Family – Page 5 – 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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December 8, 2020 leebutler Uncategorized

The War With Grandpa (2020) – War Is Hell!

Released: 12th November
Seen: 7th December

At some point in every prestige actor’s career, you will hear them utter the following phrase… “I did this one for my grandkids”. It’s a phrase that’s almost always followed by a movie that won’t be remembered for long but it’s forgivable because it’s for kids and clearly the actor in question would like something to share with their young relatives. Robert De Niro’s done enough films like The War With Grandpa, he can stop doing them any damn time that he wants!

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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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October 24, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite (2020) – Mass Hysteria!

Released: 24th September
Seen: 18th October

In 2001, a silly little film called Cats & Dogs came out. No one would dare suggest it was anything more than a cinematic oddity with ninja cats that kept kids entertained for a few hours. It made a lot of money, almost tripling its budget and therefore was pretty much guaranteed a sequel which would happen in 2010 with Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. It wasn’t quite as popular and the joke was wearing thin… so, naturally, due to the ten year cycle that the series appears to have built up that means that in 2020 we needed to get a sequel because God has abandoned us and we are doomed to walk the earth in never ending torment and pain.

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October 9, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Hubie Halloween (2020) – Helloween

Released: 7th October
Seen: 8th October

Late in 2019 during an interview with Howard Stern, Adam Sandler made what can only be seen as a threat. A threat that if he wasn’t nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Uncut Gems that he would come back to make the worst film he’s ever made, which is scary considering that he has already made a movie that got a 0% on RT and almost a half dozen films that don’t even go up to double digits. The idea of the worst film that Adam Sandler could come up with is absolutely terrifying and since he was one of the infamous snubs of the 2020 Oscars it’s been a matter of time, just waiting to see if Sandler would follow through with his threat to perform cinematic terrorism upon an unsuspecting audience. So when Hubie Halloween dropped I wondered if maybe this was it, was this going to be the worst film ever? Well, no because this started being filmed in July of 2019 before the threat was made but it’s still not that good.

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September 29, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Feel The Beat (2020) – The Beat Feels Familiar

Released: 19th June
Seen: 23rd September

Not long ago, I reviewed the Netflix original film Work It which was about a young girl trying to put together a dance troupe in order to get into college. Dance films are a very rare breed because they tend to require actors who can pull off the vastly different skills of acting and dancing. The problem with dance films is that it takes something kind of special to break out into the mainstream, films like Dirty Dancing, Hairspray and Step Up managed to infuse dancing with a plot that people latched onto and have kept in the cultural landscape for years… something tells me Feel the Beat isn’t going to be one of those movies, but it’s fine.

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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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September 10, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Fearless (2020) – I Fear Nothing

Released: 14th August
Seen: 8th September

In this, the year of impending doom and sadness, a lot of great animated films are either shunted off to the land of digital downloads or postponed until we feel like it’s safe to let a large number of children share an enclosed space again. Of course, this plague makes things like Netflix turn into a go to source for children’s entertainment which means that films like Fearless might seem like a great idea to entertain the small ones who are in desperate need for something to distract them but despite its bright colors and simplistic fart jokes, this film is not good enough to properly entertain your kids.

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