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In: 2016, Hot Take

Hot Take: Your standard genre movie. Slightly too good to be a TV movie yet not all that enthralling enough to warrant a theatrical release. Natalie Portman is good, the supporting cast is adequate and the story is OK. Jane misfires.

There was a time where Westerns ruled the cinema. Today, the Western is few and far between and it’s hard to count films like The Hateful Eight as a traditional Western (it’s hard to imagine John Wayne in a film as violent and crude as The Hateful Eight). For what it’s worth, Jane Got A Gun is awfully close to a classic Western in style. Unfortunately, despite it’s nostalgic feel, some of the film feels as if it lacks direction and while the film’s title indirectly promises a strong female character, Natalie Portman’s Jane ends up not living up to the billing.Read More →

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In: 2015, Hot Take

Hot Take: Charlie Kaufman makes more film school student/film critic porn and this time I’m not buying it.

Sometimes it’s great when a film makes you think. Sometimes it’s fun when a film gives you pause to reflect on your own thinking and wonder if you are fundamentally flawed. Sometimes a film can be therapeutic in the way it delivers a message. Sometimes it’s bullshit. Anomalisa felt more like bullshit. It’s interesting, watchable bullshit but it’s bullshit nonetheless.

Spoiler Alert: The rest of this piece will likely give away some of the film’s plot twists and break from the typical format of this site. This is a post about film school porn, after all.Read More →

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In: 2016, Hot Take

Hot Take: The latest in “What will Robert DeNiro do for money?” genre of movies. (Initially, I wanted to go with “Apparently, Robert DeNiro would allow someone to film him for 90 minutes in one of those Money Machines you see at a casino wearing only a thong with the blowers turned up to hurricane force as long as he was allowed to keep the cash and they kept refilling it if he grabbed it all” but felt it might be too long.)

Rather than spend too much time chastising Dirty Grandpa for it’s offensiveness (not really the content so much — which is very offensive — but it’s total disrespect for a human’s intelligence to accept this as entertainment), let’s talk about Robert DeNiro’s career choices. He’s done easy bad (Righteous Kill). He’s done lazy bad (Analyze That). He’s done ridiculously bad (The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle). He’s done reboot bad (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). He’s done “skip the theaters” bad (Freelancers). He’s done “Let’s make another shitty sequel and see if you still keep coming” bad (Little Fockers). He’s even gotten sucked into those “Let’s do an ensemble piece around a holiday” bad (New Year’s Eve). Sadly, I’m probably doing DeNiro’s shit list a discredit by leaving off a few turds. The saddest part of all of this is how easily an offensive, brutally lazy movie like Dirty Grandpa can make you quickly forget how good DeNiro was as recently as he was in The Intern and think maybe he’s done. He’s not… he just can’t say no.Read More →

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In: 2016, Hot Take

Hot Take: How to make watching The 5th Wave fun: Spot how many other movies it has ripped off and then give it a new title based on what you’ve spotted. Mine is called Buffy Potter and the Day After the Deep Divergent Twilight Hunger Maze of the Red Flies… They Live! What about yours?

The best thing about The 5th Wave will be the Honest Trailer it will give life to in the not so distant future. Actually, if you haven’t seen The Hunger Games franchise or the Divergent Series or The Maze Runner films or Twilight, The 5th Wave might be kind of okay. The film opens with an somewhat intriguing premise involving an alien invasion and some cool looking apocalyptic annihilation scenes but dissolves into every teen vs. adult action flick you’ve ever seen. In the end, The 5th Wave is mediocre (which is all you can ask for from a movie coming out in January, let’s be honest) but with a modest $38 million budget and existing source material — the movie is based on a trilogy of YA dystopian novels — it wouldn’t be surprising to see a sequel or two.Read More →

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In: 2016, Hot Take, Trailers

Anticipation (Before Trailer): 50/100

Anticipation (After Trailer): 100/100

If you put a gun to my head and said I could only see one movie into 2016, it would be Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. But if you said I could see two movies, the second movie would be Keanu!

I’m not a huge Key and Peele fan but I’ve watched some of the better bits from their show on YouTube and found them extremely funny in small doses. Seriously, though, look at the cat! He’s a star in the making and will be all over your movie screen April 29, 2016.

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In: 2016, Hot Take

Hot Take: Yosemite struggles to fill 82 minutes. Despite heaping helpings of dramatic build-up, nothing ever really happens. When it does, it’s not very interesting.

Yosemite is one of the darkest films I’ve seen in some time. However, part of me wonders if it’s me that is dark and the movie is really about something else. Because of the deliberate, patient pace combined with the just below the surface darkness, the viewing is unnerving and allows for a lot of thought. That’s not to say the film is thought provoking. There’s too much left open to interpretation to credit it with being thought provoking. You have no choice but to think. Yosemite leaves you no other option.Read More →

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In: 2016, Hot Take, Trailers

Anticipation (Before Trailer): 70/100

Anticipation (After Trailer): 85/100

It’s hard to admit how much I secretly enjoyed the first Neighbors. It’s even harder to admit that I laughed out loud at the Neighbors 2 trailer at least 3 times. I frequently watch bad movies and wonder who is the freak who loves this movie… well, when it comes to Neighbors, the freak is me. Coming May 20, 2016.

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In: 2016, Hot Take, Trailers

Anticipation (Before Trailer): 90/100

Anticipation (After Trailer): 99/100

Suicide Squad looks crazy. It should be interesting to see how it comes together. What’s with the August 5th release date though? Maybe it’s all sizzle and no steak.

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In: 2016, Hot Take

Hot Take: Right now, the careers of Kevin Hart and Ice Cube are hot… but so is hell and I don’t know too many people lining up to visit for 2 hours. It should have to pay royalties to every buddy cop movie it borrowed from and apologize for how poorly it was done. If you loved Ride Along, go watch Ride Along again! Skip Ride Along 2. (You’ll thank me!)

What suffers from an overly revealing trailer, sequel fatigue and unoriginality? Ride Along 2! Sorry Kevin Hart and Ice Cube but this is not the movie your pairing was looking for. After the huge success of Ride Along in a month where even moderate success is celebrated, the studio had no choice. So it ran every buddy cop comedy through the copier and out came Ride Along 2. To ensure stale freshness, it added a mixture of Ken Jeong’s roles and Benjamin Bratt’s bad guy character. Read More →

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In: 2016, Hot Take

Hot Take: It’s as if someone took all of the unfunny parts of Happy Feet, Ice Age, The Penguins of Madagascar and Minions and tossed them in a film blender. Norm of the North is the horrific concoction that would ooze out. (We could call it an Arctic Shake… if you see the movie, you’ll get it.)

I’m not really sure what to say about Norm of the North. It could have easily been made a decade ago and been sitting in a studio’s film vault collecting dust. Look at the voice cast — Rob Schneider, Heather Graham, Colm Meany, Ken Jeong, Gabriel Iglesias — and most of them are no more relevant now than they were in 2006. At least if it came out in 2006, maybe some of it would have been new.Read More →