35.) The Right Guys [6/2/2016]

I went into this wanting to love every ounce of the strange, highly-stylized crime movie. Ryan Gosling is still artistically apologizing for The Notebook, and the movie viewers have thus far been the beneficiaries of this acting purge. Russell Crowe has been decent in some movies, and this sort of tough guy act was just what he was made for. I loved Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, so another Shane Black movie seemed like an obvious win for me.

That said, the movie was not that great. It wasn't terrible, by any means, and there were some genuinely funny moments, but a lot of the plot was strained. There were two female characters whose only part to play was either the damsel in distress or the moral conscience (and the little kid as moral conscience trope is exhausted). Because of this, the motivation of the characters was also strained. Crowe's big moral shift seemed to come out of character and from nowhere.

Still, it's worth a watch. It was perfectly scored, well-acted, and some of the dialogue was hilarious. Just don't expect a sister-film to the much superior Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

34.) Money Monster [5/28/2016]

Like 99 Homes and The Big Short, this film took a look at the current financial crisis in America through a fictionalized financial show (a more cartoonishly-vapid Jim Cramer from Mad Money). Unlike the first two movies mentioned, this film ground out all the nuance, and instead used a cliched, cardboard cutout of a hedge fund manager as the bad guy, whose obvious money laundering would have seemed outlandish in a Bond film. Still, the core actors, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Jack O'Connell (from Unbreakable), were entertaining to watch and the movie required less math to make sense of the mess (which was nice, considering how tired I was when I watched it). You could think of this as the poor man's The Big Short.