Just saw Luca, that new Pixar film.
It was ... Okay? I mean, it's not boring, and it's visually stunning, but it's probably the most by-the-numbers Pixar film I've seen to date. If you've seen the trailers, you know the entire plot, and it's a plot you've seen before. The characters are not particularly interesting (possibly with the exception of the girl's father, who has quite a few touching moments, but he's mostly a background character). There aren't many highlights among the jokes. The world building is not Pixar's best either (granted, that's a very high bar to clear, but they aren't really trying).
It's serviceable. I suspect it wouldn't really have been a smashing success at the box office, but its format suits streaming just fine. It's almost so one suspects that Pixar decided to take a very old story recipe and make a movie that followed it as closely as possible, without really taking any chances, but also to make the prettiest movie to ever follow that recipe. It works fine as a well-crafted showcase of a lot of old tropes, at least.
Yeah, it was really pedestrian. I did enjoy it, but it was so shallow. Was perfect as a Disney Plus, plus - I'd have been really disappointed to see it at the cinema though. It was lovely to look at, but so little actually happens - we never really follow the parents or delve into the world under the sea. Just completely lacking in any real meat.
Black Widow I saw on a big screen and it was fine. Probably one of the weakest films in the MCU for me. If it was released around the time the story takes place would I think better of it? Only a bit. The accents were extremely distracting and the action scenes were ok but predictable due to the billions of adverts over the past year and a half.
100% the weakest MCU film for me too. I was hoping for something more - Winter Soldier is one of my favourite MCU films because it takes the time to be something other than a "Spandex Super" film - it's more akin to James Bond (Tuxedo Super?). So yeah, I had a lot of hope that maybe it would follow a similar path, but it just didn't.
The accents were bad (why have somebody famed for being a broad cockney play a Russian?) - but the biggest issues were the basic premise and the bad guy. Again, the MCU fails to deliver a big bad. Taskmaster was criminally underused and Cockney Russian Gangster bloke was useless. "I shall surround myself with mind controlled girls of DOOOOOM!" or something?
The horror of what was done to the Widows was the fact that they were taken as children and turned into living weapons. Make them into robots with fairy dust that turns them back into real girls? It all just falls apart. I need to watch it again, just to see if there was something that can redeem it.
Caught up this weekend with the Netflix Fear Street trilogy. I really enjoyed them, I liked the overall story arc and the way the films linked up. I was surprised by how gruesome some of the deaths were. Also the songs on the soundtracks are brilliant.
OMG - This thing frustrates me so much.
I have a problem with the basics of it. The entire film is based on the horror tropes (it wears this proudly). The problem is, that the tropes it plays on are all from films that have killers who (originally) weren't meant to be supernatural. Jason (well, his mum) and Michael Myers predominantly, in their original films were more sinister because they were human.
Then Scream was the perfect film where it played on these tropes. Again, none supernatural. So, you have a series of films, that ape "real life" killer films, only with a supernatural twist. Achieving none of the threat, terror or horror of the tropes they played off.
Even worse, the soundtracks... Sorry
@peep
I liked the soundtracks, but they were the most "what songs can we have that define the era, only songs that not everyone listened too to show how cool we are for not going for the obvious?" The trouble is, that the songs were too esoteric. Moonage Daydream rather than Ziggy Stardust, Carry On My Wayward Son instead of Sweet Home Alabama, Come out and Play instead of Smells Like Teen Spirit? Even worse, they used Don't Fear The Reaper, which was already used in Scream! And nobody, NOBODY, listened to White Zombie in 1994
Don't get me wrong, I actually like the soundtrack and have appreciated all those songs for many decades - but they were never popular. I think the fact that The Offspring are used, when they wrote a song with the lyrics "I'm not a trendy asshole" shouting out against the mallrat mentality of early/mid 90's teens (which most of the film revolves around) just shows how "edgy" they were trying to be and failed.
I've also got an issue with how clean the film was. A good horror should be dark and dirty. Things hidden in shadows. Grainy film concealing death. The films showed everything, all the time. There's no suspense if you can see it all. "Oh, hi there guy with an axe stood in the spotlights!"
Having said all of that... I think that it was really interesting. This is what frustrates me. I enjoyed it. First of all, I think that films should progress. While I hated the way it played on the tropes, I liked the fact that it twisted it in a modern way. It was the clever use of streaming and the three film format to tell the whole story. Watching the first one, I couldn't understand how they could go back in time when they had revealed everything by the end of the first film? It was really quite clever the way they twisted the story across the films and the times. This is understanding modern audiences and using modern medium to do something a little different.
Having complained about the cleanliness of the film, the fact it showed some original (and unexpected) deaths with such clarity was actually very well done. It was actually shocking at times.
So, despite there being several things that irked me, I did kind of enjoy it. It just needed to be a bit less cheesy... Or a bit MORE cheesy? It needed to try less hard to be edgy if it was going to be so bland about some things. If you're going to riff off classics, riff off them, don't be a piss-poor cover band. It just wasn't quite there, but I think it gives us a taste of where the horror format could potentially go.
