This week, I’m doing things a little differently. Due to me having other things going on this weekend, Saturday was the only time to go to the theater. This wouldn’t be a problem usually, but my dumb self decided to use up all of my A-List reservations for the week in one day. So it’s a Triple Feature. The last time I did two movies in a day was last December with Silent Night and Godzilla Minus One (that’s and interesting pairing), but never three in a day. That’s almost too much Nicole telling me the movies are magic. Only one way to find out and that is doing the darn thing. This week, this will turn into a journal of sorts since it is just basically Saturday this week. Every week, I close this section with on to the reviews, but I guess this week I will start it off with On to me at my house!
11:45 a.m. – Leave for the theater. One of the big downsides for me to moving to just outside of the City of Detroit (the border is literally just on the other side of the road) is a severe lack of theaters. As in, there aren’t any. So that means I go to all the ones still I went to when I lived at my old apartment. 20 minute drives aren’t the worst thing, but it could be a lot better.
12:15 p.m. – Billed as a kind of eat the rich kind of black comedy, it didn’t really work the way I hoped it would. Set during the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918, Peter Sarsgaard plays a cook who is hired on by a wealthy family, whose patriarch, played by Billy Magnussen, is a journalist who thinks Woodrow Wilson is trying to shut him up. As the movie progresses, you see how Magnussen’s character is the worst person in the movie, and how the movie ends really is a darkly funny way to end things. While I did like Sargaard’s character is mysterious and you aren’t sure what his endgame is, they never really pay off his character. Also, Sarah Gadon was great as the wife of Magnussen’s Jay. The only problem is she appears to be in a very different movie at times. I get that her changes of character are part of the plot, and it worked. My problem again is how the movie ended. It really made things feel uncomfortable, and I think that was the point.
2:15 p.m. – Lunch break. For the first few years since I moved down here, my food options if I wanted to grab something after a movie was basically only McDonalds or Taco Bell. That got kind of old. Then, a Chick-fil-A opened next to the theater and I danced. Following that, a Shake Shack opened nearby too. In no way do I go to either of those places before the movie and sneak food in. No sir. That would be wrong…..🤓This two hour gap is the biggest open section of the day and gives me a good time to see the real world before I go back in for the other 2/3 of this dumb plan I made.
4:30 p.m. – I think it was wise to make this the middle movie today. This was the longest 90 minutes for me. If it was the first movie, it would have started the day on a sour note, and if it was last, I might not have finished it. There are movies that just feel like it should have been a TV movie. Space Cadet a couple weeks ago was like that. So was this. It was boring the kid sitting a few seats over from me, and that isn’t a good sign. They ham fist the original book into this, and I guess it was the best you could do with the original material. That is the main point here: not all kids books need to be movies. Nobody was calling for this, and seeing the box office returns so far, nobody is seeing it either. If you desperately want to see this, just watch the trailer. Nearly everything he draws is in the trailer. You just miss Zooey Deschanel’s wooden acting. I’m sure Zachary Levi and Jermaine Clement got paid enough to star in this. I’m also sure if it is going to be watched by most kids, it will be on streaming where it honestly belongs.
6:00 p.m. – We are at the point of the day I was worried about, and after Harold, I need Trap to be watchable. I’m not sure people were meant to see this many movies in the theater in a day. On an interesting note, there were 14 trailers between Coup and Harold, and not a single duplicate among them. That should change with the 6 or 7 trailers I’m about to see before Trap. If there isn’t a Smile 2 trailer, I will eat my hat.
7:30 p.m. – Smile 2 was the sixth trailer of the eight shown. Trap was puzzling movie. It was a decent tense movie that put us in the P.O.V. of a serial killer trying to escape a trap set at a concert by the FBI. Josh Hartnett was the best part of this movie. He really did a great job playing both Cooper the dad and The Butcher. There are quite a few points in the first two thirds where you see those two sides bleed into each other. M Night’s daughter Saleka was also good as Lady Raven, the superstar whose concert is the titular trap. It’s when we get to the final third where this movie starts to fall apart a bit. You know Cooper is going to get caught eventually, and for some reason Lady Raven has to be a bigger part of the story. It really starts to get dumb. That is ok though. It’s a Shyamalan film. They has to be a twist here to make this all worth it. I was ready for the wife to be Cooper’s secret accomplice. That is the problem here. There is no twist. This is just a normal thriller that doesn’t really know how to land the plane. For some directors, this would be ok. However, when go into a Shyamalan film, you o in with an expectation. When it isn’t there, it comes across as incomplete.
9:40 p.m. – Head home after stopping at Taco Bell. I usually stop there after I go to movies. Over the 3 movies, I watched 22 trailers, and surprisingly they were all different. I even saw some trailers to movies I had no idea even existed, which is strange for me. I also got all three versions of Nicole telling us how movies are magic. Today has been interesting, but it also has been a lot. I know I never could handle one of those Marvel marathons that are held, but I’m not sure I will do this triple feature again for quite awhile.
The real question this upcoming weekend is how well Borderlands will do. I imagine Deadpool brings in at least $50 million on weekend three, so does the video game adaptation get to that level? I say no, but am prepared to be surprised if it does.
- Deadpool & Wolverine
- Borderlands
- Twisters
- Trap
- It Ends With Us.
Three more movies next week, and I’ll watch them on different days this time. Monday is a Secret Movie I’m hoping is Blink Twice, Saturday is Borderlands, and the Instigators is sometime in there on AppleTV+. That is also a sign of what a lot of those months will be. A lot of streaming movies, as my options at the theater are pretty bare in August.
Mitten Film Nerd 
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