Mom and Dad (2018) Review

The concept for the 2018 horror-comedy Mom And Dad is pretty good on paper. In fact, there was plenty of material to work with said premise, in which one can take different routes in mocking both  modern and old american suburbia.

However, what Mom and Dad ends up to be is a disjointed mess, filled with cringe worthy moments, that both don't succeed in creating a passable parody of the genre that it's attempting to mock, and/or to create a tension filled horror comedy. Brian Taylor has created a film that is so unfocused, that it doesn't even know what time era it should mock. The opening credit sequence of the film was clearly an homage to 70's action credit sequence. However, the rest of the film did not match with the tone of the opening credits, and instead, Brian Taylor, chose an abhorrent route of parody of mocking modern day poorly-directed action films. The thing is, who is he to judge when the only things that he has created and produced in the last 10 years has been trashy disposable action films (COUGH *Ghost Rider* COUGH)

Not only does Taylor not know how to parody a genre in which he has previous experience working with, he just doesn't know how to execute said parody. Two great examples on how to do parody right are Hot Fuzz and Nirvanna The Band The Show. Both of these pieces of entertainment not only excel at there craftsman ship, but with each parody or mock that they make throughout the run time, each mock has both a narrative and artistic purpose to further develop the style and narrative of there pieces. With Mom and Dad, each mock done in the film is just plain lazy and does not serve as something of artistic value.

As for the film itself, it's absolute shit. As stated before, each element of what I despise in the genre that Brian Taylor attempted to mock is in full force here with not a single restraint. Nothing is visually pleasing. The script is absolutely filled with un-needed bullshit. Nearly everything in this film is incompetent. The sound design, the way the film was edited. It's just plain lazy and dull. The only positive that I could find from this mess, was Nicholas Cage's typical over the top performance. But even in that regard, he was only in the film for around 30 minutes max, which was a big disappointment.

Mom and Dad is a film that nearly fails in all regards. It fails at mocking it's own genre, and fails at making a competent motion picture. Dispose of this film immediately.

Rating: 2.5/10

The Final Year (2018) Review

Greg Barker's The Final Year is an detailed and prolific journey filled with simplistic human actions. The Final Year is one of those rare documentaries that show the humanitarian side of the Human connection through political actions. Barker, in my opinion, did a fantastic job with each detail and edit throughout the film. Not to mention that the film itself is very well edited. More specifically, the opening introduction, which in my opinion, had a great aesthetically pleasing color pallet that matched the tone and emotional truth of the film perfectly.

The Final Year isn't perfect however. It's filled with plenty of scenes that just felt staged and unnatural for the environment that it was setting. Because of this, the pace of the film dragged on, and several moments throughout this motion picture could have been cut out. As well, the soundtrack for this documentary is nothing special. While it did fit with the tone of the film, it didn't really improve or add on to the thematic strength of it's pre-existing material.

The Final Year is a strong documentary with some big flaws. While it isn't one of the greatest docs I have seen in the last year, it's certainly worth your time, especially if your into politics with a 3 dimensional mind set.

Rating:
7/10

Permission (2018) Review

2018, similar to a trend that occurred in 2017, is a year where the first few films which are released, are either absolute trash or guilty pleasure fun. We rarely get a film that's great (with an exception of Paddington 2.) This trend also effects independent films as well, including the recent Rebecca Hall starring flick "Permission." Permission is simply a hipster dumpster fire, in which it's flames we're to hard to engulfed, to the point that there was no point in saving the final product. It other terms, it's absolute shit. Barely anything is competent in this film, which includes two major things, the writing and the performances. The writing is a weak mimic of Aaron Sorkin dialogue, but if it we're filled to the brim with exposition and unnecessary trash. I kid you not, that there is a singular supporting character, in which her main goal and purpose is to spout exposition for the watcher to hear. The performances in "Permission" is easily worst of the year material, and it's only been just a month. Rebecca Hall has barely nothing to work with. Dan Stevens was laughably bad. Gina Gershon had one of the most cringe-worthy acting roles that I have seen in a while. Finally, François Arnaud, a Canadian Based Actor who has proven himself before as a great actor in films such as Xavier Dolan's "I Killed My Mother", is at his worst here. None of his arks work. In fact, none of the character arks work due to it's clunky script. The only decent role in this film, is a short and sweet character portrayed by Jason Sudeikis, and the only reason why his character work was due to his minimal presence. Not only on both the writing and acting side, "Permission" is filled to the brim with romantic indie film cliche's. Here's a list of some of the one's I found while watching this film:

-Slow Piano Music

-Altered Indie Rock/Pop music played in the background

-Shot Reverse Shot camera techniques

-Out of focus camerawork during tense "emotionally driven" scenes

-Cliche Stock Music

The list goes on! Now for some of the good. The shot composition was aesthetically pleasing. Jason Sudeikis was good as stated before. The film had me interested even though after the first 10 minutes I realized that this film was utter garbage. But other than that, "Permission" is simply boring romantic dribble. It's nonsensical and there is no point for it to exist. There was potential here. Maybe if this material was put into the hands of Woody Allen, then maybe, just maybe, we could have gotten some decent material. But at last, here we are now, viewing this piece of utter trash. 

Score: 4.5/10