Arctic Justice (2019) - Movie Review

 

Expecting quality control from a talking animal movie nowadays is like asking for the world to start making sense: Most of us would appreciate it, but the chances of it actually happening seem to keep shrinking with each passing day. The latest effort in this undermined subgenre is yet another piece of disposable product designed to be shipped directly to the bargain bin, but this seems to be yet another new variety of bad, even compared to the films I’ve already covered on here. It’s not just bad; it is so lacking in quality control that it can’t even maintain consistency in its badness. And no, that doesn’t mean that it occasionally stumbles into competency. It just means that it goes from bad to a different kind of bad and back again.

The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs (2018) - Movie Review

 

As someone who has gone on record about being rather lukewarm with both the Coen brothers and the entire Western genre, this review is going to prove a little tricky. Doubly so because we’re dealing with an anthology film, the kind of fare that doesn’t exactly lend itself well to cohesion. There’s gonna be duds, there’s gonna be winners, and even then, that’s if you’re lucky; most of the time, it’s a collection of middling stories that wouldn’t be able to warrant a separate release, much less stand on their own alongside each other. Well, with all three ducks lined up in a row, I am thankful to report that this turns out good. Like, really damn good.

Kin (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: While searching an abandoned building for scrap metal, Elijah (Myles Truitt) finds a weapon that is clearly not of this earth. As the original owners of the weapon set out to retrieve, his adoptive older brother Jimmy (Jack Reynor) is on the run from gangster Taylor (James Franco) and he and Elijah hit the road to get away from them all.

The Disaster Artist (2017) - Movie Review

Some films go down as the greatest of their era. Some go down as the greatest of any era. Some go down as the worst of their era, and then trickle down into being the worst of any era. But some films, a rare few, manage to find a middle ground: Something that by all rationality should go down as one of the worst but is instead remembered as something great.

 

There’s been quite a few examples of this in my lifetime alone. The all-round shoddy production values of the Birdemic films have kept coathangers in everyone’s hands since the first one’s release in 2010. M. Night Shyamalan, for many years, was regarded as one of the absolute worst, with such crowning jewels of hilariously awful as The Happening and After Earth under his belt. Hell, depending on who you ask, even the Twilight series enters into this realm of reputation. But for my money, no singular bad film has given me more joy than Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 magnum opus The Room.

 

And apparently, I’m not the only one, seeing as the film’s reputation has grown so much over the last few years that we now have a Hollywood production all about the making of the infamous classic. But how does it hold up?

Why Him? (2016) - Movie Review

The glamourous life of a film critic and spending more time at the cinemas than I do awake in my own house means that I actually understand very little of regular human interaction. That said, knowing how awkward social situations can get to start with, I still understand why meeting the potential in-laws is as nerve-wracking as it is. In fact, again with my lack of experience in the matter in mind, it’s possibly the most awkward prospect of any courtship and the myriad of possibilities (or even just the fear of those possibilities) can lead to quite a bit of misery. As any good comedian knows, misery makes for good comedy, and sure enough that scenario has made for pretty decent rom-com material for many a decade now. Yeah, it may be old hat by now but it has given birth to some good chuckles in the past. Of course, I didn’t realise exactly how old hat it was until I sat down to watch this thing.

Sausage Party (2016) - Movie Review

I once again find myself in a position similar to that when I reviewed Vacation, where I am under the impression that I could watch virtually anything as a follow-up and it’s bound to be a step-up from what I saw previously. While my opinion on Lights Out has been softened slightly in light of its rewrite, make no mistake, I still hate that piece of trash. So, I figured I’d actively go out and find a film I was really looking forward to, and this was certainly it. I’ve made my point about how much I’ve come to appreciate the films produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, but this might have one of the most striking trailers I’ve seen all year. Like, on par if not better than the trailer for 10 Cloverfield Lane, which turned out to be one of the best films of the year so far. Now, with how family-friendly animated films have really taken on board the idea of appealing everyone in said family with more mature story-telling and a basic level of respect for its audiences, I would normally question if making an R-rated animated film is even necessary in today’s day and age. As I’m about to get into, that question got answered in the best way possible.

The Interview (2015) - Movie Review

Well, after the essay I wrote about Fifty Shades Of Fucked Up, I figured I’d follow it up with something a little easier to digest. So here I am talking about a film that nearly kinda maybe could have started a world war… possibly. Yeah, there’s a fair bit of background info to spool through before even getting into the film proper this time round. When you’re dealing with a film centred on the assassination of the leader of a foreign nation, it’d be a miracle if there wasn’t some form of backlash against the film but that’s just the start of it. Between North Korea’s UN ambassador declaring the film as "sponsoring terrorism" and "an act of war", the hacking of Sony Entertainment’s networks by the Guardians of Peace and subsequent leaking of several films along with certain sensitive information, and the reaction to all this that nearly ended up with the film not being released at all, I don’t know whether to call this the greatest marketing ploy ever or an awesome attempt at creating a Homefront LARPing session. Of course, there’s also the possibility that all of this media furore surrounding the film could end up overshadowing it and creating a lot of build-up for what might be a so-so comedy.