Oscar Winners 2022

Posted on March 13, 2023 by jjcwn • Posted in Uncategorized • Leave a comment

There is something seriously wrong when a movie about people fighting with hot-dog fingers, bagel time portals, and a screenplay and film so bad, it is in my opinion just about the worst movie ever produced. The problem when something as insane as “Everything Everywhere All at Once” wins best picture during the most important award show of the year, is that – deserving performances and important films are not given the recognition they deserve:

Steven Speilberg should have won best director for the Fabelmans.

The “Fabelmans” or “All Quiet on the Western Front” (one of the best war movies ever made) do not win the best picture.

An outstanding actress, Michelle Williams who should have won for best actress for the Fabelmans, loses for the fifth time. She is long overdue to win best actress. She lost to a woman who was dancing around and fighting with hot-dog fingers and had plastic rotating eyes pasted on her forehead.

We can only hope that this horrible movie does not set a new precedent that different, no matter how bad, is now good.

From a routine browsing of the opinions in IMDB of Everything Everywhere All At Once here are just some of the opinions of normal moviegoers, of this horrendously bad movie.

From: BA Harrison:

Utter Drivel:

In what universe is a film starring Jamie Lee Curtis with hotdogs for fingers considered Oscar-worthy? The answer to that question seems to be ‘this one’, Everything Everywhere All At Once having been nominated in eleven categories at the 2023 Academy Awards. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve somehow slipped into an alternate reality where a film’s worth is measured by how quirky, irritating and baffling it is.

I believe that this film’s success is down to viewers not wanting to admit that they don’t ‘get’ it – “It’s A24, and that means it’s intellectual, and if I say I don’t understand it everyone will think I am stupid”. Well I think you’re stupid for playing along.

So what’s the film about? Well, Michelle Yeoh plays laundromat owner Evelyn Wang, who discovers that the universe is made up of infinite parallel realities, each one different, and that an evil force is attempting to… ah, who am I kidding? I can’t sum up this film. I tried to follow the plot, but there’s so much random crap crammed into the excruciatingly tedious 139 minutes, all edited so as to induce a migraine, that I soon found myself struggling, not just to understand the plot, but to stay watching till the end.

I get that the film is attempting to say something profound about life — being happy with the choices that we have made, having no regrets, and accepting others for who they are — but it’s hard to give a toss about any of that when faced with such relentless codswallop.

Rant over, I’m off to try and find a universe where this film doesn’t exist.

From: Claudio Carvalho

Overhyped and Overrated Bad Trip

I watch and re-watch a lot of movies per year as a hobby (no money involved), and today I have 9988 reviews in IMDb. Last month, I received an email from IMDb listing “Everything Everywhere All at Once” as one of the Top-10 movies of 2022. In IMDb, it is informed that this flick is nominated for 10 BAFTA Awards, 240 wins, and 351 nominations. I can only understand that this is a heard behavior to the promotion of the studio, using “professional critics” and press to promote such garbage. I cannot envision a normal being, without financial interest or being manipulated by critics, to enjoy this crap. It seems to be a bad trip of the writers turned into a movie by insane producers. In the end, this film is 2h 19 min of a complete waste of time. My vote is one (awful).

Title (Brazil): “Tudo em Todo Lugar ao Mesmo Tempo” (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”)

From: The Oak

Confusing, annoying and insulting

This movie was supposed to be the best ever, but it just freaked me out. The movie is all over the place and the depth it could have had is ruined by randomness, absurd humor, and pretentiousness. In one of the scenes, the characters suddenly have sausages instead of fingers and they make a pretentious reference to A space odyssey where the pre-human apes fight with sausage fingers. Maybe that’s just humourous and well-meant, but I could hardly watch. It’s impossible to tell if this movie is a comedy or an action movie or a deep drama and if such confusion is your thing, then maybe you would love it. I could barely stand it.

Movie Review: Scream VI

Posted on March 12, 2023 by jjcwn • Posted in Uncategorized • Tagged Jenna Ortega, Scream 6 • Leave a comment

In most theaters, when it is time to return your 3D glasses there is a cardboard receptacle when you leave the theater. For a movie as stupid as the latest Scream movie – Scream 6, there should be a place to drop off your brain before you step into the theater. In all 6 movies in this series that started in 1996, the formula is the same. People run for their lives and are horribly and very violently stabbed by some murderer wearing this same strange ghost mask. Then after numerous people are killed throughout the movie, the ending provides the “let’s explain what is really happening to the audience” scene at the end. The one at the end of this film, could be the worst ever in the entire series.

This time around the explanation-end-scene requires intensive knowledge of what happened in all the previous 5 Scream movies – and/or some heavy drug usage. The explanation of this ending for Scream 6 made no sense to me, and any movie that requires heavy end-of-movie-flash-cards – can never be a good story. When this happens at the end of any film, all it means is that the screenplay was not effective enough to explain what was going on for the first 2 hours.

The other stupid time-honored tradition is the showing of people who are stabbed over and over again, who then miraculously, turn out somehow – undead. How can this be? There is one man who is stabbed directly in the mouth, with the knife twisted and then later, is seen running to kill someone else. Another young man is stabbed by two attackers at the same time probably over 50 times and then, is seen exiting a crime scene on a stretcher, somehow still alive. Do we really have to be this idiotic? Do we really have to show scenes where people are killed over and over again? I thought it is only possible to die once, not 9 times. The overt stabbing and over-killing in this installment are probably worse than all of the previous movies in this franchise. Why do this, considering how ridiculous this entire idea is since it all started in 1996. The other thing to consider is why movies that are all about horrendous killing and murder are so popular? This is the 6th installment in a horror series that is completely inane, from day one. If you have seen one Scream movie, you have really seen them all.

Courtney Cox returns in this latest in the series, without Neve Campbell, who it was reported was not offered enough money to reprise her role. Hayden Panettiere, returns to this series, with her last appearance in Scream 4. Newcomers Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera play sisters and seem to be the new actors who will take this series – onto even more stupid sequels.

Considering the ambitions of actresses like Campbell and Cox when they started acting, it is rather depressing to realize that their movie careers will be mostly remembered for a series of essentially dumb Scream movies. That is real life in Hollywood. You have to go with the flow to keep acting and hope that high quality will come around, someday. Very often for too many good actors this never happens and you have to continue to act, to make money and stay relevant. This industry has always been money over quality and due to the gamble it requires to produce any movie, this will most likely never change.

I was rather surprised at the relatively high 74% rating on Rotten Tomatoes for Scream 6, with my rating at around 50% and a solid pass.

Movie Review: Champions

Posted on March 11, 2023 by jjcwn • Posted in Uncategorized • Tagged Champions, Kaitlin Olson, Woody Harrenson • Leave a comment

I have seen a number of coaching basketball movies in the last few years where the coach gets into trouble, loses his job, and then gets drunk. The best one of these is the Ben Affleck film, “The Way Back”, released in March 2020, right before the United States declared the Pandemic a national emergency. The difference between The Way Back and the new movie “Champions” is that this movie is much more of a comedy than a serious drama.

The message here is a good one. A down-and-out coach in the NBA J-league Marcus, played by Woody Harrelson has an argument with the head coach and is fired, then he gets drunk and hits a police car. What follows is 90 days of community service coaching a basketball team comprised of mentally challenged teenagers. Over time Marcus mutates from someone who hates his new job to someone who wants to help a group of kids who need all the help they can get. We have all seen movies like this before, but this one is done well enough to recommend.

I also thought that most of the basketball scenes were well done, including one player who could never shoot the ball unless his back was to the basket and shoots without looking. This running joke I also thought had a funny yet predictable resolution at the end of this movie.

The love interest for Marcus is Alex, played by Kaitlin Olson, who is the mother of one of the mentally challenged teenagers. Her life of poverty and borderline desperation is very well portrayed within this mostly comedic but at times dramatic story. An actress with down-syndrome Madison Tevlin who plays Cosentino, just about steals this entire movie with some of her scenes. She is amazingly high functioning for someone with down syndrome.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for Champions is a stupidly low 53%, with my rating a solid 75%. This is a good family movie with a good message about what is really important.