Tag: Bill Hader

Puns. Puns are an often overlooked humor tool that are wildly taken for granted. In fact, some people respond to puns with groans!

Those groaners I have to imagine would not enjoy Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2 which has more puns than the number of acupuncturists who also happen to be backstabbers.

I wonder how many animated dicks could fit in his mouth. For research.

CWaCoM2 takes places immediately after CWaCoM, with the town of Swallow Falls in disarray and covered with food. Flint (Bill Hader) and his friends are excited for the rebuild, but they are forced to temporarily move to San Franjose, California, while Live Corp cleans up their island…for science! After all, Live Corp is run by Chester V (Matt Forte), Flint’s hero since he was a kid and the coolest scientist ever. It is usually a good idea to let trained professionals take care of a job.

Unfortunately, the clean up isn’t going as smoothly as they had hoped. The FLDSMDFR device was not destroyed after the first film, and it has created animal food hybrids to take over the island! They are also learning how to swim, and if they do, they will spread out and attack the rest of the world! Scary!

So it is up to Flint, with the rest of his crew to save the day. Sam Sparks (Anna Faris), girlfriend and meteorologist, Tim (James Caan), father, Brent McHale (Andy Samberg), former bully and current idiot, Manny (Benjamin Bratt), jack of all trades, Earl (Terry Crews), security guard, and Steve (Neil Patrick Harris) the monkey.

We also get introduced to Barb (Kristen Schaal), the ape. The fact that she is an ape, and not a monkey, is a very important difference.

Charles V reminded me a lot of Professor Hawk from Dexter’s Laboratory.

When I saw the trailer for CWaCoM2, I knew there would be an overwhelming amount of puns, but I still somehow underestimated how many they would actually throw at the viewer. At one point, the PPM (Puns Per Minute) value had to be greater than 10. Just constant puns, one after another, with hardly any time to comprehend them all.

Personally, I think the film was a bit too short to tell the story it wanted to tell. A lot of the movie felt rushed, especially once they first got to the island. In order to appease the kid viewers, they must have moved quickly to keep their interest. That has to be the biggest negative, not giving enough time to really flesh out the island and “foodimals.”

At the same time, I was equally impressed with the film’s ability to include “background jokes.” Once I saw the first few, my eyes were constantly watching the edge of the screen and I was surprised at how often they appeared. Heck, Joe Townee from the first film was snuck into this film twice. Unfortunately he had no lines this time, because his voice actor, Will Forte, was now voicing a new major character.

This film is filled with its fair share of low brow humor jokes, but an almost equal number of intelligent-ish jokes. I guess the point I am really trying to make is that this film has a lot of jokes, and they vary across the whole spectrum (outside of the adult themed joke territory). Despite the new writers and directors, I think it is a very worthy sequel to this franchise, and I would definitely watch a third one should it ever get made.

3 out of 4.

Turbo is the latest example of a kids movie following a very standard formula. Let’s take some sort of entity and either a) give them an impossible dream (and reach it!), or b) give them some ridiculous flaw (and overcome it!). Like a bird who doesn’t know how to fly. Or a plane that is afraid of heights (and wants to race). Or an overweight comedian who wants to box. Or a snail who wants to race in the Indy 500. Oh wait, that one is Turbo!

Fuck. Let’s get this over with. Turbo (Ryan Reynolds) is a snail! He has big dreams. He wants to go fast, and is the fastest snail he knows. In fact, he just did the yard in 17 minutes, a new personal record. He dreams of entering the Indy 500, thanks to words of advice from his hero Guy Gagne (Bill Hader), who claims that no dream is too big. His brother Chet (Paul Giamatti) thinks his dream is stupid, rightfully so.

Well, eventually Turbo falls into a car engine and gets coated with NOS, transforming his DNA and giving him incredible speed! This also somehow turns him partially into a car, with headlights, radio, rear review lights and stuff. Not sure how that second part happened. Even more eventually, Chet and Turbo find themself caught by Tito (Michael Pena), a down on his luck Taco maker. He works for his older brother (Luis Guzman) and their business is not doing well. Why did Turbo decide to not run away as soon as they were captured? No idea. But he could have.

Luckily, Tito is all into snail racing. Turns out Turbo is stupid fast and he wants to use Turbo to get more business. A very noble cause. So they set off to enter him into the Indy 500, for exposure. Nowadays kids would just make a YouTube video and become famous that way.

Oh yeah, Turbo has his own snail crew to back him up now. There is Whiplash (Samuel L. Jackson), Smoove Move (Snoop Dogg), Burn (Maya Rudolph), Skidmark (Ben Schwartz), and White Shadow (Mike Bell). Of course Ken Jeong voices a tiny Asian nail technician.

This movie is about to get fucked. Seriously. No mercy. Cover your eyes if you don’t like violent imagery.Let’s start with some factual errors. Why? Because they matter to me. I am a Masters Geophysics Student, and the sloppiness bugged me. Basically I am going to be super critical.

Turbo made a big deal about getting a yard in 17 minutes. I know it was a yard, because they showed the measuring stick briefly. However, 36 inches in 17 minutes is really slow. Like, really really slow. That is why I went over to WolframAlpha to convert it. Seriously check the link.

WolframAlpha is so amazing it compared the velocity calculated to the the velocity of a garden snail automatically and it is about 33% the speed of the actual garden snail. Great, we have a snail that is statistically slower than most garden snails. Let’s say that factual error can be ignored, fine. Unfortunately, almost every other point in the movie (pre-genetic manipulation), Turbo and other snails are still shown with greater velocities than his trial. Unless it was important to the plot that is (see: the tomato/lawn mower scene).

Come on now, consistency.

[Editor’s note: Apparently IRL and F1 are different things, but similar vehicles. I just know them as “Not NASCAR”. Point still stands, basically.]
The ending bugged me a lot as well. As it is a car race, it involved a pile up of cars real close to the finish. At this point, Turbo and Guy go into a “foot race” type of situation for the finish like, similar to Talladega Nights.  But according to official Formula 1 racing rules (here and here specifically), none of it would count and the whole thing feels pointless.

Let’s get to the most important part of the movie. This plot is inherently stupid and bad. I didn’t read the full rules for the Formula 1 racing, so I can’t confirm if there is no rule that would disallow a snail. However, the concept behind it can only be described as cheating and a snail would never be allowed to race in such an event. They have very specific standards for the size of the vehicles, type of protection they need, everything you can possibly imagine. The snail’s dimensions do not match a car’s dimensions. For an extreme example, it’d be like using a Ferrari. Or like doping.

At one point during the race, the announcer screams that he can’t believe Turbo is passing a car from below. I am fine with his reaction, because Turbo is basically cheating. But the announcer is surprised instead that he could fit, even though Formula 1 cars have about 4.5 inches of room underneath them, while a garden snail is at most 1.5 inches tall.

If you hadn’t figured out by now, Guy is the villain of this movie, but only because he wants to win the race too. Just like the other 30ish humans in the race, all doing it without cheating.

I laughed I think a total of two times. The laziness of the plot, the laziness of the details, and the laziness of the character development ruined this movie for me. To quote Eleanor Roosevelt. “America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, bad-ass speed.” Turbo would not have lived up to the former First Lady’s opinions on America or Racing.

 

1 out of 4.

Adventureland! A title like that, it must be a good time.

This is actually my second attempt at watching Adventureland. The first time I tried, it was going to be while I was donating Plasma. But the nurses kept talking to me the first 30 minutes of the film, so I missed a lot of plot (and was quite annoyed) and then the machine blew up. Very messy. Never really tried to reschedule after that!

I also had a temporary ban on Jesse Eisenberg movies, because there was a month span when I saw…pretty much all of them but this one.

Fuck the plot, just tell me how to get one of them giant pandas.

James (Eisenberg) has just graduated from college! And as part of his college grad gift, he gets to go to Europe for the summer for many weeks. All planned out, just needs a bit more to fix the cost of travel.

But fuck. His dad kind of got demoted and they are losing a lot lot of money. They can’t even help him handle graduate school in NYC. So his Euro trip is cancelled and he has to move back to Pittsburgh to find a summer job. But where could he work with virtually no real world work experience (fucking literature majors man)?

Adventureland! Too bad the owner (Bill Hader) and his wife (Kristen Wiig) have him working at Games. Rides are where the real winners get to be. A lot easier, no asshole customers. I mean, even his asshole old friend Frigo (Matt Bush) has a rides job. Oh well.
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So he gets shown the carnie ropes by Joel (Martin Starr), a fellow intellectual lost in the pit of amusement park despair. And it kind of sucks a lot. But then he meets Em (Kristen Stewart), and it gets a bit better. Kind of. Too bad too much drama happens at this place, and way too much pent up sexual frustration. Especially one Lisa P (Margarita Levieva) returns to the park. Not to mention having the maintenance guy (Ryan Reynolds) being a kick ass musician who once jammed with Lou Reed.

Studies have shown that reviews with a picture of Ryan Reynolds get clicked on 3x as much than those without.

Adventureland! Where uhh, dreams go to die I guess? Apparently carnie life sucks in Pittsburgh, and it is full of privileged white people. It happens all the time, I am sure.

I was kind of very disappointed with the movie. No one really stood out as a great role, except for the Hader/Wiig duo of awkward owners. Good at conversations they are. But didn’t feel like it was that funny for a comedy. Probably has a lot more drama in it than people would expect. But when one of the biggest movie problems is just based off of miscommunication and people not talking about what is actually happening? That is such a cop out. That shit doesn’t happen in real life. Anger can still be there, but at least people generally get the truth.

But overall, the movie felt pretty lazy and just eventually ended for me.

1 out of 4.

Here’s something I have learned today. Men In Black 3 is the first movie Will Smith has done in four years. FOUR YEARS.

Isn’t that weird? Someone who used to do action movies every other year on average since ID4, with a drama or two thrown in? I only looked this up because Will Smith was not tagged on my website yet. Just found that shocking.

But now on his IMDB, he has like, 6 things in production or rumored. So I guess he just took a little break. Work on his daughter’s singing career. Stuff like that.

Maybe instead of a movie review, we can just talk about all of the achievements of Will Smith.

Needless to say, I would suggest you have seen MIB and MIB2 before this movie, even though MIB2 is dumb and isn’t necessary for this movie.

But in MIB3, we have a new head of the department, Agent O (Emma Thompson). Don’t remember her? Well she has totally been there forever, shh. Long story short, Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement) has escape from the moon prison, and is coming back to earth. He is the last of his kind, and missing his arm, thanks to Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) from 40 years earlier in the past.

And he does! Agent K is wiped out of existence, and the only one who can remember him is Agent J (Smith). Why? Because Spoilers. Either way, Agent J gets the idea to go back in the past as well, a day prior, kill the original Boris, so the future can be even better than it was before. Just needs help from a pot head time jumper (Michael Chernus).

Needless to say, going back in time doesn’t work out as planned, and despite being told not to, he teams up with the past version of Agent K (Josh Brolin) to save the future, and the world. Also Bill Hader has a small role as Andy Warhol. a

For the first time, their main villain actually looks and is pretty bad ass.

First things first: entertaining? Yes. Dealing with time travel tricky, pretty sure they dealt with it badly, but hey, I’m fine with that right now. Was a fun story, good action, good humor.

And Josh Brolin. Josh Brolin as young Tommy Lee Jones as Agent K was astounding. That dude had TLJ from these movies down to a T, and it was just crazy to watch. He really felt like a younger version of himself, which was pretty great.

This movie also lacks a forced love component for Will Smith’s character like the other two. Is there some love? Sure. But not really. Instead a good movie with some pretty awesome acting

3 out of 4.

Hooray! Another Super CGI movie based on a kids book. Only remotely of course. At least this kids book had a real plot, so making a movie made sense, unlike some others.

Fingers crossed that Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs is more than just a random kids movie!

Although it might be his goal, dude should watch out. Burger might cram itself right in that mouth.

Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) is a scientist in Swallow Island, or something like that. But no one likes his inventions, think they all suck! Like Spray on Shoes. But he also just makes a mess. Well, while he was a kid the local sardine can factory went out of business, meaning the town lost its prosperity. They then had to pretty much eat only sardines because of no tourists. His dad (James Caan) doesn’t really approve, show little emotion, and has the most killer moustache / unibrow combo ever.

Well no worries! The mayor (Bruce Campbell) and the Sardine factory mascot (Andy Samberg) are opening up Sardineland to get tourists and prosperity back. But after a tussle between Flint the local police guy (Mr. T), his new invention that turns water into food (kind of sick of sardines) blasts off into atmosphere…and destroys most of Sardineland. Unfortunately this is all also reported on a national weather news channel, by Sam Sparks (Anna Faris), so they are a laughing stock agian.

But eventually, burgers rain from the sky. Everyone is happy! They taste so good! But can it be repeated?

Yes. It can. 3 meals a day (or more), and everyone can be happy! Not the dad though. Thinks it is wasteful. Oh well, scientist becomes the talk of the day. They change the town to ChewandSwallow (from the book) and people even start to like his monkey (Neil Patrick Harris). Blah blah, eventually bad things happen, have to fix, learn lessons, also junk food is bad.

But the coolest person in the movie is this guy, Joe Towne. He is in almost every scene (small town?) and pretty hilarious. Voiced by Will Forte, and he deserves his own spin off.

So the plot was predictable, more or less. Morals and what not. The first half was a bit better than the second half (which seemed “too long” post disaster). But the dialogue was killer. A lot of the lines in the movie are hilarious. A movie parents wont also mind watching. At one point when he makes it snow “ice cream” and has admitted he has never been in a snowball fight. So once he figures it out? A great scene of him destroying so many kids right in the face. Hilarious.

I laughed a lot more than I expected. Not just at Flint’s inability to be social, but they made fun of a lot of things, including normal disaster movie tropes. Also, cutscenes when he was doing “Science!” were very well done indeed.

3 out of 4.