#2,286: Star Trek Beyond

The Purge - ★★★☆☆
There are two kinds of movie I used to skip in the theater: big broad blockbuster comedies and a lot of horror stuff. Except, when I end up watching them later, it turns out that I like the horror stuff. Sometimes just to admire the economy of it.

Plus, the premise of this one makes me laugh.

The Infiltrator - ★★★☆☆
Felt to me like a throwback to the kind of movie made in the time this movie takes place. Like a 70s movie about the 70s, made last year. I thought it was pretty tense, just waiting for the shoe to drop. Cranston has a streak going of doing movies with unusual structure. I wonder if he insists on it.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier - ★★☆☆☆
I was oddly eager to see what is supposedly the worst movie in the series. It didn't seem all that different from Beyond, really. I like how the transporter isn't made of, like, tiny complicated circuit boards and electronics. It seems to be run on gears and pipes and things you need a huge wrench to fix.

I hope they get Ricky Gervais to play Sybok in the remake.

Star Trek Beyond - ★★½☆☆
A little bit boring, but possibly the movie in the reboot series that is most like the original series. Less galaxy-spanning wild action and more talking to people in goofy makeup in small rooms. More broken technology things. More sciencey stuff that doesn't make sense in our world OR theirs. And a thing at the end that's supposed to be really awesome that is really silly.

DDMTA Big News Drops!

You want your big news? I've got your big news!

Diani & Devine Meet the Apocalypse has been selected as one of the ten flagship films of the 2016 Austin Film Festival! This is where the movie will – at last! – be hatched unto the world!

Here's an Entertainment Weekly story about it, and please enjoy yesterday's post for the official trailer!

DDMTA Trailer Drops!

So like I sometimes talk about, Diani and Devine Meet The Apocalypse is this movie I helped to produce, and it's actually good, and it's actually coming out soon. Here's the full trailer. 

Find out more at DDMTA.com!  It's a good time to find out more because BIG SECRET NEWS is coming tomorrow!

#2,282: Ghostbusters

The Legend of Tarzan - ★★★☆☆
• This movie is like if The Jungle Book was kind of good. Like, half-decent.
• There's a kind of 90s Three Musketeers vibe.
• And Christoph Waltz as the villain, Fitzcarraldo!
• It's the first time a movie has tried to make swinging around on vines make sense.
• It also really helped that Friendly Fire was set to Off during the final battle.

KidPoker - ★½☆☆☆
Too fluffy. Felt written to a template. The parts excerpting televised poker were fun.

Nintendo Quest - ½☆☆☆☆
I think that this is a really fun idea for a movie, and that there's still room for someone to go out and make a fun movie out of it, because this movie sucks.

Who was the intended audience? It's not going to be people who like Storage Wars or whatever since all of the prices are secret. It's not going to be Nintendo collectors, unless they're just feeling smug about how bad this guy is at collecting. It's not going to be people who want to see someone complete an unlikely challenge, or people who like travelogue, road tripping documentaries, because there's none of that in here. Context clues would suggest that this is probably made for people who have never heard of Nintendo before, but it doesn't seem like that's the sort of person that would click on this. Not on purpose anyway.

I guess I hope this documentary was a hoax. Then there'd be something interesting about it.

Ghostbusters - ★★½☆☆
Ghostbusters: The Phantom Menace

It's not great, but that's certainly not because of the core cast. I'd put it more on Paul Feig. This movie feels like the difference between film and digital, and maybe that's why it's a different (sub)genre from the '84 edition. The original was a textbook example of magical realism, and people who actually really dug that might be put off by this big cartoon. But if you look at the scope of the ghostbusters franchise, it's mostly cartoons. I bet kids who see this one first will prefer it.

Still, who goes and makes a movie that makes you say "ugh, I wish there wasn't so much Bill Murray in that movie"?

#2,278: Independence Day: Resurgence

Hello, My Name Is Doris - ★★★½☆
After the Sony hack, a lot of people scoffed at the notion that there was an Aunt May solo movie on the table, but I think it worked out just fine.

Iron Man Three - ★★★☆☆
I'm not convinced the plot of this movie completely works on a repeat viewing, but I am impressed with Shane Black for navigating the Marvel machine to make a good Iron Man movie that still feels like his own thing.

Iron Man 2 - ★★★½☆
It's fun to see how much Tony has changed, and how this movie fits into the bigger frame of MCU movies. I think I always liked it more than the popular opinion, and it would still rank in the upper half, top 7, let's say, of the MCU. The chief complaint of the time, I think, was too much connective material to other movies, but it seems so light compared to what we've seen in later installments.

Independence Day: Resurgence - ★½☆☆☆
Sometimes after seeing a movie, I like to think about who that movie was for. Who did the filmmakers have in mind as the ideal audience for their particular film? In this case, I think it was "people who have been harboring a grudge against the cast of Independence Day for the past twenty years."

I mean, it could be, "teens who have been eagerly awaiting a trilogy of films where a bunch of old people do things that don't affect the plot." I don't know. I don't think it was "the writers of this movie."

It's weird how they bothered to include the son of Will Smith's character as one of the 40 main characters even though the Will Smith role in this movie went to a white guy.