Pokemon Detective Pikachu (2019)

Like a lot of people my age, my childhood was full of the colorful abominations called Pokemon. I played those games fucking constantly growing up, dabbled in the card games, watched a lot of the real old TV show. Hell, I’ve got old VHS tapes of the shit in my parents’ house. This movie’s trailer made it look like a kind of love letter to the kids like me who liked this stuff in the late 90s. But in reality it’s a pile of dog shit with a Pokemon card on top.

SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE WITHIN.

Director: Rob Letterman

Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Justice Smith, Kathryn Newton

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

I guess the story begins with this insurance salesman, Tim, is out with a buddy trying to hunt a Cubone when he learns his father dies – but really, the movie just wants us to forget that a grown man has to run for his life from a two-foot rat in a bone mask. How hard could it possibly be to capture that thing?

But yeah, his dad dies and he has to go to this city where Pokemon and humans live in harmony and don’t do any of the battling you’d expect out of this franchise. So it’s Pokemon with nothing cool about it, essentially. Riveting! We find this out through some truly wretched exposition – it’s just shown on a train TV screen ad, conveniently for the beginning of the movie. I dunno about you, but whenever shit like this shows up on Hulu or Spotify, I tune out. It wouldn't be an effective method to convey backstory.

In the city, we get some painfully stock scenes flashing back to Tim’s childhood where he lost his mom. I know it’s supposed to be sad, but this and every other emotional moment in the film seems like it was taken from a giant corporate warehouse with CLICHE SCENES & PLOTS written on the side.

Fortunately the titular talking Pikachu, voiced by Ryan Reynolds, shows up soon after that. Sure, ‘Ryan Reynolds plays a talking Pikachu’ sounds like something you and your friends came up with in 15 minutes while you were high off your asses. But it does provide for some funny moments. There’s some half-decent absurdist comedy to watching him run around and seeing the other Pokemon doing goofy shit. Unfortunately, that isn't enough for a full hour and forty-minute movie.

The problem is that everything aside from the weirdness and humor of the Pokemon is utterly phoned in. There’s a budding romance between Tim and Kathryn Newton’s junior reporter character Lucy. It’s every bit as lame and awkward as you’d expect; retro in the sense that we quit doing these types of hack storylines in the 90s because they were bad. Oh, he makes some awkward Freudian slips and Pikachu ribs him about it? Stop the presses! The fantastic Bill Nighy is wasted as the rich guy businessman who turns out to be a villain later. Awesome twist if you’ve never seen a movie in your life.

Everything is by the book and the story is a practically just a bunch of cliches patched together with rubber bands and cheap glue. There are some emotional scenes that don’t pack any punch because every line and every story beat is predictable and hollow. Like, really, are they going to let Pikachu die in this Detective Pikachu movie by being hit with a rock? Are they going to keep Pikachu and Tim apart when, right after being saved from dying, Pikachu arbitrarily decides to go on his own to stop anyone else from being hurt? I mean, wow, I was really surprised when everything turned out OK after those incredibly stale cliché tropes you guys trotted out like fat out of shape race-horses.

One of the worst parts is how they do exposition and revelations of story elements like how Pikachu lost his memory or what happened to Tim’s dad. Basically Nighy’s character invented this virtual reality camera thing that can show what happened in the past “from all angles,” effectively giving the characters an extremely hacky way to see what happened – conveniently it’s able to show everything perfectly in a neat way that explains stuff! I’d say this is spoon-feeding you exposition, but really it’s like tying you down Guantanamo-style and shoving a feeding tube forcefully into your nostrils and flushing the exposition in that way.

The climax is truly horrible, with Bill Nighy putting his brain into Mewtwo’s body. I guess his character, who is in a wheelchair, wants to merge with Pokemon to “heal” everyone in the world or some stupid shit like that. I’ve seen this ‘disabled villain wants to cure the world in an evil way’ trope before and usually done better. But as a disabled person, it’s not realistic – we’d probably just kill people like any other type of villain. We’re not that noble.

Nighy as Mewtwo spends the finale spouting out lines that somehow top even the previous cliches in the movie, which I find an amazing feat. All the good humor from earlier is long gone, and the movie bafflingly delivers this totally straight-faced, no irony at all. If actors could be punished for crimes by being forced to do horrible scenes in movies, this one would be the punishment for a triple homicide.

Maybe I’m being too harsh – there are a few OK jokes and it’s nice to see some Pokemon on screen, I guess, though it’s been ages since I was super into this stuff. Maybe some will like it better. It’d probably be a blast if I was drunk or high, watching the first act or two anyway. But overall there are way better kids’ movies you could see. Just make sure you cover your kids’ eyes at the part where Pikachu commits genocide against a bunch of Digimon. That shit was horrific to watch.

Image copyright of its original owners, I don't own any of it.

Holmes & Watson (2018)

Holmes & Watson is the kind of movie you make when you don't give a shit anymore, really. This is a woefully insane movie that had Tony and I just wondering what kind of gambling debts Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly had to settle that led them to do this shit. It's getting press as one of the worst movies of the year and had a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes at first – now it's gotten to the clandestined, unparalleled highs of 8%. Hallelujah!

But what exactly is it that makes it so godawful? Well, strap in, kids!

Director: Etan Cohen

Starring: Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Ralph Fiennes

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

This thing starts off with a young Sherlock Holmes as a child going to a British boarding school, where all the kids are mean to him and force him to kiss the backside of a donkey by blindfolding him – hey, you little jackasses, what do you think this is, Bird Box? And they made fun of him because he did the thing THEY TRICKED HIM to do. What imagination! What candor! You really showed him by executing a planned trick and him falling for it! The height of comedy!

In response, young Holmes immediately, like as he’s standing there humiliated, becomes super smart, cold and detached – he even makes his tears recede back into his body, which is something I imagine alt-right assholes wish they could do to mask their own insecurities. Then he gets every other kid expelled from school for various things he immediately deduces they've done – I wonder what their parents think about this. BUT AT LEAST SHERLOCK GOT HIS EDUCATION, THE LITTLE NARC.

No, seriously; every teacher just teaches him alone for the rest of his time there, I guess. No other students were admitted? Nobody found this weird? OK then, movie.

Then we fast forward to years later as Sherlock Holmes and Watson are world-class detectives, ready to solve any case. Well, actually they’re complete idiots and weirdos, only Holmes occasionally has a burst of deduction to solve whatever hamfisted case they come across. I guess all that specialized education for Holmes didn’t bother to teach him even the most basic things about how to interact in the real world. They get drawn into some kind of mystery involving someone threatening to kill the queen, I guess, although personally I’d trust any random homeless man on the street a thousand times before I hired these obvious deviant maniacs. I’d be afraid of these guys murdering me in my sleep. They’re fucking bonkers.

I mean, a lot of the rest of the movie doesn’t even make enough sense to critique in my usual way - the plot is a lot of nonsense that’s silly on purpose, and the main issue is that it’s weird instead of funny like 99% of the time. These gags are so strange that you’d swear they were working off some ancient parchment full of things an alien civilization found funny hundreds of millennia ago - they’re certainly not funny now. There’s a lot of shots of characters eating raw onions for some reason? A lot of random vomiting? A scene where two characters exchange a romantic glance while performing an autopsy?

It’s just head-scratching. It’s gibberish. Even when the comedy isn’t outwardly terrible like in the first scene of him as a kid, it’s so confusing and bizarre that you don’t laugh anyway.

Then there are the scenes that take up the majority of the film where they just extend lame gags for long enough that they could call this a full length movie rather than a serial killer’s demo reel for SNL. There’s one segment where they break a bee hive conspicuously in Holmes’ apartment and spend several minutes messing around with that - there’s no reason why they have it there except for this gag and the plot doesn’t advance at all, so it’s pretty much a hollow thing and wastes all of our time. If you could fast forward past an entire comedy segment and your movie doesn’t lose much, maybe it sucks… well, maybe it’d be fine if it were legitimately funny, but we know that ship sailed when we saw the first scene.

The second one they do involves the queen coming over, you know, like she does. They end up knocking her unconscious, and then there’s a long sequence of them trying to hide her body, using an obviously fake voice that nobody catches onto, and finally almost chopping her body to pieces with a hacksaw! Wow! I wonder what repercussions there will be for that and what comedic reactions we’ll get! Oh, nothing at all and this was a non-sequitur? OK then.

Seriously - without some of these scenes this would probably be basically a short film. The padding is so much that you could heal a guy with horrific back pain by just lying them down on this movie’s rolls of fat. It’s like a cloud. No substance at all.

There’s really zero point in going into all the other random shit that happens… just to gloss over it, they meet two women from America who fall in love with them, because this is that kind of movie. Also there’s some really dumb dialogue about how America is so noble and has a democracy and a fair justice system. So, you know, if you were thinking this movie was gonna be the second coming of Sartre, you’re wrong about that.

I guess at the end of the movie, Holmes figures out the killer must be someone close to him who can predict what he’s going to do, and so with no real reason he suspects Watson, having him arrested and almost hanged. It turns out, through an overly-long, dragging sequence, that we figure out he’s really just upset because Watson was going to leave him and be with the American woman - so, great reason to do all this! What a stand-up guy! This movie doesn’t have the complexity to tackle stuff like this, and it’s somehow glossed over and done lazily even though they spend time on it.

Anyway, that’s Holmes and Watson. It’s a baffling piece of cinema. Some parts are so weird they border on avant garde, and then you just get other things that are fairly normal, dumb-ass comedy without much in the way of any humor. By the end of the movie it seriously slows down and becomes a more generic picture and this is where it pretty much lost me. Most of the things that happen are inconsequential, and so the movie as a whole tends to feel like a waste of time.

It’s not good, but for those curious like we were due to the awful reviews… well, don’t bother. It sucks. That’s pretty much all there is to it.

Image copyright of its original owners; we don't own it.

The Happytime Murders (2018)

This movie fucking sucks. I might as well just put that on the table at the top here. I know, right? A movie that took 10 years to get out of development hell and is about a puppet police detective is bad? Stop the presses.

Director: Brian Henson

Starring: Melissa McCarthy, Bill Barretta

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

SPOILERS ahead!!!

It's just so, so bad. It's like a distillation of a bunch of horrible jokes you'd hear at a bad comedy open mic vomited onto the screen with a bunch of puppets saying them. It's the kind of humor you'd hear from a 14 year old just trying to be edgy by making a bunch of raunchy jokes with no context or talent to do so. It's every internet troll going 'oh, you don't think these jokes are funny? Stop being so offended, snowflake!'

Like, even from the start, you get a bunch of stupid perverted voice-overs in the main character, Phil's, head as he's investigating this case from a hot woman puppet who says she's being blackmailed. In the first five minutes, she's already promising Phil she'll have sex with him if he solves her case. Calm down, movie, god; we barely have characters defined yet. And they don't waste time getting to a puppet sex shop, either, which only leads to more embarrassingly bad jokes. Get it? It's puppets, but they're talking about super raunchy things! It's funny because puppets are usually for kids! Do you get it yet?

I guess Melissa McCarthy is playing this other detective who has bad blood with Phil. You can tell because they argue and fight like idiot children every time they're on screen, bringing the plot to a screeching halt several times, spitting terrible roast jokes and insults at each other. Some of the backstory is shoved obnoxiously in your face... apparently, years and years ago, Phil was the first and only puppet cop and he was unable to kill this guy who had captured McCarthy. Then everyone thought he did it on purpose because 'puppets don't shoot puppets.' And then puppets were forever banned, by law, from becoming cops anymore.

All of this shit just shows how bad the writers were at crafting a plot. Really, none of it makes sense. What parallels are there to real life at all? Why would they ban all puppets from being cops or think he did it on purpose? It's never really clarified, instead just made out to be some kind of hamfisted racism allegory, because people all hate puppets in this world for some undefined reason. I guess I can see why they didn't care about plot; I mean a bunch of bad puppet sex jokes probably took a long time for them to come up with. They were probably too tired to make a plot.

The plot, if you can call it that, is that someone is killing off the cast of this old show called the Happytime Gang. Though the movie barely focuses on that. Instead we get a super long scene in this biker bar where McCarthy does puppet coke and fires a gun off a few times, then gets mad at some guy for using the word 'bitches' and beating the shit out of him for that. It's cute that this movie is seriously trying to shoehorn in a feminist message when everything else about it is trashy and low-brow as fuck. It's like if someone took a giant steaming shit on your car window but then lectured you about how you shouldn't say 'cunt' because it's rude.

Oh, and there's a hacky romance scene between Phil and his old girlfriend played by Elizabeth Banks where they talk about what could've been. Every fucking thing in this movie is playing the most rancid, tired detective movie cliches straight, without even trying to be satire. It's pretty amazing that I can't even tell if this movie is even a little bit self-aware. It seems to think it qualifies as 'satire' since they're trying to make jokes in the movie, but how does that make sense? Just having eggs and flour separately doesn't mean you've made a fucking cake.

Perhaps the real low point, though it's hard to choose, is the sex scene between Phil and the lady he accepted the case from, in which there's an extended scene of Phil ejaculating Silly String all over the place for far, far too long... I think Silly String should really reconsider how their product is used in media from now on.

I just can't believe any functioning adult wanted to put this in a movie. There are a bunch of people watching, too, including Phil's secretary Bubbles and a bunch of cops, and none of them seem to make much of a big deal out of it. Bubbles even grabs a bunch of cleaning supplies like this happens all the time. That's really why so much of this is such bad comedy – why would she stay around after the first time her boss jizzed all over his own office and made her clean it up? Just because it's a comedy doesn't mean you can just stop making any logical sense. Part of good comedy is people's reactions to bizarre or over the top situations. Here, this gross, weird nonsense is just treated like an every day thing.

The rest of the movie doesn't improve at all. More bad sex puppet jokes, and they throw in some physical gags about McCarthy's appearance for good measure, which is weird since I thought the movie was trying to be all feminist or whatever. But because it's comedy, it apparently doesn't have to make sense, so I guess I'm the jackass here.

Oh, and did you want to see a children's puppet portrayed as a strung out dying drug addict in a grimy, dark hellhole? You're in luck. The movie provides this soul-killing image with the exact amount of tact you've come to expect, which is none. Seriously, what reason would anyone have to want to see that image?

I guess they find out the real killer was that hot puppet lady from the very beginning, because the bullet Phil fired while trying to kill the guy who'd captured McCarthy accidentally killed her father all those years ago. It's a real stretch. But they make it work by not trying to give this character a personality in any way. Phew! That solves that problem!

The movie ends, finally and mercifully, with Phil asking out his secretary Bubbles, despite there being no romantic connection between the two at all for the entire movie. Does she even want to go out with him after she's had to literally clean up his jizz at the office multiple times? I guess it's consistent in that it's totally unfunny garbage just like literally every single other frame of the movie.

The jokes were bad, the story was bad, I really didn't see even one thing to like here. It's been a while since that happened. The humor in this is solely based on stupid juvenile shock value shit that is bad even by that standard. There's basically one joke idea: puppets swearing and talking about dirty things = funny. And it can't even do that remotely well. Everything in this is overly simplistic low-brow crap and doesn't try to use its creativity for anything but the easiest, lamest jokes possible.

It's actually kind of amazing how truly worthless this movie is, and I really doubt there will be anything worse this year. But if you like terrible jokes and no plot or character, go nuts with The Happytime Murders!

Image copyright of its original owners, we don't own this.

Ant-Man (2015)

Marvel has a pretty good reputation for dependable action movies these days – in fact, they're addicted to making them. Hell, I think they'd go into a coma if enough people didn't re-tweet them on Twitter about each new movie that came out. But they did have one movie that was pretty weak, and it should be obvious what I am talking about by now, unless for some reason you didn't pay any attention to the title of this review.

I'll give you a hint though: If you've ever said the words 'my favorite movie is Ant-Man,' then you may not like this one.

Director: Peyton Reed

Starring: Paul Rudd, Corey Stoll, Michael Douglas

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

Ant Man is the kind of movie I think they'd produce if they asked the most generic human being alive to produce a movie that is acceptable – not great, not even particularly good, just acceptable. And then you took that and gave it to a robot who had never seen or talked to a human before to recreate it from memory. That's this movie. It's as unfunny, weird and awkward as you'd expect, while simultaneously also being pretty dull and ordinary.

This thing starts with Michael Douglas's scientist character punching another guy in the face for a disagreement at work – you know, one of those heated scientist disagreements that so often results in a physical altercation. Oh those rowdy scientists. Apparently Douglas is mad because they stole his formula to make people tiny. What, how does he know it's HIS formula? I mean, that's pretty self centered of him. What an attention whore.

Don't worry, he can't hurt you. He's all bad CGI to make him look younger.

Then we fast forward about 20 years to the middle of a Fight Club outtake starring Paul Rudd, who is less an actor and more of an alchemic combination of bad comedy tropes cobbled into something resembling a man. He's playing Scott, a Thief With a Heart of Gold™ who got arrested for stealing some stuff from a rich con man and giving it back to the people he conned. Don't worry – there's a scene about 20 minutes in that spoonfeeds you this information with all the nuance of a guy trying to fit a square peg into a round hole by just destroying the whole thing with a jackhammer. Exposition!

This movie represents prison like you would if you talked about a second cousin you don't see that often - vague and noncommittal. I know it's not the point of the movie, but could we have ANY effort at character development? Like at all?

But this only lasts a few minutes, because we have really important shit to focus on like the pretty racist caricatures of everyone else who isn't Paul Rudd. Like, the guy who picks him up from prison is the most stereotypical Hispanic character ever, like you'd think Donald Trump's idea of any Spanish speaking person is. His thing is that he talks in a really stereotypical way and goes on long, unfunny tangents when he's trying to convey information. Wow, what a great character idea. I'm sure glad someone's paying you to write this.

And who else do we get? A black guy whose only purpose in the movie is to steal a cop car? A European guy of vague descent who talks in a ridiculous accent and talks about his reverence for superstition in one scene while also being an expert at computers like a Die Hard villain the next scene? Wow. I guess it's progressive if you consider 'progression' to be having them in the movie at all?

Oh good, the local awful Improv troupe is here...

I just think it takes a lot of balls to write characters that most pornos wouldn't consider writing because they're too stupid and shallow. “Hmm, well, you've got a good start, but how much MORE racist can you get without getting protesters on our asses? Can you implement at least some of the stereotypes from 1950s conservative drug propaganda films before your time is up?” It's asinine exactly how bad this is – like, what, just because the KKK would still be like 'nah, that's weaksauce,' it's okay?

I guess Paul Rudd can't hold down a job at Baskin Robbins, which is a bad joke that the movie milks like hell with even worse jokes on top of it, like the manager at Baskin Robbins chewing scenery and talking in unrealistic dialogue about how cool it is that Scott stole things, but also saying they have to fire him. Yeah, convicts can't get jobs! Hilarious! A gut buster!

Ugh, ANOTHER movie in the pocket of Big Ice Cream, shoving its message down our throats...

Oh, and he tries to see his daughter at a birthday party only to get harassed by his ex-wife's new husband, a cop who seems to be so unrealistically douchey that I am pretty sure he literally has a stick rammed up his ass. Can we get a Kickstarter fund going to remove it and end this man's pain? He really is just such a douche to Scott that it comes off as hacky. Because ya know... a convict not being able to spend time with his kid, just more of that hilarity that is Ant Man.

The rest of the plot focuses around Corey Stoll's character Darren performing experiments on goats to try and turn them tiny, which doesn't work and only turns them into formless goop. I'm sure glad all this money is going toward this noble fucking cause.

We really learned a lot from this...

I guess this is what Michael Douglas's old scientist character perfected years ago, which he didn't release to the world and now Stoll's character wants to make a whole army of tiny soldiers to go and do evil shit like assassinate world leaders. They have a whole video presentation about this, like it's some sort of weird school presentation, which is kinda funny. It should really just say “WE'RE GONNA DO REALLY EVIL SHIT” across every picture in boldface lettering. Like, who the fuck was actually in charge of making a goddamn video presentation about assassinating world leaders and doing military coups?

Douglas, I guess, has the one suit he used locked up in a safe which Scott goes to burgle. He breaks into the safe and tries on the suit for no real reason except shits 'n' giggles – like, he broke in already, so why not, I guess? Then it shrinks him down to the size of an ant and we get a pretty decent action scene of him being tiny and running around and stuff. Though I am not sure why this mansion Michael Douglas lives in is apparently in the same building as a fucking night club...

I guess Douglas just likes a good time.

Also, how does he not die when he gets sucked up by the vacuum cleaner? I mean, I guess I've never really TRIED to do that. So maybe I can't criticize the movie on this part.

This is not the movie for you if you're afraid of vacuum cleaners at all.

Then we get a bunch of lame scenes of Scott waking up in Douglas's mansion, where he and his hot daughter live. They also have an army of ants in there that Douglas can apparently control, so he has them guard the bed Scott is in so it's almost like he's a prisoner there – if he steps off the bed, they'll sting him I guess. Except then that turns out to be pointless as he gets out and there is really no threat to him – so, whoop-de-do I guess.

Then there's a bunch of training scenes with him and the daughter, who is the most boring and lame type of female character – the super stoic, badass chick who says everything in a deadpan monotone because THAT shows strength, right? The only type of strong woman is the kind who never experiences emotion because she was probably created in a laboratory as a domesticated robot to deliver quips. I mean, what kind of woman ever has emotions, or a personality, am I right? Oh, she fires back blandly sarcastic quips to literally everything Rudd says? Yes, exactly how real people talk. And in this movie about a guy who shrinks down to the size of an ant, THAT is what I am most worried about for realism, yes.

Her wanting to cause Paul Rudd pain is the only believable part of her character.

Oh, what's that? You didn't think we had enough scenes of forced, dull fucking family drama with the daughter and Douglas shouting about how they didn't really love one another and a whole bunch of other stuff that makes me fall asleep? The movie has you covered.

Then there's a lot more bad jokes, stiff and unrealistic dialogue and lame stereotype characters as the climax clunks along. They stage some plan to break into the lab and I guess Stoll is so far gone by this point that he just ends up dressing up in the suit and going full on supervillain like, immediately. Wow. I dunno why THAT was his first choice, but one thing is clear, and that's that this lab really should do better background checks and mental health analyses on these people before hiring them.

Who, aside from gun sellers in the US, could look at this and go 'yes, this is a mentally OK man'?

Because this is still so cliché that it borders on parody, Stoll goes straight to the house of Scott's kid and threatens his family. How would we have any conflict if we didn't make it super personal right away? I mean, there's NO other sources of things a villain can do that are evil.

But to be fair, this is actually a good scene, and one of the only ones in the whole movie that actually works – I like the silly stuff they can do with the shrinking fight scene, like when they knock stuff over, it falls over with the weight of a mountain in their eyes. But then they show it just looked like some little thing falling over in the regular world:

It's really just one of the only scenes that actually works for the movie's sense of humor – why couldn't they have put this kind of effort into the characters and dialogue? Visually, it's good. Though I think the world could have done without this giant Thomas the Tank Engine and the mutant giant ant... I mean, is this like what the 1950s-era horror films predicted would happen? Jesus.

I guess there really is no price too high to give kids nightmares in this movie's universe.

That is pretty much the end really – we get a few more scenes of things winding down in a happy way, and I don't really care. That's Ant Man!

I guess a lot of people like this, and that's fine – sometimes that many people ARE just wrong. I dunno. I just find it really dull and bland – the writing is bad and the characters are weak when they're not outwardly idiotic stereotypes that come off as vaguely racist. The plot is dime-a-dozen origin story stuff and there's really nothing of interest about any of this except for the wacky scenes where he shrinks down to ant-size. So I guess I'm saying, if the movie was just a 10 minute short film with only those scenes, it'd be okayish, so long as they cut out literally everything else in the movie.

Oh well, at least it's better than Batman vs Superman or Suicide Squad; because those are good standards to have!

Images copyright of their original owners; we own none of them.

Silver Bullet (1985)

Any movie based on a Stephen King book is usually bound to be, uh, interesting at least. This one, called Silver Bullet, is about a werewolf and a kid in a magic motorcycle wheelchair invented by Gary Busey. Do I even have to say anything else to get you to read more? I mean, really?

Director: Daniel Attias

Starring: Gary Busey, Corey Haim

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

This thing starts with a truck driver guy hangin' out by the train tracks, digging with a shovel to find something I don't even want to know about, I'm sure. Then he gets decapitated by a werewolf, which is always really a bummer way to end the night. But people in town just assume he got decapitated by the oncoming train in a preventable accident. Because, you know, it's one of those trains that extends a mechanical arm holding a Japanese Katana to decapitate everyone standing in its vicinity. It's just how trains work and is pristine, prime technology!

So we've established that everyone in this town is truly stupid and/or doesn't care at all about their fellow townspeople. Great... now we establish that our main characters are a little boy and girl living in town. The little girl is especially suited to be the lead in a horror movie, we see, as she gets scared by an obviously fake snake hanging from a tree in the middle of the fucking day. I'm not sure why that scares her – maybe cardboard and paper fake animals and bad attempts at pranks are just terrifying for her.

"Do you have any Halloween props from the costume store? BECAUSE THAT WOULD TRULY SCARE ME TO DEATH!"

Then she and her wheelchair-bound brother, played by Corey Haim of many 80s movies fame, are going home and she blames him for the prank, being that his friend was the one who did it. She says it isn't HER fault that he's in a wheelchair – so why does she have to take care of him, right? Yeah, if it's not your fault directly that someone is wheelchair-bound, you can just say fuck it and toss them to the curb. That's how it works.

I guess their drunk loser uncle comes into the picture, played by Gary Busey, whose acting direction in this seemed to be “just do whatever you want.” He mugs for the camera a shitload, screams a lot, and then accuses the mother of not really knowing her son and thinking his only personality is to be stuck in a wheelchair forever. Yeah, I love it when loser relatives stay at my house because they have nowhere else to go and then criticize me, too.

"I'm the kind of jackass who just says whatever he wants."

While that's going on, we get introduced to this idiot redneck guy who is about every cartoon stereotype of that you can imagine - he talks to himself about kicking peoples' asses, he drinks beer and he screams at everyone. What a rich, compelling character. Apparently he's interrupted watching pro wrestling (the injustice!) by the sound of someone messing around in his greenhouse. So wait a second, how does this guy have a greenhouse again? He really just doesn't seem like the kind of guy to have one. What is he growing in there? Weeds he can trample all over when he's drunk tomorrow?

Hey now. I'm sure this man has a Shakespearean background that would totally vindicate him for us.

I love how seemingly every setting in one of these movies looks like the architect went, “Okay, just make it look like it belongs in a horror movie.” They're already fucking creepy places to begin with. Did this guy just ask for the Jurassic Park set to be built on his property? For that matter, it takes a while for the werewolf to kill him... this werewolf seems to have an unusual amount of patience and discerning for a bloodthirsty monster.

The werewolf is not content to just slash peoples' heads off anymore... he's got a taste for plotting now. He has blueprints and carefully constructed plans and shit.

The deaths of luminary town members like this guy prompts outcry around town as they plan to go on a manhunt for the thing. They do try that, and they even bring along their one black guy in town so he can die instantly, because this movie and others like it are the reason that trope exists in the first place!

Then one other guy attacks the wolf with a baseball bat, only for the wolf to, apparently, take it from him and start beating HIM up with it!

You have to admit, it would be worth it to die for a cause such as the badassery of this scene.

I fucking love that. A werewolf wielding a baseball bat. How is that not the new coolest thing ever?

After that, I guess, the whole town is in mourning and they have a funeral service where everyone else also turns into werewolves, which is probably not how their dead loved ones would've wanted them to react. But it's all just a dream by the priest... I guess his active imagination is getting way out of hand. Maybe he should quit reading so many Stephen King books before bed.

Not good organ playing. Try again.

I guess everyone has different ways of coping, though. The priest may have dreams about werewolves, but Gary Busey makes his nephew a wheelchair that is more like a goddamn motorcycle, for the kid to ride. My favorite part of this scene is that Busey tells him to be safe and acts like it's just a normal bike. Dude, you made a fucking war tank for this kid. Seriously – he can drive at like 60 miles per hour on that thing. You can see him outspeeding cars on the road later!

"Remember to be safe on the horrific death machine I made you, kid."

A cop driving by scratches his head: "Is there even a law regulating what that thing is?"

Then the kid proceeds to race around also setting off fireworks while doing so! Because fuck safety, I guess. Hey, I'll give the movie this – at least it's versatile. I wouldn't want the only deaths in a horror movie to be from a werewolf, after all. Some of them can be from wheelchair/fireworks-related accidents.

But he doesn't die, further teaching him that he can do whatever he wants and be completely invincible. He can ride off into the sunset like this is some completely different, feel-good movie, because hey, why not?

Oh, should we maybe get back to the werewolf plot now? I mean, I had almost forgotten it was part of the movie. I thought this was just a movie about magic wheelchair daredevil stunts now. The kid DOES get into some trouble when the werewolf finds him while he's out at night shooting off fireworks – why are his parents letting him do that anyway? Do they just have no curfew and WANT the wolf to kill him? I mean, I know he's disabled, but... oh, God, are they trying to have him killed like some old Biblical shit where disabled children are deemed unworthy? Jesus. I mean, that's the ONLY explanation for something this stupid.

Or... maybe not. I dunno. Either way, the kid shoots the wolf in the eye with a firework, and is then able to escape.

The next day, he and his sister go hunting all over town for a guy with only one eye, thinking for sure that that means they'll find the werewolf. Personally, in a podunk small town like this, I dunno if "werewolf" is the only reason someone would have one eye – walk a block over and you could just find a guy who poked his eye out with a drill or something while making a new chair for his living room. But I like their optimism.

They find him pretty easily – it's the priest, who now wears an eyepatch and also has a garage full of a whole pile of shit unceremoniously thrown there with no order at all. Wow! You'd think he'd hide this better! I guess not! Gotta love the sister's reaction to seeing a small field mouse in the garage - she's more afraid of this and that dumb fake snake from earlier than she is of the real werewolf. I guess everyone is different!

Oh, and the way she figures out he's the werewolf is because she sees that baseball bat from earlier. Whoops. You'd have thought he would try to hide that better. I guess you would have too high expectations.

Pictured: the scariest thing in the movie.

It doesn't exactly take a master fucking detective...

Speaking of which, what did that priest tell everyone in town about why he suddenly has an eyepatch? “I was drafted in the Vietnam War for a day”? Not sure that would be convincing. But maybe it is, and maybe everyone in town is a fucking idiot.

Then we see how he acts when he's not a werewolf – he drives around spying on little boys playing baseball. Huh, that's odd – most monster movies usually don't have the monster's human form as the scarier part of him.

The two kids convince Gary Busey to believe them just enough to talk to the sheriff about it. The sheriff then goes out to the house alone with no backup – you know, like cops are supposed to do when investigating a possible suspect in multiple murders.

Surprisingly (did you read that with sarcasm?) the wolf easily kills him – so easily that it's like he wasn't a sheriff but a newborn baby, completely helpless and dumb. I love how, after this, nobody in town says a word about the sheriff at all. I guess you could say it's because the movie is nearing its climax and didn't have time to spend on him, but I prefer to think it's really just like “Oh, the sheriff vanished? Who cares!” This is how it is in my imagination.

What is the obsession with using bats in this movie? Does the writer know werewolves don't usually use baseball bats to carry out their kills? For a movie with a fucking werewolf in it, this has a surprisingly light amount of actual wolf-related carnage going on.

The climax is Busey and the kids holed up in their house and waiting around for the werewolf to show up, like the world's worst date who is late for everything. Apparently the wolf waits for Busey to get annoyed and shout at the kids for making the whole thing up to cut the power and attack them. He really has a theatrical flourish for timing. This wolf should be a magician or something else that needs good timing.

The ensuing fight scene is OK I guess. They kill him by shooting him with a... wait for it... SILVER BULLET! And then he turns back into the priest, in what I have to admit, is a pretty cool use of effects.

Well this doesn't look healthy at all. I wonder how they'll explain the dead priest in their house anyway. I'm sure that will be a fun conversation.

The film ends with some narration about how the sister loves her brother and what not... and then the movie ends without showing us the inevitable future where the brother rides that crazy wheelchair thing until he collides with a car and it kills him. So it's a happy ending, as is!

That's Silver Bullet, the silly movie about werewolves and wheelchairs and priests that become less scary when they turn into werewolves. The story is pretty over the top and Gary Busey only adds fuel to that fire. In the end, it's not too bad of a flick. Certainly one of the more entertaining King adaptations I've seen. If you want something fun and a bit goofy, Silver Bullet is a decent pick.

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them.

Get Out (2017)

So after the rousing success of Get Out, including a 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, director and comedian Jordan Peele is set to direct a handful of other horror movies about 'social demons' over the next 10 years.

I think that's fucking great news.

We need more horror movies about stuff like this – about the current issues of the day, about social ills. 

In Get Out, Peele talks about race relations and prejudice and turns those things into a bizarro-funhouse horror/comedy flick. The film, about a black guy named Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) who goes home for the holidays to his white girlfriend Rose's (Allison Williams) parents' huge mansion and begins to notice things askew, is a breath of fresh air for the nuance and intelligence with which it talks about its subject matter.

SPOILERS henceforth... is henceforth even the right word? I don't know.

The basic concept is that he starts to notice that the family's black servants, and the other few black people he meets in the area, are all acting really strange, like robots or aliens – to the point where things start to get disconcerting. At first, you think it's a pretty obvious and heavy handed thing – oh, it's about slavery, they hate black people, et cetera. And I thought so too. But as it went on, you see it's different than that. These old people are actually using the black peoples' bodies as a kind of body-swap thing, brainwashing them and then putting other peoples' dying brains inside them and becoming them. But still, also, leaving a part of the original person inside, too. Pretty cruel stuff.

I love the humor in this too. Like Rose's dad has a line about thinking Barack Obama is the greatest president of his lifetime. So how could HE ever be racist, right? I love it. Pretty soon, all the conversations turn into stuff like that. It's crazy to me – but hell, to a lot of people, this kind of stuff is likely routine and depressing in how often it happens. We don't know how to talk to one another well enough.

And I like that this is a film about race, made by and starring black men, that isn't just a period piece retelling the horrors of slavery or something like that. I think some more modernized takes are welcome now – there's more to talk about then that. Between this and Moonlight, I'm enjoying the takes on subsets of American culture we haven't seen enough raw, real takes on in mainstream movies. That's a good thing, to see more diversity and culture than just that of the standard middle class white guy protagonist we've seen over and over for decades. It's a step forward.

It's the mutation of racism into the modern day coded words, the 'oh, we don't hate black people, we enjoy conversations with those rare specimens under microscopes and in controlled environments.' It's all the bullshit racism still prevalent in our society that dumb people pretend doesn't exist anymore because slavery was outlawed and Civil Rights happened in the 60s, and that's all there was to worry about, right? God bless the U.S. education system whitewashing everything else that happened.

And we should have more movies like this – so, good that Peele is making more. We live in some weird, crazy times right now, very polarized politically, and social issues are increasingly in the spotlight as we continue to fight over them in the USA. Movies can be mirrors of these social issues. They can have a meaning behind them. Horror, too, maybe more than some other genres, can be used in an allegorical manner – fears run wide and far of so many different things in our society and that's why we created monsters like the Wolfman and Frankenstein to talk about them. Modern horror can do that, too. Movies like Get Out are an important step in that direction, again – I'm glad this was so visible and so well-reviewed.

“The best and scariest monsters in the world are human beings and what we are capable of especially when we get together. I've been working on these premises about these different social demons, these innately human monsters that are woven into the fabric of how we think and how we interact, and each one of my movies is going to be about a different one of these social demons.”

--Jordan Peele, in the article I linked earlier.

Spot fucking on, man.

For that matter, it's just an entertaining film. It's a horror comedy that exists as a tense, creepy thriller, but also injects a fair amount of humor into the whole thing. This is a funny movie, both in awkward, subtle ways as Chris navigates his girlfriend's family's weird, creepy neighborhood and in overt ways with the character Rod (LilRel Howery), a TSA agent friend of Chris's who helps get to the bottom of what's going on. It's just good to have a horror film that's also funny WITHOUT parodying the genre's tropes – we've seen enough of that shit. This is just funny while also being scary. It is possible.

So this is a great, smart horror movie that manages to be creepy, funny and socially aware all at the same time. Go see this. I can't wait to see more of Peele's films.

Image copyright of its original owner, I don't own it.

Cinema Freaks Live: Ghostbusters (2016)

Well, the new Ghostbusters movie is out, after all the months and months of online wars and sexism and misogyny and a whole bunch of other undeserved crap thrown at the fact that a beloved 80s classic was being remade with four women. And after all the drama, all the threats of the world ending because of this film's existence, how did this movie hold up?

It's pretty solid.

Director: Paul Feig
Starring: Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

If you want more than that, check out the video my friend Nathan and I did about it. It's the first time we've tried this, and it probably isn't going to look that good after we do more later. But check it out anyway. There are also SPOILERS in it!

(You can also check out our original attempt here, which didn't work because I fucked up on how my camera worked, and it cut off before we were done filming. But it's still a good watch in some ways.)

It was just a fun movie. Nothing great, and the plot was a bit thin and the villain a bit too lame and not every joke hit. But more jokes hit than not. And I liked the new Ghostbusters. A lot. All of them do a good job and they add charisma to it. Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy have a good amount of chemistry, Leslie Jones is a huge presence on screen and Kate McKinnon is a shitload of fun to watch. I wanted to know more about these characters, and like The Force Awakens, the fact that they're totally new and original characters lends the movie a freshness and spontaneity it wouldn't have if it were a straight up remake. So they were enough to save any minor failings the rest of the movie had, and I dug it. Was a fun time.

I think the energy it had really carried above and beyond what it would have been otherwise – if this movie had felt too sluggish or boorish, it would've just felt like a slog to get through. But the energy and verve this movie had was infectious as hell. It really worked. Even the more pedestrian moments just had this crackling, lively feel and it coasted along nicely and I wasn't bored. Pacing and energy are important. This movie succeeded at them.

I wouldn't even really have much to say about this film aside from 'I liked it' if not for all the 'controversial' nonsense surrounding it. I can't even believe all the shit this movie got, and most of it for the all-women angle. It's the dumbest thing ever. This movie is not pushing some feminist angle, and just having women as the main characters doesn't make it some sort of weird political statement – fuck that line of thought. Is having any type of person in a movie aside from a white guy a political statement then? It's not. This is not political at all. It's just a fun film. I also love all the people moaning about Chris Hemsworth's character being a dumb eye-candy type of character that the women swoon over at some parts of the movie. There are so many movies where women fulfill that role the other 95% of the time and ignore movies that actually have developed characters. I hardly think one movie to the contrary is going to destroy the fabric of cinema.

A special fuck-you to human dumpster fire Milo Yiannapolous and his equally shitty website Breitbart. If you don't know them, it's a “journalism” website in the way that the dumpster behind the McDonalds in your town is fine dining. Yiannapolous constantly insults every demographic he can and then whines and whines about “political correctness” and “censorship” when people ban him from places. It's trolling, and not any sort of funny trolling. I bring this up at all because they recently had a campaign against Leslie Jones of the movie, hurling all sorts of deplorable racist insults against them. Just awful, awful stuff.

Luckily, she's better than them. And this movie is better than anything these assholes can shit out.

And that's why I'm making a point of defending this movie. Not just because it's good, but because it's worth speaking out against nonsense hate-mongering and misogyny. And seriously, guys. It's a movie. It's not fucking Selma or The Help or something, it's Ghostbusters – this much vitriol and controversy over politics in it is insane. Just get over it. It's a good, fun movie. Just go have fun with it.

Image copyright of its original owners, we own none of them.

Orange Is The New Black's Season Four & the Viewer's Prism - SPOILERS

The new Orange is the New Black season is probably the show's most audacious and challenging yet. I say that because there were parts of this that were awful and gut-wrenching to watch. This is challenging, forward thinking TV, and yeah, there are going to be some SPOILERS in this thing, so if you don't want that, go back on Netflix and finish the show.

I guess I'll just address the elephant in the room immediately, with Poussey Washington's death in Episode 12, “The Animals.” It's a horrible thing to watch, her being suffocated on the floor, and notably by Bayley, who was the most harmless looking, innocent seeming guy prior to this – that's really, really something, I think.

The thing for me was that I didn't know how to feel – Poussey's death was a tragedy, and Bayley was responsible yet is not some kind of evil psychotic monster like some of the other guards. That's important. Several characters on the show in the last episode – Caputo and Coates most notably – talk about how prison changes you, how Bayley is ruined after that. And obviously, that's the complete wrong reaction to have – like in the case of the Stanford rapist, talking about his life when another person has died (or in the Stanford case, been raped) because of him is unspeakably shitty. But Bayley isn't portrayed as some kind of evil monster either. His actions are awful and what happened is awful, because he's a moron who wasn't good at his job. He feels bad and he should fucking feel bad. But he isn't written as some kind of cartoon villain monster like he would be in other shows. It would be cheaper if he was written that way. He had to be a fully fleshed out character.

It's just a shitty situation. And the show does well at testing your moral compass and then smashing it up and throwing it into a blender.

The flashbacks in the episode are about Bayley basically going through life as this moron slacker kid. Getting thrown in jail for drinking on top of a water tower, getting fired from a job for giving free ice cream to girls. It's all inconsequential goofy petty bullshit that happens and none of it means a thing, because he's an upper-middle-class white kid and the world's his oyster. Even when asked why he's working at the prison, his answer is to shrug and say he's here “until the next thing.” Nothing has any meaning and he's just this aimless loser who gets by because he was born in a pretty privileged area and had a decent life up to now. He doesn't look like the kind of guy who'd kill someone, so when he does without meaning to, its his future and well being that are worried about – not that of Poussey or her friends, family, or the general injustice of it all. Infuriating shit. It's supposed to be – you're supposed to be mad at this.

The finale is even more gut wrenching – we see Caputo and the MCC PR people floundering desperately, Poussey's body left for hours on the kitchen floor while they try to spin it their way. Caputo, who has talked a big game all season about really helping these inmates and being there for them, can't do anything – he's paralyzed and his actions come off as cowardly. He's a fairweather friend of sorts, with good, charitable intentions during the good times, but then unable to do a thing during the bad solely from his own incompetence. And then again, how can we blame him? Any major insurrection against MCC would lose him his job and then nothing would ever change at all. He's doing what he can. But as in real life, doing what one can isn't always enough and it won't always matter a damn.

The show excels at creating these situations that are so morally complex that there is no right answer and people will view them through different lens. It's easy and valid to say that Caputo's a piece of shit and Bayley is trash and the flashbacks about him are unnecessary, because a person died, a black person, who are so often victimized by police in real life. It's also easy to say that they're all doing their best and things are fucked either way and nothing is simple. That's valid, too.

The show is a sort of reflective mirror-prism for how you look at any number of situations in life. Not everyone is supposed to find this season pleasant or easy to watch. I think that is what makes it great art, and what puts this show up there with Breaking Bad and The Wire for groundbreaking TV that portrays the human experience. I've read a handful of editorials from black viewers who absolutely hated this season:

http://jawnbaejaeger.tumblr.com/post/146175495753/every-white-person-talking-about-how-poussey

http://wearyourvoicemag.com/more/entertainment/orange-is-the-new-black-trauma-porn-written-white-people

http://verysmartbrothas.com/yeah-im-finished-with-the-black-suffering-trauma-porn-of-orange-is-the-new-black/

They are perfectly justified in doing so. Why wouldn't they? It more directly affects their community. It talks about a problem they deal with every day and which is so much more real to them. Expecting them to react to Poussey's fictional death in the same way as someone like me is farcicial. It's never going to happen. I don't know shit compared to them.

So, like I said – the mirror-prism thing. Your view of this sequence of events in OITNB is solely dependent on your view of the real life things going on. Some people won't like this stuff because it's uncomfortable or it comes off as exploitative, and that's fine, they are perfectly justified. I would never try and patronize them by acting like I know better. I don't. I have no idea what they go through and wouldn't dream of trying to push my worldview on theirs. I'm just a guy myself, seeing this show and I like it because I'm into real life news, and seeing art that portrays things in this manner interests me. But other people have different experiences and they may find this to be offputting. I don't think the show really wanted to please everyone anyway. What it wanted was to show this stuff – to open the window a bit. Let us gaze out.

But as sad as this all is, what you should be taking away is that young black people die at the hands of the law way too often in real life. This is a fiction, but what's happening mirrors things that the black community has faced for real. This is nothing compared to real life. Black lives do matter, and the show's portrayal of these current events is maybe not even necessary when there's so much real evidence of this kind of thing happening. That's the one flaw here. It's ugly, sad and horrific, and there are no punches pulled. Maybe it doesn't need to exist or be shown. I don't know - but it is here. And so I'm writing this.

The show pulls this trick, of testing your morals, over and over again. Sam Healy is an odious man, a racist and a misogynist who uses his position in power at the prison to work out his mommy issues. But he has other dimensions to him and we see the show's portrayals of him as sympathetic in his attempts to find real human connection, to feel good at his job, to help out. He doesn't often succeed, because of his own limitations as a person. Not everyone gets a happy ending. That's realistic. The point of portraying him this way is that even terrible people have dimensions and complexities. Lots of movies and shows don't have anywhere near this kind of insight. Should art only humanize and explore those that are widely considered good and respectful people? It's all fiction at the end of the day. We should use it to challenge ourselves a bit.

Likewise with the perhaps even worse Coates, who raped Pennsatucky last year. He was widely reviled last season. But this year, we see that he feels confused and starts to regret what he did after he learns what Pennsatucky thinks of him – you know, that she isn't just avoiding him to play coy. The fact that a show with such a feminist message and written by so many women is doing this is pretty key here. For one, it's the same thing as Healy, this humanization of a rapist, showing that he's still a person at the end of the day with his own complexities. You don't have to like him. In fact you're probably not supposed to. But his characterization, his humanization shows a different point – rapists are not the shadowy monster in the bushes, and they aren't somehow less human than us, and it isn't okay to feel vindicated or different if you've done something to someone without their consent just because you aren't that old stereotype. Rapists are guys who appear pretty normal from far away. That's what Coates shows.

The fact that the show gets these reactions is what makes it great to me though. I don't think art needs to be likable or palatable to everyone. Better if it's not, even. I want art to surprise and challenge me and make me consider things in ways I hadn't. OITNB does that big time here. That should be the whole purpose of art. People not liking something is fine. With a show like this, it'll be a given. You shouldn't want art to be easily palatable and accessible to everyone, because what's going on then? You're not taking a real stance, you aren't saying anything controversial or exciting or electrifying, and it's harder to come out with something really great if you're just taking the middle of the road and not trying to push any buttons. Does all art have to be likable first and foremost, over any other quality? I don't think it does.

Images copyright of their original owners. I don't own any of them.