Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star
I’ve determined that Adam Sandler through his Happy Madison shingle is trying to make everyone hate him. I cannot fathom any other explanation for his recent output (see Jack & Jill below). I needn’t really say much because the crap speaks for itself. Even the trailer announcer sounds bored. Watch for it to hopefully tank this weekend, September 9. Bucky Larson trailer

Abduction
“Whatdya say we remake those Bourne movies with that kid from those, eh … Twilight movies? Yeah! No, not Robert Patterson (sic)! The other hunky one. Yeah. We just need to get a big director like Spike Lee! Oh, he’s not available. What about John Singleton? Yeah, that’s the stuff. And, uh, we’ll pack it with good actors like Alfred Molina and Sigourney Weaver! Big blockbusta on our hands!” – random movie exec. I’ll pass on this September 23. Abduction trailer

Real Steel
Pop quiz, Hollywood hot shot! What do you get when you combine the Fighter/Rocky/any other boxing movie with Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots? Uh, the humorously named Real Steel apparently. From the trailer below, it seems to hit all of the stepping stones for a underdog sports movie … except by replacing the underdog with a pile of metal under the tutelage of Wolverine and some bratty looking kid. Expect it to make a trillion dollars off the backs of stupid movie fans on October 7. Reel Steal trailer

Footloose
Sacrilege alert! I’ve never seen the original Kevin-Baconized Footloose. Wait, is that cheering or booing? Either way, chalk another 80s film to the Tinsel Town remake train as a small town with a ban on typical teenager fun like dancing. I would assume the sex and drugs are off-limits as well. A new cast of unknowns attempt to shake up the establishment by dancing any-damn-way (shocker!) and ruffle Dennis Quaid’s feathers. It looks flashy like Step Up and edgy like … Step Up 3(?) with the hollowness of both combined. Mark your calenders to skip this turkey October 14. Footloose trailer

Red State
Honestly, it’s hard to judge this one by the trailer alone. It looks part awesome (the gunfight mostly) and questionable (everything else). But this has gotten crapped on by a lot of reviews regardless of what Quentin Tarantino says. Kevin Smith will probably chalk that up to critics being stuck-up assholes but I am hardly a critic and despised Cop Out. Be educated when it drops October 21.
Red State trailer

Tower Heist
I’ve already spoken of Brett Ratner’s Tower Heist before but mostly because it was a pretty good cast in a horrid looking movie. It is even more relevant now that Eddie Murphy has been tapped to host the Oscars next February (coincidentally produced by Ratner too) and I still cannot imagine a good movie coming out of this. Be skeptical come November 4. Tower Heist trailer

Jack and Jill
Dear baby Jesus. I cannot believe this is a real movie! I honestly cannot conceive that “From the Producers of Just Go With It and Grown Ups” is a selling point in the trailer! I cannot comprehend that there seems to be twice as much unfunny Adam Sandler in this than his last aborted comedy I watched. I am still waiting for the day before November 11 that Sandler announces to the world that this was merely a big-budgeted hoax made into a trailer just to show movie-goers how asinine their purchases are. I’m really waiting … still waiting. Jack and Jill trailer (Dear God, why?)

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1
So … positives! The trailer came in under two minutes! That’s pretty good considering the recent crop. And … well, I got nothing else. Yes, you might recall that I kind of liked the last one to an extent. At least it wasn’t as bad as the preceeding entry. Watching this trailer makes me want to go tear off my shirt in anger and go run in the rain. If I transform into a werewolf, at least I won’t have to worry about gaining admittance to this piece on November 18. And I hate weddings too! Breaking Dawn trailer

New Year’s Eve
What can Ashton Kutcher, Katherine Heigl, Zac Efron, and Sarah Jessica Parker equal? A movie that I unconditionally do not want to see! I never saw Valentine’s Day either. I consider myself lucky for that but even the celebratory night of drinking and shenanigans is not safe from the rom-com crew. Put those folks in a remake of New Year’s Evil and I’ll be there. Otherwise, have fun in a probably crowded theater when this launches December 9. New Year’s Eve trailer

Back in February after the release of Cop Out was bombarded with negative reviews from many different critics, director Kevin Smith took to Twitter to explain how reviewers were out of touch with the general movie going populace. His main point (and this is from memory because I am damn sure not going back through all of Smith’s tweets to refresh) was that reviewers did not appreciate the movie for what it was intended to be: a light buddy-cop comedy with throwbacks to its 80s brethen. Less than twenty-four hours after watching a movie that did successfully replicate a lost 80s movie (that would be Piranha, review here), I can safely say that may have been the intention here but a bad movie got in the way.

Taking the old buddy-cop formula, Cop Out does absolutely nothing else with it. Here we have two partners who are loose cannons, destroy things in downtown New York City, get reprimanded and suspended by their captain, and yet continue to investigate a theft and a drug-smuggling ring outside of their authority. As you can tell by that brief synopsis, there is very little original or defining here that you cannot see in the dozens of other buddy-cop movies. In fairness to Smith, Cop Out is not the warning sign of the apocalypse as some reviews might make it out to be. It has its moments but those are mostly contained in the final act, long after any patience you had has worn thin. The biggest flaw is that for a comedy, there is very little humor that does not revolve around Tracy Morgan acting like a ten-year-old or the Kevin Smith standard of dick and fart jokes.

Even though I rather enjoy Morgan in other projects, he is playing the same exact character as everything else I have seen him in. His shtick of a loud-mouthed, self-involved, aggravating manchild works in short bursts on 30 Rock and SNL sketches but only in moderation. Here we have the bulk of the movie where his character Paul is constantly bickering, whining, or just being inept to the point that I cannot fathom how anyone in production thought he could be sold as a cop, let alone one that is a tenured detective. And if there is anything that Bruce Willis can sell, it should be a gruff, city cop but he looks so damn bored here that I could not even buy that.

Aside from the A-plot about Willis’ character Jimmy’s stolen baseball card as it leads to a Mexican drug cartel, both detectives have problems at home as Paul is insanely jealous and convinced that his wife is cheating on him while Jimmy is desperately trying to pay for his daughter’s wedding with the sale of the aforementioned rare and valuable baseball card. Short of the dubious connection with the card and paying for the wedding, these side stories rarely factor into the larger narrative making things incredibly irritating as the already slow progress of investigating is slammed to a halt while Paul cries like a baby over his wife’s alleged infidelities.

Things would have been better served in the movie if the comedic aspect was downplayed while the action sequences were more pronounced. After all, think of other previous cop films like Die Hard or Lethal Weapon which worked as action films with a hint of facetiousness, not reversed. We know that Smith can do comedy damn well but he just was not on his game here so the only time I was not bored silly was during car chases, foot chases, or gunfights. In fact, all of those scenes had very little dialogue which means that we can place some blame on the pair of writers. But Smith should fire himself from the editing duties after this as even scenes or jokes that are threadbare to begin with are stretched to a painstaking length (which almost any scene with Sean William Scott fits here). The child in the backseat repeating others, Paul wearing a cell phone costume hours after it was necessary, a fake phone conversation to talk shit about two rival detectives, and more scenes all began badly but were drawn out to the point of potential self-inflicted harm.

I tried to go into this movie with an open mind as I have reveled in films designated as crap by others before. However, when I am praying for the movie to come to a quick resolution around the thirty-five minute mark, someone has clearly overestimated the entertainment value of bickering and toilet humor.

***THIS REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS***

Let’s do some math. View Askew + clown = funny,  right? Not really.

Vulgar is the story of Will (Brian O’Halloran), who is having a rough time of it in life. He lives in a crappy house, has a crappy car. His neighbors throw bottles at him. He is a clown for hire named Flappy, that makes birthday party appearances. While this is not paying very well (or sometimes at all) he loves it. His mother also lives in a rest home, which is yet another bill that he has to foot. Needing money badly, he comes up with an idea. In addition to being Flappy, the birthday party clown, he will become Vulgar, the bachelor party clown. An idea that would have immediately come to anyone’s mind, he will dress up as a clown, but wear lingerie. As a gag, he will come in to a bachelor party, tricking the groom-to-be in to thinking a gay clown stripper was hired instead of a whorish woman stripper. Obviously hilarity would ensue as all of the party guests would be in on this, and then a whorish stripper would really come in and the planned debauchery would go on. Unfortunately, his first gig does not go as planned and he is sexually assaulted by a man and his 2 adult sons, and the incident is video taped.

The story of this film is rather unique and interesting. However, it is almost unbearable in some scenes to watch, but not because of the depravity. Brian O’Halloran is just not a good actor. He really tries, and sometimes, he does deliver a good line, but he just really sucks. I am all for movies that don’t require decent acting, and this is certainly one of them, but he can’t pull it off. And I will tell you another thing, the scenes with him and the film’s writer/director Bryan Johnson are painful.  In one of them, they are spouting off out of place faux clever dialogue back and forth like they’re reading lines off the walls behind each other. Thankfully, that Mallrats-esque banter is only in one or two scenes, but the poor acting continues throughout. Jerry Lewkowitz, who plays Ed, the father and sexual deviant, gives a fairly decent performance. One problem with his scenes however, is that most of them are with his two sons, who are idiots, and the scenes take a somewhat comical tone. While this may take the edge off a scene where 3 guys are raping a clown, it also kind of makes it less realistic. I would blame that on the way the two sons were written, and not on Lewkowitz’s performance. The film was also directed fairly well, if you’ll excuse a scene were a dead man is obviously breathing. And, again, ignoring some bad dialogue, the script is not bad either. It isn’t a bad little film, but in the Viewaskewniverse, it is near the bottom.

I would not mind seeing a second attempt at this movie, just with some recasting. This film barely had a budget, was written in less than a month, and shot in less time than it was written. Now that there is a lot more money in these people’s bank accounts,  I would like to see what could be done with this story to make it better on film. Interesting bit of trivia: Vulgar is the clown logo of View Askew.