Tavern Talk: Video Review - FREAKY

It's been a while, but given original Initial Reaction co-host Charles Browder was able to return for a random review of one of the few new releases in theaters coupled with the fact I won't be doing a full write-up on Freaky, it seemed as good a time as any to re-vamp the video review posts. To add some perspective, the last post I wrote of this nature was back in March for the Disney/Pixar release of Onward which published on March 11th AKA the week the entire world shut down. This was honestly the day before major studios would announce delays in some of their biggest movies planned for the remainder of the calendar year and given this post focuses as much if not more on the box office results of the movie myself and my co-host had reviewed the week prior it seemed silly to try and talk about anything when nothing was coming out. Things have changed somewhat since the beginning of September when Tenet more or less forced theaters to re-open with a slew of low-key new releases premiering since and a lot of anniversary editions and restorations of older classics mostly being shown instead. That of course brings us to mid-November which saw the release of Universal and Blumhouse’s body-swap horror-comedy Freaky which has topped the box office for two straight weeks now (again, mostly due to lack of competition and no other new, wide releases), but while the film debuted to $3.6 million on nearly 2,500 screens in its first weekend the second week of the films release was plagued (pun intended) by news of COVID-19 cases continuing to rise across the nation resulting in an only $1.2 million haul for a total domestic cume just shy of $5.6 million. Not bad for a movie rumored to be budgeted at right around $6 million during a pandemic, but still pretty bleak in terms of theater-going prospects for the foreseeable future. Overseas, the film added $3.7 million bringing its worldwide total to $9.2 million. As Thanksgiving approaches, Universal’s animated sequel The Croods: A New Age is slated to hit theaters over the holiday weekend and there is still some hope that business will pick up, but with families largely (hopefully) remaining confined to their own households for the festivities this year the question is how many will risk going to the movies to see a seven year-later sequel to an animated movie? Time will tell, but hopefully we'll have more video reviews coming sooner rather than later. As always, be sure to follow the official TAVERN TALK by Initial Reaction YouTube channel as well as on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter where you can find all the latest content! 

POKÉMON DETECTIVE PIKACHU Review

It's still difficult for me to wrap my brain around the fact that despite countless video games and other IP adaptations over the years that Pokémon has somehow eluded becoming a big screen, live-action event film until this weekend. I can remember Christmas of '99 and getting a Game Boy Color that had to be shared between myself and my siblings with each of us wanting to play our respective Pokémon games at the same time whether that was the red version I received or the blue version my brother did. This was my first real encounter with the world of Pokémon after which I enjoyed collecting the cards more so than I did necessarily playing the actual game. And then there was of course the animated series which led to a couple of animated feature-length films and some Nintendo 64 games (Pokémon Stadium was legit!), but in retrospect it all felt more like a fad that came and went rather quickly in the scheme of things. After the Pokémon roster started expanding past that original one hundred and fifty characters and through to a few years back when the brand re-claimed its dominance over the market with Pokémon GO-the interactive mobile game that had you feeling like you were actually catching Pokémon in the wild-I'd been more or less out of the loop. Moreover, despite how far-reaching Pokémon continued to be, I simply couldn't muster any interest in the multi-format craze; the individual facets of it seeming as widespread as the next and each with as dedicated a fan base as the next. What was I missing? With this in mind, one can imagine my initial response to the news Warner Bros. was hiring Ryan Reynolds to voice Pikachu in a live-action adaptation of one of the newer video games that dealt with this fan-favorite Poké-creature becoming a detective. In short, it sounded like a really dumb idea that could in no way translate to the big screen in any type of credible manner that might pull in an audience beyond the already initiated and the Deadpool 3 screenwriters. Rather, it felt as if it would probably end up going the route of those Alvin and the Chipmunk or Smurf movies where no one actually cared about them and the only people who saw them were children whose parents needed eighty-eight minutes of repose over the weekend. This was, of course, until the first trailer arrived lending the feature the favor of clearly being a more creative endeavor than those aforementioned cash before quality adaptations. This is to say there was evidence of a certain level of care given in the creation of Pokémon Detective Pikachu as the trailer and subsequent execution of the film illustrates both a style and ambition in developing this world that means to both fulfill the fan base as well as weave this strange attraction from the uninitiated by being just weird enough to be engaging; by being unabashedly unusual, but undeniably interesting.

First Trailer for POKÉMON DETECTIVE PIKACHU

This is just...too weird. Warner Bros. has apparently figured out how to, after nearly two decades of prominence in the States, concoct a live-action Pokémon movie that actually looks nothing like I would have imagined the first live-action Pokémon movie would look. That said, I don't remember much about the whole Pokémon boom of the late nineties other than the fact that the show was mildly entertaining as were the Game Boy games and I never got that damn holographic Charizard card. I'm not necessarily a big fan of the brand, but I was able to get into it for a little bit when everyone else was given I was in junior high at the time and all anyone was doing was playing the new N64 games Nintendo and The Pokémon Company were pumping out. How the brand is still viable so long after it catapulted into the zeitgeist twenty years ago is beyond me (and no, I didn't play Pokémon Go a couple of years ago), but as these things go it's clear as to why WB and Legendary would partner with The Pokémon Company to bring these monsters to life for the first time: global appeal, global dollars. Still, POKÉMON Detective Pikachu doesn't exactly seem the obvious route to go. The film is apparently based on a spin-off game that came out a few years ago in Japan. The Japanese version had an older, deeper voice actor performing the role of Pikachu, but for this Americanized version we have Deadpool himself, Ryan Reynolds. To hear this very distinctive voice coming out of this well-known character is a bit disorienting to be sure, but it will be interesting to see if Reynolds can condition audiences to look past his voice and believe it really is the character of Pikachu rather than Reynolds in a booth somewhere. The film concerns itself with an ace detective, Harry Goodman, who goes missing thus prompting his son, Tim (Justice Smith), to find out what happened to his father. The trailer tells us Tim is the only one who is able to actually understand Pikachu and thus the two of them partner up as Pikachu assists in Tim's investigation; the two of them piecing together clues through the streets of Ryme City. POKÉMON Detective Pikachu also stars Kathryn Newton, Ken Watanabe, is directed by Rob Letterman (Goosebumps), and opens on May 10th, 2019.

Red-Band Trailer for BLOCKERS Starring John Cena

The first, red-band trailer for Universal's Blockers has arrived and it finally feels as if we might have a solid comedy waiting in the wings. Over what was a notoriously dry summer that saw Snatched, Baywatch, The House, and The Hitman's Bodyguard do little to nothing for the genre (not to mention Edgar Wright making another good film, but not necessarily a funny one) most audiences relied on the likes of dramedies such as The Big Sick and maybe Logan Lucky (for those who actually saw it) to garner a few laughs while even the animated fare was somewhat light on quality with Captain Underpants maybe being the best, but least seen of the bunch. All of that to say, the fall awards season isn't particularly known for its sense of humor, but while we'll get a few comedies in the form of sequels such as Daddy's Home 2 and A Bad Mom's Christmas I'll be looking forward to next spring when an original and seemingly clever comedy like Blockers drops. I'm surprised much of the reception to this has been negative as I found much of the situational stuff here to be pretty appealing in terms of the comedy being elicited from the generational gap which typically plays pretty stale. Maybe I simply have more trust in the movie as a whole because it is the directorial debut of Kay Cannon who has cut her teeth as a writer on New Girl and the Pitch Perfect series before jumping into the director's chair. I tend to appreciate Cannon's offbeat and rather random sense of humor that she infuses into her projects and I look forward to how that crosses over into her filmmaking style. It also doesn't hurt that Cannon's lead trio consisting of Leslie Mann, Ike Barinholtz, and John Cena seem to have great chemistry between one another and make for a group of friends I could see having fun hanging out with outside of watching them in a movie. Mann and Barinholtz definitely know their way around a studio comedy, but it will be nice to see Cena take on a larger role in a live action comedy after that scene-stealing performance in Trainwreck a few years back. All of that said, I hope this breaks the mold of stale studio comedies for, if you saw the trailer for Father Figures a few weeks back, you'll recognize how dry the well has indeed run. Blockers also stars Kathryn Newton, Geraldine Viswanathan, Graham Phillips, Gideon Adlan, Jake Picking, Ramona Young, Miles Robbins, Jimmy Bellinger, and opens on April 6th, 2018.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 Review

Let's talk about the Paranormal Activity series and what it has become. At this point most people will be quick to dismiss it as nothing more than a cash cow for Paramount who turns a huge profit off these things by making them for next to nothing and placing them in theaters every year around this time to see how many of us show up to see where the mythology of the films go next. I don't know that I have a problem with it, at least, not until the films themselves become obvious to the audience as to what they really are. For the time being though, the studio has been lucky enough to have New York filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (Catfish) who also made the third installment and writer Christopher Landon who co-wrote the second and penned the third and fourth all on his own. Each of these individuals have managed to inject a good amount of fun into the franchise while also investing enough in the movies that we can tell they are pretty excited about where the franchise could potentially take the story and that they want to be a part of that. I tend to forget how wrapped up in these movies I get. I have begun to even view seeing them as more of an obligation than a genuine thrill or excitement for scares. When it comes down to it though, and I sit down with the people so genuinely portrayed on screen and not your standard horror-heroine cliches I remember how invested I have become in these movies and how, despite this being the least scary in the series, it moves the story along and pushes the mythology surrounding Katie and her demon-tainted life.