This week Steve joins Lynda for a little discussion about the Bill Cosby retrial before heading into his review on Amy Schumer’s latest film, I Feel Pretty. To close out the segment, Steve gives his love to Monty Python, who’s entire catalog is now available on Netflix!
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1. Uninspired horror – Does it feel like good horror is a dime a dozen? With John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place currently killing it at the box office and with critics it feels like a good time to address all the cheap pandering films in this genre that don’t make the cut of even being a passably scary movie. Just look at Blumhouse’s latest one Truth Or Dare, a story that takes its inspiration from a handful of more successful movies to forge in glued together identity. Oh, a guy lured everyone to a place to get an unseen evil’s focus off of him and on to someone else? Seems like you lifted the beginning of It Follows a little. I feel like I’m being a little focused on this one movie, so let me bring up another one from last year, Happy Death Day. The movie basically rolls Mean Girls into a Groundhog Day style plot but fails to make any sort of original stride with this premise. My overarching complaint is that mainstream horror has been resting on its laurels for too long and we need better original horror. Especially Blumhouse. This is what you were made for!
2. The diminishing role of critics – This may be slightly self-indulgent of me to rant about this but it is becoming increasingly difficult to get the coverage on films like we used to in this industry. Now, for me to bring this up publicly is a bit premature as I have only been involved in an official capacity for around three years but those who have been doing this longer have voiced this concern as well and it really does seem that for a lot of us, the writing is on the wall. The position is frequently unpaid, we receive endless hate for our opinions and now the studios are actively restricting movies from us for review. Disney is the biggest culprit as Rogue One was the only new Star Wars film to get an advance screening and neither or the Episodes were shown. This has now stretched as far as the Marvel movies with Avengers: Infinity War being screening-less on the West Coast. Film appreciation in the media is nearing extinction and as a person who is passionate about it I feel the weight of my decision to get into this at the worst possible time.
3. The Gunman – Ever take a look at those Liam Neeson films like Taken, Unknown or Non-Stop and think “I wonder what Sean Penn would be like in that role?” Well, you are the only one and you’re weird but, that aside, it’s already been done in 2015 by, ironically enough, Pierre Morel, the man behind Taken. Well, the movie is new to Netflix this week and I know you’re asking what’s the problem? Is it Penn himself? No, not really. The big issue is the movie is boring as hell, predictable and not enough action bite to even warrant it to be considered part of the action genre. Fantastic character actors like Javier Bardem, Idris Elba and a pre-Oscar winning Mark Rylance star in the film but are so ineffectual and forgettable that they must have just come in, collected a paycheck and left. Again, just like most films in the last few years, I saw this one in theaters and still look for the day that I can get a full life refund from Morel and company, including Penn himself, who served as producer additionally. Make that cheque out to cash please!
1. Borg vs. McEnroe – How good could a movie about tennis be? A better question, is it better than Wimbledon? That last one is misleading because no film can unseat that Paul Bettany/Kirsten Dunst classic. I kid, I kid, this one is infinitely better and is completely devoid of an awkward romantic center. Instead we got the face-off between two of the greatest tennis players of all time, John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg, played by Shia LeBeouf and Sverrir Gudnason respectively. For the majority of the film, we get the back stories on both revered athletes peppered into their very different preparations for the biggest match of their career at Wimbledon. LeBeouf brilliantly captures McEnroe’s volatile nature in his strive for greatness without ever having met the real man in the process, much to the subject’s angry displeasure. Gudnason, on the other hand, plays to Borg’s quiet thoughtful side, a phenomenal talent that never wanted the crush of attention that his skills always garnered. We get a bit of insight into both of these unforgettable stars and it all comes together in a totally pace shifting third act, depicting the war these two battled on the court. Seriously, the movie is worth a watch just for that.
2. You Were Never Really Here – A couple years back, director Lynne Ramsey was all set to direct Natalie Portman in a western called Jane Got A Gun. Through unknown circumstances behind the scenes, a reported disagreement between Ramsay and the film’s producer and financier, and she no showed the first day before quitting entirely. Well, that film turned out to be a bit lackluster but luckily for the We Need To Talk About Kevin filmmaker, and more importantly us the viewers, she moved on to this thriller starring Joaquin Phoenix. He plays a disturbed Gulf war veteran who now lives with his mother, making his living tracking down missing teen girls. When one of his clients ends up involving him in a darker conspiracy, his reality starts to fracture and this movie starts to head down a rabbit hole of disturbing proportions. A lot of this film I felt a slight comparison to Taxi Driver with a side of Jacob’s Ladder PTSD but the one thing that was a constant was Joaquin’s performance which is damn riveting in its silence.
3. Monty Python – If I were ever to say that John Cleese, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam didn’t have a formative effect on my idea of comedy then I would be an absolute liar because Monty Python was everything to me. It seems that the comedy gods were listening, or at least Chapman was, because Netflix orchestrated a deal to acquire the entire catalog of their work and it is now already here and we’re talking EVERYTHING. The series, the live specials, the movies and the documentaries. Now you can stop pantomiming your favorite bits to your friends or the uninitiated and actually show them the really product, streaming into your home at the click of a button. Trust me, your wife already appreciates you not John Cleese goose stepping everywhere and kicking over that lamp. Again.
Steve shares his new release movie recommendations with Drex across Canada on the Corus Radio Network . This week he’s reviewing Rampage, Truth or Dare, Borg Vs. McEnroe and more.
On this week’s spot Steve chats with Lynda about a Langley father’s beef with an inappropriate Amy Schumer film and one of the best filmmakers in the world is gearing up to make a documentary on one of the most influential comedy shows ever. Steve also gives his thoughts on the new Dwayne Johnson film Rampage and the HBO documentary Andre The Giant.
https://omny.fm/shows/steele-drex/at-the-box-office-with-steve-stebbing-17/embed
It’s only my second week of doing these throwback recommendations and I already kind of stumped myself. It’s not that I am at a loss for any titles to bring up, it really just comes down to relevancy. First in my mind, I wanted to talk about Rob Zombie’s House Of 1000 Corpses, which celebrates it fifteen year anniversary this week. Seeing as I brought Fede Alvarez’s remake of Evil Dead last week, doubling up on horror may be a little much but this film is an absolute iconic gory experience that showed Zombie’s love for everything monstrous and paved the way for his greatest onscreen masterpiece, The Devil’s Rejects. If you have never seen this one and have a penchant for something decidedly messed up and slightly derivative of Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre the “run, rabbit, run” to go find this one.
I digress. My point this week is to bring attention to two fantastic films from the last year or so that are now available anytime on Netflix. First up is the latest Yorgos Lanthimos film The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which was uploaded last week. If you have already checked out his last film The Lobster starring Colin Farrell then you are already aware of how much his films differ from everyone else’s. He has stilted dialogue, wooden feeling blocking and a penchant for making things unbelievably twisted in the blink of an eye and where The Lobster was a comedy, Killing is certainly not. The story is about an idyllic family man and open heart surgeon, again played by Farrell, who has a questionable and awkward friendship with the son of a former patient that get very sinister very quickly. This film will stick with you for a long time after the credits hit.
The second film is a bit more popular but always demanding another re-watch, Shane Black’s buddy comedy The Nice Guys. Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe have such magic chemistry together, playing private investigators of varying degrees that have to team up to solve the murder of an adult film actress. Actors are only as good as their script and however great our two leads are in this film, Black screenplay elevates them even higher and when you add in young Australian actress Angourie Rice as Gosling’s whip smart daughter to the mix you have a movie filled with so much great dialogue that you will be laughing so hard that you may miss follow-up lines here and there. This is why it is so brilliant for Netflix to offer this title. They know just as well as I do that this one will get people over and over again.
With all the movies out there, some of them surely have to be terrible. My job is to make sure you don’t waste any time on them so here are my dumpster fires this week:
1. Father Figures – I know I brought up this movie last week for my little rant about terrible photo shop but I have now gotten a look at what’s in the box and, folks, it’s not pretty. The film is centered around Ed Helms and Owen Wilson as two fraternal twin brothers who find out at their mother’s wedding that the man they believed to be their father was not, sending them on a road trip to track down the real one. The problem is that their mother, played by Glenn Close, was quite promiscuous at the time of their conception, making the search that much more difficult. If that lazy premise still has you intrigued, let me dispel that by informing you that the laziness doesn’t stop there. Wilson and Helms both rely on what their known for, the former’s “Oh Wow” bewilderment and the latter’s uptight nature, as well as constant “your mom’s a slut” jokes. Leave this one in the Walmart bargain bin, friends.
2. T.J. Miller – Is it even alright to say you enjoy this guy’s comedy anymore because it feels like he throwing every roadblock at us to be an absolute pariah. Now, I’ve been a fan of Miller for years. His stand-up comedy is hilarious, plus his memorable turns in Extract, She’s Out Of My League and Our Idiot Brother all made him someone to look forward to no matter how large or small his role was. It’s hard to believe when you look at him in Deadpool that he started as the cameraman Hud in Cloverfield and now I can’t even make any Erlich Bachman Silicon Valley jokes without thinking about his sexual harassment allegations, his general terrible attitude reported on the set of that aforementioned HBO series and this new bit of information about him calling in a fake bomb threat. Seriously, I should have completely wrote him off when he praised his film The Emoji Movie.
3. The I Feel Pretty trailer – Now, this one doesn’t actually apply to the film, as I haven’t seen it yet, but directly at the Cineplex theater chain as well as the film distributor, eOne. The story is that a father in Langley brought his 9-year-old daughter to a Saturday matinée of the wholesome sports film The Miracle Season, a G rated film in Canada. Prior to the film, a trailer for the new Amy Schumer movie ran, one that is rated PG-13 for sexual content, partial nudity and language. This also includes a wet t-shirt contest that appears in the trailer. Now, this certainly seems like a total mistake by a rushed studio trying to get eyes on their film. The trailer will be removed from any other screening of The Miracle Season but the method in which the outrage snowballs is due to the echo chamber that is the internet. This is a small snafu that could have been resolved quietly but instead it blew up big enough to be a feature story on news sites in the lower mainland. That’s kind of ridiculous. The only other real problem I have with this dad is that he also took some offense to a trailer for the new film On Chisel Beach, which has a far more progressive message but that’s a rant for another dumpster fire.
In an attempt to bring you the best of what’s out there I give you my “High Spots” of the week, three noteworthy things you need to check out:
1. Blockers – Coming off of WrestleMania weekend, you might think I’m exhausted to death about talking about wrestling and wrestlers but I think John Cena’s new film deserves some recognition. The movie is about three parents banding together to prevent their daughters from losing their virginity on prom night. Starring alongside Leslie Mann and Ike Barinholtz, Cena makes his first step towards a Dwayne Johnson like big screen career with a film that feels like it has a sweetheart nestled in the raunchy horn dog humor with a refreshing direction of three girls trying to figure out the pitfalls of sexual relationships, going against the norm of the usual American Pie male driven fare. Blockers may be, in some parts, exactly what you think it’s going to be but it still has room to surprise you.
2. A Quiet Place – You may know him, above everything, as Jim from The Office but as a filmmaker, John Krasinski has now arrived. With two small indie films under his belt, Krasinksi co-wrote and stars opposite his real life wife Emily Blunt in this horror film that is downright terrifying to an uncomfortable degree. The story takes place in a “post-fall” world where the last human are being hunted down by creatures that track by sound, centred around Krasinki, Blunt and their two children. Be warned, A Quiet Place is not only the title of the movie but also a descriptor of what your theater experience will be like. Bearing that in mind, if you want to grab popcorn, nachos or anything else crunchy, everyone in the room will hear you eat. Not deterring you from that concession visit but in a world where we are increasingly horrible and lack courtesy in the cinemas, well, don’t be “that guy”.
3. Sweet Virginia – A film that definitely flew under the radar and one I had the privilege of seeing at the Vancouver International Film festival, this story plays as an understated and soft-spoken Coen Brothers style feature. Director Jamie Dagg makes his first film not based on his own script and has two brilliant actors in Jon Bernthal and Christopher Abbott playing against their stereotypical roles, which are performed masterfully. Bernthal plays a quiet motel owner in a sleepy little Alaska town who may have a tenant who was responsible for a cold-blooded multiple homicide that kicks off the film. Abbott plays the secondary character with a seething rage that feels unpredictable, giving the film a deep-seated tension that doesn’t leave until the credits hit the screen. Jamie Dagg has an incredibly bright future ahead of him. I will have my interview from when the film was released up for you to listen to soon.
Every week I’m going to shed a bit of light on a movie that’s either celebrating a milestone anniversary, hitting a streaming device or that I selfishly want to praise. These are my #TBT Cinematic Moments:
Evil Dead – If you follow me on Twitter my handle is an obvious nod to a cult horror classic, Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, so of course I’m going to cover this film at some point. This isn’t the original I’m talking about though, this is the 2013 Fede Alvarez remake, celebrating its five-year anniversary right as I publish this.
For a long time there was speculation if we’d ever see a follow-up to 1993’s Army Of Darkness and, well, the fan base is pretty rabid and outspoken as I’m sure Raimi and Bruce Campbell could attest to. Being that fans held so true to the originals, the announcement of a remake/reboot was met with an unfathomable anger. No one wanted to give it a chance, Alvarez was an unproven talent and no amount of back up from Campbell and Raimi themselves seemed to sway that.
The movie came out on April 5th, 2013 and, in my opinion, blew the doors off in a fun and original direction. Instead of Having Ash, his lady and a couple of friends heading to a cabin in the woods for a weekend getaway we have a group of friends in crisis mode as they are bringing their friends Mia to the cabin for a serious heroin detox. Then, one of the more dangerously curious friends decides to read from a book that has been bound and shoved away in the cellar and, oh man, does he ever pay for that.
Evil Dead is everything I wanted from a possession horror film, especially under the header of an Evil Dead film. We get high levels of gore, incredibly dark humor and, best of all, practical effects, something that is sourly missed from this genre nowadays. The cast is well assembled, including the lead, a personal favorite, Jane Levy from the short-lived sitcom Suburgatory. If you are a staunch anti-remake film-goer it’s likely that this one stayed far off your radar but I implore you to give it a chance, even just for the glorious third act of this movie that has a shot that I can’t even begin to explain how beautiful it is. Seriously, Fede is a gift to us movie fans. Don’t believe me? Watch this, then his follow-up Don’t Breathe.
With all the movies out there, some of them surely have to be terrible. My job is to make sure you don’t waste any time on them so here are my dumpster fires this week:
1. Faith based films – At the current time there are three targeted films for the faith-based audiences playing in theaters, Paul, Apostle Of Christ, God’s Not Dead: A Light In The Darkness and I Can Only Imagine. While that last one is at a 70% on Rotten Tomatoes, Paul is at a rotten 41% and God’s Not Dead, the third in that series, is an abysmal 15%. Now, let’s put into context that the best measuring stick on the web, Metacritic, has that positive 70% ranked I Can Only Imagine at a horribly low score of 29/100 and you will get the point I make right here: There are no good faith based films and definitely none that will appeal to a new audience. Seriously. I believe the last film that seemed to cross over into the mainstream was The Passion Of The Christ and that had to be the controversy of the entire project that piqued the audience’s curiosity. Maybe the built-in and targeted viewers are enough to sustain these studios but shouldn’t they want more?
2. Tyler Perry – The theme of this week seems to be “don’t you want more?” as mega producer, writer and director Tyler Perry has another new film out this week. To date, his biggest hits involve him in drag playing the character of Madea, a successful adaptation from stage to screen, now muddled into a separate comedy horror genre for at least two films so far. Beyond that, Perry has many other dramas that have come and gone like two Why Did I Get Married movies, Kim Kardashian as a marriage counselor in Temptation and this week’s offering, Taraji P. Henson in Acrimony. In the U.S., Tyler Perry’s films are released across the country but here they are in a more limited capacity and, while I understand that he has gotten to the point that he gets to make whatever he wants, I wish we could see something fresh, bold and unpredictable. Is this too much to ask?
3. Cover art photo shopping – I won’t begin to get into the actual film itself but the cover art on the Blu-ray of the new comedy Father Figures brings up another marketing pet peeve of mine, horrible photo shop. Working at a video store for years (remember those?), I was subjected to dreadful cover art on many different titles but the ones that really bug me are big studio releases. Father Figures being the prime example right now, Ed Helms literally does not have a neck. What is this movie about? Just from the cover, we can surmise that Ed Helms has misplaced his neck and a surprised Owen Wilson is on board to help him recover it. Really, if you’re looking for something out of the blue to watch and this is thrust under your nose, it’s doubtful that this one is going home with you just based on sheer marketing laziness. I think we need to publicly shame these instances more. Who’s with me?
