Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)

  This was my first live-tweet of a movie.  I decided to do it because it is just old enough to tap into nostalgia for a lot of people and I had never seen it before.  I'd seen the odd gif but never the whole film.  It turned out better than I thought it would.  (The movie, not the live-tweet.  I can't really tell if that was welcome or not until I lose a bunch of followers, I guess.)

Milo Thatch (Michael J. Fox) is an academic and linguist frustrated by his boss' apathy towards Milo's theory about the disappearance and location of the fabled island of Atlantis.  When a wealthy magnate (John Mahoney) offers to fund a complete expedition, Milo jumps at the chance, ignoring every single red flag about the expedition leader Rourke (James Garner) and why he needs a full complement of soldiers for a scientific exploration.  After many hardships, they discover the lost island and its princess, Kida (Cree Summer), who is very interested in restoring some of the information lost in the cataclysm that brought the island down but not as interested as Rourke is in taking the Atlantean's perpetual energy source and selling it to the highest bidder.

Overall, this was a decent animated movie.  It never comes close to Disney's heyday but I can see why people would have been drawn to it.  There are some significant plotholes and too many characters that rely on a one-dimensional description for me, but I'm also looking at it as a 36-year-old who breaks down movies for fun.  I don't say this often, but I would actually really love for Disney to revisit this, maybe as a series on Disney+. 

Detainment (2018)

It's Memorial Day in the Unites States, the day we've chosen to honor all the fallen in war.  People don't like to think about death, but please know that for some of us, it's never far from our thoughts.  Please be kind and respectful today and all days.  You never know what someone is going through.    Do any of you remember the James Bulger case from 1993?  I don't but I was a kid when it happened and not really paying attention to international crime news.  The gist is that two ten-year-old boys were tried as adults and convicted of murdering 3-year-old James Bulger in Liverpool, England.  This short film dramatizes the account.  It's drawn from interrogation tapes made of the two boys, Jon (Ely Solan) and Robert (Leon Hughes), after being identified by surveillance footage taking the toddler from a mall.

This is pretty harrowing, even without the violence of the actual murder.  Watching one kid fall apart under police investigation while the other becomes damn near combative is guaranteed to cause some kind of emotional response in the viewer.

Not for the faint of heart.

The Pirate Fairy (2014)

  Today we continue our trend of kids movies/fandoms I've never paid attention to.  Did you know there's a whole series of DTV movies starring Tinkerbell?  Because I didn't.  And she's apparently immortal?

Zarina (Christina Hendricks) works as a dust handler in the Neverland pixie world.  They use the yellow pixie dust to fly but Zarina believes they've only scratched the surface of its capabilities.  She steals a spark of the blue pixie dust, which acts as an amplifier/catalyst, to use in her experiments, but when one goes wrong she is exiled.  A year later, she returns and steals the entire container of blue pixie dust.  Tinkerbell (Mae Whitman) and her friends believe that Zarina is acting under duress from a group of pirates but soon discover Zarina is their captain and plans to make enough pixie dust to fly the ship straight to Earth and plunder the cities from above.  (Seriously, they have a whole song about it.)

This is definitely geared towards the 7-year-old girl demographic.  Except for the part where it's a Captain Hook origin story.  Yeah, that's a deep cut, fucking Shyamalan twist to throw into a third-rate direct-to-video spinoff series.  I'm not saying it's a terrible movie, but I don't know that it's worth watching just to see a young Hook with his original hands.  Even if he does sound like Loki.

I have no doubt this will get pulled when Disney launches their new streaming service, but for now, it's on Netflix.

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu (2019)

  Tyler has been a fan of Pokémon since he was a kid.  I remember seeing Pokémon cards but I was not interested or involved so I have missed something like 20 years of history through cards, games, TV shows, and movies.  But I heard really good reviews of Detective Pikachu so I thought I'd just wade in anyway.

Tim (Justice Smith) receives word that his estranged father, Harry, has died in an accident, so he goes to Ryme City to pack up the apartment.  His father's Pokémon partner, Pikachu (Ryan Reynolds), finds him and the pair discover that they can understand each other.  Pikachu was with Harry, working the case, but is suffering from amnesia and needs Tim's help to piece together the path they were on when Harry's car was attacked.  With the help of unpaid intern/journalist Lucy (Kathryn Newton) and her Psyduck, Tim and Pikachu uncover a conspiracy that has the potential to destroy the lives of humans and Pokémon alike.

As a complete Pokémon novice, there was a lot of stuff in the movie that I instantly realized was not for me.  There were musical cues I didn't get, an army of various adorable creatures I couldn't identify, and callbacks to the movies and TV shows.  I could see those things and recognize their purpose, but they had no intrinsic meaning or value to me.  So my experience was completely different from Tyler's, who has seen every iteration of Pokémon since its inception.

I will say that you do not need to be able to flawlessly execute the Pokérap to enjoy this movie.  Ryan Reynolds is still Ryan Reynolds even when he's family-friendly and fuzzy.  Smith and Newton are relative newcomers but show the professionalism of actors decades their senior.  The Pokémon and the world they inhabit are meticulously crafted and realistic, making the film a joy to watch.  The only thing that lets it down at all is the plot, which is formulaic and predictable.  Given its target audience demographic, however, that may not be much of a concern.

I don't know if I'd call it Best Video Game Adaptation Ever but it's definitely got to be near the top of that list.

John Wick 3: Parabellum (2019)

  I think the filmmakers behind this particular series have finally embraced that audiences want more fleshing out from the John Wick universe.  The man himself is very straightforward so the side characters are really the ones doing the heavy lifting.  This is the first movie in the franchise to branch out towards larger machinations in the world which is enough (for me) to make it worth watching.

Also, Keanu Reeves shoots people real good.

After being marked excommunicado, former assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is on the run once more.  He reaches out to an old ally, The Director (Anjelica Huston), to get to Casablanca, where he hopes to cash in a blood marker he is owed by Sophia (Halle Berry).  What he does not know is that the High Table has assigned an Adjudicator (Asia Kate Dillon) to review the excommunicado and assign blame and punishment to Wick's co-conspirators, Winston (Ian McShane) and the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne).  Winston feels particularly singled out by his punishment and begins making his own plans for self-preservation.

This is one of the only series I can think of that is really intended to be watched in fast succession.  The first movie went down over the course of like two days, the second was maybe a week in universe, and the third picks up immediately.  It's almost like extended TV episodes.  The character is introduced, sparks conflict, responds to the conflict, and sets off a chain reaction in characters around him.  I really hope Chad Stahelski doesn't get bored or lured away before he has a chance to show the full character arc because this is a really promising direction for what was essentially a one-note character.

Border (2018)

  I am so mad this didn't win for Best Makeup at the Oscars.  I mean, Vice was great but the prosthetics in this movie were incredible.  They were swimming!  In full makeup!  Also, this movie is completely bonkers.  It's Sweden's answer to The Shape of Water and I am here for it.

Tina (Eva Melander) is a customs agent with the uncanny ability to smell human emotions.  This makes her incredibly gifted at discovering contraband and helps her uncover a child pornography ring.  At around the same time, she meets a dude named Vore (Eero Milonoff) with the same kind of facial deformities, scar, and fear of lightning that she has.  This leads her to a different kind of discovery and forces her to question all of her assumptions about herself.

Depending on how much you know about Swedish folklore, you may be able to guess where this is going, but friends I assure you, you are not prepared.  The sex scene, the child porn, the taped-up fridge, it's all crazy.  This is streaming right now on Hulu and you should definitely give it a watch.

Kon-Tiki (2012)

  I found this movie to be a weird artifact.  Who was clamoring for a dramatic recreation of a documentary from 1951 involving a now disproved Norwegian anthropologist's theory on the origin of the indigenous peoples of Polynesia?  What audience was this intended for, precisely?

Thor Heyerdahl (Pal Sverre Hagen) has spent his life in the South Pacific islands, blithely recording folktales and customs when he reads about how pineapples plentiful in the islands are actually native to South America.  He theorizes that if plants migrated on the westward currents, people could have done the same, upending the prevailing scientific consensus that Polynesia was originally settled by people of Asian descent moving east (which was later proven to be true).  Desperate for funding to prove his theory, Thor travels to America and meets struggling refrigerator salesman and engineer, Herman Watzinger (Anders Baasmo Christiansen), who offers to help construct the raft that will carry the six-man crew over 5000 miles of ocean.  Thor gets his best friend, Erik (Odd-Magnus Williamson), two military veterans (Tobias Santelmann and Jakob Oftebro), and a Swedish cameraman (Gustaf Skarsgaard) to join him on his quest. 

The original Kon-Tiki is almost 80-years-old at this point, so I'm not sure how prevalent it is in the current zeitgeist.  Maybe that's why this new adaptation tries to aggressively spoon-feed the facts to the audience instead of trusting that they will understand the cultural and scientific underpinnings.  Having watched the original fairly recently for a college film class, I felt it was very heavy-handed. 

Also, I wasn't super enthused about how much of a zealot Heyerdahl is painted.  He never once wavers from his belief in his theory, despite exhortations and almost a mutiny by his crew, dangers he couldn't anticipate, and the ever present knowledge that should anything go wrong, he has condemned five other men to death.

The film is shot and edited very well, and the VFX of the marine life are impeccable.  There was clearly an effort made to conform to certain scenes from the documentary and a very nice little postscript detailing their lives after the voyage and some of the lasting legacies they've had but the viewing overall left me cold.

The Invisible Woman (2013)

I blame Wing Commander for not having any other posts last weekend.  That movie took forever to watch.  We are back on track for this weekend, however.    This was an incredibly boring movie.  Also, kind of gross/sad if you think about it too long.

Nelly (Felicity Jones) is a budding actress when she catches the eye of established and famous author Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes).  They have a few interactions but their relationship is hampered by Dickens' fame and his being married to Catherine (Joanna Scanlan) and having six children with her.  Undaunted by what he perceives as a loveless and unfulfilling union, Dickens approaches Nelly's mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) with a proposition to take Nelly as his mistress. 

The film is told through a series of flashbacks from Nelly in her present as a respectable, if severe, married woman and Nelly of the past, a young ingénue forced to conform to a shameful relationship to secure her family's fortune.  She has a hero worship of Dickens but didn't come across (at least, to me) as having any real romantic feelings.

Charles Dickens is definitely the villain of this film, blithely ignoring social conventions no matter the cost to the women in his life.  It's a very flat portrayal and Fiennes isn't given a lot of opportunity to imbue any nuance.  Jones does what she can but for me, the stand-out here is Joanna Scanlan.  That woman was beautifully subtle and makes the absolute most out of her limited screen time. 

I wouldn't recommend this to any but the most adamant of classical literature fans. 

Wing Commander (1999)

  Oh my holy God, this is a terrible movie.  It took me over a week to watch it.  I just couldn't subject myself to more than about 20 minutes at a time.

Blair (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) is assigned to be a new pilot for the Terran Federation in their ongoing war against the Kilrathi, for reasons not explained in this film.  His commander (Tcheky Karyo) discovers that the Kilrathi fleet has stolen coordinates to Terran space and will be making a surprise attack on Earth before the Terran Federation ships can get into position.  Their only hope is to send a ship ahead through uncharted space to warn the fleet while the rest of the battle group delays the Kilrathi from making the jump.

This is an unrelentingly stupid movie chock full of shitty special effects, a cliché-ridden script, and pasteboard characters.  It was made in 1999 but looks at least a decade older and wastes enormously popular (for 1999) actors like Prinze, Matthew Lillard, and Saffron Burrows.

Honestly, this is just godawful.  I mean, it --

Wait.  What?

Oh.

Oh, it's a video game adaptation.  Ohhhhhhhhh, that makes so much more sense now.

Shoplifters (2018)

  Well, this was marginally less depressing than most of the Oscar nominees.

Shota's (Jyo Kairi) family lives below the poverty line, so he shoplifts with his dad (Lily Franky) to supplement their income.  It's treated as a kind of bonding ritual until his family takes in four-year-old Yuri (Miyu Sasaki), essentially kidnapping her from her abusive parents.  Shota is initially jealous but after bonding with Yuri, he begins to question the morality of his parents' lifestyle when he is asked to teach her how to shoplift.

This is a great meditation on the meaning of family and the spirit versus the letter of the law.  It reminded me a lot of the show Shameless in its depiction of how poverty really is just a vicious downward spiral.  The performances are wonderfully natural, especially the mother, Nobuyu (Sakura Andô).  She ends up being the bedrock of this film and it would have been much poorer without her.  I'm not sure I fully understood the subplot with the grandma (Kirin Kiki) and Aki (Mayu Matsuoka) but it wasn't enough to take me out of the film while I was watching.

It's streaming on Hulu right now and you should give it a look.

The Nun (2018)

  This is a terrible movie and the weakest entry into the Conjuring-verse yet.

In the 1950's, Father Anthony Burke (Demián Bichir) is sent to investigate the suicide of a nun at a remote Romanian abbey.  He is instructed to bring Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga), a novitiate who experienced visions as a child, to determine if the abbey is still holy ground.  What they discover is an ancient evil that has managed to free itself of containment and which must be stopped before it can escape to the outside world.

This is very campy and could have been fun if it hadn't taken itself so seriously.  Bichir chews scenery like he's auditioning for a lawn mower and Farmiga the younger is stuck with being doe-eyed and timid.  "The Nun" demon itself suffers from overuse, gliding through the back of every scene as if the actress's actual job was polishing the floorboards.  The CGI is cartoonish and overused where practical effects might have done better.

This is a huge misfire but if the Conjuring spin-off series for Annabelle has taught us anything, The Nun 2: Valak's Origin, will be miles better.

Creed II (2018)

  I watched this on a transatlantic flight with two screaming children sitting in front of me so not the best experience but I'm trying to not let that color my review.

Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) finally has everything working out for him.  He's at the top of his game physically and emotionally, aided by his girlfriend, Bianca (Tessa Thompson), and coach, Rocky (Sylvester Stallone).  Unbeknownst to him, however, old grudges are resurfacing.  Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) has been training his son Viktor (Florian Munteanu) pretty much since birth to be a contender for the World Heavyweight title and the time is finally right, thanks to a self-interested boxing promoter (Russell Hornsby).

This is still a pretty decent boxing movie but I felt like there was a lot more they could have done with it.  The boxing promotor character is really not fleshed out at all.  It would have been nice to see some more motivation from him, other than just "I am being paid to be here."  I almost wish they had just called it Drago and focused on Viktor and Ivan's relationship.  I get why they didn't but still.  The character arcs of Creed and Bianca were pushed further, there was more screen time for Phylicia Rashad, and there was a nice ending for Rocky, all of which are good things.

Would I buy it?  No.  But it was a decent enough distraction from the fact that I was in a middle seat for eight straight hours.