a) El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
For me, "Breaking Bad" was just a pretty good show, not a high watermark in the entire history of television. And it always felt to me like a fairly self-contained story that isn't served by an entire spinoff series and feature film about supporting characters. So I wasn't really looking forward to this movie that picks up where the series left off with Aaron Paul's character, but I was still kind of curious to see where it went. Ultimately, it kinda felt like they were just kind of spinning wheels and throwing a few curveballs into what was basically what you'd imagine the character's fate being anyway, but there were a few entertaining scenes in the second half of the movie that weren't pure fanservice. And I tend to make fun of Paul's 3-time Emmy-winning performance of saying "yo" and "bitch" all the time, but at this point in Jesse Pinkman's character arc he's kind of a broken person and he played that really well.

b) Shaft
Samuel L. Jackson's first Shaft movie in 2000 was one of the more forgettable movies I ever saw in the theater, but my vague memory is that it at least tried to feel like a Shaft movie. But this one felt like they just let Kenya Barris stitch together a bunch of "Black-ish" scenes full of urbane observational humor about generation gaps and culture clashes and it pretty much made the Shaft stuff feel like an afterthought.

c) Drunk Parents
'90s "SNL" writer Fred Wolf has had a pretty middling career directing features where The House Bunny qualifies as his masterpiece, and he now seems to be putting his own stamp on the "bad [noun]" comedy trend with Mad Families and Drunk Parents. But I was tempted to watch this because it stars Alec Baldwin and Salma Hayek, who had great comedic chemistry as my favorite couple on "30 Rock" (and, at 8 years' difference, were actually a relatively age appropriate pairing). It was actually pretty good, nothing special but a solid cast and some very funny scenes.

d) Welcome To Marwen
Steve Carell is only 6 years younger than Tom Hanks so I can't really say he's the new Hanks, nor is that really fair to either of them, but he's certainly stepped into a similar space in pop culture, and unfortunately that includes weird uncanny valley Robert Zemeckis projects. I feel like I should probably see the documentary that inspired this, Marwencol, because the story is pretty interesting, but I just don't like the weird sheen this movie puts on it to kind of make the most family-friendly version of a story that's not really that family-friendly.

e) The Happytime Murders
Obviously the whole point of this movie is contrasting the style of puppetry people associate with "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show" with a dark crime drama, and it was pretty successful at wringing comedy out of that while still being a pretty coherent mystery story. I didn't love it, but it was good enough, and Melissa McCarthy was definitely the right human lead for it. When the movie ended, I flipped on Comedy Central and saw the new rebooted "Crank Yankers" and remembered how much worse the whole 'adult puppet show' thing can go.

f) The Predator
I like Shane Black's quippy breezy action movies more than I care about any Predator movies so I was pleased that this had a pretty charming cast and a good amount of character-driven stuff apart from the action scenes. This franchise probably wasn't the best fit for him, though, Iron Man 3 is about as far as I really want him to go in the high concept effects-driven direction.

g) Mission: Impossible - Fallout
I'm not as in awe of these movies as an action tour de force as some people are, but they're generally pretty exciting and well done. I think my favorite thing about it was finding out that the famous gif of Henry Cavill looking super tough is directly before and after Cavill totally gets his ass handed to him by Lian Yang in a fantastic fight scene.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 12, 2019 at 10:06 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.