Worst boozy movie ever

Directed by Rian Johnson
Starring Bruce Willis, JGL, Emily Blunt, Bruce Willis, Jeff Daniels, Pierce Gagnon, Bruce Willis, Piper Perabo, and Bruce Willis

***
Minor spoiler alert: I will discuss a few plot points of the film that you probably could have guessed would be in there if you’ve read anything about it. However, if you wish your slate to remain completely blank you should probably skip this review.

I also spoil Signs but whatever.

****

Despite sporting a huge (intermittent) boner for this film over the past 3-4 months, I have to say Looper is just about the worst boozy movie I’ve ever watched.

It is not meritless as a film. It does have redeeming qualities, but sadly only one of them makes the film any easier to bear when you’ve been drinking. (I will discuss this redemption later)

Having read and heard only positive things about Looper, I went in totally psyched. I equipped myself with a cold bag, some ice, lemon slices, and a bottle of Bruce Willis vodka, entering the movie theatre with a healthy strut in my step. Also, can I say that by owning his own vodka, a firearms arsenal, schtupping Demi Moore (in the 1980s and 90s!), exclusively dating lingerie models since his divorce, and grossing over $3 billion in North America alone Bruce Willis is officially the biggest baller in the history of the universe. Seriously, Jay-Z could take fuckin lessons from this guy. 

And then some.

Right, the movie. The movie starts with some voiceover exposition/explanation about how time-travel is invented in the late 21st century and immediately outlawed, relegated to shady, clandestine use by only the largest criminal organisations. When they need to carry out a hit, they whisk a bound, hooded victim back 30 years. A specialised assassin (or “looper”) executes them and disposes of the body the moment they materialise in the past. To eliminate all traces of these hits, loopers are sooner or later forced to unknowingly execute their future selves, who are sent back through time along with a large sum of gold to usher in the looper’s retirement.

This system, of course, makes zero sense, since it would be miles easier to zap people back to the 1870s when a) gold had more value; and b) all your hitmen would die of natural causes over two centuries before they posed a threat to your criminal organisation. Or, shit, better yet transport them back a few hundred thousand years because I don’t care how tough JGL is, he’s not as badass as this fuckin guy.

And if you outrun him you're still Cretaceously fucked.

 

But by this point I’m already drunk so whatever. Bruce Willis shows up as JGL's future self, only unmasked. JGL recognises the man in front of him, hesitates, and before he knows it Bruce gets the upper hand (becasue OF COURSE HE DOES), escapes, and the mob is after them both.

I go along with things because Jeff Daniels makes a lot of his small role, JGL is a strong leading man, and Piper Perabo takes her gear off in this movie, which held my motivation to watch for at least another 20 minutes. There’s some time-travel intrigue, a few cool action set pieces wherein Bruce Willis ruins everyone’s shit, and then Looper proceeds to suck huge amounts of camel dick for a full hour-and-a-half.

The narrative of this film arcs in such a way that it kills all momentum about halfway through. Looper just slows down to a crawl. There’s about 30 minutes of movie in there that doesn’t need to exist, followed by the most anti-climactic ending since Signs. (Seriously, Night. Water is the second most abundant molecule in the universe; what the fuck were you thinking?)

It also turns into a kid’s movie. Although he’s nowhere in any of the trailers, this goddamn kid shows up out of the blue and gives the movie a totally new slant.

Of course, proponents of the films are all hysterical like “This Pierce Gagnon kid is a revelation! Breakthrough performance of the year!” but seriously those people can go suck an egg. I didn’t sign up for this. The title card says Looper, not The Mighty Ducks. I bring the vodka, Bruce brings the pwnage. That’s been the covenant for three decades running and it’s worked out just fine. Plus this kid spends half of his screen time being a shrill asshole, which may have threatened to upset my drunk if, of course, I remembered anything about seeing this movie.

Well, okay, I do remember one thing about the movie, and only because it’s the film’s only redeeming quality. It’s almost as if Rian Johnson realised towards the end of shooting “Hold on just a second… this movie sucks camel dick.” and so he tried to alleviate the camel dick-sucking by throwing in a superfluous but nut-bustingly awesome scene of Bruce Willis going around a building killing everything that isn’t Bruce Willis.

Having drank over half a bottle of Bruce Willis vodka at this point, my natural inclination was to fully embrace The Stupid, yelling “YEEEAAAHHH!! BRUCE WILLIISSSSSS!”at full volume, then repeating this every time he killed another volley of guys (in case people in the next theatre had not figured out how much I love Bruce Willis). 

But yeah no amount of Bruce Willis vodka or Bruce Willis love can save this movie.

Boozy rating: 1/10

Damage: 9/10 (pre-movie: 70 ml Stolichnaya Elit vodka; during: 350-400 ml Bruce Willis vodka)

Next week: Taken 2

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Directed by Brad Bird

Starring Tom Cruise, some other white dude, some English white dude, some bangin’ mulatto chick, assorted Slavic and Scandinavian white bad dudes, that white dude from Lost, and Tom Wilkinson

Okay. I would normally say spoiler alert but that’s not quite it. I was in the middle of watching this Ghost Protocol shiznit and thought to myself: “Impossible boozy mission? Challenge: accepted.” By that point I was already five drinks deep so my rationale was hazy at best. In fact I’m pretty sure I then immediately started humming the MI theme song to myself as I cracked my third Miller.

Consequently the only things I remember about this movie can be described as “fragments,” loosely supplemented by drunken scribblings on my trusty Moleskin notepad that my mother gave me two Christmases ago. To be fair to my mother, I’m pretty sure that if she knew I would be using it as a tool to document my drunken misadventures she would have gotten me Zelda or a hammock instead. Because I love slaying stuff and lying down.

So the MO for this review is going to be merely citing all the moments of MIGP that I remember in chronological order (the latter will be trickier). From that I’ll try to infer what the movie is about and run my trademark cavalier, devil-may-care commentary about Tom Cruise not owning enough people and chicks and their breasts. Sound like a plan? Good.

THINGS I REMEMBER ABOUT MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL

• That white dude from Lost totally gets iced by a woman

What better way to establish IMF agents as huge pussies early on than by having them axed by waifish French bimbos? Nice! Get this: secret agent man blasts his way out of a building with secret documents, makes a death-defying escape, and fleeing the scene a moment later he lets his guard down to CHECK A TEXT MESSAGE.

Just like that, millions of dollars in spy training are wasted because the first lesson on the first day of spy school ought to have been:

Drinking

Driving

Texting

Covert operations

 Lesson 1: Don’t do any of these things while doing another one of these things.

(Yeah, fine, some of you will say “Well hey Ben! How about driving and covert operations? Can’t they go together?” Okay, nice one, and the answer to your question is fuck you.)

• Tom Cruise narrowly escapes from jail with his boyfriend

Not so sure about you guys, but if I got locked in Russian prison for first-degree murder and had a two-minute window of opportunity to escape I would not double back for my shower buddy. Just sayin. You’re Tom Cruise. You can smoke whoever’s pole you want. And probably do.

• The Kremlin explodes

Yes, the whole Kremlin. Yes, I know, it’s stupid but the guy who directed this has only ever done animated films. Because he’s a grown man and makes cartoons for a living I’m taking it as a given that he’s mentally retarded. So cut him some slack, alright?

They gloss over it pretty quickly, actually, but it has something to do with stealing nuclear launch codes and framing Tom Cruise. Tom Wilkinson comes to warn Tom Cruise but then Tom Wilkinson gets shot and dies and makes me sad because I have been drinking.

• The villain’s name is Cobalt and he appears for about five minutes in this movie

Double black belt: Aikido and Noshing

What better way to establish your core villain as a huge pussy early on than by giving him a name that even Steven Seagal wouldn’t get out of bed for? Mind you these days Steven Seagal looks like he only gets out of bed for these two guys Ben & Jerry.

But seriously, whatever happened to the days when villains had badass names? Like Darth Vader or Jaws or The Jackal or Cyrus the Virus or even that Le Chiffre guy who cried blood? Sure he loses at poker and gets his ass whipped a lot but his tears are fucking blood. The only way they could have made that guy more of a hardass is by having him sweat crude oil and shit dragon eggs. Pure awesome coming out of every orifice.

Cobalt is to villains as Kim Kardashian is to women. You’re upset that you even know they exist. I’ll bet money they gave him that stupid name because MIGP's screenwriter approached the producers with a list of potential villain names that went something like this:

Ocker

Cadmium yellow

Chartreuse

Vermillion

Saffron

Cerulean

Cobalt

And the producers just fucking stood there saying: “Well… at least he gave us a choice, right?”

• There’s one scene where Tom Cruise chases a guy through a sandstorm

I’m pretty sure I still have some bad lingering memories from those really bright desert scenes in The Adventures of Tintin so I took a nap during this part. I’m guessing Tom Cruise never caught the guy because that would have meant the movie ending sooner and guest movieboozer Patrick waking me up. Or security.

• At first Jeremy Renner is an analyst, but then he’s not who he appears to be

Remembering this moment WIN

Nice twist. That never happens in spy movies.

• In one scene Jeremy Renner floats

He must be a Jedi. Or it’s magnets. Can’t remember which. But now that makes me think… what if Yoda were using magnets all along?

• Cobalt owns no one in this movie

The last half hour of this movie was spent drunk and confused about what was going on. This Cobalt guy commandeers himself a sweet fucking nuke and then just fires it at the States without asking for ransom. So while Tom Cruise is trying to stop him, I’m leaning over to Patrick all like: “Pooch! What the fuck is going on?! Where’s the ransom? … Bahahahahahaha! That nuke is fucking AWESOME! Look at it going through space! Did you see it going through space like that and jettisoning its, like… shell and stuff? … Pooch, did you see that shit?”

Seriously, for about five minutes I could not shut up about this goddamn nuclear rocket. I was like a Down Syndrome child who just saw a laser pointer for the first time. So thoroughly impressed was I that I scribbled this on my pad:

“If I had a nuke this amazing E would save it. For later.”

I’m assuming by ‘E’ I meant ‘I’ and to my credit I wrote that without a flashlight pen. That’s 100% pure spatial awareness, folks.

As an aside: what impressed me most (about myself) while watching this movie was that even plunging headfirst into the most absurd drunkenness in recent memory, there was still a Sober Ben at that back of my brain saying: “Dude. This movie is fucking terrible. You should be at home watching Suits instead of this because it’s clever and filmed in Canada. Represent dude.” Of course JuggernautDrunk Ben came crashing through moments later, all like: “DUUUUDE! You needs to fuck up your brain more because IT’S WEDNESDAY!!!!”

Which one do you think I listened to? Yeah. Exactly.

• The girl in this movie neglected to show me her tits

In her defence she did look pretty busy doing other stuff. Still, if she were a stripper I would have left a lousy tip.

• Ving Rhames shows up at the end to give the movie to lend some street cred

You now have 1.5 black people in your movie. Respect. I felt like I was watching the BET Awards.

Yeah, that’s pretty much alls I remember. If it means anything I was hungover until Monday.

Damage: 9/10 (pre-movie: ≈110 ml Glenkinchie 12yo 43% ABV; during: 5 x 330 ml Miller Genuine Draught and ≈110 ml Jura Superstition 45% ABV; post-movie: 1 x 330 ml Einstock fucking Viking beer. Grrrrrr.)

Boozy rating: 9/10 (What? You look surprised. I had an amazing time.)

La piel que habito

Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar 

Starring Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, and Jan Cornet

Alright folks, Martyn and I seriously took one for the team this time around. Not only did my urine come out brown and cloudy this morning (looking much like unfiltered apple cider) but this movie was worse than most things. Many people may take this with a grain of salt, since my modus operandi for film reviews consists of drinking heavily and seeing mediocre action flicks, but I know my art film and I’ve seen Mulholland Drive and understood it so when I say this movie was not merely worse than most movies but most THINGS, you had better believe it suckers.

Here are some things I’d rather do than watch La piel que habito:

• Get kicked in the junk (perhaps not with cleats or boots but a shoeless foot or a pair of casual shoes or trainers would be acceptable)
• Sit in traffic for two hours
• Shave a really hairy guy’s back
• Witness a robbery or two hookers fighting in the street and spend the whole day in a police station giving a deposition
• Have my back shaved by a really hairy guy



It came out like this, for reals

• Have someone step on my blue suede shoes

For serious people, this movie made me wish that I had one of those red flashing Batphones that I could use upon my return home, only instead of linking me up to Commissioner Gordon it would go straight to Hisashi Owada’s office at the International Court of Justice.

Me: Yo Shishi, what’s the good word brother?

Hisashi Owada: Yeah, yeah, you know, same as ever. Breakin teeth, breakin hearts. This geezer Goran Hadžić was here the other week, getting all up in my grill talking all kinds of smack so I had to set him right, you know, gave him a good coupla slaps so he know Daddy Owady don’t play no shit.

Me: Yea, that’s straight-up yakuza. You gonna give him the chair?

Hisashi Owada: Fucking-A right I’m giving him the chair! The hammer’s gon’ fall on all those death-dealing Serbo roundeyes. Daddy don’t sleep till alla dem is hangin from the business end of a rope, son.

Me: Word.

Hisashi Owada: So what’s the skinny, B-money? I’m kinda busy here you know. Slow justice is no justice.

Me: Dude I need you to look into Pedro Almodóvar for me.

Hisashi Owada: What for?

Me: Crimes against humanity.

Hisashi Owada: For Skin?

Me: 2 right, 2 right.

Hisashi Owada: Yeah, no surprise there. Connery called earlier saying the same damn thing. I’ll make sure the charges stick.

Me: Nice. Big up yourself, brother. Tell your daughter I said what’s up.

Daddy Owady finds your lack of faith disturbing

Only I have no Batphone so instead of that I went home and passed out cold after dry-heaving for a few minutes. Martyn later reported falling asleep on the tube, waking up in Morden, and taking a night bus home at stupid o’clock. Fair to say we paid our share to bring you this review, so you had better read it.

Right, the movie. The audience is essentially parachuted into the middle of an ongoing narrative, with critical plot points unveiled gradually as the film lumbers forward. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is a prominent surgeon and geneticist who, by conducting clandestine experiments on a beautiful young patient imprisoned in his house (Elena Anaya), has developed completely flame-resistant skin that looks and feels natural. The announcement of his discovery to the scientific community generates a lot of chatter but it may be tricky for him to reveal his results since his only test subject is a hostage in a spandex bodysuit. When Ledgard’s estranged half-brother later shows up to his house dressed like a fat tiger (see the trailer if you don’t believe me!), discovers the girl, and decides to get his rape on, the mess just gets messier.

La piel que habito treads conventional Almodóvar ground, exploring isolation, sexual identity, the significance of blood ties, and by “exploring” I mean he beats you over the head with them until the banging ceases to make sense. These are things everyone has surely thought over at some point, but the narrative and characters are so bat-shit crazy and far-removed from reality that their world becomes a grotesquely indulgent exaggeration of emotions otherwise worth exploring. Even if you manage to overlook the film’s unabashedly and gratuitously lurid turns, it is one of the most manipulative things you’ll ever watch. I must have watched half of this movie with my jaw agape in wonder at how useless and psychotic it becomes, but I still wouldn’t go so far as to say it has “shock value” because to attribute any kind of value to Skin would be heresy.

Nice car ruined

Halfway through the longest two hours of my life and desperate, I tried pummeling through a 6 oz. hip flask of 86-proof Dalwhinnie 15yo. I was incorrect in my assumption that it would make the film easier to digest or forget; I remember every miserable moment of it and getting liquored up only made me wish incessantly that Antonio Banderas would get into a wicked car chase in this pimpin’ BMW M6 with 18” mags he rolls around in but he only ends up driving that thing in an out of his driveway. The only car chase-ish scene (and I say “ish” because Almodóvar directs a car chase like Kubrick directs space travel, YAAAAWWWN) sees Banderas driving a panel van and that’s just a huge waste of time, action/adventure star power, and built-up anticipation. The booze also makes you want to ogle the sublime Elena Anaya, who is paraded shamelessly around the screen nude or in skin-tight outfits for the entire movie, only Almodóvar throws a plot twist halfway into the film that makes you not want to ogle her anymore. Not only can he ruin your evening, this cat can also ruin a hot girl for life, which adds teasing to his ever-expanding list of tricks alongside self-indulgence and pretension.

Nice girl ruined

Sure, you could turn around and say “you’re a fine one to talk, this whole blog is self-indulgent” (which it is) but I’m still right and this movie is still bull’s pizzle and Hisashi Owada is still getting a call from me as soon as I can find his phone number or locate him on Facebook. Because yeah, I was totally kidding before. We’re totally not friends. Yet.

Damage: 8/10 (pre-movie: one measure Talisker 10yo, ½ bottle Cava Brut; during movie: 2 x 500 ml cans of Kronenbourg 1664, 6 oz Dalwhinnie 15yo; post-movie: one measure Talisker)

Boozy rating: 1/10 (the movie made me want to never drink again more than the drinking did)

Next week: Cowboys and Aliens (for real this time)

Horrible Bosses

Directed by Seth Gordon

Starring Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey, Colin Ferrell, and Jamie Foxx

*** WARNING: MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD ***

If tasked to write the review in a single sentence it would be: Horrible Bosses is essentially a 98-minute version of the trailer.

You walk into the theatre having seen two minutes of film featuring Nick (Jason Bateman), Dale (Charlie Day), and Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) bitching about their bosses, making a pact to deep six them, and snooping around incompetently in effort to edge them out. You’re then treated to 96 more minutes of them doing exactly the same thing.

Nick’s boss Dave Harken (Kevin Spacey) is a narcissistic, manipulative slave-driver who makes unreasonable demands of his employees, but that’s about as far as the misery goes. Threatening Dale’s engagement is “horrible” boss Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston), a smoking hot, sexpot dentist who makes regular attempts to shag his brains out and walks around the office wearing nothing but a lab coat and the body God gave her. The newly appointed CEO of Kurt’s chemicals company is Bobby Pellitt (Colin Farrell), who sports a pot-belly and comb over, wears anime dragon shirts to work, does massive amounts of blow, and threatens to fire all the fat and crippled people in the office. In a nutshell, the most awesome boss ever.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s impossible to enjoy this movie if you’re not drunk. I remember approximately 25% of it, none of which was particularly funny, but all of the parts that I don’t remember were absolutely hysterical. In addition to providing a laugh track to a movie that sure needs one, booze is crucial in suspending your disbelief for certain glaring narrative deficiencies.

The first and most obvious being if your boss looks like Jennifer and also happens to have the sex drive of Gene Simmonds after a couple lines of cocaine laced with Mexican Viagra you’re not going to remain faithful to Lindsay Sloane. Don’t get me wrong, Lindsay is a really nice-looking Jewish girl and I would absolutely not kick her out of my bed… come to think of it I would probably even make her breakfast (like a nice omelet with Gruyère cheese, spring onions, and chives), go steady with her for a few months to a year, probably even introduce her to my mother – because let’s face it she’s a charming, successful young tsatskeh, has a cute voice, and grew up on Long Island and it takes a lot to impress my mother; she really doesn’t like most of the girls I date – and do the Sunday Times crossword with her in my gorilla t-shirt and big weekend underwear.

Hollywood sex offender

Okay, but here’s what I’m saying: Jennifer Aniston is a sexual tigress and I saw the outline of her boobs in this movie and it made my cock feel like a rocket that was about to blast off into outer space.

But that doesn’t even matter because the second humongous plot hole is that I’ve seen what female sex offenders look like and they don’t look like Jennifer Aniston. And this isn’t one of those discrepancies that you can fix with method acting or a bunch of makeup (like Colin Farrell does in this movie). Jennifer Aniston does not look like a sexual harassment lawsuit so much as someone who you’d just love to have sit on your face. They should have just gotten Charlie Sheen or Rosie O’Donnell to play this role because Charlie Day could be legit fearful of them and I could sit and drink and watch the movie without raising an eyebrow.

St. Albans, Vermont, sex offender

The second and third acts are a bit fuzzy for me except for 10-15 minutes of notes I had taken documenting the parts of the movie that Martyn missed. To his credit, this guy is a champion drinker but he has the bladder of a seven-year-old schoolgirl so usually needs to see a man about a horse during our boozy movie outings. This time he decides to have a smoke break as well (which I can only imagine compounds the hours of drinking we’ve been doing) and on his way back into the Cineplex he loses his bearings and stumbles drunkenly into the wrong movie theatre, up to another row H, falling over a few people on his way to seat 12 where he finds a pair of befuddled moviegoers (neither of whom are me) doubtless unimpressed by a 9 o’clock shadow drunk wearing an orange Samurai t-shirt I lent him earlier that afternoon. I imagine their conversation going like this:

Martyn: WHERE AM I? WHAT MOVIE IS THIS?

Moviegoer 1: This is Sarah’s Key. I think you’re in the wrong cinema, sir. Have you been drinking?

Martyn: Fuck beans. Is this the one with Jennifer Aniston and her tits?

Moviegoer 2: No. It stars Kristin Scott-Thomas but if you want to see her tits you need to refer back to Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient. Juliette Binoche gets nudie in that one too and they both look pretty bangin’ for their age.

Martyn: Niiice.

Moviegoer 3 [one row behind]: Hey! Could you guys shut the fuck up? This movie is about the goddamn Holocaust. Have some respect, please guys.

Martyn: … Are you SURE Jennifer Aniston isn’t in this movie?

Luckily he found his way back, plopped down into his seat and immediately started laughing about his 15-minute absence.

Martyn: I WALKED INTO THE WRONG THEATRE AND TRIPPED OVER A BUNCH OF PEOPLE! BAAAHAHAHAHA!

Me: Dude, Kevin Spacey just Mozambiqued someone. This guy is fucking gangster!

Anyway, during this time Nick, Dale, and Kurt break into a house, witness a murder, flee the scene at high speeds in a Prius, get picked up and interrogated by the cops, and never drink four quid Pinot Grigio again. Okay, I’m reading over my notes and that last one was probably a note to myself, not about the movie. The main characters may have sworn off a particular grape variety halfway through the film but I can’t remember; the same way I can’t remember Bob Newhart being in this entire movie even though he apparently was.

Listen, if you’re going to see this movie you have to be ready to dig deep and find the consummate booze hound within yourself. There’s unfortunately no middle ground for this one.

Damage: 8/10 (pre-movie: three measures of whiskey and one pint of Guinness; during movie: 1¼ bottle of dirty supermarket Pinot Grigio)

Boozy rating: 6/10 (even whilst drunk you understand the movie would be no good if you were sober)

Next Week: Cowbows and Aliens