Sonic The Hedgehog (2020) - Movie Review

I don’t get Sonic The Hedgehog. No, I’m not talking about the ravenous fanbase, or even having a dig at the games themselves (although it must be said that the Sonic games aren’t the kind to do things small; when they’re bad, they’re really bad); I’m talking strictly in terms of the character himself. He’s a blue anthropomorphic hedgehog who can run faster than anything else, and he has a really cocky attitude. That’s pretty much it. I don’t claim to be the biggest Sonic afficionado out there, but I’ve gone through enough Let’s Play osmosis to have seen the games and, even considering the competition, this has to be one of the trickiest games to give the big-screen treatment. A trick that these filmmakers just didn’t seem to get right.

Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond (2017) - Movie Review

Jim Carrey has never really gotten the credit he deserves as a singular being. His grand heyday in the 80’s and 90’s is treated for what it is, him at the peak of his rubber-faced and highly energetic game, but that’s also the big thing associated with him. Now, while I myself personally love the guy’s work in that mode, admitting that also ends up discarding everything else that the man has done on the big screen. It disregards the painfully emotional performance he gave in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, or the genuinely confronting portrayal of The Number 23, or the truly perfect depiction he gave of comedic legend Andy Kaufman in Miloš Forman’s 1999 classic Man On The Moon.

It’s as if these two worlds, Jim Carrey as the comedian and Jim Carrey as the actor, never managed to collide in a way that made the world appreciate that he was both. I see it, I recognize it and I consider him my personal favourite actor because of it. I don’t see anything special in making that announcement; I’m just putting my bias right on the table like always before getting into a review (provided I can even be bothered to write an introduction for a review nowadays for admission of bias to even exist in). So, when this documentary about the making of Man On The Moon popped up on NetFlix, it immediately had my attention and I knew I had to cover it before the year was out. But I don’t think anything, not even my pre-existing love for the actor in question, could have prepared me for this.

Dumb And Dumber To (2015) - Movie Review

There are so many rules, regulations and concessions surrounding sequels to Jim Carrey movies that the Sequels Rulebook has an entire chapter dedicated to them alone. You make a sequel with Jim Carrey in it? You get Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.  You make a sequel without Jim Carrey in it? You get Evan Almighty. You make a sequel without Jim Carrey in it several years after the fact? You get Son Of The Mask. You make a sequel with Jim Carrey when he wasn’t in the original? You get Kick-Ass 2. The range and scale of quality of these films is staggering, which makes today’s film something of an oddity. It’s a sequel made several years after the fact that does star Jim Carrey, which is interesting given his previous stance on sequels that don’t involve Ace Ventura (and even then, he was spared the horrors of being in Ace Ventura Jr.), and it also has the Farrelly brothers coming back to write and direct. How does it turn out? Time to find out in my first review of 2015: This is Dumb & Dumber To.