Review: ‘Straight Outta Compton’

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“Straight Outta Compton” is the kind of movie that manages to serve multiple purposes. On the surface it is a normal biopic, the stereotypical rise and fall (and sometimes rise again) story of a musician or group of musicians, but it also gets into deeper societal issues that unfortunately still resonate today. Racial tensions, unfair policing, government censorship, the power of The Truth, it is all here in this tale of a group of rappers who tapped into a raw nerve in this country and became one of the biggest things going on in all of pop culture.

The opening scene of “Straight Outta Compton” is a grabber, as Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell) is involved in what appears to be a gun deal going south, and just as the tension becomes unbearable, here comes a fully militarized police squad knocking down the door of this drug house in the hood, and Eazy has to ghetto parkour his way out of that house before the police catch him, and as he gets away, the title card SLAMS on to the screen in huge letters, saying “Straight Outta Compton,” immediately telling you that this shit is serious.

This is what makes this movie really work because they take the time to really establish their neighborhood and the nature of their lives, the poverty, the struggle, the self doubt, the crime, this is all important to understand, so that when Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins) and O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) start talking about “reality rap,” we know what reality they are talking about. When we see them get harassed and almost arrested by the police foe the umpteenth time for literally standing while black, and then the very next scene is Ice Cube showing everyone his lyrics for “Fuck the Police,” we totally get why he would go that route, we all know what has compelled him to express himself in such a manner.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Wolfpack’

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“The Wolfpack” is a deeply fascinating documentary, a look at a family situation that is almost impossible to fathom, totally unbelievable if it weren’t for all the filmed evidence on display, a tiny social experiment gone awry, which resulted in a story that has to be seen to be believed. What happens when people are locked away from society for their whole lives? And what happens when those same people are taught about the world via thousands of movies? What does that do to someone? How does that change a person, make them in to what they are? And is that a good or bad thing? This is the essence of “The Wolfpack.”

The Angulo family lives in a four-bedroom apartment in a government housing building in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. And despite living deep in one of the liveliest and most vibrant cities in the world, the Angulos never left their home. The father Oscar was afraid to let his children and wife leave the apartment because he didn’t want anything bad to happen to them, so he obsessively locked everyone away in side the apartment, taking everyone out on only on supervised visits, and forbidding them to talk to anyone at all when they did manage to get outside. Some years would go by and the family would be lucky enough to get out of the apartment nine times, and once there was a year when the family didn’t make it outside at all. This is how Oscar Angulo raised his family, which consists of seven children, six of whom are brothers, all of them locked inside their small bit of public housing like a prison.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Gift’

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“The Gift” is the kind of movie people like to say don’t get made anymore, an original film aimed at the adults, not relying on gimmicks, tricks, huge budgets or some preexisting source material, but instead built on a tight, lean story about actual characters who are more complex than they initially seem. It has much more in common with Alfred Hitchcock than Michael Bay, in the best way possible. It takes the audience on a ride, building up to a pretty wild conclusion, never dumbing down or pandering but instead challenging and engaging, exactly the kind of film that works as a nice palate cleanser after a summer of huge blockbusters.

Simon (Jason Bateman) and Robyn (Rebecca Hall) move back to Simon’s hometown so he can work a new job, and shortly after coming back to town, Simon is seen and approached by Gordon (Joel Edgerton, who also wrote and directed), an old friend from high school. Gordon quickly latches on to Simon and Robyn, dropping by during the day to visit Robyn when Simon is at work and constantly dropping off gifts for them, going out of his way to be kind and giving, which Robyn doesn’t mind too much but Simon gets weirded out by. It becomes obvious that Gordon being back in Simon’s life is upsetting him, even though from the outside Gordon does seem to have the best of intentions. But we know this is a movie, and shit is gonna get intense and so it goes. Simon tries to break off the one-sided friendship with Gordon, and Gordon starts stalking and terrorizing them in small, impossible to prove ways.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Fantastic Four’

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Okay, right off the bat, let’s address the elephant in the room, the fact that according to Rotten Tomatoes, “Fantastic Four” is the worst reviewed comic book movie of all time. OF ALL TIME. This movie is not liked by just about everybody. And I feel like I have to write about this movie with this framework in mind, because while I would never defend this movie as being “good,” there is no way it is as bad as people like to say it is. Quite simply, there are too many good ideas and interesting decisions made to simply write this off like it is some sort of Nic Cage January movie release about whether or not witches were real during the Crusades.

Reed Richards (Miles Teller) is a young scientist and inventor, who I believe in this movie is a senior in high school. That’s one thing in this film that can be chalked up to typical movie wonkiness, in that most of our main characters are played by actors in their late 20’s or early 30’s, yet are consistently referred to as “children.” So Reed and his buddy Ben (Jamie Bell) have worked together to figure out how to transport matter from point A to point B and then make it return back to point A. By doing this, they unknowingly found a way to rip a hole in the fabric of space-time and opened a portal into an alternate dimension to another world parallel to ours. This experiment gets them noticed by the Baxter Company, and they are recruited to help with a larger scale version of the same machine. Reed joins Sue Storm (Kate Mara) and her father Franklin (Reg E. Cathey) to make the experiment work, and they are joined by original project mastermind Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell) and Franklin’s son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), who isn’t that smart seemingly (not like the others anyway) but is great with his hands and “can build anything.” In a manned experiment to the other dimension gone horribly wrong, everyone gets powers, Victor gets stranded, and shit generally hits the fan for the rest of the movie.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation’

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“Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” is the fifth in this film series started in the mid-90’s and based on a television show from the 60’s and 70’s, and it is kind of surprising how long this particular piece of spy-based entertainment has stuck around, and by most accounts, continues to age like fine wine. Cool gadgets and effects, great stunts and action scenes, fun stories with interesting outcomes, the M:I movies have come along way since dangling Tom Cruise on a rope in an all white room almost twenty years ago, and have become a reliable source of serialized, big screen entertainment.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Vacation’

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Well they have been threatening to make this movie for years, so it was inevitable that it was about to happen whether we asked for it or not. “Vacation” picks up where the previous “National Lampoon’s Vacation” movies have left off, picking up and continuing the story of one of America’s most hapless families, this time getting into the not-so-great family life of the next generation of Griswolds.

When “Vegas Vacation” ended 17 years ago in that dark theater you were sitting in, did you immediately wonder what would it be like if Clark’s son Rusty grew up, had a shitty family, and went on his own family vacation? No, you didn’t? Well here you go anyway.

Rusty started out as skinny Anthony Michael Hall in 1983 and is now middle-aged Ed Helms. His oldest son James is a passive dork and a bit of a sensitive weirdo and his youngest son Kevin is a little foul mouthed shit with serious issued with giving respect. And his wife Debbie (the always delightful Christina Applegate) is bored with the marriage to the point of apathy. To get his family out of this rut, Rusty unilaterally decided to amend their summer vacation plans to a road trip from Illinois to California to visit the theme park Wally World a.k.a. the same road trip his dad Clark took his family on all those years ago. And of course things go wrong every step of the way because that’s the point of the movie even existing, to watch a family go through shit, sometimes literally, to get to where they need to be.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Southpaw’

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Every couple of years we get a new boxing movie, usually a tale of a book-dumb but street-wise hustler who is either trying to claw his (or her) way out of poverty or already got out of poverty and claimed fortune and fame only to lose it all and have to work back up from the bottom again. Either it’s achieving the American Dream or seeking redemption for losing that Dream. Usually our lead pugilist has a family to provide for or a life partner to lean on, and usually these things are taken away in some capacity so our hero can, ahem, fight for them. Throw in a training montage or two, some punch-drunk pseudo philosophy, and a few gallons of red-dyed corn syrup, and you have yourself an honest-to-god boxing movie. And in 2015, that movie is called “Southpaw.”Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Ant-Man’

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After years and years of movies about costumed superheroes fighting random bad guys in attempts to save the entire world (if not the whole universe) from destruction and death, often resulting in films that end with twenty-plus minutes of CG-enhanced mayhem, whole buildings being destroyed, entire cities reduced to rubble and ash, often at the hands of some giant energy beam, Marvel has finally made a movie with smaller stakes, a more emotional story, and more relatable characters and situations, and quite frankly, it is one of their best movies. No one was expecting “Ant-Man” to be the answer to the question we all wanted to ask, and yet here it is, intimate, fun, energetic and delightful, a wonderful movie that is a pleasure to watch.

“Ant-Man” centers on Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), who starts the movie fresh out of prison. He just finished a stretch for stealing millions of dollars from some corporation and Robin Hood style returning that money to The People, and now that he’s out, he wants to be a proper father to his little daughter Cassie, which is hard to do when people won’t give him a job or rent him a place to live due to his status as an ex-con. The only way he has any shot of making any money is by meeting up with some friends from prison who have a tip on a job that would require Scott’s cat-burglar skills. Unbeknownst to all of them, this job leads directly to Scott meeting a scientist with a secret piece of technology that would change the way the world sees matter itself.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Terminator Genisys’

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When “The Terminator” came out in the early 1980’s, it hit like a bomb, a low-budget B-movie about a time travelling killer machine, expertly made, blending a chase thriller with science fiction and horror, and it was an instant success. It spawned a fantastic sequel almost a decade later which helped usher in a whole new era of special effects, and then…well, and then more sequels kept happening. They got goofier, sillier, dumber, not as impressive, and somehow worse with each new installment. Here we are in 2015 with the fifth film in this unkillable franchise, and it appears that “Terminator Genisys” just may be the worst of them all.

The story ties directly into the plot of the first movie, in that this film’s set up starts with Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) being saved by John Connor (Jason Clarke) and becoming his right hand man in the war against the machines, and how John Connor leading mankind to victory against the machines directly led to the start of the events in “The Terminator.” Kyle Reese gets sent back in time to save John Connor’s mom Sarah (Emilia Clarke) from the T-800 sent back to her kill, but when he gets to 1984, he finds that events aren’t happening as he expected them to because the timelines have been changed. Skynet has been sending back Terminators to different times to try to stop mankind from having a shot in the future against the machines, and this has changed everything. Sarah was saved by a Terminator when she was nine, and it raised her and trained her so by 1984 she was already a bad ass and really didn’t need Kyle Reese except to maybe father her child so John could be born. And also she plans to travel to 1997 in order to stop Skynet before it goes online and destroys the world, but for some reason Kyle knows they need to go to October 2017 to the true start of Skynet so they can stop them then.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Ted 2’

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Oh comedy sequels. Why do you even exist? We enjoyed the original the first time around when it was fresh and new and interesting, we laughed, we had a good time, and when it was all said and done, we told our friends about it and we all had a good laugh together as we recounted our favorite jokes and bits. And then a couple of years go by, and along comes the inevitable sequel, and we all go see it, and it is just not as good. We chuckle, maybe we’re amused throughout, but familiarity breeds contempt and seeing the same jokes repackaged just feeds right into the law of diminishing returns. It’s more of the same, but somehow it is also less. That is the essence of the comedy sequel. That is “Ted 2.”

When “Ted” came out a few years ago, the idea of a foul-mouthed talking teddy bear hanging out with Mark Wahlberg and doing crazy shit was novel, it was ridiculous and absurd and then we saw the movie and we were surprised when it worked so well. But there is a moment in the beginning of that movie in which it is explained that the world got used to Ted and his talking teddy bear status and he faded into cultural obscurity as a relic of a by-gone era (i.e. 1980’s celebrityhood), and when people encounter him, they don’t care as much as they used to. So should anyone be surprised that the movie is the same way? Because here is “Ted 2” and it is less special and interesting this time around because we’ve already seen this. We get it. It is a talking teddy bear and he hangs out with a guy and they smoke weed and love Flash Gordon and consume Bud Light in every other scene. Why are we spending another two hours with these guys?Continue Reading …