SUCK MY DISC

DVD releases for the week of January 17, 2012

BUCKY LARSON: BORN TO BE A STAR

* (OUT OF ****)

When I first saw a preview for this movie I honestly thought it was a joke. I couldn’t believe this was actually going to be a movie. Turns out I was wrong. Turns out this was a movie and it looked terrible. However, I had a few friends who thought it looked like it could be funny. Once the movie came out the reviews destroyed it, and it got the legendary 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Bucky Larson was absolutely buried by critics. The lead actor, Nick Swardson, defends the film by saying, “I knew the critics were going to bury us… None of those reviewers was psyched to see Bucky Larson and laugh. They go in with the mentality ‘fuck these guys for making another movie.’ They go in there to kind of headhunt.”  Personally, I am a Happy Madison fan (especially from 2009 and prior), especially how they use Nick Swardson, and where some of his argument may be justified, I believe this film did need the criticism it got.

During the writing of my notes on this film, the adjective I kept unintentionally using to describe characters and scenes was ‘stupid,’ and with no bias opinion and being completely objective Bucky Larson was just that. Stupid.

Right away this film jumps into a world that has not rhyme or reason. Their is no set up and the viewer is left playing catch up to a film which makes no attempt to keep the viewer’s attention. I was actually entertained for a good 5 minutes of this film, however, early into Buck Larson you realize every joke and laugh has already been played out and writing quickly becomes lazy.

Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star, is about a midwestern boy with a small penis coming out Hollywood to fulfill what he fills should be his destiny… to become a porn star. Soon his small penis catches on making men feel less intimidated and women feel more satisfied with their men. Bucky Larson becomes the most popular porn star of the year.

Basically, this movie should have been a 5 to 10 minute online sketch. That way none of the jokes would get old and people wouldn’t have to waste their money on going to see it in theaters or buying it on DVD.

Nick Swardson’s ‘funny’ midwestern talk actually gave me a few chuckles, but was embarrassing to see for 90+ minutes. The only true laugh I got came during a porno film within the movie shot as if it was black and white silent film era Chaplin movie. It was actually funny to see Swardson playing Chaplin with his pants around his ankles.

Another problem with the humor (or lack their of) comes with how absurd everything was. His teeth were WAY too big, unhumanly sized. His penis was smaller then the tip of a straw for God sakes. Nothing was even remotely close to real, taking me completely out of the movie I was already barely in. The characters were just abandoned mid way through the film and sloppily brought back at random times with no reasons.

Plain and simple this was just a bad movie. I know these people didn’t set out to make a bad film, but they did make a lazy film. Bucky Larson deserves all of its negative reviews even if they all weren’t warranted. It deserved them because it should be made an example of. This film should set a precedent for all future films of its kind. The paying audience deserves to see a movie worthy of being seen. It’s fine that you made a bad movie, but just don’t expect us to come see it. -KM

 

THE IDES OF MARCH

**1/2 (OUT OF ****)

I just spent five minutes on the “Best Performances of 2011” episode of the PopFilter podcast declaring my new found love of Ryan Gosling, thanks to his performances in Crazy, Stupid, Love and Drive, and then comes The Ides of March, in which he gets blown out of the water by every single actor around him. Gosling’s drowning aside, this movie never really delivers the punch that it spends it’s entire runtime winding up for. Gosling stars as a campaign manager for George Clooney, who is trying to get the democratic presidential nomination. Gosling starts out as Mr. Smith, but after going to Washington, or in this case the Ohio primary, the realities of politics and the misgivings of the hero he works for corrupt him. He slowly becomes the insatiable backstabber he originally hated, much to no one’s surprise, either the character’s or the audience’s. I still think Clooney can be a great director, and the way he turned this play into a movie does show as much promise as anything else he’s done, but everything here just feels way more lightweight than advertised. With almost no light shown on how these primaries work, we’re stuck depending on the actors to make the story compelling, and Clooney, Paul Giamatti, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman (all great here) can only do so much to battle back Gosling’s obvious choice making and severe lack of subtlety. I truly think that Ryan Gosling has the potential to one day be great, but it’s going to take a string of directors letting him make no acting decisions whatsoever, and basically holding his hand the entire way – RH

ABDUCTION

PopFilter reviewed this turd bucket when it was in theaters. Check it out here.

https://popfilter.co/2011/09/bottom-feeders-the-twilight-ultimatum/

KEVIN HART: LAUGH AT MY PAIN

** 1/2 (out of ***)

Somehow I missed when Kevin Hart shot up to superstardom. He’s been in a bunch of terrible things, and had a really good guest spot on Party Down, but I didn’t realize he’s one of the biggest black stand-up comics out right now. Apparently I’ve lost touch with the pulse of the black entertainment community I once had. I was surprised how funny I found this special; given that I knew Hart was in stuff like Superhero Movie and Soul Plane, I didn’t really think I’d be the demographic. But Hart does a good job at not pandering to any demographic, he simply tells personal, dark stories from his life. The stories would be dark regardless of his ethnicity…don’t read into that. Hart has boundless energy onstage, jumping between impressions and zany physical bits. It’s easy to see why he’s so popular, and why he is only going to continue to rise. My biggest complaint is his desperate need to make catch phrases stick. At a certain point he’s giving a class on how to milk a certain phrase for more laughs, but then it gets beyond irritating, and then he does it some more. That being said, there are definitely worse comics out there you could watch, I just don’t understand the point of owning a stand up special in this day and age. Just wait for it to be on Netflix. -MG

ALSO RELEASED:

COURAGEOUS

NEW TO BLU RAY

DUTCH

**1/2 (out of ****)

If you were curious as to when this very underseen comedy came out, just read the quote at the bottom of the cover, which references both Home Alone and Bart Simpson, with all of the timeliness of an M.C. Scat Cat appearance on the soundtrack. Dutch is not exactly phenomenal, but it’s got a storyline (new stepdad drives across country with the punkass stepson he just met) that is easy to fill with jokes and adventure, and it has a pretty great performance from Ed O’Neill, showing that he could have been a comedic leading man if things had gone just a little bit differently. Now we have his character on Modern Family, but at the time, we only really knew him as Al Bundy, and Dutch showed that there was a little bit of range there. It also features Ethan Randall, who would go on to co-star with Ed O’Neill in the short lived Dragnet remake, which most likely failed because they didn’t advertise it as the Dutch reunion we had all been waiting for. – RH

LICENSE TO DRIVE

** (out of ****)

I, at one point in my life, loved License to Drive so much that when tasked to write a story in third grade, I wrote a three page synopsis of this movie and passed it off as my own. My teacher figured it out, and asked me to see her after class was over. After teaching me what plagiarism was, and explaining how much trouble it would get me in to in the future, she leaned in closely and whispered that if I’m going to steal ideas for movies, I should at least pick better films. Although this movie kicked off a shortly lived love of the Two Coreys, and a lifetime love of Heather Graham, time has not been kind to it, which makes sense, because it was awful when it was released. It’s the story of a young man, played by Corey 1, who fails his driver’s test, but takes his grandpa’s car out anyway. He and Corey 2 get in to adventures so mundane that I can barely remember them, despite having seen this movie dozens of time. ButohmyGodHeatherGraham. – RH

 

TVD

MAD SEASON 1 PART 2

If you were going to turn Mad Magazine into a show (and why wouldn’t you), a show like this probably always made more sense than one like MadTV. Mad is also a skit show, but it’s completely animated, which allows to have a pace and a do-anything attitude that would be impossible to imitate with live actors. It also does a lot less character work, and a lot more pop culture skewering, which makes it seem more like the magazine that it shares its name with. No celebrity is safe, and although the satire is not particularly clever or original, it works great for Baby’s First Satire. Besides never letting the most ADD-riddled kid get bored, it teaches children that celebrities are awful people, and just because they take themselves way too seriously doesn’t mean that you ever should, a lesson it took my generation far too long to learn. – RH