Tag: Comedy

I got very excited about watching Pulling Strings in theaters. Why? Because I had no idea what the movie was about. Zero. Never heard of it. But there it was, just a movie, screening in front of a boy, asking him to love it.

Mostly because I was the only one in the theater. Looks like no one else heard of it either. I was even more excited when I found out it was not rated. What hijinks might this movie provide? Sex on sex? Drugs on sex on crime? Who knows.

Wait. Or it could just be foreign. They don’t rate those movies always. If so, it’s probably just PG or something. Lame.

Foreignness confirmed.

Alejandro (Jaime Camil) is the lead singer of a mariachi band in Mexico City, Mexico. There are a lot of mariachi bands there, but he is the best singer, so really no competition at all. He used to write a lot of original songs too. Until, the incident.

This is actually a real incident, his wife died. Very sad. Now he is a single father, and he is failing at it. Because he works at night, the catholic church school feel like he is being a bad influence on his daughter. He is also in debt to some bad people. So he wants to send her away to her grandparents in Arizona, he just has to get a visa first. Well Rachel (Laura Ramsey) ain’t having none of his shit. He has none of the required forms, no stable income, a non official lease for his house. Nothing. No visa. She barely even looks at him or listens to him.

Speaking of Rachel, she is totally getting transferred to London, but her mother (Stockard Channing) disapproves and wants her to come home. The mom character annoys the piss out of me this movie, even though I think they were going for sympathetic, so I am done talking about her.

Anyways, she gets super drunk at her going away party (which Alejandro performs at), tries to sleep on a bus station, but Alejandro won’t allow that. She won’t tell him her address, because she doesn’t want to go home drunk to her mom, so he just takes her to his house. But she freaks out the next morning when she can’t find a laptop from her boss (Tom Arnold), which has important government data on it. Alejandro finds it in his house, but decides to lead her on a multi day ruse first, where he helps her find it through the back alleys of Mexico, with “scary people” just played by his friends. This will show him as dependable, hard working, smart, and get him that visa! He is …pulling her strings, and also pulls strings on his guitar. Get it?

Alejandro’s best friend comes along for the ride (Omar Chaparro), and also Rachel’s best friend every once in awhile (Catherine Papile).

All in the sexiest van known to man. What an adventure this will be!

For those wondering, this movie is not 100% Spanish. Heck no, we got at least four American characters in here, and they are all embassy people or mothers, so when they interact, all English baby. Also, Rachel doesn’t know Spanish fluently, so she mostly speaks in English to Alejandro. So there is that.

And because we are dealing with a mariachi singer, we totally get a lot of mariachi music. And shit, that Jaime Camil guy can really sing. They gave us subtitles during that part, but I chose to ignore them, because reading lyrics is stupid. I just wanted to feel the music, and the music felt good.

Like any romance movie, this one is based off of lies. They will fall in love, but when she finds out he was lying for two days, she won’t like that. We do get other cliches, we even get the rush to the airport to stop her one. Thankfully, the cliches it seems to openly acknowledge, so we end up getting changes from the norm at the same time.

Overall, I thought this was a really cute movie. It had music, it had a budding romance, it had comedy, and it had a cute ending. 100% of the people in the theater with my agreed with this rating.

Prince Avalanche has the distinction of being the only indie movie this week to come out and actually catch my interest. That interest is easily described coming from two factors.

One – It has a name of Prince Avalanche. What is going on there? I want to be a royal disaster, too!

Two – It has Paul Rudd in it. This might have helped my decision even more than note one.

Well, it is good that the people in this movie work hard.

Alvin (Rudd) and Lance (Emile Hirsch) are construction workers, more or less, working in a remote area. Super remote. Like, only tagging three actors overall remote. It is also set in the 1980s, so a lot of technological luxuries are not present. Just two guys and a truck. Monday through Friday, they work and camp out in the area, drawing lines on the high way, random other bullshit work, who really knows. But on the weekend they can continue with their social lives and interact with their loved ones.

Alvin has a girlfriend, and that girlfriend’s brother happens to be Lance. Aw. It is like they decided together to work this summer because they already knew each other kind of.

They are pretty different, Alvin is a lot more calm and stern, while Lance isn’t an exceptionally hard worker and not really self confident. So he is learning a lot from Alvin.

But things happen in their social lives, those things bringing back both positive and negative energy back to their work environment, making it potentially very difficult.

Also, there is a truck driver (Lance LeGault) who has some speaking lines more than once in this film. Hello truck driver man!

Oooh, they play hard as well!

I really do hate writing reviews out of movies that I get practically nothing out of.

Prince Avalanche is an indie comedy/drama, a pretty standard one at that. What do I mean? I mean not a lot happens in this movie, despite being the length of a normal movie. Realism is taken to the extreme, and we have two guys who work, play, and talk with each other, sometimes yell, and that is about it. Writing that plot description pained me because I really didn’t imagine writing more than two sentences. So if it sounded like stalling, yeah, it basically was.

Not a lot from this story grasped my interest in any way, so it really felt like a battle to get through. The acting? Sure, its okay. Pretty “regular” if anything.

I’d say avoid. It isn’t a complete piece of shit, just felt like a complete waste of time.

“This sounds like a porno.”

That is what the man at the video rental store told me. I agreed. Didn’t even think of that somehow.

I think this is the fifth film I have reviewed that begins with “Para.”

Strangely enough, I didn’t really love any of the first four either. Science tells me that trend will continue with Paranormal Whacktivity.

Yep, we got another damn spoof here.

This is a spoof on Paranormal Activity. One of many, yes, this is just another one.

But this couple is having problems being intimate. And that is mostly because of the demon haunting the house pleasuring the wife, Kasey (Sasha Formoso) at night. The guy, Michael (William Patrick Riley) is a dumb ass, video taping every thing, wanting to make a movie.

It then spends a lot of time trying to spoof other things. Like Ghostbusters, Avatar and there is a line by line remake of a scene from Superbad, just randomly thrown into the middle. The fuck? None of these are even like, modern horrors. Many of these are years late. Was this made in 2009 and considered fresh but hidden for a few years?

I will spoil this. They trick the demon into falling in love with another chick after a big house party, and he leaves them alone. That is also because our main girl has decided to stay with her husband, awww. How sweet.

They look like they are still joking around, even when they scream.

The demon is of course a midget. Because why not.

This was meant to be a comedy. A sexy comedy. But definitely a comedy. Unfortunately they forgot the laughs. They also made the mistake a lot of movies do. Just because a plot point is about sex (or lack thereof), it does not make it sexy. Having a bunch of random attractive doesn’t make it sexy on its own. Heck, this movie I think barely even earns its R rating. I guess it was given to the movie for like, two topless scenes? But it is a pretty weak R besides that.

Parody movies can be done well, and this is an example of one that was done really really badly.

If I could erase this movie from my mind, I would. I’d watch a movie that isn’t even cleverly titled called Paranormal Parody.

Heck, I’d almost rather watch 30 Nights Of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo than this again. Okay, not that desperate. I don’t think I could even touch that movie without forever becoming jaded and insecure.

Back to Paranormal Whacktivity. Don’t watch it. Shit’s bad. It maybe could have been good. But it is bad. Hell, the woman on the cover isn’t even in the movie. Fuck all of that.

What would the world be like, without Jane Austen? I mean, she is basically the go to source for Victorian era living, of all social groups, right? So, without her, people might not ever aspire to be…well, Elizabeth Bennet, I guess.

I’ve actually read Pride and Prejudice too, I know, surprising. I have also seen the movie, Sense and Sensibility, and a few movies modeled off of the two. But never something like this. Never something like Austenland.

Austenland, where everyone is so hot, it makes people sexist.

Let’s talk about Jane Hayes (Keri Russell). She really likes Jane Austen. Like. Really. She has been obsessed with finding her own Mr. Darcy since she was a little girl, and really that is all she thinks about. It has even started to affect her work life.

Well, thanks to some inner city pressure, she finally breaks down and puts her entire life savings into a trip to Austenland! Austenland?? Yes, Austenland. A week long vacation in England to live like they did in Austen times, and experience a person like a character out of a book. Hooray. No, having a week long trip with a fake romance is not a bad idea, just think about it.

The good news is, when she gets there, she is still the most beautiful girl in the room, she just didn’t get a deluxe package so she doesn’t get all the cool stuff with the other guests, Miss Elizabeth Charming (Jennifer Coolidge), very rich, and Lady Amelia Heartwright (Georgia King), a leggie blonde.

But which of these gentlemen will she end up with? There is Mr. Henry Noble (JJ Feild), clearly a Darcy carbon copy, Colonel Andrews (James Callis), very rich and extravagant and nothing like Gaius Baltar, or Captain George East (Ricky Whittle), from the west indies and foreign! But maybe she doesn’t intend to spend her business time with any of them. Maybe she is actually just interested in the stable boy / butler (Bret McKenzie), who is totally real with her and letting her escape the Victorian era she thought she loved so much.

Either way, just because she kisses one guy, they have to realize that a kiss is not a contract.

Also starring Jane Seymour as the hostess, who is not going to meddle with the love affairs of her guests…unless you’re into it. Okay I am done.

Jenny.

The gang’s all here. So what do they do now? Shit’s boring without internet.

It turns out, Austenland is super fucked up. No, it isn’t just a simple romance comedy. It is very fucked up. Like the end of Bubble Boy fucked up. So somewhat comedic, but also really just out there. I won’t go into it any more, but that is what I felt by the end.

Austenland takes a ridiculous concept, and ridiculous characters and decides to make a movie. The beginning is a mess, and adding Jennifer Coolidge has never made me think better of a movie.

But it does have its moments. There are obvious references to Austen’s work. The male suitors are very entertaining, while being over the top. The plot line between “Darcy”/Bret/Keri was actually interesting by the end, go figure.

And sure, we ended with a relatively happy ending, but sad endings in a romance would be stupid. Austenland may be stupid, but it isn’t that stupid.

I am afraid I am going to turn into a total fanboy of Richard Curtis. He is the director of About Time, but before that he also directed Pirate Radio and Love Actually. Two movies that I could watch again and again and gave high marks to. Let’s just say I went into About Time with a bit of a bias.

A bit of a bias, and a bit of a romance-boner. Mmmm, love.

Time travel in movies can be a hard topic to get right. There are many ways they can set up the time travel concept, but the hard part comes in being consistent and still following the rules they set up logically. Plenty of bad films fail at this, About Time keeps it consistent and follows its rules throughout.

Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) was living a loveless and sad life until he learned a family secret. Before then, he always felt like he was missing something. That is when his dad (Bill Nighy) informed him that the men in his family can travel through time once they hit 21. A genetic condition or something.

They can’t go to the future and they can’t travel anywhere in time, but they can revisit moments in their own life, as long as they can remember that moment. They can relive them just for the experience, or they can change their actions, if they dare. Pretty awesome, but also very dangerous. They have to worry about the Butterfly Effect, so the changes can’t be too drastic. Once Tim makes his first trip, he knows exactly how he will use his new power. For love.

He quickly learns that using time travel to make someone love you doesn’t really work. No, he still has to find someone who finds him generally interesting, like the American Mary (Rachel McAdams). For whatever reason, she thinks he is charming, he just uses the time travel to fix his awkwardness. After all, practice makes perfect.

The good news is that this movie deals with more than just romance. Traveling through time gives an individual a lot of power, the power to affect the lives of those around you in meaningful ways. But could you morally handle the pressure of interfering with your friend’s life, instead of letting them choose their own destiny? Can you cope with the death of a loved one, if you know you have the ability to just visit them again in the past over and over again?

On the other hand, if you had some really sweet cake, you could always go back to that too.

By the end of the movie, I found myself crying as it attempted to tackle these hard subjects. About Time doesn’t fall into the same cliches that other films of the genre get caught up with. A lot of comparisons are being made between this movie and The Time Traveler’s Wife, and not just because Rachel McAdams is the the main love interest in both. They deal with love and time travel, but in completely different ways. The Time Traveler’s Wife was sad, but purely a drama/romance. About Time has equal parts drama and comedy, while dealing with more than just love, but life in general.

Gleeson hasn’t been in a lot of movies, and he currently is known for playing Bill Weasley in the later Harry Potter films, but he was a great choice as the lead role. He had a lot of help of course, with Nighy, a staple in Richard Curtis movies playing his father, his guide to the world of time travel, and the main source of drama in the final act. McAdams is really sweet in this film, and plays a character quite different than any of her previous roles. I also enjoyed the mother (Lindsay Duncan) and the sister (Lydia Wilson).

Overall, I think About Time will turn out to be one of those films that I can watch again and again, possibly getting something new out of it after every viewing. My opinions on it will also probably change as I get older, and experience events that the movie touches upon. It is a charming movie in every way. Thank you Richard Curtis, consider me a total fanboy now.

Another day, another Milestone Review.

That’s right, welcome to my 950th review for the website! The only thing really special about this milestone is that it is super close to a real, actual, super duper milestone, at 1000! That review I have been planning for awhile now.

But for now, I am going to talk about Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. I did Journey To The Center Of The Earth as my 850th, because I am a Geologist, and damn it, I wanted to talk a lot about the bad geology and strangeness of that movie. But once a franchise gets suckered into the Milestone review category, it is really hard to get out. Thus a sequel! A third one is coming out eventually, so hopefully that lines up nicely for me.

Speaking of nice, this movie is about an island! Hell yeah. That means it won’t distract me with a bunch of bad geology. I might even be able to enjoy it?!

Oh for fucks sake.

This movie takes place a few years after the first film. Sean (Josh Hutcherson) no longer has to talk about his uncle, because well, he does’t live with his uncle. That was a one time thing. There are zero references to Brendan Fraser in this movie. So he is back to living with his mom, who has finally gotten married, to Hank (Dwayne Johnson). Probably one of the best possible upgrades for adult male star.

The thing is, Sean doesn’t want to hang out with him ever. He is getting into trouble in school, with the local lawmakers, you name it. But why?

Because secrets.

Turns out Sean has been hearing a signal broadcasted by satellite in a code, and he is pretty sure it is from his Grandpa, who hasn’t been seen in two years! He is now a full fledged Vernian, and by golly, Hank was an intelligence person with the Navy. So he helps crack the code, which appears to hint the location/existence of The Mysterious Island. Apparently the same island as Treasure Island and an island in Gulliver’s Travels! Whoa! Collusion between authors! So, fuck it, they somehow convince the mom to let them go and find the dang island, as a way of bring them closer together.

At the island, they find only one man crazy enough to take them. Gabato (Luis Guzman). What? How did Luis Guzman get into this movie?

[This space left intentionally blank]

Turns out he doesn’t have a boat, but a helicopter. Oh well, it will do. He also has a daughter, Kailani (Vanessa Hudgens), who also happens to be around the same age as Sean. How lucky!

Well, they get to the island, but through crash landing. Apparently there is a storm always around it or near it, hooray protection. Too bad they don’t have a way off the island. Looks like the only way they can think of is to first find the grandpa, and use whatever he has to get out. Right? Right?

Well they find him (Michael Caine) pretty easily, it will just be a few weeks before his transportation happens. Shit. Oh well, time to explore then, eh?

Aw yeah, mother fuckin’ ruins and shit.

Through whatever bullshit book source they decide to give us, not only do they determine that this island is home to Atlantis (see above), but it also sinks down to the bottom of the ocean every hundred something years. Of course, plenty of time to do research.

Until Navy Intelligence Speicalist Hank takes the case! No dog, there is salt water in the middle of the island in puddles around Atlantis. For it to get there, the sinking must be early. They probably only have a week or so to get off the island. Well shit. Better hurry on up then.

“No guys seriously, I was in the armed forces for my brains not my brawn!”

So they rush. Oh yeah, what makes this island actually magical or cool? Well, normally big things are small, like a tiny elephant, and normally small things are big, like bees or lizards. In fact, they can ride the bees and the bees are totally like “Oh yeah that’s cool, fuck it, hop on.”

Shit. Luis Guzman and The Rock share a bee. That is some strong bee muscles. Well, turns out after a night of sex appeal and Rock serenading on a ukulele, his calculations were incorrect.

No. They only have mere hours before the island sinks. Oh nooooo!

Not so subtle sex appeal for a PG movie.

So they search for The Nautilus, the submarine from that one book. You know the one. But other bad things happen, like getting split up, and getting greedy. Because shit, that volcano is over a huge gold deposit, and thus gold is all around the base. You will never guess which character makes it his mission to retrieve the gold before the island sinks.

To be fair, they have noble reasons.

Sean and Hank find The Nautilus, but it is off the coast and under water. Shit. Thankfully they can hold their breaths forever, and successfully get down to the submarine. But it won’t start. Oh man, its been inactive so long, it needs power.

If only there was some way for them to get power down there?

Needless to say, things work out, and we are set up for part 3.

So first of all, you can tell this movie really wanted to sell its 3D aspect to the viewers. I didn’t get to see it in 3D, just Blu-Ray, but they have a lot of silly shit fly at your from the screen, and it is really obvious even in the just Blu-Ray version.

Need an example? I found this awesome gif.

To be fair, that was also one of my favorite scenes in the movie. Kid wants to know how to get the ladies. Apparently the correct way is by flexing the pecs back and forth. True. I am falling in love the more and more I watch it, and that shit was hilarious.

I can say without a doubt this movie is better than the last. Now they have an established story line. The first film has the problem of trying to exist in a world where the book…exists. So it isn’t telling the same story, but still does a lot of the same events in that story.

In this one, they don’t worry about telling The Mysterious Island story, they make their own across multiple books. It is just a lot more interesting and less annoying scientifically.

For this one, science wise, it is a bit better, but of course none of the biological implications of the island are explained, the storm, or how it actually can just go up and down every hundred years with no one noticing. Outside of magic.

But it is a lot more amusing and a lot more pretty than the first one.

And again, sorry to Mr. Fraser, but Mr. Johnson is far better suited for this and interesting.

So yeah, this movie isn’t a complete shit storm? Go figure!

I really like hockey. Definitely my favorite sport to watch and cheer for. I also really like movies (you see where this is going?) So generally, hockey movies I am pretty fond of. Goon was fan-fucking-tastic, and Score: A Hockey Musical was so ridiculous, I couldn’t not enjoy it.

Well, the streak of great hockey movies is coming to an end tonight, unfortunately. Because I watched Breakaway.

I know what you are wondering. Yes, they do have helmets that can fit around turbans.

Rajveer Singh (Vinay Virmani) likes hockey. But he is Indian. Indian’s don’t play hockey. That is a fact! But her is actually good. All he does is play pick up with his friends, also all Indian, and they are looked down on by others. No, not by white people, just other older Indians. Indians don’t play hockey. Or Soccer. That is a movie reference of a movie with a similar plot, guys. Don’t make me spell it out.

Anyways, Rajveer had to leave college to work for his father (Anupam Kher), who really hates this hockey thing. He wants him to rise up in the family business that he created when he moved to America, but all Rajveer seems to want to do is play hockey and be a truck driver. No drive.

When Rajveer tries out for a local technically amateur but almost professional team in Toronto, he isn’t given a fair chance at all, despite being a great player. So he gets the idea. Why not just make a team with his friends? Then they can compete in the local tournament, win the cup, beat that other team whose name I can’t remember, and be heroes! Heroes to themselves at least.

Unless…unless the local Indian culture actually finds their tale inspirational and bands behind them? Just don’t tell Rajveer’s dad about it. No, the Speedy Singhs want to prove they can play hockey too. Also starring Camilla Belle as his love interest, Drake as the actual Drake (he likes Hockey, so what?), Russell Peters, and Rob Lowe as the local janitor turned their hockey coach.

Rob Lowe is LITERALLY the most famous person in this movie.

Oh goodness, the cliches.

Before anyone makes the claim, no I am not giving the movie a low rating just because of the first scene. Where our main character was imagining he was on the Toronto Maple Leafs and about to score the game 7 OT winner for the Stanley Cup against the Detroit Red Wings. Not the reason at all, but I did dislike it.

Unfortunately, this film is filled with all the cliches, even ones that are not about sports. There are other plot lines in here, outside of just Indians wanting to play hockey, but they weren’t as important, and just in general side plots. Because all the cliches happen, you will know already how it ends, and yeah, it does. There is even a chance when they might not get to play anymore due to a rule, but hey, they find a way around it. They even found an enforcer. They got it all!

The hockey in this movie isn’t really exciting to watch, and the story isn’t original. There was also a lot of Drake in this movie, more than I expected (which was around zero, I guess). It had some amusing moments, but not enough to make it worth ever watching again.

Every once in awhile I pick out bad movies to even out my website if I have seen too many good movies in theaters recently. I will at least try to pick a probably bad movie by knowing one of the actors in that movie.

Miss Dial is one of those movies, and also a great example of why I will watch random shit and give it a fair shot. Because somehow, despite everything, I really liked it.

No, this is not the people on the cover that made me want to watch it.

Erika (Robinne Lee) works for CPI consumer affairs. Who are they? They cover a lot of products, and take complaints and help answer concerns for people using these products. She can work from home, take calls via her laptop and all she has to do is follow a script and work blah hours a day, while multi tasking and doing whatever. What fun!

Well, except for she hates it. She also has recently heard rumors that her boyfriend, Alex (Jon Huertas) has been fooling around with one of his coworkers on the side. In fact, someone saw them together at dinner, maybe kissing, the night before. No. Not cool. Not cool at all.

So during a break she decides to call her best friend to talk about it but she accidentally dials the wrong number, and ends up having a conversation with some random guy instead. It felt like relief. She felt connected. She wanted to do it more. But with her boss constantly checking in (David H. Lawrence XVII), a queue of dumb consumers that doesn’t ever seem to shrink, and boyfriend troubles, she is having a very strange and confusing afternoon.

And when she calls Kyle (Sam Jaeger), a random NYC number, she feels more connected to him than anyone yet. And he is offering advice. He would be perfect, if she wasn’t so confused with hey boyfriend and you know, he didn’t live far from LA. Dule Hill and Gabrielle Union are also in this movie, but they are just two callers to the complaint department while the other events are unfolding.

Yet note their position on the DVD cover, and note Sam Jaegers.

Hint, Sam Jaeger isn’t on the cover.

Seriously. Dule Hill’s character name is “Popcorn Caller”. He has one scene, and so does Gabrielle Union. They are both famous kind of, but Sam Jaeger is also kind of famous. He is on Parenthood! And the second main character! But no cover. At least his name is on the top?

Despite that. Despite that glaring fact and awkwardly deceitful advertising. I liked the story. I really did.

First off, the movie was basically in real time, since it was mostly conversation, no other events really going on. Made it seem a lot shorter than it ended up being.

Second, a lot of clever shit happened by the end. The way they used phones and just normal conversation into tricking people to tell the truth. It was brilliant.

Third, the complaint people were hilarious. They really were. I knew a lot of people who ended up calling too, bunch of small time actors, getting a scene in to make us laugh. That is awesome.

And fourth, I really enjoyed the ending. I think that is point two. It had its ups and downs, but shit, I was entertained, and overall glad I saw this movie. Weird right?

I got to see the trailer for Girl Most Likely only once, and that was at an independent movie theater before I saw Fruitvale Station.

And I made plans to wait for it on DVD. Wasn’t an appealing trailer, looked super low budget. It looks like one of those stories, written by someone who doesn’t write normally, but is secretly writing about her own life, and this is a way of telling her story.

Yes, I determined that out a trailer once a few months ago. Shut up.

I said shut up, not hold open your mouth. That is just awkward.

Imogene (Kristen Wiig) is about to have a break down. She used to be considered very bright. She was a great writer. She won a huge grant for $30,000 to write a play and have it performed in NYC. But all of her dreams came crashing down and she has been slowly unraveling, enough to chase her long time boyfriend away. So she tries to kill herself.

Oh. Erm. Shit.

She isn’t too good at it though, so she gets hospitalized instead. Even worse than that, she has to be released from the hospital into a loving environment, which they assume is her home in Jersey. Nopenopenope. Her child hood sucked! She was in a single parent home, because her dad died when she was young and her mom (Annette Bening) was trash. Her brother, Ralph, (Christopher Fitzgerald) had it worse, having some form of autism. He is smart, just a recluse. At least he will be there when she moves back.

Oh, and her mom’s new boyfriend, Geourge Bousche, who talks about spirtuality and is quite mysterious (Matt Dillion). And some dude, Lee (Darren Criss), who she has rented out her old room too. Shit, she can’t even stay in her old bed. Oh well, she just has to survive three days until she can go back to her apartment in NYC. Or if her boyfriend comes to pick her up.

One of the two.
One. Of. The. Two.

Ah, Glee has turned Criss into a boy band member. That was unexpected.

Alright, my original thoughts may have been wrong, but I can’t get that same feeling out of my head.

The main character is a play writer going through a tough time. She has to get out of a slump, and is in freak out mode. Like every movie ever about a struggling writer, the events in the film eventually turn into inspiration, and aww, she is accepted again. That isn’t a spoil, because that is a stupid movie cliche, and it totally happens in this one.

So I feel like this movie of this happening is the third level of realization or something. A movie about a writer who writes a play about her life, and this movie might be about her life too secretly.

I think I am babbling.

This movie had some nice moments, I laughed out loud a few times. It also had a lot of whatever moments, like the first part, and the ending. It was just full of rookie movie mistakes. Things were cut oddly, and it all just felt like a lot of rookie movie making mistakes. Full of jokes that just fell flat.

So overall, it was okay. I enjoyed what they tried to do, and some of the things that were done, but thought a lot of it was just not up to par.

I will admit, when I first saw the trailer for Free Birds, I chuckled at a few spots. The nameless government entities making a pun and laughing throughout the trailer was great. A movie about a dumb animal trying to save the world with other dumb animals might lead to a lot of just tongue in cheek situations or rampant fourth wall breaking or who knows what. The possibilities are limitless.

But they also are including time travel, a known killer of many movies, if they define a version that doesn’t make much sense. None of this “its a kids movie!” bullshit either. No, the story has to be somewhat coherent, or else shit is going down.

“Down like a Tom covered in poults.”
“Hey, that’s not a joke, witty, or remotely funny.”
“It would be if we were dealing with chickens, not turkeys!”

Reggie (Owen Wilson) is a freak. He is a smarter than your average turkey, which isn’t hard, because turkeys are dumb. But he is too smart, and refuses to eat and get fattened up for Thanksgiving, which causes the flock to throw him out. Luckily for him, he gets pardoned by the President, which apparently means he can sit around all day, not worry about getting eaten, and just watch TV and eat pizza.

Well, his new awesome reality comes crashing down when Jake (Woody Harrelson) takes him from his home! Oh no! Another Turkey, not some random dude named Jake.

He wants to infiltrate a secret base in Camp David where there is apparently a time machine. He wants to use that time machine to travel back in time to the first Thanksgiving, to take turkeys off the menu. Err okay. Well they do that. And the time machine named S.T.E.V.E. (George Takei), which was built for humans, can somehow understand the gobbles from turkeys.

Then they get there. The turkeys are just extremely obvious metaphors for American Indians, being hunted by the colonists, for this important feasts in a few days. Except these turkeys are all smart. That is right, they are saying turkeys became dumb due to domestication and Thanksgiving. So we have a bunch of smart turkeys and really only one dumb one, Jake. CAN THE TIME TRAVELING TURKEYS SAVE THEIR RACE FROM DESTRUCTION? Will he be able to score with Jenny (Amy Poehler), a smart enough turkey to not believe he is from the future? WILL HUMANS BE CAST AS THE BAD GUYS?

Or you know, will anything really cool happen? Eh.

Does this turkey look high to you?

Man, Owen Wilson I tend to hate at voice acting. Aka Cars and Cars 2. But he was able to show some emotion this time. Well done. Woody Harrelson sounded nothing like himself, so I want to assume that means he put effort into his lines. Having George Takei as navigator of sorts was a “I see what you did there” moment.

But enough about that, lets talk about the plot and other things I disliked. The beginning of the movie is very fast, so much that I’d be willing to bet that 85% or more of the movie takes place in the past, whereas the trailer had mostly set just getting to the time machine. A little misleading. Most of the best jokes were also in the trailer, including jokes that weren’t actually in the movie (due to splicing of the trailer into new jokes, not taking them out of the movie). Meh. I don’t think I would have liked it more if I didn’t see the trailer, however.

Making the turkeys in the past smart is lame. That leaves only one stupid character, and not the hordes of them that they implied in the trailer. That would allow it to have a lot more zany shenanigans! So, overall, the humor in this film isn’t really existent. The theater was practically silent for the most part.

The time travel itself is super sloppy. It was fine early on, but they went back to the present, and all sorts of stuff started to occur that don’t make sense based on how they defined time travel earlier in the film.

The ending is horrible. It just…it just isn’t good. The conflict doesn’t happen, despite a resolution. The resolution leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

So we got an unfunny movie, that breaks its own definitions of time travel, and has a shitty ending. Yawn. Let’s just wait for Frozen at the end of this month.