Knowing

I mean, WTF. Should I spoil it or just let anyone with a few spare hours and hopefully some recreational drugs and or alcohol actually sit through this blah, suspenseful, dark, cagey film? 

It's full of Cage. He is pensive, he is reflective, he is insightful and as it turns out, the harbinger for literally (quite literally) the end of the world. Thank goodness there are whispering people and thank goodness Cage's son is a chosen one, which seems very much like college admissions. 

Onto the movie, it starts dark, goes dark, ends basically dark and the alien guys disguise themselves like metrosexuals. Calamitous, yes it is. At all impactful or full of useful takeaways, no it is not. It's Cage up in Mass a few days before the end of the world drinking some booze and losing his shit. It's just too bad that his lady friend got run over by a truck, and thanks a lot movie for probably causing me some serious and deranged nightmares for the near future.

Jurassic World

So what exactly happened? First question

Second question, what are the take aways? 

An Indian billionaire decided to mess with nature and build a themepark with dinosaurs, then things went wrong. Somewhere intertwined were this teenage kid and his tween bro, both in need of serious haircuts. Teen dude is a young romeo, and his little bro is apparently smart. Their parents are breaking up, since the little bro did some forensic work on lawyer letters to the house. Anyways, velociraptors are also involved, and in Jurassic World there is a genetically modified dino that is super crazy.  Also, the theme park has a commercial aspect, biz leaders of the jurassic world project don't want to kill any bad behaving dinos, since they are expensive. In addition, a shadowy military element is afoot with one rogue employee with paramilitary interests thinking that velociraptors would make great army war soldiers. So, as expected things go bad, especially from the start when one of the guys who monitors videos and presses buttons (not sure what job title that is) wears a Jurassic Park shirt to work. Totally ironic, and a mean no bs, super focused boss lady, the teen and pre-teen's aunt, is all about her job, from the visitors to the security parameters. Although, her hyper focus on the biz has taken a toll on her personal relationships.  At one point hundreds of flying dinos are let loose on park goers after the real mean dino breaks into a dino bird sanctuary.  Also the water dino is really cool. I am not a fan of reptiles generally, so no real interest in these animals, or fictitious animals as they are.  Good riddance, they should have leveled that island at the end of the movie, but you don't want to leave out the option for a Jurassic Galaxy type movie next. I see it now, dinos take over the USA, then figure out how to space travel, then fuck up shit on Mars or something. At least the velociraptor will make it to the earth's moon, I am sure, during the movie these animals followed some dude's orders, and then they spoke to the big mean genetically modified dino. The movie really kept me interested, and I like the straight to shock and awe approach, kudos to the setup, and please make another. I like Dinos, but sometimes the museum of natural history is enough of a fix.  

San Andreas

To say SF got wrecked was an understatement. Man they torched the place. 

What was the point of that movie, was it to scare the people of San Francisco/ California into wanting to be extremely prepared for the next earthquake? Maybe the point was to make people appreciate their current living conditions a little more and quit having so much beef with the little things in life. For example it might be bad that your vegan wine was poured a little too thin and the wi-fi access is not working, and that someone on linked-in did not just endorse you for your skills, and that your local free range chicken seller is actually using chickens that get penned up for a short period of time, or your kid found out about Santa Claus a bit too early, or that windsurfing on Saturday got pushed back, or that craft beer was a little too hoppy.  At least your entire town did not first get hit by two major earthquakes, then completely pushed under by an after-shock Tsunami. But enough with humanity, what San Andreas taught us more than anything is that it really pays to have emergency training. Plus we learned that A-holes will get wiped out, no matter how rich they are.  Finally, most importantly, marriages can be saved, but sometimes reconciling a marriage takes the worst earthquake to ever hit the world. 

Regarding special effects, well, it was pretty stunning. Although it seemed like a similar format was repeated throughout the movie where something would be breaking…..ground cracking, buildings falling, and there would be this split second where a herculean effort on the part of the major characters would save themselves and usually an innocent women or child bystander. Nice touch, that is Hollywood, this is clearly not French cinema. 

Gosh, that would be a macabre tale. If this were a French movie the heroin Dwayne Johnson would basically work so hard to locate and save his daughter amid the chaos in SF, only to then have his daughter die, very ironically, drowning, just like his first daughter. Probably all else would have stayed the same in a French version, except Dwayne's wife would really enforce those divorce papers. 

At least the bad guy, mom’s new boyfriend, got crushed.  What a loser….his "child" is a building, and he decides to just save himself instead of his new lady friend's kid, and he seems like an uptight prick. Where did all those hours working overtime get you buddy? It got you crushed under a container ship when a Tsunami hit SF, just after two major earthquakes, that is where it got you. Plus, your annoying sister….she is totally done too. Good people win, bad people fall afoul of natural disasters. The last shot in the movie was an American flag, yeah, that’s right, America!

Pacific Rim

And so 130 minutes was spent. It was spent by myself viewing the movie, by the editing crew making the movie that long, and then multiples of hours were spent conjuring this anti-masterpiece. What a creation. The nomenclature "Kaiju" "Jaeger" "Neural"... something and of course "The Drift" will linger on in all viewers hearts and minds.  So psychological, so penetrating. So scary. Its hard to fathom the day when aliens land in the Pacific Ocean and begin conquering the coastal territories adjacent. Now viewers know what this feels like and its not pretty.  However, its somewhat harder to fathom that when humans create defensive robotic machines called "Jaegers" to fight the aliens , they failed to make them more automated. These Jaegers (btw, Jaegermeister must have sponsored this movie, how else would they ever come up with this name?) must operate by a highly complicated system.  Two people that share common hopes and dreams must unite via some kind of really high tech futuristic brain sharing mechanism to collaborate on moving an enormous robotic nuclear powered machine around. Another quick logistical point; if these Jaeger robots are so hard to maneuver why F-around against the aliens in the middle of the sea all the time, keep them on ground.  Altogether there was lively, yet fairly difficult to comprehend or follow action scenes, a colourful sketchy merchant of alien parts based in a shadowy part of Hong Kong and one of the guys from Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia playing a role that is far above his IQ on the sitcom.    

Purge 2: Anarchy

Purge One focused on a home invasion and was a little weak regarding depicting the horror of street violence ensuing across America on one very special night each year. Writer and director James DeMonaco definitely understood that feedback and ran with it for Purge 2.  Its been over 48 hours since I viewed Purge 2 and I still have nightmares, and day terrors.  I walk down the street wondering if a tractor trailer is going to lift up its back door and a guy smoking a cigar, wearing a clear plastic raincoat, baseball hat and sunglasses will spray me down with bullets using a military level stand-up machine gun.  I sit in a cafe by an open window wondering whether a hoodlum wearing a geisha mask is going to wave a machete at me then hop back in his bakery truck. The subway tunnel guys with flame throwers were epic. At one point a ping of nostalgia swept across myself and movie-going friend that we wished we were watching Running Man, the original, since it’s a better movie.  Social commentary was afoot in Purge 2. The manner in which the wealthy purged was completely perverse. Another observation; the couple who were ready to get a divorce but wound up stranded on a mean downtown LA street running for their lives were really annoying, especially the wife. It is a shame that eventually the husband gets mowed down in crossfire towards the end of the movie (spoiler alert!). The thought was early on that the wife was all set to be purged, since its ok to kill family and friends on purge night, anything goes!  The real question is whether the current civil structure in America is better than the Purge? Probably not, since in The Purge criminals have much cooler costumes.  Stay Safe! Have a good cleanse!