Gorgon Reviews

Like a lot of people, I am beginning to mistrust Paul Feig and Melissa McCarthy.

Paul Feig did give us Bridesmaids, sure, but The Heat didn’t feel right with me. He also has his strange obsession with McCarthy, so when it was announced he would do a Ghostbusters reboot, it was obvious he would be casting her in it. McCarthy has had a few terrible movies, namely Identity Thief and Tammy, where it seemed through all her work she could really only play one type of character.

So of course when you see a trailer for a badly named movie like Spy, you assume it is going to be one long running fat joke. Where it is absurd that she should be in the position she is in and you know, more fat jokes. It isn’t an absurd assumption, given that is what Tammy was, a movie McCarthy even wrote for herself, unable to get herself out of her own type casting.

If this was a gif, you all would hate me.

Being a spy is a tough job, but thankfully you have a handler back at HQ who helps you out on each and every mission. Bradley Fine (Jude Law) is a spy, and a damn good one at that. But he wouldn’t be anywhere without his handler, Susan Cooper (McCarthy). She helps protect him from surprising bad guys, helps him escape, and just keeps him aware of all of his surroundings! Things can still go wrong, sure, like when Bradley accidentally kills Tihomir Boyanov (Raad Rawi), who is supposed to be the only one alive who knows about some tiny nukes that he wants to sell. Whoops. Oh well, other than that, they are a great team!

Until he dies. She wasn’t too helpful then. He was killed by Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne), daughter of that other dead dude. Looks like she knows where the nukes are! She also knows every single spy that we have on record, names and what they look like, so it is incredibly unlikely of any of them being able to get close to her. Now Elaine Crocker (Allison Janney) has no idea what to do, so she agrees to let Susan go undercover to find out more information, with her best friend Nancy (Miranda Hart) serving as her handler. She is supposed to avoid Rayna and instead follow Sergio De Luca (Bobby Cannavale), but, you know, shit happens.

On top of the whole, being a spy thing, she also has to deal with the fact that some of the agents have quit. Namely, Rick Ford (Jason Statham), one of their best, and he wants revenge on Rayna since knows all about him. Too bad she also is the only one who knows about the nukes! Can’t let her be killed as well. Oh golly gumdrops.

Also, hey! We have Will Yun Lee and Zach Woods.

I normally only comment on facial hair, but come on, this is astounding.

Good news, everyone! Spy is not just one long fat joke. Sure, independently, on your own, you could giggle when a larger person does something athletic, but that is on you buddy. No, these jokes come from a deeper level. A lot more of them are based on how she has the body of a middle aged cat lady and the like. Way better than fat jokes.

In all honesty, Spy ended up being a pretty funny movie. Byrne still seems to have come out of nowhere in the comedy world, but she is still knocking it out of the park. Statham was in this movie and he was able to play a very Statham character. And yes, McCarthy of course carried it very, very well.

The action was also pretty decent. I didn’t know how it would end either, because they set it up pretty early that anyone could be killed, not to mention them wanting to earn the R rating.

One thing the film lacks is rewatchability, as in, I don’t ever see myself buying the film because I know I will never be in the mood again. But our female leads are fantastic, even Hart, and Statham provides some nice laughs as well.

Last summer I watched two really good teenage romance films that involved death based on books. The Fault In Our Stars and If I Stay. I was surprised at the quality of both films and how I was able to still connect with them despite not being in the target demographic.

Of course, John Green wrote The Fault in Our Stars and wrote a few books besides that one. Before that one, he wrote one called Paper Towns, which my wife has assured me is fantastic.

Really, as long as it avoids the normal cliches, it will probably make me happy. And knowing my recent track record with any sort of romance film or drama, it will probably just end up making me cry in public again.

It does feature some amateur level hallway creepin’ though, so that’s a plus.

Quentin/Q (Nat Wolff) has always lived a typical lame boy life. He does what he is supposed to, does good in school, has nerd friends and no love life. He does have love in his life, however. He loves Margo (Cara Delevingne), who moved across the street from his house when they were both kids. Back then they hung out and started to do adventured, but she did it way more and eventually they lost touch. Still, he hoped and dreamed.

Then one night, she appeared at his window! She needed someone to drive her around Orlando, get revenge on her ex boyfriend and so called friends. A night of adventure and a night to remember!

And then? The next day? Poof. Margo was gone. She ran away again, Q thought they would start to hit it off, so soon to finishing high school. But luckily, Margo always leaves some clues for her friends when she leaves so that they know where they can find her. Now it is up to Q to put himself out there for once and do something out of his comfort zone! With the help of his two best friends (Austin Abrams, Justice Smith), the old best friend of Margo (Halston Sage), and the girlfriend of one of his best friends (Jaz Sinclair), he will hopefully find true love and happiness.

Also featuring the amazingly accurate kid versions of our leads, Hannah Alligood and Josiah Cerio, and Cara Buono as Q’s mom. Seriously, I am willing to believe they just filmed the kid scenes many years ago and decided to give them fake imdb credits and names so that people wouldn’t think it was weird.

Jokes on you, I think everything is weird!

Alright, before the movie I had two hopes. First of all, I can say that Paper Towns definitely avoided cliches. It had a huge “nice guy” boner going throughout it, but by the end it was certainly not your standard story. Which was fantastic!

Unfortunately, it didn’t make me cry. No tears at all, not even a little. Come on John Green. You destroyed me with your last film, this one only gave me chuckles and contemplation.

Here’s the thing. Our two leads were fantastic. Wolff and Delevingne felt like real people for the most part with genuine expressions and appropriate reactions to everything. They made their characters awesome. The supporting cast however is not able to get on their level. I thought the chemistry between Wolff and friends felt real, but the other two actors just didn’t feel real. One character in particular was more annoying than funny.

Again, I am all for surprises along the way, and in fact, the twists in this film are generally good overall. It just didn’t resonate with me as much as I had hoped. Thankfully the leads were still great and oh so charismatic.

Hold up your hands. Now bend your hands back a little bit and curl your fingers. Then use this hand position to hit someone in the face, with the bottom part of your palm. That is what I thought Southpaw was before this movie.

Southpaw didn’t actually teach me what a Southpaw was, I had to find out after the fact. Apparently it is just a mainly left handed boxer though, instead of the normal right handed boxer. Oh well.

Either way, the main reason I was interested in this film was to see a buff Jake Gyllenhaal. We had glimpses of it in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, but no one wanted to see that movie for some reason. The best part about the muscles put on by Gyllenhaal is that he did it right after starring in Nightcrawler, where he famously lost a lot of weight and has scrawny body.

Look out everyone. Gyllenhaal is now willing to do potential future harm to his health to give it his all in these roles.

And he is excited to do it!

Billy Hope (Gyllenhaal) has got it all. He is undefeated, over 40 wins to his name! He is the lightweight champion of the world! He has friends, a loving wife, Maureen (Rachel McAdams), a daughter, Leila (Oona Laurence), a mansion, a lifelong manager friend/promoter (50 Cent), and fat filthy stacks of cash.

But he wasn’t given these things. He had to work hard. He was an orphan, raised in the foster care system. So was his wife! So were all his friends. From nothing they created something great, and now with all the hits to the head, there is a chance he could lose it all if he keeps taking a beating. His wife wants him to live to see their daughter grow up, a fair request. So sure, maybe he should retire.

Not everyone is down with his retirement though. Miguel Escobar (Miguel Gomez) claims he is the best at the sport, but Billy won’t give him a chance. Miguel needs to beat the best to claim he is the best, so he starts a public taunting event to get Billy to commit. But when the taunting gets too personal, events quickly escalate and a pretty bad thing happens. I honestly don’t know if the bad thing was said in the spoiler, so I will avoid saying it.

Needless to say, post “bad thing”, Billy won’t get to live out the rest of his life as planned. Depression, loss of wealth, drugs, all of these things bring Billy down. After he loses everything, then, maybe then, he can turn his life around with an old gym owner (Forest Whitaker) and living on the streets.

Also featuring Naomie Harris, Skylan Brooks, and Beau Knapp.

Billy was eventually defeated by a KO from his daughter, quite embarrassingly.

Southpaw left me an emotional wreck. Notably important, I have a wife and I have a daughter, so despite not growing up on the streets or being athletic in any way, I found myself relating really heavily with the main character. All the bad things that happened to him I could imagine happening to me, so I was on the same wavelength from minute 1 and on.

Southpaw isn’t a revolutionary story. It has some normal boxing movie moments, maybe even cliches if you will. It wasn’t going for Warrior (shut up, I know it wasn’t boxing, close enough). But what elevates Southpaw is in the incredible acting.

Everyone was on point in this film. Gyllenhaal gave a complete performance, transforming himself into a new person. The film was originally going to star Eminem as the titular role, as a spiritual sequel to 8 Mile. Obviously Eminem wasn’t a champion boxer, but the whole film would be a metaphor for what was going on in his life and his own struggles. It was actually easy to imagine him playing the role early on, but I don’t think he could have pulled off the more emotional and intense parts of the film in the middle and end.

McAdams is in a lot of movies that make me cry, but she is never the reason for the tears. This time McAdams made me cry, who gave one of her best performances. It took awhile to get used to it, but it worked. Whitaker also gives his best performance in years, doing well on the drunk ramblings. It was nice to see after a few pretty bad and cheap movies in a row. And of course, Laurence as the daughter did an amazing job. She conveyed emotions through her eyes like a seasoned pro, with only one of her scenes feeling a bit cheesy.

Southpaw is a movie about a family and boxing. Broken down it is awkward: Boxer’s life turned upside down due to boxing, only way to fix it is more boxing. But the acting and characters make it an incredible film experience.

Buy It! – This movie is available now on {Blu-Ray} and {DVD}.

I have been waiting to see the documentary Merchants of Doubt for years. Technically. Kind of.

Let me back track. When I was an undergraduate at UNC, I was also a security guard. Paid well, and I got to do homework/watch movies during shifts. During one desk shift at a building, there was a talk from some lady. Apparently there was a gun nut in attendance who disagreed a lot with her and asked a bunch of awkward questions, noting he had a gun and then left. I of course wasn’t anywhere near it, but was told after he left to be on the look out.

The speaker was Naomi Oreskes, one of the authors of the book. The talk she gave was probably wonderful, but I wasn’t able to see it obviously. So I bought the book instead, Merchants of Doubt, telling myself I would totally read it. This was back in 2010 or 2011.

Obviously I never read the book. But last year I found out that a documentary would be made of the same name! Hooray! Now I don’t have to read the book I bought so many years ago! I can just spend a little over an hour and a half, getting all of the same information in easy to digest form! So although when I bought the book I didn’t know it would become a documentary, I somehow knew then I wished it was the whole time.

Either way, long intro aside, this documentary has one main point: The same science fucks who sided with the smoking companies saying there was no evidence of smoke being bad / cigarettes being addictive are the fucks who are also denying climate change.

This is one of those fucks right here.

Of course it isn’t as simple as that. First of all, the title comes from the strategy that tobacco companies used once there began to be evidence of bad things. They used doubt. People went on the TV, to spread confusion. They told people that scientists didn’t know, some say yes, some say no, no real proof yet, but they are working on it. This worked for a long, long time. So other companies began to use it as well. Oil, pesticides, pharmaceutical companies, you name it.

And again the fact that the scientists involved to back these claims up also tend to be on the “company side” more often than not sounds beyond sketch. Because you know, it is in fact sketch.

This documentary goes into great detail through both the history and how it affects today’s scientific and political landscape. Long story short: think tanks, ran by corporations secretly, to make it seem like things like climate change are controversial and not completely agreed upon. They even help make reports look identical to the IPCC report, with opposite conclusions, to confuse people further.

Shit’s fucked up, and now Republicans all disagree with man made climate change (despite most saying it was real back in ’08) because that is where the money is. End of story.

A very informative documentary, one that should be watched by more people to see the shady shit that happens in politics, in order to make money.

I felt a bit bad, reviewing Self/Less, talking about how it was Ryan Reynold‘s forth movie for the year, and realizing that I skipped two of them in the process, only reviewing The Voices.

I’m sorry Ryan. We’re still cool right? I am going to make it up to you by reviewing Woman In Gold right away (whenever this gets posted). For your non-Ryan Reynolds readers out there, yes, I am almost certain Ryan reads these reviews. Don’t be jelly.

Despite the lateness of this review, after watching two disappointing films about a Woman in Black, I am excited to see what one wearing Gold can pull off.

Oh no, she has some black on her as well! Oh nooooo!

Tie your shoes, folks. There are Nazis in this movie.

This film takes place during World War II and during modern times! As you may have heard, the Nazis stole a lot of artwork during the wars. There was a very mediocre movie about protecting that artwork. And at least one Simpsons episode about having stolen artwork! This is about one woman’s true story to get a painting back.

You see, Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren) is from Austria, but when she was a young girl she was played by Tatiana Manslany. Her Aunt was beautiful and also the subject of the very real Woman In Gold painting! Well, to make a long story short, they had to flee the city thanks to the Nazis, some people were killed, and in a will from the Aunt, the painting was donated to an Austrian museum and is now considered a national treasure.

But the will shouldn’t be legal, as it wasn’t the Aunt’s painting to give! And since Maria is the only family left, she wants her dang painting back, because it belongs to her family and it is the right thing to do.

However, she needs help. So she gets some random inexperienced lawyer (Reynolds) to work on their case. And so they have to go back to Austria, then America, then a lot of American courts, then Austrian courts, and eventually hey they win and she gets the painting back the end. This is the only expected outcome, if you didn’t know that this true story would end happy, you are silly.

Also staring Daniel Brühl, Max Irons, and Katie Holmes in the role of “wife to important character that isn’t an important role” that is quite common in…so many damn movies.

In this movie, Reynolds acts as a man with imperfect vision.

Woman In Gold is not everything you’d expect it to be, but actually a bit less. If anything, the trailer makes it looks like it would be an exciting courtroom drama, about freedoms and the right thing happening. About taking down the big bad country lawyers with a small town boy, in a trial worth millions!

Unfortunately, the whole story seems to take a backstage to a few flashbacks in Austria, about love, war, and paintings. Very little characterization is given to the now. Instead it is all set in the past, with characters the viewer will care a lot less about. We already know what more or less happens in Austria at the start of the film. Our main character lands in America, her family has to die for the painting to be taken, and you know, World War II. But at least a third or more of the film takes place in the flashbacks, leaving me bored and ready for excitement.

And excitement I thought I was finally about to get with 40 minutes left! We had a real court scene coming up. Time for witnesses, deliberation, objections, and yelling! Maybe some bribes too. No, none of that. All of the court scenes are incredibly short, dealing with maybe one issue, and then they move on. The reason we get so many court scenes is just because of all the levels of court they have to go through: to the USA Supreme Court then back to Austria.

And it is the dullest of experiences. The real life story probably has some exciting moments, but they go an incredibly safe route with the entire film and instead we get a boring disaster. And the worst part is, Reynolds and Mirren do a fine job acting in this movie. Too bad no one would care by the end.

I feel like it was just yesterday when I finally reached the elusive 1050th review for my website. I know, an awkward number to be nostalgic about, especially since it is the milestone after an actual big one of 1000.

But you see, my Milestone Review for 1050 was the movie, Teen Beach Movie, a Disney channel original, which could be or might be the next big thing after High School Musical. Which of course also had its own big review.

Well, apparently TBM (acronym, bitches!) did do well enough to warrant more praise. I mean, I gave it a 2 out of 4, and was surprised I didn’t end up hating it! So sure, why no do another. Although, the second HSM film is the WORST by far. The camera work is terrible, it looks like it was all done second handed and rushed and none of the songs were good. And unfortunately that one was about summer time and swimming. So I am a bit worried for Teen Beach 2, which is my 1400th review (woot woot). I hope the sequel doesn’t drastically reduce the quality of the first, rushing out a movie to get people all sex nuts.

Just give me some good old fashioned satire. Please and thank yous.

Dancing in front of the screen to your favorite movie in sync with the actors is kind of cool.

Last day of summer! Mack (Maia Mitchell) and Brady (Ross Lynch) are enjoying some anniversary of meeting each other. How so? By watching the same damn movie they probably watched a thousand times on the beach before school starts. And hey, it is a song about how it was the best summer. Nice. Convenient.

But it turns out school is hard. Brady is a bit of a slacker that cares mostly about surfing. Mack keeps really busy, lots of clubs and organizations and wants to get into a good college. When they start to hang out with their older friends (Raymond Alexander Cham Jr., Piper Curda), it is clear that they might not have enough time for each other.

Maybe they were just a summer fling!

Brady can’t spend time focusing on this generic college application. He doesn’t even know his full name!

They quickly break up later that day. Brady forgot to meet her for college fair, and so she went with hunky tall asian kid Spencer (Ross Butler, even shares the same first acting name, oh noes!) instead. It takes 24 minutes into the movie post breakup for us to get another song, which is an incredibly long time for a musical. That song, On My Own, starts out good, but then goes extremely poppy real quick, and suddenly Brady is singing it into a microphone in his room. Does he record songs all of the sudden?

While this is going on, in the Wet Side Story world, Lela (Grace Phipps) is turning away from the script. She wants to save the day too and not be a damsel. Somehow this turns into them finding the magical necklace, where Lela and Tanner (Garrett Clayton) decide to run off into the ocean, taking them to the real world, not the movie world!

Everything is wonderful here, outside of the lack of singing. But don’t worry, they can make people sing in dance, because they are movie characters. They sing “Right Where I Want To Be,” not knowing their movie-ness, but just thinking they are in the future. They have other super powers as well. Like, their hair and clothes don’t get wet under the water.

I was legit going to complain about this picture and bad CGI until they made it a plot point. 🙁

Either way, Brady and Mack now have to work together. Totally sucks, since they hate each other now since it is not summer. They each take the same gendered movie character to their homes to help them blend in. Their plan is simple, make the real world seem terrible, and they will leave on their own free will. That way if anything bad starts to happen, like their world disappear, it isn’t such a big deal to fix it.

You know. Showing them things like calculus. And introducing them to their best friends. Those BFFs who totally love the new friends too, quirks and all. Another fun movie power is that they can’t not be in 1960’s clothing. They put on a new outfit, and magic, that shit looks old.

Nothing seems to be working, so instead they make them go to the cafeteria alone to find a place to sit. This cafeteria is apparently 100% outside and full on high school cliche. Instead of dealing with that negativity of goth kids and cheerleaders, they turn their frowns upside down. Like, literally. They sing a song about how wonderful smiling is, to get everyone to smile and sit with new people.

There is a such thing as smiling too hard though.

I feel like I have to talk more about this scene. It ended up being my favorite song, because it was the perfect satire/parody-ish musical song that I wanted and liked about the first. Most of the songs up this point were pretty shit, or failed to make the right points. But this one. This one went full on weird and 1960’s musical.

Just look at the picture below this one. Look at it in wonder and realize that it is totally in this movie, fully embracing the weirdness that is this now franchise. Musicals in the real world would totally be as awkward as this. I need awkward to thrive, and this is what I needed in the movie.

The more you look, the more weird stuff you will notice.

Hey what about movie world? Well they are all bored, not sure how to move the plot forward. They still have biker Butchy (John DeLuca), biker chick CheeChee (Chrissie Fit, now way more famous for being in Pitch Perfect 2), the shimmy girl Giggles (Mollee Gray), and other dude Seacat (Jordan Fisher). Well they also notice that people are starting to disappear and go away, mostly background characters. Still scary. Thankfully they find the necklace to go to the real world too and can get their friends back!

Back in the real world, Lela and Tanner are adapting way too quickly. No longer do they have their movie powers. When Tanner smiles it doesn’t necessarily produce the cool shiny sparkle! Since idea #1 didn’t work, they decide to instead hype up why life in the movies is better. And of course, they now try singing to them, because that is the only way this shit works.

But then it still doesn’t.

It is very impressive for them to have all these sets on a beach ready to go!

Well shit. Now that the friends arrive and tell them that people are disappearing and presumably dying, they think it is a good idea to go back to movie world. They don’t want death on their hands.

But Mack and Brady are still not back together! I know, it is pretty fucked up. So it is a school dance night, and they aren’t dancing together. That is the saddest of all the things. Turns out the movie gang didn’t go back after all. No, they needed to save the relationship. And the best way to do that is to force a song at this strange dance, where they sing about how they just gotta be themselves you know? And they can’t change who they are. A classic musical trope, that features all the boys and girls dancing at each other on their respective halves of the school gymnasium.

So that basically works, but holy fuck, they really gotta get these movie guys back home. So they run to the beach, and literally all the people with speaking lines blow up and fizzle out of reality, leaving just Lena and Tanner from the film. They don’t go into details, but I imagine if they go back, they will be alone and confused. Unless going back magically saves the day and everyone pops back all easy-peasy. There is no real reason to assume that though.

Being your own unique person involves doing mirror like dance sets and singing the same chorus.

Brady and Mack sing a song to get back together. Mack also finds out that Brady has been designing super sweet surf boards on his spare time and he has been afraid to tell her, because Brady is a fuck face. They also realize that if Lela and Tanner pop away, apparently the movie will not exist and they will never meet. Which is awkward. Before Lela goes, she is told by Mack to make her own story and not give into the preconceptions of her movie world. Be her own woman!

They save the day! Yay! Wait what, Brady and Mack don’t know each other. Apparently Wet Side Story still doesn’t exist. Instead it is called Lela, Queen of the Beach. Instead of an awesome Romeo and Juliet musical beach movie it is a movie with even less plot, about Lela being awesome at the beach? Talk about a down grade. Somehow this erases the last few months of history, despite the movie not even mentioning this possibility.

But don’t fret. Brady and Mack now meet for the first time at a screening of this new movie on the beach, at a big party! For whatever reason, everyone knows the movie but Brady. This is some strange flip of the first time they meet, conversations and all. Thankfully, everyone dances and sings along to the movie on the screen, in time with the movie again, letting Brady and Mack fall in love. Or something. Hooray they still end up together, but…differently.

Again, singing and dancing along with the screen is THE coolest.

Obviously, this sequel is worse than the first film. The first film was an average parody of the old fashioned musicals and it was over the top on purpose. This film barely crosses the over the top moments, outside of the song I talked a lot about halfway through the review. I was disappointed with most of the songs. The school dance song could have been better if it didn’t have a generic as fuck chorus about marching to their own beat. It made it terrible. Not even the final closing song was good, because it has a nonsensical chorus for no reason at all.

“Bubble bubble bubble-a, popple popple popple-a
Sparkle sparkle rattly-doo
Fizzle fizzle fizzle-a, whizzle whizzle whizzle-a
Boom-a, boom-a, that’s how we do.” (Repeat x2 each time).

I want to say that song and a few other scenes may be references to Grease, but they do them poorly and just end up looking like shit.

I am also pretty annoyed that the ending doesn’t make any sense. Let alone the danger of them disappearing and somehow just changing their world as they knew it. This isn’t even a time travel movie. This is people going from a movie into the real world and vice versa. They equate their issues as if they were being transported back to the 1960’s, which is not at all how movies should work. Having them suddenly not meet at all earlier in the summer because a movie changed is also terrible, because it came out of no where with no explanation. Related, the fake movie in question always looked bad, but the new movie it became somehow looks far worse.

The only redeeming quality, outside of the awkward smile song, are the biker characters of course, who don’t get as much time to shine. Tanner and Lela have some decent jokes in the real world, but when they become real, those jokes fade.

It is disappointing that they brought in an awesome Asian male to be fawned over, and he ends up with another Asian character at the end, losing some potential sweet romantic diversity.

Teen Beach 2 went for the shitty sequel to make cash quickly route, instead of developing a story as smart (ish) as the original. It practically changed the genre from parody to…just regular not so good original Disney Channel movie. Such a shame. And it will probably develop into a trilogy, maybe with this one also going to theaters?

In conclusion, Ross Lynch is no Zac Efron.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to see A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. Shit, I have a hard enough time remembering the title. When mentioning it out loud I have been calling it A Girl Walks Home At Midnight. Close enough right? Not at all.

I knew it was supposed to be scary, but I also knew it was extremely stylized and also with subtitles. So it is one of those films I need to be in the right mood for in order to even begin to appreciate it.

I like new and exciting things! But potential super artsy foreign films are obviously one of my weaknesses. They usually don’t involve cool super heroes or things blowing up.

Well, I guess she is sort of in a costume.

AGWHAAN takes place in a make believe town called Bad City in Iran. You can tell it is make believe, because it is called Bad City.

It is a very small city, not a lot of people involved, but enough people for drugs. There is only one gangster asshole, Saeed (Dominic Rains), a pimp and drug dealer. He is a bad dude, and he has gotten Hossein (Marshall Manesh) hooked on drugs! That is bad for Hossein, for many obvious reasons, but even worse for Arash (Arash Marandi), our hero(?) and Hossein’s son.

Arash had his car taken by Saeed because his dad owes money. That suchs for Arash, who worked hard to get that slick sexy car! Oh, and Saeed also is abusive to his women, like Atti (Mozhan Marnò).

Which is why he gets fucked up by a vampire! The Girl (Sheila Vand) totally goes all vampire on him! You know, the one who walks home alone. At night.

The Girl isn’t just some random blood sucking fiend. No, she has morals. She killed Saeed because he was a bad dude. And there are more bad people in this small town. But is Arash a bad dude or his he just desperate?

Hopefully she knows for sure before she sucks his blood too. Also featuring Rome Shadanloo.

Arash is a James Dean looking motherfucker. I don’t mean the male porn star of the similar name.

AGWHAAN is definitely an interesting film, and an even more interesting acronym. There is both a lot and only a little that goes on, so what does end up happening has to be paid attention to for the film to drive home its message.

The message being that it can make a pretty killer soundtrack.

That and the visuals were the best parts. Each frame was shot meticulously in order to heighten you senses to what is going on. AGWHAAN is not a standard horror in any shape or form. There are no jump scares, no real scares at all, just several tense moments. Quite a few longer shots are done in this film, often with just characters staring at at each other, with dialogue at the very minimum.

At the same time, it is easy to understand that someone would say not a lot happens in this film. It is true. It can feel quite long and drawn out with not enough gusto behind the scenes to keep your interest. So I see it in two ways. If the film can keep your interest the whole time, you will go on a pretty unique experience when it comes to modern vampire films. If it doesn’t, it will feel like a lot of wasted potential, with some cool shit that occassionall happens.

Which unfortunately for my street cred, the latter is how I see it. Some cool shit happens, and a lot of other drawn out scenes. Oh well. It is still a stylistically beautiful film, the black and white do a lot of favors. Just not my cup of blood, so to speak.

Movie confession: I was born in 1989, and it took until the summer of 2015 for me to watch the first four Mission: Impossible films. I have definitely never seen the TV show (and don’t plan on it). I really wanted to review Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation when it was in theaters though, so I had to gain copies of the first three films.

Oh, I had Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol on Blu-Ray already though. Bought it three years ago for about $3 and put it on my “eventually” shelf.

Well the time is now! And as a way of catching up, I thought the first one was good, the second one was really really terrible and took me five days to finish it (watching a little bit each day), and the third one was decent, thanks a lot to Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Good, we are caught up. On with the recent film!

I have learned to not get attached to the female lead. She totally won’t make the next film.

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is now locked away in a Russian prison. He has been there for years! Some say he killed a bunch of Serbians, some say it was due to the death of his wife. Some say he is there on a secret mission. All they know is that they have to break him out right away. So a team featuring Jane (Paula Patton) and Benji (Simon Pegg), who has his field badge finally break him out. They also help break out some dude named Bogdan (Miraj Grbic), because he helped Ethan out, despite not knowing he was secretly an American.

It turns out they really really needed Ethan to break into the The Kremlin to find out the identity of a man named Cobalt. The IMF was close to figuring it out, but one of their agents (Josh Holloway) was killed by an assassin (Léa Seydoux) before they could get too close.

But then shit even goes wrong at the Kremlin. Turns out Cobalt (Michael Nyqvist) was there first and frames the IMF/USA into doing some bad naughty things in the Kremlin. In response to that, the president has disbanded the entire organization, as a way of appeasing the Russians. However, our three crew members were still ordered, on their own, to stop Cobalt and get the USA out of the bad position it is in. But hey, they also an Analyst (Jeremy Renner) on their team, so that is cool! And you know, having to also escape the special agent Russian forces looking to track them down, led by Sidorov (Vladimir Mashkov). Man, there is a lot of hard shit going on.

Oh yeah, and if they fail, probably a nuclear war will happen. Jolly good, righto. Also featuring Samuli Edelmann and Ivan Shvedoff.

Camera angles intentional to show how crazy the stunts are in this tower scene.

Comparing Ghost Protocol to the other three films, it is far better than 2, better than 3, and I would say on par or even better than the first film. Ghost Protocol came out 15 years after the first film, and I am generally skeptical of 90’s movies getting sequels way later. You know, like Jurassic World. Sure, there were other films, but there was still a large gap between films 3 and 4 of those series. I assume they are making a movie not because of having a great idea (just late), but instead hope to ride the nostalgia of movie goers instead of making a new property. Remakes remake money, after all.

I couldn’t be happier to be wrong on my assumption about this film though!

I was on edge of my seat throughout the film, and not just because I also had to deal with a crying baby while I watched it. The plot was intricate, but easy to follow. And there is a ton of action to entertain. The skyscraper climbing scene was better than advertised and one of the highlights of the movie. Both the climb and the descent. Despite knowing that our hero wouldn’t die obviously, it was tense enough to scare me both times. But it wasn’t the only tense moment! The final fight scene in the strange parking garage was colorful and had such well done cinematography.

Despite his real life personality, Tom Cruise makes excellent action movies. His last seven movies, including the Tropic Thunder cameo I have given good or better reviews to. We shouldn’t care about what an actor does in real life (unless it is killing babies?) or if he has a short person complex if he can consistently entertain and put out wonderful characters and work. Needless to say, I am appropriately pumped for the next Mission Impossible and whatever future films he wants to partake in.

Buy It! – This movie is available now on {Blu-Ray} and {DVD}.

The human penis.

Often worshiped throughout society, often by other men, building great and giant phallic monuments into the sky. The subject of the penis can even get a man into college.

Just in case you wanted another movie reference, here is one of my favorite quotes from Chasing Amy, about how everyone needs dick.

But before I get off on a tool tangent, let me tell you that I am talking about a documentary about penises. The Final Member is about a penis museum. Not just any penis museum, the only penis museum, located in the family friendly city of Reykjavík, Iceland.

It was founded by Sigurður Hjartarson, who originally just collected penises as a hobby. Not a weird fetish thing, mind you. Just a hobby. And then people heard about it and wanted to see all the penises. Dude has everything too! He even has a troll dick, whatever that means!

But he was missing one main mammal specimen. The human penis.

Troll dicks are made of stone, I have to assume.

This documentary is about the search for the missing piece of their prick puzzle. The problem is they couldn’t just take a penis from a dead man. People don’t let that happen. Instead he had to have someone donate their penis ahead of time. And then that person had to die. And ideally it wouldn’t be in a frail old dude state.

The documentary talks about its two most likely candidates. Pall Arason, a 95 year old Icelandic adventurer/womanizer who is pretty famous in the area and wants his penis to live on after his death. And Tom Mitchell, an American with a much larger than average sized penis named Elmo, who he wants to be immortalized and worshiped. Basically.

The problem with these men come with age (and shrinkage), and the American being awkwardly obsessed about how his penis would be immortalized, willing to have it surgically removed to become The Final Member.

And it is awkward. Sure, you might have gathered that from a documentary about a penis museum. But it was even more awkward than what you would expect. Imagine what you would expect, and you are wrong, it is worse.

The problem isn’t just with the awkwardness either. It is that for some reason, a documentary about searching for a human penis is far more boring than you would imagine as well. All the drama felt sort of fake, given the camera crews involved, and I can’t tell if the American actually wanted to just become famous for being crazy. It didn’t feel real. And if you are talking about penises, you need to be real.

The museum is probably a joy to visit. Just the documentary spent too much time on the search and not enough on what the guy had already accomplished: a room full of dicks.

Yay Cake!

Finally a film to give me what I want, which is cake, cake frosting, really anything cake related. This film will put cake so high up on the map, kind of like what the film did for Butter (and for Jennifer Garner‘s accent).

Hopefully it shows cake in all of its wonderful forms. The Wedding Cake, the Birthday Cake, the Cupcake Cake, the Cheesecake, the “just because we want a cake, fuck you!” Cake. I also hope it covers up some of the dark past for cakes, because this should celebrate the cake, and not focus too much on the negatives.

“I just love cake so. Damn. Much.”

Claire Bennett (Jennifer Aniston) isn’t actually a cake aficionado, but more of a hurt and depressed lady. She lost a child in a car accident, where she herself got pretty injured. She has a lot of back troubles and even goes to a therapy group for people experiencing lots of pain. The story begins a whole year after the accident and right after Nina Collins (Anna Kendrick), another member of the group had committed suicide.

But things aren’t going good for Claire. Her kid gone, her marriage to Jason (Chris Messina) in ruin, her back all sorts of messed up. Her back hurts so much, she can’t drive, and her housekeeper Silvana (Adriana Barraza) puts up with constant complaining and pessimism to drive her too.

Basically, Claire hates everything and maybe she hates things enough to do what Nina did. She ended it all and is probably better for it. Can’t Claire just do the same? Before she decides, she should investigate by hanging out with Nina’s old lover (Sam Worthington) and her son. That sounds like a perfect idea!

Also featuring a bunch of other women and one dude: Mamie Gummer, Felicity Huffman, Lucy Punch, and William H. Macy.

“Two rules, man: Stay away from my fuckin’ percocets and do you have any fucking percocets, man?”

Yeah, I know, it sucks that this film had so little to do with actual cakes. But to be fair, there are a couple cakes in it! I am pretty sure I saw too, but part of me also thinks I might have made up one of the cakes to fill my cake void.

The story we did get with Cake can really only be described as okay. The main issue with it was that it didn’t tell the narrative in the easiest of ways to follow. We had to watch Claire wallow for so long without knowing the details behind things. It is hard for one to emotionally connect with a character without getting better information on why they are so repugnant, angry, and basically given up the will to live.

That being said, Aniston does some mighty fine acting here, probably the best of her career. She is raw, emotional and full of flaws, but again without that connection, I didn’t care about her journey. The only other character given a lot to work with is Barraza as the housekeeper, who also does a fantastic job and is definitely someone the viewer can relate to and pseudo cheer for throughout the film. At the same time, her character makes so many aggravating choices given how Claire acts, it is still not one to save the film.

The other men and women involved with the project don’t matter as much in the film, so they can only help it so little.

If you want a well acted Drama from a famous A-lister, this could be a good bet. But if you want something that will really tickle your emotions and take you on a journey, this one will just leave you in the parking lot.