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Cookie's Corner - Year 1

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lol I knew the streak had to stop somewhere - I would like to clarify a few details, however, and I apologize if they weren't clear enough in the movie.

 

Oliver is basically the founder of the time travel support group - there really hasn't been much in that field before the events of the movie hit. Months literally pass before he's in the group. Should have made clearer where Oliver was getting the money though.

 

Because the time travel services are so widespread, they usually offer competitively low prices. Sarah's snarky foursqure line was also a comment on how poorly run the other center was. I wanted to add a point where Oliver eventually resorted to stealing money from his parents (okay, I can see how they're a-holes haha), but figured it might have been overkill.

 

eh, you can't win em all, haha. Your review was amusing. 

 

 

 

 

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28 minutes ago, spaghetti! said:

lol I knew the streak had to stop somewhere - I would like to clarify a few details, however, and I apologize if they weren't clear enough in the movie.

 

Oliver is basically the founder of the time travel support group - there really hasn't been much in that field before the events of the movie hit. Months literally pass before he's in the group. Should have made clearer where Oliver was getting the money though.

And yet there are enough time travel institutions that one can exist only one hour away from the other. There are places with greater distances between abortion clinics than this setting has between time travel institutions, so why time travel addiction hasn't come up before the events of the movie is kinda odd.

 

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Because the time travel services are so widespread, they usually offer competitively low prices. Sarah's snarky foursqure line was also a comment on how poorly run the other center was.
 

 

 

This reinforces my point about the idiot ball. Sarah, Mike and Edmund should have stopped Oliver from going there in the first place if they already know what the risk is. But they let him go without even considering the possibility that Oliver would try something like that, leading to Sarah conveniently realizing "oh shit, we probably shouldn't have that done that".

 

And I went through the plot again. The movie never clarifies that the other time travel institution is poorly run (other than the baffling lack of background checks).

 

 

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I wanted to add a point where Oliver eventually resorted to stealing money from his parents (okay, I can see how they're a-holes haha), but figured it might have been overkill.
 

 

 

 

That would solve the issue I had with him being able to afford the procedure (especially since he was fired from his internship halfway through the movie) and exemplify his desperation. You should've kept it.

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Dawn of Extinction

 

Had the potential to be a fun dino B-movie but it doesn't do anything outlandish enough to make itself stand out. Catch it on the Syfy channel.

 

C-

 

 

Signed in Blood

 

This is Terminator with robots and time travel switched out with gangsters and a stoic hitman. Most of the movie is just one long chase so if you're looking for a date night movie and read my review of Seeing Her you can do worse. :P

 

C+

 

 

Rabbids, the Big Adventure

 

I'm going to admit upfront that I'm on a forgiving streak for Ubisoft's Rabbids franchise due to the recent success of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle so I'm not going in as harsh from the outset as some other critics have been. Plus the Mario plushie that appears in the movie is a kinda cute tribute.

 

But then I found out that this follows the same formula as those crappy Smurfs movies with the Rabbids instead of the Smurfs and I almost immediately zoned out. To its credit I don't think the movie does anything harmful to kids brains or assault adults with especially egregious shit, but it's pretty much kids only.

 

C

 

 

Salem's Lot

 

I'm just gonna place this here:

 

 

But really, the only difference is that the movie drops its lame payoff early (it's vampires!) and it's just a bunch of killing from there. You'd be better off reading one of King's other books instead.

 

C-

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10 minutes ago, Alpha said:

8 straight Cs in a row.

 

And I thought I was too strict this year. :P

I didn't intend it to go this way, really. I went into Seeing Her wanting to love it but by the end I was all

 

giphy-downsized-large.gif

 

Hopefully the summer releases can bring the scores up a bit.

 

Edit: Also you have to pretty bad to earn a score lower than C- from me so take that as consolation.

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As to Séance - I thought it was pretty obvious only Amanda's ghost was real. It's mentioned multiple times before the twist that she's the only ghost anyone but Myra actually sees. As to the car crash thing - the end of the movie is the very next morning. He's been gone for less than 12 hours, and she quite explicitly does not like him anyway. I will admit however that I should have been more explicit in saying the car rolled off into the woods or something though so it wasn't found, I guess I just sort of took that for granted in my head for some reason :P

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2 hours ago, cookie said:

And yet there are enough time travel institutions that one can exist only one hour away from the other. There are places with greater distances between abortion clinics than this setting has between time travel institutions, so why time travel addiction hasn't come up before the events of the movie is kinda odd.

 

 

This reinforces my point about the idiot ball. Sarah, Mike and Edmund should have stopped Oliver from going there in the first place if they already know what the risk is. But they let him go without even considering the possibility that Oliver would try something like that, leading to Sarah conveniently realizing "oh shit, we probably shouldn't have that done that".

 

And I went through the plot again. The movie never clarifies that the other time travel institution is poorly run (other than the baffling lack of background checks).

 

 

 

 

That would solve the issue I had with him being able to afford the procedure (especially since he was fired from his internship halfway through the movie) and exemplify his desperation. You should've kept it.

Time travel had been a relatively quiet process, especially as it wasn't so much  advertised as time travel as it was memory retrieval. It was used for arbitrary purposes, such as remembering where you left your keys. It was rarely every tried to create a new timeline. The things that Oliver had done were rarely tried before. That's sort of why the three weren't too concerned....at first.

 

They did eventually cut him off once they felt concerned. The three didn't know truly what Oliver was going through, but he felt happy and excited at their center, so things did seem fine. I supposed there is some moral ambiguity to whether or not they should have let him in for the first place, but the way I see it, they assumed they could cut him off once things seemed to be going too far. It's somewhat implied that once everything ends time travel will be a LOT more controlled.

 

I should have made clear a lot of these details to leave few ends unclear with regards to the time travel. It can definitely be a can of worms to open up. If you weren't as hot on the movie, that's still fine with me.

 

P.S. I did have a line in there where it's mentioned that Oliver's job paid surprisingly well. But that was a minor detail even I forgot about about, haha

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4 hours ago, spaghetti! said:

Time travel had been a relatively quiet process, especially as it wasn't so much  advertised as time travel as it was memory retrieval. It was used for arbitrary purposes, such as remembering where you left your keys. It was rarely every tried to create a new timeline. The things that Oliver had done were rarely tried before. That's sort of why the three weren't too concerned....at first.

Time travel would never be a quiet process if it's available publicly. If that's what the movie was going for then I'm sorry but that just raises further questions. Word of mouth alone would have transcended advertising. In Back to the Future it was just one nutso scientist, here it's a business big enough to spawn multiple competing institutions. There would have already been government regulations up the wazoo with these things. And this is even contradicted by the movie, the name of the institution is "BRIDGEVIEW MALL TIME TRAVEL SERVICES". Kinda hard to make it a quiet process when it's in your name.

 

It circles back to my original complaints about the idiot ball and the whiplashing tone. Had this been set up as a screwball comedy from the start I wouldn't have cared at all, but it wasn't.

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Except it isn't exactly time travel - of course it would cause a gigantic fuss if it were legitimate time travel and not just a way to look back on past memories - part of the fun, I had initially thought, would be to have it be newish and exciting, yet mundane enough to show up in strip malls next to grocery stores and Chinese restaurants. The time travel stuff in the company name was little more than a marketing ploy, in a sense. I figure that's a bit of a cop out, but even then the scientists explain how their process isn't quite time travel at the star.

 

I will admit that the film could have used some additional explanation and focus about the time travel, and it would have been a bit more popular than I had described in the film, but I think a lot of this came from me writing it as a romantic comedy/drama first and and as a sci-fi movie second. 

 

But I digress, I just hope you like the rest of my Y1 fare more. :) 

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Final Caveat: The film was originally released in CAYOM 2.0 in Y7, and the film was virtually unchanged except for the ending and the cast/crew. I was admittedly shocked as to how well it was received here, given how it generally got a few positive mentions but not much more in its initial form.

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1 hour ago, spaghetti! said:

Except it isn't exactly time travel - of course it would cause a gigantic fuss if it were legitimate time travel and not just a way to look back on past memories - part of the fun, I had initially thought, would be to have it be newish and exciting, yet mundane enough to show up in strip malls next to grocery stores and Chinese restaurants. The time travel stuff in the company name was little more than a marketing ploy, in a sense. I figure that's a bit of a cop out, but even then the scientists explain how their process isn't quite time travel at the star.

 

I will admit that the film could have used some additional explanation and focus about the time travel, and it would have been a bit more popular than I had described in the film, but I think a lot of this came from me writing it as a romantic comedy/drama first and and as a sci-fi movie second. 

 

But I digress, I just hope you like the rest of my Y1 fare more. :) 

I'm going to make a final post about this, then I'll be moving on: It is time travel. Oliver would not be able to change things and create a separate timeline if it was simply memory retrieval. It's not Total Recall where he emerges with a fake memory. The only limitation I could see was that Oliver could only stay in that timeline as long as the machine was powered, and every time Oliver goes back to use the machine again he's in the timeline he created. If it was simply memory retrieval all that would happen was that he'd go back to the same point in time again and again and he wouldn't collide with another Oliver when he went over to the other institution. And if disrupting the universe is as simple as going to a second location then yes I stand by my point that the handlers should've thought this through, especially if it's common enough to appear in strip malls plus there'd be far stricter rules about this.

 

You were on the right track when Oliver's life and state of mind in the original timeline collapses as he keeps hopping back and forth. Really the last third of the movie should've just been about that IMO. But when the second institution is introduced and the consequences of that become apparent the movie falls apart in my view. But everybody else seems to love it so I'm well aware I'm in the minority here.

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The Defiler

 

Like Séance it has a few neat twists and turns with an altogether better executed third act, even if it gets pretty silly with the "everyone you knew is part of the cult!" twist. Plus the downer ending is honestly a bit of a shame since all we get from that is a cheap jump scare at the end. Still the monsters and gore are imaginative and well executed plus there's a few decent scares even if some of them get a bit goofy.

 

B-

 

 

He-Man

 

And the Masters of the Origin Story!

 

I appreciate this more than BraveStarr and Captain Planet among Gold Crescent Pictures' 80s cartoon adaptations because it forgoes the snark and actually takes the material seriously, with some levity thrown in when it's appropriate. That said if you showed up for a lot of He-Man action you're probably gonna be a bit disappointed. Adam doesn't transform into He-Man until the end of the second act and he really doesn't do anything with his powers until the final battle. Most of the movie before that is a long stretch of exposition with some scenes of character development and at times it gets a bit tedious. The movie tries to work around this by cutting back to Skeletor mucking things up every now and then but when the title character doesn't get in on the action until the third act you're left with a bit of a case of the blue balls. Still, the visuals are nice, the cast holds up decently, even the newcomer in the lead role isn't half bad. Go in with some adjusted expectations and you'll have a fun time.

 

B/B-

 

 

A Love To Die For

 

This movie kinda saves itself on the strength of it's middle portion, because the setup and ultimate payoff doesn't make a whole lot of sense (why go through such a convoluted plan with the game tickets when you could have just snatched Dennison from any random street if you needed him to pull off the heist at his firm anyway? What if somebody else had gotten the tickets? Would there have been a forced lesbian relationship if it was a woman?). When it's just the characters hanging around the chemistry between them is what elevates it. Date night audiences who can forgive the sketchy beginnings and ends will enjoy it.

 

B-/C+

 

 

PЯom

 

This is the first act of a slasher movie where the slasher never arrives. Boy do I wish he did. The characters are alternatingly stupid or annoying, the jokes aren't funny and there are some weird scenes throughout (apparently the hillbillies don't have any cars they can lend them to get to resort with so instead they get a raft). And being PG-13 the jokes don't go far enough for fans of crude high school comedies like this to find much enjoyment. Just wait for the summer movies, they're a week away.

 

D+

 

 

The Trail

 

This is one of those direct-to-DVD slasher movies that somehow got a theatrical release. I was asking for a slasher to show up and slay the characters in Prom but seeing this piece of shit I honestly prefer their company. The characters aren't even annoying, they're non-existent, and the killer just does what he does without much rhyme or reason. Again, wait for summer.

 

D-

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1 hour ago, cookie said:

I appreciate this more than BraveStarr and Captain Planet among Gold Crescent Pictures' 80s cartoon adaptations

Just small point of fact - BraveStarr and Captain Planet were both MV Pictures films

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1 hour ago, cookie said:

 

A Love To Die For

 

This movie kinda saves itself on the strength of it's middle portion, because the setup and ultimate payoff doesn't make a whole lot of sense (why go through such a convoluted plan with the game tickets when you could have just snatched Dennison from any random street if you needed him to pull off the heist at his firm anyway? What if somebody else had gotten the tickets? Would there have been a forced lesbian relationship if it was a woman?). When it's just the characters hanging around the chemistry between them is what elevates it. Date night audiences who can forgive the sketchy beginnings and ends will enjoy it.

 

B-/C+

 

 

 

To answer the lesbian question.....:redcapes:

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Then again, @cookie, you kinda helped me to realize a general weakness within my films: I often tend to put characters in more complicated or vague situations when a more coherent and rational alternative usually exists - a lot of the time it can boil down to me not really giving films more than one draft.

 

I'm low key dreading your Spark Rising review, but it could give me a lot of good pointers of where to go with the sequels, as well as general writing advice for future films.

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Among the Serpents

 

I don't think IMAX would want their names displayed so prominently in this when it's about a camera crew being pursued and one of them murdered by cartels. For what it is it's well-shot and at times exciting, but giving the characters no identities outside of their job descriptions I think was a major misstep.

 

C+

 

 

Chrono Trigger

 

You're forcing me to use this quote from the second worst Transformers movie. That is how bad this is.

 

 

First of all, Ryan Gosling is way miscast in this. I looked it up, the character in the game is supposed to be seventeen. Sure, you can generously bump that up to eighteen or a little bit past twenty, but does Ryan Gosling look convincing in that role either way? I doubt it.

 

This is one of the worst kinds of video game adaptation. It is deathly afraid of cutting anything while adapting the game and what you get as a result is a whole semester's worth of sidetracking in the span of two hours. That leaves no time for any character development or any world-building when you get down to it. By the first third I was annoyed, halfway through I was angry and by the last third I was just numb and bored. If the movie didn't want to make any sacrifices it really should have been split into multiple parts. In the end this is one of the worst movies of the summer. It takes one of the greatest RPGs of all time and by cramming such a dense story into so little time it reduces the whole thing into a pile of unrecognizable mush. Stay away, people.

 

D

 

 

Mara, Daughter of the Nile

 

This is a decent palate cleanser after the horrors that were the last film we looked at. Sofia Boutella steals the show as the lead even if her character isn't especially deep. Couple that with some nice set pieces (although the film's budget could have been upped a bit to allow more visual spectacle) and a good supporting cast it's an engaging drama even if it's mostly all surface-level.

 

B

 

 

Blood and Fur

 

This is one hell of a wacky movie, but that makes it all the more entertaining. I was at first afraid that it was going to equate the furries with the neo-nazis in a "haha, look how stupid both of them are!" but the movie fortunately avoids that by siding with the furries. Seeing alt-right assholes get their comeuppance in humorously gory ways plus a hilarious turn by Al Pacino never gets old, and for the first time this year I felt the urge to applaud as the credits came up. This is a midnight movie for the ages.

 

A-

 

 

Operation MegaSquad

 

Andrew Garfield is surprisingly fun as the film's goofy antagonist, but other than that it feels fairly standard. It reminded me of G.I Joe in a lot of ways, and not just because the director worked on Retaliation. The low budget forgoes us any real visual spectacle unfortunately. It's a Netflix rental at best to be honest, nothing you need to rush out to see.

 

C+

 

 

The Ultimate Prank

 

Holy hell was this mean-spirited. Miguel Arteta must hate the human race because this just got uncomfortable by the end. I can't recommend this to anyone, least of all kids - in fact if you see your kid watch this snap the DVD and give them a stern talking to about respecting other human beings.

 

D-

 

 

Brandybrook

 

I owe Chrono Trigger and The Ultimate Prank an apology. Hell, I owe Uwe Boll an apology. THIS is the worst movie of the summer and so far the worst movie of the year... but in fairness, I think it wants to be.

 

It's deliberately designed to get a reaction out of you. Every racist, sexist, ableist and homophobic joke is in here. Seth MacFarlane has clearly given up. This shit makes the worst of Family Guy look tasteful by comparison.  Even the one potentially promising angle (the subplot about the lesbian couple) is squandered spectacularly by the end after you're assaulted by a barrage of homophobic gags to get there.

 

And it's really horrible too because I know Seth MacFarlane can be funny. I think American Dad is still funny. The first Ted is pretty good. But when he doesn't give a shit and just wants to troll you, man does it get bad. I hope the cast of Blood and Fur show up to massacre the cast of this. I hope Voltron kicks MacFarlane in his dangly balls. I'd rather watch any of the godawful Family Guy ripoffs that came in the wake of its popularity. I'd rather watch that shitawful sitcom MacFarlane made a few years back that was canceled after one season. Every person who's in this should be blacklisted from Hollywood for a year. Owen Wilson is getting a stern talking to when he begins his promotional tour for Sailing Champion.

 

I've got nothing else, people. Fuck this movie.

 

F-

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