First Time Watches: July 2020

Each month, I watch a lot of movies. Some of them are rewatches of things I love. Those are the comfort movies for when I’m feeling down. Or they’re movies that I haven’t seen in a while and want to watch again. But there are always many more first time watches. The new-to-me movies end up being the majority of what I watch on a regular basis. That’s where this post comes in.

As I watch my way through movies over the course of a month, I try to compile my thoughts about the first time watching experience into these posts. Each of the first time watches gets its own little section for me to elaborate on it. It’s not too long, not too short. I give my peace about the movies and move on with my day. I get my thoughts into the ether for all to see.

July 2020 was no different. I watched a bunch of movies for the first time, and then came here to write a little bit about them. You’re going to get my thoughts on a Disney television adaptation of Twelfth Night and dirtbiking. I’ll get into a few movies from one of the most notable comedy franchises of the 1980s. There will be a basketball documentary, and a horror movie out of Singapore. There were a lot of movies to cover. Twenty-four movies were watched for the first time. I’ll be getting to the first one right now.

Little

Body swap movies have a long history throughout film, especially in the comedic realm. Movies like Freaky Friday, Dream a Little Dream, Vice Versa, and Hot Tub Time Machine have all featured their own variations on the body swap story. Little saw a successful, selfish businesswoman placed back into her childhood body so that she could be humbled. Her assistant was left to take care of her business while she was forced back into junior high. It wasn’t the greatest movie, and the ending felt as rushed as an ending could possibly be. I’m still struggling over why everything in that ending happened at all. None of it made sense. I don’t know. It lost me.

Perfume

Ensemble movies where everyone in the ensemble has their own story are difficult to pull off. If the entire ensemble works together for one story, that’s one thing. But the interwoven story stuff needs real care put into it to be enjoyable. Perfume didn’t pull that off. The stories were either too basic or didn’t get enough time to succeed. There was a character who had fast-acting cancer. There was someone who tried to run a fashion show, but a bunch of her models left. There was the woman trying to move forward in the business by dating for connections. There was the long-lost daughter meeting her mother. Most of them didn’t get enough screentime to work, and what screentime they had was wasted with a muted tone. It was a pretty big letdown.

Texas Rangers

I knew this wasn’t going to be good when it started by outlining one of the main character’s histories by saying they fought for the south in the Civil War then returned to Texas and started the Texas Rangers police force. That’s not a good guy, but they were playing him off as the hero. In the opening moments, at least. The movie followed a different character who was working with that guy, looking up to that guy, and slowly becoming the heir apparent to that guy. So… Not much better. Aside from that, Texas Rangers was a western by way of Dimension Films. Needless to say, that was a strange combination. It gave me a good gif of James Van Der Beek running into a western town double wielding some pistols, though, so I’m happy about that one thing.

Motocrossed

I enjoy when classic stories are given a new makeover and told in a different setting. It breathes life into what might otherwise be a stale story. That was the case with Motocrossed, a Disney Channel film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. There was a family that ran a motocross team. The dad was training the oldest son to be a professional motocross racer and make a name for the family. When the son got injured, the daughter pretended to be him, behind the father’s back, to keep the family in the competition. She liked it, too. I enjoyed the movie. The family was fun to watch. The romance between the main girl and her fellow motocross competitor was interesting to see play out. The motocross was high energy, as well. It was an all-around good television movie.

The Pretty One

This was the second movie in a row with casual identity theft. There were two twin women, one popular, and one an awkward shut-in. When they were both in a car accident, the popular one died. People mistook the shut-in for her, and she decided to keep on living her sister’s life. It was one of those quirky idea independent dark comedies and very much felt so. But I was watching it for the cast, and that cast was solid. There were zero complaints on that front.

The Last Airbender

What the hell happened here? From moment one, there was something off about the movie. I haven’t seen Avatar: The Last Airbender, so I can’t claim to know how well it was adapted into this movie. From everything I’ve heard, not well. Not well at all. My problem was in the casting. The first few characters introduced were decked out in classic Inuit style clothing. But they were the whitest of white people that could possibly be found. It felt like cultural appropriation. That only got more awkward when Aang came into the picture. His Air Nation was clearly based on Tibetan Monks or people like that, yet he was also a white kid. Again, the race didn’t match the inspiration. When the movie cast people that weren’t white, they were the villains. The entire Fire Nation was composed of South Asian or South Asian looking people. They were the villains. Somehow, a movie that clearly should have been one of the most diverse big budget films managed to make it about white people saving the day from the evil South Asians. That’s especially strange when the movie was directed by M. Night Shyamalan, a South Asian director. What the hell happened?

Bab El Oued City

My international film travels took me to Algeria for a movie that portrayed the uprising of Islamic fundamentalism in the area. They preached their beliefs from the rooftops, via giant speakers installed around the city. Someone stole one of the speakers so he didn’t have to listen to the preaching while he tried to sleep. Things unravelled from there. It was an interesting look into the Algeria of the early 1990s through the lens of Algerians from a couple years later. It was a well-made movie about fundamentalists not representing all of Islam, and the condemnation of the violence that the fundamentalists brought. It was made close enough to when similar acts happened that it truly felt of the moment, but it was also a year or so later, so that there was a little bit of retrospection. All around solid movie and important to understand the Algeria of the early 1990s.

The Safety of Objects

This was the right way to do the ensemble cast, multiple story thread stuff that Perfume stumbled with. There were a bunch of characters. They each had their own story arcs. Not just little threads, but full arcs. They interwove. Things felt connected. This might not be the greatest example of utilizing an ensemble cast with multiple stories, but it was well enough done that I had a good time with it. Most of the stories hinged on a car accident that happened before the events of the movie. That accident shaped the lives of everyone in this small community. It pushed everyone to the point they were at. Well, almost everyone. Maybe not the mom who was doing whatever she could to make herself feel attractive, and maybe not the kid with the doll fetish. Yes, there was a kid with a doll fetish. Could it have been better? Yes. But did it succeed at what it did, and did I enjoy it? Yes.

Prozac Nation

The last movie that I had to watch between seasons 4 and 5 of Dawson’s Creek was this 2001 drama that featured Michelle Williams in a supporting role. It was about a girl suffering through severe depression who became addicted to drugs and alcohol. She destroyed every relationship in her life because her depression made her feel like she wasn’t good enough, they weren’t good enough, or nothing was good enough. She sabotaged her life because she always felt like garbage. And she was a writer. Writers are also pretty good at sabotaging their lives and relationships. The acting was pretty great throughout the whole movie. It was a film that depended on the performances. Some of them needed to be big performances, particularly that of Christina Ricci in the lead role. But they couldn’t be too big or they would border on that Lifetime channel melodrama sort of thing. The movie rode that fine line between believable and overwrought, making for an impactful story.

Necessary Roughness

My year long trip through sports movies brought me back around to football with Necessary Roughness. It was basically the prototype film for The Replacements. The players and coaches from a college football team were kicked out of collegiate football for cheating. They were doping and breaking recruitment rules. Thus, the college had to hire new coaches and field a team of all new players. Aside from the one player on the previous team who wasn’t a part of the cheating. It was a ragtag team that included a wide receiver who couldn’t catch, a thirty-something year old quarterback who was in his freshman year at college, a TA going for his doctorate who was a high school football star, and a few other wacky characters. They weren’t a winning team by any stretch of the imagination, but they pulled together. Through hard work and learning how to be a team, they made the best of a bad situation. I like ragtag team movies, so I enjoyed this one for what it was. It wasn’t anything special, but it had its moments.

Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment

I saw the first four Police Academy movies in July. I had seen the first one a few years ago, but decided it was time to go through the Guttenberg era of the franchise. This sequel was new territory. Six of the cadets returned from the first film to be tossed into their first assignment in the field. Technically, it wasn’t their first assignment. Mahoney was coming off being a beach cop. Tackleberry had been working outside a school. They had assignments between their academy days and their days in the precinct. But this was the movie where the cadets were allowed out into the field. It was a solid follow up that allowed the franchise to grow. The world got bigger. The characters were off on new adventures. Mauser was a fun precinct bad guy while Zed was the most memorable criminal in the entire Guttenberg era. The only real issue with was that it was brought down from an R rating to a PG-13 rating, which took some of the wind out of the sails. Had it been an R rating like the first film, it could have been something special.

Rockers

Jamaica, the land of bobsled and reggae. This movie didn’t have the bobsled stuff, but it was full of reggae. A drummer wanted to get a motorcycle so that he could deliver records and make some extra money. The motorcycle as stolen, he stole it back, then some mob stuff happened. The story wasn’t great. I wasn’t a huge fan of it, mostly because I wasn’t a huge fan of the main character. But the music… If you enjoy reggae music, then you’ll likely enjoy Rockers. It’s filled to the brim with Jamaican raggae music and Jamaican reggae musicians. That’s the selling point of Rockers. The music.

Police Academy 3: Back in Training

After the lack of success from Police Academy 2, the franchise returned to the academy for Police Academy 3: Back in Training. Mahoney and the other cadets were called back to help Commandant Lassard train a new class of cadets. Their academy was competing against an academy run by Mauser. The problems in the franchise really started to shine in the third installment. Leaving the academy hadn’t worked for the second movie, so things were returned to the academy in the hopes of salvaging the franchise. It kind of worked, I guess, since the franchise made it to seven movies. The new characters weren’t as good as the old characters, though. The movie felt like a lesser rehash of the first film, this time on a PG rating. It didn’t have the magic of what had come before. There was a good water chase to end things off, though. It was a solid final action set piece. The movie was worth it for that alone.

Charlie’s Angels

Caught this one on a whim. I wasn’t planning on it but ended up seeing it because it popped up on Amazon Prime in Canada. It was much better than the trailers made it look. The action was fun. I enjoyed watching the characters interact and kick ass. There were some fun twists and turns. There was also a joke near the end of the movie delivered so well I had to rewind the movie because I laughed over the whole rest of the scene. This was a surprising delight that I had a great time with. I’m not sure if it did well enough to warrant a sequel, but I would certainly love to see the franchise continue with this cast.

Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol

Take Police Academy 3, rinse, and repeat. The only real difference was that the program was quicker, and Lt. Harris was back instead of Mauser. There were empty characters going through the academy to be part of the Citizens on Patrol program, which was a quicker academy program. The movie’s rating was PG. There was a big action scene at the end, only it was airplanes and hot air balloons instead of boats and jet skis. For the most part, though, it was the same tired retread of the first film. It also featured Tony Hawk as David Spade’s skateboarding stunt double, so there’s that too. Pretty much a forgettable movie.

Baxu and the Giants

I checked out a short film from Namibia to add that country to my international movie checklist for 2020. It was a tale about how rhino hunting was affecting the small towns throughout Namibia. The main girl was Baxu and her brother was involved in hunting large animals out in the desert. She snuck into the truck he took out one day and found him about to shoot a rhino. She guilted him into turning himself and his backers into the police, thus saving her family from the horrible reliance on hunting endangered animals. For the twenty-nine-minute runtime, I enjoyed it. It was definitely a movie made to hammer home the message that hunting rhinos was bad, but I didn’t care. It had good performances and I was captivated the whole time, so it was good.

The Greatest Game Ever Played

I’ve never seen a golf movie this captivating. The movie was about one tournament and the different competitors all trying to win it. Each of the main five competitors got built up so that I cared what they were going through in the tournament. They got their big moments when they were eliminated from the title run. I didn’t know the outcome of the event as I hadn’t looked up the real story that the movie was based on. It made for a captivating conclusion as two of the characters went head to head in a final playoff round. Bill Paxton did a fantastic job of directing so the golf was as exciting as any of the other more physical sports movies out there. This was absolutely one of the best golf movies ever and one of the best sports movies I saw this year.

The Fanatic

This was sort of a spiritual sequel to the music video for Eminem’s Stan. There was a guy obsessed with a celebrity who ended up lashing out after the celebrity brushed them off. In the music video for Stan, Devon Sawa played the obsessive fan. In The Fanatic, Devon Sawa played the celebrity. If you want to see that role reversal play out, The Fanatic is worth getting you eyes on. If you don’t care about that connection, it’s not worth watching. It’s pretty bad. John Travolta overacts at an autistic man. I think he’s autistic, at least. He goes over-the-top. The movie tried to sympathise with him because of his disability but had him commit some heinous acts. It was a confused mess of morality that never solidified a stance. Everyone was bad and the movie wasn’t good.

The Skulls III

There was an abundance of direct-to-video sequels that came out during the 2000s. It was the height of video stores. It was before Netflix and Redbox started renting out DVDs without the need for a person to spend time perusing the aisles of stores, and it was after the transition from VHS to DVD made it easier and, for the most part, cheaper for people to rent and buy from their favourite brick-and-mortar locations. The Skulls, which came out in 2000, got two direct-to-video sequels. This was the better of the two. It felt like a story that could have easily been told in a bigger and better, more bombastic way in a theatrical release. It would have been justified. Where the second one felt like a smaller world with smaller stakes and a much smaller budget, the third one felt like the budget was the only thing holding it back. The stakes worked. The world felt lived in. The Skulls society felt like a credible threat that had backing behind it. I enjoyed this one. It was one of the better direct-to-video sequels of the era, especially in the teen film world.

Down to You

I instantly fell in love with this one. Freddie Prinze Jr. and Julia Stiles were great together. The cast was filled out by fun supporting characters that helped liven up every moment of the film. It was a story about first true love and how people could get disillusioned by it because of one hiccup. But true love would always win out. It was a delight. The best part might have been when Henry Winkler, as Freddie Prinze Jr.’s television chef father, pitched his idea for a show that combined a cooking show with Cops. That idea was ridiculous to begin with. But then there was a visual put over it. It was a scene of Henry Winkler and Freddie Prinze Jr. participating in the show. They were barging into someone’s home and cooking, in the handheld Cops style. Great joke that was just the cherry on top of a new favourite movie.

Ip Man 4: The Finale

The Ip Man movies are each various levels of great. This was no exception. Most of that greatness came down to the martial arts work on display from Donnie Yen and the cast of each movie. This might have been the weakest of the four, if only because the story didn’t feel quite as tight. Ip Man went to San Francisco to find a good school to send his son to after he died. He found that the city was filled with racism. The Chinese people didn’t want to share their martial arts with people who weren’t Chinese. The white people were harassing the Chinese people. Scott Adkins played a military sergeant who was racist in his fighting, refusing to believe that Wing Chun could possibly be better than karate, and insulting every Chinese person he met because his karate fighting was the best. I didn’t understand how he could think karate, a Japanese fighting style, was the best American fighting style, but whatever. He was racist. The guy who arrested the head of the Chinese community group for being Chinese was racist. The white girl who beat up the Chinese girl for being better at cheerleading was racist. All the white people were racist. And Ip Man was there to stop them from being racist. There were good fights. Donnie Yen and Scott Adkins are both fantastic martial artists. But the story didn’t have quite the same depth as the previous movies. Still good. Could have been better.

Not Another Not Another Movie

Spoof movies found a new popularity after the release of Scary Movie in 2000. That subgenre of comedy grew to a breaking point where people started getting fed up with each one that was released. Not Another Not Another Movie tried to play on that tired anger at spoof films, while also becoming a spoof film, itself. There wasn’t too much to enjoy. The majority of the jokes fell flat. The spoof parts were based on 90s movies, even though this movie came out in 2011. There was stunt casting with Burt Reynolds, Chevy Chase, Michael Madsen, and Vinnie Jones each coming in for a scene or two before disappearing from the movie. The only thing worth watching the movie for was a Chevy Chase monologue about starting an ice cream company that had 30 flavours, only to be outdone by Baskin Robbins, who had 31. Other than that, not worth checking out.

Revenge of the Pontianak

It was international movie time again. Singapore was the location of choice with this horror film based on an urban legend. The legend went that if a woman died during childbirth and didn’t get a proper burial, her spirit would return as a vampire to seek revenge. Well, that happened to the new husband in the movie. He married his new wife, only to be confronted by his past demons. A vampire of his ex-lover returned to seek revenge on him for her untimely death years earlier. It was a well shot movie that was filled with creepy visuals and a spooky atmosphere. The story was solid. It’s well worth giving a peek if you’re interested in horror in any way.

Hoop Dreams

This was a long documentary. It was nearly three hours long. Two kids from inner city Chicago were given the chance to attend a prestigious high school and play basketball there. Their futures took completely different paths almost immediately. The movie showed their high school basketball careers and lives. It showed the ups of being on a winning team or being the star player and the downs of flunking out of school or serious injuries. It showed how tough it could be for inner city kids to find success. Hoop Dreams was as good a sports documentary as there could be. It didn’t sensationalize. It simply showed what happened to the two kids as they went through their four years of high school in the hopes of one day playing in the NBA. And it was fantastic.

That was when July came to an end. After twenty-four first time watches, the month closed out. It was a month filled with all sorts of stuff. There was love. There was basketball. There was a vampire. And there was reggae. Through all that, I was surprised, stunned, shocked, and scared. I was entertained. I was not entertained. I saw a wide variety of movies and felt a wide variety of emotions. It was a wonderful month of first time watching.

August was the same way. There were all kinds of first-time watches. Maybe not as many as July, but still quite a few. Let me give you a little preview of what’s to come in the August post. I saw Queen & Slim, which was pretty great. I saw Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, which wasn’t. I saw Jump In!, which was as goofy as you’d expect a jump rope movie to be. And there was The Farewell, which was sadder than you might expect. All that and more will be coming up in the post for August. You should come back and read that one when it goes up.

Before you leave, though, I’ve got a few plugs to put into the post. You can find me on Twitter here and here. I’m also on Instagram here and here. I write the Sunday “Bad” Movies posts and I write about Power Rangers. My pal Jaime Burchardt is always around on Twitter, so give him a look see. Also pop your peepers over to Talk Film Society. They’ve always got some great writing over there. Loafpile recently (last month) wrote a little something about E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial that is worth a read. And with that, I bid you adieu. Until next time!