Like A Boss (2020) - Movie Review

I’m starting to feel bad for Tiffany Haddish. Oh sure, 2019 proved to be a quite fruitful year for her on the voice-acting front, between The Lego Movie 2 and The Angry Birds Movie 2, but on the live-action front, the side of her that got pushed into the mainstream with Girls Trip? Not so much. Night School was ghastly, her teaming-up with Tyler freaking Perry on Nobody’s Fool couldn’t have possibly sounded like a good idea, and while she managed to pull through okay with The Kitchen, that was largely in spite of everything around her, not because of it. Her current presence as a comedic actress seems to be codified by her being a potential saving throw for a film that needs outside assistance, rather than actually giving her material to work with. And with her latest, it seems like we’ve reached the bottom of the barrel.

Booksmart (2019) - Movie Review

Between Blockers and Eighth Grade, I’m quite glad that we’re getting a bit more variety when it comes to high school-set coming of age stories on the big screen. Not only is it making the teenaged multiplex less of a sausage fest, it’s also highlighting that there’s a whole heap of narrative opportunities that we’ve been missing out on as a collective audience. What’s more, we’re once again dealing with a directorial debut in the form of Olivia Wilde. Knowing what happened last time we checked in on her cinematic efforts, not being left with any good things to say about her, I am both surprised and quite relieved that this film works out as well as it does.

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.

The Boss Baby (2017) - Movie Review

Well, today’s feature marks another genuine first for this blog. Of all the weird and disheartening pre-ambles I’ve seen leading up to a film, I’ve never really come across a film that actively had to convince that it even existed. Seriously, this film comes across like a one-off joke that Baldwin would make in-between Trump caricaturing, or worse yet an Asylum rip-off of last year’s The Boss. It probably doesn’t help that, in the lead-up to its release, I have only ever seen the teaser trailer for this film which barely showed anything.

 

Between the dubious concept and the minimal sketch-length trailer, I can’t be the only one who thought that this thing was a bit suspect. (And yes, I know, Beauty And The Beast trailer thing; I saw this a few days before that hit the news so, over here, it still feels off) Then again, I had similarly negative thoughts with Dreamworks’ last film Trolls’ pre-amble and I ended up really liking that film. Maybe the same could happen here?

The Girl On The Train (2016) - Movie Review

After spending far longer than I was expecting to this year complaining about movie marketing, I finally get to talk about the positives of movie marketing. Specifically, what it is capable of telling studios. The oldest rule in the medium of entertainment is to give the audience what they want, and what we spend our money on confirms that this is a thing we like to see and wouldn’t mind seeing again. It’s the cornerstone for the franchise-heavy filmmaking mindset that Hollywood has made some comfy cash on in recent years (or decades, if we’re being honest).

I say all this because, with only a passing glimpse at this film’s marketing, it is clear that the grease in the production’s gears is the success of David Fincher’s Gone Girl from two years ago. People saw that film in droves, both critics and casuals alike, and I myself would love to see more of that kind of smart and intense thriller. I’ve admitted before to my own fascination with trickery and games of wits, and no film of the last several years did a better job in those two areas than Gone Girl. But that’s where the association gets a little dangerous: This film wants to be seen as another Gone Girl. But is it capable of fulfilling that role? Hell, removed from connections to any other film, is it capable of fulfilling its role as a movie?