I can't enjoy anything, and I like to demonstrate that fact with movie reviews.
My ratings are the maximum of their objective cinematic quality and how much I enjoyed them.
Staunch adherence to the wrong parts of the source material make Z spread itself too thin in an attempt to check referential check boxes, rather than focus, or take inspiration from the source. Predictable and mostly inoffensive with glimmers of quality buried in tired tropes.
Astonishingly inept. One wonders how no one steps in on projects like this and amends at minimum, or entirely arrests them at best.
The appropriately shortened 'Man inspects the incoherent, illogical perversion that would be matriarchy as viewed with bees in one's eyes.
Vastly superior to its offensive previous installment, Darkness does a better job eschewing scenarios that require logic or coherence, and so is less blatant with its (still copious) plot holes. But for the cynical franchise grabs, I genuinely enjoyed its syrupy, empty calories.
A melodramatic and ham-handed attempt to marry modern, gritty war-movie memes with the incoherent grandeur of Independence Day and its ilk. It steals wholesale from more serious works like Saving Private Ryan and it bludgeons with half baked emotional stereotypes. A big fat suck.
Children of Men stays exceptionally authentic from end to end with sufficiently fragile humans and none of the bravado that usually soaks this kind of film. CoM is a touchstone for why bigger isn't usually better for drawing an audience into the action, and setting.
Sufficient for an action injection there are some interesting sights to see and the requisite loud noises to hear. Riddick feels like a grab bag of dissected set pieces from superior movies sloppily connected, and its namesake's dripping machismo grates on the nerves.
Drained of authority by the contrivances necessary to keep the plot going Changing Lanes is a good idea that can't bear the burden of its own implausibility.
The first of my parents murdering children murdering parents double feature. Satisfyingly creepy, but difficult to buy into for reasons I'm not entirely sure I understand. No masterpiece, but if you want to see parent and child murder this should be in your go-to list.
A movie about children killing their parents, and parents killing their children and the children of other parents. Then some of the parents try to kill other parents, and then a whole bunch of children kill everyone. Right up my alley. An interesting, if flawed, Zombie remix.
A coming of age flick full of guilty laughs, date rape, racism, homophobia and utterly bizarre characters. Honestly, at its core there's something to be said about the multidimensional characters and its shedding of standard tropes, but the old school sensibilities burn my ears.
Stupid, slapstick fun. From a spate of '80s feel-good family comedy outings staring Saturday Night Live veterans, The Great Outdoors delivers on what little it promises and that's more than adequate for what I was looking for.
With poor acting, poor special effects, a horrible script and a reach far, far beyond its grasp Alien Armageddon feels an awful lot like elaborate school project rather than a genuine, modern film. Not bad enough to be good, and not earnest enough to be charming, it just.. is.
A simple, sappy and harmless bit of feel good fluff with more than one or two moments of genuine entertainment. Subject to each individual's own tolerance for Ferrell, Elf is a good bit of family friendly time wasting for the holidays.
Bad CG, thin characters and a universe that refuses to set any rules for itself make for a boring, and disengaged experience. No single mistake is fatal, but the cumulative effect of a thousand mediocrities drains the tension and entertainment leaving a ho-hum husk.
A horrible, lurching comical mess. Half the cast take themselves way to seriously, while stand outs in the other half ham it up with delightfully comical performances that simply can't be anything but intentionally cartoonish. Predictably absurd, and entertaining for it.
In an act of inexplicable self flagellation I subjected myself to this entire miserable mess of a movie. Simply a litany of bad cultural references without any introspective snap the narrative, such as it is, stumbles from disconnected, terrible skit to skit like a gong show.
Uncritical, childish, disrespectful, ignorant garbage that exemplifies cretinous armchair science and the limitless credulity of the unwashed, brain-dead masses.
That this claptrap has been so readily swallowed whole makes it an embodiment of my misanthropy filmed large.
The one and only instance of lightning in a bottle for this now exsanguinated franchise. Perhaps a result of it's novelty, or of a more adept use of pacing, Paranormal manages to tap dance on the happier side of competence threshold, if only just slightly.
The continuing, unchecked devolution of the found-footage genre into ever more predictable, low-budgeted, formulaic, regurgitation. The buttressing constructs and rational for the filming (and subsequent, phantom editing) are stretched terminally beyond believability.
Ludicrous '80s action at it's absolute "best". Laugher is so unavoidable at the groan worthy one-liners, and every character is so over-infused with technicolor machismo it's impossible not to shake your head and enjoy the lunacy.
I really, really love this movie.
The Anti-Twilight. This slow, considerate and somewhat too methodically paced bit of semi-romantic, vampire driven melodrama is appealing, thoughtful and interesting. The impending tragedy wonderfully frames a universal story about loneliness and the search for acceptance.
Hurt by an overwrought artistic sensibility, poor pacing and utter implausibility The Incident cannot connect effectively. Instead of feeling intensity and tension it instils little more than frustration and winces at it's boorish toy chest of brazen, unnecessary ultra-violence.
This deeply uneven film lurches uneasily between social commentary and slapstick comedy badly damaging the experience in the process. Poor time allocation wastes critical minutes, so while Aykroyd's transformation is a hit, Murphy is regrettably stilted and synthetic.
Though it didn't have the discipline to stick to shadows The Pact was entertaining enough, had a few good scares and gave me an excuse to watch a braless Lotz run about for 89 minutes. Though it messed itself at the very end I still got to see Sabrina break down, so good enough.
Ironically Grown Ups is all about Adam Sandler's child-like author insertion fantasies, bullying and intolerance. The movie in total is an autoerotic celebration of Sandler's gigantic ego, and in parts is a pointless, predictable collage of mean spirited, juvenile toilet humor.
Blair Witch has the discipline and patience to invest in its characters rather than cashing in credibility for cheap startle scares like its modern day copycats. The extra time spent on authenticity allows the earthy simplicity of the found footage format to shine.
I've never understood the following this movie gets, but then that's how cult classics work. Rocky is full of sexual assault, emotional manipulation, forcible confinement and aggrandized megalomaniacal narcissism. It doesn't seem worthy of of its celebration, or canonization.
Little Shop is a colourful and charming adaptation full of surreal moments and entertaining musical numbers. Some songs are longer than they need to be and the story has run its course by the end, but on balance Shop is wonderfully fun and creatively implemented.
I had no interest in Looper, but I was definitely wrong. If you can suspend hard scientific criticisms there's a surprisingly integral experience to be found. Themes of introspection, growth, humanity and consequence are deeply woven, but deftly handled. Good, good stuff.
An almost uniquely joyless outing into the paranoid, racist imagination at the nadir of masculine, white American culture. Rarely have I found myself as simultaneously bored, nauseous and offended as during this incompetently shot mess of chauvinistic and misogynistic garbage.
Sacrilegious though it might be to say I thought R.E. was a respectable enough popcorn munching outing. The callow retelling of Alice in Wonderland was competent enough to carry nearly the length, and the presentation had a buffed enough shine to be interesting to watch.
Twinkie filling which has given up even the illusion of coherent story telling. Characters come and go without explanation and the shrivelled vestigial plot is delivered through comically cornball exposition sequences. Presentation shows brief moments of talent, but that's all.
Not every rebooted series benefits from what seems to be a craze of dark, serious story telling; Judge Dredd certainly DID, however, benefit. Revisiting this time capsule has been a painful experience. Empty, stupid, vapid cotton candy of a movie. Rob... fucking... Schneider.
Takes itself a little too seriously but on balance is gritty, violent and surprisingly stylish. Dredd manages to steer clear of most action movie cliches and stays the better for it particularly in the first hour or so. It succumbs later, but for what it is it ain't bad.
Cluttered with a number of lopsidedly misconfigured action tropes and spotty choreography Rises came up a little short of where I had hoped it would land. That said, it was an enjoyable experience, and though cheap at times the emotional pay-off was appropriate and substantial.
It drew a chuckle here and there, and at times the presentation was quite good with desaturated gun metal visuals. But then there's the script and story. The writing is not nearly as smart as it expects to be and so never gels. Without a core the presentation cannot hold.
A timid and shallow retelling of the vastly superior 1990 original. The parts here were competent enough to be adequate, if boring, but by choosing to stand in the shadow of such a recognizable landmark it never finds a voice and feels like an unintentionally ironic fabrication.
I can't decide if this is an extreme right or left wing sick idiot's fantasy. Undocumented is a pointless and sadistically masturbatory attempt at pretension gone awry. All I can imagine is Lou Dobbs getting off at the beginning, and Michael Moore getting off at the end.
A misogynistic mehfest that thinks it is a lot more clever than it actually is. It presents itself with an undeserved bombast that belies its immodest self awareness. Inept attempts at irony (I hope) fall completely flat and instead everything feels mindlessly ostentatious.
Some things happen, Megan Fox kisses some other woman for a few seconds, then some other stuff happens and the movie ends.
My recollection of this movie follows the same mental pattern as the unsatisfying porn I've seen. You decide if that's what you need in your life or not.
A joyless mess that fails to capture its namesake, the mood of its predecessors or any sense of tension. Brief moments generate some dread, but the plot and characters are boring and banal, and the action is overwrought and childishly toothless in the ways that matter.
Failing to elicit more than a half chuckle once or twice from end to end Vampires fails to understand parody, irony or much of anything else. Worst of all trying to do a tweaked to 11 parody of Twilight was doomed from go because the ludicrous source material was already at 15.
It's astonishing that the editing of any movie could be so far off the mark, even for the Asylum, and not be caught by anyone. Everything AO has in its toybox is in its trailer making the 2hr 20min run time a fucking unconscionable war crime. Skip even if you love stinkers.
Feeding Frenzy isn't what I would necessarily call a good movie, but it's one I enjoyed very much. Stoklasa and Bauman are cool guys and they've constructed a cool experience without the putrid. fetid, PR infested mainstream industry. Funny, charming and likeable. Buy it.
While interesting and creative it lacks the space to breath creating something similar, but not quite Twin Peaks. Without access to the full cast, and the necessary focus on the least interesting characters mostly makes me want a third season even more, rather than entertaining.
It's terrible, make no mistake of that. The plot is a mess, the acting is atrocious and the writing is a sliver above grade 5 creative writing. That said, it's exceptionally entertaining, packed with laugh out loud moments and the delightful innocence of unalloyed ignorance.
Uwe Boll doesn't even know where the mark is but rarely is his work this offensive. I started Blubberella expecting to laugh at Boll's work (not with) but in this case even his astonishing ineptitude was overshadowed by the shamelessly vile and pathetic, maladroit gibbering.
A runaway train of groan worthy, stilted buddy-flick tripe. Theoretically passable if it had been aware of the juvenile shot construction, cliche writing and idiotic premise but instead it races forward convinced of its own tooth grinding intensity. I was embarrassed for them.
It didn't give me syphilis, probably. Things happened. There were noises and huge flying space alligators. Who cares? Harmless, vapid, blustery and stupid with the occasionally entertaining joke usually leaning entirely on the natural charisma of Robert Downey Jr.
We all know it was beautiful, and so it is worth experiencing regardless of plot. Unfortunately, it was as beautiful as it was sloppily written and characters simply don't behave coherently or realistically. With that alone the root magic of the early franchise is sapped.
A muddy, confused and inappropriately overwrought attempt at political commentary and hard hitting moral introspection. The dialogue is packed with obvious buzz phrase drops, and the scatterbrained approach to important themes give the story a sheen of petulant childishness.
A genuinely affecting introspection of loss, redemption and the machinations of the human condition. The plot arc strays too far into the fanciful to stay consistently poignant, but save missteps surrounding Williams' hackneyed catalysing relationship, overall quite successful.
A brilliant and loving analysis of the formulaic arbitrariness of the horror genre. Rubber stars a malicious tire, but the real star of the show is an insight into way horror ticks, and how with thoughtful execution the deconstruction can trump the construction by far.
Stupid, worthless claptrap that I didn't hate nearly as much as I had expected to. Since the scourge of Transformers it's next to impossible to invoke any serious hatred for pointless action movies, and this is duplicate review text intentionally.
Stupid, worthless claptrap that I didn't hate nearly as much as I had expected to. Since the scourge of Transformers it's next to impossible to invoke any serious hatred for pointless action movies, and this falls squarely into the meh bin with the rest.
An exceptionally clever deconstruction of the survival horror genre with a competent and entertaining script just absurd enough to introduce a vein of levity to the dark subtext. Unfortunately the violence wanders into inappropriate intensity tainting the skilled delivery.
A visual feast if ever there was one, Legend is beautiful to watch with incredible sets and make up throughout. Style is certainly the saving grace, however, because substance has not received the same attention. Legend wanders, and never really gels its simplistic story.
Not a good movie by any conventional standard but AO has a luminescent innocence about it that makes the meta-movie incredibly enjoyable. It's hardcore cornball and tonnes of fun to watch with intentional and intentionally-unintentional laughs throughout. Watch the commentary.
Fantastic Mr. Fox is a brilliantly constructed fable nouveau packed with charm and with a solid bedrock of story telling. The voice performances are almost as colourful as the vivid presentation and the script, even without the flair of the presentation is, well, Fantastic.
It's critical that remakes understand the source material at the core of the target franchise, and this shockingly bad garbage absolutely does not, or worse, does not care. The plot, performances and narrative are all a gigantic mess in this pointless and cynical cash-in.
It was just pointless, and inept and inert and full of mediocre special effects, mediocre acting and set pieces I remember only to the extent that I laughed at them. I ALMOST enjoyed the pro-LGBT message if it hadn't been so in-artful that it maybe harmed the cause.
I didn't want to, but I found myself laughing out loud at the often sophomoric and disconnected skits. Childish set-pieces loosely chained within the groan inducing story as often as not hit the mark, but the primary narrative is so ineptly written it's hard to fully enjoy them.
A mostly harmless, silly and messy popcorn flick. Carter (the character) is a nut-case for whom "hard to empathize with" is a giant understatement. Still, there are several chuckle worthy moments making it far less insufferable than Transforms or its other contemporar
Astonishing. This may be the most singularly terrible movie I have ever seen in my life. Cage staggers embarrassingly from pointless and flaccid scene to scene pausing only, one can imagine, to wet himself on the set. Bees in my eyes, indeed.
Carried somewhat by the intrinsically captivating subject matter Capturing the Friedmans is a difficult tour of the heinous carnival sideshow we call law and order. Guilty or not, the reckless indifference to justice shown sinks any faith the viewer has in the legal process.
A prosaic and slogging mess that feels 3 hours longer than its already completely unjustifiable 1h 49. Senselessly padded out with endlessly and obviously repeated special effect sequences and devoid of even a twinge of humanity this dreck is a complete waste of time.
In the Loop is a fantastically human and charming descent into the intrigue and deceit of modern politics. The intense and stressful final act is an unavoidably sadistic set of body blows that leave you burned out and wincing. If you care about politics this is your movie.
An intriguing exploration of a complex, and tragic character. It's perversely fascinating to watch as he seems to whither, and break under the hounding and eventually harassment of his country and countrymen. A quality presentation of a pitiable introvert under a spotlight.
A gut-wrenching ride toward a brick wall visible from all too far away. Dread permeates every square inch of the celluloid, sometimes overwhelmingly so. The emotional supersaturation of personalities can make it a little like staring at the sun losing some image for intensity.
Any storyteller that suggests people can't see a foot tall puppet running around at their feet is not channelling Shakespeare, that much is obvious. Absurdity is on the menu, and cheap, but the spectacle is good for a few chuckles. Watch with a competent heckler.
Halloween is retroactively marred by its progeny. As a historical pillar of the slasher genre everything is intact and entertaining enough, but all cylinders aren't firing well enough for it to have aged perfectly. That said it's a creepy, well told story worthy of respect.
So awash with wooden performances and cheap predictability the occasional tiny glimmer of competence is overwhelmingly crushed. A landslide of ineptitude and clumsily undisciplined cheap scare tactics that go on too long, and have no point.
Confessions is a warm and sometimes sad distillation of the complexities of the human condition. Motives and sympathies differ and dart from portrait to portrait, but throughout is an honest intensity that shows that people are only eccentric because WE don't understand.
Humanoids from the Deep has copious boobs, overflowing incoherence, and marauding, mutated salmon from the deep. This is a bad movie. It's a really bad movie. You should definitely check it out if rapist salmon are your thing.
The Mist creates a bleak and sadistic kaleidoscope of horrors to place as a backdrop for an even more desolate examination of the human soul. The mist, tentacles and monsters eventually pale to the depravity of superstition, ignorance and fear. An excellent study of humanity.
Not a movie so much as loosely connected triad of short stories, Cat's Eye is bookended by entertaining shorts and loosely linked by the adventure and actions of a suitably adorable cat, present to witness the lot, and star in the final piece. Charming, simple and inoffensive.
Interesting ideas that languish and die without a strong backbone to focus the story. There's a tonne of talent present, but Walken is a painful miscast that left the room laughing at all the wrong times. The Dead Zone is a wasted opportunity.
Astonishingly bad. Thinner had 22 minutes worth of story to tell stretched out feature length. A lukewarm idea for an Outer Limits episode that fell absolutely flat on horrifying acting by a ludicrous cast paced as if molasses. The best part of Thinner is the racism. Yeah.
Adds up to far more than the sum of its parts mostly on the back of Paxton's earthy intensity. Every time the story begins to unravel or the mood loosen a great moment will snap things back into focus. Bring a healthy suspension of disbelief and enjoy.
Slick, effective, informative and more than occasionally shocking. In many ways The Corporation is a well produced cipher to allow the easy appreciation the gravity of decisions being made on our watch. Required viewing in the time of Citizens United, and Koyoto.
Expertly paced, Drive is interestingly shot with long, deliberate scenes punctuated with furiously effective action. Drive pays huge dividends on fantastic soundtrack selections, disciplined timing and directorial restraint.
The Thing from Another World is a poster child for why we need to look to the past to better understand what is missing from movies today. Sharp and convincing dialogue is expertly delivered buttressing a competent and charming flying saucer flick. Great stuff.
Intended to be a hard-eyed send-up of Super Size Me, Fat Head instead manages to be so intellectually dishonest that it somehow transforms the flimsy shell of reporting that was Super Size Me into a paragon of journalistic honesty. Truly shameless.
Yep, those 98 minutes are gone forever. Imagine a fairly clever cultural satire like Clueless with all of the charm, wit, introspection and self respect slowly exsanguinated leaving only a hardened, souless husk of cynically crystallized marketing and you've got Bring It On.
Against a field of smart stories this would simply be pretentious chicanery standing in for cleverness. However, in a field bereft of thoughtfulness Inception shines like a fucking cinematic lighthouse. Well acted and entertaining, it lets us think, and thank god for that.
Though built on a solid foundation some uneven acting and an end unworthy of the build-up it follows drags Pet Sematary down. Still, the first two acts are well constructed and underrated, and definitely worthy of a watch.
Offensively simplistic and childlike. This whole inert affair was as banal and formulaic as it was predictable. The video game construction, inconsistent plot and hollow acting made the ordeal a matter of surviving the viewing, not the holidays.
Ghost Protocol was a movie. It had beginning and a middle and an end. Already that puts it head and shoulders above some of its contemporaries. Going into this MI:GP with low expectations paid off in that I left only slightly more insulted by humanity than when I entered.
I find many movies offensive, but it is a rare treat to witness something so shocking to the conscience that I have to turn it off. Three different sessions it took to get through this insulting, shlockly, and unbearably smug pile of offal.
The climax of this tripe involves sinking an iceberg. I think that mostly covers it. Obnoxiously long for the value of the story, G.I. Joe is basically two hours of noise if noise could be made more out of tune. Jingoistic garbage delivered without even competent shine.
With a slightly fetishistic take on the detached sterility of research The Andromeda Strain promises, but mostly fails, to deliver an intellectual spin on the heroics of dealing with disasters. Instead of a celebration of civilization we're given serendipity and human impotence.
A disquieting journey into the immorality and unsustainability at the core of our civilization. The slick visuals occasionally belie the gravity of the underlying message, but may be at the core of its effective penetration of our cynical, ignorant, meat-eating culture.
Serenity is a competent and snappy distillation of the cult classic Firefly series. The movie is about as good as it can be given the inappropriateness of the format for a brilliant cast of characters that need a series to really breathe. We'll take it any way we can get it.
A charming and sweet story about finding oneself and the transcendent core of good or evil inside each of us. Can, at times, feel like an also-ran despite solid voice acting and sharp visuals.
Could have afforded trimming, but even with its extended duration it has a charming, coherent and uplifting story. It is a rare thing to have such an exciting story also be an apparently quite accurate rendering of real events.
Heavy material given too light a treatment. There's a lot going on, but it all goes on on the surface. It's painful to watch people behave stupidly because they need to for the plot, and to watch whites save sweaty blacks to save the day. Still, the building blocks have value.
The Warriors sets ancient mythology in a modern, gang drenched New York rendered through the vivid filter of comic book sensibility, addictive synth and singular style. I don't know what makes The Warriors so resiliently iconic, but there's no question that it is.
Morris assembles an insightful, haunting and intimate portrait of the enigmatic, and brilliant Robert Strange McNamara. Try as you might to come to the piece with bias and preconception you'll walk away knee deep in the morass of ideological dissatisfaction. A work of art.
SH:AGoS is a horrible mess. 129 minutes of not but a collage of shamelessly masturbatory exchanges I refuse to call dialogue and slow motion, CGI schlock I refuse to call action. Ritchie hasn't only baked a Souffle that failed to rise, but also somehow burned down the kitchen.
Brilliant, gory, shocking, clever, charming and hilarious. Boobs and brains and split dogs with an awesome synth score. This is a zombie movie and a parody of zombie movies and it does both fantastically well. A classic companion piece to Romero's more serious treatments.
A new, more intimate twist on the standard monster movie formula which is far from perfect, but generates genuine tension and keeps the audience engaged from end to end. Decent characterization for the subject matter and solid cinematography.
Immortals is as incoherent and unlikable as nearly anything I've seen in years. The story is a mess laden with events containing no story, and the characters are uniformly lifeless husks containing no soul. To drain the rich subject matter of life is its only achievement.
Too frequently mistakes crass for clever to be as stealthily wholesome and likable as it wants to be. The problem is that the one or two genuinely humanizing moments do not counterweight the litany of sociopathy and misguided racism surrounding them. Mallrats you are not.
Crisp, clever, bittersweet and brilliant to a degree utterly absent from most storytelling. DHSAB is distillation of the fictional form. Character, empathy, despair and tragedy are delivered with heartfelt earnestness normally unseen. You'll love it, or your opinion is wrong.
A screen full of ridiculous, felt fabrications that shine with real wit, real charm and a real soul almost entirely absent from 'real' movie characters. Packed with cameos that would have normally churned my stomach The Muppets somehow stays honest, sincere, lovable and resonant
Twilight? More like Twiright! Amiright!?
No, but seriously, this is a very bad movie. It's hard to call Breaking Dawn anything but perversely masturbatory as it is unintentionally hilarious one moment, but careens into wildly inappropriate violence the next.
An extended SNL skit, Sandler's cynical cash-in is a stream of product placement, failed juvenile toilet humour, failed juvenile physical humour, failed juvenile racist humour and failed juvenile story telling.
Who want's some Dunkin' Donuts?!
In Time is unfortunately stilted and uneven with moments of genuine interest lost in a sea of incompetence, and expediently prosaic editing decisions. Murphy provides the only vaguely interesting character in a movie that feels to be written by one writer, and three children.
This movie was an abortion of the soul. Unlovable, unbelievable caricatures embark on nonsensical and unrelated happenstances learning nothing in the process and producing not but the faint odour of racism, unintentional sympathy for victims of slavery and an urge to suicide.
Chase many sci-fi or military cliches back to their source and you'll find a surprising number of them birthed by Cameron's Aliens. Perfectly paced, excellently acted and flawlessly executed Aliens is a sterling example of storytelling done right.
A coherent and exciting story provides a perfect medium to display the fantastic chemistry of Connery and Ford. Able to stand out and stand up for itself in the series, quite admirably considering its pedigree.
Deliberately paced, reasonably well acted and authentic feeling enough to strike a chord . Perhaps overly optimistic about the human race, but still effective and interesting.
This movie is a trite, painful simplification of a series that used to brag intellectual and introspective gravitas. It's a shameful, pitiful shell of a franchise that once helped define a generation, and is now two hours of lens flare, tits, and cheap jokes.
