Looking for something?
Archives
Archives
Find me!

Browsing Tags 2015

The Hateful Eight (2015)

22/01/2017 · by Joy

I love Quentin Tarantino, I really do, but man… 3 hours and 7 minutes is a long-ass time for a movie that’s like, 90% dialogue. That’s not to say I lost interest, because I didn’t. I knew what was coming… that Tarantino ending. The payout I was waiting for. If I stopped 2 hours in and abandoned the trek, it’d all be for naught. So you best believe that I toughed it out.

Nothing about The Hateful Eight was boring – Tarantino doesn’t do boring. It’s dark, it’s unrealistic, it’s gory (at times)… it’s everything I’ve come to expect from a movie directed by the Tarantines himself. You’ve got a roster of A-list stars who are typical of his movies – Samuel L. Jackson (True Romance, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and now, The Hateful Eight), Walton Goggins (Django Unchained), Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms), Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill). Tarantino loves to build a relationship with his stars and reuse them again and again. He also added Kurt Russell to the roster, as well as Channing Tatum, who surprised me by doing a decent job!

The overuse of the n-word doesn’t particularly agree with me. I get that he’s trying to be historically accurate of the time period the film is set in, but it was juuuust a bit excessive at 65 (I didn’t count myself, though, so I could definitely be wrong) utterances.

To be honest, it wasn’t my favourite Tarantino film… not by a long shot… but I did enjoy it. It was interesting, it was a bloodbath (as is his modus operandi), and it was thrilling, at least at the end. Solid watch! Solid watch.

Green Room (2015)

02/01/2017 · by Joy

Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’ve seen way too many movies. It’s been so difficult to find movies to watch that I’m interested in and that can keep my attention past the first 30 minutes! Green Room has been on My List on Netflix since it was added to the Recently Added category and I just kind of decided out of desperation that today was the day and let me tell you, I was not disappointed! I haven’t seen a single movie before this with Anton Yelchin and he was a treat to watch onscreen. He was wonderful and it made me so sad to think of his passing. Beyond that, however, I really liked this bizarro Red State-esque thriller. The cake was topped when I went to Cash Converters and, lo and behold, there it is – Green Room on Bluray! It’s been a glorious day.

The plot is pretty basic – a punk band goes to perform a gig but oh no the gig is to be performed in a neo-Nazi skinhead bar… they then open with the Dead Kennedys song “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” which is, in retrospect, the worst choice they could have possibly gone with. They essentially win the hearts of their white supremacist audience, but then witness a stabbing and have to fight for their lives and try to escape alive. The things they encounter during their escape attempt(s) are gruesome and gritty and shocking. There is bonding with traitors (of the neo-Nazi organization), there is injury, there is death… it is not for you if you’re afraid of gore, but I really liked it. I thought everyone acted well and I thought the story, while basic, was compelling.

The villain – the leader of the skinheads – is played by none other than Sir Patrick Stewart and he does a fantastic job portraying a bad guy. He is a bad guy and encompasses all that is bad in this film. The green room is a claustrophobic setting and for the better part of the movie, they’re stuck in it. I felt the tension rising as every second ticked by and desperately wished for them to get out of that room!

Overall, I thought this film was… not exactly a work of art, but it was gritty and the characters were well-developed. The plot, while thin, was sufficient enough to carry me through the film. I bought this one, and I plan to watch it again… definitely worth a watch!

Emelie (2015)

11/09/2016 · by Joy

Emelie is the movie that encompasses every parent’s nightmare when hiring a babysitter that you don’t reaaaally know all that well. It’s directed by Michael Thelin, who, as far as I can tell, hasn’t directed any movies before now. It stars a bunch of “unrecognizables”, which is one of my favourite things when watching a horror movie. When there’s a recognizable actor, you can’t help but be taken out of the movie just a tad.

Sarah Bolger plays Emelie, a girl fronting as “Anna”, a couple’s go-to babysitter’s best friend. At the very beginning of the film, you learn that “Anna” is not who she says she is as we watch the real Anna, a character we haven’t met – at all, get thrown into a mysterious black car. The new “Anna” shows up at the house, sweet as pie and the parents detect nothing amiss and head out on their much-anticipated date. Before the parents leave, in some pretty obvious foreshadowing, we learn that the children are not allowed to have cell phones until they’re 13. After the parents leave, the kids are put through the ringer… they have to watch the youngest (and only) daughter’s pet hamster get eaten by the oldest son’s snake, they are forced to watch their dad’s amateur sex tape with a woman who is not his wife(?), and then they listen to a bedtime story about a girl who neglectfully kills her infant child and now needs to find a new one, referring to the new child she is on the hunt for as her “Cubby.” Creepy. Very creepy.

Eventually, we learn that this operation is clearly bigger than Emelie alone when the parents get t-boned by an oncoming car on their way home from their date. As Emelie and her mysterious suited man’s death toll rises, the three children are fighting for their lives and Jacob, the oldest, is fighting to keep his younger brother from being kidnapped.

In a disturbing twist of events (to the parents, since we already know this), they are driven home by a cop, but on the drive back the cop gets a radio call letting him know he needs to head back to the crime scene as OH MY GOD, a body was found in the trunk of the car – the body of Anna Coleman.

This movie was tense, I’ll give it that, albeit a little farfetched. If I had children, it would probably make me think twice about who I’m leaving my children with. But come on, if I knew who the girl was, I’d have looked her up on Facebook to confirm her identity before leaving my children with them at the veeeery least!

Overall, a decent thriller (with surprisingly okay child actors) that I probably wouldn’t venture to watch again, at least for a long while!

Sleeping Giant (2015)

23/04/2016 · by Joy

Today my friend Paula texted me at like 10:30 this morning and asked if I wanted to go see “that Thunder Bay movie” with her. So, naturally, I was like, “What Thunder Bay movie??” and she sent me the trailer. I went in with zero expectations and no idea what the film was actually about and to be honest, I’m still not 100% sure. We went to the 4:45 PM showing on a Saturday, hoping to beat the rush, but we didn’t quite succeed – the theatre was pretty packed!

Here in Thunder Bay, it’s definitely not an everyday occurrence to see our city’s landmarks on the big screen, so that’s an exciting thing for most of us. However, I feel like maybe the film focused too much on being THUNDER BAY and less on having an actual plot to follow. I get it, it’s supposed to be a coming-of-age story, which I guess it fulfills, but it just felt… a little bit too in-your-face about being local. I really wanted to like it and to come back and write about how this is THE best film to grace any film festival ever, but I can’t really do that.

I can write about how the lead actors, Jackson Martin, Nick Serino and Reece Moffett portrayed their characters really well. I was especially taken with Jackson Martin’s acting because his seemed the most authentic which makes sense as he’s been in other things before, this being his first feature film. Nick Serino’s character, Nate, is indisputibly an asshole and I found that really difficult to get around. By the end of the film, I was really rooting for something bad to happen to him because he was SUCH a huge douche. That’s terrible to say, because his character is a 14 year old adolescent boy, but it’s true.

The three boys worked really well together, which again makes a lot of sense, because Nick Serino and Reece Moffett are actually cousins in real life… and seeing as Jackson Martin’s character is supposed to be a little bit of an outcast in their trio, it really works. Another thing I really enjoyed was the camerawork – there were a lot of really fantastic shots of the landscapes, waterscapes, and different creatures in nature, including the horrifying and well-known (in Thunder Bay, anyway) spruce beetle.

Basically, to sum up, this film was a lot of teenage boys smoking weed and drinking stolen beer and showing off their masculinity… which is actually incredibly accurate when you’re shooting a movie about teenage boys in Thunder Bay. It really took a hard look at both the sensitive sides of adolescence and the crueler underbelly, I just think it was too “HEY LOOK IT’S THUNDER BAY” for it’s own good – it felt a tad gimmicky by the end of the film. It is definitely worth a watch, though, especially if you were born and raised in Thunder Bay, like I was.

The Boy (2015)

03/04/2016 · by Joy

One of my favourite things to do is to flip through Netflix’s horror catalogue and pick either something that looks REALLY bad or something that looks like it might actually be good – of course, the good ones are the rarity.

The Boy caught my eye because, at first, I thought that it was the film that was just coming out this year which looks both hilarious and horrendous all at one time. But the description grabbed me and pulled me in ultimately. “Neglected by his heartbroken father and abandoned by his mother, a boy who is fascinated with death drifts toward becoming a future serial killer.” Anyone that knows me, or at least knows my reading habits, knows that I am very interested in serial killers and even now I’m currently 700 pages deep in “Fatal Vision,” the story of Captain Jeffrey MacDonald and his journey through the trials when he was accused and later convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and two young daughters. Being a psychology major, abnormal psychology is a deep-seated interest of mine. Anyway, that’s what drew me to The Boy.

The first thing that needs to be said about this film is that it is a veeeeeryyyyy slow burn. I can definitely see where some critics are coming from (Devan Coggan, for example, from Entertainment Weekly) when they say that the film feels overly long and drags at certain points. It has a really great score, which is something I put a lot of stock into when I watch a film… especially horror films.

While I can’t say I was enthralled throughout the entire film, which is an hour and 45 minutes long and contains many, many, MANY landscape shots of mountains, I was interested. If you’re going into this one looking for a scare, you’re not going to find it. I hesitate to even call it a horror movie simply because it is just not scary. Nobody is going to watch this and go, “Yes, that 9-year-old boy scraping roadkill off the road IS frightening!” I’d label it as more of a thriller than anything. Rainn Wilson, however, I did find off-putting at least. I’ve never seen him in a serious role such as this one and it was an unexpectedly positive surprise.

The first two-thirds of the film are building up to something and the ending is pretty climactic. The last few minutes of the film are, by far, the most chilling in the entire film. All in all, it felt like an “artsy” sort of thriller and it failed to… well, thrill. I was just expecting more to happen the whole time, instead of watching idling silence for the first 70 minutes. I’d still recommend that anyone who considers themselves a fan of the genre give it a watch, but it’s not going to be hailed as a classic anytime soon, that’s for sure.

The Gallows (2015)

19/03/2016 · by Joy

A few months ago… actually, likely closer to a year ago, some friends and I had a movie night, as we have been inclined to do. We watched The Gallows (2015) and I came away thinking it wasn’t that bad – likely due to the screams coming from my friend Julie who was to my left and my other friend Brandi who was to my right (the rest of us don’t get so… involved in our horror films). However, my previous assessment of the film was trash – utterly falsified trash.

My boyfriend, David, and I rented it… from Movie Network (geez, they get a lot of advertising on here from me!) tonight to rewatch it for specific reviewing purposes.

So the premise of The Gallows… it’s based in a high school around our main character, Ryan, who is a bit of an asshole. His friend Reese is a football player who is also playing the lead in the school’s play which is so aptly named, The Gallows. 20 years previously, the school had attempted to put on the same play with horrific results – the character playing Reese’s character, August, accidentally got hung and tragically died. So anyway, Ryan discovers by happy accident that the stage door is broken and doesn’t lock. This discovery spawns Ryan’s bright idea to break into the school that night and trash the set, ruining opening night. Ryan and Reese, along with Ryan’s girlfriend, Cassidy enter the school and run into the other lead cast member, Pfeifer (yeah, that’s her FIRST name… I was appalled too, and not only that, but it’s the ACTRESS’ first name as well!) and find themselves locked in the dark, creepy school unable to escape.

The plot, I think, sounds pretty intriguing on paper, but the more I watched, the angrier I got at the plotholes, the shoddy camerawork, and the terrible acting. I am a huge fan of found-footage films – there are lots that are more worth your time than this one. It really did have potential, but it didn’t quite hit the mark for me. There are so many things wrong with the plot, I don’t even know where to begin. For instance, there is constant repetition of the fact that you cannot, under any circumstances, utter the name of the first victim (Charlie) on stage because it’s bad luck, but they never tell you WHY that’s considered bad luck… and it turns out later that the motives of the “ghost” are revenge-based, so why would saying his name be bad luck? It just doesn’t make much sense.

David and I noticed on many occasions very obvious cut and scene changes… it just seemed amateur in it’s execution. The ghastly figure that sometimes appears behind people in scenes is just sort of ridiculous and not that scary, honestly. The characters are unlikeable to begin with, the writing is awful, and the plot (as I’ve previously mentioned) is full of loopholes and sadness.

The saddest part is that it could have been good and it could have been scary, but it just fell flat due to flaws and technicalities (you know, like writing, acting, and camerawork – all the non-essentials for a film to succeed).

Save your money… save your time… watch something else.

Unfriended (2015)

13/03/2016 · by Joy

Yesterday I drove all the way down the street a ways to the Movie Network (which still exists!! I know, I’m excited too) to return the movies we had previously taken out (which were The Woman in Gold and The Equalizer and for which I had late fees, also… remember late fees?) I strolled around the store and when I got to the letter ‘U’, I saw it. I saw the film I’d laughed at so many times in trailers at the movie theatre or online… Unfriended, as directed by Levan Gabriadze. I felt something strange come over me and suddenly I was doing it, I was lifting it off of the shelf, I was holding it in my hand, I was paying to rent it for a week, I was taking it home. I put it into my Playstation 4. I pressed play.

I was really intrigued by the premise and the style – how they pulled the story off, really. The whole film is told from one girl’s computer screen. The other 5 characters are only seen via their “webcams” on Skype. I think that’s really innovative and it’s not something I would have come up with or been able to pull off!

Anyway, these 6 teenagers are all friends, I guess. The main character, Blaire (Shelley Hennig), is the innocent do-gooder who has never sinned and CERTAINLY never had sex. Her boyfriend, Mitch (Moses Jacob Storm), is the bad boy with a sensitive side. Then you have Mitch’s best friend, Adam (William Peltz), who’s just a bad boy (no sensitive side here). There’s Ken (Jacob Wysocki) who’s just there and really has no personality, except possibly he’s supposed to be the “tech geek.” There’s Jess (Renee Olstead) who is supposed to be the slutty one, but there’s also a second slutty one, Val (Courtney Halverson).

So they’re just Skyping like teenagers do on a weekend evening, when they notice an unauthorized presence in their group chat who introduces themselves as a girl who committed suicide a year to the day. As the film goes on, in true horror fashion, the characters get picked off and secrets come out.

I mean, it’s nothing that hasn’t been done or seen before plot-wise, but it was an entertaining watch at the very least. It was no Spielberg, but it genuinely kept me interested the whole time. There were a couple jump scares, but it wasn’t overly hokey either.

If you’re a horror junkie like I am, it’s worth a viewing… maybe with the lights off, some friends, and some popcorn. Happy viewing!