“A man is never alone who has friends.”

Despite some clumsiness and a very basic story about disconnecting to reconnect with what really matters (also, rebellion), nostalgia is a powerful force and I grinned my way through most of this spectacle. Seeing Battletoads, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Chucky, Gundam and the Overlook Hotel all existing and interacting together in one movie worked, perhaps, far too well on me. Plus it fixes quite a few problems from the book and eventually finds it’s way to a beating Spielbergian heart that I haven’t felt since, well, Goonies.

My VHS cover pull-quote: “The set piece in The Overlook Hotel alone makes this whole dang thing worth it. Here’s Spielberg directing characters through his old mentor Kubrick’s masterpiece of horror as a haunted house of sorts. It’s a love letter to the man who helped make him into the director he is today, faults and all. Watching it felt like watching the whole thesis of the film, which stands as a love letter to the rampant artistic and childlike imagination that sits cozily beside the capitalism inherent in pop culture.”