Tag: Crime

For awhile, I was up in Northern Minnesota. This is real life, true story. How north, you ask? Well, apparently a 45 minute drive would have taken me to Canada.

I bring this up for two reasons: One, it made me miss quite a few screenings, because they show movies up there months after everyone else saw them, certainly not before. And two, the movie Wind River is set in the wilderness.

Not almost Canada, but cold enough in the months of “barely Spring” Wyoming, in the mountains.

So basically, I am this story. If you squint really really hard.

Oh hey. Avengers. I see you upgraded weapons.

Set in the titular Wind River, Wyoming, this takes us to a big reservation city where people want to just be left alone, raise their families, and not be fucked over by the white man. Basically like a lot of people in the world.

Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner) is a cool white guy though, as you can tell with his white name. He is okay, because he works to help the area. He lives alone and is a hunter, and he works for the government sort of, taking out wolves or lions or whatever that are messing with people’s farms. He has an ex wife (Julia Jones) and a son (Teo Briones) that he has visitation for sometimes. Definitely some backstory there. Would be awesome if a new character was brought in so that it could be addressed at some point.

But before that, DEATH. Because while out looking for a momma lion and her cubs, he stumbles upon a dead body. A girl, Natalie (Kelsey Asbille) that he knows, barefoot, and miles away from any house. His plans have changed, and now they have to wait for an FBI agent to get there to investigate the possible murder. Which is where we meet Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), girl totally not used to the cold, here to check things out. Despite bad things that have clearly happened to the girl, specifically physical stuff, the death cannot be ruled a murder but natural causes. Weather is a goddamn bitch.

Banner doesn’t have a lot of time to investigate this before she will be called back to a new job, so she enlists Lambert’s help in order to get someone who knows the area and land to maybe make some leads quickly before she has to run off again. Can they figure out the mystery behind her death?

Featuring the awesome Graham Greene as the local cop, and Gil Birmingham as Natalie’s dad. Also all of these people: Apesanahkwat, Eric Lange, Tantoo Cardinal, Althea Sam, Tyler Laracca, Martin Sensmeier, Tokala Clifford, Jon Bernthal, James Jordan, Austin R. Grant, Blake Robbins, Hugh Dillon, Ian Bohen, and Matthew Del Negro.

And Birmingham’s face was played by William Wallace.

After watching, Wind River seems like one of those movies that I really love for basically every aspect, that other movie watchers will find to be boring or dumb. I hate it when that happens. I want those people to open their minds and realize they just witnessed something epic, so I write about it (while begrudgingly say that yeah, everyone can have an opinion), and make sure people get out there.

But honestly I can’t see that happening. I can’t imagine people going to watch this and not being impressed with it. It is just so damn good. There is no way this can have a disconnect between critic and the average movie goer. Anyone should be able to go in, see how much Renner, Olsen and Greene brought it the entire time they weer on the screen. They should be able to see how much Birmingham did with a lot less screen time. They should be appreciative of the cast that was very racially sensitive to the area.

And they should be able to see how well the plot unfolded. When the movie decided to reveal the secrets, they should feel how their stomach turned and their anger increased. The emotions would be on a ride if someone just let them.

Sure, Wind River started off a little bit slow, but once we get dead body, it should captivate the viewer, and you will see definitely one of the best films of 2017.

Oh my damn. Here we go. A continuation of a bad franchise, hitting its trilogy mark after an equally bad spinoff. Does that sound familiar? This summer is Deja Vu-ing.

I will be honest when I went in with the lowest of expectations with Despicable Me 3. I mean, how could it get worse? It really couldn’t. It would just be more of the same, probably.

But it was announced over a year ago that Trey Parker, of BASEketball, Cannibal! The Musical, and yes, South Park fame would be voicing the villain. Parker! Crude humorist! Apparently it is something a lot of R rated people do, voice a kids movie so that their kids can finally see something that they have done.

At first I thought it was just another rando-celebrity signing instead of a nice voice actor. But then I remembered that Parker is a voice actor, he voices a shit ton of characters. So it won’t just be his regular talking voice, but an actual character! Hooray!

And that character ends up sounding up mostly like Randy Marsh.

And if you look closely, it should look a bit like a Randy too.

For whatever reason, this franchise still exists with the title of Despicable Me, because as we all know, Gru (Steve Carell) is now a “good guy” taking care of his girls and his wife, Lucy (Kristen Wiig), who needs no taking care of. They are both members of the Anti-Villain League, and you know, trying to stop the bad guys.

After a failed encounter with Balthazar Bratt (Trey Parker), an 80’s kid TV star whose show was cancelled due to puberty, and now world villain playing his character as an adult and relying on 80’s themed reference weapons, Gru and Lucy are fired from the AVL! Boo new director (Jenny Slate).

Sad times, being fired and jobless. But he promises to not resort back to villainy, for his girls (Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier, Nev Scharrel. Note: the last one is new, Agnes used to be Elsie Fisher but I guess she got too old). Also, hey look at the timing, he gets a notice that his long lost twin brother is looking for him. Apparently his parents got divorced when they were babies and they decided to break up the twins. The fuck, right?

Blah blah blah, his brother is Dru (Steve Carell), super rich and lives in a land that is like Denmark, or Northern Europe. It is time for Gru to learn about the family business…being a bad guy! His dad was a famous bad guy, and now Dru wants Gru to teach him how to be bad. Oh no.

Also featuring the voices of Steve Coogan, Julie Andrews, and Adrian Ciscato.

Don’t worry, Dru also speaks in a high pitched voice to help tell them apart.

Despicable Me 3 is basically as bad as I had imagined, but not worse. For those keeping track, I am saying that Despicable Me 3 is a better movie than Cars 3. It had issues, but not as many. It had some better moments, but not too many.

It is another franchise that decides to keep adding permanent characters to keep things interesting, instead of just making an interesting story with the characters we have. Last one we got Lucy, now we have a now twin brother Dru. However, having Gru’s father being a very famous villain/criminal who was super successful, is shit. They show photos of him in the new lair, and yes, he looks like Gru. So somehow Gru, master villain himself, has never heard of another bad guy who is older than him but looks almost identical? Unheard of. It is such a cheap cop out to introduce sudden new family members, and quite lazy.

Speaking of characters, there are too many and therefore not enough plot for all of them. Like poor Edith, I think that is the middle kid. She just exists in this film. She has a handful of lines, but doesn’t have her own story like the other two girls. Their stories Margo and Agnes, are incredibly minor though and just feel like filler because of too many characters.

The movie has the minions leave Gru, because they need to be bad things and need a villain, but he doesn’t want to. Hooray less minions right? Nope. Two of them stay behind so we get to have them with Gru still, and we get to see their minion adventures as they wander the town and prison.

I guess I don’t have a lot more else to say. With Despicable Me 3, you get a lot more of the same. The plot is weak, the sideplots are weak, some catchphrases to get people quoting the film, the animation is kind of shit (where the characters are all extremes, like too thin, too fat, etc), but that has been the norm. Just another bad animated film in the year with a lot of bad animated films.

At the time of writing this introduction, Baby Driver was listed on Wikipedia as a British-American action crime comedy jukebox musical film, and when I first read that my heart skipped several beats. I am now dead. [Editor’s note: I have gotten better, and the Wikipedia article has since been shortened.]

Those genre’s together just seemed too good to be true, and it was. Because a jukebox musical means, 1) It is a musical, and 2) That the songs that the character sing already exist and come from the charts. But I knew this wasn’t a musical, just a film that really, really, really, loved music. Music that yes, at different times, may have hit the charts. And even if the main character sings some of them, they still don’t qualify it as a musical.

Which is sad, but I am mostly certain no one will turn a plot like this one into an actual musical. Or at least, not for film, but you never know with Broadway turning out 2 or more “Movie title, the musical!” films a year.

“Elevator, the musical!” is coming up and down this fall.

Baby (Ansel Elgort) loves music. It is a major part of his identity, there are always earbuds in his ears with an iPod playing a song to help the situation. When Baby was a kid, his parents got into a car accident with him in the back seat. They died, he survived, and he gained an ever persistent noise in his ears that won’t go away. The music helps dull it out.

Baby unfortunately got into some trouble. He became very good at cars, being one of the best drivers around despite his young age. But one day, he messed with the wrong man, Doc (Kevin Spacey), and lost a lot of his merchandise. And now, to pay Doc back, Baby has been the driver for several bank robberies in the greater Atlanta area, with his share always going towards his payment. But as soon as he pays off Doc, he wants out. He just wants to drive and be free, he definitely doesn’t want to hurt anyone.

Baby works with criminals, however. And criminals can be erratic and put his family in danger. His family being his foster dad (CJ Jones), who is now in a wheel chair, deaf, and needs a lot of attention. And Deborah (Lily James), a waitress at a diner he frequents who shares his passion of music and is generally a free spirit. So when the criminals start doing bad things, it is Baby’s duty to get out of it while protecting those he cares about.

We have quite a few criminals played by actors like Jon Hamm, Jon Bernthal, Jamie Foxx, Eiza González, Flea, and Lanny Joon. Also featuring Sky Ferreira and Hal Whiteside.

Everyone knows that diners are the best place to go for music and pie.

Baby Driver, from start to finish, will keep you on the edge of your seat and the edge of your car seat as well when you are heading home. Don’t watch this movie during the day, because you will want the roads empty so you can blast music and drive (responsibly) maybe a little bit faster. It will take over you, especially if you are a movie goer with varied music tastes.

Elgort has been in quite a few teenage romance / young adult films. The Fault in our Stars, Paper Towns, Divergent, even the Carrie remake. But Baby Driver is finally his jumping off point into something greater than all of his parts before combined. He is now part of a cinematic masterpiece, playing a role unlike his other characters, and hopefully will lead him to a lot of better roles in the future. Elgort might be a star, especially lucky after he didn’t get the Star Wars gig.

The cinematography, the action, the variety of characters, the dialogue, and of course, the music, make Baby Driver a must see film. I especially appreciate at how diverse the music ends up being, from all sorts of decades and genres. In addition to that, having the action FIT the music is an incredible achievement and allowed me to sit in my seat in awe.

I can’t talk enough about how wonderful an experience Baby Driver was. It is a film that I want to see again in theaters and will pick up on Blu-Ray day one of its release.

Studies have shown that reviews that feature “Lake” in the title end up being better than expected when writing said review.

Of course, my only review before this was the movie Flakes, which was, I admit, better than I imagined it would be. It was quirky, off beat.

Shimmer Lake, it has plenty of quirky actors in it, but I am not sure how off beat it will end up being. I did go in with low expectations, despite the Lake theory, and as you can see, hey, it was better than I imagined.

There was less sexual tension in this movie than I imagined as well. Look at that gap between police officers!

Shimmer Lake is also a story told in reverse. Similar to Memento, sure, but it is on a day by day basis. We start our story on Friday, and we see how the entirety of Friday plays out, then we see Thursday, all the way to Tuesday.

Because you see, on Tuesday, there was a bank robbery. And this is a small town, Shimmer Lake, so everybody knows everybody, and heck, a lot of them are related. Like or Sheriff Zeke (Benjamin Walker), whose brother, Andy (Rainn Wilson), a lawyer, just helped rob a bank on Tuesday. Andy worked with two other locals (Wyatt Russell, Mark Rendall) robbed a bank when it had a well known surplus, and Zeke was shot in the theft.

And now they are still about the town, Zeke is sure of it.

We just have to figure out how all the players are involved, which of course is revealed slowly while telling us backwards. We also have a judge (John Michael Higgins), a couple of FBI helpers (Rob Corddry, Ron Livingston), the deputy (Adam Pally), and the wife of a robber (Stephanie Sigman), and somehow one or more of them are involved.

And don’t worry, the lake is not the answer to the mystery.

Blueprints and alcohol are the best items to help with a bank robbery.

About three fourths of the way into this movie, I wondered why it was being told in reverse. It didn’t seem to be adding really anything extra to the story. It seemed to be Memento-ing because people liked Memento.

But of course by the end it all became a bit more clear. And yes, Shimmer Lake is a film that will be better the second go around. I don’t know if I will ever really watch it a second time, but I would like to see what clues give it all away and make this story tick.

It was a bit hard to label this movie, because there are a lot of actors who are mostly in comedy films filling out the roster, and I think that adds a strange aesthetic to the whole film. I am calling it a Dark Comedy in that regard, because it is normally comic actors acting serious, in events that are larger than life.

Shimmer Lake isn’t a film that is reinventing the wheel or adding something entirely new to the industry. But it does try to stand out and, as I implied earlier, ends up being a better ride than expected.

Finally, I am getting into some obscure titles that a lot of people probably have missed out on. Oh, I skipped a lot of non-obscure titles to get here, but those were at my home, this was on my phone in a parking lot.

Deidra & Laney Rob A Train is not too long of a movie, going for an audience that is not an adult male who criticizes films. The perfect thing to watch and write about.

This is another Netflix original, just not one they advertised. Again, a different demographic, gotta make money somehow, and gotta do it by making content that appeals to every different sect they can imagine.

Stoop Kids are afraid to leave their stoop!

The sect that this film was made for was teenage girls or families who don’t want to think about what they are watching.

Deidra (Ashleigh Murray) is a senior in high school and she has worked her whole life to be in a good position for college. She is the top of her class, she has dreams and aspirations of getting out of her small town or whatever life, far away and become someone great. She has a younger sister, Laney (Rachel Crow), who is somewhere in the high school age range, and Jet (Lance Gray) who is probably middle school aged but treated like a 3 year old.

Their dad (David Sullivan) is out of the picture, because he had a drug and criminal past, but he lives nearby. Their mom (Danielle Nicolet), has been working hard to give them some level of existence, but she has gone surprisingly berserk at her job, breaking TVs and gets arrested. Arrested?! Yes, arrested.

For whatever reason, CPS is totally cool with the kids living on their own (Deidra is 18), as long as an adult is at home with kids at all time and they have food and pay the bills. Long story short, shit is hard, it affects their school, and eventually decide to start robbing items from the local trains that come through their town. They make some money, pay some bills, work on bail, and work on saving through college.

Ah, to now live a stress free lifestyle. Featuring Tim Blake Nelson as a railroad cop, Sasheer Zamata as a guidance counselor, Arturo Castro as a cop, and Missi Pyle, Brooke Markham, and Kinna McInroe.

I couldn’t find a picture to cram even more side characters in one shot.

Deidra & Laney Rob A Train, looks, feels, sounds, and smells like a made for TV ABC Family (Or FreeForm, whatever the fuck that is) movie. Somehow even the camera work seems specific to that channel. And I am not speaking entirely out of my ass, I have reviewed made for TV movies on ABC Family. With that mantle, it delivers exactly as I would have expected: safe, bubbly, yawns.

D&L is just a bore. We have a single interesting character, Deidra, who has to make hard decisions. However the details on her life in this film are really weird. The Guidance Counselor talks about how most of the kids at the school suck and don’t achieve, because it is an inner city school. Yet they show it as a small rural town, and straight up everyone in it outside of our leads are super white, upper middle class to upper class looking kids.

It also has a very strange subplot about a Miss Idaho teen pageant that Laney gets involved with. It appears she is in an actual class at her school to prepare her for this pageant, and honestly, the plot barely goes anywhere and is just a distraction to get the running time up.

Nelson is just a cartoon villain in this movie. There are no real consequences for our characters, and even the one sob scene moment just doesn’t really seem to connect. It explains why the mom goes berserk, but it does not fix the problems that are still caused by the acts. And again, robbing trains is totally the right and best choice by the time the movie ends.

Sigh, to be young and pointless, like this movie.

I can really get into a good shoot ´em up film. Ones with some plot, no plot, or a lot of plot (rare), I can really get behind losing most of the cast in a 90-120 minute time frame. I am willing to suspend my belief enough about the events that led to a long gun battle, and hope that the ¨main characters¨ end up actually dying in surprising fashions to make sure the genre keeps its unpredictability.

And I feel like Free Fire is the type of film that will fire in all cylinders to the parts of the brain that get me all jolly.

The cast is a real big reason for my excitement. Let´s just say that a lot of these actors I have been enjoying in almost every single one of their roles, yes even that shitty one, and always get excited to see them in a movie, even if it ends with disappointment.

Only one woman in the entire movie? I wonder who will probably “win” the fight?!

Never take a rock to a gun fight, unless that rock is Dwayne Johnson. But he isn’t here, so instead we got a few junkies and some Europeans who want to buy and sell guns.

On one side, we have Chris (Cillian Murphy) who needs some weapons for Ireland. He brought along his main muscle, the aging Frank (Michael Smiley), someone who helped set up the deal in Justine (Brie Larson), and a couple of stupid young guys to help make their crew look bigger and carry the boxes (Enzo Cilenti, Sam Riley).

They meet Ord (Armie Hammer), who makes sure the deal is on the up and up, another middle man type person, but basically a mercenary hired by the other side.

The other side is led by Vernon (Sharlto Copley), a South African, and his associate Martin (Babou Ceesay). Their muscle include Harry (Jack Reynor) and Gordon (Noah Taylor). But they brought a different type of rifle than agreed upon, so arguments start getting made, people are getting antsy.

The real argument comes from two of the lackies, unrelated to the deal, but once shots start firing and both sides start taking hits, all bets are off. It gets worse when two sharpshooters arrive (Patrick Bergin, Mark Monero), meaning someone was already looking to double cross someone else for some money.

Also featuring Tom Davis as a giant.

Generally, in the middle of gun fire, it is the best time to discuss pay raises.

I love Armie Hammer in everything. I am enjoying Jack Reynor’s up and coming career. I think Brie Larson is awesome. Sharlto Copley is the best part of a lot of bad movies, and the best part of some good movies.

But this film is another movie that I must have just overhyped in my brain. I knew that it was a short film, a one set location, and mostly about people shooting each other. There was the chance for a smart plot, but I didn’t expect one (and it obviously did not delivery one). But at the very least, I expected a lot of exciting deaths and amazing feats of showmanship.

Yet in the middle, it felt like it was dragging. They didn’t have a lot of people to start with, so the deaths had to be spread out and relatively slow. It just seems like every single one of them was a terrible shot. Most of them get injured relatively quickly, shots to the shoulder or leg, meaning everyone crawls for both cover and necessity. But it almost seemed bizarre just at how little people were actually shot versus the number of bullets used.

Maybe it was a realism thing, maybe it was because they didn’t know where to take it. But at least the movie is relatively funny. Hearing the quips in the background and the angst these people started to have with each other were pretty great. And now, whenever I hear Annie’s Song by John Denver, I will think of this movie fondly. Not as fondly as as I had hoped, but still a bit fondly.

Okay, let’s start this with my fast and the furious order of liking the films.

1, 5, 3, 7, 6, 4, 2.

And now that I have seen The Fate of the Furious, I would either put it after 7, or after 6. The trend continues, that I would have mentioned in a few of the previous F&F reviews I have done.

The even ones are not as good as the odd ones. It is science, bitch!

I think this is also some science.

F8 begins with Dom (Vin Diesel) and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) in Havana, Cuba on a honeymoon. A honeymoon! Hooray! And it comes complete with a street race so absurd and contradictory, you can accept anything else the film has to offer.

While walking around, Dom runs into a stranded woman. Car problems, sucks to suck. Turns out it was a trap, this lady is named Cipher (Charlize Theron) (A name that always means villain in any movie that features it), and she has something to blackmail Dom with. She needs him to run a mission, he can’t tell anyone, and yes, it will involve betraying his friends and loved ones to do it. But part of the film is learning about the mystery, so why would I tell you now?

We have a lot of returning characters, including: Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), Tej (Ludacris), Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), Deckard (Jason Statham) and Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), Elena (Elsa Pataky) and Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell). For some reason, no Brian, although he is mentioned a ton.

But also new characters! Mainly featuring Little Nobody (Scott Eastwood), underling of Mr. Nobody who is going to be geared towards our new Brian, Rhodes (Kristofer Hivju), Cipher’s main muscle, and Helen Mirren doing something or another.

Ending with Mirren is like popping out a secretive submarine out of nowhere, right car guys?!

What is it like to enjoy this movie? I truly cannot fathom it. It seems to be plagued with issues, from ridiculous character decisions, to plot points, to plot twists. I understand that not every character should be smart, but this group of people has now turned into an international task force that deals with apparently world ending problems, so they have to have some intelligence.

But instead we get a main character who says that ¨It doesn matter what is under the hood, but who is behind the wheel¨ before a street race. So when he is called out on that quote and given a shitty car, what does he do? A whole lot of quick modifications in order to change what is under the hood. Ah, thanks Dom, so it does matter, okay.

And that was just the beginning of the film, with the rest of the movie falling straight in line with those scenes.

We have a few mentions of Brian, but terrible reasons for not involving him. We have returning bad guys, meaning you actually have to remember the inane plots from previous films, and then watch as these bad guys gain sudden redeeming qualities and everything is fine again. We get a build up of a big fight, and it never gets to occur.

And again, we get poor decision after poor decision. In one of the above pictures we have all the cars driving in reverse to keep the middle car in place. Before that, they were just breaking to keep him stopped. But at this point in the film I had to scratch my head, wondering what their plan was going to be to actually stop him, because keeping him in place with a lot of moving tires is clearly not a good idea with no end goal. Before this scene we had a great idea with cars being hacked and forced to get in the way and block up traffic, but for whatever reason, that tactic had to be thrown out of the window for these scenes.

And you know what? The ending explosion and save rivals Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That might sound harsh, but it is true.

Some amusing banter aside, if you like superhero films where there power is driving and surviving explosions, while also having lower than average intelligence, you will enjoy The Fate of the Furious.

Hey! A new movie, on Netflix! That means this bad boy didn’t go to theaters, it just appeared in our lives, and in some film festivals. Because I had quite a few critic friends talking about it, and I had no idea why.

When I heard the words I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore, I groaned. Last thing I need to see is a bunch of twenty-somethings bitching about the tiniest inconveniences and quoting Futurama. I then assumed it was some indie movie opening in five theaters across the USA, and only decided to watch it when I got on Netflix and the film slapped its dick in my face.

And even then I had reluctance. It was that little boy from those ring movies that made me want to watch it.

Actual footage of man me and girl me glaring at the movie from afar. In my car.

Ruth (Melanie Lynskey, indie movie princess) is pissed off at the world. She is a nursing assistant, but that doesn’t matter right now. She lives alone, has some friends, and people piss her off. People cut in front of her at the supermarket, dogs shit on her lawn, people spoil the book series she is reading, and someone broke into her house, fucked it all up, and stole some of her things.

Oh yeah, that is a pretty big one. She is shaken up about the whole thing, even more upset that the police (Gary Anthony Williams) seems to not give a shit about it, taking her statement and not giving her hope for restitution.

So she sets out to finding the culprit on her own, footprints and all. And after a brief tiff, she enlists the help of a neighbor, Tony (Elijah Wood), who is upset over theft in the neighborhood. They have hacking skills, ninja stars, and they are pissed off at the world. They will find out who took her stuff and there will be some sort of payback. Maybe a stern talking to.

Also starring Christine Woods, David Yow, Devon Graye, Robert Longstreet, and Jane Levy.

Nothing like book spoilers to spoil ones appetite as well.

Despite my rantings about indie films, I really didn’t know what to expect. Elijah Wood has been doing a lot of this darker, trippy stuff in his post Hobbit career. There was Sin City, there was Wilfred, Cooties, and now this. And of course Tobey Maguire was in The Details, which is kind of the same thing since they are similar. I didn’t expect this film to be a dark comedy, but once it started, it delivered hand over feet.

It has a few shocking events, sudden escalations, death, violence, and a bit of realism. If there is a fight, both sides are getting hurt and in unexpected ways, as they realize they are NOT superheroes. There is real danger for the characters involved and a lot of morally gray areas as well. And morally very very black areas, but we get through those as well.

This has got to be Lynskey’s best work to date. I am not going to call myself a super fan of hers or anything, and I have only seen a handful of roles, but most of them are side characters, reserved, and forgettable. In this film, it is HER movie, she grows as a character, she starts to take charge, and it is a good change.

If this film had problems, it would mostly just involve the ending. How everything ends up resolved might not match the tone from the rest of the film. It also took me awhile to really get into it, the build up being necessary, but still unexciting.

War Dogs came and went and no one cared. And you know what that is?

Jonah Hill is back to being fat in it. Not only is he fat, but he looks uncomfortably rapey. Everyone thought that skinny Jonah would not be funny, but he totally is! And then from then on, Fat Jonah was put in shitty movies. Like The Sitter.

Needless to say, the Fat Jonah theory is definitely one of the main reasons I stayed away, and it sounds like a lot of people in America stayed away as well. I can only hope it is for the same reason.

Fuck, they don’t even make him reasonable to look at when they put him in a suit.

This is partially a story about David Packouz (Miles Teller), a man in love and who cannot find good work. He has spent a lot of money on some high quality sheets to sell discounted to retirement homes, but the retirement homes don’t want nice sheets for people going to die soon. His only real income is giving massages which is not his ideal job either.

His lady Iz (Ana de Armas) is taking care of them. Until he runs into an old buddy from high school, Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), who eventually invites him to join his company. The company, AEY (which stands for nothing), is a sort of middle man company, who sells arms to the US government for the ongoing War in Iraq.

How did he get into that business? Long story, it is shady, but they are making their money by getting weapons from other countries and bringing them to Iraq, sometimes physically on their own. And once they get paid and people like what they get, they get more government contracts and start to live like fat cats. These are the deals that big contractors don’t bother with, but will still make them millions.

But eventually the money gets to their head, and the pursuit of more and more money. This leads to problems. This leads to threats.

Also featuring Patrick St. Esprit, Kevin Pollak, and Bradley Cooper.

Making money off of war. There is a word for that I think.

It was hard to get a lot out of War Dogs. Just from the basic color scheme of the film they go out of their and way to make it unpleasant looking.

Just look at our main characters. They didn’t even try to accurately look like the people they portrayed. Nothing. Alike. At all. They are only similar in that they are men. Normally in these things they try and make them at least look similar. The casting director here gave no fucks, went for who they wanted, and in addition to it, decided to make Hill as ugly as they possibly could to drive home a point.

What was that point? That the charcter was a scumbag. Of course this is all based on testimony of the other guy, who wrote a book and got less prison time. Of course he will make himself seem not too bad.

Somehow despite everything I still found it an okay watch. They rushed through a lot of things and the entire thing seemed to hurt my eyes, but in there somewhere is an okay story with a decent lesson.

Fuck bitches, get money. Or else I think that is what the lesson was.

I am thankful that I waited to review The Accountant. If I reviewed it months ago when it came out, it would have been so less…relevant.

What? Reviewing a movie when it comes out in theaters is LESS relevant? How crazy.

But yes. Because now I can say that regardless of the films topic and plot, this film should actually be about the 2017 Oscars. The two men responsible for the envelopes, the accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers, have lived their lives up to that night probably in perfection. Never flubbing a number, never getting BBQ sauce on their beards, just perfection.

And then they fucked up at the biggest award and took a little bit of time to fix it. It wasn’t a smaller technical award (which would have been equally devastating for those involved), but the Best Picture, which affects large groups of people.

Just fucking insane. I want their story. But this one will have to do.

Ah good, numbers, now we know it is an intense mystery film.

A lot of threads in this film, so I will try to keep it simple and brief.

Ray King (J.K. Simmons), some head of a treasury department, is looking for this Accountant dude, who might behind all these various…accountant things. And crimes. He gets some underling, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), to look into it. Some blackmail was involved too.

Chris Wolff (Ben Affleck) is of course our Accountant in question. He is a high functioning autistic dude, so he is good with numbers, but he was also trained to fight and stuff as a kid by his dad, because why not.

He is called into some company to look up financial irregularities. Turns out a lot of shenanigans are going on, we get some action, we get some mystery.

Starring Andy Umberger, Alison Wright, Anna Kendrick, Jon Bernthal, Jeffrey Tambor, John Lithgow, and Jean Smart. The A’s and J’s of the Hollywood complex.

He punched those numbers so hard they turned into tiny booklets and the room emptied.

A couple of days after I watched The Accountant, I realized something powerful. I don’t remember a whole lot about The Accountant.

The experience while watching it had some okay moments, but for the most part, nothing anymore stands out. It is a completely forgettable film, and that is not a good thing at all. If I wrote this review right away after watching it, it would have still only been a 2 out of 4.

But at this point, a die hard Ben Affleck fan, I am just wondering what happened? Is it worth ever seeing again? Shit, should I even watch Live By Night? I feel like I am automatically going to get the exact same reception for that film, and I can’t handle that happening right now. Another recent movie is Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and I don’t think I can handle that much shitty Ben Affleck in a row. I cannot go back the early 2000’s. Gone Girl was supposed to help lead to better roles, not worse!

I am just worried about my friend. Most of his upcoming films involve DC and I don’t want him to lose his acting career. He is lucky he even has one after all those shitty movies in the before time, here is no way he can survive a second falling out.

The Accountant is a forgettable action thriller. It might have smart moments, but it is not anything that I will care about discussing in the future, unfortunately.