leebutler Action, Adventure, Review, Sci-Fi

Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts (2023) – Fun Film In Disguise

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 22nd June
Seen: 6th November

Let’s be honest, the Transformers series as a cinematic universe hasn’t exactly had the best track record. Sure, the original animated film is considered something of a cult classic that had people sobbing over the death of a cartoon robot but then we had almost a half dozen atrocities directed by the luckiest man on earth, Michael Bay and that ended up being a big mistake. Sure, Bay’s films made money but none of them were actually good, they were spectacles that eventually lost their luster through bad filmmaking and uninteresting stories. Now fortunately the franchise was wrestled away from Bay and given to people who seemed to care which led to Bumblebee which is still the high point for the live-action series. It was a movie that actually felt fun and fresh in a way that has clearly impacted how these movies are made because it led directly to Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts, which might not be as great as Bumblebee, but it’s still fun.

Continue reading “Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts (2023) – Fun Film In Disguise” →
leebutler Crime, Drama, History, Review

Killers Of The Flower Moon (2023) – Damn It Scorsese!

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 20th October
Seen: 4th November

Killers Of The Flower Moon Info

There are some directors who seem pretty much incapable of making a genuinely bad film, Martin Scorsese is one of those people who just seems incapable of making something that’s actually bad. It’s honestly kind of amazing the streak of undeniably great films that this man has had, he’s the kind of director whose filmography is so great you could have hour-long arguments about which is his best and there’s at least a dozen solid choices you could make. It’s kind of amazing to think that this man is still putting out absolutely brilliant films in his 80s and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down any time soon. Even now with another absolutely fascinating work, Killers of the Flower Moon shows the man keeps on hitting… but he also really needs to be told to make a film under 3 hours because it’s getting silly at this point.

Continue reading “Killers Of The Flower Moon (2023) – Damn It Scorsese!” →
leebutler Comedy, Drama, Review

You Hurt My Feelings (2023) – Wo-o-o Feelings

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 15th June
Seen: 4th November

One thing that’s particularly hard to talk about is films with low stakes. Films where people are just trying to get by in a small everyday situation where there isn’t much being risked are often the kinds of films that are perfectly fine enough but don’t have much that you can really sink your teeth into in order to talk about. Maybe a smarter reviewer would have set up something so that films like this could be bunched together in a single post instead of trying to turn “It’s fine” into a thousand-word review… this isn’t a site run by a smarter reviewer, this site is run by a big dumb dummy who thought it would be a good idea to do a lengthy individual review on every film that is seen in a given year so now I will attempt to find ways to talk about You Hurt My Feelings for more than a few paragraphs, which is going to be a challenge but one worth trying.

Continue reading “You Hurt My Feelings (2023) – Wo-o-o Feelings” →
leebutler Crime, Drama, Review

Pain Hustlers (2023) – Pop A Pill

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 27th October
Seen: 2nd November

The current opioid crisis that’s going on feels like it’s almost inevitably going to be the fodder for a ton of movies and TV shows just because it feels so insidious. It’s aA= massive health crisis that’s ravaged a desperate part of society and was turbocharged by a couple of money-hungry assholes who already have more money than god. That right there is basically the kind of situation that is destined to be turned into a form of consumable entertainment so that we can hope to understand just how this happened to hopefully start working on repairing the damage. A recent miniseries that tackled this was Dopesick which was a big hit but is also 8 episodes long, that might be too much for some people so a speedier version of this story is told in Pain Hustlers, a dark crime drama that shoots for the stars but just barely manages to hit orbit.

Continue reading “Pain Hustlers (2023) – Pop A Pill” →
leebutler Horror, Review

Haunting of the Queen Mary (2023) – Sinking Ship

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 18th August
Seen: 3rd November

Some horror films are incredibly simple, a basic plot and setting that means you just get to sit back and enjoy the terror as it unfolds. Think of things like the first Halloween movie, a film that’s scary almost entirely because of its intense commitment to pure simplicity. You instantly know the characters, the setting and the stakes in a way that allows the scares to actually work considerably well. Some horror films require a little bit of thought to follow, maybe they’re playing with some darker heavier ideas than normal that need to be thought about in order for everything to make sense, like how Get Out works so much better when you understand the racial politics behind it all. Then there’s films so complicated they feel like they require an instruction guide just to understand what the hell is going on, or as I like to call those films “Pretentious as fuck”, which is pretty much the central feeling you get with something like Haunting of the Queen Mary.

Continue reading “Haunting of the Queen Mary (2023) – Sinking Ship” →
leebutler Horror, Review

Sick (2023) – Siiiick

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 13th Jan
Seen: 2nd November

The slightly depressing reality is that we will probably never stop having to deal with the repercussions of the pandemic, or at least not for an excruciatingly long time. The last 4 years have been an absolute shitshow in terms of physical and mental health, the toll on the system from this one illness is impossible to properly measure and will undoubtedly be a reference point that most of us use for the rest of our lives. It’s also undoubtedly going to be a major part of a ton of art that’s being made for the next decade, how could it not be? It’s a major world event that absolutely everyone in some way has been impacted by, it not only impacted what kinds of art is made and how they make it but also will keep turning up as part of the narrative for a long time. Horror has had a fairly good crack at it with Host using it mostly as a way to justify a certain filming technique but now with Sick we have a film that uses it as an intrinsic portion of the central story and it makes for a surprisingly interesting little film.

Continue reading “Sick (2023) – Siiiick” →
leebutler Comedy, Review

Old Dads (2023) – Retire

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 20th October
Seen: 1st November

Every now and then a stand-up comic takes a chance and makes a leap from the stages of the comedy clubs to the bright lights of Hollywood to star in movies. So many greats have tried this, legends like Steve Martin, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy all have shown you can be great at stand up and as a movie actor. Others take their stand-up acts and turn it into a movie or TV show, this is how we got Seinfeld, The Machine or Trainwreck. Sometimes though people take the personality they’ve created for the stage and craft an entire movie around it, which can sometimes work wonderfully – and sometimes you get something like Old Dads, a film that takes Bill Burr’s style of angry comedy and fits it around the eternally fun conversation of how different the generations are… that’s a topic that never gets old, no sir.

Continue reading “Old Dads (2023) – Retire” →
leebutler Horror, Thriller

Night Of The Hunted (2023) – Oh Shoot!

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 20th October
Seen: 30th October

For some strange reason, the idea of a movie diving into politics annoys a certain class of people who seem to think that movies used to be apolitical and only recently got infected. The truth of the matter is that all art, on some level, is political and some films are just more overt about it than others. This goes double for the Horror genre which has always been a great place to play with heavy political ideas (Look at Night of the Dead, Get Out or They Live for some prime examples of this) and recently has had a few films tackle the divide between the right and the left. Films like Tone Deaf or The Hunt tried to find ways to make fun of the divide, showing it to be comical and extreme in ways that maybe made for a half-decent film but was not great about the way it presented its politics. Night of the Hunted also has some problems with how it’s presenting politics, but without as much fun in how it’s trying to present those politics.

Continue reading “Night Of The Hunted (2023) – Oh Shoot!” →