Month: March 2020

Hey, hey, heyheyhey. Vin Diesel. You’re looking kind of rough there. Are you stressed out? Are you getting enough sleep? Because you are looking a little…Bloodshot there.

Hyuck hyuck hyuck.

Of course Bloodshot is based on a comic, and no one really is aware of that. If it ain’t Marvel, DC, or even Dark Horse, ain’t no one give a damn. And sure, through some of the images, it looks like Diesel looks like the comic, so they are going for the same thing here.

See, if you didn’t read my words, you would have just assumed this is Diesel living out another of his Sci-Fi/Fantasy fantasies. Giving him cool powers and letting him run around like he bribed the DM of his campaign. Alas, this isn’t OG made up stuff, but a sourced material made up stuff.

Every punch is sourced.Ray Garrison (Vin Diesel) is one of those elite soldiers of America, who is good at killing and not being killed. He just returned from vague mission, where he did good things for America, and now he can go on vacation with his wife (Talulah Riley). But uh oh. Ray doing good, means bad guys are mad at him.

This one bad guy, Martin Axe (Toby Kebbell), dances his way in to their life and kills the wife, and kills Ray for not giving them good information. And end of movie!

Oh wait, no. Some company, RTS, brings Ray back to life, full of nanobots. Now he is a super soldier. Dr. Emil Harting (Guy Pearce) has brought him back to life, knowing only he died in war and didn’t have anyone claim his body. Ray’s memories are gone and he has a new purpose.

But, if he tries hard, maybe memories will return to him and he can get revenge on that dancing madman. That’d be swell, now that he is a superhero.

Also starring Alex Hernandez, Sam Heughan, Eiza González, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, and Lamorne Morris.

All the bots, all the time, always ready to party. Do you like emotional robots? Because then I have a film to not recommend. Because apparently being made of nanobots for your blood means you will stop feeling anything and somehow turn wooden, not metal.

Diesel smiles a couple times in this movie, generally when he is with his wife, and that is it. Everything else is super serious and stern. This movie takes itself far more seriously than the events on the screen should allow. I need some passion or winks or something to keep me more interested in the very weak plot.

The film I am giving an average rating for only due to originality. The plot could have gone a lot of ways, realistically, and it didn’t go the dumbest way. Audiences, whether they want to or not, have to pay a little bit attention and can’t just be impressed by some punches.

I will also highlight two scenes in particular. The flour fight scene was probably the coolest scene. The lighting gave it some fun visuals that really amplified the moment. And two, the elevator Spider-man deleted scene. Where Doc Ock is involved as well. This sounds ridiculous, and it is ridiculous, but I appreciate them doing this long fight scene in the bright light and not hide it all in the darkness.

But this film has weak acting all around. Average effects. A poor plot. And some okay twists. Somehow exactly what I expected without watching the trailer or knowing anything about the movie going in, weird huh?

2 out of 4.

Before all of the hubbub, I just naturally assumed that The Hunt was a remake of the Danish movie, also called The Hunt. Because it was famous, got nominated for awards, and so of course it will be remade by America at some point.

And that film was about maybe a pedophile, but maybe not, teaching at a school. Apparently this movie is about hunting people as a game, a very unoriginal story!

And apparently, due to its violence, it was taken off the schedule until further notice. And further notice means March 13th, because we haven’t had a big gun disaster in awhile, so it is okay to have a movie with violence.

I mean, minus the fact that people died, it has a pretty good PR campaign to get people talking about the movie. I will assume that was not their goal this whole time.

Ah fuck yeah, two guns!Everyone knows about Manorgate. You know, the conspiracy? The one that says the rich liberal elite once a year steal “deplorables” from the society, to round up and kill them like they are animals. Deplorables can just be anyone they don’t agree with.

You know. Card carrying republicans, gun nuts, conspiracy podcasters, anti-immigration, anti-gay, anti-abortion people. Any of those types. They just want to round them up in a small group and easily pick them off with traps and weapons, and slowly, this will be the rich’s way of getting rid of the poor and shifting our country blue.

Everyone. Knows. About. This. It has to be true!

That’s why when our cast of characters wake up, gagged, and find guns, they immediately know what is up when they start getting picked off. Can they survive? Can they put an end to this program once and for all?

A big cast of characters, on both sides of this hunt, including in no particular order: Ike Barinholtz, Wayne Duvall, Ethan Suplee, Betty Gilpin, Hilary Swank, Emma Roberts, Christopher Berry, Sturgill Simpson, Kate Nowlin, Amy Madigan, Reed Birney, Glenn Howerton, Steve Coulter, Dean J. West, Vince Pisani, Teri Wyble, and Steve Mokate.

Shit, the military is involved as well? Better just add them to the Republicans side! For a film about rounding up people and killing them (allegedly), they really knew how to drag things out and make it really boring. This is the sort of film that promises a lot of deaths, on both sides, and this is wasted on fast group kills that don’t leave a lot left for the viewer.

This works in favor of the film early on, when people are dying when you might not expect it. Big names, with barely any lines, it is hard to know just who the main character is going to be. A lot of traps and explosions and more.

And then when we have only a handful left, it stalls really hard. Later on, a large percentage of the “bad guys” go out right around the same time, once again, why so fast? They needed to much better pace out the killing and keep it diverse.

In the second half of the film, I was left with a lot of slower conversations, like they really needed to pad the running time of this movie to make it last 90 minutes. I shouldn’t be falling asleep as they get to the point.

And yet here I am. The Hunt is all hype and not enough substance. It doesn’t go far enough on the killing, nor really anywhere with its message. This is a film that would only work as a short. Could have told the same sort of story in about 20 minutes and saved all of us time with a much better experience overall.

1 out of 4.

Greed is probably my 2nd favorite game show of all time. I think it had a good balance of trivia, team work, back stabbery, and good money prizes. I am annoyed it didn’t take off more. My favorite would be Survivor, if that counts as a game show.

However, this doesn’t have anything to do with the game show, outside of the concept of needing…uhh, money. And Greed.

I couldn’t tell what I was really getting into when I accepted the invite. It had an orange dude on the cover, so I didn’t know if it was going for Trump parody, a different person, a mockumentary or what. I did know it was going to be British, which means strange humor.

This doesn’t look like British humor! These are clearly Brazilian outfits!

Sir Richard McCreadie (Steve Coogan), or Greedy McCreadie from his non-fans, is a dick. An older, relatively wealthy, dick. He grabbed himself by his bootstraps, had already a large sum of money, and turned himself into a fashion icon.

Sure, most of his companies failed. Most of them went bankrupt and somehow the assets went to his family. His wife (Isla Fisher) was able to profit off of them the most, and a lot of it went into Tax Free havens. He borrowed money from the banks to pay for companies, that then went into the companies debt, not his own. He knew the system and knew how to make it work for him and his own, no one else.

>Well McCreadie is about to turn 60. He is annoyed about the bad press, the investigations, and the negativity. He is going to throw a giant bash for himself, regardless of what conditions his workers face. He is going to have the best party, in Greece, with all the stops pulled out. He also has a writer (David Mitchell) doing his life story. He has a lot of random workers like Amanda (Dinita Gohil) whose mom works in his factory, and a son (Asa Butterfield) who can’t stand him.

Yep, this party is going to be the best or the worst.

Also starring Sarah

Solemani, Tim Key, Asim Chaudhry, Ollie Locke, Kareem Alkabbani, Pearl Mackie, Jamie Blackley, Shanina Shaik, Jonny Sweet, Sophie Cookson, and Shirley Henderson.

He’s not Trump. He is more competent.

Greed was weird. It had good moments, and lame moments. I want to be positive and focus mostly on the good.

I enjoyed the strangeness of Mitchell’s character, the writer, who was above it all and awkwardly placed at the same time. Name dropping literary references, not being sure how to handle the lavish dicks all around. He is our character going through the same emotions the audience go through, except he has a bit more say in what happens by the end.

Other actors of note include Gohil, Key, and Chaudhry, who all give us realistic feeling characters. And sure. Coogan as our asshole rich man, with his slick and creative slurs. The rest of the cast isn’t given a lot to work with, outside of being unbearable rich people for the most part, doing dick things and living fake lives. It is more of a script issue than anything, but none of them stand out in a positive way to elevate the film.

The film gets really weird with the end. Often, real stories give us text updates at the end to let us know about the real characters after the events of the film. This one did that as well, except it is about fake people. Instead it talked about real issues, with a lot more weight and passion that didn’t seem to match the scrutiny during the actual film.

Sure, it had rich people doing bad things, and they noted it as bad. It still didn’t seem like such a big deal in the context of ridiculous characters. So it felt like a harder attack at the end. They should have done a better job at being more explicit with the message they were really going for overall.

On its own, its is an okay movie, with some interesting elements. In retrospect, especially how it was filmed, it might have been even better as an actual mockumentary, as it already had a lot of good elements there.

2 out of 4.