The Month in Theaters and Streaming For January 2022

Photo of Meridian 16 Cinema, downtown Seattle. 2012 by Sea Turtle on Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

This is getting to y’all later than I wanted, but I was busy the first weekend of the month. Moving on… I saw eight movies in theaters during the month of January, although two of them are repeats. On top of theaters, I watched fifteen other movies, but one of them is also a repeat. That’s twenty total reviews. Only one of those three repeats is a movie I already talked about here before, namely Spider-Man: No Way Home. The rest will be talked about in due course. SPOILERS AHEAD!!

The 355

This female-led action film was just sort of boring. The “twist” late in the second act can be seen coming a country mile away. The action set pieces when they happen are enjoyable, but the plot just wasn’t very good. Per the trailer, the MacGuffin of the movie is some movie magic hacking device. This kind of thing works fine in a movie that doesn’t take itself seriously, like the Fast & Furious franchise, but here it just comes off as dumb. Anything could have served as plot fuel for the film, from the planned assassination of an important figure or a heist of something dangerous that wouldn’t be ridiculous like a small nuke. It didn’t have to be a hacking device with an idiotic origin. And considering the star-studded cast, there’s not a lot of chemistry nor much room for them to display the great acting I know they can provide. I wouldn’t say this movie is a failure, but that’s just barely. A C- is the best I can give this movie. Mostly because I didn’t expect much from an action movie released in January.

Scream (2022)

Man, this one was real fun. So much fun, I saw it twice! Without much further ado, this is movie of the month for the films I saw in theaters. This may even be the best sequel in the series. It doesn’t reach the heights of the original, my favorite horror movie of all time, but I was thoroughly happy. I will talk about the other sequels below (that’s a little spoiler for everyone,) but this one has excellent fan service for long-time fans, great visceral kills, and a well-done villain reveal. And they put in digs at a certain filmmaker that fans of a certain franchise will delight in. Part of why this film works so well is they got the directors of Ready or Not, one of the best horror movies of the last five years, to helm it. As I do not wish to spoil anything more, just go see this movie if you’re a horror fan. A sequel has already been greenlit. This gets a solid A from me.

The Tiger Rising

God, this movie sucked. Dangling plot threads abound. The movie just kind of ends. The handful of actors most could name don’t really do much. An obvious F without a doubt. To go back to an earlier point, the movie plants seeds of certain plot elements with zero follow through. I counted about three or four, which only seemed to be done to pad the run time. Lack of resolution is a major movie sin. The main narrative thrust of the film is that a boy discovers a tiger in a cage in the woods behind the hotel he currently lives in. For some reason, he thinks he should release the tiger. A wild predatory animal. Into a populated area. Stupid. Just contact animal control as I highly doubt owning a tiger in this fashion is completely above board. This movie is apparently based on a best-selling novel. Either this was a terrible adaptation, or the book sucked. Possibly both! Avoid this, although that probably won’t be very difficult.

Belle

An anime movie involving virtual reality. I saw this dubbed instead of subbed because of the showtimes for both. Since this film involves a wallflower coming out of her shell using a virtual reality persona that sings, I don’t know if seeing it subbed would have worked as well. The movie is fine, but didn’t thoroughly impress me. A lot happens in the movie that doesn’t clear the bar for suspension of disbelief. Some of that could be attributed to the localization of the dub, but putting a flashforward at the beginning without really notating it didn’t help things. Just ends up being confusing, especially as it never strongly delineates when it ends. Not to spoil things too much, but the film opens with a performance of what we eventually discover is the main character’s VR persona and said main character seemingly following the online engagement of said persona as if she’s a fan. Then, a little bit further into the movie, we see her join the online platform and create the persona. Confusing. I went into the movie knowing essentially nothing, so maybe part of that is my fault. I give this a C+ to B-, as I might watch the subbed version maybe.

Sing 2

An underwhelming sequel to an underwhelming animated movie. It isn’t terrible, but it doesn’t do anything that I haven’t seen before. They retread jokes from the first movie that were already pretty tired. The best parts of the first one were the musical performances. I wasn’t as impressed this time around with what are mostly glorified covers. The only reason this movie exists is that the first one made a decent amount of money. I doubt this was the sequel plan as it basically undoes the ending of the first one less than fifteen minutes in. And this one also made good scratch, so they will probably do a third one. I give this a C.

Licorice Pizza

I didn’t get why people loved this movie so much. The movie is a love story between a fifteen-year-old boy and a twenty-five-year-old woman. That’s just creepy. The title is also confusing. I Googled it after I saw the film to discover that “licorice pizza” is an obscure term for a vinyl record. The performances are good, but the plot is muddled with not much in the way of a narrative through line. It just ping pongs from event to event with little to connect them. I dug the soundtrack. Not surprising that a period piece in 1970s California would have good music. There are several actors playing real people that I had little to no knowledge of. I’ll never see the movie again, so I have to give it a C.

ALL OTHER MOVIES

Before I get to the movies, a few shows need to be talked about first. Still working on Cold Case; I will finish it eventually. The Book of Boba Fett premiered right at the end of December. It got better once a certain character showed up. The beginning was kind of slow. Peacemaker has been pretty dope. John Cena clearly excels when he’s allowed to be goofy for an adult audience. One episode left of its first season as of this writing.

As I mentioned this in my top ten movies of 2021 article, it should be no surprise that I loved Tick, Tick… Boom! As a writer myself, the struggles of a gifted but underappreciated writer really hit home. It’s on Netflix. Watch it. I give it a A+. This technically wins movie of the month.

Shattered Hearts: A Moment of Truth sucked. It’s an F. A crappy made-for-TV movie. A high school quarterback gets diagnosed with cancer and eventually dies of it. The acting is awful, the script is terrible, and the lack of chemistry between the two leads is painful.

This should have been better but disappointed strongly. THX 1138 is the directorial debut of George Lucas. It just isn’t good. The middle of the film is an absolute slog. And then it just ends rather abruptly. It would have helped if the world-building was up to snuff. But it wasn’t. I know it’s a science fiction dystopia, but we don’t really learn why or how. And the rules imposed by what passes for a government are poorly explained. This is another F.

And another F. Meatballs this time. Bill Murray’s first movie in a starring role. This is like a piss-poor attempt at a non-R-rated Animal House, my favorite comedy of all time. We know where the plot is heading towards, but the movie seems to forget about that for the first two-thirds of it. This movie just drags so hard because most of what happens ain’t all that funny or innovative. It also doesn’t help, like Top Gun, that the movie repeats a couple of songs what felt like five or more times.

Having rewatched the first movie like four months ago, I finally rewatched this movie for the first time in probably over two decades. A Very Brady Sequel was fine. I’d give it a B-, while I would probably give the first one a B. Similar callbacks to old episodes of The Brady Bunch I remember seeing on Nick at Nite just like the first one. Otter from Animal House plays the antagonist. He’s good as a villain. The one thing that really drags it down is a good chunk of the movie is spent on a creepy subplot where Marcia and Greg become attracted to each other. That has not aged well, to say the least.

Jeepers Creepers 3 gives us yet another F. While I enjoyed the first film in this franchise and thought the second one was fine, this movie just isn’t very good. The main issue is putting this movie’s events between the first and second movies instead of following through on the set-up from the end of the second. This should have been set twenty-three years later. The cycle of the killer repeats every twenty-three years. This movie came out fourteen years after the second one, so maybe that’s why. But it retains the same director of the first two. He even wrote all three of them. Some of the kills are fun even if most of them are heavily telegraphed, but the movie just doesn’t justify itself.

In the spirit of showing my girlfriend all the Scream movies before she sees the new one, I rewatched Scream 2. This is possibly the strongest sequel outside of the newest one. This is a solid A. Good twist villain reveal, fun kills, and a decent story. It is funny that the ending coda shows someone who clearly shouldn’t have survived surviving. It doesn’t really make sense, but I guess Wes Craven liked the character too much to kill them off.

I ended up watching Scream 3 twice this month. The reason? My girlfriend didn’t come over due to weather, I believe, and I wanted to watch it before I saw the new movie. So, I eventually watched it a second time so she could see it. The second time I saw the fifth one was her seeing it for the first time. This one is easily the weakest in the franchise. A B to B+. They should have stuck to the original plan for the killers. Wes Craven caved to studio pressure to reduce the violence in this movie, so more comedy got added to not quite make up for it. Including a very strange cameo that just ends up being confusing.

The Perfect Husband: The Laci Peterson Story was a lot better than I thought it was gonna be. I give it a C+ to B-. Honestly, it’s because the acting was better than I thought it would be. Scott Peterson was such a scumbag. And a stupid one at that. Let’s move on…

I finally saw The Replacements. Funny enough, Roy from The Office is in this movie and the previous one. Although the movie does depend on some stereotypes at times, I enjoyed myself enough. Solid B. Keanu Reeves and Gene Hackman were both good in their respective roles.

13 Going on 30 was fine. A romantic comedy with the usual trappings, but using a Quantum Leap-esque mechanic. A thirteen-year-old girl finds herself in the body of her thirty-year-old self without any knowledge from the intervening years. She finds out she grew into a horrible person and seeks to be better. This is a B-.

This should have been better. So I Married an Axe Murderer was funny at times, but it felt a little empty. And I saw the twist coming. Another B-. It does have Mike Myers playing more than one character, a technique he’d use to much better effect in the Austin Powers franchise.

Scream 4 completes the set. Better than the third and about on par with the second. Solid A. Updating the horror clichés in the eleven intervening years between the third and this one was pretty fun while keeping the meta edge, something the fifth one also did well. As per usual, good kills, twist, and story.

I enjoyed The Book of Henry more than a lot of people seemed to. It is hard to talk about this movie without spoiling a major event that happens around the end of the first act, so I won’t. While the cast credits were coming on screen at the beginning, I saw a name I thought was the lead child actor from the 2017 movie It and even though I was wrong, he was in the movie. That was funny. This is a B+ to me.

I have already seen two movies in theaters in February with two more on the schedule in the next few days. Not the greatest slate for the month, but we’ll see.