Category Archives: movies

Sony desperately wants a Marvel-ous franchise (or series of franchises, really) of its own. Despite failing the Spider-Man franchise the prior three times at bat before the MCU stepped in to help guide last year’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, they have another push with Venom, a not-quite spin-off from the Spidey mothership that is depressing in its inability to be interesting in any way. It tries to crib from the Marvel formula but only really succeeds in copying two of the MCU’s weakest elements-a too-long origin story and a final conflict where the good guy has to fight the evil version of himself.

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I don’t think it’s any great tragedy, but despite the three prior iterations, writer-actor-director-performer Bradley Cooper’s “A Star is Born” is my first venture into this particular story. It didn’t quite matter, everything on screen played out exactly as I would have expected as if I had seen one of the others. That doesn’t mean Born is a particularly bad movie. It’s not. It’s certainly engaging, the music is mostly amazing, except when it’s almost supposed to be bad, and the performances are quite nice. There’s just not a lot of weight to the story despite how hard Cooper tries in every aspect of the film.

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An interesting concept-a dark comedy in a world where puppets (more accurately, Muppets, or Sesame Street-esque creatures, thanks to director Brian Henson, yes, son of) live alongside humans-is wasted in the not-nearly-as-funny-as-it-should-be Happytime Murders. The film seems to think that a Muppet saying “fuck” is enough to generate laughs, which it isn’t after the first two or three times. Melissa McCarthy does her able best as a cop working with her former puppet partner investigating a series of murders to the actors who once worked on a 90s TV show, but she can’t escape a script lacking in, amongst other things, effort.

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