New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Max Braden: A couple years ago, Dax made a mockumentary about himself as he tried to make the transition from struggling comic actor to martial arts star. It's called Brother's Justice. It's a lousy, lousy movie. High school, fooling around with a camera and your buddies bad. Bradley Cooper is in it. Hit and Run looks like another of their backyard projects. I like both of them, but you can't just throw stuff at the screen and say "let's see if this sticks" and hope to come out looking anything more than amateurish.

Reagen Sulewski: I'm sort of sympathetic to Dax on this one, to be honest. By all accounts the movie is no good, but it was made for $2 million, and more than doubled that on its first weekend. It's no blockbuster and something you'd probably not even bother with when it comes up on cable, but he's living his own dream and just happened to get someone to finance it for him, and made sure he got them their money back.

David Mumpower: Warning to Kristen Bell: your significant other spends far too much time thinking about prison life. First, there was Let's Go to Prison and now there is the prison rape humor of Hit and Run. I would wager Dax Shepherd's favorite scene in The Shawkshank Redemption occurs much earlier in the film than the prison escape/reunion most of us would choose.

Hit and Run's commercials were among the worst I've seen since Freddy Got Fingered. Its failure is not a surprise. The better question is why someone believed that ad buys for this project were a good investment. To a larger point, I would make a passionate plea to the supremely talented Kristen Bell. PLEASE fire your agent and stop agreeing to projects with your boyfriend. You should be a superstar, not a punchline.

Timing is everything.

Kim Hollis: 2016 Obama's America expanded into 1,091 theaters this weekend and earned $6.5 million. How did Rocky Mountain Pictures accomplish such a solid weekend performance for a documentary?

Bruce Hall: If you have influence over people, the easiest way to motivate your followers is to demonize your opponents. There's a segment of the population that wants their opinions handed to them, because thinking is hard. And even if the economy wasn't still in the tank, there are a lot of people who will never accept Barack Obama's presidency just....because. Things are never as bad or as good as they seem but if truth is the first casualty of politics, logic is the second. All of these things make it easy for a conservative themed opinion piece to flourish in an election year. Hooray for fear!

Jason Barney: I hadn't even heard of 2016 Obama's America until this week, so I don't think this one is going to have any staying power. Still, it is a headline, and politically leaning documentaries have made money in the past. One of the reasons this probably won't catch on very much beyond the people that really need to see it is that folks are really fed up with politicians right now. It is almost as though you and I and the average person in the street know that the system is broken, but the people involved in the system don't realize they are part of the problem. So why will this film be a flash in the pan? The market for this is extremely small, and anyone who wants to see this message can just turn on Fox News at any point in the day, anyway.

I hope the people who really need to have their perceptions reinforced by a film like this go and see "The Campaign". I saw that flick a few weeks ago and was disappointed. The humor was kinda childish and very raw.

Continued:       1       2       3