Power Rangers

I do realize that I haven't done many reviews this month. I wanted to knock at least one more out before the end of the month and why not jump into a film that I had absolutely no interest in seeing at all and swore I wouldn't spend a dime to see. Well guess what showed up on Amazon Prime?

So I never watched Power Rangers as a kid. It just wasn't my thing. I think for a while I wanted it to be my thing and I tried to watch it once... but then I saw an episode with the real Rita Repulsa and I laughed and turned back to Star Wars. So I'm gonna say right now, I have not see any of the original Power Rangers. The very little I have seen in no way makes me an expert to point out whether or not this movie was faithful to the series or not. I'll also say, I have absolutely no interest in this franchise whatsoever. The only little interest I've ever had was to the fan film starring Katie Sackhoff, and even that I wasn't nearly as interested as everyone else... With that out of the way, let's talk about Saban's Power Rangers.

The movie follows the story of five misfit teenagers in a town called Angel Grove. At the beginning they very much want to harken back to the 80s Nostalgia of The Breakfast Club but that is pretty much forgotten after the first half hour so if you were going into this movie because it reminded you of that, you're in for a disappointment already.

You've got Jason Scott (played by Dacre Montgomrey), the former football star now washout after his injury made him unable to play for the football team. Former cheerleader Kimberly Hart (played by Naomi Scott) who is outcasted from his cheerleading squad and cuts her hair to be different. Billy Cranston (played by RJ Cyler) a kid with autism who becomes very much the heart of the team. Trini (played by Becky G) the "new kid" who is struggling with her sexuality. And Zack (played by Ludi Lin) a wildcard risk taker. Coincidence really takes them to the same place where they find these crystals and gain super powers.

They're introduced to Zordon (voiced by Bryan Cranston) who informs them that their powers make them the Power Rangers, a team of powerful individuals destined to fight off evil, especially a rogue former ranger named Rita Repulsa (played incredibly unironically by Elizabeth Banks).

I'll get into Elizabeth Banks but one thing I really need to applaud about this movie is how amazing Bryan Cranston is an actor. There is a lot about this movie that is ridiculous. The premise, the script, the acting, all of it, super silly. However, Cranston still manages to deliver his lines like he is delivering Shakespeare. He is somehow able to get me to totally buy into this world that I have no knowledge or interest in. Applause for the incredibly talented actor giving it 110% in a role he really could have just phoned in.

The rest of the film though is super hokey, weird, and takes itself WAY too seriously.

I mean someone, please tell me how you can take the Power Rangers seriously. It is not a subject that allows for the gritty realistic feeling all superheroes have post-2008. And yet everyone wants to treat this as seriously as they've treated the Marvel movies because we all know Marvel makes gangbuster money.

It is so weird because everything is played so seriously and not ironic at all.

The best example of this comes in the form of Elizabeth Banks playing a character named Rita Repulsa.

If this picture wasn't enough, just take a look at the way this character was played in the show and tell me please how I am expected to take this character seriously at all.

And like I said, this is just one of multiple aspects of this entire concept that I am supposed to be taking seriously but can't do just due to the fact of how ridiculous it is. If you grew up with Power Rangers, I'm not making fun of you, I really just want to know how this is expected to be played as serious.

Now if the movie was played off as a comedy or meta humor, I could see this being played off as a joke or a funny character, but Banks plays it 100% serious. She's weird in the movie, very similarly to the character in the show, but they play it with enough seriousness that I feel as though I need to take it seriously.

The weird thing however is that this movie potentially could have worked. The actors playing the Power Rangers are by no means good, but some of the intended emotions and feelings I knew I was supposed to have about these characters do manage to come through in certain parts of the film, especially in the character of Billy. And while the other four are not very good actors, I feel like if they had had a script and a good director that did more than Project Almanac back in 2015, this could have potentially been an okay movie.

They play this movie very much like a superhero origin film. In fact they steal a lot of origin ideas from movies like Spider-man and X-men. But when these kids start figuring out that they have superpowers, they maneuver through it the way a kid would write a superhero origin story in 5th grade after seeing the first Sam Raimi Spider-man film. I say this because I was that kid. I've looked back at some of my writing from an early age and it's not a whole lot different than the writing in this movie as these kids are trying to figure out their powers. There isn't really anything driving these kids to figure out their powers together, it just turns out that way because the script needs them too. For a story that is very much about friendship and growing up, I feel like the movie sacrificed some moments that could have been really good relationship building by just fast forwarding these kids through what is admittedly probably an awkward transition for normal writers to write. Taking characters from ordinary to extraordinary can be difficult but that's why people like John Gatins gets paid a lot more than I do to write the screenplay for this film.

The other mistake this movie made was not only taking itself WAY too seriously, but they addressed this film like a superhero origin story as opposed to the monster destruction movie it clearly should have been as evident by the end of the film.

Listen, the final fight of the film is not very good. It was too little, too late. But as I was watching it and the Power Rangers get geared up into their Zords, I got a glimmer of the action sequences from a movie like the first Pacific Rim. The action got a lot cooler and a lot less hokey when they were in their dinobots and fighting Rita's giant gold monster. In a way it's the Transformers movie we probably will never get that would still be terrible, but I would be more interested in than the Transformers fighting with King Arthur.

I don't want to see a Transformers Power Rangers crossover. I have no interest in seeing either one of these film franchises come back in any way shape or form. But one of the biggest complaints I've heard about the Transformers films is that they focus way too much on the human characters and not enough on the actual Transformers. My thoughts are, if you're going to continue focusing on the human characters, why not make them Power Rangers and have them be able to go toe to toe with the Transformers?

Again, I am in no way endorsing this crossover and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't happen due to the fact that they belong to two different studios, but if they insist on continuing to waste money on these franchises that I have no interest in, you might as well just throw everything into it, make it the wackiest concept you'll ever see and just invite me to spend money on it, chances are I might just out of Fear of Missing Out.

Is Power Rangers as bad as I thought it was going to be. For the most part yes. It is not a good movie and I didn't think in any uncertain terms that it was not going to be bad. But there were more parts that I enjoyed than I expected. Still bad, but it at least gave me some fun ideas that will probably never happen due to copyrights.

But what did you think? Did you watch Power Rangers as a kid? Did you like this movie? Should they make a sequel? Should they make a sequel crossing over with Transformers? Or Pacific Rim? Isn't Bryan Cranston the best? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @MovieSymposium as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

I'll leave you with this. Seriously, if you have 15 minutes to spare, just treat yourself to this fan film. It takes the concept of Power Rangers and takes it WAY WAY WAY too seriously almost to the point that it works. Check it out here.

Shutter Island

There are a lot of reasons why I haven't seen Shutter Island until now. When it first came out in 2010, I didn't see it because the trailers portrayed it (inaccurately) as a generic horror film set in an insane asylum. 2010 Connor had no interest in that because he was (and still is) a wimp when it comes to horror films. Another reason I didn't end up seeing it was because when everyone figured out it wasn't so much a horror film as much as a it was a cerebral film, it unfortunately fell off people's radars because it came out the same year as Inception and of course that blew everyone's minds and kind of overshadowed this film. More recently though I figured out it was an adaptation from a book and I wanted to read it first. Finally, while I was flying home on a plane I saw it on the in flight entertainment menu and I thought it was finally time.

Shutter Island takes place in the 50s and follows the story of US Marshall Edward (Teddy) Daniels (played by Leonardo DiCaprio). Teddy and his new partner Chuck Aule (played by Mark Ruffalo) are sent to Ashcliff Hospital for the criminally insane on Shutter island to investigate the disappearance of a patient of the hospital. The name of the patient is Rachael Solando (played by Emily Mortimer) and she is there because she drowned her kids in the lake.

The audience soon discovers that there is more to this hospital than meets the eye and Teddy makes it his mission to thoroughly investigate Ashcliff to not only find the missing patient, but uncover the unsavory acts happening behind closed doors. The movie starts to blend illusions and reality as Teddy is reminded of his dark past and the mystery unfolds.

So the cast of this movie is actually really solid, utilizing some pretty talented actors and actresses that I'm not sure were as well known or popular at the time. DiCaprio has always been pretty particular about the roles he takes on and the directors he works with and in looking at his filmography, there hasn't been a movie he's been in since 2002 that I haven't thought he's given a solid performance.

I'm not one of those people who believe DiCaprio deserved an Oscar for the longest time well before The Revenant because if we're being honest, I don't think that's necessarily true, Fight me. But that doesn't take away from the fact that he's a solid performer and this movie is no different.

This is such a cerebral and personal movie for DiCaprio's character that it requires someone I need to be totally invested in the whole time and Leo does that with this film. It's not his best performance, but again, I find it hard to find a movie after Catch Me If You Can where you can honestly say that DiCaprio sucked in a role. It cannot be done. Fight Me!

Mark Ruffalo does a good job in this film. I am trying to make it a goal of mine to watch more Ruffalo pre-MCU because the guy is a solid actor, he just hasn't been in many films I watched before he became the Hulk. He doesn't steal the show by any means, but he's good.

Ben Kingsley and Max Von Sydow both play Doctors at the hospital and these are both veteran actors who I have a very hard time finding a film they're bad in. The one thing about these two is that their characters are a little bit redundant. They're both good, but I feel like you could have combined their characters and made them one. Having read the book I know that they are two separate characters in the book, but I feel like that could have been adapted differently.

Ted Levine (Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs) plays a small role that was fun. Not incredibly huge or important but fun. I had to actually look him up because his name is not that familiar.

I think the thing that took me by surprise in this movie was the female talent. I've always been a fan of Emily Mortimer from The Newsroom but she's always been a bubbly happy character. In this she's very dark and creepy in her delivery and I loved it. Patricia Clarkson has a small role that was kind of like Levine that I had to look up who she was to recognize her.

And then Michelle Williams has a pretty decent role as the ghost of Teddy's dead wife Dolores. Now I had to look this up, but apparently Williams has been active pretty much since the 90s. She was in a lot of stuff I didn't watch like Dawson's Creek and she's been in other roles since, but I've only really come to notice her in the past few years, especially starting with Manchester by the Sea. More recently she was in The Greatest Showman and I really enjoyed her in that. So it was a surprise to me to see her there doing a phenomenal job in a really cerebral role. I obviously need to be paying more attention to Michelle Williams because she should have been on my radar a long time ago.

Now I loved the book and the movie is pretty true to it. The one issue with that is that because this movie is so cerebral and a bit of a thinker, it's automatically compared to the other cerebral thinker film of 2010 Inception. And I'm going to answer this question right away, Inception is better.

Shutter Island is a really good film. It definitely plays with the mind and it's very well acted, if not a little bit better acted than the performances in Inception. The problem is, Shutter Island is such a condensed story and very personal that it feels very small compared to Inception. When you come to the end of Shutter Island, there is a lot to think about and when you watch it a second time it does change the experience. However, I can't imagine this film is one I would want to watch multiple times over like I do Inception. Watching it twice and maybe revisiting it every once in a while might be the max for me, whereas Inception I could go back to multiple times and still be awed by it.

Now it's not exactly fair to compare the two because while they are cerebral films that came out in 2010, they are still very different. My point of bringing up the comparison is to point out how Shutter Island is a small story. It feels like a noir and the atmosphere is great, but I can't see myself going back to this movie to uncover more things. Once you've uncovered things in the first viewing, you're pretty much covered.

Seriously, if you haven't checked out Shutter Island yet, I am highly recommending it. It's a really solid film. But after that initial viewing and maybe another one, I could imagine this storyline just being a one-off fun experience.

I've laid out the great probably underrated cast, Martin Scorsese directs it the only way he knows how, brilliantly, and the story is definitely one to check out. Don't worry about how it compares to Inception. Take that out of the equation. Again, my point in bringing that up is not to compare them, but to point out the scale of this movie. It's less of an epic, and more of a personal claustrophobic experience. It does that phenomenally.

If you haven't checked out Shutter Island, avoid all spoilers and give it watch, you won't regret it.

But those are my thoughts on Shutter Island. What did you think? Comment and Discuss below! Do you think it was unfairly compared to Inception in 2010? Am I unfairly comparing it to Inception now? Have you read the book? Let me know your thoughts. You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @MovieSymposium as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

Thanks for your support!

mother!

Darren Aronofski is definitely a unique voice in the movie making community. I haven’t seen nearly enough of his films to tell if I’m a fan of him, but I respect him mostly out of reputation more than anything. I’ve seen Requiem for a Dream and Noah and the common thread that I can pull from his movies is that you don’t exactly come out of the theater feeling good about life in general. He pulls a lot of his inspiration from disturbing imagery, theme heavy story-telling, and almost a horror element in some of his films as well, though I wouldn’t call Noah or Requiem a horror film. But I think some people thought that mother! was going to be a horror film, based on the trailer and previous films like Black Swan (it’s on my list, I promise), so when it turned out the way it was, people were disappointed. I think the biggest thing to take away from 2017 movies is that if we get our expectations so high and it doesn’t turn out being what we think it should have been, that doesn’t make it a bad film. And mother! is no exception. After taking some time to finish mother! I actually think this movie will probably be more appreciated as time goes by. Is it a phenomenal film? Well, no, it definitely has its problems, but this review might be a little hard because I don’t want to give too much away. At the same time, I don’t think this movie is the kind of movie I do a full spoilers review on. I hope I can describe this movie as best as I can without going into spoilers and hopefully you'll be able to asses whether or not this movie is one for you or if you can skip it. 

mother! stars Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence. They are a married couple who live in this house together in the middle of nowhere. Bardem’s character is a poet who is having trouble writing a new piece whereas Lawrence is just a homemaker, in the sense that she spends a lot of time taking care of the house that they live in so Bardem can write. You may notice I’m using the actor’s names and that’s not for the reason it usually is that these characters don’t have memorable names or something, it’s that they don’t have names. On Wikipedia, Lawrence is credited as “mother” and Bardem is credited as “him”. That might give you a little bit of insight into the type of movie we’re dealing with here. Everything is very abstract and while characters are making decisions in the film and they say things, it’s usually, if not always alluding to some kind of metaphor.

Well Bardem and Lawrence are visited by this couple played by Ed Harris and Michelle Pheifer. From there things only get more and more hectic as stuff starts to happen and more people start to show up, and they start to make themselves comfortable in Lawerence and Bardem’s house and a lot of stuff happens and it’s all symbolic towards a larger message that I won’t get into now.

This movie is definitely not for everyone. It’s easy to be turned off by the style of this movie because in all reality, it’s pretty hard to not catch onto the metaphor they’re trying to convey and the movie pretty much forgoes any structured story in exchange for a super abstract metaphor. Which I’m not sure it really needed to do that.

There is a definite supernatural element to this movie and it could have easily been turned into an interesting story with a couple of twists and turns while still being symbolic. Jennifer Lawrence herself has these moments and things she does that are really interesting and could have made her an actual character. The issue is she’s not a character, she is a symbol. It’s very hard to relate to a character when the entire movie is banging you over the head trying to explain that she is symbolizing something. 

The last thing I will say as somewhat of a criticism of this movie is that if you read about the production of this film, it all seemed very laid back and finished very quickly. Aronofsky apparently wrote the script in five days, and since it’s all really abstract, he can kind of get away with it by saying read into it however you like. And while I kind of like how mother! is definitely different from other films, I do think it is a little bit pretentious to write a script that you could see being written on a 5 day cocaine bender (not saying Aronofsky does cocaine, just a joke) and leaving things up to interpretation.

But that being said, I do have to give Aronofsky credit, although I’m a little bit skeptical on the amount of work that was put into this film, it still is a movie that makes me think. The allegories in it are pretty well done in the context of a modern setting, and there are definitely parts of the film that don’t exactly fit into that allegory so it just makes you think more and more about what it could mean.

There are other pretty recognizable names in this film and pretty much everyone is 100% committed to the role they're in and the style this movie is, but the other parts played by other big names actors is so small, they're almost like cameos that were more entertaining than super important to the plot of the story. I'll leave their names out so if you decide to watch the film you'll be pleasantly surprised like I was, but you should know that the other actors like these cameos and Harris and Phiefer, outside of Bardem and Lawrence, give good performances in this film. 

I think the biggest thing I enjoyed about this movie was just how it made me think a little bit about the metaphors being portrayed. Like I said, everything is a metaphor and instead of a real structured story, it just decides to bang you over the head with that metaphor. However, not everything is so clear cut as other things. There are things that happen in this film that are clearly alluding towards a certain allegory or symbol and it's pretty obvious while there are other things that are open ended or just things I'm not totally aware of. 

Now, this does have the danger of making Aronofsky seem a little pretentious that instead of a story, he's giving you "art" or "a message" but I'm not going to be the guy who criticized him because I didn't understand some elements of the film. But I'm also not going to say this is the most inspired thing I've seen ever. It's fine and it's a mind fuck. It's Arronofsky, what did you expect?

I won't spoil the ending but it's a great example of how this movie could have multiple interpretations and at the end of the day, that's really what film and themes in films are, subject to interpretation. You might get something out of this movie differently than I do and you may hate this movie even if you think I'm describing a movie you will enjoy. 

My goal is to point out what is good and bad about the film, say a type of people who might enjoy it, and the rest is up to you. I hope I have done that in this review because this review was difficult. 

Have you seen mother!? What did you think? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts via Twitter @MovieSymposium as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog. 

I do thank you for your patience as this is the first review I've done in a while. I've got a couple of posts I want to get out this weekend so I'll push for that, but it's the same old excuse about transitions and making money as I've done in the past. I've also been playing some video games. I'm thinking I'm going to try and incorporate some video game reviews and thoughts. Again, thanks for your patience and continue your support on the blog and on Twitter. Thanks!