Meg Up To The Trench

Finally got around to watching this, 'cos I'm chasing the latest fads!

In the first half of the movie, we see a group of idiots go under water and immediately everything goes wrong as a meg escapes with no problems what so ever, then the Bad Guys do Bad Things because they are Bad Guys. Characterisation? Who needs it? Then in the second half, they repeat what many other movies have done and do "what if we increased the body count?" and here's an island to attack with sharks.

There's nothing new here that you couldn't predict from just guessing. Apparently this is based on a novel "The Trench," although I have no idea how much of an adaptation it was, especially as they needed to incorporate all the characters from the first movie... at least I assume so, I remember sod all of the first movie aside from it had Jason Statham and the young girl and basically has a lot of features China would like... that is basically this movie too.

Do I sound like I'm not impressed? It just had a hard time holding my interest as, as I say, it didn't do anything we haven't seen elsewhere. It's fine, I guess, but... it's just fine.

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Maddy Can Dance

The latest "album" from Madonna is Finally Enough Love, which contains (if you get the extended version) 50 different singles of hers remixed. Which reminded me of another remix album of hers: You Can Dance.

What is weird is that the Vinyl, CD and Cassette (yes, we are back in the days of vinyl and cassettes) all contain the main seven songs. However, the CD has three extra tracks... but the cassette has four different tracks... and they are different extra tracks to what the CD has! The CD has "Dub" versions of Holiday, Into The Groove, and Where's the Party, where the Cassette has "Dub" versions of Spotlight, Holiday, Over and Over, and Into the Groove.

So if you wanted all those remixes... you had to get the CD and cassette... which I did (although no idea where they are now).

I did wonder if those remixes might have been released on Finally Enough Love, but those are different mixes again.

But none of them have my favourite remix:

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Colourful Cockroach

Yes, I know a beetle is not a cockroach, but it's more alliterative.

After spending time with the Reyes family, Jaime just happens to be in the right place to be near the beetle, and it happens to choose him... but this is superheroes, so that's about as much an origin story as you get. After flailing around, he and Jenny get a hold of a lot of backstory, and then they are dragged into the third act.

Like, literally, he gets dragged into the third act, and it's like the movie just wanted to move onto the next part after spending a LOT of time just getting to know the Reyes family, and then info-dumping. Am I saying this could be tighter, but certainly it feels unbalanced.

I was aware of some parts of it before I saw this, in particular that Jaime says "no killing" and then his family does killing. I could nearly forgive it except a) they spend time humanising the henchman, and the others can suck it?, and b) at one point they go "20 points!" after killing someone... Nope, fuck you movie, you don't get any credit for pretending to go a non-violence route.

This movie is... all right. Apparently James Gunn intends to keep Jaime around, so we'll see what evolves. There is an obvious mid-credits scene, but dammit give me Jenny Blue Beetle!

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Haunted Venice

Remember the classic Agatha Christie story everyone talks about? No? Well, here's a movie of it anyway.

It's Halloween in a haunted house... that happens to be in Italy. Poirot happens to be there and there's a murder... because of course there is. But there are also spookiness, spirits, ghosts and goblins. After the inciting incident, we get the classic interviews and then... accidentally Poirot solves the case! Huzzah! (Like I'm giving away that he does that...)

This feels more like an excuse for Kenneth Branagh to film a spoopy story... and to be fair, he films it well. There are some nice touches, and great shots... but as a Poirot story, it feels like it's missing something. Because outside of that there haunted aspect, there isn't much too it. There are some leaps of logic that only Poirot gets, of course, otherwise the audience would be ahead, and Agatha would never have that... although she reused enough plots that you could work out some of her stories ahead of time.

And speaking of Agatha, we have Tiny Fey as Agatha Christie Ariadne Oliver, but I always felt like Agatha self-inserted herself with more care, and certainly more subtlety, than what we get here. There are less big names in this one, at least less that I recognise. Aside from Michelle Yeoh of course, living out another Evelyn.

At not even 2 hours, this doesn't outstay things, but still feels like there could have been some trimming. I can't say that I fully recommend seeing this in a theatre, but I did get in for the advance screening, so I'm not the best poster boy for waiting.

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Rising of the Biggie

Yeah, it took me a while 'cos I just didn't care...

The Maximals... okay, let's just pause there for a moment, that's a stupid name. Like, it was done way back in the '80s or whatever, but it sounds silly, 'cos it is silly. Anyway, the Maximals fails to stop Unicron, so they go to Earth and will later fail to stop Unicron then. Meanwhile, the Autobots are on Earth because... they are, and instead of Bumblebee being the main car we follow, we follow Mirage instead as he hooks up with Noah Diaz and it's all very gangster and hip hop and all them other things to show that this movie is down with the hood. And then they will fail to stop Unicron's minions. Failure all around, until they fail as one at the end.

This movie felt... just not much really. Not a lot happens, and amazingly lots of people fail to notice transforming robots all over the place, to protect the surprise of later movies, I assume? But when big cargo planes can just drop down anywhere and no-one notices, I just go "fine, whatever, I don't care".

At least the humans aren't as annoying as previous movies, even if a lot of happenstance has to happen to a) get them into the movie, and then b) make them relevant to anything that happens in the movie.

I'm glad I didn't bust myself getting to see this, because it is easily a "wait for home release" picture.

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Teenage Mutant Mayhem Ninjas

I'm not really a Turts fan, but this is what the kids are talking about.

For the Nth time, we get the origin of the Turtle, who are now just teenagers that just want to hang with humans. (Clearly, they haven't met us.) But small problem, there's a weird creature stealing things... I mean, they are turtles and supposedly everyone reacts with horror when meeting them. But hey, maybe sorting out that stealing things will solve problems? And no more problems were ever faced again..

I don't really know Turt movie stuff, so I guess this is fine? This certainly feels like a decent enough take in this year of our pandemic that it works for them being teenagers, and for them being mutants, and expanding on the whole mutant creature thing. People's opinions does turn quite easily, but this is a simple movie, we aren't spending hours on random character development.

There are quite some names here, mainly is the other roles. I gather they actually have kids voicing the turtles so... they will do well until they age out? This movie ends up with an easy sequel hook, but no doubt any sequel will be driven purely by profit.

It's a movie about the turtles, sure. Speaks to a lot of people and they seem happy with it.

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Whose Land?

Maori land? As is pointed out at the end, Maori own under 5% of the land currently.

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