The Mandalorian Season 1 Review - Let’s Be Honest, You Came to See Baby Yoda

For those of you who have somehow avoided the shadow of Baby Yoda that has been cast over this planet since November 8th, 2019, The Mandalorian is the first of the big Disney + original tv shows to be released. It follows a certain Mandalorian, a warrior creed that never takes off their masks, in his adventures across the outer-rim of the galaxy. The eight-episode story begins when the Mandalorian, called Mando by what seems to be the entire universe, accepts a special bounty from a vestige faction of the empire to capture some mystery character. His target, of course, turns out to be Baby Yoda, referred to as “The Child”. Baby Yoda, being the Baby Yoda he or she is, is so cute that the Mandalorian decides that he can’t let the empire do whatever have it so he goes into hiding with that adorable little green merchandise-seller. Along the way the Mandalorian meets many different characters and does various odd jobs before finally taking his original employer head-on in hopes of finally allowing space Kermit baby to live in peace.

The production design is excellent. Despite it being a TV show, you can tell that Disney spared no expense in making it and that they wanted it to be as enjoyable as possible. It also really feels like something new, this isn’t some formulaic money-maker that Disney will be churning out for us to mindlessly consume. You can tell that actual thought and care went into everything, they’re not just saying “Oh, look! Star Wars!” and expecting that to be enough.

The season itself, because it’s structured as a western where Mando pops into a place does some stuff and leaves, really only has four essential episodes to watch, but every episode is a fun ride and worth your watch even if they do seem a bit inconsequential. That inconsequential-ness is most apparent in the finale, which struggles from the empire not feeling like that much of a threat, especially since they unceremoniously kill off who seemed to be the main bad guy (Werner Herzog) and switching him out for a much less intimidating Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito). At least the fact that he survived the final fight and now has a darksaber might make him a worthy adversary in the next season which has already been confirmed. 

The acting ranges from great to kinda forgettable. Pedro Pascal is terrific as the Mandalorian and the amount he manages to express while not talking and wearing an unresponsive mask is astounding. Baby Yoda is terrific as always, he or she’s yet to turn in a bad performance. Taika Waititi is fantastic as the droid IG-11, although he’s not allowed to Waititi out quite enough. Carl Weathers is fine as the bounty hunter contractor, he doesn’t really do anything extra-ordinary, and that kinda follows for the rest of the cast too. None of them are particularly engaging but they’re fine enough and don’t embarrass themselves.

The greatest strength of the Mandalorian is that it represents what, at least personally speaking, the Star Wars franchise should be now. The Skywalker Saga never really needed to be more than just the original and perhaps a film or two explaining Anakin Skywalker. What Star Wars should be is a universe, with an endless amount of stories able to be told there. The Mandalorian indicates that this is where the franchise is going, and for this reason it should be watched.

In the end, the Mandalorian isn’t something to get Disney + over, but it’s enjoyable and engaging and it has Baby Yoda, so it’s definitely worth your time.

P.S. The opening scene for the finale was the strangest, most bizarre thing ever and not at all what I expected to begin a season finale. That being said, it was also the funniest scene yet to be seen in the Star Wars universe.

Personal Rating: 8/10

Entertainment: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ☆

Depth: ⭐️⭐️ ☆ ☆ ☆

Comedy: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ☆ ☆

Tension: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ☆

Acting: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ☆ ☆

Directing: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ☆

Cuteness: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Little Women Review - A Celebration of Family and Ambition

Now, I’ve never actually read Little Women by Louissa May Alcott, but I have vague memories of seeing a play of it when I was little and I’ve just now skimmed the Wikipedia expert so I guess I’m an expert now.

There’s a lot to love about this new adaptation about Meg (Emma Watson), Jo (Saoirse Ronan), Beth (Eliza Scanlen) and Amy (Florence Pugh) March. The movie cleverly intertwines both the past and the present, contrasting the cheerful youth of the four sisters with the more dreary present. The flashbacks are all coated with warmer tones giving a sense of coziness to the girls memories in sharp contrast to the cold blues of the present. Little Women is not the first movie to have flashbacks in a different color tone than the main story, but Greta Gerwig manages to make all the colors come from the natural environment, making both the flashbacks and present day feel very real despite looking very different. 

The movie, like the story, centers around the second oldest sister, Jo, as she grows up over the seven-some years that the movie covers. Jo is tomboyish and generally opposed to playing the feminine part that society wants her to play. The movie begins with her struggling as a writer in New York, writing harsh and violent stories in an effort to make her writing relevant in a world of men. Despite managing to sell many of her stories, she is told very early on by a fellow tutor at the home that she works at teaching children, Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel), that her stories simply aren’t good. The movie never admonishes her dislike of traditional femininity, but over the course of the movie she learns that it is possible to embrace her life as a woman and all that entails while still maintaining her sense of identity. Ronan excels both at her hard resilience against the marital institution and all other misogynistic institutions and the softer, more sensitive side of Jo that loves her sisters and eventually 

Little Women ends up being both a celebration for both women who fight against society and push for greatness and women who choose to live a domestic life with a husband and kids and women who choose to live both lives. The movie begins with Jo’s publisher saying that if she is going to write a female protagonist that she has to be either married at the end or dead and it’s treated as if it’s another example of the suppression of women’s stories. Then, at the very end of the movie, when Jo has brought her new novel, an autobiography or memoir finally allowing Jo to embrace her domestic side, to be published, the same publisher insists that if Jo needs to marry off her protagonist, an extension of Jo herself, saying that marrying the protagonist off isn’t patriarchal, it’s romantic. Once again there’s a hint of misogyny, but Jo amusedly agrees to the marriage as the movie intercuts to her chasing her recently discovered love Bhaer to the train station. 

The rest of the sisters build off this film in their own ways. There’s a flashback early on in the movie where each girl through some way or another announces their passion and what they want to do with their lives. Meg wants to be an actress, Beth wants to play music and Amy wants to be a painter. Out of the three, Florence Pugh is easily the strongest as Amy. Amy has similar ambition to Jo, but also loves elegant life and realizes that she will have to marry rich in order to provide for her family. Pugh manages to turn what would otherwise be an annoying, selfish character into a real person who’s attention seeking as most younger siblings are while also ambitious and yearning for genius or something that could let her make her mark in a world of men while also being very aware that she’ll have to marry some rich man simply to have money that she can take care of her sisters and family with. Pugh becomes almost a second lead to Ronan, rivaling her in depth and growth in character. Unfortunately, Emma Watson and Eliza Scanlen get less to do with Meg and Beth respectfully. Emma Watson plays Meg similarly throughout the entire movie and although there is some sort of sub-plot of her learning to settle for domesticity with her husband John Brooke (James Norton), it doesn’t quite feel that she’s grown from the experience or changed at all. Scanlen does a fine enough job portraying Beth but unfortunately, the movie doesn’t do quite enough to endear us to her besides the occasional nice thing that she says followed by all the sisters saying that “Beth is the best of us”. The fact that Beth never quite comes into her own as a character diminishes the emotional punch of her death somewhat and makes her appear as more of a narrative device to allow Jo to embrace domestic life more. Nevertheless, Scanlen portrays the shy warmth of Beth very well and, what the script lacks, she is able to make up.

The rest of the supporting cast fares about as well as the sisters, with a few shining while a few others disappoint. Timothée Chalamet excels as Laurie, playing both the lazy, rich boy along with the endearing neighbor and love interest. Chris Cooper does a fine job as his grandfather Mr. Lawrence and Meryl Streep turns in a very entertaining role as Aunt March. It’s Laura Dern however, that proves to be the weakest, not that she isn’t trying, but it is simply hard to believe her as the mother to the four girls. As for Bob Odenkirk and Tracy Letts, they play such insignificant roles that you wonder why they’re in the movie at all even though Amy needs a love interest and the sisters need a father. The movie might have benefitted from cutting them all together, because as it is it’s asking the audience to have some connection to characters that almost don’t exist.

In the end Little Women will be very poignant for some and a enjoyable enough use of two hours for others. This isn’t a movie that’s going to blow a lot of people away, but what you’re left with is a well crafted story of family and femininity that gets better and better the more you think about it.

P.S. Emma Watson really struggled with an American accent, I’m not normally the type of person to pick up on these things but it was painfully obvious at many points.

Personal Rating: 9/10

Entertainment: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Depth: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Comedy: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ☆ ☆

Tension: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ☆ ☆

Acting: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ☆

Directing: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Jumanji: The Next Level Review - Sloppy but Satisfying

SPOILERS BELOW

     The first Jumanji movie was a simply enjoyable movie. There wasn't a lot of complications or deeper themes to it, the characters were all pretty one-dimensional and the story was very simple. And because of this, the movie worked perfectly. That's not to say there weren't problems with it, but none of them actively took away from the movie. The simplicity of the movie allowed the creators to sharpen every little aspect of it to make what might  be the most enjoyable movie possible given the story. All the characters got put into just the right avatar to move their arc forward, the multiple lives of a video game setting to forward the "you only have one life" concept was pretty clever, and you could tell that every single actor was having a blast. Also we got Jack Black pretending to be the popular, blonde, high school girl which is perhaps the greatest thing ever. Jumanji 2 (or 3 I guess?) doesn't quite stick the landing quite as well. And this is most likely due to both the two year time frame to create the movie, and a more ambitious plot.

     Where Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, had a very basic high schooler coming into their own plot, The Next Level tries for (vaguely) more complicated themes about getting old and losing connection with your friends. And to the movie's credit, you can see a rather good set-up to explore those themes. Spencer (Alex Wolf/Awkwafina/Dwayne Johnson/boy this movie does not want to make naming the actors for these roles easy) is struggling moving on from high school and the distance that creates between him and his friends so he retreats back into the childhood comfort of playing video games instead of addressing these problems. Then you have Grandpa Eddie (Danny DeVito,  Dwayne Johnson, Awkwafina) as a cautionary tale to Spencer if he follows this path. Eddie has not been able to move on from working at the restaurant that he co-owned with Milo Walker (Danny Glover/ Kevin Hart) and is now a grumpy old man who resents his old age, resents the new restaurant that took the place of what once was his restaurants, and resents Milo Walker for forcing him into retirement. Heck, Spencer and Eddie even have the same two avatars during the movie. 

     All of the actors bring their A game once again and appear to be having even more fun than originally. The weird green water plot device, although strange and relatively inconsequential to the plot (we'll get back to that), does allow all the actors to just go crazy. Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart are having an obvious blast playing elderly people having no clue what's going on. Karen Gillan mostly sticks with what she had in the original, but she has a fun scene as Fridge, even if it is short-lived. Awkwafina seamlessly inserts herself into the Jumanji cast, playing both Spencer and Eddie flawlessly. Nick Jonas doesn't really have anything new or exciting to do but he does his job fine enough. Oddly enough, it's Jack Black that seems to have the most trouble out of the cast, but that's really only in comparison to his phenomenal work in the first one. His Fridge, simply isn't quite as engaging as either Kevin Hart's or Karen Gillan's and definitely is nowhere close to matching his Bethany. 

     The biggest problem with the movie is that it simply isn't as tight as the first one, Fridge (Ser'Darius Blain/Jack Black/Karen Gillan/Kevin Hart) seems to only be in the movie because he was in the first one, and, although Spencer is supposed to be the main character, he's missing for most of the first act of the movie. This confuses who the lead is for the movie, sometimes it seems to be Martha (Morgan Turner/Karen Gillan/Jack Black), sometimes it seems to be Eddie and sometimes you have no idea who it is. Additionally, the body swapping gimmick, while amusing, did not really add anything to the plot. The only reason why it was in there was so that the star cast could have amusing, new characters to begin with but let them play their normal characters again for the climax, which doesn't make much sense because the whole point of the first (or second) Jumanji movie was to allow them to play amusing, new characters so now that they seem to be tied down to specific characters it kinda takes away from the inherent fun of the Jumanji franchise that Sony has set up for us. Maybe it's not that big of a deal, but the way I see it, there really was no narrative reason for the characters to go back to their avatars from the first movie, and there is something more inherently exciting in never knowing who to expect Jack Black or Dwayne Johnson or Kevin Hart or Karen Gillan to be playing every time a new Jumanji movie comes around. If we know that eventually we'll see The Rock return to the nerdy shy character it takes away a bit of the fun. Although if Jack Black wants to play Bethany in all the movies from now until the end of time that's fine with me.

     In the end, Jumanji: The Next Level is a worthy follow-up to the original (or the sequel), even if it's more uneven and is not quite as funny as the original. Still the actors are having as much fun as always and it will always be a joy to see actors playing against their type. The magic of Jumanji is still there, even if not everything else is.

P.S. The horse was nice for a one-joke thing, one that I wish wasn't spoiled in the trailers and promotional imaging, but wasn't very interesting other than that.

P.P.S. The after credit scene sets up an interesting concept for Jumanji 3 (or 4). However, if they fully follow through with it, I'm unsure how they plan on bringing their star cast back.

Personal Rating: 8/10

Entertainment: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Depth: ⭐⭐⭐☆☆

Story: ⭐⭐☆☆☆

Comedy: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Tension: ⭐☆☆☆☆

Acting: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Directing: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

Doctor Sleep Review - 2/3 of a great movie

Doctor Sleep Review

You don't know where your standing.

With that line, the Doctor Sleep turns what could have been a great climax, into a complete mess. Let's be clear, we all knew that this was not going to be as good as The Shining. Now, normally I would say that that shouldn't really matter, and that we should just take the movie for what it is. The problem is, is that the movie is unwilling to do that. So instead we end up with a movie that was banking too hard on people's love of The Shining to get them into the theater, that the movie ruins it's own story needlessly.
That's not to say that this is a bad movie. The first two thirds, although a bit chaotic at times, are actually pretty good. Ewan McGregor and Rebecca Ferguson are both great in their parts. Ewan McGregor nails an older Danny Torrance haunted by his experiences at the overlook hotel and Ferguson plays Rose the Hat with a lot of humanity and at moments you almost root for her to win until she suddenly switches into very creepy mode as soon as it is demanded of her. Honestly, most of the movie, the first act especially, would not have worked at all of these two actors had not brought their a-game. The other actors are passible. I can't exactly call them out for bad performances. The supporting cast all perform their roles as they need to be played, even if they do miss out on the emotional connection sometimes. The other lead character, Abra, played by Kyliech Curran, does about as well as can be expected from a child actress. The only real problem I have with the casting, is not a fact with the acting specifically, but rather the fact that the entirely wrong actors are playing them. Because, well, they decided to recast all the main characters from The Shining for flashbacks and hallucinations. And, except for Carl Lumbly playing Dick Halloran, they are all pretty awful, the worst being a character that appears later on who brings a near-insulting take to a famous character. And I get that this is neither Star Wars nor Marvel, and that facial reconstruction was very likely out of their budgetary restrictions, but just cut all that material please, because it looks and feels awful.
In general, the first two acts of Doctor Sleep, despite a couple missteps that are not impossible to ignore, have two great performances, an engaging story and several interesting ideas but feels like it should have been directed by Stanley Kubrick. If he wasn't dead, that is. From what I can tell, most of the movie follows pretty close to the book, albeit with a lot of cuts, and then suddenly swerves in the third act. As a result, most of the aforementioned interesting ideas are never really tied up in the end, and it feels like those scenes were just added in because they were part of the book, which then doesn't make any sense why they followed the book so closely in the beginning when the ending is so wildly different. I mean, I know why. They wanted the movie to connect more with The Shining so that they could sell more tickets, so they completely re-wrote the ending. Does that mean I think they should have stuck with a re-telling of Doctor Sleep? No. There are plenty of problems with the first two acts that could have been fixed, and despite the stumbling, I liked where the third act was going. So that's why I said that this movie should have been directed by Stanley Kubrick. If he had done to Doctor Sleep what he had done to The Shining, we could have had a really good film on our hands. Instead, what we're left with is a confused film that was too scared to venture too far away from it's source material, but also really, really wanted to be The Shining Part 2 instead of Doctor Sleep.

P.S. Also, is it just me, or was the movie way to fond of cross dissolves? It definitely felt like a third grader was editing the movie and found out that they could add transitions between scenes and got really excited but for some reason was only allowed to use the boring transition.

Personal Rating: 7/10
Entertainment: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆
Depth: ⭐⭐☆☆☆
Story: ⭐☆☆☆☆
Comedy: ⭐☆☆☆☆
Tension: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆
Acting: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆
Directing: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆