Tag: 3 out of 4

Just like you, I didn’t know a lot about Touched With Fire before watching it. (Okay, I guess for most of you, you probably haven’t seen it either). Virtually no advertising, a super limited release, and well, that is all that I need to say.

It is of course based on a book, and some people thought the book was good enough to be a movie. [Editor’s note: The movie isn’t the book, they just use the real research book with this title. Check it out!]

According to some article on the internet, this whole movie might be a big fuck you to Scientology from Katie Holmes, some how. So let’s go in with that excitement!

I didn’t read the article. I don’t know how to read.

Carla (Katie Holmes) once ran out into the desert with some friends in college, and forced herself to stare at the sun. This is technically not relevant, but it is a good starting off point. She is a poet, and she is manic depressive. She has been living on her own, but she went off of her meds again and accidentally checked herself into a psychiatric hospital.

But at the hospital, she met Marco/Luna (Luke Kirby), who also finds himself checked in on the same day. Not to make light of his situation, but he is obsessed with the moon and believes he comes from another planet. He is also a poet, but more of a rapper, and he understands that most of the great artists and poets of the last hundred years have been manic.

Needless to say, they fall in love. Kind of. They escalate each others conditions to a point of extreme mania, so they then find themselves separated, depressed, and longing to find each other again.

Carla’s parents are played by Christine Lahti and Bruce Altman, and Marco’s dad is Griffin Dunne. Also Maryann Urbano plays their doctor.

Stars. Moons. And this painting. Alien theory checks out!

When they first introduced Luna, I hated him immediately. I thought the movie was trying too hard. The camera kept moving like someone had just run up a flight of stairs and couldn’t keep it straight. I assume to show his current state of mind, but it just pissed me off and I was hoping he wouldn’t have a big role.

But as the film continued, he grew on me. Carla grew on me. The two embracing their condition, not seeing it as an illness or a crutch, but living their lives without drugs or help. I was right there with them. I was thinking “Man, fuck these doctors. Fuck their parents for trying to ‘help!’ Just let them love each other, damn it!” And thus, the movie had me right where it wanted.

I got caught up in the emotions and was cheering for ill people to not get help. It was a weird position in retrospect to be in, but damn, the acting from Kirby and Holmes came out strong and I was left unprepared. Hell, Kirby reminded me of a young Mark Ruffalo, but I don’t know if that is just his general look or because he was recently bipolar in Infinitely Polar Bear. It was a roller coaster. Because they were manics, they were constantly going to extremes and it perfectly captured everything for the viewer.

And yes, there are some disturbing scenes as well. This is a drama, not a happy comedy.

It is well acted from the leads, a good job from everyone overall.

Surprisingly this year I am far more caught up on Oscar nominated films than the years prior. Of the major categories, I am only missing two films, Trumbo and of course 45 Years for Best Actor and Best Actress.

Best Actress and Supporting Actress are almost always weaker categories for me. And so, damn it, I swore I would see 45 Years before Trumbo. The only sad part about that is thanks to release dates, my review of 45 Years will still come out after Trumbo, but I did see 45 Years first!

I am a bit excited about 45 Years because I only ever heard of it when it was announced as a nominee! I love surprises! Except for surprise parties. No one likes those.

Surprise love letters are also frowned upon.

45 Years is about three people, but only two of which have a person playing them.

Kate Mercer (Charlotte Rampling) and her husband, Geoff Mercer (Tom Courtenay) have been married a long time. Specifically, 45 years! They have no kids and mostly live by themselves in a loving marriage. They planned on having a big party for their 40th Anniversary, but a surgery came up and wrecked their plans. So instead they are going all out for 45. After all, they don’t know if they can make it to the next milestone

But then Geoff received some news. They discovered Katya’s body. Katya was Geoff’s girlfriend before Kate and she died 50 years ago. It involved mountain climbing and she fell off into a river or mountain or something. It was very tragic, but her body has finally been found and it is perfectly preserved.

That is weird and strange. It has been so long and it was so tragic, but Geoff has mostly forgotten about her. Obviously Kate never knew her, but she really doesn’t want to know her either. This is the week before their big party and they should be taking it easy and planning. But now Geoff wants to go and see the body for closure, at his age despite his health.

And that is only the first problem that comes up. Kate is noticing a change in her relationship and Geoff’s behavior over this knowledge, one that makes her feel like second fiddle despite their many many years together.

Time for awkward old people talk.

Shit, is he friend zoning her?!

Movies about old people are weird for me. I am still a relatively young adult male and so I haven’t necessarily had enough adult experiences to relate to everything. The passing of family and loved ones, for instance, is one thankfully I have yet to experience.

This one is still a bit different. This is about a death before a marriage occurred. Before the couple even met. And something that normally wouldn’t come up again so much later in life, but a missing body brings it to the for front. It is a unique occurrence and one that rarely anyone would ever experience

Thankfully, the two actors here do a phenomenal job together conveying years of anguish and loss over these events, almost entirely through their facial expressions and tone of voice. This isn’t a dialogue heavy film. It is a strict drama and it is slow (painfully at times).

If you want to see 45 Years, you will want to see it for its great, subtle and realistic acting. But as I just mentioned, it is slow and I question how much of some of the middle parts ended up being relevant to the plot. I can’t just watch a movie of people being old and sad. I do need changes to occur and plot to develop a bit more than what ends up happening.

The final scenes in the anniversary party are good though. Some long scenes of just straight up speeches and acting and it stays incredibly sad. Not a film I would ever want to watch again. But still sad and if it wasn’t such a stacked year for Best Actors, Courtenay probably would have been nominated too.

Animated films can take a long time to make. It takes years to get all of the CGI right, and pretty. It does not take a lot of time to record dialogue, or figure out the plot (Unless you are The Good Dinosaur). But all the technical work making sure every frame is wonderful and all the characters are as you had hoped. Years and hundreds of people at work.

Technically it only takes years if you care about the final product. That is why we had Planes and Planes: Fire & Rescue less than a year apart. The animators didn’t care.

There was a five year gap between Kung Fu Panda 2 and Kung Fu Panda 3. And you know that is not because the voice actors were too busy for lines. Kung Fu Panda 2 in 2011 was the prettiest film of all the CGI movies. Prettier than Rango and Puss In Boots. If they wanted to not just recipricate the second movie but surpass it, you can bet your ass it would take them years of work.

I am rambling. All I am trying to say is I expect this film to shit rainbows and make my eyes bleed in wonder. A sweet villain would also be delightful.

Creepy and promising! Me likey.

As we know from the end of 2, there is a secret panda village somewhere and Po (Jack Black) doesn’t know about it. He won’t care about it until a mysterious panda, Li (Bryan Cranston) shows up to the valley. He is looking for his lost son. Could it be?! Yes, yes it could be.

Great news! Now Po can show his dad all the cool dragon warrior stuff, and make his Foster Dad, Mr. Ping (James Hong) feel incredibly sad and jealous. Also Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) plans on retiring so he can focus on himself and find his Chi to do even better Kung Fu, leaving Po in charge of training the five (Angelina Jolie, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, David Cross, Jackie Chan). But he can’t teach.

Even worse? Well, Kai (J.K. Simmons) has escaped from the Spirit Realm! Who? He used to be a friend of Master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim) 500 years ago, even saved his life! But he got jealous of Oogway when he was taught to harness Chi from the mystical Panda village and wanted the power for his own, so he had to be put down in a jealous fury. Well, he eventually figured out how to steal Chi in the spirit realm, defeating all former masters and now he is back to the real world to defeat any and all would be challengers.

Jeez. Now Po has to learn Chi to defeat Kai. But it took Oogway 30 years! And Shifu can’t! Time for Po to go to his homeland. To determine how he can be the most Panda he can be, to learn what he has been missing all his life. To really become the Dragon Warrior.

Also featuring Kate Hudson as a ribbon dancing Panda.

And of course this rhino panda bird metal hybrid warrior! Don’t forget about him!

This part of the review is actually really hard to write. How many times can I say how beautiful this movie is? I don’t want to look in a thesaurus but I believe everything I say about the CGI and art style will just sound repetitive. Gorgeous, detailed, beautiful, wonderful and wunderbar, eye orgasmic. The best part that this Kung Fu movie is animated is they can show amazing fight scenes and nothing gets lost to blur or shaky camera. We can see every punch and kick. Every fantastic movement. And it is awe inspiring. Just like the previous films, the entire thing isn’t just CGI, they have other art styles to show within back stories which give it more traditional feels.

Fuck its so pretty.

Okay. Sorry. I will stop.

Kung Fu Panda 3 is sadly not perfect. A lot of the early film is wasted. Part of the charm of sequels for action films like this is that we don’t have to waste our time with origin stories. But this film has us sit through Po being bad at teaching, then he is has to do the long Panda training. The Panda training in particular, discovering his family and friends, just takes so much time and makes me lose interest in Po. The twists that show up during the village are also quite obvious, so we don’t even get the benefit of a nice shock.

The villain is awesome, although we don’t get to see enough of him doing bad things. The spirit realm was awesome and allowed the film to add more magical components to the franchise. Making “Chi” the big new thing feels a bit strange. I think KFP2 added that he needed Inner Peace and the Chi concept just feels like the same thing again. I don’t want each film to be Po learning something bigger to defeat a new threat. That isn’t original. Although I don’t know if there will be any more films after this one, given the ending.

Oh well. Pretty franchise. Pretty good. Not perfect.

Trumbo! The great white buffalo! Of the main acting awards, this is the final film I needed to see to complete the categories.

I missed it when it came out in November, because, I dunno, I was busy or something. I didn’t care to see it. I figured it wouldn’t get nominated, no matter how much I like Bryan Cranston.

But hey, he did get nominated for best actor. And with a mustache! It is basically what Johnny Depp was doing with Mortdecai. That is the movie in 2015 he wanted to win Best Actor for right? I can’t think of any other film.

Erm. Trumbo! True story! Communists! Time to party! Red Party.

That’s a communist joke and damn it, that is probably a communist dress too.

Back to Trumbo, or Dalton Trumbo (Cranston) as everyone everywhere calls him. He lives a good life. He is one of the most successful writers in Hollywood. He has contracts with movie studios to write exclusively for them, meaning that his family can live a nice life. That is of course his wife (Diane Lane), main daughter (eventually Elle Fanning) and two other kids who we don’t care about.

But he has a secret. A very vocal secret. He cares about the rights of the workers. Any workers technically, but specifically the Hollywood workers who don’t make money and should make more instead of the Hollywood fat cats. He is a…a…a…COMMUNIST. And there are a bunch of them too. This is now the late 40s and people are starting to get afraid of the Commies, thanks to the Russians and the coldness of their threats. So they try and round up all the communists in Hollywood and KILL THEM! No, not kill them, but black list them. Refuse to let them work in movies ever again. After all, if they are writing their movies, they could be putting subliminal communist things into mainstream America and fuck us from the inside! That would be terrifying.

And Trumbo is about how this man and his friends decided to try and fight for their first amendment rights. And to work despite the blacklist through aliases, friends, or by boldly ignoring the threats of others. Guess how many Oscars Trumbo won while black listed? Three. He was basically penning the “Fuck The Police” song well before the boys in Straight Outta Compton.

And of course we have more people in this movie: John Goodman and Stephen Root are brothers who make a shit ton of B movies. David James Elliott plays JOHN WAYNE. Louis C.K. is a fellow writer commie, Alan Tudyk is a fellow writer, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is a prison man, and Helen Mirren and Michael Stuhlbarg fuck some shit up.

It is rumored that Cranston was able to grow out the ‘Stashe in just 3 minutes.

Despite my wildly successful movie watching lifestyle, I am super behind on almost everything before 1990. I only barely have the 80’s covered, and everything before that is pitiful. So if I can watch a modern movie telling me about movies back in the day, I consider it a win. I have never seen Roman Holiday or The Brave One, but you bet your ass I have seen Spartacus. Getting to hear behind the scenes stories of how these films were written and what they had to do to hide Trumbo’s name was fascinating. It is probably the sexiest thing I have ever heard of when talking about 1950’s Hollywood writers.

Cranston gave a pretty good performance. I am not willing to call it incredible. I saw a lot of Cranston that I have seen in other roles, and I never really saw someone other than himself. I didn’t feel like he ever fully transformed into the man he was playing, not even when he was sitting in the bathtub. I can say it was my least favorite of the Best Actor nominee performances, and would probably rather someone like Steve Carell or Mark Ruffalo from Infinitely Polar Bear.

C.K. and Lane both did excellent jobs with their supporting characters, although Lane wasn’t given a lot to work with.

Story wise, again, there were a lot of interesting moments, but I will say I got confused a few times at a lot of the extra characters, who they were supposed to be, whose side people were on, and just why they were relevant. There are a lot of extra characters here with important roles, too many to list and name, and yeah. I can’t remember most of them. Thankfully it was only small bits of confusion and I could still easily grasp the main points of the story.

Confession time. I did not do my due diligence. But I did almost just say “do do”. If I am ever going to watch a movie part of a pre-existing franchise, I always make sure I have seen all the previous films before it. Just recently I had to watch all the Alvin and Chipmunks before Alvin and the Chipmunk: The Road Trip. I did it with Madagascar 3 and I did it with Ice Age 4.

The theme for all of these are kid movies, but I have to do something similar when Resident Evil: The Final Chapter comes out. Kid movies are easy to do, and honestly, can multi task like a beast through them.

But I did not see Ip Man or Ip Man 2. I have known about them for at least 3 years and heard good things, but never sat down to see them. Getting to review Ip Man 3 was kind of last minute, the kind of last minute that didn’t allow me to put a lot of time into two whole movies full of subtitles. But I read pretty excellent plot outlines on them (Wikipedia), and hey, if I like this one, they are certainly going to be watched within a few months!

Oh I know that guy. This is now familiar and I am no longer afraid.

Alright, Hong Kong! Did you know that something from Hong Kong was called Hong Konese, not Hong Kongian? The more you know.

Ip Man (Donnie Yen) is living with is wife (Lynn Hung) and youngest son, and he is now a successful martial arts teacher. He is a Master at a big school, where masters work together and have their own disciples, including Master Tin (Ka-Yan Leung).

Despite the police force in Hong Kong, crime is still rampant with many street gangs. An American developer, Frank (Mike Tyson) is trying to muscle in his way to HK and is using locals to do the work for him. He hires a former student of Master Tin, Ma King-Sang (Patrick Tam) to force a school to sell its prime real estate to him. Thankfully, Ip Man’s son goes to that school, and he helps guard the school from the vandals.

But that is not all! No, there is also a Cheung Tin-chi (Jin Zhang), who also studied under the same master as Ip Man. However, he claims to be the better martial artist. Apprently Ip Man teaches a modified version of Wing Chun while Cheung knows and teaches the official way. He wants to challenge for title of Grand master, but first he has to earn money (with the bad guys!) despite morals, and make his own gym a big deal.

Also featuring some wife drama. And featuring Karena Ng as Miss Wong a teacher, Kent Cheng returning as Fatso, and Kwok-Kwan Chan playing a young Bruce Lee, whom Ip Man most famously trained.

I want to wear all of the cool outfits, but have no energy to become a grandmaster. 🙁

I had to take some serious notes throughout the film to make sure I wouldn’t get confused, given my unfamiliarity with the back ground. But thankfully, Wikipedia’s plot outline for the third film is also pretty detailed. It just has a big spoiler in the first few sentences, which is stupid.

I loved the fight scenes in the film. They ranged from elegant (the fight scene between the two Wing Chun masters) to extreme (Ip Man taking on what felt like 1,000 fighters, workers, gang members while protecting his son). And they were all so very good. I enjoy the crap out of a fight scene where I can actually tell what is going on. The actors and stunt fighters (if there are any?) did a wonderful job and every jab, punch and strike is visible and well choreographed. In particular, I also really enjoyed a fight scene down a stair case with a lot of interesting angles.

The biggest problem with the movie is that the whole thing seems messy. I was worried about describing the plot, because it seemed to go so many different ways. It wasn’t one nice and easy to follow story, which I believe the other films might have been. Maybe none of the plots were big enough for a film, or they had all these things they wanted to say and only wanted to do them in a single movie for budget reasons. Who knows. But it is quite crowded and at times it meanders.

Yen has a lot of charm as our lead character and watching him definitely made me want to watch the other films. He is extremely charismatic, but in a quiet way, and it is nice having an honest good person to cheer for in the movies. Too many anti-heroes nowadays. Ip Man is a saint.

I almost watched The Grandmaster a few years ago, but the US release was delayed for some reason. And because of that, I forgot about the film, but it is about the same man. I have to believe he was the coolest dude to have this many movies about his life.

Ip Man 3 was the exact thing to get me back into watching martial arts film. I was planning on re-watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for the first time since I was 11 before the sequel is released, and I think I finally have the energy to do it.

Now that I have a new baby, my wife and I are trying to figure out what her future will be. You know, will she be good at sports or school? Will she be a gymnast or a singer? Will she like bugs or kitties? You know, the normal things. Because if a parent can do anything, it is force their own ideas and beliefs onto their baby and shape them how they want, right? I think that is right.

So I definitely wanted to see the documentary Trophy Kids. I figured it would teach me how to make my child into a future super star. That way she can earn millions of dollars doing sports stuff (Even though no women outside of like 5 make millions I think) and I can retire early because of it. That sure would be swell.

But of course that is not what this documentary is about. Hell, it isn’t about athletes who were Trophy Kids or Trophy Kids currently in training. Nope, it is about the parents. It is about the lengths they will go to for their child to succeed. And by lengths, I mean how dickish, angry, and abusive will these adults be to their kids in order for them to be scared into doing things correctly.

After all, yelling at your kid five feet away from them, in the stands, and on the side line will totally improve their performance. It is easy to listen to your parents shrieking voices with all the other sports distractions around you.

In Trophy Kids, we examine several different sports and aged kids, and how all their parents are more or less the same.

There is no crying in baseball, but there is crying in golf.

The one parent who is slightly different from the rest was a very religious mom with twin boys, who was training them to be future Doubles Tennis champions. She talked a lot about Jesus and their path, and they were all freakishly nice. That one wasn’t too bad I guess.

Everyone else? A guy who divorced his wife and forced their kid to move with him in high school to focus on his football training. After all, his wife is making him too feminine. Pictured above is a dad with a golf prodigy daughter who could put and hit at 3 years old. She doesn’t like him as her caddy.

And the other main story is dealing with two dads who have sons in high school basketball. Since their youth, they have had personal trainers, height training, and of course actual basketball training. Basically a full time job. And their dads get to go and yell a lot during high school match ups and get coaches fired. Thanks dads!

The documentary starts off a bit slow but ramps up after a halfway mark. Hell, if they could have just spread out a lot more of the intensity, this might have ended up as a 4 for me. There is one extremely powerful scene with the football dad in a car ride. It starts off simple and then suddenly everything is switched to 11, and suddenly, child abuse. It was surprisingly how long that scene in particular was and how messed up in the head the dad actually ended up being.

But really, shit, I just feel bad for the kids. They all want to do good and live up to their parents expectations, but of course the expectations always get raised and they are never satisfied. It is sad for them and when we get to see where a few of them place after the fact, it is just sad. Damn documentaries, making me feel emotions.

Animated can be a weird thing to define. Sure, hand drawn and colored films are animation. Classic example. Sure.

CGI films? They are new an exciting, but technically like, all films have CGI in them now. How much CGI needs to be in the film in order to count as animation? Apparently 75% according to the Academy*. Technically 300 might qualify.

So what about stop motion? Anomalisa is a film done with puppets, like Team America: World Police. Except instead of being puppets on strings walking around, it was stop motion, like The Boxtrolls. I still feel strange calling puppets stop motion animated, but for some other reason, claymation seems perfectly fine as animation.

This hurts my head. Let’s get this movie going!

The puppets tell me to burn things.

Michael Stone (David Thewlis) is a lonely man. He is an author, a self acclaimed expert on customer service. So yes, he writes books telling people how to be great with customers. So now he is on the road, doing a few conferences, giving speeches, selling books.

Now Michael is on the last leg of his tour. Cincinnati. According to the cab driver (Tom Noonan) there is a nice zoo sized zoo there. But he doesn’t care. He just wants to be lonely in his hotel room. He tries to contact an old flame for sex (Tom Noonan) but it doesn’t go so well. Crap, back to his shitty room.

That is until he hears a voice. Someone different. Someone that isn’t spouting the same bullshit. Her name is Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh). He could listen to her talk all day. Or all night, if he can manage it.

Sure he has a wife (Tom Noonan) and kid (Tom Noonan) at home, but they are naggy and annoying. Lisa could change his life if he could convince her to run away with him.

Because she is different. She doesn’t sound like everyone else. Get it? Get it?! Tom. Noonan.

The Knights Who Say Tom Noonan run the world now.

It has been seven years since Charlie Kaufman has released a film he has written, and this time he was also co-director! He has written some great films, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Being John Malkovich. You know, he really likes the human mind.

So it is unique for him to want to do a story with puppets to convey more human emotion on screen, but it really works out. I know I made it obvious, but having only three unique voices in the film really drove the point home. Some could call it heavy handed, I would just call it smart.

Basically life sucks and depression sucks. The end.

Yes, there is more to it than that. The conversations seem real and the situations are incredibly awkward. I think my only real complaint about the movie is how long it really took for me to get going. I also wasn’t a big fan of the dream sequence.

I am most interested in the fact that this was actually a play first that was performed with real people in London. It is basically the same as this movie, including only three people throughout it. It sounds like an exciting** version of this story.

Great movie, but I still like Inside Out more.

* – I heard this once before and I am not checking my sources. Suck it.

** – This isn’t sarcastic, despite the fact that exciting doesn’t explain the film at all.

It is a law older than time itself. If you find it, you can keep it. If you lose it, you can weep it. Possession is 9/10 of the law. Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?

These rules get even more set in stone once an item is purchased. Obviously if you find it and buy it before someone else, it is definitely yours.

So Finders Keepers is a documentary that takes that concept to its most extreme. If you are American, you are familiar with Storage Wars and other shit reality TV. People who don’t pay their rent on their storage units can have it taken away from them and the contents sold to the highest bidder. Sometimes it is individual items, sometimes it is the whole unit, and you usually don’t have time to inspect.

If someone spent $50 and inside one of the boxes was $1,000 it would be a sweet buy. If it had a unique rare item they could sell, it would be a sweet buy. IF it had naked pictures of their own mother, it would be the worst money ever spent.

Well, Shannon Whisnant bought a grill. He loves buying things cheaply and reselling them for a profit. So he figured he could clean it up and make some nice bank. Instead, Whisnant finds a severed human foot.

Yeah! A real human foot! Clearly he would go back and return it and find the owner and talk about how awkward it was. But Whisnant wants to make money. So he calls the police, sure, but he wants the news to know too. And he can charge people money to see the foot, earn that sweet cash. But the cops confiscate it, not sure what to do. Fucking pigs man.

Fucking America though, right?

The foot belongs to John Wood, who lost it in an airplane crash. His dad was taking his family for a spin when they had to crash land, killing his dad and obviously losing his foot. Well, Wood wanted to be buried a full skeleton, so he was able to smuggle his leg out of the hospital.

Don’t worry, it isn’t completely gross. It was preserved in some way. But Wood was a druggie and after a big series of changes, he found himself not paying for the storage unit and he lost the leg.

This was apparently a big media frenzy, with both sides arguing for the leg. Whisnant clearly had solid ground to stand on, while the specifics of body parts in this way has never been put down in law before, so one can easily see why Wood should get it back.

And in the end, what I really learned from this documentary, that tells of their story throughout the whole time line, the resolution, and aftermath, is that Judge Mathis is fucking awesome. Yes, some reality show arbitration is used, but the Judge goes above and beyond in his ruling and makes me think he is awesome.

I am left thinking that Wood and Whisnant might be jerks, while also happy/sad what happened to them, but that Mathis is a bro in the best way.

The documentary itself is funny and sad. I am a bit confused as to why I had never heard of any of this happening, especially when I used to live in North Carolina where the foot was found. Maybe it was only a big deal in the western part of the state and not actually national news. But the story is a good one without a simple conclusion.

One of the more unique documentaries in a year full of bio-docs, and with a very reasonable running time of under 90 minutes.

Quentin Tarantino is a crazy sunuvabitch.

He has passion, you gotta agree with that. He loves movies and wants movies to be real. Christopher Nolan and him are some of the only reasons film is even relevant anymore.

Tarantino had a lot of problems leading up to The Hateful Eight. Like when his script was leaked before they even began filming, causing him to cancel it completely. After awhile, he apparently changed some things and did it eventually.

He also wanted to film the whole thing on 70mm film, but barely anyone had a projector that could play it. So he decided to just provide free cameras to almost a hundred movie theaters across America, just so people everywhere could see his film in the vision he had in his mind. I can respect that, but I also think he is a single man on a mission to move a mounain. So we will see if his lunacy gets us anywhere. Until then. H8FULL8.

“Replace more parts of words with numbers, I dare you.”

Set a few years after the end of the Civil War, and thus, after Lincoln’s assassination, The Hateful Eight is about a group of would be killers, maybe killing each other.

Namely, John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell), rocking the same facial hair he had in Bone Tomahawk, is bringing a bounty to Red Rock to get executed. Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is a very bad murderer and she has a $10,000 bounty on her head, dead or alive. Well, Ruth brings them in alive, because they deserve to have justice done to them. By hanging. Hanging justice. He is nicknamed The Hangman.

Unfortunately, they are currently racing against a mighty big blizzard and his driver, O.B. (James Park) is hoping to get him to Minnie’s Haberdashery before it hits so they can have a place to stay until it all melts. Along the way though, he runs into Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a bounty hunter with his own set of bodies heading to the same place. He is able to get a ride. But they also run into Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), son a Rebel leader who claims he is going to be the new Sheriff of Red Rock!

But when they got to Minnie’s, Minnie wasn’t there. She apparently was away to visit relatives and left Señor Bob (Demir Bichir) was left in charge. Other patrons included Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), a British literal Hangman, Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), a cow puncher visiting his mom, and General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern), from the Rebel side looking to bury his son.

Ruth thinks someone is lying. He thinks someone here is not who they say they are and looking to free Daisy and kill all the witnesses. People are lying, and now everyone might die because of it.

Also featuring some less hateful people, Dana Gourrier, Gene Jones, Zoë Bell, and Channing Tatum.

Tim Roth is actually just playing the real life Christoph Waltz.

The Hateful Eight feels like a play, and I love plays. It is definitely the best part of the film and it is why I might want to watch it over and over. The action is of course another big part, graphic and very violent once it gets going. Not as violent or crazy as his previous films, but it is still pretty up there.

The 70 mm version of the film, which is what this is based off of, did not feel too long at over 3 hours. It went quickly because there was rarely a dull moment. And hell, an intermission meant I could buy a drink and not torture myself for two hours refusing to leave my seat. The overture was a nice touch and of course the music throughout.

The film is tonally different over its two halves and I wasn’t as excited during the second half. The whole thing is set up as a mystery as to who is a liar and a cheat. Without spoiling, let’s just say the whole thing let me down. It was unexpected surely, but not in a good way. There were still some great acting moments in it, and some of the scenes were very tense, but damn, it just wasn’t that sexy of a reveal.

I cannot say for certain of the 70 mm actually added a lot to the film, it’d be hard to without seeing both versions. I believe the digital version is about 20 minutes shorter including the intermission, but I have no idea what they’d cut out of it.

Not Tarantino’s best work, and worst of his most recent films, but still quite memorable and worthy of multiple viewings.

Drugs are bad, mmkay. They put people in jail, they cost billions of dollars, they can lead to death via shootouts and they fund terrorist organizations. Sure, they can harm your body, but who cares about that? That shouldn’t be an issue.

In fact, if they were made legal, a lot of issues would go away. Shootouts will go down, jails would be emptied, they wouldn’t cost as much, and it wouldn’t help terrorist organizations. If the US just changed their mind and made it all government sanctioned, it would help a lot of crime ridden areas of the world.

Like Mexico. A lot of drugs are grown or manufactured there and brought over the border to be sold in America. They can use this money for weapons and political power, meaning drug cartels control large areas, both physically and through bribes. And that is what Cartel Land is about. Groups of people using force to win back their homes from the evils that threaten it.

And this man even has a doctorate.

The trick here is I said groups of people. We have a group in Michoacán, led by Dr. Jose Mireles, a small town doctor, who made a group named Autodefensas. They are just groups of locals who want to get the cartel, a group who calls themselves the Templars, out! They are all volunteers, still holding their normal jobs and lifestyles, but they also have shifts to keep perimeter checks after they forced the group out. Even better, they then take their work ethic and guns, go to nearby cities and villages, get the cartel out, and help the citizens set up their own Autodefensas group.

Then they leave. They aren’t looking to take over the whole area and rule it over their own corrupt national government.

On the other side of the coin and border, we also have Tim “Nailer” Foley, an American veteran in Arizona who sees illegal immigrants crossing the border all the time. He helped set up a small paramilitary group to patrol the border and stop being from bringing drugs across the border. Both groups don’t like the drug war and what it is doing to their countries. And both are hated by various groups and government officials.

The best part of Cartel Land is how much access the documentary director had. He had to go to Mexico to work with Mireles and his Autodefensas, see them gain control back in an area, teach others, still live their lives with families, and also face extreme pressures from the Mexican government to stop.

Cartel Land is also mostly unbiased, letting the people tell their own stories and not offering judgments or concerns. It was a stark and real look at current affairs in Arizona and Mexico and is useful to help understand the plights of average citizens.