Maybe from your post you didn't enjoy it and didn't pay much attention. I don't know. They were pretty equal but Renner was still the one who saved the day.
Ready Player One (2018) Directed by Stephen Spielberg 4A
An homage to the kind of dated pop culture that doesn't deserve an homage in the first place. When did Spielberg become a gun for hire? This is his second straight anonymously directed movie.
The visuals were busy, many of the action sequences are a blur, and the colour scheme is (to me) massively unappealing and monotonous. There are a ton of action sequences, some of which are decent but nothing ground breaking, and I thought a lot of the early ones wear out their welcome quite quickly. The adventure wasn't much fun because there was never any reason to care about any of the characters because basically they were all cardboard cutouts. Character development in this thing is at the Avatar level, and that may be slandering Avatar. The final act is more engaging and is more entertaining than the rest of the movie.Sometimes I thought the purpose of the movie was just to have the audience count the pop cult/80's references with which the movie is full to bursting. Like so many other movies that Spielberg has made, it will play great with 14 to 16 year old boys; in addition, people who feel nostalgic about the period will likely dig it. Ultimately it will be one of Spielberg's most forgettable movies.
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I flag a movie whenever I see Sam Worthington in it. He's not a good actor, but his movie selection has been straight up abysmal. Other than Avatar, which in itself is very divisive, Hacksaw Ridge is head and shoulders above everything else, not even close.
The editor on those two films was Todd Ramsay (aka Todd C, Ramsay) and, ironically, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Thing were respectively the first and third films that he edited in his career. (Why the Star Trek franchise on its first movie would cast its lot with a rookie editor is another good question}. He is still working today. The salient point: in a career that spans 29 movies, he has never worked on a "A" list project since The Thing. In fact, most of his work seems to be relegated to cheep genre films--sub "C" list in other words. He is indeed a horrible editor.
The Death of Stalin (2018) Directed by Armando Iannucci 5B
The Death of Stalin is a satire based on the power struggle in 1953 that occurred in the Soviet Union among murderous men after Stalin died. If you have just completed your doctoral thesis on "Anti-Democratic Modes of Succession in the Post-War Soviet State," you are going to love this movie. If you are not among that group, you are likely to find the proceedings more problematic. Technically this is a well directed, well-acted movie, though with a strong caveat. Why anyone thought Steve Buscemi with his Brooklyn accent would make a convincing Nikita Khrushchev, the successor to Stalin, is beyond me. He neither looks the part, nor does he bring any sense of gravitas to the role. He acts more like a casino hustler than a future head of state. However the movie has a more serious problem. Unlike director Armando Iannucci's brilliant debut In the Loop, The Death of Stalin isn't funny. I saw the movie in a movie theatre that was two thirds full, and while a few instances of wit brought an isolated chuckle here and there, on not a single occasion did the entire audience laugh in unison. A lot of the movie is brutal men plotting against one another to gain power. It wasn't like I expected these thugs to be charmers, but the movie neither provides insights nor laughs about their conflicts. So why should I be interested?
The aspic ratio was 1.85:1. Not that I knew that until I looked it up--I'm terrible at noticing these things unless its a movie like Ida or something ultra obvious like that. Everything seemed perfectly normal about the screening.
Decent trailer for sure. How primitive the effects seem by today's standards, though.
