Tag: Movie Review

Cinema Dispatch: The Edge of Seventeen

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 2 Comments

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The Edge of Seventeen and all the images you see in this review are owned by STX Entertainment

Directed by Kelly Fremon Craig

Oh hey!  It’s our good ol’ friends at STX entertainment once again!  They’ve only been around for just over a year now, yet they’ve responsible for five of the films I’ve had to review this year; all of which have been to surprisingly polarizing results with The Boy being one of the biggest surprises of the year and Free State of Jones turning out to be a major snooze fest.  Still, they are sitting pretty after Bad Moms managed to rake in almost two hundred million dollars (and I get the feeling The Space Between Us is gonna make quite a few bucks as well), so they’re gonna stick around for some time; especially if their latest film manages to find a similar audience the way Bad Moms did.  Does The Edge of Seventeen fill a niche for teenage moviegoers while also being a great film in its own right, or is this yet another lazy attempt to get the John Hughes formula to work one more time?  Let’s find out!!

The movie is all about Nadine Byrd (Hailee Steinfeld) who’s life as a middle class white girl REALLY sucks as she’s at the point in her life where nothing makes sense and everyone seems to be against her; especially when that’s compounded by the tragic loss of her father a few years back which drove a wedge between her and her mother (Kyra Sedgwick) to this very day.  Not only that, but she’s ALSO got to deal with her brother Darian (Blake Jenner) being so perfect at everything so she gets to compare her own lousy existence to a better one every single day. What could POSSIBLY make things worse!?  Her best friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson) sleeping with her brother?  Okay, that will do it.  Clearly Nadine is on the verge of a nervous breakdown and needs to find a way to become more comfortable with her own life and the ways in which it is changing; whether it’s by hanging out with a guy who TOTALLY loves her but she’s not all that into (Hayden Szeto) or working up the nerve to talk to the dude she’s been crushing on for quite some time now (Alexander Calvert).  Will Nadine finally get her life on track after getting through this rough patch in her life?  Will the hot bad boy who works in a pet shop FINALLY notice her?  Maybe her teacher (Woody Harelson) can help sort this all out for her.

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“My professional advice to as a school teacher is to shut the hell up about this until after you graduate.”     “WHY!?”     “Because then you’re the state’s problem.  Not mine.”

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Cinema Dispatch: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 1 Comment

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Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and all the images you see in this review are owned by Warner Bros Pictures

Directed by David Yates

Well DC certainly isn’t about to keep Warner Bros solvent for years to come, so it’s time to dip back into the Harry Potter well and Accio them some of that sweet franchise cash!  Now despite the somewhat desperate circumstances surrounding the studio behind this film, there is a lot of potential here as JK Rowling wrote the script for it and David Yates has returned once again to direct.  Then again… neither one of them has had much luck with their creative endeavors since the last Potter film, particular David Yates whose Legend of Tarzan earlier this year is one of the many domestic flops Warner Bros has had to deal with in the last few years.  Huh.  Well I’m SURE none of that is important when it comes to this film which promises to get us all back to waving overpriced wands and repurchasing the book sets once again!  Does this latest entry in the Potter Franchise manage to inject some new life to build a new slate of films from, or is this a desperate cash grab form a lot of people who haven’t found a way to move on from this series?  Let’s find out!!

The movie begins with Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) arriving in New York City with nothing more than the clothes on his back and his TARDIS like suitcase full of magical creatures.  He’s come to the US in search of yet another magical creature to further his research, yet things start to go sideways once his suitcase’s latch starts malfunctioning which gives some of the more rascally creatures a chance to escape.  You’d think that tying a belt around it would solve the issue, but maybe he would need a MAGIC belt and simply didn’t have one available at the time.  Anyway, one of the creatures does get loose which is quickly retrieved, but not before a No-maj (the American word for Muggle) named Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler) sees too much as well as Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterson) who seems to work for the US Ministry of Magic  and wants to bring Newt in for questioning.  Sadly for all involved, shenanigans ensue and Newt’s suitcase is broken wide open for even MORE creatures to escape which means that he must roam the streets of New York looking for them with Tina and Jacob in tow in an attempt to keep things nice and quiet as well as avoid jail time for all three of them.  Of course, that’s not ALL that’s going on here as there seem to be some deeper intrigue involving a REALLY on the nose religious group known as the New Salem Church (subtle) being led by some zealot (Samantha Morton) and there might even be some traitorous players in the US Ministry of Magic that are helping them in their goals of hunting down magic users.  Will Newt manage to get his creatures back before animal control either kills them or gets eaten themselves?  What exactly is the New Salem church after, as well as those inside the wizarding world who are VERY closely looking at their activities?  How the hell did Newt even get mixed up in all this!?  HE JUST WANTED TO BUY SOMETHING!!

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“I know what you all are thinking, but I can ABSOLUTELY explain.”

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Cinema Dispatch: Hacksaw Ridge

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Hacksaw Ridge and all the images you see in this review are owned by Summit Entertainment

Directed by Mel Gibson

So The Birth of a Nation, while still being directed by terrible person with seemingly no interest in doing the hard work to change that, at least had the benefit of its filmmaker being a new voice with a desperately needed perspective in an industry that had grown pretty monolithic despite the way the world (and their audience) was changing around them.  Mel Gibson on the other hand has been around for decades and is already part of that overly white-cis-het culture that needs to be changed (both in Hollywood and everywhere else) which is only compounded by him being a shit bag for WAY longer.  Now I’m sure that he struggles with his demons constantly and that those kinds of fights are never easy to win, but no one owes this guy sympathy for those plights considering the harm he’s caused or their money to see his films even if it’s good in its own right.  I’m a film critic, so I critique films and all I can do is try to relay what this movie is trying to do, if it succeeds in doing so, and how I reacted to it given the full scope of how and why it was created instead of just on how well they made it.  Is this a masterpiece from a deeply disturbed filmmaker, or has the director’s own personal hang-ups dragged down a biopic about a much great man than him?  Let’s find out!!

The movie is essentially a biopic of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield) whose religious beliefs meant he would not carry weapons or cause direct harm to others, but he still wanted to serve his country and do what he can to help his fellow Americans fighting in the Pacific Rim, so he enlists anyway with the hope of being a medic.  Now apparently medics STILL have to carry weapons and get weapons training, but he refuses to do even that much and becomes a target by his commanding officers (Vince Vaughn and Sam Worthington) and fellow recruits who consider this an act of cowardice rather than religious conviction, and the movie takes great pains to explore the suffering he went through to earn the right not to carry a weapon as well as how he got these convictions (his alcoholic father Tom played by Hugo Weaving was a big influence), how this act of rebellion can ruin his life as well as the life of his wife Dorothy (Teresa palmer) and what he does once he’s in the field of battle with no way to protect himself.  Does Desmond manage to keep his convictions even when faced with the horrors of battle?  Will the rest of his unit learn to respect his convictions once he proves himself out in the field?  Is the film drenched in religious symbolism and Jesus allegories?  Does a bear shit in the woods?  And is Mel Gibson a serial abuser?

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SYMBOLISM!!

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Cinema Dispatch: Arrival

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Arrival and all the images you see in this review are owned by Paramount Pictures

Directed by Denis Villeneuve

Well this is another movie that just kind of snuck up on me.  Apparently we’re not supposed to know movies are coming out unless they’re part of a franchise or have talking animals in it.  The thing is that had I known about this more than a week before it came out, I probably would have gotten really excited to see it as it’s directed by the same guy who did Sicario which was one of my favorite movies of last year.  That, and hard sci-fi is usually an easy sell for me, so maybe it wouldn’t have hurt to throw this trailer in front of that new Independence Day movie or something.  Anyway, does this in-depth examination on the problems with communicating not only work as a scientific procedural but as a badass alien flick, or is all the moody imagery and themes about humanity’s inability to effectively talk to one another just a cover for a mediocre slog?  Let’s find out!!

The movie begins with a montage as we see Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) give birth to her daughter Hannah and watch her grow up and die due to some sort of illness.  After that uplifting introduction, we see Dr. Banks go back to work (presumably some time has passed since the funeral) where she’s a professor of Linguistics at… some college.  Unfortunately, it JUST SO HAPPENS that aliens have started landing all over the planet in these giant spaceships that are referred to as Shells, but always looked like black contact lenses to me.  Because she’s so good at what she does, Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) brings her to one of the landing sites to see if she can help them understand the alien creatures inside.  Those two, along with Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) who is a theoretical physicists need to work together to get these aliens talking or else the world governments, especially a Military leader in China General Shang (Tzi Ma), get too antsy about the shells just hanging around and start firing at them.  Can this rag tag group of smart people unlock the secrets inside of these spaceships and prevent humanity from destroying them and possibly themselves in the process?  Just what exactly do these aliens want, and why are they just hanging around instead of doing something productive?  Seriously, they mastered light speed travel, but they couldn’t figure out a way to communicate with the primitive species BEFORE parking their giant spaceships!?

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“So wait, we’ve only been able to access THIS part of the ship which is basically a stage for the aliens to walk past?”     “Yup.”     “Are you sure we’re not on some intergalactic prank show?”

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Cinema Dispatch: Shut In

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 1 Comment

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Shut In and all the images you see in this review are owned by EuropaCorp

Directed by Farren Blackburn

So when did this movie get announced, because I didn’t know anything about it until I looked up the new releases for this week.  It’s not like Naomi Watts is an unknown actor, and horror movies are big business right now, so the fact that I didn’t even see a trailer for this at any of the horror films I saw this year is not a great sign of what’s to come.  Still, it’s not like movies that get a whole bunch of press are guaranteed to do any better, and a lot of great horror films don’t even get a theatrical release, so maybe they just didn’t know how to sell something like this.  Does this film deliver yet another fantastic horror experience in a year that has already had so many, or will this just get lost in the shuffle?  Let’s find out!!

The movie follows the Portman Family who at one point consisted of three able bodied and happy members, but after a car accident has been reduced to the mother Mary (Naomi Watts) and her son Steven (Charlie Heaton), the latter of whom has suffered severe brain damage and is pretty much unable to move or communicate.  After six months of this routine where she cares for her son and then goes to work as a childhood psychologist, things start to change when one of her patients Tom (Jacob Tremblay) is being moved to Boston so that he can get more specialized care.  The night after Mary finds this out however, Tom shows up at her doorstep… well technical he smashes the window to her car and crawls inside, and while Mary is trying to figure out what to do next, the boy disappears into the night.  So not only is she dealing with her son who is in need of constant care, she now has a possible dead boy on her conscious (they’re up in Maine so it’s snowing all the freaking time) and starts to hear things go bump in the night along with a series of night terrors that are making it hard for her to distinguish between fantasy and reality.  Are the things that Mary is hearing at night real and a possible threat to her and Steven?  Will Tom be found at some point, or is he really just a kid-cicle waiting to be uncovered once Spring rolls around?  Wait, didn’t I see this movie like a year ago!?

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“I wonder what The Babadook would be like if it didn’t have The Babadook in it.  Steven, get the camera.  Oh right… I’ll just get it.”

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Cinema Dispatch: Doctor Strange

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Doctor Strange and all the images you see in this review are owned by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Directed by Scott Derrickson

So on the one hand, I don’t’ really have any love for Doctor Strange as a character, and I’m still a bit salty that they didn’t cast Hugh Laurie in the role which I have been fan casting since the film first got announced all the way back in what, the beginning of phase two?   On the other hand I’ve been a fan of C Robert Cargill as a film critic all the way back in the good ol’ days of Spill, so there is a part of me that wants this to succeed just because I like that ONE GUY.  Then again it’s a Marvel movie, so it’s going to succeed anyway.  LOOK!  It’s complicated, alright!?  I don’t put myself is some sort of cryogenic fridge between movies so my “precious objectivity” is working at peak efficiency!  Actually, I should probably look into that and see if I can skip most of the next four years…  ANYWAY!  Does Doctor Strange deliver on all the weird fun that the trailers are promising, or is this another cookie cutter entry in the ever expanding Marvel canon?  Let’s find out!!

The movie follows Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) who is a world renounce Neurosurgeon with an ego the size of Hulk’s biceps and ends up smashing the hell out of his car while texting.  Fortunately, the only part of his body that was harmed was his hands, but unfortunately he can’t be neurosurgeon if he can’t even pick up a pencil.  Now instead of starting a diagnostics department and act super snarky to his subordinates, he instead blows his fortune trying to get his hands fixed to no avail while also pushing away his only real friend Christine (Rachel McAdams) due to his increasingly bitter outlook on life.  His last resort is this temple in Kathmandu Nepal which healed someone else with even worse debilitating injuries and finds someone to take pity on him in the form of Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who takes him to see THE ANCIENT ONE (Tilda Swinton).  She blows the puny human’s mind away with what can only be described as a drug trip, but I think the implication is that she just gave him a small taste of what the universe has to offer, and she begrudgingly takes him on as a disciple despite his arrogance and penchant for being whiney.  Of course, there might be ANOTHER reason why she wants at least one more meat shield training at their monastery.  You see, the LAST prized pupil of The Ancient One was some jerk named Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen) who’s now trying to do some bad stuff and will probably be coming for her bald ass soon enough, so the more bodies on hand to absorb energy blasts, the better.  Will Stephen Strange find what he is looking for in the teachings of the ancient one?  What is Kaecilius after and why is he so pissed about everything?  Seriously, what the hell were they smoking when they were making this?

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“Far out, bro!”     “We REALLY need to keep moving.  THEY’RE SHOOTING MAGIC BEAMS AT US!”

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Cinema Dispatch: Inferno

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Inferno and all the images you see in this review are owned by Columbia Pictures

Directed by Ron Howard

Oh hey!  I guess this is the reason Tom Hanks has been around so much recently!  His recent Saturday Night Live appearance was absolutely fantastic and honestly just what we needed during this very stressful time of the year.  Now I thought The Da Vinci Code was a decent enough film, and while I haven’t seen the sequel Angels and Demons, it’s mostly due to laziness rather than a real lack of desire to see the further adventures of Robert Langdon; especially considering that Ron Howard is still helming these things.  Can they manage to make decent thriller out of yet another Dan Brown novel, or has this series already grown stale? Let’s find out!!

The movie begins with good ol’ Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) waking up in a hospital in Florence with a bleeding skull and no memory of how he ended up there or what the hell he’s doing in Italy in the first place.  He doesn’t have much time to figure out what happened though as within minutes of him waking up, he’s attacked by a rouge police officer and only manages to escape with the help of the on duty nurse Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones).  It doesn’t take long after looking through his personal affects that he’s trying to solve some mystery left by Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) who’s some asshole tech billionaire (oxymoron, I know) who’s SO concerned about overpopulation that he creates this super virus that will kill half the Earth’s population and will be release on the world in twenty four hours and FOR SOME REASON left a series of clues to find the damn thing so that Langdon can Sienna can stop him.  Of course, the reason why they have to follow the clues instead of getting Jack Bauer to beat the location out of him is because dumbass jumped off a tower and went splat after being chased by World Health Organization agent Christopher Bouchard (Omar Sy) who was trying to stop him.  Of course, the World Health Organization is ALSO after Langdon for some reason that probably has to do with that block of time that he cannot remember.  So not only does he have to run from renegade cops, but also from the WHO that I guess will only slow him down on his quest to find where the virus is and how it will be released upon mankind.  Can Robert solve this mystery despite recently suffering a head injury, and are the answers locked up in his slowly recovering mind?  Will the World Health Organization get its shit together long enough to be of some ACTUAL use in this situation rather than getting in Langdon’s way?  What is it with rich assholes thinking they can kill their way to a better world!?

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“Look!  Zobrist added words to this picture! It must mean something!”     …     “No wait.  It’s just some terrible poetry about the darkness of mankind and shit.”

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Cinema Dispatch: Jack Reacher: Never Go Back

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Jack Reacher: Never Go Back and all the images you see in this review are owned by Paramount Pictures

Directed by Edward Zwick

Everyone liked the first movie, right?  It had depth, a decent mystery to solve, some solid action scenes, and Tom Cruise was charming as all hell!  Sure, he was the embodiment of the masculine ideal which comes with a certain amount of baggage (just ask James Bond) , but that film brought a lot to the table where so many others would just coast on its star power and wouldn’t even worry about telling a decent story.  Now it’s time for them to pump out a sequel, and of course they couldn’t get the same writer/director to return this time (instead he’s just a producer) leaving it up to the director of The Last Samurai and Tom Cruise’s raw charisma to pick up the slack.  Can they catch lightening in a bottle twice for this franchise, or are we domed to exponentially worse films until Tom Cruise gets tired of this series?  Let’s find out!!

The movie begins with Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) heading toward Washington DC to meet up with a friend of his who’s his only real connection to his past life in the military, but when he arrives he finds out that Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders) has been arrested for her e-mails or something (ha ha).  Of course, Jack Reacher finds out pretty much immediately that this is all a setup but gets arrested by the military for killing Turner’s lawyer which he obviously didn’t do.  I don’t know why the bad guys felt it necessary to do this, especially because he’s getting processed at the Military Prison at the same time the bad guys are sending hired goons to kill Major Turner in this co-ed prison.  Jack Reacher kicks everyone’s ass, the two of them escape, and now they have to find out who it is that set the both of them up.  Of course, it’s not quite that easy.  You see, it turns out that in ALL this time that Jack’s been contacting Major Turner over the phone, she failed to mention that he’s had a paternity suit pending for the last fifteen years which means he might have a kid out there who probably hates his guts right now.  The kid in question is Samantha Dayton (Danik Yarosh) and sure enough the bad guys know about her and start targeting her to get to Jack which means he has to drag her along until this mystery is solved.  Can Jack and Turner figure out who’s responsible for their incarceration and what they’re so desperate to cover up?  Is Jack really the father of this surly teenager who’s not in the mood to deal with any of this bullshit?  Seriously, there’s like twenty of these Jack Reacher books.  Was this the best story they could get out of them!?

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Oh HELL no!  You’re not getting out of this one so easily!

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Cinema Dispatch: Keeping Up with the Joneses

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 3 Comments

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Keeping Up with the Joneses and all the images you see in this review are owned by 20th Century Fox

Directed by Greg Mottola

Are you SURE I didn’t see this last month?  I’m just getting the weirdest sense of déjà vu right now…  Well either way, we’re stuck with another Zach Galifianakis comedy to throw on the pile, and the Unique Selling Point here is that it’s a spy movie.  Sigh… Really?  We just got a dumb criminal movie; now we’ve got him dicking around in the most overplayed genre of the year!?  Well, who knows?  Central Intelligence managed to be good despite its rather weak spy angle, and while Masterminds had a pretty strong cast as well, THIS one has sexiest man alive who’s named after food, Jon Hamm, as it’s costar!  Maybe this could end up being really good!  Right?  Let’s find out!!

The movie follows the Typical American Suburban CoupleTM  made up of Jeff Gaffney (Zach Galifianakis) and Karen Gaffney (Isla Fisher) who are living out what some dumbass Hollywood executives must believe are the normal lives of middle class white people.  Jeff works at some defense company as the Human Resources manager which means he basically wastes people’s time and lets them use his computer for personal stuff.  Basically he’s a doormat that’s merely tolerated by his peers, but he’s perfectly happy to live this life of quiet desperation for some reason and will probably be behind his crappy little desk until the day he keels over and dies.  Those plans start to change though as the cul-de-sac gets new neighbors in the form of Tim Jones (Jon Hamm) and Natalie Jones (Gal Gadot) who are pretty bad at their jobs as they are OBVIOUSLY spies.  In fact, they are so unsubtle about this that Karen picks up on it immediately and it doesn’t take long for her suspicious to be confirmed.  By the time this happens though, both she and Jeff have already been dragged into some sort national security operation to prevent some sort of black market sale that was happening right under Jeff’s nose as SOMEONE who’s been using his computer was setting it all up from there!  Now the two couples have to work together to save the world or something, and I’m SURE Jeff and Karen are gonna pull their weight in this situation and not be total albatrosses hanging around the necks of these two professional spies who ACTUALLY know what the hell they’re doing.  Who is the person setting up the sale that will threaten national security, and why did they have to be a dick about it by using Jeff’s computer?  The Joneses may seem like the perfect power couple, but are there issues that they aren’t addressing?  Was anyone looking forward to this?  Like… at all?

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“I’m think you’re gonna need this, bro.”     “Why do you think that?”     “Pass it over here.  I was in The Town god damn it…”

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Cinema Dispatch: Boo! A Madea Halloween

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Boo! A Madea Halloween and all the images you see in this review are owned by Lionsgate

Directed by Tyler Perry

I knew this day would come.  Ever since this guy came on the scene, I’ve just never had an interest in seeing anything he’s made and until now I’ve never had a reason to.  I mean I knew becoming a film critic would have its downsides… but come on!  Oh well.  No point in putting it off any longer.  It’s time for me to sit down and watch a Madea film.  Who knows?  Maybe it won’t be all bad.  Hell, it looks like it’s the spiritual successor to Ernest Scared Stupid, so maybe they’ll replace Jesus with Halloween Kitsch? Yeah, probably not.  Still, is it any good?  Let’s find out!!

The movie is all about Brian Simmons (Tyler Perry) and his increasingly strained relationship with his teenage daughter Tiffany (Diamond White).  Tiffany wants to go to a Halloween party that’s hosted by a Frat House that’s conveniently located within walking distance and wants to drag her Good Christian Preacher’s DaughterTM friend Aday (Liza Koshy) along with her.  Brian says no, Tiffany says Fuck You (not literally) and so he has to pull out the big guns; namely Mabel “Madea” Simmons (Tyler Perry again) along with her friends Uncle Joe (Tyler Perry… again), Aunt Bam (Cassi Davis), and Hattie (Patrice Lovely) to babysit while he goes out on a business trip… on Halloween.  Tiffany isn’t about to give up without a fight though and convinces the four of them that there’s a ghost in the house to keep them distracted while she sneaks off to the party and things get more shenanigan filled from there.  Will Tiffany learn a lesson about listening to her father after getting to the party?  Is there something ACTUALLY haunting Madea and her friends at the house, even if Tiffany’s story was total bullshit?  God damn, is THIS what I’ve been avoiding all these years!?

 

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I WISH Tim Curry would show up in this damn thing!

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