Month: June 2015

When Unfinished Business hit theaters, it committed Seppuku on itself almost immediately? Why? Well, it is a comedy, and it has some famous people in it, AND it was released in theaters, it just didn’t do any screenings for anyone.

I can understand why a movie like Step Up: All In might not do screeners. It is for a very specific group or audience, who will see it, critics be damned. And if you aren’t into dancing, you won’t like it.

I can see why a low budget indie movie with no famous people would also hold no screeners. They are art house films and want awards, not money. (This is a lie, everyone wants money).

But what is supposed to be an A-Level comedy? They are saying they have literally no confidence in this movie at all and are just releasing it while hoping no one will really notice. It is not a good thing to know going into a film and really makes you wonder how bad it could be before you even see anything.

I mean, it has Vince Vaughn and beer, how could this not appeal to the majority of Americans at this point?

Dan Trunkman (Vince Vaughn), before having an unfortunate name, is also about to leave his work. He is in sales, selling things, but the what is not important. He feels like he is getting screwed out of his pay check, because his boss, Chuck Portnoy (Sienna Miller) (what the fuck is that name?) wants to renegotiate how much he is getting for a new sale. So he decides to walk out. And much like Jerry Maguire, he was left basically alone and sad.

Wait, there are two people with him! Timothy McWinters (Tom Wilkinson), who has a mandatory age of retirement or something, but doesn’t really want to stop working, and Mike Pancake (Dave Franco), someone who was applying for a job but is willing to work for Dan! Yeah! They will start their own business selling…things!

A year later, life sucks. They aren’t doing great, they don’t have an office. Dan has troubles at home. His son (Britton Sear) is getting bullied, his girl (Ella Anderson) is needing him to work on a project about his unsuccessful life, and his wife (June Diane Raphael) wants to put the boy in private school, but Dan can’t talk about their financial woes.

Either way, they finally are going to close on a deal. Just need to shake hands with a Jim (James Marsden) and they will have money to fix all the things! Well, then there is fucking Chuck, suddenly in the races and they have a lot more work to do. And also Nick Frost is hanging out.

They just have to do the things to maybe get the deal! The things! The things!

Pancake is probably one of the greatest last names in movie history.

You know, this is probably 2013’s fault. In that year we had The Internship (which I actually liked) and Delivery Man (a scene for scene remake of a French Canadian film), both of which basically bombed and were groaned at by critics. All with Vince at the helm! Since then he had nothing in 2014, a cameo in Anchorman 2, and that is it. Literally, a string of bad movies might have killed his career. After all, this movie began its shoots in October 2013, and a year later had to do reshoots. I guess the studio really did have no faith at all. Nor did the public, giving this the lowest grossing film opening of his career.

And it is sad to say that all of it is entirely warranted. This is a comedy in the sense that occasionally an amusing scene may happen. In no way does it ever give the minute after minute of laughter that you are hoping for with this movie. No, and it doesn’t help that this film has entirely too many serious moments in it, serious moments that don’t end up affecting the viewer on an emotional level. The movie isn’t just stale, but the entire time you are watching you are waiting to figure out just what the point of the whole film is.

The drama, the plot, the comedy, the acting for the most part is all terrible in this film. The pacing is all over the place and it honestly feels like everyone is super passive. Vaughn’s character is passive, the bad guys are passive. 90 minutes of people standing around and talking about doing great things, and of course, not.

The only reason I am giving it the 1 and not a 0 is, surprisingly, Dave Franco. He basically plays someone who is literally retarded. It was very strange and yet, it was very different for little Franco. His character was able to bring a smile to my face through his simplicity and his discoveries through this film journey. If we could have a spin-off movie of him traveling the world, that would be ideal.

The good news for Vince is that he is about to star in True Detective season 2. He is hoping to have some sort of Vaughn-Respawn for his career, just like the recent McConaissance.

Kill me once, kill me twice, kill me deadly, as Lita Ford kind of almost once said.

Ms Ford couldn’t count to three, much like Valve, but it is for good reason. Kill Me Three Times? That is definitely excessive. Two is usually excessive as well, unless you believe in resurrection, but most cultures don’t have double resurrection as far as I can tell.

Now, this could be some strange Beetlejuice situation, where the only way to die is killing the entity three times. Maybe the person in question is a third cat and two thirds human (how to genetics work?), so they only were given 3 lives instead of 9.

Actually, yes, that is my official answer going into this movie. A movie that must be about a man who is one-third cat. And no, I hope it isn’t anything like Catwoman.

Although wearing all black and having a sexually awakened pose does give me pause.

In the Australian action thriller comedy (?) we’ve all been waiting for, we get to see Simon Pegg play a hit man! Sure, Charlie Wolfe is a bit eccentric, with a mustache and all. And maybe he doesn’t take out his targets in one well placed sniper kill. But you know, he eventually gets the job done! And right after getting the job done, he gets a call to do another job! Ha ha! Life is good, plenty of work, people to kill.

It is simple, Jack Taylor (Callan Mulvey) wants his wife, Alice (Alice Braga), killed and he wants Charlie to do it. A nice lump of sum for the job too. He wants her dead for the reason anyone would, getting cheated on. She cheated on him with a MECHANIC, Dylan (Luke Hemsworth), which makes sense, given that he is the third (and oldest) Hemsworth.

However, the issue is that Charlie wasn’t the only one who was hired to kill Alice! Enter mild mannered dentist, Natahn Webb (Sullivan Stapleton). He has a bit of a gambling addiction and owes some powerful people a lot of money. His wife and receptionist Lucy (Teresa Palmer) is going to help him out, and they are going to be awkward about it.

Also featuring Steve Le Marquand and Bryan Brown. And other shenanigans and twists occur of course, but if I told you them, you’d have no reason to watch the movie.

Like, omg, how did that knife get in his hand?!

Kill Me Three Times was actually a bit harder of a film to describe for two reasons. One, the story isn’t told in standard chronological order. It jumps around a bit. Why? Just to see things in different points of view, and get some flash backs. That is why. It could be fine, but in this case it didn’t enhance the movie at all.

Two, the movie was boring as fuck. I am so disappointed by how uninterested the film went as it dragged along. This element of course made the scenes where we were able to see events again from a different point of view even more dull. I was bored the first time they showed it to me, now I get to be bored from a new angle!

I don’t remember laughing at all. I thought some scenes may have been amusing, but no outright guffaws bellowed from my diaphragm. Was it a bit dark? Sure. And there was technically a little bit of action to make it interesting.

Pegg wasn’t terrible, but his character also felt underutilized. There was a bit too much advertising his character for how much of the movie was about all the other characters as well, if you know what I mean.

Overall, I would describe Kill Me Three Times as a bad cluster fuck. A movie that wanted to be a Tarantino film and dropped the mark a few yards before a first down.

I have avoided it long enough. I can tell you I didn’t want to see McFarland, USA, at all. Cross country is not an inherently exciting sports. It is a bunch of people running long distance. It is just another inspirational Disney sports movie. So the company that brought us Remember The Titans, which was and still is amazing. But they also brought us Invincible (meh), Miracle (meh, as a hockey fan), and Million Dollar Arm (big meh).

What have they done for me lately? That is what I want to know. Not a whole lot. So the prospect of another inspirational true sports story doesn’t exactly get me excited. Couple that with the sports choice, and the fact that Kevin Costner is at the lead, there is just a lot of apathy around this project. Check out my Black or White review about Costner and his recent movies, I don’t need to bring them back up here, but overall he has been on a mostly disappointing trek of films.

As for my final complaint, McFarland, USA. What? Why the second part? What state is this city really in? Did you try at first just “McFarland”? Because that sounds a bit more bold to me. Adding the USA makes it seem like some fake town on a TV show because the writers were feeling lazy.

If you expected pictures of anything but running from this movie, you are surely a dumbass.

Jim White (Costner) is your average white dude football coach. Then he got mad at his players playing like shitty players and threw a cleat at a kid.

Next thing you know, his wife (Maria Bello) and kids are moving! Guess who got fired! (It was Jim). The only job he could find was as an assistant coach in the middle of nowhere, a place called McFarland. Well, he doesn’t last long there either. No, he doesn’t get fired, but after he doesn’t let a kid who was pretty beat up get back on the field during a game, the coach has a hissy fit. So he can keep teaching his random classes, but not be on the team. Gee, well that blows.

Until Jim gets bored and decides to start up a cross country team. Why? Because he is bored and doesn’t like hanging out with his kids. He also notices a lot of these kids can run pretty fast and run home and well, let’s put dos and dos together.

Eventually he gets his team of 7 kids! Ramiro Rodriguez, Carlos Pratts, Johnny Ortiz, Rafael Martinez, Hector Duran, Sergio Avelar and Michael Aguero.

So Jim White, with his white-ness, takes a group of Hispanic boys and turns them into winners! Running winners! And college winners too! (spoiler?)

Also, I feel obligated to include Valente Rodriguez as the principal, because he made me laugh once.

Ah yes, the classic “yep, this is still a picture of people running!” follow up!

I don’t even know why they make movies about people running long distances anymore. Did everyone else not watch Forrest Gump? That dude ran forever and literally cross country. Sure, this was a true story of a coach who ended up winning a lot of cross country meets over a 14 year period and at least all the kids in the movie were real. But it still lacks the wow factor that a movie needs to have.

Inspiration is one thing. If it doesn’t entertain while it inspires, what will a viewer actually get out of it? It doesn’t help that this movie is OVER two hours long with not a whole lot going on. It is mostly a lot of “how do I reach these keeeds” type moments, which at this point is one of the most boring subsets of the genre.

Here is how you teach kids to run good. Are you ready? Well, first they already for the most part have to be good runners before you get them. Buy them some new shoes. And make them practice. A lot. All the time. Make them practice running up and down tiny man made hills and get them used to that. And then? Then you win the things.

It didn’t really feel like the coach in question was great in the film version, again, just a guy who didn’t like where he was and kept his time busy with coaching athletes which is all he really liked to do.

This film features average to okay (at least consistent) from everyone involved and stories you heard many times before in better contexts.

In honor of Jurassic World, I too am going to open my own theme park. I won’t fill it with dinosaurs though, I will fill it with greek legendary monsters. It makes sense, if you remember you are reading this review on Gorgon Reviews.

I don’t have the funds yet for it. I don’t have the feasibility either. I thought about CGI, but that doesn’t make sense in real life. Although if the entire park was an entire green screen overlaying the sidewalks and buildings and grass, I could buy the material in bulk.

After all, if they can successfully make a park with monsters despite a whole bunch of deaths right off the back twenty years ago, more power to them (and me). Afterall, Jurassic World is going to be a strict economic drama about the costs that go into large island parks, right? And about how everything is awesome?

About how everything is cool, when you’re part of a team?

Set 22 years after the first Jurassic Park or so, this movie takes place on the exact same island. Now the island is a bustling theme park! The idea was a success! Everyone gets dinosaurs and no one dies!

This version of the park still took some time to happen and it has only existed for 10 years or so. They occasionally release a new exhibit, which spikes up business and gets everyone about dinosaurs again. But kids today, with their Pac-man video games and MTV and hula hoops have attention spans that can be measured only in nanoseconds. And they aren’t afraid of dinosaurs anymore. They are basically like slightly more exotic elephants at this point.

So they went bigger. Better. They made up a dinosaur. Taking DNA from several big dinosaurs and filling in the gaps with some crazy shit, they made a big, intelligent dinosaur that is going to make everyone shit their pants and the investors dive in piles of gold coins. They just have to pass a few safety tests before the big day in a few weeks. And sure, wouldn’t you know it? We got ourselves a highly intelligent killing machine that is not just a mere animal, but almost a dino-god. And he is now loose on a regular park day with 20,000 guests.

Guests like, Gray (Ty Simpkins) and Zach (Nick Robinson), who are there for the weekend with their Aunt Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), a big wig who helps run the park. We have Henry Wu (BD Wong) as our head scientist who made the creature, the only returning member from the first film. Our rich park owner who doesn’t care about profits (Irrfan Khan), some people who work in the control room (Jake Johnson, Lauren Lapkus), a bad baby sitter (Katie McGrath), the emotional mom of the kids (Judy Greer), a guy with nefarious intentions (Vincent D’Onofrio), and a raptor handler (Omar Sy), are also involved in some way or another!

Hmm. Am I missing anyone? Oh, I guess there is Owen (Chris Pratt), an ex military man who thinks dinosaurs are thinking, intelligent creatures who just want the respect they deserve.

The orca’s at Sea World, however, don’t deserve respect and don’t deserve great white shark food like this big guy.

Welcome to 2015, where everything is CGI and the point doesn’t matter. I am one who would say that Jurassic Park still holds up to this day, animatronics and all. CGI has the ability to get dated pretty quickly because it is constantly evolving and getting better, while animatronics have staying power. From a basic movie watching point of view, I think every single dinosaur was done with CGI. And it shows! The Pterodactyls were horrible. They were at least diverse looking, but every time they flew onto the screen, I cringed a bit. Sure the raptors and the T-Rexes and the bigger guy are much better CGI, I feel like something amazing was lost in the process.

Jurassic World is definitely scarier than the first film, as the threats are bigger and badder with a potential much higher body count. Given that Spielberg is directing it, somehow the kids are able to run through everything with more or less invisible shields protecting them, which is kind of annoying, because any tension in their scenes is a bit diluted. Speaking of tension, despite it being a rich and well funded island park, cell service goes out quite frequently, enough to make it quite annoying at times at how frequently they use it as a crutch. Cell service AND walkie talkies, for double trouble.

One annoying aspect to make it scarier is at one point, it was a bright and sunny early afternoon setting, but the very next scene suddenly made it middle of night. It didn’t need to skip ahead several hours, and made very little sense because most of that time must have been them waiting for it to get dark. But being dark served no purpose outside of making it scarier for the viewer, despite risking time continuity to do so.

I am a bit surprised, however, at some of the characters who did die. One character I noted from above actually died after several bites, flying through the air, drowning, in such a grotesque fashion, you would have thought they were the most evil character ever. But of course, nothing was inherently bad with them.

Despite all of this, there were still quite a few entertaining scenes. I was delighted that Pratt’s character didn’t just feel like Star Lord or Indiana Jones, but a new and unique entity. There were also good moments for our people in the control panel.

Overall, this is probably the best movie in this franchise not called Jurassic Park, but given the quality of the other two films, it doesn’t actually say much.

It is hard to be a girl. People don’t let you drive late at night. Being some sort of freak, where people all sit and stare with their eyes. You know, being a girl, all pretty and petite. And people won’t let you have any rights.

And other lyrics from Just A Girl, where I get all my go to info on what it is like girl-ing.

Hot Girls Wanted is an interesting title because it can be read in many different ways. There is the “Oh shit, is that person trying to buy attractive women?” way. There is the obvious statement of “Of course hot girls are wanted, no shit sherlock.” And there is the “Wait, why did they say girls? That’s creepy.”

And I guess the answer for this documentary is basically yes to all of that.

One of the riskiest google searches for pics for this movie in recent history.

This movie is about the amateur porn business! Thanks to the internet, there is porn in every dirty nook and cranny and they need a lot of people to do it. Apparently the “amateur porn” stuff, or entry level porn for the women involved, is all over the USA, not just California anymore (thanks to laws they have regarding condoms). Especially in Miami! Girls can find a Craigslist ad to get into porn, head on down, stay in a house with other women trying to break it into the field, and live the life of luxury!

Unless…unless the porn business isn’t as glamorous as people imagine? That wouldn’t be the point of this documentary, would it?

Well, probably. This documentary premiered at Sundance this year and is probably only famous because Rashida Jones is a producer (along with like, 15 other people).

In actuality, the film more or less talks about 4-6 porn workers. I wouldn’t call them porn stars, because they aren’t industry leading names or anything. No, these are the ladies who found ads on craigslist and are doing a shoot here or there earning a couple hundred bucks to a thousand dollars a shoot, hoping one day to lead to stardom.

And then we learn a lot about pron archetypes that are about abuse and forced situations to make everyone uncomfortable watching, and then we see what the ladies are now doing with their lives after the fact.

If there was any one real interesting part, I would say the awkwardness of one girl telling her parents and the conversations surrounding it. Yeah, that is solid docu-tainment right there. My issues with the rest of the documentary is that overall it felt kind of pointless. It tried to argue against this type of stuff, I think, but they did it through 5-6 text on screen scenes randomly put in the documentary and that was it. No porn experts, no psychologists, nothing. Just the girls in the situation over presumably a few weeks.

So all in all, Hot Girls Wanted just felt very incomplete and a little bit boring. I guess it is an okay subject to show and talk about, I just wanted something more. Some sort of analysis. Some sort of better point.

It has been awhile since Night At The Museum: Secret of the Tomb came out, but I am finally now ready to talk about it. Why did I wait so long?

Well, I had never seen the first two movies, Night at the Museum and Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. I have owned the two Night at the Museum movies, which came out out in 2006 and 2009, since 2012. I just haven’t “found the time” to see them. Never in the right mood.

A few things helped put me in that mood. One, Robin Williams died, very sad, I really needed to see more of his movies. Two, the kids were about to go home for the summer and we had a long Memorial day weekend where I didn’t have anything to show them. So it was easy to watch one, then the next a few days apart, and finally, FINALLY, the third and last movie.

Fair warning, I thought the first movie was kind of terrible, and the second one had its moments, but was overall okay.

But those movies lacked a dreamy knight in shining armor.

Years later, that museum is still popular! Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) is opening up more cheating night things. This time, constellations. Well, shit goes badly and he gets fired. Why? The magical tablet is acting all fucky. People are freaking out, getting meaner. Who knows what is going on?? Well, apparently the parents (Ben Kingsley, Anjali Jay) of Ahkmenrah do! Yes, but they are in a museum in London.

So the gang gets together, tablet in hand, to go to a new museum at night and find out how to fix the tablet. Pretty simple plot actually. His son, Nick (Skyler Gisondo), played by a new guy, is also going to come. For reasons. You know, get him back on track and shit.

Oh hey, and we also have Rebel Wilson playing the London night guard. And Dan Stevens, yes, that Dan Stevens, as Lancelot. Sure, he is a fictional character, apparently in a museum, but go with it, assholes.

And there are all the returning characters of course. We still have Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams), Octavius (Steve Coogan), Jedediah (Owen Wilson), Ahkmenrah (Rami Malek), Attila the Hun (Patrick Gallagher), Sacajawea (Mizuo Peck), and even Dr. McPhee (Ricky Gervais). Hell, we also have the old geezers back played by Dick Van Dyke, Bill Cobbs, and Mickey Rooney (who also is dead now).

Just a bunch of eccentric Americans and killers hanging out, riding a bus.

The overall problem with this franchise are the inconsistencies. And the inconsistencies are all shrouded behind a mysterious Egyptian tablet and magic, so that any of them can just be written off. But no, it is incredibly annoying.

For instance, why do some things come alive and others not? Statue and wax people? Fine. But in this movie there is a display of Pompeii, and it even explodes and has its own lava and everything. What? The things are supposed to be alive people or animals or creatures. They are just making things up as they go.

The tablet was losing its power and so people were slowly reverting back to their original forms. Apparently people who get transformed for the first time didn’t turn back slowly because it was their first night. They are apparently just making up rules on the fly because why not. In this movie, they say people act a lot weirder right when they transform and get used to the change eventually. This wasn’t true at all in the second movie, as we saw tons of people come alive and go straight into character and being fine with it.

A more structured, less clusterfuck, is all I ask.

Now this one has some interesting jokes and I laughed a few times. Despite the fact that the main new character was a fictional person who makes no sense to be a museum exhibit, Lancelot was killer. Rebel Wilson also did a good job. But the issue with the tablet was lame, as was the “threat” behind it all. It all seemed poorly done, where conflict continued to be created for the stupidest reasons.

After American Hustle, I just assumed every Christmas we would get a movie with Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. They did it two years a row, and that means they have to do it forever?

Sure enough, looking at their IMDBs early in 2014, you would have seen Serena, coming out sometime end of 2014. Three for three, they were going for the Turkey!

But then something happened. It never came out. It got pushed to MARCH of 2015, basically the middle of nowhere. And it had an instant VOD release. Thinks weren’t looking good for this period drama set in North Carolina based on a book…

Real lumberjacks wear pink. Just ask Monty Python!

This movie, Serena, is a period drama (early 1930’s), set in North Carolina (Mountains) based on a book (also called Serena!).

George Pemberton (Cooper) is there, trying to start (or already has?) a big timber business. He is a lumberjack, okay? He is working on expanding his business to overseas, Brazil, get some of that rain forest money.

And then there is Serena (Lawrence). You may have heard about her. She is a blonde stand out, living amongst all the mountain folk. She doesn’t need no man to get her way, but she does, in George. Speaking of George, he has a child actually, with Rachel (Ana Ularu). Kind of awkward, but boys will be boys.

That is, until it is found out that Serena can NOT have kids. So the only person to carry on George’s legacy is some bastard kid. That’s not okay. When people get in Serena’s way, people get hurt. She is conniving and maybe even a little bit mad.

But what else is there to do in the North Carolina mountains?

Also featuring David Dencik, Rhys Ifans, Sean Harris, and Toby Jones.

And of course it ends with a big dance sequence like in Silver Linings Playbook. Right? Right?!

This has taken me about 10 hours of research after watching the movie, but I think I figured out why it was delayed and eventually only a limited release and VOD.

Serena is not very good.

The book might be fine, great, grand, wonderful. I don’t care. The movie is a bore and it is awkward. First off, Cooper and Lawrence, despite their presumably best efforts, do not look like they fit at all with the rest of the actors in this film. Maybe they are too pretty, maybe just too famous, but it doesn’t work. I would also say they don’t act that great here, which is a shame, since we know what they can do.

The side characters all above were pretty good though! Which is a shame. Their collective good was not great enough to overshadow the lumps of coal that Cooper and Lawrence delivered on a platter, however.

Aside from that, the story is pretty much a bore. Some excitement happens. Maybe two exciting things. And a couple more moments that were meant to be exciting, but instead were met with yawns. By the end when I should care more about the fate of certain characters, I instead found myself checking how much time was left and when it would finally end.

This isn’t All About Steve bad, no, but at least All About Steve had some entertainment value.

As this is my intro, instead of talking about Inside Out (and how sad I was there was no 2014 installment), I will just talk about the intro to Inside Out, a short called Lava.

Lava is about love, volcanoes, and tectonic shifts with hot spots. HOT SPOTS.

Obviously some liberties are taken, but it tells a wonderful love story, to great ukulele music, featuring real Hawaiians, and it will win Best Animated Short this year. You are hearing it first. It is better than Frozen Fever. It is better than Feast and Paperman.

It united all of my emotions into the orgasm phase of existence.

Fine, fine, back to the movie. Inside Out is really about a girl named Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), growing up and trying to find her place in the world. She has a loving mother (Diane Lane) and father (Kyle MacLachlan), and enjoys the long winters in Minnesota where she can play the greatest sport ever made: Hockey. But all of that is about to come to a comical screeching halt, when suddenly they are moving to San Francisco for some “work reason” that is stressful and new and different.

To find out what is really going on inside Riley’s head, we have to go inside her head. Heyy brain stuff! That is where her emotions live! Right when she popped out of the womb and opened her eyes, she giggled and laughed, because Joy (Amy Poehler) was her only worker. It was almost instantly followed by gloomy as fuck Sadness (Phyllis Smith). As she got older, she gained more emotions, including Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Bill Hader) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling).

Together, working in harmony, they can make a fully functional girl. An honest girl, with friends, and family, and hockey, and a goofy side, all making up her core memories. They also work on putting her memories into long term and bring back appropriate memories when appropriate.

But with a half cross country move to a smaller house, no friends, no frozen lakes for hockey, whats a girl to do? Well, apparently have her emotions go all crazy and bad things start happening to her right when she needs them to work together the most. Of course!

And where the heck is her old imaginary friend, Bing Bong (Richard Kind)? He is important, damn it!

“Bing Bong is dead now, sweetie, so eat your imitation Chinese food please.”

Did I mention how good Lava was? Five out of four stars. I want to buy a Blu-Ray with it on it, just so I can get a digital copy and watch it with ease wherever I go.

The good news is, Inside Out was also awesome! Given its subject matter, it should come to no surprise that my emotions were all over the place. Thankfully Anger didn’t really show up, but maybe I did have a little bit of Disgust and some Fear. But hey, the Sadness came into full fruition too. I cried three times during this screening. Once for Lava, twice for this movie. Using literal emotions, it did a fantastic job of controlling my own emotions to make it an overall wild ride.

The film starts out cute, gets happy, stays happy, then gets into the sadness/fear territory, but by the end, it returns you back to the cute/aww feels by the end. A perfect journey, basically. The voice actors did a wonderful job, Lewis Black and Mindy Kaling in particular felt perfect for their roles. And of course Phyllis Smith, a wonderful choice for Sadness, who I assume they also based her design around.

The “hero” of our story in young Riley is a nice change of pace. She is a normal girl and one that most people can probably relate to. Not to mention she plays Hockey, which I must again note plays a significant role in this film. Hockey is slowly creeping its way more and more into mainstream, and I thank Pixar for doing something different.

Last but not least, this movie is for everybody. There are plenty of jokes and fun parts for the kids, but also of course a lot of higher concepts for the adults out there. When dealing with the brain, you should be prepared to use yours, for at least a little bit.

There is no Deus here, no, we just got the Ex Machina.

In case you didn’t know, Deus Ex Machina (god from the machine) is a plot device where some outside force just kind of appears, fixes the issue, and leaves. It is usually a badly written plot device, Greece/Roman plays are full of these types of things where literally the gods came down and did some stuff.

And just to reiterate, this movie is the phrase without the god part. So just “From the Machine”. A movie about robots.

Maybe even robots kind of just appearing, fixing the issue, and leaving. That’d be swell.

I don’t think I can bore up this intro anymore so I should just get right to it!

Put on your thinking face and get to movie watching.

To err is human. To compute is robot.

Humans and robots don’t really interact nowadays on any level that isn’t a slave/owner relationship. Right now, robots have it rough.

Related, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) totally just won a prize. He is a coder for Bluebook, the Google of this movie, and he has won a week to spend with their reclusive CEO on his giant resort island thing. Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the CEO, has turned his home into a secret underground facility, to test out new technologies and prepare for the next big technical revolution and he is very secretive.

Nathan wants Caleb to perform the Turing test on something he is working on. In the test, a human asks a robot questions, without knowing whether they are talking to a human or a robot. And if the human cannot determine what it is, the robot/AI passes the test! But err, knowing you are doing that kind of ruins the point you would think. Hell, being introduce to Ava (Alicia Vikander), and seeing her in a robot body also probably puts a hamper on the basics for the test.

Maybe. JUST MAYBE. There is more going on in this facility that Nathan isn’t telling Caleb. Maybe things are more than just the Turing test. Maybe! Who knows? That Asian maid, Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) who doesn’t know English and is the only other person in the whole facility? Yeah, probably. Bet she has seen some shit.

If you thought the elevator scene from Captain America was bad ass, wait til you see this action fest!

I think Ex Machina is the type of movie you just want to watch with someone else. There are a lot of themes present, and since I watch the majority of my movies alone, the only people I can talk about those themes with are you guys.

But then I’d be a silly spoil sport.

Instead, let me instead make sure you realize this is a sci-fi drama. That means we are going to have a lot of talking and not a lot of action, and I wouldn’t want you to go into this thinking otherwise (like a dumb ass).

The discussions and the twists that went into the film were pretty enjoyable. I went in assuming I would be able to see everything coming a mile away and I think that most of my predictions did not end up coming true. So it is great to see it not go down the obvious path.

The three main actors involved all did an excellent job. It is now expected of Isaac to provide quality, but Gleeson is still not super tested and Vikander of course is out of nowhere (in comparison). The story the film tells can be interpreted in several different ways, depending on who is watching the film, which will provide excellent discussions.

At the end, I felt as though it was still a bit too slow and not as grandiose as I had expected. That is of course my fault, not the films. Ex Machina is a wonderful addition to the Sci-Fi genre and one loves of that and drama should definitely seek out.

You could say that the Russians are kind of good at hockey.

Not Canada good, but really high up there. In fact, during the Cold War, their national hockey team was the pride of their country. It helped that they had a literal national school to foster players into the team, to practice all the time and become the very best. Like no one ever was. And to beat them in 1980 was our greatest test. Freedom was our cause.

Okay, no more pokemon references.

Either way, they were a dominant team and often seen as a villain of the hockey world, mostly due to the fact that we leave in America and they were communists and communists were/are bad.

But what history fails to teach over and over again is that on the other side, there are also people. People who are playing for their country, for their families, for the joy of the game. And in the Red Army documentary, we get to hear from those players their stories and how everything went down.

Here are the original Russian Five and boy, are they FABULOUUUUUS!

For the most part, the stories told are told by Slava Fetisov, famed young defensemen for the Red Army, who later became the captain of the National team, outscoring most of the forwards and leading them to a couple of gold cup medals. He has also had a bit of a tragic life trying to get OUT of the Soviet Union, where coaches and government officials promised he could go to the NHL and you know, changing their minds.

The plight of their hockey players mirrors the plight of a lot of their citizens in the last 10-20 years of the Cold War before Russia became Russia again.

And it felt kind of awesome hearing their side of the story. The other half of the coin is usually fascinating, and frankly one sided history is boring.

I was a bit confused at first that they had multiple different interviews with Fetisov, so he was wearing different outfits and not having glasses, made me think it was a different player a few times.

But more importantly, the film also touched on the Russian Five 2.0, which played for the Red Wings, the best organization in all of professional sports. It got me pumped about the team despite their playoff loss, and also didn’t get me all sad about the car crash following the cup victory. They didn’t mention it at all!

Go hockey, hockey, the greatest game in the land.