Category Archives: Jay

Pixar Twofer

For the first time ever, Pixar is releasing two movies in a single year. You’ve already seen Inside Out (I hope) and today The Good Dinosaur is roaring into a theatre near you.

To celebrate, we want to send someone a prize pack including a copy of Inside Out on DVD.

To enter: pick an emotion – ANGER \ JOY \ FEAR \ SADNESS \ DISGUST – and leave us a comment telling us which one you’re feeling today.

Gain additional entries by:

Reading about why Jay thinks Inside Out is a bit racist, and leaving a comment.
Tweeting a picture of your best angry\sad\happy\scared\ disgusted face @assholemovies #assholeemotions.
Sharing an “emotional” story or picture on our Facebook page.
Commenting on our review of The Good Dinosaur.

Multiple entries welcome as long as they’re all different.

And congratulations to Ashley at Syncopated Eyeball for winning our Assholes Reading Movies contest!

The Night Before

26 Replies

This is the most easily swallowed holiday movie I’ve ever seen. Maybe that reveals my inner Grinchiness, but the truth is, no matter how magical the season, my threshold for the trite & schmaltzy is painfully low. Every time a family literally gathers around a piano to sing carols, I want to slit my night-before-feat wrists and douse all the mistletoe and twinkle lights in my eggnog-infused blood.

Ethan’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) parents died 14 years ago, and his two buddies Chris (Anthony Mackie) and Isaac (Seth Rogen) stepped up to the plate to make sure he’d never be alone at Christmas, establishing an annual tradition of getting right ripped the night before.

This movie is really just a Christmassy version of Rogen’s usual raunchy fare, but it’s worth it just to see Rogen and New York City all dressed up for the holidays – he in a garish Jewish version of the ugly-Christmas-sweater.

Chris is a rising star and Isaac’s about to become a daddy, so they’re hoping that this will be the grand finale on their Christmas obligations; Ethan, however, is stuck, and much less inclined to let go.

Isaac’s very pregnant wife has bestowed him with the penultimate holiday gift: a treasure box filled with drugs. It’s his last chance to go hog wild screen-shot-2015-07-29-at-15-20-21 before the baby, and this is Seth Rogen at his best: manic, sweaty, trippin balls, panicked, and awkward. This wires their adventure with the kind of wacky energy we want and need in a film that dares to ask: how much r-rated nastiness can we possibly cram into the holiest of days? And may I just say: how refreshing to see the wife encouraging her husband to spend time with his pals instead of the usual wet-blanket cliche.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is charming as always, but cursed to play it straight in this movie (except for his elf face, which may be worth your $12 ticket alone). Anthony Mackie is the charismatic one who pinballs between the straight arrow and the hot mess, clearly having fun with his strut.

This movie isn’t as laugh-out-loud funny as the trailer led me to believe. Some of the bits bog down the hijinks, but you never have to wait for long before the next chapter unfolds (my favourite bit being when Isaac attends nightbefore3 midnight mass high as fuck – I may have accidentally punched Sean in the balls during that scene – may god, and Spencer, forgive me). This movie is both template-following in terms of Rogen stoner comedies, and refreshingly irreverent in terms of holiday fare: a weird mashup, but what else do you expect from a movie that worships both Run-DMC and Miley Cyrus?

Paprika

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In the near future, a device called the DC mini will allow a new kind of psychotherapy, whereby a person wearing the device during sleep will allow his or her therapist to view their dreams. The DC minis aren’t quite ready yet, but Dr. Chiba is already using them outside the facility to help her patients, like Detective Konakawa, who has recurring nightmares, by assuming her alter-ego Paprika in the dream world, and guiding him through the source of his anxiety.

Despite secrecy, the lab is broken into, and the DC minis fall into the wrong hands. Still in their early stages of development, the devices lack access restrictions, so when they’re stolen, they allow anyone to enter anyone else’s dreams. Soon the scientists at the lab seem to be falling prey to dream invasions – bad dreams being implanted by the thieves of the device – which have real-world consequences.

As dreams and real life start to merge, does the film get confusing? You betcha: kind of like the best dreams do. It’s surreal, of course, fresh and fantastic, but trippy, and rife with the problems of translated-from-Japanese dialogue. You might get a brain bleed trying to make sense of this movie, which I suspect is meant to be experienced more than understood anyway. If it sounds a little like Inception, you’re not wrong. Christopher Nolan was influenced by Paprika, but while Satoshi Kon’s film is able to play with the fluidity between dreams and reality more recklessly, Nolan’s film irons out the incongruities and presents something a little easier to follow and swallow.

Satoshi Kon is not just a film maker, but a film lover as well, and he uses the dream sequences in Paprika, now watchable and movie-like, as an homage to his own favourite films. There’s a parrallel between dreams, movies, and how we use both to construct narrative in our own lives. The imagery is truly like nothing you’ve seen before, and paired with a very unique soundtrack, it lifts you out of, and beyond, the usual movie going experience.

A SPECTRE Review For the Rest of Us

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Has enough time gone by yet that I can write this without being burned at the cross for heresy?

I didn’t like it. Worse still: I was completely bored by it.

I probably wasn’t ever going to be blown away by it, I was mostly along for the ride, because I sort of naturally abhor “franchises” – I just can’t watch the same thing happen to the same person over and over and be entertained by it. At work I might call such a person pathological, or emotionally stunted, or incapable. At the movies, we call him Bond. James Bond.

007 and I parted ways long ago, but I’ve at least felt the past few movies were diverting, or at least they passed the time. This one actually slowed the clock down. And as soon as the creepy guy in the paisley shirt and twirly mustache sitting next to Matt stopped taking pictures of himself with the VIP waitress, and himself with his chicken wings, and himself watching a movie, I got bored.

The day of the dead parade was actually promising. Really promising. Wasn’t it beautiful? The colours and the energy and the tension in the long take? But then that opening helicopter scene. Shit. They obviously ran out of money. That thing looked horrendous: completely fake. I’m pretty sure I could rig up something more convincing with my Samsung Galaxy and a bucket of plastic army guys. It was laughable – and the script is so lazy they use the helicopter stunt twice. You know, because it worked so well the first time.

And then the train. Seriously? I know they don’t make trains like they used to, but if you want people to take your set seriously, and to believe that it’s not just spit and cardboard, then don’t make it crumple every time Bond sneezes. Every time he threw an elbow the whole thing wobbled. I know Daniel Craig is soooo tough and everything, but I’m pretty sure some walls can withstand him some of the time.

And speaking of travel. James Bond is a spy, no? I always had this notion that a spy would travel light. But this spy has a goddamned different suede jacket for every occasion! And he changes sunglasses more often than he changes underpants (presumably).

And I still had less of a problem with Craig’s wardrobe than Christoph Waltz’s. Here is a free piece of advice to any and all of you Hollywood types, feel free to write it down: nobody looks threatening in sockless loafers. Nobody looks good in them either, but that’s besides the point. The loafers aren’t even the biggest problem with bad guy accessories. Let’s talk that octopus ring. Bond gets it from Sciarra but when Q scans it for DNA, all 3 previous bad guys have also spilled their DNA on the thing. So what, there’s a big mutual bad guy jewelry box, and when all the baddies are getting ready to go out to the club, Le Chiffre is like, “No you wear it tonight, Raoul. It looks so darling with your evil polka-dot pocket square.”

Not that I’m ready to let Blofeld off the hook yet. Because first, why the artifice when he‘s first introduced? His face is literally in the shadows when in fact, Waltz’s name was in the opening credits. There’s no surprise here. Waltz was announced as the villain months ago and the internet has already talked it to death. But now we’re all going to pretend we don’t know? Surprise! It’s Christoph Stupid Waltz! Playing my least favourite Bond villain maybe ever. I mean, how weird is it that he somehow raced back to the empty ruins of MI6 in order to set up a “James Bond, this is your life” funhouse display (is there some sort of Evil Pinterest I don’t know about)? And then he reveals himself behind bullet proof glass, a move we all know he stole from Ethan Hunt. I’m beginning to think that Quentin

Mandarin collars: all the rage in evil pret-a-porter this season

Tarantino fooled me into momentarily liking Christoph Waltz. Have I liked him in anything since? I definitely abhorred him in Big Eyes. He was less cartoonish here, but that doesn’t mean he was good. Aren’t villains supposed to seem…evil? Ruthless? Blood thirsty? This guy just came off like someone’s jaunty if letchy, grabby uncle (and p.s., “Cuckoo” is the lamest villain catch phrase EVER).

And speaking of letchy! Confidential to James Bond: it’s fucking 2015, dude. You don’t get to act this way anymore. I was so excited to learn that Monica Bellucci was in this – I love her. Loved her. I’m sorry, but after watching that super weird “makeout session” (?) in front of the mirror, I can’t even look at her the same way. I don’t know if they do it different in Italy, but usually kissing involves…the touching of lips. Not just open-mouthed hovering. It felt…well, almost non-consensual. Like, when on earth did she decide this was going down? That it was okay? Because I totally missed that part. And was totally grossed out by the, um, foreplay. And boy did he drop her like she was hot. Literally the script forgot she ever existed as soon as he left her boudoir – her only raison d’être was to look fleetingly luscious in European lingerie (which she apparently put on after sex, as people do – since her back was BARE when Bond unzipped her dress), and she’s goddamned Monica Bellucci! If you’re lucky enough to have her, you use her! But no, by all means bring in a younger version to offer romance, a doctor so we know she’s not just going to stand around looking cute in her nightie (although, come to think of it, we did get a look at her in her nightie…which she was not wearing when James put her to bed, and yet…WAIT A MINUTE! Is James Bond’s kink to dress women in their lingerie? And is he possibly also wearing women’s lingerie under his relentless supply of suede desert jackets?).

And is it just me, or did things take a turn for the Michael Bay toward the end? When Blofeld declares that the thing about brothers is they always know “which buttons to press” – he then actually presses a button. It’s the kind of cheese I expect from Michael Bay but that line made me cringe for real. Is this really what it’s come to? And now this film has left us with a bad taste in our mouths. James Bond is outed as the exact opposite of the badass superspy we’ve built him up to be – apparently he’s just been a pawn manipulated by Blofeld this whole time. When we thought he was digging up villains in the previous films, it was actually Blofeld cleverly orchestrating the whole thing. In fact: James Bond is terrible at his job. Not only did these villains want to be found, THEY were coming for HIM. A monkey could have done his job, and would have probably worn less suede jackets.

Sean thinks he can outBond me? I don’t think so! I’m recruiting more members to #TeamJay – let’s let him know what we think! I’m calling out yet another Jay, and Ben, Kenny, Ruth …maybe even Peggy?

Room VS Brooklyn

22 Replies

The great think about being an insomniac – the only good thing, in fact – is that it gives plenty of time to pursue my heart’s true passion: reading. If I had to pick between movies and books, it wouldn’t even be a contest. No hesitation: give me books or give me death (and actually, losing the ability to read is the thing I fear most about aging).

Some of my favourite books inevitably get turned into movies. Sometimes it’s a good thing (The Martian was great!) and sometimes it’s a goddamned travesty (The Golden Compass – ugh). This month you can see two movies based on books that for once, I can actually get behind.

Room, starring Brie Larson, is a revelation. It was deemed “unadaptable” but director Lenny Abrahamson delivers a unique cinematic event with a powerhouse performance by its star. The novel, by Emma Donoghue, is smart, taut, and emotional without sentimentalizing. It’s told from the perspective of 5 year old Jack, held captive in the room where his kidnapped mother conceived and gave birth to him, who has no knowledge of the outside world.

Brooklyn, written by Colm Toibin, is simply beautiful. I fell in love with Eilis, the young Irish immigrant, and her voice – so truly and honestly written. She is brought to life on the big screen by Saoirse Ronan in a feature directed by John Crowley. It debuted at Sundance to such appreciation that it sparked a bidding war that landed the biggest Sundance deal ever. I think it’s worth checking out.

When the cool weather arrives, there’s nothing I like better than curling up by the fire with a glass of wine and a good book…except maybe relaxing in the hot tub with a cigar and a good book. In any case, you need a good book. So here’s your chance to win a book and maybe get inspired to see the movie. Enter the contest and let us know which one you’d rather win – Room or Brooklyn – either way, you can’t lose.

Contest closes at midnight EST November 24 2015. Winner will be announced and notified by email November 25 2015. Anyone can enter in the following ways:

Like us on Facebook (1 entry)
Follow us on Twitter @assholemovies (1 entry)
Tweet this contest to your friends (1 entry)
Check out our review of Room, and leave a comment (1 entry)
Leave a comment on this post and tell us which book you’d like to win (1 entry – mandatory)

Be sure to check our Contests! page often – we’re giving lots of stuff away to celebrate 365 days of Assholes Watching Movies.

100 Years – The Movie You Will Never See

5 Replies

Robert Rodriguez and John Malkovich made a movie together that won’t be released until November 18, 2215. That’s right – 100 years from now. It’s literally locked up in a safe until then. Neither you nor I will likely still be around to see it, but Louis XIII Cognac (uncoincidentally also aged 100 years) is giving away 1000 metal tickets that will allow your descendents to attend the screening a century from now. Well, not your descendents. The descendents of carefully selected “influential” individuals, who can no doubt afford the 3K price tag on a bottle of the Remy cognac. I’m sure their grandkids will be chomping at the bit to see the final unseen film from the man who brought them Sin City: A Dame To Kill For.

Aside from a publicity stunt, what is art without an audience? And in an age of micro-attention spans, 140 character tweets, and Redbull – is a century of secrecy maybe actually a good thing?

And if we were to open a time capsule today containing a movie made 100 years ago intended for viewing in 2015, what would it look like?

Even Malkovich and Rodriguez haven’t seen the finished work – and I wonder if that’s like having an itch you can’t scratch for the rest of your life. I have it on good authority that they do, however, have those elusive metal tickets. I think they should make tickets available to the descendants of Richard Linklater and Ellar Coltrane – director and star of Boyhood, which made waves last year for being a measly 12 years in the making. Oh, only a dozen, Linklater? I’ll see your 12 and raise you A CENTURY. Microphone drop.

Dear Jack

8 Replies

Andrew McMahon was the front man of one of my favourite bands, Something Corporate, so I was a little miffed when he left to pursue a (solo) passion project called Jack’s Mannequin. Of course, that was before I heard the album and totally fell in love. McMahon is a crack song writer and his feverish piano playing is really exciting to watch live. His songs are energetic and poppy and if they didn’t quite reach the mainstream, they should have.

The successful release of Jack’s Mannequin’s first album, Everything In Transit, came when he was just 22 years old, and in the hospital battling leukemia. This movie is his cancer diary. It’s cheaply shot with home video cameras – truly nothing fancy. But it is very honest, and very grounding to watch a kid who is so full of life hear his new songs on the radio for the first time while also losing his hair and maybe even his hope. It’s sobering. At 22, his doctors are delaying chemo just long enough for him to freeze some sperm because although he’s never even considered whether he wants a family, now he has to prepare for the worst.

Spoiler alert: he survives, by the skin of his teeth, with love from his fans and support from his family and bone marrow from his brave sister. He survived to write a second Jack’s Mannequin album, the lyrics heavy with his hospital philosophy. That album, Glass Passenger, featured heavily on my mp3 player when I was in the hospital going through my own treatment. I think the music got into my veins through the IV drip and I’ve never really been able to shake it. So imagine how miffed I was to learn that McMahon had ants in his pants once again and was disbanding my treasured Jack’s Mannequin.

But now he’s back, not just in documentary form, but with a new album that finally bears his name front and centre, just in time for another round of treatment for me. My favourite song off the album is about his darling daughter, a miracle baby after all her father had been through, a testament to his survival. And if you, or she, want to know a little more about how he made it through the dark days, Dear Jack offers some barrier-free insight.

Z For Zachariah

25 Replies

In a way, this is exactly the kind of end-of-the-world movie I’ve been keening for. No disaster porn here, it’s quiet, contemplative; a meditation on faith and hope. Margot Robbie plays a farmer’s daughter who’s beginning to think she might just be the last woman on earth when she comes across an exhausted scientist (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who can’t believe he’s just found the last lungful of fresh air. The two start building a life together when a third person (Chris Pine) arrives, disrupting their equilibrium.

The movie tells very little and shows even less of whatever it was that brought upon the world’s end. All we know are these few survivors and the shadows behind their eyes. You already know that Ejiofor is a fine actor, but both Robbie and Pine bring their A game as well, and this becomes a character study in the garden of Eden.

If you need action in your apocalypse, this one’s not for you. But if you like a movie that raises more questions than it answers, then you’ve probably met your match. What becomes of people when their past is wiped out and their future uncertain? And what happens to morality when no one is looking? There’s just a touch of creepiness to all that quietness, all that wide-open space that you can’t quite trust. A concept like safety gets redefined when humanity has just been all but wiped out.

If you’re open to it, there’s a lot of religious symbolism hidden like Easter eggs in the narrative of this movie. I wrote narrative rather than plot because to be honest, not a lot happens in this movie. And as much as I loved the absence of mutated monsters, and actually appreciated the stillness, and the lush cinematography that made it feel almost impossible that any ugliness could find their little corner of land, there was also a…dullness, something lackluster about it all, despite the finely tuned performances. I think it was a lack of commitment, as if the movie really didn’t want to make any choices at all, wasn’t confident enough to actually choose a position. I’m not usually unconformable with ambiguity, but this one tested me a bit, and it was only because the movie was quite good that I wanted for it to be great, and this weakness held it back.

Blue Ruin

19 Replies

We meet the world’s saddest homeless man. Homelessness is already sad to begin with, but this guy just seems so solitary and dejected. He’s sleeping in his car one day when a kindly police officer swings by to deliver some rough news: the man who murdered his parents has just been released from prison.

Oh, we think. That’s why.

But then homeless guy springs into action; he’s clearly been plotting or waiting or both all along. There’s a plan, and it’s in motion. You think revenge blueruin will be sweet, but actually, revenge is messy. Very, very messy. Remember that.

Macon Blair plays Dwight, the sad-eyed homeless guy you won’t soon forget. He’s the exact opposite of what you think a blood-lusting revenge monster will look like, and that’s why this movie stands out from the crowd. He hasn’t spent the last ten years doing push ups and tattooing plans to his torso. He isn’t nimble with weapons and if he had access to tiny bottles of liquor he’d probably drink them surreptitiously while sitting in a quiet diner booth rather than tape their broken fragments to his knuckles. He’s an anti-action star and an anti-hero…but that doesn’t mean we don’t root for him. It just means we’re probably messed up for doing it.

But that’s what makes writer/director Jeremy Saulnier kind of a genius. He finds truth in the fundamentals, stripping this down to its ba kickstarter and festival darling blue ruin revenge flick re bones and exposing the ugliness to the air, where the stench is palpable and we’re often dared to look away. It’s a little unpredictable even within the confines of its genre, and definitely an exercise in elevating your heart beat while you sit pinned to your couch.

This movie defied my expectations and made me like it even when I felt I shouldn’t. And when you’re done being “entertained” (a strange word to use in the face of such determined bloodshed), you might just find there’s a message hidden in the body count, and it’s not the one we’re used to hearing from Hollywood.

Well done, you vengeful vagabond.

Mistress America

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It was about this time 6 years ago when my mother went to her school’s Christmas party and the janitor brought a date who thought my mom would be perfect for her dad. Turns out, she was right, and now Jay has a new daddy.

That’s the condensed version, anyway. She has 4 kids, he has 2, and together they have 5 grandsons and 1 extremely imminent granddaughter. We have a weird blended family but those sweet grandkids have never known any different.

In Mistress America, two women make nice because their parents are about to marry. Tracy, a lonely college freshman (Lola Kirke) is thrilled to go along on the adventures of her impetuous 30-something soon to be step-sister, Brooke (Greta Gerwig). Sure she’s uneducated and unstable, but to an 18-year-old, that seems glamourous and free.

Greta Gerwig is a force of nature – like, that’s her permanent state. Is Gerwig her generation’s Diane Keaton? Or maybe she’s a little more screwball than that? I can never quite put my finger on it, but she’s a gem and a star and man oh man I can never keep my eyes off her. Her performances feel free and unselfconscious, just totally unleashed and genuine. She has a physicality that I’m not used to with young actresses, a way of using the space, of filling up the screen without taking up all the room.

She co-wrote this script with director Noah Baumbach and the lines just keep zooming by; you can almost see the trail they’re blazing around the screen as they get launched by one character and hit their target. This is Baumbach’s funniest – and dare I say, most accessible – work to date. It’s frenetic but feels more accomplished than his previous collaboration with Gerwig, Frances Ha.

The movie’s as flighty as its main character, but I was utterly charmed not just by the leads but by the entire cast, who lend the movie that feel of an older comedy, with randoms popping up with funny lines and disappearing again just as quickly, keeping us guessing, keeping us on our toes. It makes for an almost caffeinated ride, and it has left me wanting (needing?) more.