Review:
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Brazen removes 47.3 shades from 50 Shades of Grey to make it worthy of a Lifetime Original, then crosses it with the Preposterous Nanny Thriller Deadly Illusions , a Netflix original in which Kristen Davis played a murder-mystery novelist caught in a real-life thriller situation.
Performance Worth Watching: A Who’s the Boss? -related crush lingering since 1987 perpetually endears me to Milano, yet I’m not far gone enough to offer apologies on her behalf for this forgettable toothless cornball junk.
And another:
January is often referred to as the “dump month” when it comes to big screen movies. Any new projects destined to fail, including ones from big studios are rushed out without much fanfare in the hopes that they’re quickly forgotten. It’s not all bad of course, but Brazen is a perfect example. And what a bad movie this is.
Now, Brazen almost feels like a guilty pleasure in every sense of the word. You’ll feel guilty watching this, and likely ashamed at enjoying parts of it. That enjoyment doesn’t come from the story, plot or characters though, it comes from the tone this film adopts.
Brazen embraces its story so seriously and believes in its ridiculously illogical story with such enthusiasm that it’s actually funny at times. And that’s probably the only compliment I can give this one. Beyond that, there’s absolutely nothing here worth recommending.
It looks like I started watching that at some point. I have no recollection of doing that, all I know is that past me made it a whole 9 minutes into the movie before giving up.
Oh, man. I am excited for this.
Hopefully Choose or Die will give me real insight into 80s gaming :)
I saw the Netflix pop-up preview for that and it looked awful. The trailer is very slightly less awful, but… still awful.
Also, is the premise really that they’re trying to claim an unclaimed video game prize from a 80’s game? That’s… not how any of this works.
Dude, I have ten thousand hours into Earthquest and NOW you tell me?!
Ah… not really. But it’s not better than that…
Took a chance on Code 8 after it popped up on Netflix suggestions, and was surprised to find that this was all that showed up in a QT3 search. I really liked it. Sure, it’s a shallow exploration of the premise but they did pretty well for having only 90 minutes to work with. Better than a lot of stuff I’ve watched with longer runtimes. Thought the action was done well, and the Amell cousins did a fine job with their roles. As for the ending, it seemed fine to me…they didn’t fix the dystopia or perform any miracles, so I guess if you were looking for that you’d be disappointed, but it seemed to follow just fine from everything preceding it.
I can’t believe I announced I’m going to watch a movie. A very aspirational post.
(No, I never watched it). Thank you for the impressions!
So I tried out Captain Nova, a film about a time traveler saving the world from climate disaster. It’s aimed at kids, so I was expecting it to have a fairly simple story and straightforward characters. This is the case, but unfortunately it also has terrible writing. It’s like they skipped over the parts of the story where people react like normal humans. Kid sees a spaceship crash and a robot comes out yelling orders at him…and he’s all like, yeah, this is normal, no fear or even questioning. Couple of kids stuck in the woods by a broken-down SUV, and the guy who finds them asks no questions, doesn’t try to find out who they are or track down parents. The whole thing just feels off, even accounting for it being written for kids.
Avoid Always Be My Maybe. Like hard avoid. This is not a romcom about two friends who grew up together then grew apart and then get back together in the rote romcom way. Ali Wong is this asshole celebrity chef, who had nothing but contempt for most of the life she left behind, including her childhood friend Randall Park. And in the last 5 mins they turned her in this not-asshole and everything is fine! Like the previous 85 mins did not exist.
And they have the nerve to make Keanu Reeves plays himself, except this Keanu is also an asshole, i.e. nothing like the real Keanu. What the what?
I thought the Keanu scenes were funny, and made it worth loading it up on Netflix (probably best to skip to those parts though no need to watch the other 90% of the movie).
Celebs playing exaggerated asshole caricatures of themselves is not some bizarre thing, Curb for instance does it really well.
Or Neil Patrick Harris in the Harold and Kumar movies. (Also an exaggerated womanizer when he’d already come out as gay.)
And Ricky Gervais’ Extras made two seasons out of the concept, with each episode featuring a different celeb caricaturing themselves. Hilarious! :)
I can see the appeal of celebrities playing an alternative version of themselves (masturbatory as it is), but IMO Keanu’s cameo is just painful to watch.
There is one scene where they tried to recreate the famous Notting Hill press conference, ended up sucking all the fun and charm out of it and practically made Randall Park get down on his knees to beg.
Operation Mincemeat, based on the famed WW2 espionage operation and Ben Macintyre book, is pretty good. Those who are familiar with the book won’t necessarily learn anything new, and predictably will roll their eyes at the ways the writers have juiced up the history in spots for drama. But, even so, this is a solid, old-fashioned espionage drama, with some of the juicing working both dramatically and as commentary on the nature of the spy business.
The main pleasure, though, is seeing a whole bunch of talented and familiar actors all in the same place. Look, there’s Galahad from Kingsmen (Colin Firth,) Margaret from Boardwalk Empire (Kelly Macdonald,) Isobel from Downton Abbey (Penelope Wilton) and Tom from Succession (Matthew Macfayden) all teaming up to invent stories about a corpse. There’s Mycroft from Sherlock popping in ever so briefly for a couple of scenes. And there’s a mini The Death of Stalin reunion, except this time Marshal Zhukhov is playing a British general and Beria is playing Churchill.
It’s a very enjoyable film, as you say largely based on the pleasure of watching a large group of exceptional actors chew up some very good dialog. A real pleasant surprise.
We watched Operation Mincemeat and agreed that it was okay. I had hoped that I would’ve enjoyed it more given the cast and subject matter.
But the love triangle didn’t add anything to the story and detracted from it IMHO.
Spending more time on the German officer and will he/won’t he would have been more interesting. They went to the effort of casting that role and showing it but did nothing with it.