Review: ‘The World’s End’

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Here is “The World’s End” – from the writers, director and stars of “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” comes a movie about a group of friends reuniting to recreate a pub crawl 20 years after their failed first attempt, and during this pub crawl they work out a number of issues among themselves while also coming to the realization that their old hometown seems to have been taken over all “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” style.

“The World’s End” may be about a group of friends, but really its about two of the guys, ringleader Gary King (Simon Pegg) and Andy Knightley (Nick Frost), and even then, it’s really just about Gary King, BUT REALLY in the end when it’s all said and done this movie is actually about all of us. So the movie starts with a retelling of a pub crawl attempt by five teenagers in a small UK village, with the goal being to down a pint at 12 different pubs over the course of a night. This first attempt is a failure.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Lee Daniels’ The Butler’

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Using this Washington Post profile of real life White House butler Eugene Allen as a way to tell the story of the United States civil rights movement, “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” tells this bold story in bold strokes, but also manages to squeeze in a much more intimate look at the personal cost of said movement on the lives of the families it effected directly. This movie is both dramatic and melodramatic, in your face and reserved, both unbelievable and all too real, and at the very least the most interesting and worthwhile movie playing in theaters right now.

The Butler in this movie is a made up butler (though many of the coolest and notable things that happen to the fake butler in this movie happened to the Mr. Allen for realsies), and we start with him as a kid living and working with his family on a plantation in the 1920s, but if you didn’t know any better, you would have thought this was a plantation in the 1820s, and after this kid endures his mother being raped and his father being murdered, he gets taken into the house by the old racist lady who lives there and is taught how to serve, which he seems to excel at for some reason, like some really shitty superpower.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Kick-Ass 2’

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If I was some sort of stupid film critic superhero, then ambivalence would be my kryptonite, making it as difficult as possible for me to even put together enough words to actually constitute a “review” of some sort. And “Kick-Ass 2” has filled me with this ambivalence, as it doesn’t really seem to commit to anything, bounces back and forth between satire and comic book hero worship, admittedly strives to be good but really is just okay at best, and really it all comes down to an overall story that doesn’t add up to much of anything in the end and a bunch of empty action scenes with nothing behind them.

There just ain’t nothing to sink my teeth into with this movie. A lot of critics are going into fits over the movie’s violence, which is indeed over the top and in some cases done in bad taste, but really there isn’t anything in here that’s worse than what’s on primetime television. Doesn’t anyone wince at digital blood? Does that crap fool anyone? I didn’t think so. At least in “Kick-Ass 2” when someone gets stabbed or shot, there IS the blood (no matter how fake it looks), as much of this movie is about the consequences and repurcussions of the violence, which is better than a lot of PG-13 action movies that regularly feature the obvious deaths of hundreds if not thousands if not MILLIONS of people, usually in the most sanitized and bloodless manner possible. Now THAT’S offensive.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Mud’

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Jeff Nichols started pretty small with the little blood feud Southern-fried drama “Shotgun Stories,” and then followed that up with “Take Shelter,” an oh so slightly bigger Southern-fried movie about a man suffering from visions of an impending apocalyptic storm. And now he’s back with something a little bigger in scope, a Southern-fried coming-of-age drama called “Mud,” which makes Jeff Nichols three-for-three in terms of well-made movies.

In “Mud,” 14-year old Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and his buddy Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) stumble across a dude named Mud (Matthew McConaughey), a fugitive chilling on an island in the Mississippi River in the Arkansas Delta area. Not too many movies made about this region of the world (and as a matter of fact, according to the interwebz, this $2 million movie is the biggest budgeted film ever shot in Arkansas). Mud convinces Ellis and Neckbone to help him fix up a motor boat so Mud can reunite with his girlfriend Juniper (Reese Witherspoon) and get the hell out of dodge.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Conjuring

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Okay, folks, I am a day late and a dollar short on this one, but “The Conjuring” proved to be so popular and generally well liked that I just gotta get something down, on the record, so to speak, as I have finally gotten around to seeing this supposedly “based on a true story” horror movie and there are a couple of things that might be worth noting. You know. For posterity.

So in case ya haven’t heard, “The Conjuring” is on real-life paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) and is loosely based on an investigation of a haunted home in the 1970’s in which a family was terrorized by what was deemed to be a demonic spirit. Good times. Directed by James Wan (Saw, Insidious, Death Sentence), this is a 1970’s styled horror movie, as it is mostly tension built through atmosphere and mood, but with the modern favorite of loading the whole thing with jump scares to keep things moving along, resulting in a pretty decent horror film that has a few things going for it.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Elysium’

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Anyone looking for a dose of political allegory mixed with some intense action and a few outbursts of surprising violence? Want to see Matt Damon in a cybernetic exoskeleton suit? Do you desire an action movie that is more than just chases and gun fights but also includes thoughts and ideas? Then get thee to a movie theater and check out “Elysium,” because this flick is smarter than the average fare (see that? See what I did there?).Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Fruitvale Station’

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Starting out as a “slice of life” type of movie and ending as a brutal tearjerker (a two-hanky movie, they used to call ’em), “Fruitvale Station” is a small movie about a big issue, and the timing of this particular film couldn’t be any more perfect. Just as a gigantic mirror has been held up to this great nation so we can see just how racist we still are as a whole, this movie comes along and openly questions the perceived value of the life of a black youth in today’s America.

You have two choice right now: you can do a Google search on “Oscar Grant” and read about the tragic event that this movie is based on, or you can just go into the movie and let the shocking events fold right in front of you. Now, while I am sure it would be interesting to watch this movie play out without really knowing what the story is really about, I think it actually does the movie a great service to know ahead of time how the story is going to end. And since “Fruitvale Station” starts with real-life cell phone footage from a very fateful and horrendous night on a train station platform in Oakland, California in the early morning of New Year’s Day in 2009, it is apparent that writer/director Ryan Coogler knew this and wanted to make sure the audience indeed knows what this movie is going to end up.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Wolverine’

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“The Wolverine” is the sixth time Hugh Jackman has played the adamantium-laced, clawed, mutton chopped character of Logan, a.k.a. the Wolverine, and the overall quality of the movie aside, this may be my favorite portrayal of this character to date. Focusing on his gift slash curse of healing and pretty much being immortal and his deep sense of loss and loneliness that has built up over the years, this movie is free to get into Logan’s damaged psyche and really dig in the character and what makes him tick, and in the long run it pays off.

“The Wolverine” is a sequel to (the god awful) “X-Men: The Last Stand,” in that Wolverine’s love interest Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) is dead and the rest of the X-Men are pretty much disbanded, leaving Logan all by himself (they also seem to pretty much ignore “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” which is somehow even worse than “X-Men: The Last Stand“). He is literally wandering from town to town, living in the wilderness, looking like a crazy person, and it’s sad to think about such a powerful person just hiding out and having nightmares every night about horrible things that happened in his life. They hit this pretty hard, but obviously it must be horrible to live forever because you get to watch people you care about die all around you, and even if you meet new people and start to care about them, they are going to die eventually as well, and you’ll outlive them all, and that’s a bummer. How many times can you lose people before you stop trying to connect to them anymore?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Upstream Color’

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This is going to be a rough ride, peoples. After several viewings of “Upstream Color,” I feel I have a grasp on the ins and outs of the story itself, but I’ll be honest and tell you that I am struggling with what this thing is actually about, know what I mean? So in the spirit of this film, which is a just a little experimental, I am going to try something new with this particular entry; we’re going to figure this thing out together.

First off, I’m going to need you to see “Upstream Color” for this to work. We need to be on the same wavelength. If you need a quick “review” before checking it out, I offer you this:

“Upstream Color” will surprise you. It will confuse you, and if you are paying attention and also allow it to wash over you, it will also reward you. To simply summarize the story and plot here before you see it would be a disservice, so instead I will say that this movie is about a woman meeting a man and together they help each other understand the world they live in and the forces effecting them, all subconsciously of course, and it all boils down to basic, simple human interaction, wordless even, thoughts conveyed through expressions, emotions reverberated and amplified with a look, all the things we know in our own lives, reflected in this movie that quite simply defies basic classification. Is it a romance? Science fiction? Horror? A mystery? An art film? A tone poem? A thriller?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘R.I.P.D.’

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Well that was a big old waste of everyone’s time and money. I would add “effort” to the list of items of things wasted in the making and viewing of this movie, but sadly that seems to be the one thing that wasn’t even deployed in the first place in the making of “R.I.P.D.”

Hmmm, maybe that’s a little harsh. Let’s start with some positives.

“R.I.P.D.” is a movie about a police department for the dead. When Boston PD veteran and kind of dirty cop Nick (Ryan Reynolds, Safe House, The Change Up) gets killed in the line of duty, he’s given a choice – he can face judgment and the likely scenario of eternal damnation, or he can join the Rest In Peace Department, which is filled with dead lawmen whose job it is to make sure that the dead stay dead, as some of these bad souls escape judgment and manage to continue living on Earth with all us alive people.Continue Reading …