First Time Watches: March 2019

I’ve been writing these first-time watch posts for a long time. They are a chronicle, month by month, of the movies that are new to me. They could be theatrical releases or they could be older movies that I’m finally getting around to. Either way, they’re fresh to my eyes, never having gone through them before. With that comes pleasant surprise, a great experience, disappointment, or frustration. There could be many more emotions as well. These posts share my emotions from having watched the movies with whoever decides to read them.

I fell behind on these posts a long time ago and have been trying to work my way through them to eventually catch up. This post will cover March 2019 and the movies I saw for the first time over the course of that month. Any rewatches will not be a part of this post. If they aren’t first time watches, they don’t count.

March was a month full of all kinds of movies. There were good and bad, like usual, and a variety of genres, also like usual. There were a bunch of ladies riding skateboards in New York. A man had to stop some extremely cold storms from killing people. Another man was killed by rival porn producers. There was even a strange Sean Connery science fiction flick tossed in there to finish things off. I should really get to discussing the eleven movies I saw for the first time that month, so here we go.

Streets of Fire

Walter Hill has been a director in my life for a long time. My parents introduced me to The Warriors and 48 Hrs. when I was a kid. It was only a matter of time before I saw Streets of Fire, a movie that has found a massive cult following over recent years. For the most part, it was great. The tone of the whole thing is what hooked me in. The action was a bonus. The only thing keeping it from being great, for me at least, was the casting of Michael Paré in the lead role. That was only a minor issue, though. He still did alright and the whole movie was a rock and roll kind of fun. I’ll definitely like it even more when I see it again.

Skate Kitchen

If I’m being completely honest here, I don’t remember much of the actual story. It’s kind of hard to blame me when I’m writing about the movie over a year after watching it. The story wasn’t important, though. The movie excelled in the relationships between the characters. There were a bunch of girls in a skateboarding collective called Skate Kitchen. There was a story to the movie, but the bond between the girls was the driving force of everything. Their interactions felt real and natural, which makes sense since they all know each other in real life. The movie was based on them actually being a group in the real world. I’m looking forward to checking out the television follow-up that recently began on HBO.

The Girl on the Train

I didn’t like this one. I didn’t like it one bit. It came off the heels of successful adaptations of modern pulp mystery thrillers with Girl in the title like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl. It had a solid cast of people like Emily Blunt, Rebecca Ferguson, Justin Theroux, Allison Janney, Lisa Kudrow, and Luke Evans. For whatever reason, it didn’t work. It didn’t work at all. It was a slog to get through and I remember nothing outside of a burning passion of dislike for the movie. I can’t say it was the worst movie I saw in 2019 since it was decently made on the technical front. But that can only go so far when the rest of the movie is blah. The only way I would go back to this movie would be if I had to write about it.

Ice Twisters

SyFy channel certainly enjoys airing made-for-television weather disaster movies. They found huge success with the Sharknado movies, but a few years earlier had a different tornado-based weather movie hit the airwaves. Ice Twisters starred Mark Moses, known for his work on Mad Men, as a scientist turned fiction writer tasked with helping prevent a series of increasingly chilly storms from decimating the country. If you’re into the SyFy brand of disaster movies, this was right up that same dumb fun alley. It was like the writers were inspired by Twister, The Day After Tomorrow, and Stephen King’s habit of placing writers into whatever he writes. That absolutely interested me and I had a good enough time with it.

A Quiet Place

I could have seen this with a friend at the theater, but they decided we were going to see Super Troopers 2 instead. It took me a while to get around to this one after that night. When I finally did, it had been hyped to death. It wasn’t as good as people claimed it was. But what could be? This was hailed as the next great horror movie, and rarely does any horror movie live up to that hype. I heard the same things about other movies that I didn’t find great. This was still a solid movie. Don’t get me wrong. John Krasinski did a formidable job bringing it together. The performances were all really good. I liked it. Best horror movie of recent years though? Not really. This sounds more negative than I mean it to be.

Captain Marvel

There was an important place in the MCU for Captain Marvel. It was the first movie from Marvel Studios to solely star a female superhero. On that front, it was a movie with meaning. It had a good soundtrack, consisting of mostly female musicians from the early to mid-1990s or earlier. There was that Nirvana song in there, too. It brought Ben Mendelsohn and the Skrulls into the MCU, which was a great choice. Mendelsohn killed it as the main Skrull. But it ended up being kind of dull. There weren’t really too many stand-out action scenes, which is what you really want out of a superhero movie like this. It’s easy to think of broad details like the twist halfway through or that there was an action scene set to Just a Girl (where I don’t remember the action, just that it had the song). But there was nothing to set this apart from the rest of the Marvel movies, other than basic plot elements like female hero and 90s setting. There was so much potential that wasn’t met.

Every Day

There was a very interesting premise to this one. A person woke up every day in another person’s body. They fell in love with a girl and the romance played out through many days in many bodies. It’s the perfect kind of young adult romantic fantasy story. The problem was that it was really, really boring. The relationship didn’t pop the way it should have. The movie tossed in so many issues, such as suicide, a transgender teen, and mental instability, that it took away from the romance story. The characters were bland. The idea was there. The execution was not. It ended up being such a boring slog to get through, as it went from serious topic to serious topic without every spending enough time to tell an interesting story with any of them, that I all but forgot the movie the moment it ended.

Us

I was hooked from the first moment until the very end. The performances throughout were great. The twists and turns were fantastic. That sequence where Good Vibrations by The Beach Boys played was one of my favourite bits of a movie that whole year. I wouldn’t go so far as to claim it was the best horror movie in a long time. I don’t typically make claims like that. They’re unfair to other movies and they usually straight up aren’t true. This was a solid one in a long line of great horror that gets embraced by horror fans but other people look down on. Jordan Peele’s follow-up to Get Out showed how much he understands horror. Us showed that he wasn’t a one-hit wonder.

King Cobra

The real-life controversies of the film business will always be interesting to see play out in other movies. The affairs, the injuries, the murders, and so many other things make up numerous stories that deserve to be told. King Cobra re-enacted the story of Sean Paul Lockhart’s early career in gay porn, while he was still underage. It culminated in the murder of Stephen Kocis by two rival porn director/producers. There was a great story to be told about the exploitative nature of the porn industry and the rivalries that come from being in the film business. However, there were two distinct tones whenever the story shifted from Lockhart and Kocis to the rival pornographers. The tones didn’t mix together, with one being a serious drama and the other being some sort of goofy dark comedy. That kept King Cobra from being as good as it could have been.

Triple Frontier

The cast did the best they could to bring the movie up. Ben Affleck, Pedro Pascal, Garrett Hedlund, Charlie Hunnam, and Oscar Isaac were good together. The camaraderie of their characters kept things from falling off the rails. But the characters weren’t all that likeable. Their goal was as far from honorable as it could have been in the circumstances, and I didn’t care when things started going wrong for them. Toss in the on-the-nose music choices like Run Through the Jungle playing while they were driving through the jungle, and you have a movie that felt more like squandered potential than anything.

Zardoz

Where do I even start with this one? There was a flying head that told people that the penis was bad and guns were good. Sean Connery ran around in some sort of over the shoulder thong looking thing. People didn’t age unless the other people wanted to age them as a punishment. Nobody died. The word Zardoz came from The Wizard of Oz. I honestly don’t know what to say about this movie because it was a bunch of bonkers ideas all thrown together in a past-future setting. What did I watch? I watched Zardoz.

With that, March 2019 came to a close. There were eleven first time watches. Some of them were memorable, others were not. Some were good, others were not. It was just like any other month, only with movies I didn’t watch for the first time in the other months. I watched them for the first time in March 2019.

April 2019 would end up being more of the same. There were more new-to-me movies. There were more oddities, oddballs, classics, and not-so-classics. There were memorable movies and forgettable movies. First Man was in there. So was The Post. So was The Incredible Hulk Returns. To find out what I thought of those would mean a whole other post. And that’s what will be coming up pretty soon. I’ll have a brand-new post about the movies I saw for the first time in April 2019. Come back when that goes up to see what my thoughts were on those movies.

Before you head off, though, I’ve got a few plugs to toss in here. You can find me on Twitter here and here. You can find me on Instagram here and here. I write about bad movies over at Sunday “Bad” Movies. I also write about Power Rangers. I’ve recently moved into the Mighty Morphin Alien Rangers mini-series. If you’re sick of me, check out Jaime Burchardt, one of my favourite Twitter pals. Or you can head on over to TalkFilm Society. Marcelo Pico recently wrote about The Way Back and missing the theatrical experience during the pandemic. It might be kind of outdated by the time this post goes up but check it out anyway. Alright. See you next time!