Ok. After a break, I’m back. I did watch movies this month, but didn’t have a lot of time to write out reviews. My family runs the largest Southern Gospel Music Convention in Michigan each August, so that has taken most of my energy this month. That event was this past weekend, so I’m now free to return to this crazy place. The pair of movies this week are going to be really hard to talk about without giving things away, so spoilers are all over the place this week. If you want to stay away from knowing a lot of either Blink Twice or Slingshot, I fully understand. I’ll see you in the next post. They both got a 3 out of 5 from me if you are curious. Once you’ve seen them though, please come back and see if you agree with what I am going to say about them. Still here? Ok, lets get started (if I remember how to do this after a month away). On to the reviews!
Basically, this movie boils down to Channing Tatum’s Slater King has an island where he and his buddies bring beautiful women to, and party everyday. Nothing evil going on at all. Before I get into what happens, there are some overall points to talk about. First the cast is pretty good. Naomi Ackie carries this film as Frida. Alia Shawkat plays her best friend Jess, and Adria Arjona plays Sarah, another woman brought to the island. For the bros, there is Simon Rex as a chef (Cody), Christian Slater as a dude who love umbrellas in drinks (Vic), and for some reason, Haley Joel Osment (Tom). Each day, everyone lays around getting high and drinking. They then each these extravagant meals from Cody, then take hallucinogenic drugs from Vic. Each morning, they wake up in their rooms and repeat the day. If you saw the trailer or have caught on to what is going on.
Spoiler time. One night of partying, Jess is bit by one of the snakes that are everywhere on the island. She then feels something is wrong and wants to go home. The next morning she disappears and nobody remembers her. Frida somehow finds herself in a building with gift bags and is given what she learns snake venom to drink. This counteracts what we learn are drugs to make you forget. She then gets all the other women to drink it. What is really happening each night is the men a sexually assaulting the women, then giving them the drug to forget. Chaos ensues, and eventually leads to Frida getting Slater to unknowingly take the drug. We then learn she keeps him on the drug in order to take over his company.
I left a lot out of that last paragraph since I don’t want to recap the whole movie. I did leave some major plot points out of that paragraph too. This movie was just uncomfortable. I know that was Zoe Kravitz’s whole point, but at a certain point, who is this movie really for? There is a disclaimer from MGM before the movie telling you there is sexual assault storylines in it, and those scenes are very much not pleasant. This movie was originally titled Pussy Island, but was changed to a more palatable title in order to sell the movie. They might as well have kept the original title though. This isn’t going to have a big reach in terms of the audience for it. It’s really a movie where you can judge the people watching it based on what they take from it. A way the men test the women if they are still forgetting is to ask them if they are still having a good time. I’m not sure many watching will, and that is kind of the point.
There isn’t a lot to say about this without getting into what really happens. This is about three astronauts on a mission to Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. They are trying to get methane there to help Earth’s global issues somehow. Our three spacemen are played by Lawrence Fishburne (Captain Franks), Tomer Capone (Nash), and Casey Affleck (John, our main character). There is also Zoe, played by Emily Beecham, who is John’s love interest back on Earth. The main issues are brought into play in the story as each time they leave hibernation every 90 days, they start to get hit harder and harder by the side effects of the drugs that knock them out. Nash gets more parnoid, we don’t quite see how it affects Franks, and John starts hallucinating Zoe on the ship. After something happens on the ship nobody can explain, things start to unravel. Nash wants to abandon the mission and head back to Earth, Franks produces a gun to maintain control for some reason, and John starts hearing voices on radios that shouldn’t be able to hear things so far into space.
Here is where things come to a head, so move on if you don’t want to know the ending. After the final turn in hibernation we see, John asks the computer where Nash is. We have already seen Franks supposedly kill him earlier. The computer then tells John his full name is Captain John Nash Franks. Meaning he is the only one on the ship, with Franks and Nash being in his head. Then, Zoe comes on the radio to tell John that he is still on Earth, just buried below ground as a rehearsal test. All he has to do is go out the air lock to go home. Franks then enters to tell John this in his head and the mission is real. John opens the lock anyway, and sees that they really are underground. That is until he has a moment of clarity and realizes his mistake. We then see him drift out into space. End credits.
The film is for the most part kind of interesting. There are a lot of flashbacks to John and Zoe on Earth, and the film could have used less of them. I also would have ended the film right as the air lock countdown got to zero. Showing twist after that only made some in my theater laugh and gave the film a definite conclusion. The rest of the movie was so unsure with what was happening. You are really not given any reason to think anything in space is actually happening as it is, until you see John float away into the void. Ending it at the countdown would have left you wondering if he was really in space or underground. It leaves you in a state of mind that John has been in all film, and it would have been better in my opinion. This film is something worth watching at home just for the bonkers last third. You can fast forward some of the flash back then too.
After a month of Deadpool controlling the Box Office, the Ghost with the Most finally returns to hopefully be as good as the original. It will no doubt take first place. The quest is how long it can stay there. September isn’t deep with popular IP, so if the sequel is anywhere close to the original, it could have some serious legs.
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
- Deadpool & Wolverine
- It Ends With Us
- AfrAId
- Alien: Romulus
Last year, Boy and the Heron was my 100th film of the year, and that was in the first week of December. This Wednesday, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice will be #100 for this year. Also, tomorrow, I will post my Fall preview. I’ll go over the films I’m looking forward to, and post my box office predictions for Autumn. We are starting to approach festival season, and I’m giddy for good films again.
Also, as of this post going live, there is still 6.5 hours left to vote on on the Semifinal matchups in my Tim Burton Tournament over on Instagram. You can find the polls to vote in the stories. The voting for the Finals will begin Monday night at 7 p.m. and last 24 hours like all the other rounds. I’ll post the recap of the tournament here on Wednesday.
Mitten Film Nerd 
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