Tag Archives: Comedy

Win It All review

29 Saturday Apr 2017

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To gambling, the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems

by Thom Yee

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Win It All images courtesy of Netflix

Manifest destiny is one of those concepts that’s surprisingly easy to throw around, even if we don’t all have a firm grasp on 19th century colonialism, because it’s so tempting to believe what we’re doing is right. What we’re doing is inevitable. What we’re doing is something we ought to be doing, something that will bring about the way things should be and, perhaps, always should have been. It’s a lot like gambling that way. It’s an act of faith.

Gambling is something you do at least partially because you believe it can help you to meet your end goals. That doesn’t necessarily make it a lot better or an easy thing to condone, but I think it makes it easier to understand. Continue reading →

Get Out review

04 Saturday Mar 2017

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You cool like dat? I’m cool like that.

by Thom Yee

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Get Out images courtesy of Universal Pictures

One of the most cogent and convincing arguments I’ve ever heard in my life was about cheating:

“If you can take advantage of a situation in some way, it’s your duty … to do it. Why should the race always be to the swift, or the Jumble to the quick-witted? Should they be allowed to win merely because of the gifts God gave them? Well I say, ‘Cheating is the gift man gives himself.'”

Eugenics isn’t explicit in that statement, but I think it is implicit, and eugenics, or at least the idea of pre-determining a preferred path based on your beliefs on superior genetic traits, is an idea at the core of Get Out. Continue reading →

Swiss Army Man review

01 Saturday Oct 2016

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And as I watched the lonely man ride the farting corpse of Harry Potter like a jet ski through the ocean waves, I realized I may never again have occasion to write a finer sentence.

by Thom Yee

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Swiss Army Man images courtesy of A24

Normally around this time of year we take a look at the smaller, less well-attended movies of the summer just passed, which is why you’ve been reading reviews of The Nice Guys and Green Room and like that, but FYI, we also had a skip week in September (as we are wont to do) because nobody here had enough to say about our third scheduled movie, Sing Street, to write a whole review about it. I point this out for two reasons. One, we hope it’s interesting to get a bit of a behind-the-scenes look at GOO Reviews (i.e., we do think ahead of time about what we’re doing), and two (and more importantly), you need to know that we watched Sing Street because the movies we ended up watching for this year’s “Summer Movies You Missed” review series wound up being weirdly distorted mirror versions of each other. In weeks two and three, we watched Green Room and then Sing Street, both movies about music’s role in growing up, but while the former was nihilistic and horrific, the latter was overtly, naively hopeful and upbeat. Now in weeks four and five, we watched Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Swiss Army Man, both movies about coming of age while trapped in the wilderness, but where the former was a lovely portrait about finding the best in each other, Swiss Army Man… well it’s about a lonely weirdo and the farting corpse he finds in the woods. Continue reading →

Hunt for the Wilderpeople review

24 Saturday Sep 2016

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Ninjas! Direwolves! Child welfare!

by Thom Yee

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Hunt for the Wilderpeople images courtesy of The Orchard

Growing up is tough. Whether you grew up in a stable home with parents who loved you, as an orphan who was never lucky enough to find somewhere to belong, both your parents were shot in front of you in a senseless crime that sent you on a path of dark vengeance, or you’re like me and you never really did grow up (still the same self-serious weirdo you’ve always been), growing up is a tough thing even in the best of circumstances. That’s why there’s so many movies about it. There are moments locked away in all of our youths that have, consciously or unconsciously, become so personally meaningful or profound or scarring that they stay with us forever. Though you might not have known it at the time, those are the moments that helped to shape who you are and probably who you always will be. And they weren’t always positive experiences. Continue reading →

The Nice Guys review

03 Saturday Sep 2016

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Violence, sex, corruption, nudity, two main characters who hate but somehow complete each other… Christmas? It’s a Shane Black movie alright.

by Thom Yee

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The Nice Guys images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Ask any movie fan about their favourite buddy movie and you’ll might get a wide variety of responses, from classics like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or Midnight Cowboy to latter-day classics like Tango & Cash or White Men Can’t Jump to more recent movies like The Hangover or The Heat, but whatever your choice of favourite might be, there’s a pretty good chance one of the first movies thought of was Lethal Weapon.

In a lot of very important, very substantial ways, the Lethal Weapon movies set the standard for most of what we expect from the genre, even today when most tend to be comedies like 21 Jump Street or The Other Guys more often than straight-ahead action movies. Continue reading →

Ghostbusters (2016) review

23 Saturday Jul 2016

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Women Ghostbusters? What’s next, a female Slimer?

by Thom Yee

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Ghostbusters (2016) images courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Do you guys actually think the original Ghostbusters was that good? ‘Cause I don’t. It’s overly casual and fairly shallow, it’s slow and meandering, and its ultimate resolution, crossing the streams, is a placeholder of an ending that ties into nothing else in the movie other than an earlier passing mention not to. No, it’s not a great movie in most of the usual, identifiable, quantifiable measures we like to apply to movies, and there’s only one significant reason why anyone likes it. Luckily, it’s the only reason that matters, and that’s that it works. For some reason, the 1984 Ghostbusters just works in a way that engages you, keeps you watching, makes you laugh, and even gives you an odd sense of contentment, and that’s an extremely rare thing to create let alone recreate. Continue reading →

Back to the Future Part III

21 Saturday Nov 2015

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If you don’t enjoy this movie, you’re not thinking fourth-dimensionally

by Thom Yee

Back to the Future Part III images courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Back to the Future Part III images courtesy of Universal Pictures.

There’s always been a strong argument against a Back to the Future sequel, and it’s an argument that still stands even now, twenty-five years after two sequels came out and both turned out to be at least okay. Beyond its obvious strengths, the original Back to the Future is simply a neat, tidy, and self-contained story, one that, because of its time-travel premise, rewards multiple viewings but also one that, because of its time-travel premise, begins to unravel the more you add to it with further installments. And for those of you who’ve always wondered (or have always misremembered), no, in its original showings it did not end with the famous “To Be Continued…>” title card.

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Back to the Future Part II

24 Saturday Oct 2015

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Roads! When we are, why do we still need roads?!

by Thom Yee

Back to the Future Part II images courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Back to the Future Part II images courtesy of Universal Pictures.

The date is October 24 and the year is 2015 — three days after Marty McFly and Doctor Emmett Brown arrived in their future (our present) to prevent Marty McFly, Jr.’s arrest. In the process, they unwittingly set forward a series of events that would alter our past (their present), resulting in a ruined 1985 where Biff Tannen became one of the richest men in America who used his newfound economic power to influence the political and socio-economic climate of the country for the worse, resulting in widespread crime, corruption, prostitution, and gang warfare. In order to prevent this dark timeline from happening, McFly and Brown engaged in further unsanctioned time travelling to fix their present-day 1985 and set history back on its correct course. But did they really succeed or did they, in fact, set humanity — all of us — back by engaging in these chronal machinations. Continue reading →