Ex Machina

Robo Sexbot: the Movie.

"What happens to me if I fail your test?"

Hello my dear friends and imaginary new readers, welcome back to another thrilling trip down Tagline lane. Today I'm going to take a break from time travelers who speak poor English to talk about non-time travelers who use their position as the head of notgoogle to create robots. So it's sort of the reverse of what they were trying to do in Terminator Genisys, which was try to blow up notgoogle before they invent Skynet. I'm talking about Ex Machina, the April sci-fi suspense film that asks the question "well can I fuck the robot?" with a resounding "of course." Ex Machina stars Domhnall Gleeson (who I guess is also going to be in the new Star Wars) as Caleb, an employee of the fictional Google stand-in Blue Book. He is invited by the company's reclusive but brilliant founder Nathan (Oscar Isaac, also in Star Wars go figure) to his middle of nowhere hyper secure and high tech home/research compound, so that he can participate in Nathan's research. We discover that Nathan has created an AI housed in a lifelike human frame, named Ava. Caleb's job is to evaluate her, and see if she passes their modified Turing test, to qualify as a truly self-aware AI.

Team America: World Police

Here to save the motherfuckin' day.

"Putting the F Back in Freedom."

Hi gang, and welcome back to The Tagline. Originally I had intended to review a different movie tonight, but the recent withdrawal from theaters of The Interview, followed by the withdrawal by Paramount of Team America: World police, prompted me to change my plans, and instead review Team America, which I realized I had not done. If you find that offensive somehow, the idea of me reviewing a movie where a team of American puppets attempt to thwart the plans of terrorists and Kim Jong Il to blow up the world, well fuck you, too bad. Here at the Tagline we don't respond to threats, only generous bribes. Since Paramount and Sony have refused my generous offers to be bribed, I will instead review the greatest masterpiece in puppet existence, TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE. From the genius duo that brought us South Park, Orgazmo, and who starred in BASEketball, the thing my girlfriend always gets mixed up with actual basketball, Team America is the movie that Matt and Trey said they weren't going to make. After the South Park movie, the guys were pretty disdainful about doing another movie. Despite this, they were inspired apparently by how stupid the idea of The Day After Tomorrow was, and originally planned to re-shoot the whole movie only in puppet form. They were informed that this could have legal difficulties, so instead they opted to just make a puppet movie that was a send up of all manner of big action movies. Team America is about a stage actor named Gary who is recruited to be part of Team America, an elite Thunderbirds-esque team that fights terrorists around the world, by shooting them and blowing them up and stuff. Awesome right?

Anaconda

Is this The Nightman Cometh?

"When You Can't Breathe You Can't Scream"

Hello everyone, it is that time again! Welcome back to more from The Tagline, where terrible movies I saw that one time are king! Recently (last Thursday actually) there was a live Rifftrax presentation of the fantastically not good snake movie Anaconda. This reminded me that Anaconda was a movie that happened, for better or worse. So today I figured I'd share that recollection with you, and review ANACONDA, the least scary movie involving snakes ever made. Starring Jennifer Lopez as a documentary maker named Terri Florez who is attempting to locate the elusive Shirishamas tribe in the Amazon. This is also a region of the world where enormous, 70 mile long snakes who are all powerfule burst through boats and try to kill Danny Trejo (not before he shoots himself though!). For those wondering, the longest verified Anacondas range around the 25 ft marker, but firsthand reports have reached such outlandish numbers as 145 ft. This movie capitalizes on that absurdity, and so JLo ventures out into the jungle, along with Ice Cube, Owen Wilson, Kari Wuhrer (the queen of B-horror T&A) and that foppish british guy from The Mummy. Oh also there's some other guy but he gets stung by a deadly wasp and is basically not in most of the movie. This crew of mostly incompetents ventures into the Amazon aboard a ship captain by the second most obviously untrustworthy person in this film. After a short trip down the amazon into a massive rainstorm, the group meets the FIRST most untrustworthy person in the movie, Jon Voight's character Paul Serone, a man who is perpetually saying vaguely threatening things and leering at everyone. He may as well be wearing a high collared cape and be cackling while he ties maidens to train tracks. I assume the movie taking place in the jungle is the only reason he was NOT tying people to train tracks.

The Maze Runner

Run dat maze boyee.

"Based on the Best-Selling Novel"

Hello everyone! Welcome back to another thrilling, chilling edition of the Tagline! Today I am going to jump back to the present and review a movie that I don't recall fondly from 20 years ago (god it is so unreal to think that 1993 was over 20 years ago). So instead of that, today we're jumping back into the vibrant genre of "movies based on young adult novels featuring dystopic or post-apocalyptic settings" Because hell if one movie like that is good then surely eight or nine hundred will be GREAT RIGHT? I don't know. Anyway today I'm going to be talking about the Maze Runner and not the Giver, I know it was a real toss up but there it is. The Maze Runner is a thrilling film based on a novel of the same name, and starring that kid from Teen Wolf as Thomas, a boy who wakes up in a cage that has opened into a grove full of young dudes, and is understandably freaked out, because really who knows what they might do to him. Fortunately it's not that kind of movie, and Thomas discovers that he has been released into the center of a massive labyrinth where many other youths have been released before him. He learns that there is no known escape from the maze, and that at night the area outside of the grove (the maze proper) is prowled by things called grievers, which no one has encountered and survived. They sound like shrieking hell monsters, and for the curious out there, once they show us one we as the audience discover that they also LOOK like shrieking hell monsters, that are also have mechanical. They're basically like something out of doom, as I was watching I had to ask myself like... why did they build them like that? Any mechanical thing chasing you would be scary, but these guys really went the extra mile in the bowel-voiding terror department. Anyway, no one has any memories of how or why they ended up in the maze, but they all want to get out, because living in a grassy grove surrounded by monsters and with a bunch of other dirty dudes isn't the greatest way to spend the rest of your life... I mean unless that's your thing I guess. No judgement.

Casa De Mi Padre

A joke? Maybe, I'm not sure.

Hi Everyone! I'm gearing up for a convention, and persistent snow obstacles have kept me from striking distance of a movie theater, so here's a weird one for you. Travelling into benighted, dangerous territory, I got really bored several months ago, and with the whole of Netflix's library at my fingertips, I made some legitimately poor watching decisions, even by my generous standards. One of them was this very bizarre Will Ferrell movie, Casa de mi Padre. For starters, this movie is almost entirely in Spanish, with the exception of a few interactions with American border patrol (with special guest appearance by Ron Swanson, not really but you know Nick Offerman). So that's pretty unusual, because I frankly didn't realize Will Ferrell spoke that much Spanish. Everyone else in this movie is pretty much Spanish except for Will Ferrell, who plays Armando Alvarez, a ranch-hand who has lived and worked on his father's ranch all his life. The ranch is falling on hard times, but when Armando's brother Raul returns with his fiance and money from his business ventures to settle all the ranch's debts, things seem to be taking a turn for the better. Only naturally, Armando falls for Sonia (the fiance, entiendan?) and also his brother is obviously a drug dealer, who angers Mexico's biggest narcotraficante, and what follows is a plot-line worthy of daytime Telemundo.