The SAG Awards kept me busy most of Sunday night, but I still managed to get some new movies in this weekend.
Dog – Look, Channing Tatum, while usually entertaining, is also kind of hit or miss for me. Normally, a drama like Dog is something I would skip for fear of tears, but when I saw the Rotten Tomatoes score on this film and I learned it was Tatum’s directorial debut, well, I knew I had to give it a go. It also helped that I could see it at my local theater for cheap. With all that being said, Dog was a pretty consistent and nice film. There were plenty of moments of levity and humor to balance out the heavier topics covered in this film. Tatum plays Jackson Briggs, a US Army Ranger who is trying his hardest to get back in on the action after suffering traumatic brain injuries from his time in combat. Before one of his old commanders puts in a good word, he’s tasked with transporting his recently deceased comrade’s war dog down to his funeral. The dog has been equally as damaged by war so the trip is a complicated one. Not too many tears by the end of it, but it’s not for the faint of heart…or animal lovers.
No Exit – I saw this advertised only really recently for Hulu and in watching only part of a trailer I thought the plot seemed an awful lot like a book I read a couple of years ago. Turns out the movie was based on that book of the same name! Boo to myself for not remembering the name of the book (which is the same as the movie). Anyways, in watching the film, I felt like a lot of the details of the book were followed pretty closely. Darby is trying to get to the hospital to see her mother but a bad snow storm traps her, and some other people, at a travel center. Not too long later, Darby discovers a girl tied up in a van outside and has to try and determine who the kidnapper is and who she can trust. Naturally, a lot of things backfire on Darby, but the girl is a lot stronger than I’d ever be if I got a nail gun to the wrist. Lots of action and a pretty nice cast for this one. Go check it out!
Studio 666 – Regardless of the quality of this movie I was going to see it because it was a Foo Fighters film. That means I went in with really low expectations, and yes, it was kind of so bad that it was great. A horror comedy, this film leans in hard on the gore and the laughs and it pays off. The band need to deliver their tenth record, so they get set up at some old, creepy house with a bloody past that they are unaware of. After some standard possession, Dave gets inspired to make the longest song ever known to man. Then, oh yeah, he starts killing off his bandmates. The other celebrity cameos here are so random but very comical and the band members themselves are not nearly as stiff as I was anticipating. Major props to Rami Jaffee and Pat Smear for making me laugh in almost every scene they were in. I would say the first twenty minutes I was nervous the whole thing was going to be painful, then laughed for the next hour. The final bit puttered out a little, but overall I loved it. This will definitely make it into my movie collection.