21
o compound the shitty obviousness of the plot is the incredibly lame characters are. Besides Sturgess being as bland and doughy as the bread at Subway, the rest of the blackjack team is nondescript.
15 Minutes
This is a bad, expensive movie. Get off your high-fucking horse, Hollywood. If you want to make a message, have some fucking clue what it is, and some conviction that is stronger than your slutty desire for cash.
13 Ghosts
The plot drags itself along like a man who just had his legs bitten off by sharks. It flops, stumbles and leaves a trail of blood to the spot where it finally dies and all I can think is, why didn’t someone put it out of its misery quicker?
Waking Life
It’s worth seeing, it’s fan-fucking-tastic to look at. But it’s a God damn shame Linklater didn’t have enough imagination to see the ideas come to life.
Velvet Buzzsaw
Velvet Buzzsaw is the sort of movie first-year art students might really, really love, because they believe Gilroy. They might quote bad lines from it as though they were now in on the secrets too. When they grow up, though, they’ll realize how stupid they sounded, and how little knowledge they had.
Upgrade
Upgrade is like an Ayn Rand convention, where everyone thinks they’re much more clever than they really are. On an almost scene by scene basis this movie undercuts its own logic in a rush to get to its big, dumb-ass obvious climax.
Under the Silver Lake
What was it that guy who used to host America’s Top 40 used to say? “Keep reaching for the stars.” People forget, though, that he also urged caution. I believe the entire message was, “Keep reaching for the stars, but don’t be a fucking moron about it.”
Uncut Gems
I don’t understand why anyone would make movies like a bad parent feeding babies sawdust mixed with sugar: A shrug, another spoonful and reasoning, “They keep eating it.”
Tully
Cody wrote and Reitman directed Juno, Young Adult and now Tully. In every one of them, they substitute a sense of real adulthood with a take that feels like an ambitious high school class kid making a musical version of Dicken’s Bleak House.
Tread
Tread is about the perception of heroism. It’s a uniquely Colorado story maybe only playing in theaters around here. It’s a documentary about Marv Heemeyer, the guy who built an armored bulldozer in secret and then plowed through the mountain town of Granby because he thought they town elders were treating him unfairly.