Unlikeable people do unlikeable things in this unlikeable, laugh-free comedy. Paul Rudd plays a stick-figure of a character who is the catalyst for unpleasant changes in his narcissistic family's life, and he affably wanders about like a zen, tie-dyed Post-It note. I cringed throughout this film wondering when the nearly-always-funny Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel, and Steve Coogan would be funny. It didn't happen. Here's the trailer:
I know. Even the trailer is a chore to watch. I'm sorry I posted it.
A man moves into his grandmother's spooky rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side for 12 days in this plot-hole ridden thriller, and by "spooky" I mean "3500 square feet near Central Park for $650 a month". I mean seriously, for $650 a month an apartment that great would have to have all the ghosts of Poltergeist and The Haunting plus the serial killers Freddy Kruger and Michael Myers and the xenomorph from Alien all sleeping on a fold-out couch to deter me from living there. I'm not sure what the writer of Occupant finds frightening about a plastic bag filled with women's shoes, but I'm not going to ask because that just opens up a whole big can of worms about this movie. Is there something ill-defined, not-thoroughly-fleshed-out, and paranormal happening in this apartment? Heck if I know, but I sure in the heck would be upset if my overly attached doorman who likes to buy me groceries while I'm unable to leave my enormous New York apartment brought me some gosh-darned Hungry Man dinners when the Popover Cafe is 6 blocks away. I'd be hot mad if Doorman Joe Who Calls Me Baby brought me microwavable entrees when he could have brought me an order of vegetable samosas from Swagat which is literally around the corner. Who even does that? Did Doorman Joe think to himself, "Why, there's hundreds of restaurants nearby. I'm gonna show my BFF that I love him the only sensible way, which is though the power of the Lean Cuisine. Here you go, baby. Eat up."? If so, he gets no tip.
By the way, the grandma who lived in this apartment is a bad ass since because she seemingly held out since New York was called New Amsterdam, and her wimpy grandson couldn't hack it for 12 measly days. Weak.
So I started watching White Zombie for the millionth time last night, and Mrs. Deathrage said to me, "Hey, can we watch a movie?" I said, "Well, we're watching one." She said, "No we're not, and we're not watching this." Because I'm apparently not the boss, even though I run a billion-dollar multi-national brimstone-something-or-other business, I stopped watching White Zombie, and it was right at the part where Bela Lugosi plays Bela Lugosi which is all the time.
I wanted to go to the theatre all summer and watch Pacific Rim, because it's not every day that movies about giant monsters wrestling giant robots play at the 3D googolplex theatre, but Mrs. Deathrage wouldn't allow it. It's now available to buy for the completely unreasonable price of $19.95 at the I-Tunes Store. I said, "You wouldn't allow me to go see it in the theatre, so I'm going to buy it now." She vetoed that plan, which I should have seen coming.
She said, "Let's rent something from the Top Movies." So I started skimming through the completely unacceptable list of movies available to rent, because this is October and I said that I was going to only watch horror movies this month but there weren't many horror films and Mrs. Deathrage would refuse to watch them anwyay and I didn't want to go through the aggravation but I was already aggravated. I saw that This Is The End was available, so not giving Mrs. Deathrage an opportunity to veto it, I immediately rented it. She said, "Wait, what is this movie?", and I gave her a brief synopsis. She said, "The Apocalypse? Why, that's my favorite holiday!" which is why I married her in spite of her bossiness.
This Is The End started playing, and Mrs. Deathrage said, "We can't watch it now. I'm not ready.", and she puttered around the house for another 20 minutes with my laptop, so that I have no computer to pass the time and the movie I rented is about 2 minutes in and the TV is paused with Seth Rogan's affable face glowing in the semi-darkness.
I am totally annoyed, so I say, "Honey, can we watch this movie now? I've started two movies and I'm watching neither". She says, "I like you better when you're at work", which is probably why we've remained married for nearly a century.
Celebrities have an all-male sleepover and cookout in this documentary. I would think with all the money James Franco has, he would have been able to afford more than one Milky Way. I'm pretty sure they have a Costco in Los Angeles, so he could have bought a case or two in case of a Milky Way emergency. I'm not one to tell celebrities how to live their lives, but he shouldn't recklessly spend all his money on art, and should try and keep more Capri Suns in the house for Michael Cera. That guy seems awfully thirsty. Plus, you never can tell when an air-conditioning unit will fall on the clerk at the convenience store, so you should stock up in case strange things like that happen. He lives in Los Angeles, after all, and odd things happen there all the time.
Tom Selleck's mustache stars in this horror film about a guy that buys a painting of a coven of witches being burned at the stake and one of the witches looks like his wife. So Tom Selleck's mustache buys artwork, drives a convertible, and is often shirtless in pajama bottoms, which is pretty much what it did when it played Magnum PI's mustache on television in the 80s.
Hey, did you know the director of Daughters of Satan, Hollingsworth Morse, directed episodes of the Pufnstuf, Flipper, Dukes Of Hazzard, and Shazam? He did! I had to look it up because I thought with an outlandish name like Hollingsworth Morse it just had to be made up. Turns out, it isn't.
October is finally here, and I'm going to try my best to only watch horror movies. I think it's going to work out just fine.
I was really itching to watch a horror film about a paranormal bird, so I watched Ghost Bird on Netflix. Unfortunately, Ghost Bird is about an ordinary bird, not a spectral one. Well, it is kind of spectral bird, because it's about the seemingly extinct ivory-billed woodpecker. But I thought it was going to be about some horrifying bird that rises from the tomb to exact its bloodthirsty revenge on the townspeople that never understood it, or maybe about a zombie bird that roams the urban landscape eating brains. Actually, Ghost Bird does have an awful lot of bird corpses in it, but not the fun kind that shuffles around killing people. Just the regular old dead kind, except they're 100 years old and kept in special bird-corpse drawers in a museum, and that's not especially frightening.
