Tag: review

Being a Japanophile, finding out that Our Little Sister was playing at The Charles, I wasn’t going to miss out on it. I read about it probably late this past winter. If it was about an imouto, then I am there. It is and it isn’t. It is very Japanese. I wanted to be enchanted by it, but it was fine.

Our Little Sister is about 3 sisters who upon attending their estranged father’s funeral invite their younger half-sister to live with them in their maternal grandmother’s home. Their offer is generous and heart warming as it comes off the cuff as they boarded a train. The younger sister accepts. She doesn’t have a father anymore and she doesn’t want to impede on her father’s third wife. No family ties, so she wants to make them with her older sisters.

The film goes flitting about stories and moments for the sisters in the house. It is a true slice-of-life movie as there isn’t much of a plot or much of drama to propel the story. There is no one story arc, but that of showing the sisters being a family. The mother comes back to bring some drama, but she is too flighty of a person to stir up the home.

It may be titled (in the English) for the little sister, but the main protagonist was the eldest. She was an Ozu female – burdened with being true to the family and to liking the matriarch position. The second was the wild one always drinking. I would love to drink with her. The third, the original imouto, was pleasingly young, an imouto if there isn’t one.

I dug the film because it reminds me of Ozu. His explorations of the family dynamics, tradition keeping, and old versus young in Japan fascinates me to no end.

A side note: I’ve seen one movie from the director, Hirokazu Koreeda, already: Nobody Knows. That one was a harrowing tale of a mother abandoning her children and letting the eldest, 13 year old, attempt to keep his siblings alive. It had a Grave of the Fireflies kind of thing as the ending made you sad…

3 of 5 stars.

Hollywood is bereft of ideas. Jason Bourne, a sequel that no one asked for, is a prime example of the death of creativity in movie land.

It’s a movie that is unnecessary. Bourne’s story was done. He should’ve stayed hid. Yet, like Al Pacino in Godfather III, they kept pulling him back in.

It starts with Julia Stiles showing back up. She’s been gone from Hollywood movies so it was a surprise to see her back. She too should’ve stayed hid because any girl linked with Bourne ends up in a sniper’s sights. She pulls Bourne in with the most hoary of cliches – it was Bourne’s father who started Treadstone and that Bourne was recruited because the government had to lock him as the country’s most steely assassin-spy.

And that was it. A back story which was dumb. He was a better character because of the mystery.

This will be a terrible summer for movies.

1 of 5 stars.

Star Trek Beyond is the best movie I’ve seen this summer. Thoroughly enjoyable. Currently, I think that it is the best film of the summer. I’ll admit, though, that this summer has been pretty bleak in terms of movies. They have all been mediocre at best.

Anyhow, Star Trek Beyond wants to bring the franchise to the status quo as a television series. It is ready now to boldly go where no one has gone before now that all movie baddies have been defeated.

4 of 5 stars.

I read a review of Lights Out that said the movies sub-text became actual text. Horror films seem to deal with things we can’t really handle in an imaginary way. For this one, the fright was all about depression. That’s all that needs to be said because you can imagine what that the ghost/haunting was about depression. Depression made all too real and literal.

But the word part, the movie did not scare me. I went home, went to bed, closed out the lights in my house. I wanted to be scared of the dark. I wasn’t. I put the lights out on this one.

2 of 5 stars.

Damn, I should’ve written this Ghostbusters review soon after I had seen it a couple weeks ago. Right now I can’t remember anything to say about it.

Okay, now I know. Escalation of stakes was missing from this one. In the original, as the movie progressed the stakes were raised. And the stages could be felt. For this one, not so much. I guess they couldn’t mimic the original too much lest they are accused of cheap imitation. It could’ve used some escalation.

The actresses were fine though. They actually were the funnest parts of the movie. And to be honest, the first scare had me hiding my eyes behind my fingers.

I will enjoy this when they run the Ghostbusters double feature on Comedy Central.

3 of 5 stars.

Finding Dory. Another sequel from Pixar. Sadly, that is what they’ve been doing a lot lately. Maybe their magic is ending.

I caught this in a theatre out in Newport Beach, CA. The theatre had reclining leather couches. I fell asleep for a few minutes nodding off unsuccessfully for the previous five before my cousin woke me up with a hard nudge. I don’t think I was snoring, but I was really sleepy.

Finding Dory isn’t a boring movie per se, but it is more of the same. More of the same is boring.

3 of 5 stars.

Independence Day: Resurgence is no ID4. It is, 20 years later, ID4’s sequel. It has many of the same characters from the first one. It features Earth against alien invaders. It destroys the White House, the Capitol, Paris, London, and the East Coast all over again. It isn’t any good.

The first one was a summer smash. This one is a dud. We’ve seen the Earth destroyed countless times since ID4 that it is no longer special. Ho-hum. This one is pure popcorn. Nothing special. I almost forgot that I saw it but since a co-worker had seen it on the opening weekend. There was something to talk about.

At least Jeff Goldblum is still alive.

2 of 5 stars.

Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising is as good as a sequel can be.

That’s a damning one line review. It’s just like a sequel to not live up to the expectations of the first movie even though the first movie didn’t live up to my expectations. I came expecting more. Instead I got grown ups again and a weird fixation with parents having sex.

The sequel starts with Rose Byrne and Seth Rogan planning to sell their house and move to a more respectable one in which to raise their children. But they seem to not feel like proper parents. They have parent regrets and worries but that’s because they maybe are terrible at parenting.

Then we shift to freshmen girls attending sorority rush and finding out how disappointing greek life can be for girls — lots of sexual harassment by frats. These girls then move into the neighborhood to start a sorority that can be all it wants to be — women. They begin to party and wreck the chances of their neighbors to sell their home.

The girls and the sorority are all lead by Zack Efron. He has a quarter life crisis. His frat brothers have settled down even Franco is marrying his best man. What he does to pick himself up is to lead the sorority through making money to keep their house. Of course, being older, he falls out with the girls and then joins the neighbors to get them to stop partying for 1 month.

I actually didn’t mind the flick, but it could’ve been better. It could’ve achieved Neighbors level of hilarity but it was missing a hootie-hoo scene. It could’ve used a hootie-hoo scene. As now, several weeks later, I can’t remember a dang thing.

3 of 5 stars.

Captain America: Civil War suffers the same issues as Avengers 2: it feels bloated. It’s not the spritely First Avenger or the wonderful thriller of Winter Soldier. It’s the kitchen sink and ginormous plotting of Age of Ultron. Perhaps this comes from the source material, the Civil War comic event.

It was nothing like the book but the plot was similar. Should the government control super heroes? Should there be a licensing arm? Who watches the watchmen? It was a story that needed to be told about power and who wields it, but this movie made the scope smaller. Not a civil war between super heroes against super heroes, but Avengers versus Avengers. Small in scope. What does this mean for Marvel Cinematic Universe? The end of Captain America? The end of Iron Man? The end? We’ll have to look for X-Men to carry us to Apocalypse.

3 of 5 stars.