I say this with the utmost honesty, that despite the initial criticism of “Wish” looking like generic AI produced junk, I was very optimistic about it. I defended it often. I loved Ariana DeBose in “West Side Story,” I’m a big fan of Chris Pine, I love Alan Tudyk, so its just so sad that Chris Buck, and Fawn Veerasunthorn’s “Wish” really does end up feeling like Disney is going for the bare minimum with audiences. In a year filled with humongous milestones like the 100 year anniversary and the SAG and WGA strike (which hurt their image with a lot of audiences), you’d assume Disney would pull out all of the stops for their newest animated movie.
Category Archives: Movie Reviews
Nightmare on 34th Street (2023)
Like clockwork every year a studio releases a Christmas themed anthology for the masses, and almost always it’s a big letdown. It’s not really enough to inject the whole Christmas aesthetic. A genuinely scary story helps, too. “Nightmare on 34th Street” is a rambling, often nonsensical, unscary Christmas anthology movie that is literally all over the place. It re-uses actors, garners a whole cast that spend their time obviously reading from cue cards off screen, and director Crow doubles down a shoddy editing job that makes his film more confusing and jarring than scary.
Thanksgiving (2023)
Back in 2007 after the collaborative efforts of Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez known as “Grindhouse” flopped, one of the popular elements of the double feature that lingered on was the mock trailers during intermission. After delivering a very popular faux trailer with “Thanksgiving,” director Eli Roth finally gives us what we’ve been begging for almost twenty years later. Thankfully while the whole faux grindhouse aesthetic has fallen out of favor with mainstream cinema, “Thanksgiving” ends as a pretty great slasher film with its own merits to offer the horror genre.
Token Taverns: An Arcade Bar Documentary (2023)
Before the video game age, arcades were one of the biggest social spots for mainly kids and teenagers to commute, compete, and share their passion. Once home video game became a mainstay allowing kids a more personal and intimate video gaming experience. This prompted the unfortunate collapse of the arcade industry for a very long time. That is until the last twenty years when many folks that fondly recall the arcade age and the joy it brought them sought to revive not just the arcade, but the social experience of the arcade.
Bad CGI Gator (2023)
See here’s my problem with “Bad CGI Gator.” It’s not that it takes a short coming and tries to turn it in to some kind of schlocky B movie element. It’s that the movie is only fifty eight minutes and it’s called “Bad CGI Gator.” And said Bad CGI Gator doesn’t make an appearance until at least seventeen minutes in to the movie. If you have only sixty minutes to work with, and your movie is called “Bad CGI Gator,” and you’re promising a Bad CGI Gator, I would think one would try to plaster the titular Bad CGI Gator on every frame as much as humanly possible.
Pig Killer (2022)
Based on the Pickton true crime case, that of a man who may or may not have killed multiple women and disposed of the bodies on his pig far, Pig Killer follows this killer, named Robert “Willy” Pickton here, as he looks for victims, kills them, deals with his family issues, and eventually gets caught. At the same time, the film follows one of his victims before she gets taken and after.
The Marvels (2023)
What hinders Nia DaCosta’s “The Marvels” is that it literally is all over the place. This feels like Marvel is trying to squeeze in so much in ninety minutes, and while often it succeeds in getting the idea across, it can also stumble here and there. Nonetheless, “The Marvels” still winds up being a bang up Marvel entry, one that’s packed with some excellent fight sequences, wonderful conflict, and a great trio of characters, all of whom present a common goal in spite of how they operate as superheroes. Carol Danvers, Monica Rambeua and Kamala Khan are all heroes in their own right approaching the ideas of the superhero in their own mind set.