Including...
In a year which brought us two of the best films the Marvel Studios have ever made, Peyton Reed's "Ant-Man and the Wasp" was quite the come down. Yes, the conceit of this character and series is to be more low stakes than many of the more epic minded Marvel entries. But Reed's first go with Ant-Man was just sensational, light and frothy while being absolutely inventive with its special effects and playful visuals toying with our size perspectives.
This time, the successes of the first film felt a bi told hat in a story that was so low stakes and not really much ever happened other than things growing bigger and smaller over and over again. Yes, it had it good points. Paul Rudd remains as engaging as ever. The new character of Ghost (as played by Hannah John-Kamen) made for a terrific tragic villain. The journeys into the Quantum Realm continue in their psychedelic wonder. And it's always great to see Michelle Pfeiffer. But that said, and except for a great post-credit sequence tying directly into "Avengers: Infinity War," this film is an inconsequential place holder.
(Originally reviewed July 2018)
The same thoughts are voiced for this film as well, a sequel that really works overtime and yet, not very much happens. There is much to admire, from the resplendent animation to Bird's zippy plotline and adventurous style and the fact that Elastigirl (voiced by Holly Hunter) gets to be the star of the show this time around. And yet, I just found myself more than a little bored, making this yet another subpar Pixar sequel that pales considerably from the original, making for one I will most likely never see again--and to think, this studio was once the GOLD STANDARD for American animated films, the films that I would watch all over again in their entirety right this instant. "Incredibles 2" is not one of them.
(Originally reviewed June 2018)
When it comes to the nature of homage, there is a very fine line between innovation and a simple exercise in nostalgia. "Ready Player One," Steven Spielberg's adaptation of the smash Ernest Cline novel is truly mixed at best, and while the source material for me was also more than middling and not much more than an excuse to have a book length pop-culture clothesline, this film failed to connect with me for different reasons.
As with the novel, the story itself is very clever. Set in the year 2045, where the Earth has become an over-populated disaster zone, humanity has turned towards life in the virtual reality world known as the OASIS where everyone lives through their avatars and the pop culture ridden landscape of essentially anything you can think of from the 1970's-1990's with the 1980's as the touchstone. The film chronicles a race for the three virtual keys that will reward the victor with complete control of the virtual wonderland. Yes, it is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory merged with "Tron" (1982) and "The Matrix" (1999) and since this is Steven Spielberg we're talking about, he has delivered a visually astounding feature.
But aside from some sequences, including a blast of an opening and voluminous car chase starring every familiar vehicle from pop culture you can think of, to dancing in a floating disco to New Order's "Blue Monday" and a downright spectacular tribute to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" (1980), and a slight commentary about our continued dehumanization in the real world compared to our synthetic lives on-line, "Ready Player One" is an otherwise empty experience drowning in purposeless CGI bombast and hollow nostalgia.
(Originally reviewed March 2018)
And now for the honestly bad ones...
Before Liam Neeson revealed himself to being the George Zimmerman of yore--a violent, racist caveman ready, willing and able to murder an innocent and random Black man in a bizarre form of troglodyte chivalry, the worst thing to happen to him was this film here, one so utterly stupid that I never even bothered to waste my time reviewing it! Not much more to say than it was simply 2018's entry in the annual "Liam Neeson Gets Mad" action series, this time involving a murder conspiracy upon a commuter train, and it was the dumbest, most insufferably inexcusable piece of tripe yet. It made the hysterical "Taken 3" (2014) look like "The Godfather" (1972).
The more I think about this film, I like it less and less.
Dear readers, I know how much so many of you loved this movie. I know that many of you are probably rooting for it to win Oscar recognition, thus capping off a very impressive awards season for itself, an accomplishment that only accents its massive box office success. To that, I am happy for you and I do not wish to rain on your parade.
But for me, as a lifelong lover of the movies and the band Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was an enormous letdown, the very type of film that could have been so much more because Queen, and the immortal Freddie Mercury in particular were so much more in reality. They deserved nothing less than a film for the ages and what they received (and for that matter, sanctioned as the surviving band members signed off on the film) was a bland, sanitized, watered down, by the numbers, sing-a-long crowd pleaser as tame as any forced jukebox musical.
Yes, we can debate about what kind of a movie "Bohemian Rhapsody" could have been for I would have loved to have seen the hard R rated art film that exploded onto the screen and broke the rules of the musical biopic genre much like how Queen fully re-wrote the rules for what rock albums could be over and over and over again. That is decidedly not what Bryan Singer, and then the uncredited Dexter Fletcher who finished the film after Singer's firing, delivered. Now, this would be OK, a more wide reaching populist film, but why did it have to be so badly stagnant?
There are good scenes here and there and it is gloriously filmed, but there was no momentum to the film, and therefore no ascension, just an empty checklist of the things we have to place into a Queen biopic just to say that these events were represented. And even then, the wealth of blatant historical inaccuracies was astoundingly oft-putting to the point where they completely took me out of the film!
No, you do not even have to be a Queen scholar to know when certain SMASH HIT songs were released but here they are in the film being depicted as being written in the wrong years, band members performing when they did not and worst of all, life altering events completely re-arranged to manufacture prefabricated drama in a life story that already possessed more than its share of inherent drama. The greatest offense for me was having Freddie Mercury's AIDS diagnosis become the catalyst for the band's iconic Live Aid performance in 1985, when in reality, Mercury's diagnosis arrived two years AFTER Live Aid! Inexcusable!
No, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is not a documentary. I realize that. But the re-structuring and watered down nature made the experience more than a little banal as well as fully inauthentic. As for Rami Malek's celebrated work in the impossible role of Freddie Mercury? Well, he works like the devil and he is probably the greatest Freddie Mercury impersonator you will see but I do not think it is really a great performance.
All in all, "Bohemian Rhapsody," a film designed to celebrate the life and legacy of Freddie Mercury and Queen, ended up being a film that was ultimately a disservice to them.
(Originally reviewed November 2018)
THE WORST FILM OF 2018
One of my favorite lines of dialogue from John Landis' eternal "National Lampoon's Animal House" (1978) arrives late in the film when the several members of the beleaguered, cheerfully dilapidated, outrageously drunken, unrepentantly filthy fraternity Delta House find themselves within the office clutches of the insidious Dean Vernon Wormer (the late John Vernon). As he regards each member of the fraternity with disgusted contempt yet relishing in at the prospect of expelling them all from Faber University due to their relentless debauchery and poor grades, he turns to college Freshman Flounder (the late Stephen Furst) after delivering his sad midterm grades and proclaims, plainly, "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son."
Something very similar could be said for the "Jurassic Park" film series.
Now, we reach my least favorite, otherwise known as the worst film of the year, with "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" the fifth film in this miraculously continuing series which has not grown even one brain cell smarter in the interim between each installment. With the still spectacular special effects and seamless action set pieces and grandstanding dinosaurs as the stars, the series has remained on track. Unfortunately, where it has also remained on track and has refused to evolve is through the storytelling and complete lack of even one intelligent human being that could even begin to make a film like this interesting, as well as exciting, awe inspiring, frightening and even entertaining. Honestly, it is UNFATHOMABLE to me as to why the filmmakers have just refused to have the human characters be smart just even one time instead of being yet another lumbering, bludgeoning episode of "Whack-A-Mole" where stupid people do stupid things solely to get eaten.
And it is not even that these characters, once again led by Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, are just not smart. They all seem to have fallen under a sort of collective amnesia, like the participants on a long running reality game show who are actually shocked, shocked I tell you from the goings on the viewers at home all expect and are commonplace. These characters behave as if they have no knowledge of the previous "Jurassic Park" installment, and even their actions within the previous installment.
So, how else can anyone explain to me why Howard's character has become a dinosaur right's activist?! And for the love of Pete, why do these idiots keep going back to the island anyway, even one that is about to consume itself due to an erupting volcano? If not then we can't have those nifty special effects then can we? Characters are continuously duped by those bad corporate interests who still think these genetically created dinosaurs can be tamed and used for their own greedy financial ends, all of which could easily force even a child viewer of these movies to ask "Didn't any of you learn the lessons from say...the first film?"
I could go on and on but why bother? A loud, bombastic, belligerent bore fully devoid of anything resembling terror or adventure or intelligence, "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" is so terrible, so stupid, so mind-numbingly bone headed, that I am now going to root for the dinosaurs to emerge victorious just so human beings cannot make another one of these awful movies.
(Originally reviewed October 2018)
STAY TUNED: MY TOP TEN FAVORITE FILMS OF 2018!!!!
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