leebutler Action, Adventure, Review, Thriller

Plane (2023) – Minimal Turbulance

Released: 13th January
Seen: 21st May

January tends to be known as a dump month for releases. Basically, a film that is released this month tends to be something that the studios don’t have faith in and throw out quickly and quietly with minimal expectations. There are obviously exceptions to this idea, truly spectacular movies can come out pretty much any time but a January release is usually the spot where films go to die. It takes something kind of special to break this rule and actually make a splash… or you can be mediocre enough in the exact right ways to make back a minuscule budget and be something more than just a quick write-off.

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Crime, Review

Fast X (2023) – Slow Down!

Released: 17th May
Seen: 20th May

Fast X Info

The Fast and the Furious franchise has developed something of a reputation over the years. At first, that reputation was that these were the films to see cool car tricks and hot women in skimpy outfits, maybe with a little bit of a heist thrown in for dramatic tension. Now the Fast and Furious movies are where you go to see physics be violently pegged by a souped-up automobile powered by the laws of “Fuck you, this looks cool”. It’s somewhat of a dramatic shift over the years but it’s honestly been for the best, the franchise was kind of dull and boring in the beginning and now it’s almost impossible not to salivate in anticipation for what insanely stupid thing is going to be done next behind the wheel of a car.

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Comedy, Review

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3 (2023) – Out Of This World

Released: 3rd May
Seen: 3rd May

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3

When it comes to the many franchises that make up the MCU, it’s arguable that one of the most surprising of them all is the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. Based on one of the most obscure Marvel comics out there, the first Guardians movie took the MCU into space and, effectively, introduced the character Thanos to the franchise as an actual character in the narrative instead of as an end credits gag. The second Guardians movie somehow managed to be even better, funnier and more emotional with grander stakes that showed just what these characters were capable of. 

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Comedy, Review

Ghosted (2023) – Leave On Read

Released: 21st April
Seen: 24th April

Sometimes a film feels like it should be basically impossible to mess up, a combination of a great director, great writers and great actors that seems like at the bare minimum it should produce a piece of fun, harmless entertainment that’ll deliver on what it promises. Say you have the director of one of the best biopic films ever, gave him a film written by the people who wrote two major superhero franchise films and a pair of actors who have proven to have chemistry before who are also wildly popular and insanely talented. That sounds like a recipe for success, a surefire way to make something that’s at least on the surface level enjoyable… so what the hell went wrong with Ghostedyou to make it as dull as it is?

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leebutler Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Review

The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) – Let’s-a go.

Released: 5th April
Seen: 12th April

When it comes to the world of video games, there is no character quite as well-known and iconic as Mario. For 40 years the short Italian with the red hat has been lighting up video game consoles and being the blueprint for an entire genre of games that he still basically runs to this day, and probably will until the universe implodes and we all die. He is such an icon that it’s kind of surprising that there’s only been a single movie made about him and it is, to be charitable, a tortuous trip through 90s consumerist dystopian fiction wrapped in an absurdist nightmare.

It’s a film that people mostly enjoy in the way most cult films are enjoyed, because they’re incredibly strange and mockable and it’s impossible to believe that someone actually made this happen. It’s an adaptation that was so bad that it put an end to the idea of Nintendo games getting made into movies up until the 2019 release of Detective Pikachu proved that they could actually work, leading to Nintendo giving the Mario Brothers one more chance… thank goodness.

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Review

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) – Natural 20

Released: 30th March
Seen: 30th March

In 1974, the very first edition of Dungeons & Dragons was published and it pretty quickly became a mainstay of pop culture. Every decade seems to change how people look at it, be it back in the 80s when it was a very large part of the Satanic Panic bullshit or in the 2000s when we were talking about the first film adaptation that carried the name or even the 2010s when Stranger Things reminded people of why they enjoyed playing this game back in the 80s when the adults said it was evil and satanic. Even now it still maintains high popularity with an untold number of web shows and podcasts dedicated to variations on this classic tabletop RPG… I’ve never played it once, so I went into this movie completely blind and had a great time but who knows how a fanboy might react to this.

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Comedy, Review

Shazam: Fury Of The Gods (2023) – Less Fury Than Expected

Released: 16th March
Seen: 18th March

In 2019, DC released one of its few good films, Shazam. At the time it felt like somewhat of a revelation, after years of a dark and dour DC universe being built with several below-average films that refused to even try to have a little fun, we finally got a film that seemed to understand why this genre is so popular while also having one of the biggest heartfelt stories in all of Superhero media (The Billy Batson story with his mother is still heartbreaking, I will die on that hill). It might not have been the biggest box office hit, possibly because the DC well was basically poisoned even by that point but somehow it got a sequel that got somewhat delayed by the recent plague but is here now… it’s fine, I guess.

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leebutler Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Netflix, Review

The Sea Beast (2022) – Beastly

Released: 8th July 2022
Seen: 4th March 2023

The Sea Beast Info

The Sea Beast has taken up the spot of the surprise 5th Oscar nominee in this years Best Animated Feature category, it’s the film that’s seemingly there just because they had to round it out to five nominees. The other four are getting nominated time and time again in several other awards shows but The Sea Beast is basically the one in this category that scraped on in. Theoretically, that means it could probably be the one that was missed out of all of these nominated films due to its likelihood of winning being minimal, but it’s also one of the easiest to get a hold of since it sits on Netflix… and you should go watch it because it’s actually pretty damn fantastic.

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Comedy, Review

Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania (2023) – Otherworldly

Released: 16th February
Seen: 22nd February

Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been somewhat polarising for people who are fans of this cultural juggernaut. In the aftermath of the Infinity Saga and dealing with the events of Endgame, Phase 4 has felt somewhat uneven to some viewers who have been vocal about not really knowing where it’s been going. Personally, this hasn’t felt like a big deal since it felt pretty obvious to me that phase 4 is pulling the double duty of dealing with the aftermath of Endgame (This being the major thread of films like Multiverse of Madness, Love and Thunder and Wakanda Forever) and setting up the Multiverse that will clearly be a large factor for phase 5 (This idea is explored in things like Loki, No Way Home and What if?). Sure they’ve been a little haphazard about how to use these ideas and haven’t really made it clear on what’s to come but the groundwork has been laid… and now with Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania they’ve decided to start showing their hand.

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