Fish and Cherries Productions

There were a lot of new releases this week, but Comic Con ate up a lot of my weekend and unfortunately I’ve come down with a bit of sickness. Instead, I’m leaving you guys with a recent classic that I just saw for the first time. Come next Monday, I can imagine that I’ll come out with a lot of Snippets at once given all the current and upcoming releases (Ant-Man, anyone?). In the meantime, enjoy:

Horrible Bosses

Stay tuned tomorrow for some Comic Con related announcements.

Only one Reel Snippet today. I know a lot of you were expecting a review of the new Terminator movie, but as we’ll see later, I’m saving that. Instead, take in this unknown gem simply called…

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Starting out our new schedule is a weekend of sequels. Here are my Reel Snippets of Jurassic World and Ted 2. Which did I like? Which couldn’t I stand? Take a look and find out.

Jurassic World
Ted 2

Routine. A lot of people see it as a restriction, but it’s actually your best friend. Routine gives you deadlines, meaning that you don’t have an excuse to put off any endeavors and stuff gets done. That should be the ultimate goal of a creator next to artistic integrity: completed projects. But there’s another benefit, especially when you’re in my line of work. Routine means that things come out on a schedule, which means that people will come by a website on a regular basis to see new posts. That’s what I’m going for and that’s why we have our new schedule.

Reel Snippets – Every Monday

It’s fitting that my most common post comes out weekly now. Since Friday is when new movies come out and my editing process takes about a day, that gives me a nice weekend turnaround to get a Snippet (or a few) ready for Monday. That way, you guys can know my opinion on the movie after the first weekend. Some people would argue that things would be better if I put these out every Friday. Well, truth be told, I don’t have the resources to get so much out on Friday (since I plan on multiple reviews coming out on occasion) or access to early screenings. But I’m trying to make up for it by getting them out as early in the workweek as possible.

Ronin Reads – The Last Thursday of Every Month

If I could get most than one of these out in a month, I would. But I put a lot more analysis in the Ronin Reads and reading an entire novel or comic volume is pretty time consuming. It feels like a nice closer for the month to me.

Musings – Unknown

Musings are tricky for me to schedule because they aren’t like my other works. I never know what’s going to inspire me to write one of these and I don’t want to wind up writing one that says absolutely nothing, like I’ve seen a lot of other online personalities do. I’ll leave these open to change for now, but check back for an update after I post the latest one next week.

Podcasts – Sunday… maybe

Okay, I’ll admit it, we’re really slow in editing the podcasts and have two in the backlog that we recorded before the E3 one. We’d love to get into a system where we record it, edit it in one day, and post it, but we’re not there yet. Also, the podcasts haven’t been catching as much fire as I would have hoped, but persistence might be the key.

That’s all for the schedule. In the future, there will of course be updates as things change, but for the moment we’ll see how the works Thanks for bearing with me and I’ll see you next time.

Whoa, what’s this? Three updates at once?! Yep, in order to get things balanced for my new schedule, I’m coming out with three different things on the same day. Let’s start out with two Reel Snippets, one classic and one new release.

Love Actually
Inside Out

Now let’s follow that up with my newest Ronin Reads on an obscure comic. One day, I’ll do an actual prose story…

Letter 44

The schedule will be posted this Friday. But in case you crave more content between then and now… how about our E3 podcast? Guess this isn’t a triple feature anymore! Accolades all around!

Kung Fury is one of the most over the top and enjoyable experiences I’ve had in a while. This may technically be cheating, given the nature of the film and its inception. However, just because the movie is crowd funded and about thirty minutes long, doesn’t make it any less of a movie. The whole thing is like one delicious caramel apple, only the apple is cinema and the caramel dipping is the cheesiness of the 80s. As such, the plot is nonsensical and extremely tongue-in-cheek, which I think adds to its charm. Describing any more would ruin some of the surprise, so go check it out. After all, it’s absolutely free on YouTube! No need to overspend on popcorn or 3-D glasses. Just sit back in your own home and enjoy this glorious Swedish masterpiece. Hey, it’s a foreign film too! You’ll get art house credibility!

Jupiter Ascending was a movie so bad, it nearly broke me. Unlike Fifty Shades of Grey, I didn’t have a healthy cushion of alcohol to fall back on and as such I got the full force of a movie terrible enough to make me laugh and cry in the fetal position at the same time. The best you could say about the film is that it’s visually creative, but that’s about where the praise ends. We know next to nothing about the characters, save for a few where they have exposition dumps devoted to them, who all seem to struggle with one another for relevance in the story. Even the main villain switches in the middle of the story, apropos of nothing. The whole thing is incredibly bland storywise and has the distinct dishonor of being one of those rare movies that is both over-explained and yet criminally underdeveloped. Concepts are introduced, but are by no means established, leaving a lot of hanging scenes where you just have to wonder what the point was. Even if they’re leading up to a punchline, you can’t help but feel that the whole thing could have been left on the cutting room floor.

But the biggest crime of this movie is how it takes Eddie Redmayne and puts him in an absolutely thankless role. He won an Academy Award for playing Stephen Hawking, but here his performance alternates between a poor man’s Marlon Brando and a screeching rooster. It would be bad enough to leave it at that, but then there’s the gender politics that go belly-up in this supposedly women empowerment film. I said back in another Snippet that I don’t consider the Bechtel Test a show of real feminism and this film is living proof. Despite it passing the test, Jupiter constantly gets kidnapped and needs saving to move the plot forward. That really sums up the experience, as I feel like I was getting abducted from reality against my will and forced to watch this dross. If anyone likes this movie, I won’t hold it against them, but I personally want to bundle up all my memories of this film and fire them into a black hole.

Mad Max: Fury Road is simply phenomenal. Never let it be said that I have a hate on for the grim and gritty because this movie was chock full of it. But while most gritty films tend to shoot everything in a gray or brown filter, this film has a whole pastiche of warm colors. Your eyes are bombarded with browns, silvers, reds, yellows, occasional blues, and more that lend themselves to the visual wonder that is this film. Even more than the color scheme, the designs are really what sell the visuals, which have a heavy metal aesthetic. This is a world that you can really believe is after the collapse of civilization with machinery cobbled together into ingenious designs and nothing is superfluous or without function.

The main characters themselves are completely believable, if not always making the smartest decisions. Given that they live in a harsh, unforgiving wasteland where only the fittest survive, though, it makes sense that they would make more pragmatic decisions and less compassionate ones. The portrayal of Max in particular is rather intriguing, playing off as a rather disturbed individual complete with visually interesting flashbacks of people that he “let die.” I’ll admit that I haven’t seen the previous Mad Max films so I don’t know how close it is to the original, but it worked for me. Charlize Theron plays a truly awesome character with a cool mechanical arm to boot, though her American accent makes her stand out when surrounded by Brits and Australians. The huge standouts for me were the villains from the minions and vagabonds to the overlords who all have deformities that lend themselves to a distinct and memorable design. They’re like classic James Bond villains on steroids.

And of course, let me address the big selling point of this movie: the women. Despite the fact that the plot revolves around getting a warlord’s concubines to safety, they are far from damsels in distress. Not only do they have their own agency, but they all have enough sense to fight back and come up with clever ideas when it’s smart for them to do so. Admittedly, they aren’t the best actors, but it didn’t bother me next to everything else. While we don’t see any female minions in the enemy convoys, I give that a pass as the warlords are shown to treat their women like dirt, so it makes sense in the context of the film. Plus, there are other capable women gangs in the movie that are no slouches in combat. This, to me, is what true progressivism looks like in an action movie.

Everything about the plot is tightly woven and creates a huge emotional rollercoaster. The first ten to twenty minutes had my blood pumping as hard as the heavy drums in the score — so much so that when the movie finally got to a quiet moment, I realized how out of breath I was and could appreciate the calm before the next storm. I honestly feel like Mad Max: Fury Road could be this generation’s Die Hard. Gone are the boring invincible hero and helpless damsels that plague many of today’s action movies, to be replaced by capable and very mortal protagonists trying to outrun true monsters. Also, I would be remise if I didn’t mention the vehicle with minions banging war drums on its back and a man dressed in a red gimp’s outfit playing an electric guitar that shoots fire. That part alone alone is enough to immortalize this movie in the halls of Valhal-ywood. Also, I have to give this movie a lot of props for working said gimp’s diegetic shredding (meaning the music he played was actually in the movie’s reality) into the score itself. That type of ingenuity sums up the film entirely: a compelling story with a lot of creativity and ambition. Yes, it’s violent. Yes, it’s graphic. But yes, it deserves to be seen.

Ex Machina is a movie that just can’t be summed up into one word or genre. It’s science fiction. It’s a thriller. It’s a romance. It’s suspense. It’s a mystery. It’s a coming-of-age story. It’s uplifting. It’s horrifying. Mostly, though, it’s amazing.

In a way, I’ve always wanted to make a movie like this: a science fiction or fantasy that wasn’t bound by the hero’s journey. It’s somewhat the Blade Runner of our time, exploring the different themes of life and the rights of artificial intelligence. This movie takes place in our own time, though, growing off the technological advancements that we have already made and as such, the story seems much more imminent and possible. It’s also not afraid to ask the hard questions and show some rather graphic and necessary imagery. It wants the audience to think and ask questions and I don’t think any two people will come away from it with the same thoughts. The ending in particular will leave people confused as to whether it could be considered happy or not or even if anyone chose the correct path.

This is to movies what Bayonetta is to video games, combining elements from all across the board to make something beautiful. I haven’t seen a movie this smart since Inception and I’m honestly surprised that it was allowed a big screen release, given all it contained. I’m happy it did, though, and even happier that it’s doing so well at the box office. I can safely say that I don’t want to live in a universe where Ex Machina doesn’t succeed.

The Age of Adaline left absolutely no impression on me once I left the theater. Even as I write this, I’m having trouble conjuring thoughts about what was an utterly bland and simpering experience. The film feels like it’s trying to be Forrest Gump mixed with a Nicholas Sparks novel and not doing very well at either of those. Another comparison to this film is the television series Forever, which has a shockingly similar premise. But while Ioan Grufford is charming and charismatic in that series, Blake Lively is bland and carries the same monotone in her voice whether she’s happy, upset, or fearing for her life.

I could go through a laundry list of the movie’s problems, but I’m going to focus on the fact that, through completely unnecessary narration, a pseudo-science explanation is offered for Adaline’s immortality and it just kills the whole thing for me. No explanation was needed; you could have let yourself run on fairy tale logic and I would have been far more forgiving. After all, Harrison Ford reads his lines like a wistful old grandfather reading to young’uns, so it wouldn’t have been too far of a mood stretch. Speaking of, Harrison’s scenes are positively magnetic, owing much to his acting talent and his years of experience. Those are where the movie was the most interesting and tolerable. The rest just left me cold. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button had me far better sold on a romance with unusual age circumstances than this did and if it weren’t part of my job to watch the whole thing, I would have walked out of the movie before the halfway mark.