The Review: How It Ends

How It Ends 1/10

I was this damn close to giving this movie either a 4 or 5 and then when it ended I dropped it immediately to a 1. How It Ends has a promising start. This couple Will and Samantha find out that a baby is on the way. Will played by the blandest damned actor I've seen in a long time, Theo James, wants to ask her father Tom played by Forest Whitaker, for her hand in marriage. He hates Will and after a terrible dinner he heads to a hotel to take a flight. Samantha calls him the next day and there is an explosion and the phone dies. Will races back to Tom and his wife and they take a road trip from Chicago to Seattle. Along the way people lose all their shit and within days the country has become The Purge but for some reason money is still a thing even when there is nothing to buy. Money is just paper, people!

Theater Whore: Arrival

Arrival 9/10

There will be some spoilers. This always happens. I will have long since made my best of list (click here to check that out) and then I'll see some movie and for sure know I would have added it to that list. I watched Arrival and this damned movie was as good as folks have been saying. People have been comparing it to Contact and that does not work for me at all since I did not like that movie at all. I am also not a fan of the last film the director of this did either. This movie was great. A damned movie about aliens arriving to the planet and there was no space battles, punching aliens in their mouths, or using their weapons against them.

Theater Whore: Taken 3

Taken 3 – 2/10

“This is so stupid!” One of the many things I said while watching Taken 3. Liam Neeson is back once again but this time it is not his daughter being taken. Its not even him. Its his ex wife's life! Yeah, that's right. This movie is weird. The first Taken was awesome. Taken 2 was one of the best comedies of that year. This one goes between a boring ass story to cameras that stay on a scene for no more than two seconds. I counted!

Who Should Be In The Expendables?

The Expendables 3 is coming out in a few months. I saw the first two and for some reason there are stars from the 80's that have not appeared. In this next film they have Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Terry Crews, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Wesley Snipes, Antonio Banderas, Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, Kelsey Grammer, Kellan Lutz, Ronda Rousey, Victor Ortiz, Glen Powell and Robert Davi. You would think that after three films that they would be running out of action stars based on some of the names they have added. Lutz? Grammer? Davi? Come on. This is silly. They didn't even need to have Couture in the last two films but have kept him for whatever reason.

I was talking to Beastman a few weeks ago about this movie and we were trying to think of some Black actors that could be used. Beastman was thinking of Blair Underwood (this took hours to figure out who the hell he was even talking about) and I shot that down like a suggestion to Veggie Grill. While Crews has the look and is a funny ass guy he is not an action star from my youth. I came up with a few that should be in the movie (assuming they aren't surprise guests) as well as some women. I love Rousey like I love a good BLT but come on.

Theater Whore: Out Of The Furnace

This is gonna be a pretty fast review. The trailer for Out Of The Furnace made this look like a pretty great film. Hell, the cast alone made me wanna see this. Christian Bale, Casey Affleck, Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe, and Woody Harrelson? Come on! That is a lot of good in one place. So why didn't I enjoy a single moment of this movie? Mostly for the fact that it was about halfway through this two hour movie where what is shown immediately in the trailer occurs.

The story is something that could've been done on a half hour episode of some show. Brother comes back home from war a fuck up, the other brother is a drunk fuck up, his woman meets someone new, fuck up war brother gets killed because he is a fuck up, and evil guy ends up paying for a crime that is slightly more fucked up than the ones everyone else did.

This movie just happened. There's no need to tell any of you to ever see this. The accents that people have are bad. The acting is so wooden. It was like watching a bunch of people on screen who didn't quite want to be there. Its not even bad because its sad, because its not really sad. It made me feel no emotions other than the joy that comes with not living where they do.

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"Bad Ass Mofo": Forest Whitaker

I’m not sure why I never wrote about this guy. This guy has played everything from sympathetic guys, guys you felt bad for, and even hardasses that made you nervous as hell. Forest Whitaker is this weeks Bad Ass Mofo! Born in Longview, Texas he and his family said “Fuck this place!” and moved to Los Angeles when he was 4 years old. He is an accomplished actor, producer and director. Did you know that he directed Waiting To Exhale? Well, he did.

His first movie (that counts) was Fast Times At Ridgemont High as a beast of a football player. He was almost not cast because he looked too nice and the director didn’t think he could pull off angry. He went on to be in films like Platoon, The Crying Game, Jason’s Lyric, Phone Booth, and Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai. Now, with this film I was offered a free screening and turned it down because seeing Whitaker with a samurai sword in New York didn’t appeal to me. Fast forward to it being the first film I ever bought on DVD.