michael's movie reviews
2018
These are the movies I reviewed in 2018.
A Million Ways to Die in the West
reviewed 2018.12.29
As I was watching this, it began to dawn on me that it was mostly just alternating shots of two people speaking. So I started moving the old slider and found that yes, that was the large majority of the movie. The two leads speaking directly at each other.I gave up due to the unfunny hamming, the lack of at least some compelling action that comes with the Western genre, and yes, the talking...
reviewed 2018.12.25
This is a Star Wars prequel that needless attempts to tell Han Solo's back-story...
reviewed 2018.12.17
This is a charming Christmas story featuring a brother and sister who are spending X'mas eve alone (mum's working; dad's dead)...
reviewed 2018.12.13
This is the story of a corporate employee who is sent to Mexico for purposes that aren't quite what it seems...
reviewed 2018.12.04
This is a thoroughly unpleasant Bat Man movie with an absurd story line even by the standards of Bat Man...
reviewed 2018.11.18
This is a series of shorts set in the Wild West of the late 19th Century...
reviewed 2018.10.23
This is the story of two men who join LA's police force in the time when the city (and continent) are being overrun by the drug trade...
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
reviewed 2018.09.21
This is the grand finale of the "Harry Potter" movies and I think it's only to be seen if you've seen part one. Because it's mostly a huge wizard fight in the school grounds. It's not clear exactly why that should be the final battle scene but I imagine it's because everyone's so invested in the school, its inhabitants, and its mythology.Recommended...
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
reviewed 2018.09.20
The kids have been watching the "Harry Potter" movies without me because I watched them all once years ago and refused to do so again. But now we're covering films I haven't seen so I rejoined.I'm more-or-less starting from scratch, so I am all but coming at this from the point of view of a new-comer...
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
reviewed 2018.09.18
This is hands-down the best super-hero movie I've seen...
reviewed 2018.09.17
This is an animated story about an advanced "security" droid and the human girl it befriends...
Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie
reviewed 2018.09.14
This is a story about an LA detective who works magic in the field but stumbles in dealing with his own affairs...
reviewed 2018.09.12
This confounding movie begins (more or less) with a couple's decision to shrink themselves to live in an eco-friendly fashion as miniature humans in a miniature domed habitat...
reviewed 2018.08.30
This is a clever zombie movie set in Korea...
reviewed 2018.08.25
This is an unrelentingly unpleasant movie in which an unspeaking slave finds freedom when his captors are attacked...
reviewed 2018.08.15
This is a movie in which a bartender is dragged into the underworld of crime...
reviewed 2018.08.13
This is an animated story about supermarket food products that become aware that they are food stuffs and other disposable products - and then fail to recover from that realization...
reviewed 2018.08.12
Two high school nerds attempt to throw a party...
reviewed 2018.08.10
This is a story about a teenage girl who's struggling with her emotional load due in part to suffering terrible bullying, witnessing the illness of her mother, and living without her father. Our heroine escapes into fantasy, in which she's defending the town against an incursion by giants.By the end of the thing, I couldn't quite parse what was real and what meant what exactly to our hero...
reviewed 2018.08.09
This is a drama about a raid on a "safe house" maintained by the CIA, and the unlikely pairing for the rest of the story between one of the agents and the Bad Guy he is tasked with protecting...
reviewed 2018.08.07
This is a story of Armageddon; peaceful cities of citizens going through their lives in a near-future setting that seems to be getting on pretty well. One person is plagued by visions of a coming invasion but this is suppressed and all is well (if told in an overly-restrained way).Then the invasion starts as foretold.And then the invaders are found to be human, though they're clearly arriving ..
reviewed 2018.07.25
The four of us went to see this hugely popular super-hero flick and I have to say I am close to the end of my tolerance for these things...
reviewed 2018.07.23
Everyone loves this thing, it's current rating on imdb on 8...
reviewed 2018.06.29
This is an ambitious movie about a young lad who's sent out to kill a reindeer with a bow and arrow as part of his "becoming a man"...
reviewed 2018.05.26
This is a retelling of an animated movie from several years ago, but the story lines deviate considerably...
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
reviewed 2018.05.09
As you can probably tell from the title of this movie, it's a sequel and not a particularly good one...
reviewed 2018.05.07
This is a telling of the eradication of the culture of the marginal islands in the Gulf along Louisiana...
reviewed 2018.04.30
This is a re-telling of the King Kong story, but with Brie Larson along for some reason...
reviewed 2018.04.30
This is the tale of four high school kids that get swept up in an ancient video game that transports them to an in-game world of high stakes adventure...
reviewed 2018.04.20
This is a story about three couples who meet while hiking a famous path in a tropical paradise...
reviewed 2018.04.17
This is a buddy movie in which a tough bounty hunter and a skittish accountant are thrust together by circumstances. The accountant's been working for the mob but skipped bail to flee his former employers and the authorities. Everyone else in the movie is either after the accountant or is a bystander.I enjoyed the story, the friction/tension between the two leads, the dialog, and the overall vib..
reviewed 2018.04.16
Once in a while, Hollywood produces a movie where they take some stars and tell them, "Here's the plot outline, improvise...
reviewed 2018.04.15
A couple of years ago I wrote one of my mini-reviews about "Jupiter Ascending", a Mila Kunis movie that eh, didn't work. I wrote, "Better luck next time", and I'm happy to report that this, the next time, worked.This is an accidental spy story about two room-mates who find themselves tangled in some bewildering and deadly spy stuff after one friend's charming boyfriend breaks up with her...
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
reviewed 2018.04.14
We watched this for "Movie night"...
reviewed 2018.03.31
Despite the many times I've seen this film over the years, I realized with a start today that I've never written one of my capsule reviews for one of my favorite flicks. So let's do this!This is an animated movie that tracks what I would argue is the imaginative response of an eleven year old to what she perceives is a close call with losing her mother to an unspecified illness...
Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
reviewed 2018.03.27
This is the story of an aging actor who decides on one final big splash...
reviewed 2018.03.19
This is a surprisingly excellent story of a wildlife officer who becomes involved in the investigation into the murder of a friend's daughter...
reviewed 2018.03.17
This is a mockumentary/found-footage flick about a house (nest?) of vampires living in the modern age...
reviewed 2018.03.03
This is a gangster flick, in which a mute bartender is dragged into the appalling underworld of a sci-fi Crapsack setting. Dealing with characters like an Paul Rudd's uncharacteristically evil surgeon in a quest to find his girlfriend, he finds himself in a violent and desperate situation without much help.It's dire, it's appalling, and despite some interesting flashes it seems to have been murd..
reviewed 2018.02.24
This is an action movie, a follow-up of sorts to another with a similar title and the same bluff lead. It's not good. It's just not good.In fact, I'll summarize it like this: there is one mostly-excellent action sequence mid-way that you can probably find on Youtube...
reviewed 2018.02.23
This is a movie about gun-running during the Bush administration and the massive orgy of mis-allocation of resources across the global "war on terror"...
reviewed 2018.02.15
This is an animated story of a young boy who lives on a lighthouse with her father and little sister...
reviewed 2018.01.30
This is a Horror movie dressed up as a robbery flick...
Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters
reviewed 2018.01.23
This anime has the interesting premise of documenting mankind's return Earth some 20,000 years after Godzilla chased them off the planet...
reviewed 2018.01.18
This is a movie about a twentyish drop-out who meets a girl with some very strange dating requirements...
reviewed 2018.01.06
So it turns out there's a third of these movies, and tonight that's what we watched...