Creative Productions, Arrangements and Operations • Art, Technology and Amusements. Software Engineer and certified FileMaker Pro developer and full-stack web developer by day, https//www.kupietz.com
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.
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.
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.
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…
An assassin uses mind-transfer technology to carry out assassinations with other people's bodies. Decent enough outing from Brandon Cronenberg, who's still got his dad's high-concept pretensions (in a good way) but seems to be getting better at his own execution. A bit slow moving, but fans of his contrived-seeming but reasonably interesting other feature "Antiviral" will be familiar with the pacing. Might not be for everybody, but I found it watchable enough.
Overly amateur production about a recoving alcoholic stressing out during the pandemic, which apparently consists of seeing "artsy" video montages and effects, plus way too many real-life clips of Donald Trump being a dick during the pandemic. I guess they thought we needed to be told he's an asshole.
I lasted over an hour, but with 30 minutes left to go, I gave up.
Well-made but irredeemably, genuinely horrible "Funny Games"*-type picture consisting of nothing but brutality as entertainment. Billed as a "black comedy", without a single bit of humor, unless you think violence is funny.
Two down-on-their-luck losers meet a rich couple in a bar who challenge them to an escalating series of repulsive, cruel, and brutally violent dares for massive sums of cash. And that's it, that's all there is. When someone finally wins the final dare, the movie ends with him returning home to his family with the money, and that's it. I supposed it's supposed to read as some sort of redemption that he's sicker than the other guy in how far he's willing to go to save his family's finances. I didn't really see it that way.
David Koechner in the role he was born to play—that's not a good thing—as the leering rich guy.
Elijah Wood, whom I always seem to like, goes to visit the father he's never known (Canadian character actor Stephen McHattie from Pontypool and a whole lot more) at his remote coastal Oregon cabin, and after somewhat of a slow start, what seems like it's going to be a horror movie turns into a low-grade but somewhat fun, twisted neo-noir in the post-Tarantino tradition. I liked it fine, no regrets about watching it. I believe neither Wood nor McHattie have yet let me down at this point.
Found-footage crap about a gorgeous mortician who works on the body of serial killer and is possessed by the entity that made him kill and spends the rest of the movie killing whoever shows up, as seen exclusivey through the funeral home's security cameras and the odd number of body cams that everyone in this movie seems to wear for some reason. Actually has one notable gore scene where she slowly enbalms a living person. Might have been a decent exploitation flick, as exploitation flicks go... if they had just bothered to hire a cameraman.
I think this is a softcore porno that somehow wound up on Tubi. Some sort of horror-themed nonsense about a ouija board summoning a 300-year-old witch is a pretext for showing a lot of unnaturally large tits and trashy people talking about screwing, in the lowest-possible home-movie production quality.
I mean, yeah, if you resurrected a busty 300-year-old witch with a ouija board, I'm sure the first thing she would do is stand in the shower caressing her own body, right? That's the level this thing operates on.
I lasted about 45 minutes before turning it off, but truthfully that was only because I was distracted for a lot of that time by looking up naked photos of one of the actresses on the internet.
Hokey C-grade but fun flick that plays like a forgotten vampire TV show pilot. A gorgeous ex-con, down on her luck, gets hired as a chef for private club catering to a clan of vampires and has episodic adventures in between making steak tartare for everyone in the whole damn place every night.
I dunno, I kinda found it entertaining. Not in a way I'd recommend, though.
This is one of the best awful movies I've ever seen. A jilted college student summons a succubus to get revenge on her ex-boyfriend, and then can't stop her from rampaging. An absolutely amateur, zero budget, probably student-run production. But—I liked it! The actors really commit, and it had odd moments of cheeky humor that worked in much the same way as your friend saying something cheeky might work.
And it stayed in its lane: tt didn't get overambitious, it seemed to know it wasn't working with much and did what it could with what little it had. The sum total was that it was kind of charming how bad it was.
Not-as-bad-as-it-should be little indie horror with a fairly original premise: with no explanation, just a statement that it is so, a shapeshifting serial killer must repeatedly kill people and assuming their forms and memories, leaving their desiccated bodies hidden at a remote farm. He falls in love with a young woman and repeatedly tries to insinuate himself into her life, dealing the whole time with the rate at which the bodies he assumes decay.
Not terrible, for what it is. Not that good, but I'll call it "watchable" because it really should have been so much worse.
High-concept British zombie film takes a talky, philosophical approach with the idea that a "zombie virus" infeecting people is actually elevating them to "second generation" life forms, with a desire to eliminate the first generation, only with far less action and many more dark scenes full of quiet conversation than that concept might lead to expect.
It's a Marvel superhero movie.That generally says it all, in my experience.
Somehow these big Marvel superhero movies remind me of Michael Jackson's adult career: get a bunch of big-name luminaries together with a big budget to expertly craft something that screams "blockbuster", and yet still, somehow, manages to be less than the sum of its parts—the writing just isn't exceptional, it's formula dressed up with big names and glitzy production. . And everybody for some reason thinks it's great, except me.
Basically watchable, for a special-effects superhero action blockbuster. But for as much talent was involved in making this movie, that's a crime.
Nothing special, but a somewhat fun little indie sci-fi/horror flick about a gorgeous ranger stationed alone at a remote fire lookout tower for a month when otherworldly things start happening.
A gorgeous programmer living in a remote desert home with her husband begins to hallucinate creepy things. Then there's some sort of satanic ritual, and then we see her absolutely fine. And that's it. It's atmospheric, but just makes no sense.
This is not a very good movie, but, I will say, it's about ten times better than I expected it to be. I never like Kevin James nor the track record of Adam Sandler's production company, that made this, but rather than being the truly stupid pile of garbage I expected, it's actually—once it gets going, which takes quite a while—a moderately watchable B-grade action comedy, if you don't go into it expecting more than that.
I'm really surprised. Never imagined I'd think anywhere nearly that highly of it.
Decent drama about the politics behind a morning news show and the network that puts it on. It's not top-flight entertainment like "The Larry Sanders Show", nor is it a classic behind-the-scenes drama series with memorable characters like "Mad Men" or "The Sopranos"—and it sure isn't even anywhere near in the same league as "Network"—but the acting is good, and the writing is fairly gripping, every time a season ended I wanted it to go on.
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