Tag: 3 out of 4

I don’t get it. I don’t know why it is called Z for Zachariah. None of the main characters are named it. I could have easily missed it if someone said their brother/dad/whatever was named Zachariah.

It sounds biblical in a way, and there was a Zechariah in the Bible AND Quran, making him a big deal. But he was just the father of John the Baptist, and I have no idea why that matters.

Damn it. Someone smarter than me should eventually comment why. It might be more obvious in the book version, but I will definitely never read it.

They are watching where the TV would be. You know, if channels worked. 🙁

Guess what, everyone is dead! Boooo! Nuclear war fucked everything up and radiation is a bitch.

But guess what. Ann Burden (Margot Robbie) is alive! Her farm was located in a small area that the radiation was able to avoid. You know, in the mountains in a valley and stuff like that. In fact, her whole family survived, their church and all.

But the parents felt it was their duty to go look for survivors, and they never returned. So her brother also left to look for them. So she is all alone, with her dog, running a farm and struggling to survive.

However, she comes upon a man in a radiation suit and a cart, Loomis (Chiwetel Ejiofor). He has been searching for a radiation free zone for a long time, being in a bunker when all the bombs went off. She saves his life, and they learn to live and love each other. Even if he isn’t religious.

That would be too convenient. Him helping her get gas for vehicles, design a water wheel, and all that stuff. Life cannot be easy. Which is why a third person joins the group, Caleb (Chris Pine). He is just stopping through, but Loomis gets jealous. Caleb is a religious boy and Ann likes him too.

When you only know that three people exist, it just seems natural for a love triangle to form. Are one of the guys evil? Are both of them good people? Who knows. Maybe Jesus?

Jesus killed for your sins. So don’t kill one of the three people on Earth.

Seriously. What the fuck does the title mean? Argghhh.

When you have a movie with only three characters, not even background people, you have to hope they are all great actors or else your movie will suffer because of them. Margot Robbie is the assumed weakest link right off the bat, because she doesn’t have as significant of lines of work as the other two gentlemen. She was made famous from The Wolf of Wall Street, she was terrible in Focus, barely in About Time, and was average in Pan Am. Yes, I watched all of Pan Am.

Despite her average film history, that hasn’t stopped people from over hyping her role as Harley Quinn in the Suicide Squad Movie that is roughly a year away still. Just from trailers, the things meant to overhype things! I assume someone won’t be fantastic in a movie until they prove to me they can act great in said movies. Thankfully, Robbie is fantastic and this is easily her best work to date.

Ejiofor, as always gives it his all and gives a wondrous performance. But we expect that from him. Pine might be the only actor I had an issue with. He is supposed to be suspect, being the last to join the group. But he seemed to overdo it and didn’t always act like a normal person. He overacted the role, while Robbie and Ejiofor felt more natural and subtle.

The best part of the film outside of the acting is just the general atmosphere and world they created. No one was ever really happy, everyone they knew was likely dead. Life sucks, but they were making the best of it and trying to create something sustainable. That is great.

The film does seem to lack enough events to really keep the viewer interested still. I am not saying I have ADHD, but damn, let’s get some more important things to occur, outside of working montages and glaring. The ending is also a bit vague, and in this case pretty annoying. This is a simple movie and interpretation is stupid. Just let me know what happened, damn it. It is probably the book’s fault. Boo, books. Just give me fantastic movies, damn it.

I was told I need to watch The Visit, for a few reasons! One, my wife likes a lot of the M. Night Shyamalan films and she needs me to tell her how it is. Good reason.

Two, I have only seen one MNS film in theaters, and that was the terrible After Earth. And come on, that doesn’t count. None of that was typical MNS. And finally, despite thinking otherwise, I have actually seen all of his films but two. I figured I was missing at least 6 or 7 by now, but somehow I have watched most of them. I kind of have to keep going at this point, no matter my preconceived notions.

As for biases, IMDB labels the film as a comedy horror. For some people who have found his recent movies to be laughably bad with terrible twists, this allows him to join in on the joke with him. If he makes things intentionally cheesy, it is a win win for him.

Kind of like how a visit with the grandparents is a win win. They get to feel loved, you get snacks.

Fifteen or so years ago, a woman left her parents house to be with an older man. They had a baby girl, then another kid. Then eventually the man left her to raise the two kids all alone. The whole time the woman would not go back to her parents for help, never communicating with them despite problems in her life.

But then they found her via the internet. They want to see their grand kids! She said no. Grand kids forced it and now Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) are going by train to see them! While they are away, The Mom (Kathryn Hahn) is going on a cruise with her boyfriend to get some well deserved time off.

Becca is a smart girl, aspiring film maker, so she wants to make a documentary about her experiences. This will be used as a project to help her mom heal the past between them all and leave to a better life hopefully. Tyler is the younger brother and a rapper, who enjoys free styling about random topics for “the ladies.”

Anyways, when they get to the farm, where there is no real cell phone signal (of course), they find their Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie, not Luke Youngblood) acting strangely. They were supposed to be a couple who offer counseling to sick people at the hospital that they volunteer at. But Pop Pop just seems to clean his guns and chop wood and stay alone. Nana bakes all the time and sometimes has a wild side.

Also there is the rule that they can’t leave their room after 9:30. That is when Nana starts acting even stranger and they wouldn’t want an accident to happen in the confusion. No, not at all.

At the same time, this oven is pretty nice and big and cozy.

Ed Oxenbould has already been in a lot of things in his very young career. In fact, he was Alexander in Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. He was also the worst part of that movie. Technically, he was also the worst part of this movie, but in this case, his acting wasn’t bad. Just his actual character had some annoyances.

Shit, I am completely fine with basically everything he did in this movie, except for the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad rapping. He freestyles like, 3-4 times in the film and each one is cringeworthy and awkward. It doesn’t feel like it fits his charterer at all. I assume the actor could really do it and so they included it, but I just wanted it to end immediately each time it started.

The Visit is actually a decent comedy when it needs to be and scary at the other points. As we get closer to the end, the balances shift a bit more to the scary side with a bit of absurdity. Despite the shifts in tone, the movie handles it all really well. It never feels jarring to be a bit scared and then laughing a minute later. That being said, this is not going to be the movie for you if you want an extremely funny or scary movie, as both sides are lessened in order to make the narrative work.

I enjoyed Dejonge as the lead, main narrator and it was refreshing to see such a smart teenager in a horror film. It was also interesting to her talk about the documentary she is trying to make, allowing a strange level of meta awareness to the final product movie that ends up being The Village.

More importantly, Dunagan was fantastic. She played a great Nana, pulling off the crazy, confused, and happy extremes that the character went through. The weirdness of the film relies heavily on her character, and if she wasn’t a great actress, the film would have been complete shit.

That’s right. This film wasn’t complete shit. This was a good movie. A good, new, M. Night Shyamalan movie. That factoid is probably the biggest twist of all.

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

How To Change The World will premier in theaters nationwide on September 9, 2015, as a part of Fathom Events.

If there is one thing every kid wants to do, it is to change the world. Or rule it, which would definitely be a type of change. So going to see a documentary called How To Change The World should be something on everyone’s radar. What can be better than a step by step guide that anyone can follow?!

Well, things aren’t that simple. And the documentary in question isn’t meant to be a vague guide, but instead tells the story of how a group of scientists, journalists, free thinkers, and all around hippies, accidentally started one of the largest environmental movements in the world today: Greenpeace.

Now now, calm your britches. Greenpeace is an organization with a lot of controversy and strong opinions. People seem to either love them or hate them, rarely maintaining a neutral stance on the group.

Despite that, the documentary can still be seen as an eye-opener. You see, the founders realized that the media would be important in order for any of their protests to matter. So they filmed everything they did. Every meeting, every decision, every protest in action, every run in with the law. They knew they needed documentation, and How To Change The World shows footage from their most famous early moments, showing how the group was made and eventually how they began to fracture.

This picture is a metaphor, but also something that really happened.

Their basic leader early on is the now deceased Bob Hunter, a journalist from Vancouver. He was the one who kept up their early news presence. Their first goal, as a group of friends, was to sail a Canadian boat from Vancouver to Amchitka, Alaska to protest a nuclear bomb test. They would go straight to the testing site on the boat and just exist offshore, daring the US to set the bomb off. Their boat of course was named Greenpeace.

After that, their next main goal was to help Save The Whales. Yes, they made the phrase. Their goal was to find Russian vessels that were harvesting the whales off of the coast of California, and again, put themselves in the way of their harpoons, hoping to save the whales by risking their own lives. A bold move that definitely put them on the map, allowing them to then protest the clubbing of baby seals and more environmental issues.

Other notable members include Patrick Moore, who has since defected from the group and actively goes against their protests, and Paul Watson, that asshole from Whale Wars who uses ridiculously aggressive tactics because he thinks he is better than other people. I should note, I felt really bad for Moore, because he clearly had good ideas but no one else in the group would listen to him. It makes sense that he hates them now. But then I also found out he is a climate change denier suddenly, so all good faith was quickly lost.

How To Change The World ended up having incredible depth. I was amazed at the amount of footage that actually existed on these first few voyages and the seal clips. And the footage isn’t edited down to make it easy on the eyes. You will see slaughtered whales and see baby seals getting clubbed. It makes its points by showing you the reality.

In all honesty, the organization started off with great ideas and goals and this documentary makes you feel like you are there the whole time with them. But once they began to fracture and have offices around the world, things got out of hand and they have gained a lot worse press.

The main thing I think lacking from this documentary would be addressing some of their controversies that are more modern and in greater detail. The documentary is only about 1:45 in length, and it doesn’t go into the members feuding and other smaller problems until the last 15 minutes, the majority being about their first few voyages. It has a lot of interesting information and will definitely do its job on teaching about Greenpeace.

However, I just wanted more, damn it.

Strange as it may sound, to properly start this review I need to talk about The ABCs of Death. If you have never heard of it, it is a horror anthology movie (all the rage these days) with 26 shorts, one for each letter of the alphabet. They have free reign to do basically whatever they want, to match up any word they want to a particular letter. It is an easy way to make a movie, as each director is only involved for a short while and can be done on almost any schedule.

So what does that have to do with Turbo Kid, a retro inspired sci-fi adventure horror (eh) movie?

Well, it turns out that this was inspired by a short made for the anthology that was eventually not used: T is for Turbo. Although it didn’t make it in the film, one of the producers decided that it would be even better as a full feature length film. So they brought Jason Eisener, who directed Hobo with a Shotgun (a movie I still have never watched, sadly), to be executive producer and Turbo Kid was born! And yes, you can watch the short if you click on the title link above.

See kids, dreams really do come true!

You see that? That is a GnomeStick, and it is truly wonderful.

The world is in shambles. The land they live in is now referred to as The Wasteland, and of course it is a post apocalyptic world. The future is a scary place, the year is 1997.

Our hero is named…well, no idea, so let’s call him The Kid (Munro Chambers). He is alone, a scavenger, just him and his bike. He is also a lover of comic books! Who isn’t though, right?

Well, this Kid meets a girl, despite trying to avoid strangers. Her name is Apple (Laurence Laboeuf), she has pink here, is very eccentric, and doesn’t seem like the type of person who could survive in The Wasteland alone. She just wants a friend, and the Kid reluctantly lets her tag along — only if she follows his rules and gets a weapon!

Eventually the Kid finds a cool suit that is straight out of comic books, and when he puts it on he gets super powers! Okay, he just gets a laser cannon gun thing on his arm, that has a timer after a few uses that lets him recharge. But at least it looks cool and snazzy. More importantly, it gives him the confidence to start fighting back.

Fighting back against Zeus (Michael Ironside), self proclaimed ruler of The Wasteland. He has an army of warriors, including Skeletron (Edwin Wright), who shoots out rotating saw blades, and Female Guard (Orphée Ladouceur), who is a woman!

But the Kid isn’t alone, no. He has the help of Frederic (Aaron Jeffery), an Indiana Jones looking mother fucker who arm wrestlers, until he loses his hand early on. And also there is Bagu (Romano Orzani), a trader who was the only friend the Kid had before this mess gets started.

When Metal Man and Skeletor have a baby, you get this lovely killing machine.

I feel like I was transported back into my 1980’s going to see sweet B movies live for the first time. This is of course ridiculous, because I was born in 1989 (Like Taylor Swift. We are both successful people), and I have no memories of being zero or watching movies. It is a ridiculous statement for me to make, and this entire paragraph is down right nonsensical, which makes it a perfect description for Turbo Kid.

I joke a bit, of course. There are character motives, a plot, everything that is necessary for a movie to be comprehensive. The world created is just over the top and very Mad Max-ian. It can easily be pictured as a movie in the franchise, just with a much smaller budget and a kid with lasers as the hero. Fuck it. George Miller needs to just somehow make it canon and everyone would win out in the future if they can eventually crossover.

There was a lot great with this movie, outside of its intentionally bad graphics for the death scenes. The soundtrack is straight out of the 80’s and gives the best vibes possible when watching this movie. And they were very creative when it came to costume (and hair!) designs, weapons, deaths, and sets. It was a visual rainbow explosion, despite the bleak landscape.

The cheese is high with this film and it runs with it. This is why I hate the bad on purpose films like Sharknado so much. Because there can be actual movies that are bad in a good way, like Turbo Kid, or Black Dynamite, that serve as genre parodies while also entertaining people without the use of alcohol.

This review deserves a third picture just to showcase some great costume design or something.

Yes. This will do.

Owen Wilson. Action Thriller. Owen Wilson. Action Thriller.

No matter how many times I say it, I cannot picture this man seriously in an action thriller. My mind cannot wrap itself around that concept. It just doesn’t make sense.

Owen Wilson and comedy? Sure, that is pretty standard. Owen Wilson and slightly dramatic/romantic roles? He has been making those now, especially with Woody Allen. Owen Wilson and action comedy? Yeah, he did Shanghai Noon!

But I feel like I can’t ever take just his face seriously. I can’t imagine him running from people trying to kill him and it not be an amusing situation. I can’t imagine him trying to protect loved ones in a real life or death situation.

So, honestly, I am expecting No Escape to be a satire of some sort. Or a secret parody of the action thriller genre. That is the only way I can go through my day without breaking down, knowing that this movie is coming out.

He never listened, but eventually his face really did freeze in place like that.

Economy is tough, so sometimes even the most qualified of people can find themselves with a family to support but no job. That is why Jack Dwyer (Owen Wilson) is taking his wife, Annie (Lake Bell), and two daughters (Sterling Jerins, Claire Geare) to Asia. Where in Asia? Eh, South East Asia. Not important.

They meet Hammond (Pierce Brosnan), who is Australian, or British. Basically someone who speaks English from not-America. He offers them a ride to the hotel and is just a fun guy, if not too inappropriate for their family.

Well, things don’t work well in the hotel. TV is out. Phone is out. No cell phone signal. Shit.

Even worse, the next day in the streets, Jack overcomes an apparent riot in the streets. A bunch of people going to war against the police. That is extremely inconvenient. He is supposed to start his job today, but this large group of people with bats, machetes, and guns are running around killing white people.

Gosh, this really isn’t a good move for their family.

Also starring Sahajak Boonthanakit as Kenny Rogers!

“It won’t be scary if you just assume you are getting pushed violently into a pool 80 feet below.”

See, now I know why this movie can make sense. It isn’t an action thriller at all. No, it is also not a strange satire. It is a straight up horror film. First scene, very stylized, shows the political assassination happening. Then there is a nice dull bore of the family flying over and getting settled. But once the riots start, my heart never stops racing. The music, the violence, everything was just so terrifying. Maybe more so because I too am white and I too have a family to protect.

It makes sense for it to have such a strong horror action feel. The director is John Erick Dowdle who has also directed Quarantine, Devil, and As Above, So Below. Say what you will about the quality of those films. They are all definitely horror. It was completely unexpected to find myself that scared throughout the film, but it happened and it was extremely effective.

A weird thing about this film is the awkward lengths it went to avoid saying where the hell they were. Any time they attempted to get close, it was always just vague “Asia” instead of a country name. It was annoying and took me out of the film every time they were purposefully vague. It was filmed in Thailand, but eventually we find out that the country is attached to Vietnam (which Thailand is not). That leaves Cambodia or Laos. They apparently tried to make it a made up country, but then used upside-down Cambodian language on text (which they did not like), so Cambodia it is!

Back to the film. Wilson plays an every man type of role who is just doing whatever he can to protect his family. He is extremely relatable in this film. He is able to appropriately pull off the “constant freaking out, while also trying to calm down his kids” speech down. Yes, it is still full of his unique (bad?) whisper calmness, but it seems right.

Bell doesn’t play just a typical screaming mother role. She takes an active part in their escape, putting herself in danger several times, including a quite graphic scene. And Brosnan wasn’t on screen a lot, but he was smooth as fuck and a strange pseudo-hero.

Honestly, this film has some issues. Some strange character decisions, one scene of very shit CGI, some boredom in the beginning, and the awkward country-evasion part. But when it gets going, it never stops and it did what it set off to do really well.

I expected I would hate No Escape but it really felt like I too was in the middle of a country uprising and on the run. It was refreshing to have the USA/UK kind of be the bad guy, while also not getting too preachy about the subject. And shit. It was scary.

It’s The End of the Tour as we know it, and I feel fine.

Premiering at Sundance, I can say that I heard a lot about this film, but nothing about what it was actually about. I heard praise and more praise, that it was based on a true story, and even more praise and that is all I heard about it.

Based on the title alone, you would assume they were talking about a musician finishing possibly their final tour, and not a book author. Book authors are beyond un-sexy. Throughout history, the only sexy authors that everyone would agree on would probably just be Jack Kerouac and Homer.

I just wanted to make sure you knew that going into the film I was thinking positive, un-sexy thoughts.

After seeing this image, you can see that my initial reactions were confirmed!

The 90’s sure were a different time. We barely had the internet and we definitely didn’t really have cell phones. David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) is a journalist, writer, and author of fiction! He just wrote a book called The Art Fair that is loosely based on his own life. He thinks it has potential to be the best book of the year!

Then he finds out about Infinite Jest, a book written by David Foster Wallace (Jason Segal) and it is miles away the better book. Everyone loves it, it takes the country by storm and Wallace becomes an overnight sensation. But he is just a normal guy, who writes and teaches at the college level. He lives in a small northern town by himself with his dogs.

Lipsky sees a nice story behind the man though and appeals to the editors of Rolling Stone to let him do an all exclusive interview with Wallace. Sure, they don’t tend to interview authors, because (as we all know) authors aren’t sexy. But he is persuasive. So Lipsky gets to fly to his town, join him on the last stop of his tour, and spend five days talking with a newly famous and successful man, to see what makes him tick and how he is handling life.

Just so you don’t leave thinking there is literally only two people in the film, I can tell you the other characters, although they are all wildly unimportant. Anna Chlumsky plays Lipsky’s girlfriend, Mamie Gummer and Mickey Sumner play two of Wallace’s old friends, Ron Livingston plays an editor at Rolling Stone, and Joan Cusack plays a Minnesotan escort for the last leg of the tour.

Basically, the whole thing is like My Dinner With Andre, but several dinners.

I love movies where they focus mostly on the dialogue between a few characters and the other elements such as location, background, (action?), scenery, or other events aren’t at all important. A great script with a captivating dialogue can carry a movie and turn the silliest of ideas into something magnificent. Just look at Clerks!

Basically what I am saying is that I like plays, and this was one of the “play-iest” movies based on a book and not a play that I have ever seen. The dialogue is extremely top notch, and given it is based on a book that is based on a series of tapes that recorded everything they said, I have the highest hopes that these conversations actually happened word for word. Two intellectual writers talking the shit and talking about things that really matter. David Foster Wallace comes across as a very smart dude, the type of dude you just want to hear his opinion on literally anything.

And major props go to Segal, who gave by far his best performance in his career. Segal tends to be one of those actors who doesn’t change much in between roles, but he definitely captured a completely new persona in this film, where by the end I forgot it was Segal even acting, despite those distracting eyes of his. I don’t know if he will win best acting in any category, but I can definitely see some nominations in his future.

If anything, The End of the Tour did an impressive task that no other movie has done before: It has made me want to read TWO different books. The book by Lipsky about his time with Wallace, and of course Infinite Jest, which was apparently the hottest thing since sliced bread.

I am a big Armie Hammer fan, which is a weird thing to say out loud (or through words in a review post).

Seriously.

I liked him as The Lone Ranger and I liked him in The Social Network. He was charming in Mirror Mirror and appropriately dramatic in J. Edgar. And hell, he was the best cameo in Entourage.

I realize that The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is based on a television show from the 1960s, but that is super old and I will never watch it for research purposes. All I care about right now is that Armie Hammer gets more leading roles, and damn it, maybe one day he can play a super hero?

pic with henry canville asking if he is jealous

Set during the Cold War, the opening credits of the movie really really want you to realize that after World War II, Germany was broken up into East and West, with West Germany controlled militarily by America and East by the Soviet Union. Why? Because that is where our film starts, and is one of the many places of tension between USA/USSR!

It begins with Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) bringing his American self into East Germany! He is there to see a mechanic, Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander). It turns our her father was a great scientist, who of course worked with the Nazis. He was able to eventually head to America to work on their nuclear program, but two years ago he went missing. Shit.

Solo and the US government think that he is in Italy against his will, working for Victoria (Elizabeth Debicki) and Alexander Vinciguerra (Luca Calvani). They plan on building their own nuclear warhead and using it. No good at all. In fact, this potentially threatens the whole world. Which is why the Soviet Union and United States have to team up! They are going to send Solo, the CIA’s best agent, in with Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer), one of the KGB’s best agents, two men who have battled before, to work together to save the world.

Also featuring Sylvester Groth, Jared Harris, and Hugh Grant.

I have heard that the movie that came out is actually nothing like the TV show outside of people sharing the names. You know what I think? Don’t care. I don’t base reviews off of the source material, just what is presented before me. And what was presented before me ended up being a very entertaining film.

First off, it’s a Guy Ritchie film. Outside of his Sherlock films, I haven’t been able to see one of his movies without subtitles because they usually go way too strong on the accents. That almost happened again at the start, with strong German talk, but we got over it thankfully. The movie itself is HIGHLY stylized. The tone, props, settings, everything screams out that decade. It is one giant love letter to the entire era. The cinematography was wonderful and so was the choreography. It is hard to describe how stylized the film became, with one action scene featuring a very comic book feel despite not being based on the genre.

As for the main characters, Cavill and Hammer both did great jobs with excellent chemistry together. The first scene where they were introduced was able to showcase how fully badass both individuals were, while never really making one seem like the lesser spy. This film has been in production for a long time, and the last guy on before Cavill was actually Tom Cruise, but he had to back out due to Rogue Nation. With Cruise, it would have been a very enjoyable movie, but probably not the same dynamic these two were able to pull off with each other.

The movie was also decently funny. The competition between the leads and them being forced into awkward situations had me laughing quite often. Longer jokes existed too, including the “watch gag” which featured obvious and subtle jokes throughout the film.

I hope at least one more film gets made as a follow up, because I could watch Hammer talk with the Russian accent all day. Not to be ignored, Vikander also held up her own as a relative newcomer to the action genre (because we all should ignore Seventh Son).

Shit. This one is honestly hard to describe. I definitely enjoyed The Man From U.N.C.L.E., but I feel like an eight year old trying to describe…well…anything. I think if I had to say anything, this movie was definitely very cool. Hell, I felt a bit cooler after watching it, almost picking up a pack of cigarettes on my way home while listening to popular band music.

If you see The Man From U.N.C.L.E., you can feel cool, too!

Ohhhh, we got crowdfunding. Right here on the internet! With a Capital C, and that rhymes with “D”, and that stands for “Down with the old way of doing things, this is the future, man!”

If you are cool and hip, like me, you might have put your money on the internet to go into some business that is just starting out or trying something new. I’m taking Kickstarter, or Indiegogo for some of your more counterculture people out there. I guess I have some confessions. I didn’t back the Veronica Mars movie, but I meant to. I also didn’t back Wish I Was Here, but I never was going to. I have only backed one movie on Kickstarter, and it is a super indie film that hasn’t finished in three years yet despite my constant questions.

No, I use Kickstarter for board games and that is about it. But it is the thought that counts.

Some businesses got their start through Kickstarter though and are now financially-ish stable organizations operating in some specific niche that can’t succeed through normal business ways. And sometimes it is a celebrity or older company looking to get back in the game to bring more of what people liked in the past.

This documentary is about how crowdfunding has changed our economic landscape and the lives of a few individuals who have had some crowdfunding success.

This is the type of guy who would appreciate my The Music Man reference up top.

The companies featured include: Freaker! They made some stretchy sock contraption with cool designs to cover your beverage with. I think. They became a success, with constant communication to the consumer, and even got to go on Shark Tank! And then uhh, some bad things. Zach Crain is their main spokesperson.

We have an old computer game company, Interplay, lead by Brian Fargo, who has been trying for decades to get money to make a sequel to his late 1980s game Wasteland. Well, crowdfunding answers their question, leading to one of the most funded projects of all time, and helped lead them to even more title releases.

Finally, we have Jackson Robinson, a man with two last names, who started a kickstarter for Federal Playing Cards, which are basically just really sexy cards. He had a goal of about $8000 and ended up with almost $150,000. However he is just a one man company, with a wife and two very young kids, and his own full time job. He has to deal with the pressure of all of that and feeling alienated out of his own life, while also, maybe, doing a new campaign to get him something even better.

And that is it. Literally the bulk of the documentary is about three successful campaigns and the aftermath of their success and how their lives have changed for better or for worse. Sure, we have other speakers, professors, talking about the idea of crowdfunding in general and any other topic that will pop up. This doesn’t sound like a lot actually happens, but strangely enough it was incredibly interesting to see.

Part of it is to hear the stories, sure. The other reason is that the documentary is filmed with the utmost care of setting up every interview shot with the viewer in mind. It is beautifully shot, which is a surprise given it isn’t about nature or animals. Just people. Just people talkin’ ’bout computers and business. Some of the least sexy sounding words in terms of cinematography. But Capital C makes it work.

I have been told by my peers that Shaun the Sheep is a pretty popular kids television show. About a sheep! And shenanigans! Sheepanigans!

So these people were excited that a movie was coming out. But much like my recent review of The Unbeatables, Shaun the Sheep Movie came out a long time ago in the UK. The delay wasn’t as extreme, but it came out in theaters in February for the British and obviously early August for America. Unlike the last animated film, they didn’t even have to replace the voice actors with Americans, because it is a movie has no words! That makes me feel like it is just petty on their part. Booo pettiness!

This is also one of those movies I knew nothing about going in. It has that classic looking stop animation that the Wallace and Gromit studio is known for, which makes sense given that it is the same studio behind this film. Hell, apparently Shaun is a spin-off character from that franchise. I am seriously behind on my stop motion British genre films.

But I am strangely up to date on my sheep based films.

How do you describe a movie like Shaun the Sheep? Well, hopefully with good grammar and real human words.

Shaun the Sheep lives on a farm! He has an owner, who raises the sheep, a cow, some pigs, and has a dog too, Bitzer. Bitzer runs things around the farm. Sometimes he herds sheep too.

Well, their life is pretty standard. Wake up, eat, get herded, go back to sleep. Not a lot changes and everyone finds it dull. Duller than a pair of kids scissors covered with tape.

So Shaun gets the idea to have a “Day off”, by sort of tricking their owner to think it is still night time, locking him away so they can do whatever they want all day! No one will get hurt, just a few tricks and sheepanigans. But of course like all well laid our plans, something goes wrong. Now Shaun and the sheep and Bitzer have to go on a journey, AWAY from the farm their home, into the big city and you know, do things. Things!

And look! A dog that is actually more dog than human! There are levels of humanization in the animal kingdom!

My review of Shaun the Sheep is going to be short and straight to the point (despite all my fluff already). Shaun the Sheep is a funny and witty stop claymation film. I am always awed by clay/stop motion work, given the extreme amount of time and dedication it takes to getting it all done and done well. One of those things I tried to do as a kid because of all my free time and getting no where fast and giving up after an hour. The camera work despite the just very small sets is also well done, given a few types of shorts I couldn’t even imagine were doable for the genre.

Given the lack of dialogue outside of human mumblings to sounds like words, all of the jokes take place as sight gags or slap stick, and it is great that it leans a lot more in the sight gag department. There is almost always something happening in the background that is interesting, making it a movie you definitely have to pay hard attention to in order to get the full experience. (Which should technically be true for all movies. It just happens to be more true in this film).

If there is one main disappointment I had it would be its length. It sort of seems too long because of the no dialogue. About a third of the way into the film I was fighting back sleep. I was entertained from the movie, but not enough variation in sound was making it hard to fight back the tiredness. After the movie was halfway through, I had no problems anymore. That is when stuff started getting hectic to appease my millennial mind that always needs things exploding to keep my attention.

Despite this, Shaun the Sheep movie will most definitely end up nominated for Best Animated film, but as of now, it will also lose to Inside Out.

The Unbeatables, aka Underdogs, aka Metegol. You might know this movie by one of its names.

It was of course first called Metegol in Argentina, where the film was made and released back in July of 2013! It had the distinction of being the most expensive Argentinian film ever at $21 million, and most expensive animated film in all of Latin America. Given the American budgets on these things, that is a pretty crazy fact.

Needless to say, it did well enough to release internationally. The Unbeatables came out in the UK in August of 2014, same plot and everything, just nice English voices to make the populace happy.

And that is why I am watching this version of the movie. Despite being available for a long time, it isn’t hitting USA theaters until mid August 2015, a whole year after the British counterpart. It was pushed back several times over a year. Well, screw that. If I can legally watch and buy a movie already out, many months before it comes out here with just more American voices instead of British voices, there is really no reason to wait.

No matter the nationality, we can all agree on their fabulous hair.

In a small village in, I dunno, let’s say Mexico, there is a boy who really loves foosball. Young Amadeo (Rupert Grint) works at a small cafe/bar where he cleans and plays foosball all day long. In fact, he got pretty dang good at it. He can score in so many ways, can flip the ball through the air, and you know, other shenanigans. Others do not share his passion, so he gave all of his players a name and personality and often puts them in their own soccer based stories.

Then he met Laura (Eve Posonby), who likes things, and likes foosball, and even maybe likes Amadeo. Then he met Flash (Anthony Head), a pompous boy who never loses and is a soccer star. Well, he sees Laura and also wants to impress her, so he challenges the loser Amadeo. And sure enough, Amadeo wins. This is Flash’s first real loss in anything, so he runs from the town.

Now years later, the town is close to dying, but Amadeo is still there playing foosball and Laura is about to leave. WAIT JUST A SECOND. Flash is back, now a world famous soccer star. The BEST star. Rich beyond imagination. Rich enough to buy his birth town and build the biggest stadium ever there.

Well, the villagers don’t want their town to get demolished. And so eventually Amadeo challenges Flash to a game. If Amadeo wins, he will leave the town forever. Great! Just they aren’t good at real soccer which is what Amadeo has demanded to enact his revenge.

If only…if only there was some nice tear magic out there, that would bring his foosball players back to life, and help him solve his many problems and save the day. If only.

Featuring the voice work of Rob Brydon, Ralf Little, Alistair McGowan, Peter Serafinowicz, and Alex Norton.

Basically, everyone is Pinocchio, but no where close to being real men.

“You can trust me I used to work with FIFA.” That’s an actual quote from this movie and it really made me laugh. I know there has been talk about FIFA being corrupt for years, with the Qatar mess, but it still feels even better to hear that joke after all of the indictments.

The trailers for the US version, Underdogs, are shit. I have seen two of them and they made me immediately hate the film. The animation was odd, the plot was pretty dumb, and, well, yeah. It was very stupid sounding, no way around those words. Surprisingly and thankfully, there was a lot more to the movie than the trailers showcased. That is usually the case, but there are also trailers who show everything and it really felt like one of those moments.

The animation at first bugged me as well, but while watching it, they had clear distinction between the foosball players and people, making them both feel unique in their world. The players had a completely different clunky style that made their existence a bit jarring, but something that made a lot of sense in the film.

Again, a lot more happens in this film than just the “play soccer for the town”, and I am a bit worried some of the other side plots or jokes will get cut from the American version of the story. I might edit this review in the future after watching the new version to see if it deserves the same grade, so as for now, The Unbeatables and not Underdogs is surprisingly worth a watch.