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This past week was a pretty exciting week for the box office. The new Star Wars film came out and everyone is porg-ing out - did you see what I did there?

Unfortunately, this entry will not be about Star Wars. We were lazy on buying tickets so we couldn’t get any for this weekend, and I bought a new car so we wouldn’t have had time anyways. I’ll be seeing it this upcoming Saturday and it will be included in my next review.

I just want to make it known that this blog will not have a strict structure to it. I am going to start out reviewing films that I watched in 2017. If you want to see my full list of movies I have seen that released this year feel free to go over to my Letterboxd list here: CLICK HERE. Also, if you want to see my diary of films I have been watching recently and you have an account you can follow me and I’ll follow you back.

Now moving on to the reviews…

The Disaster Artist (RT 93%)

Cut to the chase: A film adaptation of a book about the making of quite possibly one of the worst movies of all time – The Room.

On June 27^th 2003 a film named ‘The Room’ was released in only one theater in Los Angeles. I think anyone that considers themselves a film buff has had to sit through this piece of s**t at least once in their life. It is the most painful film to watch with so many plot holes and horrible acting but it is also so bad that it makes you have to finish just to see where it goes. Don’t worry, if you’ve never seen ‘The Room’, you don’t need to before you watch ‘The Disaster Artist’. I didn’t know all the weird facts about ‘The Room’ before seeing ‘The Disaster Artist’. Watching it originally, I just assumed it was a super low budget film. Turns out that this film had a budget of $6M DOLLARS. Tommy Wiseau financed the entire cost of making the movie as well as directing, writing and starring in it. Apparently, he was confused about the difference between 35mm and high definition video so he bought 2 separate cameras so that he could shoot the entire movie in both formats by using a custom-built apparatus that housed both cameras side-by-side and required two crews to operate. This is complete bonkers!

Now let’s transition back to the focus of this review, ‘The Disaster Artist’. This film is to the ‘The Room’ what ‘Ed Wood’ is to ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’. Directed by James Franco, this film gave an insider look at the crazy events that took place while making ‘The Room’. Franco plays Tommy Wiseau and stars alongside his brother Dave Franco who plays Greg Sestero. The real-life Greg Sestero was the author of the book this film is based on. You get an observation of how a film that bad could be made and get a closer look at the mastermind behind it. ‘The Disaster Artist’ answers all the questions I had after watching ‘The Room’. James Franco does a really good impression of Wiseau. He’s got the accent down and the makeup is so believable you would almost never know it was James Franco behind it all. Whether you are interested in filmmaking or not this is a really funny movie and I’d recommend you go see it.

Thor: Ragnarok (RT 92%)

Cut to the chase: Taking place a year after the events of Captian America: Civil War, this film centers around Thor struggling to get off the alien planet Sakaar in time to save his home planet of Asgard from being destroyed.

Most people who know me know that I am a huge Marvel comics fan more specifically the X-men. I don’t want to really get into a debate about the Fox thing but being a HUGE Xmen fan I have some mixed feelings about it…

Anyways, ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ has been talked about as being the highest-scoring movie ever in the Marvel Cinematic Universe on Rotten Tomatoes. I can’t say for sure that I think it is the best Marvel film but I would say that it is up there with The Avengers. They are setting it up nicely to transition into the Infinity War movie set to release in 2018. To understand this movie, I think it would be necessary to watch the other Marvel movies before- or ‘Captain America: Civil War’ at least. I just think there are a lot of jokes and plotlines that would be confusing if you haven’t seen at least one of the Avenger movies. All in all, I thought it was a really good movie. I am not too familiar with the Thor comics but I did do some research before I went to see the film. Apparently “Ragnarok” actually is a cyborg clone of Thor designed by Tony Stark. So, I went into this movie thinking that I’d see some clone action but that was not the case… It was still a good movie though, I just don’t really get why it was called ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ when we didn’t see a cyborg Thor clone.

Oh well, I got over it pretty fast when I started watching the movie. I don’t want to give any spoilers but I thought it had a good balance of corny jokes and there was more “adult-like” jokes in it that most Avengers movies shy away from. The action scenes were pretty good, and I don’t think they were as gratuitous as most of the other Marvel movies. I like the way they depicted Thor, I liked the new characters and really felt like Loki was one of the best parts of this film. He brought some jokes with him and a new complexity to his character that we haven’t really seen before. Also, I like Thor with short hair ;) If you are a Marvel fan this is definitely not one of the ones you want to miss. I enjoyed it a lot but I still am scratching my head at why there was no cyborg Thor. Oh well… maybe a Thor super fan can explain it to me.

I hope someone is enjoying reading these reviews. I made this mostly as a creative outlet for myself. I love writing and I love movies, and I’m excited to start writing more frequently again. I hope I can keep this up but who knows.

I’ll catch you later to let you know what I thought about Star Wars.