We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011)

Right from the title, this is suspect. That's a seriously unwieldy, awkward title – not sure there'll be any T-shirts of that one. And there also won't be any T-shirts because nobody would ever want to touch such an appalling film. We Need To Talk About Kevin is a miserable film and I am here to tell you why.

Director: Lynne Ramsay

Starring: Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller

IMDb

I guess this is one of those 'evil kid' movies that was for some reason popular through the years – like the Omen, the Good Son, and so on. Only this time he gets to grow up and we see that it's 100% what you'd expect, a violent sociopath that makes American Psycho look like a well adjusted individual. Who needs surprises in a movie anyway, right?

The movie is done in a jumbled fashion where scenes are shown out of order, for no real discernible reason. I guess they wanted to create some kind of tension or mystery, but the effect this creates is just a simulation of walking into a meeting halfway through and missing all context. For like the first 20 minutes, I was just scratching my head – it was too difficult to tell what the actual story was. There are a few scenes of Tilda Swinton's main character Eva being bombarded with red paint on her house and screamed threats that she's a murderer, a few scenes of her and John C. Reilly as the husband playing with small children and some others of Eva in some other country doing activist work. None of it is put together well. It's like if a small child holding a jigsaw puzzle sneezed and dropped all the pieces everywhere, and then we just made that into a movie to placate him.

I guess eventually we start to see the real story – Eva's son Kevin is, shock and awe, a weird, bad kid! He does wacky shit like mess up Eva's paintings and cry all the time when she's holding him. Wow. What a truly horrible thing and you deserve sympathy more than other people. Though there's at least one scene where she's holding him as a baby and says, with real malice, that she was happy before Kevin was born and now just wants to cry all the time I guess. Gee, real surprise he didn't turn out well... we never return to this again, but honestly, I'd love to see a smarter movie actually tackle bad parenting like that. Too bad this one isn't it.

The movie isn't a fan of brevity or getting to the point, as we cycle through endless vague time-hopping scenes, like a drunk Dr. Who episode, switching from a miserable and enervated looking Eva trying to keep afoot when everyone hates her, to Eva with her family and kids in the past. There are a lot of just boring as fuck scenes of Eva in some office building that finally hires her. And there's one set at Halloween when an army of awful children pound on the windows screaming for candy – Jesus. Where do kids act like this? I want to know so I can recommend we quarantine that hellish place for all of time.

When it isn't showing those pointless scenes, you get downright awful and miserable scenes of Eva trying to relate to her hopelessly sociopathic son. I love the one scene where she's telling him he can decorate his own room to show his personality, and he goes “what personality?” The kid's delivery is just so hammy and the line itself is such dogshit that I'm tempted to say the kid could've done better if he wrote his own dialogue.

There's also a scene where Eva is teaching him to count and, to prove he can, counts from one to 50 in a very obnoxious manner, and then shits his pants. I guess the pants-shitting was meant to rebel against his mother. Truly this kid is the next incarnate of punk rock. Then he farts as he's walking away and she throws him against a wall, breaking his arm. More of those amazing parenting skills! I'm amazed this woman could ever create a child who wasn't well adjusted!

Honestly, I get it – the kid is “just evil.” It isn't the mother's fault because this is a stupid movie that doesn't care about actually saying anything. This is just agonizing, dull scene after agonizing, dull scene of the kid tormenting her and, after she breaks his arm, basically blackmailing her. There's a scene where he makes her go home instead of getting something she needs at the store because of that. Wow, what a riveting scene if you're 89 years old and in a coma. A real nail-biter.

It isn't any better when they grow up and there's a second kid born – if anything, it gets worse when Kevin is a teenager because now he is as pretentious as your average dude-bro atheist philosophy “expert,” only also a psycho fuck. There's a scene where he jerks off in front of his mom, if you were wondering if there was. I know you were. And there's one where he gives her computer a virus. All of these scenes are as bad as any bad movies you ever saw. There's no redeeming value.

I especially love the scene where Eva takes Kevin out for a day for them to just talk, because it's everything bad about the movie – there's one part where they're at some outside eatery and Eva totally randomly says she hates fat people because they're just fat due to eating too much and are unhealthy for that reason. It's totally out of nowhere. Like a scriptwriter just had a bunch of hateful shit he wanted to get off his chest.

Then, at another restaurant later, Kevin shows off those college atheist philosophy reading skills again and pompously “predicts” what his mother is going to do – scold him for fucking girls and then cry because she drank too much wine. It's a carnival of dog shit writing, just terrible garbage spewing everywhere like a malfunctioning sewer. But then, that IS the movie.

Perhaps the crowning moment of awful parenting goes to John C. Reilly as the dad. After an entire movie where he has done nothing except scoff at Eva and say she's dumb for thinking Kevin is bad, he gives Kevin a fucking bow and arrow for Christmas. I can see liking his son – but for Reilly to see that dead-eyed piece of shit he fathered no doubt under the influence of alcohol, and give him a fucking weapon – that's insane to me and the biggest plothole in the film. This kid was never even close to sympathetic, even when Eva broke his arm earlier. He's been shown to be a one-dimensional evil psycho from the beginning. There's no nuance here and it's just crazy that his dad is so blind to this.

It's no surprise that the whole thing ends in a school shooting? He takes a bow and arrow to school like the only angry fucker in America to not have money to buy a gun. He isn't even the real deal – how many of these guys get their sole weapon from their fathers? I think this kid is weak as hell.

I'm making a lot of jokes here, but hey, the movie isn't taking this issue even remotely seriously. What's the message here? A bad kid will turn out bad if you parent him in a terrible way, I guess, and even that's a stretch to say there's any message at all. There's no real exploration of why he turned out that way or what we can do about it – all the movie wants to do is show shocking things for no reason. So fuck that.

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The Disappointments Room (2016)

Here we go again, with another ghost story movie that really could've been improved in a number of ways... most of all in this case, if the filmmakers had had any kind of point or plot to anything they were doing. Welcome to The Disappointments Room!

Director: DJ Caruso

Starring: Kate Beckinsale, Mel Raido

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Apparently this movie was made a few years ago, but only released last year after the studio came back from a bankruptcy filing after a bunch of lawsuits and missing loan payments. Would it really have been too much to ask for it to have just STAYED lost?

Also, director DJ Caruso was also responsible for Disturbia, which is... yeah, great, I guess? I dunno. Let's just dig into this crap pile.

This is another ghost story, paranormal type of film, in the mold of Insidious and The Haunting of Connecticut and God knows how many others. It's got a super original premise where a troubled woman, Dana (Kate Beckinsale) and her family are moving to a fancy house in the country to try and get away from their problems – something people in real life do all the time, and something totally relatable to the modern person. Not feeling good about anything? Just do the totally plausible and affordable thing and move to a fancy old house in the country. If you can't do that, YOU DESERVE TO SUFFER.

It's so simple. Just make sure you have access to enough wealth and personal opportunity to move to a place like this at any time you're sad. Then you'll never truly be in the dark.

The movie actually starts with the family singing in the car driving to the place, and it's really quite annoying. The dad is waaaay too into it, he looks like he's doing his best Off Broadway musical voice. Calm the fuck down, dude. I'm pretty sure there are no talent agents out on the road in the woods that will hear you.

I guess one of the first things that happens is a leak in the roof – you know, the best possible way to start off a horror film. I can't count the number of horror films I've seen where it was good but would have been improved with a subplot about a leaky roof. Also, it starts to rain – so this is a really bad movie to watch if you have to pee really bad.

They do some more boring shit like go into town to talk to the weirdest lady the movie could find – she's just super excited about everything, blathering on about how there's a hot carpenter in town who's father is an alcoholic, which is stuff I'd find really interesting if I was wasted off my ass at 3 a.m. and unaware of my surroundings. But I'm not, so this scene just falls flat.

But there's actually SOME creepy shit that starts happening... like, Dana sees a dog in the yard one time. OOOOOoooooOOOOOOOoooo! Scary!

It turns out to just be a wheelbarrow or something. Easy mistake to make, they look exactly identical.

There's also, of course, the weird little room they never heard about when they were looking at the house, up in the attic. It starts to weird Dana out, but she can't open it at all until a separate scene the next day when she finds a key to the place. Wonderful scriptwriting – no way at all that couldn't've happened in the same scene. But I guess the movie had to fill its insanely difficult hour and 15-minute runtime somehow! These guys really know how to write movies.

Then she does get in, and the door mysteriously closes behind her. That's just how houses in the south work – they're super polite, always wanting to make your living experience easier by taking steps out of everything. She tries to get out, but apparently the house doesn't want her to get out. Oh well. It happens. Then I guess she's just a really unmemorable person, because she falls asleep in there for several fucking hours and nobody notices she's gone.

Seriously? Her husband doesn't notice? I guess he WAS busy playing with his kid outside though. This guy is such a weirdly immature character that I'm not sure whose idea it was to do this.

This is actually advance footage of the next Avengers movie. Looks lazy.

The rest of this is just full of nonsense jump scares that we saw in 2004 and some really bad dream sequence scenes that are so obvious you could see them in space... like, yeah, I'm sure she really woke up and found her kid with blood all over him... no way THAT could be a hallucination. These scenes can work, but only if you have a strong story narrative and connection to the characters. This movie doesn't.

The “story” I guess is that this old house used to belong to a family who had a deformed daughter and kept her locked up in the attic. This is relayed extremely calmly to Dana by an old lady in a museum who knew about it before and didn't tell them when they initially talked about buying the house. GEE, THANKS A LOT, LADY!

"Heh heh heh... fucking with the new people in town is the only way I feel alive anymore."

If you're wondering, like I was, what's going on with that leaky roof thing, then never fear. The movie rushes through all that boring “horror” shit and gets back to that with a scene probably longer than the horror ones – the super handsome construction guy from the town comes to the house and openly flirts with Dana with apparently no shame, and she hashes out a deal for him to work on their house. Wow! WHAT. GRIPPING. CINEMA.

Like, what in the fuck are you doing, movie? There's barely any horror in your horror movie! This thing doesn't even seem like it wanted to be a horror film – it seems much more preoccupied with these scenes of Dana and Hot Carpenter Fuckboy there quasi-flirting. Where's the scares?

Oh – another overly long hallucination dream scene of her kid supposedly getting eaten by a dog. Yeah – not convincing me, movie.

Apparently part of the reason for all this, we find out, is because she accidentally rolled over and suffocated her other child a while back and has been traumatized ever since. This is a horribly tragic thing to have happen. But this movie just isn't doing very well at articulating that. Can't it take a page out of a film like, oh I don't know, Lars von Trier's Antichrist?

Then what? She decides to burn some old paintings in the house for... better interior decorating, I'm guessing.

But who cares about that? What's going on with her and that carpenter guy now?! I guess he finally takes it too far when he offers to sleep over when her husband is away. Ooh, shot down like a U.S. government drone flying over the farm of a devout Luddite with a gun.

Keep in mind, this movie is less than 80 minutes long, and this is what we're focusing on.

How about a scene where the husband is talking to a therapist about his wife's troubles? Is THAT going to be any good?

He is actually talking to just a pair of legs.

What is this movie's fascination with showing us scenes like this that have NOTHING to do with the movie? I get it, character development is good. But they're not developing characters! They're just showing us random bullshit that distracts from the point. It's like if The Shining took a detour to show us Wendy and Jack sitting at the table talking about what color curtain to put in their bathroom at home, no scares or anything else revealed. Just ridiculous.

After finding the grave of the deformed girl in the woods, Carpenter Wonder Boy is then killed by a ghost himself, and hung in a tree where Dana finds him. Later on, it's revealed that apparently he wasn't really in the tree. Even though we see him killed by the ghost from his own point of view, apparently that DIDN'T really happen. These ghosts are up to some super complex Houdini type shit, I'll tell you.

It's extra funny if he really did die though - in that case, apparently they just leave him out there to rot while they have their little family therapy session in the house later. What a bunch of dicks.

I guess there's some sort of a “climax” after that, where she learns through magical unexplained psychic ghost powers that this old guy in the house murdered the disabled girl in the attic. What an awesome revelation that I truly care about.

Then, I guess, the ghost of that guy tells her that her son will die, so she runs to his room with a hammer and attacks a pillow that she thinks is the old man's head trying to attack her son! But really it's just, you know, a pillow, and she scared her kid. Whoops.

Wow, what an imagination she has! She should go into creative writing.

Then she and her husband talk in the kitchen about her grief from letting her baby die, which wasn't her fault, but really kind of was. Her husband says it's cool and they can work on shit, and they hug and then the screen goes to a sunny day with them leaving the house. Because that's all you need to cure emotional trauma! A hug and a 'it'll be okay' and then you're fine. Nothing else necessary! Wow! I never knew it was that easy. Apparently anything is fixable with enough money to move to a nice country house, move out and the support of a loving family. That truly is a great moral, movie. Really learned a lot from this!

This is a lame and awful movie. It didn't even feel like a finished film. But I will give it this – its plot was generic tripe I've seen a thousand times and should've been retired five years ago, but at least this movie didn't spend too much time on it. This one was trying really hard NOT to even be a fucking horror movie, what with all the time spent on the roof fixing plot, that they barely spent any time on the usual cliches I hate.

Speaking of that, what ever did happen with the roof of that place? I guess the family moved out before it could get done, which is the real reason I think this sucks! No resolution to its main plot!

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