The Qwipster Film Review Podcast

Morris from America is a coming-of-age story about a pudgy, thirteen-year-old African-American kid named named Morris Gentry, who lives with his widower soccer-coach father Curtis in a place where there are few who look like them, Heidelberg, Germany. Under a suggestion by his German instructor, Inka, Morris makes some attempt to make friends while in his new environment, meeting an impulsive fifteen-year-old local named Katrin, with whom he's instantly attracted, but he's not quite sure if she feels the same way. The mischievously flirty Katrin tries to get him out of his shell by unplugging the headphones he perpetually wears as he walks though life and going to various parties with the local kids around his age, much to his father's chagrin, where Morris has to contend with the fish-out-of-water experience first-hand by striving to break out of his comfort zone. Perhaps only the crush on Katrin is able to compel him to try, though following the heart can also lead to heartache in this tender time of confusion for many young teens.

the story of Judah Ben-Hur, a wealthy Jewish prince living in Rome-occupied Jerusalem, as well as his strong competitive bond with his adopted Roman brother, Messala Severus, who will come to be his main adversary in that climactic race. However, that bond is put to the test when Messala becomes a centurion in the Roman military, eventually returning to Jerusalem as a captain entrusted to command the troops as Roman prefect to Judaea, Pontius Pilate, enters the city, which has been a trouble spot for Rome due to a faction of murderous zealots. When Judah refuses to name names to Messala prior to another eruption in Pilate's presence, he's convicted of sedition for the incident, effectively beginning his enslavement in the galley of a Roman warship, where he will presumably be shackled until he expires. The rest of the film concerns how Judah goes from that predicament to ultimately compete against his brother for guts and glory in the chariot race. Oh, and Jesus is in there somewhere too.

Kubo is set in a fantasy/folk version of medieval Japan, where we find young Kubo spending his days using his elaborate magical origami constructions to spin beautiful stories of the heroism of his legendary father, the samurai Hanzo, to the people of his village, brought to life from the magic of his shamisen, a three-stringed Japanese lute. His evenings are spent with his melancholy mother hiding in seclusion in a cliff-side cave, who informs him of his own troubled youth after having to escape his murderous grandfather, The Moon King, who took his left eye and wants his other, with help from his supernatural minion daughters, Kubo's Noh-masked witchy aunts. Eventually, their past comes home to find them, causing Kubo to go on a harrowing but heroic adventure, along with his protectors, the motherly mentor, Monkey, and an insectoid amnesiac fighter named Beetle, to fulfill his quest of finding three samurai items imbued by magical properties -- an unbreakable sword, an impenetrable suit of armor, and an invulnerable helmet -- that belonged to his long-lost father.

The gentle, dreamlike film starts with some of the heavier material when we find the titular Pete as a very young boy left orphaned after a car crash, leaving him alone in the dense woods of the Pacific Northwest with seemingly no one to protect him -- that is until a kind-hearted giant green dragon, also gone astray from his own family, comes along to take the child under his wing, almost literally, and raise him for the next six years in seclusion. That's when Pete, now ten years old, is discovered by a friendly forest ranger named Grace, who takes the lad home with her daughter Natalie and fiancée Jack until they can find out where Pete's home actually is. However, complications arise then Jack's brother, Gavin, run into Elliot, which is what Pete has called the dragon, while they're out in the woods working for their logging company, seeing a means to become wealthy if they can capture the magical creature for all the world to see.

Weiner is a behind-the-scenes documentary covering the publicly disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner and his bid for mayor of New York City in 2013. Carrying a great deal of baggage going in, Weiner manages to gain some traction by claiming that his indiscretions, which had to do with multiple instances of sexting, exchange of nude photographs, and phone sex with several women admirers he had been in contact with but reportedly had never met, were a thing of the past. As he becomes the frontrunner in the race, new information regarding the allegations arise, resulting in additional scandal and subsequent damage control on the part of the campaign to address the salacious details, as well as the trust issues that emerge due to Weiner's inability to handle the deluge of personal questions that he hopes will blow over, but only causes the campaign to control the damage only causes his bid to spin even further put of control.

Set in New York during the mid 1940s, Stephen Frears' film about a real-life, upper-class heiress with a zest for music and charitable works gives Meryl Streep another juicy role that taps into even more of her seemingly boundless talent as an actress, and as a singer (many of her more recent roles have utilized her vocal talent), even as a very good singer who has to sing quite badly. A former child prodigy at the piano who can no longer play due to an injured hand, Foster finds a way to keep herself in the limelight when she becomes a singer of opera, which she has done for friends or in small venues, while her doting husband-at-heart, St. Clair Bayfield, massages the crowd to her favor, whether through sympathy for their social enablers, to whom Florence Foster Jenkins has been a great benefactor of their art, or with a bit of bribery for members of the press, who go on to give warm reviews to her performances.

The food items at the supermarket named Shopwell's are excited about the prospects of the annual '4th of July' sale, where many of them get chosen by the 'gods' to go to the promised land of the "Great Beyond." The most excited are the members of a package of ten phallic sausages, especially Frank, who becomes enamored of what he hopes will be his future companion, Brenda, who is one of a collection of eight vulvic hot dog buns. As luck would have it, the god selects both of their respective packages, but a returned jar of honey mustard warns them of the horrors that await them all once they leave the store (i.e., getting sliced, diced, cooked and consumed), leading to a series of events that has Frank, Brenda, and company out of the packages and on to a crazy odyssey as they mill about within the store.

Birbiglia plays Miles, the eldest member of the Commune at 36, who teaches improv to younger up-and-comers in his spare time. He feed the hopes and dreams they all have, though all the while, he has grown more cynical and bitter with each passing year of finding himself exactly in the same place as he was the year before, while many of those who've learned from him are doing what he can only dream to do. Even though it seems a longshot at this point in his career, he sees little hope but to press on, even if the Brooklyn theater that hosts their shows is on the verge of closing down, and effectively putting the Commune on hiatus. However, another member of the tight-knit troupe, Jack, has a career trajectory that looks like it has more promise, even landing an audition with "Weekend Live" that could mean a regular gig, and perhaps parlay this into a long-running career in comedy on TV and in films, if chosen. His girlfriend Samantha, who is also in the Commune and who also lands an audition, but feels less certain she can make that next step in her profession, finding it a scary proposition to effectively end her dreams by actually achieving them -- that it is always beyond her reach is what keeps her running after them.

The Dirty Dozen-inspired plotline involves black ops ringleader, federal agent Amanda Waller, bringing together Task Force X, a group of strangers, all violently criminal super-powered sociopaths locked away in elaborately imagined high-security prisons, forced to do the government's dirty work to stave off the threat of other meta-humans that, in the wake of the death of Earth's savior, Superman, can't be stopped by conventional forces. To keep these fiercely independent baddies under control, these criminals are injected with micro-explosives (a la Escape from New York) through which Waller can detonate them with the touch of a phone app, and to sweeten the deal, promises of reduced sentences. Their first big mission ends up being taking down the evil, ancient entity known as Enchantress, who has usurped, for spells, the body of a scientist named Dr. June Moone -- an entity once controlled by Waller but she managed to finally break free from the curse that bound her.

Viggo Mortensen stars as Ben Cash, a father of six (ages range from six to eighteen), living "off the grid" in the remote dense wilderness of the Pacific Northwest as part of some sort of self-imposed counterculture exile, where they live off mostly of what's out in nature in a ritualistic fashion -- hunting, farming, rock climbing, survivalist training, and keeping physically fit, as well as mentally agile, learning from some of the great thinkers and philosophers, some quite revolutionary and controversial, the world has ever known. They're all anxiously awaiting his bipolar wife Leslie to be cured of a disease during her hospital stay back in her home town in New Mexico when word comes that she has taken her own life. Though father-in-law Jack, who blames Ben for poisoning his daughter and grandchildren with his cultish hippie beliefs, explicitly tells him to stay away or get arrested, he packs the family bus and the septet vacate their bohemian digs and are off on the long road trip to crash the funeral. The kids, who've spent their entire lives away from any form of other civilization not found in their novels and textbooks, find so-called civilized society to be a crazier place than they've ever imagined.

This chapter in the saga finds Jason Bourne giving up the spy game and living completely off the grid, earning his keep as a bruising slugger in the Eastern European underground fighting circuit. That's until he's pulled out by his old crony in the CIA, Nicky Parsons, who has gone rogue to deliver intel to Jason that she's hacked regarding the identity and mysterious death of his father, as well as his key involvement in a top-secret government operation. Tenacious CIA director Robert Dewey is hot on their trail, but he doesn't so much want Bourne to come in out of the cold so much as think he is better off dead for being unobtainable and knowing far too much, which might jeopardize their current plot to utilize a monumentally popular social-media platform dubbed "Deep Dream" to spy on the majority of the world's population. Dewey's underling, Heather Lee, meanwhile, searches for a way to get Bourne on board without taking him out.

Set in the 1930s, Jesse Eisenberg stars as Bobby Dorfman, a young Bronxite and aspiring writer who calls on his distant uncle Phil to hook him up with a job in his top-flight talent agency in Hollywood. Shortly after relocating, Phil sends hisassistant, the decidedly glamour-averse Vonnie, to show his young nephew around the town, and the two soon hit it off as friends. However, friendship turns to feelings for Bobby, but she says she's seeing someone else, though Bobby doesn't know that her beau is, in fact, married uncle Phil. However, when Phil looks like he can't quite pull the trigger and leave his wife for Vonnie once and for all, Bobby gets his chance at burgeoning love, though things get far more complicated when all of the players begin putting the pieces of the love triangle's thorny entanglements together.

Mila Kunis plays 32-year old wife and mother of two, Amy, whose already stale marriage in the Chicago suburbs (filmed in New Orleans) hits an impasse when she catches her hubby having an online affair. Her best friends, spitfire sexpot single-mom Carla and mousy housewife Kiki, form a pact to be "bad moms" as a means of rebellion against having to put up with bratty, unappreciative kids and husbands that take them for granted for the last several years. However, when the far-too-influential busybody PTA president, Gwendolyn, begins to make life difficult for them and their middle-school aged kids, Amy decides to run against her for control of the organization on a platform of empowering mothers to do not have to always have to be so perfect.

Emma Roberts plays venus 'Vee' Delmonico, an introverted, straight-as-an-arrow senior in a Staten Island high school. Vee is cajoled by her more outgoing and bold friend Sydney to install a popular underground ("dark web") smartphone and desktop app called 'Nerve' in which one can choose to be a Player, who participates in a customized series of 'dares' for cash deposits and follower base, or Watcher, who, for a fee, contribute to the game system by making dare suggestions, monitoring and submitting approval (a la Periscope) when they're completed by the Players. Pegged as an instant watcher, Vee decides to be a bit more daring and see what life is like on the Player side. Her first dare is to kiss a complete stranger in a diner for five seconds, which introduces her to Dave Franco's Ian, who turns out to also be a Player himself. The game continues to pair up the two based on algorithms generated through the harvesting of their online personas through all manner of social media and private accounts, leading them to continue their misadventures-on-demand through the department stores and bustling streets of Manhattan. The problem is that the further you're into it, the harder it is to quit, whether you want to or not.

In this film, the antics of Scrat the squirrel flying a UFO in outer space, chasing the elusive acorn, ends up inadvertently causing a massive meteor shower to hit Earth. Manny the woly mammoth and his wife Ellie forget, for a moment, their fears that their daughter Peaches will end up leaving them once she gets married to the silly-natured but loveable Julian. They see the fiery rocks hurtling in their vicinity and immediately run for cover, along with their gang of friends (aka The Herd) of many species, eventually running into the spirited and highly intelligent one-eyed weasel named Buck (returning from the third film, Dawn of the Dinosaurs), who concocts a plan to keep the most massive of asteroids from hitting Earth yet again and wiping them all out. Teamwork is employed, but they're going to have to stay a step ahead of a trio of ill-mannered Dino-Birds who want all of these other pesky critters like the dino-egg saving Buck out of the way so they can rule the roost as the most powerful creatures on the newly destroyed planet.