Tag: Margarita Levieva

Ah, LARPing. An easy subject to make fun of. I have never LARP’d, because actually LARPing involves having a character, having stats abilities and stuff, and doesn’t necessarily involve just hitting people with swords. I have done the thing where I hit people with swords though.

Movies that feature LARPing generally are just overall parodies of them, never really getting the actuality of it all (like anything nerdy in films). Recently I watched Lloyd the Conqueror and it didn’t trash on the subject. Still probably far off, but at least it wasn’t just making fun of it. I imagine this movie, Knights of Badassdom will do the same thing, but with a bigger budget and bigger stars.

There is an obvious joke here, but I will be the bigger man and not make it.

Some friends like to role play and have eventually elevated their play to the next level to involve LARPing. After one of their friends goes down with a paintball injury, Hung (Peter Dinklage) and Eric (Steve Zahn) need another member for their team before the big even this weekend!

Which is where they find Joe (Ryan Kwanten), their old friend, wallowing in misery. His girlfriend (Margarita Levieva) just broke up with him. He used to play D&D with them, but stopped. Using the power of drugs and alcohol, they convince him to join their band for the weekend. The rest of their team includes Lando (Danny Pudi), Gunther (Brett Gipson), and Gwen (Summer Glau).

But early in the weekend, Eric accidentally casts a spell from a book he found that unleashes a succubus upon the festivities. Weee, real demons!

Also featuring Brian Posehn for one scene, and Jimmi Simpson as the Game Master. Nerds, every single one of them.

In case you are curious, yes, the lightning bolt joke makes it here too.

Arguably, this is some sort of “horror comedy” or “black comedy,” I have heard it described as both. The only issue I have with both sides is the comedy element. I remember a couple amusing scenes, maybe, but most of it was sans chuckles. That sucks! I know most of the actors in this. All of them are amusing in their own way and definitely are “nerds” in terms of roles they play normally, so I believe that they are nerdy in real life as well.

But this film is just disappointing. Again, very few laughs. If there were more laughs, I could forgive the mediocre acting or plot or whatever. Kind of cool fight near the end but it isn’t enough to save it. Definitely a passable movie. I can’t even bring myself to describe it more than what I have done already.

Adventureland! A title like that, it must be a good time.

This is actually my second attempt at watching Adventureland. The first time I tried, it was going to be while I was donating Plasma. But the nurses kept talking to me the first 30 minutes of the film, so I missed a lot of plot (and was quite annoyed) and then the machine blew up. Very messy. Never really tried to reschedule after that!

I also had a temporary ban on Jesse Eisenberg movies, because there was a month span when I saw…pretty much all of them but this one.

Fuck the plot, just tell me how to get one of them giant pandas.

James (Eisenberg) has just graduated from college! And as part of his college grad gift, he gets to go to Europe for the summer for many weeks. All planned out, just needs a bit more to fix the cost of travel.

But fuck. His dad kind of got demoted and they are losing a lot lot of money. They can’t even help him handle graduate school in NYC. So his Euro trip is cancelled and he has to move back to Pittsburgh to find a summer job. But where could he work with virtually no real world work experience (fucking literature majors man)?

Adventureland! Too bad the owner (Bill Hader) and his wife (Kristen Wiig) have him working at Games. Rides are where the real winners get to be. A lot easier, no asshole customers. I mean, even his asshole old friend Frigo (Matt Bush) has a rides job. Oh well.
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So he gets shown the carnie ropes by Joel (Martin Starr), a fellow intellectual lost in the pit of amusement park despair. And it kind of sucks a lot. But then he meets Em (Kristen Stewart), and it gets a bit better. Kind of. Too bad too much drama happens at this place, and way too much pent up sexual frustration. Especially one Lisa P (Margarita Levieva) returns to the park. Not to mention having the maintenance guy (Ryan Reynolds) being a kick ass musician who once jammed with Lou Reed.

Studies have shown that reviews with a picture of Ryan Reynolds get clicked on 3x as much than those without.

Adventureland! Where uhh, dreams go to die I guess? Apparently carnie life sucks in Pittsburgh, and it is full of privileged white people. It happens all the time, I am sure.

I was kind of very disappointed with the movie. No one really stood out as a great role, except for the Hader/Wiig duo of awkward owners. Good at conversations they are. But didn’t feel like it was that funny for a comedy. Probably has a lot more drama in it than people would expect. But when one of the biggest movie problems is just based off of miscommunication and people not talking about what is actually happening? That is such a cop out. That shit doesn’t happen in real life. Anger can still be there, but at least people generally get the truth.

But overall, the movie felt pretty lazy and just eventually ended for me.

Ooh, Noise. That would be either some vague horror movie, or another remake of The Grinch.

Obviously it is neither, but man, wouldn’t some gritty remake of The Grinch be cool? Something rated R, yet also still not a horror movie.

I’d watch it.

Quick googling says there is no such thing as a Gritty Grinch. Yet.

Instead of my bizarre idea, this movie goes one step bizarrier (Level 2 spell?). It stars mild mannered Tim Robbins. He lives and works in New York city, with his wife, Bridget Moynahan, and their young daughter. But every night the same thing happens. The noise never stops. More specifically, the car alarms, but all the excess noises are a big problem in his eyes.

It makes the baby wake up, and makes it so no one can sleep well, and also makes him limp. Err. Well because the cops never seem to do something about it, he decides to do his own punishment. First he starts slow, deflating a tire or whatever. But eventually he is full on rage mode, smashing the window open to pop the trunk, to cut the line to the battery, just to shut it off. 3 minutes is too long for an alarm to go, given that most people ignore alarms anyways and probably do more harm than good.

He becomes known as The Rectifier, a sort of vigilante punishing those who don’t turn off their alarms. He does try to use the courts to his advantage, but each time his case is thrown out. After his wife makes him leave for his obsession, he meets a Russian student, Margarita Levieva, who helps him start a simple petition to change some car alarm laws and make it fine-able which gets huge support. But the Mayor (William Hurt) and his assistant (William Baldwin) don’t like it just because it seems to support vigilantism, so they put a stop to it.

So it becomes up to Tim Robbins to find a way to get his law passed, any means possible.

Look at all that rage. Yeah, he clearly mad.

I will keep this short and sweet. This movie was weird, yes, which I like. The beginning felt pretty good but died down after about twenty or so minutes. The ending was also strong, I liked what he decided to do in order to finally get his ordinance passed. But a whole lot of the middle was kind of boring. I didn’t even like their quick country plantation visit, where he found that the noise problems still exist outside of the city.

It is a bad problem, no one likes it but everyone accepts it and his character cannot fathom why they should accept it any longer. So he decides to spend a long time trying to combat it, and it is kind of awesome in an “unexpected hero” sort of way. I was surprised this wasn’t based on some real life story of a guy who hated the alarms that much.

But man, if it was a bit better in the middle, this movie would be a lot better.