"Vacation" Review

(You can watch my video review of this film here: bit.ly/1VOdX0L)

I hate to admit it, but I’ve never seen any of the original National Lampoon’s Vacation movies. I know, I know, I’m missing out on Chevy Chase in his prime. And Harold Ramis directed the first one. And John Hughes wrote the first three! I know, I know. You see, I’m a youngster. I’m only 17, and consequently, I haven’t seen every popular movie in existence. I got my advance screening passes to Vacation about 4 hours before the screening began, so I didn’t have time to get myself acquainted with the Griswolds. That said, I think that gives me a more unique perspective than a lot of film critics who grew up on these films.

This sequel, taking place a full generation after the first one, stars Ed Helms as Rusty Griswold. After discovering that his family doesn’t like going to a cabin in Michigan, he decides to spice things up by taking a road trip to “Walley World”, a theme park that his Dad took him to when he was young. Rusty is an airline pilot though, so I guess he doesn’t like to mix work and leisure. After beginning their cross-country journey, things quickly go downhill, and continue to get worse at every turn.

Vacation reminds me a lot of We’re the Millers, which came out a couple summers ago, only Vacation isn’t quite as bad. We’re the Millers takes a bunch of annoying characters and tries to make you sympathize with them. The characters make a bunch of bad choices and, at times, are seemingly rewarded for them. The filmmakers try to convince you that the characters develop, even though they obviously haven’t, and the whole ordeal becomes too sentimental and ultimately frustrating. On the other hand, Vacation takes a bunch of annoying characters and makes fun of them. The entire movie is focused on punishing these characters, and forced sentimentality is limited. Not to mention that Vacation is funnier and slightly more daring than We’re the Millers.

Vacation is the directorial debut for John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein, but you might know them from some of the movies that they’ve written. They helped write Horrible Bosses and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, which, if you haven’t seen yet, you should. 2 Cloudy 2 Meatballs is probably one of my favorite animated sequels, and I will defend it to the death. What I’m getting at is that Daley and Goldstein are good at writing self-aware comedies that are just fun. They’re a lot like Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, without the great third act. Daley and Goldstein wrote the film as well as directed it, and they put together a solid little screenplay that doesn’t aspire to do much more than make you laugh. There’s a constant stream of incredibly raunchy jokes, so if you’re into that, you’ll probably like this. Vacation also provides a very respectable directorial debut for the two of them. The movie is mostly cut-and-dried, but there are some small stylistic choices that show that some effort was put into the film. Daley and Goldstein are writing the upcoming Spiderman reboot, and I’m excited to see what they put together.

One of this comedies strongest selling points is that it has a great comedic ensemble. Ed Helms is wonderfully naive as the head of the household, and Christina Applegate is really funny as his wife. The two child actors, Skyler Gisondo and Steele Stebbins, both do fantastic jobs delivering their jokes, but they are somewhat exploited by the script and the nature of the comedy. Vacation also has a ton of great cameos. I won’t reveal them all because the surprise appearances is part of the fun of the film, but Charlie Day, Chevy Chase, and Chris Hemsworth all show up, and they’re all fantastic.

Vacation doesn’t always make a ton of sense, and it doesn’t have a very long shelf life, but it’s actually pretty funny. Even though I haven’t seen any of the originals, I still enjoyed it. There were some callbacks to the original films, but with exception to one that a trailer had clued me in on, they were either obvious enough where I got it immediately, or subtle enough where I didn’t pay any attention to it. I laughed a lot at this movie, even at jokes that I had seen previously in trailers, and I’d recommend it if you’re just looking to laugh at some stupid jokes. 6/10.

So, I enjoyed the film, more or less. But, after writing my review, I wanted to go back and watch the original to see if that would have had any impact on my thoughts. Granted, this wouldn’t account for nostalgia, but I’d perhaps gain some insight on where the film was coming from. I could have rented National Lampoon’s Vacation online or something, but I decided to follow the path of my ancestors and buy the DVD from a video store. It was a strange and intriguing experience, and I watched it on a mysterious DVD player after my parents went to sleep.

I noticed a lot of similarities between the films, and stylistic inspirations the sequel took from the original. None of this really made the sequel seem too incredibly forced, but it might have made the sequel seem too familiar if I had watched the original first. However, the sequel took things in a different direction or took the situations to another level. Seeing the original film added additional jokes to the sequel, but the sequel works independently as well. Not to mention that the sequel also had plenty of original jokes.

One of the interesting things I noticed about the two films is that the punishment for the family progressed at different rates. With the original film, there was a build, with each event being worse than the last. With the sequel, things started out extreme and stayed at that level throughout. In torture terms, the progression of punishment for the original film is like being dehydrated, then given salty foods, then given hallucinogens. With the sequel, the progression of punishment is like being shot in the kneecaps and then being hit 4 times with a tire iron every 3 minutes.

Another thing I noticed was that the style of humor was very different between the two films. For starters, the original film utilizes a lot of dark humor, whereas the sequel is more based off of shock value. There are a lot more singular jokes in the sequel, but the original has a lot more character development. I ended up laughing a lot more to the sequel, but I had a more fulfilling overall experience with the original.

Overall, I felt like the sequel was a nice follow-up to the original. It differentiated itself in style and tone while still keeping several important themes and motifs. I don’t think seeing the original changed my opinion too much of the sequel, but it gave me more of a reference point. I’d say that this new film is worth a watch if you’re a Griswold completionist, looking for a stupid, inappropriate comedy, or want to rent from the comfort of your home. I’m sticking with a 6/10.

"Ant-Man" Review

Watch my video review here: bit.ly/1Ifey1n

Concluding Phase Two of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we have Ant-Man. Ant-Man is a strange film to hold that position though. If anything, it feels like Ant-Man is the interlude between the second and third phase. Sure, it introduces a new hero, but Avengers: Age of Ultron was the movie that created a solid resolution for the series (and Joss Whedon), and having Ant-Man follow it as the official conclusion seems forced and unnecessary. The scale of the film is just too small (heh) for the movie to seem like anything but filler.

Ant-Man is directed by Peyton Reed, which is a definite step-down from when Edgar Wright was attached to the movie. In fact, Edgar Wright was the one who lobbied so hard to get the film made in the first place, but he left the project last year due to ‘creative differences’. Now, it’s not a very daring remark to say that Edgar Wright would have probably made the Ant-Man better, but I think that it’s true. For one thing, he was obviously incredibly passionate about the project, and that goes a long way towards making an enjoyable movie. Wright also has a strong track record making quality films for a cult audience. However, Wright’s movies also don’t always reach a wide audience on their initial release, making him a not-so-profitable director. It’s disappointing, but it makes sense to me why Marvel is wary about taking risks with their pictures, especially with characters they want to make a big part of their shared universe. And it’s incredibly obvious as you watch Ant-Man that the focus was on establishing a character to be used in upcoming films, rather than creating a unique and singular movie.

Paul Rudd stars as the titular superhero, and he has a good amount of charisma, but not a lot of material to work with. There’s some blatant emotional manipulation and mediocre humor and that’s about it. The film is ultimately a superhero origin story, and Ant-Man’s origin is a man named Scott Lang. He’s an everyday sort of dude who went to San Quentin after hacking into his corrupt company’s system and ‘Robin Hood’ing millions of dollars. He’s trying to raise enough money to pay for child support so that he can see his daughter, who absolutely adores and remembers him after he spent several years away from her in prison. He resorts to a life of crime, where he meets Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), and gains his shrinking powers. There are father-daughter relationships, villains that we don’t really need to talk about because they’re not memorable or important, and brief cameos by both Avengers and postmodern Nazis.

The special effects in this movie are really good, at least. In the first scene, we see a younger version of Michael Douglas, and while it’s not perfect, it’s pretty convincing. Shrinking the main character gives a new perspective to each of the action sequences, making them somewhat more enjoyable than the standard color orgy that we find in most Marvel films. Not to mention that the shrinking special effects look really cool.

But the thing about Ant-Man is that you’ve already seen Ant-Man in one form or another. There are no surprises here. Just some redundant plot points and missed opportunities. The film is missing the sense of fun and passion that’s necessary to make a movie like this really work. Ant-Man is by no means a bad film, but it’s pretty tedious and dull at times. To me, Phase Two was increasing in likeability as each film went by, but this installment is a lukewarm finale. 5/10.

"The Gallows" Review

(To watch my video review of this film, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ry_2poKNWI)

When Paranormal Activity was released in theatres back in 2009, it marked the beginning of an era of supernatural horror. Franchises like Saw died off and we replaced all of the torture porn with ghost stories, 79% of which came from Blumhouse productions. We’ve seen a wide variety of ghosts in this time, between soul-sucking demons, to ouija-board spirits, to skype session spooks, and it honestly feels like the bottom of the barrel is being scraped by the time we get to the ghosts within every high school theatre. Personally, I’m not really all that into the whole paranormal genre, for two big reasons. First, I find it hard to feel genuinely frightened about something that doesn’t have a physical presence in our world. Moving around objects in a room can create an unsettling mood, but it’s hard to sell me on a movie that’s just that and jump scares. Second, I don’t really believe in the whole ghost thing in the first place. There was a self-proclaimed psychic that performed before the screening that I saw this film at, and while it was impressive how quickly she answered the question of if she could see dead dogs (yes), it was hard for me to take her seriously when she said that she was “sensing the spirit of someone whose name starts with an R”.

We start The Gallows with a home recording of a high school production of… The Gallows. I looked it up, and there’s no play out there called The Gallows, but all you need to know is that there’s a guy named August that they want to hang. Anyway, it’s one of the worst, most boring instances of high school theatre imaginable, until the actor playing August accidentally dies on stage due to a prop malfunction. Twenty years later, for some absolutely unimaginable reason, this same high school wants to honor the anniversary of this incident by putting up another production of The Gallows. This clues us in pretty quickly that The Gallows isn’t all that interested in logic, which is a good thing to recognize pretty quickly, because if you hadn’t already, you are now given explicit permission by the filmmakers to not take the film too seriously.

So we see a rehearsal for the revival production of The Gallows, and it’s just as cringey, if not more cringey, than the performance twenty years prior. It’s at this point we are introduced to our four main characters, who must all be punished for being unreasonably attractive for high school students. Ryan, who holds the camera for most of the film, is potentially one of the most annoying characters ever put to screen. You know how no matter what, someone talking while holding a camera sounds extremely obnoxious? Well imagine that, only coupled with the fact that everything that comes out of their mouth is hypocritical, overeager, and misogynistic. That’s Ryan. He’s a Football player who has to help out with tech for The Gallows. He has a stereotypical cheerleader girlfriend named Cassidy, and his best friend, Reese, is starring in the production as August. Reese quit football to be in the play, but his lack of experience hurts his ability as a performer. He has a big crush on Pfeifer, the girl that he’s starring with, who is the absolute stereotype of a theatre person. Ryan convinces his girlfriend and Reese to come to the high school after dark to destroy the set, and we have our plot.

While all of the characters are different levels of annoying, at least they act extremely genuine on camera. The Gallows is a found footage movie, and while the acting in these types of films is often very stilted, everyone in this movie, from lead to background actor, is incredibly naturalistic in their performance. Of course, there are more than several instances during the film where it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever for anyone to be holding a camera, but I don’t think that this film would have worked without the found footage vibe. The shaky cam, like it or not, really adds to the effect, much more than a camera with smooth movements would. This is not the film for meticulously crafted shots with brilliant lighting. Not that The Gallows really revitalizes found footage in any way whatsoever, but the stylistic choice just works really well for this movie.

Okay, so the whole ghost in the theatre premise is pretty stupid, but it’s also kind of hysterical, and really lends itself very nicely to creating a fun atmosphere for watching the movie. From a horror perspective, a theatre is actually kind of a perfect setting. There are no windows, so there’s always a sense of isolation and captivity present. The general layout of a theatre makes sense, but there’s a bunch of secret doors and hallways, so you’re always sort of disoriented, but never alienated by the film. There’s also a bunch of foreign props and cables all around, and that stuff is always creepy.

The Gallows also works surprisingly well because although the villain is technically a ghost, he has a sort of physical presence that presents a real sense of danger for the characters. He also doesn’t screw around with the way he attacks his victims. There’s no, “Oh, I’m gonna slowly drain your soul and demolish your personality.” Everytime he wants someone dead, they die quickly and dramatically. The film almost blurs the lines between being a supernatural and a slasher horror film.

With only four main characters, The Gallows ends up being really short. It’s only 81 minutes long, which is far under the average run-time for a movie, and I actually kind of like that aspect to it. The movie doesn’t devise ways to waste time or drag on the film, it just gets in and gets out. A solid amount of screentime with four somewhat undeveloped characters is still better than watching 23 six-line characters get murdered to death. The film is tight, and doesn’t leave you with much of an opportunity to get bored.

In fact, this movie fooled me into thinking that it was just gonna be some crappy horror film with no effort put into it. Although the script does lack any true sense of logic, it’s obvious that it went through several revisions to create some interesting moments. Everything that happens in the film serves some sort of purpose to the story, which is just awesome to see, because that’s not always the case for horror films, a genre that has a reputation of being cheap and exploitative. There was some really nice reintegration near the end of the film. I don’t mean reintegration where the filmmakers shove metaphors and motifs down your throat throughout the whole film, I mean a moment where a small detail that you thought nothing of was brought back to make a significant impact on the film’s story. There was even a cool ‘Left vs. Right’ moral dilemma in the movie that really caught me off guard. These things don’t make the movie brilliant, but they show that some effort was there.

The Gallows is super campy, and never really gets scary past a couple decent jump scares, but it’s pretty enjoyable. It falls into a lot of the same horror film tropes, but it executes them with competence and limited style. The story doesn’t really make a lot of sense, and the more you think about it, the more infuriating it becomes, but that doesn’t prevent the movie from being an entertaining watch. It doesn’t do anything revolutionary, and it has very short shelf life, but it’s far from a negative or a boring experience. 5/10.

"VICE: eSports" Review

(The following review was done as a result of a fiverr gig. Have me write a review on the movie of your choice: http://bit.ly/1IA8IfO)

The world of online gaming is a fascinating place. In places like South Korea, gaming is as big as football in America or chess in Russia. There are celebrities, commentators, and high-stakes competitions. In the past few years, there have been several very insightful documentaries and news stories that analyze the gaming culture and where it’s going. If you have seen any of these, or know anything whatsoever about South Korean gaming, you can skip eSports (also known as The Celebrity Millionaires of Gaming). While attempting to cover one of the biggest gaming events ever, the documentary stumbles over its shoelaces and manages to miss every single opportunity to be interesting.

The biggest problem here is that the host, Matt Shea, is the wrong man for this job. He covers this job in the way I’d expect a basketball correspondent to cover the World Cup. He makes fun of the whole culture and doesn’t seem at all interested. When he talks, he appears woefully unprepared, and asks his interviewees some of the most painfully boring questions. One of my favorites examples of bad interviewing was when he talked to KSI, “UK’s #2 gamer”, and asked him, “Are you a millionaire?” KSI responded with, “uhhhh… yeah.” Throughout the documentary, Shea speaks with such indecision that it seems like the take that is used is rehearsal footage, and all of the actual footage was lost in a fire.

It’s also obvious that Matt Shea is not particularly charismatic in front of the camera. He is far too passive when talking to people, and far too passive-aggressive when talking about them. At a press conference, he timidly raises his hand, and then throws a fit when he doesn’t get called on. When his friends want to play games at a game cafe, he acts all hurt and insists on taking everyone to a club, even though that has nothing to do with what the documentary is looking at. And when asking for an interview with one of the industry’s biggest stars, he gets a, “Now or later?” from the star. He then proceeds to whine about not being able to get interviews. Matt Shea feels like a character that Mike Judge put on TV, not someone hosting an hour-long special on VICE.

On a technical level, there’s some pretty bad filmmaking going on here. The voiceovers honestly sound like they were done in Shea’s basement. The point of this documentary is to feel like you’re witnessing the events through Matt’s eyes, so it’s understandable why they didn’t hire a professional voice artist, but couldn’t Matt do more than one take in the recording booth? The clips used to illustrate Matt’s points seem to be chosen indiscriminately, and there is more than one instance of a clip running too long when it could have easily been cut much earlier. It’s just sloppy the whole way through.

As KSI says, “It’s all about personality.” And this documentary has none. At times, it seems fitting that a documentary that (briefly) talks about reaction-based YouTube playthroughs feels so much like one. Every time something interesting happens on screen, we cut to a shot of Matt Shea explaining to us what we just saw. There’s so much wasted potential here. What you end up with is a couple of mediocre character studies, not the multi-dimensional analysis that could have been. The documentary even manages to take any of the tension out of the World finals, making nothing in the film worth caring about. 2/10.

"Insidious: Chapter 3" Review

Insidious: Chapter 3 is a pretty bad movie. I didn’t really like Insidious or Insidious: Chapter 2 much either though, so if you liked those two films, you’ll probably like this prequel, written and now directed by Leigh Whannell. Whannell wrote the first two films, and because James Wan was busy making Furious 7, Whannell is making this third installment his directorial debut.

Okay, so Insidious is a really profitable franchise. True to the Blumhouse style of making movies, the original film was made for only a million and a half dollars and grossed nearly one hundred. Of course, that number doesn’t account for marketing, but that’s still a pretty great return on investment. Although all of the scares were mostly laughable in my opinion, it had some interesting imagery and utilized its budget relatively effectively. Insidious: Chapter 3’s budget is evidently nearly $10 million, and I have to wonder where the money went.

The story takes place a couple of years prior to the events of the first film. There’s a girl named Quinn, played by Stefanie Scott, and she misses her dead Mom. She tries to reach out to her dead Mom, but instead an evil spirit comes to try and kill her. There’s a lot of unnecessary exposition and then all of the demon hunters from the first two films come in and mediocrity ensues.

I spent much more time cringing at the non-scary moments of this film than I did at the scary moments. For a writer who claims to have made an effort to avoid cliches in the first film, there’s an unsettling amount of them here. Quinn has an annoying younger brother, an attractive but awkward guy who is desperately in love with her, and a sassy friend of another ethnicity. She has an audition for a theatre college and she's super nervous about the results, and all of this faux character development goes on too long and you end up feeling like Quinn is less real than when she began. She gets hit by a car at one point. I laughed when she got hit by the car.

The performances are only okayish but the dialogue is just not good. Lin Shaye easily gives the best performance as Elaine Rainer, and she's only decent. Generally, caring about the characters in peril is important to create good horror, and in this movie, the characters just aren't developed enough to be cared about.

In all honesty, this movie feels like it belongs straight-to-DVD. If it didn’t have the Insidious franchise to back it up, I’m not sure it would have been released to theatres. The story is overly simple and every moment feels far too redundant. At times, it’s hard to watch. There were a few somewhat inspired shots, and a couple decent jump scares, but that’s about all I got out of it. At the end of the day, it’s not fun to sit through, and, just like the other films, it’s very forgettable. 2/10.

"Pitch Perfect 2" Review

I'm proud to say that I've been with the Bellas since the beginning. I remember going to see Pitch Perfect way back in 2012 on opening weekend and being pleasantly surprised. At first, the film didn't perform too well at the box office, until word-of-mouth kicked in and Pitch Perfect became a huge sleeper hit. Elizabeth Banks, who produced and had a supporting role in the first film, directs this sequel in which the Bellas compete at the A Capella world championship in attempt to bounce back from a disastrous performance for the President.

Pitch Perfect 2 succeeds because it carries the same spirit of the original, without seeming to copy it. The big thing is that the film takes the world of A Capella super seriously. A lot of the humor is derived from being part of this bubble where A Capella is the most serious thing ever, and if there's too much winking within the bubble, the whole thing falls through. Thankfully, the film takes A Capella just as seriously as it did in the original. Another part of the magic comes from the hysterical improv on set, coming mostly from Rebel Wilson and Adam Devine. The final aspect of the winning combination is the great singing.

Pitch Perfect 2 does what is expected of it for a franchise sequel. The stakes are higher and the situations are more extreme. There's a larger budget and even some more celebrity cameos. However, this film strays from the norm in that Pitch Perfect 2 is much more of a feminist movie than the original. It's not preachy, but it's definitely a 'girl power' movie. Personally, I think that's cool. Hollywood is super sexist both in front of and behind the camera, and it's not often where you have a large ensemble filled with women and a female director.

Of course, students can't be students forever, and with this installment of the franchise, all of the characters from the original are graduating. If there's going to be a Pitch Perfect 3 though, new characters need to be introduced. That's why this film spends a significant portion of the film developing Emily (Hailee Steinfeld) as a character. Steinfeld blew onto the scene after scoring an Oscar nod for 2010's True Grit, but after seeing her in a few more movies, it becomes apparent that her performance is somewhat dependent on the quality of her co-stars. I think that she's a great actress, but I'm not quite sure she'd be able to carry the film in the next installment. Who knows though. The Pitch Perfect franchise has had plenty of surprises.

While Pitch Perfect 2 keeps a lot of the qualities that made the original good, it also retains a lot of the faults. Jokes don't always land where they need to, and there's some sense that a lot of scenes were left on the cutting room floor for the sake of pacing. However, I would argue that this film is at the same quality of the original, it's just less of a shock. Your opinion of the first movie will be your opinion of this one. 7/10.

"Mad Max: Fury Road" Review

Reboots of properties from the 80s are a dime a dozen, but very rarely do we get reboots from the 80s with the same original director. Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott have been toying with some of their previous properties, but they are producing and directing so constantly that it's not all that surprising. The original Mad Max film was released in 1979. Starring Mel Gibson and directed by George Miller, the film was a huge hit in Australia. However, it wasn't until 2 years later with the release of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior that the franchise became a hit in the United States and made Mel Gibson a star. Miller directs Mad Max: Fury Road, and while Gibson has been replaced by Tom Hardy in the titular role, Fury Road stands on its own, so watching the originals is a reward rather than a prerequisite.

Early on in the film, Max says that he has "been reduced to a single instinct: Survive." That's the gist of the story. Sure, there are motivations for the characters to do the things they do, but for the most part, the film is 2 hours of watching the protagonists try to not die during epic fights and car chases. While this lack of a story might throw some people off, it works very well thematically, and allows the movie to focus on creating some incredible action sequences.

As far as action scenes go, Fury Road really raises the bar. The editing for this movie is absolutely astounding. The frame rate is manipulated very frequently to give the film a distinct style and make the action clear, despite the often fast cutting. A majority of the film takes place through various car chases, but the constant movement doesn't get disorienting, and it doesn't get boring. This is likely due to the brilliant cinematography, which makes the desert seem strangely beautiful, and captures the action marvelously without making you feel like you're watching a movie. The movie also utilizes a lot of practical effects, which help avoid the tragic fate of looking like an animated film. Fury Road is super crazy, but you never feel alienated by the craziness. The insanity of it all just goes to serve the tone of the film.

The performances here are astoundingly good, far better than what you come to expect from an action film. While the film lacks a detailed plotline, the characters are all extremely well developed. Tom Hardy is so mesmerizing in the movie that you forget that he's largely silent throughout. Charlize Theron commands the screen as Imperator Furiosa, and Nicholas Hoult is surprisingly affecting as Nux. I'd also be remiss not mention that Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played Toecutter in the original Mad Max, absolutely dominates on screen as Immortan Joe, the antagonist of the film.

Mad Max: Fury Road is one of those movies that I feel would get even better upon a second viewing. The first time you watch it, you're engrossed in the huge spectacle of it all, and then when you watch it a second time, you know exactly what to expect. There's a great energy behind this film that makes it incredibly fun to watch. If you're at all interested in this movie, see it in theatres. It is worth your money to have that sort of an experience. 9/10.