#2,435: Love, Simon

Ready Player One - ★½☆☆☆
This is what you get when you make the whole movie out of the last act of Tomorrowland.

Credit where credit’s due, my audience loved the Shining references.

Pacific Rim: Uprising - ★★★☆☆
Pacific Rim 2 feels a bit like it maybe should have been a straight-to-video sequel, but it's fun, it knows what was good about the original (robot fights), and next to Ready Player One, it shines.

Much like the original, this movie is a thin connective web of scenes you'll skip past on netflix designed to vaguely justify a bunch of robot fights. See it if you’re into robot fights. Although, if not if you’re *too* into robot fights and going to end up complaining about something. If you're that guy, maybe give it a pass.

Love, Simon - ★★★★★
Man, this was great. We're still early enough in the year that pretty much everything that comes out is on the top ten list for the year, but for now this is topping the list.

I just like when a smaller (let's say under $200m) movie like this can come out and stand in contrast to the past few months of robot fights, and manage to do it with significantly deeper stakes and tension than something bland and abstract like the fate of the world. Best high school movie since Bad Genius, and a fun way to do a mystery.

#2,432: Tomb Raider

Thor: Ragnarok - ★★★½☆
Things I thought were weird:
- How we're making a big deal of All-New Thor, like the other movies had no jokes.
- How filmed improv is a drag on repeat viewings of pretty much any movie, even a superhero movie.
- How everyone is surprised to find out that the girl with Valkyrie tattoos on her face is a Valkyrie when they see the Valkyrie tattoo on her arm.
- That you can control a god with lightning powers with a fancy taser.
- How much this movie now reminds me of The Last Jedi.

Unsane - ★★★★☆
I like Soderbergh's experiments. The simple, horrible premise is super effective - it's a plausible threat! I thought the iPhone gimmick was a little distracting at first, but I got over it once the story picked up.

I did find myself surprised at how dark this movie was. Like, some parts were really dark. Like, hey, someone turn on a light in there.

Tomb Raider - ★★½☆☆
This would have blown everyone’s minds if it had come out twenty years ago instead of the Angelina Jolie version. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, it’s a terrific 90s action movie, but it’s no longer the 90s. We’re now in the era of filmmakers who grew up in the 90s adopting, adapting, and improving on the films they loved as kids.

Seeing Dominic West kind of made me nostalgic for The Wire. Specifically, the season that doesn’t have McNulty in it.

IDIOMATIC Pilot Taping this Sunday!

A lot of classic sitcoms are, according to their opening credits, "Based on the stand-up comedy of" their stars. Seinfeld, Home Improvement, Roseanne, and maybe even examples that aren't from the 90s. If I had a TV show with a credit like that, it wouldn't be a sitcom, it would be a UK-style panel quiz game about words. 

So I'm making that.

Come be part of our live studio audience this Sunday, May 13th, at 10pm in the upstairs theater of the Clubhouse (1607 N. Vermont Ave, one door over from the Jon's supermarket) as we record a pilot episode of our new show.

The panelists will be improvisers Becky Sanders and Jonny Svarzbein, stand-ups Alex Hanna and Felicia Folkes, and TV writers Brian Kiley and Zach Sherwin. 

IDIOMATIC is created by Rob Schultz
and Produced by Jason Van Glass
with writers Frankie Griffen and Vincent Lam

How To: Reveal One Layer With Another

I saw a post online where someone was all confused about how to make something like this clip here, so I told him all you need is three layers:

• Top layer: someone shot on green screen, keyed, with posterize time.
• Middle layer: foreground art, using top layer as an alpha matte.
• Bottom layer: background art!

And then that guy was all like, "Isn't there a youtube tutorial that takes 45 minutes to give me that same information? Preferably one full of self-promotional nonsense at the beginning and end?" So...

I made one! Except it's only 96 seconds long. I'm sure I'll learn to pad them out as I go.

He's Him Who Sees Her

Remember the beginning of Batman movie, Mask of the Phantasm, with the choir singing... something ?

I think this is one of those movies my cousins watched a lot, and we'd make jokes about trying to figure it out. Is it even in English? "He's him who sees her"? Okay, that would be a weird sentence, but maybe it kind of makes sense with the movie?

I just learned about the choir. They're singing the names of the music staff, phonetically reversed. 'Eetzim ooze eet hap' was Patti Zimitti, whose job was hiring musicians.

Another childhood mystery solved!