Tag: Halston Sage

Oh X-Men, how much we weep for thee.

X-Men so bad now, they took X-Men out of the title.

X-Men so bad, they are trying to remake their previous worst main X-Men title with the same writer.

X-Men so bad, they make a movie called Dark Phoenix and don´t have Phoenix in the movie at all.

X-Men so bad, this movie killed the X-Men.

And no amount of Albinism can save it. 

X-Men: Apocalypse took place in the 1980´s, and this one takes place in the 1990´s and features no real aging of any of the mutants. That is the real superpowers here.

At this point, they are accepted by the public, a weird timeline indeed. And after the crew was sent into space to safe a spaceship disaster. And sure enough, some space dust gets absorbed into Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) making her feel all funny inside.

It turns out Xavier (James McAvoy) may have been lying to her about her past, and hidden some of her own memories from her. That makes her sad. And mad. And willing apparently to turn her back on all of the X-Men, even killing a few of them, just to showcase how mad she is.

Also aliens.

Featuring of various amounts Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Alexandra Shipp, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Evan Peters, Halston Sage, Brian d´Arcy James, Lamar Johnson, Scott Shepherd, and Jessica Chastain.

X-Men so bad, their faces are breaking and not the box office records.

X-Men so bad, they keep having their greatest enemy be themselves.

X-Men so bad, that kindness saves the day, like they are care bears.

X-Men so bad, this is not the first time actors have asked for their characters to be killed in order to leave the franchise.

X-Men so bad, that they used time travel to fix the bad movies and still made more bad movies (and time paradoxes).

X-Men so bad, they have failed multiple times to make a hero turning bad in no way compelling for the viewers.

X-Men so bad, they are their own Greek tragedy in terms of a rise and fall of successful films.

X-Men so bad, their film qualities would make a better roller coaster than anything at the Island of Adventure.

X-Men so bad, I put off writing this review for months due to complete and utter apathy.

Oh you didn’t hear about the super new, ultra fresh, Netflix Original movie everyone is talking about? No, I’m not talking about Okja, I’m talking about You Get Me!

You Get Me was released on Netflix on 06-28-17, which happened to be the same day they also released Okja. And I was very excited to watch Okja on that day, I had it all planned out, and when I got to the computer around 7:30am, Okja wasn’t there. I looked it up, and it just said the release date (which was the right day!) and no link to the movie. Oh no!

So instead I said fuck it, I came to watch a movie and a movie would be watched. And advertised in front of me was You Get Me, a movie where I might not even know most of the people involved, but it was new, and it needed someone to watch it. So why not make that someone me?

I believe this was a ploy by Netflix to get me to watch a bad movie instead. You get me, Netflix.

Tyler Hanson (Taylor John Smith) is a high school boy who wants one thing. Sex. And attention. And love. And a stable home life. Okay that is a lot. He is about to be a senior, his dad is dead, and his mom travels a lot, so he sort of takes care of his younger sister on his own. Sort of weird.

He has a girlfriend, Ali (Halston Sage), whom he loves a lot, but they don’t do the sex. And it turns out, before she moved there she had a lot of sex and drinking. Hopefully that wasn’t that long ago because you know, high school. Tyler gets upset, they fight, they break up. Tyler meets Holly (Bella Thorne). She likes to party, likes Tyler, they have a weekend of hanging out and fun and yes, the sexy time.

But it is just a small fling, she is just here for the summer, and he ends up reconnecting with Ali and they fix their relationship. Hooray! Of course, it turns out Holly is now here at the school for real, she has moved here with her mom. It makes things awkward, but to make it less awkward, Tyler doesn’t tell the secret, and Holly befriends the fuck out of Ali. Like quick, BFFs. Ah joy.

She comes into the friends circle, she starts getting angry that her love is not being fulfilled, and oh yeah, we got a jealous angry ex movie.

Also starring Nash Grier and Anna Akana as other best friend characters.

“Oh. My. God. I am so annoyed at everyone right now.”

It is a bit weird to see a sexual thriller from a still in high school perspective. But not too weird, because high schoolers have sex. What is weird is its rating. I don’t know if it officially has a rating, but it is clearly just a PG-13 movie, so a sexual thriller about teenagers, for teenagers, that doesn’t go as far as most movies in the genre. This is a gateway film for young adults to get into sexual thrillers, a niche film you didn’t know needed to exist.

My thoughts on Thorne are all over the place. She is in so many movies and things, at the time of writing 65 acting credits despite being 19 years old. At this point, if there is a movie with high school students, I assume she will be in it, even if she doesn’t have a big role. Sometimes she is a bitch, sometimes nice, but if you have seen enough of these films, you realize her range isn’t really there.

So to have her as this main antagonist, this deranged character, who gets all revengey and wants to hurt a boy who has wronger her. And you know what, he kind of did. He pushed her away after a good weekend. So she has a reason to be angry, not a reason to get all close to killing, but still angry.

This is a predictable film. If you’ve seen one sexual thriller, you’ve seen this one. And this is a bad one, in a genre that generally is pretty bad.

Last summer I watched two really good teenage romance films that involved death based on books. The Fault In Our Stars and If I Stay. I was surprised at the quality of both films and how I was able to still connect with them despite not being in the target demographic.

Of course, John Green wrote The Fault in Our Stars and wrote a few books besides that one. Before that one, he wrote one called Paper Towns, which my wife has assured me is fantastic.

Really, as long as it avoids the normal cliches, it will probably make me happy. And knowing my recent track record with any sort of romance film or drama, it will probably just end up making me cry in public again.

It does feature some amateur level hallway creepin’ though, so that’s a plus.

Quentin/Q (Nat Wolff) has always lived a typical lame boy life. He does what he is supposed to, does good in school, has nerd friends and no love life. He does have love in his life, however. He loves Margo (Cara Delevingne), who moved across the street from his house when they were both kids. Back then they hung out and started to do adventured, but she did it way more and eventually they lost touch. Still, he hoped and dreamed.

Then one night, she appeared at his window! She needed someone to drive her around Orlando, get revenge on her ex boyfriend and so called friends. A night of adventure and a night to remember!

And then? The next day? Poof. Margo was gone. She ran away again, Q thought they would start to hit it off, so soon to finishing high school. But luckily, Margo always leaves some clues for her friends when she leaves so that they know where they can find her. Now it is up to Q to put himself out there for once and do something out of his comfort zone! With the help of his two best friends (Austin Abrams, Justice Smith), the old best friend of Margo (Halston Sage), and the girlfriend of one of his best friends (Jaz Sinclair), he will hopefully find true love and happiness.

Also featuring the amazingly accurate kid versions of our leads, Hannah Alligood and Josiah Cerio, and Cara Buono as Q’s mom. Seriously, I am willing to believe they just filmed the kid scenes many years ago and decided to give them fake imdb credits and names so that people wouldn’t think it was weird.

Jokes on you, I think everything is weird!

Alright, before the movie I had two hopes. First of all, I can say that Paper Towns definitely avoided cliches. It had a huge “nice guy” boner going throughout it, but by the end it was certainly not your standard story. Which was fantastic!

Unfortunately, it didn’t make me cry. No tears at all, not even a little. Come on John Green. You destroyed me with your last film, this one only gave me chuckles and contemplation.

Here’s the thing. Our two leads were fantastic. Wolff and Delevingne felt like real people for the most part with genuine expressions and appropriate reactions to everything. They made their characters awesome. The supporting cast however is not able to get on their level. I thought the chemistry between Wolff and friends felt real, but the other two actors just didn’t feel real. One character in particular was more annoying than funny.

Again, I am all for surprises along the way, and in fact, the twists in this film are generally good overall. It just didn’t resonate with me as much as I had hoped. Thankfully the leads were still great and oh so charismatic.

Finally, a movie that can relate to almost anyone. Neighbors. Hey, I have had neighbors most of my life! Some people live on farms in the middle of no where with no real neighbors. Those people aren’t the target audience for this movie though. I doubt they are anyone’s target audience really.

Also it is the first big comedy of the summer. Last year we got This Is The End as our first big movie (because I am just making shit up now and ignoring other films, like The Hangover 3. Let me make up this imaginary point, jeez), and that one set a bar too high for most other comedies to follow.

Can Neighbors do the same?

Not with these squares trying to act cool. Nope nope nope.

Mac (Seth Rogen) and, Kelly (Rose Byrne) are adults! They have finally done it! They created a human from their love and they have a house!

But then they got…grr…neighbors! They thought it would be a lovely gay couple. No, it was a frat house. How’d they get a house in the middle of a residential neighborhood? Who knows. But they are stoked, because it is time to party. Their president, THE Teddy Sanders (Zac Efron) and a VP of Pete (Dave Franco).

Mac and Kelly try and be cool about it all. Sure they have a baby, but as long as they are cool, the frat will probably try to keep it down. The frat is willing to be friendly with them, as long as they don’t call the cops ever, just them first.

Well, they call the cops eventually after a party that won’t end and won’t get quiet. That makes the frat angry. They decide to rage war on their neighbors, as they have messed with the wrong frat. Then shenanigans happen. Shenanigans!

We also get Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Jerrod Carmichael as frat guys. And Ike Barinholtz and Carla Gallo as friends of Mac and Kelly. And Hannibal Buress as a cop! But his role is limited.

When there are multiple De Niros, you will never know who is talking to who.

I have long talked about how great Zac Efron is in past reviews, and it is still true here, so I won’t talk about it more here. Seth Rogen is very much like his normal self, so I won’t talk about that more here.

Instead, I will talk about Rose Byrne, who was absolutely hilarious in the movie along with the rest of the cast. I realize I rarely praise the female in a comedy, but she really held her own against some of these other professionals of comedy. She doesn’t do comedy much, outside of Bridesmaids I really can’t remember anything, so it really came as a big surprise to me.

The film definitely has its moments. The one De Niro scene had me in stitches, and reminded me a bit of the seagulls in Finding Nemo.

It was a good show from an all-star-ish cast with hardly any downtime in between laughs.