Tag: Cheryl Hines

Who the fuck is Wilson? Is this a movie about a volleyball?

Those were the only thoughts I had going into this movie. And when I saw one poster, that it would be able a creepy dude. Not just any creepy dude. A creepy older dude, with glasses, and a beard.

I also quickly learned that the movie would be a weird movie, because it was directed by Craig Johnson, who directed The Skeleton Twins. I didn’t love that one, but man, it was weird.

How shocking, that it is about a real person, not a volleyball.

Wilson (Woody Harrelson) isn’t actually creepy, really. He is a bit weird. He is weird because he hates the way the world is changing. He hates that everyone is so anti-social nowadays. He wants to communicate with people, even if they are strangers. He wants to just say what is on his mind and let other people say what is on their minds. He isn’t going to be trapped on his phone, or sleeping on the train, he just wants to experience the world. If he doesn’t slow down once in awhile, he might miss it, after all.

And then his best friend moves away, without any warning. Now Wilson is all alone. He has no purpose. Just his dog. No family, nothing. Well, he does have an ex-wife. Pippi (Laura Dern) was with Wilson for a few years, a real piece of work. Then one day she up and left him. Got an abortion and moved far, far away. But it turns out she is in the area again! So maybe he can try and see how she is and get to know her again. Maybe start a relationship so that the hole in his life can be filled.

Speaking of filling holes, turns out she didn’t get an abortion. She put the kid up for adoption and the girl is like, 17 now, living in the same city this whole time and he had no idea! Now Wilson has a family. He has a purpose. He just has to bring it all together.

Starring Isabella Amara as the daughter, along with Brett Gelman, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Judy Greer, Margo Martindale, Cheryl Hines, and Bill McCallum.

Apparently this is also the most shocking movie ever, from his point of view.

Wilson was a surprise hit, and surprisingly hysterical at points. The man was just so absurd and so socially weird it was constantly surprising. The main poster shows him standing next to another person at a urinal, with a ton of open urinals. The biggest social faux pas you can do in a restroom, outside of also hold a conversation with them, which he does. And it is a nice scene about families and how to raise your kids. And it ends with one of the funniest, unexpected yet completely expected lines ever. I was laughing way too long at it.

Wilson was great. As a person and a character study. A movie I could watch over and over again and still crack up. An instant classic on just its humor.

But its story could use some work, a lot of work. It feels so long but the movie is only about an hour and a half. It takes awhile to get to the point, and then it goes in several weird directions. Including jail, which lasts a long time for that late in the film. And we even have a post jail tiny plot to take care about. It is a bit disjointed in these regards.

Harrelson does a great performance though and always seems to find new ways to entertain me.

Hey, everyone love’s cats. Just go onto the internet. But the love for cats comes from being cute, or seeing them do derpy things. They don’t love all cats.

Which is why the concept for Nine Lives is so bizarre. The plot comes straight out of a film from the 1990’s (Or a Rob Schneider film from any decade). Guy goes into a cat. The only way it could be really worse is if the cat itself could talk in English and spoke to the cast, but alas, it just has to meow at them.

People don’t like those sorts of films anymore. Those are the films that get mocked and burned at a stake. And here it is, 2016, with Nine Lives coming out. Sure, yeah, I did think Keanu would be a movie about a talking cat, but ended up just being a regular cat and pretty decent.

I don’t think the same sort of change can occur here while watching.

He is going to stare a whole through that cats head.

Tom Brand (Kevin Spacey) is what his name suggests, a walking brand. He is all about his image and his companies success. As CEO, he wants to do fascinating things and leave a permanent mark on society. And he decided that permanent mark would be the tallest building in America. Now that it is almost completed, it turns out another building in Chicago being built will easily beat theirs in height, ruining his dreams.

One of his workers, Ian Cox (Mark Consuelos) was supposed to know about this sort of thing, but he didn’t care. He wanted to take over the company and sell it for money.

All of Brand’s success means his family had to suffer a little. His new wife (Jennifer Garner) and daughter (Malina Weissman) don’t see him a lot and he forgets things, like birthdays. And his daughter wants a cat, but he doesn’t want a cat in his house. But eventually he just gets the cat.

Buys it from a weird guy (Christopher Walken), and sure enough, an accident happens putting Cox in a coma and his spirit or mind or whatever in the cats body. Knowing that the last thing he did before the accident was to actually get a gift for the daughter was a good thing, they take the cat in while he recovers. This allows Brand to try and bond with the daughter and convince them that he is a man in a cat’s body.

Also starring Robbie Amell as the son who is trying to help Brand’s company while he is in a coma, Cheryl Hines as his ex-wife, and Talitha Bateman as his ex-wife’s new daughter.

Oh ho ho, the human is on all fours. What a role reversal!

Jennifer Garner almost had the worst year ever. She had three movies come out, and I have seen two of them. Nine Lives is beyond terrible and Mother’s Day (which I haven’t seen) was blasted by critics as well. She is down right lucky that Miracles From Heaven ended up being a relatively decent Christian film, and not a standard tacky/corny over the top Christian film. It would have been real close to being just a complete fail of a year.

There isn’t a whole lot to be said about Nine Lives that isn’t already out there on the internet. What the hell was everyone involved thinking?

There are very little surprises in this film. Spacey, Garner, everyone just phones it in. When things start feeling the bleakest, it was because they made the son character a passive, dumbass. He seemingly refused to fight and it didn’t make sense. So why did it happen? Oh, so the son could do a bigger distraction near the end of the film, in order to end on a bigger note. So yeah, temporarily changing how a character works, because the writers don’t know what the hell they are doing to get to the finale they want.

The cat looked terrible when it had to switch to CGI, which was whenever the cat had to do anything special. So a giant chunk of the movie.

Walken was in this movie, and he has been in mostly shit for years.

There is just nothing really positive to note. It has a weak script, weak plot, weak acting, and at under 90 minutes it still feels too long.

Yes! More movies in the supernatural rom com genre!

There hasn’t been a lot of these, I guess. Most of them are dramas more than comedies. Apparently that is where they think the money is at, teenage girls. But the comedy element? Outside of Warm Bodies (Warm Bodies), there haven’t been that many.

So sure, Life After Beth is giving us love and zombies again, a year later, but just like regular romantic comedies, as long as they are done in different and unique ways it shouldn’t be an issue.

You don’t need a beating heart to float on water!

Beth (Aubrey Plaza) is dead. You can’t change that. Freak accident. Her boyfriend at the time, Zach (Dane DeHaan) is taking it really badly. Yeah, sure, he lost the love of his life, but it ended badly too. They were fighting. He didn’t her what he really felt.

So yeah. That sucks. Trying to cope after a death is hard. He has even been hanging out with Beth’s parents (John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon) in the down time.

But then he sees Beth. Walking around. Seemingly normal.

What in the highest amounts of fucks? Was this some joke to get him out of their lives? A shitty way to break up with him?

Or, was she resurrected, like her parents believe? They don’t care. They were missing their little girl and are happy to have her back, regardless of any complications.

You know. Zombie things.

The parents of Zach are played by Cheryl Hines and Paul Reiser, he has a brother who is a cop played by Matthew Gray Gubler, and Anna Kendrick as an old friend and old fling.

Sometimes your flirt face is the same as your scare face.

While other supernatural movies may strive for extreme supernatural things going on, Life After Beth keeps it surprisingly realistic. Yes. Sure. Zombies happen. These zombies may have big strength, start to decay, don’t feel much pain, whatever. Normal zombie stereotypes.

But the emotions and reactions are surprisingly real feeling. The grief Zach feels over words not spoken. His reactions to her being alive, the many that occur. The parents, unsure of what to do about it. And ignoring the problems as things get worse and worse over time.

Life After Beth does a great job about moving on but in a unique way. Just because the dead are rising up and walking around doesn’t mean that life is over as we know it, right?

Definitely another movie I bought just because of who is on the cover.

Henry Poole Is Here sounds pretty much like a meaningless title to me. I guess this Henry Poole character is some sort of new neighbor, who moves into a suburban neighborhood and parties it up, causing his neighbors ire. Maybe.

By the end maybe he will learn to not be an asshole. Maybe.

Well I was wrong. Shit is a drama, and it is serious at that.

I was dead on with the asshole commentary though.

Predicting movies is hard. I rarely turn out to be right if I have never heard of it before.

Maybe calling Henry Poole (Luke Wilson) an asshole is bad. Mostly because he is going to die. Alright, we all are, but he has a terminal illness. He decides to wait out the rest of his days by moving back to his old hometown, and getting a small house in a suburban neighborhood, where he can waste away his days with pizza and liquor. Pretty much retirement. And waiting to die.

His neighbor, an old hispanic woman (Adriana Barraza) sees a face on his outer wall in his backyard, from mold or something and claim it to be a face of Jesus. She even tries to get the priest (George Lopez!?) to make it a holy site, but he doesn’t seem any proof of it. Not until that shit starts having blood appear. And maybe healing people?

One neighbor Dawn (Radha Mitchell) separated from her husband, and for about a year her daughter has not spoke. But after seeing the face she has begun to speak. A miracle! No…not really. But another girl, Patience (Rachel Seiferth), an annoying cashier at the market, can see when she visits and touches the wall. She had thick glasses before. Another ehhh moment.

But eventually all of this builds up into anger. More and more people are visiting it and bothering him at his house. He meets someone he likes, but he is going to die soon. So he destroys the wall with a sledgehammer.

Then some other things happen.

Oh hey, Cheryl Hines is also in this movie as a Realtor.

When you are going to die soon, you take every opportunity to spray neighbors with a hose.

But then I hated the ending.

This is a movie that is kind of about religion and Christianity, but also about believing in believing. Despite the large faith issues associated with it, I was very into the movie for most of it. The drama was slow at times, but I thought appropriately paced for this guys point of view.

But the ending? It killed me. The last few minutes. Just seems to go against his character completely, and felt like a cop out for the directors. Everything fell into place too neatly, and I just didn’t care anymore.

A bad ending can ruin pretty much everything. But I thought the acting was pretty well done in the movie. Definitely a lot different than I expected. And once I found out it was religious (very early on) I am surprised it kept me as interested as it did.

I think a lot of my reviews coming up will be from my “box of weirder things” in the corner of my room. And by weirder, I just mean lesser known.

Bart Got A Room I picked by grabbing randomly, but originally bought it because hey, when has William H. Macy ever disappointed? The answer is never, damn it. If you have a real example, I will ignore it and just say haters gonna hate.

But then again, Macy isn’t the main character.

The main character is Danny (Steven Kaplan), hah. You thought his name would be Bart. A few months before Prom, and he is starting to think of what to do. Sure, everyone expects him to go with Camille (Alia Shawkat), one of his neighbors and best friends since pre school. But he wants it to be more of a romantic thing. So of course he instead thinks about asking the sophomore he takes to and from school every day, Alice (Ashley Benson).

Well that doesn’t work, and he already told Camille it was a sure thing. Awk. Oh well, it is still a few months before prom, he can easily find another woman and not have to weirdly go back to Camille and ask her, right?

His parents are also recently divorced (Macy and Cheryl Hines) and dealing with their own relationship problems at the same time. The potential of a new step parents, and the potential of a sexfreak (oh guess which parent each applies to).

The movie also has a “music video” attached to it!

First off, this movie is pretty short, about 75 minutes in length. So the story moves fast, as you can tell, since it doesn’t have that much going on with it. I loved the beginning, the quirkyness of it all felt funny in an embarrassing way. And the constant face palms at our main character, trying to make prom something more than it is, because even BART got a damn room and date.

But eventually the film lost its uniqueness, and the last third is kind of disappointing. A lot of predictability, and eh, just was a let down with the buildup. Opening hooks are great, but endings are the last impression, damn it.

So it is an okay movie, but you know. Could have had a stronger finish.

I have heard about the Waitress movie for awhile. Mostly positive things. And once I got rid of all the opinions from people who thought I was talking about Waiting…, turns out people still overall liked Waitress. I knew not much about it, just assumed because it was about a woman, that there would be a love element!

This mostly being necessary for a review coming out on Valentine’s Day.

And she’s happy!

Kari Russell plays a waitress in a small town diner. She likes to make pies, and is good at it. Did the whole pie thing since she was a child. She is married to Jeremy Sisto though, who doesn’t treat her right. Doesn’t beat her or anything, but he also just seems to be controlling. Won’t let her have a car, doesn’t care about her pies, and doesn’t seem to “love” her.

But she gets pregnant! Damn it, damn it! She won’t get rid of it, but she wants to leave her husband anyways, maybe win a pie contest. Unfortunately her doctor just retired, and all she is left with in the small town is Nathan Fillion. Who is awkward around her.

So Keri has to deal with putting up her husband, secretly going to a birthdoctor, possibly wanting to tap said doctor, and still make a lot of pies for the shop. Her friends try their best, fellow waitresses Cheryl Hines and Adrienne Shell, but even the owner, played by Andy Griffith, seems to give her a hard time every time he stops in for meals (and PIES).

The movie isn’t really about love or her looking for love. No it is about a woman, who wants to just live her life the way she wants to live it, with the unfortunate side effect of getting pregnant with a man she doesn’t love. Nathan Fillion is a nice doctor, but he might not be the answers she needs either.

Although they make such nice pies together.

I liked this movie a lot. As I just said it was nice to see a movie about an independent woman who is not working towards getting a man the whole time. Everyone in the movie does a great job conveying the small town feel. Even though Sisto’s character is a jerk that you will hate, he also does a great performance.

This must be where Sisto first met Hines, since they both are now in the show Suburgatory together. Connections, also, are one of the more fun things you can do with movies and tv shows.

Overall, great movie, with an ending that isn’t entirely predictable. Yay!