Author Archives: jjcwn

Movie Review: The Flash

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All science fiction/action movies that involve time travel take the risk of creating a timeline and/or a storyline that has a high chance of becoming ridiculous very quickly. The case of the new Marvel movie “The Flash” is about a Marvel character who can move at the speed of light and can also run faster than the speed of light (not possible within any natural law of Physics). The Flash got his incredible speed from a combination of being struck by lightning while being drenched in toxic chemicals. An off the wall crazy idea that I thought should have come from a better explanation.

When the Flash, played by actor Ezra Miller, runs faster than the speed of light, he has the ability to go back in time. This is the part of this story that does not work because the time travel is way overdone and mostly makes no sense. The time travel within this story brings back superheroes from other times in history, including Christopher Reeve, and George Reeves as Superman, using archive footage, and even Ben Affleck, Michael Keaton (the original Batman from 1989), and Adam West, the original Television Batman from the 1960s. The main message within this movie about time travel and superheroes are that if you make even one tiny change in what has happened in the past, the entire universe can come to an end, with possibly no way of fixing this corruption of time. In this story, due to a tiny event involving a can of tomato sauce, Barry “The Flash’s” mother is killed and his father is falsely arrested for her murder. Undoing this injustice is the majority of the plot of this film.

This movie includes the addition of a new movie Super Girl, played by newcomer Sasha Calle, who makes her first appearance about 75% into this story. As with all Marvel action movies like this one, the special effects are once again spectacular with the same idea of CGI first, story refinement is always less important.

Overall the acting is good and there are some genuine moments of humor, but not quite enough to save this film for a recommendation. I agree with the low 66% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and do not recommend The Flash.

Hulu Movie Review: Flamin’ Hot

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The best movies are about real-life stories, a comment repeated in this blog many times over the last 8+ years.

The new Hulu movie “Flamin’ Hot” is a real-life story about a very poor and beaten down but proud Mexican man Richard Montañez, played very well by Jesse Garcia, who started as a janitor at Frito Lay in the 1980s and was so appreciative of having any job to provide for his family (a wife and 2 sons), that he worked harder than anybody in the company. After several years of hard work, and being treated with rudeness and disrespect by management, Richard had one idea about new spicy hot chips and Cheetos that tapped a new unknown market in the Latin community. Nobody had ever had this idea before, but it was Richard’s idea that generated enormous sales for Frito Lay. I was happy to see in the end, the company did right by Richard and gave him a huge promotion and a high-paying job. This is a real-life Rocky story and for the millions of us who have been treated badly as an employee of large corporations, this story provides inspiration and hope for so many who every day, dream of a better life, somehow, someday, our day will come. We will be appreciated, finally.

Richard’s mentor within Frito Lay is Clarence C. Baker, played very well by Dennis Haysbert. It was nice to see someone in management, reach out and treat a low-paid and disrespected Mexican Janitor with respect and listen to his ideas and his opinions. How many people have we seen in our lives who have true empathy for someone struggling just to survive? I thought this relationship was the best part of this movie along with Richard’s wife Judy Montañez, played by Annie Gonzalez, who is outstanding in her role as a Mexican wife doing anything to help and support her husband, who had trouble ever believing in himself.

The message of this story is another great part of this film. “We are all worthy of respect, and our opinions have merit.”

The actor Eva Longoria directed this very good movie, in her first outing as a director. Tony Shalhoub is also great as the CEO of Frito Lay Roger Enrico.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this movie are a stupidly low 68% – entirely missing the point of this true story, with my rating a solid 85% and a strong recommendation.

Movie Review: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

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The only real upside to the latest Transformer movie “Transformers” Rise of the Beasts” is that Michael Bay is not involved with this production in any way. Bay’s last two Transformer movies, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”, 2009 and “Transformers: Age of Extinction”, 2014, are generally known to be two of the worst movies ever produced. In 2018, the movie “Bumblebee” was released – again without Michael Bay, and starred Hailee Steinfeld. This version was a good movie with a coherent story and was reviewed in this blog.

The problem with too many of these Transformer movies is that the decision-makers were all about huge special effects over any kind of understandable coherent story. Movies like these are created from the top down – CGI and the spectacular effects first, and then write the story around the effects later. The end result is garbage movies that are a nightmare to sit through.

The story with the newest Transformer movie is that it is better than most of the previous versions, but once again, the story is a total disaster and impossible to follow. The best critical review I have seen so far from critic Kevin Carr is “More coherent than the garbage from Michael Bay, but still a noisy, overblown mess.” I 100% agree with this assessment.

Somewhere along the line, with the invention of CGI and special effects movie science, the real reasons for making a movie have been lost. It was always supposed to be about the story first.

I mostly agree with the low 53% rating for this film on Rotten Tomatoes, with my rating around 33%. This movie should be missed by everyone except for kids who have a toy collection of about 100 Transformers.