The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)

I checked my watch so many times.

The Mandalorian and Grogu was interesting for several minutes—maybe a quarter of an hour or so—when the helmet was off; we finally got some emotion from the protagonist. A short list of other things I liked:

The monsters in that pit were cool, as was the poisonous pink Cthulhu thing, plus it was in the water.

I liked Jeremy Allen White's character for the most part, although he has no depth whatsoever: I think he said "I'm not like my dad" about five separate times. 

There is a short but cool chase sequence after he escapes the fighting pit.

Mostly, though, this feels like something all of us have seen before. And if the Mandalorian was supposed to be somehow morally ambiguous (I thought I read that somewhere), what we get in this film is very, very clear good vs. very, very clear evil.

Also, PG-13 movies are an outrage. This movie is filled with violence from start to finish. Some of it is committed for almost no reason at all. The Mandalorian shoots up a bar to get someone's attention, killing (one presumes) many people. But it's PG-13 so we never see anyone suffer or die, we can just enjoy all the shooting and punching and kicking and stabbing without reckoning with the pain that might cause to the actual bodies of humans and animals. Fun for the whole family!

King of the Fumble

Insanely, horribly cynical. This Lion King exists only to make money. What's worse is that it is so nearly exactly like the original film that (like Beauty and the Beast before it), one can't help comparing this 2019 version to the 1994 version almost frame by frame. What a total waste of time.

Oscar Noms 2017: 11 of 13

Part 1 - La La Land, Moonlight, Arrival
Part 2 - Manchester by the Sea, Hacksaw Ridge, Lion
Part 3 - Fences, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, Jackie
Part 4 - Florence Foster Jenkins, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Passengers, Rogue One
Part 5 - Deepwater Horizon, Kubo and the Two Strings, Moana, A Man Called Ove
Part 6 - Captain Fantastic, Elle, Loving, Nocturnal Animals
Part 7 - The Lobster, 20th Century Women, Silence, Hail, Caesar!
Part 8 - Live-action Short Films
Part 9 - Animated Short Films
Part 10 - Toni Erdmann, The Salesman, Land of Mine, Tanna

Part 11:

Allied

1 Nomination

• Costume Design: Joanna Johnston (Lincoln)

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Cast: Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris, Matthew Goode, Lizzy Caplan, Simon McBurney, Anton Lesser, August Diehl, Camille Cottin, Charlotte Hope, Marion Bailey, Thierry Frémont

I pregamed this film, thinking that it might, on an off chance, snag a costume nomination... and it did. This nomination for such a bad movie actually quite surprised me. You can read my original thoughts if you follow the link, but let's just leave it at me telling you that this movie makes no actual sense. A shame, too, because the parts in act one when Cotillard and Pitt are doing spy shit like randomly killing SS officers and upending tables in order to more easily see the enemy before grabbing a machine gun and cutting Nazis in half. That part is all quite cool. The second half is very boring.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #76 out of 95

The Jungle Book

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Jon Favreau

Cast: Neel Sethi, Ben Kingsley, Bill Murray, Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong'o, Scarlett Johansson, Christopher Walken, Giancarlo Esposito

This was pleasant enough, but I guess I'm not really sure what the point of making it was. The visual effects look cool, although to my mind the animals don't look like animals so much as they look like very good CGI version of animals. In other words, visual effects are the purpose of this movie, so it is fitting that The Jungle Book got nominated for precisely that. But the new Jungle Book is no more realistic than the 1967 cartoon – it's still filled with talking animals, silly jokes, and the same songs as the original. Or at least a couple of them. And it is here where the film really can't find its footing. The new movie has not figured out a way to make The Jungle Book the live-action extravaganza it wants while also keeping "The Bare Necessities" and "I Want to Be like You". Favreau has the animals sing "Bare Necessities" half-heartedly, as a way of splitting the difference between a musical and a regular film, but then when Christopher Walken appears as King Louie, he sings his own song in full voice like it's a musical number. The whole thing felt uneven, and I was left thinking why they bothered at all. It wasn't a bad movie, but its not different enough from the original to matter at all.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #68 out of 95

Doctor Strange

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Scott Derrickson

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, Benedict Wong, Mads Mikkelsen, Michael Stuhlbarg

This was another of my pregames that paid off. I complained in my original post that all of these Marvel movies are about the potential destruction of the known universe and that every single time the entire universe manages to be saved by the Marvel hero. As one reader pointed out, this isn't precisely true. There are plenty of Marvel movies where total apocalypse is not threatening the human race, but that doesn't stop Doctor Strange from being perhaps the most formulaic of the Marvel films yet. There have been so many of them, and this one comes so late, so I get that the well is running a bit dry, but they really need to ask more of these films. Doctor Strange has a great number of cool visual effects, but it hasn't a thing to say about anything. I was fairly bored.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #69 out of 95

13 Hours

1 Nomination

• Sound Mixing

Director: Michael Bay

Cast: John Krasinski, James Badge Dale, Pablo Schreiber, David Denman, Dominic Fumusa, Max Martini, David Costabile, Alexia Barlier, Peyman Moaadi, Matt Letscher, Toby Stephens, Demetrius Grosse, David Giuntoli


And then there's this steaming pile of garbage. First off, this bloated action movie (like all of Bay's overstuffed action movies) refuses to trim itself down to a normal action-movie length. Instead, we are treated to what felt like 13 hours of footage. It just kept going! But it wasn't the length that made 13 Hours so distasteful. I don't know enough about what actually happened in Benghazi to speak to this film's interpretation of events vis-à-vis history, but I can easily say that if this is what happened, I don't understand why everyone has been talking about Benghazi for the last year and a half. The film follows four or five mostly interchangeable macho, fratboy assholes, played mostly by Schreiber, Krasinski, Dale, and Denman, as they swagger around Libya and act like they own the place. As far as I can tell they do not work for the military, but are hired guns who work for the CIA's secret base in Benghazi. So far so bro. But these guys have no desire to work for their actual bosses. They know how things are supposed to be done here in Libya, and they're interested in telling everyone else what to do. I thought all of them were assholes from the absolute get-go. From the very beginning of the film they follow no orders at all and, from what I gathered, they break the secret base's cover by deciding (the film thinks heroically) to go save the U.S. ambassador's life after he is attacked at a mansion where he and his security detail are staying. The ambassador is dead already, and our fratboys disobey orders to go to the compound to try to save him and his guys. Fine. But then the saved guys and the swaggerers with guns lead their attackers directly to the no longer secret CIA base where they endanger the lives of some 75 operatives who had been working in secret in Libya but who are now exposed as U.S. spies. Then the bros defend the base for the last hour or so of the movie. This anti-intellectual film (a Harvard degree is an indication of total cluelessness in this movie) is photographed more than anything else like a single-person shooter video game, and the effects look comparable to one of them. It's designed to celebrate blowing things up, to take pleasure in shooting nameless and mostly faceless Africans, and to justify U.S. presence in North Africa. Perhaps what is most interesting about 13 Hours is its own blindness to the fact that it caused its own problems. The characters wouldn't have needed to be saved if they hadn't have been swaggering idiots in the first place. And Americans wouldn't be dead if they weren't holed up in a secret CIA base in North Africa to begin with. What is so extraordinarily distasteful about a movie like this is that it believes that no one in the military knows anything about what to do in a situation like the one the film describes. Apparently the only people who know anything at all are the men with the guns. And they know what to do simply by virtue of having guns. Because the right thing to do is always to shoot. When the right thing to do is always to kill people, it is the men with the guns who always seem to be able to do the right thing. I hated every second of this.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #95 out of 95

Back to:
Part 1 - La La Land, Moonlight, Arrival
Part 2 - Manchester by the Sea, Hacksaw Ridge, Lion
Part 3 - Fences, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, Jackie
Part 4 - Florence Foster Jenkins, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Passengers, Rogue One
Part 5 - Deepwater Horizon, Kubo and the Two Strings, Moana, A Man Called Ove
Part 6 - Captain Fantastic, Elle, Loving, Nocturnal Animals
Part 7 - The Lobster, 20th Century Women, Silence, Hail, Caesar!
Part 8 - Live-action Short Films
Part 9 - Animated Short Films 

Part 10 - Toni Erdmann, The Salesman, Land of Mine, Tanna

Monsters. And Robots. And That's All You Need to Know

Guillermo del Toro's new film Monsters vs. Robots is really excellent. Okay, so its real title is Pacific Rim, which – as I am sure everyone you know has already remarked at least once – sounds like some kind of (gay) (Asian) pornographic video, and has almost nothing to do with Monsters vs. Robots, which is what this movie's real title ought to have been.

But back to the movie itself. There are these giant fucking monsters called kaiju and they are coming up out of the ocean through a portal from another world or dimension or somesuch. And the monsters are really, really cool looking. I mean, the design on these things is absolutely incredible. They are terrifying but sort of beautiful – vaguely dinosaur-esque but also have a kind of alien sludge/slime thing happening. And they also have this radioactive blue goo that coats their mouths and innards and spills out of them like monster blood when the kaiju are slain. And the monsters evolve, so after some are killed, new monsters keep showing up, and they have uniquely different and enhanced abilities and body types. It's all very exciting.

The same goes for the robots (a/k/a jaegers), if you can believe it. By the time of the film, the robot/monster war is in its seventh year or something like that, and so the technologies, though they are really cool and obviously better than anything we have in 2013, are actually sort of dated. The paint is chipped. The operators are practiced and even a little bored. No one thinks these robots are cool. The jaegers aren't slick like Iron Man; the people who run them treat them like a day-job. In other words, this art direction is absolutely excellent: it is detailed and studied, and every single room looks suitably tired, with the slight dishevelment and carelessness of bureaucratic banality.

Okay, so the side plots in Monsters vs. Robots are not very interesting – your generic heterosexual love plot, your generic father/son narrative, your generic father/daughter narrative – and the acting is not really very good (Robert Kazinsky as the hero's bitter rival is particularly painful, and Rinko Kikuchi and Charlie Hunnam are not much better). But Clifton Collins, Idris Elba and Ron Perlman are always welcome sights, and their performances are great.

I want to say, too, that Del Toro has managed to make a film with giant robots that (unlike Transformers 1-3 or Real Steel or Iron Man 2) does more than show these robots punching one another. Del Toro's robots fire weird plasma blasts and wield giant fiery swords and do all kinds of other cool stuff. Because if ever in the future, we as a people decide to invest in giant robots, I hope we give them more firepower than the simple use of their enormous metal fists.

But look. It's all about these monsters and these robots. That's really all that is important about the movie. I found the plotting tight and fast paced, the narrative just unpredictable enough to keep me totally engaged, and the finale just plausible enough to keep me from scoffing. I think Pacific Rim is worth seeing for its awesome sound effects, its absolutely fabulous production design, and its riveting action sequences.

America, Fuck Yeah

This film's subtitle The First Avenger doesn't make any sense without the Avengers movie which is coming out next summer, right? Otherwise what is he avenging? I don't get it.

In truth, I didn't understand most of this movie. It is just so dumb. I sort of loved Tommy Lee Jones and Dominic Cooper in it – and it was nice to see Derek Luke all grown up (remember Antwon Fisher?) and speaking French, no less. Captain America: the First Avenger is a film that totally rewrites history in more ways than are worth listing. I also really hated that the villain is this expressionless red skull dude and all of his minions were (literally) faceless automatons. Good and evil were just so easy in this movie. The right choice is always an obvious one in this Captain America universe.

Say what you will about Thor (I liked it) or Iron Man 2 (I was not much of a fan), their main characters are complicated and make difficult decisions. The extent of Captain America's decisions is only ever: Am I actually gonna do this thing that we all know is the right thing to do? Of course I am!

I find worlds like this kind of boring and I found Captain America pretty boring.

I will say one thing about it that I appreciated, which is that at least (unlike, say, the Transformers franchise or Iron Man 2), Captain America's fight sequences move us past the hand-to-hand combat tradition. You guys have crazy-magic guns that make people explode instantly and you're punching each other? Captain America does this a lot too, don't get me wrong, but there is also a lot of technological firepower on display here. Not enough to make this flick worth watching, but still.

P.S. Chris Evans has a gorgeous body in this film. And the camera is interested in it for a sum total of about thirty seconds. Foolishness.

2011's Nominees: Part 10 of 12

UNSTOPPABLE

1 Nomination:

  · Best Sound Effects Editing

Director: Tony Scott
Cast: Chris Pine, Denzel Washington, Ethan Suplee, Rosario Dawson, T.J. Miller, Kevin Dunn, Kevin Corrigan, Kevin Chapman

 
I can't figure out why Netflix doesn't have this yet, but anyway, suffice it to say that this is one I haven't seen. I do love a Runaway Train movie as much as the next guy, and Tony Scott is an interesting director if a little – shall we say – repetitive. Still, I am intrigued by his use of violence in films. It is certainly a lot more interesting than, say, something like Salt, which refuses to actually show violence, and instead just shows a bunch of people kicking one another where no one gets injured.

Will Win: N/A
Might Win: N/A
My Rating: Not Yet Rated

TRON: LEGACY

1 Nomination:

  · Best Sound Effects Editing

Director: Joseph Kosinski
Cast: Jeff Bridges, Garret Hedlund, Bruce Boxleitner, Olivia Wilde, Beau Garrett, Michael Sheen, James Frain

 
I liked this picture. Now, granted, I was a little drunk when I saw it, but how else ought one to watch a sequel to a film from 1982. I saw it in 3D Imax, too. Why not? The thing is, the Academy obviously did not like this movie. Even Star Wars Episode I: Can't Remember the Subtitle did better than this in snagging effects nominations, and yet here is a movie basically designed to be a visual and sound effects behemoth with a score you can dance to, but the Academy all but ignores it. Consider this dead on arrival in terms of the Academy. This is due, granted, to the total absurdity of the filmmaking involved here. The effects people did great work, but the director and screenwriters basically delivered a television show in a really expensive outfit. No imagination. No wit in the writing. No sense in the plot. (I would see it again, though, just for the effects, I must admit, and I listen to the soundtrack regularly.)

Will Win: N/A
Might Win: N/A
My Rating: #25 out of 48

IRON MAN 2

1 Nomination:

  · Best Visual Effects

Director: Jon Favreau
Cast: Robert Downey, Jr., Mickey Rourke, Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johanssen, Samuel L. Jackson, Jon Favreau

 
After the delight that was the first Iron Man film, I assume I was not the only one disappointed by this offering from director Jon Favreau. There are more explosions, more drunken parties, and way more giant robots, but this film is, in a word, boring. Seriously. Nothing happens in this movie worth caring about. It is actually extraordinary how boring it is. Gwyneth Paltrow is sort of charming and Robert Downey, Jr. is his usual charismatic self, but this movie just falls flat. This leads me to something I've complained about before (in reference to the Transformers franchise) but want to repeat here. This film is filled with enormous giant robots who fly with jetpacks and have lasers that cut people in half and allegedly have access to all of this amazingly intricate and advanced technology, and yet... when it comes to a final showdown, all that the writers can think of for these incredibly advanced technological machines to do to one another is punch each other in the (metal) face. You are a giant robot! Don't punch the other giant robot; launch a grenade for fuck's sake. And this, after all, may have been the problem with Iron Man 2, it just looked too much like a Michael Bay movie. A step down, indeed, for Mr. Favreau and his franchise.
 
Will Win: N/A
Might Win: N/A
My Rating: #39 out of 48

I Have So Much Time!

Well, not really, but still. I wish I could spend every day watching at least one movie. It would be great.
I spent most of today painting the new roommate's room. His name is Ryan and he is an MFA director here and a very good friend. The last roommate Tim had done a little damage to the walls of the room, so it needed to be repainted and we spent the day painting it a lovely rich brown color called "Crunch Granola." We're all about the Earth.

BUT, I wanted to talk abut the movies I've seen recently, because there have been some good ones.

First off, I saw Jon Favreau's blockbuster Iron Man on Sunday morning for $4! And I really liked it. Those kinds of movies are not usually my kind of thing (Transformers, Spider-man 3, and even better ones like Casino Royale) because they don't have enough action in them. They get bogged down in sentiment and romantic subplots. The studios have also tended to cast very young actors in the parts lately, as well. And I lose interest when Superman and Lois Lane look younger than me. For my money, Iron Man fell into none of those traps. I thought it was nicely plotted, interesting, and never boring. There were about two minutes total of sentimentality. It wasn't always action-packed, but the times when stuff wasn't blowing up were filled with suspenseful moments and good acting. I liked this movie a lot. I know it made millions of dollars last weekend and hardly needs my blessing, but I think it deserves its millions. I'm a fan.

And a couple days ago I watched Edward Dmytryk's film noir (I've been on a kick lately) Crossfire. It's a kind of whodunit story where we know who the killer is after the movie is about half over. The rest of the film is about catching the bad guy: trapping him in his own lies. The film stars Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum, Robert Young, George Cooper, and Gloria Grahame. What's cool about this film (from 1947) is that it's a movie about anti-semitism. Robert Young has this fabulous monologue near the end of the film that talks about hate and how it is like a loaded gun waiting to kill someone. I was worried that it was going to be preachy (like 1947's Best Picture winner, Gentleman's Agreement) but it's not; it's really great. I got a little teary-eyed during the speech, because it's about anti-semitism specifically, but it's also about homophobia or racism or prejudice of any kind that makes people hate one another instead of allowing people to live freely in the way they wish to live. Robert Ryan (who plays the film's main bigot) got an Oscar nomination for his work in the film, but Mitchum and Young are both great and Gloria Grahame is fabulous. My favorite performance in the film is a much smaller one from a much lesser-known actor, though. His name is William Phipps and he had a long career in television after this film, but his work in Crossfire is excellent and I wish he had made more films.

I also caught the great Lindsay Anderson's first film This Sporting Life, which stars Richard Harris as a British footballer who knows all the rules on the field, but can't seem to figure anything out off the field. It's a classic angry-young-man film and a really great one. I totally loved it.