Tag Archives: Josh Lawson

Insomnia File #59: True Spirit (dir by Sarah Spillane)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable or Netflix? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

If you were having trouble getting to sleep last night (or this night, for that matter), you could have turned over to Netflix and passed the time watching True Spirit, a rather wholesome biopic from Australia.

Teagan Croft stars as Jessica Watson, who, at the age of 16, became the youngest person ever to sail solo, non-stop around the world.  For Jessica, it was not only the fulfilment of a childhood dream but it was also a true test of survival as, towards the end of her journey, she got trapped in a very violent storm and, at one point, her boat was actually 15 feet below the surface of the ocean.  For the nation of Australia, it was a moment of great pride despite the fact that many of the same people who celebrated Jessica’s accomplishment had earlier tried to prevent her from making the journey.  (Indeed, the film suggests that one reason why Jessica was in such a hurry to start her voyage was because the Queensland legislature was literally putting together a bill that, once passed, would have made it illegal for her to do so.)  The film begins with Jessica already in training for her voyage.  One mistake during a trial run leads to her boat nearly crashing into a tanker, a reminder that, as beautiful as the ocean may be, it can still be a dangerous place.  With the help of Ben Bryant (Cliff Curtis) and the support her parents (Anna Paquin and Josh Lawson), Jessica is determined to make her voyage.  She not only wants to set a world record but she also wants to prove that, even though she’s dyslexic, she can still accomplish anything that she sets her mind too.

There’s really nothing that surprising to be found in True Spirit.  Even if you didn’t already know the true story on which the film was based, you wouldn’t be surprised by how Jessica’s voyage goes.  But, at the same time, it’s a well-intentioned and almost achingly sincere film, one that celebrates a worthy accomplishment and which features a likable lead performance from Teagan Croft.  It’s a film that is determined to focus on the positive, though it certainly doesn’t shy away from the fact that nature can be frightening and unpredictable.  There’s nothing particularly edgy about True Spirit.  Despite a nicely executed storm scene, this isn’t All is Lost.  But it will hold your attention and it’ll probably leave you in a good mood.  It did for me!

Finally, I can’t complete this review without mentioning that Todd Lasance plays a rather obnoxious television journalist named Atherton.  Would it be too much to hope that his name was meant to be a reference to William Atherton, who played a similar reporter in the first two Die Hards?

Previous Insomnia Files:

  1. Story of Mankind
  2. Stag
  3. Love Is A Gun
  4. Nina Takes A Lover
  5. Black Ice
  6. Frogs For Snakes
  7. Fair Game
  8. From The Hip
  9. Born Killers
  10. Eye For An Eye
  11. Summer Catch
  12. Beyond the Law
  13. Spring Broke
  14. Promise
  15. George Wallace
  16. Kill The Messenger
  17. The Suburbans
  18. Only The Strong
  19. Great Expectations
  20. Casual Sex?
  21. Truth
  22. Insomina
  23. Death Do Us Part
  24. A Star is Born
  25. The Winning Season
  26. Rabbit Run
  27. Remember My Name
  28. The Arrangement
  29. Day of the Animals
  30. Still of The Night
  31. Arsenal
  32. Smooth Talk
  33. The Comedian
  34. The Minus Man
  35. Donnie Brasco
  36. Punchline
  37. Evita
  38. Six: The Mark Unleashed
  39. Disclosure
  40. The Spanish Prisoner
  41. Elektra
  42. Revenge
  43. Legend
  44. Cat Run
  45. The Pyramid
  46. Enter the Ninja
  47. Downhill
  48. Malice
  49. Mystery Date
  50. Zola
  51. Ira & Abby
  52. The Next Karate Kid
  53. A Nightmare on Drug Street
  54. Jud
  55. FTA
  56. Exterminators of the Year 3000
  57. Boris Karloff: The Man Behind The Monster
  58. The Haunting of Helen Walker

Film Review: Mortal Kombat (dir by Simon McQuoid)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

About ten minutes into Mortal Kombat, there’s a title card that reads, “Earthrealm is on the verge of catastrophe….”

As soon as I saw it, I shouted, “Oh my God, this is one of those films!”

And indeed, it is. Mortal Kombat is one of those films that has a lot of mythology that doesn’t quite make sense but which the audience is expected to blindly accept because it’s Mortal Kombat. The main idea here is that, of the last few Mortal Kombat tournaments, Earthworld has lost nine of them and, if it loses for a tenth time, the rules state that Outworld will then be able to conquer Earthworld. What I want to know is who agreed to those stupid rules in the first place? Were they drunk at the time? Who decided on the ten-victory arrangement? Does it have to be ten victories in a row or do they just have to win ten times? If Earthworld wins the next tournmant, does everything reset or are we now in a position where we have to win every single tournament until the end of time? The film tells us that Raiden, the God of the Thunder, is the protector of Earthworld. Can we get a new protector because Raiden obviously sucks at his job.

Anyway, with an opening like that, you would think that Mortal Kombat would be all about the tournament but we don’t actually get the tournament in this film. We get a lot of combat (or should I say, “kombat”) because the champions of Outworld keep trying to kill the champions of Earthworld before the tournament. That sounds like cheating to me but whatever. All of the fighters have a special power, though some powers are more impressive than others. Kano (played by Josh Lawson) may be loud and obnoxious but he eventually learns how to shoot a laser beam out of his eye, which seems pretty nice until you consider that Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) can do all sorts of cool stuff with fire and Raiden can turn his hat into a freaking buzzsaw. Jax (Mehcad Brooks) loses his arms early on but then he gets some replacement arms that he can use to tear people in half. “These motherfuckers really work,” Jax says after savagely killing an opponent. Excuse me, Jax, but that was someone’s child.

The main character is Cole Young (Lewis Tan), who is a washed-up MMA fighter who gets a chance to save the world. Cole is a boring characters and his powers kind of suck too. After watching the film, I checked and I discovered that Cole is apparently not a character in any of the Mortal Kombat video games so I guess he was created to give the audience someone to relate to. But I would think that the audience would want to relate to someone who can actually do spectacular things as opposed to just standing around and whining about how his powers are inadequate.

The film’s big attraction is watching Sub-Zero battle Scorpion at the end. I’ve never even played Mortal Kombat and even I know who Sub-Zero and Scorpion are. That’s how much they’ve become a part of pop culture. Sub-Zero (who is played by Joe Taslim) is actually portrayed fairly well in the film. Taslim moves like a confident killer and, visually, the film comes up with some striking images of his ice-covered existence. If you’re only watching for the big Scorpion/Sub-Zero fight, be aware that it doesn’t happen until the very end of the film and it’s a bit anti-climatic. But Scorpion does say, “Get over here!” He says it in English despite all of his other dialogue being in Japanese and he shouts it at a character who is also never heard to speak English but whatever. It’s Mortal Kombat. They might be able to get away with not showing the tournament but there’s no way they could have gotten away with not using the line.

Mortal Kombat is pretty forgettable. It gets bogged down in story when its should just be concentrating on combat and the fights themselves are pretty rudimentary. There’s a lot of blood but not much imagination. I’m going to write a movie called Moral Kombat, which will just be three hours of Benedictines and Jesuits arguing with each other. I think it’ll be a hit.

Dying Is Easy, Comedy is Hard: Freeloaders (dir by Dan Rosen)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Supposedly, the great comedic character actor Edmund Gwenn once said, “Dying is easy.  Comedy is hard.”

I have to agree because I’ve seen a lot of comedies in 2013.  A few of them — like This Is The End and The World’s End — have worked.  However, the majority of them have not only been bad but they’ve been so bad that they’ve invited audiences to wonder if comedy is a dying art form.  For every genuinely clever comedy, it seems like we’ve had to sit through a dozen Movie 43s.  These are movies where genuinely funny people get together and proceed to prove that they can be just as unfunny as the obnoxious cousin that everyone avoids at the family reunion.

Case in point: Freeloaders.

Even Movie 43 made me laugh once.  That’s one laugh more than I got out of Freeloaders.  Freeloaders is quite possibly the least funny comedy that I’ve ever seen.  Freeloaders almost feels like a social experiment, a test to see what would happen if an audience, expecting to see a silly and crude comedy, instead found themselves trapped in a laugh-repellent environment for 80 minutes.

Freeloaders tells the story of a group of stereotypes who have spent the last six years living in a mansion owned by “rock star” Adam Duritz.  It turns out that one of them is a childhood friend of Duritz’s and, since Duritz has been out touring for the past decade, he’s allowed his friends to occupy his home rent-free.  However, Duritz is getting married and planning on moving to New York City and, as a result, he’s selling his mansion.  The freeloaders are told that they have a week to get out of the mansion.  Well, since everyone in this film is basically a total and complete dumbass, nobody can figure out how to rent an apartment.  So, instead, they come up with some painfully wacky schemes to raise the money to buy the mansion themselves.  Standing in their way is Adam’s real estate agent who …. well, it’s never really all that clear why she’s standing in their way.  Presumably, it’s because there wouldn’t be a film unless she was standing in their way and then we would have all missed out on the chance to watch Freeloaders.

Why doesn’t Freeloaders work?

Well, let’s start by considering the fact that Adam Duritz plays himself.  I actually had to go on Wikipedia to remind myself who Adam Duritz is and I discovered that he’ was apparently a big deal back in the 90s and that he’s responsible for that painfully annoying cover of Big Yellow Taxi that was playing everywhere back in the summer of 2003.   Unfortunately, as both an actor and as a “fictional” character, Adam Duritz is so bland that his character serves mostly as a distraction.  The use of a real celebrity (if Adam Duritz can legitimately be called a celebrity) should have provided the filmmakers with a lot of comedic opportunity but that opportunity is pretty much wasted because Freeloaders seems to be obsessed with letting us know that Adam Duritz is a really great guy.

(That might be because Adam Duritz was one of the film’s producers.)

While I doubt that Adam Duritz has ever been a funny guy, Freeloaders is filled with other actors who have proven themselves to be funny in the past.  I, for one, was excited to see the name Nat Faxon in the opening credits because, while he might not be a household name, anyone who has ever seen Nat Faxon in a movie knows just how funny he can be.  However, both Mr. Faxon and the rest of cast struggle with the fact that they’re playing a collection of one-dimensional stereotypes.  Everyone has one overly defining, predictable trait to help us keep them straight.  There’s the nice guy, the stoner, the womanizer, the nice girl, the hoodlum, and the girl who will inspire some in the audience to say, “Is that Olivia Munn?,” largely because she is Olivia Munn.  Since they’re never allowed to become individual characters, all of their attempts at humor fall painfully flat.  It doesn’t help that director Dan Rosen directs without any hint of timing or originality.

Freeloaders was produced by Broken Lizard, the comedy troupe that’s developed a large cult following as the result of films like Super Troopers and Club Dread.  However, the members of Broken Lizard did not write or direct the film and they only appear in a rather brief cameo where they parody Boogie Nights.

The Boogie Nights parody is actually fairly clever but it also highlights this film’s biggest problem.  Freeloaders was originally filmed in 2009 and then sat on the shelf until it finally got a very limited theatrical release earlier this year.  (Perhaps that’s why one of the film’s characters worries about getting sent to Iraq if he joins the army.)  However, the script feels like it was written back in the 90s.  Everything from the premise of slacker stoners being forced to raise money to Adam Duritz being described as a world-famous star to Broken Lizard parodying a film that came out in 1997 serves to make this film feel as if it was made about 14 years too late.

I love a good comedy but, by that same regard, there’s nothing a i hate more than a really bad comedy.  However, as a film lover, I will always be willing to take chance on comedy.  Comedy may be hard but the rewards are great.

Sometimes, you end up with something really special.

Sometimes, you just end up with Freeloaders.

freeloaders