B.A.D. Movie of the Week: Secret Headquarters

Secret Headquarters (2022)

Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman

Story by Christopher L. Yost

Screenplay by Christopher L. Yost and Josh Koenigsberg & Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman

Stars: Walker Scobell, Keith L. Williams, Momona Tamada, Abby James Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Jesse Williams, Michael Peña, Dustin Ingram, Levy Tran, Michael Anthony, Charles Melton, and Jessie Mueller

Has anyone heard of this movie? I didn't know about it until I saw a story of Jesse William's Instagram talking about this movie coming out. Let's just say that poster is misleading. The movie as a whole is a mess.

The world is a safer place with The Guard, a mysterious superhero that travels across the globe doing heroic feats. A secret organization headed by Argon (Peña) wants to the find the source of The Guard's power. Charlie (Scobell) staying over at his dad, Jack's (Wilson) house with his friends discover a secret lair beneath. He discovers that his dad is The Guard, and the children have a target on their backs.

Going into this movie, I thought the movie was going to be like Sky High based on the poster. No, I wasn't. It's more like Iron Man, but but he barely in the movie. Seriously. The movie was focusing on these dumb teenagers who did dumb things. 

Let's have a movie that have teenagers play with alien guns. Cool. Let's a movie where these adults are willing to kill these kids. All right. Have the kids cheat in school with alien technology and suffer no consequences. Fine. Have one of the characters, Lizzie (Witherspoon) be completely crazy for "older boys." Nope.

The secret lair was the coolest thing about this movie. Other than that, it was a disaster.

Rating: 2/10

The Royal Tenenbaums

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Directed by Wes Anderson

Screenplay by Wes Anderson & Owen Wilson

Stars: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston,  Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Danny Glover and Alec Baldwin

Let's get this out of the way. I am not the biggest fan of Wes Anderson's films to say the least. I did not have that many options so I tried to sit through this movie. Even though this movie was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, I was over the movie when it started.

Alec Baldwin narrates the tale of the Tenenbaum family where Etheline (Huston) asks her husband Royal (Hackman) to leave. He checks into a hotel for 22 years and he is being kicked out. So he tries to get sympathy by insinuating that he is dying. His grown kids, the business mogul Chas (Stiller), genius playwright adopted daughter Margot (Paltrow) and tennis champ Richie (L. Wilson) are in a slump. Some other stuff happened. Who cares!

The quirkiness of Anderson's movies really bother me to no end. The only anomaly was Fantastic Mr. Fox. This is why I cannot watch Moonrise Kingdom. I want to have something different from Mr. Anderson. I watched this movie to get something written on here. I could not care less about this film. Everybody being so emo and all that shit. Whatever.

My Rating

Midnight in Paris

Midnight in Paris (2011)

Written and directed by Woody Allen

Stars: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy,  Léa Seydoux, Corey Stoll, Adrien Brody, Michael Sheen, Carla Bruni and Kathy Bates

I am not familiar with the works of Woody Allen. The only movie I have seen in its entirety is Annie Hall, which I loved. When i heard that Allen won his fourth Oscar for his screenplay of this movie, I wanted to see it. Parts of the movie was wondrous and others left a bad taste in my mouth.

The setting is 2010 Paris where an engaged couple, Gil and Inez (Wilson, McAdams) are visiting the city while Inez's parents, John and Helen (Fuller, Kennedy) are trying to take in the sight and sounds of the city. It seems that trouble is in paradise when Inez's old school crush, Paul (Sheen) comes to try to make them feel like Parisians with his grandiose observations of French culture. One drunken night, Gil walks around the Parisian to find himself transported to the 1920s where he is swept away by the likes of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway. Gil tries to make sense of things when this successful screenwriter struggles to write his first book.

Can I say that this movie is a hodgepodge? There were certain elements to this movie that I loved when Gil was in the 20s where he meets a beautiful Parisian woman named Adriana (Cotillard). I was completely swept up in those moments of the film. The modern day moments of the film were very repellent with the ice queen, Inez pissing Gil's parade, the parents that are upper crust that they spit on regular people and the Michael Sheen character trying to make the dumb American look stupid.

I loved sense of discovery and wonderment when Gil meets these greats of art, literature and music. Sometimes, I had to question why does Allen want to jam pack all these people into one particular place at the same time. You had a rogue's gallery of people like Cole Porter, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Matisse, T.S. Eliot, Gaugin, Degas and list goes on. It felt like a drive by people to come in to shock Gil and leave never to be seen again. I wanted to point out that I thought the lowlight on the film was Adrien Brody as Salvador Dalí. He kept droning on about rhinoceros. Who gives a fuck about rhinoceros!

The ending of movie felt rushed and things were not resolved. I was left hanging. If the movie was more of the wonderment of Gil into this fantastical world that inspires him to write his novel, I would be on board. I wish the modern part where jettisoned all together. It was filler.

My Rating