Month: November 2015

In all honesty, when I first heard about the movie Trainwreck, I really really really thought that this movie would involve a train. A couple meets on a train and talk and get to know each other. And hilarious things happen. But that is basically Before Sunrise minus comedy. Trainwreck is nothing like Before Sunrise, unfortunately.

So, no train. Maybe that means it will be like Trainspotting. That had no train right? It has been awhile.

There is a train of pain in his arms though.

Amy (Amy Schumer, yes she plays herself or something), is the trainwreck in question. Why? Because she is promiscuous after sex doesn’t stick around. Oh no! Why is she like this? Because her father (Colin Quinn), when divorcing their mom, told them love isn’t real and to not trust it. Didn’t affect her younger sister, Kim (Brie Larson), though. She is in a nice relationship, married to a man (Mike Birbiglia) and helping to raise his son (Evan Brinkman). Ugh, stable relationships, yuck.

The only thing sort of stable is Amy’s relationship with Steven (John Cena), except that is getting a bit rocky too as Steven might want something deeper.

Anyways, Amy works at a shitty magazine, and her boss (Tilda Swinton) wants her to do an article about a guy named Aaron (Bill Hader), who is a sports injury surgeon. He is the best surgeon too, working with the best athletes to repair their legs and knees to get them back in the game. He is even BFF’s with LeBron James (LeBron James)! Too bad Amy hates sports.

But hey, dorky Aaron is a nice guy. She should sleep with him and dump him. But he is so endearing. Maybe she will date him. Yeah. Sounds good.

Also featuring smaller roles by Dave Attell as a bum, and Vanessa Bayer, Randall Park and Jon Glaser as coworkers, and Ezra Miller as an intern.

I didn’t know LeBron was that much of an actor, but he plays the fuck out of himself.

Trainwreck is directed by Judd Apatow and it feels very much like an Apatow movie. It is too long, it has long unfunny periods, and everyone is a bit awkward talking about real issues.

It is also written by Amy Schumer, and thus, the main characters name and I guess mostly her jokes? Hard to say, I haven’t seen her shows or stand up or anything really. But everything is about sex, making this an adult comedy about adult things. Get your big boy pants on.

Either way, the film on its own isn’t that great. The romance doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense and Hader’s character is legitimately boring. Schumer’s character gets old relatively quick, because it seems like it is just the same joke over and over again.

But cameos make this movie. Cena and LeBron are amazing. Ah maze ing. Cena didn’t have as many scenes, but he rocked it each time. LeBron is in this film a lot more, and does a great fake version of himself. His jokes are great, although also a bit repetitive.

Overall, the cameos makes it worth it. Despite the meh leads and overall length.

What makes a Legend? Is it their walk, their background, their story, their Will Smithy-ness?

Or does it involve being a bad ass mofo mobster, enough that one day someone will make a movie about you?

Like, Whitey, he was bad ass, and Johnny Depp played him in Black Mass.

Is your Legend-ness downplayed if you have to share the spotlight with a partner? Obviously it is easier to become famous if you are a duo act, instead of a solo act. And in Legend, our criminals are real life twins. Which means we get one actor playing two people, which is probably one of my favorite things ever in movies. One of those things you just can’t do in a play.

However this picture makes it look like a bad romcom.

Ronald Kray (Tom Hardy) and Reggie Kray (Tom Hardy) are twins and gangsters and running this small town of London. Well, soon. Ronald just got released from a mental hospital, because a psychiatrist said he was sane after some arm twisting, but he is very messed up. He was some level of schizophrenic, and openly homosexual. He liked the truth. He also wore glasses, which is helpful for telling them apart early on. Reggie, no glasses, wasn’t insane, but still a gangster. He just had a good head on his shoulders, could think things through and wanted to maybe, eventually, go clean.

This story, narrated by Frances Shea (Emily Browning), tells of their rise to actually control the London underground, their falling aparts, their separate arrests, and what finally brought them down to justice. Oh, and she is totally dating Reggie, of course. Because he is the cute one.

Nipper Read (Christopher Eccleston) is the main constable trying to bring him down (and Joshua Hill is his side constable). Adam Fogerty plays their muscle, Shane Attwooll some competition, David Thewlis their business partner, and Taron Egerton one of the gay lovers of Ronald.

No, don’t cry Emily. Yes you have to kiss a killer Tom Hardy. But at least he isn’t wearing a mask.

If there is one reason I am glad to be writing this review, it is that Legend will serve as a great example for future movie reviews. For quite a few films, I have seen great acting in overall mediocre films, which is sad. But rarely do you see great acting in actually bad movies.

Hardy. Is. Excellent. Twice! The brothers are very unique individuals, they talk differently, they have different mannerisms, and one even wears glasses. I actually hard a hard time believing that Hardy was playing Twins because they started to look nothing alike in my eyes. It is such an amazing show being put on him, especially as he seamlessly argues and fights with himself. This isn’t a dumb Parent Trap situation. This is great fucking shit. I will admit I found them hard to understand 70% of the time and would have loved subtitles, but I will take that as my own fault.

The rest of the film falters, and it does so big time. It is too long, over two hours and seemingly drags. I was sitting in the theater just wondering when they would finally mess up and get caught. Hurry up and lose. The narration from Browning felt unattached from the rest of the film and mostly unnecessary. Giving it from her perspective made it feel Romance instead of a Crime/Drama. And I have to mention the music, which I basically never do in a review. The score sounded as if it was taken from a soap opera or an extremely older film. Jazz is one thing, but the music was always painfully obvious and distracting, never helping the scenes out.

This is bad that the acting from Hardy was so good but the rest of the film is meh. Most of you will watch this movie, solely for the fact that Hardy is in it. And you know what? Do that. Watch that man do his best. Watch him work. And then forget the rest.

Think back to earlier in 2015. It was a scary time. So much was different in my own life for sure. But one thing has haunted me from earlier in the year. The Oscar category for Best Original Song. Because I got four of the five films pretty easily, but then there was “I’m Not Gonna Miss You” from Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me.

Wasn’t even nominated for Best Documentary! Just Best Original Song! You bastard!

Well, the good news is Netflix finally has it available so us regular people can see this technically obscure documentary. The good news is, he is still alive as of the time of this post. The bad news is, damn it, I have another documentary about an celebrity. Three weeks in a row, when will it end, when will it end?!

This whole thing is just a major troll, to make my list incomplete.

Glen Campbell is a famed musician. He got his start by playing as a studio band (See: The Wrecking Crew, Love & Mercy, both out this year). He is the most famous studio band member, who eventually became a ridciulously famous country star. Hell, the rest of The Wrecking Crew who matter even got parts in this documentary.

And now he has Alzheimer’s. But that won’t stop him from touring, making his own family his backing musicians, with new songs on what is most likely his final tour ever.

That is the whole basis for the documentary. A sad tale. A little bit of his history, a lot of performances from the tour, a lot of doctor visits, some Alzheimer’s awareness for cure research, and a whole lot of Campbell forgetting things.

And yet still, this is a documentary mainly for people who either A) Have relatives with Alzheimer’s, or B) Love Glen Campbell. I am willing to go on a limb and say it is for people older than myself. It is still touching at points, and his performance that got nominated was very good. Touching, full of montages, full of heart. But you know. Mostly a low key concert documentary, that could feel a bit more personal for some.

In all honesty, because he is real and I am not a super fan, I connect less to it. However, something like Still Alice, bringing a fictional Alzheimer’s account, makes it far easier for me to get emotional about it.

Feel free to listen to the song on the youtubes. But it has a much better impact after watching the entire documentary.

Pixar! What are you doing? This seems highly unusual!

They had Inside Out come out earlier in the year. The year being 2015. But this is another Pixar movie, The Good Dinosaur, coming out in the same year. Don’t they know that this will mean they are competing against themselves for animated film awards?

Oh well, that is because this Pixar film was supposed to come out in 2013. But delays occurred. Serious delays that pushed it back a year, and then another. The whole story had to be redone from what they initially thought about, as there were apparent serious problems with the script. Not only that, but the entire voice cast, except for Frances McDormand was replaced earlier this year. Some crazy shit went down into getting this film out.

Either way, this is the first time that Pixar has released two films in the same year. The next time they do this is in 2017, with the release of Coco and Cars 3. That year, however, they won’t be competing against themselves since they know that there is no way Cars 3 will win anything.

Oh no, there are 3 T-Rexs here. This just make me think of how bad Cars 3 will be, noo!

What if the asteroid that hit the earth 65 million years ago didn’t happen? Well, then the dinosaurs wouldn’t have been wiped out. And lots of other things would have happened, like we would never have had the rise of mammals, humans probably wouldn’t exist, and no one would be able to make lame Nickelback jokes anymore. But let’s ignore the many things that would change, assume they stay the same, but also dinosaurs still exist.

That way we can meet Poppa (Jeffrey Wright) and Momma (Frances McDormand), some sort of “long neck” dinosaur species (Apatosaurus). They have three eggs and they are about to hatch! We have little Libby (Maleah Nipay-Padilla, who I assume does the voice the whole time, not just the baby. Shitty IMDB stuff going on), strong Buck (Marcus Scribenr), and Arlo (Raymond Ochoa), the runt. Having kids is great, because they work a farm, and now they can expand their corn farm and get even more corn food to survive winters and have a wonderful home!

Let’s just say, eventually, some tragedies occur, due to the very explicit foreshadowing, so next thing we know, Arlo is far from home and on his own! Well, there is also this random human toddler, Spot (Jack Bright). See his name? He is basically a really smart dog.

They have to get back to the farm before it is too late. Before what is too late? Well, basically death. This area has a bit of volcanism, large bugs, scary winged dinosaurs, scary big mouthed dinosaurs, scary cryptic dinosaurs, and giant ass storms that make shit flood and get all sorts of scary. SCARY!

Also featuring the voices of Peter Sohn, Steve Zahn, A.J. Buckley, Anna Paquin, and of course, Sam Elliott.

Sam Elliot plays the whisper of the wind on the grass. Or at least that is how smooth his voice is in my mind.

Cutting to the chase, The Good Dinosaur is a very safe movie from the Pixar perspective. It was just a journey film between two unlikely entities. A buddy road trip movie. Sure they had their differences, but working together, their strengths were doubled and their weaknesses were, lets say cut down a small bit.

Early in the film was a bit dull, and I was worried it would finish with an average rating. Then we started to meet a few characters. The triceratops scene and the bad fruit scene were basically back to back and had me in stitches. Then we had the scary flying things (I don’t know if they were pterodactyls, so I won’t call them that). They were cool. But the T-Rex’s were just cowboys and a bit boring at that. Elliot voice be damned.

The Good Dinosaur had a few touching moments, but only made me barely cry just once. I was never able to connect to it emotionally like I could Inside Out. And hey, there was a death scene, and it was intense as fuck. About the same level of intensity as when Mufasa kicked the bucket in that one movie.

I was weary of the animation style, with cartoony dinosaurs/people and hyper realistic backgrounds, but it was amazing to watch it on the screen.

Again, The Good Dinosaur has some amazingly funny parts. The animation was great, but the story overall was very plain, not very original. Given their production problems, it is clear they just really wanted to do some dinosaur film. Through all the rewrites the film probably gradually became simpler and simpler, until we got the mostly unoriginal story line. It’s a shame, but at least we have Inside Out.

Gorgon Reviews – Watching Shitty (Terrible) Movies So You Don’t Have To. My long standing tagline and life philosophy. But for the most part, lately, my movies have just been everything in theaters. Some shitty, some not.

This is not a strange indie film. We Are Your Friends a film that was released throughout the US, but no one saw it. Almost no one. At the time of its release, it had the third worse opening for any film with over 2000 theaters showing it. It was the worst for live action movies.

Since it came out, Jem and the Holograms somehow decided to beat its box office records.

So We Are Your Friends only got to live in notoriety for about two months. Now it is second fiddle and now it won’t even be remembered for being never seen.

It may be remembered for having the same name as a famous Justice song though.
(Sweet music video alert)

Cole (Zac Efron) wants to be a great DJ. He is a small time guy, working the local clubs. He thinks he will be big one day. He just needs the perfect first song and the perfect opportunity. He definitely understands DJing though. He knows how to work a crowd, get them moving, and make the optimal BPMs .

He has three friends, Squirrel (Alex Shaffer), Ollie (Shiloh Fernandez), and Mason (Jonny Weston).

They need cash to make their dreams come true. But also, they like to party.

And party they do. They party a lot. And get ladies and stuff. Starring Jon Bernthal as a scummy dude, Wes Bentley as a pompous dude, and Emily Ratajkowski as a woman who doesn’t just want to be there for her looks.

Putting my hands on my head is the only way I know how to dance.

Who doesn’t love Zac Efron? He has successfully turned himself around from pretty boy Disney child into a guy who does what he wants. For the most part, he wants to do risque comedies. He did That Awkward Moment and Neighbors. And he is going to be in the Baywatch movie, which will hopefully be as good as the 21 Jump Street franchise.

But this isn’t risque or really a comedy. I mean, it is supposed to be, but it feels like a terrible drama the whole time. Having attractive women, even ones that show their boobies, does not make it really risque either.

We Are Your Friends has a boring plot, the kind you can figure out within the first fifteen minutes. Any surprises are actually completely random, and most of them serve little to no purpose. The same old romance things happen in this film that happen in all shitty romance movies.

And guess what? Spoilers. He does the song by the end. He makes people dance.

Hip hip fucking hooray. Some good music as the soundtrack though, but literally it felt about 20% of the film was saved for party montages.

For Brooklyn, I was able to go into it not knowing a thing about the plot. All I knew were the main actors involved, and that’s it. Brooklyn could have been the place or the main characters name.

It is wonderful.

Of course, now you should read this review and have that feeling taken away from you. Or stop now, see my star rating, and watch it on your own in the future. It is up to you, reader. You are the one who has all the power!

That face you make when you just get propositioned with dick pics.

Our stars name is not Brooklyn, but it is Eilis (Saoirse Ronan). It is 1951, and she is living in small town Ireland. Yes, that means you will be hearing a lot of sexy accents in this one. Times are tough in Ireland, but when are they not? She lives with her older sister Rose (Fiona Glascott) and her Mami (Jane Brennan). Rose has a nice life as a bookkeeper for a local company, but Eilis cannot find work. She works at a small convenience store only on Sundays with mean old Miss Kelly (Brid Brennan).

But things are about to change. Thanks to Rose for help, she reached out to a Catholic priest from their area, Father Flood (Jim Broadbent), who lives in NYC. He has agreed to pay for Eilis to come to the city, with a job lined up for her and a place to stay. That way she can make money and make a living of her self. I won’t tell you where specifically in NYC she will work and live, but I bet you can figure it out. Eilis just has to leave everything she has ever known behind, including her BFF Nancy (Eileen O’Higgins).

Unfortunately, life is hard for Eilis. She is not fun and outgoing and always reserved. She is homesick. She is sad. But all that changes when she meets Tony (Emory Cohen), an Italian boy. He teaches her a lot of things, giving her confidence in herself and makes life wonderful. But when circumstances have her return to Ireland for a time, she finds things quite different. Suddenly, a job is available to her, she has things she can do, and there is an available boy, Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson), right now in her home town that is perfect for her. She has to decide if she should go back to her first love in NYC, a city she has made her own, but at the cost of again, her family and friends back across the pond.

Also featuring a handful of other women. Jessica Paré plays her boss, Julie Walters her housekeeper, and the other boarders are played by Emily Bett Rickards, Eve Macklin, Nora-Jane Noone, and Jenn Murray.

The true love test is to try and make a heart between your bodies.

Brooklyn doesn’t have fancy things. It has a simple plot, and it is all focused on a young girl trying to make her own decisions and not let the world make them for her. The description of the film isn’t sexy in any way. A simple plot means a simple story. But in this case, this simple story is one that was actually worth being told.

Now I will admit, yes, it did turn into a “which guy (/lifestyle) should I choose” film, so some may find it too romance heavy. And I admit, that if she made the choice I didn’t like, I would have been angry and you would have been seeing a much different review.

Ronan is utterly fantastic in this movie. I am a bit mad that it took this long into the year for me to see a movie where I can see someone who definitely will be nominated for Best Actress. And no, I haven’t seen Room yet. Best Actress is always my weakest category when it comes to seeing this ahead of time, so I am glad I have something at this point. Did I mention Ronan was also great? Her accent, her mannerisms, everything about her was wonderful.

Brooklyn also had the unique characteristic that it felt much longer, in a good way. When she finally got back to Ireland, I assume it only had about five minutes left, but again, I was surprised.

Brooklyn is a simple tale, but a good story, and some great acting. Accents are the cherry on top.

Hooray another franchise is over! After Harry Potter, I am grateful book series are still afraid to break from the trilogy format. Or else we’d get these yearly movies that drive up the box office and everyone freaks out about and so on.

You know, like Marvel movies. Or the upcoming Star Wars films. One a year. Fuck.

Of course, this time it is The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2. The studios will say over and over again it is because the last story needs all that time to tell the story, but it is just for money grabbing purposes. It is putting a pause in the plot, usually meaning neither half are a complete film and overdrawn.

Part 1 was the worst film of the franchise. It had about 30 minutes of plot spread out over two hours. And because of that, Part 2 is almost definitely going to suffer for similar reasons. Even if Part 2 is great, the fact that Part 1 exists and is bad, instead of one coherent picture, means both are weaker than they should be. Happened with the final two Twilights, happened with the final two Harry Potters, and will probably happen again here.

You know, Katniss, this is the last time I might get to dress you.” – Creepy Effie

Katniss Katniss Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence). Katniss found herself choked up over the fact that they saved Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) from the Capital, her emotions all over the place. She knows one thing now. She will help Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and the rebels in any way she knows how. The Capital and President Snow (Donald Sutherland) must fall! And die!

Got it? Good. I’m done with that point of view. Lets change it up.

My man, Finnick Odair (Sam Claflin) is still a bad ass mother fucker, cool spear trident weapon thing. No one can take him one on one. Except one girl. That’s right, Finnick is getting married. They will have ginger babies. Apparently they are all Irish, and Irish is a thing in this world, because their wedding has Irish violin music and jigs and shit. But that won’t stop him from putting his life on the line to take down the bad guys, YEAH!

Okay okay one more. Caesar Flickerman (StanleY Tucci) is the best host in all of the districts. He has flair, hair, and style. Unfortunately in this movie, he only has one scene as a shitty news anchor person. We don’t delve more into his life. Sad news.

Alright, everyone else in this movie are played by the same people you have seen before. Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Willow Shields, Elizabeth Banks, Mahershala Ali, Jena Malone, Jeffrey Wright, Patina Miller, and of course, Elden Henson as the best video camera man in the world. Formally best at shooting the puck really hard.

“What are you going to do, just walk up to the door stop and kill him?”

I felt a bit silly typing up the plot outline for this film, as you may have guessed. They are finally doing that fight thing. No longer is this about the hunger games, it is about a revolution, damn it. They should really assume the viewers are smarter and just call it Mockingjay without THG.

Part 2 ended up being a lot better than Part 1, but not as good as the first movie or Catching Fire. The ending wasn’t full of epic moments, but just a slow fuse that slowly ran out of steam. And then a couple more scenes, and an epilogue. Hell, the ending was very confusing just in terms of time. I can’t be more specific without bigger spoilers, but the events being shown and that were talked shouldn’t have overlapped as such.

There were some decent action scenes in the middle though. The best was the sewer scene, although it was also confusing. Dark places means they don’t have to make coherent action, which might just be an allusion to the first film where they just changed the camera angles a lot and shook the camera. They threw in zombies out of no where, which is I guess the cool thing to do in a teen book franchises (see Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials). I am sure technically they are not zombies, but they came out of no where and never were really explained, so that is all I can really call them.

When I think back on the Hunger Games franchise in the future, I will just think about the first two movies. As long as you accept that Catching Fire ends with a crappy cliff hanger and doesn’t resolve anything, it will save you from the extremely mediocre two film filler after the fact. With only a handful amount of Finnick scenes to get you by.

2015 may be the year of documentaries about celebrities. I feel a bit bad that so many of mine for this year are about a single person, dead or alive. I mean, last week I did Amy. And I still have that Kurt Cobain one to do.

But today I talk about Brand: A Second Coming, about Russell Brand, a guy who is definitely still alive and kicking. Shit he kicks a lot.

This is about a documentary about how Brand came into fame, how he reached the top, how he fell, and whatever the fuck he is doing now. He is an actor, a stand up comic, sometimes a singer, and a political activist.

What? You only know him from Get Him To The Greek, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, or Arthur? Well, where have you been? Someplace that isn’t England? Oh, that makes sense.

If you aren’t in England, you might never come across this guy. Or the Queen. Or the ghost of Winston Churchill.

Technically, part of this documentary is also showcasing Brand’s stand up tour, The Messiah Complex. You know, where he compares himself to Jesus is vulgar and funny ways. But only a few jokes/stories. Really, I think the main point of this review is to show how he went from acting celebrity, to political…activist…humorist…political something that he is today. Maybe consider him like Jon Stewart. But his show isn’t a big one on Comedy Central, it is instead a YouTube channel called The Trews (if the news had truth I think), where he went over how the news was reported the previous day, showing biases, lies, or whatever.

It is actually a really ambitious project and had actually gained me a lot of respect for him. All I knew about his politics was from that one Morning Joe clip that blew up on the internet a year or so ago. It is actually quite entertaining and shows he is smarter than some of his characters let him put on.

And hey, it was also interesting to see his side of the Katy Perry divorce story, as I only really heard about the why from Katy Perry: Part Of Me. How often do divorced couples each get their own documentary? Outside of presidents and their wives.

Overall, I’d call Brand: A Second Coming as merely interesting. It feels like it is going all over the place early on, and I did find myself wondering why he even had a documentary at this point in his career. Good for people who love Brand already, that is for sure. Probably the most profound sentence in any review I’ve written right there.

I apologize. I have been doing mostly main stream movies lately. My only weird outlet has been in terms of documentaries, which also have been pretty standard lately.

But no, I need to take time every once in awhile to do something weird. Those indie and low budget movies you haven’t heard about. Which is why I picked Circle today. I heard about it a few weeks ago, and since I could remember the title, knew it was weird, and it was short (hey, I have time crunches some times), it was the perfect movie to review.

Fifty people. Strangers (mostly). They find themselves in a two tiered circle. You can visually see it above. They are each standing in their own red circle. If they try to step off, an alarm goes off. If they touch someone else, an alarm goes off. And in the middle of the circle is a mysterious sphere.

There is a African American man (Coley Speaks). A husband (Matt Corboy) and a wife (Julie Benz). A rich man (Daniel Lench), a pastor (Kurt Long), and a Bruce (David Reivers).

Every few minutes a deep thumping sound occurs from the center, and sure enough, a lightning beam shoots out of it and kills one of our fifty participants. Fuck. Don’t worry, you won’t get piles of bodies, they get whisked away, somewhat magically into the darkness around the room, never to be seen again. Turns out if you leave your circle or touch people after the warning, you too get shot and killed. Definitely a rough life.

There is a bearded man (Kaiwi Lyman). There is the first man that talks (Kevin Sheridan), and a silent man (Muneer Katchi). There is a college kid (Carter Jenkins), an atheist (Rene Heger) and an Eric (Michael Nardelli).

Oh see those arrows? Turns out if they turn their hands, the arrows light up around the room and only they can see their arrow. Turns out they get to vote on who is the next to get killed every time the thumping starts. Now things get interested. Who do they decide to kill? What happens when there is a tie? Does the last person alive get to leave? What if there are two people left, do they tie and both die? Fuck.

There is a soldier (Jordi Vilasuso), an Asian kid (Lawrence Kao) and a lawyer (Michael McLafferty). There is a pretty girl (Sara Sanderson), a tattooed man (Cesar Garcia) and a lesbian (Mercy Malick).

There is a cancer survivor (Lisa Pelikan), a one handed man (Zachary James Rukavina), a pregnant woman (Allegra Masters) and an 11 year old girl (Molly Jackson).

I do love me some psychological thrillers. I also love me some movies that take place for the most part in one room. I also love me some dialogue based movies. Needless to say, this movie has them all. An interesting premise, a constant guessing game who is going to die, and lots of arguing. Everyone is talking to save themselves, but some people get caught up in the moment. You can see several games and plans characters have to ensure their own survival, and it is wonderful. I also definitely enjoyed the ending.

There is one bad thing, technically. The acting. There is a lot of people involved, so it is all over the place. A lot of it is kind of shit. But I forgave it for the nice concept and story.

Honestly not much more I can say about this one. Under 90 minutes, on Netflix, and a nice way to spend the evening. Unless you aren’t into slightly weird shit.

The 2010 Chilean mining accident is a wonderful topic for a movie. I am surprised it took them five years in fact.

It was a national event, it lasted months, it involved dozens of people (33 to be exact), and it had a happy ending.

Imagine if they opened the hole and it was a few guys surrounded by corpses. That’d be terrifying. That would be a different sort of movie, not at all uplifting.

So I am going into The 33 with optimism. I hope they get buried within like, the first 10 minutes too. Let them build up that scare factor just a bit.

Besides, the last movie I saw set in Chile that involved a huge disaster and trying to survive was Aftershock. That wasn’t uplifting, well, besides the tectonic plates.

Seeing all those sweaty food deprived bodies could also be considered uplifting.

12,000 miners die every year. That is a big number. But, at least 9 million kids under 5 die every year, and that is only one portion of minors. So it is much more dangerous to be a minor than a miner. I assume.

Well, in this case, the miners were going down on a normal day, just to get the copper and gold. They use relatively small crews, I guess to not upset the mountain too much with the drills and other equipment. This particular mountain has been mined heavily and they are very deep into it. Mario Sepúlveda (Antonio Banderas) needs some extra money, so he is working too, despite not originally on the schedule. And guess what? Not long after they are down there and working, the mountain begins to move. Now, a super rock is blocking their only exit and they are trapped in a relatively small area. They have a hall way or two, and thankfully they are in The Refuge, a room with some food and supplies. But still, it is quite dangerous and scary down there.

The food supplies are not plentiful. The company lied about a few safety measures as well, making escape impossible. And the company isn’t even going to do anything about it! They are a private company, so they are doing the bare minimum, but they aren’t even letting the friends and family members enter the area, as they are blocked off by gates and people with guns.

Thankfully, María Segovia (Juliette Binoche) is not having any of their shit. She is the sister of one of the miners and she basically helps frenzy them into a riot, creating pressure on the government and company to attempt the rescue mission. This brings the Minister of Mining, Laurence Golborne (Rodrigo Santoro) down to the scene. He is moved by everyone’s committment and he promises to do everything he can to rescue the miners, no matter the cost.

Sure they only have 3 days of food for 3 people and it would take at least a week to get a small hole somewhere into their area. And they also have no idea how to get to the right spot, due to the density of the stone being unknown and their drills will curve. But damn it, they gotta try, right?

Obviously with so many minors, we have a huge cast. But most of the minors have no talking roles. But the people they do showcase have families worried about them or other unusual characteristics. And a lot of people helping, including Bob Gunton playing President Piñera. These people are played by Mario Casas, Juan Pablo Raba, Oscar Nuñez, Tenoch Huerta, Marco Treviño, Jacob Vargas, Lou Diamond Phillips, James Brolin, Adriana Barraza, Kate del Castillo, Elizabeth De Razzo, Cote de Pablo, and Gabriel Byrne.

Count them. They don’t even try to make the number of characters accurate.

Did I cry? Of course I cried. They had beautiful tense moments of rescue. They had people who hadn’t seen each other for 69 days, who had assumed their loved ones died, reconnecting. Someone had a baby girl, and you know how they affect me. But just because I cried doesn’t mean it is an excellent film.

First of all, when your title is The 33 and it is a well known fact that there are 33 people, you should probably have all the many extras around who don’t talk when the whole group is together. That dinner scene is unacceptable. Didn’t even have people standing to the side having their own conversation.

Second of all, there is geology in this movie. Not a lot, technically. But there was the big “eureka” moment with how they would get the drill to the correct area. And it was terrible. I cannot believe that is how it really happened, because it would mean all of the drilling crews were inept.

But there were some nice moments of course. Banderas gives an excellent speech or two that really get me going. The scene where they imagined food was super weird. And they really felt like coworkers and a family by the end.

Slightly inspirational without shoving it in your face, and a nice tail. Just those inaccuracies.