As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, at 10 pm et and weather-permitting, I will be hosting #FridayNightFlix! The movie? 2001’s Zoolander!
It may be freezing outside but #FridayNightFlix will be keeping things hot with Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, and Will Ferrell!
If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #FridayNightFlix hashtag! I’ll be there tweeting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
Zoolander is available on Prime and Paramount! See you there!
Anyone who’s ever had a sister has encountered Barbie (and all of her costumed variants) at some point in their lives. Just as my sister played along with my Star Wars/ Transformers / Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles adventures, I played along with her and the Barbie Dream House and convertible, borrowing Kimber from her Jem set.
The teaser is cute, borrowing a bit from 2001: A Space Odyssey. We’re not sure what the story is, but the theme is definitely looking good.
Greta Gerwig (Little Women, Lady Bird) releases Barbie next year, starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Emma Mackey, Simu Liu, Michael Cera, Will Farrell, Alexandra Shipp, Nicola Coughlan, Kate McKinnon and Ariana Greenblatt.
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 at two in the morning last night, you could have turned over to HBO and watched Downhill, the remake of Force Majeure that was released in February.
Downhill tells the story of annoying family taking a ski vacation in Austria. Billie Stanton (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is a high-powered attorney who gets annoyed when things don’t go perfectly. Pete Stanton (Will Ferrell) is …. well, he’s Will Ferrell playing a typical Will Ferrell role. He’s a big. annoying dofus who spends all of his time on his phone and who is constantly telling the same long, boring, faux profound story about his dead father. They have two annoying sons and it’s pretty obvious from the start that neither Billie nor Pete is particularly happy with how their marriage or their lives have turned out. When Pete abandons his family during a minor avalanche, it leads to Billie realizing that Pete doesn’t really seem to be that much into his family or his marriage. But, since that was obvious from the start, it’s not really that big of a revelation for the audience.
Downhill is a frustrating film to watch, especially if you’ve seen Force Majeure.Downhill takes the basic storyline of Force Majeure and all of the issues that were raised by Force Majeure and then it explores them in the shallowest way possible. A lot of the trouble comes down to the fact that Will Ferrell is a good comedian but he’s an inconsistent dramatic actor. The film tries to work as a dramedy but Ferrell approaches each scene as if it were a sketch on Saturday Night Live. As a result, Downhill is less like Force Majeure and more like an episode of The Office where D’Angelo Vickers takes everyone skiing. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a little bit more grounded in reality but there’s really not much to her role, beyond being annoyed.
I did like the performance of Zach Woods, playing a pretentious friend of the couple and bragging about how he went skiing on shrooms. Woods has a talent for suggesting the oddness that often hides behind the most straight-laced of facades. And the scenes with Miranda Otto as a decadent libertine would have been funny if they didn’t feel as if they belonged in a totally different move. For the most part, though, Downhill fell flat.
Sometimes, it’s hard not to feel that the Lego movies are their own worst enemy.
I mean, they’re just so cute and fun and likable and cheerfully dorky that it’s easy to overlook just clever they often are. Everything is Awesome may have been a cute song but it was also a pitch perfect parody of mindless conformity. And yes, The Lego Batman Movie got a lot of laughs out of Will Arnett’s guttural growl but it was also the best Batman film since The Dark Knight and it also had a lot to say about how lonely it can be when you’re an extremely paranoid super hero. As for The Lego Ninjago Movie …. well, give me a minute and I’ll think of something. Uhmmmm …. it had that cute kitty! Woo hoo!
Beyond all that, all of the Lego movies — from the best to the less-than-the-best — celebrate imagination. They celebrate being an individual and the joy of creating your own world as opposed to just conforming to someone else’s rules. As much as I loved Chris Pratt as Emmett and Elizabeth Banks as Wyldstyle, the heart of the first Lego Movie is to be found in the scene where Will Ferrell essentially realizes that he’s being a jerk when he won’t let his son build what he wants to build.
That said, the main appeal of the Lego movies is that they’re incredibly cute. Just take The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part for instance. Especially when compared to the first Lego Movie and The Lego Batman Movie, this sequel has its flaws. Admittedly, some of those flaws are unavoidable. Just the fact that we start the movie knowing that everyone is in Will Ferrell’s house means that the sequel can’t take us as much by surprise as the first Lego Movie did. Though the film’s original directors, Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, wrote the script and contribute some genuinely witty dialogue, the sequel’s pacing occasionally seems a little bit off. There’s a few slow spots, the majority of which are really only noticeable when you compare the sequel to the flawlessly paced first film. And yet, in the end, it’s such a cute movie that it’s easy to overlook those flaws.
The sequel begins immediately where the first ended, with Will Ferrell decreeing that both his son and his daughter are now allowed to play with his Lego collection. Jump forward five years and this has basically led to chaos. The Lego Universe is now a Mad Max-style wasteland. Not surprisingly, both Wylstyle and Batman have really gotten into their new dystopian lifestyle. Meanwhile, Emmett remains just as blindly cheerful and optimistic as ever. He still feels that everything is awesome.
Or, at least Emmet feels that way until all of his friends are kidnapped to the Systar System, where Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi (Tiffany Haddish) wants to marry Batman. Determined to rescue his friends, Emmett decides to travel to the Systar System himself. Helping him out is Rex Dangervest, who seems like the type of adventurer that Emmett has always dreamed of becoming. Chris Pratt voices both Rex and Emmett and the film has a lot of fun playing with Pratt’s post-Guardians of the Galaxy stardom. Rex is not just an intergalactic explorer. No, he’s also a cowboy, a dinosaur trainer, an archaeologist, a first baseman, and — we’re told — a script doctor. (Those, of course, are references to Pratt’s roles in The Magnificent Seven, Jurassic World, and Moneyball. Interestingly enough, his work in Passengers goes unmentioned.) Rex pressures Emmett to become more cynical and ruthless in his efforts to save his friends and destroy the Systar System and Chris Pratt does a great job voicing both roles. Indeed, if nothing else, this film will always stand as a tribute to the incredible and unending charm of Chris Pratt.
If Lego Movie 2 never reaches the glorious heights of the first film, that’s because the element of surprise has been lost. There’s no moment in the sequel that’s as memorable as when a live action Will Ferrell suddenly showed up in the first movie. (In the second movie, Ferrell appears in a flashback and has a brief voice cameo as President Business. Maya Rudolph does show up as his wife but the sequel’s live action scenes just don’t have the emotional impact of the first film’s.) But, with all that in mind, it’s still an undeniably cute and entertaining movie. All of your old favorites back — everyone from Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill as Superman and Green Lantern to Alison Brie as Unikitty to Charlie Day as the astronaut. (Sadly, Liam Neeson did not return as the Good Cop/Bad Cop and his absence is felt.) The film is full of clever parodies, my favorite being the references to Mad Max: Fury Road. There’s more than enough witty lines, visual gags, and sweet moments that Lego Movie 2 will hold your interest and bring a smile to your face.
At the box office, Lego Movie 2 fell victim to the same Lego fatigue that took down the Lego Ninjago film and it did not become quite the phenomenon that the first movie did. Regardless, it’s still a worthy sequel. I wouldn’t quite say it’s awesome but it’s definitely a lot of fun.
Well, that and solve crimes and protect royalty. Holmes & Watson, which came out this previous Christmas, features Sherlock and John attempting to prevent Professor Moriarty (Ralph Fiennes) from assassinating Queen Victoria. Watson, being the proud Englishman that he is, is an obsessive fan of Queen Victoria. In fact, he’s such a fan that, upon meeting her, he insists that she pose for a “self-photography” with him and Holmes. Of course, cameras back then were a lot bigger and more bulkier than cameras today so Watson ends up bashing the Queen in the head. Watson and Holmes are terrified that they’ve killed the Queen. But then she wakes up. That’s the joke.
Holmes & Watson isn’t so much a parody of the original Sherlock Holmes stories as much as it’s a parody of the Guy Ritchie films that almost everyone has already forgotten about. Of course, it can be argued that the Guy Ritchie films were, themselves, parodies which makes Holmes & Watson a parody of a parody. (Now, we just need someone to parody Holmes & Watson so that the universe can collapse in on itself.) As a result, the film opens with a young Sherlock Holmes being tricked into kissing a donkey’s ass and then it progresses to an adult Holmes using his deductive powers to deduce that a man is a compulsive masturbator. The film never seems to be quite sure if its version of Holmes is meant to be an eccentric genius or an overrated bungler and Will Ferrell’s inconsistent performance doesn’t help matters. When Holmes starts to incorrectly suspect that Watson has betrayed him, we don’t know if we’re supposed to share Watson’s feeling of betrayal or if this is just another case of Holmes being a brilliant idiot. The film doesn’t seem to know either.
In the role of Watson, John C. Reilly is expected to do most of the dramatic heavy lifting. He gets several scenes in which he discusses how difficult it is to always be the sidekick. It’s a role that Reilly has played in several other films and perhaps that explains why he seems so bored in this movie. We’re all kind of used to Will Ferrell being an inconsistent performer but it’s far more depressing to see John C. Reilly sleepwalking through a film.
Anyway, Holmes & Watson is not a film that I normally would have wasted my time seeing but, with so many people proclaiming it to be not only the worst film of 2018 but the worst film of all time, I felt that I had a certain obligation to do so. After all, I’ll be posting my worst of and best of lists over this upcoming week and Holmes & Watson seemed like it would be a legitimate contender for one of those lists. Having now seen the film, I can say that it’s pretty bad. Unfortunately, unlike some other bad films, it’s also rather dull and forgettable. It’s certainly far more dull than any film featuring John C. Reilly, Ralph Fiennes, Rebecca Hall, Hugh Laurie, Steve Coogan, and Kelly MacDonald has any right to be. It’s a comedy where so many of the jokes fall flat that even the jokes that do work kind of suffer just by association. Usually, I would have laughed at the film’s Billy Zane cameo but I was still annoyed by the film’s unnecessary musical number so I merely chuckled.
If Holmes & Watson has a saving grace, it is that it’s just a silly comedy. It’s not really pompous enough to justify the claim that some have made that it’s the worst film of all time. It’s neither as smug as Vice nor as pretentious as Life Itself. In fact, it’s not even the worst comedy of the year. (That honor would belong to The Happytime Murders.) What Holmes & Watson is, is a huge disappointment. With all the talent involved, you would hope that the film would be a bit more memorable.
The biggest trailer that dropped this week was the trailer for Creed II, which Lisa shared on Wednesday. Here’s the best of the rest.
The X-Men franchise has seen so,e impressive highs (First Class, Days of Future Past) and some astounding lows (Last Stand, Apocalypse). Hopefully, the upcoming Dark Phoenix will be another high. Based on one of the comic’s best known storylines, Dark Phoenix would seem to have all the ingredients for success with the only question mark being first time director Simon Kinberg. Dark Phoenix will be released on February 14th.
Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly are together again as Holmes & Watson. Holmes & Watson will be released on November 9th, just in time to help you laugh away your Election Day blues.
Everyone’s favorite transformer gets a brand new trailer for his upcoming solo project, Bumblebee.Bumblebee will be released this Christmas.
For those who have still not gotten over the conclusion of the Harry Potter films, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald will be coming for your money on November 16th.
Finally, we have the trailer for Peter Jackson’s upcoming documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old. Jackson has taken footage that was actually shot during World War I, colorized it, and added sound, in order to let modern audiences experience, for themselves, the infamous War to End All Wars. They Shall Not Grow Old will be released on October 16th in the UK.
All good things must come to an end and the Winter Olympics have done just that. Tonight, here in the States, NBC will wrap up their coverage of the Games and they’ll broadcast the Closing Ceremonies. As NBC tends to do, they’ll pretend that they’re broadcasting live but the truth of the matter is that the Winter Games are over and now we’ll have to wait two years for the far-less exciting Summer Games.
I enjoyed the Winter Olympics this year. I was one of those obsessive people who would watch all of the recaps at one in the morning. Medal-wise, Norway dominated with a total of 39 medals. The United States came in fourth with only 23 medals but that’s still 22 more medals than Latvia got! (Just kidding, we love you, Latvia!) Overall, though, it was a pretty good Olympics.
That said, there were a few things missing.
For instance, no one attempted to recreate JFK’s affair with Marilyn Monroe on ice. I thought that was definitely a missed opportunity.
There weren’t any frantic chase scenes. No mascots were injured over the course of the Olympics. I guess we should be happy about that, all things considered. Still, it’s hard not to feel that this break with Olympic tradition left something lacking in the games.
Finally, none of the skating routines featured the risk of decapitation. Again, I guess this is a good thing. I mean, we really don’t want to see anyone lose their head, especially not when the games are being broadcast across the world. But again, it was hard not to feel that lack of the Iron Lotus was unfortunate.
In short, the Winter Olympics may have been good but they were nothing like the 2007 film, Blades of Glory.
Blades of Glory tells the story of two very different ice skaters. Jon Heder is Jimmy McElroy, who was adopted by a hyper-competitive, kinda creepy millionaire (William Fichtner) and practically raised to become a gold medalist. Will Ferrell is Chazz Michael Michaels, who is a hard-drinking, hard-living, sex addict. Jimmy is all about technical perfection. He’s a non-threatening, almost child-like celebrity, the type who has earned himself his own obsessive stalker (Nick Swardson). Chazz is, on the other hand, is a self-styled rock star, as well as being something of an idiot. In 2002, when they both tie for the gold, they get into an argument that 1) leads to a mascot getting set on fire, 2) brings shame upon the “World Winter Games,” and 3) leads to them getting banned from men’s single competition.
But, as Jimmy’s stalker figures out, that doesn’t mean that they can’t compete in pair skating! The former rivals may loathe each other but it’s either that or a future of skating in cheap ice shows and working in retail! Under the guidance of their burned-out coach (Craig T. Nelson), Jimmy and Chazz learn to work together. And what better way to win the gold than to do an extremely dangerous maneuver that could potentially lead to one of them losing his head?
However, not everyone is happy to see Chazz and Jimmy return to competition. The reigning champions — Straz and Fairchild Van Waldenberg (Amy Poehler and Will Arnett, who were still married when they played creepy siblings in this film) — have no intention of allowing themselves to be upstaged. And if that means using their younger sister (Jenna Fischer) to try to drive a wedge between Chazz and Jimmy, so be it…
So, obviously, Blades of Glory is not a serious look at the world of ice skating. The plot is really just an excuse to highlight the absurdity of putting people who clearly don’t belong there on the ice. This is another Will Ferrell comedy where the majority of the laughs come from the absolute dedication that Ferrell brings to playing an almost absurdly stupid human being. Ferrell has the ability to deliver even the most nonsensical of dialogue with total sincerity and conviction. In Blades of Glory, he’s well-matched by Jon Heder, who brings his own odd style to the role of Jimmy. If Ferrell is all about aggressive stupidity, Jon Heder is all about impish stupidity and it becomes surprisingly compelling to see whose stupidity will ultimately win it.
While it never quite reaches the highs of Anchorman, Blades of Glory is still a funny movie. It made me laugh and that’s always a good thing.
(Lisa recently discovered that she only has about 8 hours of space left on her DVR! It turns out that she’s been recording movies from July and she just hasn’t gotten around to watching and reviewing them yet. So, once again, Lisa is cleaning out her DVR! She is going to try to watch and review 52 movies by Wednesday, November 30th! Will she make it? Keep checking the site to find out!)
On October 14th, I recorded Zoolander 2 off of Epix.
A sequel to the 2001 cult hit, Zoolander 2 came out earlier this year and got absolutely terrible reviews and quickly vanished from theaters. Watching the film last night, I could understand why it got such terrible reviews. Zoolander 2 is not only a terrible movie but it’s also a rather bland one. Somehow, the blandness is even more offensive than the badness.
Zoolander 2 opens with Justin Bieber getting assassinated and Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) being forced to come out of retirement and discover why pop stars are being targeted. And, of course, Zoolander can’t do it without the help of Hansel (Owen Wilson)! Penelope Cruz is in the film as well, playing Zoolander’s handler and essentially being wasted in a role that could have been played by anyone.
Oh! And Will Ferrell returns as well. Ferrell gives a performance that essentially shouts out to the world, “Fuck you, I’m Will Ferrell and no one is going to tell Will Ferrell to tone his shit down!”
Actually, I think everyone in the world is in Zoolander 2. This is one of those films that is full of cameos from people who probably thought a silly comedy would be good for their image. For instance, there’s a huge number of journalists who show up playing themselves. Matt Lauer shows up and I get the feeling that we’re supposed to be happy about that. There was a reason why people cheered when the sharks ate him in Sharknado 3.
You know who else shows up as himself? Billy Zane! And Billy Zane has exactly the right type of attitude for a film like this. He shows up and he mocks the whole enterprise by giving the Billy Zaniest performance of Billy Zane’s career. For that matter, Kiefer Sutherland also shows up as himself. I’m not really sure what Kiefer was doing in the film but he makes sure to deliver all of his lines in that sexy growl of his. Kiefer knows what we want to hear.
You may notice that I’m not talking about the plot of Zoolander 2. That’s largely because I couldn’t follow the plot. This is an incredibly complicated film but it’s not complicated in a funny way. Instead, it’s complicated in a way that suggests that the film was made up on the spot. It’s as if the cast said, “We’re all funny! Just turn on the camera and we’ll make it work!”
The problem with Zoolander 2 is obvious. The first film pretty much exhausted the comic possibilities of making a spy film about shallow and stupid models. Don’t get me wrong — the first film did a good job but it’s not like it left any material untapped. But I would ask you to indulge me as I imagine an alternate reality.
Consider this: Terrence Malick was reportedly a huge fun of Zoolander.
Let’s take just a minute to imagine a world in which Ben Stiller asked Terrence Malick to write and direct Zoolander 2. And let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that Malick agreed!
Just think about it — 4 hours of Zoolander and Hansel staring up at the sky and thinking about nature. “What is this thing that causes the heart of man to beat?” Zoolander asks. “Are we nature or has nature become us?” Hansel replies.
Through the Shattered Lens 