Movie Review: A MAN CALLED OTTO...

Earlier today, I watched the Marc Forster-directed dramedy A Man Called Otto at AMC theaters.

Based on the 2012 Fredrik Backman novel A Man Called Ove, A Man Called Otto is about a Pittsburgh widower who vents his grumpiness on everyone and everything he stumbles across...from the cashier at a local hardware store and morning joggers who ignore his disgruntled persona on the street as they greet him anyway, to the stray cat loitering on his front porch.

While A Man Called Otto was lighthearted and sweet, it still had a darkness about it as Otto Anderson—played by Tom Hanks—tried to find different ways to commit suicide due to his ever-growing loneliness after his wife Sonya (genially portrayed by Rachel Keller in flashbacks) passed away from cancer a few years earlier.

Otto thought that he could get away with treating everyone he met like garbage, until he's introduced to Marisol (cheerily played by Mariana Treviño), his new neighbor across the street.

While Marisol had a sweet cluelessness about her (Marisol couldn't drive even though she's in her 30s, and she's married to an imbecile who's as carefree as her), she didn't tolerate how Otto tried to dismiss her at the beginning...using her foot to prevent Otto from completely shutting his front door on her after they first met.

As expected with movies about grumpy old men who want to be left alone for the remainder of their lives, A Man Called Otto eventually found Anderson growing closer to Marisol and everyone else he knew. This didn't come as a surprise—seeing as how Otto did nice things to help other people at the same time he called them "idiots" and tried to blow them off.

Saving someone who fell onto a train track from the boarding platform after he suffered a cardiac issue, helping prevent long-time neighbors from being evicted from their home by a heartless real estate company, and taking a stray cat as your pet after finding it freezing in the snow outside your house one morning will do that to ya...

At the end of the movie, Anderson achieves his goal of reuniting with his wife (I won't spoil how, but it fortunately wasn't suicide), while leaving behind a legacy that will be continued by Marisol and other people who never gave up on Otto even as he tried to exclude them from his life.

A Man Called Otto is a film that's both entertaining and heartfelt... It's definitely a must-watch.

The 2023 Academy Award Nominations...

Congratulations to all of the movies, filmmakers and thespians who received an Oscar nomination this morning by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences! The winners will be revealed during the 95th Academy Awards that will be televised March 12 on ABC TV.

As shown below, Everything Everywhere All at Once (which I saw at the theater last April and immensely enjoyed) leads the Best Picture pack with 11 nominations. Top Gun: Maverick—which I saw multiple times at the theater last year—is up for 6 trophies; it unfortunately isn't up for Best Cinematography but is amazingly up for Best Adapted Screenplay!

Most-Nominated Movies for the 95th Academy Awards:

Everything Everywhere All at Once - 11 nominations
All Quiet on the Western Front - 9 nominations
The Banshees of Inisherin - 9 nominations
Elvis - 8 nominations
The Fabelmans - 7 nominations
Tár - 6 nominations
Top Gun: Maverick - 6 nominations
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - 5 nominations

I didn't watch the Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde, but I do know that Ana de Armas is a very talented actress who was great in 2017's Blade Runner 2049 and 2019's Knives Out. Congrats to her for her Best Actress nomination!

Click here to see all of the nominees for this year's Academy Awards.

One actor who I hoped would get nominated was John Boyega for his role as a down-on-his-luck Marine veteran in last August's Breaking. I gave this dramatic crime thriller an enthusiastic review last summer, and I was hoping that the Academy would give this movie the kudos it deserves... Next time, Boyega.

And up for Best Visual Effects for 2022 is Top Gun: Maverick, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Batman (which should've also been nominated for Best Original Score), Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Avatar: The Way of Water. Yes, James Cameron's sequel to the 2009 sci-fi epic will go home with the trophy.

Can't wait to watch the Oscars on March 12!

Movie Review: MISSING...

A few hours ago, I watched the dramatic thriller Missing at AMC theaters.

An unofficial sequel to the 2018 film Searching (which starred John Cho and Debra Messing), Missing is about an 18-year-old girl named June (Storm Reid) who uses every online tool at her disposal to find her mother Grace (Nia Long)...who suddenly disappeared when she was supposed to be on vacation in Colombia.

Missing was both very clever and pretty suspenseful—with the clever part due to June's ability to figure out the passwords to the Gmail accounts of both Grace and her boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung)...and to do other things like pinpointing (from June's home in Southern California) the locations of surveillance cameras at the Colombian hotel where Grace was staying at. With the exception of actual apps and websites like WhatsApp, Taskrabbit and Gmail, I'm wondering how many of the other sites that June used to locate her mom really existed.

Either way, June was so brilliant at using social media and other online sites to find private information about various people that there should be another sequel, or spinoff flick, where she grew up to become a computer hacker working for the CIA! No seriously.

(Well okay, maybe not the CIA... That's such an overused trope in Hollywood movies.)

The suspenseful part of Missing came from all of the amazing plot twists that dot the film. I'm not going to spoil things here, but just when you thought that June finally discovered where her mom was, Missing threw the audience for a loop.

Missing had some amazing twists... Not as amazing as the twist at the end of the movie The Usual Suspects, but still great nonetheless.

The only downer in Missing was the climax itself; not that it wasn't good, but because it's here where the film switches from being an intriguing, 111-minute take on social media and other forms of Web technology to being a serious statement about spousal abuse and domestic violence. Such a bummer.

Overlooking the climax, ironically, Missing was still a great ride that showed the audience what can be found if you sleuthed through the Internet hard enough. Whether or not that's a good thing is up to the moviegoers to decide.

Movie Review: PLANE...

Earlier today, I watched the action thriller Plane at AMC theaters.

This film—which stars Gerard Butler as an airline pilot who ends up making an emergency landing on a remote island in the Philippines after his passenger jet is damaged in a lightning storm (and his passengers are in turn taken hostage by Filipino separatists who stumble upon them)—was very entertaining. However, I felt that this movie would've been even better if it was a bit longer...as I thought the stakes weren't big enough and the story unsurprisingly predictable.

Mike Colter, who plays Louis Gaspare, a prisoner who was placed on the flight for extradition to Tokyo on a murder charge, was great in Plane...though it seems like he and Butler's character, Brodie Torrance, got along too quickly as they searched for help on the island after the emergency landing. Looks like I need to watch the film again to see if I'm correct in my assessment of this plot point.

As for the setting itself, I'm Filipino and was impressed by how accurate the depiction of the Philippines was in Plane. Yes, there's a Jolo island in the Sulu Sea...and yes, the southern part of the Philippines (which is the Mindanao region, where Jolo is located) is run by militants—namely the Abu Sayyaf, an Islamic State affiliate.

I cracked up when Louis Gaspare asked Brodie Torrance—welding a walkie talkie so he could call for help—if he spoke Tagalog (the main language in the Philippines), only for Torrance to toss the walkie talkie to the ground in response. Yes, Tagalog is basically the Filipino offshoot of Spanish, but I'd get rid of the walkie talkie too if I was in a country where I had absolutely no clue how to speak the dialect.

Bottom line is, Plane was very entertaining but could've been longer and more dramatic. But considering how the film ends, I wouldn't be surprised if we see Butler and Colter team up again in a sequel...which I'll watch.

One last thing— In real life, do U.S. airlines like American, Delta and United have their own private 'assets' (re: commando groups) to use in case their passengers are taken hostage overseas? Hm.

Movie Review: M3GAN...

Earlier today, I watched the Gerard Johnstone-directed sci-fi horror flick M3GAN at AMC theaters.

Co-written by James Wan of The Conjuring fame (with assistance by Akela Cooper), M3GAN is an entertaining film...even though it was more twisted and emotional than it was scary (which may have to do with the fact that a lot of the frightening moments were, surprise, surprise, already shared in the theatrical trailers).

M3GAN (which stands for Model 3 Generative ANdroid) was no doubt inspired by Chucky in the Child's Play movies—probably moreso by the robotic, Mark Hamill-voiced incarnation of the doll in the 2019 reboot of Child's Play. Amie Donald, the young actress who portrayed M3GAN (with Jenna Davis providing the voice), did a wonderful job as this caretaking-turned-murderous toy...and looks to have her career take off after this exciting role.

Allison Williams was great as Gemma, the creator of M3GAN who realizes that her goal of moving up in her toy-making career might have disastrous consequences—especially for her niece Cady (wonderfully played by Violet McGraw), who obviously needed major guidance following the accidental deaths of her parents earlier in the film.

The rest of the cast was commendable...with Jen Van Epps (Tess), Brian Jordan Alvarez (Cole), Jack Cassidy (Brandon), Ronny Chieng (David), Lori Dungey (Celia) and Stephane Garneau-Monten (Kurt) playing the hapless characters who would be unfortunate enough to get on M3GAN's bad side during the movie.

The final shot in M3GAN suggests that this flick might have a sequel, but I said the same thing about last month's Violent Night when one of the characters just mysteriously disappeared at the end of that film. We'll see.

The bottom line is, M3GAN is another intriguing flick about evil dolls (the other one, of course, being Annabelle) that was produced by James Wan! Well done.

GLADIATOR 2 Has Found Its Star...

So I just found out earlier today that Ridley Scott is moving ahead with the sequel to his 2000 Best Picture-winning epic, Gladiator. While I heard years ago that Scott wanted to continue the story of Maximus (the Roman general-turned-gladiator memorably portrayed by Russell Crowe), even though he died in the first film, it's only today that it appears this movie will finally become a reality!

Paul Mescal, who stars in the Hulu streaming series Normal People, will have the leading role in Gladiator 2...playing the adult version of Lucius, the son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) and nephew of the evil emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). Lots of other actors apparently chased this role—such as Austin Butler (who played Elvis in a Baz Luhrmann film about the legendary singer last year), Miles Teller (probably still basking in the success of Top Gun: Maverick) and Richard Madden (who appeared in Marvel Studios' 2021 movie Eternals).

While it's great news that Gladiator 2 has its star and will finally get made, one (highly-rhetorical) question remains: Will Hans Zimmer return to compose the sequel's music score? The Oscar-nominated score for the first Gladiator movie is one of my all-time favorites...to the point where I was listening to Gladiator tracks on MP3 while typing this entry!

It's a no-brainer that Zimmer will return and add the music of Gladiator 2 to his long list of memorable scores which includes those for The Dark Knight trilogy, The Lion King, Crimson Tide, Broken Arrow, Interstellar and Inception. Costume designer Janty Yates and production designer Arthur Max will reunite with Scott for the sequel— Why not Zimmer as well?

Carry on.