Ad Astra. James Gray. 2019. ⚁

For a moment, I was worried that this was going to be one of those interminable real space movies instead of sci-fi. *phew* It’s sci-fi!

Brad Pitt is getting a scraggly face, and it suits him. Especially in 4K, where you can see all the laugh lines and tiny wrinkles.

[twenty minutes pass]

Well, OK, the cinematography is very… modern… That is, every scene is colour-graded to an inch. It’s not that it doesn’t look good — it does — but it’s a bit boring visually. It’s so… controlled.

The actors are really working at making everything all modern and sombre, too. Nobody speaks in their natural register, but pitch their voices as low as they will go.

[ten minutes pass]

Oh, now it’s just stupid. A highway robbery on the Moon? This is not a past-scarcity movie or where major sci-fi technological breakthroughs have been made (I think), so just getting all those resources up to the Moon, and then staging a moon buggy ambush, just to… er… rob them? When any tear in their suits mean that they’re dead? It’s almost unbelievable moronic. I mean, by the filmmakers. And of course almost everybody dies, because that is what would happen in a situation like that. I guess that’s realistic?

[five minutes pass]

This is in-credibly boring. So of course:

If all the reviewers like a sci-fi movie, you pretty much know that it’s going to be pure tedium: All character development (i.e., daddy issues, because that’s the only character development allowed) and no fun.

[ten minutes pass]

This may be the most moronic movie I’ve seen in quite a while, and I watched Scary Movie 2 yesterday. He opened up the door to vacuum and the primate exploded? I thought they’d stopped doing that a couple of decades ago. (Because that’s not a thing.) And, yes, the primate had… crushed the space helmet of a guy? What?

Why is there zero G on the ship, anyway? On all the shots, it looked like it was under acceleration?

This is a sci-fi movie for people who’ve never seen, or wanted to see, a sci-fi movie, I guess.

[the end]

It’s really a ⚀ movie: It’s unimaginably boring and it’s stupid as nothing you’ve seen, and it’s pretentious and portentous.

But it’s got some nice shots.

Scary Movie 2. Keenen Ivory Wayans. 2001. ⚃

[four minutes pass]

Oh deer.

I liked the first Scary Movie er movie — it was very focused. It was basically a parody of Scream with some drop-ins from other movies, and it worked very well.

I’m guessing this is going to be more of a hodge-podge. I mean, it’s The Exorcist, but they do a really big poop joke, and that could have been pretty much anything. So I’m calling it: I think this is just gonna be a bunch of unrelated skits doing famous scenes from a bunch of horror movies, with a bunch of scenes of randomness.

[four minutes pass]

Oh, that was just the introduction? And then we’re into another Scream parody!?

I didn’t see that coming. Anyway, the Exorcist parody was really gross, but I like lol-ed out loud, so…

I’m not proud of it!

[twenty minutes pass]

OK, so I think I was right the first time? It’s the cast from the first Scary Movie er movie, but it’s got nothing to do with Scream. I’m not quite sure what it’s riffing on… everything just seems to random. Or… is this a parody of those Paranormal Activity movies? I haven’t seen any of those.

It leans hard into being gross, but none of it lands. Most of the bits have some potential, but they’re just so lazily developed.

The cast is still good. Anna Faris, in particular, is perfect in all her scenes (so charming and engaging), but there’s so little for her to do… it feels like such a waste.

[the end]

Wow! That took a turn. The last, like, half of the movie was really funny! Really stupid, really silly, and really funny. It’s like it was suddenly a different movie where they actually gave a fuck about following through on the bits.

So odd.

So how do you rate something like this? It’s funny (in part), but it’s so sloppily made. Half of it was like the worst movie ever, and one quarter of it was hilarious. I’m going with a ⚃, because anything that’s actually funny is a good thing. But I can totally see why people would hate this.

I think the audience is right here.

Ouch.

The Fast and the Furious. Rob Cohen. 2001. ⚃

I’ve just seen the 100 movies on the Sight & Sound directors’ poll. So I was thinking… “What would be the opposite of that?”

And then it just came to me: The Fast and the Furious series! And it turned out they’d just released a 4K box set, so I got that.

It’s not that these movies are universally reviled:

Instead, it’s just that these movies aren’t even really talked about at all; they’re outside the consideration of polite society?

I know nothing about these movies except that they’re about people driving around in cars.

Sounds great!

[seven minutes pass]

This started off with a … truck heist? And then we went to some drama stuff where a bleached blond(e) guy got punched by a guy who called him a faggot, and now they’re fighting while the soundtrack is playing a song where the lyrics just seem to be “macho crap! macho crap!”.

It’s very… knowing?

[fifteen minutes more pass]

It’s very hard not to enjoy this movie. It’s guys shit-talking each other while looking really cool, with slightly unrealistic cars, and driving around really fast. But it’s also got chemistry: The bit after the bleached blond(e) guy lost that race was really charming. It’s very playful.

[half an hour passes]

I’m still liking this movie, but it’s got problems. So much of the cinematography is pure cliché — the dramatic swoop up, the switch-aroung, etc — that it starts to get grating after a while. Not that there isn’t fun, bold stuff.

I was also thinking “hey, there’s no daddy issues! Just a pretty complex and confusing crime thing” and then Vin started in on his monologue about his dad.

*sigh*

[half an hour passes]

I’ve always liked Vin Diesel… he’s got charm, and he ends up in slightly off-kilter genre movies like Pitch Black. He doesn’t take the movies very seriously… and it’s obvious he didn’t think much of this movie. You can see him smirking after delivering every shouty line, just before the director cuts to something else. It’s fun to watch.

Of course, this because a box office behemoth, so I wonder whether that’ll make him all serious and stuff in the subsequent instalments…

[the end]

Well… plot-wise, so to speak, this didn’t really stake the ending. But on the other hand, the final scene was fun, and perhaps that’s the important thing.

I’m not surprised that I liked this movie, but I was surprised at how un-annoying it is. These sorts of movies are usually offensive in some way or other, and it steer clears of all that stuff by just having one fun action scene after another.

Now I’m all excited about seeing the next (oh dear) seven movies.