Twenty Film Reviews and A Recipe for Cranberry Sauce So That This Post Holds More Value
Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) - This film, in which the two most likable characters in the franchise contemplate assisted suicide and get shot to death protecting a baby, is considered the "fun" and "heartwarming" entry in the series. This is not inaccurate.
Ghost in the Shell (1995) - If you saw Blade Runner and thought to yourself "This is good, but I could do without the barely perceivable warmth and tenderness," buddy have I got the movie for you.
Batman Returns (1992) - Sometimes if a movie's art design is good enough then a straight-up sloppy script β this one at least three drafts away from a well-constructed narrative β winds up knocking the whole endeavour into nightmare dream logic territory, or a high budget adaptation of how a weird kid plays with action figures. I do not encourage walking this tightrope, but I will absolutely doff my cap to any film that pulls it off. Yes, the middle section with the Penguin's run for mayor could be wholly excised without affecting the rest of the narrative, and there are at least one too many villains here. All of this renders Batman as an agency-less reactive character, which makes for a boring protagonist β if you can even call him one at all. Yet the film continues to take up welcome real estate in my brain, the sort of movie I don't even really like much but still appreciate for how perfectly it captures the type of dreams I'd have as a kid whenever I'd chug a litre of room temperature milk right before bed.
PokΓ©mon Detective Pikachu (2019) - This was touted as a major step forward for film adaptations of video games because, I guess, it achieved the level of βGenerically Functionalβ instead of βMemorably Terribleβ like so many before it. Frankly I preferred the latter, although if this is the steppingstone necessary for the genre to reach βOverambitious, Well-Intentioned Failureβ then Iβll accept it as the innocuous mediocrity it is.
While I was watching this I grappled with my assumptions over which PokΓ©mon would be furry or not furry, which was a fun mental exercise.
The Simpsons Movie (2007) - It just goes to show that with a six year production cycle and over one hundred script revisions The Simpsons can still craft something that's about as good as your average season 9 episode, which was famously the first season where they didn't try as hard.
Broadcast News (1987) - You would think that a nicely shot, pleasingly witty, middlebrow film about three adults caught in a love triangle where no one is the villain would be a dime dozen, but if you look at the metrics it turns out that this is actually the fifth and final one.
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) - If you can, watch this when a power outage seems imminent. For the first thirty minutes itβs going to feel like youβve discovered an overlooked Coen brothers classic, and if you're lucky your power will go out before this thing collapses under the weight of its own impeccable imagination and bravura setpieces. Never before have so many elements I should love β A confident idiot protagonist! Zip-zap dialogue! A surreal, off-putting universe that everyone just kinda rolls with! β added up to less than the sum of their parts. Folks, I am sorry to report that this exhausted me.
Bill & Tedβs Bogus Journey (1991) - Absolutely criminal that this was not understood in the '90s to be the rare comedy sequel that surpasses the original, although I suppose the authorities were investigating more important crimes at the time.
The Sandlot (1993) - Because this is a '90s children's film there is an extended chase sequence of wacky, generic property damage. This is what they kept shoveling to you if you were a kid, and eventually you learned to accept that a long table of food would inevitably be toppled, a theatre screen playing a public domain horror movie would get ripped through precisely at the scariest moment, and anyone who devoted their life to public education was counting down the minutes until a dog bit them in the nuts. I always hated these scenes β Hollywood writers had such condescending contempt for my generation, assuming I was a child sociopath who delighted in people's lives and labour being disrupted, when in reality I was merely stupid.
Anyway if you know me and my colourful self-esteem issues then you definitely know that there's no better way to make me empathize with an ostensible protagonist than by having them pushed out of their own narrative in favour of a character whose journey turns out to matter more. It's a fun twist, and if pulled off well adds a lot of interesting wrinkles to whatever theme they've been building. That device happens here with the main kid and his hotshot best friend β except I think it's a screenwriting error? Like they straight-up didn't realise that the first billed kid's arc of finding acceptance in a new town is achieved by the end of Act 1, and then he just kind of hangs around the vicinity of his louder friends for the next hour. The climax of the movie is spearheaded by his best friend who grows from being a kid who is brave and cool into a kid who is braver and cooler. It's real weird.
At one point our ostensible hero lays in bed and narrates his best friend's dream from across town, in which Babe Ruth gives him a pep-talk and then steals from his bedroom. The obvious takeaway is that the main character has a heretofore unmentioned clairvoyant ability to surreptitiously witness and comment upon the dreams of others, which he uses exactly once. Maybe The Sandlot 2 expands on this idea more, I don't know, I never saw it.
Blade Runner (1982) - I love Blade Runner. I love its themes and how Harrison Ford doesn't do a single cool thing in it. I love how sleepy I feel when I watch it.
Only Yesterday (1991) - This is a lovely film about the quiet joys of rural life and how staying in conversation with the person you've ceased to be offers invaluable guidance, and my idiot brain will always resent it for how it (justifiably, efficiently) abandons its urban setting five minutes in. Some of the most beautiful '90s Tokyo cityscapes ever captured, give or take a SimCity (SNES) title screen.
Fail Safe (2000) - I remember in university a prof showed this as part of his Cold War history class, and for the entire lecture afterwards he kept casually referring to the nuclear physicist character played by Hank Azaria as "Moe the Bartender." Five stars just for that memory.
Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995) - The one Die Hard sequel that it's acceptable to like (look, I don't make the rules, this is just how it is), marred only by the absolute cowardice of barely factoring John McClane's so-called "hangover" into the plot. Huge whiff to not have him constantly chugging waters, deploying his detective skills to piece together which family member he needs to apologise to, or slipping into a drive-thru during a car chase. Oh what I would give for this movie to swap out its helicopter gunfight finale in favour of Jeremy Irons downing a whole cargo palette of blue Gatorades in front of a tied-up Bruce Willis, completely inconsolable for the first time in the series. If y'all wanna take another crack at this with some re-shoots I'm available for punch-up, just shoot me a line at my Hotmail.
Bowfinger (1999) - This really feels like the last Steve Martin movie that's A STEVE MARTIN MOVIE, y'know? Still to this day have no idea what a Frank Oz movie is.
Strange Brew (1983) - Bob and Doug sketches were a bit of an anomaly on SCTV, birthed as mockery towards the CBCβs mandate that the series have two minutes of exclusively βCanadian content.β The results were deliberately sloppy, wholly-improvised meanderings that worked in part because they were a careful-what-you-wish-for middle finger to Canadaβs culture-policing, and there was a hard cut-off after two minutes. Moranis and Thomasβ other sketches tended to err on the headier side β weird conceptual stuff like a βSpecial Editionβ of The Merv Griffin Show thatβs a ten minute post-script where he leaves his talk show set to go to space, a riff on the Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship via a sketch gloriously titled βThe Adventures of Shake and Bake," or Moranis basically inventing MTV before the network even started. Good shit all around, but, I mean, you can see why Bob and Doug popped with a mass audience and their other stuff didnβt. Sometimes you just want to see your Canadian TV friends say dumb stuff about snow tires, and I respect that right.
The problem is that when you put Bob and Doug into a feature film you lose the meta layer of Canadian tax dollars and broadcast law creating the monster of a stereotype they wanted to avoid, and when the energy flags thereβs no longer an easy out where we can jump over to Eugene Levy really working his eyebrows with a whole new character or whatever. After the superb opening five minutes exploring how doomed a higher-budget, direct translation of their SCTV sketches would play as a film, the movie tries to marry the charming stupidity of Bob and Doug with a smarty-pants thematic riff on Hamlet. Mashed together each style of Thomas and Moranis comedy winds up holding the other one back, leaving you lost in a too complicated plot without enough absurdist gags to sustain it. You keep waiting for it to [clears throat, leans uncomfortably close] βtake offβ but it never quite does.
That said this is still one of the five best Canadian films ever made, and itβs not even really close.
Animal Crossing: The Movie (2006) - Animal Crossing is the perfect video game for when you don't really want to be engaged with what you're playing, and it's dope that the film adaptation follows suit by being something you can watch when you don't really want to be entertained. There's a legit good movie to be adapted from this property using the template of the M*A*S*H or Childrens Hospital episodes that take place over an entire year, but I'm only going to speak on this more if you're nice to me.
Manhattan (1979) - Even before we as a culture got fed up with Woody Allen like so many Diane Keaton characters before us, I never thought this was half the movie Annie Hall is. βThe heart wants what it wantsβ is a line so lovely and eloquent that itβs easy to overlook its inherent selfishness, cynically dispatched to handwave any real exploration of what a 41-year-old bedding a high schooler would entail. The film relies on us taking Isaac and Tracyβs relationship seriously without giving proper weight to what it means for Tracy in particular, and for better or for worse my brain is not conditioned enough to pull off the mental gymnastics required to just roll with that.
EXCELLENT orgasm joke during the party scene.
Waiting for Guffman (1996) - What the elites donβt want you to talk about is that the back half of this movie doesn't work nearly as well as its front. The play we spend 45 minutes building up to neither pays off as a delightful Muppet Show-esque disaster, nor a Rushmore-style triumph of limited resources. Instead itβs just a so-so local theatre production in a very general way, and I canβt help but expect more from a movie that sets up almost every single character as a gloriously specific failure. Still, you gotta give credit to Christopher Guest for understanding his movie well enough to close it with a character monologuing about a Remains of the Day lunchbox, and have that be the most natural ending imaginable.
Joker (2019) - One of those movies that seems to be saying something but in reality just has a colour palette. Its existence is totally warranted, however, if it winds up launching a sub-franchise built around wedging Batman villains into the tropes and aesthetics of other films from the '70s and early '80s (e.g. an intensely pessimistic Albert Brooks-esque rom-com with a narcissistic Riddler as the lead, Harley and Ivy doing the Cheech & Chong thing, Bat-Mite in some animated Fritz the Cat nonsense that you can only see if your cousin lends you a third generation VHS tape of it, etc.).
The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) - This is my favourite time travel movie.
A Recipe for Cranberry Sauce:
β’ 1 (12 ounce) bag of cranberries
β’ 1 cup of water
β’ 1/2 - 3/4 cup of sugar (I prefer less sugar so that theyβre slightly tart)
Directions
β’ Rinse cranberries
β’ Bring water and 1/2 - 3/4 cup of sugar to boil
β’ Add cranberries and cover
β’ Let simmer for about 5-10 minutes
β’ Add more sugar to taste, if desired
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