Let's Cee a Movie

Viva

This movie is not what I thought it would be. (Unmarked Spoilers)

Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) must assemble a team to perform a daring casino heist. First, they must sneak into a quarantine Las Vegas, avoiding the numerous undead, switch on the casino generators, break into the uncrackable vault, make their way to the casino roof with the abandoned helicopter, and fly away before the whole city gets nuked. Yes, that is their entire plan, and only one person points out how utterly crazy the whole thing is.

The joys of motherhood III: And now for something completely different

Much better than actually eating eggs.

Karen (Christina Hendricks) and her husband Don (David Alan Basche) decide to have lunch with Tina (Alyssa Reiner), an old art school friend of Karen’s. In trying to one-up her friend, Tina reveals that she and her husband Wayne (Gbenga Akinnagbe) are going to have a baby. Except as opposed to Tina giving birth, her egg has been implanted in a surrogate, Kiki (Anna Camp), who will also be the child’s mother. What they’re going to do is dismantle the traditional family unit in favor of a more shared economy with a redistribution of roles that doesn’t make any sense until Tina says she’s going to be like the child’s nanny.

What’cha mean walk the earth?

As the opening scroll explains, following a reduced demand for sheetrock, Empire, Nevada shut down its plant and turned into a ghost town. After this and the death of her husband, Fern (Frances McDormand) decides to sell off most of her belongings and become a nomad. She travels all around the country, working various odd jobs and meeting plenty of new people.

Odysseus

Meet mid-life crisis John Wick.

In a past life, Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk) used to be an “auditor” for various US government agencies, which is similar to how Frank Sheeran used to paint houses for the mob. Now Hutch is a suburban family man with a wife named Becca (Connie Nielsen), two beautiful kids (Gage Munroe and Paisley Cadorath), and a humdrum life driving him crazy. Though all of that starts to change the night his home gets broken into by two thieves.

Rise and Fall

The movie that started one tremendous franchise.

Today marks a special occasion as this is my 100^th review on this website. To celebrate, I decided to do something a little more personal. The original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, the prototype of my favorite tv series of all time.

Ready, steady, go 1.5

What? Can’t I get tired of reviewing movies? (Unmarked Spoilers)

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is a 2011 novel that tells the tale of James Halliday, an eccentric genius that created a virtual reality videogame called the OASIS. Upon his death, he set up an elaborate Easter Egg hunt to determine who was worthy of becoming his heir and inheriting his vast riches. The person who discovers the Egg is Wade Watts/Parzival, with a little help from his friends, the High Five, and Halliday’s old business partner Ogden “Og” Marrow. Its film adaptation, which you can read more about here, was released in 2018 and a sequel, Ready Player Two, came out in 2020. Since a film adaptation of Ready Player Two is still a long way away, I thought it’d be fun to take a look at the novel in the meantime.

The trilogy that made Batman movies cool again

Even with that voice, you know the one. (Unmarked Spoilers)

Batman Begins should have been entitled The Dark Knight Begins, but hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. After he loses his chance to get his revenge on Joe Chill (Richard Brake), the murder of his parents (Linus Roache, Sara Stewart), Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) sets out on a journey to understand the criminal underworld. Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson) finds him and introduces him to the League of Shadows and their mysterious leader Ra’s al Ghul (Ken Watanabe). From them, Bruce learns everything he needs to become Batman.

It’s an art film, I swear!

Ah, two of my favorite genres combined.

Porno is set in 1992 and concerns a movie theatre that stresses strong Christian values to its employees, the most subtly named of which is Chasity (Jillian Mueller) or Chaz for short. One night they discover this mysterious film reel that they decide to watch after work. The problem is that by doing so, they release a succubus that the credits refer to as Lilith (Katelyn Pearce), but she’s never called that in the movie itself.

Just the two of us

Enjoy finding a reason to care about these people.

Malcolm (John David Washington) is a filmmaker who has just made a movie he wrote and directed about a drug addict. Marie (Zendaya) is a former actress and drug addict who is currently dating Malcolm. During the movie’s premiere, Malcolm thanks, everyone but Marie. Once home, tensions boil over, and the two of them launch into a whole movie’s worth of arguments.

Finally

I can still remember when a Snyder cut seemed like a pipe dream. (Unmarked Spoilers for theatrical version)

The plot of Zack Snyder’s Justice League is more or less the same as the theatrical cut. (Emphasize on the more, because the runtime of this movie is four hours long.) Following the death of Superman/Clark Kent (Henry Cavill), evil alien Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds) has come to conquer Earth in the name of Darkseid (Ray Porter). To do so, he must assemble three Mother Boxes that will allow Steppenwolf to terraform Earth into a copy of his homeworld Apokolips. The only thing standing in his way is Batman/Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), who assembles a team of powerful heroes to combat this deadly threat.