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!
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.)
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.
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.)
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 fromthe 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.
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.
While Netflix's prestige Oscar-bait film Maria dropped last Wednesday, Friday is reserved for their passable popcorn fluff titles and this week's entry is the high-concept thriller Carry-On. Does it make its flight or end up in lost luggage? Let's find out.
Taron Egerton (Kingsman series) stars as Ethan, a TSA agent at LAX whose girlfriend, Nora (Sofia Carson, the Disney Descendants series), is newly pregnant. Their relationship is under some strain because he's kind of a listless vessel, underachieving in work and life. He shows up late for work on Christmas Eve and still asks his boss, Sarkowski (Dean Norris, Breaking Bad), for a promotion and is nearly laughed out of the room due to his lack of initiative.
However, a co-worker, Jason (Sinqua Walls, Friday Night Lights), suggests he take his place on the X-ray machine so he can work crowd management and Sarkowski reluctantly agrees. Jason feels bad for Ethan because he's only been there a few months and already gotten promoted twice while Ethan has been there three years and gone nowhere career-wise.
Unfortunately for Ethan, this means that when a bin comes through his machine with an earpiece in it and a note to stick it in his ear, he is now trapped in a scheme where the man on the other end, the nameless Traveler (Jason Bateman!), calmly informs him that unless he lets a specific bag pass through his scanner, someone will die, specifically Nora. With an accomplice, the Watcher (Theo Rossi, the kinky shrink in The Penguin), monitoring the security cameras, and a third, never seen, accomplice breaking into houses to gather intel - and initially intended to grab Jason's wife and kids as he was supposed to be on the machine - the Traveler is always ahead of Ethan frantic attempts to save Nora and the airport from the deadly carry-on.
Simultaneously, a LAPD detective, Cole (Danielle Deadwyler), investigating the murders of two Russians whacked by the Traveler earlier, is closing in on the airport as a possible destination for a suspected nerve gas weapon. When Ethan's failed attempt to call 911 is correlated to her case, she's on the move.
Carry-On is a decent, albeit predictable, potboiler that mostly succeeds due to Jaume Collet-Serra (Black Adam, The Shallows, four 2nd-tier Liam Neeson movies) taut direction because the screenplay by videogame writer T.J. Fixman, with additional uncredited input by Michael Green (Blade Runner 2049, Logan), is trope-heavy to the point you can spot which tertiary characters are going to be killed off the moment they're introduced. We also have to suspend disbelief that the Watcher has magical hacking powers to access information instantly and that he is able to find a convenient sniper vantage point in a parking structure where he can see Nora in the terminal. (To paraphrase Cinema Sins, convenient vantage point is convenient.)
Egerton is appropriately frantic as the man who finally finds something worth putting in the effort for and Bateman is surprisingly chilling as the low-key mastermind orchestrating this far-fetched scheme.
As far as passable yet forgettable Netflix Original movies go, Carry-On delivers what it says on the tin. You're paying for Netflix, so may as well watch it. It's not a waste of time.
Here's how Dominique opens: We see a Jeep with three Colombian men driving through the jungle, arriving at a crashed small airplane. They open the hatch and spy a large crate bound with chains, so lug it outside. One of them goes to investigate the pilot and finds a blonde woman inert at the controls, unconscious or dead. He notices her cleavage in a gratuitous closeup and begins to fondle her because oink. He then notices hundred dollar bills tucked under her clothing and pulls out a knife to cut her seatbelt off when to the surprise of no one, she awakes, snatches the knife from him and stabs him repeatedly, spraying blood all over the cockpit window and her. She then goes outside and whacks the other two men, taking their truck, burying the crate and heading into town. Alrightee then!
That's our introduction to the titular character played by Ukrainian-Scandanavian actress Oksana Orlan (more about how you haven't heard of her either later), so we're clearly in for some grindhouse antics. She goes to a bar where a middle-aged Amazonian blonde (she's 5'11") chugging tequila doesn't really blend in. A local, Julio (Sebastián Carvajal), introduces himself and she clearly takes a liking to him because she's immediately back at his place, having her way with him. (Grrrl Powah! Girls on top!)
The morning after, she discovers he's a local policeman when he puts on his uniform, but he leaves this woman whom he'd just met and boinked home to hang out with his very pregnant sister, her two kids, and his elderly wheelchair-bound father, while he goes to work for the exceedingly corrupt police Chief Santiago (Maurice Compte, Narcos), who uses the police as an army for the local cartel boss. But Julio is the One Good Cop and meets with an Internal Affairs officer to provide video evidence of the atrocities being committed only to learn the hard way the the cop cops are also corrupt and it ends very badly for him.
Santiago sends a half-dozen cops to get the laptop with the original files from the home, but Dominique kills them all. He them parlays with her, telling her that if she gives him the laptop that night, he'll spare Julio's family. Knowing that's a lie, she fortifies the home and lots of killy hijinks ensue.
Now I'm a fan of revenge flicks and hot kickass women kicking ass, so why am I giving Dominique a Skip It? To explain requires massive spoilers, so let me run down what sorta works first.
When the trailer for this arrived, looking like "female John Wick meets Desperado" I looked it up on IMDB and was puzzled why this movie even existed considering it has zero stars - the closest to a recognizable face is Compte who has a bunch of TV series credits - and Orlan's IMDB page's most recognizable past projects were 2005's xXx: State of the Union (the one with Ice Cube instead of Vin Diesel) where she played the uncredited Trophy Wife and Michael Bay's The Island where she was the uncredited Rich Woman. And also she's now 51-years-old.
Alright, so you have a middle-aged former model with almost no prior roles of note who looks a lot like Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon and an exhibited acting range similar to Keanu Reeves (not that these roles require a ton of emoting). Perhaps the director/writer/editor Michael S. Ojeda is someone? Scanning his IMDB......annnnnd nope, nothing much except 20 episodes as a "recreations director" for a show called Deadliest Warrior which took the question of "Who would win a fight between Jesse James and Al Capone or Vlad the Impaler versus Sun Tzu?" and made a show of it.
However, he does have two relevant listings: First a direct-to-video thing called The Russian Bride which starred Orlan as, well, duh, mail-ordered by evil billionaire Corbin Bernsen and a short film called Rise of the Phoenix where Orlan starred as a woman named...wait for it...Dominique. This was made in 2015 and clearly was the demo reel to get the feature funded. Orlan is co-credited with coming up with the story so it's like Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman's collaboration creating The Bride for the Kill Bill films if you ordered from Temu.
So, is Ojeda a pulp grindhouse visionary or something? Not that Dominique indicates. He has a jittery handheld aesthetic that reminded me of Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi in its rawness and the story and execution of the action scenes is adequate for the caliber of the production this is.
But where it all goes wrong requires spoiling the ending, so if you're still down for a lean and mean low budget revenge action flick that will leave you angry at the end, go for it. It was riding a 5/10, Catch It On Streaming review until the end so perhaps you can overcome it.
But for the rest of you, SPOILERS BEGIN NOW:
After surviving the massive attack with the grandfather and oldest daughter's boyfriend catching some death, Dominque takes the sister, her newborn baby (who arrived during the battle after about 10 minutes of labor), and the other two children into the countryside to meet up with a kindly doctor who is waiting for them with an ambulance to transport them to safety far from this town. Everything looks hunky dory until the doctor is killed by a sniper and it's revealed the cartel had the rendezvous staked out. In the ensuing mayhem, everyone in the family is killed, even the newborn.
What. The. F*CK?!?!?
Earlier in the movie, Dominique explains that the only reason she's staying to defend the family of her one-night stand was, "I don't like when people die for no good reason." Um, HELLO?!?!? What would you call that ending, Mr. Ojeda?!?!? No, the fact you show the aftermath of her killing all the cartel members during the end credits doesn't make it better and if you thought you were launching a series off this movie, hooooo boy, no no no no NOOOOOOO!!!!
For all his evil-doing, you have to credit Harvey Weinstein for making a condition of releasing Clerks be that the original ending where Dante is murdered by a robber be cut. He understood that after all the wacky fun of this comedy, killing the poor guy who wasn't even supposed to be working that day would be commercial suicide, thus saving Kevin Smith from his own post-ironic stupidity. Too bad no one told Ojeda that killing children wasn't a winning move.
That's not to say that downbeat endings can't work. Leon doesn't make it out alive at the end of Leon: The Professional, but his death has meaning. This is just senseless shock.
END SPOILERS.
As for the 4K HDR presentation, it's not very effective as the low-budget cinematography is frequently blown out and generally flat. Looks more like Blu-ray quality which is fine for the material.
Dominique could've been a low-rent cheap thrill on top of a puzzlement as to why it was even made, but the unbelievably bad choice at the end just blows it.
The latest in Bitcoin-themed documentaries comes courtesy of Netflix and director Chris Smith (Wham!, Hollywood Con Queen) in the form of Biggest Heist Ever, the tale of the 2016 theft of $70 million in Bitcoin from a Hong Kong-based crypto currency exchange called Bitfinex by hackers. With the crypto boom several years later, the haul was then worth $4.5 billion - at the time of this writing, it'd be worth $12 billion & yes, I regret not buying Bitcoin in 2010 - an amount that prompted Internal Revenue Service money laundering investigator Chris Janczewski to begin trying to track down where the money may've gone.
Because every crypto transaction is logged on the blockchain (the makers explain the tech of crypto clearly), Janczewski was able to analyze where the coins had passed from wallet to wallet, but couldn't determine who had control of them. He suspected that the hackers were stuck trying to get the cyber coins translated into spendable currency because to do so means presenting your real identities to set up accounts.
His prime suspects are the least likely pair of cyber Bonnie & Clydes - Silicon Valley tech bro Ilya Lichtenstein and his girlfriend Heather Morgan who worked as a consultant and contributor to Forbes online. Adding a bizarre spin to things is Morgan's rapper/social media influencer wannabe persona as "Razzlekhan" with thousands of videos including some of the most cringe-inducing stuff you'll ever see. No way could these two have pulled off the heist of the 21st Century, right?
Spoiler: They did, or to be more specific, they plead guilty to the charges, though Smith definitely implies they may not have conducted the actual hack. (The way they ultimately trip themselves up is so stupid it beggars belief.) This leads to the fundamental flaw with Biggest Heist Ever in that it doesn't quite resolve itself satisfactorily, though it offers more of a conclusion than the long walk to nowhere which was Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan & Sara.
With no participation from either perp, we're left with lots of talk from former friends, colleagues, collaborators, and investigators along with the massive amounts of videos from the weirdos. It's entertaining, but superficial and vaguely incomplete feeling.
To quote Morrissey, stop me if you've heard this one before: Monsters have wiped out virtually the entirety of the human race leaving a remnant clinging to life while coping with the specific rules of the threat. Sure sounds like A Quiet Place, right? While that sleeper hit has already spawned a sequel and prequel installment, Elevation is the first outright knockoff that I can think of.
This time the gimmick is literally unstoppable killing machine monsters called Reapers (super original name there!) have burst from below ground and killed everyone. Their one weakness is they can't go any higher than 8000 feet, so after a few years handy white rock lines and fence posts have been placed to tell survivors when they're crossing the line of death or safety, depending on which way you're headed.
In the Rocky Mountains lives Will (Anthony Mackie), a widower whose wife was killed by the beasts and lives with his young son, Hunter (Danny Boyd Jr.). Next door lives Nina (Morena Baccarin), a hard-drinking misanthrope of a scientist constantly trying to discover a way to kill the Reapers.
Hunter has a lung condition requiring filters for an oxygen machine while he sleeps and of course the supply runs out. The hospital in Boulder, CO will have plenty, but it's below the line. Nina demands to come along because she has a theory about the Reapers and how to kill them, but requires chemicals in her lab in Boulder. There's bad blood between Will and Nina for fairly predictable reasons, but he agrees to let her tag along. Katie (Maddie Hasson) is a tomboyish hunting pal of Will's who also invites herself along.
While the route only dips below the line at a couple of places before the final long leg into Boulder, it's no surprise that they manage to run into Reapers and it won't be much of a surprise who gets killed, who survives and how. While director George Nolfi (The Adjustment Bureau) does an OK job trying to keep the tension up, the committee-written script doesn't have enough originality to really keep the mystery of the Reapers going and when they're finally explained, it's mostly to set up a sequel that will never happen and begs a question that the 8000-foot limit being arbitrary shouldn't have been an impediment at all. (See below the trailer for a spoiler about this.)
Clocking in at a tidy 91 minutes, at least Elevation doesn't try to pad out the proceeding too much. The performances are OK considering the thinness of the writing, but if Baccarin was actually drinking as much as Nina is portrayed as guzzling, she wouldn't been looking that choice.
While A Quiet Place elevated the post-Apocalyptic monster movie genre in a surprising way, Elevation is strictly plodding along in the valley of adequacy.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.
>>>> SPOILER ALERT!!! <<<<<
The Reapers are revealed to be alien robots and a mid-credits scene shows three "meteorites" in the night sky - presumably alien ships approaching Earth with updated models to finish the eradication of carbon-based life forms infesting the third planet in the system. But why was there a limit in the first place? If you're going to depopulate a world, why leave the high ground as a refuge? Set the height limit to 25,000 feet to cover Mt. Everest or just not have one at all.
Identity theft is a nightmare for those it happens to. But what if you're a semi-famous musician who discovers someone (or someones) has been impersonating you to your fans, leading them to believe they have been Close Personal Friends with you? This is the situation Tegan Quin - half of the musical group Tegan & Sara (probably mostly known to Normies who've even heard of them as "those identical twin lesbians") - found herself in over a decade ago and now recounted in the sparse documentary, Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan & Sara.
Opening with a quick recap of their career, starting as 18-year-olds in Calgary, Alberta, Canuckia, their early adoption of social media and close bonds with their fans - coming out to greet them outside venues in line, going to the merch table after the show, posing for all the photos requested - also laid the foundation for who (or whoms, plural, it develops) became know as "Fake Tegan" or "Fegan" to begin building years-long relationships with fans, leading them to believe they were actually pals with Tegan.
This erupted in 2011 when Fegan sent a fan named Julie a link to a drive containing their passport photos, info about their band members, and very personal details like their mother battling breast cancer. Sensing something off about this escalation, Julie contacted their management and was told in reply Tegan had no idea who Julie was. As management put the word out to fan boards that anyone interacting with Fegan was being had, more reports of fans having been suckered by the catfisher came in, some even believing they were in line for some up close & personal happy fun times with Tegan, if you follow.
The distress over this hit the fans hard, leaving them embarrassed or hurt, especially a Vancouver musician named JT who lashed out publicly against Tegan (the real one), whom she'd had a real world friendship, after feeling dissed by Fegan. But on the band's side, the question of how tightly secured song demos and items like the passport photos got released led to paranoia about their friends and employees. Who was using their access to then harm the fans. While no one lost money, they lost more: Their sense of privacy, trust, and security. Some said they couldn't listen to T&S's music anymore because of the feelings of betrayal or embarrassment.
So, who was this perpetrator? Well, that's the problem because Fanatical never finds out. Several suspects were identified, including a woman named "Tara" located in Maine who the director, Erin Lee Carr (Britney vs. Spears), traveled to interview only to get stood up. Ultimately, Tara takes a conference call with Carr and Tegan where she denies being Fegan, but is actually another hurt fan who only reached out to others to have her feelings validated. In a post-call discussion, Carr and Tegan decide to believe her.
With no resolution, Fanatical overall lacks much of a purpose. Many of the incidents occurred over a decade ago and even Tegan had relegated the experience to background noise. They had never publicized it during its peak, so what's the benefit of dredging it up now when there is no resolution other than a long therapy session for her and the fans whom she communicates over Zoom calls? The reunion of JT and her is poignant, but the imbalance of their statuses hangs over the meeting.
The line between being a really big fan and a danger to the objects of their adoration is touched on. They had to stop mingling with fans before or after the show, resorting to VIP meet & greets where they know who's coming in. "The barricades and security are there for a reason. We've had people rush the stage and bearhug us." and these are just fans wanting to show their love, not dangerous psychos like the lunatic who assassinated Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell on stage at a Damageplan gig. But the added level of invasion of privacy with these catfishings must suck even more of the joy out of the art.
Without a resolution and so far removed from events discussed, Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan & Sara ends up feeling like a video of Tegan's group therapy sessions with those who were deceived.
As Saturday Night Live begins its 50th season, it's hard to believe there was a time where the show's existence was hanging by a thread and that the whole thing may've just been a gambit in a contract dispute with King of Late Night Johnny Carson at the time. Thus is the background for Saturday Night, the semi-biographical portrayal of the final 90 minutes before the airing of the first episode on October 11, 1975.
Gabriel LaBelle (The Fabelmans) stars as Lorne Michaels, creator and el jefe of SNL for most of its half-century run. The 30-year-old Canadian comedy writer and producer had been given 90 minutes of time at 11:30 pm Saturday nights which normally ran reruns of Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show to do something with and he assembled a rogues gallery of writers and performers from the National Lampoon, Second City, and The Groundlings along with short films by Albert Brooks, Jim Henson's Muppets (not Kermit or the Sesame Street ones, but original adult ones), musical performers, etc. Not a typical Seventies variety show, the question of "What is this?" looms over everything.
Told in close to real-time, Saturday Night portrays the countdown as utter chaos with friction between the cast, open rebellion from the union stagehands and technical staff, and a menacing network executive (Willem Dafoe) who has the power to kill the show and air another Carson rerun if he loses faith in Michaels.
Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith, Gotham) is a vainglorious a-hole already plotting his next career move; Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation, New Girl) is a Julliard-trained published playwright and at 38, far older than most of the cast and writers and wondering why he's there; Billy Crystal (Nicolas Podany) is looking at show rundown - the dress rehearsal ran three hours - and wonders how he's going to get on the air; host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) thinks it's all a joke. Chasing after Michaels is Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman, Licorice Pizza), a network exec who's trying to keep him on course, but also trying to shoehorn product placement. (Ebersol would take over as producer of SNL for part of the five-year interregnum where Michaels was away.) Will the show go on in time? Duh.
There are two major problems with Saturday Night which hamper it despite the energetic direction and go-for-broke efforts of the cast. First off is the real-time conceit where we're supposed to believe all this stuff went on in the 90 minutes before air and I saw this as someone who watched every season of 24 where we accepted that Jack Bauer could get across LA in 15 minutes. To believe the movie is to believe Michaels left the studio, went to a nearby bar and met and recruited writer Alan Zweibel (Josh Brener) about 11:15 pm and the audience was still waiting to be let in five minutes before the show started. If they had simply made it the 5-6 hours before that first show, all those moments would've been infinitely more believable.
The second problem was manifested by the disappointing box office (about $10M gross against a $25-$30M budget) as the question of "Who is this movie for?" isn't answered. Unless you're an older Gen Xer who remembers the OG SNL and/or is familiar with the behind-the-scenes intrigue from one of the two books written on the show, you won't really know what the actual heck is going on, who these people are, etc.
Now, as a member of both cohorts, I was able to keep up with (and sometimes fact-check) what was being portrayed, but with nearly two dozen major characters fighting for time, characterizations are mostly shorthand at best - Chevy's a jerk, John Belushi (Matt Wood) is surly, Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O'Brien, The Maze Runner series) is a motormouth, and so on. It mostly comes down, like so many biopics, to how well the actors imitate their counterparts; the Morris, Aykroyd and Carlin ones are the best matches. J.K. Simmons also has a blast cameoing as Milton Berle.
LaBelle chooses not to imitate Michaels unique tone - which Mike Myers based his Dr. Evil accent on and if you've ever heard anyone tell an anecdote involving Michaels they ALL fall into doing this voice - but perhaps he should have because with not much more time than the rest of the mob to make an impression, maybe doing an impression would've triggered some latent familiarity in the viewer.
While the haters insist "the show hasn't been funny since the original cast left", the show simply couldn't have coasted without regular infusions of new stars like Eddie Murphy, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Dennis Miller, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Keenan Thompson, Fred Armisen, Jason Sudakis, and countless more for the ensuing 44 seasons. It's been around so long you have to be eligible to join AARP to remember a world without it and the story of how Lorne Michaels cobbled together what turned into a comedic institution is why there are two oral histories in print about it while Saturday Night ends up a rushed, chaotic sliver of how it came to be.
The unknown and unsung musicians who played on the hit songs of he 1960s have been assayed in acclaimed documentaries Standing in the Shadows of Motown (which covered the Funk Brothers, the house band of Motown) and The Wrecking Crew (covering the L.A. session players which included pre-solo artist Glen Campbell and legendary bassist Carol Kaye) and fans of these retrospectives now have another documentary to check out from Denny Tedesco (son of Wrecking Crew guitarist Tommy Tedesco), director of the latter doc, Immediate Family. (Bad title even in context.)
Focusing on the quartet of players - guitarists Danny 'Kootch' Kortchmar and Waddy Wachtel, bassist Leland Sklar, and drummer Russ Kunkel - who became the first famous session cats thanks to manager/producer Peter Asher putting musician credits in album liner notes, they backed a Who's Who of 1970s stars such as James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Stevie Nicks, Linda Ronstadt, and more and became in demand as others wanted the guys who played on so-and-so's album.
With testimonials from those they worked backed with copious clips, we're given the quick rundown of their lives and how they rapidly coalesced into the unit they became. Whereas the Wrecking Crew musicians didn't tour because they feared someone else getting their chair in the studios, times changed where artists wanted the guys who recorded the album to be their live band, so they had active studio and touring careers. Sklar and Wachtel are both recognizable to normies due to their distinctive looks - Sklar has a massive white beard and Wachtel long tight curly hair - so this may be revelatory to non-liner notes nerds.
There are amusing stories like when Everly Brothers superfan Wachtel auditioned for their touring band and met their music director, Warren Zevon, and showed he knew the material better than Zevon and the time Waddy accompanied Ronstadt to a strip club when she didn't have any ID on her. Don Henley's solo career is basically owed to Kootch as the fellows branched off into different career paths of production and writing in the Eighties.
The pacing drags a bit towards the end as the focus shifts to what they're doing now - they're all still active in their seventies, but also slowing down to enjoy life more - and their recording and live shows as The Immediate Family, but for fans of music docs (and liner notes), it's worth a watch.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Viewed on Hulu.)
Sometimes you're disappointed by a movie even when it's not actually that bad and that's the case with My Old Ass (bad title even in context), the second feature by actress-turned-writer/director Megan Park (The Secret Life of the American Teenager). What is being touted as a sci-fi comedy co-starring Aubrey Plaza is not remotely sci-fi and it's more a dramedy as my tags indicate. Due to the incorrect expectations set by the trailer and reviews, we went in expecting something it wasn't, not that it was bad. Let's get into it.
Maisy Stella (TV's Nashville) stars as Elliott (no explanation for the male name), a newly 18-year-old girl from a rural Canadian town in lovely country with a lake. Her family owns a cranberry farm, she has a couple of gal pals - Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks) - and a girlfriend, Chealsea (Alexandria Rivera), who we know nothing about other than they're always making out, two younger brothers (the youngest of which is obsessed with Saoirse Ronan because that's a thing that really happens), nice non-stupid parents, and she can't wait to get out of this podunk town and move to Toronto to start having a real life.
While her family sits waiting with her birthday cake at home, she and her pals go camping on an island and drink tea made with a lot of hallucinogenic mushrooms. While her friends start tripping balls, Elliot doesn't feel anything until suddenly Aubrey Plaza appears next to her and announces that she is Elliot at age 39. (How the vanilla white Stella transforms into the Puerto Rican Plaza is never explained either.) Older Elliot is cagey about telling her about the future, but only lays down one firm recommendation: Avoid a boy named Chad.
Of course, Elliot almost immediately encounters a boy named Chad (Percy Hynes White, The Gifted) who is doing summer work on the family farm. And also of course the more she hangs out with Chad, the more she becomes attracted to her causing confusion about her being gay because straight kids in movies aren't a thing much these days. Compounding matters is that she can't reach Older Elliot (who left her phone number in Elliot's contacts as "My Old Ass" leading to many chats); she's stopped responding to her calls and texts leaving her to wonder what's so bad about Chad?
The fundamental "problem" with My Old Ass is that we went in expecting much more Plaza than it delivers. (We're on a bit of a kick with her lately, having watched Agatha All Along just because she was in that and also wasn't in it enough.) About halfway through the missus grumbled that "this is an Afterschool Special" and groused about the trailer being misleading. (She also found White not hot.) Semi-valid complaints, but what remains is still a nice modest dramedy about not taking life for granted & appreciating the times you get to have with family and friends.
Park sets a naturalistic tone in the girls conversations and performances which gets tripped up when Elliot spouts off woke blather which also makes one wonder how a movie where a gay teen goes straight got financed and the little brothers Ronan infatuation. But it also shows Elliot not being such a self-absorbed brat under her older self's influence. Stella's performance is fine, but Plaza sparks so much when she's there, her absence lowers the energy level.
As for the supposed sci-fi element, it's reminiscent of the underappreciated 2000 film Frequency which starred Jim Caviezel and Dennis Quaid as a son and father who communicate across 30 years via ham radio enhanced by aurora borealis and how they literally change the world with their actions, albeit on a micro scale. All we learn of the future is that salmon are extinct, people aren't allowed to have three kids, and there are air raid sirens going off, but Older Elliot doesn't seem too concerned.
The film's ending is nice, but requires one final massive suspension of disbelief to accept what's happening. How this connection works isn't explained and perhaps is besides the point. My Old Ass is a pleasant enough coming-of-age story. Just adjust your expectations going in.
There is an annoying habit of film critics losing their minds over weird movies because they are so numbed by the usual mindless dreck Hollyweird pumps out that anything that's remotely unique triggers a herdthink stampede of fawning slobbering about how "important", "thought provoking", "blah-blah-woof-woof" a film is. Toss in some elite festival prizes, like winning Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival and the synchronized baaing intensifies. Thus it is with 2024's cause célèbre, the dark satire/body horror freakout The Substance.
Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging ("OMG, she's 50! That's like....dead for women!" is the text, not even subtext here) actress who hosts an aerobics fitness show that's a cross between Jane Fonda and the 20 Minute Workout show which ran from 1983-84 featuring hot babes working out while making O-faces for the camera. (IYKYK, Gen Xers) As a birthday present, she is fired from her show by the producer, Harvey (a wildly flamboyant Dennis Quaid), and distracted by her billboard being taken down, she's in a big auto accident which miraculously leaves her uninjured.
While at the hospital, a male nurse slips her a flash drive labeled The Substance on one side with a phone number on the other. At home she watches its promo video promising a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of herself. Initially, she tosses the drive away, but after seeing an ad in the paper for auditions for her old job, she calls the number and is given an address in an alley and sent a keycard to access the dropbox where The Substance and refills will be left.
The setup is simple and clear: After taking the Activator, she must stabilize herself with injections daily, and after seven days she must switch back with The Matrix, the original version of herself. (The emphasis is important.) What's not made clear in the packaging is that the Activator doesn't transform Elisabeth's body, it causes it to divide into a wholly separate person who emerges from a split in her back. (Zoiks!) While Elisabeth lays unconscious for the week, fed intravenously, her new improved version will be on the loose until she returns, cross-transfuses with her, then going dormant for a week.
The new girl is Sue (Margaret Qualley, whose mother is Andie McDowell, who costarred with Moore in St. Elmo's Fire) and she promptly goes and gets the job as the new host of Pump It Up, the updated edition of Elisabeth's workout show. Harvey loves her and is fine with her cover story that she needs alternating weeks off to care for her sick mother.
Of course, where there are rules with severe consequences for breaking them - like getting a Mogwai wet and feeding it after midnight - it doesn't take long for Sue to start bending them. When time runs out just as she's about to hook up with some dude, she rushes to extract more stabilizing spinal fluid from Elisabeth's inert body, switching back the next day. But Elisabeth wakes up to her index finger being withered. She calls the Substance hotline and is told that whatever has been taken cannot be returned - the damage is permanent; follow the rules.
What follows is a game of passive-aggressive warfare between the two. Elisabeth spends her week just eating or watching TV while Sue parties and rapidly advances in her career. Sue begins to stay out longer and longer, wrecking ever more damage on Elisabeth. Eventually it gets VERY out of control leading to an utterly gonzo bonkers finale.
Writer-director Coralie Fargeat (whose last movie was her debut, 1997's Revenge) isn't hiding the ball as to her intentions and inspirations. She's fusing the body horror of David Cronenberg movies like The Fly and Crimes of the Future to a commentary on how society and especially the entertainment industry pressure women to look young and attractive at all costs lest they lose their value and be discarded. However, while you can see the obvious outlines of theses, the irony of The Substance is that its execution lacks much substance.
There was an LOL moment in Barbie when Barbie was crying about not being traditionally Barbie pretty and narrator Helen Mirren snarks, "Note to the filmmakers: Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make this point." This immediately came to mind as we are presented Moore's fully nude 59-year-old body (at time of filming in 2022) which despite some sags & remnants of plastic surgery effects is holding up quite well. When an actress can pass for a decade younger & even pass muster by the supposedly merciless beauty standards the movie contends to rage against, you're starting in verisimilitude hole.
The sterile art-directed world & calculated cinematography adds to the unreality. After taping her show, Elisabeth walks down a long hallway festooned with huge posters cataloging her career only to find the women's restroom out of service, forcing her into the men's room where she conveniently overhears Harvey's plans to replace her. She doesn't have her own dressing room with private bathroom?!?
The rules of the Substance also seem situationally random. We're told there is only one person and the switching process involves hooking up a two-line transfusion device, implying that memories would be downloaded into the other body, but neither is aware of what the other does except environmentally as Sue is disgusted by Elisabeth's binges and Elisabeth resents Sue's rapid fame as shown on the billboard outside her window. But Elisabeth's binges don't harm Sue; she eats her way through a French cuisine cookbook and Sue remains a hardbody; but Sue's cheating wrecks Elisabeth.
It also suffers from what I call "no one in the world but the people in the movie." Elisabeth has no family, no friends, no ex-husbands or children, not even a therapist. She is utterly alone. The one outside man she encounters who knew her from school, she makes a date with out of desperation, but ends up standing him up because she didn't think she looked good enough when she looked fine.
Which leads to the ending, which I shant spoil here, but for all its Grand Guignol excess, it's just too much in a movie where excess was the medium. There is a shot where Sue appears on stage at the climatic New Year's Eve show which should've been the end of the movie. But Fargeat didn't end it there.
I have a suspicion that much of the fawning adulation for The Substance & uniform commentary echoed by critics comes from reading the press notes about what the movie is about more than what the movie actually has to say in its telling. Too arch & sterile in its milieu, too sparse in its actual storytelling - surprisingly it's 2-1/4 hour runtime didn't drag - its commentary is inferred rather than explicit and the choices made in telling the story ends up leaving things to interpretation - "Like, wow, man, what did it mean when Bowman saw himself as a dying old man reaching for the Monolith at the end of 2001 and did he turn into the Space Baby, man?" - which you'd think were explicit according to those who got the explainer notes in their press packets.
It's not that the subject doesn't merit discussion. Hollyweird has always liked its starlets young and tales of ridiculous ageism are legion like how then-28 year-old Olivia Wilde was considered too old to play 37-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio's wife in The Wolf of Wall Street so the role went to 22-year-old Margot Robbie, her career-making big break.
But wouldn't it have made more sense to cast an actress who was once a sexy star, but clearly lost the genetic lottery for aging? Elizabeth Hurley, Salma Hayek, Nicole Kidman, and Ming-Na Wen range from 57-60 years old and would have little trouble attracting the so-called male gaze. Kelly McGillis was blunt when asked why she wasn't asked to return for Top Gun: Maverick - then 48-year-old Jennifer Connolly was cast as then 57-year-old Tom Cruise's love interest - stating, “I’m old, and I’m fat, and I look age-appropriate for what my age is." (She's also five years older than Cruise.) People age, some better than others, so how stunning and brave is it really to cast one of the lottery winners in a story of unrealistic beauty standards when she's already waaaaay ahead of the game compared to mere mortal women?
Moore is being talked up for Oscar attention and I can see the case for it, but let's be honest, most of that is because she was willing to play "old" & get naked in the process. Someone snarked that Patricia Arquette won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Boyhood (which I call Twelve Years A Movie) for "being willing to age 12 years on screen." Considering how shrill and one-note her character was, that's likely. Moore is good and she needs to work more - perhaps some of the roles Jennifer Connolly is too busy to take - but again the overpraise.
Qualley has the different task of being both a naif and a malevolent actor in the story. Decked out with impressive prosthetic breasts - makeup has become so advanced that actresses who used to have to get implants (e.g. Mariel Hemingway's modest upsizing to play doomed Playmate Dorothy Stratten in Star 80) now can play boob queens like Pamela Anderson (Lily James in the Pam & Tommy miniseries) or Angelyne (Emmy Rossum) - she almost fares as badly as Moore as The Substance wreaks its havoc on rulebreakers, but as with everyone else, the script infers more than explicates.
Quaid is clearly having a blast filling in for originally-cast Ray Liotta, who passed away before filming started, but he's playing a cartoon.
While the sum is less then its parts, The Substance is still worth a look for those seeking something....different, yeah, let's go with that. If you didn't grow up with Cronenberg body horror movies in your life, it may seem like the craziest thing you've ever seen with its gooey old school makeup effects. But for all its slickness & grotesque excesses, it's a shame that there's not more thematic, narrative & character substance to The Substance. (Yes, I enjoyed the pun enough to use it twice. Sue me.)
Almost as fraught as the Terminator franchise is the Alien franchise with the good-bad ratio decidedly in the red. After Ridley Scott's seminal Alien and James Cameron's genre-defining Aliens, the series suffered through David Fincher's disowned & meddled-to-death Alien 3, the worse-than-you-remember Alien Resurrection, and a pair of Alien vs. Predator movies no one talks about. Scott returned to the series with 2012's Prometheus which suffered from a disjointed script, but looks slick, and its far worse sequel Alien Covenant which was both stupid and a victim of being an Alien prequel which was stuck trying to meet up with the original's continuity despite a totally different aesthetic like how the garbage Star Trek: Discovery series' ships look like the Kelvin Timeline's Apple Stores when the time frame is just ahead of the original series.
Overall, the scorecard is two good, five bad, and one middle. Into the breach steps Alien: Romulus, co-written and directed by Fede Álvarez (2013's Evil Dead remake; Don't Breathe) and is set in between the first two movies while Ripley was off sleeping lost in space for 57 years.
Opening with a montage of a ship collecting what turns out to be a cocoon holding the xenomorph from the wreckage of the Nostromo (which was supposedly blown to dust by Ripley's overloading the reactors, so huh? Also, how did they know there was any alien to recover when Ripley and her logs are three decades away from being recovered?) we meet our obvious Final Girl, Rain (Cailee Spaeny, Priscilla), and her "brother" Andy (David Jonsson, HBO's Industry), who was a broken android fixed up by Rain's now-deceased father and programmed with plenty of dad jokes.
They live on the Weyland-Yutani (the Alien universe's Big Evil Corporation) colony of Jackson's Star, a miserable place which gets zero hours of sunlight per year. An orphan whose parents both died of diseases on this godforsaken rock, she has been laboring to finish her contract with WY, but when she goes to get her travel permit to emigrate to a free colony called Yvaga she learns that due to staffing shortages her contract has unilaterally extended from 12,000 hours of servitude to 24,000 hours, meaning another 5-6 years, but now in the mines. (How her family got into this contract situation and the reason WY can basically enslave workers isn't explained.)
Facing a bleak non-future, she's receptive to a scheme proposed by her friends - her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux, Netflix's Shadow & Bone), his sister Kay (Isabela Merced, Madam Web), their cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn, say it out loud), and his adopted sister Navarro (Aileen Wu) - to go up and loot a derelict spaceship for hypersleep cryo pods which could allow them to make the nine-year journey to Yvaga, leaving the oppressive control of WY behind. They need Andy, a WY product, to go to open doors and access systems for them.
With Navarro piloting, they head into orbit - so the Big Evil Corporation that literally enslaves its workers to borrow the company cargo ships for heist jobs with no oversight, remote controls, etc.? - and discover its more than a ship, it's a space station in a degrading orbit heading for the planet's ring in a matter of hours. Docking with the station, they quickly find the pods, but they don't have enough fuel to power themselves long enough to make the trip. More cryo fuel will be needed and they figure the station's lab may have some.
Upon reaching the lab they discover a scene of chaos with dead bodies and holes melted in the deck. While retrieving the fuel cells, they trip an alarm which locks down the room Tyler, Bjorn and Andy are in and Andy can't open the door due to lack of clearance. Rain realizes the half-melted android in the main lab could have a chip which would upgrade Andy's privileges and while they're retrieving it, the containers holding many facehuggers begin thawing, opening, and unleashing their peril on the young group, eventually landing on Navarro's face and, well, if you've seen an Alien movie you know what's coming. (Especially if you've seen the trailer which spoils the event.)
After that, it's a race to get off the station before it's accelerated decay crashes it in less than an hour while masses of facehuggers and full-grown xenomorphs lurk everywhere and Andy's upgraded programming causes a shift in allegiance from protecting Rain to protecting WY's interests.
Where Alien: Romulus shines is in nailing the grungy lived-in low-tech aesthetic of the first two movies, especially the original. Displays are CRTs, not flat panels or transparent or holographic; the emphasis is on practical sets and effects; the design language is of a piece with Scott's first trip into space. The colony is dingy & bleak, making the young people's decision to try and escape perfectly rational. Álvarez's staging of things also works for the most part in ratcheting up tension in a 45-year-old franchise where we know the drill a bit too well.
But where it lacks is in the story and some dubious choices in callbacks. It's always tempting to member berry new movies with references to previous entries (e.g. Terminator movies have to say, "I'll be back") and for the most part Alien: Romulus handles things subtly, fun for those who catch the references without being obvious (e.g. the computer is called "Mother" for MU/TH/UR; oooooh, look, Colonial Marine pulse rifles), but it wildly goes overboard quoting Aliens' signature line verbatim then borrowing one of the lamest bits from Alien Resurrection with a similar denouement. But more questionable is the distracting attempt to resurrect a deceased actor's character to play a similar role. It would've been fine to just create a new character, but in trying to chain it directly to the original and doing such an odd job of it backfires.
Spaeny and Jonsson are good in their roles with the latter having more notes to play as he changes levels of sophistication. The others are written too flatly - Navarro's distinguishing traits are being Asian, having a shaved head, being a pilot, and dying first (not really a spoiler if you saw the trailer) and she's more fleshed out than the guys - and the twists aren't really surprising. The whole deal about the absent government allowing WY to abuse its workers for years, the independent colonies, etc. begs for more amplification. The cast also feels too young; despite the actors being 23 to 31 years old, they all seem like teenagers raising questions about why WY had families on such a harsh world as laborers, unlike the families terraforming LV-426 (Hadley's Hope) in Aliens. Merced's Kay draws the shortest straw and is such a non-entity that when she was shown after a while I'd forgotten about her.
While not an unqualified return to form, Alien: Romulus sits below Prometheus in my rankings by virtue of returning to stylistic terrain of the original and its monster-in-the-house plotting, while missing out on staking its own claims to fresh storytelling or world-building. Cameron took the bare bones of the original's milieu and was off to the races, creating THE defining space marine archtype which everything from Halo to Starship Troopers tapped; making Weyland-Yutani into the Big Evil Corporation that overshadow the galaxy. While he nibbles at some new concepts, Alvarez ultimately falls back into member berry box checking.
The A/V presentation is good with the dingy environments never crushing to indistinct blacks on my QD-OLED display. There's not a lot of bright highlights as the color palette is mostly grim browns, grays and blacks, so it's the holding of shadow detail that benefits from the HDR grade. Surround audio is clear and active.
After plenty of lackluster big budget whiffs with their original features, Netflix has gone indie budget with It's What's Inside which has the distinction of being even worse, but at least not costing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars sucking. So, yay for fiscal restraint?
A pack of college friends gather in a mansion that belonged to one of their mother's before she passed away. The occasion is the host's impending nuptials and they're there to party like it's back in school. The last to arrive is Forbes (David W. Thompson) who shows up with a suitcase with a machine inside that he proposes they play a party game with. The game is simple: Everyone puts a pair of electrodes on their temples and when he presses the button, their consciousnesses are swapped between the bodies. While in other bodies, they have to guess who is in which bodies.
After the original shock passes, they're all in and of course immediately start cheating - both in the rules by lying about who they are and in beginning to hook up with each other as they work out their true desires while using other people's bodies to do it. Things get wildly out of hand when two of the friends die while swapped meaning not only are they gone spiritually, it also means two people no longer have their bodies to return to. And not everyone wants to go back to their original shells.
While the premise has potential, it's squandered by writer-director-editor Greg Jardin's overly self-indulgent visual wankery and all the characters being mostly annoying twits. We never really get a bead on who these people are - there's a reason I didn't bother rattling off the characters and actors - there are eight of them with no time to set them up before they start swapping around and other than the one couple where the guy clearly wants another woman it's all noise. With wacky split screens and exaggerated colored lighting, Jardin comes off as a try hard rather than focusing his expanded Twilight Zone-ish tale.
However, to be fair, he does use a visual shorthand to help us know who is really who and the way backstory elements are portrayed with photos is genuinely cool in the vain of the Michael Pena stories in the first two Ant-Man movies.
With chaotic execution of a okay premise, it turns out that It's What's Inside is a whole lotta nothin'.
If you saw the 2003 episode of South Park "Casa Bonita" and wondered if Cartman's beloved fantasy land of a Mexican restaurant with cliff divers and treasure caves was based on reality, the answer is surprisingly yes. Opened in 1973, it was a Denver-area mashup of Chi-Chi's and Disneyland. When it closed in the wake of the Fauci Flu scamdemic, it was feared to be gone forever and it went into bankruptcy.
But, to the surprise of no one South Park creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, stepped up to buy Casa Bonita with the intention of renovating it to its former glory for future generations. Flush with net worths in the hundreds of millions between South Park and The Book of Mormon revenues, it would be a pricey endeavor, but not onerous. But decades of corporate disinterest in basic maintenance left it run down with duct tape on the carpet and many areas so sketchy in the safety department it makes one wonder how code enforcers hadn't shut it down ages ago? And the food was notoriously bad.
But they had no idea just how bad things were and the extremely expensive and lengthy project is documented in ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! by director Arthur Bradford whose excellent 2011 documentary 6 Days to Air: The Making of South Park showed how they managed to crank out episodes on a weekly basis - or used to; their current output is just six episodes per year with a handful of longer specials - starting with a blank whiteboard on a Thursday to shipping a finished, animated show the following Friday. With that past collaboration, he was naturally allowed close access to document the nightmarish process.
Built within a failed department store in a shopping center, Casa Bonita was cobbled together without a general architectural plan on the fly and those foundational decisions result in nearly everything needing to be gutted for basic safety. The HVAC systems are so filthy due to lack of cleaning and using flex ducts that when shaken, mounds of dirt spill out. A hawk in the bell tower has turned the roof into a pigeon graveyard. (There's even a shot of the hawk pursuing its prey.) The cliff dive pool had high-voltage lighting near the splash zone and the way divers exited is so tight and adjacent to an electrical box it's a miracle no one died. The kitchen needs to be completely gutted. As a result, the budget rockets to multiples of the original planned cost on top of the $3.1 million they spent buying this money pit.
But they soldier on, hiring an acclaimed local chef/restaurateur to revamp the menu to not be terrible and seeking to modernize the puppet show, animatronics, performers and characters and the overall artistic intent of the venue to retain what people remember fondly while improving the experience. While Parker made his fortune off of cartoons where foul-mouthed children hang out with talking pieces of crap, he has more sense than Disney seems to nowadays about what makes a magical experience for children at Casa Bonita. An early dry run goes badly, but the reactions of the real children customers shows that what may seem hokey to grownups is magical to kids.
Even though ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! is as much an infomercial for the joint as a documentary about its return from the dead, it's still a fascinating portrait of how all one needs to keep dreams alive is the ability to see the shine through the grime. And tens of millions of dollars.
When I become Emperor of the Universe there's gonna be some changes. (OK, LOTS of changes.) One of the first tranche of edicts will be that any plastic surgeon who works on any famous woman who is by all objective standards in the top tier of beauty because they think they can improve on their natural genetics which were more than fine to start with will be condemned repairing cleft palettes and other deformities on poor Third World children for minimum wage.
The reason for this opening outburst is because some butchers have been allowing Megan Fox to alter herself to please her dirtbag boyfriend, Machine Gun Kelly, making her look like an absolute bimbo/porn star and I don't mean in a good way. This is the same Megan Fox of whom I coined one of my classic retorts in response to the missus saying she doesn't look very smart: "Sometimes you're not looking for a conversation." (Or as Tina Fey said in response to an interviewer calling her a "thinking man's sex symbol" - "Even thinking men want to f*ck Megan Fox." I love Tina.) She was always riding the line of self-parody, but when she's gone from this...
...to this...
...for the disposable new sci-fi erotic thriller (there's a genre-filing nightmare) Subservience, it was impossible for me to stop being distracted by her duck-lipped Instahoe face. What needed improving?!? Jeez, that body has THREE kids aged 8-12 years old on it. (That they're all looking to be raised a mess is a separate matter.)
"Ummmm, Dirk, is this a movie review or a rant against women doing what they want with their bodies?" you may be saying? BOTH!!! Pop Quiz, Hotshots - Name a top shelf beauty whose looks were IMPROVED by plastic surgery? Pamela Anderson was in Playboy and on Home Improvement with her original breasts. Did making them into cartoonish sweater blimps improve them for anyone but Tommy Lee or Kid Rock?
OK, rant over, on to the movie....Subservience is the story of Nick (a shockingly uncharismatic Italian Michele Morrone), a construction worker whose wife Maggie (Madeline Zima) appears to die in the opening scene. (Ooooh, it's a Disney movie!) With two young kids to raise, Nick goes to the mall and buys himself a helper in the form of Alice (Megan Fox) to help around the house.
That this Alice looks like Megan Fox and not The Brady Bunch's Ann B. Davis is the whole hook of the movie and it's not a spoiler to say he eventually plugs himself into her charging port because of course these robots have that feature. Oh, and Maggie isn't dead, she's just waiting for a heart transplant at the hospital so she's not around to see how Alice is keeping hubs occupied. (To be fair, he does feel guilty about the docking maneuver he allowed her to force him into with her robot super strength and sure, bro, go with that story when the wife figures it out.)
Meanwhile at work, the owners of the building project decide to lay off all the meatbag workers in favor of robots because why not have a strong workforce that never gets hurt or will go on strike. Nick is kept on because of his needing his health insurance for Maggie's surgery and insurance insisting on a human supervisor because if robots can be entrusted with child care, they definitely need to be babysat doing construction or something. Of course his former coworkers aren't too happy about the machines and Nick's pal Monty (Andrew Whipp) coerces him into aiding in some drunken vandalism.
But that's not all, because Nick feels Alice is missing the emotional resonance of Casablanca because she has the plots of every movie in her databanks, he follows her instructions to reboot her so she'd be less knowledgeable and of course this also turns off her restrictions against harming people because SkyNet ain't gonna arise by itself or something.
In the hands of a competent writer, the themes Subservience grazes past could've been woven into something more than the nothing this movie is. Killer robots on the loose trying to be human is a pulpy premise, but the light years between twaddle like this and Blade Runner are immeasurable. The thin script and flat performances and leaps over plot convenience Subservience requires are simply not worth the effort.
And for crying out loud, do not see this because you've heard about "Megan Fox's first nude scene!" You see a side view of her butt. Big deal. This isn't Emma Stone in Poor Things where she went from one nipple in The Favourite to full monty yikes sex scenes.
So M. Night Shyamalan has photos of the big bosses of Hollyweird committing heinous felonies (or at least really skeevy morally depraved stuff) because why else would he be allowed to make a movie of a screenplay as intrinsically terrible as the one for Trap, which at this writing has a 6.1 average score on IMDB which also indicts the stupidity of audiences while also explaining a lot of why so many politicians remain in office?
Trap stars Josh Harnett as Cooper, a fireman who's also an awesome girl dad who is taking his tween daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to see her fave pop star, Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan - one guess as to who her dad is). But as we know going in from the trailer, he's also the Butcher, an unimaginatively-named serial killer whose signature move is hacking up his bodies like a, you know, a crazy person.
But the cops somehow know he's going to be at the concert and have set a trap (roll credits!) for him by deploying a literal army of black-clad SWAT officers toting assault rifles as well as tons of regular dress cops who cover every entrance and exit. There is enough man and firepower present to knock over a moderate-sized country, so there's no way the Butcher can escape and the concert goers won't even seem to notice the armed prison vibe during the show.
Having entered Fort Hockey Arena despite the show of force, Cooper asks a super helpful merch booth worker, Jamie (Jonathan Langdon), what all the troops are for and Jamie tells Cooper that they're there to catch the Butcher. (This is also in the trailer.) How will our plucky serial killer possibly escape?
Well, as the great Ryan George Pitch Meeting series always says, it'll be super easy, barely an inconvenience because at every step of the way, Cooper will be able to hear the next important piece of information, either by always being right there when someone says it or conveniently listening in on a purloined walkie talkie when the FBI profiler, Dr. Grant (Hayley Mills, presumably hired because she started in The Parent Trap and Shyamalan has even less originality that we thought), broadcasts Basil Exposition infodumps.
There is so much stupid going on with Trap that it's hard to know where to start cataloging the transgressions, but the alarm bells began going off within minutes as detail after detail elicited annoyed, "That would never happen," comments from me (ahhhh, the benefits of home theater, where you can stop to heckle a movie without annoying strangers) and raising the question whether MNS ever been to a concert in his life? Does he know how anything works in reality?
During the show a guest performer emerges from the floor of the arena. The floor in the aisle opens up and a staircase emerges with the guest standing atop it before descending down to walk the floor towards the stage. There are no barricades around this chasm so anyone not paying attention could fall down into it. Many pop shows have runways that thrust out into the crowd so any guest would emerge from the stage surrounded by barricades. MNS only stages it this way because Cooper sees it as a possible escape route.
At another point Cooper manages to access an area where SWAT troops are getting a briefing about their mission so he can conveniently hear what they know about him. The concert is going on and the place is staked out. Wouldn't this briefing have been done beforehand?
Then there is a B-plot about Riley having issues with mean girls at school and Cooper repeatedly running into one of their mothers in the concourse. Did I mention that Riley keeps leaving the concert of her favorite artist to find her dad running all over? That happens when everyone knows that the only time people leave their seats is to hit the bathroom during the mid-show part of the set when the artist wants to play something off the new album or a boring ballad. NOTHING IS REAL!!!
And hoo boy there is the whole Jamie the merch guy situation where he enables so much by doing things that WOULD NEVER HAPPEN like leave his booth to take Cooper to get a t-shirt from the back area. He just gives it to him as if every item of merch isn't counted out and in to determine how much money should be in the til and to cut the venue their percentage. And he doesn't even take the rest of the box to sell at the booth! (He does get a good mid-credits callback moment.)
When Cooper's escape plan leads to him getting backstage after the most convenient pretense ever to get Riley involved with the show, the way he gets Raven to facilitate their escape hammered the OH, COME THE F*CK ON!!! meter so hard the needle bent 45 degrees. Does this big star not have an entourage, handlers, beggars and hangers-on? Why is her dressing room so sparsely done up? (Seriously, I have been in nicer green rooms as a nobody musician than this space.) How does no one notice she's taking off with some guy and his kid without comment?!?!?
Now I will admit that once he gets out of the arena with Raven, my level of interest ticked up from enraged apathy to vague curiosity whether the back half of the movie could be better? It's not and frankly indulges in new flavors of stupid leading to a twist even I saw coming and a final twist which again requires everyone to be moronic to unbelievable levels.
Aspiring screenwriters are constantly lectured about making sure their screenplays follow basic logic, so it must be super appalling to see MNS get away with attracting a reported $30M budget for a script that with get a neophyte in a night school class advised to pursue a career in the food service or housekeeping industries. Cooper is supposed to be this brilliant psychopath, but he has every step of his dodging capture literally handed to him. He's as if Tugg Speedman wanted to make The Silence of the Lambs as his Simple Jack character.
The entire chain of events depicted would unravel if everything doesn't go totally according to the hackneyed way MNS types them out. If they didn't have all the cops in plain sight, Cooper would have suspected nothing. What kind of sting operation has massive shows of police force? Without the cops, he doesn't ask Jamie the Very Talkative Merch Dude Who Can't Keep A Secret what's going on, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. If Raven's people say, "Hey, where is she going with that guy?" then he's caught. It's maddening.
Hartnett has been having a bit of a moment lately due to his co-starring role in last year's Oppenheimer (that was the movie about making the atomic bomb, not the one about Barbie in the "Barbenheimer" double-feature) and while he tries his best with the garbage MNS typed up, his efforts are wasted. I never cared for him during his teen idol days in the late-20th/early-21st Centuries where I felt his shtick was acting like a puppy dog with caterpillar eyebrows. But now in his mid-40s, his face has filled out and he looks like Kyle Chandler's brother. (Paging casting directors!) Someone get him a good script, please.
As for the other major purpose of this dumb movie, launching Daddy's little girl's pop and acting career, Saleka Shyamalan is adequate to the task. She's perfectly fine playing a pop singer and her music is as generically bland as most of what passes for "music" these days on the Spotify charts. In the one restrained directorial choice Daddy S makes, he shoots the numerous concert segments from the point of view of Riley's seat in the arena, not up close like a concert video. So the view is filled with idiots filming on their phones and she's only really seen on the video screens.
Shyamalan has had so many career highs and lows due to his own poor choices that one could get whiplash. After a killer opening run of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village followed by a decade of Razzie Awards bait before coming back with The Visit and Split, only to piss that comeback away with Glass (seriously, screw you, Night, for that ending!) and seemingly alternative between OK and bad movies (according to my missus who watches more of them than I do), he's firmly back in the Suck Zone with Trap. Don't let him trap you into wasting 100 minutes of your life on such dumb dreck. Go watch one of his early movies instead.
Another week, another star-studded Netflix Original that will be consumed and forgotten almost immediately. This week's movie snack is The Union, a blandly-titled spy caper action film packed with more talent than in deserves slumming for a check & being able to shoot in nice places.
After an opening sequence in Trieste, Italy where an unnamed squad of military gear-clad operatives led by Nick (Mike Colter, Luke Cage) and supervised by Roxanne (Oscar-winner Halle Berry, ) are all killed by unknown snipers along with the guy they'd grabbed who had a McGuffin briefcase containing the identities of every spy for every agency in the world; the case which was spirited away by someone after the squad wipe.
We then meet Mike (two-time Oscar nominee Mark Wahlberg, Ted 2), a New Jersey working schmo who is banging his 7th-grade English teacher (Dana Delany) who kicks him out in the morning, so he passes her husband having breakfast in the kitchen in the morning (wait, what?!?), on his way home to where he lives with his mother (Lorraine Bracco, looking hefty). After a quick montage showing him doing his blue collar job, he and the boys adjourn to the bar for brewskis.
Into this dive arrives Roxanne, who turns out to be an old high school flame of Mike's. After some drinking and flirting, she takes him to their old makeout spot where she then injects him with something. He wakes up in London to find out she works for the Union (roll credits!), a secret spy agency that's less blue bloods and more blue collar in their recruiting. The London office is led by Tom (Oscar-winner J.K. Simmons, Portal 2) and staffed by a colorful assortment of caricatures including Foreman (Oscar-nominee Jackie Earle Haley, Breaking Away) and some other red shirts. (Spoiler alert!)
Ted wants Mike to lead an attempt to recover the McGuffin so after a montage showing how Marky Mark, er, Mike packs six months of training into a couple of weeks, off they go for a bunch of capering, action, double crosses and a bunch of stuff that I can't even remember as I write this review two weeks later and frankly don't feel like tabbing over to the Wikipedia page to look up.
The Union tries to be a comedy, a spy thriller, an action flick, with some romantic tension mixed in because of course while trotting around Europe's nicer areas in bright 4K Dolby Vision. I kind of want to compare it to the Kevin Hart Netflix caper flick Lift which aired last January before disappearing from everyone's memory, but I can't remember much about that and don't feel like reading my review again.
After her appearance in John Wick: Chapter Three -Parabellum I thought Berry deserved a shot at more action roles, but should've specified "in good movies" like the John Wick series. She's looking great at 56 (at time of filming in 2022), but whoever thought the blonde "Karen" hairstyle with these long hanks falling over one eye half the time was a good look must've harbored deep resentment toward her. Bad hair, BAD!
Everyone else seems to be having fun collecting a paycheck to make believe in luxurious places, so who cares about the performances or anything else in this forgettable piece of content?
If you've got a bright 4K TV, you'll get your money's worth from the colorful cinematography, but you can find plenty of great demo videos on YouTube with better plots than The Union.
