The Duff is a cute teenage film. Duff stands for Designated Ugly Fat Friend, and when Bianca learns she is the Duff for her hot friends, she sets out to make changes to her life, in order to get the attention of her crush Toby. She enlists help from her neighbor Wesley, with whom she was good friends as kids, but has grown apart from as he became Mr. Popular as they got older. I don’t think it will attain cult classic status like some of the coming-of-age films that were around in my younger years, or maybe I’m just biased, but it is funny throughout and has a heartfelt, if anticipated, ending. It does a good job of poking fun at today’s youth in the way Clueless did for my generation.
Chappie is the third film from Neill Blomkamp, and unfortunately they keep getting worse after his first, District 9, which I loved. Chappie tells the tale of a robot gaining consciousness in a Short Circuit sort of story, if you were to take Johnny 5 and put him in the hood. Chappie is raised by a couple thugs, who mistreat him horribly and take him on their crime spree. When the only saving grace of the film is the emotion you feel when Chappie is getting abused, you know it isn’t good. They also tried far too hard to grab your attention during action scenes, and the story is about as thin as it gets. Even sci-fi lovers like myself will find little to enjoy here.
Project Almanac is about the same as the above review. A very good premise, it starts when a group of teenage friends are watching old home videos and see one of themselves, as a current 17 year old, reflected in the mirror of their own 7th birthday party. Knowing they somehow build a time machine, they get to it. The movie is about the consequences of making little changes in the past and how that affects the future. Unfortunately it is very disjointed and poorly explained, and to make matters worse, it uses the “found footage” routine to try to keep it feeling fresh, which lets face it, it doesn’t feel fresh anymore. It is really wasted too, there are some original ideas, but they are never explored properly and the whole movie deevolves to teenagers yelling “oh shit!” and running around frantically.
Should have listened to all the reviews and avoided this one. Serena stars the heralded duo of Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, so it has to be good, right? Unfortunately their talents are wasted on this one. Bradley plays George, owner of a lumber company trying to work and save to grow his business, doing underhand dealings with the local politicians to keep his struggling business afloat. He meets and falls in love with Jennifer’s Serena, a strong-willed businesswoman whose family also came from the timber business. Somewhere along the lines, a movie is supposed to take place, but I couldn’t find it. Plot elements are introduced and go nowhere, including one device that is used twice! (Friend starts to turn in George, and he is “dealt with.”) Very quickly Serena goes from a shrewd, smart woman to bat-shit crazy, with the transformation so fast you wonder if you missed something. Just stay away.
I don’t know what to make of Welcome to Me. It stars Kristen Wiig in yet another dramatic role, but this one is more Hateship Loveship (bad) than Skeleton Twins (good). She plays Alice, an adult who has been hurt much of her life, a bad situation made worse because she has decided to stop taking meds for her Borderline Personality Disorder. She wins a huge lottery of $80+ million, and decides to sink it into a talk show about her life. Most of the movie is the sort of cringe worthy, awkward humor that Wiig is known for, and she is good as always, but because of her character’s disorder you don’t know whether to laugh or just squirm uncomfortably. Wiig seems to like these roles lately and is really pumping them out the last couple years, but this one is a bit of a miss.
Jons Movie Takes 