Category Archives: Films

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 review

13 Saturday May 2017

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“We’re not friends, we’re family.”  Huh, where have I heard that before?

by Thom Yee

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Honestly, it’s starting to feel a little weird that we live in a world where I can talk to my mom about Rocket Raccoon.  At this point, I could probably even talk about Rocket Raccoon with your mom.  We geeks are really getting spoiled right now.

So anyway, the original Guardians of the Galaxy did did very well with us here at GOO Reviews, but the farther we’ve all gotten from it, the more I’ve personally learned to… well, not to dislike it, but to not love it SO much.  Guardians of the Galaxy is a movie defined by extremes, its most visible and memorable elements probably being its colourful comedy and its general wackiness, and though those extremes aren’t necessarily that surprising given that it is a comicbook movie, it still lacks some of the nuance that’s allowed the best superhero movies to endure (even as the most enduring superhero movies usually come across as far more sanctimonious and self-serious).  That doesn’t mean Guardians isn’t well remembered or that it couldn’t or shouldn’t be your favourite superhero movie, but Guardians was the type of movie that left me feeling extremely satisfied at first but ultimately somewhat empty, like a really, really great fast food meal.  Continue reading →

Win It All review

29 Saturday Apr 2017

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To gambling, the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems

by Thom Yee

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Win It All images courtesy of Netflix

Manifest destiny is one of those concepts that’s surprisingly easy to throw around, even if we don’t all have a firm grasp on 19th century colonialism, because it’s so tempting to believe what we’re doing is right. What we’re doing is inevitable. What we’re doing is something we ought to be doing, something that will bring about the way things should be and, perhaps, always should have been. It’s a lot like gambling that way. It’s an act of faith.

Gambling is something you do at least partially because you believe it can help you to meet your end goals. That doesn’t necessarily make it a lot better or an easy thing to condone, but I think it makes it easier to understand. Continue reading →

The Fate of the Furious review

22 Saturday Apr 2017

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Hey!  He did kill Han, right?

by Thom Yee

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The Fate of the Furious images courtesy of Universal Pictures

If you had asked me all those years ago in 2001 as I waited for the lights of our theatre to dim and The Fast and the Furious to begin if I thought it would be a movie that could spawn more than six direct sequels, I probably would’ve asked right back, “Who are you?  Why are you talking to me?”  I was hostile like that.  And I usually didn’t talk to strangers.  But if you had, nevertheless, somehow convinced me to share my honest opinion of the movie and its potential to grow into the powerhouse, box-office-ruling franchise it’s become?  I’d probably say, “Pfft.  Yeah. And the American people will one day elect Donald Trump as their first Nazi President.”

But enough with the misdirection jokes. Continue reading →

Your Name. (Kimi no Na wa) review

15 Saturday Apr 2017

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Where’s Lindsay Lohan when you need her?

by Thom Yee

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Your Name. (Kimi no Na wa) images courtesy of Toho

Did you ever wake up crying and you weren’t sure why? You’ve had a huge swelling of emotions that you could feel like the heat from a roaring fire, and then snap! Just like that, you’re awake; you’ve experienced something of almost unbearable emotional intensity, something deeply draining, something almost alive, but with every second that passes you drift further and further away from whatever it was that made you feel that way. And you forget it. You forget the moments, the details, the places and names, all gradually but surely disappearing with every second that passes. You get up, go to your bathroom, and study yourself in the mirror, the face looking back at you familiar but foreign, and a horrible feeling starts growing in your stomach and your heart, a feeling that tells you that, though it was just a dream, you’ve somehow lost something of infinite value. A feeling so big it makes you want to cry. But you don’t. You have a cat to feed, a humidifier to turn off, and a degrading job to get to, so you wash your face, put your clothes on, eat your cold breakfast, tie up your shoes, step out the door, and try to join the human race. Just like everyone else. Continue reading →

Power Rangers (2017) review

01 Saturday Apr 2017

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Sincerely yours, The Breakfast Club Power Rangers

by Thom Yee

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Power Rangers images courtesy of Lionsgate Films

When it comes to the narrow windows of time that separate our personal childhood fascinations from the general nostalgia that we just can’t stand, I fell just outside of the right age to be into the Power Rangers. I was in upper elementary school, grades 4 through 6, when the morphenomenal teen team first debuted and gained prominence, just a little too mature to fully immerse in their world, but still surrounded by the property’s deluge of television episodes, toys, and commercials. If I’m being honest, there was a part of me that envied the younger kids at my school who were at just the right age for the Power Rangers and could play with the Japanese-looking robots that combined together to form even bigger robots, but at that point I mostly had my sights set firmly on one other goal: Toughening up so that I wouldn’t be eaten alive in junior high. In my case, that meant leaving behind such juvenilia, picking up at least one sport to be good at, and pretending to be into gangsta rap. But, as long as we’re being so honest with each other here, I should probably go ahead and admit something else to you: I still watched Power Rangers sometimes. Continue reading →

Kong: Skull Island review

18 Saturday Mar 2017

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‘Twas beauty killed the—what’s that. He’s still alive? Oh… well never mind then.

by Thom Yee

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Kong: Skull Island images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

So, I’ve never actually seen the original King Kong, not all the way through or all in one sitting at least. That’s not something I regret either despite being ‘the movie guy’ in my group of friends and despite being a person who prides himself on his knowledge of movie history. It may ultimately be a failing on my part, but I just don’t have a great deal of patience when it comes to the classics, and, as has been the case with Citizen Kane, The Graduate, or Scarface, I doubt that I’m going to see the original King Kong anytime soon. I’ve seen parts of it of course, the same way we’ve all watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory, pressed the wrong floor in a cramped elevator, or eaten at Subway, but there was never any intentionality behind those viewings, so while I have a pretty good idea of what the movie was about, I don’t really know what people see in it. But I have seen the 2014 Godzilla. Continue reading →

Logan review

11 Saturday Mar 2017

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Ew… no! Blood! Unngh!

by Thom Yee

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Logan images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

The last time we checked in on a Wolverine movie was in 2013’s The Wolverine, a small, self-contained little story where Wolverine travelled to Japan and was charged with the care of the rich heiress and granddaughter of a soldier whose life he saved in World War II that quickly and drastically grew less small and less self-contained when that same soldier wound up betraying Wolverine in a bid to steal his youth-imbuing healing factor. I know that’s a bit more than a spoiler (and a really long and convoluted sentence), but, frankly, eff that movie and its weird Viper-snake-ladies, its ridiculous Silver Samurais, and its jump-right-off-the-rails-of-sanity third act after its much more even-toned first two [acts]. Besides The Wolverine’s bullet train sequence, there is almost no reason to see that movie, at least not in its entirety. Continue reading →

Get Out review

04 Saturday Mar 2017

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You cool like dat? I’m cool like that.

by Thom Yee

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Get Out images courtesy of Universal Pictures

One of the most cogent and convincing arguments I’ve ever heard in my life was about cheating:

“If you can take advantage of a situation in some way, it’s your duty … to do it. Why should the race always be to the swift, or the Jumble to the quick-witted? Should they be allowed to win merely because of the gifts God gave them? Well I say, ‘Cheating is the gift man gives himself.'”

Eugenics isn’t explicit in that statement, but I think it is implicit, and eugenics, or at least the idea of pre-determining a preferred path based on your beliefs on superior genetic traits, is an idea at the core of Get Out. Continue reading →