bushwick

[IMDB]

interesting premise ruined by directorial masturbation. note that i said interesting, not plausible.

here is the thing, if you are going to do some fancy camera work, eg, make it look like you shot the whole movie in a single take, then you better a) make it invisible, or b) have a good goddamn reason. bushwick did neither. this whole one-take thing in particular is really driving me batshit, by the way. once you see it, you cannot unsee it, and what it is is awkward.

on the plus side, Dave Bautista turned in another understated performance that served to further secure his place as my new favorite wrestler-turned-actor. i also really appreciated the sound work, especially around gunfire. and finally, if there was anything that held this film together, it was the relentless pace paired with an unflinching look at a brutal experience. the balance between acknowledging the gore without lingering on it was exactly where i like it to be, which is to say, far away from me.

bushwick gets three fingers shot off in a gunfight.

bright

[IMDB] [Netflix]

bright is a painfully wrought allegorical tale about race relations in whatever century we currently find ourselves in. plus in this world everybody hates cops, apparently. so i guess that maps cleanly, in the sense that some people say they hate cops, except then the cops save the day, which allows them to be simultaneously downtrodden and heroic and secretly loved by all. except for bad people, who still hate cops, but it is ok, they will get theirs one way or another.

while i am complaining, i will also mention that the storyline was obvious, dialogue trite, characters unidimensional, special effects over/poorly used, and where the fuck were the other six races? there was a girl with nictitating membranes, was she supposed to be something? an aardvark-person, perhaps?

also, i know that will smith never dies in his movies, but if he had turned out not to be a bright, then it would have made for an instance of actual heroism, sacrifice, and character development. just saying.

so i guess what i am saying is that if you were going to really fuck up a movie about race relations, then you would do something like this. please oh please no sequels.

bright gets one elf with a dragon tattoo.

the truth about alcohol

[IMDB] [Netflix]

the truth about alcohol is one of those fake scientific documentaries that drives you batshit if you know how science works.  eg, if you go to the sleep lab for one night to measure the effect of drinking alcohol before sleeping, you cannot actually draw firm conclusions about the measurements because you do not have a baseline.  it was doubly maddening to see the interviews of actual doctors and scientists, most of whom seemed to understand that they were partaking in bullshit.  the interviewer asked questions which indicated he had not been paying attention to what he had been saying for the previous 5-10 minutes, then the doctor/scientist would struggle to not cry while answering.  clearly, it was one of those situations where they soiled their hands in order to accomplish a greater good.

the truth about alcohol is that it can be tasty and/or mind altering, and the only reason it is legal is that most people consume it regularly.  it gets one terrible night's sleep.

wheelman

[IMDB] [Netflix]

i will just come right to the point. wheelman used this gimmicky story-telling thing where it always left the camera in the car, and it bothered me because there was no apparent point to doing so. unless it was to distract from the overall weakness of the film, but that would imply that this overall weakness was somehow foreseen. it is not like you would go back and reshoot the whole movie in goofy perspective after you realize your first attempt was crap. or would you?

i dunno. i watch movies, i do not make them. it just seems like a lot to me. why not hire new actors, or make a different movie? it is not like there was anything amazing going on here that absolutely demanded to be preserved. like for example, if samurai princess had left out the love rhombus, they would not have been all, "crap, nothing to salvage here." instead they would have obviously preserved the director's artistic vision and reshot whatever needed reshooting because samurai princess was a film whose time had come, a work of art that demanded to be released.

well, wheelman was no samurai princess. it gets two red trunks. by the way, if your authentication protocol involves just believing anything somebody tells you over the phone, then you have at least one problem which demands immediate attention.

also, in case you are wondering, i intentionally left out all the jokes about how an alternate explanation for the camera placement is that the director could see into the future and already knew about the film's weakness, and just shot it that way the first time.  it just seemed too obvious.

the number 23

[IMDB] [Amazon]

the number 23 would have been a lot creepier if i did not already have the habit of playing stupid number games in my head. it is not really that hard to turn a string of numbers into another number, usually. and it is way easier if you have a modicum of control over which numbers get to be in your string and in what order. and if you allow splicing, then it is easier still. so there was nothing scary about the number 23. 

with that said, it was not a terrible movie. i was pleasantly surprised to find jim carey doing well in a serious role, and the plot was entertaining enough to justify the time expenditure.

the number 23 gets three top secrets. three is twice three halves, three halves is basically 32, which is 23 reversed, for a grand total of 46. er, 64? then 64 is 2^6, which is 26. and 26 is of course 3 more than 23. scary, right? right?

hello? is this thing on?