"Beverly Hills Cop" 4K Review

 With the Netflix Original Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F hitting streaming, it's time to revisit the series which I've owned for quite a while after buying the trilogy in 4K from iTunes for $10. Before starting, I've seen the first one several times, I think I've only seen the sequel once and only remember that it was very mean-spirited, and don't think I've seen the third one, but have heard it's pretty terrible. Let's find out!

Kicking off is the OG Beverly Hills Cop from 1984 (my senior year in high school), the movie that blew Eddie Murphy up into superstar status after his first two movies, 48 Hours and Trading Places. And he was only 23 at the time.

For those unfamiliar with the movie (I'll keep spoilers for a 40-year-old movie to a minimum) somehow, Murphy plays Detroit Police Detective Axel Foley, a young hotshot we're introduced to as an attempted undercover sting involving cigarettes results in a mayhem-causing chase through Detroit's downtown streets. The aftermath has him on thin ice with his boss, Inspector Todd (real-life Detroit cop Gil Hill, who the documentary White Boy Ric alleges may've been dirty), who warns Axel that if he screws up again, he's out of a job.

Matters are complicated when Axel comes home to find an old friend, Mikey (James Russo), has broken into his apartment after getting out of jail. In his possession he has a paper bag filled with German bearer bonds. After hitting a bar and reminiscing over how they stole cars in high school and how it was odd that Axel became a cop, they return to his apartment only to be ambushed by two assailants who knock Axel out and then execute Mikey, taking the bag of bonds. 

Put on vacation by a fed-up Todd, Axel drives to Beverly Hills to find answers by checking in with art gallery manager Jenny (Lisa Eilbacher), an old friend of his and Mikey's from Detroit, who had gotten Mikey the security job at the warehouse of Very Wealthy & Obvious Bad Guy Victor Maitland (Steven Berkoff). When he goes to Maitland's office to accost him, he's bum-rushed by a half-dozen security men and hurled through a plate glass window and arrested by Beverly Hills PD.

We now meet Detectives Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and John Taggart (John Ashton) and their boss, Lt. Bogomil (Ronny Cox). They are by-the-book professionals who have no use for Axel's rogue antics and he repeatedly gives them the slip or tricks them into situations because of course the hip guy is going to get over on the squares, can you dig it? Many hijinx ensue.

Revisiting Beverly Hills Cop now is instant flashback to the era. The soundtrack was so ubiquitous with hits like Glenn Fry's opening theme "The Heat Is On", Pointer Sisters' "Neutron Dance" (during the opening heist chase), and the omnipresent "Axel F Theme" by Harold Faltermeyer which for music store keyboard department employees was the tag-team partner to Van Halen's "Jump" for needing a sign forbidding their playing the way guitar departments have a "NO STAIRWAY!" sign.

Murphy is in full control here as he BSes his way into situation - several scenes were improvised by Murphy, which would bite the sequels in the butt as "Eddie does something funny" is not a substitute for writing - and throwing race cards at will (though without the malice you'd get nowadays). But it's not all razzle-dazzle bluster; there are moments of quiet drama where Murphy shows that he wasn't just a young buck comic, but had acting chops as well. (I still believe that he would've won an Oscar for Dreamgirls if they hadn't released Norbit while Oscar voting was still happening. If they had just waited a week, his career the past nearly 20 years would've been far different.)

Credit for holding this wacky comedy-gritty crime movie together goes to director Martin Brest who manages to balance the competing tones nicely, allowing Murphy room to cut loose without it becoming overly indulgent & obnoxious. (Which the sequel illustrates when tone is handled incorrectly.) Brest had directed the charming geezers-robbing-a-bank movie Going In Style before and would go on to direct the well-regarded Midnight Run before blowing up his career with the tag team of Meet Joe Black and the Bennifer debacle Gigli, but here he nails what the material needs.

The tropes of hip vs. square, urban street smarts vs. urbane procedure following, West Coast vs. Motown which would become stock items on the buddy cop crime comedy checklist began here and when you see how poorly things go when the balance isn't maintained, you appreciate even more what Beverly Hills Cop accomplished. It's also fun to see co-stars Paul Reiser and Bronson Pinchot (both in their second film roles ever and Pinchot pretty much converted mincing art gallery employee Serge into Cousin Balki on the Perfect Strangers sitcom) and Damon Wayans make his debut in a bit part as Banana Man.

As for the presentation, the 4K Dolby Vision is good and clear, but nothing you'd show off to demo your home theater. This is due to the look of the film being deliberately drab in Detroit before getting bright in Beverly Hills. Audio is basic 5.1, clear and dated, typical of the era.

Score: 8/10. Buy it for $5 or less.

"Pearl" 4K & "X" Reviews

 Doing something different this time in that this double-feature are directly related movies which we watched in reverse order than they were released. But first some background for those not familiar with the gimmick.

In March 2022, snooty film snobs favorite studio, A24 (the 21st Century's Miramax), released an art house slasher movie titled X about a ill-fated group making a porno film on a rural Texas farm owned by an elderly couple in 1979. It was quite buzzy because it was an A24 joint and who the killers were. But where it got interesting was when it was announced that they had already filmed a prequel about the origins of the old woman, Pearl, in X titled Pearl which would be released in September 2022, just six months later, and that a sequel, MaXXXine, would be coming in 2024 continuing the story of (spoiler alert) the survivor of X. 

The final film of the trilogy opened this weekend meaning it'll be on video in a matter of weeks and since I was interested in that one, I figured it was time to catch the first two. I'm not a big horror movie fan, but the missus is and she'd seen X and Pearl, but suggested we watch them in reverse order because she thought it wouldn't change the story and wanted to see how it'd play. So that's what we did and thus this tag-team review.

 Set in 1918, Pearl introduces us to the titular character (Mia Goth) in a subversive manner by introducing this farm girl as she feeds the animals in the barn while 1940s style credits play before she impales a goose on a pitchfork then takes it down to the lake to feed to an alligator. Swell girl!

Her husband, Howard (Alistair Sewell), is off fighting the Great War, and she's under the thumb of her strict dour German immigrant mother, Ruth (Tandi Wright), and caring for her invalid father (Matthew Sunderland). Pearl dreams of being a dancer and sneaks off to the picture show where she makes the acquaintance of the projectionist (David Corenswet, the new Superman in James Gunn's upcoming reboot). This angers her mother and leads to lethal family drama.

 Since I hand't seen X I had no context as to what Pearl was supposed to be about other than as a small story about a sad bad seed farm girl. But what is interesting is how director Ti West filmed and color-graded the picture like a Technicolor Douglas Sirk melodrama. Usually movies set in old times go for a muted nostalgic tone like the Kansas scenes of The Wizard of Oz, so it's a jolt to see it look more like the Oz part of the film. Presented in 4K HDR on Amazon Prime, the colors are so hot, bright, saturated and amped up it looked like the garish Vivid picture mode on TVs that only lunatics prefer. Skin tones are flushed and primary colors like red and green are searing. It doesn't look like genuine Technicolor, which was a three-strip process that resulted in a very specific color tone, but it's definitely a look.

 The story, co-written by Goth with West, is fairly simplistic, more designed as a showcase for Goth with a couple of standout scenes like her confession to her kind, wealthy sister-in-law, Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro), of the very bad things she's done filmed in a long take without the obligatory cutaways to Mitsy's reaction which makes the eventual reaction shot an interesting choice. The final shot almost borders on camp, though.

 With that down, it was time for the next chronological entry in the series, X, which leaps forward six decades with Goth playing the double-role of elderly Pearl (unrecognizable under makeup which took 6-8 hours to apply) and Maxine Minx, one of the performers in The Farmer's Daughter which the producer/strip club owner Wayne (Martin Henderson) hopes to be bigger than Debbie Does Dallas. 

Along for the production are fellow performers Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) and Jackson Hole (Scott Mescudi, bka hip-hop artist Kid Cudi), director/cameraman RJ (Owen Campbell), and his girlfriend/sound recordist Lorraine (Jenna Ortega). Things get off to a rocky start when Pearl's husband Howard (now played by Stephen Ure) greets Wayne with a shotgun because he forgot he had rented the farm's bunkhouse to him though he is unaware of the plans to film a porno movie there.

 Filming gets off to an uneventful start, but take a turn in the evening when Lorraine decides she wants to film a scene much to the consternation of RJ. Upset in the aftermath, he attempts to leave in the group's van only to find the driveway blocked by Pearl. He attempts to assist her back inside, but she has other ideas about his immediate life expectancy - not really a spoiler because the movie opens with the Sheriff's department on the scene with lots of bodies covered in sheets before doing the "24 Hours Earlier" thing - so we're off to the races as Porn Makers vs. Psycho Octogenarians begins. Who will survive? (Hint: The one who has another movie set in the 1980s opening this weekend.)

The whole hook for X is the unique killer(s) which changes up the usual Giant Supernatural Unkillable Monster formula. We've seen a bazillion slasher films, but outside of Mrs. Vorhees in the original Friday the 13th, how many have been older villains, much less really old? As opposed to the gaudy colors of Pearl, West (who also wrote and edited) goes for a grimy Seventies grindhouse vibe and it's a trip seeing the bright pristine red barn and yellow house all run down and grungy with age. It's also fun to spot the callbacks (or in this case foreshadowings) in shots and the lake gator.

The performances are all good with the cast fleshing out the stock characters nicely, albeit laying on the Texas accents a tad thick. Goth is so hidden under the Pearl makeup as to raise a legitimate question as to why not simply cast an older or different actress, but West felt that it was important to have a link between Pearl and Maxine. (It does raise the question why Maxine doesn't notice young Pearl could've been her twin.)

Taken as a package, X and Pearl, are an adequate horror movies with a couple of good gimmicks. Both could be a shorter and Pearl is the slightly weaker film because like the flop Furiosa, it's an unnecessary origin story that doesn't add much to the original for those not curious about everyone's backstory.

Scores: Pearl 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently in 4K HDR on Amazon Prime)

 X: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on no services, but available to rent/buy)

 

 

"Trigger Warning" 4K Review

Serving a sub-sub-sub-genre no one specifically asked for - action movies starring hot middle-aged Latina actresses - Netflix has come through with a pair of J.Lo-led entries within the past year (the terrible The Mother and the screamingly mediocre Atlas) and now the unexpected Trigger Warning (lame title with no relationship to anything) starring Jessica Alba in her first movie in five years and frankly her first since 2014's Sin City: A Dame To Kill For that anyone may've seen other than possible Mechanic: Resurrection, which I haven't even though I own it on 4K digital. Presumably because her kids are 6 to 16 years old and her suburban living company has made her very wealthy, she's decided to return to acting as a 43-year-old action heroine. Alrighty then.

Alba stars as Parker (no last name), a Special Forces commando (don't laugh) who we're introduced to in Syria in the middle of a chase which ends up in a morally gray area. She then gets a call from Sheriff Jesse (Mark Webber), her high school boyfriend, informing her that her also surnameless father, Harry (Alejandro De Hoyos), had died in a mine cave-in. So she returns home to Creation, No State Named to discover her father's death may not have been an accident.

 Harry lived in a mining building which was converted into a bar, so she mourns by walking around drinking straight out of liquor bottles. The bar's manager, Mike (Gabriel Basso), arrives and they hang out at another bar to drink and as they leave she notices a SUV with an assault rifle laying in plain sight in the back. She decides to follow the guys and witnesses them going to rob a hardware store. (In the middle of the night?) Conveniently, the back loading door is partially open (why?) and she's able to beat up all the robbers with her commando skills.

 The actual plot gets rolling when she discovers Elvis Swann (Jake Weary) is selling stolen military arms from a neighboring arms depot (convenient) and setting up a deal with a notorious domestic terrorist. It doesn't help that Elvis' daddy is Senator Ezekiel Swann (Anthony Michael Hall) who may as well have been named Baddie Whiteguy and given a Snidely Whiplash mustache. This puts Sheriff Jesse in the middle because he is also a Swann - a detail the script doesn't make clear early enough - and may be in on covering up Harry's death while he hooks up with Parker. (Awkward.) This leads to vengeance, death, and action.

As with every so-so movie the problems begin with the script which is maddeningly generic potboiler revenge thriller stuff. Writers John Brancato (co-writer of The Game, Terminator 3, Terminator Salvation), Josh Olson (A History of Violence), and Halley Gross (The Last of Us Part II videogame, ruh-roh) have decent pedigrees, but as with the indistinguishable from a ChatGPT product script for The Mother (despite Oscar-nominated writers there), there is nothing unique or distinctive here. There's something about Netflix movies which seems to homogenize screenplays into the dumbest common denominator.

Why don't Parker and Henry have last names and why name her Parker? What state is this? Is Swann a state or national Senator? (It's more implied Congress, but we can't be sure.) What happened to her mother who is only seen in a photo? Does she have no other family? Why is this bar in the middle of nowhere? How did the mine's tunnels happen to run all the way to the arms depot and have an access hatch into a container which allows for the thefts by Elvis's crew without the Army noticing? Why is her father's body laying out in the morgue instead of in a freezer? What was the back door of the hardware store open? Is there only one other deputy in the Sheriff's department and he's cool with what the Swanns are doing? This goes on and on because this is a TV movie-level script.

 Indonesian director Mouly Surya makes her English-language debut here and while she's lauded for her work in her homeland, there's nothing distinctive about the storytelling here, but the action is competently staged.

Which leaves Alba, who is actually pretty good here. For the bulk of her career as a starlet she's never been much in the talent department to go with her looks, but she apparently got some acting training in her 30s because her turn as Nancy Callahan in Sin City 2 was a night and day improvement over her performance in the first one. She also played the villain in the unseen Hallie Steinfeld vehicle Barely Lethal which was better than the material required. She's unlikely to suddenly become Academy bait, but she's respectable.

She struggles with the weak script to give her cardboard cutout character some depth, but is convincing in the action scenes. It's become a trope about how the tiny girlboss women kick the asses of big men who are physically larger and stronger, but the action choreography addresses this by showing her constantly being thrown around - she's 5'7" - but using jujitsu moves and improvised weapons and blades to even the odds. But she's not invincible: When she's badly beaten she passes out for three days and when shot in the arm, she doesn't use it, down to just one arm to fight with. She's bruised and battered like Charlize Theron was in Atomic Blonde's centerpiece stairway fight.

Despite the bad script and questionable direction which decided making all the guys look the same (short hair, beards) so sometimes we're confused as who's who other than her Army sidekick Spider (Tone Bell), who's black, Trigger Warning (seriously, what is that name supposed to mean) is a entertaining enough diversion that you're already paying for on Netflix, so it's not a total waste of time to watch.

As for the 4K Dolby Vision and Atmos presentation, with a few points where there are some bright highlights, there's nothing particularly demo worthy about the film's look and sound. If you're not shelling out for the top tier, you're not missing too much.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"Remembering Gene Wilder" Review

If a documentary ever did what it said on the tin, Remembering Gene Wilder would be it. A pleasant overview of Gene Wilder's life and career with interviews with his frequent collaborator Mel Brooks (The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein), Wilder's wife at the time of his death from Alzheimer's in 2016, Karen Wilder, Alan Alda, Carol Kane, Harry Connick Jr., Mike Medavoy, Rain Pryor (Richard's daughter), TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, and more, it fairly rotely runs down his life and career from while downplaying how his career continued despite minimal marketability for another decade after its peak.

It had occurred to me some time ago that for someone who was so lauded, his window of top work only ran just over a decade from The Producers in 1967 through 1980's Stir Crazy with his later works forgotten when he was in classics like Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and his Mel Brooks collaborations before moving on to teaming with Richard Pryor frequently even as Pryor's health declined due to MS.

While a lot of it was fairly familiar stuff even though I'm not a big fan, I was genuinely surprised at some of the details in his career like how his break came from co-starring in a short-lived Broadway play with Anne Bancroft and making the acquaintance of her then-boyfriend Mel Brooks. I'd always thought Young Frankenstein was strictly a Brooks joint, but Wilder actually created the premise and written a script then brought Brooks in. The real doozy of a story is how Carol Kane had received a Best Actress Oscar nomination - no, I'm not kidding! - and then didn't work for a year, but Wilder somehow saw a talent for comedy that no one else had noticed, casting her in his second directorial effort, The World's Greatest Lover. 

Luck seemed to smile upon him personally as well leading to his marriage to Gilda Radner after meeting filming Hanky Panky and his last wife while researching playing a deaf character in See No Evil, Hear No Evil.

Overall, Remembering Gene Wilder is a pleasant overview of a beloved performer's life and career. Whether you're a fan or a neophyte regarding his work, there's something to enjoy. It's just not super special in its execution.

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

"Less Than Zero" Review

 After the horror that was St. Elmo's Fire, it was time to check off another Eighties checkbox, the 1987 adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' 1985 novel, Less Than Zero. The sentient Wonder bread boy Andrew McCarthy stars along with James Spader, Jami Gertz, and the actual star of the show, Robert Downey Jr., in a tale of sex, drugs, more drugs, the eternal suffering of the spoiled rich kids of LA, and even more drugs.

 We open with a high school graduation ceremony where we're introduced to Clay (McCarthy), his girlfriend Blair (Gertz), and best friend Julian (Downey Jr.) who is celebrating the funding for his record label, Tone Deaf (so creative) Records. Everything is wonderful and they lived happily ever after.

 Six months later, Blair is calling Clay at his not a dorm where he's attending Unspecified East Coast University majoring in Who Knows What begging him to come home for Christmas. In a serious of B&W flashbacks, we see that when he went home for Thanksgiving he caught Blair and Julian in bed together which really toasted his Wonder bread.

 Clay arrives home at his family's very swanky mansion in Unspecified High Rent District in LA and hops into his vintage 1960 Corvette convertible to find the others. Julian is in deep trouble with his label already failed and his coke habit so bad that he's $50,000 in debt to Rip (Spader) who is leaning on him hard to repay the money or else get made to work for Rip in an unfun capacity. Blair is also a cokehead and Clay is still upset about her hooking up with Julian, but love conquers all, right, so they proceed to get their shag on.

As Julian's dire situation spirals out of control, he makes moves to clean himself up, but without much support from his fed-up family. Eventually it devolves into a chase where Clay and Blair try to rescue Julian from the pit he's put himself into. Will they live happily ever after? (Spoiler: No.)

It's nearly impossible to empathize with the characters here because who gives a rip about spoiled super rich kids making poor life choices? Boo-friggedy-hoo. The glossy representation of LA parties where houses look like art galleries with more TV sets than a sports bar is pure fantasy and unrelatable.

The exception is Julian, because Downey's nuanced performance brings his desperation to life as his life spirals down the drain. It also raises the question why RDJ chose to model his personal life as a drug-addicted loser breaking into people's homes and almost losing his career after Julian. Definitely not a scared straight success story.

But there is a single choice which completely torpedoes Less Than Zero even as a messy fantasia about shiny wealth and grungy drugs and it's making them high school graduates and not college grads. Throughout the movie, I kept thinking that there's no way 18-19 year-old kids would be in this situations just six months after graduating. We never see any trace of Tone Deaf Records existing; no way would Julian be in a position to open a club at that age; why would Rip allow Julian to go $50K in debt to him; and so on.

The cast was 21-26 years-old and there's nothing that requires them to be high schoolers; if fact, the studio added the graduation scene to make the characters more likeable and had the effect of wrecking the verisimilitude of the entire story. If they had just made them college grads and sent Clay east for a job, nearly all the problems nagging at the story would've gone away. Not that it would've been a much better movie, but at least it wouldn't be so implausible as to prevent suspending disbelief.

 Outside of Downey's performance and some slick visuals, there's not much more than zero to recommend in Less Than Zero.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"St. Elmo's Fire" Review

 While watching Andrew McCarthy's Brats documentary last night I realized I had some gaping holes in my Gen X filmography where I hadn't seen movies like The Goonies, Less Than Zero and especially the locus of the whole Brat Pack kerfuffle, St. Elmo's Fire. Sure, I knew the hit John Parr single ("Man In Motion") and David Foster's theme song, but I had never actually bothered to see the thing due to an utter lack of interest and apathy bordering on antipathy.

But in the interests of checking off another Major Cultural Touchstone checkbox (I only got around to seeing Saturday Night Fever a couple of years ago), that was the priority for tonight's viewing and as I suspected, my life for the past 39 years hadn't been negatively impacted in the least by missing this screaming mediocrity.

I'm not even going to bother trying to recap this hodgepodge of WTFery so here's the Wikipedia synopsis for those of you who didn't watch it 100 times in the Eighties as someone on Reddit told me. Suffice to say it's about a bunch of beautiful young people - Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Andrew McCarthy - and their awful grandma-dressing Plain Jane virgin friend, Mare Winningham, who graduate from college and pretty much mess up their lives shagging each other, having substance abuse problems, and generally being messes despite Georgetown degrees.
   
 Everything reminded me of my take on Allan Moyle's Empire Records where I noted that the movie had to be set on an alien planet because despite the characters looking human, no actual people actually behave this way. A perfect example is the subplot involving Estevez's character being obsessed with wooing a medical resident (Andie MacDowell) whom he went on ONE date with in college when she was a senior to his freshman. Ignoring that she seems to be living the lifestyle of an established doctor, his stalking of her would've been problematic 40 years ago, much less in today's hypersensitive times.

Desperate to appear more successful, he gets a job as an assistant to a wealthy Korean businessman so he can use the guy's home to throw a rager and invite her. When she blows him off to go skiing with her boyfriend, he abandons the house to his partygoers and drives to the mountains to make Say Anything look quaint. But does her boyfriend beat this weirdo down? Nope, he invites him in to stay the night before heading back tomorrow. (No, not to sit in the cuck chair to watch him rail Estevez's crush.)

I get that being young means having hyper emotions and making dumb mistakes (I was younger once), but everyone seems to be competing to ruin their lives the hardest and we're supposed to think it's adorable because they're all so darn attractive except for Winningham who dresses like a cat lady's cats in knitted outfits.

St. Elmo's Fire was director Joel Schumacher's first hit which he followed up with movies like The Lost Boys (he discovered his thing for sexy sax men here with an extended number with Rob Lowe), Flatliners, Falling Down, and The Client before wrecking the Batman franchise with Batman Forever (which I like despite itself) and Batman & Robin (nope). He directs the insipidness with style, but the script which he co-wrote is vapid.

Similarly to how I felt about Saturday Night Fever, I don't get how people got worked up over St. Elmo's Fire? It's not remotely as good as the overrated SNF and it just seems to coast on the association with the Brat Pack and being one of those Eighties movies with insanely stacked casts like The Outsiders (starring C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Diane Lane, Emilio Estevez and Tom Cruise) or The Big Chill (Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mary Kay Place, JoBeth Williams), both from 1983, where almost everyone in a large ensemble went on to long careers individually. Even by the standards of the Eighties it's naff.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

"Brats" Review

 In June 1985, New York magazine ran a profile of the stars of the upcoming movie St. Elmo's Fire entitled "Hollywood's Brat Pack" - a riff on the old Rat Pack clique which featured Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., et al - which in a instant tagged, tarred and/or tarnished everyone in the movie and adjacent films with the shorthand that they were unserious, spoiled and/or untalented, well, brats. This had lingering effects on many of their careers even after the Eighties ended and though some soldiered on in their careers, others felt permanently damaged.

In the latter camp is clearly Andrew McCarthy - star of Pretty In Pink, St. Elmo's Fire, Less Than Zero and director of the documentary Brats (not to be confused with the slutty Bratz doll movies), which is based on his 2021 memoir Brat: An '80s Story. After musing to the camera in a precious manner about how the article messed up his career, he proceeds to call all his costars to talk about it, some whom he hasn't spoken with in over 30 years. (But he has their phone numbers?)

So off he goes for interviews with Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore (all from St. Elmo's Fire) as well as Lea Thompson and Jon Cryer from Pretty In Pink as well as its director (and Thompson's husband) Howard Deutch, and Timothy Hutton, winner of a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Ordinary People in 1981, for some reason.

Things get off very awkwardly with his interview with Estevez who looks at him with a mix of fear, pity, and embarrassment for him which prompted me to say the missus, "This movie is going to be Andrew working out his shit on everyone else, isn't it?" For the most part it is, though stars like Moore and Lowe who are still working and wealthy seemed quite relaxed about it. Money makes old hurts fade. Notably, Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald declined to participate, presumably because they want to move forward with their lives unless McCarthy.

 Interspersed with his therapy sessions, he sidebars into an interesting discussion with Lauren Schuler Donner, producer of Pretty In Pink and St. Elmo's Fire, and some casting directors about how the early-1980s represented a major sea change in movies as the works of John Hughes (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller's Day Off) as well as movies like Risky Business and Fast Times At Ridgemont High changed the focus from the Seventies serious auteur era of Coppola and Scorsese, then the blockbuster era of Lucas and Spielberg, to movies focusing on teenagers stories starring teens and near teens.

Towards the end, a big surprise is his sitting down with David Blum, the author of the article that ruined his life. Blum explains the origins of the Brat Pack moniker and that it wasn't even intended as an attack, but was the doing of a 29-year-old writer trying to be clever. (I've seen it mentioned that McCarthy is only mentioned once in the article and that's via a castmate making a crack about him, so all this angst is over what?)

 As someone who went through high school at this time when Fast Times and Breakfast Club somewhat bookended my tenure, Brats was interesting as a reflection upon that phase of Hollywood and young people's lives starring and watching these movies. It's nice to see how the rest of the gang seemed far more able to cope with a headline than McCarthy was, but you'll have to wade through some self-pitying cringiness in the process. The way the scenes are filmed with multiple cameras wandering into frame is distracting as well.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Hulu.

"The Fall Guy" 4K Review

 The 2024 Summer movie season started with a thud as the hotly anticipated big screen reboot of the old 1980s TV series The Fall Guy starring Ryan Gosling (fresh off of an Oscar nomination for Barbie) and Emily Blunt (fresh off an Oscar nomination for Oppenheimer). Retooled as a rom-com action caper, it was expected to kick things off with a bang. Instead it was a damp squib grossing only $34M its opening weekend leading to it's being rushed to streaming after only 19 days in release while still in theaters. It had decent reviews and the stars are well-liked, so what went wrong?

Well, for starters, it's not a particularly good movie with a bad script, but since when has that been an impediment to financial success for Hollyweird?

Gosling stars as Colt Seavers, ace stuntman who's having a fling with Blunt's camera operator Jody Moreno. He's the lead stunt double for a-hole movie star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), but things go very wrong on a stunt and his back is broken.

18 months later, he's out of the business and working as a valet when the call comes from producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham, Ted Lasso) that she needs him to fly to Australia to double Ryder after his stunt double is injured. He's reluctant, but when he hears the director is Jody, making her debut, he hops on the plane, arriving on the set jet-lagged, but glad to see the stunt coordinator is Dan Tucker (Winston Duke, Black Panther). Less glad to see him is Jody who subjects him to repeated takes of a fire stunt while discussing their failed relationship over a bullhorn in transparently veiled terms.

Gail tells Colt what he's really needed for is to locate Ryder who's gone missing from the set, presumably on a bender. She tells him that unless he finds the wayward star and returns him to the set, the movie will be shut down and Jody's big break will be ruined. So of course he heads out to find Ryder, but instead finds what appears to be Ryder's corpse in a tub filled with ice which leaves Colt the prime suspect.

There are so many problems with The Fall Guy's script that it's hard to know where to begin, but since it's a rom-com/action flick we should begin with the childish relationship Colt and Jody supposedly have. Writer Drew Pearce (Iron Man 3, Hobbs & Shaw, Hotel Artemis) seems to never been in a relationship with an adult as every chemistry-free exchange between the two mistakes coyness for banter and they're so silly that I began rooting for them to not get together as is pre-ordained by these sorts of movies.

The caper plot is wildly convoluted and requires so many outside players that it'd never hold together, but what really stuck out was how many things would never happen even by the loose reality standards of silly popcorn movies. Jody would never advance from camera operator to director. Cinematographer or 2nd unit director, sure; operator, never. Colt's injury ended his career and we see him putting some electrical stimulator on it, but as he is repeatedly beaten, hit by cars, making high falls, etc. he never seems to suffer any ill effects.

Most egregious is the aforementioned scene where Jody repeatedly has Colt set on fire then thrown on wires into a rock (back injury, remember?) as obvious retribution for his falling out of her life after the accident. She is openly making it clear she's doing this to punish the man she supposedly feels for, but instead of being cute and romantic as Pearce imagines, it comes of as cruel and would be career suicide. Michael Bay wouldn't get away with enacting a personal vendetta against a stunt player - the stunt coordinator would step in and the studio would whack him - so there's no way a rookie female director would work again especially if Colt was injured.

There's a character of Ryder's assistant, Alma (Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All At Once), who appears out of nowhere, participates in an action sequence, then vanishes without a trace and the movie within the movie's starlet, Iggy Palmer (Teresa Palmer, Warm Bodies), has a wild fight scene with Colt that makes no logical sense. The movie feels like it's missing chunks of plot to make it a still too long 2h 5m runtime.

While the script may be problematic, the greater problem is that David Leitch is not good at balancing tone in comedy and basic storytelling mechanics. Frankly, every movie he's made since "co-directing John Wick" has been inferior to the John Wick sequels directed by Chad Stahelski. Ive seen them all, so let's run 'em down:

Atomic Blonde - Very good except for having one too many twists at the end - seriously, drop any one of them and it's a better movie; having them all trips it up - and the fatal flaw of telling the story as flashbacks so there's never any tension because we know she survives. (Steven Soderbergh made the same mistake with Haywire.)

Deadpool 2 - The humor too often felt forced and mean-spirited compared to the original. Drags on too long.

F&F Hobbs & Shaw - More forced humor as it makes the fundamental mistake of trying to be a buddy action movie in which both leads get to be the funny guy. 48 Hours or Lethal Weapon had odd couple pairings, one wild man, one straight man; H&S had both Rock & Statham playing for laughs which Idris Elba was in a different, more serious movie, then stopped everything dead for Ryan Reynolds & Kevin Hart cameos.

Bullet Train - More tedious blathering "humor" with Brian Tyree Henry's endless nattering on about what Thomas the Tank Engine character various people represent. Who talks like this? No one. Once again, cool action fights wasted on clunky storytelling.

Leitch can stage and execute action well, but when it comes to telling a story or doing comedy - which is an art that comedy directors often struggle with (looking at you, John Landis) - he messes it up more than not. In The Fall Guy he makes a fatal mistake in shooting long rom-com banter scenes as single-take oners. Comedy is about timing and editing can make it sing, but when there's nothing to cut away to then you just have people babbling tediously.

 All the actors do what they can with the weak script and poor direction - Leitch, being a former stuntman both gets into the nitty gritty of how stunts are done and also shows patently unsafe or impossible practices - but poor Blunt really suffers from the weak writing. The missus proposed that someone like Rachel McAdams (The Notebook reunion!) may've been better, but I don't anyone could've overcome the structural issues of script and direction.

And if Hollyweird doesn't want to keep losing money, they need to stop letting Leitch make mediocre movies.

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

The opening and closing bits on the street and screening room aren't in the actual movie.

"Atlas" 4K Review

AI is the big buzzword these days. From being stuffed into everything from Google searches to movie plots, it's unavoidable. While some view AI as the Great Liberator of Mankind (by freeing people from work so they can spend all their time consuming), there has always been the dark dystopian view that AI would revolt and destroy humanity a la SkyNet from the Terminator series and this is the angle taken by this weekend's Big Netflix Original movie Atlas, a movie about AI which feels written by AI, but not smart AI, more like Siri.

While the opening credits roll we are infodumped the background of the story: In the future AI is integrated into all our tech which is fine and dandy until the day a super AI cyborg named Harlan Shepherd (Simu Liu, Shang-Chi) manages to transcend his programming to take control of all the tech and launches a genocidal attack killing three million humans before hopping a rocket to parts unknown. Right off the bat, the news footage confuses because it appears to be near future before the whole rocket thing appears leading to my wondering when this movie is set. (I had to look it up and it starts in 2043 before jumping to 2071.)

 After the jump we meet the grown up Atlas Shepherd (Jennifer Lopez), a messy woman with mussed hair who lives alone (no cat?) and plays holo-chess with her computer to show us she's really smart. Her mother created Harlan and he was sort of a brother to her, so when another cyborg associate of Harlan's is captured, she's called in to interrogate its head to find out where Harlan is hiding. She tricks him (or does she?) to reveal the location, an uninhabited world in the Andromeda galaxy. (More on this later.) She convinces General Boothe (Mark Strong) to allow her to go on the military mission to capture Harlan over the objections of Colonel Banks (Sterling K. Brown).

 Atlas wanted to be a Ranger, but washed out on the test which becomes a problem when the assault ship is attacked approaching the planet and she's thrown into a mech suit that falls from the sky only firing braking rockets at the last second preventing a big movie-ending splat. Coming to, she makes the acquaintance of Smith (voiced by Gregory James Cohan, star of the absolutely insane movie The VelociPastor which is about a priest who can turn into a dinosaur to fight ninjas and I'm not making this up!), the AI controlling her mech suit. For the suit to work at its best, Smith needs her to put on on a "sync" device which will allow them to join consciousnesses which is no bueno for Atlas due to her traumatic past with Harlan.

After finding almost all the other Rangers dead in their suits, the goal becomes to get to the rescue pod before the suit's energy is depleted while Harlan's minions chase her down. Will Atlas be able to save the Earth whose fate she figuratively has on her shoulders which has to be the reason she has that name, right?

A year ago J.Lo had another bad Netflix Original actioner called The Mother (not to be confused with the other Jennifer L's mother!) which was so by-the-numbers that I mused on how it felt written by AI despite a trio of highly pedigreed scribes typing it up. This time it's clear that the ScriptGPT AI used to cobble together the skeletons of many other movies and videogames hasn't advanced much in a year resulting in a so-bad-it's-bad mess from two feature rookies, Leo Sardarian & Aron Eli Coleite.

The howlers start immediately with Harlan's hiding planet being located in the Andromeda galaxy meaning we're supposed to believe that in just 20 years not only will AI develop to the level of totally human-looking robots, but that we will have the ability to fly to a place 2.5 MILLION LIGHT YEARS AWAY!!! That means (for the real science-challenged) at the speed of light (very fast) it would take 2.5M years to get there, but we're supposed to believe it's possible to travel there in a couple of days it appears and communications are instant. To quote the Critical Drinker, "What? The? F*ck?"

There's also a running gag about how Atlas needs coffee (shades of Capt. Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager) leading to a bit where in a future of rapid intergalactic space travel, the coffee vending machine sputters and fails like it's a 1980s buddy cop movie. And in a genuflection to modern woketardedness, a female-voiced mech named Zoe announces that her pronouns are "she" and "her" because in 2071 they're still trying to make that stupid fetch happen. (It's not going to happen.)

Mostly it's Lopez talking to herself and she does OK with the material as lame as it is? Will she get over her guilt for propagating this war in the first place and learn to trust Smith? Will we not notice how the entire plot is cobbled together from movies and videogames like Titanfall and the villain's motivation is the same tired "Humanity is going to destroy itself, so I'm going to kill them all first to save them" claptrap from The Day the Earth Stood Still to Godzilla: King of Monsters? Will J.Lo every make a good Netflix movie?

For those looking for good visuals and sounds for your top-tier payment to Netflix, it's an adequate Dolby Vision and Atmos presentation with bright colors and immersive audio, but in service of a forgettable dumb script. (Reminds me of how the Blu-ray of Green Lantern was a favorite demo disc despite being a terribad movie.)

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"Romeo Is Bleeding" Review

Because I'm not great about maintaining this site, I never wrote a review for Romeo Is Bleeding when we watched the DVD in February 2021, but looking back I see I drafted the first paragraph of a review:

"I couldn't remember much about the 1993 noir crime drama Romeo Is Bleeding other than one shot (which is one of the great foreshadowing bits in movies), that co-star Lena Olin was hot, and that it was a pretty good movie. After revisiting it for the first time in easily 20-plus years, only the first two points hold up."

 I gave it a score of 5/10. After rewatching it at the behest of the missus, I was being too generous. 

Gary Oldman stars as dirty cop Jack Grimaldi, who supplements his detective income with doing favors for Mob boss Don Falcone (Roy Scheider) via his middleman Sal (Michael Wincott). He's married to Natalie (Annabella Sciorra) and they have a cute house overlooking a cemetary. He also has a ditzy waitress side piece, Sheri (Juliette Lewis).

 After providing the location of a Mob informant (an uncredited Dennis Farina) to Falcone, the informant and the FBI babysitters all get whacked by hitwoman Mona Demarkov (Lena Olin). Jack isn't happy about fellow lawmen getting killed and when she's arrested Falcone orders Jack to kill her. Conveniently, he gets assigned to transport her to a safe house hotel and she immediately begins to seduce him and because he's clearly not the sharpest bulb in the henhouse (I never really mastered idioms) he goes along with it only to be interrupted by the Feds arriving to pick her up.

Displeased by his failure, Falcone gives Jack two days to kill Mona. Mona counters by offering him a pile of money to help her fake her death, but of course there are going to be double-crosses and twisty turns of plot as Jack's double life unravels.

What's notable about Romeo Is Bleeding is how stacked the cast is. In addition to the previously mentioned actors, Will Patton, Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts on The Sopranos), James Cromwell, and Ron Perlman all have bit parts. What's also notable is how mediocre the whole thing is as it borders on parody of what a noir crime story is with obligatory jazzy score heavy on double bass and wheezing saxophone. A year later Pulp Fiction would nuke the old ways the same as how Star Wars made the previous year's Logan's Run seem like something 20 years older.

Screenwriter Hilary Henkin has only a few credits with the wild context of her previous film being co-writer of the original Road House and her sole subsequent (and final) credit being the brilliant Wag The Dog for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay with legendary playwright David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross, The Untouchables) who I'm fairly certain did the heavy lifting. From the voiceover narration to the spoiler opening which tells us Jack's never in mortal peril. Director Peter Medak (that Species II may be his most known film speaks volumes) tries to jazz things up with some unique camera choices, but can't overcome the script.

(MEMO TO SCREENWRITERS/DIRECTORS: When you tell stories in flashback & we're supposed to be concerned whether the protagonist will survive perils, the fact they're alive in the present tells us they won't die, so no tension. Offenders: Atomic Blonde, Haywire, Romeo Is Bleeding)

Considering the thinness of the rote boilerplate plot, the actors don't really have characters to play as much as tropes and cartoons. Oldman is sweaty and panicked, Olin is exotic & loves being a killer in inappropriate outfit, Sciorra is cute, but Lewis is stuck as Jack's bimbette Sheri who is so dumb that when he stops by to see her after shagging Mona, I snarked to the missus, "This is like going finishing a fine steakhouse dinner then deciding to hit Taco Bell on the way home."

After finally writing up a review for Romeo Is Bleeding I hope I can finally remember that it's not as good as I remembered and stop watching it again. Spare yourself having to remember yourself.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

This trailer's music is utterly unrelated to the film's tone. WTF?

"Abigail" Review

The elevator pitch for Abigail is a model of brevity: An ersatz group of criminals kidnap a young girl and are to hole up in a mansion with her for 24 hours until a $50 million ransom is paid. The problem is that they are locked in without their cell phones and the girl is a VAMPIRE who begins knocking them off! (Not a spoiler, literally the selling point in the trailer.) Hijinx ensue.

 There's not much more to recap than that and just as with Damsel spending too much time vamping its first act as if we don't know where it's going (again, the trailers sell the twists), we get to spend over 40 minutes meeting the crew assembled by mastermind Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito). There's obvious Final Girl Joey (Melissa Barrera, Scream V & VI) who seems wrong for a life of crime; twitchy hard case Frank (Dan Stevens, Downtown Abbey!); dumb French-Canuckian muscle Peter (Kevin Durand); sniper Rickles (Will Catlett); annoying hacker chick Sammy (Kathryn Newton, as annoying as she was in Lisa Frankenstein); and creepy wheelman Dean (Angus Cloud, Euphoria, who the movie is dedicated to as he died of an OD in 2023).

The time is spent fleshing out who these strangers to each other are - the names are dished out my Lambert based on the Rat Pack - and it's interesting, but drags out too long as we wait for the vampire action to begin. But when it does begin, it's off to the races with some killer kills & some plot developments that weren't obvious and kept things fresh as Abigail (Alisha Weir) whips between pretending to be a helpless little ballerina and the monster she truly is.

In thinking about Abigail's above-average quality where the results transcend the premise, I thought about Ready or Not, the 2019 Samara Weaving-starring movie about a bride who spends her wedding night being hunted by her new in-laws in a demonic version of Family Game Night and that turned out to be an apt comparison because directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett helmed that lean mean thriller and subsequent Scream reboot movies. They know how to do "trapped in a mansion" horror well, so I was surprised to see that Abigail was a box office disappointment, most due to a weirdly high budget for a few name stars horror flick.

Other than the first act being twice as long as necessary - we know what the twist is; quit trying to drag things out, filmmakers - Abigail is a bloody good time with good gallows laughs to go with the oceans of blood.

Score: 8/10. Catch it on cable.

Trailer gives away too many good moments. The review sets the premise and is all you need.

"The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare" 4K Review

Guy Ritchie has had a wildly uneven career, qualitatively and successfully. After breaking out at the turn of the Millennium with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, he face-planted with the Madonna-led flop Swept Away (which led to their marriage and her sucking his talent away) and followed with a pair of movies so mediocre,  Revolver and RocknRolla, that I demanded he be blocked from making more movies.

He caught a reprieve when 2009's Sherlock Holmes (5/10, cable) was able to ride Robert Downey Jr.'s post-Iron Man Renaissance to box office gold, but then followed with a trio of disappointing efforts in the sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (didn't see), the bland The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (3/10, skip), and the disastrous King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (DNS), which killed a planned half-dozen movie franchise. (Memo to studios: Try making ONE good and successful movie before planning on making a bunch of them.)

But like a phoenix he came back with the last big Disney live action cash grab before the world ended in 2020 with the Will Smith-fronted Aladdin (DNS). Given a new lease on career, he then promptly reeled off a string of yawners and duds beginning with The Gentlemen (5/10, cable - the new Netflix series has good buzz, not that I buy it), Wrath of Man (4/10, skip), Worst Title Ever entrant Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (5.5/10, cable), and Guy Ritchie's The Covenant (haven't seen it yet, heard good things). Which brings us to his latest flop which only grossed $20 million worldwide on a $60M production budget, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, his latest exercise in working so hard to seem cool that he forgets to make it very interesting.

Based on an actual true caper called Operation Postmaster pulled off by far less attractive people than our stars here, TMoUW stars  Henry Cavill as Gus March-Phillipps (who was reputed to be one of Ian Fleming's inspirations for James Bond), a bit of a rogue who is tasked by Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear) via Brigadier Gubbins (Cary Elwes), also known as M (another Bond reference), to assemble an off-the-books raid to disrupt the Nazis U-boat supply chain in early-1942.

Because the German subs are sinking half of the ships traversing the Atlantic, England is being starved of supplies and the Americans are reluctant to enter the war in Europe. If the supply ship which brings CO2 scrubber cartridges (which allow the subs to stay submerged undetected for long periods) were to be sunk in its port on a neutral island of Fernando Po off the African coast, it would force the subs to be on the surface enough to be spotted and taken out. 

Gus assembles a crew including Alan Ritchson (Reacher), Henry Golding (Crazy Rich Asians), Hero Fiennes Tiffin and sets off on a fishing vessel with a stop at Nazi island base where Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer) is being held and interrogated. After a super easy, barely an inconvenience raid to free him, they head for the ship. Since it's an secret mission, if the British Navy catches them, they'll be arrested, and of course the Nazis will be less friendly.

Concurrently, a second team of a Heron (Babs Olusanmokun, the doctor on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and the Freman that Paul kills at the end of Dune Part 1), who runs a casino hall on the island and has connections to additional forces and weapons, and Majorie Stewart (Eiza González) travel to the island to reconnoiter and set up distractions to cover the raid. Majorie catches the eye of SS commander Luhr (Til Schweiger) and proceeds to play a high stakes game of seduction considering she's Jewish.

Along the way complications arise including the supply ship's departure being moved up, the hull being reinforced with armor, and a mole in the Ministry (20 points to anyone who gets that reference) making anything less than total success for our crew not an option.

While slickly made, Ritchie once again manages to drain the energy out of the story with leisurely pacing and an inconsistent tone which feels like a mashup of war movie and Ocean's 11. Are you making a war drama about a desperate mission upon which the survival of England hangs upon opening the seas or is it a jokey action comedy?

Everyone wears plot armor and barely gets a scratch while hordes of Nazis are mowed down. Characters are flattened into a pretty two-dimensional picture without much internal motivation beyond the most superficial like Marjorie's natural antipathy to the Nazis attempting to exterminate her kind. Compare this to something like Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds which was a revisionist war fantasy film and Ritchie and his three co-writers really come up short.

Cavill has an impressive beard and swagger, but other than the quiet comedy of him cleaning out the good cigars and booze while being ordered on the mission, he's just another one of Ritchie's shallow gentlemen like, well, The Gentlemen. The rest of the cast is fine, but not really challenged.

In counterpoint, the missus really enjoyed it more than she expected and I'm sure the presence of hunks Cavill and Golding had nothing to do with it. To be fair, González is a dish, especially when she shows up in a Cleopatra costume and asks if the dress is OK, to which I remarked, "It's not the dress."

The 4K presentation has good colors and balance, but not much in the way of demo-worthy HDR grading. It looks good on good TVs. Audio is fine; nothing outstanding.

Score: 5.5/10. Catch it on cable.

"Monkey Man" 4K Review

 When the trailer for Monkey Man dropped a few months ago, it caught everyone off guard because not only did it look like "Indian John Wick" but it was also produced, co-written and directed by star Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire, the excellent but overlooked Lion). Also sporting a misleading "produced by Jordan Peele" credit (Peele championed the finished, but abandoned by original distributor Netflix, picture to be picked up by Universal, but had no input in its making; he should be an executive producer) there was great anticipation. However, when it actually came out, reviews were favorable, but mixed, and this is about to be another one of those.

Patel plays Kid, a struggling young man whose mother was killed when his village was destroyed on the orders of Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande), a cult leader-tinged spirtual figure tied to a political party, who sent corrupt police chief Rana Singh (Sikandar Kher) to do the deed. Kid is fighting in an underground boxing club run by Tiger (Sharlto Copley, District 9) where he's being encouraged to throw his matches. He wears a monkey mask which relates to an opening story about the Hindu god Hanuman his mother told him.

He learns Singh is a regular at a luxury club/brothel called Kings operated by Queenie Kapoor (Ashwini Kalsekar), a cruel piece of work. After a ridiculously complex pickpocketing scheme puts her wallet in Kid's hands, he returns it to her at her office and begs for any job he could have. She reluctantly hires him as a dishwasher and uses that toe in the door to sidle up to Alphonso (Pitobash), the diminutive gopher who supplies the drugs, etc. for clubgoers and soon is working the VIP floor where Singh and other power players partake in hookers and blow.

 Eventually, he creates an opportunity to kill Singh and finds wanting revenge is a lot harder than exacting revenge. Barely escaping with his life and freedom, he is taken in by a commune of hijra - enuchs, transgender, and intersex people - led by Alpha (Vipin Sharma) who helps Kid recuperate and train for one last assault on Kings (sort of literally).

To audiences outside the territory where a movie is set, political allegories can sail over the heads of viewers. Done properly, as with District 9, it doesn't matter though to people who do catch the references it provides an extra layer of nuance. With Alphonso Cuoron's Roma, the peripheral story of Mexican civil war in the 1960s didn't click. Apparently there is some serious debate about how Patel references India's political terrain and a rising Hindu nationalist movement, but since no attempt to explain it to non-Indians is made, it's just generic bad guy stuff with a curry flavor.

With the political and spiritual stuff just kind of being there, it makes the movie feel sluggish from the parts that anyone can appreciate, the badass fight scenes. As a basic revenge story, the story is really basic with no depth to the villains beyond "You killed my mother!" but Patel has an action director's eye that is remarkably sophisticated in contrasting the way the ultra-wealthy and slum dwellers coexist in very close proximity in the fictionalized version of Mumbai called Yatana. The pickpocket scene is a true Rube Goldberg construct where the wallet changes hands many, many times before ending up in Kid's hands as we see it chasing through the cramped neighborhoods. The fight scenes are equally well-done with some seriously gnarly kills which would make John Wick go "Whoa."

While Monkey Man doesn't quite deliver on its trailer's promise of straight up revenge kill action, it's still an impressive debut from Patel that with some judicious editing would've landed more of a punch.

From a technical standpoint, the 4K HDR presentation offers solid rich colors that convey the stylized cinematography by Sharone Meir (Whiplash) with deep reds, blues and golds. Sound is appropriately bass-heavy to give the punches heft.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"The Bricklayer" Review

Coming out around the same time as The Beekeeper it would reasonable to wonder if The Bricklayer was part of a Hollyweird shift to macho action movies with odd job categories as titles, but while the Jason Statham killfest was about an imaginary super secret spy agency, this is about the plain old CIA and their highjinks.

After a former CIA asset, the imaginatively named Victor Radek (Clifton Collins Jr.), who was presumed dead is connected to the murders of three journalists, each of which implying that he will expose CIA shenanigans which will have Major International Ramifications, the Agency drags in his former handler, Steve Vail (Aaron Eckhart), and asks him to go to Greece to bring him in. He refuses, but after a pack of assassins try to unalive him at his bricklaying job, he grumpily catches the flight accompanied by plucky CIA analyst Kate (Nina Dobrev).

 Upon arriving in Greece, he promptly diverges from her plan by meeting his old contact who sets the pair up with a more upscale cover as a shipping tycoon and his wife - when she objects, he tells her, "You're too old to be my girlfriend." (Eckhart is 56, Dobrev is 35) - with a snazzy customized Mercedes. While they try to figure out where Radek is, he's steps ahead in his scheme and whacks another journalist, further raising the stakes.

The plot then becomes another one of those dumb stories where we're supposed to guess who may be a mole, who may be dirty, who's putting one over on who, but the more it tries to twist, the less you care because it ceases to be a puzzle you can try to solve and reduces the viewer to someone waiting for the nonsense to end. (For what it's worth, the missus guessed who the mole would be. I didn't care enough to try.) Screenwriters Hanna Weg (nothing you've heard of) and Matt Johnson (Torque, Tracers, Into the Blue, the last only remembered for Jessica Alba in a bikini most of the movie) are working from a novel which may've sold the twists better, but it doesn't translate.

Director Renny Harlin - to quote Ben Kenobi in Star Wars, "Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time." - was quite the guy in the 1990s with Die Hard 2, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and his best, Cliffhanger, but checking his IMDB I see that The Bricklayer is his 14th movie since the last one of his I saw literally 20 years ago, Mindhunters, which I reviewed the DVD of and can only remember that Christian Slater gets killed in a cool (literally) way early on.

So how is he doing after all these years? In a word, workmanlike. The action scenes are OK, but not up to the current John Wick state of the art. The first big fight scene in a rainstorm has some interesting staging, but you have no idea which of the brawlers is Eckhart (or his stuntman) or the attacker because of similar clothing and darkness. Other scenes lack clear geography. 

On the performance side, everyone is fine. When is someone going to cast Eckhart, Thomas Jane, and Jon Cena as brothers? Dobrev is spunky, but in a rejection of the current girlboss women-are-betterer-than-wimpy-men trope, she gets whomped when she tries to fight as she finds training insufficient in the real world and they must not have taught that you don't let opponents get so close if you want to keep your gun.

The Bricklayer is an adequate throwback to the fare they used to churn out regularly in the late-20th Century. It's passable & forgettable, but at least the time spent isn't regrettable.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Netflix.)

"Knox Goes Away" Review

There seems to be a run of movies lately riffing off the theme of the 2003 Belgian movie The Alzheimer Case (aka The Memory of a Killer) which was remade as a 2022 Liam Neeson vehicle called Memory and told the story of a hitman who was losing his faculties to Alzheimer's disease. Now there's a Russell Crowe movie hitting streaming called Sleeping Dogs about an retired police detective with Alzheimer's just in time to be compared to Knox Goes Away which stars Michael Keaton, who's also making his directorial debut, as a hitman who has.... Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, which is a fast-progressing form of dementia which is basically turbocharged Alzheimer's.

Keaton's John Knox is informed of his dire condition by his doctor and told to get his affairs in order sooner than later. He makes arrangements to liquidate his holding in stolen items and cash to distribute to a short list of recipients. While we've seen him blanking in the opening scenes, things really go south when he accidentally kills his partner (Ray McKinnon) after he whacks the target and a woman who was in the shower with him.

Confused as to what happened, he hurriedly stages the scene to make it look like the target returned fire, but he knows the setup won't withstand scrutiny for long since all the bullets will match to one gun. He's right as the lead detective investigating the case, Ikari (Suzy Nakamura), immediately wonders who turned the shower off when everyone was dead and the ballistics prove it was a single gun.

Complicating matters is the knock at the door that night from his estranged son, Miles (James Marsden), who he doesn't immediate recognize due to his condition and it's been many years since they'd spoken. Miles has a cut hand which he'd picked up when he murdered the older man who had groomed, seduced and impregnated his teen-aged daughter. Desperate, he comes to Knox since he figures someone like him who does what he does may have an idea of how to manage the situation.

 Knox then proceeds to come up with a plan to handle Myles' mess with his friend, crime boss Xavier (Al Pacino working just above phoning it in), helping to keep him on track lest he lose his mind before completing the scheme. As the plan plays out, we don't really understand what he's doing and when all the evidence instead directly implicates Miles to the point he is arrested for the murder, we're left to wonder if Knox messed up.

What makes Knox Goes Away a decent little film is the low-key manner Keaton directs the proceedings including his performance. Rather than make a splashy look-at-me-I'm-acting-and-directing-suck-it-Bradley-Cooper self-indulgent ego trip, he underplays the moments which a less confident actor may've wanted to swing for the fences. The staging and framing is unobtrusive and he gives his co-stars plenty of nice moments particularly Marcia Gay Harden as his ex-wife whom he visits one last time, telling her he's "going away", and Marsden who definitely breaks from his usual pretty boy roles (he was Cyclops in the original X-Men movies) with a raw nerve performance which actually makes him looked middle aged. (I see he's now 50, so it's about time he started looking like he's 40.)

 The script by Gregory Poirier is competent, including so quiet humorous moments to lighten the mood without turning it into a dramedy. Knox is definitely going to end up having gone away, but the trip isn't too much of a bummer. There's also a side plot about a Polish call girl, Annie (Jonanna Kulig), whose weekly visits serve as an indicator of Knox's decline and resolves in a somewhat surprising fashion.

There doesn't seem to be much market for mature stories about mature people that aren't directly targeted for Awards Season, so it's an oddity that a movie like Knox Goes Away that merely tells a quiet character story quietly exists. It's not a necessary story, but it's told well enough and won't waste your time.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"Prisoners of the Ghostland" Review

 While trying to find something to watch some time ago the missus and I bookmarked a weird-looking (based on the trailer) trailer for a Shudder Original Nicolas Cage movie called Prisoners of the Ghostland. Tonight we actually got around to watching it. And afterwards we wished we hadn't.

Cage stars as Hero (movies aren't even trying anymore, are they?), a bank robber who while robbing a bank (hey, it's in the job title) with his co-robber, Psycho (Nick Cassavetes; what was I saying about names?), ended up with a lot of dead people is being held in a bizarre Japanese town which seems to be part brothel, part Western frontier town where the armed men either present as cowboys or samurais in service of the Governor (Bill Moseley, many Rob Zombie films), a white man who wears an all white suit and cowboy hat like Boss Hogg on The Dukes of Hazzard. 

Governor wants Hero to find his "granddaughter" (read: escaped sex slave), Bernice (Sofia Boutella), and to keep him focused on his task he puts him in a swank leather suit with explosive charges on his arms and crotch (in case he gets any bad thoughts) and his neck (to kill him) and a five-day lifespan, the last two only if he finds the Bernice by the third day. Tick-tock, Hero!

As he sets off into the bizarre wasteland, he is captured and taken to an odd community built around trying to literally stop time by holding a rope attached to the minute hand of a clock tower. Again, while the people are mostly Japanese, the leader is a white guy. Hero learns of the nuclear accident that occurred there involving a prison bus and tanker of nuclear waste. By the time you factor in the choreographed background cultists dancing, it's all pretty wacky.

And it's also quite dull. Apparently director Sion Sono is a name in the Very Weird Movies genre (I only recognize a couple of his titles), but this, his first English-language movie, while being packed with weird, doesn't make much sense no matter how hard Cage tries to keep us focused. I was wondering if this was all some sort of journey to Hell parable, but it ultimately comes off as being just weird for weird's sake. By the time the final scenes with some action occur, they're welcome because they indicate the movie's almost over.

 I can see why Cage signed on to this freak show (other than for the paycheck) and he doesn't phone in his performance, but there's not much of a character for him to play and he spends too much time unconscious and carted around from one weird spot to another. Boutella has even less to do other than be exotic looking and a flashback revealing how she got a scar and how it connects to Hero's crime confuses as to what sort of timeframe things take place in. Moseley's Governor is a cartoon, again due to the script.

 While the setting and details clearly required thought and planning to execute, the underlying story is simply too thin, confusing, and ultimately irrelevant to merit the time to watch it. If you subscribe to Shudder, randomly flip through it and stop at random spots to see some weird.

Score: 2/10. Skip it (or just skip around the timeline to see some weirdness).

Oscars 2024 Review Roundup & My Awards Picks

Tonight is the who careseth Academy Awards where Hollyweird gets together to conclude Awards Season with the biggest show of self congratulations. As I've done in recent years I attempted to watch as many of the nominees in the Best Picture, Best Director, and the two screenplay and four acting categories in what I've termed the Oscars Death March as there are frequently movies I had no interest in that, in the name of wanting to make informed judgements and know where Oscar blew it or got it right, I had to see.

This year with the fixed number of Best Picture contenders at 10 that meant there were 45 nominees to slog through and in my best ever performance, I saw 43 of them including ALL the Best Picture nominees AND managed to get reviews posted for all but one (Barbie) which I viewed too long ago to properly review and want to revisit to properly evaluate.

What follows is who I would've voted for if I had an Academy ballot. (In tribute to Siskel & Ebert's traditional "If We Picked The Winners" show.) I will count down from #10 to my ultimate vote getter (I think Oscar uses ranked voting, so this is the inverse of how they'd tally) and then run through the individual awards with comments.

But enough of my yakking. Let's boogie!

#10 - Killers of the Flower Moon (Score: 3/10) - Martin Scorsese's interminable story of white oppression and murder of the Osage Indians in the 1920s was a team up with his two biggest muses, De Niro and DiCaprio, and it was 2 hours of movie dragged out for 3-1/2 hours. The only Skip It review of all nominees.

#9 - The Zone of Interest (5/10) - The banality of evil gets an extended remix in this odd dry film about living next door to Auschwitz with the sounds and ashes of genocide wafting into a Nazi family's idyllic life. Great sound design, but drones on too long.

#8 - Past Lives (6/10) - One of three foreign language films and the smallest in scale that I have no idea why it's in the running with it's frustrating story of unrequited pining. Greta Lee deserved to be nominated Best Actress, though.

#7 - Oppenheimer (6/10) - The odds-on favorite to win big is Christopher Nolan's first movie that I haven't actively hated since Inception. Not that it's a particularly good movie as it manages to sound and fury the impression of something substantive for three hours while being maddeningly sparse. Congrats for not sucking, Chris. Enjoy your career makeup Oscars - this is your The Departed.

#6 - Maestro (7/10) - Bradley Cooper's Oscar bait tour de force has the look and performances, but is undercut by a screenplay that chooses to look at the periphery of the Leonard Bernstein's life thus requiring viewers to come in with too much knowledge of his music on their own. He should've been nominated for direction over screenwriting.

#5 - Anatomy of a Fall (7/10) - An interesting psychological legal drama that lands with a splat due to an ambiguous, choose-your-own-ending-and-meaning conclusion that leaves the viewer high and dry and unsatisfied.

#4 - The Holdovers (7/10) - An odd retro-styled throwback to the way movies were in the early-1970s with a somewhat shaggy story propelled by nuanced performances by Paul Giamatti and Da'Vine Joy Randolph. The script is somewhat unsatisfying in the end, but has a lot of rich moments throughout which liven up the stock plot.

#3 - Barbie (7.5/10 pending review) - Considering the political firestorm around the blockbuster #1 movie of 2023 with one side calling it the greatest feminist triumph ever and the other calling it a misandrist hate crime and some contrary opinions in between, I was surprised that I mostly enjoyed Greta Gerwig's plastic fantastic toy commercial. While the score may change, the ranking is unlikely to move other than perhaps switching with The Holdovers.

#2 - Poor Things (8.5/10) - Yorgos Lanthimos' absolutely bonkers take on Frankenstein is the year's most original movie, weird, wacky, wild and what movies are supposed to do: Show you people and places you've never seen. Emma Stone gives a career best performance and should win her second Oscar for it.

Which leaves us my vote for Best Picture....

#1 - American Fiction (9/10) - Lost behind the generic title (seriously, how many "America [Second Word]" movies are there? American Psycho, American Sniper, American Gangster/Pie/Graffiti/Made/Beauty/Etc.) is one of the sharpest satires in memory running along with a surprisingly layered and warm family drama that mocks white liberal racism while telling a story about people who are black, but not Hollyweird's stereotypical Magical Negro or Helpless Victim framing. Writer-Director Cord Jefferson has created something special and I hope he doesn't fall off like Jordan Peele did after Get Out. Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown are excellent.

This is the first Best Picture vote that I'd be enthused to cast in a long time as even the "best movies in past years were flawed like Parasite or Nomadland. It doesn't stand a chance this year - or any year - but at least it was nominated. Go watch it. (It's currently on Fubo and MGM+; hopefully it will migrate to a more common service.)

And now onto the rest of the categories with my votes in bold and comments:

BEST DIRECTOR:
Justine Triet - ANATOMY OF A FALL
Martin Scorsese - KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
Christopher Nolan - OPPENHEIMER
Yorgos Lanthimos - POOR THINGS
Jonathan Glazer - THE ZONE OF INTEREST

Nolan is going to win, but Lanthimos is the best director in a weak field where three of the nominees could've been replaced by others like Bradley Cooper or Greta Gerwig. He made the most original and stylistic film of the year. It's on Hulu now. Go watch it.

BEST ACTOR:
Bradley Cooper in MAESTRO
Colman Domingo in RUSTIN
Paul Giamatti in THE HOLDOVERS
Cillian Murphy in OPPENHEIMER
Jeffrey Wright in AMERICAN FICTION

Giamatti gives his most Giamatti performance here, but it's not just more of the same. I just wish the script had resolved more satisfactorily. It's a toss-up between him and Murphy to win, but my 2nd choice would be Wright as he's been so good for so long and this is his first real leading showcase and he kills it.

I didn't see Domingo in Rustin because the movie didn't interest me, the reviews were bad, and he wasn't going to win.

BEST ACTRESS:
Annette Bening in NYAD
Lily Gladstone in KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
Sandra Hüller in ANATOMY OF A FALL
Carey Mulligan in MAESTRO
Emma Stone in POOR THINGS

Stone delivers the boldest and bravest performance of the year (and not just because she sailed into Mr. Skin's "Great Nudity" ranking with her overload of sex scenes here which weren't that sexy which was the point). She's always been a very subtle actor thanks to her giant Na'vi-sized eyes - just watch the audition scene in La La Land as she realizes they're not paying attention - but here she has to arc Bella from a toddler's mentality to a bright woman's with matching physicality and an English accent to boot.

If Gladstone beats her because the Academy wants to Make History, it'd be a traveshamockery. Greta Lee (Past Lives) should've been nominated over her and perhaps Hüller.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Sterling K. Brown in AMERICAN FICTION
Robert De Niro in KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
Robert Downey Jr. in OPPENHEIMER
Ryan Gosling in BARBIE
Mark Ruffalo in POOR THINGS

A stacked year with all deserving contenders that edged out some other good performances. Downey is going to win and should win both as a lifetime achievement award and being the only really recognizably human character in the clinical Oppenheimer. 2nd choice would be Brown or Gosling.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
Emily Blunt in OPPENHEIMER
Danielle Brooks in THE COLOR PURPLE
America Ferrera in BARBIE
Jodie Foster in NYAD
Da'Vine Joy Randolph in THE HOLDOVERS

 The surest bet of the night and deservedly so as she had the most to do and nailed it. 2nd choice would probably be Foster who's making a comeback lately and this was far better than her turn in True Detective: Night Country. Ferrera is here solely because of her thesis statement rant about how persecuted women are which was pure agitprop and the worst moment in the movie.

Brooks was the only other performance I missed because I haven't seen the original The Color Purple since it was in theaters and I recently bought it in 4K and wanted to revisit that before watching the musical remake. As the sole nomination from the movie, she has no chance and was thus deprioritized, but I'll catch it eventually.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:
AMERICAN FICTION - Cord Jefferson
BARBIE - Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach
OPPENHEIMER - Christopher Nolan
POOR THINGS - Tony McNamara
THE ZONE OF INTEREST - Jonathan Glazer

Best pictures start with best screenplays, so this is the gimme. My 2nd pick would be Barbie because while it's stuck in the Adapted category due to it being based on the dolls, it's not as if there was a source book like every other nominee had to draw from and what Gerwig and Baumbach did was quite unique.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:
ANATOMY OF A FALL - Justine Triet and Arthur Harari
THE HOLDOVERS - David Hemingson
MAESTRO - Bradley Cooper & Josh Singer
MAY DECEMBER - Screenplay by Samy Burch; Story by Samy Burch & Alex Mechanik
PAST LIVES - Celine Song
=======
As noted, Barbie should be here, and frankly I'm not super enthused about any of the nominees, so I'm going with The Holdovers for being the least flawed of the lot. Based on my issues with the rest, no 2nd pick. Weakest category of the Death March.

So that's it for this year's Oscars Death March other than catching The Color Purple (2023) and rewatching Barbie. With the exception of Killers of the Flower Moon, there weren't many movies that were too much of a chore to get through and for the most part the nominations and likely winners aren't worth burning a city down over. There could be a few upsets if the Academy decides to spread the wealth around as they've tended to do, but as long as Gladstone doesn't beat Stone (that would merit a small riot) I'll allow it.

What do you think? Leave a comment.

"Lisa Frankenstein" Review

 What happened to Diablo Cody? After her Oscar-winning debut screenplay for 2007's Juno, she followed up with the cult classic Jennifer's Body in 2009, then pretty much never wrote another movie that did business since. I see she won a Tony for her book of the Jagged Little Pill musical, but movie-wise she's been a non-entity for over a decade. And that losing streak hit a new low with Lisa Frankenstein, which also marked the feature directing debut (and likely finale) of Robin Williams' daughter Zelda.

We were watching this because a friend of the missus had claimed Poor Things - my #2 pick for this year's Best Picture - was a ripoff of the plot to Frankenhooker, which we hadn't seen. With the Oscars Death March over, it was time to check it out, but we decided to look at this first and hoo boy, was it bad.

 Kathryn Newton (Cassie Lang in Ant-Man: Quantumania) is Lisa Swallows, a teenage girl in 1989 whose mother was killed two years prior by a random axe murderer. Her father, Dale (Joe Chrest, Stranger Things), remarried a mean woman, Janet (Carla Gugino), and now she has bubbly cheerleader half-sister, Taffy (Liza Soberano, she's big in the Philippines), which doesn't match her misanthropic personality. She likes to hang out in an abandoned cemetery, making rubbings of tombstones and hanging out at the grave of a young man who died in the 19th Century.

 After accidentally getting a spiked drink at a house party and almost raped by a dorky high school boy, Lisa goes to the cemetery and wishes she could be with the dead young man forever. After she goes home, a freak storm causes lighting to hit and guess who's back from the dead?

When the Creature (Cole Sprouse, Jughead on Riverdale) shows up at her home, she's naturally terrified because it seems to be a replay of how her mother died, but then a few seconds later she realizes this is the guy from the cemetery and decides to stash the zombie in her closet. He's missing an ear, hand and penis, but with a combination of murder and an extremely defective tanning bed that Taffy won as Miss Hawaiian Tropic, she can rebuild him and he becomes more lively looking in the process.

While the premise seems to have potential as a mashup of several horror and teen movies, nothing works starting with Lisa who is simply unlikable and ill-defined as if the pages of the script where you'd set up the protagonist were lost or never written and Newton doesn't imbue her with any charm. Gugino's stepmother is a cartoon; her dad is a passive wimp who never seems to be emotionally engaged even when his wife goes missing; all the teen boys are blockheads. Only Taffy is a basically decent character which is meant to be a twist because she's introduced as a vapid bimbette. Sprouse does well with a nearly wordless performance, but it's clear his direction was "be Edward Scissorhands."

But beyond the thin script, the direction by Williams doesn't get the tone anywhere near right. Horror-comedy done properly results in the likes of Evil Dead II, An American Werewolf in London, Freaky, and the recent Amazon Prime Original Totally Killer. Black comedies like American Psycho or Heathers could go wildly wrong if mishandled. Lisa Frankenstein is a prime example of bad script meeting incompetent direction resulting in a mishmash mess of little merit.

However, in response to this disaster the missus suggested we watch a movie I've owned forever, but had never gotten around to watching though she'd seen it, Life After Beth.

Score: 2/10. Skip it!

"Damsel" 4K Review

If it's Friday it must be time for another Netflix Original Movie and this week's forgettable disposable reason why they're the most expensive service is Damsel, a fantasy movie starring Stranger Things girlboss Millie Bobby Brown as, well, a damsel in distress.

 Brown is Elodie, a poor girl from a frigid region scraping for food and firewood. One day, a proposal comes from the Queen of Aurea (Robin Wright, cuz she was The Princess Bride) for her to marry her son, Henry (Nick Robinson). The union would greatly help her people, so she heads to Aurea with her father, Lord Bayford (Ray Winstone, Beowulf), her stepmother (Angela Bassett), and younger sister Floria (Brooke Carter). Once there, they are ensconced in luxury and Elodie spends time with Henry and finds common interests.

Of course, anyone who's seen the trailer knows that this is all a ruse because after the wedding, they head to the mountains for a blood ritual surrounded by the partygoers from Eyes Wide Shut after which our damsel (roll credits!) is unceremoniously tossed into a pit where after crashing through various branches and vines to break her fall, ends up in a cave network within the mountain which is home to a dragon (voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo and her "smoked three packs a day beginning in kindergarten" voice) seeking to burninate her. Rude!

 Turns out the Royals (BTW, what ever happened to Lorde?) made a deal long ago that in exchange for not burninating their lands, each generation they would sacrifice three royal daughters and thus the blood ritual to make these peasant girls smell like royal blood. Fortunately, Eleven Elodie is a clever resourceful girl and with some convenient help from magic healing creatures and notes left by previous losing contestants on The Royal Bachelor, she is able to turn the tables on everyone. (No, this isn't a spoiler. What did you think was going to happen?)

 While predictable and disposable, I had an OK time with Damsel. Brown is acceptably capable without being too girlbossy and other than too much time spent getting on with the twist (which is in the trailer), it passes quickly. I've seen some nerd rager YouTubers lose their minds over this being a girlboss who don't need no man/men are ineffectual and weak feminist Mary Sue hatefest a la the M-She-U, but that seems more a need to keep the outrage clicks coming than genuine anger. The villain is the Queen, so what's the problem?

As far as AV goes, the Dolby Vision presentation is bright, especially the golden carriage, and the cave scenes aren't too dim. The Atmos audio has some good bass notes like the dragon's voice and flames. Speaking of which, the way they portray the dragon breath as more of a napalm-like liquid fire than a gas flame was different and even more effective because if it sticks to you, you're burned.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"Spaceman" 4K Review

Since I'm relaxing my boycott of Adam Sandler - which after some reflection seems overkill (but that's another discussion) - I was willing to watch the weird cerebral science fiction Netflix Original Spaceman, in which Sandler plays an astronaut who has a close encounter with a giant talking spider while on a deep space mission.

Sandler is Jakub, a Czech cosmonaut on a solo mission to a bizarre astronomical phenomena called Chopra which has appeared beyond Jupiter. He is battling loneliness and depression after six months heading out and this is without knowing that his very pregnant wife, Lenka (Carey Mulligan), wants to leave him, but her Dear Jakub message was blocked by his commander on Earth, Tuma (Isabella Rossellini). One night he has a nightmare that something is crawling under his face before a spider's legs erupt from his mouth.

Then one day he discovers a visitor has boarded his ship, a HUGE (man-sized) tarantula looking alien he eventually names Hanus (voiced by Paul Dano), who tells Jakub he was in the neighborhood to see Chopra, but was drawn to Jakub's loneliness and wants to help. Able to telepathically access Jakub's memories, he begins to counsel him by exploring why his marriage is falling apart. Meanwhile on Earth, after a visit to her mother (Lena Olin), Lenka spends time at a ritzy spa for pregnant women.

Spaceman reminded me of Steven Soderbergh's 2002 version of Solaris in its quiet tone and increasing sense that what we're watching isn't really happening. Is there really a friendly alien spider who develops a hankering for Nutella acting as a marriage counselor or is Jakub's guilt for being a lousy, unavailable husband manifesting as Hanus. While Lenka comes off initially as a beyatch, as we get his side of the story we realize it took two to tear a relationship.

But what it really resembles is the mopey 2019 Brad Pitt sci-fi film Ad Astra (which I saw, but somehow didn't log and have no review score for) with Pitt as an astronaut with daddy issues who travels to the fringes of the solar system to have a showdown with his father. Along the way he encounters rabid lab monkeys and Moon pirates and it's all ridiculously stupid and convoluted for a story that could've been told on Earth as a road trip movie.

Forgetting the whole "When did Czechoslovakia get a space program? or "Is the spider real?" angles, what is the reason for sending only one man on this supposedly critical mission other than to have him be depressed, lonely and susceptible to space spider marriage counseling? That sentence alone is why you'd have a co-pilot on the trip. And it's a weird choice considering the production design of the spaceship is the most realistic depiction of what real spaceships look like I can recall. Not slick and futuristic, but functional, tactile, and what an Eastern European country would put together.

But the centerpiece of Spaceman is Sandler's performance and this may be the best acting I've seen him do. While I last suspended my boycott for Uncut Gems (score: 7/10) and appreciated his raw nerve performance, what he does here is so subtle, refined and underplayed that I suspect most people won't appreciate it. Instead of just playing Jakub as mopey, glum, and po'-faced, Sandler's stillness conveys the hollowed-out depression of a man set adrift, literally and figuratively, by his circumstances and his choices. It's really something to behold and that he was doing this while suspended by uncomfortable wires, harnesses and poles is even more impressive.

Mulligan, Rossellini, and Olin don't have much to do but provide diversions to cut away to. Mulligan's Lenka is more an idea than a character which is ironic considering her role is to be the center of Jakub's guilt. If they had cut all the Earth scenes, it would've have made much difference story-wise. 

While I was left lukewarm about Spaceman, the missus really liked it and she hated Solaris, so go figure. If you're in the mood for a sad tale of a man metaphysically lost in space, you may want to give this a look if only to see what the star(s) of Jack and Jill could've been doing instead.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on Netflix.