Category: Showtime

Zach’s Zany Movie Reviews: THE SWING OF THINGS

If 2020 is a giant dumpster fire, then THE SWING OF THINGS is a mini dumpster fire inside said dumpster fire. HOLY. FUCKING. SHIT. I was laughing throughout this whole movie so hard… and not because of the movie itself, but by how awful it was. This film is one of worst sound edited, worst acted, one of the worst edited in general and one of the worst directorial efforts of ALL time. The only reason why I watched the whole damn thing was because…it was a literal dumpster fire and I wanted to watch the entire thing burn to the ground. I’m not listing this as my worst film of the year list because I wanted a title or two you all probably knew at the top, as this is a film I guarantee would elicit a few, “what the fuck is The Swing Of Things?” if it happened to come up in conversation. This is not even a so bad it’s good movie, like Anaconda or Snakes On A Plane, this is a bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad fucking movie that the guys at Red Letter Media would be watching and putting up in competition with other bad movies in one of their ‘Best Of The Worst’ segments. If you happen to catch this movie where it is playing on Hulu, or God forbid, be a giant dumb fuck and spend money to rent the mother fucking thing, it’ll probably remind you of really really bad late 90s/early 00’s gross out comedies such as Freddy Got Fingered, Tom Cats, Say It Isn’t So and Slackers. But those films and my worst film of the year so far, The Wrong Missy, are masterpieces compared to this abortion.

IMDB describes The Swing Of Things with the following: “A groom-to-be accidentally books his destination wedding and honeymoon at a swingers resort in Jamaica.” What is even more embarrassing than that awful film premise is some of the names that they actually got to be in this thing. Supermodel Olivia Culpo, Adelaide Kane, Jon Lovitz, and even fucking Luke Wilson are in this, albeit Lovitz for probably an hour of work and Luke Wilson looks drugged out of his mind just to get through the shoot to get that nice paycheck at the end of the day. I wonder if he joined as part of a lost bet? This is one of those “Sandler Vacation” films, meaning that all involved probably jumped on board because a free vacation was in the cards along with the shoot. The jig is up if you go to Olivia Culpo’s Instagram and scroll down to right before COVID-19 hit, as you can see exactly when the shoot took place. One of her stories has her in the same white bikini she wears in the film, talking about vacationing with her real life football player fiancee. By the way, her and and Adelaide Kane were completely hired only for their looks and scantly clad swim wear and other outfits. I’m surprised that neither one of them filed a sexual harassment suit against any of the other cast or crew. The story is really just a back drop to watch how poorly made this movie is. The only way to describe all the bullshit to you is to give you a list of bullet points of the beats that go down in the film:

  1. A seagull has a cigarette in its mouth and says “God Damn!” as a woman in a yellow bikini runs in Baywatch slow motion type fashion across the beach. Remember how I said the sound editing was terrible? They couldn’t even match the “God Damn!” to when the bird opened it’s beak twice.
  2. A flock of regular little birds, instead of chirps, keep repeating “TITS TITS TITS TITS TITS TITS TITS TITS TITS N ASS ASS ASS ASS ASS ASS ASS ASS” in two scenes for what seems like forever.
  3. Dolphins rape people on this island. I shit you not.
  4. For this movie having a premise of accidentally holding a wedding at a swingers resort, there is little to no sex in this movie. No smart sexual humor either.
  5. The sexual humor that is in this movie has been done before, is cheap, ans is resorted to small dildos and little whips being strapped to pens when signing up for activities on the island. One of the older women in the wedding party can’t decide what she wants to do, so instead of tapping just a pen to her cheek to simulate that she’s thinking, she’s tapping the dildo and/or whip on her cheek. Ha…Ha.
  6. For what little nudity there is in this movie (I’m surprised Culpo or Kane didn’t show anything), the camera obnoxiously zooms in on naked body parts of extras. That joke is about 21 years old, first done in Road Trip…no originality.
  7. Does anyone remember Jack Black’s awfully annoying and racist character, Jamaican White Guy, in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer? There is one here too, but add on about 1000% annoyance.
  8. The audio has an echo and/or tries to readjust itself several times in several scenes. If the movie needed any additional ADR, which it did, Luke Wilson obviously said no, as there seems to be someone impersonating his voice in parts that were probably hard to hear audio wise and needed several more takes.
  9. It’s just a bunch of incoherent scenes strung together, and when a possible plot is brought into the mix, whether or not the male fiancee cheated on Olivia Culpo, it’s solved in less than 5 minutes flat.
  10. A girl character loathes this other male asshole character the whole movie and then has sex with him and blows him underwater to get some secretive info out of him and then for no reason is in love with said asshole at the end of the film.

See what I mean? This movie is COMPLETE BULLSHIT. And very misogynistic and degrading to women. How director Matt Shapira, who replaces Uwe Boll as the worst director of all time for me as this movie compared to ANY of Boll’s make them look like masterpieces, got financing for this thing is anyone’s idea. I honestly think everyone knew each other in some way shape or form, and wanted a vacation, and Shapira got Culpo and Kane because he is a giant fucking pervert flashing dollars bills and a fun time in the sun in their eyes. The screenplay was written by five people…let me repeat that…FIVE PEOPLE. It’s like they were on pot and wrote it together over dinner one night, passing the screenplay to the left and instead of trying to fix and expand upon the previous ones work, just added on to it without reading the scenes that came before. Then once shooting began, everything was shot in one take and the editor had absolutely nothing to work with but the bare bones of dailies. The framing is bad, the actors seem as though they tried to memorize their lines 2 minutes before “Action!” was yelled…it’s basically a feature length porn movie with no sex scenes…and even some of those are better than this trash. When you are on Hulu or if you are wanting to rent a comedy on another streaming site and come upon this abysmal disaster, swing the other way. Swing FAR the other way.

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Zach’s Zany TV Binge Watchin’ Reviews: HOMELAND SEASON 8 (The Final Season & I talk about the series as a whole)

Thank God HOMELAND SEASON 8 stuck the landing in their series finale last night. I was dreadfully afraid it was going to be another Dexter or Ray Donovan series finale fuck up of epic proportions. To be fair, the makers of Ray Donovan didn’t know their last episode was a series finale, I’m just pissed I invested so much time in a television show (7 seasons) that didn’t have an ending…yet (I hope maybe they wrap shit up in a TV movie or be brought back from the dead in a final really short, maybe only 4 or 5 episode season?). Anyway, the reason I was dreadfully afraid of a terrible series ender was because the 8th and final season of Homeland was okay, with some decent parts and the same can be said for Dexter’s final 8th season as well. But then Showtime gave us that final episode, you know the one where Dexter, a serial killer who kills serial killers/bad guys, becomes a mute lumberjack at the end, that is now the staple of bad endings whenever and wherever television series endings are discussed. Dexter’s first two seasons were great, the 4th it’s best, the 3rd only okay with a couple of juicy moments, and the fifth was better than average with what could’ve been a decent ending. Seasons 6, 7, and 8 (especially after the ending of the latter) are all tedious, uninspired, and boring.

To be fair, out of 8 seasons, there has only really been one terrible season of Homeland, that being Season 3 and how awfully boring it was and the way they handled Brody’s arc. I’d say season 1, 2, 6, 4, and 5 were great although all but the 1st had their minor share of problems (that red neck massacre with that conspiracy theory nut in Season 6…what the fuck was that?). Season 1 to me is perfect as Season 1 and 5 were to 24 (same creators and writers if you didn’t know). And then when we get to the final two seasons of this show season 7 and 8, they were only okay really. I’m just glad this last one, didn’t massacre the ending, and makes me look back at the entire thing with fondness and maybe even one day revisit binge wise. When I look at my complete series set of Dexter, I cringe when I think about revisiting it and then going past season 5. Anyway, if you don’t know what Homeland is, or the only thing about Homeland you know is that it is from the creators and writers of 24 and both television shows are similar, it is about a highly skilled CIA agent named Carrie Matheson (played brilliantly by Claire Danes) who is very intelligent, there is just one problem, she is mentally unstable dealing with being bi polar and a bit schizophrenic. The first season deals with an American soldier prisoner of war being turned by Islamic terrorists and then the seasons get different from there. At the heart though has been Carrie all along, and her CIA handler/confidant Saul Berenson played to perfection by the great Mandy Patinkin.

To me, Homeland was a much more serious, much more realistic, much more political version of 24, even though I loved the latter show much much better as Jack Bauer was much more of a bad ass than Carrie Matheson was, and 24 got really really dark really fast and had much better action. But I still like Homeland, I could see Jack Bauer’s character living somewhere in that universe, waiting to come out of the shadows. But enough about 24. Homeland was an engaging show throughout its 8 seasons on the air. The political intrigue, the stakes, the acting, the plot threads, the spy game, all must watch television. If you are looking something to pass the time during quarantine season and have already gone through Breaking Bad, El Camino, and Better Call Saul, 24, and The Americans (up next for me), Homeland is a great title to add to this list. There are a bunch of twists you don’t see coming, memorable villians, the future Supergirl naked, naked little older Inara, the works. This season’s final thread had America being in peace talks with the Middle East, and then going almost straight to hell with a devastating tragedy, only for Carrie to go out and prove that this tragedy was just a mistake. It was very simple, which is probably why I found it to be a bit tedious and a little boring. Without getting into spoilers, Carrie Matheson had to go after this device that proved what really happened with this tragedy, and all the plot threads from it seemed a bit of a copycat from the latter half of season 4 of 24.

And I was afraid that with the ending, basically a “Carrie vs. Saul” type of ordeal, that the show would jump the shark the first time since the terrible season 3, but instead smartly side stepped what I thought was the inevitable, and contained a conclusion that was smart, bittersweet, and made sense. And no, Carrie does not become a lumberjack thank God. The acting here is all top notch, with a few noticeable exceptions. Hugh Dancy, who is Claire Danes’ husband in real life, plays a villainous advisor to the President of the United States. This role was not a stretch for him as he’s done that a lot recently since Hannibal being cancelled. And the wonderful Beau Bridges is wasted as the current President of the United States in that universe. Without spoiling anything, he isn’t in this season that much which is a shame. But really, this last season was all about Carrie and Saul, which it had to be. The crux of the show, the heart of it, was their friendship and relationship as mentor and apprentice. Throughout all 8 seasons, Saul was grooming Carrie to not only be the person that he could trust the most in the world, but be a terrific CIA agent. And this last episode even goes back to Season 1 to tie up some themes (mainly one asking the question: Could Carrie ever betray her country and why?) but mostly has a good farewell to their awesomely platonic relationship. If you like international espionage and political intrigue type shows, that even though it tries to keep it as realistic as possible it manages to still keep some sort of sense of fantasy for your entertainment enjoyment, you can do no better than Homeland.

My Homeland Season Ranking

  1. Season 1
  2. Season 2
  3. Season 6
  4. Season 4
  5. Season 5
  6. Season 7
  7. Season 8
  8. Season 3 (again, really the only terrible season)