First Time Watches: April 2019

There’s no feeling quite like the first time watch of a movie. You go in with fresh eyes. The marketing may have let you in on some of the big moments. Word of mouth might have spoiled a few things for you. You could have checked out the synopsis to see what the story was about. But, for all intents and purposes, a first time watch is you going into a movie not knowing everything that is about to happen, and experiencing the full story for the first time. There’s not a lot that can compare.

That special feeling is one that I like to share with the few people that actually read these posts. I know that not many people do. I don’t care. These posts are a place for me to share my thoughts on movies that I saw for the first time in a given month. I fell way behind on them, so this one covers the movies from April 2019.

It was a good, solid month for first time watches. Much like most other months, there was some variety. There were different years when the movies were released, and there were different genres of stories being told. I even went to the theater to see a couple of them. There weren’t too many, as April was a busy month of me finishing up school and starting at a new job. It was an interesting one with horror about loss, action about loss, and… Well, a weird undefinable movie about, you guessed it, loss. There was a lot of loss going through the movies in April. Why don’t we get started?

First Man

I like Damien Chazelle’s work. Whiplash and La La Land were both great movies. First Man was another great one. I originally saw about half an hour of it when one of my teachers pulled me into the class where he was showing it. I liked what I saw but had to leave because I had other commitments. Eventually, I saw it on my own. The cast was full of people I enjoy seeing whenever they show up in something. People like Patrick Fugit, Corey Stoll, Kyle Chandler, and Shea Whigham make me point at the screen with excitement when I see them, so this movie had a lot of that. And, though it was about Neil Armstrong getting to be the titular first man to step on the moon, the emotional brunt of the movie hinged on grieving the loss of his daughter. See? There’s some loss in this one. First Man deserved much more credit for the work it did, but it was mostly overlooked upon release. Oh well. I found it. I loved it. That’s all I care about.

Pet Sematary

Right off the bat, I want to note that this was a story about loss. A family’s cat died and was brought back to life through being buried in a secret place behind a pet cemetery. Then the family lost a child and brought the child back the same way. Neither the cat nor the child was the same. This was the 2019 film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. For the most part, I enjoyed it. I definitely liked it more than the 1980s version, which I was lukewarm on. My main issue with the newer version was that I felt there wasn’t enough connection between the characters. The plot moved at a fairly quick pace, but there was a lack of character moments to build relationships or deepen the characters themselves. Had the movie found the right balance between moving the plot and building out the characters, it could have been great. I did like the new ending as well.

The $cheme

I made a decision for Christmas 2018 that I would buy all my close friends a terrible movie from the local video store. Yes, there’s one of those around here. The movies would either be movies that reminded me of the friends, or movies that seemed to represent their personality. When I saw The $cheme, one of the earliest movies to feature Jimmy Fallon, I immediately thought of one of those friends. I picked it up. And because I hate myself, I got a second copy that I would be able to watch at some point, too. Fast forward three months later and I was getting ready to watch it. Boy, was it a terrible movie. The technical aspects were bad and the performances were bad. Yet they were both overshadowed by the ludicrous story. There were three guys who were trying to figure out their next get rich quick scheme. They tried stealing money from the mail. Of course that didn’t work. Their next plan was to exploit the loss of innocence (See? Loss!) of a politicians daughter, and extort some money from the man in power. It’s terrible and it’s no wonder that the movie has basically been scrubbed out of existence. Nobody wants this.

The Post

There are many subgenres that I will always go to bat for and say I enjoy. One of those subgenres is the newspaper thriller. There’s something about people writing for a newspaper and uncovering secrets, conspiracies, murders, and all that sort of stuff that I just enjoy watching. The Post fit right in there. The people working at The Washington Post uncovered the Pentagon Papers scandal in the just-pre-Watergate political world. It had Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks in major role, which is always great to see. There’s not much to say about the movie other than I enjoyed it. It was good.

Fuck My Friends

Alright, so there’s probably not many people who even know this movie exists. There was a guy I went to school with for about a year before he dropped out of the broadcasting program to do his own film work without the oversight of the school. This was what he ended up doing. It’s not good. I watched it in one of the editing suites at school with a friend and one of the teaching assistants. None of us could believe what we were seeing. The story was about loss. One friend died, the other friends were broken up about it, someone had sex with the corpse… You know, all the fun stuff about loss. Everything felt like it was shot in close ups, which I know was because the director barely had any of the actors there at the same time. It was terrible. That’s all there is to say about it.

Frogtown II

It was a hollow shell of its predecessor. The entire cast was replaced. The layer of the story where reproduction was near impossible and Sam Hell was needed to save the human race was also gone. The only things that were kept for the sequel were the names, the frog people, and the rescue storyline. They lost everything else. The first one felt like a real movie. The sequel felt like the director was already going into his Zen Filmmaking ways and putting the movie together without a script. There was the loss of a person as they were taken by the frog people. Sam Hell had to save him. That was it. That was the entire story. Ugh. This was a disappointing turn for a franchise that wasn’t even great to begin with.

Shazam!

I saw this one at the drive-in. I was the first of two trips I made there that year. It was opening weekend. I wanted to go to the drive-in for opening weekend and nothing was going to stop me. Not even the heavy rain the entire night. Through the rain-spattered windshield and occasional swipe of my wipers, I got to see a story about a child who experienced the loss of his family while discovering a new family and his new superpowers. Zachary Levi was great. I’m glad that the DC movies, for the most part, have taken the opportunity to have more fun. They’ve been nailing the fun of superheroes.

The Curse of La Llorona

To be fair, this probably shouldn’t even count as a first time watch. It was right after Shazam! on the same rainy night at the same drive-in. The difference between the movies is stark. This one was dark for the most part, which made it next to impossible to see. I couldn’t tell you half of what went on. The legend on which the movie was based involved loss. A woman killed her children and immediately regretted it, pained by the loss. Again, I don’t know how well the movie dealt with it since it was so tough to make out anything that was happening. I’ll have to give the movie another shot to see how I really feel about it.

The Incredible Hulk Returns

Okay, when isn’t a story about The Incredible Hulk a story about loss? Think back to that song from the television series when he was hitchhiking. If that doesn’t bring up feelings of loss, I don’t know what would. David Banner lost his place in society the moment he got hit with the gamma ray. He dealth with that loss for decades. This television movie was made as a follow-up to the television series, and it paired The Incredible Hulk up with Thor. It was the first live-action version of the comic book Thor. I’ve never seen the television series, so I don’t know how this compared to it. What I can say is that it was a fun television movie. There was some fun action and good banter between the superhero characters. It was kind of strange that Donald Blake and Thor were two separate characters that could share the same space, but I guess the MCU has spoiled me on Thor being one way. Speaking of…

Avengers: Endgame

This is as loss filled as a superhero movie could be, and that’s including the many times that Uncle Ben has died in the different Spider-Man iterations. Half of living life was wiped out of existence at the end of Infinity War. Every survivor was dealing with that loss. Hawkeye even became a completely different persona, Ronin, because he lost his family in the snap. Everyone was dealing with their loss, and that loss fueled their push to bring everyone back. It was a fun enough, emotional movie as the surviving characters worked their hardest to retrieve the half of humanity that had been lost five years earlier. But the different parts never really fit together. There was the loss section, the time travel heist section, and the fight section. There wasn’t really any flow between them. They felt completely different and distinct. And having the Thanos of the beginning of the MCU be the villain didn’t work as well as the Thanos of Infinity War because the motivation wasn’t as strong. Though an entertaining movie, it was kind of a mess.

That was how April wrapped up. Loss moved its way through the month from children being lost to innocence being lost to half of humanity being lost. Everything was being lost in April. It was all a matter of how people reacted to it. Did they turn into vengeful ghosts or did they fight their hardest to get back what was gone? The many movies played that many ways. As long as they were entertaining, that’s what mattered. For the most part, they were.

May might be a little different. I haven’t checked the movies I watched there for a refresher (it is more than a year later, you know), but they might not all have that same thread of loss that April had. Only time will tell. The time from now until that post, I mean. Let me check quick and give you a preview of what’s to come. Oh, it should be fun. Reefer Madness, John Wick 3, and To the Bone are only a few of the movies I’ll be writing about in the next post. That’s some interesting stuff in there, albeit with multiple Keanu appearances. Maybe that’s the thread.

Before you head out, I’ve got just a few plugs to share. You can find me on Twitter here and here. You can find me on Instagram here and here. I’m always writing stuff for the Sunday “Bad” Movies. I also write about Power Rangers. If you’re sick of me, check out Jaime Burchardt. Great guy. There’s also Talk Film Society. One of the more captivating recent post they’ve had was one in which Aaron Hendrix wrote about The Last of Us Part II and some real life experiences. It’s a great read that you should absolutely check out. That does it for the plugs. I’ll see you soon with another one of these posts.