens are facing a huge new threat: Lego Duplo invaders from outer space, wrecking everything faster than they can rebuild. This was a fun sequel that hit all the right notes but still felt like it wasn’t needed, almost as if the first movie really did everything I needed from a LEGO film.

Sean and Alex go on the run after Alex encounters mysterious orbs of light giving her extraordinary powers. Fleeing a covert government agency, they find themselves at the center of an unprecedented event in human history. First contact. I don’t think I’ve seen Stefanie Scott in anything else, but I was impressed by her in this film. It’s a fun ride with some odd choices but sticks the landing.

A cynical young woman in New York City keeps dying and returning to the party that’s being thrown in her honor on that same evening. She tries to find a way out of this strange time loop. How did they make a series out of this and not just a two hour movie? More importantly, how did they manage to make a series that’s THIS GOOD? The first couple episodes are pretty fun and in the same vein as Groundhog day, as seen through the haze of cocaine infused weed with psychotropics, but then the plot takes a massive turn...

A deactivated female cyborg is revived, but cannot remember anything of her past life and goes on a quest to find out who she is. Went to a sneak peek showing last night and thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of the film, though I do have some reservations about how the story was wrapped up. The effect are amazing, the story was pretty solid, and the world building is right up my alley.

In MY COUSIN VINNY, lawyer Vincent Gambini fights heroically to save two clients who have everything against them — including the facts that Vinny isn’t from the area, has never been in a courtroom, and only passed the bar exam six weeks ago. Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei were absolutely fantastic in this movie that I honestly don’t think would be able to be made today, if only because there’s so many damn cameras everywhere recording everything. Additionally, even backwoods Alabama would have a better legal system than what’s presented here, at least I’m assuming they would. Regardless, I missed...

Following the theft of a valuable piece of artwork, Gin Baker, an insurance agent, convinces her employers to allow her to befriend an aging master thief, in order to better protect their clients. Such a fantastic movie with obvious salacious elements, but it came out at a formative time in my life (13!) and at the height of Catherine Zeta Jones’ career, in my mind at least. This was also one of the last films that Sean Connery was in, and one of the first films that I remember with Ving Rhames. There’s some previous obvious and hilarious filters being...

Netflix has the entire series right now and while I remember not liking The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I actually found it to fit pretty well with the other movies in terms of story and lore. The special effects and acting are still confusingly bad, and the normally amazing Cate Blanchett was all over the place with her acting and accent.

After teens with mysterious abilities are detained by the government, Ruby, one of the most powerful, escapes and joins a group of other runaways in a resistance to take back control. Here’s a novel concept: people suddenly get powers and the rest of the worlds hates them, fears them, and hunts them down. I joke, but there’s a lot of x-men / mutant similarities here. It wasn’t until I looked up the movie on amazon that I learned it’s based on a series of four novels that I’m eventually going to check out. Sometimes there’s a good science fiction YA...

After a malicious data hack exposes the secrets of the perpetually American town of Salem, chaos decends and four girls must fight to survive, while coping with the hack themselves. That tagline on the cover is right on. There’s a gratuitiously long trigger warning at the beginning of the film that I really did laugh at, then went on to understand that it wasn’t entirely a joke, as all the stuff they warned you about really does happen. This was a good film, but really damn weird in all the best ways.