Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

  This movie totally sucked.  It sucked so hard that I completely forgot that I even watched it. 

Also, Christy and I had seen a number of movies while she was up here.  We saw Green Lantern, Despicable Me, Original Sin, Legend of the Boneknapper (the bonus disc from How to Train Your Dragon) and Angel-A.  This one just kind of fell through the cracks, despite it being the first movie I watched with New Boyfriend.  Hi, again!  (Yes, I will probably do a review for Original Sin in the next day or so.  I may not post it til Sat, though.  I'm still catching up.)

I bought this one to complete my RE collection.  I liked the first one, did not care for the second, and thought the third redeemed the series.  Based on the final scene from this one, they are not going to let the franchise die any time soon, even though they are serioulsy scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

The movie picks up almost immediately after the third one ends and squanders whatever goodwill that one had garnered.  Alice is still a badass and she is trying to make her way back to Arcadia, where the helicopter of survivors from RE3 had headed.  She finds only Claire (Ali Larter), living like a wild thing with a metal spider on her chest and no memory.  They head down to LA in a prop plane and land on the top of a prison where a tastefully ethnically diverse cast of hardbodies has holed up. 

Zombies besiege the gates, of course, but this time the regular shambling menaces have been joined by rejects from other movies.  There's a giant burlap-sack-headed creature with a hamer/saw combo that wandered out of Silent Hill and some zombies that apparently were bitten by the vagina-face vampires from Blade II.  The survivors have to make it out of the prison and onto a ship, which is revealed to be the fabled Arcadia, in order to solve the metal spider mystery.  In the basement of the prison, they find Wentworth Miller (the Prison Break guy) locked in a Hannibal Lector-style cell.  My guess is for Crimes Against Acting.

Seriously.  In a movie filled with shitty CGI, a microwaved plot, and D-list supporting actors, this guy takes the Extremely Bad Grande Prix.

Avoid at all costs.

Fired Up! (2009)

  This is one of the rare guy-oriented comedies I really enjoyed.  Seriously, I can count the films of this type that I liked on one hand:  Fired Up, Super Troopers, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and Bad Santa.  That's it.

I originally saw this on Christy's recommendation (before The Experiment began) and loved it so much she actually bought it for me.  Since then, I have pushed it onto as many people as I possibly could.  Including my new boyfriend, Rob, whom I promised I wouldn't talk about on my site.  Hi!

Anyway, the movie is about two football jocks (Nick and Sean) who join cheerleading camp in order to hook up.  It's a thin premise that is only slightly elevated because they don't attempt to dress in drag in order to accomplish this.  These types of movies live and die by dialogue, and this one is outstanding in that respect.

The quips come in fast and strong from both main characters with Sean's acerbic kid sister Poppy picking up the third place slot.  The cheerleaders have a few choice lines apiece as caricatures and then the rest are doled out amongst the supporting cast.  The only one who is played completely straight is Team Captain Carly, the resident not-amused-by-anything girl.  Last night was my fourth time watching the movie and I found her to be rapidly losing lustre with each review.  The rest of it holds up very well, however, which is my defining criterion for ownership.

Green Lantern (2011)

  Christy (she of the Experiment) has been visiting me for the last week so I took her to see Green Lantern since she has a huge Ryan Reynolds fetish.

It's an okay movie.  The special effects are great, Mark Strong and Peter Sarsgaard are very good, and the story is decent.  What ruins it are the "love" scenes between Reynolds and Blake Lively.  I'm just going to come out and say it:  bitch can't act.  I don't find her attractive so maybe that's part of the problem but whenever she was trying to pull off any kind of emotion I just wanted to punch her in her oily face.

I only knew the bare minimum about Green Lantern because I was much more of a Marvel girl than DC (except for Batman) so I can't really speak to the criticism I heard that the story was too fan-boy specific.  It seemed fairly general to me.  Hal Jordan is a test pilot whose father died in an explosion so he runs from any real feelings.  Abin Sur is a magenta alien who imprisoned the evil Parallax in a lost quadrant.  Parallax feeds on fear and when he escapes, he vows to destroy the Green Lantern Corps.  Abin Sur fights him, gets wounded, crashes on Earth, and gives the ring to Jordan.

The ring takes Jordan to O'a, the magical world of the Green Lanterns powered by the force of Will and various aliens voiced by A-listers try and train him.  Mark Strong plays Sinestro who will probably end up being the villain in the sequel if this movie makes any money.  His condescension towards Jordan is so thick it could survive re-entry into the atmosphere.  Meanwhile, a piece of the alien Parallax was stuck inside the alien Abin Sur and Hector Hammond gets infected with it while doing the autopsy.  He becomes all gross and potato-headed with jaundice-yellow eyes.  It's quite impressive.

Anyway, Jordan has to learn how to confront his fears so he can defeat the bad guys and win the girl.

In summary:  Man gets ring.  Man sucks at first.  Man mans up.  The end.

But the special effects are really pretty.

You Kill Me (2007)

  I promise I'm not intentionally watching similar movies back to back.  I got The Matador as a disc and had a couple of days where I wouldn't get the next one so I jumped over to my Streaming Queue.  This one was on top, despite being dowin around #22 in the DVD queue.  It's just coincidence that they happen to follow one another.

Although, not that big of a coincidence considering that half my movies contain assassins of some sort. 

Anyway, this one is also about an alcoholic hitman but it's way funnier.  Frank (Ben Kingsley) works as a hitman for the Polish mob in Buffalo.  His drinking causes him to pass out when he's supposed to be killing a rival mob boss (Dennis Farina) so his bosses send him to San Francisco to dry out.  The mob contact there (Bill Pullman) gets him a temporary job as a mortuary assistant and enrolls him in AA.  Luke Wilson is his gay sponser and Tea Leoni is the woman he meets after her stepfather dies.

Ben Kingsley is a much better actor than Pierce Brosnan and this movie is much more well written than Matador.  That one I would say is fairly middling but I liked this one a lot.  Probably still not going to buy it, unless I see it somewhere for $4.  Then I might.

The Matador (2005)

  This was a cute little hitman movie.  I don't know why Hollywood always assumes that professional killers are only one job away from a complete emotional breakdown, but it seems like the majority of movies I've seen featuring them revolve around this precept.  In Bruges, Grosse Pointe Blank, The Whole Nine Yards...  What's up with that?  Can't a man just be a psychopath who handles the disposal of human life in a stoic and objective manner?

Anyway, movie.  Pierce Brosnan is a hitman/drunken lecher who is beginning to lose his killing edge.  Could be the rampant alcoholism taking its toll, but they play it as a crisis of faith, where he starts to see a younger version of himself as each target.  On a business trip to Mexico, he meets Greg Kinnear, a man struggling to win a desperately-needed contract. 

Despite himself, Kinnear is drawn to the enigmatic Brosnan and allows himself to be taken to a bullfight, where the hitman demonstrates some of his skill.  They part ways acrimoniously when Brosnan asks Kinnear to help him out on a job and Kinnear refuses.

Six months pass and Brosnan's anxiety attacks have cost him two assignments.  Unhappy, his higher-ups order his execution.  He turns to his only friend in the world for help with One Last Job before retirement.

Brosnan is unrepentantly offensive in this movie, making off-color jokes and talking about various whorehouses around the world.  It was nice to see him play something where he wasn't a stuck-up bastard.  I've never particularly cared for him as an actor and Kinnear has always been somewhat of a non-entity to me.  Hope Davis was surprisingly funny as Kinnear's wife.  Between this and The Impostors  I'm starting to actually like her.

Fame (2009)

  Man this remake sucked.  I wasn't even a fan of the original but at least it had something to say.  It dealt with uncomfortable subjects and the seamier side of the arts industry.  A dancer had to choose between giving up her career or an abortion.  A singer is pressured to strip for a producer.  It was difficult to watch but it was very illustrative of the lengths people will go.

This one is very pretty, very flashy, and completely flat.  Dance 10, Looks 3 for sure.

All of the kids are stock characters.  There's the kid whose parents want her to pursue classical piano while she wants to branch out into hip-hop.  There's the rich girl dating some kid from across the tracks to piss off her parents.  The ghetto kid attending this performing arts high school who is hiding it from his mother so he can pursue his dream.  The kid from the middle of nowhere who wants to make it in the Big City.

It might have been better, had there been any semblance of a plot stringing this together.  Instead, all the money was blown on a "Halloween CarnEVIL" dance showpiece that, while impressive, furthers the story not one whit. 

There are no tough decisions for these kids.  The middle of nowhere kid gets told that he's just not good enough to ever make it as a dancer and that his future will involve returning to Iowa so he tries to walk off a subway platform...and gets stopped by his friends.  Not that I would advocated teenage suicide (Ed. note:  I do not in any way advocate teenage suicide), but come on!  A little pathos would have been nice.  Even the "casting couch" experience is glossed over.  Jenny the way-too-serious-kid falls for some sleazy douchebag's line about meeting a casting director but leaves before he does anything but attempt to make out with her.  And the worst fallout from that is that her way-more-talented boyfriend dumps her...and then takes her back in time for senior year.

Oh, that reminds me.  WTF is up with the timeline in this movie?  The auditions to get in the school last precisely as long as the opening credits, freshman year about 2 minutes past that.  I realize that it's probably hard to squish four years into 1 hr and 41 mins of running time but there's no sense of growth or progression for the characters. 

If you want a coming of age story about young performers, watch Center Stage or A Chorus Line.  Skip this one at all costs.

Ballerina (2006)

  So, the Kirov is the Soviet name for the St. Petersburg troupe of ballet dancers who perform in the Mariinsky Theater.  It is regarded as one of the top ballet troupes in the entire world.  As you can imagine, getting into the Mariinsky is a dream for most young girls.  This documentary follows five young ballerinas who have achieved that dream.  

The youngest, Alina, has just graduated from Vaganova Ballet Academy.  The entrance exam starts at 10-years-old and school lasts for the next 8.  Seniors are required to dance at the year-end graduation gala, with scouts from all the major ballet companies.  Alina was granted the lead in that production, and won a spot at the Kirov...where she was immediately relegated to the corps de ballet, the lowest echelon of ballerina.

Immediately above that is coryphee, then soloist, then prima ballerina.  Evgueya is a 19-year-old coryphee who is working on becoming a soloist.  Diana is a prima ballerina who takes international roles in Paris, Los Angeles, and New York.  Uliana was a promising soloist until an ankle injury and subsequent surgery forced her to put dance aside for a couple of years so she's trying to work her way back up to solo roles.  Svetlana is a prima ballerina who has just landed the lead in Swan Lake for the Kirov.  

All five of these girls are gifted, extremely dedicated dancers in a profession that demands constant perfection.  Surprisingly, they seem quite normal despite this.  

Sideways (2009)

  I had wanted to see this movie when it came out simply because it seemed like everyone and their dog was talking about it.  Then I promptly forgot about it until I got Netflix again.  I threw it in the queue, despite Netflix's warning that I would severely dislike it.

And they were mostly right.  Only about 15 minutes of this movie is watchable.  The rest is complete crap.  It's boring, repetitive, and it's impossible to give a damn about any of the characters.  Miles (Paul Giamatti) is a classic sadsack still reeling from his divorce with a novel that is never going to get published.  Jake (Thomas Haden Church) is a washed-up actor trying desperately to hook up with other girls before he gets married.  Virginia Madsen is the perfect-in-every-way girl Miles is afraid of getting too close to, and Sandra Oh is the fun sexpot who gets disillusioned by Jake.  There was really no need to even give their characters names.

The only truly funny part of the film begins when Sandra beats the everloving shit out of Jake with a motorcycle helmet and continues until a naked MC Gainey chases their car.  Amusing, yes, but not worth sitting through two hours of mid-life crisis and wine pretension.

SARS Wars: Bangkok Zombie Crisis (2004)

  Judge me all you want.  I watched Bangkok Zombie Crisis and I loved the hell out of it.

BZC was a fun, self-aware, Thai B-movie.  The credits are animated, as well as all expository bits in the middle. 

The girl in the plaid skirt is Liu, a mobster's daughter who gets kidnapped.  Her father hires the old dude with the lightsaber (not actually in the movie, probably for copyright reasons) who sends in his star pupil to go rescue her.  The problem is that SARS Virus #4 has mutated in Africa, infecting a cockroach which bites a random white businessman in Bangkok and turns him into the piranha-faced dude above the title.  He is Patient Zero for the zombie outbreak in the condos where Liu is being held for ransom.  Khun, the hero, must now rescue the girl from gangsters as well as the undead before the government blows up the building.  Also, there is a giant snake that sounds like a kitty.

I have mentioned before how location is a big factor in determining zombie strains.  Japanese zombies can shoot at you, English zombies are fast, and American zombies like the mall.  Thai zombies seem to be more like ghouls, with some higher functioning ability like being able to manipulate locks and work in teams.  They also develop shark teeth and heavier brows which may indicate stronger jaw musculature, allowing them to bite right through a human skull.  So if there ever is a zombie apocalypse, avoid Southeast Asia.

I am rapidly becoming a legitimate fan of Thai cinema and I hope to keep finding little gems like this.

The Ladykillers (1955)

  This is a classic British comedy from Ealing Studios starring Alec (Obi-wan) Guiness as the head of a group of thieves who find their plans foiled by a tiny adorable old lady.  Think Granny from The Looney Tunes level of cuteness.

My copy of Kind Hearts and Coronets had a couple of featurettes about the history of Ealing Studios and an interview of Sir Alec that highlighted some of his roles while he was with them.

For those of us (Americans) who only knew him as Luke's mentor, it's a fascinating glimpse into his career.  He was one of those actors who are able to change pretty much everything about their physical appearance for a role.  For this movie, in fact, he wore a number of prosthetics, lending him an almost Karloff-ian look as Professor Marcus.  Seriously, the man was gifted. 

Peter Sellers also had one of his earliest roles in this movie as a baby-faced thief who gets bitten by a parrot.  Again, if you're only used to seeing him as Inspector Clouseau, it's almost a shock to recognize him without the moustache. 

As a movie, it's very dry, humor-wise.  I believe the proper British term is "droll".  If you enjoy that sort of thing, this is certainly worth watching.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)

  Guys, I tried to find a poster that didn't look like the worst thing ever.  This was as close as I could get.  I'm sorry.

Dakota Fanning only has about five minutes' worth of screen time anyway since this movie is prejudiced against good actors.

Here's the thing:  I am not a Twilight fan.  I saw the first movie (at Christy's behest) and wanted to claw my eyes out and/or destroy every copy.  I have avoided it and its adherents like they're leprosy carriers.  And then my cousin picked it as her Birthday Bonus.

So I have now sat through 2 of the (eventual) 5 movies.  This one was directed by the guy who did American Pie, which does not recommend it.  Surprisingly, there are no slapstick gags, or plot points involving baked goods.  That may have actually improved it.

Look, I give my cousin a lot of shit for liking this series because I think it's juvenile, sappy, and an unforgivable affront to the vampire legend.  The sick part is my cousin generally agrees with me.  I was texting her throughout the process with little comments like "Her (Kristen Stewart) nightmares sound like a pig being killed."  AND SHE AGREED!  Despite its many flaws, she apparently likes it this way.  I don't know.

Its faults are legion but I probably could have enjoyed myself if they had recast the two leads.  Kristen Stewart has all the acting ability of wet carpet and I simply do not understand how anyone finds Robert Pattinson attractive.  Exacerbating his problem are the "gold" or red contact lenses all the vampires wear.  It doesn't make them mysterious or sexy.  It just makes them look like they all have pink eye.  Blue or even violet would have made a better, more arresting, choice on him. 

The werewolf kid is the only one who might have a future career when all this Twi-tard nonsense is over.  He managed to overcome a bad weave and terrible dialogue to put forth a little bit of character. 

That brings me to the CGI werewolves.  Oh dear God in heaven.  I'm not asking for An American Werewolf in London, but could you at least try and not make them look like marshmallows in fur coats?

The dialogue is so godawful in this movie that Christy had to yell at me for texting her codes to a cell phone game I was playing while I was supposed to be watching it.  I had already given myself a manicure AND pedicure, what else was I supposed to do? 

To be fair, there was a moment in the film that could have been extremely sexy.  The Anti-Meryl-Streep has to go to Italy to prevent Sparkles McFangface from exposing himself (as a vampire!  Naughty gutter-minds!) to a square full of people so that other (better) vampires will kill him.  She slo-mo runs through a fountain and hurls herself bodily at him before he can step into the sunlight.  Could have been sexy.

If this...



had been this and...


Now, if you'll all excuse me, I have to go mentally rewrite the movie to star those two instead.

Sky High (2005)

  As a celebration of the anniversary of her birth (and the First Anniversary of the Christy Experiment) she gets two picks for the month of June. 

This was her first and it segued nicely into a very superhero-filled weekend. 

It's a cute little paint-by-numbers Disney film about a kid named Will Stronghold whose parents are both superheroes and his trials in navigating high school as a freshman.  A freshman at a school for superpowered kids when he hasn't shown even a glimmer of having powers of his own.

His dad (Kurt Russell) has super strength and his mom (Kelly Preston) can fly.  His best friend, Layla, (Danielle Panabaker) can summon plants and even his nerdy friend Zach (no one you've heard about or care about) can glow but Will can't do jack. 

Thanks to this delayed puberty, Will ends up relegated to "Hero Support" with the other rejects by the always awesome Bruce Campbell (as Sonic Boom, the gym teacher).  Sidekick class is hosted by Dave Foley and the Principal is Lynda Carter, who is still looking damn good.  Unfortunately, superhero high school is still high school so there are bullies (a super-fast guy and a stretchy guy), mean girls (a replicating cheerleader) and the obligatory hottie that's out of his league (Scott Pilgrim's Mary Elizabeth Winstead).  As an added complication, Will has to deal with the son of a supervillain his dad locked up for four life sentences, the cringingly named Warren Peace. 

Of course drama abounds with a shadowy figure threatening the future of all mankind and so forth and so on.  Also, homecoming. 

The special effects are integrated pretty well with the exception of the hand puppet they use to represent a plot-point-crucial guinea pig.  The gopher from Caddyshack looked more lifelike.  Other than that, this was a fun little superhero movie with some good turns by movie veterans like Russell, Foley, Campbell, and even Chloris Leachman as the X-ray-visioned school nurse.  Suitable for family viewing if X-Men is a little too violent for your tastes.

X-Men: First Class (2011)

  This was better than it had any right to be.  Bless you, Matthew Vaughn, for salvaging the X-Men movies and giving me a decent trilogy out of the four.

Is it strictly canon?  No.  There are some continuity differences between the movies but I think they're actually handled better in this film than they could have been.  And there are a couple of great moments that link to the later timelines.  There is one absolutely stellar cameo (that also provides the movie's only F-bomb) and another that's just really well-played.  I'm trying really hard not to spoil them for you.

Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is a young, swinging professor at Oxford University when Moira McTaggert (Rose Byrne) (who is supposed to be a Scottish scientist and is instead an American CIA agent) comes to him about some individuals running the shadowy Hellfire Club that may have some genetic mutations.  The club is run by the ruthless Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) who has very definite ideas about the future of humankind.  Meanwhile, Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender) is a man on a mission to track down the ruthless Nazi doctor Klaus Schmidt, who experimented on him while he was a prisoner in the concentration camps.  Erik and Charles cross paths when they realize they are after the same dude.  At that point, as the kids like to say, shit gets real.

There are some great performances here from Jennifer Lawrence (Winter's Bone) and Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds) and James McAvoy is so good as Xavier that I almost forgive him for Atonement.  Almost.  But hands down BEST performance in the movie goes to Kevin Bacon.  Holy crap, I totally forgot that man could act.  Seriously, there's a reason he has a game named after him.  So.  Good.

Titan A.E. (2000)

  This didn't suck as much as I thought it would.  I had never heard good things about it and, in fact, I had forgotten about its existence entirely until I read an article that I can't seem to find right now calling it an underrated gem.  It made me curious and Netflix had it out on Streaming so it seemed ridiculously easy to just push play and decide for myself.

I wouldn't buy it but it definitely doesn't deserve to be relegated to the ash-heap of history.  It was done by Bluth Animation, who did some of my favorite childhood films, and the artwork is beautiful.  Which, sadly, you can't tell from that poster.  Trust me, the real movie is better.

So Earth gets destroyed by electric aliens and the human race has to disperse amongst the galaxies.  Cale (Matt Damon) is the angsty son of a brilliant inventor (Ron Perlman) who created a ship called Titan and hid it somewhere away from the evil aliens.  Fifteen years after Earth's destruction, one of his father's friends, Captain Korso (Bill Pullman), finds Cale and tells him that his father's ring is actually a map to the long-lost Titan but they have to get there before the evil aliens.

From there it's a pretty standard quest movie.  Again, this is probably not going to be played on constant Repeat in anyone's house but if you have kids between about 6 and 11 who still like animated films but feel too grown-up for Wall-E (side note:  you can never be too grown up for Wall-E) this might be obscure and interesting enough.

The Tale of Despereaux (2008)

Before I begin with this movie, I want to talk about you guys for a minute.  That's you, readers, you swirls of amorphous possibility within the teeming cosmos of the interwebz.  You guys are hilarious.  Blogger lets me track my stats (which I look at obsessively) by country, by operating system, and by traffic sources.  That gets broken down even further until I can see what random crap you are putting into Google that somehow gets you to my page.  Some of my favorites:

Johnny Hansen -- I don't know who this is and I don't remember ever writing about him but apparently people are looking for him and getting to me.  I cannot help you.

Penny Tweedy lost the coin toss to...?  --  This I actually covered, so yay, Internet!  Bless you, you little Secretariat fan, whoever you are.

Lucyano salazar secks -- I don't even know where to begin with this.  From the spelling, I'd guess that either someone was trying to get around a censor or they are 12 and just can't spell.  Either way, haha!

And the number one search... 
Every possible combination of the words "Johnny Depp" and "Mad Hatter".  You guys.  You do me proud.  /wipes away tear

Enough of this crap.  Let's destroy a children's movie!

  This movie had a lot going for it.  There's a huge voice cast including Matthew Broderick, Dustin Hoffman, Sigourney Weaver, Tracey Ullman, Stanley Tucci, Kevin Kline and a couple of the Harry Potter people, Emma Watson (Hermione) and Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid).  The animation is beautiful, especially the background work and the way they handled the light of the movie.

The only sticking point is the story. 

A ship rat comes to the country of Dor in order to taste their famous soup.  He sneaks into the royal hall, falls off a chandelier into the Queen's bowl and scares her into a heart attack.  The heartbroken King immediately bans both soup and rats from the city, somehow plunging it into an overcast drought, thus setting up the movie's theme about unintended consequences. 

A fearless mouse is born and reads a fairytale about knights rescuing princesses.  He meets the actual Princess who tells him that she wants the soup to come back, the rain to come back, and even the rats to come back.  With his imagination fired by the story he read, he vows to do just that.  He goes back home and tells the other mice who immediately banish him into the sewer to live with the rats.  There he meets the rat who started this whole chain of events.  The rat tries to apologize to the Princess for killing her mom and everything but she freaks out so he instead convinces a simple-minded serving girl to kidnap her and give her to the Head Rat where she will be eaten.

At this point, you could be forgiven for thinking that the rat is supposed to be the main character here instead of the Dumbo-eared mouse.

This is a children's movie so you can pretty much guess how everything ends up, although they did leave an out for a sequel.  It's a cute film overall if you run across it but I wouldn't put a lot of effort into searching it out.

La Vie en Rose (2007)

  Marion Cotillard totally deserved the Oscar she got for this movie.  That being said, I didn't like it very much.

It's a biopic about the French singer, Edith Piaf, who went from the gutters to being the toast of society.  Unfortunately, she was also an alcoholic, a morphine addict, and a total bitch.

The movie is non-linear, swinging from her final days to her childhood and early fame, which would be fine if the cuts made any sort of sense story-wise.  I think they were trying to tie the jumps to the different people that stood by her but it was really hard to follow who everyone was.  Maybe this is just me, but I wondered exactly how this woman was able to keep so many friends.  She was constantly throwing fits, making demands, and generally being incredibly high-maintenance.  I'm not sure why the movie focused on those aspects instead of showing her being more charming.  Why else would anyone put up with her?

Also, the director waits until about the two hour mark to introduce a love interest, and ten minutes before the credits roll they break out the fact that she had a daughter who died of meningitis while she was still singing in cabaret acts.  Yet they spend 45 solid minutes on her life growing up in a brothel owned by her paternal grandmother.

The whole movie experience is like sitting down with an elderly relative and having them recount their life for you.  You're only going to get the parts that are interesting to them and unlike a face-to-face, there's no way to go back and ask or try and steer the conversation.

The costumes and makeup are great but overall this movie was crap.