Happy 4th day of the month of July!!!!

So, in the past few days I saw my favorite movie of the year (so far) and my least favorite movie of the year (so far)! Thank you for your diversity, Independence Day Weekend!

I can already tell I’ve taken Me and Earl and the Dying Girl personally. Yesterday I tweeted, “Anyone who says it was engineered to be a hit is a creep,” and truly, this is so. It is a sincere and emotional experience, and very funny to boot. It is inspired by great art films of the past (and is full of wonderful inside references that made my art-film-loving heart hop. There’s a scene where a character watches Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffman with Martin Scorsese’s commentary, and it isn’t ironic or anything. He’s just watching it!), and yet is totally accessible to anyone. Movies like this, which really celebrate and mourn life, which have genuinely inspiring spirit, cannot be manufactured like the blockbuster movie of the week. A+

The Overnight is a little movie that you probably haven’t heard of (and you didn’t hear it from me, either) which will slip away into forgotten movie limbo just as silently as it slipped into movie theaters. And may I just mention how awkward it is? Like, with a capital awk. It’s an extremely sparse movie, clocking in at right around 75 minutes, and that’s the perfect length for it. It’s just enough to time to do what it needs to do, but not enough time to make us actually dislike it for doing it. I liked that it made me chuckle with discomfort, since that was the whole point, but it is definitely not for everyone. B

Now, if you’re looking for a movie that actually has been pressed and folded into existence for the sake of being a moneymaker, just take a look at the rotting corpse of Terminator Genisys. Genisys is not a real word. Is this a movie that provides fairly safe, relatively satisfactory entertainment for a couple hours? Sure, I will not argue with that. It offers exactly what you expect and does so without being dull. But accepting that is called settling, kids, and you can do better than to sell your time, not to mention your brain, for such a cheap price. The only helpful thing it did was make me wanna watch the first two again, since they were actually good and everything. C

If I snatched a ten dollar bill out of your hand, slapped you in the face for an hour while telling knock-knock jokes, and then sat you down to tell you about Jesus, would you really want to listen to what I have to say? And yet that’s what Faith of Our Fathers, the latest atrocity from Pure Flix, has done. This is the sort of imbecilic crap that Christians love because it’s clean and has a Biblical message, but which is so aggressively horrible that non-believers are driven away from not just the movie, but from church too. These movies perpetuate for the rest of the world the stereotype that Christians are loud, intrusive morons who should mind their own business, and it’s Christians who keep ensuring that the darn things get made! If you want clean movies, you have options that are so much better it makes my brain puke. Get out of town, Pure Flix, a pox on thee! F

I did not see Magic Mike XXL, and I know it’ll be tough trying to get through the coming week wondering what I would have though of it, but I know you can suffer through. I believe in you.