Klaus (2019) - Movie Review

This film, an animated Netflix-exclusive release, is the product of an alternate reality. A reality as gleamed at by writer/director Sergio Pablos, an animator who assisted in some of Disney’s later Renaissance efforts and the man behind the source material for last year’s Smallfoot. It is a reality where, instead of CGI becoming the standard, traditional animation continued to be the norm. I am no nearly well-versed enough in multiverse theory to even attempt to figure out how to see this reality for myself, but if the films of that timeline looks half as good as this, then hot damn, we’ve been missing out.

21 Bridges (2019) - Movie Review

 

The son of a murdered cop, who himself is a detective in New York, gets brought in on a seemingly open-and-shut robbery case. Of course, when the robbery in question is one of the biggest drug seizures in the city’s history, and the culprits are not only still at large but have racked up a sizeable body count of police officers, things are about to get complicated. To give themselves a chance to catch them, detective Andre Davis orders that all 21 bridges connecting Manhattan to the outside world are to be blocked off, trapping the killers on the island.

The Front Runner (2019) - Movie Review

2019 is an election year here in Australia. Knowing the intense makeover that has taken place over the last couple of years in regards to political discourse, largely due to what can charitably be called an unexpected result in the U.S. 2016 election, it seems that the public are more aware than ever of the chicanery that goes down on the party front lines. As such, features like this which delve into the political past are typically done as a means of making some sense of what is happening in the now. The Post managed it, Vice ultimately didn't, and today’s outing? Well, it does technically speak to the current political climate... in the worst way possible.

The Snowman (2017) - Movie Review

 

While the reigning school of auteur theory may argue against this, directors don’t always have complete control over their work. Sometimes, it’s down to studio interference like with Walking With Dinosaurs; sometimes, it’s down to a rotating list of creatives attached to a single film that can lead to a major case of too many cooks in the kitchen like with Jane Got A Gun; and sometimes, it’s down to just poor planning. A lot of work goes into every single film I have covered so far and will ever cover on this blog; even the worst pieces of crap I’ve talked about involved dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people working together. There’s all sorts of room for error in that kind of situation, from stunt work that goes hideously wrong to constant re-writes in the middle of production that put the story out of whack.

 

Then there’s what went into today’s film, which is objectively unfinished. I feel somewhat bad for even writing about this in the first place, but as I’ll get into, the production issues aren’t nearly enough to excuse how… baffling this turned out.

Patriots Day (2017) - Movie Review

Since taking the art of cinema as seriously as I do nowadays, I have gained a greater appreciation for the films that I watch. Of the many boons that I consider myself gaining because of this, the one I hold closest to me is how I now attach specific names to features. Actors, directors and screenwriters behind the films I look at here have gained greater meaning to me and have led me to some works that I wouldn’t have batted an eye at beforehand. For example: "You mean the guy who made Back To The Future and Forrest Gump also made The Walk? Man, I gotta check this out!" That’s a statement that would never cross my lips a few short years ago, and I always get a bit of a kick from linking films together through the people involved in social situations.

However, there’s a flipside to that that not only links bad films to particular people, but also because it has made me more aware of the specific styles employed by most directors. In terms of today’s film, it’s what I’ve noticed about director/co-writer Peter Berg’s more recent filmography… and how his attachment to it didn’t exactly have me riveted to check it out. Why is this? Well, let’s get started and I’ll hopefully be able to explain why.

La La Land (2016) - Movie Review

The movie musical is dead. Or, at least, the original concept of the movie musical is dead. Starting out as a natural extension of film’s stylistic origins in theatre, it was full of big grins and bigger dance numbers about the ways of life and love. And then we started to get inventive with the format, using it less as a means of showing the fantastical nature of the musical and more to highlight it as a heavy contrast to the harshness of reality. Through this, we’ve gotten some proper quality musical films as Sweeney Todd, Repo! The Genetic Opera, Hedwig And The Angry Inch, Reefer Madness and a bunch of others that wouldn’t even be conceivable as viable musicals back in the old days. Now, as much as this evolution of the format has honestly worked out for the best all things considered, maybe a bit of revivalism could help keep everything in perspective. And thanks to rising star filmmaker Damian Chazelle, it seems that we have just that for today.

The Accountant (2016) - Movie Review

Some of my long(er)-time readers may have noticed that I am not one to shy away from certain aspects of mental disorders. Specifically, when it comes to how modern-day cinema portrays said disorders. As someone who freely admits to using movie-watching as a form of personal therapy (less risky to lash out at a piece of fiction than at an actual person), seeing films use mental conditions that I personally relate to can be a big part of that. Some films do an incredible job with them like Inside Out, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children and X+Y, and some can make a complete dog’s breakfast out of it like Mommy, Love Is Now and the more recent headache of Vaxxed. Today, we have another addition to that canon, except this is something that I don’t think exists in that great a number out there in the larger cinematic world. And quite frankly, we need more films like this.

Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016) - Movie Review

While How To Train Your Dragon serves as a lot of people’s evidence that Dreamworks is far better than we give them credit for, the Kung Fu Panda films are also an example of the studio at their best. Admittedly, the entire franchise started on a rather ill-fitting note by casting Jack Black as the main character, and sure his mannerisms were quite grating to start out with, but it had a sense of excitement and fun that a lot of other recent family films were lacking. The animation was high-energy and very well-crafted, leading to probably some of the best fight scenes of any film series of the last several years, the acting was top-notch with an all-star cast that contained some real martial arts legends like Jackie Chan and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Oh, and the writing took the standard “be yourself” theme of a lot of family-friendly fare and executed it so well that it managed to break the mould of its kind and surpass the genre clichés. You can imagine, with a pedigree like this, that this third film would have some rather high expectations. For reasons I will get into with the review proper, I was really not looking forward to this. But hey, after the weaksauce family offerings of the last long while, I’m still positive that this will be a decent watch. How decent is the question, though.