Tag: Damon Wayans Jr.

The Russo Brothers and Tom Holland go together like Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. Both of them have careers that sometimes intersect and sometimes produce good movies. Yes, I did come up with that comparison myself, why do you ask?

I have a big fan of the Russos since their episodes on Community, and honestly, don’t know if they have done anything bad up to this point. They have done basically all of the best Marvel movies, so it is good to see them move on to a different source material. A book I have never heard of before. And if they bring along someone hoping to break from their boyish and charming mold, then it would be hard to pick someone better than Tom Holland right now.

What is Cherry about? I bet it ain’t about fruit.

I think the Russo brothers intentionally made him look like Tobey Maguire Spider-Man here.

Cherry (Tom Holland) (I can’t really tell you if that is his first name or last or what) is a young college student, a bit off, a bit popular or cool, but still a bit out there. And he sees a girl, Emily (Ciara Bravo, also hoping to lose her kids tv channel roots) and he wants her. He has a girlfriend back at home, but she is the past, Emily is the future.

They begin to couple, and they have a time, but Emily doesn’t know if he is good for her, and decides some forced time apart is important. She goes to Montreal, so he decides to enlist, having not left in his life.

The rest of the film deals with his basic training, his time overseas, the amount of fucked up shit he sees over there, his PTSD from those events, and of course, some nice opioid and heroin addiction leading to a life of crime.

Is that not enough for you? It should be. It is quite a lot of topics for our hero (?) to hit and endure, and it is over 2 hours to make sure it has some breathing room. But not much.

Also starring Jack Reynor, Forrest Goodluck, Jeff Wahlberg, and Damon Wayans Jr.

Oh shit, and now he looks like Uncle Ben’s killer?

I described Cherry as a thrill ride already, but it really is a wild movie. A Wild Cherry film, if you will. I stole that joke from another, but it is okay, because I set them up for it when I was delirious. If I was a smarter man on that day, I would have made it on my own.

This film feels like it definitely was meant to get people to not think of Holland as some sweet kid (And so was the point of The Devil All The Time, right?).  We need to see if Holland can be a mega movie star on his own without the backing power of Disney behind him, and I truly do think he delivers. His character is fast talking, crass, and absolutely in love despite showing it in a weird way. I couldn’t catch a break for this film because the characters in the movie can’t catch them either. Some of the war scenes just totally made my heart sink, and were put in just to show the absurdity of everything in life and how people can just suck.

This is a much better film than the also recently released Chaos Walking, also starring Holland. It is so hard to describe outside of just the topics presented. It feels timely and fresh though nonetheless. It didn’t give me the same feelings of angst as other recent releases like Greenland, but it is still up there in quality. Not for the feint of heart. They use naughty language in this movie. t

For whatever reason, I know a lot of people who were upset when Disney bought Marvel Studios. They thought it was the end of the good stuff. They thought only bad could come. They said the same thing when they bought Lucasfilm.

I, however, was excited. They weren’t going to mess around with a good thing too much, they didn’t want to spend billions to not make billions more back! But I was even more excited about the potential of a full on, super good CGI Marvel/Disney flick. Yeah. Something with the cutting edge in technology, giving me full on super hero battles, with flash colors and everything the comics promised, and really that live action movies still can’t fully give. So when I found out it was Big Hero 6? Well, I obviously had to look up what the hell that was.

Big Hero 6 is a much smaller property that has a small following. It is most well known for having, at times, Sunfire and Silver Samurai from X-Men in it, but we know that Fox has those rights, so they had to work around it. Disney also wanted to be able to tell a new story and not feel super tied down to any mythos, so messing with a smaller property would work well with that. And hey, if they didn’t have the Big Hero 6 leader in it, they’d probably have to change a lot anyways.

And thus, this animated movie exists, presumably nothing like the (old) comics, and I knowing nothing about it couldn’t have been happier.

Yay surprises and happiness and sunshine flowers!

This story is about Hiro Hamada (Ryan Potter) and his trouble with ladies. That’s not true, he doesn’t have troubles, he just doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about ANYTHING really, outside of robots and robot fighting. You see, Hiro is only 14, but he already graduated high school. Bright kid. Has a bright older brother too, Tadashi (Daniel Henney), but he is in college doing boring stuff. Hiro just wants to illegally bot fight and make money that way.

But once he finds out that Tadashi is actually in a really fucking cool robotics program, with really cool people? Yeah, that is when he thinks college might be a good thing, and not just living at home with his Aunt (Maya Rudolph) in San Fransokyo (which you should be able to figure out what two cities were combined for this).

Well, Hiro is able to design super sexy nanobot technology to get himself admission to the school! But when disaster strikes and he loses his invention, he is sad again. Not even his new college friends can help: Go Go Tomago (Jamie Chung), Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez), Wasabi (Damon Wayans Jr.) and Fred (T.J. Miller).

But when he finds out his invention was stolen and is being used for nefarious purposes, well, he cannot just sit idly by. He has to fight back. And he has to use Baymax (Scott Adsit), the soft robot helper and turn him into a fighting machine! And maybe he can fight back too. And his friends. Yes… Maybe they can be…super heroes.

Also featuring James Cromwell as Professor Robert Callaghan and Alan Tudyk as the seedy business man Alistair Krei.

Shake that sexy butt.

Color? Yes. Fantastic animation? Yes yes. Likeable characters? Yesx3. A plot about science and why knowledge is good and how science can change the world? Hells to the yes.

Watching Big Hero 6, the best way to describe it was having a blast. This Disney film is notable for not having a lot of songs, which might be their goal. They went Tangled, then Wreck-It Ralph, then Frozen, and now Big Hero 6. A lot more “macho” themed movie, if you go by outdated gender stereotypes, so there is no room for silly songs. Just action, humor, and sexy sexy graphics.

This was just a really great both super hero movie and animated family film. That is a hard one to pull off. A lot of great humor and it has a lot of similarities (based on my research) with the comics, but unique enough to make it its own thing. The only issue with it being in the animated field and a Disney flick, is I know that if we are going to get it a sequel, we have at least a four year wait. Can’t have one of these guys every two years, as it will make them compete with themselves for Best Animated Picture, and they don’t want that.

And can we get another shout out to science? Yay science! Some of the tech was inspired by real life advances too, making this futuristic tale also a bit modern.

It is too close to Halloween now, but I expect fully by next year that we will see a lot of Hiro and Baymax duos out and about. Not more than Elsa, but a fair number still.

Let’s Be Cops. A movie that has been advertised for almost six months before coming out, despite for all intents and purposes, looking like a shitty cop comedy.

I mean. You saw the trailer. It just pumps loud rap music at you with scenes that aren’t really funny and situations that are so unbelievable that you glare. Well, maybe I am just talking from my experience.

But from the looks of it, it just looks like a collection of people from TV shows trying to get into a big movie. I also missed three different screenings before finally going to the fourth available one because of how little I cared.

This is clearly just a recreation of a scene from Tommy Boy.

Justin (Damon Wayans Jr.) has a dream job, a video game maker in L.A. And by that, he works at a company but no one cares about his opinion or his game, especially not his boss (Jonathan Lajoie), and he kind of gets shit on. Non literally. He lives with his best friend, Ryan (Jake Johnson), who played college football but didn’t go pro due to an injury. He has been living off of money he made from a commercial for a few years, no prospects. Life sucks for them.

It sucks even more when they go to a reunion party and everyone there is successful and they are losers. They also showed up wearing cop outfits thinking it was a costume party. But hey, it turns out regular people believe them to be actual cops, since their outfits are authentic. They get to boss people around and have fun. Shit, even the ladies like them.

Well, Ryan gets really into this idea. He is the bigger loser. He gets the used cop car. Lights. Super illegal. Justin hates the idea. He has a job. Doesn’t like it. But likes the perks of the cute girl Josie (Nina Dobrev) at the diner they frequent finally paying attention to him.

But things quickly get out of hand when they end up pissing off a local mob crime dude, Mossi (James D’Arcy), who thinks a few actual street cops are trying to clean up the turf. They can’t handle this shit. They don’t even have real guns!

Also there are roles for Rob Riggle, Keegan-Michael Key, Andy Garcia, Natasha Leggero and Joshua Ormond as Little Joey.

Don’t give me that disgusted look just because there is a kid in this movie. There are dozens of them!

As expected, a lot of the humor in this film is crude and I didn’t find a lot of it funny. But then, every once in awhile, something made me chuckle. Generally they came from Damon Wayans Jr., who has been making me laugh for years. He just has those dance moves, you know?

The moments that I actually found amusing were apparently enough to warrant the film into okay status. On top of that, James D’Arcy made a pretty interesting mob boss. Classic eye scar and all.

It still had quite a few annoying plot points, especially near the end, that cause characters to react only in ways to save our stars / make the movie move forward, instead of what their character would actually do. Like, you know, shoot someone.

Whatever happens, this movie definitely doesn’t deserve a sequel. So I do hope it fails enough financially for them to not even think about it. Watch on Netflix eventually, maybe.

I have been told that The Other Guys was a great movie. By looking at the cover a long time ago, I assumed that was not true. This also came out around the same time as Cop Out, so I need to spread out my police cop comedy thrillers. Cop Out seemed to be a good movie at the beginning, very funny, and try and turn into a more serious thing by the end, causing me to care less. The Other Guys, on the other hand, seems to be a comedy throughout, yet still, I lost interest.

I am fine with this level of seriousness.

This movie starts out as an over the top action movie. Samuel L. Jackson and The Rock are chasing some criminals in NYC, and lots of damage get done. Sure, they had about only 3k worth of pot on them, and they caused 12million in damages, but who is counting? Crime has been stopped. They are heroes!

But the movie isn’t about them. It isn’t about Rob Riggle and Damon Wayans Jr. either, they are just normal guy. No, it is about the Other Guys. Will Ferrell, desk cop accountant who loves paper work, and Mark Whalberg, overly angry and paranoid detective who has to work with him.

The movie plot is pretty much, SLJ and The Rock end up dying with their reckless ways, and some people need to fill their shoes!

I loved the beginning, had me “lol”ing more than once. But as it got into the story (which was heavy on banking and monetary things, which is something I don’t understand well anyways), I didn’t get confused, I just cared less. Hard to describe it. The jokes did seem to get less funny, or be the same joke over and over. Eva Mendes and Michael Keaton are also both in this movie.

“Two possible pictures here, you chose one with Michael Keaton???” – Angry Gorgon Review reader.

I also didn’t like Whalberg’s character. Normally in a duo, one is annoying, and one is normal. You take Whalberg to be the “normal” part of the pair at the start, until later when you find out he is way annoying. Always yelling and freaking out. Part of the design, but not one I liked to see. So to me, it started out strong, then just got okay.