Short Movie Reviews: Neighbors, Trust Me, Mystery Team, The Objective

Neighbors (2014)

Seth Rogan and Rose Byrne are a married couple with a newborn child living in a nice house in a nice neighborhood.  Everything looks great until Zac Efron and his fraternity move into the house next door.  From there, the two neighbors go to war.  I found this film to be pretty amusing without quite making me laugh out loud.  But the charisma of the actors went far enough to make it an enjoyable time.

Trust Me (2013)

Clark Gregg plays a down on his luck agent for child stars in Hollywood who befriends a teen actress (Saxon Sharbino) so talented, she may revive his career.  It starts out as a comedy, then takes a hard turn into drama.  As a comedy, it's really good; as a drama, it's a mixed bag, with an over the top, noirish ending.  It's not a bad film, and there are some wonderful performances here, but it will make you long for the great film that could have come from the same cast and material.





Mystery Team (2009)

It's about a team of stunted, adolescent detectives who are faced with solving a murder, forcing them to come of age.  It's a very dumb film, but that's by design.  The contrast between these wide-eyed innocent teens (led by Donald Glover, who was drafted by Dan Harmon to be in the sit-com Community after seeing this film) and the very adult world they're forced to contend with can be laugh out loud funny.  But as many of the jokes miss as hit, so it makes it hard for me to fully recommend the film.  Still, it's a lot better than your average Adam Sandler flick...

The Objective (2008) 

This one was recommended to me by a website that specializes in obscure movies; once I rented it, I noticed that it had been slammed by the critics-- but after watching it, I couldn't quite understand why.  It's about a CIA agent who leads a military special ops team in search of mysterious weapon in the mountains of Afghanistan; the further they go, the more bewildering things get.  It was made by the same guy who did The Blair Witch Project, and many reviewers compare it to that film, though I felt it was quite different in execution.  There's not a lot of deep character work here, and the low budget can be felt, but the director creates a lot of tension and an effective sense of mystery.  If it had been a movie on the SyFy channel, everybody would've praised it.