Some Dude Reviews Movies

In the Sunken Place It isn't often that you come across a movie whose Rotten Tomatoes score is 100%**. And I don't mean Opening-Thursday-With-Ten-Reviews-Counted 100%. I mean a Whopping-133-Reviews-Weighed-Saturday-Showing 100%. So, as I've been tracking Jordan Peele's directorial debut (he wrote it, too) on RT, I knew it was something special just from the hype. I'd been following it before then, on all my movie news websites, but the RT hype is real. I was anxious to see how this king of comedy managed to break into the horror genre, and the movie-feature medium. Spoilers: I wasn't disappointed. ** Shortly after this review was written, the RT score for Get Out plunged to 99%. Summary: Chris and his girlfriend are going away to her parents' house for the weekend. Chris is black. Rose, his girlfriend, is white. The Look Who's Coming to Dinner tension is built in from the get-go. From the moment of their arrival, however, things don't go as...

Baba Yaga All great movies are great for their own reasons: dramas aren't necessarily better movies, out of hand, than comedies. Or sci-fi films. Or even the much derided Summer Blockbusters. When a movie sets up a vision, and executes it, it can be said to be great. John Wick came along in 2014 and blew me, and many others, away with its stylish imagery, slickly choreographed action scenes, and sly world b uilding. It wasn't what most would consider "great art," or even the "pinnacle of cinema." But it was a great film, nonetheless. I have been waiting for the sequel every day since I walked out of the cineplex that fated day in October, three years ago. A second film would be a crucial point for the franchise, and the talent behind the camera: was the first film a flash in the pan, a fluke? Or could lightning be bottled twice? Synopsis:  John Wick, fresh off his assault of the Russian criminal element, tries to return to the shambles of his ...

Paddington 2 is, as of this moment, one of four films to maintain a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. If you are flummoxed by this, you haven't seen the movie, and you probably never bothered with the first one. But trust me, those are two mistakes you should rectify. Synopsis:   Paddington lands himself in jail, after being framed for the robbery of an antique pop-up book. It falls on his family's shoulders to prove his innocence, while he does his level best to make prison a better, more polite place. Pros:  Ben Whishaw: is perfection, as Paddington. He has a wonderful sense of innocence that plays exceedingly well. Consider this pitch-perfect casting. Wonderful CG: How does Paddington 2 look more realistic than Justice League? We live in this world. There are times where I forgot that Paddington was a CG creation: that is the mark of a well-made, beautifully constructed piece of cinema magic. Go fuck yourself, DCEU. (Yeah, I just dropped an F bomb in the r...

Pew Pew Pew Look, I get why people clutch their pearls around the new Star Wars films: their childhood joys, the Star Wars Expanded Universe, have been tossed in the trash, and Disney has decided to kind of do their own thing. I mean, they paid a billion dollars for it. They're kind of entitled to that. But still: I get it. I understand how people can watch something play out on screen that is completely different than the way it was in their novels and comics. To that end, Solo: A Star Wars Story was always going to be controversial, at least in the fandom. That's to say nothing of the film's troubled production. I would say that most people waited on tenterhooks about the quality of this one. Synopsis:  Young Han Solo grows up on the mean streets of Corellia, boosting speeders and making cons. After a particularly bad job-gone-wrong, he has to flee, but promises to return one day, once he's become the greatest pilot in the galaxy. Only it doesn't quite wor...