Yesterday a huge movie day for me. First, I went out with a friend to catch the Scary Movie Sequel. Then I came home and watched a few more movies, ones which I have seen before but not rated on this website.
Scary Movie 6
Went into this one knowing it would be pretty silly and didn’t expect much. So I wasn’t disappointed when the movie turned out to be a bomb. Some of the same tired old jokes mixed in with a few new ones. But I found myself not laughing through most of it. There were maybe 2 laughs for me through this entire thing.
The audience wasn’t very large, but I could tell most of them were not laughing all that much either. At the end of a big punchline where there was supposed to be laughs you just heard a few snickers.
The end of the movie was a complete cluster and really did nothing for me. Overall, I give this movie a score of 25 potatoes (out of 100). It was definitely bad and I would recommend people skip it.
The Substitute (1996)
This movie came out when I worked at a video store in Virginia. I got to take home a “screener” copy that movie companies would provide to video rental stores so the owners and/or employees could check it out first. This usually was done so that store employees could get a gauge on how many copies they wanted to order. Also, they would be able to recommend it or not to the customers.
When it first came out, I remember thinking “oh here we go again with the tough teacher who turns around an inner-city school for the better”. That seemed to be a very common theme in that era of movie making. But this one was different. He didn’t go into the teaching job in order to help the kids. He wanted revenge for his girlfriend (who was attacked by a student gang) and he wanted to make some $ for his crew by ripping off drug dealers.
The action is very well done and the Miami backdrop felt pretty authentic. I lived down in that area as a kid. There were some pretty well-known actors in this one. Tom Berenger (who I thought was awesome during this period of time), William Forsythe, Mark Anthony (yep him), and Ernie Hudson. They all do fantastic jobs in my opinion and were very believable. Seeing Winston from Ghostbusters play a bad guy was cool and he did great.
My rating for this one may be affected by my rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, but I have to admit I really love this movie. It’s gritty, it’s tough, and it feels relatively authentic. I give The Substitute a rating of 84/100. It’s one that I will go back to every 5 years or so and enjoy over and over.
Kill the Irishman (2011)
This movie did so much right that it is really quite surprising. It did some things wrong as well. Let me start with the bad.
The very opening scene has a car explosion which uses bad CGI. Like really bad CGI. I remember when I sat down to watch this years ago, I turned it off after seeing that car explosion. And it’s not like they didn’t have the budget for real explosions. There were real explosions throughout the rest of the movie. It was a very odd choice to settle on those horrible effects for the opening seen. I’ll never understand.
The main actor Ray Stevenson was VERY good in his role. He is really good in this. It struck me as odd they didn’t hire a younger actor to portray the main character for the scenes depicting his early life. They had a guy who looked 45-50 years old playing someone in their 20’s. As the movie progressed, the age of the actor made more sense. But come on guys.
The movie is all about organized crime and it did a pretty decent job showing all the various aspects of it. The cast for this movie was pretty impressive as they had Val Kilmer, Christopher Walken and Vincent D’Onofrio. But all of their characters and performances fell flat with the slight exception of D’Onofrio. He was very charismatic but seemed all wrong as a mob capo.
Anyway, this is a solidly entertaining movie. If you are into mob or crime thrillers I say, give it a shot. I am giving it 80 potatoes. With some better effects, editing, and acting from a few guys, this movie could have been in the 90+ percentile.