Month: December 2016

After I saw the first Ice Age movie, I avoided the rest. It was okay, I just didn’t have any interest in future films.

But then I became a movie reviewer, and in 2012 Ice Age 4: Continental Drift came out, so I had to watch several movies in a short span and my brain became fried. Every film got less and less scientifically accurate.

After a few years I figured we were safe, but no, since Blue Sky Studios has practically no other films coming out, we were given Ice Age: Collision Course, involving outer space. Another frontier for science to be destroyed in.

So many god damn characters now.

Look at all the people I get to talk about. Our original Ice Age crew is still around. Manny (Ray Romano), the mammoth. Sid (John Leguizamo), the ground sloth. Diego (Denis Leary), the saber toothed tiger. And by this time most of them have lovers and extra friends. Manny has Ellie (Queen Latifah), and her two opossum brothers, Crash and Eddie (Seann William Scott, Josh Peck). Diego has Shira (Jennifer Lopez) and they are only briefly thinking about kids. Oh and Sid is all alone, technically.

But Manny and Ellie’s daughter, Peaches (Keke Palmer)? She has found a long term boyfriend as well now. Julian (Adam Devine), a mammoth who wants to marry Peaches and move her far away from the family. That sucks for the parents, but it would be great for the movie, because this cast of characters is already too large.

Scrat and his nut help cause a series of events that begins to hurtle a giant asteroid towards the Earth, putting a damper on their parties. The giant crew quickly runs into a weasel, Buck (Simon Pegg), who is some sort of extreme adventurer and smart entity, who has been living in an underground paradise. He believes the asteroid is being attracted to the Earth at a certain spot and that if they get there, they can stop it. But with him also comes a group of evil winged dinosaurs (Nick Offerman, Max Greenfield, Stephanie Beatriz), who also escaped extinction. They want the asteroid hit so that the mammals will die out and maybe they can rule again.

There you go! I think I got the basic plot in there.

Also featuring voice work from Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jessie J, Wanda Sykes, and Michael Strahan.

Ah, Simon Pegg, always the light in the darkness.

The pattern seems to continue. Check mate, science. Once again, every further Ice Age film in the franchise decides to take a big poop on science, despite starting off strong. I will say that some of the past discretions are more egregious, most notably being off on Pangaea splitting up by 155~ million years or so. This time, we are being threatened by a meteor, going to destroy the planet. One that is going to hit the same place that killed the dinosaurs, and a previous mass extinction event. The MAJOR plot point is literally just to bring up a real event, and repeat it to give it an old ancient past feel, I guess.

Not only that, but they then go on to imply that events in this film would be responsible for Mars becoming a desert, life less planet RIGHT AFTER saying it would have happened billions of years ago, completely vandalizing our poor time line.

One isn’t supposed to get bent out of shape when faced with inaccuracies in a forgettable animated film, but when the film series used to be accurate and is still trying to showcase science, it gets quite annoying. What hurts me even more so is that Neil deGrasse Tyson not only lends his voice to narrate a few aspects, but they even make a character that is a flash in the pan to look like him for a couple more lines. Damn it Tyson, this movie is not helping get people smarter.

Outside of the science issues, this cast is way too large. No one gets killed off, everyone stays alive, and no one is leaving. So it started too big and then it grew further into the movie. It is beyond manageable and no one can really shine or matter. Not even the original trio. Okay okay, the new guy Buck shines a fuck ton in this film, and they thankfully make him interesting, but it is certainly not enough to save the movie in any way.

And yet, this is not the worst animated film of the year. This isn’t even the worst animated film of the year to imply coldness. Ice Age is lucky Norm of the North exists to give us more context.

Don’t Think Twice. Does that mean to live in the moment (and don’t over think things) or is it actually cautionary. Don’t think just two times man, think about stuff a lot.

Sorry, this intro is already bad, let’s assume I know that and move on.

I tried stand up comedy before. Just once. I attempted to turn stories I have told my friends for laughs into jokes, but unfortunately I just came across as pathetic. With that, my foray into stand up comedy was over, but it was still a good experience. Those stereotypically awkward people have to have some amount of courage and respect, to bare their souls on stage and hope people like what they have, dragging their bodies through hecklers and smelly back stages to rise to the stop.

It is a hard life and one I wouldn’t wish upon most people.

Especially those who make strange faces when pointing.

Being a stand up comic is hard, yeah, I know this because movie and television shows tell me all the time. You have to be funny, deal with dicks, you have to balance the creep/pathetic/fun line, and you get bad knees. You know, from all the standing.

The Commune is an improv group in NYC, made by Miles (Mike Birbiglia) a few years ago, and has moderate success. He also teaches improv classes, because he has bills to pay. Thankfully he also has a few roommates. The roommates being the entire rest of the group! There is Jack (Keegan-Michael Key) and Samantha (Gillian Jacobs), a couple romantically. Jack sometimes shows off, and Samantha is the emcee of the group. Allison (Kate Micucci) is a great artist, working on a graphic novel. Lindsay (Tami Sagher) has rich parents and thus doesn’t have to worry as much about survival. Finally, Bill (Chris Gethard) is our stereotypical comic looking guy who just exists and has bad things happen to him.

Things are going okay for the group, a bunch of funny people. They all want to get on the show called Weekend Live, basically Saturday Night Live.

And of course, one or more of them might actually get interviewed and make it on the cast. Regardless of perceived talent, experience, or anything.

How that fame changes the dynamic of their house and the group, who all want to reach their own goals is the real story here.

Maybe a little bit of improv as well.

Oh my god, look at all the improv!

Don’t Think Twice features an impressive line up of comedians who probably all had experience with imrpov or being a stand up comic. And hey, as far as I can tell, none of them have actually been on Saturday Night Live, to give some more authenticity to it all. Unfortunately, a movie about improv also strangely acts like a film with mostly no improv at all. Outside of some hang out scenes, it feels very structured, having to get to the point it needs to make.

What points are that? Well, improv is hard, comedy is hard, and the world can be a cruel mistress that never lets you get a chance to succeed at just because of luck or timing. Yeah, real life sucks, which is why we go to movies for escapism. But it is important for these sorts of movies to exist as well, to give us an inside look at different ways of life and learn a little bit about the world.

I know, I know, if your goal was to learn about the world, you probably weren’t talking about improv comics in NYC. It becomes a more welcoming topic when you realize these are the type of people who eventually become our favorite entertainers. People wonder why comedians kill themselves, suffer from depression or just are simple pessimists. But the road to success is full of trouble and knowing that can help one understand why people become hard or distant.

Don’t Think Twice is real (and realistic), decently funny, and a bit sad. I was a bit disappointed with the chemistry between our improv troupe, they didn’t always feel like a group of friends who lived and worked together. For those who like comedian though, this sort of film is a must watch and help put a little piece of the world into perspective.

Picture me, young and wild, in the summer of 2016. I heard about this small film coming out and it promised to fill all of my desires for a film at the time.

First it had a mysterious and pretentious name, Indignation. Good, that means there is probably intellectual dialogue at least. It promised to be a serious drama. And it had one of my top three favorite young actors at the helm.

I needed to see this film! But alas, didn’t get to the theater, didn’t get a screener, and then I mostly forgot about it. But it is December, damn it. Good film time. At some point it just clicked on me, I rushed out to gain a copy and watched it when I was ready to potentially feel depressed.

All I really had to do to prepare was to look at my college loans.

Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman), a Jewish born boy, is heading off to college. He is leaving his home in New Jersey to go to a smaller college in Ohio, basically a different country, while his friends all go and sign up for the Korean war. Not Marcus though. He wants to be a lawyer. He wants to argue and show off his intelligence.

They immediately put him in a triple room with two other Jewish students, guys who didn’t join the one Jewish fraternity in a prominently Christian campus. How Christian? Well, the Dean (Tracy Letts) requires every student to go to a few of his sermons every year, not all of them, just about ten or so (I forgot), where he preaches for an hour on morality, rules, and more.

This is really just one of the problems Marcus finds himself in when he gets there. There begins to be problems with the roommates. And he meets a girl, Olicia (Sarah Gadon), who opens his eyes. And his trousers, as she is technically more experience than him and he really doesn’t know how to handle it. She does know how to handle it though, if you know what I mean.

Needless to say, college will change little Marcus, for the better, for the worse, it is hard to determine.

Also featuring Danny Burstein, Pico Alexander, and Linda Emond.

Just a car ride and chill, right?

This seems to have turned into an example of a poor, simple movie reviewer getting over hyped on very little amounts of detail. I expected a film full of arguments about religion and academia. About what it means to grow up Jewish. Maybe some antisemitism. Instead I received a regular drama film with a couple above average scenes.

Let’s go into some detail here. There was one main scene between Lerman and Letts’ characters, lasting maybe even twenty minutes, about how Logan’s character reacted and saw the world. If the whole film was packed full of scenes like that one, it would be fantastic. A nice serious drama with great dialogue.

There were also a few great scenes between Lerman and Gadon, on sexuality and may also be worth the price of admission. It just felt like the rest of the film fell flat.

I won’t call it boring, but I will say it feels incredibly lacking. A story is there, but one that never gets fully fleshed out. At 110 minutes, I feel like it could have cut out almost thirty and still given the same exact story.

Maybe there is something I am missing, but honestly, Indignation has turned into an incredibly disappointing film.

Zero Days is an ominous sounding title. Fuck! When did the countdown start? Why am I already at zero?

Something about the title makes it feel like a count down versus the beginning of a count, which is interesting enough on its own. It just screams out negativity.

It turns out the term zero days refers to a malware attack on a computer. It is an unknown type of attack, that affects the entity as soon as it could possibly be known. There is no time to prepare before the attack begins, and you have to just start dealing with it while trying to fix it at the same time. It is technically rare, as most forms of attack are known and can be dealt with before the attack begins.

But what if you have a program on your computer with multiple zero days attached to it? That would be unheard of. And the documentary starts with a talk about Stuxnet, a malware discovered a few years ago with four zero day fronts on it, all around the world.

Unfortunately no, it doesn’t take on human forms and take over that way.

Long story short, Stuxnet was a form of cyberwarfare. The first one ever discovered, but probably not the first one implemented. And it was made in the US and Israel, to target the Iranian nuclear program, and sort of blow it all up from inside with their own tech.

Cool right?!

Given this, the documentary is also about cyberwarfare in general, the history of Iranian nuclear power and US-Iran relations, how other forms of warfare were implemented and so on. It isn’t just on the one very powerful and very specific malware.

And you know what? Zero Days felt like it was all over the place. The beginning was instantly very tech heavy and honestly, I got lost right away. It got better eventually. We got some very powerful testimonies from people who made Stuxnet, from people in the government programs and more. That part of Zero Days is fascinating.

When I say it is all over the place, it is all technically related, it just feels like several different mini documentaries put together almost. It has some good parts, but some parts that just feel above my complete comprehension. So with that, I have to knock it down a bit.

The only reason I am late on seeing the film Moonlight is mostly out of confusion. I was definitely invited to a pre-screening, it looked good to me, but then the date kept getting changed around, so it got lost in the shuffle.

I also thought I had to choose between Moonlight and Doctor Strange, and I have to go for the giant blockbuster a lot of those times. Especially if the blockbuster is something I have been wanting to see for years.

Another fun fact about Moonlight is that two of the stars in this film were also in big roles in Hidden Figures. That on its own isn’t weird, it is just amusing given the subject matter of this movie, compared to Hidden Figures, a PG Disney real life film.

Enough mindless stalling, lets get on to the crack.

No no no, I said crack, not smack.

Moonlight is broken into three parts of a Chiron’s life. We have 9 year old Chiron, or Little (Alex R. Hibbert), teenage Chiron (Ashton Sanders), and adult Chiron, now going by Black (Trevante Rhodes). It takes place in a lower class area of Miami, not Chicago which I assumed, allowing the film to make a lot more sense.

When Chiron was growing up, he was picked on a lot for his size (See: Nickname of Little). He didn’t like going home to his mom (Naomie Harris), who doesn’t care for him and is getting into drugs herself. By accident he runs into Juan (Mahershala Ali), who decides to give him a meal, since he finds a frightened boy who wont talk and is lost. He even gets to spend the night and meet his wife (Janelle Monáe). And yes, Juan is a big time crack dealer.

When he is a teenager, Chiron gets bullied (by Patrick Decile) a lot more, which leads to a rougher home life. He only has one friend his age, Kevin (Jaden Piner, Jharrel Jerome, André Holland), and their relationship is a very close one.

Needless to say, Moonlight is a story examining the choices in a man’s life. What led him to his decisions, how those decisions affected him later down the line, and the internal struggles he had to deal with mostly on his own.

The good news is he turned into a not so little adult.

Moonlight is certainly a hard movie to talk about, for those easily distracted they will watch it and assume not a lot actually happened. There are longer shots, there are long moments of silence, there are only a few characters, and so on. But what drives Moonlight is how deep it gets into our main character, how much it shows through his face and through his surroundings.

The themes that Moonlight explored I certainly didn’t expect, as they didn’t really explain a lot in the IMDB synopsis, so I will avoid going into explicit detail. But part of the plot is not just growing up in an emotionally abusive household, where the nicest people in your life deal drugs. It is also exploring his sexuality, figuring out how to be true to himself, and deal with issues in his own way.

All three Chiron’s give deep, personal performances. It is strange how three different people can feel so connected. But it works.

Moonlight feels like a dream at some point, branching out into some Terrence Malick territory. Nothing too out there, but visually it was unexpected given what many might just assume is another “gang/drug” adolescent movie.

Basically what I am getting at is that Moonlight is full of surprises. It defies the genre you think it will play into, and it gives a few powerful but subtle performances.