X-Men: Dark Phoenix may have tanked at the box office, but here's a dissenting opinion: The movie isn't as bad as most people have made it out to be.
The 1992 Aladdin animated movie is one of my favourite Disney movies -- because of Robin Williams' hilarious Genie, and "A Whole New World" -- and I'm happy to say that this live-action remake is charming in its own right.
Pokémon Detective Pikachu is the kind of fun and family-friendly film you bring your kids to, but can enjoy as an adult as well, even though the villain's plan MAKES NO SENSE.
In this new movie, Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is now a full-fledged member of the Kingsmen, a spy agency masquerading as a posh tailor shop. When a rejected Kingsman applicant works with an insane drug lord called Poppy (Julianne Moore) to take revenge and destroy all the Kingsmen headquarters, Eggsy and remaining survivor Merlin (Mark Strong) go to America to seek help from their spy cousins, called Statesmen, who own a far more profitable whiskey business as a front than their English counterpart.
If you've read this blog for long enough, you probably would have come across me ranting about Johnny Depp's falling star and declining quality (and often profitability too) of his movies. But I didn't always dislike Johnny Depp. He used to get me excited about his movies, until On Stranger Tides came out and was so clearly a cash grab in which he just phoned in his oddball schtick and exaggerated his Captain Jack Sparrow mannerisms that I started viewing him with a prejudiced eye. (It didn't help that I am still SHOCKED to this day that Alice in Wonderland, another movie I dislike immensely, earned a billion, undeserving, dollars.)
I was talking to my colleagues the other day, and the topic got around to how they would never walk out of a movie halfway, no matter how much they dislike it, because they felt that it was just so rude and disrespectful (to the filmmakers and their efforts in making the film, I suppose). And it reminded me of The Revenant. Because I absolutely hated it.
Stephen King's magnum opus, The Dark Tower, a long book series with a sprawling mythology and epic battle of good against evil, has finally been made into a movie. I've heard it being talked about for years as this practically unfilmable book series -- kind of like The Lord of the Rings -- that Hollywood has been trying so hard to adapt for at least the last decade, but hasn't been able to succeed until now.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is out this week along with Dunkirk (which I've watched and reviewed in my previous post) and Baby Driver (which I'm watching tomorrow). It's a pretty crowded week for films to open in, and one which Valerian has the disadvantage of not being as wonderfully reviewed as the latter two films.
The general consensus among critics seems to be that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 isn't as good as the first one. I'm not so sure about that. The first movie was the oddball, weird kooky cousin of the other Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, and I did like it, but not as fondly as say, Thor or Ant-Man, or even Doctor Strange. Vol. 2 feels darker and more emotional than the first, though it still retains its quirkiness. If not for the underlying sinister tones of the film, I would have preferred it to the first. As it is, their pros and cons balance them out for me.
The Mummy (2017) not only has a plot that barely makes sense, and an ending which definitely doesn't, it's also a clearly desperate cash-grabbing bid to shoehorn in an entire new "cinematic universe" of horror movie monsters, which is off-putting.
