Zach’s Zany TV Binge Watchin’ Reviews: THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY SEASON 2 (Netflix)

The sophomore slump. It happens to 95% of television shows. The second season of almost anything is usually not as good as the first. For example: 24, Lost, Alias, Homeland, Stranger Things, The Walking Dead, and Westworld, to name a few. There is the occasional exception when you think of shows such as Seinfeld, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Friends, and The Americans. Well, the 2nd season I’m about to review of a newer popular Netflix series has just reached that rare 5% where it not only doesn’t have a whiff of a sophomore slump, but completely destroys that cautious train of thought. If THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY Season 1 was the series’ A New Hope, then SEASON 2 is its EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. Season 2 eclipses Season 1 in every way imaginable: character development, plot structure, acting, pacing, twists, turns, visuals, and its entertainment value. I couldn’t believe how perfect the second set of ten episodes were. It starts off with a bang and does not let up, the final three episodes being some of the most perfect hours of television I have seen in 2020 along with the entirety of Better Call Saul’s 5th season. This season is a masterpiece, and it doesn’t matter if Season 3 is not up to snuff (which if there isn’t a season 3 after this Netflix is out of their fucking minds), there is no way in hell it could ruin the perfection of what I just witnessed. To put it in a better metaphor: the show’s umbrella did not let a drop of rain ruin the cashmere fabric that is these ten episodes.

I won’t be digging into Season 1 all that much on here, so if you are looking for an in depth analysis on it, I suggest you look elsewhere. I will just say that Umbrella Academy’s first season is a fun, if not flawed first 10 episodes, where the first couple of them are great and the last couple are great, but the middle of the series lags a bit. Only do the acting and characters pull through that slog to reach its grand epic conclusion. If you haven’t seen any of this show…what the fuck are you waiting for? The Umbrella Academy is about a family of 7 former child superheroes, who have grown apart, one of them even dead, that must now reunite to continue to protect the world. Well, that’s the first season in a nutshell. Minor spoiler alert for that season (but don’t worry, won’t spoil the big stuff of Season 2), they end up failing in the end and have to use one of their time traveling abilities to go back in time and try again. The first season ends right as they time travel, right before everything blows up and dies around them. The only thing I will reveal about the 2nd seasons story is at the beginning it is revealed that they went a little too far back into time, the 1960’s to be exact, and they have to prevent another and different kind of apocalypse, this one much sooner than what they had experienced in April of 2019. That’s all I’m going to say. Needless to say, when watching a trailer tease for this 2nd season, I was worried at first about the story line having a copy cat apocalypse angle from the first season and just doing more of the same. Boy, was I dead wrong.

The names of the seven characters are Vanya, Klaus, Allison, Luther, Ben, Diego, and Number Five. Their arcs and screen time were kind of uneven last season, focusing a little too much on just Ellen Page’s Vanya, but this season, everybody gets the exact same amount of screen time, all of them have full, interesting arcs and densely developed story lines. One villain that was uninteresting and in the background too much in the first, Kate Walsh’s Handler, is front and center this time and much more interesting, and a new character Lila, played extremely well by Rita Arya, has a fantastic dynamic with Diego and her own interesting reveals. Plus you have little mini arcs with some interesting characters from last season including Hazel, Pogo, Grace and Reginald Hargreeves, but nothing too distracting that takes away from the main seven. Episode 7 is easily the best of the ten, providing a new look at a list of time paradox ticks that are used perfectly and hilariously (you’ll see what I mean when you get there). I can’t reveal much more, so I’ll end this by saying that the series has a fantastic climax that is perfectly plotted over the course of the last three episodes (making the climax of season 1, that really just took place in the last 15 minutes of the final episode, feel rather tame), the visual effects are much more striking, the characters have a shit ton more to do, and Robert Sheehan’s Klaus and Aiden Gallagher’s Number Five, much like last season, steal every scene they are in. It’s just a fun and engaging second season that is perfectly structured narratively, directed and shot to perfection, and the character development is crisp and acted to new heights. It’s a perfect season of television, an unbreakable, sturdy umbrella if you will, that is sure to make you weather this COVID-19 bullshit of a storm for a bit.

Zach’s Zany Movie Reviews: RADIOACTIVE (Amazon Prime)

Is it just me, or is it odd that what is supposed to be a biography celebrating Nobel Peace prize winner Marie Curie and her findings, she discovered polonium and radium with her husband, turns out to be a scathing piece of how her discoveries hurt the world more than it helped? RADIOACTIVE doesn’t know what kind of tone it wants to have, completely nose diving in its second half narrative wise when the first half was somewhat enjoyable. The only constant this movie has is a wonderful performance by Rosamund Pike as Curie, probably her best performance since Gone Girl and A Private War. The film is mostly told in a linear fashion but is continuously disrupted by a flash forward to where her discoveries ended up costing the lives of millions, such as the bombing of Hiroshima and Chernobyl’s meltdown. To top it all off, when doing actual research into what really happened in Curie’s life versus what I witnessed play out on screen, a lot of it is very, very inaccurate. Not only inaccurate to her character/personality depiction, but also with historical and scientific events. What this all boils down to is that you can’t use this film an educational or biographical source. So then what can you use it as? A piece of entertainment? No, because the pacing and lack of focus in the second half of the film made me droopy eyed. Can you use it as a uplifting yet cautionary tale on science? No and that is why the movie ultimately doesn’t work, there are so many mixed messages in this that it ends up pointing to nothing.

Per IMDB, it describes Radioactive as: “Pioneer – Rebel – Genius. Radioactive is incredible, true-story of Marie Sklodowska-Curie and her Nobel Prize-winning work that changed the world.” After seeing this movie, doing some research and then reading the description, I scoffed and laughed when I got to the word ‘true.’ In the film, it depicts Curie as advising her daughter Irene (a minor background role wasting actress Anya Taylor-Joy’s talents) against a career in science, when in fact she encouraged her daughter in the subject, welcomed Irene into her laboratory, and even started an experimental school for her in which Curie ending up teaching lessons on physics. Also, in the film the both Curie and her future husband almost laughingly meet in a classic rom-com manner. Marie literally runs into him on the streets of Paris, and he notices what she’s reading. In reality, Marie and Pierre met when a Polish professor of physics introduced them, because he knew Marie was looking for laboratory space and thought Pierre would be able to provide it. Also in the movie she constantly blames her sickness on her studies in radiation when there is no historical proof that she ever really truly acknowledged the dangers of her career. Yeah…I don’t want to say it because I hate the man that coin phrased it…but this movie is in fact, “fake news.” That is just a few examples, but believe you me, this movie takes many, many liberties with what really went down during that time.

I understand that ‘true story’ films from Hollywood always take some liberties, it is just that this movie took several too many when it could’ve easily adhered to the facts and made the movie much more interesting in the process. Historical and personality inaccuracies aside, it’s the tone, messages, and pacing of the second half of the film that make it almost completely unwatchable. At one moment the film was trying to celebrate her life in how hard she worked to achieve her goals and make discoveries, and the next minute the film was like, “look what your findings ended up doing, you bitch!” It’s as if the movie was trying to do a very straight adaptation on the subject, and in the middle of it, while you are watching it at a theater, suddenly a Karen stands up, pauses the movie, and starts pointing and yelling at the screen about how much she is triggered by what she is witnessing. Disgracing the audience for feeling for Marie Curie and her family when her discoveries did more harm than good. The film couldn’t pick a tone, and it constantly had a bunch of time lapses that ended up being hard to keep track of. To sum it up, I got bored and I didn’t care what happened anymore about 55 minutes into this hour and 49 minute movie. Things get even more confusing right before the end credits with title cards detailing how great her discoveries were, with X-Rays during World War I and such. It didn’t know whether it wanted to praise or condemn her, and in doing both, muddled everything it was trying to say and gave its audience a surreal experience that I never want to take part in again.

I don’t blame director Marjane Satrapi, as the imagery and shots in this are better than average. The real person to blame is the screenwriter, Jack Thorne, who unsurprisingly also co-wrote the very historically inaccurate 2019 film The Aeronauts, whose first half was much better than its second as well. Maybe he needs to take lessons on how to better construct the second half of the stories that he writes. Maybe instead of taking liberties with the material he is trying to adapt, he should take lessons on how to accurately portray events and still make them interesting on screen, instead of making shit up, and still having the final product come out tire-some, boring, and sloppy. His too on-the-nose writing with characters ceremoniously announcing the film’s themes and their personal motivations as they go along, makes the film completely by-the-numbers drivel that will be forgotten about in one month’s time. It’s no wonder that Amazon Prime quickly snatched this up after its theatrical premiere was cancelled due to COVID-19. It was probably really cheap to do so as the studio probably had no faith in it. Only if you are a Rosamund Pike performance completist can I recommend this film to you. She’s stunning and really good and the only part of the film, save for some of the first half, that works. I’m going for the easy last sentence sum it up pun joke here, so forgive me, but just like radium itself, you should stay far away from Radioactive.

Zach’s Zany Movie Reviews: INFAMOUS

Everyone involved in INFAMOUS should be ashamed of themselves. And no, I’m not talking about the popular videogame made awhile back, but a new movie that stars former Disney channel star, now more of a social media mogul with one directorial credit in a PornHub short film (I shit you not, look it up), Bella Thorne. I follow Ms. Thorne on Instagram for kicks, she is actually entertaining even though you could say that she is something that rhymes with ‘attention s’more.’ A lot of women and other adults think she’s a bad actress and kind of a word that rhymes with smut, and while I’d argue with the 2nd statement, because if you follow her she has had long term relationships, and not that many of them, I can tell you that the first opinion is 200% fact. Bella Thorne is a terrible, terrible actress. But surprisingly, she’s only the second main thing to bother me about this movie. The main problem I had with Infamous is that it treats its audience as if we were morons. Per IMDB, it describes the movie as: “Two young lovers rob their way across the southland, posting their exploits to social media, and gaining fame and followers as a result.” So you can probably put two and two together: they are a modern day millennial white trash social media Bonnie and Clyde. And the film desperately tries to get you to believe, in this day and age of triggered offended young people, that people that can’t pick their heads up for their laptops and phones would love that these two criminals are going around killing innocent people and robbing them of money. Not only is this film offensive in mind but in soul, and writer/director Joshua Caldwell needs to quit the business before he tarnishes it any longer.

This film is groan a minute worthy. Starting with cringe inducing acting from Bella Thorne (surprisingly everyone else is not that bad), the movie just keeps not only getting dumber with what it is trying to get you to believe and say about social media fame, but also in terms of narrative and common sense. Bella Thorne’s character, Arielle (don’t you dare pronounce it after the mermaid!) posts almost all of their crimes and exploits on an app that looks like either Instagram or Facebook Live. And the news on television talks about their crimes almost immediately after they happen. There is no fucking way in hell that they would’ve been able to get away with as much as they did for so long. The app would’ve done the responsible thing and either A. shut down her account and/or B. work with Feds and the cellular company to track down her phone and arrest their asses before they could even start their next crime. Writer/director Joshua Caldwell doesn’t even try to give a reason for them getting away with it in a one or two sentence throwaway line, the movie just expects you to gloss over the whole situation. There is not one likable character in this film, and the movie had the opportunity to do it with the male lead, played by Jake Manley. Bella Thorne is the one that kills all the innocent people to the climax, and at times it just seems like his boyfriend character is only along for the ride and starts to not want anything to do with it. But instead of tapping into that sympathy, to get the audience more involved with his downward plight, his character is written so poorly, that he’s just mentally THAT dumb and decides to keep following her because he ‘loves’ her and has had his dick in her mouth (in the movie, not in real life).

This movie was only a couple of scenes of stupidity away from beating my #1 shittiest film of 2020 so far, John Henry. The only reason why this doesn’t quite reach that level of abysmal is because John Henry had a very weird collaboration of different tones that failed on every single level. The tone here at least is consistent with the dumb ass white trash stupidity of the two lead protagonists. And there are a couple of decent shots in the movie, but writer/director Joshua Caldwell will not get out on a technicality with me. This movie is in every way imaginable, unwatchable. It even breaks Screenwriting 101 rules with having the end of the film be at the beginning and then we retrace their steps, leaving absolutely no tension into the fate of the two leads. Caldwell also must’ve been obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio’s look in Romeo & Juliet because the male lead’s clothing in this was Leo’s main outfit from that film (Hawaiian over shirt) in almost each and every scene, even Leo’s hair from that movie, and it wasn’t just an homage, it was a blatant rip off. And don’t get me started on the implausible last scene of Infamous, as there is no way any real life event would’ve ended like that. Which makes me think, was this film supposed to be a satire of social media life and fame? Because if it was, it really needed to work on the satire part. Even if they wanted the satire part to be subtle, Caldwell should’ve watched Spring Breakers to see how it is correctly done. But I have a feeling that wasn’t the intention at all, that Infamous was all along supposed to be super serious. And in doing so, the movie will now be infamous for being abysmal and one of the worst ones of 2020.

Zach’s Zany Movie Reviews: ARCHIVE

Nothing can ruin a solid, solid movie other than its last act. Plenty of movies have been absolutely destroyed by them, whether it be Repo Men, Knowing, The Village, to name a few. I’m sure if you thought hard enough you’d come up with a list of 10 to 20 in the next couple of minutes. I being a huge movie buff, these kinds of films manage to break my heart all the time. Some more than others. In the case of the new direct to video title ARCHIVE, starring Divergent’s Theo James and Nymphomaniac’s Stacy Martin, it’s only the movie’s very, very last minute reveal (last 3-4 minutes of 1 hr 49 minute run time) that made me groan a little bit. I don’t want to give anything away, but it has an ending similar to one of the three movies I’ve mentioned above. It did a better job of hiding this so called “twist” (even though I knew it was coming and was praying only 10 minutes into it for me to be wrong), but I could still think of a handful of other ways it could’ve ended and been much more satisfactory in a storytelling stand point. The rest of the film is so so good though, and I have a feeling that upon a re-watch this twist might make you see everything in a different kind of light, that I’m ultimately going to give it a decent recommendation. It is a sci-fi drama sort of thriller in the vein of those you might’ve seen before like Moon or I Am Mother, but with much more meaningful undertones. The movie runs along as such a brisk pace even though it intentionally only slowly gives you bits and pieces of information throughout to put together what is going on and doesn’t just spoon feed it to you all at once. It’s very well made, shot, acted, etc. But I don’t think I can ever forgive the last 3-4 minute ending, it’s unfortunately permanently archived in my brain.

Per IMDB, it describes Archive as such: “2038: George Almore (Theo James) is working on a true human-equivalent AI. His latest prototype is almost ready. This sensitive phase is also the riskiest. Especially as he has a goal that must be hidden at all costs: being reunited with his dead wife (Stacy Martin).” For this being a low budget movie, the special effects are top notch. They kept it simple, which is always the healthiest way to go if you don’t have a lot of money to spend on a film project. The robots (humans inside of them obviously) look and act realistic, the inside and outside of the lab where George is working on his AI is the perfect display of futuristic dystopian imagery. The make up on the more human looking of these artificial intelligent beings are extremely well done. Theo James easily gives a career best performance (not too hard considering the other bullshit that is on his resume, but still appreciated), Stacy Martin is great, and the direction is crisp, fluid, and engaging. The themes, motifs, and messages are dramatically poignant, especially in this time of our real life isolation because of COVID-19. Everything in this film is near perfect. If it just wasn’t for that damned ending. Fuck, I really want to spoil it so I can vent my frustrations better. But I know that I can figure out a way to relay my true feelings without ruining things if you have any interest whatsoever in discovering what I’m bitching about. The film’s ending unfortunately breaks the Screenplay/Storytelling 101 of what not to do with an ending, because better movies have already done it with much better results.

It is too similar to the ending of a 2 word movie whose last word rhymes with Madder. If you’ve seen the movie I’m alluding to, you know what I’m talking about. That film did it so much better, really the blueprint of what this movie tries to do but kind of fails at the last minute because of how invested we are in everything that came before. But I’m ultimately giving this a solid recommendation, because the 1 hr and 44 minutes before the ending were just too damn good to ignore. It made me think a lot of the movie Moon, by Duncan Jones, and when doing a little more research on Archive, low and behold, its similarity isn’t that surprising. Archive’s director, Gavin Rothery, was part of the art department for Moon. He doesn’t blatantly rip it off, it’s more of an homage, so I’m not going to bitch about how similar they are. Rothery does make it is own and since he has never written or directed anything at all before, I’m absolutely shocked with how much he learned in that department to become as skilled as he is here. Maybe if he can direct a film with a better ending, he could wind up being a masterful sci-fi director like Ridley Scott or Denis Villenueve. He just needs to hone in on his screenplay writing skills, but hey, this is a start and shows lots of potential. This movie is better than 9/10ths of the straight to video shit we are getting because of the pandemic (that 1/10th being Palm Springs), and that ain’t bad. It’s just every time I think about the ending I cringe, just a little bit. It makes me curious if this had any alternate endings, as I would’ve loved to see how other conclusions had worked with the rest of the solid 9/10ths of this film. If there were none, some should’ve been conceived and archived.

Zach’s Zany Movie Reviews: ANIMAL CRACKERS (Netflix)

ANIMAL CRACKERS journey to make it to the big scr…well…any kind of screen is interesting in itself. I’ll get to that bit in a minute. I watched this movie last weekend with my kid (it premiered on Netflix this past Friday as well) and while the 2nd half is much better than the first (it lost both his and mine attention multiple times as it took a bit to get really into the movie), it ultimately succeeds because of the fantastic climax, the cool set of rules the magical box of cookies come with that reveals itself along the way and not all at once, and the superb voice acting. If only the beginning of the film had a little more focus to make the set up a little less confusing. It goes through several generations of family in the span of only a couple of minutes and it is hard to sort out who is who for several scenes and it also takes a tad too long to get to the animal crackers themselves. But then once those magical MacGuffin’s are introduced, the film blasts off at the speed of light. It is just a little disappointing because if the whole movie was as strong in both parts, it would’ve really been something special. Well, it already is because I loved watching my son pointing out all of the different animals, naming them at the top of his lungs and “ohhh” and “ahhhh”ing at the action. As a avid film goer and fanatic I might only make a couple of more trips to this wild circus of a movie before I start to just fast forward to the good stuff.

Per IMDB.com, it describes ANIMAL CRACKERS as: “A family must use a magical box of Animal Crackers to save a run-down circus from being taken over by their evil uncle Horatio P. Huntington.” This movie was originally intended to be released on April 27, 2017 by Relativity Media, before they went defunct. It then set to be released on September 1, 2017 by upstart film company Serafini Releasing before they also shut down. This movie was later acquired by Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures, but the producers have since come out from that deal. The film almost never came out because it was held up for almost a year due to a lawsuit by a Seattle fisherman named Rodger May who claimed he owned the copyright to the film. The lawsuit was eventually withdrawn. All records of the lawsuit are public and can be found by a search for “Mayday vs. Animal Crackers”. Eventually Netflix bought it and although it was finished in 2017, that copyright states 2019. And then it was just released this past weekend on the streaming platform. I recommend you take a deeper look into its history, it is quite interesting to say the least. More interesting than the first half. Anyway, the point is, it is out there now, which is good because I don’t think any project should be delayed that long to see the light of day…looking at you New Mutants! The voice acting in this is excellent, there are too many celebrities to list but you have Danny DeVito, Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Ian McKellen, and Sylvester Stallone. They all do a fantastic job, Stallone’s Bullet-Man character making me laugh out loud several times.

The other two things that make me ultimately recommend this movie is that the action packed climax is perfectly executed combining perfect pacing with plot progression, and then the rules of the animal crackers themselves. To try and explain it to the best of my ability, there is this box of animal crackers passed down from generation to generation that magically never, ever run out. You eat one, it turns into the animal that you eat, and then to turn back into human, you have to find the human cracker of you in the box, and then once you eat that, you turn back to your normal self while the cookie of the animal you had just eaten reappears in the box. There are other new rules that you figure out along the way as well, but revealing any of those would be spoilers and it is best for you to experience the journey for yourselves if you have any interest in watching this thing with your kids and family. I like how it stuck to the rules, and that there were no bending or breaking of them, it was all quite clever, even though some twists at the end I saw coming from a mile away. Again, I just wish the first half was as good. In any kind of movie you just can’t have the interest bits come up when you finally introduce the MacGuffin’s. Your story and movie need to have a beginning hook, and I just found it to be boring plot set up that felt like I was watching a standard biography on a generation of a family. That’s just me though. The animation is nice and pleasing to the eye, and the second half will definitely grab you, it’s just that those first 30 minutes were almost too bland and stale. Key word is almost.

Zach’s Zany Movie Reviews: YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT

You can say that again. Normally I would tease what I really think about a movie just to get clicks and for you to read my entire review, but this time…eh, fuck it. I should have left YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT about 30 minutes into this 1 hour and 33 minute film. That runtime felt more like a two and a half hour one filled with “what’s?”, “really’s?”, slogs, bores and snores. But my rule is, in order to fully review a film, you have to fully watch it, so I battened down the hatches and watched the final hour. And while the movie is well shot, framed and moderately well acted, if you watch closely you’ll realize that it’s just a “smoke and mirrors” film: cheap editing and post production tricks to make you think it’s more special than it really is. But when the end credits roll, if you ever took a film class in college, you’ll be thinking the exact same thing as me: that this would’ve been a perfect little 15-20 minute short film because of how inconsequential the small message is at the end of the film. If you think the movie makes absolutely no sense, it doesn’t, until it does, and then when it reveals itself you’ll get a relatively confused look on your face and say, “wait, all that for THAT?!?” Yep, there isn’t anything deeper under the surface. It’s a very boring, very “meh” haunted house movie that unfortunately doesn’t really do anything different from some others that have been released recently, such as the overrated Relic that was released just a few weeks ago.

When this movie came out a month, month and a half ago via PVOD for $19.99 for a 48 hr rental, I knew to just be patient, and based on the poor reviews this was receiving, knew that it would be 5 bucks in no time. Well only a month and a half is definitely no time at all in the film buisness. And frankly, if I had spent $19.99 for one viewing of this movie back in June I would’ve slapped myself silly. Per IMDB, their log line for You Should Have Left is as follows: “A former banker (Kevin Bacon), his actress wife (Amanda Seyfried), and their spirited daughter book a vacation at an isolated modern home in the Welsh countryside where nothing is quite as it seems.” Ugh, when a movie’s log line uses “nothing is quite as it seems,” it seems to be at a loss for words on how else to describe a very plain, cut and dry film. They should just come out and say, “it’s basically another boring psychological haunted house film with cheap jump scares that don’t work at all.” Has David Koepp not learned anything from his poorly reviewed other films, such as his last “horror” film Secret Window or his last blockbuster he co-wrote…Tom Cruise’s The Mummy…or even before that…Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull? I’ll give you a minute to let Mr. Koepp’s post year 2000 screenwriting ability seep in. What happened to this guy? In the 90’s he wrote fantastic adaptations of Jurassic Park and Mission: Impossible…oh wait though, he also did The Lost World and Snake Eyes…but wait…give him Stir of Echoes (his last collaboration with Kevin Bacon) and I’ll give him writing credit on one post 2000 film, Panic Room. But instead of dragging through his entire filmography for another two paragraphs before I get to my point, like he did with this film, let me just say it: The man is the epitome of a roller coaster like film career. Screenwriting wise.

While his writing career is full of highs and lows, his directing career is mostly lows. And all I need to point out is one film to prove my point: Mortdecai starring Johnny Depp. He has only directed one decent movie, Stir of Echoes. And even then there are some out there that feel that that movie is overrated. While You Should Have Left is well shot, the screenplay is so boringly bad that it takes away from that fact in the end. I would trust him more if he directed a horror movie where he didn’t have a hand in the screenplay whatsoever. He could focus on his directing craft instead of trying to do that WHILE looking and changing the blueprints every two seconds. Blueprints that were wonky to begin with. Again, the whole movie will leave you very confused the entire run time as to what its endgame is until about 5 minutes left, and even after it is revealed, you’ll be as disappointed in the conclusion as well as the journey. It is not one of the year’s worst films, because you can tell it was made with some effort. There is precisely one shot in the movie I like, in the house’s stairwell with a swinging light. I would rather watch Kevin Bacon run up and down those stairs all day than watch this film again. The acting is decent, but then again Bacon and Seyfried are pros, so that wasn’t shocking. What’s shocking was just how “meh” this film was. It was unnecessary and pointless. The point has been done before and in much better movies. But Blumhouse, who produced this film, makes a shit ton of movies on a very small ass budget. So to get Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried in a movie that takes place mostly just inside a house…why not right? I’ll tell you why not. Because they left logic, reasoning, and most of all…they left the scares nowhere to be seen.

Zach’s Zany Movie Review: THE KISSING BOOTH 1 & 2 (Netflix)

So I usually only write movie reviews on either the year they come out or a month or two after the new year has started. The latter reason is because they either weren’t available because of how limited they were released in the first place or that and they were also Oscar bait films (these movies probably only released last minute December in only New York and LA). Because of COVID-19 in 2020, new content hasn’t been released in theaters for months and I’ve been writing these reviews long after Jan or Feb because I need stuff to review because it’s all I have left to save my sanity and my blog. Now with my television reviews, which I started doing more of this year, I will only review that season that ended this year, but I’ll also combine it saying a little somethin’ somethin’ about the series as a whole. I have to do this in order to be able to explain my feelings about the current season well. This is my first movie review, where I’m needing to briefly talk about a Netflix film that released in 2018 so I can accurately review its sequel, which just came out this weekend. I never watched THE KISSING BOOTH back in 2018 because at that point in time I was relying mostly on theatrical reviews and didn’t have time to watch all this dumb yet harmless teen rom-com crap. Needless to say in years prior, I skipped a shit ton Netflix original films. But when I heard THE KISSING BOOTH 2 was releasing this weekend, and knew if I just watched the original real quick, I could watch and review the sequel, just to have new contend on my blog. How were they? Well, I already gave you a hint of what I thought when I used the words “dumb yet harmless” two sentences ago, but let me be a bit more clear: Just like To All The Boys I’ve Love Before and it’s sequel, both Booth movies are almost exactly carbon copies of each other, both sequels are unnecessary because the characters end up in the exact same place they were at at the end of the first movie, but both make up a lack for the dumbness by having everyone in its cast have great chemistry with each other. They also look like they are having a ton of fun making it, and the movie doesn’t treat its target audience as if they were idiots for liking the movie either.

Noticed I said ‘target audience’ just there. I AM NOT THESE MOVIES TARGET AUDIENCE! To me, they were harmless one time watches, maybe only watching the first one again sometime with my wife because its much shorter and a little more fun than its sequel. Any other guy watching this, especially single, would probably want to gouge their eyes out during either film and would be bored to tears. Per IMDB it describes the first Kissing Booth movie as: “A high school student is forced to confront her secret crush at a kissing booth.” IMDB describes the second Kissing Booth movie as: “High school senior Elle juggles a long-distance relationship with her dreamy boyfriend Noah, college applications, and a new friendship with a handsome classmate that could change everything.” Sound familiar? That’s because both Booth movies are basically both To All The Boys I Loved Before Movies, all four almost have the exact same plot and narrative structures. It is very, very bizarre. The real difference is that the To All The Boys movies take itself a bit more seriously than the Booth movies, where its just goofy fun teen angst stuff with just a little pinch of drama here and there. To get a little more into the Booth movies, Elle secret crush in the first oned is her boyfriend in the second movie, Noah, and Noah is the older brother of her best-est best friend in the world, Lee, who just happened to have been born the exact same day and time as Elle and they’ve been inseparable ever since, because their mothers were inseparable in high school. They have these list of rules of how best-est best friends should behave and act around each other and rule number #9 or something is you can’t date the spouses of your best friend. Needless to say it all gets complicated in the first film and everything happens and ends up exactly the way you could easily predict it would.

I’m just glad that the first movie didn’t end with Elle and Lee realizing they should now be more than friends with sexual feelings for each other…an ending plot point that has been done in too many rom-com’s we’ve already seen before. No, I can happily say that they don’t become more in either film, and they just remain truly best-est best friends, with no feelings of sexual love at any point whatsoever. He just doesn’t want her dating his older brother. Now the sequel, since Noah and her are together, you can guess how the first movie ends. So to stir up the pot this time and go somewhere different, albeit eerily very familiar when you think about the To All The Boys movies, it has Noah go off to college, and a new handsome boy comes to their school for senior year named Marco. Elle tries to get this Marco to do not only do their school kissing booth fundraiser that year, because he’s so hot and he could make them a ton of money, but also partners up with him in this Dance Dance Revolution competition for money so that she could possibly have enough money to pay for Harvard if she applies. IF she gets accepted, she could end up going to the same college as Noah next year after she graduates. You can basically see how all that predictably plays out can’t you? It’s all very, very predictable and ultimately very, very unnecessary. So now you might be asking me: “Zach, if you are saying all these negative things about it, why are you ultimately giving this film a pass for its target audience instead ripping it a new asshole?” The answer to your question is simple: the chemistry of all the actors together is fun and refreshing, and unlike other rom-coms, where it looks like people are suffering throughout filming just to get it done, everyone here looks like they are having fun and seem as though they want to be there.

And when the cast and crew look to be having fun, that fun was a tiny bit contagious for me. Joey King is just fun, innocent, and so damn delightful in these movies (her real life sister, Hunter King, who is not in this, is an absolute babe, my perverted self just had to mention that). Her chemistry with Joel Courtney, who plays her platonic best-est best friend, is refreshing to watch, knowing that it doesn’t become more than that. In the first movie at least, her chemistry with Noah, played by Jacob Elordi, is fantastic and felt real, and even though in the sequel he isn’t in it as much because he is off to college, when they do end up sharing the screen in scenes that are few and far between, their chemistry at least hasn’t missed a beat. And even though the kissing booth is questionable, ethics wise, in the first movie (it doesn’t really address homosexual people being left out), it at least made up for it in the sequel. In the end, I do end up preferring the first film, mainly because it is only an hour and 45 minutes long, where as the sequel tries to be this epic rom-com we didn’t need at 2 hrs and 12 minutes long. TOO. LONG. FOR. A. MOVIE. LIKE. THIS. This isn’t fucking Shakespeare In Love. Things that were supposed to happen in the third act happened in the second with still an hour left in the movie. Thankfully the films are frantically fast paced enough and not too complicated camera work or dialogue wise to get through it. Look, it’s this simple, you know who this movie is for. If it’s for you, it’s for you, don’t be ashamed about being interested in it, and don’t let my sometimes harsh critique get in the way of your enjoyment of it. I am ultimately recommending it to you, if you are its target audience. It’s harmless, teen angst fun. If it were teen angst for the sake of being teen angst added with too much bullshit drama, then that’s another story. Let’s just say, that if this movie itself were a real kissing booth, I’d buy YOU a ticket to go and kiss the man/girl of your dreams, and I would happily support you at a distance.

Zach’s Zany Movie Reviews: THE RENTAL

Finally, a slow burn horror/thriller film that is decently developed during that down time in the first act. Then, when the shit hits the fan in acts two and three, the shit really, really hits the fan. Some will argue that THE RENTAL is a little too conventional for Dave Franco’s theatrical length directorial debut (he also co-wrote this). I would argue that not only is that okay when the rest of your film is downright entertaining as hell, but it should be completely ignored when you prove that you have a promising eye behind the camera. Dave Franco, he’s honestly not that great of an actor. He’s very limited when in front of the camera, but that is just my opinion of course. However, with this first big-ish feature, kind of like Ben Affleck’s first film, Gone Baby Gone, he shows that maybe he should do what Ben Affleck couldn’t: quit his day job. His future is bright and I hope he takes more roles behind the camera from now on (and none in front of them). Whether that happens remains to be seen but I have a good feeling about it. Granted, there are some flaws in the woodwork, such as the real villain isn’t ‘revealed’ until too late in the feature, all of the characters (except maybe Alison Brie’s and some aspects of Jeremy Allen White’s) are very, very unlikable, and some of the suspense could’ve been slowed down instead of rushed at times. Overall though, the hell of a good time I had with this movie is worth the price of rental (pun intended) alone.

Per IMDB, The Rental stars Dan Stevens, Alison Brie, Sheila Vand, and Jeremy Allen White and is described as: “Two couples rent a vacation home for what should be a celebratory weekend get-away.” That log line is perfect. It teases with the words, ‘what should be’ and just leaves it at that. I need to get into some of the details of the story just a tad more for my review, mainly so I can give my critique acting wise.I promise to still not reveal much. Jeremy Allen White is Dan Steven’s character’s brother in this, he’s considered the “black sheep” of his family, and his girlfriend is someone that Dan Steven’s character closely works with. Any other reveals would ruin everything. Everybody acting wise, does a great job here, especially Dan Stevens, even though that most of the things these characters wind up doing throughout this film make them completely un-sympathetic to the audience, unlikable and they all look really fucking dumb. Two exceptions to my train of thought. First off, the only reason why Alison Brie’s character may come off as unlikable is due to the fact that she makes some really dumb fucking decisions in this movie and isn’t shown doing much else. Her character has a decent personality, but she really isn’t given much of a back story for the audience to invest any likable feelings at all toward her. I have a feeling that a few more scenes of her, a well written background, and an actual narrative arc could’ve made her the only character we sympathize with, which would strengthened the impact of some of the shit that goes down.

Secondly, Jeremy Allen White at least doesn’t play the typical “black sheep of the family” movie trope. He knows he fucks up and he’s actually generally sorry for what he’s done, even though he keeps on keepin’ on fuckin’ up. But with The Rental, you don’t really stay for the likability of the characters or some of the cliched dialogue, you stay for the last hour of pure…shit fan hittin’…madness. And that’s maybe why it could be argued that these characters are supposed to be unlikable, because you can’t wait for the bad shit to keep happening to them. For these clueless people renting this cliff side cabin/home, they keep making the dumbest fucking decisions possible, and with each passing minute you can’t wait for the next fuck up, which is only maybe 1 to 2 minutes after the last. That’s why some of the movies’ payoffs from the slow set ups in the first act are so juicy. You want to, but you just can’t look away from the bloody mayhem that follows. I just wish that the movie had set up the ‘villain’ a tad bit earlier, it felt like his reveal was almost too little too late. Not quite though for me here. Also, while Franco has an eye for the camera, the cinematography in this is excellent the shots are framed perfectly, there were a couple of moments that need more…oomph, shall we say. More tension that leaded into more pay off jump scares. I know his intentions were pure in that the movie is supposed to be more traumatic and creepy than it is a loud, big noise, unearned jump scares galore, teenage bullshit horror film, but some of the “gotcha!” pay offs needed just a tad bit more build up and they would’ve been masterful. However, for the first time in a long time, The Rental is a rental I’d rent more than once.

Zach’s Zany Movie Reviews: JOHN HENRY (Netflix)

JOHN HENRY already has my vote as the most awful misogynistic film of the decade, and will probably remain that way by the time December 31st, 2029 rolls around. How this movie got released post #MeToo is downright fucking shocking. It is THAT bad. I can guarantee you though that it just received my coveted “Worst Film of 2020” award. I didn’t think anything would beat the almost equally shitty ‘The Last Thing She Wanted’ (coincidentally but not surprisingly both Netflix films), but this one did by a mile. I think instead of another one of my typical 3 to 4 paragraph reviews explaining why this film is the worst and most offensive film since Surf Ninjas, I think I’m just going to list not only awful shit that is said, but the awful shit that goes down in it. I’ll try to be vague enough not to give away any spoilers in case you were still interested in this after I rip it a new asshole. Per IMDB’s log line for John Henry, it stars Terry Crews and Ludacris and it is described as such: “When two immigrant kids on the run from his former South Los Angeles gang leader (Ludacris) stumble into his life, John (Terry Crews) is forced to reconcile with his past in order to try and give them a future.” Sounds sane enough but a little familiar right? WRONG. Here is some of the shocking bullshit that happens in this only hr and 30 minute movie:

Ludacris has a gold plated jaw. It’s laughably stupid looking. He’s only in two-three scenes.
An entire conversation that involves ‘gay panic’ takes place for several minutes in a van between two gang members. This ‘gay panic’ conversation also somehow incorporates the film ‘Human Centipede’ into the argument.
For about 5 minutes, at the beginning of the film, female vaginas (they use the p word in the most derogatory fashion) are compared to how delicious Red Lobster Cheddar Bay biscuits are. No, that’s not a joke. I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
Right before a character is about to be blown up, he yells, “I’m ____________, and my dick was legendary.”
When one character is teaching another character how to correctly hold a gun, “Steady now, just like you would place a hand on a woman’s titty.”
Women are called “bitches”…I don’t know how many times. Probably more than Django Unchained used the N word.
A character gets shot in the head, but it turns out he’s okay, bullet just grazed him.
Terry Crews rips his sleeves off while holding a sledgehammer as dramatic Western music plays in the background.
Ludacris forces everybody who works for him to exclusively dress in white track suits.
The film literally stops halfway through so we can get a montage of random places in Compton.
Terry Crews flirts with a woman as he debates what brand of feminine products to buy.
Ken Foree, who spends the majority of the film in a wheelchair, magically stops being a paraplegic during a gunfight because “adrenaline.”
(Enter one of the awful and stupid things that happens in this film I forgot here here, because I’m sure I forgot something.)

The movie is tonally all over the place. If this movie was meant to be a satire, I could maybe, ONLY MAYBE, see one or two things on my list work, like the gold plated jaw. But no, it takes everything that happens in it seriously, and it wants the audience to take it seriously as well. But we can’t. The film doesn’t make any God damn fucking sense. Yes, there are a few allusions in John Henry to the folklore hero John Henry, but very few, and they are more insulting than they are homages. Co-writer and director Will Forbes and co-writer Doug Skinner, who have never written or directed a movie before, shouldn’t be allowed to ever make one again. Terry Crews and Ludacris are decent people in real life and they try and breathe as much life as they can into these poorly written characters, but it was all for naught. The gang accents are laughably bad, the violence is too “looney tunes” to take seriously, and even the original rap music written and made for the film was impossible to get into. It’s just a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very awfully made film. On all levels. There was no saving this screenplay and whoever fronted the money for this thing to get green lit should be banished from Hollywood forever. And I really really really really hope that when Terry Crews and Ludacris, fuck…any actor/actress in this production, cashed their paychecks in from this movie…I hope they felt ashamed. ABYSMAL.

Zach’s Zany Movie Reviews: CLEMENCY

Let’s get another two quick reviews out today shall we? Next up is CLEMENCY, which is probably the last film that toed the December 2019/January 2020 release date line that I will give my critique on (and it’s also the last one I truly know about). It was released very limited wise, in just two theaters (NY & LA) on December 27th 2019 to try and get a campaign going for Alfre Woodard for Best Actress at the Academy Awards. I don’t think it had much of a wider expansion, it definitely didn’t play at a theater near me around January, and I think it was just dumped on VOD a month or two ago. While this movie is in the 90 percentile on Rotten Tomatoes and there is giant praise of Alfre Woodard’s performance, I myself am going to say, in my own opinion of course, all of that is a bit exaggerated. Clemency is one of those one time watch factors for me, not because it is a bad film (although it has some major flaws), it is half way decent to be sure, but it was just too God damn depressing for me. And while Alfre Woodard’s performance was good, I didn’t think it was Oscar worthy (she for sure though made up for her weird performance in the Luke Cage Netflix TV series here, IMO). And while the story is supposed to show how an extreme career, specifically this one being a warden to a prison that also carries out executions, effects not only your outside life but also wrecks havoc on your personal demons, a lot of the examples used have been done before. You’ve seen them before too: getting drunk to temporarily make the pain go away, fighting with your spouse, crying at moments when you are supposed to show remorselessness and/or strength. It’s because of all this familiarity why I didn’t like it as much as I probably should have.

That’s not to say I didn’t like it. It’s a very well made film with very good acting, it’s just that I felt like it could’ve dug deeper into the personal demons motifs more. Per IMDB’s log line, it describes Clemency as: “As she prepares to execute another inmate, Bernadine must confront the psychological and emotional demons her job creates, ultimately connecting her to the man she is sanctioned to kill.” The main problem with this film being able to dig deeper into those issues is the problem with its focus. At first, it focuses solely on Alfre Woodward character, as it should, she is the lead, but juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust after it seems like it gets past all the personal demons we’ve seen before in better films and will go even further…it shifts focus to the inmate that is soon going to be executed. Which is completely fine by the way, but when I say it shifts focus, it COMPLETELY SHIFTS focus. At that point into the film, if it wanted to more accurately and more emotionally portray both Woodard and the inmate’s inner demons, they needed to interact with each other more than they ultimately ended up doing. They have only a couple of brief interactions with each other, all of which have him refusing to talk to her. Most of his interactions don’t involve her, and is just the inmate, played wonderfully by The Invisible Man’s Aldis Hodge by the way, interacting with a lost love, his lawyer, etc. But in order for the movie to have earned MY emotional investment, Woodard and Hodge needed more scenes and scenarios together. And when it failed to bring me that, it failed to garner the same praise from me that it had other critics.

This feels like two movies cobbled and edited into an hour and 50 minute movie. One movie where a prison warden starts to get too emotionally attached to those inmates being executed and another movie where an innocent inmate is on death row, hoping upon hope that the governor’s office will either grant him clemency at the last moment or his appeal goes through. That’s another thing I didn’t like a little about the movie. I think the movie should’ve challenged the viewer more, playing with the audience of whether this “cop killer” truly did the crime or not. However, there is one scene of the warden driving to work, and the inmate’s lawyer is doing some kind of radio interview, and the lawyer lays out all the evidence out of why he’s innocent. Why they gave all that info in a compacted two minutes instead of spread throughout the entire film is beyond me. And if all of that evidence was there in real life, it is really hard to believe that he would’ve been denied an appeal and not given a retrial. I don’t know, I can’t say anything about it because I’m white, and the character was black, and there is some awful racial injustice happening around the world right now that I couldn’t even begin to explain let alone comprehend. My point is I think the movie should’ve made it unclear whether he did it or not, to try to have the audience just invest with the character because he is being put to death against his will. If you can make a human being care and feel for a person being put to death, even if it is unclear whether the inmate did do the crime or not, that is some powerful, powerful cinema. On the other hand if you are going to go the route of, “this person is being denied appeals and put to death just because he’s black and he really is innocent,” you need to MAKE the movie about racial injustice. This movie wasn’t about that at all, hence why this whole film felt very unfocused for me.

Wow, this review is longer than I meant it to be as it feels like I’m trying to defend myself from calling this film “only okay.” I guess I am. But here’s the thing, two movies about inmate’s being put to death came out around the exact same time, and I would definitely recommend Just Mercy over this because that film had fantastic focus. It focused on two things: racial injustice and the relationship between Michael B. Jordan, and the inmate on death row played by Jamie Foxx. If that film, halfway through, had completely shifted focus to Brie Larson’s characters efforts, or another inmate perhaps, and then eventually got back to Jordan and Foxx, I would’ve said the exact same thing about that film as I am this one. It has all the ingredients there, writer and director Chinonye Chukwu just needed to punch up and strengthen the script. Moved some things around a little, added a little here and there, or taken a couple of things out. That’s all. The atmosphere in this film is perfect, the camera work is perfect, and the acting would’ve been perfect if it hadn’t had shifted attention to detail mid way through the film. It’s just frustrating for me, because right now and certainly while watching it, I could imagine the perfect film that Clemency could have been. But in the end, I have to stick to my movie loving instincts and I just can’t grant it clemency from being “only okay.”