Movies I wish I had skipped. This could be for any number of reasons: the film was made sloppily, the narrative didn’t engage me, or I simply could not connect with the film in any way for whatever reason.
The Avalon II is on a 120 year course to a second Earth: Homestead II. 5,000 passengers sleep in hibernation pods until four months of the voyage remain. Except, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) wakes up 90 years too soon.
Passengers wants to be a lot of things. A Castaway story. A Titanic story. A 2001: A Space Odyssey story. What it fails to be is Continue reading Passengers (2016) Movie Review
Office Christmas Party. No synopsis required.
Except, the film presents itself as if there needs to be a thorough plot for this raucous party comedy. A struggling tech company faces layoffs due to sibling rivalry, the newly divorced CTO (Jason Bateman) is…yadda yadda yadda.
Office Christmas Party is slow to get started. The premise and characters are Continue reading Office Christmas Party (2016) Movie Review
Kevin Smith’s latest feature, the blatantly Canadian-set Yoga Hosers, feels at first like an unofficial Clerks 3 graduated to a new generation to include Instagram, yoga, an attempt at current slang, and a female empowerment angle. Indeed, most characters are introduced through an Instagram insert that adds no information to the character that was not already presented through narrative context.
The film is also a horror movie about bratwurst Nazis. And a musical, kind of. It paints Canada like a fantasy world completely alien to American audiences, so alien that Continue reading Yoga Hosers (2016) Movie Review
The exorcism film. Has it ever lived up to its contemporary creator, The Exorcist? Not really. Yet, here we are four decades later still letting Hollywood churn them out like soap operas.
Incarnate, the latest effort (if we can call it that) from Blumhouse Tilt, takes the possessed child angle to “new heights” by providing our exorcist character Dr. Seth Embers (Aaron Eckhart) with an ability to enter the victim’s subconscious during the exorcism. In short, Incarnate is The Exorcist meets Inception, only without everything that makes those films interesting and different.
The wheelchair-bound Embers is executing exorcisms (or “evictions”) in search for the demon Maggie. Maggie has also been searching for him so that she can cause him interminable pain, only it has taken Embers dozens of exorcisms to find her. Horror movies don’t need logical premises, right?
The reality check with Incarnate is that Continue reading Incarnate (2016) Movie Review
Nothing screams a middle aged man writing a teen-targeted comedy like an extended opening gag involving “Netflix and chill.” The subject of the gag in question, the parents (Bryan Cranston and Megan Mullally) of upcoming Stanford grad Stephanie (Zoey Deutch), are about to take a holiday to visit their little girl…and her new boyfriend. Laird Mayhew (James Franco) is a tattoed man-child who stumbled into wealth with an app production outfit, and he wants to marry Ned Fleming’s daughter.
Throughout the setup of Why Him?, every joke is punctuated or predicated on Continue reading Why Him? (2016) Movie Review
In an instant, Rules Don’t Apply flings us into 1950s Hollywood under the reclusive control of Howard Hughes (Warren Beatty, who also directs), a Hollywood on the verge change. Hughes hires a bevy of young and hopeful starlets and precocious Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich) to drive them around the city. Forbes and Hughes both fall into fascination over one of the actresses, Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins), a virginal and devout Virginian who chose to forego a college education for stardom.
The film’s style begins equally in-your-face as the narrative. Cuts between reaction shots are rapid, disorienting. Sudden flourishes of period appropriate music intrude and then disappear before a meaningful tone can be established from it. The lighting is invasive in its brightness. Everything about the film has Continue reading Rules Don’t Apply (2016) Movie Review
Vinny Pazienza (Miles Teller) is a boxer on his way out. After losing a title fight his representation, in lieu of dropping him outright, strands him with an alcoholic trainer (Aaron Eckhart) who is also on the way out.
This, this 45 minutes of the film, is not the narrative crux of the film, though. In a way, it is a thematic introduction, but it is a lengthy one. Risking everything, Pazienza “The Pazmanian Devil” bulks up two weight classes and finds himself Continue reading Bleed For This (2016) Movie Review
Ewan McGregor’s directorial debut (he also stars) comes from source material penned by Philip Roth. As has become custom with adaptations of more high brow author’s works, American Pastoral has been called unfilmable. While the “filmable” quality of a book is a mere talking point, McGregor’s Pastoral suffers at its core from its story of a quiet rural American family turned upside down by the departure of a daughter (Dakota Fanning).
The film’s narrative flies through nearly two decades in a span of 30 minutes. In nearly a blink of an eye McGregor’s factory owner and former beauty pageant winner turned farmer Dawn (Jennifer Connelly) go from being Continue reading American Pastoral (2016) Movie Review
Inferno begins with an ethical quandary: “There is a switch. If you pull it, half of humanity will die. If you don’t, the human race will go extinct in 100 years.” The words are uttered by Ben Foster’s eccentric millionaire Bertrand Zobrist just before he plunges himself from a tower, backed into a corner by a pursuer wanting some sort of confidential information.
Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) wakes up in a hospital, delirious and hallucinating deformed people and a black plague-era doctor. He thinks he is in Boston, but he is in Florence. Of course, there is little time for explanation, as Continue reading Inferno (2016) Movie Review
Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck), once an army brat raised under the strict militaristic rule of his father, is a crackpot accountant whose Asperger’s syndrome and radical upbringing create an eccentric skill set.
Armed with a poorly-motivated narrative deadline—do the job in time or go to jail—Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) is an analyst in the Treasury Department tasked with finding a “black money” operator who has worked with numerous terrorist cells, a man who is none other than Christian Wolff.
The narrative of The Accountant weaves in and out of chronologies, perhaps needlessly, in order to Continue reading The Accountant (2016) Movie Review
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