Hey! I actually made a bit of a dent this weekend! For maybe the first time this summer. Crazy.
I Don’t Understand You – I really wanted to like this movie! I find Andrew Rannells and Nick Kroll extremely watchable, and while I don’t totally buy them as a couple, they sure do a decent job of trying to sell it. They play Dom and Cole, a couple on the brink of learning if they will finally become dads for the first time. Though that suspense is quickly dispelled – they do! – the rest of the film’s plot comes when they decide to celebrate their last kid-free anniversary in Italy. A friend of Dom’s father sends them into the remote countryside to get a taste of real, authentic Italian cooking, but it instead leads to a lot of miscommunication. Not just between the men and their hosts, but between themselves. The gore was unexpectedly funny, but overall, this thing just took too long to get anywhere for me.
Relay – The excitement I had at the prospect of being able to watch this again was too real! It’s been almost one year since my friend and I ended our TIFF journey with this certified banger. It’s a crime that it’s not in more theaters, at least around where I live, and I fear that it will not get the love that it is due. What was sweet this time around was seeing my sister react to the twist at the end. She was just as shocked as we were. About half way through I was thinking to myself how freaking cool this movie is. Everything about the plot is expertly crafted and carried out. Riz Ahmen shines, and I once again was so happy to see him get to use his ALS skills. There’s not much more I’m willing to give away here, but just know it will be one of the best things you watch this year. I promise.
Honey Don’t! – Woof. I wanted to like this, but just like Drive-Away Dolls, something just didn’t work here. Speaking of that prior film, apparently Honey Don’t is the second in “lesbian B-movie trilogy.” Who knew? Margaret Qualley is the one carry-over actress here, though this time she plays private investigator, Honey O’Donahue. A fishy car crash has her getting entangled with a local cop, albeit romantically, one of her sister’s many children, and a sleezy local church. The church is sleezy in more than one way, but the bow on that particular story was pretty anti-climatic. Aubrey Plaza is the real interesting character here, playing Honey’s cop lover. There is a lot of sex in this movie. Some of it felt a little gratuitous, while the others were deliberately funny. I’ll certainly finish out the trilogy, but I have no plans to repeat any of these entries.
Nobody 2 – I’ll be totally honest. I do not remember much of anything from the original film. The fact that a sequel was in the works was a complete surprise to me about two months ago. This time around, Becca is hip to Hutch’s assassin lifestyle, though that doesn’t mean it’s working well for them. In an effort to show his wife that he misses her and their family, he proposes taking the family on vacation to the one place he vacationed at when he was a kid. It’s a place seemingly in the middle of nowhere, though it actually seemed to have a decent amount of stuff going for it. Aside from the surface level stuff, it’s also the hub for a lot of criminal activity led by the unhinged Lendina. Hutch kind of gets involved on accident, but he ultimately stays involved to make things right. An assassin with a moral compass and some friends is always a good time. Do I like this better than the original? No. But it was still a fun time.