Tag: 4 out of 4

I am happy to say that I was able to go into Sicario with a blind eye. I knew nothing about the plot and I was happy about that fact. Hell, when I first saw the cover and name, I just assumed it was some random horror film.

But what I was unable to avoid was the hype train. The hype train drove through my city like a…well, train. Praise from all sides about the acting, directing, cinemetography, plot, you name it, people loved it.

That sucks. Now I went into the film expecting greatness. The important note here is that I did, in fact, go into the film. I was supposed to see 99 Films this night. I convinced myself otherwise, to avoid the free pre-screening, and pay my hard cash money to see the movie so I can review it and compare it to its hype. I might have had to wait until a DVD release if it wasn’t super hyped, and who the hell knows when that would be. I can’t miss out on potential Oscar greatness for Andrew MotherFucking Garfield!?!

Some say Garfield is living his post-Spider-Man life as an immigrant on the run from the law.

Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is an FBI agent living in Arizona and she is pretty dang good at her job. She is currently working on a string of kidnappings in the area by a Mexican Cartel lord. The guy pretends to be a legitimate business man, but they all know he is running the gangs secretly and taking orders from Mexico. Kate and her partner, Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluuya), also find out that parts of the house were rigged to explode. Well fuck. These assholes are going to start booby trapping their hideouts to smuggle people places. This means every future job just got that much more dangerous and things really really suck.

But have no fear, every day American citizens. The government is on the case!

Kate is hand picked to join a larger, inter-department task force, lead by the CIA. She doesn’t know a lot about the mission. Just that it is lead by an asshole, Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), who only slightly works or the CIA, and his mysterious friend, Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), someone who isn’t even American, nor is he CIA. He is a “consultant.”

Next thing Kate knows, she is whisked away to El Paso. She was told the overall mission of the task force was to bring own the kidnappings and drugs in that area. To actually hurt the cartel from the top and not through their lackies.

What she didn’t know is how many laws would be broken in the process. Not including murder, crossing borders, torture and kidnapping. Lovely. What’s a moral girl gonna do in a situation like that?

Also with Victor Garber, Jon Bernthal, Maximillia Hernandez, and the best Miami Spy, Jeffrey Donovan.

You can’t fool me with your hipster glasses and fake mustache. I know it is you, Michael Weston.

Sicario was one of those perfect movie experiences. Outside of the two dudes who literally had phone calls during the showing. This is what I get for going to a non-screener, non-drafthouse like setting.

Why was it perfect? Sicario was like a slow burning wine. It was dark, realistic, slow, beautifully well shot, great characters, tense moments, and with a bit of moral ambiguity. Not a lot, but a bit. Someone should let me know if what I said about wine makes any sense, because I don’t know anything about wine, but the saying seemed natural enough.

Acting on all fronts were great. We got Brolin being a dick, pretty standard. But the obvious and clear stand outs come from Blunt and Del Toro. Blunt has been having a heck of a career with her last few movies. She seems to always give it her all and seems to be getting even more dramatic roles in the future thanks to it. Blunt gets to play our law abiding character who doesn’t know what really goes on, the one the audience gets to relate to.

Del Toro isn’t introduced until later in the film, but by the end he definitely becomes a true co star and almost another main protagonist. I once had a friend who said he would watch anything with Del Toro in it. But that was in 2010 and he was trying to justify being interested in The Wolfman. I knew he was in a lot of good movies, but I wasn’t a megafan. But hell, this is the type of performance that could make someone a megafan. His character is very rich and the movie does a nice job of slowly unraveling his mystique. He is one of the most BAMF characters in film this year, while at the same time you never really know if you are supposed to be cheering for or against him.

I wouldn’t be a good reviewer if I didn’t further talk about the cinematography. Denis Villeneuve likes pretty movies and he wants your eyes to be ecstatic. You’d know that if you saw his recent movies, Enemy and Prisoners. That is why with this film and Prisoners he used the legendary Roger Deakins to set up his shots. So much attention to detail was put into every frame, the only thing that could ruin it would be mutilated bodies and dead nudity.

Oh.

Yeah. Some of that is in here too I guess.

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

Everyone knows that James Cameron really loves the ocean. He is stupid rich and just wants to conquer it.

In some ways, I am starting to think that Matt Damon is like a James Cameron-lite. He doesn’t like water, but he is starting to love the shit out of outer space. Three films in three years have featured a Mr. Damon spending time away from Earth. First in Elysium, he went from the slums to the orbit. But you know, he was just there for a little bit. In Interstellar, he was in space for a long..long time. And he was alone!

Think of it like a Three Bears situation. In Elysium he was in space for a small amount of time, in Interstellar it was too long. But maybe in The Martian, Damon will find his “just right” amount of space time. You know, then he can go back to Earth and start doing political things again. Or Boston things. Or maybe, just maybe, fingers crossed, he can go back to voicing Bill the Krill.

Damon had a lot of time alone to reflect on his career while pretending to be on Mars.

Set somewhere in the future, NASA has successfully put people on Mars! Yay! We rock! Speaking of Rocks, there are a lot of them on Mars. And sometimes there are dangerous rock storms. When a particularly powerful storm begins to develop, Commander Lewis (Jessica Chastain) decides that they need to evacuate the planet. There is a chance their escape rocket could tip over and then they’d be stranded! During the storm though, Matt Watney (Damon), a space botanist, gets hit by some debris and goes flying. All of their suit flashy devices say that his suit has opened and he has to be dead.

So Lewis and the rest of the crew (Michael Pena, Kate Mara, Sebastian Stan, Aksel Hennie) escape Mars to begin their flight home a few weeks ahead of schedule.

But it turns out, against extreme odds, that Matt is actually alive. However, he is now stranded. The mission only was supposed to last about 30 days, and they had made it to 17, so his rations aren’t that plentiful. He has a huge checklist of responsibilities suddenly that are all vital to his survival. He has to figure out how to grow his own food on a desert planet. He has to make sure his equipment doesn’t break, so he doesn’t run out of water or oxygen. He has to figure out a way to communicate with NASA. And of course, he has to figure out how to get himself home. Even though Matt wants to survive, he openly acknowledges his impending doom and realizes that almost everything he does is just prolonging his most likely catastrophic death.

Eventually, obviously, he isn’t 100% alone. Or else it would be an impossibility. Back on Earth, thanks to satellites, they are able to eventually note the differences of the site and realize he must be alive and kicking. This is where I can sneak in all the rest of the actors.

Who is involved in the mission to get him back? Well, of course, the Head of NASA (Jeff Daniels), a different head of NASA type guy (Chiwetel Ejiofor), head of the Mars program (Sean Bean), head…engineer…of the shuttle? (Benedict Wong), an Astrodynamics guy (Donald Glover), head of NASA PR (Kristen Wiig), and Mindy Park (Mackenzie Davis) who controls a satellite. Or something.

This unfortunate scene reminded me too much of Fantastic Four and now I am undergoing PTSD.

Ridley Scott has been not putting his best foot forward recently. Exodus: Gods and Kings and The Counselor were terrible, and Prometheus had a lot of issues. So I have to go into every new movie of his with a bit of a hesitation.

Thankfully, Scott did not disappoint this time and knocked The Martian out of the park.

The absolute best part of the film is its attention to detail and scientific accuracy. I don’t know how hardcore they went into it, but I will be checking Neil Gegrasse Tyson’s twitter to see if the stars on mars were at least accurate. But everything else is so damn sound and smart. I almost stood up in the middle of the movie to chant U-S-A and show off my Science Boner. That is a bit graphic, but the metaphor is necessary to emphasis how sexy it all was. It isn’t dumbed down and they just go full on smart people talk on the viewer.

After the science, we have to talk about the Damon. Damon plays what has to be the greatest Botanist ever on the silver screen. I don’t know how praise worthy that statement actually is. The writers made him smart, charming, witty and a guy with a morbid sense of humor. He tells jokes to logs where he notes everything he is doing, with the caveat that it probably won’t matter since he will most likely die. And he even got to say “Fuck” twice in the film, despite the PG-13 Rating!

Basically everyone in the cast was great in their roles. Even Stan, Mara, and Hennie, the crew members who people don’t care much about. I want to give special shout outs to Glover, who had a small role but was extremely convincing, and Wong, who was an important side character who for some reason didn’t even make the IMDB credit list.

The film is of course also visually wonderful. Mars, the future Houston space center, outer space, all of it is great. I don’t think 3D added much to the film, and it should be a good experience without it. It isn’t as necessary as Gravity.

Despite how much I liked the film, it only has one issue. There is a sort of epilogue after the events, so you can find out what happened to characters. It seemed off to me. It was also a bit sudden of a tone shift. The previous scene I was almost at the point of tears (You don’t get to know if from happiness or sadness, sorry), but they ended it too quickly for all the emotions to rile up in me. And the last few minutes were just…meh.

Oh well, 99% of a film is still pretty damn awesome.

For the most part, I tend to avoid films that begin with the word Love. I did a theme week a few years ago watching a whole lot of films that began with Love, and for the most part I was disappointed. Here’s a snapshot of those films and review ratings as simple reminder. Basically, since I watched Love and Other Drugs, no other Love film got close. A few strange ones did a good job, but for the most part, they were all meh, bad, or shit.

But new movies keep coming out, and occasionally they start with love. I still don’t mean that in a story telling sense. As I review new movies, I will of course still watch them, but I won’t actively seek out a film with this strange specification. Regardless, I was slightly interested to see Love & Mercy.

That is because this bad boy is about the “greatest rock album” of the 20th century, Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys Brian Wilson!

Less surfing, more strange sounds and a journey through one’s mind.
So… mind surfing.

In the mid-1960’s, The Beach Boys were everywhere. In 4 years they had already released 10 albums, a lot of them about surfing. They were world famous, tours, money, all that fun stuff. But Brian Wilson (Paul Dano) wanted something more. None of them actually ever surfed, it all felt fake. He was a composer at heart and had a sound in his head that he needed to record and let the world hear!

So he didn’t tour with the group to focus on their next album. He pulled out all the strings, getting great orchaestra players to figure out the tunes and sounds without any words for most of the music yet. And he did what he always wanted to do, to make what would become the Pet Sounds album, despite all the naysayers.

Also, it is the mid-1980’s. Brian Wilson (John Cusack) is mostly alone, on a lot of drugs, and under the guidance of a caregiver Dr. Landy (Paul Giamatti). He cannot see his kids, he is under constant watch and other people make all of his main decisions in life.

His life sucks. His life might have always sucked. But there is some hope, in Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), a cars saleswoman he meets one day. They start to date and she starts to see how bad his situation is. She wants to get him help because she is starting to like Wilson, who seems to only be a shell of a person at this time.

Oh and I guess some other Beach Boys are in this movie. Played by Kenny Wormald, Graham Rogers, Jake Abel and Brett Davern. They have various speaking parts in this movie and some of them butt heads with Brian when they hear his album concept. And of course, Bill Camp gets to play the dad of the Wilson kids and former manager and not former mean person.

Sometimes you just wake up in the morning and think, “Fuck, even my art is beach themed.”

What is this, the year of the musical biopic? A lot of them tend to be terrible VH1 Behind the Music level films that tell a story we have all heard before with some sweet tunes. But 2015 has given us Love & Mercy, which you know I will call amazing, and Straight Outta Compton, which was definitely amazing. I would like to thank Get On Up from August 2014 for this. It was a good musical biopic, not on the level of the above films, but better than average. It seems like the genre can do no wrong!

Why is this one fantastic? Thankfully it is for multiple reasons. First off, the acting from Dano and Cusack is incredible, yet very very different. Yes, they play the same man about twenty years apart, but they are very different times in his life where he has a very different psyche. In Dano, you can see the artistic genius at show but also see how he starts to crack and fall apart despite the currently good events in his life. For Cusack, he plays a more typical drugged up/mentally ill person trying to make his way in the world. While a good performance, from an acting stand point it didn’t seem to be breaking new ground like it did for Dano.

Again, Cusack was actually really good in this, but to me he was overshadowed by Dano who was really really good in this. And besides, it was a bit hard to imagine Cusack as anyone other than just a bit more out of touch Cusack.

But that is just the first reason! The other reason comes from the plot and accuracy. I, like a lot of people, would love it if the bio films were more all encompassing instead of focusing on a few events. But they picked great (read: sad) times in Wilson’s life to really tell the story of what he has overcome and what he has accomplished. But to tell a coherent parallel story always takes some gusto. This is the first major movie directed by Bill Pohlad, who has produced a lot of great films. It is a very impressive first outing, an incredible work for him and the writers who pieced together this movie.

God Only Knows what we would have done without the Pet Sounds album and eventually this film.

“You know what your website needs?” I hear these words all the time. People offering suggestions for genres, or movies to review. I like suggestions, so this is great. “Your website needs more horror films from other countries.” Well, that is a very specific request. But let’s do it.

Now the person who requested that most likely meant something Asian. They have a lot of crazy scary horror films, if I am to believe my friends. Since I am afraid of scary things, I never really jumped into that subset. So instead, let’s take it slow and dive into European Horror. Specifically, Austrian.

Oh hey, look at that. Austria’s official submission for Best Foreign Language Film in the next Oscars is actually a horror movie! That means it is either really good, or Austrian cinema is really lacking.

That is why I am looking at Goodnight Mommy, or, Ich Seh, Ich Seh (which of course does not mean Goodnight Mommy in German). I assume the name change in English is because they didn’t want their film compared to Foghorn Leghorn.

“Ah see, I see, sons, why are you wearing those masks?” – Foghorn Leghorn playing the mother.

Lukas (Lukas Schwarz) and Elias (Elias Schwarz) are twins, let’s say 11, living in a secluded and rich house in the Austrian countryside. There are farms nearby, woods, a lake, some caves, everything they could want. And eventually their mom (Susanne Wuest) comes home! Yay!

Or…or does she? Their mom was involved in some sort of accident. She had a lot of surgery on her face. So her face is wrapped up in bandages, with just her eyes and mouth visible. But the boys believe that something is different. Their mom is meaner and more distant. She has created a lot of rules that keep the boys mostly in home or right in the yard.

She doesn’t take them to town. She orders in food so they can just be alone for a good long time while she heals. They are alone and they are pretty certain that the lady is not their mother under the bandages. But with a dad out of the picture and no real ability to talk to anyone, what are a couple of kids supposed to do?

Also featuring Hans Escher as a priest and Elfriede Schatz and Karl Purker as two Red Cross workers.

“Why the hell aren’t you showing any faces in these pictures?” – You, the reader.

On the comment card after the film, I wrote “I am completely unsettled.” That wasn’t descriptive enough though. I should have also mentioned that my jimmies were in fact rustled as well. In all honesty, the best way to describe my emotions after the film can probably only be described as an emoji, but I don’t use those and I don’t want to find the appropriate one.

This is not a typical horror. It isn’t full of scares throughout, but a good chunk of the film is instead just a bit eerie. The directors spend a lot of time building the mood before things really start to hit the fan. There are glimpses of madness, but they are in short bursts, or told through dreams, letting the creepiness build.

But the in the entire third act, we reach the level of things you come to expect from the drama, and it pays off wonderfully.

Two aspects of this movie I really enjoyed. One, it is a mystery of sorts technically. But the mystery doesn’t seem to be that important. I imagine most people will “figure it out” before they finally reveal what is going on, but that doesn’t take away from the film. Once I had my guess, I enjoyed watching the film to look for hints or clues to see if what I thought was right. It was still a good experience.

Two, the directors used a lot of silence which is a lacking sound from most modern horrors. Silence is a wonderful tool that can be used to make a situation far more tense. And I don’t mean “Silence, followed by loud scary noise to make you jump!”. No, just silence to make the gross or scary a bit more realistic and thus a bit more darker.

I don’t want to see Goodnight Mommy again. My body couldn’t take it. I hope some of the more graphic scenes eventually leave my brain completely because of how brutal they were. Goodnight Mommy has to be a good horror film, because it scared me into wanting to see it a second time.

Man on Wire is another documentary I have inexplicably just avoided. I blame the year it came out, 2008. Right now I am only watching things from 2010 and on! A five year window is very important for my website to feel modern and fresh. If you ever google recommended good documentaries, Man on Wire will be a relatively recent one always recommended, along with Grizzly Man.

Needless to say, it has almost always been on Netflix as well. A very easy documentary to get access to. There is also the ticking clock element here, with The Walk coming out in a couple weeks. You know, the movie version of this same old story that was probably only made because of how allegedly good the documentary was. I have to watch this, because a film based on a film is totally something I should do as a reviewer. Nothing like reading a book before the movie. And that is why I chose Man on Wire for my 4th day of Fucking Finally week.

The documentary is about Philippe Petit, an eccentric French man, who is really confident in his balance.

And he had dreams. He had dreams of showing the world how good he could balance. He was just a guy who had a type rope and would walk it in the park, getting better over time. But he wanted to reach for the stars. He wanted to tight rope walk on national land marks.

Kind of like my own goal to take a poop in every National park in America. It is just something that can drive someone to do weird things.

Hey look. A dude on a string!

How weird? Well, homeboy went and tight roped on top of the Notre Dame chapel thing. Kind of cool. But not that impressive. Then he went to Australia and did it on top of the Sydney Opera House. Boring. Gravity works differently in Australia because they are all upside down. We all know that.

Those things were all for the kids though. His real life long goal was the Twin Towers in NYC. He knew it when he first saw a picture of them in a magazine before they were finishing being built. That would be his greatest life moment. One day.

So he did it! Before they were even finished. With many months of planning, sneaking, with a group of friends and acquaintances to help him pull of the best art crime of the century. Man on Wire is his story, told by him and his friends (yes, still alive!), through reenactments and real footage.

And despite knowing the outcome (success, good job!), it is still somehow unbelievably tense. The music department does a fantastic job, along with the reenactments of keeping away from the guards in their many trips to make their plan work.

But the reason this documentary works is Philippe Petit himself. This man has a huge ego and is clearly in love with himself. But he is also giddy and excited in the telling of his own story (I would be too if it made me world famous and helped me not have to really work much again). His enthusiasm is contagious. He doesn’t even sit still for the interview, getting up several times to make a point more clear by acting things out.

Petit is the kind of guy you invite to a party, assuming you don’t care if it becomes all about him.

Petit is the kind of guy who can make a really good sandwich, and will share it with you, but only one type of sandwich.

Petit is the reason this documentary is so well loved and a fantastic thing to view and listen to. I hope Joseph Gordon-Levitt can pull him off!

Here is a dumb question you can ask your friends and coworkers if you want them to dislike you a little bit more than they already do.

“Before Mount Everest was discovered, what was the highest mountain on Earth?” This will make them ponder and come up with some bad guess, and you can quickly toss in a “It was still Mount Everest, it just wasn’t discovered, dipshit!” And again, you will lose friends.

My main problem with this joke, as a geophysicist/movie reviewer, is that it assumes that Mount Everest was always the tallest mountain on Earth, and that things don’t change. But we know they change, we know India and Asia weren’t always smashing into each other, so there is a real answer to the question of what used to be the tallest mountain before Mount Everest took over.

Turns out this knowledge is hard to get to and a bit awkward. But know there is a real answer out there. Just modern technology hasn’t always existed.

Oh yeah, I am supposed to talk about Everest. I think I should watch it on a large screen to give the large mountain its necessary honor.

Like a very gentle soft touch on its top most tip.

About 50-55 million years ago, India collided with Asia. It was probably the fastest moving tectonic plate ever, as it split with what is now Madagascar, presumably looking for a new climate. India was on an oceanic plate that was subducting under Asia at the time, which is the why it moved so fast. Once they crashed, the Himalaya mountains decided to be a thing, as the two land masses crumbled into each other, upward and forward! They grew fast and grew hard, making some really tall mountains that are still growing today. Mount Everest, aka Sagarm?th?, aka Chomolungma, currently sitting at 29,029 ft above sea level. Everest’s main purpose seems to be looking tall and killing crazy white assholes.

Oh, but maybe you care about those assholes? Well in that case, the film itself takes place in 1996, based on a real life disaster that took place that year and had like, five books written about it from survivors. Lot of primary sources to work with.

But our main character is Rob Hall (Jason Clarke), owner of Adventure Consultants out of New Zealand leads groups up Everest for large sums, helping them the whole way. He was the first to do this as a commercial business. There is also Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal), main guide of Mountain Madness, who started doing the same thing later. In 1996, it was extremely popular though, and there were dozens of groups up there, all trying to use the few mountain paths to make it to the top, around the same time, causing a lot of problems.

Speaking of people, we have a few more notables. Like the fact that Rob’s wife (Kiera Knightley) is at home, pregnant, ready to give birth not long after his return. And Jon Krakauer (Michael Kelly), a journalist who is going to write about his experience. And Doug Hansen (John Hawkes), a regular guy who worked three jobs to save up money to hike Everest, making his second attempt to the peak to help school kids realize that dreams come true! And Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin), from Texas, a cocky dude who feels good when he climbs, but is depressed back at home. And and and and of course Anatoli Boukreev (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson), one of the guides working with Fischer, and a general bamf climber.

Honestly, plot reviews are easy in this case, because I don’t have to describe bad things happening. I just have to talk about who is involved. And since it is such a big cast, here are a few other people involved!

Emily Watson played the base camp leader with Elizabeth Debicki as their team doctor. Thomas M. Wright, Martin Henderson, and Tom Goodman-Hill play the other 3 guides and Sam Worthington plays a literal Guy who works with Adventuring Consultants, and in real life later becomes their director and CEO. Naoko Mori plays Yasuko Namba, who had climbed 6 of the 7 main peaks with Everest as her last, and Robin Wright as the wife of Beck Weathers.

Color coding the hikers is a good strategy, but I feel bad for anyone who got stuck with red.

Apparently, sometimes, I get a little bit emotional over some geology. Because at least one scene in particular had me bawling my eyes out. I mean I found myself crying in the dark theater, surrounded by strangers, crying for like two minutes. It wasn’t even at the end of film, it was probably about 80% of the way through. I am just an emotional wreck since I had a baby, I guess.

Everest is an intense, dramatic, and gorgeous film. It was made in particular to be experience first hand on an IMAX screen. Sure, in the beginning, it is a bit weird as we get some character introductions, watching them hike to base camp and the weeks of training before they finally climb. It isn’t just a group of people running up a hill and facing constant threats. They don’t slowly die one at a time like it is a horror film. This is based on a true story and the attention to detail is astounding. It is easy to get things right when you have multiple books to figure it all out.

The last 40 minutes is extremely gripping. Not knowing the actual story, I didn’t know who would make it out alive so I was afraid for everyone. They all feel like real people and it is easy to connect with many of them before their eventual ascent.

Finally, I think my favorite part of this movie is that it isn’t about a group of people trying to battle nature and show their dominance. It is really about a mountain, who gives zero fucks about the insignificant life forms that sometimes explore its slopes. It is about how nature is unforgiving and doesn’t care about how much prep work occurs, it will do what it wants, when it wants. It is about how life doesn’t care if you are a good person, or a bad person, a newbie or a trainer climber, you are just as likely to get killed in a heart beat.

Nature is a fucking beast. And Everest is fucking good.

I started talking about Straight Outta Compton with my review of Dope, because I am super white and ignorant.

Basically, I don’t know jack shit about this album, nor do I know a lot about the artists who made up N.W.A. I do know the phrase before the internet meme sensation came out, but that is probably only due to the fact that Weird Al made a similar joke almost ten years ago. Weird Al continues to give me most of my music knowledge about what is hip and cool in the world.

Despite not being able to name even one song from the album, I would probably consider myself an expert on late 80’s and early 90’s rap music. As you already know, I have seen and reviewed the movie Notorious! Yeah, because rap on the west coast and rap on the east coast were basically the same thing. That sounds like something I heard once.

They find my joke hilarious, because I am so white and don’t know any better.

Lives used to suck for black people back in the day. I can keep that sentence vague, because in America is has basically always been true. Back in the day could be yesterday, technically. But in this case I mean 1980’s, where apparently everyone was free and equal under the law, and the law wanted to put the black youth in their place. Arrested for being black was a common occurrence, but also drugs, gang violence, and more. N.W.A. was a rap super group from Compton, California, composed of five members with various talent.

We had Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), who was just in high school but a great lyricist. He wasn’t a thug, but he sure got harassed by the police. Dr. Dre, or Andre (Corey Hawkins) was hoping to be a DJ and produce music, not sit in a cubicle all day. There was Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), who had money and some clout in the music business and would help set them up if they had a good idea. But then he was forced to rap, and hey, he could do it well. And then there was MC Ren (Aldis Hodge) and Dj Yella (Neil Brown Jr.) were also in the group, but this film was a lot less about them and more about the other three. They wrote some rhymes and DJ’d too, I guess. I don’t know shit about them.

They are the two on the left so they don’t complain to me about under-representation. Now I can ignore them the rest of this review.

Either way, their first single Boyz-N-The-Hood was an instant success. Their whole city and area loved it, and it spread like wildfire. They weren’t being soft with their words and they were telling the street truth about their lives. It was gangster rap. They were quickly signed by Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti) as their manager, because he does sleazy well, and he was able to get them to produce a few more hits to create their first album. Straight Outta Compton! They were signed by the same record company who was getting big off of the California Raisins and wanted to branch out, and next thing you know, they are touring around the United States to sold our concert arenas carrying a strong message. You know, Fuck The Police and all that.

This of course led to the arrest for being black and speaking out, and other shenanigans. The group was now super famous, but thanks to contract disputes and managers screwing people over, they also had to go their separate ways. First Ice Cube left, causing a big rift and song battles, then Dr. Dre founded his own company with Suge Knight (R. Marcos Taylor) (Don’t fuck with Suge Knight. He will secretly give you aids, kill Tupac and Biggie and get away with it all).

And uhh. More stuff happens I guess. Shit. I can’t tell you about everything. I can’t tell you about Rodney King. I should let something be a surprise.

Other artists name dropped in the film include The D.O.C., Tupac, and Snoop Dogg. Actors aren’t even important in there. However, some of the women who would go on to be wives and lovers of the big three are played by Carra Patterson, Alexandra Shipp, and Elena Goode.

You can tell the band members apart by what their favorite teams are: All from California, surprisingly!

Not many people get to play their own dad in a movie about their life. First you need a famous father. Then you have to be the right age at the right time. You also need to look a lot like him. So O’Shea Jackson Jr. got to play his dad, Ice Cube, which is awesome. He is like the kid in Notorious, who played his dad for like one small age group in that film.

In particular, I thought Jackson Jr. and Hawkins did a phenomenal job playing Cube and Dre, which also happen to be the people I know more about thanks to how big they both got. But their stories, and Eazy-E’s story was a fantastic thing for almost anyone to hear and , despite it being over 20 years ago, oddly relevant to today still. Things don’t change that quickly, regardless of the size of computer chips. However, nothing made me cry! There were three scenes where they were going to attempt to bring out the tears, but I was able to resist them all. The last two would have totally gotten me if they just made those scenes a little bit longer, but when your film is already pushing 2.5 hours, it is understandable to make a few cuts.

Seriously, this movie was intense, dramatic, entertaining, a bit funny, extremely informative, and an all around fantastic film for just about everybody. Maybe not your kids, leave them at home for awhile. Honestly, this is now my second favorite music group biographical film, and I don’t even care about most of the music in this one! It will be hard for something to beat The Temptations, honestly, unless we eventually get a gritty Weird Al movie. Two references in one review, solid.

Hold up your hands. Now bend your hands back a little bit and curl your fingers. Then use this hand position to hit someone in the face, with the bottom part of your palm. That is what I thought Southpaw was before this movie.

Southpaw didn’t actually teach me what a Southpaw was, I had to find out after the fact. Apparently it is just a mainly left handed boxer though, instead of the normal right handed boxer. Oh well.

Either way, the main reason I was interested in this film was to see a buff Jake Gyllenhaal. We had glimpses of it in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, but no one wanted to see that movie for some reason. The best part about the muscles put on by Gyllenhaal is that he did it right after starring in Nightcrawler, where he famously lost a lot of weight and has scrawny body.

Look out everyone. Gyllenhaal is now willing to do potential future harm to his health to give it his all in these roles.

And he is excited to do it!

Billy Hope (Gyllenhaal) has got it all. He is undefeated, over 40 wins to his name! He is the lightweight champion of the world! He has friends, a loving wife, Maureen (Rachel McAdams), a daughter, Leila (Oona Laurence), a mansion, a lifelong manager friend/promoter (50 Cent), and fat filthy stacks of cash.

But he wasn’t given these things. He had to work hard. He was an orphan, raised in the foster care system. So was his wife! So were all his friends. From nothing they created something great, and now with all the hits to the head, there is a chance he could lose it all if he keeps taking a beating. His wife wants him to live to see their daughter grow up, a fair request. So sure, maybe he should retire.

Not everyone is down with his retirement though. Miguel Escobar (Miguel Gomez) claims he is the best at the sport, but Billy won’t give him a chance. Miguel needs to beat the best to claim he is the best, so he starts a public taunting event to get Billy to commit. But when the taunting gets too personal, events quickly escalate and a pretty bad thing happens. I honestly don’t know if the bad thing was said in the spoiler, so I will avoid saying it.

Needless to say, post “bad thing”, Billy won’t get to live out the rest of his life as planned. Depression, loss of wealth, drugs, all of these things bring Billy down. After he loses everything, then, maybe then, he can turn his life around with an old gym owner (Forest Whitaker) and living on the streets.

Also featuring Naomie Harris, Skylan Brooks, and Beau Knapp.

Billy was eventually defeated by a KO from his daughter, quite embarrassingly.

Southpaw left me an emotional wreck. Notably important, I have a wife and I have a daughter, so despite not growing up on the streets or being athletic in any way, I found myself relating really heavily with the main character. All the bad things that happened to him I could imagine happening to me, so I was on the same wavelength from minute 1 and on.

Southpaw isn’t a revolutionary story. It has some normal boxing movie moments, maybe even cliches if you will. It wasn’t going for Warrior (shut up, I know it wasn’t boxing, close enough). But what elevates Southpaw is in the incredible acting.

Everyone was on point in this film. Gyllenhaal gave a complete performance, transforming himself into a new person. The film was originally going to star Eminem as the titular role, as a spiritual sequel to 8 Mile. Obviously Eminem wasn’t a champion boxer, but the whole film would be a metaphor for what was going on in his life and his own struggles. It was actually easy to imagine him playing the role early on, but I don’t think he could have pulled off the more emotional and intense parts of the film in the middle and end.

McAdams is in a lot of movies that make me cry, but she is never the reason for the tears. This time McAdams made me cry, who gave one of her best performances. It took awhile to get used to it, but it worked. Whitaker also gives his best performance in years, doing well on the drunk ramblings. It was nice to see after a few pretty bad and cheap movies in a row. And of course, Laurence as the daughter did an amazing job. She conveyed emotions through her eyes like a seasoned pro, with only one of her scenes feeling a bit cheesy.

Southpaw is a movie about a family and boxing. Broken down it is awkward: Boxer’s life turned upside down due to boxing, only way to fix it is more boxing. But the acting and characters make it an incredible film experience.

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

I have been waiting to see the documentary Merchants of Doubt for years. Technically. Kind of.

Let me back track. When I was an undergraduate at UNC, I was also a security guard. Paid well, and I got to do homework/watch movies during shifts. During one desk shift at a building, there was a talk from some lady. Apparently there was a gun nut in attendance who disagreed a lot with her and asked a bunch of awkward questions, noting he had a gun and then left. I of course wasn’t anywhere near it, but was told after he left to be on the look out.

The speaker was Naomi Oreskes, one of the authors of the book. The talk she gave was probably wonderful, but I wasn’t able to see it obviously. So I bought the book instead, Merchants of Doubt, telling myself I would totally read it. This was back in 2010 or 2011.

Obviously I never read the book. But last year I found out that a documentary would be made of the same name! Hooray! Now I don’t have to read the book I bought so many years ago! I can just spend a little over an hour and a half, getting all of the same information in easy to digest form! So although when I bought the book I didn’t know it would become a documentary, I somehow knew then I wished it was the whole time.

Either way, long intro aside, this documentary has one main point: The same science fucks who sided with the smoking companies saying there was no evidence of smoke being bad / cigarettes being addictive are the fucks who are also denying climate change.

This is one of those fucks right here.

Of course it isn’t as simple as that. First of all, the title comes from the strategy that tobacco companies used once there began to be evidence of bad things. They used doubt. People went on the TV, to spread confusion. They told people that scientists didn’t know, some say yes, some say no, no real proof yet, but they are working on it. This worked for a long, long time. So other companies began to use it as well. Oil, pesticides, pharmaceutical companies, you name it.

And again the fact that the scientists involved to back these claims up also tend to be on the “company side” more often than not sounds beyond sketch. Because you know, it is in fact sketch.

This documentary goes into great detail through both the history and how it affects today’s scientific and political landscape. Long story short: think tanks, ran by corporations secretly, to make it seem like things like climate change are controversial and not completely agreed upon. They even help make reports look identical to the IPCC report, with opposite conclusions, to confuse people further.

Shit’s fucked up, and now Republicans all disagree with man made climate change (despite most saying it was real back in ’08) because that is where the money is. End of story.

A very informative documentary, one that should be watched by more people to see the shady shit that happens in politics, in order to make money.

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.