Booksmart (2019)

Books are only the beginning.

Booksmart is the misadventures of Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever). They have dedicated all their time to each other and to academics; they always get good grades, teachers love them. Classic overachievers. Now the best friends have one night left to see (high school) life for the very first time.

Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)

We're not gonna make it

So Spencer repairs the game and this launched the story into Jumanji: The Next Level?

Going in Style (2017)

Joe (Michael Caine) took a hard look at himself, his friends Willie (Morgan Freeman) and Albert (Alan Arkin) and concluded that they should rob a bank. Age is going up, money is going down, and family that depend on them still around.

There’s a point in life when things are seen more as a countdown, but the point is it doesn’t have to be sad. 

Joe considered the numbers: their age and needs, risk and reward, failure of the system; robbing a bank was just a line in the sand. They’re all going out anyway so why not take a chance to go out in style.

The Nice Guys (2016)

It is refreshing not being able to see where a movie will go. There were elements that didn’t normally go together: mystery and humor, dramatic actors doing humor, porn and social consciousness. I favored one and was surprised constantly with the other.

Ghostbusters (2016)

Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig), Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy), Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) and Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones) may have not laughed their way throughout the story but it feels like they did. 

That’s because the 2016 Ghostbusters had the comic pacing of a sitcom or more appropriately a Saturday Night Live.

Swiss Army Man (2016)

Although not obvious at first, Swiss Army Man can be described in one quote given by its leading character.

“You know, I’d always hoped that right before I died my life would flash before my eyes and I would see wonderful things, but as I was hanging up there I didn’t really see much of anything, but I did see you.”

Miss You Already (2015)

Miss You Already is a long intimate goodbye between the best of friends Jess (Drew Barrymore) and Milly (Toni Collette).

Lazer Team (2015)

Is it unfair to walk out on a movie before seeing the end; say that the fact I have not finished it, it therefore sucks.  Or, as in real life I should finish it all before I pass judgement. Almost always I try the latter; at least it gives me the reasons why I think that of a movie.

Sometimes I feel it in the beginning the urge to walk out or in the front of the PC, it’s the urge to press stop.  There’s being fair and there’s the right to keep your sanity. 

Almost always that first urge is triggered by the visual. Lazer Team is classified as a science fiction movie.  Sci-fi nowadays carries with it visual expectations and suffice to say the movie screams cheap and under budget – lights, composition, sets, costume.

Postcards from the Edge (1990)

“Who could resist my stunning layered and moving not unlike Mary Poppins performance...?”  Carrie Fisher said that referring to Princess Leia during her one woman show Wishful Drinking. The audience laughed especially when Carrie paired it with Mary Poppins.  They understood what she meant. 

Now I don’t know what the technical definition of layered is – besides that analogy on onions – but I have seen Star Wars many times and all I remember is the gung-ho princess. Not even Han Solo managed to peel off a mushy side of her.  Not even the destruction of Alderaan revealed an orphan of an entire planet now that I think about it.

For much of Carrie’s life millions of fans – more so if they lived outside the States like me – Princess Leia was never peeled off the late actress’s life.  And when Carrie died this Christmas break I decided to change that and peel off Princess Leia from my eyes, see what I have missed.

Can the Avengers survive?

Can all the ego; all the differences in personalities and skills, inherent in a large group of people, a team, be properly addressed in a forced ranking system such as the Performance Based Incentive System?

License to Wed (2007)

It’s funny (or maybe not) that in driver’s license there is a mandatory age before you can apply, but sometimes in marriage people seem to have the idea that there is an age when you should apply regardless of anything else.

In License to Wed, comedy’s energizer bunny Robin William stars as Reverent Frank a highly unorthodox pastor of St. Augustine. Believing that desire (and majority age of course) does not close the deal for having a great marriage he holds what is in effect a stress test masked as a wedding seminar for couples wishing to use his church for the ceremony. His target, at least for the duration of the film, Ben Murphy (played by John Krasinski) and Sadie Jones (played by Mandy Moore).