#2,438: Avengers: Infinity War

Girls Trip - ★½☆☆☆
I’m too white or too old or too not-a-movie-theater-full-of-people to appreciate this movie properly. Also, separately, in addition to that, I can’t remember the last time I was so faked out by an ending. This movie ends, and then, just, like, goes and goes and goes.

The Death of Stalin - ★★½☆☆
It’s perhaps the mark of a truly black comedy that it’s so consistently silly and yet never fun.

Avengers: Infinity War - ★★★★★
Loved it. The cast-of-thousands battle scenes stand in such contrast to the standard lasers-and-noise DC movie endings; it’s probably a testament not only to the directors ability to establish and maintain geography, but all the years of getting to know and care about the characters.

I’m so happy to have gotten my predictions wrong, because it’s way more fun to be surprised than to go ‘ah, I knew it!’ The closest that anyone I know got to the truth of things was with a guess that Thanos was the Red Skull. Wrong, but I was still happy for the guesser when we saw that red smiling face. For my part, I'd been spending my valuable time trying to convince people that Thanos would die in the first act of this movie and Iron Man, mad with power and other infinity stones, would be the real villain. That's not how it shakes out, of course, but I hope that in the back of certain minds during a certain scene, someone might have been worried that I was right!

#2,435: Love, Simon

Ready Player One - ★½☆☆☆
This is what you get when you make the whole movie out of the last act of Tomorrowland.

Credit where credit’s due, my audience loved the Shining references.

Pacific Rim: Uprising - ★★★☆☆
Pacific Rim 2 feels a bit like it maybe should have been a straight-to-video sequel, but it's fun, it knows what was good about the original (robot fights), and next to Ready Player One, it shines.

Much like the original, this movie is a thin connective web of scenes you'll skip past on netflix designed to vaguely justify a bunch of robot fights. See it if you’re into robot fights. Although, if not if you’re *too* into robot fights and going to end up complaining about something. If you're that guy, maybe give it a pass.

Love, Simon - ★★★★★
Man, this was great. We're still early enough in the year that pretty much everything that comes out is on the top ten list for the year, but for now this is topping the list.

I just like when a smaller (let's say under $200m) movie like this can come out and stand in contrast to the past few months of robot fights, and manage to do it with significantly deeper stakes and tension than something bland and abstract like the fate of the world. Best high school movie since Bad Genius, and a fun way to do a mystery.

#2,432: Tomb Raider

Thor: Ragnarok - ★★★½☆
Things I thought were weird:
- How we're making a big deal of All-New Thor, like the other movies had no jokes.
- How filmed improv is a drag on repeat viewings of pretty much any movie, even a superhero movie.
- How everyone is surprised to find out that the girl with Valkyrie tattoos on her face is a Valkyrie when they see the Valkyrie tattoo on her arm.
- That you can control a god with lightning powers with a fancy taser.
- How much this movie now reminds me of The Last Jedi.

Unsane - ★★★★☆
I like Soderbergh's experiments. The simple, horrible premise is super effective - it's a plausible threat! I thought the iPhone gimmick was a little distracting at first, but I got over it once the story picked up.

I did find myself surprised at how dark this movie was. Like, some parts were really dark. Like, hey, someone turn on a light in there.

Tomb Raider - ★★½☆☆
This would have blown everyone’s minds if it had come out twenty years ago instead of the Angelina Jolie version. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, it’s a terrific 90s action movie, but it’s no longer the 90s. We’re now in the era of filmmakers who grew up in the 90s adopting, adapting, and improving on the films they loved as kids.

Seeing Dominic West kind of made me nostalgic for The Wire. Specifically, the season that doesn’t have McNulty in it.

How To: Reveal One Layer With Another

I saw a post online where someone was all confused about how to make something like this clip here, so I told him all you need is three layers:

• Top layer: someone shot on green screen, keyed, with posterize time.
• Middle layer: foreground art, using top layer as an alpha matte.
• Bottom layer: background art!

And then that guy was all like, "Isn't there a youtube tutorial that takes 45 minutes to give me that same information? Preferably one full of self-promotional nonsense at the beginning and end?" So...

I made one! Except it's only 96 seconds long. I'm sure I'll learn to pad them out as I go.

#2,430: Legends of the Hidden Temple

Chris Rock: Tamborine - ★★★☆☆
I found myself getting more interested in hearing about Chris Rock's life than in the jokes.

Fred Armisen: Standup for Drummers - ★★☆☆☆
Anti-comedy you don't need to leave the house for!

Do you guys ever have that thing happen to you where you have an idea for a couple of youtube videos or maybe a podcast, but you're so famous that you end up making a special for Netflix or HBO?

Legends of the Hidden Temple - ★★★★☆
I was very surprised at how well done this is. I didn't really watch the game show, so it's sort of weird that I watched this, and I was probably a little bit surprised by times the script bent over backwards to set up a scenario from the show that a fan would have seen coming immediately. Even the VFX were pretty solid - I'm just really happy for whoever got to make this.

If it was something I or anyone else believed in, I would say this is firmly a movie for the New Sincerity movement.