The Movie Addict

So I missed the first one when it came out in 2022 and only watched it the night before. I thought it was fine and enjoyed the characters but didn’t think it required a sequel but the first one must have made enough money to warrant a sequel so here we are. The story is that the Bad Guys have fallen on hard times trying to be good but are tricked into helping Kitty Kat who secretly has a plan to use a space rocket to go into space and make a huge device to bring all the gold from the earth.  As they dont have to introduce all the characters then the film has to fill the running time with stuff so we have to see the Bad Guys try to get jobs and fail before being forced into returning to their bad ways. The idea of taking the story into space is usually a sign that a franchise has run out of ideas (I’m looking at your Fast and the Furious and Friday the 13th), but it doesn't seem out of place in this film. There are things that happen during the space portion of the film that would t...

Why do I do this to myself? Ok so a 42 man is not the target audience for this movie and I never really grew up watching the Smurfs so I don’t know how faithful the film is to the characters. The set up of the film is that Papa Smurf (John Goodman) has been taken by evil wizards and Smurfette (Rhianna) & No Name (James Corden) lead the group to try and find him.  I didn't know that James Corden was going to be in it as Rhianna seems to have taken the marketing and had I known that Corden was in this then I may have had second thoughts about paying money to see this. He is irritating at the best of times but add singing to it and then it is 100 times worse. Rhianna can sing but act is a bit of a stretch. Together they are passable and mercifully there are only a few songs which seem to have been put in to pad the run time out as it comes to 92 minutes.  There are things that I liked about this. First there were plenty of funny named Smurfs which indicate what their job is a...

The Goonies is one of my favourite films ever. It has been in my favourite four on Letterboxd since I created my account about three years ago. The set up is that Mikey (Sean Astin) and his Goonie friends Chunk (Jeff Cohen), Mouth (Corey Feldman) & Data (Ke Huy Quan) are about to be broken up as Mikey’s mom and dad are being forced to sell the house to property developers. To try and save their home, Mikey goes in search of treasure. They also have to deal with the Fratelli’s who are trying to hide from the police after breaking Jake (Robert Davi) out of jail.  The film works because of the central four cast members. You totally believe that they are best friends and it would be very sad if they got broken up. Each one of them has a personality which makes them important to the group. Mikey is the leader with a kind heart, Chunk is the comedy one because he is either always eating or looking for something to eat, Mouth is useful cause he can speak Spanish even though he uses it...

An opportunity to see E.T at the cinema. I never really watched it growing up but it’s one of those films that is much loved and arguably one of Spielberg's best although I think there are better such as Jurassic Park. This is a story about a boy who befriends an alien who is left on earth mistakenly. It’s not long before the authorities are after him and they are painted as the bad guys, in particular some guy who we only see from a shot of his keys hanging off his belt. Had this film been made today then this guy would be Elliott’s dad who is working for the government but as it is the dad is in Mexico and so its just this typical 1980’s family. Henry Thomas is very good as Elliot. He has a lovely bond with E.T. and that is at the heart of the film. Child actors in the 1980’s and even until quite recently were very patchy in terms of quality. Most of the time the child actors are terrible but Thomas was a rare find and at the end when E.T. is gone you feel sorry for Elliott as he...

Fantastic Four has had a torrid time at the cinema. There were the 2005 and 2007 versions with Jessica Alba that were fine but nothing special and then there was the 2015 Josh Trank which had some interesting moments but was a car wreck with one of the worst combinations of leading characters that there had been for quite a while. 10 Years later we have a new attempt to try and make these four characters work and continue the current MCU phase. This time we get Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach & Joseph Quinn as the new fantastic four. The story is set on an alternate version of Earth and at this point they already have their powers so we don't have 40 minutes to an hour worth of origin stuff. Things are going well until the arrival of the Silver Surfer who tells them that the earth is going to get destroyed and we learn that the Silver Surfer is working for Galactus who is played by Ralph Ineson. The only way that Galactus will spare earth is if Sue Storm gives u...

I previously watched this film on Netflix back in 2024 but with an opportunity to watch it again on the big screen, I felt like I couldn't miss the chance. The set up is pretty straight forward but there are parts of the film that are anything but. Chihiro and her parents are moving when they come across an abandoned amusement park and after pigging out on what appears to be food in this clearly abandoned area, they are turned into pigs and the rest of the film is about trying to help her parents. The first 30-40 minutes are really good and the final 30 minutes is really good but the middle is where the film really is confusing as to what is actually going on. Despite not knowing what is really going on at times, it never felt like weird things were happening just for the sake of things. This may be a case of something being lost in translation but I think things would have made more sense if I had watched this when it originally came out or grew up with this kind of cinema. I was ...

After enjoying Talk To Me, I was intrigued with what Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou would come up with next. The set up is that Piper and Andy are step brother and step sister who after the death of their father are sent to Laura and as Andy is nearly 18 he has three months to show he is responsible to be the legal guardian of Piper. This is a slow build up type film which might put some people off but I like this type of film but it has to feel like it's building up to something and this definitely does, there is something strange happening every so often and then the story progresses. The vast majority of the story takes place in this house which despite being quite big (compared to British houses with this being an Australian house), the film still feels claustrophobic. This was an 18 certificate film and boy did it deserve that rating. There were about four occasions which made me look away. The first time was by far the worst as it involved Ollie eating the knife with...

Legacy reboots are all the rage these days and we have now reached the I Know What You Did Last Summer, the first came out in 1997, the sequel the following year and then in 2006 we got the last terrible instalment. The film follows a new group of irritating young people after they are involved in an accidental death and the following year they start getting a note saying…you know what it says. One of the few positives that they at least tried to do something different to make it less like they rehashed the original plot. In this version, the death happens when the car avoids hitting Teddy who is being irritating by thinking he has the right to be standing in the middle of the road at night when lighting is not great. Like Jurassic World and Star Wars there is a mix of new and old. We have Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. return along with a surprise cameo from Sarah Michelle Gellar. Jennifer Love Hewitt makes a Ralph Macchio level appearance. She only appears in two or thre...

I didn't know too much about this film except that it follows Denise who is always in trouble with the law and is on the hunt to find out what happened to her father who disappeared years earlier and she enlists the help of the UFO group that he was a part of. The central performance from Inez Dahl Torhaug because she has this thing about her that she is missing something as the film progresses, she realises that the thing she was missing is family and the misfit group of UFO Sweden is her family.  Despite the slightly cliched ending, I thought that it was interesting enough. I was never bored and thought that the pacing was quite good. Also Denise is driven enough to be likeable and the members of the UFO group are quirky enough to be interesting and the one one that stood out was Gunnar who is reluctant to trust Denise and when the rest of the group decide to follow her journey he effectively gets stroppy and hobbles away.  The scene where Denise actually meets her father it...

Superman is the first film in the James Gunn led DCU. After nearly 2 decades of missteps after missteps, Warner Bros decided to hire James Gunn which might be a smart move based on how good the Peacemaker TV series turned out to be and how I felt after the end of this film. The film decides to start when people are aware of Superman and Lois Lane knows that Clark Kent is Superman. I didn't mind this as I felt that it saved about 40 minutes to an hour of plot which probably wouldn't have helped that much so getting on with it was quite refreshing. First of all, they cast Superman well. I didn't know who David Corenswet really was before this film but his version of Clark Kent/Superman had the vibes of Christopher Reeve but still felt like it had his stamp on it. I liked how they addressed the thing that always bothered me which is how the resident of Metropolis never worked out that Clark Kent is Superman and in this film they say that Kent is wearing Hypno-Glasses which is ...

To paraphrase a famous quote from this franchise “Universal were preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should”. It’s only been three years since the last disappointing Jurassic World film. I don't know if it's been long enough before they hit the reboot button but they have. The set up being that Scarlett Johannson plays Zara who is tasked by Rupert Friend’s Martin who works for a pharmaceutical company that wants genetic material from living dinosaurs and they rope in Jonathan Bailey’s Henry Loomis and Mahershala Ali’s Duncan. As they go to the island they come across a father, his two daughters and the elder daughter’s lazy boyfriend who are attacked by a dinosaur.  There are many problems with this film. Mainly the family is an annoying distraction. The boyfriend is so unlikeable that when the scene comes where the father accepts him, I just didn't care and was hoping that one of the dinosaurs would kill him. Another issue is t...