My Own Little World

The Mission: Impossible series is one of the best action franchises around today. It hasn’t always been this way, but ever since 2011’s Ghost Protocol things have been looking up for Tom Cruise’s flagship films. These last two films have been an example of both the extreme lengths to which Cruise will go as his own stuntman and the correct way to make a ridiculous action movie. At their core, of course, that is what the M:I films are: bombastic, slightly silly, and self-aware heist films with a unique ability to also tie in more realistic threats than the average “grounded” spy film. I love that these films can walk that line without feeling stressed by doing so, and this latest entry is no exception: Mission: Impossible – Fallout is one of the best action films of the past decade, a monument to fun entertainment and excellent filmmaking at the same time. I would be remiss, though, if I didn’t express that the plot and characters are just as good as the action sequences...

It’s rare when I have a cinematic experience that truly shocks me to my core because of a film being outside of the box. That shouldn’t be the case, but often the movies I prioritize seeing are made for the sake of making money and not to primarily send a message to its audience. This film, however, is something completely different. Boots Riley’s directorial debut Sorry to Bother You is a wild, wild ride that aims to be a protest of the systemic oppression of the fundamental truths of capitalism, albeit taken to extreme places. Its allegorical nature makes it bold and forward with its message, but its method of getting that message across is highly effective. What will make or break this film for somebody watching it is how they handle its extremely literal nature. Sorry to Bother You makes no efforts to hide its message; in the naming of its characters, the parts they will eventually play in the story are often revealed (the pro-union character is named Squeeze, the pro...

I don’t see many horror films. Part of this is due to films like Hereditary that scare the living daylights out of me, as I, like many normal people, don’t often choose to scare myself. A larger portion of my aversion to the genre, perhaps, is the reputation mainstream horror films have these days. Especially when looking at Blumhouse-produced films, they are plain garbage. The characters make the worst possible decisions every time they have a choice presented to them simply to drive them into a terrible situation that will somehow kill them mercilessly with blood and gore everywhere, and often the scares used are cheap gimmickry and fake jump scares that do nothing but relieve the audience and bore them into their seats. Seeing Unfriended: Dark Web yielded almost that exact response from me. I was either laughing or scoffing at this movie for all of its eighty-eight minutes because of how ridiculously stupid its characters are. It made me furious yet enthused because Dark W...

Having just come from Infinity War , the Marvel Cinematic Universe is reeling. The film with the largest scope and greatest stakes (along with arguably the franchise’s most menacing villain) has left all fans in a sort of mourning period. I saw that film twice in theaters, and because of its weight I felt like I needed a bit of space to process all the consequences of its insane climax. That’s part of what makes the franchise’s next entry both fitting and puzzling. Ant-Man and the Wasp takes a completely different tone than Infinity War , and that split my opinion of it. I appreciate that it does not have the large stakes and scale of most MCU films, but at the same time it also feels unimportant and almost like filler. In a similar manner to the first ­ Ant-Man film, its lightweight nature undermines its own sense of self-importance but in an even worse context for such a film because it follows a much grimmer installment. I know that that might be a strange area of criticis...

I grew up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood more mornings than not. My mom probably remembers it better than I do, but from what I can recall I loved the show in my early childhood. In retrospect, Fred Rogers’s demeanor was probably a big part of that; the man was warm, compassionate, and more sophisticated than many of the other main characters of the other shows I watched alongside his. One of the questions that has sat in my mind about Rogers, though, is whether he was like the man on the show. To have that kind of demeanor in everyday life would completely shock me in the cynical, jaded world in which we live. The documentary on Rogers’s life Won’t You Be My Neighbor? answers this question of many with a resounding “yes.” This film is overwhelmingly optimistic yet not without a sense of grounded realism that Rogers himself possessed. It feels exactly like Fred Rogers the character which, it asserts quite confidently, was Fred Rogers the man. Instead of focusing ...

Sicario has grown on me since I first saw it a couple years ago. It is even more timely now than it was then, casting moral ambiguity onto the War on Drugs and its fallout around the U.S.-Mexico border. With its beautiful yet bleak composition from director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer/legend Roger Deakins and excellent performances from Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, and Josh Brolin, that film asks a lot of questions about grey areas and, due to its construction, lets each individual audience member answer them. That’s the biggest difference between that film and its sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado : while in some respects it does keep pace with its predecessor, its treatment of its events’ moral standing leaves a lot to be desired. We view the actions of Alejandro Gillick (del Toro) and Matt Graver (Brolin) through the lens of Blunt’s Kate Macer, an outsider who is seeing all these grisly, gruesome acts for the first time. She bears the emotional weight of the fi...

As I have become an adult, the first Incredibles movie has grown on me quite a lot. I began to realize how deep-seated its themes are and how many mature issues it tackles for an animated film; there is something special about how animated films like this can allow one’s guard to drop and communicate some heavy messages to the non-children in the room. A sequel has seemed like a pipe dream for so long that I was almost in disbelief when the announcement was made that Incredibles 2 was entering production and would be released in 2018. I think it is safe to assume that few people were nervous about this film ruining its predecessor; Pixar has done a highly serviceable job with its most beloved properties’ long-awaited sequels ( Toy Story 3 and Finding Dory being prime examples), and the return of nearly every component involved in the original eased my mind that much more. I wanted to see the return of that impeccable family dynamic that was often more enticing than the acti...

What is the Jurassic Park franchise, and what should it be? Those two questions are sitting at the front of my mind the morning after watching the fifth installment in this series, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom . Sleeping on this movie was not a good idea; instead of being ambivalent as I was last night, I am now deeply concerned that this franchise is not going to continue being one of my more anticipated summer movie events as it has been for both this film and Jurassic World . The predominant problem with watching Fallen Kingdom is structure and pacing. It appears like two separate movies were put together end to end and played as the final product. The first half revolves around getting the dinosaurs off the island of Isla Nublar, saving the animals from its active volcano, while the second half turns into a gothic horror-esque monster movie that is tonally inconsistent by itself. These distinct aesthetics and tones make the finished film nothing more than a bridge b...

There is something about Wes Anderson’s filmmaking that ensnares me. I cannot say if it is his meticulous method, his whimsical and dry humor, or his ability to tell parable-like stories about human nature; whatever the case, his unique technique makes me love every single one of his films – even the lesser ones are still highly enjoyable.  Isle of Dogs is no different in that respect; the film's style has the same overtly charming effect on me as all of Anderson's other works. I reveled in the experience of seeing one of his films in a theater for the first time. My question going into the film was what Isle of Dogs would do to make itself different from the other films in Anderson's catalog and whether those differences would benefit or hinder the   final product. The biggest difference is the setting; Anderson has not set any of his films in the Far East yet, the closest being The Darjeeling Limited in India. Placing the story in Japan with many Japanese char...

I was raised in a conservative evangelical Christian household in a suburb-like small city. Currently, I am pursuing a degree at a moderate Christian university for the purpose of pursuing a career in full-time church work and have worked in churches for this summer and the previous two. In the past couple years since going to school, I have experienced several crises of juxtaposition in my faith, pitting beliefs I have had since I was a child against a more “liberal” or “secular” understanding and being surprised when realizing that the two were not contrary but could be complementary. The juxtaposition at the crux of this wrestling has been that between faith and doubt, how the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty (or, more damningly, self-sufficiency). I say this to show why a film like First Reformed resonated with every fiber of my being. It is a treatise on the difference between facades of authenticity and the real thing, and it uses the supposed tension between...

Upgrade really, really, really tries to be smart. It knows that it has the confines of a familiar story arc of a man seeking revenge for the killing of his wife. It knows it has a small budget which means it cannot do anything too ambitious. It knows that it needs to have an aesthetic like films much more intelligent and meaningful than itself. Upgrade knows something else, too: it has a get-out-of-jail-free card inside the mind of its protagonist. And that makes it one of the laziest films I have seen this year. STEM, the computer implanted in the protagonist Grey’s spinal cord, can do whatever it wants to with Grey’s body if he gives it permission to do so. We see this happen near the beginning of the second act in a fight scene that caught me by surprise with its tone and fun cinematography, both of which were altered dramatically from the moments before it. As scenes like this began to make a pattern, however, my mind began to see how the script was using STEM as...

Horror films have two main ways of scaring their audiences. The more conventional option is to hold the audience in suspense by what they do not see coming, scaring the audience by the surprise factor of the scare itself. This is an easy, no-risk way of building tension that many good mainstream horror films put to frequent but satisfying use. The less-utilized method, and my favorite, is by telegraphing what is going to happen and let the audience fear come from the knowledge of the inevitable or from the danger most likely to come. This requires far more skill to execute properly, but when done so – a la Stanley Kubrick’s immortal classic The Shining – there is an ambiguity to the audience’s fear that makes the whole film creepy and unsettling because there is no indication to whether something should be feared. Hereditary falls firmly into the latter category, and that is why it is the most disturbing horror film I have seen in quite some time. It uses almost no cheap ...

Solo is the first Star Wars movie where I just don’t care. This isn’t because of franchise fatigue or because it irreparably damages the franchise in any way or because it is a lesser achievement in filmmaking than the other entries in the series: Solo cannot stake any claim of coming close to these faults. No, my apathy towards this film is due to how much it bores me. There is nothing of consequence – either good or bad – to the Star Wars franchise, and there is nothing stunningly good or atrociously bad regarding the filmmaking. Solo takes not one risk in its 135-minute runtime, and it feels just as bland as that statement makes it out to be. The largest contributor to this is the film’s character development. Instead of being an origin story of how Han came to be the scruffy-looking nerf herder to who we are introduced in A New Hope , he shows up already being that character in the first five minutes, taking away any tension or anticipation for the character’s ar...

What a ride. What a dark, depressing, riveting ride. I had very few expectations going into You Were Never Really Here . The story, characters, and aim – all were mysteries to me. After seeing it, I have never been happier that that has been the case. This film is shocking, brutal, and just an overall rough emotional experience. It also tells a story of sex trafficking that is too real to be ignored, and my guess is that is the main point this movie tries to get across. You Were Never Really Here mirrors themes of and comments on some recent events in the news like the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, focusing on how the rich and powerful can do anything they want to just about anybody – (horrifyingly) including 13-year-old girls. I was almost brought to tears several times in this hour and twenty-five-minute film because I realized how unfortunately realistic this story might be. The film has a great voice behind it in Lynne Ramsay’s direction. She often takes a slower han...

Yikes. I don’t typically like tame studio comedies, but I don’t usually hate them either. They have very little weight or originality, but because they lack both of those they also do not offend in the jokes or subject matter all that often, making them lackluster yet forgettably so. I Feel Pretty , unfortunately, feels quite ugly: it manages to be both unfunny and cringeworthy in its handling of subject at the same time. I do not know what compelled the writers of this film to craft it in the way they did, but it does not work at all. One of the most puzzling things about the film is how it undermines the entire aim of the film. From the marketing I saw, I Feel Pretty was supposed to be an uplifting film for people who do not have the body type they might desire and therefore lacking self-esteem. Instead, almost all of the jokes made in the film are at the expense of Amy Schumer’s body type, as she thinks after hitting her head hard that she is “more attractive” than she ...

Lean on Pete is somehow bleak yet beautiful. I was taken aback by how brutal this film is to its protagonist. Charley’s life as shown in the film does not start too great, and when life begins to hit him with blow after blow, taking one thing he loves after another away from him, it begins to become almost depressing. By the end of the film, Charley has almost nothing to continue living for – and the fact that he is just fifteen years old and has seen more life than most middle-aged adults I know makes that all the more heartbreaking. He finds a companion in the titular Pete for a while, becoming attached to this aging racehorse; and when he takes Pete’s future into his own hands and runs away with him, it is done with such poeticism and such little dialogue that makes it resonate incredibly well. As good as the film continues to be after that moment, Lean on Pete begins to show its flaws not long after. As events transpire on Charley and Pete’s journey, everything starts...

Infinity War is the Empire Strikes Back of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is a comparison made quite often – not just for this film, but for nearly every franchise. At some point, every gritty sequel will be likened to the practical perfection of Empire and its usurping of its predecessor’s formula. Whether this is deserved or not is a contentious subject with the fans of whatever franchise falls prey to the discussion. With the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though, Infinity War fits the mold perfectly. For the first time in these nineteen films, the stakes are real and not contrived by an incompetent villain. For the first time, the villain is a true psychopathic terror that gets true sympathy that can even approach empathy. For the first time (at least in an Avengers film), this group of god-like beings feels truly threatened by the antagonist, incapable of stopping them. There’s other parallels to be made for sure – like how both Infinity War and Empire split up ...

Manchester by the Sea makes me grieve. This is a powerful tale of emotion, a tale of life being so relentlessly brutal in the blows it deals – and in how often a single man can be reminded of those blows. It is a real film – real in the way it portrays the process of grief, the desensitization it causes to the outside world, real in the motivations and reactions its characters have. It all starts with Kenneth Lonergan. The writer-director shows here his uncanny intuition for sculpting characters in respectful, complex, and subtle ways. Manchester does not have one scene out of place: every moment has purpose and builds something into the story. Sometimes films like this one can become bloated due to their complicated character building and the many necessary subplots for doing so, but that is not the case here. In fact, as the film went on and introduced more elements I longed for all of them to be explored more – which does happen – just because these characters became s...

Blockers is surprising. I didn’t expect most of the things I got from this seemingly conventional comedy. It has a surprising amount of heart and great cast chemistry, though not between who you might think. This is a type of film that for me rarely rises above mediocre, but upon leaving the theater I was quite entertained. The thing that sold me throughout Blockers was the three girls. They aren’t the central characters, but every scene they are in stole the show. I don’t know whether it was the writing or the acting, but either way these girls had incredible chemistry on screen that made me believe every word of dialogue they said. Kathryn Newton, Geraldine Viswanathan, and Gideon Adlon do so much to ensure that I only see their characters on screen, and for actresses this young and this new to the game, that is quite an impressive feat. The rest of the cast is fine, but the lead adults can at times overstay their welcome. John Cena is the one that proves his worth ...

If A Quiet Place has taught me anything, it is the importance of good sound design. This is a highly effective horror film for a lot of reasons, but the way it uses sound to its advantage creates such a tense atmosphere that I won’t be forgetting soon. It is almost entirely silent with few portions of spoken dialogue. The production team tried to make very little noise so that every on-camera sound could be amplified in post-production, and it paid off. Because the suddenly loud noises are so loud and because we know that the creatures in the film are only attracted by these kinds of sudden noises, every time those sounds occur the tension instantly goes up. It is a perfect setup for a lot of good jump scares, but it also lends itself to the character development. One of the children of the family focused on is deaf, and when the film is from her perspective all the on-set sound goes away, giving us some very suspenseful and even emotional moments. In fact, A Quiet Place ...