Ant-Man fun, neglects great underlying story

Posted on July 17, 2015 by reelentropy

Giant bugs can be a pretty big turn-off for a lot of moviegoers, but the ants are cute and gracefully animated in this. Photos courtesy Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios.

Ant-Man shoots off at the blistering pace of a post-2000 Scorsese movie or a heist comedy, but it takes shortcuts to get there and some important aspects fall through the cracks.

The movie stars Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, a clever thief fresh from a three-year stint in prison. Unable to hold a job and pay child support to his ex-wife (Judy Greer), who won’t let him see their daughter (Abby Ryder Fortson) without doing so, Lang turns back to crime when his roommates (Michael Peña, T.I. and David Dastmalchian), ex-convicts themselves, tip him off on a vacationing millionaire’s mysterious safe.

The millionaire is tech mogul Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), and the safe contains nothing but his old shrinking suit. Lang steals this, and when he puts it on, Pym reveals that he set the whole thing up to test Lang, eventually training him with the suit so he can help steal a similar suit from Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), Pym’s old protege who took over his company has been working to unlock the secret to people-shrinking, which Pym successfully kept from the world.

Got all that?

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Ant-Man staring at lowest Marvel opening in four years

Posted on July 16, 2015 by reelentropy

Photo courtesy Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios

Remember how amped everyone was in 2008 for Iron Man? 

There’s been a lot of noise in the past few months, strengthened by Age of Ultron’s performing less than The Avengers on the same weekend and Comic Con, about superhero fatigue finally setting in over the next few years. That may mean next year, with a whopping six properties slated for release. What used to be once or twice a year save-the-date occasions will be an every two month thing in 2016. That’ll continue through the rest of the decade, with Marvel pumping out two or three movies per year until 2019, DC pushing two a year until 2020, and Fox edging in with a Fantastic Four sequel and another Wolverine movie at least.

Oh yeah, there’s a Fantastic Four reboot coming out in just a couple of weeks! With a ton of racial controversy and some weird stuff about the directors. Anyone even remember that? No?

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The Gallows generic, visually dynamic

Posted on July 13, 2015 by reelentropy

The Gallows also relies on a lot of the same stage-magic gimmicks with people moving like ninjas in long shots to scare viewers, but they do a lot of cheating with the hangman ghost flickering in and out with static. It’s a shortcut, but it’s at least a little kind of impressive how steady the camera is for these shots. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

The Gallows is generic found-footage horror, but in the end it’s quite a likable addition to the endlessly self-replicating subgenre.

The film opens with the original 1993 Beatrice High School production of “The Gallows,” which ends tragically when Charlie Grimille (Jesse Cross), playing the lead after another player backed out, is accidentally hanged for real. The film then cuts to 2013, in which a morbid 20th anniversary showing is being put on starring Reese Houser (Reese Mishler), a football star and hopelessly poor actor only doing it to impress the female lead, Pfeifer Ross (Pfeifer Brown). When they discover a backstage door that doesn’t lock, cameraman and fellow football star Ryan Shoos (Ryan Shoos) convinces his girlfriend, Cassidy Spilker (Cassidy Gifford), and Houser to sneak in and take down the set so that Houser can get more time to practice his lines without disappointing Ross, but the obviously haunted school is obviously haunted, and obvious haunting shenanigans ensue.

The set design in this movie is absolutely fantastic. There are nooses everywhere in this school, whether or not they are actual nooses. The best example is one of the first, when the gang is trapped backstage and being lead down a dark hall to a plot point. Their light can’t pierce all the way down the hall, and as they walk slowly forward, a power tube running straight down the ceiling is the only prominent shape in the frame. The light catches on a break in the tube, giving the entire thing the appearance of a dimly lit noose awaiting the group in the distance for a split second.

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ILLUMINATI CONFIRMED

Posted on July 13, 2015 by reelentropy

Minions was enjoyable enough. It was exactly what everyone expected it to be — a two-hour romp with your favorite characters from Despicable Me, but none of the plot or understandable dialogue. For better or worse. Photos courtesy Universal Pictures.

There’s been a lot of noise about the McDonald’s Happy Meal toys cursing, exposing children to language that their virgin ears just shouldn’t hear. What they’re really saying is far more sinister.

The toys in question are tied in to the movie Minions, a spin-off from the Despicable Me franchise. The movie chronicles their passage from the dawn of time to their meeting of Gru (Steve Carell), their master in the first movies. After millenia of wandering the earth, inadvertetly killing every master they attach to, the minions are in self-imposed exile in the antarctic, but without a master, they fall into a clan-wide depression. Three — THREE — minions, Kevin, Stuart and Bob (Pierre Coffin, who also co-directs with Kyle Balda) venture to America to work for Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock), a legendary thief, who can’t be bothered to steal the Crown Jewels herself and sends the minions to do it for her. The plan backfires when Bob withdraws Excalibur from the stone and becomes the rightful king of England.

It is important to note that while the other minions have two eyes, Bob, the king, has one. You know what else has one eye?

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New stripping movie all talk, no strip

Posted on July 4, 2015 by reelentropy

In the climax, Mike (Channing Tatum) and this other random guy they picked up along the way (Michael Strahan) do this bit where they each give a lapdance on the opposite sides of an empty mirror frame, performing the exact same moves in a lengthy, highly choreographed dance. Impressive, with someone you met a day ago and never talked with onscreen. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

In the title Magic Mike XXL, the XXL is supposed to mean extra extra large, implicitly referring to the lead character’s penis. However, at an astounding 130 minutes, about 10 of which is stripping and about a million of which is lame, stiff dialogue scenes, it’d be more accurate if it stood for extra extra long.

The sequel to the 2012 hit, ostensibly about Channing Tatum’s life as a stripper before he achieved stardom, isn’t much of a sequel, with none of the four principle secondary characters returning. Characters like Big Dick Richie (Joe Manganiello) and Tarzan (Kevin Nash), background characters who the first movie left undeveloped, take center stage. As such, this movie is easier to watch and much better when viewed as its own independent story, which coincidentally has characters that feel really underdeveloped.

Three years after “Magic” Mike Martingano (Tatum) left the drug-filled, sex-crazed dead end world of stripping to pursue his passion, furniture sales, he gets a call from Tarzan recruiting him on a last ride to the stripping convention in Myrtle Beach. On the way, the estranged Martingano rekindles relationships with his old colleagues, and they all face private demons related to loneliness and growing old.

Then, suddenly, Donald Glover!

First thing’s first — ladies, you will be disappointed. Magic Mike XXL is a movie about stripping the same way Star Wars is a movie about awarding medals. It all happens at the end after a bunch of other stuff you don’t necessarily care about that doesn’t connect with the stripping scenes in any way. It’ll all be on Youtube soon. If abs are the reason you want to see this movie you absolutely should not go.

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