February 23: What Vicky Is Watching

Hey hey! Welcome back to WVIW! The weekly sesh where I review, rate and recommend the movies and shows that are SO. DARN. GOOD. No genre or platform is off limits. I missed last week and I am totally sorry but I was eating nuts and kicking butts over at Geek For Win where, I'm proud to announce, I'm now a contributor. GFTW is an exciting new place to fangirl (and fanboy) over all things geeky you simply muuuuuust check it out!
This week on WVIW I’m including some disappointments and duds ‘cuz I promise you real talk and honest reviews! The days are too short and our to-watch list is WAY too long to squander them on the meh! So, let’s crack into it like Tippy-Toe with a walnut! (Ok, I'm done with the Squirrel Girl references... for now.)

Limited series Miracle Workers airs Tuesdays at 10:30 p.m. on TBS (or stream online). Source: IMDB

Cable: Miracle Workers

The Short of It: Up in Heaven Inc. God (Steve Buscemi), with his frizzy, bristly mop of gray hair and unkempt janky hobo duds spends his days watching tv screen after tv screen of disasters going down on Earth. Disillusioned by the melting ice caps, raging forest fires, drought and famine, and obvs so. much. more. he'd rather spend his days snacking on junk food. When an ambitious angel, Eliza (Geraldine Viswanathan), is transferred to Heaven Inc.'s prayer department she’s dismayed by how out of touch her socially awkward partner Craig (Daniel Radcliffe) is. Play-it-safe Craig would rather grant prayers to find lost car keys and gloves than say, save a defenseless hiker from wolves. Thousands of years of sorting prayers doesn’t change that Craig sends hundreds of thousands of impossible prayers to God every day. God, who doesn’t give ‘em a second thought or even attempt to help. When God gathers his Angels and declares his master plan is to blow up the hopelessly doomed Earth Eliza makes a deal with him-- if she and Craig can make an impossible prayer possible in two weeks, he'll have to spare Earth. Sooo save humanity and make a miracle, #NBD, right?  

What Vicky Thinks: There’s no delicate way to put this. TBS’s Miracle Workers pilot episode is an uneven, uninteresting, and unfunny bore. Even Dan Radcliffe’s and Steve Buscemi’s combined star power can’t give Miracle Workers wings to keep pace with the other workplace and fantasy cable comedies airing today like...well... The Good Place. The offbeat concept and casting (I’m a big fan of both men’s filmographies) were enough for me to tune in to the premiere on February 12th but, as the show limped along it wasn’t enough to keep me entertained.
The run time is less than 30 minutes but Miracle Workers barely has a pulse. Even though the plot's clock is a’ tickin’ till the apocalypse. For a limited series to start off on such shaky footing doesn’t bode well for anyone.

Visually, Heaven Inc. is so boooring. It’s a bland world designed like a warehouse, all windowless industrially metal walls, and awash in a color palette that’s gray on gray on gray, that it’s almost painfully unattractive to watch. Along with that the characters simply aren’t given enough to do (in one scene Dan Radcliffe huddles under a blanket clicking away at his computer “answering” prayers) and have damp and dull dialogue that’s completely drained of the camp and what looked to be a quirky, dark comedy TBS promised in Miracle Workers teaser trailers. It's barely a comedy at all.  

2 out of 5 Stars. I don't need to see the future to predict that a premature cancellation is in the cards for Miracle Workers. The premise -- save humanity by engineering a miracle-- is churned out so lifelessly that the few moments and elements that work (like Geraldine Viswanathan’s peppy and determined Eliza), are smothered by the ones that fail spectacularly. Will I watch episode 2? Ehh...🤷🏻‍♀️

Rebel Wilson and Liam Hemsworth in Isn't It Romantic Source: IMDB.   

In Theatres: Isn’t It Romantic

The Short of It: Thirtysomething NYC architect Natalie has a dumpy cramped apartment, a smelly, stubborn dog and despite being one of the lead architects at her firm her designs and proposals are brushed off and ignored. Relegated to coffee runs and copy machine repairs, Natalie is the definition of underappreciated. Her only friends? Her “assistant” Whitney (Betty Gilpin) who streams and swoons over gushy rom-coms every day and her dorky yet down-to-earth co-worker Josh (Adam Devine), who constantly invites her to go to karaoke night. Known for her burning hatred and cynicism towards rom-coms everything changes when a mad struggle with a sleazy mugger on the subway ends with Nat plowing head first into a metal pole and knocking herself unconscious. She wakes up to find (horror of horrors!) she’s trapped in a rom-friggen’-com movie! What's a woman who learned from her mum at a very young age that girls like her (ones that can stop runaway street food carts with their bodies as a vendor screams they’re “built like a truck!”) aren’t rom-com movie material, to do?!

What Vicky Thinks: Hell-bent on roasting everything about rom-coms, Isn’t It Romantic plunges headfirst into the syrupy sweet genre taking its tropes to extremes. New York City is now a lavender-scented, couple-filled PG-13 universe full of pastel, candy-colored cupcake shops, cafes, and bakeries. Natalie has a chic Williams-Sonoma-ized apartment, her office coworkers adore her, and she's suddenly beguiling to every man she meets, especially "CW handsome" new client Blake (Liam Hemsworth). Nat can’t drop any f-bombs and any time she tries to get to the naughty bits with Blake the scene skips ahead to the next morning.

Although it's not consistently laugh-out-loud funny Isn’t It Romantic is escapist entertainment. Riffing on signature rom-com cliches Isn’t It Romantic features Nat belting out Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” in a karaoke battle to bust up a love triangle and win her man (complete with back up dancers), a giant group choreographed dance to Madonna and a romantic rival in gorg yoga ambassador Isabella (Priyanka Chopra).

One of the most humorous and lively parts of Isn't It Romantic is Natalie’s scenes with her GBF neighbor Donny (Brandon Scott Jones). While he's one humongous stereotype and "setting gay rights back, like, a hundred years" Donny's chemistry with Natalie is especially standout and memorable. The shrill and campy queen, like all other GBFs before him, exists to cheer Natalie on and dispense his cliche wisdom while making sure GIRL. GETS. HER. MAN. Even if it’s NOT the hunky man with the restaurant grade pepper grinder sized peen, but an average Joe (hmm..wonder who!) whose decidedly unsexy nickname is “mush”. And Jones nails it with his comedic timing and delivery every time.

3 out of 5 Stars. While Isn’t It Romantic embraces an unapologetically ridiculous tone, its rom is predictable and its com isn't as funny as it thinks it is. Even worse? The plot takes a promising turn towards self-love only to be diluted by a gimmicky happy ending. It goes from parodying cliches to actually peddling them. Despite those flaws Isn’t It Romantic authentically brings visibility to oft-ignored plus-sized women characters. Fueled by heart, depth, and confidence Natalie's (and Rebel's) body size isn’t used as a punch line. By defying typecasting Rebel Wilson’s Natalie as the sassy, loud, fat sidekick who’s just there to bolster up a conventionally skinny protagonist, Isn’t It Romantic redefines rom-coms. Unfortunately, the script does not play up to her strengths or use her full potential. But for a fluffy, absurdist, just for kicks flick, it hits the mark and then some!

The Ritual is currently streaming on Netflix. Source: IMDB. 

Streaming: The Ritual

The Short of It: Six months after the sudden and violent death of their friend Rob (Paul Reid), four friends (Dom, Hutch, Luke, and Phil) embark on a lads holiday to Sweden. It never crosses their mind that the hiking trip along the Kungsleden, “Kings Trail”, may be their last. When Dom (Sam Troughton) takes a tumble, gravely injuring his knee Hutch (Robert James-Collier) quickly decides that taking a shortcut through the middle of the woods will cut their traveling time in half and keep them from being declared missing. Little do they know this “detour” leads to unimaginable darkness and danger. The kind that will haunt them forever...if it doesn’t kill them first.

What Vicky Thinks: The Ritual’s unnerving and foreboding ambiance doesn’t come from jump scares or torrents of blood but, instead, the character of the Swedish forest itself. The densely clustered spindly trees close in on the men and stretch on endlessly. Suffocating them with weighty silence, mere slivers of the surrounding black forest seep through the skewer-like branches. As the friends plunge deeper into the darkness they find an elk pierced on tree branches, splayed openly widely, its entrails piled wetly beneath it, and eerie and chilling ancient runes carved into the bark of every tree in sight.

Luke (Rafe Spall), the only one to witness Rob’s death, navigates the woods, hammered by increasingly surreal and nightmarish flashbacks of Rob’s brutal murder. Masterfully dark and twisted, it becomes tricky to pick apart the recurrent traumatic delusions from the equally horrific reality of the forest.

The Ritual sets itself apart from other supernatural horror films with its distinctly British script (the dialogue is terrific) and its emphasis on showing the friendship between the men. Strained as it may be (now in their 40s the guys lost the closeness they had in their university days), they often take the mickey out of one another. But here’s the thing, their bantering,bickering, and teasing doesn’t diffuse the disturbing energy in the increasingly claustrophobic wilderness. It actually intensifies it.

Like when some of the men ignore the obvious (umm MAJOR dark juju) and insist on breaking into a sketchy abandoned shack deep in the woods and hunkering down for the night. As torrential rain pounds down, the men are in for a very wet very unsettling night. Gripping, and pulsing with dread and anxiety, it culminates in a shocking and blood-curdling scene. Dom wakes up screaming with deep bloody gashes carved int his skin, Luke standing outside amongst the trees with his chest bleeding, and Phil (Arsher Ali) naked and bowing in prayer to a cultish effigy. Headless and antler-handed the effigy is as nauseatingly creepy as Hereditary's Paimon that begins. Dominating the screen (and our attention) with its atmospheric setting, savage, unseen force️s hunting the men and compelling characters The Ritual amplifies our deeply rooted, instinctual human fears to new heights.

4 and 1/2 out of 5 Stars. The Ritual is a harrowing monster movie that takes the horror of what human beings are capable of and threads it with the sinister unknown of supernatural forces. Designed unlike any other other movie monster seeing the grotesque CGI creature fully makes the pay off for watching The Ritual So. Darn. Worth. It. A must-see screen gem for any and all horror and supernatural fans. The Ritual is streaming on Netflix.

Source: GIPHY 

So, friends have you seen these movies or this show? What did you think?

And if you haven't, what are YOU watching this week? Leave a comment below!