First Time Watches: May 2019

Welcome back to another of my first time watches posts, where I write about the movies that I watched for the first time in a given month. I recently looked up how long I’ve been writing these posts and it’s been five years or something. I didn’t know I’d been posting them for that long. Go figure. Over those five years, I watched a lot of movies for the first time. I also missed a fair chunk of posts due to being busy with school and work and stuff. Now that I’m getting better with my time management, I’m catching up on some of the posts I’ve missed. That’s where this one comes in.

 

This post will be covering the movies that I watched in May 2019. That’s more than a year ago. I know. I’m slowly working my way through the older months while simultaneously writing posts for the newer months. I’m on top of this. That month, I saw thirteen movies for the first time. That means I’ll be covering thirteen movies over the course of this post. I’ll be discussing what I thought of them on my first watch. Or trying to remember what I thought of them on a first watch. There’s one movie that I’ve seen since then, which might cloud my first viewing thoughts.

 

Anyway, coming up in this post are a bunch of movies from different genres and years. The usual. Three of them featured Keanu Reeves, so he got a big push in May. The other movies included a television movie about a television show, a drug warning from decades past, a Burt Reynolds flick and its direct-to-video sequel, as well as a Netflix original experience. Hold onto your butts, here we go.

 

 

The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story

When I was in high school, I woke up every morning, turned on TBS, and watched whatever episode of Saved by the Bell they played. They weren’t new episodes. They were more than a decade old by that point. But it was my morning routine. This Lifetime Original Movie was a sensationalized take on the behind-the-scenes drama of the early 90s sitcom. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. The competitive bravado of the guys when it came to earning the affection of the girls worked well. It played for laughs in the right ways. The actual romances or Dustin Diamond’s heightened drug personality didn’t stick it quite as well. Overall, I had a good time. I’d like to revisit it.

 

 

Manborg

I don’t know. There was something that didn’t quite click for me. Most of that came down to the visuals. I’m not a fan of the future 80s vibe through green screen background style of visuals. I know that didn’t describe it well, but that was the best I could think of. Whatever the visual style of Manborg was, it didn’t sit well with me. It took me right out of enjoying the movie. I would be willing to watch it again to see if it was a one-off distaste for it. Was I crazy? I don’t know.

 

 

Reefer Madness

It won me over almost immediately with the ridiculous text cards that kicked things off. It claimed that “marihuana” was “the real public enemy number one!” and said that smoking weed would lead to “acts of shocking violence… ending often in incurable insanity.” Clearly, that was never the case. But a movie that took such a hard stance as soon as it began would clearly go over-the-top to depict that point. And that was exactly what this one did. I had a great time. It was a movie that I could see myself turning on with friends if they wanted to watch a terrible movie and have ridiculous fun.

 

 

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum

I feel like the John Wick movies have kept getting better. The first one was good. The second one was great. The third was exceptional. This was the movie I saw more than once that I must try to remember my first watch feeling on. When he slapped the horse to kick the guy dead, great. The gunfight with the dogs, great. Seeing the concierge out there with John Wick, shooting a bunch of bad guys, great. Mark Dacascos, great. There was so much great that it was tough not to want to see it again. Of course I went to the drive-in a few days after first seeing it to watch it a second time. Come on. It’s great.

 

 

Under the Silver Lake

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Give me a good through the rabbit hole movie and I’m in. A character discovers a world they were not a part of. They travel through that world seeing weird thing after weird thing. I love that. Under the Silver Lake was a solid rabbit hole movie. The main character pulled one thread and unravelled a whole conspiracy in this underground world he never knew about. It’s exactly the kind of thing I love to see. On a side note, when I went to LA for the film festival premiere of the documentary short I produced, I recreated a shot from this movie at The Griffith Observatory. That doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of Under the Silver Lake or how much I like the movie. It’s just something that happened.

 

 

Cop and ½

To be honest, I don’t remember a whole lot about this one aside from not being a huge fan of it. It was a cop paired with a cute kid to solve a crime. Oh, and the kid wanted to be a cop. What I remember more was my blinding rage at one of the actors. It wasn’t for anything he did in the movie. About halfway through, I looked up who played the bad guy. Ray Sharkey. Then I saw what he did. He was diagnosed with HIV and went on to have sex with, reportedly, over 100 women without telling them, infecting many. Then he denied it to everyone. So, yeah, he was a piece of shit, and that’s my main memory of Cop and ½.

 

 

Cop and a Half: New Recruit

I liked this one more than the first. Lou Diamond Phillips took the lead cop role and played it with much more energy than Burt Reynolds in the original. The kid was also a better actor, though I think she may have come from a Disney or Nickelodeon background. The biggest difference in the direct-to-video sequel, however, was the nature of the crime. The first film was a gangster who killed someone and wanted to kill other people. I forget why. The sequel had an unknown bad guy pulling a series of criminal pranks around the city and controlling drones that shot lasers. It was much more PG in nature. But that also made it more fun. I was caught off guard by the song Safe and Sound playing over the end credits, though. Anyway, improvement over the first.

 

 

The Lonely Island Presents: The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience

I enjoy The Lonely Island. They have two albums that I love, one that I quite enjoy, and one that I’m not huge on, but it still has a couple songs I really like. And now this. They were coming off Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, my favourite comedy of the 2010s. That album was all certified bangers that I can never get enough of. They followed it up with a Netflix experience about Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. The Bash Brothers. There were songs that hit really hard and I fell in love with immediately. Jose & Mark, Oakland Nights, IHOP Parking Lot. The visuals were entrancing. I don’t remember much about the actual story. I do remember loving the experience.

 

 

The Perfection

Another Netflix Original, this time a horror movie about musicians. In the moment, I loved the movie. I came out of the movie thinking it was great. But ever since about a month after watching it, I’ve been questioning that judgement. Did I really love it that much? Did I only love it because, as you can see from these first time watches, I hadn’t gotten any other great first time horror movies in May? I’ve been wrestling with thoughts like these since I initially saw it. I need to give it a rewatch to justify my initial thought and get rid of these itching, nagging, second-guessing thoughts.

 

 

To the Bone

Keanu number 2. Sometimes movies deal with heavy subjects that aren’t relationship woes or war. This was one of those movies, touching on how eating disorders can hurt a person and the people around them. It might be the best movie I’ve seen that dealt with eating disorders. Most either go too far with it, pushing things into the melodramatic realm, or they sideline the story for something else to take the focus. This one managed to be about the eating disorders while feeling emotionally real. Keanu was a doctor.

 

 

mid90s

One of the skateboarding movies from 2018. This one focused on a group of guys who liked to skateboard and the kid that joined up with them. It was alright. Nothing special. Jonah Hill did fine in his directorial debut. I know I shouldn’t be comparing it to other movies and I should judge this one on its own, but I feel like Skate Kitchen did most of the same stuff better. And I couldn’t stop thinking about that while watching this one. It was unfair on my part, I know that, but I couldn’t help it.

 

 

Crazy Rich Asians

Girl meets guy. Girl falls for guy. Girl starts relationship with guy. Girl goes to Singapore to meet guy’s family. Girl finds out guy is part of one of the richest families in Singapore. Wacky hijinks ensue. Crazy Rich Asians was a good Hollywood movie led by an Asian cast, one of the first to do that in over twenty years at the time of its release. I didn’t love the movie, but it was nice to see a movie about Asian culture, even if it was sometimes over-the-top excess. There aren’t a whole lot of movies like that coming out of Hollywood.

 

 

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

And the month ended on a third helping of Keanu Reeves. This was one of the movies that truly helped put him on the map as an actor. I had seen the sequel before, and I had seen bits and pieces of this one. But I had never sat down and watched the full thing. It was time. Bill and Ted Face the Music was being made. The first film was playing at the theater as part of their throwback lineup. Of course I was going to see it on the big screen. It was a good time. There’s a reason that it spawned a franchise and a following of loyal fans. Who didn’t want to see Napoleon on a water slide? I didn’t know I needed that in my life, but I needed that in my life. Yeah, this was a great way to end the month.

 

 

 

That brought May to a close. There were thirteen movies that I saw for the first time and thirteen different opinions on them. No two movies are the same. Some of these movies will be in my rotation for years to come. My annual rotation. Others, I’d like to forget about. That’s typical of any month of first time watches, though. There are some that you love, some that you don’t, and some that fall in between.

 

June was going to be the same way. A bunch of movies I’d never seen before would get watched. I would have thoughts about them. I would like some, I wouldn’t like some. They would be from different genres, different studios, and different years. I kicked things off with more Keanu Reeves in Always Be My Maybe. I saw NSYNC in On the Line. I went to the theater for Toy Story 4 and The Dead Don’t Die. There was a bunch of other stuff, too. That’ll be for the June post, which should come up pretty soon.

 

Before we head off, though, I’ve got a few plugs. Check out my writing for the Sunday “Bad” Movies and check out my posts about Power Rangers. You can find me on Twitter here and here, or on Instagram here and here. If you’ve had enough of me, check out my pal Jaime Burchardt. He should be gearing up for another Horrorfest pretty soon. Check out Talk Film Society, too. They’ve always got some good stuff going on over there. Sarah Fisher recently wrote a piece on Jimmy Stewart’s work in Hitchcock movies that’s worth getting your eyes on. So do that. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again next time.