Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Neighbors, or Seth Rogen Kind of Grows Up.


I no longer know how to write about comedies without being tempted to go on a long tirade about why there are so few great ones nowadays.  Maybe someday I'll provide you with that lecture, but for now let me try to focus on Neighbors, the latest entry in a long line of comedies that we can at least consider adequately amusing.

In Neighbors, Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne play a young couple with a cute baby who are trying to keep the youthful dream of having sex in the kitchen alive.  Unfortunately, they're now old and sleep deprived, so their efforts are typically stifled by their child, exhaustion, or Seth Rogen's declining sexual prowess.  When a fraternity moves into the house next door, Seth and Rose attempt to become fast friends with the fraternity leadership (Zac Efron and Dave Franco) in the hope that their friendship will convince their new neighbors to keep it down while they're trying to sleep.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

X-Men Days of Future Past, or Terminator 2: Motivational Speaker Edition.

"You need to make stronger life choices, son."

It's the future, guys.  It's really dark in the future.  And the T-1000's Sentinels have been killing all of our mutant friends.  The solution, of course, is to send Wolverine into the past, because Kitty Pryde (who went into the past in the comic incarnation) is a woman, and women aren't allowed to be main characters in movies.

The resulting film is an X-Men family reunion composed largely of motivational speeches, since the majority of the plot is articulated to us within the first fifteen minutes by narration, and then relayed to the X-men of the past via Wolverine's first of many motivational speeches to a young Professor Xavier.  Thankfully, we're also treated to the obligatory getting-the-band-back-together sequences, which are the moments in which Days of Future Past actually remains bearable for a while.