Review – Gotti

So this is what you get when you let the Gotti family decide what kind of movie to make about the Dapper Don and his “reformed” son. During the first act the story hops around in the timeline so often that I had to stop and read the Wikipedia page on John Gotti just to follow what was going on. Even when it settles down and tells a coherent story, the picture it paints is of a protagonist with a bad temper but a good heart. Of course to get to that viewpoint the production has to side step an epic amount of drug dealing, witness intimidation, jury tampering, murder, and so on and so on. The end product – particularly John Travolta’s performance in the lead – sits in that awful valley between “good” and “so bad it’s funny.” See if desperate

Review – They Shall Not Grow Old

The Imperial War Museum and the BBC both gave Peter Jackson unlimited access to their archives of materials about World War One, and he achieved two results. He found some incredible film records of the war, particularly life in the trenches. But then he “modernizes” it all, cropping it to a new aspect ratio, overdubbing it with what people appear to be saying, and colorizing it. I admit I’ve been an opponent of colorization since it first became an issue back in the 1980s, but it’s a particularly terrible job here. For example, all the corpses have been painted pale blue. The process takes one of history’s most epic tragedies and turns it into a bad comic book. The source footage would have made an amazing movie, but the project is undone by the director’s tinkering. Mildly amusing

Review – American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally

Axis Sally, guess you better slow your Axis down. Actually if she’d rid herself of the whole Nazi thing four years earlier, Mildred Gillars wouldn’t have found herself on trial for treason after the war. This fictionalized version of her life and prosecution takes a sympathetic view of its subject. Despite that (or maybe because of it), the tale proves less than heart-warming. Mildly amusing

Review – The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone

I originally saw this as The Godfather Part III when it first came out, but apparently it was so long ago that I don’t have a review for it. So this new re-edit by master re-editor Francis Ford Coppola gave me a good excuse to re-watch and share my thoughts. This is by far the dumbest, sappiest episode of the trilogy, a pale shadow of its predecessors. Sure, you get a little of the high-level intrigue that helped make the second one such a masterpiece, but even here it’s mostly financial wheeling and dealing rather than all the cool Cuba conspiracy stuff. In any event, even a better batch of mob doings wouldn’t justify the intolerable wallow in the Michael-Corleone-gettin’-old crap. And that’s not even the worst part of the film; that distinction belongs to the icky love affair between the protagonist’s daughter (played by the director’s daughter, who is much more talented behind the camera than she is in front of it) and her first cousin (fortunately played by Andy Garcia rather than Nicolas Cage). Minor spoiler: it’s funny that the new title mentions a death that occurred on screen in the original edit but doesn’t happen at all in the new cut. See if desperate

Review – Malignant

Here we have further proof – as if it was needed or even wanted – that “borrowing” plot elements from a bunch of old movies doesn’t make a good new movie. The Dark Half and Basket Case are the most obvious donors, but horror movie fans will notice many other familiar moments. Fans of James Wan’s directing style will find enough common ground between this and his other efforts to justify the experience. Mildly amusing

Review – Bill and Ted Face the Music

Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves are getting too old for this. Or I’m getting too old for this. Or both. This second unnecessary sequel follows the formula of the first two, bringing in the title duo’s daughters for any shenanigans their dads can’t plausibly indulge. If you’ve been pining away for more plotless, witless, time-traveling situation comedy sprinkled with sub-references, pine no longer. See if desperate

Review – A Quiet Place 2

If you liked the first one, odds are you’ll enjoy this one as well. I enjoyed the prequel at the beginning, because any time society falls apart in a movie I like to see how it came about. But even there the audience has to suspend a fair amount of disbelief in order to go with the monster flow. This one includes some familiar new faces in addition to the cast from the original. And of course it has terrifying-yet-sound-sensitive beasts aplenty in a constant parade of alien menace. Mildly amusing