Irrelevant But Awesome

It really can’t be avoided anymore. We have to talk about the unbelievable box office story that is Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. This past weekend, Jumanji was once again the highest grossing movie at the box office. Seven weeks after its debut, Jumanji is still able to top the weekend at the box office. Yes there have been a few of those weeks where Jumanji came in at number two in the weekly rundown (it did open the weekend after Star Wars after all) but all in all, Jumanji’s box office dominance is something that nobody was expecting. The movie has grossed over $350 million domestically making it The Rock’s highest domestic grossing movie of his career (yes, even more than any of his movies in the Fast and the Furious franchise) and has brought in over $850 million worldwide making it Sony’s fifth highest grossing movie ever with no end in sight (Only Spider-Man and James Bond movies have grossed more worldwide and Jumanji’s number continues to climb). To continue to put in pe...

Joel:  What makes this movie work is the confidence that the movie has in itself and its ability to scare the audience. It’s very easy for a horror movies to use a loud, sudden piano bang when a monster jumps at the screen to give a quick jolt to the audience, but that’s not really impressive. What’s much more impressive, and much harder to accomplish, is a spooky, uncomfortable vibe that goes through the movie, keeping the audience tense so that feeling of genuine fear is present. Oculus has very few if any of those jump scares. Instead, it opts to take advantage of a disjointed narrative that weaves two separate stories from two separate time periods together to keep the audience enraptured with the movie. Going back and forth between the two times as freely as the movie does give you a distorted perception of reality, much like the one that the main characters are experiencing throughout the movie. It’s scary, and unnerving to watch. It’s not always easy for a movie to ac...