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I have been playing Borderlands for eight years. More precisely, I've been playing Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel; the other games in that family--Borderlands 1, Borderlands 3, Tiny Tina's Wonderland--are absolute crap. In the case of Borderlands 3, I consider it unplayable because the fonts are so small. For whatever weird reason, the normally incompetent Gearbox made a masterpiece with Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel.
My point is that Gearbox, the game developer, is an awful inconsistent mess. They never managed to capitalize artistically or commercially off the success of Borderlands 2, so I had low expectations for this movie. For instance, you'll notice that David Eddings isn't in the movie to voice Claptrap. Why? Because the Gearbox CEO didn't want to pay him more than union scale (on a previous project) and it escalated to the CEO Pitchford assaulting Eddings at a Marriot Marquis--allegedly. A former Gearbox lawyer, Wade Calendar, sued Pitchford for all kinds of malfeasance, including giving himself a $12 million bonus. So, in my mind, I see Pitchford as this acrimonious ass with an ego the size of a planet whose antics poison Gearbox productions. Pitchford still runs Gearbox, so yes, this movie is a turd. The first thing to note is that they pushed the age of all characters by a solid twenty years or more. Tanis, played by Jamie Lee Curtis (65) is in her late thirties or early forties at most in the game. Lilith is the game's cheesecake, smoking hot, done up in fan-boy anime style. She is the uber-hot siren; her character is literally called a siren. So a 55-year-old Cate Blanchette is a completely different character at a completely different stage of life. Moxie, the over-sexualized barmaid tech-wizard mother of Scooter and Ellie, is played by Gina Gershon who is 62. I was pleasantly surprised to say she made it work well. So even though Ms. Gershon can deliver a smoking-hot Moxie and make all sexagenarians proud, my point is that the vibe of the whole crew is severely aged. This is no youthful crew fighting the good fight, it's a bunch of hardened, tired, sexless grandparents just trying to survive. And, hey, if they made it work, I'd be noting how clever they were in their adaptation, not regaling you with tales of Gearbox incompetence. They decided to write this movie about the events before or concurrent with Borderlands 1. They rewrote a lot of backstory. Most significantly, they invented a prophecy that said only a 'daughter of Iridian' could open the vault. Why? So they had an excuse to throw Tiny Tina in the crew. Most action movies avoid dragging a 12-year-old girl through deadly gunfights, but Tiny Tina is the most popular character of the franchise, so they needed an excuse to throw her into this flick. While they were at it, they made her sane, removing all the fun from her character. In the games, Tina's parents were murdered in front of her, graphically, by a psycho named Fleshstick; that drove her insane and set her on the path of becoming a bomb maker. Explosives took one of her arms. So, in the movie, we have a mostly sweet young girl possessed of all her limbs and sanity with no role to play. Boring. And I get it, you didn't all play Borderlands and roughly couldn't give a crap about the fidelity of the movie to the game franchise. I don't exactly disagree, but my point isn't so much about fidelity to the franchise, but to point out how much they bent the characters in the name of commerce. Tina was, as Marcus would call her, "a little psychopath", brilliantly voiced by Ashly Burch. She was magic and they destroyed that magic in pursuit of commerce. Everyone loves Tina, so how can't you put her in the movie? Yeah, I agree, but put Tina in, not some milquetoast approximation of her who is nothing more than living luggage. Alright, they ruined Tina's character and aged everyone two or three decades, so what about the movie? It was meh, a linear heartless story that checked a lot of marketing boxes but didn't deliver anything evocative on screen. The story is that the Atlas CEO hires Lilith to find Tina. Turns out that, in movie logic, Tina is supposed to be required to open the vault because she is the only daughter of Iridian (produced as a clone from Iridian blood). So Lilith goes to Pandora, finds Tina, realizes she's on the wrong team and joins with Roland and Krieg to save Tina from Atlas. In an unfathomable twist of logic, they seek out the vault key (a thing in the game, but three things in the movie). It turns out Tanis is the only one who knows where it should be, so Tanis joins the team. That's the point where they explain that Lilith's mom programmed Claptrap to help Lilith. So, magic, Claptrap is on the team too. It's just these endless convenient contrivances to get the team together. They spent so much time trying to shoehorn together these characters into the same frame, that they forgot to film a proper movie. By the time they have the band together, the movie is just about done. They have one more battle wherein Lilith goes siren for the first time ever. They eventually open the vault and kill the Atlas CEO (Athena did that in the game). But hey, what's in the vault? Now that it's open, isn't it dangerous? Don't know the answer to any of that. The movie just cut to a big post-Deathstar Ewok-style party in Sanctuary. It's silly, on a lot of levels. What's on the screen is just one overlong battle after another, then the lights come up. They develop no interpersonal relationships, get to use any cool alien tech or do anything noteworthy. It's just a bunch of overlong Mad Max style gunfights. It's a mediocre movie, at best. If you care about the game, it's a travesty, barely watchable. My recommendation is that if you feel you need to watch it, stream it for free somewhere in a few years, and make sure you're plenty intoxicated so your brain will slide over all the stupid bits. The story occurs in the early 1600s, based roughly on the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate. At that point in history, Japan was emerging from self-imposed isolation. The Portuguese were the only European power with a presence there, and the main character, John Blackthorn is part of a privateering crew whose job it is to harry the Portuguese. He shipwrecks in Japan with many of the crew. As the only remaining officer, he is singled out for special attention.
So, it's a classic stranger in a strange land story. He's alone, isolated, and the only people he can even speak with consider him an enemy pirate and heretic. John Blackthorn might as well be on an alien planet, so wide is the culture gap between Japan and England. Blackthorn is used mostly as a camera for the Japanese battle for succession; the previous sovereign dies and his male heir is a toddler, so there's tons of palace intrigue and jockeying for position with all the attendant questions about who gets to speak for the young heir. Despite having no salient part of the larger power play, Blackthorn's life is engaging at first. We watch him struggle with language, culture, and Japanese Catholics who are prejudiced against Protestants like Blackthorn. They even manage to build a bit of a love story into it for John. I spent the entire show waiting for Blackthorn to evolve, to become…something. Despite being in Japan for a couple of years, his Japanese never really reaches a serviceable level. In the first few episodes, I held out hope, but he just never grew (which lovers of the novel will tell you is a crime). For most of the episodes, it doesn't matter because he's a camera and there's plenty to see through his eyes. But I got this growing sense of annoyance as the series went on and he remained stagnant while the political events of Japan evolved around him. It was odd. The one truly poignant scene they gave Blackthorn was in the final episode: a private memorial at sea in a row boat with a Japanese woman. His Japanese was so crappy that it just ruined the whole thing. They essentially have Blackthorn live down to a Japanese stereotype of a barbarian foreigner: passionate, clumsy, witless, slow to learn, rude, and stubborn. And that almost-great scene is the last one he has. As infuriating as that was, it got worse. In the final episode, we don't learn what happens to Blackthorn. Toranaga muses about what might happen to him, but nothing else. We don't learn what happens to Toranaga. Does he become shogun? They don't say. What happens to the Catholics at court? They don't say. What happens to any of the political operators that you might have built an interest in? They don't say. It was the most fundamentally flawed last episode of a TV series I've ever watched. I've seen canceled shows do hurried wrap-up final episodes that were more cogent than the way they ended this series. So, I would save you from all that annoyance. Don't watch the show. It does a lot of great setup with fantastic settings and period costumes and then proceeds to waste it all. Most people enjoyed the original Avatar: The Last Airbender, the anime. That's an understatement. It's deeply loved across most demographics, so there was a lot of pressure on this new production. The previous cinematic release of a live-action version was a train wreck, so most people were wary.
I watched all eight season-one episodes on Netflix. That's probably my only real complaint: eight episodes. For those of you old enough to remember the days of three networks, you'll remember that a standard TV season was 24 episodes. The cartoon version of this show had 20, 20, and 21 episodes in its three seasons. So, if Netflix continues the way it started, those 61 episodes of content will be crammed into a meager 24. The production is quite strong. The bending effects are rendered extremely well. The fantastic animals like Apa and Momo are likewise very well done. In what I'm guessing is a nod to its anime origins, the producers decided to over-saturate the color palette. It gives the show a sort of half-step to being a cartoon. The bright blues of the water tribe outfits are too blue. Ang's saffron robe's colors pop too much. I got used to it. The way they've structured the episodes is a combination of slavishly following the original on a micro-scale while rejiggering big swaths of the narrative to speed things up. So, you'll find some characters' lines occasionally match the original exactly even though the episode structure is completely different. The actors they've cast are a mixed bag. The guys playing Iroh and Zuko are fantastic. Sokka and Kitara are pretty strong performers. Ang is the worst. Seriously, the title character is played by a kid who is the worst performer in the cast. The farther from Ang you get, the stronger the performance you get. For instance, Suki's mom on Kyoshi Island has a tiny part, but she's excellent at it. The tone of the show is quite well done. The most campy aspects of the anime have been smoothed away. Jet's little band of radicals which came across as so cartoonish in the anime, now presents as wholly more realistic. The singers in the caves under Omashu are still goofy, but realistically so. Iroh has been transformed from a campy over-the-top Zuko fan club into a more realistic, avuncular figure. The producers have done an excellent job of sanding away the explicitly childish bits of the anime while preserving the ethos of the show. Overall I'm very pleased with it. It is a fantastic refutation of M. Night Shamlyan's abysmal oeuvre. I will be bingeing the other two seasons the second they are released. It had been three weeks since I had been to a movie. Normally, I go every weekend, but the last three weeks have been devoid of anything even plausible to watch. I'm pretty flexible when I get desperate for a movie to watch, but the only other thing remotely plausible was The Marvels, but the previews just looked so stupid. So, I was excited to see The Holdovers.
The first thing to note is that it is a period piece. It starts in 1970. As a guy born before then, it had some nostalgia value for me. The second thing to note is that I wasn't annoyed at the writing. As a guy who writes and critiques fiction every day, I can't turn off my editor brain. Any bullshit writing that surfaces immediately pulls me out of a movie, so I'm happy to report that I found the writing to be quite strong. I was impressed that they dodged a lot of the tropes. This was clearly one talented person's vision, not the Hollywood focus-grouped-to-death crap that usually gets the big distribution deal. The previews tell the outline of the story. It's Christmas at boarding school and some of the kids have nowhere to go. Someone's got to supervise them, so let's assign Paul Giamati's character. The movie is a character study of him. Fortunately, they layer in two other robust characters played by Dominic Sessa and DaVine Randolph who deliver standout performances. Subtlety is what I loved about this script. The student-on-student hatred wasn't some over-the-top Carrie at the prom crap, just modestly hurtful and funny stuff. The school politics are just the right amount of cruel. Everyone and everything is written with nuance. I didn't always agree with the choices, but that was part of what made it interesting to me. The movie is shot quite quietly. There are no soaring musical cues, just some period music. There isn't a thrilling pace, just a functional gait to the end of the Christmas break. In fact, it's so quiet that there isn't even an epilogue. The ending is a little harsh and upends our characters, and they don't wrap it up for us with any kind of evocative epilogue. It's a risk. Some people want it all spelled out. Some people like to fill the ambiguity with their preferences. I think it works well. What makes this movie is Paul Giamatti. He plays this tragic-comic faux academic to perfection. His character is an irascible ass most of the time, but hilarious. As he and the kid navigate Christmas break, they layer in a few adventures that organically dip into both of their backstories which are quite evocative. So it's sort of tragic-comic as they lurch through the movie. One great surprise was DaVine Randolph. Narratologically, she is a writer's trap in this woke world: a black woman, a cook, very fat, and wise. She's perilously close to the "Mammy" trope. Fortunately, her character is written engagingly enough that all those labels are irrelevant. She functions like the moral conscience of the movie. Ms. Randolph does a superb job and plays off Giamatti excellently. In the end, it's a strong production well performed. I found the movie to be finely balanced between comedy and tragedy. They didn't milk the pathos. They didn't go for cheap laughs. It's thoughtful and nuanced. I recommend it to everyone.. Do you remember broadcast TV? I mean literally pulled out of the air by an antenna? Those of you under thirty years old probably don't. Personally, I didn't get cable TV until after college when I lived on my own. My father was too cheap to pay for it. This was all back when TV was on the NTSC standard.
These days I'm the maximum cord cutter. I buy internet service and stream several services through apps on streaming devices to cobble together a collection of I don't know how many channels. That's not even getting to all the on-demand content those streaming services provide. Anyway, recently Comcast/Xfinity had an outage in my area that lasted about 21 hours. It was the longest I'd experienced in my life. I'm not so weak that I can't live without TV, but I wanted to be able to get the news and weather. Days after the outage, I had forgotten about it. My girlfriend, however, had not. She was determined that we have an alternative. So she bought an HDTV antenna. That was new to me. In college, I started in electrical engineering, so I understood the idea. There weren't a lot of powered antennas when I grew up. So I thought it was going to be crappy reception of a handful of channels. I was shockingly wrong. I hooked this thing up, told my TV to scan for channels, and damned if it didn't find 28 HD channels (No one broadcasts NTSC/analog TV anymore). And the picture quality was astonishingly crisp. There was no static snow, no vertical/horizontal hold weirdness, just really good picture and sound. So, yeah, yay team, but practically speaking, who cares? Well, in the ever-changing streaming landscape, one of the hiccups I have run into is local channels. Everyone will sell you the marquee networks, but if you want local channels, it gets ugly and sometimes expensive. You typically pay extra to get access to local channels. Another hiccup I hit sometimes is Spanish content. I've been studying Spanish informally for years and like to listen to Spanish TV to keep up with it. I love to have it on in the background while I'm working in my basement shop. So, the Spanish package from your cable provider? Usually another pile of money, but not anymore. I get Telemundo, Univision, Unimas, and LATV over the air for free. Though, part of the bounty of Spanish TV is because I live in Pueblo Colorado. Other than sharing my astonishment at being so ignorant of what so-called HD TV was, I was encouraged by the potential cost savings. Now I can get my local channels and a good deal of Spanish over the air for free. The only thing is that over-the-air channels don't come with digital DVRs. But people still buy DVR boxes--standalone DVR units (remember Tivo?). Cue the SouthPark 'Member Berries. I feel old. I was looking forward to Asteroid City for months. I know better. Every time I build a movie up in my mind, it's almost impossible to meet those expectations. I didn't much enjoy this movie. I'll also spoil the snot out of it, so if that sort of thing annoys you, stop reading now.
The good news is that there is a lot of fun stuff in it, scenes I mean. Asteroid City is where this tiny metallic meteorite fell to Earth. It's a tourist attraction but also the site of a science competition. So we get a mixture of tourists and competitors with their families staying in a collection of tiny bungalows. They are forced to stay together because the government quarantines the place. In true Wes Anderson style, each character is severely quirky, so when they are forced to interact, you get the fun stuff he is famous for. That is, there is a bunch of fun, quirky characters who are pretty entertaining, scene by scene. The problem I had is that those scenes aren't stitched into anything resembling a coherent narrative. And, yes, I've seen other Wes Anderson movies that have similarly weird characters that very obliquely meander their way through a plot. So, I didn't expect much of a pace, or plot, really. But Asteroid City is incoherent, both for the lack of a salient plot, and the structure. Structure? Yes, structure. There are two movies in this movie. One was filmed in the desert in a washed-out pastel palette, and the other is a black-and-white flick set in a city theater. Constantly throughout the movie, they cut to Bryan Cranston doing stuff in this theater company. I can't say I parsed much of it because it was so disjointed, but it appeared to me that the black-and-white stuff was talking about developing a play for the stage, the story of which was the color footage interwoven into the film. So everything gets a bit meta, so to speak. The black-and-white stuff seemed to inform the color stuff. Pardon my vagueness, but I was not interested in trying to parse out some clever mote of wit from the pile of crap dumped on the screen. If there was something there, it took more effort to ferret out than I cared to put out. One big problem is that the cast is too large. They can't service everyone. Margot Robbie appears in one single throwaway scene. Jeff Goldblum has maybe five seconds, sitting in a space alien rubber suit. Matt Dillon gets a little more screen time playing the auto mechanic, and on and on. It felt to me like Wes had to rotate through each of the big-name actors to fill a quota or something. Bizarrely, there is actually a brief glimpse, blurry, on a dirty mirror, of Scarlet Johanson fully nude--maybe half a second. Why? That's one of a thousand questions I had bouncing through my head as I watched this thing. By the end of the movie, I was bemused. A good portion of my brain wondered if there was something wrong with me. Perhaps there is. The movie stopped more than ended. I don't know if anything was resolved. There certainly wasn't any emotion to it. It ended. I walked out. In the future I will likely skip Wes Anderson movies until someone convinces me he produced something worth watching. As failures (for me) go, this is an interesting one, but I hope to never see it again. I encourage anyone who feels they have to watch it, to not do so sober. I suspect this movie would be much more enjoyable in an altered state of mind. I had little faith in this movie going in. Cocaine Bear was such a disappointment that I was gunshy about trying another farcical comedy. The only reason I went was because I really like to see a movie in the theater every weekend and there were slim pickings this weekend. I certainly wasn’t going to throw my money at another insipid Fast & Furious episode.
Happily, The Machine is everything I hoped it would be. It's a tribute to the movie makers that they took such a brainless pretext and built a very strong comedy around it. The setup is in the previews: Bert's misadventures in Russia during college comes back to haunt him thirty years later. There's this crime boss who simply must have his precious watch that Bert and friends stole from him thirty years previously. All his miscreant kids want to find it to secure their position as his successor. Stupid as that setup is, they make it work brilliantly. It's about the tone. They manage to keep it ridiculous without going over the top. They manage to kill a lot of people and have you laughing about it. They infuse all the side characters with quirky personalities that the performers managed to get on film. They cast it perfectly. Speaking of casting, Mark Hamil does a stunningly good job playing Bert's father. As a guy who grew up watching his teenage mug torturing lines in Star Wars, I'd convinced myself that his best work was as the voice of Fire Lord Ozai in Avatar the Last Air Bender. I'm happy to report that I had him wrong. Somewhere in the last 40+ years, he became a very strong performer. There is a bit of a nostalgia bias in this flick. Because Bert is middle-aged, they have callbacks to pop references from his younger days that might not land with anyone born this century. Other than that, this movie is very entertaining. It's also very re-watchable because so much of what works is in the performances rather than the plot. Go watch it. I'll be surprised if you don't like it at least a little. Most of you will love it. It's an instant classic in the vein of The Hangover. It was hard to miss the ads for this movie, at least for me. They used a thumping Led Zepplin tune. It was another great piece of music from my youth that had fallen--become cheap enough--to use to advertise a movie. Ironically, no Zepplin is used in the movie, only in the ad. I had no illusions about this being a great oeuvre, but it had Michelle Rodriguez and Chris Pine in it, so I figured why not. It couldn't be any worse than John Wick 4 which I saw last weekend.
It starts with our two heroes (Chris and Michelle) in jail. Despite the horrendous conditions, they are chipper, healthy, and up for parole. They have the requisite we're-so-tough moment when they beat on a menacing prisoner. A few minutes in, the movie goes off the rails for me. They are at their parole hearing and lay out their backstory to the panel deciding their fate. So, it's a string of exposition bomb flashbacks that try to set up what narratologists call the 'inciting event' as well as any other backstory it might be convenient to toss into this structural garbage pail. It's boring. It's unevocative. Pine's character has a daughter played by the least charismatic child actress I've seen on screen in a long time. He's going to resurrect her mother with a magical artifact. But since the mother died when the child was too young to remember her, it's a non-event, an abstraction, a check box on some producer's clipboard more than proper motivation. The tone is firmly established when the rambling random exposition ends and the two heroes break out of jail literally as their parole is granted. I don't mind that. If they can be witty about it, I'm happy to ride along. The thing is, they aren't that witty about it. At the opening of the movie, that's the plot: resurrect mom for the unlikable kid who can't even remember her. That becomes: raid the vault of their former friend turned enemy (played by Hugh Grant). That in turn becomes: obtain the Helm of Destruction to defeat the vault security. All the while…why should I care? [Spoilers Ahead] The biggest crime of the movie makers is that there turn out to be much higher plot stakes in the background. Hugh Grant's character is propped up by an uber-sorceress who plans to use a festival to create an army of undead slaves to take over the country. Seriously, in the background the entire time was this truly horrific, evocative, interesting plot that was ignored until the last ten minutes of the movie. Perhaps worst of all is that, piece-wise, they film some decent scenes. They simply fail to use the script and editing to pace us along on an escalating ride to an exciting climax. The pieces were all there, but they were really clumsy about how they knit it all together. All that is a long-winded way of saying this was a mediocre movie. The casting of the child and the bad guy dragged the movie down. The clumsy plot structure made the viewing experience choppy. The late revelation of high stakes wasted the setup. The result was a poorly-paced movie with little suspense and no emotional payoff at the end. I suspect that intoxicants would significantly enhance the viewing experience. The bland title "65" is because someone already used the title "65 Million Years Ago." It's sci-fi so I had to see it. I didn't care for the previews. Watching them, I actually thought they were doing some kind of time travel anomaly: Humans get sent back in time by ____ to the time of dinosaurs. The truth is far dumber. This movie is about another race exploring the Earth mere hours before the dinosaur-killing asteroid hits it.
Yeah, that's right. There's an alien race of completely human people that decide to explore the Earth or something near it. They open the movie with a lot of subtitles to explain the setup. Of course, once I saw that, I thought they were going for some Earth-seeded-by-aliens angle. The problem with that is that the fossil record shows hominids evolving over perhaps five million years yielding something like the modern human about 200,000 years ago. So that plot would fly in the face of current science. Having seen the movie, I can say that even that stupidity would be better than what they delivered. I intend to spoil this movie for you, so stop reading now if that will annoy you. I do it without misgivings because there's precious little to spoil about this movie. The actual plot is more boring and many times as stupid as whatever you thought it might be. A man goes on a two-year mission to explore something--we're never told what. He's ferrying a bunch of people in cryo pods. Ostensibly that's a year out and a year back. So, somewhere within a year's travel of Earth is their amazingly advanced planet filled with perfectly human inhabitants. How does that travel occur? Well, on screen, it looks like three engines spitting blue flame do the job. Oh, and when they crash, they can send messages home in mere hours. How? Who knows. At the very end, their little escape pod will apparently be able to meet up with a rescue ship. Why am I being a hard-science-fiction dick about all that? Mostly because it destroys the tension of the plot. If you can have real-time communications with home and can arrange a rescue rendez-vous in near real-time, what's the tension? They aren't so badly stranded. This isn't Gilligan's Island, just a breakdown on the side of the road with AAA on the way. But wait, don't harp on gritty little plot holes, let's focus on the emotional heart of the piece. Adam Driver's character has a daughter that dies while he's away. The one survivor from the cryo pods just happens to be a little girl about his daughter's age. She even shares her long dark hair. Ostensibly the pilot's broken parent-heart is supposed to inject some pathos into this movie. It really doesn't. What you really get is a dinosaur movie. It's a guy and a child running through the wilderness fighting off dinosaur attacks. Think the fat guy in Jurassic Park getting hunted when his Jeep breaks down. What was appropriately a little side interlude in that movie was the entire plot of 65. I'm leaving out a lot of the plot holes, but I want to share my favorite one. At the end, their escape ship is upside down. It can't launch. Instead of the A-Team montage of let's upfit the van, er, fix the ship, we have a dinosaur attack and magically flip the ship over into launch position without breaking its FTL drive and sensitive systems. It was at least a good laugh. You'd have a harder time jump-starting a car than they had getting back into space with their vehicle that had survived a crash and rough handling by a dinosaur. My point is that there isn't much of a plot, setup, or characters here. Adam Driver is boring to watch. The setup is laughably stupid. The timing of crashing on Earth mere hours before that famous extinction event is absurd. Driver's character having a handheld thingy that could identify and time the asteroid from him pointing it at the sky was even more asinine. This movie is so empty that they frontloaded fifteen minutes of Adam Driver's character and his family just to get this thing to come up to ninety minutes. For me, the most interesting thing about this movie is wondering how it got made. People sat around a table with this script, nodded their heads, and decided it was worth spending forty-five million dollars to make it. Even more confusing is why you would put Adam Driver at the head of this two-person cast. There's got to be something good in it, right? Some little chunk 'o goodness? There is. If you love dinosaurs, there are a couple of excellent dinosaur scares. Intoxicants might make this an enjoyable movie to watch, either by making you too torpid to notice the problems or by kicking it into the so-bad-its-good zone. Missing surprised me by having an excellent plot with great twists. So I was disappointed that they couldn't leverage that plot to produce an excellent movie. For me, the way they shot this movie destroyed it. The fact that the main character was about the single most unlikable teen girl didn't help either.
These days, production values tend to be high, so what about the way that they shot this is so bad? It's all cell phone and webcam footage. When I say 'all' I mean every damn frame of this movie. Most of the footage is the main character sitting at her Mac Book. We watch as the teen slacker navigates websites, and interacts with other characters. I get how the occasional scene filmed that way could be evocative, but trust me when I tell you, by the end of the movie, it's infuriating. I saw it as cheap, boring, and lazy way to tell a story. That's how they got this wide release out the door for $7 million. Then there's the main character. I actually forgot her name. She is a lazy teen slacker who has a scare because momma money tit goes missing. The first part of the movie is a rote, parents-away-kids-party sequence; the kid throws a house party with the 'emergency' money that mom gave her while she's away on a trip. She's so damn lazy that she hires a maid service to clean up after the party--on mom's dime. Even worse, the kid is a camera, not a character. She has no distinguishing character traits, goals, aspirations, or ambition. Also, as good as the plot is in essence, there is a huge plot hole near the end that amounts to the movie chickening out, lacking the guts to give us anything but sunshine blown up our collective asses at the end. My suggestion is that you not watch this movie. Even intoxicated, enjoying this movie would be tough. |
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