Netflix – Page 8 – Movie Meister Reviews

July 4, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Fear Street Part One: 1994 (2021) – Screamingly Great

Released: 2nd July
Seen: 2nd July

In 1989 the first book in the Fear Street series was released. This book, dubbed The New Girl, began a franchise that would probably have defined writer R.L. Stine’s career were it not for the Goosebumps series that started 3 years later. In fact, if you say the name R.L. Stine most people who were around in the 90s will start humming the theme tune for the Goosebumps TV series, because that book franchise got adapted quickly into books and even a couple of films while Fear Street would only get a pilot for a series that never got made. It’s taken over 30 years for Fear Street to finally get an adaptation but oh god damn did it was it worth the wait!

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June 21, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Arlo the Alligator Boy (2021) – Smile At This Crocodile

Released: 16th April
Seen: 18th June

Back in the 90s and early 2000’s, Disney had this thing that they did where they would make a movie out of the first three episodes of an upcoming series in order to get people used to what was to come. This led to such films as The Return of Jafar, Mighty Ducks the Movie: The First Face Off and Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins among a whole cornucopia of other films.

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June 19, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Wish Dragon (2021) – A Charming Little Wish

Released: 11th June
Seen: 16th June

So earlier this year, Disney released the film Raya and the Last Dragon. It was a pretty great film as a lot of Disney’s animated fare tends to be but there was this weird thing going around where people wrote off its box office as a failure because it only made 130 million worldwide on a 100 million budget. For some reason this is a thing that keeps coming up this year where films are having their box offices judged based on pre-pandemic expectations, as though we’re completely through the wilderness. Spoilers, we’re not. Anyway I bring this up because I wonder if the supposed failure of Raya and the Last Dragon led to today’s film Wish Dragon not getting as much attention as it deserves which is a shame because Wish Dragon is charming.

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June 17, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Awake (2021) – Snoozefest

Released: 9th June
Seen: 15th June

Sometimes a film can have a simple well-worn idea and use it well enough to make something interesting, and sometimes a film can have an interesting original idea and be about as bland as paper made from milk toast and mayonnaise. Awake is going to be that second kind of film and you’re probably going to be as irritated as I am at just how badly they wasted a potentially interesting idea on a film that’s so forgettable and stupid.

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June 2, 2021June 2, 2021 leebutler Review

Why Did You Kill Me? (2021) – Seemed Like A Good Idea

Released: 14th April
Seen: 31st May

The crime documentary is definitely having a major resurgence right now, in no small part thanks to Netflix who seems to churn out a new one every other week. This kind of makes sense for a streaming platform desperate for unique content because in theory these are simple things to make. Find a weird murder with a lot of twists and turns, have relatives and police officers describe the events as they remember it, maybe hire some actors to recreate certain elements, wait for the editor to put it all together and you have a movie. What sets them apart is how weird/interesting/disturbing the crime is and the general presentation of the information. So, with a film titled “Why Did You Kill Me?” basically begging for attention, does it deserve it?

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May 7, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Yes Day (2021) – Not On This Day

Released: 12th March
Seen: 6th May

Films, in general, are full of tropes. Some hide them better than others but every film has them. The trick is to either hide them well enough behind interesting characters and dialogue that no one cares or to find ways to subvert them or put them together in new and interesting ways. Then there’s the films that don’t even bother to try and hide their tropes and just hope you’re stupid enough to enjoy them. Yes Day is kind of the queen of trope films for 2021 and unfortunately for it, I’m not as stupid as I look.

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May 3, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021) – The Animated Charmer Of The Year

Released: 30th April
Seen: 2nd May

Sony Animation has had something of an interesting history in regards to their output over 20 films. They’ve run the gamut when it comes to quality, from the objectively awful fare like The Emoji Movie to some of the best animation in history with Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. Slowly they’ve gone from an animation company people would cringe about to one that actually gets a lot of excitement going with their new releases. So, where does The Mitchells vs the Machines fall in regard to the rest of Sony Animation’s output? It’s borderline perfect.

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May 2, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Thunder Force (2021) – Super Pooper

Released: 9th April
Seen: 29th April

The Superhero genre has been the biggest thing in movies for a little over the last decade, largely thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe that has somehow managed to go from strength to strength. When something is as culturally important as the Superhero genre has been for the last several years it stands to reason that someone would come along and satirize the tropes that by this point have become tiresome… or, if you’re something as unabashedly awful as Thunder Force, you could not make a single decent joke despite a decades worth of material you’ve been gifted and instead rely on the talents of two leads who aren’t miracle workers and can’t make you even remotely humorous.

Yes, this is one of those angry reviews about a bad film, go get a soda because we will be here a while.

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April 7, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Over The Moon (2020) – Out Of This World

Released: 23rd October 2020
Seen: 5th April 2021

When it comes to the Oscar race this year for best animated film, it feels like Soul is the foregone conclusion. It’s kind of hard to beat a film that was so funny and poignant with such impeccable visuals and was such a cultural event. However, the race isn’t quite over yet and I would like to offer a wild card entry that might sneak in at the last minute, that being the Netflix original film Over The Moon.

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February 20, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

To All The Boys: Always And Forever (2021) – It’s Sweet

Released: 12th February
Seen: 16th February

To All The Boys: Always And Forever Info

Some films require a lot of thought, you need to sit down with it to figure out what it meant by using a certain camera angle or how a certain line is a reference to a piece of ancient text that sets up something in the end. Some films are hard to write about because they’re so complicated that everything could easily be considered a spoiler. Then there are films like the To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before trilogy which are just so easy going and sweet that you barely have to think about them, you can just enjoy them and not worry about them being anything more complicated than sweet little teen romance films that just barely approach the line of saccharine without fully crossing it.

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