The Review: Staying Alive & Hairspray

Last night Cam and I did a double feature with Chipotle for dinner, beer, and cookies for dessert because we're grown ass people and can do things like that. It had been a long time since we had and we watched two movies she loved and I had never seen. The first was Staying Alive. I had seen Saturday Night Fever for the first time three years ago and the only thing I knew about this movie was the weird ass outfit he wore for some reason. This is six years after the previous film and was written, produced, and directed by Sylvester Stallone. What?! I had no idea. When I say I got into movies blind I mean it.

John Travolta is back as Tony Manero. He is in Manhattan now and lives in what looks like an open door jail while having a bunch of jobs at once. He is a dance instructor which they show for a moment and a waiter where woman that look like The Misfits hit on him. He has a fuck buddy named Jackie that puts up with copious amounts of his bullshit. If I thought he was a dick in the first film he has evolved into an asshole into the second. He ends up on a Broadway show where she is and meeting this other chick that is very toothy named Laura.

The Review: Supergirl

The phrase “Its just the pilot” can no longer be used as an excuse for a new series. We live in a time where there are way too many TV shows on for the first episode to not at least get close to be really good. The new Supergirl series debuted on CBS last night and it was just like I feared it would be according to a post I did earlier this year. This show suffers from uneven acting to a very rushed origin story and by the middle of it I was ready to check out. Supergirl is already a character that I'm not a fan of except in the Justice League cartoons. But the same could be said for Flash. I was not a fan of him at all but love the show.

Melissa Benoist stars as Kara Zor-El aka Kara Danvers aka Supergirl. This starts off with her being put on a rocket ship from Krypton and told that she is supposed to protect her cousin who would one day become every version of the name Superman. Its weird. I think they said his name maybe once and used other versions the rest of the time. Her ship gets knocked off course and by the time she gets to Earth he's already doing his thing. She is raised like a normal girl fully aware that she is strong as all hell. A dull girl becomes a dull girl with powers. 

Theater Whore: Sicario

Sicario 2/10

Sicario is one of those movies that I know I should like but for whatever reason does not work for me. It has good actors like Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, and Emily Blunt aka Lady Punching Bag. Its about a SWAT member being recruited to help dirty people stop other dirty people by being dirtier than the people they are hunting. It starts off hard and fast then drops to a very slow crawl until the very end of what felt like a three hour movie. I could have left, played some video games, had a quick lunch, came back, and still not have missed any information that was important to the story. After watching this I read reviews and people love this movie. Every year there is a movie people love that I don't get at all. This is that movie for 2015.

Click here for previous Theater Whore. 

Theater Whore: The Martian

The Martian 9/10

This will have some spoilers. “I'm gonna science the shit out of this planet.” And he does! This is not Gravity. Its is not close to that film for a lot of reasons and I was happy for it. The Martian stars Matt Damon as a botanist stranded on Mars after a storm occurs and his crew is forced to leave him behind thinking he is dead. He's not and that sucks because he is stuck on Mars with enough food for a whole crew but not enough to, like, live forever.

The cast of this also includes Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Michael Peña, Kate Mara, Donald Glover, Sean Bean, Sebastian Stan, Aksel Hennie, and Chiwetel Ejiofor. They are all really good and even some folks I didn't mention that have smaller parts. A lot of this movie is spent wanting Mark Watney played by Damon to survive. I laughed, I cheered, I screamed “Fuck!” when he did after something went wrong. Watney would spend parts of his days making video logs and complaining about the only music being available being disco which made the movie funnier.

The Review: What We Do In The Shadows

I checked out this movie called What We Do In The Shadows. There will be spoilers. Its a comedy about four vampires that are roommates being filmed for a documentary. There is Deacon, Viago, Vladislav, and 8,000 year old Petyr who is in the movie just enough to keep him creepy as hell and funny. They are recorded talking about their daily lives and how it is being in the modern world which they are bad at. Deacon has a helper named Jackie who has been waiting years to be turned into a vampire. She does their laundry and helps bring victims, preferably virgins. As he puts it “I think of it like this. If you are going to eat a sandwich, you would just enjoy it more if you knew no one had fucked it.”

You Had One Job: Apocalypse In X-Men

When the image of the character Apocalypse was released a while back I was pissed. My first introduction to the character was I the X-Men animated cartoon and I was intrigued. Who the hell was this guy that could fly, change shape, super strong, shot lasers, and had a talking spaceship? At the time he was just some mutant that wanted to kill weaker mutants and humans. Then Marvel started giving more back story on the guy.

"In the harsh, unforgiving desert of ancient Egypt, ruled by Rama-Tut, a band of nomadic raiders found an infant, gray-skinned and freakish in appearance, abandoned by the settlers of Akkaba. The nomads took the child for their own, giving him the name En Sabah Nur, 'The First One,' and teaching him to be 'strong' in order to survive the desert as a child. This idea, that 'the strong will survive,' would shape Apocalypse's actions throughout time."

The Review: Justice League Gods And Monsters

I finally got around to watching Justice League Gods And Monsters and I didn't enjoy it all that much. I had watched the shorts and got the same feeling I did when watching the movie which was I felt like there had been an entire series that I somehow had no idea about. It is a very different take on the DC Universe which could easily work if there had been individual films about each of the characters. As it is, each was told through flashbacks that should have been at the beginning of the movie and gone from there.

In this version Superman is the son of General Zod but on Earth after crashing as a baby is found by a Mexican couple who name him Hernan Guerra. He's a dick but effective. Batman is not Bruce Wayne but instead Kirk Langstrom who is normally Man-Bat. He was sick, took an injection, became a vampire. Its silly. And Wonder Woman is a New God named Bekka whose husband Orion was slaughtered and she tapped out and came to Earth. Its weak.

The Review: The Woman In Black

I got to see the movie The Woman In Black starring Daniel Radcliffe with H., Beastman, and B. the other day. I'd heard of the movie and ha a vague idea of what it was about. Thankfully it was not one of those “based on a true story” movies that have no real ending. I hate those. It's always some bendy White girl that does yoga posing weird and screaming while vomiting black goo. I just described my next girlfriend.

This movie is about Radcliffe as Arthur Kipps who is a lawyer heading to this creepy ass small English village which means that everyone there will be creepy and superstitious. He is going there to handle a dead woman's papers and leaves his son and caretaker behind. When he gets there everyone tries to hurry him out but he is stubborn (stupid) and stays to finish the job even though there is an obviously angry ghost haunting the place and making kids kill themselves.