Tag: 2 out of 4

Dark Skies might have one of the worst trailers I have ever seen, this year and every year. Besides giving away far too much, it looks like a parody of itself. We have a kid who talks funny doing a growl about a sandman, some events that are set up to show potential child abuse, and the “oh face”. Oh my goodness that oh face. Not to mention the look of shock that follows the “oh face.” It has to be a joke, right?

I mean…right?

He has to be faking this whole thing. Come on guys. Right? Come on! Lacy (Keri Russell) and Daniel (Josh Hamilton) are a married couple on the top of the world! Or the opposite of that. Daniel lost his job (that darn economy and all!), and Lacy isn’t doing that great as a real estate agent. The bills are piling up, and now someone keeps breaking into their house and messing up their kitchen. For example, they are stacking all their boxes in elaborate shapes and taking all the pictures from their frames. Alright, I guess that is kind of weird.

If you saw the trailer, how many children do you think they have? I know I just thought it was one, but there is an older son as well! Jesse (Dakota Goyo) is the kid you just found out about, and Sam (Kadan Rockett) is the little brother growling in the trailer. They, too, are experiencing weird things. Strange dreams/drawlings, having street lights go out on them, or even seizures. This all can’t just be a coincidence!

No coincidience, just aliens fucking with them. That definitely explains it better. Heck, they even found a paranormal expert (J.K. Simmons) who knows all about these aliens, who confirms their suspicions. They found him on the internet too, so he must be legitimate.  But can the family still escape this long abduction/testing plan, or is it too late for any of them?

“Watch out bitch! It’s right behind you! Turn around!” – Me in the theaterWell, the initial thought I had after the fact is that the trailer is a bad representation of the movie. Every single ridiculous scene is way better in the actual movie, meaning the trailer just spliced them badly. For shame trailer, for shame.

Dark Skies takes its time to set up the events, perhaps a bit too slow. The beginning of the movie dragged on at a crawl, and I wanted to leave because of that. The youngest kid actor was bad as well, but I guess because he is a kid that is okay?

Despite this, the film did eventually get better. The aliens showed up on actual camera a lot earlier in the film than I would have guessed. The ending is what really sold the film. Instead of the horror feel, it turned into a last stand type situation as the family prepped for the aliens to come and get their abducting on. The last 10 minutes involved scenes that can only be described as some sort of acid trip, and hey, they were a bit scary as well!

Overall the “horror” of the movie was really light, mostly some jump scares and kids doing weird things. Nothing to write home about. The actual last 30 seconds of the film are a bit disappointing, but I do think overall Dark Skies has something to offer to the film watcher, especially if you look at is as a thriller. You just have to wade through a lot of crap to get there.

2 out of 4.

Dwayne Johnson has a movie a month for the next few months. Seriously. Look it up. February, Snitch. March, GI Joe 2. April, Pain & Gain. May, Fast and the Furious 6.

Holy crap, that is a lot of rocks!

But what makes Snitch different? Well, in the ads for Snitch, I only saw that “Dwayne Johnson” was starring in it. That means it was not “Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson” like you see most of the time. Pretty crazy right? Has he finally made the switch (minus those other three movies?) Probably not. But I will respect that and not defile him with the nickname in this review.

Because The Rock would kick my ass if I defiled him.

John Matthews (Mr. Johnson) runs a construction company, built it himself, hells yeah. But he is divorced, because this is what drives plot. His ex Sylvie (Melina Kanakaredes) was able to keep the son Jason (Rafi Gavron) in the divorce, because John drove around a lot as a truck driver for his job. Damn, sucks. He has a new family though, a wife (Nadine Velazquez, solid solid upgrade) and a daughter there as well, but still wants to be in his sons life. He is about to go to college!

But his son does a dumb thing. He agrees to let his friend ship him a package of high quality drugs to his place, so he can pick it up later. Little did he know, that his friend got caught, and just snitched on Jason to reduce his own sentence. Jason didn’t want to help sell them, but agreed to help his friend, and now it looks like it was his idea! Sucks to suck. With federal minimum sentencing laws, he is looking up to 10 years in jail, despite the first time offense and no solid evidence. Unless he can snitch out someone else. The problem is, he doesn’t know any other drug dealers, and he is not willing to set up a friend.

Good morals, bad situation.

John wants to do anything to help his son. He is able to get the district attorney (or some equivalent title thing…Susan Sarandon) to reduce his son’s sentence if he helps set up an arrest himself. He just needs the help of one of his workers who used to be in on the drug game (Jon Bernthal) to get him started. Also featuring Barry Pepper as head of the local DEA thing and Michael Kenneth Williams as a big drug dealer guy.

By now you realize that if I see weird facial hair, I am going to post the weird facial hair.

First off, fuck this based on a true story nonsense. This time it is based on the fact that federal minimum sentencing is real, and it causes people to rat out other people maybe not actually involved. That is it. Go die, true story message. Die hard.

Snitch tries to go in two different directions, an action movie, and a drama where the father wants to do anything to help his son (like John Q, I guess. But more action). Part of the problem is that the action really isn’t there. The ads show lots of action, but that is mostly one and a half scenes of the movie, so I would definitely call action a stretch.

So that means we have a drama, folks.

A drama that isn’t that bad, but ehh, not to great either. Mr. Johnson actually great. Most of the supporting characters are so-so. The fact that this movie is just a strange way of saying that mandatory minimum sentences are bad, is kind of silly. They could have done it a lot better making it a more realistic picture, instead of the small action sideplot near the end.

Mr. Johnson did do great, as I said, but it would have been a better role for a frail guy. That is all. We are so ingrained in seeing Mr. Johnson as an action star, I can’t imagine him getting beaten up in this movie, or overcoming any difficulties by the end. Because he is Dwayne ‘The Friggan Dwayne Johnson’ Johnson.

2 out of 4.

I remember seeing the cover for The Collector when I worked at a Blockbuster and thinking I would never touch it with a 10 ft pole. But then something else happened. I saw a trailer for The Collection, thought it seemed familiar, and thought it looked interesting, if not a bloody mess. Well, turns out it is a sequel to The Collector (shocking, I know). Too bad local theaters never got the sequel to show, so I am stuck waiting for the dvd release, which also means plenty of time to watch the original.

Which is now.

Hooray!

Well I guess that is a unique look for a bad guy. I guess.

Arkin (Josh Stewart) is a crook. He has crook friends too, but not a crook family. He just needs money to help them get by and survive! So he hears about this house that the family has left for vacation, and they got a pretty good jewel in their safe. He takes the one last job, steals the gem, makes bank, and boom, he can stop being a crook.

But who would have thought that this Collector (Juan Fernandez) would have turned it into his own house of horrors at the same time? Go figure. So a quick in and out thievery turns into a locked in the house, try to escape, avoid the plethora of traps and other currently being tortured individuals. Hooray! You know, while he is also actively looking for anyone who might have come to fuck up his strange torture plans.

Here are some other people I’ve seen before in this movie, Madeline Zima, Andrea Roth, and Michael Reilly Burke.

I won’t even do a dramatic question thing to end this plot, its pretty simple.

I was going to make a joke about his character from No Ordinary Family, but given its ratings, I know no one would get it.

But pretty simple can be a good thing. The beginning of The Collector was a little bit slow, but I think the build up was worth it. The traps seemed intelligent and well put together, no crazy Rube Goldberg contraption. We just have a stranger entering these traps when he is already set up and torturing some house people, that is all.

The traps however felt inconsistent. I am surprised his initial trip into the house / to the safe upstairs he found himself trap free, but after that, was surrounded by them in literally every room. Like they magically appeared. Really that is my biggest problem with the movie. Inconsistencies with traps. I know the Collector wasn’t just placing them still, maybe just a few resets. The Collector also had no problem running around the house avoiding his stuff. The ‘bear trap’ trap just came out of no where, despite the floor being covered with them.

There is some “torture porn” in here, but not much. Most of it is based on the trap aspect and a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. I did like that The Collector never said anything, had a mask on, yet still conveyed enough personality without going into a long and dumb back story. What I don’t understand is how (from the ending), the sequel makes any sense.

2 out of 4.

If you have never heard of Anna Karenina, then you might have your finger far from the pulse of the Russian Literature community. So you might be like me.

“But this is Tolstoy!” all two of you yell in anguish. Yeah, well, he is dead now, so how great can he have been?

This is not the first time a movie has been made from the book, no, it is the thirteenth time. Of the previous 12, I of course have seen zero of them, so this Joe Wright adaption shall be my first.

I think this is a literal example of a crowd being taken aback by something amazing.

There is a lot of plot going on in Anna Karenina. Maybe even too much. I am even surprise they can fit so much story in these movies. I have the basic gist of the story, but I cannot fill in a lot of the details on my own.

Anna Karenina (Keira Knightley) is a Russian aristocrat and in the spot light, married to Karenin (Jude Law). It is an okay life, she is rich and all, the sister of an eccentric Prince Stiva (Matthew Macfadyen) who is married to princess Dolly (Kelly Macdonald).

But something is missing. Passion is missing.

Passion is what she feels when she meets the Count Vronsky (Aaron Johnson), and then embarks on an affair, that will lead to divorce, hearsay, gossip, sexytimes, and a life filled with love. But with love, comes great sorrow.

Many other characters and players in this, but going over all their plots would literally kill me. But hey, Domhnall Gleeson is in this movie, so is Olivia Williams.

That woman in the top right is shunning SO HARD right now.

Here is a fact that I realized watching this movie, that is both unfortunate and wonderful. I don’t think someone watching this would consider it a straight adaption of the story and novel. Sure the setting is there, the character and plots are the same, but there is more than that going on in the movie from the visuals. It is not that I began to question if scenes were actually happening, but just they way they were presented were strange. Almost a giant metaphor, I think that they were trying to say that when you are an aristocrat, you must always put on a performance/show or else you might lose your prestige.

Alright, did that paragraph confuse you? I am sorry. It is just hard to describe.

But I think a problem with this movie is that I didn’t know the story or its many sub plotlines, and I quickly got lost in the flashy colors and grand scenes. I am not sure of half the things that happened, because the filmmakers probably assumed I knew about it. After all, wickedly famous novel, many movie adaptations? Well I am sorry, but I couldn’t get it to work.

The acting however was very well done, and I would say I loved the costumes and cinematography. The final message sucks and reminds me a bit of Gone With The Wind but I guess that is life. I just wish it was a bit easier to follow.

2 out of 4.

I…CAN’T THINK OF A GOOD INTRO FOR THIS MOVIE.
Blah blah, Nicholas Sparks, blah blah Valentine’s Day, blah blah, bow chicka bow wow.

Safe Haven.

Aww yeah. Kiss her. Right on the mouth. There you go. This is what we paid for.

Safe Haven of course opens with Katie (Julianne Hough) having her hands covered in blood. Wait, what? Okay, that is different.

She is running from the law, apparently. Dyes her hair blonde, gets on a bus to Atlanta, and barely makes it out in time. That detective Tierney (David Lyons) is super frustrated, probably because he just let a murderer or something go home free.

But on the way there, she decides to stop in the city of Southport, North Carolina, which is nothing like Boston. Yeah, that is a good place to hide away, small town, nice beach, everything is cheap there. In fact, getting a nice secluded house was also pretty dang easy, and a job. Well done, Katie. Well done. She only has one neighbor, the boring and seemingly needy Jo (Cobie Smulders) who always wants to hang out at Katie’s house and hook her up, while bitching about being stuck in NC.

Either way, she feels safe in this (I guess you could call it) haven that she has found, and starts getting a little bit interested in the local clerk Alex (Josh Duhamel). He has two young kids, had a wife, but she died of that cancer thing. Bad times. But his (uncle? Old friend who also works at the shop? Red West?) convinces him he too must move on, and they do that romance thing.

I’d say more, but that ruins the surprises.

Trying to figure out why the cop is a giant douche bag is half of the fun!

Real quick, two fun things.

One, this was filmed on location in Southport, NC. Basically every thing he said about it was true, down to their festivals. Even the phone area code, well done Sparky. But it isn’t too impressive, since he has filmed multiple films there already, even if not based in it.

Two, in terms of chemistry, Duhamel and Hough have got it. It seemed and felt real, unlike a few other movies I have seen of his. Like, high quality. They were great together.

The issues of the film come, as expected, from the plot and characters in it. I explained my frustration with Jo. Like, zero depth to her character, and she felt awkward the whole movie. I cared zero about Jo, just that she seemed weird.

The cop on her case, until we find out more, is just a drunk asshole, who keeps breaking the law to find her location. It doesn’t make sense early on, and gives us zero time to actually assume she did something wrong, because we are too busy hating the cop the entire film.

And lastly. HOLY FUCK THAT ENDING. NO. NO NO NO. NOOOOO. WHAT?! Come on Sparks. You were sailing. Good stuff was happening. Then you throw, THAT at us? Do you hate your fans? That ending is just, so bad. I wish I could tell you without feeling like an asshat. If you want spoilers, you can request them (and probably read a wiki outline or something on them faster).

Overall, I would say the majority of the story ended up being one of my favorite stories by Sparks, but uhh. Certain elements kind of kill it for me. Like a lot.

2 out of 4.

Die Hard, Die Hard, Die Hard.

Such a strange film series when you think about it. How many others have the main character balding naturally through the series, and look nothing like he really did in the first? It is so strange, yet so real, and thus it is awkward.

But did anyone really like the fourth Die Hard? To me, it felt pretty weird, and put me off. I liked it more than Die Hard 2, but not on the tier of Die Hard 1 / Die Hard 3. Did I tag them all? Well, not Die Hard 5 yet. Oh snap, done.

Either way, time to see what is good and bad about the next installment. Maybe even see if they lied to us about movie scenes with the trailer?

And now my website shows more of this scene than the actual theatrical release.

John McClane (Bruce Willis). Still a cop. Has had a rough relationship with his son. Why? Because of vague “always at work, no time for family” stuff. His daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is fine with it. Just not his son, Jack (Jai Courtney).

But he finally finds him after three years, apparently in Russia. In Prison. For murder. Well, guess John has to use some vacation time to go figure out what the hell is up.

Oh snap, he is actually some sort of Spy and undercover?! Trying to extract Komarov (Sebastian Koch) and his daughter (Yuliya Snigir) from the country, to get valuable information on one of their new leaders Chagarin (Sergei Kolesnikov) who might be willing to start World War 3? Yes, I am aware of the run-on sentence.

Why does John have to show up and fuck everything up? It is like he is looking for trouble. Also featuring Radivoje Bukvic as a tap dancing hit man.

Warning – This was my favorite scene, despite its awkwardness and strange ending.

I can’t not compare the movies, damn it. First things first, this Die Hard is about 30 minutes shorter than the previous Die Hards. That is 25% less movie! Previous Die Hards have had pretty intense plots, some with big political intigue and pretty awesome one liners, with great action as well. So does this one?

Well, first off it isn’t Hard enough. There is one death that feels pretty great, but everything else was a lot tamer. As I eluded to above, the trailer made it seem like the main woman would get down into her skivies for a scene, and in the actual movie it cuts away when the zipper goes down a few inches only. Not even cleavage. I am not trying to sound pervy, but they put a long version of the scene in the trailer literally to attract more males. That was its purpose. Yet it wasn’t in the movie? That is pretty strong levels of deception there.

So no sex, no great violence, heck, even the cursing felt tamer.

But the positives? For the first time, in a long time, it felt like an actual “non stop action” movie. Outside of the “plot-y” beginning, basically once it started, it kept going the whole film. I think my main issue is it really didnt feel like a Die Hard film to me. They basically made him invincible in this film, surviving many crashes without too big of a problem, and having the stupidest fall (that a person can run from) I have ever really seen. Remember in the first film, when he had issues because of no shoes? If this John McClane was there, he would have taken the C4 himself down the elevator shaft.

I think the actual best part about this movie, is that we will get a fifth verse to this amazing song about the franchise.

2 out of 4.

Hooray hooray! I have finally got a chance to see Amour, the last movie I needed to see for all the Best Picture nominees this year. BEFORE the award, not several months after.

Plus, it is a foreign film, from Austria, in French!

I must be growing up. I am an adult now, watching adult movies, in adult speeds.

Adults watch their form of adults (old people) do things, right?

Amour means love, but you knew that. Bitches love amour, and surely if it is about old people, we will get to see a wonderful, blossoming relationship despite their limiting factors. Crap. It could also go the other way. The super sad way.

Studies have shown that old people have a higher chance of dying soon, than say, teenagers. Are we going to see the end of a life, and how sad it is to lose someone you love? Especially if you lose them very very slowly? I should move the above picture ahead a few seconds just to check.

Oh no. Oh no, oh no, oh no. Look at how sad she is! Fuck, we are in a drama folks! Prepare the ship! Tears are incoming!

Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) have lived long and prosperous lives. They love music, and have helped musicians with sponsorships (Alexandre Tharaud). They are rich, for whatever reason, and live in luxury. They have a beautiful daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert), who is married with kids off in another part of Europe, and life is sweet.

But one morning, during a normal breakfast, Anne becomes unresponsive, just staring out into space, unable to respond to any sort of stimuli from her husband. Eventually she snaps out of it, but it still puts him into quite a scare and he takes her to the doctor. Something is blocking something else in her brain, and if they don’t take care of it, it could happen again but worse.

Well, the surgery goes wrong. A 5% chance, but now Anne finds it hard to walk, and she is forced to live in her own home, bound by a wheelchair. She might get better, or it might get worse. But you already know which way it is going to go.

She starts to move much slower, eventually half of her body gets paralyzed, and she becomes entirely bed ridden. The pain is unbearable, it causes her to scream out in pain throughout the day. She. Wants. To. Die.

But Georges can’t just let her kill herself, can he? The love of his life?

Oh no! It just keeps zooming! I can’t stop, we have crashed straight into sad land!

Whew. That is all I can really say, just whew. I can also say that this film is perfect. I often dislike films for not being realistic enough, in terms of character actions and dialogue, but this one might be on the other extreme side of the scale. /Too real/ and not enough, I guess…entertainment? Even when I go to a drama, and even if it is sad and I cry my eyes out, I still expect to be entertained by the story.

But Amour doesn’t really let me do that. The scenes in this movie are quite long, so the acting was clearly there. But they are too long. They are too slow. Many minutes of watching the husband try and feed his halfway paralyzed wife. Despite feeling the feels that were given to me on the screen, I was still combating sleep the first half of the movie. It was just far too incredibly slow, perhaps perfectly mimicking the slow death of a loved one.

But again, the acting is incredible. If the Oscars are based on talent, I think Emmanuelle Riva wins the best Actress award. The things she did in that movie were incredible and honestly no one else came close to her sort of delivery.

2 out of 4.

The Arnold is back!

Alright, maybe he hasn’t really gone anywhere. The Govenator was still taking part in The Expendables franchise at least, but with The Last Stand he is officially back in the lead role. Just don’t confuse it with the X-Men movie of the same name.

Although Phoenix could solve this problem in an instant.

Sommerton Junction is a small town in Arizona by the border of Mexico. That border is a giant canyon, so there aren’t too many problems associated with it. The high school has a big road football game, so most of the town has left for the weekend to cheer them on, but not Sheriff Ray Owens (Arnold). He is happy to have a weekend off, but he gets a strange feeling about a trucker (Peter Stormare),who comes up clean when his plates are run.

Oh well, it is not like he is secretly a member of the Mexican Cartel, working on busting out Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) from FBI Custody (Forest Whitaker), and then racing him to Mexico across the canyon. That would be ludicrous!

Ray decides that no Mexican Drug lord is going to come into his town and kill its citizens, not on his watch. Nope. He wants to make a stand. With his crew by his side (Luis Guzman, Jaimie Alexander, Zach Gilford) and the deputized citizens of an alcoholic who wants to redeem himself (Rodrigo Santoro) and a weapons museum owner (Johnny Knoxville), they decide to go all out to show that they are not just stupid farmers and rednecks.

“GET TO THE DINNAH”

Sometimes it can be hard to figure out if you are supposed to take a movie seriously or not. I like to apply the LG test. That is, if the movie includes Luis Guzman, do not take it seriously, and I don’t think it has failed me yet.

I do love that The Last Stand provides an action movie without an overabundance of special effects, and being set in rural Arizona helps add to the grittiness. I liked the resolution to the plot, even if the plot was one of the more ridiculous things I’ve heard of. It also wasn’t just a silly shoot em up movie where the good guys use Home Alone-esque traps to take out the bad guys. I actually feared that any character could die.

But, the acting still is pretty bad, and the dialogue probably over did its “one liner” quota. I think the beginning was also a bit too slow, but it picked up when they discovered the bridge being built. An interesting movie, but not sure if it is one I will ever try to watch again.

2 out of 4.

One of the advertisements for Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters basically said “a classic tale with a darker twist!”.

Fuck that. Hansel & Gretel is one of the darkest fairy tales out there. Parents abandon their kids in the wood because they are too poor to eat. Only have some bread. They go to a house, made of candy. They get all excited. Oh no, locks and chains, girl forced to be a slave, boy force to eat. Witch is going to cook and eat the child, but they fuck up her shit and lock her in the oven in an escape. That is dark. I don’t think you can go too darker than that.

But I will say this tale probably has more foul language, nakedness, and blood.

Not to mention 325% more explosions!

For whatever reason, Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton) are immune to witch magic. With great immunities come great responsibilities, I think the saying goes. So they were orphaned in by a local town, as they were now heroes, and kind of just started killing all the witches. Unfortunately Hansel also developed super diabetes from all that candy. If he doesn’t get a shot of (somethingvague) every (someamountoftime) he will fall to the ground and die quickly! All that candy, damn.

They get brought into a new town by the mayor, because 11 or so children have been kidnapped recently and they don’t know by who! The Sheriff (Peter Stormare) doesn’t like the idea of other people doing this in his town, but since he was about to kill Mina (Pihla Viitala), wrongfully accusing her of witchcraft, they really really needed to step in. Also, money.

Eventually they find out that a blood moon is happening soon, and a lot of witches are going to convene for some sort of special ceremony, lead by grand witch Muriel (Famke Janssen). Shit. That is a lot of witches. And you know what they say, witches dig ditches. Okay, no one says that.

Also featuring Thomas Mann as their crazy obsessed super fan and Derek Mears as Edward the Troll.

I am not sure if attached to the back is as effective as they would have hoped it to be.

Whoa H&G, where did this come from? Not only are you rated R, it is a hard R. I was joking on the nakedness, but it is there. Fbombs a plenty, and the death scenes are pretty dang gruesome, for witch and human alike. The blood looks fake as crap, but there is a lot of it, and there is a lot of murder. I was a bit surprised.

In case you are curious, I doubt there is any real difference between 3D and 2D, so save the money in difference.

The movie was less than 90 minutes in length, and it did feel pretty rushed to me. I think they could have explained certain things better. Just because something is called a White Witch, doesn’t mean I should have to think of it as a good witch. Specific lineage plot points were also a bit strange to me, but I don’t know a thing about this world’s genetics, since they didn’t tell me.

In terms of entertainment, the fight scenes are pretty good. The acting from secondary people not as much. Also, H&G seem to make pretty crappy witch hunters. You don’t see a single hunt of theirs that actually works as planned or goes well. Yes, they always survive, but come on, prep better. I don’t want my heroes to barely survive every bout, you gotta be able to take these witches down.

2 out of 4.

When they announced the nominees for the Academy Awards this year, nothing really surprised me. Yes yes, snubs and what nots, but I had at least heard of every (American) movie on the list. Every one, but The Sessions. To be fair it was only nominated for one award, but that award is Best Actress. I mean, something crazy must be going on in that movie then, damn it.

Then I found out it was about a guy in an iron lung.

This is the best picture I could find of him in the lung. What the hell?

Originally I was mad about the concept of an iron lung, but now I am mad that there is no picture of him in the lung online. Why was I mad originally? Because, what the hell, an iron lung? Stop it. Just stop it. Iron Lungs, popular over 50 years ago, became non-existant after they fucked up Polio and got their technology on. Just popping out a movie about a guy in an iron lung wanting to lose his virginity just seems silly.

What? It’s a true story, based on the book of the guy who wrote about his life in an iron lung? Damn it. Fine. Carry on.

Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes) is in an iron lung, got the Polio when he was six, it has been a long life of laying down. He decided to become a writer, because he sure a hell couldn’t do anything else. He did poems, short stories, eventually a book on his life. Either way, he was lonely. Lonely in the pants. He was a middle aged man who hasn’t even groped a boob, let alone done the business. Hard to when you can barely move your head.

Eventually he learns about a sex surrogate. Definitely not a prostitute. Their is payment for sessions, and her job is to help him experience his sexuality, but there is a limit. The max number of sessions he can do is six, no more, certainly can do less. He gets his priest’s permission (William H. Fucking Macy), and sets up to do the business.

Who is the sex surrogate? Someone named Cheryl (Helen Hunt). She is even married, and the husband is fine with it. She leads Mark on a journey of experiencing an orgasm, full penetration, and boobs! Also, Moon Bloodgood and Annika Marks play some of his care assistants.

Spoilers – Sex Happens.

Now I know what you guys are wondering. How the hell can Helen Hunt play in a movie where he is a sex master and having sex with someone with polio. She wouldn’t get naked on camera. Would she?

Yes. Yes she would. Helen Hunt is super naked in this movie, full friggan body. And unless you are Anne Hathaway, that usually earns you a nomination.

As for the rest of the movie, it was a sweet story, if not incredible awkward. John Hawkes is probably more deserving of a nomination than Hunt, but that could just because he had a disability. We all know what happens when actors play with disabilities.

2 out of 4.