wild card

[IMDB] [Amazon]

jason statham plays an alcoholic, down-on-his-luck, ex-unspecified-type-of-special-forces hardass with a heart of gold who scowls as he does not like to talk about his past.  if this is your first jason statham vehicle, that might sound kind of intriguing, but otherwise, you recognize this as the setup for every jason statham vehicle.  they just change details like the city he is in, the kind of car he drives, and what kind of rotgut he favours. obviously, he is always british.  i feel like there is a jason statham movie generator in here somewhere, but i cannot convince myself that it is worth the effort to write it.

wild card gets one hit on nineteen.

final girl

[IMDB] [Amazon]

final girl is a movie about a sadistic sociopath who lures men out into the woods, drugs them, then slaughters them.  no character arc to this one, and the fight choreography is pretty lame.  also the acting, directing, and plot are--and i am being generous here--god awful.  you should also be aware that the movie's marketing suggests this is a turn-the-tables kind of story or maybe a revenge flick, but they spend so little effort setting up the bad guys that they might as well have not bothered.  the one-dimensional thugs dutifully climb into the barrel, and then the girl shoots them. that was a metaphor, not a thing that actually happened.

oh, it was also a love story, but that was pretty thin, too.

final girl finally gets one milkshake.

deadpool

[IMDB] [Amazon]

deadpool is basically exactly what it is advertised as.  it set out to be a crudely funny, self-referential, action movie, and it succeeded completely in accomplishing this goal.  so, high marks for that.  on the other hand, it was not really high art, but if you were expecting high art, then you must have accidentally wandered into the wrong movie.

computer graphics have come a long way since the final fantasy movie.  i was pretty impressed with how naturally colossus fit into the environment.  the character was actually not originally supposed to be computer generated, you know.  what happened is that when they were filming the big fight scene between angel dust and colossus, gina carano kept accidentally kicking colossus's ass.  after 37 takes, colossus quit.  so then they cast a voice actor, who insisted on a clause in his contract which would compensate him in the event that the computer-generated colossus got its ass kicked so hard that he was injured.  after four takes and four injuries, the studio decided to work around the problem by computer-generating colossus *and* angel dust.  this also did not work because gina carano's likeness was still too tough.  so finally they put together a fight between a computer-generated colossus and drew barrymore, then did some post-processing to put gina carano's face on drew barrymore.  this mostly worked. the fight ended up taking two minutes longer because drew barrymore with gina carano's face was still too tough.  true story.

deadpool gets four unicorns and a gold star for unabashedly being the movie it was trying to be.

a girl walks home alone at night

[IMDB] [Amazon]

a girl walks home alone at night is a bit avant garde, which is french for "craptasm."  they tried to mask the crappy sets and costumes by filming in black and white--a totally valid tactic, by the way--but it did not work in this case.  black and white is also not useful for hiding bad acting and writing.  the main selling point is that the vampire was genuinely creepy.

a girl walks home alone at night gets one cat of betrayal.  cursed item!

beginners

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1532503

i do not understand why this movie was called beginners, though i vaguely recall that at some point somebody trotted out a tired cliche about all of us being beginners.  i think a more natural name would have been parallels, but i guess that name was already taken, by a movie that came out about five years later. in this universe.

anyway, this story was told with so many parallels that i cannot even.  it seemed like each character was shown to be an echo of every other character, plus they told the story in a slightly-disjointed way that i think was intended to *parallel* the way ewan mcgregor's mother experienced life.  there were so many parallels that i was convinced for most of the movie the girl was going to end up with cancer.

beginners gets two dogs upon which to project your innermost thoughts. i liked that everybody put in a good effort, but it is too bad that the final result fell so very very flat, ie, parallel to the floor.