#41: THEATRE CAMP

 

Starring and written by Noah Galvin, Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman and Ben Platt and directed by Molly and Nick. Also starring Jimmy Tatro, Patti Harrison, Nathan Lee Graham, Ayo Edebiri, Owen Thiele, Caroline Aaron, and Amy Sedaris. Running time 93 minutes. 

In a tale as old as time, but told through the modern over-used trope of a 'fly on the wall documentary', the film follows the adventures of the AdirondACTS Summer theatre camp. 

Set in upstate New York, the AdirondActs camp follows the lives of the various child performers, actors, dancers and wannabe agents over the course of a three week summer course. And then there's the staff of mostly failed but deeply eccentric actors, writers, dancers and performers, lead by the double act of failed actors Amos Klobuchar (Ben Platt) and Rebecca-Diane (Molly Gordon). The camp is run by Joan a passionate and determined owner/Principle who somehow manages to make the camp run, that is until this year when during a fund raising effort she slips into a strobe-light induced coma forcing her useless and thick as shit, but kind-hearted son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) to take over. But when the banks threaten to foreclose on the camp, Troy tries desperate means to raise the money, while an oblivious Amos and Rebecca mount a musical called Joan, Still – a celebration of their comatose principle's life, put on by the kids and shown to brilliant effect in the film's final act.  

The film presented as a film on the wall documentary starts very well and promises to be very funny but sadly the promise is sadly squandered and the film's main failing can be seen in the poster, where the adults shine big and brightly and the kids (the true stars) are seen small and tiny in the bottom left of the poster. Written and directed by the cast of simply 'fabulous' actors and performers who all think they're funny and in a word simply fabulous. They aren't terrible but every time they're on screen and doing their thang, you're waiting for the kids to come back.    

Choosing to focus on the adults rather than the kids is a major miss-fire, the kids bring pure heart and delight while the adults mug their way through their generic adventures 

Told across three weeks and with the use of captions, you yearn to see more of the kids struggling with their crazy classes or rehearsing the stage plays and shows that we're promised at the beginning, but the film becomes bogged down in Amos and Rebecca's deteriorating relationship. Naturally the film sticks closely to the classic three act structure and after the forced addition of a subplot involving a rival camp and a foreclosing bank, we finally get to see the show the kids have been rehearsing all summer on Parent's Night and it's fantastic! Revealing as it does the true star of the camp, who's been hiding in plain sight for the whole time and who steps up to save the day delivering a star-making turn. The show, Joan, Still manages to be funny, touching and the absolute star of the and reminded me of the brilliant shows put on by Max Fischer in Rushmore. 

And it has to be said that the various kid performers are fantastic and incredibly talented, there's a great gag about one of the boy performers coming out to his gay dads which is one of the high-lights of the movie. And there's a real sense that there's a lot that ended up on the cutting room floor. 

It's just a shame that the film didn't focus more on them and stick more closely to the concept of the documentary film approach because if it had then I think this would have been an easy 10/10 but sadly the film feels too disjointed and somewhat misguided and feels more like a showreel by the adult actors to Hollywood than a properly formed comedy. 

That said, it's still a fun and delightful movie, but only when the kids are allowed to shine.

7/10

#40: STRAYS

Starring the voice talents of Will Ferrell, Jamie Foxx, Isla Fisher, Randall Park, Brett Gelman and Will Forte. Written by Dan Perrault. Produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. Directed by Josh Greenbaum. Budget $48 million. Running time 93 minutes.

When dog Reggie (Will Ferrell) gets abandoned in the big city by his vile human owner (Will Forte) he teams up with fellow strays Bug (Jamie Foxx), Maggie (Isla Fisher) and Hunter (Randall Park) for a cross country quest to get Reggie home so he can bite the dick off his human owner. 

Oh, I know what you're thinking, 'oh boy! this sounds like a modern day remake of that wonderful Disney film Incredible Journey, I bet it's going to be really funny!' And you'd be wrong. Dead wrong. 

Over the next deeply long 93 minutes much hilarity ensues. That is if your idea of hilarity is copious piss and shit jokes, and jokes about dog cocks, and people getting their dicks bitten off, and the hilarious results of overdosing on eating magic mushrooms, or ripping a warren of baby bunnies to pieces. Indeed, this film leaves no stone or turd unturned in its attempts to be as funny as fuck! So, it's sad to report that this just isn't that funny. Well, not funny in the old fashioned sense of the word. And certainly not funny in the way that old comedies used to be funny. Instead we have a typically unfunny modern comedy with just enough amusing moments to make you chortle and perhaps chuckle (all of which you've seen in the trailer). Indeed, it seems far more concerned with making sure our loveable cast of characters learn valuable life lessons about caring and working together and some such shit rather than mining any hilarity or jokes out of the situation, beyond the scatilogical and there are many lengthy and quite tedious sequences where the dogs discuss important human issues from a dog's point of view. That said there is one very funny sequence that sees the four dogs happily discussing Hunter's massive dog dick openly and without embarrassment which was rather funny.

That coupled with a totally unnecessary tacked on third act side mission just there to give one of the dodgy doggy characters closure in the closing sequence. At the end of the day, this is just one more deeply disappointing modern day so-called Hollywood comedies. So, not a comedy at all, just an utterly horrible remake of a true 1963 classic called Incredible Journey, that managed to invest its film with a heart, meaning and comedy while never once having to bite the penis off a man to get a laugh.

Although that said, it's the funniest scene in the film, well that and a great joke about a narrating Retriever. 

Not a totally dog's dinner but nevertheless it sure as shit ain't the dog's bollox.

4/10

 

 

#39 BLUE BEETLE

 

Starring Xolo Maridueña, Adriana Barraza, Damián Alcázar, Elpidia Carrillo, Bruna Marquezine, Raoul Max Trujillo, Susan Sarandon and George Lopez. Written by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer and directed by Ángel Manuel Soto. Budget $104 million. Running time 127 minutes.

Based on a DC comic character that only hardcore comic fans will have heard of, this the latest effort from the DCEU and one of the last before DC desperately try and reboot the whole thing is played entirely as a comedy. With a wacky, Latino family as his comedy sidekicks our hero, Jamie Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) returns from college to find out his family are on their uppers, his dad's has survived a heart attack and lost his job, his sister has lost her job, they're all about to lose their house, his grannie is an ex-guerrilla and his uncle is a Stark level super genius inventor and computer wise. Meanwhile big (everybody hiss) baddie Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) is about to unleash her OMAC army and has found a scarab thing from outer space that will help her. Luckily Victoria's niece Jenny has other ideas and gives Jamie the scarab which promptly turns him into an armoured all-powerful superhero. Then the baddies attack, Blue Beetle goes through a hilarious training montage, someone dies to give our hero motivation and the baddy's henchman gets transformed into a being equal and slightly better than our hero for the big bad act 3 punch-up. Then sprinkled with the hilarious Mexican family who lead a rescue mission to save Blue Beetle, an army of disposable thugs to be merrily murdered with impunity, and a funny old Mexican lady who relives her glory days killing innocents in the jungle by murdering henchmen.  

Somehow This film delighted critics because, get this, it's not as shit as DCEU last few efforts, Blank Adam, Shazam Furry Knobs and The Flash (although I quite liked that!).

Feeling like as if the whole thing had been filmed in the 1980s, this film is a remake of RoboCop 2 crossed with Iron Man 2 and feels like a lazy panto, Susan Sarandon is horribly wasted as a villain and stops short of twiddling her moustache. It leaves no stone unturned in its attempt to tick off so many Super Hero Cliches as possible and believe me it's almost as if the writer and director stopped watching movies after 1990. At no point in this film do the actual authorities in the guise of the police arrive to investigate the explosions, killings and gun battles that litter this film. The Baddies super secret device is stolen with such ease it's almost as if the whole thing is written as an overlong SNL skit. 

There is no explanation as to how our hero can fight or why the Blue Beetle scarab has chosen him, it just does. Luckily for him Jenny Kord's old dad who 'mysteriously disappeared' has left his daughter a Batman-like Bat cave filled with super power computer tech which our hilarious Latino Uncle can easily access and use, that is when he's not inventing portable EMP devices out of house hold junk. Every character in this shit fest is a tedious generic woke-approved cypher of a character, with a check list of acceptable social tropes used instead of back story. And every baddy a dreadful Caucasian out to exploit our plucky dirt-poor, but good, ethnically diverse but pure heroes.

I'm so sick to death of these incredible devices that are given to heroes with no noticable abilities that can generate mass from nothing, there's never any explanation as to how these things work and can we just decide now that along with the whole sky portal McGuffin that we should retire any nanotech suits which just appear out of nothing. 

I sat through this letting the whole thing just wash over me, little was I to know that it was going to be a long night as my second film was due to start mere moments after the end of this one. 

There are two post credit stings, one sets up an uneeded sequel and the other is just filler.

4/10

#38: ENTER THE DRAGON

Starring Bruce Lee, John Saxon, Jim Kelly, Ahna Capri, Bob Wall, Shih Kien. Written by Michael Allin, directed by Robert Clouse. Music by Lalo Schifrin. Budget $850,000 Box office $400 million. Running time 102 minutes. 

In his all to brief life, Bruce Lee starred in just three movies before he died, and this his fourth and final film, not counting Game of Death was the first to be released posthumously and would be the film that turned him into a global superstar equal in stature to Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean.

The film is slight in the story department. A Hong Kong martial artist master called Lee is asked by American intelligence to take part in a fighting tournament held once every three years by a mysterious crime lord called Han as a ruse to uncover his criminal activity. Along the way he teams up with Jim Kelly and John Saxon, and much action and death ensue.

The film's plot isn't why you go and see this, it's to see Bruce Lee in action, and he's simply astonishing, he is utterly magnetic and you can't take your eyes off him. He dominates each and every scene he's in and his athleticism, fighting skill and sheer presence is astonishing. Also is the setting of Hong Kong and last but by no means least the beautiful iconic musical score by Lalo Schifrin. 

The last Bruce Lee film I saw at the cinema was Game of Death back in 1980 in the Empire Cinema Bridgetown, Barbados. And to see Bruce in action 20 feet high was an utter treat. It's old fashioned, story wise it's dated, its attitudes are not in keeping with today's far more sensitive audiences, and it's about as deep as yogurt pot but I bloody loved it. 

8/10

#37: JOY RIDE

 

Starring Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu and Sabrina Wu. Written by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, Teresa Hsiao from a story by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, Teresa Hsiao and Adele Lim. Produced by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, James Weaver, Josh Fagen, Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, Teresa Hsiao and Adele Lim. Directed by Adele Lim. Running time 95 minutes long.

It's an ensemble comedy which can only mean one thing, Road Trip!

The plot sees four Chinese girls head to China under the guise of closing a business deal where some hilarity ensues to a degree, some of it funny, some of it insanely cringey and some of it downright awful. One of the girls was adopted as a baby and is very Americanised, she learns the errors of her ways and sets out to track down her birth mother. Her high-school best friend, a budding artist obsessed with sex creates bizarre sexual sculptures, while her other friend, an ex-college friend, is now a famous Chinese actress. And finally along for shits and giggles is Dead Eye is a techno nerd and friend of the artist who's there to bring a sense of wackiness and strangeness.

The four girls bicker, encounter an white American drug mule, take copious, as in, lethal amounts of drugs, have wild sex with a group of American basketball players, fall-out, pretend to be K-Pop stars, and act so outrageously it borders on the insane. Actually the sex scene is perhaps the funniest part of the film. 

Many of the jokes land, but for me the gross-out nature of the humour rang false and is merely there to shock, none more so than a pussy cat tattoo which proves to be the absolute pinnacle of the movie, or nadir depending on your point of view. I felt Bridesmaids did it far better.

Following rigidly the three act structure of Syd Fields the film is basically a series of over-the-top skits all cobbled together into a sort of plot with a feel good gooey centre and a lesson about truth and friendship and finding out who you are. At the end of act two the friends fall-out, valuable life lessons are learned and the friends reunite and bond all over again in the third act, before the obligatory 'One Year Later' caption when we see the friends embark on a new group trip. Oh, how we laughed. 

7/10

#36: SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS

 

Directed by David Hand, Perce Pearce, William Cottrell, Larry Morey, Wilfred Jackson and Ben Sharpsteen. Story by Ted Sears, Richard Creedon, Otto Englander, Dick Rickard, Earl Hurd, Merrill De Maris, Dorothy Ann Blank and Webb Smith. Voices by Adriana Caselotti, Roy Atwell, Pinto Colvig, Otis Harlan, Scotty Mattraw, Billy Gilbert. Running time 83 minutes.

With a story as old as time, well 1812, this 1937 musical fantasy adaptation is the film that started it all, the first-ever full-length animated movie spearheaded by visionary Walt Disney. A film that very nearly bankrupted both Disney the man and the company, a film described in its day as Disney's folly. However its legacy is truly extraordinary, one of the first 25 films to be preserved in the Library of Congress, one of the top ten highest grossing films of all times earning over $8 million dollars off of a budget of $1.5 million. 

The story based on the Brother's Grimm original sees the innocent, beautiful and delightful Snow White forced to live in the forest to escape the murderous intent of her wicked step-mother. Lead by the forest creatures, Snow White finds the house of the Seven Dwarfs and becomes their surrogate mother, and starts to live happily ever after, that is until her step-mother discovering her step-daughter is still alive poisons her with a cursed apple. 

I've not seen this film at the cinema since I was a child and I've not watched it for well over 20 years, indeed i don't think I ever showed it to my children. so that said it was amazing how ingrained this is in my psyche and likewise how much seemed strangely new, I'd forgotten it was for all intensive purposes a musical and I'd forgotten just how delightful it was. A film so charming, gentle and sweet-natured that you fall hook, line and sinker for its beguiling charm so much so that when the wicked queen turns into the terrifying old lady and gives the apple to Snow White, you're genuinely mortified.

I marvelled at the sheer artistry on show here, the staggering animation, the beauty of it all, all hand-drawn and painted, no cgi trickery, and only the minimal use of optical tricks. The opening tracking shot into the castle is a marvel and the character animation is perfection. And the clever use of rotoscoped human motion capture animation is peerless.

It's a film that doesn't outstay its welcome, running at a brisk 83 minutes, and put to shame the truly horrendous animated trailers for new films that ran before it. 

There's no cringey life-lessons to be learned here, no twee little tale about cute animals going on a quest, or some crass no-stakes adventure. It's a shame the modern day animated movies have moved so far from their source and become so generic, similarly it's a shame that Disney itself has become so safe and risk adverse, you could never imagine them making something like this, or Pinocchio ever again. Modern day films need messages and lessons to be learned, they need strong sassy wise-cracking teenagers and those dwarfs, awkward. 

Go and see this on the big screen and be delighted as you were when you first saw it, the kids who were in the cinema this morning were engrossed, and enthralled in a way you just don't normally see in modern day cinemas.

An utter cinematic delight. 10/10  

 

#35: MEG 2: THE TRENCH

Starring Jason Statham, Wu Jing, Sophia Cai, Page Kennedy, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Skyle Samuels and Cliff Curtis. Screenplay by Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgaris. Directed by Ben Wheatley. Budget $129 million. Running time 116 minutes. 

The three screenplay writers and also the guys responsible for the story had a big problem. They just couldn't agree on a story for this second film. Should it be a sequel retreading the same beats as the first but with a different Megalon or should it be something new? They all agreed they wanted to try something new, but should it be a big budget version of Walking With Dinosaurs? How-about a reworking of Deep Blue Sea crossed with The Abyss with a group of scientists and workers besieged by sharks on a rapidly sinking deep sea research laboratory? Should it be Die Hard on the high seas with not one, not two, but THREE massive Megalon sharks adding a further dimension, how about an underwater heist movie? Or should it be Jurassic World, with a holiday resort terrorised by a bunch of humungous Megalon sharks? The trouble was they just couldn't agree. They argued for days, then weeks, then months until one of them had an epiphany moment, what-if we do all of them? The three writers burst into tears, gosh weren't they clever, they all agreed. What a brilliant idea.

And that was what they did. Not one story, not two but four completely different stories vaguely linked in someway, usually by THE STATH (Jason Statham) oh and some MASSIVE PREHISTORIC SHARKS, but only when we remember them. The producers were excited but had a note. 'Can we please have dinosaurs too.'

And that's the plot of this wretched piece of sewage, a film so shit, it's almost like it was financed by the combined might of the water companies.

It starts with THE STATH infiltrating an illegal nuclear waste dumping operation on the high seas, before finally arriving at the research base Mana One above the Trench leading to the discovery of an illegal mining operation in the trench itself and not one but two disabled submarines stuck at the bottom of the sea. Then it's back upstairs for the brief Die Hard sequence on board Mana One, with three massive Meladons in hot pursuit and something else, something that eats giant Megadons - a giant squid, or in this case, a tentacle, then it's a race off to the holiday resort for the final sequence, where THE STATH faces off against the beasties with some jury-rigged exploding spears. 

Shoe-horned into the bloated cast are a stepdaughter for THE STATH, and a Diversity-bingo card checklist of secondary characters and a generic band of limitless bad guys, lead by a Spanish henchmen all working for the generic rich British CEO of a global corporation who's financing the mining operation that only exists in the Trench. Oh and a pack of dinosaurs that somehow managed to survive over 65 million years. 

Obviously because this is a Chinese financed movie the film is packed with a horde of Chinese characters and Chinese sensibilities, and the whole third act sequence that takes place on 'FUN ISLAND' which is populated by beautiful Chinese people and fat, obnoxious Americans who all die horribly. Oh and the dog from the first film. The script contains only sound bites and memes, the violence which often results in death is utterly blood free and bullets only kill when fired by the heroes. Much of the first hour is filled with subtitles and The Stath delivers a truly generic and blank performance, even more so than usual. The main baddy, leader of the underwater villains returns to life over and over again until he's finally eaten by a Megalon. 

Oh, yes the sharks, sorry Megalons. They're barely in it. They're mostly forgotten and only appear vaguely until the final showdown on Fun Island, heavily featured in the trailer, but woefully underused and wasted in this putrid liquid crap. 

One character is torn to pieces in the back of a helicopter leaving not one drop of blood, a piece of cloth or any gubbins at all. Oh and there is a hilarious midair helicopter refuelling that is so staggering stupid and implausible as to render everything else utterly unbelievable.

This is a water-logged, boring and crushingly tedious movie that plumbs new depths of blandness. Added to this was the shaky cam approach to each and every action scene.

Which is a real shame because the trailer, the best thing about this film, seemed to indicate it all took place in a holiday resort, which would have been fantastic. Sadly the writers had other ideas and Ben Wheatly was too busy counting his fat wads of money to care.

Shit, bland and almost completely without merit. And do not under any circumstances, if you choose to go and see this crap take the 3D option. Worst use of 3D ever.

3/10