Men in Black: International. F. Gary Gray. 2019.

I only vaguely remember the first movie. Or were there two? It was… Fresh Prince and that Tommy Lee guy?

So this is … not a reboot but a sequel with new characters? The concept is basically “Bond, but with funny aliens” so it seems well suited for a series.

Oh! And here Chris Hemsworth (one of the Chris people) does play a Bond parody.

It’s a bit frustrating to watch. Every scene is like “oh… I see what they want this scene to be”… It’s so close to being fun and exciting and cool, but it’s like everything is just slightly out of phase. I can’t even pinpoint what is wrong: The effects are great, Hemsworth is very Chris and Tessa Thompson is a great smartypants rookie, and the plot is satisfyingly over-complicated.

It’s just not … sharp? It needs to be turned up a bit? Is it made for the Chinese market? It’s produced by Tencent?

I like the deadly assassins. They’re super cool.

This movie is inexplicably boring.

Oh, here’s the explanation:

The film went through a troubled production due to frequent clashes between director Gray and producer Parkes, which started when the executive overseeing the project, Sony’s executive vice president of production David Beaubaire, exited the studio in the summer of 2018, and was not replaced. […] Parkes’ new script pages stripped away the early draft’s modern sensibilities, and were newly sent, daily, to Hemsworth and Thompson, who were both so confused that they hired their own dialogue writers. […] The studio tested two cuts — one put together by Gray, the other by Parkes — with the version by Parkes being chosen as the theatrical cut.

But perhaps Parkes isn’t the bad guy here:

Parkes and Gray also clashed over the color-correction process during post-production.

Because the colour grading looks great! Rich, deep and fresh colours.

Alita: Battle Angel. Robert Rodriguez. 2019.

The title character is CGI, but moves around in a non-CGI environment. (Well, FSVO.) It’s pretty good! I mean, the CGI. As usual, they animate the hair list a bit too much: Not modelling how greasy hair (and all hair is greasy to some degree) just doesn’t move that much.

So it’s a novelty movie based on a Japanese comic book. The weird thing is that the performances by the human actors (like Christoph Waltz) are even more stilted than the CGI performances.

That’s pretty incomprehensible. Not the tomatometer: That sounds about right. But 93% of the audience liked it? Odd.

Because this is pretty dull stuff. I mean, it looks good, but it’s just hard to find anything here that’s interesting. Perhaps if you’re a fan of the comic book, then it’s exciting to watch this version of it? I don’t know?

I expected the big action scenes to be as exciting as watching video games on Youtube. But they manage to make you forget you’re watching CGI creatures in a CGI world. Either that, or it transcends the entire thing into a cartoon. It’s kinda exhilarating, anyway. It’s when they’re not fighting the movie has a problem.

So I liked the last half of the movie a lot more than the first half. But it did feel a bit like the pilot season to a TV show. Unusually with movies these days, it actually felt a bit on the short side?

It cannot be!

Spider-Man: Far From Home. Jon Watts. 2019.

Oh right. This is after Avengers: Endgame. It starts off with a quite funny recap of the events.

I really enjoyed the first Holland Spider-Man movie. This one starts off a bit slower. It’s amusing, but so far (I’m just 15 minutes in) it’s not as exciting as the first movie. But… it’s got a kind of Bond vibe? Super-glitzy, super-professional shots; repartee that’s crackles without snapping; and a reassuring feeling that we’ll soon be embroiled in some silly adventure or other.

[two seconds pass]

And there we are! Silly adventure!

The plot of this movie makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, but I think that’s an advantage. It just makes the movie more like festive. More Bond.

I did smile through large parts of this movie, but there were surprisingly boring bits. It’s like they only had plot enough for … like … an hour, and the rest is padding.

I’m not quite sure how to roll the dice on this one. There are bits here I really, really liked (Peter tingle hee hee), and there’s at least half an hour I was bored silly. And the CGI Spidey doesn’t look as good as in the first movie.

Still, it looks lovely, and Holland is wonderful, and Gyllenhaal is perfectly unhinged, and basically all the actors are charming.