The Qwipster Film Review Podcast

The origin of Deadpool is told in an extended flashback sequence in the middle of the film, pushing forward a relatively improbable story of a rebellious ex-special ops, mercenary type named Wade Wilson who meets his "soulmate" in the equally deviant spitfire named Vanessa. Just as strongly as their bond of love begins to take hold, it's all about to come to an end, when Wilson is diagnosed with late-stage cancer. With seemingly no real cure in sight, Wilson reluctantly agrees to be a guinea pig for a shadowy underground company that promises a cure for his condition, though he quickly realizes after it's too late that their operation isn't quite on the up and up. Alas, Wilson, known for having almost no filter on voicing his thoughts in the most insulting of ways, antagonizes the company's mad doctor, Ajax, into paying special attention to him in a series of sadistic experiments that triggers his mutant superpowers of regeneration, but also leaves him horribly disfigured. The rest of the movie deals with the escaped Wilson, now operating as a costumed merc named Deadpool, trying to get his hands on the powerful Ajax to restore his looks back to normal on the hope that his beloved Vanessa can look upon his grotesque appearance with all of the attraction he yearns for.

Lily James plays Elizabeth Bennet, the second-oldest sister hoping to find a proper wealthy husband in an isolated version of London that is completely surrounded by zombie masses hoping to feast on the brains of the living within its walls. In order to combat the undead, many of the families have taken to sending their children to Asia to learn martial arts from the masters in either Japan or China. Even with extinction a very real possibility, the Bennets still hope their daughters marry well, and while the more fetching eldest sister Jane is catching the eye of most potential suitors, a mixture of emotions begin to swell between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, an emotionally aloof zombie hunter of good breeding. Despite Darcy's ill manners at times, the potential for more is still there between them, if they can survive long enough to make it all happen.

Set in Hollywood of the 1950s, Josh Brolin plays Eddie Mannix, an executive of the fictional Capitol Pictures film studio who is tasked with 'fixing' a host of extracurricular scandals that their contracted star performers are engaged in before the tabloids get a hold of the stories and ruin their big-budget prestige pictures they're set to appear in.  One such problem involves their most bankable box office draw, Baird Whitlock, who goes missing from the set of his sprawling biblical epic of a Quo Vadis or Ben Hur type, kidnapped (kinda?) by a group of Communists in the industry to impart their philosophies in private meetings, requiring much of Mannix's attention to keep anyone from knowing about until he figures out what's going on.

Set primarily in the New Mexico Territory of 1871, the titular Jane is shocked to find her husband, Bill Hammond, riding home after a long time away with bullets in his back. A deadly gang of former outlaw fur traders called "the Bishop Boys", run by the vicious John Bishop have been after them for some time for past betrayals, and Bill informs Jane to get prepared, and perhaps get moving. After dropping off their young daughter with a friend, Jane tries to enlist the services of a former lover named Dan Frost for protection, but they've been separated and estranged since the Civil War drove Jane to have to fend for herself, not knowing if Dan ever made it back from the conflict alive. However, Dan has his own reasons to distrust Jane, and to want Bill out of the picture, causing a tension in loyalties when Dan accepts for a fee, but only because he's trying to get his beloved Jane back.

Po's master, Shifu, decides to retire his teachings and promote his Dragon Warrior to become the teacher of the rest of the Furious Five in the ways of kung fu.  His new and somewhat reluctant status as a martial arts master is soon after put to the test when a spirit warrior named Kai thrusts himself into the mortal plane after gathering all of the chi, the Chinese term for the mystical energy that flows within us, he can get from those who have learned to harness it best: the kung fu masters.  Meanwhile, Po is visited by another panda named Li who reveals himself to be his long-lost father, who takes him to a hidden valley where the rest of his panda brethren have been living in relative harmony.  With Po the only entity that can stop Kai's path to total domination, the happy village, and perhaps all of China, rests in the paws of the kung-fu panda.

Based on a true story, The Finest Hours is set mostly in winter of 1952, where, off of the snowy coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, an oil tanker called the SS Pendleton would be split in half due to a vicious nor-easter and massive 60-foot swells, with one half sinking immediately to the bottom of the ocean, while the other half sinking much more slowly, with the thirty-three men on board desperate to try to figure out a way to stay alive in the freezing, turbulent chaos, hoping to figure out a way to run the half-ship aground until they can be rescued. Chris Pine stars as Bernie Webber, the meek Coast Guard recruit assigned to try to mount a four-man rescue mission in a small 36-foot craft through the heart of the storm and whatever men he can find back to shore.

Michael Fassbender stars as Macbeth, who is foretold by three sisters of mystical powers that he will one day be the king in Scotland. Lady Macbeth, a firm believer in the prophecy, convinces her husband, who is a heartbeat away from ascending to the throne, to murder Scottish King Duncan and become the leader of the land. However, once that threshold to murder has been breached, it becomes a toxic force in the lives of the new king and queen, as Macbeth finds himself all-too-willing to snuff out more, trying to find a sense of peace and tranquility that continues to elude him with each life extinguished.

Lauren Cohan stars as Greta, an American woman who takes a job as a nanny in England in order to get away from a dangerously abusive and obsessed ex.  It's a large and isolated country mansion owned by an older couple called the Heelshires, who expect Greta to cater to the every needs of their eight-year-old boy, Brahms, as they go away on holiday.  Greta finds out the reason why they've had difficulty keeping prior nannies on hire once she meets Brahms, as he turns out to be a doll, literally, life-sized, and made mostly of porcelain.  The Heelshires maintain that their boy, who died in a house fire two decades prior, is very much alive in this doll, and he has particular needs that Greta must fulfill to keep him happy, one of them being that the only person other then the Heelshires allowed to come over is the delivery man, Malcolm.  Greta initially think the notion is absurd, but a job's a job, but soon discovers there may be some truth in the assertion that Brahms is very much alive, and isn't going to take kindly to her not following his rules, or attempting to leave him there alone.

Chloe Grace Moretz stars as Ohioan teenager Cassie Sullivan, whom we first meet in a post-apocalyptic world fighting for her survival. We flash back to how this world came to be, starting with the appearance of a massive alien spaceship in the sky. After four waves of cataclysmic "plagues" that include such things as tsunamis and a deadly virus, human beings begin to suspect that "the Others" are trying to take the planet and don't want humans on it when they do. Dealing with the separation from her family through a variety of mishaps, Cassie finds herself caught in the middle of a fight between the Others, who've been able to take over human bodies, and the last survivors of Earth, in a world where it's unclear who to trust.

De Niro plays Dick Kelly, a very recent widower who is being driven by his uptight corporate lawyer grandson Jason from the former's home in Georgia to his Boca vacation home, and the latter's marriage celebration and ceremony in Florida.  After 40 years of having only sex with one woman, grandpa Dick is ready to get his perv on by sowing his wild oats with college girls in Daytona Beach partying for spring break, and persistently cajoles Jason to try to remove the stick from his bum and party along with him, even if it comes at the potential cost of his impending marriage.

13 Hours takes place during a volatile time in Libya, shortly after the overthrow and murder of their dictator, Muammar Guadaffi in 2011. Various factions began their scramble for power, starting with raiding the government arsenals for high-powered weaponry, as other countries, sensing the instability that could lead to atrocities, pulled out of their embassies in the area. The U.S. did keep a small outpost of diplomats in the city of Benghazi, as well as a hidden CIA annex not far away that was under the protection of a small band of armed ex-Special Forces contractors working for a CIA-funded organization called Global Response Staff. Former Navy SEAL Jack Silva is the new guy in the group of six beefy, bearded men, led by Tyrone 'Rone' Woods, and this time out proves to be the most dangerous contract work for everyone involved. On September 11, 2012, the eleventh anniversary of the '9/11' attacks, a group of local radicals lay siege on a building housing the United States Ambassador, Chris Stevens, while the security company is ordered to stand down by their boss there. Eventually, they can't stand idle anymore and decide to 'go rogue' to help their fellow Americans in need, but too late to stave off the major damage that is done. The fatigued men end up having to scramble back to the hidden CIA base when the armed militias are determined to attack there as well, but they're grossly outnumbered. The men do the best they can against overwhelming odds to minimize casualties during the prolonged firefight while waiting for outside help that seems slow to arrive.

We pick up not long after the first entry with Hart's character, Ben Barber, now a probationary officer for the Atlanta Police Department.  He's just a little over a week away from marrying his beloved fiancée Angela, sister of his former reluctant partner-in-crime-fighting James Payton.  Once again, James finds himself in a situation in which he decides to take Ben as a partner in order to embarrass him by showing just how over his head he will be in dealing with real dangerous criminals, as the two head out to Miami for a 'milk run' to gain information that will lead to taking down Antonio Pope, an influential businessman who is also murderous big-time drug kingpin who is controlling the flow of narcotics between the two cities.  Teaming up with a bravado Miami detective named Maya, as well as A.J., Pope's computer hacker-turned-informant, it's up to James to get his man and keep his future brother-in-law alive long enough to see his wedding day.

Hitchcock/Truffaut is a documentary on Alfred Hitchcock, his influence on other filmmakers in history, including Francois Truffaut, who wrote a definitive book on the man through a series of interviews over the course of one week in 1962.

On the verge of celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary, wife Kate is putting together all of the necessities for their big party at an esteemed hall in the English countryside, while husband Geoff seems to be preoccupied. What's been on his mind has stemmed from a letter he's received that the body of the woman he was involved with before he met Kate, a woman named Katya, has been found frozen in a glacier in Switzerland, preserved nearly as it had been since she fell into a fissure as they were exploring through the area in 1962. As they had told people there they were married in order to keep their rooming arrangements from being questioned, Geoff has been considered the next of kin, and has therefore been the one notified. This is all news to Kate, who is curious not only as to why, after spending most of her life with someone, he never shared this with her, but also as to why the news of her found body is causing Geoff to exhibit new behavior, taking up smoking again, spending time in the attic looking at old items, reading books he's had since before she's met him, and listening to music he hasn't listened to since he was young. After forty-five years of marriage, Kate wonders is she has been number two in Geoff's heart all of those years.

The end-of-they-year podcast. Vince Leo runs down his favorite films of the year 2015, as well as some honorable mentions. Happy New Year everyone!