Welcome To DirkFlix!

UPDATED 4/1/2025: Completely revised the When To See scale to reflect the extinction of rental stores and 2nd run dollar show theaters in today's streaming world. The original version of this can be visited here.
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Oh, fercryingoutloud! ANOTHER movie review blog?!? Another guy who thinks his opinion matters and wishes to inflict it on the overloaded Information Superhighway? (What ever happened to that buzzword? Haven't heard it in ages.) Why should we care?

A: Yes, yes, and why not?

The purpose of this blog when started after seeing Avatar in 2009 was to allow me to get back into the habit of reviewing movies and DVDs like I used to between 2004-2008 for IGN and The Digital Bits before life stuff and editorial differences ended those associations.

 Initially intended to not be 1000-2000 word chin-stroking epics, but mostly a few paragraphs about what I've been watching and whether they might be of interest to you, I unfortunately got slack about actually writing anything. While I logged and scored everything I've seen, I didn't write reviews in a timely manner and after a while and a dozen intervening movies, I couldn't remember enough specifics to properly review them, so they remained unpublished.

Since fixing hundreds of unwritten reviews is impossible, I've dedicated myself to knuckling down this year (2025), and as of this revised update only a few reviews need to be finished off out of over 40 this year. I may also go back and start publishing older reviews, even if they're just scores; perhaps adding a sentence or two. Use the hashtag options and search box to see if I saw something in particular.

With movies even more outrageously expensive and even an all-you-can eat service like Netflix and Amazon Prime can still cost you time (which is worth more than money because you can't make more of it), I give movies a numerical score (wow! original!) and how urgently it is for you to see it. Since the Hot Fad Plague of 2020-2022 completely upended going to the movies and everyone and their dog started subscription streaming services (as well as good old cable for Boomers), I have radically revised the When To See scale from six to basically three points:

 1. Pay full/matinee price to see it at a theater. Pretty self-explanatory. The rare times I now go see a movie theatrically, I'll rate whether it's worth going to the show and how much you should pay.

2. Catch it on cable/streaming. This is the most common recommendation now because I see the overwhelming majority of movies at home, but also not every movie needs the theatrical experience. Whether you choose to wait for it to come to your streamer/cable channel of choice, rent or buy it digitally, or hoist the black flag to obtain it, is up to your budget and/or morals. Movies with this ranking are worth your time.

3. Skip it. Even for free, life's too short to waste on bad movies.

For Blu-ray/DVD reviews, I'll recommend whether they're worth buying since there's no rental options anymore now that Redbox has joined Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, Family Video in oblivion. The quantity and quality of extras or the audio-visual quality factor heavily here.

As always, these reviews are just one lifelong movie fans opinions, except that unlike other critics & fans, mine is the only opinion that matters and all reviews are 100% correct in their judgements. If you disagree, that's fine, but understand that you are incorrect in your opinion. ;-)

 Enough of my yakking, let's review some movies!

"The Lost Bus" 4K Review

California wildfires are as common as bottles of baby oil at a Diddy party and one of the largest, costliest, and deadliest was the 2018 Camp Fire where 85 people died, nearly $17 billion in damage was done, over 55,000 people were displaced as several towns and cities were burned to the ground. In the midst of this rapidly spreading firestorm was The Lost Bus, now a heavily-fictionalized docudrama by Paul Greengrass (Captain Phillips, United 93, three Jason Bourne sequels) about the school bus full of kids trying to get to safety.

Matthew McConaughey stars as Kevin McKay, a school bus driver with so many problems I suspected the most dishonest screenwriter in Hollyweird, Paul Haggis, was involved. He's a divorced dad whose estranged father recently died bringing him back home to Paradise, CA where his invalid mother (played by McConaughey's real mother) and surly son (played by his real son, Levi) live. He has to put his cancer-ridden dog down and his bus driving job seems on shaky ground due to his screwups which put him on the wrong side of the dispatcher, Ruby (Ashlie Atkinson, The Gilded Age).

On the morning of November 8, 2018, poorly maintained power lines spark in the high winds and set the tinder-dry undergrowth ablaze. Kevin is trying to balance getting his charges delivered to school while trying to get medicine back home to his sick son while Ruby is hectoring him to get the bus in for maintenance. As the blaze spreads, evacuation orders go out and 22 children at a school whose parents aren't able to come get them need a ride. Kevin is the only one in the area so he volunteers to pick them up in hopes it will earn some points with Ruby.

The class and their teacher, Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera, Ugly Barbie), get on board and of course things rapidly begin to fall apart as the roads are jammed with evacuees, communication with Ruby falters then fails, and the roaring blazes close in around them. It doesn't help that their first destination was closed and evacuated without their knowledge due to lost communication, so they're scrambling to find an alternate route to what seems to be safety.

Of course, they find time for Kevin and Mary to discuss their lives and disappointments while waiting for the blaze to consume them and as with the opening scenes, they ring false as Hollywood inventions to pad the run time and provide a respite between the thrilling action sequences. The problem with those is that apparently they never really happened and pretty much everything other than Kevin and Mary being real people and a bus full of kids needing to flee is invention including the "lost" aspect; they were stuck in traffic, but in constant contact.

But bolstering the fiction is the portrayal of the firefighters led by Ray Martinez (Yul Vazquez, Petey on Severance) and their doomed attempts to fight the fire culminating in their realizing there was nothing to be done but evacuate the population. Vazquez is so believable I wondered if Greengrass had cast real participants; I'm sure a lot of the extras are real firefighters; they look like real people.

I knocked a point off the score for The Lost Bus because of its overly-fictionalized plot and forced melodrama, but it's still a worthy watch as an action adventure flick. Perhaps they should've just gone fully fictional so the changes weren't so jarring.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on Apple TV+