All posts by Louis Fowler

Comedy

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)

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In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I can fully understand how a lifetime of bitter hate against the poor is undone in one evening, thanks to three life-changing ghosts. However, with Mark Waters’ terrible Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, I find it extremely hard to believe that Matthew McConaughey will change his never-ending pussy-pooling ways, thanks to an extremely similar haunting.

Basically what passed as a romantic comedy before the era of #MeToo, the muscular Matthew plays Connor Mead, a womanizing photographer speaking dialogue totally filled with nothing but the sleaziest of come-ons that, if not being delivered by McConaughey, would easily venture into sexual harassment and, quite possibly, date-rape territory. It seems that he turned out this way because his parents died when he was 7 and left him with elder whore Uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas); do you have ample-enough pity for him yet?

Turns out that this weekend, his grating brother, Paul (the grating Breckin Meyer), is getting married to the irritating Sandra (the irritating Lacey Chabert). Connor shows up already erect and ready to plow through a few drunken bridesmaids, unaware that his childhood sweetheart, Jenny (Jennifer Garner), is there — with whom he had already pumped and dumped — but who cares, because she secretly loves the scamp.

As you can probably imagine, that night he’s visited by three girlfriends, all of whom he attempts multiple times to sleep with, including a 16-year-old Emma Stone. Condoms full of semen drop from the sky at one point, among one of the more grotesque ideas of “romantic” humor in this dreadfully painful flick.

Director Waters, by the way, made other bad films like Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Vampire Academy and Just Like Heaven, wherein a ghostly Reese Witherspoon haunts a forlorn Mark Ruffalo. I haven’t seen it, but judging from the trailer, I’m sure it’s sexually horrific as well. —Louis Fowler

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Kitchen Sink

When the Wind Blows (1986)

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WTFWhereas the terrifying British film Threads is a nuclear story about the destruction of England made for adults, the animated British movie When the Wind Blows follows a similar path, but for children, apparently. I guess kids have got to learn about the ravages of bleeding gums and hair loss due to atomic warfare sometime.

Lovely couple Jim and Hilda are retirees who mostly piddle around in their quaint country home, drinking plenty of tea and arguing about which of the four radio stations is best. That serene life is torn asunder when an atomic bomb is dropped in nearby London, leaving them on their own as they struggle with no power, no water and no health care in the aftermath.

For 87 minutes, we are painfully forced to watch this charming elderly pair as they not only physically deteriorate in the worst ways possible due to radiation sickness, but hold out irrefutable hope that the government will come and rescue them any minute from the “Russkies.” They never do.

With a stellar title song by David Bowie and a decent end-credits tune by Roger Waters, this partly live-action film will hit hard for people my age (somewhere in our 40s) as an animated reminder of our own aging parents and how their blind faith in manmade doctrines could ultimately leave them to die alone and scared in a puddle of their own filth. —Louis Fowler

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Comedy

Mo’ Money (1992)

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In the early ’90s, all of your favorite comedians from Saturday Night Live were busy in the theaters making their feature film debuts to varying degrees; but, if you ask me, the more interesting movies were coming for the gang at In Living Color, with its second most popular star Damon Wayans hitting hard with The Last Boy Scout, Blankman and the mostly forgotten Mo’ Money.

Based on Wayans’ popular street-hustler catchphrase, this cinematic incarnation still finds him on the street, trying to make dollars with his real-life brother Marlon. Together, they rip off marks for televisions and other high-ticket items, usually while in now-offensive characters like a homeless man, a mentally handicapped man or a very homosexual man.

When he meets the stunning Amber (the still-stunning Stacey Dash), Wayans decides he’s going to fly right and work hard at the most important credit card firm in history; when temptation strikes and he steals a few cards, however, that’s when he’s lured into a badly envisioned criminal ring of credit conmen who use murder to solve all of their problems.

When Mo’ Money lets Wayans do his comedic thing, it’s a very funny movie. But, for some reason, with about 30 or so minutes left to go, it becomes a highly disjointed, tonally erratic action film, one that never recovers as he chases the bad guys in typical ’90s mode, sans, strangely enough, any wisecracks at their deathly expense.

Directed by Peter MacDonald, perhaps best known for the execrable Rambo III, the only thing that this flick had going for it during its original release was the platinum new jack soundtrack, featuring five hits, including the Janet Jackson/Luther Vandross smash “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” which was inescapable for a while.

A few years later, sketch-show cast members would cross paths when Wayans and Adam Sandler starred in Bulletproof, which was only funny for a can’t-repeat-here joke about Disneyland. —Louis Fowler

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Freaks (2018)

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The paranoiac thriller Freaks — at least at first — has a wonderfully dark idea: A maniacally intense father (the disheveled Emile Hirsch) is keeping his small daughter (the mostly irritating Lexy Kolker) from going outside of their house, mostly for fear that the world will consider her a “freak” and imprison her inside a mountain compound.

As creepy neighbors — usually armed with melty ice cream cones — prowl around her house, it’s easy to think that Dad might be on to something here. But when her ice cream salesman grandfather (a wizened Bruce Dern) shows up, that’s when we learn the truth about the world — it’s some kind of a cheap superhero thing — and it’s really hard to care about any of it anymore.

The “freaks” tend to bleed from their eyes while displaying very cost-effective powers like super-speed, disappearing and telling people what to do, with a killer task force assigned to keep them under control and imprisoned, even though it’s apparently one officer and a hard-nosed agent (Grace Park).

The film was obviously made to cash in on the crop of recent superhero movies — mostly of the mutant variety — which I can understand, but as long as Marvel and DC are pumping these things out on a regular basis, why even bother? Why choose store-brand cereal if you can afford Froot Loops? Why choose Freaks when you can choose X-Men: Dark Phoenix?

Okay, bad example. —Louis Fowler

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

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When Terminator: Dark Fate was released last year, it was met with unbridled hatred from conservatives, which I mostly chocked up to it being a movie featuring three women in the lead roles. Having just seen it though, their hatred of this franchise is more apparent than even that: It casts Latino actors Natalia Reyes as the savior of humanity and Gabriel Luna as its destroyer.

That being said, with a decidedly death-dealing tone toward immigration and their paid foot soldiers, Dark Fate was one of the better science-fiction films of 2019.

With each Terminator film veering off into a new timeline of sorts — it really makes sense if you let it — this one takes place in an alternate present where, a short time after T2, John Connor (Edward Furlong) is blown away by the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) while on a tropical beach vacation. This gives a returning Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) a new purpose, as you could guess.

Meanwhile, Skynet never happened, but a different form of AI, known as the Legion, took its place instead, offering up a new Judgment Day of killer cyborgs warring against surviving humans, many of whom become augmented soldiers. One of them, Grace (Mackenzie Davis), travels back in time to protect Mexican factory worker Dani (Reyes) against a newer Terminator menace (Luna) known as a REV-9.

There’s plenty of what we’ve come to expect from Terminator flicks, including explosive set pieces, constant authority slashings and naked time travelers — as well as a returning Schwarzenegger — that runs this engine well, with the innovation of Deadpool’s Tim Miller behind the camera and a story by returning creator Harlan Ellison James Cameron.

But, you know, the scene where the Terminator does in about 40 or 50 immigration officials … it’s hard to not cheer for that. No MAGA here, ese.
—Louis Fowler

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