Cranky T-Rex's Blog

Well now that Darkest Hour has gotten a few Oscar nods, I realized I neglected to put the review up over here at the blog.  It's doubly unfortunate I forgot since this was definitely one of my more anticipated films of the year, for all the reasons that it got Oscar nominations in the first place. I mean, Gary Oldman playing Winston Churchill? Where could you possibly go wrong with that?  That's like Daniel Day-Lewis playing Abraham Lincoln, which is probably why everyone immediately started comparing this movie to Lincoln in the first place. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy this nearly as much as I thought I would, but I can tell you it did absolutely earn some of those Oscar nominations.  Let's talk about which parts of Darkest Hour worked, and which didn't:

I don't think there was anyone on the planet who thought "hey, we need a sequel to Jumanji !" and yet here comes Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle .  Even with the increasing pedigree of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson at its forefront, this was still a film met with incredible skepticism by almost everyone, myself included. Still, despite that, it's had more staying power at the box office than Star Wars: The Last Jedi , and I paid to see it almost 3 weeks early thanks to Amazon Prime offering special early screenings at local theaters.  I did that for the novelty, fully anticipating an absolutely cringe-worthy experience that I would delight in regretting. Strangely...that's not what I got.  In fact, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle turned out to be a lot of fun. Here's what I had to say about it:

Our yearly Star Wars event has come and gone now. The Last Jedi didn't last nearly as long at the box office as we all probably expected, but then again, the movie wasn't nearly as good as we all hoped. That kind of cuts right to the chase, but the fact of the matter is it's an objectively badly constructed movie. You can like it anyway, that's fine, but it's just not good storytelling. So here's seven minutes or so of me talking about why: