We Could Leave This Town And Run Forever

Year: 2005
Director: Andrew Douglas
Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Melissa George, Jimmy Bennett
Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Here we are, folks. The end of the line. Well, actually that’s not accurate. This is my stop. The line continues to stretch on into oblivion, because huckster filmmakers will keep on exploiting the Amityville name until either the art of cinema comes to an end or the heat death of the universe plunges us into eternal darkness, whichever comes first. What we can – for lack of a better word – call the “pure” Amityville franchise ends here, with the high-gloss studio remake of 2005, smack dab in the middle of the tremendous new millennium run of godawful remakes of classic horror titles. Most of these were shepherded into existence by Michael Bay’s production company Platinum Dunes, and oh – would you look at that title card.

Generally speaking, remakes tend to put to rest even the most robust of franchises. We haven’t revisited Crystal Lake or Elm Street since they were interred by their respective Platinum Dunes reboots, and a franchise as rickety as Amityville couldn’t stack up to those giants. So it went the way of Freddy and Jason. Mostly.

You see, unfortunately for the general populace, six years later turbo-indie filmmakers cottoned on to the fact that a town’s name ain’t copyrightable, so slapping the word into the title of their chintzy microbudget ghost project was a ticket to earning a couple extra bucks. Since 2011, one or two faux-Amityville projects have seeped into the market from its darkest, dankest corners every year, with a whopping four dropped onto the world like an anvil in 2016 alone (The Amityville Terror, Amityville: No Escape, Amityville: Vanishing Point, and The Amityville Legacy. I’m exhausted just listing them).

As much of a completist as I am, I don’t consider these universally ignored, artistically anemic works as movies, let alone viable entries into a dotty but venerable franchise. I feel no shame about ignoring them and sparing my already ailing patience. You wouldn’t want to read that much useless bile anyway, and I’ve already wasted my breath on the little-seen back half of this marathon, which nobody needed to be warned away from anyway. So! The buck stops here.

The house screamed “Get Out!” and for once, I’m going to heed that warning.

I daresay we’re pretty familiar with the plot of The Amityville Horror at this point. In the mid-70’s,, newlywed couple Kathy (Melissa George) and George Lutz (Ryan Reynolds) find a home with a price they can’t refuse in Amityville, Long Island. They move in with Kathy’s three children (the most important being played by Chloë Grace Moretz in her film debut) and naught but 28 days later are driven out by the same demonic forces that caused a boy to murder his family with a  shotgun just a year earlier, who this time have their sights set on corrupting George.

The same general plot beats and scare gags play out, with a few notable exceptions:

1. The addition of a rooftop setpiece they loved so damn much they used it twice
2. Liberal application of a shirtless, wet-whenever-possible Ryan Reynolds
3. Not only is the ghost Jodie not a sinister invisible presence, she might as well get third billing
4. It’s hella dumb.

Platinum Dunes strikes again.

To be honest, I was convinced that a remake with a shirtless Ryan Reynolds could only have been an improvement on the original Amityville Horror. I found that film incredibly tedious and lackluster, and the run time of the new version was already a massive improvement. The propaganda artists who wrote the back of the box would have you believe that the film is 90 minutes long, but it clocks out at a fleet hour and twenty, lopping a good 40 minutes off the 1979 entry.

While that was always and continues to be the right decision, every other choice the filmmakers made seems to have been the wrong one. I’m completely used to and even enjoy some sequels and remakes where the ethos is “the same thing, only worse,” but when the original thing was already pretty bad, this all just becomes incredibly punishing.

Amityville ’05 is mirthlessly stupid, top to bottom. It has one of my favorite hallmarks of dumb movies (Melissa George reads aloud the headlines on the microfiche she’s investigating, in case you weren’t paying attention) but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, baby! This is a film where shining a flashlight into someone’s face knocks them over like a bowling pin, and where their solution to the haunted house problem is to take a boat and sail to the middle of a lake (in full view of the house, mind you), as if they saw the end of Friday the 13th and were impressed by Alice’s genius decision-making.

Literally, they just sit on a boat and wait to see if Ryan Reynolds decides to kill them or not. This is beyond stupid Horror Movie Decision-Making, it borders on literal child abuse.

It’s hard to pinpoint the primary problem with the movie, because there’s just so damn many of them. The one that bothered me the most though was how brutally unsubtle the whole thing is. I already touched on how Jodie has been converted from an offscreen menacing presence to a bloated CGI-laden spook who pops in every ten minutes or so for some of the goofiest fright gags you ever did see, but another scene that really ruffles my feathers is the following:

Ryan Reynolds is outside, chopping wood and being sexy. Melissa George runs out, frantically asking where their daughter is! It has been in no way established that he was supposed to be watching her. For all we knew, she’s been chilling in the house this whole time. But now, we’re suddenly supposed to care about this dunderheaded scene that leads to a frightfully silly non-scare that assumes that because Chloë Grace is standing on a boat, she must be in danger(?). None of it makes any sense, but it’s so brutally injected into the screenplay that it isn’t even supported by any sort of context. It just is, and what it is is moronic.

I will admit that there’s one incredibly effective jump scare buried in the mire here, so the movie has that going for it. But the rest of the scares are so effortful that they misjudge their impact and clang uselessly against the screen. The camera goes wild, swopping and whirling in an unnecessarily complicated display that hopes to distract us from the fact that refrigerator magnets moving around isn’t a super scary thing.

The one thing that could have salvaged any sort of atmosphere was the lead performances. Ryan Reynolds is a performer I generally like, and Melissa George is… Melissa George. But they both fumble the ball here. Reynolds especially lets his beard do most of the acting for him. He’s charming in the first act as a handsome, hopeful newlywed, but his descent into madness is accompanied by some of the worst horror movie screaming I’ve ever seen. He yips like a dog, adding extra aftershock screams after long pauses, each yelp a painful stab into your brain.

Amityville ’05 is just exhausting. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it has the wisdom to use Reynolds’ shirtless body as a crutch during some of the shakier scenes, but other than maybe The Amityville Curse, this is the biggest waste of time in the entire franchise, and that is not something I expected to be saying when the marathon finally swung back around to a movie with an actual budget.

TL;DR: The Amityville Horror is a horror film by blunt force trauma, a brutally unsubtle exercise in pointless remaking.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1303
Reviews In This Series
The Amityville Horror (Rosenberg, 1979)
Amityville II: The Possession (Damiani, 1982)
Amityville 3-D (Fleischer, 1983)
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (Stern, 1989)
The Amityville Curse (Berry, 1990)
Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992)
Amityville: A New Generation (Murlowski, 1993)
Amityville Dollhouse (White, 1996)
The Amityville Horror (Douglas, 2005)
Amityville: The Awakening (Khalfoun, 2017)

Girls Next Door

Year: 2016

Director: Nicholas Stoller

Cast: Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne, Zac Efron

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As you may recall, the frat comedy Neighbors landed on my Top 10 list of 2014. It’s a movie that really resonated with me, what with my love of college movies and shirtless Zac Efrons. But more than that, it was a definite surprise: a genuinely funny comedy that was from the Apatow school of filmmaking yet had a hilarious woman up front and center with the man-children. That woman was, of course, Rose Byrne, who proved in neighbors what she would cement in stone and toss into the river with Spy: that she is a tremendously gifted comic talent, capable of delivering outrageous punchlines with deadpan certainty.

As you might imagine, I brought a lot of baggage to Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising. I won’t say the movie completely hefted the load, but it certainly called over a bellboy to pick up a suitcase or two and help me upstairs. But enough with this needlessly elaborate metaphor! Let’s let the movie answer for itself.

Well-spoken, Neighbors 2.

In Neighbors 2, Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly Radner (Rose Byrne) are living a quiet life (literally quiet since the frat next door moved out) with their daughter. When Kelly gets pregnant, they decide to move into a bigger home, but they skimp on the escrow, meaning that they have 30 days to keep the potential buyers convinced that they’re making the right decision, or else they will end up with two homes and empty bank accounts.

Unfortunately, as is wont to happen in comedy sequels, this is the exact time that a group of hard-partying sorority girls led by Shelby (Chloë Grace Moretz) decide to move in next door, frustrated by the American university system’s refusal to allow sororities to throw parties in official sorority houses. They are being mentored by Teddy (Zac Efron), the ex-frat president who is trying to find a place where he belongs now that his friends are all growing up, getting careers and fiancés and whatnot.

Now that we’ve plugged the requisite “man-child who needs to learn to grow up” into the Apatowian formula, let’s get this review rolling.

Basically, the fulcrum on which Neighbors 2 is balanced is sexism: what it is, how it works, what to do if you get it. This is most likely a knee-jerk response to Ann Hornaday’s wildly misguided claim that films like Neighbors promoted misogyny, more or less directly leading to the tragic shooting at UC Santa Barbara back in 2014. Obviously, I’m not here to defend Judd Apatow’s work as un-misogynist, having leveled that complaint against the man myself, but Neighbors (a production in which Apatow held no official role) was very unfairly caught in the crossfire.

However, the film’s use of feminist themes and lessons give depth to what is otherwise a pretty standard comedy sequel plot. It allows its protagonists a new avenue in which to grow rather than undoing their previous character arcs, thus continuing their story in a satisfying, organic manner. One drawback to this approach is a rather overstuffed cast list (between the Radners, the real estate people, the frat bros, the sorority girls, and the crammed-in cameos that waste returning players like Lisa Kudrow, the population of Neighbors 2 is higher than my hometown’s), but that’s a small price to pay for an actually interesting comedy part 2.

One admirably strange side effect of this approach is that it evokes the work of Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. His films, including the famous Battleship Potemkin, have no discernible characters - focusing on the exploits of the collective rather than the individual. And such is the case here. Rather than any one character rising from the pack, it’s just an old collective vs. a young collective. This is not a compliment, but it’s too odd to be quite as frustrating as it could be.

However, the fact does remain that the sorority sisters, as the only major characters that are entirely new to the film, are given no opportunity to develop a real backstory or personality. The character moments for anyone are few and far between, but the girls really do get the short end of the stick, acting as mouthpieces for the film’s feminist themes rather than genuine, unique personalities, skating through a plot that we’ve seen a million times and thus doesn’t feel the need to go into too much detail.

Chloë Grace Moretz does manage some interesting work, ingraining her overconfident bravado with a vulnerable fear about finally being out on her own for the first time and not really understanding how the world works. But overall, her performance falls back a little too often on hers standard, shouted line readings to really assert itself.

By the way, if possible, I’d like some kind of plaque to acknowledge that I’m the first person to ever compare a Zac Efron movie to Battleship Potemkin.

I suppose that, buried beneath the dissertation on sexism, there’s a comedy movie in there somewhere, so let’s talk about it. Neighbors 2 opens with a surprisingly delightful scene that adds a fresh tag onto a totally predictable joke, breathing new life into its gross-out humor and proving that this sequel will have the exact same crude sensibility that made it such a gonzo comedy the first time around.

Obviously, the humor is a notch or so lower than the original, such is the price of sequeldom. But all things considered, Neighbors 2 is a bit of triumph, maintaining much of its comic potency thanks to Rose Byrne’s continuing excellence in the field of machete sharp comic timing and Zac Efron’s continuing willingness to poke fun at himself, adding an element of giddy darkness to his role this time around. If Dirty Grandpa didn’t hang on his filmography like a malignant lump, I might say hew was improving by the year.

There are a lot of genuine laughs in Neighbors 2, especially if your sense of humor is as sophomoric as mine tends to be in my shameful heart of hearts. Only one gag truly rankles, a bit on police racism that scrapes across the film like a jagged edge, capsizing the comedy’s tone with a whiff of too-grim hyperviolence. But other than that, neighbors is a peculiarly solid sequel, never matching its predecessor but always defeating the middling expectations of a comedy continuation.

TL;DR: Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising is an excellent continuation of the original film that's a little too overstuffed to have any real characters but nevertheless funny.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1104

Reviews In This Series

Neighbors (Stoller, 2014)

Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising (Stoller, 2016)

The Ghost And Ms. Moretz

Year: 2014
Director: R. J. Cutler
Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Mireille Enos, Jamie Blackley
Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

If you, like me, have existed inside a movie theater during the year of 2014, you have almost assuredly seen the trailer for If I Stay a minimum of three times per visit and been equally perplexed about the plot of the film each time you gazed upon its choppily-edited facade. Fear no more, gentle readers! For I have ventured into the dark and dangerous chasm of YA cinema to extract that very knowledge for you today.

The things I do for you people.

As (bad) luck would have it, If I Stay is based on the novel of the same name by Gayle Forman. Though I suppose part of the blame should fall on screenwriter Shauna Cross, Forman's experience writing for magazines like Seventeen and Cosmopolitan in no way prepares her to pen anything other than the insipid teenage wish-fulfillment turkey that the film turns out to be.

The plot goes like this. Mia Hall (Chloë Grace Moretz) is a Portland teen with the world at her feet. She's a talented cello player awaiting a letter from Juilliard, her parents - Kat (Mireille Enos) and Denny (Joshua Leonard, recognizable to three cool people as the freaking guy from Blair Witch, how did that happen) - are absurdly lax and supportive, and she had a cool rocker boyfriend named Adam (Jamie Blackley). Although things have been tough with him since he graduated a year ahead of her, she still has a lot to live for.

Until, suddenly, she doesn't. While driving on an icy road, a car accident wrenches her family away from her and she becomes trapped in limbo, watching as hospital workers, relatives, and friends gather around her comatose body, unable to interact with the world or the people that love her. Thus begins a struggle to decide whether or not she should continue living in a world so scarily new to her, mostly told through useless flashbacks.

Absolutely, 100% the key moment you want to be mulling over when deciding to live or die.

The biggest problem with the film is that the storytelling is absolutely, functionally useless. The hospital scenes and random flashbacks (which, I might add, never add information to the story, only fleshing out things we already know from the first scene) are carelessly lumped together like the contents of a toy box. Although for pacing reasons I'm glad that the car crash happens early in the film, there is no narrative drive for any of the flashbacks to occur. They just sort of fart across the screen at random while Mia wanders around the hospital in varying states of ennui, never actively attending to her survival or even wondering just how she got in this position and how she might get out.

There is never a sense that, if she made the conscious decision to keep living, she could actually figure out how the hell to make that happen. The flashbacks that fail to comment on her current situation are just another nail in the vacuous coffin. Also the movie was very clearly not filmed in Portland, but that's a pointless thing to be enraged about in the face of such a gargantuan wall of film-breaking flaws.

Yet watch me continue to be mad. I'm a rebel like that. 

Where do I even begin? How about the arch, self-consciously cool dialogue that slams the audience with purportedly meaningful voiceover (because however could anyone possibly display such heaving literary emotion through a visual medium?!) and dire metaphors about sex and classical music? Yeah, that's a good starting point. There's nothing better than a bland teenage protagonist practically getting down on her knees and tearing out her hair, begging with us, pleading with us to please just notice how damn cool she is.

I get it. You're a loner. Your taste for classical music makes you an outsider in your rock-loving family. But that doesn't mean I have to be subjected to dialogue so terrible it sees the need to explain in excruciating detail what exactly a Juilliard is, or how you always thought of a cello as a solo instrument until some speckly boy showed up in your life. I hate to break it to you, but there's such a thing as an orchestra. You'd think you'd have heard of one what with owning all that super cool classical music which you love to complain that nobody else listens to.

And this may just be the writing, but the central romance is like my post-high school education: no chemistry. Moretz does a fine job in her performance overall, but she can't find a foothold with Blackley, who sighs out his lines like he's in the midst of a deep sleep.

What more can I say? If I Stay is entertaining enough as a trashy teen soap, but the plot structure actively mutinies against itself, the writing is ear-gougingly annoying, and there is nothing at the center holding it all together. It's not even worthy of being forgotten. It's just an utter nothing of a film, not offensive enough to make a fuss but not remotely good enough to waste your time on.

TL;DR: If I Stay is not worth the salt in all the tears you won't cry over it.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 901

A Sketchy Comedy

Year: 2013

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Movie 43 is sketch comedy, so for better or for worse there's at least a frequent shift in attention. For the laggiest parts of the film this is a boon, but for the few and far between "good" sketches, this means being dragged unwillingly into yet another prolonged scatological gag that is only made worse by the relative quality of the sketch before it.

There are several funny jokes in this comedy movie, thankfully. But finding them is like panning for gold downstream from a cow field. Sometimes you'll find something shiny and glittering but mostly you end up with a panful of crap.

Let's break down some sketches, shall we?

"The Pitch"

Director: Peter Farrelly

Cast: Dennis Quaid, Greg Kinnear, Common

The awful one in between all the other awful ones.

Much like in the horror anthology series V/H/S, there is an interstitial sketch that links everything together into one big heaving mass. In this case, it's a series of pitches for a movie that Charlie (Dennis Quaid) wants to get made. Studio executive Griffin (Greg Kinnear) shoots them down because, frankly, they're a better fit for awful sketch comedy than an actual feature film.

Desperate, Charlie demands that Griffin get his boss(some rapper called Common)'s approval to greenlight the script at gunpoint. Through remarkably uncomic escalation, tensions with Griffin's boss reach a boiling point and he ends up with the gun pointed right at his boss's head.

On top of this linking sketch being a grueling series of reminders of how terrible each of the sketch ideas are, it starts with an Isabella Rossellini fart joke and goes downhill from there, ending up with forced fellatio and a meta gag that is baffling even by the haggard standards of this script.

The One Good Joke: A cameo by Seth McFarlane pitching a new sitcom called "Hollacaust" is surprisingly self-aware and funny.

"The Catch"

Director: Peter Farrelly

Cast: Kate Winslet, Hugh Jackman

Beth (Kate Winslet)'s blind date goes horribly wrong when the handsome Davis (Hugh Jackman) turns out to have balls on his chin. Seriously.

Right off the bat, the movie homes in on its primary goals - getting the biggest stars they can to do the stupidest and/or grossest stuff they can think of. There's a place for grossout humor, but a script where they can't think of anything funny beyond "chin testicles" is not that place.

This film is just an endless cycle of ball joke - reaction shot - grossout that doesn't see fit to even resolve itself with a punchline. It's tedious and further proof that Peter Farrelly burnt himself out on directing There's Something About Mary, because not a single film he's directed since 1998 has had any merit whatsoever.

The One Good Joke: OK, when he's forced to kiss her on the forehead while taking a photo and they end up in her face, it's kinda funny. But it doesn't justify the total lack of direction the sketch has.

"Homeschooled"

Director: Will Graham

Cast: Liev Schreiber, Naomi Watts, Jeremy Allen White

Homeschooler Kevin (Jeremy Allen White)'s parents (Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber) want him to have a totally normal high school experience - complete with emotional trauma.

OK, this one was actually pretty good. Watching this kid's parents act like petulant high schoolers to maintain the loneliness and alienation that are an essential part of the high school experience is a sharp concept.

But the trouble is, as the good gags rolled out and nothing came up to replace them, they kept going further and further in the hopes that audiences would laugh at the obscenity and not notice the absence of humor. This sketch doesn't "end" as much as it just throws in some incest jokes, runs out of steam, and dies panting on the carpet.

The One Good Joke: Kevin's mom knocks his books down in the hallway and calls him mean names.

"The Proposition"

Director: Steve Carr

Cast: Anna Faris, Chris Pratt, J. B. Smoove

Vanessa (Anna Faris) wants Jason (Chris Pratt) to move things to the next level.

Real quick: What is the sketch that you think would spring forth from the fertile imagination of the man behind Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Dr. Doolittle 2, and a short film called Touch a Tit, Save a Tit?

Did you guess something lowbrow and inane? Close.

It's actually much much worse. 

Vanessa wants Jason to poop on her. That's it. No more comedy. After that first reveal, the sketch is just an unending conveyor belt of advice on how best to poop on your girl. Several burritos and laxatives later, he really needs to poop but she wants to savor the moment.

Ha?

I can't even with this one. It's just five minutes of a guy needing to poop and then he gets hit by a car and no I'm not making that up.

The One Good Joke: I don't know if I can even keep doing this.

"Veronica"

Director: Griffin Dunne

Cast: Kieran Culkin, Emma Stone

Neil (Kieran Culkin) is working as a cashier at a grocery store when his ex Veronic (Emma Stone) comes in. There's dirty flirting, and some of what they say is caught on the intercom.

That's it. This sketch is approximately 45 seconds long. There are no discernible jokes and the microphone seems to be able to turn itself on and off at will.

Emma Stone tries her hardest and manages to eke some laughs out of a "joke" that can't even be considered a full-fledged premise. I'm talking failing out of Premise School and huffing crack on the street-level jokesmithy here.

The One Good Joke: It's not even a joke, but Emma Stone's line delivery makes it so. Hence, it would do me no good to repeat it here.

"iBabe"

Director: Steven Brill

Cast: Richard Gere, Kate Bosworth, Jack McBrayer

A company has created an MP3 player that looks like a naked woman, but there's a dangerous fan in the area where her vagina should be that is harming teen boys who try to get creative.

A sketch invented solely as a medium for showing boobs. Again, there's not so much "jokes" here as there is a table discussion of fans and vaginas. And nobody but Kate Bosworth realizing that this might be a bad idea.

The dialogue meanders around the room and fades into the wind, as neither the actors nor the audience really care what anybody is saying at this point.

The One Good Joke: Their solution is to run a commercial with the tagline "iBabe. Don't f*ck it."

"Super Hero Speed Dating"

Director: James Duffy

Cast: Jason Sudeikis, Justin Long, Uma Thurman

Batman (Jason Sudeikis) embarrasses Robin (Justin Long) on a blind date by being supremely inappropriate.

When your superhero parody would be just as funny (funny being a relative term here) if every one of the characters was just a regular person, you've got a problem here. It's just a cheap way to wring laughs by putting a guy in a 99 cent Batman suit and having him talk about vaginas.

And show Superman as a Guido with jizz in his hair.

Another sketch with no ending, it just cuts to black once they run out of things to say.

The One Good Joke: Supergirl (Kristen Bell) can see Batman hiding under the table as he gives Robin advice, not with her X-ray vision as he suspects, but because it's a tiny café table and his butt is sticking out.

"Middleschool Date"

Director: Elizabeth Banks

Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Patrick Warburton

Amanda (Chloë Grace Moretz) gets her first period in a house full of boys. Periods are gross.

Isn't it weird that this movie and Carrie came out the same year? Chloë is just getting her period all over the place in 2013. Although this kind of humor is played out, some of the boys' attempts to help despite not knowing anything about periods are pretty funny.

Honestly, as a cinematic directorial debut for Elizabeth Banks, she could have done a lot worse.

The One Good Joke: One of the panicking boys proffers a sponge to Amanda.

"Happy Birthday"

Director: Brett Ratner

Cast: Seann William Scott, Johnny Knoxville, Gerard Butler

In retribution for sleeping with Brian (Seann William Scott)'s girlfriend, Pete (Johnny Knoxville) captures him a Leprechaun (Gerard Butler).

Finally, a breath of fresh air. Instead of scatological humor, this sketch uses violence to disguise the fact that it doesn't actually contain jokes. At least it's a new one.

And to be fair, it does have a punchline unlike most of the other sketches. Unfortunately, the punchline has nothing to do with the actual story, isn't funny, and just... dumb! EVERYTHING IS DUMB.

The One Good Joke: Nothing. Nothing about this is funny.

"Truth or Dare"

Director: Peter Farrelly

Cast: Halle Berry, Stephen Merchant

Emily (Halle Berry) is bored of internet dating so she invites her newest blind date (Stephen Merchant) to a game of truth or dare in a Mexican restaurant instead of small talk.

This one is up there with "Homeschooling" in that it had a really great beginning! Berry and Merchant have really sweet chemistry and the sketch was promising to be quite charming before it turned right down the road of all the others, investing way too much time in crass humor including, but not limited to, a baster full of hot sauce shoved into her vagina and massive breast implants.

It's quite dispiriting, because I was really beginning to like this one.

The One Good Joke: Emily is dared to blow out the candles on a kid's birthday cake before he gets a chance to.

"Victory's Glory"

Director: Rusty Cundieff

Cast: Terrence Howard

A five minute sketch with one joke: Black people are good at basketball.

For five whole minutes.

The One Good Joke: There's only one joke and it's not good.

"Beezel"

Director: James Gunn

Cast: Elizabeth Banks, Josh Duhamel

Amy (Elizabeth Banks)'s boyfriend Anson (Josh Duhamel) has a cat named Beezel that is in love with him to the point that it attempts murder.

Right when you think the movie's over, they shove this one on in with the end credits and Jesus Christ is it just a train wreck of biblical proportions. Have you ever wanted to see Effie Trinkett get hit by a car and then go to town on a CGI effect with a shovel? OK, maybe.

But have you ever wanted to see a cartoon cat jerk off to pictures of Josh Duhamel in a Speedo while anally penetrating itself?

You'd do well to just turn this film off after "Victory's Glory."

Actually you'd do even better just to avoid the film in its entirety.

The One Good Joke: Josh Duhamel has this on his résumé forever.

Also there's two commercial parodies, but I am not going to talk about them because WHAT THE HELL ARE COMMERCIAL PARODIES DOING IN A MOVIE. NO. NO. I HAVE REACHED THE END OF MY ROPE, GUYS.

The only reason this movie exists is for actors who want to direct to have an opportunity to try it out in a low-risk cinematic environment.

Movie 43 is 90 minutes of celebrity after celebrity being pitched into the brackish waters of bottom-feeding grossout comedy and slowly sinking into the muck. Only Emma Stone, Chloë Grace Moretz, and maybe Seth McFarlane manage to thrash themselves loose by attacking the dialogue with the power of sheer comedy.

Basically, between this film and Gary Marshall's systematic attempts to ruin beloved American holidays, there's nobody left in Hollywood to embarrass.

Sketch Ranking:

#12 "Beezel"

#11 "The Proposition"

#10 "Happy Birthday"

#9 "Victory's Glory"

#8 "The Pitch"

#7 "Super Hero Speed Dating"

#6 "iBabe"

#5 "Veronica"

#4 "The Catch"

#3 "Homeschooled"

#2 "Truth or Dare"

#1 "Middleschool Date"

But only the top 3 are any good at all.

TL;DR: Movie 43 isn't a good film.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 2013

Thy Will Be Done

Year: 2013

Director: Kimberly Peirce

Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Julianne Moore, Gabriella Wilde

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

There is, of course, only one question that any review of Carrie needs to answer: Is it as good as the 1976 Brian De Palma classic?

The answer is of course not, but the film itself is nothing to scoff at.

I'm just as shocked as you.

Let's switch things up and start with the problems for once so I can actually end this review on a good note. And there are a number of them, but they aren't nearly so critical as all that.

1) Chloë Grace Moretz is not an outsider.

This girl's a superstar and she can't entirely shake that charisma, which I suppose isn't a bad thing for Chloë. But occasionally it's hard to watch this amazing girl cowering in the corner without thinking "Stand up straight and take charge, you got this girl." Also her shower scene was way more sensual than the story called for. Sorry girl, you're awesome. But Carrie White... isn't.

2) The film is a little too eager to punch those early moments.

We get it. She's discovering her powers. When she gets angry, things start to move. We figured that out with the tampon hurricane in the locker room. And the water cooler exploding. And the mirror shattering. And the door cracking. And the fact that we've all already seen Carrie. It's just like Twilight drawing out the part where Bella discovers that Edward is a vampire. Yeah, you're your own story, but calm down. American audiences aren't as dumb as the Zac Efron trailer before the film would have you believe.

3) Really? This is high school?

This is Carrie's friend Sue.

This is Carrie's enemy, Billy.

If those two are high school aged, I really missed out.

4) The film relies too much on creaky CGI.

How hard is it to unspool some fishing line and go to town? The visual effects really show their seams and it all ends up feeling too glossy and sharp, like licking a page of a magazine.

That last flaw is the most evident and comes closest to dampening the movie's effect but where Carrie has strengths, Carrie has strengths.

Pictured: Strengths.

Now that we have those out of the way, we can talk about nice things and plot! If you are one of the few people who doesn't know this story (And they're out there. There are tens of them!), Carrie is about a young woman named Carrie White (Moretz) who lives under the iron fist of her devoutly religious mother Margaret (Julianne Moore).

One day when she gets her first period in the locker room, she is mercilessly mocked by a gang of girls led by Chris Hargensen (Portia Doubleday), a Regina George if there ever was one. In her anger, Carrie discovers that along with her period has come a mysterious power to make things move with her mind.

Sue Snell (Gabriella Wilde) has extreme guilt about having been part of the group that made fun of Carrie and she talks her boyfriend Tommy (Ansel Elgort) into asking Carrie to prom to make her feel better. Meanwhile, Chris and her hot boyfriend Billy (Alex Russell) make a plan to ruin Carrie's special night via a lovely pig's blood facial.

High school is like being pelted with bloody tampons every single second of your waking existence. My grandfather claims it was the best time of his life. He must have been really hot back then.

One of the most exciting things about Carrie is its old fashioned approach to horror. There's no jump scares here, just plain old nerve wracking creepiness. Now, a lot of the tension is lost because you know exactly what's going to happen (The Statute of Spoiler Limitations has long since run out on a 1976 film based on a 1974 novella), but the film still packs plenty of punch, mostly in the scenes where Julianne Moore and Chloë Grace get to square off.

The decisions to cast Moore and Moretz were the first and third most effective choices for the film, the second being Judy Greer as Ms. Desjardin, the gym teacher who just wants to see Carrie succeed. Greer (whose career highlight thus far has been as the inimitable Kitty Sanchez on Arrested Development) works in a pitch perfect comic register that balances out the film quite nicely and her motherly affection toward Carrie is utterly compelling.

Between that, Moore's gut-wrenchingly terrifying and zealous histrionics, and Moretz's naïve charm (her nervous smile put me in the mind of Boris Karloff in Bride of Frankenstein more than a few times), Carrie has more than enough legs to stand on.

Two. You only need two.

And frankly this is a story that, although simple, deserves to be retold. Openly lesbian director Kimberly Peirce (whose biggest feature by far is her debut film Boys Don't Cry) updates the timeless themes (namely: teenagers suck) and pulls them into a new world pervaded with social media and cyberbullying.

This past decade, the dangers of bullying have been receiving a lot more press and activist groups are becoming much more numerous and involved with high schools across the country. People are beginning to stand up for themselves and fight against something that has up until now merely been seen as an unpleasant but expected institution in the lives of young men and women.

Essentially, the time has never been riper for a reinvention of Stephen King's fabulous freshman debut, and although the film feels somewhat insubstantial when held to the light of his masterwork of exploring a young woman's development, at the end of the day it has something to say, it's disturbing when it wants to be, and it never slows down.

Carrie is enjoyable to the very end, no matter how many times this story has been reworked.

The devil never dies, it just keeps coming back. And this devil of a tale is unstoppable.

TL;DR: Carrie is perhaps unnecessary, but not even remotely unenjoyable.

Rating: 8/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Yes, especially considering this is the only wide release horror film of this year (gag me with a spoon). Support horror! Happy Halloween!

Word Count: 1053

Half Assed

Editor's Note: This post is rated R for necessary swearing in the plot synopsis. Although considering that it's  Kick-Ass 2, so you should really already know what you're in for.

Year: 2013

Director: Jeff Wadlow

Cast: Aaron Taylor Johnson, Chloë Grace Moretz, Christopher Mintz-Plasse

Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Am I the only one who thinks it's weird that all three of the top-billed cast members have triple names? People have got to calm down. You gotta earn that distinction. When you think you can reasonably compete with Neil Patrick Harris or Sarah Michelle Gellar, give me a call.

First, a caveat. I have little to no recollection of the original Kick-Ass, so forgive me if I sound like an idiot for not understanding a couple minor plot points.

Second, Jim Carrey has renounced his support of this film due to its violent content, and we shall make no judgements on or further mention of this stupidity.

"There's a dog on your balls." 

That quote could be from a number of his movies, to tell you the truth.

KA2 presumably follows the events of the first film, which is but a shimmering mirage on the highway of my memory. Kick-Ass/Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor Johnson) has retired from superherodom, but when a slew of copycat vigilantes takes to the streets, he decides high school is too boring and begins his training again under the guidance of his old friend Hit Girl/Mindy Macready (Chloë Grace Moretz).

However, Mindy's new guardian has decided that maybe a fifteen-year-old girl shouldn't be out fighting crime, even if she is awesome at it. She is forced to attempt to assimilate into the world of a normal high school freshman and Dave, rudderless, joins a crew of vigilantes known as Justice Forever, led by Colonel Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey).

Unbeknownst to the teen, his old arch-rival (or ex-friend. I don't remember, I don't care, but he hates him. He killed his dad with a bazooka. That would make anybody mad. Even Gandhi, probably.), Chris D'Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) has donned leather bondage gear and is parading around under the moniker The Motherfucker, gathering a group of heavy hitters to become the world's first real supervillain and destroy Kick-Ass once and for all.

And then violence and punching, mainly.

And pube beards.

The film's best scenes are invariably the ones where Hit Girl gets the most to do as she takes on hooded baddies and Regina Georges with aplomb. 

During her brief retirement from kicking ass, she is mentored on the art of being popular by a girl who's clearly 20 (The fact that Moretz is 16 in real life only highlights how outrageously old all the other "high school students" in the film are). She auditions for the dance team with some spectacular martial arts-derived moves, falls in love with her first boy band (In the form of a clear One Direction parody that, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a real band. Ouch.), and is left in the dust by what turns out to be a group of very Mean Girls.

Moretz just can't catch a break between this and the whole pig's blood thing at prom, so after getting revenge on the girls in a truly cheap and un-hilarious vomit gag she jumps right on into the best action setpiece in the entire film, taking on a moving van of villains as they try to escape, Kick-Ass in tow.

He's a character too, I guess.

If I could only talk about Moretz for the rest of this review, I would, because she is without a doubt the most accomplished person on the set and a lot of fun to watch, leaping deftly between fish-out-of-water comedy and foulmouthed badassery and taking it all in stride.

The other actors do their jobs, for the most part. I would like to take a moment to call out a certain Mr. Mintz-Plasse, though. Perhaps this is just typecasting rearing its ugly head, but the whole "spitting out your words like a rabid chipmunk" thing just isn't doing it for me anymore.

His performance is clumsy and annoying, much like the film's handling of the overarching themes of identity and bloodletting. I can't begrudge a film with a name like Kick-Ass 2 for wielding its theme with a sledgehammer, but when every scene says some variation of "the mask doesn't define you" or "I may wear a mask, but so do you," it gets old.

Hey she's wearing a mask! I get it now!

The time has come. We had to get to the violence eventually. While some scenes are pretty great action pieces, like the aformentioned "moving van beatdown," the brutality can get a little intense, especially when it comes to characters we care about. Or at least characters with names.

The film spends its entire first half trying to ground itself in reality, exploring the real-world consequences of a man putting on a mask and fighting crime. The second half involves a guy getting his peeper ripped off with pliers and fed to him (to be fair this is implied and may not have actually happened), a man's teeth knocked about before being decapitated, and a lot of up-close gore (stuff like mouths and eyes that hit the audience harder than just seeing somebody get stabbed or punched).

While the best scenes work according to the ancient tradition of suspending disbelief, some of them are far too intense, especially in the face of all the movie's attempts to convince the audience that the world they display is as real as possible.

We watch action movies and enjoy all the face punching and stabbing and explosions because we understand innately that there are no real world consequences. It's only a movie. But when a film tries as hard as Kick-Ass 2 to tell us that it isn't, the more hardcore scenes are just a little too jarring to be truly enjoyable.

All in all, Kick-Ass 2 is a decent action movie with some great scenes and general good humor (and a gay character who is well-written, immediately accepted, and doesn't die to boot!) but sometimes it backslides into something a little bit more sinister, and that's not what you want out of your summer popcorn fare.

Last Word: If you give your characters racist names and comment on how they're racist, it doesn't change the fact that they are, in fact, racist. Bad doggy.

TL;DR: Kick-Ass 2 is enjoyable but uneven.
Rating: 6/10
Should I Spend Money On This? I'm sure you expected this answer but only if you liked the first film.
Word Count: 1113