August 2020 – Page 2 – Movie Meister Reviews

August 13, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

23 Walks (2020) – Promising But Tiring

Released: 26th July
Seen: 11th August

With all the movies out of the cinema, I’m noticing more and more of the replacements seem to be these quiet little films that might’ve gone straight to DVD or just been shown once on Sundays for seniors’ tea screenings. Little quiet films like Love Sarah and The Secret: Dare To Dream are so small and quiet that they’d probably never even be noticed on a normal screening schedule but we’re not on a normal schedule anymore, which is how a background noise film like 23 Walks can find its way onto a big screen.

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August 12, 2020 leebutler Uncategorized

7500 (2020) – Just Plane Awesome

Released: 18th June
Seen: 10th August

You know what’s hard? Starting reviews on movies about difficult subjects, like 7500, because I have to try and give a brief catchy way to clue you into the movie. This opening paragraph is designed, in part, to catch your eye while you’re scrolling through my site and maybe make you curious about the content of the review and normally can involve backstory or a comparison or even an anecdote that relates to the media at hand… well, 7500 is about a bunch of people hijacking a plane so how exactly do I ease into that? Guess what I just did might be the best I’ll be able to do.

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August 11, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Howard (2020) – Lyrically Beautiful

Released: 7th August
Seen: 8th August

Were it not for Howard Ashman, there’s a chance that Disney studios wouldn’t be the behemoth that it is today. The legendary lyricist is partially responsible (in conjunction with his friend Alan Menkin) for the songs from The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin which would be the three films that began the Disney Renaissance and, effectively, saved the company. He also wrote one of the greatest musicals of all time with Little Shop of Horrors, a masterpiece no one expected to work. His career was the stuff that icons are made of but judge as Howard was reaching his peak, he was taken from us. Now, in this hell year, we are given a documentary to honour a legend who should never be forgotten.

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August 10, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (2020) – Running on Embers

Released: 26th July
Seen: 8th August

The Eurovision Song Contest is one of the greatest and strangest things that we, as a society, have ever put together. A competition show like no other, it’s where Abba became world famous and it’s regularly known for having the weirdest and wildest acts to ever be put on the stage. It’s one of those things that’s so perfectly weird that it seems like it should be almost impossible to parody, making jokes about Eurovision is a little bit like putting a hat on a hat but Will Ferrell certainly tried and what he ended up with was… interesting.

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August 9, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Underwater (2020) – Watered Down Alien

Released: 23rd January
Seen: 8th August

Alien knockoffs seem to be making a huge comeback as of late and I gotta admit, I’m weirdly enjoying seeing just what people do as part of their homage to the classic space horror. Just since starting this blog I’ve run into Life, which was Alien without the female protagonist and an ending that might be one of my favourite surprise endings in recent years.

Then there was Cloverfield Paradox which is Alien if it was the ship trying to kill them all instead of an Alien creature (and I was certainly a little too nice to it back then, I was early in my reviewing life). Well, the new entry into “Alien, except…” is Underwater, which is Alien except it takes place at the bottom of the ocean.

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August 8, 2020 leebutler Uncategorized

Host (2020) – Terror 404

Released: 31st July
Seen: 7th August

2020 has been a terrible year, this one is the year we can leave out of the history books for a whole host of reasons. In terms of the real world, we now get to see what it’s like to live through a plague that spreads so quickly and easily that the only way to prevent it is for everyone to stay home. For the movies, which this blog relies on heavily for sweet delicious content, it’s meant that everything interesting has moved to next year but it also means that we now live in a world where some things won’t ring true anymore.

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August 7, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Greyhound (2020) – Explosively… fine

Released: 10th July
Seen: 7th August

It’s somewhat of a cliché to refer to movies about the war (any war really) as “Dad movies”, but it’s one that feels weirdly appropriate no matter what kind of dad you have. There’s something about the genre that just paints the image of a dad on a couch ignoring everything while watching some good old boys bomb some nameless bad guys who have accents and maybe a weird 4 legged spider on a flag. Greyhound is definitely playing to that kind of dad, but a dad who also has things to do and needs to get his movie watching done in under 80 minutes if it’s at all possible.

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August 6, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

The Personal History of David Copperfield (2020) – Delightful Dickens

Released: 2nd July
Seen: 5th August

The Personal History of David Copperfield Info

When it comes to adaptations of Charles Dickens, everyone has had a crack at one of his stories. There’ve been versions that rewrote Oliver as a story of a young gay prostitute and versions of A Christmas Carol focussed around a vacuous TV host, just to name the oddest ones I could think of. The brilliance of Dickens’ work is that it lends itself to adaptation with it’s grand characters, beautiful stories and fiendishly fun dialogue, though when you do adapt his work you have to be aware that some of the stories already have definitive adaptations you will be compared with.

If you adapt Oliver, you will be compared to the 1968 musical adaptation that everyone thinks about when they hear that title. If you adapt A Christmas Carol you’re going to have to do better than what the Muppets did back in 92 (or be interesting like the most recent adaptation) and now if you adapt David Copperfield… well, I’m not sure this would be the ultimate adaptation of that novel, but it’s a genuinely great one.

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August 5, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado (2020) – Truly Legendary

Released: 8th July
Seen: 4th August

Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado Info

July 3rd of 2020 was the first time I’ve ever heard the name Walter Mercado. I wasn’t introduced to him the way a lot of people were, I didn’t watch his shows or call his hotline or see his interviews. No, I learned about him the same way I learned about Little Edie, Mary Berry and Theresa Caputo… I saw them being portrayed as characters on the Snatch Game during an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race. That was my introduction to Walter, drag queen Alexis Mateo decided to portray Walter Mercado during the most iconic challenge in the entire series and the second I saw this impression I wanted to know more about this person and then, 5 days later Netflix released the documentary Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado and like a good procrastinator I didn’t watch it for over a month because damnit, that’s what a professional does!

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August 4, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

The Secret: Dare To Dream (2020) – Keep This Secret

Released: 31st July
Seen: 3rd August

In 2006, The Secret was let loose upon society. The self-help book introduced many to the concept of the law of attraction, namely that if you think about something enough that it will appear in your life (which I can roundly disprove by pointing out that at no point in my life has Chris Hemsworth turned up to my house to feed me freshly peeled grapes, a thing I think about often). The book became a monster hit with people like her holiness Oprah championing it to the masses. Well, it’s 14 years later, so naturally now is the perfect time to start a cinematic universe around the concepts presented in that book.

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