#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"?