All that needs to be said about After Earth is that Will Smith's character is named "Cypher Raige." Excuse me, " General Cypher Raige."

"Starring Jaden Smith" was all I needed to know to take a hard pass.

Okay, we got Kingsman from the library, and I have to say, it was really fucking entertaining. My only real problem with it was Jack Davenport's criminal lack of screen time.

Check it out before it gets pulled: The Force Awakens syncs up with Dark Side of the Moon: [link]

Just got back from a screening of Green Room at the new Alamo Drafthouse here in SF. I didn't think it had the depth of Blue Ruin but it was an entertaining (albeit rough) ride.

So I don't keep spamming Facebook, anyone want to complain about Trainwreck with me?

I WILL!

ETA: Where should we start?

Trainwreck: Amy Schumer bravely plays a character named...Amy, who has no last name, maybe it's Schumer, who knows. I am only slightly aware of Schumer as a comedian, so I have no idea how closely this character is modeled after her or her persona, but THIS Amy writes for a fashion magazine, and she is the titular trainwreck. She drinks, she gets high, she sleeps around—a habit she learned from her father, who inculcated her with the idea that monogamy is not cool, although her sister managed to make it work. But now she meets Bill Hader, and he's the sweetest guy, and can they make this monogamy thing work, who knows, who cares. I just could not get into this movie, like for two hours I could see the movie trying to be funny and compelling and everything bounced off of me except for John Cena as a musclebound lug who has trouble with dirty talk and insult talk and LeBron James as a concerned friend. Also there's an intervention scene later that's pretty great. But I never laughed out loud, only gave the occasional chuckle, and I guess I'm not Schumer's target audience; I've enjoyed Judd Apatow's work in the past. There's a lot of "awkward relationship humor" that some people maybe relate to a lot but did nothing for me. Amy tries to work through her relationship issues and her life issues and it's okay I guess. The movie eschews the usual rom-com tropes for the most part until the end. B-/B

Everytime I watch something Amy Schumer related I think that I will like her more than I do, since I do appreciate the bawdy, but mostly I just find her at least borderline racist and just not very funny.

Some of her stuff is really funny, like Last Fuckable Day and the whole standoff of self-deprecation. But it's funny for the exact reasons that Trainwreck is not: it's poking at and mocking these ideas.

The whole movie was sold as the inversion of romantic comedy expectations, yet, as Jesse just said on Facebook, was at least 90% straight up standard romcom values.

It's a slut-shaming movie about the value of monogamy and traditional relationships. I found the Cena stuff twitchy because of the homophobia going on there: stick with the protein shake jokes, avoid the "it's funny because his insults are super homoerotic! haha! muscle-bound overcompensation!", people!

But now she meets Bill Hader, and he's the sweetest guy

Nah. He's totally not, though! Like, the "we like each other and should date" thing? SO GROSS. Nope. Nope. So much nope. Plus, they had no chemistry and they didn't show them having anything in common or anything that they liked about each other other than, apparently, the sex? They just told us how great they were together. Forced instead of organic. You didn't see them grow into a relationship. Plus, It's not like he had the come to Jesus moment where he realized his being twitchy about her basic personality was a bad thing, and, in fact, the movie ended up MAKING it a bad thing. Like somehow sexuality is pathology. They really didn't separate that from her other poor life choices. At all. It was front and center with them, in fact.

Again, repeating myself from FB, it's like the anti What's Your Number?, which remains the only romcom I am willing to watch repeatedly unless you count the subgenre of underdog sports romcoms, which I don't. Because they're about underdog sports and have their own standards, damn it.