Category: TV and Film

Here are my reactions to finally watching the Matt Reeves Batman movie (2022).

1) Pattinson was good.

I didn’t expect him to be, because my main familiarity is from the Twilight stuff and even he hates that. He’s a decent actor and he put it to work here. I did feel like he was a little young, though. First time I’ve watched a lead Batman who was younger than me and that might be why.

2) I want that Batmobile.

Muscle Car with a Rocket Engine is an awesome version of the Batmobile.

3) Creepy serial killer Riddler was an interesting interpretation of that villain…

Certainly more palatable than the green suit and question marks, they didn’t force it, it just worked.

4)…until they made him a violent 4Channer.

Yeah, that whole bit where he was streaming and convincing other disaffected men to go on a shooting spree was too on-the-nose. If this were real life, the Riddler would turn out to be a fedposter.

5) Great score and ambience.

It certainly set the mood for grit and grunge, without feeling overly stylized or bogus. The photography was excellent and the fight scenes didn’t have a ton of cutting, like in other movies.

6) Plot was a little too convoluted when it all wrapped up.

I like that Detective Batman made some mistakes as he tried to untangle this tangled web. That said, it was all a little crazy when you get to the end and realize it was just the Riddler trying to goad a bunch of his bros into doing a mass shooting (why?)

7) Don’t drop F-bombs in a Batman movie.

I hated that they did this in a Transformers movie in 2014. Do not keep pushing this envelope.

8) Don’t make a Batman movie that’s as long as a LOTR movie but slower than a Hobbit movie.

This movie is inexcusably three hours long.

9) A few too many current-dayisms snuck in.

They of course had to have Bisexual Catwoman get in a line about priveleged white guys, which never became an issue elsewhere in the story. It just served to signal to the kind of people who don’t actually go to superhero movies. “Oh look we hate wypipo too!” Stop it.

Stunning and Brave Flawless Mayor Candidate was kind of a nag. “Hey Bruce, why aren’t you doing anything like your parents did??!” How about you shut up.

Anyway, overall it was good. Above Batfleck in terms of the performance and stuff, but Nolan is still king of the mountain.

…but I might give it a shot. Some guy at Church called me “the Viking guy” because he couldn’t remember my name. I’ll take it.

Have you watched? Was it good? Worth the time? Nothing new is any good, so I’m curious.

Aiight so hey, Michael Rosenbaum and Tom Welling started a podcast, because that’s what part-time celebrity actors do these days, especially if they were on a successful TV show more than a decade ago.

Admittedly I’ve been following it because it takes me back to some of the fun that I had whilst watching Smallville in my teens. It’s also a hilarious look at the absolute kitsch and schmalz that formed a huge part of my identity at age 17. I laugh so that I do not cringe.

Anyway, this week I showed my wife the first two episodes. It just validates what Tanner Guzy said, about how a present version of yourself should always be able to beat up on a past version of yourself.

I want to go find 17 year-old Graham, running on the treadmill at 24Hr Fitness with his Discman, playing CDs that he burned off of WinMX, listening to teenage emotional rage music, and tell him what an absolutely unqualified P***Y HE IS so that he will look back at those workouts 20 years later, in his house with his wife and kids and dog and Hemi Durango, and just laugh.

Though I supposed I’m already there, so thanks, Present Graham.

And I say that with all affection.

Legitimately, I like the dude. I have yet to see a movie where he wasn’t likeable. Granted I haven’t seen all his movies, so who knows.

The wife and I watched The Lost City last week and it was really funny. Movies about writers tend to really exaggerate the headaches we deal with, but they do it for dramatic and comedic chops, which is kind of the point of the format.

What I didn’t know is that cover models are a huge deal in romance, and they have their own cultish followings. Tatum plays a cover model for Sandra Bullock’s character, Loretta.

There’s some raunchy humor in it here and there, but overall it’s pretty clever for its genre, and a lot of fun. Channing Tatum, who IRL got his start modeling and dancing, basically spends the whole movie playing Channing Tatum, just a little bit dumber. At the same time you can tell he’s playing it straight and taking it seriously, and the effort makes the movie watchable. Plus the dude is jacked, and I respect that.

He was in the running to play Captain America before Marvel handed it to Evans. He was supposed to be Gambit years ago, but Fox is morally opposed to making good X-Men movies since Days of Future Past, so who knows what will happen. But I liked him in this one and you should watch it.

Took the wife to see Maverick last night, and it was awesome the second time–despite being stuck between a cussy meathead on my left, and a Latino couple on the right, the woman of whom had never seen Top Gun, and was asking her boyfriend in Spanish the whole time WTF was going on.

Anyway, I’ve griped about this before and I will yet gripe about it in the future. SDCC is going on this week so Disney is blasting out its ongoing comic book desecration project known as Marvel Phases Four Through Six.

Pretty much everything else coming out this year is a sequel or spinoff of something that was good before and is just tired now. Top Gun is of course a 1980s American staple, but it’s the rare exception that got a late sequel which didn’t suck. The Mission: Impossible movies are adding a two-part finale that starts next year, and I’ll probably see it because those movies are predictably exciting. But by the time that series wraps, it will have been in cinemas off and on for 28 years. 0_0

I’m not even wasting time on superhero movies on streaming services anymore. I could watch them for free in my car on the way to work and I still won’t do it. I’m just done. And that’s increasingly the case with movie theaters in general. It’s all too corporate, too calculated, too much of the same thing digested and discarded over and over again.

What’s some older stuff I should watch? Drop me some recs. Hopefully American cinema gets its act together.

It’s only natural that we watch one of the most important American documentaries ever on an annual basis. But there are others, too.

I’m always partial to these classic Schulz cartoons as long as Frank Welker is in there somewhere doing a voice.

Haven’t seen either of these. I’m curious about Saints and Strangers, and I’ve heard good things about Sons of Liberty.

And hey, speaking of the Sons, check out this Disney classic. It’s pro-America so they won’t put it on their streaming service, because NO BALLS.

Check out this song from the movie. It SLAAAAAAAAAPS.

What else do you watch leading up to ID4?

Really freaking good movie. Why?

Lots of reasons.

–It’s a 36-year sequel to a classic from the 80s that neither negates, retcons, or destablizes its predecessor.

–While we don’t find out what happened with Pete and Charlie, we get enough context on Pete and Penny to know that she’s one of his other frequent flames from the intervening years.

–Tom Cruise is still a fun actor to watch

–The action scenes were incredible, and full of tension.

–Jeez, Miles Teller can act? Never saw that before.

–The respect for Val Kilmer and the way they worked him into the movie was superb. Bro has throat cancer IRL and apparently has to feed himself with a tube these days.

–I’m a sucker for multigenerational stories, especially when they’re done well. Rooster’s similarities to Goose were a little on-the-nose at times, but they had to be, I think; this is a dude who was a little kid in the first movie, lost his dad as a child, and now his mother’s gone. He’s clinging to what’s most important to him (his family) and that comes through beautifully over and over.

–Maverick and Rooster teaming up to overcome their greatest interpersonal obstacles in the third act is a thing of beauty. I’m so starved for good, masculine characters in popular entertainment these days. This was a bro movie for bros and bro-ettes alike.

–Zero postmodern politics is an absolute plus in the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-two. Kudos to them for keeping it out of the film.

I’ll leave you with Drinker’s video, with the usual content warning for strong language.