Some Meh Movies That Are Decent Enough

Hollywood doesn't really make good movies anymore, so here are some Meh ones that are decent wastes of your time.

So if you need stuff to watch this Thanksgiving holiday weekend:

Hansel & Gretl: Witch-Hunters. Just pretty much fun from the opening. Good "Troll" make up (or CGI). I honestly just flat-out enjoyed this movie.

Oh by the way: This movie is ridiculously violent. Ridiculously.

It doesn't just have one head being squashed/exploded by powerful force (a troll's fist, a horse's hoof). It has at least two and maybe three.

Non-Stop. Cranky conservatives may whine about the solution to the mystery, but I'd object back that It's just a movie and a movie has to do something different, right?

Well the solution is dumb and really makes no sense if you think about it, but that doesn't detract from the fact that it's fun, tense, involving thriller, and they don't really make thrillers anymore, so.

Another movie I just liked.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. The concept looks awful, the trailers looked like unfunny CGI-overload nonsense, and it seems kind of shitty to use the "Walter Mitty" title to sell a movie that has almost nothing at all to do with Walter Mitty.

But it turns out the movie is reasonably good. Maybe you just have to be in the mood for it. It's one of those Follow Your Dream movies, but it's especially strident about it.

But I got into it.

On the "Walter Mitty" title -- It feels like a script was written that had nothing to do with Walter Mitty at all, except for the basic idea of a daydreamer hero, but the studio decided "Wow we'd have so much more MindSpace if we had the Walter Mitty title, so let's buy the title and slap it on this unrelated movie."

Now even though that's what I think happened here, I'd point out that the unrelated screenplay is still worth shooting a movie from, and if they had to buy the Walter Mitty title to get financing (based on all that additional "MindSpace"), well, who cares.

Understand going in that this movie has nothing to do with Walter Mitty, except for the title, and except for the hero's name. Not even the better dream sequences are used for the movie.

Still, Walter Mitty is unfilmable as a movie so what did you expect? (No character arc, no actual plot movement. It's just the same joke 4 or 5 times, and then "The End.")

And also, if they felt like they needed that Walter Mitty brand name to sell an unrelated, but still worthy, script, eh, who cares. This is Jon Gruber's America, after all. Such minor deceptions aren't worth getting upset about.

The movie can't really decide if it's your typical Zoolander crazy-silliness Ben Stiller movie or a more heartfelt Follow Your Dream adventure, but it still works, mostly.

Basically a travelogue movie with some settings I wasn't expecting and didn't realize would be fun to look at (Greenland, Iceland, and Afghanistan).

Guardians of the Galaxy. Professional enough, and determined to please you like a puppy. Like a puppy, it's kind of dumb and only has three modes (Eat, Poop, and Slobber), but it's okay.

Not really anything like "The modern-day Star Wars" or anything like that. It's just not serious enough to sell you on the idea that this is what Space looks like. Some nonsense is so cheesy that it seems more Flash Gordon (and I mean the 70s movie version) than Star Wars.

The characters are kind of broad and silly... like Muppets. So it's Muppets in Space, but more violent.

Nothing really wrong with it, and I'd definitely rent it. I just don't want anyone's expectation levels to be set anywhere close to high, though. It's just a dumb, silly special effects movie that doesn't offend. Okay, but don't expect something inspired.

Live. Die. Repeat: The Edge of Tomorrow: People are mentioning this Tom Cruise sci-fi movie favorably in the comments. I reviewed it a while back, also very favorably.

posted by Ace at 04:44 PM

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