Reviews of albums, films, concerts, and more from the Bay Area Music and Movie Nerds
The 2020 Sundance Film Festival concluded this weekend with Festival jurors bestowing prizes upon 28 of the 128 films shown during the ten-day Fest. All the winners can be found here, but, as I did last year, below I present my own highlights — good and bad — and let you know which films you should SEE or SKIP, should any of these be widely released at some point.
Continue reading “Film Feature: Highs and Lows from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival”
With A Bad Moms Christmas, writer/directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore try in vain to recapture the success of Bad Moms, their smart, funny, and truthful comedy from last year about overextended and overwhelmed modern day moms. They should have left well enough alone; not every picture needs a sequel or to be the start of a franchise. A Bad Moms Christmas is not nearly as funny as the original, and just feels like a painfully obvious and rather weak extension of the filmmakers’ initial idea. Continue reading “Film Review: A Bad Moms Christmas“
A few weeks ago, we learned that Mike and Dave need wedding dates, and now today, in Bad Moms, we find that some stressed out moms need to cut loose. In the summer’s second booze-soaked, raunchy-but-sweet comedy to open this month, Josh Lucas and Scott Moore, the co-writers of the Hangover trilogy, also pick up the director’s reins to bring us this similarly over-the-top, often very funny film that has a lot of predictable heart under its R-rated laughs.
Continue reading “Film Review: Bad Moms“
There’s a line in Jupiter Ascending where a former alien soldier stationed on Earth tells a newly-discovered woman of royalty, “Bees don’t lie.” With or without context, you should get a sense of how ridiculous this sounds, because it is. Completely. Ridiculous. Jupiter Ascending, from the Wachowskis, whose credibility is descending rapidly, is a silly overwrought mess. Too much is packed into too complex a premise. The tone shifts back and forth between silly and serious, imaginative and derivative, from The Fifth Element to Dune (minus the intelligence). When a movie gets pushed from a summer tentpole position (May-July) to the cinema graveyard shift (January-February), it’s obvious that something is wrong. In the case of Jupiter Ascending, it has all the makings of a sci fi summer blockbuster, but fails to execute on all fronts aside from some nifty special effects that look quite pretty.
starring: Justin Timberlake, Mila Kunis, Patricia Clarkson, Woody Harrelson, Richard Jenkins, Jenna Elfman, Nolan Gould, Bryan Greenberg, Andy Samberg, Emma Stone
written by: Keith Merryman, David A. Newman, Will Gluck, Harley Peyton
directed by: Will Gluck
MPAA: rated R for sexual content and language.