September 1, 2012, - 11:55 pm
Wknd Box Office: Lawless, Killer Joe, Celeste & Jesse Forever
Sorry I’m late with my movie reviews but I had a lot going on Friday (couldn’t get ’em done in time for the Jewish Sabbath), I hated the new movies, and there are no blockbusters among them. Remember, August is the cemetery in which Hollywood studios send the worst movies to die a quick death. And this weekend shows that in spades. I did not see “The Possession,” which was not screened for Detroit-area critics (which usually means it’s a bomb).
* “Lawless“: There are plenty of interesting moonshiner stories in America (and I’ve written about one of them, Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton), but this wasn’t one of them. This long, slow, boring, waste of time was nothing but two hours of torture porn and killing. It was bloody and violent with no point to it. I’m disappointed in the Gary Oldman and Guy Pearce–two terrific actors I admire–for taking what was obviously just a paycheck. They co-star in this absolute garbage.
Shia LaBeouf, in the movie’s lead role, just cannot do a Southern accent. He plays one of three real-life moonshining brothers in Franklin County, Virginia during the prohibition. Between the three brothers, there are three different Southern accents. Even more ridiculous is the story. There’s hardly a plot, little suspense, and just a whole lot of blood and sickening scenes, such as the one in which a man is literally tarred and feathered (am I racist for saying that?). The brothers fight rivals, thugs, corrupt cops, and a corrupt federal prosecutor from Chicago (Pearce). And I just could not have cared less. The whole purpose of the movie was to show as much violence and torture porn as possible and make all of the characters as unsympathetic and uninteresting as possible. Graphic, gory, and just plain garbage. And frankly, if everyone in the movie would have been killed off at the beginning, I’d have applauded. Sadly, some lived.
Skip this.
FOUR MARXES
Watch the trailer . . .
* “Killer Joe“: This is the second torture/killing porn movie of the week, and it’s far worse than “Lawless.” It’s rated NC-17, and it’s just sick and utterly warped. Complete garbage. Matthew McConaughey plays a police detective in Texas who doubles as a hitman. He demands $25,000 for a hit. A trashy family that lives in a trailer wants to hire him. The adult son (Emile Hirsch) owes some mobsters $6,000 in gambling debt, and he wants to hire a hitman to kill his mother for insurance money to pay off his debt so he can avoid being killed. He convinces his father (Thomas Haden Church), who is divorced from his mother, to agree to hire the hitman. But they don’t have any money to pay him, and he wants his money up front. So, they agree to give their respective sister/daughter, who is mildly retarded (not sure if I’m allowed to say that word in this PC-world, but “mildly-Downs Syndrome-afflicted” sounds ridiculous), to the hitman to have sex with her at whim as a “retainer” payment. Sound warped enough for you? It gets worse. The movies is absolutely disgusting, incredibly violent and bloody, and features a scene in which McConaughey’s character forces a women to simulate oral sex with a piece of fried chicken on his crotch while he masturbates. Yup, Hollywood keeps getting more warped. High Quality Al-Qaeda terrorist recruitment material.
Despicable. Absolute trash.
FOUR MARXES PLUS A BIN LADEN
Watch the trailer . . .
* “Celeste & Jesse Forever“: While this movie had a lot of funny lines, it was also extremely annoying. Rashida Jones is a driven, successful PR person who is married to her loser boyfriend she’s known since high school, the unemployed Andy Samberg. They decide to split up, and he lives in the guesthouse behind her house. But while he moves on and meets someone else, she misses him and can’t seem to move on. They are both hipsters. Ick. Um, I don’t know about you, but watching two annoying hipsters simulate manual sex on a carrot at a wedding reception ain’t exactly entertaining to me. It’s stupid and so was this movie. And I had no use from Samberg’s insertion of his Hebrew name and constant self-deprecation for being Jewish gratuitously inserted in the movie. More self-hatred from Hollywood’s Jews. And it’s hard to believe that Rashida Jones would ever be with Andy Samberg (or that anyone would be with Andy Samberg, for that matter.) The guy is talentless, and this movie is a time bandit. At the end of it, you’ll walk out wondering why you voluntarily allowed it to steal 1.5 hours and ten bucks from you.
TWO MARXES
Watch the trailer . . .
Tags: Andy Samberg, Celeste & Jesse Forever, Celeste and Jesse Forever, Emile Hirsch, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce, hipsters, Killer Joe, Killer Joe movie reviews, Killer Joe review, Lawless, Lawless movie, Lawless movie review, Lawless review, Matthew McConaughey, moonshiners, movie, movie review, Movie Reviews, NC-17, Rashida Jones, Shia LaBeouf, Thomas Haden Church
I hear there’s a movie coming out soon called “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” or some such nonsense about an American Moslem who reluctantly becomes a terrorist because we Americans are just so islamophobic or something.
I think you’re going to have to whip out infinity marxes for that one.
Ari Mendelson on September 2, 2012 at 12:23 am