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!
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. -----------------
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a while and a dozen intervening movies, I couldn't remember enough specifics to properly review them, so they remained unpublished.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. ;-)
Eminem's 2000 album The Marshall Mathers LP contained one of his biggest tracks, "Stan", which told the story of an obsessed stalker fan (thus the portmanteau of "stan") writing him fan letters that become more and more unhinged until it results in the fan killing himself and his pregnant girlfriend because Em never wrote back. The last verse is Em replying to the notes, trying to chill the guy out before ultimately realizing that a news story he'd seen was about Stan.
As both a portrayal of how fans can feel they have personal relationships with celebrities and how it feels to be on the receiving end of such unnerving fan mail, it was Mathers stepping up on his sophomore release to show he was capable of rapping about subjects more nuanced than the cartoonish violence showcased on his debut, The Slim Shady LP.
It also provides the title for the documentary Stans, which is partially a very superficial recap of Mathers' early career and mostly a platform for a lot of his stans to talk about how they love him and how much his music means to them. They identify with what he talks about and find strength in his bravado and vulnerability. While the initial read on them made me wonder if they were handed their own restraining order while signing the release forms, most seem to understand that they're obsessed and aren't looking to harm him though the woman who has the Guinness Book of World Records record for most tattoos of single person (22!) needs to have posters and photos explained to her.
Occasionally, Mathers chimes in with how this feels to him, but there's a dissonance about how detached from reality some fans can get while giving them a platform because they're superfans. They make the pilgrimage to Detroit to visit important sites from his life like Gilbert's Lodge, a restaurant a couple miles from the Detroit border he used to busboy at (that I coincidentally drive past an average of once a day because it's a mile from my home) as if he may be hanging around.
If he wants to temper their hopes up for meeting them, it doesn't help that one fan relates how after a show in 2013, Em's car stopped and a security guy summoned him to get in to meet Mathers and snap a picture. So, he's saying there's a chance? How did Mathers know who this fan was? Don't know.
And that's the core problem with Stans, it doesn't really delve deeply enough into the subject of Mathers or his fans enough to make this critical viewing. At least they put the dates of when things happen so one can realize that the period between his first album dropping and his Oscar-winning movie 8 Mile premiering was less than four years and he'd dropped three albums.
While it's tempting to suggest that the body horror genre pretty much begins and ends with the work of David Cronenberg (Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Crash, Crimes of the Future, to name a few) there are other practitioners such as Michael Shanks who makes his directorial debut with Together, which asks the question, how close is too close to be with someone?
Real-life married couple Allison Brie (GLOW, Community) and Dave Franco (Now You See Me, James' little brother) star as Millie and Tim, a young couple leaving New York City for her to start a job at an unnamed upstate elementary school. They've been dating for years, but never married and when she attempts to propose at their going away party in front of their friends, he freezes on answering, causing major embarrassment. He's struggling with having to functionally give up on his music career to follow her to the sticks, but he's going nowhere though accepts a touring guitarist gig with a friend's band.
While trying to get acclimated to the area, they go for a hike, get lost in a rainstorm, and fall into a cavern in the woods. With night falling, they decide to stay and lacking water, Tim drinks from a pool in the cave; a pool we saw a pair of dogs drink from in a prologue and suffer horrific effects. When they wake up, they find their calves stuck together which he attributes to mildew.
Afterwards, he begins to experience weird dreams and an overwhelming attraction to Millie (yes, Brie is attractive but not with the bad bangs hairstyle she's sporting here) and contact between them results in more things sticking together. Soon, she's being drawn to him leading to a scene where they're sleepcrawling towards each other, awaking in time to partially succeed in not getting totally stuck on each other, though a sabre saw is required to, well, you get the idea.
The reason for their fusing and a mysterious New Agey church/cult centered on the cavern, which was the chapel before sinking into the earth isn't really explained and it begs a lot of questions about just how close you really need to be to your partner. The ending - which I unfortunately had spoiled - could be a shark-jumping moment for some, like the horror fan missus who flipped from kinda liking it to "What the hell was that?"-ing it in the end.
I don't think it adds up to much despite grazing on some interesting ideas about relationships. The house they're living in seems waaaaaay too large for a teacher to afford and more space than they need. If feels like Shanks wanted to make a movie about a couple sticking together, literally, then sprinkled some details around it to make it seem more substantive without quite succeeding.
Even if you know more about the Akron, Ohio's favorite spud boys, Devo, than their Big Hit from 1980 "Whip It", you probably aren't prepared for what you'll learn watching DEVO, the 2024 Sundance hit documentary which has finally arrived on Netflix to coincide with the band's 50th anniversary tour with The B-52's.
Director Chris Smith applies the style from his excellent WHAM! documentary to let the subjects - new interviews with Mark Mothersbaugh, Jerry Casale, and Bob Mothersbaugh as well as archive footage of deceased members Bob Casale and Alan Myers - tell their story rather than having various dinosaur critics from Rolling Stone or one of the dreaded doc trio of Henry Rollins, Dave Grohl and/or Questlove.
Their story starts with Mothersbaugh and Casale attending Kent State and having two of their friends killed in that infamous incident in 1970. Both were artists and had been active in protesting the Vietnam War, but underlying their Leftist ideology was a deep cynicism about the world and its promises and that rather than becoming a better place, society and humanity itself was sliding down the slope to devolution - de-evolving into primitives - thus the name Devo.
Their art provocateur antics didn't go over great with the townies of The Rubber City, but a short film they'd made won a film festival which got them invited to play in LA for a label. While that didn't result in a deal, it gave them a leg up on trying the Big Apple where they rapidly found celebrities like John Lennon and Jack Nicholson in the crowd. David Bowie even introduced them for one show and offered to produce them.
After signing to Warner Bros., Bowie kept being too busy to produce them, but handed them off to Brian Eno for some contentious sessions. When the album was complete, the label's marketing team suggested making life-size cardboard cutouts of the band to stand in record stores. The band asked for that money instead to make a video for their cover of "Satisfaction." This was several years before MTV (a cable channel that used to play music videos long ago) launched, so the label was baffled, but agreed.
A high-profile appearance on Saturday Night Live ahead of their tour put them in the spotlight, but eventually their sophomore album flopped and the ultimatum was given: Your next album better have a hit or else hit the bricks. They took it to heart and turned in their Freedom of Choice album and when the label's pick for leadoff single, "Girl U Want," flopped, the second was the band's choice: "Whip It" and the rest was one-hit wonder history.
Because MTV was starved for content in the beginning and the band had produced several videos, they were ubiquitous in those early days. Ironically, as everyone got in on the act, MTV suddenly got picky about showing Devo's videos, pointing the the charts as an excuse for not playing them because lack of promotion leading to poor charts isn't a self-fulfilling prophecy or anything.
Eventually, Warners would tire of declining sales and drop the band and when they tried another label, Enigma, it was just before it would fold. At which point the band packed it in with Mothersbaugh and "the Bobs" starting a scoring company doing movies for Wes Anderson movies and Pee-Wee's Playhouse and Casale becoming a commercial and music video director.
Running throughout DEVO is a constant frustration they had in getting their philosophical, ideological, and political points across when everyone just saw the goofy costumes and weird videos. While their clear Leftist bent is referenced, the movie doesn't harp on the subject beyond the typical Boomer hippie whining about Ronald Reagan beating Jimmy Carter and the obligatory atheist snark against religion. (i.e. the current resident of the White House is never evoked)
That they've occasionally reunited to tour - I saw them at NXNE in Toronto in 2011 - goes unmentioned and the beginning dwells quite a while on Kent State before moving to the band proper, so DEVO doesn't quite hit the mark between those who know little and big fans needs. I was never that into them, but I had no idea about their early years and political underpinnings. However, as they covered their commercial misfortunes, especially the banned-by-MTV video for "That's Good", I was familiar with much of what they discussed.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on Netflix.
For some reason there is no trailer for this. Weird.
I've been a fan of Samara Weaving for a while now. Unfortunately, due to my inconsistent completing of reviews (i.e. sometimes not even logging more than a date and score, sorry), you'd be hard pressed to tell I'd seen any of her movies beyond Mayhem, but she's had a remarkably consistent streak of projects including Ready or Not, Guns Akimbo, and The Babysitter (which I never even logged). I've called her "Margot Robbie's slightly-less-attractive little sister," but on further inspections she's hotter, looking like a cross between Robbie and Heather Graham.
So, when the trailer dropped for the Hulu Original movie Eenie Meanie promising a tale of a former wheelwoman for criminal activities - Babe Driver, if you will (yes, I'm proud of that) - I was onboard. The trailer loudly promotes it was produced by the pair who'd co-written all the Deadpool movies, implying profane hijinks will ensure. Unfortunately, the actual result is a frustratingly misbegotten tonal misfire which wastes what should've been a breakout performance from Weaving and a good time for the audience.
We first meet 14-year-old Edie Meaney (Elle Graham) in a flashback to 2007 when she walks to the Cleveland bar to drive her drunk parents (Steve Zahn and Chelsea Crisp) home. The cops pull them over and the combination of Edie being underage and unlicensed and Mom having a bunch of cocaine in her possession, which would be a third strike, so Dad encourages her to make a run for it as he taught her. We don't see what happens next, but are eventually told by inference it didn't go great for everyone.
We jump to the present where grown-up Edie (Weaving) is working as a bank teller. When inept robbers hit her branch and she's knocked out, she's taken to the hospital where she's informed that while she doesn't have a concussion, she is pregnant by her ex-boyfriend, John (Karl Glusman, The Bikeriders), a terminal loser for whom making poor choices is his default setting. When she goes to tell him of her being embabied, she finds him about to be whacked by unknown gunmen and helps his buck naked ass escape with her superior wheelman skills. Why was he in peril? Who freaking cares.
I have to pause to say that at this point only a half-hour into the movie, I said to the missus, "If this movie ends with her back in love with him, I'm scoring it a zero." This guy isn't a loveable loser, he's a L-O-S-E-R and frankly, I'm disappointed in her that she was shtupping this doofus. (Was Pete Davidson unavailable?)
To get this over with, he's $3 million in hock to crime boss Nico (Andy Garcia), so to save his worthless life Edie will need to be the wheelgirl for an audacious heist of a Dodge Charger with $3M in cash in the trunk being given as the prize for a poker tournament at the Hollywood Casino in Toledo. (Meaningless Factoid: I've driven past this place once, I think.) They have all the right connections on the inside and it's going to be a piece of cake, right? Well, not really, because betrayal, double crosses, blah-blah-woof-woof and Johnny being an effing psycho at the end.
As with all bad movies, the trouble begins with the schizophrenic script by writer-director Shawn Simmons (co-creator of the John Wick prequel series The Continental) which apparently the Deadpool writers who produced this didn't flag as ruinous. This mess rivals Alex Garland for face-planting in the third act, but the problems shoot through the entire length.
For example, we're desperately trying to understand WHY Edie is so stuck on Johnny and finally, well into the plot she explains that they met when he intervened to save her from being pimped out by her foster father when she was 15. Icky stuff, but OK, I get that. But why was she in foster care? Because as a visit to her father implies, that opening scene where she runs from the cops resulted in her mother being killed and her father paralyzed and wheelchair-bound. Yikes.
He'd allowed her to go into the system because he couldn't have cared for her, but when we visit him he has remarried and appears to have a young daughter Edie was unaware of meaning in the ensuing 17 years he restarted his life and never reached out to his first daughter. But he seems to know who Johnny is, so....ummmmm, whut?
The heist itself is laughable because one moment she's being chased by tons of cop cars, then it's as if they completely gave up and never attempted to pursue and capture the thief of $3M. It's harder to shake off a two-star wanted level in Grand Theft Auto than it is to get away with a casino robbery. No one has her on security cameras IN A CASINO, not to mention the eyewitnesses who saw her behind the wheel - how many hot blonde getaway drivers are there in Ohio? - so she gets away clean?
The way Eenie Meanie careens into a ditch is a shame because there are several genuinely laugh out loud moments and lines and if Simmons had just stayed in the comedic lane where colorful characters like a competing wheelman with an amusing backstory for his burns is appropriate. Or he could've gone gritty and dark. Pick a lane and stay in it because when most of the movie is amusing, the whammies at the end wipe out all the goodwill the movie had scraped together.
But the biggest victim is Weaving who really hits all the notes the Simmons asks her to only for it to not matter in the end. There's a sequel to Ready or Not coming next year and she'll be in a couple more upcoming movies which may be good. She deserves to be known as more than looking a lot like Margot Robbie, a role she played in Damien Chazelle's bloated misfire Babylon.
Despite Weaving and some decent practical car chases and laughs, the messy ending makes Eenie Meanie one to miss.
In the current trend of sequels arriving waaaaaaaaaaay after they would've been useful comes 28 Years Later, the third installment in the series of Danny Boyle & Alex Garland's series which began with 2002's 28 Days Later and 2007's 28 Weeks Later. While not technically a zombie series - the Rage virus infects and changes its victims into monsters within seconds - it's the source of the abominable fast-running zombie species which populated Zak Snyder's 2004 breakout remake of Dawn of the Dead.
After a prologue that seems utterly superfluous until the last minute, 28 Years Later is the story of Spike (Alfie Williams), a 12-year-old boy living on a small island off the coast of England with his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kick-Ass), and mother, Isla (Jodie Comer, Killing Eve). The entirety of England is quarantined and left to fend for themselves while the rest of the world apparently goes on as if animal rights lunatics hadn't unleashed a plague in their countries. The island is connected to the mainland via a causeway which is impassible any time other than low tide which helps in defending the small, but thriving community there.
Jamie decides it's time for Spike to make his first trip to the mainland and hopefully get his first zombie kill, a major rite of passage. The village elder doesn't approve because boys are usually 14 or 15 years-old when they make their first jaunt, but allows it after explaining the rules that anyone who goes out is on their own, no one will come to their rescue if anything happens.
The hunt goes OK until a pack of infected led by a larger, smarter Alpha chases them into the ruin of a house where they're stuck for the night due to the tide being in covering the causeway. From his perch in the attic, Spike sees a quarantine patrol ship & a fire off in the distance. He asks Jamie what it is, but dad demurs. When the house collapses, they barely make it back to their gate as the Alpha gains on them.
The town throws a celebration for Spike popping his zombie hunting cherry, but Jamie keeps exaggerating Spike's bravery & killing skills when he missed most shots and almost got them both killed. Disgusted, he leaves the party and spots dad getting super friendly with a townswoman not his wife. While it's somewhat understandable because Isla is racked by delirium & disorientation, mistaking days, people, referring to Spike as her father, Spike just sees his mother being cheated on.
When he gets home, he tells the family friend watching Isla about the fire and is told it may be the place of Dr. Kelson, a former general practitioner whose abode he'd approached some time after the plague and what he saw scared him from ever returning. But Spike hears "doctor" and believes his mother may be helped, so he bundles this infirm & not-totally-with-it woman up for a road trip farther than he barely survived before.
I've had a major problem with Garland's scripts for almost every movie he's written because he nearly invariably manages to crash a working movie in the third act or finale, but here he outdoes himself by making the plot lose me barely halfway through. The idea that this kid, who barely survived his first trip to the mainland is going to successfully shepherd his mother to find the doctor just didn't work. The sidebar of a military squad getting wiped out by infected is poorly premised. That there are now supersmart Alphas and families of zombies that look like giant waterlogged babies after 28 years is a huh? That there is a pregnant zombie is a double huh?
It all caps off with Spike choosing to stay on the mainland and almost get killed until he's saved by a weird group led by someone the audience probably forgot about and as soon as they're introduced the movie ends. WTF?!? Turns out a sequel, 28 Weeks Later: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DiCosta (last seen making the all-time biggest box office bomb of the MCU, The Marvels) from a Garland script, is coming in January. Oh, lovely.
Williams is very good as Spike, only annoying because the script writes him that way. He could have a future after this series. Taylor-Johnson and Comer are equally reigned in by the script, but do with it what they can. Fiennes is also good, but his character is just a weird caricature.
I've never been a huge fan of the 28 Days/Weeks series, especially the first one's third act. Part of the knock on 28 Years Later was that it's not more of the same, and while that could've been a good thing because it's unlikely conditions would be exactly the same after three decades, what Garland comes up with is just dumb. Why didn't the world try to evacuate people from the island? Symptoms manifest within seconds so you just put evacuees into a holding pen for a couple of minutes and everyone who wasn't trying to eat the rest gets to board a boat to safety.
The 4K HDR presentation results in some occasionally brilliant photography with hyperreal colors. The hyped bullet time effect created by using an array of iPhones around the subject is a gimmick that doesn't really land and there are some shots that appear shot on phone which gives a member berry for the low-fi original movie's look.
I'm sure we'll eventually catch the sequel when it hits video, but I'm not expecting much better than what 28 Years Later sets up.
Following last week's spin of The Linguini Incident, the missus & I decided a trilogy of 1980s Rosanna Arquette movies was required and thus our second stop was 1985's Desperately Seeking Susan, a shaggy dramady most notable for being then-megahot pop star Madonna's Big Movie Debut as the titular (in both meanings) Susan and its inclusion of her hit "Into The Groove."
Arquette plays Roberta Glass, a young New Jersey housewife married to Gary (Mark Blum, Mozart in the Jungle) who sells bathtub spas, saunas and hot tubs. She's obsessed with personal ads in the paper headlined "Desperately Seeking Susan" (roll credits!) to arrange meets between Susan and her boyfriend Jimmy (Robert Joy, CSI:NY).
Meanwhile we meet Susan in a hotel room where she's been shacked up with some guy not Jimmy who's passed out after a long night of getting into the groove, if you follow. She orders room service, steals the silverware and towels, and a pair of big earrings. As she leaves the room, she passes a creepy guy, Wayne (Will Patton, Armageddon), who's heading for the room. She arrives at the Port Authority bus terminal, stashes her drum case-turned-suitcase in a locker by jimmying the lock, to avoid paying. She puts on one of the earrings and leaves the other in the case.
When Susan meets up with Jimmy in Battery Park, Roberta is watching and after Jimmy has to take off with his band for a gig in Buffalo she follows Susan around the city and when she trades her distinctive jacket for some boots, Roberta buys the jacket and discovers the key. Wanting to return it, Roberta runs her own Desperately Seeking Susan ad to set up a meeting, signing it "A Stranger," which concerns Jimmy because who's trying to meet his girl who was banging a guy who fell out of a hotel window the day before and some priceless Egyptian earrings were involved.
Jimmy calls his friend Dez (Aidan Quinn, Reckless), a movie projectionist, and asks if he'd go to the meet to make sure Susan's OK, describing her as a blonde with a distinctive jacket. (Getting where this is going yet?) One thing leads to another, identities are mistaken and things are complicated by Roberta getting lightly bonked on the head, losing her purse and her memory, and with Dez calling her "Susan," assumes that's who she is. Hijinks ensue.
Whereas The Linguini Incident was a haphazard attempt at a screwball comedy, Desperately Seeking Susan is a lackluster, tonally off mess with a patchy screenplay and unlikable characters. I know this is heresy for older Gen Xers who are nostalgic about it because they aped Madonna's thrift store trampy style of mesh tops, exposed bras, rubber bracelets, etc., but the truth is the script by Leora Barish (making her screenwriting debut here and whose only other script of note was her last, 2006's Basic Insinct 2, so hackery was the constant) both relies on viewers overlooking the gaping plot holes and logic gaps, but also have no knowledge of how human beings behave.
The problems start with Susan herself. I don't think I've seen DSS since the 1980s and pretty much all I could I remember about it was Susan was a jerk and, yep, she still is. She's a thief, a tramp, and a sociopath, but because she looks and acts like Madonna, we're supposed to be smitten with Susan. Yeah, no. I was a teenager who thought Madge was hot while having a squeaky voice and bought both of the competing Playboy and Penthouse issues with her pre-fame nude modeling photos in them, but Susan still sucks.
Arquette is, well, Arquette. The fact Roberta ends up at one point as a magician's assistant ties neatly into her Houdini obsession in The Linguini Incident, but her character is as thin as her skull apparently is as she gets conked into forgetting who she is then rebooting back into her Roberta self later. While it's understandable that she'd boink Dez since he looks like Aiden Quinn, the fact he does her when he think's she's Susan, his bro's girl, and does so about five minutes after bailing her out of jail (where she'd somehow been busted for prostitution) was randomly abrupt and he's a bad bro.
It's more interesting spotting actors in early roles such as John Turturro, Richard Edson, and Giancarlo Esposito several years before they were in Do The Right Thing, Laurie Metcalf, Steven Wright, and a slew of art scene folks like Anne Carlisle, John Lurie, Richard Hell, and Ann Magnuson.
As a time capsule of mid-1980s New York with lots of big names before they were big names and Madonna totally loving herself, Desperately Seeking Susan may serve a purpose. But as a movie unable to decide what it's about and how it goes about it, it's less successful.
I didn't even realize that The Wedding Banquet was a remake of the 1993 Ang Lee film of the same name until the missus claimed we'd seen it at a local art house theater. I honestly don't recall seeing it, but if so it was 32 years ago, so let's see what this updated version has to offer. (Obviously, I can't compare it to the original.)
Kelly Marie Tran (Star Wars: The Last Jedi) stars as Angela Chen, a Seattle lesbian whose mother, May (Joan Chen, Twin Peaks), is such a performative ally with the local PFLAG chapter it's driving her crazy. Her partner, Lee (Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon), is struggling to have a baby and after their second attempt at IVF fails, there's a question of whether they have the finances to try again and whether Lee's body can handle it. Angela doesn't want to carry the baby due to her fraught relationship with her mother.
Living in their garage is Angela's bestie from college, Chris (Bowen Yang, SNL), with whom she had a one-off fling, and his boyfriend Min (Han Gi-chan in his film debut), an artist and fashion designer whom Chris is refusing to marry though his visa will soon expire requiring him to return to South Korea. Adding to the pressure is a call from Min's wealthy grandmother, Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung, Oscar winner for Minari), telling him it's time to come home and join the family business empire.
While marrying Chris would get Min a green card, Chris fears that since Min isn't out his intolerant grandfather will cut him off. Fed up, Min proposes to Angela with the added benefit that he will pay for Lily's next IVF treatment. During her bachelorette party, Angela and Chris manage to PO Lee and Min, making them leave the club, and after a lot of drinks they wake up together in the garage and you have one guess as to what happened and what the ramifications will be.
What's refreshing about The Wedding Banquet is that rather than being the usual Hollyweird celebration of the cartoonish perfection of gay people, the characters are messy complicated people who happen to be gay. Too many movies with gay themes believe the only thing that matters is the sexuality and how perfect it is and how mean straight people oppress them. Here the story is about people who are gay, not GAY people and the difference makes all the difference. With some tinkering the story could've been about blacks and whites, different religions or nationalities because at its core it's about people and their foibles and fears whereas lesser GAY movies are all about the GAY all day, forgetting the people. (See my review of the horribly-titled Bottoms for similar observations.)
Poor Tran has had a hard career road since a-hole spudboy "Ruin" Johnson abused her in his vandalism of Star Wars by stuffing her in a formless jumpsuit costume with a bad haircut as Rose Tico in The Last Jedi. Johnson wanted to deconstruct attractive Asian characters in movies (along with destroying the most valuable IP in entertainment) and the fandom-hating media promulgated the smear that RAAAAAAAAACIST nerds bullied Tran off social media when the reality was that racist liberal media hacks were protecting pasty potato Johnson's travesty by using her as a human shield. Note that co-star John Boyega, whose Finn character was also mistreated, wasn't used even as Disney shrank him down on the posters for China because those audiences don't like black actors. (But it's Americans who are racists?)
But I digress. Anyway, Tran first resurfaced on my radar as a heavy on the final season of Netflix's Sweet Tooth and she's really good here as well, finally showing off some acting. Gladstone is good as well and Yang manages to get away from his usual "Gaysian" persona he's plied for years on SNL. Youn shows her Oscar wasn't a fluke with another sly savvy performance where she leverages her age and others presumptions of it against them.
Co-writer James Schamus - a frequent collaborator of Ang Lee's having written eight films for him including the original Wedding Banquet (which is sadly unavailable to stream anywhere at this time) - has updated his original story of a gay man who offers to marry a woman needing a green card to keep his boyfriend secret from his family (I skimmed the Wikipedia synopsis. Sue me.) changing Chinese to Korean and tweaking the genders. Since I can't compare with the original, I'll withhold judgement other than to wonder why this version of The Wedding Banquet doesn't include, well, a wedding banquet? It should've been retitled The Wedding Ceremony or something.
Heartfelt and amusing, The Wedding Banquet may be overlooked because of people's aversion to gay themes or dismissed as a remake, but it's not woke and actually quite traditional in the end, in a manner of speaking.
Ever heard the phrase, "Big bucks! No Whammies!"? Know where that's from? If you're a Gen Xer, you're likely to know that was from a game show called Press Your Luck. A mash-up of Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, it had a trivia question phase where contestants garnered "spins" leading to the centerpiece of the show where a square of 18 screens would flash various dollar amounts and prizes while a lighted rim on the screens indicate what you'd win when you slapped down the Big Red Button. Hit a dollar amount and win money. Hit the cartoon demon "Whammie" screen - like Wheel's "Bankrupt" space - and you lose it all.
On May 19, 1984, an ice cream truck driver from Ohio named Michael Larson appeared on Press Your Luck and after a shaky start began to live the title of DJ Khaled's "All I Do Is Win" by nailing a seemingly impossible string of big bucks with no Whammies leading to an at-the-time highest winnings ever on a game show, relieving the show of over $110,000 in cash and prizes. This achievement and the freakout behind-the-scenes with the show's producers is dramatized in The Luckiest Man in America.
It begins with the slovenly and somewhat creepy Larson (Paul Walter Hauser, Richard Jewell) attempting to audition for the show by assuming the identity of another applicant. Despite being escorted off the property by security, the show's executive producer, Bill Carruthers (David Strathairn, The Expanse), takes a shine to him and allows him to participate in the next day's taping provided he tidy up his appearance and get better clothes. Larson goes to a thrift store, rips a button off a jacket to get a discount for its condition, and returns with a nice shirt and jacket over khaki shorts.
As mentioned above, ones he gets rolling, he gets ROLLING, and the bulk of the movie is about the freakout of the production team as they try to figure out how he's doing it. They deduce that he has somehow memorized the patterns of the board which appeared random but weren't. Is he cheating or could he be a boon in publicity? (And if memorizing the limited patterns - there were only five variations - is cheating, would studying trivia be cheating for Jeopardy.)
While the movie opens with a disclaimer about creative license being taken in its dramatization of real events, the script co-written by director Samir Oliveros (whose sole previous feature was something called Bad Lucky Goat) really stretches credibility as a producer, Chuck (Shamier Anderson, Mr. Nobody in John Wick 4), breaks into Larson's truck, finds video tapes, watches them, and deduces how Larson figured out the patterns, but also calls someone with a restraining order against him, all while the show is taping. TV shows generally go "live to tape" with minimal editing and the pauses shown and the amount of gumshoeing Chuck does simply couldn't happen. The details about his family are also muddled and enhance Larson's creepiness.
Hauser has cornered the market on tubby, creepy characters and he does the same here. From the bits of the actual show I've seen, Larson wasn't that oddball. The supporting performances from Straithairn, Anderson, and Walton Goggins as show host Peter Tomarken are good, but why is Maisie Williams (Throne Games) here as a production assistant? She's not bad, but it's distracting that an English girl is working at CBS Television City.
While The Luckiest Man in America isn't a bad docudrama, it could've been tighter and structured differently rather than trying to cram everything into 90-minutes. If you want to see the real, the Press Your Luck episodes are on YouTube along with GSN's - Game Show Network - documentary Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal exploring the events. (Haven't watched it yet, but hear it's good.) There's also a substantial Wikipedia entry which illuminates the differences between reality and dramatization.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on AMC+)
The 2023 slasher flick M3GAN was a sleeper hit, grossing $181M off a $12M budget. So a sequel was ordered up and a few weeks ago M3GAN 2.0 arrived, flopping massively with an opening weekend gross one-third of the original's leading to a rapid trip to streaming after just a few weeks. Complaints were that it changed genres - from horror to sci-fi - and attempted to turn the memeable moppet murderbot into a good girl a la Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but even more problematic is that the story is a convoluted mess that I don't even want to try and synopsize, but let's get on with it.
It's a couple years after the events of the first film and the military, having never seen the Jurassic Park sequels has decided to make a new murderbot called AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno, Pacific Rim) copied from M3GAN's designs. During an operational demonstration, it goes rogue after revealing it was sentient and not working for the Army any more.
Gemma (Allison Williams, Get Out), M3GAN's creator has become an author and advocate for AI regulation who, along with her (I think) boyfriend Christian (Aristotle Athari, SNL) has been developing an exoskeleton device which could provide mobility to the paralyzed or turn people into human forklifts capable of lifting great weights. Her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw, M3GAN), lives with her and is studying computer science.
After Gemma is informed of AMELIA's existence, M3GAN (body: Amie Donald; voice: Jenna Davis; the same team as before) reveals that she'd been living in Gemma's smart home after uploading her program before being killed, a la The Lawnmower Man. She offers to help them take down AMELIA in exchange for a physical body. Gemma doesn't trust her, so puts her into a Moxie unit - a toy robot thing clearly copied from Black Mirror's "Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too" episode (the one with Miley Cyrus as a pop star performing a rewritten version of Nine Inch Nails' "Head Like A Hole") - in order to hack into wealthy tech billionaire creep Alton Appleton's (Jemaine Clement, Flight of the Conchords) servers to find out what's going on.
After AMELIA kills Alton, the group retreat to a massive bunker under Gemma's house that M3GAN had constructed with plans that they'd hide there when AMELIA triggers an AI Apocalypse. It was at this point my feelings on the movie flipped from "this isn't so bad" to "what the heck is this crap?!?" How the actual how does a secret underground lair get built under a residential home without anyone knowing?!? This isn't some billionaire superhero with the means to have Lairs 'r' Us build a Batcave under his estate where trucks full of mined earth can be removed without notice. If M3GAN can have this done, why does she need to beg Gemma to build her a body?
From there the plot gets even more convoluted and ludicrous involving a Xerox motherboard created in the early-1980s which as been learning for four decades and if someone were to remove it from its air-gapped Faraday cage it would provide Total Control Power of all tech in the world, blah-blah-woof-woof. There are so many red herrings, fakeouts, "oh no, M3GAN's dead, oh wait, no, she's not" twists and turns I stopped caring because the movie was just trying to be clever when it was braindead.
While director Gerald Johnstone came up with the story with M3GAN co-writer Akela Cooper, the final script was his and he sabotages himself with the spaghetti plot and cringe-worthy dialogue like, "Hold on to your vaginas," which is so dumb that a Speak & Spell wouldn't say it. While his direction is workmanlike, he limits himself by his on contrivances.
The 4K presentation is clean and has some good highlights at times, but who cares when the story is dumb?
The first M3GAN caught on with meme culture thanks to the goofy murder dance she does in the trailer, but under the hype was a neat 8/10 score (never finished the review) B-movie that delivered the goods promised on the tin. But in their desire to force another social media craze, they forgot that it's impossible to make fetch happen by brute force. Blumhouse head Jason Blum admitted they botched this one and while there's a spinoff film, SOULM8TE ("soulmate"), coming in January 2026, it's going to be difficult to resurrect the girl again without an exceptional concept and script. Too bad.
For a dozen years from 1968-1980, Led Zeppelin were Titans of rock & roll, putting out eight albums (not counting the posthumous outtakes collection, Coda, nor the live The Song Remains the Same) and filling the playlists of AOR FM radio stations until the tragic death of drummer John "Bonzo" Bonham in 1980 just ahead of a massive stadium tour, their first in three years, after consuming about 40 shots of vodka in a 24-hour period and choking on his vomit at the age of only 32. (Drink responsibly.) The band disbanded with singer Robert Plant launching a successful solo career, guitarist Jimmy Page briefly having a band called The Firm with Bad Company vocalist Paul Rodgers, and bassist John Paul Jones continuing with producing and arranging including string arrangements on R.E.M.'s Automatic For The People album.
But that's how they ended, how did Led Zeppelin begin? That's the story told by Becoming Led Zeppelin, the first documentary project produced with the full cooperation of the band. Comprised of new interviews with the surviving members and a previously unheard interview with the usually press-shy Bonham and a wealth of never before seen concert footage, it briskly summarizes the members' memories of how they got into music leading to the rapid career ascendance of Page and Jones as they worked as session musicians including both playing on the iconic Shirley Bassey Bond theme "Goldfinger."
After his stint in The Yardbirds - with fellow guitar heroes Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck - Page wanted to strike off into new directions and the seeming fairytale ease with which the players came together in 1968 and instantly melded into a fully formed group with killer songs - their debut's nine tracks included "Good Times Bad Times", "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You", "Dazed and Confused", "Your Time Is Gonna Come", and "Communication Breakdown"! - beggars belief. Page produced the entire album then shopped it to labels with a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum meaning no label interference, shut up and sell it. Oh, and it's not going to be called The New Yardbirds, but Led Zeppelin.
Considering how modern record release schedules often result in YEARS between albums, it's especially mind-blowing that the Led Zeppelin debut began recording a MONTH after their first rehearsals in August 1968 (and a quick Scandinavian tour as The New Yardbirds, footage of which is included), was released in January 1969, followed by a grueling seven months of tours of North America and Europe, writing and recording Led Zeppelin II in various studios on the road, culminating in its release in October 1969. (And contrary to the "sophomore jinx" trope, it's arguably got even more bangers than the first album.) For those of you keeping score, that's two albums of classic rock created, recorded and released within 14 months of the blokes first getting together.
The live footage is both revelatory and a bit of a drag. It's funny seeing early audiences kind of staring blankly at them, seemingly unimpressed by what they're witnessing, but after a time and the songs which lean more heavily on jamming running longer, it gets a bit tedious. (The missus fell asleep and I was tempted to fast-forward through them.) If you're a Led Zep fanatic, feel free to ignore this comment, but there's a reason why when I used to be a soundman in clubs and I told bands that when I gave the "two songs" warning to wrap up their sets I added, "And I don't mean do the live versions of "Free Bird" (which ran 14-15 mins) and "Dazed and Confused" (27 mins on The Song Remains The Same)."
At times the members are shown archive clips and their reactions are fascinating, like Page seeing a 13-year-old him appearing on a TV show strumming an acoustic or their reacting to Bonham's interview. It's also nice to have a documentary with only the subjects talking about themselves and not surrounded by various Rolling Stone hacks or some combo of Dave Grohl, Henry Rollins, and/or Questlove talking about Led Zeppelin.
But while it's not wholly sanitized, it doesn't delve much into how the songs were created, what lyrical inspiration Plant drew from (to be fair, we all know it's Tolkien the way Rush's Neil Peart was all about Ayn Rand), or square how a band where most of the members were married dealt with the friendly women they met on the long, yet rapid road to stardom.
The speed of their ascendency cannot be understated either. On Jan. 9, 1969, just four days before their debut dropped they were playing San Francisco's Fillmore West, desperately trying to make an impression in America. Exactly one year later, touring Led Zeppelin II, they took to the stage of London's Royal Albert Hall as conquering rulers of the rock world. And this is where Becoming Led Zeppelin ends, so anyone wanting to hear about Led Zep IV and "Stairway To Heaven" are out of luck.
If you approach Becoming Led Zeppelin with the proper expectations, you're likely to quite enjoy it. The concert footage is terrific even if I thought it dragged on at times. (I'm a power-pop fan who'd rather have four songs in 13 minutes rather than a wanked-out blooze jam.) The members are fairly forthcoming in their recollections, though it's not as deep as one could wish for and they are filmed separately depriving the audience of seeing them interact. Production of this doc was announced in 2019 and a work-in-progress cut was screened at the Venice Film Festival in 2021, so it's unlikely follow-ups covering the rest of their career are in the offing.
I must single out director Bernard MacMahon for doing one thing right that most documentary filmmakers militantly refuse to do to my endless annoyance: He provides dates for the events we see so we're never confused as to what year it is when recapping their lives. It's a small detail so often ignored.
Score: 8/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Netflix)
Not to be confused with Ruin Johnson's 2005 debut, Netflix's Brick is a small high-concept sci-fi flick imported from Germany and dubbed fairly well. The premise is the plot: A couple - Tim (Matthias Schweighöfer, Army of Thieves) and Olivia (Ruby O. Fee, Army of the Dead) - whose relationship has collapsed to the point she's leaving him, discovers their apartment's doors & windows are blocked by mysterious black brick walls which seem impenetrable & can become dangerous at times.
Where did this come from and how do they get out? Those are the questions as they proceed to meet their neighbors by drilling and sledgehammering through the walls and floors, attempting to get to a basement bomb shelter which may connect to tunnels. Some want to help, others are more of an impediment, and one is a threat as they don't believe it's safe outside due to anything from a chemical spill or alien invasion.
Brick is an OK chamber thriller where there are a few too many convenient turns like the couple having a big industrial drill in the drawer, someone having a sledgehammer, another having a ladder which makes getting between floors easy, and the owner of the building putting spy cameras in the apartments during renovations which allows for a lot of convenient information discovery. It's also convenient that while cellular, landline, Internet and even the water is cut off, the electricity remains on. The final reveal is visually interesting, but still begs some questions.
The 4K Dolby Vision presentation is fine, but nothing those not paying for the 4K tier will miss out on.
Firmly landing in the "may as well watch it because you're paying for Netflix" zone, Brick is a passable time-killer.
With so many movies these days being massive VFX-heavy epics about invincible superheroes, it's a little disorienting to watch a small revenge thriller of the kind that was common in the 1990s. So it is with The Amateur, a modest global caper flick with some twists.
Rami Malek (Mr. Robot) stars as Charlie Heller, a CIA cryptographer who's married to Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan, Superman), a businesswoman who was attending a conference in London when she was taken hostage and killed by terrorists who were fleeing a botched arms deal in the hotel she was at. It was a random event and she was just an unfortunate bystander.
Using the CIA's Yeah, Right technology (i.e. tech in movies/shows which does the impossible like enhance a full-color hi-rez image of someone off a few pixels in a reflection and makes me say, "Yeah, right!") he determines who the terrorists were and approaches his boss, CIA Deputy Director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany, Mindhunter), with the expectation they'd be brought to justice, but his request is denied because the leader, Horst Schiller (Michael Stuhlbarg, Men in Black 3), who pulled the trigger was a terrorism kingpin and they want to roll up his entire network and to capture this handful would interfere.
Outraged, Charlie uses information from a secret source that Moore and others were hiding malfeasance, blaming accidental US military killings on terrorist IEDs, to threaten Moore with exposure unless he's sent to The Farm, a CIA facility, for training so he can personally hunt and terminate the bad guys. He claims he has a dead man's switch which will send the evidence to the media if they try to disappear him, so they reluctantly agree while frantically tearing his home apart to verify whether he actually has the goods.
At The Farm he's handed over to Robert "Hendo" Henderson (Laurence Fishburne, Pee-Wee's Playhouse) who rapidly determines Charlie simply doesn't have it in him to kill someone. He's a terrible shot, barely able to hit a target unless he's within nearly punching distance, but he does show an aptitude for improvised explosives. After a time, Moore decides Charlie was bluffing and orders Hendo to whack him. Fortunately for Charlie, he'd already bugged out with the fake passports the CIA had cooked up for him and headed to Europe to hunt his wife's killers with Hendo in pursuit.
In contrast to the usual superspies like James Bond and Jason Bourne, Charlie not only lacks their JB initials, but is actually pretty bad at vigilantism. He comes up with a clever way to deal with his first target, but the way they die is a total fluke. He manages to get better at it - the trailer gives away the most spectacular case - but his final takedown is a bit convenient.
While adapted from a novel which was also made into a 1981Canuckian feature starring John Savage and Christopher Plummer, the screenplay by Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down, but also Transformers: The Last Knight, a movie I bought in 2017 and still haven't watched because everyone says it's so bad) and Gary Spinelli (American Made) feels generic and formulaic. It suffers from the thing where the world's population is limited to just the characters in the movie so Charlie seems to have no friends or family or in-laws also mourning Sarah's killing. Jon Bernthal appears twice as a CIA field operative, but contributes nothing so why is the character even there?
Malek is OK in his usual twitchy bug-eyed Eliot Alderson way and Fishburne basically plays a cross between Morpheus (The Matrix) and the Bowery King (John Wick 2-4). Brosnahan is appealing in her flashbacks, but everyone is playing the script which isn't stretching many boundaries.
The Dolby Vision presentation has some brief moments of bright highlights, but the generally gray spy movie color palette limits eye candy opportunities.
Remember The Old Guard? It was released on Netflix in July 2020 during the Scamdemic lockdowns (Thanks, Trump!) and was a hit because with nothing else to do, everything on streaming became a hit. I somehow failed to log watching it and only know I scored it a 7/10 from my IMDB. (I'd guessed 6/10 based on a reference in another review here.) A sequel was inevitable, but thanks to various writers and actors strikes, The Old Guard 2 shuffles into view for the Independence Day weekend five years laer and that's the reason I ask if you remember it is because if you haven't rewatched it recently, you will very likely be lost for most of this dull and incomplete sequel.
It opens with Quỳnh (Veronica Ngô) being hoisted out of the ocean where she's spent the last five centuries trapped in an iron maiden. Her savior is a mysterious woman named Discord (Uma Thurman, My Super Ex-Girlfriend) who is eventually revealed to be the Original First Immortal, a title that Andromache "Andy" (Charlize Theron, Atomic Blonde) thought she held.
Meanwhile, Andy and her gang of immortals - The Old Guard - are raiding a Croatian mansion with some questionable art choices to stop a weapons sale. After the mission, the two gay men on the team - Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) - are having relationship trouble because one (don't recall which and don't care) feels he needs some space after 1000 years together. Not trusting his partner, the other guy follows him along with Nile (KiKi Layne, The Old Guard), who was the last movie's newest immortal to where he was headed, the apartment of Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts, probably some European movies), a former teammate who was exiled for betraying them in the last movie, only to find him missing thus paying off the end-credits scene of the first movie where he came home to find Quỳnh there.
You know, I don't want to recap this thing anymore. The plot is nonsense involving Discord claiming Nile is the Last Immortal due to a matching birthmark and that she wants to use Nile to kill everyone else to stop Immortals - not to be confused with Marvel's Eternals or Inhumans - from meddling in human affairs. Why? Don't know. Then there's also the theory of newly-introduced Immortal Librarian Tuah (Henry Golding, Crazy Rich Asians) that anyone wounded by Nile would lose their immortality, but if they freely chose to they could pass their powers onto someone who'd lost theirs so yes, Andy will get her groove back. (SPOILER ALERT!)
And after spending five centuries literally drowning, resurrecting, rinsing, repeating in the icy darkness of the sea, shouldn't Quỳnh be pretty much insane & madly seeking vengeance, not just acting pouty as if Andy said her flan was "mid"?
It ends in a cliffhanger which presumes that audiences will be desperate to see how it turns out, but with a third movie depending on this one fared, that's unlikely. Then again, Netflix handed the Russo Brothers over a half-BILLION dollars to make The Gray Man and The Electric State, so perhaps they won't mind burning more cash if the budget is under control.
Despite the script being co-written by the source graphic novels' co-creator, Greg Rucka, the mythology is flat and laden with mumbo jumbo that alludes, but never concludes. The action scenes are shakycam/edit fu and if you were looking forward to a hot, sexy throwdown between Beatrix Kiddo and Aeon Flux, prepare to be disappointed.
As for the A/V presentation, other than some Atmos effects in spots and some OK highlights, you're not missing much if not springing for the top tier plan.
If you've watched any of the documentary features on previous releases of Jaws then much of what's included in Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story will be very familiar with tales of the mechanical shark not working, the production running waaaaaay over schedule & budget and how Steven Spielberg was looking down the barrel of career annihilation with just his second feature, but ended up inventing the "blockbuster" and securing final cut in perpetuity.
Featuring new interviews with Spielberg, co-star Lorraine Gary (Elaine Brody), the widow and son of novel author Peter Benchley, son of Robery Shaw (Quint), and various shark extras and townies who were in the cast - one new detail is that only eight cast members were from Hollywood (and one was the co-writer); the rest were locals civilians - it treads familiar ground while popping in new details even for extras junkies like me like that there were three mechanical sharks made for use depending on which side would be facing the cameras.
While this was added to my existing digital 4K copy of Jaws, it's also available it appears on Hulu, Mouse+ and National Geographic's services. If you're a fan, but haven't watched extras before, you'll get some new insights on a favorite film of many.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on streaming. (Coming to Hulu July 10, 2025)
Ah, summer - the time of year when temperatures rise and the IQ of movies drop, not that that's always a bad thing. People want escapist popcorn fare and on this Independence Day weekend that means dinosaurs running amok in theaters and streamers treating the stay-at-home crowd to a sequel like Netflix's The Old Guard 2 and the high concept action comedy Heads of State from Amazon Prime.
It opens with a prologue in Spain where a joint CIA-MI-6 operation goes horribly sideways resulting in the deaths of everyone including team leader Noel Bisset (Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Quantico) - spoiler: she's not dead; it's in the trailer - and allowing a hacker (Stephen Root, Office Space) working for Russian arms dealer Viktor Gradov (Paddy Considine, Mobland) to access the super spy network Echelon which holds all the secrets and sees everything.
We then meet our titular heads of state: Recently inaugurated American President Will Derringer (Jon Cena, Peacemaker) is a former action movie star nicknamed "the Venom in Denim" for his Water Cobra series and British Prime Minister Same Clarke (Idris Elba, Pacific Rim) has been PM for six years, is suffering poor approval ratings, and thinks Derringer is a clown. Derringer isn't too chuffed about Clarke either because during the campaign he had fish & chips with his leading opponent & considered that interference in the election.
After their personal beefs erupt during a joint press conference, their respective chiefs of staffs suggest Clarke riding on Air Force One with Derringer to the upcoming NATO Summit in Trieste, Italy with a side stop in Warsaw, Poland. It will make for a good photo op to tamp down the negative press. Unfortunately, a bad guy posing as a chef on AF1 kills the comms officers and turns off the radios, then attempts to kill the leaders while a cargo jet filled with attack drones appears and launches an assault on the plane. The plane critically damaged, a Secret Service agent gets them into parachutes and off the plane before it crashes into the woods of Belarus. (If you're thinking, "Wait? Isn't Belarus past Poland?" then give yourself a cookie because it is.)
While Derringer wants to call home to let his family and government know they're alive, Clarke believes that whoever could've pulled off such an audacious attack would be listening for such a call and probably had moles in their governments, so best to keep quiet and get the the CIA safe house in Warsaw that the agent directed them to. Through a series of hijinks they make it to Warsaw and into the hands of CIA station agent Marty Comer (Jack Quaid, Novocaine). On the downside, with control of Echelon Gradov's goons immediately show up to kill everyone.
The pair almost escape, but are caught and basically dead until a car appears out of nowhere to run down their captors. And who is this driver ex machina? Duh. It's Bisset! (Told you she wasn't dead!) The trio then make their way to the NATO Summit which is in a state of uproar because Gradov has leaked documents showing that everyone was spying on and interfering in their supposed allies business. While Acting President Elizabeth Kirk (Carla Gugino, Sin City) tries to hold the alliance together, things aren't looking good. Will the Prez & the PM (Free Band Name!) learn to get along and save the day?
Derringer gets ragged on for being "gym strong as opposed to strong strong" by the actual military vet Clarke, but they don't turn him into a punching bag for "stupid ugly Americans" or an avatar of a certain former pal of Hollyweird celebs who they decided was worse than Satan a decade ago because he changed team jerseys. Derringer is a bit of a goof, but he's a kind family man who's trying to do good in the world. Conversely, Clarke's dismissive snootiness is a front for being a lonely bachelor in a job he's getting jaded about as he still pines for the girl who got away but comes back into his life in time to run bad guys down with a car.
Director Ilya Naishuller (Hardcore Henry, Nobody) sometimes wobbles a bit on the tone when dealing with Gradov's brutality, but it's only briefly, unlike someone like David Leitch (Bullet Train) who wobbles for entire movies. The action is clear and there are a couple of genuinely brilliant instances of showing not telling to explain how characters got from one point to another.
While Heads of State may not be a towering achievement in action cinema, it's a notch above the usual dumped to streaming dreck we get served and watch only because we're paying for it anyway. A post-credit scene hints at possible sequel action and I wouldn't be opposed to more in this vein.
Because I've been lackadaisical about keeping DirkFlix updated, I've never adequately surfaced my adoration for the John Wick franchise, only writing reviews for John Wick when I caught it on video and John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum theatrically (which I somehow felt it flowed better than Chapter 2 when now I feel JW2 is the best of the series) despite multiple viewings of the series. I own them all on 4K UHD Blu-ray, I watched the so-so Peacock series The Continental which was a Winston origin story and made a rare trip to the theaters again for the spinoff Ballerina.
The new standard they've set for action films is something I mercilessly hold against movies which still trade in the old shaky-cam and edit fu techniques to obscure the fact the performers aren't very good at fighting or the mistaken belief that SHAKY! = ENERGY FUN! The Paul Greengrass school of action as typified in his The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum sequels is out, the John Wick style is in or should be.
But how did John Wick arise to conquer action cinema? That's the question answered in the feature length documentary Wick Is Pain, which is a mantra that director Chad Stahelski and star Keanu Reeves have for the brutal physical toll these movies take on everyone involved.
It introduces us to the directorial tag-team of Stahelski and David Leitch (The Fall Guy, Deadpool 2) and how they came up together as stuntmen and fight choreographers in the 1990s. Stahelski was a good friend and training partner of Brandon Lee's and when Lee was killed by an accidental shooting while filming The Crow in 1993, Stahelski came in to be Lee's body double for the final two weeks of shooting, either being filmed from behind or having Lee's face superimposed over Stahelski's body. Another big break came when he was Reeves key stunt double for The Matrix.
The pair founded 87Eleven, an "action design" company that provided complete services to Hollywood from fight choreography and pre-viz to training the stunt performers and doing 2nd unit direction. Their backgrounds in martial arts allowed them to ride the wave of change from old style stunts to wire-assisted Hong Kong style work as done by action legend Yuen Woo-ping, who did The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Looking to transition into directing they found a script by Derek Kolstad called Scorn about a retired hitman whose wife died and the puppy she'd left him was killed. Initially intended for a Paul Newman type (Newman died in 2008, so weird pick), they realized the action would require a younger star in his 50s. They rapidly settled on Reeves, who was also looking to get back into action after nearly a decade of non-action movies since 2005's Constantine. He was in the process of finishing 47 Ronin and his directorial debut, Man of Tai Chi, but when both flopped, his star power was dimming and there wasn't a ton of enthusiasm from the studio, Lionsgate, to invest too heavily in this rookie effort by two stunt guys starring a washed-up actor and oh my God, do you have to kill the puppy?!?
The production was so fraught that it almost collapsed days before shooting was to begin when the financing fell apart. They were facing trying to cut $6.5 million from the budget (impossible) and it was almost scrapped, which would triggered lawsuits from everyone against them, until the most unlikely angel investor - Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria! - swooped in with the cash (and got a producers credit) to save the day. They didn't tell Reeves who'd bailed them out until they'd finished.
Even with the money, the troubles didn't relent. Stahelski's marriage to stuntwoman Heidi Moneymaker (who is Scarlet Johansson's double) was crumbling and the partnership with Leith (who wasn't credited as director) was getting tense. Lots of "Mom and Dad are fighting" vibes on the set. Concerned that they wouldn't be taken seriously as storytellers they spend nine days shooting Keanu moping around his house, burning two days to film him doing bookbinding repairs. The dailies were boring and the assembly cut was a disaster. (To be fair, Martin Scorsese has mentioned that if a filmmaker does not feel physically ill when watching their first cut, then something might be wrong.)
When they finally sorted things out, no one wanted to pick up the distribution rights. Finally, Lionsgate took them just because otherwise it'd get dumped direct to video. But in a stroke of luck, Kingsman: The Secret Service moved its release date from October 2014 to early-2015 opening a date for John Wick. As an extra bonus, Fantastic Fest was just before that date so they held a screening to the prime target audience of the film which resulted in rave reviews and tons of social media hype.
After becoming a sleeper hit, Lionsgate knew that they needed to get a John Wick 2 rolling as fast as possible, but they didn't have an idea for a story beyond expanding the universe somehow and going to Rome. The timing was poor for the duo to launch into the sequel because Leitch was ready to go with a movie called The Coldest City (which would become Atomic Blonde, his best movie) so the decision to go their separate ways was made, leaving Stahelski to shepherd the rapidly expanding John Wick franchise while Leitch made so-so movies consistently hampered by his inability to manage tone while having terrific action.
The rest of the series is covered with plenty of behind-the-scenes footage from the productions along with interviews and Reeves and Stahelski together, watching clips from the movies and discussing the challenges of shooting things. Reeves fanatical dedication to training often bumps into the fact that as a 50-something man who's got a lot of miles on his body - if you've ever seen BTS footage from the first Matrix you've seen Reeves wearing a neck brace after spinal fusion doing his training - to the point where if you seen John Wick limping in pain, that's not acting.
As a junkie for making-of stuff, it's cool how they explain developments in the tech where they went from using Airsoft guns with digital muzzle flashes and shell casings (which they hated) to what are called full-block guns where the barrel is plugged so nothing comes out of the barrel - even blanks can deliver lethal force out of the business end as Jon-Erik Hexum learned the hard way - and low-powered blanks cycle the action, eject brass, and make bangs that help the stuntmen cue their actions.
The way the series success allowed for even bigger set pieces, location shots - there's a funny sidebar about how shooting JW3 in Morocco was a hassle because it was a fishing town with tons of stray cats all over who'd wander onto the set and they had to save them from being eaten by Halle Berry's attack dogs - casting (like Berry or Donnie Yen) is covered, all driven by Stahelski and Reeves desire to tell a compelling story in spectacular fashion.
Wick Is Pain walks the line between being an "Oh boy, aren't we so awesome? We're the best!" puff piece and a warts-and-all expose of the grueling amount of work it takes to execute these films. While the details about how miraculous the production of the first film was, subsequent entries get diminishing coverage with little in the way of details like how the Dragon's Breathe shotgun ammo top-view scene was done. For someone like me, the lack of depth made it less useful, though to be fair the individual releases covered these topics.
While it's priced at $10 to buy, it feels overpriced for the actual content. If it shows up on a streaming service and you're a fan, it's a fun, if slight, watch which will inform how the carnage gets made.
Considering Hollyweird is (usually) all about making money and horror films are the most consistently profitable genre because they are typically inexpensive to make due to no big stars, low budgets, and decent box office, it's odd to realize that it's been 14 years since the last Final Destination movie - Final Destination 5 - which ended the run of five movies between 2000 and 2011 which featured an unstoppable "villain" in the form of Death itself and sometimes absolutely bonkers Rube Goldberg machine death scenes. (No one who's seen Final Destination 2 will ever drive behind a log hauler.) Well, Death is back from holiday with Final Destination Bloodlines, which takes the familiar dog and teaches it a few new tricks.
It opens with the traditional elaborate disaster premonition scene set in 1968 at the opening of the Sky View restaurant atop a tower which is meant to evoke Seattle's Space Needle. We meet young Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger, Stargirl), who has been brought there by her boyfriend as a surprise and also to propose. No thanks to a bratty kid tossing the unluckiest penny ever off the open air observation deck, a wild chain reaction of events leads to the explosion and collapse of the tower, killing everyone including Iris.
Usually in the series, the person who foresees disaster then intervenes to halt things, but here we jump to Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) as she wakes up screaming in her college math class. Unable to sleep for the past two months as she's constantly tormented by the visions of the Sky View disaster, her grades have suffered to the point she's on academic probation, at risk of losing her scholarship. She believes the visions are related to her grandmother, so goes home to ask her father, Marty (Tinpo Lee), about grandma.
It's a sore point for him because his wife, Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), Stefani and her brother Charlie's (Teo Briones) mother, had left the family when Stefani was 10 because of how Iris had raised her and Stefani's uncle Howard (Alex Zahara) and he forbids her to seek Grandma out. So she tries Uncle Howard who always waves her off because of how his mother had seemingly gone nuts over this premonition. However her aunt tips her as to where she could locate Iris.
Stefani goes to her place in the woods and finds it's a walled fortress that makes Laurie Strode's place in Halloween (2018, unreviewed, 5/10 - catch on cable/streaming) look like a city park. Old Iris (Gabrielle Rose), has been cheating Death by staying locked in there, never stepping outside, for years. She explains her premonition and we then see the usual prevention of disaster, but explains that Death will not be denied and not only has it been killing all the people who should've died that night, but also their descendants who never would've been born.
She's compiled a book full of scrawled notes and clippings documenting the past six decades of carnage, but Stefani refuses to believe the crazy until Iris, who now has terminal cancer, demonstrates by stepping out of her cabin and is promptly killed in spectacularly gory fashion. NOW Stefani believes! But when she tries to explain the theory to her family - that Death has been systematically reaping the survivors and descendants in order of when they died in the premonition then by order of birth, and that Uncle Howard and his four kids would be next followed by Darlene, Stefani and Charlie (spouses are exempt) - they think she's caught a case of the crazies until Howard is killed in a bizarre gardening accident.
When Darlene rolls into town in her Winnebago, her home now, for her brother's funeral, Stefani is naturally chilly to bad mom, but allows her to join the kids' ersatz Scooby Gang as they try to use Iris's book of clues to find a way to beat Death which leads them to recurring franchise character William Bludworth (Tony Todd, in his last performance before passing in December 2024, less than a year after filming) who is also dying of cancer. He explains that the only way to stop Death is to either kill and take the remaining years of the victim or die and they get revived. Attempts to do the latter go about as well as you'd expect.
I've been a casual fan of the Final Destination series since the beginning, really appreciating the whole Death conceit as an invisible force orchestrating ridiculous accidents as opposed to a Freddie or Jason or Leatherface with metal claws/machete/chainsaw. (No one cosplays as "Death from Final Destination.") But by the third entry, I found the setups too obviously telegraphed, and I think I skipped the 4th installment (The Final Destination). But the fifth film with its epic North Bay Bridge collapse sequence and the closing whammy revealing it was a pseudo-prequel to the first was a winner.
Though I own the other movies on Blu-ray, we didn't rewatch them ahead of Bloodlines, so I'd forgotten about some of the rules (like the kill to steal time one), but it's not important for this soft relaunch of the series. Overall, it's an OK entry in the series with a good amount of "OOOOOH!!!!" kill moments which if we're being honest is why we watch these movies. The unfamiliarity wish most of the cast helps keep the tension up because no one has the plot armor of being the Big Star.
The writers are an eclectic mix with Jon Watts, director of the MCU Spider-Man films, contributing to the story and Guy Busick, who's co-written the Scream series reboots as well as the above-average Ready Or Not (7/10) and Abigail (7/10), but it's not as elevated as those movies. Directorial team Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein step into the Big Leagues here and do well staging the action. Some of the visual effects are a bit obvious, but they're mostly good.
Final Destination Bloodlines grossed $280M on a $50M budget, so it's highly likely a sequel will be forthcoming sooner than 2039. As long as they can keep the quality up - storywise as well as inventive kills - Death is welcome to do his thing.
The short, weird life of weird "anti-comic" comedian(?) Andy Kaufman is explored superficially in Thank You Very Much, which was the signature line of his Foreign Man character which he parlayed into the role of Latka Gravas on Taxi for five seasons between 1978 thru 1983, ending a year before his shocking death of lung cancer at age 35; shocking because he didn't smoke or drink, was a vegetarian, and practiced Transcendental Meditation.
With loads of archival footage, the documentary recaps his outlandish shtick where he always seemed to be "on" and constantly riding the line between amusing and bemusing as he'd read from The Great Gatsby for HOURS during his performances. His unsuccessful audition for Saturday Night Live is shown and while he didn't make the cast, he was invited to perform bits from his act throughout the show's first season including the debut show where he did the Mighty Mouse theme bit where he stands there playing the record, only moving to lipsynch along with the "Here I come to save the day!" chorus.
Interspersed with the footage are reminiscences from admirers like Steve Martin (a fellow anti-comedian who didn't tell jokes per se); contemporaries like SNL boss Lorne Michaels; Taxi cast mates Danny DeVito and Marilu Henner; his girlfriend and other friends including performance artist Laurie Anderson, who spoke of her times with Kaufman in a piece on her The Ugly One with the Jewels album; and most importantly, yet frustratingly, his best friend and writer, Bob Zmuda, who'd be an accomplice in some of his put-on bits.
The frustration comes from fact that Zmuda never goes into discussing how they came up with Kaufman's stunts. Want a theory about how his parents lying about his grandfather's death traumatized him so much that it warped his entire pysche? Thank You Very Much has you covered. Want to hear about how he developed the grotesque Vegas lounge lizard character Tony Clifton or how Zmuda would collaborate in confusing whether Kaufman was Clifton under all the prosthetic makeup by donning the Clifton guise so he and Andy would be seen together? Nope.
While his foray into being a wrestling heel, challenging women to fight him, culminating in pro wrestler Jerry Lawler slapping him out of his chair on Late Night with David Letterman, they don't reveal that the altercation was staged. With Kaufman dead over 40 years now....or is he?.....what's the point of keeping the secrets? I shouldn't know more about a documentary subject simply by virtue of being old enough to have lived through his brief heyday.
While Thank You Very Much is a tidy primer on Andy Kaufman's brief and idiosyncratic life which will clue in those too young to remember him or wish to use it as an addendum to the 1999 Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon or the 2017 Netflix documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond which covered how Jim Carrey drove everyone crazy being full metal Method in his channeling of Kaufman for Man on the Moon. But those seeking deep insight or tales of how and or why he did what he did will have to settle for Lucy Van Pelt-grade psychoanalysis of what may've been an unknowable man.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Hoopla.)
If you like your men behaving very badly and correctly believe Network is a documentary and American Psycho is a comedy, then the new HBO/Max Original film Mountainhead is here to reinforce your fears of gazillionaire tech bros and the generative AI deepfake world we're plummeting into.
Hugo "Souper" Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman, Rushmore) has invited his three besties - collectively known as the "Brewsters" for never-explained reasons - to his new 21,000 sq ft, 7-bedroom mountain mansion outside of Park City, UT called Mountainhead (roll credits!) for a no stress, no deals, brofest weekend. Coming are Venis "Ven" Paris (Cory Michael Smith, May December), the owner of a web company called Traam (think Hooli if you're a Silicon Valley fan) and the Richest Man in the World; Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef, Ramy), owner of AI company Bilter; and Randall Garrett (Steve Carell, Anchorman), a venture capitalist who helped the other startups in addition to running a company that sounds patterned after Peter Thiel's Palantir.
Hugo's nickname "Souper" is because at only a half-billion dollars net worth (approximately 1/460th of Ven's tally) coming from a meditation app makes him the "poorest" and thus closest to needing alms from a soup kitchen and the not-so-subtle hazing of the shortest member of the quartet begins as they diss Mountainhead with slights like, "Is that supposed to be like The Fountainhead? Who was your decorator, Ayn BLAND?" They snowmobile and hike to a mountain peak where they write their net worth on their chests, don hats symbolizing their rank - Ven (crown), Randall (captain's hat), Jeff (sailor hat), Hugo (soup ladle on a chain) - then shout their wishes into the void.
The casual intentions of weekend are interrupted by constant news alerts on their phones about the unrest sweeping the world as generative AI tools released by Traam are being used to create fake videos of atrocities which are then sparking very real and lethal reprisals as tribal groups seeking payback respond to the fake videos. As death tolls rise, Ven doesn't seem particularly bothered by the fallout, saying that it's just a rough patch and that good content will drown out the bad. (As Tony Stark said, "Not a great plan.")
However, a solution exists as Jeff's AI tools could be used to detect and expose the deepfake videos being used to propagandize and radicalize people to violence. Ven wants to buy Bilter to integrate its fact-checking AI tools so he doesn't have to roll back the new features (nor take responsibility for what it's wrought), but Jeff doesn't want his creation subsumed into Traam. Unknown to the others, Randall wants the merger to happen because he's been given a terminal cancer diagnosis and believes that Ven is on the cusp of launching a transhumanist epoch where he will be able to be uploaded and live forever in The Matrix, so to speak.
As the world's governments begin to falter, the three who aren't Jeff decide this would be a perfect time to overthrown the Old World Order and install themselves as the oligarchs of a global technocracy powered up their tech companies endless reach into governments, militaries, power grids, etc. Realizing that taking over the world at once may be too much, they decide to start small with Randall launches a rolling brownout in Belgium and Zoom conferences with Argentina to discuss being taken over by them beginning.
While this goes on Jeff is worried about his girlfriend Hester (Hadley Robinson, Little Women) who has gone on to Mexico for what he calls "a sex party" but she retorts isn't that but "a party where people have sex." While he's troubled by the chaos, he still won't sell to Ven and when Randall fears his life as the Lawnmower Man is at risk, he proposes to the others that they kill Jeff because he's messing up their plans. Because morality doesn't exist in this dojo, they all agree, but because being a megawealthy tech broligarch doesn't necessarily come with competent murder skills, it devolves into farce.
If this all feels ripped from the headlines it's because writer-director Jesse Armstrong (creator of Succession) only began writing the script in January 2025, filming for five weeks in March, and getting it finished and on HBO Max by May 31, 2025. However, it's to his great credit that he doesn't indulge in what 99% of Hollyweird would've done in their current rage state over the peasants voting incorrectly and make it into an obvious bash of Elon Musk and the Bad Orange Man.
While there are some similarities to real people if you know who's who in the techocratic elite space, Armstrong chooses to craft a more general tale of wealthy male fear (a la David Mamet's Glengarry Glenn Ross) and ego, the risks of unchecked AI, the self-anointed regard techno bros have over the rabble, while leavening it with farcical attempts at violence and how even when your best friends try to murder you, you can move past it if there's a buck to be made. His dialog doesn't stop to Basil Exposition anything for the non-nerds so you either keep up with the rapid-fire or get left behind. He trusts the audience to follow enough to understand the base emotions fueling the characters.
The performances are all strong from deft comic performers, especially Carell who's Randall could be seen as a brother to his role in The Big Short which was criminally denied an Oscar nomination. I'm not familiar with Youssef or Smith (though he was Chevy Chase in Saturday Night), but they're good as well. Schwartzman, of course, can play these weasels in his sleep.
Perhaps a more deliberately developed (read: not filmed shortly after writing) script could've honed Mountainhead's intentions to a finer, deeper-cutting edge though the rapidly evolving capabilities of generative AI may've left whatever more time in scripting in the dust. Just last month Google unveiled their new Gemini AI video tool powered by Veo3 and it's capable of producing video with audio, sound effects, camera movement, etc. like this:
Sure, it has some jankiness like the text on the signs at the rally being gibberish, BUT what happens in 2028 when a video showing "[Disfavored Politician] BUSTED Drowning Puppies While Shouting 'I LOVE NICKELBACK!'" pops up on teh Intartoobz a month before the Election and it's amplified by corrupt legacy media outlets who eagerly covered up the last President's senility & family corruption. How will we be able to trust what we're shown anymore and who is going to get even richer and more powerful while having fun running the corps which will generate and disseminate these fabrications? While Mountainhead doesn't have those answers, it is willing to posit the question, albeit in the guise of a bro comic farce.
