#moviemunchtime

[moviemunchtime]

Project Almanac - Munch to the Future

SCORES

Sloppy – 3.0/10

Spud – 3.0/10

Dumb teenagers do dumb things and we’re old and grumpy and Sloppy can’t believe Spud talked him into seeing this.

~

Spud: Firstly, let me say... I’m sorry.

Sloppy: Two dollars! It cost you two dollars to buy our tickets! I could’ve time traveled to being 8-years-old and bought a small, plastic Feraligatr figure for two dollars!! 

Spud: I didn’t know it was just gonna be white kids doing white-kid stuff.

Sloppy: The kids run on the stage with their favourite band and everyone’s just cool with it! There’s a line of believability, guys!! It was just embarrassing to watch. All I could see was the writer lying on a therapists couch.

Spud: That dialogue... “Oh my god, the light’s went out!” Hilarious. It’s like the writer was bullied as akid, so now he’s sitting at his working desk: “Ooohhh, if I could go back! The things I could’ve been! I’d get the hot girl!”

Sloppy: Some of the lines in this movie... “Wow David, you’re like a superhero!” And it does not give one single fahk about logic. Like, there are movies with plot holes, and sometimes you can look past them. But this one shows you its plot holes – shoves them in your face – and hopes you turn the other way.

Spud: They’re creating so many versions of themselves! We see them!

Sloppy: But they hope you don’t question how these characters are sneaking around ALL these versions of themselves they’re creating. I mean, are they killing them?? What’s going on there?? The good things I can say is that I enjoyed his friends Christie, Sam and Adam. They were fine.

Spud: Yeah, I enjoyed Adam. But Christie was that pretty blonde chick who we’re supposed to believe has no friends and gets bullied. That never happens.

Sloppy: And why would "the hottest and most popular girl in school" be sitting alone at lunch— 

Spud: --doing her homework.

Sloppy: And no, I’m sorry, you DO NOT take your camera to the hospital where your best friend lies in a coma.

Spud: That’s the thing. There’s so reason for this to be a found-footage movie. There’s no reason. At all. 

Sloppy: It’s just a gimmick. And how long was it before they started time-travelling?

Spud: I swear to god it was like 45-minutes. The movie started at about 9:35.

Sloppy: I checked my phone. It was exactly 10:20 when they time-travelled for the first time. Ridiculous.

Spud: Half the movie was, “Ooh, we need nitrogen! Ooh, we need hydrogen! Ooh, now we need—“

Sloppy: GAAHH! Skip it! Just skip all that! Who cares?!

Spud: Back to the Future, they cover all that in under twenty minutes.

Sloppy: I felt so old watching this... First time I was consciously aware of this – when all the male characters are saying how hot one of the girls are, but all I see is some baby-faced child.

Spud: And how they thought it was so fun retaking that science quiz like ten times. That just wasn’t fun for anyone.

Sloppy: “Yo, teach! That’s how y’do it dawg!”

Spud: “That’s how it is! Boom!” Whitest kid alive. “I’m gonna have sex with all these pretty girls! WoOOoAaaAH!” God. So what you gonna give the ol’ Project Almanac?

Sloppy: It’s hard, I shouldn’t have been sitting in that cinema.

Spud: It’s just not for us.

Sloppy: You know that not even a speck of me was, “Yeah, you know, I’ll check out Almanac.” It’s the last movie I should be sitting down to watch. I had no right to be there.

Spud: But you gotta rate it based on your experience, not others... 

Sloppy: Look, it’s stupid as shit.

Spud: Even if it is for kids younger than us, kids should be watching better shit than this. I’m just sayin’, holy crap.

Sloppy: I can see 14-year-olds watching this going, “Yeeaaahh man, farkin’ lollapalooozaaaa!” 

Spud: “Lollapalooza wahs sah gr8!”

Sloppy: “Sah sick!” 3.0

Spud: Yep, 3.0.

Sloppy: This movie lives in a world where everyone has a camera ready. There’s a huge jumbo plane going down – ON FIRE – and someone’s standing there, ready with a camera to get a nice close-up. It crashes, massive explosion, and he’s walking towards it, zooming-in. Perfectly stable shot.

Spud: Man, that was Jake Gyllenhaal on the scene. 

Sloppy: *laughs and claps* Well done.

[moviemunchtime]

Big Hero 6 - Baymunch (Full Spoiler Warning)

SCORE

Spud: 7.0/10

A special bond develops between inflatable robot Baymax and prodigy Hiro Hamada, who team up with a group of friends to form a band of high-tech heroes.

~

Spud: I really need you to see it. I need you to agree with me.

Sloppy: What if I love it?

Spud: But you can’t! I don’t know what I’d do.

Sloppy: You sound like you hate the movie.

Spud: Look, I have to be like this because everyone else loves it so much. I need to balance it out. I need to rage against the machine.

Sloppy: Rage against the Disney machine. I hear that visually, it’s incredible.

Spud: The visuals are insane. The colours and the city, that’s what made the movie for me.

Sloppy: The world it’s set in?

Spud: The world is fucked. The city’s called San Fransokyo, so you’ve got all this Japanese wackiness in these beautiful hilltops and around the beach. Crazy Tokyo signs everywhere, and the Golden Gate Bridge is this oriental bridge. It’s so bright and vivid. It’s so cool.

Sloppy: Sounds very new.

Spud: It’s new! It’s such an original idea! San Fransokyo? Why not. It’s ace.

Sloppy: Awesome.

Spud: What’s not so ace are the heroes.

Sloppy: Is this like an origin story? Do they have super powers?

Spud: They have skills, and the skills are awesome. Honey Blossom has this purse with the periodic table on it, so she taps different elements and this ball pops out that does something amazing depending on the combination of elements.

Sloppy: That’s amazing.

Spud: It’s the coolest shit. And there’s this other chick, and she’s got these two disks that she zooms around on, but she also uses them as her weapons, like Frisbees. So she’s doing mid-air flips, throwing Frisbees, it’s the best.

Sloppy: Oh.

Spud: What?

Sloppy: I’m waiting for the turnaround. I’m waiting for your St. Vincent stroke moment.

Spud: *laughs* And Baymax is adorable. The first half-hour is just all this slapstick, and it’s all great and hilarious. On the surface, it’s all great. The problem is, there’s nothing underneath that. The characters aren’t there. They’re not characters, apart from the cool skills they have.

Sloppy: There’s one key element you haven’t touched on yet. I’m guessing that’s the biggest problem?

Spud: Which is?

Sloppy: The main character.

Spud: His name’s Hiro. Good one Disney.

Sloppy: *laughs*

Spud: His older brother creates Baymax at his science school. So Hiro enters the high school, he meets two people: the dude who’s the obvious bad guy, and then the overbearingly nice guy who is the real bad guy.

Sloppy: Ah, sure sure. The ol’ James P. Waternoose effect.

Spud: Yep. There’s an explosion, Hiro’s brother dies. I didn’t care, the guy was so pure and perfect. He didn’t feel like a real person at all. He only felt like a plot device. And his death is what’s driving the entire movie, so because I felt no emotion there, it didn’t carry the rest of the movie.

Sloppy: Hmm, yeah.

Spud: Hiro wants revenge. He tells his friends, “We should be heroes.” They’re like, “Yeah, we should.” And then they just suit up.

Sloppy: Like, in the next scene? They’re now in costumes with awesome weapons and skills?

Spud: Yeah, exactly. And if you’re going to do a superhero team movie, your characters need to feel unique and stand apart from each other, like in The Avengers. But here, they all just become superheroes in a second, they have like these quirks, but nothing deeper than that.

Sloppy: They step into a revolving door as a normal kid, come out as a superhero.

Spud: *laughs* Pretty much. The training montage is what you’ve seen a thousand times before. “Oh no, I’m missing my targets.” Next second, “Yay, I’m hitting them.” And then Hiro has a How to Train Your Dragon sequence with Baymax, literally flying above the clouds into the sunset. Something goes wrong, Baymax dives, but they pull up at the last second.

Sloppy: Hiro throws his arms in the air and goes, “Woohoo!!”

Spud: It’s exactly the same scene. It’s shameless. See, that’s the worst thing. Everything in this movie from then on has been done to death.

Sloppy: Oh no. So the movie feels like it was made by a marketing team.

Spud: Then they do the whole Iron Giant thing where Baymax’s eyes go red because he has a kill switch. Then the friends are like, “No, killing’s bad!” Hiro realises that part of his brother is in Baymax and that killing isn’t the answer to grief.

Sloppy: Is there a villain?

Spud: Holy shit, the bad guy is barely a bad guy. All he wants to do is beat his competition, this other corporation. It’s this whole revenge thing, coz his daughter “died” in this portal that had to do with the corporation.

Sloppy: But what’s at stake if he wins?

Spud: He gets revenge. Takes out some corporation.

Sloppy: That sounds like a job for the police, not superheroes.

Spud: Nah mate, he wears a mask. If you wear a mask, you’re a supervillain. Superheroes take down supervillains.

Sloppy: *laughs*

Spud: No but he does have control of these super crazy magnet-things that make for some good visuals. Not technically a super-power but enough to make him supervillain-y.

Sloppy: Is this all connected to Hiro’s brother dying?

Spud: Look I think so, it’s all kinda fuzzy at the moment... Hiro takes responsibility for it because he’s a superhero because he has Baymax. It’s all very sloppy. It’s too sloppy for a Disney movie.

Sloppy: Does it set itself up for a sequel?

Spud: Oh my god, it’s the worst ending. They just defeat the bad guy and go, “We are…!” And the screen cuts to: BIG HERO 6.

Sloppy: Huh. Yeah, you’re making it sound like there’s nothing besides making a movie that looks cool and sells toys.

Spud: There’s no substance. I was so disappointed. The short before the movie is about a boy and his dog, and it’s so much better at creating emotion, and it’s only 6 minutes long.

Sloppy: You’ve convinced me. I’m a believer. Doesn’t sound like a great follow-up to Princess and the Frog, Tangled, Frozen… I’m surprised your rating isn’t Big Hero 6.5.

Spud: *laughs* The animation is incredible. There are some really trippy scenes.

Sloppy: I’ll wait till Blu-Ray, be stunned, call it a day.

Spud: I wish you’d seen it. You could’ve saved me from sounding like this heartless grump. I wanted to like it!

Sloppy: Maybe I’ll see it and love it and buy all the Pop Vinyls. 

Spud: The worst.

[moviemunchtime]

Pride - Munchin' Loud and Munchin' Proud (Full Spoiler Warning)

SCORES

Sloppy – 9.0/10

Spud – 9.5/10

U.K. gay activists work to help miners during their lengthy strike of the National Union of Mineworkers in the summer of 1984.

~

Sloppy: Pride. Get into it.

Spud: I think Pride was… amazing. I loved it so much. It was just so funny, and so happy. I went into it thinking, “Yeah, another one of Bill Nighy’s cute British movies.”

Sloppy: That’s what I was worried about! That it was gonna be too cute. Too camp.

Spud: Oh man, it was campy though!

Sloppy: I felt like I was in the scouts again, that’s how camp it was. Singing Kumbaya in the cinema.

Spud: But it was genuinely very good. Amazing, even.

Sloppy: The music is what did it for me. It lifted this movie above being—

Spud: Being too cute.

Sloppy: Yeah. It was powerful! Passionate! Those inspiring violin swells!

Spud: When the Welsh stood up and sang that chant—whatever that tribal song was. And the moment it began, with that Margaret Thatcher anger! The movie gives you the gist really quickly. But it wasn’t too British. The accents weren’t hard to understand for once!

Sloppy: I know! Thank god we’re not in the late 90s anymore, when every Irish character sounded like an angry cartoon mouse.

Spud: Arr, harleybarley, stick y’tosh oop da shuggis. None of that.

Sloppy: Can I just… Bill Nighy, playing that character—

Spud: So reserved for once!

Sloppy: I’ve never seen him do that, but he nailed it. I knew that person.

Spud: That scene where he’s buttering bread… That’s the thing. There’s a lot of subtlety in the movie. As flamboyant as it can be, it was all the subtleties that made it so great.

Sloppy: It was so real.

Spud: Everything with Gethin (Andrew Scott) and his mother. Everything with him finally coming home. That was my favourite. I teared up so many times, and when he goes to his mum again… It killed me. It absolutely killed me.

Sloppy: That one line: “And when’s the last time you said a word to her?” There’s so much truth there. And it wasn’t too in your face with anything either. Especially with the AIDS stuff. They handled it so well. They didn’t talk down to the audience with that. Again, the one line: “I’m on my farewell tour.”

Spud: Tears down my face, all the time. And you know what, the guy who played Mike, Joseph Gilgun – he’s the best. He’s so awesome. Just every look, every body movement. He’s such a character actor. We need more of him. The world needs to realise how brilliant he is.

Sloppy: I think, Mark Ashton – the real man, and the way he was portrayed here – is so inspiring. Take any kid who’s in the closet. Any kid who’s so deep in there they’re going, “Ooh, Turkish Delight! This is so delicious! Thank you Miss White Witch!” (laughs)

Spud: . . .

Sloppy: Chronicles of Narnia.

Spud: Oh.

Sloppy: . . . anyway. Give them 10 minutes of Mark Ashton and they’ll be set. He’s the most inspiring person I’ve come across in the longest time.

Spud: He’s so strong. And what I loved most about this movie is all the people who start off with an idea, like those women. At the start, “Eww, gays.” Just all the turnarounds. The dancing scene… so great.

Sloppy: They really did do the turnarounds well. But.

Spud: Oh, here’s the but. Here’s the great big Kim Kardashian.

Sloppy: The largest but you ever saw is coming your way. I thought the antagonists were very poorly written. They conflicted themselves every other scene.

Spud: The woman with the tiny eyes and pursed lips?

Sloppy: She was just written in there because they needed a villain. Her reason for hating gays goes as deep as, “Perverts!” I want a little more of that. Can’t I get a little more?

Spud: But it was the old way of thinking.

Sloppy: But I believed the other characters. Everyone in the town turned around, except her.

Spud: There were others. The guy who beat up Gethin. The group of miners. The women speaking to Tiny-Eyes.

Sloppy: I needed more from her. Every one of her scenes, that was the cute movie. That was the TV Movie feel I didn’t want. She’s glaring through the curtains in the dark. It wasn’t real any more. It was very scripty.

Spud: It gave the movie momentum. It needs conflict.

Sloppy: Compare her to Josh Brolin in Milk. That’s what I need. And Joe’s parents? I thought they were terribly written. Everything they said and did was only there to serve the mood the director was in when he did that scene.

Spud: The Dad barely paid attention to his son—

Sloppy: He’s not even interested when it’s his son’s birthday. Then, when Joe leaves the house, the Dad’s calling after him all sympathetic-like. He’s sitting on that fence and I’m yelling, “Pick a side!!! JUST PICK A SIDE!”

Spud: I see where you’re coming from. It was a bit wishy-washy. But I’m willing to overlook that, because the rest of the movie was so great. You get that ending. When those buses pull up. All the minors get up. That two-hour buildup for that moment – it ruined me. That’s what the movie was working towards the whole time. This message of hand in hand.

Sloppy: If Harvey Milk is about standing up for your rights, Mark Ashton is about recognizing all those who need their rights stood for. What a phenomenal person. Even though there was four people in my cinema, everyone made a sound when that final tagline came up.

Spud: Man, mine was packed with little old ladies – like those women in the movie – and they were eating it up. They were loving it. The audience was having the best time. It’s the gayest, most fun movie. I was laughing and crying for two hours straight. It’s so full of heart. It’s a 9.5.

Sloppy: If not for a couple of flat and carelessly written characters, I’d agree. 9.0 from me. But seriously, I’m converted. I’m loud and proud.

Spud: Yeah!

Sloppy: I’m gonna go outside and mine some goddamn rocks. Where’s my pickaxe?

Spud: It’s straight to the coals, gettin’ covered with soot. And get the gays in there. Have them help out.

Sloppy: We do need help. Where’s our gays? We need a whole group, holding banners, “Gays and Lesbians Support the Two Guys Who Liked I, Frankenstein!”

Spud: (laughs)

Sloppy: Where’s our story?!

Spud: Don’t go spreading that around! Don’t type it! Leave it out. They’ll find us. They’ll kill us.

Sloppy: But if I’m not honest about it now, I’m gonna be 60 years old, buttering bread… “I liked I, Frankenstein.” Won’t get the same reaction though. She’ll be all, “WHAT?! You unnatural beast!”

Spud: (laughs) “It’s okay, Sloppy. I always knew. I knew since we were kids.”