Category Archives: Long Reviews (>400 Words)

All Movie Reviews, Animation, Comedy, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Sausage Party (2016) Movie Review

August 11, 2016 Alex Brannan

At Shopwell’s, food is alive. Not with teeming bacteria and molds, but with voices and personalities. Sausage Party, it’s like Foodfight! with substantially better animation, actual comedy, and adult themes. Well, actually, Foodfight! has plenty of adult themes, but I digress.

The premise of Sausage Party is certainly novel. A re-enactment of the Omaha Beach scene from Saving Private Ryan done with animated food products is nothing I thought I would see on film. It’s pretty awesome.

The film is littered with Continue reading Sausage Party (2016) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Short Films

Holidays (2016) Movie Review

August 11, 2016 Alex Brannan

Holidays is the latest in the line of horror anthology films that have been surfacing on online streaming sites in recent years. The conceit of this particular film is to take eight short films from eight different creative teams. Each film focuses on subject matter related to a different holiday of the calendar year. For this review, let’s dive into each short separately before making final judgments on the film as a whole.

Valentine’s Day

High dives are scary. It combines the fear of heights with the fear of drowning. Bullies are scary, too, I guess. As is Continue reading Holidays (2016) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Suicide Squad (2016) Movie Review

August 4, 2016 Alex Brannan

Suicide Squad begins with a montage of exposition. More specifically, it begins with multiple montages of exposition. Deadshot (Will Smith) is exactly what he sounds like: a hitman who never misses. But he also has a chip on his shoulder because he was taken away from his daughter. Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) is an ex-doctor turned Joker (Jared Leto) sidekick. And then there are a couple other baddies thrown in for good measure.

The United States government’s goal is to use these villains to provide some checks and balances against superheroes who could turn against mankind. For whatever reason, they feel Continue reading Suicide Squad (2016) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Horror, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Sharknado 4: The 4th Awakens (2016) Movie Review

July 31, 2016 Alex Brannan

Oh Sharknado, what are we to do with you? Being the main vein of Syfy’s annual income, a trilogy just wasn’t enough. Sharknado needs to be a saga!

For the uninitiated, Sharknado is exactly the Frankenstein’s monster it sounds like: sharks + tornadoes = sharks inside tornadoes aiming to kill everybody. It’s Jaws meets Twister, etc. etc. etc. What began as an innocent, Tara Reid-starring B-movie on basic cable has blown up to the appointment viewing, C-list celebrity cameo filled annual event that we now know. We’ve survived four years of Sharknado, and we didn’t even get a stupid T-shirt.

To understand the tone of the Sharknado-verse, just look at the climactic end of Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!. Our heroes fight sharks in space, stars Ian Ziering and Tara Reid are both eaten by sharks which fall back to Earth, they both escape from said shark bellies, Tara Reid pushing out first a newborn baby. Depending on who you ask, the films are Continue reading Sharknado 4: The 4th Awakens (2016) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Documentary, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

The Man Who Saved Ben-Hur (2016) Movie Review

July 30, 2016 Alex Brannan

You won’t find many credits for John Alarimo Jr. on IMDb. But the man was entrenched in the Hollywood system for years. He ate lunch with Gore Vidal, sat on set with Frank Sinatra and Vincent Price, acted alongside Mae West, danced with Stella Adler. Most notably, he acted as a (uncredited) second assistant director on the iconic epic Ben-Hur.

In The Man Who Saved Ben-Hur, Alarimo’s cousin Joe Forte, now a filmmaker himself, interviews Alarimo about his time in Hollywood. Surprisingly, this interview does not begin with stories of California, but with stories of Continue reading The Man Who Saved Ben-Hur (2016) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Bad Moms (2016) Movie Review

July 29, 2016 Alex Brannan

Amy Mitchell (Mila Kunis) is always running late. She works at a hipster coffee company. A hipster coffee company with employees that don’t respect her and don’t work as hard as her. She has two children and a child husband. A child husband who cheats on her online with another woman. When Amy gets fed up with the infuriating mundaity of suburban motherhood, she…does things. Most of them involve parental irresponsibility and middle-fingering the dictatorial PTA president (Christina Applegate). Oh, and plenty of slow motion montages.

Given the premise of this film, I have no real reason to Continue reading Bad Moms (2016) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Nerve (2016) Movie Review

July 28, 2016 Alex Brannan

“Nerve” is a game of extreme sports and social media. The “players” film themselves doing a series of dares for money, and the more people watching them, the closer they are to being number one, a position that ironically guarantees nothing other than the empty stardom of fleeting viral attention.

Venus (Emma Roberts), a born watcher, throws caution to the wind for once in her life by becoming a player in the game. Nerve ropes her into Continue reading Nerve (2016) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Drama, Indie Films, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Love It

Captain Fantastic (2016) Movie Review

July 27, 2016 Alex Brannan

Ben (Viggo Mortensen) raises his children under a strict survivalist patriarchy in the woods. They wear caked mud as camouflage to stalk and hunt game. They train in knife combat. At night they read books on quantum mechanics and high literature. It is an extreme form of home schooling, in a way, if home was a forest and school taught you how to skin a deer.

Ben is trying, but he is a loving father. The family’s life appears serene in its isolation and in spite of nature’s harshness, but, like the ever-pressing power of globalization, the outside world Continue reading Captain Fantastic (2016) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Jason Bourne (2016) Movie Review

July 26, 2016 Alex Brannan

Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) remembers. He remembers everything. He is also doing one of the things that he does most often: hiding. We see him as an underground fighter, ripped and captured in a lot of shots with lens flares.

Meanwhile, Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) is hacking into the CIA to get documents on their covert operations; documents that include information on Bourne and his late father. When Parsons contacts Bourne, he has to Continue reading Jason Bourne (2016) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Animation, Box Office Most Wanted, Loath It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Foodfight! (2012): The Most Terrifying, Inappropriate Children’s Movie

July 24, 2016 Alex Brannan

The premise of the ill-fated, surprisingly high budgeted (estimated at $65 million, a $65 million that cannot be found on screen) Foodfight! is enough to make most people cringe at the exploitation of audiences. During the after hours at a grocery store dubbed “Marketroplis,” the food products come to life (and the store itself morphs into a weird alternate food universe for some reason). Some of these food products are familiar to us: Mr. Clean, Mrs. Butterworth, Charlie Tuna. The concept of pushing product placement on such an overt level to children is discomforting enough. Then, of course, there is the plot of the film.

Foodfight! follows an ex-detective dog (Charlie Sheen) who quits the biz after his bride-to-be mysteriously vanishes from the store. He is pulled out of retirement when a Continue reading Foodfight! (2012): The Most Terrifying, Inappropriate Children’s Movie →

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