I thought this was pretty good, enjoyed seeing Edgar Wright sink his teeth into something a little more serious and a little more scary that still let him show of his record collection and build a playfully stylized world. Great performance from Thomasin Mackenzie that kind of relegated Anya Taylor-Joy to more of a supporting role than I expected, but the twist was interesting. Kind of hard to believe Matt Smith's head just looks like that without any kind of movie magic. 

I don't have too much investment in the Predator franchise, but this prequel got great word-of-mouth so I checked it out, and it's pretty excellent. I kind of got the impression that maybe the whole movie would be Naru (Amber Midthunder in a starmaking performance) and her dog against the Predator with very little dialogue. But it's a bit more conventional than that, with lots of supporting characters, and they had everybody speak English instead of going with subtitles or whatever. It totally lives up to the hype, though, really fun and thrilling movie. 

We spent a week at the beach last month, and told our 7-year-old son that one day he could pick family activities, and he asked to go to the movies. I was a little surprised he picked DC League of Super-Pets over Rise of Gru, since he's usually pretty down with the Minions, but I was down for it. DC has a great track record of satirizing itself in animated projects, from The LEGO Batman Movie to "Harley Quinn" and "Teen Titans Go!" and this was a little sillier and geared toward a younger audience, but it was cute and they got some good DC lore jokes in there. 

Skydance announced this movie 2 years before they hired disgraced Pixar CEO John Lasseter as their head of animation, so I feel bad for everyone who'd been working on this movie before that decision sort of created an advance backlash. And I felt conflicted about whether to watch it, but I decided to put it on one day with my kid, and we enjoyed it, it was charming if a little forgettable. Simon Pegg is a surprisingly bad voice actor, or maybe they just pushed him to play up his accent so much that he sounded kind of ridiculous. 

I saw an ad for a family movie where Owen Wilson plays a superhero dad and was like, y'know what, I'm in, that sounds fun. The kid-heavy parts of the movie were whatever, but the scenes with Owen Wilson and Michael Pena were funny. 

I already reviewed this for Consequence so all I'll say here is reiterate that J.J. Perry is a pretty impressive first-time director and I hope he gets a big franchise or a Marvel movie off of the strength of Day Shift's mix of humor and kickass fight scenes. 

During my aforementioned week at the beach, my brother-in-law decided to catch up on the Pirates of the Caribbean movies he hadn't seen, so that's what was on the TV in the living room most of the nights we were in the beach house. And I never really saw any of these movies in full even early in the franchise when they were supposedly good, so it was kind of surreal to see the later ones, especially this year given all of the awful things Johnny Depp represents now. I think At World's End was the only one I saw all of, and it feels like the Be Here Now of movies, it's just so stupid and almost 3 hours long. Is Orlando Bloom the dullest actor to have ever starred in two huge billion dollar trilogies? 

I watched this Paul Schrader joint on the strength of it starring Oscar Isaac, and it was just okay, I think critics overrated it, maybe I just wanted a more straightforward story about an ex-con becoming a professional gambler but the reveal of what the movie's 'really about' didn't quite work for me. I know we're kind of used to successful comedians doing a serious role in a dramatic movie and killing it most of the time, but Tiffany Haddish really did not seem ready to star in a movie like this. 

When I was working on my Joe Strummer piece I just put on some documentaries just to soak up ideas, but it was mostly little one-hour things, The Future is Unwritten wasn't available. But this one was a cool find, a German documentary crew making a pilgrimage to London in 1977 to film and interview British punk bands just as everything was exploding. There's a lot of 2nd tier bands like The Killjoys (Kevin Rowland's band before Dexys Midnight Runners) and Chelsea (the band that Generation X rose out of) before the movie climaxes with some great footage of The Clash and The Jam. The movie doesn't have any chyrons identifying anybody, though, so it's kind of annoying to have to google context clues just to figure out who some of the more obscure figures are. X Ray Spex perform a couple songs and are far and away the highlight of the film. And there are some hilarious scenes, like The Stranglers lecturing the German interlopers about why they didn't want to participate in the film, or the interview with 'teddy boys' talking about how much cooler they are than the punks.