Tag: Mike Epps

Title alone, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a winner. I comment, quite a lot, about a title can make or break a movie. Stuber, on one hand, helped break that movie. This title? I am intrigued, tell me more, what are you about?

Is this a fantasy film? A political one? A drama, a musical, or an action film?

I don’t know, I just know I am ready to be wow’d with whatever direction it chooses and hope the story can live up to the name.

The hugs look very cozy, I want one. Jimmie Fails (Jimmie Fails, no he is not a celebrity) is a relatively young adult living in Sand Francisco. And no, he isn’t the only black person in the city.

He lives with his friend Mont (Jonathan Majors ) and his friend’s grandfather (Danny Glover) . They travel the city often and comment on its changes, but a lot of Jimmie’s time is spent going to a special Victorian house that he USED to live in when he was younger. Due to many factors, they had to move, but he loves this house because his grandfather built it after World War II. It is in his families history and the old couple who live there now aren’t taking good care of it.

A lot of his free time is spent fixing the exterior without permission, much to their annoyance.
But lo and behold, one day, there is crying and packages moving away. Apparently the new owner had died, and now the sisters are battling with who gets to have it, and until that is settled, the house is going to be empty.

Jimmy and Mont should just, you know, live there, with the old furniture, and fix it, and maybe he can claim it back for his family again!

Also starring Mike Epps, Tichina Arnold, Rob Morgan, and Finn Wittrock.

The movie shines of San Franciscian.

TLBMiSF is a hard film to describe and recommend on why it is good and worth your time watching. The plot is simple, and yet still far more than that. A guy wants his family home back, that his grandfather built, and he is just really kind and nice about it.

This film goes through racial stereotypes in a lot more of a subtle way than other films on this topic. What does it mean to be a black man? And does the city matter when it comes to your race? Is there a wrong way and a right way to live?

The play scene near the end is very powerful, and yet, so is the regular sites and sounds of the city. It is a really great film from first time actors, directors, and writers, and hopefully wont be forgotten by the years end completely.

3 out of 4.

Where you been, Eddie Murphy? What you doing, pseudo-retiring on me like that?

Sure your last two real films, Mr. Church (2016) and A Thousand Words (2013) were bad, but that is probably…uhh, your fault. Trying to do some spiritual family stuff instead of letting your real humor out.

Surely, giving yourself a role where you get to talk and swear and joke is just the role for you.

Telling a true story of a different stand up comic that influenced his whole career seems like a good tribute to that actor/comedian, while also getting Murphy back on his feet again. Dolemite is my Name? Well, make me laugh and I’ll call you anything.

No, I won’t call you daddy though, even with that suit. Rudy Ray Moore (Eddie Murphy) is the baddest motherfucker around. Or at least he is in his own eyes.

He wants to be famous, he knows he can do it, and he has tried it all. He has released songs, has done stand up, and he is now middle aged and still nowhere. He can’t get a damn thing going.

But while MCing at a local club, he decides to try a little bit of material he has taken from older homeless people in his neck of the woods. He asked them their stories, and listened to their jokes. They spoke rhythmically and told ridiculous stories, and he thinks that audiences might really enjoy it with the right delivery.

And this content takes off. He builds the character Dolemite, and people love his swears and graphic humor. He is able to sell records of his material, mostly on his own, and get popular in the hoods all over the world. And after all of that, he still wants more. He wants to make a movie. Who cares if he has never made a movie before.

Also featuring Keegan-Michael Key, Mike Epps, Craig Robinson, Tituss Burgess, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Snoop Dogg, T.I., Ron Cephas Jones, Barry Shabaka Henley, Chris Rock, and Wesley Snipes.

Fact: Snipes and Murphy have never been in a movie before together.

Dolemite is my Name is one of those films that comes along that you didn’t know you needed until you had to see it. I never knew anything about Rudy Ray Moore. I knew about the blaxploitation films of the 70’s and 80’s, only a tiny amount, enough to enjoy Black Dynamite. But I didn’t know who the real precursor to all of that was.

And sure, as research, I watched Dolemite just to really get the whole picture, which is not necessary for those who don’t want to have to go searching for it.

I haven’t seen Murphy this on fire in quite a lot of time. Over a decade probably. This is a great return to form and it is like he was never gone in the first place. Snipes was also on point in the film, and similarly, haven’t seen him like this in a good while, but part of this is thanks to prison I guess.

A large cast of characters bring their own quirks and fun moments, but this is the Murphy show and they are all just a part of it. A funny comedy and a good story overall.

3 out of 4.

After the success of my Saw Franchise review as a Milestone Review, I knew I wanted to do it again at some point in the future. Films that were mostly too old to be reviewed individually on the website, but as a whole, could make a pretty decent Milestone Review investment, for whatever relevant reason I could think about. And yes, I was a bit surprised that it was review 550, when it doesn’t feel like that long ago.

And I knew the next one of those I would want to do would be the Resident Evil Franchise for a variety reasons. The fact that this is review 1750 makes it extra special in my eyes.

1) When I moved to Ames, I started to review EVERYTHING that hit our theaters, both new and the cheap-o theater. I made that declaration the week AFTER Resident Evil: Retribution left the main theaters apparently. I had no worry, I would watch it when it hit the cheap theaters, because I would even watch “horror” movies now. And then the cheap theater never got it.

2) End of January, a new Resident Evil film comes out, and hey, I need to watch these in order to prepare for it.

And finally, 3) I own all five of these films on Blu-Ray, bought a couple years ago on Black Friday real cheap. So, uhh, I really need to watch them already. Also, I never rushed to watch them, because I have never really played any of these games. I played like, 5-10 minutes of Resident Evil 4, found it too scary, and didn’t touch it again.

And I will finally have some context for The Kick Heard Around the Video Game Movie World.

Resident Evil

Let’s talk about Resident Evil, the first movie based on a horror video game, based on the first horror action video game. This film starts us in the Umbrella Corporation facility. They do tech stuff around the world, basically Google, but they also secretly did weapon stuff around the world, making them filthy rich. After some disease juice gets loose in their facility, the AI who runs the whole thing (The Red Queen), kills everyone inside the facility. Every single scientist, worker, peon.

So a military group of soldiers are being sent down there to investigate why and to turn off The Red Queen. Before this happens, we see Alice (Milla Jovovich) waking up naked in a bathtub, in a mansion, with some amnesia. And that is when the soldiers bust in. The group, led by “One” (Colin Salmon) bring Alice along into The Hive (the name of the underground research facility) and let her know that she works for the Umbrella Corporation as well and is meant to guard the entrance. The rest of the team includes Michelle Rodriguez and Martin Crewes. They also have Matt (Eric Mabius) as someone who they recently arrested, and Spence (James Purefoy), Alice’s husband and also guardian of the mansion.

Don’t get your pants in a twist, this monster is coming.

When they get down there, they find destruction, death, and weird shit everywhere. Getting into The Red Queen’s server room is difficult and people die, but damn it, they shut down The Red Queen. Yay! Time to leave and go back to the fun outside in Raccoon City, good job everyone. BUT WAIT. With the AI shut down, all of the locks and operations shut down as well. And it turns out that the virus, the T-Virus, basically made zombies. And shit like that thing in the picture above to deal with.

Somehow Alice is like, super incredibly, awesome. She fights so well. Turns out that Spence is the one who spread the virus, because he was trying to stop Matt and his sister from telling the world about what they were doing. So Spence has to die, and Alice and Matt barely escape to the top before bad things happen, with Matt dying from a claw mark, the antidote so close… And then they are found by Umbrella operatives and taken away.

When Alice awakes, she finds herself in an empty hospital. After she gets out of there, she finds Raccoon City in ruins. Crashed cars, fires, and apparently the T-Virus got out and it is zombie time in the real world. MOVIE 2!

2 out of 4.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the extremely high bar setting subtitle, take place right after the events of the first film. Because of the team going in to capture Alice and Matt, they accidentally also let off a wave of the infected zombies onto the city. And this spreads like wild, against Umbrella’s interests. They set up a perimeter wall around the city and only have one area for people to leave, assuming they pass the test to show they are not infected or bitten. But when the dead get to that area to, they close off the last gate and leave the people inside to deal with it on their owns, even willing to fire on regular citizens.

And this is a problem. This is what Alice wakes up to. Umbrella tried to get its best scientists out of the city as well, including the inventor of the T-Virus, Dr. Ashford (Jared Harris). They were unable to get his daughter out though, Angie (Sophie Vavasseur), clearly the inspiration for The Red Queen. So he wants people to go in and find her, anyone really, promising them a way out.

It takes a lot of skill to keep that outfit together in a high action zombie apocalypse.

People like Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), an ex-cop who hated Umbrella, and her old friend, Sargeant Payton Wells (Razaaq Adoti). People like Umbrella soldiers Carlos (Oded Fehr) and Nicholai (Zack Ward). And eventually all of them meet up with a news reporter Terri (Sandrine Holt), and T.J. (Mike Epps), a guy with guns, and Alice and the girl.

Also running around the city is a giant monster, named Nemesis, working for Umbrella and killing soldiers, not citizens. He is controlled by Umbrella, namely Major Cain (Thomas Kretschmann). Eventually they find out that the monster is actually Matt, from the first on. He was experimented on, just like Alice, except she just got super strong and looked the same while he mutated as he was already scratched. Oh snap!

Also Dr. Ashford gets killed, a lot of fighting ensures, and the survivors escape on a helicopter as Raccoon City is fucking blasted with a nuke! Their helicopter crashes in the wave, Alice is killed saving the girl and Umbrella finds them some time later. Alice wakes up a few weeks later, in a Detroit Umbrella facility, by Dr. Sam Isaacs (Iain Glen), restores her own memories, breaks out and goes on the run with T.J., Jill, Carlos, and Angela, with Isaacs letting her run, knowing she is still controlled. Or something.

1 out of 4.

Resident Evil: Extinction

Exctinction takes us five years further into the franchise. The T-Virus has spread throughout the world, and basically life sucks. It is all desert-y and dead, very Mad Max-esque. Alice is now driving on her own, abandoning her friends because she is being tracked by satellite. She also has some sort of psychic powers now, thanks to experimentation.

Somewhere near Las Vegas is where we find them all now, Alice wandering and killing bad people and bad zombies alike. And a big caravan of survivors looking for a place to call home. It is led by Claire Redfield (Ali Lartner), and features some returnees like Carlos and T.J. Yay! No idea where Jill went. Some of the new “survivors” include a girl named K-Mart (Spencer Locke) and other actors (Ashanti, Christopher Egan, Matthew Marsden, and Linden Ashby).

Shit, sand got everywhere. I hate sand.

And uhh, well, eventually Umbrella attacks them again when they are in Las Vegas trying to get supplies. They want to go to Alaska, where they heard there is a settlement. More people die, and Alice goes to the local Umbrella facility to put a stop to them and take their helicopter, so the survivors can go. And she does that!

Inside the lair is of course Dr. Isaacs again, but this time he was weak, so he injected himself with the T-Virus too. This turned him into a hybrid fighting entity, with arms that could be elongated with tentacles. Fun! Alice kills that guy, finds out that this facility has hundreds of Alice clones, and she plans to use them to take down Umbrella. Looks like they are located in Tokyo for sure now, they didn’t like Isaacs, and some guy in glasses (Jason O’Mara) is the new, bad guy. Survivors to Alaska, Alice plans to take out Tokyo Hive, end of film.

2 out of 4.

Resident Evil: Afterlife

Afterlife begins with showing how Tokyo got infected. Then we see Alice storm in after Extinction, clone army and all, and clear house. But Wesker (Shawn Roberts), Mr. Sunglasses himself, now played by a new actor, escapes. During their battle, he removes Alice’s super powers, of which she is happy, they both crash and explode and somehow, Alice survives. So she makes her way to Alaska.

There she is attacked by Claire, with a metal spider on her chest. Once she removes it, Claire stops, with some amnesia and doesn’t talk. But Alice finds no other survivors, just a lot of planes and emptiness. So she flies a plane to LA with Claire and lands on top of a prison with some survivors flagging her down. The survivors include Luther West (Boris Kodjoe), Crystal Waters (Kacey Clarke), Angel (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), Bennett (Kim Coates), and a prisoner who calls himself Chris (Wentworth Miller).

Indoor rain scenes are all the rage these days, not at all for sexual reasons either.

And yeah, they are now in a prison, surrounded by zombies. Not just zombies, but a giant one with a big axe/hammer weapon, called Axeman. Turns out Arcadia, the Alaskan settlement, was actually the name of a ship, which is off the coast. They want to get to the ship, to see the other survivors, makes sense. So they do that. They escape, some people die, but when they get to the ship, turns out it also is an Umbrella trap.

They have everyone in tubes under ground, for testing or who knows what. And surprise! There is Wesker again, this time, super super fucking powerful, and fast, and he can regenerate. Much fighting occurs, eventually he is on a ship that explodes and everyone is free! Yay, the survivors are freed from the tubes, when…suddenly! More Umbrella ships show up, with guns. And our old friend, Jill Valentine, now blonde and not at all looking like her former self. But she has a robot spider on her chest, and then…movie ends!

0 out of 4.

Resident Evil: Retribution

Don’t worry, at the start of Retribution, we will see what immediately happens to Alice in crew, but in slow motion and backwards! Then she will tell us about the first four movie plot, then it will show the attack in regular motion at regular speed. Then we find Alice waking up in a suburban house, with a husband, a deaf child Becky (Aryana Engineer) and no zombies. Weird. Okay. Until zombies attack their neighborhood! Lot of people start dying and of course, then real Alice wakes up, again, in an Umbrella facility.

Sigh. Okay. But the computer that runs it starts to malfunction. So she escapes, a lot of weird things happen, and somehow she finds herself in Tokyo right when the plague begins? What in the fuck? Blah blah action, blah blah plot, eventually we get some knowledge. She is in a large Hive base (They are all really big), but it is a testing facility in Russia. They built huge areas to simulate T-Virus attacks in a few major cities, to sell the tech to governments against each other. It is also underwater and under ice. But don’t work she is being rescued by…Wesker?! What, he survived?

Oh and Ada Wong (Bingbing Li) his assistant. Apparently they want to free her to finally bring down Umbrella, because now Umbrella is being run by The Red Queen herself. They now have to escape, with Becky (who things Alice is her mom, despite just being a clone), in a two hour timer before the facility explodes. Also rescuing her on the other side is a crack team of warriors. Including Luther West! Also Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb), Barry Burton (Kevin Durand), and two guys who are totally not as important (Robin Kasyanov, Ofilio Portillo).

Resident Evil always had the most appropriate outfits for fighting AND doing that BDSM thing.

That’s right, this is another movie where they have to escape a place before they all die. But this one features a lot of returning members, because apparently a lot of them were actually clones the whole time. So people from the first and second movie are back, just to fight her with Valentine, still controlled by a robot, while the base comes crumbling down. And more Axemen, zombies, infected, and guns.

Needless to say, eventually they win, and get picked up by Wesker. Where is Wesker? In the White House, with the “last remaining survivors” ready to finally rid the infected threat once and for all. Maybe.

0 out of 4.

Conclusion

Oh where to do we begin. I guess the first film. Despite having CGI that has aged terribly over the last 14 years, the first film in the franchise is dreadfully okay. The acting isn’t great, but the concept it is introducing is original for the time and it creates a potentially scary situation. Out of all the five films, it is the scariest because everything is new, but again, bad CGI takes away some of the frights. Some of the scenes felt straight out of a video game, but it still wasn’t high art in any sense of the word.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse introduces us to some video game characters and a lot more action. Action at the expense of horror. Like, there are no fears at all in this movie. The zombies aren’t scary, and Nemesis NEVER feels scary, just threatening and powerful. For a horror franchise to immediately drop large portions of horror is a terrible move to make. But at least this film feels like the next step in the franchise and continues the plot along decently, despite the dumb teaser at the end. It is still bad and should feel bad, but there were some attempts there.

Resident Evil: Extinction takes the series in a completely different direction than anyone expected. The point of it was to make a scarier movie with a lot of it set during the day instead of night like normal zombie flicks. The plot was a bit of a weaker point in this film as well, but it would have been stronger had the next two movies not done what they did. It did increase some of the horror elements from the first film, not to the same level, but that is why I left it as okay. Mad Max and Zombies is a fun crossover idea and the film once again got a closer to some sort of closure.

Wow how did Umbrella get their logo to burn on a building like that? Is that a metaphor?!

Resident Evil: Afterlife is where the franchise starts to hit garbage fire mode. To talk about both films, neither really seem to feature that strongly of a horror element. Once again, these films feel incredibly action oriented, with very weak plots. And by weak plots, I mean the films should barely exist. After the third film, we have Alice heading to stop Umbrella Corp’s main office in Tokyo. Awesome, she does that early in the film, then most of the film is instead dealing with this being stuck in a prison, trying to get on a ship situation. This is not really a new plot line from this franchise or from zombie films in general.

And in the fifth film, we start off once again LOCKED IN A GODDAMN UMBRELLA BUILDING. And the entire focus of the movie is to get out of the building. Just like movie one. Just like movie four. They are just rehashing the same plot line and not moving the plot along. Sure, at the end of the movie, they escape the place that they were. But they are solving problems that the films itself create.

After the third film, we can sort of assume where the franchise is going and will go. And instead of delivering that outcome, the fourth film is almost entirely a filler plot line. At the end of the fourth film, we know where the franchise should go, and instead of getting there, it is entirely filled with a different fucking filler plot line. They create and solve issues in the movie itself at the expense of telling a story and it is downright furious.

Sure, they might have some cool sequences in them. They were movies made for 3D and IMAX screens. But they abandoned the genre of horror, retold the first plot in worse ways, and refused to give us growth, which is goddamn necessary that late in to a franchise.

I can hope and hope amongst all things that the next film, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, will bring us the plot we have been looking forward to. But I honestly am just assuming it will also end on a bad cliffhanger and not actually be the final movie. Because money. And dicks.

2 out of 4.
1 out of 4.
2 out of 4.
0 out of 4.
0 out of 4.

I am a huge fan of The Purge series. Or at least the first one, which I still think is the best, and The Purge: Anarchy. And The Purge: Election Year didn’t live up to the first two for me.

Anyways, because of this I was actually excited to see Meet The Blacks. It had virtually no advertisements, opened in only a little over a thousand theaters, and I think quickly left them. And now it is out on DVD and again, no one really knew anything about it.

I also would have ignored it, but someone else let me know that it existed and was actually a spoof on The Purge films. Shit, The Purge came out in 2013. How did it take three years for them to come out with a spoof film? It is just about the first film too, so just seems weird for such a delay.

And here is clearly a scene from the ending of the movie. Spoiler?!

Carl Black (Mike Epps) just wants to make a better life for his family. Sure, they have been living in the wrong part of Chicago, he has been super in the drug game and been a real dick, but he just wants what is best for them. So when famed criminal, Key Flo (Charlie Murphy) is getting sent to prison for a few years, Carl grabs a shit ton of his cash and moves his family out of Chicago.

His family involves his new wife, Lorena (Zulay Henao) who is notably white, his daughter (Bresha Webb), his son who pretends to be a vampire (Alex Henderson) and cousin (Lil Duval). He gets them a sweet crib in Beverly Hills, a gated community, basically all rich white people.

And they are there right before The Annual Purge. Carl says rich people don’t do the purge, so they don’t have to worry. But they have made enough enemies in life to come halfway around the country to kill them. Let alone the racist old white people who don’t like their new neighbors.

Now they just have to survive the night and each other. Starring Gary Owen and George Lopez as President El Bama.

Whatever joke I made for this pic in The Purge, you should assume I said it here as well.

I went into this movie expecting a bad movie, but I honestly still expected to be better than what I was given.

Most parody films have sucked, a lot, in the recent years. They do bottom of the barrel jokes. They make references and think references to film and pop culture are good enough when it comes to humor. Meet The Blacks couldn’t even do that much.

For a 90 minute film, it dragged and dragged to set up the family and their situation. So much that the actual purge didn’t begin until about 43 minutes in, basically halfway. Shit.

And the purge part also dragged. They had a lot of different people coming after them it turns out, so each character had its own scare and introduction, story of why they were mad at Carl Black, and then altercation. It didn’t flow well at all. The film became just more and more ridiculous people looking for more petty revenge.

Damn was it boring. Damn did it suck. Damn did it no make me laugh at all once. At least Fifty Shades of Black, also out this year, made me laugh occasionally. This one has unlikable characters, unnecessary amounts of backstory and talking filler.

A good movie can make dialogue work. This dialogue just felt like they were stalling. It was a low budget film not getting a lot out of its budget.

0 out of 4.

You can’t spell controversy without an ‘s’ and you can’t spell Nina Simone without an ‘s; as well! There must be something deeper there.

If you are like a lot of movie watchers, you probably watched What Happened, Miss Simone? last year. It is free on Netflix and was nominated for an Oscar, so that is really all I should have to say on the matter. It was about the troubling life of Musician and Activist from the 1940’s to the 1970’s. She won a shit ton of Grammys, so you should know her name at least, even if you didn’t know anything about her.

But there is another film about her life. Not a documentary, but a nice musical bio film, just named Nina. It was originally supposed to star Mary J. Blige in the title role, which makes sense. She is a singer and somewhat an activist. But she had to drop out and they replaced her with Zoe Saldana which led to some issues.

Nina Simone grew up in a time where she wasn’t expected to succeed, she was a very dark woman and had a very distinct face, while Saldana was much lighter skinned, very pretty and is not known for her singing. In particular they had a problem with the skin color because Simone was SUPER active in the Black Power movement and it felt like a form of white washing, since Saldana is Hispanic. That, and they also colored Simone’s skin darker. Is it Blackface if the person doing it is not White? Eh, probably.

Because of all this and more, this film took a long time to come out. It was being filmed in the end of 2012, so it took years to release, possibly waiting for all the controversy to die down and maybe finally out thanks to the successful documentary. However, it seems like the distributors still wanted to bury it, with a very limited release and instant VOD.

Sad Simone/Saldana doesn’t like the controversy.

Nina Simone (Zoe Saldana) grew up like a normal black kid in a southern town. But some old white lady liked her and taught her how to play piano. She got really good at classical music and had a dream of playing at the Carnegie Hall and totally did as the first Black Jazz musician. She also went to Julliard. She made a lot of albums, mixing Jazz with Rock and Roll and Gospel and protest songs. She worked with Martin Luther King and a whole lot of other famous activists. She had an abusive husband/manager and a daughter.

Then, eventually, she left America to Paris to play, because America was too racist. And everything in the above paragraph was basically the first five minutes of the movie, told through newspaper headlines, and this film takes place all after that. Like, in the 1980’s, after she had already been out of America for a long time. She was put in a psychiatric hospital for a day in LA after threatening a lawyer with a gun, where she met Clifton Henderson (David Oyelowo), an orderly. She liked that he tried to help her, so she hired him as her assistant and took him back to France.

So she is a drunk and a jerk to him while he tries to help. She forces him to help her get one nigh stands and makes his life hell. But hey, he eventually gets her back into the US for a concert, despite no one wanting to work with her. Yay biography movie!

Also featuring Kevin Mambo, Ronald Guttman, Mike Epps, and Chuma Gault.

But Simone/Saldana loves that booze apparently!

I don’t plan on talking any more about the controversy. I mean, I’d say just let Saldana be her self with the fake nose and not go all out. The entire skin experience just felt distracting for the most part, because I recognized Saldana, except she was “off” the entire time. Just a distraction, just like the controversy.

But let’s focus on this trainwreck of a film. Simone has been the focus of several documentaries and part of a few more, but never a biography of her life. Out of people who deserve their own Hollywood bio film, Simone is definitely up there on the list. For whatever terrible reason, they focus on the late 80’s and early 90’s and none of the “good stuff” in her life.

Fuck. She was a domestic abuse victim for years and couldn’t get out of it. She made so many great songs and led amazing protests. She had a ton of achievements. And I only know any of this thanks to the documentary about her entire life. Most people in the current generations don’t know anything about her and will only learn this stuff through theatrical films. And they pick her lamest and a very unimportant part of her life. They ignore so many important points in her life and focus on such a small frame it just seems disrespectful.

It seems like the people who made this film hated Nina Simone and didn’t know how to hide it. They showed her as a terrible person and ignored how she got to the lowest point in her life. It is misleading and just…just so bizarre.

Watching Nina, I can only see huge amounts of wasted potential. Even if I didn’t see the documentary, this movie wouldn’t have excited me in any way. I would be left wondering what the heck happened. Why did this person get a movie? Why did Paris matter?

Nina is a mess of a film, and one of the worst biographical movies I have ever seen.

0 out of 4.

It is now mid-April, and if that means anything, it means that shitty January movies are finally coming out on DVD. A lot of these January films were not screened for critics, for some reason. I mean, do they not care about press?! (That was sarcasm).

The one January movie I actually wanted to watch was Fifty Shades of Black. Sure, it is a parody film. But I have several reasons for wanting to see this one.

1) Fifty Shades of Grey, the film that is being parodied, was on its own terrible. We are getting a parody of shit, so the parody is likely to call out the shit while doing it.

2) It is a Wayans parody. Say what you will, but his two haunted house parodies are better than the last three Scary Movies combined. They aren’t necessarily great films, but he did put a lot of effort into them and didn’t just phone in his performance.

3) I don’t have a third reason, I just really want to see how bad this thing actually is.

It definitely captures the romance from Grey pretty well.

The story begins with young Hannah (Kali Hawk) going to interview Christian Black (Marlon Wayans), the head of a big company for her university paper. She isn’t a journalist, but her roommate, Kateesha (Jenny Zigrino) is sick, so she goes for her.

She is immediately swept away by his charm and his looks and starts to have feelings for him. Christian begins to take Hannah on dates and he lets her know that he has a secretive side. A play room, where he is a dominant and is looking for a submissive for some sex play.

Of course Hannah isn’t really into that, nor is she into contracts. But she still wants the sex, no matter how quick and uneventful it is. And hey, if he wants to smack her butt a few times, whatever. But when she starts to fall in love, that is where their relationship begins to fall apart. And basically I wrote the actual plot of Fifty Shades of Grey just now.

Kate Miner is the assistant, Mike Epps is Hannah’s father, with Fred Willard and Jane Seymour playing Christian’s adoptive parents, Affion Crockett his brother and Irene Choi his sister. Also Andrew Bachelor as Hannah’s best male friend, and Florence Henderson as…well, a rather weird cameo.

No, Marlon is not acting those abs. Those are the real and you are now pregnant.

If I could draw one conclusion from watching both the real and the parody movie, I can determine that they are equally bad. Grey is telling a stupid story and Black is telling a worse version of the story with the occasionally funny joke.

That is right. Fifty Shades of Black made me laugh occasionally. It was actually the movie’s goal too, unlike the times I laughed during Grey. It had some funny moments, with sometimes subtle jokes. And it made fun of the bad writing of the Grey book and some of the nonsensical parts of the film, which is what a parody is supposed to do. Of course, Black also went overboard, over and over again. For every actual funny joke there are 10 jokes that fall flat. Either from poor delivery, poor effort, or by over acting the scenes to extremes.

This film is somehow the polar opposite of Grey. In Grey, you see a lot of naked women and no penis, and in this movie, no naked women at all, but at least three fake penises. Life is weird. I just want a movie that can unite the genitalia under one film equally, and not be stingy on either side.

Wayons still put a lot of effort into this movie, although some of the physical comedy aspects were now given to other cast members. I think this film would have benefited by cutting out Crockett’s role completely, along with Zigrino. Their jokes were the bottom of the very full barrel and went on for too long.

The funniest thing? This parody actually has a better ending. It doesn’t end on a forced cliff hanger. It completes a story and doesn’t blue ball the audience. Fuck you, Fifty Shades of Grey.

1 out of 4.

The Hangover series is a bit of an enigma. Here is why!

The original is about four men on a bachelor party in Las Vegas, where they all black out, one goes missing, and they have to retrace their steps through the wildest night of their lives before the wedding. So what’d the sequel do? The Hangover Part II gave us another wedding, another night of blacked our memories and regrets, but in Thailand. Like most sequels, in contained the same theme and a similar plot. After all, it is called The Hangover and is about being hungover, and it is not called “Some Guys Get Into Shenanigans!” I don’t know if people complained about the similarities between Die Hard and Die Hard 2.

But for whatever reason, audiences hated it and voiced their displeasure. Which is why we now have The Hangover Part III! (Trailer) Learning from their mistakes, we now have a movie about a few guys getting into shenanigans and no hangovers.

Classic elevator scenes are classic. Those sheets are suggestive as fuck.

A few years after Part II, Alan (Zach Galifianakis) is still a madman. He is off his medication and causing accidents, overly stressing his father (Jeffrey Tambor) and giving him a fatal heart attack.

Which is why his friends decide to give him an intervention. Doug (Justin Bartha), Stu (Ed Helms), and Phil (Bradley Cooper) convince him to drive down to the rehab center to get his life back on track! But along the way, they are hijacked by Marshall (John Goodman), a drug dealer and international criminal, who claims Chow (Ken Jeong) stole $21 Million in gold bars from him.

Of course the only person to be in contact with Chow since Thailand is Alan. So he kidnaps Doug, and they have three days to find Chow and his money, or Doug dies. Swell!

This film also brings back Mike Epps as “Black Doug”, Heather Graham as Jade, and introduces Melissa McCarthy as a pawn shop owner.

Yep, the whole gang is represented in this poster. Wait…

I think I am going to put this blame on the writers. In terms of plot, this Hangover actually tells a decent story. There is betrayal, redemption, and a group of guys that can’t fix their larger than life problems. But instead of focusing on the entire group, it is almost a if Stu and Phil get pushed out of the way for the Alan and Chow show.

Alan is an annoying character, which Zach G. tends to to play a lot (With mixed results). He is the type of character that is good for a comedy, but shouldn’t be the main focus. Chow was also a secondary character, but  it feels like he has more lines than even Stu, who in turn is just a punching bag for Alan this movie.

The writers intended this to be a redemption movie for Alan, and thus  gave him the leading role. After all, everyone else has settled down besides his character, so this is just his turn to settle to end the series. But it feels very forced. The film on the whole has less humor than the previous two, focusing more on the intense plot lines. In fact, the scaffolding scene from the trailer made me jump from my feet in fright. Not that the seriousness was a bad thing, but it is framed as a comedy and not an adventure/action film.

I know it is a strange thing to blame the writers yet talk highly of the plot.I wish they were able to have the same overall storyline, without cramming two (Arguably) secondary characters down our throat. It shouldn’t be hard to give Bradley Cooper or Ed Helms bigger roles in the film. They felt like replaceable cast members, which is unacceptable.

That being said, Part III wasn’t horrible, it just wasn’t amazing either.

2 out of 4.

Alright, turns out everything I thought I knew about Sparkle was a lie. A lie! When I first heard about it, I was told that it was about a Motown era girl group, like the Supremes. One of them being Sparkle, the daughter of Whitney Houston.

Personally, I had never heard of their group, didn’t know Whitney Houston had a singing daughter who was also famous, and didn’t know any songs by this person. But whatever.

Well, not even a spoiler, I was way off. Topic, sure, but it wasn’t Whitney Houston being a character, it was Whitney Houston just playing a mom character before she died. Oh. That explains why everyone called her Emma…and she never sang…and wasn’t famous in the movie. I seriously was confused the whole movie because of this.

Pictured: Actual Whitney Houston playing someone, not someone playing Whitney Houston.

Sparkle (Jordin Sparks. Okay, that is unintentional maybe. This movie is actually a remake of one in the 1970s. Still weird. Also still fake) is the youngest daughter to her now single mom Emma (Houston). She is 19, while her oldest sister Sister (yes. Carmen Ejogo) is 28 and had to recently move back home due to some issues, and the middle sister Dee (Tika Sumpter) is 24. Turns out Sparkle is a song writer, and great at it, but might have some singing issues. Thankfully Sister is not shy, and performed her song at a club like a star.

Guess who else is at the club? Stix (Derek Luke) an aspiring record executive spots them at the club and becomes interested. He learns that not only did Sparkle write the song, but they all have singing talent too. So he eventually convinces them all to join him and be a singing group, yay! And it takes awhile… But here is some other issues.

Emma doesn’t want her daughters getting involved. Dee is just going to do it until she has money to pay for medical school. Sparkle kind of has a thing for Stix. Sister kind of has a thing for everyone. Seriously, a potential serious mate in Levi (Omari Hardwick), and a more successful person in Satin (Mike Epps) who might also get her hooked on the drugs and beat her. Can they keep it together and get a real record deal by Larry (Curtis Armstrong)? Does CeeLo Green have more than one scene in this movie?

Feel free to guess on who looks like doctor, druggie, and writer.

Alright, so besides my initial confusion, I still felt like this film was a waste of time. I was incredibly bored, and this film kind of qualifies as a musical! Lots of songs in the movie. Some were nice, some were okay. But I couldn’t get over the rest of the movie to just enjoy them.

I don’t know how this compares to the original Sparkle, obviously, but its general description sounds like a better version of what I watched. “A girl group experiences turmoil after one of their members turns to drugs and another achieves their desired fame all by herself.” That makes it seem less like Sparkle, and more about them all. After all, middle sister doesn’t even care. Sparkle, by the end does succeed on her own as a solo artist (with a weird concert I also have issues with), but the other sisters don’t care. The only problems come from the mom not wanting them to be famous and stick with church choirs. Boring!

This film basically put me to sleep. A lot of nothing kept happening, disguised as things happening. That is all I can really describe it as.

1 out of 4.

For world building purposes in movies I generally like it if the characters have last names. Just makes it feel more “Real” to me, or at least gives the false impression that they spent some more time working on the plot.

But sometimes, movies can say fuck character names in general and go a more simpler route. For Faster, we get characters like Driver, Cop, and Killer! Yeah! Fuck names!

Guess which name he gets!

Dwayne Johnson is…the driver. Yes. Correct. He gets out of prison at the start of the movie, and he is mad. So mad that once he gets out of the gate (of course on an abandoned desert road?) he just starts running. He runs to a car, drives said car, and then kills a telemarketer. Damn.

Mike Epps plays the guy who got him the car, and with that car, a list of names of people who helped put him in jail. He was double crossed after a heist with his brother. They shot him in the head! But it ricocheted around his skull in one way, out the other, avoiding his brain, so somehow he survived.

At the same time, the cops Carla Gugino and Billy Bob Thornton (who is of course about to retire) are looking for him/trying to figure it out. Also also Oliver Jackson-Cohen plays the Killer, who is (re?)hired to kill the Driver, before he enacts revenge on all of the people who have mostly changed their lives around.

Like Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who is now a traveling Evangelist. And the last name on the list. But who actually shot him and failed at being an assassin?

And why does BBT look so sad when he is about to retire?

The movie is a pretty simple plot, so it will have to rely on at least decent acting or surprises along the way to keep interest. It kind of delivers on small scales. I think I have heard of people surviving shots to the head the same way. Maybe I have heard of that just in movies though.

I think the ending was decent given the premises too, was acceptable. I also liked that they tried to give the other non-Rock characters some story lines too. I really didnt like BBT or the other cops involvement though. Felt like a weaker plot line of the movie.

But hey. The movie is called Faster. What can you expect. Its not like they are going to one up it with an unrelated movie called Fastest, right?

2 out of 4.