Adventure – Page 15 – Movie Meister Reviews

December 24, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Mulan (2020) – I’ll Make A Film Out Of You

Released: 4th September
Seen: 23rd December

I’ve made it no secret how I feel about Disney remakes, I hate them, I hate them on a fundamental “These have no reason to exist beyond capitalism gone amuck” level. Sure, in a very real sense every remake is kind of pointless in some way, but the recent batch of Disney remakes seem to be extra pointless since they’ve taken to remaking some of their absolute classics. They don’t bother remaking things like The Black Cauldron or Oliver and Company, films that didn’t exactly do well. No, instead let’s remake classics like Dumbo, Aladdin and The Lion King… you know, that trilogy of remakes was so awful that I gave them all a joint place on my worst of 2019 list. Well, this year we add another film to the list of remakes… Mulan.

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December 21, 2020December 21, 2020 leebutler Uncategorized

The Witches (2020) Witches Get Stitches

Released: 10th December
Seen: 20th December

In 1983, Roald Dahl released his 14th novel The Witches and his story of a boy and his grandma going up against a coven of witches has always been somewhat polarizing. On the one hand, it’s a best selling novel that recently appeared on the BBC’s list of Top 100 most influential novels and on the other it’s been accused of being a misogynistic text ever since it released (and considering that the main villain is, essentially, every woman who isn’t a kindly old grandma and it was written by Roald Dahl… yeah, yeah that’s definitely there).

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November 18, 2020 leebutler Uncategorized

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run (2020) – Run, Sponge… RUN!

Released: 5th November
Seen: 17th November

The SpongeBob Movie Sponge On The Run Info

On the first of May 1999, the first episode of SpongeBob SquarePants was aired and it was an almost instant phenomenon and became one of the longest running animated series in history. It spawned multiple video games, a Broadway play and several movies. The first two films were fairly big hits and it’s fair to say that this one would’ve been too but, you know the drill, the world decided to end and all the potentially good movies either got pulled out of cinemas until 2021 or they got thrown onto VOD. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run is one of the latter kind of films and honestly, I feel like VOD is the right place to put this film.

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September 30, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Enola Holmes (2020) – Elementary School, My Dear Watson

Released: 23rd September
Seen: 27th September

December 26, 2018. A date that will live in infamy. This is the date when Holmes & Watson was released and, despite the year being almost completely finished, made a case to be called one of the worst movies of the year (a case it won, easily, since it made it on my list with 5 days to go!). It was truly a ghastly nightmare but as since then it looks like it may have done something even more sinister… it may have killed the Sherlock Holmes brand!

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September 27, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Pets United (2020) – These Dogs Can Go To Hell

Released: 11th September
Seen: 21st September

Sometimes a film gives me a very easy opening topic for a review, either there’s some interesting backstory or the film is so boring I decide to compare it to paint drying or it’s an adaptation of a book so I can do some basic research and pretend that I know something about the book or comic that a movie is based on. Then there’s films like Pets United which give me nothing to work with, literally nothing. I mean, I could run through the long list of films about abysmally animated animals going on a quest that I’ve subjected myself to over the past few years in a vain attempt to get more eyes on some of my hilarious takedowns of films that belong in the discount bin at the dollar store (Read my review of The Big Trip) but… after Pets United? I’m just so tired.

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September 17, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Bill & Ted Face The Music (2020) – Excellent GUITAR RIFF

Released: 10th September
Seen: 16th September

The year was 1989, Ted ‘Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) and Bill S. Preston Esq. (Alex Winters) were visited by a time traveler named Rufus (The late great George Carlin) who was tasked with helping them pass a history test, a most excellent adventure that made up the plot of a film that had the truly strange title Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

It almost instantly became a beloved cult film, it’s popularity leading to a sequel 2 years after and a short lived cartoon series. Sadly, for the last 30 years or so Bill & Ted haven’t been able to have many adventures, mostly because Ted keeps running off into The Matrix or stopping buses from going under certain speed limits or seeking vengeance for his dog. Well, now that the world’s slowed down a little I guess we can have one more adventure with everyone’s favourite slackers.

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September 14, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Trolls World Tour (2020) – All Over The World

Released: 17th September
Seen: 13th September (Advance Screening)

When we look back on 2020 in film (through the spaces between our fingers like one might watch a particularly gory horror movie) there will be one film that stands out as having changed cinema forever. That film will be Trolls World Tour, one of the first films to make the leap from a cinematic release to a VOD release that created a stand off between AMC theatres and Universal that ended with Universal getting to put their films on VOD a lot sooner than they ever had been able to before and AMC gets to maybe show James Bond movies if we ever put big blockbusters out again. This film hit VOD in April… oh wait, I’m sorry, it hit VOD in the USA back in April but because of reasons, I had to wait until it came out in an Australian cinema in the middle of September in order to see it. Seriously, this kind of gap is dumb at the best of times but during a pandemic? ANYWAY

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September 11, 2020September 11, 2020 leebutler Uncategorized

The Sleepover (2020) – I’m So Extremely Tired

Released: 21st August
Seen: 9th September

In 2001 the movie Spy Kids was released to an unsuspecting public. The story of the Cortez family became something of a major hit, in part because it had such a fun and simplistic story. A pair of kids found out that their uncool parents were actually spies and when those parents were kidnapped it was up to the children to learn how to be spies themselves and rescue their parents. When I say it was a hit, I mean it, the film raked in over $140 million worldwide and was one of the 20 highest grossing films of the year. It led to a bunch of sequels and, naturally, some rip offs… including The Sleepover which is clearly copying so many ideas that Spy Kids had roughly 2 decades later which means it isn’t dated in the slightest.

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July 30, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Animal Crackers (2020) – Moderately Adequate

Released: 24th July
Seen: 29th July

In 1930 the Marx Brothers released Animal Crackers, probably one of their best films. It contains several of Groucho’s best lines, the song Hooray for Captain Spaulding is one of the classics from the group and it was based on one of their highly popular stage plays. I bring this up because I was genuinely stunned, one might even say I was perplexed when I saw that there was going to be an animated film based on the Animal Crackers property… and then I watched it, realised that it had nothing whatsoever to do with the Marx Brothers and then wrote this paragraph because the movie doesn’t exactly give me a lot to work with for a good opening.

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July 15, 2020 leebutler Uncategorized

Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs (2020) – Fairy Fail

Released: 2nd July
Seen: 8th July

In 1937, Disney released what many regard as the definitive version of the German fairy tale Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs. It’s certainly the version that most of us think of when we talk about that legendary fable, to the point where the question “What are the names of the seven dwarfs” is answered with “Doc, Grumpy, Sleepy, Happy, Sneezy, Dopey and Bashful” instead of the names used in the original Grimm’s fairy tale. Do you even know what the dwarfs were named in the original Grimm’s fairy tale? Trick question, they didn’t have names and were referred to either as a collective or by “The first one, the second one, etc”. With Disney’s version looming large over the history of the story, every version since then has had to try and do something to make it stand apart from the most well-known iteration of this story. Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs decided to be confusingly boring, which is fun.

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