Monday Morning Movie Review: Guest Post: Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) and Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)

17 July 20236 July 2023 The Portly Politico3 Comments

Good old Pontifex Maximus has returned from self-imposed exile with a trio of posts, all of which I’ll be posting throughout this week and the next. The first of these is a dual movie review of two remake/sequels of the 1995 classic Jumanji, a flick that was both fun and terrifying to a then-ten-year old yours portly.

The film was remade/reimagined in 2017 as Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, and followed by a sequel in 2019, Jumanji: The Next Level. Ponty gives both films a thorough treatment, and readers will be pleasantly surprised to know that, unlike many reboots of classic IPs from the 1980s and 1990s, these films don’t flounder.

With that, here are Ponty’s reviews of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle andJumanji: The Next Level:

Monday Morning Movie Review: Bloody Oranges (2021)

26 June 202322 June 2023 The Portly Politico7 Comments

I’m not typically one for “trigger warnings,” but this week’s film is hard to watch. I’ve seen some pretty foul stuff in all the crappy B-grade horror flicks I consume, and I have, perhaps sadly, become immune to most shocking material. Just writing that sentence made me feel convicted… dang.

But my crushing Pentecostal guilt can wait until after this film review. This flick, the 2021 French black comedy Bloody Oranges (or Oranges sanguines in French) possesses some truly difficult scenes to endure. I found myself watching through my fingers at a couple of points in the film.

It’s an incredible movie, a movie I will heavily discourage most readers from watching. My parents, my aunts, Audre—don’t watch it. Read some reviews if your curiosity is piqued, but don’t watch it. Ponty, you could probably handle it, even though I know how much you hate the frogs.

Monday Morning Movie Review: Calvaire (2004)

19 June 202318 June 2023 The Portly Politico2 Comments

When I was young ~~I thought that life was so wonderful~~ that foreign films were snooty, arthouse affairs, the kinds of flicks pretentious people only pretended to like in order to look sophisticated. That’s probably true of some foreign films (and most modern art in general), but I’ve found that the opposite is frequently the case. Some of the best movies I’ve watched lately were foreign films.

Koreans and Spaniards (of various derivations) make some of the best films. Much to my surprise and delight, the French make some excellent films, too.

To be clear, some of the crappier stuff I’ve seen have been pretentious French flicks. My beloved Shudder has a whole collection of French films that are, let’s say, experimental garbage.

But the frogs do get some things right now and then. One of those is 2004’s Calvaire (alternatively Calvary or The Ordeal).

Monday Morning Movie Review: The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)

22 May 202318 May 2023 The Portly Politico4 Comments

Those of us who were children in the early 1990s will remember Super Mario Bros. (1993). It was the first time a video game had been adapted for film—ever, and, sure, WarGames (1983) was about playing a computer game, but Super Mario Bros. was the first time an actual video game IP had been made for the big screen—-and we were all super (no pun intended) excited to see our favorite 8-bit (well, 16-bit, by that point) heroes, Mario and Luigi, on film (note—there was a WarGames video game, but it was released in 1984 and was based on the film, not the other way around). I was eight when the movie was released, so I was old enough to be aware of the hype surrounding the film. The schoolyard was abuzz with anticipation.

Unfortunately, you probably know how the rest of the story goes: it was an abysmal failure. The film bore little resemblance to the 2D platformer we all loved, and while Dennis Hopper certainly makes for an intimidating antagonist, he bore little resemblance to Bowser (he was “King Koopa” in the film). I remember watching the movie as a kid (we rented it) and being baffled by what was happening. Why was everything so dark and dystopian? It was a far too impressionistic endeavor to work as an adaptation of a beloved video game that captured the imagination of children.

The film was such a disaster, critically and financially, that Nintendo shied away from any more forays into cinema for thirty years. Other than some cartoons on television, Nintendo did not go near Hollywood for three solid decades.

Now, when movie-going is struggling to revive itself after The Age of The Virus, Nintendo has reentered the ring with The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023), a film that may very well save Hollywood from its penchant for wokery and poor box office receipts. More importantly, it’s the Mario Bros. movie we should have gotten thirty years ago.

Better late than never, eh, Nintendo?

Monday Morning Movie Review: Ponty’s Top Ten Best Films: #1: The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

3 April 202331 March 2023 The Portly Politico9 Comments

Here we are—the end of the long countdown of best films of all time. Ponty delivers, as always, with his clear, detailed analysis.

Boy, did he pick a great film. This flick was a perennial favorite on cable television in the late 1990s and early 2000s. You can pick up with the story pretty much anywhere and it is gripping.

I won’t dilute Ponty’s review further with my commentary. He has done it so well, I cannot add anything of additional value.

With that—and at long last!—here’s Ponty’s #1 pick:

Monday Morning Movie Review: Portly’s Top Ten Best Films: #1: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

27 March 202319 March 2023 The Portly Politico2 Comments

As far as I can tell, the very first installment of Monday Morning Movie Review—simply “Monday Movie Review” back then—was a review of The Empire Strikes Back (1980). I wrote it on 28 September 2020, which seems like just a few days ago. Pretty crazy to think it’s been almost three years since this blog started running movie reviews on Mondays.

Indeed, in the interest of saving time (today is my school’s big Spring Concert, and I’m chaperoning a trip to Washington, D.C., later in the week, so time is at a premium), I’m quoting extensively from that original review. Work smarter, not harder, eh?

Growing up as a chubby kid in the 1990s, I was a huge Star Wars fan. That was long before the new trilogy retconned/soft-rebooted everything and destroyed the legacy of classic Star Wars, and even before the prequels made the flicks even more cartoonishly ridiculous. I’m not even a huge critic of the prequels—they were never going to live up to the perfection of the original trilogy—and I enjoyed some of the fun world-building and thorny trade blockades of Phantom Menace (1999; although that’s all a bit too technocratic for a space opera). But the magic of the original trilogy is more than the sum of its parts, and it’s based on rich storytelling and exceptionally strong character development, with nearly every major character growing and evolving over the course of the three films.

So it is that I would argue that The Empire Strikes Back is not just the best Star Wars film, but the best film of all time.

Monday Morning Movie Review: Ponty’s Top Ten Best Films: Hono[u]rable Mentions, Part I

6 March 20233 March 2023 The Portly Politico15 Comments

Ponty’s detailed and impassioned reviews of movies routinely put mine to shame. By comparison, his are erudite, thorough, and nuanced—and almost always include some great clips.

His honorable mention list is no different. Indeed, it’s lists, plural, as we’ll be treated to the second half next week. Rather than running down a bunch of films as I did, Ponty breaks them down into specific categories, featuring foreign films and sci-fi/horror this week. I completely missed foreign films on my lists and my honorable mentions, which is a major oversight. I might be a full-throated closed-borders nationalist on some issues, but when it comes to movies, music, and art, I’m an open borders extremist. Let a thousand Korean flowers bloom!

He also mentions (honorably) quite a few flicks that nearly made my list—several of which would make it on a second go around.

With that, here is the first part of Ponty’s honourable mentions:

Monday Morning Movie Review: Portly’s Top Ten Best Films: #2: Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

13 February 20237 February 2023 The Portly Politico10 Comments

My Number 2 pick is going to come as a surprise to Ponty, at the very least; it’s certainly a bit of a surprise to me. It’s not because I don’t love this film—indeed, it may be my favorite film of all time—but because it’s not firmly at Number 1.

My original intent was to place John Carpenter‘s lightning-in-a-bottle classic Big Trouble in Little China (1996) in the top spot, but I realized there is a film that is objectively better (probably many such films exist, but the one I have in mind is, perhaps, the greatest film ever made, and not just because a chubby Internet personality says so).

I’m also thankful that we’ll be both be posting “Hono[u]rable Mention” (HM) pieces before we reveal our Number 1s. I am realizing that I missed quite a few classics—Ghostbusters (1984) and Blade Runner (1982), for example—and I am increasingly regretting placing Krull (1983) on the list, even at Number 7. I think it’s a great movie, but in hindsight, it should have been an HM pick.

But enough whinging. There’ll be plenty of time for that on the HM post. What about the second greatest film of all time?

Well, as that gigantic balloon reminded us, “China is here, Mr. Burton.”

Delayed Monday Morning Movie Review: A Very Portly Christmas: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

29 December 202229 December 2022 The Portly Politico2 Comments

My sincerest apologies again to readers: I am extremely delayed with this review (as readers will note, this Monday review is going up on a Thursday—d’oh!). Like a good little port, I re-watched 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life two or three weeks ago, when Audre, Ponty, and I agreed to review it and the 1951 Alistair Sim version of A Christmas Carol earlier in December. I was writing and editing like the wind to get most everything done before departing for a pre-Christmas trip to Arizona (more on that in a separate post), but didn’t quite manage to get it all done.

As I’ll detail in another post, I spent the first quarter of Christmas Day driving from western Kentucky down through Nashville, Chattanooga, Atlanta, and Augusta, before finally reaching my parents’ home in western South Carolina. I’d managed to get posts done through Christmas, thanks to a delayed connecting flight in Minneapolis, but was unable to get much more writing done beyond that. Christmas Eve saw me convoying to Kentucky from my older brother’s home in Indianapolis; I spent a frosty Christmas Eve with his in-laws on their farm, before setting out early Christmas morn along the route delineated above.

That’s all to say that, despite my chubbiest efforts, I was not able to get everything done. Facing the prospect of writing this review late on Christmas night, I put it off, hoping I’d knock it out Monday evening—to no avail.

But I digress—enough excuses. What about the film?

The Portly Politico

One Southerner's unique, erudite, conservative perspective in a hectic world

Tag: Monday Morning Movies