Choke Job

“Choke” (2008) starts out at a sex addict group session where we see Victor headed to the bathroom with another sex addict for sex. So much for therapy.

Victor played by Sam Rockwell is a sex addict and con artist who also works as a “historical interpreter” at a New England historical theme park.

Interwoven with scenes of Victor having sex with numerous women, Victor also visits his mother at a health care facility.

Angelica Huston plays Victor’s mother Ida who we learn through flashbacks was a con artist throughout her life. She now suffers from dementia and rarely recognizes her son on his visits.

Victor has a love/hate relationship with Ida similar to another Huston film, “The Grifters”.

Victor to help pay for his mother’s stay in the health center fakes choking at local restaurants. He does it to elicit sympathy from those who help him in order to have them send money to him.

The movie can best be described as a series of vignettes held together loosely by Victor’s antics. And for added levity, we have Victor’s pal Denny played by Brian William Hanke. Denny is also a sex addict whose pleasure is masturbating constantly.

The film attempts to delve into the relationship between Victor and his mother but it falls short.

There are a few funny scenes in the film. The funniest involves a computer date with a woman whose detailed instructions to Victor for a rape fantasy is hilarious. If the entire film had the humor of this scene, it would have been a home run.

“Choke” tries to be both funny and serious and unfortunately fails at both for the most part.

Even a scene on a plane as Victor gets his Mile High wings fails to keep the film from crash landing.

I give “Choke” two flip flops out of five on my rating scale.

Running time: 92 min.

Production:
A Fox Searchlight release of an ATO Pictures presentation in association with Wild Bunch of a Contrafilm/ATO production. Produced by Beau Flynn, Tripp Vinson, Johnathan Dorfman, Temple Fennell. Executive producers, Mike S. Ryan, Derrick Tseng, Gary Ventimiglia, Mary Vernieu. Directed by Clark Gregg. Screenplay, Gregg, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk.

Crew:
Camera (color, HD cam), Tim Orr; editor, Joe Klotz; music, Nathan Larson.

With:
Sam Rockwell as Victor
Angelica Huston as Ida
Brian William Henke as Denny
Kelly MacDonald as Paige
Clark Gregg as Lord High Charlie
Joel Grey as Phil

RIP Robin

(Note:This is the last Robin Williams film that I watched. He will be greatly missed.RIP Robin.)

If the truth be known, the character played by Robin Williams in the film “World’s Greatest Dad”(2009) is like many fathers. 

He plays a single father with unfulfilled dreams and a son who he dislikes but at the same time loves.

Williams is a high school poetry teacher who has written five books and numerous articles and has been rejected by publishers everytime.

His teenage son is a loner and sexual freak who hates his father and masturbates constantly. Williams does his best to be close to his son but is rejected by him constantly.

An event happens in their life that profoundly changes him and those around him.

The film is an interesting look into love, fame, and rejection. It once again shows Robin Williams as not only a great comedian but a serious actor.

I give the film three flips flops out of five on my rating scale. 

Back story:

The film was written and directed by “Bobcat” Goldthwait who is primarily known as a comedian. He is commonly known for his energetic stage personality, his dark, acerbic black comedy, and his gruff but high-pitched voice.

The film was shot in Seattle, Washington, largely at the former F.A. McDonald School in Wallingford.Seattle resident and former Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic has a wordless cameo while consoling Williams’ character at a newspaper stand (Goldthwait had previously opened for Nirvana and the cameo may be a reference to Cobain’s suicide). Bruce Hornsby appears as himself at the library dedication.

Running time: 99 min.

With:
Robin Williams, Alexie Gilmore, Daryl Sabara, Geoff Pierson, Henry Simmons, Mitzi McCall, Evan Martin, Jermaine Williams, Tony V CQ, Lorraine Nicholson, Zach Sanchez.

Lame Game

It is in the future after the earth was attacked by aliens called the Formics  which killed millions. The alien invasion was ended by hero Mazer Rockhampton who rammed his plane into an alien vessel stopping the rest of their fleet.

“Ender’s Game”(2013) is a futuristic film that in some ways resembles “Lord of the Flies”. Young boys and girls have been recruited over the course of fifty years to once again take on the aliens.

The young are selected because they are more creative and intuitive than older people.

And most of the film revolves around the conflicts and power struggles between these young people.

The central character is Ender Wiggin played by Asa Butterfield. He is a gifted adolescent who is thrown in with others in training to battle the aliens.

Harrison Ford plays Colonel Graff who is in charge of these youngsters being trained for battle. Ben Kingsley also has a cameo role as a Maori tattooed pilot.

The film attempts to make some moralistic judgments and there are vague references to the Holocaust and previous wars.

“Ender’s Game” has a ho hum surprise ending and then reverts to a conclusion that seeks to make its moralistic point.

The film however never held my interest despite the high tech CGI effects.

It reminded me of a giant video game wrapped around a psychological study of young people attempting to get along.

My recommendation is to ditch the movie and play a video game if that’s your pleasure.

I give “Ender’s Game” a disappointing two flip flops out of five on my rating scale.

Running time: 114 min.

Production:
A Summit Entertainment release and presentation in association with OddLot Entertainment of a Chartoff Prods., Taleswapper, OddLot Entertainment, K/O Paper Products, Digital Domain production.

With:
Harrison Ford, Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld, VIola Davis, Abigail Breslin, Ben Kingsley, Moises Arias, Aramis Knight, Suraj Parthasarathy, Khylin Rhambo, Jimmy Jax Pinchak, Conor Carroll, Nonso Anozie, Tony Mirrcandani.

Crew:
Directed, written by Gavin Hood, based on the novel by Orson Scott Card. Camera (color, widescreen), Donald M. McAlpine; editors, Zach Staenberg, Lee Smith; music, Steve Jablonski.

Dark Abyss

“The Canyons”(2013) starring Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen is an emotionless and amateurish film by director Paul Schrader.

The film opening presents the viewer with pictures of abandoned and demolished cinema houses and theaters. A visual metaphor for a decline in film?  If so, this film ably supports that thesis.

The first scene of the film introduces us to the major characters in the film. We see two couples seated in a restaurant talking about an upcoming movie and swinging.

James Deen as Christian is a movie producer and his long time companion Tara played by Lindsey Lohan are having dinner with his assistant and her boyfriend. The boyfriend has been cast in their low budget slasher movie.

The conversation is rambling and disjointed as Christian shows the group pictures on his phone of guys invited over for sexual pleasure. He freely discusses their sexual proclivities while at the same time demonstrating his arrogance and narcissism.

The movie doesn’t get any better as we learn Christian is a trust fund baby with too much time on his hands. He dabbles as a movie producer while inviting guys and couples to his house for sex.

There are some sex scenes in the film that prior to its distribution were hailed as ground breaking. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There is nudity and one dimly lit sex scene involving Deen and Lohan with a couple in a scene done many times.

The ultimate ending of the film is no real surprise. And for me,  I had no feelings for any of these characters and the actors who seemed to be merely hitting their marks. It’s largely an emotionless film with horrible dialogue and acting.

Lohan who is a co-producer for the movie and Deen are both unremarkable in their roles .Lohan may want to go back to such commercial successes as “Herbie Fully Loaded”.

I give “The Canyons” a grade of one flip flop out of five on my rating scale.

Running time: 95 min. 

Cast:
Lindsay Lohan as Tara
James Deen as Christian
Nolan Funk, Amanda Brooks, Tenille Houston, Gus Van Sant, Jarod Einsohn, Chris Zeischegg, Victor of Aquitaine, Jim Boeven, Phil Pavel, Lily Labeau, Thomas Trussel, Alex Ashbaugh, Chris Schellenger, Lauren Schacher, Diana Gitelman, Andres De La Fuente.

Crew
Directed by Paul Schrader. Screenplay, Bret Easton Ellis. Camera (color, HD, widescreen), John DeFazio; editor, Tim Silano; music, Brendan Canning; additional music, Me and John.

Even God Doesn’t Forgive This

You have to wonder what Ryan Gosling was thinking when he agreed to star in “Only God Forgives”(2013).

I would have loved to have heard the pitch from his agent and/or the director for why he should do this monstrosity. This movie is beyond awful.

These are the kind of films that can destroy a career. Gosling who I like a lot should be very careful.

You know the film is awful when it gets booed at the Cannes Film Festival. The film which takes place in Bangkok stars Gosling who owns a boxing club which is a front for his drug business of cocaine and heroin.

Gosling throughout the film appears to be comatose and Zombie like.

So what is the film about? We see Gosling’s older brother asking a brothel owner to find him a fourteen year old girl “to fuck”.

When the owner refuses, Gosling’s brother then asks the owner if he has a daughter.

Later on, we see the bloody remains of a sixteen year old prostitute who has been raped and murdered by the brother.

The brother is murdered by the father and the movie then takes the viewer on a bloody rampage of revenge by Gosling.

There is also a sadistic police detective who exacts his own brand of justice on Gosling’s accomplices.

Enter Gosling’s demented mother played by Kristin Scott Thomas from the United States who arrives to accept the body of her older son.

You learn all you need to know about her and the family when we witness a scene in a restaurant between Gosling, his mother, and his girlfriend.

Thomas calls the girlfriend a “cum dumpster” and laments the loss of her older son and his “huge cock”.

The characters in the film seem drugged and hardly show any emotion as they go on a killing spree that is capped by a sadistic orgy of violence by the police detective in one gruesome scene.

Gosling besides being comatose utters only seventeen lines throughout the film. I can only ask Gosling why?

Why do this monstrosity that will forever be a part of your acting resume? View at your own risk.

I give it a rating of one-half flip flop out of five because I like Gosling.

Running time: 90 min.

Cast:
Ryan Gosling, Kristin Scott Thomas, Vithaya Pansringarm, Rhatha Phongam, Gordon Brown, Tom Burke.

English, Thai dialogue

Crew:
Directed, written by Nicolas Winding Refn. Camera (color), Larry Smith; editor, Matthew Newman; music, Cliff Martinez.

Back Story:

Thought you might want to read what others had to say about “Only God Forgives”:

 “Gruesomely grotesque and pathologically pretentious, a diabolical horror called ‘Only God Forgives’ may not be the worst movie ever made, but it is unquestionably in the top five.” — Rex Reed, New York Observer

 “The wallpaper emotes more than Ryan Gosling does in ‘Only God Forgives Peter Debruge, Variety

“This is the worst, least, dumbest picture made by people of talent this year.” — Michael Philips, Chicago Tribune

Do As I Say

The premise of “Compliance” (2012) is ludicrous until you discover this is based on actual events.

Ann Dowd is excellent in her role as Sandra, the manager of a Chickwich fast food restaurant.

She receives a phone call from a man who says he is a detective investigating the theft of some money by one of her employees.

He says he has her district manager on another line who has told her to comply with the investigation.

What happens after the initial call seems preposterous and unbelievable. She subjects her young employee Becky played by Dreama Walker to a humiliating body search to discover the missing money.

The progession of this as it unfolds is well done and builds to its surprising conclusion.

The film tells us a lot about our willingness to submit to authority. Reports are that scores of people walked out of this film because I suspect they believed this was absurd.

I believe if we do a little introspection we can find that we as a society are willing to comply with authority or the state.

We see it in our everyday lives with abuses by the TSA and NSA and the willing compliance by the majority of Americans.

The film is worth watching and asking questions of ourselves and society as a whole.

I give “Compliance” four flip flops out of five on my rating scale.

Back Story:

This film is based on an actual 2004 event that took place at a McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Ky. Google it and you’ll find most of the same details.

For those who did not walk out of the movie, the viewer discovered at the end that 70 similar deceptions have occurred in the United States.

For those interested in studies regarding authority, I refer you to a famous 1960s studies by the behavioral scientist Stanley Milgram. 

He told subjects they were in control of a dial that administered electrical shocks to a person in the next room.

As he ordered them to turn the dial higher and higher, they obeyed, even though they could hear screams and pleading through the wall. Milgram, with his white laboratory coat, stethoscope and clipboard, represented authority, and a majority of his test subjects were willing to turn their dials even up into a red “danger” area.

Written and directed by Craig Zobel; director of photography, Adam Stone; edited by Jane Rizzo; music by Heather McIntosh. 

Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

WITH: Ann Dowd (Sandra), Dreama Walker (Becky), Pat Healy (Officer Daniels), Bill Camp (Van), Philip Ettinger (Kevin) and James McCaffrey (Detective Neals).

Nazi Heist

“Monuments Men”(2014) is a movie that would have been best made as a documentary.  The film directed by and starring George Clooney is based on general historical facts.

The film tells of a group of men commissioned by Franklin Roosevelt during World War II to identify and protect historical buildings and monuments from allied bombing.

The film focuses instead on the thousands of art works stolen and taken by the Nazis.

The film stars among others Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, and Bill Murray.  The film is disjointed and plods along waiting for moments in which Clooney gives short moral lessons to the audience.

This is a movie best put on the back shelf to be watched when nothing else is available.

I give it a generous two flip flops out of five on my rating scale.  For an historical account of the real Monuments Men,  here is a link: http://www.history.com/news/the-real-life-story-behind-the-monuments-men

Slaughter Cove

“The Cove” (2009) is a compelling, informative, and heartbreaking film about the capture and senseless slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan.

Some of the dolphins are captured and sold to such places as Sea World for $150,000. The rest are slaughtered and sold for meat.

And what is a macabre ritual every year more dolphins in Taiji are senselessly slaughtered,

Richard O’Barry once trained the dolphins for the popular television series Flipper. He had an epiphany when one of the dolphins he trained committed suicide in his arms.

As he says in the film, she simp!y chose not to breathe. For over twenty-five years, he has been an ardent activist seeking to free and save dolphins worldwide.

The film documents his visit along with other activists to attempt to film the slaughter of the dolphins in a hidden cove in Taiji, Japan.

Despite great physical risk, they are able to plant hidden cameras that record the fisherman brutally slaughtering thousands of dolphins.

Certain parts of the film will make most sick to their stomach.

I urge anyone who cares about this kind of inhumanity and cruelty to watch this extraordinary documentary film.

I give “The Cove” four flip flops out of five on my rating scale.

Skin Rash

Jonathan Glazer’s “Under The Skin” (2014) starring Scarlett Johansson is one-hundred and eight minutes long. That’s one-hundred and eight minutes of my life that I will never be able to get back. To say this film is bad is to denigrate bad films.

This film joins my special film genre category of “WTF” that includes such duds as “Upstream Color”, (2013) and “The Brown Bunny”(2004). By the way, the acronym WTF does not stand for “What The Film”.

I do like Scarlett Johansson and particularly liked her in Woody Allen’s “Match Point”(2005). However, I found her performance lacking in this film.

This science fiction film begins with a bizarre opening and then continues as we see a dead woman being stripped of her clothes by a nude Johansson who puts on her clothes.

I am not giving away much by saying Johansson is an alien who rides around in a truck in Glasgow picking up men. When men agree, she takes them to a house where the men walk into black ooze. There is only one brief scene that hints at the purpose of her picking up the men.

There is very little dialogue in the film as Johansson trolls the streets of Glasgow. The one interesting aspect of the film is that much of “Under the Skin” was shot covertly in the real world, with Johansson interacting in character with passers-by and the results captured on hidden cameras.

The film lacks any emotion as it builds to its unexciting climax. I would be interested in knowing how many people walked out of the theater well before the end of this flop. I give it one flip flop out of five on my rating scale.

Back Story

In the interest of fairness,  here are two contradictory reviews of “Under The Skin” from film critics.

Long time movie critic Rex Reed: “Don’t try to figure out anything that passes for a plot. The disturbing, solitary lady predator at the center of the action is programmed, like an iPod, without human feelings. The imagery she leaves behind is all there is to a film that is almost totally without dialogue.”

Film critic Matt Zoller Seitz says this: “I feel secure in saying that it’s going to end up on my list of the year’s best movies…. I do know that the movie’s sensibility is as distinctive as any I’ve seen. “Under the Skin” is hideously beautiful.”

Googling

OMG! Who in Hollywood came up with the “brilliant” idea that an infomercial about Google starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn would be great? “Wedding Crashers” it’s not.

“The Internship”(2013) is unfortunately a boring and predictable film written by Vaughn about two former watch salesmen who become interns at Google.

Wilson and Owen head to Google headquarters as interns hoping to compete for jobs there.

And in no surprise, they are the older guys competing with young computer geeks with Ivy league degrees. That’s the whole movie.

Well, not quite. Wilson manages to start up a romance with a Google exec. played by Rose Byrne while Vaughn goes awol selling motorized scooters to retirement home residents.

The film even manages some geriatric jokes involving fellatio and group sex. Is this a great film or what?

How could you not like a film with the scintillating line,  “I need you to ice my balls for me.” Classic.

And I will leave it to those who choose to watch this film to find out who wins the Google jobs.

As for me,  “The Internship” was a 404. I give it a one and a half flip flops out of five on my rating scale.