Talking Head with Chris Hardwick... well he would host it...

Power Rangers

(because I refuse to call it Saban’s Power Rangers)

 

I was probably too old to be watching Power Rangers when it came out but I did. I also watched Batman: The Animated Series and Animaniacs…. I say this now with the nostalgia of old age (I’m 38 nearing 40 with every breath). It’s also become slightly more acceptable now that I associate Amy Jo Johnson (the original and best Pink Ranger) with Canadian SWAT team show Flashpoint. At least my attraction is based on a show where she isn’t playing a high school student but I digress. I liked the original show, mostly for the horrible dubbing and the hackneyed fighting and storylines. You never stop to think critically why Rita Repulsa attacks only this small hamlet of Angel Grove which apparently builds and rebuilds its buildings out of a high-grade cardboard that can withstand anything but a 40 ton monster the sized of the Statue of Liberty falling on it. I liked Jason, Zach, Billy, Trini and Kimberly (with Amy Jo my high school pop culture crush). I even liked Tommy but seeing as how he wasn’t original 5… I’m excluding him for this review.

As seems to be popular these days they have remade my beloved cheese factory of a show and tried to (sigh) do it seriously. I get it, that’s the kitsch these days. Let’s make this hero movie as though they were actually defending the Earth from evil alien Rita Repulsa. That name alone questions credibility and since the original five were such boy scouts lets have these kids be rebels who live in a world where Saturday detention exists. They have attempted to Breakfast Club the hell out of this movie. If Kimberly fell in love with Skull (named just in spirit in the movie) at the end of the movie and he walked across the football field, raising his fist in glory, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Jason (Red Ranger) crashes his car whilst running from the cops for putting a cow in the locker room? Kimberly mean girled her way into detention, Trini is just an outcast based solely on her inability to tell her parents who she is, Zach is a loner who skips school to avoid dealing with his mother’s death and Billy is autistic. Not badly but enough to maybe check the boxes on the wheel of inclusion. I mean I just don’t understand what narrative purpose his autism has because it truly seems to only be a hindrance when plot decides it so and then he’s cured by the power of friendship. 

Anyway Rita (Elizabeth Banks) awakens and is going to create her creature Goldar (out of the gold teeth of hobos apparently) to find the Zeo crystal and destroy all life on earth. These are all throwbacks to the show. She needs to accumulate enough gold and thus gives the power ranger coins\amulets time to choose Breakfast Club Lite as their owners. Zordon and Alpha 5 (Bryan Cranston and Bill Hader) are awakened to train and prepare the new rangers to face Rita.  The Rangers have 11 days to learn how to morph (no it’s Morphin time… recite names of dinosaurs) or just stand on the space ships magic morphing pads and let them judge you worthy or not.  There are some third act surprises and Angel Grove…of course… takes a beat down. Would you have it any other way?

I guess what disturbed or disappointed me is not that the movie wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be. There is a way to create a very serious, dark knight style, Power Rangers movie but this kind of hedges it’s bets. None of the teens is very outwardly rebellious or dangerous. They swear but they love their only when gosh darn it won’t do…they are maybe sort of gay…but they never really say it… Billy is a nerd…but he’s autistic so it’s not his fault. I would love to see the all-out balls to the wall version of this but jumping from PG to PG-13 is a massive leap across a gorge. My preferred version of this would have been to upgrade the effects but not completely and cash in on the cheesiness of the show. Have them fight Toho Godzilla style. Use guys in big suits not CGI gold teeth monsters. Or have something to say. I’m not saying I wasn’t entertained by this movie but I wasn’t blown away by any of it. The suits are cool.  They play the Power Rangers theme, Alpha still looks slightly ridiculous, and Zordon is a big face in a wall. Much of this problematic storytelling may come from the origin story effect. You can never tell how someone becomes a hero without having much of the story be about how badly they suck. Once you’ve established the heroes, stories become action packed thrill rides. That’s why Power Rangers meets the Breakfast Club only mildly thrills and doesn’t take me on a ride at all. The kids are all enjoyable and Banks as Rita is great. Overall, it gives you a sense of being a good story.  I just wish it had a little more cheese.

Mr. Unhappy sez: Go-Go Power Rangers…tell me you didn’t just hum that shit in your head.

Damn...

Magic makes a rose seem more rosie...

Beauty and the Beast

 

    I’ve always been a closet Disney fan. The Little Mermaid is perhaps my favorite and Beauty and The Beast has always been a second tier movie for me. I mean it is good and I liked the movie but it didn’t touch me in a special place. That came out a little more perverted than I intended but it’s true. I just never got into it. I can’t tell you why. I tried multiple times to like it and until last Monday I’ve always been slightly curious why people hold it with such reverance. Again it is good but it was just a movie with a singing teapot and some memorable songs. Just not my cup of tea to pardon the pun. That is until I saw the live action remake of Beauty and The Beast.

    The story is a well known tale. Belle is an outcast in her small french village. She is devoted to her father and loved (albeit more for status than actual love) by Gaston, the mouthy loud braggart in love with himself. Her father is caught in a storm and seeks refuge in a castle occupied by a cursed prince/beast and his household staff. When Belle seeks to rescue him, she takes his place as the beast’s prisoner to spare her father. Soon they begin to fall in love and just in time, for if the beast cannot find love, the beast and all the houses inhabitants will be stuck in their present forms for all time. Emma Watson (Hermione in Harry Potter and Sam in one of my favorite movies The Perks of Being a Wallflower) is Belle and she plays her as a feminist in a time where feminism might as well have been witchcraft. She is her own woman and doesn’t need a man to make her whole, just her books and her hope to one day travel and see the world. Watson is a very smart woman and very good performer. Singing the songs, she holds her own and creates a three dimensional character that displays both a love of her small town and the intense desire to escape it. That chance comes in the form of the beast.

    There is no real new ground plowed here. If you’ve seen the animated Beauty and The Beast, you are gonna know the beats. The Candlestick Lumiere (played by a game Ewan McGregor) and the old clock Cogsworth (Played by Ian McKellan) play their parts as their counterparts did. Yet the mobile inanimate objects really seem to come alive. The motion capture technology used and the creation of real objects magically animated on screen is well magical...in a way it wasn’t in the animated feature. I was dubious of Disney’s desire to make live action movies of their books. The Jungle Book was done previously but it was this film that captured me enough to make me want to see the final feature. I’ve often been caught off guard by movies I think won’t be magical and turn out to be very magical (Sing Street is the most recent film) but Beauty and The Beast gave me pretty much what I thought it would. A feature live action of the cartoon and yet watching this, I found myself more drawn to the characters and invested in the story. The songs popped and found the emotional sweet spot. I gotta say, this movie is just a treat and worth the admission.

Mr. Unhappy sez: A tale as old as time and a story magical enough to make an old unhappy bastard smile... I’m not as lyrical as Mrs. Potts.

 If you like Emma Watson you should see.... The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Perks of Being a Wallflower is the story of Charlie, a freshman with a horrible secret. Through his friends Sam (Watson) and Patrick (Justice League's Ezra Miller) he is brought out of his shell and facing the terrible things that have happened to him as well as fall in love. It's a coming of age story that is true and honest and filled with horrible moment...you know like real life. This movie never fails to unearth emotion and feeling in me and gave me the epic line "You accept the love you think you deserve." Such a smart, touching story. I try to show it to anyone I know. Truly one of my favorite movies of all time.

 

Requiem for a blogger...and dreams... and stuff

The Return of the Unhappy Critic

A treatise on me sucking at blogging regularly

I’ve gone through fits of just not doing my job and failing to inform you of movies you should see. My last review about Sing Street was an attempt (while lame and horribly written) to tell you about the lost love of my life and now that I’ve for the most part decided that being with anyone else is tantamount to slamming my head against a wall to make myself smarter, I’m mostly free of the whiny narrator of the past few years. I’m hopeful that my life will influence my reviews because I think movies inform us about our lives. You can see yourself in any movie. I can relate to Moonlight, even though I am not a black gay teen because I can understand the loneliness and pain of not being able or allowed to be who you are. We can all relate to that. 
   
And yet that may not be why I haven’t reviewed more in the past two years. Honestly who has the time? Amiright? I’m running a store full time, hanging out with my friends, watching TV, seeing movies and having dinner with my dad nightly. You just get worn out and oddly things that you love but require effort get thrown aside. There is also the fact that the girl I loved/love (depending on who you believe... apparently being in love with someone is only valid when they love you too) partially if not vaguely blamed my choice of moniker as a reason why I was apparently unhappy being with her.

And then there was my computer.

They call it a laptop. At 17 inches of computing power, it is awesome for watching TV and movies on. When it comes to putting that giant piece of machinery in your lap and writing a bad ass blog about how awesome this movie was, it becomes a slog. Plus having something called a smartphone makes it especially hard to write. All these distractions and all play makes work the dull boy... to paraphrase. So I went on Amazon and found a smaller yet still functional sized computer. Hopefully it will make this job easier.

I am trying to be a better man and a better critic. So I’m gonna try to restart this blog for the umpteenth time and do it on a more regular basis. I’ve seen a few new movies so I’m gonna do some smaller quick hits... Let’s get back on the bike and see what we can say about some of the fun little pieces of celluloid being projected in a movie theater near you. Although I think now movie theaters use more of a fancy DVD player... like Uber Blu-Ray or something.





Quick Hits

1. Kong - Skull Island

It’s a movie...about a giant monkey... we’ve been here before. And yet we haven’t. Skull Island takes place in the 1970’s pretty much as Vietnam was ending. A top secret mission is called on to map an uncharted island that is perpetually surrounded by a constant hurricane. A group of soldiers coming back from the war are diverted to Skull Island to protect and help the teams discover all they can about this island. Led by Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman and Tom Hiddleston they fly through the hurricane to arrive on the peaceful tropical paradise that is Skull Island. It isn’t long before the bombs they drop (to map the island through vibrations or something) attract the attention of the king... Kong.

The clever way they take the Giant Monkey and create sympathy without it being all about the way we treat Kong makes this movie worth the ride. 3D, as usual, is not necessary but available if you so desire. All the big names are amazing as always. It is told as a story of survival on an island filled with monsters, some human and some more creature feature. Kong is a hero and a protector. For the first time in big monkey feature films they treat Kong as the king and not a weak feeble monster. He’s a fully realized character and not the monster climbing the empire state building or world trade center. He’s a ruler, protecting all the people on the island regardless of their motivations.   

Mr. Unhappy sez: One thing they don’t explain it how Kong lost his dong... but otherwise a fun adventure.   

 2. John Wick - Chapter 2

If you watched the original John Wick you know that he is thinking he’s back. In Chapter 2, he returns from avenging his puppy and car in the first movie to be drawn back in by a marker that got him out in the first place. The John Wick movies are about a man so scary and dangerous that the very thought of him coming to kill you might make you kill yourself. He’s the bogeyman and you really don’t want to piss him off.

John Wick isn’t a story so much as a continuation of the horror show that is the life of a professional bad ass. Mostly consisting of a lot of dead men with mohawks and full untrimmed beards. I’m not against a beard in general other than I can’t grow one without looking like a dead cat. You might call me Patches. But the beards are a full and manly variety here... so if that gets you moist... enjoy. I liked this movie, mostly because it’s not trying to be anything more than an action movie and cleverly choreographed fight sequences. One of my favorite scenes involves John Wick and an assassin trying to kill him trade silenced shots at each other in a crowded subway station. They are smart, capable and trained. John Wick is a character than can continue on for multiple chapters and never lose it’s freshness. Say that about most anything else.

Mr. Unhappy sez: Good deaths... smart killers... and a reverence to the story they tell. It’s not complex but it is layered.
 

3. Logan

It is here. Logan is a movie about an old man who wants nothing more than to protect the father figure he loves and live their lives. And he may want to die. This is not a normal X-Men movie... seeing Patrick Stewart as Professor Xavier rant and swear is a sight not behold. Seeing Wolverine chop of limbs and fight his own nature is new and fresh. Since Deadpool we now know we can have an ultra violent and obscene superhero movie without losing that all important box office. Now doing it for no reason and not creating a story won’t work but if you cover those bases, fans will not dessert you because it’s rated R. Logan is just a good movie. The story of a man at the end of his life finding redemption for the horrors he’s committed and the life he’s led. It’s a story of a beaten broken man and finding a person and cause to fight for again.

Mr. Unhappy sez: It’s good and the Wolverine story you wished the first two movies were.

Streaming Movie of the Week


It Follows

It Follows is a redefining the genre type of movie. It is a story about a girl who has sex with a boy and then is stalked by a slowly walking killer who seems to come from nowhere and is pure unstoppable evil. Seen this before? No, you really haven’t. It follows succeeds because it takes the tropes of horror movies and uses them to it’s advantage. The leading girl survives because she is pure and therefore unpunishable for her sins... no Jay is a pretty and reasoned woman who falls for a guy and she has sex with him. That he gives her one hell of an STD is not her fault. It happens to her and she takes responsibility for it. The killer moves slowly and seems to always find the heroine? That’s the scary part. No matter where Jay runs all she is buying is time. It follows and never stops. Unless you pass it on. It follows is one of those movies which raises horror movies to a higher levels. It doesn’t try to be anything more than it is. It follows... and eventually it kills you. Personally I can’t see anything more frightening.

Mr. Unhappy Sez: It Follows is a rare movie that resets the bar. In the time to come, It Follows will be the movie that inspires new horror directors. Available for streaming on Netflix.