Movie Review: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts


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.

Movie Review: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse


Going into this movie, everybody knows this is a cartoon. What someone would not know is that graphic arts quality is nothing like a movie like “Toy Story” produced by Pixar or most other quality cartoon movies. The graphics for “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” looks terrible on the screen, especially the background drawings. The story is about as bad as the cartoon quality and so hard to sit through I left early. Why this movie got a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes is anyone’s guess, this movie is a “must miss”.

I don’t agree with or recommend this movie, even for children.

Movie Review: Kandahar


A different perspective to review the new movie “Kandahar” is to understand the hardships of the cast and crew of this movie – while filming this average story about the war in Afghanistan in Saudi Arabia. All of the scenes of this movie are in barren desert locations, under the hot sun and sand for months. One can only wonder how much the star of this film, Gerard Butler was paid to go through a long period of time living in tents in a hot desert. After reading the script, which is nothing special, and then considering so many months of a filming schedule, it is hard to understand why Butler took this role. There is almost no story here, just a series of events that we have all seen many times before.

The story of Kandahar is about a CIA operative, played by Butler who following a successful mission to blow up a nuclear facility is exposed as a spy in the second mission and is forced to leave the country. The rest of this movie is nothing more than a series of chase scenes, gunfire, and explosions, making this one of the most minimal war movies I have ever seen. As far as the cast, Butler is the only well-known actor in this film with most of the other actors taken from a local actors pool in Saudi Arabia.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Kandahar is a low and correct 46% that I agree with and do not recommend this film.