| Movie | Rating | Review | Date | Your Rating | Match | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| World's Greatest Dad - R |
 Lance Clayton becomes famous through his own son's "suicide". I say that with quotations because he didn't commit suicide. His son, Kyle, instead died through auto erotic asphyxiation. To not further any humiliation to his son, Lance stages a suicide. He makes it look like Kyle hung himself in his closet. Lance always wanted to be a famous writer. He gets rejected constantly from publishers. To make matters worse, his son is an asshole. Kyle has no redeeming qualities except for being a pervert. So it's understandable to know why Lance doesn't freak out on his son since the kid obviously could care less what his father thinks or does. Lance is a school teacher. He teaches English, but not many students take his course in poetry. One other teacher, Mike, seems to get most of the attention after an article of his shows up in the New Yorker. Even Lance's girlfriend who is also a teacher, Claire, finds this attractive about Mike. Claire is one of those women who will obviously sleep with someone who is, well, famous. Lance may or may not want to believe it, but Claire is getting some on the side with Mike. Too bad. After having a date with Claire though, he returns home to find his son dead from auto erotic asphyxiation. Lance breaks down when he realizes it. He stages it as a suicide, even writes a suicide note and boom! His son's death wasn't one big humiliation. So how does Lance become famous? Well, it all starts with that suicide note. One of the students got their hands on it and published it in the school paper. It effects everyone that reads it and everyone starts to see Kyle in a different light. He went from a pervert to a saint thanks to the World's Greatest Dad. Now, since Lance can't get his writing career off the ground he decides to make up a journal that Kyle wrote. He does this after talking with the guidance counselor who tells him that all the students are so touched by Kyle's suicide note. Lance writes down a shit load of bullshit, turns it in to the counselor and before you know it Lance has his first piece of work published! Something is fishy though. You see Kyle had a friend, Andrew. He hung around Kyle all the time. So seeing and hearing all these positive things about Kyle really makes Andrew suspicious. With Lance's fame through his son's death, Claire becomes smitten with him. He even goes on a talk show to talk about his book, I mean his son's "suicide". Somewhere along the line, Lance confesses the real truth of how Kyle died to everyone after Nick Hornsby plays a song (for which Lance told everyone that Kyle liked, but wasn't true. Lance likes Nick Hornsby.) After his confession, everyone turns on him. "I use to think the worse thing in life was to end up all alone," he says. "It's not. The worse thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone." And with that Lance quietly leaves, stripping off all his clothes while the tune 'Under Pressure' plays. He makes his way to the swimming pool where he dives in, naked. The trailer to this film makes it look like a father having trouble with his son. Partially true. If you're easily offended with suicide I would seriously suggest you don't watch this film because it's pitch black to the core and I loved it. A surprisingly well made dark comedy. |
December 21, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Whatever Works - PG-13 |
 Boris married his first wife Jessica for all the wrong reasons. It leads him to commit suicide. It didn't work. If it had he wouldn't be telling us his story. An opening monologue directed to us, the audience, introduces what Boris is like as a person: A profound and insensitive soul who sees the world in a negative light. That's until he meets a runaway homeless girl from Mississippi named Melodie. She's an impressionable southern gal. He insults her to no end for being what he likes to call an inch worm. "You're a brainless little twit who couldn't last 3 days in New York" he tells her. She needs a place to stay and Boris, too tired to decline, lets her stay. He gives her a tour of New York or the way he see's it. She tells him about the first time she lost her virginity behind the tent at the fish fry and you can see as she tells this tale how innocent she really is. Boris finds this not to be charming because he wants no emotional attachments with her. Boris awakes from panic attacks, mostly due to his obsessive thoughts of death and the black abyss. Melodie is there to comfort him and turns the television on to some show which really calms Boris down. For a man who wants to be isolated, it's nice to see some company hanging around. She begins to have a crush on Boris who decline's her offer due to their age differences and his crazy world views. She gets a job as a dog walker and meets a guy named Perry. They go out on a date, but it doesn't work out. She comes back to Boris place explaining everything she hated about the evening. Looks like Boris's theories are beginning to rub off on her. She even starts to coin the phrase Whatever works. Something Boris always uses. This turns into a hilarious turn of events when Boris immediately marries her for this alone. He believes finally that somebody out there in the world understands or at least wants to understand about his views of the world. They're together for a year, Melodie is now a nanny and Boris is still having those panic attacks. Then disaster strikes when Melodie's mother enters the picture. She shows up with horrible news that Melodie's father has left with Melodie's mother's best friend Mandy. Melodie's mother is now a single woman in New York where the possibilities are endless. She is pursued by one of Boris's friends, Leo Brockman, who loves her pear shaped butt and her perfect breasts. I couldn't agree more! Brockman finds talent in the photographs she took of her daughter and home. They begin a relationship which eventually turns into a threesome with one of Brockman's friends. Over the course of a year, Melodie's mother has become a New York photographer who is in love with two men for whom she lives with. She is happy. Now she wants her daughter to leave Boris and be with an Actor named Randy Lee James. Randy and Melodie bump into each other. They have chemistry. It's something different than with Boris. So, Melodie takes the leap and sleeps with Randy. Her father comes knocking on Boris's door looking to get back with his wife, but that doesn't work out since his wife is happy without him. Melodie's father left the woman he was seeing because deep down he's really gay. He confesses this to another gay man at a bar where the two of them share a bit of conversation. Melodie's father finds happiness. So does Melodie in the arms of Randy. She breaks up with Boris. So where does that leave Boris? Suicide again. He jumps out the window. Luckily, fate would have it, he lands on a woman who is a psychic. He falls in love with her. It all then leads to Boris and the psychic, Melodie, Randy, Melodie's mother and her two lovers, Melodie's father and his gay lover spending time together on New Years Eve watching the ball fall as it rings in a New Year. That's pretty much the film. The character Boris spends some of the time speaking to the camera for which everyone thinks he's crazy for doing because they don't see anybody watching them. Boris does though, that's why he's a "genius". An okay time waster with Woody Allen zingers galore. |
December 21, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Leolo - Unrated | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| All Things Fair (Lust och fägring stor) (Love Lessons) - Unrated | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Across The Hall - R | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Deadline - R | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Politist, adj. (Police, Adjective) - Unrated | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Saint John of Las Vegas - R | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Splice - Unrated | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Machete - Unrated | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Sin City 2 - Unrated | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| The Rum Diary - Unrated | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Wild At Heart - R | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Boogie Nights - R | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Love Liza - R | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Panic - R | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| One Point O (1.0)(Paranoia: 1.0) - R | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Being John Malkovich - R | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Greenberg - R | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Game 6 - R | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| The Darkroom - Unrated | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Long Weekend (Nature's Grave) - PG | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Ink - Unrated |
 Hard to summarize the plot because it's an Allegory. Two forces battle for a young girl's soul while her father tries to come to grips with what is right. So what is right? Working forever or being there for your daughter? Tough decision. I'll say work forever in John's case. John is the father by the way. He's overcome with a negative force in his mind which makes him lash out at his late wife's father and at himself. This brewing negativity has been there for quite sometime. Even after his wife died it was still there which lead to his daughter, Emma, having to live with her grandparents. Child neglect and drug addiction cost John is daughter. Too bad buddy. So what's left for John? I can't say because it will ruin the ending. So let's go backwards now. There are these two opposing forces. One good and one bad. The good give people nice dreams. The bad give people bad dreams and can take your soul. One night Emma is taken. The storytellers fight to stop her abduction, but fail. We learn that it was somebody in a group called Incubus who had taken her. This creatures name is Ink. He has a long Schnauzer (nose) and looks like a Sith lord. He drags little Emma around, but when he can't get her over to the other side to his world due to a broken key which is a small bongo drum he's stuck having to find another one by having to meet three people. He even captures a storyteller who believes that Ink can be good, not bad. The good one's, the storytellers, are probably the most forgettable characters in the film. A pathfinder, Jacob, is assigned to the group to help find little Emma. Jacob is probably the only character that is the most memorable due to his inevitable knack for saying 1234. He also has black X's of tape over his eyes. Probably the highest point in the film is when Jacob orchestrates everything to the rhythm on a city sidewalk by constantly saying 1234. Everything becomes sequenced leading to Emma's father John getting hit by a car while driving. "Something's gotta stop the flow" Jacob says. With Emma taken, it's put her into a coma. Luckily John got hit by that car because as fate would have it his little girl is at the same hospital. This is where much of the film's 3rd act plays out with the good versus evil battling for her soul. In the other world, with Ink, a funny thing happens when he's able to bring Emma and the storyteller over to his world. And this is where I stop because I don't want to give it away. The character development is scatterbrain-ish. So is the direction and the fights are too disorienting. As an idea and watching it come to life I was pretty impressed how creative this low budget film was in that department. It isn't close to Brazil. Not by a long shot. It's more closer films like Parasomnia and The Girl From Monday. Also the ambient choice of music made me think of Southland Tales. This film can achieve cult status because it does have that element of originality. Overall it was a different experience. |
December 20, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Fantastic Mr. Fox - PG |
 When Mr. Fox and his wife, Felicity, are stealing chickens from a farm they get captured. They don't stay that way for long since Foxes are excellent diggers which helps them out of this situation. It does present, however, the opportunity to inject that Felicity is pregnant. Change has to be made now for Mr. Fox since he's going to be a father. In short, he needs to stop stealing chickens. Two years pass, 12 in fox years, a son was born. His name is Ash and he's a bit different. Unless you call grouchy and competitive as being different then okay. Mr. Fox has become restless. He's not getting any younger and wants to live above ground. Not in a hole. So he sets his sights on a tree. His lawyer, The Badger, warns Mr. Fox that if he is to move into one particular type of tree it might become dangerous since it's close to three facilities run by three very ugly farmers: Boggis, Bunce & Bean. Mr. Fox doesn't care. So he moves his family into the tree. A nephew, on Felicity's side of the family, comes to stay with them since his father is ill. His name is Kristofferson and he knows karate. Mr. Fox selfishly favors Kristofferson over his own son Ash which makes him angry. The competitive Ash is envious of his nephew and the banter between them is one of the most fun in the film. Ash, however, wins the respect of his father through a heroic act. I'm sorry, it was an athletic act. Maybe if those words combined: Ath-roic act. Yeah. That's better. Mr. Fox gets back to stealing chickens and puts his family at risk when Boggis, Bunce & Bean spend much of the film trying to kill them. There's also a Rat who I'm sure would be much scarier in person then on the screen who also tries to kill them or at least try to antagonize them I think. The end is one of bittersweet and the stop motion is incredible. It isn't a Wallace and Gromit production and Tim Burton didn't play a part in it. The only beef I do have with the film is that it's kind of bland. I'm not a big Wes Anderson fan because I don't really like is anal retentive direction. His storytelling is also self aware which throws me off. Like for example when the Possum asks Mr. Fox why he whistles and he replies 'It's my trademark'. Duh! This film has it's moments and if you're a fan of stop motion films or Roald Dahl or even Wes Anderson then see this film! |
December 20, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Rushmore - R | December 20, 2009 | N/A |
4019 ratings
384 reviews
