The big giant crazy movie of the week is The Fate of the Furious, but you should really consider checking out Gifted, and maybe even Their Finest. Gifted is one of Adam’s favorite movies of the year so far. Andy mentions his mom twice on the podcast, once because she might like the BBC costume drama of Their Finest. How Fate of the Furious might have finally fixed Andy.
Bored as Hell Podcast - This week's episode
Three sequels all of which tease next chapters in The Lego Batman Movie, John Wick: Chapter Two, and Fifty Shades Darker. The first two of those are great, the last is terrible, but if you’re reading a review of it you don’t care anyway. 50 Shades is not sexy terrible fanfic, abuse masquerading as kink. John Wick delivers on expanding the world of the original and a rare sequel as good as the original. Lego Batman is an amazing homage to previous Batmans and boasts the most amazing supporting cast ever. Why can’t the rest of the Warner Brothers comic movies be this good?
Bored as Hell Podcast - This week's episode
We’re once again joined by Brooke Heym as we review London Has Fallen, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and Zootopia.
Bored as Hell Podcast - This week's episode
London Has Fallen is a sequel/lazy rehash of the first movie. The production delays and “creative differences.” Laughable script. Ridiculous premise. “Time of the month” jokes. A dick flick, not a chick flick. But stuff blows up, and there’s Gerard Butler, so there’s that. Brooke gives it 2/10.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is Tina Fey producing an adaptation of a memoir of a television journalist about her time on Afghanistan from 2003-2007. It’s not a comedy– it’s real life, with real humor interjected to lighten the mood. Like M*A*S*H. Lots of talk about Afghanistan. Tina Fey delivers an amazing performance that’s both emotional and funny. Andy and Brooke both give it 7/10.
Zootopia is possibly the best movie of the year so far. A cute story about a bunny who wants to become a cop becomes “48 Hours” when she gets paired with a streetwise fox. Sooooooo much deep meaning in this movie about prejudice, bullying, etc, but maybe too much? Andy’s pancake analogy– Adam prefers waffles. Trump. Hillary. Not quite as good or straightforward as Wreck-It Ralph, but almost. Andy gives it 8.5/10, Brooke gives it 9/10 and says Andy is wrong about Tangled.
Oscars wrap-up! We were mostly right! Except that Best Picture thing. Andy’s idea about Spotlight– we need a new Oscar category for acting or “Best Ensemble” and one for “Best Special Performance in Motion Capture, Voice Over or Animation” and how it would be good for diversifying the Oscar nominees and winners.
Next week! Cloverfield sequel and Andy will be at SXSW!
We review Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, Black Mass, and Everest. Also, we apologize in advance we will skip next week because of Salt Lake Comic Con and lack of new releases being screened. We’ll be back Monday, October 5 to start a month of Halloween-themed episodes!
Bored as Hell Podcast - This week's episode
Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials picks up where the last one abruptly ends. Tried so hard to be the epic, dark, character-driven second episode in the trilogy but fails. It’s overstuffed. But at least it’s a vast improvement on the first movie. Andy gave it 3.5/10.
Black Mass tells the story of Whitey Bolger’s rise as the biggest crimelord in America. This is Johnny Depp’s movie. Amazing performances, but maybe tries to humanize him too much. This could’ve lost 20 minutes and been great. 8/10
Everest – the Utah pronunciation of the word “mountain.” It’s a disaster/survival movie, except real. Amazing cast. Kiwi accents. Andy wishes it was more like Jon Krakauer’s book, gave it 5/10. Adam loved it, despite a first half that needed to pick up the pace, gave it 7/10.
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Vacation are both worth your precious time and movie dollars, but Adam liked both just slightly more than Andy.
Bored as Hell Podcast - This week's episode
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation – This is the 5th movie in the series and by no means the worst. Maybe not as good as some of the other movies. Amazing stunts. Tom Cruise — still got it. His co-stars are great, too, especially Simon Pegg. The villain is weak, though. Still, go see it on the biggest screen you can. Adam gives it 8/10 (his full review here) and Andy gives it 7/10.
Vacation – a sort of reboot, sort of sequel. Rusty’s all growed up. Let’s go to Wally World… and hijinks ensue. “Do Anything Debbie.” Special spirit son keeps playing Seals and Croft. Cameos, cameos, cameos! Chevy Chase is the worst. These guys are writing the next Spider-Man movie. Adam gave it 8/10, Andy gave it a 7/10 (his full review here).
Songs in this episode:
This week we review Magic Mike XXL (bros), Terminator: Genisys (robos), and then discuss our favorite guilty pleasures.
Bored as Hell Podcast - This week's episode
Featuring guest host Brooke Heym of Two Feminist Moms. You should listen to their podcast! And go to twofeministmoms.com
Magic Mike XXL – Andy says it’s a pale imitation of the original. Anyone who wants to see this movie should just go watch Magic Mike instead. 4/10
Best review ever from Brooke: “Well, that’s worth the $1 rental from Redbox…” A movie about male strippers with only 4 dance scenes in it?!!? 3/10
Terminator: Genisys –
This thing gets totally retconned. Adam likes it and how it resets the timeline– like X-Men: Days of Future Past. 8/10
This made Andy’s head hurt. He’s too close to the other movies and they didn’t explain well how they were making time travel and alternate timelines worked. They missed out on exploring the coolest parts of the movie an the best part of what makes a Terminator movie. 6.5/10
Brooke’s never seen a Terminator movie, so it was ok, but she was missing something. She saw a lot of missed opportunity, especially with Sarah Connor. Did not like the ending. 6/10
Guilty pleasures!!!
Brooke: Blue Crush. It’s like Magic Mike with surfer girls and surfer guys.
Andy: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
It’s like the Muppet Movie in reverse. Don’t tell my wife about Eliza Dushku in a skintight leather catsuit. Mark Hammil!
Adam: Orgazmo Trey Parker and Matt Stone from South Park made a movie about a Mormon missionary who accidentally becomes a porn star. We could watch every day and laugh at it. It’s rated NC-17 for dialogue, but there is almost zero female nudity. Lot of dudes’ butts, though.
This episode include music from:
We review Jurassic World and share memories about Christopher Lee.
Bored as Hell Podcast - This week's episode
Jurassic World – It has its flaws, but we both loved it. Buy the premise, but the bit. Lots of easter eggs and nods to the first film. Maybe too many nods– and outright aping shots and score from the first one. Christ Pratt is awesome. Least annoying kids. Wasted D’Onofrio. Adam gives it 7/10, Andy gives it 7.5/10. For more and to read us arguing with Bryan Young, read the roundtable review over at Big Shiny Robot.
In Memoriam: Christopher Lee – Yes Saruman and Dooku, but so much more. Andy talks The Man with the Golden Gun. Lee’s Nazi-hunting days. Tolkien expert and stabbing expert. Adam talks heavy metal and Christmas albums.
Music in this week’s episode taken from the Jurassic Park score by John Williams, the Fellowship of the Ring score by Howard Shore, and “The Bloody Verdict of Verden” from Christopher Lee’s metal rock opera about Charlemagne.
What is “Bored as Hell”? A podcast that will keep you from being bored as hell at the movies.
Bored as Hell Podcast - This week's episode
Our philosophy on movie ratings: a 1-10 scale that is essentially a Bell Curve: most movies are going to be in the 3-7 range, and 1s and 10s are truly rare and equally awful as they are spectacular. But taking your entire family to the movies and buying popcorn can be as expensive as movie ticket, so you want to choose wisely.
Tomorrowland – It’s good to go into this movie relatively blind of what it’s all about. Know that it’s a slower burn, more thinky movie. But it’s still good for kids– depending on your kids. The acting is great: Clooney and Britt Robertson are great, but the breakout star is Raffi Cassidy.
The third act has some problems, and the ending is a little preachy. Andy likes the preachiness.
8/10
Tron 3 gets cancelled. Why Adam’s mom hates Tron. The dumbing down of sci-fi.
Hugh Laurie and George Clooney on Graham Norton this week was great. Next week Chris Pratt!
Mad Max: Fury Road – the movie that shouldn’t have been made. Max is basically a feral creature, captured by Immortan Joe’s cult of War Boys and used as a bloodbag for Nux, played by Nicholas Hoult. When Imperator Furiousa (Charlize Theron) takes off in her war rig with Immortan Joe’s harem, they go after her with all the fury they can muster. And then you have a 2 hour car chase.
Remember when Warner Bros was going to let George Miller make a Justice League movie? Andy thinks this is not only the best movie of the year, but the best of the last several years– the best since the first Avengers. Tiny moments and glances mean so much. You can dissect so much of this movie. The War Boys’ religion and nerding out about it for an hour and a half.
This is the opposite side of the same coin of Tomorrowland. Both directors present visions of the future and we can choose our destiny. Is the movie about feminism? Sure, but it’s also about a ton of other issues and layered. Nux probably has the best character arc of the movie.
Go see this a bunch of times.
10/10
What we’re excited about, what we’re concerned about for the rest of the year.
Recommendations:
Andy: Get a Hulu Plus subscription. Catch up on tv you missed, plus Hulu is adding Seinfeld on June 24th. They also have every Criteron movie available to stream.
Adam: Criterion Collection dvds/blu-rays at Costco. Why Criterion is great. This month’s Criterions at Costco is Seven Samurai and Fantastic Mr. Fox.
MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (10 out of 10) – Directed by George Miller; Written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, and Nick Lathouris; Starring: Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Josh Helman, Nathan Jones, Zoë Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, Courtney Eaton, John Howard, Richard Carter; Rated R for intense sequences of violence throughout, and for disturbing images, in wide release May 15, 2015.
Originally posted on BigShinyRobot.com by Andy.
Yes. Mad Max: Fury Road is just as good, if not better, than you’ve heard. Whether you’re looking for a ridiculous spectacle of epic proportions of an action movie, or a thoughtful (but incredibly intense) musing on ecology, feminism, religion, resource allocation, you will find it here. And stuff blows up. A lot of stuff blows up.
The plot is fairly simple: Max (Tom Hardy) finds himself alone, going crazy, but now captured by a tribe ruled over by Immortan Joe, who is treated like a demi-god by his people because he controls the scarcest resource of all: water. Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) is sent out on a resupply mission to trade water for gasoline and bullets, but it seems she has her own agenda. Instead, she has set free Immortan Joe’s harem/sex slaves (let’s be real, that’s what they are!) and is off in search of “the Green Place,” which she believes she can find.
Max is taken along as the “bloodbag” for one of Joe’s WarBoys, who use his universal donor type O negative blood (and considerable strength and resilience) to transfuse into themselves to amp up for battle (in much the same way endurance cyclists would supposedly bank their own blood and then get a transfusion to increase the red blood cell count and replenish nutrients). Also amping them up for battle? a giant truck with six drummers and a heavy metal guitar player who actually provide the score for most of the intense battles. Oh, and, in case you missed it in the trailer? The guitar shoots fire.
Max finds himself between Joe’s Warboys and Furiosa and generally wants no part in this dispute, but just wants to escape and be left alone.
And hijinks ensue. And by hijinks, I mean that’s all in the first 15 minutes of the film. The rest of it is just one giant car chase scene for the rest of the movie.
George Miller has not only revitalized his Mad Max franchise, but in so doing has remolded what our expectations should be for action films. It bookends well with the two other best films (so far) of 2015, Kingsman: The Secret Service and Ex Machina. Kingsman was fun and a great spectacle, but not much in the way of being thinky. Ex Machina had all the thinks and all the feels. Somehow Miller manages to offer both in a film I can’t wait to see again, or, even moreso, get on Blu Ray and watch repeatedly, rewinding sequences and going frame by frame to study what is truly the apotheosis of everything this director has done before.
If there is any downside of Fury Road, it is that it moves so fast that you will miss things. It has an intensity that films like Furious 7 should be jealous of, and whips the audience along at a breakneck speed. Let me create a metaphor out of the film’s content itself:
In the film, Theron’s character Furiosa drives a war rig: a giant tanker truck outfitted with weapons and defensive measures.
The film moves like this giant war rig– with a huge intensity and inertia that once it is going it is not going to stop for anything or anyone. There are dozens of tiny moments — glances between characters, crumbs of information and exposition and world-building — that if you blink you might miss them because the movie is going so fast. Characters are often jumping on and off the rig, finding places to grab on and stage some of the more daring fights. In this same way, there’s multiple places for the audience to find purchase and get onto the movie. But it is moving so fast it expects you to keep up and keep holding on.
Also like the war rig, Furiosa is the only one who can drive it. In the hands of a less skilled director who didn’t intimately know what he was doing, this could be a huge mess. But Miller, like Furiosa, has a plan, and knows exactly how to handle this gargantuan mess cobbled together from pieces of lesser cars and trucks.
There’s been a lot said about whether or not this is a “feminist” movie or not. It undoubtedly is. Theron’s Furiosa is the main character of this film, and is far more developed than even Max, who mostly plays the brooding sidekick role (and is also the surrogate for the audience, as he has to be explained to exactly what’s going on). Furiosa kicks more ass than most male action stars do in their films. And since she is literally liberating women from sex slavery, confronting Joe that women are not property, and fighting a literal oppressive patriarchy, it’s hard not to say this isn’t not just a feminist film, but perhaps THE feminist action movie. (Move over, Aliens!)
But to reduce it to just being feminist belies a much greater complexity. Immortan Joe is not just a stand-in for patriarchy, but also for the worst aspects of capitalism, religion, and all other manner of great evils. (Not to say capitalism and religion are evils– just that they can be certainly used for evil purposes.) There is also a strong undercurrent message about ecology and how we’re destroying the planet. Or you can completely shut your brain off and watch this as just a plain action movie. People with agendas are certainly welcome to claim this movie as their own, but much like the cave in Empire Strikes Back, what you see therein is determined by what you take with you.
Seriously, anyone threatening to boycott this movie because they don’t like some perceived agenda is a fool of the highest magnitude. You’re simply denying yourself one of the greatest treats of the year, and probably encouraging your opposing side to want to go see it more. Everyone just calm yourselves down and go enjoy one of the best movies of the year? No, make that one of the best movies of the decade. MRAs and SJWs should go to the theater together, enjoy a tub of popped corn and a tasty beverage, and just watch stuff get blown up real cool.
10 out of 10.
Yes. 10 out of 10. It’s just that good.
Furious 7 (8 out of 10); Directed by James Wan; Starring Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, Jason Statham, Dwayne Johnson and Kurt Russell; Written by Chris Morgan; Rated PG-13 for prolonged frenetic sequences of violence, action and mayhem, suggestive content and brief strong language; 140 minutes; In wide release on April 3, 2015.
Originally posted at BigShinyRobot.com by Adam.
The Fast and Furious franchise hasn’t made a name for itself for its deep acting, storytelling or filmmaking. Fans go in expecting fast cars, beautiful, scantily clad people and lots of ‘splosions, and most of the series has provided that in spades. Some misfires in the middle gave way to a decent fifth and sixth outing, but this final film has trumped them all and is easily the best in the series. Not only fun and frantic, it also pays tribute to the late Paul Walker and delivers a satisfying and touching experience.
Due to the twisted continuity of the films — four, five and six are prequels — Furious 7 takes place after the events of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift with ex-MI6 assassin Ian Shaw (Jason Statham) on a mission to hunt down Dom (Vin Diesel) and the rest of his crew in revenge for their nearly killing his little brother. Brian (Paul Walker) is happy yet not content with his new life and family and agrees to come out of retirement to help Dom and the crew put the Shaw issue to rest once and for all. Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) and his shadowy government organization rescue them and promise to do everything in their power to stop Shaw if Dom and Brian will do them a favor — rescue a brilliant hacker and her tracking program from a notorious terrorist. The crew races across the globe in an attempt to guarantee her safety and also stay one step ahead of the madman out for their blood. Enemies join forces and force an epic showdown in the streets of L.A. where fast cars and fancy driving may not be enough to help Dom and his family survive.
While this isn’t high art by any means, Furious 7 is definitely one of the more entertaining movies to come along in awhile. In fact, the only other recent one I can think of that I’ve enjoyed this much was Kingsman. Yes, it’s incredibly stupid and has no idea how gravity or the laws of physics work, but the whole experience of watching cars literally fly through the air and the streets is exhilarating. Newcomer James Wan has an incredible eye for shooting action and doesn’t disappoint anywhere. Whether it’s jumping cars in between and through luxury high rises in Abu Dhabi to having them literally fall from the sky, he never lets up or fails to eke out the most excitement possible in each shot.
The same can’t quite be said of the script which, while not horrible, is definitely the weakest point in the film. I wasn’t expecting The Godfather, but the rewrites and edits are evident throughout as characters react or respond to things that were never mentioned or said anywhere else. It’s also too long, clocking in at nearly two and a half hours. It’s entertaining throughout, but there are a few too many moments where we are waiting for everyone to stop talking about family and get to the next action set piece.
The best thing here is the thoughtful and poignant respect they paid to Paul Walker. Without spoiling anything, I can say that they give his character a proper send off that was befitting of his role in all seven of the films. The wonderful montage showing some of the his well-known moments in the series combined with a touching voice over by Dom will no doubt leave moviegoers a bit misty-eyed as they exit the theater.
Too many action movies take themselves far too seriously or end up being brain dead, but Furious 7 never forgets what it is and what it wants to do. It delivers a surprisingly well-done and fun thrill ride that also squeezes in a poignant ending. Film snobs will absolutely hate it, but if anyone is willing to sit down and just enjoy the spectacle for what it is, they’ll have a good time. It’s big, dumb fun with heart … and nitrous.
