The Wind Rises

Studio Ghibli has made a lot of movies and most people would consider them to be a big deal. More importantly, their main director Hayao Miyazaki has created some of the best, most financially successful and well known anime movies to come out of Japan!

I have only seen a handful of their movies and only reviewed one before (The Secret World of Arrietty), so I am not an expert on the subject. But since it is the internet, expertness is just a click away.

Either way, The Wind Rises is now most known for being Miyazaki’s final film, finally ready to retire. This was released barely last year in 2013 for like a week to make the Academy Awards and then released for real barely in February. Needless to say, this is another one that took forever to see. But I guess they have no rush since it totally didn’t win Best Animated Picture. Sucks to not go out on a high note, Miyazaki.

Boy
Which is probably why he made a movie about objects that go so high.

“Wait a minute,” you might be stating quite boringly. “Does that tag on the bottom of the page after the review is over say Biography? This is an animated movie!” Why yes, person who reads the tags before the review. This is a pseudo biography of Jiro Horikoshi (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an airplane engineer for Japan who designed some sweet planes before World War II. Yes, the war where Japan used planes to fuck up parts of America.

It starts with tiny Jiro who wants to one day be a fighter pilot. But with his poor vision, he realizes he would never be allowed to fly one. That is when he does research on plane manufacturers and begins to dream about Giovanni Battista Caproni (Stanley Tucci), an world renowned plane designer who tells him that making the planes is far more exciting than flying them. That planes should be beautiful creations and not war machines. He tells him that and oh so much more.

Well, with hard work and perseverance, Jiro becomes kind of awesome at planes and engineering. He gets accepted into a top program in the field and meets his sarcastic and always joyful friend Honjo (John Krasinski). He eventually gets a job with Mitsubishi where is boss Kurokawa (Martin Short) is a strict tiny man, but one who knows Jiro has what it takes.

Oh, Jiro was also involved in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. That is where he meets young Nahoko (Emily Blunt) who, wouldn’t you guess it, has some effect on him later in life too?

Other famous people are Mae Whitman who voices his younger sister, and William H. Macy, who is surely someone important because it is William H. Macy voicing them.

Plane
“Less pew pew pew and more zoom zoom zoom!” – Paraphrased movie quote

Given the majority of Miyazaki’s work dealing with fantasy and the bizarre, it is quite odd to find a movie that is set so firmly in reality. I mean, a biography? Set in Japan? The only strange things that really happen in the movie are when Jiro is dreaming, where anything goes anyways. I can’t tell you how factual the film is, but it seems to paint a realistic picture of society and of Jiro. Even the smaller details I appreciated, such as Jiro and Honjo smoking. A lot. Many smokes were had in designing and school, and they didn’t ignore that just because kids might watch it like Disney did with Saving Mr. Banks. He didn’t whitewash history despite Japan’s tendencies to do that (especially from that time period).

As always, the animation is also absolutely beautiful and showcases how great these types of films can be without CGI. Fucking talent right here.

It tells a story about love and reaching your goals, but I do feel like parts of the film tend to drag. I also decided as an experiment to watch it dubbed with the same English subtitles, because sometimes there are big differences. For the most part it kept with the same theme, but there was one scene where it mentioned someone had a kid in the subtitles and completely ignored it in the English dub version. There might have been more stark differences that I missed, but holy crap, did they get rid of a kid in the dubbed version? That’s like animation murder.

It is a fine movie on its own right, but The Wind Rises was clearly not the best animated movie of last year. It is a fine send off for an established director and I tip my fedora in his honor.

3 out of 4.

Chef

I had the unfortunate bad luck to miss Chef when it first hit theaters in May this year. I was living in a place that didn’t get too many limited releases, and once I moved to a place with them, it had already left most theaters, or was still an hour away. So it took a lot longer than I would have liked, but at least I beat the DVD release. Aka, getting to see it when it was hitting the cheater theater cycle.

The reason I really wanted to see it is that in a summer with so many giant block busters, the trailer made this one seem a lot more realistic and honest. It also helps that it secretly had a lot of actors I enjoyed, many of which who had starred in big block busters.

Not to mention I heard it was a movie about cooking, where they actually featured a lot of cooking. Not calling out any names or anything.

Kid
Hey! A kid too! This would appeal to the Disney crowd! That and the heavy cursing!

This is a movie about Carl Casper (Jon Favreau) who has been cooking food longer than some people have been alive. Hell, I have been writing reviews longer than some people have been alive. If anyone is younger than this website and reading it, congrats, you are very advanced for your age. He has been working at the same restaurant for awhile too, under the owner Riva (Dustin Hoffman). They have butt heads a lot recently, Carl wanting to constantly change the menu and experiment and Riva thinking that people come in expecting a certain taste. Carl wants to change the menu because famed LA food critic Ramsey Michel (Oliver Platt) is coming in to give them a new rating.

Well, when everything starts to not go as planned and Carl seems to get angry at everyone he needs a change of pace and stat. His ex wife (Sofia Vergara) keeps telling him he should start a food truck so he can be his own boss. He just has to borrow money from her ex husband before him (Robert Downey Jr.). Jeez. But hey, if he goes somewhere new, his old line cook Martin (John Leguizamo) promised to join him. And if the food truck can bring him closer to his son (Emjay Anthony), as the two have drifted over the years, then it is even better.

He just has to first figure out how to use the dang internet and that twitter thing, and figure out why everyone is so interested in his truck in the first place. Also a wild Scarlett Johansson and Bobby Cannavale appear, so they should be noted too.
a

Internet
What the fuck is the internet?

Despite knowing a little bit about the movie, I still found this movie to be full of surprises. Some big names have pretty small roles in the movie and some of the character choices were surprising, even by the ending. But in the end, really, it is a movie about following your dreams, family, and food.

It actually took me a little bit to recognize Sofia Vergara in that her voice wasn’t completely exaggerated like it must be in Modern Family. Jon Favreau when he was wearing the bandanna looked like The Amazing Johnathan which was just weird. John Leguizamo I had to assume was actually Michael Pena because Leguizamo hasn’t been in anything great since…well, almost forever.

Speaking of food. This movie features a lot of food, a bit more varied early on pre-food truck, but darn it, they show a lot of food prep and more importantly people eating it. Which is important in this genre.

It was all decently funny and cute at the same time. There weren’t any hugely dramatic or crazy moments happening throughout, just an appropriate sequence events after the critic bundle early on. That was refreshing. A lot more comedies rely on outrageous antics to carry the plot, but this one keeps it relatively simple.

Overall, Chef is clearly the best cooking related movie of this year so far.

3 out of 4.

The Maze Runner

With The Maze Runner coming to theaters, I believe this is the 143rd young adult novel turned into a film. It is also the 87th dystopian novel. And the next half movie hasn’t even come out yet!

Needless to say, the trailers at least looked a bit entertaining. However, I also knew this book series had 3 or 4 books in it. There is no way at the end of the book the guys are still in this giant maze thing, right? Like. The later books have to deal with something else.

That worries me. I feel like without knowing a lot about it, the story can’t possibly go anywhere. It’d be like having a sequel, but having nothing similar to the first but the characters? I don’t get it. Well. Maybe their could be a bigger and badder maze. Or maybe they can introduce more women to their society.

Penetration
Because the only penetrating that happened here was through this hole.

Elevator shaft. Darkness. Open sky. Big group of men. Sounds like my idea of a party.

However, for poor Thomas (Dylan O’Brien), this looks like a nightmare. He is in a field with a small wooded area. And of course surrounded by lots of dudes and giant towering walls.

Not only that, but they have a few rules. No hurting others, do you part, and never go into the maze. What? A giant maze? What is even more infuriating about those rules is that he gets hurt quite a few times in the first day, by many people, most notably the asshole Gally (Will Poulter).

Either way. They are stuck there. Once a month a new boy comes up with supplies and that is all they know. The doors to the maze close at night too, with scary creatures on the inside. So they best bet is to figure out the maze and escape but only when it is daylight.

He just has to become a runner first if he really wants to help. But it up to the “elder” Alby (Aml Ameen) and Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) before that can happen.

Also there is Ki Hong Lee as the best runner, Blake Cooper as some fat reject comic relief kid, Kaya Scodelario as a girl who comes and messes things up, and Patricia Clarkson as a mysterious woman.

Penetration?
This dude I know named Adam blames everyone on women though, so who knows if we can take his word for it.

First of all, The Maze Runner made fantastic use of its time. Just a little bit under two hours and every minute seems to count. Either for world building, character development, or continuing the plot. Awesome. We are also not given some shitty exposition at the beginning or end to explain things. It just tells the story through the characters.

I thought the special effects were pretty rad as well. The spider creatures in the maze were pretty unique and a bit scary at times.

And overall? Pretty dang entertaining. I would even describe myself as someone who is interested in the future movies. I would read the books, but it will probably take them another 5 years to get the other 3 books out (the last one split into three parts or some bullshit probably), so I will wait a long time for that.

But it wasn’t perfect of course. You can watch the trailer and find that out. A character utters “What if we were put in here for a reason?”

No. No fucking way. Really? You don’t remember a thing from your past but you wake up in an elevator with a bunch of other people who were put in there one at a time? AND THERE MIGHT BE A FUCKING REASON? Just die. Seriously.

Yes. I will rage over a line as bad as that one.

There were other errors as well. I noticed at least once where items just disappeared that a person had and was just forgot about I guess. Not the best dialogue choices.

The movie is definitely a bit darker and more entertaining than I expected. So yeah, let’s do more.

3 out of 4.

Mission Blue

In trying to watch at least one documentary a week, I get a bit excited when I get to see a newer documentary, freshly released and ready to take on the world.

Mission Blue came out mid August as a Netflix Original Documentary, which of course meant that it was immediately available to watch. Not running around the indie markets and festivals for a year first.

And hey. I like Netflix original stuff sometimes. Or at least I think I would, if I had seen anything outside of Arrested Development or House Of Cards (just season 1, shh).

Mission Blue
Mission Blue is the new Orange Is The New Black.

Mission Blue is a very very simple documentary. It is about Sylvia Earle, a woman marine biologist from the mid 1900s and on who helped change the science around the world. She was certainly a pioneer in the field, being at one point the first person to go beyond a specific depth in the ocean, and even living in an underwater research facility for a few weeks.

And where is she now? Still doing science job stuff. Yay old people!

More or less, this documentary was made after a TED Talk in 2009 of the same talk, where Sylvia had a very simple idea. She wants to set up protected ecosystems and environments around the world’s oceans where no commercial development or farming can occur. No bullshit, just fish and fish accessories.

And hey, it is a good idea. Sure. Why not. Like national parks. As long as I can still eat my fish and power my car, then you know I am definitely fine with that.

Outside of this novel idea, we just get to see a lot about Sylvia’s life and accomplishments, what she is doing now, and bad stuff happening to our oceans.

Overall, Mission Blue was interesting, but just felt like a bio piece on a person. I guess documentaries can be used for that purpose, but it makes most of this feel like an hour episode of some show that probably exists on the Biography Channel.

Nothing about this was super elite quality wise or showing me that much that I haven’t seen before. But it was exciting seeing James Cameron, because James Cameron raises the bar significantly by being in this documentary.

2 out of 4.

As Above, So Below

Found footage films get a lot of hate. So much that now when any movie is filmed by a character in that movie, that is what it is called regardless of the reason. Most of the time it is a simple style reason. But because The Blair Witch Project was first, that places this silly title on to the genre. Then people get nitpicky, especially if no one finds the footage. I had to note in my review of Into The Storm that just because it was camera, doesn’t mean that it was found footage, but hey, people still raged.

For what it is worth, it looks like As Above, So Below night be a found footage standard horror film too. Found Footage films that are true to the word are annoying, because they usually mean no survivors. Knowing there is no survivors can be annoying. Back in the day, lots of people survived horror films. More and more recently they seem to want to make it one or no survivors.

Oh well. Hopefully based on the setting it is at least full of history?

Holes
And hopefully this is the biggest hole in the movie.

I guess it is based on history. History…and magic!

Scarlett (Perdita Weeks) is a young archaeologist and scholar, with several degrees. More than one would expect for someone so young. Her father helped pick out her career path and was big in the field. However, some say he went mad trying to discover the true location of the Philosopher’s Stone. That’s right. They want immortality.

Well, after going to Iran and finding out some Rosetta Stone like artifact that would allow her to decipher a code, she heads back to Paris where the one and only Nicolas Flamel died. Rumor has it that Flamel achieved immortality by being a cool alchemist and discovering the Philosopher’s Stone, which also made him super rich! And since then people have wanted to find him or find the stone to get some of that wealth action.

Scarlett isn’t doing it for money. She is doing it for science. Along with Benji (Edwin Hodge), a man who wants to make a documentary on the search, and her good friend George (Ben Feldman) (who can also translate some stuff for her), they are going to scour Paris looking for it!

But, below Paris? That means the Catacombs! Which have only been partially explored still. It is really easy to get lost down there and lose track of where you are going. Would be scary without a guide to get them to where they need to go. Like Papillon (François Civil) and his two friends (Ali Marhyar, Marion Lambert)! They know those catacombs and the superstitions behind them.

Crushing
Pro Tip 3: Crawling on bones is probably not bad luck.

For what it is worth, only parts of this movie could be considered found footage. Multiple cameras and people with cameras dying, you are going to have cameras being left behind. So technically someone can find those.

I also thought at times things were pretty scary. Based on the score and framing you can tell when something spooky was about to jump at you, so I might have looked far to the side of the theater, or behind me to make sure no one was about to jump on me in real life. Going to a theater in the slums that is a real fear.

Also, at times the movie felt a bit intelligent. They were doing a lot of smart things, which is good because the two main leads are supposed to be smart characters. So that is nice. A lot of leaps of logic by the end though.

As Above, So Below was a strange movie. It was interesting in that it was unique and felt more like a thriller early on. I had some scares. By the end it was pretty dang crazy and felt harder to follow. Everything they were doing made sense, sure, but as to why it made sense is the bigger question.

Overall, a good use of the “found footage” and an okay movie.

2 out of 4.

Nymphomaniac Vol 2

When I first started the two Nymphomaniac movies, I figured I would just watch them back to back, get all four hours done with and have a unique, if not disturbing, experience. After all, the original movie is 5.5 hours and was split into 2 two hour movies for practical reasons. A lot hit the floor.

But if you remember my Nymphomaniac Vol 1 review, you might recall that I just needed a break. I couldn’t do it right after the other. Just intense subject matter with a lot of themes on top of it.

I figured enough time had past though, possibly way too much time. Had to read an outline of part 1 before I watched Nymphomaniac Vol 2. Make sure I was in the right frame of mind and all, you know. But no matter how much prep I thought I had before delving back into this story, I certainly now know it could have never been enough.

Care
I am reusing the same first picture too, damn it. We determined

The story continues right where it left off in part 1. But Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is going down a much darker path now that she finds herself in relationship with Jerome (Shia LaBeouf). At least Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard) is still there to hear here story, not judge her, not get excited, and offer advice as to why people or she acted the way they did.

Darker path indeed. We have some hard stuff in here. Mostly due to her issues with her relationship with Jerome, she lost the good feeling down there and really wants it back. Sure she accidentally also had a kid. But responsibilities aren’t important. Getting that urge back is.

So she started to experience a lot of new things. Strangers of another language barriers and BDSM mostly. So much went down that it of course affected her parenting and lead her to support groups, and eventually using these skills she has learned through the years to help shake down people for cash.

But maybe there is a reason for all of this. Maybe things are going to start finally looking up.

Also still featuring Christian Slater, along with Willem Dafoe, Mia Goth and Jamie Bell.

Couch
This one was actually the safer of two potential images.

Just like my last review, let’s just say that this movie is hard movie to talk about. After all, a lot of this is about her experiences and it is a continuation. I don’t want to give things away, as I know most people who read this review wouldn’t have seen part 1, but since this is a continuation, part 1 knowledge is necessary.

I felt very uncomfortable during several scenes, but also found these darker plotlines a bit more interesting than the first volume. I am sure I gasped at more than one occasion, staring in disbelief at others. So much shocking material, but the movie itself isn’t just a shocker meant to put you on guard. There are deeper themes and elements going around to make sense of the chaos.

And shit. You know what? Life is hard, is the basic theme of the movie. No matter your position in life and circumstances, you will have faced hard experiences and hopefully you can over come them.

I think it ended on a strong, if not shocking final two hours, and am glad I didn’t leave super disappointed like Melancholia.

3 out of 4.

Life After Beth

Yes! More movies in the supernatural rom com genre!

There hasn’t been a lot of these, I guess. Most of them are dramas more than comedies. Apparently that is where they think the money is at, teenage girls. But the comedy element? Outside of Warm Bodies (Warm Bodies), there haven’t been that many.

So sure, Life After Beth is giving us love and zombies again, a year later, but just like regular romantic comedies, as long as they are done in different and unique ways it shouldn’t be an issue.

Pool
You don’t need a beating heart to float on water!

Beth (Aubrey Plaza) is dead. You can’t change that. Freak accident. Her boyfriend at the time, Zach (Dane DeHaan) is taking it really badly. Yeah, sure, he lost the love of his life, but it ended badly too. They were fighting. He didn’t her what he really felt.

So yeah. That sucks. Trying to cope after a death is hard. He has even been hanging out with Beth’s parents (John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon) in the down time.

But then he sees Beth. Walking around. Seemingly normal.

What in the highest amounts of fucks? Was this some joke to get him out of their lives? A shitty way to break up with him?

Or, was she resurrected, like her parents believe? They don’t care. They were missing their little girl and are happy to have her back, regardless of any complications.

You know. Zombie things.

The parents of Zach are played by Cheryl Hines and Paul Reiser, he has a brother who is a cop played by Matthew Gray Gubler, and Anna Kendrick as an old friend and old fling.

Craze
Sometimes your flirt face is the same as your scare face.

While other supernatural movies may strive for extreme supernatural things going on, Life After Beth keeps it surprisingly realistic. Yes. Sure. Zombies happen. These zombies may have big strength, start to decay, don’t feel much pain, whatever. Normal zombie stereotypes.

But the emotions and reactions are surprisingly real feeling. The grief Zach feels over words not spoken. His reactions to her being alive, the many that occur. The parents, unsure of what to do about it. And ignoring the problems as things get worse and worse over time.

Life After Beth does a great job about moving on but in a unique way. Just because the dead are rising up and walking around doesn’t mean that life is over as we know it, right?

3 out of 4.

The November Man

Whoa, when did the first half of September turn into shit? Not making biases or anything, but there are not a lot of releases for Labor day weekend or the week after it. We don’t see big titles until mid September. What is this? January? Because even January has big titles, they are just usually big shitty titles. This is just…just nothing coming out for a couple weeks.

The November Man is the only real big release coming out for Labor Day Weekend, which makes it like an anti-Memorial Day weekend. There is a horror, but that is a lot more limited and didn’t really have a lot of advertising.

So, like it or not, The November Man, coming out in September, becomes the biggest release. Even if it looks like an awkward shitty spy thriller that might have gone straight to DVD, it gets to be the big draw to the theaters. Boooo. Booooo.

Jump
Full of generic action scene cliches, if we are lucky.

The November Man. Why is Devereaux (Pierce Brosnan) called that? Well, according to the trailer, the CIA used to call him that because after he came through, nothing lived. Fuck. That has got to be the worst/cringe inducing reasoning for a nickname that I have ever heard. Seriously. Nicknames are organic things that are kind of on the spot based on a small reference. Does the nickname make sense? Sure. Can a normal person organically come up with that without a lot of thought? Fuck no. Even after describing that to someone, they might not get it right away.

So Devereaux used to be in the CIA and was, I guess, a killing machine. A few years ago, while training a young operative Mason (Luke Bracey), a kid got killed during an operation, and Deveraux decided to call it quits. He just wanted to retire in Switzerland, like any sane person.

But now, present day? His old handler, Hanley (Bill Smitrovich), has called him back in. They have to extract a woman out of Russia. This woman has information on Arkady Federov (Lazar Ristovski) who is primed to be the next president of Russia. This information she has is a game changer. And she asked for Devereaux by name.

Factor in a Belgium social worker (Olga Kurylenko), some other CIA people (Caterina Scorsone, Will Patton), a reporter (Patrick Kennedy) and a Russian assassin (Amila Terzimehic), and you got yourself a political action thriller.

Grimace
“Okay Pierce, can you give us a grimace?”
“Can I?!!?”

I will be the first to admit that I didn’t hate all of the the movie. Despite the beginning of the films best efforts to make it look like a shitty Luc Besson movie, eventually the movie started to make some amount of sense. A little bit. It definitely has its shares of twists and turns, if you are into that sort of thing. And I guess, for the most part, they make sense.

That is a stretch. This film has a lot of plot holes. When there are too many twists, early character actions don’t always make a lot of sense. We can chalk it up to deception, but…people aren’t that smart.

Follow up to that. The main character is not a hero in anyway. He kills a lot of people. A lot of US citizens in the CIA, who aren’t bad guys at all, but don’t know what is going on and are just following orders. He feels no remorse either, just killing everybody on every side. It is terrible. Speaking of killing, the ending series of events was also bad because he could have killed one of the main legit bad guys and didn’t. It would have solved his problems and not put the people he cares about in harms way.

Just a mess of a movie. It had some interesting parts. But a cringey title, bad hero, and bad decisions for smart characters turn me completely off.

1 out of 4.

Shenandoah

In the town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, Luis Ramirez was killed.

Luis is a Mexican immigrant, one of the many to move to the small town over the last few years to work in nearby mattress factories. Shenandoah used to be a coal mining town, a lot of European immigrants, but that eventually shut down, so now they are just another small town with low incomes and high school football to get them by.

Oh yeah. High School Football. Like the team who ended up killing Luis Ramirez one night, turning a simple beating of a Mexican into a killing thanks to a few kicks to the head.

Shenandoah captures the town in its aftermath, how they were affected by the racial based beating, how the high school football team started to do after it, and how the court case went down.

Shen
I can’t even.

The unfortuante news is, you can probably already figure out where this story goes. Spoilers, there is a some major disappointment and parts of the documentary that will make you swell with anger.

But at the same time, this is a story I have heard before. I have read about it in books and seen documentaries of similar cases where racial injustice happened in small towns around America, and it still happens to this day. Maybe this one is more relevant because it wasn’t in the 1960s or 20th century, but just half a decade ago. But I just couldn’t find myself captivated by it nor did I find it really too shocking.

On top of that, I thought it was a shoddy documentary. It felt poorly put together, full of awkward scenes that didn’t really help tell the story, but was just talking to people in general. I am glad they went to Mexico and talked to the guy’s family about it, but it felt like it was filled with so much useless crap, I didn’t care by the end.

Well, obviously I still cared. And it is good to know that not everything ended so badly (outside of someone losing their life). But this documentary needed a lot more umph in it to make me care about something I have seen again and again.

1 out of 4.

The Angel’s Share

“Give me a random foreign movie!” I shouted at the Netflix, not fully understanding how technology worked.

Four hours later, when the program still did nothing, I decided to just search and find one on my own. And thus, a review of The Angels’ Share was born!

This one from Scotland. Sure, not really super foreign, in that they are technically speaking English, but I definitely had to turn on the subtitles to fully understand some of these characters.

Kilts
Get it? Kilts! Foreign movies! A-ha-ha!

Community service seems to be the punishment of choice in Scotland. I can say that, because the beginning of the story introduces us to several different people all receiving several hundred hours of community service for various crimes they have committed and none of them get jail time! Including our…uhh, main character Robbie (Paul Brannigan). Except Robbie maybe should have deserved jail time, for beating up a complete stranger. But his wife Leonie (Siobhan Reilly) is about to give birth, and somehow they argued that his life is undergoing changes and he should be there for the newborn.

Well, Robbie is caught up in a family feud / gang war type of situation. He grew up in a violent world and cannot escape it. Hell, Leonie’s family beat him up when he went to visit his new son, just because of all the trouble he had caused.

But some people give him hope. Like Harry (John Henshaw) their volunteer foreman guy, who helps him out, and tries to reward the crew with good work done, like taking them to a distillery. They soon find out Robbie has a nose for different beverages and a good judge of taste and quality. A very useless talent mostly.

However, maybe alcohol can be the answer to all of his problems? Maybe he can get a real job in the industry? Well, that won’t help too much, because he also has to get out of the area or else he will always be caught up in this violence?

So what is Robbie to do? He needs money fast. So when news of a very rare cask is going up for action, will he succumb to the high monetary gain should he steal it, in order to start his life anew? Or will he, you know, not. Also starring Jasmin Riggins, Gary Maitland, and William Ruane as his community service companions.

Brew
Ah, so bottles are under their kilts. Now it all makes sense.

Seriously, how can these people understand each other? Some characters are just so Scottish. Reminded me of Brad Pitt‘s character on Snatch, nationalities aside.

I will say that after watching it, I am a bit disappointed by the level of comedy in this comedy/drama. My hopes were raised pretty high because the first scene had me almost cackling. But then the humor after it was few and far between. It gave me false expectations so early in the movie, I was left with a sour taste in my mouth.

The entire middle felt pretty slow. The ending was interesting however, but not a lot happened at that point.

So, overall, disappointed with the comedy, but the drama had some interesting moments. Because it is Scottish and there is anger, there are some pretty sweet curses thrown about, reminding Americans that our curses are shit in comparison.

I guess it is okay. Not really something I’d watch again after a viewing, but it was a decent way to past the time. Maybe next time I yell at Netflix, it will find me a movie faster.

2 out of 4.