The smartest move they made was casting Paul Rudd in the lead of Ant-Man. He also had a hand in re-writing the script so his fingerprints are all over this great movie.

Ant-Man is one of the most enjoyable movies in the current Marvel stable. Rudd is a really likeable guy and he brings that charm and comedic lightness as cat burglar Scott Lang. With such a strong guy in the lead, everyone else around him has to perform well alongside him. Michael Douglas as the genius Dr. Hank Pym is a great father figure and mentor. Evangeline Lilly as his daughter Hope makes for a great driving force and teammate. The trio od Michael Pena, T.I. and David Dastmalchian are funny sidekicks. Really like Corey Stoll as the main villain Darren Cross. Many of these movies have crap antagonists that are largely forgettable, but Cross’ motivations work and he looks awesome as Yellowjacket.

I can’t think of anything to complain about. Ant-Man is really well paced and light hearted enough to be fun, but not stupid. It gets the drama and serious parts correct right when it’s necessary. A solid and smartly told origin story for both Scott and Dr. Pym. The shrinking powers make for creative and well-executed action scenes that can’t be done elsewhere (in terms of speed and momentum, closest to Spiderman’s locomotion capabilities). Each set piece gets more and more elaborate right to the finale so there’s always something to look forward to and admire (top notch special effects bring Ant-Man to life).

Really impressed with how this movie turned out. Terrific introduction to a character many don’t know, smart tie-in to The Avengers with Sam Wilson/Falcon and a satisfying ending to boot! I put this at number 2 on my Marvel cinematic list behind Captain America: Winter Soldier.

Here’s the last sentence I wrote in my Jurrasic World review in July:

P.S.- Holywood. You might want to give up on Terminator while we’re having this discussion.

Now having seen Terminator Genisys, I have to say that I liked it a lot more than Jurassic World! I thought JW stuck too close to the formula and didn’t do enough new to give it its own identity. Genisys does run around in a familiar and favorite playground but takes bold steps to change the formula and bring us something new.

In a controversial move, Genisys changes the established timeline of Terminator (thus keeping any of the other movies from happening). John Connor gets jumped just as he sends Kyle Reese back to 1984 to protect his mother. When Kyle gets there, he quickly sees that things haven’t gone as John told them they happened.

I like a lot of what the writers did, they made bold choices while keeping the tone and hallmarks of the series together. They took the relationship that John and the Terminator had in 2 and established it for Sarah and the Terminator (“You named it?!”) wisely. We get to see a big Future War battle and a bunch of different Terminators on the hunt. A few scenes from T1 are revisited at the start but are completely changed so they seem new. Arnold is back and terrific. Nods to the history of the series (like the Dyson family still being evolved despite the timeline alteration). Lots of action and the SFX are top notch, there’s some crazy visuals from start to finish. Really smart pacing that keeps delivering the goods.

Many pieces of the Terminator mythos are shown and used a bit differently. Sara and Kyle have to handle a T-800 and T-1000 at the same time. Both look fantastic, are real threats and used well. While the Terminators are the same, they don’t rely on the exact same beats (like Jurrasic World does) and are dispatched in smart ways (really liked Sarah’s trap for the 1000). With those two pillars in the movie, they also introduce two more advanced Terminators (and a combat “spider” that James Cameron came up with but never got to use) to keep up the pressure and add to the tech advancement that Skynet is so keen on.

Really liked the direction and cinematography of the movie as it’s often beautiful. Smart and clear direction during action scenes without using slow motion and shaky cam as a crutch. The action set pieces are a mix of car chases, gun and robot fights and overall destruction together that kept me entertained and engaged. I like the casting choices, I think everyone delivered aside from a goofy hype speech from John Connor at the beginning (this is really hard to do right, it usually brings everyone back to Independence Day).

I’m really surprised by how much I enjoyed Terminator Genisys. Sure, time travel is really messy to work with and can get you into dumb logic loops, but nothing here ruined it for me. I think this got more hate than it deserves and it is without a doubt better than Salvation. T1 and T2 are classics so it doesn’t touch those. While it’s been a long time since I’ve seen 3, I’m going to put Genisys  in third place. It didn’t do well domestically but made nearly half a billion dollars worldwide and I’m curious to see where they go with it from here.

In 2012, Skyfall lit audiences up. It’s easily in the top five James Bond movies ever made and set an incredibly high bar. Spectre has a lot to live up to and while I think it’s a great movie, it falls flat in a few areas.

Spectre is not only a direct sequel to Skyfall, but the threats from Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace are also a part of this story. Right out of the gate, Bond is the case to hunt down a man and the result is one crazy action set piece during The Day of the Dead in Mexico. A voice from James’ past put him on this mission which sends him down the road to uncover a massive sinister organisation. While Bond goes rogue to handle this issue, M is left to keep MI6 and the Double 0 program up and running as pressure from C and his high-tech surveillance program seeks to replace it.

There’s a lot to cover in this 140 minute adventure so I’ll break it down in my three major mindsets.

Things I liked: It’s a great looking movie with a fantastic soundtrack. I like the entire cast, especially Lea Seydoux as Madeleine Swann. Everyone is amazingly well dressed. Love Daniel Craig as Bond. He’s got some great lines, he looks like a well dressed bad ass and a stone cold assassin. I heard some early complaints about Spectre bringing back some of the goofier Bond qualities (like landing safely on a couch from a fall, looking surprised but pleased), but I didn’t mind it at all. If I go to a Bond movie I expect to see some series hallmarks to be checked off. Q and Money Penny are better used. Spectre is a globe-trotting mission, there’s a lot of amazing stuff to look at. Many great action scenes, the aforementioned opening scene, a neat snow chase with a plane and some Land Rovers and the train fight with Hinx is the best. Speaking of Mr. Hinx, he’s a long overdue henchman. It’s been awhile since we’ve seen a Jaws and Oddjob caliber character and Dave Bautista is perfect casting for him. Great introduction, awesome physical and dangerous presence. I’m a fan of Christoph Waltz and I enjoyed seeing him here. Really liked the end. It feels like a bookend to the four Craig Bond films while remaining open for him to continue for one more.

On The Fense: The pacing and tone is weird. There are many percalating scenes that feel long, but I also think are necessary. It felt much like the Bond movies of the 60’s where there is no rush to get to the next scene. Christoph Waltz introduction is very delibrate and methotical. He takes him time from the shadows and tips his hand when he’s good and ready (which leads into a chase scene). Waltz wasn’t given much to do as the main villain. He is (and has been) the puppet master and Mr. Hinx is the muscle, so I think it works in the end, but it does feel disappointing. He may not be the one threating you with a gun, but he does wield tremendous power. At two hours and 20 minutes, it feels a bit too long. While there are many action scenes, some of them fall flat. Mainly the car chase in Rome is surprisingly boring. Two beautiful exotic cars buzzing around an amazing city, but nothing really happens. His DB 10 isn’t as kitted out too well, so a lot doesn’t work and is played for laughs. Some power slides and a rear flamethrower are the only standouts. Few close calls and the streets are basically empty. The cars never touch each other so it’s more like watching two rich people driving home from a fund raiser at a modest speed. It never feels like any of the proaganists are in danger. There are few gadgets. Q only gives him a watch with a bomb in it. Standard fare that pales to what Mission: Impossible has been doing (the whole lone wolf angle has now been beaten to death by both franchises). They rely on Bond’s experience and never say die attitude to get him through everything (which I like, but I also like gadgets. Hense putting this “on the fense”). As good as the movie does look, Skyfall is way more striking. Spectre looks more muted in the color palette, right down to the clothing. Skyfall is a sumptious and vibrant in compairison. Adele’s title song (and the opening credits) for Skyfall is way better than what Sam Smith did for this.

Didn’t Like: So much just works out and the movie wants you to accept it with no questions asked. Know and be okay with all the important people walking away from brutal crashes and fights. No one reacts appropriately to intense experiences. There is this bizarre mentality in just about everyone to not sell the action on screen. No one yells in surprise about crazy dangerous stuff flying by their head. I understand Bond being able to keep it together, but Swann and the rest barely react to anything. Bond and Swann at one point stand right in front of a massive explosion and they treat it like they are watching someone walking across the street. And that complex destroying explosion was triggered by a few bullets hitting a valve. Who designed that Evil Doer HQ? It’s so weird. The torture scene is another head scratcher. Specific things are done to Bond to disable him and none of it worked. Sure, it was painful, but that wasn’t even the point. When he gets away from it, he’s blasting baddies like nothing happened for the rest of the movie when he should be drooling on himself. There was no consequence to that entire segment. A lot happens off screen (a kidnapping) and you just have to go along with things progressing in the spy genre mold (the kidnapped person is being held somewhere in the building for the finale!). As much as the movie wants to be new and cool, it relies on a ton of cliches that come off as lazy more than anything else.

Coming out of Skyfall, I was in love. From the first frame to the last I was all in. Spectre doesn’t hit all the right marks like Skyfall does. It feels like it’s not too sure what it wants to be and pulls punches because of it. While there’s a lot to like, my main concern is that Spectre won’t be nearly as good in repeat viewings. That said, with this whole story arc over and with an ending I truly love, I hope Daniel Craig comes back for another. End his James Bond legacy with one MI6 backed, stunning, stand-alone spy bonanza.

This was an interesting little movie. I saw the trailer some time ago and it did its job, it got me to add it to my list to watch. Apocalypse/social collapse movies are a dime a dozen these days and are tough to do right. It’s easy to use every cliche in the book. The Rover keeps it simple. It’s set in Australia, 10 years after a massive global economic collapse. After a botched encounter, a group of men steal Eric’s car. It’s the only thing he owns aside from the clothes on his back. He follows the men to get it back and runs into Rey, the younger brother of one of the thieves. Rey got shot in the botched encounter and was left for dead.

When you have little of your own, you cherish what you do have. Eric’s car is a part of him and holds signficants that’s revealed at the end. The Rover is very much a man on a mission movie and it’s done very well.

At just over an hour and a half, the movie sets up it’s pieces and moves along with very little waiting. Each stop on the road is interesting and well thought out. The bits of this world and how it works are revealed slowly, but wisely. Guy Pierce as Eric holds it down, but the real star and the most impressive work is done by Robert Pattinson as Rey. A real tranformative role, he manages to visually and tonaly get into another persons skin. It’s not Pattinson up there, it’s Rey.

A surpsing movie as I’ve never heard of it until recently, I liked The Rover quite a bit. I enjoy “what if…” scenarios alot and when they are done right, they are a joy to watch. A man’s (or woman’s) purpose in life is always ripe for exploration and discussion.

Paul Walker’s death two years ago put a major spotlight on this movie. Losing a major star and loved person mid-production was a huge loss. A year delay to rewrite the ending and finish filming, Furious 7 turned out to be one of the series stronger entries.

In Fast and Furious 6, Owen Shaw was the big bad of the film. He didn’t fare too well by the end of it. That brings to light his brother, Deckard, who vows to wipe out Dom’s entire team as revenge in Furious 7.

With that setup, they hit all the marks for this franchise. A ton of cars, racing, destruction, fights, shoot-outs, explosions and corny dialog for good measure. Everything about this series is over the top and the movie keeps things fun until the end.

With Walker’s death, they set up his departure as his retirement from the team, going full time family man with Dom’s sister, Mia. It’s sprinkled in a few times in the movie until the good guys win and it’s like this huge cloud moves over everything as all the actors (you can tell it’s not the characters) get super bummed. Various techniques were used to get Paul into the end, the most obvious being body doubles on the beach where they never show his face. But they do manage to send him off in a touching and dare I say, artistic way.

As a whole, I think 7 is better than the last movie (5 being my favorite). It’s still an absurd summer blockbuster movie, but it feels a bit more grounded than 6 (and I do mean a bit, they went all out to make new and interesting carnage). The ending does feel weird to me because real life stuck its ugly mug into an onscreen reality. Knowing why the ending is the way it is, I’m curious to hear what a person who has no idea what happened thinks about it. I’m not sure how much it skews my perspective, but it feels to me like the Furious 7 ends when Dom is taken out of the rubble of the last action set piece. Saying goodbye to Brian O’Conner is this surreal “don’t break the 4th wall” moment because it’s everyone saying goodbye to Paul Walker. Feels like getting to the end of a book, but the last chapter is from a different one. I’m not sure if there was any way around it though, it couldn’t be ignored as Walker practically was the Fast and the Furious.

I hope they take their time moving on from this bookend to creating the next one.

Dark Skies

I liked this alien abduction movie a lot, glad I found this happy surprise. A suburban family’s life gets turned inside out when their youngest son starts having nightmares of “The Sandman” visiting him. Then the weird things around the house start happening. Smart direction with great escalation of weirdness into panic inducing events to a great finale. Really liked the cast, Keri Russell is the stand out as usual. Perfect spooky PG-13 alien flick.

V/H/S: Viral

I’m a fan of the V/H/S series, I’ve written reviews for the first two movies. The stories in the first two movies range from good to high fives all around awesome. I have no idea WTF happened with this one (OK, I have some ideas). The found footage angle made things way too complicated for the filmmakers of Viral to handle. Very little works the way they wanted it to. The main piece that “stitches” the other stories into the movie is a departure for the series and is a complete waste. It makes little sense and is boring (it’s where “Viral” fits into the title). The non-stop artificial artifacting and tape distortion is incredibly irritating. All the short stories completely miss the mark. None of them come close to being scary or suspenseful. The magician story is an interesting idea but I think it would work better if it was used for a novella collection like Stephen King’s Four Past Midnight. It just doesn’t fit what the V/H/S is supposed to do. The alternate dimension door story is ruined by a god awful hand puppet. The skater story has some neat looking skeleton guys sometimes. I think that can count as praise. Besides that, it’s stupid and edited so bad it’s unwatchable. They all look super cheap with terrible CG effects. A merciful 80 minutes long is the only highlight of this pile of disappointment.

Rosemary’s Baby

It’s taken me awhile to get this horror classic. As with any movie from the 60’s (and each decade really) it shows off a standard of filmmaking this simply isn’t done today. It’s much slower in every regard. Long(er) opening credits, the first act takes a while to spool up and the editing is much slower and deliberate. You’re eased into the movie and left to digest each scene. Once you get it down, the next bit comes at you. So, Rosemary and her husband Guy move into a nice apartment in NYC where their neighbors are a bit eccentric. Things progress slowly and rather uneventfully until Rosemary and Guy decide to start a family. The night they have planned for themselves, Rosemary falls ill, has a super messed up dream and in the morning finds out that her husband decided to go for it despite her being passed out. A red flag if there ever was one. Mia Farrow as Rosemary is far and away the best part of the movie. She holds the whole movie together and is a hell of a leading actress. I can see how this was scary 50 years ago, but today just about all of that is lost. It’s very dated and doesn’t stand up to the likes of The Exorcist (released 6 years later). At 135 minutes, it takes forever to really get going. I get setting things up and this is really from the perspective of someone used to more modern filmmaking (the last 30 years or so), but good lord does this movie draw things out. I think you could easily cut out 15 minutes and not miss a thing. While the beginning makes you suspicious of some people, it isn’t until that crazy night that the movie actually gets engaging. Her getting sick and being told what to do is disturbing and then the growing paranoia (which is also drawn out) as she puts things together add the next much-needed layer. Things really come together in the last 25 minutes or so. I think you can watch Rosemary’s Baby and appreciate it significant a piece of movie history, but it’ll bore the vast majority of people today. It just didn’t age well.

Going to start this post off with the clean winner of the pack.

The Babadook

Knocked my socks off. A truly scary movie that’s a throw back to what makes horror movies so great. A single mother is struggling to raise her young son after her husband dies. He’s terrified of monsters lurking in the house, which makes him a difficult kid. One night, her son pulls a book off the shelf for them to read before bedtime: Mister Babadook. Its red cover holds a sinister presence that begins to seep off the page and into their home. Awesome idea and a visual presentation that simply needs to be seen. So many amazing set ups and gorgeous cinematography. The sound design really sells this thing, the monster just comes alive because of it (a point off for using the Jurassic Park raptor scream that’s really out of place). A forboding figure, he’s at his worst when you can’t see him. I think this is one of the coolest monster movies ever made. I think it’s closest to a mix of Nightmare on Elm Street and The Exorcist in terms of tone and story. Very low on gore and violence, so it sells its scares by the creep factor. Really impressed by writer/director Jennifer Kent, sign me up for whatever she does next.

Tusk

Sticking to the WTF category of filmmaking, writer/director Kevin Smith drops another horror tale on his fans. Tusk, born from the ideas gestated in a podcast with fellow friend/producer Scott Mosier, we watch a mad man turn another man into a walrus in the shady edges of Canada! Super weird, often creepy and surprisingly beautiful. Kevin Smith landed a great cast and crew (Michael Parks and Johnny Depp doing wonders) to make this crazy idea actually work. Production design is great and the monster effect is really impressive. They got every dime of the $3 million production budget up on screen. Two gripes: the terrible choice to do a fast zoom out on the man-walrus really cheapens the reveal and I think they made a mistake anatomically with the front legs. With how Howard Howe prepared Wallace for the transformation, I don’t understand how he could be so ambulatory with his arms. Sure there might be some kind of explanation you could come up with, but if you are trying to sell body horror (which they do really well otherwise) you gotta do it all the way.

Tremors 5: Bloodlines

I’m always surprised to see a new Tremors movie. I hold the original 1990 monster movie a classic and none of the direct to video series ever match up. Spaced many years apart, they all come off as rather cheap, adding new types of “graboids” and never match the fun and tension of the original. Bloodlines is one of the better entries, bringing series mainstay Burt Gummer to Africa on a graboid hunt. Jamie Kennedy plays a major part as Travis Welker and holds it down as Burt’s opportunistic sidekick. The main worm graboid worm and the “ass blaster” variant are the creatures run amok. All the moving creatures are done in CG and in low lighting look really good. The death count is low and with a PG-13 rating, not much is shown (this series was never about gore though). While there are splashes of blood here and there, it’s clear a lot of on-screen action was avoided (even holes in the ground) to save on budget to use on CG scenes of worm jumping out of the ground like an orca at SeaWorld. Bloodlines falls short on the physicality and weight of the original making it more dull and incomplete than it should be. While disappointing, I did enjoyed watching it.

Life After Beth

A fun romantic comedy take on the zombie genre. Aubrey Plaza stars as Beth who dies from a snake bite when she goes hiking alone. Her boyfriend, Zach (Dane DeHaan) and her parents are obviously distaught over her premature death. Zach hangs around her parents for the next few days when suddenly they start ignoring him. Checking to see what’s up, he sees Beth walking around the house! Clever movie that’s both sad and funny. It’s got some cool ideas along with smart execution (really liked the end). Impressive work for an  indie budget too. Stacked cast with Paul Reiser, John C Reilly, Molly Shannon, Cheryl Hines and Anna Kendrick.