Matt's Movie Lodgecast

The bones are scattered all over the map when it comes to rating Robert Rodriguez & James Cameron's $200 million lovechild Alita: Battle Angel. Did you like the Japanese manga "Battle Angel Alita"? Well we don't discuss that. Instead we discuss Robert Rodriguez extensively and his wild cast of characters including Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly, Mahershala Ali, Ed Skrein, Jackie Earle Haley, and Keean Johnson. After two hours of this epic cyberpunk saga, some of us had fun and some of us had allergic reactions! We can fundamentally agree that the extras in this movie are phenomenal and that the final reveal at the end of the movie will be one of the greatest things we witness in 2019.

On a cold, wintry L.A. night with temps dropping as low as 45 degrees, we saw Cold Pursuit starring Liam Neeson, Laura Dern, Emmy Rossum, William Forsythe, and Tom Bateman. Unlike we were led to believe, this movie is not a standard Liam Neeson revenge flick. Cold Pursuit is actually a black comedy in the vein of Tarantino knock-off movies such as Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, Suicide Kings, and the most atrocious movie ever The Boondock Saints. While the Lodgemaster stands up for this amoral, violent, unfunny oddity, the Prius fights back with a vengeance. See Cold Pursuit directed by the Norwegian Hans Petter Moland and you decide who's right!

Four Lodge Members take a deep psychological dive into the masculine psyche and its archetypal configurations that are manifesting in 2019. They went and saw What Men Want! The movie is a very loose sequel to Mel Gibson's What Women Want (2000) and Mad Mel is neither seen nor heard. This time the woman who hears "men people" is Taraji P. Henson and she leads a cast including Aldis Hodge, Richard Roundtree, Wendi McLendon-Covey and Tracy Morgan. We do hear the innermost thoughts of one of our own male Lodge members in this podcast and you will not want to miss what he is thinking!

M. Night Shyamalan's Glass completes the Unbreakable trilogy I guess. AMC Century City 15 is the place where we accidentally cut ourselves on this sharp cinematic diamond. We've got some expert Lodgers on this 'cast that have seen every single M. Night Shyamalan Joint in theaters! During this hawt take, we discuss Bruce Willis' dead eyes, Samuel L. Jackson's heavy sedation, and James McAvoy dialing it up to eleven for an insane performance that has nothing to do with actual dissociative identity disorder.

Put on your suits and dresses cause it is time to lift our glasses to Tinseltown and exclaim "Hooray for Hollywood" as we toast our love for the Oscars! Host Brother Bischke leads a hard-charging gallop through the Academy Award nominations as the Boyz lay down their picks for what should win and what will win in twenty Oscar categories in a little over 20 minutes! Then it's on to the very serious business of picking our 2018 movie favourites as we all count down from #10 to #1 of our very favourite films of 2018 (well Brother Lucas only liked 5 films this year so he joins us halfway through). Some Lodgecast movies make the cut of our best films, but there are many surprises. Have a listen and let us know what you think!

To kick off the 2019 movie season we locked ourselves in a Burbank movie theater and subjected ourselves to a late night screening of the horror movie Escape Room. We tossed and turned and tried to get out and somehow managed to stay awake for the entirety. A January movie release if there ever was one, it wasn't that bad, but it wasn't too good either. I guess it was shot in South Africa so that's kind of cool. It stars Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Deborah Ann Woll, Tyler Labine, Jay Ellis, and Nik Dodani. There'll probably be an inescapable sequel with diminishing returns.

This is what we Lodgecast for ladies and gentlemen! We Go Out of Our Way to Watch Weird Movies so You Don't Have To! Ain't no one in the whole wide world gonna see in theaters a little movie Keanu Reeves did called Replicas. We ate at Marie Callender's in Monterey Park and then proceeded directly to the AMC Atlantic Times Square 14 to see the sci-fi techno-thriller Replicas. Some stiff drinks at Marie Callender's knocked one Lodge viewer out, but the rest of us remained alert for a fun-filled biotechnological evening. Directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, written by Chad St. John, from a story by Stephen Hamel, Replicas delivers to us a wild adventure tale on human replication. The sequences of Keanu Reeves endlessly hacking through his virtual reality computer interfaces will stay in our hearts and minds forever. No techtards here!

Very dangerous spoilers ahead in our review of the movie Serenity (2019) written and directed by Steven Knight. Matthew McConaughey is at his tanned, bare-bottomed best as Baker Dill trying to catch a big tuna fish. Anne Hathaway, Diane Lane, Jason Clarke, and Djimon Hounsou are there to cheer him on, but then things take a turn as McConaughey suffers a severe existential crisis. Find out why in our in-depth review of Serenity!

Learn about the former US Vice President Dick Cheney in the new movie Vice written and directed by Adam McKay. Christian Bale embodies Dick Cheney in every conceivable way. Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, and Tyler Perry all lend great support. But when McKay gets into the editing room he starts to play Oliver Stone and the result is a mixed bag. Cheney 2020!

Take the Bird Box blindfold challenge with us as we blindfold ourselves while watching Bird Box and then review it. Actually we watched this Netflix movie starring Sandra Bullock and then we went insane. John Malkovich is in it and so is B.D. Wong. Does this meme-generating machine live up to its hype or is it all a public relations stunt? Chirp with us and find out.

Get Hawt & Wet with Us in our movie review of Aquaman directed by the great James Wan. The movie has grossed over $300 million in China and we try to figure out why. It stars Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Willem Dafoe, Patrick Wilson, and Dolph Lundgren. Can't wait for Avatar 2 to blow this out of the water!

Lodgecast hits up the Cinerama Dome at ArcLight Cinemas Hollywood to takes in the sights, sounds, and smells of Yorgos Lanthimos' The Favourite featuring our favorite actresses Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, and Rachel Weisz. We generally feel that Lanthimos has hit his stride and we relish all the strange little details in this 18th century period dramedy.

Natalie Portman stars in Vox Lux written and directed by Brady Corbet. A gang of Lodgers went to see Natalie & Brady at a special screening at the AMC Century City 15. Natalie stars as pop star Celeste Montgomery and so does Raffey Cassidy, but then stars as Natalie's daughter. Jude Law also stars and Willem Dafoe narrates. Pop songs by Sia.

Welcome to Marwen is recommended viewing by the Lodgemaster. The film was a box office bomb with projected losses for the studio at $60 million. That being said, there is no film quite like Welcome to Marwen. Robert Zemeckis takes his motion capture obsession to the next level capturing foot fetishes and doll fetishes and torture and all sorts of weird stuff. Zemeckis twists the documentary Marwencol into a PTSD nightmare that will haunt you for a long time. Steve Carell, Leslie Mann, Diane Kruger, Merritt Wever, Janelle Monáe, Eiza González, Gwendoline Christie, Leslie Zemeckis, Siobhan Williams and Neil Jackson star in it. I hope Marwencol creator Mark Hogancamp never has to watch this!

You gotta see The Mule. Clint Eastwood directs and acts in this geriatric comedy at age 88! He's still got it. And by got it, we mean he is able to maneuver in a threesome at a party held by the Mexican drug cartel. This movie had us in tears laughing and we had a lot of fun talking about ol' man drug mule Clint and the hard-charging DEA played by Bradley Cooper, Laurence Fishburne, and Michael Peña who are hot on his tail. Dianne Wiest and Andy Garcia also star.

What's up with Creed 2? We'll let you know in this latest Hawt Take. Drago returns with his son and they want revenge, but they also want love and forgiveness. Or do they? Russia wants to be our friends but they also want to murder us. Things get confusing and they star Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Dolph Lundgren, Florian Munteanu, Wood Harris, and Phylicia Rashad. With a very special cameo from Brigitte Nielsen as Ludmilla Drago.

Lodge Boyz review of Widows directed by Steve McQueen. Based on a 12-hour British TV series from the 80s, McQueen and Gillian Flynn try to cram it all into 2 hours. But they fail in our opinion. Should've been a TV series. Oh well. It is chock-full of stars including Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell, Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya, Jacki Weaver, Carrie Coon, Robert Duvall, and Liam Neeson.

Speed Kills (or as we like to refer to it, Yotti) is a 2018 movie starring John Travolta as a speedboat racing champion. It features a Virtual Reality component that we explore. It also features many similarities to John Travolta's 2018 film Gotti. This movie covers the adventures of boat racer Ben Aronoff. Matthew Modine co-stars as George H.W. Bush. Join us for this wet and wild ride!

Modern auteur Tyler Perry dazzles us with our second cinematic masterpiece of the year in Tyler Perry's Nobody's Fool. Tiffany Haddish is a force of nature and we were psyched to see her team up with T.P. Add Whoopi Goldberg into the mix and you know you've got a winning combination. Tyler Perry, we salute you sir!

From the bowels of hell of a Burbank parking garage we secretly recorded our thoughts and feels about director Luca Guadagnino's re-envisioning of Dario Argento's horror classic Suspiria. The film doth star Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Mia Goth, and Chloë Grace Moretz with a cameo by the original Susie Bannion, Miss Jessica Harper herself.