gdeangel

"We have no skills" says one protagonist to the other about midway through this film. And that about gets to the heart of what the film conveys - that today's young adults are barely adults. They have no sense of permanence in the society they occupy, instead being carried along on a wave of Internet chatter and trendy group-think. At another point in the film, the heroine compares her life at age 2_ to her mother's: she had a job, she was married, she had children. The reality that hits her as any sense of career building she might have had is unceremoniously swept away, along with the vestiges of who passed for a pretty shabby ego propped up Internet lists. And in that we have the thematic parallel to the invasion of Earth that unfolds as the plot catalyst -- it is not the center of the plot, but a mere plot device to illustrate how crummy it is to be coming-of-late-age (if ever) in the 21st century. What makes the film genius is the portrayal of the main characters as perfectly reasonable, likable, and competent individuals who are complete victims of not just the titular circumstance, but the greater circumstance of not really having a role of even moderate importance in the pre-invasion world.

The storytelling is also better than decent, and certainly better than what you will find in nearly any of the garbage passing for film today garnering media attention. There are unforeseeable twists, tension, a novel framework of alien life / occupation that I would describe as Attack the Block meets Killer Clowns from Mars. The only dissatisfying aspect is that the story does such a decent job of slowly building it's invasion scenario one grain of sand at a time, that I really really wanted to see at least the outline of the finished sand castle. Instead, the film ends by following one more grain of sand on it's journey without providing any answers; the result is a feeling that the stakes didn't really matter at all.

My personal assessment is that the ending suffered the effects of the very disease it was poking fun of -- the inability of modern writers to pick one ending over another for fear of being criticized. So just pick an "open" ending and claim that critics are being small minded. Well, I like a story with an ending. I did not care for this ending, as it was merely an ending of the "escape" plot on Earth, but does nothing to address the goings on that are the real story - the arc of the main characters. Have they changed? Sure. Has their relationship to their environment changed? Yes. But we don't get to see how it's changed, only that it's changed.

It is the eve of the indefinite closure of Regal cinemas, and with the looming obliteration of one of the institutions that saw our homefront through the Great Depression, a World War, and countless other crisis... I scrounged around for an excuse to see a film on the big screen. And it was a choice between Tenet and Hocus Pocus (a film that we project on bed sheets in our neighborhood around Haloween... yeah, not gonna face Covid for that).

Anyway, this film is just trash. It's James Bond meets Edge of Tomorrow, only it wasn't born out of a love for cloak-and-dagger international espionage, nor a nerds homage to sci-fi. No, this film was clearly born in the editing room when somebody doing frame by frame reverse playbacks of CGI got the idea of superimposing a reverse reel onto a forward motion reel.

It doesn't work. The initial premise is fine -- some simple machines are flowing through time backward. But then the ante just keeps getting up'ed higher and higher so that the earlier stakes kinda seem pointless. And through it all there is a kind of ridiculous "lets stop saving the world to save the pretty girl", and then the "I am doing this for my son" schlock. Imagine James Bond saying, "I had to kill him so he wouldn't think he'd won." No sir. Not professional.

20 minutes in to this 3-hour pile of trash, it became clear what makes a Bond film exciting... the thing that brings a tear to the forefront of your eye, or makes you feel like you need to run to the little boys room and tinkle. It's the space between the set-pieces. It's not exactly plot transition. Plot transition is when two main characters have to be show hanging out in a storage container talking so that the audience can be let in on the secret of WFT they are doing. The think I'm talking about is visual and auditory transition. We go from M's office to a wide shot of the Alpine ski resort... or Bond in his Jaguar tearing along a winding road. The audience's eye is traveling with the camera, and there is definitely traveling music announcing your pending arrival somewhere cool.

Tenet has none of that. I don't even think there was any music. Just lots of explosions and baritones blasting "WHOOOOMMMMMMMMM". Yeah, putting the same spice on every dish is kinda like hitting the same musical note in every scene.

Here's another tip to the production team -- don't spray darken your leading actor's beard. His beard is the equivalent of Groucho's eyebrows, only pasted over the entire lower half of his face. If James Bond had a beard, it would not look like this.

I sat through this garbage in I-Max. I almost wish I had gone for that tepid looking rom-com, which was the only alternative. So as the curtain falls on my local cinema, all I can do is blame Hollywood. This isn't because people are scared of covid. I see them out at the pickleball courts, not wearing masks -- the senior citizens even. I see them in the restaurants drinking a beer and not social distancing. I see the teachers, afraid to be in a classroom with the kids without plexi-glass cages, milling around in the parking lot running through the daily gossip. But there were exactly 4 people in this movie theater tonight... each space > 10 feet apart. Four delusional individuals who thought an Fx extravaganza this Tenet be a nice way to say goodby to the big screen. It is confirmed. Cinema is now officially dead.

There is a certain expressiveness that is linked to groups of people, ethnicities, community struggles. I would impress this point upon the prospective viewer of the dubbed English version of this film: an undertaking to capture the moment of civil unrest in the black community, only instead of speaking in the authentic manner or the black community, each actor's lines are overdubbed with proper Scottish dialect complete with accent. That's what it was like to watch this film in the English dub, and unfortunately subtitles were not available. As a western, this film is a cheap imitation of "A Fistful of Dollars", itself an imitation of "Yojimbo". But whereas those films have a whimsical undertone engulfing the nobody from nowhere with no cares, this film was undertaken from a more serious perspective of building a heroic narrative around the collapse of the padrone system. Ironic since the lead here would soon gain cult-like status for his slapstick fists and fazouli routines with Bud Spencer. And in the attempt to capitalize on that notoriety, this film would be marketed as an "Trinity" adventure, which it certainly is not. It is a tragedy. The final scene is an attempt to reproduce the poignant final moment of Dr.Zhivago. Why not? The substance of the film is the rise of democratic socialism in Italy as the Padrone was challenged, no less momentous to Italians than the rise of Marxism in Russia would be to students of the ante-bellum Russian writers. But it would take 6 years for the subject of the Italian social upheaval to receive an epic cinematic treatment with none other than Vito Andolini (Robert Dinero) anchoring the cast in "1900". But yet the kernels of an emotional tale of divided loyalties, personal struggles, and the ethics of organized society are evidenced in this film. Too bad they cannot be heard as well due to the crummy English overdubs which put Hong-Kong-Phoey martial arts movies to shame.

The fact is that the most professional critics must be fools. When Last Jedi came out, they praised it till the cows came home. It was a train wreck of plot holes and political agendas surpassed only by Solo. Then Rise of Skywalker comes out and they have nothing but criticisms. "Finn looks lost. The Emperor is back and we don't know how! We are confused." Well, they were confused before the film came off and there's just no hope for them. The film isn't confusing when you understand that what it's mostly doing is ret-conning all the junk out of the Star Wars cannon that Rian Johnson pulled out of his backside to surprise us with a toaster when we wanted a hero?

Eliminate Holdo kamakazi hyperspace jumping. Check. Make the horses stakeholders in the defeat of the Empire. Check. Give us less whiny woman with a conscience by sidelining Rose Ticco. Check. Give us some strong females who understand self-sacrifice and have complex inner choices to make, but don't crap all over male fans by making Luke Skywalker a joke. Check. Surprise us with Rey's origin story in a way that fits with the prior 2 films. Well, if you didn't read spoilers before seeing the film, then check. Explain how Leah can fly like Mary Poppins. Check. Salvage Rey from Mary Sue land. Double Check. Somehow they even managed to salvage the notion of droid abuse from the mess that was Solo by subtly giving a character arc to D-O, and also having C3P0 memory wiped. Note that Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter implied that C3P0's memory has been wiped before. Can you say FAN SERVICE! I mean REAL FAN service!

Now, in fairness, to do all that massive patch job, the film introduces a lot of new Force powers. But unlike the BS from Last Jedi, they are at least consistent with what is cannon, or used to be cannon, or whatever you want to call stuff that fans think they know about the force. Yes, it can heal. That was established way back in the Zhan trilogy.

Now about the Emperor (I don't consider this spoilers because the freaking trailer gave it away -- but some of it does talk about other films, so if you don't want to know about stuff in the prequels or original films, then stop reading). One of the main criticism is "Well how did the Emperor come back... it don't make sense! They are retcon'ing Return of the Jedi." Well, up to this film, very little was known about the Sith. We know that in ROTJ, the emperor goads Luke to strike him down. The popular interpretation was that by giving in to hate and committing murder, Luke would become more powerful in the Dark Side than Vader. And even more so, by killing his own father, he would be owned by the Dark Side big time. When Ben's ghost discovers that Vader told Luke his parentage, Luke says "I can't kill my own father", and Ben says, "Then the Emperor has won". We assume this means that he will lack the will to go through with it. But it could also mean that killing someone you have an emotional connection to is the ultimate path to the Dark Side. And since Luke had not yet achieved the level of emotional and worldly detachment that we see the Jedi order demanding of all recruits in the prequels (and it seemed to not fit with what TOS suggested for Jedi), it now makes more sense. And at the same time, it explains why Vader's path to the Sith had to involve not just giving in to anger and fear, but also killing Padme. Since he didn't really kill Padme, he wasn't a true Sith. Which is why he could find redemption at the end of ROTJ.

Then you also have to take a very close look at the two times the Emperor was involved in fights. There is the time that Sam Jackson fried his face. There is his fight with Yoda... if you pay attention closely you'll notice that the two fights have something in common. Then there is the finale of ROTJ, where he is "killed" by Vader. That fight has some of the same "thing" happening to the Emperor, but then Vader throws him into the reactor, and that "thing" obviously had to stop before his corporal form was nuked. So obviously the writers of TROS went back and really teased out these things to come up with what I thought was a super ending.

Then there is Finn. In TLJ, he got paired up in a marginalized race-duo. I say marginalized because even though gets to knock off Phasma, it's due to a well timed distraction by Rose. All the Force sensitive suggestions from TFA were swept away. As though we were supposed to just forget that he had handled Luke's light saber against Kylo better than Luke did in TESB against Vader... and Luke trained with both Ben and Yoda at that point! And I felt that TROS did a great job of putting his character back on track to "A-list" hero status. Because that's what Star Wars had... 3 A-list stars: Luke, Leah and Han. The jury is still out on Poe, but definitely Finn and Rey make the "A" cut in the finale of this film. Poe ends up is somewhere in "Lando" land, the guy who wasn't particularly heroic but was there to get the job done. A leader by consequence, not by nature. In a way, one last attempt to shoe-horn in the disparaging treatment his character received in TLJ.

Overall this is a film that has many parallels to ROTJ. It gives some added context to Luke's face off with himself in the cave on Dagabah. Something that the Zhan novels ascribed to Dark-side juju at a place where a Sith had been defeated. It uses that, along with a touching final scene, to explain how the Dark Side hole in the ground from TLJ might have been formed. I supposed the only thing it can't really explain is Rey's actual vision form TLJ, which appears to have a bit of bait and switch, although there is a possible way to explain it in terms of Force Diad. What is needed is a "Abrahms cut" of TLJ and instead of seeing infinite "clones" of herself in the Dark Side Hole, Rey would see a single mirror image of herself. Now... is it her dark half, or it is something else? Just a few minor tweaks to TLJ, like overdubbing a few lines between Holdo and Poe, as well as Leah and Poe, changing the "you can't park here" guys into actual Imperial troops looking for rebels, etc.

Which brings up my one criticism of TROS. There are too many "over the shoulder" shots with Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and whatever they were using to resurect Carrie Fisher. We are not fooled. We know that the Back of Han's head was a double. We know Harrison Ford said his lines in front of a green screen, probably in his basement. Given how the prior two film's productions treated Hamill and Ford, it's not surprising. Of course Carrie Fisher had no say in the matter and gets a pass.

Remember Sunshine (2007), where people are dying on a spaceship that was on a suicide mission to save humanity? More specifically, remember that part where they decide that they should take a detour from their mission to do something that wasn't on the schedule. Now, think about how that movie would have played out if they didn't make that stop? Kinda boring, right? But it made sense somewhat... the detour had a rational justification. I mean, it wasn't like Aline, where some off-camera mega corporation was moving in the shadows searching for a super weapon. It wasn't like 2001, where a transistor just happened to fail. Nor like Ad Astra, where ... gee wiz there's a ship floating out there... we have to stop and see if they need help... alright... I don't want to make any spoilers. Let's just say if you are counting the number of space-mission films that rely on the old "unplanned encounter" with a broken down ship was the entire catalyst for the drama, then you might run out of fingers and toes to count them on. And once you see this formula presenting itself, it's time to tune out the movie because what you guess is going to happen is probably going to happen. And don't forget Event Horizon... when somebody looks like they are cracking up in space, what you guess is going to happen is also probably going to happen. This old saw has been making the rounds since John Carpenter put it to good use in the satirical low budget cult film "Dark Star". Well, The Last Scout is basically Dark Star in reverse, and I think it's safe to say that the actors took their roles about as seriously as those who plied their craft in 1974 for a laugh.

... but instead it's a campy comedy ... if the camp your parents signed you up for was porno-camp.

Now let's get a little intellectual. Maybe it's because I watched this film in Spanish for free on Vudu last night that my "artsy" brain neurons were firing in overload (I don't speak Spanish too well) but this film made me thing of "The Big Picture" (1989) with Kevin Bacon. This film represented the stuff that Nick Chapman would have been pressured into churning out once he got to "big time" Hollywood in the 1980s. Big time 1980's Hollywood... think about it for a minute... the two headliners of this film were basically the poster-boys of that era. I'm talking about Corey & Corey. In this film, you can see how Corey Feldman went from delivering an amazing and relatable performance as Teddy Duchamp, to phoning it in as Ricky Wade in a weak-sauce attempt to fill Bill Murray's comedic shoes in a franchise that, prior to his attachment, included a third installment where a dead porn star helps Patrick Dempsey score with the bimbos. "Meatballs 4" was technically a 90's film, but it perfectly captures the Hollywood ethos of the 80's, which Feldman and Haim career's were quagmired in. In fact, the rookie-meets-the-twins sub-plot, if one is allowed to use the word "plot" with this film, is literally a rehash of what didn't work so well back in Meatballs 3!

Speaking of the second of the 2 Corey's, we barely see Haim in this film. He appears second in the credits, but has about 3 minutes of total screen time in the entire picture. Knowing what we know now about Corey H's problems with drugs, it seems highly probably that his part in the film was conceived as much more that it amounted to. There is even a joke about it in the end, when somebody asks where Cliff (Corey's character) is and somebody said he had to turn in his badge -- clearly this was an inside joke tacked on at the end. This was the film where Feldman fired Haim over his drug use.

This is a film that could have been a great piece of satire. Given a legitimate treatment by somebody like Barry Sonnenfeld, this film could have flashed in and out of the fourth wall over the rise and fall of heart-throb, T&A films in a way that might have led to more activity in the audience's head above the shoulders, and less in the other one. Instead, the film pans on other Hollywood institutions, remaking a famous fight scene from one of the Rocky Films with two actresses whose boobs can't stop bouncing. Naming the town Amity and tacking a "no sharks" sign on the police station. 11 year old boys watching this film in the pre-Internet year of 1997 to catch a glimpse of mythical BOOBIES were neither interested in, nor capable of placing, those references.

When the dust settles, this film belongs in a syllabus for film studies majors that examines the rise of the low budget "pan everything" film. I am thinking of the never ending stream of Madea films, as well as all the "-*fill in the blank*- Movie" titles (e.g., "Disaster Movie"). As such I give it 6/10 stars, not because it's great cinema, but because it represents an integral part of the deformed and contorted disposable theme-of-the-decade soul of Hollywood. In the 1980s, that soul was pushing T&A films that pandered to a culture of casual sex, drugs and something that claimed to be rock-n-roll but was 90% Phil Collins and Madonna. By the 1990's, Madonna had become an "artist" instead of a pinup girl, and Phil Colin was setting up shop with Disney animation. But the two Corey's continued to plod along with the sex and drugs, the T&A films, and a misguided sense that teen idols never die, they just stagger from party to party a little slower now that they have to shave.

... yeah, this is another one of those. Because if the story was just laid out in linear fashion, it would be pretty flimsy. Trouble is that although our curiosity is certainly piqued in terms of backstory, we get nothing satisfying other than the trite "we were the cast off's of society" nonsense. Time skips of months, and years are just interspersed with backstory in a way that is absurd. Add to that a completely needless soft-core solo-porn scene with once titan of acting Juliette Binoche, and you'll be remarking that the award for prosthetic should go to the journeyman who crafted the most over-the-top bush committed to celluloid in decades. Ok, I understand there is realism... we have to believe that they are on a ship where water is scarce and shaving is not an option, but if you have respect for the female body, don't flash it at us while the woman is riding a dildo machine... show it in a tasteful scene where issues of privacy among passengers is laid out for the audience to consider. I mean, here's a genuine artsy question to ask: in a zero gravity prison (yeah, they make up an excuse for gravity to exist, but let's conceded it's at lease REDUCED gravity...) where intercourse is verboten and the ships doctor is going full-on jungle bush queen, do the women wear bras, or not? It's an honest question about the female body, women's lib. (Just a generation ago that women were burning their bras in acts of self-liberation, in the pre-judgemental, pre-consumer-brainwashed era of humanist ideals.) But instead of exploring those questions of an intimate, personal nature, we get a dildo machine with red lights (all that is missing is a bucket on a chain and they can re-enact flash dance!) This film claims to be high art, but in my opinion it's garbage. In the "making of" bonus on the DVD, there is a still of the screenplay. If you pause it and actually read it, the language is what you'd expect to find in those grocery store pulp paperbacks with pictures of shirtless men that look like Fabio on the cover and only the thinnest claim to literary merit. Everything in the space sequences that is meant to build tension has been done before. Black holes? See Interstellar. Encounter with derelict full of feral animals who were being experimented on? See Ad Astra. Existential questions about isolation in space? See Moon. In fact, Moon is pretty much everything that this film pretends to be. But do yourself a favor and skip High Live.

A premise that has been around the block more times that you can count -- a young teenager missing, a parent with who goes against the grain to get them back "their way". This genre of the "seeking justice" film may harken from "based on true story" material like Ransom, or it can be the product of a superman fantasy, as in Rambo Last Blood, but nowhere will you see it stretched to such extreme lengths of antisocial behavior as in this film. Taking cues from Oldboy, there is brutal bashing of brains, a suicide related to sexual discovery, and questions about fidelity, sanguity, suffering, and a few plot twists. But what it put on display at another level is a study in pathological amorality of the "bottom" in a trafficking ring. And yet, it takes a ridiculously fantastic view of sex rings and gangs that is peculiarly Japanese, and somewhat disconnected from the realities of the abuse of disaffected teenagers, and the generation beat-skip of emasculated young men wagging their tales as they sniff around and prostrate themselves for the "perfect girl" and their old-school wife beating fathers. I do not recommend this film. I am interested to see what was made of similar material in the film "Searching" which seems to have a lot in common but perhaps a bit more of a realistic parental perspective.

My 10 year old was so unimpressed with this so-called sci-fy action fantasy film, that literally she was reading the tags on her stuff animals while we watched the 4K (surround sound, etc.) at home. It felt just like "who cares". Just too many "if only the sliding door hadn't shut" moments in the film. So since they can be put in at any time, there is no reason to invest in a plot arc. The film was like breathing. The action rises and falls, and that keeps you alive, but it doesn't particularly get your brain juiced or your hear racing. The chemistry in the "romance" part of it was rubbish. The heart felt sympathy for the nascent rebellion was "meh". The movie tried so hard to deviate from our expectations as a way to make us pay attention, that I just stopped caring. Oh, so you know Han won the Falcon in a card game? Well, I bet you don't know WHICH card game?! So you know Han and Chewie were smugglers but I bet you didn't know how that REALLY met?! Yeh, I really don't care. I just want to be entertained. When it started out, Star Wars entertained us with cool new things, like droids, hyperspace, blasters, etc. No they are just trying too hard to set up their own cinematic universe by dropping phrases like "___ >sea cow< milker" (Oh, so that's what was going on in TLJ". Oh, here's a creature that expands on those hyperspace cows from Rebels. And did you ever wonder why the prow of that that spaceship has a gap? Yada yada. It's barely a coherent story, let alone an epic one.

Let's face it, this film was a flop, despite have a respectable user rating and many "10" user reviews. It failed to break even in the US. Abroad it did o.k., but not anywhere the numbers for a colossus special effects, battle royale action film. In Japan, the native land of Godzilla, it churned out an anemic $20+ MM. In fact it barely grossed half of what it 2014 progenitor raked in.... so the question has to be why?

It's not the plot, which by the contemporary standards of Marvel movies, is robust and, while it has one or two plot holes, pretty much holds water and is internally consistent. As the supposed much-coveted "universe" film in a Monarch franchise, it doesn't rely on ret-con gimicks to address the the prior 2 films, which frankly were pretty weak.

It's not the special effects, which are pretty much spot on. Godzilla is there in full glory, not constantly obscured by fog, buildings, and spider-monster appendages. The titular hero even gets some proper anthropomorphication, finally erasing the "dinosaur run amok" image of the 1998 film. The film probably has one too many supersonic jets being munched out of the sky by winged monstrosities with zero aerodynamics, and it definitely over-uses the word "Orspray". And there are extended sequences of human dialogue -- it relies on a big battle, back to the boardroom, rinse and repeat formula. Then again so do many other highly successful films. In the boardroom, the characters hold up well. There are two slightly tormented male leads carrying around Godzilla family baggage. There are the less flushed out comedic characters and the tough-as-nails female military field commander. So what is it that doomed this film?

The film has basically three problems. First: the human villains. The villains are essentially disciples of the Thanos philosophy, but they fail to conform to the modern villain demogrphic. Neither inspires much fear and hatred. There is no the hulking toxic-male aggression. Instead there is an impotent looking old man with a velvety voice and demeanor. Rather than seething of toxic masculinity and acting like a psychopath, his character is an environmental terrorist who is basically apathetic to people and conflict. Then there is his partner in crime, who I won't give away, but whose back-story flunks the 21st-century Hollywood litmus test for who can be a megalomaniac.

Another flaw that audiences in the screening room will tire of, it is in the way the human stories drag on the action. Themes of sacrifice, redemption, hubris, mourning the loss of a child -- all plot enhancers -- are just piled on until there are too many to sort out. Give us a neophite scientist struggling against the massive military-industrial complex, and we're more than happy to wash it down with a popcorn and a coke. Give us mish-most of complicated backstories, and no amount of pauses in the action give us the time to chew it up and process it. Also, this is a point where the film's color pallet fails. Those pauses in the action when the good guys return to base and lick their wounds while giving exposition and advancing the plot have been been blue light enhanced to the extreme -- the 21st century's paint by numbers substitute for quality acting.

Yes, many of the monster-battle backgrounds had to be produced right from the photo-shop color wheel, but it would be nice if at least the set-filmed segments look like they are taking place in the real world of color, and that the pallet was used to in ways to offset rather than enhance the drag of watching the humans mull over how bad their situation is. By literally slamming the breaks on the audience adrenaline and cutting off the air supply with human sacrifice after human sacrifice, by the time Godzilla finally climbs to the top of the monster heap, the audience is in tears rather than exploding with cheers and applause. Then again, whooping and whistling when one titan bashing another titan's brains out would be close to toxic masculinity, something Hollywood just can't abide today.

Overall, it was a good film. A huge leap from the cellophane plot of the 2014 film, and a notch above Kong Skull Island.

I recently re-watched this film in order to get the disgusting Scope mouthwash taste out of my mouth after recently checking out "Mid 90s". There are certain films that can be re-watched over and over for the things you missed the first time through. There are other films you watch to see if there were breadcrumbs leading up to the "twist" ending. Despite the "spot the cameo of Tony Hawk" moments, LODT is neither of those. It falls into the category of films built around the soul. All the critical reviews from 10+ years ago seem to have missed that point, expecting instead to see some great skate-narrative. This film instead gives a stream of events all connected to a spiritual center, and that is freedom.

It's in the surf shop, with the guys who abandon the board making to ride waves. It's in the driveway at night when Stacy is trying to make the team on his own. There is tragedy. There is triumph. There is even some comedy. The villian is, in true millennial form, profiteering corporations, and yet we secretly understand that the long term success that will or won't be had for the heroic doppelgangers of the actual bricklayers of modern skateboarding depends on money. And yet, despite all the money the sidekick Sid has, he can't buy himself a happy ending, nor does it look like he's so unhappy.

It sound like a lot of prosthletising, and yet it's just put in as a natural backdrop for realistic characters. Nobody feels like they have been politically engineered with a certain color skin or a certain sexual orientation to beat the audience with a stick over the head about. There are no pathetic lines about social justice, the environment, etc. And consequently as a work of storytelling, it's genuine, even if some people were disappointed by the lack of blow-by-blow in the history of skatboarding.

Also the cinematography is great. Someone in another review mentioned "shaking camera". I read that and wanted to tear my hair out. Because in the intervening 10 years, the idea of shaking the camera has come to mean jarring around the audience like they are in a washing machine spin cycle with a drunk cameraman. This film has some shake when it needs shake, and it has glide when it needs glide! The shots of the skating are great. You won't see anything like what is now common on X-games, but it's more or less period accurate tricks.

Overall this is a great film and has the perfect blend of vintage 70's window dressing and Gen-X gestalt.

It would take all your fingers and toes to count the action films starring Bruce Willis and Ah-nold in the mass-video / mass-streaming ere that seriously had absolutely no business getting made. Now, with this sad excuse for a film, Sly tosses his hat into the ring of the paycheck-whoring of action star credentials by playing a cop who sort-of lingers around as a plot facilitator for 80 minutes and then plays Rambo with a handgun for the last 10 minutes.

If you can imagine a mash up of "Reservoir Dogs" (without the flashbacks and character development, and it sucked), "A Simple Plan" (with the ethical conundrums reduced to three lines of easily missed dialogue), peppered together with a grab bad of cliche "local cops good; FBI bad" plot twists (not very twisty), and on top of that, there is the mind-enhancing drug angle (although if you were expected "Limitless", don't. Think "The Jacket" done with over-the-top shaky-cam and the director basically telling Mathew Modine, "Grab your head and scream like your in pain", and rather than suspenseful pacing and the tense overtones of a mad scientist in a sanitarium, expect three minor characters who basically want loot.)

Together the minor characters and Mr. "My Brain Hurts" Modine visit three locations from the past to trigger memories. We're not talking about places with any action, or places where anything mysterious or particularly captivating gets revealed. Think of an empty house or a vacant lot, jazzed up with lots of shaky-cam. And every time, the catalyst for building tension in the story is the same -- someone shows up and asks what they are doing there. Wow. What an action movie.

The film sandwiches it's "action" between two over-the-top shoot out's that are completely ridiculous. I mean laughable. The kind of shootouts where there's a 10 minute fire-fight, and when it's over, rather than collect the guy who knows where the money is stashed (who, by the way, they've been shooting to kill), the bad guy suddenly says, "We've got to get out of here", and they just leave. That bad. But the most ridiculous thing is Sly's hair. I don't know whether to long for the days of convention spray-on hair darkening effects, or call for the resurrection of Sean Connery's toupe, but Stallone's hair looks like it was photo-shopped by a 9-year-old using an iPad. I'm mildly suspicious they also tried to photoshop a crease down the middle of Mathew Modine's forehead. That would be odd. Maybe the director thought it added more realism to his perennial scene: my head hurts!

It's the kid. It's what her character stands as a testament to in a time where pretty much every kid in America has become the antithesis of what endears Curly Sue's character to every parent who will see her precociously address where babies come from, exhibit tough street smarts, grapple with ethical conundrums, delight in the luxury of watching TV all night in bed, and, most of all, demonstrate that even tough kids have vulnerable hearts and will return love and kindness with love back. All that while existing in a character package that is free from exogenous programming. No school. No piano lessons. No club soccer. No mandatory community service to show social responsibility to college admissions officers.

In the 21st century, America has fallen prey to a bifurcation of its youth. There are the criminal lost causes. On the one hand, there are the kids who lacked appropriate role models and are out there populating the ranks of prisons and gangs. On the other hand, there are the helicoptered children, of all social strata from working-class kids whose parents ferry them around to pedestrian things like swim lessons and public library arts and crafts, to the elite who are shuffled into training for everything from chess to ski jumping at levels that in prior generations one would consider absurd for anyone less than a professional! And completely devalued in the mix is good, old-fashioned role-model parenting. Where Jr. comes outside and helps dad fix the car or mom weed the garden (oh no, no, no... jr's time is far to precious for that sort of thing today!) And where Jr. is allowed to assume the mantle of adulthood, with it's sense of right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, organically, through a free, unhindered childhood of interacting with the real world directly, with parental GUIDANCE rather than a tomb of legalese filled handbooks, rules, policies and procedures that should make any self-respecting lawyer blush when asking a 10 year old to "agree" to them (yes, read the fine print next time you register your kid for any activity, or even enroll them in school).

And therein lies the beauty of this film about childhood with the rather thin plot. In many ways, it's a counterpoint to "Home Alone". That film shows how creative and resourceful a Dennis-the-menace kid can be when the parents aren't home and the "bad guys" show up. In contrast, "Curly Sue" gies us the juxtaposition of charismatic pluck and vulnerability in a child holding hands with an adult who cares about her very much but cannot provide her with the experiences that the progressive, regulatory, judgemental state demands.

To take a step further into the Hughes-universe, consider the teenage characters in universally loved "The Breakfast Club". The film is about the collision of helicoptered, well appointed childhoods of privilege with young adult who have come through some hard knocks. Curly Sue attempts to encapsulate the virtues of the hard-knock's childhood, while "Dutch" (written but not directed by Hughes) instead attempts the opposite, by exposing the character defects generated from the "ideal" childhood. To an American society struggling to reconcile the aspirations of the consumption oriented 1980s with the realities of the Bush recession, in 1991 Hughes proselytizing was rejected by audiences. They turned out in droves to see the kid in the big McMansion drop bowling balls on the heads of two-big burglars, but they could not open their hearts to a girl with a dirty face who couldn't read, just like the laughed hilariously at the fat guy trashing a hotel with a rental car while the straight man chases behind, but they rejected the message behind a private school kid who would steal his step-father's town car and go on a rampage in the parking lot. The former were diversions from the harsh reality that the McMansion and the town car were not going to be in mom and dad's future, as inflation soared and American corporations like IBM shuttered facilities that employed the people living in those McMansions. The latter were unpleasant reminders of how the virtues of good ethics and the normal American childhood of the 1950s had failed to deliver the prosperity that had seemed within reach during the 1980s.

Imagine your screenwriting professor hands you the following assignment: craft a script that builds a collage of at least 5 films and includes absolutely nothing original. The last man apparently was written for that class. It's 1 part "Jacob's Ladder", 1 part "Babylon AD", 1 part "Take Shelter", 1 part "Mutant Chronicles" (for the shots of vintage trench warfare in the 21st century), 1 part "Green Room" (for the cheese eating neo-Nazis) and a bit of "The Sixth Sense". Nothing about it is good.

The plot goes something like this: a soldier with PTSD returns to his family house in the city he grew up in, and after an encounter with a street preacher decides to build a secret bunker in the basement, which puts him at odds with his boss, who accuses him of stealing money from the company to pay for the equipment. He is put into a mental institution that is predictably operating at the level of a Victorian era sanitarium, but because he saved the preacher from neo-Nazis by going Chuck Norris on them, he is able to escape when the neo-Nazis predictably show up at the sanitarian looking for revenge with a cattle prod.

Yup, you might have thought there was a movie there from the first few lines of plot, but pretty quickly to realize it's a hot mess of what are trying to pass for "action" elements tossed together in an under-developed, un-interesting ways. The film tries to rely on over-darkening shot after shot to try to create tension and anticipation, but frankly it just makes you want to close your eyes and go to sleep. After enjoying Mr. Chirstiansen's recent foray into rom-com, "Little Italy", an unpretentious opportunity for him to demonstrate something that passed for acting range, he is back playing the Anakin Skywalker emotion set... brooding and isolation, paranoid schizophrenia, and murderous psychopathy. Not to mention creeping on the woman he is working for, leading to another "forbidden" relationship. Frankly, he plays it better this time in as 40-year-old messed up PTSD veteran, than when he was playing a hot teenage jedi hitting on a 30(?) year old Imperial Senator, but the core set of empathies are the same. The rest of the acting is just garbage. Harvey Keitel phones it in for the pay-check trying to pull off a comical Moses evoking fake beard.

This film is not a Transformers film. Make no mistake, there are transformers in it. It gives some passing lip service to a space war; there is some relativist remark about "traitors" and "rebellion", as well as autobots and deceptacons, but they are just a few splotches of what might be vivid paint to color out the background of an otherwise bland movie.

That movie is basically a remake of the Iron Giant, only the robot, instead of being a kind of visual towering steam-punk monstrosity which becomes humanized through the influence of a 10 year old boy and his imagination, personal ethics, and love of comic books, now a 17-year-old girl who has the character depth of a shoe sole, but is replete with angst, dead-daddy abandonment issues, and general 21st century loser-ness, is going to covet a cute "mini size" robot that makes the perfect car for her -- a yellow VW Beetle. At least they got the car right this time. But they are keeping (and explaining) the "can't talk" idiom, so 80s music will be featured heavily.

Together, they will bungle through antics that were fresh with Charlie Chaplin, and got stale somewhere around the time of Beethoven's 4th. The robot will get into the house unsupervised and break things. He will do goofy and inappropriate things, like ignoring the steering wheel while the comic book "out of touch mom" is driving. No, I'm kidding... we don't even get that. Mostly it's interludes of flim-flamy diaglogue meant to give us an emotional investment in cut-off-tank-top 80s girl, as she explores her issues with nerdy afro-boy. And makes lemonade while wearing a doofy hat. Or was it falice like corn dogs? The movie can't make up it's mind. But it does get in it's licks against the "plastics", who belittle our heroine for driving a VW Beetle. A VW Beetle that, in fact, is pretty unremarkable. In a throw down between Herbie and Bumblebee, I'd put my money on Herbie.

But anyway, the plastics will get their comeuppance. Household objects will be experimented with. Nostalgic 80's pop-culture will be exploited. Humans will be splatted like goo. Beard step-dad will fail to be cool driving a more historically accurate version of the Wagon Queen Family Truckster. An a couple of paper thin deceptacon baddies will overcome... somehow... the big finale battle is so ridiculous you will just have to set aside anything remotely resembling the laws of physics once again and watch the CGI in "oooh, ahhh" mode. Your kids will leave the theater with visions of Bumblebee merch dancing in their heads. Although they will have a pretty nominal connection to the people and attempted emotional note of in the film. So if you are raising the next generation of vacuous consumer, by all means, pick up a copy of this film for your kids. But if you want to set your kids up for an appreciation of the humanities and storytelling, do them a favor and pick up a copy of The Iron Giant instead.

The trouble with this series, in addition to the character "trasnforms" which are noted by others (and are essentially continuations of trends that began with the live action films), is that is goes on and on and on for 50+ episodes with a kind of insanely drawn out "Mystery of Crystal Cove" plot.

There is nothing original in this mystery. It blatantly steals from everything from Predator, Jo Jo's Bizarre Adventure, to Twin Peak and Iron Sky (nazi robot soldiers). But the critical shortcoming of the massively drawn out "mystery" is that the chief villian becomes patently obvious about 10 episodes in. The only real contribution here is the idea that a talking dog is in fact peculiar (and Scooby gets some real dialogue for a change), and is merely part of a tradition of other peculiar talking pets. In case you were kept up at night wondering how Scooby Doo could talk. But if you're like the rest of us, and always just assumed he was a normal dog who could kinda growl and wuff in interesting slightly more articular ways, you will probably be disappointed by the conclusion. And the time investment in serialized episode after episode will leave you wondering if maybe the clock was supposed to reset in your town too to give you back the days you never had.

The plot is simplistic. I would say it is targeted for children age 4-8, but being enjoyable for children up to 10 depending on how precocious they are about social issues. It basically regurgitates a kind of PC framework of "incuded / excluded" social justice throughout the film. Peppered in the mix is the familiar old saw that's been worn to death over the past 15-20 years: that women are tougher than men and they don't need to be in romantic relationships with men (even when the film is ostensibly set in the Victorian period -- revisionist much?) There's even a wink and a nod at transgender-ism.

To put it bluntly, the film comes off as having been written by a committee of screenwriting students at a PC liberal university, who were more concerned with toadying up to the contemporary ideologies of the senior members of the committee than writing a brilliant, witty and engaging story. The foundational idea was absolutely brilliant... as the trailer revealed, rather than tacking on the "bigfoot walks off into the forest of other bigfoots" feel good ending, this film is supposedly about a trek to find other bigfoots. But the villains are written thinner and less substntial than a sheet of cellophane. The heroine is flat with nothing developed beyond the point of passing interest. Zoe Saldana delivers her typical performance with her impression of Selma Hayek if Selma Hayek was a blank piece of wood totally devoid of charisma. Jackman has the tone of his character's bravado down cold, but he has nowhere to take it; the film's predetermined destination -- an epiphany about self-centeredness, was already baked into his characters motivations from the beginning, so in the end he it feels like the same hero from the beginning of the film is just reading lines put in front of him -- there is no sense of character arc. It's just flat. Which brings us to the animation. Stop motion is a beloved form that has a niche in these kinds of stylized children's imagination movies. But this film apparently ran out of money or something, because about 1/2 through, the facial animation becomes incredibly choppy. As in you will see the discrete position of lips jumping from one spot to another ... apparently there were no in-betweeners in the budget? It turned out to be quite distracting, and in the end may have been part of the reason I walked out of the theater glad I had paid only $4 for a matinee. My 9 year old left the theater in better spirits than myself, although the film failed to make much of an impression since she has not had a single question or observation about it since the credits rolled.

I was quite surpised by this film. It is not a kids film, but it has the creativity to pepper it's history of pre-war Japan with enough visual dazzlers and artistic beauty that my 9 year old surprised me by sitting through the whole film. This is film put to its highest application -- an extension of the humanities, exploring themes of life, youth, ambition, love, and sadness. The fact that this film made it to the US at all is a surprise. Clearly Disney did not make a big push to make a wide release for this film, deciding instead that children should be fed more head-spinning CGI super hero movies and "life-action" remakes of classic cartoons that push Disney's SJW agenda. This film has it's own political agenda, which is the elevation of humanity above the devastating Earthly ambitions of nations, while at the same time demonstrating the not-so-evil origins of those national ambitions. If instead of feeding our kids a constant drip of ADD inducing, merchandise peddling dope for their brain, we should be putting this kind of fare in front of them to nourish their deeper appreciation for their fellow men, and the history of their planet.

Great sci-fi thrillers of the past used to go out of their way to capture an element realism. Those film-makers, the ones that were visionary sci-fi directors, were not hamstrung by the effects technology... they planned the shots and adapted according to what worked for the story and tone of the movie. It's well documented how in the original predator the Fx people sent down a red "crab creature" to the shoot location, and the filmmaker basically said, this is not going to work, and got someone else to design the rastafari Predator we know and love.

In the modern era, however, we have directors who are better at comic book story-boarding than they are at filmmaking (think about it... when you pitch your film with an entire story board vs. a mere text screenplay, how much less vision and trust is required from the producer to open up their wallet!) And the dialogue / writing ends up sounding like it was lifted off the pages of a comic book as well.

I suggest watching "The Abyss" to see how story premise can be used to create tension. Even though that film flows into several sub-conflicts, there is constant demands put on the audience to anticipate what will happen next. What does the alien look like. Is it friendly or hostile. Who will survive.

Modern comic book style sci-fi films, none less than "The Predator", abandon that approach and instead try to entertain you with "Deadpool" like *shocker* dialogue, and as filler gouge out the audience's eyeballs to CGI effects that come so fast and frequent that suspension of the laws of physics becomes trope, as does the Sarah Conner gritty female who can fight better than the men. As others have mentioned, this film gives a female biology professor who goes from cowering in a heap to blasting away with an AR like she's John Rambo. OK PC Hollywood. But did you also have to go all "Mercury Rising" on us?

And BTW, the IMDB "filters" prevent using the kind of language that you will find in this film, as well as the kind of review it truly deserves. I would say this movie is not just a "pass", but one of those movies where Predator fans should be writing angry letters to the studio. That's how bad it is. So why 3 stars and not 1? Because there are a few places where they were creative in tying back to the original film: namely "Get to the Choppers"... a ridiculous scene, but one that was actually funny in a creative way. But then again, I'm someone who likes this franchise so much I would rate AVP at about a 7/10 and AVP2 a 6. In many ways, this film has a lot in common with AVP2... even to the point of having a "good" predator have to take on a bigger, tougher "hybrid". The difference is that AVP2 made no bones about being a B-movie slasher film where everybody is going to die... kids, dogs, they don't care. "The Predator", on the other hand, film tries to resurrect an epic-premise, the alien hunter vs. the elite soldier, and falls all over it's face trying to do it.

Most critical reviews of Lego 2nd find that it fails to stack up to the first film. However, that comparison is like putting apples next to oranges. They are both fruit and they art both colorful and round; similarly both TLM the Lego 2nd are about Lego's and the existential connection between toys and reality. By the way, so are the Toy Story films. But nobody showed up complaining that TLM wasn't up to Toy Story standards, even the lowered standards of TS3. Character continuity is what we expect to drive a sequel. But the continuity here is based on the same formula archetype. Sentient Lego's dance and sing. That's it.

And what else could they do in Lego 2nd when, frankly, character depth wasn't exactly a huge part of TLM's original success. Emmet was a loser, Wild Child was awesome. Was there anything beyond that really? Well, of course there were cameos, and you'll get them as well in Lego 2nd. Lord Business even has a cameo or two. And we find out where the fixation with pant's comes from. But what remains is the glitzy pop musical numbers. If you want a character driven sequel, go see Lego Batman... But if you want to watch block shaped toys zoom around and sing, this is it. There is the mandatory emotional theme. The emotional payoff is surprisingly poignant. Hint: it has to do with the dynamic between siblings in a family.

Overall, your kids will enjoy it. The music will get your toes tapping just like the first film. But you will feel somewhat used for having paid the price of admission for four to the theater when you could have sat at home and watched the copy of the original film you own while making popcorn in your own microwave for 25 cents per bag, and your toes would have been tapping just as much.

This film is just utter garbage. The story of gallant nutcracker fighting to protect the damsel who, in her own right, participates actively in the struggle against the evil mouse king, gets a "twist" that is utterly predictable. When you first see the CGI mouse, with his anthropomorphic behaviorism, one thing can be quite certain... nobody will be throwing any shoes at it. From there only the most simple of children will have trouble connecting the dots to figure out who is evil and who is good.

The road to get to the "gotcha" moment, however, will remain long and tedious, cluttered with meaningless dialogue between characters who were shot in such a way to maximize the edit potential by rarely having them on screen together. Then there is an odd hodge podge of effects, from costumes that look like they were put together out of junk found in an attic, to soul less CGI that simply makes no sense.

As a journey of discovery, it literally steals it's ideas from the Chronicles of Narnia as well as Hugo. There is minimal romance. The heroine is sufficiently plastic to allow her to speak completely in platitudes, and to be totally forgettable. The villian is one-dimensional, and by the end of the movie we have to just wonder whether Disney is capable of telling engaging stories or merely has to rely on the rent earning potential of "famous" stuff... like the Nutcracker, which, after this venture, most certainly remains a tale best told sans Disney.

Know your target audience. That's where this film missed the boat -- in 2001. This third installment of Crocodile Dundee was ahead of it's time. Because what it was meant to be essentially was a reboot. Thirteen years after the sequel. Yup. Today we get reboots 2 years after a film. Back then nobody even knew what a "reboot" was. There were "remakes" and there were "sequels", but the notion of franchise reboot did not exist.

Films 1 and 2 were about a kick-a(ss) 80's kinda guy who took no s hite but also didn't go around starting s hite. And a world full of 80's kinda values, and 80's kinda women. Those films were a mix of gags and action -- especially CD2, which is 90% action.

Film 3 replays many of the gags from the first films... and exploits many of the same charm moments. And in it, Mick comes off as a much softer character. At the time, people said Hogan looked old. Well, I just watched all three films back to back and he didn't look much older in the third than the first. At the time of the first movie he was already almost 50! Fact is that the script was softer. There was no wrestling crocodiles. No hanging off the ledges of buildings. At one point in a chase, he slams a door on a guy (this is a repeat gag from CD2) and in another action scene he climbs a ladder. I don't think he actually punches anyone (more on that later) in CDLA. More to the point, the film is a societal comedy that, rather than contrasting the bumpkin with the go-go Manhattanite, it contrasted the manly man with the LA uber chic. To be a manly man in 2001, you didn't have to slash up muggers with a 10 inch knife. You just had to have the instinct and courage to not care what other people thought of you. i have a feeling a lot of that came from Hogan and his co-star/wife's experience and attitudes "milling" in Hollywood since the first movies. Now that the farce that is Hollywood glitteratti has been laid bear by the cultural phenomena of twitter and Instagram, the joke with George Hamilton about coffee colonics is funny. In 2001 -- I saw it in the theater's then as a college student -- I just didn't get that joke. I went to see Mick Dundee swing around like a super hero, and instead it was an entire film of him being a normal guy -- a particularly fit septagenarian who could easily pass for 40 -- but a normal guy nonetheless.

There are a few abrupt cuts in the film and some not-so-tactful cases of product placement. The fast food bit doesn't work mainly because rather than use an obscure LA burger chain, they used a big chain. The Subaru outback... well, of course we know that's what Crocodile Dundee would drive in the bush, but to fit the theme of being out-of-place, we'd rather seem him rambling along in an old Land Cruiser. In fact it could have been a great joke in 2001 for him to be driving along in an international scout making lots of smoke, and the roads filled with Priuses, and he'd say something like "I got to get rid of this car - it's got to be causing all this smog", and then he gets the Outback and the highway is now full of giant H1's / Range Rovers and Excursions. Lack of thoughtfulness in the writing does cheapen the film. But it's more introspective and socially in tune with the things people find ridiculous. At that time, those things were mostly in LA I guess, but now that they've infected wholesale American culture, the social jokes are funnier. Making fun of the clapper, though, is still just stale, lazy writing. And it also suffers from a bit of political-correctness itself.

You see, sometime between 1988, when every boy got into at least one brawl where he had to use his fists on the playground that ended with a trip to the principal and some detention, and 2001, where every playground brawl in the schoolyard was a scandalous case of life-destorying bullying, and every boy who used his fists was doomed to grow up to become an evil war monger destined to kill women and babies in the jungles of Vietnam like their fathers... and every mother in America was out to keep that from happening... the use of the fist became more evil than "fantasy" violence with guns. Yup, the lawyers had their way. Every individual got the imaginary bubble which cannot be invaded without being sued. The final scene is an outright recognition of that fact, maybe because somewhere in the script editing process the exact point was made: you can't have a character go around punching people who insult him. You also can't show women as sexual objects. You can't show homosexuals in a negative light. And so on. Which brings me back to one of the points about why this film was panned in 2001. What was the biggest action film of 2001 (excluding Harry Potter and LOTR -- which were fantasy not live-action). The answer, surprisingly, is Rush Hour 2, in which there is more punching and kicking than probably all 3 Crocodile Dundee films. But it was used as perfect punctuation for a real no s(hite) guy standing up for himself/his woman / people in general. Whereas in Rush Hour 2 is was to showcase martial arts skills that most humans can't do even if they trained for years. On the other hand, 2001 also gave us "Joe Somebody" which tackled the phenomena of mind-neutered men head on. What audiences and critics were really saying when they complained about CD3 was that they had paid their money to escape out of the world of male-mind-neutering, and there just wasn't enough tough-as -leather moments in the script. There are a few "tough-as-leather is out of place" moments. And the protagonist recognizes that in the film, which makes him seem old, even if he doesn't actually look much older than he did 13 years earlier.

I loved the original "Deep Blue Sea". It transformed the Killer Shark movie from Jaws to Jurassic Park. This was a twist to the hunter-killer monster movie -- an immersive underwater fantasy world that wasn't all to impossible to take seriously. The archetype is simple: sharks hunting a group of captive, well intentioned people. Whether it's Arnold in jungle trying to get to the chopper, a couple kids hiding from Raptors in a freezer, or Ripley trying to get to the escape pod, hunter-killer movies live or die by how well they can amaze the audience. Somewhere around Jaws 3, the idea of a giant sharks stopped being amazing. Even in 3-D. Three men trapped on a boat was amazing in 1975 to watch a mechanical shark destroy a boat and munch humans but by 1983 the audiences were already yawning.

The original Deep Blue Sea refreshed the genre by amazing us with a new concept: tactical sharks with intelligence. A labyrinthine underwater research complex with everyone from hot women in non-conducting wetsuits (you know the scene I'm talking about) to a goofy cooks with a pot on his head. And the right kind of pacing between set-up and back-story and swim for your life action.

The sequel tries to amaze us with mini-sharks that sound like bats. Have you seen "Piranha"? Bunch of people stuck on a sinking boat in a lake full of piranahs... and Lee Majors. Well, take that film, subtract Lee Majors, mix in some tropes from the Jaws, bubbles. exploding water, and stupid people. That sums up this film. From the moment the first two "victims" manage to fall into the water and drift 50 feet from their boat, you should know it's not getting any better. I was hoping for an "Aliens" up-the-stakes style sequel. Instead, I had to sit through literally the "Alien Resurrection" story about a one-dimensional female character kinda doing nothing particular in the nefarious science project of a slightly psychotic boss. I suppose her character has more that just the curves of her bikini to pass for an arc: she starts out devoting her life to shark conservation, but by the third act she is calling them monsters. Bravo writers, you successfully turned one of the few characters the audience might want to root for into an A$$hole.

I've watched a lot of movies in the past 5 years that attempt to bring historical revisionism to life. Some have been pretty thought provoking. I've watched many other movies that try to keep an accurate accounting of forgotten history alive over my lifetime. As the credits roll you come away with a sense of having learned a new appreciation for a hidden chapter along the road to here. But I have never quite seen such a poorly conceived story as "Suburbicon", where the inter-racial tensions just shy of lynching are casually paraded and escalated in the background. This framework is a ruse to avoid subjecting a ridiculously fabricated account of New Jersey suburban race relations to include open mob violence targeting a single family for nothing more than living there to scrutiny. The reels roll from a plausible town meeting where the whites discuss fences, to a ridiculously stupid conclusion where the black residents are being blamed by Mrs. Stupid Fat White Septuagenarian for an auto accident.

Meanwhile, in the foreground, we get a story aobut The Talented Mr. Rippley all grown up. Now instead of being a charismatic genius able to further his sociopathic and psychopathic goals, he has been lowered to the level of Jerry Lundegaard, sans the slimy patheticness that William H. Macey pulled off so expertly. Mr. Rippley now plays opposite a pair of discount brand-x knock off villains standing in for Peter Stormare and Steve Buscemi. Other than looking something Italian, and without a Columbo-esque pregnant detective to hunt them down in a beautiful case of role reversal, these villians never quite reach the level of funny stupid that could have saved the film. Nor does Mr. Damon ever reach beyond his recent assortment of Fedor and tie wearing personas from the Cold War to give us a character to either love or despise. We would just like to erase him from the film, and, I suspect the goal of the writers is to inspire us to simply erase his kind from the world as well as the history books.

In place of a hero we can cheer for, we get a little white boy, not particularly bright, not particularly interesting. He moons around and acts like a good victim. At one point he nails the door to his bedroom shut. Otherwise he is for all intents and purposes a walking catatonic... just like good sheeple should be.

Do yourself a favor and watch this film. Use it to take stock of the Kool-aid Hollywood has been trying to peddle to American audiences.

Let's start out with the cards on the table -- don't see this movie if you aren't a soccer mom or dad. Don't see this movie if you are the parent of those 1% super human mini-athletes who run circles around their classmates... unless you've been through the sausage making machine called US youth soccer with them (or their less talented siblings). You won't relate to any of the satire, and you'll be so underwhelmed with the phoned in performances, low production value, and lack of any explanation of the central character's various arcs. Put simply, it's a sketch comedy based all around youth soccer. As a stand up routine, it would be gold. As a low budget film, it leaves a lot to be desired.

Now to the good. The themes:(1) US youth sports today are ridiculous enough to drive parents insane... nearly every parent can relate to that. (2) Youth soccer in particular has become a mangled mish-mosh of divergent priorities from the various stakeholders. Could not be truer. (3) That our society is obsessed with results, even from 7 year old "athletes" who would rather be out kicking a ball against a wall than listening to a coach give them a lecture. Hey, we've all been there... soccer, little league, gymnastics, even butter sculpting (more on that later).

Finally there are the particular skeletons of youth soccer laid bare: A team/B team politics. Excessive cost. Community elitism. Amateur youth coach "credentialing" and "career" making. And nepotism. You will eye roll at the mom who is ready to sleep with the coach to get her daughter playing time, but secretly thing of 3 moms who you know who you wouldn't put it past. You will shake your head when the moms gossip on the sideline about whose riding the bench or getting too much playing time, but you'll secretly call up similar late night conversations you've had with your best confidants. If you've ever coached, you'll be shouting "amen" when the internal debates about fun vs. winning as cooped by the cut-throat agenda character and the sane parent is boxed out. Buzzwords and jargon -- in 7 y.o. sports. Things that happen, but dialed up a few notches to drive hove the ridiculousness.

The ending however is a weak attempt at a comedic "twist", and frankly falls flat. The only characters with any arc -- the assistant coach, who fills the sycophantic role to be scorned by the audience, and the laundry mom -- pop in and out of focus in such isolated bursts that by the time they have "evolved", the audience doesn't really think much of it.

And one thing that's left out -- the violence. At one point, a parent yells from the sidelines: "Don't let her push you... push her back." Most of the flaws of soccer the film parodies are things that people do try to mitigate in the soccer world. Coaches do set up even teams, and try to set up even playing time, not to help kids psychies, but to ensure that the entire crop is tended long enough for the prize tomato to ripen. One thing that is understated, however, if the on field brutality of the game. If they had filmed realistic matches for this film, with the pushing and the elbowing and the steam rolling and the unsafe tackling... the child work standards board would have shut down the film. And it's that escalation of "aggressive play", something very foreign to most parents who grew up playing the game when it was the less violent alternative to American football, that makes this film incomplete. The more timid players become disenchanted with the game after getting mashed up by bigger, more aggressive kids far more than they do from riding the bench. Lots of girls I've coached actually like to sit on the sideline and goof around with their friends. Like waiting for your at-bat in the dugout with little league -- it's what makes the game fun for the kids who aren't hitting the home runs. However, I've seen at least one girl (we're talking about U8 - U10) in every season leave the field with a bad injury -- broken ankles, broken wrists, concussions, torn ligaments. The deficiency (and nepotency in hiring) of 14-year "older player" referees is completely missing from this film.

In fairness, most of these objects of scorn and ire are universal to "communicty" competition in the US. The best way to poke fun at them is to sever them from the sport, so that the nit's and nat's of the accuracy of portraying that sport don't ruin the film. Many films have tried to satirize girls youth soccer, from Rodney Dangerfield's prescient "The Ladybugs" in 1992, to 2005's "Kicking and Screaming" which was basically a Will Farrel comedic "loser" vehicle with some kids in it. Neither of them has been able to do the sport justice, nor does Bad Parents.

While I think this film is worth a few chuckles, for my money, it doesn't even come close to "Butter", which takes these elements of back-room board meetings, nepotency (and anti-nepotency), fullfillment by proxy, and lays them bare in the ridiculous sport of butter carving. That film achieves, without a bigger budget or more acting pedigree, to turn in a 100% satirical masterpiece.