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Reviews
Candy Cane Lane (2023)
Major disappointment. Awful would be too kind.
Merry Christmas everyone! Welcome to our appallingly trite and vapidly shallow community of inexplicably wealthy people engaged in a pointless but over-hyped annual Christmas light show.
Predictable. Repetitive. Paralyzingly dull. Eddie Murphy was funny once upon a time. Tracee Ellis Ross needs to commited for mental health evaluation based on the make up choices alone. Nick Offerman, Chris Redd, and David Allen Grier are just collecting a paycheck for minimal effort. At less than two hours in length, it inspires the viewer to claw their own eyes out less than half way in.
This is an interminable steaming turd of a movie. Avoid at all costs. If you dare, Santa will judge you. 🎅💩😱
#LawlessReviews.
Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011)
Worth a punch in the throat.
"Jeff, Who Lives at Home".
A dust-bin find (2011) of me. Jason Segel, Ed Helms, Susan Sarandon, and a host of other fun supporting actors.
My spouse thought it was "stupid". Right there, that's a big check in the plus column.
Admittedly, it is a bit "comédie de l'absurde"reminiscent of "After Hours" (1985) or "Something Wild" (1986). I liked it. It's far from a "high speed romp" but there are more than enough twists, turns, jerks, and shocks to hold the viewer's interest.
At the closing credits, my spouse threatened to "punch me in the throat" if I ever subjected her to similar entertainment in the future.
So I got that goin' for me, which is nice. 😅
Your Place or Mine (2023)
All the elements. None of the heart.
Take all of the best moments from "The Holiday", "Dutch", "You've Got Mail", " About a Boy", and "My Best Friend's Wedding", then combine them all together into one movie... then throw that movie into the dumpster and gather up all the irrelevant, passionless, awkward bits and bobs left over and you'll have "Your Place or Mine", now showing on NetFlix.
It's not the worst thing I'be ever seen. I mean, pretty people, cavorting in pretty places, while drinking coffee and exchanging clever barbs. (More or less a two hour episode of "Friends") But this is just sadly soulless and unbelievable. Ashton Kutcher has more chemistry with his rental car than he has with Reese Witherspoon.
By the end, I was actually rooting for a different ending than this overly predictable train wreck.
Can't recommend this one.
Overboard (2018)
Simply dreadful
Consider this a public service.
The new Overboard remake is simply dreadful. Where the original was light and funny and endlessly quotable, the remake is flat, depressing, and basically comes off as a "Spanish 101 lesson for Gringos".
Anna Faris generally strikes me as fairly funny in her other work but even she can't right this sinking ship. Eugenio Derbez captures none of Goldie Hawn's hilarious, over-the-top pretentiousness, Swoosie Kurtz is an abomination in the insane mother role so superbly executed by Katherine Helmond in the original. John Hannah is his usual charming self as the beleaguered "Andrew" but he's given almost nothing to work with, whereas Roddy McDowell ( both acting and exec. producer in the original) steals many classic scenes.
The kids are dreadful. The rich relatives are dreadful. The poor friends, including Eva Longoria... dreadful.
Run, don't walk, away from this picture.
Pacific Rim Uprising (2018)
The first was dumb. This one is dumber. I can't wait for the 3rd!
For anyone who saw "Pacific Rim" and enjoyed it, you probably shouldn't admit it because it was a really dumb giant robot and monster movie with tons of gratuitous explosions, property destruction and ooey gooey monster guts. By comparison, any of the Transformer movies (which are also monumentally dumb) read like the great works of Shakespeare (and, well... Megan Fox.)
"Pacific Rim: Uprising" takes the franchise to a whole new level of silliness and camp. More giant robots, more monsters, more monster guts and just top it all off, the robots now fall to the responsibility of a predictably diverse group of cute kids--"Goonies" perhaps?--who may as well have been plucked directly from the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
Why would anyone in their right mind waste two hours on such tripe, you ask? Well, the wife's out of town, we were running out of dog food, the movie theater is next door to the pet store, and my MoviePass was burning a hole in my pocket. "Just like the holes that those robots and monsters were burning through each other!" -- might say one of the other 3 or 4 lonely fan boys also sitting in a theater on a Friday afternoon. In short, it wasn't anything that I would want to pay money for... at least not money that hadn't already been spent!
(Oh! And side benefit! I did get to see the trailer for the upcoming Han "Solo" movie!)
Phantom Thread (2017)
The Dress-Maker Has No Clothes
"Phantom Thread" is an Oscar-nominated stinker. Some of the scenery is beautiful, the costumes are extravagant and the bizarre, meticulous process of 1950's era dress-making for the social elite is a mild curiosity but the story is threadbare and the actors may as well have been cardboard cut-outs for all the prolonged shots of them staring wordlessly at each other. Even when speaking, they didn't have all that much to say.
In the end, it's not enough for characters to be eccentric. They have to be interesting eccentrics.
Spoiler Alert: There are one or two points at which the viewer might suspect that something interesting is about to happen. It doesn't.