Some Other Movies I Saw in 2014 (Part One: The Less Worse, I Guess)

 It's fair to say that you might see the first few movies on this list and say "really, _____ made it on your 'Worst' list, but that didn't?" That's fair, I suppose; I could hide behind the veil of "subjectivity" and argue that this is my list, not yours, but the name of the blog isn't "General Cranpire's Den of Filmduggery" (note to Cranpire - that's a great title and you should use it, post-haste), so that should be obvious who the opinions belong to. Spoiler Alert: The Highest Bidder! But yes, okay, it's under a weird criteria that I determined where to stop the "worst of" without including one of last year's Liam Neeson movies (not the one where he fights vampires, I assume strictly from the title). That's how I roll, kids.


 So it makes sense to just get Non-Stop out of the way, and by that I mean mostly just link to my review from earlier this year. It was short enough to sandwich in with Bye Bye Birdie and Die, Monster Die!, so while I didn't hate it, clearly the movie didn't make much of an impression, review-wise: but, looking back at it, it's way longer than needs to be in a recap. This section of the review does seem to sum things up pretty well:

"It's almost ridiculous enough to recommend in and of itself, but the fact that the first half or so is also a decent game of "cat and mouse" works in its favor. In the "Liam Neeson, man of action" genre, it falls somewhere between Taken and Taken 2 - neither as enjoyable stupid as the former, nor as inane and redundant as the second [...] If you're inclined to enjoy movies like this, or saw the poster and said "I'll rent that," you're better off watching Non-Stop than, say, Drive Hard. If you're more predisposed towards, say, Neeson in The Grey, this is not going to be your cup of tea, but if you liked Flightplan... well, um, you liked Flightplan. Congratulations?"

 Fading Gigolo is a movie I'm guessing most of you didn't see, because it came out not long after last year's "is Woody Allen a pedophile or not" row that was everywhere between the Golden Globes and the Oscars but was pretty much gone by the time Magic in the Moonlight came out (a movie I'll be discussing in another part of the recap). At this point I'm going to stop talking about that, because I learned what a bad idea it is to mention the words "Woody Allen" or "Roman Polanski" and "controversy" on the internet. But yes, Woody Allen is in Fading Gigolo. He did not direct it - John Turturro did, along with writing and starring as the titular character, Fioravante. He's a florist, and his friend Murray (Allen) just lost his bookstore and needs money. Fioravante agrees to become an escort with Murray as his manager, in the service of eventually fulfilling the fantasy of Murray's dermatologist (Sharon Stone) and her friend (Sofia Vergara) to have a three-way.

 That's probably enough of a movie right there, but Turturro also includes an entirely separate plot about an Orthodox Jewish woman named Avigal (Vanessa Paradis) who Fioravante falls in love with, much to the chagrin of Dovi (Liev Schreiber), a community police officer. At some point, a council of Rabbis get involved, and it plays out like a bizarro version of being confronted by the mob, complete with Murray needing his lawyer (Bob Balaban) to save him from charges of being a pimp. It's a mostly harmless and sometimes amusing movie, even sweet sometimes, but not something that stuck with me for very long afterward. There's a better movie with John Turturro that will be showing up later in the recaps, so stay tuned for that.

 While we're on the subject of "better movies," I feel like there's a better movie somewhere in Alexandre Aja's Horns. Maybe it got lost in the editing, or maybe it's just inherent in the adaptation of Joe Hill's novel, but the finished product just don't quite work. It's as though Aja made a bitterly funny, black comedy, and also made a more generic, teen-friendly story of good and evil, and then smashed them together at the worst possible junctures. For the opening twenty minutes of Horns, you're probably going to think the movie is great: it has a wicked mean streak, Daniel Radcliffe is spot on as a guy everyone thinks is a murderer, that embraces the horns he grows and the power that comes with it. The way people react, first telling him their darkest fantasies and then acting on them when he says they should, is often hilarious.

 And then we hit the first of what turn out to be several, lengthy, flashbacks, giving us the backstory of Ig (Radcliffe) and Merrin (Juno Temple), leading up to her death - the one everyone assumes Ig is responsible for. Everyone, including his family - played by James Remar, Kathleen Quinlan, and Joe Anderson - is positive he did it and that he's lying, with the exception of his friend, Lee (Max Minghella). The "whodunit" is pretty easy to work out for yourself, even if Aja, Hill, and screenwriter Keith Bunin throw in a number of red herrings. I bet, without telling you anything else, you can guess who the real killer is. That's not the problem, so much as the flashbacks that put the mystery together. There's a massive tonal shift from black comedy to slightly tragic story of temptation and of good and evil (on a biblical scale), and for some reason, ne'er the twain shall meet in Horns.

 I can understand how it might have worked in Hill's novel - which I haven't yet read, but plan to - but as a film, the structure of the story is at times jarring and disruptive. Maybe there was no way to properly balance the two in a film, because Horns alternates between wicked and bland, between clever and obvious, without ever finding a good middle ground. There are some fantastic moments sprinkled throughout the film, and the cast is game for anything, playing both the best and worst versions of themselves as they encounter "evil" Ig, but Horns gets away from them. It's never quite the movie that it could be, so I'm left feeling ambivalent with the end result.

 Speaking of ambivalent, here's a good time to mention Bad Words, a movie people seemed to like a lot more than I did. While it's true that I liked Horrible Bosses 2 less than Bad Words, Jason Bateman is jerk instead of beleaguered everyman was not novelty enough to win me over what is essentially a one-note joke. If Bateman hadn't directed the film and the star was, oh, let's say Billy Bob Thornton, I somehow doubt anyone would even be talking about this, another film in the "bad" series of comedies. (For the record, that review is probably NSFW, just based on the first sentence).

  The best thing I can say about Automata is that it's a better version of I, Robot than I, Robot is. Actually, there are a lot of things to like about the film, which is not-so loosely based on I, Robot, but for some reason the film as a whole is underwhelming. There's little doubt in my mind that the film is trying to skirt by under the radar without people noticing the similarities to Alex Proyas', kinda loud, kinda dumb Big Willie Style / Shia LeBouf CGI action fest, including scaling back to rules of robotics from three to two (and changing one of them to suit the narrative - that robots can't self repair). It's a visual feast, for what I have to imagine was not a large budget (director and co-writer Gabe Ibáñez shot the film in Bulgaria).

 Stop me if you've heard this before: in the future, there's been a catastrophic global weather shift, which caused most of Earth to be irradiated. People live in cramped cities, with some living in zeppelin-like housing units. Robots help humanity, although they've so permeated the culture that they're considered just as useless as any of the other trash (shades of Elysium, if you remember that movie from, you know, last year). Cop Sean Wallace (Dylan McDermott) finds one repairing itself, and blows it away, causing the ROC Robotics Corporation to send insurance adjuster Jacq Vaucan (Antonio Banderas) to investigate. What he finds could change the ROC corporation forever, as well as endanger his boss, Robert Bold (Robert Forster) and his wife Rachel (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) and their unborn son.

 And what does he discover (SPOILER???): that the robots are evolving, some past the point where they require humans at all. But they just want to be free, man. This doesn't sound familiar or anything, so I'm not going to belabor the comparisons to I, Robot any more. You get it. It's a more visually stylish, more sober approach to the story, after Jacq is rescued by the robots (one voiced by Melanie Griffith, who is also another character in the film, and one voice by Javier Bardem, although I didn't realize that until I saw his name in the credits). The ending is kind of predictable, but it feels like there's more at stake than in I, Robot, and that violent ends can and will come to any character.

 So why didn't I like it more? That is an excellent question, and I'm not convinced I can give you a good answer. Despite the fact that it does almost everything I, Robot does, but better, in part by giving is a Neill Blomkamp sheen or grime and decay over everything, there's something strangely inert about Automata. I can't quite put my finger on it, but instead of being invested, I found myself distanced, at times bored. It wasn't that you can see where the movie is going a mile away - that can be said of Horns, too, which is at least partly a fun ride - but that despite all of the effort into making the film look great, Ibáñez never quite makes the humans interesting. Banderas certainly gives it his all, but neither he nor the robots are all that gripping as characters. It's a very nice film to look at, and has a lot of things I would recommend about it, but I hesitate to recommend it over any of the better science fiction films released in 2014. And there were a lot, as you'll see when we get near the top of my list.

 There's a degree to which I enjoyed Batman: Assault on Arkham, one of the better DC Animated films that I've seen in a while. Despite the misleading title (this is, make no mistake, a Suicide Squad movie that Batman pops up in periodically), it's fast paced, sporadically funny, surprisingly violent, and pushes the PG-13 as far as they can with animated sideboob. Being that it's a Suicide Squad story - one tied to the Arkham games, and specifically Origins - the death toll is quite high, including many of the main characters. Unless you're a massive DC fan, you probably won't know many more characters beyond Harley Quinn and Deadshot. Maybe Captain Boomerang, and if you didn't, yes, that's a real thing. It has the odd distinction of having Kevin Conroy as Batman but not Mark Hamill as the Joker (although Troy Baker does a fine job) - also odd because Conroy isn't the voice of Batman in Arkham Origins, which ends with the setup for this movie. It's short, and I'm struggling to remember much more than a few offhand references to The Dark Knight and using the layout of the asylum you'll immediately recognize from the first game. So, uh, recommended?

 On that decisive note, we'll leave it here for now, but there's more. Next time, I'll move a little farther up the list, to mixed-positives that you might want to check out (with some caveats), although I have the feeling that one of them might be more contentious than anything included in this section. Until then...

Blogorium Review: Bad Words

 Around nine years ago, I saw this movie called Fuck; it was a documentary about profanity, and specifically how the titular word was the best one. It was one of the last things I remember seeing Hunter S. Thompson in while he was still alive. You might be familiar with the word, but if you're young and somehow haven't come across it until you found this review, it has its own scene in A Christmas Story. Ralphie calls it the "queen mother of dirty words," but in the movie he says "fudge." But he didn't say "fudge." He said "fuck." Hence, the soap in the mouth. Don't say it out loud, kids.

 Bad Words contains the "fudge" word and a whole bunch of other ones, some that aren't even curse words. Like floccinaucinihilipilification, which is a word that 40 year old Guy Trilby (Jason Bateman) has to spell when he uses an obscure loophole to enter a spelling bee for middle school students. We first meet Guy arguing that he's perfectly eligible because he didn't complete the 8th grade by the cut-off year and then threatens to shut down the Spelling Bee if he can't compete. When he wins, he's chased out of the school by angry parents, but Guy has the trophy, and more importantly, he's going to the Golden Quill Spelling Bee Tournament.


  Guy's sponsor, Jenny Widgeon (Kathryn Hahn) is a reporter along for the ride, and while he promised her insight into why a grown man with a photographic memory is competing with pre-teens, he hasn't been very forthcoming. Instead, he drinks a lot and makes enemies with everybody he meets. His presence is even less welcome at the Golden Quill, with the director of the program, Dr. Bernice Deagan (Allison Janney) promising to make his life miserable (starting with booking the utilities closet as his hotel room). The founder of the Golden Quill, Dr. Bowman (Philip Baker Hall) takes great umbrage a Guy's temerity, but he's technically playing by the rules. Except, of course, when he isn't: even though Guy has no problem spelling any word given to him, he still feels the need to cheat in order to eliminate two competitors. He's a bad person, obviously.

 The only kid who doesn't think Guy is a horrible asshole is Chaitanya Chopra (newcomer Rohan Chand), a young man with no friend, other than his notebook (named "Todd"). Guy wants nothing to do with Chaitanya at first, but eventually decides to teach him how to get in trouble, with an accompanying montage of shenanigans set to a Beastie Boys song. (The best part is the novel use of a lobster involving a toilet). Their relationship is the backbone of Bad Words, in large part because much ado is made of the question "Why is Guy doing this?" but the script by Andrew Dodge mostly strings you along until an hour or so in. In the meantime, here, enjoy Jason Bateman being the jerk for a change.

 Bad Words is a movie that's sometimes pretty good but never great. There are laughs to be had, but more often you'll chuckle, and the reliance on profanity and crude behavior doesn't quite sustain the film. I've heard criticism of movies like Bad Santa and Cheap Thrills for their reliance on shock value and bad taste over actual narrative, but Bad Words does even less with its central conceit. Once you know why Guy is hell-bent on making a mockery of the Golden Quill, it doesn't make his actions any more justified, or make the story any richer. And, despite that, the climax of the film - the showdown between the last two competitors (I'll let you guess based on the synopsis) - is arguably the best part of Bad Words.

 The vulgarity up to that point is amusing at first, but wears out its welcome by the first sex scene, when Jenny is screaming "don't look at me" at Guy, a joke that ends up being reused later, to no real effect. Anything you see Guy teaching Chaitanya comes off as a pale retread of Bad Santa, which is shame because Chand and Bateman have good chemistry on-screen together. Most of the other parents (including former VH1 and The Daily Show regular Rachael Harris) are there to express their frustration with Guy, and for him to string together crass insults at. Again, it's amusing, up to a point, but to be honest I nearly lost interest leading up the end of the film.

  If the novelty of Jason Bateman not being the "everyman" he usually plays is enough for you, Bad Words might be worth checking out. I will grant that as a director, Bateman keeps Bad Words visually interesting, even if the story struggles to maintain momentum. The "twist" doesn't amount to much, and the shock value of a belligerent adult in a pre-teen environment wears out quickly, but the movie never collapses. It chugs along, dutifully playing the same notes as Bad Santa and other films of its ilk, but not doing anything really new with the tune. I suppose for some, that's good enough. More people seem to enjoy it than I did, for what it's worth.

 In all honesty, I had no expectations going in to Bad Words, because I only knew it existed after seeing a review on CNN while getting my oil changed, but the premise sounded interesting. I was a little bummed that it didn't live up to even the muted hype, but a telling (and worrying) giveaway for me was the presence of the "Darko Productions" logo in front of the movie. While it should have no bearing on Bateman as a director, there's not really a better indicator of "failed potential" than Richard Kelly (Southland Tales), and unfortunately it carried over to films being presented by his production company. And it is, for a little while - while never hilarious, you might find Bad Words to be a nice distraction as a Saturday afternoon rental, but not much more than that. If you're really looking for bad language, might I recommend Fuck instead? That'll cover your bases, and you'll be able to spell most of them to boot.

So You Won't Have To: The Change-Up

 After my Horrible Bosses review, it was suggested that the Cap'n was maybe too hard on The Change-Up, a film that I hadn't seen but felt had "chosen wisely" in ignoring for the other Jason Bateman-centric R-rated comedy. So, in the interest of fairness, I watched The Change-Up. Guess what? I was 100% correct in my earlier assertion.

 I'm going to forgo the typical synopsis because there's nothing you can't learn about The Change-Up from the trailer: Jason Bateman is the put-upon husband Dave and Ryan Reynolds is single pot head Mitch. They get drunk, pee in a fountain, and exchange bodies. Mitch is suddenly in Dave's body, just in time for a major deal in Dave's law firm, and Dave is... well, single. Just so we have to sit through the whole movie of watching unfunny gross out humor transition into a by-the-numbers "gee, I learned so much about what I really want" dramedy, the magic fountain is moved. Gee, will Dave succumb to temptation and bone his assistant Sabrina (Olivia Wilde) while in Mitch's body? Will Mitch regret the mundane world of life with kids and Dave's wife Jamie (Leslie Mann)? Will I give a shit by the end of the movie?

 Speaking of shit, The Change-Up opens with Jason Bateman on the receiving end of projectile baby crap. Just in case we didn't laugh the first time, the second squirt goes into his open mouth. That's how the movie starts. It never gets better. Instead, we're subjected to 112 more minutes of laugh-free shenanigans, objectification of women*, racism, homophobia, and computer enhanced child endangerment.

 In fact, here are a few things that happen in The Change-Up that I think were supposed to be funny:

 - Dave as Mitch is going to hook up with Tatiana, who turns out to be pregnant which disgusts Dave, and if it wasn't enough that she's naked throughout the whole scene, the baby "kicks" inside her stomach so we can see it on camera and laugh.

- You've already seen the Leslie Mann bathroom scene in the trailer, but what you didn't see was the set-up, which involves her stripping down while Warrant's "Cherry Pie" is playing. It's really just an excuse for more gratuitous nudity.

 - Dave as Mitch has to go to the set of Mitch's acting gig, which turns out to be a "Lorno" (light porno, or Skinemax flick), where he sticks his finger up some lady's ass and makes out with a guy in a thong (uncomfortably, of course, because it's a comedy).

 - Mitch as Dave ruins the big merger by making a series of jokes about Asian stereotypes and says "fuck" a lot.

 - When Dave and Mitch finally find the fountain, it's in a crowded mall, so they whip it out and start peeing anyway. There are no less than three jokes made about Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds exposing themselves to children.

 The Change-Up gets even worse when it stops being an offensive, gross-out comedy about balls and shit jokes and turns into a movie about appreciating what you have in life. It's a hard left turn that shifts the film into strictly predictable territory, right down to two separate montages of Mitch and Dave making the best of their new lives in different bodies. After a while, I stopped not laughing and started getting bored, and when everything ends up okay in the end, I was finally happy the movie was over. There's nothing to say about the acting because every single character is unlikeable, so if that was the goal, I guess good job?

I'm all for a movie with dirty jokes, harsh language, even gross-out gags. Read my review of Bridesmaids, or Horrible Bosses. The Change-Up isn't funny at all. I don't know why anyone would waste their time watching the film when so many better options are out there, and the only reason I'm glad I saw it was So You Won't Have To.




* I guess if you've been patiently sitting through Judd Apatow movies hoping you'd see Leslie Mann naked, The Change-Up will check that off of your bucket list. Of course, if that's on your bucket list, go ahead and kick that bucket. There's no good reason for anything that happens in The Change-Up, including all of the nudity.

Blogorium Review: Horrible Bosses

 Well, I didn't see The Change-Up, but I did watch another R-rated comedy featuring one Jason Bateman in it, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Horrible Bosses was the wiser choice. From everything I've heard about The Change-Up, another entry in the "body switching" comedy subgenre, I'll take a movie about three losers trying to kill their bosses any day. Nobody ends up with baby shit in their mouths in Horrible Bosses. That's not to say other, comparably awful things happen to our protagonists.

 Nick Hendricks (Jason Bateman), Dale Arbus (Charlie Day), and Kurt Buckman (Jason Sudeikis) each have a serious problem: their bosses are pure evil. Dale, a dental assistant, is constantly sexually harassed by Dr. Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston), a raging horndog that takes advantage of her patients and Arbus' unique situation as a "sex offender" to keep him in her employ. Since Dale is engaged, this is a problem. Kurt had it made at a chemical company until his boss Jack Pellit (Donald Sutherland) died suddenly, leaving his cokehead lothario son Bobby (Colin Farrell) in charge. Bobby wants to drain the company dry and skip town, ruining everything Kurt worked for. Nick has been toiling away under the tyrannical and sadistic Dave Harken (Kevin Spacey) for eight years, hoping for a promotion that Harken ends up giving himself. They can't quit, and they can't stay. The only option that remains is to kill their bosses, but can they really pull it off?

 As essential to the story as Bateman, Sudeikis, and Day are, Horrible Bosses would be nothing without antagonists that lived up to the title, and it's really the bad guys who steal the show. Aniston is predatory, shameless, and works perfectly against Day's perpetually uncomfortable Dale*. Colin Farrell, hiding underneath a lousy combover, pot-belly, and goatee, doesn't get to do much as Bobby, but the artwork in his house more than makes up for the limited character. The star of the show, as it should be, is Kevin Spacey, playing the kind of sarcastic asshole that made him famous in films like The Ref, Swimming with Sharks and American Beauty. It's funny - I used to think that he was going to play that same type over and over again until I couldn't stand watching him, but after Horrible Bosses, I wondered why it was he stayed away from it for so long during the 2000s. He plays this kind of role better than anyone, bossing around spineless underlings, regarding them as something he'd find under his shoe in a dog park.

 Notable in a smaller role is Jamie Foxx as "Motherfucker" Jones, a shady character the guys hire as a "murder consultant." The revelations about who Jones is (and why he doesn't go by his first name), why he was in jail, and why he's willing to work so cheap are a consistent source of laughter during the second half of the film. Sudeikis is also hilarious as a guy who will sleep with almost anybody (including two major characters in the narrative) and has a habit of sticking things well, where the sun doesn't shine.

 Horrible Bosses doesn't aim to be high art; it's a crass, foul, borderline gross-out comedy along the lines of Bridesmaids. Director Seth Gordon (The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters) makes the jump from documentary to narrative features with relative ease, and screenwriters Michael Markowitz, John Francis Daley, and Jonathan Goldstein keep things moving at a brisk pace. The stakes are set up clearly, the characters behave irrationally, and things go horribly wrong. I think you could guess that coming in, but the important part is that, like Bridesmaids, the film is very funny. The jokes are clever, the actors are all game to behave foolishly, and the R-rating isn't stretched to any point beyond letting you know this is a comedy for adults. In the case of Horrible Bosses, it's better to suggest what a person advertising "Wet works" does than go the extra mile and show it, and I'd argue that it's funnier for it. I've yet to hear the same for The Change-Up, which apparently didn't get that memo. Like I said, I think I chose wisely.




 * I don't mean to under-represent Charlie Day here, but if you've seen It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, you have a really good idea of what kind of person Dale is. Like Spacey, he's very good at playing this type of lovable schmuck, and Dale Arbus is no exception.