Tag: 3 out of 4

The Stanford Prison Experiment was one of the coolest and scariest things I ever heard about, when I learned about it as a freshman in college. I don’t even remember in what class it was brought up, but the real life experiment was so fascinating I remember running home to wiki all I could about it. After all, doing my own research outside of Wikipedia seemed silly.

Hearing about it lead to hearing about all the creepy things people ended up doing in the name of psychology, before jerky standards were set in place. So now things like TSPE cannot take place for scientific knowledge, because you know, humans and shit. So instead of crazier and more ridiculous experiments, this is one of the top tier ones and I guess it will stay that way.

And although they can’t recreate this one for science, they sure can recreate it for film and TV. They did it in season 3 of Veronica Mars, they had that movie five years ago called The Experiment, and more!

But now, this film is about the entire enchilada. Nut just the test itself. But also the people behind it and what occurred before and after, for realsies, in Stanford.

How do you know someone went to Stanford? Don’t worry, they will probably …err, not talk about this.

In 1971, hair was everywhere and government oversight was only a legend. The 60’s were dead, so it was time to get serious. Dr. Philip Zimbardo (Billy Crudup) was a professor who wanted to simulate a prison in their own building. They would do it over the summer when not many students were around and offer to pay people $15 a day to participate in a two week experiment. After extensive interviews to make sure people weren’t crazy, they narrowed down the group of men and used a coin flip to determine who would be the prisoner and who would be the guards.

Zimbardo and his crew (Gaius Charles, Olivia Thirlby, and more), along with Jesse Fletcher (Nelsan Ellis), a guy he knew who went to prison to help “legitimize” the experiment, would monitor the halls 24/7. The men are kept to a strict contract, where the guards are in charge, the prisoners have very few rights, and there is to be no physical violence of any sort.

So the prisoners get brought in my volunteer police to arrest them at their homes to make it feel a bit real. They have to get naked, cleaned, and put into prison uniforms (which are closer to dresses to help break them down), and put into their cells. The guards try to break their humanity right away in order to maintain order and make it feel a bit more serious. The prisoners are referred to as their numbers not their names. They don’t get a lot of sleep. They are forced into exercise and other mental punishments, since they can’t just get beaten down.

And the prisoners break. They break quickly. Mentally and physically. It becomes quickly a torture job, as suddenly, the people who identify as guards feel they have to be mean and the prisoners feel like they are worthless.

And of course, even more dramatic and scary shit.

Some of the guards are played by Nicholas Braun, Moises Arias, and Michael Angarano, who plays the “worst” guard and calls himself John Wayne. He knows how to push buttons.

A lot more of the prisoners matter, and they are sort of led by Ezra Miller and Tye Sheridan. Other prisoners who play big roles include Johnny Simmons, Logan Miller, Ki Hong Lee, and Thomas Mann who joins later to fill in a spot after a prisoner has to leave.

Everything about this movie is real. Including the facial hair.

Want to see a bunch of male youths devolve into their primal forms and do bad things, but not on an island? Then this movie might be for you!

The filmmakers did an excellent job of really driving home the moments when people began to break under pressure. It is one thing to know that the prisoners were referred to as numbers, constantly having their number drilled into their head, and long amounts of time spent sounding off their number until the guards were satisfied. But it is another thing to see it happen. These, for lack of a better word, mental torture scenes are long, loud, and constant. Major props to everyone involved for making me feel sick to my stomach that things like this could have even happened.

From the prisoners, over half of the prison cast seemed to play an important role. There might have been 2-3 people who were just also there, but every single one of them had a personality that presumably matched reality and a lot of them got focus. We were able to see almost every single one of them break and lose any sense of hope. Seeing that is disgusting, but by golly, is it some fine acting.

For the most part, the guards were just lead by Angarano’s fine acting. Angarano has to play a person playing a role, not just some mean dude. It is sadistic and cruel, but surprisingly not physical. No, other guards devolve into physicality. He is just a mind fucker.

This can be a hard watch, but a good one if you want to learn some crazy shit about human nature, while also watching a lot of young new talented actors in the same film.

Ha ha ha! A girl who sang about not wanting to go to rehab went to rehab! Ha ha ha!

Now that this obvious and shit joke is over with, we can talk about Amy. Amy Winehouse was a singer and upcoming British star. She had a soulful voice, very jazzy, and wrote her own songs. I cared absolutely nothing about her.

I knew she had a song Rehab and I knew she had a song Valerie. Valerie might have been a cover. I only knew about those songs, really, because Glee did them on their show before she died. Glee got really bad real quick, but by golly, it kept me up to date with the hip new music. Speaking of Rehab, what in the hell is the deal with that song? I don’t get it. I don’t get why people like it or what is the point of the song. But that is my silly rant.

The point is, I was a bit reluctant to watch the Amy documentary because I didn’t really enjoy her as a musician and she was just “another young artist who died from drugs early.” That quote was definitely too long. In all honesty, it is the same reason I haven’t seen Cobain: Montage of Heck yet. And I like some Nirvana songs. It is just a year with a lot of musician bios, documentary or otherwise.

I don’t care for Amy Winehouse, but I enjoyed this documentary.

Fun punny joke about one of her famous song lyrics that I totally know!

Her friends knew Amy would be a big success, and I guess that is why there is so much footage of her when she was early in her career. And honestly, the only reason to watch it is to learn about her before her big success, see how she was when she was a normal person before the drugs. All of this footage is a raw look on her life and it is very endearing.

This documentary can help you relate to Amy as a person, realize she is someone who might not have wanted all the success and fame. She wanted to write songs and her feelings and that was it. She wanted to love her boyfriend and friends.

You know, and more vague descriptions that probably sound like all real people.

Here is the thing. She was living a very interesting life. And seeing this side of anyone will be quite interesting. So give it a gander. See her reactions to things. And learn about her way more than you know about your own loved ones.

Going into The Peanuts Movie, I was worried. There are like, 3 or 4 Charlie Brown movies overall, and they were all made in the 1960’s and 70’s. That is a big gap in content. Yes, there was the longer lasting comic strip, and yes, there was a cartoon show or two I am sure. But in all reality, there hasn’t been new Peanuts stuff in a good long while.

So, will The Peanuts Movie just be a rehash of old material in a new way? Or will it be new material in a new way?

Regardless, it will be presented in a new way, so that is a positive. One of my biggest complaints about Winnie The Pooh from a few years ago, was that it was all material I had seen before, in the exact same art style as before. That was a rehash for no reason. That was a rehash for nostalgia profit. That is annoying. Although, John Cleese as the narrator for the film and the TV show that came out at the same time was a great idea.

Whether the material is old or new, damn it, at least they are portraying it in a new super CGI way, which better cover ups the nostalgia money grab.

“You keep using that term nostalgia? Are you really just upset with your own childhood and lack of fond memories?”
“Shut up, Lucy!” -Me

SNOW DAY! No school, the best news in town. Everyone is excited. Peppermint Patty (Venus Schultheis) and Marcie (Rebecca Bloom) are ready for hockey. Sally Brown (Mariel Sheets) is ready to exploit the situation as always. There is also of course Lucy (Hadley Belle Miller) and Linus (Alexander Garfin), Schroeder (Noah Johnston) and Franklin (Marleik Mar Mar Walker), Violet (Madisyn Shipman) and other Patty (Anastasia Bredikhina). Hell, even Pig-Pen (A.J. Tecce), Shermy (William Wunsch), and the little kid (Micah Revelli) are ready to play.

Everyone but one kid. Where the heck is Charlie Brown (Noah Schanpp)!? Sleeping in again, I see. Damn it Charlie Brown. We got shit to do, and you are off daydreaming and trying to fly a kite in a snow storm? It takes a special kind of guy to be Charlie Brown.

But their snow day is quickly interrupted when a moving truck comes into their neighborhood. Who could it be? Oh, a little red haired girl (Francesca Capaldi)! Oh shucks, she is pretty. And Charlie Brown wants to talk to her, but he is too embarrassed. After all, he is clumsy, he messes things up, he fails at most things. She would never like him, no matter what. Especially if he never talks to her.

Oh, and let’s not forget about Snoopy and Woodstock (Bill Melendez). That guy has been voicing Snoopy for fifty years! And for a few growls and dog noises, we also have Kristin Chenoweth voicing Fifi, the love interest. Yes, her super small role still qualifies her as the only real famous person in this whole movie.

Sorry Snoopy. You are truly the biggest star.

The Peanuts Movie is rated G for Good Old Fashioned Family Fun, and it is still an enjoyable film for child and adult alike. It isn’t even full of crude and sneaky adult jokes. The only adult joke in it is about Leo Tolstoy.

I honestly am not super familiar with past Peanuts content. I read some of the comics as a kid and have only seen parts of some of those movies. I might have seen a cartoon show a few times while growing up, but that would be it.

My main understanding is all the pop culture references so that I can survive as a functional human being. I know when to say “I got a rock” to get the cheap and easy laughs (Pro tip: Geologists love this line). The Peanuts Movie hit all the appropriate notes I could have hoped for in a Peanuts Movie, while also presenting it in a new (yet also familiar) art style.

See, the art style is hard to describe. Everyone is clearly rounder with more than 2 dimensions of shape. But the faces and the face styles are all still exactly the same as they have always been. I was a bit worried when I saw their faces in a poster, but it worked extremely well on the screen.

The Peanuts Movie truly is just a nice family movie. Sure, it isn’t an original concept. But it is a great introduction to a new generation and, of course, nostalgic trip for he older ones.

“Final Girl” is a term given to the last surviving female in a horror movie. This woman may have been in danger the whole movie. But somehow by the end she has enough gumption to slay the killer, or escape the building, or whatever. Hell, Ripley is a Final Girl.

Enough horror film had this happen for it to become a trope at least. I actually never heard about it until this year. Not just because of the movie The Final Girls that I am about to review, but because there was another movie also out aroudn the same time called…Final Girl. Yeah. It is pretty damn easy to get these ones confused. I haven’t seen such close titles for real unrelated movies since A Late Quartet and Quartet.

Now I will see Final Girl, some day. I have to given how easily it is to mistake The Final Girls. But to make matters even more confusing, they also share an actor. Somehow, Alexander Ludwig decided it’d be a good idea to be a lead in both films.

With an amazing shocked face like that, there’s no question how he landed the roles either.

Amanda Cartwright (Malin Akerman) was in a series of horror films back in the day, but now she is just struggling to find a job. All people remember her for is her role in Camp Bloodbath, now a cult classic, but a movie she doesn’t like too much. But this isn’t her story. You know, because she dies in a car crash early on in the film. Her daughter, Max (Taissa Farmiga) was also in the car but she survived.

Since then, life has been lame. Her best friends brother, Duncan (Thomas Middleditch), has apparently promised that Max would show up to a special screening of Camp Bloodbath. She agrees, reluctantly, as long as her friend, Gertie (Alia Shawkat) comes along. Chriss (Alexander Ludwig), a male friend who is totally into her, also comes along, which means the local bitch, Vicki (Nina Dobrev), who used to date him tags along as well.

And since this is hard to explain, I will be succinct: Some shit went down, and now they are trapped in the movie. Good news: Max can reunite with a version of her mother, that’s cool! Bad news: a masked man is trying to kill them all! But now that they are in the movie, it is harder to predict what would happen. Their mere presence changes the plot line for good, so they can’t rely on their movie knowledge to win this one.

Other campers are played by the likes of Adam DeVine, Angela Trimbur, Chloe Bridges, and Tory N. Thompson.

Honestly the only thing you need to be good at in a horror movie is your scared face.

Remember Cabin In The Woods? That was a genre bending, horror comedy that a lot of people didn’t know how to react to, but has eventually been accepted as a great and unique film. Cabin in the Woods is hard to define. The Final Girls is not hard to define, because I can look at it and say “It is like, Cabin in the Woods, kind of!”

A comedy horror means two things: It is usually funny, and it is usually not at all scary. They all just become parodies of horror without the fear behind it and this is honestly no exception. There are maybe “scary” moments, sure, but no one watching it will find it scary as per the norm.

Instead, The Final Girls should be judged on its comedy and it should be valued highly. Witty and fun, the cast of characters, and movie character stereotypes allow a lot of good deaths that follow and exploit common horror tropes. This is a PG-13 movie, which I feel limits some of the extremes they could have gone to, which is a shame. But the final fight scene felt nicely epic, some of the deaths were pretty creative, and the constant allusions that they were in a movie and not just a strange story were a very nice touch.

Overall, The Final Girls is a pretty good movie experience, and I hope they don’t mess it up with sequels. Hell, I like Alexander Ludwig now, and that is after I also saw When The Game Stands Tall.

Thank goodness this film is called Burnt. Based on the title and poster, of Bradley Cooper in a chef’s outfit, I can make inferences though. It is about a angry chef, that was wronged and he wants revenge. Maybe. He could be a Gordon Ramsay like character and his life could come crashing down.

I am happy it is called Burnt, because it used to be called Adam Jones. Movie titles where it is just a fictional characters name are already bad ideas, because they don’t mean anything. And if you character is Adam Jones? One of the plainest damn names of all time. It didn’t feature a cool name like Enrique, Pierre, or Sadrik. Just Adam. Jones.

Naming aside, it turns out Adam Jones wasn’t the original name either. The original name was Chef, and we all know why that title was eventually changed. Hell, the plot of Chef was the first thing I thought of when I heard the word Burnt. As long as it is as good as Chef, we should have nothing to worry about.

Hey, it has food in it! Another similarity!

If you didn’t already guess it, this film is about Adam Jones (Cooper)! Turns out Jones used to be a big deal. He lived in Paris and worked for one of the finest restaurants and eventually its head chef. While he was in Paris hear earned himself TWO Michelin Stars. Which is a pretty big fucking deal. But he did some bad things. He was on almost every narcotic, and it messed with his brain. He burned bridges and disappeared from his friends, his coworkers and lovers.

He actually put himself into exile. He shucked oysters for two or three years in New Orleans, getting clean, sober, and his focus back. And now he is ready to take the cooking world by storm again. This time: London. He wants the third Michelin Star. He wants to be one of the all time greatest chefs. He just has to try and reconcile a lot of relationships and find good talent to help him get there.

Obviously it won’t be easy to fix all the issues. He left Tony (Daniel Brühl), a Maître D’ and close friend, in a shambled restaurant. He ruined his good friend and former sous chef, Michel’s (Omar Sy) new restaurant. There is the daughter of his former mentor, Anne Marie (Alicia Vikander), who he was dating at the time. He has a now rival chef, Reece (Matthew Rhys), who used to be a coworker and is now a Three Star chef. And there is Helene (Sienna Miller), a great young chef who he wants to take under his wing, but refuses to work with the guy based on his reputation. She also has a daughter, Lily (Lexi Benbow-Hart).

Here are some more important-ish people. Some of his new chefs are played by Riccardo Scamarcio and Sam Keeley. Emma Thompson is a psychiatrist who has to monitor his blood for any narcotics. Uma Thurman plays a big deal food critic in London. And Sarah Greene is the Hostess for their new restaurant, basically a little Tony.

If I get a plate that has fingerprints on it, I send the whole thing back, personally.

It turns out that my guess on him just being Gordon Ramsey was pretty accurate. Not British Gordon Ramsay, but American shitty TV Gordon Ramsay. He owns like 3/4 of Fox reality shows at this point, and Fox has the worst reality shows. They commercial break at tense moments or cliff hangers, they encourage language just so it can be bleeped out, and half of the episode is a recap, or the intro/outros that transition with the commercial breaks, which tell you what you will see and what you just saw. Except this is a movie where adults can see adults do adult things, so we get to hear the glorious Fucks and so on. One long scene early on during a particularly upsetting service, it is like just a big Hell’s Kitchen break down.

But thankfully after that moment, it gets better. He becomes less Ramsay and more actual character. He has growth in this film, he does’t yell 100% of the time, but he maintains the same passion and drive throughout. It was nice to see his highs and his lows. It was not as nice to see his stunt double clearly in one scene, and in another scene, have his face bloody with a piece of skin falling off and in the next scene a minute or two later, magically only a small cut. Those were dumb moments.

I think Cooper did a good job leading a film that wasn’t a straight up comedy. His French was also surprisingly good, that is, to a lame American’s ears at least. Thankfully, the rest of the cast was really great as well. Let’s give them their own sentence, shall we?

Miller was good as the main female lead, and she wasn’t a typical romance pretty face – she rocked it. I usually see Brühl in more interesting roles, but he helped carry the film and the restaurant with his simplestic and seemingly perfect performance as the best Maitre D’. Sy I don’t see in a lot of films, but this is the second French-ish role. His character had nice surprise and intense moments. And Rhys was a limited role, but brought his own unique intensity to it all.

Yay acting! Are there cliches? Sure. But it is a well done cooking movie that doesn’t make one feel stupid for not knowing how the fancy foods work. It tells a fun story and doesn’t turn into a sappy romcom ever. Yay food!

Oh no, they’ve gone and done it. Netflix has bought the movie, Beasts of No Nation, from the film festivals and decided to release it. Fuck the big studios. They want to get in on that game too. They paid 12 million to distribute the film, and since it is Netflix, most of you can see it. Hell, if you prefer films in theaters, you can go see it on the big screen instead. It has a limited release, because none of the big chains would show it. They demand at least 90 days before the film gets released online, or they won’t show it. Because theaters are dying and all that jazz.

But yeah! They wanted a good film to try and win awards to help legitimize their business. Making their own TV shows is cool and all, but releasing their own movies is another. Note, they did not make this film. They just paid to distribute it. The next film that Netflix will release at the same time as theaters is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Green Legend. So regardless of quality, BoNN is in some good company. Hopefully. I guess The Green Legend can also suck.

Needless to say, this film probably won’t win any Oscars. Those are run by the Academy, and so many of them are stuck in their ways, they are probably firmly against things like Netflix trying to join their game and hurt the money studios can make in theater ticket sales. Since ticket sales are the end all be all in movies making money, outside of the few that can go cult status and coast on DVD/Blu-Ray sales for decades.

There is a joke there, implying DVDs or Blu-Rays will still be a thing decades from now.

Maybe they will be things in other parts of the world. But I doubt they make much in the African DVD Sales Department.

Agu (Abraham Attah) is just your typical boy living in a typical civil war torn African country. This one is unnamed, because it is a fictional story, but hey, you can probably imagine it all. He likes to sing and dance with his friends. He hangs out on the streets, because the schools were closed due to wars. Oh well, at least the local police force from Nigeria is keeping things calm in their village.

You know, until it doesn’t. Next thing they know, danger is everywhere, and it is hard for them to get their loved ones to safety. Try as he might, Agu’s dad is only able to get his wife to safety as he is unable to find a car for his boys. And sure enough, when the “government army” comes rolling in, they assume the villagers are actually working with the rebels and get shot. But Agu was told one thing. To run into the bush and to survive.

And that is when Agu meets the Commandant (Idris Elba). Turns out he has his own army as part of the rebel force. He is always recruiting too, especially if they are younger. In fact, there are quite a large number of children in this army, so it is easier for Agu to really get involved when the officer directly above him is only a year older than him. And hey, if they are staying in line and being obedient, he should too. They have food, shelter, camaraderie. AND YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE? The government killed his family, damn it. Why shouldn’t he join the rebels? Where he is loved and can continue to be loved if he just, you knows, shoots the innocent villager or two.

Other main-ish child soldiers are played by Annointed Wesseh, Kurt Egyiawan, and Emmanuel Nii Adorn Quaye.

Look at me. Look at me. I am your daddy now.

Running at around 147 minutes, Beasts of No Nation is basically your typical war film. Those are always long fuckers.

However everything else about it is pretty different from your standard war drama. Usually in those films when they talk about people just being kids, it is due to the dead bodies of a village they find, or an eighteen year old recruit heading overseas to kill the bad guys. BoNN dealing with actual child soldiers reflecting an actual reality of some African countries adds a constant level of fright into the whole equation.

At the same time, because of this being in the news (hah, not TV news of course. But internet news and stuff) so much and for so long, it also feels like a lot of the surprise is and shock factor is already gone. Do you remember Kony 2012? I fucking do. I got caught up in the hype and ordered one of those paint the town red packages. A week later I realized that it was a terrible program and was able to fight tooth and nail to cancel it and get my money back. But still. That was a super big thing for like, a whole month almost.

I wish now more than anything that it could have never happened. Because once people realize that yes, it is shitty there, but three dudes form San Fransisco are not the best holders of our money to do it, people kind of got fed up with the child soldier thing and then promptly ignored the real problems that are still occuring. If that had never happened and then BoNN came out, it could lead to a lot better and positive PR in order to help stop the civil wars over there. Then again, blah blah, USA needs to stop interfering with countries trying to do their own thing because we cannot police the world.

What I am getting at is the situation is hard in real life for the rest of the world, and it is much harder for those living in those areas, which the movie does an incredible job of showcasing.

Attah and Elba do a good job at the helm of the film, and their relationship is convincing and a bit scary. Elba is such a smooth talker that I almost wanted to shoot some fictional villagers for him. But make no mistake, despite the bigger headline, this is Attah’s film and story and it is a great one. Due to the subject matter, it was a lot harder for me to find myself completely emotionally invested in the situation, and from some sudden changes in the plot’s direction, I did find it harder to understand just what was happening in the story. But on future re-watches* I’d probably be able to relate and understand it all a lot better.

* – Hah. I won’t rewatch this. War stories take too much out of me and time. Still haven’t seen Saving Private Ryan since I was like 10.

When I first heard about the movie title, Time Out Of Mind, I thought it was a completely ridiculous title. When I found it was also the name of a Bob Dylan album from the late 90’s, I still thought it was a ridiculous title.

Is it supposed to be a drunk guy getting a saying wrong? Is it someone so completely lost that they can’t even sentence right?

Or does it want to go one step further? Does it want the viewer to over analyze the title so much that they, too, become Time Out Of Mind? Shit. This is too spooky for me. I hope it doesn’t cause me to obsess too long over this, so that I can’t focus at work, lose my job, become homeless, and wander the streets looking for spare change and someone to give me a sandwich or something.

When being a homeless person on the mean streets of New York, it is best to use the buddy system.

His name is George (Richard Gere), and he is homeless. But those are words you wouldn’t ever hear him say. No, life just sucks a bit right now. He has made bad decisions and has no job sure, but he isn’t some homeless asshole.

He had a place to stay, but bad things happened and the person who owned it is now evicted. He can’t stay there, he can’t stay anywhere. He tries to just sleep in ER lobbies, but even they throw him out.

So sure. Fuck it. He will go to the official center for homeless men. He has no ID of any sort because his wallet was stolen while he was sleeping outside, so that is a big issue. There is no way he can get a job, he is too old. There is no way he can do much of anything without the proof that he is even alive. I should also mention he has a daughter, Maggie (Jena Malone), but she hates him and his inability to face his own reality.

Also helping him cope with his situation include Steve Buscemi for a whole 1-2 scenes, Kyra Sedgwick, and Ben Vereen, who more famously voice the preacher bird in Once Upon A Forrest.

If you lose your buddy, you’re gonna have a bad time.

Time Out Of Mind is a strange movie. Turns out I have seen both other movies directed by Oren Moverman, The Messenger and Rampart. The difference between those movies of course is that the former was amazing and emotional, and the later was just a boring mess, now made famous by a bad AMA on Reddit. Thankfully, if you can sit through it, Time Out of Mind falls closer to The Messenger than Rampart.

Time Out of Mind is slow, it is bleak, and it doesn’t take you on a wonderful journey. George’s life just plain ole sucks and barely anything positive happens to him in the film. In this way, it is almost brutally realistic (don’t worry, nothing super graphic in the film). Moverman uses a lot of longer takes with the camera a bit farther away than normal from those acting. This helps as a constant reminder that George is just a very small piece of an ever moving and non caring city that makes his home, adding to the overall bleakness of his situation.

Time Out Of Mind is also not the movie for everyone. I was on the verge halfway through of pausing it to do something “fun” for awhile, not even sure if I was liking or hating what I saw. But what really turned the whole thing around for me was Vereen. He acted the shit out of this movie. He went full on into his character, a babbling homeless man who has lost his wits but befriends George. Gere’s acting was fine, but his character was a bit uninteresting in his constant pessimism. But Vereen though, he nailed it. Watch it for Vereen. And to make you sad about America. But mostly Vereen.

Buy It! – This movie is available now on {Blu-Ray} and {DVD}.

What’s that? Oh, it’s October! That means we are supposed to be getting a lot of horror movies, right? Where the fuck are they?

Oh, there are some horror comedies, and a lot of horrors from the summer are coming out on DVD. But not a whole lot in October, because the studio people hate us. The last few Octobers have been mostly shit as well.

So thank goodness, early October, we have the chance of something wonderful. We have Crimson Peak, directed by my man, Guillermo del Toro. That man loves scary stuff. Sure he is some times hit or miss with his work, but damn it, he at least has the passion enough for me to trust his work and not judge it from crappy trailers.

I haven’t reviewed a single horror film all month (Goodnight Mommy I did in September!), so hopefully Crimson Peak gets me on the right foot and scares the Hellboy out of me.

Oh no! It looks like those bricks are covered with the remains of Hellboy 3!

Traveling back about a hundred years, Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) believes in ghosts. Her mom died when she was a child, and one very frightful night, her ghost visited her and warned her about Crimson Peak. Of course it was just childish nonsense. Now, she is an adult and living with her father (Jim Beaver), in a nice Buffalo mansion. She considers herself to be an author, but not stupid romance, instead nice dramas and ghost stories even. In reality, it is hard to define her work by a single genre.

Her dad wants her to be set up with a local boy, an eye doctor, Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam). But Edith is a bit more interested in a stranger to their town, Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston). He came for a loan. His families business is in ruins, collecting red clay for bricks below their mansion. He has made a device to help dig it out, but he just needs capital to get the working parts in order.

Needless to say, he didn’t expect to find love in Buffalo. Thomas and his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), are a bit weird, but their family has been through rough times, so it makes sense. Eventually, after some circumstances, Edith finds herself whisked away to Great Britain to live in their home. A deteriorating building with a lot of quirks due to its location.

And you know. Some ghosts maybe. Some really creepy shit. And a whole lot of secrets.

Special shout out to Burn Gorman, who played a small role as a Private Investigator. I normally just say “also featuring” but I enjoyed his 3 scenes a lot more than just a “featuring” line.

Shit Lucille, you need to clean that mirror or something.

Crimson Peak is like an old timey horror movie, in almost every way. It isn’t your modern horror film that cares about the number of jump scares it can fill in and how many people they can kill by the end. In fact, the plot itself as it unravels won’t feel new. There are elements taken from other stories that sure, may have done it better originally.

But Crimson Peak excels in the areas that the older styled movies had no chance in. First of all, HOLY FUCK, this is a pretty movie. The use of contrasting colors is so heavily used that it almost feels like the entire set was made by a darker Wes Anderson. The oozing red clay splattered around the mansion (that yes, looks like blood), does a great job of constantly enforcing the mood and history of the house. The snow, the green and blue hued windows. It is all so damn beautiful.

I wasn’t aware the movie was being release on IMAX, which unsettled me, as it would make it harder for me to cover my eyes if the screen was that much bigger than normal. Thankfully, the attention to detail that del Toro is known for when it comes to set design shined so well on the giant screen.

You know what else the older movies didn’t have? Jessica Fucking Chastain. I can admit that Chastain is a good actress, but I never really thought she was great. She was good in a lot of recent movies, including The Martian, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, A Most Violent Year, Interstellar, and sure, Zero Dark Thirty. Honestly though, they never seemed to push her into the excellence category. It just took a Drama/Horror/Fantasy for me really respect her. She went so hardcore into her character, by the end I couldn’t believe that someone who generally plays such quiet characters could be pulling it off.

The actors are of course good to fine in their own ways, all playing their roles wonderfully. But Chastain stole the damn show.

Crimson Peak will be frightening at only some points, strangely graphic at other parts (involving insects!), but for the most part, del Toro just wanted to tell a romance/drama story. Sort of. This is only slightly a horror, so those who are expecting a lot more in the scream department will be disappointed. In this film, there just happens to be ghosts and dead bodies along the way.

Sometimes it takes a long time to get your documentary filmed and published. Like, let’s say, for example…oh…I don’t know…The Wrecking Crew!

The director, Denny Tedesco, started getting film for this project in 1996. I was seven years old when he started this documentary. At that point in my life, I doubt I had even seen a documentary. The film was completed twelve years later, in 2008. He went and showed it at some of the festivals and people loved it. The issue with his documentary was that it was basically impossible for him to get a distributor. You see, this documentary uses music. A LOT of music. And all of the music is owned by a corporation or person and they need to pay those people money to use the song in the documentary. This suddenly makes the documentary costs several hundred thousands of dollars before they can even start selling copies!

Needless to say, no one wanted to front load that bill. So they raised a lot of the money on their own. Roughly $300,000. Somehow that still wasn’t enough. It was 2013. So he turned to Kickstarter. Using the story he wanted to tell, he was able to raise $300,000 more dollars to pay off the fees and make the film even more snazzy. And now it is on Netflix for us to enjoy.

Enjoy what though? All this intro and I don’t tell you about what it is, like some sort of movie slut.

Well. It is about music. It is about most of the famous songs that you know and love from the 1960’s and 70’s. Back when bands didn’t necessarily know how to play instruments that well and companies were figuring out how to sell an image and look more than talent. They needed to make hit records fast and didn’t have time to spend weeks in the recording studio when there is all that touring to do. That is where The Wrecking Crew came in, the most famous recording studio band of all time.

And you forgot all of their birthdays. 🙁

The name The Wrecking Crew was just a nickname for a lot of these people. They weren’t an official cohesive group that worked together, but technically each individually signed musicians who knew how to play their instrument well, could read music fast, and could improv on the fly to make a tune better. Sure, a lot of these guys were hired over and over again, so they grew to be friends and had that bond, but technically any of them could be replaced at any moment. This documentary does its best job to talk about as many big members of this crew as it can, based on who is still alive. It even gets a few of them talking to tell stories about musicians from behind the scenes.

Funny enough, we can all thank Brian Wilson from The Beach Boys for basically setting this up, using different musicians to make his Pet Sounds album. What? Didn’t know about that? You missed my review of Love & Mercy then (which I only just saw mere weeks before this). The efficiency and professionalism made these people work hard for their money and helped create such fantastic music.

Back to the front, Danny made this documentary because of his dad, Tommy Tedesco, who was one of the main guitarists from The Wrecking Crew. He wanted to tell his story, and didn’t get a chance to show it to the world before his death. If you want more name drops, the most famous member of the crew ended up being Glen Campbell. Yeah, he got super damn famous and started as a studio band jockey!

I didn’t do a lot of talking about the details of the documentary, because hey, it is on Netflix and you can easily watch it for yourself. Just hearing the music and hearing their stories is a blast on its own. Overall I didn’t find it life changing in anyway. It was light, easy, and fluffy. Yeah, I said fluffy damn it.

A good documentary that a lot of people should watch. I appreciate the effort and passion that went into it and it really shows on the screen. Now give me more more documentaries about people who did all the work for others, or something. Yay the little guy!

I would consider myself a fan of Adam Carolla. He is a man’s man, and not just because of his role on The Man Show.

But in general, he is like a old man’s Nick Offerman. He knows a lot about cars, building stuff, and…being an adult? I guess.

Either way, I was very upset when he was kicked off from Celebrity Apprentice, because he probably should have won it after Penn Jillette.

Damn it, I keep getting side tracked. Carolla made a movie, starring himself, funded by a shit ton of people. Whatever site he raised the funds on let him reach past his goal to fund the film. It even broke a record for whatever that site is. And now that I will see Road Hard, I will have seen and reviewed all two movies he has ever been the main star. Big numbers there.

He might even be able to afford his own Waffle House franchise.

Adam plays Bruce Madsen, a man with a manly name, who has gone through a lot. Well, most recently it feels like, he has gone through a divorce. That is a shame, but it is what it is. Sure, he isn’t living in his amazing house anymore that his TV career paid for, but at least his kids are happy. And fuck. They are smart too and wanting to go to college? What is up with that?

You see, Bruce used to be famous. He got super well known for The Bro Show on television. This lead to a lot of money and other TV show opportunities. It ended up being better for his co-host, Jack (Jay Mohr), whose career skyrocketed and is now hosting one of those late night television shows. Damn, that sucks for Bruce! Needless to say, the jobs aren’t coming as easy for Bruce as they used to be. People are starting to only remember him being really good on that Celebrity Barn Raising show.

So Bruce has to go back into stand up comedy, his roots. He has to travel around doing small time shows, that don’t sell out, but do okay because he is that “guy who used to be on the TV!” And college is expensive. He needs a big break to get his career off the ground. He needs to get back into TV, getting a steady pay check to enhance his resume. He needs something to get him back out of the comedy clubs to land back on his feet.

Featuring Diane Farr, David Alan Grier, Philip Rosenthal, David Koechner, Cynthy Wu, Larry Miller, and Howie Mandel as himself.

In this picture: Literally not landing on his own feet.

I think I can speak for all Adam Carolla fans when I say this movie is him at his finest. Hell, if you couldn’t tell, this is literally him playing himself. I tried to drop off enough hints in the intro, but he made a fictionalized version of himself, dumped a few more shitty moments on it, and called it a movie. Regardless of one’s skill, you probably know how to play yourself in most situations so the acting should just come natural.

I hope there is no bad blood between him and Kimmel in real life. That will make me sad.

Back to to film! Not surprisingly, I enjoyed this tale. It is a simple one, but it has some good comedic moments, features jokes in the form of stand up comic acts, and has good supporting characters who also make me laugh.

Sure, because it is a simple story, it doesn’t really end up too surprising by the end. It just tells a simple story solidly, and I can respect that. Like a well crafted stool. Or a…movie that isn’t shit.

Yeah. Much like that.