Eight movies and a brief rant:

“The Girl in the Spider’s Web” is set in a weird fantasy version of contemporary Sweden where the sun never shines, where no one ever smiles or laughs, and where (I am NOT making this up) a skilled hacker can remotely fire a car’s air bag in a matter of seconds WHILE driving pursuit in a high-speed chase. The script betrays no concept of “character arc”. I’ve seen worse movies, but not in a while. 

“Overlord” is a zombie movie centered around D-Day. The art director and associated minions did their best to make this movie LOOK authentic. One could wish that the writers put even a fraction of that effort in to understanding military process or personality, or even human personality, for that matter. The film is slightly redeemed by the charm and talent of the cast, who are all significantly better than the material.

“Venom” is a super-anti-hero movie based on a character I fundamentally don’t like, played by an actor who was born to play thugs but keeps trying to go elsewhere. This movie exceeded my expectations, but my expectations were abysmal.

“Creed II” is a “Triumph of the Underdog” movie with a good cast and a decent script. If you like this kind of thing, and we do, this is the kind of thing you will like.

“Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” is yet another effort to drag the whimsical world of Harry Potter into a more solid and adult political story. It didn’t work in the last movie, and apparently no one learned from that experience for this one. This isn’t a BAD movie, but it is overblown and badly unfocused.

“Ralph Breaks the Internet” is somewhat better than it predecessor, but that isn’t hard. The two main characters are beginning to develop more personality than is in the script, apparently because the actors have had several years to let them incubate. There are a few REALLY clever bits, most of which involve the stable of Disney princesses, and a new character named “Shank” who is probably the sexiest female in the history of animation. If you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you will like. Me, I’m not really sure.

“Robin Hood” is a thoroughly mediocre whole cloth medieval epic with significant amounts of technological fantasy wrapped in a thin skin of Robin Hood trivia. The main cast is charming and able, and do what they can, but the result is still a train wreck.

“Destination Wedding” is a staight-to-the-internet rom-com about two extremely damaged and prickly people who are thrown together by the circumstance of an egreiously inconvenient and self indulgent wedding. The dialog is hyperbolic and full of brilliant flourishes. One gets the impression that this movie doesn’t really want to be liked, but we did, anyway.

And now, a brief cinematic rant: Hollywood is well past the point of being able to put ANYHING on the screen. It has become nearly impossible to create a visual “Wow” factor, and yet they keep trying. Worse, they have not yet learned that spectacle won’t carry a movie. Most of the movies in this batch have good casts, big budgets, and awful scripts. Something really needs to change…

Uncle Hyena