Jospeh Gordon-Levitt utterly fails to stop being Joseph Gordon-Levitt and disappear into a role as an uncouth dirtbag type who insinuates himself into the life of a young boy who just lost his mother and his working-class father and grandmother. He ain't Brad Pitt in "Kalifornia", that's for sure. Well-made and gritty, and with a good cast (Rainn Wilson, Natalie Portman) but, a little too sentimental and overlong, and failed to engage me.
Decent documentary on Roger Ebert and "At The Movies", by a friend of his. I've always liked Ebert as a critic, this sheds some light on him as a person. Has interviews with his family members, Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, plus you get to see an outtake where Gene Siskel calls him an asshole, which, you always knew must've happened behind the scenes, but never thought you'd see it.
A woman returns to her rural home and winds up crossing the dimensional barrier to be with her dead parents, or some nonsense. I believe this is the pilot for a miniseries or something. Not terribly interesting, very TV-sci-fi-like.
Godawful home-movie-quality "mockumentary" about a bunch of cringily inane college students in 2007 who decide to make a YouTube video, as if that's some sort of event, with not a single laugh to be had anywhere in it.
This appears to be the work of some sort of improv comedy troupe whose primary distinguishing attribute is that one of them owned a movie camera, and thought that entertaining themselves would be entertaining to an audience.
Weirdly, some of the voice work in this apparent home movie is from cast members of Parks & Rec and Reno 911, and it's executive produced by one of the producers behind Portlandia. Why would successful TV comedy people do this to themselves? Was there blackmail involved?
Unfunny Canadian sketch comedy show that only lasted a season, thankfully. I guess sometimes even Canada has an off day.
This odd little sci-fi/not-very-funny black comedy has a certain appeal until it eventually collapses under its own weight. In the near future when all drugs have been made legal, a douchey biochemist tests his latest concotions on his douchey friends. The movie is mostly scenes of people getting fucked up or being hung over in imaginative and increasingly gross ways, yet manages somehow to be slightly entertaining and not anywhere near as bad as that sounds... not surprising, because it's Canadian, and seems to have that typical Canadian entertainment "slightly better than it should have been" thing.
Unfortunately, though, by the end, it sort of gives up the ghost, disappearing into an inscrutable and unsatisfying montage of psychedelic visuals instead of tying up the story. It's too bad.
I have an odd affection for this atrocious Stephen King adaptation about a strange mist that brings a plague of monsters to a Maine town.
Sadly, King adaptations seem to be more often Hollywoodized bubblegum pap like "1408" than "The Shining". This is the former. Aside from the unfortunately usual cringeworthy standards so many King adaptations seem to have, this one scrapes the bottom of the barrel even worse: unbelievable and clichéd story points obviously contrived to add "drama" but only succeeding in adding cringe, two-dimensional characters, and of course the de riguer overally tv-movie-quality productions which King's stories too often attract.
Roger Ebert called it a "competently made Horrible Things Pouncing on People movie", but I think he was being generous. There are moments of true incompetence here, which is surprising, as it was directed by Frank Darabont, who also adapted "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green…
"Fatal Attraction" lite. TV-movie-quality thriller about sexually fluid LA hipsters taken in by a psycho pretending to be an old love. Worse than it sounds.
Just putting here because I forgot to review it and it's a touchstone for a certain variety of film that I find so worthless I can't imagine why they were made. See my review of "Visioneers" for a description.
At one point there seemed to be this new school of thought where you can make a movie by taking one or two high concept self-consciously "weird" ideas which may or may not be worth a whole movie, and wrapping it in stiffly-mannered, self-consciously "weird" acting and direction, with lots of random weirdness thrown in which is supposed to seem meaningful somehow, I suppose. This actually kind of worked in "Schizopolis" (haven't reviewed, google it) but hit its nadir with a small handful of films—still too many—like "An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn" (which I see I have not reviewed, but did sit through).
I'm sorry to see Zach Galiafinakis get involved in one, though. ZG plays in emotionless man (everyone in these movies is either totally overemotional or way over-the-top emotional) working in a workplace which seems to be an uninspired second-rate version of Lumon Corp from "
Wow. The ultimate "A+ for effort" horror/fantasy flick. Fails, but what an effort!
In terms of plot, if it matters, a temporary resident of a mental institution falls for the comatose girl up the hall, who it turns out... nah, I'm not going to spoil it. It's not exactly "different", but it steals so brazenly from films that are, that it is.
This "teen scream"-quality film shamelessly steals from Silence Of The Lambs, Saw, Mirrormask (actually stealing from that one shows impressive discernment) and I'm sure a million others on its way to a far more phantasmagoric second half than anyone could possibly see coming. It goes so far, and commits so hard to what it's trying to do, that it's actually impressive. And it's not even "so bad it's good"... it's not bad bad bad, it's just... aggressively mediocre, in so many ways, yet tries so hard…
James Franco leads a a broad selection of modern comedy actors on a tour up Hollywood's ass.
It's extremely well-directed, with fantastic production values, and a cast with more plusses than minuses, and yet, that can't save it. Franco plays a dyspeptic Hollywood Forrest Gump, finding himself coincidentally involved with a series of the most important directors and film productions between 1970-1982, plus catching Patti Smith at CBGBs, in an aimless and episodic romance revolving around an actress played by Megan Fox, of all people. Arthouse pretensions sink the whole endeavor, and occasional touches of Charlie Kaufman-like throwaway unjustified weirdness, such as Franco philosophizing about "...a secret movie, hidden in every other movie ever made. Who made it? Who put it there?" just make it worse.
Too bad because the production and direction a great. I guess they forgot that if you're going to make a love love…
Zero budget but still somewhat entertaining slice-of-life about a crack-addicted photographer just getting by in LA. Not much plot, and some of the acting is flat-out terrible, but actually kind of manages somehow to be just gritty enough that it wasn't totally terrible. Which, for this kind of movie, is actually kind of an accomplishment. For this kind of movie.
Australian for "OITNB".
Womens' prison drama plays it fairly straight and gritty, doesn't have OITNB's perverse humor. Decent, though, with good acting. Maybe it's Australian for "Oz".
Not terribly thrilling captivity thriller. Weird high-concept background that doesn't really come into play, as children are being put into camps for carrying a zombie cannibal virus, and a group of teens trying to make it to the border stop by Michelle Dockery's rural house, where she poisons and imprisons them. Meh.
I've never been more torn as to whether I liked or hated a film.
This plays like the evil twin of "Being There"—a cheaply-made film in which a deranged man-child, kept imprisoned in squalor and sexually abused by his mother for his entire life, escapes into urban Adelaide, and in a highly episodic series of events is taken, "Chance the gardener"-like, into various people's company, eventually fronting a rock band, and getting laid way more often than a babbling, homeless-looking person who can only repeat things he's heard said to him really ought to be, before ultimately stumbling into true love, all without being able to string together a single coherent sentence.
First off, this film has a lot of taboos—incest and animal cruelty, for starters, as he has sex with his mother and senselessly asphyxiates first his cat and then his parents with plastic wrap.
Then, the…
Barbie and Ken travel back and forth between Barbie land and the real world, with fairly predictable results, in a feminist spoof on the toy dolls and their immense world of merchandising. I'd been curious to see it because it was very well-reviewed, but ultimately my curiosity wasn't justified.
It starts off cute enough, with a fair bit of sly wit and fourth-wall humor, but eventually settles into just-slightly-above-average, too-saccharine Hollywood fare. Lots of positive messages here for girls, which is hard to argue with, and a fair dose of mild misandry, also hard to argue with as it's absolutely no worse than women regularly get treated with in mass media (which may be the point), but also wore a little thin on me personally, because I need more than that in a movie. A plot as clever as the passing jokes would have saved it.
A slow-to-get-going, very quiet but beautifully shot rural folk horror that I'm sure most people will hate but I found very satisfying, once it got going, to the extent that it ever does. A researcher out at a rural pond for not-clearly-specified reasons encounters mounting hallucinations and increasingly hostile locals, with a heavy dose of pagan mythology. Picture a much quieter, almost arthouse "The Wicker Man" or "Midsommar" vibe, but fortunately restrained enough not to be distractingly pretentious.
This was very badly panned by a lot of people on IMDB, but a few seemed to appreciate it as I did, and film buffs might find it to stand out from the pack. Despite being bored for the first part, I did, and by the end I found it very good.
The cinematography stood out, and even a lot of reviewers who hated the film acknowledged that—very reminiscent of Lars…
Goofy, mildly amusing Cartoon Network Adult Swim news parody segment repackaged as a series on Tubi. Fairly funny, although more in a "chuckle" kind of way than a "laugh out loud" kind of way, with cameos from virtually everyone you've seen play a supporting role in a comedy show in the last 15 years. Plus a recurring segment with Ray Wise as a clueless, grouchy old-school commentator, so, as Wise's presence usually indicates, there's a certain baseline that it does maintain. I enjoyed it well enough.
Funny enough, if you like Sacha Baron-Cohen's type of humor. It's not nonstop hilarity but definitely has some laugh-out-loud moments. A big plus is that they added the character of his daughter, played by an eastern European actress who is every bit as funny as he is, which helps a lot. I don't know where they found this woman.
David Cross in a dramedy biopic of a lepidopterist who gets lost on a hiking trip in the woods near Mr. Ranier. A little saccharine and not really funny but not terrible. I've seen worse.
Resonably amusing comedy about a deranged fan stalking a pop star. Samara Weaving. Soundtrack is faintly interesting.
An artist and his wife scream at each other through an endless montage of artsy-fartsy special effects, choppy editing, and frequent changes of film stock. IMDB says it's a story of a man traveling through alternate dimensions after his wife leaves him, but fucked if I could figure that out watching it.
Some sort of BS attempt at weak horror about a filmmaker. As amateurish as it gets. High-school-play-level acting, too talky, leaden pacing.
Decently lit, though, which is funny.
Alcoholic singer comes home to her just-slightly-quirky family in rural Michigan after her dad dies while looking for UFOs in this actually-not-bad-for-a-terrible-Christian-movie flick. Stars Donnie Most and Victoria Jackson, who are, surprisingly, not bad, and most of the production values and acting are better than this sort of fare usually is, possibly owing to this seeming, oddly, to have a budget.
However, I should add that some movies just kind of sit on in the background while I surf the web. This was one of those. The Christian stuff might have been much more annoying had I been paying more attention, I don't know.
Tediously slow, talky folk horror. People out in the woods are stalked by some sort of demonic entity or cult, I'm not sure because I kept zoning out.
The rare snoozer from Terry Gilliam. A 10 year old girl, her odd-duck neighbors, and the corpse of Jeff Bridges inhabit an abandoned rural house. All the gorgeous cinematography you'd expect, and the requisite occasional fantasy sequences, but the plot doesn't, well, the story just doesn't seem to be there. She amuses herself playing with doll heads, interacts with weird characters, and that's about it, for two hours. I hate to pan a Terry Gilliam movie, and, I mean, it wasn't bad, it just didn't have enough story to sustain it for 30 minutes, let alone 2 hours.
Several couples take an experimental drug and argue about their relationships, and argue about their relationships, and argue about their relationships, and argue about their relationships, and argue about their relationships, and argue about their relationships...
Update: I came back a few days later and I had forgotten to close my browser, this was still queued to where I'd turned the TV off. So I watched the last half-hour. Spoiler alert: They spend the rest of the movie arguing about their relationships.
Serious but kind of dull ostensible horror about a young girl kidnapped and put to work in a brothel in a war-torn eastern European country. Plays more like a drama than horror, but I guess they spend a lot of the movie chasing her, so it's a pursuit/captivity flick. Seemed well-made but just didn't hold my attention.
Now, this is a uniquely weird movie. A bizarre and gory tale of unseen forces manipulating humans to commit acts of extreme violence is told entirely with human-sized puppets, which are detailed enough to go straight down the uncanny valley: they blink, they appear to have nearly-real-looking human skin with stray hairs and razor stubble, although the facial expressions are largely unchanging. It helps that it's filmed in real locations.
At first it seems like someone knew they had a fair-to-middling-at-best horror sci-fi on their hands so they decided to make the best of it and elevate it into something truly strange, making suspension of disbelief much easier with the puppet-only production. But, boy, the trick kinda worked.
One critic said, "too damn strange to completely ignore", and I agree with that.
To give an idea of what's going on here, turns out some of the characters are…
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