Some quick hits for season!

Fun Size is a cute Halloween movie. Wren is forced to take out her little trouble maker brother, Albert, out for Halloween (so she misses a very important party). For some reason Wren isn’t popular in high school (despite looking like a super model) so that party is a really important one for her social life. Cue crisis when she loses track of him and spends the night looking for him. It’s an easy watch with some weird set ups (Albert makes friends with a convenience store clerk, played by the great Thomas Middleditch, which is odd, but they do mention it so it kinda works anyway). I liked it more than I thought I would. Rated PG-13 because “shit” is said a few times.

Final Destination 5 tries to keep Death in business and it sort of succeeds. These movies are really like the Supernatural Saw franchise so it’s really hard to get this formula fresh. There’s only so many times you can make bolts and other restraining equipment magically loosen and still be scary. They came up with some good kill scenarios, but a heavy reliance on CG effects make them less effective (it came out in 2011, smack dab in the 3D craze so you get a lot of cheesy things flying at camera too). I really liked the end though. Cool idea to tie it into the franchise and it’s really brutal. Effective finale.

Deliver Us From Evil was disappointing as far as horror/scares go, but it was a good, well told story. I like Eric Bana, he’s often a great lead and he can pull of being a new NYC cop. The haunting scenes are surprisingly tame and the last encounter is pretty disappointing. The case itself is fun to watch unfold though. Nice way to start the Prime Evil with a domestic abuse call which leads to a few other odd cases that string things together. Some quality direction, make up work and a solid cast make this a good, but not great movie.

Why anyone thought they needed to remake 2004’s District B13 is beyond me. I guess Luc Besson found a few days to churn this out for someone who had a few bucks to spend. They reeled in Paul Walker as the lead and invited David Belle back for another round (there was a sequel in 2009).

Brick Mansions takes place in Detroit. A large slum has been walled off from the rest of the city where crime runs rampant. An undercover cop (Paul Walker) gets help from an ex-con (David Belle) to try and stop a crime lord’s plan to level downtown Detroit. District B13 is most notable for introducing the world to parkour. David Belle is one of the pioneers of the sport and the free running stunts and choreography gave action fans something new and exciting to watch. The same is on display here with Belle strutting his stuff, something I’m sure Jackie Chan is impressed with.

If you’ve never seen DB13, then what’s here could seem pretty fresh to you. It’s an average action movie in general and RZA being cast as the main villain doesn’t do the movie any favors. While not his worse performance, RZA isn’t a good actor so there’s not a big well of praise to dip into for him. There’s some great stunt work and fight choreography here and there but there’s not much else to raise this movie to its above average status.

Sinister is a decent ghost/demon horror movie. The writer/director Scott Derrickson is a horror movie maker who’s been quite busy in the genre for the passed decade or so. Sinister stars Ethan Hawke as Ellison Oswalt, a true-crime novelist. It’s been awhile since his last hit novel and he moves his family into a home that’s had a rather gruesome murder in it to help him write about what happened there. He finds a box of 8mm film in the attic which gives him huge leads on the crimes he wants to write about. It also awakens a demon that pulls Ellison and his family into the darkness of a decades long killing path, If Ellison can make it through, he has the novel of a lifetime in his hands.

Very easy on the gore front, Sinister goes more for the creepy scares. Lot’s of shadows, things that go bump in the night type of stuff. The movie is well put together and has some good ideas in it, but it’s a bit long in the tooth. It slowly builds up until the last 10 minutes or so where everything comes together. An angle with Elllison’s son is started near the beginning and then completely dropped in favor of focusing solely on Ellison. In fact after that, the son is basically forgotten for the rest of the movie. There’s some great tension build up throughout, but the “monster” of the movie looks like a professional wrestler more than a demon so his visual impact undermines his impressive stalking capabilities

I thought the end was pretty creative, but it’s an easy movie to forget when one or two of these types of demon/possession movies  come out every single year. It’s a packed field with Insidious, Mama, The Conjuring, Paranormal Activity and all of their sequels. It gets hard to remember which ones I’ve seen and which one is new.  ‘Tis the season for this kind of movie, but I found Sinister to be a middle of the road affair.

I like seeing Wes Anderson movies because no one makes them like he does. He has a unique voice and vision that is all his own. It’s like seeing a Quentin Tarantino movie, you know you are in for something unique which is half the fun. The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson’s 8th full length movie and possibly my favorite.

GBH is the tale of Gustave, a legendary concierge of the hotel between the first and second world wars. We watch as the story is relayed to a writer in the 1960’s by Zero Moustafa, the lobby boy who became Gustave’s protege and best friend. It’s a story packed with adventure, love and murder run by some of the most memorable characters (and actors) around.

This movie is an absolute joy to look at. A color palette rarely seen in this age of orange and teal combined with wild set design, crisp costumes and some of the most meticulous direction and staging. Wes Anderson sees his movies long before he films them and somehow manages to get it all out of his head for others to see. It’s almost like watching a doll house come to life. Wes has somehow come up with this style that is like live action animation.  His actors seem to move in a special way for his films.

As much as I gush about the visual brilliance of GBH, the acting (and amazing characters) need just as much praise. Wes Anderson likes using the same actors from project to project and quite a few return for bit parts (Ed Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson). Ralph Fiennes as Gustave is simply brilliant. The manic pace and line delivery never stops with him. F. Murray Abraham as the grown Zero holds a certain gentlemanly glow and pride that Gustave would have been over the moon about. Tony Revolori as young Zero is the epitome of a Wes Anderson character actor. While Gustave and Zero are the stars of this universe, they are surrounded by greatness. Willem Dafoe as the murderous Jopling, Adrien Brody as the angry and hilarious Dmitri and the always lovely cadence of Jeff Goldblum as Kovacs.

Wes Anderson movies are very polarizing. You either love it or hate it. You understand what it is or you don’t get it at all. The Grand Budapest Hotel hits all my marks with phenomenal dialog, distinct and memorable characters and actors who can pull it all off. Unique production that shows what masters of the craft can do and sumptuous directing. A story that is new, weird, funny and touching. Love every bit of it, I know I’ll be coming back to The Grand Budapest Hotel for years to come.

Four movies into this franchise and it’s more of an endurance test to get to the end. The quality has always been all over the place, from a decent start, to a horrific sequel to a much better third movie. Age of Extinction feels tired and dragged out in every conceivable way.

The set up is mostly the same. The Autobots are in hiding after the events of the last movie as the battle in Chicago turned the nation against these aliens. When a new threat arises, the Autobots are needed to fight again. Most of the human cast is new with cookie cutter characters who more or less just run and scream when necessary.

Everything feels very paint by numbers, it follows the Transformers mold without anything really added to it. Sure there are new characters, but they all do the same thing. One city is replaced by another for the last action scene. Optimus Prime is completely unstoppable as he repeatedly gets up from devastating damage. Massive liberties with the laws of physics. Action scenes that are like watching a circus as there is so much going on at once that you don’t know what your supposed to be looking at. Computer generated images just running into each other. It gets exhausting. The quality of CG also varies quite a bit. The third movie has some truly stunning work from start to finish while Age tends to have compositing issues. While the robots usually blend and match well with the live action, it can get sloppy which is distracting. Direction wise, it’s Michael Bay so you know exactly what to expect (there are some sweet explosions).

Somehow they managed to stretch this out to over 2 and a half hours when it has no business going passed 2. It just keeps going and going and going.  I think not making a movie as bad as the second one is an achievement, but there’s nothing here worth paying attention to. Somehow they keep pulling in massive amount of money, so until more people get bored and move on, I don’t think there’s an end in sight.

Jack the Giant Slayer is the retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk (somethings were changed from how most of us have heard the  fairy tale) with director Bryan Singer at the helm. Starring Nicholas Hoult as the title character, Slayer is a solid interpretation of this age old tale.

Giants are legend, a story told to children at bedtime. When Jack runs into a monk who is quick to make a deal, it’s not long before Jack and mankind come to realize that Giants are real when the beanstalk stretches into the sky and the two worlds collide.

This movie has it all, a reluctant hero, a tough princess on a mission, a bad guy hell bent on power and an army of Giants ready to crush anything in their way. When this movie finally came out, it was basically met with shrugs and a box office take that was way below it’s budget. It’s a good movie, I’m not too sure why it was met with such apathy. I guess the popularity of this fable is pretty low.

I’m a fan of Nicholas Hoult since seeing him in the UK show Skins and he’s great as Jack. The whole movie is cast with great actors. It’s a fun story, some good action scenes, a runtime that’s just right and a great storybook ending.

I think the biggest knock would be the Giants themselves. They always look like they’re computer generated, but they still look and animate really well. There’s a ton of CG from start to finish and most of it is very good. It’s also rated PG-13 with most of the violence not shown on camera (Giants do like eating people). The battles get pretty intense and there is death shown, so younger kids could get frightened.

I was pleasantly surprised by this one.