#1:
Life
This
was a mistake. I thought there were no movies worth watching but I was only
looking at the magazine – there were actually a few I wanted to see much more
than this. In fact, there were plenty of better choices in the magazine, but I
wanted some light cheesy sci-fi to start the journey.
I
guess it was indeed light, cheesy sci-fi, but it was also really not enjoyable.
Essentially, it aimed for realism with a disaster on the international space
station, but the conceit was the old cliché of hostile life from Mars.
With
a soil sample comes a microorganism. The scientists revive it, and of course it
soon gets out of their control. A poor imitation of Alien ensues, with a dreadful bait-and-switch ending.
Some
big-name actors do their best with extremely basic material, though Ryan
Reynolds phones it in, but the CG blob isn’t interesting enough and ultimately
the film offers absolutely nothing new.
#2:
In This Corner of the World
See
animation blog review
#3:
Gifted
Still
not one of the must-see movies on offer from today, Gifted was nonetheless well worth a watch. Chris Pratt’s speciality
is being an everyman who is nonetheless very attractive to those around him and
really seems to care about his loved ones, and that makes him the perfect star
for this movie.
It’s
not wholly original material, but it’s done well. Pratt’s character Frank is
raising his niece, who happens to be a maths prodigy. However, it’s a gift she
inherited from her mother, whose life was extremely unstable as a result of her
mathematics achievements. Frank is trying to give her a normal life, mostly
keeping her in a trailer park with an incredibly cute one-eyed cat, but when he
enrols her in school for the first time, things quickly slip out of his
control.
Delicately
acted with a very believable performance from young Mckenna Grace, balancing
intelligence, brattiness and normal childish hopes and fears, it did the family
drama, courtroom scenes and even romance well.
#4:
Kubo and the Two Strings
See
animation blog review
#5:
La La Land
I
guess I just didn’t get La La Land.
Beloved of many on my social media and a critical darling highly lauded at the
Oscars, I expected good things. I get that it’s been a while since there has
been a high-impact original musical, but there’s been plenty of big-screen
adaptations of musicals lately. This pushes some nostalgia buttons and has some
good tunes, but much like Greece I just didn’t like the characters and didn’t
think the moral messages were good here.
So
the centre of La La Land is the
celebration of failing artists doing their best and following their dreams. That’s
fine, but in the end the main characters aren’t really struggling artists. He
is a jazz pianist who happens to have an old contract who just hands him a
major-label contract and $52k+ a year salary, and she lives in a la-la land
where someone can put on a one-man play for a single night, attract an audience
of about 5, yet still get a call that one of those audience members loves her
and wants to put her into a major feature film in a starring role. Meanwhile,
it has no consequence that he can’t pay the rent and bills, or that she apparently
gets supported by her rich boyfriend only to cheat on him and move on. I’d
rather hear a story about some actual struggling artists.
Then
there’s the fact that those two main characters are just obnoxious and hard to
like. Both are extremely self-centred and ultimately their relationship could
easily have worked with or without professional success, but they just don’t
bother. Unlike Whiplash, which was
loads of fun, I found this follow-up pretty poor.
#6:
Beauty and the Beast
Maybe
the most successful of the recent Disney live-action remakes, I enjoyed
watching Beauty and the Beast for the
artistry, the effects and Emma Watson looking very pretty as usual, but I did
end up wondering why this needed to be made. Sure, it will bring in money,
again targeting nostalgia and piggybacking on the animated classic to make for
easy feel-good watching, but it was pretty redundant creatively, and other than
some more realistic designs and some modern quips from Josh Gad’s Lefou, whose
homosexual feelings (which may or may not make him ‘gay’) are far less of an
issue than it was suggested by headlines around this film’s release.
The adaptation really does nothing wrong and it is fun to enjoy it when
familiar with the original, which I suppose is everything it needed to do in
order to make money, but the redundancy of it all ultimately feels…pretty hollow. 
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