Month: July 2015

Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbander have an interesting thing in common. Fassbender has played two different roles that McKellen has more famously played before him. They were both Magneto and they were both Macbeth.

This is all technically irrelevant, since Fassbender has never played Sherlock Holmes. But Benedict Cumberbatch has played him! And they are basically the same person.

This is a bad intro, in that I am now going to hope that Ian McKellen will play a second role that Cumberbatch had famously played before him. We can’t see McKellen as an older Alan Turing, unfortunately. That’d be preferable. Honestly, most of Cumberbatch’s roles are not super famous, so we might have to wait for McKellen to play a very old Julian Assange. I assume time travel will be involved to get this done.

Either way, that nonsense aside, I think Mr. Holmes is the first time anyone has looked at the Holmes character, super old and near death. The only one attempting to give a closer look into the man behind the myths, the man without a Watson.

They meant a literal closer look of course.

Sherlock Holmes (McKellen) is now very old, in his 90s, and living far away from Baker Street. Watson had finally left him after getting married, leaving Sherlock to continue work on his own. But something happened that caused him to retire from detective-ing altogether. He instead wanted to move to the coast, in a nice house alone, to become a beekeeper and read books all day long.

He isn’t alone though. No, he is too old to be alone. He has a housekeeper (Laura Linney) and her son (Milo Parker) living with them to take care of the day to day needs. And of course he has regular doctor (Roger Allam) visits for his ever declining health. Did you know he is losing his memory? He can’t remember simple things, such as the names of people he used to interact with or even just interacted with. He even forgot the boys name at one point!

Thanks to his failing memory, he has to do things before it goes away. Like stalling, with plot of him going to Japan to meet basically a stranger (Hiroyuki Sanada) to eat a flower to help with his memory. And finally reading all those damn books that Watson wrote about him, turning him into a caricature of his actual self. He sets off to write one of the famous mysteries down in his own words, one without all the pomp and circumstances, because he himself can’t remember how it ended, just that it was important. All the while passing on some wisdom to the boy in his home and hopefully stop being such a smart asshole to everyone he meets.

Also featuring Hattie Morahan and Patrick Kennedy.

I assume he is actually telling the kid about his inherent X-gene and how to exploit others.

If anything, Mr. Holmes gets points for trying something different with a character who has had dozens of film and TV iterations. We don’t even have a Watson in this film! No Watson at all! It is just one guy losing his mind. I can always appreciate it when they take an established work or character and give it a completely new flavor.

That being said, despite its originality the story ended up being a weak point. There were two stories being told through flashbacks while Holmes is hanging out in his cottage trying to remember them. The Alzheimer based plot allowed for things to take their time and force the stories to pace themselves out. It just felt lazy though watching it. It is not interesting to watch someone slowly remember events, especially if the events aren’t life threatening in any way. Memento was about a guy slowly remembering events, and it was a well done crime thriller. This one the stakes were no where near as high, so it made me wonder what the point was.

The good news is that it was for the most part well acted. Everyone played their parts well, even though it felt like McKellen was literally dying in front of the camera as the movie went on. Playing an old and enfeebled person will not get you on the cover of any magazines. It was also a gorgeous movie with its set pieces, costumes and cinematography. It just also featured a mostly forgettable story with only a bit of the wit I have come to know and love from a made up detective character.

Don’t look too closely at the calendars, but roughly 4-5 months after the Oscars, I can say I finished another category! A few categories ended up being extremely elusive, namely Best Original Song, Best Documentary and Best Foreign Film. I have made zero headway on finishing any of those three categories (And just downright ignoring the shorts categories), until this moment. With this review of The Salt of the Earth, the documentary category will finally officially be finished.

What makes this better is that it didn’t win. If it had won the category, this would be almost embarrassing for me. But since it didn’t, it is a loser, and taking your time is expected, right?

Right!

But in reality, I didn’t get to watch it because I couldn’t find a copy. It took forever to be released in America, and I didn’t even let the fact that it would be a completely foreign and thus subtitled movie get in my way from watching it ASAP.

Alright, here we go, a documentary about a photographer named Sebastião Salgado.

ART, motherfucker, do you speak it!?

It turns out that Mr. Salgado is a pretty damn good photographer. He traveled the world, an adventurer of sorts, and he would talk to people and connect to them on a personal level. If you have a chance, google his name and art. They are mostly black and white and, well, really fucking good. Sorry for the language, I just don’t know how to describe artwork.

He knew how to tell a story in a single shot. He also knew how to tell a story with words, which is what the bulk of the documentary is about. Just listening to an old man telling stories about some of his more iconic sets of work. Like, a lot of detail. Good memory he has, but he also probably had to tell these stories before.

It should be obvious this is a very well done and beautiful documentary. However, I feel like I am personally missing out on it by not speaking the same language as Salgado. According to the subtitles, he spoke quite eloquently, but I found myself almost saddened by the fact that I didn’t get to understand it. I head to read along. I think a lot of the beauty was lost in the transition. Yes, I am sort of advocating for dubbing here. We would still get the wonderful visuals, and get to hear the great story, and I’d be able to get lost in everything.

But as it is, it was hard to feel connected. Which is a shame. Still, a great film for photography lovers, art lovers, and old people lovers.

There isn’t much new to say about the Mission: Impossible series that I didn’t already say in my Ghost Protocol review weeks ago. I watched the other four movies in the series, some were good, some were bad. More importantly, the last one was good, so the series is on an upswing and I can be excited!

Tom Cruise puts out exciting movies. He can be a bit crazy, but by damn does the man know how to entertain an audience.

Part of me secretly hopes that this time, in Rogue Nation, the mission actually ends up being impossible and they lose. That would be a nice plot twist and a fantastic way to end the franchise. A bit of a downer, but man, what IDGAF attitude they would have!

Your mission should you choose to accept it: Die in the movie and NOT return for a sequel.

Remember the Syndicate? Of course you don’t! They were mentioned at the end of the last movie but vaguely and that they were bad people. Turns out they are very, very bad people. So bad that Ethan Hunt (Cruise) got captured by them relatively early on in the movie, with innocent people being killed. He doesn’t know a lot about them, they are a very secret organization, led by some guy (Sean Harris) that he of course knows next to nothing about.

All he knows is that he only is able to escape thanks to the help of a woman (Rebecca Ferguson). But just like previous films, due to all of the chaos of events going around the IMF, they officially get disbanded. The head of the CIA (Alec Baldwin) has brought all usable resources into his division, including Benji (Simon Pegg) and Brandt (Jeremy Renner). Luther (Ving Rhames) figured he’d rather retire than work for the CIA.

And now Ethan is on his own, being hunted by the CIA and the Syndicate, the latter of which no organization actually believes exists. A typical Tuesday for him I’d imagine.

Also featuring Jens Hultén as henchman who speaks and Saif Al-Warith as henchman who doesn’t speak, but has a nice beard.

If you look closely, you will notice reversed gender roles!

M:I 5, if I can call it that, was an action movie done right. We don’t have lamely on a mission killing an entire island worth of henchmen, or people running around just yelling shitty puns. No, the action scenes in this film have depth. It helps that a lot of the stunts are done by Cruise himself, which just adds to his action star credibility. The plane scene is the famous stunt scene, which is funny in context of the film based on how little it matters. The underwater scene was one of the best scenes, as well as the motorcycle/car chase.

For the plot, it has the normal twists and turns that the franchise tends to offer, but I think it falls apart a bit near the end. Things get almost too convoluted. Thankfully it doesn’t completely ruin the film which spends the rest of the time before it building up your good graces with cool scene after cool scene.

Ferguson plays the best Mission: Impossible lady star of the five films. She is a kick ass, bad ass woman, who has her own motives for doing everything. She isn’t just a lame plot device for Hunt, like a Bond girl.

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is definitely one of the best action movies of the year at this point, and probably one of the better non Superhero action movies from the last few years. Go and see and be entertained.

Buy It! – This movie is available now on {Blu-Ray} and {DVD}.

Like a lot of people, I am beginning to mistrust Paul Feig and Melissa McCarthy.

Paul Feig did give us Bridesmaids, sure, but The Heat didn’t feel right with me. He also has his strange obsession with McCarthy, so when it was announced he would do a Ghostbusters reboot, it was obvious he would be casting her in it. McCarthy has had a few terrible movies, namely Identity Thief and Tammy, where it seemed through all her work she could really only play one type of character.

So of course when you see a trailer for a badly named movie like Spy, you assume it is going to be one long running fat joke. Where it is absurd that she should be in the position she is in and you know, more fat jokes. It isn’t an absurd assumption, given that is what Tammy was, a movie McCarthy even wrote for herself, unable to get herself out of her own type casting.

If this was a gif, you all would hate me.

Being a spy is a tough job, but thankfully you have a handler back at HQ who helps you out on each and every mission. Bradley Fine (Jude Law) is a spy, and a damn good one at that. But he wouldn’t be anywhere without his handler, Susan Cooper (McCarthy). She helps protect him from surprising bad guys, helps him escape, and just keeps him aware of all of his surroundings! Things can still go wrong, sure, like when Bradley accidentally kills Tihomir Boyanov (Raad Rawi), who is supposed to be the only one alive who knows about some tiny nukes that he wants to sell. Whoops. Oh well, other than that, they are a great team!

Until he dies. She wasn’t too helpful then. He was killed by Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne), daughter of that other dead dude. Looks like she knows where the nukes are! She also knows every single spy that we have on record, names and what they look like, so it is incredibly unlikely of any of them being able to get close to her. Now Elaine Crocker (Allison Janney) has no idea what to do, so she agrees to let Susan go undercover to find out more information, with her best friend Nancy (Miranda Hart) serving as her handler. She is supposed to avoid Rayna and instead follow Sergio De Luca (Bobby Cannavale), but, you know, shit happens.

On top of the whole, being a spy thing, she also has to deal with the fact that some of the agents have quit. Namely, Rick Ford (Jason Statham), one of their best, and he wants revenge on Rayna since knows all about him. Too bad she also is the only one who knows about the nukes! Can’t let her be killed as well. Oh golly gumdrops.

Also, hey! We have Will Yun Lee and Zach Woods.

I normally only comment on facial hair, but come on, this is astounding.

Good news, everyone! Spy is not just one long fat joke. Sure, independently, on your own, you could giggle when a larger person does something athletic, but that is on you buddy. No, these jokes come from a deeper level. A lot more of them are based on how she has the body of a middle aged cat lady and the like. Way better than fat jokes.

In all honesty, Spy ended up being a pretty funny movie. Byrne still seems to have come out of nowhere in the comedy world, but she is still knocking it out of the park. Statham was in this movie and he was able to play a very Statham character. And yes, McCarthy of course carried it very, very well.

The action was also pretty decent. I didn’t know how it would end either, because they set it up pretty early that anyone could be killed, not to mention them wanting to earn the R rating.

One thing the film lacks is rewatchability, as in, I don’t ever see myself buying the film because I know I will never be in the mood again. But our female leads are fantastic, even Hart, and Statham provides some nice laughs as well.

Last summer I watched two really good teenage romance films that involved death based on books. The Fault In Our Stars and If I Stay. I was surprised at the quality of both films and how I was able to still connect with them despite not being in the target demographic.

Of course, John Green wrote The Fault in Our Stars and wrote a few books besides that one. Before that one, he wrote one called Paper Towns, which my wife has assured me is fantastic.

Really, as long as it avoids the normal cliches, it will probably make me happy. And knowing my recent track record with any sort of romance film or drama, it will probably just end up making me cry in public again.

It does feature some amateur level hallway creepin’ though, so that’s a plus.

Quentin/Q (Nat Wolff) has always lived a typical lame boy life. He does what he is supposed to, does good in school, has nerd friends and no love life. He does have love in his life, however. He loves Margo (Cara Delevingne), who moved across the street from his house when they were both kids. Back then they hung out and started to do adventured, but she did it way more and eventually they lost touch. Still, he hoped and dreamed.

Then one night, she appeared at his window! She needed someone to drive her around Orlando, get revenge on her ex boyfriend and so called friends. A night of adventure and a night to remember!

And then? The next day? Poof. Margo was gone. She ran away again, Q thought they would start to hit it off, so soon to finishing high school. But luckily, Margo always leaves some clues for her friends when she leaves so that they know where they can find her. Now it is up to Q to put himself out there for once and do something out of his comfort zone! With the help of his two best friends (Austin Abrams, Justice Smith), the old best friend of Margo (Halston Sage), and the girlfriend of one of his best friends (Jaz Sinclair), he will hopefully find true love and happiness.

Also featuring the amazingly accurate kid versions of our leads, Hannah Alligood and Josiah Cerio, and Cara Buono as Q’s mom. Seriously, I am willing to believe they just filmed the kid scenes many years ago and decided to give them fake imdb credits and names so that people wouldn’t think it was weird.

Jokes on you, I think everything is weird!

Alright, before the movie I had two hopes. First of all, I can say that Paper Towns definitely avoided cliches. It had a huge “nice guy” boner going throughout it, but by the end it was certainly not your standard story. Which was fantastic!

Unfortunately, it didn’t make me cry. No tears at all, not even a little. Come on John Green. You destroyed me with your last film, this one only gave me chuckles and contemplation.

Here’s the thing. Our two leads were fantastic. Wolff and Delevingne felt like real people for the most part with genuine expressions and appropriate reactions to everything. They made their characters awesome. The supporting cast however is not able to get on their level. I thought the chemistry between Wolff and friends felt real, but the other two actors just didn’t feel real. One character in particular was more annoying than funny.

Again, I am all for surprises along the way, and in fact, the twists in this film are generally good overall. It just didn’t resonate with me as much as I had hoped. Thankfully the leads were still great and oh so charismatic.

Hold up your hands. Now bend your hands back a little bit and curl your fingers. Then use this hand position to hit someone in the face, with the bottom part of your palm. That is what I thought Southpaw was before this movie.

Southpaw didn’t actually teach me what a Southpaw was, I had to find out after the fact. Apparently it is just a mainly left handed boxer though, instead of the normal right handed boxer. Oh well.

Either way, the main reason I was interested in this film was to see a buff Jake Gyllenhaal. We had glimpses of it in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, but no one wanted to see that movie for some reason. The best part about the muscles put on by Gyllenhaal is that he did it right after starring in Nightcrawler, where he famously lost a lot of weight and has scrawny body.

Look out everyone. Gyllenhaal is now willing to do potential future harm to his health to give it his all in these roles.

And he is excited to do it!

Billy Hope (Gyllenhaal) has got it all. He is undefeated, over 40 wins to his name! He is the lightweight champion of the world! He has friends, a loving wife, Maureen (Rachel McAdams), a daughter, Leila (Oona Laurence), a mansion, a lifelong manager friend/promoter (50 Cent), and fat filthy stacks of cash.

But he wasn’t given these things. He had to work hard. He was an orphan, raised in the foster care system. So was his wife! So were all his friends. From nothing they created something great, and now with all the hits to the head, there is a chance he could lose it all if he keeps taking a beating. His wife wants him to live to see their daughter grow up, a fair request. So sure, maybe he should retire.

Not everyone is down with his retirement though. Miguel Escobar (Miguel Gomez) claims he is the best at the sport, but Billy won’t give him a chance. Miguel needs to beat the best to claim he is the best, so he starts a public taunting event to get Billy to commit. But when the taunting gets too personal, events quickly escalate and a pretty bad thing happens. I honestly don’t know if the bad thing was said in the spoiler, so I will avoid saying it.

Needless to say, post “bad thing”, Billy won’t get to live out the rest of his life as planned. Depression, loss of wealth, drugs, all of these things bring Billy down. After he loses everything, then, maybe then, he can turn his life around with an old gym owner (Forest Whitaker) and living on the streets.

Also featuring Naomie Harris, Skylan Brooks, and Beau Knapp.

Billy was eventually defeated by a KO from his daughter, quite embarrassingly.

Southpaw left me an emotional wreck. Notably important, I have a wife and I have a daughter, so despite not growing up on the streets or being athletic in any way, I found myself relating really heavily with the main character. All the bad things that happened to him I could imagine happening to me, so I was on the same wavelength from minute 1 and on.

Southpaw isn’t a revolutionary story. It has some normal boxing movie moments, maybe even cliches if you will. It wasn’t going for Warrior (shut up, I know it wasn’t boxing, close enough). But what elevates Southpaw is in the incredible acting.

Everyone was on point in this film. Gyllenhaal gave a complete performance, transforming himself into a new person. The film was originally going to star Eminem as the titular role, as a spiritual sequel to 8 Mile. Obviously Eminem wasn’t a champion boxer, but the whole film would be a metaphor for what was going on in his life and his own struggles. It was actually easy to imagine him playing the role early on, but I don’t think he could have pulled off the more emotional and intense parts of the film in the middle and end.

McAdams is in a lot of movies that make me cry, but she is never the reason for the tears. This time McAdams made me cry, who gave one of her best performances. It took awhile to get used to it, but it worked. Whitaker also gives his best performance in years, doing well on the drunk ramblings. It was nice to see after a few pretty bad and cheap movies in a row. And of course, Laurence as the daughter did an amazing job. She conveyed emotions through her eyes like a seasoned pro, with only one of her scenes feeling a bit cheesy.

Southpaw is a movie about a family and boxing. Broken down it is awkward: Boxer’s life turned upside down due to boxing, only way to fix it is more boxing. But the acting and characters make it an incredible film experience.

Buy It! – This movie is available now on {Blu-Ray} and {DVD}.

I have been waiting to see the documentary Merchants of Doubt for years. Technically. Kind of.

Let me back track. When I was an undergraduate at UNC, I was also a security guard. Paid well, and I got to do homework/watch movies during shifts. During one desk shift at a building, there was a talk from some lady. Apparently there was a gun nut in attendance who disagreed a lot with her and asked a bunch of awkward questions, noting he had a gun and then left. I of course wasn’t anywhere near it, but was told after he left to be on the look out.

The speaker was Naomi Oreskes, one of the authors of the book. The talk she gave was probably wonderful, but I wasn’t able to see it obviously. So I bought the book instead, Merchants of Doubt, telling myself I would totally read it. This was back in 2010 or 2011.

Obviously I never read the book. But last year I found out that a documentary would be made of the same name! Hooray! Now I don’t have to read the book I bought so many years ago! I can just spend a little over an hour and a half, getting all of the same information in easy to digest form! So although when I bought the book I didn’t know it would become a documentary, I somehow knew then I wished it was the whole time.

Either way, long intro aside, this documentary has one main point: The same science fucks who sided with the smoking companies saying there was no evidence of smoke being bad / cigarettes being addictive are the fucks who are also denying climate change.

This is one of those fucks right here.

Of course it isn’t as simple as that. First of all, the title comes from the strategy that tobacco companies used once there began to be evidence of bad things. They used doubt. People went on the TV, to spread confusion. They told people that scientists didn’t know, some say yes, some say no, no real proof yet, but they are working on it. This worked for a long, long time. So other companies began to use it as well. Oil, pesticides, pharmaceutical companies, you name it.

And again the fact that the scientists involved to back these claims up also tend to be on the “company side” more often than not sounds beyond sketch. Because you know, it is in fact sketch.

This documentary goes into great detail through both the history and how it affects today’s scientific and political landscape. Long story short: think tanks, ran by corporations secretly, to make it seem like things like climate change are controversial and not completely agreed upon. They even help make reports look identical to the IPCC report, with opposite conclusions, to confuse people further.

Shit’s fucked up, and now Republicans all disagree with man made climate change (despite most saying it was real back in ’08) because that is where the money is. End of story.

A very informative documentary, one that should be watched by more people to see the shady shit that happens in politics, in order to make money.

I felt a bit bad, reviewing Self/Less, talking about how it was Ryan Reynold‘s forth movie for the year, and realizing that I skipped two of them in the process, only reviewing The Voices.

I’m sorry Ryan. We’re still cool right? I am going to make it up to you by reviewing Woman In Gold right away (whenever this gets posted). For your non-Ryan Reynolds readers out there, yes, I am almost certain Ryan reads these reviews. Don’t be jelly.

Despite the lateness of this review, after watching two disappointing films about a Woman in Black, I am excited to see what one wearing Gold can pull off.

Oh no, she has some black on her as well! Oh nooooo!

Tie your shoes, folks. There are Nazis in this movie.

This film takes place during World War II and during modern times! As you may have heard, the Nazis stole a lot of artwork during the wars. There was a very mediocre movie about protecting that artwork. And at least one Simpsons episode about having stolen artwork! This is about one woman’s true story to get a painting back.

You see, Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren) is from Austria, but when she was a young girl she was played by Tatiana Manslany. Her Aunt was beautiful and also the subject of the very real Woman In Gold painting! Well, to make a long story short, they had to flee the city thanks to the Nazis, some people were killed, and in a will from the Aunt, the painting was donated to an Austrian museum and is now considered a national treasure.

But the will shouldn’t be legal, as it wasn’t the Aunt’s painting to give! And since Maria is the only family left, she wants her dang painting back, because it belongs to her family and it is the right thing to do.

However, she needs help. So she gets some random inexperienced lawyer (Reynolds) to work on their case. And so they have to go back to Austria, then America, then a lot of American courts, then Austrian courts, and eventually hey they win and she gets the painting back the end. This is the only expected outcome, if you didn’t know that this true story would end happy, you are silly.

Also staring Daniel Brühl, Max Irons, and Katie Holmes in the role of “wife to important character that isn’t an important role” that is quite common in…so many damn movies.

In this movie, Reynolds acts as a man with imperfect vision.

Woman In Gold is not everything you’d expect it to be, but actually a bit less. If anything, the trailer makes it looks like it would be an exciting courtroom drama, about freedoms and the right thing happening. About taking down the big bad country lawyers with a small town boy, in a trial worth millions!

Unfortunately, the whole story seems to take a backstage to a few flashbacks in Austria, about love, war, and paintings. Very little characterization is given to the now. Instead it is all set in the past, with characters the viewer will care a lot less about. We already know what more or less happens in Austria at the start of the film. Our main character lands in America, her family has to die for the painting to be taken, and you know, World War II. But at least a third or more of the film takes place in the flashbacks, leaving me bored and ready for excitement.

And excitement I thought I was finally about to get with 40 minutes left! We had a real court scene coming up. Time for witnesses, deliberation, objections, and yelling! Maybe some bribes too. No, none of that. All of the court scenes are incredibly short, dealing with maybe one issue, and then they move on. The reason we get so many court scenes is just because of all the levels of court they have to go through: to the USA Supreme Court then back to Austria.

And it is the dullest of experiences. The real life story probably has some exciting moments, but they go an incredibly safe route with the entire film and instead we get a boring disaster. And the worst part is, Reynolds and Mirren do a fine job acting in this movie. Too bad no one would care by the end.

I feel like it was just yesterday when I finally reached the elusive 1050th review for my website. I know, an awkward number to be nostalgic about, especially since it is the milestone after an actual big one of 1000.

But you see, my Milestone Review for 1050 was the movie, Teen Beach Movie, a Disney channel original, which could be or might be the next big thing after High School Musical. Which of course also had its own big review.

Well, apparently TBM (acronym, bitches!) did do well enough to warrant more praise. I mean, I gave it a 2 out of 4, and was surprised I didn’t end up hating it! So sure, why no do another. Although, the second HSM film is the WORST by far. The camera work is terrible, it looks like it was all done second handed and rushed and none of the songs were good. And unfortunately that one was about summer time and swimming. So I am a bit worried for Teen Beach 2, which is my 1400th review (woot woot). I hope the sequel doesn’t drastically reduce the quality of the first, rushing out a movie to get people all sex nuts.

Just give me some good old fashioned satire. Please and thank yous.

Dancing in front of the screen to your favorite movie in sync with the actors is kind of cool.

Last day of summer! Mack (Maia Mitchell) and Brady (Ross Lynch) are enjoying some anniversary of meeting each other. How so? By watching the same damn movie they probably watched a thousand times on the beach before school starts. And hey, it is a song about how it was the best summer. Nice. Convenient.

But it turns out school is hard. Brady is a bit of a slacker that cares mostly about surfing. Mack keeps really busy, lots of clubs and organizations and wants to get into a good college. When they start to hang out with their older friends (Raymond Alexander Cham Jr., Piper Curda), it is clear that they might not have enough time for each other.

Maybe they were just a summer fling!

Brady can’t spend time focusing on this generic college application. He doesn’t even know his full name!

They quickly break up later that day. Brady forgot to meet her for college fair, and so she went with hunky tall asian kid Spencer (Ross Butler, even shares the same first acting name, oh noes!) instead. It takes 24 minutes into the movie post breakup for us to get another song, which is an incredibly long time for a musical. That song, On My Own, starts out good, but then goes extremely poppy real quick, and suddenly Brady is singing it into a microphone in his room. Does he record songs all of the sudden?

While this is going on, in the Wet Side Story world, Lela (Grace Phipps) is turning away from the script. She wants to save the day too and not be a damsel. Somehow this turns into them finding the magical necklace, where Lela and Tanner (Garrett Clayton) decide to run off into the ocean, taking them to the real world, not the movie world!

Everything is wonderful here, outside of the lack of singing. But don’t worry, they can make people sing in dance, because they are movie characters. They sing “Right Where I Want To Be,” not knowing their movie-ness, but just thinking they are in the future. They have other super powers as well. Like, their hair and clothes don’t get wet under the water.

I was legit going to complain about this picture and bad CGI until they made it a plot point. 🙁

Either way, Brady and Mack now have to work together. Totally sucks, since they hate each other now since it is not summer. They each take the same gendered movie character to their homes to help them blend in. Their plan is simple, make the real world seem terrible, and they will leave on their own free will. That way if anything bad starts to happen, like their world disappear, it isn’t such a big deal to fix it.

You know. Showing them things like calculus. And introducing them to their best friends. Those BFFs who totally love the new friends too, quirks and all. Another fun movie power is that they can’t not be in 1960’s clothing. They put on a new outfit, and magic, that shit looks old.

Nothing seems to be working, so instead they make them go to the cafeteria alone to find a place to sit. This cafeteria is apparently 100% outside and full on high school cliche. Instead of dealing with that negativity of goth kids and cheerleaders, they turn their frowns upside down. Like, literally. They sing a song about how wonderful smiling is, to get everyone to smile and sit with new people.

There is a such thing as smiling too hard though.

I feel like I have to talk more about this scene. It ended up being my favorite song, because it was the perfect satire/parody-ish musical song that I wanted and liked about the first. Most of the songs up this point were pretty shit, or failed to make the right points. But this one. This one went full on weird and 1960’s musical.

Just look at the picture below this one. Look at it in wonder and realize that it is totally in this movie, fully embracing the weirdness that is this now franchise. Musicals in the real world would totally be as awkward as this. I need awkward to thrive, and this is what I needed in the movie.

The more you look, the more weird stuff you will notice.

Hey what about movie world? Well they are all bored, not sure how to move the plot forward. They still have biker Butchy (John DeLuca), biker chick CheeChee (Chrissie Fit, now way more famous for being in Pitch Perfect 2), the shimmy girl Giggles (Mollee Gray), and other dude Seacat (Jordan Fisher). Well they also notice that people are starting to disappear and go away, mostly background characters. Still scary. Thankfully they find the necklace to go to the real world too and can get their friends back!

Back in the real world, Lela and Tanner are adapting way too quickly. No longer do they have their movie powers. When Tanner smiles it doesn’t necessarily produce the cool shiny sparkle! Since idea #1 didn’t work, they decide to instead hype up why life in the movies is better. And of course, they now try singing to them, because that is the only way this shit works.

But then it still doesn’t.

It is very impressive for them to have all these sets on a beach ready to go!

Well shit. Now that the friends arrive and tell them that people are disappearing and presumably dying, they think it is a good idea to go back to movie world. They don’t want death on their hands.

But Mack and Brady are still not back together! I know, it is pretty fucked up. So it is a school dance night, and they aren’t dancing together. That is the saddest of all the things. Turns out the movie gang didn’t go back after all. No, they needed to save the relationship. And the best way to do that is to force a song at this strange dance, where they sing about how they just gotta be themselves you know? And they can’t change who they are. A classic musical trope, that features all the boys and girls dancing at each other on their respective halves of the school gymnasium.

So that basically works, but holy fuck, they really gotta get these movie guys back home. So they run to the beach, and literally all the people with speaking lines blow up and fizzle out of reality, leaving just Lena and Tanner from the film. They don’t go into details, but I imagine if they go back, they will be alone and confused. Unless going back magically saves the day and everyone pops back all easy-peasy. There is no real reason to assume that though.

Being your own unique person involves doing mirror like dance sets and singing the same chorus.

Brady and Mack sing a song to get back together. Mack also finds out that Brady has been designing super sweet surf boards on his spare time and he has been afraid to tell her, because Brady is a fuck face. They also realize that if Lela and Tanner pop away, apparently the movie will not exist and they will never meet. Which is awkward. Before Lela goes, she is told by Mack to make her own story and not give into the preconceptions of her movie world. Be her own woman!

They save the day! Yay! Wait what, Brady and Mack don’t know each other. Apparently Wet Side Story still doesn’t exist. Instead it is called Lela, Queen of the Beach. Instead of an awesome Romeo and Juliet musical beach movie it is a movie with even less plot, about Lela being awesome at the beach? Talk about a down grade. Somehow this erases the last few months of history, despite the movie not even mentioning this possibility.

But don’t fret. Brady and Mack now meet for the first time at a screening of this new movie on the beach, at a big party! For whatever reason, everyone knows the movie but Brady. This is some strange flip of the first time they meet, conversations and all. Thankfully, everyone dances and sings along to the movie on the screen, in time with the movie again, letting Brady and Mack fall in love. Or something. Hooray they still end up together, but…differently.

Again, singing and dancing along with the screen is THE coolest.

Obviously, this sequel is worse than the first film. The first film was an average parody of the old fashioned musicals and it was over the top on purpose. This film barely crosses the over the top moments, outside of the song I talked a lot about halfway through the review. I was disappointed with most of the songs. The school dance song could have been better if it didn’t have a generic as fuck chorus about marching to their own beat. It made it terrible. Not even the final closing song was good, because it has a nonsensical chorus for no reason at all.

“Bubble bubble bubble-a, popple popple popple-a
Sparkle sparkle rattly-doo
Fizzle fizzle fizzle-a, whizzle whizzle whizzle-a
Boom-a, boom-a, that’s how we do.” (Repeat x2 each time).

I want to say that song and a few other scenes may be references to Grease, but they do them poorly and just end up looking like shit.

I am also pretty annoyed that the ending doesn’t make any sense. Let alone the danger of them disappearing and somehow just changing their world as they knew it. This isn’t even a time travel movie. This is people going from a movie into the real world and vice versa. They equate their issues as if they were being transported back to the 1960’s, which is not at all how movies should work. Having them suddenly not meet at all earlier in the summer because a movie changed is also terrible, because it came out of no where with no explanation. Related, the fake movie in question always looked bad, but the new movie it became somehow looks far worse.

The only redeeming quality, outside of the awkward smile song, are the biker characters of course, who don’t get as much time to shine. Tanner and Lela have some decent jokes in the real world, but when they become real, those jokes fade.

It is disappointing that they brought in an awesome Asian male to be fawned over, and he ends up with another Asian character at the end, losing some potential sweet romantic diversity.

Teen Beach 2 went for the shitty sequel to make cash quickly route, instead of developing a story as smart (ish) as the original. It practically changed the genre from parody to…just regular not so good original Disney Channel movie. Such a shame. And it will probably develop into a trilogy, maybe with this one also going to theaters?

In conclusion, Ross Lynch is no Zac Efron.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to see A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. Shit, I have a hard enough time remembering the title. When mentioning it out loud I have been calling it A Girl Walks Home At Midnight. Close enough right? Not at all.

I knew it was supposed to be scary, but I also knew it was extremely stylized and also with subtitles. So it is one of those films I need to be in the right mood for in order to even begin to appreciate it.

I like new and exciting things! But potential super artsy foreign films are obviously one of my weaknesses. They usually don’t involve cool super heroes or things blowing up.

Well, I guess she is sort of in a costume.

AGWHAAN takes place in a make believe town called Bad City in Iran. You can tell it is make believe, because it is called Bad City.

It is a very small city, not a lot of people involved, but enough people for drugs. There is only one gangster asshole, Saeed (Dominic Rains), a pimp and drug dealer. He is a bad dude, and he has gotten Hossein (Marshall Manesh) hooked on drugs! That is bad for Hossein, for many obvious reasons, but even worse for Arash (Arash Marandi), our hero(?) and Hossein’s son.

Arash had his car taken by Saeed because his dad owes money. That suchs for Arash, who worked hard to get that slick sexy car! Oh, and Saeed also is abusive to his women, like Atti (Mozhan Marnò).

Which is why he gets fucked up by a vampire! The Girl (Sheila Vand) totally goes all vampire on him! You know, the one who walks home alone. At night.

The Girl isn’t just some random blood sucking fiend. No, she has morals. She killed Saeed because he was a bad dude. And there are more bad people in this small town. But is Arash a bad dude or his he just desperate?

Hopefully she knows for sure before she sucks his blood too. Also featuring Rome Shadanloo.

Arash is a James Dean looking motherfucker. I don’t mean the male porn star of the similar name.

AGWHAAN is definitely an interesting film, and an even more interesting acronym. There is both a lot and only a little that goes on, so what does end up happening has to be paid attention to for the film to drive home its message.

The message being that it can make a pretty killer soundtrack.

That and the visuals were the best parts. Each frame was shot meticulously in order to heighten you senses to what is going on. AGWHAAN is not a standard horror in any shape or form. There are no jump scares, no real scares at all, just several tense moments. Quite a few longer shots are done in this film, often with just characters staring at at each other, with dialogue at the very minimum.

At the same time, it is easy to understand that someone would say not a lot happens in this film. It is true. It can feel quite long and drawn out with not enough gusto behind the scenes to keep your interest. So I see it in two ways. If the film can keep your interest the whole time, you will go on a pretty unique experience when it comes to modern vampire films. If it doesn’t, it will feel like a lot of wasted potential, with some cool shit that occassionall happens.

Which unfortunately for my street cred, the latter is how I see it. Some cool shit happens, and a lot of other drawn out scenes. Oh well. It is still a stylistically beautiful film, the black and white do a lot of favors. Just not my cup of blood, so to speak.