Kaos' way behind movie reviews

[Godfather]

Mad Max: Fury Road

Meh.  About 45 minutes too long.  The overbearing hockey horn was too much, too often.  Too much girly drama for a Max film

That's disappointing to hear.

[wesfau2]

That's disappointing to hear.

Worth pirating or ordering OD, but save the theater money.

[GH2001]

A whole lot of "meh".  Nothing new or groundbreaking.  The jokes/one-liners are getting progressively worse as the franchise dumbs down for the masses.

Total waste of my 2.5 hours and $30.

Saw this yesterday and yes. Agree entirely especially on the cheesy one liners. Movie could have also been shortened by a half hour.

[Tiger Wench]

Saw this yesterday and yes. Agree entirely especially on the cheesy one liners. Movie could have also been shortened by a half hour.

Dead to me, you are.

[GH2001]

Dead to me, you are.

Like Kaos, I generally thought it was ok overall. But a lot wrong with it too. The length and one liners both irked me. I didn't pay for the movie because it was a company "paid for" trip, but I'm glad I didn't.

[Kaos]

White House Down

Channing Tatum as a father and aspiring Secret Service member?   

Jamie Fucking Foxx as a missile-firing Obama-like President?   

That ugly fucking Gylenhall chick as anything? She cracks the screen with her hideous mug. 

Chase scene around the White House Lawn?   

Laughable exchanges like: Where's my daughter? Come and get her. What are you gonna do? What do you think? 

Wasting the usually good Jason Clarke as an accent dropping Russian one minute, American the next hackneyed bad guy?   

Promoting a utopian vision of the world where olive branches are the only answer to world problems?   

Making the bad guys American "Right Wing Extremists"    Hey.... wait.... 

This movie played like something an ultra liberal tenth-grade lesbian vegan would have scripted and shot on her iPhone to impress her ultra liberal dreadlock-wearing hippie LGBT crew.

Foxx was ridiculously bad as President whatever.  Tatum was dead-eyed terrible.  I've probably reviewed this movie before, but I saw it again last night with its "Withdraw the troops and feed those bastards if we want to win the Middle East" propaganda and its "the real bad guys are American businessmen" agenda and I was so ashamed of it and so appalled by the epic awfulness of the performances that I had to shake my head in disgust and point and laugh at the absurdity of the thing one more time. 

To the director and the writers?  I say this with the full weight and authority of an American citizen:  Fuck you.   

[Kaos]

Mad Max: Fury Road

This review will be written using lines from the movie uttered by Max.

No No No.

Unh, Hrm. Grrrr. Unh.  Ugh.

The end. 

Translation:  Meh?  It would have to crawl across the Sahara to reach up to meh.   Maybe I was high when I tried to watch it, but it was like a really dumb Cannonball Run if Burt Reynolds was a bald girl and the Sheriff wore a Halloween mask. 

Eleven kinds of terrible. 

[Kaos]

San Andreas

If you thought the Avengers turned havoc loose on New York or the Transformers unleashed hell on Chicago, wait until you see what Mother Nature has in store for LA, San Francisco and half the west coast. 

The "plot" was so laughably bad that it became more interesting to tally up the ridiculous carnage than it did to pay attention to the background noise Rock, Spy Kid Mom, Limbo from Planet of the Apes, Plasti-Man and this chick with boobs were putting up.

Alexandra Daddario, 29 playing a 21-year old, had boobs that needed their own billing. They bounced, jiggled, waggled and wiggled every time she moved. 

Limbo, aka Paul Giamatti, had to be cringing inside when he delivered his cheese-laden drama lines. 

Rock tried his best to emote, but for the most part he simply looked intensely constipated at every emotional turn.  Like he REALLY had to poo.

The story, such as it was, floundered. They're not divorced, but she's moving in with some super rich dude and leaving him behind, and everybody's okay with it, except they still love each other, they just couldn't get past the drowning death of a younger daughter and then this earthquake takes out the Hoover Dam, but it's not just that it's gonna mow down LA, San Fran and a lot of cities in between.  Because, carnage, yo!

The sheer spectacle of cities imploding is worth watching.  But maybe not at the theater. 

What do we do now?  We rebuild. 

Extra cheese please. 

I'm gonna grant you that the girl's tits were spectacular.  You didn't see enough of them in this movie but if you want to see them on full majestic display, check out her performance in True Detective (Season 1)



Try to ignore Woody Harrelson mauling them -- as well he should.

[Kaos]

The Drop

Tom Hardy is a weird dude.  In every movie I've ever seen him in, he does some weird nearly unintelligible accent.  No different here.  It's sort of a cross between the really dumb Rocky from the first Italian Stallion film and Rainman.  His role is like an almost retarded bartender with a touch of meanness and a big dash of "I love my dog" dimness.

James Gandolfini is a version of Tony Soprano. A weaker, ineffective, sadder version of Tony.  Sort of what Tony would have been had he not been the son of Johnny and heir to the throne.  This role again served notice that Gandolfini had very limited range and was going to be stuck in that mold for the rest of his life.

I don't know what this movie was about, only that it moved at a slowness that cold molasses would envy.  There were some occasional moments of almost danger followed by hours upon hours of meandering slowness that really explained or added nothing to the film. 

Part of the end was actually good in a story-telling sense, but it took so long meandering to get there that the effect was lost. 

Cardboard cutout foreign gangsters didn't help.  Neither did weird Naomi Rapooce or whatever. 

If you need to go to sleep watch this movie.  Just don't get caught up in trying to figure out what Hardy is mumbling or that will keep you awake. 

After watching Hardy in Batman, Lawless, Mad Max, This Means War, Inception and this?  I'm off the Hardy bandwagon.  Not that I was ever on it, but his presence is now definitely not a hook to encourage me to watch a movie. 

[Kaos]

Spy

The Melissa McCarthy checklist:

1) Have her rant profanely and obnoxiously. Check.
2) Have her fall down because she is fat. Check.
3) Have someone ridicule her because she is fat. Check.
4) Have someone completely improbable be attracted to her. Check.
5) At lease one dinner gag where she eats something inappropriately or grotesquely. Check.
6) At some point have her dress up in some monstrous black sail, flip her hair and show off her "sexiness." Check.
7) Have her perform some physical stunt that her weight would clearly preclude her from being able to perform. Check.


Every segment of the typical Melissa McCarthy hippo list was marked off in this parody of the James Bond genre. 

And still it wasn't bad.  Not as bad as Tammy (abysmal), The Heat (cringingly unfunny) or Identity Theft (pathetic).  It was, to me, the best film she's ever done but that was largely because she dialed back some of the outlandish oafishness and let a cast that included Allison Janney, Jude Law, Rose Byrne and Jason Statham carry their own limited weights. (All four combined don't equal her if we're talking about body weight, but I'm actually referring to screen presence).

The biggest problem with this film is that it showed once again that McCarthy has essentially no range whatsoever. She plays the same fat, bumbling, braying, crude slob in every single film.  It's starting to wear thin.  Given the performances of the rest of the cast, this movie would have been much better without her in it.  Slot Mindy Kaling into that role or Zooey Deschanel or ehh, you get the picture.

The movie starts off with McSwarthy sitting at a computer screen guiding a field agent (Jude Law) through his paces. Slob on the makeup, add a pair of glasses and make Law a large blackish man and it would be a direct ripoff of Criminal Minds down to the sexually frustrated patter between the two. 

Eventually Law gets murderedish and swooning McCarthy becomes a field agent to help avenge his death. Hilarity (or what passes for it these days) ensues. Statham is probably the best part of the film with his intense rants about past experiences. 

There are some good parts. Some bad parts. And some sloppy editing.  During one chase sequence that featured a blue BMW, the rim styles kept changing depending on the angle. And at one point when McSweaty is on a scooter her shoes kept flipping back and forth from heels to flats.  There's also a scene where she's hanging from a helicopter by the landing rails.  Nope. That's not happening. No way could her pudgy hands a) get a grip on that bar or b) support that swaying weight.

Also, the 50-Cent cameos were not as funny as they probably meant them to be.  Nor was a ridiculous (and mercifully short) bat/rat/rodent side story that added nothing to the movie and seemed stolen directly from Dwight/Meredith and The Office.  All we needed was for Bullissa McCarthy to set up the Elaine Crocker's CIA Virginia Susan Cooper Memorial Celebrity Rabies Awareness Pro-Am Fun Run Race for the Cure and the theft would have been complete.

Even so, it's the only McCarthy movie I've ever seen where I could possibly suggest that it was worth the time to watch it.

Edit this to note: McFarthy has apparently become like Bruce Jenner.  People are afraid to criticize her/him.  Every review for this movie gushes over how magnificent she is.  Part of that is, I think, because that one reviewer had the (correct) audacity to call her a "hippo" in a review of a previous film and the backlash was so strong the world now lives in fear of not recognizing her greatness. It's like the Emperor's New Clothes.  Nobody really likes her or thinks she's sexy/funny -- but you can't say it out loud.

[GH2001]

Alexandra Daddario, 29 playing a 21-year old, had boobs that needed their own billing. They bounced, jiggled, waggled and wiggled every time she moved. 

I love her.

That is all.

[Kaos]

Enough Said

I put off watching this movie for a number of reasons, chief among them that it was James Gandolfini's last official role. I also was not personally in a place where I wanted to watch the struggles faced by divorced men and women who are about to confront an empty home when the kids leave.  Struck too close to MY home.

First, Jimmy G.  I thought his performance in The Sopranos was among the best in television history.  He layered that character with so much sadness and confusion and elation and rage and arrogance and despair and pettiness and pride. I'm no gangster, but as a father and business man of relatively the same age I could completely relate to the entire palette of emotions he brought to the role.  Now that I've seen him in several other things, though, I wonder if he was acting or not.  What made Tony Soprano work was that all his weaknesses were offset by a power that few of us have and fewer know how to effectively wield.

In roles like this (and The Drop, Killing Them Softly, Burt Wonderstone, Welcome to the Rileys, Surviving Christmas, etc.) only one part of that persona comes through. He's either a petulant brute or a pussy. Doesn't seem to be much in between. Gandolfini the actor thrived in that grey area on The Sopranos.

Here he was mostly puss. Broken down by an ex-wife who failed to appreciate him, trapped in a body with which he was uncomfortable, struggling to relate to his almost grown daughters, he slogged through a mundane life that was devoid of accomplishment, value or warmth.  (Sounds uncomfortably familiar, actually). 

Enter Elaine.  (She will always be Elaine to me).  She's broken in her own right.  A masseuse who's battling the onset of empty nest syndrome by trying too hard to be the cool mom and glomming on to her daughter's friends. 

Neither of them has a life that could be called fulfilling.  In that wasteland, they find each other.  She doesn't like him at first, but grows to later. 

Complicating this slowly developing romance is the fact that she unknowingly took on his ex-wife as a massage client and spends part of her days listening to her demean the man who is her new beau.  The criticisms get to her. In addition her married friends spend much of their time squabbling which further causes her to question the relationship she's building. 

The movie really wasn't bad at all. It had a slow, syrupy sweetness to it. Some of the topics of divorced and dating rang truer than I wanted them to be.  So did the struggle to maintain relationships with children who are learning how to "be" in the world.  All of that felt very real to me.

The dinner conversation where Elaine had too much wine and acted like a shrewish bitch was hard to watch.  Had I been her date, I would have left her ass there.

Still it was hard to separate Gandolfini from Tony. It pained me to see a mild version of Tony without any teeth.  His meekness needed just a little power to balance it out.  His presence was simply too big to be stripped away like it was. 

Not really a date movie, but better than the average romantic comedy.  That was part of the problem. It wasn't really a drama, wasn't really a comedy.  Doesn't really fit anywhere. 

[Snaggletiger]

Beverly Hills Cop

Must see.  Eddie Murphy hasn't put out anything funny in a very long time.  He knocked it out of the park with this one.  Murphy plays a Detroit detective who takes a "vacation" out to Beverly Hills, but the real purpose of his trip is to track down his friend's killers.  During the course of his hunt for the mobsters, he befriends a couple of Beverly Hills detectives, played by John Ashton and Judge Reinhold, always keeping them in trouble with his zany antics.  Reinhold looks like he's barely aged since Fast Times.  Must be the make up. 

The contrast in police styles between the whatever-means-necessary Murphy, and the by-the-book, straight laced Beverly Hills detectives, makes for some real side splitting moments.  Guffaws a-plenty.  Bronson Pinchot and Damon Wayans have cameo appearances that add so much to the hilarity as well.  I can only hope they're already working on a sequel. 

[bgreene]

Beverly Hills Cop

Must see.  Eddie Murphy hasn't put out anything funny in a very long time.  He knocked it out of the park with this one.  Murphy plays a Detroit detective who takes a "vacation" out to Beverly Hills, but the real purpose of his trip is to track down his friend's killers.  During the course of his hunt for the mobsters, he befriends a couple of Beverly Hills detectives, played by John Ashton and Judge Reinhold, always keeping them in trouble with his zany antics.  Reinhold looks like he's barely aged since Fast Times.  Must be the make up. 

The contrast in police styles between the whatever-means-necessary Murphy, and the by-the-book, straight laced Beverly Hills detectives, makes for some real side splitting moments.  Guffaws a-plenty.  Bronson Pinchot and Damon Wayans have cameo appearances that add so much to the hilarity as well.  I can only hope they're already working on a sequel.

I must say, I took your advise and watched this movie last night.  Thanks for the tip.

[Pell City Tiger]

Beverly Hills Cop

The key to comedy is timing. Those who understand the concept are the ones who reap the benefits.

Snags post is a textbook example which accurately illustrates the concept of comedic timing. A guy offers a look into this soul and makes a touching connection with the plot of an emotional movie. Snags follows it with fucking Beverly Hills Cop - from 1986!

I went from the depths of K's soulful review to the apex of lowbrow comedy - all in the matter of 2 minutes.

I salute you, Snags! Very nicely played!

[Snaggletiger]

The key to comedy is timing. Those who understand the concept are the ones who reap the benefits.

Snags post is a textbook example which accurately illustrates the concept of comedic timing. A guy offers a look into this soul and makes a touching connection with the plot of an emotional movie. Snags follows it with fucking Beverly Hills Cop - from 1986!

I went from the depths of K's soulful review to the apex of lowbrow comedy - all in the matter of 2 minutes.

I salute you, Snags! Very nicely played!

1986????  Son of a..........

[Jumbo]

1986????  Son of a..........

Thanks for keeping us up to date with all the new releases.

[Godfather]

I'm not gonna fall for the banana in the tailpipe.

[dallaswareagle]

Thanks for keeping us up to date with all the new releases.

Just got mine in the mail today.

   

[Kaos]

Zombeavers

Yes. It's exactly what it sounds like.  Beavers imbued with zombie powers after a vat of toxic waste lands on their damn dam. 

There are come and go Southern accents, some gratuitous titties, some implied lesbianism, Frank Tripp from CSI Miami, Kuby from Breaking Bad, a whack-a-mole scene and some horribly rendered Muppet Zombie Beavers.

Yeah.  All of that.