Awake not Woke!

I love this movie... and guitars

I had to give this one a tick of woke. It's actually a half-tick rounded up. Willie argues that Eugene would be "just one more white boy ripping off our music." Willie also gets called "mud-duck" by a white pimp in a small southern town. That's about it for the woke report. The movie itself is based on the legend of Robert Johnson's deal with the devil at the crossroads. Willie is a harmonica player that spent his life in prison over a self-defense killing of a band member. Eugene is a privileged classical guitar prodigy who is obsessed with Robert Johnson. He believes Johnson had a song that never got recorded and Willie may be the last chance to find it. Eugene breaks Willie out of the hospital, and they go on the road. Eugene is looking for a lost song. Willie is looking for a way to back out of his deal with the devil. The strength of this movie is the music. There's kind of a Devil Went Down to Georgia story at the end. It's a guitar contest between Eugene and the Devil's guitarist (Steve Vai). If you don't watch the movie, at least find the ending on YouTube. The contest is called "Cutting Heads." Ralph Macchio learned to play guitar for this part. He didn't do the actual playing, but he developed enough skill that you wouldn't know it. Ry Cooder played most of the actual soundtrack. Vai, of course, played for real. It was awesome!

Another Norwegian monster movie. The acting is pretty bad and the FX look cheap. For some reason there is a lot of blurry out of focus background scenes that are distracting. The title Kraken shows up for about 30 seconds of bad CG screen time, the rest is all cheap looking tentacles and the first 45 minutes is pretty much all setup with nothing happening. The ending is hilariously bad and the whole movie is an environmentalist monster revenge movie on evil humans destroying the ecosystem and messing with nature. There is far too much DEI casting here for a Norwegian movie where the country is 94 percent white. The opening scenes has a white male and black male, the 3 teenagers' includes a black male and the lead is a mixed Iranian Norwegian female. Speaking of this is another movie all about the females, every group is focused on female leads with background male characters, the scrawny female police officer, the mixed Iranian smart scientist, the teenagers focus on the female of the group. The only one that has a male lead is the evil corporation harming the environment.

A lot of DEI overrepresentation in casting. Leads assistant is gay. As far as I can remember there were very few white males anywhere to be seen here. At 2hrs and 7 minutes this an overly long slow moving bloated film that should of been cut significantly. Far too much time is spent trying to convince the audience this character is a famous pop superstar. Too many musical dance scenes with terrible songs and a lot of time spent on her going about her day. There is very little horror and a lot of angsty drama. How many times can you use the jump scare it's in her head and not real tactic before the scenes lose any possible affect they may of had. The lead who is pretty much on screen the entire time just isn't good enough an actor to carry the movie and despite what they want you to believe has all the likability and charisma of burnt toast. The FX are decent and there are a couple of creepy scenes but it seems like the director is more interested in making some weird statement about celebrity and fame than an actual horror movie. The best scene in the entire movie is the opening 10 or so minutes. Where's the rest of that movie, that was far better than the entire rest of the film.

Ah shit! Here we go again...

Let's just agree from the start that the Scary Movie franchise was never high-brow cinema. It's not some super-developed, heavy narrative shit that inspires you to think deep thoughts. It's simple, dumb jokes that are already in everyone's heads, and the creators just put them on screen as parodies. Making this stuff isn't easy, but if you've got the budget for it, you should at least put in the time so your comedy actually lands and makes people laugh. Anyway, in this case the movie tries to act like it's super politically incorrect, but most of it really isn't. It only has a few traces of that. The sketches poking fun at DEI casting and woke stuff have already been done to death in other movies and even on SNL. I saw some comments from well-known anti-woke YouTubers saying the movie was trying to be an anti-woke comedy, making fun of that whole thing, but ended up doing exactly what it was trying to mock. In my case, I didn't really feel that. It does have a couple of genuinely funny moments. The problem is those are like 10% of the movie. The other 90% is just mediocre to straight-up boring. Some parts are so bad I honestly thought they were written by AI. I think this franchise is dead. The Wayans brothers clearly have the talent to make good humor when they actually try, but this is just an easy cash grab. They’re milking a classic parody that should’ve never gone past three movies, and by keeping it going, they turned into exactly what they used to make fun of... P.S.: ⚠SPOILER ALERT⚠ Ah! One of the biggest reasons I’m giving this movie such that “woke score” is because it starts with a fake little movie-within-a-movie where Teyana Taylor plays this super uninhibited, super powerful black woman that nothing can destroy. It could’ve been funny if they had gone completely the opposite way, but it’s clear they wanted to push her as this cliché, hypocritical icon of representation. That completely sets the opposite tone for the whole thing.