Tag / suki waterhouse

by Jaime Rebanal

“Pokémon: Detective Pikachu” Review: Bizarre Charms Don’t Reach Their Peak But Remain Entertaining

✯✯✯

It’s only fitting enough for me to preface this review by stating this, I have been a lifelong Pokémon fan since childhood. But the old animated films have never aged well, which always disappointed me as someone who had been sticking so closely with the series with every new game that were to come out, so it always left me wondering how these films could fare if they were to be done in live action. With a universe of this scope having so much potential for so many more stories to be done based around the wonders of the Pokémon themselves, a comedic noir made to show its inspiration from films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit wouldn’t even be a bad start. To say the least, they’ve already managed to get everything about what made a world uniting humans and Pokémon so wonderful right from the surface, but there’s nothing about the story being told in Pokémon: Detective Pikachu that really feels as if it’s using up all the most of what this world can offer. It’s certainly not a bad way to start, because watching this as someone who has been a lifelong fan of the games it already gave me the urge to find my old games once again – though something still feels missing elsewhere.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Assassination Nation is a Muddled Mess That Doesn’t Know Its Audience: TIFF Review

✯½

If you already saw from the trailers that this movie passes itself as a long trigger warning, you’re expected to get what exactly you think this film is going to be. If there were a much simpler way to describe what Assassination Nation is, it’s a nearly two-hour long trigger warning that dwells upon the worst parts of American society, without ever offering much satire in order to make it last longer. But even with all the worst qualities of a film like this shining out on the screen, it’s somehow not a complete waste of time – which isn’t what I would have expected to get from a film that seems to set the bar so low for tolerance of standards among America’s own youth. It’s a film that just finds itself being so fascinating because of how out of touch it really is with the way the world works simply from the fact it’s trying to be so relevant to the way our world is moving. By the time you finish watching the film, you’re only asking yourself what was the point that the movie is trying to make especially when it seems it can’t figure that out.

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by Jaime Rebanal

The Bad Batch – Review

✯½

Although I wasn’t so much a fan of Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night I had a great feeling from the style that she would only build up to become something more but from her second feature, The Bad Batch, I’ve only found myself growing increasingly cautious in approaching her future work now. For as much as I found myself able to admire A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night as a form of visual experimentation, there seemed to be something far more restrictive coming in regards to what The Bad Batchwas trying to do with its own narrative – for at its worst it either becomes needlessly disgusting or outright boring, yet at its best we have a charismatic performance or two. If anything felt more fitting in describing what The Bad Batch felt like, it was an exploitation film that seemed to overreach beyond what it really was at its core.

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