Chuck's Movie Breakdown

        Hey guys, Chuck here. Well, this September sees director Tim Burton release his new film Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.  Well, before we get to that movie, I think that it's high time to take a look at the 1988 original classic Beetlejuice,  starring Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Catherine O'Hara, Glenn Shadix, Sylvia Sidney, and Jeffrey Jones.          The movie is set in the small town of Winter River, Connecticut, where we meet married couple Adam and Barbara Maitland. The two are enjoying some vacation time at home, but find themselves in an unfortunate accident, where they swerve to avoid hitting a dog, and wind up driving off a covered bridge into a river, where they drown. However, they find themselves miraculously back at home, where they cannot leave again, and find a book in the house: the Handbook For the Recently Deceased. In other words, Adam and Barbara are dead, and are trapped in their ho...

        Hey guys, Chuck here. And, with my love of Star Wars , it shouldn't be a surprise that I would also enjoy parodies and fan films based on Star Wars . And, of course, one of my personal favorites of these is a YouTube series called Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager , or Chad Vader for short.         Created by Matt Sloan and Aaron Yonda of the Madison, Wisconsin based YouTube comedy channel BlameSociety, Chad Vader came from a concept by one of their friends, Tim Harmston. The idea: what if Darth Vader was the manager of a grocery store. Well, after changing the name from Darth Vader to Chad Vader, the series was born, and was an instant success on both YouTube and MySpace. But, let's get into what made it so popular.        The series open in a fictitious grocery store called Empire Market (filmed on location at the Willy Street Co-Op in Madison, Wisconsin), where Chad Vader serves as the Day Shift Manager. And, Chad i...

         Hey guys, Chuck here. And, it's with a heavy heart that I am writing this review. On May 25, 2024, beloved music composer and songwriter Richard M. Sherman passed away at the age of 95. Richard, along with his brother Robert (who passed away in March of 2012), wrote many beloved songs for movies released by Disney, including the film Mary Poppins.  Another film that the Sherman Brothers wrote songs for is the subject of this review: 1977's The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.          In truth, this wasn't really a movie, as much as it was a cinematic repackaging of three animated featurettes based on the beloved Winnie the Pooh stories by A.A. Milne: Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, and Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, Too . Now, each of these three featurettes were released previously, with Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day going on to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Short...

        Hey guys, Chuck here. It's been nine years since George Miller released the last Mad Max movie, Fury Road.  And, well, we're here with the new movie Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga , which is directed by Mad Max  franchise creator George Miller. This movie stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Lachy Hulme, Nathan Jones, and Angus Sampson, just to name a few.          Okay, so, as the title would suggest, this movie tells the story of Furiosa, and it explores her childhood in the Green Place of the Many Mothers, shows how she was taken from there, and finds herself at the mercy of a warlord named Dementus. Years later, as a young woman, Furiosa seeks to exact revenge against Dementus, and finds herself in an uneasy alliance with Immortan Joe and his followers, who seek to rid the Wasteland of Dementus and his followers.         Okay, so much like with Fury Road, Furiosa is pretty light on plot. However, tha...

        Hey guys, Chuck here. Well, I said I would have at least one Marvel review for this month, and it's definitely worth it. X-Men '97 is a Disney+ animated series, which serves as a continuation of the '90s Fox Kids animated series X-Men. This series was developed by Beau DeMayo, and has been easily the most popular Marvel series produced for Disney+.           So, X-Men '97  picks up some time after the ending of the classic '90s X-Men series. Charles Xavier is dead, and a question comes up about the future of the X-Men themselves. Meanwhile, we meet a teenage mutant named Roberto Da Costa, who is rescued and brought to the X-Mansion. Meanwhile, while Cyclops is undecided on whether he'll step up and lead the X-Men or not is tabled when it's revealed that in his will, Professor Xavier left both the Mansion and the X-Men to Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto. Also, we learn that Jean Grey was cloned by Mister Sinister, and Jean's clone, Ma...

         Hey guys, Chuck here. A couple years back, I reviewed the Men in Black trilogy as part of Will Smith Month . Well, it's taken a while to get around to doing so, but I did promise to review Men in Black: International, a 2019 spin-off movie starring Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Liam Neeson, Kumail Nanjiani, Rebecca Ferguson, and Emma Thompson, and directed by F. Gary Gray. Well, today, I'm finally keeping my promise and reviewing Men in Black: International . So, here we go.          The movie establishes that the Men in Black organization is spread across the Earth, with our main focus being the London branch of MIB, with its chief being an agent named High T. We open with High T, along with Agent H, in Paris in the year 2016, as they attempted to thwart the arrival of an alien force called The Hive. We then cut to 1996 Brooklyn, where a little girl named Molly Wright witnesses her parents being questioned by agents of MIB, ...

        Hey guys, Chuck here. Recall back to 2020, I reviewed both Fred: The Movie and Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred . Well, it's taken a while, but I'm finally at a point where I am ready to finish this stupid-ass trilogy off. This is my review of Fred 3: Camp Fred , starring Lucas Cruikshank, Jake Weary, Carlos Knight, and Tom Arnold, with appearances by John Cena, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, and Daniella Monet.         The movie opens on the last day of school, and Fred is excited for summer vacation, as he's hoping to attend summer camp at Camp Superior, which is the best summer camp ever. However, his cheapskate of a mother couldn't afford the cost, and she sends him to the WORST summer camp ever with easily the most stupid-ass camp name in history: Camp Iwannapeepee. And, yes, even the movie itself acknowledges how stupid the camp's name is. And, we meet the camp director Floyd, who is just ridiculously jolly in this movie.    ...

        Hey guys, Chuck here, and I just went to see the new movie Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes , directed by Maze Runner director Wes Ball, and starring Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand, William H. Macy, and Peter Macon.         So, it's been many generations since the time of Caesar, and the ape civilization has grown extensively. The leader of the apes calls himself Proximus Caesar, and makes it a mission of ape kind to assert their dominance by hunting humans. It's here where we meet the likes of Noa and Raka, who work together to protect a young human woman named Mae, who is a human capable of speaking.         Now, something that makes this movie work so well is the way we see how much the world has changed from the time of Caesar. For instance, while there are ruined remains of buildings and human architecture, they're mostly grown over with trees and plant life. I like how, while it looks like natur...

        Hey guys, Chuck here. Well, as someone who has loved the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, I was pretty excited when I heard that Paramount would be producing a spin-off series for Paramount+. Knuckles , which released on Paramount+ in April of 2024, is set in the universe of the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, and features Idris Elba as the voice of Knuckles the Echidna, and also stars Adam Pally, Julian Barratt, Rory McCann, Scott "Kid Cudi" Mescudi, Ellie Taylor, and Tika Sumpter, with the return of both Ben Schwartz as Sonic and Colleen O'Shaughnessy as Tails.        So, the series is centered on Knuckles the Echidna, who is struggling to adjust to his new life with the Wachowski family, in spite of the best efforts of both Sonic and Tails to help him adjust. It's also centered around Wade Whipple, who is the deputy sheriff of Green Hills, who is struggling to prepare for an upcoming bowling tournament. Unfortunately, however, they do run afoul of...

         Hey guys, Chuck here. A few months ago, I talked about the HBO comedy series Entourage.  Well, as promised, we're in the month of May, so we're taking a look at the 2015 movie Entourage , starring Kevin Connolly, Adrian Grenier, Jerry Ferrara, Kevin Dillon, and Jeremy Piven, along with the likes of Debi Mazar, Perrey Reeves, Rex Lee, Rhys Coiro, Ronda Rousey, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Constance Zimmer, Alan Dale, Kid Cudi, Emily Ratajkowski, Haley Joel Osment, and Billy Bob Thornton, and written and directed by series creator Doug Ellin.          So, picking up nine days after the series finale, the Entourage movie opens with Eric, Turtle, and Drama taking a speedboat all the way to a yacht, where Vince is having a massive party now that he's divorced from Sophia, the woman he was engaged to at the end of this series. Well, I'm really not surprised that Vince didn't stay married for very long. Anyway, it's definitely great to see...

         Hey guys, Chuck here. Hope everyone is enjoying this May the Fourth. And today, we'll be taking a look at Obi-Wan Kenobi, the 2022 Disney+ Star Wars series directed by Deborah Chow, and starring Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christensen, Rupert Friend, Sung Kang, Moses Ingram, Indira Varma, Kumail Nanjiani, Vivien Lyra Blair, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Flea, Joel Edgerton, Bonnie Piesse, Benny Safdie, and Jimmy Smits.         So, the series is set ten years after the events of Revenge of the Sith , and Obi-Wan Kenobi has been living a life of exile on the desert planet Tatooine, working local labor gigs and watching over Luke Skywalker, son of his former Padawan Anakin, who is now the armored Sith warrior Darth Vader. And, unfortunately, Obi-Wan is carrying around a mass amount of guilt over what happened to Anakin, feeling he broke his promise to his own mentor, Qui-Gon Jinn, to train Anakin, and left his old apprentice to die on Mustafar....

        Hey guys, Chuck here. Now, normally the month of May is mostly reserved for Marvel May . But, I decided to give Marvel a break for this year. But, so that there's at least some kind of Marvel review this month, I'll be taking a look at X-Men '97 later in the month. But, for now, let's dive into a movie I've put off reviewing for long enough: Stargate.           Released in 1994, Stargate came about when co-writers Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, the film's director, had two spec scripts that they decided to combine. Emmerich had a spec script for a film called Necropol , which would have involved a mystery behind people disappearing, and would have involved an alien craft buried beneath the Great Pyramid of Giza. Devlin, meanwhile, had a spec script for what he referred to as " Lawrence of Arabia  in space." Using a common plot device in science fiction literature, the teleportation device, Emmerich and Devlin were able to combi...