Random Thoughts of a Movie Insomniac Vol 15. Part 2

The one thing that becomes problematic when hosting a blog  and this will make sense to all of you wonderful people that do it.  Is that you never feel like there is enough time to write up your post or edit a podcast.  Most of us have jobs and hopefully a nice social life and so it’s not always easy to put these reviews up as constant as we would like.   Right now I’m writing for Channel Superhero with my reviews of X-Men The Animated Series(my apologies for not writing any new things for The Cinematic Katzenjammer. I urge you all to still check it out),editing and hosting As You Watch, and Film Pasture podcasts, and still doing posts for this here blog.   I also love reading reviews from you all and I try my best to look at all your stuff, but fuck.  There is not enough time in the day.  Plus I still want time to watch a movie and play some X-Box.   Oh shit.  I forgot the band I’m in Victory Riot has a paid gig  this labor day weekend.  I need to practice for.  Still despite all this.  I have managed to see some flicks and most of them are still in theaters.  At least I hope they still are by the time this posts.

Mad Max: Fury Road.

I have never watched any of the other movies in this series, and I wasn’t really that thrilled to watch this one.  But then every single person I have met were just praising the shit out of this film.   I was broke as hell these last few months and still am.  But I saw that it was playing at a local $2 theater and I decided to check out.    WOW!!!! This was probably one of my favorite films of the year.   It’s a fairly simple road movie where the good guys haft to get from point A to point B and stop the bad guys from getting there first.  Tom Hardy is billed as the hero because the movie is called Mad Max.  But the real hero is not him.  Nor do I think it’s  Imperator Furiosa, played with awesomeness by Charlize Theron(Click link to read my early awesome tribute to this lady.  I think the real lead character is Nux played by Nicholas Hoult.  His character goes through the most changes and he is a much different person at the end then he was at the start.   I’m going to post this video The Film Theorists had to say about this movie and how director George Miller directed how your eye moves to certain part of the screen.

Inside Out.

Pixar is great at creating movies that appeal to both kids and adults, and they do it without having to use pop culture reference jokes.  However their latest venture will be more emotionally draining for parents then the kids they take to.  This is about the loss of innocence, and how growing up can be both exciting but also very sad.  Yeah, we laugh at the interaction between all the emotions in this young girl’s head.  We even get some nice jokes inside the parent’s head too.  But the real emotional part comes when we are reintroduced to one of her imaginary friends and what he does near the end made me a little sadden by what younger kids will haft to face when they get older.   The only thing I did not like was having Sadness and Joy get removed from their base and then haft to make their way back.  That was a very weak script element because it had nothing to do with the end lesson that the young girl learns.  All in all a really good movie.   I leave you with a great video The Nostalgia Critic had with a movie that is quite similar to this one.

Mission Impossible:Rouge Nation.

This one had people being disavowed and Tom Cruise running. It was like watching a weaker James Bond Film.  You know it’s cool watching because you like the character but your not thrilled to watch this particular adventure.  One of my friends said it was like watching a 007 film where the British were the bad guys.   I would put it above the 2nd one in the series, but it wasn’t anything that great.

Straight Outta Compton.

Joe, Heather and myself did a whole show dedicated to this movie for As You Watch and if you want to know what I thought.  Just click on the link below.

https://asyouwatch.wordpress.com/2015/08/19/nwa-straight-outta-comptonbest-music-biopics/

RazeZoe Bell plays a woman who is trapped in this prison like system where girls are forced to beat each other to the death  by a sadistic warden (Doug Jones) and his wife(Sherilyn Finn).   While it was cool seeing Miss Bell re team with her costar Tracie Thoms from Death Proof.(Click to read my review)  I never really understood the motives the bad guys had for keeping them there.  Yeah it was entertainment for all the rich folks they show.  But it was a very small percentage that liked watching it.  Shit, there were less then ten people watching the fight at the end.  I wanted to see these girls team up and attack the Warden, but instead we haft to make one of the girls a crazy psycho bitch so that Zoe can fight her.   The fight sequences are indeed brutal and the cast members all do a good job at making it look very real.   I just wanted a more satisfactory ending is all.

Tales From the Hood.

Have you ever wanted a movie that combined the grittiness of living in “The Hood”  with a horror anthology feature.  Well I would like to say that Tales from the Hood is your wish come true, but it is not.  It’s almost like watching a low rent version of Are You Afraid of the Dark that aired on Nickelodeon back in the day.  The wrap around story involves three gangsters who visit a morgue to pick up some sort of drug from the head owner.    He tells the each a different story while they’re there.  Story number one involves a group of racist cops who kill a black politician and then get hunted by the corpse of said guy.  2nd one is about a young boy who is abused by a demon after his father passed away.  Spoiler alert!! Sort of. The Demon is the kid’s step father played by David Allen Grier of In Living Color.  He is not even a demon he is just an abusive asshole.  Next one has a politician who has recently moved into house that was once a plantation.  He is haunted by these dolls who were suppose to have the souls of slaves that were killed there.  In one scene, one of his aids trips over one and is killed instantly when he falls down the stairs.   Last one is about a gang member who is about to be killed by a rival gang, but at the last minute is saved by the cops by being arrested.  Let me set the scene for this moment, because it is really funny.  On a residential area, the three gang members  shoot the guy and they walk up  to finish him off.  The camera gives us their perspective looking down on him. Then all of a sudden when they look up.  All these cop cars are just there.  You don’t even hear them approaching, they just appear for no reason.  So this gangster/gangsta  gets sent to this rehabilitation center.  Which basically is just a bad version of Jacob’s Ladder  meets A Clockwork Orange.   He is shown all these images of Klu Kluk Klan members killing blacks and how is life being a gangster is like that.  We end the movie when it turns out the three gangsters who are visiting the morgue are  the same that killed the guy before he got arrested in the last story.  The funeral home is not what they think and it turns out that they are now in hell.  Sorry I know I shouldn’t have given away the whole movie, but this was bad.  Really fucking bad.  It wasn’t scary, it wasn’t a great insight into gang life.  It was just udder shit, that almost borders on being racist itself

The End of The Tour.

I saw this for the Minneapolis International Film Fest and I didn’t review it at the time because frankly I forgot that I saw it.  It’s one of those movies that has good acting but not a strong enough story in my opinion. Dave Lipsky( Jesse Eisenberg) is sent by Rolling Stone to interview this novelist David Foster( Jason Segal) and get some dirt on the guy.  Jesse’s character is resentful of this guy’s success and it reminded me of Amadeus in how Salleri was jealous of Mozart.  It would have been kind of cool if this movie went a more darker comedy route.    Seeing this jealous writer try to outdo this guy, only to have it backfire on him, would be a more enjoyable feature then what we got.  Which is just these two guys traveling around for a book tour.  It was like watching Lost in Translation set in Minnesota but with not so interesting characters.  Now I love seeing my home state get featured in a movie but seeing all the great landmarks couldn’t help my boredom.  I know this was based on a true story about these two guys and both Eisenberg and Segal  do a great job at their roles.  It’s just what happens to them is very predictable and not a lot of fun. Joan Cusack has a great part as their driver that takes them to certain events

The Babadook.

I love this movie.  The only thing I hate is why do horror movies like this and It Follows get ignored by the general public.  This is something very different and it works as both a horror film and a drama.  The acting from everyone involved is just perfect, and Jennifer Kent knows when to make a scene scary or if it needs to be more heartfelt and dramatic.   If you have never heard of this movie before.  All I will say is that it’s about a mother who gets this  children’s book outside her door.  After she reads it to her son, they start getting  terrorized by the main baddie in it.  You may think that it’s going to be a simple monster project, but it’s a lot more then that.   I’m going to have you read Jason Soto from Your Face   for a more detailed review.

http://www.yourfaceisa.com/theatrical-review-the-babadook/

Well that is it for what I’ve seen this week,  What have you seen?

I also want to give a shout out to bloggers Vinnie H from https://vinnieh.wordpress.com/ and Zoe Rose Smitz  from http://thefilmfetishist.com/ for nominating me for  blogger awards.  My sincere apologies for not partaking in their posts, as well as anyone else that I forgot to mention  I am very thankful, but I just didn’t have any time to respond  to them.