The return of the reviews special! Double Review: American Ultra (2015) and We are your friends (2015)

Greetings all,

Good news, the computer has been fixed and I can get back to writing reviews (Big shout out to these guys.) So first we’re going to finish our comparison of unintentionally funny films vs intentionally funny films. Last time we looked at Hitman Agent 47, a movie to which I will still defend was just so bad I ended up laughing my ass off. Now with American Ultra, we have a stoner comedy mixed with a spy thriller, but does the combination pay off? (Obviously ignoring it’s terrible box office results.)

Plot Summary - Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg) is a stoner clerk living in a small town with his girlfriend Phoebe Larson (Kristen Stewart) and is planning to propose to her. Meanwhile, unknown to Howell, in Langley, Virginia, Victoria Lasseter (Connie Britton) learns that the sole survivor of her failed ultra agent program is set to be eliminated by her rival Adrian Yates (Topher Grace). That agent turns out to be Howell, who is completely unaware of his past. Now, he must rely on skills he didn’t even know he had in order to survive and save himself and Phoebe.

Pros - Jesse and Kristen prove to be a good duo, balancing out his neurosis with her ability to take charge. They work well together and this movie shows it. Topher Grace also does very well as an over ambitious agent throwing everything he can at Howell in order to eliminate him. The rest of the cast does well too. It’s well shot and the action scenes are solid, and most of the jokes work well.

Cons - There’s three side characters that are barely in this film. John Leguizamo is only in this for a few scenes even though he’s actually pretty funny, and two other side characters are basically there to set up one or two jokes, and that’s it. Also, and this isn’t 100% a bad thing, but the plot kind of reminds me heavily of The Bourne Identity. An agent who doesn’t know he’s an agent being hunted by his agency, I know it’s not a totally original thing but still.

Final Score - 8/10

I’m disappointed more people haven’t seen it, and I hope this review gets people going to see it. It isn’t a grand slam, but it’s one I definitely want to see again.

So, in comparison, intentionally funny will usually beat out unintentional, especially if, at the end of the day, it’s still a bad film.

So now let’s turn our attention to one of this weeks new releases, We Are Your Friends.

Plot Summary - Cole Carter (Zac Efron) is a struggling young DJ living with his friends in the san fernando valley. One day, he meets James (Wes Bentley) an older DJ who takes him under his wing. Cole also falls for James’s girlfriend Sophie (Emily Ratajkowski) , and now must balance his dreams, his friends, and the girl he loves.

Pros - The music is the best thing about the film, with the only exception being the song played at the end. Zac Efron also tries his best with the material he’s given, and there are actually a few really good scenes in the film which I don’t want to spoil here but my good they were amazing scenes.

Cons - The film comes off as a bit of a bad mix of two genres: The coming of age story, and the rise to fame story. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, and while they try to do interesting things with this mix, unfortunately it ultimately devolves into the same kind of story you see in both films and it doesn’t always balance. The mix brings out the worst traits in both films, and what’s worst is that the few really good scenes in the beginning and the way they were stylized  are not even seen again in the remaining half of the film. It feels like a letdown as it plays you realize you’re not going to be seeing more scenes like them. Ultimately, it’s cliched and doesn’t quite pack the punch that it clearly wants too.

Final Score - 5/10

I struggled with this a bit, I wanted to give it a soft pass for what it tried to do but in the end, it’s a film that for me coasts right down the middle.

I should be seeing No Escape soon, but I also wanted to report that Dope, a film I did a review on when it was in limited release, is finally getting a wide release this weekend, and if you haven’t seen it yet, I encourage it. I know I want to see it again.

If you’re unsure, read my review of it here: http://ryanmovieblogokay.blogspot.ca/2015/07/double-movie-review-terminator.html

Until then, I’ll see you guys at the movies.

Slight Delay in Reviews for a while

Hello All,

I ran into some computer problems friday night, hence the delay of the American Ultra review. I am currently dealing with the situation, so there might be a slight delay in reviews as I will be focused on making sure my computer is either not broken or going to cost me a lot of money. If it's going to take longer than expected Ill be doing them on my backup computer.

Hang in there folks, and keep my computer in your prayers.

Until then, Ill see you folks at the movies.

Movie Review: Hitman Agent 47 (2015)

Hello all,

This review and the American Ultra review will serve as a comparison between two types of comedies: the intentionally hilarious, and the unintentionally hilarious. For this review, I will be talking about the latter, as Hitman Agent 47 (also a great nominee for most awkward title of the year) was fucking hysterical for all the wrong reasons. I can’t think of anything more to write in this part so let’s just get straight to it shall we.

Plot Summary - Honestly, I can’t figure out a way to tell the plot without it sounding really stupid, so let’s the easiest way to say it, Zachary Quinto and the guy playing 47 are looking for a girl and want to use her to find her father who made 47 so they can make more of him.

Pros - It had a couple of great shots and the action scenes we’re pretty solid for the most part.

Cons - I honestly don’t know where to start, so to avoid one long block of text we’ll make a list and I’ll just write them down as they come to mind, oh and spoiler alert.

• Zachary Quinto in this movie, is basically a terminator with a self esteem issue. They give this description of how he survives getting shot point blank four times and they basically just rewrote Kyle Reese’s description of the terminator from the first terminator movie. As for the self esteem issue, he has this pretty solid fight scene against the agent and basically sets himself up as a badass, only for him when he thinks he has the agent cornered to suddenly ask him to say that he’s (Quinto) better than him. What the hell dude you’re already a badass basic terminator and all of a sudden you need a self esteem boost? Why?
• 47, for the same amount of time Quinto’s a badass, is this stern deep voiced no nonsense killer, then once he has the girl and is basically training her to be like him, out of fucking nowhere is voice changes and he starts making jokes without any setup whatsoever. The first time he makes one is so sudden I actually had to do a double take on it.
• Katya, for longer than the other two is a pretty interesting character, she’s trying to find a man who she knows nothing about while dealing with the same heightened sense that 47 has without the benefit of knowing it. How 47 trains her though also starts out interestingly, but then it just gets bewildering. He sort of just drops these lessons on her out of nowhere, one of them being how to avoid being seen by cameras at the airport. So there is a scene in this movie where we watch her walk around an airport. not hiding behind pillars or running from someone, just walking around trying not to be seen by the cameras. Thrilling scenes of her walking, sitting on a cart, and following groups of people, only for them to reveal at the end of the scene that she got spotted by the camera at the door making the whole previous scene moot. Speaking of pointless scenes….
• The main plot of the movie is that they are looking for Katya’s father, so when they go to the city that she’s in, the stay the first night in a hotel room. When 47 goes to sleep, Katya goes swimming (in the longest fucking private suite pool I have ever fucking seen) then she gets out and looks at 47’s guns, cut to the next morning, she’s taken them apart, and then three guys storm in the room and 47 has to kill them by hand, after which she explains that when she gets nervous and can’t sleep she takes thing apart, which once again had not been previously established, except for maybe a blink and you’ll miss it shot from earlier in the movie. I say maybe because I have no fucking idea if it was there. So basically it’s an out of nowhere reason to have an out of nowhere fight (because they were freelance guys who somehow found them in one night) because they needed to pad a ninety minute long movie.
• The meeting with Katya’s father is, judging by how long it felt, was ten minutes and with all of the cliched dialogue you can think goes from why did you leave me to now the three of us are a family. Yes, three of us, including 47. Then when where they are gets attacked, he gets shot, and when 47 says to leave him behind, she, having only just met him, doesn’t want to leave him. It’s more cliched nonsense.
• Most PG-13 of 14A movies depending on your rating system usually have one or two swears in them that give them that rating. In this film when Quinto is torturing Katya’s father he forcefully adds the word fuck into two sentences because yeah this is a 14A film we can say fuck a couple of times look at how cool we are.
• But by far, and this was the scene that I finally realized that this was going to be hilarious, was when…..actually this needs a full explanation. In the beginning of the film, when we first meet Katya, she’s looking for a man who she doesn’t even know anything about, including that the man is her father, she’s just looking for someone. After she runs into Quinto, he tells her enough info about him, including that he’s her father, so that she figures out where he is. But after she’s captured by the agent, who she has been lead to believe will kill her without remorse, reveals to her that, this entire fucking time, she actually remembers everything about her childhood, including her father, what he did and even seeing 47, was in her head the entire time. She knew nothing about her past, spent most of her life looking for that information and she already knew it the entire fucking time. There’s an argument to be made that maybe him saying it provoked her, but the way it’s shot makes it look like he somehow transmitted the thoughts into her head himself and it’s just so bizarre looking.
• As for the rest of it, the dialogue is hokey, the character development is lacking and what little there is is forced, it has a sequel bait ending at the end which is never going to happen I’m sorry, they also have Agent 46 show up at the end but only for a weak twist and we don’t even get to see him do anything.

Final Score - 1/10

If this had been marketed as a satire of bad video game films, this would’ve been a solid 10. As it stands, since this whole blatant mess is played completely straight (which makes it even funnier) it has to get a one. The two good points are just massively overshadowed by the sheer ineptitude of what this film was trying to go for and massively missed. If you need a good laugh, this is the film for you, if you go into this expecting a serious hardcore reimagining of a movie adaptation, you’ll get a generic 90 minute mess.

I have tomorrow off, I’m seeing American Ultra, I’m super excited, and I’ll be posting the review tomorrow.

Until then, I’ll see you folks at the movies.

Movie Review: Straight Outta Compton (2015)

Hello All,

Forgive the lateness, I would’ve posted this last night but I was out until three am. Today we are tackling the genre of film known as the docudrama. For those who don’t know, a docudrama is a dramatic telling of true events, this time chronicling the rise and fall of N.W.A. So how does the film do?

Plot Summary - The film chronicles the rise and fall of rap group N.W.A, from their early days living in Compton, their rise to fame and their fallout and everything that happened in between.

Pros - The film is well shot, the story is well told, and everyone involved is clearly giving it their all. The music is definitely good.

Cons - There a couple of scenes I thought didn’t really contribute much to the story.

Final Score - 9/10

If this seems like a brief review, I apologize, I don’t know much about hip hop so I'm coming at this as a movie geek, and Straight Outta Compton is a really good movie, and it’s really informative for those who may not know the story, but it didn’t really hit me as hard as a it might a hip hop fan.

I’m gonna try for a Thursday night review, of what I don’t know yet, might do another in between. Why not check out my other reviews while you wait?

Until then, I’ll see you folks at the movies.

Movie Review: The Man From U.N.C.L.E (2015)

Hello All,

I know I said I’d do Shaun the Sheep, ended up taking the week off. Saw The Gift, haven’t reviewed it yet because to put it simply, I can’t quite figure out why I can’t describe as more than just “it’s alright.” But anyways, I’m back in the reviewing mode, this time with the big screen adaptation of the classic tv series The Man From U.N.C.L.E, directed by Guy Ritchie who I think would be best known, at least most recently for the Robert Downey Jr Sherlock Holmes movies and Rocknrolla. So does his latest effort prove fruitful or is it another tv movie misfire?

Plot Summary - Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) is a former master thief turned CIA agent, who gets paired up with KGB agent Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer), to take Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander) on a mission to find her father, a rocket scientist who has been captured by a group working with Nazi’s to build an atom bomb. The two must overcome their differences and distrust of each other in order to save the world.

Pros - The film’s musical score is quite catchy, capturing the style of the sixties perfectly. The humour is very on point as well, as most of it s played up with dry wit while also having a few visual gags thrown into the mix as well. The cast is on point, especially Hammer as the hard russian trying to fight the urge to simply destroy everyone and everything. The film is for the most part shot and edited well, the actions scenes are also pretty entertaining.

Cons - The plot is very thin, well told, but thin. It was pointed out to me that they might have chosen it to try and not over complicate the plot, and while I can certainly agree with that sentiment I still have to make a note of it, especially in the mission impossible era. The other thing about this film was two scenes where you’d only hear or see part of what was going on, and then less than two minutes later they’d fill in those small gaps mostly by playing the rest of the scene. I can understand wanting to reveal a twist further down the line of a story, but these two times there was not enough time given to allow for the gravity of those moments to sink in.

Final Score - 8/10

Overall it’s got enough style and charm to elevate the story, if they make another one I only hope we get a bit more of a challenge plot wise.

I am going to try my hardest to see Straight Outta Compton tomorrow. I am being dragged to a work function so I’m hoping to catch it before that.

Until then, I’ll see you folks at the movies.

(Unexpected) Double Movie Review: Vacation (2015) and Fantastic Four (2015)

Hello All,

So yeah, I found myself with a lot of time to kill today, so I decided to do some catching up with a movie that’s been out for a few weeks and then tackle the new release...I regret both of those things, why? well let’s find out shall we?

Vacation Review

Plot Summary - Decades after the original family trip to Wally World, Rusty Griswold (Ed Helms) and his family are stuck in a rut, so he decides to recreate his childhood trip to wally world and hijinks ensue and does anyone really care?

Pros - There were exactly three jokes I laughed at, it was two actual scenes and one off joke.

Cons - The rest of the jokes are either pointlessly crude or bizarrely missing a punchline. There was even  an actual moment in the movie that made me get up and leave for ten minutes. I didn’t even leave Pixels for any amount of time.

Final Score - 3/10

The three jokes I laughed at, were all legitimately funny. So you know, it gets a point per joke because of that.

Fantastic Four Review

Plot Summary - Reed Richards (Miles Teller) and Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) have been friends since childhood, building Reed’s invention in his garage. When one of them gets the attention of Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey). Drafting his daughter Sue (Kate Mara),  his son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) and former student Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell) to help, an accident causes them to get powers and once again that’s about it.

Pros - The Human Torch and The Thing looked kind of good, and the film has a few unintentional laughs and doom looks hilariously awful.

Cons - The best way to describe this film is that it’s a ninety minute build up to an ending that comes out of nowhere and has little to no impact on anything. It’s all exposition and describing how serious and important everything is and nothing happens in it. It took me a legit five minutes to come up with just that summary and even then I don’t think that’s right.

Final Score - 1/10

This is a movie where nothing happens in it. It’s literally a movie about nothing. This might as well be an episode of seinfeld because nothing happens in it. Except if this was actually Seinfeld it be better.

Yeah today was not a good day, but before I go, I have a matter of business to attend to. I recently became a mod for a streamer friend of mine whose channel you can find here http://www.twitch.tv/savagehero93. He mostly does WoW and hearthstone but if you love watching streams and want to be in on the ground floor of the next great legendary gamer, you owe it to yourself to follow him and watch him as often as possible.

Shaun the Sheep will be the next and that will most likely be tomorrow.

Until then, I’ll see you guys at the movies.

Movie Review: Mr. Holmes (2015)

Hello All,

I actually saw this film on Sunday, I just took a couple of days to get around to writing it and for that I apologize. I’m gonna try and keep this one short so let’s get to it.

Plot Summary - Having just returned from Japan, the now retired Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen)  lives in isolation aside from his housekeeper Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney) and her son Roger (Milo Parker) as he struggles to write a book about the final case in his career to, as he puts it, correct the mistakes that Watson had made when he began writing books about Sherlock and his adventures.

Pros - The cast is stellar and McKellen shines as the much older holmes. It’s also well written as the story does keep you engaged the entire time as it’s actually three mysteries in one movie.

Cons - It takes a while for everything to tie itself together but when it does it’s quite a pay off.

Final Score - 10/10

Honestly the movie is good enough that I’m willing to over the slight issues and honestly it’s just a really good movie.

I’m seeing Fantastic Four on Thursday….god help me.

Until then, I’ll see you folks at the movies.