Movie Review: Inside Out

Ever since I was little, people have done many tests and asked me lots of questions to try and get into my head and see what was going on in there. This is one of the reasons I wanted to go see Inside Out, because you get to see inside the main characters head.

Riley is born to a very loving Mother and Father and as she opens her eyes and begins to experience the world, we can see her inner emotions start to appear. The first one we meet is Joy (voiced by Amy Poelher) and then Sadness (voiced by Phyllis Smith). As time goes on we meet Fear (voiced by Bill Hader), Disgust (voiced by Mindy Kaling) and of course Anger (voiced by Lewis Black) who all look up to Joy as a leader, most of the time. This also leads to a little devaluing of the importance the other emotions play in Riley’s life as she has a very happy childhood that bring out her core personalities. 

This all gets shaken up when the family moves away from the only home she has ever known. As they struggle to figure out how to keep life the same as they always have in this new place, trouble happens. Sadness touches a memory and, somehow, turns it from a joyful one to one that is very sad. Joy panics at this and as one thing leads to another, Joy and Sadness are sucked away from the main control area with the core memories, changing Riley and who she is, possibly forever.

I really enjoyed the way Pixar portrayed our thoughts and emotions we feel every day. To be honest, I related mostly to Anger as that is the one that seems to be the hardest for me to keep in control when things go differently than what I feel it should. The lessons the different emotions learn as they fight to try and find a way to solve all the problems are ones everyone should learn, including how important every one (or in their case, every emotion) really is.

The one thing I think they didn’t quite get, was how many emotions the average human in this movie has. I know it was supposed to be a children’s movie so I understand the simplification, but would have enjoyed maybe a few more possibly at the end. I do think they had an evenly good way to resolve this a little at the end, so I don’t completely hold it against them.

I would probably rate this movie 8.5/10 for great voice acting and pretty good overall story plot, but for me it was a little bit too simple. 

As a fun Pixar tradition there is a cute animation short before the actual movie called Lava. It involves the Hawaiian Volcanic Islands with a love story set to song.

Movie Review: Jurassic World

Before I start this review, I want to say sorry for getting this out so late but my family is in the middle of moving and the computer accidentally got packed into one of the boxes.

When I was little, there was nothing I loved more than dinosaurs. In fact, I had a membership to the Royal Tyrrell museum and even though we didn’t live where it is, we went every summer because I loved dinos so much.

But anyways, let’s start with what you need to do before you watch this movie. Do you need to watch a movie marathon before you go and watch it? No, you just need to watch the first movie before you go to compare.

The movie starts with a shot of two eggs hatching, and because it’s a movie in the Jurassic park series, they are dinosaur eggs. It moves on to scenes that introduce us to the main characters; Owen (played by Chris Pratt) who is the expert dino handler, Claire (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) the park manager and Aunt of Gray (Played by Ty Simpkins) & Zach (played by Nick Robinson) who are brothers and get into a lot of trouble at Jurassic World.

The rest of the story is about how the now up and running park, renamed to Jurassic World because of what happened in the first movie, is trying to figure out a way to keep people interested. They decide to make a new dinosaur that is scarier and more awesome to bring more people to the park. This is where the Indominus Rex comes in. The part I struggle with is them saying this is the first genetically modified dinosaur because really, all of them are genetically modified because they used frogs to fill in the gene gaps. Maybe the writers didn’t think of that part, but it’s really the first dinosaur with more than just a single dinosaur’s genes and genes of a frog.

The story plot I found was very similar to the one in Jurassic Park, which was probably to bring us back to the first movie, but still. Even though they were supposed to be a throwback to the first movie, I found them to be almost the same as the ones in Jurassic Park. In most cases I would think this was bad but it works for this movie as the other one is 22 years old so this is a better way of going rather than remaking the whole series. But if they do decide to make two more Jurassic World movies that are just as similar to the other Jurassic Park movies, I might just give them lower ratings if I decide to review them. But I do like that they show a more personal side to taking care of the dinosaurs and that they have more respect for them. 

I have a few favorite parts to the movie but will not spoil it for you, however I will say the unlikely trio of heroes at the end was awesome. It made me jump a couple of times and really kept me involved. Speaking of which, my biggest jump didn’t come from a dinosaur, it came from a pig.

I found the acting to be very good, but there were some moments that were a little hard to believe because of how they treated the dinosaurs up close, and how the dinosaurs treated them up close as well. It maybe how the script was written but I still didn’t like it too much.

I would rate this movie 8.2/10 for good acting and a thrilling story. Lost a little for having a little too familiar story plot and thinking the idea of genetically modified was new. 

As a side thought, one of my favorite parts of going to the theater to watch the movies are the Cineplex pre-shows that play 15 minutes before the movies start. Get there early and check it out if you want.

Don't forget to leave me your thoughts below. 

Movie Review: Spy

So for this review I decided to go watch the new movie Spy. But before I get to the review, you should probably know that this movie does have a lot of swear words and a scene where you see a man’s private area. This means I do not recommend taking young children to this movie.

 Thanks!

The movie starts at a gathering where Bradley Fine (played by Jude Law) is on a mission to find out the location of a nuke. He is to interrogate someone who wants to sell it for a lot of money and is one of the only two people who know where it’s hidden. As he interrogates him, he sneezes and shoots him, which you can see in the commercials. Talking in his ear is his CIA analyst counterpart Susan Cooper (played by Melissa McCarthy) and she helps get him out of trouble by keeping him informed of people in his path so that he knows when and where to go.

Later, while on a different mission to find the nuke, everything gets compromised when Bradley Fine gets shot and killed by Rayna Boyanov (played by Rose Byrne) who knows all of their spies. This leads to Susan Cooper getting to be a spy, which leads to many interesting adventures.

I thought that the acting was very well done for most characters but I thought that one guy was just too unrealistic. But other than that, the characters were played pretty good most of the time.

The overall story plot was, in my eyes, not very good because of so many random things happening at the times where I thought the story was moving along, and also a plot twist. 

Overall though, I thought that it was not a bad movie, but not good in terms of language and slight lack of plot. For these reasons I would rate this movie 7.4/10

Edit: Thank-you Just Linda for pointing out the part of my review I forgot to add.. is the movie funny. The movie was actually funny, but some of the jokes were a bit crude. Even though there are more funny parts in the movie, I feel Melissa McCarthy could have not said so many bad words in the movie itself.

Movie Review: San Andreas

Before I start this review, I would like to say Thank-you to my Grandma Lybbert who is visiting this week and helped me edit this post. Grandma Lybbert, you rock.

The movie San Andreas starts out with a girl driving while drinking water and talking on her phone. But while on the phone, she drives off a cliff. Then a rescue helicopter comes with Ray (played by Dwayne Johnson), two other guys and a TV crew, which is filming them rescue her. They end up rescuing her after one of the rescue guys gets his arm stuck under the car (he gets out too)

Ray is an LA Fire Department helicopter-rescue pilot with an amazing track record for saves. He has a troubled life at home as his wife Emma (played by Carla Gugino) wants a divorce to live with some other guy named Daniel Reddick (played by Ioan Gruffudd) and his daughter Blake (played by Alexandra Daddario) is going off to school and wants to use Daniels private plane to get there.

We are also introduced to a scientist named Lawrence Hayes (played by Paul Giamatti) who is predicting earthquakes. They make some kind of breakthrough but it is apparently too late because this massive earthquake hits the Hoover Dam area they are at and continues from there.

There is a lot of action in this movie but almost too much action. They talk about the big one but what it was was a lot of smaller ones that turned into a big one?  It’s like being on a roller coaster that goes from loop to loop to drop to loop to water to loop… you get the point.  If you like disaster movies, this one gives you a lot of it.

I also find that the actors did the best they could with the script they were given but the characters are poorly developed. It is a typical cookie cutter plot in Hollywood for movies like this to have a plot where someone tries to save their family rather than everyone else and I would have liked to have seen them take a different approach.

The special effects were awesome to watch and they really maximized the use of 3D graphics. I also liked the camera work and angles to really bring the audience into the action.

Over all I rate this movie 8.2/10 for great casting of the Rock as the Hero and great effects, but poor story plot and lack of one major climax.