First Time Watches: August 2019

I’m nearly two years out from when I should have written this post. In those two years, a lot of things changed. One, I went to a few film festivals to promote the short films I made while in school. Two, a pandemic shut down most of the world for a good chunk of time and we’re still reeling from the effects of that. Three, people died, people were born, and people came in and out of my life. That’s not even everything. But I’m a different person than I was two years ago. Anyone would be, in that time.

That doesn’t mean I’m just going to scrap this post. Oh no. I’m still going to write about my first time watches from August 2019. I’m still going to go over each movie I watched for the first time and give some of my super distanced thoughts about them. That’s just what I do. It’s what I write, sometimes. And it’s what I’ll be catching up on in this third lockdown in Ontario. I’m going to get some of these posts out there.

Throughout August 2019, I saw sixteen different movies for the first time. Some of them, hell, most of them, were franchise movies. One of them involved a xenomorph. One of them involved an online competition show. One of them involved a superhero who had been spun-off from another movie. And four of them were a franchise I was watching for the first time. It was a busy month, so it’s about time I got into the movies. Don’t you think so? 

 

Rappin’

From the director of Breakin’ came this third movie in the franchise that wasn’t really a part of the franchise. It was something completely different. It was a “save the rec centre” movie where a former gangster who could rap had to save his neighbourhood from the businessman who wanted to force everyone out. The rapping wasn’t great. The story wasn’t great. But there were a bunch of laughs throughout the movie to make it worth the watch. I’m glad I bought this one at the local video store.

Alien Resurrection

Through the end of July and into August, I watched the original four Alien movies. The only one I hadn’t already seen at that point was Alien Resurrection, the fourth of the franchise. The first three felt like a sort of trilogy. This fourth film felt like a tacked-on “let’s make more money” endeavor that never really coalesced into something overly enjoyable. There were some good moments, to be sure. You’re going to get those out of a movie directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. But the way that a Ripley clone was forced into the story to bring Sigourney Weaver back, as well as the fact that she was cross-bred with a Xenomorph made for something much more outlandish than what the other films brought. It wasn’t as terrible as people say. It just wasn’t good, either.

 

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw

The Fast & Furious franchise has been speeding along for twenty years. With eight movies under the franchise’s belt, a spin-off was greenlit featuring two breakout characters. One of them was Luke Hobbs, the character that Dwayne Johnson had portrayed in the previous four Fast & Furious movies. Perhaps he was getting a spin-off series because of his disputes with franchise star Vin Diesel. The character he brought with him was Deckard Shaw, the villain from Furious 7 and reluctant hero from Fate of the Furious. They teamed up with Vanessa Kirby to take on Idris Elba, whose character called himself Black Superman. There was crazy Fast & Furious style action that included a family finale. It also had one of the highlights of the entire franchise, a fist bump montage. It was missing the cast of the mainline Fast & Furious movies but was easily able to stand on its own as a fun romp.

 

Pets to the Rescue

This was a family movie that was part of a box set found in a Walmart bargain bin. That should tell you the overall quality. It wasn’t great. There were two siblings left home alone on their farm. Some bank robbers showed up. The kids were taken hostage. They had to be saved by the farm animals. The farm animals could talk to each other. Nobody else could hear their speech, but they could talk to each other. Um… The little brother was weird with his sister, asking if her breasts got any bigger. Yeah, not much was memorable with this one. Moving on…

 

Phantom Thread

The Film Twitter people who read this aren’t going to like it. They never do when I say it. I didn’t like Phantom Thread. I usually like Paul Thomas Anderson’s work, but something about Phantom Thread just didn’t do it for me. It did nothing for me. I watched it. I finished it. I thought, “Oh. That’s Phantom Thread, I guess.” Then I moved on. It did nothing to keep me interested. It did nothing to stick with me. It was just there, and I was bored most of the time. If you like it, that’s fine. I didn’t.

 

Hard Ticket to Hawaii

There’s a sort of magic when a movie plays into its B-movie status in a sincere way. It’s not winking at the audience about it. It’s not self-aware. It’s simply a B-movie at its roots and goes full in on that. Hard Ticket to Hawaii was one of those movies. It put Playboy models into action hero roles. It had them shooting and killing a drug gang. There was nudity for seemingly no reason. Someone was killed by a frisbee lined with razor blades. All that would be good enough, but there was a b-plot about a cancer snake that was roaming Molokai and killing people. It burst out of the toilet during the climax. Everything about this movie was perfect B-movie. There are few that fit in where this one does.

 

Wonder Woman

It took me a couple years to see this one because Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice burnt me out of the DC superhero movies. Eventually, I got back to them. I ended up seeing Shazam! as part of a drive-in double feature and I saw Aquaman. They were fun and got me thinking that Wonder Woman could be the same. And it was, though not quite on the same level as the other two. It was perfectly fine. There were moments that stood out, like the ice cream bit, but it felt like DC’s version of Captain America: The First Avenger. I wish it had done a little more to stand out. The Wonder Woman guitar riff is great, though, when used properly.

 

Dunkirk

It’s a Christopher Nolan war movie. That’s about all there is to it. It had that Nolan sort of time play, where there were multiple timelines being spliced together even though they weren’t happening at the same time. It felt Nolan. Not my favourite Nolan movie. Maybe not even near the top of my Nolan rankings. Sound design was good. I don’t have too much more to say about it.

 

Mad Max

Up until this point, I had never seen any Mad Max movie. I had seen bits and pieces of some of them but had never watched any of them outright. I thought they were all the post-apocalyptic setting that I had been sold on in trailers for Fury Road. That wasn’t the case. The first movie was some sort of middle ground between the real world and the world of the other Mad Max movies. Things hadn’t gone so far down the road to be truly post-apocalyptic. This one was just a man out to get the gang who killed his family in a sort of future broken down world. It was okay. It wasn’t anything special. The sequels made something special of the series.

 

Death Tube 2

I saw the first one a few years earlier and enjoyed its take on internet entertainment as a horror premise. The second one took that to the next level by expanding upon the show that was the basis of the story. It was about a live stream snuff gameshow where people compete to keep their lives. But the people in the second film learned what to do from watching previous iterations of the show and were able to fight back. It was a fun little horror flick, much like the first.

 

Ready or Not

What if the game of hide and seek was turned into a horror movie? That was the concept behind Ready or Not. For the most part, it was a fun horror movie where a crazed family hunted an unknowing, then knowing, bride on her wedding night. It thrived because of the cast involved. Everyone was playing their roles to the best of their abilities, from the hunters relishing in their hunt, to the couple family members who were wavering, to the victim who had to fight for her life. If you’re into horror that isn’t only the so-called “elevated horror,” then this is a fun one worth checking out.

 

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior

Here is where the Mad Max series became more of what I expected. A small gas town in the middle of a desolate wasteland was terrorized by bandits and Max came to their aid. It had the look. It had the feel. It had the massive chase for the climax, something that would become a staple of each subsequent film. This one was a lot of fun. I had a blast and am looking forward to revisiting it at some point. It ended up being my favourite of the franchise.

 

Call Me by Your Name

If the people from Film Twitter manage to find this post, which I doubt, they’re going to roast me for this. I’m not a fan of Call Me by Your Name. I don’t really like Timothée Chalamet, so a movie starring him was likely never going to be something I loved. I thought I’d give it a try, anyway. There were some great things. The dad was great. The ending was pretty great. But the movie was, overall, just kind of okay.

 

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

The third Mad Max movie was not as good as the second one. There’s no doubt about that. It’s messier. It felt like a bunch of parts put together that didn’t quite gel. But do you know what it was? Memorable. The Thunderdome itself, with the “two men enter, one man leaves” mantra. The train chase to close things out. Tina Turner. It was a memorable movie that was also fun. It might not have had the clarity of other Mad Max movies, but it was memorable.

 

Mad Max: Fury Road

Another hot take if the Film Twitter people find this one… This was not the greatest action movie of all time. There were some amazing visuals, to be sure. There were also some not-so-great effects that people ignored. Mainly just the sandstorm stuff. This was like George Miller took his previous movies and turned them up to eleven. It was not the best. Still a lot of fun, though. It was basically the chase from the end of Road Warrior, but a full movie of that. Absolutely worth the time and the desert wasteland never looked so good.

 

Last Flag Flying

Finishing off the month was a movie by one of my favourite directors, Richard Linklater. I wouldn’t put this near the top of his movies. It was a solid little drama about a group of war vets coming back together after the son of one of them died. Like most Richard Linklater stuff, the success of the movie was in the conversational dialogue. It grounded everything. Rather than feeling like an overwrought, emotional drama, it felt very real. The characters felt like people. The movie lived and breathed like a real piece of the world. Few writers and directors capture people being people in the way that Linklater does. That’s why I love the guy’s movies.

 

August was a month filled to the brim with first time watches. Many of them were on the good side of things. I either had fun with them or truly appreciated what they were doing. Of course, there were a few outliers as well. There were some movies that just fell flat, never got off the ground, and underwhelmed. That’s like any month, though. There are always highs and lows when watching movies for the first time.

September would be the same, though on a much smaller scale. I spent most of the month doing rewatches, so there were only a handful of first timers. Hunt for the Wilderpeople, The Wraith, and Rottweiler were among the only seven movies I saw for the first time that month. I’m not going to get into any details about them here, though. That’s for another post at another time. Hopefully sooner, rather than later. I’m way too far behind on these posts.

Before you go, I just want to give a few plugs. You can find my writing about bad movies here and my writing about Power Rangers here. I am on Twitter here and here. I’m on Instagram here, here, here, and here. If you’re sick of seeing what I have to say, you can head over to Jaime Burchardt’s Twitter page. That guy is great. There’s also Talk Film Society. There are a lot of great writers over there doing great things. Look at this post about the Saw movies by Marcelo J. Pico. Wow. That’s it for the plugs. I’ll see you next time!