Author Archives: Jay

The Age of Adaline

We missed this screening while in Paris, and I was okay with missing it, although our proxy did give it a one-word rave review: “fine”.

On our return flight from California, it was the only New Release I hadn’t already seen, so I gave it a go, and came up with much the same conclusion: it’s fine.

Adaline gets into an accident that causes her to stay 29 forever. And then she has the gall to complain about it. So that’s annoying. And she may have the glowing complexion of a 29-year-old, but she tells a story like a 129 year old: it’s long, rambling, often pointless.

Adaline, that is to say Blake Lively, looks gorgeous in every era. But her “problem” has made her selfish and I had a hard time finding anything likeable about her, other than having Ellen Burstyn as a daughter, and wondered why yet another of her “problems” was having all these handsome men fall in love with her. Wow. Poor Adaline. Tough life.

Anyway, you know exactly where this movie is going, and it goes exactly there, eventually, after a lot of plodding along.

I did love that it was set in San Francisco, since I had just been holidaying there myself, and recognized her digs in Chinatown. Actually, San Francisco is maybe the most interesting character – it’s often shot beautifully, almost noir-ish, which almost makes me sad. It looks and sounds like a movie that was supposed to be so much better than it was. Unfortunately it’s just another bland romance with a light and improbable sci-fi twist – basically, a very pretty fashion show. And the thing is, I don’t buy Blake as anything more than a mannequinn. She’s a clothes horse, but her eyes are blank. Her face is incapable of communicating anything to the audience, and she pales next to Harrison Ford, who gives off some mega wattage in a hammy performance I didn’t expect from him.

Verdict: missed opportunity.

Infinitely Polar Bear

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Jordan over at Epileptic Moondancer wrote about this great film he saw, and he made me want to see it too, only, it never came. Well, not quite never, since it’s here now, only it’s just playing at our local art-house theatre (shout out, Bytowne, we love you!) and as far as I can tell, didn’t get much in the way of a release.

And that’s too bad because Mark Ruffalo, whom I normally loathe, does a bang-up job of portraying a husband and father who struggles with the mental illness that is now known as bi-polar (not so much in the 70s, when this film is set). His wife (a strong Zoe Saldana) married him optimistically and learns about his disease the hard way. In the throes of a manic phase he’s erratic at best, and scares his wife and two young daughters. They lose him to a psychiatric ward, and a FIPHD1iOek65hl6LdUL2HQ halfway house, and to loads of mood-altering medications, and in his quest to come back to them, he agrees to care for his girls while his wife goes off to NYC to get a business degree and a real shot at a job. She’s putting an awful lot of faith in a man who, most days, doesn’t seem capable of caring even for himself, but this is what he needs, and what their family needs, and needs must.

It’s easy to applaud this intimate and sympathetic look at a challenging illness. Writer-director Maya Forbes cast her own daughter in the fictionalized version of herself, a young girl caught between a father she dearly loves and a disease she doesn’t fully understand. This is clearly a deeply personal movie, stemming from a deeply personal place. And if this is how she experienced her father’s mental illness, then good for her. The movie makes it seem more like a quirky inconvenience than the devastating illness I know it to be, but if you ever have the misfortune of this diagnosis, then I fully hope that you get the bi-polar that Forbes lived with, and not the one I did.

Coming out of the theatre, Sean asked what I thought. And I genuinely thought it was a brilliant movie, so well-acted by all involved. I also think it makes bi-polar look kind of fun. And the thing is, like any mental illness, and like many illnesses period, I suppose, the symptoms and severity and experience will vary from person to person. So while some may enjoy riding bicycles in bathing suits as their low, when I lived with someone who was bi-polar, I spent long months in a sad, scary, violent, life-shattering space. It’s not always as fun as it looks in the movies.

But Mark Ruffalo does an excellent job of hitting both highs and lows with some subtlety, playing each note, finding the heartbreak. Saldana is vulnerable, and even though I never stopped asking myself how she could leave her kids alone with this man, I still felt warmth toward her for trying so hard to make bi-polar just another thing to live with. I’m still queasy about movies that romanticize mental illness, but I’m also blown away by some fantastic performances that thrive and come alive despite a saccharine script.

Minions

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There’s nothing wrong with the Minions movie, as long as you call it what it is: a kid’s movie. In the olden days, kids’ movies would have primary-coloured protagonists with annoying, high-pitched voices who got into non-sensical high jinks with little to no thought to plot. And we were fine with this, because we’d pop it into the VCR and let it babysit our kids for a while, and we’d pay as little attention to it as humanly possible. But then Pixar came along and raised the bar. Sure they improved the quality of computer-generated animation, but they also did something few had done before: the movie spoke directly to the adults in the audience. They found a way to appeal to children, and also the child in all of us. So the other animation studios have (tried) to follow suit.

Despicable Me was reasonably successful at this – if you remember the Evil Bank where Gru goes to get an evil loan, you may have caught the sign, which identified the bank as (Formerly Lehman Brothers) – think the kids got that one? I took a poll. They did not. What kids did notice, however, was the bright yellow pill-shaped sidekicks, aka the Minions. They squeak gibberish and generally look cute while acting devilish – what 3-year-old can resist? In fact, these little sidekicks are modeled after three-year-olds, full stop. Sidekick spinoffs are meant for them, not us.

Minions are occasionally funny and occasionally annoying as fuck. You’ll get tired of the joke well before it’s over, but this movie isn’t made for you. It’s not even made for your adorable nephew. This movie is made to move merchandise, and dear god has it been successful on that score. A movie is a $12 ticket and maybe a $25 DVD, if they’re lucky. But adorable, rotund minions are potentially a whole line of toys waiting to happen. Action figures! Plushies! Jigsaw puzzles, sticker books, back to school supplies, board games, snack packs, fart guns, voice changers, licensed goddamned EVERYTHING! And we should know. Having recently visited Universal Studios, we Assholes were briefly (but memorably!) turned into minions. Thankfully we were turned back because the park was already overrun as it was: the minions were everywhere! You could eat them, buy them, have your picture taken with them. The Minions are a machine now. You may feed it dollars to keep it quiet.

Trailers Blowin Up!

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For better or worse, it’s here, the first look at Suicide Squad.

First of all, oh my god, does anyone really want this many origin stories all at once? My head will implode. Warning you now, Sean: green plants will be required. In abundance.

Dorkly.com featured an article about a fan theory on Jared Leto’s Joker – are we buying it?

You know what I’m not buying? Will Smith. I know his career really needs a hit right now, but I’m just not sure I’m ready for any more Will Smith.

Some of the Joker – Jason Todd “evidence” comes right from the big man himself, Batman, in this little thing also unveiled at Comic Con:

How many good guys are left? How many stayed that way?

I’m really over Jesse Eisenberg. Like, he can just go back into the little suitcase from which he escaped. Totally over him.

Damn I wish ole Butt Chin Affleck wasn’t so sexy.

Also, Jesse Eisenberg refers to Batman and Superman as day vs night, which I misheard at first as gay – and I literally thought, um, which one?

Now, gun to head, you can only see one of these movies, which one’s it gonna be?

Rebel Without A Cause

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We’re travelling home today, which means we’ll probably be watching something god-awful on the plane which you’ll likely have to read me whine about in tomorrow’s post. But today we can still bask in the glow of our wonderful California trip.

Rebel Without a Cause is a too-cool movie about too-cool kids and their fast, fast cars (and morals!). James Dean is the coolest, of course, so he can’t help it if both Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo both fall a little in love with him.

In the movie, their class visits the Griffith Observatory, and so will we. It’s a great spot for checking out the great big Hollywood sign but it’s also a bit of Hollywood history itself, having also appeared in Terminator Genisys, San Andreas, The Rocketeer, The People vs Larry Flynt, McFarland, among a host of others, including, notably, the Paula Abdul video for Rush Rush starring Mister Keanu Reeves. And now the Assholes Who Watch Movies will have visited it too. 😉

Universally Acclaimed

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Today we’re touring Universal Studios.

Courtney over at Cinema Axis wrote an interesting article recently about Universal’s surprising temerity and box office success despite the fact that they are one of few studios without a superhero franchise. They do, however, have thriving franchises in The Fast and The Furious, Jurassic Park, and The Minions (of Despicable Me fame), which all, not coincidentally, are featured heavily throughout the park.

And if you tour the backlot, so are some of their older hits, like Jaws, E.T., and Back to the Future. They’ve got props and costumes and even set pieces, like a plane crash from War of the Worlds and the house f universal rom Psycho (where Jim Carrey once spent the day doing his best Norman Bates impression between shooting scenes for Man on the Moon). It is, after all, still a working film lot. You can see the cul-de-sac where The Burbs was shot and some rides are housed in old sound stages; the Transformers ride inhabits one used for Hitchcock’s The Birds. The tour also takes you through current productions – you may have seen a segment on the Conan O’Brien show back in the day where he and Andy would stage events specifically for the tour as it passed.

I’m kind of a chicken when it comes to rides, so I’ll let Matt and Sean cover those. I have a feeling I’ll be found wandering around Springfield – yup, the very one housing Homer and Marge. I might just find myself a Krusty Burger and put my tired feet up for a while. No, scratch that. Make it Moe’s. Oh my god, do you think they’ll have Duff beer???

Check out our Twitter for shots of the day ( @assholemovies ) and previous posts for the rest of our California adventure.

Los Angeles, I’m Yours

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Today we’re exploring the big beautiful city of Los Angeles, and to prepare I’ve cycled through several films that have given me invaluable insight on what we might encounter:

Boyz N The Hood: Luckily our hotel is on Hollywood & Vine rather than in the ghetto. Ice Cube and Cuba Gooding Jr play boyhood friends who are just barely surviving the gunfire in their neighbourhood. Bullets and helicopters are the film’s soundtrack. John Singleton paints a pretty bleak outlook for these kids without the benefit of options, futures, or even fathers. Lessons learned: watch out for rival gangs and street racing, and eat your french fries indoors.

Fletch: Chevy Chase plays an investigative journalist a little too comfortable going undercover as a bum\new age guru. Fletch is looking into the booming drug trade on the beach when approached one day by a wealthy man who asks him to be the homeless man who shoots him dead, bypassing cancer and netting his wife the insurance. But Fletch isn’t really a bum and the guy isn’t really dying of cancer. Lessons learned: watch out for rollerskaters on the boardwalk, bums and new age gurus are practically indistinguishable, the people are rude to waiters, LAPD is useless.

L.A. Story: Steve Martin is a weather guy in sunny and 72-degrees Los Angeles. He resorts to hijinks just to make his broadcasts interesting. Then he meets a girl, and that’s when this satirization of the big city really starts to zing. A freeway signpost starts to talk to him, and he begins to listen. Lots of celebrity cameos ensue. Lessons learned: the traffic is so bad you may as well take love advice from it

Less Than Zero: Andrew McCarthy is back from college for the holidays and finds his girlfriend hooking up with his best friend, the drug addict (Robert Downey Jr – kinda tough to watch him like this all things considered). It’s a real testament to crazy L.A. decadence. Then James Spader makes RDJ become a whore, and things really get interesting. Lessons learned: the girls are loose and the drugs are abundant – just my kind of town!

Collateral: Jamie Foxx has cabbie good luck (hot lady fare, Jada Pinkett Smith, gives him respect AND her number) and cabbie bad luck (hit man, Tom Cruise, takes him hostage); just a typical day driving around L.A. I guess! He’s forced to drive around while Cruise assassinates various names on a list of witnesses – the last of which of course turns out to be previously mentioned hot lady. Lessons learned: watch your bags at the airport, doormen are for shit, maybe take the bus? Although Lesson learned in Speed: DO NOT take the bus!

If you’d like to find out whether we’ve taken the bus or a taxi, follow us @assholemovies – we’re updating our California adventure daily!

San Francisco Treats

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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).