Finding Nemo has a special place in my heart. Not because it was my first Pixar movie. No, my first was the same as most people my age, Toy Story. It has a special place in my heart because it was the first Pixar movie I saw with my wife. We had just barely begun to hang out with each other then and so the title and vows were many years away, but it has remained a movie that is near and dear to both of our hearts. It got us hooked on seeing Pixar films together. Until last year when I stopped enjoying their films and she started seeing them early without me. Not the point. This past weekend we had the chance to see an early viewing of Finding Dory, the sequel to, of course, Finding Nemo. Some of you probably know it as “that movie Ellen is super excited about.” Right off the bat I didn’t feel that Nemo needed a sequel. I used to have respect for Pixar because they weren’t sequel machines and when they would make a sequel, it was usually really freaking good (except for Monsters University, that’s unwatchable).
Already I had my doubts going into the movie. It also didn’t help that every time I’ve seen an advanced showing in L.A., the crowd has always, always decided if they love the or hate the movie before the lights dim in the theater. It’s one of the most baffling things and I will never understand it. This crowd was anxious to love this film. Anxious. I mention that because the crowd you see a film with can very easily sway your opinion about a film if you let it. I had my doubts, but the crowd has nothing but love which balanced me out.
The film itself is unfortunately predictable. I called the film and the “message” of the film just from the trailer, which I had tried to avoid seeing until the days leading up to the screening. If you don’t already know, it’s about Dory finding her family and a little bit of “finding herself” as well. If you didn’t care for Dory’s character in the first film, then you’d do well to skip this film altogether.
There is the typical dramatic sadness that’s become commonplace with Pixar movies. It works every time though so it’s not a complaint that’s it’s there, more of a statement. There’s plenty of humor of course, but what was strange was that you could almost perfectly call when the humor would happen. It follows the Nemo formula that closely.
The voice acting in the film is fine. All the stars of the first film reprise their role and new additions are added. At this point Pixar has brought in new regulars to their films and so you’ll hear a few familiar voices. The only problem with this is that several of them had similar tones and so you can be fooled into thinking the same actors are doing voices over and over.
Idris Elba and Dominic West steal the show as two sea lions with their thick British accents. They’re so amusing that they find as many ways as possible to fit them into the story, to the point that it feels like forced humor.
I will say that Young Dory, voiced by Sloane Murray, will make you tearful. If you’re a new parent like I am, she and her parent’s interactions will likely make you blame the wind on more than one occasion. Ellen is good as Dory, but it felt like her memory loss was cranked just a little too much this time. It’s consistent throughout the film, but it reveals the overall problem with the character and film in general… too much of Dory isn’t a good thing. Sure, by the end her character has grown and developed more, but I honestly didn’t feel rewarded by that journey. It was more of a sense of relief that it was finally over.
The animation is incredible. The water effects are so much better this time around and really the textures that all of the animals have is leaps and bounds better. Granted that’s always a technology thing and since these films all have a two-year cycle, Finding Dory already looks better than Pixar’s films from last year. There really did seem to be a sense of love in handling this film though. A sense of love that was completely missing from Monsters University which didn’t wow with its story or graphics. It very much felt like we were taking another adventure into the ocean.
As for the movie and how it did as a sequel, it was good, but not great. Even with my fondness for Nemo aside, the overall story suffered from too much of the Pixar formula. A formula that has this desire to hit comedic beats at exact minutes in the film and to hit dramatic beats at exact minutes in the film. It felt too much like someone had cracked the math behind our emotions and wanted to prove the formula. At times it still worked, but other times it stood out as an attempt to make me feel something rather than genuinely making me feel something.
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As you can already probably see, this film is lacking nothing in the story space. It is masterfully written by Christopher Nolan, and is honestly the most original film I probably have ever seen. Even though the story itself is very straight forward, the tricks Nolan uses in order for us to feel and think in certain ways really creates an intense and revolving story. I love how we feel like the main character, we learn things as he does, because he can’t remember them.
Let’s talk about The Babadook itself. Now this film was originally marketed as a “Creature Feature” but if your quick to look past it, you’ll end up with the same feeling after watching The Village (no, not that bad) but remember, although this is a horror about a creature, that is not the main point of the story. This is the story about the pain and suffering a family has when losing a loved one (father and husband in this case) Now with that being said, The Babadook is real! Make no mistake, this isn’t some M. Night fake out crap, but just remember that this is deeper than what it seems.
Let me first start off by saying and you can quote me on this… THIS IS THE GREATEST CINEMATOGRAPHY I’VE EVER SEEM. Yes, it took some while to finally decide that it was. Being a filmmaker myself, I know what it takes to even light one small shot, or nailing the perfect exposure outside, and this film BLEW me away! This film was filmed in 100% natural light with no use of artificial light and I could not believe what I was seeing. Beautiful landscapes, smoke and fire, fog, epic wide close ups, long battle shots. I was sitting in my seat completely stunned by what I was seeing. I would see the film JUST for the visuals.
I’m going to be honest, I was trying to like this film. I really was. I tried with every muscle I had to watch this and feel like I was watching an award winning film, but I couldn’t. Nothing felt right to me. Let’s talk about the cinematography. This film changed its aspect ratio several times for some effect. Now a lot of films have done this such as 
As their parents sell their childhood house, the two decide to revive their high school parties and create the Project X of their generation. BUT… this movie did none of that excitement for me. This film felt like a jumble of party scenes mashed together by “compelling” dialogue and exposition. This movie was so bad I honestly don’t have a lot to say about it. The cinematography was very boring.
Unable to reach Red Rock due to the snowfall, they stop over at a cabin called Minnie's Haberdashery, which is in the temporary control of a mysterious Mexican named Senor Bob (Demian Bichir). There they meet others bound for Red Rock and beyond - the hangman of Red Rock, Oswald Mobray (Tim Roth), ex-Confederate General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) and sullen cowboy Joe Gage (Michael Madsen). Ruth soon deduces that one - or more - of the inhabitants of the haberdashery are in league with Domergue and plotting her escape. He forms an uneasy alliance with Warren to find out who's plotting against him. In the meantime, there's also a rescue plot staged by Domergue's brother Jody (Channing Tatum) to deal with.
The film is almost nothing but a spectacular car chase, reminiscent of the final 20 minutes of 1981's second Mad Max installment The Road Warrior - only louder and even more spectacular. What plot there is concerns Max being captured early on in the desert citadel run by terrifying despotic demi-god Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). Joe has five "wives" locked up to sire him a healthy heir, but when they escape in a petrol tanker piloted by an ex-wife Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), Joe's army give chase - and Max gets caught up in the conflict.
This is the second sci-fi film in my top five of the year. Ex Machina is the other, and while it doesn't share that film's philosophical bent, The Martian similarly uses science as a foundation for its fiction thanks to the meticulously-researched novel that is its source. It takes its visual and narrative cues from recent crowd-pleasing space dramas like Gravity and Interstellar (the latter of which also features Damon as an astronaut stranded on a hostile planet) but perhaps its nearest cinematic brethren is Ducan Jones' Moon. While it isn't as quirky as Duncan Jones' effort, both of them feature a lone protagonist talking to himself for much of their runtime.
Inside Out ostensibly follows the trials and tribulations of an 11-year-old girl Riley (Kaitlin Dias) as she is uprooted from her happy Midwest life and moved to San Francisco along with her parents. But Inside Out’s real story centres around the emotions that inhabit her brain: Joy ( an impossibly perky Amy Poehler), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Bill Hader), Disgust (Mandy Kaling) and Sadness (Phyliss Smith). As Riley tries - and fails - to adjust to a new city, a new house, and a new school, negative emotions begin to take hold and when an accident sees Joy and Sadness ejected from the "control room" inside Riley's brain, the odd couple must work together to get back in control before they lose Riley for good.
The film is heavier on ideas than plot. Caleb (Domhall Gleeson) is a talented young computer programmer for search engine giant Blue Book. He gets the opportunity of a lifetime when he is invited to meet his company's reclusive genius CEO Nathan (Oscar Isaac) and participate in an experiment with a groundbreaking AI (Alicia Vikander).
Like the book on which it is based, Going Clear is divided into two distinct halves. First we're introduced to the birth of Scientology via its founding father, L. Ron Hubbard. The man Scientologists refer to as "LRH" was a pulp sci-fi writer, churning out over a thousand books to make a living (at a penny a word). He is presented as a pathological liar, a man given to fantasically embellishing his less-than-stellar military career or straight up inventing "field work" studying indigenous tribes.
Elf's story is a simple one. Buddy the Elf (Will Ferrell) lives at the North Pole with Santa and the other elves, making toys for Christmas. But despite his name, Buddy isn't really an elf at all. Buddy is a human, an ophan who accidentally made his way into Santa's sack one Christmas. Kind-hearted Santa Claus (Ed Asner) keeps the child at the North Pole, where he's raised as an elf by, well, Papa Elf (Bob Newhart). As Buddy grows he becomes much taller, stronger, and clumsier than the other elves. Realising he's adopted, Buddy ventures to New York to find his real father Walter Hobbs (James Caan).
The bright spots are few and far between. Nick Notle plays his role with a twinkly-eyed charisma that suggests he thought he was in a different film entirely; Harvey Keitel chews the scenery with gusto as a malevolent saloon owner and John Turturro channels Peter Sellers as Abner Doubleday, the man who invents the rules of baseball (which calls "Sticky McShnickens") as he goes along. The baseball scene is incongruous because it's easily the film's funniest moment, and has absolutely nothing to do with the plot. It's funny purely because of Turturro, too, who does all the heavy lifting opposite a dead-eyed Sandler.
Spy is about a, well spy, played by Jude Law who after an issue, is replaced by Melissa McCarthy, who basically has almost no field experience. Most people will get caught up in Melissa, but I found that Jason Statham and Rose Byrne truly blew me away in this film. They were DROP. DEAD. FUNNY. I mean Statham’s character was so funny, I couldn’t stop laughing through whole scenes! Rose Byrne is very vulgar in most scenes, so is the entire movie, but I found that it really worked for the film’s tone.
Pixels is about a nerdy kid who loses a 1980’s Arcade Gaming Tournament, but after Aliens invade using 80’s arcade games as a front, his talent comes in handy. So, this movie is not a good movie when it comes to cinema except for two things. The visual effects were OUTSTANDING, and the story was well crafted to actually seem very realistic. Of course this film began with the idea of making 80’s video games come to life, but Adam Sandler came up with the perfect way. I love how a Time Capsule was taken as a threat and became this movie. It is so off but felt so real (the only real way this would make sense). So, yes it’s dumb, but worked.
