Twenty years ago, our heroes went on a crime spree in the great city of Edinburgh. Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle return as the older, and slightly wiser, childhood friends and all around losers. I had forgotten that Jonny Lee Miller was Sick Boy, but I remembered the rest of the guys well enough. It’s directed by Danny Boyle and written by John Hodge. Trainspotting was an awesome movie. I loved it from the first time I watched it, though it does have a few heartbreaking, disturbing, and disgusting scenes. I love the closing scene…
Category: movie review
Passangers
In 1998 the brilliant Douglas Adams wrote a computer game called Starship Titanic. The game play involved a sole passenger wandering around a cruise ship trying to keep it from blowing up. The only other people on board are a collection of robots, well, more correctly, androids. Passengers reminded me of Starship Titanic once or twice. This is one of the problems with being a Science Fiction fan, everything reminds me of something else. Ok, so Passengers got all kinds of bad press for no good reason. This is a perfectly fine science fiction film. The acting is good, the sets…
Colossal
At first I thought this was just a low budget movie that had done a good job of finding an Anne Hathaway look alike, but turns out it really is Anne Hathaway. This is an odd movie. One of the rules of sci-fi is to not explain too much, but I think they might had kept a few too many secrets to themselves in Colossal. At first Colossal looks like your average Rom-Com about a 30 something failure who moves back home. Well, that is if you overlook the opening scene of a little girl in South Korea confronting a…
Valerian
Over the course of three or four hundred years, the International Space Station changes as hundreds or thousands of aliens dock and never leave. We have a cute montage of humans greeting new visitors to the station, with each race being a little more alien than the last. We watch as a race of uber peaceful aliens living on the planet Tahiti Screen Saver go about their day doing a number of bizarre and incomprehensible things. Then they watch helplessly as wreckage from a battle raging in close proximity to the planet rain down on their perfect and defenseless paradise.…
The Circle
If The Circle had been released about ten years ago, it might have been a terrifying glimpse of the future. If it had been released five years ago, it might have still been a bit of a warning of things to come. But since it was released in 2017 and everything seen on screen is already possible, if not actively happening, its a tale of closing the gate after the cow has left the pasture. The Circle is a bad movie. It’s an odd mixture of a Steve Jobs bio-pic and The Truman Show. We start with our hero, a…
Before I Fall
Image Groundhog Day, only you hate everyone. spoilers Before I Fall is the story of five total and complete losers, four psycho bitch mean girls and one pathetic emo girl. This is a time loop story, that like Groundhog Day, resets as each day begins again. Our ‘hero’ is one of the mean girls, a total bitch to everyone she knows. Her big plan for the day is to have sex with her boyfriend and end her time as a virgin. We follow her as she is mean to her sister, her mother, her father, and everyone else who happens…
The Founder
Michael Keaton plays Ray Kroc, a failure in his fifties who still has dreams of hitting it big. We open up with Ray giving a sales pitch for a shake machine. We then watch as everyone he pitches slams the door in his face. Then he hears about a small hamburger stand that ordered six of the shake machines. This leads him to McDonald’s, a small, but very well run restaurant in California. Ray is amazed by the crowds and the speed of food delivery. The McDonald brothers take Ray on a tour and show him exactly how they run…
La La Land
I grew up watching Musicals. Singing in The Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and My Fair Lady were regular viewing fare. There were plenty of bad musicals as well. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Little Prince didn’t quite measure up for me. The last Musical that I really loved with Julia Andrew’s Victor/Victoria, and it was more of a modern twist on the musical, since all of it’s songs were preformed on a stange, as opposed to everyone just breaking into song for no reason. La La Land opens with a song and dance number on one of…
Manchester by the Sea
Casey Affleck has won all kinds of awards for playing the role of Lee Chandler. This was the main reason I decided to watch Manchester by the Sea. As is often the case when I go into a movie expecting to see something great, I was a bit disappointed. Our hero, such as he is, is lonely loser who has a crappy job as a maintenance man. He lives in the tiny basement apartment that comes with job and has no patience for the people who bitch and moan about life as he tries to repair whatever needs to be…
Rogue One
Many Bothans died to bring us this information. Many years ago, when computers were first used in films, someone predicted that one day there would be digital Marilyn Monroes and digital James Deans. But what, he asked, if the CGI actors couldn’t act? We find out the answer in Rogue One, where several characters from Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Return of the Jedi make cameo appearances. The most jarring of these was a stiff and emotionless Peter Cushing composite playing Grand Moff Tarkin. It was very good, but still not perfect. Of course, it is only…