The Review: The Iceman

The Iceman 5/10

I finally watched this movie The Iceman starring Michael Shannon as the real life serial killer Richard Kuklinski. I had meant to watch this for a while since I watched the documentary about the guy years ago on cable. This movie should have been way better than it was but it seemed like they were trying to make this lunatic somewhat a good guy and as if he were just doing bad things to get money to give his family a better life. They showed a few moments of him losing his shit at home but left out how he beat his wife played by Winona Ryder and would be evil as hell for long periods of time. In this it was more like he would lose his temper and some of the bad would get out for his family to see. This movie definitely had a Goodfellas vibe to it which wasn't helped by the fact that Ray Liotta was in it.

The Review: Spring Breakers

Spring Breakers is the movie Koko and I were supposed to watch a few weeks ago when we accidentally watched Spring Break from the 1980's. This is a very (spring break...) different movie. This is the tale of a director that wanted to have as many nude girls that looked 13 as possible on film. Koko enjoyed this film while I only liked the parts where James Franco was on screen as the rapper/drug dealer named Alien. He was awesome.

This is the story of one religious (spring break...) fuck up girl and her three sociopath friends that all really want to go to spring break because life is so hard when you're a hot young White chick. Three of them decide to rob a waffle place and get enough for their trip. They go and drink, do coke, smoke weed, and end up (spring break...) arrested at a party. By the way, this movie is full of mumbling. These girls can mumble their asses off. It turns out that the one with the worst acting (spring break...) and least attractive is the directors wife. Go figure. Alien ends up bailing them out of jail because he thinks they are special.

DVDiculous: The Letter

East asked if I had seen a movie called The Letter that had come out last year starring James Franco and Winona Ryder. She didn't like it. I like the two of them just fine as actors so I gave it a try. Wow. What a boring ass movie. I'm not even mad. I'm confused. Even as I watched it I asked myself “Why was this made? Who is this for?”

Here is what the movie is described as on Wikipedia. I will not adjust any of the spelling errors. “A playwright, Martine (Ryder) suffers from paranoia and hallucations as she attempts to stage a new production. She is uncertain over whether she is deluded or if there is a plot against her. Tyrone (Franco) is an actor in Martine's new play.” Now, that sounds like it could be interesting, but its totally not. If I saw this in the theater I would be pissed not only for wasting money but because its so fucking quiet that I know my stomach would growl at all the wrong times. By the time it gets to the part where she totally loses her shit I'd already cashed out.

Theater Whore: Amour and Rust And Bone

Another year goes by and me and Cam decide to check out some more Oscar films. This time we decided t add on to A Royal Affair by seeing a couple of films nominated for Best Foreign Film. A few things I know about foreign films is that people die, people will be in fucked up situation, there will be all kinds of nudity, and I will leave confused at something I saw.

The first film we saw was a French one called Amour. I know that its been getting a lot of talk but I had no idea what it was about except that old people were in it. Which meant that someone had to die.

Oh, and there will be spoilers.

Demand It!: Killer Joe, Source Code, John Dies At The End

I have been watching a lot of stuff On Demand lately and decided to make yet another category of movie reviews because of it. There’s already Babbling Old Man, DVDiculous, Theater Whore, and TV Slut.

The first film up is Killer Joe starring Matthew McConaughey as Killer Joe. He’s a cop that also kills professionally on the side. This is being called a dark comedy by many and I don’t get why. Its about a fuck up played by Emile Hirsch who owes money to bad people and decides to have his mom killed for her insurance policy. His dad Thomas Haden Church, step mom Gina Gershon, and sister Juno Temple who is strange as fuck agree and madness ensues.

Fap Of The Year 2012: Sofia Vergara

2012 will go down as the year that the Fap Files took a dramatic hit. Hell, the Spank Bank was damn near depleted this year. So many women either messed with their faces, got pregnant, and forcibly removed themselves from the list by getting married. But one woman stayed fapable despite having a 20 year old son, being 40, being engaged, and hard to understand unless I pay attention. Sofia Vergara is the Fap Of The Year!

Last years winner Rosario Dawson disappeared from the public after winning the award and I searched high and low for this one. Looking at the files I compiled this year, only four, makes me and my junk sad. Vergara’s been busy with a hit series, being on her son’s reality show, being the face of Covergirl, starring in Pepsi commercials, and starting a clothing line for soccer mom’s for K-Mart that makes soccer mom’s wish they looked like her.

Theater Whore: Jack Reacher

Last night East and I went to check out Jack Reacher. East wasn’t all that excited after seeing the trailer and I wanted to see it but wasn’t dying to until I heard a review saying how there’s more to it than the trailer showed. I had fallen into the trailer trap plenty of times and ended up missing out on really good films because of the bad trailer. So after some convincing we headed to The Cineramadome which is connected to The Arclight and checked it out.

I hadn’t been in this portion of the theater I think since Spiderman 2. It had been years. I miss this theater. We sat up high in row Q and started the movie. It begins with a guy getting ready to shoot folks in Pittsburgh  People in the theater were feeling way uncomfortable but not me because I know the difference between a trained sniper and some asshole that likes to shoot schools. So this guy picks off five people and drives off. A guy is caught and arrested and as he is being interviewed writes down “Get Jack Reacher.”

Theater Whore: Flight

Denzel Washington is a national treasure. Seriously, this guy is just a ridiculously amazing actor. In his latest movie Flight the trailer made it look like this crazy action flick about a plane that is gonna crash and has to flip upside down to survive. That was pretty much all I knew about it and it wasn't enough to seriously make me wanna see it. I did want to but I wasn't dying to. Then Cam called and said “Is it too early to see a movie?” and I said it was not. So we headed to The Grove for a 10:30am showing.

Denzel stars as William “Whip” Whitaker who is a pilot. But before all that the movie starts off with a shot of a nipple. Not his thankfully. He wakes up and starts fighting with his ex wife over paying for their son's private school. He then finishes off his beer and does a line of coke. Next shot is this son of a bitch walking to the plane to pilot it. Oh, and the chick he was banging is a stewardess named Katerina. She is hot.

DVDiculous: Get The Gringo

I know how we all…well, most of us, feel about Mel Gibson. If he met me he’d probably smile but on the inside hope that me and a bunch of guys that looked like me would rape his baby mama to teach her a lesson for wearing tight pants. Or he would call me sugar tits. Either way his reputation has been rather fucked for quite some time. There are certain actors where their outside life will effect the way I enjoy a film with them. Like from now on if I see Michael Fassbender in a movie all I’m thinking is “Magneto has a giant penis. And that’s not fair.”  

Get The Gringo also known as How I Spent My Summer Vacation starts off with a crazy ass car chase with two guys running from cops and border patrol. They are dressed as clowns and one of them has been shot. Gibson known throughout the film as Driver is pissed that the guy in back is bleeding all over the money. He ends up crashing through the Mexican border.

Theater Whore: Rise Of The Guardians

Let me start off by saying that I loved this movie. I really did. There have been few things that had such an emotional impact on me. To name a few there was An American Tail, Antwone Fisher, John Q., and watching Eddie Guerrero tributes on Youtube. I didn’t expect this movie to be as good as it was and it was a super surprise to me. Okay. Now that that’s out of the way lets begin.

This is about Jack Frost who is pretty much the ignored spirit of the holidays. He’s hanging out in a small town helping some kids have fun by creating a snow day for them. He feels unappreciated by everyone and asks The Man In The Moon aka Sky Jesus to help him out and gets no answer. At the North Pole Santa Claus senses that something is wrong and calls all the guardians together including Frost who is confused since he doesn’t consider himself one of them.

Theater Whore: Wreck It Ralph

It takes something special for me to watch a CGI film. I love hand drawn cartoons and miss them like crazy and semi rage against these new films that take three years or something to make because the hair has to look real, damn it! The last computerized films I liked a lot were The Incredibles and How To Train Your Dragon. So when I saw the trailer for Wreck-It Ralph what got me interested was the fact that it was filled with old school game characters that I knew.

This movie is about a character named Ralph that wrecks things in a game called Fix-It Felix Jr. Ralph breaks things, Felix fixes them, Ralph gets tossed off the building, repeat. Ralph wants to be friends with the neighbors but since he’s the bad guy they don’t want any part of him. At his bad guy support group they worry that Ralph may be going “Turbo” which is a term I will using in my vocabulary from now on. We find out what it means later.

Ralph tries to go to a party thrown by the neighbors and Felix when they tell him that he’s a bad guy and will always be one. The only way for him to become a good guy is to win a medal which he cant do in his own game so he abandons it. All of the video games are in an arcade and when kids aren’t playing them at night they cross to each others games. Ralph finds out about a game called Hero’s Duty where you climb a building and get a medal and jumps into that game.

Theater Whore: Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2

Oh my god so many beheadings! This movie should have been called Twilight: Breaking Necks Part 2! This was by far the most violent of the series. Fuck that. One of the most violent films to come out in the last few years. This movie was more violent than Wolverine. Read that again at least four times and try to make sense of it. You cant! I have already mentioned that I have seen all these films and did not super hate them. This film takes place right after Twilight Breaking Dawn: Part 1. If you recall Kristen Stewart, who I cant stand, had a baby and became a vampire.

So Bella wakes up and Edward is watching her like a total creepazoid and she bolts across the room and starts molesting her face. He tells her that she is stronger than him right now and that before she goes to see the baby, Renesmee, that she needs to feed. They go out hunting and she is gonna snatch a deer when she spots a hiker. She fights the urge to chomp his ass and kills a mountain lion instead. Then she heads back to the house and starts to kick Jacob’s ass because he is imprinted on her daughter. Who is only a couple weeks old. Yeah.

No fuck the baby!

Alice leaves the family after having a terrible vision and then a vampire that left the family, Irina, sees Bella, Jacob, and Renesmee, who is aging fast as hell, strolling and is all like “Ooh, I’m telling’!” and runs back to the Volturi. They are the old weird vampires that popped up in the other films. Irina says that they have made a child vampire which is bad. I shit you not there’s a scene where Dakota Fanning tosses a toddler into fire like it was a bag of chips. I laughed knowing I shouldn’t have. Now the Volturi are heading to the Cullen family to start some shit.

Theater Whore: A Royal Affair

Once again I went to the Sundance Theater up on Sunset. Me and Cam had been meaning to see a movie for a while and she keeps up on all the classy films that get awards unlike me who wants to see things based on how many explosions are in the trailer. Our choices were Flight and A Royal Affair and after watching the trailer for Flight I feel like I’ve seen the film so we chose the latter. So glad that we did since this was really good. I normally hate movies based around time periods where people wore way too many layers.

Too much!

A young girl, Caroline Mathilde, is heading to Denmark to become the new queen of King Christian VII. She has never met him and has heard all these stories of how cultured and handsome he is. She gets there and dude is hiding behind a tree acting like a total weirdo. And by weirdo I mean lunatic. He hates that everyone thinks she is so damned artsy when he is the real talented one. Caroline spends most of her time looking sad even after she has her first kid.

Whoopwhoopwhoopwhoopwhoop!

Elsewhere this guy Johann Friedrich Struensee, who I will just call Ze German from now on because fuck typing that name repeatedly, is brought in as part of a plan to influence this crazy ass king. The king likes him because he knows Shakespeare and everything gets better. The king stops acting as crazy. Yay.

Theater Whore: The Man With The Iron Fists

The entry for the premise of The Man With The Iron Fists says “On the hunt for a fabled treasure of gold, a band of warriors, assassins, and a rogue British soldier descend upon a village in feudal China, where a humble blacksmith looks to defend himself and his fellow villagers.” This is a super lie. This is the tale of a man that wanted to see a movie about a man with iron fists and ended up watching a jumbled batch of nonsense about a guy that not only watches but helps a lot of terrible shit happen.

RZA wrote, directed, and starred in this movie. He shouldn’t have done any of these things. He’s a blacksmith in a small Chinese village where these multiple clans are fighting for gold and control. He makes weapons for both sides meanwhile he just wants to save enough money so he and his hooker girlfriend can move away and fuck in the forest in peace. It made me wonder “Is there such a place where you can be left alone?” I don’t think so. Just when you think you’re safe some asshole will jump out of a tree wearing wolf claws that were probably made by you.

DVDiculous: The Campaign

I finally decided to watch The Campaign after allowing my hatred of Casa De Mi Padre die down. You see, I like Will Ferrell. He’s a funny guy to me and I will watch almost anything with him in it. Zach Galifianakis on the other hand I can only take in very small doses. This movie has some parts that had me crack up laughing and others where I wished they would hurry up and start punching more babies. Yes, that happened in this movie. That baby got rocked! Ferrell plays Cam Brady who is running for Congress in North Carolina’s 14th District. He has won four times in a row and no one even goes up against him. He’s a total dick who sleeps around with any woman that looks at him. Oh, and he is married with two children as does Huggins.

After accidentally sending a voice message to thousands of homes instead of the woman he is sleeping with the Motch brothers played by John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd decide to use a former Congressman’s son Marty Huggins to accomplish their goals of moving sweatshops from China to North Carolina to save on shipping costs.

They assign Tim Wattley played by Dylan McDermott to give Huggins a makeover. They get rid of their pugs because they’re Chinese and give them two Labradors. They give his wife a haircut and completely change the house. Wattley is one the best parts of the movie. He is a fucking lunatic. There's a scene where he catches the family having fun and has to shut that shit down.

Theater Whore: Argo

When I want historical accuracy I watch a documentary or jump into my time machine where I make George Washington cry by calling him “Termite Mouth.” When I want to be entertained I watch a good film and Argo was that film. Seriously. People are getting upset about changes made in this film compared to what actually happened. Go watch a cartoon and have a Pop Tart, you weirdoes. It’s a movie. They could’ve gave all the hostages kung fu powers if they felt like it. I saw this over at The Vista in Silverlake and it was my first time in that theater. It is very cool. Wish I had time to get popcorn…

In 1979, the best year ever, the U.S Embassy in Tehran is being protested because we have their former Shah and he is all nice and cozy after apparently doing a lot of horrible shit to the people of the country and they want him back. The US is like “Nope.” The people start rioting and they storm the embassy and the workers start burning everything and shredding documents. One of the guards is all “I’m gonna go talk to them…” and is instantly blindfolded and held at gunpoint. Six folks get away and hide with the Canadian representatives. One of the hostages is played by Clea Duvall who I now have a crush on all over again.

Theater Whore: Taken 2

After four years Liam Neeson is back with the number one comedy of the year, Taken 2! I’m joking but totally not at the same time. This movie had me cracking up laughing. I know it wasn’t supposed to but some of the stuff that happened reminded me of dumb shit from Transporter which made sense later when I found out that the director did Transporter 3 and friggin’ Colombiana. That guy loves live action Looney Tunes and if I had known that going in, I would’ve waited a while to watch this.

Neeson is once again Bryan Mills. This takes place a few years after the first movie so hopefully his daughter has gotten smarter. Oh, she is named Kim and played by Maggie Grace. She’s supposed to be a teenager I think but it doesn’t look like it. I’m getting ahead of myself. Some dude named Murad Hoxha who I don’t ever remember them saying in the movie wants Neeson killed for killing his son in the first film. His son was the one Neeson shocked to death. You remember him right?

Taken 2: Electric Bugaloo!

Yeah. Him. So his dad played by…uh the guy called Boris The Blade in Snatch vows revenge because Neeson killed his pedophile asshole son. “Oh, I know my son sold young girls into drugs and prostitution. But it’s the principal of the thing!” So he rounds up a bunch of other losers who didn’t die in the first film and they ride in a bunch of cars to find Neeson.

DVDiculous: Dark Knight Returns Part 1

A few weeks ago while trolling the internets I stumbled upon the fact that there was going to be a Batman: The Dark Knight Returns animated movie based off of Frank Miller’s graphic novel of the same name. Not only that, but it was coming out very soon! The first thing I noticed, and was very happy about, was that the art style was not based exactly on Miller’s style. Don’t get me wrong. I like his art…sometimes. And don’t get me started on how terrible the Dark Knight Strikes Again story, art, and coloring was. Sheesh…

This movie starts off with Bruce Wayne in a race car pushing it past its limits before it explodes and he ejects. Bruce, now at 55 years old, meets up with Commissioner James Gordon who is also retiring from his job. Gordon hopes that Bruce really stays retired and brings up a sore spot when he mentions Jason Todd, the Robin that was killed by The Joker years prior. Bruce leaves and wanders to Crime Alley where his parents were murdered and is confronted by The Mutants, a gang that now runs the streets doing every violent thing you can imagine.

Bruce sits at home watching the news and how violent his city is getting. He begins to have nightmares and ends up walking into the Batcave. Alfred tells Bruce that he set off the alarms and asks him when he shaved his mustache. Bruce touches his face as if shocked that it is indeed gone. Know why? Because Batman ain’t got no mustache! Bruce ends up suiting up as Batman as Harvey Dent aka Two Face is released after getting surgery to look normal again. He immediately plots to blow up two buildings. Batman stops him and sees that Dent is damaged mentally beyond repair.

Theater Whore: Resident Evil Retribution

Have you ever watched a Resident Evil movie? Well, let me give you a crash course. Little story, lots of killing, main star survives, ends badly. That is how each and every one of these films goes. The latest, Resident Evil: Retribution, is no different. It stars Milla Jovovich who is back as Alice, the genetically engineered fighting machine that had her bionic-ness removed but still manages to do shit that would make The Wachowski’s say “Okay, come on, really?” The first few minutes are done in reverse where you see a bunch of folks being killed and Alice fighting back before being blown off a ship. Then you see it happen in real time which seems kinda pointless.

Cold. Naked. Alone. Yep. Must be Resident Evil.

She wakes in bed with her husband and daughter before being attacked by zombies. Then they bump into Michelle Rodriguez who died in the first film. She then wakes up wearing napkins because fuck you its Milla Jovovich and we gots to see the goods! She gets tortured with some dubstep music by her old friend Jill before the computer is shut down and Alice is given a cool outfit to wear and a door opens that allows her to escape.

Hooooly shiiiiiiit!!!

In the hallways that damned laser grid chases her and she gets away. She heads outside and is in Japan all of a sudden where zombies start eating folks before turning to her. She runs back inside and kills the zombies.

Government issues Spandex FTW!

She finds this hot Asian dame named Ada Wong who used to be bad that and Wesker who has been the enemy for a while. They tell her that The Red Queen is back. She’s that evil English girl. You know the “You’re all going to die down here” girl? Her. A group of guys who I will refer to as Team Eye Candy show up and are going to take an elevator down and help Alice and Ada escape. Kevin Durand is one of them and that dude is awesome. I want to see a movie where him and Karl Urban are brothers that just punch people in the face.

Neither of these outfits seem battle tested.

Anyhoot, Alice and Ada battle these fucking giants in fake New York which is just a little bit less scary than real New York. They then head to the same street Alice was on when she was dreaming and find her daughter. Ada’s like “Uh, she isn’t real, you know” and Alice is all “She is to me!”

Mmm...

They drag fake little girl along because Paul W.S Anderson is a fan of Aliens and wants his own Newt. Then they are attacked by Jill who has all of Alice’s former teammates including…Michelle Rodriguez? Ada gets caught.

Theater Whore: Dredd

In the new movie Dredd there is a drug called Slo-Mo which is also a good name for this movie. I’m kidding…but I’m also totally not. This is a reboot from that terribly awesome Sylvester Stallone version that was lightly based off of the comic book which started a few years before I was born. Judge Dredd was a character that growing up I had seen but knew nothing about. This movie was a chance to get new viewers into the guy and his world and it failed. But there were some good things about it. In the future America is a giant wasteland that looks like Florida will in 2014 called the Cursed Earth.

I am the lols.

In Mega-City one there are millions of people living piled on each other where Judges are the law. They have the ability to capture, judge, and execute people for their crimes. At the start Dredd played by Karl Urban chases down some guys high on the Slo-Mo drug where two of them die in a car wreck and he tracks down and kills the other using his magic gun. Its not really magic but however the judge tells it to shoot it will. Judge Dredd is assigned a trainee that had failed to become a Judge named Anderson played by Olivia Thirlby who is psychic.