I’d not heard of Skin when it made it’s way to me, but the topic of a reformed white supremacist in today’s racially charged world with the backing of A24, I was interested to see how it played out. While I can see what the film is going for, I think it’s missing a few key steps in making the whole thing work properly.
Going into Booksmart, I’d had the film on the edge of my radar, mostly due to it being the directorial debut of Olivia Wilde, the strong reviews and was being touted as the female Superbad. This was a description I later found out was more apt than I initially thought with one of the lead actresses being Jonah Hill’s sister – but had I not been given a free ticket to see the film early, I might have waited before checking this one out. Instead, I’m going to use this platform to tell people to go out there and see this film because it’s a hilarious, dirty, and an unclichéd look into female friendships and the life of a modern high-school student that deserves more than just being called the female Superbad.
For obvious reasons, this review is going to spoil Infinity War, so if you haven’t seen that yet get on it. I’ll try my best not to spoil Avengers: Endgame, but a lot of shit happens in the set-up that I can’t talk about so consider this a MILD SPOILER WARNING, just in case I let anything slip.
I’m not sure how this review is gonna go down because a large part of me is still trying to decipher this film. After Get Out, I was very much looking forward to more of what Peele had to bring to the horror circuit and Us looked like another winner. My initial thoughts though were good, but flawed, and yet after doing some reading I’m slowly coming around to the film. I still think that Jordan Peele is one of the most interesting voices to come out of modern horror and he’s got plenty more to say, but Us might cause a bit of rift when people talk about him.
I might have eventually got around to watching the first Happy Death Day, but amazingly enough it was the announcement of the sequel title, Happy Death Day 2U that made me seek it out because I figured a sequel title with that level of tongue-in-cheek humor must be alright. I really enjoyed the first movie thanks largely in part to Jessica Rothe’s star-making performance, so I was all in for the sequel and having now seen it, I’m happy to say it lives up to the original, not better, but if you liked the first then there’s every chance you’ll like this one too.
Despite not having revisited it since my initial viewing I have good memories of the first Pacific Rim, it managed to capture the awe-inspiring nature of watching giant robots fight giant monsters. The less than stellar reviews for the sequel had me disheartened, but enough goodwill had carried over and I was willing to give Uprising a shot.
Turns out I probably shouldn’t have.
There’s a lot of value in a name, if I see a movie called Hobo With A Shotgun, I know that I’m probably in for something violent, something ridiculous, and something fun. Or if I see a movie called 2 Fast 2 Furious, I know it’s probably “Dude-Bro Dog-Shit.” So when I got the chance to watch a movie called The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot, I had all kinds of B-Movie ideas in my head about what it could be. To my surprise, the film is actually a reflective look on one man’s amazing life and the decidable un-amazing place he’s found himself in his old age. And I’m not sure how I feel about that, it’s not that the film wasn’t what I was expecting it to be, and the film itself didn’t know what it wanted to be.
