{"id":15107,"date":"2020-10-12T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-12T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=15107"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:17:43","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:17:43","slug":"vodepths-what-to-see-and-avoid-on-demand-this-week-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/vodepths-what-to-see-and-avoid-on-demand-this-week-4\/","title":{"rendered":"VODepths: What to See (and Avoid) On Demand This Week"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This week on the edge of VOD, cosplayers and comedians take the spotlight, a Smiths fan grows up, and the devil makes a deal with Donald Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bad President<\/em><\/strong> (VOD October 12)<\/strong> Maybe there\u2019s still a way to successfully satirize Donald Trump, but this glorified sketch from director and co-writer Param Gill certainly isn\u2019t it. Gill barely has a single joke here, casting Eddie Griffin as Satan, who sets his sights on Trump (Jeff Rector) as a means to sow chaos. The majority of the movie is just a cheap-looking recreation of the notable moments of Trump\u2019s presidential campaign (Access Hollywood<\/em> tape, Hillary\u2019s emails, Muslim ban, etc.), featuring terrible actors in ill-fitting wigs. Meanwhile, Griffin\u2019s devil schemes to claim Trump\u2019s soul, which seems entirely superfluous to the election itself. Somehow this drags on for 90 minutes, which feels nearly as long as Trump\u2019s actual campaign. The ugly sets are as flimsy as Rector\u2019s Trump impression, and at least one bit is stolen directly from Saturday Night Live<\/em>. Even Stormy Daniels looks embarrassed to be playing herself. Grade: F<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Monster Force Zero<\/em><\/strong> (VOD October 13)<\/strong> There\u2019s more enthusiasm than skill on display in this incoherent sci-fi movie, but maybe that\u2019s fitting for a story about misfit cosplayers. While attending a local comic-con, the creators of the indie comic book Monster Force Zero<\/em> are offered actual superpowers by a race of ancient aliens, but only if they can defeat another group of cosplayers in what looks like a summer camp obstacle course with neon lights. The filmmakers devote half the movie to this poorly defined competition before Monster Force Zero gets its actual mission: to take down a pair of supposedly evil scientists (whose headquarters is clearly in someone\u2019s garage) about to unleash a prop dinosaur (or, sorry, gamma reptilian) on Earth. None of it makes any sense, but the homemade costumes and sets were obviously crafted with love, and Star Trek: Voyager<\/em>\u2019s Garrett Wang has an amusingly self-deprecating cameo. It\u2019s about as entertaining as your average comic-con panel. Grade: C<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The More You Ignore Me<\/em><\/strong> (VOD October 13)<\/strong> A 1980s-set coming-of-age drama about a working-class English teenager who dreams of a better life inspired by the music of her favorite band, this adaptation of comedian Jo Brand\u2019s 2009 novel isn\u2019t quite a female version of Blinded by the Light<\/em>, but in its best moments it comes close to the exuberance and intensity of Gurinder Chadha\u2019s ode to Bruce Springsteen. Alice (Ella Hunt) is obsessed with The Smiths, but she\u2019s stuck in a dead-end town with a severely mentally ill mother (Sheridan Smith) and a well-meaning but hapless dad (Mark Addy). The movie is more about coping with family dysfunction than about the power of music (and it only has the budget to license two Smiths songs), but Hunt is charming, and she brings heartfelt passion to Alice\u2019s struggles. It\u2019s a disjointed but affecting story with the emotional rush of a good pop song. Grade: B<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Monochrome: The Chromism<\/em><\/strong> (VOD October 16)<\/strong> With a dystopian concept seemingly inspired by the basic functions of video editing software, writer-director Kodi Zene\u2019s film presents a black-and-white world in which people who suddenly start to appear in color (and are derisively known as \u201cHues\u201d) are hunted and persecuted. The film begins with Hue protagonist Isaac (Josh Bangle) wandering through a desert landscape trying to hide his true nature, but it quickly flashes back to a far more mundane setting, before the spread of Hues, when Isaac was a boring office drone about to propose to his girlfriend. A shadowy cabal conspires to unleash a virus, but it\u2019s never clear whether being a Hue is caused by the virus or provides immunity to it, or why the corporate overlords want to stoke fear about Hues among the general populace. Mostly, the characters just run around the same handful of Dallas streets, while Zene engages in vague world-building and futile sequel-baiting. Grade: D+<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Opening Act<\/em> (VOD and select theaters October 16)<\/strong> It\u2019s not surprising that comedian Steve Byrne rounded up a who\u2019s-who of stand-up comics for his debut feature as a writer-director, and he gets a lot of mileage out of just putting funny people onscreen (with small roles for everyone from Whitney Cummings to Felipe Esparza). The dramatic arc of The Opening Act <\/em>is less successful, following aspiring comedian Will Chu (Silicon Valley<\/em>\u2019s Jimmy O. Yang) during the weekend of his first big club gig. Will shares a bill with lewd road veteran Chris Palmer (Alex Moffat) and fading sitcom star Billy G. (Cedric the Entertainer), each of whom offers his own brand of career advice. There isn\u2019t much more to the story than that, aside from a couple of middling cringe-comedy set pieces, but Byrne\u2019s personal connection to the material shines through, and the stand-up scenes deliver enough genuine laughs that 90 minutes of these people just telling jokes might have made for a stronger movie. Grade: B-<\/strong> \"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our mini-reviews of \u2018Bad President,\u2019 \u2018Monster Force Zero,\u2019 \u2018Monochrome: The Chromism,\u201d and more recent off-the-beaten-path on-demand releases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":539,"featured_media":15110,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[340],"tags":[1436,1427],"class_list":["post-15107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-reviews","tag-vodepths"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/539"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15107"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22700,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15107\/revisions\/22700"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}