MOVIE: Mickey 17 (2025)

by benmweilertNo Comments
Mickey 17 Year: 2025 Rating: R Length: 137 minutes / 2.28 hours I can appreciate when movies try to do something new. The trick is that I also want my movies to be an escape from reality. Science fiction is meant to ask tough questions about society, but sometimes I don’t think sci-fi looks far enough out when certain plots would be completely feasible in the near future. Mickey 17 (2025) basically answers the question, “When the poor have nothing else to give, what will capitalism do to them?” Answer: clone them as expendables for dangerous menial labor situations. Acting-wise, Robert Pattinson carries this movie on his ability to truly pull off cloned versions of the same person with quite unique personalities. Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette are also great in their roles as a couple who use authoritarianism to subdue a population on an alien planet. Naomi Ackie and Steven Yeun were good too, but didn’t have the extremes the other characters were portraying....
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MOVIE: The Batman (2022)

by benmweilertNo Comments
The Batman Year: 2022 Rating: PG-13 Length: 176 minutes / 2.93 hours I am glad that society has reached the point where every new reboot of a comic book franchise does not require repeatedly rehashing the same origin story. Spider-man: Homecoming (2017) did this, and now The Batman (2022) can join its ranks. It's a good thing, too. At almost three hours long, The Batman takes its time exploring a side of Batman we rarely see: the detective. Perhaps now that he's solved this case, he can figure out where all the lights in Gotham City went? Either way, the aesthetic and style of this Matt Reeves reboot had me skeptical at first, but won me over by the end. After rolling my eyes at yet another reboot of a comic franchise that has seen five reboots since I've been born, I have to admit that this film felt the closest to being realistically feasible. The characters (brilliantly acted by Robert Pattinson, Jeffrey Wright, Colin...
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MOVIE: The Lighthouse (2019)

by benmweilertNo Comments
The Lighthouse Year: 2019 Rating: R Length: 109 minutes / 1.82 hours When Oscar season rolled around a few years ago, I heard a lot of buzz about an artsy film known as The Lighthouse (2019). Years later, I finally found the time to sit down and watch it on Amazon Prime. Now I understand why the Academy didn't nominate this film for Best Picture. It's weird. I legitimately tried to figure out what was going on but gave up when things just spiraled into chaos. I have a suspicion that a key moment in the film resulted in a character's death and that the remainder all takes place in some sort of purgatory, but that's the best explanation I can give at the moment. For a film that features two actors for almost the entire runtime, I have to say that Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson make this movie something to see at least once. In fact, I'm still half-certain that Willem Dafoe wasn't...
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MOVIE: Tenet (2020)

by benmweilert1 Comment
TenetYear: 2020Rating: PG-13Length: 150 minutes / 2.50 hours I'll admit: I probably have to watch this movie again. I'm usually pretty good at unraveling a Christopher Nolan movie when I watch it for the first time. Not since Memento (2000), have I had such a difficult time piecing together the intertwining timelines. At least with Memento, I was aided by the black-and-white sections. In Tenet (2020), time moves in both directions in the same scene. Sure, this is a visually-stunning feat, but it's often a slap in the face of the Grandfather Paradox, which Tenet simply waves away with a shrug and a "don't worry about it." What's interesting is how moments of foreshadowing in this film triggered my "lightbulb reflex" each time the corresponding portion of the plot came into focus and gave me the "aha moment." I'm sure I'll pick up more of these when I watch it a second time. As it stands after a single viewing, my mind...
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