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.

Jane Eyre

Just let the sad sink in.

"Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.”"
Hello Friends, it is that time again! Today I am going to discuss one of my favorite pastimes. See sometimes in the summertime, I like to watch morose movies about English moors and brood about them. Okay, so I like to do it even when it isn't summer, but in this particular case it was summer. The nearby art cinema a town over was showing Jane Eyre, probably my favorite work of gothic fiction, and I had nothing to occupy me for the afternoon (a state so long past that I can't even remember how it felt). Obviously Jane Eyre has been adapted numerous times, but I'm talking about the 2011 film, direct by Cary Fukunaga, probably best known now for True Detective. This film starred Mia Wasikowska, whose name I will literally never spell right on the first try, as Jane Eyre, and Michael Fassbender as Rochester. I haven't been shy about my feelings for Wasikowska, and the types of characters she gravitates towards, but I'll make a rare exception for Bronte, and maybe Crimson Peak when it comes out. Not for another goddamned Alice in Wonderland movie though. Fuck that. Enough about her though, let's talk about Jane Eyre. I'll give you a brief intro if you haven't read it first, and we can go from there. Jane Eyre is a novel written by Chalotte Bronte, about an orphan who experiences a typically miserable and dreary childhood in the late 18th century, being sent to Lowood school for girls, which is bleak and awful, are you sensing a theme. She eventually leaves to become a governess at the home of the eccentric and secretive Mr. Rochester.

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?

BASEketball

Get it, they're balls.

"Two guys invented a game... and turned the sports world upside down!"

Welcome to Friday gang, welcome back to the Tagline, where now ball jokes are king until the end of this post at least. As part of my spectacular series on films you can stream on the Netflix garbage superhighway, today I will be taking us back to 1998, to talk about one of the great late 90s oddities, BASEketball (yeah it's really spelled like that just look at the cover, but I'm not going to spell it like that again). Before I go into the movie, let's study a little history. Like I just mentioned, this movie was released in 1998, in the end of July to be more precise. This would mean that it was released approximately one yeah after Trey Parker and Matt Stone began work on South Park. South Park was an immediate success, though at that point it was still a new thing and not the culturally immovable point it has no become, and so this I guess opened up some new opportunities for these... fine gentlemen. BASEketball is notable as being the only production Stone and Parker have been involved in to date that they did not write, direct, or produce in some way. They apparently did have some creative input with the director David Zucker (noted for such jewels as Airplane!, The Naked Gun movies and several of the latter-day Scary Movies unfortunately) so I guess there IS that. This movie's core concept was actually centered around a game Zucker had actually made up, which is sort of like a combination of Horse, Around the World, and being an asshole to the other players. The movie focuses on loser best buddies Coop (Parker) and Remer (Stone) inventing the game to occupy themselves during unemployment, which presumably is ongoing. The game has rules that allow them to level the playing field between themselves and more athletic individuals, and it becomes popular rapidly. Eventually a rich old guy, Ted Denslow (our second Ernest Borgnine performance this week how about that), offers to make the sport a major league of its own, and to keep it from becoming a corporate shit show like other sports.

House of 1000 Corpses

This zombie not featured prominently.

"Life and Death are Meaningless...And Pain Is God."

Always one for subtlety that Rob Zombie. Anyway welcome to the spooky conclusion of my October reviews! Today I will round out this celebration of spook by talking about one of my favorite terrible horror movies that's great because of how completely ridiculous it is. Obviously this is going to be a Rob Zombie movie I'm talking about (see also here and here) in this case his directorial debut, House of 1000 Corpses. Though it may be his first, This movie bears all the great hallmarks of Zombie's films, including lots of gore, intense and overbearing background music and soundtrack, Syd Haig doing random shit, and Sheri Moon Zombie being naked on camera, and dressed in a bunch of kinky outfits. Sound familiar? Well YEAH IT IS, but there's so much more to enjoy! You ain't seen nothin' yet. House of 1000 Corpses starts with an almost completely irrelevant scene where two assholes try to rob Captain Spaulding's Museum of Monsters and Madmen. It doesn't work out so great and they both end up getting shot. Later two dumbasses named Jerry and Bill stop in with their girlfriends Mary and Denise because they're trying to write a guide of off-beat tourist attractions, because they're douchebags. On Spaulding's tour they learn about Dr. Satan, a crazy guy who used crude brain surgery to try and make an army of super-soldier zombies, which sounds a lot like the plot of Frankenstein's army actually, a really gross C-budget movie you can see on Netflix ANYWAY. The two assholes decide they just have to find the tree where this guy was hung, so they go driving out into the middle of nowhere in a thunderstorm, and nothing bad happens and they all make it home.

Adult World

Is this a real poster? I DON'T KNOW

"When life gets hard, rise to the occasion."

I like this tagline because it is a boner joke, and really that's the kind of class and general level of discourse I like to encourage here. Welcome back, its time for more of the very best that el cine has to provide, here at The Tagline. Today's offering really spoke to me, because it concerns a fleshed out version of a stock character in a story I like to tell. It is maybe a story that is forever retold, because I don't believe for second that my experiences in the matter were unique. Let me give some background. When I was a fledgling undergraduate, still filled with hopes and aspirations, my dreams not yet rent asunder by the jagged, merciless crags of reality, I thought that it would be super cool to take a creative writing class, and actually I ended up taking several, but this story is mostly about the introductory courses. A lot of higher level creative writing courses have a kind of try out, where you submit a piece to the teacher so they can attempt to verify that your primary interest isn't like Naruto/X-Files slash fiction or something. Intro creative writing classes, the 100 level stuff? It doesn't have any of that gate keeping. What that means is that you might meet some not truly awesome authors. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that I am the world's greatest gift to the written word or anything, but I mean, some writers redefine bad. Others just define it in the same way it has been defined before. I would think and proclaim suggesting that such a person could exist at all was offensive if I had not interacted with them on at least three separate occasions (you don't get to choose who you're peer reviewing folks). ANYWAY to bring the story back around, there are certain people who you will inevitably interact with in such a class, and one of them is poet girl (also poet guy but he tends to embody a different archetype, as he is trying to emulate different individual). Poetry girl is so deep and her writing always tends to favor verse, and abstract, stream of consciousness style stuff. Everything is a metaphor nested inside of a simile, inevitably about the deep well of anguish that resides in her tormented, maybe 19-year-old soul. Somehow almost everything is about a boy she broke up with. After all, as I've established in earlier posts growing up in upper-middle class suburbia is hard.

Red Dragon and Manhunter

So 80s man.

"Enter the mind of a serial killer... you may never come back."

"Before the Silence, there was the Dragon"

Hello everyone, welcome to a new week filled with creepy murderers and their half-eaten victims! Today I'm going to be doing something a little bit different, and instead of talking about a single movie I will be talking about two different movies that were both adaptations of the same novel. The first is Manhunter, released in 1986, and the second is Red Dragon, which was released in 2002, as the third and last film in which Anthony Hopkins portrayed Hannibal Lecter. While based on events from the same novel, the two present very different takes on the same plot, in terms of theme and overall tone. This is partially because they were made during very different time periods (the mid 80s have cinematically essentially nothing in common with 2002) but also due to the context in which they were released. Manhunter was released simply as an adaptation of the novel Red Dragon, whereas Red Dragon was released as the third "Hannibal Lecter" movie, and the cultural import of that character had a real impact on the way the movie's plot was framed and presented. Both concern special agent Will Graham as he is brought back on with the FBI in an attempt to stop a serial killer being called "The Tooth Fairy", due to the distinctive bite marks he leaves on his victims. To help him get into the mind of the killer and prevent further victims, Will seeks the insight of Hannibal Lecter, who was the killer behind Graham's last case, before he went into retirement, due to the strain of assuming the mindset of killers to deduce their motives. Lecter of course is a genius and a madman, and has his own motivations for assisting Graham. Now that the basics are established, let's compare and contrast!

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones

Teen Angst Squad.

"There is a world hidden within our own."

Hello all, and welcome back to The Tagline! Today I will at long last deliver on broken promises, and talk about The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, seeing as it now looks inevitable that we will be seeing more of this series (at least one more movie is already in the pipe). Starring Lily Collins as Clary Fray, normal girl living in the city, City of Bones follows her as she discovers that she is intensely and gruesomely not ordinary. This movie, like any movie that is not about comic book characters or that has a female protagonist, is based on a series of young adult novels, set in a world where unknown to regular people, a race of half-angels (Nephilim if you want to be sassy about it) are charged with fighting against demons and other varieties of nightmare creatures, all while the rest of the world's assholes are oblivious to the fact that Dracula is trying to summon the devil or something, with help from Moriarty. Don't worry though, some rail thin teenage girls and teen heartthrobs are more than ready to eff those demons in the A, by which I mean mostly be moody at each other. This cast of likable jack-holes includes Jace (who you DON'T remember as Caius from the Twilight movies, but see him here in Anonymous as the young Oxford) who is Clary's sexy love interest who might be her brother, which makes some of the stuff that happens in the movie Luke & Leia levels of awkward, Alec who is a douchebag with few if any redeeming qualities we see, and his sister Isabelle, who has this whole leather vixen thing going on that was kind of awkward but I guess it was probably the way she was described in the books, given how frequently it comes up in the movie. Also I'd be remiss if I forgot to mention Clary's boy in waiting who will always be waiting, Simon, who just doesn't stand a chance against the brooding possibly sibling Jace. Like how much does that hurt, she thinks the guy is her brother and you still can't compete. Ouch Simon.

R.I.P.D.

This makes it almost look not dumb.

"Defending Our World One Soul at a Time"

That is open to debate and remains to be seen. Welcome back to The Tagline, and pardon my Tuesday/Thursday late post earlier this week, it was the result of forgetfulness and being away in Boston all weekend. Incidentally, today's movie takes place IN Boston, and was actually shot, at least in part, on location there. I know this for a fact because there is a modestly lengthy sequence in the middle of the film that was clearly shot in the Hynes Convention Center, which is where I was in Boston for the entire weekend. The scene is supposed to be a finance convention or something, I have no idea. I was definitely not attending a finance convention. ENOUGH OF THAT THOUGH today I will be talking about R.I.P.D. a movie billed as a supernatural comedy film released last summer, based on a Darkhorse comic book of the same name. The film stars Ryan Reynolds (here taking his fourth bad turn as a comic book character by most people's reckoning, though I honestly didn't think Green Lantern was that terrible, and I think Ryan Reynolds was a perfect Hal Jordan) as imminently deceased police officer Nick Walker, and Jeff Bridges (AKA The Dude/Obadiah Stane I guess) as very deceased former U.S. Marshall Roy Pulsipher, as they work out their sentence in the Rest In Peace Department so as to improve their chances of not ending up at the big barbecue down below (that's Hell kids. I'm talking about Hell). Nick of course still has unfinished issues to work out with his violent death, where he was killed by his partner Bobby (Kevin Bacon, here as a ghost monster and not a pretend Nazi) after deciding he was going to turn in his portion of the gold they found during a drug bust. Nick is also worried about his wife, and just generally is dealing well with having been shot off of a balcony in a burning warehouse.

Birdemic: Shock and Terror

Wow.

"Why did the eagles and vultures attack?"

That's right fuckers, welcome back to the Tagytagtags, it's time for SHOCK AND TERROR on a Thursday morning (or Wednesday night if you stay glued to your feed I don't know). Over the weekend I had the unique experience that is viewing Birdemic, a movie so impossibly bad that I at first was convinced that its shittiness was deliberate. Alas, my sense of shock and terror grew as I came to realize that this movie was a sincere effort, that just also happened to be one of the worst things a human being has ever done on camera under the guise of cinema. Directed, written, and produced by James Nguyen, a person I can only assume is criminally insane, Birdemic chronicles the life, love, and attack by killer birds, of Rod and Nathalie, two young successful young people living in I don't remember or care, California. Rod is a multi-millionaire, after he closes some great sales, his company sells for A BILLION DOLLARS, and he launches his own start up that sells solar panels or something. He drives a Mustang, or at least I assume he is driving it, but it's possible that he cut a hole in the floor and is powering it with his feet like the Flinstones, because I've seriously never seen a Mustang move so slow in my entire life. I honestly didn't think they could be running and move that slow, but now I know better I guess! Anyway, Rod meets an old classmate one day, who is a fashion model, which I guess is different than some other kind of model, and they're really careful to make sure you know how much she is a fashion model. She's really on the rise too, given that she has become "the cover model for Victoria's Secret". Is that a thing? I don't know, but gosh they sure are nonchalant about how she is now a super famous model suddenly. Anyway, despite these two collectively commanding the wealth of a medium sized third world country, they go on dates at town fairs and low-class looking vietnamese restaurants. Also they enjoy live musical performances by some weird guy singing a song about hanging out and having a party with your family.

Don Jon

WORDS CAPS STUFF

"There's more to life than a happy ending."

Hello and welcome back. Before I talk about today's movie, I want to briefly talk about another movie I watched, Kill Your Darlings. This movie was about Allen Ginsberg and his crew and while I didn't take issue with any of that (though admittedly I found the whole movie kind of generally uninteresting) the casting made the movie a really uncomfortable experience for me. What do I mean? Well Daniel Radcliffe is portraying Allen Ginsberg, and I just got really weirded out when Harry Potter started kissing men. Especially when the man was the kid who went crazy at the end of Chronicle (who I think is Harry Osborn in the upcoming Spiderman movie). I'm not super into watching dude make-outs to begin with, but I particularly don't want to watch Harry Potter make out with a two-time supervillain, doing some crazy drugs, and then manically jerking off. I don't want to see like... any of that happening. I know I know, he's not always Harry Potter... but really he's always Harry Potter. Also did I mention the movie was pretty boring? Basically when some gross sex act wasn't being performed (get a bj from a girl in the stacks while you lock eyes with your best friend and are also committing a book crime) people were being super pretentious about writing. I didn't end up making it through the whole movie, I just got to a point where I felt like there was no point in continuing.

She's very convincing in this role, almost TOO CONVINCING.

But that isn't the subject of today's post, which does admittedly have to do with a lot of sex, it's just a lot less weird and no one gets murdered at any point, and they didn't let Michael C. Hall in on the proceedings which was probably for the best. Don Jon represents the first directorial outing for Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who also wrote the screenplay. To add a third role, he also stars as the eponymous Don Jon. So more or less he everything'd this movie. Don Jon is a film about a guy, who would you guess it is named Jon, and his friends call him Don Jon, because he's so good at closing the deal with ladies inadeclub (I have a Sean Paul related speech impediment). Jon states early on that not much matters in life to him, except his boys, bangin' random ladies, his car, working out, his family, and of course, constantly watching internet porn on Pornhub. Yeah, that's right, its all about the pr0nzzzorrzzz or whatever I don't know. Anyway, Jon is doing great with that arrangement until he meets Barbara (Scarlett Johansson) who if you haven't been paying attention to the media is so attractive that it will melt your face off. Jon immediately compromises everything about himself to attempt to snare this lady, and eventually he succeeds.

Norwegian Wood

I think Japanese Wood is a more accurate name. For his boner.

"All that remains now is nostalgia."

Hello everyone, welcome to a new week full of spectacular cinema achievements, and also weird sex things. Okay if I'm being honest mostly weird sex things today, but that is absolutely NOT my fault! If you want to blame someone, blame Haruki Murakami, after all this was his doing! Today I'm going to talk about Norwegian Wood, a Japanese film based on a Murakami novel of the same name. This novel focuses on Toru Watanabe, a college-aged young man growing up in the 60s in Japan, and his relationships with the people around him, particularly two ladies, his troubled childhood friend Naoko, and a girl he meets named Midori. Naoko is portrayed by Rinko Kikuchi, who you probably saw in Pacific Rim as Mako. Here she plays an actual honest to god crazy person, and does a... very convincing job. She kind of alternates between calm quiet crazy and shrieking hysterical, so that is a fun experience. The movie specifically follows Toru as he makes his way in a listless daze through his life, attempting to figure out up from down and doing a kind of pisspoor job of it. A little bit more background on that though.

Cyber Seduction

Really took the time to make this legit.

"He's with hundreds of women every night... without ever leaving his computer."

Good morning my friends, and welcome. Normally its all shits and giggles up in here, but today I want to talk about a very serious epidemic that's sweeping the 2005 nation: Boys looking at mostly covered up boobs on the internet. Yes that's right, it's no joke, boys the nation over are giving up otherwise productive lives so they can almost see a boob on the internet, but not quite. They start drinking energy drinks, and will drain your credit card dry, just to pay for an almost glimpse at part of a boob maybe in some leather bikini. It's horrifying to imagine but we can't just turn a blind eye while the terrifying internets suck the souls from the still living penises of teenagers everywhere. Yes I really typed that sentence, looked at it, and thought "yup, let's go with that." That's not the point though. Okay it kind of is the point of today's movie actually, which is the often lauded and truly informative CYBER SEDUCTION: HIS SECRET LIFE, a made for Lifetime movie about a teenage boy who discovers internet pornography, and is then sucked headlong into a world of desperate jacking off, that ultimately destroys him almost.

Mazes and Monsters

This is a really misleading cover.

"Danger lurks between fantasy and reality."

Good morning boys and girls, it's that time again! Time for me to relay to you my latest foray into the danger that lurks between good actors, bad movies, and role-playing games! Well, at least that is what I will be doing today, as I explore the exquisite garbage that is Mazes and Monsters, a 1982 film based on a novel written by Rona Jaffe, during the height of Satanic D&D pandemonium. Am I referring to how Dungeons and Dragons is a tool used to recruit children into covens of Satan worshipers, using non-Christian ideologies and REAL MAGIC INCANTATIONS to twist their minds and souls to do the work of the devil? Why you bet I am! A quick primer for the uninitiated. Back in the 1980s, when liking nerd things didn't have a sitcom about it and basically made people regard you with a mixture of pity, suspicion and fear, a number of groups, particularly religious ones, put forth that D&D, and to a lesser extent all fantasy role-playing games, were tools of occultists and devil worshippers. By getting individuals to play these games, they were introducing them to real satanic rituals, and using the guise of a game to get these impressionable minds tied up in a pursuit of power and riches, making them servants of the beast. Of course no one ever had substantive proof that any of these cults existed, despite claims that their members numbered in the hundreds of thousands AT LEAST, but that didn't stop every hack on the block from blaming D&D for all the wrongs of the youthful world. It also didn't seem to encourage any of these people to actually discover what kind of game D&D WAS, given that none of the things they talk about actually happen in a D&D game or any game ever. There is also of course the very real possibility that these groups were simply full of liars and reprobates, but NO surely that couldn't be possible?

Now You See Me

NOW IM LEAVING.

"Come in close, because the more you think you see, the easier it'll be to fool you."

Happy New Year everyone! I thought I would start off the new year just as I spent the last year. By venting spleen into the internet, spewing a white hot spigot of hatred into the aether, about a movie that was indisputably a steaming pile of horseshit. To that end, I picked a movie to watch that I couldn't even imagine liking in any way, and I was not disappointed. What movie am I talking about? Now You See Me of course, a movie that from the previews I'd seen in theaters looked like the hokiest thing ever, as much as it was trying to act like it was going to be cool and clever. Now You See Me stars Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher and Dave Franco as four magicians/illusionists who are brought together by a mysterious benefactor in order to pull off a series of large magic shows/bank heists. They are pursued by Mark Ruffalo (whose secret is that he's always angry), who is an FBI agent, and Melanie Laurent (who killed a theater full of Nazis in Inglorious Basterds) who is an Interpol agent assigned to the case. The two are caught in a web of stupid deception and dumb set piece ruses, that would likely only trick a very dumb person, or say an audience that only gets information the movie wants to give them.

Your Highness

Time for some strong homoerotic overtones.

"Get your quest on."

Hey y'all, welcome back to The Tagline, it's another exciting week filled to the brim with broken promises, broken dreams, and mediocre movies I watched while I was spacing out after work. Today I will be continuing the trend I started last week by reviewing a movie that was both vulgar and stupid. Today I will be dipping into the robust film pool that is the career of Seth Rogan's boyfriend, James Franco. That's right, I'll be talking about Your Highness, a film starring Franco as a probably molested prince of considerable heroism, and also kind of homoerotic stature, named Fabious, who often goes on adventures to kick ass with his shifty clearly going to betray him later knights. In comparison, his brother Thadeous (Danny McBride, who like Franco was in This is the End) is a drunken, lascivious boor, who travels around the kingdom participating in debauchery with his servant Courtney. All this fuckery ends however when Fabious returns to his father Tywin Lannister (no I'm not kidding Charles Dance is the king) with a ditsy girl he saved from imprisonment in a tower (Zooey Deschanel) that he intends to marry. Thadeous gets super jealous, because he is a stupid asshole, but before the wedding can finish, the evil wizard Leezar shows up to kidnap the girl, so he can bone her and she will give birth to a dragon that he will use to kill everyone because he's a huge asshole. With his fiance kidnapped for nefarious ends, Fabious sets off after her, and Thadeous is forced by their father to tag along, even though he is a craven moron.

Only God Forgives

He's a really bad boxer.

"Time to Meet The Devil."

Hello again friends, it is once again time for The Tagline. I know I promised true holiday horrors today, but you'll have to wait a bit longer to realize my darkest nightmares. Frankly speaking... some things are just TOO terrible. I'm afraid dear readers, afraid of what I will do in the pursuit of your entertainment. So in the meantime, I offer up something less horrific, and not as seasonal, while I steel myself, body and mind, for what might be the worst thing I've ever watched... again. Instead, let me reach into my bag of stupid, and pull out a movie that was bad, but not in a particularly holiday way. I'm talking about Only God Forgives, a film starring Ryan Gosling as Julian, who runs a muay thai club in Thailand that's actually a front for a drug operation. His brother brutally murders and rapes a prostitute (and probably in that order too the twisted sack of shit) and then is killed in turn by the prostitute's father, with the consent of the fucked up Thai police, who play things kinda fast and loose as you can probably guess. After the death of Julian's brother, his horrible crime boss mom shows up to run the show, and tells him to go out and even up the score. This is about what you can sort out as regards the plot of this movie.

The To Do List

Awful guys. Awful.

"She's going from straight A's to her first F."

That is not good guys and gals. Look at that tagline. It is a bad tagline. It should feel bad about who and what it is. I threw up a little typing it, but I mean, I had to. That's what was on the poster, what else could I do? Let me try and regain my composure. Okay I'm ready, hello everyone, and welcome to the awkward sex portion of the week. Today you'll be following me down a bizarre rabbit hole into the figurative and literal clusterfuck that is The To Do List. For those wondering "what even are you talking about" that's a fair question. The To Do List stars Aubrey Plaza (see her here as well) as Brandy Klark, a really awkward power nerd who decides that she needs to be more experienced sexually before she goes to college. To this end, she goes about solving the problem any true nerd would, by making a list of mundane (and also kind of weird) sex stuff, researching said things, and then setting about doing them all. I first heard about this movie after a bizarre incident that a lot of people think might have been staged, but that I'm not 100% about because it was really weird, you can look it up online. I'm referring to Aubrey Plaza crashing the stage of the MTV Movie awards and attempting to take Will Ferrel's award during his acceptance speech. There are reasons to believe that it was staged and that she wasn't just bomb annihilated drunk, for starters why she was in the very front row. Also she had the name of this movie written across her chest, and that got some camera time when she returned to her seat (before she was reportedly ejected from the venue). The MTV Movie Awards are known for that kind of "unstaged but actually no totally staged" stuff though, so who knows. THE POINT IS that was how I first heard about this movie, and so I figured what the hell, give it a watch and see what sorts of weird shit happens. Well all kinds I guess.

Troll 2

Troll squared? What are you trying to tell me.

"Be afraid... be TWICE as afraid!"

It's Thursday, and you know what that means, I've returned to haunt you with more movie reviews! Now many of you are probably at least passing familiar with today's movie, as it has been made popular at least in meme form by the internet. In particular there is one clip that frequently surfaced for a while, catching an especially shitty moment. While it is a funny clip, and certainly representative of the movie, I feel that no short length of the film can really encompass in all its grandeur the sheer insane shitty-ness of this movie. From opening credits to close this movie is sucking at 100% capacity like an industrial vacuum cleaning up a basement flooded by a burst septic system. Before I really get into the heart of the matter, I wanted to note a few things about the movie. Firstly, while the company that produced it bought the rights to Troll the first (because it experienced very mild financial success, despite also being dross) this movie has no relation to that one at all. Second, there are no trolls at any point in the movie. There are only goblins. The movie even specifically refers to them AS goblins, so that's important too. Third, the movie was produced and directed by an entirely Italian crew, and none of them spoke English, except for a set or costume designer (I don't remember which) who interpreted. Fourth, the entire cast auditioned for parts as extras, but were then cast in leading roles. Most are incredibly ashamed of this film, so I will refrain from referring to them by anything but their character names. None of them went on to anything much better anyway, so mentioning their names would only serve to further their already considerable public humiliation. Speaking of, let's talk about the movie itself.

The People Under the Stairs

THE SKULLS IN THE SKY

"In every neighborhood there is one house that adults whisper about and children cross the street to avoid."

Presumably on Wes Craven's street that is his house! Welcome back to The Tagline everyone, today I will keep the ball rolling with more sort of horror, brought to you from the master of poor timing and genre confusion, Wes Craven! To be honest, I had previously not seen enough Wes Craven movies to entirely connect the dots. I had seen the Freddy movies, I'd seen Vampire in Brooklyn (more on that disaster here) and I'd watched cumulatively maybe like 2/3rds of a Scream movie (of which I believe there are approximately 700 thousand). Looking back now, I can see a common pattern of terrible timing, intermixing scenes of gruesome brutality and child abuse, with goofy Home Alone style kid's movie humor and slapstick. So just as we saw in Vampire in Brooklyn, so too shall we see today in The People Under the Stairs, a heartwarming tale about a young boy nicknamed Fool, who goes on a mission to steal gold from the cruel rich landlords trying to evict his family from their tenement in the ghetto. That sounds like a kid's movie right? Well hold on, let me add a little more context and then we'll see if you still feel the same way.