House at the End of the Street (2012)

Honey, Sometimes People Can’t be Fixed.

When I get requests from people, the same question goes through my mind most of the time: “Is this being requested because this person wants me to share their love for this movie or because this person wants me to hate-fuck this movie with words?”  It was certainly what I thought when today’s movie was requested by my friend Tiffany.  It’s the kind of movie that I knew existed, but certainly never would’ve felt the need to watch on my own.  It basically just looked like a pretty standard thriller movie.  But, if nothing else, the main actress is hot.  I decided to watch the movie very quickly after the request because it was a 2012 movie that I could add to my list, so you may have already seen a paragraph about this movie.  But I intend to add a few more paragraphs as I review House at the End of the Street, written by David Loucka and Jonathan Mostow, directed by Mark Tonderai, and starring Jennifer Lawrence, Max Thieriot, Elisabeth Shue, Eva Link, Gil Bellows, Nolan Gerard Funk, and Allie MacDonald.

In the beginning, a crazy little girl kills her parents with a hammer.  Years later, Sarah (Elisabeth Shue) and her daughter Elissa (Jennifer Lawrence) rent a house … also with a hammer.  I’m not entire sure what that’s supposed to mean.  They find out that they have moved in near where those murders happened, and the crazy girl’s brother, Ryan (Max Thieriot), is still living there as the sole survivor in his family.  Because Elissa is herself crazy, she decides she’s gots to have her some of that definitely-not-psychologically-damaged man meat named Ryan, and starts developing a bit of a relationship with him, even though her mother frowns upon the eventuality that her daughter will be murdered with a hammer.

I didn’t get this movie.  I wouldn’t say I necessarily got to the point where the movie’s initials were accurate.  I didn’t HatE … otS this movie.  But I didn’t like it.  Most of it didn’t really make sense to me, and it wasn’t even remotely scary.  I’m not even entirely confident that they were trying to be scary.  I mean, one of their earliest ideas of a startle was a light in a house turning on.  The movie starts slowly with the scares, but it’s decent enough in the logic department.  Then they start switching places, letting the movie start to amp up as it takes a turn for the nonsensical.  The entire premise for the movie didn’t make a goddamned bit of sense to me, but let me put this up first.  ::SPOILER ALERT::  How the hell is a person fully aware of his own psychosis and still able to convince himself that it’s real?  “I know you’re not actually my sister, but I’m gonna kidnap you and imagine you are anyway.”  I guess psychos shouldn’t make that much sense to sane people, but movies should.  ::END SPOILERS::  Another thing that makes no sense is that a cop would draw his gun because he knows a situation is dangerous, but decides that it is far too much effort to reach up to his shoulder to use his radio to call in back up.  And later, when Elissa comes across the cop, she also does not find the situation worthy of using his radio.  I guess they didn’t want to bother anyone at the station.  And when the guy and the girl are running through the forest, am I supposed to know how the girl died?  He was holding her mouth to keep her quiet and she was suddenly dead.  Did she suffocate?  Did he break her neck?  Do you know that you should let us know these things?  Also, at what point are horror movies going to get over the idea of the malfunctioning flashlight?  The scene managed to be a little tense, but not in any way we haven’t seen before.  And we’ve definitely seen the flashlight malfunctioning in horror movies, but never in real life.  I’ve come across a large number of flashlights in my day, but never one that turned on intermittently.  I have a flashlight on my desk that has been dying for about 7 years, and the bulb remains on when I turn it on, but is just really dim.  There is no truth in this cinema…

The greater majority of the performances in the movie were fine, but I hated pretty much all of the characters.  Jennifer Lawrence did a good job portraying her character, but her character was an asshole.  She was randomly douchey to people, and makes the decision that all Ryan could possibly want to talk about in their very first conversation is the brutal murder of his family.  I realize that we needed to get caught up on the backstory, but I assume we’re also supposed to like the character.  As best I can tell, there was also no reason to have some stupid battle of the bands thing going on in the movie beyond Jennifer Lawrence wanting to sing and the director wanting to pad the movie.  Elisabeth Shue did a good job in her performance as well, but that mom was a bitch too.  It makes it really hard to decide whether douchiness is nature or nurture.  She decides she hates Ryan and doesn’t want Elissa hanging out with him.  Why?  Because his family was murdered?  He didn’t do it!  What does this chick do if she walks past an orphanage?  Yell at the confused kids that they should stay away from her daughter because they’re inherently evil?  The Ryan character was the exact opposite for me.  I thought Max Thieriot did not give a very interesting or appealing performance, but I kept siding with his character (aside from the spoiler bullshit from earlier).  Besides the other two instances that I mentioned in this paragraph, there’s also a point in the movie where four guys start to randomly beat the shit out of him for some insult that only they could’ve possibly understood, and everyone looks at Ryan like he’s a monster because he decides he’d like to stop getting kicked in his ribs, and puts a halt to it by breaking the dude’s ankle.  Everyone in the mob watching gasps and Elissa shuns him.  Of course Elisabeth Shue thinks he’s evil already, so we know which way she’ll go on it.  Look, I’m not a violent guy by any stretch of the imagination.  I’ve never been in a fight, and I assume I’ll never need to be.  But if the situation arises that four guys are beating me mercilessly, they should feel lucky if the only thing I break is their ankle if I get the opportunity.  Even if the other three guys stopped after I broke the other one’s ankle, I would go after them next yelling, “YOU EARNED THIS!”  And anyone that gave me an odd look for it would have a foot cast in their future as well.

House at the End of the Street did not work out for me.  The movie starts as if it’s got some promise, but then the logic starts to unravel.  It manages to build some tension, but none of it evolves into scares or even startles, and though the performances were mostly good, the characters that they were performing were generally annoying and nonsensical.  This movie wasn’t painful to watch, but it also has nothing it can offer that would give you a reason to watch it.  House at the End of the Street gets “HatE” out of “otS.”

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The Hunger Games (2012)

The Hunger Games Can Eat Me

No one person requested today’s movie.  It was overly talked about on Facebook until I finally felt like I was definitely going to have to see it.  When my days off gave me the opportunity to catch the movie for cheap, I finally decided that it was necessary.  The movie is based on a novel by Suzanne Collins that I have not/will never read, but it’s really popular.  The movie was so popular that I walked past the second longest line for a movie’s opening night on my way to my last theatrical disappointment, John Carter.  Since it came out, I’ve heard way too much about it, so it’s now time for you to hear a little more about it in my review of The Hunger Games, based on a novel by Suzanne Collins, written by Gary Ross and Billy Ray, directed by Gary Ross, and starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Donald Sutherland, Wes Bentley, Alexander Ludwig, Isabelle Fuhrman, Amandla Stenberg, Liam Hemsworth, Lenny Kravitz, Stanley Tucci, and Willow Shields.

In post-apocalyptic North America, the government has decided that it’s a super good idea to collect one boy and one girl from 11 districts to fight to the death in a battle called the Hunger Games.  For the 74^th Hunger Games, 12-year-old Primrose Everdeen (Willow Shields) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) are chosen from District 12, but Primrose’s sister Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) – herein referred to as Catness – steps in and volunteers to take part in the games instead of her sister.  They’re taken by Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) to meet their mentor, Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson) – herein referred to as Sammitch – who helps them learn how to play the game.  After some training and other nonsense, they get started into the Hunger Games.  Whoever shall survive and be the star of the next two books?  No one will ever know.

I do not understand you women-folk.  I really feel like I should try to figure out why you like the things you like, but I’ll probably just try to either ignore them or just mock them in review form.  I’ve heard this movie compared to Twilight because it’s based on a series of novels and is enjoyed almost exclusively by women, and I can say that this is a better movie than Twilight.  Of course, almost every movie is better than Twilight.  This movie is an interesting enough concept that is ruined by almost everything else.  Sure, it’s an interesting idea to have a bunch of kids try to kill each other, but it’s not when you make us follow a kid that won’t really kill anyone.  The same problems that came up in my review of Japanese Hunger Games (aka Battle Royale) came up in this movie: why is anyone unwilling to kill in this setting, and why would anyone make alliances?  You’ve been told as you enter this game that only one person is going to leave, so fucking kill yourself or throw down.  And why bother making alliances?  You’ll only have to kill them eventually anyways.  Why grow attached to someone you will have to kill eventually?  Knowing how they want us to feel about Catness, you can easily figure out how each character is going to die.  She’s meant to be our hero, so she will not be killing any friendly opponents and will probably only kill the assholes.  Catness takes it one step further by not really killing anyone.  She kills one person on accident, one person out of a reflexive action, and the last person out of mercy.  There were more than a few times in the movie where I had no fucking idea what was going on.  These things caused me to have to turn to my friend and ask him what was happening.  It seemed like there were a lot of things that would’ve been pretty obvious had I read the books, so I say fuck you to this movie for that shit.  You can’t assume that I’ve done my homework before watching your movie!  For a movie that I went into thinking it would be pretty action-heavy, I actually had walked into a movie about a girl sleeping in a tree.  All Catness really does effectively in this movie is sleep in trees, and she does it a lot and the film does not want us to miss one minute of it.  Catness is an exceptional archer, but for strategic purposes she does not pick up a bow and arrow at first.  Instead, she runs into the wilderness and sleeps in a tree.  Then she encounters enemies, so she climbs up into a tree.  Then she drops wasps on them, takes a bow from one, and climbs into a different tree.

The way they told their exceptionally boring story was also very tedious.  The director chose to film the entire thing with shaky cam, making watching the movie nearly impossible but entirely nauseating.  The final fight, for example, was shot so close and so jerky that I could barely see what was happening.  I got excited as the camera stepped back for a second that I might actually be able to see what was happening, but nope.  Right back in.  They also did a weird thing throughout the entire movie where they forgot to put sound in.  You could still figure out what was happening, but I still found it really annoying.  The settings were mostly drab and, when they weren’t, they were mostly just a bunch of trees.  The time in the Capitol had interesting settings, but they weren’t there long.  The futuristic technology that they had was pretty cool.

Okay, here’s some more things I hated that had to be prefaced with ::SPOILER ALERT::  There was a point in the movie where Catness finds out that the bad opponents are guarding a stockpile of supplies, hoping that others will come after it and get blown up by the mines they lined it with.  Catness decides to destroy this stockpile, but for some reason has someone else draw them away from it so she can shoot it with arrows and blow it up.  Guess what, Catness, you could’ve blown the thing up with them surrounding it and killed 4 of the assholes at the same time.  At one point (while Catness is sleeping in a tree … go figure), she finds Peeta has been helping the assholes to find her.  One can assume that he was trying to lead them away from her, but they never really deal with this in the movie at all.  At one point, he yells for her to run.  When they reunite later, they never have Catness say, “What the fuck were you doing, dick?”  Near the end, Catness is holding an arrow at the main bad guy, who is holding Peeta in front of him to block her shot.  She shoots him in the hand so that Peeta can push him over.  What bothers me was that Peeta had early helped establish Catness’ archery prowess by remarking on how she could shoot squirrels through the eye every single time.  But apparently she can’t hit a much larger eye under much more important circumstances.  The biggest annoyance I had in the movie (besides the shaky cam) was the resolution.  They had been told that two people from the same district could escape and Catness and Peeta survived.  They then said, “PSYCH!” and said they had to kill each other.  They decide to eat poison berries together and they give in and tell them they can both go home.  The problem with this is that they gave no weight to this dilemma and resolution, both of which were introduced and dissipated within the span of a minute.  ::END SPOILER::

Pretty much all of the performances in the movie were good, and also roughly what I’d expect from the bulk of the cast.  Jennifer Lawrence didn’t get an Oscar nomination for being hot (although that’s why I’d give her one).  She’s a good actress.  But I was curious what genetic experiment is going to come up in later books that caused her to be the only attractive person in her entire district.  She had a good bit of attitude to her.  The fact that she was never able to fully achieve badassdom was the fault of the writing, not the actress.  Neither of the love interests (Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth) did anything spectacular for me to pay them any attention, even though one of them is the brother of Thor.  Hutcherson was a little annoying to me, and usually seemed pretty dumb.  I love Elizabeth Banks, and she was good in the movie, but they made her look so weird that I only recognized her because I had seen it before watching the movie.  I also had no idea Lenny Kravitz was in the movie, but that’s all I have to say about his character.  Woody Harrelson got off to a rough start for me as Sammitch, acting the part of the clichéd guy who’s seen too much, always drunk and rude.  But you warm up to him as the movie goes along.  The only thing I have to say about Wes Bentley is that his facial hair in the movie annoyed the piss out of me.  I don’t even know how his performance was because I kept staring at it.  Also, Donald Sutherland looked like Santa Claus.

I still think you women need to raise your standards.  You’ve stepped up a pretty solid amount from Twilight, but you could still do much better.  The story was predictable, slow, and mostly Catness sleeping up a tree.  The shaky cam was annoying, but their random omission of sound was worse.  The performances were good, though.  There are worse ways to spend two and a half hours than this movie, but you might find it more entertaining to sleep in a tree for yourself.  I don’t really recommend this movie.  I promise not to hate people for liking it as I did with Twilight, but I cannot throw my vote behind others seeing it.  The Hunger Games gets “I guess we try to forget” out of “May the odds be ever in your favor.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

X-Men: First Class (2011)

Finally it has happened, the release of one of my most anticipated BluRay releases in recent memory.  Last Friday was the day when X-Men: First Class was released.  I had already seen this movie 3 times by the time I picked up the BluRay but that did nothing to quell my excitement.  I had put off watching it because I already had a back log of reviews, but it finally came time to watch it.  So I opened it up, popped it in, and my BluRay player on my computer promptly failed about 3 minutes into the movie.  Once I’m sure it’s not my computer and is, in fact, the program I use, I may post a scathing review of it.  But that’s a story for a different day.  Today I watched X-Men: First Class, starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Rose Byrne, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Bacon, January Jones, and Oliver Platt.

X-Men: First Class starts many years before the events of X-Men 1, though still starting at the same place with a shot-for-shot remake of the opening of X1, with Magneto as a kid in a Nazi concentration camp.  Here Eric Lehnsherr – later Magneto – meets a Nazi scientist that is later revealed to be Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon).  Having revealed himself as a mutant by messing up a gate, Eric has caught the interest of Shaw.  To attempt to help Eric find his powers, he threatens to kill Eric’s mother if Eric can’t move a coin.  Failing to do so, Shaw promptly kills Eric’s mother.  Turns out anger is a very good catalyst for Eric’s magnetic powers, which is shown by Eric trashing the room with his powers.  Jumping over to the states, telepath Charles Xavier as a child comes down stairs in his mansion to meet shapeshifter Raven Darkholme – later Mystique.  Years later, Raven (now played by Jennifer Lawrence) lives with Charles (now James McAvoy) in England where Charles is just getting his doctorate in genetics.  Eric (now Michael Fassbender) is spending his time hunting down Shaw.  Elsewhere still, Dr. Moira MacTaggart (Rose Byrne) stumbles upon Shaw and his Hellfire Club – comprised of telepath Emma Frost (January Jones), teleporter Azazel, and whirlwind creator Riptide.  Shaw threatens a general into voting to move nuclear weapons to Turkey, starting the Cuban Missile Crisis in hopes of getting both sides to nuke the Hell out of each other, leaving only the mutants.  No one believes Moira when she reports this because mutants are relatively unheard of at this point.  So she goes and gets Charles on her side and together they manage to launch a fairly unsuccessful assault on Shaw, which only becomes relatively successful at the intervention of Eric.  Shaw escapes and Eric joins up with Charles and Raven to create a team to take on Shaw in a facility run by Oliver Platt.  At said facility, they meet Hank McCoy – later Beast – who has created a machine that will amplify Charles’ powers.  Using this, they create a team with Angel, a stripper with wings who can spit hot fire like Dylan; Alex Summers, who can shoot destructive red circles as Havok; Sean Cassidy, who can scream real loud as Banshee; and a guy who can adapt to survive named Darwin.  This new team must now train to take on Shaw and stop the two superpowers from destroying each other.

My review of this movie?  I loved every bit of it!  THE END!  …Okay, I’ll do more.

It should not come as a surprise to anyone that knows me to find this out, but here goes: I … am a nerd.  And not only am I nerdy about movies and video games, but I’m nerdy about comic books.  Though not all comic books.  My childhood was spent reading almost exclusively Marvel comic books, my favorite of which being the X-Men.  So one could say that my opinion is a bit swayed by my preexisting condition.  That being said, this movie rocks.  I’m not sure if it’s based on some version of the X-Men I haven’t read, but it doesn’t exactly fit the actual story of the X-Men as I know them.  The first official X-Men team was Cyclops, Jean Gray, Beast (not yet blue and hairy), Iceman, and Angel (though not female bug winged Angel, but male angel winged Angel).  But do I necessarily want to see a movie based on a comic book I’ve already read?  Heck no!  I already know that story.  Gimme some new stuff.  I’m not the type of fan that says they can’t deviate from the text.  I’m the kind of fan that says entertain me, and this movie does that in spades.  It pains me not to spoil them, but the cameos (2 of them in particular) are worth the price of admission alone.  The story was all around fantastic and left me with no complaints.  And (again, no spoilers) the climax of this movie is basically what all movies should take as an example.  It has a very poignant and significant defeat of the main antagonist, an epic showdown, the crippling of Charles Xavier (that’s not a spoiler to anyone that’s watching this movie), and the birth of Magneto.

I would say the biggest thing I had a problem with in this movie was the casting, though not all of it.  Michael Fassbender was the perfect Magneto.  A bona fide badass if ever there was one.  The problem with him was the kid who played him in the beginning.  I thought that kid was awful.  Most of what he did was laughable when it should have been heart wrenching.  Thankfully that kid grows into Michael Fassbender soon enough.  Also, as a side note, from being the coolest Spartan in 300 to being the guy that nearly fudged up the whole plan in Inglourious Basterds, I have not seen Michael Fassbender do something bad.  I even liked him in Centurion, though the movie wasn’t that good.  Next up was Professor X.  Going into the movie I was pretty sure I’d like Fassbender, but something about James McAvoy rubbed me the wrong way.  And since I had only previously seen him in Wanted, and I thought that movie blew, I’d have to blame that.  Thankfully he did a great job as well.  The only problem was that Professor X acted kind of like McAvoy was doing an Austin Powers impression in the beginning, but that was youthful indiscretion and he grew up pretty quick to be the Professor X I wanted, though I was constantly curious about when exactly Professor Xavier became powerful enough that he could stop holding his fingers to his temple to use his abilities.  Didn’t see Patrick Stewart doing that!  Rose Byrne was, as always, a stone cold hottie.  She was good in the movie too.  Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique was good as well.  My only problem with her is that I really don’t see what everyone’s on about with her being so hot.  She’s good looking, sure, and I wouldn’t kick her out of bed, but she doesn’t hold a candle to Rose Byrne for me.

Two big bads to the casting for me were Angel and Emma Frost.  Angel’s performance was fair enough, my problem was with the character.  Who the Hell is she?  As aforementioned, I’m a huge Marvel nerd and even I had to look her up after my first viewing.  Turns out she was a real character in the Marvel universe, but I don’t know if she was significant enough to be in the movie.  And then there was Emma.  At first I thought January Jones made an interesting, albeit tedious choice, to make Emma Frost seem constantly bored and disinterested in being in the movie.  Emma Frost in the comics is a bit stuck up, sure, but devoid of personality?  Not so much.  But I let it slide at first because I thought it was a choice and it just wasn’t the one I would have made.  Then my roommate tells me that she always acts like that and now I can’t watch the movie without seeing how bad January Jones is here.  She is DEVOID of personality.  Hell, her CG diamond form emoted more than she did!

January Jones was not, however, able to dampen my love for this movie.  If you don’t like comic books or comic book movies I: a) pity you, and b) could see this movie not being your cup of tea.  I would say I put this movie as number 3 in my all time favorite comic book movies; right behind Watchman and, of course, Dark Knight.  You should at least see this movie, if not own it.  I give X-Men: First Class a “MAKE ANOTHER ONE, QUICK” out of “THIS MOVIE RULES!”

And, as always, please rate, comment, and/or like this post and others.  It may help me get better.