‘The Upside’ decently entertaining, has no story

Posted on January 13, 2019 by reelentropy

Better not find any gay moments down here. Images courtesy STX Entertainment.

1/10 The Upside had its premiere all the way back in September 2017 at the Toronto International Film Festival, and was set for distribution March 9 of the next year. Unfortunately, that distribution was being handled by The Weinstein Company, which was hit by a small bit of scandal that October.

The Upside was one of several films dropped from release until another distributor could be found, in this case a partnership between STX Entertainment and The Weinstein Company’s remnants, Lantern Entertainment. Having been spared from the frying pan of The Weinstein Company, The Upside would release right into the fire Jan. 11, 2019, just over a month after star Kevin Hart stepped down as Oscar host a single day after getting the job because of backlash over homosexist tweets and jokes from earlier in his career.

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The most important films of 2018

Posted on January 5, 2019 by reelentropy

Annual top 10 list are boring and dumb and stupid and dumb and boring and, and, and dumb. At Reel Entropy, we aspire to track movies over time, and as such, instead of bringing you personal picks for the best movies of 2018, we’re going to put together a list of what should be the most influential.

Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Paramount Pictures, RLJE Films, Sony Pictures Releasing, Warner Bros. Pictures and Netflix, respectively.

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‘Vice’ wastes spectacular cast in disorganized docu-comedy

Posted on December 30, 2018 by reelentropy

It me! Images courtesy Annapurna Pictures.

5/10 In 2015, tired of making Will Ferrell movies, Adam McKay wrote and directed The Big Short, a strange docu-comedy that aimed to explain to mass audiences how the 2008 economic collapse happened, and that movie won a ton of awards and nominations even though it was essentially just a more boring Wolf of Wall Street with more explicit moralizing about illegal stock market practices and the 2008 recession is really not that complicated anyway.

So here we are, three years later, and he made another one, this time going after former vice president Dick Cheney.

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‘Bumblebee’ isn’t actively offensive, which is apparently enough now

Posted on December 30, 2018 by reelentropy

Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

4/10 It’s 2018. The Transformers series was met with poor critical reception pretty much on arrival, but last year brought with it the first indication that audiences might be growing tired of it as well. Franchise director Michael Bay, who has a history of sexualizing underage girls in his movies, could get #metoo’d at any moment. Paramount Pictures needs proof that its star franchise can successful without Bay and all that he brings with him, with a potentially different cast of characters and on a much smaller scale, proof that it can remain a reliable and more varied source of income going into its second decade of existence.

Enter Bumblebee.

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‘Aquaman’ gets big picture wrong, gets details wrong too

Posted on December 29, 2018 by reelentropy

Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

2/10 Last year, The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro’s fairy tale love story about banging a frog person, won best picture, and I warned at the time to be ready for an influx of movies about sexy frog people.

Now, almost a year to the day after Shape of Water’s wide release, Warner Bros. has released Aquaman, its superhero spin on the classic frog person myth, starring Jason Momoa as the most conventionally sexy frog person that ever croaked. As with most movies crimping off an Oscar winner, Aquaman is pretty awful.

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