Category: Movies (Page 2 of 4)

Movie Review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes 8/10

June 20, 2024 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

With the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes in theaters, it seemed like a good time to watch the series of movies in close succession.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, showing on Hulu, is the first movie in this series and has a theme entirely different from the original Planet of the Apes. They aren’t comparable. Which is good, because it’s difficult to beat the gravitas of Charlton Heston. He had some great lines and really sells them. The 1968 series has a racial tension theme, and while the first movie is enjoyable, the rest of the movies in that series are a weak.

Movie theaters are dinosaurs.

June 6, 2024 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

Box Office Mojo provides up-to-date ticket sales for movies that are in theatrical release. Looking back 20 years, there is a trend that hasn’t been commented on elsewhere. Based on the trend, movie theaters will close and more movies will be sequels.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is watchable, but forgettable. 7/10

June 4, 2024 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a movie made for streaming, but it opened in theaters 6 weeks ago and only pulled $21 million domestically. It has a good cast, used poorly.

Godzilla Minus One is more than a monster movie. 9/10

June 2, 2024 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

When was the last time a Godzilla movie was a good movie? Not good for a monster movie, but a good movie? Godzilla Minus One is a good movie and is available on Netflix. It won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, has a 7.9 on IMDB and 98%/98% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Godzilla Minus One cost $15 million to make and pulled $56 million at the domestic box office. For comparison, Godzilla x Kong has an IMDB rating of 6.2, cost $150 million to make and pulled $196 million in domestic ticket sales. Godzilla x Kong turned a profit, but is a forgettable movie.

NYT: Star Wars Acolyte will not be good.

June 2, 2024 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

NYT: Will the Force be with The Acolyte

In two days, a Star Wars spin-off TV show, The Acolyte, will premier on Disney+. The eight episode season will cost $180 million. It’s hard to believe anyone thinks this show will be successful.

This is how Leslye Headland, the show creator, pitched her idea for the show to Kathleen Kennedy, the president of Lucas Films.

Headland described her concept in the meeting as “‘Frozen’ meets ‘Kill Bill.’” Kennedy bought it on the spot.

That’s why the Star Wars IP is trashed. Kennedy couldn’t resist a sister drama crossed with a woman’s revenge fantasy.

Stenberg, the show’s star, said “Leslye really is driven by emotion and heart and relationships. So even though our show is within the ‘Star Wars’ universe and set in outer space, in a galaxy far, far away, it’s really a family drama.”

Star Wars fans don’t want that, and everyone else knows that Star Wars is a deteriorating IP, so aren’t going to get on board now.

There was a way that the Star Wars universe could have thrived if the people in charge were competent and didn’t despise the original fan base. Instead, they tried a bait-and-switch.

Make the three pre-quels and sequels for the original fans. Tell those masculine stories by staying true to the original trilogy. Knock out a few TV shows in the same manner, like Mandalorian .

With a well-developed universe, be honest about a TV series that is going to be less action-oriented. Say you are making a family drama, love story or children’s adventure in that universe. The original movie, Star Wars: A New Hope was described as a Western in space. There are plenty of family-oriented Westerns like The Big Valley or Bonanza. Make sure that original fans know that you don’t hate them and aren’t going to destroy legacy characters. Emphasize quality, not diversity.

Disney’s Star Wars hotel was never going to work.

May 31, 2024 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

Disney spent a quarter billion dollars to build, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel, and it only remained open for a year and a half. This girl spent $6000 to be immersed in the experience. Fortunately, she’s cute and made an engaging 4-hour video about her Star Wars adventure that’s been viewed by 7 million people. She should recoup her expenses.

Disney is a big company, with a net profit of 1.7 billion dollars last year. They can’t keep making big mistakes like this. How did they screw this up so bad?

Oblivion is great Sci-Fi, 8.5/10

May 15, 2024 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

Somehow I missed Oblivion when it came out in 2013. This is the kind of science fiction I like. Nothing to do with time travel, not a futuristic soap opera, humans aren’t the bad guys and it’s not all CGI action scenes. Just a great story with cool technology and aliens.

It’s a very nice looking movie. Everything looks almost artistic. A couple of scenes look to have been designed to make Tom Cruise look cool. And he does.

Unfrosted is a comfort movie for people born before 1963. 9/10

May 8, 2024 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

Unfrosted was written and directed by Jerry Seinfeld and is currently playing on Netflix. The movie is set in Battle Creek, Michigan in 1963 and provides a fictional account of the development of the Pop Tart. It shouldn’t be watched by anyone born after 1963.

On IMDB, Unfrosted isn’t rated highly, because it’s a tricky movie to categorize. It isn’t a satire or a parody, or even especially funny, but it is fun to watch, for people born before 1963. Imagine an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry and George have to explain how Pop Tarts were invented to Kramer. Jerry and George make up an elaborate tale while Kramer asks questions about superfluous details.

It’s hard to imagine how this movie was made. The cereal companies, Kellogg and Post, are in a race to develop a new breakfast product. Both companies and their actual products are mentioned dozens of times. Neither company is portrayed favorably, but it’s clear that everything is fictional except for the details. The details are what make the movie fun. Characters, products and music are all from the era, and familiar to people of a certain vintage. It isn’t nostalgia, because the story is absurd, but it’s entertaining to hear a bunch of shout-outs and references that we understand.

This is a pop culture movie that covers two eras. I’ve never seen Jack Lalanne referenced in any contemporary TV show or movie, but people of a certain will enjoy the shout-out. I also liked seeing Bill Burr play JFK. It seemed like every actor was recognizable from a TV show or movie.

Unfrosted isn’t a great movie, but for people eligible for Social Security, it’s a comfort movie. There is no strong language or message, just the joy of watching familiar actors playing long-gone characters to a good soundtrack. I’d give it a 9/10 for what it is.

Called it: Poor Things wins the right Oscars.

March 11, 2024 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

Of course I don’t watch the Academy Awards, but I posted a review of Poor Things and noticed that the awards show was scheduled for later in the day.

Emma Stone won Best Actress for her part in Poor Things. She had to act like something that didn’t exist. She did it convincingly. She completely sold the performance. That seems much more difficult than acting like a particular person or type of person.

For instance, Da’Vine Joy Randolph won Best Supporting Actress for her part in The Holdovers. She acted like the fat, Black ladies who used to serve at the cafeterias at Ohio State. Da’Vine had some extra dramatic work that she did convincingly. I really enjoyed The Holdovers. It was a subtle movie, but very relatable. It was nominated, but didn’t win, for Best Original Screenplay.

Poor Things also won Best Production Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling and Best Costume Design. Those are all aspects that go into making a unique and plausible world. It’s much more difficult when it’s a fantasy world.

Oppenheimer won a bunch of awards. I liked it well enough, but I’m more interested in the physicists of era, and they weren’t very prominent in the film.

Godzilla Minus One was awarded the prize for Best Visual Effects. I’m happy for them. I haven’t seen it yet, but many people are impressed with the film and it only cost $15 million to make. Domestically, it’s made $56 million. That should be wake up call for Disney who spend 30 times that much on big franchise films, but only sell two or three times more tickets.

Poor Things gets 8.5/10 for being innovative and well-done.

March 10, 2024 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is about hubris. Man playing god, creating life, that sort of thing. Poor Things is a Frankenstein movie without a moral or message.