Nope (2022)

Director: Jordan Peele. Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Brandon Perea, Steven Yeun, Keith David. 130 min. Sci-fi/Horror.

• If Spielberg wanted to make a Hitchcock movie (or Hitchcock wanted to make a Spielberg movie), this would’ve been the result. While the step by step thriller/horror approach to an alien encounter is right out of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (and to a lesser degree, his War of the Worlds) all the way down to power outages during a UFO fly-by, and the scene of dismounting a pick up truck to see a UFO hovering above; the style is obviously Hitchcockian, most notably the suspense of the inflatable dancing men sequence towards the end, and a mid movie god’s-eye view showing the town from above - a salute to Hitchcock’s The Birds.
• After Jordon Peele’s masterpiece debut, Get Out, his second feature, Us, was a big disappointment - so I didn’t go into this one with any major expectations. I was pleasantly surprised. Nope contains what we as moviegoers are always thirsty for: lots and lots of beautiful, memorable images. I was somewhat dissatisfied with the ending (never as deep as Get Out), but that imagery … that was enough to love.

MoGo's rating: 9/10

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Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (2022)

Director: Richard Linklater. Cast (voices): Milo Coy, Jack Black, Lee Eddy. 97 min. Animation/Drama.

• It's great to have the luxury (and of course, the talent) of telling the world what your childhood "felt" like. Because that's what this predominantly story-less movie is all about: the atmosphere of Richard Linklater's 1960's childhood in Texas, where the first men on the moon were being launched from your hometown of Houston. And didn't we all imagine ourselves as kids as the tycoon with hundreds of cool cars, Elton John playing in concert, or Neil Armstrong going to the moon? Linklater inserts that childhood dream of being the first man on the moon into his coming-of-age recollections, and makes this an enjoyable movie (in animated form, no less), even if you weren't born in America, or didn't have American childhood aspirations.
• Available on Netflix.

MoGo's rating: 7/10

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Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Director: Taika Waititi. Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Christian Bale, Tessa Thompson, Taika Waititi (voice), Russell Crowe, Jaimie Alexander, Chris Pratt. 118 min. Fantasy/Action.

• If I wanted to list my top 5 Marvel movies so far, Thor: Ragnarok (Thor 3) would've been in there (the other four being Iron Man, Captain America: Winter Soldier, Avengers: Infinity War, and Spider-man: Far From Home). The delightful Ragnar ok was directed by the bright New Zealand import, Taiki Waititi ... so of course, after awhile they corrupt him. This film's screenplay has a similar structure with similar jokes - down to a mid-movie sequence where a crazy god-like figure (Jeff Goldblum in Thor 3, Russell Crowe in Thor 4) demolishes throwaway characters. And Natalie Portman wasn't just going to stand by as the girlfriend/sidekick, so they turned her into a Thor clone in this one (no joking), never really explaining what the mechanism of her metamorphosis is. The only interesting aspect is Christian Bale as Gorr, the god-butcher (yikes!) and his tormented past - but then again, Christian Bale has a habit of being the only interesting aspect of a movie.

MoGo's rating: 6/10

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Jurassic World Dominion (2022)

Director: Colin Trevorrow. Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Laura Dern, Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum, Campbell Scott, BD Wong, Omar Sy. 146 min. Action/Sci-fi.

• I watched this movie around a month ago on opening weekend, and already remember almost nothing of it. That's how bland and repetitive this movie is. Lackluster villains, unnecessary close-up shots of action sequences, and going down a checklist of the original movie's best hits, makes this film difficult to tolerate. The joining of the old (Neill, Dern, Goldblum) and new (Pratt, Howard) casts in this movie creates significant hope, but even that effort falls flat, as story-wise you never know why the old crew was even invited to be in this one, as opposed to some other trio of scientists. There's an underground dinosaur bazaar here that I found somewhat interesting, but that's all I'm giving the below average score for. 
• Case in point: In the 1993 original made by Spielberg, there's the majestic scene where Sam Neill's Alan Grant first sees the brachiosaurus, gets up in the jeep, and pulls off his very dark and opaque sunglasses, upon which we see his wide-eyed shock at the scene in front of him. In this movie, Laura Dern's Ellie Sattler does the exact same thing upon seeing a dinosaur, but this time, her sunglasses are not opaque enough - we can already see her wide eyes behind the glasses, so pulling them off doesn't project the intensity of her amazement when she does. In other words, Trevorrow never understood why or how Spielberg's scene worked. But he still used it in his movie.  
• Curiously, Jurassic Park's sequel trilogy follows the same trajectory as the Star Wars sequel trilogy: the first movie (Jurassic World, and Episode VII - The Force Awakens) was a "maybe", creating some hope that the director (Colin Trevorrow for JP, J.J. Abrams for SW) was onto something. The second movie, a better movie (Fallen Kingdom, and Episode VIII - The Last Jedi) was made by someone else, and then the third (Dominion, Episode IX - Rise of Skywalker) made by the same director as the first, was just horrendous, making you hope they never make a movie of this franchise again. 

MoGo's rating: 4/10

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The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)

Director: Tom Gormican. Cast: Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Tiffany Haddish, Neil Patrick Harris. 107 min. Comedy/Action.

• Nicolas Cage is one of those actors with whom people have a love-hate relationship; no in-between (mine is love). My favorite Cage movies, panned by many, have been The Rock and Knowing; and I find his dumbest and most hilarious, loved by many, to be Con-Air. Everybody went crazy over Face/Off (not sure why), and I thought he was the perfect choice to play Johnny Blaze/Ghost Rider, even though the movie was horrible. See what I mean? 
• In the manner of other actor flagellating movies such as Being John Malkovich and JCVD (satirizing our vision of John Malkovich and Jean-Claude Van Damme, respectively), while playing himself in some sort of cliché adventure movie, Cage bravely and whole-heartedly embraces the above notion. He acknowledges that despite the nepotism that probably helped him launch his career (Francis Ford Coppola is his uncle), he exudes a certain depressing style of weirdness and corniness that makes him unique, and lovable. The movie is a satire of Cage's movie persona, and possibly, his real-life issues. At times watching the movie, it's hard to differentiate the two. 
• The ingenuity of the screenplay shows in the very last moments with the appearance of a certain actress. You'll know when you see it.

MoGo's rating: 7/10

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