This may be the most difficult movie review I’ve ever written, and it’s not me, Serenity, it’s YOU. Serenity is a movie that defies reviewing, because the only thing worth talking about is the thing I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t talk about.
It came and went in theatres without a blip, which is strange for a movie with two bankable Oscar winners. Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway play exes. Baker (McConaughey) lives on a remote island where he fishes for a tuna. Not tuna. A tuna. This tuna is his Moby Dick. He’s obsessed. He pays the bills by taking tourists out on fishing expeditions, though as his first mate Duke (Djimon Hounsou) is quick to remind him that actually he’s technically not paying his bills lately. Baker’s pursuit of Moby Tuna is pretty single-minded and increasingly urgent. The only other hobby he has is missing his son.
But then his ex wife Karen (Anne Hathaway) appears out of nowhere, and she has a 
small favour to ask. She’s married to this Cuban mob boss (maybe. I didn’t catch this myself – Sean supplied this detail) who hits her. And Baker’s poor son witnesses this. So could Baker, please, pretty please, kill him? Just a small favour. For old time’s sake. All he’d really have to do is get him drunk and push him overboard. Let the sharks do the dirty work.
Do you think Baker says yes?
Just because a murder is easy doesn’t make it right. And just because someone is violent doesn’t give you a free pass for doing the same, and worse. Right? Or is it sort of justified? And does it surprise you that in fact, it doesn’t matter. Whether or not Baker kills Karen’s abusive husband (played by Jason Clarke, who always plays the terrible husband) doesn’t matter. There are bigger things at play here.
But I’m being a good girl so I won’t even hint at what it is. The movie hints enough for the both of us, and to be honest, the twist wasn’t exactly hairpin. For an observant sleuth such as myself, it was pretty near a straightaway. Which is why I haven’t rated this movie very highly. It sort of negates itself as a murder-thriller, but it fails to surprise at this second level as well. I think if they had tried to make the movie less commercially appealing, and not marketed it as a straight up thriller, it would have been more appealing. The premise is interesting. So this movie really represents a lost opportunity, and that’s something I will always mourn.
Thompson). I mean, her look is early Madonna but her name is Beverly, which implies Mom jeans and shapeless sweaters, and her sound is more 80s power ballad, and she’s played by Lea Thompson, and it’s hard to sit here in 2019 and see how exactly she was ever considered an It Girl. Beautiful? Hot? She’s mousy and thin-lipped and mostly whiny. But anyway, let’s pretend she’s a hot as shit punk rock girl who somehow befriends a duck – and finds him sexually attractive.
exactly those issues in better movies than this a hundred times before. And Williams just doesn’t have the allure of Johnny Cash or the talent of Ray Charles or the magnetism of James Brown. He’s just an entitled white dude who made life rough for himself. He made some music and then he died. Hank Williams may be a legend, but you’d never know it from this movie. It makes him seem banal and tiresome. And that’s gotta be hard to do to a man known as the King of Country Music, influencer of Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan, prolific song writer, winner of a posthumous Pulitzer for craftsmanship.
to great lengths to honour his brilliant mind and the world’s most esteemed detective. Will Ferrell’s Sherlock is also supposed to be brilliant, but Cohen can’t find a way to express that while still being funny. The result is a rim shot – you know, when the basketball can’t decide whether to score or not, so it just sort of hobbles around in midair, keeping everyone in suspense? Only the movie’s tone is the basketball, and it circles the rim for so long that you’d rather just walk away in disgust than find it whether it eventually lands.
including Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Larry Johnson, Muggsy Bogues and Shawn Bradley. Jordan is then recruited by Bugs Bunny to play with a bunch of other cartoon characters, with some help from Bill Murray and no help at all from Wayne Knight, as the cartoons take on the aliens in a basketball game to determine whether the aliens will enslave those loony ‘toons as an amusement park attraction.
If LeBron’s career arc is any indication, the next Space Jam is destined to be technically superior to Jordan’s original but lacking the same emotional core. That doesn’t bode well for the reboot when there was no substance or emotion to the first Space Jam at all. Watching it again only makes one wonder why anyone bothered to make it in the first place, as well as why James would want to invite any more comparisons to Jordan’s six for six NBA Finals record against LeBron’s three wins and six losses in his attempts (which I don’t begrudge but I’m in the minority on that point). On the other hand, since the original Space Jam has nothing to offer, the reboot can’t possibly be worse!
childhood, but the ride is even older than he is – it opened in 1969 in Disneyland, and 1971 in Disney World, and both are still operating today. You ride in a doom-buggy through a dark, spook-filled mansion. To this day, Sean is disappointed that his little sister ruined the ride for him – her little body occupying the space between Sean and his dad meant that they didn’t see the ghost in their cart, but two-person carts are treated to a spectral sight between them, among many other spooky tricks.
workaholic and they’re supposed to be at the lake with their kids this weekend, but instead he can’t resist a detour to check out a potential listing – a cobwebbed, derelict mansion. Its “master” Gracey (Nathanial Parker) is reclusive and his butler, Ramsley (Terence Stamp), is…protective. Jennifer Tilly, Wallace Shawn, and Dina Waters round out the the mansion’s creepy staff.
music spectacle, and have done so in Walt Disney World since 1971 – and they do to this day, in a slightly revamped version. I find it fascinating that park-goers in 2019 continue to be entertained satisfactorily by “technology” that was obsolete before most of them were born (if the popularity of the Millennial Pink Minnie mouse ears are any indicator of the park’s demographics). And yet the bears can still be found strumming banjos and talking to taxidermied heads in Frontierland.
adopted. The only kinship he feels is toward The Country Bears, a defunct country-rock band made up of bears, who have since broken up. When Beary runs away from home to The Country Bears’ favourite venue, he finds it derelict, and about to be torn down. In a bid to save it, he tries to reunite the band for a fundraiser reunion concert. It’s a bafflingly bad film with zero laughs. I don’t know how it got made, I don’t know which 17 people went to a theatre to see it, and I don’t know how The Muppets got away with stealing this exact plot line 9 years later. And yes that’s Christopher Walken in the photo.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 