From Dictionary.com:

The Definition of Catharsis:

1. The purging of the emotions or relieving of emotional tensions, especially through certain kinds of art, as tragedy or music.
2. Psychiatry: Psychotherapy that encourages or permits the discharge of pent-up, socially unacceptable effects. Discharge of pent-up emotions so as to result in the alleviation of symptoms or the permanent relief of the condition.

The definition of the word Catharsis is a very good summarization of what the movie Wilson is all about. Once you realize very early on that this film is about a man named Wilson, played by Woody Harrelson, whose entire life has been a disaster, you start to wonder if a story about a person like this could ever be funny. Perhaps this could be possible, but Wilson fails to be funny often enough to conclude that it is not really a comedy movie or a very good movie either. Perhaps if Wilson was made more of a likable person, this movie would have been more entertaining and engaging or even funny, but far too often Wilson just bothers people, many of them total strangers and engages in rude conversations with everybody he encounters to perhaps temporarily make himself feel less alone. Ultimately the result of all this rude behavior is the audience has to endure an annoying and obnoxious person for the full 90 minutes this movie runs. I was surprised that during this entire story there was not one mention of what Wilson does for money or what he does for a living or even how he became such a disaster of a person in the first place. Considering our jobs are such a large percentage of our existence it would have been nice to see how or if Wilson is employed.

The story of Wilson is really no story at all, but rather a series of strange events and discoveries, including running into his x-wife and from there events go from strange, to weird, to pathetic, to very depressing and then back to pathetic again. There are several cameo appearances in this film, including Mary Lynn Rajskub, Cheryl Hines and Laura Dern, who plays Wilson’s x-wife who has of all things the name “Pippi”, and her life and reality since her divorce from Wilson many years earlier is almost as pathetic has his is.

The attempts to be a different type of a story are many in this film, but being different than most stories we have all seen before is not enough to make Wilson a good or even an average movie. It is hard to imagine how this movie was even made considering the uninteresting depressing story that tries to make a sad and pathetic life funny. On top of all this just about all the characters in this file are very unlikable and in the end, there is no attempt by Wilson or even his x-wife to somehow transition into a better person. For these reasons and so many others, I cannot recommend Wilson.

It can be embarrassing when I go to movies like the new movie “Chips” because I know it is going to be bad going in, but I still see films like this to perhaps learn more about movies and screenwriting and I still believe you have to experience the good ones as well as the bad ones, maybe to learn how not to write a screenplay. I also see movies like this for this movie blog, because moviegoers are interested in bad movies as well as good movies, or at least I think so, with the possible exception of this one.

Name recognition is a marketing tool. In this latest TV season, no less than three TV shows have been created based off of well-known movies, Taken, Training Day and Lethal Weapon. The idea here is that the name recognition could cause a greater number of people to tune in because they are curious about the TV show if they remember and liked the movie. The hope is that once they watch the first episode because of curiosity, then maybe they will get hooked and watch the entire series or many more episodes. This marketing idea also sometimes works for movies, that are based on TV shows. Starsky and Hutch released in 2004, 21 Jump Street in 20012, The Addams Family in 1991, others include Lost in Space, Miami Vice and Mission Impossible, which is the most popular movie franchise based on a TV show in movie history. Another example of using name recognition is to make a movie based on characters from a TV show and the best example of this is Saturday Night Live and there are no less than 12 movies that have been made from Saturday Night Live characters. Yes, 12 Saturday Night Live movies.

Clearly, this name recognition marketing idea works most of the time, (see link) otherwise there would not be so many movies made from well-known TV shows. The difference with the movie Chips, based on the TV show Chips that ran from 1977-1983 is that this TV show as at best barely average and not a TV series that anyone would think would be worth making into a movie and it has been off the air for 34 years. I have never understood the value of having police officers on motorcycles among cars and trucks on California highways. I would have liked to seen some kind of explanation in this movie as to why something like CHP (California Highway Patrol) still even exists, considering the danger of one person riding a motorcycle on a highway traveling at high speed chasing after some criminal. According to this website, of the 233 deaths for the CHP, 70 of them were from motorcycle accidents. Given this statistic alone, it is hard to understand why something like the CHP is still considered necessary.

Unfortunately perhaps through the Hollywood deal-making pipeline or some other reason, a very bad script, written by Dax Shepard was greenlighted and made into a bad movie. This movie is not the worst I have ever seen, but it probably has the most convoluted and “all over the place” nightmare of splintered story lines that I have ever sat through in a very long time. It is almost as if the screenwriter would write a scene, and then forget to explain how this scene is connected to or related to another part of the story. Different parts of this film seem to be just an excuse to show something raunchy or continue a disgusting running gag that didn’t work the first or the second time it was attempted. This movie is supposed to be a comedy-drama but there was very few if anything to laugh about, and the police drama part was not interesting enough to keep your attention for any length of time. Additional to these problems is that the whole story barely made any sense, with the myriad of characters and scenes that jumped around through an unbearable almost 2 hours.

This movie stars Dax Shepard and Micheal Pena with a cameo from several other actors including Dax Shepard’s wife Kristen Bell, but even with this pretty large cast and several cameos, there is nothing that can ever save a script this bad.  Run from the movie Chips, it is just not worth sitting through and should have gone directly to DVD and never released.

The movie “Life” is one of the few films since 1979 and the release of the movie Alien that has attempted to address the idea of an alien life form that becomes violent on a spaceship and attempts to kill all on board. The main reason why so few, if any movies like this have been made in the last 38 years, is probably because Alien was such a perfect horror movie about Aliens and outer space that has ever been produced. The movie Alien, obviously, is a tough if not impossible act to follow.

Very early in this film, I was surprised that the space station was orbiting the Earth and not Mars as was suggested in some of the previews. One flaw was the point at which scientists aboard this space station suddenly have an alien life form in their laboratory, supposedly from Mars, but it was never really explained how they got the life form, other than the crashing of a space capsule that I assume was coming from Mars. Starting off with something this important to the flow of the story took something away from my understanding and enjoyment of the story because I always wondered once they started experimenting with this one cell microscopic organism, I was still trying to figure out where on Mars the alien was found, and how it was transported from Mars to a space station that was orbiting Earth. Fundamentally, movies about science or science fiction should make some sort of sense and not have glaring holes in the story, especially at the beginning.

This movie has two big stars, Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal and several other less famous actors and the entire film, with the exception of one shot of Time Square in New York city at the beginning, happens inside the space station.  The problems with this film are many, starting with the convoluted and ridiculous ideas the crew come up with to try and kill “Calvin”, which is the name they lead scientist calls his alien. The reason for the name “Calvin” was also never explained, along with many other important details. Over time, Calvin grows bigger as he kills a mouse and members of the crew and starts to look like a combination of a jellyfish and an octopus. If there is life somewhere in the universe other than Earth, we can definitely believe that some variation of a creature like this could exist.

Even in the beginning of this movie, the way these genius level scientists handle this alien creature, by touching it with a rubber glove made no sense, because you just know that no one would ever be so relaxed with their scientific examination of an unknown alien creature. It is one thing to put yourself in danger because of the risky environment and reality of space travel, but way too many times, stupid decisions that made absolutely no sense were both idiotic and infuriating to sit through. There was no common sense here, no scientific validity and almost no decisions that super intelligent people would actually make. One incident, in particular, is when one of the female astronauts goes outside the space station in an attempt to try and kill or trap the alien that had escaped from inside. This entire idea and the events that followed during this scene probably are one some of the stupidest ideas I have ever seen in any science fiction movie. Why this entire scene wasn’t scrapped in a conference room or somewhere on a cutting floor in Hollywood is a mystery. Why was this woman spacewalking outside with a dangerous alien? What was she trying to accomplish? This entire scene just made no sense.

The ending of this movie had a very similar feel to the end of Alien which is understandable, but the build up and convoluted trick ending the writer and director tried to pull off I saw coming a mile away. The movie Life is a pale imitation of Alien and due to the many inane plot ideas with so many decisions by the astronauts and scientists on board the space station that were downright ridiculous, I cannot recommend this movie.