So fast, So Furious

Fast & Furious - ★★★★☆
So far, this is my favorite of the series. I like when someone decides to make a sequel in a different genre from the original movie. Like, I don't want to see that Jump Street / Men in Black crossover movie, but I'd be happy for them if they made it.

Dom's superpowers begin to manifest in this movie.

Fast Five - ★★★☆☆
Another sequel, another genre. I like the inventiveness keeping the series cranking along. Cheers to the writer who decided that we can now, 5 movies in, simply assume that our heroes always win all street races.

Dom's superpowers are more openly on display now. Notice metal bars clang off of his bare arms, among other weird and inhuman behaviors.

The Rock's superpowers are that it's always raining on only him in this movie, and that he's terrible at acting in it.

Fast & Furious Six - ★★☆☆☆
The hallmark of this series is spending the downtime between action set pieces reminiscing about previous installments and what good, down-to-earth friends everyone is (they're such pals that even the guys who only met Dom once come running when he calls). But planting the movie's feet so firmly on the ground makes it really, bizarrely jarring and dissonant when the characters start doing arbitrarily impossible things.

I mean, sure, they do impossible things all the time, but early on in the series we can pretend that they're actually just incredibly skilled mechanics and drivers. Just about any car stunt they want to pull off, we'll buy it. But this doesn't seem like the right movie to make you believe a man can fly.

What this entry does have is a whole lot of punching. Substantially more hitting than seen previously. On the Dom super powers front, he seems slightly more vulnerable to harm than in the last movie, but new powers make up for it.

(Also, why doesn't anyone go and look for Gisele? Everyone else survives falling off of that plane. She probably just needed a medic. Nobody even checked on her.)

Furious 7 - ★★½☆☆
This one's just a cartoon. The first movie in the series to not lead off the credits with a disclaimer reminding you not to attempt the stunts you've just seen, because, of course not. Nothing in this movie would work in any way; the veneer of realism from the earlier ones has completely washed away. Which is fine, but it leaves me hoping that maybe part 8 will be about street racing somehow. Otherwise I think they've got to go to space.

The God's Eye ranges from superfluous to ridiculous, the marriage is a retcon too far, but I'm going to subscribe to the idea that it's Dom that died in this movie. He's the one that "left without saying goodbye." All that stuff on the beach and whatnot, that's his bridge at Owl Creek. His super powers are probably at an all-time high here, but they weren't enough. He's a ghost!

#2,134: Merchants of Doubt

The Myth of the American Sleepover - ★★½☆☆
I think this would be the middle movie in a trilogy that starts with Dazed and Confused and ends with a movie that hasn't been made yet about kids in the 90s or 00s about to enter high school, except in that third movie, they'll all sit at home texting each other. The really daring kids might video chat a little.

Almost nobody gets what they want, and only a few people get what they deserve. Each story had a side-character that I kind of felt bad for.

2 Fast 2 Furious - ★★★☆☆
This movie doubles down on the two most notable things from the first movie: car chases and embarrassingly bad dialogue. I give 'em credit for making what seems to be the only traditional sequel in the series - it's the same movie, but not, and bigger. Also, points for no dumb just-because romantic sub-plot.

I wonder if Ludicris appears in the movie because they want him to do a song, or if they let him do a song so he'll act in the movie.

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief - ★★★☆☆
I don't know what I thought this was going to be, but it's pretty much what you'd expect: every story you've heard about scientology. Not as flashy as Merchants Of Doubt, but better organized. Similar in pacing though, and it definitely has an opinion, maybe even a mission. I've been working with a lot of documentary projects recently, and it's refreshing to see a movie that knows what it wants.

Merchants of Doubt - ★★★½☆
Even if I completely set the content aside – which is admittedly a weird thing to do – I really liked how this is a movie that has a thesis and presents its case in interesting ways. Consequently, I was kind of unhappy with the last third of the movie, which seemed to wander somewhat from the original point.

Unlike Going Clear, I'd be interested in checking out the book that was the basis for this movie, but mainly because I'm curious to see where it diverges. Although Merchants may have been an adaptation, it felt like its own filmic creation, where Going Clear felt more like a translation - a conveyance of existing material into a new medium.

#2,130: It Follows

Swingers - ★★★½☆
Such an LA movie. So many little gags that I don't think I'd appreciate without living here. It's probably nonsense, but I felt a little bit of fake nostalgia, or maybe envy, for Mike's computer-free lifestyle in his little apartment across the street from the scientologists.

Dazed and Confused - ★★½☆☆
In much the same way that I was better able to appreciate Swingers for having lived in LA, I can't help but think that I'm not appreciating this movie to the fullest by not having lived in the 70's. This is not a high school experience that I simply missed out on, this is a high school experience that no longer existed in any recognizable fashion 20-some years later, if it ever existed at all. I'm glad I finally saw this, but it's nostalgia for something completely alien to me.

To Live and Die in L.A. - ★★☆☆☆
More like To Live and Die in Long Beach.

A story of the Secret Service's worst agents, featuring an incredible-for-its-day car chase and honest-to-goodness character arcs, both of which have had their edge somewhat dulled by decades of CGI reproductions.

Cinderella - ★½☆☆☆
I don't really want to believe in 'boy movies' and 'girl movies,' but this one just wasn't for me. The storybook dialogue was too ridiculous, the story itself was too beat-for-beat exactly the way you know it, the choice to make references to the cartoon was almost as weird as the fact that they apparently recorded a lot of the songs and then didn't use them. Was this going to be a musical at some point?

I am glad they went all-in on sincerity, at least, but this felt like a movie based on a wikipedia summary of another movie.

It Follows - ★★★★★
I wanted to put that line from Death Proof here, "kind of cool, kind of sexy, kind of funny but definitely not funny looking" or however that goes.

I really think that a lot of the reviewers of and commenters on this movie are getting it wrong. The movie isn't saying that sex is bad, it's saying that growing up is tough.

#2,125: Focus

Citizenfour - ★★★★☆
Very interesting to get to see a record of a moment like this as it happens, not 50 years after the death of everyone involved, on a participant's deathbed, or reconstructed from leftover, fading printouts.

Safe - ★★☆☆☆
It's really interesting how not interesting this movie is. Over and over, I'd cotton to the idea of what the movie was going to be about, settle myself in for a story about X, and then this isn't a movie about X. Or almost anything else. I don't feel like I need to know whether her problems are psychosomatic or real, but I guess I want the movie to have an opinion. About anything.

The Fast and the Furious - ★★★☆☆
I guess I never bothered with this movie before because I thought it was going to be dumb. And, it was dumb. But that's okay.

Focus- ★★½☆☆
Luckily, this is better than the trailer. I wonder if now would be a good time to mention that I've been using MoviePass this year. It's a flat fee for almost-unlimited movie tickets. So if you've been reading along and worrying about me as I report back on some of the worst of what 2015 has had to offer so far, then a) fear not, but b) I am somewhat concerned that the Wednesday night ticket taker at my local cinema just thinks that we're a couple of idiots, seeing all these sub-par movies.

Anyhow, Focus plays out pretty much just like you might expect it to, if you're paying any attention at all, or you've seen a con man flick before. It's a little bit of a drag that the most fun scam in the movie is based in complete nonsense, and a little bit more of a drag that it takes place so early in the movie. I thought it was odd that the filmmakers opted to force a needless R-rating. I wonder if it was a kind of excuse insurance against low box office.

If I knew anyone else who had seen this, maybe I'd like discussing with them how many acts they think this movie has.

DDMTA Teaser Trailer

It's like, the hardest thing, to find a project you really believe in. Whenever I talk to fellow movie crew kinds of folks and ask them how many projects they've done that they're really proud of, the numbers are always discouragingly small. 

Here's a new teaser for Diani and Devine Meet The Apocalypse. I think this may take the crown for best movie I've ever worked on, and this video barely scratches the surface of why.