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Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
On Par for Modern Hollywood Remakes (Meaning it Stinks)
First off, this is another movie in which the action sequences last so long that you can go to the bathroom, get a soda, come back and still find the same people fighting the same fights you saw begin 15 minutes earlier. Personally, these type of action movies bore me to tears, because the story has to stop moving every time we watch one of these extended action sequences. In terms of story, the good guys and the bad guys meeting is a plot point. Then they fight, then one of them wins. As an audience member, I'm ready to know who wins as soon as they start fighting. And I really need the lead characters to have some logical reasons for doing what they are doing.
Here's my spoiler: They drive away from someplace for half the movie and then decide to turn around and go back. The only thing that happened was that they picked up a gang of old ladies. That's as deep as it gets right there. They're running away, fighting the whole way, they get away and then they decide to go back, so they have to fight the whole way. Nothing makes much sense, no characters are anything but as shallow as they could have possibly been made. If you like Avatar, you'll like this movie. If you liked Mad Max and Road Warrior, you're going to be angry about how that franchise was exploited in name and setting only.
This character isn't Mad Max. He doesn't have a dog, he doesn't eat dog food, he doesn't eat anything. Nobody in the film ever eats anything. Nor are people clamoring for gasoline, they all just seem to have it. There's an issue with water, but it makes no sense and the entire weak plot seems to depend on it. The movie ends with giant water valves being opened just like the air valves on Mars get turned on in the end of that Governor Arnold movie, I can't remember the name. The reviews calling this something new and different are absolute hogwash. This is nothing but things blowing up and cars crashing for two hours, which, by the way, is another egregious offense of these silly movies. They take a 90 minute movie with a great story line, and they strip it of plot and somehow extend it by 30 minutes. It's a scary trend, the kind of thing that makes one think Idiocracy was prophetic. The less the story and the more things blow up, the higher the ratings. Ridiculous!
The Gunman (2015)
As Tedious as a Textbook
Sean Penn is a true tour de force actor. What makes him so is exactly one thing: his performance in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Since Spicoli, it has been nothing but lackluster, boring rubbish. If you don't believe me, go ahead and watch The Gunman, and put this in your pocket for later: "I told you so."
Javier Bardem uses this stinker as an opportunity to teach us the art of overacting in a second language.
The woman in the film, whose name I don't want to know, is probably the only actress in the world who could match Sean Penn in boringness and lack of on-screen personality. She does a great job of making sure you don't suddenly wake up during the film.
Despite all the above big-money actors doing their best to compete against each other and completely forget the fact that there's a camera in the room with them, this movie can't save itself from its own infestation of story lines. There must be seven different stories taking place here, and none of them interested me in the slightest bit. They all seem overly generic in their progress, but the way they are presented left me highly confused as to what the movie was really about. It's a boring film with too many story lines, all of them predictable, but somehow it has been knotted together in such a way that it almost comes off as a thriller that intends to be hazy until it wants to take shape. This stinker never takes shape, or if it does it's the shape of a pile of warm dog poop on a cold sidewalk, a real 'steamer'.
Nightcrawler (2014)
High Freakin Art, This Is...
This film is ridiculous. The story, the acting, the photography, the editing, the music; it's all just ridiculously good.
The most outstanding features are the acting and the writing. Out of those, Jake's (I can't spell his last name) performance ranks up there with the most memorable screen characters ever, characters like Travis Bickle, Henry Chinasky (Barfly), Jeff Lebowski and Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates. And there are absolutely no weak links in the film's cast. Bill Paxton must be the safest bet in Hollywood, and for this film he's a necessity. All the acting is on par with Paxton's, which means it is all absolutely perfect, and inspired. Rene Russo is perfect as well, and Riz Ahmed is so good that this one film will make him a household name.
The writing seems too good to be true. The dialogue is as memorable as any movie's, and the story is so authentic that I thought this was based on a book. Apparently, this story was written by the director, a first timer. Watch the movie and I'm sure you'll ask yourself how that's possible. Unless there was a deal with the devil involved, I can't understand how such a great and developed story could come from thin air. Maybe we're witnessing the debut of a game-changing director, I don't know. What I do know is that Nightcrawler is one of my favorite films ever, and nobody should have needed to read this much before deciding to go see it.
St. Vincent (2014)
It's A 5 At Best.
Not the worst movie in the world, but it's pretty bad. For starters, just read the tag line: "A young boy finds an unlikely friend...." Is this a genre now? Because there are a lot of these movies, and this one isn't nearly the best of them. So, the story is cliché, and that doesn't ruin a movie on its own, but when the entire production is terribly predictable, the combination of those two things leaves one embarrassed for the cast as they try their hardest to make something unique out of something doomed to be no more than an imitation of something else. And it's not just the story that's predictable, it's every scene. If you're over 30 and have seen a lot of movies, within 15 minutes of this one you'll want to jail the screenwriter for thievery. I saw stolen scenes from at least 5 movies, and I only watched about twenty minutes of this stinker.
Simply put, don't believe the hype. BM is a good actor, but he's not good enough to make this another Rushmore. In fact, this is more like another 'The Razor's Edge'.
Django Unchained (2012)
Andy Warhol Was Right!
When Warhol said that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes, he was almost dead-on. Watch yourself a TED talk and see, Warhol was such a damned genius that he was only 5 minutes off. But he didn't only mean that fame would become an industry and everyday people would achieve it, if for only a little while. He meant there would be different degrees of fame, all for sale, and the lowest form would be 15 minutes of unjustified stardom. He meant that it would be arbitrary.
That's what Quentin Tarantino's fame is; totally arbitrary. He isn't proof that filmmaking geniuses can be found in video stores, he's proof that filmmaking geniuses aren't necessary, and they're too hard to find. It's easier, in these times, to take some hack from a video store and make him into a filmmaking genius, which is what the studios did with this moron. Quentin Tarantino is the boy-band of the movie industry. Kevin Smith was the same thing, but he's been accepted as a hack by now. Quentin rages on. He's a genius, they say. They give him Academy awards for movies that hardly make sense, like this stinker.
This movie, the darling of America, is a total mess. The plot holes are so big they're canyons, and the dialogue is just tired. All the way back to Reservoir Dogs, the dialogue in Tarantino movies all sounds like Quentin sitting around talking to himself and thinking, "Oh my God, that's a cool thing to say."
And that's the crux of this entire film. Quentin Tarantino wants so badly to be cool, as opposed to being the quintessential geek, that he's totally flipped out and dragged his envy of black skin into the equation. He's one step from being the reverse Michael Jackson and dyeing his skin black. He's an ugly white dude and he thinks black men look cool. He's not alone in that, he's alone in his obsession. This isn't a western, it's a bunch of fantasies of Quentin's. He's fantasizing about being a slave, which, I guess, is his way of justifying his envy and his insanity regarding black people. He's going to identify with the entire race with a movie, and forever after he will be accepted as an honorary black man, or something similarly crazy. Ultimately, though, how could Quentin Tarantino be an ugly white geek if he's black? He can't, so he must be cool. I don't know. It's hard to guess the logic of a moron.
His movies have always been a hodgepodge of scenes he thinks are cool, but in this one he didn't even connect them. Actually, I think he's incapable of connecting them. He's not capable of making a decent movie by himself. Luckily, studio people are smarter than he is, and they get him the help he needs, even when it's help writing the films he supposedly writes, and directing them too. Since Reservoir Dogs, other people have been making critical decisions for Quentin, and his movies have been serious studio investments managed by intelligent people. The reason the movies got worse and worse since Pulp Fiction is simple: Quentin has gotten more and more demanding, because he believes his own hype. The studios can't impose enough influence over his movies now to make them any good, but people seem to love them so the studios just go along.
I just can't wait until people come out from under the Tarantino spell. I know they give him awards, I know everybody expects you to like his movies. And that's just one constant in the human condition, I guess. People always shower hacks with affection and hail them as genius while they're alive. Then, generations after forget the hacks and discover some talent from the same period, some poor bastard who went completely unrecognized and died penniless, who revolutionized the very nature of his class of art. It's a shame, because I'd like to see what really talented people are doing with cameras these days, but I'm stuck watching crap like Django because the entire world around me is hypnotized by the fame and genius of a video store clerk.
X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
Enough Already!
Spoiler: I didn't see this movie. Maybe that's not a spoiler. It's more of an admission, one I'm damned proud of. I've had enough of these X-Men movies. They're too many already, and they don't even connect to each other. What in the world does 'Days of Future Past' mean? Is that like 'Back to the Future' articulated so clumsily that it makes your head spin? And if these freaks had a time machine all along, why did it take them so long to turn it on? It doesn't even matter, because I'm just exhausted by the idea of humans and mutants waring up to wipe each other out. Have the damned war already. Isn't it like 20 years now that we've been put on the edge of our seats over this war that's coming? My sensitivities have been callused over, I don't care about mutants anymore. Wipe 'em all out or put them on reservations already. They're a nuisance, and I'm sick of them.
Non-Stop (2014)
Don't Believe the Hype, It's a Stinker
7.2? The fix is in, folks. This stinker deserves a 5.9 and no higher.
'Non-Stop' sort of sucked. It completely missed the mark on almost every level. The characters were poorly developed, especially Liam's, the story was dumb and recycled from four different 'Die Hard' movies and, worst of all, the villain was so clichéd and ambiguous that he might as well not have been in the film at all. To be honest, at this point, I can't even remember who the real villain was. In fact, that's the best way I can think of to sum up 'Non-Stop' with one word. The entire thing is utterly FORGETTABLE. The most intelligent decision you can make right now is to simply forget this film even exists. Move on, and better luck with your next inclination.
Neighbors (2014)
I haven't Even Seen It But I Hate It
Why do I hate it? Because I think Seth Rogan is a terrible actor and an annoying soul, and I've heard the name Zac Effron a million times but haven't actually seen him in anything I know of. What's the appeal to Seth Rogan, and what's a Zac Effron? Screw them both.
Judd's movies are getting worse and worse. He was a one-trick pony that just won't leave the fair. He'll keep doing his one trick forever, or until they cart him off to the glue factory.
Man, I have to write more about this damned movie to submit it, and like I already told you in the title of my review, I haven't actually seen it. Seth Rogan is one of those guys I see making movies and living out the life of a movie star, but I can't figure out how or why. If he were the pest-control guy, you'd get bored of him and want him out of your house in twenty minutes.
There, that's at least ten lines of text.
3 Days to Kill (2014)
A Real Stinker
Cliché after cliché, all of them done horribly wrong. This movie feels like it was pasted together from the scraps and additional scenes of a movie that never made it to the screen because it was so bad. If your car felt as retooled as this movie, it would jump from drive to reverse as you're going down the road. It would shock you (with actual electricity) when you try to turn on the radio, the washer fluid nozzles would be mounted on the INSIDE of the windshield and when you put on your left turn signal the entire vehicle would explode. I don't know what Kevin Costner was thinking, or how Luc Besson's name got attached to this movie. It's as if Luc got drunk and accidentally sold a story to a bartender and a coked-up producer, and the two of them fell out and fought their way to making a crap story into the worst movie possible. The female CIA agent who recruits Costner is one of the worst screen characters I have ever seen. The attempts at making her unique and interesting are so amateurish that I couldn't even make out the intent of the filmmakers. That character alone would ruin a good movie, and this stinker is the furthest thing from a good movie. It doesn't even qualify as a movie if your definition of such includes a coherent story line.
Oculus (2013)
Crappy B-Rate Horror Flick Takes Itself Way Too Seriously
6.8 after 11,000 users? There's something really wrong with the current rating of this film. The reviews are way off as well. I don't quite understand it. The movie is being portrayed through reviews as coming in just under the bar set by 'The Conjuring,' but this movie is nothing more than a low-budget stinker. The acting is crap, the story is crap, the pace is really slow, etc. I have no idea where this film ought to rate in the ranks of low-budget horrors, because I don't watch them. It might be the best crap B-rate movie ever made, I wouldn't know and I don't care. All I know is that this movie is exactly the same to me as every other low-budget independent stinker. I recognize them in the first few seconds and then I shut them off, but for this one I didn't do that. I actually gave it a chance, and then I fast-forwarded to make sure it doesn't get any better. I saw scenes right out of Scooby Doo, Nightmare on Elm Street and Paranormal Activity. The story takes itself very seriously, and I get the impression the screenwriter and director wholeheartedly believed in this film. But it feels like the writer and director are teenagers in awe of something that can't make an adult raise an eyebrow. Don't believe a rating of over 5.0 for this stinker. If you're into low-budget indies, you might find some value in it, but if you expect professionalism in your films, skip it and don't wonder about it any longer.