Category Archives: Drama

Movie Review: Freakier Friday

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The new movie “Freakier Friday”, the sequel to “Freaky Friday” released in 2003, is one of those bad movies that you are embarrassed to tell people you actually saw. I only saw this movie because the theater for the film I wanted to see had a broken projector, so I sat through this horrendous waste of two hours for this blog.

This entire story about people who swap bodies was so poorly done that for most of the movie, you are trying to figure out who swapped into who, all along hoping that this nightmare would be over soon. There is a series of filler side stories, entirely designed to make this movie last two hours, where the goal should have been to end this mess in 80 minutes.

Freakier Friday stars the same two main actors from the previous movie, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as Tess Coleman and Anna Coleman, and two new characters who are also swapped, Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons, who play Harper Coleman and Lily Reyes. After the initial screaming scene where they all found out they were swapped, it seemed that the swapping after effects were ignored in favor of other stories to fill out the two hours. It’s hard to believe that a bad movie from 2003 was greenlit for a sequel 22 years later. With millions of dollars at stake, what were the producers thinking with this disaster?

The Rotten Tomatoes average rating of 73% is way too high with my rating 10% and a run from this mess at all costs recommendation.


Jurassic World: Rebirth

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Writing one logline to describe all 7 of the Jurassic Park movies is easy. “Very Dangerous Dinosaurs are safely enclosed in cages, then something goes horribly wrong, and the Dinosaurs are released and they kill and eat people, and people run for their lives”.

The 7th Jurassic Park movie, “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” starts out with a scientist within a highly secure and state-of-the-art Dinosaur research facility dropping the wrapper of a Milky Way candy bar on the floor while entering a clean room. What follows is a disaster that turns off all the security in the facility, and once again, the Dinosaurs are released. The good news is that even though the main idea is exactly the same as the other six movies, this time around, this story has more imagination and even better special effects than the previous six.

This film starts 17 years after the security disaster, and there is a major medical science discovery where it is discovered that the blood of 3 specific dinosaurs might contain the cure for all heart disease for the entire world. The story then follows the obvious path as a major medical company, out for a trillion-dollar windfall, a scientist and two adventurers, including Zora Bennett, played by Scarlett Johansson, and her long-time friend Duncan Kincaid, played by Mahershala Ali, travel to this dangerous island to retrieve impossible-to-obtain dinosaur blood. There is the typical evil, only caring about money, representative of a medical company, trying to make trillions on this magic dinosaur blood Martin Krebs, played by Rupert Friend, is typical of the bad people we see in movies like this one.

The big surprise in this movie was the appearance of a father of two daughters Reuben Delgado, played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, who is the great lead actor in the very good Netflix series, ‘The Lincoln Lawyer”. Delgado’s daughters are played by Audrina Miranda and Luna Blaise. Some of the most spectacular special effects in this movie involve Deglado, his two daughters, and their boat captain running for their lives, with many of the scenes infuriating because nobody would take some of the risks they do in this film.

The good news is that this seventh installment is better than most of the previous 4 movies with a better story, even though the reasons for the chaos are still the same.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings are an understandably low 51% because there is nothing new enough in this film that we have not seen before, other than the new types of genetically modified dinosaurs, especially one that looks like a combination of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and the creature from “Alien”. Hopefully, this small step in the right direction will create better Jurassic movies in the future, because with the money involved, there will be many more movies like this one.

Movie Review: F1: The Movie

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My first question about this film is why not just “F1”, rather than “F1: The Movie”, because we know it’s a movie, in this case about the dangerous sport of Formula 1 racing.

This film is mostly about an ongoing dialogue of watching incredibly expensive racecars, that cost between 12-15 million dollars, race at speeds over 200 miles an hour around an oval track, while the racing crew monitors every aspect of the car using impressive advanced technology. The problem with this movie is that there is too much showing of this technology and racing, and not enough of any noticeable story.

The acting starring Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes and Damson Idris as Joshua Pearce, who play the two drivers, and Javier Bardem as Ruben Cervantes, who plays the CEO of the racing crew, is all very well done. With all racing movies like this one, it is at times hard to understand why any person would be willing to risk their life just to race a car, but like all professions like this one, you have to have it in your blood – you don’t have anything else you want to do.

It is impressive the work that went into this film, including risking the two main actors who actually drove their racecars at over 180 miles an hour. Given the risk, it does not make sense to risk lives like this when all of the dangerous driving could have been replaced with relatively simple special effects.

I agree with the middle-of-the-road 84% ratings for this movie, which could have been much better with an improved story and screenplay. This movie is also way too long at 2 hours and 35 minutes, and could have easily told the same story in less than two hours. Mainly for the great racecar driving effects, I do recommend this film.