Month: July 2015

Movie confession: I was born in 1989, and it took until the summer of 2015 for me to watch the first four Mission: Impossible films. I have definitely never seen the TV show (and don’t plan on it). I really wanted to review Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation when it was in theaters though, so I had to gain copies of the first three films.

Oh, I had Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol on Blu-Ray already though. Bought it three years ago for about $3 and put it on my “eventually” shelf.

Well the time is now! And as a way of catching up, I thought the first one was good, the second one was really really terrible and took me five days to finish it (watching a little bit each day), and the third one was decent, thanks a lot to Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Good, we are caught up. On with the recent film!

I have learned to not get attached to the female lead. She totally won’t make the next film.

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is now locked away in a Russian prison. He has been there for years! Some say he killed a bunch of Serbians, some say it was due to the death of his wife. Some say he is there on a secret mission. All they know is that they have to break him out right away. So a team featuring Jane (Paula Patton) and Benji (Simon Pegg), who has his field badge finally break him out. They also help break out some dude named Bogdan (Miraj Grbic), because he helped Ethan out, despite not knowing he was secretly an American.

It turns out they really really needed Ethan to break into the The Kremlin to find out the identity of a man named Cobalt. The IMF was close to figuring it out, but one of their agents (Josh Holloway) was killed by an assassin (Léa Seydoux) before they could get too close.

But then shit even goes wrong at the Kremlin. Turns out Cobalt (Michael Nyqvist) was there first and frames the IMF/USA into doing some bad naughty things in the Kremlin. In response to that, the president has disbanded the entire organization, as a way of appeasing the Russians. However, our three crew members were still ordered, on their own, to stop Cobalt and get the USA out of the bad position it is in. But hey, they also an Analyst (Jeremy Renner) on their team, so that is cool! And you know, having to also escape the special agent Russian forces looking to track them down, led by Sidorov (Vladimir Mashkov). Man, there is a lot of hard shit going on.

Oh yeah, and if they fail, probably a nuclear war will happen. Jolly good, righto. Also featuring Samuli Edelmann and Ivan Shvedoff.

Camera angles intentional to show how crazy the stunts are in this tower scene.

Comparing Ghost Protocol to the other three films, it is far better than 2, better than 3, and I would say on par or even better than the first film. Ghost Protocol came out 15 years after the first film, and I am generally skeptical of 90’s movies getting sequels way later. You know, like Jurassic World. Sure, there were other films, but there was still a large gap between films 3 and 4 of those series. I assume they are making a movie not because of having a great idea (just late), but instead hope to ride the nostalgia of movie goers instead of making a new property. Remakes remake money, after all.

I couldn’t be happier to be wrong on my assumption about this film though!

I was on edge of my seat throughout the film, and not just because I also had to deal with a crying baby while I watched it. The plot was intricate, but easy to follow. And there is a ton of action to entertain. The skyscraper climbing scene was better than advertised and one of the highlights of the movie. Both the climb and the descent. Despite knowing that our hero wouldn’t die obviously, it was tense enough to scare me both times. But it wasn’t the only tense moment! The final fight scene in the strange parking garage was colorful and had such well done cinematography.

Despite his real life personality, Tom Cruise makes excellent action movies. His last seven movies, including the Tropic Thunder cameo I have given good or better reviews to. We shouldn’t care about what an actor does in real life (unless it is killing babies?) or if he has a short person complex if he can consistently entertain and put out wonderful characters and work. Needless to say, I am appropriately pumped for the next Mission Impossible and whatever future films he wants to partake in.

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

The human penis.

Often worshiped throughout society, often by other men, building great and giant phallic monuments into the sky. The subject of the penis can even get a man into college.

Just in case you wanted another movie reference, here is one of my favorite quotes from Chasing Amy, about how everyone needs dick.

But before I get off on a tool tangent, let me tell you that I am talking about a documentary about penises. The Final Member is about a penis museum. Not just any penis museum, the only penis museum, located in the family friendly city of Reykjavík, Iceland.

It was founded by Sigurður Hjartarson, who originally just collected penises as a hobby. Not a weird fetish thing, mind you. Just a hobby. And then people heard about it and wanted to see all the penises. Dude has everything too! He even has a troll dick, whatever that means!

But he was missing one main mammal specimen. The human penis.

Troll dicks are made of stone, I have to assume.

This documentary is about the search for the missing piece of their prick puzzle. The problem is they couldn’t just take a penis from a dead man. People don’t let that happen. Instead he had to have someone donate their penis ahead of time. And then that person had to die. And ideally it wouldn’t be in a frail old dude state.

The documentary talks about its two most likely candidates. Pall Arason, a 95 year old Icelandic adventurer/womanizer who is pretty famous in the area and wants his penis to live on after his death. And Tom Mitchell, an American with a much larger than average sized penis named Elmo, who he wants to be immortalized and worshiped. Basically.

The problem with these men come with age (and shrinkage), and the American being awkwardly obsessed about how his penis would be immortalized, willing to have it surgically removed to become The Final Member.

And it is awkward. Sure, you might have gathered that from a documentary about a penis museum. But it was even more awkward than what you would expect. Imagine what you would expect, and you are wrong, it is worse.

The problem isn’t just with the awkwardness either. It is that for some reason, a documentary about searching for a human penis is far more boring than you would imagine as well. All the drama felt sort of fake, given the camera crews involved, and I can’t tell if the American actually wanted to just become famous for being crazy. It didn’t feel real. And if you are talking about penises, you need to be real.

The museum is probably a joy to visit. Just the documentary spent too much time on the search and not enough on what the guy had already accomplished: a room full of dicks.

Yay Cake!

Finally a film to give me what I want, which is cake, cake frosting, really anything cake related. This film will put cake so high up on the map, kind of like what the film did for Butter (and for Jennifer Garner‘s accent).

Hopefully it shows cake in all of its wonderful forms. The Wedding Cake, the Birthday Cake, the Cupcake Cake, the Cheesecake, the “just because we want a cake, fuck you!” Cake. I also hope it covers up some of the dark past for cakes, because this should celebrate the cake, and not focus too much on the negatives.

“I just love cake so. Damn. Much.”

Claire Bennett (Jennifer Aniston) isn’t actually a cake aficionado, but more of a hurt and depressed lady. She lost a child in a car accident, where she herself got pretty injured. She has a lot of back troubles and even goes to a therapy group for people experiencing lots of pain. The story begins a whole year after the accident and right after Nina Collins (Anna Kendrick), another member of the group had committed suicide.

But things aren’t going good for Claire. Her kid gone, her marriage to Jason (Chris Messina) in ruin, her back all sorts of messed up. Her back hurts so much, she can’t drive, and her housekeeper Silvana (Adriana Barraza) puts up with constant complaining and pessimism to drive her too.

Basically, Claire hates everything and maybe she hates things enough to do what Nina did. She ended it all and is probably better for it. Can’t Claire just do the same? Before she decides, she should investigate by hanging out with Nina’s old lover (Sam Worthington) and her son. That sounds like a perfect idea!

Also featuring a bunch of other women and one dude: Mamie Gummer, Felicity Huffman, Lucy Punch, and William H. Macy.

“Two rules, man: Stay away from my fuckin’ percocets and do you have any fucking percocets, man?”

Yeah, I know, it sucks that this film had so little to do with actual cakes. But to be fair, there are a couple cakes in it! I am pretty sure I saw too, but part of me also thinks I might have made up one of the cakes to fill my cake void.

The story we did get with Cake can really only be described as okay. The main issue with it was that it didn’t tell the narrative in the easiest of ways to follow. We had to watch Claire wallow for so long without knowing the details behind things. It is hard for one to emotionally connect with a character without getting better information on why they are so repugnant, angry, and basically given up the will to live.

That being said, Aniston does some mighty fine acting here, probably the best of her career. She is raw, emotional and full of flaws, but again without that connection, I didn’t care about her journey. The only other character given a lot to work with is Barraza as the housekeeper, who also does a fantastic job and is definitely someone the viewer can relate to and pseudo cheer for throughout the film. At the same time, her character makes so many aggravating choices given how Claire acts, it is still not one to save the film.

The other men and women involved with the project don’t matter as much in the film, so they can only help it so little.

If you want a well acted Drama from a famous A-lister, this could be a good bet. But if you want something that will really tickle your emotions and take you on a journey, this one will just leave you in the parking lot.

The original Paul Blart: Mall Cop came out very early in 2009, which was a weird time in America. A lot of people lost their money and jobs, so they wanted entertainment to take them away from this brutal thing called life, to help them pass the time until something good finally happened.

That movie was just another kick in the nuts for America. In fact, it was so bad, no one even noticed when Observe and Report came out two months later. That ended up being the better film, but no one wanted to watch something with another mall security guard.

Now, six years later, the movie gods have decided that we have forsaken them over and over again, with shitty film after shitty film. So they have decreed there would be a sequel, aptly named Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2!

And unless we change our ways, they have even threatened us with a television show for his story to continue, guaranteed eight seasons. This news blurb came to me in a deep theater based prayer.

Bow down movie watching mortals and repent! For he acts for your sins!

Paul Blart (Kevin James) was lucky. That is what we have learned since the first film. Six years later he is still working the same crappy mall security job, doing what he loves. However, his wife that he met in the first film left him after six days. And then his mom died after getting hit by a vehicle while checking the mail. Yep. Everything is shit for Paul. At least he still has his daughter, Maya (Raini Rodriguez) who loves him. However, she got accepted into UCLA, and that would have her move far from home. Best to ignore that until a critical moment later in the film.

Thankfully, there is the perfect distraction. Paul gets invited to a security guard conference in Las Vegas, very exclusive, only for the best of the best!

Unfortunately, bad things are also afoot at the conference. Vincent Sofel (Neal McDonough) is there with a bunch of bad guys! They are going to steal works of art from the hotel that are worth millions! Mwhaha!

Too bad they are going to underestimate the small security guard conference sharing a hotel with them. Typical bad guys, ignoring mall security. Have they learned nothing in six years?

A lot more people here, but none of them are really important enough to talk about their characters. But they are played by David Henrie, D.B. Woodside, Nicholas Turturro, Loni Love, Gary Valentine, Ana Gasteyer, Eduardo Verástegui, and Daniella Alonso.

This picture makes it look like Kevin James has a tiny mouth under his real mouth.

I don’t hate Kevin James, I actually like him. I am not saying he is a great actor, but he can be a funny dude. Remember Hitch? Hitch wasn’t that bad. And I thought Here Comes The Boom was way better than it had any right to be. My first media intake of James was actually his stand up special Sweat the Small Stuff (I never watched The King of Queens) and loved it for years! It just seems that no one outside of Adam Sandler is giving him any work to do which is sad. Everything is also super family friendly. He could do great with some more at least upper teenager material.

Unfortunately instead we get shit like Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, where everything is a fat joke, slap stick, or just awkward in the worst ways.

The acting is bad, the plot is worse, the characters are boring and not funny. Nothing works in this movie. Sure, technically it tells a mostly cohesive story, but it does it in the lamest ways possible. It doesn’t even want to treat its hero correctly. Watching his mom get killed by the car and the divorce so soon into the film, it was clear this was a movie to make fun of a man and shit all over him and not to laugh with him. Those things felt mean, not funny, and set the tone for the entire rest of the movie.

Kids might find this movie funny, but I would never show it to my own. I try to only show them good material and not just the lowest common denominator film for the cheapest laughs. That is why they will never see Planes under my watch. And hopefully they won’t even have to live in a world where a third one of these films gets made.

Something must be in the water, because this is my second “made for TV” movie in a few weeks. Not to spoil the surprise, but I have a third one next week as well.

To give 7 Days In Hell some credit, it is at least an HBO movie, so it won’t be restricted by what stay at home moms want to call the network to complain about if it gets too violent, sexy, grotesque, or angry. They can do what they want!

The release of the film of course is due to Wimbledon about to finish, so why not have a quick mockumentary about a game that never happened. This film is of course inspired by the Isner-Mahut Wimbledon match up in 2010, that went for over 11 hours over 3 days, and was the real game that would never end. It is not based on the Wimbledon romantic comedy from 2004, which (screw you haters!) is actually one of my favorites of the year.

Paul Bettany just needed better hair, like these folks.

This historic match took place in the early 2000s, but before one can find out why they battled hard enough to play tennis for 7 days straight, one has to see where the men involved came from.

Aaron Williams (Andy Samberg) had a reverse Blind Side situation, where he was a white kid on the streets and he got adopted into a black family. Note the last name, yes, he was the adopted brother of the Williams sisters. So it is no wonder he too became great at tennis. Never great enough unfortunately. Because after a huge accident one serve away from winning Wimbledon in the 90’s, Aaron has never been the same. His game was off, he had to turn to other careers and eventually wound up in prison. His hot head personality is missed on the court for many years until he gets out of jail.

On the other side, we have Charles Poole (Kit Harington), a child prodigy, starting to play tennis at the age of three. Some say his maybe abusive mom (Mary Steenburgen) forced him to be the star he is, but it worked and he became the youngest pro ever. He is also the best chance of a British person actually winning Wimbledon in a long time, coming into the tournament at the 2nd overall seed. He is also close to retarded, having no real schooling outside of tennis and graduating from a truck driving school.

Needless to say, due to (plot), these two gentlemen find themselves playing each other in the first round, Aaron to get back to the top, and Charles for his country and to be the very best.

But then rain delays were just the beginning of the issue, in this back and forth match where a player could rarely hold an upper hand, until, you know, it finally ends and stuff.

Any documentary of course has people to tell the story, so we got a few of those! Including a few tennis historians (Will Forte, Fred Armisen), a Jordache Executive (Lena Dunham), the girlfriend of Charles’ at the time (Karen Gillan), and a creepy TV interview host (Michael Sheen). But that isn’t it, the story is also told by David Copperfield, John McEnroe, and Serena Williams!

This is bullshit, they should be playing overnight as well. Who gave them breaks?

I tend to try and have some sort of time criteria for a review. If a movie isn’t an hour long, is it really a movie? Or is it a strange television episode? This in particular has made documentary watching harder, because there are a lot of made for TV documentaries that include commercials leaving the viewer with 40-45 minutes of material. Most notably in this group would be the ESPN 30 for 30 documentaries, which this mockumentary is actually styled after. So it makes sense for the movie to only be about 43 minutes in length, and hey, I will let it pass, because the teaser for it made me giggle. Damn it.

I was surprised at how many jokes it could cram into one tiny documentary. A lot goes on with their lives and with the game, and it feels good not really spoiling any of it. In particular, after Samberg, Forte and Armisen provide the most laughs as the historians.

This is a tiny project and it definitely works for what it is. If anything, Harington is actually the most disappointing aspect. I don’t think it is him, but they gave him a lame character to play. Either way, I hope they do more movies in this style in the future, as they can provide easy entertainment probably relatively cheaply for the channel.

Me and Illumination Entertainment don’t get along. They had one of the most racist kid movies in recent history with Hop, a bad Lorax, and the Despicable Me series. I thought the first film was bad, but at least I liked the minions.

Then Despicable Me 2 came out. They heard we liked minions, so they gave us a bunch more minions. It ended up being bad as well, full of shitty humor and too much minions, not enough good story.

But that made Universal, the distributor, a shit ton of money. More money than any other film they had distributed, so of course we needed MORE. More what? More Minions of course! “Fuck Gru, give us Minions!” They are now super advertised, with tiny shorts before movies, awkward commercials, lunchboxes, pencils, everything. They are printing money by having tiny yellow creatures on them that speak gibberish and sing gibberish covers of famous songs.

This film was also pushed back, but not for delays. Originally scheduled for end of 2014 release, they went with the mid-summer release instead because it had been making them pretty dang good money.

Enough money to take down Disney World? We will see…

Minions is a prequel to the Despicable Me movies, about how the large group of minions (Pierre Coffin, all of them) came into existence and how they eventually met Gru. Turns out they are basically large single celled organisms, and never really evolved into bigger and better things. Instead they were followers. Instead of looking for just the biggest and strongest creature to protect them, for whatever reason they looked for the most “despicable” person to follow, because the minions are apparently evil as fuck, despite never doing anything evil.

The minions went throughout time, following bad guys and always pissing them off or killing them from their ineptitude. Until they had to go into hiding where they made their own minion community! It was safe, but boring. It wasn’t until three minions, Kevin, Stuart, and Bob, set off to find a new big bad boss did anything change. Aka, the 1960’s. Their travels eventually introduce them to Scarlet Overkill (Sandra Bullock) and her husband Herb (Jon Hamm), who are about to steal the crown from Queen Elizabeth (Jennifer Saunders) and take over the country.

But if the minions want in on being her slaves, they gotta prove themselves first. You know, doing evil stuff and doing the job for her. Easy peasy. And if they fail, well, eventually they will find Gru right?

Also using the voice talents of Michael Keaton, Allison Janney, Steve Coogan, Geoffrey Rush as the narrator, and Hiroyuki Sanada as “Sumo Villain” because that is all they could give him, I guess.

If this was called Minion Pie, this scene could be the day that the minions died?

Watching the trailer for Minions, I had hope. It looked like it could actually be a funnier movie and maybe make me laugh. Not having to worry about the awkward bad guy + kids situation, we could focus on a better more interesting plot of shenanigans and tomfoolery. Tomfoolery we may have gotten, but not the kind of tomfoolery one would want.

The movie made me laugh just one time in 90 minutes, which is obviously a bad sign. The jokes weren’t clever. Their only attempt at appeasing the adult audience would be the several songs they included for the minions to gibberish sing, all of the songs older of course given when it takes place. But even that is incredibly lazy. That joke is more of a “Haha, do you get it? You know this song right? This is funny because it is something you know but minions singing!”

This is not to say that I am angry at the fact that they don’t speak any real language. That is part of their character design. But to have a movie focus so much on them talking to others and each other, feels terrible. We can assume everything they are saying, sure, due to the weird way their language works. But it feels more annoying than anything. They rely on side human characters and narrators to actually explain plot points, because for the most part their main characters cannot.

Additionally, having them focus on three random minions to give them some sort of personality just annoys me that the other dozens of characters are ignored. I would have rather seen them work as the cohesive group, going full on henchmen, not just a couple guys on a bad road trip.

I am surprised that it ended with them actually meeting young Gru. I figured it took place in the late 60’s so they could justifiably fit in 3-4 more Minion movies pre-Gru to milk the franchise more. A Minions 2 with young Gru would be annoying, because it gets rid of all of his character development (but maybe it would actually make him evil? That’d be a shocker). For now though, our next film with them would be Despicable Me 3 out in a few years, which promises more of the same, so it will probably suck.

I am a bit annoyed that this will probably make so much money, especially if it makes more than Inside Out, a superior film in almost every conceivable way. The success of the film just means that minions will still appear everywhere. Yes, that includes the strange memes going around that have the minions as the main picture, and then some random joke text, that has abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with the franchise at all that old women and dumbasses share on your facebook page.

If you want a movie in production hell, then you want Ant-Man. Sure, Iron Man was technically in development since the 1990s, but those were with different studios before Marvel got it back in 2006. If you didn’t notice, they then pushed out the movie just two years alter.

Ant-Man, however, was also in development since 2006 and took just nine years to finally get released. That is a long time of trying to make a movie work and never giving up. Well, they technically gave up a little bit. Edgar Wright who was signed on to be the director since the beginning was fired early 2014 from the project which scared a lot of movie fans. Wright is well liked and has an awesome style. And the movie was roughly a year away! How could they do this? And with script re-writes as well!

I will admit that I too overreacted, expecting that Ant-Man would unfortunately be Marvel’s first real disaster of a movie in a long time, possibly meaning bad news for the other new franchises coming down the time lines. But as a not so secretive fanboy, I was also of course hoping for the best.

Thumbs up, seven new franchises up!

The movie starts in Taylor Swift’s favorite year, 1989, where some dude named Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) is upset over S.H.I.E.L.D. turning his science into weapons! He made a Pym Particle, but he refuses to let them have it for warfare, so he quits and starts his own company. It should be noted we get to see Agent Carter (Hayley Atwell), an older Howard Stark (John Slattery), and a random tool, Mitchell Carson (Martin Donovan).

Now, in the present day, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is just getting out of prison. He stole from his corrupt company who took millions from customers and gave it all back. He has a masters in Electrical Engineering, but he is also a pretty great thief it turns out. He has tried getting a regular job, but his crime history makes it hard. No job means no money, which means he can’t pay child support to his ex (Judy Greer), and thus he can’t really see his daughter (Abby Ryder Fortson). To make things worse, the ex is now dating a cop (Bobby Cannavale) which is all sorts of awkward.

So Scott gets with his friend, Luis (Michael Peña), who has a heist for them. With a few friends (David Dastmalchian, T.I.), they are going to rob Pym’s house who has the biggest safe ever. Unfortunately, the only thing in it is an awkward suit.

Turns out it was all a test. (I swear I am not spoiling the whole film). Pym’s company is no longer in his hands, and his protege Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) is about to discover the shrinking secret. Once he gets the formula right, he is going to sell the Yellow Jacket suits to the highest bidder, making an unstoppable army at whomever’s disposal. Their only person on the inside is Pym’s daughter, Hope (Evangeline Lilly).

So it is simple. Break into an extremely secure facility, destroy the science and the suits, save the day. A nice heist. Perfect for someone who can shrink and control ants, right? Also Wood Harris! Fuck, I couldn’t fit him in naturally!

Super powers are overrated, you da real MVP!

Again, it looks like I told too much, but I think I told the basic motivations of our main characters and also threw in most of the side players as well. You got to see the two good guys, where they are coming from, and of course the bad guy.

And I fucking loved it.

Ant-Man had everything I wanted in a Marvel super hero film. It wasn’t ever super drama serious, but it had its touching moments. It was funny, and then it was also hilarious. Many characters brought the charm in. And the action was exciting. The CGI ants I thought would be cheesy, but they worked really well in the context of the rest of the film. Going back and forth between small and large to fight everyone was very slick. There was a wonderful montage and we even got a pretty significant Avenger cameo.

I really need to acknowledge Michael Peña, who was the best part of this movie and for all I know, not based on any comic book character. He was hilarious and I hope he gets to be in future Marvel films.

There was a weak part though. The relationship between Pym and Hope was supposed to be strained, but the actors didn’t act it well and it instead kind of just sucked. I am more incline to place the blame onto Lilly, but it could be that she was just given a weaker character with terrible lines and development.

Ant-Man has it all. It even has a villain who seems realistic and isn’t just a dark brooding figure. He has his own real motivations and a backstory and his arc makes a little bit of sense. Their fight scenes were wonderful. And on paper he may seem like a minor bad guy, but I think he is the best villain since Bucky and Loki.

Bring me more Ant-Man.

Lies are really fun. I am not even talking about big lies, or little white lies. I am talking about minor invisible lies, lies that don’t hurt anyone and can’t possibly come back to harm you. A lie you tell that no one would ever question the need for it to be a lie, because why would anyone lie about it?

“I saw another vehicle give a homeless guy $20 today!”
“An SUV cut me off on I-10, I was so angry.”
“Back in college I once met Michael Jordan. He was at a publicity signing for some new shoe.”

See, these are all lies you can tell your friends and family and they’d have no reason to believe you are lying (as long as you both have a vehicle and went to college years ago, that is). They are the best.

Sometimes “little white lies” can come back to harm you I guess, like saying a dress is not ugly, or something like that, but that is rare.

Little White Lie, however, is not about a standard little white lie, but instead about a big white lie.

If you don’t get my hint, this lady told her daughter she was totally white.

If you squint your eyes, you might see it.

Little White Lie is actually a self made documentary by Lacey Schwartz, about growing up believing herself to be a white Jewish girl, and finding out years later it wasn’t completely true. To explain the darkness of her skin, there was an Italian grandfather, who was super darker and European and it must have came out in poor Lacey. But everyone knew, and no one talked about it. It wasn’t until years later in her teenage years, when Lacey’s folks got divorced did she even really think that much about it.

In case you were wondering, yes, of course, the mother did have an affair with a black man and it was a secret for decades. But this documentary is more than just finding out who her real daddy is. That would be a boring mystery unless it was someone famous. No, his is her own self discovery, on whether or not she can feel accepted in the black community without growing up black. Whether her own family relationships can ever be repaired. Whether she can do any of this before her father, dad, or mother, end up kicking the bucket and find themselves unwilling to talk about their past.

At only an hour long, Little White Lie has a good amount of time to tell the story of learning to accept ones self and tell the story that Lacey wants to tell. However, it never really gets as deep as the topic really required. There were moments of intensity that one would expect when she was talking to her non-biological father near the end and things didn’t go as smoothly as a movie would allow. But they never maintained that intensity enough, giving us only splashes of really interesting story.

Add in the fact that these uncomfortable conversations between a child and their parents were all done in front of cameras leads its own awkwardness, wondering if the conversations are real and heartfelt, or potentially staged with multiple takes.

Either way, Little White Lie does a decent job of telling an okay story over an hour. Just a bit more in depth and raw emotion would have made it truly wonderful.

The Gallows has a decent trailer. I say that in that it doesn’t give the whole movie away. They only show literally one scene of a girl crying under the red light of an exit sign. And then of course she dies by the bad guy of the movie. That is it. We aren’t seen every scary moment in the trailer, we are shown just enough to tease us into watching it.

Despite how the movie goes, I am stoked that the trailer wasn’t terrible, in a time and age where it feels like everything cool and somewhat spoilery is shown because they assume the average movie goer wants to see it.

The Gallows trailer showed me so little that the movie looked like it could be scary and something I could enjoy, all in about a minute! Hooray advertising!

Unless of course the trailer is actually the final scene. If they do what The Apparition or (even worse) Quarantine did, I will be quite upset with the whole thing.

Fun Fact: This is the elusive actress who was in God’s Not Dead that I couldn’t find the name of last year.

Twenty years ago, disaster struck Beatrice High School. They were putting on an original play called The Gallows, and everything was period specific and ye olde well done. Except for the ending. When Charlie was actually hung from the gallows, breaking his neck and killing him instantly. That wasn’t part of the script.

But now it is modern times! And to honor the tragedy, the drama club has decided to fucking put the play on again. They had to fight the school board and PTA, but damn it, it is happening, no matter how terrible the play looks. Also apparently at this school, the play is done by a real drama class, which a lot of kids are forced to take for elective reasons. They don’t have to act, they could be backstage or tech crew people! Like Ryan (Ryan Shoos), who thinks the whole thing is a big joke and is recording things so we can get a movie. Ryan and Reese (Reese Mishler) are football players, although Reese quit the team to star in the play awkwardly enough. He is starring along side Pfeifer (Pfeifer Brown), a drama geek who actually likes acting but no one likes her. (EXCEPT FOR REESE THAT IS. OH SNAP).

Also Cassidy (Cassidy Gifford) is involved, because she is Ryan’s girlfriend.

Long story short, Reese is a terrible actor. He can’t remember a lot of his lines and has no delivery. But he likes Pfeifer. So Ryan convinces them to sneak into the auditorium before opening night to trash the set. Ryan could then comfort Pfeifer and both of them be upset over the no play thing. But Pfeifer catches them at the theater because she saw his car! And then…and then…the doors all lock. No way out of the school for some reason. Ohhhh boy. This is creepy. Especially if there is some ghost spirit Charlie thing running around haunting shit and trying to kill these kids.

Or maybe it is not a ghost. Maybe it is someone super mad about something. Like the stage boy/manager (Price T. Morgan). Or the drama teacher (Travis Cluff). Or that old lady who went to the school 20 years ago and watches each rehearsal (Melissa Bratton). Or Reese’s dad (Theo Burkhardt). Or David the Janitor (David Herrera), because he works at night and stuff.

And lets not forget about the butler or the lighting guy!

The Gallows clocks in at barely 80 minutes, not counting the credits, so it is another of those short horror films like Unfriended. The good news about these short horrors is that if they suck, you aren’t wasting too much time to see if the payout is worth it. The entire film felt like it was teetering on that edge between waste of time and kind of awesome, making it a more frustrating experience.

A lot of people hate the “found footage” genre of horror film, because a lot of films end up doing it badly. Unfortunately, this is a badly done version of the format. After they get into the high school, the only reason anyone uses a camera is for the light features, and apparently they only work (whether phone or real camera) if it is on and recording. This causes them to needlessly lose power and other bad situations when it became plot convenient. [Technically unrelated, but a bad feature of the genre: Our screening went fuzzy about 15 minutes in and it took 15 minutes for the theater to notice, because given the format, the lack of focus could have technically been a feature!]

The acting isn’t that great, which is fair since these are all just scared teenagers mostly. The film did scare me a few times, but almost the entire film is jump scares, which is a bit disappointing.

The best thing going for the movie is actually its plot. Yeah, I know. The film wraps everything up nicely by the end, with a few twists and turns to show that they had an actual point to their film and not just an easy to make horror. I loved the ending, just thought the rest could have been a bit better on the scare department.

If I had a nickle for every time I decided to not yet watch The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, I’d probably have at least $1.50 by now. I remember seeing it in the movie rental store Family Video, back when rental stores existed where I live. I would walk by the B section, glance at it, and mumble “Not today.”

And then they announced the sequel. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I saw a trailer, not actually knowing what the first one was about. Then I realized I had to hurry and watch the first one by early March, or else I wouldn’t get to see the sequel in theaters!

And here we are in July. I can say not getting to see the sequel in theaters was apparently a perfectly acceptable decision!

Much like my stereotype of the characters in the film, I would get to it when I get to it, dagnabbit.

Sonny (Dev Patel) has an idea. He is going to take his inherited family hotel and turn it into a lush amazing retirement home for Americans and British people to come to, to die. He is the third son and no one expects anything of him. His mom (Lillete Dubey) just wants him to come home for an arranged marriage, and doesn’t want him to marry Sunaina (Tina Desai). Too bad. He has dreams.

And this group of old people are his guinea pigs. That sounds sadistic, but really the film is about these gentle people ready to die.

Like Jean (Penelope Wilton) and Douglas (Bill Nighy), who have lost most of their money due to investing in their offspring and need some cheap place to go. And Evelyn (Judi Dench) who needs to sell off her house to pay off debts left by her late husband and needs somewhere cheap to go. She also is our blogger and narrator! And Muriel (Maggie Smith), who actually hates India but needs somewhere cheap to go for hip replacement surgery.

The theme here being people who want to go someplace cheap and far away for reasons.

Unless you are Graham (Tom Wilkinson), who retired suddenly and went back to India where he grew up for secret reasons. And finally we have Madge (Celia Imrie) and Norman (Ronald Pickup), looking for love and youth. But not young love, don’t be creepy.

This could be the most exciting falcon punch warm up.

The best part of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is that it went exactly as I expected and thus, my delay of watching the film seems justified. Sure, one could argue I forced the movie to be as good as my brain let it be, but I gave it as fair of a shake as I would give most films I know nothing about.

At times, the film was touching, at times I smiled a bit, but I didn’t find it to be great in either the drama or the comedy regards. Tom Wilkinson has the best plot, hands down, and some of the plots don’t feel like I should have even mentioned them in the plot details. But that would be harsh to ignore a couple of the main cast members. After Wilkinson, I enjoyed Patel’s story line and thought the Nighy/Wilton plot was unique enough. Everything else was closer to a miss than an barely hit for me.

If anything, this movie just has too much going on in it. There are eight residents of the hotel, only a couple that have overlapping plot points for their own journeys, AND the owner of the hotel with his own story. So much going on, crammed into two hours, and I couldn’t connect with all the characters. Having so many people makes it feel like they are shooting with a shotgun, hoping the spread would hit enough people to make enough people love the film.

I do think a sequel can be better though. We will have established characters, some with finished plot lines from the first film, so they are easier to understand allowing for even newer characters to take the spotlight. The movie finishes pretty damn average, but it does lay down enough foundation for better films down the line.