Tag: Ava Acres

When you build a website on a willingness to watch anything, you have to actually watch a lot of random shit. And it gets harder when you get behind, because then most of your reviews end up being the films that everyone is already going to watch or already know about. Not the real hidden gems or hidden turds out there.

And yet somehow, I found a new Netflix original film that wasn’t very advertised and one they are probably just trying to make and hide. A hidden title, still with their Netflix original sticker on it. Not only that, but the title is Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie. It has Netflix in the fucking title? What’s up with that? That’s weird.

This movie has so little information about it that I couldn’t even find out why they went that route. Is it just a double form of advertising? Does it take place INSIDE the Netflix head quarters? I DON’T KNOW.

But I need to know, and now, I am watching a movie not many people have noticed to exist yet. Hooray!

The fireworks are a metaphor.

Gene Handsome (Jeff Garlin) is a detective, getting old, maybe he will retire, maybe not. But he is lonely. He lives alone on his street, with one of his neighbors (Eddie Pepitone) being a PI with a younger accordion playing wife (Leah Remini) and they are eccentric. But he has new neighbors! And on the way over to introduce them and give them cookies, he finds Heather (Hailee Keanna Lautenbach), the baby sitter instead and she doesn’t trust him. That’s fair.

But then the next day, Heather is found dead and cut up on a famous actor’s lawn. Talbert Bacorn (Steven Weber) has no idea who this lady is or why his lawn, but Handsome and his partner, Fleur Scozzari (Natasha Lyonne) are on the case! With almost nothing to base it off of.

Thankfully, he can now meet his new neighbor (Christine Woods) and her daughter (Ava Acres) under a weird set of circumstances. Maybe it can lead to a less lonely life. Oh sorry, that is creepy, given the circumstances.

Also featuring Timm Sharp, William Stanford Davis, and Joe Kenda.

That bathrobe is also a metaphor.

Handsome is a hard movie to categorize. It isn’t laugh out loud funny, it is more just peculiar. My wife described it as quirky. I would also describe it as overexagerrated while also somehow down to earth.

There isn’t necessarily anything in this film that feels unreasonable. All of the plot details are fine. It is just that everyone is a bit odd, a bit out there, I don’t know if there is a single “straight character” in the movie. All of the characters seem to have their own stories and inspirations and this is just us caught up right in the middle of it.

In fact, this movie sort of feels like a pilot episode. Maybe that is why Netflix is in the title? This was a test run of a television show, or a many episodic movie series that are really easy to make and produce.

And if so, it is going to be something that someone can put on an enjoy and half pay attention to, like a lot of mystery/crime television shows. This is not a movie that you would rush out and recommend to your friends, but there is nothing inherently awful about it. It is just safe. A safe and easy movie.

Good on Garlin, who decided to write, direct, and star in this movie. A passion project for him and one that didn’t crash and burn.

Horror anthologies are all of the rage. I probably said that in my last review of a horror anthology, V/H/S: Viral, in October of 2014. Since then there hasn’t really been any horror anthologies. They died really quick.

There was another film called Southbound, but I missed it, so I will just have to wait for the DVD release or around Halloween. Whenever I remember it exists. Other than Southbound, the latest film to match this category is of course Holidays.

Holidays!? Yes, Holidays. A horror anthology with a common theme of several different holidays. Eight to be exact, with a bunch of random directors. That is a low enough number for me to talk about each one quickly!

So many holidays, you probably can’t even guess what this one is about!

For Valentine’s day, we have a little girl (Madeleine Coghlan), who gets teased by a different girl (Savannah Kennick) because she is a bitch. Our first girl also has a crush on her swimming coach (Rick Peters), who just wants her to be happy and not get picked on.

In St. Patrick’s Day, our Irish teacher (Ruth Bradley), wants to make a new girl (Isolt McCaffrey) smile, so that girl puts a curse on her to give birth to a snake.

For Easter, a little girl (Ava Acres) confuses the Bunny with Jesus, but is also told that no one has ever seen the Easter Bunny before for a pretty scary reason.

In Mother’s Day, we learn about a woman (Sophie Traub) who always gets pregnant after sex, regardless of birth control or condom usage. She is 100% fertile and it is ruining her life, so she goes to a middle of nowhere to people who claim that they can help her, when in reality, they want to just force her to stay.

On the other side for Father’s Day, we have a girl (Jocelin Donahue) who thought her dad (Michael Gross) was dead and gone since she was 11, but when she finds a voice recorder with a message on it, she has to go and investigate.

For Halloween (directed by Kevin Smith), we see a dude (Harley Morenstein) operating a small time cam girl operation, where the girls (Ashley Greene, Olivia Roush, Harley Quinn Smith) decide to get even and put him through the same abuse. You know, just worse.

On Christmas, a guy (Seth Green) goes to great lengths to get the latest VR tech for his son, but when the virtual reality starts to show his inner secrets, he and his wife (Clare Grant) have to cope with them.

Finally, on New Year’s Eve, a man (Andrew Bowen) has been killing a woman on each holiday that he has met while online dating, and now he will complete his collection (Lorenza Izzo). He hopes.

What is love? Baby don’t hurt me.

I spent most of my alloted time just going over 1-2 sentence synopsis’ of each short. I figured I could do that with only eight segments, but I may have been wrong.

Like almost every single horror anthology before it, Holidays is definitely hit or miss. The entire thing is less than two hours so overall it is probably worth a late night viewing.

In particular, I liked the Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day and Halloween shorts the most. New Year’s Eve told a decent story as well.

Christmas felt too short, St. Patrick’s Day was mostly weird, and Easter was also incredibly weird (but mostly just short).

Mother’s Day might have been the longest short story, I didn’t really keep track. It had an interesting premise, but I thought it dulled too much in the middle, despite the also pretty good ending.

Now I am ready for the Horror Anthologies to die. I think they are running out of ideas on how to package them together.

Hayao Miyazaki, remember that guy? Famed animated director at Studio Ghibli who made a shit ton of great animated films and then retired after The Wind Rises?

Well, Studio Ghibli was basically all up on that Miyazaki hype train, so the didn’t really know what to do. Yes, they did The Tale of the Princess Kaguya which was incredibly different (and still amazeballs), but they decided they should take a break to figure out what the hell they were going to do.

Right after When Marnie Was There, which was already in development. Yes, after that, THEN they would take their break and figure shit out.

So here we are. Ho hum. Feels like a filler movie knowing these details.

When Marnie was there, Anna was still a good steps from the finishing line.
That slow running bitch.

Anna Sasaki (Hailee Steinfeld) is a 12 year old girl, a bit of a loner, and a lot of a tom boy. She isn’t going to the mall or teeheehee-ing it up with the other girls. She just wants to draw and be left alone (thus my use of the term loner). Either way, she has an asthma attack, so her Foster mom (Geena Davis) sends her to her relatives over the summer to get a refresher on life.

There she stays with Setsu (Grey Griffin) and Kiyomasa Oiwa (John C. Reilly), still feeling weird. Anna gets in a fight with a girl about her blue eyes (not knowing her real family), so she runs off to the mysterious mansion across the Marsh that used to have foreigners live there. It is not abandoned. JUST KIDDING. Marnie (Kiernan Shipka)is there, and so is her whole rich family. Funny, it used to look abandoned and shit.

Marnie and Anna agree to keep each other secret, so they can be friends but let no one know.

Overtime, with Marnie, Anna is able to find out the truth about her life and her family, even though she doesn’t know it yet.

Also having the voices of Ava Acres, Vanessa Williams, and Catherine O’Hara.

When Marnie was there behind the bushes, we could see everything. EVERYTHING.

Just so we are clear, I totally watched the English Dub, thus the actors/actresses tagged. I couldn’t even find a subtitled version if I wanted it.

And just so we are clear again, this film was nominated for an Oscar for Animated Films, as the Studio Ghibli movies tend to be. But this one just doesn’t do it for me on any level.

Ghibli in recent movies have had the sexiest animation, although going in many different directions (see the two movies I tagged in the intro). This one just felt so bland and old. It felt stylistically like a step back in the wrong direction. It wasn’t completely shit, it just wasn’t up to the standards that I have become accustomed to.

The voice acting from the English cast felt pathetic. The first half of the movie, everyone seemingly just talks in a monotone voice. It makes the story drag on and on. By the end, I didn’t give a crap about the mystery of who Marnie was. It felt like the characters were bored with it all, and the emotions were just pitiful. I wonder if the voice work was all done in one take with never any context.

As I already mentioned, the story was a big meh from me. It could never grasp me or make me care about those involved. It felt way too long, without enough happening to push the mystery closer to its conclusion. The entire mystery is told by the end of course, but if there were clues along the way to let you know what was happening, I didn’t see any of them.

Ghibli is taking a break to figure shit out. This is good. I am sad they ended the note on this film, which I almost feel like was nominated because the Academy is used to their films being so much better.