Movie Review: The End of Oak Street


“The End of Oak Street” is one of the very few movies involving dinosaurs chasing and killing people, aside from the seven Jurassic Park films. When it comes to dinosaurs, with no exception, there will be scenes with people running for their lives and being eaten alive.

This new movie has the interesting idea of a small town in the 1980’s that transports through a portal of time back to millions of years ago, where dinosaurs dominate the planet Earth. This is, of course, completely crazy, but it sets the stage for highly unusual scenes of people running for their lives and being attacked and killed by a number of different dinosaurs around a normal lower-class neighborhood.

This film stars Anne Hathaway (Denise Platt) and Ewan McGregor (Greg Platt), who are having relationship problems with hints of a possible divorce. They have two children, Brian Platt (Christian Convery) and Audrey Platt Maisy Stella. In terms of character development and any complex story, understandably, this is not that kind of movie.

The first 20 percent of this film is just setup for the run for your life rest of the story. My main problem with this movie is that there are too many scenes where the characters do things that nobody would ever do in real life. The worst one is Brian leaving the protection of his house to chase after his dog, with giant man-eating dinosaurs running all over the neighborhood. Obviously, nobody would ever do this. There was one shocking scene that seemed way out of place in this film, where two dinosaurs are mating. This scene should have been cut from this movie, including the selfie that Denise takes of her husband standing in front of the mating dinosaurs. What were they thinking with this scene?

The Rotten Tomatoes rating of 84% for this film is mostly correct, with my rating at 80% and a mild recommendation, mainly for some of the impressive special effects.

Movie Review: Spider-Man: Brand New Day


The last Spider-Man movie, “Movie Review: Spider-Man: No Way Home”, was released in December 2021, nearly five years ago. That movie had a plotline that continues into this latest franchise film, where Spider-Man’s two friends, MJ (Zendaya) and Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon), do not remember who Spider-Man/Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is because, in the last film, the world discovered Spider-Man’s true identity. Peter Parker’s exposed identity caused many serious problems for his friends, forcing him to go to Doctor Strange to reverse time so that Parker could choose certain people in the world who were allowed to know Spider-Man’s true identity. Once again, for Marvel films like this, you have to suspend any level of common sense, and I considered this part of the story one of the most insane ideas within the Marvel franchise.

For this new film, Spider-Man has a new friend, Frank Castle/The Punisher (Jon Bernthal), and Detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas) – who is one of the lead actors in “The Bear” Hulu series, and visits with his old friend The Hulk(Mark Ruffalo). Florence Pugh also makes an appearance as Yelena Belova/Black Widow, who has all of her scenes in a steam room, which I thought was too off-the-wall an idea.

Spider-Man is also very depressed, having lost his friends, and this time around, fighting nonstop crime is interrupted by some medical issues, with severe headaches that are suggested to be caused by his depression over losing his friends, including the love of his life MJ. He has many other medical issues, including his wrists’ spider web ejector either erratically working or not working at all.

The antagonist in this story is a woman named Jean Gray, played by Sadie Sink, who has the ability to invade people’s minds and force them to do whatever she wants, with the one exception being Spider-Man. Later in this story, Gray’s brain control ability increases greatly to being able to control the minds of everybody in New York City. All this creates many scenes of impressive special effects that are as good as, or in some scenes better than, all the previous Spider-Man movies.

I mostly agree with Rotten Tomatoes’ 91% rating, with my rating at 85% and a solid recommendation.

Movie Review: Motor City


The last post on this movie review blog, “The Invite,” was a movie that was 100% dialogue and violated the screenwriting mantra, “show don’t tell”. The new movie “Motor City” is the exact opposite, with about 8 words of dialogue, “all showing, no telling”. In the history of moviemaking, Motor City very likely has fewer words of dialogue than since silent films, making production more of an experiment about trying something new than a viable new movie idea.

Motor City stars Alan Ritchson (John Miller), a man who has just been released from probation and works in a factory in Detroit, Michigan, in 1977. John has a girlfriend, Sophia (played by Shailene Woodley), who works as both a waitress and a call girl for an evil criminal, Reynolds (played by Ben Foster). The story that follows we have all seen before, as John Miller is arrested for a crime he did not commit and sentenced to 25 years in prison. How he was set up is explained, all without dialogue, through subtle scenes, facial expressions, and an engagement ring that makes an appearance in many scenes throughout this story. There are some impressive action scenes, with a climax between John Miller and another criminal in an elevator that looked like it took some time to choreograph. Unfortunately, this “no dialogue action movie experiment” did not work.

I agree with the low 66% ratings for this movie and do not recommend it.