Author: Ga2so

Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths Part III

When I watched part two of this series, it was so boring that I said I’d probably skip part three. I wish I’d stuck to that plan. I ended up watching it, and while it’s slightly better than part two, but it certainly isn’t good. Lots of stiff standing around, even in the middle of “action” scenes.

Longlegs

I only saw this because I thought we had tickets to see Deadpool today. We didn’t, so we went to see Longlegs instead. I don’t generally care for “creepy” movies. They usually bore me, and I end up hunting for illogical nonsense for entertainment. Almost nothing in this worked for me, so I spent most of my time annoyed by The World’s World (and yet somehow productive) FBI office.

But at least Longlegs had a style and actors actually acting! If I liked spooky movies, I’m pretty sure I would have liked this, but I should have skipped both and gone for a bike ride.

Is this the sweariest adaption of Shakespeare? Also: It was fun to watch a movie featuring lots of nudity on the seat back monitor. It could have been worse; they also had Poor Things available.

I don’t know if my appreciation of the movie was helped or hindered by being the last thing I watched at the end of eleven hours in a plane (the first half of those with a headache), but I laughed more than a couple of times watching this. I think Glen Powell could turn out to be a star. Drop him in a Richard Linklater film or a legacy action sequel and he could get huge.

BONUS: I managed to time my watching to end just before the in flight entertainment was turned off.

The movie is exactly what it looks like. No surprises. But it was interesting to see how Cardiff theaters are different from the ones in Los Angeles.

• Better theater rake (the incline of the floor)
• Worse seats
• Fewer trailers
• More regular commercials (like for beer)
• No movie trivia
• No Maria Menounos- HOW WILL THE WORLD KNOW ABOUT HEAL SQUAD????

I fully expected to totally hate this movie, but Eddie Murphy managed to be charming enough to keep it pretty watchable. It’s still mostly a predictable rehash of the previous films, and it has some ridiculous plotholes and tropes, like:

• A character saying “I just have to do one more thing” and then getting caught so Axel has to figure things out, instead of that character doing the sensible thing and saying “I’m going to [list of planned actions and reasons].”
• A character gets a key piece of evidence that they could easily make copies of and/or put online, but they just hide it so there’s something everyone has to find.
• Axel and pals spend the whole movie stealing things and killing people, but everyone’s cool because it was in pursuit of justice. “Death and destruction? SOUNDS LIKE FOLEY’S ON THE CASE! HA HA HA HA!”

But it was a good movie to have on in the background while I was packing. No attention required.

I saw Used Cars a few months ago, and I was sad to realize it was a dated comedy, full of racism, sexism, and homophobia, with very few jokes that still worked. I am happy to report that Top Secret! is a movie full of jokes that mostly still work, with very almost no racism, sexism, or homophobia. Bonus: even though I’ve seen it several times before, it’s so packed with ridiculous jokes that my brain had forgotten a ton of them. And the jokes I did remember mostly managed to still land (the disguise to sneak into the prison is inspired).

All I knew about this movie when I bought the ticket was it was one of a billion Bruce Lee movies that tried to cash in after he died. Then it started, and I realized that this wasn’t just any Bruce Lee knockoff- this was the movie where Bruce Lee goes to purgatory and fights James Bond- and Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, and Caine from Kung Fu, and the One-Armed Swordsman, and Dracula, and Popeye??? That would have been weird enough, but Alamo decided to make it a little more interesting by playing the Spanish dub without subtitles. I don’t speak Spanish, and I think that helped.

Also appearing: The Godfather and Emmanuel (as played by “Jenny, Emmanuel of N. Europe”).

Please enjoy this trailer and try and imagine an entire movie of this. Also, imagine it in Spanish.

First, the milestone: According to Letterboxd, this was my 100th movie of the year. However, it counts shorts as films, and I’ve seen a bunch of those. It also counts each repeat viewing, and I had a couple of those. The actual number of full-length movies I’ve seen at least once this year is closer to 80, and the number of full-length films I had never seen before this year is around 75. Still: Close enough to celebrate. Yay for too much time at the movies!

As for the movie: It’s fine. Lupita Nyong’o is wonderful as usual, but she can’t do anything about the inescapable challenges of making the third film in a franchise (particularly a sequel). It can’t just rehash the first movie, but it can’t add anything that contradicts it. So we get new “secret” facts about the creatures and how the government responded to the noise monsters. Some of them make sense, but others make it hard to understand why they couldn’t actually solve the problem. Here’s the solution I came up with:

Also, maybe cats are magical?

If you make a movie that is almost entirely a cabbie talking to a fare as they drive from the airport to her apartment, your characters had better be enthralling. Dakota Johnson is right in her lane: guarded and aloof at first, and gradually exposing herself. Sean Penn is a little too far into the “Hey, I’m a New Yawk cabbie here! How ’bout dat?” mode. Also, he’s Sean Penn.

Also, if you’re planning to see this: it’s all talk, there are no dramatic special effects, and 99% of it is inside the cab, so there’s no burning need to see it in a theater.