Month: March 2017

[Editor’s Note: I watched Land of Mine before the Oscars, but couldn’t publish it until March 10, so keep that in mind.]

In my attempt to prepare for the Oscars, I was able to see the Denmark film, Land of Mine, making it my second to last film in that category. Most years I see 0-2 of the foreign films, so I am quite surprised I made it this far. I haven’t reviewed them all, but damn it, I reviewed some.

Now sure, it is a foreign film about World War II, and we are chock full of World War II films, but for the most part, they come from an American/English/German perspective. So a Danish WWII film has the potential to offer up something new on the subject, and a hope to have a new story worth telling.

And please not just be a film about boot camp and normal war tropes.

The film begins with the end of World War II. The Germans have surrendered after the suicide of Adolf Hitler, and now reparations are being made.

For this film, we are focusing on landmines (thus the title), thousands of them placed on the Denmark coast by the Nazi soldiers. They have maps of each landmine of course, because they needed it to get out of the area, so the Danish government has said that the German soldiers need to disarm and remove them.

Germany has sent over a group of soldiers to take care of it. However, these soldiers are all men in their teens. They were forced to join the army in the final months, given the need of bodies, and probably didn’t do anything terrible in their short time. But they were given to this dangerous job so that the older soldiers with more clout could go back home. They were a sacrifice.

Sgt. Carl Rasmussen (Roland Møller) is in charge of training these soldiers on how to properly dissarm and remove them. He is hard on them, because damn it, they are Nazis. But he also needs them to do a good job, because he doesn’t want his own men to get rid of the bombs, and he doesn’t need them all dying leaving thousands of mines left to go.

It is a grueling process, and every time someone makes a mistake, body parts go flying and their life is cut short. But they are promised when they finish the beach, they can go home. They have something to work towards. As long as they can make it.

Also starring Louis Hofmann, Joel Basman, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, Emil Belton, and Oskar Belton.

My years of minesweeper playing has taught me that they should be placing red flags.

Yep, as I already mentioned we got another WW2 war film. Thankfully, this one is heavy on the drama, and weak on the war. Taking place after the war is helpful in that regard. It still has some graphic violence of course. Given that we are dealing with land mines, it should not be surprising that some people blow up thanks to these minds.

And those scenes were gross. But they were realistic.

Land of Mine tells a story that decades ago no one would want to tell. No one wants to here the plight of the Nazi. But these kids were barely Nazis, barely adults, and didn’t deserve to die either.

Land of Mine is well acted, but hard to watch at times. And hard to hear at other times. But a worthy foreign film to be nominated.

War Dogs came and went and no one cared. And you know what that is?

Jonah Hill is back to being fat in it. Not only is he fat, but he looks uncomfortably rapey. Everyone thought that skinny Jonah would not be funny, but he totally is! And then from then on, Fat Jonah was put in shitty movies. Like The Sitter.

Needless to say, the Fat Jonah theory is definitely one of the main reasons I stayed away, and it sounds like a lot of people in America stayed away as well. I can only hope it is for the same reason.

Fuck, they don’t even make him reasonable to look at when they put him in a suit.

This is partially a story about David Packouz (Miles Teller), a man in love and who cannot find good work. He has spent a lot of money on some high quality sheets to sell discounted to retirement homes, but the retirement homes don’t want nice sheets for people going to die soon. His only real income is giving massages which is not his ideal job either.

His lady Iz (Ana de Armas) is taking care of them. Until he runs into an old buddy from high school, Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), who eventually invites him to join his company. The company, AEY (which stands for nothing), is a sort of middle man company, who sells arms to the US government for the ongoing War in Iraq.

How did he get into that business? Long story, it is shady, but they are making their money by getting weapons from other countries and bringing them to Iraq, sometimes physically on their own. And once they get paid and people like what they get, they get more government contracts and start to live like fat cats. These are the deals that big contractors don’t bother with, but will still make them millions.

But eventually the money gets to their head, and the pursuit of more and more money. This leads to problems. This leads to threats.

Also featuring Patrick St. Esprit, Kevin Pollak, and Bradley Cooper.

Making money off of war. There is a word for that I think.

It was hard to get a lot out of War Dogs. Just from the basic color scheme of the film they go out of their and way to make it unpleasant looking.

Just look at our main characters. They didn’t even try to accurately look like the people they portrayed. Nothing. Alike. At all. They are only similar in that they are men. Normally in these things they try and make them at least look similar. The casting director here gave no fucks, went for who they wanted, and in addition to it, decided to make Hill as ugly as they possibly could to drive home a point.

What was that point? That the charcter was a scumbag. Of course this is all based on testimony of the other guy, who wrote a book and got less prison time. Of course he will make himself seem not too bad.

Somehow despite everything I still found it an okay watch. They rushed through a lot of things and the entire thing seemed to hurt my eyes, but in there somewhere is an okay story with a decent lesson.

Fuck bitches, get money. Or else I think that is what the lesson was.

I find it very odd to see a lot of hype for the movie Kong: Skull Island. King Kong has happened over and over in film’s history, and given everything I know about the internet, they hate reboots, reimaginings, and remakes of other films, so they shouldn’t care about this one.

But alas, here we are. I don’t have too many fucks to give about it of course, after King Kong 11 years ago. Overly long and it didn’t really do anything different.

I guess this one is bringing in some hardcore CGI and bigger acting names. Maybe that is it. Or people are freaking out over the potential of a Godzilla and Kong showdown in the future. Needless to say, if this film doesn’t do anything different, I will probably be mostly annoyed.

I don’t care about context, these two people are not dirty enough.

Kong: Skull Island makes sure you get to see a giant ape really early in the film, when two crashed World War II pilots land on the island, start to fight, and then he shows up. But this isn’t set during that war, this is actually set in 1973, during the end of the Vietnam war.

Bill Randa (John Goodman) is some sort of scientist, who believes there is a lot to discover on this skull island they have found in the South Pacific. Ancient civilizations have talked about it, there are constant storms that surround it, but he wants a mission to explore what has never been explored. Let’s call it a geologic mapping mission. With a military escort.

He is able to gather a team. He has his own crew, a geologist (Corey Hawkins) and a biologist (Tian Jing), along with some extra scientists from another company (John Ortiz, Marc Evan Jackson). They have a legendary British explorer to help explore the jungles, James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston), who is in it for some money. A prize winning photojournalist, Mason Weaver (Brie Larson), who helped show the truth about Vietnam to the public. And of course a helicopter team lead by LTC Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) and Captain Jack Chapman (Toby Kebbell), straight out of ‘Nam.

Most of them assume it is just a real exploratory mission. But really, Randa has an agenda and believes to be giant monsters on this island, and he wants to bring an end to them. They’ve got weapons of many sizes. Unfortunately, when setting off seismic blasts to detect the crust, they wake up these beasts on the island, and they do not like having explosions all over the place. Spread out over the island, the crew has three days to make it to the north side before they can be rescued.

Also featuring John C. Reilly, and a whole lot of soldiers: Jason Mitchell, Shea Whigham, Thomas Mann, and Eugene Cordero.

Turns out this Kong film has a lot of Japanese influence.

At its heart, Kong: Skull Island is an action adventure flick that wants to show us giant animals fighting some dudes with bombs. Which on its own could be enough for most of the people who want to see it. I will say there are some scenes that look a bit awkward based on CGI usage. It doesn’t always mesh well. But the more pure CGI scenes like Kong fighting with the giant lizards look amazing.

The film also doesn’t pussy foot around Kong. We get to see him in the first few minutes. Within 15 more we are on the island and Kong totally fucks up the helicopters putting our characters in a perilous situation. We get a lot of Kong and they don’t tease him out.

You know what we don’t get a lot of? Character development. Basically every character in this movie is weak on that level. There is no gain. They don’t change. Well, some of them die. We have exactly one character who people will care about and does change and that man is played by John C. Reilly. His character is wonderful, an amazing addition to the film, and worthy of praise.

But Kong: Skull Island is just going to be a interesting film that could have been a lot better. With its post credit scene trying its best to imitate The Avengers it leaves some hope for the future. But have to hope they improve the scripts first.

I am thankful that I waited to review The Accountant. If I reviewed it months ago when it came out, it would have been so less…relevant.

What? Reviewing a movie when it comes out in theaters is LESS relevant? How crazy.

But yes. Because now I can say that regardless of the films topic and plot, this film should actually be about the 2017 Oscars. The two men responsible for the envelopes, the accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers, have lived their lives up to that night probably in perfection. Never flubbing a number, never getting BBQ sauce on their beards, just perfection.

And then they fucked up at the biggest award and took a little bit of time to fix it. It wasn’t a smaller technical award (which would have been equally devastating for those involved), but the Best Picture, which affects large groups of people.

Just fucking insane. I want their story. But this one will have to do.

Ah good, numbers, now we know it is an intense mystery film.

A lot of threads in this film, so I will try to keep it simple and brief.

Ray King (J.K. Simmons), some head of a treasury department, is looking for this Accountant dude, who might behind all these various…accountant things. And crimes. He gets some underling, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), to look into it. Some blackmail was involved too.

Chris Wolff (Ben Affleck) is of course our Accountant in question. He is a high functioning autistic dude, so he is good with numbers, but he was also trained to fight and stuff as a kid by his dad, because why not.

He is called into some company to look up financial irregularities. Turns out a lot of shenanigans are going on, we get some action, we get some mystery.

Starring Andy Umberger, Alison Wright, Anna Kendrick, Jon Bernthal, Jeffrey Tambor, John Lithgow, and Jean Smart. The A’s and J’s of the Hollywood complex.

He punched those numbers so hard they turned into tiny booklets and the room emptied.

A couple of days after I watched The Accountant, I realized something powerful. I don’t remember a whole lot about The Accountant.

The experience while watching it had some okay moments, but for the most part, nothing anymore stands out. It is a completely forgettable film, and that is not a good thing at all. If I wrote this review right away after watching it, it would have still only been a 2 out of 4.

But at this point, a die hard Ben Affleck fan, I am just wondering what happened? Is it worth ever seeing again? Shit, should I even watch Live By Night? I feel like I am automatically going to get the exact same reception for that film, and I can’t handle that happening right now. Another recent movie is Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and I don’t think I can handle that much shitty Ben Affleck in a row. I cannot go back the early 2000’s. Gone Girl was supposed to help lead to better roles, not worse!

I am just worried about my friend. Most of his upcoming films involve DC and I don’t want him to lose his acting career. He is lucky he even has one after all those shitty movies in the before time, here is no way he can survive a second falling out.

The Accountant is a forgettable action thriller. It might have smart moments, but it is not anything that I will care about discussing in the future, unfortunately.

At first I thought it had been awhile since I saw a Tyler Perry Madea movie. My last one was A Madea Christmas. That was at the end of 2013. I had to assume that I had missed a few, because these used to come out all the time.

But technically the only one I missed was Madea’s Neighbors from Hell, but that is one of the plays and I am not rushing off to start reviewing plays. Especially those plays.

So technically, Boo! A Madea Halloween is the first of these sort of films in three years. And unfortunately for me, it means I have not missed a few, but I am still on track. Damn.

But hey, this one has other old people so that should mean more…uhh, ranting I guess.

This film of course takes place around Halloween, specifically he day of. We have some local fraternity trying to plan the sickest party yet, led by Jonathan (Yousef Erakat), Quinton (Andre Hall), and Horse (Brock O’Hurn). They catcall some girls who walk by. You know, Tiffany (Diamond White) and her three friends (Lexy Panterra, Liza Koshy, and Bella Thorne). They agree to come later and check it out.

But you know, they are high school girls. And some of them live in strict houses. Tiffany specifically wants to go and party, but she has an over controlling father (Tyler Perry). He has to do…something, so he asks Madea (Tyler Perry) is she can stay at their house and watch her, to make sure nothing funny happens. Madea brings along Aunt Bam (Cassi Davis), Hattie (Patrice Lovely), and Joe (Tyler Perry).

Needless to say, the gaggle of old people in her house annoys Tiffany, but she sneaks out anyways. Madea and gang end up breaking the party after some shenanigans,so the girls and frat work together to play pranks on them, hoping to scare them out of the house.

This would be the trick part of the trick or treat, of course.

This picture accurately represents how much Bella Thorne is actually in this movie.

Some of the times, I can find something worthwhile in these Madea movies. A really good joke. An okay plot. Something. This one doesn’t have any of that. Literally the most amusing scene is just a couple of people talking about a fat kid and stealing his candy in front of their mom.

An excessive amount of conversation in this film is about beating their kids to get them to listen. A whole lot of it involves very low level scares. The pranks feel authentic, in that I believe a bunch of drunk college students came up with them. Because they are shit. The movie should get rid of authenticity in this level and actually give me something entertaining.

Boo! isn’t funny. It isn’t scary. And it is a waste of time. Perry is running out of ideas.

Wow, how do you introduce a tale as old as time? Something as true as it can be? You just gotta speak from the heart.

I do love the animated Beauty and the Beast film. It celebrates intelligence! It has one of my favorite introduction songs. Gaston is fascinating, with his own great song. But I have always had issues for it. So I better get it off my chest now:

The main takeaway from Beauty and the Beast is bullshit. The prince was punished for not seeing someone’s true beauty, so he was turned into an ugly creature. To learn his lesson, he needs to fall in love and be loved in return, with a nice kiss too, before he turns 21. (Which of course means he was punished as a kid, joy). So how does it eventually happen? By getting the perfect person in his life. She is smart, kind, but also the hottest chick in the village. To really drive the point home, she should have been not matched the perfect standard of beauty. It is kind of crap. Shrek and Shallow Hal end up driving the point home better.

Okay, no more of that. I also appreciate that Gaston is set up as a typical old school Disney Prince, who just wants love because they are beautiful, so it sort of shows Disney going away from their older film tropes.

What I am really getting at is that I am excited for the live action version of Beauty and the Beast. I was not excited for the live action Cinderella, because the plot of Cinderella is shit and celebrates obedience to mean people and doing chores until a prince can take you away. Fuck that.

Give that bitch a book. Bitches love books.

In some nondescript village in old timey France, there was a castle. None of this is Paris, we know that for certain. There was a prince (Dan Stevens), who lived in the castle, and he was mean. He was so mean to some haggy bitch, that the haggy bitch turned him into a really hairy dude and all of his servants into utensils and shit. What in the fuck!

Now years later, they have almost given up hope at becoming human again. The Beast has to not just fall in love, but have someone love him back. They are depressed, cold, and a spell was put on the area for people to forget about their existence. So that doesn’t help either.

Thankfully, there is a really freaky girl in that poor provincial nearby town. Belle (Emma Watson), a girl who was trained to use that brain of hers, an inventor, a girl who likes books and is somehow still decent looking. Some shit goes down with her dad (Kevin Kline). He finds himself locked up in this castle forever. Thankfully, their horse was also trained to use its brain and he is able to take her to the castle and HOLY FUCK, A BEAST!

Using that goddamn brain of hers, she is able to trick her dad into taking his place, planning to escape in the future. You know, because she is so youthful. But then she falls in love. Oh, way too early. A lot of strife happens. But after a good old fashioned food orgy, she starts to love the place, and thinks about calling it home. Plus, it can clean itself, with the magical slave item army and all.

Also starring Ewan McGregor as a candelabra, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a duster, Ian McKellen as a clock, Emma Thompson as a teapot, Stanley Tucci as a piano, Audra McDonald as a dresser, Luke Evans as a tall, dark, strong, handsome brute, Josh Gad as his miniature life mate, and also Hattie Morahan as a begger.

Gaston’s face cannot be shown because Gorgon Reviews is not a big enough website.

Remember Cinderella? That film I already mentioned? Again, it was okay. It was colorful. Shit story. Good dresses. A terrible idea for a first run. It was like the Universal Monsters series trying to give us Dracula Untold as the start of their shared Universe. But now they gotta get The Mummy to save their asses. Yes, I recognize we have had a few other live action films since Cinderella, but this is the first one since then to be about a Disney Princess!

Beauty and the Beast delivers, and it delivers hard.

Of course, we get the best parts from the original. Bonjour is fascinating, with a village of real people, and we still get the “Please Let Me Through!” line. Be Our Guest is an explosion of extravagance. The Gaston song starts off awkward for me, but grows into its own, feels like a giant party, and has a few surprises. (Although, the chorus of that song is also almost impossible to understand)

But we also get a whole lot new! An expanded introduction, more backstory on the Beast and Belle’s lives before the film and their parents, bigger connections to the castle and the village and why it is a big surprise, Belle being a stronger female character, and more. AND! Alan Goddamn Menken, the Disney musical genius, came back to rewrite some of his songs from two decades ago, plus a few new ones. Three at that. Day in the Sun and Evermore are great additions to the film and Evermore had me crying. And don’t worry, the Human Again song added to the animated film does not take place in this movie.

I am annoyed that at the timing of this review, I have to wait a week to hear some of the newer songs again, just to see if I like them as much as I am writing.

Beauty and the Beast is not just a remake. It is also a re imagining. With more backstories, more lines for side yet important characters, everyone feels more fleshed out. Even Gaston and especially LeFou. We get some good call backs, and good changes to match the times. It was an incredible job done by the team, who treated their source material with respect, and really matched what made the first film great 26 years ago.

When Jack Reacher came out, I was able to avoid the controversy involving casting choices, because I of course never read the books and didn’t care. I just wanted a good action thriller.

And Jack Reacher was a good action thriller. I enjoyed how small and personal it felt. It felt unique. It had an amazing opening.

I was totally pumped for a Jack Reacher sequel. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is a dumb title, but hey, if it was anything like the first one, fuck it, who cares.

This one promises to feature at one visually appealing location.

This film starts off already way less exciting than the first film. Just Jack (Tom Cruise) helping catch a human trafficking cop, without much detail on how he did it or why it was done in any special way. Then we get to see him calling Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), someone he has worked with. But he talks to her a lot, he probably has the hots for her.

Anyway, according to some Colonel (Holt McCallany), Turner has been arrested for espionage. And also she maybe killed two people in Afghanistan. People she wasn’t supposed to kill. That is odd. Also, Jack might have a daughter (Danika Yarosh) that he has no knowledge of, from a prostitute. Look at all these shenanigans!

Somehow all of this gets connected. Jack gets framed for the murder of his lawyer, everyone gets in the same jail so they can break out and figure out all this shit.

Also featuring Aldis Hodge and Patrick Heusinger.

And after all of this, I fucking ran away from the movie.

You might be really interested in why the low rating? That is because I did the unthinkable during this movie. No, I didn’t sleep through it. But sleeping usually gives an automatic 0 as well. I turned the piece of shit off.

I realized my time was far too valuable instead of wasting it on another hour of the shit in front of me. This is not the Jack Reacher I remember from just a few years prior. This is some global conspiracy military film, without a strong focus. This is a complete mess.

Technically, from the first scene it was worse, but the first scene of Jack Reacher was legendary. This felt like a sequel that was made from a different cheaper studio, like a lot of the Disney straight-to-video sequels. Whatever was on the screen couldn’t have possibly been done by the same people. It just seemed so goddamn different.

I obviously don’t have a lot of unique things to say, seeing just under half of the movie. And hey, maybe the ending made it a bit better. But whatever it is I watched just felt so wrong, so non-Jack Reacher, that I figured I had already seen enough. This is not a worthy successor. They should have Never Gone Back to this franchise, apparently.

Do better in your next film Cruise. I trust you.

Girlfriend’s Day is a movie that came out of nowhere and just popped up on Netflix. That isn’t true. I saw at least one note for one pre-screening the day before it was released.

It came out right on Valentine’s Day, because why not talk about a made up holiday on a similar holiday.

Hey, this intro is hard. I will admit the only reason I went and saw it because it had a run time of like, 65 minutes, meaning it was easy to fit in between other films.

And I was able to type this review real quick. No effort even.

Ray Wentworth (Bob Odenkirk) used to be the best. The best at what? Writing greeting card messages. He won some awards a few years in a row. But that was years ago. Now his ideas are misses and he lost his groove.

Yes, he used to be married, so he could write the most beautiful cards all to his wife, and people loved it. But once his marriage ended, his writing became a sham, and now he is fired.

Which is a blessing, and a curse. Because California has decided to introduce a new holiday: Girlfriend’s Day. And to celebrate the event, they are giving away a large cash prize to the person who can create and submit the best Girlfriend’s Day card. People currently employed in the Greeting Card industry are ineligible.

So now Ray can work on his ultimate card. To get him in the game again. To bring him to the top. To get that sweet money. But it turns out this has brought out a lot of crazies and thugs, who all want that money without doing the work, getting Ray in the middle of several stories and threats against his life.

Also starring Stacy Keach, Amber Tamblyn, Alex Karpovsky, Kevin O’Grady, Rich Sommer, Larry Fessenden, Natasha Lyonne, June Diane Raphael, and Andy Richter.

Oh look, a potential girlfriend!

There is only one good thing about Girlfriend’s Day. Its run time.

Being barely over an hour, I didn’t have to waste too much of my life watching it.

The filmmakers tried to do a big elaborate film with side characters all building up to one big event. Like a Cohen brothers flick basically. But it felt rushed, it felt lame, and it definitely did not feel funny.

Yes, another comedy movie without the comedy. A few smirks at most, but Odenkirk is basically supposed to carry this movie on his own charm. But he is nor Saul Goodman in this movie, he is barely charismatic and it just feels like a mistake.

Definitely an easy movie to pass and one that would be enjoyed by very few.