Way Too Beautiful Reviews

 

 

Welcome back!!!

Here we are, ready to dive into the 2nd month of the year. A quick look at the calendar and…SHIT! I was wayyyyyyyyyy behind on movies and if I plan to finish the year with 365 I had to get to work. As tempting as it may have been to rent all new releases I continued to avoid renting movies and stuck primarily to the streaming apps. Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO GO, and Xfinity On-Demand had more than enough options for me to get my cinema fix. However, I have rented a few movies, nobody’s perfect. The temptation was too great, I even visited the movie theater to catch some new releases. It was nice to see the outside world, even though I regretted it almost immediately. The last weekend of February I ventured out into the world with some friends and my girlfriend to see the Philadelphia Flyers play the Pittsburgh Penguins outdoors at Heinz Field. While it was frigid outside and the outcome of the game was not what I had hoped for, I was able to drown my disappointment with plenty of beer. All that was missing from that weekend was a movie.

Now I can’t say with certainty what day I officially committed to the movie challenge, but it definitely happened around late February. I spent any waking moment watching a movie. Over the last two weeks of February, I saw as many as 4 movies in one day. I probably averaged close to 2 movies a day for that final week. The weekend I went away to Pittsburgh was the only time since I started this 365 movie challenge where I didn’t watch at least 1 movie.

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February’s Winner and Losers

 

Best Movie of February: Ex-Machina

Runner-up: The Big Short

Worst Movie of February: Yoga Hosers

Runner-up: Mascots

 

Unlike January, I liked a lot of the movies I watched this month. Dallas Buyers Club, Steve Jobs, Brooklyn, Joy, Mad Max: Fury Road, Creed… were all in the running for the best movie as well. I would love to talk about each of those films, but I’ll focus on the 2 picked or I’ll be here all night. The Big Short tackled the complicated subject of the global financial crisis and kept me entertained in the process. The celebrity break-away scenes used creative and simple analogies to explain a financial concept which helped me from getting lost. It was a star-studded movie that was well acted across the board with plenty of humor in it for such a depressing moment in US history. Similar to January, the best movie I saw in February, in a way, involved Allen Turing. Ex-Machina was based around a computer programmer brought in to be the human part of the Turing test to determine the capabilities and consciousness of Ava, an attractive robot. After the movie ended I had my jaw on the floor. I would like to say I wouldn’t be so easily manipulated by a pretty robot, but who knows, she was extremely life like. Watching the ending play out how it did had me going over it in my head for days after. Between the amazing CGI of the robot and the excellent build to the final act, I loved this movie and would watch it again in a heartbeat.

 

Let us talk about the bad movies now. Mascots was a Netflix original film about the competitive world of Mascoting. When this popped up on Netflix I thought, judging the book by its cover, that this could have the potential to be pretty funny. I was bigly let down… and I laugh at almost everything. A few of the Mascot scenes made me laugh, but not enough to prevent me from being bored and hoping for it to end soon. Now, for the winner of February’s worst watched movie, also on Netflix… which I have a hard time saying it’s bad. I’m almost positive this movie was meant to be weirdly bad. Written and directed by Kevin Smith, it starred his daughter Harley Quinn Smith, Johnny Depp, and his daughter Lily-Rose Depp. It was about these two teenage yoga enthusiasts who are asked to help hunt down an evil presence after being attacked in the convenience store they work at. It was just odd. There are no other words for it. I almost want to recommend it just so you get what I mean, but I won’t, I like you all too much. I’m pretty sure I even heard Kevin Smith say on multiple occasions this movie was bad or agree that it was. Same thing.

 

Since this is the ending of my second entry on my quest to 365 I wanted to mention I don’t truly find these movies bad. Of the movies I watched, these are just the ones I liked the least…

My 365 Movie List