Kaos' way behind movie reviews

[Kaos]

The Calendar Killer

German film. But there's one guy in it you'd recognize if you're a fan of Better Call Saul - the sappy, wife-missing German engineer Werner Zeigler, who was the lead architect/designer of what eventually became Walter and Gus' laundry/meth lab. Too bad he doesn't have much to do here.

The film is a unnecessarily confusing in parts, opening rabbit hole doors to where you question whether the 'final girl' actually sees or experiences the things she claims to see/experience. That's only one of the main issues here. The film tries to juggle at least five or six different story arcs and at the end, it drops the ball on nearly all of them.

The arcs:
1. Jules' (a guy) life as a helpline operator, dealing with his own personal loss
2. Jules' tangled relationship with his father
3. Klara's mental lapses and possible delusions, which at one point had her committed
4. Klara's possibly abusive relationship with her politically powerful husband
5. Klara's interaction with Jules when she becomes the target of the "Calendar Killer."
6. The Calendar Killer's strange "kill somebody else or I'll kill you" modus operandi

All of these are interwoven but each is given what essentially amounts to superficial treatment. Had the film taken only the Calendar Killer aspect and built its foundation there, it might have been pretty decent.  Or if it had focused entirely on Klara's struggles with her husband and the effort to escape his perverted (maybe?) abuse, it might have succeeded. Instead you only get a little taste of each of the flavors.

One thing to be clear on: This is not a Christmas movie despite the insertion of at least one Christmas carol, the presence of Christmas trees, the appearance of a live Santa, and the use of a bejeweled Santa Claus lapel pin. All of those things are merely incidental to the story (muddled mess that it is) and not central to the events.

Maybe I'll start rating films as Pass or Play since this is kind of a sports board?  Or Punt or Play?  Unless you're into confusing German films, this is a Punt.

[Kaos]

Speak No Evil

I've never wanted the protagonists to die in a grisly, horrible way more than I did the frosty, insufferable, self-involved, hypocritical c*** at the heart of this film.  I don't know who she is or what else she's been in, but I despised the lantern-jawed, slack ass McKenzie Davis. I had a nearly equal measure of hate for her mewling wimpy cuck of a husband.

I guess we were supposed to root for their escape from an unraveling McAvoy and his wife. I just wanted all of them - Jug Head B****, Sniveling Hubby, Snarling McAvoy, Kinda Sexy McAvoy wife --  all of them except the girl who played the daughter and maybe the kid playing the son,  to perish in some kind of creative gruesome way.  But the c*** first. Good lord I hated her character. I wish 15 minutes of the film had been her being set on fire and stuffed in a fireplace. Grab me a hot cocoa and watch it like the Christmas Yule Log until it was nothing but ash. Loathed every single second that no-tit fish face was on the screen.

ANYWAY... I hated her.

The movie opens with the c***'s family meeting McAvoy's at a resort in Italy. They vacay-bond and decide to go visit the McAvoy's in rural England for a long weekend away. Well... it turns out McAvoy and his fam isn't exactly what they seemed to be. They're trying to get the family thing right, but sometimes that means they have to hit the reset button in some cruel and violent ways.

McAvoy is pretty good. He handles the slowly unspooling menace with the right touch of barely restrained rage and fury - until he doesn't. I was thinking he'd make a really good werewolf during this, actually.

The setting was good, the crazy insertion of some musical choices was interesting. The tension the film created was solid - except I kept finding myself wanting needle dick and his square-headed b**** wife to fall off a roof, get impaled on a fence, eaten by a goat, something... It's bad when you want the psycho killer to get away with it.

Dickless and the stick-figure c*** were obviously a problem, but the biggest problem this film had was the languid pace at which McAvoy's psychotic turn rolled out. It took a long time.  Like more than 3/4 of the film. The rest of it was just occasional nibbles of "something might not be right around here..."  When he broke bad, though, he broke bad with the appropriate level of creepy menace. He's a good actor and makes almost anything he's in worth at least one watch. (If you haven't seen him in Last King of Scotland, atone and watch that one now. Great performance).

It wasn't a bad movie, and I won't punt/pass on it.  But I won't ever watch it again because I want the uptight hoor wife to fall off a cliff and be shattered on the rocks below 11.2 seconds into the film.  I don't ever want to see or hear her again.

[Kaos]

Saturday Night
The way this one bounced from theaters to paid streaming to free streaming in about four days had me concerned about its quality. That wasn't really the problem, though. The film focused on a 90-minute fragment of time that people under the age of 60 probably don't remember or to which they have any relation. 

Saturday Night Live debuted on October 11, 1975. John Belushi, who was one of the initial Not Ready for Prime Time Players who made up the cast, died in 1982.  For a frame of reference?  He's been dead 43 years.  Think about that for a second. For somebody who was, say, 10 when SNL first hit the airwaves in 1975 you'd be talking about somebody who had died in 1942.  How relevant is the first episode of SNL to someone my daughter's age (34)?  It might as well be the Kennedy assassination or the Civil War.  There's just no connection there. She's going to know Chevy Chase (Christmas Vacation), have some concept of who Dan Aykroyd (Ghostbusters) is, and she might know Belush (Animal House) but she's not going to have any idea who Gilda Radner, Larraine Newman, Garrett Morris, or Jane Curtin are  - or why they mattered. She won't have any clue who George Carlin or Billy Preston or Milton Berle might be.

This is a movie made for people my age. People who were alive in 1975 and remember when this show was ground-breaking. When it was edgy, subversive, and cool. It's not going to have any resonance for anyone else. It vastly overestimates the nostalgia people have for those scrappy, uneven early days.

It's not a bad film. I kind of enjoyed it on the whole. The cast is pretty good - including a bizarre casting choice for Milton Berle. It's just so completely niche I can't see many people having the interest or patience to sit through the heavily fictionalized "real-time" 90 minutes as the clock ticks toward the first broadcast. 

If you remember those days with fondness or interest?  Give it a try. Otherwise, I don't think I could recommend it.

This one is a Punt for 97.35% of the viewing public.

I did find the woman playing Lorne Michael's wife to be very 70s sexy.  So that was a plus.

[Snaggletiger]

Being one of the olds, SNL was definitely a huge part of my entertainment culture growing up.  It was one of those must-see TV events every week.  I even recall "double dating" one night, and discussing where we all wanted to eat, and what we would do until we went back to David's house to watch Saturday Night Live.

[Snakebite]

Being one of the olds, SNL was definitely a huge part of my entertainment culture growing up.  It was one of those must-see TV events every week.  I even recall "double dating" one night, and discussing where we all wanted to eat, and what we would do until we went back to David's house to watch Saturday Night Live.

You dated a guy named David?

[Snaggletiger]

You dated a guy named David?

What? No!

I mean, we were just friends.  Sure, we went out a few times, but we never really looked at it as dating. We each paid for our own meals and movie tickets.

[Kaos]

Being one of the olds, SNL was definitely a huge part of my entertainment culture growing up.  It was one of those must-see TV events every week.  I even recall "double dating" one night, and discussing where we all wanted to eat, and what we would do until we went back to David's house to watch Saturday Night Live.

I can't really pinpoint the moment it turned. It was always a little bit left leaning, but there came a point where it careened into a ditch and turned into utter communist trash. 

Chevy, as much as anyone, was responsible for the election of Jimmy Carter. When he lampooned Gerald Ford tripping and falling constantly, he reinforced the idea that Ford was a clumsy, bumbling fool. Once Carter was in, though, the show was just as hard on him. Aykroyd's Carter impersonation was terrible, but harsh.


What's funny is really how little things have changed.  Demonizing Nazis as republicans, etc.

They lampooned society fairly equally in the beginning. At some point that shifted. The show was AWFUL from about 1980 until it stabilized in 1986. In fact, had it not been for Eddie Murphy during those dismal wasteland seasons, I'd wager the show would have quietly disappeared. The show fired everybody from the 85 cast except for Nora Dunn, Jon Lovitz, and Dennis Miller. Firings included Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Michael Hall, Joan Cusack, Damon Wayans, and Randy Quaid. Probably saved it.  And then it was reasonably funny again for a while. Once Ferrell showed up in 1995 or so, the show had outlived its usefulness for me.  I haven't watched it consistently or even sporadically, since. 

I did like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler but as the show slid further and further into leftist politics it lost me.

[Snaggletiger]

Honestly, I never paid that much attention to the left/right leaning stuff, probably because I was never into politics at all.  Most likely never noticed, and/or didn't care.  I just thought it was a given that whoever was in office, was going to get skewered.

I stayed with SNL through Ferrell, Fallon, Kattan etc.  My main reason for moving on was the constant turnover. They'd start a new season, and it would go from 8 cast members to 24, and I wouldn't recognize 2 of them.  Didn't want to have to start over and get familiar with all the new characters.

[Kaos]

Honestly, I never paid that much attention to the left/right leaning stuff, probably because I was never into politics at all.  Most likely never noticed, and/or didn't care.  I just thought it was a given that whoever was in office, was going to get skewered.

I stayed with SNL through Ferrell, Fallon, Kattan etc.  My main reason for moving on was the constant turnover. They'd start a new season, and it would go from 8 cast members to 24, and I wouldn't recognize 2 of them.  Didn't want to have to start over and get familiar with all the new characters.

It was really after Clinton because they hammered him pretty hard with Darryl and Phil Hartman but at some point it turned from lampooning the administration (which was always a comedic staple, even for Carson) to not-so-subtly attempting to influence people.  It became more purposeful. The edge was sharper. And the blade didn't cut both ways. Maybe that really didn't start in earnest until they attached collectively mouth-to-butt to suck off Obama. Fey's take on Sarah Palin went beyond comedy and into cruelty designed to shape public opinion of her - and derail any hope traitor McCain had of becoming president. In retrospect, it's probably a good thing. He was a deep-state Democrat hiding in Republican skin.

I loathed Ferrell.  Couldn't stand him. I also hated Adam Sandler on the show. Never funny in any way whatsoever.  That was really enough to push me away.  About the only thing that was interesting to me during that era was Norm Macdonald and sometimes Dennis Miller. I was never even much of a Chris Farley fan - poor man's John Belushi was all he was. 

I think part of that is age, too. I grew out of it. Occasionally somebody sends me a "great" sketch but it's always so stupid and lame I rarely even finish the three or four minutes of whatever it is. 

I am grateful for the talents it found. Some of my favorite movies of all time came from the early years crew. 

Vacation and Christmas Vacation, Fletch, Ghostbusters, Stripes, Animal House, Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop, Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, Groundhog Day, 48 Hours, Coming to America.  I have to include Elf here, although everything else that idiot rump ranger did is garbage.
 
Chevy. Dan. Bill. Eddie. John.

Yes, I know some of those younger than me would strenuously object to my rejection of films like Waterboy, Happy Gilmore, Grown Ups, Wayne's World, Click, Austin Powers, Old School, Anchorman, and Tommy Boy from my list, but I wouldn't wake up to poop on any of them. IMO they are all horrible, unfunny, one-note, superficial, superflous trash films. Seen them once, hope to never see them again.

This discussion is actually more entertaining than the film that initiated it.

[Kaos]

Heretic
Not your usual horror movie.

Hugh Grant is kind of great as a guy who’s a little (okay, a lot) off but is also very analytical about his oddness. 

Sophie Thatcher (Yellow Jackets) is going to be a great actress but needed a little more to do here.  Chloe East starts slowly but eventually comes into her own and owns the screen. Really strong performance.

Thatcher and East are naive Mormon missionaries who visit Grant to provide tracts and their usual conversion spiel.

Grant, however, has already done his homework on the LDS. And Christianity.  And Islam.  And Judaism.  And Tao, Dao, Egyptian, Hindi and more.  His game is to challenge their convictions - a game which spirals into the horror of the two being held essentially captive by someone who is confident in the delusion his self study has developed.

His journey through a world of religions and sects was very similar to my own, honestly. I’m grateful I did not arrive at the same conclusions he did. But I can kinda see it - without the lunacy of his efforts to prove it to himself. 

It’s not a typical horror movie by any stretch.  Not a chop-em-up. Not a paint by numbing numbers Blumble House cookie cutter jump scare bore. Nobody walks into a darkened room, doesn’t bother to turn on a light and then goes “hello?”  I hate that.

It’s a much deeper movie than I expected.

The verdict here was split.  My movie watching partner said it wasn’t for her at all.  Punt.  Punt hard is her advice. 

BUT she also said “I get that you liked it. Your brain works that way.” And so it does.  I say play. 

[Kaos]

Wolfs

Saw this a while back.  Forgot to do a review.  Down and dirty...

Brad Pitt and George Clooney have an easy, affable chemistry. That's basically the entire movie.

The two play competing "cleaners" who clean up messes for rich, connected clients.  They're called to a scene by Holly Flax to remove a body that turns out not to be dead and whom they enlist in their cleanup campaign. The transition from suspicious competitors each vying to prove they're the best in the game to reluctant partners who eventually realize there's more to the situation than they planned isn't the worst ride ever. 

There are a few funny moments.

Even though I'm not much of a Clooney fan these days, he does have a certain charm on screen. The pairing with Pitt is a good one - as it was in Ocean's. 

Good pace, some setups that sorta defy logic and a Butch and Sundance ending that wasn't completely obvious.

I've wasted brain cells on much worse fare. It's not something I'd watch over and over, but I enjoyed it for what it was.