When David Lynch mined more weirdness from his iconic television show in 2017 for Twin Peaks: The Return, David Nevins, the CEO of Showtime, where the new season aired, described it as “pure heroin David Lynch.” If you prefer your outlandish comedy to have the same level of straight, uncut weirdness, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar won’t disappoint. Barb and Star is pure heroin Kristen Wiig.
Wiig wrote the film, about two lonely midwestern women who travel to Florida for a life-changing vacation, with Annie Mumolo. The two also co-wrote the smash-hit comedy Bridesmaids, and they star as the eponymous Barb and Star in the new film. While Bridesmaids is hilarious, and has its share of outrageous moments – Maya Rudolph defecating in the street in a wedding dress, for example – it’s fairly straightforward comedy territory. Wiig and Mumolo’s off-kilter sketch-comedy sensibilities are totally unleashed in Barb and Star.
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If you want to find the most polarizing film of 2017, look no further than Darren Aronofsky’s baroque experiment in psychological horror, mother! (which after this point, I’ll refer to simply as Mother). This is a movie that’s impact I suspect will diminish on a second viewing. Unlocking the secret at Mother’s core, which will probably come at a slightly different point for just about everyone seeing it, robs it of some of its power. Aronofsky has made pure allegory here, using an extreme dream-logic aesthetic that is nothing if not simultaneously hypnotic and terrifying.
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Sausage Party is about as shallow and lazy as comedy scripts come. The cleverest thing about the movie is the restricted red band trailer. It’s quite a shock to see that trailer for the first time. In the first twenty seconds, you’re led to believe the movie is another Pixar-like children’s animated movie. This time it’s food that is being anthropomorphized, and the adventure will begin when the heroes are chosen by humans at the grocery store for a life beyond the walls of the supermarket.
The (admittedly hilarious) shock comes when the woman who bought the groceries starts to peel a potato in front of the rest of the food. Like the humans in this sort of Pixar movie, she’s oblivious to the sentient nature of our heroes, and she can’t hear the horrific cries of the potato as he screams, “Jesus! Fuck!” After that initial shock, you realize this is one of the most sexually explicit, most foul-mouthed animated movie ever made, and that there’s not much else to Sausage Party.
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It’s times like these that I wonder if Roger Ebert ever faced the problem I’m having. Does that make it sound like I’m putting myself in the same ballpark as Roger Ebert? I’m not. I am to Roger Ebert what Caddyshack II is to Caddyshack. (As per review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the sequel currently stands at 4%(!) positive compared to the original’s 75% rating. So, yeah, that seems fair.) If anything, the higher rating isn’t high enough to properly gauge the late, great film critic’s skills. Still, did he ever review a remake of a movie he so beloved, and felt so close to, that he wasn’t sure if he could fairly assess the remake on its own merits? That was my worry going into the 2016 version of Ghostbusters.
If pop culture-obsessed children of the 1980s made a top ten list of movies that should be treated most like Lennie’s beloved rabbits in Of Mice and Men, the original Ghostbusters would be a heavy contender for number one. I turned five the summer it was released, and if you weren’t there, it’s impossible to overstate the absolute phenomenon that the movie was. A photo exists of my entire family wearing white shirts with the Ghostbusters logo emblazoned on the front, each of our names ironed onto the pocket. I vividly remember Ghostbusters being the very first VHS rental for my family’s freshly purchased VCR.
There’s a lot of history here is all I’m saying.
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It’s a great feeling when a filmmaker capable of cinematic magic comes in from wandering the creative desert. Ridley Scott has had a rough go of it the past five years. In that time, the director helmed the debacle Exodus: Gods and Kings, the critically lambasted The Counselor, the made-for-TV movie The Vatican, and the disappointing Robin Hood. The uneven Prometheus was also released amidst that flurry but, as a return to the world he created in his classic Alien, is entertaining despite suffocating under the weight of its own mythology. The Martian is a return to form for Scott, almost matching his best work. All that’s missing here is the heavy tone that comes out of exploring themes like what it means to be human, as he did in Blade Runner. But that’s like faulting the stars in the sky because of the view from a light-polluted city. Scott did exactly what The Martian’s source material demands. He made a wildly fun, acerbically funny, exciting ride of a movie.
The film is based on the bestselling book of the same name by first time novelist Andy Weir. The author self-published The Martian in serial format for free on his own website before it exploded in popularity via Amazon Kindle. It’s essentially Robinson Crusoe on Mars, albeit far more scientifically accurate. Weir did painstaking research while writing the novel to ensure as much technical exactitude as possible. The Martian tells the story of astronaut Mark Watney, a botanist and mechanical engineer, who becomes stranded on the fourth planet from the sun when his fellow crew members are forced to abort their mission because of a harrowing sandstorm. The crew believes Watney was killed during the escape, and the scientist’s attempts to survive and to figure out how to contact NASA with no working communications equipment make up the crux of the story.
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