Polar (2019) - Movie Review

There are many ways in which a filmmaker can screw up an action flick. Making the hero unconvincing as an action lead, making the villain unconvincing as a viable threat, making the action scenes incoherent or just plain dull to sit through, making the dialogue stringing the action together flat or threadbare, or just making the production as a whole uninteresting. In a genre built on viscera and heart-racing engagement, being boring to sit through is the worst thing an action film can be. Enter this film, which manages to one-up all of that. It’s not just boring; it’s so bafflingly constructed that it should rationally stumble into being interesting purely by accident, and yet can’t even manage to get that far.

Wrinkles The Clown (2019) - Movie Review

It can be difficult to think of a time when clowns weren’t terrifying. Between Pennywise from It in its many variations, the even greater variations of the Joker, not to mention those weird clown sightings that kept popping up in 2016, our culture seems to be hardwired to view these harlequins are something to be afraid of. And in Internet circles, there’s a particular clown that keeps being brought up: Wrinkles The Clown, a Florida-based scary clown for hire that parents can call to scare their naughty kids straight.

The Laundromat (2019) - Movie Review

It’s Steven Soderbergh time again! Yep, not content with gracing NetFlix with merely a single feature this year, he’s made another one already. Soderbergh’s workhorse work ethic is one in the growing list of reasons why I bloody love this man’s work, as this isn’t even the first time he’s pulled a double-feature like this. In 2012, he released both the stripping economic dramedy Magic Mike and the action thriller Haywire. In 2013, he made the medical thriller Side Effects and the Liberace biopic Behind The Candelabra, which were supposed to be his last films before retiring but… yeah, like a man with this much creative drive has it in him to just step away from a medium he clearly adores.

In The Tall Grass (2019) - Movie Review

Write a story about two people in a room. For the entirety of that story, these two never leave that room. There is nothing in it except for themselves. There is nothing that they can do except interact, either through basic conversation or something more… physical. There might be flashbacks to their lives before entering that room, but otherwise, this is where the story takes place. This one room with just two people in it.

Sounds boring, right? Well, it’s one of the more classic tests of great filmmaking: Take that conceit and make it interesting. And writer/director Vincenzo Natali, when he isn’t making genre flicks about bioengineered rape shenanigans (seriously, Splice is a weird movie), has made a career out of pushing that idea to its breaking point. From the theological twists of Cube to the existential dramedy Nothing, whose most memorable scenes show two people in a void of bright white nothingness, he knows how to do a lot with very little scenery. If there was any Stephen King story he'd choose to adapt, of course it’d be this one.

Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (2019) - Movie Review

Hype is the epitome of what social currency looks like. It has zero tangible or even practical value on its own, but it has the power to create so much momentum that it can turn otherwise unassuming media into a colossal event. It is one of the few things I’ve encountered that can completely alter how I approach a given film, whether it’s a recently-released tentpole blockbuster that has everyone and their mother talking on social media, or an older classic that makes me consider how it was received at the time vs. how it is received divorced from its contemporaneous marketing. Sometimes, it leads to moments that can define an entire year, and sometimes, it becomes a disaster that defines an entire generation. This documentary, directed by Jim & Andy’s Chris Smith, covers something that wholly belongs in the latter category.

Countdown (2019) - Movie Review

Well, someone must’ve overheard me when I was complaining about how outdated Sextuplets was, because this horror film falls into the same category. However, this isn’t a matter of questioning whether the idea behind it was ever good, but rather questioning whether the idea is good now. Speaking personally (as if I ever do any different around here, but regardless), I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone use the phrase "there’s an app for that" unironically or outside of a game of Cards Against Humanity. Or, at the very least, it's been many years since that last happened. I can’t find any hard data to prove that this is a script that has been kicking around for a long time, but looking at the end result, I would not be surprised because this is some serious reheated leftovers.

Sextuplets (2019) - Movie Review

Why this premise still a thing that people think is a good idea? A comedic actor reaches a certain level of notoriety that, in order to make bank on their presence on-screen, someone decides that the best way to go is to make more of the actor to spread around, i.e. double-casting. It’s essentially the textbook example of ‘too much of a good thing’, and what makes it worse is that it is rarely if ever implemented by comedians who are tolerable all on their own, let alone in multitudes.

Eddie Murphy did it with the Nutty Professor movies (first one was alright, but c'mon, The Klumps was pretty dire stuff), Adam Sandler infamously tried it in Jack & Jill, and the whole enterprise has become such a cliché that it even made for one of Tropic Thunder’s gag trailers. It’s an idea that shouldn’t exist in a modern release to begin with, so you can imagine how well it turns out in the hands of perennial shite script magnet Marlon Wayans.