Terrible Plan! Movie Reviews

What I liked: The architecture of a heist movie has 4 stages: stage 1 explain how hard the job is, stage 2 come up with a ridiculously elaborate plan to accomplish the job and acquire hard to find equipment, stage 3 execute the plan but something goes terribly wrong, stage 4 sneaky twist and huge pay off. The Solo movie takes the bold move of streamlining the first two and a half steps, picking up with stage 3.5 "Something goes terribly wrong". This saves everyone the slow wind up to the actual action. This saved time translates into a movie with not one but all the heists. We have grand theft, customs evasion, train robbery, vault robbery, the classic hustle, and of course smuggling. I guess they may have tried to crowd too a little much in because they also almost always skip stage 4. This stage skipping also means that we don't know if the things they are doing are actually hard or they are just incompetent. I'm surprised more heist movies don't explore this ...

What I liked: This is an inspiring story. Not, as one might imagine from the title and cover art, in an early 20th century "We bought a zoo" kind of way or even a look at all these cute zoo animals kind of way. It is inspiring in a Schindler's List kind of way, the story of a Polish family who used their destroyed zoo as a cover to smuggle more than 300 Jews out of the Warsaw ghetto. This is similar in scale to the efforts of the ten Boom family and about 1/4 the scale of Schindler's operation. But it this endeavor, in addition to hiding the Jews and passing them on to other safe houses, included a massive smuggling operation to extract them from the ghetto. The characters make courageous decisions in terrible terrible circumstances. Clearly the main characters are brave and mastermind an elaborate rescue operation, but all of the side characters ring true too. I don't know if the characters represent individuals or are composites but the film did an excellent j...

What I liked: This is a solid monster movie. So if you have been looking for the next Creature from the Black Lagoon, where it takes the super fast, super perceptive, super strong monster an hour and a half to eat three people and a raccoon, look no further. This film does an excellent job of playing on stress. The best comparison I can make is to a syllabus. You know exactly what is coming and exactly how it will happen, but you have no choice but wait the entire semester for it to happen. This makes normal things, like going up and down stairs, stressful. It also makes you wish the monsters would just hurry up already. Because the monsters have highly acute hearing the main characters communicate predominantly in sign language. The actress who plays the deaf daughter is actually deaf which is pretty cool. Several parents I know will feel vindicated to learn that noisy toys are the ultimate downfall in the movie. You have been right all along. Similarly, I have spent enough time on ...

What I liked: This was a lot of fun to watch. The stunts were good the booby traps and puzzles were elaborate. I was having enough fun to not get too concerned about falling 300 feet into a raging river, or the creative parachuting, or the excessive effect of 6 sticks of dynamite, or how everyone was doing pretty well for being shot in the chest, stabbed, breaking all their bones, etc. The plot is pretty similar to Last Crusade with fewer Germans and less Sean Connery. I liked the sidekick he was not useless and seemed reasonably invested in the "let's sail into the most dangerous ocean in the world to find and release the mythical queen of death" plan. What I didn't: There is a long tradition of people bringing the wrong kind of weaponry to gun fights but an ice axe? really? Why do you even have an ice axe in the tropics? And there are guns lying around and double guns is kind of your trademark. Every time I build a prison tomb to contain the evil queen of death ...

I have just published my 100th movie review. I have had a lot of fun watching the movies and it has been pretty entertaining writing the reviews. I hope you have had fun reading them and maybe have found some good films that you would not have thought to watch. I took a look back at the movies I have reviewed over the last four years and found some favorites and some things that surprised me. Some Movie statistics  Fortunately, having reviewed 100 movies the percentages are shockingly easy to work out. 25% of the movies were sequels 14% of the movies were remakes or reboots 12% of the movies were based on books 14% superhero movies 15% historical movies 3% Jack Ryan 3% Submarine movies 3% Jurassic Park The percent of superhero movies surprised me because it seems like most of the movies I watch have heroes in them. I was impressed with how many historical movies I have watched, I guess I'm more cultured than I thought I was. Unexpectedly there was 0 overlap between th...

What I liked: Infinity War fixed many of my problems with Civil War  and Age of Ultron . For one the scale, if not the time frame, was much more war like. Most people have improved weaponry and suits, Black Widow gets some night sticks which is a huge improvement over the glowstick bracelets and Spiderman gets his fancy schmancy suit. They may have over compensated a bit in the body count but since they are in an 18 movie deficit we can forgive them there. We got to see the Wakandans engage in a much much larger battle, which fuels my suspicions that most Wakandans sat out the Killmonger vs Black panther show down in Black panther. Come on Wakanda, be politically active. I liked the unexpected team ups. Rocket and Thor was a pretty entertaining combination as was Rocket and Bucky. I liked the Star Lord vs Thor stand off and Guardians meeting Ironman and Strange was pretty good. Spiderman is always a favorite, smashing bad guys and being hilarious. There was some good banter and ...

What I liked: Wonder Woman is always cool and she is quite speedy. The flash was funny in an awkward, anti-social kind of way. I was impressed that they actually made Meera cool. It was fun to get a glimpse of green lantern. I liked that when the world is invaded by giant insects that feed off fear, people prepare to battle them with raid. The bat rock crawler was cool but not near as cool as the batmobile. What I didn't: Batman's suit. No it is not just like every other Batman suit. It has a weird texture that makes it look like Batman is a CG computer game character. And there was too much CG happening, real stunts and practical effects are cooler than the completely impossible CG fight scenes. Superman was way over powered. I know that this is the ever present argument against Superman, but this was just absurd. He should not be able to stand alone against the entire Justice League, each of them has defeated him at least once. The core Justice League is an assembly of pe...