Tag: Christopher Lloyd

Who is this guy? This Nobody. This comedian. This laugh em upper. This ambulance chasing lawyer. What is her doing in this action movie? Who invited him to the party?

I will admit that going in to see Nobody, I thought this was supposed to be an action comedy. You know, a slightly more funny John Wick. Because the star is goddamn Bob Odenkirk. He isn’t an action person, there is no way they can realistically pretend he is either…can they?

What I will say though after watching it is that it is definitely not a comedy. There are amusing action parts, but at no point are you going to go on a laugh riot. Hell, John Wick is full of amusing action parts as well, but it is not a comedy. It turns out that they never advertised this movie as a comedy either, I just assumed so based on its sort of ridiculous poster. And I guess that is on me.

There is nothing more serious than this face right here.

Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk) (What kind of name is Hutch Mansell?) (What kind of name is Bob Odenkirk?) (Fair point, moving on) is your typical family man. He has a wife (Connie Nielsen) and two kids (Gage Munroe, Paisley Cadorath). He goes to work every day. He rides the bus. He takes out the trash. He misses the trash. He sleeps. He jogs. It just goes on and on and on.

But one day Hutch finds himself to be the victim. A home robbery. Two people break into his house and demand money and valuables and he doesn’t have much to give him. And thanks to his son, there is a real good chance they can apprehend these criminals and keep their stuff, but Hutch misses his cue and he becomes a sort of laughing stock. Or at least everyone pities him. His family thinks less of him. Is he even a man? How dare he not do violence.

All of this makes him crack. He does seem to let on more than he knows about action stuff, but he wants to keep it contained. And after deciding to go after the criminals, he eventually gets himself into a bigger fight than he imagined. One that gets him involved with a dangerous Russian crime lord (Aleksey Serebryakov). Can this nobody still protect himself and his family? Is he actually a nobody?

Also starring RZA,  Colin Salmon, and Christopher Lloyd as an 82 year old with a shot gun.

And this is Odenkirk with a uhhh…. faster shot gun, idk guns. 

Do we have room in our world for another John Wick? Of course we do. After all, there have been plenty of movies before of seemingly normal guy (Who might secretly be abnormal) go on to do amazing feats of killing and vengeance. It isn’t something John Wick made up.

But with John Wick the actor was someone who we had seen in action movies before. Someone who knows Kung Fu. Not an actual regular looking joe who we know as a regular actor comedian. That is a plus. And also, the John Wick movies (2 and 3) got worse with each version, because the script blows, and they didn’t focus on the action enough.

So sure we have room for this movie, but is it good? Surprisingly yes.

It doesn’t feature narrative prose that one would look for in award winning films, it still has a weak plot. But the action is not only good, it is far more graphic and intense than I thought it would be (Watching people get stabbed and broken bones graphically, when I still thought it was a comedy, would do that). Odenkirk fucking brings it. And later on when he has help, they fucking bring it too, and it is just an amazing defense set with a spectacular finish.

I would be excited for more Nobody films, even if narratively it wouldn’t make sense for the character to continue. It didn’t make sense for John Wick either and it turned out gr — err, oh wait. It turned out bad. And will likely get worse.

Nobody was surprisingly fun and intense. A great action movie for those who want this sort of action genre. We don’t get a long one-take hallway scene, but the bus scene does feel almost just as good.

Not surprising, what first drew me to this film was the title.

I Am Not A Serial Killer? What are you, an S-Mart Employee?

Of course this movie was based on a book of the same title, and of course, I have never heard of it either. And now we are all on the same page.

You shouldn’t have to glare to hard. Page one, dick!

John Wayne Cleaver (Max Records), yes, has a good name, but don’t worry he is not a serial killer. No, he is a weird kid, sure. His family owns the small town morgue, sure. He helps preserve corpses with his mom (Laura Fraser), of course. And yeah, he is a psychopath, but he is not a serial killer!

Don’t worry, everyone knows it. He is seeing a therapist (Karl Geary), it is official, we are all working just to keep him in check. He has rules to keep himself from lashing out, ways to force himself to be nice. Despite the fact that sure, yeah, he doesn’t care about anyone in their small town.

Well, old Mr. Crowley (Christopher Lloyd) is a weird guy. Really loves his wife. And he might have killed someone?

There is actually a serial killer in their town! Right now! And John is almost certain that Crowley is the one doing it. But he is all over the place. Sometimes he hides the bodies, sometimes he does not. And he steals organs. Huh. Erm. Okay that is weird.

Maybe Crowley isn’t just another sociopath. Maybe he is something other worldly. John is going to find out, because telling people secrets is lame.

I mean otherworldly like alien, not like Jesus.

A Minnesota Murder spree? Oh, like Fargo! I love Fargo!

Not so fast, assholes. This is nothing like Fargo. The show or the movie. Actually, well, with some supernatural elements, I guess part of it is similar to season 2.

All of it is from the point of view of our teenage psychopath, so there is a lot we don’t get to see. We don’t get to see people talking about him behind closed doors, we don’t have those heartfelt discussions about people trying to fix him. Just a kid on a mystery that is a bit bigger than life.

And it is decent. It is. It has some scares, sure. Lloyd is like, super super old now (since he was old as Doc Brown 30 years ago) but he gave a great and creepy performance.

If anything, one can say the film is unique. The ending gets a bit more crazy and the tone doesn’t match the previous 80 or so minutes, but I did love the build up towards the climax.

I am not a Serial Killer. I am just a movie reviewer. And I would say watch this if it is on Netflix one day in the future, maybe. I don’t care, I won’t kill you over it.

You saw the title of this review. You aren’t a complete noob. You know what is going down.

With this, I have reached review number 1650 for my website. Like I have been saying more and more lately, sure, that number isn’t sexy, but a milestone is still sexy to me. My last few Milestone Reviews have had a theme of career ending films for the actors involved. So I figured we needed to take a break from that and switch to babies.

I used to hate babies. They confused me. Then I went and had one of my own. Hell, my baby turned 1 just last week. Literally a week ago from this posting. That is crazy. I understand babies now. And I also understood that Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 was considered one of the worst films ever created. Have I seen it? Of course not, why would I watch anything back then starring babies? But now it is basically a film I have to review eventually as a Milestone Review.

BUT IT IS A SEQUEL. A movie has come before it. Baby Geniuses. A whole five years earlier, when it was still the 1990s! The 90’s have a lot of weird and strange movies, reviewing them all would be a terrifying endeavor. But this time, there is an important reason. If I never see Baby Geniuses, then I can never see Superbabies without the proper context! Don’t worry, Superbabies won’t be review #1700. Instead I will just sneak it out sometime in the future. Definitely before review #2000.

Daww, babies giggling or something. That can be cute.

Babies are inherently smart. That is the main point of this movie. They know a whole lot about the universe. Secrets of the universe. That is all hiding up in their baby heads. And they can communicate with other babies, using their baby talk language. It is just that once they start learning the actual human language they forget everything before then. They call it crossing over. Learning human talk means forgetting everything they knew from baby times and thus becoming non important entities in the world.

If you missed my explanation, don’t worry, a high tech computer explains all of the backstory to Dr. Heep (Christopher Lloyd), despite being a doctor who knows all of this to be true. Heep and Dr. Kinder (Kathleen Turner) just haven’t fully figured out baby speak yet. They know how to teach babies to be incredibly smart, including karate and shit, they just don’t know how to communicate with those little ankle biters.

Look at how evil they look! Mwhahaha!

Anyways, their best baby is Sylvester (I don’t want to tag the babies or their voice people) as he has been there the longest. He is almost 2 years old, an excellent fighter (sigh), and constantly trying to escape their laboratories at BabyCo. BabyCo is a company that just makes toys and items for babies, makes sense.

Sylvester (or Sly as they call him) is a twin that they took from an orphanage. The other twin is Whit, but he was adopted by Robin (Kim Cattrall) and Dan (Peter MacNicol). Robin is the niece of Dr. Kinder, and Dan is just really good with babies and writes books or something.

Holy fuck that is a big baby!

Anyways, Sly does another escape attempt, and guess what! It is successful. It involves hiding in a dirty diaper basket, getting thrown away, and getting the crap (heh) out of there. He tries to bring another baby with him, a girl, but she is too scared to go. So, obviously, she goes alone.

And then he heads to a mall. To hide, he switches clothes with a girl baby and goes completely undercover. Yep, he wears drag as the baby calls it. Sly waits until the mall is closed before going out of hiding and he has the mall to himself! Yes!

When you have a mall to yourself, obviously you can now play video games. And change your outfit! So we get an entire baby fashion show, seeing the baby in a tux, a Saturday Night Fever outfit, and more get ups. While dancing and doing random shit.

This picture isn’t good enough. Just watch the scene while it exists on YouTube.

That scene really irks me for probably obvious reasons. Babies can’t dance, just like babies can’t fight and stuff. But since this is just a one camera shot of him dancing a few times, not a lot of quick cuts, they couldn’t fake it well. So they got a tiny good dancing toddler/kid or midget to do all the dancing. Or a large person and made them look small by perspective. But then they OBVIOUSLY just kind of attached a the face of the baby onto the dancer both times. It looks awkward as it is badly done and obviously fake.

Just such poor quality. I mean, at this point in the movie I already knew it was terrible. I just didn’t expect it to get this bad.

Oh hey, did I mention JoyLand? It is a baby themed Theme Park, entirely indoors. Kids can use it too. All of it is free for them, parents have to pay and the money goes to research or charity. Everything is robotic, including that one giant robot baby. There is an entirely robotic petting zoo too, that a child can take a controller for an animal and make them do things. Why? Because apparently no one else has one like it.

Although, it takes away from any reason to really go. People can see fake animals every day, clearly a real petting zoo is a superior thing, but whatever. I am sure the robot stuff won’t come back to harm them.

I also have barely talked about these guys. Maybe I will do that now.

Thanks to the most unlikely of circumstances, Sly picks and outfit that Whit owns. And they both happen to be wearing it. Robin decides to take Whit to the mall and they run into each other in one of those big crawl tube places. They freak each other out, go opposite ways. So Robin ends up grabbing Sly and the goons end up grabbing Whit! Oh no!

Sly is stoked, because he escape. He goes back to that house. He finds out that Whit had a sister, a bit younger than him, Carrie. And Carrie knows that Sly is an impostor but doesn’t know what to think. Whit is back at the secret lab, with a bunch of smarter babies, all sad and crying and confused. But no one cares. They don’t care about the crying baby. THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT THE CRYING BABY EVERYONE.

This lady is a big fat phony. She just wants to eat the babies.

Where am I? I barely remember.

Dr. Kinder realizes quickly that the goons grabbed the wrong baby. It is actually that fuckface Whit, her nieces adopted kid. So she figures she will just go running over to her house to grab the correct kid, no problems.

But there are problems. Namely in that Dan through his own research has basically figured out baby talk. He can understand the babble and what it means in actual Human English. That’s fucking crazy. And when his kid tells him to not let him be left with Dr. Kinder, he listens.

There are a fuck ton of other babies in this movie, but none of them really matter.

Anyways, some more dumb stuff happens for awhile. Then all the babies in the research facility are sent to Lichtenstein, because that is where their other lab is. The babies at the house led by Sly decide to break into Joyland/BabyCo to break the other babies out. Or destroy the research. Or something. They do it by hypnotizing Lenny (Dom DeLuise), whom I don’t even know why he is in this movie. Him or Dickie (Kyle Howard).

And of course, the robot animals and robot babies are used to take out all the guards. Some more things happens, Dr. Kinder loses, and the babies Whit and Sly decide to cross over from the baby speak land into Human language land, leaving behind the secrets of the universe and more. Sly gets adopted by Robin and Dan and yay families.

The ending then has like, 3 minutes of montage of the babies doing stuff, like, actual clips from the movie we just saw, with the Randy Travis song The Gift Of Love for some reason. I guess they wanted that emotional impact ending and to fulfill your quota of babies for the next week.

Kyle, what are you even doing? And this isn’t even his worst outfit.

I can readily admit that this is not my best written Milestone Review. It is not even top half most likely. It doesn’t help that within the first 10 minutes of the movie I knew I already hated it, with the rest of the 80 or so minutes not doing a damn thing to change my mind.

So yeah, it became a bit harder to remember all the different aspects of the film. Like random baby names. Like the purpose of Deluse or Howard in the film. Like the plan at the end. Like how Lichtenstein was even involved. My mind tried to completely wipe all knowledge of the film right after viewing it, with only my few notes written down as a guide to actually write this summary.

It doesn’t help that this movie is from the 1990s, was a crap quality, and finding decent pictures of it on google was a major pain.

The biggest problem with this movie is that it is a comedy that doesn’t have any good humor. Oh, they insert a bunch of giggling babies to make you think funny moments are happening, but babies giggle at every random little thing. It is like they made this movie for babies and no one else to find entertaining. But if you know babies, they can watch and be entertained by anything, regardless of how deep the content is.

And honestly, if you are going to have a movie where babies before 2 years are super smart, know all these things and communicate with each other, you shouldn’t still have them sound like babies. That is boring. You know what is funny? Babies sounding like adults. Just look at those ETrade Baby commercials, talking about adult things with a grown up voice.

Hilarious!

This movie is not and once I hit Publish, I will forget about this one too. Let’s assume I need no previous knowledge to understand Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2.

I don’t know how people reviewed the movie Sin City when it came out, I just know that Sin City: A Dame To Kill For will be pretty hard to review.

Sin City itself was pretty polarizing. I think overall it was on the positive side of the spectrum for most people (including me). The art style was something very different and took awhile for some people to get used to. It was also pseudo copied with The Spirit, which a lot of people hated (and those people also suck).

But a sequel has long been in development and long been clamored for, as the original came out in 2005. Almost took 10 years to get another installment. It has to live up to a lot of pressure, so I hope it can deliver.

Now with more nakedness than ever before.

Sin City is a land where dreams come true. Assuming your dreams involve corruption, drugs, sex, betrayal, murder, lawlessness, crime, death, and other synonyms. Shit is weak. Shit is weak everywhere.

Marv (Mickey Rourke) is still running around, being a badass. If you like him, good news, he is basically in every plot line.

Like when Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) comes to town, looking for secretive revenge and wanting to use his elite poker skills to do it. Or when Nancy the never naked Stripper (Jessica Alba) wants to enact revenge on the death of Hartigan (Bruce Willis) from the first film. Or when Dwight (Josh Brolin) has to go an save Ava (Eva Green) from an abusive relationship, taking out an inhuman body guard Manute (Dennis Haysbert).

So, basically Marv is everywhere. Yay continuity?

Also featuring others, like Rosario Dawson and Powers Boothe bringing back their old characters. Or like Jamie Chung, taking over someone else character. And some people in much smaller roles, like Ray Liotta, Christopher Meloni, Jeremy Piven and Christopher Lloyd who is like 150 at this point.

If only there were angels out there for him to help out?

More action! More death! More sex! Is Sin City: A Dame To Kill For a step in the franchise? Or is it just too late?

Hard to say what the reason is, but this movie felt incredibly lack luster for me. Maybe it is because when Sin City first came up, it was before comic book movies really started to amp up their games. Before The Dark Knight before the Marvel films. Because for the most part, this story / set of stories feels very familiar, yet still distant.

Maybe I am annoyed at just how connected they wanted everything to feel? I liked the disjointedness of the first film, just a few short stories and then another.

Maybe it is just the quality of the stories? For what it is worth, there are basically three plot lines. The middle being the longest and most complete, or at least featuring the most characters, but even it dragged by the end. The “first” plot with JG-L didn’t feel interesting, and Alba’s felt not as epic as it was going for.

Maybe it is that the style feels stale after all this time, with the 3D elements never really enhancing it like I had hoped?

Maybe I don’t know. The only thing I know is this movie felt like a great disappointment. But also, maybe I am just getting older.

Despite its flaws, Piranha had its moments. One of those moments being a geologist who kicked some sort of ass.

But the end of it did leave us with a cliffhanger. Turns out that the big Piranha’s attacking the lake from way back when were actually babies. The adults were much bigger, (as we saw in the last scene a character getting killed by this many meter long fish). Alright, reason for sequel! Piranha 3DD, because of boob jokes.

That’s what you get for going to a water park and expecting to have a good time. Right in the face.

“Fuck your continuity”. That is what the makers of this film said. Despite the knowledge gained in the last film, the only Piranha in this film are the same size as the last film. And smaller, if they want to be. Whatever.

Maddy (Danielle Panabaker, yes from Sky High, because I apparently want to mention that movie as often as I can on this website) is a 49% owner of a water park, yay. The 51% belongs to her step dad, Chet (David Koechner), after her mom died. And well, he is turning the park into a joke of itself.

In its grand re opening, he is trying to sell sex. He fired all the former life guards, and replaced them with strippers (who are technically certified) just to look hot. Has deals to get more women to come to the park, and an adult only pool, where clothing is optional. Oh yeahhh.

Either way, turns out the Piranha’s that fucked the world up last Spring (and apparently no one has noticed moving) have migrated to the local lake, where the water park dumps its water out. According to the mad scientist (Christopher Lloyd) they may be getting confused and start to go through pipes and drains to more populated areas. Uh oh. Like the water park!?

Maddy tries to stop the opening of the park, just in case, but to no avail. And then Piranhas happen. Worst opening day ever. With the help of her best friend who is definitely not gay Barry (Matt Bush) she tries to save the day! Too bad he can’t swim. There is also asshole local cop Josh (Jean-Luc Bilodeau), best friend Shelby (Katrina Bowden) (who we will get to later…) and even David Hasselhoff, playing himself as a “lifeguard”.

Heck, even Ving Rhames returns to reprise his Oscar worth role as a deputy, now without legs after the tragic events of the first film.

There’s no way a Piranha would be in her bath tub. Right?
That’d just be silly. …Right?

Here are some spoilers. The movie ends by setting up for a third movie, like the last one. This time saying the Piranhas are evolving to maybe grow legs and grow on land. But like with this movie, I expect if there is a third, them to say “fuck you” and lie about that as well. (Despite showing one on land, like the big one last time. Bah). Also, I am disappointed with some deaths. The step dad was just stupid. Most of the others were expected. Hated the lake scene before hand too, just because the woman was just incredible dumb.

Speaking of incredible, how bout incredibly painful. The biggest WTF moment in the show happens when you realize that Katrina Bowden’s character has a Piranha inside of her (small one I guess) that chooses to not eat anything. Skinny dipping was the cause, and I will let you figure out what happened there. This doesn’t lead to anything until she has sex where…well you can figure it out.

There was some nice self parodying in there. Hasselhoff put it the best, when someone was yelling for him to help and he refused to leave his chair. Pretty much said he won’t help, they are in a dang pool, once everyone just leaves the pool they will be fine. Not his fault they are all morons. Well put Hasselhoff, clearly the best part of this movie.

The movie did had some nice moments going with it, but by ignoring the first one’s big discovery (seriously?), and other factors, it was just not as good as its predecessor. Also the credits were like 11 minutes long, with extended scenes, bloopers, and more Hasselhoff. Was bizarre.

I didn’t mean to watch this movie today, but when I was halfway to work I realized I didn’t bring any of the three I had meant to watch. So I had a quick “Oh no! Boredom!” moment, but thankfully I do have access to someone’s netflix. I went randomly through my list of movies I own that I didn’t watch and Flakes was on instant stream.

Problem solved. But if I was cooler, I’d have found a movie I don’t own and haven’t seen. My bad!

But as it stands, my ability to slack is over my ability to be efficient.

Speaking of slackers, this is another movie about a slacker. I feel like that’s all I watch now. Neal (Aaron Stanford) is going no where with life. He has a hot girlfriend in Zooey Deschanel though. But he is the manager and main worker at a store called Flakes, which is like a bar, but instead of alcohol they server cereal, all day every day. Such a wide selection too, and some rare cereals. Can add fruit if you want, and change up the milk kind. Pretty rad idea. But not the biggest money maker.

But when some suit (Keir O’Donnell) opens up a shop next door, with a similar name and same concept, just MORE, it could mean trouble. Especially since thanks to fights and not hiring Zooey, she goes to work with the new store. After all, if she can shut down the origial Flakes, her boyfriend can finally stop wasting all his time, and finish his damn album.

The movie is basically the battle of the cereal shops, in New Orleans. Christopher Lloyd plays the seemingly crazy owner of the business, and Frank Wood a very dedicated customer who also can find hard to find / discontinued cereals.

MOAR CEREAL

For whatever reason, I found this movie quite enjoyable. Not the most compelling tale at all, something probably done many times before, and even a bit too slow paced, but I thought it all worked given the circumstances. My plotline sets it up for a different type of movie. Sure they battle at the beginning. Business tactics, but mostly apathy and assume their side will win. Well the wrong side wins about halfway through the movie, leaving our “heroes” jobless from their own pseudo-creation.

So we get to see them try other jobs and going to their conquerors, and seeing if a lack of Flakes really changes their outlook at all.

Sometimes you need a story that has a happy ending, even if it comes through unconventional ways.

Piranha! A movie in no way taking itself seriously, relying on CGI “3D” effects for a better experience, and a lot of naked womens. Okay, technically that could fall under a lot of different Horror movies, but this one still has a more obvious comedic element to it. In fact, the first scene involves Richard Dreyfuss being the first to die, which is an obvious shout out.

Obvious shout out, sure. But to what?!

Earthquake opens up a chasm to an underground lake that has been sealed off for thousands of years. What is in it? A larger more dangerous form of Piranha!

“Wait!” you say. “Sealed off for thousands of year? How could they survive!”. Apparently cannibalism. So they still have large numbers somehow despite that.

At the same time as this small earthquake, Spring Break is happening on the lake of this local sunny town. Ving Rhames is the Sheriff of the town, and he hates it, with his Lieutenant being Elisabeth Shue. Her son is local boy, Steven R. McQueen, who instead of watching his little siblings, accidentally gets a job showing a pornographer the cool hot spots of the lake. Jerry O’Connell is the drug and sex crazed filmmaker, and really shows that Jerry will do anything they ask of him.

Also involved? Jessica Szohr, his friend who is talked into coming along, and Kelly Brook, a way too hot porn actress. Anyone else in this movie? Of course!

Christopher Lloyd plays retired paleobiologist like dude, who recognizes the species that was thought to be extinct (somehow). Also, Adam Scott, a GEOLOGIST, who leads a team to check out the opening to the lake.

So, most of the film is a couple of random small deaths out of no where, and teases of deaths. Also, lots of hot college kids partying it up, and the “famous” underwater naked scene involving Kelly and random porn actress. That scene was /very/ long, and had opera music in the background. An example of mocking itself, I guess. But once they finally attack the boat / the spring breakers, it is just way way way too long.

Its weird enough to see the local cops firing their shot guns into the water to try and kill all the fish. But it just seemed like so many minutes of watching people, more or less, die the same way, in a gruesome light. The “dude trying to escape on a motor boat and run over people along the way” scene was also horrid. Ving Rhames deserved his Oscar for what he did in the movie though. It made the most sense out of all the cop actions (didn’t make sense. Just made the most sense.)

Only a bad ass geologist would think to jump on a jet ski to drive around and shoot fish in the ocean.

I was going to give it a 2/4 just because of including a Geologist hero, and so I did it anyways. I almost made it lower because of a silly grudge, but fixed that. Just now. There is a planned sequel, Piranha 3DD (get it?), and it is starring that plant chick from Sky High, and a water park.