This blog covers Movies, TV, and other Geeky things...... Movie Reviews (over 3,400 movies rated so far) Countdowns of my top movies by year.... and much more.
In the Tall Grass (Netflix Movie) 2019 1 out of 10 Instead of reviewing this film I'll just post my thoughts while watching it that I posted on the Facebook page.
The trailer for this Netflix film looked incredible. The idea for the movie was really solid. Unfortunately the film itself was a little slow and dull at times and didn't live up to the potential of the trailer.
The film takes place after an extinction event and follows the story of a robot that is bringing up and raising a human child. The only contact the human has ever had is the robot which it calls Mother. Then another person shows up outside of the airlock of their human. The rest of the movie is a battle for the main character between who to believe the human or the robot that raised her. Who is telling her the truth?
The premise of the film is cool, although it feels like it borrowed from the recent Lost in Space as little. Although the concept was good it just didn't grab my attention as much as I thought it would. I also felt that the main character too easily put her trust in a random stranger over the robot that had raised her. That just didn't ring true to me.
Like Father was a surprisingly charming straight to Netflix film starring Kristen Bell and Kelsey Grammer. Kristen Bell's character gets walked out on at her wedding after she is delayed walking down the aisle because she is too obsessed with her phone and work even walk down the aisle on time. Her father who walked out on her when she was still a kid shows up to the wedding and after talking her out for a drink they both end totally hammered and on her honeymoon cruise.
The film does a great job of exploring this broken relationship with the cruise as a backdrop. It has a few funny moments --but for the most part it is a drama grounded in the reality of their broken relationship. What makes this movie work so well is the talent of its main to stars. I pretty much love Kristen Bell in everything and Kelsey Grammer was a part of two of my favorite TV shows (Cheers and Frasier). The two great actors play off each other really well and made what I figured would just be a throw away movie a lot more fun, especially the sequence where they compete in a on ship game show together.
If you don't go into this movie expecting big laughs and just enjoy the experience you may find this film as enjoyable as I did.
Bright is basically an Alien Nation remake with an Orc cop instead of an alien. It stars Will Smith in what sounds like a really silly concept. Instead the movie takes itself a lot more serious than one would expect. It is more a serious buddy cop film in which the two cops uncover a dangerous plot by rogue elves to gather up some magic wands in order to bring the dark lord back. It was an interesting concept and is actually a decent film--- but it really would benefited from a lighter and more comic tone. One would it expect it to be in tone similar to Will Smith's Men in Black or at least between that and the TV series G Vs E.
The action scenes in the movie were good and the story was actually interesting. The lack of humor and fun that the film had with it's story is just kind of bewildering. It could have been a lot more fun if just a little bit of humor was injected into the film. It is definitely and odd movie --but probably worth watching if you can buy into the world and embrace the seriousness of a film that one would expect to be lighter in tone.
The trailer for Mute looked interesting. I'd just watched Altered Carbon a Netflix tv show that heavily used the visual style of BladeRunner and for the most part enjoyed it and it's visual look. Mute looked like a movie that would be interesting. The story of a Mute Bartender that seeks out what happened to his girlfriend after she disappears sounds intriguing. It featured Alexander Skarsgard, Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux so it had a good cast.
I was so wrong, I literally had to endure Mute to get to the end. Unfortunately the movie was a just a strange mess. Just because you have flying cars, neon and rain --that doesn't make you Bladerunner.
The murder mystery aspect of the story was incredible dull. A Mute man wandering around a sexually deviant underworld trying to ask questions without being able to talk didn't work. Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux's characters were just odd and at first their scenes just seem like they were put there just to try and have some type of interesting dialogue. They seem to have nothing to do with the main plot at first. It quickly becomes clear early on that somehow they are involved in the disappearance of the Mute bartenders girlfriend. If they aren't the killers then there is no reason for their characters to exist in the story at all. This takes any sense of mystery out of the story. It is apparent from early in the story that the angry Mute (ex amish) bartender is going to have a showdown with them at some point. I also I found the subject matter in this seedy underworld obnoxious. I literally thought about giving up on the movie about an hour into it. I struggled to get to the end.
Apparently it took 16 years for the director Duncan Jones to get this movie made. Maybe there was a reason that it was so difficult to get this movie made, because it was just a difficult watch. I definitely wouldn't recommend this film. So far it is the worst movie I've watched in 2018 (of course the bad shark movies of the summer on Sci-fi haven't come out yet).
An interesting concept that doesn't live up to it's potential. Originally a movie called the God Particle this movie was slapped with the Cloverfield title after the fact which is an insult to the audience. The concept behind the movie is interesting and the movie could have been something along the lines of "Event Horizon" but instead it becomes a standard trying to fix a broken spacecraft movie instead of exploring the story it sets up.
The story features a group of scientists on a space station testing a device that hopes to solve a dying Earth's energy crisis. Instead they end up propelling themselves into an alternated reality with Earth no longer on their radar. They discover a crew member they don't know trapped inside a panel of the spacecraft with wires stuck in her. Then other unexplainable strange events begin to happen. The film uses many sci-fi space ship tropes in scenes that mirror other sci-fi films you have seen before. There is an a scene that is straight out of Alien when a crew member is infected.
The film blows its potential as it turns as the crew tries to get back to their Earth and turns into a predictable battle with the crew member from the other universe. And then at the end they throw in a random ending that ties it to the Cloverfield universe. It really isn't a Cloverfield movie -but that franchise name holds some weight so they decided to try and link it to draw more people into what was just an average Sci-Fi film
