Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (06.09.23)

 When I saw Avengers: Infinity War in theaters I was bit annoyed, despite the fact that I absolutely loved it. Seeing some of my favorite characters together for the first time was an incredibly fulfilling and fun experience up until the very end, at which point things just kinda stopped. There was no real resolution to anything, making the tale of Thanos and his quest for magical rocks half of a bigger whole instead of a movie that could stand completely on its own. Films that boil down to elaborate advertisements for the next offering generally bother me, but with the new Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the first of a two-part follow-up to 2018’s amazing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Into is the first one, Across is the new one, and Beyond will come out next year… keep that in mind, because it can get confusing), the feeling wasn’t too big of a factor, as was the case with Infinity War, just because the film itself is so darned good.

Like its predecessor, one of the coolest parts of Across the Spider-Verse is how perfectly it captures the feel of reading a comic book. The stylish animation, purposefully low framerate, and energetic busyness of it all takes a minute to get used to, but once one does it becomes a singular experience like no other on film. The sheer amount of creativity on screen at any given moment is incredible, from the fight scenes to the quiet moments to the scene transitions. The story itself is pretty straightforward, a miracle in and of itself for a film about multiverse shenanigans, but it works to the movie’s benefit as it instead has us mostly focusing on the characters and their relationships. For what its worth Across does have a slower pace than Into (and I do think that it could have been cut and streamlined just a bit), and I’m not sure how well this will go over with younger audiences, but I did not mind at all because these characters and relationships were just developed so well. The voice acting and script are what sell these, and if I have any criticism towards the former it’s that I occasionally had a hard time understanding a certain cockney-accented character, but I’ll let that slide. I’m sure I didn’t miss anything important.

Do I wish it was a more complete experience? Sure. Across the Spider-Verse doesn’t have any resolution whatsoever at the end and doesn’t have a typical story structure, namely rising action, climax, and all of that good stuff you learned back in high school English class, and that can be a bit unfulfilling if you aren’t expecting it (the scene that is probably  considered the climax felt more like another set-up scene to me). But the journey to that “to be continued” is so cool and heartfelt that it’s hard to not be anything other than wowed. If next year’s Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse sticks the landing (and at this point I have no reason to believe it won’t) then we might just have one of the best animated trilogies of all time on our hands.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is now playing exclusively in theaters. 

 

This review was first published in the Keizertimes on June 9^th, 2023. Visit at www.keizertimes.com/

White Men Can't Jump (06.02.23)

 

Some movies just don’t need to be remade, no matter how much Hollywood wants us to believe the opposite. If the original is beloved then there is nowhere for the quality to go than down, because we humans love our nostalgia above all else. I never saw 1992's White Men Can’t Jump staring Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson, but I can still tell you with close to one hundred percent certainty that it wasn’t a movie that needed a facelift for 2023. I know this simply because I know the original has its fans, and I am sure no one is going to be a fan of this new version. Dull, led by boring and irritating characters, and offering nothing to say about race relations beyond a few surface observations, 2023’s White Men Can’t Jump offers a few chuckles but is ultimately unnecessary and forgettable.

It is clear from the outset that White Men Can’t Jump is going for broke on the whole unlikely bromance thing that other films have done so well in the past, but it is an attempt built on a flimsy foundation of two-dimensional characters and a complete lack of chemistry between the two leads. Kamal (played by Sinqua Walls) is a former high school basketball star that wants to get his former glory back, and that’s about it. Jeremy (played by Jack Harlow) has the same boring motivation with the added baggage of being the most stereotypical and unlikable douche (it’s the only word that really fits, sorry!) you can think of. They make for a thoroughly uninteresting pair, leaving the film to rely on its equally uninteresting story and a mere handful of laughs, most of which are provided by the tertiary friend characters Lorenzo and Speedy (Myles Bullock and Vince Staples, respectively) who are genuinely hilarious and thoroughly steal the show every scene they are in.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of White Men Can’t Jump is how safe the film plays it with its social and racial commentary. Instead of trying for something new, meaningful, and funny, Can’t Jump is content to merely reiterate already well-trodden material, making observations and jokes about as shallow as its title. Even though I have never seen the original film I still felt the distinct impression that I had seen White Men Can’t Jump already many times before as I watched the remake. And why not just revisit one of those films instead? Surely they at least have characters I want to root for instead of a self-obsessed hipster and a blank slate.

White Men Can’t Jump isn’t painful or anything, mind you. It just doesn’t do enough to justify its own existence and instead serves as a reminder that better entertainment of this ilk is out there. Ultimately this is just another unnecessary remake doomed to be forgotten in the shadowy edges of the Hulu catalogue, a place very few will ever tread and even fewer will ever watch.

White Men Can’t Jump is now available on Hulu. 

This review was first published in the Keizertimes on June 2nd, 2023. Visit at www.keizertimes.com/

The Mother (05.26.23)

 

Jennifer Lopez has had a uniquely interesting career. After starting out as a dancer on the sketch comedy series In Living Color, she went on to become a hugely successful popstar, a romantic comedy icon, and, according to a cursory Wikipedia search, the highest paid Hispanic actress in Hollywood. However, As far as I know she’s never played a Jason Bourne-esque killing machine, which she does in Netflix's The Mother. She is pretty good. The movie itself is fine, if perfectly forgettable.

The story of The Mother is fairly simple, which I actually find refreshing. Jennifer Lopez plays an army veteran with super-duper aiming powers who turns on some bad people and has to go into hiding as a result. She’s pregnant at the time, so she gives up her baby and then goes into action when that child is threatened by those same bad people. They bond, they participate in a climatic snowmobile battle together. It all serves as a nice reminder that motherhood can take many forms and that extended wolf metaphors are very useful at conveying that fact if the audience somehow doesn’t reach that conclusion themselves.

JLo’s turn as a tough-as-nails action star is a fun development that I would like to see explored in future films, if not necessarily a sequel to this one. She does the tough, quiet brooding thing quite well, and her dancing background makes the transition to a more violent form of choreography a natural one. The fight scenes in The Mother seem decent enough, but it was kind of hard to tell because one of the film’s failures lies in the editing of said fight scenes. The cinematography is so choppy when the action starts and has so many cuts that these brawls rarely look like continuous, fluid sequences, but instead come across as a Frankenstein’s monster of separate split-second clips spliced together. I don’t know if this was done in order to hide obvious stunt doubles or to make things seem faster paced and more exciting than they actually were, but either way it serves as a huge distraction to what otherwise might have been exciting set pieces. Another thing that would have benefited these fight scenes greatly is some semblance of a score. Jason Bourne got music during his fight scenes. James Bond gets music during his fight scenes. So why does JLo get complete silence?

The script of The Mother is also not the film’s strongest suit, filled with cliches and questionable FBI protocol as it is (I’m far from an expert, but I don’t think the Bureau has the jurisdiction to go and kill a bunch of people in Cuba while someone who should be in witness protection tags along, even if the people in question were bad guys). Everything that happens in this film can be accurately guessed far in advance, leaving little room for surprises or originality. But thanks to its lead, straightforward plot, and decent if sometimes hard-to-read action sequences, The Mother isn’t terrible... it’s just not really good either.

The Mother is now available on Netflix. 

This review was first published in the Keizertimes on May 26th, 2023. Visit at www.keizertimes.com/

Air (05.19.23)

 

Last month I bought a pair of knockoff Hey Dudes at the local Costco, bringing my shoe collection up to a total of seven pairs, give or take a misplaced flip flop or two. I can afford more (thank you for asking and being concerned), but I would rather spend my money on literally anything else if I can help it because there are few things on this earth that I care about less than shoes. When I saw the trailer for Amazon Studio's Air in theaters I scoffed. When I saw the poster for Air I scoffed. This was the preconceived bias that I was bringing into the film when I begrudgingly sat down to review it, and although the movie did little to dispel this ambivalence towards shoes, I have to say… I really liked Air.

I felt a little gross watching Air because nothing screams soulless corporate sponsored art quite like a movie about Nike made by Amazon. Not only was I disinterested about shoes, but I was also disinterested in watching a feature-length commercial. But as films like The LEGO Movie have shown us in the past, sometimes feature-length commercials masquerading as movies can still be great movies in their own right. This turned out to be the case with Air, the story of how Nike signed the legendary Michael Jordan and created the Air Jordan line, a topic that makes me want to fall asleep outside of the context of Air, as much as I love and appreciate MJ himself (and not just because of Space Jam). The script, penned by Alex Convery, is punchy and sharp and does the impossible by making business talk engaging. The actors who bring it to life (Matt Damon, Jason Bateman, Ben Affleck, Chris Tucker, and Viola Davis, to name a few) do so in lively and convincing ways, making you root for them as if they were the true little guys instead of being mostly, you know, Nike executives.

Ben Affleck not only costars but also directs Air, once again proving that he is just as good behind the camera as he is in front of it. He does make one choice that adversely affects the film, however, and that is giving MJ himself very limited screen time and never showing his face. The logic behind this decision is sound— although he is obviously an important player in this story (pun intended), this is not an MJ biopic, plus we all know what MJ looks like, so showing a face that is clearly not his own and calling him Michael Jordan might draw people out of the illusion of the film—it does give the impression that MJ didn’t have much agency in the matter and reduces his personality to pretty much nothing. This is an odd choice considering the fact that much of the Air Jordan line was supposedly based around Michael Jordan’s charisma and personality, but ultimately this gripe doesn’t amount to much. For a short while Air made me care about shoes, and you won’t get a better recommendation than that.

Air is now available on Amazon Prime. 

 

This review was first published in the Keizertimes on May 19^th, 2023. Visit at www.keizertimes.com/

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (05.12.23)

 

When it was first announced that the C-List Marvel team known as the Guardians of the Galaxy would be getting their own movie, I was a bit skeptical, not to mention puzzled. While it was true that Marvel Studios had managed to turn lesser-known characters like Iron Man into silver screen hits in the past, this was a team that was not even that familiar to a lot of diehard comic fans. Surely the odd choice to invest time and effort into bringing these obscure characters to the big screen would be the still fledgling studio’s first real misstep in their still blooming cinematic universe. Well here we are, nine years later in a future where names like “Star-Lord” and “Groot” are household names, saying goodbye to the original lineup of space misfits in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, a beautiful, dark, and heartfelt sendoff that, like a good Zune playlist, hits all of the right notes.

One of the things that made the original 2014 film so successful was its blend of space opera drama and director/writer James Gunn’s tone-perfect sense of humor, a combination that is still very much in play in Vol. 3, if skewed a bit more to the latter this time around. While there are still funny bits, the story is one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s darkest yet, thanks in no small part to the long-awaited exploration of the backstory of Bradley Cooper’s Rocket, the snarky raccoon with a taste for firearms. This backstory is brutal and sometimes hard to watch, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t draw a tear or two from me, which it was clearly designed to do. Gunn and crew let these moments take their full emotional toll, which is especially nice given the wider MCU’s annoying tendency to lessen dramatic moments by capping them off with out of place jokes.

Another thing the Guardians films always get right are the pure spectacle—gorgeous CGI, well-choreographed fight scenes, and giant set pieces, all of which are present and accounted for in Vol. 3. At two-and-a-half hours it can all be a bit exhausting at times, especially past the two-hour mark, but it never really felt excessive, nor did it overstay its welcome. Because when it comes down to it, Guardians of the Galaxy has really been about the characters, and they are characters that are a whole lot of fun to spend time with thanks to fantastic performances across the board, from returning veterans who at this point wear their characters like a second skin (I have to laud the spectacular voice acting of the aforementioned Bradley Cooper in particular) to team newcomers to Chukwudi Iwuji’s brilliant turn as the High Evolutionary, one of the most irredeemably evil villains in the entire MCU franchise (which, I may remind you, has had literal Nazis in it as well as a giant purple man who successfully killed half of the universe). 

I really can’t imagine a better sendoff for these loveable idiots.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is now available in theaters.

 

 This review was first published in the Keizertimes on May 12th, 2023. Visit at www.keizertimes.com/

Boston Strangler (04.28.23)

 

I am of the opinion that when it comes to creating an engaging film the basic premise is one of the least important factors. This sounds a little contradictory, but when you have a good writer, talented actors, and a creative crew, “kids in detention getting to know each other” can become The Breakfast Club and “twelve people have jury duty and talk all day” can become 12 Angry Men. This is one of the reasons it is so disappointing for the opposite to happen: A movie being boring despite having an interesting premise. This describes Boston Strangler to a t, because despite its real-life story of murder and professional empowerment, decent acting, and adequate script, the film is ultimately just as boring and unengaging as the name implies. 

Movies based on true stories can be a little tricky, as life is often more mundane than fiction, but you also shouldn’t go too far when spicing up the truth for an audience looking to be entertained. I don’t know much about the actual story of the Boston Strangler, but I imagine this film is pretty true to what actually happened, as any possible spicing up blends in so perfectly with the blandness of the rest of the movie that it all appears as one plausible yet tedious blob. Boston Strangler may be based on a true story, but there is nothing in it that has not been done more interestingly in other films, be they completely fictional ones or other partial adaptations of events that actually happened. This actually led me to wish there were clearer liberties taken in the name of audience engagement, something I don’t usually do-- anything to make the experience more interesting.

Outside of the humdrum familiarity of the plot (murder happens, investigation happens, another murder happens, repeat until “where are they now” text pops up right before the end credits) and characters (Keira Knightley tries to break into investigative reporting in a man’s world, gets obsessed with her work, her marriage suffers as a result), I am not entirely sure why Boston Strangler was so unmotivating to me, as all of its separate parts are somehow much more than its sum. The acting is good, and not once did I find Keira Knightley’s American accent silly or unnatural. The script is believable, the cinematography occasionally ambitious if sometimes a little distracting. I guess there was music, although that might have just been me humming to myself as I tried to keep my mind from wandering. Overall there just isn’t anything exceptional about any of it; I’m even having a difficult time writing this review, because though I watched Boston Strangler less than twenty-four hours ago I’ve already forgotten nearly everything about it, and the things I do remember may or may not actually be memories of things that happened in much more engaging true crime movies like Zodiac.

Needless to say, I’d go ahead and skip this one unless you are a true crime fanatic with a lot of time on your hands.

Boston Strangler is now available on Hulu. 

 

This review was first published in The Keizertimes on April 28^th, 2023. Visit at www.keizertimes.com/

The Super Mario Bros. Movie (04.14.23)

 

Despite having some of the most recognizable and popular characters in the industry, Nintendo has been very shy about adapting their video games into film ever since the spectacularly awful Super Mario Bros., a live-action disaster starring a belligerently drunk Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as the titular plumbers. It was the first feature-length film based on a video game, a trainwreck that set the tone for awful adaptations from other companies for years to come and turned Nintendo off of the idea of bringing their property to the big screen for three entire decades (with the exception of Pokémon, which they only partly control). With Sonic the Hedgehog and Detective Pikachu reminding us that video game movies don’t have to suck, Nintendo has finally come out of its Koopa shell by partnering with Illumination to give us The Super Mario Bros. Movie, a pretty, fanservice-y romp that is decent fun for fans and kids but ultimately falls prey to the general mediocrity that plagues most Illumination films.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie was clearly made with a lot of love by people who are fans of the source material, and this passion is the reason the film works as well as it does. There is an astounding amount of Easter eggs and references to the video games, be they visual, spoken, or a part of the fantastic original score that incorporates tunes from Mario's entire video game history. The voice cast is also very good, particularly Jack Black as the evil, love-struck Bowser (don’t worry, he sings) and Charlie Day as the cowardly Luigi. Chris Pratt as Mario isn’t half as bad as I was expecting him to be, and Anya Taylor-Joy elevates Peach to a level far beyond that of the Princess’s usual (and outdated) damsel-in-distress role. Most of the time I was just thrilled to see this colorful world in all of its glory, a realization of the formative childhood years I spent with a Nintendo Entertainment System that made the experience of The Super Mario Bros. Movie that much more gratifying for me.

But if I’m honest with myself, it’s not that great of a movie on its own merits. The jokes are sometimes lazy, falling back on eye-rolling Illumination clichés like characters flying through the air in slow motion with stupid expressions on their faces. The plot is very thin (which goes along pretty well with a series known from getting from point A to point B while stomping on stuff, I suppose), and while the original score is awesome (does it count as an original score if it’s full of music from the games?), every time a modern licensed track started playing I found myself wishing they just wouldn’t. As a fan I liked The Super Mario Bros. Movie, but I can’t help but wonder how much better it would have been if Pixar or DreamWorks had handled it instead of the studio that cursed the earth with the advent of Minions.

After 1993’s Super Mario Bros. the only way for Nintendo movies to go was up. Hopefully they won’t take another thirty years to make the jump from The Super Mario Bros. Movie to whatever the next level is.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie is now available in theaters. 

 

This review was first published in The Keizertimes on April 14th, 2023. Visit at www.keizertimes.com/