Double Feature: Crawl (2019) & Bumblebee (2018)

Welcome back to another double feature! Today, we are looking at an interesting pairing to say the least. One is a creature feature with alligators and the other is another Transformers movie but more of a spin-off of how Bumblebee ended up on Earth. Its a pretty fun double feature

Crawl (2019)

Director: Alexandre Aja

Cast: Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper, Morfydd Clark, Ross Anderson, Jose Palma, George Somner

A young woman, while attempting to save her father during a category 5 hurricane, finds herself trapped in a flooding house and must fight for her life against alligators. – IMDB

*Originally posted as Friday Film Club on Movies and Tea HERE*

While sharks are primarily the star of creature features, Crawl takes on a lesser used monster as it takes a disaster film and pairs it with a horror film where a father, daughter and their dog gets trapped in their basement crawl space and hunted down by alligators during a Category 5 hurricane. As in any of these films, it is about survival. Directed by Alexandre Aja who is no stranger to directing horror films, Crawl takes on a decent form from the atmosphere and how the whole story goes as it builds gripping tension with these characters and this quiet predator.

Starring Kaya Scodelario as a rising swimming athlete in university called Haley who goes to check on her father Dave played by Barry Pepper, she ends up finding him in a crawl space unconscious and their own salvation is behind these pipes that the alligators hunting them can’t get through. As the crawl space fills up with water, they need to find a way to escape without being noticed by these alligators. Just looking at the character designs, it definitely feels like a rather contrived way to put a swimmer as a central character in a flood and yet, if you can get past that (and you should), Crawl manages to create some gripping moments and build up a decent  bit of tension while also making the whole crawl space experience to play well in the claustrophobic and time-sensitive situation.

There’s a lot to love about Crawl. For one, it uses a lesser used “monster” which definitely needs to be used more as quiet predators create some good surprise attack moments. At the same time, the characters are pretty good. While there is still some family drama to sort out between the father and daughter, the focus on survival is the priority. At the same time, the script makes an effort to give reasoning for why these alligators have gathered in this crawl space and it all does come together in the end. Plus, the director manages to not only use the crawl space and the claustrophobia of that setting to its potential but when it migrates out of there, it still manages to use its environment and the hurricane to its advantage as well. Crawl definitely delivers a great creature feature film that’s well worth a watch.

Bumblebee (2018)

Director: Travis Knight

Cast: Hailee Steinfeld, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., John Cena, Jason Drucker, Pamela Adlon, Stephen Schneider, Ricardo Hoyos, John Ortiz

On the run in the year 1987, Bumblebee finds refuge in a junkyard in a small California beach town. On the cusp of turning 18 and trying to find her place in the world, Charlie Watson discovers Bumblebee, battle-scarred and broken. – IMDB

While I don’t have any major qualms with Transformers to this certain point but knowing that its really just mindless entertainment, Bumblebee is a whole different level. I guess nothing looks so bad until you find something better that comes along. Bumblebee is a fun movie and brings so much to the table because its so goofy and really about the unlikely friendship between Bumblebee and Charlie as she learns gradually about what he is, maybe not fully as this movie also shows how he loses his voice and ends up finding it again with the help of Charlie and her mechanic skills.

Hailee Steinfeld has gone a long way in her acting career. She’s had some misses, mostly due to the overall movie and not her. Bumblebee sees her in a blockbuster role that she really does take on very well. Her character is a tad bitter about her life with her own burdens in her current life situation while at the same time, her sarcasm adds to the humor especially when playing off of Bumblebee who also is discovering Earth and just how it all works despite his amnesia. Its a bit of a fish out of water story in a Transformer point of view and its executed so well.

If there was anything that I disliked about Transformers, it would have to be the annoying John Cena character which plays a little like Samuel L. Jackson’s role in Kong: Skull Island who pursues Bumblebee like he is a threat and the army gets manipulated by the Decepticons (because you know, who wouldn’t believe anyone called Decepticons, right?).

Overall, Bumblebee is a fun time. It definitely has much more substance and gives an origin story angle for Bumblebee which works very well. It balances between the comedy, drama and action a lot and also manages to get in a lot of  screen time for the Autobots and Depcepticons instead of the humans. Really good job here!

That’s it for this double feature!
Have you seen these two films? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Transformers: The Last Knight (2017)

Finally back to the theatres! It has been a while.

With work taking up a ton of time and then my general lack of desire to write long form reviews, I’ve been shying away from the theatres. However, I promised my friend that I’d go see Transformers: The Last Knight with him so during my week of staycation, we went on Tuesday evening. I really need to go back and review the entire franchise. As of now,  I only have Age of Extinction reviewed here. I’m on record to enjoy this franchise for the most part, although 2 and 3 are slightly blurry and I can’t decide which I liked less. The Last Knight’s trailers looked really fantastic and it had me hyped up to see it again. Honestly, I don’t expect much for these movies. Its very mindless entertainment with explosions and robots and action-packed thrills. If it checks all those boxes, I’ll be pretty happy.

Let’s check it out!

Transformers: The Last Knight (2017)

Director: Michael Bay

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel, Laura Haddock, Isabela Moner, Santiago Cabrera

Autobots and Decepticons are at war, with humans on the sidelines. Optimus Prime is gone. The key to saving our future lies buried in the secrets of the past, in the hidden history of Transformers on Earth. – IMDB

I feel like reviewing Transformers franchise is like talking about the Fast and Furious franchise or Resident Evil franchise, you either are on board or not with the style and tone. However, I’d like to say that Transformers: The Last Knight’s trailer did feel a lot more epic than the previous movies. While others had issues with Age of Extinction, I personally couldn’t hate on it because I had a really fun time at the theatres watching it. You can read the review HERE.

 

Transformers: The Last Knight brings us into a world that is in shambles as Transformers keep dropping in and wreaking havoc. Mark Wahlberg continues his path in this franchise as Cade Yaeger as he takes care of the Autobots still remaining as Optimus Prime is no longer with them. No one really knows whats going on but the Decepticons attacking Earth has broken many families. While the Transformers, regardless of Autobots or Decepticons, have been classified as dangerous and a special unit has been put together to keep them under control. One of the reasons why Cade Yaeger needs to be in hiding with his robotic friends when they have a fourteen year old girl orphaned from one of the attacks , Izabella (played by Isabela Moner) ends up joining them. Before all this starts, the movie starts in an odd fashion as the Transformers are brought into the Knights of the Roundtable and King Arthur and Merlin all get brought into the story as the origins of where the first time Transformers were part of human history. Now how does those events link to the current situation? That is what the movie is focused on. A rather simple and pretty disjointed story that gets made into a three hour movie, however, the characters are pretty fun as they have some of the normal banter exchanges, an expected (yet unexpected) romance and of course, lots of explosions and action-packed moments. Add in the Dinobots from the last movie and some baby dinobots and this movie pretty much made it into my heart.

Perhaps that is what I love about Transformers in general, the cool cars and the whole transforming thing. The action is sometimes a little odd and there was a part where it did kind of feel a little dragged out, which is normal for a three hour movie, however, I do like Mark Wahlberg in this franchise. I actually enjoy his presence quite a bit. It was also great to see Anthony Hopkins also enter here as the Earl of Folger and talk a little more about the back story and how Sam Witwicky from the first three movies got pulled into this as well. A nice link, maybe unnecessary, but I thought it added a little more to the story. We also saw the return of Josh Duhamel in the army.  I do like him as well. There are some extreme suspension of imagination but then, Transformers are something of a fantasy/alien so I guess it could happen. I mean, Cade Yaeger walks in the midair, hopping from drone to drone in one part of the escape, like it was some easy stepping stones on a river or stream or something. It doesn’t get more entertaining to watch than that. However, it is also this stuff that I eat up.  They add in a lovely lady who pretty much gets kidnapped and clueless about the whole Transformers thing called Vivian, played by Laura Haddock.

What is pretty cool is that the scale of the movie has truly grown in this one. As they truly embrace the sea, sky and land aspects of the action and fighting. There are alien planets making appearance and the mastermind deceiver, Quintessa who shows up in space as she pulls some tricks to put Optimus Prime under her spell. That part doesn’t get fleshed out as much as it should, however, I don’t know how much more all the ideas they have can get fleshed out because the movie is already over three hours and that is incredibly lengthy. On that note, I love the Transformers design and the cars they get to morph into and stuff. Its really fantastic. I was totally on board with Dinobots and then I loved the baby dinobots but man, a dragon – bot or whatever you call it. That is incredibly epic.

Overall, Transformers: The Last Knight won’t be hard to follow if you just hopped in right now because the story is pretty thin. You just really need a very basic knowledge. But then, I’d like to know if anyone would just jump in to watch this one. This one has a pretty thin storyline as well however, it does try to give it more of a backstory so that we get why the world has been plagued with the Transformers dropping in on them non-stop. The story may be a little disjointed and nothing really gets the attention it needs as we flip from the army to Cade Yaeger to Vivian to Anthony Hopkins to Megatron and Quintessa. There isn’t really a moment to digest everything and piece it together. However, something about The Last Knight grabbing a piece of history and putting it together with the Transformers and why this is all happening along with the new and old Autobots and Dinobots and dragonbots all are so fun to watch. The action sequences are thrilling and entertaining and the characters and their banters are also a lot of fun. Sure, its not going to win any awards but this was a fun, mindless fun at the theatres. To be honest, if I had to compare this one and Age of Extinction, I actually think this one did was better than the last one.

 

As a closing note, if movie makers do read this (and I doubt it), could you please stop making long movies that end with water or underwater scenes? Just please. I try to ration my hydration levels but man, it gets tough after 2.5 hours to control my desire to go to the washroom when there is some long drippy underwater scene. I keep thinking that a ton of long movies do that, and I just wanted to add it in while I remembered to. Just a random thought.

Have you seen Transformers: The Last Knight? What do you think of the Transformers franchise?

Ends, Beginnings and Everything in Between!

A lot to talk about this week.  Well, kind of! Lets just get straight to the 8 little bits and pieces 😉

1) End of Fantasia Film Festival 2014

I had a blast at Fantasia Film Festival this year. After 11 movies, I learned a lot about myself and the way I understood movies and just a lot about movies and their purposes in general. If you want to check my reviews, click on the menu and Movies, Festivals, Fantasia 😉

If not, here is the list of the movies and I’ll link it to the reviews I’ve done and update as it goes!

Fantasia Film Festival 2014

Open Windows
I Origins
Cybernatural
The Harvest
Jack et la Mecanique du Coeur
Hal/short: Sonny Boy and Dewdrop Girl
Into the Storm
Dys-/short: I am Monster
The Drownsman/short: Picket
Time Lapse
The Demon Within

I still have 1 movie to review for the festival.  They will be going up soon!

2) Resuming workout

There is nothing to say but that I’ve really taken a LONG break from working out.  I still go out to bike rides and did some jogging in between but I’m ready to get right back into it now.  This week, I got in two 20 minutes yoga sessions and some other activities which I’ll talk about in a little bit later of this post!  Here’s the awesome yoga sessions if you’re interested:

Starting next week, I should resume with the 4 weeks Nike Training Club program (if everything goes as planned), I might just boost up my strength with some random circuits first and start the week after!

3) Catching up with TV!

This week, I finished Season 7 of Psych.  Thanks to Netflix for updating it!

Psych has its up and down moments.  There are some episodes which are a bit meh.  I can’t really blame it since its at season 7 now.  However, compared to season 7, this totally rocked.  I particularly LOVED the season 7 finale. I’m going to try to find Season 8 now since thats the final season and I hate to keep these things hanging.

I also took the time this week to catch up on True Blood.  I like to watch them in bundles of episodes just so some stupid episode endings don’t bother me as much.  I was about 3 episodes behind so I sat down and took care of that. Its the series finale in just a few episodes and honestly, I’m still not quite sure if I like where everything is going.

My goal this little while is to keep up with True Blood and Pretty Little Liars, so next line of business will be to catch up with the last 3 episodes of that. I will be binge watching Season 1 of Arrow right after though 😉

What series have you been watching?

4) (Kind of) Secret Weekend Getaway!

My boyfriend and I went off on a weekend getaway this past weekend.  One of the reasons why I’ve been slightly quiet and well, I didn’t even bother to say anything because since we’re just a few hours up north, I had my cell that worked and its a little escape.  A few of my friends knew about it and our parents but in general, its just a little bit of a breather to recharge.

We did some hiking (a part of resuming my workout) and we did some visiting in Saguenay region in Quebec.  Its about a 5 hours drive or so away and we had a lot of fun.  I’ll be posting about the few places we went in the next week.

As much as we love buying a house together and spending every living moment making it ours, its nice to just get away by ourselves and take a little break.

5) Lovely Surprises in the Garden

Hello raspberries! Thats right! I amped up the bottles for self-watering system in the raspberry plants and when I came back, I had some ripe raspberries waiting for me.  There’s still a good bunch waiting to ripen but so far they are delicious and sweet. My mom was also a sweetheart and dropped by to help me water the plants to keep the soil wet during our very hot weekend.

I have some strawberry, yellow zucchini and tomato harvests happening and coming up.

There are few other things on my agenda for the garden:

• Orange thyme harvesting and drying,
• Figuring out why my basil all died and was so weak when it was alive,
• Looking at the uses of lemongrass and how to harvest it,
• Searching up what to do and how to harvest lemon verbena.

Plus, I have to figure out my front yard and pull out some over abundant plants and by the end of the season, shift some plants around.

Green thumbs anyone?

6) Geeking out!

Mario and Dinobot Yoshi!

While I was on the getaway, I used my ton of overtime and took Friday off.  Much to my surprise, somehow this package arrived that exact day.  Thank goodness, the mailman was great and put it in my mailbox.  Its a tank top that I ordered from For Human Peoples and its the totally awesome crossover of Transformers and Mario.  Excuse me, Dinobot Yoshi! Allow me to geek out just a little bit and tell you that I saw this and I knew that I had to own it!

*ahem* I’ve regained myself a little! Moving along…

7) Finding the Perfect Gluten-Free Article from Popsugar Fitness

Click on the image to get to the article! 🙂

Everyone read this already? So, some of you know that I’ve been trying to go gluten-free.  I’m about 80% there.  I’ve cut out a lot of foods including bread and I make an effort to make and buy lots of gluten-free products.  Its helpful because now it opens up the options I never had when I was just dealing with lactose intolerance.  Except, cutting gluten and lactose is like double hard and I absolutely hate it when people make it harder.

What really gets me all the time with any food intolerance is “just give it a bite, it won’t kill you” or “Its all your head”.

If gluten-free was me doing this just to have fun and lose weight, sure thing but its not.  I truly believe that its going to make my life a lot better and reduce a lot of this recurring discomfort from IBS symptoms.  Just to make things clear, its really hard to go gluten-free.  Almost everything on store shelves has gluten, its really a pain so lets refrain from any comments that will just make it worse.  Because no, its not in my head and no, it won’t kill me but it will put me in a state where I’d like you to kill me.  You know, just to skip the disgusting details….

Rant over but that article made me laugh a little 🙂

8) Home is Where My Cat Is 😉

My Cat Taking up All the Space

My cat is a huge baby and she’s the princess of the house.  She’s making a point that she’s hot and that she deserves the best spot in the house where the wind hits or the A/C.  So here’s her the night before I left for my getaway and not letting me sleep.  And she’s not joking, she’s in full dream mode 😉

By the way, Aeropostale actually has a shirt with “My Home Is Where My Cat Is” . Its true though.  I always miss my little girl (even if she hogs the bed).

BEFORE I SAY THE GOOD NIGHTS…

Here’s a little something to help you go to sleep a la Disney style 😉

Its getting late, so I’m off to bed! 🙂

Hope you all had a great weekend! 

Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

I’m not one of those opening day movie goers.  Not because I don’t want to, I just don’t really like the crowds but a few of my friends have been wanting to see this as much as I’ve wanted to so one of them used his coupons and booked us some seats at the VIP cinema.  Its a pretty luxurious cinema experience limited to adults only and you can eat with a little table, more comfy seats for a more expensive price.  Either way, we all got some food, our drinks and sat back to what we shortly before the movie started learned an almost 3 hour movie.  All I hoped in my mind when it started was the the dinobots would kick some ass.

I don’t usually post revews on the weekend but I just wanted to enjoy being the first few to catch a movie on opening weekend. Lets check it out! 😉

Director: Michael Bay

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Nicola Peltz, Kelsey Grammar, Jack Reynor, Sophia Myles, Bingbing Li

Picking up after the last epic battle in Chicago, the world is stricken with fear with the robots in general and the government has decided to not be in line with any robots regardless of which side they stand.  As they pick up their pieces, in Texas, Cade Yaeger (Mark Wahlberg) and his teenage daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz) try to live their lives struggling to pay their bills and keep afloat financially. Thats when he finds a broken truck which turns out to be a damaged Optimus Prime.  He decides to try to fix him while the black ops (I think) tracks them and wants to neutralize Optimus.  With Tess’s secret boyfriend Shane (Jack Reynor), they struggle to escape while helping the Autobots reunite and find out who is trying to destroy them.

Referring back to my opening paragraph, it seems that I had very low expectations.  The fact is after the garbage presented in Transformers 2 & 3, I wasn’t too confident about how this one would turn out. However, I had hopes because one, Shia LaBeouf wasn’t part of this anymore and it was replaced with the much more competent Mark Wahlberg and there was dinobots.  Plus, with Michael Bay, there is a certain level of dumb, over the top, CGI-y, explosions and action going on.  Pretty much defines an action movie that is simply enjoyable without having to think much.

As I’m writing this out, I just got out of the movie less than 4 hours ago.  Transformers was everything that I expected it to be and maybe it even gave me hopes of it keeping that quality for following movies.  Sure, there was some cheesy and rather laughable moments that kind of gave me a few shake my head and face-palm moments, like for example, the slow motion low angle shooting the agents coming in with their jackets flapping in the wind or deliberately making Tessa and her short shorts walking slow pace.  Not to mention, the movie was ridiculously long and at about 90 minutes in, I almost felt like it was losing steam.  However, it did come back with some more action as usual.

Lets just say that Michael Bay keeps his signature Michael Bay stuff and this movie is more in line with the enjoyment level I had for the first one and might even have surpassed it.  One of those reasons goes to Mark Wahlberg.  I like Wahlberg a lot.  Seriously, the man is very many.  Like he has a very likable appearance and his acting is pretty good.  I’ve enjoyed a lot of the movies that he has been in and no, I haven’t seen The Happening so I can’t comment. I felt like he brought a lot more than anything that Shia Lebeouf could offer in the previous instalments.  Plus, Wahlberg is diversified as an actor.  He can bring a bit of humor and do good in action and that really is needed in this role.

I’m going to go straight out and say that the cast really impressed me.  I love Stanley Tucci and the man is kick ass funny and just great.  I haven’t dived much into his character but he does have a pretty key role as he ends up stuck with Cade and group as they escape from their many dangers.  Along with that, we have Kelsey Grammar as the second line bad guy.  I kind of found his character annoying but that makes sense seeing as that was the role he was given.  I spent the whole movie trying to figure out where I saw Nicola Peltz and realized as the IMDB page was loading that she was in Bates Motel.  I’m not exactly sure that I like her as an actress or I just didn’t really like it always giving the girls a stupid roles and lines, although I do like her more than Megan Fox. Plus, there’s a smaller role for Sophia Myles who is the main girl in the series Moonlight (that I love although it only had one season).

On the other side of things, in the trailers you see it anyways, which was also a highlight for me is bringing in the whole Hong Kong scene.  For one, there was a few cameos from known actors in the Hong Kong and China entertainment. Then, my friend and I had a bet before of who can identify which buildings were real and which were CGI. While we are talking about this, Bingbing Li has a little role in this one.  I had to add a picture of her just because I believe Mikey@Screenkicker told me he has a thing for Asian girls so here’s a picture for him. She is better than Ziyi Zhang 😉 Plus, she’s an actress that I’m slowly liking more and more.

If you haven’t liked the previous Transformers, I’m going to say that you probably won’t like this one either and I’d say to just back away from it.  You get exactly what you’d expect from a Michael Bay movie and thats an over the top summer blockbuster which is a tad dumb, and over the top with action and explosion. The only difference that gives it a little edge is that it doesn’t take itself seriously and for that, I can sit down and watch this and have a great laugh.  Plus, I really dig this cast and the Chinese actor cameos. Mark Wahlberg brings something fresh to the whole equation and the dinobots kicked serious butt even if they weren’t there for too long.  The Transformers themselves made the movie great as well.

I had a lot of fun with this one.  Its not a masterpiece and I hope that you don’t walk in expecting it to be.  How I feel for this one pretty much measures up to why and how I love silly movies like Resident Evil Retribution and The Expendables.  There’s going to be lots of criticisms about this one.  I’m pretty sure about that but hey, what counts in the end to have fun and I definitely did 🙂

Have you seen Transformers 4? Do you intend to? What are your thoughts on Mark Wahlberg?