Monthly Archives: July 2015

San Francisco Treats

If you haven’t caught on yet, the Assholes are on vacation! Matt, Jay & Sean are in California for the week, and today we’re in sunny San Francisco, possibly on the ferry right this very minute on our way to visit Alcatraz.

Because movies are the only homework we know, we prepped for this vacation for watching anything that gave us a glimpse of the monuments we planned to visit, and today’s theme was a no-brainer.

Alcatraz island, also known as the rock, was home to a federal prison from 1933-1963. At the time the movie The Rock was made, the island was already a tourist hotspot, allowing tourists to explore the prison and sit in the cells where the worst and most violent prisoners were held, and from whence no one ever successfully escaped.

Or did they? In The Rock, Sean Connery plays a convict and the one unofficial escapee. When a group of crazed rogue Marines take over the prison and claim 81 tourists as hostages, Connery is tapped to help coordinate the police mission to win the prison back. In the end it falls to him and to weiner-chemist Nicolas Cage to save the day.

The prison (in real life) was very expensive to operate and locals were complaining about the sewage attributed to the inmates, so the facility was closed down. Today the whole island is a National Historical Landmark and we’re reasonably confident that hostage situations no longer arise, and if they do, they’ll have the foresight to pick on a later tour group.

During filming, Sean Connery didn’t want to travel back and forth to the mainland so he had a cottage built on the island to accommodate him. Later, the film’s premiere was held in the prison’s rec yard. The island had remained open to the public during filming, so I suppose the tourists had a little something to keep them entertained while waiting in line (unless it was a Cage scene, in which case I’m sure they asked for their money back).

This is Michael Bay’s favourite Michael Bay film, and the only one in his whole repertoire certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Quentin Tarantino was an uncredited writer on the script. And Arnold Schwarzenegger was offered either Cage’s or Connery’s role, depending who you ask, but in any case turned it down, and lived to regret it.

Later tonight, Sean and I are going to a Giants game where Sean will likely drink a Pabst Blue Ribbon and I’ll cheer for mustard in the hot dog race, we’ll watch a little baseball, and no one will show up to stalk and\or stab any of the players.

The Fan came out the same year as The Rock (1996), what a boon for San Francisco! Robert De Niro plays the degenerate fan and Wesley Snipes the star player who inspires De Niro’s fanaticism. It’s not a great movie and also not a great comfort if these are possibly the kinds of fans we might encounter tonight. Anyway, if a disgruntled knife salesman does get stabby, then I guess we’re out of luck, with little else than a witty Hunter Pence poster to defend ourselves with (and last time I checked, scissors beat paper). A natural disaster, however, we can handle. The other The Rock (as in Dwayne Johnson) showed is in San Andreas just how sturdy this stadium is – AT&T Park is immovable, come hell or high water, and of course both those things come in spades during the course of this disasteriest of disaster movies.

Annnnyway, I’m sure San Francisco is nothing like the movies. I’m sure it’s much more like an episode of Full House!

Wino Forever

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Today we’re leaving San Francisco to explore wine country. Does it make us sound like lushes to admit this was the whole reason we planned this trip?

Before they were Spiderman villains, Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church were wine loving assholes just like us. The pair are not very likeable men in the movie Sideways, but they sure do bond over bottles of fine wine. Sales of Pinot Noir surged after this movie hit theatres and of course sales of Merlot plunged. It was a little film that could, showing that life can be both funny and tragic at the same time. Alexander Payne (along with Jim Taylor) took home the Oscar for its stellar screenplay and it, along with its four leads, had plenty of acclaim. I liked it the minute I first saw it but after “cellaring” it for a bit, I find that it has matured, and I suppose so have I. It’s a thoughtful movie that pairs well with stuffed olives and\or brie. 😉

We three Assholes don’t need wine to get us going and we don’t drink to get happy – we drink to get EVEN MORE happy! And we’ll be sloppily happifying all over California wine country today (don’t worry, we’ve engaged a chauffeur), and steadfastly keeping each other’s hair out of the spit bucket (I never spit anyway, I’m definitely a swallower).

We’ll be sure to be updating our twitter account with drunken trip highlights all week long – join us @assholemovies .

The Bridge

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A few weeks ago, Sean, Matt and I were at a screening of San Andreas, a movie that seemed to do its best to squash California tourism but actually only encouraged us to seek out some baseball tickets (that’s a very sturdy stadium they’ve got in San Francisco!) to a Giants game while we’re there.

By the time you’re reading (curse you, early morning flights!) we’ve probably already touched down in the Golden State and with any luck, we’ve had our first glimpse of the Golden Gate bridge. Now, if you thought San Andreas should have had us cancelling our plans to visit the shakiest of the united states, get a load of this movie:

The Bridge is a documentary about that beautiful bridge in San Francisco that just happened, at the time of its filming in 2004, to be the busiest site for suicides in the world (they don’t mention this fact on Trip Advisor) (has since been surpassed by a bridge in China). Director Eric Steel shot the bridge from across the bay for a full year, and captured 23 of the 24 known suicides during that time, bringing the bridge’s body count to somewhere in the vicinity of 1200. Steel was shocked that such a popular spot, well documented for its suicides (averaged 1 every 15 days during filming), was still not inclined toward any kind of prevention. Training his film crew in suicide prevention, the documentary is responsible for saving the lives of at least 6 would-be jumpers. The film, however, focuses mostly on those they didn’t save. Friends and family give voice to those no longer with us, casting the film with an eerie glow. It’s an honest look at suicide, but for some, it may blur the lines between morbidity and sensitivity.

The deck of the Golden Gate bridge is about 75m above water, which means a jump takes four full seconds before a person hits the water at 120km\hr. That sounds short but is an awfully long time to regret your decision. Most will die from impact; about 5% may survive the initial trauma only to drown or die of hypothermia. Very few live to tell the tale, but makers of The Bridge manage to track one down, and his story may be more haunting than any other.

So, a pretty bleak movie to celebrate the first day of our trip, but I always have love for a well-made documentary. And when I finally lay eyes on this amazing feat of engineering, I’ll be marvelling at its design and span, and mourning for the people who choose to end their lives there.

Stay tuned – we’ll be posting about movies inspired by our California trip as we go, and later today we’ll be checking out the Painted Ladies from the opening credits of Full House, as well as notable spots from Inside Out, Planet of the Apes, Big Hero 6, and Antman, and then Jay will complain that her feet hurt and Sean will wonder aloud why she didn’t wear more comfortable shoes, and Matt will try to placate them both with the lure of San Francisco treats (and by treats I mean martinis. Obviously).

Road Trip Movies

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Wanderer’s timing has been spooky lately. The Assholes fly out to sunny California today and will be taking a road trip of our own on Sunday along the beautiful Pacific Coast Highway. Perfect time to be thinking of our favourite road trip movies.

Thelma and Louise (1991)– A road trip to a friend’s cabin in the mountains quickly goes off the rails for Thelma and Louise when Louise shoots an attempted rapist to death before they’ve even reached their destination. The trip goes from vacation to nightmare to something much more as the two realize they wouldn’t go back to their old lives even if they could. Nothing like the life of a fugitive to make you finally feel free.

Sideways (2004)– I made a deal with myself that I would only pick one Alexander Payne movie this week. As much as I love his last four movies- all road trip movies- Sideways was an easy decision, given that we will be doing a Napa Valley wine tour of our own tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll have more fun than Miles (Paul Giamatti), a depressed alcoholic and failed novelist. Sideways is a hopeful but often painful comedy that to this day still makes me feel a little guilty every time I order Merlot.

Due Date (2010)– Director Todd Phillips and star Zach Galifianakis’s follow-up to 2009’s The Hangover was highly anticipated and very disappointing to many but I have always stood by it. Galifianakis’ Ethan Tremblay and Robert Downey Jr.’s Peter Highman are forced to drive cross-country together after they’re both improbably kicked off an airplane. Both stars play off of each other beautifully and the gags mostly work but what I love is how the story is constructed around what’s going on in the lives of these two men instead of around a bunch of setpieces and jokes. Downey is particularly good as his performance hints at a more real pain than he has been able to manage even in his recent “dramas” like The Judge.

The Colour of Joy

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Sean and I got to see Inside Out again this past weekend (it was playing at the drive-in and yup, just as good the second time around). Pixar’s latest offers us a sweet and clever insight into the emotions ruling 11-year-old Riley’s brain – Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. These emotions are personified by colourful characters and truly wonderful voice talent (Amy Pohler, Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Bill Hader, Mindy Kaling). It was a real treat to see these emotions come to life, but between the laughter and tears, I also had some follow-up questions:

1. Why is Joy Caucasian?

Anger is a squat red guy, with matching red eyes and fire shooting out of his head. Disgust is green, naturally, with green hair and eyes. Sadness: blue, of course, with blue hair and eyes. Fear is purple, with – guess what! – purple hair and eyes. But for some reason Joy is a race, not a colour. Think she’s yellow? Look again. She’s a glowing peachy colour, and her eyes are big and blue and she’s got a cute little pixie cut. Joy is a white girl. This makes me vaguely uncomfortable.

2. Why is Sadness fat?

They made Sadness into a chubster in a turtleneck. They may as well have given her cats too, just to give her the complete Depressed Lady makeover. Her glasses cover almost her entire face and though we never see the emotions eating, we can imagine that she must eat the heck out of hers. Mint chocolate chip? No. Ben & Jerry’s cookie dough.

3. What gender are YOUR emotio Inside-Out-Father-Headquarters ns?

Riley’s emotions are mixed-gender. Anxiety is a dude, Disgust is a dudette. But her father’s emotions are all mustachioed men while her mother’s are all bespectacled ladies. Now, why might this be? Sean thought it might just be for simplicity’s sake. Her mother’s brain is instantly identifiable since all her emotions have the same drab haircut. Her father’s brain is even worse shape: it’s being run by a bunch of hockey-obsessed jerks (or soccer-obsessed, for international audiences). This felt uncomfortably stereotypical but got a big laugh from the jam-packed theatre because – haha – men never listen!

4. Why is Joy lone-wolfing it?

As a counsellor, I often find myself telling people that no emotion is necessarily good or bad because all might be helpful or have purpose. Certainly this movie does a good job of justifying Sadness, but I still feel like the balance is a little off-kilter. Sadness, Anger, Fear, Disgust: all could be said to be on one side of the positive-negative spectrum of emotions, while Joy is lonely on the other. It may be true that Amy Pohler is worth at least 3 Bill Haders but I still felt a little sad that she was representing positivity and light all by her lonesome. And when Joy went missing, everything went to hell, so it would seem that a little Hope or Excitement might have been a good pack up plan (though admittedly I understand why 5 characters were a manageable number from an engaging, story-telling point of view). Still, there are many emotions left out – which would you have liked to see?

5. What is your primary emotion?

It is clear from birth that Joy is running the show. She leads the other emotions and guides Riley’s experience, always striving for the perfect, happy day. Not so for Riley’s parents. Anger seems to helm the control console in her father’s brain. He does not seem to be an outwardly angry person, but maybe we’re once again short-hand stereotyping anger as somehow masculine. Worse still, Riley’s mom’s primary emotion appears to be Sadness. She doesn’t seem depressed to us, but it made me feel blue to think of her every move being tinged by a pall of unhappiness. Who do you think is the captain of your ship? I think I might have Joy and Anger as co-pilots; I’m at my best when I’m in full-on snarky bitch mode.

Anyway, today my primary emotion is Anticipation! Just like Riley and her family, we’re about to embark on a San Francisco adventure (well, it’s our first stop, anyway) and I can’t wait to land there and be filled with Joy and Excitement and Wonder and Dread of Eventually Going Back to Work, which is too a legit emotion as I have it ALL THE TIME. While the Assholes are in California we’ll be posting about our favourite movies as they relate to our sight-seeing adventures, so please keep checking in to see what we’re up to next – and if you’re feeling brave, follow us on Twitter ( @assholemovies ) to see things like Jay’s contemptuous travel face, Sean’s hungry frown, an orange blur that might be the Golden Gate Bridge, 13 pictures of Jack Nicholson’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame obscured by half of Jay’s fat finger, Matt riding a train off into the sunset like he’s in some kind of goddamned movie. It’ll be good times, I promise!

A Star Is Born (1954)

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“The public loves me” slurs a drunken Norman Maine, and that may be so, but the press and the studio heads have had just about enough of his shenanigans. His star’s been dimming, his films flopping, and he’s aging in the wrong direction. It’s a wonder to Vicki Lester that he’s still in pictures at all – this after he’s crashed her starring number on stage.

MV5BODMyYjJhZjgtOTlhMy00MzZmLWIxOTYtMGYxZjkwZDc5NjhlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjU4NzU2OTA@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,795,1000_AL_ She agrees to go out with him because he’s still quite charming, and perhaps his fame dazzles her. Certainly it’s easy for a less-naive girl like me to shout at her angrily. He’s already been a drunken, selfish buffoon. Usually you have to sleep with them and get half-attached before they show their true colours, but Norman (James Mason) laid all his ugly cards out on the table for her, and Vicki (Judy Garland), with stars in her eyes, was just too dumb to notice. And as if dinner wasn’t bad enough, she risks everything she’s ever worked for to skip out on her tour and go out for a screen test on his say so. I can’t tell if she’s a star-fucker or if she’s just willing to put out in order to advance her career. Oh, I know, I know: this version of A Star Is Born, a pretty faithful remake of the one previous, is beloved. And apparently romantic, though it must be said, this feels very much like a one-woman show. A fine show, a spectacle. Garland is a phenom. But you get the feeling that her co-star may have felt as eclipsed as his onscreen persona.

The studio cut out 30 minutes of film against the director’s wishes. The version I rented was a “restored” 176-minute version that uses production stills in place of the missing footage, layered with flawlessly restored dialogue. Still, it’s kind of frustrating. The camera pans over photographs for an extra 30 minutes of run time, which brings this baby up to 3 hours. It’s a lot. It’s too much. Though it still feels shorter than the Barbra Streisand monstrosity which is technically shorter but suffers from the bloat.

Anyway, as wonderful as Judy Garland is, I’m finding my tolerance for bad men to be low. Or at least, for pretending that bad men are good. Any woman with half a cell in her pretty little head should have seen this trainwreck coming a mile away. Norman Maine sends up all the flares, all the red flags. If Vicki had had a mother or a sister or a best friend, that man would have had the Beyonce treatment long ago, and A Star would have been Born much quicker, much hotter, without an ugly old asteroid holding her down.

[The Beyonce treatment, sing it with me: to the left, to the left, everything you own in a box to the left.]

We are never, ever, ever getting back together.

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Some movies you could watch a million times, quote every line, and never get enough.

Other movies, you regret seeing even the once.

Somewhere in between is a movie that you’re glad you watched, but that you know you’ll never revisit. These are mine:

Monster – Stupidly, I bought this one. Does anyone need a copy of Monster? I won’t be using it. Based on the real monster life events of Aileen Wuornos, who Charlize Theron plays to perfection. Maybe a little too perfectly? This woman was convicted of murdering 6 men, but that’s not the worst of it. Aileen is a prostitute who gets beaten and raped by a client. She wants to quit the life but can’t find any legitimate work and her girlfriend wants to be supported in the matter to which she’s become accustomed. Going back to prostitution, she can’t control her anxiety and believes that every john is out to hurt her – so, she kills them first, and takes their money. It’s never easy to see ruthless murder on film, but it’s so much worse when you’ve seen the back story and understand where all the pain and fear is coming from – and it infects you too.

Inglorious Basterds – Quentin Tarantino presents us with an alternate history where Jewish-American soldiers assassinate N deliverance4 azi political leadership and brutally murder German soldiers. We went to see this in the theatre, and thing about Tarantino is, there’s no way you’re getting off easy. I was prepared for blood and guts. What I can’t shake is the sound the knife makes as it carves a swastika into victims’ foreheads.

Deliverance – Four friends go out into the woods to have themselves a little male bonding time in nature. Unfortunately, they happen upon some hillbillies who take some of the friends hostage, and force Ned Beatty onto his knees, bidding him to “squeal like a pig” as he is forcefully raped. It’s harsh and humiliating and just about as degrading as it gets – for him, and for us.

Antichrist – Should I even write this? If you’re a nice person, please turn away now. Do not read on. For the rest of you: Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play a grieving couple who have recently lost a child. To cope with their pain, they retreat to a cabin in the woods whee he has crazy visions and she exhibits increasingly violent sexual behaviour, culminating in (last chance! turn away!) her snipping off her clitoris with a pair of rusty scissors after a pretty punishing round of frantic, joyless masturbation. Do I really need to explain why I’ll never watch this again?

Man Bites Dog – A mockumentary that’s anything but funny. A film crew follows around a charismatic serial killer. The murders get increasingly graphic and horrible. The rapes are just fucking brutal. But the haunting thing is that the film crew goes all Stockholm Syndrome and pretty soon they’re willing accomplices. Fucking harsh, man.

Anything Michael Haneke – This guy loves to make unwatchable films. Matt bravely made his way through Funny Games while I bore The White Ribbon, but not happily, I tell you. Not happily.

Anything with eyes – I have a super duper eye phobia and despise any movie with extreme close-ups with eyes. Worse still: blood shot eyes. Worse still: eyes being forcibly held open. A Clockwork Orange being the worst possible case.

Anything with shaving – Mostly just men shaving their necks. 99% of times it’s just shaving, but I am literally hiding behind my own fingers, certain that at any moment a major artery is about to be opened, accidentally, on purpose, I don’t care, I just can’t take the anxiety leading up to it. And then mostly they just wipe the shaving cream off and continue on with their days, but me? My blood pressure’s through the roof.

Anything where the dog dies. I can’t take dead dogs, whether or not they go to heaven.

So which movies can you never revisit – and why?

Spirited Away

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I don’t know if I need to turn in my Asshole card for saying this but I’m not into Japanese animation. To be fair, I don’t know much about it. All I know is that Howl’s Moving Castle didn’t do it for me and neither did Ponyo, even though I know they should. Part of the problem, as Jay pointed out, is the rock and hard place in which we’re caught between reading subtitles or enduring bad dubbing. Recently though, I was on a date with someone who said that I absolutely had to see Spirited Away and next time- in the event of an uncomfortable silence- it would be nice to have “So, I finally saw Spiritied Away…” in my back pocket.

I was a little discouraged to discover (shows how little I know about the wonderful world of Japanese animation) that both of the above-mentioned films I had so little interest in were from the same master of the medium (Hayao Miyazaki) as Spirited Away. Not a great sign that this was going to be the movie that finally turned me on to anime.

Even though most who have seen it tend to regard it as a modern masterpiece, I was still surprised how much I enjoyed it. I chose to watch the dubbed version, which being supervised by Pixar’s John Lasseter wasn’t nearly as distracting as usual. I made the right choice, partly because the English-language script was specifically written to match the lip movements on screen and was supported by well-cast voice actors. Mostly though, the images are often so bizarre, so imaginative, so exquisite that I would have hated focusing my attention to just the bottom of the screen even more than I susually would.

The plot centers around a bathhouse where dirty spirits can come to relax and the cast of characters include talking forgs, giant babies, stink spirits, and dragons. What drives it though is one human child’s journey into the unkown as she confronts her many fears to save her parents who are stuck in the spirit world. It’s like Finding Nemo in reverse set in a brothel.

Oh yeah, the brothel. Apparently Miyazaki saw Spirited Away as his commentary on prostitution in Japan. Even at a glance, the parallels are hard to miss but, after reading up on it, the metaphor is even clearer. I’m still not as enthusiastic as I am about movies like Wall-E or Up but it’s nice to see an anime film for once where I can understand what all the fuss is about.

Paul Blarts: Mall Cops 1 & 2

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It should be wonderful when a sequel tops its predecessor. Think Godfather 2 or Empire Strikes Back. It’s a very rare occurrence, and you would think anytime it happens the sequel would be memorable, since if a sequel got greenlit the original movie must have been decent at least, right? If you felt safe making that assumption, like I did, now is the time to reconsider. Because Kevin James and Adam Sandler have gone out of their way to prove us all wrong.

I did not see Paul Blart 1 until Friday. I didn’t try to avoid it at the time but did not expect it to be much good. And I was okay with it being mediocre and also with seeing it at some point. So that point was two days ago. It was surprisingly not funny. Like I was just supposed to sort of cheer for Paul because he was the main guy. I think? It was more confusing than anything, really, as to why this mediocre idea didn’t even get to the mediocre level.

And if they had stopped at one there would have been nothing more to say. It wrapped up, Paul Blart won, he foiled all the bad guys and got the girl. So he could stop being sad and start being a more respected mall cop. Or something, I mean, it didn’t seem like he had more story to tell. But then, six years after that, for some reason a sequel got made.

There can’t have been anyone asking for a sequel. I don’t know how anyone could have thought this was a good idea. But here we are, with Paul Blart 2 playing this week at the drive in. We hadn’t been in a while because we’ve been busy, and we were semi-free, and it was a nice night, so really, it didn’t matter what was playing.

Paul Blart 2 is pretty much Paul Blart 1. I think if anything everyone was a little more practiced, like the first was a dress rehearsal for the second, so the second turned out a bit more polished. The second one is a slightly better movie, just comparing them straight up. But it is still mediocre at best. If it’s at your local drive in then go. Or you could consider it as an option on a plane, I mean, I’d probably rewatch Jurassic World instead but maybe it can be your 3rd or 4th option if your flight is crossing the Pacific Ocean. That’s about the best thing I can say about Paul Blart 2: it’s slightly better than the first one but it is probably not as good as rewatching something you already saw and liked.

I will give this franchise a combined rating of half a segway out of two. Because there’s probably a supercut of these two movies that might be entertaining but even then I think I would be better off rewatching Jurassic World and Mad Max: Fury Road and Inside Out and Furious 7 on my next plane ride (and since it’s to San Francisco that’s more than enough to fill my flight).

Made For TV?

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Grace of Monaco was supposed to be a brilliant piece of Oscar bait for Nicole Kidman but ended up getting so screwed up along the way that it went to small screen rather than the big one. I watched it recently (it’s available on Netflix) and I didn’t think it was awful, at least not god-awful, but it’s clear that something went wrong. That something seems to have been tension between director Olivier Dahan and distributor Harvey Weinstein. The film had two distinct cuts and the two men could never reconcile them. The screenwriter, caught in the middle, refused to attend the opening at Cannes because of the controversy. This isn’t the first time Weinstein has tried to intervene between a movie and its director; he tried to kill Snowpiercer and luckily didn’t succeed.

Both the script and the direction feel wooden. There’s no blood running through the grace-of-monaco-vogue-3-13may14-pr_b veins of this movie. Physically, Kidman embodies the role of Grace Kelly, especially as a newish princess still trying to make the transition between royalty and Hollywood. The actual royal family, children of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier, have gone on record that this is a patently inaccurate recounting, fictionalized, fabricated, pointed not a biopic. Either way, Nicole doesn’t do Grace justice. She seems blank a lot of the time, and the performance is uneven. Tim Roth as Rainier isn’t any more inspiring.

So this movie went from getting booed at Cannes to being released on Lifetime, and then straight to video on demand where presumably it can hang out with other ill-conceived disappointments like the Jennifer Lawrence-Bradley Cooper piece of crap everyone wants to forget about, Serena.

Meanwhile, Lifetime is ramping up its cred by making fun of its own reputation. At least, I thought the Lifetime movie A Deadly Adoption was supposed to be a parody. I mean, you cast Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell and I just assumed. The movie, though, doesn’t really feel that way until the last 15 minutes or so. Up until then, Wiig and Ferrell are a little too earnest, their parts and the story a little too straight. It’s actually pretty straight up Lifetime sexual thriller, with requisite DAUGHTER WITH A DISEASE!, REVENGE PLOT WITH A TWIST!, and my favourite, SLOW MOTION FOR MAXIMUM DRAMATIC IMPACT!

I actually felt pretty deflated about this movie. I was expecting something a little more…good? Entertaining? Funny? Worthwhile? Subversive? I don’t really get what was in it for Wiig and Ferrell. Is this a James Franco on that soap opera thing? Like, I’m so square I’m cool? I’m so big I can do anything? If so, it was largely lost on me. I’m voting missed opportunity.