New Releases: December 22, 2017

The second half of the this week’s new releases feature a group of pitches, a couple bastards and a number of very short people trying to make your season bright.

1. Pitch Perfect 3 (Universal, @3,400 Theaters, 93 Minutes, Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content, language and some action, Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer at press time: 34% Fresh [47 Reviews]: I’m not sure but I’m fairly certain that there had to be executives who had a chance to make this film who said, “A movie about a group of women? I don’t even want to make a film with one woman. And they sing? Get out of here!”

Well, the first film made back almost 7 times its budget, which led to a sequel that made back almost 10 times its budget which leads us to this.

They say that this will be the last of the trilogy and there will be no more after this. We’ll see. If this film multiplies its budget going up against The Last Jedi then I think we’d see a fourth film.

2. Father Figures (Warner Brothers, @2,800 Theaters, 113 Minutes, Rated R for language and sexual references throughout, Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer at press time: N/A [No Reviews At Press Time]: You can tell everything you want to know about this film just by looking at that poster. No, not from a plot perspective of how funny it will be. No, you can tell how bad the film will be just by looking at how horrible that poster is.

It’s like Adobe Photoshop became possessed by a demon and started vomiting collages at random. I think the image of Christopher Walken is from a red carpet event. They couldn’t be bothered to even use and image from the film. It’s a poorly made, sloppy, thrown together, ugly poster.

And this movie looks like a poorly made, sloppy, thrown together, ugly movie. These ‘idiot man-child” films are never known for being high art, but this one looks like something thrown together at the last minute from parts of other films. The fact that we have two Oscar winners and three Oscar nominees in the cast means that awards doesn’t really guarantee a steady paycheck so they have to take what they can get.

The film was originally called Bastards and was supposed to be released in November of last year. It was delayed until January of 2017 then shelved until now. Methinks the lack of reviews for the film is not a coincidence.

3. Downsizing (Paramount, @2,600 Theaters, 135 Minutes, Rated R for language including sexual references, some graphic nudity and drug use, Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer at press time: 58% Fresh [93 Reviews]: Norwegian scientists have discovered the cure for overpopulation–shrinking every human down to five inches. The process is non-reversible, but the small people can live like kings as their money goes farther.

Paul and Audrey are having a hard time making ends meet, so a downsizing sounds good to them. That is, until Audrey chickens out at the last minute and leaves Paul alone in the miniaturized world. Paul must find his place in his new surroundings, and he does by looking outside the boundaries of his new community.

This film is done by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, a pairing that usually results in better reviews than this one has received. But it still is the best bet this week.