Tag Archives: Sucks ass

These movies are to be avoided at all costs. The only good thing about them is probably our review.

Joy

Joy is joyless. There is nothing entertaining about watching Joy and her family of unsympathetic characters make bad decisions. And even when Joy eventually triumphs, it’s not fulfilling in the least because by then you are tired of her.

Apparently this is all based on a real person, Joy Mangano. According to Wikipedia, the real Joy is a big deal on the Home Shopping Network and invented the mop in this movie along with a bunch of other stuff. The real Joy is now a multimillionaire and an executive producer of Joy the movie. I didn’t know of her beforehand and in hindsight I would rather have kept it that way. I did not find Joy’s story interesting and it’s certainly not entertaining. The only way I can rationalize this movie’s existence is as an ego trip for the real Joy.

So naturally, I am surprised this is nominated for a Golden Globe in the Musical or Comedy category for two reasons. First, it’s not a good movie. Second, it’s not funny at all. I didn’t laugh once.

I’m surprised as well that Jennifer Lawrence is nominated for best actress. I don’t think she gives a bad performance but there’s nothing here worthy of recognition. Joy needed to be a sympathetic character in order for this movie to work, but she’s not. There’s nothing Lawrence could have done to change that, it’s an inherent flaw of the underlying character. You don’t feel sorry for Joy because she’s letting her family (and ex-family) take advantage of her, so of course her life is shitty. She keeps letting that happen over and over, and I quickly stopped caring whether she would have a happy ending. All I wanted after about 20 minutes was for the movie to end.

But because of those Golden Globe nominations, I stuck with it. I felt obligated and I figured Joy must turn around sometime. Well, it doesn’t. Joy is a chore all the way through, which is ironic considering Joy is a movie based around a cleaning product. I give Joy a score of four Miracle Mops out of ten.

Melodrama… in 3D!: Part 1

19 Replies

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.

The Ridiculous 6

53 Replies

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.

Love the Coopers

26 Replies

Last week, Jay and Sean got to see The Night Before, Seth Rogen’s tale of Christmas debauchery. That I wound up seeing the latest holiday offering from the producer of The Family Stone instead wasn’t- as you might think- because I drew the short straw at the Assholes Christmas party. My family is just REALLY into Christmas.

For me, it’s not Christmas until I’ve tried every Starbucks Christmas drink on the menu at least once, wept to the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, helped my colleague understand her granddaughter’s Christmas list, and shared the Swiss Chalet festive meal with my parents. Because my visit home last week happened to coincide with our first snowfall, it seemed the perfect time to scratch the Festive Meal (chicken leg, cramberry sauce, stuffing, and french fries) off the list. After supper, which was well worth the wait, tradition dictates that it’s time for a Christmas movie.

The Coopers have clearly not had their festive meal yet because their Christmas is getting off to a Bah Humbuggy start. We meet Elanor (Olivia Wilde) in an airport bar on Christmas Eve where she is stalling and trying to gather up enough nerve to face her family’s Christmas. Her brother Hank (Ed Helms) can’t bring himself to tell his family that he has been out of work for a month. Sam and Charlotte (John Goodman and Diane Keaton), their parents, are getting a divorce but are putting off breaking the news until after Christmas. Charlotte’s sister Emma (Marisa Tomei) has just been arrested by a closeted gay cop (Anthony Mackie) for shoplifting. Meanwhile, Charlotte and Emma’s father (Alan Arkin)’s world has come crashing down when he learns that his favourite waitress (Amanda Seyfried) is moving away.

I didn’t enjoy this movie as much as I’d like to tell my parents that I did but didn’t hate it as much as I’d like to tell the internet that I did either. Featuring one Avenger, two former Dunder Mifflin employees, and three Oscar winners, it does its best to appeal to a modern audience. Sam frequently and unintentionally misquotes Joy to the World and Silent Night to make them sound dirty. Elanor meets and clashes with a Republican soldier (Jake Lacy) at a bar. There’s even a toddler with the adorable catchphrase “You’re such a dick!”. Coopers is still a holiday sap like me though with all the predictable family reconcilations and unlikely displays of Christmas spirit.

That we’ve seen it all before is not the only reason Love the Coopers feels insincere. The unusually talented cast phones it in, probably because they know they can afford to. Almost all of them have appeared in their share of good movies over the last couple of years and seem to be counting on the strength in numbers that come with a cast of so many recognizable faces. Wilde is a notable exception. Whether she is the only one on set who actually likes this script or is somehow better at hiding it than her more experienced co-stars, she plays her scenes with Lacy as if she’s sure these are the ones they’ll remember her for. I wouldn’t nominate her for any awards but her confidence does make her dynamic with the Republican soldier the most endearing in the film.

Overall, Love the Coopers earned some big laughs from the Silvercity crowd last week while working in some genuinely sad and tender moments but way too many jokes don’t connect (Mostly from trying too hard. Did I mention that Steve Martin is the narrator?) and mostly feels trite (mostly from not trying hard enough).

For a chance to win a Holiday Prize Pack with a GOOD Holiday movie, tell us about your own favourite Holiday movie in the Comments section of this post. Check our Contests page for more details.

The Visit

34 Replies

Can we please put an end to the “found footage” genre? It worked in the Blair Witch Project but since then it just comes off as a distraction and a crutch. The Visit is the worst example I’ve seen because it tries to add a new wrinkle, i.e., that the 15 year old protagonist wants to make a documentary for her mom.

Except it’s an absolutely idiotic wrinkle because guess what? We don’t see the finished product here [SPOILER ALERT #1] even though she survives! [END SPOILER ALERT #1] It makes no sense at all for her to make comments in the movie like “oh, this would be a good opening shot”, or leave in her warm-up interview questions, or present her filming chronologically rather than in the order she’s talking about in the film, and while at the same time leaving no doubt that she has taken the time to do quite a bit of editing because there are two cameras on the go and we cut back and forth between them as we would if we were watching a regular movie. So if this child prodigy is so serious about her craft, why didn’t she complete the movie before letting us (and presumably her mom) see it?

Plus, at one point [SPOILER ALERT #2] the crazy old grandma (who is supposedly out of her mind at the time) picks up the camera, moves it upstairs, drops it so we (and, when they review the footage the next day, the kids in the movie) can see perfectly her threatening knife work that is being performed 20 feet away from the camera, then she picks the camera back up and puts it where she found it, then presumably she goes back to being out of her mind. [END SPOILER ALERT #2]

So what the hell, M. Night Shyamalan? What is the point? All any of this pretense did was take me completely out of the movie and make me madder at you than I was after seeing The Last Airbender at the drive in. And I don’t know whether the Lady in the Water references were intentional but either way it was a terrible idea to go there.

There is nothing to recommend about this movie at all. It is not new. It is not smart. It is not scary. It is not entertaining in any way. Jamie knew the “twist” about one minute into the movie. The protagonists are annoying caricatures (terrible 12 year old white rapper and pretentious 15 year old kid filmmaker) who further took me out of the movie because if anything I was rooting for them to die. And then when we finally get to the part where everything comes to light, it’s over in 30 seconds and I think it would have been entirely unsatisfying even if I had cared about the kids’ survival.

The Visit is a terrible movie. It is among M. Night Shyamalan’s worst, and at this point those depths ought to be very hard for him to re-achieve (and this is coming from a guy who hasn’t seen The Happening or After Earth). Is there any way we can convince him to just call it a day?

This is a big fat zero for me. I absolutely despised it and I want an hour and a half of my life back.

TIFF 2015: Hardcore

7 Replies

Midnight Madness coordinator Colin Geddes is a sick son of a bitch and I love him for it. If it weren’t for him, I never would have discovered The Raid or God Bless America, two of my favourites from TIFF 2011. His love both of cinema and ultra-violence has made Midnight Madness a regular stop on my TIFF tour.

To be fair, I only managed to sit through half of Saturday night’s premiere of Hardcore. From director Ilya Naishuller, who apparently used a similar style in a popular online short, takes an entirely POV approach to his tale of a supersoldier’s quest to rescue his wife from a psychotic psychic paramilitary leader feels like a failed experiment. Designed to put us right in the middle of the action, Naishuller’s style has the opposite effect. Seeing everything through the eyes of our badass hero, it can be impossible to tell exactly what’s going on, with most of the action movie money shots happening offscreen . The main problem, I think, is that we can never tell what the character is feeling. We see our hero run through his eyes but we never sense the hero’s feet hitting the pavement. When he jumps out of a plane, I never felt like I was jumping with him.

Of course,again- I left halfway through. Did anyone stay until the end? What did you think of Hardcore?

Terminator: Genisys

13 Replies

There were already a lot of strikes against this movie and then to add insult to injury, I had to double check the “correct” spelling of Genisys. The agony this movie is inflicting on me seems endless. And with that, I have tipped my hand as to how this review is going to end.

Terminator: Genisys is a complete mess, which sadly has been a recurring theme for this franchise over the last 20 years. So in that regard, I can understand why rebooting it makes sense, particularly since the original Judgment Day was in 1997, so when that came and went it made the franchise feel a little dated.

But the way they handled the reboot just trampled all over the first two films, which I still consider to be two of the best sci-fi movies of all time (with the second one being one of my all-time favourite movies period, having seen it at least 25 times because when 14-year-old me was in a hotel for a swim meet one weekend, I figured out how to watch pay-per-view for free, so had this movie on repeat every minute I was in the room). I’m not even sure if I need to be careful with the big twist, since James Cameron spoiled it for me repeatedly in Cineplex’s pre-show.

Without even referring specifically to it I may still give it away. My complaint is simple: somehow someone decided that a good plot twist would be to do something to one of the franchise’s main characters that renders every movie to date, including this one, totally irrelevant. I have no idea why that ever seemed like a good plan. Sure, it makes it easy to put a new timeline in place going forward, but even if that was the plan, the movie fails as a reboot because the ending leaves us with no momentum whatsoever and no reason to anticipate the next movie in the series (if there even is one after this debacle).

I often complain about reboots and, in particular, rehashes of origin stories as a reboot mechanism. Well, this reboot mechanism is worse. And that has me really shaking my head in disbelief, that somehow they found a way to be worse than the lazy reboots, because it seems they did really try with this one. Unfortunately, it’s just so misguided and so unfaithful to what has come before that it offends me. It brings me almost to the level of hatred I had for the Star Wars prequels. Terminator and Terminator 2 were movies I absolutely loved as a teenager and basically, this movie is the equivalent of Skynet sending a robot back to 1991 to repeatedly punch me in the groin while I was watching T2 for the first time, thereby changing the course of history and preventing me from ever liking it. And this time, the robots won.

I’m not even giving this a rating. I’m too angry.

Pixels

17 Replies

I should have known better than to get my hopes up. Mediocrity is as good as we have gotten from Adam Sandler and Kevin James over the last five years plus, and even that “height” has been rarely obtained. But then the Pixels trailer hit and tapped into that latent 80s kid vibe that Wreck-It-Ralph and Ready Player One both nailed, and I suddenly had this irrational hope that this movie would make me feel the same way, despite who was behind it.

But this movie about a world threatened by 80s videogames is not a disaster movie; it’s just a disaster. There are a few laughs but it’s awful to see how badly the movie wasted its concept. This could have, and should have, been something fun. It was a great summer movie idea. Instead, 95% of the funny parts are in the three minute trailer. They got me a few other times with stupid stuff but mainly I was just thinking about how this seemed to have all been thrown together in a week, and how much the writers must have hated the source material to not even try to have any fun with it (really, it’s like they didn’t even watch a Wreck-It-Ralph trailer, let alone the movie).

To say much more would be to give the movie too much of my energy, so I’ll just paraphrase Billy Madison’s high school principal and say I am now dumber for having watched this movie, I award Pixels three 80s videogame points out of ten, and may god have mercy on Adam Sandler’s soul.

The Forger

21 Replies

For those who like a little Kids with Cancer with their heist movies, John Travolta’s latest may be for you.

Travolta plays Raymond Cutter, a skilled art forger who, upon learning that his teenage son is terminally ill, begs his old crime boss to pull some strings to get him released from prison with only months left to go on his sentence. Of course, nothing’s free in these kinds of movies and his boos wants something in return: forge me a Monet and steal me the real one. Not an easy task under the best of times but even harder when you’re trying to bond with your estranged sick son and your estranged Dad at the same time.

I had a short conversation with Khalid from The Blazing Reel last week about Travolta’s many questionable choices but I was amazed when watching The Forger how bad things really have gotten for him. I’m amazed that this wasn’t a straight-to DVD release. As I implied in my opening paragraph, the pairing of the sick kid family drama and caper picture feels awkward and a little crass. Travolta, as well as Christopher Plummer and Tye Sheridan (who play Travolta’s father and son), really seem to be trying but the family drama really doesn’t give them much to work with. Cutter spends most of his bonding time with his son by taking him to see a prostitute and teaching him to forge paintings. The father-son story takes up so much of the film’s running time that little time is left over for the planning and execution of the heist itself, which is pretty much rushed through at the end.

Still, I can’t claim indifference. I found myself wanting things to work out for these three characters. Knowing that Travolta himself has lost a son made it impossible for me to write off the story as completely trite. Unfortunately, there’s just not a single new twist or idea to be found in this movie that tries to be two movies without delivering on either one.

Paul Blarts: Mall Cops 1 & 2

9 Replies

It should be wonderful when a sequel tops its predecessor. Think Godfather 2 or Empire Strikes Back. It’s a very rare occurrence, and you would think anytime it happens the sequel would be memorable, since if a sequel got greenlit the original movie must have been decent at least, right? If you felt safe making that assumption, like I did, now is the time to reconsider. Because Kevin James and Adam Sandler have gone out of their way to prove us all wrong.

I did not see Paul Blart 1 until Friday. I didn’t try to avoid it at the time but did not expect it to be much good. And I was okay with it being mediocre and also with seeing it at some point. So that point was two days ago. It was surprisingly not funny. Like I was just supposed to sort of cheer for Paul because he was the main guy. I think? It was more confusing than anything, really, as to why this mediocre idea didn’t even get to the mediocre level.

And if they had stopped at one there would have been nothing more to say. It wrapped up, Paul Blart won, he foiled all the bad guys and got the girl. So he could stop being sad and start being a more respected mall cop. Or something, I mean, it didn’t seem like he had more story to tell. But then, six years after that, for some reason a sequel got made.

There can’t have been anyone asking for a sequel. I don’t know how anyone could have thought this was a good idea. But here we are, with Paul Blart 2 playing this week at the drive in. We hadn’t been in a while because we’ve been busy, and we were semi-free, and it was a nice night, so really, it didn’t matter what was playing.

Paul Blart 2 is pretty much Paul Blart 1. I think if anything everyone was a little more practiced, like the first was a dress rehearsal for the second, so the second turned out a bit more polished. The second one is a slightly better movie, just comparing them straight up. But it is still mediocre at best. If it’s at your local drive in then go. Or you could consider it as an option on a plane, I mean, I’d probably rewatch Jurassic World instead but maybe it can be your 3rd or 4th option if your flight is crossing the Pacific Ocean. That’s about the best thing I can say about Paul Blart 2: it’s slightly better than the first one but it is probably not as good as rewatching something you already saw and liked.

I will give this franchise a combined rating of half a segway out of two. Because there’s probably a supercut of these two movies that might be entertaining but even then I think I would be better off rewatching Jurassic World and Mad Max: Fury Road and Inside Out and Furious 7 on my next plane ride (and since it’s to San Francisco that’s more than enough to fill my flight).