Monthly Archives: December 2015

The Grumpy Guide to Christmas Movies

Why must Christmas movies be so…terrible? What is it about the holidays that turns regular moviegoers into big balls of mush? I feel like a big green cynic but bah, humbug! I hate when it magically starts to snow when two people kiss. I hate when families gather round a piano to sing carols. In movies, extended families always fit around one large table. Nobody ever has to sit at a wobbly card table. Nobody ever has to balance a paper plate on their lap, trying not to let a lake of gravy scald them. Nobody ever gets stuck sitting between two lefties. The turkey comes out golden brown and nobody ever gets salmonella. Nobody ever buys their brother a sweater that doesn’t fit. Nobody ever has to skype Christmas greetings because they drew the short straw at work. And most of all I’m sick of everybody always falling in love at Christmas. Has anyone actually ever fallen in love at Christmas? Isn’t that like having your first date on Valentine’s day?

Here’s a bunch of sappy Netflix movies I’ve watched while wrapping my oddly shaped gifts (in movies they’re always easy to wrap boxes and nobody has to hunt for scotch tape for 2 hours) so you don’t have to.

Holiday Engagement: a woman breaks up with her perfect fiance the week before she was going to trot him out to her family at Thanksgiving. Since 30 is “in her rearview mirror” and her mother’s determined not to have an old maid for a daughter, she does what any reasonable woman would and hires an actor to pose as her intended. So of course they spend an awkward holiday weekend pretend-planning a wedding (while buying actual dresses and china) and – wouldn’t you know it – falling in love. Hated every minute of it and even seeing Shelley Long as the obtrusive mother didn’t mitigate this for me in any way.

Merry Kissmas: Two people meet in a mistletoed magical elevator and so of course they must begin the 89 minute process of falling in love. It’s slightly awkward because she’s actually engaged to someone else, but don’t worry, he’s a dick, and we don’t feel sorry for him in the least. We have to sit through the couple getting into a cutesy flour-fight while baking suspiciously perfect cookies, and then they top it all off by adopting a shelter dog.

12 Dates of Christmas: I’ll see you your rescue dog and raise you some orphans! Remember when Amy Smart was almost a thing? I think she probably peaked around Butterfly Effect, which was at least a decade ago. So now she’s relegated to the land of bad Christmas movies, where washed up TV stars frolic. Mark Paul Gosslar co-stars as the man she’s bound to fall in love with. The catch? 12 Dates of Christmas is holiday Groundhog Day. Poor Amy Smart keeps waking up on Christmas Eve trying to find the right combination of Christmas cliché to break the spell and let her live happily ever after with Zack Morris (hint: it will involve both an orphan AND a rescue dog).

The Heart of Christmas: Just in case you thought I was going a little soft on 12 Dates, now I’m going to shit all over a kid dying of cancer. Because really, how better to up the Christmas ante than with childhood leukemia? I don’t necessarily want to make light of a very serious disease but then again, the movie does star Candace Cameron Bure (from that other early 90s TV show, Full House) as a workaholic mom who has no time for her kids until she discovers a blog written by a woman watching her 3 year old son go through chemo, and spends all her time reading that instead, still netting no time with her kids, but man do your little heartstrings get yanked. A sick kid’s not going to see another Christmas? You know what that means! Time to get the whole town to band together and sing Christmas carols in the street! Candace is very lucky that the only thing she loves more than god is shitty movies – she’s been able to nudge her career along by combining the two into a putrid Christmas holiday special nearly every season since her husband retired from the NHL. I assume they cover her SUV payments. Early next year her old sitcom’s getting a (Netflix!) reboot, so I guess her Christmas wish came true.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (An Extremely Non-Spoilerrific Review)

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Sean’s from the 70s. Jay is an 80s chick. Sean is kind of a nerd. Jay, not so much. Sean saw Star Wars: A New Hope (though he still just calls it, “Star Wars”) at least 20 times before his eighth birthday. Jay had never seen any Star Wars movie until this past weekend. So what did they think of Star Wars: The Force Awakens?

Sean: As a kid, I always loved Star Wars. I’m at the younger end of the Star Wars generation since I never knew a world without it. Too young to see the first two in theatres, I caught up by Return of the Jedi thanks to the miracle of VCRs and HBO showing Star Wars around the clock in 1983 (and I kept watching it over and over every chance I got). Star Wars felt like it belonged to me since it was happening just as I was growing up and learning what movies were. And because of my age I was still young enough to not be at all cynical about product placement or Ewoks by the time Return of the Jedi rolled around. To my seven year old self, it was all positive that Return of the Jedi served firstly as a mechanism to manufacture more toys and second as a conclusion to my favourite movie series.

My two favourites: Luke in his Jedi robe (though I kept losing the lightsaber)…

…and Leia as a bounty hunter (though I always was looking for that goddamn helmet too)!

The only negative was that I had to convince my parents to buy all those action figures and vehicles, but fortunately I was a very spoiled kid so I got more than my share (but sadly, not the amazing Imperial Shuttle, though I’m over the disappointment, I swear). It helped that I was willing to do pretty much anything to “earn” more toys, whether it was mowing the lawn or painting the deck or saving my proofs of purchase from other toys so I could send away for the Emperor!

The prequels were a whole other matter. I was so disappointed to see how boring Darth Vader’s backstory was on screen, as opposed to how awesome it had been in my head, having patched it together through whatever references were offered by the original trilogy. And I don’t think it was the 16 year gap in between, since even in university I was perfectly happy to watch the original trilogy over and over (and I wasn’t alone, my roommates and I would often spend Saturday afternoons watching all three back-to-back-to-back). Anyway, even though I ~~was~~ still am mad about the prequels’ wasted potential, I watched all three, even seeing the last one in theatres.

Which leads us to Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Having really enjoyed J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, and since chronologically we could sort of forget the prequels ever happened, I have had high hopes for The Force Awakens ever since it was announced. And Jay was nice enough to track down tickets even though she could not have been less excited to see it.

Jay: The only exposure I’ve had to Star Wars was a set of sheets I inherited from my cousin Tim, who’s a decade or more older than I am.

The infamous Star Wars sheets. I also had a flannel blanket but we buried my dead dog in it.

I guess he grew out of his single bed so I got his sheets, and spent a good deal of my youth sleeping with Harrison Ford. Plus, I exist in the world. I haven’t seen the movies, but I’ve seen plenty of stuff that references them, so I almost didn’t have to. I can never remember if C-3PO is the big gold robot or the little blue and white one, but I know it’s a robot. It’s just that the Star Wars universe never appealed to me. Science fiction will always have to work harder to convince me, and so will movies with talking animals, green aliens, and make-believe weapons.

So no, I hadn’t seen Star Wars, and I really didn’t care to. My life felt perfectly complete without it, and to be honest, I think 2015 is already way too inundated with movies that are meant for young boys but consumed by grown men (I’m looking at you, Marvel). But I could see that this movie meant something to Sean. It was a revival of his childhood, a tribute to his youthful imagination, and a chance for the franchise’s redemption after the last trilogy sullied things up. Kevin Smith said he cried when he visited the set of the Millennium Falcon because it reminded him of that feeling he’d had for it as a child. And how many times do we really get to recapture those magical feelings once we’re grown up? Not too damn many. It did nothing for me, I wasn’t even curious about it, but I resolved to be by Sean’s side when the portal to his boyhood opened up on the big screen before him.

And you know what? I didn’t hate it. I was enchanted by John Boyega’s Finn and the arc of his character. I had fun slotting together the puzzle pieces of Star Wars trivia I’ve picked up over the years (mostly from The Simpsons, I think) and seeing how they translated 30 years later. I was charmed by Harrison Ford’s rapport with the furry beast Chewbacca. And I felt the momentum of the piece really drove me forward and kept me interested despite the fact that I was jumping in blind for movie #7. So I was feeling pretty juiced about it, squeezed Sean’s hand during all the parts I thought he must be loving, and had plenty of follow up questions for our car ride home. But you know what? When the credits rolled and I looked over at Sean expecting to see rapture, he shrugged his shoulders. It was okay, he thought, but not great. Not even as good as Creed – not even as good as “The Avengers” he said – “Wait- there was an Avengers movie this year, right?” He couldn’t even remember if there was an Avengers movie this year, but if there was, it was better than this.

Ladies and gentlemen: Sean’s lacklustre response FUCKING BROKE MY HEART. Here I had drummed it up as this Big Fucking Deal and it’s not even going to crack his top ten this year.

Sean: I had no idea Jay was so invested in this, for my sake. And she’s invested in everything I’m interested in, she’s amazing like that. I liked Star Wars: The Force Awakens. My complaints about it are minor and spoilery so I won’t get into them here, but it’s a solid movie and objectively I would rank it third out of the Star Wars movies, behind A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back (yes, ahead of Return of the Jedi as a standalone movie). That seemed like a ringing endorsement but Jay was expecting more and after reading her thoughts above, I understand why.

“You’re all clear, kid. Now let’s blow this thing and go home.” BEST. SCENE. EVER.

This should have been my thing, it should have taken me back to my childhood, it should have sucked me in and made me talk about it for days, and it didn’t. As a gateway/jumping on point for the next generation of fans/consumers, The Force Awakens works really well. As fan service, it ticks all the boxes and I don’t think that anyone who anticipated like I did will leave the theatre disappointed, exactly. But you know what? This all felt like something I’ve seen before (twice) and I’ve seen it BETTER before (twice). I’m not trying to be a contrarian asshole (just a regular asshole) when I say that if J.J. Abrams was shooting for greatness, he missed the mark here. Paying tribute to the feelings I had as a kid is not enough to give me those feelings all over again. And if you pay tribute by imitating something beloved, the fact the script includes ironic acknowledgements of the imitation does not help make the imitation great. It only tells me that the imitation was a conscious decision and you went this way rather than coming up with something new. That’s not reassuring to me in any way and it didn’t invoke nostalgia within your movie. It just made me wish I was watching the original trilogy and that took me completely out of what was happening on-screen in yours.

Not quite as epic but still awesome, and the afterparty made it a classic (original footage of the afterparty not found and there will be no Hayden Christensen cameo here).

Maybe it wouldn’t have been enough for The Force Awakens to take a new path. Maybe my expectations were too high. Because again, The Force Awakens is a good movie and I enjoyed the ride, but I couldn’t truly love it when it felt so much like a remake. To quote Jimmy Johnson for the first (and hopefully last) time in my life, “Do you want to be safe and good, or do you want to take a chance and be great?” The Force Awakens is safe and good, but it’s not the great movie I was hoping for, and that’s why I can’t put it in my top ten for the year.

I give Star Wars: The Force Awakens a score of seven Kessel Runs out of ten. Seeing that score is as painful for me, Jay, as it is for you.

Jay: What the fuck’s a Kessel Run?

Sean: Oh Jay, we absolutely have to watch the original trilogy. Something tells me I still hold all those magical feelings from my youth, but the path to them is through the greatness of Episodes IV, V and VI rather than trying to recapture those feelings through something “new”. There will always be room for new Star Wars stories, but for me I don’t think the originals will ever be topped.

Jay: I think you of all people should be a little more open-minded about sequels. You are, after all, husband #2, and you’d better hope I don’t court warm fuzzy feelings toward “the husband of my youth.”

Melodrama… in 3D!: Part 1

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The second row is a little too close for comfort to watch a prolonged bout of mutual masturbation in 3D but that’s exactly where I found myself a couple of weeks ago during the opening scene of Gaspar Noe’s Love. With the camera zooming in so close to the action and me so close to the screen, it was hard to know where to look. Watch her give him a handjob to my left or him finger her to my right? I was so close to the action I couldn’t possibly do both. So I decided to compromise and sheepishly look down at my shoes.

Okay, obviously this is the movie where the sex is unsimulated and shot in 3D so clearly I showed up looking to see some sex. I regretted missing this at TIFF whose website peaked my interest with “3D ejaculation, anyone?”. What I could not have anticipated was how awkward it would be to watch at first. Or, once I’d gotten over the initial discomfort, how boring it would be. Love scenes are always tough to sell, it turns out, just because the penetration is real doesn’t mean the passion is.

And just because the images are 3D doesn’t mean the characters are. Karl Glusman plays Murphy (so they can make a pointless reference to Murphy’s Law at some point), an American aspiring filmmaker living in Paris. He wakes up on New Years Day (or “January 1st”, as it’s called in this movie) to a frantic voice mail message from his ex’s mom. Elektra (Aomi Muyock) is missing and probably suicidal. Murphy is now living with Omi, with whom he has a young son, but his whiny interior monologue reveals that he is fed up with her and is still hung up on Elektra. Before you feel too sorry for him, you should know that he cheated on Elektra with Omi and called her a “selfish cunt” when she got upset that he had knocked up some other woman.

Murphy and Elektra are moody people and all this moodiness was starting to feel hypnotic. I could get into this story about Murphy trying to find his lost love. Unfortunately, Noe devotes very little time to this mystery and overwhelms us with flashbacks of the Murphy-Elektra love affair, which seems to have been mostly a series of increasingly trashy fights followed by increasingly tedious make-up sex. It gets dull pretty quick and it doesn’t help that Noe made a big mistake writing this script in his second language. “Have you ever made love on opium?” Elektra asks. “No,” says Murphy. “You should. It’s great”.

So, did it need to be in 3D? Well, “unsimulated sex in 3D” is a cool gimmick and it clearly got my attention. And the 3D ejaculation was anything but anti-climatic and I dare you not to watch it without ducking or at least flinching. Other than that, the story is too dark and the filmmaking too pseudo-artsy to work as a guilty pleasure but it’s also too awful to work as art.

Kumiko The Treasure Hunter

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I love the movie Fargo. Like, LOVE the movie Fargo. I recently likened The Legend of Barney Thomson to a Scottish Fargo, and believe me, that’s the highest compliment I know how to pay.

Kumiko lives in Tokyo. She is an “office lady,” working a demeaning job for a patronizing boss. She’s an extreme introvert and doesn’t seem to have any hobbies or outside interests other than hunting for treasure to escape her dreary life. Her most recent acquisition, found buried in a cave, is a VHS copy of the movie Fargo where she “discovers” buried treasure. You know – the bag of money that Steve Buscemi buries in the snow? Yeah.

So poor confused Kumiko embroiders herself a treasure map and flies to Minnesota with “I want to go Fargo” as her only English and a stolen company credit card her only money. Do things go well? No they do not.

Rinko Kikuchi is nothing short of fantastic as Kumiko and director David Zellner elevates the somewhat silly premise with beautiful things to look at. But I can’t say I loved this movie. It’s offbeat in a way I want to like, but I was so turned off by Kumiko that I couldn’t really surrender to the movie. Kumiko is stubborn and subservient and child-like and capable of tantrums. You just want to shake her, but no one ever does. I found myself wondering if perhaps she is mentally challenged, and I can only surmise based on her thoughts and actions that she is, but that doesn’t seem to concern the script very much. Instead it just launches her into absurd and dangerous conditions, and best of luck to her – and to us, for sitting through it. Because I most certainly did. There was so much potential that I kept willing it to be just a bit better, to see just a little bit of character development from her, any growth at all. I was willing to take anything.

Instead, any satisfaction I got was not from Kumiko but from a friendly cop (played by the director) who seemed to sense if not feel our frustration, and provided some much-needed laugh-out-loud moments that broke up the beautiful imagery dotted with the annoying Japanese woman.

While I can’t quite embrace it, I am a little fascinated by it, and would love to hear from anyone who saw it. Did you find a way to connect with it? Or did you survive it by delivering constant mental slaps?

Everybody’s got a Christmas Movie

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Instead of skeletons in their closets, celebrities have Christmas movies.

I recently came across a real piece of ~~work~~ art called The 2nd Day of Christmas that I can only imagine keeps Mark Ruffalo up at night. It stars Mary Stuart Masterson as the aunt of an orphaned 7-year-old girl who she trains up as a pick-pocket. Their Oliver Twist act is pretty fruitful too, until they get caught by a department store security guard (Ruffalo) at Christmas. Holiday Movie Law applying, the owner fails to call the cops, or child services, and opts instead for his ‘prisoners’ to be guarded by Ruffalo in his own home over the holidays. And guys – you totally won’t believe this, but they fall in love. I know! How can that happen? In 24 hours? While being forcibly imprisoned against your will? Hard to believe, and yet this is what Christmas schmaltz is all about.

The second movie I watched, called Happy Christmas, is apparently titled ironically. Also, it’s an indie movie, in every sense of the term: it looks bad, it sounds bad, and it costars Lena Dunham. It’s about the fuck up family member that everybody has – this time, Kevin’s little sister Jenny (Anna Kendrick) is moving into his basement and no one really knows why. Job? Breakup? Drinking problem? Kevin’s wife Kelly (Melanie Lynskey) is a stay-at-home mom who is both exasperated and enchanted by her irresponsible sister-in-law. Christmas only exists on the absolute periphery of this movie, and as long as you like your holiday classics with a fair bit of pot smoking and erotica, and almost a total absence of cheer or hope or merriment, this one’s for you.

The Ridiculous 6

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For some reason, I like Adam Sandler. Even though his movies are atrocious. For every funny scene, there are three times as many that just don’t work. Despite his efforts to appeal to the shortest of attention spans, his movies are usually ironic culprits of the worst crime any film can commit. They’re boring.

Still, I like him. Maybe I’m biased by my fond memories of 90s Saturday Night Live or the first time I saw Happy Gilmore. Or maybe he just seems like a nice guy. Everyone around him seems to be having so much fun. And as juvenile and offensive as his humour can sometimes be, that classic Sandler grin can’t help but make us feel like he means us no harm. Besides, he’s a funny guy who throws so much at you that some of it is bound to stick. I don’t think there’s a single Adam Sandler movie that hasn’t made me laugh out loud at least a few times.

Until now. This week I watched Sandler’s Netflix Original The Ridiculous 6, which has to be a new low for him both as an actor and as a writer. Sandler, Rob Schneider, Taylor Lautner, Jorge Garcia, Luke Wilson, and Terry Crews all play brothers from other mothers who Sandler meets one by one while on a mission to rescue their father from a gang of thieves. They’re a ridiculously diverse group of brothers; Sandler was adopted and raised by Native Americans so naturally knows how to do all kinds of mystical shit, Schneider is half-Mexican with a horse that sprays you with shit to let you know that it likes you, Lautner is a simple-minded redneck with a missing tooth, Garcia doesn’t speak English and is good at strangling people, Wilson was Abe Lincoln’s bodyguard, and Crews is a piano-playing black guy and of course has a huge penis.

So, obviously it all feels dated, desperately banking on the hope that the stereotypes from Adam’s SNL days are still funny 20 years later. The injustices suffered by First Nations people have been a hot and controversial topic in Canada lately, making Sandler’s performance and the film’s depiction of the culture in general just seem wrong. I believe that a gifted comedian can get away with joking about almost anything but firmly believe that, if you’re going to take on such a sensitive subject, you’d better make damn sure at the very least that you’re funny. There’s nothing funny going on here.

Thank God we’ve got Taylor Lautner. Sandler going Native was a bad idea but he can’t help being at least a little likeable and, thanks to Lautner, he does not come close to giving the worst performance of The Ridiculous 6. Lautner’s hillbilly feels less offensive since southern white guys have been fair game for so long now but rarely have they been portrayed by an actor with so little charisma and sense of comic timing. It’s hard to watch him without wondering how no one close to him was ever able to talk him out of this.

If you still want to watch it, the good news is that The Ridiculous 6 is not all bad. While it never made me laugh, I might have managed a chuckle or too had I not been so irritated by the rest of the movie. John Turturro’s cameo featuring an early version of baseball nearly got a “nice job with that” from me and the usual cast of Sandler cameos show up as real-life historical figures occasionally made me smile despite myself. I hate to name specific actors or characters here because I wouldn’t want to spoil what little fun this movie has to offer.

A Christmas Story 2

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Last year for Christmas my baby sister Jana presented me with a gift, declaring (gleefully, I thought) “You’ll hate it!” My immediate gut reaction was to make cooing noises resembling ‘I’m sure it’s lovely’ but something stopped me. This was Jana. She gets me. She’s not struck by second thoughts or buyer’s remorse. She knows I’m going to hate this. She wants me to hate it.
It was a copy of A Christmas Story 2. That’s right: the sequel. Didn’t know it had one? Yeah, me neither. And A Christmas Story is my favourite holiday movie of all time. It’s just so charming and nostalgiarrific (it even caused me to call Jana a bitch in last year’s review!). But a sequel? Isn’t anything sacred?

Answer: no. Nothing is. But some things should be. This movie is not exactly terrible, it’s just terribly derivative. It’s supposedly the same family – Ralphie, his weird kid brother Randy, his cantankerous old man, and his poor, harried mother – just 5 years later. Of course, it’s all new actors and this time Daniel Stern is playing the old man, and while he’s not bad, he’s not Darren McGavin. It tries really hard to have the same narrative style, but I missed the sarcasm, the nearly dark undertones of the first. This one is clearly a pale imitation, and one that recycles the same jokes: the awful outfit from Aunt Clara, the tongue getting stuck, even the leg lamp makes a comeback. And of course Ralphie’s lusting over that one perfect gift again, only gone are the days when a red ryder BB gun; Ralphie’s grown up and this year, he wants a car (and if you remember his stingy old man, then you know how likely he is to get it). The film even attempts to recreate the fantasy bits which I so loved in the first and quite hated in the second. They’re not just a bad imitation, they’re dragging down an already sub par movie.
The sequel fails to recapture the magic of the first. But if you’re tired of watching the same thing every year, or if your sister’s trying to get your goat – well, tis the season.

Meanwhile, I’m still thinking about that one perfect gift. I never asked for a car or a gun but last year I wrote about the Barbie horse trailer that I always wanted and never got. I got plenty, let me tell you, but there is still one thing that sticks out as The Best Present Ever. It was a pair of Doc Martens – a perfect, special pair chosen just for me that I knew meant my mother had gone to Montreal to get. Those boots wore the scuff marks of nearly every concert I ever attended. I’d often wear them with a short skirt and a looooong jacket. I loved them dearly, both because they were cool boots, and because I knew the trouble my mother had gone to for them. I loved them so dearly they are still in my closet today (they’re a little awkward to scrapbook).

What was your Best Present Ever?

One Proud Canadian at the Whistler Film Festival

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If you’ve glanced at our chaotic Comments section on Jay’s Golden Globes post, you may have noticed that I am a big supporter of Todd Haynes’ Carol, which had its Canadian premiere at the opening gala of this year’s Whistler Film Festival. It was the best by far of the films I saw at the festival but- my love for this Hollywood indie aside- I am as proud as I am surprised to announced that the Canadian films I saw outshone every other American entry. Here are my thoughts on the three most pleasant surprises from my side of the border.

I don’t know why why I was so surprised that How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town was exactly what it sounds like. Maybe knowing that it was Canadian, I was expecting it to be more polite and restrained. But, no, the second sex comedy from director Jeremy Lalonde does not skimp on the orgy. Having been labelled the town slut as a teenager, sex columnist and closet virgin Cassie returns to her conservative small town for her mother’s funeral. No one is particularly happy to see her until several townspeople- each one having reasons of their own- decide they need to have an orgy and beg her to facilitate it for them. Lalonde, on hand to introduce the film and to answer audience questions, packs Cassie’s living room with likable characters you’d never experience to show up to an orgy. The implausibility of the situation- especially that they’d keep coming back after every increasingly hilarious false start, is part of the fun. The jokes are mostly lowbrow (a montage of cum faces being one highlight) but rarely cross the line into juvenility.

In The Steps, Marla (Emmanuelle Chriqui) and Jeff (Jason Ritter) are brother and sister living in New York who are called to their estranged father’s (James Brolin) cottage in Ontario to meet his new Canadian wife Sherry (Christine Lahti) and her three kids. Truthfully, things haven’t been going great for Jeff lately. He’s lost his fancy New York job and his fancy New York girlfriend and he watches a little too much porn. But that doesn’t stop him from judging the shit out of his new step family; Sherry loves lame icebreaker games, David (Benjamin Arthur) owns the third largest paintball course in the province and loves hair metal and Nicolas Cage movies, Keith (Steve McCarthy) is a depressed former indie rock musician, and Sam (Vinay Virmany) keeps sneaking away to smoke pot. Obviously, this isn’t going to be one big happy family right away but (spoiler alert) they’ll be backing each other up in bar fights in no time. Obviously, it’s hard to watch this movie without knowing where it’s going and each character seems plucked from the Handbook for Movies About Dysfunctional Families. But the casting, both in how they inhabit their own characters as well as how they interact with the others, is bang on. It got big laughs from a small 9 am crowd at Whistler and was well worth getting up so early for.

The Steps was a perfect example of how a familiar story, when told well, can feel new. This is just as true of Forsaken, which had its Western Canada premiere at the festival. Kiefer Sutherland (who stood like 20 feet from me when introducing the film) plays gunslinger John Henry Clayton who returns home to his Reverend father (Donald Sutherland, sharing the screen with his son for the first time). As a pacifist, Rev. Clayton is none too happy to see his boy and is skeptical that he is sincere in his vow to hang up his guns for good. John Henry’s abstinence from the way of the gun is tested when some bullies ride into town forcing people off their land and threaten his long-lost love (Demi Moore).

They don’t make westerns like this anymore. Forsaken is neither revisionist nor homage. Instead, it follows the tradition of the great westerns of the 50s that understood the excitement of watching a hero getting his revenge just as well as they did the importance of making us wait for it. John Henry takes a lot of abuse and witnesses a lot of injustice before finally unleashing hell. We’ve seen this character before and know how it’s all going to turn out but it’s fun to see it all play out, especially with first-time feature director Jon Cassar taking his time with telling the story. If there’s one thing Kiefer knows , it’s how to play a killer who just wants to retire but keeps getting pulled back in and plays John Henry with just the right mix of badass and bashful. Both Sutherlands play their parts well, although the accent Kiefer tries out in some scenes doesn’t suit him, and the two are at their best when onscreen together. Even more effortless, however, are the bad guys played by the great Brian Cox, Sean’s high school buddy Aaron Poole, and the amazing but underrated Michael Wincott. It’s a blast watching these three be despicable and even more fun knowing that, by the end, their uppance will come.

Daddy’s Home

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One of the things that made Will Ferrell so great on Saturday Night Live was his versatility. For every out-there cheerleader, there was a guy who drove a Dodge Stratus (for the record, the Dodge Stratus guy is one of my all-time favourites, the cheerleaders, not so much). But even the Dodge Stratus guy ended up being over-the-top, you just didn’t know it at first. The one thing we never really saw was low-key Will Ferrell.

His movie roles continued that trend with only one or two exceptions (like Stranger than Fiction and judging from the trailer, Bewitched). Of course, with those low-key movies being flops, in almost everything else we have gotten from Ferrell he’s a cartoon (Anchorman, Zoolander, Blades of Glory), a cliche (Get Hard, The Other Guys, A Deadly Adoption), or both (Semi-Pro, Talladega Nights). And more often than not, those movies have disappointed.

With all that in mind, and especially in light of the awfulness that was Get Hard, my expectations for Daddy’s Home could not have been lower, because a half-assed Will Ferrell riff on a loser step-dad is one of the least-funny characters I could picture.

But you know what? Will Ferrell’s step-dad in Daddy’s Home isn’t a cartoon or a cliche. Maybe he’s a bit of a loser but he’s also a sweet and genuine guy that is loved by everyone around him (even his step-kids are warming up to him). And then the kids’ sleazy, deadbeat biological dad (Mark Wahlberg) appears and throws everything into chaos.

For the first time in years, we finally get something fresh from Ferrell. He is clearly using his whole ass in Daddy’s Home and it’s glorious. With Ferrell bringing his A-game, everyone else steps up as well. Mark Wahlberg plays (or is?) a fantastic charming asshole, and I also thoroughly enjoyed Thomas Haden Church as Ferrell’s boss and Hannibal Burress as Ferrell’s contractor/unwanted houseguest.

Daddy’s Home deserves praise as well for a script that avoids the easy way out and sets up something greater. It is wonderful to see jokes come together the way they do in Daddy’s Home. A perfect example is the daddy-daughter dance sequence, which has to be seen to be believed. It’s set up so well that in hindsight it’s obvious but I didn’t see it coming until it happened. Daddy’s Home delivers these types of scenes again and again, right until the credits roll, and will keep you laughing the whole time.

Daddy’s Home gets a score of nine long and shiny broadswords out of ten. Be sure to catch it when it opens on December 25.

The Mule

31 Replies

I can’t, and won’t, recommend this movie.

You see, there are two kinds of people in this life: those who will watch a movie where poop is eaten, and those who won’t. Can you guess which category I fall into? It doesn’t matter. Because thanks to The Mule, I am now a person who has watched a movie where poop is eaten, like it or not (emphatic NOT).

The whole “plot” is just waiting for someone to take a dump. A little more context? Fine. Television repairman and all-round dim bulb Ray (Angus Sampson) gets convinced\coerced by his “best friend” Gavin (Leigh Whannell) to smuggle a whole key of heroin down his gullet. Ray lacks the smuggler’s panache, and the customs agent sees through his beads of sweat and flimsy story. The rectum comes up empty (after a thorough search that’s uncomfortable for all of us), so he’s being quarantined in a hotel room where cops (Hugo Weaving) are waiting round the clock for him to expel his bowels.

This movie starts out slow but as Ray writhes around on the bed, trying not to defecate or die, but mostly not to defecate, the situation around him starts to escalate. If you think the cops aren’t happy, you should see the drug dealers! But it starts to be an awkward contest as to who is the most shady and pretty soon there are no winners but lots and lots of losers, including me.

The truth is, you might actually enjoy this movie. It’s smart enough to elicit sympathy growls from your own tummy, I bet. Tony Mahony and Sampson co-direct, so there are at least two men to blame when you inevitably have to pause this movie to a) vomit, or b) brush your teeth vigorously, for days. I don’t have the stomach for a movie like this, no matter how good it otherwise is. I’d rather watch James Franco saw off his arm and Tom Hanks pull out his rotted teeth on a loop for the rest of my life than watch those 30 seconds of film ever again. Consider yourselves warned.