Category: movies

  • Movie Pass Adventures: We Grown Now

    I really wanted to like this movie more. The lead kids have tons of charm, and their performances carry real weight when they aren’t trying to make the dialogue work. It’s not just them; the rest of the cast has to deal with the same problems. Add in some saccharine music and the whole thing falls apart. Even the color grading seems off, way more amber colored than the trailer.

    By the way, I seem to be in the minority on this one. It has really strong critic and audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, and a pretty strong showing on Metacritic.

  • Movie Pass Adventures- Double Dunst, Day 2: Spider-Man 2

    My brother and I saw the original 2002 Spider-Man movie in a theater last week, and it was great to see it with an audience. This week we went to Spider-Man 2, and the audience… sucked. Look, I know James Franco has been exposed as a less than stellar human, and I know his part is mighty melodramatic, but that doesn’t mean you should laugh every time he appears. Stay with the movie, people! I should have gone to the Alamo Drafthouse instead; audiences there are rarely jerks.

    Rosemary Harris is the Aunt Mayest of Aunt Mays. Her Aunt May is also mighty strong: she hangs from an umbrella off the side of a build for nearly two minutes! I couldn’t do that.

  • Alamo Drafthouse plays some wild stuff.

    A poster for "Alamo Mind Cinema" featuring images and titles of multiple imaginary movies, including Chubby Rain, Simple Jack, Satan's Alley, and Da Derp Dee Derp Da Teetley Derpee Derpee Dumb

    Update:

    Someone pointed out that a movie called “Bitter Harvest” was actually made a few years ago. If you want your poster of imaginary movies to avoid having real counterparts, steal this version instead:

    A poster for "Alamo Mind Cinema" featuring images and titles of multiple imaginary movies, including Chubby Rain, Simple Jack, Satan's Alley, and Da Derp Dee Derp Da Teetley Derpee Derpee Dumb. Bitter Harvest has been replaced by Habeas Corpus.

  • Movie Pass Adventures- Double Dunst, Day 1: Civil War

    Civil War movie bar

    I like the “grizzled and world-weary” version of Kirsten Dunst.

    We never find out what caused the war, or why the states split the way that they did, but that’s not the part of the story this movie is telling. We’re not here for the war; we’re here to explore the creation of journalists. There’s some obvious foreshadowing- at one point I thought “here come the lovable-yet-easily-disposable characters that one of the main characters need to die so they can have an emotional breakthrough” – but it wasn’t so egregious that it broke the movie.

    Tomorrow: Another day, another Dunst movie featuring photojournalism!

  • Movie Pass Adventures: I’m “George Lucas” : A Conor Ratliff Story

    I'm "George Lucas" : A Conor Ratliff Story movie bar

    I’ve never really watched The George Lucas Talk Show- I flipped by it once a few years ago and I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for it, so I snap judged it to be not for me and never went back- but I enjoyed this enough to think I should give it another shot. Even if the show still isn’t for me, I appreciated the look into one man’s devotion to an idea that seemed more than a little too kooky to succeed.

  • Movie Pass Adventures: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

    The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare movie bar

    BASED ON A TRUE STORY, YOU GUYS!

    That’s what it said at the beginning of TMoUW (I’m declaring “TMoUW” to be the official shorthand name for this movie, by the way), and I’m sure there are chunks of somewhat-factual people and events in there, but most of it felt about as true as The Beekeeper. In fact, this is like a whole squad of Keepers of Bee. The main difference is that the unstoppable good guys in this movie all seem very pleasant as they plow through Nazis to save the world.

    My main thought watching this: I wish they’d given Henry Cavill a chance to play a charming and happy Superman.

  • Retro Movie Pass Adventures: Spider-Man (2002)

    Spider-Man movie block

    Man, this movie holds up. It’s a superhero movie that respects the source material without taking it as gospel. So good to see it on a proper screen.

    Side note: when this movie came out I remember thinking “that guy is way to old to play Norman Osborne.” Now I watch it and think “Hey, look at Willem Dafoe’s baby face!”

  • Movie Pass Adventures: Monkey Man

    Monkey Man movie bar

    Dev Patel plays kid, a homeless underground fighter with perfect teeth and a thirst for revenge. Watch and see how many different action movie references you can find! See if you can collect all the parts of The Hero’s Journey! And if you only take one lesson from this film, let it be this: Don’t mess with the Trans community.

    Lots of fun, but how can you make a movie called “Monkey Man” and not include the Rolling Stones song? Maybe it was in the end credits and I missed it.

  • Movie Pass Adventures: La Chimera

    La Chimera movie bar

    Advice: If you’re going to see three movies in three days, don’t watch the quiet subtitled foreign language film on day three after a no dialogue movie on day one and a frenetic tons of layered jokes film on day two.

    Also: if you are going to ignore this advice, make sure the day three movie is worth watching. La Chimera was worth the sudden lane change and gear shifting.

    What? That doesn’t seem like a review? Well, who told you this was a review blog?

  • Movie (no) Pass Adventures: The People’s Joker

    I saw The People’s Joker last night, and I couldn’t figure out a clear way to describe it. There’s so much going on. It uses existing characters, except they’re really distorted parodies of the characters. It looks like it had an eight dollar budget. It’s direct and garish, but also subtle and clever. It includes a ton of different media styles – live action, CG, animated, musical, whatever it can afford- but it all holds together. Packed with references to three different worlds, but somehow still cohesive. How do you condense that into a word a phrase?

    Then I listened to the Maximum Film podcast discussion of the movie, and they had the right term: this is a movie version of a zine. Take existing materials, cut them up, mix in your own creations and ideas, and make something wonky and wonderful. Something undeniably new.

    I think I can safely say this is the best trans self discovery story seen through the lenses of mainstream superhero films and the stand up comedy world ever created.

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