Bad Movie Club: Overkill

1987 action movie

Bad Movie Rating: 3/5 (Josh: 3/5; Fred: 2/5; J.D.: 3/5)

Rating: 4/20

Plot: A cop in LA teams up with a Japanese fellow to bring down the yakuza.

I've seen the name Ulli Lommel a few times when researching for Bad Movie Club, but this is our first dip into his filmography. The best-worst thing about this movie is the editing. I can't believe how poorly this thing was edited. There's a scene early on that makes it clear that Lommel or whoever put all this together doesn't have any idea how to tell a story visually. The hero, a guy with a mustache who apparently doesn't own any shirts, and his girlfriend are in a pool where I figured she was about to get shot and end up naked and face down in the pool like in a Neil Breen movie. And then it cuts to the two of them in a kitchen where they talk about having intercourse. The hero really seems to want to do it right there in the kitchen. And she says that they should do it in the pool instead, so it cuts to them in the pool once again. Why the hell did we need to go to the kitchen?

The jumpy editing keeps things largely incoherent throughout, but the action sequences give them some competition for the most inept thing about Overkill. Body parts are lopped off, bloody bullet wounds look incredibly fake, and lots of people fall in pools. There's a big climactic shoot-out near what I thought was the end of the movie, and I had trouble figuring out who was shooting at whom and why they were doing it. There's a random masked character who is decapitated (oh, spoiler alert), and I didn't have a clue who that was even supposed to be or what side he was on.

A dope 80's score, a shocking twist, and a touching scene involving a guy and a horse nearly save the day.

American Honey

2016 drama

Rating: 12/20

Plot: A teenager falls under Shooby Leboof's spell and joins a caravan of driftless door-to-door magazine salespeople.

The idea of this movie is a lot better than its execution. Shooby Leboof electrifies things. Early on, he seems to be having trouble keeping his finger out of his eye, but he gives his character a rhythm that I liked, and the unpredictability of the character kept things interesting. And he has a fanny pack. And if you're in to this sort of thing and enjoyed his sex scenes in Nymphomaniac, you get to see him have some movie sex in this one.

Of course, at a little under three hours, there's a good chance that you'll end up getting to see these characters do nearly everything. That's probably the main problem with American Honey--its length. I'm not sure there's enough here to justify that running time. There's not a lot of character development, and any conflicts really only simmer rather than bubble to life. The film's episodic, but there's not a lot of variety between the episodes and they have this same cadence that makes things feel redundant pretty quickly. Things picked up a bit when the main character befriends some old cowboys, but that scene is disrupted by something that doesn't make all that much sense. And then it goes back to that same tired rhythm the movie had before the cowboys showed up. There's just not a lot of substance to the whole thing, and the character arc for Star--the protagonist--doesn't feel authentic. There's such a clash between the cinema verite style and the more plastic emotional bits. . You just don't buy those aforementioned sex scenes, Star's interaction with some children, clashes with her boss, or an encounter with a turtle.

At an hour and a half, this movie might have been something that I liked a lot more. And maybe a lot of scenes where Sasha Lane just isn't very good could have been cut. There are times when I really liked her performance, but it was uneven to the point where the character didn't even make much sense. Only in the most maudlin bits of this--the plastic parts--did I really feel like I knew what was going on in Star's mind. It's an intriguing first performance though.

Shane Czechs Out a Film from Czechoslovakia: Happy End

1967 dark comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A man is born, meets and assembles his wife, and fights for her love as she becomes infatuated with another man. Unless you watch it on rewind. Then it's about something else entirely.

I'm not doing too well with my personal 2018 movie challenge of czeching out every single Czechoslovakian movie. This is only my third, and the year is already half over!

This movie was an absolute delight. There's a gimmick here, the same sort of gimmick you've seen with Memento and Irreversible where it all unfolds backwards. The key difference is that this doesn't just show the scenes in reverse chronological order. No, Happy End shows everything in reverse. So you see people walking backwards, a guillotined head defying gravity and finding its way back onto its body, a flailing man rising from the ground to an upper-story apartment window, and horses and riders reverse-falling. It seems like the sort of gimmick that would get tiresome after a bit, but director Oldrich Lipsky--the guy who did Lemonade Joe, the only other film of his I've seen--keeps finding clever ways to keep the idea fresh. A completely different sort of dramatic irony is utilized here, an odd case where the audience knows something that the character also knows but doesn't quite know it in the right context.

For example, there's the protagonist's court case where we have already heard the verdict of guilty and have seen his head lopped off as punishment for his crimes where we next get to see his attorney reassuring him with a "Don't worry." With Lipsky's backward storytelling, death becomes birth, dismemberment becomes assembly, prison becomes school, and the saving of a life becomes a coldblooded murder that is cheered by onlookers. It's brilliantly funny stuff. Lipsky takes advantage of all sorts of things that just look funny backwards--eating cookies (which transforms people into cookie-generation machines), etc. I'm juvenile enough that I would giggle at people doing things backwards anyway, but this is packed with so many clever moments.

It's not just visually funny. Cleverly written dialogue takes on whole new meanings as lines are flipped around. Forced to read subtitles and still focus on the visuals, there were countless funny bits of dialogue that I know I missed that I wouldn't have missed had this been in English. The main character also narrates his story, adding new meaning to life events like marriage, the death of a loved one, and childbirth.

It's not the least bit profound, but it's one of the most entertaining comedies I've seen in a really long time. I need to see more Oldrich Lipsky soon, and not just because his name is made up of four everyday English words. This guy is great!

Very highly recommended.

Pete's Dragon

2016 remake

Rating: 12/20

Plot: An orphan and his dragon frolic in the woods until some loggers intervene.

Granted, it's been way too long since I've seen the 1977 Pete's Dragon, a much different story, but I think I definitely prefer that one. I was interested in this because of David Lowery's A Ghost Story. No, I didn't expect this to be anything like that movie, but I did want to see what Lowery could do with something on the opposite end of the cinematic spectrum. Turns out, he can deliver on-screen cliches with the best of them.

This pulls at the exact heartstrings you'd expect it to. You're one step ahead of the storyteller every step of the way, the emotions fail to resonate, and the constant musical score just pummels you into submission.

It's not all bad. The CGI Eliot is pretty good most of the time, especially his fur. The special effects were a little inconsistent, but they're definitely better than the storytelling here. I also enjoyed the CGI Robert Redford.

OK, I just did a little research, and apparently that was not a CGI Robert Redford. It was the actual Robert Redford. I thought his teeth and eyes looked a little fake, but apparently they're the real deals.

I tried to get my daughter Buster to watch this with me, but she refused. I don't think she would have liked a car accident at the beginning or the scene where Eliot goes crazy and starts eviscerating the townspeople while Pete wipes blood off his face and screams, "You fucking get them, Eliot! You let them know that a dragon doesn't have to take that shit from nobody!"

I just noticed something. I looked at a cast list for this movie and noticed that Bart the Bear is in it. Bart the Bear, star of The Edge, died in 2000. I just wrote about how he wasn't available for Annihilation. This is a different Bart the Bear. What the hell, Hollywood? When a legendary acting bear passes on, you don't just use his name for the next bear that comes along. I'm really having a difficult time with this news. Did you people know about this?

Red Sparrow

2018 spy thriller

Rating: 11/20

Plot: A ballerina is trained as a spy and sent on a mission to uncover the identity of a mole.

This movie felt like it was seven hours long, and like all spy movies, I never felt like I had the same grasp on what was going on that the rest of the people watching this movie did.

Another cinephile weakness of mine is knowing whether or not a performer's fake accent is good enough. I know a couple of Russians, and they kind of talk like Jennifer Lawrence does in this movie. I think she's a good actress, but I thought this performance was a little uneven. Or maybe the character was uneven. She was a little too stoic at times. I never really believed in the character, and without buying what they're selling with this central character, this movie just doesn't have much of a chance to work.

Note: When I say that I "know a couple of Russians," I don't mean in a Trump way. I mean, I've never had a Russian urinate on me or anything.

I'm not sure if the big twist was supposed to be as predictable as it was. Without giving anything away, there was this visual cue that really spelled everything out. It was so obvious that I actually thought I was being tricked into guessing incorrectly. Maybe, since the movie knows I'm incapable of understanding spy movies anyway, it was tricking me into thinking I was being tricked so that it could trick me into not thinking what I originally thought. If so, well played, Red Sparrow. Well played.

This wasn't really an enjoyable movie. There are stylistic flashes, and Jennifer Lawrence is naked in there. Unfortunately, those scenes were impossible to enjoy because of the context. A lot of this movie is like that actually. It's kind of like an animal you're getting ready to dissect. In its plastic package, it doesn't look so bad. Cutting open this dead animal might be an adventure. Then you remove it from that plastic, and there's a slime covering the thing and a sickening formaldehyde stench. But you figure, "I'll get past this, slice open this animal, and investigate what it's all about." And then it's just smooshy viscera. Like that, this is pretty unpleasant.

I did like the score, however. That's James Newton Howard.

Microbe and Gasoline

2015 quirky coming-of-age story

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A loner befriends another loner, and after they build their own whimsical car, they travel across the country together.

It's quirky, but it's not as imaginative as Michel Gondry's other films. The car is a funky little thing, and I loved shots of it traveling along French roads. I also liked the performances of Ange Dargent and Theophile Baquet at the heart of this. This story of friendship feels very personal although I'm sure Gondry never built a car out of junk and traveled across France with a buddy. Or maybe he did. How the hell am I supposed to know?

MacGruber

2010 action comedy

Rating: 9/20

Plot: The titular special agent tries to save the world.

There are guys on this podcast I listen to sometimes who swear by this comedy based off a Saturday Night Live recurring sketch. I didn't think it was funny in ten-minute installments, and I'm not sure why I was tricked into watching a full-length feature with this character.

Kristen Wiig is the best thing about this movie. Everything else is tied for the worst thing about it.

I guess I have to stop listening to that podcast.

While We're Young

2014 comedy

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A childless couple in their forties, as friends their own age raise their children, befriends an exciting new couple in their twenties.

Look, everybody! It's the ubiquitous Adam Driver!

There are pieces of this that I really enjoyed, but it just doesn't come together as a whole as much as it should.

This was part of an effort to catch up on Noah Baumbach movies.

I apologize if you wasted your time reading this.

Death Wish

2018 remake

Rating: 6/20

Plot: A surgeon gets himself a new penis and becomes a hooded vigilante as he hunts down the people responsible for the death of his wife.

An ode to manly gun use, this NRA wet dream ends up much duller than it should be. Bruce Willis sleepwalks his way through this. The storytelling is stupid, and both its violent action sequences and attempts to invoke genuine emotion are corny. One scene in a garage was so unnecessarily gruesome that this movie almost became the first movie I ever walked out on. It's not because I'm squeamish either.

I'm surprised I've never walked out on a movie actually.

Buzzard

2014 dark comedy

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A temp at a bank sees his poorly-planned petty criminal acts add up, and with his Nintendo Power Glove, he is forced to flee.

There are some darkly humorous moments throughout this, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to all add up to. The freewheeling tale of this small-time scam artist intrigues, but his story never seems like it was something that was finished before the movie was made.

I did appreciate the Bugles product placement. And Hot Pockets. And Mountain Dew. And Doritos. And Totinos. And Little Caesars. And probably some that I'm forgetting about, but it's the Bugles product placement that I'll remember the next time I'm in a grocery store.

Joshua Burge's Marty is an almost-interesting character, and his performance is almost good. If he was a little easier to like while being a real asshole, I think I would have liked this movie more. There's a scene where he eats spaghetti that is really great though.

Why is this movie called Buzzard?

The Fairy

2011 rom-com

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A hotel desk clerk meets and falls in love with a fairy.

What a kooky delight! I had seen Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon before in L'Iceberg, another whimsical romantic comedy that pays tribute to silent comedians like Keaton, Chaplin, and Tati. I didn't think to look up anything else that they had done. In fact, I think I was too busy trying to watch 365 movies that year I started blogging that I didn't even realize they were married and worked together all the time. They have that ability to be fleshy cartoon characters. They're pliable and acrobatic, and although neither one of them is what you'd call conventionally attractive, there's a sexiness in this rapport that they have. A dance scene underwater and an escape from a hospital are standouts, but this movie put a smile on my face from beginning to end and made me laugh quite a bit.

Recommended for folks who enjoy really silly French romantic comedies. You know who you are.

Fruitvale Station

2013 movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Oscar Grant III celebrates the New Year, ready to make some changes in his life to be a better human being. Then, he's killed by a cop.

That's not a spoiler warning as some of the iPhone footage detailing the tragic events of this real-life event open up this movie. This is harrowing, and a lot of it is because of the Michael B. Jordan performance at the center of it. It's perfectly quiet and reflective when it needs to be, and there's enough bombast in there as well. Grant's final day is filled with minutiae because that's precisely the kind of stuff that a person's last day is filled with when you don't know that you're going to be shot in the back by a cop at a train station.

There's some manipulation here, but none of that makes it any less powerful. For me, I was on the edge of my seat during the climactic scene and hoping that Jordan's character would end up not being shot in the back by a cop at a train station.

Bad Movie Night: D'Curse

2013 cop movie

Bad Movie Rating: 4/5 (Josh: 4/5; Jeremy: fell asleep; Fred: 2/5; Lisa: 4/5; J.D.: 3/5)

Rating: 4/20

Plot: A bunch of shady cops deal with a voodoo curse put on them after a series of bad deeds.

Here's a drinking game that could kill you: drink a shot every time you see a flag in this movie.

Somebody on Reddit described writer/director Alex Maisonette as "the Neil Breen of bad cop movies," and that was enough to peak my interest. And Maisonette's earnest approach to this drama, his attempts to tie in something mystical or spiritual, and the awkwardness with his efforts to chime in on the timely issue of cop killings make that comparison an appropriate one. Although let's face it--there isn't another Neil Breen and never will be. Like Breen, he put himself in his own movie, but his acting is far from the worst thing about this. The camera work, the Kinkos-aided set design so that we can know when the characters are in a police station, the nearly incomprehensible disjointed narrative, the bad acting from the rest of the cast, the special effects, the questionable logic, the failed artsy-fartsiness. Those are the main problems with this.

Most of the cop cast were entertainingly bad, but there were two standouts. First was Michael Wright who played Officer Ruda, the guy who was a cop by day and a voodoo guy by night. A scene where he uses an egg on another officer has a chance to be my favorite movie scene of the year. Rocky Passafaro is also really good as Sergeant Rocko. I'm not even sure he knew he was in a movie a lot of the time.

This also might have my favorite death scene in which a cop is electrocuted while trying to change a light bulb. You can accuse me of spoiling this one, but if you watch the trailer for D'Curse (that means "The Curse," by the way), that also spoils it. Plus, you probably won't ever see this. If you want to, it's available on Amazon Prime, however.

Game Night

2018 comedy

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Game night is off the hook!

Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams have great chemistry, and there are a few moments that almost got a chuckle out of me, but the narrative is preposterous enough to distract me too much from just sitting and enjoying myself.

My favorite part might have been the end credits.

I may have penalized this one a point or two because of the games that were chosen. You can't even play Scrabble with that many people, and nobody is going to play Life at a game night. C'mon, Game Night.

Product placement for Tostitos got a little embarrassing.

I find Rachel McAdams very attractive. I also find Jason Bateman very attractive.

Annihilation

2018 sci-fi movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Natalie Portman and some new friends venture into a mysterious bubble and come out with flowers coming out their pores.

I walked into this expecting a Predator clone but with a group of females. That's what the trailer convinced me this would be. To be honest, I wasn't interested in that at all, but I'm seeing pretty much everything these days, and I liked the look of that giant bubble. Annihilation thankfully has almost nothing in common with Predator. It's much more sophisticated, more artistic, more emotional, and more capable of turning your mind inside out. It's layered, and I think even the individuals layers might have layers.

This is the kind of film that doesn't really seem to say much with conviction, but it says a variety of things depending on what life experiences you bring into the thing. I've seen various theories, not really anything that matches exactly what I think it's about. Is this a look at depression? How people handle individual trauma? Relationships, specifically the struggle with two people becoming one person and unnatural monogamy? Is it about our destructive natures as human beings, the idea that that which doesn't kill us keeps persisting and tries to kill us again and again if we invite it to do so? That destructive nature colliding so profoundly with human's survival instincts? Is it about science, evolution, or God's habit of creating the unnatural?

Here's a question: Why an all-female team? Why previous all-male teams? For me, that makes this seem like it has more to do with relationships than anything else. That along with the fact that Natalie Portman's character is the protagonist and that every flashback we get has to do with her marital relationship.

Aesthetically, this is something else. The creatures don't always look real, but if there's going to be some CGI that's off, it can be forgiven with something so ambitious and unique. It's easier to excuse obvious CGI when they're creating something that doesn't exist as opposed to, say, just an elephant or rhinoceros. Bart the Bear wasn't available for this, and let's face it, I'm not sure he could have pulled this off anyway. Lots of imagery in this just stuns, things I've never seen before and shots that had my eyes bouncing all over the screen to pick up every little detail. The bubbly shimmer is something I could look at for hours, mostly because I don't have a lot to do with my time, and I liked how there always seemed to be a visual reminder that they were in this alien bubble thing in most of the shots of the second half of the movie. The foliage and flowers? The shocking human remains they come across? The trippy climax that I won't say anything else about because I want you to experience it for yourself? The world building is exceptional here.

The experience is a visceral one. Not-Bart-the-Bear is absolutely terrifying, there's at least one jump scare that really will make you jump, and I could sense collective breath-holding and gasps around me during the ending of this movie. The disjointed storytelling might frustrate some viewers, but there are tricks up the sleeve, and I thought the narrative was enhanced by the flashbacks and flash forwards. The movie tingles your nerves and raises the hairs on the back of your neck, but it also keeps your mind moving long after the movie's over.

I also thought the score was interesting. I kept waiting to hear that three-note theme that I kept hearing from the trailer, and it shows up at a time when it couldn't have more of an impact. There's also some seemingly out-of-place folk guitar music that confused me at first but later really seemed to humanize the whole thing, make it all a little less cold.

Great closing credits for this one as it made me feel like I was inside a defective kaleidoscope.

It's a shame that this isn't making much money. This is the kind of original film-making that should be celebrated, and it proves that Alex Garland is a force when it comes to these brainy sci-fi movies.