Tag Archives: Sucks ass

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

Game Over, Man!

First of all, I don’t like punctuation in movie titles.

Second, it’s possible that I both consciously repressed having watched this film on Friday night and unconsciously blamed Sean for having made me watch it all weekend long. And I’ve only just made that connection in the cold, cold light of Monday morning.

Alex, Darren, and Joel are members of the self-styled “dude crew” – which is just 3 weird guys who are hotel maids. Which, since we’re on the topic, in what universe does it take 3 maids to clean one room? Well, the same universe that employs 3 white men instead of 1 brown woman I suppose. But anyway, with Daniel Stern running the hotel, I suppose this flimsy premise isn’t the most unbelievable thing that’s going to happen in the next hour and a half.

So anyway. Bae, some billionaire’s son, is visiting the hotel which means two things: a) the stoner maids are going to pitch him their video game idea because they sure aren’t busy cleaning any rooms or anything, and b) Bae’s own security team is going to hold him and a whole bunch of other hotel guests hostage for money and the love of explosions. Will Alex (Adam Devine), Darren (Anders Holm) and Joel (Blake MV5BNzQ5YmQxZDMtNjEyNi00MmVhLWFkMTQtMTk0MjQzNWQwOTc5XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMzcyNDk1NTk@._V1_SX1777_CR0,0,1777,999_AL_ Anderson) step up and save the day? Haha, no. Not even close. Not even unintentionally. I mean, they’ll mistakenly believe in their own hero potential at times (I extrapolate this from the slow-motion hero walks they do down dingy hotel hallways) but they’re never sober enough, smart enough, or organized enough to get shit done. But don’t worry for a single second that there won’t be enough bone-headed antics to go around: there will be blood. And guts. And digits and limbs and pieces of face sprayed all over this damn hotel.

These are the same idiots who brought you Workaholics for 7 agonizing seasons, so if you think that’s funny, this movie will provide you more of the same. But if your tolerance for lowbrow bro humour is as nonexistent as mine, and you like your movies to make sense, and baffling b-list cameos don’t impress you much, and you’ve never been all that curious about human cheek prosciutto, then Game Over, Man! should be a hard pass for you as it should have been for me.

The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter

12 Replies

It’s hard to imagine a movie more out of touch with the greater culture right now. In the era of #neveragain, this movie puts an assault rifle in the hands of a gleeful, stupid 12 year old, and expects it to be funny.

Buck Ferguson (Josh Brolin, 40 lbs heavier, with an inexcusable mustache) is an asshat hunter who makes his living making juvenile hunting videos caught on film by his faithful manservant\camera man, Don (Danny McBride). Now, I don’t care for (white) hunters any day of the week. Unless you’re preserving a (native) way of life, food can be purchased in a civilized manner at the super market, and anything else is just fulfilling a latent desire for murder. So I already despise Buck and his way of life, but now he’s bring along his son Jaden (Montana Jordan), ostensibly to “reconnect” after divorcing his mother, but actually because he hopes it’ll be ratings gold.

If arming a preteen doesn’t nominate Buck for worst father of the year already, he’s also just checked out and uninterested. His son has plenty of other hobbies, but Buck either ignores them or flat-out forbids them (or tosses them in the river, because he’s an intolerant bastard). The only acceptable form of bonding is hunting, and the only acceptable form of hunting is to stalk a beautiful animal and then watch the life leave its frightened eyes as it bleeds out all over your boots.

I would like to believe this kind of insensitive fatherhood and unfathomable personhood is a dying way of life, but whether or not I’m right, it’s definitely no joke. I’m pretty sure I didn’t crack a smile this whole entire movie because as long as a trigger is twitching near fingers that aren’t even finished growing yet, I could not take my eye off the gun(s). It made me angry. As tens of thousands of kids walked out of class to protest their continued slaughter at the hands of fellow students, armed to the teeth, the world just doesn’t have room for this kind of “entertainment”, or for the kind of people who would be entertained by it. Shame on Netflix for picking this one up.

The Vault

19 Replies

Two sisters (Taryn Manning, Francesca Eastwood) agree to pull a bank heist in order to save their brother. The siblings are split up, some guarding the hostages while others go in search of money. The bank manager (James Franco) sends them downstairs to a creepy subterranean bank vault that’s haunted as shit. The stuff happening down there makes the bank robbery seem like a cakewalk. Those hostages don’t know how good they’ve got it! And the bank robbers don’t know what they’ve gotten themselves into.

MV5BNTUyMjlmZmEtNjIzMC00NmI5LWE1YTEtNjc5YTg1ZGFjOWMwXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyODU3NTQxMw@@._V1_ The criminals are surprised how south this has gone, and how quickly. How are the cops already here? The tellers reluctantly tell them: the bank is haunted. The ghosts are the victims of another bank heist, an extraordinarily bloody and cruel one, and they’re not about to let another one go down if they can help it. Of course, you can warn the people in a horror movie all you want; they never listen. They never listen!

A known and admitted chicken shit, I can attest that some of this got to me. But some of the horror also struck me as downright silly, and I do not believe this was remotely intended as a horror-comedy. Horror-heist, perhaps, but it clearly fails at both of these at the same damn time. I started this movie two months ago (before James Franco was even on the #MeToo hit list) and abandoned it, too freaked out to keep going. The quick editing is the most effective – flashes of evil do more to prey on my imagination. I only took it up again in broad daylight, with 4 dogs cuddling me, and Sean wall-papering nearby (dogs pick up on tone – do you think the score of a horror movie is as disturbing to them as it is to me?).

The truth is, this movie wasn’t worth the extraordinary measures I’m forced to undertake just to survive it. I tend to stay away from scary movies because I know my limitations and I’m generally not good for anything worse than say Shaun of the Dead, but preferably ParaNorman. However, some exceptions must be made. Last year I knew that Get Out was one of the ages, a movie that transcends its genre. I saw it in theatres and kept myself from hyperventilating to death. Before that, I somehow managed to sit through The Witch at the New Hampshire Film Festival. It didn’t kill me but it sure as hell tried; its eerie atmosphere made for an incredible film but for me, it was just too much. My panic was so intense that for most of the movie I was simply eyeing the exits and praying for escape.

Now I’m on my way to SXSW where the opening film is a horror called A Quiet Place, directed and co-written by John Krasinski, whom I cannot believe would do me like this. The movie stars both himself and his lovely with Emily Blunt and they play the parents of a family forced to live in utter and complete silence, or else some unknown but terrifying thing will hunt and kill them. The trailer made me pee a bit. So how, dear readers, am I going to get through this one? Please, send your tips and tricks for surviving this movie. The gore doesn’t bother me. It’s the anticipation, the quiet moments, which this film will be filled to the brim with, fuck you very much John Krasinksi. I’ll be the one doing lamaze-type breathing, with or without a paper bag over my head. But don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll write a totally objective review!

The Strangers: Prey at Night

20 Replies

I’ve avoided slasher flicks ever since I was 12 and the idea of Friday the 13th (which I’d never seen but had the plot recited to me on a canoe trip the previous summer) made me run in terror anytime I was alone in the woods at night. Since then, I’ve seen very, very few straight-up slashers (Halloween being a rare excepti Strangers 7-5-17-6620.dng on and a standout) because, honestly, they’re almost always really stupid. The Strangers: Prey at Night is a very good example of “really stupid”, and that is about the nicest thing I can say about it.

Since I really don’t care for this type of movie, I may be dead wrong, but I have always thought the appeal of these films can be distilled down to three basic elements:

Clever kill sequences;
The filmmaker toying with the audience’s expectations, delivering a humourous jolt when we think a scare is coming, or vice versa; and
Seeing idiots get what is coming to them, namely being murdered in some kind of clever kill sequence.

Combine those elements with a memorable mass murderer and you’ve got a franchise on your hands!

The Strangers: Prey at Night has none of those things. Sure, the killers wear weird masks, but doesn’t almost every murderer? Otherwise, these killers just walk around menacingly, more out of obligation than for any particular purpose, and don’t have any discernable motivation, backstory, or personality traits. The only memorable thing is that the killers have a penchant for 80s music. Like, will search the radio presets until they find some, even if there is a potential victim right there for the murdering, so they are pretty big fans.

And there are no clever or humourous sequences, just monotony. The people who die get stabbed. Also, the people who live get stabbed. None of the encounters consists of anything more than that, save for the 80s synth-pop blaring consistently while the fights take place. Worst of all, we are forced to sit through about 25 minutes of family “drama” before the killing even really begins.

So who, exactly, is this movie for? You will have to tell me because it is not for me or for anyone I know. I also don’t think it would have worried little 12-year-old me in the least, which is the biggest strike of all since back then I was terrified by the very idea of the phantom zone from Superman 2. Basically, if you are looking for a mix of synth-pop and grisly violence, skip this film and stick with the holy trinity: Halloween, Drive, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

Burying The Ex

10 Replies

Max, an inveterate nice guy, moves in with his girlfriend Evelyn, who turns out to be a bit of a bitch. You know, classic manipulative, controlling stuff that makes you wonder what kind of a nitwit Max is to have sold his gas-guzzling car and given up delicious, delicious meat for her in the first place. But anyway, eventually Max grows a bit of a backbone and decides to break up with her…but before he can do the damage, a bus obliterates her to hell. Evelyn is now his dead ex-girlfriend.

Which is the next best thing to a breakup, I guess, in that he can now make a move on the hot girl at the ice cream place. They’re so well-suited because she has streaks of fake purple hair, and they both like monsters and cemeteries and stuff! Unfortunately, Max Photo by Suzanne Tenner had made a promise on the devil-genie to love Evelyn forever, and she takes that shit seriously. So seriously that she digs herself out of her cold, dark grave and returns as a horny little zombie. Which may sound appealing until you account for the slipping flesh and her commitment to making Max’s life a living hell. And that’s before her cravings for brains start!

Anton Yelchin plays the nice guy, which makes sense. I miss Anton Yelchin. Alexandra Daddario plays the hot ice cream girl, which sort of makes sense, except she’s not a convincing princess of darkness or even just a goth. But she’s got big, pillowy breasts so I guess if I just keep my eyes where the director wants them, I’d have less to complain about. The crazy dead girlfriend is played by Ashley Greene and this is where I really must object. Nobody who’s ever hired her has truly been serious about their movie. There are certain women in Hollywood whose inclusion in a cast signals to the rest of us that this is not going to be a quality movie and is probably not even going to pretend be.

Max and Olivia share a passion for horror, but this movie doesn’t really fit the genre, despite the whole zombie thing. I think it’s supposed to be a comedy, as evidenced by the annoying, low-rent-Jonah-Hill half-brother character who doesn’t even have the decency to be played by actual Jonah Hill. Anyway. I couldn’t take this thing seriously, it sure as heck wasn’t scary, but it wasn’t funny enough (or funny at all) for me to even acknowledge it as a comedy. The makeup and effects are sub-par and the story is so unimaginative to call it derivative would be to give it respect it doesn’t deserve.

Pitch Perfect 3

31 Replies

The Barden Bellas from the first 2 movies are back, but they’ve been replaced. Having finally graduated from college, a new crop of girls is singing acapella at their alma matter and the old Bellas are feeling obsolete. Shitty jobs aren’t panning out and dreams are already broken, and the old Bellas are feeling obsolete (I know! Who would have guessed that majoring in mouth music wasn’t really the best life choice?!). A last ditch effort to reunite comes in an invitation to perform for the troops in a USO show and since the Bellas have literally nothing else going on (except for one unwanted pregnancy), off they go to a warn-torn Spanish resort hotel to do their part.

Now you might think that being in a war zone is the toughest part of this new chapter, but in fact, to the Bellas, because they’re not crazy AT ALL, the worst part is dims competing against bands that play instruments. How dare they! I thought college was supposed to prepare you for the real world but these ladies are literally not even prepared for guitars. Yeesh. (Not to give too much credit to the new “bands”, including Evermoist, led by Ruby Rose, because after seriously mocking the Bellas for being a “cover band”, it turns out they all do covers too! A Cranberries tribute is particularly poignant with the recent death of Dolores O’Riordan.)

Anyway. There was absolutely no call to make a third movie here, and the script strains so hard to justify itself you’ll want to buy it a squatty potty. If you absolutely must watch it, you’ll want to wait until it’s available at home, where you can fast-forward to all the Sia bits and avoid the inane “plot” (though you’ll want to hear John Lithgow sing with an Australian accent at least once, just to say you did). It’s pretty clear that this franchise needs to learn the same lesson the Bellas do: moving on is good.

Every Day

20 Replies

A couple of weeks ago, after yet another heavy snowfall, Sean slid his beautiful car into a dump truck stubbornly parked in the middle of the road. Mournful, he sent me pictures of the damage (he was totally fine, the car incurred some ugly scratches) so that I could send a sympathy bouquet with my deepest condolences. He had his car doctor on speed dial of course, and this week he brought her in for cosmetic surgery. In the meantime, he’s traded in his flashy muscle car for a Toyota Camry rental and it’s destroying his soul. After a 6 minute drive he declared “Everything is backwards!” What, pray tell, is backwards, exactly? Well, the wipers. Well, not the wipers, but the wiper knob, it’s on the other side of the steering wheel. Is that all, Sean? Oh no. Another backwards thing: his car is fast, this one is slow. When I mention this seems more like opposites than backwards, he clearly does not appreciate the difference, or he doesn’t appreciate my pointing it out.

Cut to: a Camry-ride later, we’re at a screening of Every Day, the newest in teen romance. One of the “lead characters” is…well, not a ghost, maybe more like a soul, who migrates MV5BNDQwYTJhYWItNzY1MC00NzM5LWI1YjgtM2ExNzE3MWRiODk1XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNDI4MTE4OTU@._V1_SX1499_CR0,0,1499,999_AL_ to a different teenaged body every day. This entity will henceforth be named A. A. happens to fall in love with a girl named Rhiannon (Angourie Rice). Rhiannon never knows what her love will look like, so she just has to walk around school until she finds a stranger giving her the creeps. That’ll be today’s version of A.

As you can imagine, there are some challenges to dating someone who is, erm, bodily challenged. It’s a lot for a couple of kids to take on. Luckily, these aren’t normal teenagers but the world’s most tolerant, imaginative, understanding teenagers who are so open-minded they might just make this thing work (if only the skeptical\logical adults don’t get in the way). It’s hard to imagine less vain members of the selfie generation – A. runs the gamut from hot cheerleader to the fat sidekick from Spiderman: Homecoming, and yes of course A. chronicles them all on Instagram, because duh.

It seems statistically impossible that, of the more than a dozen young actors who play A., not a single one of them is any good, but this is where the long odds pay off. At some point the casting agent must have just said fuck it and gone for the perfect score, even if it is in the wrong direction. What I’m really grappling with is how old this movie made me feel. I am now so far away from being a teenage girl myself that I can’t even identify what a “cute boy” is anymore. Understand that my mother called me boy-crazy since I was 3; my bedroom walls were plastered in Luke Perry posters, and Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and Joey McIntyre, and Leo, of course. So I used to be a bit of a heartthrob aficionado, not to brag. But now? My hottie-thermometer was stone cold. I could not have distinguished between the “hot boyz” and lint pulled up from between the sofa cushions. The struggle is real, y’all.

In conclusion: if you are a 14 year old girl, proceed with gusto. Everyone else should probably consider carrying a special spray just to ward this one off. Watching this movie is like main-lining progesterone. It hits you in the ovaries so hard I went home and immediately had the period cries.

Sean watched the movie hands clasped, eyes to the ceiling. Was he praying for his own death? We’ll never know. But as we walked back toward the Camry humbly awaiting us in the cinema parking lot, he wondered if it was actually his beloved Mustang simply manifesting itself in the ugly body of a reliable, economical, mid-size sedan. Maybe?

Poop Talk

26 Replies

Poop. Everybody does it; polite people don’t talk about it. Poop Talk features very few polite people. Make no mistake, Poop Talk is a documentary but it will not enlighten you or educate you. Instead it assembles dozens of your favourite comedians and asks them to relate their best bits about poop. Whether or not this documentary will entertain you depends entirely on your tolerance for scatological humour.

Personally, I have likely never laughed at a poop joke. I believe there’s a reason that we build sacred rooms in our homes devoted to just one thing: pooping. Bodily functions are private. Why bother doing them behind closed doors if we then fling the door open and MV5BMTA5ODIxN2ItMTE0My00NjZkLWEyNjEtZTcxNzVhMzQwMzQwXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjMyOTQ5OTA@._V1_ proudly boast about our most disgusting feats? Having recently spent quite a lot of time with nephews aged 3,4, and 6, the phrase “no toilet talk” has left my lips more times than I can count. And now I realize I’m happy to do my part in teaching the future generation what’s appropriate to talk about in public and what’s not if it means no one has to sit through such a “frank” documentary every again.

Nicole Byer, Eric Stonestreet, Rob Coddry, Pete Holmes, Aisha Tyler, the Sklar Brothers, Nick Swardson, Paul Scheer, and Kumail Nanjiani are among the film’s culprits. Each brings a poop story to the table: airplane poops, public restrooms, bidets, sullied pants, ruined Passovers. Nothing is off-limits for this documentary, though it exists in a world where poop is still probably our favourite taboo. We may all be responsible for approximately 365 pounds of it per year, but most of us prefer to do it behind closed doors. Comedians, however, are not normal people. Emancipated from shame, they lay bare their most intimate poop details, and you can choose whether or not to laugh and commiserate. Eric Stonestreet is a notable exception: his list of places he won’t poop is extensive, and almost as long as mine. Thank you, sir, for being the single voice of reason.

Using almost exclusively talking head interviews, director Aaron Feldman keeps things simple and straight-forward, and never in my life have I been more grateful for a lack of illustrative graphics. I was one cutesy animation away from losing my shit. If we truly must do this, then let’s get in and get out as quickly as possible. A tight 75 minute running time is a blessing. The film’s philosophy is elemental: the more we share openly about these things, the more united we’ll be in our human experience. Around the globe and across all cultures, everybody poops. And some rare specimens have learned to turn shit into comedy gold.

Wilde Wedding

11 Replies

Eve Wilde (Glenn Close), famous actress, is getting married. She should be good at it by now: it’s her 5th attempt. She has inspired a whole family’s worth of broken marriages, which is common enough I suppose, but I’m not sure why so many exes were invited to the wedding.

Eve’s first love, Laurence (John Malkovich), not a movie star but a very serious actor, is included. Eve’s current love, Harold (Patrick Stewart), a writer with terrible hair, is a bit intimidated. Is this civilized, or insanity? Eve’s granddaughter Mackenzie is making a documentary, “what does love mean to you?,” and the lineup of family members covered is immediately confusing. With so many spouses, are any of these people related?

The Minnie Driver and Peter Facinelli introduce lots of drugs to the mix, and what better on the eve of a family wedding where the first cousins are already kissing?

We tend to use ‘corny’ and ‘cheesy’ interchangeably, but they’re two different sentiments, and this movie highlights that fact perfectly: one will make you roll your eyes, the other will make you cover them. Both are incredibly uncomfortable. This is one of those movies where everything goes wrong, and wronger, in the most charmless way possible. The person who wrote this script clearly believes that bad behaviour at weddings is de facto, and that wild behaviour is entertaining. In fact, it makes me quite sad for the very venerable cast, brought so low by the material on display here. And just when you think they’ve hit every wrong note in the book, it gets worse. Predictably but not forgivably worse. To the point where even my dogs were barking at the screen, though that may have been in response to my increasingly high-pitched and indignant “REALLY?s”. Do not watch. The end.

Lovesick

13 Replies

Everyone goes just a little bit crazy when they fall in love. Charlie, however, goes clinically, certifiably insane. Outwardly he’s a middle school principal who looks like he’s got it together, but he’s ruined literally all of his relationships because of his insanity. The only trouble is, until now, he hasn’t known it. Undiagnosed, his nutty downward spiral always seems perfectly logical to him. He make huge mental leaps in order to convince himself that his girlfriend is cheating on him. This time he’s aware that he’s crazy, but that’s not the difference-maker you’d think.

And the more perfect Molly (Ali Larter) seems, the more obvious Charlie’s (Matt LeBlanc) psychosis becomes. Choosing to keep Molly in the dark, he struggles to explain away all his deranged behaviour. My sister recently told me she hates movies where everything matt-leblanc-ali-larter-lovesick-07171201a goes wrong, and I suppose I’m feeling exactly that during Lovesick. His best friend is less a character in the movie and more of a narrative device. The screenwriter seems to think if he uses him to constantly point out that yeah, his friends and family should maybe have intervened, we’ll forgive them for not doing so. But there’s no way Charlie’s behaviour would go unchecked for so long and through such serious ups and downs in real life. He does stuff he should get fired for, maybe even go to prison for, but the movie treats them like cute foibles on the road to love.

Matt LeBlanc is not a terrific actor. Previous to this, he hadn’t had a film role in 11 years (since Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle), or a starring one since 2001. With his Friends money he doesn’t have to ever act again, and it’s unimaginable that this was the material that drew him back (it’s much easier to imagine that he simply doesn’t get asked a lot). Ali Larter is not a terrific actor either. They’re not pulling this off. And we’ll never know how Chevy Chase get embroiled in this, but there he is, breaking, entering, and watching porn. You may be scrolling through Netflix looking for a Valentine’s treat, but by god, this isn’t it.