Game Night (2018)

Some people long for adventure while others seem content to fall into a rut.  Max and Annie both have a love of games.  They met while competing.  Eventually, they married and now host game night for their friends.   Kevin and Michelle are also husband and wife.  Then, there’s Ryan, who’s a little on the slow side.  He seems to have a revolving door in terms of his dates.  For the duration of the movie, Ryan’s date is Sarah, a woman way better than he deserves.

The main story begins when Max’s brother, Books, comes back to town for a while .  Brooks has always been more successful than Max at pretty much everything.  Max tries not to let it show, but Brooks knows which buttons to push.  For instance, Brooks comes through the front door when Max and Annie had specifically asked everyone to come in more discretely.  The idea was to not attract the attention of their neighbor, Gary.  You see, Gary’s the annoying neighbor everyone else is trying to avoid.

One week, Brooks decides to put on a special game night.  He’s hired a company that specializes in faking a kidnapping and having the group of friends follow clues to find the faux victim.  If you’ve seen the coming attractions, you may remember that Brooks is actually kidnapped while the would-be players watch in amusement.  When the actual actors show up, the hunt is on to get Brooks back.

I once heard a good definition for what separates a comedy from a drama:  In a comedy, no one dies.  While this isn’t always true, it does serve as a good rule of thumb.  When Max gets shot, it doesn’t seem to slow him down much.  He and Amy stop to tend to it, but it would ultimately seem to be a minor inconvenience.  I would imagine that most people would have died in that situation, or at least have been lightheaded.

The movie is somewhere between The Game and Clue.  On the one hand, it has several layers of what might be real or fake.  The audience knows that Brooks is actually being kidnapped, but we don’t know why or by whom.  There are several reveals along the way, such as what Brooks did that might warrant such attention.  (Minor spoiler alert:  Not everyone is what they seem.)

This is one case where I’d say that the trailer was pretty accurate in terms of giving a good impression of what the movie is about.  It’s not a question of if something will go wrong.  It’s a question of when and how.  This can be difficult to pull off, but it works here.  The situations aren’t over the top.  Well, maybe the scene where they steal the Faberge egg was over the top.  But most of the scenes are more moderate.

IMDb page

Wonder Woman (2017)

There’s been talk of a Wonder Woman feature-length movie for some time now.  I remember back when Guardians of the Galaxy was in theaters, someone joked about the constant delaying on DC’s part.  DC was constantly putting it off, saying that it wasn’t the right time for a female superhero.  Meanwhile, Marvel gave us a talking raccoon.  In fact, the talking raccoon’s movie’s sequel opened a month before Wonder Woman did this past Friday.  But I digress.

It should be noted that while I saw Man of Steel, I regrettably have not had the chance to see Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice yet, which I hope to rectify soon.  While I’m assuming that there were a few references that I missed, I don’t think that I suffered much for having missed it.  The movie opens at the Louvre, where Diana is receiving a package courtesy Wayne Industries.  In it is a photograph of Diana and several other people.  The rest of the movie is told in flashback, starting with Diana’s origins on Themyscira.

She’s a defiant girl.  Her mother, Queen Hippolyta, would rather her daughter study.  Diana would rather watch the other Amazon women fight, as that’s what Diana wants to do one day.  She knows who and what she is.  She’s been told the legends and the myths.  She does eventually get what she wants, but her mother worries about what Diana really is and what she may become.

Enter Steve Trevor.  He’s a spy operating for the British Government, which he admits to only because the women of Themyscira compel him to.  He has a very important book he has to get back to the British.  He’s denied this out of security concerns.  Diana takes him back anyway, only because she believes Ares, the god of war, is responsible for The Great War.  It’s what she was meant for.  It’s what she believes her people were meant for, although they choose to sit by.  Thus begins the story.

When Diana arrives in London in 1914, she finds opposition.  She and Steve know what has to be done.  However, just as the women of Themyscira seem to have no need for men, London of 1914 seems to have no use for women.  Thus, we get the culture class.  As you might have seen in the coming attraction, she can’t believe that women’s clothing won’t allow for fighting.  She’s not even allowed to follow Steve into a room of men discussing armistice.

She’s insistent on being taken to the front lines of the war so that she might slay Ares.  Steve is somewhat reluctant, but begins to see her worth when he sees her fight.  Steve is able to get two men, Steve and Sameer, to come with them to Germany.  There, they meet Chief, who can get them where they want to be.  They do get there and Diana does have her moment to do what she needs to do, even if it means finding out some truth that she doesn’t want to hear.

There is a lot of anticipation and hype surrounding the movie, and rightfully so.  I’ll admit to having watched the coming attractions a few times whenever I had the chance.  The movie doesn’t disappoint.  There are a number of fight scenes that don‘t feel forced.  It didn’t seem like they were there to show off the CGI or the main character.  They seemed natural parts of the story, but in an epic way.

For instance, the protagonists are able to liberate a town on their way to see the main antagonists.  And when I say protagonists, I mean Diana with some assistance from Steve, Sameer, Charlie and Chief.  This is where the aspect of Diana being a woman is handled more subtly than I would have expected.  There are doubts from the men, but she doesn’t bother with putting them in their place.  She lets her ability speak for her.

This is where I felt the movie was able to walk the line very well.  It does present the sexism of a female superhero without making it seem like we’re being preached to.  She’s made to dress the part of a woman in 1918 London, which she does, for a while.  There does come a time in the movie where Diana can’t do that any more.  She’s the hero.  Dressing the part only gets you so far in life.

My only complaint was the run time.  141 minutes is a little intimidating.  I don’t know that I would have cut anything.  The movie didn’t drag at all, but it’s still a long movie.  It’s just something to consider if you have somewhere to be afterwards.

IMDb page

Birth (2004)

I have this thing for strange movies. Some I honestly like while others I watch simply because they’re strange. There are some like Birth that I watch simply to see how they turn out. They get you interested and don’t let go until a very unusual ending.

The movie opens with a man saying that he doesn’t believe in reincarnation. Next is a man (presumably the same man) jogging. It’s a very simple, powerful scene. It looks like he’s jogging his usual route when all of a sudden, he collapses underneath a bridge. The next scene is a child being born.

Ten years pass since the man dies. The man’s wife, Anna, is getting married again, this time to a man named Joseph. One day, at a party, a ten-year-old boy walks in claiming to be Sean. It turns out his name is actually Sean, but he means Anna’s dead husband Sean. This freaks Anna out a little, but she begins to accept and believe the boy. He seems to know things about Sean, Sr., like where he died.

Most of the people surrounding Anna don’t believe. Anna’s mother is particularly resistant, threatening to call the police at one point. Even if Sean were to prove that he was who he claimed to be, it’s just not right for a woman of Anna’s age to have that kind of a relationship with a child of ten. (I should warn you that there’s a bathtub scene along those lines that may freak people out. It was staged, but it’s still a little freaky.)

Joseph is outright resistant to the idea that Sean is the reincarnation of the deceased. He’s had to wait a long time for Anna and be persistent. It’s understandable that he doesn’t want the boy in his house. After all, here’s this ten-year-old kid that practically walks right in to their lives and almost instantly wins Anna over, whereas he’s had to wait several years just to get her to say yes to a marriage proposal.

But is it even really Sean? The movie goes back and forth several times. Yes, he knows stuff, but he doesn’t know other things. There are also critical facts that the young Sean doesn’t know. He spends the entire movie seemingly convinced that he’s reincarnated, but what does he have to gain? What’s his game? Of all the people that could have been reincarnated and aware of it, why him? Why now?

That was what kept me watching the movie, even though it was slow and a little confusing. I kept waiting for some sort of major revelation, but I never got it. There was no heavy “Oh crap” moment where the entire movie came into focus. It would have been nice.

Don’t get me wrong. The acting was good. Nichole Kidman effectively played a woman that needed to believe. Lauren Bacall was great as a mother who knew that her daughter was digging a hole she might never get out of. But it was too strange a story. Reincarnation is one of those things that some people dismiss as mystic nonsense. I think that many of these people will turn the movie off within a half an hour. I can’t even say that that’s a bad thing.

I kind of wish I hadn’t watched the movie. Having watched it all the way to the end, I didn’t get it. Someone could come up to me and explain it and I probably still wouldn’t get it. I’m not sure what Anna was planning on doing at the end of the movie. Did she finally feel that she was being taken? I can’t recommend this movie.