Category: 2 Stars
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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker smothers all hope and wonder
My brilliant wife had the following absolutely perfect appraisal of the first two entries in the new Star Wars trilogy, which I will paraphrase here: “Most of the criticism of The Force Awakens was absolutely correct, but I loved it anyway. Most of the criticism of The Last Jedi was absolutely wrong, but I loved…
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Toys buy happiness in the cloying The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
Cloying, saccharine, and worst of all, painfully obvious. Mike Mitchell’s The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part emblematizes my biggest gripe with most contemporary animated features: that perhaps the purest form of cinema is so often overwritten to the point of death. With animation, everything must be literally created from nothing, and anything is possible.…
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Netflix’s Triple Frontier is aggro, macho horseshit
J.C. Chandor’s Triple Frontier, Netflix’s latest high-profile exclusive, aspires to be a serious Expendables. It draws surface-level inspiration from the likes of Heat and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but forgets that you need more than square jaws and gun porn. There’s some dramatic potential in the premise of a heist orchestrated by veterans…
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Noomi Rapace shoots ’em up in the Netflix exclusive Close
Noomi Rapace was seemingly set for big things after The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo films, but was shortly thereafter cruelly written out of her starring role in Ridley Scott’s Alien prequels. I can only imagine how it must hurt for an actor to “appear” in a sequel only as a corpse, as she did…
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Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome fracks it up
“You get an E for effort and an F for fracking it up.” That just about sums it up. I was a big fan of the mid-2000s Battlestar Galactica reboot and its sister series Caprica, but had somehow overlooked this pilot for a second prequel spinoff. Belatedly seeing it now, the plot seems too slight…
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The documentary Together and Apart tells the genesis of Genesis
The venerable band Genesis reconvenes to tell their own story, from progressive rock outsiders to mainstream pop success story.
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Winnie-the-Pooh is a labor reformer in Disney’s Christopher Robin
Given its sluggish pace, depressive tone, and dramatization of the origin of Paid Time Off for postwar UK laborers, whom exactly was the intended audience for Christopher Robin? Kids with premature midlife crises and uncommonly long attention spans? Adults with low vocabularies and an acceptance of brain-bending metaphysics? Think about it too hard, and it’s…
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Teenagers shall inherit the world in Wes Ball’s Maze Runner: The Death Cure
While definitely not in the target audience, and without expressly setting out to do so, I’ve still somehow managed to see all three Maze Runner movies. Their easy availability on streaming services is just too tempting for my chronic addiction to escapist sci-fi. It’s interesting to see how young adult fiction contrives such scenarios where…
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Monty Python throws a farewell party for themselves in “Live (Mostly): One Down, Four to Go”
Like many misfit American kids of my generation, my brain was permanently rewired when I discovered the BBC series Monty Python’s Flying Circus on PBS in the 1980s. Monty Python, Doctor Who, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy formed a triumvirate of British pop culture that gave dorky anglophiles like us a pool of…
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Gorging on Nostalgia: Solo: A Star Wars Story
Like a big bowl of candy, Solo: A Star Wars Story certainly went down easy. But also like a big bowl of candy, generations raised on too much Star Wars are going to gorge themselves sick on nostalgia. Who filled that bowl, and why? When Disney acquired the Star Wars rights, and promised a new…