Opening Everywhere: Guardians of the Galaxy, Get On Up
Opening Somewhere: Calvary, Behaving Badly, Child of God
FilmDrunk Suggests: Both Vince and Dan have weighed in with their expert analysis of Guardians of the Galaxy, so I’m going to offer mine as the resident guy who just likes going to movies to enjoy the explosions and funny words – It was really f*cking good, you guys. I might have liked it more than Marvel’s The Avengers, to be honest.
Guardians of the Galaxy
Rotten Tomatoes Scores: 92% critics, 96% audience, 100% Burnsy
Gratuitous Review Quotes:
Gunn appears to remember the high of certain kinds of moviegoing, where when the credits are over, all you want to do is get back in line and enjoy the whole thing again. – Wesley Morris, Grantland
“Guardians of the Galaxy” has wit, energy and zaniness to spare. It will pop your corn and leave you hungry for more. – Tom Long, Detroit News
Armchair Analysis: I don’t like writing reviews because I feel like they always wind up being really long-winded descriptions of what I just watched, and I’ll leave that to the Top Critics of Rotten Tomatoes to do with their really big vocabularies and knowledge of the inner-workings of peoples’ brains. But from the perspective of a guy who has never read a Guardians of the Galaxy comic book, or any Marvel book written since the mid-90s for that matter, I absolutely loved this movie. Remember, I was really skeptical about it being possible to make a movie that involved planets far, far away and especially a talking raccoon, but oh Rocket, you stole my heart, you little scamp.
This movie really caught me off guard right from the start with how much heart it had, as I was worried that we’d just be getting another crash course of characters from the Marvel Universe while learning very little about them. Sure, we didn’t get as much of some of them as I would have liked, but I assume that a certain something of so-and-so will be featured more prominently in Guardians 2. More than anything, I can’t believe how much I laughed throughout this film, all while never losing focus on what was at stake. That’s really impressive.
As I was leaving the theater, I overheard some grumblings about how it shouldn’t have been so funny or how a certain so-and-so shouldn’t have been in it, and I was irritated, because I wanted to stop one Kevin Smith lookalike and scream, “JUST ENJOY THE F*CKING MOVIE THAT NOBODY EVER IMAGINED BEING MADE, FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING HOLY!!!” but it’s not worth it. Bottom line, if you’ve enjoyed Marvel’s stable of movies thus far, you’ll really like Guardians. Like I said, I think it was better than Avengers, and when those two casts finally meet up… well, I just can’t even imagine how great that will be.
Get On Up
Rotten Tomatoes Scores: 76% critics, 77% audience
Gratuitous Review Quotes:
More often, the film skates along the surface of Brown’s contradictory character. Now if it skated like Brown’s dance moves glided onstage, that really would have been something. – Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post
The storytelling is mostly linear, with some confusing back-and-forth in the chronology, and it’s a long slog. The Brown who emerges from this film has a monstrous ego to go with his monster talent. – Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor
Armchair Analysis: Okay, can we all agree that it’s time to get Chadwick Boseman in a non-biopic leading role? He was the – and I can’t emphasize this enough – only thing about Draft Day that I liked, and I LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOATHED every second of that awful movie (and yet it’s still not No. 1 on my current Worst Of list).
Calvary
Rotten Tomatoes Scores: 88% critics, 86% audience
Gratuitous Review Quotes:
Calvary is bleak and corrosively funny in about equal measure. – Bob Mondello, NPR
Good actors like Chris O’Dowd, Moran, Gleeson, and Walsh are acting their hearts out, but they can’t make these characters seem like more than puppets. – David Edelstein, Vulture
Armchair Analysis: I was about to write this one off and pretend that it doesn’t even exist, but Brendan Gleeson is the man. And I guess Chris O’Dowd is pretty cool, too.
Behaving Badly
Rotten Tomatoes Scores: 0% critics (10 reviews so far, I’ll keep an eye on its Bucky Larson status), 36% idiots
Gratuitous Review Quotes:
Aside from a few lines of juicy bad language, Gomez plays the innocent in this fast-paced screwball farce, which is full of cheerful vulgarity but dangerously low on wit, charm or narrative logic. – Stephen Dalton, Hollywood Reporter
Selena Gomez is adorable and manages to float away unscathed. But other than that, it’s an unfunny comedy, populated by irredeemable sociopaths. – Sheila O’Malley, RogerEbert.com
Armchair Analysis: Here’s the summary of this straight to On Demand flop:
In this fast-paced, outrageously funny, all-star romp, socially awkward high schooler Rick Stevens (Nat Wolff) is willing to do whatever it takes to win the heart of the girl of his dreams … and he does mean anything. But love’s a bitch! Particularly when your sights are set on the most beautiful and popular girl at school (teen queen and pop superstar Selena Gomez).
How is this crap still being made? How is Selena Gomez so hard up for work that she’ll do this? How the hell are Mary-Louise Parker, Heather Graham and Elizabeth Shue in this? The only thing that would make any sense would be if it turned out that Nat Wolff’s dad is a producer and this is his belated Bar Mitzvah present.
Child of God
Rotten Tomatoes Scores: 37% critics, 20% audience
Gratuitous Review Quotes:
This wrong-headed adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s taut 1973 novel, as interpreted by director James Franco, spends too much time trying to create an element of compassion for this devilishly aberrant killer. – Claudia Puig, USA Today
Too bad all this grungy intimacy renders him neither knowable nor fascinating as he hunkers down in a shack and then in a cavern that doubles as a crypt. – Michael Sragow, Orange County Register
Armchair Analysis: I’m sure all of the negative reviews are from people who just don’t seem to get James Franco’s fart. Did I mean art? No.