Wonder Park (2019)

It would seem that the moment I joined AMC’s A-List, AMC started requiring that I pick a seat beforehand.  I don’t know if this is coincidence or not.  It does seem to be new, as people are still getting used to it.  However, it does have its advantages.  I can pick a seat with lots of leg room.  I can also see how full a movie is before getting seats.  This is especially useful for an animated movie like Wonder Park, where there might be lots of children.  I was fortunate to have only two other people, both adults, watching the movie with me.  Children tend to be, shall we say, unpredictable audience members.

The movie is about a girl named June who plans an imaginary park with her mother, called Wonderland.  (This leads to the conundrum of why a movie about Wonderland would be called Wonder Park.  There doesn’t seem to be a definitive answer for this.)  The plans are derailed when June’s mother, simply called Mom, has to go away.  (It’s not explicitly stated, but parents will pick up on the fact that the reason is most likely cancer.)

This leave’s Dad to take care of June.  He does his best, but June is affected by Mom's departure.  She puts away anything related to Wonderland, instead becoming overly protective of her father.  It becomes so bad that Dad has to send June to math camp to get her mind off of things.  She initially agrees, but escapes the bus ride and tries to run back  She’s diverted when she finds a piece of her Wonderland map and is led to the actual Wonderland, or what’s left of it.

There, she meets all of the characters that she and her mother created.  Many of the rides are there, but the park is being dismantled by chimpanzombies (stuffed toys that came to life) and fed into a great void called The Darkness.  Absent, at first, is Peanut, a chimpanzee who builds the park.  June manages to find him, believing that if he can fix the rides, all will be restored.

I think this may be a movie that was intended for both children and adults that somehow missed the mark.  There’s a certain amount of allegory that will go over the heads of children.  To be honest, I started reading about the movie after I saw it.  I came to realize that I had missed a bit, myself.  For instance, the chimpanzombies could be seen as an allusion to cancer.  They’re in the likeness of Peanut and attack the park, much like a cancer would attack a person.  (They’re also difficult to get rid of.)

I’m not sure this is a bad thing.  Someone who wanted to sit back and just watch the movie could easily do so.  On that level, it works as a girl who goes off on an adventure and finds the peace of mind that she needs.  On the other hand, someone who wanted to find deeper meaning could find a few connections.

The trouble is that it’s not a really great story.  It sort of reminds me of The Explorers.  The Explorers was rushed to production and had an incomplete feel to it.  Wonder Park seems like something that wasn’t quite fully developed, either.  It’s an entertaining 85 minutes, but it’s not the best I’ve seen.

According to Wikipedia, Nickelodeon is using this to launch a TV show, which I suppose makes sense.  I could see this being a pilot episode, setting up the characters and mythology.  Still, given the 85 minute runtime, I feel like the movie could have done better.  Then again, this may explain why I don’t watch any of Nickelodeon’s TV shows.

IMDb page

Love, Simon (2018)

It always bothers me when a movie is based on a bad decision.  Someone has to decide between a wise chouce, resulting in no movie, or an unwise choice, resulting in a movie.  This isn’t exactly the case with Love, Simon.  You can understand why Simon chooses what he does.

Simon is a teenager in high school.  By all accounts, he’s a normal teenager.  He does all the things most of us did at that age.  The crucial difference is that he’s gay.  The story starts when Simon starts an email conversation with an anonymous poster on a message board.  The other person, who goes by Blue, is presumably another student at Simon’s school.  However, there are no clues as to who Blue might be.  He might not even be a current student.

The turning point is when Martin discovers Simon’s conversation with Blue.  Martin is that annoying/creepy kid who tries to hard to be liked.  He wants to date Abby and Abby is Simon’s friend, so Martin uses the information to blackmail Simon.  This is where the decision has the potential to make for a much shorter film.

Simon could very easily admit to being gay.  His friends and family would be supportive.  Simon isn’t necessarily opposed to the idea, but he doesn’t like the fact that straight people don’t need to come out.  If Simon does this, it will remove any power that Martin holds over him.  The drawback is that there is real harassment at his school.  Ethan is a student at Simon’s school.  He came out and faces harassment, so it’s understandable that Simon would give in to Martin’s demands.

If you’ve seen similar movies, you know that things will only get more complicated for Simon.  You may also know that there will come a point where Simon’s secret will come out.  The question is how it will work out for everyone.  Fortunately, the movie doesn’t make this part of the story overly awkward.  Martin is aggressive in getting what he wants, especially once Simon gives in.  This leads to maybe two cringe-worthy moments.

Love, Simon is similar to many other movies aimed at young adults.  It’s almost like watching Hallmark movies in that they only differ in the details.  It is a well-written story.  You have a clear antagonist and protagonist.  The tension wasn’t over the top, like I would have expected with blackmail.  My only real issue is with Gmail.  Yes, they do really leave you logged in when you close the browser.  You have to manually log out, even if you’re in a public place.  (I imagine that a lot of people find this out the hard way, as Simon did.)  It was a fun movie to watch, but I don’t know if I’ll be going back to another young-adult movie any time soon.

IMDb page

The Invention of Lying (2009)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

Could you imagine a world with no lying?  This would be a world  where no one would know how to say something that wasn’t true.  Words like ‘true’ and ‘lie’ wouldn’t even exist.  Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson imagined such a world.  They wrote The Invention of Lying, in which Gervais plays Mark Bellison.

In Mark’s world, things are basically the same.  They still have movies, corrupt police officers and attractive women.  It’s just that since there is no lying, there’s no fiction.  Since there’s no fiction, all movies are documentaries.  When I say documentary, I mean some guy sitting in front of a camera telling the audience what happened.  Police officers will still take an occasional bribe, but are totally honest about their motives.

Things aren’t going so well for Mark.  He’s attracted to a woman, Anna, who doesn’t reciprocate.  He has a job writing movies about a century no one cares about, leading to his termination.  His termination leads to his being evicted.  His being evicted leads to an epiphany.  When he goes to close out his bank account, the system is down.  He has to give the teller a dollar amount, which Mark realizes can be any dollar amount. It doesn’t have to be the actual dollar amount, so he chooses the amount he owes his landlord.  When the system comes back up and the teller sees the correct amount, the teller thinks it’s a computer mistake.

Mark then realizes that he can do this as much as he wants.  The best part is that no one will suspect anything.  Since he’s the only one that knows what a lie is, people should act like the teller.  Mark goes into a casino and lies about winning.  He can claim to win the jackpot on every machine and the casino will never think to ask Mark any questions.  He can also go up to random women and tell them that the fate of the world depends on them having sex right now.  (This does lead to some sense of guilt, especially where Anna is concerned.)

Things get complicated when his mother is dying.  She’s scared, which is natural.  Mark doesn’t want this, so he invents a story about going to a great place in the sky where she’ll be loved.  He doesn’t think much of it, but an employee of the nursing home overhears him.  She passes the story along and before long, Mark has a following.  Mark doesn’t really want the attention.  The story was only for his mother’s benefit.  The rest of the movie deals with the snowball effect that results.  People want to know more about this Great Man in the Sky, so Mark has to make stuff up on the fly.

There’s something interesting about a world without lying.  As I said, there’s not so much as fiction or even lying in advertising.  Mark’s mother isn’t at a nursing home.  She’s in A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People.  Could you imagine what it would be like to be able to lie?  Even when Mark explains lying, people still can’t wrap their heads around it.  (That was the one thing I wondered about.  There should at least be terms for accurate and inaccurate, so a lie could be described as knowingly saying something inaccurate.)

The movie is safe for teenagers and up.  There are a few sexual jokes, some involving masturbation.  Mar’s Man in the Sky parallels religion.  The humor really isn’t meant to poke fun at religion.  Instead, it says more about how things get out of hand quickly.  Something that starts with the best of intentions becomes a major organization similar to what we would call a church.  Some of the things seem absurd, like Mark’s story where everything came from.  Then again, who is anyone to question Mark?  It would never enter their minds to think that he’s lying or might be crazy, as far out as it seems.

That was the one thing that I found odd.  I would think that in thousands of years of recorded history, someone would make a mistake or would be mentally unbalanced and say something that wasn’t true.  Is everyone totally accurate in this world?  One inaccuracy would present the opportunity to realize that you can deliberately make a mistake.  It wasn’t a big deal, overall.  It was a funny movie.  I’d recommend renting it. 

IMDb page

Daredevil (2003)

Note:   This review was originally posted to my Epionions account.

Movies and TV series based on comic books are nothing new.  There have been all sorts of animated features throughout the years.  It seems like over the past decade, there have been a few live-action big-budget movies made starring big names.  Many were good.  Some, not so much.

In 2003, Ben Affleck stared as Matt Murdock, a.k.a. Daredevil.  Matt’s story starts early; as a child, he was blinded by toxic waste.  The up side is that his other senses are heightened.   He can use his other senses to ‘see’ the world in a Matrix-style way.  He’s also able to leap off of tall buildings and land safely on the ground.  As an adult, Murdock serves as a defense lawyer during the day, helping those that need it most.  Daredevil comes out at night to fight crime in Hell’s Kitchen.  (He seems to pick criminals that the court system lets go.)

In the movie, Daredevil is trying to work against The Kingpin, who runs the area’s organized crime.  Enter Elektra Natchios, the daughter of Nikolas Natchios.  Unbeknownst to Matt, Nikolas has ties to The Kingpin.  Unbeknownst to Elektra, Matt is Daredevil.  Things get complicated when Nikolas wants out.  Enter Bullseye, who is hired by The Kingpin to kill Nikolas.

I don’t want to ruin the entire movie for you, so I’ll stop here.  I did have a few problems, all of which don’t require me to give anything else away.  First, it seemed like the movie went slow, then was rushed.  There were three main story lines to the movie.  One was Daredevil vs. The Kingpin.  Two was Daredevil vs. Bullseye.  Three was Matt becoming romantically involved with Elektra.

Daredevil vs. The Kingpin didn’t really seem that developed, mostly because Daredevil was fighting with Bullseye most of the time.  Both of these relationships seemed like something you’d use over the course of a TV series.  If there is a sequel, Kingpin will most likely be back.

However, Bullseye definitely seemed rushed.  Even though the pacing seemed appropriate, it seemed like Bullseye was used too much too quickly.  He seems like someone that would make a good archenemy.  Even the relationship between Daredevil and Elektra was rushed.  It’s almost like they weren’t planning on a sequel.

Overall, the movie was very dark.  Not only was much of it action, but much of it took place at night.  It seemed like the movie was driven by the fight scenes with the dialogue there only to string the fights together or give them context.  I think one of the overriding themes in the movie was revenge, which really adds to the darkness of the movie.  It’s definitely not something for small children to watch.  I don’t think they’d understand most of the themes.

I don’t read comic books, so I don’t know how the movie holds up to the source material.  However, it seemed like the movie relied on a superhero formula.  Give a hero strength (or at least ability) and give him a weakness.  Fill in the history as needed and you have a superhero.  In this case, Daredevil had most of his senses heightened, but was blind and could be incapacitated by loud noises.  Even Superman had his kryptonite.

What I remember, the coming attractions were a little misleading.  I thought that Elektra’s story would turn out much differently than it did.  It would be interesting to see how they pull one out of this, as most of Daredevil’s relationships in this movie could very well have come to an end.  (Actually, a few did.)  Overall, I really didn’t like Daredevil.  I think if this had been the first comic-book based movie I had seen, I probably wouldn’t have seen many others. 

IMDb page