Capsule Reviews Vol.3

A collection of spoiler-heavy mini movie reviews.


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365 Days

2020 – Director: Barbara Bialowas & Tomasz Mandes

I’ve been wanting to write a review of this dreck since my wife and I finished watching it. It was on the Netflix Top-10 for a good length of time and I assume that a few of her friends recommended it to her because I see no other reason to be attracted to it save for fleeting exhortation (more like extortion). What draws women to this kind of subject matter? The “50 Shades”-style “meek woman who doesn’t understand her own sexual power seduced by an overly-aggressive and socially-distant hunk of man-meat” story is all well-and-good for your dime-store Harlequin romance (and I’ve read a couple of those in my time), but as a movie – to make it work – you have to decide what side of the subject-matter line you toe. “365 Days” is pornography. And it’s hilarious, that right now, you can go on your regular Netflix account without any additional parental lock and watch a movie where there’s a full face-fuck blowjob scene with a fake dick and everything; frequent nudity (male & female); and enough bumping-and-grinding to give Sonny Jim (sic) that first uncomfortable feeling in his pants. And much like pornography, the story takes second-fiddle to the diddling, and what we are left with is a provocative experiment in adult-only content on the platform and not much else. For some, that will be enough.

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Jay’s Take: Damnation


2009 – Publisher: Codemasters

When it comes to games, I love a good narrative as much as the next guy. But when I’ve had a shitty day and feel like blowing off some steam – or I’m home sick and my attention span lasts less than my orgasm – then I love me some mindless shooting; particularly if it can be completed in the span of a week. I was angry writing my first draft for this review, not the least of which because I only wanted it to be one paragraph and it was turning into a Jason Joint. I had just finished an extended session ending with the final sequence before the Big Bad Boss and didn’t realize almost three hours had gone by and it didn’t feel like I had gotten anywhere. I was frustrated with the sloppy controls and the unintuitive level design and the brain-dead AI that seemed to hamper any progress I was making, and I just wanted to be DONE.

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the middle ground

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The second entry in the “Shotgun Room” trilogy. For mature readers.

“A family with a tragic history tries to survive during a global food crisis.”

The world is a hard place: hard ground; hard life. We are all tethered by gravity. When the government officially announced the start of a new phase of food production, some people wished they could defy it and simply float away. No one was prepared for the food shortages, other than the Preppers; but they had bugged-out long ago, holed-up in their compounds with whoever they had decided to allow entry. Climate change had permanently affected crop growth and no new wheat was being produced. No flour; no bread. Milk was a premium reserved for those who still owned viable cattle and even then, reproduction levels had severely decreased and no owner was sure their herd had been affected. It was simply too soon to tell. That was the consensus from the Men In Suits: “We are still working on a solution to the problem, and we assure you that we are doing everything in our power to ensure the future survival of mankind.” The broadcast from one of Virgin Galactic’s completed shuttlecraft took a week to breach the atmosphere and by then, the chaos had already run its course. Crime in the major metropolitan areas was at an all-time high. Seniors and the weak either starved-to-death from isolation or were home-invaded for supplies, or worse. The titular shotgun was stolen from the hospital and used in a shooting spree. There were even reports that some had resorted to cannibalism, as more-and-more half-mangled bodies with teeth marks and handkerchief-thin slices carved out had been popping up all over the city. An alternative had to be found, and it wasn’t Soylent Green.

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Jay’s Take: The Call of the Wild Double Feature

Two movie reviews.

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I hate CGI. I know it, you know it. I love animals, especially doggos. I hate CGI animals. What is it about animal movies these days where you can get an experienced wrangler and real animals but instead they cheap-out and generate everything in a computer? Has it gotten to the point where we need to be making movies where cute animals are subjected to such unimaginable hardships that the only way to film it is to fake it? Are we scared for the animals themselves? The actors? THE PRODUCERS’ INVESTMENT? We all know Lindsay Lohan is expensive to insure: what if you made a movie where Lindsay Lohan played Jane Goodall and went into the middle of the wood with a bunch of living apes to shoot one of those handheld iPhone movies? FORGET IT. You would have better luck posting your movie to YouTube to watch for free let alone wide distribution in the slowest audience-attendance period of the theatrical year. Hollywood is cheap and stingy, and if something works then they will do that thing into the foreseeable future until a cheaper alternative is found. They found their alternative in CGI. Soon you won’t even need mo-cap actors because there will be cyborgs who do a better job of imitating Carrie Fisher than her own daughter. SOON YOU WON’T NEED ACTORS AT ALL. It’ll all be dead people, vomited-up from the grave and reconstituted on IBMs. Plus side: you could then get the dead animal actors such as ALL THE DOGS from ALL THE PREVIOUS FILMED ADAPTATIONS of Jack London’s book and reanimate them and have an unscripted reunion special on HBO. Invite the holograms of the original Benji and Old Yeller while you’re at it. Live animal wrangling for film is looked-down on in today’s world the same as those who perform in the circus and it looks like it may completely go the way of the dodo, like puppetry (if the dour and pointless Dark Crystal prequel on Netflix right now is anything to go by. LOW DIG).

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