Molly’s Game, The Fall Guy, Mobile Suit Gundam 0079, A Quiet Place Part II

- Molly’s Game [2017] - 83
Aaron Sorkin’s 2017 gambling-courtroom drama Molly’s Game is a fun and engaging ride for those that like procedurals and/ or gambling. Led by great performances from both Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba, this is the rare biopic that doesn’t forget to engage the audience with its story as it theatricizes its facts. While it doesn’t entirely clear the hurdles of “I wish this was just a documentary”, it does a good enough job that you rarely want to fact-check things that are said. An intriguing and engrossing story of bad behavior and large wallets, Molly’s Game is a ride well worth taking.

- The Fall Guy [2024] - 77
How I got signed up to go see an action-comedy-romance the world may never know, but I’m not mad about it in the end. The Fall Guy is a genuinely good time and truly excellent for what it is [the aforementioned action-comedy-romance]. Most of its jokes are either laugh-out-loud funny or [at worst] induce a chuckle, and the film’s only major hang-up is some of its mid-journey storytelling and pacing. At 2-hours and 5-minutes long, David Leitch’s romping ode to stuntpeople could have taken a little slack out of its ropes and trimmed a few sequences to really shine as something worth going entirely out of your way for. As is, the extra sag in the middle is keenly felt, but easily dismissed as the always electric Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are likely to ensnare even the most biased viewer into giving the overall experience a 77.

- Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 [1979] - 72
Switching gears now, I decided I’m going to try and power through all of the digital Gundam content by the end of the year… God help me. So, starting at the start: Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 is important in that it literally revolutionized anime as an artform [and toys], and manages to mostly stand up to modern storytelling standards; showing itself to be a composed, mature, and intelligent piece of antiwar media. While it does get pretty lost in the sauce and could be trimmed down in some pretty extreme ways [not to mention that when it does show its age it uh… oof, really shows it], Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 remains watchable, engaging, and even clever almost 50 years later.

- A Quiet Place Part II [2020] - 64
I just… I don’t get this series. I’ll likely watch the third one at some point, but the popularity of John Krasinski’s “monsters that can’t be killed by tanks but get bested by a broken radio” series, uh… baffles me. A Quiet Place Part II is simply A Quiet Place, but with a few less moving parts, a few more “what in the world 🙄” moments, and a few more people getting carelessly tossed around the screen while the monsters do… whatever it is that they do. If you liked the first one, you’re going to like this one… and the next… and the next. If you didn’t like the first, this certainly isn’t going to change your mind. Somehow both more mild and more irritating, A Quiet Place Part II is fun enough as a simple monster flick, but entirely worthless if you want anything other than to be thoughtlessly entertained.