Gorgon Reviews

Hush little reader, don’t say a word. Because talking to yourself at the computer is not considered normal.

Netflix is becoming quite an amazing place for horror movies. Since it’s number of top tier well known films is constantly dwindling, it has to fill the masses with unheard of sequels and indie films. And there are a lot of indie and B-level horror films out there.

That is of course where I found Hush, a horror movie that sure, is technically just another home invasion story, but with an interesting enough story behind it to keep it fresh.

We like keeping things fresh here at Gorgon Reviews. Fresh, tasty, and full of surprises.

Like suddenly showing up at your house on a Tuesday night!

Maddie (Kate Siegel) is just your average woman. She is living on her own in a cabin in the woods. Not like, super woods, she has neighbors close by. She just wants personal space and is a writer, which explains why she wants to be alone. She is really good at figuring out multiple endings for her books, but has a hard time committing to just one. Oh, and she is deaf and mute. Pneumonia got her when she was 12 and left some damages on her body.

Basically she isn’t your average woman. She is SO CLOSE to finishing her second book too, she just has to commit to and ending. Speaking of endings, her neighbor Sarah (Samantha Sloyan) who came over for a visit totally just died at her door. She was banging on the door, but Maddie couldn’t hear it. Turns out there is some mad man (John Gallagher Jr., yes him) is just traveling around killing people.

And now he has found Maddie, not just an easy kill, but someone he can have fun with. He can cut off the power, slash her tires, so she can’t escape or “call” for help. Not only that, he can sneak around the house and she will have no idea where he is if he breaks a window, or climbs up the stairs or whatever.

But Maddie is smart and properly paranoid. She won’t be an easy kill she refuses.

Also featuring Michael Trucco and Emma Graves.

Not even the stereotypical black lady in the audience could warn her right now.

Hush was different. Hush was unique. Hush even had subtitles.

Thankfully our lead can read lips, so there can be some extra dialogue in the film and not complete silence, but we also get subtitles during sign language portions.

When it comes down the basic elements Hush was scary. On the edge of my seat afraid of what would happen next and how the events would unfold themselves. It is also an extremely simple story. It isn’t bogged down with unnecessary elements, only about 80 minutes long. We have a small cast of characters with only two being important to the story. But there are no wasted moments and everything is building towards the finale, so it is really well written.

Now, I don’t need to know every little thing about a bad guy’s motivations, especially in horror, but our killer does leave me wondering just what is going through his mind. Why is he in those woods, why is he killing? As a viewer, we aren’t privy for this information, seeing most of the film from Maddie’s mind set.

Hush is a very interesting and relatively quick horror to check out and easily one that I can recommend.

Live action remakes are of course all the rage nowadays, but Pan is not necessarily just another film in that trend. The Peter Pan story is older than Disney, so anyone can do anything they want with it. In fact, Disney plans on eventually doing their own live action Peter Pan movie within the next decade already, so you might as get used to it.

But Pan on its own can be something different. After all, we had Hook in the early 90’s, a very diverse film, both in its cast and how people took to it. A modern Peter Pan story, with a grown up Peter Pan! How dare they! I personally loved it and thought the film had a lot of heart.

So we have Pan, which has a similar naming scheme to Hook, going the opposite way and making a Peter Pan prequel. Peter when he was just a regular boy who couldn’t fly. People love Origin stories right?!

Especially if they have thousands of costumes and beards and make up.

Peter (Levi Miller), like every good Orphan, is left as a wee little baby on the steps of an orphanage by his mother Mary (Amanda Seyfried). And he never sees from her again. Now he is about…I dunno, 11. World War II is of course happening, so London occassionally gets bombed. Peter’s life is spent defying the nun (Kathy Burke) with his friend Nibs (Lewis MacDougall).

Next thing Peter knows, he is on board a flying pirate ship. The ship goes to Neverland of course! And the ship has been stealing Orphan boys around the world for ages. They are to be free and to live their lives as awesome people, as long as they can work for it. Namely, Captain Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman) wants them to mine for Pixie Dust for some secret reason.

Yadda yadda, Peter meets James Hook (Garrett Hedlund), with both hands, they find out her can fly, and eventually they escape with one Sam Smiegel (Adeel Akhtar) to get back home. However, Peter thinks his mom might be out here, so he wants to stay and look for her. This gets them to meet the natives. There they meet the Chief and Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara) and a great warrior Kwahu (Tae-joo Na) and find out that Pan is supposed to be some Chosen One Jesus figure to lead a revolt against the pirates and free Neverland.

Yay fun! Peter just wants to find his mom though, so…

Also featuring Nonso Anozie as Blackbeard’s muscle and Cara Delevingne as a mermaid, apparently.

At some points this does feel like an Indian Jones clone though, so watch out for snakes.

I just remembered. Almost no one likes origin stories. That is the biggest complaint about modern super hero films. Every new person seems to need an origin story. Even if we have already seen it many times before in film. We get shit like Fantastic Four where over half the film they don’t have any powers.

Technically no one knows about the origins of Peter Pan, but that is because no one cares. Peter Pan before he was a pirate fighting flying bad ass, was what, none of those things? So we get a story about a regular boy? I am not saying that regular boy stories are boring, because there is a shit ton out there, but knowing he eventually becomes someone like Peter Pan kind of ruins it a bit.

Pan is a strange film that doesn’t seem to know what it is. It is all over the place in terms of story. Blackbeard as the main villain seems strange, but not as strange as Hook being Peter’s BFF older friend. Sure, you might be thinking a Peter Pan origin story means we get to see a Captain Cook origin as well. We get to see that crocodile bite his hand off, fear of clocks, all of that. That could be fun! Well we get about jack and shit of that. The movie ends with them taking some boys off to Neverland, all happy. They have a few references, but no, we don’t get any of it. They want to save that for some futuristic Pan 2 that now will never exist.

See, that would have been a good story. To see what happened to Hook to make him a bad guy. What ruined their friendship. But we get nothing from this story and it is a lot more wasted potential.

Speaking of none of that, there was a lot of hullabaloo about the song choices in Pan. For some reason, large crowds in Neverland (set in World War II) are singing Smell’s Like Teen Spirit and Blitzkrieg Bop. I didn’t mind how they sounded months ago, but the problem is they have NO CONTEXT at all in the movie. They don’t fit the events around them, the lyrics don’t match anything, they make absolutely no sense. They are terribly added to the film, so they should definitely be mocked endlessly.

Pan. Wasted potential. All spectacle. Not even Jackman was good in this one. I feel a bit bad for Mara. At least has Carol.

A green room is the place in a theater/auditorium/bar where the band and performers can hang out before their gig. To relax, to prep, to snort cocaine, whatever they fancy. And that is where a large portion of the movie Green Room takes place. Fancy that!

And here I just thought that director, Jeremy Saulnier, really liked color movies after also directing Blue Ruin, which I never saw.

Not knowing much about the current punk music scene, or the current nazi skinhead scene, I had actually no idea what to expect with a movie like this one. But in retrospect it makes perfect sense for the Dead Kennedys song Nazi Punks Fuck Off to be featured.

Fuck off or get fucked up. That’s my make motto. In role playing games.

The Ain’t Rights are the biggest punk rock band currently in a van with their logo on it! Yeah, people love them! They don’t have a lot of money and they have to siphon gas just to drive around to their gigs. With Pat (Anton Yelchin) on guitar, Sam (Alia Shawkat) on bass, Reece (Joe Cole) on drums, and Tiger (Callum Turner) as their lead vocalist, there ain’t nothing that can keep them from rocking out.

They even have a radio interview with a Mohawk wielding Tad (David W. Thompson) and a gig, neither of which go so well. To make it up for them, he has hits up his cousin Daniel (Mark Webber) in Portland, and they get them a guaranteed stack of cash to perform an afternoon show at some small isolated venue! Sweet! Except it is actually a Nazi skinhead bar, not their preferred clients, just people who really like punk rock music.

Well, they play, they get paid, and get ready to bail, when unfortunately, one of them accidentally finds this chick Emily (Taylor Tunes) dead in their green room. Now the band find themselves locked in there with another witness (Imogen Poots) and Big Justin (Eric Edelstein). The club manager (Macon Blair) handles the cops and contacts the owner (Patrick Stewart) about the incident, but things still seem quite fishy. In fact, the band feels like after everything is settled, they might be taken care of as well.

After all, dead bands sing no tales.

Did you know he was knighted? That comes with a sword and ranks in horse riding! OP Boss!

As I mentioned before, I am basically illiterate when it comes to modern punk rock scene and skin head culture. But Green Room is just oozing with details that it is impossible to not pick up on them. The director didn’t just have an idea and winged it. This is a guy who knows what he is talking about. Everything just feels authentic (Editor’s Note: Yes, I can say I don’t know anything about it and call it authentic) and natural. This isn’t a group of dumb ass rockers who commit every horror mistake in the book to be slashed down by the menacing Nazis. No, they all have personalities. They are all pretty smart. Hell, at least four or five of the main Nazis are also complete characters with realistic motivations.

I’m not saying the skinheads aren’t really the bad guys. They totally are! Just that their actions make sense and you can see other motivations behind their actions outside of just movie evil.

The whole film is a cohesive unit together. No one really stands out in my eyes more than any other. Hell, my favorite acting might have just been Big Justin the door guard. Not a slight against Stewart or Yelchin, both of whom I was excited to see in the film, it just feels like everyone is on the same level and I am not watching one great performance in a movie, just one really good movie.

It is gory and gross. But I would be hard pressed to call this a horror film. Just a thriller for the most part.

Green Room is realistic and tense, definitely worth the price of admission.

Originally, 2016 was looking to be a poor year for musical films. We would have movies about music, sure, but not enough musicals. Most of them are coming later in the year, up to this point I would say we have exactly 0 for the entire year.

But let’s take a step back and talk about John Carney. When I first saw Once I was disappointed, because it was hyped up as this wonderful musical, so I expected synchronized dancing and ridiculous situations. But it was raw and realistic. On later viewings, I understood it better, but still cannot fully appreciate it. Begin Again I have still only seen once, but thoroughly enjoyed it. It is a very different film, going from indie to main stream, both in theme and reality.

And now we have Sing Street. Another movie about people who just want to play music and make a living off of it. And hey, this one has street in the title, so you know this time the singing on streets is expected and not just a bonus. This time he is returning back to his indie roots and writing a whole lot more music. But this one isn’t about adults. Screw adults. This is about a boy making a band to impress a girl, which is how most bands ever got their starts.

And clearly they are the funkiest teenage group in Dublin!

Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) is just a teenage kid, the youngest in his family, and his parents (Aiden Gillen, Maria Doyle Kennedy) are going through a tough time. Hell, this is 1985 Ireland, everyone is going through a tough time. Jobs are getting lost and many Irish youth are flocking to London for work and leaving their homes in a worst state. And now due to their financial state, Conor is transferring schools to a much cheaper Catholic school, where the boys are rough.

And now Conor gets bullied by Barry (Ian Kenny) and the head priest, Brother Baxter (Don Wycherley). But then he sees her. Raphina (Lucy Boynton), a girl who looks like she belongs in on film, with wild hair and jewelry. She says she is a model, so Conor asks her to be in a music video. After hearing him sing a bit, she agrees once they figure out the details. Great, now he just needs to get a band together.

He gets Darren (Ben Carolan), our little ginger kid who knows people, to be their manager/producer/camera man and introduce him to other musical kids. Conor knows how to play the guitar a bit and sing, but they need more than that. They are introduced to Eamon (Mark McKenna), who plays basically every instrument and owns them all, because his dad is in a wedding cover band. They get Ngig (Percy Chamburuka), Larry (Conor Hamilton) and Garry (Karl Rice) to complete the rest of the band.

Great, he has a band! And now, with the help of his older stay at home stoner brother, Brendan (Jack Reynor), he can write some songs, so they can make the music video and maybe win the heart of a mysterious model. You know, while all the other problems are going down. Also featuring Kelly Thornton as his older sister, Ann.

Stoop girl afraid to leave stoop?

Feelings, this film is full of feelings, how can I express these, with a sonnnng?

Sing Street was good. It was really good. Carney is some musical directing genius, that is the only way all of this makes sense. I was extremely skeptical going into this film. Based on the description, I took the film to its most basic parts, and all of his movies just sounded the same. I wondered how long he could make similar movies before we stopped caring. Well, after watching Sing Street, I could easily take at least another half dozen of these, as long as the lyrics remain original with a different overall plot.

As advertised, this film is about a boy just trying to impress a girl by starting a band. But the film is more than that. Just like it is more than a comedy. It is certainly more comedy than drama, but it deals with some serious issues involving divorce, infidelity, abuse (sexual and physical), giving up and following your dreams. I technically only cried one and a half times, but I had another half cry on the way home from the film just thinking about some of the plot.

Perhaps the strongest subplot in it is the brotherly bond between Conor and Brendan. Reynor does an incredible job as his pseudo role model while they both live in a house with parents who just don’t understand. Reynor is a complete scene stealer and you can see all of the deeper issues he is working with, culminating with not just one but two powerful emotional climaxes. If it sounds sexy that is because it WAS sexy. Reynor, I judged you badly for Transformers: Age of Extinction, now I want you to become Han Solo and win a supporting actor award for this film.

Heh. I said climax.

Ahem. Sorry. The acting from our lead was also good from Walsh-Peelo. In fact, basically the entire band and manager were all first time movie actors. Walsh-Peelo and McKenna were the main two that mattered, but the other boys held their own pretty good. Seeing the transformation of Walsh-Peelo as he learned about new bands was amusing and how he eventually coped with the failing home and school life that made up his current reality.

And finally, the soundtrack for this movie is just a blast. Both the original songs by our boy group and the 80’s music that inspires them create an overwhelmingly nostalgic experience. I have already listened to most of the original songs 3-4 times since watching the movie, thanks to YouTube. My favorite song is called “Up” and you should check it out if you are unsure if you will like the music in the movie.

Thank you Carney, you have given me a great pseudo-musical to give hope to this dry musical year.

Causing me pain with his stinger,
Shocking my life with lasers,
Killing Me Safely with TASER
Killing me safely…with TASER!

That’s right, we are talking about the wonderful TASER made by TASER International. The actual first shocking device was developed in the late 60’s early 70’s but it took decades to really hit off. The original problem with the device is that they weren’t really strong enough to do anything. You would get a slight zap and fight through it. They couldn’t just make it stronger, that could be bad news.

Well, eventually they were able to make it stronger and stop even the strongest guy from coming forward. They had science on their side to say it would do no real harm to those getting shocked. In most police departments as part of training they have to get shot with it to know just what it feels like to use it responsibly. The point of the TASER is to turn normally lethal situations into non-lethal situations. Now instead of shooting a bad guy, they can shock them and put them down and arrest them like normal people.

Sounds great! Especially if it can’t kill people and it saves many many lives!

And if “ifs” and “buts” were candy and nuts, we’d all have a merry Christmas.

Of course there are issues. Like people totally dying from getting hit with a TASER. The documentary shows quite a few real life cases of people who have died, despite claims from the TASER group who say the TASER didn’t do it, other causes were at play! That’s shady.

Technically this documentary is a bit shady too, tugging at my emotions with some graphic footage. There is one about a foreign dude stuck in a baggage claim at an airport, unable to communicate with anyone. That footage sickened me and I had to stop watching for a bit. Later one we get a case where it was a normal traffic stop, and then three cops decide to tase him for a long time, while his mom is nearby screaming that they are killing him. Sure enough, they did, and it basically killed me too.

There is some sound science behind the TASER, and technically if it is used correctly and in the right places, it can be a great service. But the real issues behind it is that there is no regulation to the training. It is all done by the TASER company and no one else. Add to the fact that police departments aren’t using it correctly, and you will find that there are big problems.

Doing my own research, I’ve found reports that cop shootings haven’t even gone down everywhere with Tasers. Instead, guns are still being used just as much and TASERs are being used as well at times when nothing should be used, like routine traffic stops. That is fucked up and abuse of power.

I am not saying the CEOs aren’t lying dicks, because they are. TASERs can kill people and should be used properly, they just aren’t being used properly and that is the biggest issue.

But honestly, what pissed me off the most was one of the CEO’s complaining on the radio about lawsuits and America. He brought up the Hot Coffee case and showed that he clearly knew nothing about it. So I figure he is a liar and an idiot, so fuck that guy.

Ugh. They reference the hot coffee case.

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

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

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

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

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

Sad Simone/Saldana doesn’t like the controversy.

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

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

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

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

But Simone/Saldana loves that booze apparently!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monkey Up is a movie I never planned on reviewing. I never planned on even knowing it existed. I could have gone my entire life and most likely I never would have heard about it in any situation. No one I know would have seen it, and know one I would meet in ten years would have seen it. It would have faded into obscurity.

However, extreme storms happened in the Houston area and it was suddenly rushed from the depths into my view. Streets were flooded, so I found myself unable to make it to the movie theater to see a screening of another film. So I had to literally drive myself back home, many hours early, suddenly finding myself needing to entertain kids.

So I turned to Netflix, like many a person under 40, and specifically set out to look for a shitty unheard of recent family movie. And there were a lot of great contenders. I wrote down some names, so maybe a few more of them will be coming your way soon. But eventually I found Monkey Up (my second choice, as my first one was a sequel, and I wasn’t ready for a series (or serious) commitment).

It was by Air Bud Entertainment, which I learned was a thing. Which makes sense, after all those films, and of course, the “Buddies” shit films.

No, this isn’t MVP and Dunston is not checking in.

Monty The Monkey (Crystal the Monkey) is a real, talking monkey in this world (voiced by Skylar Astin, technically the most famous person in this movie). He can speak English and everything, so you’d think he’d be everywhere. But nope, he is instead just the spokesman for Monkey Up, a banana flavored energy drink, which I would love to try.

His manager is Dessy (David Milchard) who first discovered him doing Shakespeare at the park. He isn’t too great at his job, since he cannot get Monty into serious roles, just shitty commercials for some quick fat cash. But the director (Chris Coppola) and owner of Monkey Up is a dick, so Monty is getting tired of it all. In fact, he heard about a famous director, Angelino Cappello (Danny Woodburn), making a film with a monkey as a lead, but he is doing it all with CGI! Oh no!

And yeah, Monty can’t convince him that he is a serious monkey actor ready for the big leagues. So he runs away and ends up in a giant doll house. That ends up in the room of Sophie (Kayden Magnuson), a present from her mom (Erin Allin O’Reilly) and dad (Jonathan Mangum) because they forgot her late after gymnastics. Also apparently everyone left the gymnastics place, fine with an elementary school girl by herself for like, many hours.

Sophie originally keeps him a secret, but then her brother (Caleb Burgess) finds out. Then the dad. Then eventually the mom. Monty decides that he wants to give this “family” thign a shot, to build up his potential as an actor to do more serious roles. He helps the brother learn Romeo and Juliet to impress a girl (Yasmeene Ball), the sister to do better at gymnastics, the dad to write his book, and of course in general do house hold chores and stuff.

By the end, Monty will learn what family really means. He will be able to reconnect with his own monkey family and maybe get out of these damn commercials. Also starring Jessi Cruickshank as an entertainment reporter, Christina Sicoli as an assistant, and John Ratzenberger as Sophie’s grandfather.

DRINK MONKEY UP! DO IT! DO IT! DO IT!

Seeing Crystal the Monkey in anything is very distracting. For whatever reason, almost everything makes her a male monkey. But I when I see Crystal, the first thing I think about is Annie’s Boobs. No, I’m not being weird and fantasizing about Alison Brie on a family film review. I mean the monkey on Community named Annie’s Boobs. That was my first Crystal role, even before The Hangover Part II and the Night at the Museum movies.

That’s enough monkey talk. This is a pointless movie. The story itself is one that has been told dozens of times in family films that it is almost painful to sit through. Outsider joins a family in turmoil, fixes things up, learns to be a better person, and stays with that family. Yawn, snore, writers need to try and be more original.

But they are original! This outsider is a monkey who can talk! With his own monkey issues with a similar talking family, that wears tiny monkey clothes at the zoo, and everyone is just cool with it. It is so awkward.

Overall the film can only be described as boring. I started to distract myself with cleaning and mindless walking around to get me through it. It isn’t badly filmed, or even terrible acting. It is just so mentally uninspired that it felt like torture to watch.

And here is the thing that pissed me off the most. The bad guy didn’t even get punished. To make everyone happy, he got a ridiculously amazing pay day. A stupidly large sum, that apparently the family could totally live without, because they are already rich and no biggie. And the bad guy gets money. Money and some monkey shit thrown at him, but who cares when he goes back home to start buying amazing new furniture.

Adderall is a drug designed to help those with ADHD calm the fuck down and get their work done. That is how I understand it at least.

Adderall is also a drug that goes around college campuses or weird professions, where the user will take it in order to focus more on a task. The amount sold under the table on colleges increase more around final exam times. So yeah, people might use it to “study better” or finish an essay or stop looking at their facebook every few minutes. It has also been used by journalists and writers, I am sure.

Basically, the plot of Limitless is the guy takes Adderall5000 and his extreme focus lets him do a shit ton of things. What fun!

The Adderall Diaries, if anything, is a shitty title to a movie. Adding Diaries to something is just unoriginal. This one is based on a book, but the book came out in 2009, so it was already past the point when Diaries was a cool thing to add to a title. So I am going into this movie pretending it is just 1995 and the title was cutting edge.

Of course I was six then, so I probably thought this was how to ride a motorcycle.

Hans Reiser (Christian Slater) might have killed his wife. Who knows. That is what the trial is for.

For some reason, this case drives the interest of one Stephen Elliott (James Franco). He is a writer, who writes stories based on his life. He had a rough child hood, with a dad (Ed Harris), who was abusive, left him to make him homeless, and eventually died. He has a book deal, an advance from the publishing company and more thanks to his wonderful agent (Cynthia Nixon).

But he has writers block. So he wants to write about this case instead. It drives close to home. Not that anyone wants any of that True Crime shit right now. They want his personal stories. While watching the case, he meets Lana Edmond (Amber Heard), a journalist. They start doing stuff together.

Oh and hey. His dad isn’t dead. Stephen lied about that. This creates problems, as other big moments might be lies as well. Add to the fact that he isn’t writing, no one wants the new stuff, and more, his life might come crumbling down as well.

Also featuring Jim Parrack and Wilmer Valderrama.

A VHS tape? Man, getting my head set in the 1990’s is actually pretty easy.

Last year, Franco starred in True Story, where he played a guy who might have killed his wife and kids and a journalist, Jonah Hill, was trying to tell his story. And now he is a writer, trying to get the story of a guy who maybe killed his wife.

Similar? Yes. Annoyingly so? Still yes. Franco loves independent films. So much that he is more of these indie films than he is bigger well known films, and that includes the stoner ones. And for the most part, all of these films he is a part of just seem to be incredibly lacking. It might not all be Franco’s fault…it could also be his agent specifically picking lesser roles.

This film is dull, but in a slow burn way. Franco’s character is all over the place. There are quite a few sub plots and they don’t seem to mesh together fully. There are some tense moments. There is a lot of yelling. There is some classy text over the screen to make sure you are a paying attention. But overall it just feels like the entire story is pointless.

At least in True Story we had great cinematography and a better story. This one just doesn’t seem cohesive and I am left wondering why quite a few scenes even happened.

I was forced into watching the trailer for The Huntsman: Winter’s War and I was confused. Based on the plot and what I remember about Snow White and the Huntsman, my timelines started to hurt. It said it was a prequel, but if events in the trailer happened in the prequel, how did we even get the first film? That was my main concern going in.

But before we get to that, it is hilarious that this movie even exists. Right after the first one came out, there was talk about a sequel but about The Huntsman instead of Snow White. The point of the first film was to give us a strong female lead character, so to kick her out for the sequel is just amusing.

Of course, there was also the scandal with the director, Rupert Sanders, and Kristen Stewart, having an extra martial affair thanks to the film. I wonder why they weren’t invited back…

There can only be so many queens in one picture.

Before the incidents of the first film, our Evil Queen (Charlize Theron) was marrying king after king, killing them, taking their kingdom, and moving on. She also had a family, namely, a sister. Freya (Emily Blunt) had no magical powers as she hadn’t unlocked them yet like the rest of her family, but after tragedy, sure enough, she had ice powers.

Freya runs to the North after losing her kids and decides if she cannot raise a baby she will raise an army (actual line from the film). So she begins to conquer nearby villages and kingdoms, stealing their kids so she could turn them into her own personal warriors. Her Huntsmen, as she calls them.

That is where we get to meet Eric (Chris Hemsworth) and Sara (Jessica Chastain), well, the kid versions of them. They are the best warriors, her cream of the crop, and they fall in love. But love is forbidden in her kingdom, for reasons. And if you remember the first film, you will remember that Eric was super drunk and depressed over the death of his wife Sara. It doesn’t take a genius to spoil what happens next.

Did I just spoil the whole movie? Nope. Because then it fast forwards to after the events of the first film. We have a prequel and a sequel. For the real plot of this movie, the magic mirror goes missing on its way to a Sanctuary to lock away its evil. So The Huntsmen is forced to go look for it to help end its evil. And on the way he has the help of some he-dwarves (Nick Frost, Rob Brydon) and she-dwarves (Sheridan Smith, Alexandra Roach).

Of course this might put him on a path to go against The Ice Queen, which is good since he hates her and all. Sam Claflin briefly resumes his past role and Sope Dirisu is also a Huntsman with speaking roles to make the cast more diverse.

You’re god damn right I’m reviewing The Huntsman and not showing The Hunstman in the pictures. #GirlPower

Off the bat, this film is definitely superior to the original, but it is still not a great film. The idea of having it as a prequel was weird to me as I couldn’t imagine a good enough story to take place pre-Snow White. And a sequel was weird because I imagined it would only dampen the point of the first film. So it did both and did the best it could to try to make a coherent story.

I have problems with the prequel, because if there is this terrible Ice Queen up North ravaging the country side, you’d think someone would mention it in the first movie. Maybe even that the Queen had a sister. The only part not shoe horned in is the fact that Sara was his wife and she dies. But even that was poorly done and didn’t seem like the type of thing that would drive him to years of depression and booze.

As for the sequel, yes it does cheapen the first film, but the first film was bad. The adventure wasn’t that great, the plans were still piss poor. The special effects were a bit better as was the humor, thanks to the dwarves and Hemsworth playing a happy Huntsman. The fight scenes in general were a lot better as well.

The film still suffers from a rushed ending with a lot of silly actions from the characters. I was pretty sure I heard the narrator say that Freya was betrayed by her sister early on, but apparently Freya didn’t know that? The betrayal came at the very end and the fact that it was supposed to be a surprise confused me.

Other minor notes: Yes, Blunt had to play someone emotionless, but it was terrible. Chastain and Hemsworth had great chemistry. Theron should not have been in this film. And this film has goblins, but these goblins are basically apes with horns with tar in their blood, reminiscent of fantasy trolls. Of course, the first film had a troll that was nothing like the fantasy troll, so they instead had to call them goblins.

The most ungoblin-y goblins I have ever seen.

Another Thursday, another foreign film. Or documentary. Really it is whatever is convenient on a Thursday and/or how hard it is to find a documentary I want to watch. And this week, a documentary to watch was too difficult!

So I picked My Big Night, as I saw the trailer recently at the theater and it looked funny. And it had dancing! I like to dance and party, every night is my big night. In the comfort of my own home. Clubs are scary.

My Big Night is directed by Álex de la Iglesia, who more recently directed The Last Circus and Witching and Bitching. The former I never heard of before, but it looks intense. The later I actually had recommended to me at least twice and I never saw. Whoops. Maybe I will get around to that one if My Big Night maintains my interest, at least a little bit.

And the first musical number reminded me awkwardly of Prisencolinensinainciusol.

Hooray the new year! Sure, it is like, August or September of 2015 when this movie takes place, but we need to celebrate this bad boy now.

Namely, the television company has serious issues, including a corrupt owner (Santiago Segura) about to lay off hundreds of people. So they have had massive protests outside of their studios. Regardless, they are filming this special months in advance to make sure it goes off without a hitch. That means retakes, reshoots, crowd shots, over and over again.

Speaking of the crowd, they are full of extras who have had to dress up in the same clothes, pretend to party with fake food and drinks, day after day. And then someone gets seriously injured and they need a new extra. That is where Jose (Pepón Nieto) comes in. He has been waiting for a temp job for months and this is the first one to bite. He will do anything, even if his ex-wife and kids are leaving the country to vacation and he has to leave his senile mother (Terele Pávez) at home alone. He also has to deal with Paloma (Blanca Suárez) a very attractive woman who is sitting next to him who is apparently a jinx but super into him.

Other plot lines include! Aging singer Alphonso (Raphael, who I’ve been told is a real singer doing a parody of himself?) battling for the “midnight” spot with a young pop star Adanne (Mario Casas). A stalker (Jaime Ordóñez) who loves Alphonso enough to want to kill him during his performance. And a few women trying to steal Adanne’s sperm to have a blackmail baby. And the two cohosts (Hugo Silva, Carolina Bang) constantly bickering over their lines while auditioning to host a future show.

And shit, even more weird side plots.

Also starring Carmen Ruiz, Carmen Machi, Carlos Areces, Luis Callejo, Enrique Villén, Tomás Pozzi, Luis Fernández, and Ana Polvorosa.

When you’re this fly, you don’t even need color.

My Big Night is an insane ride, with intersecting plot lines and characters, all woven around an absurd idea. The whole movie is absurd, so many little things working together to make this the craziest night of pre-recorded television ever. I like crazy, I like absurd, I would have just liked a little bit more details.

Honestly, the only reason I was able to understand the protesters outside, the time frame of this taping, and how crazy the taping process has been, is thanks to re-reading the plot summary after the fact online. There is so much going on during this film, that they forget to mention all the finer details.

Now, My Big Night is definitely entertaining. I had characters I was rooting for and enjoyed a lot of the music. Some of it could be lost on me culturally, especially not knowing anything about Raphael in real life. It just felt like it should have been a lot more. The ending was also pretty week, comparatively. It was like they had no idea how to end it.

The movie has a ton of promise and I would be excited to see more from this director. You’ve earned yourself a viewing of Witching and Bitching.