Category / ½ Star

by Jaime Rebanal

Office Christmas Party – Review

½

You can already look at the title “Office Christmas Party” and soon it’ll spell out where your expectations are going to be set. But even with a low bar being set in stone, Office Christmas Party still somehow manages to disappoint. You can’t seriously look at a title like “Office Christmas Party” and expect anything more than a crude sex-crazed comedy about a party that happens to be within an office setting during Christmastime, but even on that level it doesn’t seem like it has enough to sustain its running time of 105 minutes. At the very least one can be thankful enough that it isn’t the sort of mess that Project X was but that’s the most a movie like Office Christmas Party can really be given.

Continue reading →

by Jaime Rebanal

The Emoji Movie – Review

½

Actually did not want to be among the dogpile of half-stars that this movie was receiving from peers, so much to the point I was even remembering that I’ve seen much worse this year as I watched The Emoji Movie. And while said thought still remains rooted in my head, I can only come out of The Emoji Movie confirming that it truly is as bad as it is being made out to be. Not since Foodfight! have I come across such a lazy mishmash trying to pose as family entertainment in the most cynical manner and while showing it off with pride at full display. The whole time I was sitting through The Emoji Movie I had only refused to believe that a conceptualization so asinine would be made into a real product by a major studio given what Foodfight! has proven and it seems clear enough that within later years to come, this will only go down along the like.

Continue reading →

by Jaime Rebanal

Flatliners (2017) – Review

½

The original Flatliners from 1990 always had carried nothing more than an absolutely ridiculous premise, so it’s among many of the reasons the existence of this new film is baffling. Being a sequel to said film, it was already hard enough distinguishing it as such when it barely even feels like such and more along the lines of a lazy remake – and even if it were said to be a remake, it wouldn’t change just how cheap everything feels on its own. But among many more reasons I’m absolutely baffled at the existence of Flatliners is the extent to which it will be gathering any of its appeal because many theater trips I’ve made within the past few months have shown at least one trailer (to quite an annoying degree) – only to find here I’m unsure what Niels Arden Oplev even wanted to make.

Continue reading →

by Jaime Rebanal

Mother! – Review

½

As far as my own opinions of Darren Aronofsky have gone, I think it’s clear enough that I’m not a fan. I like only two of his films (The Fountain and The Wrestler) whereas the rest seem so drenched in showing off how distinctive they are to the point the experience would become agonizing. And it was among many reasons I greatly disliked Black Swan because oftentimes Aronofsky isn’t hiding narrative choices that often resemble better works under a layer of weirdness that ultimately adds up to nothing. But what exactly does one get if they can imagine all the worst qualities of Black Swan cranked up to the maximum? The final result of that is Mother!, because it almost feels like being pummelled by everything about him as a director that continuously has annoyed me.

Continue reading →

by Jaime Rebanal

The Last Face – Review

½

Wasting talent is one thing, but associating all of that with something nearly half as unforgivable as The Last Face is a whole other level. Sean Penn’s first directorial effort after Into the Wild has found the actor-director sinking himself down to a new low, maybe even the lowest that he’s hit in his entire career. And somehow, the word “exploitative” isn’t even enough to describe what’s wrong with The Last Face on just about every level because even an element that would make itself to appear as slightly redeeming irrelevant when discussing the product as a whole. It’s been a long while since I’ve come across something of such a rare sort of ugliness on a screen of any sort – and I’ll be amazed if I find anything else of this kind come out within this year. Penn is clearly a wonderfully talented actor and maybe his directing isn’t on the same level, but this sort of thing is just baffling for someone of his own kind.

Continue reading →

by Jaime Rebanal

Ma mère – Review

½

It probably didn’t help that prior to watching Ma mère I had only recently revisited Michael Haneke’s absolutely brilliant The Piano Teacher, another film starring Isabelle Huppert as a masochistic figure. But for as much as I am willing to defend Isabelle Huppert in anything, there’s absolutely nothing about Ma mère that can even make this experience anything close to worthwhile. Rather instead, there was a part of my experience with The Piano Teacher coming back to me, and not in a good way, because the way in which it unfolded did make me feel sick to my stomach without any real thought put behind what came around. As I try to find even anything that’s really worth defending about this film, I’m stumped because even Huppert, usually a saving grace, offered very little in her presence.

Continue reading →

by Jaime Rebanal

Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party – Review

½

Convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza invades the screen a third time now at an election year after he tried jumping against a second term for Barack Obama. While I don’t intend to change anyone’s political viewpoints whether you tend to be more left-leaning or more right-leaning, there’s a degree to which one side can make propaganda that can only sink down to an unbelievable degree of lunacy. It was something that I already managed to pick up from another Dinesh D’Souza piece I’ve watched, America: Imagine the World Without Her and it certainly seems that nothing has changed over these years and Dinesh D’Souza only remains a pseudo-intellectual nutcase for conservative ideals at the wrong times.

Continue reading →

by Jaime Rebanal

Smosh: The Movie – Review

½

At this point of my life, I’d already have gone past the time in which I thought Smosh was funny so inevitably I skipped Smosh: The Movie when it was first announced. Morbid curiosity had gotten the better of me and eventually I watched it together with a group of friends, who (somewhat) have made the experience feel less painful than it already had been. Unfortunately with that said, there is just about nothing in Smosh: The Movie that even works, and given as I’ve already outgrown Smosh’s humour all that I can truly feel when watching this was that part of me was slowly dying. I was reminded of the painful memories that had lasted all as a result of Fred: The Movie, and while nowhere near that level of being terribly awful, the experience is beyond painful. Continue reading →

by Jaime Rebanal

4.3.2.1 – Review

½

NOTE: My current views on politics have changed so much ever since the election of Donald Trump and thus most of what you would have remembered seeing here will have been altered to match how I feel now.

I think it’s best that I start off this review stating how I feel about feminism. I’m never one to talk about anything political because I know it’s an area that leads to the most fights: for on social media there’s a mindset in some people which we have people being objectively correct in whatever side of the spectrum they’ve landed on, and I’ve lost friends over it. I state this because I like to think of myself as a person who has no political leaning of any sort, because the fights I’ve witnessed made me dislike many aspects of both the left and the right. I’ve started to find myself leaning more towards the left as time passed by, and my understanding of feminism perhaps has led to why I think 4.3.2.1 doesn’t work at all, it’s a misguided piece of filth that otherwise has no idea representing what it believes it does.

Continue reading →

by Jaime Rebanal

Howard the Duck – Review

½

Howard the Duck – a crowning achievement for George Lucas’s career. Make no mistake, this notorious flop certainly is an absolutely awful film in so many ways, but there’s a lot about what it leaves behind that turns it into a thing of glory. All the wrong reasons alone add up to why Howard the Duck is a delightful product. This is the sort of failure that’s absolutely fascinating to watch because of how much it is doing wrong because the appearance to which it provides is something so bizarre it keeps one’s attention as it moves along. One such level of enjoyable badness is quite the achievement especially when all the glory of such a failure is coming into play. And that is where Howard the Duck is truly something unlike any other. Like I’ve stated, it is rather undeniably a bad film, but wow, is it truly something to be embraced. Continue reading →