RSS
Greetings! Have you ever wondered if a movie's worth blowing the money on to see at the theater or what to add next to your NetFlix queue? Then you've come to the right place! Enjoy!

"Piece by Piece" Review


 If you've heard any pop or hip-hop music in the past quarter-century, you've probably heard music performed or produced by Pharrell Williams like 2013's "Happy" from the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack. Now he gets his own documentary retrospective directed by Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom) with a truly unique twist: It's told with Legos. As in, everyone and everything is depicted with animation like The Lego Movie.

 Starting with his childhood in Virginia Beach where he went to school with his future Neptunes collaborator Chad Hugo as well as future hip-hop superstars Timbaland and Missy Elliott (I had no idea they hailed from the same place and time), it colorfully follows their struggles to get discovered in a town without a music industry until New Jack Swing kingpin Teddy Riley plants his operation in town.

Including interviews with Gwen Stefani, Kendrick Lamar, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Pusha-T, along with various music biz folks, it's your usual career overview spiced up with the Lego presentation which allows for the beats he makes to be depicted as glowing, pulsing constructs. It definitely makes for a different experience.

Where Piece by Piece stumbles is in the usual places like never telling the viewer what freaking year any of these events are happening and breezing over details like his attending Northwestern University for a couple of years and that Timbaland is his cousin which I just discovered looking at his Wikipedia page. (Seriously, WTF? I'm docking a half-point for that omission.)

Why he split from his friend and partner Hugo is never explained and the obligatory veer into race politics where a wealthy black man who sought to be a crossover sensation and made plenty of money off of white folks decides to traffic in the damnable and debunked "Hands up! Don't shoot!" lie for a Kendrick Lamar track dampens the fun.

There is also a problem with the Lego conceit in that by the virtue of portraying everyone as minifigs, they all look the same other than hair styles and at times it gets difficult to recognize who's talking because they only flash credits once or twice. At one point I thought they'd introduced a new speaker, but it was Williams in different clothes, or "clothes" since they're just decals on plastic.That said, the visuals are as good as the various Lego movies.

 When I become Emperor of the Universe I intend to use N.E.R.D.'s "Lapdance" as my walkout music - you know it from Kingpin's introduction in the Ben Affleck Daredevil movie - and as a "He did that?" primer of Williams' career, Piece by Piece is a different way of covering the high points (and a few of the low ones), but despite the unique animation format, it ultimately falls a little flat in its superficiality. But because of the style, I ended up watching it when I may not have bothered with a straight-up presentation.

Score: 6.5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently exclusively on Peacock.)

"Maria" 4K Review


 I grew up listening to opera because my mom was a huge opera buff. The King and Queen of her fandom were tenor Franco Corelli and mega-diva prima donna soprano Maria Callas, who final days are the subject of Maria, a Netflix Original biopic starring Angelina Jolie, making an unsuccessful run for Oscar appreciation for the first time in ages. 

Opening on Sept. 16, 1977 with authorities arriving in her Paris apartment to take her body away (she was only 53), the film then goes back a week to show Callas's life in her opulent home, accompanied by her two dogs and her butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and housemaid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), the former whom she is constantly requesting he move the grand piano around.

She hasn't performed for several years and has been abusing prescription drugs including Mandrax, a sedative which can cause hallucinations like the young filmmaker, also named Mandrax (get it?) played by Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Name of the Dog), who has arrived to interview her and follows her around town. She also imagines she is encountering scenarios where a crowd flash mobs the Anvil Chorus from Carmen or an orchestra & choir in front of a church in the rain are doing Madame Butterfly.

There are also flashbacks to her prime years and her ill-starred love affair with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), whom she met in 1957 and eventually left her husband for only to have Ari end up marrying the widow Jackie Kennedy, thus becoming Jackie O. These black & white flashbacks include a news-to-me scene where her mother appeared to be pimping her daughters out to German and Italian officer during WWII and the officer who chooses Maria tells her to not bother disrobing, but just sing for him.

Callas is also meeting with conductor Jeffrey Tate (Stephen Ashfield) to test her voice for a potential comeback, but it's clear that ship has sailed and sunk and that only fuels her despair more.

On paper, Maria should've been a sure fire Oscar bait film. Chilean director Pablo LarraĆ­n's past films have included 2016's Jackie and 2021's Spencer which earned stars Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart Best Actress nominations for portraying Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana, respectively. Jolie has been mostly absent from acting beyond voice work in the Kung Fu Panda series and the two Maleficent live-action Disney joints for almost 15 years. Her last big movies - 2021's Taylor Sheridan misfire Those Who Wish Me Dead and Marvel misfire Eternals did poorly in the post-Hot Fad Plague world - and her last Oscar nomination was 2008's Changeling. Her last Oscar and Golden Globe wins were literally a quarter-century ago; she's due for a comeback.

Sadly, it didn't happen partially because the Academy chose to throw away a Best Actress nomination on a man who is currently as of this writing being disavowed by Hollyweird because he made politically incorrect tweets some years back, but mostly because despite some critical kudos, it sank without a trace on the endless shelves of Netflix content mostly due to it being quite slow and dull. (The missus fell asleep and I struggled myself.)

Choosing to focus on the final days of her life makes the experience into just waiting for her to die. We don't know really understand why she was reduced to a reclusive life with her dogs and staff. The flashbacks to her relationship with Onassis don't really sell this supposedly deep love between a self-described short, ugly man who doesn't like opera and the diva.

That said, I liked the fantastical Impressionistic hallucination-fueled musical vignettes and appreciated Jolie's ghostly performance of a woman who stop living years before, yet never quite let go of the life she led. Bucking the trend of most awards-bait imitation performances, she eschews the use of prosthetics to transform her familiar visage into Callas' more honker-forward look. She chooses to act Callas, not cosplay Callas. I thought it was a subtle performance with flashes of vibrancy with minimal scene chewing, but the missus disagreed, for what it's worth.

 Ultimately, the only Oscar nomination Maria received was for Edward Lachman's period-evoking cinematography. Current day scenes have a muted color palate while flashbacks are in lustrous B&W. It's not much in the way of a Dolby Vision showcase, but the Atmos audio is clear and enveloping.

My mom had a stroke in 2007 and passed away in 2018 and thus missed this biopic of her favorite soprano as well as 2016's Florence Foster Jenkins which starred Meryl Steep as the literal antithesis of quality opera singing. I wonder what she would've thought of them both?

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"Babygirl" Review


 Back in the last century there was a workplace teen-oriented alleged comedy called Empire Records which opened with an employee taking the cash from the record store's safe then going to a casino where he proceeds to lose all the store's money. Watching this I remarked to the missus that this movie was set in an alternate universe where the people look like humans, but don't act in any way like real humans. This alternate universe appears to be the setting for Nicole Kidman's failed Oscar-bait run Babygirl. Wikipedia says it's an "erotic thriller", but just having nudity and sexual content doesn't equal erotic and there are zero thrills, but plenty of eye rolls.

Kidman stars as Romy Mathis, founder and CEO of a robotics company, who is married to theater director Jacob (Antonio Banderas), has two teen daughters - Nora (Vaughan Reilly) and Isabel (Esther McGregor, Ewan's daughter), the latter whom is gay and her parents are thrilled because of course - a gorgeous apartment in the city and mansion in the country, and for some reason an unhappy sex life. Despite the film opening with her appearing to be having happy fun times with Jacob, she later goes elsewhere in the apartment to look at porn on her laptop while bad touching herself to completion.

 Things change with the arrival of Samuel (Harris Dickinson, A Murder at the End of the World), one of the new interns. She'd previously seen him tame a dog that was attacking a pedestrian and was impressed by him. He then approaches her saying he chose her to be his mentor through the corporate mentor program. She said she wasn't part of that (being CEO and all), but he insists and because she apparently doesn't look at her Outlook calendar and the plot has to happen, she takes the meeting and responds to his inappropriate behavior not with showing him the door, but embarking on a ludicrous sexual relationship where he orders her around and makes her demean herself to him.

When she makes half-hearted moves to break things off, he reminds her that he could destroy her life with a phone call to HR, but doesn't want to. So she goes along with the affair even when he shows up at her country place (allegedly to bring her work laptop) to sit with the family and shows up with her assistant, Esme (Sophie Wilde, Talk To Me), who is dating Samuel, and not-so-subtly lets her boss know she knows what's going on and needs more opportunities for women in the firm.

There is so much wrong with Babygirl it's hard to pick a starting point to tear it apart, but let's go with what the missus immediately sounded off about during the movie, the absolutely ridonkulous choice of Dickinson as the guy a smart, wealthy, powerful woman would risk her entire world for. He's not particularly handsome (we agree that Austin Butler would've at least made some sense) or interesting and is a jerk.

Even allowing for the premise that aging women want to prove they can snag a younger man - because Banderas is dog food or something (note: while he's not Desperado hot, he's still suave in the silver fox department) - he's not really a catch and the whole HR angle makes him even less valid an option. (If he was a cater waiter at some charity event she decided to bang in the coat check room would make more sense.)

 The implication that this was all a set-up by her assistant in retribution for not paying her enough career attention requires a plan with a zillion single points of failure to execute flawlessly. If at any point Romy doesn't go for Samuel's advances, it's over. And how would she even know that Romy was susceptible to another man?

Dutch writer-director Helena Reijn apparently was inspired by sexual films like Indecent Proposal and Basic Instinct and possibly wanted to comment on women in power, women in unsatisfactory relationships - Romy says she's never orgasmed with Jabob in their two decades married; considering who she's married to, seems like a her problem for not even mentioning it - but does nothing with these seeds of ideas. I can think of so many different ways the story could've been told as an All About Eve meets The Assistant story, but as it exists Babygirl does nothing smart and so much dumb.

 And bearing the brunt of this failure is poor Kidman, who demeans & exposes herself chasing Oscar only to have the final nomination slot go to a dude because Hollyweird wants to figuratively burn itself down with the public in addition to LA burning. She gives her all even when the script doesn't deserve it and as the missus asked, who thought this was a good idea? It wouldn't even cut it as an episode of Red Shoes Diaries.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

"Star Trek: Section 31" 4K Review


 Matching Star Wars for sheer IP self-destruction has been Star Trek. After dwindling quality & box office returns of the J.J. Abrams' so-called "Kelvin Timeline", there have been several bad streaming series on Paramount+ starting with Star Trek: Discovery (never has an abbreviation - STD - been so appropriate) which was so bad I bailed out after just a few episodes of the 2nd season.

The Picard series was even worse as it took the best Enterprise Captain and made him a sad, broken old man for two seasons before streaming Trek boss Alex Kurtzman (one of the Bad Robot hacks famed for typing Transformers movies) wandered away and left a third and final season in the hands of the actually talented Terry Metalas who made it a very good Star Trek: The Next Generation bonus season which somehow prompted Will Riker actor Jonathan Frakes to deliver a performance I'd never would've believed possible.

 Strange New Worlds has been a mixed bag, but not the crapfest of STD. I don't watch the kid-oriented Prodigy or animated Lower Decks

So what of Star Trek: Section 31, the former TV series converted into a short feature film starring the awesome Michelle Yeoh - make that ACADEMY AWARD WINNER FOR BEST ACTRESS MICHELLE FREAKING YEOH! - as a member of a secret Starfleet Intelligence black ops group? The reviews were bad and the Trek purists were debating whether Section 31 violated Gene Roddenberry's Utopian vision of the future. But I was just looking for some sci-fi fun with Yeoh being hot and badass. I was willing to give it some slack because I'm not a purist. So how is it?

To quote The Critic's Jay Sherman, "It stinks!"

How bad does it stink? It's I turned it off after 20 minutes because life is too short to waste on clearly subpar entertainment stinky.

 Yeoh stars as the Phillipa Georgiou brought over from the Mirror Universe toward the end of STD's first season to replace the Discovery Captain who died in the second episode. Why she was brought over, I can't recall and I don't care enough to look up, but this Georgiou was Emperor of the Terran Empire and a Very Bad Person. But in a post-credit scene of the season finale, someone invited her to join Section 31, leaving her a snazzy black Starfleet badge.

It was meant to be a prelude to a Section 31 series but in the SEVEN YEARS between that epilogue and the arrival of this movie, they couldn't figure out how to write the series and, more critically, Yeoh had experienced a career Renaissance with her role in Crazy Rich Asians leading to her Oscar-winning turn in Everything Everywhere All At Once. It's hard to get someone at that level to commit to a streaming TV show and they gave up and converted it into a feature. They shouldn't have bothered.

 It opens with a flashback with a young Georgiou (Miku Martineau, Netflix's Kate) returning to her family after participating in what sounds like The Hunger Games to determine who gets to be Emperor. The final test for her turns out to be having to poison her entire family, parents and siblings. Whoa. Then the boy she had teamed up with (sound familiar) is beamed down, defeated because he couldn't kill his family (wuss) and she burns his face with a sword and is hailed as Emperor. (Why an Emperor is chosen this way isn't explained, but it sure makes strange women in ponds distributing swords seem like a reasonable system.)

After that grimdark opening, we're given a slapdash info dump for the majority of those who didn't watch STD as to who Georgiou is, her taste for genocidal atrocities, before closing with the clanger, "This dog bites." (Wut? Was "This kitten has claws" deemed too casual?) We're told that she is at some space casino outside Federation space, so Section 31 needs to go and entice her back into the fold to help locate some Very Bad Tech which could cause Very Bad Things to happen.

She is approached by Alok (Omari Hardwick, Starz's Power), a purported Bad Guy who is offering a deal to her. But in a moment that will seem familiar to those who've seen Vin Diesel's xXx movies, she immediately spots that he's Section 31 as are the rest of his squad who failed to blend into the crowd at the casino. Womp womp!

We are then introduced to the team and it was at that point I punched out. Everyone was Very Colorful and spoke in wisecracks while Yeoh camped it up like an Asian Mae West. This is a former genocidal Emperor who murdered her family for power in a game show? The fact they started with such a dark opening then switched to broad comedy indicated they had no idea what sort of tone they were going for and that you can't have everyone be a smart-ass.

I was about to slag credited screenwriter Craig Sweeny, mostly known as a TV writer on The 4400, Medium, and Elementary, but I also see he developed the TV series version of Limitless which was a really clever & fun continuation of the 2011 Bradley Cooper film of the same name that was one of my faves of that year, if not the fave. I fell off watching Elementary in the third season or so for no specific reason other I don't watch a lot of television, but Sweeny wrote a lot of episodes when I was watching. So he's not a total hack, but the reports of Development Hell suggests that he may have been more the loser of a credit hot potato contest to see who gets to be the scapegoat.

Obviously, I can't pass further judgement of Section 31 because I simply gave up, but that's judgement enough and I saw this as someone who watched every episode of Batwoman.

Score: DNF/10. SKIP IT!

"Anora" Review


 With the announcement of the 2025 Oscar nominees last week, thus begins the Oscars Death March, my annual slog attempting to see as many of the nominated films and performances as possible before the Oscars are handed out so I can determine whether the Academy got it right or not. (Last year's Death March recap & my Oscar votes are here.)

Having only seen two of the ten Best Picture contenders so far - Dune: Part 2 and The Substance - there's a lot to catch up with so tonight we kick the March off with Anora, nominated for six Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actress, Supporting Actor, and Editing) and winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2024.

Mikey Madison stars as Anora "Ani" Mikheeva, a stripper at a high-end NYC strip club. One night, because she can speak some Russian, she's tapped to entertain Ivan "Vanya" Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), the spoiled brat son of a Russian oligarch. Liking what he's getting at the club, he asks if she does anything outside of work which leads her to visit Ivan's family mansion in Brooklyn where he pays her for sex.

After several visits he asks if he could rent her companionship for a full week, offering $10,000. She counters with $15,000 and the deal is sealed. (Time for some Pretty Woman hijinx, right?) She accompanies him and a couple of his buddies to Vegas for high roller partying.

Concerned that he's going to have to go back to Russia as his visa is running out (wait, people actually heed those?) he proposes to her so he can get a green card and she agrees. So off to a Vegas wedding chapel and then a shopping spree (not set to "Pretty Woman" lest people catch on) with a big rock ring. And they lived happily ever after. 

Psyche! No, what actually happens is word has made it back to his parents in Russia, so Toros (Karren Karagulian), an Armenian who is the family's man in town, is commanded to get to the bottom of the things and he dispatches Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (nominated Yura Borisov) to pay Ivan a visit. 

When they arrive, Ivan bolts the scene and Ani makes it very difficult for them to subdue her. When Toros arrives, he is horrified by the situation especially due to Ivan's parents being en route for a meeting at noon the next day expecting that the marriage be annulled by then. But they need Ivan present which means finding him, so they set off on a bonkers quest to find her wayward husband. 

While Anora is modestly entertaining overall, it is yet again another movie showered with praise when there is little substance to it, like, say, The Substance. The Palme d'Or is Cannes' Best Picture award and frankly I am mystified why such a thin movie was bestowed with the highest praise.

To cut to the core of the script's key deficiency, here is everything we learn about Ani in over two hours of movie:

  • She's 23 years old.
  • She lives with her sister.
  • Her mother lives with "her man" in Miami.

That's it. Why is she a sex worker? Don't know. Why does she instantly fall for this scrawny twerp who would rather play videogames than boink the woman he's paid for and why does she believe this is a fairy tale romance destined to last forever? Ya got me. She has no agency and everything flows from other people's decisions. If Ivan hadn't asked her to turn extracurricular tricks, she never would've seen him again. If he didn't need a green card he never would've proposed and she's back giving lap dances and turning tricks.

Let's compare her to another famous movie hooker, Jamie Lee Curtis's Ophelia in Trading Places who delivers this monologue to Dan Aykroyd's Winthrop when she brings him home because he's homeless due to the plot:

Look, I'm 24 years old. I'm from a small, miserable, little mining town you probably never heard of. The only thing I got going for me in this whole big, wide world, is this body, this face, and [points to head] what I got up here. I don't do drugs. And I don't have a pimp. This place is a dump. But it's cheap, it's clean and it's all mine. I've saved 42 grand and it's in T-Bills earning interest. I figure I got three more years on my back. I'll have enough to retire on.

 There is more character detail in that paragraph than the entirety of Anora. We know where Ophelia is coming from, where she is, and where she plans to be eventually. 

Or let's look at Pretty Woman, which Anora clearly aspires to be a hard-R tribute to. I'm not going to lie, I had to refresh myself on the plot because it's been decades since I've seen it, but the romance between Richard Gere and Julia Roberts grew from each character's effects on each other beyond the initial transactional nature of their relationship. Also not going to lie when I say I want to visit the alternate universe where the original story, titled 3000 (for the number of dollars she got paid for the week), was made with Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin (reprising their Sea of Love team-up) and ended with her junkie hooker being sent back to the streets at the end. Bleak.

Quadruple-threat Sean Baker - nominated here for producing, directing, writing, and editing - brings the naturalistic, pseudo-documentary style with mostly unfamiliar casts here as he did in 2017's The Florida Project where only Willem Dafoe (who received an Oscar nomination) was a recognizable face. While Madison was in Scream V and Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood, I don't recall her and I never saw the FX series she was on for five seasons either. As for the rest of the cast, zip, zero, zilch. And that helps the situations go down because the lack of celebrity means you have no idea what's going to happen (presuming famous = plot armor).

Madison is appealing and spunky, but as noted has nothing to play but Ani's delusional fantasy of love. (And kudos for not being an actress who plays strippers as if they were Amish.) Eydelshteyn is OK as well, but his character is such a one-note sack of manure, you spend most of the time hoping his family tosses him out of their private jet over the Atlantic Ocean.

Borisov has the sleeper role as the quieter of the henchmen tasked with keeping Ani under control and as the only one who doesn't seem to be a total scumbag. His general decency leads to the final scene which almost burned the goodwill I'd extended this slight film.

Without spoiling the ending, Ani seems utterly incapable of relating to men any way but transactionally. Because Baker didn't bother to give her a backstory, we don't know if she ever had a boyfriend or why she views sex as just something men pay for and the only way she knows how to reciprocate kindness is with sex. She is a sad empty young woman, but because we're not supposed to judge anyone - especially the holy "sex workers" - we're expected to applaud her moxie and fighting spirit even though she's fighting for nothing worth fighting for.

Baker is know for his movies about the people on the fringes of acceptable society like the poor folks living in motels in Orlando in The Florida Project or the trans prostitute in Tangerine. But by making Ani off-limits from judgement and a cypher as an individual, then she is reduced to just a body to leer at, use and discard when finished with. This is the nasty secret that "sex-positive feminism" hides in encouraging women to exploit themselves on Only Fans or as strippers and prostitutes: Women are only worth what men are willing to pay them for their bodies. Who cares about their minds or souls? So doesn't that make feminism a scam to serve men?

If there's an upside to Anora's tale of sex work, Armenian goons serving Russian oligarchs, it's that it could've been a whole lot meaner and violent. But if it had been, the comedic moments would've clashed. It's all played as a goof here, but without characters we can even know, much less relate to, it's just a couple of hours looking, but not touching anything emotionally tangible.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Nosferatu (2024)" 4K Review


 Current art house belle of the ball Robert Eggars (The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman) fulfills his lifelong dream of remaking the movie which inspired him to become a filmmaker with The Nosferatu, a remake of the 1922 German film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror which itself was an unauthorized knockoff of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Who says Hollyweird doesn't have any fresh new ideas?

Lily-Rose Depp stars as Ellen Hutter, a lonely young woman in early-19th Century Germany who in the prologue wishes for a guardian angel to comfort her, somehow making a connection to Nosferatu. How? Don't know. We then jump to "years later" where she is married to Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult, Juror #2), a young real estate agent who seeks to become a partner with the Knock brokerage to provide stable income to support what he hopes will be a family.

Herr Knock (Simon McBurney, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation), charges Thomas with the task of traveling to Transylvania to have the deed to a local ramshackle mansion signed by the buyer, Count Orlok (Bill SkarsgĆ„rd, IT, John Wick: Chapter 4), who anyone who knows anything about vampire lore knows is a vampire. After a fraught journey, Thomas gets Orlock's John Hancock on the deed, but also signs a document the Count presents him written in a foreign language which is just your standard "I now own your wife's soul" boilerplate. Whoops.

Meanwhile, Ellen is staying with their friends, wealthy shipbuilder Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kick-Ass) and his wife Anna (Emma Corrin, Deadpool & Wolverine) and their two daughters (with another baby on the way), and being a poor house guest due to her horrific nightmares and sleepwalking. She fears for Thomas' life and the monster coming her way.

Thomas barely escapes Orlok's clutches and Ellen's condition stumps Dr. Wilhelm Siever (Ralph Ineson, The Green Knight), so he consults his former teacher, Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), a somewhat disgraced figure as he began delving into the occult. Von Franz deduces that her condition and the arrival of a ship that crashed into the harbor, unleashing a flood of rats and plague are connected and it's going to take great sacrifice to save the city. Lots of death and sadness ensue.

I'm not a big follower of vampire media. I've seen Francis Ford Coppola's campy Bram Stoker's Dracula, Interview with the Vampire, used to watch The Vampire Diaries but never saw a single Twilight film (because I'm a man, baby!) and despite owning the entire Universal Monsters Blu-ray box set for ages, still haven't seen the original Dracula. But the general outline of Dracula lore and imagery from the original Nosferatu are part of the collective knowledge of anyone with more than a cursory interest in vampire films. So I don't really have an overarching interest in how this went one way or another.

That said, I was left lukewarm by Nosferatu. While very stylish - Eggars' go-to cinematographer Jarin Blaschke is nominated for his lens work - and moody, it didn't feel like anything particularly special or necessary. The amped-up for modern audiences sexuality also seems more icky than erotic probably owing to the controversial choice to make SkarsgƄrd's Orlok historically accurate to what a 16th Century Hungarian noble may look.

Too quote my life accomplice, "Why does he have a porn stache? It's distracting me." Unlike me, she's big on the whole vampire thing while drawing the line at the Twilight books (though she did watch the movies because of course) and has seen a lot of spins on the concepts, but she just couldn't even Orlok here. She also felt Depp's performance was too horny and overwrought. I someone disagree; I think it's was a choice, but I'm not going to the mattresses over.

 Despite oodles of noirish style and game performances, Nosferatu lacks substantive bite. The 4k Doby Vision presentation helps with black levels, but definitely watch it on an OLED in a dark room if you want to see anything. On the audio front, Orlok's voice booms enough to get the subwoofer something to chew on.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"They Live" 4K Review


Memory is a funny thing, especially with movies from the 1980s. Revisiting movies from that time too frequently makes one question how one could've thought it was pretty good when on second glance, it's quite not so good. Such as it was with Coming to America for me several years ago and once again with tonight's feature, the 1988 (same as Coming to America!) John Carpenter cult classic They Live.

WWF (now WWE) wrestler Roddy Piper stars as Nada (something I just learned from the credits as he's never referred to by name), a drifter newly arrived in Los Angeles from Denver, seeking work. After snagging a job doing construction, a co-worker, Frank (Keith David), takes him to a shanty town where he can stay. (So the homeless problem isn't a recent phenomenon?) While watching TV, the broadcast is interrupted by a hack where the speaker warns that humanity is cattle and a signal must be shut off at the source.

The next day Nada notices leaders from the camp going to a church across the street. He's told the church lets them use their kitchen to feed the shanty folk, but when he goes to check the place out he finds the church choir heard practicing is a tape and there's a lab and boxes of sunglasses. After the church is raided by the police and the shanty town bulldozed that night (why at night?), he goes back and finds a box of sunglasses hidden away.

Later, while walking downtown, he puts them on and discovers they reveal subliminal messages emblazoned across every magazine and billboard commanding people to "OBEY" or "CONSUME"; money says, "THIS IS YOUR GOD." More concerning is that the glasses also reveal that amidst the normal folk in the city are bug-eyed aliens who look like skinned people. Soon, the aliens realized Nada can see them and he's on the run.

After convincing Frank to try the glasses after the film's signature brawl scene, they go to ground & eventually locate a resistance cell who made the sunglasses and think they have a plan to end the aliens' control of humanity.

They Live is one of those movies whose key bits have seeped into the collective memory of culture so that even people who haven't seen it are familiar with lines like Nada's signature, ""I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass....and I'm all out of bubblegum," or understand that "They Live glasses" means being able to see the truth hidden from others, or the extended brawl (a tribute to the throwdown in John Wayne's The Quiet Man) which was itself the basis for the Cripple Fight scene on South Park, these nuggets have lent the movie a stature that it sadly doesn't merit.

The pace is extremely slow and the drama is hampered by Piper's amazingly inert performance. As Rowdy Roddy Piper, he was one of the top names in pro wrestling in its first big heyday along with Hulk Hogan, Macho Man Savage, Jake "the Snake" Roberts, etc. with a larger-than-life persona and in interviews he's a charming fellow, but his Nada lives down to the name as every cutaway to his blank, gormless mien makes one wonder what he's thinking. When "acting" across from David, the gulf between talent and whatever this is yawns wider. (If you doubt the talents of Dwayne Johnson or Jon Cena, watch this and reevaluate.)

The plot only really picks up in the last act when the Carpenter's themes (he wrote the screenplay under the nom de plume of Frank Armitage, adapting a short story and comic book as well as other sources) of control and collaboration are explicitly stated. The power of media or the promise of riches to induce humans to collaborate with these invaders are valid & resonate even now, if not more so.

 The manipulation of society with social media apps which algorithmically groom users into specific attitudes and beliefs echoes the subliminal images portrayed here. Even The Matrix touched upon it with the character of Cypher colluding with the Machines to destroy humanity as long as they plug him back in so he can be comfortable believing he's eating steak.

But the script is too thin everywhere else and so forgettable that beyond what I've mentioned, I didn't remember any of it. Perhaps a smarter updated remake would work, transferring the themes to apps, AI, and algorithms which seemingly brainwashed sheeple to sleep via doom scrolling.

Technically, the 4K HDR transfer is nothing special. The print is clean and colors are good, allowing for the low budget production, but there's little visual pizzazz and the HDR grading looked like a bright SDR picture. Audio is mediocre with little surround activity, but true to the source.

 I was surprised at how mediocre They Live is compared to how I remembered it. Too slow, too thin, and generally muddled, it buries the memorable bits and interesting premise under a slack script, slow direction, and weak lead performance.

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

Spoilerific trailer which lays out the whole plot and showcases the best bits.

"Electrified: The Guitar Revolution" Review


While perusing the All Movies list on Paramount+ I spotted a Smithsonian Channel episode from 2010 titled Electrified: The Guitar Revolution which looked to be an overview of the development of the electric guitar. It was and being a guitarist with a small arsenal of axes and a fairly broad knowledge of the history of the instrument combined with its concise 46-minute length, figured I'd see if I'd learn something.

I didn't learn much I didn't already know, but if you're a rock fan with curiosity as to how the iconic instruments slung by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eddie Van Halen and others evolved through the 20th Century, Electrified is a decent primer if somewhat superficial.

Combining talking head Smithsonian historians, luthier Paul Reed Smith (whose eponymously-named company is said to be the third largest guitar maker in America behind the Coke and Pepsi of Gibson and Fender), and demos of each evolutionary step by former Saturday Night Live bandleader G.E. Smith, we're given a history of the necessities for guitarists that became the mothers of invention (not the Frank Zappa band) for the technology.

 Beginning with the need to amplify guitars so they could be heard over big bands to the development of solid body guitars to tame the howling feedback amplified acoustics were prone to, familiar names like Rickenbacker, Les Paul, and Leo Fender are discussed and their contributions to the form. The one big surprise was that the first commercially sold solid body electric may've predated Fender's Telecaster by decades as Slingerland briefly marketed a guitar and amp combo that then disappeared from cultural memory as the brand shifted to it's claim to fame, drums.

 By ending in the 1960s with effects pedals, especially fuzz, which fueled Hendrix's freakout stylings, they omit advancements like locking vibrato systems like Floyd Roses which allowed for Van Halen's dive-bomb pyrotechnics while remaining in tune (I own 17 electrics and all but four have locking systems), active electronics like EMG or Fishman pickups, synth guitars from Roland, or how amplifiers have shifted from tubes to transistors to digital modeling where one unit can mimic dozens of amps, speaker cabinets, and stomp boxes (to be fair, the real movement in that field post-dates this show), or the wild shapes that sprang up in the 1980s for heavy metal bands courtesy of brands like B.C. Rich, Charvel/Jackson et al.

But those quibbles borne of my own pre-knowledge of the subject aside, Electrified: The Guitar Revolution is a concise and fairly comprehensive trip down the six-string highway of history and may be of interest even to players who never studied the lore.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Paramount+)

No trailer available, but here's an version of the closing history of guitar jam with extra voiceovers.

"The Contractor" Review


 This one was a bit of a random find. After deciding there was nothing good to watch across all the services, I came across The Contractor in my Plex library. Released in April 2022, I didn't recognize it, but after watching the trailer figured we'd settle in for some formulaic private soldier hijinx.

Chris Pine stars as Harper, a decorated Green Beret whose use of illegal steroids to cope with a wrecked knee from numerous combat tours earns him a involuntary discharge from the Army by the new CO who's a hard ass on the subject. While given an honorable discharge, they strip him of his pension and benefits. (This doesn't make sense. Why not a medical discharge? Why strip his pension? To make the plot happen, that's why.)

With a wife (Gillian Jacobs in a nothing role) and young son and mounting bills and lots of debt collector calls, Harper needs a job. He's been contacted by various private military contractor outfits, but is reluctant to become a mercenary of sorts. While hanging out with a former service buddy, Mike (Ben Foster, Pine's co-star in Hell or High Water), who has a very nice house for his family, including a special needs son in a wheelchair, Harper is willing to take a meeting with the boss of the outfit he works for.

 This is Rusty (Keifer Sutherland), who appeals to Harper's patriotism and sense of being thrown away by the government after he gave his body in service by offering him a position where he'd do low-risk black bag ops for the government under covert intelligence direction. The pay is excellent and he's even given a $50,000 check as a signing bonus which bails the family out.

His first mission is to surveil a virus researcher, Salim (Fares Fares), in Berlin. While he works for a legitimate research lab, Rusty says the funding is coming from a Middle Eastern terrorism financier so the order is given to get Salim's research. Harper, Mike and two others raid the facility and secure the laptop, but Rusty gives the order to kill Salim, which Harper does despite Salim begging him not to kill him and trying to explain his research is for the good of humanity.

While exfiltrating, the squad runs into German police responding to the lab being set ablaze and the red shirts are killed and Mike is wounded. Harper gets him into hiding and gives him a transfusion that stabilizes him. While Mike is ready to move, Harper's knee gives out so it's agreed that Mike will return the laptop to Berlin and Harper will catch up.

Eventually, Harper gets back to Berlin and contacts Rusty for pickup, but when he goes to the rendezvous point he smells a trap and barely escapes from the kill team awaiting him. Rusty has betrayed him! Dun-dun-DUHN!!! How will he get back home to his family and what happened to Mike?

The trailer makes The Contractor look like a familiar plot of Evil Corporate Shenanigans and Double-Crosses and for the most part if you've seen a few of these espionage thrillers like The Bourne Identity then you'll be able to predict what happens most of the time.

What sets The Contractor slightly above its formulaic brethren is in the little details and restrained performances. The movie opens with Harper's family attending church where service men are being recognized by the congregation. It's a sad commentary about Hollyweird movies that showing people attending services or saying grace before eating is so rarely done and even more so that it's not done so condescendingly.

It also refrains from portraying everyone as a saint or villain (other than Rusty, who goes black hat pretty hard). Even the people trying to kill Harper are just doing the job Rusty gave them and they're as morally troubled as Harper is. One who Harper overcomes gives him an info dump to help him get away then asks for the photo of his family back so he can see them as he dies. He's as much a victim as Harper and Mike are.

But overhanging these quiet moments and performances is the overarching plot of Evil Corporations Killing To Prevent Big Pharma Profits Taking A Hit which we've seen a zillion times before. It's a rough fit between the story of how our veterans aren't treated properly and corpo greed murder death kill stuff.

Pine is an underrated actor because he's so damn handsome, but he's good here, showing graying hair (he was 39 when this was filmed) and a stoic "got to provide for my family" earthiness. He's not a super soldier like Rambo, but a well-trained and disciplined soldier coping with a failing body and desperate circumstances.

If you're looking for a solidly done lower-key action drama, The Contractor delivers fairly satisfactory results.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable. (Though it was an Amazon Original, Prime Video says it's on Paramount+, but they didn't have it. Weird.)

"Venom: The Last Dance" 4K Review


Sony has had a pretty bad run managing their sole Marvel character license, Spider-Man, with the high points like the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse and Across the Spiderverse weighed down by the lackluster Amazing Spider-Man pair of movies. It got so dire that they relented to allow Spidey to join the MCU in Captain America: Civil War and basically outsourced production of solo movies to Marvel resulting in Homecoming/Far From Home/No Way Home trilogy which augmented Tom Holland's Peter Parker with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), and Doctor Strange (Bernadette Cumberbund) and appearances in the last two Avengers movies.

But the license also gave Sony the rights to make movies with Spider-Man adjacent villains and anti-heroes which has led to a trio of absolute disasters - Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter - but also a mysteriously successful run of movies featuring Spidey's symbiote nemesis Venom. Beginning with 2018's Venom, which was OK, and continuing with 2021's noisy & bad Venom: Let There Be Carnage, the trilogy concludes with Venom: The Last Dance which is slightly better than its title and substantially better than the last entry.

After a bewildering cold-open info dump which sets up this movie's Big Bad, Knull (Andy Serkis), and the gobbledygook MacGuffin called the Codex (super original name there) which would free him to destroy the Universe (because no one just wants to rule the Upper East Side), we catch up with Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) who is temporarily hanging out in our Earth-616 universe thanks to Doctor Strange's spell in No Way Home. Tossed back into his correct universe, he finds he is internationally and wrongly wanted for murder related to events in the last movie.

While literally hitching a ride on the outside of a jet airliner, Eddie/Venom attract an attack by a Xenophage sent by Knull to get the Codex which is formed and acts like a homing beacon when they go into full Venom form. When it's just tentacles or a head popping from Eddie's body, fine; but when he's Venom, ruh roh. And the only way to destroy the Codex is for Eddie or Venom to die.

After escaping the plane encounter, they are beset upon by an the forces of Gen. Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor, this character was written as a white guy, wasn't he?) who is trying to eradicate the symbiotes. Only when the Xenophage eats the soldiers are they able to escape again, which makes them even less popular with Strickland.

Trekking though the Nevada wilderness they encounter a hippie family traveling in a VW van (what else?) headed by Martin Moon (Rhys Ifans) who are heading to Area 51 to see it before it gets decommissioned and offers to drop Eddie off in Las Vegas where the conveniently encounter Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu), the convenience store owner from the first two movies, who is such a high roller they've comped her a suite where they can go and dance to ABBA's "Dancing Queen" while Venom attracts the Xenophage and Strickland's forces to capture them and wait, what the heck is going on here?!? Why did they go full metal Venom when they know it attracts bad monsters with bad goals?

It all ends up in your typical third act VFX overload with lots of monsters and mayhem and a very predictable ending which was foreshadowed from the first moments at Area 51. Writer Kelly Marcel, who came up with the story with Hardy and also steps into the director's chair after co-writing the first and solo writing the second movies, has come up with a lumpy, disjointed string of scenes and events which never really gels into a coherent story. Details are focused on which either set up obvious payoffs or never amount to anything, feeling like there's a lot of footage that got cut to bring it down to a manageable 109 minutes. And Knull is a terrible Big Bad because he comes from nowhere in the series mythology & is just Serkis doing his Snoke voice again.

 Hardy is his usual twitchy self as Eddie who never really seems at peace with his co-pilot, but it's his gonzo vocal performance as Venom (he actually does the voice with audio processing to make it sound more alien) and the only thing that kept me engaged with the story was Venom's running commentary as when Martin hands Eddie a tray of vegan food, saying that "nothing died on this plate," and Eddie hurls it away while Venom barks (internally), "HARD PASS!" - the only thing that spares the movie from getting a similar review.

On the audio-visual front, the 4K HDR grade is above average with bright, punchy colors and good detail. The audio track is also good with the rumbling symbiote and Knull voices having a meaty low-end. 

The Venom series has always been lower second tier comic book fare, but compared to the mess of most of Sony's Spiderverse efforts have been, it's the tallest pygmy in Borneo.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable. 

"Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary" Review


 In conjunction with the 20th Anniversary of the release of the legendary game Half-Life 2 in November 2024 comes the....ummmmm.....documentary Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary on develiper Valve's YouTube which in the words of the description, "To celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2, we've gotten members of the HL2 team back to talk about the game's development, how we almost ran out of money, what it was like when we were hacked, what happened when we were sued by our publisher, the birthplace of Steam, and much more."

That sums everything up tidily as well as redundantly. As the description says, it's a lot of white dudes (and ONE white chick) talking about how they developed the game, iterating and playtesting to refine the game. Plenty of in-progress developmental test footage illustrates things and they show the local residents of their Washington town who were photographed to populate the game as NPCs. Fun Fact: The face of Dr. Eli Vance was a homeless fellow who some of the devs would pass by on their commute and thought he had a good look. So they brought him in and paid him $200 (the rate everyone got) to immortalize him across three games.

The lawfare they were subjected to by the publisher of the first Half-Life was brutal and intended to bankrupt both the company and co-founder Gabe Newell personally as he tapped his savings and even put his house up to keep the lights on. The irony is that a maneuver by the publisher to bog them down with a mountain of documents in Korean backfired as a Korean-speaking intern a Valve discovered a smoking gun email which blew the case up.

But what is sorely lacking is any candor about how Newell is a fat f*cking liar who lied about the condition of the game in the months ahead of it's originally scheduled Sept. 30, 2003 release date. Newell - "Lord GabeN" to his herds of retarded admirers - announced the release date in an exclusive cover reveal in PC Gamer six months prior, firmly stating that the game was being announced then because they were in final stages of making it and it'd be ready to go on schedule. But then a hack - covered in the doc - stole the game code and put it on the Internet and what it showed that it was nowhere close to being ready. (This is fleetingly referenced in the doc.)

Newell's deceit extended to holding a splashy launch event on Alcatraz in conjunction with terminal videocard also-rans ATI (now AMD) which as this report from the Planet Half-Life site detailed lacked the actual game. Because I loved the first game and was naive enough to believe Valve when they said the game would ship when promised, I built a new computer in August 2003 just to be ready for Half-Life 2 the next month. By the time it arrived 14 months later, I'd already upgraded the videocard.

Add on the failure to complete the promised trilogy of Episodes and the fact there are legions of drooling gamers slurping GabeN's grease-and-Cheeto-dust encrusted junk is even more appalling. The loyalty this charlatan inspires is ugh. The Orange Box, which shipped on Oct. 9, 2007, included Half-Life 2: Episode Two which ended on a cliffhanger. As of this writing it has been 6304 days since The Orange Box came out - 17 years, 3 months, 2 days, but who's counting? - and Episode Three never happened. In fact, they never officially cancelled it, preferring to just pretend it was never promised. 

 If they had simply announced that they didn't feel they could make a concluding episode that was up to their standards, it would've been disappointing, but would've been better than just going radio silent. Concept sketches from the scrapped Episode are shown and work had been done, but they diverted the team to work on Left 4 Dead and by the time they got done with that, it was too late. So they did nothing.

Yes, I am still mad about it.

But even allowing for my antipathy for the fat f*cking liar, Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary suffers from being too broad and general while papering over the inconvenient aspects of their operation. Even speed-watching at 2X speed (a feature I wish every streaming service offered on my home theater's apps like they do on web or mobile like Netflix's 1.5X speed), it's a lot of stuff only of interest to the most completionist fans of the game. Even as a big behind-the-scenes making-of, there's too much filler larding out the killer. It could've been half the length.

And Gabe Newell is a still slightly-less-fat f*cking liar.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on YouTube if you're a fan; otherwise Skip it.

Watch the whole movie here:

"Norman's Rare Guitars Documentary" Review


 If ever a movie title didn't hide the ball as to what it is, it would be Norman's Rare Guitars Documentary, the docume....well, obviously. A fixture of the LA music scene for over 50 years, founder Norman Harris and his mecca of vintage instruments has been (guitar) dealer to stars, both rock and movie, as evidenced by the rapid parade of snapshots and video clips showcasing the Who's Who of Music who have patronized his establishment.

After tracing his early days as a musician and finder of cool instruments in Miami, he relocated to LA and rapidly became the go-to source for cool instruments. As word of mouth spread, he finally moved his operation out of his crammed apartment to a series of ever-larger stores. But even his current location isn't enough as he has a warehouse worthy of the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark filled with crates filled with cases full of guitars.

Even though I'm a guitarist with a nice assortment of axes, I've never been particularly interested in the whole vintage guitar thing, mostly because they easily run in price to about what a NEW car used to cost. If I ever ended up in LA, I doubt I'd go to Norm's because there's no way I could afford or justify what he's peddling. It's like going to a Victoria's Secret show and not being able to buy the models. 

But Norman's Rare Guitars Documentary also does a mediocre job of even explaining what the big deal is. There's a saying that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but no one really explains what it is about these guitars or the need to amass great collections that keeps them coming back. Executive Keifer Sutherland talks about how he had 100 guitars and realized he'd never play them all - it's true, every guitarist has a fave or two and the rest are just inventory - so he sold off nearly 3/4 of his stash and if he buys a new one, he sells an old one. Cool, but why 100 guitars in the first place or 400+ like Joe Bonamasa cops to?

The doc also drags on with segments about how they showcase new artists on their social media and YouTube channel and his charitable works. While expanding Norm's reputation as a mensch, it also bloats the runtime about a half-hour longer than necessary.

Playing mostly as a feature-length commercial for a music store whose clientele would already know of its existence, Norman's Rare Guitars Documentary doesn't really succeed at much more than raising the question of what will happen to this institution when Norm finally retires or passes on as evidenced when he had major health issues in 2022. Lacking in guitar pr0n for guitarists or really much insights from celebrity interviewees, it's probably too specific AND general for most viewers.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Netflix.)

"Heretic" Review


One of the more frustrating experiences in movie viewing is when a story has an intriguing setup, but when it comes time to pay it off, it's at best anticlimatic and more likely annoying to infuriating. Such as it is with Heretic, art house darling studio A24's latest horror film which has disappointment in common with releases like Y2K (just viewed a few nights ago) and MaXXXine from last summer.

 Heretic follows Mormon missionaries Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher, Yellowjackets) and Sister Barnes (Chloe East, The Fabelmans) as they struggle to make converts. When not being rebuffed by people walking by, they're being pranked by cruel teenagers. As they approach their last lead, it begins to rain. Answering the door is Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), who invites them in. They initially demur because it's required for a female to be present, but he assures them his wife is home baking blueberry pie. He also asks if they have a problem with there being metal in the walls and ceiling. Ruh-roh.

Initially, Reed seems like a very interested customer as he already has a heavily annotated copy of the Book of Mormon (the Mormon Bible, not the Broadway musical), but as the referenced Mrs. Reed never appears, the girls begin to get more concerned. This concern rises to mild panic as they realize the front door is locked and they have no cell signal due to the Faraday cage construction he mentioned. And the smell of blueberry pie? It was a scented candle. (Not a spoiler; it's in the trailer.)

Venturing further into the house, they find Reed waiting in a large room with a vaguely churchish vibe. Here's where things kick into gear as he challenges the claims of religions to be the "One True Faith" by analogizing various editions of Monopoly & the similarity between The Hollies' "The Air That I Breathe" with Radiohead's "Creep" and Lana Del Rey's "Get Free" with the point being all religions are just ripping off each other. He then tells them they are free to go, but must choose between doors labeled "Belief" and "Disbelief."

What happens when they make their choice comprises the back half of Heretic and it's where things begin to fall apart storywise as co-writers/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (whose last film was the forgettable Adam Driver vs. dinosaurs sci-fi flick 65) find themselves unable to deliver on the heady premise and it spirals into more far-fetched situations which raise more questions as to what is the One True Religion. (Which everyone who watches The Simpsons knows is a mix of voodoo and Presbyterian.)

The more I thought about the last act, the madder I got to the point where I'd docked a point from its initial 7/10 score before going to bed then knocking off another while eating breakfast. Many movies require some suspension of disbelief, but Heretic requires leaps of faith that Evel Knievel couldn't clear beginning with the entire premise resting on Reed constructing this test of faith & rigged house with timed locks and signal-blocking construction seemingly in preparation for these two girls to arrive. What would've happened if two male Elders knocked on his door? How did he get elements for his scheme without anyone noticing?

That a movie about faith literally ends with a deus ex machina is stock horror movie stuff, but divorced from the premise that drew us in. The final shot is also another one of those "What does it really mean? things which bugged me the other night with Juror #2.

It's too bad because the thesis is interesting and the performances are uniformly solid beginning with Grant's calibrated descent from charming to threatening, but he's undercut by the screenplay's tropes. Anyone really surprised by Grant's later career moves must not have seen him in 2012's Cloud Atlas where he played a half-dozen wildly different characters.

Even while the overall story falters on horror tropes and contrivances, it's too its credit that it doesn't play the Sisters as total naifs as they both call BS on Reed's arguments and never succumb to helpless damseling. However, a detail about Barne's again raises questions about what she's doing in her free time.

In my 65 review linked above, I called into question Beck and Woods' writing skills as their script seemed vastly inferior to their A Quiet Place script which must have been vastly rewritten by director and star John Krasinski and my doubts continue here. While they stage their tale with good visual style, aided by Chung Chung-hoon's shadowy cinematography, the writing lets things down.

While Heretic avoids the Skip It judgement of Y2K and MaXXXine, it's still a letdown which doesn't live up to its premise.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Music By John Williams" Review


 There are few things pretty much all movie fans will agree on, but this is one of them: John Williams is the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) of movie score composers. Sure, there may be a few who disagree, but they're morons & probably Commie alien robots.

 With 54 Oscar nominations (only Walt Disney has more) and five wins (ONLY FIVE?!?) and a legacy including nine Star Wars, five Indiana Jones, three Harry Potter and so many more memorable scores - Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jurassic Park, Superman (admit it, you were humming the themes from everything I've listed) - there is no one who has cast such a transformative shadow across music for films. He is a rock star in what was a staid and underappreciated field. Film maven Robert Meyer Burnett said that if you only looked at the 29(!) scores he's composed for Steven Spielberg alone he would be the GOAT.

 So is the premise of Music by John Williams, a fascinating and informative documentary which is unfortunately on the godforsaken Mouse+ hellhole service. (There are ways around this, ahem.) Director Laurent Bouzereau - who if you've even watched the making-of behind-the-scenes supplements on a major film's DVD/Blu-ray probably directed it - pays loving tribute to the long and surprisingly varied career of Williams.

Beginning life as the son of a jazz drummer who played with Benny Goodman and others before moving the family to Hollywood where he played in studio orchestras on films you've heard of, Williams was destined for a life in music, but he thought he'd just be a pianist. Beginning in high school through his service in the Air Force, he stumbled into opportunities to learn skills in arranging and composing which led to his own career playing on scores, ultimately beginning to score countless television shows of many genres, further expanding his versatility.

Spielberg had become smitten with Williams work after hearing his score for The Reivers, swearing that if he would ever get to make a feature he'd have Williams do the music. Soon he was meeting with Williams to discuss scoring 1974's The Sugarland Express and their collaboration has continued through current times when Williams became the oldest Oscar nominee ever in 2022 at age 91 for his score to The Fabelmans. It was Spielberg who pitched George Lucas on using Williams after Jaws, when Lucas just knew him as a jazz artist.

Which is where Music by John Williams really steps up to touch upon his career before becoming Mr. Blockbuster Movie Score Guy to Gen X as a musician on scores to movies you've heard of to his personal classical compositions for various instruments which attracted some of the greatest players in the field. 

 Interestingly, he has never adopted technology in his process, still scoring by hand with pencil and paper vs. computerized methods where what you play gets automatically converted into notation. He also remains steadfast in using full orchestras to record his scores rather than using synthesizers/samplers like many do as a cost saving or speed method. (Looking at you, Hans Zimmer.) While he has brought in synths as augments (e.g. Munich) and I remember when I realized there was electric guitar during the assassin droid chase scene from Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, he has remained a Luddite in those regards, though he admits auto-transcription would be useful for faster complicated passages.

One of the wildest factoids was delivered by his daughter who mentioned her brother was the singer of Toto (in their post Toto IV phase in the 1980s for a few years). Oddly, his sons don't appear.

I've seen some grousing that this is more of a tribute than a documentary because it doesn't compare him to other contemporary composers, but so what? This is picky nattering like a theologian whining that a documentary about God doesn't talk about Apollo, Zeus & Vishnu half the time. It's not about the others, it's about John Williams. While Coldplay's Chris Martin speaks on how Williams' scores evoke emotions and Branford Marsalis notes how the cantina band number in Star Wars and the score to Catch Me If You Can prove Williams' jazz legitimacy, no other film composers are featured, just his film & classical collaborators.

 Williams will be turning 93 in a month and sadly no one lives forever, so there will eventually be a time when we won't be blessed with the new music of John Williams. But we will always have the millions of notes he has composed to not only be the soundtrack of the movies, but the soundtrack of our lives. Anyone interested in music or movies (which is why you're here, right?) should make a point of watching Music by John Williams.

Score: 8.5/10. Catch it on Disney+ (or your favorite black flag high seas method).

"Juror #2" Review


 It's a new year, but tonight's first movie of the new year is a throwback to a time when mature filmmakers made well-acted, small-scale tales which didn't involve the fate of the Universe as much as the fate of a few people's souls and moral compasses. Such as it is with Juror #2, a film unfairly burdened with historical importance due to it possibly being the last film by 94-year-old Clint Eastwood.

The titular juror is Justin (Nicholas Hoult), a writer in Georgia who has been called for jury duty in late-October 2022. He tries to beg off because his wife, Allison (Zoey Deutch), is nearly due with a high-risk pregnancy, but is denied and made to sit for the trial of James Sythe (Gabriel Basso, who played incoming Vice President JD Vance in the film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy) who is accused of murdering his girlfriend, Kendall (Francesca Eastwood, one guess as to who dad is), and throwing her body into a creek.

Immediately as the trial begins, Justin realizes that the night of alleged murder and location of her body coincided with the night he thought he had hit a deer on that dark and stormy night. He realizes he was at the bar the couple were at where they'd publicly spatted. Did he hit Kendall?

Justin goes to his AA sponsor, Larry (Kiefer Sutherland), and pays him a dollar (for attorney-client confidentiality) for advice for what to do about his situation and possible involvement. Larry points out that with his record of drunk driving and presence in a bar before the accident, no one will believe he wasn't drunk even though Justin swears he didn't drink the drink he'd ordered. To come forward to save an innocent man with a troubled past would likely destroy his family.

When the trial goes into deliberations, Justin is horrified that everyone just wants to convict James and get back to their lives. They aren't happy with this holdout and his vague comments about needing to look at the evidence, but soon he has an ally in former homicide detective, Harold (J.K. Simmons), who initially believes James should've taken the plea, but begins to agree that something seems off about the case and James doesn't seem like the killer type.

When Harold's attempt to investigate things puts him afoul of the rules, he is dismissed from the jury, but approaches the assistant DA conducting the trial, Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), and puts the bug in her ear that perhaps the case wasn't properly investigated by the police who had immediately set their sights on the victim's boyfriend and built the case around nailing him to the exclusion of other possibilities.

Where Juror #2 steps up is in the above-average script by first-time screenwriter Jonathan A. Abrams which takes the time to set up the characters to give them understandable, if sometimes unreasonable, motivations. Eastwood's spare direction also relies on viewers to notice crucial details with minimal reiteration like what the date in question meant which would trigger Justin to have a crisis of sobriety.

Abrams script also avoid the lazy tropes of too many movies. Killebrew is running for District Attorney and to win a conviction in this notorious trial would definitely help her, but she's not railroading a man who knows she's innocent. After Harold suggests the investigation may've been myopic, she actually does the work of running down the angle Harold dug up.

The 12 Annoyed Diverse Jurors are eventually willing to consider the thinness of the circumstantial evidence though one juror (Cedric Yarbrough) has an axe to grind against past behavior of the defendant that he'll never change his vote. Another (Chikako Fukuyama) notices a detail that really should've been caught by both the medical examiner and the public defender, Resnick (Chris Messina), so when the verdict is abruptly rendered, we're left wondering what had changed.

Which leads to the least satisfying and sketchiest part, the film's coda where Justin and Killebrew have an oblique conversation where they convey they know what actually happened, but he tells her to deliver actual justice would be too devastating to them. This seems out of character with what he'd tried to do during deliberations, though the final moment may imply both are about to reverse course. It feels like Abrams didn't quite know how to explicate things better and just called it close enough for government work.

Eastwood, for all his notable films in a directorial career spanning over 50 years back to 1971's Play Misty For Me, has never really been a flashy director, focusing more on straightforward storytelling without visual flourishes, and he doesn't start cribbing from Michael Bay here. But across the board the performances are solid, even with tertiary roles. (As an actor, he knows how to direct actors and famously doesn't like to shoot a lot of takes, unlike those like David Fincher who will shoot 100 takes as if anyone would know the difference if he stopped after 50.)

The controversy over Juror #2 is whether a legendary director like Eastwood's potential final film should've been dumped to streaming and denied a theatrical release, but it was always intended to be a Max Original. Frankly, how much of an audience for a quiet legal drama is going to want to schlep to the theater to see a movie like this regardless of quality? Maybe in 1998 we would've, but now any movies that don't beg for BIG SCREEN VIEWING beyond what our nice home theater delivers get caught when they're streaming. We would never have gone out now to see Juror #2, but definitely would've watched it later. So should you.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on MAX.)

"Y2K" Review


 It's New Year's Eve, so why not watch the new sci-fi/horror/comedy by former SNL alum Kyle Mooney, Y2K, which he directed and co-wrote (with Evan Winter)?

Jaeden Martell (IT) stars as Eli, an awkward high schooler whose only friend is Danny (Julian Dennison, not slimmed down in the least since Deadpool 2). He has a crush on Laura (Rachel Zegler, West Side Story), a beautiful classmate and secret tech nerd, but of course can't tell her how he feels about her and her cool kids clique are disgusted by the "Sticky Boys" (as they call themselves) because of course, this being a teen movie.

They decide to crash a New Year's Eve party being held at Laura's ex-boyfriend Soccer Chris's (Aussie rapper The Kid Laroi) house and it's your usual movie rager party until the clock strikes midnight, ushering in 2000 and the lights flicker out. After a few seconds, they come back on and it appears Y2K was a dud (as it was in reality), but then a toy jeep with other toys combined with it burns a kid's face to death with a makeshift flamethrower and other devices begin attacking and killing the partygoers including Danny.

Eli, Laura and a pair of local rap crew members who bullied Eli and Danny - CJ (Daniel Zolghadri, Eighth Grade) and Ash (Lachlan Watson, Glen/Glenda in the Chucky TV series) - then trek to find Laura's previous ex-boyfriend, an electrical engineering major named Jonas (Mason Gooding, Cuba Jr's son, Love, Victor) to see if he can help with these conglomerations of household electronics. Also in the mix is a stoner video store clerk, Garret, played by Mooney.

The problem with Y2K is that the script is a half-baked mishmash of other familiar movies. The Eli-Danny dynamic is so cribbed from Superbad that I wasn't surprised to see Jonah Hill has a producer here. The swing from teen buddy comedy to full splatter comedy a la Evil Dead II could've worked in the hands of a better director, but Mooney isn't up to the task.

The script feels like a barely hanging together first draft that needed more trips through development with the most cardboard of characters. How did the killer robots assemble themselves so quickly? Don't know. How did the virus spread when hardly anything was connected to the Internet and broadband was a novelty? Don't know. Why does there seem to be nobody else in the world than the immediate characters in the movie and why is everyone's favorite art house movie brand A24 watering down their reputation with such lackluster stuff? /shrug emoji

While the use of clever puppets and robot suits fabricated by Weta Workshop give a tactile lo-fi vibe, the cinematography by Bill Pope (three Edgar Wright, four Sam Raimi, and four Wachowskis movies including The Matrix trilogy) is too good for this project.

Frankly, if it looked worse and starred nobodies (think: Clerks) it's B-movie story would've worked better. When the best thing about your movie is the surprise cameo of a certain red-hatted nu-metal rocker who was huge in 1999 and is willing to take the piss out of himself for the last act of the movie, that's not a ringing endorsement of Mooney's effort. (FWIW, the missus liked it much more.)

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"Silicon Cowboys" Review


 Even if you're not a tech nerd like me, you probably recognize names like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak as founders of Microsoft and Apple. But how about Rod Canion, Jim Harris, or Bill Murto? Those names ring any bells? Me neither despite being a older Gen Xer nerd who remembers the wild early days of computers in the late-70s/early-80s and whose first computer bought in 1997 was made by the company they founded: Compaq. And I had no idea how revolutionary Compaq was until watching Silicon Cowboys, a fascinating documentary about the early years of the firm.

Founded in late-1981 by the trio, all Texas Instruments employees in Houston who wanted to do something on their own, their Big Idea was to make a portable ("luggable" was the term for this 27 lb box) computer that would have the display and disc drives in a housing with a removable keyboard that would be fully compatible with software written for the IBM PC. IBM was the 800 megaton gorilla (to mix metaphors) in the market owing to their long history in mainframe computers. The idea that some guys from Texas could challenge Big Blue was like if someone decided to form a startup to challenge Google now.

 The key to compatibility was the microcode in the BIOS (basic input/output system) embedded in chips in the PC. While everything that comprised IBM's PCs was off the shelf parts anyone could buy, to run the software required this code and that was copyrighted. IBM was able to shut down "PC clone" makers for infringing on their code.

So Compaq would need to write a BIOS by trial and error without referencing IBMs code. When the head engineer bought and IBM tech manual and found out all the calls were documented, he was off the project because he'd seen the code. Anyone who got these manuals had to have those pages removed and destroyed before they could have them. They just ran software until it failed then figured out why it failed until they had their own compatible BIOS that had no IBM code on it. They couldn't be shut down.

The Compaq portable was a smashing success and the company took off like a rocket becoming the fastest to enter the Fortune 500 and to reach one billion dollars in sales. IBM remained cocky and arrogant and Compaq ate their lunch, reaping massive sales and market share. Finally the Empire struck back, threatening them with patent infringement suits unless they paid up. While the critical microcode wasn't at issue, IBM had skads of patents on everything and to fight the cases to prove unique development would've been too costly, so Compaq paid the greenmail.

Then IBM tried to wipe out the clone market with their PS/2 series which implemented a new architecture called Micro Channel which added some sorely needed features, but would also require everyone to buy only Micro Channel compatible peripherals. Considering some firms had massive investments in PCs and supporting equipment, this was too big an ask. Then Compaq led a consortium of other clone-makers to announce an standard called EISA which added the advances of Micro Channel while maintaining the compatibility with existing peripherals. IBM was trapped by their greed and need for control.

 But it wasn't all smooth sailing for Compaq as eventually hungry upstarts like Dell (founded by Michael Dell in his UT-Austin dorm room in 1984) pressuring them on price which led to the their first quarterly loss ever, layoffs, and the dismissal of their co-founder/CEO Canion less than a decade after launching this rocket. (Some gratitude, huh?)

 20 years after its founding, Compaq merged with HP to form the largest PC company in the world, but the documentary downplays how it was generally considered to be a bad deal for both sides, leading to turmoil in stock prices, layoffs, and general drama. The Compaq name pretty much is extinct by now. As for IBM, they exited the PC market a few years later, selling the operation to Lenovo. 

At a tight 77-minutes long, Silicon Cowboys is a very illuminating look at what is a semi-forgotten, yet seminal period in the computer revolution. When I spotted it perusing the virtual shelves of Prime Video, I thought it sounded like the first season of the AMC series Halt and Catch Fire and I was correct as the shows co-creator, Christopher Cantwell, appears and clips of the show are used to illustrate events in the development of the first Compaq. (It was a good show, but sadly got pulled off Netflix and put behind the AMC+ paywall.)

Director Jason Cohen makes it easy to follow which of the old white guys telling the story we're watching by flashing their names & old ID photos on screen even after they've been on several times and spices things up with tons of archive footage including the cringiest "rap" video promo called "PacRap" that's even more horrible than you can imagine. Since all the key players were still alive to participate for this 2016 doc along with journalists, historians, and IBM execs to present their perspective, we're given a pretty balanced narrative that doesn't whitewash too much that I could tell.

While this may be a bit dry for non-nerds, anyone interested in the history of the tech we take for granted and how Compaq proved that portability would be the killer app should give Silicon Cowboys a watch.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on Amazon Prime. 

"Violent Night" Review


 Previously reviewed here two years ago and my general thoughts still stand, but I've lowered the score from the above-average 8/10, to the slightly below average 6/10 because the pace is slower than I'd noticed with the mayhem last time. It's not bad and perhaps for first-time viewers it will have the same initial kick, but second time around the issues are more noticeable.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently only on Starz.)

"Red One" 4K Review

 Less a movie then a massive business deal amongst long-running associates, Red One came out briefly in theaters where it disappointed commercially, except were were told that it didn't really matter because it was always heading for Amazon Prime so who cares how much it made? This was after a surprising amount of negative publicity concerning The Rock's Dwayne Johnson's prima donna behavior on set which allegedly added tens of millions to the production costs. This was especially ironic because of the beef that erupted between Rock & Furry Fastness kingpin Vin Diesel where Rock (it's less typing) called out lazy "candy-ass" behavior of Diesel on the production of 2017's The Fate of the Furious.

Then there's the stars and filmmakers involved: Director Jake Kasdan directed both of the Jumanji reboots starring the Rock. Writer Chris Morgan wrote every Furry Fastness movie from 3 (Tokyo Drift) through 8 (Fate of...) and the mediocre Hobbs & Shaw spinoff as well as Shazam! Fury of the Gods which co-starred Lucy Liu and whose first produced credit was 2004's Cellular which starred a pre-superhero Chris Evans. The story was by Hiram Garcia, producer of at least 16 previous Rock movies and TV shows.

 It's a tight group of creatives who have made a ton of money making mainstream popcorn entertainment, not that there's anything wrong with that. So why is Red One just another flat-feeling, made-for-streaming, forgotten-immediately-after-viewing piece of content like too much of what the Rock is putting out like the equally forgettable Red Notice for Netflix? (Quick: Who were the co-stars of that one? I'm not even asking what the plot was, just who the co-stars were when they've starred in their own vehicles which have made hundreds of millions of dollars. Give up? Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool) and Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman). See what I mean?)

 After a redundant prologue to set up that Jack O'Malley (Evans) was destined for the Naughty List as a kid, we meet him as he weasels his way into a university's seismology laboratory to attach a tap to the data lines. From stealing someone's coffee to a child's lollipop, he's all about himself. He's also a deadbeat non-parenting sperm donor to Dylan (Wesley Kimmel, nepo baby of unfunny crybaby Jimmy), whose mother, Olivia (Mary Elizabeth Ellis, It's Always Sunny), is a doctor who married some great guy who we never see and is unavailable, so Jack needs to pick him up from school. Apparently, this was some quick fling, but she's guilting him about not wanting to attend Dylan's school performances.

Meanwhile, we meet Rock's Callum Drift (what kind of name is that?), the head of Santa's (J.K. Simmons, being money as always) security detail. He's losing his faith in people being good and submits his resignation to Nick on Christmas Eve. But then Nick is kidnapped from the North Pole, so the race is on to find him in time to save Christmas.

The Director of MORA (Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority), the secret agency that enforces the peace treaty between mythological creatures and humans and isn't at all ripped-off from Hellboy's s Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (B.P.R.D.), Zoe Harlow (Liu), rightly figures that Jack supplied the data to find the North Pole's shield barrier (which is totally not ripped-off from the camouflage hiding Wakanda from the world in Black Panther), but realizes he didn't know what the data was for. Appealing to his mercenary sensibilities, she offers to double his money to help trace the path back to who initiated the caper leading to world-spanning hijinks.

The mastermind of the plot is Gryla (Kiernan Shipka, Mad Men), an Icelandic winter witch who was a former lover of Krampus (Kristopher Hivju, Game of Thrones, The Fate of the...oh look, another connection), who happens to be Nick's estranged brother which raises some unsettling questions considering Nick is a jacked human - no jolly round elf he - and Krampus is a 12-foot-tall goat-man, and whether he was involved. At first I thought Gryla was going to be some angry girl who didn't get the Barbie she wanted due to Shipka's youth and demeanor, but her actual plan is totally not ripped-off from Thanos to a degree.

 Will they rescue Nick in time to save Christmas because it's totally not a holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ unrelated to the secular commercial season that glommed onto it. Will Jack & Cal rediscover the Spirit of Christmas and will Jack begin to be a father to the teenager who another man has been raising as his own for years? Duh.

Even when the destination is a foregone conclusion, it's possible to make the trip entertaining and Red One simply doesn't deliver the presents. It feels rote and tired, beginning with Rock's performance. I don't know if the drama preceding it adversely colored my perception, but Rock has always excelled at knowing just what kind of movie he's in and delivering the performance that's needed. But not here. This is a phoned-in candy ass performance where it feels like he felt showing up was all that was needed without turning on the charm. And his "power" is the ability to shrink himself down to a 30-inch version of himself in a manner totally not ripped-off poorly from Ant-Man during fights.

Evans is equally lackluster as he recycles his same persona that he's used since ending his decade as Captain America, the fast-talking-saying-nothing chatterbox he's been in Knives Out, The Gray Man, Ghosted and Pain Hustlers. The range he used to have a decade ago in roles as varied as Snowpiercer, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Sunshine and Push as well as seven Captain America and Avengers films is still missing and he needs to find it again.

Kasdan's direction is adequate. He has experience with VFX-heavy genre movies from the Jumanjis (I saw the first one and like it; didn't see the second) and the VFX are top-notch and seamless, but the overall tone is dark, both visually and tonally. Why is the North Pole a dark Blade Runner-feeling world. OK, it's dark up there in the winter, but a magical kingdom run by a guy who can deliver presents to billions of people in one night can't light it up like Times Square?

But the story, especially with Jack's son is muddled by him not really being his father. It all feels like plot contrivance to get a treacly ending. Estranged parents are a common trope of Christmas movies, so why introduce this stepfather figure only to sideline him? It would've been better if he had no idea he had a kid or to have him be divorced from Olivia. (Why do I need to even be thinking about this?)

While Red One isn't a particularly bad movie, it's not a good movie. If feels like a project generated by ChatGPT to fill the schedules (and pockets) of a cozy group of makers and cast members who wanted something to do without really needing to tell this story out of passion. When even the disposable entertainment feels cheap, that's not good.

Since Amazon hides the Dolby Vision and Atmos audio behind their additional ad-free tier, the presentation was just HDR10 with 5.1 audio. It's nothing spectacular to show off your home theater setup with, so if you're just watching in HD, you're not missing much except more detail in the gloomy scenes.

Score: 5.5/10. Catch it on Amazon Prime.

"Dirty Angels" Review


 Casino Royale (with cheese!) director Martin Campbell - who also has GoldenEye, The Mask of Zorro, and Vertical Limit on the plus side, but also Green Lantern and The Legend of Zorro on the debit side of his IMDB ledger - reteams with his Casino Royale Bond girl Eva Green for the messy, underdone Dirty Angels.

Opening in 2021, we meet Green's Jake (no explanation for the male name) as she's being held captive by the forces of Malik (Reza Brojerdi) as she's being hauled out of a cage to be stoned by a crowd. (As in having rocks thrown at her, not hippies blowing bong hits in her face.) Right as the sentence is to be carried out, Army helicopters swoop in and rescue her, but over her protestations several men are left behind and executed. Who were they? We never know. Jake tries to have the pilot who took off court martialed, but it goes nowhere and allusions to her past are made.

Jumping to present day, Aghan jihadis attack a Pakistani all-girls school and kidnap those who they didn't toss off the roof back to Afghanistan. Due to their parents being important ambassadors or ministers, a handful are held for ransom with Malik demanding the return of an imam as a condition for their return.

 To attempt a rescue, Jake is tasked with leading a squad of female soldiers who will be posing as aid workers. Because Jake is all business (and the committee of four writers, including Campbell, aren't interested in character details even as minor as names), she calls them by their roles in the mission like Medic (Ruby Rose, John Wick 2, playing horny & heterosexual for a change), The Bomb (Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), Mechanic (Rona-Lee Shimon, lots of Israeli television), Geek (Jojo T. Gibbs, Past Lives), Shooter (Emily Bruni, lots of UK TV), and I put more work in looking up their credits than the screenwriters did creating their characters other than one being shown wrapping her chest in bandages for presumably gender reasons.

The only real surprise about Dirty Angels beyond how utterly unmemorable it is is how high the body count goes as very few members of the mission have plot armor sufficient to stay alive. (Though you can guess who's most likely to make it to the end credits by how familiar you are with the actress. Ahem.) More detail is spent on a pair of brothers and a running gag about how bad a driver he his versus his other skills than the squad combined, so when they start getting knocked off it carries no emotional weight.

Green is a plausible action heroine, but is also let down by the sparse script and generally apathetic action helmed by Campbell. Why she's unpopular with the Army is explained, but also rings false. With Angelina Jolie barely acting these days and her action queen heydey long in the rearview, there aren't many woman who can turn the hat trick of beauty, action skills, and acting chops. Other than AJ, you've got Charlize Theron, Halle Berry, Milla Jovovich (though she barely gets to show acting anymore), Zoe Saldana - Sigourney Weaver is 75 now! - so if Green wants to do more in this space, I'm here for it. But she deserves far better than Dirty Angels.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

 
DirkFlix. Copyright 2010-2015 Dirk Omnimedia Inc. All rights reserved.
Free WordPress Themes Presented by EZwpthemes.
Bloggerized by Miss Dothy