Tag: 2 out of 4

Way back a long time ago, when I saw the movie Colossal, I had just learned about Neon Films, a distribution company run by Alamo Drafthouse. Colossal was amazing and everyone should see it. I believe Colossal was their first big release.

They had trailers for two other films specifically from them as well, Buster’s Mal Heart, and Ingrid Goes West. Both trailers were really well done, and I knew I wanted to see both of this films. I thought Neon was starting off really strong.

Well, Buster’s Mal Heart was indeed weird, but not something I could get behind. And Ingrid Goes West I decided to wait until it could be rented, because my wife was also really interested in it, especially since we were watching Parks and Rec at the time. Again, another delay, but that is okay, still hit it in 2017.

Did they both just conquer some natievs? Whats with the victory signs?

Ingrid Thorburn (Aubrey Plaza) just loves her friends, like, a lot. I mean, mostly she stays in her room, eating junk food, but thanks to social media she can keep up with their posts and going ons. She is one like away from joining in on the fun. But fun time is over, because Charlotte (Meredith Hagner) had the gall to get married, not invite Ingrid, and also imply all of her friends were with her on that special night. That bitch. So Ingrid heads over to the wedding to crash it and give her a piece of her name, putting her in a mental institution for awhile and giving her a restraining order.

Once Ingrid gets better, she heads home to an empty home, her mom now dead and gone. With Charlotte’s Instagram now set to private, Ingrid has to find a new BFF. And that is how she found Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen). A social media pseudo celebrity, the type with a ton of followers so she can make money by posting images of products. She lived a perfect life, one that Ingrid would like to become.

And since she has all this inheritance money, she upends her life, flies to California and hopes to find Taylor to become real life BFFs with her, not just internet pals. She can become popular and awesome too. She rents a small apartment owned by the neighbor, Dan Pinto (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) and sets off to be friends with Taylor at any cost. At. Any. Cost.

Also featuring Wyatt Russell, Billy Magnussen, and Pom Klementieff.

Ice Cube’s son gets real warm with Aubrey Plaza.

Films that are about mental illnesses have a lot of weight to them. For example, a few years ago I watched the movie Young Adult, when my reviews were still poorly written but frequent. I used words like crazy to describe her and eventually realized that what I was doing was not okay to do. I didn’t get that movie.

Now, old (and as an intellectual~~), I understand more the right way and wrong way to speak about certain things, and other times I still don’t fucking care (hooray swearing in reviews). I just also know that if you are going to make a film about someone with a mental illness and their illness shouldn’t be the brunt of the jokes. Jokes can happen, but if you are just making fun of illnesses, that is bad. And honestly, at this point, I really can’t tell if it goes too far in Ingrid Goes West.

Ingrid is a tragic character, who gets obsessed with what she feels is perfection, until things go to ruin. We get to see her in an institution, and who knows why she is like that, or when her mom died and if it is related. Characters getting pissed off at Ingrid over her actions? Totally justifiable in the movie. But the movie makers made a choice and chose to not make their movie in a way that seems to understand that they can’t just call a character mentally unstable and run with it. There needs to be justification, a reason, some sort of closure, and not just a gag.

And again, since it seems like it is hard to tell if they really treated it with the appropriate gloves, it probably means they didn’t. I can see elements there, just not enough.

The film on its own wasn’t really that funny though. It took awhile to really get going, maybe they were going for realism. Jackson Jr. was hilarious though, every time he was on screen I ended up laughing, which is maybe the only reason this made it to a 2.

With a title like Majorie Prime, it in two words somehow perfectly describes the different aesthetics of this film. Despite prime really just being a math term, it also can conjure up Sci-Fi feelings, which is one of the two aspects. The other word, Majorie, is an old as fuck lady name. It hasn’t been used in forever. Old people aren’t in Sci-Fi movies, they are in dramas.

So we got ourselves an old person drama Sci-Fi. That means it is a Sci-Fi film about death, probably.

And yeah, knowing all of this, I figured it was an indie movie, and a Sci-Fi film, so it had the potential to be really great, without actually knowing anything about it.

“Let’s talk about our feelings and count this as a Sci-Fi!”

Learning to let go of loved ones can be a difficult thing. Thankfully, at this point in my life, I really don’t know that. In the near distant future, technology has grown enough along with artificial intelligence to make the transition feel a bit smoother.

You see, you can make a robot that looks and smells like you past loved one after their live. You will fill them with memories that you want them to know, and then you can just talk to them. You can tell them more stories, they will learn from you, adapt and grow with you. And better yet, they will be nostalgic with you to tell you stories that will make you feel better, ones that you originally told them, but from their point of view. It will feel real, it is kind of real. And best of all, you can get things off your chest for closure reasons if you never had a chance.

This is usually reserved for spouses. Like Majorie (Lois Smith), who is getting old and losing her memory. So her daughter Tess (Geena Davis) sets her up with one of these prime bots of Majorie’s husband, Walter (Jon Hamm) except she chooses a much younger version of him. It helps her a bit, but the memory loss is still there, so much that she even starts to forget her husband isn’t real.

But is it helpful for real? Does having a prime unit in your house actually help you? What about more than one, assuming you lose a lot of loved ones? Will it turn people into isolated recluses, will they feel better, or will it just lead to more issues in the future?

Also featuring Tim Robbins, Hannah Gross, and Stephanie Andujar.

Basically, it is a more dramatized (if that is possible) Blade Runner.

I love a good movie that is 95% dialogue, I really do. Locke was one of my favorite movies in whatever year Locke came out, thanks to the wonderful Tom Hardy. I knew that this film would be dialogue heavy, but I didn’t know the real reason behind it. This film was actually based on a play of the same name, so it took some effort to get pictures from the movie version.

Knowing it was a play makes so much more sense. Literally most of the film is usually two people just talking and recalling events, events we are really only sometimes aware of and can have a real context for.

And although the ending had a really cool moment, and this film featured at times some intense acting, it didn’t feel like the time was worth the payoff. I ended up describing the entirety of the film to my wife, only because the ending moment was interesting, but I knew that her time was more valuable than taking the 90 minutes to get to that point.

It deal with a few good concepts, about aging and what it means to be human. But it never feels like it goes hard enough. Oh well, when the end of the world comes due to the AI take over, we will know now that the robots will have old people names, like Walter and Majorie.

This film doesn’t even have to try, it’s always going to be a Good Time. Because that is its name. Carly Rae Jepsen agrees.

I am late into watching this movie. I wanted to see it months ago, but being a shithead, I got the date confused at when the screening was supposed to happen. So instead, I was in a theater and had to watch The Only Living Boy in New York, which is not at all similar to Good Time.

Thankfully, the film came back to the front of my mind lately, thanks to getting nominated for some Spirit Awards. Awards? Edward Cullen? Sign me up.

Painting the town red? No, paint YOURSELVES red.

What is the cost of having a good time? Maybe robbing a bank for some sweet sweet cash, so you have the bills to pay the…well, bills.

Connie Nikas (Robert Pattinson) and his brother, Nick Nikas (Benny Safdie) are trying to do that right now. Connie is the brains of the operation, Nick is the brawn, and only by the looks of it. He is a bit slower than a regular person, so he is just sort of there for the ride and to help out.

But the plan backfires a bit in that during the escape, everything goes wrong, and Nick gets caught by the police. They know he didn’t work alone and they know he isn’t the mastermind, but they will take what they can get while Connie goes into hiding. Connie wants to get his brother out of jail ASAP, since he is getting poorly mistreated by everyone on the inside. But when working with a bail bondsman, shit doesn’t work the way it had planned, and his friends with money are having their own personal issues.

That is when Connie finds out that his brother is in a local hospital after some new injuries from the slammer. Well, why worry about bonds when he can instead maybe break his brother out of the hospital and get them on the run? Yeah, that is the perfect plan.

Also featuring Barkhad Abdi, Buddy Duress, Eric Paykert, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Necro, Peter Verby, and Taliah Webster.

None of the photos from this film show people having an actual good time.

The best part of Good Time is the pulsing,constantly scene captivating soundtrack. The first twenty or so minutes feel so intense, as even the more mundane elements are pushed to 11 thanks to the soundtrack. As soon as I commented it to my wife about how the movie was making me anxious thanks to its music choices, it started to die down a bit and let things settle.

That is when the film also started to lose my own interest.

Good Time has a decent plot and story, and frankly great acting from the lead Pattinson. He is completely transformed for this role into a new person. It is a wonder to say.

The plot just starts to get erratic in the middle and near the end. Once it slows down, it just has a hard time picking back up. Basically, after the the breakout from the hospital it seems to pitter patter itself into a different, slower film. Slowness in a film isn’t a bad thing, it just doesn’t seem to match the earlier intensity and sounds of the beginning. They eventually bring it back, but at that point it is just too late.

Good Time would be a better time if it could just keep up the enthusiasm that it started with, instead of devolving into a complete mess in the middle.

Columbus makes me think of a few things off the bat, and none of them end up being true about this film. Not even Ohio, thankfully.

The only reason it is on my radar is it got nominated for a good number of Spirit awards and yes, that list is already out so get ready for a wave of these reviews. It had nominations for Best First Feature, Best First Screenplay, and Cinematography. It is going up against some big competition in Cinematography, but there is always a chance for the “first” awards. Those categories are very nice, because it puts all newbies against each other, not against some big shot indie director who has been here already for 10 years in a row.

But in further looking at the film, I enjoy the actors generally, so that is a plus. And if it is nominated for cinematography, you know there is a good chance it is pretty to look at it. That is another plus.

Wow, Columbus, we are starting off with two plusses before I really even get to know you.

This first picture looks like an advertisement for the local cult.

Columbus is a story about two people at very different stages of their lives, meeting and learning from one another. And it takes place in Columbus, Indiana! Not Ohio!

Jin (John Cho) is a Korean American who is in Columbus because his father is in the hospital. He hasn’t had the best relationship with his dad and had moved away a long time ago. His dad is a pretty famous architect and Jin, well, doesn’t care about architect for that reason. He has a job translating Korean texts into English, he lives alone, and right now, he lives alone in an apartment, hanging out occasionally with an old friend Eleanor (Parker Posey).

Casey (Haley Lu Richardson) is recently out of high school. And by recently, I mean a whole year earlier, but here she is, still hanging out in her town and not going to college. Casey is a smart girl by anyone’s standards, and everyone tells her this. She just has other things on her mind. Namely her mother, who happens to be a recovering addict, who is very close to relapsing time and time again. Her mom works as an overnight custodian, which keeps Casey up at weird hours, worried about her mom. But she did recently get a basic job a book store with a new friend, Gabriel (Rory Culkin). And she loves architecture, of course, because she grew up in Columbus, Indiana, which strangely has a lot of cool buildings in it or near it.

One day, Jin and Casey meet on a chance encounter. And they will begin to talk, and talk a lot, about everything, nothing, and of course, architecture.

Also starring Erin Allegretti.

“Shit is this whole movie just two people looking at buildings?” Well…

Columbus is only about 100 minutes long, but it certainly feels a lot longer than that. It drags on because nothing “showy” or ground shattering ever occurs. There are no big plot twists/reveals, no sudden changes in heart. Everything is organic, slow, and I guess developmentally sound. We have two stories, both with their own pretty much set in stone conclusions. We just have to get there for those two characters, and see how they decide their paths.

And how do we do that? Through dialogue. Having conversations about buildings and then about life. There is some awkward moments where you wonder if these two are going to develop an actual relationship or not, because of course. That seems to be the natural process of human beings, or at least those that appear in TV and film.

The dialogue is great in this movie. Cho and Richardson are also really good in their roles. It is definitely wonderful to look at, in sometimes quite subtle ways. It is just a film that is really hard to get into. It feels like it drags on, it is boring, and not something I would just ever recommend to anyone.

I bet Josh Radnor loves this movie though.

2017 has been a shit year for animation. That is basically how I begin everything for animation at the end of the year, by the way.

At this point the only films I gave okay ratings to were Coco and Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, which is saying a lot about my opinions on these films.

Well, Leap! was released at the end of last year in France and Europe, but didn’t make it to America until August. I had been waiting for a bit and waiting even more. When it finally came out, no one seemed to care, due to lack of advertising, and even I forgot about it.

It is one of those weird films that is already in English, but has a slightly different voice cast depending on the country. Not many changes were made, but the European version had Dane DeHaan as the boy lead. And honestly, without hearing it, it was probably a good change. We don’t need to hear 12 year olds with extra deep voices as if they are constantly pretending to be batman.

Now if DeHaan had voiced the lead? I would pay extra for that uncomfortable version.

Felicie (Elle Fanning) is an orphan in a small French town, in a Church. She doesn’t want to be there of course, she wants to escape and become a famous dancer! Partially because the only thing she has from her mother is a dancing figure in a music box, her main treasure. Her best friend, Victor (Nat Wolff) also wants to escape with her. He has dreams of being an inventor and is focusing a lot of his efforts on a flying machine.

Well, Victor finds a flyer for a famous ballet school in Paris, so they decide they should run away and make it there! And they do!

But they immediately get separated, so Felicie is on her own to achieve her dreams. She finds the dance hall, sees an amazing dancer, but gets found out by the groundskeeper and almost given to the police, but a cleaning lady saves her. Odette (Carly Rae Jepsen) walks with a cane, clearly having once been a dancer and had her life ruined by something or another. She stays in the guest house of a mansion, she just also has to clean it up as well. And the owner, Regine (Kate McKinnon), is a huge bitch.

She is rich though, so she can be a bitch. She has raised a bitch daughter too, Camille (Maddie Ziegler), who just so happens to be a dancer. And because she is a bitch, Felicie steals her invite to the dance school and pretends to be Camille to get a shot of her dream coming true. She just has to be good enough every day to not be the one person cut, so she can have a feature spot in the upcoming Nutcracker show.

Also featuring the voices of Shoshana Sperling and Mel Brooks.

Oh he is definitely in the “best friend for years until she loves me” role. Silly boy. This isn’t the 90’s anymore.

Leap! tells a very standard story about a girl and a boy running off to achieve their lofty ambitions, and do so, quite easily! How they both fall into their respective positions is meant to be quick and easy, which is part of the comedy and charm, so that is not an issue.

It has its moments, both funny and cute. The animation is fine, Victor makes a good comic relief, and Felicie a great go-getter lead! The film also had some Karate Kid moments, just to keep things interesting.

But the devil is in the details, and this film was a mess. I first noticed it on my own, after three very specific references happened, and I was curious if they all were around the same time. That would be, The Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, and Sherlock Holmes. The first Holmes story was in 1887, the Eiffel tower started being built in 1887, but the Statue of Liberty was already in America in 1886. So to show it barely built at the same time as the Eiffel Tower was barely built is just wrong. And it had the statue already green, which is also quite annoying.

So I figured it must be set in 1887 and they had one mistake, sure. But apparently the film was set in 1979, years before all of these things. In addition to those facts, the dancers were trying out for a part in The Nutcracker, which came out in 1892. I learned the last fact and more from IMDB’s goof section, after I already found out these inconsistencies. If they are going to set the film in a lively part of the world and go for a realistic story, then it just seems terrible to have so many references just wrong.

Another aspect that just consistantly threw me off was the soundtrack. There five or more pop songs used as montage music mostly, including songs from Sia and Jepsen, and these things took me out of the experience. They never quite melded well with the scenes behind it. Given the subject matter, actual ballet, opera, classical, anything music wise like that would have felt better for the story.

Despite being called Leap!, this film was unable to rise above other animated films this year. It just ended up okay like the rest of the best.

“I once was a dumbass,” could be the name of mine and many other people’s autobiographies. That is just a part about growing up. When An Inconvenient Truth came out, I didn’t watch it. I knew what it was about, but I didn’t care. After all, I was a senior in high school and I was pretty sure Global Warming was fake.

I wasn’t going to let some guy known for not wanting to give up an election tell me what to think. I had other people for that. Like Penn and Teller! And South Park, namely their quite famous and still amusing episode, ManBearPig. You see, that episode had Al Gore running around Colorado, talking about some mythical ManBearPig. He was super cereal about the whole thing, this threat that no one believed, and he did more damage than good.

I got it, I got the joke, I was super cool and I knew things. Then I eventually did know things, quickly changed my mind, realized that I was just being a stupid. It is especially dumb since I went into the Geology field, where of course we all know and agree that Climate Change is happening and it sucks. Even the oil companies.

But still, I did not see the documentary. At that point I didn’t need to. However, a sequel to that documentary? A new thing? An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power?

Yeah, I was going to jump on that moment.

And it looks like he has a lot of fans at the doors just happy to see him!

The sequel title calls itself inconvenient, because ideally the first one would have been enough for the world. But no, global warming was politicized, it became a Democrat versus Republican issue, despite being virtually 100% agreement amongst scientists. And plenty of easy to understand data for everyone else to get the main themes. The sequel title maybe should have added that they are pissed off they need to make another documentary.

Anyways, a lot of this documentary covers the efforts they have done since the last documentary. How their efforts have changed and grown since the documentary and Peace Prize. And how major storms have grown and impacted more and more areas, more often than ever before. Of course also, the dumbfucks who refuse to listen to any amount of reason, yet still get elected into the higher positions of power in the United States.

That is the entire documentary in a nutshell. It only had limited information based on Trump’s actions, since it takes time for this stuff to get out and shown in festivals, but it did highlight some of them.

And yet the main issue with this documentary is just how boring it made everything seem. Maybe it is due to the fact that I am so knowledgable now, I don’t know. But I could not get into this story at all. It just lacked a lot of passion (we got some at the end) throughout the film and I just didn’t care.

If you want people to like your documentary, you gotta get them interested in the topic, factual, and keep it interesting. Destruction of all mankind on its own isn’t enough for most of us, unfortunately. Just a dull, dull, documentary.

To be an effective satire, the audience has to understand what the film is satirizing. So if you told me I was going to be watching a movie that satirizes modern art, I might have changed my mindset going into The Square.

I don’t know shit about modern art, or modern art galleries, or modern tuxedo affairs, So I wouldn’t really understand when it was being made fun of. I mean, on the surface, one might just go and assume this is a normal art film about quirk art people, not going for some deeper meaning behind the whole thing.

Oh well, it is long, and it is Swedish, and I don’t have enough Swedish films on my site. I will take it.

Life is like piles of grains of sand.

Things are about to get weird for Christian (Claes Bang), who up to now has been living a modest, yet successful life in Sweden. He runs a modern art museum, meaning they have to constantly be on the cutting edge of new and modern art. They are constantly seeking new sources of funding, new ways to advertise, and ways to stay relevant in the modern world.

I mean, you’d think everyone in Sweden would care about art enough to just go to their place every new exhibit. But maybe they aren’t as hip as we thought.

Their newest exhibit is called, The Square, with the statement, “The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations.,” as its punchline. It is about being nice to strangers and the homeless. It is not sexy or controversial. So when it comes to a new advertising campaign, they decide to go with an outside group who decide that they need to turn this nice idea into a controversy. To make a viral video anyway possible.

And sure, that will backfire. But that is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to problems with Christian.

Also starring Elisabeth Moss, Dominic Moore, Terry Notary, Christopher Læssø, and more.

This man most recently played Kong in Kong: Skull Island.

The Square was definitely an experience and a hard one to really describe. At almost 2.5 hours long, it was about a lot of things, and a bit about nothing at all. It was about a man who would have a lot of hard experiences, some seemingly ironic given his supposed stances on life. A story about getting harassed by a kid. A story of lost items. A story about trusting strangers who will turn on you in a heartbeat. And a story about art taken to an extreme and a public unwilling to break away from their comfort zone.

The biggest moment comes from the scene in the second picture, which would have played out like a horror story if it went on any further. You don’t have to understand modern art in order to understand what the director is saying about that scene, in relation to the message of The Square. However, it turns out it was based on modern art as well. It was based on Oleg Kulik, an eccentric artist (read, asshole?), who imitated a dog as part of art and bit people.

Bang does good as our lead, looking the part of a man who we want to root for, but who makes strange decisions that question our own goals. Is he an asshole, is he down on his luck, or is he really a good guy? It is really hard to tell, but he is definitely a coward.

The Square is an experience, it is not for everyone, and it will be remembered in the future as a really weird film.

Walt Disney Animation Studios have been on a kick lately, where they want simplistic, yet bold film titles, often in one word. Tangled. Frozen. Moana. Zootopia. Gigantic, which apparently isn’t going to happen anymore.

Disney isn’t officially doing Coco, Pixar is (Which is owned by Disney), who, outside of the franchise that should not be named, has mostly shied away from these sort of titles. Is Coco a sign of things to come for Pixar in the title department? It is hard to say, given the fact that its previous two movies, and next two movies are all sequels. Ugh.

I will note I experienced almost no hype for Coco. And that is because of its immediately similarity to The Book of Life. They aren’t even doppelganger films, because the other one came out years earlier, so it is just a bit odd to see such similar topics in animated films so close to each other. But the good news is, The Book of Life was only okay, I forgot basically all of it by now so it really didn’t mess with my opinion.

Guitars, afterlife, Mexico, love, sadness, revenge. Very similar films indeed.

Mama Imelda (Alanna Ubach) has a sad story, but a strong one. She had a daughter, Coco (Ana Ofelia Murguía), with her husband, who had more loves in the world than just his family. He left them, to become a singer and a star, and never returned. Poor Imelda had to raise Coco on her own, while also bringing home the bacon. She learned to make shoes and started her own shoe empire, going down her line of children.

Now, many years later, Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) is a 12 year old boy, and he loves music. He wants to play the guitar and sing, but there is a ban on music in his family, given the past incident. His Abuela (Renee Victor) is the main matriarch now, since his great-grandmother, Coco, is in a chair and doesn’t speak much.

Miguel idolizes Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt), who is basically the Mexican Elvis in this film, extremely famous and well loved. But he has to keep his obsession secret. Well, due to some shenanigans involving a dead man’s guitar, Miguel finds him in the underworld! And on this, Dia de los Muertos, when the dead are trying to get back to the real world, not the other way around.

Miguel is going on an adventure, on the run from disapproving and dead realities, while he searches for his great great grandfathers approval, so that he can return to the real world AND play music officially. And he has bumbling Hector (Gael Garcia Bernal) to help him, who just wants someone to post his photo in the real world so he can cross over to the real world just one time before no one remembers him.

Also featuring the voices of many others, including Edward James Olmos, Jaime Camil, Alfonso Arau, Herbert Siguenza, Lombardo Boyar, and Sofía Espinosa.

Well, Miguel doesn’t LOOK like his ancestors.

It is interesting that this film came out in Thanksgiving weekend and not like, the week before Dia de los Muertos like the film takes place on. Usually films go into effort to come out near specific holidays, but Pixar needed that Thanksgiving break money. It was released in Mexico before the day at least, so it has been out for almost a month somewhere else in the world.

On an emotional level, Coco hits on most of the cylinders. It should be a relatively easy feat, given the subject of DEATH and loss being its main focus. Relatives dying? Wives, kids, parents, whatever the level, it will get people choked up. It had a diverse soundtrack of authentic sounds, and despite Remember Me getting the most screen time (and one cry), my favorite song was Proud Corazón by the end, which tied up everything with a nice bow, as these films tend to do.

Miguel’s relationship with his various family members feels real on the level that a 12 year old boy might feel, including the parts where no one lets him talk. But adults refusing to listen to children in films end up usually being a pet peeve, as they just create lazy plot situations where communication does not occur and leads to all of the conflict.

Coco is a beautiful film, physically and emotionally, but it just seems to falter on the smaller elements. Ideas I couldn’t get out of my mind. Timing these events on Dia de los Muertos seemed to have hurt it instead of helping it. On this day, the dead want to go to the real world to party, hang out, get trinkets. And yet the city of the dead is so fucking full of people. We see a very small shanty area of folks who can’t cross because they don’t have pictures. But all of the biggest underworld celebrities are just still there? All the citizens are having their own parties in the place they are stuck so many days of the year?

It seems like a minor nitpick, and maybe it is, but it really distracted me most of the film. There were issues with the spirit animals, in that apparently one is so much more powerful than the others that it can just murder in the underworld and be basically okay. We have the fear of falling to death ruined by a last minute save, that would have still killed the person falling based on how they did it.

And we had SO MANY times when slow decisions were being made just toe extend the film. At least three times we had moments where the viewer would assume that everyone is fine now, time to fix things, and then wham, nope. Whether it be from last second pointless arguments, lack of communication, or just forgetting how to move.

The plot felt very lazy, so much that the film became more tearjerky than anything.

I love the culture of the film, I love the authentic voice actors, and how some of the songs were actually all in Spanish. Having this much of a multicultural element in a Pixar film is a welcome change (since most of their culture is inanimate/dead things with feelings). It just relied to heavily on that component and not enough on a decent plot.

And to bring us back to the beginning, Coco is not a good title for this film.

I. Love. Goon.

I did not do a best of list of 2011, but if I did, Goon would have certainly been on in it. It was such a surprise of a film. I don’t except a lot out of hockey movies, nor do I expect a lot out of Seann William Scott films, but something magical came together to give a movie that was hilarious, brutal, but still full of heart at the same time. And it told a different sort of hockey story. A different sort of underdog.

It was the perfect storm.

And then they said there would be a sequel. This time it would be written and directed by Jay Baruchel who wrote the first film. It would be Goon: Last of the Enforcers and it would come out eventually.

So it took six years yes. And Canada had it released in theaters briefly in March with no knowledge of when it would come to America, theatrically, DVD, or otherwise. And at some point it was just here, I saw the Blu-Ray at used movie store. I freaked out, excited, and scared.

As much as I loved Goon, I had big fears that a sequel would just be utter shit, as a lot of comedy sequels tend to do.

Turning the whole thing from a comedy into a romance is a bold choice as well.

Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott) is ready to start a new season as a Halifax Highlander, but with a big change. He is going to be the captain. This upcoming season is a bit of a weird one, as there is a lockout in the NHL, so more and better players are in their league than normal and people are actually noticing them for once, including the media. They have a new owner, Hyrum Cain (Callum Keith Rennie) a former player himself.

During their first game, Glatt gets into a bloody fight with Anders Cain (Wyatt Russell), an up and coming violent winner, and yes, son of their new owner. Glatt gets his ass handed to him and his right arm injured, putting him out potentially for good. His right hand is so messed up, if he fights again, it will quickly get fractured and fuck it up permanently.

So Glatt is ready to retire on that note. Eva (Alison Pill), his now wife, is also pregnant and worried about him, so he gets a steady job in some insurance company. He hangs his skates up for his family, as the Highlanders begin to lose and lose. The owner makes changes that seem to threaten the franchise and the careers of his friends. That is not good. There is no way Glatt could come back, right? Not with an inability to fight. He would just have to be a player mostly. It might be crazy enough to work…

Also returning are basically everyone from before: Marc-Andre Grondlin, Liev Schreiber, Kim Coates, Jay Baruchel, Jonathan Cherry, George Tchortov, Karl Graboshas, Trent Pardy, and Richard Clark. It also brings in Elisha Cuthbert and T.J. Miller!

New guy definitely wins the beard game if anything.

A lot of the same happens in the Goon sequel, thankfully. We still have the locker room playful banter that makes up a decent portion of the original. A lot of the skaters are the same. The old captain has retired and is now just a coach, along with the same old coach as well. Just a new owner, a new player, and the same supporting cast.

Pill’s character has changed for the worse. She is worried about her husband, and pregnant, but she really doesn’t get to have a lot of good moments unlike the first film. She rocked originally when she was a hot mess, but I guess it is development. Glatt feels like the same old character, which feels great, although the time between the films is a bit up in the air. I definitely enjoyed seeing Rhea in a roll that felt natural as well.

Unfortunately, Russell’s new antagonist, though threatening, was all over the place. They tried to place it all under just anger issues, but it is really hard to understand him as a person, and feels like he would just do what a writer wants, not like how an actual person might react.

Jokes are still there, they just didn’t hit as hard. Some really funny moments, but I have already forgotten basically every best moment, unlike the best moments from Goon which I have quoted for years.

All in all, it is just an okay film. It won’t tarnish the memory of the first film, but also, it is one I won’t ever need to go back and see again. Oh well. Just don’t make it a trilogy and end it poorly.

I did plan on watching The Girl on the Train when it came out, you know, in 2016. I knew it was based on a pretty famous book, it had a lot of mysterious elements, and it might have been a spiritual successor to Gone Girl. The book and movie are not done by the people who did Gone Girl, but similar elements were apparently there.

However, I missed the screening, and then my wife said she really wanted to see it also. Just after she read the book first, because that is what normal people do. It took a year later, but she finally picked up and read the book in only about a week, which let us thankfully still watch it thanks to Redbox. It is great when they have oldish movies on there (and yes, I realize it is within a year of coming out, but it still feels really old).

Hooray trains!

I found her! The girl on the train! Did I solve it!?

Rachel (Emily Blunt) is a woman who happens to be an alcoholic, and she rides a train to and from work every day. And on this train ride, she has become obsessed with another woman. She can see her in her house, this Megan (Haley Bennett), living a life with her lover, happy and free. Or at least that is what Rachel invents for her life.

Rachel is a drinker because her husband, Tom (Justin Theroux) left her. He married Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), had a kid, all of the things that he could never do with Rachel. And it turns out that Megan was their nanny for the little kid, unsure if Rachel knew this fact.

Well one sad day, Rachel decided to get off on that stop, seeing that Megan was with another man. This could not be! She was perfect! And now Rachel was drunk and upset.

The next thing Rachel knew, she was awake in her home, with blood on her hands. And news that Megan was missing.

Was it Rachel, blackout drunk and angry? Could she have killed someone?

Also starring Luke Evans, Edgar Ramirez, Darren Goldstein, Laura Prepon, Allison Janney, and Lisa Kudrow.

The Girl on the Balcony was a much sexier title, but too close to Man on a Ledge.

The Girl on the Train is told from three different points of view, Emma, Megan, and of course Rachel. The timelines are a bit out of whack, for dramatic sake, in order to amp up all the mystery. After all, if we saw Megan’s point of view when she died, there would be no story to tell!

The false leads don’t end up pissing off the viewer, but really just make sense as the story unfolds. It is not an easy mystery to guess ahead of time, although enough hints really are there. I made a lot of intentionally stupid guesses just to mess with my wife, but when the final reveals occurred I wasn’t surprised in the least.

The issues with the film are just…hard to explain. It feels so bland. The acting isn’t bad, it is just mediocre feeling. The story doesn’t end up feeling as great as it is built up to be. It was maybe over hyped by the advertising or the pacing of the book, because the movie felt rushed and just average.

I think more details in the story would have gone a long way. More drives for the characters and just more things for them to do. It took a long time to reveal not too much, and just felt like a lot of potential that was never fully reached, unfortunately. Let’s hope the sequel, The Old Lady in the Shoe does a bit better.