I had the good sense to go to a double feature of the both movies back-to-back. This helped keep the story coherent when there were references to things that happened in the previous movie. The story is somewhat stretched in this sequel, unravelling as the movie went on. The performances from the cast were quite decent, but the movie never drew you in as the first one did.
If you haven’t seen the first Insidious movie, you need to stop reading this review. If you have, then you know that main character Josh, played by Patrick Wilson, went into a place in his mind to find his son before he was taken by a demon in the first movie. Josh didn’t quite make it back to his own body and that is where the second movie starts off. The story then devolves into Josh’s past and his astral presence as the two try to get him back in his body.
Unlike the first movie, the mild scares are watered down by the somewhat convoluted plot. At times, the story jumps from the past, to the present to what happened in the first movie, jumping at intervals that can be confusing. Wilson tries to play both Josh and the ghost possessing him to a very convincing end. Rose Byrne as the wife is little more than a shrieking woman, not a great use for such a talented actress. The kids were kids and less of them in horror movies would be nice.
The double-feature helped set the stage, but this movie pales in comparison to the original and is hardly worth the full-price evening fare. I won’t say pass on it, but paying more than $10 for it is too much.
Survival horror movies have a certain look and feel to them from the very beginning. In this movie, a family meets up for their parent’s 35th anniversary dinner. What happens turns the table on the happy family reunion with one well-aimed, well-timed arrow. The story starts off following a couple who are being hunted by unknown assailants. The scene turns to an older couple coming to an empty, old house, getting it ready for the kids that would be arriving that night and the following morning.
The celebratory dinner starts off with a few awkward introductions and the family quickly rekindles the feud between two of the three sons. The argument is cut short when the only daughter’s boyfriend is shot in the forehead with an arrow. After that, the survival instinct of only one member of the dinner kicks in and she engages the people attacking them, doing her best to keep everyone alive.
The gore is quite extensive in this movie, not to the level of some movies, but enough to make you look away at regular intervals. What makes this movie somewhat memorable is that there is a real story under the mayhem. In the footsteps of movies like The Purge, the modern horror movie is now combined with gore and story, to give you something to be engaged in besides being grossed out. I can’t say it was an amazing movie, but it kept me guessing for a bit and when the reveal happened, how the movie ended was still surprising. For $6, it was well worth seeing.
It feels like a lifetime ago when I saw the first Xmen movie. Hugh Jackman got a huge break when Dougray Scott had a scheduling conflict and couldn’t make it. What a difference timing makes, eh? Now, years later, Jackman is the quintessential Wolverine now, there is no other nor any equal. In this latest iteration, Logan is faced with the same complications he has been before. Special effects are always a plus in this sort of movie, but it can’t carry it.
The story is not compelling, but Jackman makes every scene pop. The only reason to see this movie is to see Hugh Jackman deliver yet another amazing performance. The man becomes Wolverine/Logan in a way that I would never have expected. The movies are great, but as a comic book fan, I feel like I see him like an old friend. The Wolverine is like any other superhero character, a name that means more than the actual person is. The Wolverine movie doesn’t add much, if anything to the lore of the character, but it is worth seeing.
The thing that stuck out for me the most were the short scenes between Hugh Jackman and Famke Janssen, who comes back as Jean Grey for dream sequences. The scenes were bittersweet and captured the tortured attitude that Wolverine struggles with throughout his life. This isn’t the big-budget blockbuster I expected, but it is one of the better movies I’ve seen this summer.
Years ago, I had seen the first Despicable Me movie and thought, wow, while it wasn’t original. It had a lot of elements that made me love it. Sure you can’t understand the minions, but their antics are more than enough to keep you engaged, even as an adult. Despicable Me 2 takes what started in the first one and builds on it. At the very core of the story, it is about Gru finding a woman so that his kids can have a mom. I think Universal missed an opportunity to prove that single parenting, while not easy, is the norm and kids can succeed in a family with only one parent, even if that isn’t optimal. I realise, having no kids, how dare I say that, but it is what it is, as one of my co-workers likes to say.
The story starts off with Gru hosting a birthday party for Agnes, the youngest of his adopted daughters. It becomes clear that he is no longer being ‘evil’ anymore, but going to sell legitimate wares, jellies and jams. A large installation with radioactive chemicals gets stolen and a secret organisation calls on Gru to help them figure out which villain may have done it. Gru is then paired up with a new agent and hilariousness ensues.
While this movie doesn’t have the same punch that the first one did, I still found it both funny and touching at times. Gru’s character evolves and he does care about the girls and their lives. There is a great sequence where Margo is trying to date a boy and Gru plays the perfect over-protective father. Though the movie is probably going to be pulled soon, this one is well worth seeing.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you might wonder why I didn’t see this last weekend. Horror movies are my guilty pleasure. I love watching them, love getting scared out of my gourd. This movie, brought to you by the makers of Insidious, delivers several knock-out blows before leaving you with your eyes covered.
Based on a true story, the movie takes us into the lives of real-life paranormal experts, Ed and Lorraine Warren. The story is set in 1970 when Ed and Lorraine had been working for some time, trying to legitimise their efforts by speaking all over the area. The duelling story with theirs is a family that moves into a new house and the very first day, strange things begin to happen. The house is old and the price was just right. The father is a truck driver and isn’t home all the time and the mother stays out home when four out of five girls go to school on a daily basis. The scares start small, a creaking door here, a strange new imaginary friend there, the action ramping up effortlessly.
If you’re familiar with any sort of haunting or horror movie, the story revolves around a problem and the solution to the problem. Like clockwork, the action escalates, forcing those affected to change their behaviour or lose a loved one. The slight twist to this story was seeing the inner workings of the Warren family. It is presumed that they are experts, but few get to see more than the snippets given from haunting-type shows.
The movie does an excellent job of making small things terrifying and playing on the innate fears of the movie-goers. Many of the scariest movies aren’t gory or have someone running at the camera, but use little elements to make you wonder what is going on. There was a perfect scene early in the movie when the mother walks down the stairs first thing in the morning and finds the clock set to a time I didn’t see. The scene moved so fast, but the action was subtle and when I saw the next clock, I knew what had happened. Less is often more and this is the case with this movie. The Conjuring was a fairly well-told scary movie and well worth seeing.
I had the rare opportunity to go to the movies on a Monday night. The hope was that after over a month, there would be less annoying children in the theatre. There were less than 10, but those 10 made their presence known. Would it kill AMC to have a screening of kids movies that adults might like without kids in attendance? I mean, I have to work too, you know? I’m excited you brought your kids after work, but if little Johnny can’t shut it, he should go outside. This isn’t an interactive movie…I digress.
Monsters University was a prequel to the rather popular Monsters Inc. that came out several years ago. In this movie, we meet Mike Wazowski and James P. Sullivan as college students. Mike is still small and wears a retainer, convinced he can be a fantastic scarer. Sully is a lanky college kid that is trying to ride the coattails of his father and the rest of his family without doing much work. Both are trying to do well on their exam in their first scarying class when an accident happens. This forces them to work together and they do so with mixed results.
The story is very engaging and at times it makes you miss your college days or reminisce about how things were at your school. The antics are spot on and can be over the top, but only to a degree. What struck me was the ending. If you haven’t seen it, you may want to stop reading here, because I’d like to discuss it, so to speak.
In most movies everything is tied up in neat little bows. When Mike and Sully don’t stay in school, getting expelled, there is no tidy, perfect ending, not really. Instead there is a montage of images of them working their way to what we see in the first movie. To me, the lesson that Pixar hits squarely is that while you may have the best laid plans, if they don’t go your way, there are other ways. I thought that message was well worth watching and turned the movie from regular Disney movie into something more. It has been almost a month since this movie came out and while there are annoying kids still seeing it, it’s still worth seeing and I’ll probably grab it on DVD as well.
There isn’t a lack of action-adventure movies these days. Just this week I saw Red 2 and a few weeks later saw World War Z. Action movies seem to be plentiful, but that doesn’t mean they are all equal. In this monster movie, Guillermo del Toro does his best to make the genre feel fresh. I saw this movie in IMAX 3D and it was worth the extra money.
Pacific Rim finds the world dozens of years in the future, where all the powers of the world must unite to create massive machines to combat what appears to be an alien invasion. The science of the movie is paper-thin, but it doesn’t matter. The characters are all very rich and yet somehow seem to fit into the usual Hollywood archetypes. The movie starts off with two brothers manning this massive machine and one brother dying, leaving the other to lament the death. The government decides to shut the project down, forcing the director to do something drastic to get his pilot back into the programme. The failsafe that would have put the mechanical monster business out doesn’t hold and the director is able to continue working.
The story is as predictable as it can be. There was not one point where I felt surprised or moved by the story or the acting. While Idris Elba is a Brit, the accent was distracting and felt inconsistent throughout. Lead man Charlie Hunnam was easy on the eyes and also uninteresting. The special effects made this movie worth seeing, the acting, not so much. I can’t mention the movie without giving credit to Ron Perlman and Charlie Day, both playing the same characters I feel like I’ve seen them play before, but just as entertaining. This isn’t a must see movie, but given the lack of good action movies right now, it might be worth watching.
