First Time Watches: August 2020
Back in 2015, I began a series of posts about the movies that I watched for the first time in any given month. Over the five years since that first post, I have amassed numerous first time watches posts that have covered hundreds of movies. There was a time where I fell behind on writing the posts, a time that I’m still working to recover from, but that hasn’t changed the fact that these posts have been written on a mostly regular basis for five years. Now it’s time for another post.
This post will be covering the movies that I watched for the first time throughout the month of August 2020. It was a pretty big month, with over twenty first time watches. I continued my international movie watching, my sports movie watching, and my female-directed movie watching. There will be a bunch of movies fitting into those three categories. There will also be a couple new “theatrical” movies that I saw at the drive-in. There isn’t any way I’m going back to an indoor theatre soon. There will be a few other surprises too.
With all the previewing done and over with, I’d just like to thank you for joining me once again. I don’t think there are too many people who check these posts out on a regular basis. Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever really gone back to any of them after they’ve been posted. But I just want to thank the people who do take the time to read these. Now let’s get onto some first time watches.
Eight Below
I have now seen three dogsledding movies produced by Disney. There was Snow Buddies, the second movie in the Air Buddies spin-off series, which saw the puppies head off to Alaska and compete in a dogsledding race. The other, and the one I always went back to if I wanted to see dogsledding, was Snow Dogs. Eight Below wasn’t as focused on the actual sledding as those other two films, but it was a story about the dogs from an Antarctic sled team surviving on their own when the scientists were forced to evacuate, and their trainer’s quest to get back and save them. It was happy and sad in all the right places, making for one of the most emotional dog films I can remember seeing.
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
I could forgive the Cannon Films budget. I could forgive Jon Cryer coming in as Lenny Luthor, a valley guy nephew of Lex Luthor, and spending the majority of the movie saying “Oh no” over and over again. I could easily forgive the fighting against the Daily Planet becoming a tabloid magazine story because it was actually good. I could not forgive the evil Superman clone villain. His name was Nuclear Man. He needed direct sunlight to stay awake. He had zero motivation or goal outside of being evil and doing evil things. Why was this the villain? Movies can and should do better.
Queen & Slim
When I was in Los Angeles back in November 2019, there were posters for two movies that I kept seeing. One was the giant stuff on the side of the buildings for Cats, because that movie had to go big to get what little audience it got. The other was Queen & Slim. The posters were everywhere. Every bus stop, in the metro, on lamp posts, and on construction walls. There were all kinds of Queen & Slim posters. I had no idea what the movie was about and the posters didn’t change that. It ended up coming to Amazon Prime in Canada a little while back, so I gave it a poke. I was blown away. Two Black people were pulled over by a white cop. He overstepped his bounds, threatened them with his gun, got in a scuffle with them, and ended up shot with his own gun. Then the two Black people went on the run because any police officers would want retaliation. It was a well written, well directed, and well acted story about how severe police brutality was and still is in the United States, and the fear that Black people constantly live in because of it.
Whale Valley
Two sad Icelandic brothers spent the runtime being sad in their depressing Icelandic landscape. There was a beached whale, an attempted suicide, and bleak visuals. It’s not a short film that I’ll be revisiting any time soon, if at all.
Terminator: Dark Fate
Over the past few years, there have been a few sequels to major franchises that involved an aged female hero returning to continue kicking villain ass in her older age. Halloween did it with Laurie Strode. Terminator: Dark Fate did it with Sarah Connor. She was joined by new characters who included a Mexican woman that was the new John Connor, an augmented human sent back to protect the Mexican woman, another T-800 who called himself Carl, and a new villainous terminator that was made of nanobots that swarmed around some sort of advanced metal skeleton. With the story being sort of a passing of the torch from the John Connor era to a new era, Terminator: Dark Fate was the best Terminator flick since Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The only problem was the effects in one of the later action sequences involving a plane. I’ve never found plane action like that to have believable effects. I’m still waiting for the day when someone nails sky action CGI.
Score: A Hockey Musical
There were two major problems with Score: A Hockey Musical. One was that the majority of the songs felt like dialogue with some sort of melody, rather than actual songs. The movie really could have benefited from making the songs feel more like songs with catchy riffs and things. The other major problem was in the story. The main character wanted hockey to be about the skill of the sport, removing any of the physicality. That would take away half of what makes hockey special. It’s a full contact sport with body checks and fighting. Taking that aggression away removes a lot of the fun of watching it. I just couldn’t get behind that character goal.
Phantom Town
This felt as though someone watched a whole bunch of Goosebumps and decided to make a movie in that same general style. Three siblings searched for their parents. They ended up in an 1800s wild west town where everything wasn’t what it seemed. The town was alive. It was some sort of slime entity and all the people living there were a part of it. They had to find their parents and escape the town before they were trapped forever. It was a fun enough kids movie that fit that 1990s kids horror tone. If that’s what you’re looking for in a movie, Phantom Town is what you want.
Genesis
My international movie exploits took me to Mali for a retelling of a Biblical tale. The acting was pretty solid through most of the movie. A major issue, however, was that much of the story involved people telling stories, without flashbacks to those stories. There’s a saying in movies that a filmmaker should “show, not tell.” This movie showed people telling instead of showing what they were telling. It was more tell than show, which kind of weakened what could have been an interesting tale. I’ve never read the Bible, so I’m not entirely familiar with the story in Genesis, but it felt like more could have been done in the presentation. Still a decent movie. I just wanted more from it.
How to Deal
Any movie that features a Cat Stevens song will for sure win me over in that moment, and How to Deal did exactly that. Mandy Moore was good as a teenager who didn’t believe in love while falling in love. The main problem with the movie was her love interest. That actor was uninteresting in every way. The character was bleh. There wasn’t much to like about him. But Mandy Moore’s character fell in love with him, so as an audience member, you got a whole bunch of him. If not for the Cat Stevens song over a great moment in the movie, and the really dark scene where a high school teen died during soccer practice, I don’t think I would ever think about How to Deal again.
We Summon the Darkness
I like horror. I like comedy. I like horror comedy. This looked like a solid horror comedy and it featured Alexandra Daddario, so I was in as soon as I discovered it. It was… Okay. I didn’t love it, but I could appreciate what it was going for and what it was doing. Three girls went to a metal concert while there were some serial killers about. They met up with three guys. The six of them went to a semi-secluded house. Then they all discovered that the murderers were there. Cue the spooky music. The thing that brought it down from loving it was the predictability. Every twist was predictable. The performance choices were predictable. Everything felt so standard that the movie just kind of coasted. The only standout thing was someone getting lit on fire because they used so much hairspray. I still liked the movie, but it was only okay.
Jump In!
It was sports movie time again, so I checked out this Disney Channel original movie about a young, aspiring boxer who learned that his real passion was in double dutch jump roping. That’s right. This was a movie about jumping rope. It starred Corbin Bleu, one of the most translated people on Wikipedia. Look it up. At one point, his Wikipedia page was the third most translated for any person. Weird fact, eh? There was a definite charm to Jump In! because it was super goofy. The main character ran everywhere. I don’t think he ever walked. He was always running. There was a bully who stopped being a bully when the main character told him off, because he respected the main character for doing that. There was a female boxer to play into the “girl doing guy thing” trope so that the main character could justify participating in a “girly” sport like double dutch. It was a goofy ass movie and I love it for that.
The Farewell
Chinese culture. That’s what The Farewell was about. A Chinese family living in the United States returned home to China when they found out their mother/grandmother was dying of cancer and only had months to live. They made their visit under the guise of a cousin’s wedding so that the mother/grandmother wouldn’t know she was dying. In China, it was better to not know than to live your life dreading the approaching death. It was a movie that had me on the verge of tears for the entire runtime. People were saying goodbye to the matriarch of the family without saying goodbye. They knew this was their final time seeing her. She didn’t know. It was one of the most emotional movies I’ve seen in a long time. I loved it.
Enter the Invincible Hero
I’ve known about Brucesploitation, the exploitation of Bruce Lee upon his death, for many years. It happened a lot in the 1970s and early 1980s but doesn’t happen as much now. There have been more martial arts movie stars than Bruce Lee, so producers don’t feel the need to fixate on him as much anymore. This was the first movie I’d seen from the early era of Brucesploitation and it was… fine. I guess. A guy went to a town, got in the middle of some gangster stuff, and ended up fighting his friend from many years before. There was a hunchbacked fighter and a guy whose belly button got pulled out. It was fine. Dragon Lee was fine.
When I finished season 5 of Dawson’s Creek, this was the first movie I watched from 2002 featuring one of the lead actors. It was Joshua Jackson playing the lead in this crime comedy set in, you guessed it, Texas. There was a solid quartet with Jackson, DJ Qualls, Matthew Davis, and Ryan Hurst. Beyond that, though, there wasn’t much that I took away from the movie. It was kind of weird to dive right into it with a character saying “I’m in love with my stepsister, but it’s fine because I was in love with her before our parents got together.” It’s important to the story. I get why it’s there. That doesn’t mean I find it any less weird.
La Estrategia del Coracol
When I went looking for a Columbian movie to watch, this was one that I saw had a lot of respect. Having watched it, I completely understand why. It was a well done story about the poor people of Bogota sticking it to the man. A rich guy wanted the squatters out of a building so that he would get it back and could sell/rent it for major profit. The squatters reciprocated by coming up with a plan to remove the entire building, bit by bit, until only the façade remained. Then they would hand the building over to the rich man without him knowing until it was too late to stop. It was a pretty great comedy. Glad I saw it.
Bend It Like Beckham
Best soccer movie? I think it just might be. A British girl of Indian descent went against her family’s wishes and joined a local football team because she loved football. When her family found out, they forbade her from playing anymore. She continued to sneak out and continued to play. It was a sports movie mixed with a cultural movie, which made for a great blending of worlds. The characters were great, the sports were fun, and the story was heartwarming. There was even a little romance for people who wanted that. I loved every minute of the movie. The best soccer movie I’ve seen. One of the best sports movies I’ve watched all year.
Disk Jockey
Micro-budget crime flick about two teams of criminals fighting over a disk that was surgically placed into a high school girl. For what it was, it was a fun little flick. The action was goofy but worked. The performances weren’t the best but had enough energy to keep the scenes entertaining. The chemistry between the actors was there because they were probably all friends who came together to make the movie. It’s definitely not for everyone. I had a good time with it.
Abandon
And the streak of having fun with movies ended here. Uh… This one was a chore to get through. The police reopened a missing person’s case. One detective went to talk to the missing person’s ex-girlfriend and fell in love with her. She was seeing her ex-boyfriend around town, though everyone else said he disappeared. All evidence said that something happened to him. He was supposed to catch a plane the day he disappeared, but never did. He hadn’t been heard from since. That should tell you all you need to know to figure out the ending of the movie. It was telegraphed from minute one, and the entire movie was trying to throw the audience off that scent until slapping them in the face with the obvious. No thanks.
Brink of Life
Ingmar Bergman knew how to make a movie. This one was set in a maternity facility where three women were experiencing different elements of childbirth. The first woman had a miscarriage. The second woman wanted an abortion. The final woman was nearing the birth of her child. Each had different life experiences that influenced their feelings during their varied stages of maternity. It was a well-conceived movie made more powerful by the performances of Eva Dahlbeck, Ingrid Thulin, and Bibi Andersson. Even with the location and technology feeling very of the time it was made, the movie was timeless in its themes. I loved this one.
Home Room
It was 2002. Major school shootings hadn’t yet been normalized. When Columbine happened three years earlier, people were shocked. They were appalled. They wanted answers. They wanted to know why it happened. Home Room wasn’t about Columbine and it didn’t have answers to why a shooting would happen. That wasn’t the point of the movie. It was a character piece looking at two vastly different students who had been in a classroom during a school shooting. It showed how something horrific could bring two people together in their pain. It could form an emotional bond that neither would have pursued otherwise. They were broken people, partly because of the shooting and partly because of their lives before. They didn’t find happiness in a bad place. But they found some resolution. They found a way to cope. They found each other.
Blackball
I didn’t expect this to be any good. It was a British sports movie from National Lampoon and the sport was lawn bowling. National Lampoon doesn’t have the greatest track record, particularly since Van Wilder was released. This was surprisingly fun. It was like Happy Gilmore for lawn bowling. Paul Kaye was fantastic as the rock and roll star of the sport. James Cromwell was good as the straight man, serious lawn bowler who didn’t want any change to the sport. It had some great sports moments and solid jokes throughout. I was pleasantly surprised.
Tenet
I’m usually not excited for a new Christopher Nolan movie. I like his stuff, sure. I don’t think there’s anything of his that I’ve seen and not liked. But the promotional material doesn’t usually get me excited. That changed with Tenet. Part of that was simply because John David Washington was in the lead role and I loved him in BlacKkKlansman. Part of it was the visuals that came with the backwards action. They came together to get me hyped up on the movie. And when I saw it, I enjoyed it about as much as I expected. There were things I didn’t understand. Of course there were. But there was a moment early in the film where a character explained the backwards stuff and said not to think too much of it because it wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense. It clicked for me. I didn’t think a lot about the movie and I was able to have a good time.
Unhinged
If I could just type LOL for this movie and get away with it, I would. I can’t let myself do that, though. Unhinged was basically a modern Duel or Joy Ride. A man in a pickup truck endlessly pursued a woman who honked at him in traffic. When she didn’t apologize for laying on the horn, he went after her, her family, and her friends. He killed people. He killed cops. All in the pursuit of a woman that he felt had wronged him. He was basically an incel living his fantasy of tormenting the women who didn’t give him the respect that he thought he deserved. It was an hour and a half of Russell Crowe insanity.
That finished off the month of August. It was a double feature of Tenet and Unhinged at the drive-in. It was the first time I saw a movie outside the comfort of my own home in months. It felt good. I’m still not considering going back to a theater anytime soon, but I might hit up the drive-in again. If there’s anything good playing, that is. I’m not going to go see Son in Law and All About Steve at the drive-in or anything. Nope. That’s not a double feature I’d want to see.
Speaking of All About Steve, I watched that in September. I watched a whole bunch of stuff in September. It was much like August. Well, maybe a little different. It was much more horror focused. But I did see a bunch of stuff. I saw All About Steve, which I already mentioned. I saw the four Wishmaster movies. I saw the third Urban Legends movie. I saw Merantau. And I saw the sequel to The Babysitter. There were some other movies, too, but I can’t give them all away before that post. You’ll have to come back and see what else I saw.
Before you leave, though, I have the same plugs I always have. You can find me on Twitter here and here, or on Instagram here and here. I write about bad movies at Sunday “Bad” Movies and I write about Power Rangers on this blog. If you’re tired of me, you can always hit up Jaime Burchardt, an old Twitter bud who is doing a Horrorfest through October. There’s also Talk Film Society, who put up great articles and reviews all the time. Loafpile wrote another great piece at the beginning of September about Tenet and cinemaduring COVID. Give that a read. That’s all I’ve got. See you soon for another month of first time watches.
Comments
Post a Comment