Tag: 2 out of 4

Although the circumstances are quite rare, every once in awhile I review a made for TV movie. The last few I did include Mr. Hockey: The Gordie Howe Story and Liz & Dick. The former I did as an accident, as I actually thought it was a documentary going into it. The latter I did only because it stared Lindsay Lohan as Liz Taylor, which just sounded hilariously bad so I had to give it a gander.

I generally avoid them if possible, because one of the best insults I can give a poor quality movie is comparing it to a made for TV movie. Their budget is lower, they usually have a shorter production window, and the tend to feature overacting and bad editing. After all, if it is on TV, you can’t show or say a lot of things to keep the rating down. If you wanted to be even more insulting you would refer to something as worse than a Lifetime TV movie, often considered to be bottom of the barrel, along with Hallmark films.

So why am I knowingly reviewing A Deadly Adoption, a few days after airing for the first time on Lifetime?

Well, that is because they are adding all the bells and whistles for this movie! They are celebrating 20 years of Lifetime movies, of overly sappy movies about women getting hurt, by making a parody film of their own films. It takes a lot of gumption to see you are a laughing stock and decide to run with it.

Speaking of gumption: facial hair.

Life is wonderful for the Benson clan. Robert (Will Ferrell) is a successful author and kicking butt, Sarah (Kristen Wiig) is pregnant and going to start selling organic vegetables to other cool kids, and their daughter Sully (Alyvia Alyn Lind) is well, a child. Everything is like a 1950’s white American suburb home, until Sarah falls off the dock and starts to drown in the water. Sure, her heroic husband saves her, but they lose something else in the process. The pregnancy is terminated. Oh noes!

Now, five years later, things are different. Robert still writes, but he is afraid of boats and leaving home. Sarah has her successful shop, but is sad that her husband won’t get over it. And Sully is older, but still a little girl and who cares. But they decide they should adopt a child, that might help everything! After a lot of searching, they find Bridget (Jessica Lowndes), who is pregnant and looking for a kind family to take in her child. However, she is living in a shelter and doesn’t have a lot of money. So they decide to bring her in until the baby comes out letting her stay in the guest room.

Everyone is happy! Unless. Of course. Bridget is not the nice girl she appears to be.

Also with some dudes, Jake Weary and Bryan Safi. They are not pregnant nor are they adopting.

Now where they pregnant and adopting, which is a rare but probably real category of people.

If there is anything the last 15 years of terrible movies have taught us, it is that the parody film is a hard movie to get right. It is very easy to make a movie full of references to popular culture while none of it is remotely funny. You know those films, so I won’t talk about them. But then there are very good unique parodies that are also celebrating the genre they are mimicking, so you can tell there is real heart behind the content.

A Deadly Adoption ends up being a mix of both. No, it is not full of pop culture references, thankfully. But it also doesn’t go to the extremes necessary to drive its point home. It is definitely aware of itself, and things are over acted with scenes overly dramatic. But it still lacks a huge amount of humor, despite its attempts. Outside of the intro and the last ten minutes, most of the film dragged on. Because it is a parody, it can be hard to differentiate between what is bad and what is supposed to be bad, to be funny. For the most part, the jokes just didn’t land.

Again, I will note the beginning and ending were fantastic though. They just didn’t know how to make the middle live up to its ends. The film would have been funnier if it was more outwardly aware of itself, instead of giving for all intents and purposes, an actual lifetime movie.

In honor of Jurassic World, I too am going to open my own theme park. I won’t fill it with dinosaurs though, I will fill it with greek legendary monsters. It makes sense, if you remember you are reading this review on Gorgon Reviews.

I don’t have the funds yet for it. I don’t have the feasibility either. I thought about CGI, but that doesn’t make sense in real life. Although if the entire park was an entire green screen overlaying the sidewalks and buildings and grass, I could buy the material in bulk.

After all, if they can successfully make a park with monsters despite a whole bunch of deaths right off the back twenty years ago, more power to them (and me). Afterall, Jurassic World is going to be a strict economic drama about the costs that go into large island parks, right? And about how everything is awesome?

About how everything is cool, when you’re part of a team?

Set 22 years after the first Jurassic Park or so, this movie takes place on the exact same island. Now the island is a bustling theme park! The idea was a success! Everyone gets dinosaurs and no one dies!

This version of the park still took some time to happen and it has only existed for 10 years or so. They occasionally release a new exhibit, which spikes up business and gets everyone about dinosaurs again. But kids today, with their Pac-man video games and MTV and hula hoops have attention spans that can be measured only in nanoseconds. And they aren’t afraid of dinosaurs anymore. They are basically like slightly more exotic elephants at this point.

So they went bigger. Better. They made up a dinosaur. Taking DNA from several big dinosaurs and filling in the gaps with some crazy shit, they made a big, intelligent dinosaur that is going to make everyone shit their pants and the investors dive in piles of gold coins. They just have to pass a few safety tests before the big day in a few weeks. And sure, wouldn’t you know it? We got ourselves a highly intelligent killing machine that is not just a mere animal, but almost a dino-god. And he is now loose on a regular park day with 20,000 guests.

Guests like, Gray (Ty Simpkins) and Zach (Nick Robinson), who are there for the weekend with their Aunt Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), a big wig who helps run the park. We have Henry Wu (BD Wong) as our head scientist who made the creature, the only returning member from the first film. Our rich park owner who doesn’t care about profits (Irrfan Khan), some people who work in the control room (Jake Johnson, Lauren Lapkus), a bad baby sitter (Katie McGrath), the emotional mom of the kids (Judy Greer), a guy with nefarious intentions (Vincent D’Onofrio), and a raptor handler (Omar Sy), are also involved in some way or another!

Hmm. Am I missing anyone? Oh, I guess there is Owen (Chris Pratt), an ex military man who thinks dinosaurs are thinking, intelligent creatures who just want the respect they deserve.

The orca’s at Sea World, however, don’t deserve respect and don’t deserve great white shark food like this big guy.

Welcome to 2015, where everything is CGI and the point doesn’t matter. I am one who would say that Jurassic Park still holds up to this day, animatronics and all. CGI has the ability to get dated pretty quickly because it is constantly evolving and getting better, while animatronics have staying power. From a basic movie watching point of view, I think every single dinosaur was done with CGI. And it shows! The Pterodactyls were horrible. They were at least diverse looking, but every time they flew onto the screen, I cringed a bit. Sure the raptors and the T-Rexes and the bigger guy are much better CGI, I feel like something amazing was lost in the process.

Jurassic World is definitely scarier than the first film, as the threats are bigger and badder with a potential much higher body count. Given that Spielberg is directing it, somehow the kids are able to run through everything with more or less invisible shields protecting them, which is kind of annoying, because any tension in their scenes is a bit diluted. Speaking of tension, despite it being a rich and well funded island park, cell service goes out quite frequently, enough to make it quite annoying at times at how frequently they use it as a crutch. Cell service AND walkie talkies, for double trouble.

One annoying aspect to make it scarier is at one point, it was a bright and sunny early afternoon setting, but the very next scene suddenly made it middle of night. It didn’t need to skip ahead several hours, and made very little sense because most of that time must have been them waiting for it to get dark. But being dark served no purpose outside of making it scarier for the viewer, despite risking time continuity to do so.

I am a bit surprised, however, at some of the characters who did die. One character I noted from above actually died after several bites, flying through the air, drowning, in such a grotesque fashion, you would have thought they were the most evil character ever. But of course, nothing was inherently bad with them.

Despite all of this, there were still quite a few entertaining scenes. I was delighted that Pratt’s character didn’t just feel like Star Lord or Indiana Jones, but a new and unique entity. There were also good moments for our people in the control panel.

Overall, this is probably the best movie in this franchise not called Jurassic Park, but given the quality of the other two films, it doesn’t actually say much.

It is hard to be a girl. People don’t let you drive late at night. Being some sort of freak, where people all sit and stare with their eyes. You know, being a girl, all pretty and petite. And people won’t let you have any rights.

And other lyrics from Just A Girl, where I get all my go to info on what it is like girl-ing.

Hot Girls Wanted is an interesting title because it can be read in many different ways. There is the “Oh shit, is that person trying to buy attractive women?” way. There is the obvious statement of “Of course hot girls are wanted, no shit sherlock.” And there is the “Wait, why did they say girls? That’s creepy.”

And I guess the answer for this documentary is basically yes to all of that.

One of the riskiest google searches for pics for this movie in recent history.

This movie is about the amateur porn business! Thanks to the internet, there is porn in every dirty nook and cranny and they need a lot of people to do it. Apparently the “amateur porn” stuff, or entry level porn for the women involved, is all over the USA, not just California anymore (thanks to laws they have regarding condoms). Especially in Miami! Girls can find a Craigslist ad to get into porn, head on down, stay in a house with other women trying to break it into the field, and live the life of luxury!

Unless…unless the porn business isn’t as glamorous as people imagine? That wouldn’t be the point of this documentary, would it?

Well, probably. This documentary premiered at Sundance this year and is probably only famous because Rashida Jones is a producer (along with like, 15 other people).

In actuality, the film more or less talks about 4-6 porn workers. I wouldn’t call them porn stars, because they aren’t industry leading names or anything. No, these are the ladies who found ads on craigslist and are doing a shoot here or there earning a couple hundred bucks to a thousand dollars a shoot, hoping one day to lead to stardom.

And then we learn a lot about pron archetypes that are about abuse and forced situations to make everyone uncomfortable watching, and then we see what the ladies are now doing with their lives after the fact.

If there was any one real interesting part, I would say the awkwardness of one girl telling her parents and the conversations surrounding it. Yeah, that is solid docu-tainment right there. My issues with the rest of the documentary is that overall it felt kind of pointless. It tried to argue against this type of stuff, I think, but they did it through 5-6 text on screen scenes randomly put in the documentary and that was it. No porn experts, no psychologists, nothing. Just the girls in the situation over presumably a few weeks.

So all in all, Hot Girls Wanted just felt very incomplete and a little bit boring. I guess it is an okay subject to show and talk about, I just wanted something more. Some sort of analysis. Some sort of better point.

It has been awhile since Night At The Museum: Secret of the Tomb came out, but I am finally now ready to talk about it. Why did I wait so long?

Well, I had never seen the first two movies, Night at the Museum and Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. I have owned the two Night at the Museum movies, which came out out in 2006 and 2009, since 2012. I just haven’t “found the time” to see them. Never in the right mood.

A few things helped put me in that mood. One, Robin Williams died, very sad, I really needed to see more of his movies. Two, the kids were about to go home for the summer and we had a long Memorial day weekend where I didn’t have anything to show them. So it was easy to watch one, then the next a few days apart, and finally, FINALLY, the third and last movie.

Fair warning, I thought the first movie was kind of terrible, and the second one had its moments, but was overall okay.

But those movies lacked a dreamy knight in shining armor.

Years later, that museum is still popular! Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) is opening up more cheating night things. This time, constellations. Well, shit goes badly and he gets fired. Why? The magical tablet is acting all fucky. People are freaking out, getting meaner. Who knows what is going on?? Well, apparently the parents (Ben Kingsley, Anjali Jay) of Ahkmenrah do! Yes, but they are in a museum in London.

So the gang gets together, tablet in hand, to go to a new museum at night and find out how to fix the tablet. Pretty simple plot actually. His son, Nick (Skyler Gisondo), played by a new guy, is also going to come. For reasons. You know, get him back on track and shit.

Oh hey, and we also have Rebel Wilson playing the London night guard. And Dan Stevens, yes, that Dan Stevens, as Lancelot. Sure, he is a fictional character, apparently in a museum, but go with it, assholes.

And there are all the returning characters of course. We still have Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams), Octavius (Steve Coogan), Jedediah (Owen Wilson), Ahkmenrah (Rami Malek), Attila the Hun (Patrick Gallagher), Sacajawea (Mizuo Peck), and even Dr. McPhee (Ricky Gervais). Hell, we also have the old geezers back played by Dick Van Dyke, Bill Cobbs, and Mickey Rooney (who also is dead now).

Just a bunch of eccentric Americans and killers hanging out, riding a bus.

The overall problem with this franchise are the inconsistencies. And the inconsistencies are all shrouded behind a mysterious Egyptian tablet and magic, so that any of them can just be written off. But no, it is incredibly annoying.

For instance, why do some things come alive and others not? Statue and wax people? Fine. But in this movie there is a display of Pompeii, and it even explodes and has its own lava and everything. What? The things are supposed to be alive people or animals or creatures. They are just making things up as they go.

The tablet was losing its power and so people were slowly reverting back to their original forms. Apparently people who get transformed for the first time didn’t turn back slowly because it was their first night. They are apparently just making up rules on the fly because why not. In this movie, they say people act a lot weirder right when they transform and get used to the change eventually. This wasn’t true at all in the second movie, as we saw tons of people come alive and go straight into character and being fine with it.

A more structured, less clusterfuck, is all I ask.

Now this one has some interesting jokes and I laughed a few times. Despite the fact that the main new character was a fictional person who makes no sense to be a museum exhibit, Lancelot was killer. Rebel Wilson also did a good job. But the issue with the tablet was lame, as was the “threat” behind it all. It all seemed poorly done, where conflict continued to be created for the stupidest reasons.

Back in the day, the early 2000s, The Amazing Race was a great reality show. Us couch potato heads got to live vicariously through teams as they traveled across the globe, from the USA to the USA, competing in local culture based challenges. Then, like most reality shows, it started to get really shitty. They added to many new things to it and the focus was no longer on awesome culture challenges, but really just fucking with your competitors.

But hey, there were other nature/foreign race things out there. I mean, there was a whole season of Cannonball Run on USA! And there was one season of something called Eco-Challenge!

Alright, maybe no real shows other than The Amazing Race exist. Whatever. There are still tons of races around the world that exist for the same purpose, they just don’t normally get put on TV. Take for instance, the Rickshaw Challenge Mumbai Xpress! It is a 12 day challenge of nearly 2,000 km (1250 miles) across a lot of India. Sure, that doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you are traveling in a tiny rickshaw, which can’t go very fast. Well, it is something else.

Hit The Road: India is a documentary of two friends who decide to record their journey. For the lols, I guess.

Also for all the Shaws and all the Ricks of the world.

The two friends, Ric Gazarian and Keith King know close to nothing about rickshaws, but just want an adventure. Needless to say, things don’t go terribly well for the couple. They don’t use maps, they don’t speak the language, and they care more about sweet tunes than winning. On the plus side, the music selection for the documentary is one of the best parts. Great and diverse amount of songs.

On the other upside, the camera work was also quite excellent. Often times, I am disappointed with how shitty the guy holding the camera is when a documentary is going. Yes, good information is important. So is a compelling argument. But there is still room for amazing scenes, which the documentary produces both while driving down windy Indian roads and of the landscape in general.

Unfortunately, that is where the praise ends. The two leads are regular average folk, which means they are like me, which means they also aren’t that entertaining. The documentary rushes through a few days, making sure we get scenes, but a lot of it isn’t interesting. What is interesting is their numerous rickshaw/car problems, their late night or rain driving, and their few and far between moments of success. But the editing job doesn’t seem to mind what is boring and what is exciting. What we may get is a more truthful account, but overall it isn’t at all exciting.

But hey, if you like some cool scenes, the documentary is only 80 minutes long, so it can bet quickly watched and then later forgotten.

You see, Spare Parts is a metaphor. It both describes what they used in the movie to accomplish their goals, and what they felt society thought about them. They were leftovers, trash, extra coleslaw on the side.

Maybe I am getting ahead of myself, but you know I could have described the movie that way without seeing anything about it. That title has to work that way. As soon as I read it, my cheese factor went off, and I knew it had a double meaning.

When I read a brief description, it had every thing going for it to make a classic, and lame, “How do I reach these keeeds?” movie.

And it came out in January. I should stop before I talk myself out of even writing this review.

Ah, you teach the kids by taking them AWAY from school.

Let’s head on over to Phoenix, Arizona, where it is hotter than hot, in a lot of good ways. There is a lot of immigration going on to, one could describe it as illegal. Like all of the main high school kids in our story. All of them are not legal United States citizens, so they don’t have a lot of prospects going for them. Their futures are kind of screwed.

Oscar (Carlos PenaVega) wants to join the military, but you know, can’t. So he is disappointed. For whatever reason, he wants to enter an underwater robotics competition in California. He has no team or adviser or anything. Thankfully, there is Fredi Cameron (George Lopez), a real engineer, and he is stuck substitute teaching at the school for a few months. The economy and all. He is the head of the Robotics club as per his job, but he was told no one would sign up.

So Oscar gets the idea to do the competition. They don’t have to compete against colleges, there is a high school division. Talent scouts and internships can be won there, along with a whole pile of prestige. Well, only if they can get a few other guys together. So Oscar is able to find a big nerd, Cristian (David Del Rio), a tech guy who is good at cars, Lorenzo (José Julián), and the muscle, for heavy lifting and stuff, Hector (J.R. Villarreal).

But things can’t just be that simple though, right? No, they really can. Here are some more cast members.

Jamie Lee Curtis plays our slightly eccentric, maybe on Xanax principal. Marisa Tomei is another teacher and new love interest of George Lopez and a huge team supporter. Alexa PenaVega gets to be random girl interested in Oscar, her real life husband. And Esai Morales gets to be the father who wasn’t there for his boy and never cared about his success. The makings of a truly stereotypical true story inspirational film.

I mean, just thinking about it all makes me wet too.

If it wasn’t obvious, I certainly wasn’t looking forward to watching this movie. But I did it finally just to get it out of the way.

And you know what? It wasn’t that bad. Wasn’t bad at all. Was it full of cliches and some stereotypes? Sure, damn straight. Was the true story a bit better than the movie? Yeah, also true. Knowing some of the changes can be quite annoying. But eh, movies, yada yada, we have to get over it.

Here’s the thing. The characters were pretty charismatic. At least 2 of the boys one would probably enjoy their story. The other two I didn’t really latch on to, as I don’t think they told as much of an interesting store. Huh, a very average amount of things that I like.

There isn’t a whole lot to say about Spare Parts. You will go in knowing what to expect, and by golly, it will happen. It is a decent feel good story, where the only real difference between this and other ones is its heavy Hispanic influence.

With the Penguins of Madagascar, every major animated release in the US in 2014 should now be reviewed on Gorgon Reviews. Hooray! Exciting!

Unfortunately it is the sequel/spinoff series to Madagascar, which I found to be very mediocre or bad. However, this one at least also had a TV show before it came out, so there is a lot of back stories with these characters and their adventures that I am wildly unaware of.

Bring on the penguins! They are cute I guess.

Holy, shit, we also get an Octopus? I am now ecstatic.

Skipper (Tom McGrath), Kowalski (Chris Miller), Rico (Conrad Vernon), and Private (Christopher Knights) are all penguins who make up a pretty unique fighting team. Or at least they think they are. Going on adventures, using code words, what have you. Recognize the voice actors? Exactly, because this movie isn’t sold on celebrities, it is sold on characters and people who are real voice actors, damn it.

Either way, while celebrating the 10th birthday of Private, directly after the events of Madagascar 3. While getting some sweet ass Cheezy Dibbles, they get kidnapped by Dave (John Malkovich, bring on the celebrities now!), an Octopus! Apparently Dave has had a shitty life of living in zoos all around the world, where he is always second fiddle and ignored thanks to cute animals like the penguins. PENGUINS.

So he wants to get rid of them all. Or make them ugly. Something like that. ALL THE PENGUINS MUST BE PUNISHED.

That should be enough plot for you. Spy movie guys. Lot of things happen. There is also another agent group, the North Force (Benedict Cumberbatch, Ken Jeong, Annet Mahendru, and Peter Stormare).

I will let you decide which voice should go with which character.

Shit, if you like Octopuses in movies, you are going to love this movie. Yes, Octopuses, mother fucker. It is the right way. They all reminded me of Octodad a little bit, especially since the main octopus is wearing a human costume sometimes.

In all reality, it was just an okay movie. I am glad that the penguins all had personality, but they didn’t really make me laugh all that much. I thought North Force was underutilized and the big bad guy plot was pretty lame as well.

There was one ongoing joke throughout the film, involving celebrity names and puns. They were fantastic and clever. Well done on that department.

But comparing it to other animated movies, the quality is definitely lower (although in line with the Madagascar animation, so at least they are consistent). It probably feels like an extended episode of the penguin TV show, so if you like the show, you will probably like the movie.

It could have been worse. It could have featured Firework over and over.

Fun fact about my brother: Maggie was his most anticipated movie of the summer of 2015. Not Avengers: Age of Ultron. Not Jurassic World. Not Mad Max: Fury Road. No, he wanted to see Maggie. I found that extremely interesting, but none of you should, because most of you won’t know my brother.

Maggie didn’t have a huge release and didn’t have any screenings for critics. However, it did come out on Video on Demand at the same time as its theatrical release, so hey, look at me now, getting to watch it in the restfulness of my own home, where I can cry if I want to. Where I can leave my friends behind. Because if they don’t cry, and if you cry, well, they might leave you behind.

Or maybe they just don’t have fully functional eyes.

That’s right. Zombies. But this is a slower zombie movie. So get your drink ahead of time, because you have to pay attention. I think overall, maybe only five or so zombies get killed the whole movie. There is a Necroambulist virus that has spread throughout the world. It might spread throughout food and regular contamination things. Also if you get bit by one, of course. Well, the movie starts with Maggie (Abigail Breslin) calling home as she is in the city after curfew and she wants to be alone. Well, her dad, Wade (Arnold Schwarzenegger) didn’t care about that. No, he is getting his daughter.

You see, Maggie has been bitten and she will slowly (very slowly) turn into a zombie. She doesn’t have to be placed into quarantine yet. She can go home to the farm and live a peaceful few days before her disease makes her too deadheaded. She can say goodbye to her friends, family, maybe get some good last meal in, who knows.

And that is about it! Life sucks when you know you are going to die. It also sucks when you know you will turn into a creature that looks kind of like you that will eat the flesh of your friends and family, potentially.

There you have it. A zombie tale about the slow decay of a person into madness. But with Arnold! And, sure, Raeden Greer, Bryce Romero, and Joely Richardson too.

“That skin condition is not a tumahh.”

So, I am not going to say I cried because I actually didn’t. But man, did I feel some emotion throughout it.

The movie felt a bit weird at first, kind of quick, lot going on with very little explanation. The movie makes you pay attention or else you might just get lost and ignore the rest of the plot.

Schwarzenegger and Breslin are actually really great in this film. The former is not known for his drama, but he played the part of a concerned father really well. And of course it wasn’t balls to the wall with action like his normal films. Breslin played the part of a frantic teenager, again, really well. But she just had to do with her arm decaying and losing vision and her mind.

The reason I am giving it this rating is that despite all of that, it still feels a bit too slow for me. I enjoyed the acting, just I know I don’t think I’d want to watch it again. Maybe a shorter cut would fix the issues. I don’t think the slow movement helps build up the tense situations later on, I think they just delay the best parts.

Welcome to the world of Tomorrow!…land!

Today!

Or whenever this movie comes out in relation to when you read this review. If you are reading this right away, you have to wait two days until Tomorrowland, which sounds silly. The best thing about any of this is that I have absolutely no friggan idea what this is about.

I know Disney. I know the main star. I know that the director has done a lot of good movies. And that is all I have going into it.

By the looks of things, this movie takes place in Nebraska.

The future is scary. Global Warming, terrorism, protests, oil spills, all of that. But what if the future could be better?

Your dreamers and inventors and all of those wonderful people? What if they formed their own society free from the masses and government influence? Why, then we’d probably get a repeat of Bioshock. But this is Disney, so it instead was a wonderful place where young Frank Walker (Thomas Richardson) got to live in awe and wonder. Until he was kicked out, for reasons.

Now, many years later, our star obsessed Casey (Britt Robertson) has seen glimpses of this wonderful place, Tomorrowland. And it was exciting. And she wants to go to there! Everyone else just thinks she is crazy. But with the help of a mysterious young girl Athena (Raffey Cassidy) and older Frank Walker (George Clooney), she might finally get her wish.

The rest of the people, in order of importance with no details at all include: Hugh Lauire, Tim McGraw, Keegan-Michael Key, Kathryn Hahn, and Matthew MacCaull.

When did Hugh Laurie get such a young boy face?

The premise behind Tomorrowland I was purposefully vague about, I hope, because it just happens to be one of those movies that is hard to describe without describing EVERYTHING. So I won’t.

However, I can say that the beginning of this movie was wonderful. We had playful banter, wonderful imagery, and a decent story going. Heck, we even had robots. Clooney and Robertson were a delight! But as the plot took a more doomsday turn, something else started to turn as well. My ability to understand the movie.

Once they got to the part of the story where the Eureka! moment occurs, it all goes down hill from there. Mostly because they rush so quickly through the explanation, it is hard to make sure you understand before they start doing something about it. But that was the most common tactic in the movie. Explain quickly and move on, so you won’t think about it and won’t realize it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But it happened and the ending was kind of terrible and very anything goes by the end.

Which is a real shame, because I was enjoying it a lot before it got to that point. I am kind of SUPER disappointed that it didn’t end spectacularly. I don’t want to be hand held, I just want things to make sense. The movie was long and allowed for a lot to happen before they even made it to Tomorrowland. So it is a shame the end had to feel so rushed. Personally, I was left trying to discuss why certain things occurred with other movie viewers, and frankly, we kind of just gave up.

So, Tomorrowland. You were so close. If I had to compare, you were almost a Friday, but you fell flat and turned into Tuesday.

Final day of Blackweek which also means I can pick almost anything I want! After all, since Black Mass isn’t out yet, I don’t have any other super new 2015 movies to review.

And I really had no idea what I wanted to watch. So as I often do in this situation, I went to Netflix and just searched around. This time was a bit easier, as I also got to search for the word “Black” and narrow down my results pretty significantly.

The reason I settled on Black Rock is for a few reasons. One, I didn’t have any horror-esque movies this week, just a thriller. And honestly a lot of horror movies have “Black” in the title. Secondly, out of all five or so movies I could have actually picked from that fit all my requirements, this is the only one I had heard of. With people I knew in it. And it wasn’t made for TV!

And familiarity leads to happy reviews because I can name drop facts or past reviews the actors have been in! We call that movie synergy.

We call this boat workingy.

Girls just wanna have fu-un. That’s what they really waaa-a-aa-aannnt. And to not die. But back up a bit.

Sarah (Kate Bosworth), Lou (Lake Bell), and Abby (Katie Aselton) have been friends since they were kids. And when they were kids, they used to go to a local island to play games, build forts, do outdoorsy things, probably experiment sexually. I don’t know, I don’t know what kids do on islands. The only book I read about it was pretty fucked up though.

They have some issues now, but they want to put the past behind and enjoy each others company. Well, while out gallivanting and arguing, they run into three hunters (Will Bouvier, Jay Paulson, Anslem Richardson), and hang out with them. They party with them! These guys all fought in the war too, but they are back. And then they DRINK with them. Well, one of our ladies gets flirty and starts to make out with one of our dudes. But he goes farther than she wants, and won’t stop when she wants him to stop. So she flails and hits him on the head with a rock.

Fatally. A black rock, maybe. Who can tell, it was night time. Other two hunters don’t like this and beat up the ladies and don’t know what to do. Well, they end up escaping, so now dudes with guns are looking for them on an island and they don’t have anything to help them. Ruh roh. Fucking hunters.

This is how you all must feel, having received zero movie synergy after my tease up.

Wait wait wait wait wait let me check something. The rating. “Rated R for some strong violence, pervasive language, sexual references and brief graphic nudity”.

BRIEF GRAPHIC NUDITY MY ASS (heh). That means a flash of a body. There was about ten minutes of naked women in the last 30 minutes of the movie. Nothing was brief about that. Did the MPAA not watch that? It was a very surprising scene, needless to say. It was a scene that you’d imagine as being very quick but you know. Ten fucking minutes. It is an eighty minute movie. A huge percentage of it is just nakedness.

Speaking of how long this movie is, I honestly feel the biggest issue is that it should be even shorter. There was not enough story to make it last. The first part of the movie, the set up, the trip to the island, the chick bonding. I don’t remember how long that lasted, but it just seemed to drag. It obviously started to speed up once we introduced the dudes, but the intro was slow.

Overall, I was surprised by how brutal the whole movie felt. It wasn’t a normal thriller/horror, as it was going for a realistic vibe. And it showed. You see the ladies up there? Beat up, cut up, black eyes. It only gets worse. Simple things seem to take people down and nothing is super movie like.

It was so real, I definitely wouldn’t want to watch it again, let’s say that. But also, not fantastic enough to warrant a second viewing either.