a) Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck
I've already read and watched and absorbed an amount of Cobain memorabilia that far outpaces my actual interest in the guy and his music, so I didn't build up any particular expectations about this movie. Still, there were a few moments, the things he and Courtney say in home movies, the animations of his journals, that made me feel like I was seeing something I hadn't experienced before. It was a little long, though, and there were choices I didn't love (string quartet AND children's choir versions of "Teen Spirit"? Seriously?).

b) The Babadook 
Horror movies often use the fears and traumas of the real world as the emotional basis of their tales of magic and monsters, sometimes to profound effects. But this movie, I don't know, it just felt too real, too close to a straight up tale of family dysfunction and people losing grip with reality. And the kid in the movie, who gives a great, brave performance, is barely older than my son, and it's just greuling what he's put through. By the end it was just depressing and unpleasant, and not in a way that I'd consider an achievement for a horror film.

c) Let's Be Cops
I was super excited about the first ad for this movie, just seeing Jake Johnson and Damon Wayans, Jr. make the jump to movies after being so funny in "New Girl" in "Happy Endings." But then, the movie wound up coming out right when the Ferguson stuff was happening, and I ended up watching it the day after I went to protests in Baltimore, and obviously thinking about all that stuff a lot can kinda sour you on the whole premise of a comedy about untrained idiots posing as police officers, which has its problems to begin with. They still have great buddy comedy chemistry and there are a few really funny sequences, but there's a bad air kinda hanging over it.

d) Guardians Of The Galaxy
For such a widely liked blockbuster, this fell surprisingly flat for me. Maybe I would've found it funnier if John C. Reilly was in it for more than 5 minutes. I'm also curious what the hell voice Bradley Cooper was doing, even if I appreciate that it didn't sound like Bradley Cooper. It was pretty charming overall, just not that charming. It's been a long time since a sci-fi movie tried to go with a color palette as bold as The Fifth Element, and I thought they did a decent job of getting a vivid, unique look.

e) Neighbors
As sick as I am of Seth Rogen movies, this one was pretty decent. The frat stuff was a lot more entertaining than the parent stuff, like Zac Efron and Dave Franco's characters actually got to have some depth, and ended up being less like villains than the trailers made them out to be.

f) Jobs
I tried to watch this just to laugh at it and maybe try to imagine it as 'Kelso in the '80s and beyond,' but I couldn't even finish it. Josh Gadd as Steve Wozniak was enough, I just couldn't deal. Opening scene was beyond ridiculous, though.

g) Mad Max
Mad Max is one of those weird franchises where the sequels are a lot more visible, in terms of being on TV all the time and stuff, than the original. So I was curious to see it, and now I kinda understand, this is a pretty quirky low budget movie all things considered. Not really that entertaining, though, just didn't hold my attention.

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