Tag: Sarah Snook

Holy shit, why are there so many brand movies this year?

Air Jordan, the movie. Tetris, the movie. Barbie, the movie. Blackberry, the movie. And now a movie about Beanie Babies?

More importantly, why are so many of those movies on that list like, really, really good movies? Is it nostalgia and brand awareness? Or is it something greater. Each great one is great for different reasons. But let’s see about The Beanie Bubble, and watch it burst in real time.

I would burst with excitement if I got to look so stylish. 
This movie is so specifically about the characters, that I need to describe the plot through their lens.
We have Ty Warner (Zach Galifianakis), CEO of this TY Warner company, who made toys, and would eventually make beanie babies, and make a shit ton of money!

But then we have the women who helped him get there.

Robbie (Elizabeth Banks), one of Ty’s girlfriends, who helped him get sales on other products, increasing the wealth of his company, and helping expand it overseas.

Sheila (Sarah Snook), a later girlfriend and single mother, whose kids and her helped come up with backstories and names for very popular beanie babies at the start.

And Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), an hourly employee who helped connect their company to the internet, the first corporation to do so with their product, and track ebay sales, and figure out how to work with the secondary market, instead of against it.

The women who made the Beanie Babies take off, and the man, who treated them like shit along the way.

“What the fuck is the internet?”

Unfortunately for my list of brands above, The Beanie Bubble is the only one I didn’t feel deserved a 3 or 4! Just an okay 2. And that is a shame, because the story of how Beanie Babies got popular, got super popular, and then became worthless, is an interesting one. A nice microcosm of society and wealth in that story, on artificial supply and demand, and on how you can get too much of a good thing (one that is ruined by greed).

Its just the story is told sloppily, and I hate when it really takes to get to the point. The goal of the movie is to talk about these three women and hype them up, so we get three different stories. And it keeps transferring between the stories. But we got things taking places in the 80’s, and the 90’s. Despite the fact that this movie has a large YEAR shown on the screen and shows it changing when we switch, it still isn’t inherently helpful. Generally, one would see the year and assume its just going forward in time, not backwards, and forward, by a decade, back and forth.

Sure, we can see that Ty is being a sleazeball, but he isn’t the biggest sleazeball in all three stories until around the same time in the movie. So we get an avalanche of sleaze, with a confusing time span because of it. I wouldn’t say this is the sort of movie that needs to be told chronologically, but it would have probably been better.

For example, Ty continually gets mad about Great Britain and sales at many points throughout the film, but we don’t know why in particular, until the end of Banks’ plotline. And that is not the sort of thing that needed to be a “ah ha!” moment in the story. I don’t feel like the movie was better by keeping that a secret for so long, it didn’t have to keep hyping her ending of the storyline for a payoff.

I do think Galifianakis was unrecognizable on the promotions for this film. Something was done with his face, a fake nose? I am not sure. But you can tell it in the voice. I loved in particular Viswanathan’s plot in this movie. It is the easiest to follow, the easiest to see why she was screwed over, and the only one who has her own Wikipedia page to see what she did after the fact. Unfortunately, the other two involve relationships, and a lot of time is spent focusing on that aspect, with less on the actual company commitments, it just makes him feel more like a bad boyfriend than the scummy businessman he happens to also be.

2 out of 4.

First off, no, I still haven’t seen Primer. Stop asking me. I will get to it eventually. My mind is ready for a mind fucking this early in 2015.

Time travel. A fun subject and one that is ridiculously hard to get right. Again, I am not saying I understand time travel and know how it should be. No. I just hate seeing a time travel movie that features it, then has inconsistencies within its own version of time travel, making it a bit confusing. The last movie to do that was Project Almanac. So close.

So, fingers crossed. Because now I am going to tackle Predestination, which hit theaters earlier this year. I didn’t hear a lot about it when it came out, but recently it has been gathering steam. And I really want to see a good time travel movie that isn’t Primer. So, extreme fingers crossed.

What’s this? A woman? In a movie about time travel! How surprisingly rare! But they only showed us Ethan!

Here’s the issue. The Fizzle Bomber. That dude is the issue. He is an American terrorist living in the United States. He is hard to catch. He makes bombs. He blows the bombs up. People get hurt and he has been hard to catch.

In fact, he blew up maybe ten blocks in NYC. Yeah.

So we should stop him, before he blows up NYC. With time travel! And thus, the Temporal Bureau is born! These Temporal Agents travel through time, in a limited range, to prevent major disasters and make our timelines a better place. There are many issues and problems of course. Things might change a little bit.

They have been slowly getting closer and closer to the Fizzle Bomber too. Each time jump they get closer to finding his identity and hopefully stopping NYC from getting wrecked. This should be the final time jump they need for their best agent (Ethan Hawke), disguised as a barkeep. But first, everything has to be perfect…

Also featuring Sarah Snook and much less featuring Noah Taylor.

The second time traveling movie I have seen to mostly take place in a bar. Coincidence? Or alcohol?

Looking at my astrological charts, we are due for a great Ethan Hawke movie again, and, yes, this indeed gets to be the one! Hooray! Don’t let Sarah Snook confuse you either. She was in the not so great Jessabelle recently, and is much much better in this movie.

By nature of it being a mystery and a bit of a thriller, Predestination obviously has some twists and turns. Some you can see a mile away, some that blew my mind. I loved it. And I loved even more than this wasn’t an action cop movie. It was a straight up Sci-Fi Drama with some mystery aspects about time travel. Excellent.

And from what I can tell, it covered up all of the loose ends. Literally everything. It was super careful about what it said and did in every scene, and the level of attention that went into it is impressive.

On another note, Hawke wasn’t that great in it. Not bad, not great, just decent or expected. He was the lead though and his character didn’t have to do a lot to excel. Snook is the one with all the acting and development and she does a fantastic job.

And well, its a movie that is a mystery. Stop asking for more details and just watch the dang thing.

4 out of 4.

Please don’t get confused. This review is going to be about Jessabelle. Not Annabelle. Sure, they are both horror films, and they came out around the same time, and you know, have that belle thing going on. But they are nothing alike.

Okay, they have one more thing in common. But we will get to that later.

Jessabelle is obviously the less well known of the movies. It was supposed to come out in January, pushed back to August, then pushed back to a soft release in November with some of that video on demand. It ho hummed its way into existence, and then ho hummed its way onto my laptop. I love you video on demand.

Oh hey, I remember this scene from A Nightmare On Elm Street.

Jessie (Sarah Snook) is living a nice life. In fact she is about to move into her fiance’s house finally and she is pregnant with child. Then surprise, car crash, fiance is dead, unborn baby is super dead, and she is paralyzed legs down. Wow, that escalated quickly.

Now she has to go back down to rural Louisiana, with her dad (David Andrews), and you know her old family home isn’t wheelchair accessible. She just has no where to go.

Well, Jessie finds a box of VHS tapes under her old bed. They were made by her mother (Joelle Carter) before she was born. That is good, because she died when Jessie was young from that cancer. But these tapes are weird. She is acting all funny, talking about death and seeming threatening. Her dad doesn’t like them, saying that wasn’t her real mother, by then her mom was out of it. From the cancer. But what can it mean?

What. Can. It. Mean?!

Also featuring Amber Stevens, Chris Ellis, and Mark Webber.

Acting.

Somewhere lurking in the marshy waters that surrounds this Louisiana horror movie Jessabelle is a unique and decent plot. It it totally there, you just kind of have to scrape off the crap. But not everyone has time to scrape off the crap on their own, and the film makers certainly didn’t do it for us. So instead we got packaged crap and were kind of told to look for it on our own.

That sounded pretty harsh, but I thought I was being clever there.

But it is true! The acting wasn’t terrible. The movie was just slow. Some times people think movies set in rural areas need to take their time and can’t be high energy, but that is just silly. It had its jump scares, it had scenes that were alluding to other movies. And it had a decent plot. But it was full of other crap and given to us in a boring “seen it!” before way.

Oh well, maybe you can surprise me with some indie sequel in like, four years.

1 out of 4.