Tuesday, April 06, 2021

Lazy weekend

My Easter weekends are usually pretty lazy:  too many people on the road and the weather is often hit or miss for holiday fun.  (It was a pretty big miss this year.)   I was especially lazy this year, but not in a particularly edifying way.   

Netflix viewing:   I actually do recommend the unusually aggressive alligators standing in for Alien movie Crawl, if you are up for well made trashy scares.   (Remember, I did enjoy The Meg last year for similar reasons.  Sometimes you just want to see monster animals eating people.)   I continually felt for the actors while watching it - they are in water for perhaps 75% of the movie's run time, and I can just imagine how tedious an acting day spending hours wet could be.  But the biggest surprise:  watch the end credits, and it turns out that it is Serbia standing in for Florida!   Pretty convincingly too.  Honestly, you can film anything anywhere these days.

The second movie more-or-less pleasant surprise:  Bad Trip.    Bad taste prank movies are not usually my thing, and I am not very familiar at all with Eric Andre.   But I agree a lot with The Vulture review which is headed:  

Netflix’s Bad Trip Might Help You Feel Better About Our Broken Nation

Yes.  Provided you can put up with things like pranking zoo visitors that a gorilla is raping a man - twice - (no doubt the worst taste scene in the movie, although to the Netflix viewer it looks sufficiently fake that it takes away some of the offensiveness),  the surprising thing about the movie is that it shows so many people (black Americans in particular) willing to help strangers.   

I was anxious a lot of time, though, as to how they could involve strangers without the concern that one of them was going to pull out a handgun to scare away the actors.

As the review says at the end:

I don’t want to oversell Bad Trip — if it doesn’t make you laugh, chances are it will annoy the shit out of you — but its generosity toward our fellow humans can, at times, be genuinely moving.


 

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