First Time Watches: November 2018

Here we are with another month’s worth of first time watches.  I’ve been trying to catch up on these posts, and it hasn’t always been going as I hoped it would.  I’m trying to narrow the window between when I watch them and when I write them.  I should hopefully be caught up by the end of the year.

This post is for the movies I watched for the first time in November 2018.  It wasn’t a huge month for first time watches.  School was busy at that point.  I was a major part of the production team for three different short films, and that took up a lot of the time that I would normally spend watching movies.  There ended up only being eight first time watches.  That was one more than October, but the total number of movies I saw in November was significantly less than the month prior.

The first time watches of November were varied.  There was a direct-to-video sequel that was the fourth in a series.  One of the movies was the inspiration for a recent television show.  There were some Nazi zombies and a stand up special from a comedy star.  All that and more happened in November and I’m about to tell you all about what I saw.

Death Race: Beyond Anarchy

I had seen the first three movies in the rebooted franchise years earlier.  The first one, which starred Jason Statham and Tyrese Gibson, was a fun B-movie.  The sequels went direct-to-video but kept some semblance of fun with Luke Goss taking over the main role and Danny Trejo stepping into an Ian McShane-like mentor role.  Things changed in the fourth outing.  Any sense of a theme that the first three films had was gone.  They had been about how anyone could be a heroic figure when they put on the mask of the hero.  This one made that masked figure into the villain, which ruined the effect.  The people behind the movie were also not going for any theme at all aside from cheap tits and ass.  It was a disappointing follow up to what I thought was a decent direct-to-video sequel franchise.

Overlord

There were rumours flying around for a while that this was going to end up being a fourth Cloverfield film.  That was tough to believe since The Cloverfield Paradox had come out earlier in 2018.  But there were reasons to believe it.  Most of it had to do with how secretive the franchise was, and how the releases had some sort of surprise every time.  It ended up not being a Cloverfield movie.  Instead, it was Nazi zombies.  It was a lot of fun with the Nazi zombies.  The cast was solid throughout.  The story was interesting enough while playing into the war movie tropes.  It worked.  Not the greatest thing ever, but fun for what it was.

Adam Sandler: 100% Fresh

The musical comedy that was being done in this special was top notch.  Adam Sandler is still at the top of his game when doing musical comedy.  The rest of the special wasn’t that funny or well put together.  It was nice to see Sandler actually trying, though.  He was enjoying his time on stage.  That came through every bit.  He was going back to his roots in a way.  Compared to the movies he has been putting out recently, he felt 100% fresh in this one.

Father of the Year

I enjoy David Spade.  There’s something about that guy.  He’s my second favourite part of the Sandler stable of lead actors behind Kevin James.  Father of the Year wasn’t nearly his best outing.  It wasn’t even the best Netflix movie to star David Spade.  There were moments in it that had some sort of comedy magic.  They were few and far between.  That could be said of most Happy Madison movies that have been made for Netflix.  Oh well.  I can always go back to Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star if I want to see some good David Spade in a starring role.

Sweet Virginia

This one popped up in my Netflix feed one day and I decided to give it a peek.  It had Jon Bernthal, Imogen Poots, and Rosemarie Dewitt, so it couldn’t be all bad.  Right?  It was an interesting enough, albeit forgettable, crime drama neo-noir type of thing.  The cast was good, and the conflict was fine to watch.  It just ended up being one of those middle of the road movies that you turn on when there’s nothing else to watch.  You don’t love it, you don’t hate it, you just watch it for the sake of watching something.  And sometimes that’s all you need.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle

There was a scene in Kingsman: The Secret Service that had a character fighting a horde of people in a church, set to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird.  The sequel felt like they knew how successful that scene was and decided that every action scene would be that.  A fight with a bunch of people set to an Elton John song?  Got it.  A fight between three people set to Word Up?  That’s here too.  Add in a bunch of twangy rock instrumentals to back other kinetic action scenes and it feels a lot like that scene was extrapolated into a whole movie.  I enjoyed it, for sure, but could understand other people who didn’t.  There were some offensive things in there that wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea.

Three Days of the Condor

Cold war thrillers were all the rage during the 1960s and 1970s.  They brought up the ideas of an impending war, espionage, and heaps of paranoia.  Three Days of the Condor went down as one of the essential films in that subgenre of thrillers.  And there was good reason for it.  The direction was great, amping up the tension throughout the entire movie.  Robert Redford gave a stellar performance, as he always does.  Almost a year out from seeing it, there are still some things in the movie that stick with me.  It’s a good one that I should watch again sometime.

Nashville

Nashville is an important movie.  It’s tough to explain exactly why.  There’s a great ensemble cast that lives their lives through a five day stretch in the town of Nashville.  Musicians and politicians interact as a gala concert is set up for the fifth day.  There were many storylines, many many characters, and quite a few musical numbers.  Plus, there’s an ending that could wreck anyone watching.  One thing that stunned be after watching it was seeing that Gary Busey (yes, that Gary Busey) had a songwriting credit.  He wasn’t in the movie but was credited for some of the music.  That’s just a fun little tidbit.

The month of November ended with a bang as I saw Nashville for the first time.  It was a long time coming.  I really enjoyed MASH and The Player.  I found Quintet interesting, if flawed.  I was going to get around to Nashville at some point, to continue my trek through Altman.  I was going to get around to all these movies at some point.  November ended up being that point.  It was a good movie month and I wouldn’t change that for anything.

I also made a film that month.  A short film.  In school.  As a matter of fact, I worked on three short films in the month of November that will hopefully all be making appearances at film festivals sometime in the near future.  That would be nice.  It was a tough month in that regard, and for personal reasons.  But I weathered that and saw some good movies.

Did that trend continue into December?  Did I watch some more good movies?  Yeah, I saw some good ones.  Into the Spider-Verse and Eighth Grade will be coming up in my next post, covering the final month of 2018.  As will some lesser stuff like Holiday Spin.  And I saw Pottersville two days in a row for some reason.  Neither were a first time watch.  I just wanted to share that.

Before I head off, though, I’ve got a few plugs.  First, I write about bad movies at the Sunday “Bad” Movies blog.  I write about Power Rangers on this blog.  My pal Jaime Burchardt will hopefully be getting back into writing soon.  He has a spooky season Share-A-Scare coming up.  Then there’s Talk Film Society.  They’re a great bunch of writers and podcasters turning out some interesting work on a daily basis.  They recently put out a piece on the best second films in horror franchises.  Check that out.  Then come back when I have the next one of these posts out.  That will hopefully be soon.  See you then.