The Bad Guys (2022) - Movie Review

Time for another unorthodox heist film, so soon after the anti-heist of The Duke, and I was quite torn initially going into this. On one hand, it’s the latest DreamWorks animated release, and if nothing else, they also manage to provide interesting material to dig into, even if it doesn’t always hold up alongside its competition. But on the other hand, we have writer Etan Cohen, whose rather inconsistent track record reached a serious nadir a few years back with his work on the unbearably smug Holmes & Watson. As much as I love heist films, this really could go either way and… well, it kinda goes for both of them?

Songbird (2021) - Movie Review

Making a film intrinsically about COVID-19, while COVID-19 is still a thing and still a danger to public health, isn’t an inherently bad idea. All art is reflective of the era in which it was made, and film is no exception; knowing how much the pandemic has fucked up the industry in regards to getting work done and released, working around the conditions involved shouldn’t automatically be seen as a bad thing. I’m not saying that exploiting the situation for profit isn’t shady as all fuck; just that not every production in this space should be seen as such. At least, not until it proves itself to be in that vein.

After what happened with Locked Down, I went into this other film set during COVID lockdown (in a roundabout way, which I’ll get to) with far lower expectations. Other than hearing a fair bit of negative press about it since it first released in the U.S. in December, I’ve resigned myself to the notion that Host was going to be a rare example of a film made in extraordinary circumstances that was itself an extraordinary work of art. I’ve been seeing the word “tasteless” floating around a lot in discussions about Songbird, hence my little spiel about the supposed ethics problems with making a film about a pandemic while said pandemic is still happening, so I was ready for the worst of it. And while that's unfortunately what I got, it wasn't in the form I was expecting.

Dolemite Is My Name (2019) - Movie Review

In the annals of blaxploitation, there are a number of certified classics that basically make the genre what it is remembered for to this day. We’ve even covered a few on here like Super Fly and Shaft, but there’s also Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (and yes, it is the inspiration for the title of that Simpsons episode where Willie chases a dog through some ventilation shafts), Coffy, Foxy Brown, and even more recent efforts like Black Dynamite. But for my money, especially given my own understanding of the genre as a major cornerstone of hip-hop culture, you’d be hard-pressed to find a film more influential than Rudy Ray Moore’s ode to the bad motherfucker that fucks up motherfuckers: Dolemite.

Table 19 (2017) - Movie Review

Even with the amount of hatred I’ve been able to generate over the pretty awful films I’ve covered over the last few years, I have rarely if ever been ungrateful for having sat through them myself. I say that because even the worst films still have enough good grace to give me things to dissect and write about. In fact, it is usually the bad ones that give me the most material, as blind fury is often an easier feeling to express than anything pleasant. This entire blog exists because of my own love for film and writing about film, so I'd be a bit stupid if I was entirely ungrateful for the films that give me the best material to work with. Hell, I'd even go so far as to say that some of my best work has come out of the more egregiously awful films that I've sat through.

 

However, every so often, there comes a film that is so bland, so dull, so not engaging that I am left struggling to properly articulate how I truly feel about the work. We’ve unfortunately got another one of those today so, as you read this, understand that every single word on this page was wrung out of my brain with quite a bit of effort. tl;dr Sorry if this review turns out too boring to slog through.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (2015) - Movie Review