Mad Max: Fury Road

Is it? IS IT?!

"The future belongs to the mad."

Hello friends and welcome back to a new week of tags, lines, and the tags that are also lines. That's right, it's the Tagline! Over the weekend I got out to that most sacred of places, the movie theater, and saw Mad Max: Fury Road, not to be confused with my anthro fanfiction Mad Max: Furry Road. Starring Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky, former law enforcer, former family man, current wasteland wanderer and serious hallucinator. During his almost 100% insane wandering through the irradiated wasteland that is the outback, Max is set upon by the warboys, servants of the legit nuts Immortan Joe, a demagogue who is a divine figure for his followers. Max is used as a living blood bag for a warboy, and taken along in pursuit of Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), one of Joe's enforcers who has gone rogue and abducted Joe's child brides, in an attempt to lead them to the green place, which we can all assume probably doesn't exist. Max is caught up in this extremely violent desert chase, as you are no doubt familiar by now this is a common occurrence in his life out in the Australian desert hellscape.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

WELCOME TO THE NEW AGE OR
WHATEVER.

"A new age begins"

Hello everyone, welcome to the Tagline once again! Today, I will finally make good, and review that massive action blockbuster, that you already no doubt have seen, but I'm going to review it anyway, just try and stop me. Picking up chronologically after Thor 2 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Age of Ultron opens with the Avengers assaulting a Hydra base, one of many they've attacked while searching for the scepter that Loki used in the first Avengers movie. If you remember from the end of Winter Soldier (or if you had missed out here's a little recap) the scepter had fallen into the hands of a Hydra-ish bad guy with a menacing accent and I think a monocle? I feel like there was definitely a monocle involved. Anyway, that guy is studying the scepter and playing babysitter to the Maximoff twins (that's Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver) when the Avengers come knocking, with like Thor's hammer and stuff. After recovering the staff (because of course they would) Tony Stark and Bruce Banner discover an AI that they try to use to resurrect the Ultron program, a peacekeeping robot program that was supposed to act as a security system for the whole planet. This goes immediately south of the border, as Ultron needs all of 10 minutes alone with the internet to determine that the entire human race needs to be eradicated.

Radical Jack

Yikes.

"No one can hold him back"

Hi folks, welcome to another riveting edition of the Tagline! I know what you were thinking, "Oh hey Justin's totally going to review Age of Ultron this week!" THINK AGAIN SUCKERS I'm going to review this fucking piece of steaming garbage. What's better than a stupid movie about a CIA ninja soldier man? A movie about that where the supposed badass is played by Billy Ray Cyrus. Yeah that's right, welcome to my nightmare. This film was released in the year 2000, when the world was kind of ridiculous, and it's called Radical Jack. It doesn't 'star' anyone per se, but features Mr. Billy Ray "Achy Breaky Heart" Cyrus as the eponymous Radical Jack, which is his very real sounding code name, and definitely isn't reminiscent of any British statesmen. Anyway, Jack used to be a Navy Seal, but now he's double fisting booze and hanging out in a bar somewhere, until he gets called out of his... deep drunk cover to take a new mission, one that will give him a chance to get even with the man who took everything from him (you know murdered his wife and kid naturally). So without further explicit telling of everything happening in the movie with awkward exposition, Jack heads to the small town of Who-Gives-a-Fuck, Vermont, where he poses as an extremely conspicuous bartender at a local roadhouse. In addition to exciting the lady bartenders, Jack's other job is to locate a local arms dealer, who for some reason does all his business in the middle of nowhere, I mean I don't know who he's selling illegal arms to in the woods but... we'll overlook that I guess for now.

Lucy

Spooky Eye: The Movie

"She has the Power."

Good afternoon friends, and welcome back to another stirring edition of the Tagline, where movies are still king, or possibly queen as the case might be. Today I will be going back a little bit to talk about the recent Luc Besson film Lucy, a movie that I avoided seeing for a while because I wasn't sure I needed to see Scarlett Johansson hurricanrana another person. As it turned out, I really didn't but she mostly hurts people in different ways, so that was a real relief. Lucy is a movie about a girl, who as you may have guessed is named Lucy. She is kind of a dumbass, For starters, she hangs around with a seedy crowd, including her super awesome boyfriend who essentially sells her as a drug mule so that he can try to get out of a bad debt he owes to some Korean crime boss in Taiwan (where they are). This doesn't really work out great for him or his splattered brains, but he was an asshole anyway so really who cares. Lucy on the other hand... doesn't end up much better off, having her abdomen stuffed full of drugs and then getting kicked in her drug bag, which seems like a dumb plan on the part of her captors. Large amounts of the drug are absorbed by her system, which causes her to freak out and then does what every drug addict dreams about: gives her super powers. Despite her enhanced abilities and telekinesis and other crazy shit, Lucy's body is rapidly deteriorating, and so she attempts to locate the rest of the drug mules so she can juice up some more. Also she contacts well known wise person and maybe god Morgan Freeman so that she can try and figure out a way not to literally disintegrate on an airplane.

Insurgent

Glass breaking everywhere.

"One Choice Can Destroy You"

Hello my friends, welcome back to the Tagline, where I promise I haven't forgotten about you all. Today, just as in the days of yore, I will discuss a piece of flaming hot trash that I recently saw in the movie theater, where they no longer let you put your feet up apparently. I will be talking this time about Insurgent, the stunning sequel to the smash lunch time bullying after school special Divergent. Take a moment to acquaint yourself and then we'll continue. Good? Okay. There are many reasons that I feel compelled to review movies that are invariably going to be trash. Sometimes I fear others will see them and be disappointed at how awful they are. Other times it's just really funny to watch how comically bad something is. Still other times a movie can be bad in a way that tells us how other movies can be good. Every now and then you get a movie that adroitly does all of these things, and this is one such time. Insurgent takes up where the first film left off, with Tris (played by the preeminently unlikable Shailene Woodley) and her grossly older boyfriend Four (Theo James) on the run from Jeanine (Kate Winslet) who is trying to hunt down all the Divergents because she thinks they're bad, and also is a wicked bitch. She heads up the Erudites, who are the caste of smarty-pants that in the first movie led a coup against the nice guys. In the process they murdered the parents of Tris, and she is as a result lookin' for some of that sweet sweet revenge.

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.

Chappie

I'm glad my parents aren't hyper-criminals
who are also Die Antwoord.

"I am discovery. I am wonder. I am Chappie."

I feel like this tagline is a bit misleading in terms of the movie's tone, but then again I've never especially gotten the impression that tagline writers have any idea what movies are about. Welcome back to THE Tagline, where robots get set on fire just to watch them burn. Over the weekend I got out to the movies, because there was something that I actually wanted to see, and that was Chappie, the latest from South African-Canadian pain artist Neill Blomkamp, a man romantically involved with cinematic misery, and also science fiction I suppose. His last fictional foray was the aggressively unpleasant and almost completely unnecessary Elysium, a film where Matt Damon portrays a low-life who enlists the help of bigger low-lifes, to bring down the biggest, meanest, low-lifes of all, who live on a magical paradise in outer space. What you may be detecting is I didn't think much of Elysium. While still kind of a bummer, I found District 9, his first major theatrical release, to be substantially less shitty, and so with these two experiences from the director behind me, I figured that I had a 50/50 shot of either liking or hating Chappie, a movie about a police robot that gains sentience, in the caldera of violence and shittiness that is Johannesburg. How did I end up liking it? Well things went about 50/50. Let's start off with the basics.