Tag: 2 out of 4

Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbander have an interesting thing in common. Fassbender has played two different roles that McKellen has more famously played before him. They were both Magneto and they were both Macbeth.

This is all technically irrelevant, since Fassbender has never played Sherlock Holmes. But Benedict Cumberbatch has played him! And they are basically the same person.

This is a bad intro, in that I am now going to hope that Ian McKellen will play a second role that Cumberbatch had famously played before him. We can’t see McKellen as an older Alan Turing, unfortunately. That’d be preferable. Honestly, most of Cumberbatch’s roles are not super famous, so we might have to wait for McKellen to play a very old Julian Assange. I assume time travel will be involved to get this done.

Either way, that nonsense aside, I think Mr. Holmes is the first time anyone has looked at the Holmes character, super old and near death. The only one attempting to give a closer look into the man behind the myths, the man without a Watson.

They meant a literal closer look of course.

Sherlock Holmes (McKellen) is now very old, in his 90s, and living far away from Baker Street. Watson had finally left him after getting married, leaving Sherlock to continue work on his own. But something happened that caused him to retire from detective-ing altogether. He instead wanted to move to the coast, in a nice house alone, to become a beekeeper and read books all day long.

He isn’t alone though. No, he is too old to be alone. He has a housekeeper (Laura Linney) and her son (Milo Parker) living with them to take care of the day to day needs. And of course he has regular doctor (Roger Allam) visits for his ever declining health. Did you know he is losing his memory? He can’t remember simple things, such as the names of people he used to interact with or even just interacted with. He even forgot the boys name at one point!

Thanks to his failing memory, he has to do things before it goes away. Like stalling, with plot of him going to Japan to meet basically a stranger (Hiroyuki Sanada) to eat a flower to help with his memory. And finally reading all those damn books that Watson wrote about him, turning him into a caricature of his actual self. He sets off to write one of the famous mysteries down in his own words, one without all the pomp and circumstances, because he himself can’t remember how it ended, just that it was important. All the while passing on some wisdom to the boy in his home and hopefully stop being such a smart asshole to everyone he meets.

Also featuring Hattie Morahan and Patrick Kennedy.

I assume he is actually telling the kid about his inherent X-gene and how to exploit others.

If anything, Mr. Holmes gets points for trying something different with a character who has had dozens of film and TV iterations. We don’t even have a Watson in this film! No Watson at all! It is just one guy losing his mind. I can always appreciate it when they take an established work or character and give it a completely new flavor.

That being said, despite its originality the story ended up being a weak point. There were two stories being told through flashbacks while Holmes is hanging out in his cottage trying to remember them. The Alzheimer based plot allowed for things to take their time and force the stories to pace themselves out. It just felt lazy though watching it. It is not interesting to watch someone slowly remember events, especially if the events aren’t life threatening in any way. Memento was about a guy slowly remembering events, and it was a well done crime thriller. This one the stakes were no where near as high, so it made me wonder what the point was.

The good news is that it was for the most part well acted. Everyone played their parts well, even though it felt like McKellen was literally dying in front of the camera as the movie went on. Playing an old and enfeebled person will not get you on the cover of any magazines. It was also a gorgeous movie with its set pieces, costumes and cinematography. It just also featured a mostly forgettable story with only a bit of the wit I have come to know and love from a made up detective character.

Don’t look too closely at the calendars, but roughly 4-5 months after the Oscars, I can say I finished another category! A few categories ended up being extremely elusive, namely Best Original Song, Best Documentary and Best Foreign Film. I have made zero headway on finishing any of those three categories (And just downright ignoring the shorts categories), until this moment. With this review of The Salt of the Earth, the documentary category will finally officially be finished.

What makes this better is that it didn’t win. If it had won the category, this would be almost embarrassing for me. But since it didn’t, it is a loser, and taking your time is expected, right?

Right!

But in reality, I didn’t get to watch it because I couldn’t find a copy. It took forever to be released in America, and I didn’t even let the fact that it would be a completely foreign and thus subtitled movie get in my way from watching it ASAP.

Alright, here we go, a documentary about a photographer named Sebastião Salgado.

ART, motherfucker, do you speak it!?

It turns out that Mr. Salgado is a pretty damn good photographer. He traveled the world, an adventurer of sorts, and he would talk to people and connect to them on a personal level. If you have a chance, google his name and art. They are mostly black and white and, well, really fucking good. Sorry for the language, I just don’t know how to describe artwork.

He knew how to tell a story in a single shot. He also knew how to tell a story with words, which is what the bulk of the documentary is about. Just listening to an old man telling stories about some of his more iconic sets of work. Like, a lot of detail. Good memory he has, but he also probably had to tell these stories before.

It should be obvious this is a very well done and beautiful documentary. However, I feel like I am personally missing out on it by not speaking the same language as Salgado. According to the subtitles, he spoke quite eloquently, but I found myself almost saddened by the fact that I didn’t get to understand it. I head to read along. I think a lot of the beauty was lost in the transition. Yes, I am sort of advocating for dubbing here. We would still get the wonderful visuals, and get to hear the great story, and I’d be able to get lost in everything.

But as it is, it was hard to feel connected. Which is a shame. Still, a great film for photography lovers, art lovers, and old people lovers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jokes on you, I think everything is weird!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yay Cake!

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

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

“I just love cake so. Damn. Much.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lies are really fun. I am not even talking about big lies, or little white lies. I am talking about minor invisible lies, lies that don’t hurt anyone and can’t possibly come back to harm you. A lie you tell that no one would ever question the need for it to be a lie, because why would anyone lie about it?

“I saw another vehicle give a homeless guy $20 today!”
“An SUV cut me off on I-10, I was so angry.”
“Back in college I once met Michael Jordan. He was at a publicity signing for some new shoe.”

See, these are all lies you can tell your friends and family and they’d have no reason to believe you are lying (as long as you both have a vehicle and went to college years ago, that is). They are the best.

Sometimes “little white lies” can come back to harm you I guess, like saying a dress is not ugly, or something like that, but that is rare.

Little White Lie, however, is not about a standard little white lie, but instead about a big white lie.

If you don’t get my hint, this lady told her daughter she was totally white.

If you squint your eyes, you might see it.

Little White Lie is actually a self made documentary by Lacey Schwartz, about growing up believing herself to be a white Jewish girl, and finding out years later it wasn’t completely true. To explain the darkness of her skin, there was an Italian grandfather, who was super darker and European and it must have came out in poor Lacey. But everyone knew, and no one talked about it. It wasn’t until years later in her teenage years, when Lacey’s folks got divorced did she even really think that much about it.

In case you were wondering, yes, of course, the mother did have an affair with a black man and it was a secret for decades. But this documentary is more than just finding out who her real daddy is. That would be a boring mystery unless it was someone famous. No, his is her own self discovery, on whether or not she can feel accepted in the black community without growing up black. Whether her own family relationships can ever be repaired. Whether she can do any of this before her father, dad, or mother, end up kicking the bucket and find themselves unwilling to talk about their past.

At only an hour long, Little White Lie has a good amount of time to tell the story of learning to accept ones self and tell the story that Lacey wants to tell. However, it never really gets as deep as the topic really required. There were moments of intensity that one would expect when she was talking to her non-biological father near the end and things didn’t go as smoothly as a movie would allow. But they never maintained that intensity enough, giving us only splashes of really interesting story.

Add in the fact that these uncomfortable conversations between a child and their parents were all done in front of cameras leads its own awkwardness, wondering if the conversations are real and heartfelt, or potentially staged with multiple takes.

Either way, Little White Lie does a decent job of telling an okay story over an hour. Just a bit more in depth and raw emotion would have made it truly wonderful.

The Gallows has a decent trailer. I say that in that it doesn’t give the whole movie away. They only show literally one scene of a girl crying under the red light of an exit sign. And then of course she dies by the bad guy of the movie. That is it. We aren’t seen every scary moment in the trailer, we are shown just enough to tease us into watching it.

Despite how the movie goes, I am stoked that the trailer wasn’t terrible, in a time and age where it feels like everything cool and somewhat spoilery is shown because they assume the average movie goer wants to see it.

The Gallows trailer showed me so little that the movie looked like it could be scary and something I could enjoy, all in about a minute! Hooray advertising!

Unless of course the trailer is actually the final scene. If they do what The Apparition or (even worse) Quarantine did, I will be quite upset with the whole thing.

Fun Fact: This is the elusive actress who was in God’s Not Dead that I couldn’t find the name of last year.

Twenty years ago, disaster struck Beatrice High School. They were putting on an original play called The Gallows, and everything was period specific and ye olde well done. Except for the ending. When Charlie was actually hung from the gallows, breaking his neck and killing him instantly. That wasn’t part of the script.

But now it is modern times! And to honor the tragedy, the drama club has decided to fucking put the play on again. They had to fight the school board and PTA, but damn it, it is happening, no matter how terrible the play looks. Also apparently at this school, the play is done by a real drama class, which a lot of kids are forced to take for elective reasons. They don’t have to act, they could be backstage or tech crew people! Like Ryan (Ryan Shoos), who thinks the whole thing is a big joke and is recording things so we can get a movie. Ryan and Reese (Reese Mishler) are football players, although Reese quit the team to star in the play awkwardly enough. He is starring along side Pfeifer (Pfeifer Brown), a drama geek who actually likes acting but no one likes her. (EXCEPT FOR REESE THAT IS. OH SNAP).

Also Cassidy (Cassidy Gifford) is involved, because she is Ryan’s girlfriend.

Long story short, Reese is a terrible actor. He can’t remember a lot of his lines and has no delivery. But he likes Pfeifer. So Ryan convinces them to sneak into the auditorium before opening night to trash the set. Ryan could then comfort Pfeifer and both of them be upset over the no play thing. But Pfeifer catches them at the theater because she saw his car! And then…and then…the doors all lock. No way out of the school for some reason. Ohhhh boy. This is creepy. Especially if there is some ghost spirit Charlie thing running around haunting shit and trying to kill these kids.

Or maybe it is not a ghost. Maybe it is someone super mad about something. Like the stage boy/manager (Price T. Morgan). Or the drama teacher (Travis Cluff). Or that old lady who went to the school 20 years ago and watches each rehearsal (Melissa Bratton). Or Reese’s dad (Theo Burkhardt). Or David the Janitor (David Herrera), because he works at night and stuff.

And lets not forget about the butler or the lighting guy!

The Gallows clocks in at barely 80 minutes, not counting the credits, so it is another of those short horror films like Unfriended. The good news about these short horrors is that if they suck, you aren’t wasting too much time to see if the payout is worth it. The entire film felt like it was teetering on that edge between waste of time and kind of awesome, making it a more frustrating experience.

A lot of people hate the “found footage” genre of horror film, because a lot of films end up doing it badly. Unfortunately, this is a badly done version of the format. After they get into the high school, the only reason anyone uses a camera is for the light features, and apparently they only work (whether phone or real camera) if it is on and recording. This causes them to needlessly lose power and other bad situations when it became plot convenient. [Technically unrelated, but a bad feature of the genre: Our screening went fuzzy about 15 minutes in and it took 15 minutes for the theater to notice, because given the format, the lack of focus could have technically been a feature!]

The acting isn’t that great, which is fair since these are all just scared teenagers mostly. The film did scare me a few times, but almost the entire film is jump scares, which is a bit disappointing.

The best thing going for the movie is actually its plot. Yeah, I know. The film wraps everything up nicely by the end, with a few twists and turns to show that they had an actual point to their film and not just an easy to make horror. I loved the ending, just thought the rest could have been a bit better on the scare department.

If I had a nickle for every time I decided to not yet watch The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, I’d probably have at least $1.50 by now. I remember seeing it in the movie rental store Family Video, back when rental stores existed where I live. I would walk by the B section, glance at it, and mumble “Not today.”

And then they announced the sequel. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I saw a trailer, not actually knowing what the first one was about. Then I realized I had to hurry and watch the first one by early March, or else I wouldn’t get to see the sequel in theaters!

And here we are in July. I can say not getting to see the sequel in theaters was apparently a perfectly acceptable decision!

Much like my stereotype of the characters in the film, I would get to it when I get to it, dagnabbit.

Sonny (Dev Patel) has an idea. He is going to take his inherited family hotel and turn it into a lush amazing retirement home for Americans and British people to come to, to die. He is the third son and no one expects anything of him. His mom (Lillete Dubey) just wants him to come home for an arranged marriage, and doesn’t want him to marry Sunaina (Tina Desai). Too bad. He has dreams.

And this group of old people are his guinea pigs. That sounds sadistic, but really the film is about these gentle people ready to die.

Like Jean (Penelope Wilton) and Douglas (Bill Nighy), who have lost most of their money due to investing in their offspring and need some cheap place to go. And Evelyn (Judi Dench) who needs to sell off her house to pay off debts left by her late husband and needs somewhere cheap to go. She also is our blogger and narrator! And Muriel (Maggie Smith), who actually hates India but needs somewhere cheap to go for hip replacement surgery.

The theme here being people who want to go someplace cheap and far away for reasons.

Unless you are Graham (Tom Wilkinson), who retired suddenly and went back to India where he grew up for secret reasons. And finally we have Madge (Celia Imrie) and Norman (Ronald Pickup), looking for love and youth. But not young love, don’t be creepy.

This could be the most exciting falcon punch warm up.

The best part of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is that it went exactly as I expected and thus, my delay of watching the film seems justified. Sure, one could argue I forced the movie to be as good as my brain let it be, but I gave it as fair of a shake as I would give most films I know nothing about.

At times, the film was touching, at times I smiled a bit, but I didn’t find it to be great in either the drama or the comedy regards. Tom Wilkinson has the best plot, hands down, and some of the plots don’t feel like I should have even mentioned them in the plot details. But that would be harsh to ignore a couple of the main cast members. After Wilkinson, I enjoyed Patel’s story line and thought the Nighy/Wilton plot was unique enough. Everything else was closer to a miss than an barely hit for me.

If anything, this movie just has too much going on in it. There are eight residents of the hotel, only a couple that have overlapping plot points for their own journeys, AND the owner of the hotel with his own story. So much going on, crammed into two hours, and I couldn’t connect with all the characters. Having so many people makes it feel like they are shooting with a shotgun, hoping the spread would hit enough people to make enough people love the film.

I do think a sequel can be better though. We will have established characters, some with finished plot lines from the first film, so they are easier to understand allowing for even newer characters to take the spotlight. The movie finishes pretty damn average, but it does lay down enough foundation for better films down the line.

Hey, didn’t I just talk about this? Yeah, last week or so! The weird genre of watching a bunch of people famous from TV shows make a movie together. I just talked about it with Adult Beginners, and now I can talk about it again with The Lazarus Effect.

This time we have a guy from The League, a girl from House, and a guy from Community.

The good news about all of this is I have never really seen a group of TV stars do a horror movie. It is almost always, 100% of the time, an independent comedy drama where not a lot happens.

But this is a horror! Time to party because it is new and different!

Science! Party! Happy times!

This isn’t just a scary movie. It is a scary SCIENCE movie, about science going to far and playing god.

The scientists in question are Frank (Mark Duplass) and Zoe (Olivia Wilde), who are not only partners, but also dating. Oh snap. Personal lives mixing with work lives. How scandalous. They started their university research into something about coma patients, but now they are on to something even bigger and more sciency. Instead of helping coma patient, it might bring the dead back to life. Kind of fucked up, right? After doing some science stuff, they are finally able to get it to work on a dog. They had some assistants of course, Niko (Donald Glover) and Clay (Evan Peters), for more witnesses.

Speaking of witnesses, they even have a girl with a video camera, Eva (Sarah Bolger), so no one cries bullshit after success.

Well, obviously the dog is now alive, but the dog is acting a bit weird. Aggression based weirdness mostly. Oh well.

What’s that? They can’t do more research because it is awkward and sneaky and some pharmaceutical company is going to take it all? What’s that, Zoe is suddenly dead thanks to an accident while trying to re-do the experiment? Oh my goodness, Zoe is back alive? That is fantastic. It works on humans. Now they can find out what it is like to die and what she can tell them and hopefully she doesn’t turn all psycho and kill everyone.

That wouldn’t be okay!

I would also probably hide if Olivia Wilde came walking down the hall.

The first thing you will notice about The Lazarus Effect is that it is unusually short. Some horror films are short because everything takes place during a small amount of time, like in Unfriended, and it worked very nicely. Unfriended also got to the “horror” part of the film pretty early on, so there wasn’t a lot of time wasted.

This film, however, dawdles pretty hard core. They had what felt like several different plot lines going on to lead up to the sudden human trial to save Zoe’s life, but that also took up at least a third if not half of the film. That would be the plot about getting the science right, dealing with a slowly more aggressive dog, and the company coming in to take their work and having them lose everything. That is a big chunk of the movie, but none of it is really that scary. So that is pretty disappointing. You would think with less than 80 minutes of film, that sort of thing can be rushed or already assumed to get us to the part most viewers would care about. For instance, it can start with the formula just working on a dog? Yeah, that would give us more time to focus on scary stuff!

But alas, it is a mostly non terrifying horror movie which is a shame. The acting also is nothing special, and rarely is in a horror film.

The reason I am giving it the average passing score is that at least it tried to make a reasonable and not completely shitty plot. The main issue is that the plot seemed to also forget the fact that it is a horror movie. I need two things to happen in a horror film to give it a rating above a 2. It has to be both scary AND entertaining. This one has only minor scary parts near the end, and is average on the entertainment.

Should there be a sequel, which I doubt, it should be able to deliver more scares as we should be passed all the set up. But it also doesn’t really deserve a chance to make up the lack of horror.

Get Hard has an immediate issue with its title. No, I am not saying that I have an issue with what it references. That is fine. But because it makes people think about erections, dick jokes become very easy to make with it. And that isn’t creative. That isn’t clever. That is boring.

If I want to make dick jokes, I’d rather craft them with something unexpected, like Paddington or Shame. Get Hard falls into the same category now as Good Dick.

I personally will do my best to not go for the lowest common denominator jokes here. No dick jokes whatsoever. I just hope I don’t get shafted with any accidental puns.

Exercising with a little prick? Clearly in training for prison.

James (Will Ferrell) is a little bitch. He has risen to success by being white and in the right place at the right time now. He is a stock broker, which means stuff a lot of us don’t understand, but also that he is filthy rich. Which is why he is now engaged to his hot wife Alissa (Alison Brie), who is totally in love with his money.

Speaking of money, James is great at making money. So great that his boss, Martin (Craig T. Nelson) is going to promote him to a partner level player in his company! That is crazy sweet. Also, Martin is Alissa’s dad, so now he can be his dad too! I guess!

Things come crashing down when James is in a scandal. Apparently he was a dirty broker, stole lots of people’s money for bad deals and was getting away with it. James loses everything in the trial. His fiance, his money, his dignity, all while maintaining his innocence. He has 30 days to get his affairs together before 10 years in a “pound me in the ass” prison. His only recourse now is to go to the one black man he knows to help prepare him for jail.

Which is why we have Darnell (Kevin Hart), a family man with wife (Edwina Findley Dickerson) and daughter, living in a rough part of the city but hoping to eventually get her in a good school. He has never been to prison, but for $30,000, of course he will attempt to train Darnell for prison. Twenty some days of lying, won’t be too bad, especially since James is scum anyways.

Also featuring Erick Chavarria, T.I., Paul Ben-Victor, and John Mayer (as John Mayer!).

The main reason anyone watched this movie was to see Brie in skimpy outfits.

Will Ferrel for the last few years has gotten really disappointing. I blame his hair. It is ugly. I am judging him right now for ugly hair. He had sweet hair in A Night At The Roxbury, but it has been all downhill after that, with the occasional bump ups with Anchorman movies. Could also be thanks to no John C. Reilly. Either way, his humor has lessened.

Kevin Hart, on the other hand, has been pretty stagnant with his films. They range from bad to mediocre, with occasionally some excellent moments popping out. And honestly, some of those moments are what saved the movie for me. These moments that you can’t help but smile because of the ridiculous going on and the banter between our leads, with Hart doing most of the work.

Everything else about the film is a drag. The plot is incredibly simple and easy to figure out where it is going. So instead of making that better, they mostly just ignore it until the end of the film. Yes, James was indeed framed and yes, you can figure out what happened reading a one paragraph description of the movie.

But again, instead of making it at all compelling, they just push it to the side. And that is boring.

Instead of being a great comedy, this movie unfortunately landed in the average comedy category. Those comedies tend to quickly be forgotten about, neither to be hated nor to be loved. Just sitting there, collecting dust, right next to the other Hart movie this year, The Wedding Ringer.