Month: December 2013

Oh man, diversity.

I do believe, with Instructions Not Included, this is the third mostly Spanish movie in the same number of weeks on my website!

Too bad I totally won’t keep that going. I literally don’t know of any other that are about to come to the US, and we have a shit ton of new releases to look forward to. So, uhhh, don’t get used to it, que?

Shit, did I not do that Spanish part correctly?

Valentín Bravo (Eugenio Derbez) is a coward. He is afraid of small problems, medium problems, big problems, and the biggest problem of all, committment. A different woman every week, living life with no job, no responsibility, no worried. Until Julie (Jessica Lindsey) visits him with a 8 month year old baby. Looks like cheap condoms aren’t full proof, but she also leaves it in his living room after a ruse, and runs away back to LA. Well shit. Babies.

Despite his best attempts, he can not keep up with her, and by the time he sneaks into LA, she has moved to NY. He is super stuck with this child, which means he has to do things like get a job, care for another human being, and try to stop being such a coward. Due to those intense parental instincts, he somehow gets a job as a stunt man and befriends a a director (Daniel Raymont), and next thing you know, seven years have flew by, and he is the coolest dad ever. Stunt work pays well, and it all goes towards making her life awesome. He even has fake letters sent from the mom to keep his daughter, Maggie (Loreto Peralta) happy.

Unfortunately, life is about to get more difficult when Julie (Record Scratch) returns home. And she is a lesbian (with Alessandra Rosaldo). And a lawyer. And she wants the kid back. And there is a disease that there is no cure for, which will also potentially ruin this happy arrangement. Well fuck.

Maybe, he should have done something different with the baby early on. Then no heartache now, right?

So this guy, Eugenio Derbez, I have seen him before. He was in Girl In Progress, and it was terrible, but he had the best part in it, even though his role was small. But not only did he star in this film, he also directed it, and helped write it, so this is definitely his baby. The girl above is most likely not his actual baby.

Well, his facial expressions were pretty great in this film, just like Girl In Progress, but it seems like everyone else was made to over act and just made this movie feel like a soap opera. A less dramatic, entirely frustrating soap opera. The beginning felt super rushed, pretty chaotic, but interesting. His life in LA just felt ridiculous, and the events that happened to him, both in his career, with his kid, and with Julie kind of started to just piss me off. Not in the “Oh, this incredible acting is pissing me off and making me feel emotion!” way, but the “This stuff is shitty, what the hell is going on, I am mad at this movie for sucking!”

But it also had heart. And at the end, thanks to a few sudden scenes, I was crying. Stupid movie. Making me rage. Interesting story. Emotional ending.

Gah.

I can’t believe I almost forgot about Homefront! Maybe because it doesn’t feel like a holiday movie? No idea. But this was the last movie I had on my mind when I went to go see movies coming out before Thanksgiving.

I guess what I am really saying is that a Red Dawn remake made a bit more sense than Homefront for the holidays.

Don’t stare too long. You will start assuming the smoke is some sort of strange facial hair.

Phil Broker (Jason Statham) is a former DEA agent. He is an excellently skilled fighter, in hand to hand combat and in gun shooting, sure, but really he was terrible at his job. The movie opens with him undercover in a Biker gang, four years of work. They are doing a drug bust finally, and from what I can tell as a movie viewer, he does everything wrong. Like reveal that he is undercover to the people he is bringing down, instead of pretending to get arrested too. He goes on a full on chase, and it ends with the death of the leader’s son, and the leader locked away.

So of course Phil goes into retirement and hiding. It is actually unclear if it was necessary, I guess. Because it isn’t witness protection, he just moves to a middle of no where place in Louisiana (which is somehow still in that same biker gang’s turf). So I don’t think he is hiding too hard.

Well, he lost his wife, and is now a single dad, with his daughter Maddy (Izabela Vidovic). He just wants to live a peaceful life, but there are rednecks here who hold grudges over the smallest things. Like when Maddy beats up a Bully, after warning him. So his parents (Kate Bosworth, Marcus Hester) hate Phil now.

So the brother in law, Gator (James Franco) gets involved, a local meth dealer boss here. So of course he knows people, has connections, blah blah blah. The tiny event turns big, and now the biker gang knows where he is, and people might die.

Annnd that’s about it. Winona Ryder plays a former crack whore (that’s the movie term, not mine), Omar Benson Miller a friend of Phil, and Clancy Brown the local sheriff.

Believe it or not, his character is not high right now.

So, right from the beginning, this movie began to disappoint. The undercover bust was one of the worst attempts at catching a criminal base that I ever saw. First, somehow their tactic included kill, not apprehend, as many of the gang members as possible. They took out the lights way before they were in position. The only prisoner they got was the leader, which is almost pointless. And of course Phil gave himself away at the first opportunity and didn’t even try to stay undercover.

I guess they had to find a bad way to get the movie started.

But after that, this was mostly a bad drama/action movie without a lot of the thriller moments implied from the trailer. With the trailer and the title being Homefront, they showed a lot of Statham in his house, preparing to defend it from a huge amount of attackers. A nice home invasion story, which would be the conclusion. Well, it wasn’t the conclusion, and he didn’t stay in the house. Right when they got there, he left the house, and then they did a bunch of shooting in the woods. The shooting itself went super quickly, and was in the dark, so we couldn’t see a lot of how it went down, depriving me of the action I deserve.

The drama components were bad. Too many scenes were tense for no reason. Statham was a huge dick to the local sheriff, who just wanted to know what was going on. Absolutely no reason.

He was a dick. And he wasn’t entertaining for me. That is all. Waste of potential of a movie. Franco was decent though.

Željko Ivanek.
Xander Berkeley.
Craig Fairbrass.
Bruce Davison.

These are all names that you may have seen before, but probably don’t recognize in big amounts. If you clicked their links and saw their pictures, you might recognize their face, but find that you can’t quite picture what you have seen them in before.

Timothy Omundson.
Mark Rolston.
Wade Williams.
J. C. MacKenzie.

Are you getting it now? These guys are those guys. Those character actor guys. The ones that make you go, oh yeah, That Guy…Who Was In That Thing.

These are the working actors, who don’t make million dollar blockbusters, and then can live at home with their family or months off not a worry in the world. These are the actors who aren’t doing it for the money, because their pay certainly isn’t a lot (unless they are a long running TV show maybe). These are the ones who love to act, who will do most any role, and sometimes even have to live paycheck to paycheck. These are the guys not going to be winning awards down the red carpet anytime soon. Nope. They can probably only get Emmys. Well that is not true, one of these guys was nominated for a Tony, but I forgot who.

It was one of these sixteen guys. Yeah. One of them.

Robert Joy.
Stanley Kamel.
Rick Worthy.
Paul Guilfoyle.

This documentary interviews all of these sixteen individuals and splices them together to tell a sort of story. We learn why they wanted to be an actor, what they were before acting, how their parents took the news, what their first big break was, what their favorite memories were, their regrets, the process into getting onto a new television show, what they have been doing lately, their interactions with fans when they have that “Oh shit, you are famous” moment, and their thoughts on fellow actors.

And that is about it.

Gregory Itzin.
W. Morgan Sheppard.
Zach Grenier.
Matt Malloy.

Honestly, early on, I was excited about this film. What a fun concept!

Then I got bored. Like, a third of the way in, I was already done. It seems like a good idea, to let us get to know these guys, and some of the stories were interesting. But I stopped caring pretty quickly. I don’t know if it is just the straight them talking format, and nothing else (because that is true), or what. But man. It turned into a snoozefest. I think it is only 80 minutes long, but it felt really really long.

Maybe the problem is that I just only knew like, half of these guys from things, and the rest felt like scrubs? Let’s go with that.

Either way. This documentary could have been a lot better.