Month: December 2014

Another day of Musical Week, another musical!

This is the third day of Musical Week and I am bringing you a British musical that came out this year as well, just no one ever heard of it. When I was first looking up musicals this year, I saw that this one came out in the summer and was pretty apathetic about it. But that was when I thought Jersey Boys was going to be the best musical of the year. Given the weaker field overall, I figured I would give Walking On Sunshine a second chance.

I had watched the trailer, sure. It was cheesy and terrible, exactly what the most famous musicals are supposed to be like, right? It is a jukebox musical, so I was happy I wouldn’t have to learn or judge new songs. The vague theme of this jukebox is just popular songs from the 1980s. Kind of boring. I feel like that is too big of a spread to choose from, so perfect songs for each moment should be easy.

But we shall see!

Especially if we are forced to by someone holding our head towards the screen.

This is your typical summer lovin’ type of film. Namely, Taylor (Hannah Arterton) and Raf (Giulio Berruti) have what feels like true love. But stuff happens, they cannot stay together.

Now, three years later Taylor is returning to Italy to visit with her best sister Maddie (Annabel Scholey). Surprise! Maddie is actually getting married in Italy, and not to her on again off again ex Doug (Greg Wise). Nope. Some mysterious Italian guy she has only known for five weeks.

I think you see where this is going.

The new fiance is Raf! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

What a crazy random happenstance. Either way, she doesn’t want her sister to know, despite all her old friends knowing (Leona Lewis, Giulio Corso, Danny Kirrane).

And now she has to keep it a secret until she can understand her feelings. And understand Raf’s feelings. And figure out what to do about this wedding mess without ruining her sisters life. Also Katy Brand.

But don’t forget about the singing and dancing.

Walking On Sunshine is everything a musical should be. Cheesy. With some love. Featuring non main characters as back ground dancers. But also, and most importantly in this case, the songs they decided to use in the musical sound unique and aren’t just carbon copies of the original.

Thank goodness.

For the most part, that is what I care about for jukebox musicals. It is one of my top twenty complaints for Glee, when they “sing a song” and it sounds identical to the radio version on the radio with no unique elements.

The story though is incredibly week in this musical. It is like a lot of romcoms or even other musicals. It felt like Mamma Mia! and Moulin Rouge! with other shitty elements rolled in. Also they have Leona Lewis in this movie, a real singer! And she doesn’t have any great singing parts or songs to her self or anything. What the hell is the point of that? I mean, this is a completely original musical, technically, so it is not like the only role she looked like had to be so minor and pointless. What a waste of talent.

It’d be like having Idina Menzel in a musical and not letting her sing. Oh wait.

So, shitty plot, waste of talent, but kept the songs at least somewhat unique and fun. Could have been better, could have been worse.

Welcome back to Musical Week!

The realest reason for Musical Week is that this December had two musicals coming out only a week apart, which meant I only had to find 3 more. Into The Woods was yesterday, and Annie is today!

When I first heard there was an Annie remake, I was mostly indifferent. I didn’t know if we needed a new one, but hey okay. But when I heard she wouldn’t be a tap dancing ginger, but a BLACK GIRL? I was still mostly indifferent. At least there was a change for the remake so that it wasn’t just rehashed material. It would allow them to do a more modern version, not one set in the way back early times.

But then I saw the first trailer. I knew something was weird and different and off from it. And it is an unfortunate change. But one I will clickbait tactic and wait to talk about at the end of the review.

And it isn’t just that when I do this dance, I always look like I have to take a pouty poop.

Little Orphan Annie (Quvenshane Wallis). No, wait, fuck that. She is just a foster kid, not an orphan. She has parents, she just doesn’t know who they are or when they will be back for her. She just knows that maybe, one day, she will see them on a Friday night at a local Italian restaurant eating cannolis.

But while being chased one day by some jerks, she falls in the street and almost gets run over! But thankfully, a man is there to pick her up and chastise her. That man is Will Stacks (Jamie Foxx), the owner of a NYC based phone company that is hugely successful, so he is totally rich, and he is also running for mayor! He isn’t doing that great though. He is super behind. Well, footage goes out of him saving Little Foster Girl Annie on the internets, which gives him a bump up. His campaign manager (Bobby Cannavale) convinces him that if he temporarily takes Annie in and make him seem more charitable.

Annie is a free going individual who understands this is just for publicity, and she is cool with that. Getting to live in a rich house for a few weeks? Hells yeah. She doesn’t want him for a dad anyways, she wants her real parents, who will totally come eventually. Maybe tomorrow even. Or the tomorrow after that.

What could go wrong? Also featuring Rose Byrne, Cameron Diaz, David Zayas, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Stephanie Kurtzuba.

No, trust me, I counted them. Definitely 76 trombones.

Let’s talk about…pop music. Some of it is good, a lot can be bad, even more of it is catchy. That is what this version of Annie is, for the most part. Just pop music broadway. And that is my major complaint. The songs don’t feel as natural as musicals usually strive for. It didn’t have that extra bellow or personality behind the notes that made me care about the lyrics and not just nod my head to a tune. Kids in general like all kinds of music, so a different sound to all of the sounds doesn’t feel warranted.

This is the second thing I have seen Wallis in, the first being Beasts Of Southern Wild, which I kind of hated. She is fine as Annie. She really is. She has charisma and she is charming and she carries that strong independent feeling with her the whole movie.

Everyone else? Ehhh. Byrne did decent. Diaz only annoyed me.

And Foxx. Come on, Foxx. I know you can sing. I remember Gold Digger quite vividly. Was your role in that song fake? I am starting to believe it. You had passion in your lines and feeling in your voice. Every song with Jaime Foxx is terrible. His voice is ridiculously soft for most of them, so I felt like I had to strain to hear him and there is just nothing of substance behind any of them. I kind of felt he was just talking his lines. Maybe they accidentally put in the mumble take? They are just down right terrible.

But you know what bugs me the most? The finale, when they re-did Tomorrow? Despite how terrible I thought the music was in the movie and thus how bad the movie was, it still made me tear up. Just a little bit. Great lyrics can do that. Balloons help.

So who is to blame for this? Will Smith and Jay-Z. They are producers, must be their fault.

Yay yay musicals! If you are a long time reader, you know I really like musicals. Which is why I am finally having a musical theme week. Yay Musical Week!

Into The Woods decided to be a musical coming out on Christmas Day. The last time that happened was two years prior for Les Miserables which I absolutely loved. It was also my first real attempt at watching it, outside of listening to a few songs ahead of time. I loved the shit out of Les Mis.

But going into Into The Woods, I knew a lot more about it ahead of time. I saw a performance of it from college actors, which I guess is above community theater and high school actors, but still not great professional people. And you know what? I down right hated it. It took a lot of familiar stories, intertwined them, gave us their endings, and that was the halfway point. The second half was all new material, it felt super awkward, it got darker and more metaphysical, and it dragged on an on. So yes, I thought it was too long. I thought there was only four or so unique sounding songs, everything else kind of melded together and by the end, it was as if everyone got a long slow ballad, one right after the other.

I guess you can say I was not at all looking forward to this movie. But hey, the fact that it was only a little bit more than two hours definitely helped ease it in.

One of the biggest changes is that the cow was played by a real cow. Boooo.

Classic fairy tales go into the dark woods, because the woods were the scariest parts of Germany. This was Pre-Nazis, post Lutherans, I think. So it makes sense.

Like who? Well, Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford) needs to bring food to her grandmothers house, in the woods. Jack (Daniel Huttlestone) was told by his mom (Tracey Ullman) to sell their milkless cow in a nearby village, on the other side of the woods. Cinderella (Anna Kendrick) wants to go to the three day ball on the other side of the woods, but she has to get past her step family (Lucy Punch, Christine Baranski, some other chick).

And there is also the Baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt) who cannot bare children. Turns out, a neighboring witch (Meryl Streep) put a curse on them. So now they have to go into the woods to get ingredients over the next few nights to fix that with a potion!

And surprisingly, that is most of the plot you need to know. We’ve got princes (Chris Pine, Billy Magnussen), girls with long hair (Mackenzie Mauzy), and wolves (Johnny Depp)! Shit, I bet the woods even have more secrets than the Library of Alexandria.

The biggest secret is what is real name of the baker’s wife? Can she not have an identity outside of her relationship?

So for those big fans of the musical, there were changes made of course. This is a PG movie because Disney is involved, you aren’t going to see everything you saw in the musical. Like most of Rapunzel’s story line. The second Agony song. No sex is had in this movie. And the sexy times are subdued.

But the only thing I really was sad to see missing was the Agony song reprise, because like the college school production, it was my favorite part. In the movie, it is probably even better as the two princes ham it up and I was laughing hard the entire time.

I do feel like the beginning of the was extremely quick and just kind of threw you into all of the plots far too fast. (Some of these complaints would be complaints with the actual broadway version. I am not reviewing how close they are, just how I feel watching the movie). So that was awkward. I thought I saw some sound editing mistakes, which is one of the hardest parts about a musical to make sure to get right. I also have a problem with the ending, that seems to just whimper and finish instead of an awesome musical bang.

But throughout the film it is definitely entertaining. My favorite would be Blunt (who had an excellent year). I didn’t know she had such singing chops, but she played a great character. I have heard Corden sing before, and it was okay. He was better in this movie than his other recent roles. I was also surprised with the singing voice of Chris Pine, so much that I don’t trust it. And Lilla Crawford, a little girl, had a surprisingly powerful voice as well.

Overall though, Into The Woods is a decently good time. Still has its bleak and sad moments and it may be one of the best musicals of the year, but this year was a bit weaker in that genre. At this point, I would say I enjoyed Muppets Most Wanted more, and probably Begin Again had better music. Despite that, the music has now been stuck in my head for several days, so I will most certainly get a soundtrack as soon as I can and listen to half of it over and over again.

I had planned to watch this before the latest health development from Mr. Hockey / Gordie Howe. Thankfully he didn’t have another stroke, but man, I have to face it that one of the greatest players is going to die soon. That is very sad, but at least I was old enough to really know about how awesome he was and that he is such a big face in the Red Wings scene over the last few decades.

I also thought this movie was a documentary, but uhh, clearly I was wrong. Even worse it is a TV movie. Even worse is that it is a Hallmark made for TV movie. Even worse, I thought until like, 4 minutes into the movie that it was still a documentary. That was an embarrassingly long time before realizing it was something else. Either way, I will write it like a documentary review either way given its status and give you just one picture. With that, Mr Hockey: The Gordie Howe Story is not a complete life bio, but instead takes place after his first retirement from the Red Wings.

Now Howe (Michael Shanks) is working a desk job as a VP for the Wings and kind of bored. He thinks he can still play, but he has been retired a couple of years. Also, the NHL is in huge disputes with the WHA, another league who is offering higher salaries to steal the better players, despite not being a storied league. They also can draft players younger than the NHL.

So when the Houston Aeros decide to pick Howe’s sons, (Dylan Playfair, Andrew Herr) with their first and later round picks, unexpectantly, the Howe’s move from Detroit to Houston, and Gordie wants to play on a team with his sons. Give it another shot, despite the implications and turning away from the NHL.

And now the fucking Aeros are the Iowa Wild. So Sad.

At this point, Howe was 44, so it was already impressive. Especially since he played for another six years or so, until he was 50, and until the WHA and NHL ended up merging, allowing him to play in an All-Star Game in Detroit before finally hanging up the laces. Also with Kathleen Robertson as Mrs. Hockey and they did a good job of showcasing how important she was. Also Lochlyn Munro as Bobby Hull, which makes me laugh a lot.

As it is a Hallmark movie, yes, this is basically a cheesy inspirational story. And given the number of random ass baseball, football, and basketball players who get better quality films, it is a bit disappointing that a top 5 all time famous Hockey player gets this treatment, but it is still better than nothing.

It did a nice job of explaining his decision and showcasing his relationship with his family. I did love a scene where Mrs. Hockey was explaining the rules to neighbors in their backyard to get more people to go to the games, because honestly, the 1970s in Texas was certainly like that.

But as it is a Hallmark movie, it doesn’t go into any great detail or showcase the game in an exciting way. So as a sports movie, you won’t get your jollies off by watching.

All I really know is Gordie Howe kicks ass, played hockey forever, and will be missed when he is gone. Maybe we have to wait til after his death to get a better movie in his honor. Until then, this one is just okay.

I picked the documentary DamNation not just because it shares its name with one of the best Magic cards in history.

Nope. I did it purely because I liked the title and it was about a subject I actually didn’t have a huge knowledge set on ahead of time. I still like learning, so sometimes I use documentaries to learn more and not just confirm what I already think I know.

Clearly this one is about dams, but it took awhile into the picture before I could tell if it was pro or anti dams. That’s a good sign, because at least early on it was pretty biased just giving information on the history of dams, talking about their pros and cons and how they affect people (people who live by them, energy, jobs). But have no doubt, this is definitely a documentary set out to tell us why dams are bad for the environment and why we should start to get rid of them.

No matter where you go, damn kids and their spray cans, amirite?

It is simple: most dams aren’t as necessary as they once were a hundred or two hundred years ago. Some would argue that a lot of those made weren’t super necessary back then either, but the dam hype went throughout the US, especially the west, and that is where we are now. But a lot of our energy comes from other sources and they aren’t helpful, so they want dams to be taken down, rivers restored to their natural habitat so that nature can be enjoyed and fish and animals can reclaim their homes.

Oh yeah, they are also super against fishing hatcheries, which makes sense from many points of view. It’d be hard to argue against that.

However I found myself not necessarily agreeing with everything that they were saying. I don’t think we should get rid of all the dams and I don’t give a damn about a lot of fish. Restoring nature? That’s cool I guess. Pretty things are pretty. But rethinking dams that exist and find out which ones we can get rid of without hurting our economy and improving the landscape? Well, why the fuck not.

Another plus, this is a very well put together documentary. They talk to a lot of experts in many fields, the cameras used are very high quality, they have a lot of footage to work with in the construction and deconstruction of these dams. It was very well researched and that is what I hope the most for when I see a documentary.

Not being a nature crazed individual (I prefer the indoors), I can still go along with the points made and I am glad that I learned about a potential biological problem by picking a nicely named documentary.

Here I thought I was done with animated kid movies for the year. Outside of The Penguins of Madagascar, I had every major release!

Nope. There was another film. The Hero Of Color City. Very limited release, but it decided to release the dvd before Christmas, so I figured I would give it a shot.

And just for more science, I watched it with a three year old who clearly is the target audience for this type of movie. Because if I am going to pay a dollar to see it, I might as well make sure someone has a good time.

A moment of silence for the man with no mouth.

This movie is set in a crayon box. Belonging to a boy! He was drawing some strange creatures but his mom made him stop. And he didn’t even get a chance to color them! Sketches, with no color! Sad times.

He also doesn’t clean up his crayons. They have to clean themselves up and return to their box. Because in their box is a portal to a crayon based world! Of course, every color has a personality trait associated with said color. Yellow (Christina Ricci) is a coward and is late to getting back to the box. So when the two sketches of the boy come to life and demand to be colored, she lets out a secret of where she is going and runs away!

Great. Now the sketches are in the color land, demanding to be colored, and threatening their way of life.

So now a small band of crayons are going to have to save the day. Including Yellow. She doesn’t want too but accidentally comes along. She joins Blue (Wayne Brady) who is so cool, Red (Rosie Perez) who is bad ass, Black (David Kaye) who is basically just Eeyore, Green (Jess Harnell) a nerd, and White, who I can’t find the voice person for, but just wants to be used really.

They also have voice talents from Owen Wilson, Sean Astin, Tom Lowell, and Jeremy Guskin who basically recreates Professor Frink from The Simpsons.

They are so jolly because they aren’t broken. They embody the YOLO.

Early on in this movie, it was clear that it was terrible. Of course each crayon is just an extreme stereotype. But while going through it, it was getting a bit better. And then the ending was downright terrible for so many reasons.

It featured extremely lazy conflict by the end. Aka, a character couldn’t explain their actions and put up no effort to really say the one or two sentences to make people understand. So their friends turned away and they were “powerless” to make them listen. But it was some of the worst attempts at talking that I have ever seen. Not only that, but once they realized how to stop the creatures from ruining their way of life, they were like, “Oh shit, it is because we judged them and didn’t try to talk to them to figure out what they wanted!”

Bull. Shit. Right when they get to the city and even before then they literally say all they want to do is get colored, and instead, the crayons who have one sole purpose in life, don’t realize this and don’t listen to them and almost get wiped from existence. Which makes sense really, because if a crayon won’t color, who gives a shit about that crayon.

This movie might have been a 2 if they could have done anything average with the ending, instead of a manure fest. It had some okay songs in it that the kid enjoyed and the story was beyond simple. But it was also very lazy.

Please don’t get confused. This review is going to be about Jessabelle. Not Annabelle. Sure, they are both horror films, and they came out around the same time, and you know, have that belle thing going on. But they are nothing alike.

Okay, they have one more thing in common. But we will get to that later.

Jessabelle is obviously the less well known of the movies. It was supposed to come out in January, pushed back to August, then pushed back to a soft release in November with some of that video on demand. It ho hummed its way into existence, and then ho hummed its way onto my laptop. I love you video on demand.

Oh hey, I remember this scene from A Nightmare On Elm Street.

Jessie (Sarah Snook) is living a nice life. In fact she is about to move into her fiance’s house finally and she is pregnant with child. Then surprise, car crash, fiance is dead, unborn baby is super dead, and she is paralyzed legs down. Wow, that escalated quickly.

Now she has to go back down to rural Louisiana, with her dad (David Andrews), and you know her old family home isn’t wheelchair accessible. She just has no where to go.

Well, Jessie finds a box of VHS tapes under her old bed. They were made by her mother (Joelle Carter) before she was born. That is good, because she died when Jessie was young from that cancer. But these tapes are weird. She is acting all funny, talking about death and seeming threatening. Her dad doesn’t like them, saying that wasn’t her real mother, by then her mom was out of it. From the cancer. But what can it mean?

What. Can. It. Mean?!

Also featuring Amber Stevens, Chris Ellis, and Mark Webber.

Acting.

Somewhere lurking in the marshy waters that surrounds this Louisiana horror movie Jessabelle is a unique and decent plot. It it totally there, you just kind of have to scrape off the crap. But not everyone has time to scrape off the crap on their own, and the film makers certainly didn’t do it for us. So instead we got packaged crap and were kind of told to look for it on our own.

That sounded pretty harsh, but I thought I was being clever there.

But it is true! The acting wasn’t terrible. The movie was just slow. Some times people think movies set in rural areas need to take their time and can’t be high energy, but that is just silly. It had its jump scares, it had scenes that were alluding to other movies. And it had a decent plot. But it was full of other crap and given to us in a boring “seen it!” before way.

Oh well, maybe you can surprise me with some indie sequel in like, four years.

Ding dong the mother fucking witch is dead. That is how I am starting to feel about this franchise. In college, I wanted to do a semester abroad in New Zealand because it is a beautiful country, but now I think I have seen enough of it.

Everyone knows the Lord of the Rings are incredible, so I won’t mention them. I was really excited with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, it was a bit longer, more CGI, but hey, let’s return to Middle Earth.

I completely hated The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug. It was far too long, and it was a completely filler movie. I mean. FUCK. It didn’t end with the Death of Smaug. The obvious end point at least. It was just a long tease that made me bored and tired.

So, here we are, at The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies. Two things of note come up with the last part. First off, I really hate the title. I booed so hard and long once they announced the title change. It was originally The Hobbit: There and Back Again, a title taken from the book of his journey. Great title. This one is as lame as The Desolation Of Smaug (given that Smaug doesn’t get desolated).

Two, this one is going to be a lot more exciting than the second film. That much is certain. It is pretty easy to do when you leave like one cool aspect into the second film and delay the rest for the ending. The third film gives the end of the dragon and the big battle, so it will be super awesome. But at what cost? A shitty second movie. Given the connectedness of these films, it is important to look at them individually and as parts of a whole. So I don’t know if I can really enjoy this movie as much knowing that it was essentially delayed a year because the movies were broken up from two films into three films.

I think I am allowed to be a little biased and peeved going into this film, as I believe the second movie was 160 minutes of my life wasted.

But this one has tiny men on rams! Yay rams!

Okay so. Battle of Five Armies. Before that, we got a Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) to kill. And then they do that. Moving onnn.

Humans are all pissed off because their water town is destroyed. They have lost everything, their wealth, their homes. They need a place to go. Making Bard (Luke Evans) their de facto leader, they decide that they kind of want to head to the near by Dwarven stronghold for safety. And to get some of that gold that was promised to them.

Speaking of people who want to go to the stronghold, the wood elves are dicking around too. Apparently there is some priceless treasure in there that they want back. And that is all. A bunch of the elves are played by these people (Lee Pace, Evangeline Lilly, Orlando Bloom). Hugo Weaving and Cate Blanchett are elves too, but they are in another part of the story. I don’t really understand what they are doing with Christopher Lee and Ian McKellen, so I won’t talk about it.

Oh yeah. Dwarves. Like Thorin (Richard Armitage). He is now a real King because he has a real Castle, but he is after his special stone and is kind of going mad. Mad enough to go to war with the humans and the wood elves. But also, the orcs that no one know are coming. And Bilbo (Martin Freeman) is kind of just hanging around.

There are also non Dwarven actors, like Ryan Gage and Stephen Fry. But also all those Dwarves? I still don’t feel like tagging most of them. Just Billy Connolly, Aidan Turner, and Dean O’Gorman. I think I am done talking about the plot. And actors.

BUT WHO IS THE FIFTH ARMY?

Orlando – “I heard you got a role in another franchise. Lucky. This one is finally owner.”
Luke – “Dude, no one is going to watch the Monster Avengers movies.”

Yeahhh, dead dragon and big army fights!

And some of that was really cool. Well, the dragon death felt kind of rushed and awkward. Like, somehow, the cartoon version of The Hobbit had a more intense dragon death scene than this movie. It kind of just happened, exactly as one would expect too. So that was actually disappointing. Just that it ended so quick and easy, they could have made the death way more awesome and also, you know…put it in the fucking second movie?

Now the army fight was pretty bamf. So that is good. Entertaining fight scenes, although it was hard to follow just how many humans were actually in the war and how the battle grounds were laid out. You just kind of had to go with it and accept it, although I doubt it was planned out. Martin Freeman still made a good Bilbo, so that was good. But of course, the focus wasn’t really on him this whole movie, despite the title. He gets super pushed to the side.

The love story is not as bad as the second one I guess, because of all the fighting going on during it.

And as I said above, I have no idea what the point of the necromancer story line was. Like, they resolved it I guess, but it was totally unexplained and felt incredibly pointless. It was really shitty.

Overall, that makes this movie just okay. Not the weakest of the series, maybe the best. Hard to say. None of these match the LOTR quality and I don’t think that was their goal. But I can’t help but feel the entire franchise was a let down. I haven’t bought any of them, because I know I want to wait for the cool extended package with all of them bundled. But also, will I actually watch any of these again? Probably not. I will probably watch the cartoon Hobbit more.

Heh. Heheheheh. They Came Together. That title. Oh man. Oh boy.

I’m done. I can’t even think of a good intro because of that.

However, I would feel like an asshat if I didn’t first mention that this movie had already been reviewed on my website. Yah! Here is a link! Because I totally have guest reviews on my website, not a lot, but they are there. And from them, of the seven, one I had reviewed already, one I reviewed soon after, and this one I reviewed way way later.

I think I am just stalling.

Like how I am avoiding cleaning up my leaves in my yard.

This movie is your classic romcom. And that is how they sell it. It is literally a spoof movie on romcoms, and they basically say that in the opening scene.

It is your classic boy meets girl. Joel (Paul Rudd) is a big corporate man working for a candy shop. Molly (Amy Poehler) is a klutz and owner of an independent candy shop. Oh my goodness, conflict!

Joel has a long term girlfriend (Cobie Smulders) who doesn’t love him like he does. Molly has an ex-husband and a kid.

Joel has a best friend (Jason Mantzoukas) who introduces him to a girl from work. Molly also has a best friend (Melanie Lynskey) who also wants to do that same thing!

Joel has a group of best friends who help him decide relationship advice. Molly has a black coworker friend (Teyonah Parris) who helps her keep it real.

Joel also has to deal with his younger brother (Max Greenfield) who is busy following his dreams and not making a living. Molly has other options, like a banker (Ed Helms) who wants to get closer to her.

I think you get the gist. It has a lot more people in it too! Like Christopher Meloni, Bill Hader, Ellie Kemper, Michael Ian Black, Kenan Thompson, Jack McBrayer, and Ken Marino.

I don’t have a joke here. I just like the picture a lot. 🙁

I felt ridiculous writing this, because in all honesty, it was a ridiculous movie. I actually put off watching it for so long, because I thought I wouldn’t like it, or it would be as average as a romantic realistic indie movie. And hey, it was weird and unique! So that was good.

It is hard to find a nice spoof movie nowadays. And I think They Came Together gave one of the better attempts at it. I did laugh at quite a few of the absurdities, and found it pretty funny. But, by the end, I thought aspects of it were going too strong and the joke was losing its luster. A bit. You know? Maybe too much of a good thing. Hell, I even had a good time explaining some of the jokes to others, but I didn’t think this is a movie I could really watch again and enjoy it as much of the first time. I think it will quickly stale out.

This is all conjecture. I might love it forever. But if anything, these reviews are first impressions and my impressions can often change through time. I usually don’t like changing a review later, because who would notice and ehhh, apathy. This time I am pretty sure that I would only enjoy this movie once though. And that is why it is just an okay film in that regard. Without staying power, I don’t want to buy it. If I don’t want to buy it, then is it really that great?

Every once in awhile, I like to watch a documentary that has something to do with religion. Not frequently at all, just 1 out of 10 maybe. They usually bug me, they can come off as self righteous (heh?)

Even if those documentaries are ones I might agree with, I still glare at them and tend to find myself way more critical. But I picked The Unbelievers for no good reason. Probably because of the awkward title.

The Unbelievers is about two men who you may have heard of, Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss.

Krauss is a theoretical physicist and works at Arizona State University and Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist from Oxford. They are maybe even more famous for being atheists, writing books about it and going around talking about it on talking tours!

Oh hey, that is what this documentary is about. These two, being in debates, talking to groups, and hanging out with each other as they talk about ways to bring down Jesus.

But at least they do it openly and not in shady dark business rooms.

To be fair, this is more of a movie about them talking about why science and reason need to be used more often in debates. To ignore stuff like cultural backgrounds or religious reasons to make political policy, but instead use logic and their brains.

A fair reason I guess.

But also it seems like the last 25% of it was to support the Reason Rally, a fest in DC about atheism and reason. Alright, another okay fest. I guess.

At this point you might be able to read complete apathetic-ness towards the topic of the film. I was definitely interested in the documentary when I sat down to watch it. But then it felt like nothing happened throughout it. Why should anyone care about random celebrities and their opinions on these two men? We don’t.

Do random cherry picked snippets really help drive points home? No. If they wanted it to be actually intellectually challenging in any way, they show us larger unedited segments of some of these debates they took part in. Makes it seem like they are hiding the other side. If they want to show they are in the right, they should be able to show why in response to what the other side says.

It just seems extremely forced, not fair, and on top of it, boring because of it. If this thing was two hours long, showed a complete debate and maybe an intro and after math, it would do far better for their cause than what we are given. Instead, this documentary just feels like a waste of time.