Category: movies

I watched the original Beetlejuice for the first time in like 30 years to prepare for the sequel. My takeaway is that the original still holds up really well, and the sequel does a pretty good job of matching the same energy. It’s not super schmaltzy, nor is it a beat-for-beat retelling of the same story. Though I am disappointed that the sequel ends with Beetlejuice once again trying to marry Lydia, and once again a sand worm appears to eat the villain(s). Note that I didn’t say it eats Beetlejuice, because this time around, Beetlejuice really isn’t the antagonist. He’s basically become a good guy and helps the heroes more than he hinders them. Which is fine, I guess. I vaguely remember the Beetlejuice cartoon being the same way. So maybe it helps to view this as a sequel to the cartoon, since the protagonists from the first movie, the Maitlands, are nowhere to be found.

I’m okay with the Maitlands not being in the sequel, whether that’s for artistic reasons or that they couldn’t get Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis to return. I also understand why Jeffrey Jones isn’t back (spoiler: he’s a pervert). But it is strange how much his face is still featured. Like, it’s funny that his character gets bitten in half by a shark, so you never see his head, but pictures of his face still show up everywhere else. Removing those wouldn’t have had any effect on the story. That’s also how I feel about the ex-wife character. She adds nothing to the story, and her motivation makes no sense. This is a movie that’s a little too overstuffed, and the first half especially could have benefited from some trimming. Still, the costumes and practical effects are great, and Catherine O’Hara is a delight, as always. If you’re at all interested in the movie, then she and Michael Keaton will make it worth your time.

I’m not a fan of this new trend where they split a story into two movies but downplay the fact that the first movie is only “Part One.” Though I did enjoy hearing half the theater erupt into audible swearing when the credits rolled after a significant cliffhanger. I knew from other reviewers what to expect going in, so it didn’t faze me as much as the rest of the audience, but I still wish studios would be more upfront about this. Or, hey, why not write better scripts that can individually end each movie in a trilogy on a satisfying note! The first Spider-Verse felt like a complete movie, after all. I had no idea we were even going to get a sequel. But I don’t want to dwell on the trilogy-ness too much, because, while the cliffhanger does deflate some of the excitement you might feel immediately after watching the movie, it’s still a pretty fun movie.

For one, I love that studios are finally taking risks with animation and pushing the envelope beyond “stock 3D.” We pretty much have the first Spider-Verse movie to thank for that, a movie that obviously inspired the new Puss in Boots aesthetic. But Across the Spider-Verse goes even harder and plays with so many different styles. Admittedly, some of the action is a bit hard to follow because of it. There’s one character who looks more like a flipbook of sketches that is really cool to see but also clashes heavily with everything around him (and yes, I know, this was thematically appropriate). There are also scenes where Gwen and her dad are talking, and every time the camera changes, the colors and background patterns change, as well. It’s a neat touch but can also be disorienting if you’re not on board with this “anything goes” style of animation.

Story-wise, Across the Spider-Verse is pretty solid, too. Maybe my only complaint (aside from the obvious cliffhanger at the end) is that the movie feels like it has two beginnings. We start with Gwen and spend a long time with her before the movie resets and shows us what Miles has been up to. I understand the choice to do this, because Gwen and Miles basically have equal footing as protagonists now, but it means it takes that much longer for the actual story to get going. You do get to know both characters really well, though, and their motivations and the stakes they face make perfect sense. It’s hard to do multiverse stories right, because the multiverse can be such a cop-out. But the way it’s presented here, how each universe’s Spider-Man must hit certain beats or that whole universe explodes, has been fun to watch unfold.

I’m a lifelong Nintendo fan and have dreamed of an animated, reference-filled Mario movie since I was a kid back in the 90s. My excitement for this movie was tempered, however, when it was announced that Illumination was helming the project. Illumination is, frankly, the worst of the big animation studios. In more capable hands, this could have been something truly special. Unfortunately, Illumination staples are ever present, like their gratuitous use of slow motion to punctuate silly action beats, ill-fitting pop songs, and lowest common denominator “jokes.” If the humor in the trailers didn’t do it for you, rest assured that the actual movie isn’t much better. One thing I was pleasantly surprised by, however, was the voice acting. The trailers made the voice acting sound awful, but in the final product, I thought everyone—yes, even Chris Pratt—did a pretty good job.

One reason why the voice acting works so well is that the characters hardly say anything. Luigi is barely in the movie, and Mario spends more time running and fighting in action sequences than he does talking to other people. And that’s really my main beef here. The story is extremely slim. There are zero character moments. It feels like you are basically watching someone else play a video game, because you have no connection to anything. And yeah, I get that the Mario games are not known for their deep plots, but this is a movie. You’re allowed to inject some “movie” into it! Instead, we are rushed from action sequence to action sequence with little to no context or justification. Mario enters the Mushroom Kingdom and is immediately greeted by Toad, who immediately escorts him to the princess without question, who immediately recruits him to help her stop Bowser. Like, can we stop and breathe for a moment?!

Nowhere is this frenetic pace more evident than in the soundtrack. Ignoring the pop songs, the soundtrack is a lovely blend of nostalgic Mario tunes mixed with standard movie epicness. But they tried to cram too much nostalgia into each song, and the same action sequence will mutate through 3-4 familiar jingles in a matter of seconds. Again, slow the eff down and let us enjoy things! This movie is undoubtedly going to do well and spawn at least one sequel, so some of these references, both physical and musical, could have been saved for later. They did not need to expend all 40 years of Mario in their first outing. But I get it. A Mario movie practically demands you fill it with Easter eggs. And these references don’t feel gimmicky at all, because they’re still part of the same universe. In that regard, the movie looks great and is fun to watch at a surface level. But there’s no reason why we couldn’t have gotten something even better.

This was my first John Wick movie, but got dang, what a wild ride. There were four main action set pieces, and the insanity of them continued to escalate. The Arc de Triomphe scene in particular is one of the craziest sequences I’ve ever seen. People jumping out of cars to fight on foot in a busy roundabout was a sight to behold. The apartment sequence that followed shortly after—where the camera pans overhead for a long take as John Wick blasts thugs with incendiary rounds—was a close second. It felt so much like a video game, in the best way possible, that I had to resist the urge to start giggling like a little kid. Of course, this scene ends with John Wick jumping out of a window and landing on a parked car, a fall that should have killed him. Later on, Wick takes a tumble down the stairs that is so comically repetitive, I had to ask myself, “Am I supposed to be taking this seriously?”

People who have seen the other movies probably wouldn’t hesitate to answer that with, “Not at all.” For me, I honestly wasn’t sure. I mean, Keanu Reeves plays John Wick super seriously, almost to a fault. His acting is simply not good. But then you also have Donnie Yen playing a blind assassin. I love Donnie Yen, and he is great in the role, but a blind assassin is a silly thing to introduce to a franchise. If that level of cheesiness was already prevalent back in John Wick 1, though, then I guess it’s not a valid complaint. There’s just such a disconnect between the grittiness that the movie strives for 90% of the time and the huge asks to suspend your disbelief. If you can accept that John Wick is basically a video game character immune to fall damage, and you can accept that there are apparently no cops in this world who respond to public shootouts and traffic accidents, you’ll have a good time.

I feel like Pinocchio is a difficult story to get right, because it’s so unstructured and episodic in its adventures. Guillermo del Toro’s version similarly struggles to create an end-to-end, engaging narrative. The middle of the movie in particular really drags, and I had to start skipping ahead through the overlong musical montage that’s supposed to encapsulate Pinocchio’s time at the carnival. Everything carnival related represents the weakest aspects of this movie. It’s when Guillermo del Toro strays from the more classic Pinocchio story beats that the movie shines. For instance, replacing Pleasure Island with a fascist youth camp was an interesting choice. You don’t get the same body horror of watching a young boy transform into a donkey, but the war setting still adds some serious gravitas. This is a movie where Pinocchio is literally executed at gunpoint, after all.

Yes, the movie is dark, but maybe not as dark as you might expect from a Guillermo del Toro film. Pinocchio repeatedly dying, visiting limbo, and coming back to life was another fun directorial choice that is both macabre and silly. I appreciated how naive and childish Pinocchio was, especially in the beginning. I do think he grows up too fast, though, given that Sebastian (this movie’s Jiminy Cricket) stops influencing him after the first day. The ending of the movie hinges on Sebastian getting his wish, having fulfilled his responsibility to make Pinocchio a good boy. But Sebastian spends the majority of the movie separated from Pinocchio, and so he really didn’t do much and definitely didn’t deserve a free wish to Deus ex Machina us into a happy ending. Well… semi-happy. The final moments are still pretty sad and do solidify this as a poignant (and beautifully animated) take on a familiar story.

This was a very strange movie, but not for the reasons you might think. It honestly felt like whoever wrote the script was taking the piss out of older animation styles. In the movie’s universe, 2D animation is seen as outdated. One of our main characters, Dale, even gets “CGI surgery” to keep with the times. But it doesn’t stop there, as our heroes visit the “uncanny valley” and meet a 2000s era, Beowulf-looking character who repeatedly gets made fun of for the remainder of the film. In theory, I don’t have a problem with lampooning how far technology has come. But they really did not do 2D animation justice in this movie. Most of the “2D” characters are actually 3D models that have been cel-shaded. And their attempts to make the actual 2D characters look like they’re interacting with the real world are extremely lazy, especially when you consider how well Who Framed Roger Rabbit pulled this off thirty years ago!

Story-wise, it’s fine. I like the idea of going meta and having the Rescue Rangers characters simply be actors who struggled to find work after the original cartoon ended. Unfortunately, the real rescue mission that they now find themselves involved in has hardly any meat to it. The Rescue Rangers movie suffers from Ready Player One syndrome, where references to other pop culture are the sole point of its existence. And yeah, it’s fun to see some of the cameos—like Ugly Sonic and a handful of DreamWorks characters—but none of them are used in any creative ways beyond just, “Look who we got!” There is still some decent humor in the movie, but the script has a habit of over explaining its better jokes. For instance, a clay-animated character smacks his head on a newspaper, which leaves an imprint of the words on his face. Funny, but then he says, “Hey, it’s stuck on my face like Silly Putty. You remember Silly Putty?!”

I really want to know what headspace the creators were in when making this, because, on one hand, it feels like they didn’t trust the audience enough to get some of the references. However, they overstuffed each frame with so many other references that you have to pause the movie to catch them all. Then for other things, they didn’t even get the references right. Pogs, for example, are a plot point, but they keep referring to the missing “slammer” from the Rescue Rangers set as just another “pog.” Like, did you even 90s, bro? And, of course, there’s the general disdain for all animation that isn’t cutting edge 3D. Maybe the oddest choice of all, though, is that they made Peter Pan the villain. If you know the story of Peter Pan’s original voice actor, Bobby Driscoll, then this comes across as being in very poor taste. So the creators either didn’t do their homework (and don’t care about animation history), or they were being purposefully cruel. Not a good look either way.