Weekend Movie Guide: Give Tyler Perry More Money For ‘Peeples’

Opening Everywhere: Peeples, The Great Gatsby

Opening Somewhere, Maybe: Aftershock

Opening Probably Nowhere: Assault on Wall Street

FilmDrunk Suggests: Head down to your local library and check out some old Choose Your Own Adventure books. And then read them while you listen to Jay-Z and the Black Eyed Peas.

Peeples

Rotten Tomatoes Scores: 38% critics, 72% audience

Gratuitous Review Quotes:

“Even the bouncy score sounds like it was lifted from an old Three’s Company episode; that is when they’re not all belting out a song about where it’s not cool to pee.” – Linda Barnard, Toronto Star

“The movie’s clichés would be more acceptable if the characters were better drawn, but there’s not a memorable one in the bunch.” – Adam Graham, Detroit News

Armchair Analysis: Great, another story about a regular guy who meets his wealthy future in-laws only to discover that they’re hard to deal with and won’t accept him easily. Hooray, Tyler Perry and Tina Gordon Chism! Way to really break the mold on this outrageous comedy plot. And I hope that everyone who pays money to see this movie feels great about it, too, living with the knowledge that you’ve enabled Perry to not only keep making his morality tales about women getting AIDS if they cheat on their husbands, but to keep paving the way for his minions to rehash the same bullsh*t ideas that have already been rehashed 8 million times before their unoriginal jokes fell out of their b-holes. It truly is a great time to be alive.

The Great Gatsby

Rotten Tomatoes Scores: 46% critics, 84% audience

Gratuitous Review Quotes:

“The best thing about Baz Luhrmann’s much-anticipated/much-dreaded The Great Gatsby is that, for all its computer-generated whoosh and overbroad acting, it is unmistakably F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. That is no small deal.” – David Edelstein, New York Magazine

“It is, as I suspected, a gargantuan hunk of over-art-directed kitsch, but it makes for a grandiose, colorful, pleasure-drenched night at the movies.” – Dana Stevens, Slate

“Which leads me to my next question: was Nick Carraway actually within and without? It seems like he’s mostly without, watching all the action excitedly from behind a tree trunk while he tugs on his little pecker.” -Vince Mancini, FilmDrunk

Armchair Analysis: I don’t really give a toot of my skin flute about Baz Luhrmann or The Great Gatsby, but I enjoyed his interview on last night’s Colbert Report, during which he talked about how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s granddaughter told him that the author would have liked this film adaptation, and how Luhrmann hopes that a movie like this will inspire the current generation of tween Tweeters and Snap Chatters to actually pick up old books and read them. I can respect that philosophy, especially since I live in Florida and nobody under the age of 17 knows how to read here anymore.

Aftershock

Rotten Tomatoes Scores: 39% critics, 53% audience

Gratuitous Review Quotes:

“A weird mash-up of disaster, horror and dystopia genre pictures, ‘Aftershock’ fails to make the Earth move.” – Kyle Smith, New York Post

“There’s so little context to the litany of ugliness – some played for laughs, some meant to shock – that it’s hard to discern where the entertainment value lies in any of this.” – Robert Abele, L.A. Times

Armchair Analysis: It’s an Eli Roth movie. If you’re expecting anything other than over-the-top gore and oddly-placed humor, then you’ve never seen an Eli Roth movie.

Assault on Wall Street

Rotten Tomatoes Scores: 20% critics (4 have reviewed it), no audience score because it’s Uwe Boll

Gratuitous Review Quotes:

“Boll spends so much time painting Jim into the corner required to ‘justify’ his bonkers actions that once the film’s fuse is irrevocably lighted, viewers may have already checked out.” – Gary Goldstein, L.A. Times

“This zeitgeist-tapping revenge fantasy doesn’t deliver enough guilty pleasures.” – Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter

Armchair Analysis: Typical Uwe Boll. He takes something that popular culture has previously celebrated – the growing anti-Wall Street resentment and downright hatred by the lower class – and he somehow manages to make people hate that. Granted, this guy has made a career out of not giving a sh*t what we think about him, and this movie could be Casablanca rolled up in Schindler’s List, but I won’t ever watch it because I’ve seen Bloodrayne and never again, Mr. Boll. Never again.

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