Irrelevant But Awesome

One movie a week for an entire year. We made it. There have been good movies and bad movies and so, so many in between. And we’ll get to some “best of” and “worst of” looking back on the movies that we watched in 2017, but for a moment, let’s peel back the curtain at how the movies were selected. To be fair, we made several adjustments and tweaks to how the movies were selected as the year progressed, but for the most part each month, one reviewer would select a movie for all of us to watch. If there was an extra month, we would usually take turns with the extra month unless there was a reason that someone wanted to pitch a specific movie to be watched on a specific week. It’s not a perfect system as there were several exceptions to the aforementioned rules, but it’s enough that we can look back at the picks and see who had the best and worst picks this year. (Note: The ratings of each movie are mine (Joel’s) and the other reviewers are free to make their own ratings if they feel min...

Melissa McCarthy is a busy person. Last year she was in three movies, as well as making time for an appearance in the Gilmore Girls revival and her constant appearances this past year on Saturday Night Live as Sean Spicer. It’s not quite Rock levels of everywhere, but make no mistake, McCarthy is keeping busy. In the five years since Bridesmaids pushed her into super stardom, McCarthy has become one of the biggest names in comedy, which makes her next project so interesting. Cook-Off! , a movie set to hit theaters this November, isn’t the latest movie that McCarthy has been working on for the past several months. This is a movie that was actually made ten years ago back in 2007. For whatever reason, the movie was completed but never released. It’s only recently been picked up by Lionsgate who is releasing the movie later this year. What’s interesting is you have to realize that in 2007, McCarthy is not the star that she is now. At the time she hadn’t appeared in a movie ...

I think I’ve gotten to the point where I can say, I don’t enjoy working out, and at this point I don’t think I ever will. That’s not to say that you can’t enjoy working out, I know that many people do. That’s also not to say that I think working out is a bad idea. It’s something that you need to do to maintain a healthy lifestyle, It’s something I will continue to do despite my decision to declare that I just don’t like working out. What I do like is having worked out. That feeling when your done and you can relax, but you feel good about yourself because you know you did something that was good for you and made the right decision. I enjoy having worked out, I just don’t enjoy working out in the moment. I say all that to say I feel that’s what watching Darren Aronofsky’s movies is like. Aronofsky usually makes really great films. Your mileage may vary on one or two of them, but for the most part he is considered to be one of the better directors working today. But the movies he ma...

My grandmother is a big Stephen King fan. In the 1980s she was the kind of fan who would get each new Stephen King book the day it came out, no questions asked. So growing up, I would often see a long shelf of hardback books, all written by Stephen King. Obviously, looking down that long shelf It was the book that really stood out. Such a huge book. And with such a small title, it was able to appear, giant, on the spine. Two letters that caught your eye at once staring at the bookshelf. “IT.” It, the book is huge. The last time it was adapted it had to be done as a mini-series to try and get enough screen time to adapt the story. This is one of the books that often appears on lists of “unfilmable” works just because of how massive it is. The new It movie approaches this issue by only attempting to adapt half of the book. It is the story of a group of kids who have to face off against an unspeakable evil that inhabits their town, and their return to the town as adults to finish ...

Welcome to “Wild Speculation” a segment here where we take a recent news story and speculate wildly on what it could mean. Today’s story, Directing duo, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who were directing the still untitled Han Solo spinoff film for Lucasfilm, announced yesterday that they were leaving the project. Officially that is all we know so far. Now, onto the wild speculation. First of all I want to say something about the idea of Phil Lord and Chris Miller directing this Han Solo movie in the first place. To date the pair have directed four movies together ( Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street, 22 Jump Street ) which have all been out and out comedies of one form or another. While not full out parodies, each of these four movies has leaned very heavily into outlandish comedy in it’s own unique way. And while Star Wars movies have always been fun movies with plenty of humor, especially when it came to the character of Han Solo, it’s nowhere ne...

You can’t really write a review about a Marvel movie being good anymore. At this point that’s pretty much expected. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is the fifteenth theatrically released movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and they’ve all had at least some amount of critical success to say nothing of commercial success for the fra nchise as a whole. So it doesn’t really mean anything at this point to say that Guardians was good, that much is expected at this point. The natural thing to do would be to compare this movie to the first Guardians of the Galaxy from 2014, but that doesn’t seem very fair either. The first movie was a crazy, off the wall idea of a movie. Something that (at the time) looked like it was going to be Marvel’s riskiest move to date, and most of the audience went into it with little to no expectations. This time around, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is probably the most anticipated movie of the year (except perhaps for Star Wars VIII ) so it’s not going ...

This past week, our Netflix movie of the week was Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves from 1991. While we had some differing opinions about the quality of the film itself, one thing that’s stuck with me is how much it’s a product of its time. Robin Hood, it seems, is a story that gets adapted again and again throughout the years, often molding itself to the filmmaking and storytelling styles that are popular at the time. For example, the most recent Robin Hood movie was the Russell Crowe movie Robin Hood from 2010, which was more or less a gritty reboot of the character at a time that gritty reboots are all the rage. But that’s the last time the Robin Hood story has been adapted for theaters. Thinking it might be time for Hollywood to take a look Robin Hood again, I wanted to see if any studios were working on trying again on making a Robin Hood movie. It turns out that everybody is planning on doing something Robin Hood related. At least seven different “Robin Hood” projects are...

First and foremost this month, we need to address that December is usually full of movies that are trying to win an Oscar, which means that while there technical release date falls somewhere in December, it’s usually a limited release date with the wide release happening sometime early in the next year. So while we will be categorizing this by release date, it’s very possible that some of the following movies will not be available in your local theater until early in 2017. That being said, let’s jump into the lineup for December. December 2nd: Jackie: Natalie Portman Plays First Lady Jackie Kennedy in the days following the Assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. It’s not really a biopic as it only focuses on that one brief moment in her life, but it looks to be a powerful film that addresses a lot of things most people didn’t even consider about those days. In addition to grieving for her husband, Jackie Kennedy had to console her children, prepare to leave her home (sinc...