Reel Entropy

Really, he just isn’t funny.

There are people in this world who think Kevin Hart is funny. But do those sad souls think he’s funnier than Jim Belushi?

Hart invites the comparison by taking one of Belushi’s classic roles in the remake of About Last Night. The story drifts further than the 1986 movie from the 1974 play on which it is based, Sexual Perversity in Chicago. It retains the core story, the rise and fall of a sex-based relationship between Danny Martin (Michael Ealy) and Debbie Sullivan (Joy Bryant). Martin and Sullivan are pressured by their best friends, sex-crazed pig Bernie Jackson (Hart) and viciously man-hating Joan Derrickson (Regina Hall).

There’s a dog and an “urban” ized cast in this one, but the biggest change is Jackson and Derrickson are also screwing. That’s just for an extra dose of bizarre humor, though. For the most part, this movie retains the soul of the 1986 film.

Not that that’s a good thing, mind you.

Continue reading →

The 1987 classic Robocop opened with a news brief informing viewers that OmniCorp literally owned the police force in Old Detroit, and the film continued into an incisive examination of deep fears about corporate control and consumerism gone wild.

The 2014 remake opens with a shock jockey talk show host (Samuel L. Jackson) gushing about how OmniCorp’s unmanned drones should be used for American law enforcement — citing, primarily, their success in Operation Freedom Tehran.

Also, he looks better in black. Everything looks better in black. Photos courtesy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Columbia Pictures

The central conflict of this new Robocop is political. Though their drones have pacified the entire world, OmniCorp CEO Raymond Sellers (Michael Keaton) can’t stand the $600 billion he’s leaving on the table every year because U.S. law won’t allow him to remake law enforcement. To get around the law and hopefully get it repealed, OmniCorp puts their technology on recently crippled Detroit cop Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) as a way to prove their technology can work in the U.S. Murphy is stripped down to his lungs, his right hand and his brain, which OmniCorp and lead physician Dennett Norton (Gary Oldman) have extreme control over. Instead of putting a man inside a drone, they remake a man into a drone.

Robocop is the best, ballsy-est and truest remake in this newfangled remake era Hollywood finds itself in. The plot is almost completely new — the core elements of a remade police officer hunting down the people who killed him are still in place, but the surrounding material is very different.

Continue reading →

Monuments Men. Good God what a waste of time!

This dreary film, based on a true story that couldn’t have been anywhere near this boring, follows seven allied art scholars through basic training and into World War II. Their job is to find and restore major works of art that the Nazis have stolen. This gets tricky — not really interesting, just tricky — when they learn Hitler has given the order to destroy everything his army has plundered if the Reich falls, meaning Lt. Stokes (George Clooney, who also directs, co-writes and co-produces) and his squad are in a race against the allies as well as the Germans, at times needing to go behind enemy lines to stay ahead of the war.

Man I don’t even know what’s going on in this scene my eyes are so glazed over at this point

SnnnooOOOORE!!!

Good God what a waste of time!

Continue reading →