Hail, Caesar

Movie : Hail, Caesar
Drink: tequila, grapefruit vodka, espresso vodka, moonshine.




     The theater I go to most often these days is in a mall.  There is a food court with an Asian style place called Fuji Chen.  I often go there before the show and dine on  blackened or bourbon chicken, Fuji pork, and sesame chicken.  It is some great food at reasonable prices.  I mention these details only because burping up Fuji Chen was, by far,  my favorite part of Hail, Caesar.
     It was as if the Coen brothers handed out camcorders to a handful of actors and told them to film themselves doing something, anything really, and then stuck it all together and called it a day.  There was a particularly dull scene where a group of men sat in chairs talking about something, the subject of which was far too boring for me to recall.  I got up to get a drink of water as slowly as I could.  On my way out I noticed a newly emptied trash can, a lone, empty popcorn bucket at the bottom.  I thought, "what the hell, why not?" and took the empty bucket to get a popcorn refill.  Best and worst case scenario: I get sick and have to go home.
     Unfortunately the popcorn was delicious and virus free.  I shoveled it into my mouth and watched as a group of fine actors dug themselves into a hole from which they may never escape.  I mean, how many times have you gone to a movie starring an actor you liked thinking, "well if THEY'RE in it, how bad can it be?" I can personally tell you, pretty bad.  Scarlett Johansen, George Clooney, Ralph Fiennes, and a host of others have now pretty much become Brendan Frasier.
     At first I thought procession of seemingly unrelated plots and twists would congeal into a complicated, sophisticated story that would inspire you to want to see it again and again if only to figure out how it all works.  But the plot twists were actually plot unravelings, and it unraveled and unravelled until all the plot lay like a limp pile of polyester yarn that not even a neutered cat would play with.
     I saw this movie with a couple of other people, and as we left in a slow, confused shuffle, we passed by a photo booth machine.  Someone suggested we get our pictures taken. We looked each other over with our glazed expressions, our drooping shoulders, and in the end, we just kept walking.      None of us wanted to remember that we had ever been there

Fantastic Four

Movie : Fantastic 4

Drink : plastic bag of tequila




   You may have noticed that I posted the photo from the 2005 Fantastic Four up for this review.   Now you may have noticed that Johnny Storm looks like a tool, Jessica Alba is white, and Reed Richards looks like an insurance salesman that just burned his other stretchy hand on Johnny's flaming butt and is trying to pretend it doesn't hurt.  So you think to yourself, " this new film can't be THAT bad, right?"
     Right.  It's not THAT bad.  In fact, I was downright enjoying myself for the first hour.  I had a Ziploc bag of tequila in one cup holder, and a bag of blackened chicken from the Chinese place at the food court in the other.
     The slow, character building pace, devoid of adolescent joking or cheap laughs in the first 45 minutes was what I look for in a movie.  The casting of a tough but short guy as Ben Grimm was a nice touch, allowing for even more anticipation for the transformation into The Thing.  The casting of a black man as Johnny Storm was confusing at first, given that he is the biological brother of the really white Sue Storm, but that was all explained with an adoption story. Hmm, that's not really how the comic book tells it, but whatever.  The four friends all get zapped during an alternate dimension experiment instead of a space exploration like the comic book says, but whatever.  Doctor Doom gets zapped during the same alternate dimensional experiment and gets a bunch of weird, unexplained powers, but whatev...no,  ok, maybe this movie should be called Fantastic Foray into a Version of a Comic Book I Flipped Through Once Really Fast.
     As I said, it's actually pretty good at first, but then the accident happens and everything blows up and powers are introduced and there is a black screen that says " One Year Later" .  I can only assume that the writer had a Monty Python style heart attack and some Disney executive took over.  The team members are all working for the government doing...whatever,  and are really bored by their own abilities.  Johnny flies around as a flaming blip I could reproduce with the technology on my Tracfone.  Sue has to mysteriously hold her breath to perform her powers, but then later doesn't, meaning we have to hear all that heavy gasping for nothing.  Ben Grimm is sad, ugly, scary... I guess?  I don't know.  I'm actually having a hard time remembering him except for his really far apart eyes.  They are, like, really spread out.  He looks like a halibut who's eyes just kept migrating.  Reed Richards is all stretched out and gross and Doctor Doom looks like something the Green Lantern made while getting wasted on Jager while watching  I, Robot.
    I know I seem preoccupied with the way these characters look, but really,  I just can't remember what the plot was.  Maybe there was a deeper message somewhere in there.  Like, let's not try to make a ethnically diverse woman look whiter by giving her blue contacts this time and finally have an African-American actor not say " Now that's what I'm talkin' 'bout!"  Except, he does say that, so who knows. I guess it's about having enough time to eat your chicken, drink your bag of tequila, and then having enough time for a decent nap in some air conditioning.

Movie :  Mission Impossible : Rogue Nation

Drink : Bonnie Rose Orange whiskey and Smirnoff 100 proof root beer vodka




    First off,  can we just address how difficult it is to smuggle booze and snacks into the theater in the summer?  How I long for the first cold snap of fall when I can trade my tank top in for a puffy winter jacket and my basketball shorts for a set of 12 pockets connected to a pair of cloth tubes (commonly called cargo pants).
   After a long hot day of trimming grass and shrubs for rich old ladies and rich lazy slobs, I was ready to get a cocktail and sit in a cold dark theater.  I was running a bit late so, when I stopped at the drink getting place, I raced in and grabbed a handful of mini bottles that were dumped in the dollar bucket.  I slapped down my money and did as little of the booze-clerk-to-customer banter designed to make me feel like less of a schmuck for buying discount minis at 3:30 in the afternoon and him feel less like he should maybe have called  IT Technical College for that free informational booklet.
    When I finally got to the theater, I wasted precious seconds trying to jam all these bottles into my shorts.  The problem was that they were basketball shorts, like I mentioned, so the stretchy fabric folded perfectly around the bottles.  Not wanting to be found out, or to look like I had the most mangled looking erection ever, I went with tying the string of my shorts tight and jamming the booze in my waistband.
     I was about ten yards from the counter when the bottles began to work their way loose.  There followed the most awkward, hunching limp into the lobby.  I managed to buy my ticket, but a few steps later I dropped all my change.  I stood there over the coins, knowing that if I bent over I would defintitely have vodka dropping out of my leg holes. I was about to walk away and call it a loss when a smiling 7 year old girl came skipping by and grabbed my coins and handed them to me.  I thanked her and felt a bit of hope for the future generation, but lost it as I saw her glowering, pursed-lip mother who would no doubt squeeze that hope out of her.
     I got a decent seat and removed the first bottle from my waistband.  I cracked the cap and took a big sip.  The resulting explosion twisted my tongue into a Gordian knot and blew the hair back on a me in the nearest alternate dimension.  I spent the entirety of the Mockingjay trailer ( no great loss)  holding back tears and choking as quietly as possible.  When I could see again I checked the bottle.  Smirnoff 100 proof root beer vodka.  No.
     The movie was good! Rip roarin' fun with plenty of flinch inducing punches.  Wild vehicle chases that make you want to hop in your mid 90's Ford Ranger and gun it out of the parking lot like Ethan Hunt in his BMW.  Plot and character twists reminiscent of the first film.  The type that really make you pay attention for fear of getting lost. I sort of dozed off from the root beer overdose, so the plot may not be as complicated as I thought...
     Say what you want about Tom Cruise,  but say it to yourself.  Who cares what he does in real life? Isn't that the whole point of being an actor?  I don't go to movies to see what my favorite celebrity is doing in their spare time.  I don't go to try to spot the flaws in the green screen.  I don't see movies like this to remind myself of reality.  I got enough of that on the way to my car.  An emaciated  young vegan couple with dyed gray hair stood next to their Prius and argued about politics while, nearby, a flock of sparrows crowded around a puddle of fresh vomit.  I wanted to go back in, buy another ticket, and watch some people save the world.  Eat your popcorn and shut up.

Her

Movie : Her
Drink : Corona and some sort of wine poured in the dark.




     This was by far the most frightening post-apocalyptic movie I have ever seen.  The future imagined as effeminate zombies roam the ultra clean streets in their ultra clean Goodwill finds, heads bent over tiny picture frame phones, oblivious to all external influence, except for maybe unisex clothing.  Seriously, why is everyone dressed like The Gap and Goodwill merged into the only clothing company on earth?
     When the main character , Theodore (of course not "Ted") isn't moping around at work at a job any normal person would have pooped on their desk and walked out on, he's moping at home.
His neighbors, who also shop at Gapwill, bicker with each other very calmly over whether a carefully ugly Amy Adams's documentary she's working on is any good.  It's something like forty minutes of just her mom sleeping.  Of course it's terrible, but in the future, much like today, ironically clothed hipsters seem incapable of telling someone that their sub-par projects, usually documentaries,  are crap.
     I'm not even going to really get into the premise of the whole human-operating system love triangle except to say that I think this whole film was maybe a pro-bullying message.  In the scene where Ted is starting to fall in love with his phone and his eyes are closed and she is telling him what to do and where to go and she tells him to spin around and he's in a public market twirling and twirling with eyes shut, head thrown back in laughter, pastel cardigan billowing out like a prom dress, I cant help but wonder if a normal guy with a pair of Wranglers and a Hanes T-shirt would have just gone up and slugged him, for his own good, and maybe told him to get a life.. would that have been such a bad thing?
     This movie had a few high points, like when Chris Pratt's character tells Ted that he admires him because he is like a man and a chick at the same time.  The sound of Scarlett Johanssen's voice.
     Oh, and best of all, the surprise twist ending where you find out that the title of the movie is referring, not to the voice of the operating system, but to Theodore.

Nebraska

Movie: Nebraska
Drink: Coors Light power hour



     For those of you that don't know,  a Power Hour is when you take a shot of beer every minute for an hour.  I calculated it in my head and figured out that an entire power hour would only be 5 beers.  True, not a small amount of drinking in an hour, but let's be honest, nothing I haven't done before without even knowing it.   By Minute 21, I knew I was in trouble.  There was something about the marking of each passing minute with the celebratory shooting of alcohol that slipped each minute of my life straight down my throat, into my stomach and towards my rectum that made me start to panic and worry about my 401k and my inevitable trek towards my 40th birthday and the fact that I could slip on some ice during this endless winter and I haven't signed up for Obamacare yet.
      I now realize that this was the perfect frame of mind in which to watch Nebraska.   A slow moving film that is slow in the way that the river you are floating on with a 30 pack of beer in one of those floating cooler things is slow.   You don't mind.
     The fact that the movie was shot in black and white usually tells me that the movie was found to be pretty lame in the editing studio and the production team was too tired to fix anything and thought the lack of color would draw some of the attention away from how lame the plot line was.  When I think back through my Coors infested short term memory, however,  I can't really imagine this movie being filmed any other way.  I would like to say that the stark beauty of the struggle of life can only be truly captured without color, but let's be honest.  Old people and the Great Plains just look better in black and white.
    I watched it with 2 other people and we all had our own interpretations of the family.  We hated the mom, liked the mom, hated the son, understood the son, rooted for the dad.  All for different reasons.  It seemed that each person filtered the characters through their experiences with their own families, recognized someone and felt a flicker of... annoyance? Guilt? Love?  Who knows.  I will say that it ended up as an argument about who had the craziest cousins.  I'm happy, or sad, to report that I lost.
   As  I sat sank down in the couch with another Coors wedged in between the cushions,  I saw my mom in the mom,  my dad in the dad, myself in the son trying to fix everything.  I had a thousand regrets, a thousand good memories, and one or two resolutions to be a better person, a better son, a better brother.
     I just hope I can remember that in the morning.

Liberal Arts

Drink : One shot of moonshine


     I only watched about half of this movie, the kitchen was a mess and I was in the middle of cleaning it after a failed experiment where I try to figure out how to make an omelet that has more than 3 eggs in it.  Making a nice, hefty omelet always leads to burnt eggs and runny insides.  The only solution I came up with was to make 2 omelets.  Lots of egg and cooked onions gave their lives to my kitchen walls that day....
     The parts of this movie I did see were pretty neutral.  A story about a mid thirties dude who feels old while actual old people tell him he's not that old and how crappy everyone feels about aging is nothing new.  The characters spend a lot of time discussing books, which was amusing to me because I was just thinking about how I had gotten out of the habit of reading books before bed.  This movie makes me reluctant to take it back up.  Books are great, but if you  read them with even partial intent of telling others about how it made you feel, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Unlike movies, books play only in your mind and that version of the book cannot be seen by anyone else. It would be like watching The Dark Knight Rises, and then discussing it with someone who had seen Batman Forever and trying to find common ground.
     At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the main female character was really annoying.  Her never ending sarcasm and one-upping got old fast. Her sarcasm face was a blend of pained eyes with a puckered trying-not-to-laugh mouth. Women of the world: don't be like this chick. Girls that are constantly sarcastic are not cute, they are not fun, they are not ever going to find a boyfriend.  Guys do not want to be around a girl that, if they got a bad haircut and passed gas more, could be their little brother.  Less sass, more class, ladies.
    I never thought I'd say this, but Zach Efron saves this film.  He plays a somewhat cliche stoner/type guy who is always sitting on a park bench giving sage advice to the neurotic main character.  It works though.  And while watching, I discovered a very simple, very large difference between men and women.  Women are the selfish ones!  The girl spends the whole movie obsessing about herself and what her boyfriend thinks of her, while the boyfriend leaves to save a friend who calls and says he just swallowed a lot of pills.  While he's gone, she obsesses about what his absence means in relation to her. She yells at him for being selfish.  He wanders off, finds Zach Efron sipping water at his bench, and they discuss life and caterpillars and butterflies and how freaking incredible they are and how if something like that can happen, life can't really be all that bad. They are living in the moment, appreciating the universe. He goes back, and she is extra pissed because all she's been doing is thinking about herself and her little lame world.
    I think if women just stopped and thought about what an amazing planet they live on and how their feelings are a minute droplet in the bucket of the universe, their husbands/boyfriends would be a lot happier, and in return they would clean up the house more and make more money and put the toilet seat down.  Just a theory.
     However, if there is a woman out there, sarcastic, cool, greedy, whatever, that can make a six egg omelet, gimme a call.

Parental Guidance

Movie: Parental Guidance
Drink: Whatever was still in my system from New Year party



Never in my right mind would I see a movie like this in a theater, so you can imagine how awesome I felt as I lay on the carpet of my brother's house, slowly dripping 7UP into my mouth while dreaming of the #1 Extra Value meal at McDonald's, which cures everything. 
     As many of you know, the winter sun makes me want to pour acid on my eyes and then scribble the scabs black with a Sharpie before blindfolding myself while sitting in the basement, so when my brother suggested we go see a movie, all I heard was "popcorn and darkness".
     We were bringing the kids, so the only appropriate movie, yes I said appropriate ( I'm talking to you, dude who brought his 4 year old daughter to Terminator Salvation, disturbing me not with her crying at the blood and dismembering, but her giggling at them) was Parental Guidance.  And this is why we should all embrace our hangovers.  Normally I would've scoffed at the idea of paying money for what surely was a crap show, but in my mentally weakened state, I agreed to go. 
     Kids are great. I think we can all agree that babies totally suck, but once they pupate into a kid, they are like having a really funny, dweeby friend that thinks everything is cool.  I when I saw the pure joy in my niece's eyes as she pressed the red button that sprayed butter all over our popcorn I could relate.  What a fantastic invention!  When the movie got lame, it was no trouble at all to find a willing participant to go out to the lobby with me to get more pop and play the toy grabber machine.  People that usually glance warily at a grown man dumping quarters into a slot in an attempt to snag a greasy, star spangled dog/bear thing now came up to me and my nieces and smiled and cheered us on. When the movie got even more boring, I sat back and watched the secondary show of my brother trying to catch his daughter who just up and ran off.
      So all you parents, stop being so stressed and lame and take your kids to the movies. It doesn't even have to be animated.  Just make sure you drink heavily the night before.
     As for the movie itself, all I can say is not since "The Bride of Chucky" have I so badly wanted to see an ugly red headed brat get his ass kicked.