The Mitchells Vs. The Machines (2021) - Movie Review

When trailers for this film first dropped (back when it was under the far lamer title Connected), I didn’t think much of it. I mean, it looked cool and all those pug licks put a smile on my face every time they showed up, but it didn’t seem like anything all that special. Or, to put it more accurately, it didn’t seem like a film that, once it finally escaped the COVID carousel, would become one of the most popular films of the year. This thing has been getting hyped into the stratosphere for the last few months, and while lockdown brain has kept me from getting as many reviews done as I’d like, this is one I wanted to hold back on for a bit just so I could separate it from the colossal praise this has been getting. And then I watched it… and realised that everyone might have been underselling it.

Go! (2020) - Movie Review

Well, this sounds familiar: An Aussie sporting movie designed for general audiences that not only focuses on a particularly niche sport, but is also drenched in classic sports movie clichés. Okay, it only sound familiar to me, as I covered a film like this years ago with Paper Planes (which, fittingly enough, has the same writer working on this one), and that film I wound up liking a lot more than I had any reason to on pure kitsch value. I’d like to say the same for this one, but for reasons both good and bad, this is a different beast than trying to make paper aeroplanes seem exciting.