Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Our reviews and thoughts on the latest releases, classics, and nostalgic favourites. Things we loved, things we hated, and worst of all, things we were ambivalent about.

Frozen – reviewed by the last man on earth to see it.

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I saw Frozen for the first time last night. Jay knew I hadn’t seen it and since all our nieces and nephews want Elsa dolls for Christmas, it seemed the time was right. I generally enjoy animated movies (or cartoons as I will probably always call them) and Wreck-It Ralph is one of my recent favourites. Since Frozen is Disney’s follow up to Wreck-It Ralph (at least chronologically) I thought Frozen might be quite enjoyable. As it turned out, there was a little bit of truth to that but not as much as I would have hoped.

The problem for me was that Frozen is basically another princess movie geared toward selling new dolls and dresses and direct-to-video sequels. And clearly it has been a massive success on that front, but it struck me as a very hollow movie. I think there were a few good choices made in its creation, mainly that Elsa did not become the bad guy (which Jay tells me was originally going to happen until they realized they were going to have a huge hit in “Let it Go”) and that the guy with the reindeer did not really end up saving our two princesses.

I shouldn’t complain too much. I don’t want to be unfairly critical or hard on Frozen. After all, it is a cartoon and a princess movie at heart and on those levels I can understand why it is beloved by all my little relatives. It’s just a big step down from Wreck-It Ralph, which really lived up to Pixar’s legacy as a movie that was designed for people my age as much as it was for kids (see Up, Toy Story, the Incredibles, etc.). It’s a high standard and a tough mark to hit but there have been some great animated movies produced in the last ten years (some not even by Pixar) and I hope most people making movies, animated or otherwise, are aiming to match or beat what has come before. Frozen had a few moments where something new and exciting seemed like it might materialize but I think it just ended up being too easy for them to stick to the tried and true princess formula instead of really making something original and memorable.

Hopefully Big Hero 6 will be a stronger continuation of Pixar’s best efforts, or at least be more exciting. That’s probably a safe bet because it seems to be about robots and superheroes so there should be very few princess cliches involved. And for whatever reason, robot and superhero cliches do not bother me at all; I will happily watch the same basic plot over and over if Batman is involved, but if you put a singing princess (or two) in the starring role and tell a generic story then I’ll call your movie unoriginal. So don’t be surprised to see my Guardians of the Galaxy review assign a final score of 21 out of ten space guns (or something equally clever) but in the meantime I am not ashamed at all to give Frozen a rating of six talking snowmen out of ten.

(Check out the comments for Jay’s rant on Frozen’s supposed feminism.)

Interstellar

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I didn’t understand all of Interstellar and it wasn’t my fault.

Christopher Nolan was so impressed with composer Hans Zimmer’s slightly over-bearing score for Batman Begins that the two have been practically inseparable ever since (with the exception of The Prestige). Zimmer’s work on Inception and The Dark Knight trilogy (usually) compliment Nolan’s story and images nicely, adding drama and suspense in all the right places. The only trouble is, when Nolan cranks the volume up to 11 and the music really starts to swell, it can be nearly impossible to make out some of the dialogue. It doesn’t help that the director loves to have his actors mumble and whisper their lines (sometimes even from behind a Bane mask).

This is even truer of Interstellar, with the roar of space shuttles and pickup trucks, dust storms, and Zimmer’s score render the dialogue completely inaudible in several places. What’s worse is this is not a movie where you can really afford to miss anything. Nolan packs as much information, theorizing, and heart-to-hearts as he possibly can into Interstellar’s nearly three-hour running time and missing even a minute is missing a lot. So, SPEAK UP, will you, Coop? And turn the music down.

As a fan of Christopher Nolan since Memento, I had been looking forward to this movie for months so I was a little disappointed when it got off to what I thought was a bit of a rough start. Matthew McConaughey, who’s been on a surprisingly long winning streak lately, plays Coop, a corn farmer who should have been an astronaut and almost got to be one once. But we don’t need astronauts anymore.

We spent so much money and resources on the space race and arms race that we have run out of food. This is an interesting vision of the not-so-distant future but we are brought up to speed on what’s been going on in some uncharacteristically (for Nolan) clumsily written scenes. Coop soon discovers that he has been “chosen” to lead a team through a wormhole into another solar system to find another planet for us to live (and ruin). Nolan rushes through all of this with plot conveniences, clumsy exposition, and lazy writing, as if he’s as eager as we are to just move this story into outer space as fast as possible.

The film really gets off the ground once the shuttle takes off. The images of space travel are unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a movie and decisions these characters will have to make are sure to make for passionate discussions during the ride home from the theater. What significance do we as a species have in an infinite universe? What does it mean to “save the human race?”. Should we follow scientific data or our heart when deciding how close we want to live to a black hole?

Nolan’s always been very good at this, even when making superhero movies. The questions he raises about human nature have made for some of the best post-movie discussions I’ve ever had. This is no surprise. What surprised me most about Interstellar were the scenes of Coop receiving transmissions from his children who are still stuck on Earth, surprisingly moving from a filmmaker who usually prefers to mess with your head than aim for the heart.

In Interstellar, Christopher Nolan gets the chance to show us new aspects of his talent that are pleasant surprises. I still think he’s at his best when he raises troubling questions about the monster inside all of us and I am not sure how I feel about this new Look to the Heavens and Love Conquers All side of him. But whether or not its director has gone soft on us, Interstellar is well worth watching.

This asshole not enough for you? Read Jay’s review over here.

How To Train Your Dragon 2

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Has it really been four years since the first one? No wonder I barely remember it.

I do remember being surprised how much I liked it though. The heroic score and spectacular animation of dragons in flight was impressive even when seen through my tiny portable dvd player. And the story-as best as I could remember about a Viking boy named Hiccup who is the only one who believes that dragons can be our friends- was touching stuff and completely changed the way I felt about dragons.

In How to Train Your Dragon 2, Hiccup has changed his village for the better. Now everyone has a dragon of their own and even have dragon races. Even though he is solely responsible for all these changes, Hiccup still can’t quite fit in and skips the dragon racing to go exploring with his own pet dragon, unsure of who he is because he never knew his mother.

Last time, Hiccup discovered that sometimes, we are afraid of things because we misunderstand them. This time, he will learn an even more grown up lesson- that sometimes we are afraid of things because they are scary. When Hiccup’s dad, the chief, learns the evil Drago is building a dragon army, Hiccup urges everyone to keep calm and let him find Drago and reason with him. “This is what I’m good at”, he says. He will soon learn that “Men who kill without reason cannot be reasoned with” and that Drago really does in fact plan on enslaving all the people and dragons he can get his hands on. What a maniac. Once he has accepted that some men are just bad and need to be fought, Hiccup will finally be able to become his father’s successor as chief, a job that only Hiccup doubts that he was born for.

My memory of How to Train Your Dragon is vague but I remember enjoying it more than I did the sequel. The animation is even more impressive this time around with two battle scenes that I absolutely loved but the story doesn’t add anything to the message of the first one. And Kristen Wiig, as talented as she is, should not be doing voice work.

Gandhi

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I spend a lot of my movie-watching time with old movies- “classics” as most DVD rental stores call them, so I thought I would post some online reviews of films that have been around longer than online reviews to see how well they hold up. This week I rented Richard Attenborough’s 1983 Academy Award for Best Picture Winner Gandhi, a movie I’ve always meant to see because I thought I “should” but never got around to. Maybe it was it’s 190 minute running time. But I sat through Interstellar twice over the last two weeks so I decided I was ready.

This is, of course, the story of Mohandas K Gandhi, who I’ll assume needs no introduction, beginning in South Africa in 1893 until his death in 1948. So, 55 years of history over 3 hours. Get comfortable.

What it’s lost with age. Or maybe this was always a problem. I was a year old when Gandhi was originally released and my parents wouldn’t take me to see it at the time as much as I begged. Watching it today though, I thought Attenborough’s perfectly understandable reverence for his subject might have gotten in the way. Gandhi is potrayed more as saint than complex human being and we never really understand why he did the things he did. I’m not usually one to complain about length but it is tough to hold an audience’s attention for three hours when the main character does nothing but humble and self-sacrificing things.

What still holds up. Gandhi is played by Ben Kingsley (Sir Ben now but back then I think it was just Ben). Ben won a well-deserved Oscar for the part, beating out Tootsie’s Dustin Hoffman who ironically turned down the chance to play Gandhi, making me shudder to think how bad this movie could have been. As both the young hopeful Gandhi and the exhausted and starving older one, Ben’s eyes, voice, and posture are almost perfect. His performance is by far the best reason to see this movie.

Nice surprise for modern audiences. Early in the film, Gandhi is stopped on the street and mocked by three young punks (although they probably wouldn’t have been called that in the 1800s). My first thought was “These guys are so over the top. They have to be the worst actors in the entire movie”. My second thought was “Is that Daniel Day-Lewis?” It was. I guess everybody has to start somewhere.

Bottom line. When I’m watching a movie about a real guy, I tend not to like movies that try to cover too much. 55 years is a lot and I would have liked a movie that focused on a smaller, more manageable window in greater detail. Still, the old school production (real human extras instead of CGI ones, for example) give you that “they don’t make ’em like this anymore” feeling. And then there’s those performances. Ben Kingsley at his best, Daniel Day-Lewis at his worst. Who could ask for more?

Horrible Bosses 2

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I haven’t been so surprised by a movie poster since Night at the Museum 2. Horrible Bosses 2??? I probably shouldn’t have been- the first movie ended with the threat of a sequel but I didn’t think that any studio would let them get away with it.

Then I saw Jason Sudeikis on Letterman talking about how Horrible Bosses made $300 million (he sounded like he couldn’t believe it either). I had no idea. I used to recommend it to people, describing it as “kind of funny” as if I had discovered it myself- a mostly forgettable but worth watching comedy that had flown below the radar. Apparently, I had under-estimated how much the average movie-goer could relate to wanting to kill their boss.

This is my first review so it might be too soon to admit something so embarrassing but, yeah, I liked Horrible Bosses. I have always liked Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis and, though I wish they had teamed up on something a little more inspired, watching Sudeikis and Day talking (screaming, in Day’s case) over each other while Bateman rolls his eyes makes me laugh every time and a screenwriter doesn’t have to be brilliant to make this trio funny.

How much you like Horrible Bosses 2 depends both on how you feel about Horrible Bosses 1 and how you feel about sequels in general. If you loved the first one and would be content with just more of the same, I can’t see you finding fault with the sequel. It plays like a 109-minute deleted scene on the Horrible Bosses dvd. Nick, Kurt, and Dale (be careful reading that out loud) are in over their heads again, dream up knuckle-headed ideas to get out of trouble, and argue amongst themselves even more than Asshole Watching Movies.

I enjoyed almost every minute Nick, Kurt, and Dale were on screen, particularly whenever they’re trying to break in and out of places as they congratulate each other on how good at this they’re getting. The movie drags only when other characters are in the spotlight, especially Kevin Spacey and Jennifer Aniston- both of whom made me laugh once or twice in the first film but are completely unnecessary in the second. A drawn-out scene where Aniston eagerly fishes for graphic details when another characters talks about his first homosexual encounter in a Sexaholics Anonymous meeting is probably the most tedious part of either of the two films.

So, if you expect a sequel to aim higher than essentially making the same movie again, I’d recommend The Dark Knight or The Godfather Part II. But if you liked these three characters as much as I did the first time around and are up for watching more of the same (just this time even more out of control), consider this my first ever Assholes Watching Movies recommendation to you.

Want another asshole’s opinion? See Sean’s review of Horrible Bosses 2 here.

Horrible Bosses 2

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I am in the same boat as Jay when it comes to Horrible Bosses – I do not remember the first movie at all. That probably means we went to the drive-in and were not watching the movie, which is fine by me! Anyway, I do remember watching Horrible Bosses 2 because I just saw it last night, and laughed a lot.

I laughed even though this movie is not particularly clever or innovative and really makes no sense when you think about it (spoiler alert: why not try to sell your 100,000 Shower Buddies to someone else?) until you take Jamie Foxx at his word that NickKurtDale are the craziest criminals he has ever met. They just like doing this sort of stuff and I guess on that reasoning it makes perfect sense that when they run into adversity they start hatching illegal schemes (which may or may not involve zip lines, trampolines and skateboards).

I laughed because these three guys (Jason Bateman, Jason Sudekis and Charlie Day) have such good chemistry and clearly are having fun every step of the way, often at each other’s expense. And I don’t think that’s character-driven, because there isn’t a whole lot of acting going on. That’s not even a criticism – I wasn’t there to see acting, I was there to laugh, and mission accomplished on that front. It’s not an Oscar winner but it’s about as much fun as you can have at the movies when the drive-in is closed for the winter.

Well executed and surprisingly good, Horrible Bosses 2 is one to watch, preferably with a few good friends who could help you plan a kidnaping if it ever comes to that.

Starred Up

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I’m a sucker for any art form that has grit, character, heart and integrity. Starred Up has it all. Set in a modern day prison (Mark, this is what a real prison looks like) the story picks up as a 19 year old (Jack O’Connell) is sent to an adult prison for an undisclosed crime. From the beginning I was enthralled by the young O’Connell who not only plays his character with intensity and accuracy, but manages to be quite endearing regardless of his aggressive and sometimes unpredictable behaviour. It doesn’t take time for O’Connell to feel at home within the penitentiary walls. It’s almost like coming to prison was all part of a master plan to reunite with his estranged father. The cast, which I did not recognize by name but rather by previous works is composed of Rupert Friend (Homeland) Ben Mendelsohn (The Dark Night Rises, Killing Them Softly) is also quite stellar. Mendelsohn, who is serving time in prison, is tasked with playing O’Connell’s caring but ultimately inadequate father.

As part of the prison routine, O’Connell is forced to attend group therapy. In comes Rupert Friend, an ultra-caring counselor who seems to have O’Connell’s best interest at heart and shows hints of a checkered past himself and turns out to be our delinquent’s only chance at redemption. It’s safe to assume O’Connell has very little upbringing. His strengths consist of aggressiveness, fearlessness and a strong will to stand up for himself amongst a cohort of rapists, murderers and thieves.

For me, the true villain of this film is poor parenting, which left me with existential questions. For example, is it fair for a child to be thrown in prison because his father was an incompetent fuck? Is the prison system the right place for most criminals? Especially young ones. Are there any decent alternatives? And also, why is prison culture something we accept as a society? We are all aware that people get raped, stabbed, shanked, shived, beaten and even killed in prison. So why is that acceptable? Because they’re are criminals? That doesn’t fly with me.

Throughout the movie the director, David Mackenzie, tackles themes of abandonment, social justice, family and in the end our humanity. We all go through trials and tribulation but unfortunately who you were born to will, more often than not, tell you what your trials will be and what tribulations await.

I totally recommend this film to anyone who enjoys good cinema. The script, the cinematography (which I know very little about) the acting, and the soul of this movie were all very satisfying to me.

7.5 out of 10

A Madea Christmas

Road to Christmas

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Julia Wise is the Martha Stewart of the Hallmark Christmas universe. This year her producer, Maggie (Jessy Schram), is planning a live Christmas Special, but Julia and the network are worried that it won’t be the ratings draw they want and need. So Julia brings in her son, Danny (Chad Michael Murray), to co-produce. He’s stepping on all ten of Maggie’s toes, but she’s professional and intends to grin and bear it. Whatever it takes!

His first suggestion to improve the live Christmas Special is to pre-tape some MV5BODAxMWNjMDMtZGE3NC00ZWYwLTg3NjgtM2ExYmNmOTc5OTM4XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQyOTc3NDU@._V1_ segments. Catch that? Live TV. Pre-taped. Does not compute, right? So yeah, toe stepping accomplished, now they’re butting heads too. But as a compromise, they decide to cross the country filming Christmas oddities, like snowman relay races (you’ll have to watch to find out), and Maggie’s secret goal is also to assemble the Wise Men (ie, Danny’s brothers, who resent the Special and their mom’s Hollywood version of Christmas) for extra holiday cheer. But, you know, for the record – two can play that game.

Anyway, you’re never going to believe what’s about to brew between these two attractive competitors. And by “never believe” I mean that you’ll of course see it coming from the opening credits because Hallmark follows a strict formula from which is never deviates. Homogeneity is their brand. People who watch Hallmark’s Countdown to Christmas want a white man to hold a white woman under the mistletoe after a brief and tumultuous courtship while the set decorators slap greenery on anything that isn’t moving. I bet the rest of us can find something more interesting to talk about.

What odd holiday traditions does your family observe? Maggie’s does a white elephant gift exchange that involves an actual white elephant. Growing up, we left Santa Doritos and daiquiris rather than milk and cookies because my Mom insisted that’s what he’d prefer, and she was right, because they were always gone. Growing up, my Mom’s family would do a Réveillon; her family would attend midnight mass on Christmas Eve, then return home to a big meal and gifts from Santa. Christmas day was spent going visiting, collecting people as they went, the soberest doing the driving, until the last house of the night had 30 guests all at once. Today we do a modified version, with the believers bundling off to church on the 24th while the rest of us stay behind to warm up the finger food and mix the drinks we’ll pass around once everyone gets back. No gifts though. Those are left for The Big Reveal on Christmas morning, when Santa has left a sea of unwrapped gifts – mine on the love seat, Jessie’s on the chair, with Jana and Tessa splitting the couch. It’s weird, but it’s tradition. What’s yours?

Shrek the Halls

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Shrek, Fiona, Donkey, and all the friends we’re accustomed to finding down in the swamp gather round the ogre’s hearth for a heartwarming Christmas celebration.

Okay, not quite. First off, Shrek is no fan of Christmas. Generally speaking, ogres aren’t, apparently. So this first Christmas with Fiona and the triplets is also Shrek’s first Christmas period. It has caught him unawares. But Shrek is nothing if not a good dad and devoted husband, so he sets about creating the perfect holiday for his little family. Look closely and you may notice his decor consists of eyeballs shrek and his roast goose is not, in fact, a goose, or fowl of any kind. He’s an ogre and he’s doing his best.

Of course, Shrek gets more than he bargained for when his whole extended family shows up uninvited – Donkey, Puss In Boots, the blind mice, the three little pigs, the whole gang’s assembled, and in true Shrek fashion, the first they do is throw a dance party, because no Shrek movie is complete without a montage or two set to high-energy, kid-friendly music.

Shrek The Halls is a short, 30 minute holiday special that you can find on Netflix. It’s got nothing new to add to the Shrek cannon, it’s just a happy holiday happening, and it can be happening right now, in your bedroom, in your living room, anywhere you need some holiday cheer that’s fun for the whole family.