Lukewarm
3
American Sniper
Hot Tub Time Machine 2 The primary charm of Hot Tub Time Machine was seeing John Cusack running around in the '80s again. That was the main reason for the film existing, and the main reason it was funny. The secondary charm was the antics of Rob Corddry as Lou, the suicidal heavy metal fan who had to deal with his bullied past. The film was the first to really highlight Corddry’s by talents, and he kicked some ass. Bob Grimm Now comes Hot Tub Time Machine 2, sans Cusack, with Corddry taking the lead. The bgrimm@ newsre view.c om movie sort of stinks, but I’m not putting all of the blame on Corddry. Movie sequels often prove to be unnecessary, and this one would be a king of the unnecessary sequels. First off, without Cusack, we’re missing the main reason for the franchise’s existence, the glue that held it all together. Cusack provided a nice anchor for the madness going on around him.
2
"Guys, let's use the time machine to go back before we made this movie."
1 Poor
2 Fair
3 Good
4
Corddry and his cohorts (Craig Robinson as Nick and Clark Duke as Jacob) just seem to be running around like mad in this movie, with no sense of purpose. The film starts in the present, with Lou living the rich life because he stole the idea for the internet and Nick living it up because he’s stealing everybody’s songs (most notably Lisa Loeb's). Lou winds up taking a shotgun to the dick and, as things turn out, this isn’t a very funny joke. Lou takes a rather bloody blast that will have the male portion of the audience doing stuff other than laughing. To save Lou’s life, Nick and Jacob jump into the hot tub again (after an awkward moment with a frazzled Chevy Chase), intent on traveling into the past to save Lou’s life.
Very Good
5 excellent
22 | RN&R |
FEBRUARY 26, 2015
They wind up accidentally going into the future where things make little sense. There’s a lot of nonsense about parallel universes and efforts to do clever twists on time travel. None of it works, and I found myself glazing over as the characters ran from one scenario to another, with Duke’s Jacob explaining the significance in the time travel continuum. Who cares about the time travel stuff? Go to whatever time you’re traveling to, and then give the audience funny jokes. The first Hot Tub movie didn’t satisfy sci-fi geeks. It satisfied '80s film comedy geeks, people who love Better Off Dead and Say Anything. Since there are no 20-years-in-the-future comedy geeks, I guess this movie really doesn’t have an audience. Instead of Cusack’s Adam, we get Adam’s son, Adam Jr., in the future, played by the ever reliable Adam Scott. Scott has the film’s best jokes, including a hallucinatory drug experience and an unfortunate game show situation. Still, he shows up deep into the movie in a film with no real sense of direction, so he’s fighting a losing battle. Corddry gets some laughs here and there, but his jokes are mostly desperate and repeated ad nauseam. The same can be said for Robinson, who gets laughs early on, but those laughs wear thin the 17th time he tells the same joke. Duke doesn’t handle the graduation from fourth banana to third banana with much aplomb. In truth, this film has no business being on the big screen. If you don’t have the dough to bring a major star back, but you still want to do a mediocre cash-in sequel, go ahead and make it with the secondary stars, but send the results straight to Netflix. This is not a major motion picture event. It’s a Thursday night “OK, What the Hell, I Got Nuthin’ to Do So I’ll Watch This Piece of Shit for a Laugh or Two” event. When the closing credits are 10 times funnier than anything in your movie, you have a serious problem. Hot Tub Time Machine 2 should mark the end of a franchise, and the last time somebody tries to sequelize a John Cusack movie without John Cusack. Ω
While Clint Eastwood’s film has plenty of problems, Bradley Cooper rises above the patchy melodrama and overly slick segments with his portrayal of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle. Kyle holds the American sniper record of 160 confirmed kills, and was killed by a veteran he was trying to mentor on a shooting range. The film works best when depicting Kyle at work in Iraq, constructing some very tense battle scenes and sequences as seen through Kyle’s riflescope. There’s a subplot involving an enemy sniper named Mustafa (Sammy Sheik) that feels like an entirely different movie. For some reason, Eastwood employs a showier style in the scenes involving Mustafa, which feel a bit false and artificial alongside the movie’s grittier moments. Saddled with the film’s worst dialogue, Sienna Miller battles hard in trying to make Kyle’s wife, Taya, an intriguing movie character. Cooper, who physically transformed himself for the role, does an excellent job of conveying the difficulties and stress that Kyle’s job entailed. He’s an actor forever taking risks and challenging himself, and he’s a big reason to see this movie.
1
Black or White
Kevin Costner plays a widower fighting for the custody of his black granddaughter (Jillian Estell) in this dopey, misguided and frequently offensive movie. Costner gets to be drunk for most of the movie, and it’s unintentionally funny. He and the rest of the cast are forced to play stereotypes in what adds up to a big pile of embarrassing nothing. It sometimes flirts with meaningfulness, but it degenerates into your typical courtroom drama where a bunch of jerks fight for the right to raise a precocious child. The whole thing feels dishonest, even straining for laughter in inappropriate ways. Costner stumbles around, Octavia Spencer shakes her head a lot, and we face palm ourselves for over two hours. By the time the Costner character’s dead wife’s ghost goes for a late night swim, the film has become a complete disaster. It’s surprising to me that anything like this makes it past direct-to-video and actually hits movie screens.
2
Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
Spike Lee partially funded his latest movie through Kickstarter, and the results are a mixed bag. While his film about a wealthy researcher (Stephen Tyrone Williams) becoming addicted to blood thanks to an ancient artifact contains some of his most startling imagery in many years, it’s a bit long in the tooth. Given the artistic freedom of a Kickstarter project, Lee doesn’t seem to check himself when it comes to pacing, resulting in a film that could benefit from 30 minutes or so being shaved off. Still, Williams is good as the secluded rich man who, after an associate (Elvis Nolasco) tries to kill him, finds himself resurrected and thirsting blood. He preys upon prostitutes, and eventually takes a wife (a strong Zaraah Abrahams) who soon joins him in blood lust. It’s not a traditional vampire movie, although it is quite bloody, featuring scenes of Williams and Abrahams lapping up victim blood on the floor like dogs. Bruce Hornsby provides a solid score, as do many unsigned artists that Lee selected for the project. Shot in just 16 days, this is Lee’s best work in years, even if it is still a bit of a failure. (Available for rent and purchase on iTunes, Amazon.com and Vimeo On Demand during its limited theatrical run.)
1
Fifty Shades of Grey
Subbing for her sick roommate, mousy college student with a porn name Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson), who is so innocent she doesn’t know what a butt plug is, goes to Seattle to interview billionaire business guy douchebag Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan). After the interview, Grey starts stalking Anastasia at the hardware store where she works, but that’s OK because he has billions of dollars and looks like the result of a night of passionate lovemaking between Ryan Phillippe and Eric Bana. His psychotic courtship eventually winds up with Anastasia becoming his prospective bondage slave. He offers her a formal contract that, if she signs, will allow him to be the dominant and her the submissive in a kinky sex relationship that will involve spanking, humiliation, nipple clips and eating toast in bed. The sex scenes eventually happen and, if anything, they provide some good, hearty laughs. While the screenplay doesn’t explain much, Grey’s sexual proclivities and needs to abuse his mate have something to do with his being a crack baby. So I guess we’re supposed to feel sorry for him when he’s torturing his
girlfriend because his mom was a stupid crack whore. Fair enough. When people aren’t having sex in this movie, which is quite often as things turn out, they talk in a somber, slow, irritatingly elongated manner. Everybody in this movie is a mopey, sodden sop. I love Seattle, but watching how residents behave and communicate in this movie makes me never want to visit the city again, even if the Mariners make the playoffs.
3
The Imitation Game
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, who helped win the war against the Nazis when he and others invented a machine capable of breaking the Enigma code. Morten Tyldum’s film, while a tad cumbersome at times, does do a good job of illustrating the impossible odds Turing and his team were up against in trying to decipher the code. Keira Knightley (who had a nice 2014 with this and Begin Again), Matthew Goode and Charles Dance contribute to a strong supporting cast. Cumberbatch portrays Turing as a disagreeable, unlikeable social outcast who just happened to play a huge part in saving the free world thanks to his talent for solving puzzles. The film also delves into some of the more controversial times in Turing’s life, and sometimes the order of things gets a little confusing. Cumberbatch keeps the whole thing afloat with a typically strong performance.
3
Paddington
This one got pushed out of 2014, which had me worried it was worthy of the junk heap. As things turn out, this mixed animation treatment of the character created by Michael Bond is actually cute. Ben Whishaw voices Paddington, a Peruvian bear who travels to England looking for a home. He winds up in the abode of the Browns, where he quickly takes to causing major damage, creating a little marital strife for Mr. and Mrs. Brown (a delightful Hugh Bonneville and Sally Hawkins). Nicole Kidman has a lot of fun as the film’s villain, determined to trap and stuff Paddington. The movie has plenty of British charm, a couple of really good jokes, and the likes of Kidman, Bonneville and Hawkins in top form. As for Paddington himself, he looks pretty good, a solid animated creation mixed in neatly with real actors and actresses.
3
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water
Things go bad for the sea creatures of Bikini Bottom when the hallowed secret formula for the Krabby Patty goes missing. The undersea home falls into a deep apocalypse with everybody wearing leather, and it’s up to SpongeBob and some of his cohorts to go above water and get the recipe back. The film is typical zany SpongeBob when it’s underwater, rendered in traditional animation (albeit 3-D). When they go above water, it’s a different story. Live action and CGI mix in a way that’s visually fun, but a little spastic at times. Still, there’s a spirit to the movie that’s always alive, and some great random humor (Bubbles the Future Dolphin is definitely a highlight). Antonio Banderas has some fun as a goofy pirate looking to start his own food truck using his pirate ship. SpongeBob fans won’t be disappointed, although they will probably enjoy the underwater scenes more than the flashier live action sequences.
4
Still Alice
Early-onset Alzheimer’s disease steals the mind of a very smart woman in this moving and heartbreaking film. Julianne Moore plays Alice, a professor at Columbia University who leads a very organized and regimented life of lectures, dinner parties and runs in the park. Alice starts forgetting words here and there, and then proceeds to lose her place in lectures. When she loses her way during a routine jog and can’t find her way home, she begins to realize that these aren’t normal memory loss problems for a 50-year-old woman. At first, Alice thinks she has a brain tumor. But some memory tests suggest to her neurologist (Stephen Kunken) that something else could be causing her difficulties. After a series of brain scans, the conclusion is made: Alice has Alzheimer’s. Moore gives us a deep, fully realized, multi-dimensional performance that never overdoes the sentiment or feels trite. Alice is a woman who prides herself on her encyclopedic knowledge for teaching, and exhibits nothing but grace as that knowledge is rapidly stripped away. Credit Moore for making every step of Alice’s tribulations seem honest and credible. A great supporting cast includes Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart and Kate Bosworth.
