#2,169: Jurassic World

Spy - ★★★☆☆
Better than I thought it'd be. It's like a good Mortdecai. I liked how the movie kind of pokes at the idea of how we typecast Melissa McCarthy by making all her disguises the kind of roles you'd expect her to be cast in instead of cool action spy, but then the movie still puts her in situations that seem like we're meant to laugh at her, not with her, so I'm not sure whether we've made any progress or not. I guess we're good for another three months until the next not-so-great spy comedy comes out.

The Wizard - ★★★☆☆
I don't think I'd ever seen this all the way through before, or realized that some of the internet jokes based on it were from this movie and not commercials. (A fine line, perhaps.)

Kind of fun to spot that it's shot by the guy who shot recent watches Spy and Love & Mercy, and stars Jenny Lewis whose name keeps popping up in movie theaters at the end of the ubiquitous Rikki and the Flash trailers. I mean, not very fun, but kind of.

Avengers: Age of Ultron - ★★★½☆
My original 5 stars was based on fan-wow, more or less the Harry Potter problem I described earlier. I did, and still do, want to see more of all of these heroes on the screen, but this is pretty cluttered.

Jurassic World - ★★☆☆☆
This reminds me of, like, Airport '77. It's a 70s disaster movie where we just cut away to the control tower to see people react to more bad news to help us understand that the news is bad. And we do that here because there's no character we care about. Nobody learns or grows or changes.

JP4 also makes me think of Birdman, because of the open contempt it has for audiences, who apparently love it.