First Time Watches: January 2019

There’s this feeling whenever you start a new year that things will be different. You come up with movie watching goals. You try to follow them, but a few of them peter out sometime before the end of the year. I’m keeping up with them fairly well this year, but 2019 was a different story. I tried to watch all the James Bond movies, but fell off between Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton. I wanted to watch more older movies and ended up seeing about the same amount as usual. That’s not to say the movies I saw weren’t good. I saw a lot of great stuff. It’s just that I didn’t accomplish what I had set out to do.

The first month will show hints of the older movies thing, though the older fell more into the 1970s and 1980s range. This post will be covering the first time watches from January 2019. That means that James Bond won’t be in there since I had seen all the pre-Dalton films before then. There will be a classic murder mystery, though. And some great food. There were some superheroes and a couple documentaries about the same doomed festival. It was a big month.

Before I get into the movies, I just want to say that I know this is more than a year out of date. I fell way behind on these posts while I was in school and never really caught back up between work, going out with friends, school, and writing other things. Now that the pandemic is here and I’m indoors for a while, I’m able to start catching up on these posts. That’s how we’re here. Now let’s get on with the movies.

Chef

This movie was food porn, care of Jon Favreau. He played a chef who was fired from his job because he got in a fight with a critic who didn’t like the food he was forced to make. He took a road trip with his son and best friend in a food truck, stopping in cities along the way and making his own brand Cuban cuisine mixed with local delicacies. It was just a good road trip bonding movie with great food. I’m glad this was how the year started. It started on a high.

The Hurricane Heist

I’m kind of a sucker for movies where actors with non-American accents play American brothers and put on bad American accents. Geostorm had that with Gerard Butler and Jim Sturgess. This one had Toby Kebbell and Ryan Kwanten trying to do southern accents. It was weird that they both kind of failed since Kwanten spent so many seasons on True Blood. The movie was filled with dumb action and twists, and a storm with a face. Yes, the hurricane had a face. This sure was something. I enjoyed it.

Bumblebee

Michael Bay had made five Transformers movies at this point. There were maybe two of those that were good. None of them were as good as Bumblebee, the first Transformers movie to be made following Michael Bay’s departure from the director’s chair. It was basically ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, but with a Transformer. There were good performances, a heartfelt story, and some good music drops. I loved everything about it.

Snake Eater

I’ve only recently started diving into the world of late 1980s and early 1990s low budget action flicks. These aren’t the ones starring people like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone. Oh no. These types of movies star people like Don Swayze, Traci Lords, and Frank Stallone. The Snake Eater franchise was a Lorenzo Lamas vehicle. The main character’s parents were killed and his sister was kidnapped. He had to get her back. It was okay, but nothing special. It spawned two sequels, which I also watched.

Snake Eater II: The Drug Buster

There was more substance in the first sequel to Snake Eater than there was in the original film. The drug lords in the city were causing sickness and death among the teens that frequented the local youth center. The main character decided to clean up the city, only to get caught by the police and sent to an insane asylum. He teamed up with the patients there to continue his quest to bust all the drug dealers in the city. Some of the characters were offensive. There’s no doubt about that. But they were colourful characters that helped to build a bigger world. The story was better. There was another character from the youth center who was going vigilante on the town, and that added another layer. It felt bigger and better in pretty much every way.

Snake Eater III: His Law

The third film basically reset things again. It went back to the basic revenge storyline of the first one, except with a few more characters to flesh out the world. The main character was hired by a family to track down the bikers who had kidnapped and sexually abused their daughter, basically turning her into a sex-frenzied vegetable. The main character teamed up with an older cowboy PI type to go after the bikers. It may have been the best of the three movies, though it wasn’t the most entertaining. That goes to the second film. There were some good bar fights and a bulldozer moment that was solid. I’ll probably never go back to any of these movies, but they’re not the worst I’ve ever seen.

Circle

I was looking through Netflix for something to watch and stumbled on this horror movie. One hundred people were put into a room together. They each stood on a circle that was part of a series of rings. Every minute or so, one of the people would be killed. They had to try and work together to figure out how to break the system and get out alive. I was surprised that the movie was able to be as captivating as it was for the full feature runtime. It was pretty good. There were some interesting twists and turns. A bunch of characters managed to get focus and many of them had distinct personalities. It was a job well done by the people making it.

Mein Schloss (My Castle)

This was put on in film class to teach us about short documentaries. A woman thought that she might be the heir to a European castle and ventured out to find the truth. It wasn’t great. There was a lot of nothing. The relationships and connections she had through the documentary were good, but they didn’t get quite enough focus to make me like it. That said, it was a student documentary. I don’t think I’ve seen any great student documentaries.

First Reformed

I don’t have too much to say about this one. The cast was good. It was one of Ethan Hawke’s best performances. The problem was that it felt more like dark for dark’s sake than dark to tell a compelling story. I still liked a lot about the movie, but that like couldn’t move to love because I always felt a separation from what was going on. That might change on a rewatch, if that ever happens.

Drugstore Cowboy

Matt Dillon is an actor that I normally think is just there to fill a role. He’s not great, he’s not terrible. He’s serviceable and recognizable. He managed to break that in Gus Van Sant’s second movie, turning in what could easily be his best performance. The movie was gripping. The cast was great throughout. If you ever want to see how great Matt Dillon can be, with the right role given to him, you need not look farther than this one.

Attila

Okay, so here’s what the movie is about. Someone brought Attila the Hun back to life. He was killing people. The science military tried to stop him. They were being decimated. There were also some ulterior motives to why Attila was back. The Asylum comes up with crazy ideas, don’t they? This was one of their lesser movies. It wasn’t the worst, but it was in that mid-range area where they become completely forgettable among the masses of Asylum produced flicks.

Murder on the Orient Express

It was fine. I’m usually a huge fan of the movies directed by Sidney Lumet. This one, however, didn’t do much for me. It was slow without suspense. The cast was solid throughout, but they couldn’t make the Agatha Christie material feel as exciting as it should have. I wanted to see this one before seeing the Kenneth Branagh treatment, which I was planning to watch sometime soon after that. Glad I saw it. Wish it was better.

Aquaman

The modern DC movies got off to a rough start. I enjoyed Man of Steel and didn’t like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Those were the only ones I saw before Aquaman. I hadn’t heard too much good about the other ones, aside from Wonder Woman. Aquaman was a huge step up, from what I had seen. It actually had fun with the material. The cast seemed to be having a good time. The overall vibe was much better. It wasn’t super serious. It got me back into the DC movies after the super disappointing Batman v Superman.

Unsane

This was the first of two movies that Steven Soderbergh filmed on an iPhone, and I would dare say that it was the better of the two movies. The angles and depth of field used with the iPhone played into the paranoia of the main character. Everything came together in a nice little horror film that helped show that Soderbergh can do almost anything that he sets his mind to.

Murder Party

A fun little horror movie about a bunch of people trying to kill a guy at a party they set up, which was more a party for them than him. It was the directorial debut of Jeremy Saulnier, who would go on to make Blue Ruin and Green Room. There were some pretty solid things in there, including a performance by Macon Blair that showed why he has been in every Saulnier flick since. This is exactly the kind of stuff I like to find.

Glass

The final film in the trilogy brought Unbreakable and Split together in a big way. David Dunn, Kevin Wendell Crumb, and Mr. Glass got locked up together. Their many personalities would clash until a momentous fight put the superhero against the supervillain. I thought it was well done. Even with that ending that not everybody likes, it was a good conclusion to a trilogy of films that nobody could have expected was going to be a trilogy five years ago.

1941

I don’t know what I expected from this movie, but this was not it. John Belushi landed a plane at a gas station to fuel up. Military vehicles and stuff were set up at a seaside family house. There was a dance number in the middle of the movie that was actually kind of great. Everything was thrown at the wall in this war comedy and only a small amount of it stuck. What stuck was really good. Most of the movie didn’t stick, though, and it was just… It was a strange one. Especially coming from Spielberg. It was as though he was making a National Lampoon movie.

The Captive

There was a time when I was at work and the street got closed off because they were filming a movie scene. That scene was from this movie. That’s the main reason I saw it, though I do also like Atom Egoyan because of The Sweet Hereafter. I was more invested in the fact that I recognized the locations of The Captive than caring about the story. That definitely says something about the quality. When I watch it and, instead of thinking about the serious conversation, I’m thinking “That’s the Dairy Queen around the corner from my house” for an entire scene, there’s a problem. Knowing a location is cool. It shouldn’t be the only thing I’m paying attention to. Captivate me, movie. And yes, I fully meant for that to be a pun. It’s not a terrible movie, but it could have been so much more.

Fyre Fraud

I’m a year out, so this one will be tough to describe. That’s because there were two Fyre Fest documentaries that came out in the same week and I watched them within two days. This one aired on Hulu. It had the interview with Billy McFarland and things were edited to make him look even worse than the festival did. This documentary focused on Billy and how his decisions led to the failure of Fyre Fest. I will also never not laugh at the bus full of influencers pulling up to the festival and screaming at what they saw.

Fyre

The other documentary about Fyre Fest. Most people preferred this one, which went up on Netflix. The big problem I had with it was that it felt like the FuckJerry people made it to try and distance themselves from what happened. They were responsible for a lot of the marketing of Fyre Fest, but they didn’t want to take any responsibility for the failure of the festival. So they made this as a way to blame all the other people involved. It’s still a decent documentary that had some moments that will always make me laugh. I just preferred the other one.

Car’s Life 2

This one was going to be bad. I knew that going in. The first one was terrible. Yet, this sequel improved on it. The animation was better, with landscapes that actually looked like landscapes. There were multiple storylines, though the main focus was on one single story. The main character was still annoying as all hell. But the supporting characters made the movie less annoying than the main character. It’s better than the first. That’s not saying much.

Polar

I wanted this one to be better. Two conflicting tones made it a mess of a movie. There was the side where an assassin had to atone for the things he had done during his career. Then there was the wacky team of assassins on a killing spree. Those two tones did not mix well when they were brought together, making for a movie that clashed with itself. Had more care been put into bringing those two halves together in a satisfying way, Polar could have been something great. As it is, the movie is very disjointed.

The Last Temptation of Christ

A great retelling of the story of Jesus, from his time as a cross maker to being on one of the crosses. Willem Dafoe gave an amazing performance as Jesus. It was easily one of his best. Martin Scorsese made a great film, which makes sense because he almost always makes great films. He also cares about religion, so that only added to the work he clearly put in to tell this story. It’s just an all-around exceptional movie.

Ghosthunters on Icy Trails

Goofy kids’ movies are a necessity in the movie market. There’s a place for the kids’ movies that are also geared towards adults, and there’s a place for the kids’ movies that are all about teaching kids to be better people, but sometimes there needs to be a goofy one. This was that goofy movie. Not A Goofy Movie. Just a cheeseball family film. A ghost hunter and a kid teamed up with a slimy ghost to stop a bigger, meaner ghost. That was the basic idea. It wasn’t great. It still hit that silly spot and had a couple of moments that made it worth the watch. For me, at least.

And there you have it. The month of January 2019. There were twenty-four first time watches. They ranged from food porn to short documentaries to feature documentaries to horror to silly kids’ movies. Almost anything you could think of was in there. It was a fun month filled with variety and only a few duds. That’s how every month should be. Maybe with fewer duds, but I write about bad movies so the duds are going to keep on coming.

February was more of the same. There was The Terror of Tiny Town, Happy Death Day 2U, and From Justin to Kelly. Plus a whole lot more. That’s not for this post, though. I’ll have a whole other post about the movies I watched for the first time in February 2019. You’ll just have to come on back to this blog to check that out. When it’s ready, of course. With this pandemic and isolation going on, it shouldn’t take too long for that post to come out. Maybe a week? Two at most.

Before I go, I just want to drop a few plugs in here. I mentioned that I write about bad movies. That happens over at Sunday “Bad”Movies. There’s a Twitter and Instagram for that, too. I have my own Twitter that you can also check out. And some writing about Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Aside from me, my bud Jaime Burchardt is still hanging around Twitter. Check him out sometime. And while you’re at it, check out Talk Film Society. I wrote one thing for them once, but let’s look at someone who writes better than me. Marcelo Pico wrote about Candyman back in February. Give that one a read. That about does it. See you next time!