Tag: Steve Martin

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you my 1700th (ish) movie review. Yes, a Milestone Review!

Except this is also technically my 1702th review. I have been quite busy lately and I forgot this grand milestone was coming upon us. Technically my review of Central Intelligence was the 1700th posted, but hey, close fucking enough, right!?

Anyways, Looney Tunes: Back In Action. Do you remember it existing at all? I doubt it. The first movie after the wildly cult success of Space Jam, I remember avoiding it at all costs. It looked bad, it looked different, it wasn’t Space Jam 2. Fourteen year old me knew it would be bad, and after it came out we basically all agreed to stop talking about it.

But to continue with a different theme. Is this the movie that helped kill Brendan Fraser‘s post Mummy career? I already did a milestone review of Journey to the Center of the Earth, but that didn’t kill his career as it was already on the decline in 2008.

Can a duck bring down a jungle boy, a caveman, and a rock star?

In this world gone mad, Looney Tunes and other cartoon figures roam the streets and live throughout the world, because they are just strange animated actors. Yes, they can still ignore physics and have other cartoon perks, but they are just…real. And in this real world, Warner Brothers is about to fire Daffy Duck.

He is being a dick, demanding rewrites, tired of getting shot and so on, so they just say screw him and kick him out of the studio. They don’t give a fuck, people want to see Bugs Bunny anyways, not the other cast and crew.

Surely this decision will not come back to bite Kate Houghton, Vice-President of Comedy (Jenna Elfman), in the ass.

These are the only other non LT cartoon characters shown and hey, it is a funny scene.

DJ Drake (Brendan Fraser) is a sort of stunt man and security guard at WB and he is yelled at to find the Duck and make sure he actually leaves the lot. Of course there is a huge scuffle and the batman mobile ends up knocking over the WB water tower, all over executives and equipment, thanks to DJ and Daffy. So DJ gets fired too, a double whammy firing day!

Those WB executives sure are cold. Looks like Kate didn’t know that he was a special security guard/stunt man. His father was Damien Drake (Timothy Dalton), a really famous movie star for the company. Shit.

She doesn’t care, they ruined her hat!

Speaking of his father, turns out Damien Drake is more than just a movie star. He is secretly a spy (because spies are usually a secretive profession). Damien needs his son to travel to Las Vegas, find his associate, and help find the “blue monkey” diamond. What is that? Good question. DAmien is too busy getting kidnapped to answer though.

And Daffy hasn’t left DJ alone, so he demands to come along for the ride. The studio be damned, he has an adventure to do.

About this time also, Kate realized she fucked up, the movie isn’t as funny without Daffy, so she makes it her mission to find DJ and Daffy to restore her film and restore her job.

That is a different woman with a different job.

They end up meeting up, making it to Vegas and that dancer is of course Dusty Tails (Heather Locklear, shit, how old is this movie?), a secret spy as well. She works at a club run by Yosemite Sam because he works for the ACME corporation, the big bad guys of this world.

Wanna know why they are bad? Good question. But they are the ones who captured Damien! Dusty gives them a Queen playing card with Mona Lisa’s face and they are chased off by Yosemite.

They also find out that the evil ACME corporation wants the blue monkey diamond to…turn everyone in the world into monkeys! Oh, okay. Mr. Chairman (Steve Martin), is that really your goal?

“Of course it is, why else would I be stretching??”

The gang heads to Paris, France, as they are basically now spies and fuck it. They go to The Louvre because The Mona Lisa painting is there and they know how to read obvious clues.

Using secret card technology, they discover that behind The Mona Lisa is a map of Africa. And it doesn’t look to detailed, but it is the best they got. Elmer Fudd also shows up, turns out he was secretly working for ACME as well, oh no! Fudd chases our duck and bunny through a series of paintings because they are cartoon characters, whatever.

And you know what? It annoys me. They go from famous painting to famous painting. Like The Scream painting. And the god damn Scream painting isn’t at The Louvre, never really was, but the movie goes lazy. Sure, they can get the Mona Lisa right, but then they decide to skirt the details?

Come on assholes. Anyways, as expected, they escape and head to “Africa” to find the next clue.

Hopefully there isn’t another art museum there. It’s best paintings will have been stolen b The Louvre.

In Africa, they awkwardly find the Jungle Temple like. Really quickly. The Grandma and Tweety bird show it to them, because they know things too. Inside is the Blue Monkey, and then, shenanigans! The Grandma and company were actually Mr. Chairman the whole time!

They transport everyone back to their lair, using technology, and force DJ and Kate to give up the blue diamond when they show Damien as their prisoner.

Mwhaha!

And now, by putting it on the satellite, they can turn the whole world into monkeys!

This picture is entirely out of place, but its strangeness makes it okay.

At this point, a lot of comic violence occurs. They have to fight to save Damien, fight to get the blue monkey back, and more people appear.

Of course they save the day and the only one who turns into a monkey is Mr. Chairman himself, take that fuckers. Daffy had to become Duck Dodgers to do it, but he was successful.

They determine the whole thing was staged to be a film and all of this was meaningless. Makes a bit more sense now. But don’t worry, Bugs is going to make Daffy equal partners from now on, until the credits suddenly appear and a deal can’t be made. Ha ha, suck it Daffy!

Other people I didn’t even bother to mention in this film include Joan Cusack and Roger Corman!

And we have to end the film with a kiss, it just makes sense.

There were so many bad decisions made in this film, it is unbelievable.

In Space Jam, we go from a regular human world with cartoons, where they live in the earth in a magical other realm, to…they just live on Earth and everything is fine? Having all of these characters not together,spread out awkwardly around the world means outside of Daffy and Bugs we rarely get any real cameo time. So it is all Bugs and Daffy and very little else, feeling like a huge missed opportunity.

And the genre shift goes from space adventure sports film to a spy film? Going from Sports film to Spy film is usually not a good genre order, but at least now can understand where Cars 2 got the terrible idea from.

I am not sure if this is the film that killed Fraser’s career, because no one really saw it or cared for it enough to damage his already strange career. Plus, Monkeybone was already a thing at this time. Another film I haven’t seen but could try it for a future milestone given the weird things I’ve heard. It might have damaged Elfman’s movie career before it could really take off, so she basically stuck to TV.

But here is the most important question I have. The subtitle is Back in Action. What the fuck at they back in action to? Like, if this was a direct sequel to Space Jam that might make sense. As they return to Earth to do things (spy things unfortunately, but things nonetheless). But no, it is talking about a return, but there is no return at any point in this movie.

If it should have a title along these lines, Looney Tunes: Now in Action might make sense as this spy adventure is not their normal cup of tea.

This movie is a disgrace. Space Jam might not actually be a great film (according to lame people), but this one is far below Space Jam.

0 out of 4.

I have written many times about how disappointing DreamWorks has been in the animation department. The TL;DR is that all of their movies are terrible, bad, or average, unless they involve Training Dragons or Fighting Pandas. They have two good series right now, but everything else has been pretty bunt or miss. I liked Shrek too, sure, but not really anything post Shrek in that series.

Going in to see Home, I was already biased. Mostly because DreamWorks made a short called Almost Home that wasn’t too exciting. It premiered last year, and was kind of shitty. They showed it before at least two of their movies too, so I had to see it a second time and go “Yep, still don’t like it.” So when I found out it was a tiny prologue to a movie coming out this year, I of course was not excited.

I definitely wasn’t excited when I found out about the voice casting. Well, one person was exciting. The rest seemed to be the now standard big names for big names sake in order to make money.

Seriously. This movie has almost nothing going for it ahead of time.

Can’t even give me a full mustache to be excited about.

The Boovs are known for only a few things: Their color changing based on mood, their tentacles, and their ability to run away. They are great runners. They run from any threat and go based on probability. If something has less than a 50% chance of a success, the run. Captain Smeck (Steve Martin) is their leader because he is the smartest and best at running away. He was even able to get them to run away from the Grok (Grog? I really don’t remember) alien race. But now they are running from this big bad enemy, and they think they have finally found a place to hide.

Earth!

So they put all the Humans in one big colony in Australia, leaving the rest of the planet for themselves! Unlikeable Oh (Jim Parsons) isn’t the same as all the Boov. He likes other things so he is weird and makes many mistakes. Including inviting the entire galaxy to his new apartment warming party. Including the evil alien race by accident. Whoops. So he is now on the run, having a big bad mistake.

And while on the run, he runs into Tip (Rihanna), short for Gratuity. Yeah. Apparently they were able to get every human except for one little (old? hard to tell) girl. She says middle school, but her voice screams 20 year old. She wants to find her mom (Jennifer Lopez), he just wants to escape and make things better.

So they work together! Traveling with a slushie based car hover craft and running away from everyone else, who also wants to run away. Especially when the big baddies come along too.

Jeez. What a mess they have made. Also there is Kyle (Matt Jones). Fuck you, Kyle.

Tip was named as such after her friends gave her a helpful hint on living life to the fullest.

Yeesh. So Rihanna didn’t fit that character at all. DreamWorks tends to have that issue though. The Croods was 100% awkward because of Voice Choices. So Rihanna made her girl sound way too old. Jim Parsons worked as our main character. It was pretty great. Jennifer Lopez was pointless as crap. She had very few lines, overall maybe three scenes technically. No reason to have a big name in such a pointless role. (Or, maybe that is the best place for a big role?). Martin did pretty good at his Captain, reminding me a bit of Sgt. Bilko, but more shitty of a character. And I am actually happy for Matt Jones, getting to be top listed as the only other character with any significant lines.

It is quite obvious why they brought in Rihanna though. She made a whole damn CD for this movie. Half the songs were song by her, J-Lo threw in one as well. And they all sounded kind of the same as a result. It became accidentally funny by the end, hearing the same different song, one after another.

And finally, I got really annoyed by some minor inconsistencies. They had some poor plot decisions to make the movie move forward, their reason for Tip not getting taken was silly, and then other small things like, taking all the pointless toilets away from the area, and then still having houses with toilets. Just minor, rookie movies at the end.

But guess what. This movie was actually still entertaining. It was funny on numerous occasions, and you really do grow to like Oh and Tip by the end. Odd voices aside, Tip is great in that she is a strong independent black woman who don’t need no Boov in her life, for the most part.

The animation was also spectacular at times. Dreamworks has always tended to make some pretty movies, and this one is no exception.

I am able to see through all the poor choices that this movie made in production and with the plot. The movie itself, as an experience, visually and character wise, is much better than the cover would make you seem. Yay for a movie changing my mind! Well done DreamWorks. Now I don’t feel so bad about having to wait so long to see Inside Out.

3 out of 4.

Apparently if I watched some of the trailers for The Big Year, you still wouldn’t really know what it is about. I will tell you right now. BIRDING. Or Bird Watching, if you want to be lame about it. Yes. The art of looking at birds and feeling good about yourself.

Mort importantly, A Big Year in the birding world is a competition to see who can see the most birds in a single calendar year. The competition can be state / province based, lower 48 states, or the biggest area of all states except Hawaii, and a bunch of other territories around the US. I didn’t learn these until I wiki’d that shit.

Can you tell who each of these three big actors are by just this picture alone?

So the story tells of three different “birders” who are attempting the big year. Owen Wilson plays an expert birder. In 2003 he reached a new record for A Big Year, reaching 723, putting him into instant celebrity status. Well, pseudo celebrity. Dude can find a bird like no other. He hasn’t attempted another big year since, but this year he is just going to do it for a few months, set the pace, make sure no one is getting close to his record. But will his dedication and drive break apart another marriage?

Steve Martin is a CEO who is retiring finally. Super rich, he wants to try a big year, full support with his wife, JoBeth Williams. But his job constantly is bugging him to return to the game, to fix problems, to even take another job. Joel McHale and Kevin Pollak are the corporate D-bags who continue to harass him throughout the year, warning him that after retirement, comes death.

Jack Black is the narrator and also attempting for the first time. He has trained to recognize any bird by a few notes only. He isn’t rich though, kind of poor, disapproving dad, and working a full time job to help pay for this during the year. But he is inspired to finally do something with his life. If he could also woo over Rashida Jones (who can do hundreds of bird noises on her own (I think in real life too?)), double win. Bird love. All that shit.

The movie shows the three men and their journey across America, just doing the things they love. They don’t travel together, but they run into each other enough to build a rivalry. Of course they don’t want others to know they are doing a big year, will make them no longer help them out. The movie probably sounds super boring. Bird watching. Wtf?

But look, there is some action!

Of course this whole thing is based on the honor system. Don’t have to take pictures, because hearing the bird counts as well. So it sounds like cheating may happen, and obviously it is dealt with in the movie. Not to mention Jim Parsons of Big Bang Theory slinks about in the movie as well.

But overall? The story was definitely done pretty nicely. By the end, you don’t hate Owen’s character like you’d expect. Everyone has their own appeal and their own “happy ending” so to speak. Had some chuckles, and hey, good for the whole family.

2 out of 4.

Hmm. This is a movie I really wanted to like. Who doesn’t like Alec Baldwin, I mean, come on!

The story is the one as old as time…a divorced couple of about 10 years want to have an affair with each other. Lots and lots of old people sex. “Old people” being of course kind of a ridiculous concept here. In fact, you may even describe their relationship as…. Complicated! It was an interesting smorgasbord of actors/actresses who played their children (/children in law) including Jim from the Office and the Silas from Weeds.

Steve Martin also being the sort of antagonist was weird as well. He has always been a “jerk” but never in this light.

Only joke here is the pun on name for a soda fountain operator. Get it? Get it? Fuck you.

The best performances are of course from Baldwin and Streep, who are very convincing at their portrayals. They are great at these roles. Unfortunately just having well done acting is not the end all be all of a movie. It also has to be a bit more interesting. It is weird that when Streep is freaking out that she is sexing up Baldwin, she calls it an affair. She isn’t cheating on anyone, but Alec is. I guess she has a higher moral ground than myself.

2 out of 4.