#2,349: Get Out

Before I Fall - ★☆☆☆☆
This year's [sci-fi premise + high school] entry.

It's said that in Harold Ramis' vision of Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character spends perhaps hundreds or thousands of years working his way to enlightenment by reliving that same day. So here's our pitch: let's take a group of teens that are meant to be pretty unlikeable at the outset, you know, so we can show what a journey they've taken? And we'll give just one of them the chance to set things right by letting her relive her day, oh, how about half a dozen times? I'm sure that'll do it.

It's goofy beyond belief, but just beginning to count the ways in print feels a little bit mean.

Sleight - ★★★☆☆
Mostly neat. A little bit fast and loose with its own rules. I'm always interested in 'magic' movies to see where they do practical tricks vs. visual effects.

(Okay, again, I want to avoid the list of nerdy nitpicks, but for real, just about everyone casually touches him on the arm at just the right spot and nobody notices anything? Even he doesn't flinch at it? Seems like a weird choice.)

The Belko Experiment - ★★½☆☆
Another B-Movie. B for Blumhouse. Everything they make is like, passable, but you wish they'd gone just a little bit further. Their whole company lives and dies by the 80/20 rule. (Which is going great for them, of course, but I'm always a little let down.)

As to the movie itself, it seems like a waste to enter this little niche of a subgenre if you don't have anything new to contribute or say or do or add. I didn't realize that James Gunn wrote it until I looked it up on Letterboxd, but that makes sense to me.

Get Out - ★★★½☆
This movie doesn't make me think that Jordan Peele "reinvented" horror or whatever, but It does make me think that he grew up watching movies made in that time when horror and sci-fi movies were about something. Get Out, like an early Romero Dead movie, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is a movie about something, and we do need more of those. It's a pretty straightforward horror flick– could've been made 30 years ago, except for if it couldn't've been made 30 years ago.

#2,345: John Wick 2

Tangerine - ★★★★☆
In that early sit-down scene with the impossible continuity, I thought, "what. What is this?"
But then I loved it. And that's only partially because I like movies that happen in locations I know.

Anthropoid - ★★☆☆☆
A little bit boring movie about the Czech liberationists that couldn't shoot straight.

Logan - ★★★★☆
Obviously the best Wolverine movie, maybe the best X-Men movie. The supporting characters are terrific in a way that X-Men usually isn't (which is a shame in an ensemble). The X-24 parts felt like a little bit of a cheat, - like Passengers, taking the 'easy out' of action instead of going even deeper and darker. But it's all worth it to learn that sometimes you can't just drive through a fence.

John Wick: Chapter 2 - ★★★★☆
This feels like a real success. I think that anyone who sees this movie on purpose is going to like it. Probably, you saw the first one, and you want more, and then you get more. Also, although not based on a game or anything else, this is a really good video game movie.

The only real downside is that any amount of time spent further explaining a mysterious and seemingly complete fictional universe can't help but erode the mystique.

#2,341: Operation Avalanche

Hide and Seek - ★★★☆☆
Four young adults disengage from society to go live a big, crazy, all-consuming art project. They make themselves outsiders, but nothing gold can stay.

The Lego Batman Movie - ★★★☆☆
I don't know if it's on the page, or in the hands of the animators, but there are a delightful sack of deep cuts in this thing. DVD buying freeze-framers, if they still exist, are going to have a lot to look for. Maybe that's the secret to selling DVDs.

Somehow this movie still wasn't immune to the DC light-and-noise ending - I think I might have started to doze a little during that part.

Operation Avalanche - ★★★☆☆
Operation Lune - ★★½☆☆
A very moon-y double feature.

I tell a joke in my stand-up, "I think there must have been one week each year at Space Camp when every kid there was a Double Dare champion."

And sometimes I make the mistake of telling that to college kids. It's the kind of sentence that will make a drunken 19-year-old just stare at you. 

But the real mistake is that I don't just move on, I get the idea that I should unpack it for them. 

"Okay," I start in, "Space Camp is this thing that doesn't exist anymore, but it was a place where you could send fancy children so that they could pretend to be a part of the Space Program, which is this thing that doesn't exist anymore, but it was this thing we cooked up in the 60s and it was a plan to shoot United States citizens at the moon. And it worked!  Of course, some people don't believe it, they think the whole thing was faked by Stanley Kubrick, who was a filmmaker that doesn't exist anymore–"

Eventually I realize that I have not so much lost them as never regained them in the first place, because I had unpacked the wrong part of the sentence. 

"Okay," I try again, "Double Dare was a game show, that doesn't exist anymore, where the grand prize, so named for its size compared to the other, lesser prizes, was a trip to Space Camp. Now obviously, we're talking about original Double Dare, and not Double Dare 2000, not Family Double Dare, and definitely not Super Sloppy Double Dare, because as we all know, the grand prize of these latter-day Doubles Dare was a trip to Universal Studios Florida. 

"Also known as the place where Double Dare was taped."

That's right, if you someone found yourself on the show, played your ten-year-old heart out, and won?

You got to go outside.

To the theme park you already paid to enter, so that you could be on Double Dare.

At least runners-up got a home copy of the game, which, if they took it home and played and won, they could put away! And take an all-expenses-paid trip to their kitchen!

#2,338: Weiner

13th - ★★★☆☆
It's so refreshing, personally, to see a thought-through documentary, making deliberate choices in both style and substance. That said, it feels just a little bit like the movie the filmmakers intended to make, and then an extra chunk they didn't plan for, but felt obligated to include.

The Founder - ★★☆☆☆
Man, I was looking forward to this one for a while last year, but I think they forgot at least an act. I guess sometimes there's a reason you move a film to the movie release graveyard.

Snowden - ★★★☆☆
I thought that since I saw Citizenfour, I wasn't going to learn anything from this movie, but I did. I learned a lot about Ed Snowden. IF any of it's true!

Weiner - ★★★½☆
Man. This guy. Is it fair for us to be mad at someone about their addiction? Is there a followup special we can watch where someone confronts him about whether we can pin 45's presidency on him?

In any other political generation to date, I bet he would have just been a well-liked and effective public servant.

#2,334: Land of Mine

Green Room - ★★★½☆
I liked this a lot more than Blue Ruin. Can't wait to see what color they make next!

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot - ★★½☆☆
What makes this movie feel weird is the scenes that are written, but not shot, like a comedy. That and and all the plot someone crammed into the third act.

La La Land - ★★★☆☆
Really put this one off for a while, even though I liked Whiplash, because all of the buzz was making it feel like homework. It's really showy. If we play the Oscar™ best = most game, I think this wins for Most Directing.

Land of Mine - ★★★★☆
A good name for this movie would be "Dane-gerous Mines"

(That's a terrific joke, for a terrific movie. My pick for the foreign film Oscar™.)