Not a super duper movie, but for once it’s not Adam Sandler’s fault! He reins in his inner moron to give a modest but adequate performance. In Hebrew his name, Sandler, means cobbler so it’s fitting that he plays the Brooklyn shoe maker resentfully hanging on to a business his father owned and abandoned when he abruptly left his family.
One night Sandler stumbles on a secret hidden in the basement: if you mend shoes using an antique machine, you can become the shoes’ owners simply by wearing them. This is just the escape he was needing – to slip into someone else’s skin, live a more glamourous life, see the city or even just the neighbourhood from someone else’s eyes. This is where The Cobbler becomes Freaky Friday. The body swap schtick means that Method Man gets to do his meanest Adam Sandler impression, and mostly fails. Dan Stevens does passably better, but his time in the film is short.
At any rate, this is a pretty neat party trick that fails to develop into anything exciting or worthwhile. In fact, the results lack any imagination whatsoever. You kind of feel like the director dangled the carrot, and then put the carrot in his pocket and walked away. Critics on Rotten Tomato have it sitting at a limp 9% although he’s got his mother beat, and his lover too (Reese Witherspoon played his angelic mother in Little Nicky; her film Hot Pursuit’s currently at 7%. Kevin James, who played his pretend boyfriend in Chuck and Larry, is sitting at 6% for Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2). Audiences, however, are much more generous with middle of the road reviews, calling it “watchable,” “potentially charming” and “a slight step up from Adam Sandler’s recent comedies.” Hear that? That’s the sound of ringing endorsements!
When Captain Grace Garland returns home from two tours of duty with the Marines, there’s no one at the airport to greet her, no poster board with her name on it, no half-wilted but well-intentioned bouquet of flowers, no weeping mother or horny husband or gleeful children, or even a welcome home lick from the dog who’s been missing her. And everyone who’s been away should be missed.
Driving herself home, she gets into a minor accident, and a sweet, sweet puppy named Justice finds and leads her to a nearby farm. Turns out, Grace is a dog lover, having worked with them in the canine unit of explosive detection and search and rescue in Afghanistan. So she knocks on the puppy’s door, and her owner is the handsome owner of some antibiotic cream. Grace is happy to spend a little extra time giving Justice belly rubs because she’s had to leave behind her dog, the verygoodboy named Christmas. The holidays are making her sad as they just remind her of her best four-legged friend.
Meanwhile, Grace’s owner Joe is the town’s judge, the kind of judge who commutes a teenager’s speeding ticket in exchange for a promise that he’ll go to college. It is all kinds of trite and eye-rolly. And Joe may be a judge, but he’s got some pretty crappy judgment, particularly as he tries to prevent Grace from leaving the very town he himself plans to leave. If he likes Grace, and we all know that’s pretty much baked into the premise, he’s got a weird way of showing it.
This holiday is nothing special, not even very noticeable. Perhaps if you’re wanting to pair Christmas romance with some good old fashioned law and order, you’re in luck? Does that sound desirable in any way? It’s a bit of a tough sell, but at least there’s cute doggies!
I’m having a hard time writing anything about this movie because it really didn’t make an impression. If you don’t have what it takes to be good, then at least have the decency to be bad, and mean it. This one just kind of meanders along the line of blandly okay when it’s not veering too close to annoying (or god forbid, racial caricature), but I did, in all honesty, stumble upon some genuine giggles along the way, so not without merit, but mostly meritless.
Actually, if you mention the title to almost anyone, the reply more than half the time is “Which one is that?” And that’s about all the review you need. It’s forgettable. It follows the formula HARD and colours within the lines even harder. Sean and I went for drinks before this movie, and when the waitress asked what we were seeing, she responded “Oh, the Cameron Diaz one with that Latino woman?”. Yup, that’s the one.
I wanted to like this movie; you want to like this movie; we all want to get on board. How often does a movie starring women get produced and directed by them as well? This one does, but instead of celebrating it we’re all just kind of looking at our shoelaces.
It’s awkward when a likeable star fails. Reese showed real comedic chops when she did Elle in Legally Blonde, or even better: Tracy Flick in Election. She has an Oscar and her own production company so what the heck is she doing saying yes to a barely mediocre script (a script trying to ride on the coat tails of barely mediocre The Heat) in a vaguely offensive movie?
Reese is charming, and even appears to be having fun, but Sofia Vergara isn’t quite up to the task. Poor woman only has one speed, and without the wit of Modern Family, it starts to feel like Latina parody rather than an actual character. I never got the appeal of Vergara. She looks like a drag queen to me, with everything dialed constantly up to 11. Opposite Reese it’s even more vulgar, and the one-notedness more glaring and irritating.
Hot Pursuit is entirely missable. Full steam ahead to Mad Max: Fury Road and please baby Cheesus let it be good.
Under the Skin is described as a science-fiction-horror-art film. I hardly know how to talk about Scarlett Johansson as this alien seductress but what I can’t help talking about is the thing that’s still haunting me three days later: the score.
It was composed by the brilliant Mica Levi (and produced by Peter Raeburn, who recommended her to director Jonathan Glazer). Mica primarily used the viola to write and record the music, deliberately seeking out the most “identifiably human” sounds the instrument could make. She
Insert creepy music here
then altered the pitch and sometimes the tempo of these sounds to “make it feel uncomfortable” which she accomplished with crazy amounts of success, I tell you what. It made me monumentally, UNCOUNTABLY uncomfortable.
Glazer had her writing music to express Johansson’s feelings as her character experiences things for the first time, with the music following and reflecting her in real time, so to speak – “What does it sound like to be on fire?” he asked of her, and oddly, she had an answer. Another scene where the alien Scarlett attempts to eat cake is a stand-out for me, but is actually accompanied solely be the normal clatter of a popular family diner. The stark absence of scoring is as jarring as the creepy, otherworldly music can be.
The greasy, sinister sound of the viola is accompanied by percussion whenever a new man (victim?) follows Scarlett into the abyss. This music is unrelenting and aggressive, and it repeats with each new conquest. In an article for The Guardian, Levi wrote: “Some parts are intended to
be quite difficult. If your life force is being distilled by an alien, it’s not necessarily going to sound very nice. It’s supposed to be physical, alarming, hot.” Well, I’ll give her alarming. And unnerving. The sound is experimental, but at times she can get a whole orchestra in on it and it gives you the shivers.
Pitchfork wrote that “the strings sometimes resemble nails going down a universe-sized chalkboard, screaming with a Legeti-like sense of horror.” There’s nothing hummable or toe-tappable in this soundtrack, but it’s filled with innovative sounds that your body reacts to on a visceral, immediate level, leaving your mind racing to catch up.
I still can’t get those strings out of my head. They contribute to an audio-visual experience that’s unequal parts tension, perversion, anticipation, anxiety, and a big ole dose of the willies. The willies! Oh man, tonally and aesthetically this movie is disturbing. I’m disturbed, guys. There’s no going back.
Thursday Movie Picks, sponsored as ever by Wandering Through the Shelves, is brought to us this week by the letter W – for movies set in the workplace.
Matt
Office gossip can be addictive. Most people wind up spending most of their time talking about work when they spend time with their colleagues outside the office. Actually, three of the Assholes work in the same place and- when we’re not arguing about movies we’re often reminiscing (or ranting) about work. Even people who claim to hate their job tend to find the comedy and drama of any workday pretty interesting. All you need to do is capture that environment in a relatable way and you’ve got a pretty good movie.
The Apartment (1960)- This has been one of my most significant Blind Spots until this week and it was worth the wait. Jack Lemmon plays an accountant at a big firm who’s just trying to get noticed. Once his superiors find out that he has a modest but nice apartment conveniently located on the Upper West Side, he becomes their go-to guy as they start borrowing his key so they can discreetly cheat on their wives. Director Billy Wilder has a lot to say about the compromises people make in the name of ambition and manages to make a movie that is still funny after all these years while he’s saying it. Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine are as charming as can be too.
Office Space (1999)- Turning an animated short into a live action feature-length film could have been a disaster but Beavis and Butt-head creator Mike Judge turned any old boring day into the office into one of the funniest comedies of the 90s. Re-watching it this week, I laughed loudest when Gary Cole’s Bill Lumbergh- in an effort to pacify the troops- announces that Friday will be Hawaiian Shirt Day. Around our office, they charge us two dollars to wear jeans on Friday. I couldn’t help feeling bad for poor old Milton though.
Margin Call (2011)- Yet another movie that I’m thankful to Wanderer for giving me an excuse to finally check out this week. Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci, Jeremy Irons, and Kevin Spacey (making my list two weeks in a row) play investment bankers who see the writing on the wall leading up to the 2008 Financial crisis and sit around wondering what to do about it. Director J. C. Chandor (A Most Violent Year) knows how to set the mood and the performances are all stellar.
Jay
Up In The Air – Poor Ryan Bingham is so afraid of real life that he’s made sure his job keeps him in constant motion. His office may be at a cruising altitude of 32 000 feet but he spends a lot of time visiting other people’s workplaces to tell them they’re no longer employed. This is such a tough job that cash-strapped businesses are still willing to pay big bucks during a recession for him to do it in their place. He sees offices at their very worst, smells the fear and senses the instability, and is the receptacle for sometimes 20 years’ worth of pain and frustration. Our identities can be so wrapped up in our work, and in many ways, Ryan (George Clooney) is the prime example of this. Director Jason Reitman bravely tackles those creeping workplace notions of downsizing and obsolescence and asks some tough questions of the aging American workforce.
The Social Network – I love how you see the growth of the company here, the “offices” originally in a Harvard dorm room, and then graduating quite quickly to the impressive work space that was eventually needed. The movie recounts a very modern invention (hello, Facebook) but its workplace themes are as old as the first profession – loyalty, jealousy, theft, power, the complicated ownership of ideas. Whether friends or enemies, friended or unfriended, colleagues or competition, this project is always work, and everybody wants to get paid.
Brokeback Mountain – The classic office romance. They meet by the photocopier, lock eyes over the on, thwater cooler, exchange business cards in the elevator…or, you know, not. Don’t you wish your office looked like this? The scenery is breathtaking but make no mistake: these two cowboys meet at work, doing a job that’s not altogether welcoming to “their kind.” When their boss gets an inkling of what’s going on, the work dries up and the two spend the rest of their lives stealing secret moments and steeling themselves with memories of the best job they ever had.
Bonus pick: Monsters, Inc. Sully and Mike are about as close as two colleagues can be. Mike is the more ambitious of the two, but it’s Sully’s talent and skill that make them so successful. The workplace is originally competitive, and tinged with the fear of contamination (they do bio-hazardous work with children). It may be a cartoon about fuzzy monsters, but any joke about paperwork in triplicate is likely to land huge with adult audiences.
Sean:
Since Matt took Office Space and Jay took Up in the Air, I am sticking to familiar territory and making my section an all-lawyer-movie workplace bonanza!
Philadelphia – a great movie about a lawyer getting kicked out of his workplace, and then going to his other workplace, the court, to try to make things right. Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington absolutely own this movie. I actually did not see this until last year and I should have seen it way sooner, because it’s excellent.
A Few Good Men – I saw this in theatres, I owned it on VHS, I own it on DVD, and one of my roommates in university recited the “You can’t handle the truth!” speech every time he had more than three drinks. And I could watch it again tomorrow. There are so many good lines and so many good characters in here that it remains enjoyable to this day. And again there are a few workplaces in here, namely the courts and the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
The Firm – Tom Cruise is probably the best lawyer ever, at least if you go by his on-screen performances. He almost got Dawson and Downey freed and in the Firm he somehow outmaneuvers a whole team of crooked lawyers and the mob while still adhering to his strict ethical code. Plus he does a lot of really fast running in the Firm which is always the best part of any Tom Cruise performance. This movie feels really long, because it is, but it’s still a good watch.
Anyone had an office love? Office hook up? Office BFFs?
Seventh Son – Saw this one unintentionally at the drive-in. A rare misstep for Julianne Moore, and Jeff Bridges seems to have just wandered in accidentally. Moore is artfully costumed but as Sean put it “the movie wasn’t very interesting and there weren’t any cool parts.” Three days were not enough between seeing Alicia Vikander in the well-executed Ex-Machina and this poop machine.
Diplomatie – A historical drama that depicts the relationship between Dietrich von Choltitz (Niels Arestrup), the German military governor of occupied Paris, and Swedish consul-general Raoul Nordling (Andre Dussollier). The acting is superb but it’s 84 long minutes of two men talking in an office (please don’t blow up Paris – but I must – well we’d rather you didn’t – but really I must) and I wasn’t that into it.
Jupiter Ascending – They weren’t joking when they said this one was bad. It’s bad. It feels more like a Saturday morning cartoon, Eddie Redmayne makes an ass out of himself giving a weird, whispered delivery, and though at times strikingly beautiful, the CGI overload mostly falls flat. But good news for Matt: apparently if you’ve never been stung by a bee, it’s because they recognize royalty.
Escobar: Paradise Lost – A young Canadian (Josh Hutcherson) goes to Columbia to follow his dreams of surf and sun and ends up meeting the love of his life, Maria – and then meets her uncle Pablo (Benicio Del Toro). You can imagine that things don’t go particularly well for him because it turns out drug lords with political ambitions aren’t overly loyal. Makes you wish Del Toro was in a true Pablo biopic, and not some movie filtered through the eyes of a white boy.
So last week, the Assholes enjoyed a late lunch on a sunny patio, some margaritas as we planned a future trip to California, and a movie that we all admitted to thoroughly enjoying.
Ex-Machina is a damn fine piece of cinema that we all came away from chittering about like we’d been starved of good film-making for centuries (and it being Avenger week, I guess it did kind of feel that way). And then we all promptly avoided writing about it.
Now why is that? Probably because I’m not interested in rehashing plot. I am, however, frothing to talk about what happens, really happens. So I’m writing two posts. This one, spoiler-free, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet: Go see it. It’s about a beautiful robot who’s (artificially?) intelligent and has a sporting vagina. How can you resist that? Answer: you can’t. See it immediately, and then come back to discuss.
And for those of you who have seen it, please follow this link to the real meat and potatoes, where we can finally get all those glorious WHAT THE FUCKS off our chests. Sound good? See you there.
You’ve been warned, ladies and gentlemen: this post is not a review but a place where we can finally talk about all those little light-bulb moments that Ex-Machina inspires, and sometimes orchestrates. Brilliant film, by the way. If you haven’t seen it, do. And then come back. For those of you sticking around, please view the following as talking points – take one or take all, and head to the comments to let us know how you feel. If you have your own questions to add, please do.
Okay, so first off: can you even believe that we haven’t learned our lesson yet? I mean, literally, every movie, every book, every comic has always warned of the exact same thing: robots will always get smarter than us. They will always realize that we a hazard. And they will always neutralize that hazard. Robots always win! End of story. Isaac Asimov microphone drop.
Director Alex Garland has described the future presented in the film as ‘ten minutes from now’. Meaning that ‘if somebody like Google or Apple announced tomorrow that they had made Ava, we would all be surprised, but we wouldn’t be that surprised’. Isn’t it a little scary that a machine that is potentially an extinction-level event for us could be being built in someone’s basement right now? Actually, we’re creeping closer and closer to this inevitability all the time – I recently warned our dear Carrie that she was wasting her time keeping in shape because one of these nights her fitbit would kill her anyway. As far as I know she’s alive and well, but I am concerned about how much of our lives we’re devoting to things like the Apple Watch, which can control your TV, pay for groceries, or give you directions. But it also has the ability to spy on you – just ask Edward Snowden! Did this movie feel like a real and imminent threat to you?
The title derives from the Latin phrase ‘Deus Ex-Machina’, meaning ‘a god From the Machine.’ It’s basically referring to a plot device where a god, or some powerful unknown, resolves character issues in one fell swoop. Nathan (Oscar Isaac) tells us that only gods can create new life – he’s cocky and proud of his invention and he loves when Caleb implies that he is a god. But Ava has other ideas. Whether or not she ever needed him, she’s certainly outgrown him (remember when Caleb sadly tells her it’s not up to him, and she asks “Why is it up to anybody?) – gave me CHILLS!), outgrown god even, by this point, and she knows it. So the ‘Deus’ is conspicuously absent from the title; god isn’t necessary. The machine is all that matters. Is it inevitable that we will create the thing that undoes us?
The movie is divided into “sessions”, each day that Caleb spends administering his best attempt at the Turing test. In the end, ‘Ava Session 7’ appears on-screen even though Caleb isn’t administering the Turing test anymore, and Nathan is pretty dead. Do you think this means Ava was doing the testing all along? It definitely feels like she was always in control. The boys felt the ultimate test would be to see if she could fall in love, but she knew that the ticket to her escape would be to manipulate Caleb into falling for her. Now that I’m thinking about it, Ava lives in this glass box, but when Caleb is questioning her, he steps into a box within her box, which sort of hints toward him being the one in the hot seat, doesn’t it?
A Turing test, you may remember, is a conversation of sorts between a person and an unknown entity. If a computer can pass itself off as a human during this test, it has passed, and the computer can be considered ‘intelligent’. In the film, Caleb can clearly see that he is interrogating an android – Nathan feels that if Ava can still relate to him as a human despite it being very obvious that she isn’t, then the test will truly be meaningful. What I think is meaningful is that the android is played by a human. So funny in this age of Ultron, but I loved that this movie was driven by ideas rather than effects. There are so many cerebral easter eggs, references to Frankenstein, and the Bible, and Greek mythology. I need to see it 8 more times just to soak it all in. But Ava is played by Alicia Vikander, who realized that to move and act like a perfect woman would end up seeming robotic, so for a robot to act like a real woman, she must be flawed. Did that make your head hurt? A robot like Ava knows and sees all. She processes everything at a much higher rate than a human ever could, but to win over Caleb, she must express a vulnerability that would appeal to him. In seeming weak, or scared, or dreamy, she gives him the opportunity to feel he has something to offer her. She plays him expertly. This is the greatest chess game a robot has ever played, but as we know, robots always win.
Matt’s been belly-aching about his favourite movie rental place biting the dust while the rest of us saw it coming for – what? – the past 15 years or so? Only teasing, Matt. Elgin Street Video was THE place; it managed to be a neighbourhood fixture and also a city-wide go-to for its eclectic catalogue that was worth getting your knees dusty for. The original owner was a bit of Luddite, like Matt, unwilling to believe that new technologies could topple his empire, having famously quoted to the Ottawa Citizen in 1994 “We certainly know the value of this so-called information highway has been grossly exaggerated in the media” but alas the internet finally caught up with his legacy (he died in 2008, his video store outliving him an impressive 7 years thanks to friends and family who vowed to keep it going). The store will shutter for good at the end of the month, and in the meantime, the store’s contents are on sale and everything must go. Everything? Even the wacky memorabilia? Even John Candy’s pants? Well, that remains to be seen.
So while Matt’s throwing a funeral for the crumbs of his nostalgia, I’m still indulging in mine.
The drive in. Oddly enough, the drive-in was almost done in by videotape. It nearly vanished when people could simply rent a tape at Blockbuster and take it home to their living rooms instead. They’ve been going extinct for 40 years now, but here’s the thing: they’re not dead yet. And unlike DVD (or VHS!) rentals, there seems to be a throwback factor that’s keeping their faint hearts beating.
Why do I love the drive-in? What’s not to love about seeing a movie under the stars? About the sense of community involved in pointing our cars in the same direction, tuning in to the same radio station, honking our horns in unison to tell the projectionist we’re ready, flashing smiles along the way as we make the dark stumble towards the bathrooms, greet each other over popcorn, walk our dogs during intermission.
By the late 1950s, one-third of theaters in the US were drive-ins. It was an affordable way to see a movie (and often two or three), the drive-ins relying more heavily on concessions and the ticket prices staying quite low, often a set price for a whole carful of movie goers. Turns out that wasn’t a super sustainable business model and today there are fewer than 350 operating drive-ins in the US (there are about 40 000 indoor screens, by contrast). But there are some things that deserve a resurgence, and like vinyl records currently enjoying a comeback, so are drive-in theatres.
This weekend, our local (the only local) drive-in theatre showed its first double bill of the season (drive-in season in snowy Canada is tragically short). It never matters what they’re showing; Sean and I go every other weekend, which is as often as they bring in new movies. The movies are almost always movies we’ve already seen paired with a movie we had no intention of seeing, but we go. We bring blankets and pillows and mosquito netting and a picnic, and a bottle of champagne. We watch the movies with varying degrees of interest, sometimes with rapt attention from the edge of our captain’s chairs, other times stretched out in the backseat, half an eye on the screen and someone’s hand up someone else’s shirt. Being at the drive-in reminds us old married fuddy-duddies of the art of making out. It inspires us to learn new ways of doing old tricks so that the Volkswagen doesn’t get to a-rocking. It gives us a new appreciation of the suburbs – the night sky, the fresh air, the full moon, the fireflies. I can’t say exactly why we love to go, but we do.
Maybe it is a form of reminiscing. As kids, Mom would have us all put on our jammies before piling into the van. We’d negotiate amongst ourselves for who would sit in the middle seats, and who would go way back. There’d be cheesies and juice boxes during the first film, the family one, and during the second we were expected to sleep. I remember sneaking surreptitious peaks at the screen during Crocodile Dundee 2, a movie only tantalizing to someone who’d been told it was off-limits, “too grown-up” (it was rated PG).
Now we have the luxury of leaving if we don’t like the second feature, but we rarely do. The movie is secondary at the Templeton Cineparc. Foremost is the holding of hands, the nuzzling, the ability to talk through the movie without being shushed, smuggling in a whole pizza if the mood strikes, and having privacy but still enjoying the communal aspect of watching a movie with your neighbours. We’ve only just been and I’m already itching to go back.
Do you have childhood memories of the drive-in? Do you still go? Do you have one near by?
Back in December, I posted one of my first ever reviews on this site of George Lucas’ classic of nostalgia American Graffiti. This is how I closed my review.
“I can’t think of many teen party movies that were made by such a celebrated and talented filmmaker. Rent it.”
In response, fellow Asshole Jay couldn’t resist leaving one of my favourite comments ever on one of my posts.
“I think “renting it” is your own little piece of nostalgia, Matt. Apart from you, I’m not sure I know anyone who rents movies anymore.”
Apparently she’s right. Truth is, I still do rent movies. Or did. Until Elgin Video announced on Thrusday that it was closing its doors after 25 years in business. I can’t say it came as a surprise. What small business that charges five dollars for a three-day rental could ever hope to compete with a more convenient and less expensive Netflix subscription. Even if every fourteenth rental is free. (Trust me, 14 comes quick when you’re an Asshole). Stores like this have been fighting a losing battle with the internet for years.
The first thing I do when I rent a DVD is assess the damage. Without even thinking, I immediately turn it over to see just how cracked it is and before inserting it into my player, I usually can’t help thinking about where else it’s been. Worse even, who among us hasn’t felt the disappointment that follows the elation of finally having tracked down You Only Live Twice only to have it start skipping just when it’s getting to the good part.
Maybe what comes too easily isn’t fully appreciated. When I was sixteen, I waited months for Supercop to come to video and- when it finally did- my video store (now long gone, barely even making it through the nineties) only had one copy. After weeks of feeling behind empty cases to find nothing there, you’d better believe I relish every kick, stunt, and badly dubbed line of dialogue when I finally went to the store at exactly the right time. I’ll even miss crawling around on my hands and knees because I know From Here To Eternity’s got to be down there somewhere.
When Elgin Video closes at the end of May, there won’t be many- if any- places like it left in Ottawa. It really is a shame. Last month when I discovered that they had Heathers in stock, it was nice to have a friendly staff of fellow cinephiles to share my excitement with. Like the girl behind the counter who, going above and beyond the call of duty, presented me with a list of 25 Movies Based on Young Adult Novels to help me with a particularly challenging Thursday Movie Picks. Or the guy behind the counter who knew more and had seen more than I did (something I rarely encounter and will even less rarely admit). I vowed that one day I would stump him. Now I never will.
I can’t help feeling an end of an era- one that I seem to have clung to longer than most. I’m a resourceful guy and- if I’m in the mood to watch Blood Simple- I’m sure I’ll find a way and may not even have to crawl around on all fours to do it. I’ll love watching the movie’s I love and hate watching the movies I hate as much as ever. It’s just finding them won’t be as fun as it used to be.
Not a super duper movie, but for once it’s not Adam Sandler’s fault! He reins in his inner moron to give a modest but adequate performance. In Hebrew his name, Sandler, means cobbler so it’s fitting that he plays the Brooklyn shoe maker resentfully hanging on to a business his father owned and abandoned when he abruptly left his family.
someone else’s skin, live a more glamourous life, see the city or even just the neighbourhood from someone else’s eyes. This is where The Cobbler becomes Freaky Friday. The body swap schtick means that Method Man gets to do his meanest Adam Sandler impression, and mostly fails. Dan Stevens does passably better, but his time in the film is short.
dangled the carrot, and then put the carrot in his pocket and walked away. Critics on Rotten Tomato have it sitting at a limp 9% although he’s got his mother beat, and his lover too (Reese Witherspoon played his angelic mother in Little Nicky; her film Hot Pursuit’s currently at 7%. Kevin James, who played his pretend boyfriend in Chuck and Larry, is sitting at 6% for Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2). Audiences, however, are much more generous with middle of the road reviews, calling it “watchable,” “potentially charming” and “a slight step up from Adam Sandler’s recent comedies.” Hear that? That’s the sound of ringing endorsements!
“You can’t handle the truth!” speech every time he had more than three drinks. And I could watch it again tomorrow. There are so many good lines and so many good characters in here that it remains enjoyable to this day. And again there are a few workplaces in here, namely the courts and the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
th is, I still do rent movies. Or did. Until Elgin Video announced on Thrusday that it was closing its doors after 25 years in business. I can’t say it came as a surprise. What small business that charges five dollars for a three-day rental could ever hope to compete with a more convenient and less expensive Netflix subscription. Even if every fourteenth rental is free. (Trust me, 14 comes quick when you’re an Asshole). Stores like this have been fighting a losing battle with the internet for years.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 