Tag: Lucien Laviscount

You love her,

but she loves him.

And he loves somebody else.

You just can’t win.

Love can stink, certainly, but what about if you have already found love? Do all of your problems go away, and you live happily ever after? Eh. Maybe.

Because now you have to be with someone forever, and have to trust them when you are apart. And if you cannot Trust someone, can you truly love them?

Oh hey, here are two of the four main characters!

Brooke (Victoria Justice) and Owen (Matthew Daddario)are a couple and lovers and everything is just, just swell. Owen is some level of famous, a new reporter. Brooke handles art deals and runs galleries. You know, a very white couple with careers featured more often in films and TV shows than in real life.

Brooke thinks Owen has been acting weird, because well, he has been. He goes out drinking a bunch and meets people. He may have met a girl. Owen also doesn’t trust Brooke as much, because she has to travel for her job. And her new client, and up and comer, Ansgar (Lucien Laviscount), is suave and lovely and people want him, it happens. He also does mostly paintings of naked ladies, especially ones he has slept with.

But Brooke also doesn’t trust Owen! She ends up hiring a service in order to check out his faithfulness. A P.I. is one thing. She wants to see if he would actually cheat on her if someone flirted. Using this service, she hires Amy (Katherine McNamara) to see she can seduce him for sex, but she won’t do that of course, just get it on camera that he is totally down to fuck strangers. But but but…she also actually wants to fuck Owen though, because they have previously met it turns out and now she might go all the way.

All of these relationships are bad and doomed.

Oh hey, here are two of the main four characters!

I could have sworn when I watched this that no famous people were actually in this. Justice is famous for things. I know it is Disney related, and I only recognize her name, not her of course. McNamara is in a bunch of CW shows (which explains her character a lot in this movie). And of course Daddario isn’t famous, but his sister is (And he is also in CW shows).

Trust plays out like a sexier CW show that can show some naked lady paintings. None of the characters have any depth to them. Everyone is pretty and everyone is shallow. No one can be described as a good person in this movie. And some of these traits doesn’t always equate to a bad film. You can have a great movie about all bad and flawed people. But this doesn’t fall into the character.

The acting is so off in this film. No one character feels believable, and the melodrama is saturated across every surface. That isn’t a great description, because sometimes melodramas have exciting moments, or moments of intense feeling, even if poorly acted. I feel like this is just four characters floating blankly through their momentary existence, and just are reading lines and getting a small paycheck. Nothing is genuine and the plot is weak.

So, just so I don’t continue to shit on CW, I will say the CW shows usually have some fun moments. But this one is void of anything interesting. It is worse than the average CW show.

So many January films, so little time. In January, most of my reviews were of Oscar quality films, trying to catch up before the Awards ceremony of everything that would be nominated. So I missed a lot of January releases, and to be fair, a lot of them didn’t even have prescreenings.

The Bye Bye Man had a prescreening, it just wasn’t worth me leaving my house for.

January horror films can be some of the worst things to sit through. For some unknown reason, they really want to make January the second scariest movie after October. They really don’t have to try that hard though, given the quality of the movies that come out in that month.

It would be hard to find someone that isn’t scared of how bad things like I, Frankenstein are.

Yeah, still not as scary as The Legend of Hercules.

A long time ago, some weirdo with a rifle decided to kill his friends and family in a small suburb, then he killed himself. He kept saying “Don’t Think It, Don’t Say It.”

Now lets fast forward to the now times. A group of kids in college, ready to take over the world. We got Elliot (Douglas Smith), his girlfriend Sasha (Cressida Bonas), and their friend John (Lucien Laviscount). They get a house together off campus, you know, for college things.

Eventually, Elliot starts seeing some weird things occur with a coin they find in a night stand. This night stand is something they just bought in a sale and brought over to furnish the place. It is full of strange writing, erratic, “Don’t Think It, Don’t Say It,” like a crazy person.

Blah blah blah, a seance happens in their place, from another friend (Jenna Kanell), and things get even more trippy. The friends start to hallucinate, thinking of this Bye Bye Man fellow (Doug Jones), with a dog, and train sounds. Just acknowledging his existence is enough to get him to mess with your life, and so the more people you talk to about him, the more people who will die or get killed. Hooray!

Also featuring Carrie-Anne Moss, Erica Tremblay, and Michael Trucco.

This part is amusing if you imagine Abe Sapien from Hellboy coming at you instead.

You know what, if I was just analyzing the plot, or the acting, or the characters themselves, this would be an easy 0 out of 4. But I was intrigued by one, and only one aspect of the movie. The camera work was top notch. The opening scene really sort of drew the viewer in, with a few longer takes, having this random guy take a rifle and shoot his family and neighbors.

I really enjoyed the opening, which had a tragic moment happen in the bright sunlight, it felt fresh. And when it got modern, the film got darker. More scenes took place at night, or with tinted lenses to really give that…modern edgy look or whatever to them. Because now we are dealing with college students, living on their own, party party! The film got notably uglier, but the camera work was still pretty decent from my point of view.

And yet, that is the only positive notes. As I already said, plot bad, acting bad, characters bad. Tone was bad too. Mythos for The Bye Bye Man was all over the place. It really made writing the whole movie quite easy when you can just say the characters hallucinate whatever with extreme detail to get them to do anything. It feels lazy.

Also our star, Douglas Smith? Honestly, he has such an uncharismatic face, it is annoying to watch him for most of this film. Which is mean. I don’t hate you as a person Douglas Smith, but you don’t match the role that you were given.

This film is an easy pass, but it will probably have thirty sequels, because YOLO.