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a while and a dozen intervening movies, I couldn't remember enough specifics to properly review them, so they remained unpublished.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. ;-)
Tonight we settle into a double-feature of 2006's The Devil Wears Prada and its 2026 sequel which tacked a 2 on the end. What follows is my IGN DVD review from 2006 after which I will update whether I had any new thoughts upon viewing this again for the first time in almost 20 years.
When Lauren Weisberger's novel The Devil Wears Prada became a best-seller in 2003, it was widely viewed as a roman a clef about Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue magazine, for whom Weisberger served as an assistant. Full of gossipy tidbits about the behind-the-scenes business of high fashion, it was a "chick lit" hit and an obvious candidate for translation to the big screen.
Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) is a plucky Midwestern college grad living in New York City looking for a writing career, having edited the Northwestern newspaper. After interviewing with the publishing conglomerate Elias-Clark, she's offered menial work at either Auto Universe or a second assistant gig at Runway magazine, working for the imperious editor, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep).
Miranda is a "boss from Hell" - demanding, dismissive, cruel, and capricious - who has driven many an assistant screaming from her presence, despite the job supposedly being one that "a million girls will kill for." Despite Andy's frumpy college prep appearance and utter lack of knowledge of the fashion world - she has to ask how to spell "Gabbana" - Miranda keeps her on and Andy tries to stick it out because she knows that if she stays a year, she'll have a good resume item that will allow her to write her own ticket to more rewarding work.
As time goes on, Andy gradually gets the hang of the job and routine, earning the grudging respect of Miranda's #1 assistant, Emily (Emily Blunt). It also helps when Nigel (Stanley Tucci), the photo editor, decides to take mercy on the fashion-challenged Andy and takes her into the magazine's "closet", the storeroom where all the clothes that are provided by designers for the magazine (and rarely returned) are kept. After finding something that the size 6 Andy could wear - one of the film's premises is that the just fine Hathaway is too bovine for the fashion world - and a trip to the salon, she begins to at least look the part of the "clackers" (named for the clacking of their stiletto heels on the marble floors) indigenous to Runway. (In a merciful twist, we're spared the obligatory Pretty Woman transformation montage; she just comes into the next scene with her new look and duds.)
With her increasing responsibilities at Runway, at Miranda's constant beck and call, Andy starts to have problems with her sous chef boyfriend, Nate (Adrian Grenier) and her art-gallery-manager friend Lilly (Tracie Thoms). Also showing an interest in Andy is Christian Thompson (Simon Baker), an author whom Andy is impressed by and could be helpful to her writing career. One sequence revolves around obtaining a copy of the unpublished next Harry Potter novel for Miranda's twins - a request slightly less feasible than obtaining a Bible autographed by God - and when he comes through, it clumsily introduces the possibility of romance.
I hadn't read the novel - hey, I'm a manly man, OK? - but as a film, The Devil Wears Prada fumbles being an effective update of prior workplace comedies like 9 to 5 and Working Girl by being too bland and toothless about its story and characters. This impression was solidified after checking out a synopsis of the novel, revealing a lot of angles that got cut in the process of Aline Brosh McKenna's script homogenizing the story into a popular hit. Considering it grossed $311 million worldwide, the producers surely aren't losing sleep over these changes.
The first problem is Andy and her career goals. In Working Girl, Tess (Melanie Griffith) had to combat workplace sexism in order to be taken seriously as something more than a secretary. Andy isn't being held down by anyone and no one is forcing her to become Miranda's on-call drone and it's not really explained how surviving a year of running errands is supposed to advance a serious journalistic career. Tess wanted to work in business; Andy could have waited tables and done freelance writing for all it matters.
Secondly, Andy's lousy friends are thinly written and hypocritical. When she bestows thousands of dollars worth of swag upon them that she's obtained from work, they're appreciative, but then they turn around and attack her for spending more time on her job than with them. Nate is an ungrateful tool - it doesn't matter when a dish like Hathaway comes home as long as she comes home, you mook - and Lilly is so underwritten that it was a surprise when a line revealed that they've been longtime friends and not just new acquaintances in the city.
Finally, the problem with Miranda is that in humanizing her by giving her a younger nemesis, Jacqueline (Stephanie Szostak), and an unhappy husband, Stephen (James Naughton), it dulls the boss-from-Hell aspects. Mr. Hart (Dabney Coleman) in 9 to 5 wasn't anything but a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot, but Miranda is painted as someone who both demands the impossible, but is also a victim of ageism and sexism and we're treated to the hoary trope that if she was a man she'd be thought as merely driven, which was boring back when it may have meant something. Because she's not a total monster 24/7, it makes her more outrageous requests less threatening, as if the fact that she allowed a total fashion naif to work for her more than 15 seconds doesn't stretch the limits of credulity.
While the story really doesn't amount to much, The Devil Wears Prada is still fairly entertaining to watch thanks to its glossy look (directed by Sex and the City vet David Frankel), dazzling array of fashions on parade, some genuine funny dialogue that doesn't smack of sitcom-grade contrivance, and the performances of the leads.
Streep doesn't have much of a reputation as a comedic actress, but she's simply sublime as Miranda, even though her skill at fleshing out what could've been a one-note character ultimately weakens her as a negative force in Andy's life. One scene has her explaining to Andy how people like those who run Runway determined the color of the lumpy sweater she is wearing years before and it's a stellar mix of sneering condescension and motherly education. Thanks to Streep, we feel for Miranda, even though I don't think Miranda was meant to be so sympathetic in the beginning.
Also excellent is Tucci as the flamboyant and bitchy, yet not campy or clichéd, Nigel. I wouldn't be surprised if he garnered a supporting Oscar nomination for a performance that could've emphasized the "fairy" in Fairy Godmother but thankfully doesn't. Hathaway is lovely with her big brown eyes, but she's somewhat hemmed in by the safe script and doesn't really get the material to shine like the others. She's very appealing, but not very compelling. Blunt is also funny as the harried and offended Emily. Thoms and Grenier are wasted with non-characters to play.
While The Devil Wears Prada feels particularly flat and predictable in its third act and ends on kind of a muddled note, it's still a decent trifle worth watching even though it's ultimately a triumph of style over substance. (Watch it while wearing some comfy sweats for added irony.) Too gentle in its satire and too pedestrian in its plot, it shows that when it came to balancing on its Manolos, the devil was in the missing details. ========== OK, 2026 Dirk here and I reread this review before watching and I must say I pretty much nailed it like a carpenter with OCD. On second viewing I noticed more business like how people scrambled to get out of Miranda's path when she strode the office halls. Considering how all the main stars have had massive award-winning careers over the past two decades and still look great, it's still wild to see Blunt so good in only her second feature role and just how luscious Hathaway looks, appearing to be made of cream and kittens' dreams. (At some point I dubbed her "Yummy Girl" and even as she's proven to be certifiably woketarded in real life, I still call her that and credit her for being the only non-terrible things in Christopher Nolan's craptacular The Dark Knight Reloaded and Intersuckular where she somehow manages to deliver the lines about love being the 5th dimension without bursting out laughing.)
When I reviewed it originally I scored it a 6/10, but on second glance it's worthy of a succeeded-at-what-it-was-trying-for...
Pardon the pun, but the only reason the airplane disaster film Deep Water appeared on my radar was because one of the dozen producers was KISS bassist Gene Simmons who hit the interview circuit wearing a baseball cap with the title on it. Since it's been a couple of months since we'd had a trashy shark movie like Thrash (4/10, Skip) we decided to unplug our brains for some dumb (hopefully) fun.
Aaron Eckhart is Ben, a pilot who is avoiding going home to cope with a very ill child by working a haul between LA and Shanghai. He's co-piloting with Captain Rich (Ben Kingsley, slumming) when during the flight where we kill the first act getting to know a bunch of people who will either die or we're supposed to care about surviving, a defective battery power bank wrongly checked into the hold by a raging a-hole, Dan (Angus Sampson), eluding the scrutiny of a distracted X-ray technician, catches fire causing a cascade of system failures leading to the plane having to ditch in the Pacific Ocean hundreds of miles from land. Unfortunately, there's a coral reef which tears the plane into three sections leaving the 30-odd survivors separated in variously precarious situations.
And there's a bunch of hungry sharks. Dun-dun-DUHN!!!!
Director Renny Harlin, coming off the trio of The Strangers movies, had directed the camp shark classic Deep Blue Sea so I suppose we're supposed to expect great shark action, but Deep Water is just dumb tedium. Perhaps there's a few surprises as to who gets eaten, but it completely drops the ball when it comes to disposing of Dan, whose battery triggered this whole disaster. He's been a complete bag of dicks the entire movie, implying that of all the kills, his will be the most visceral and satisfying. Well, it's not. Yeah, he gets his, but it's not like in The Lost World where the guy gets snacked on by two T. Rexes. (I was banking on four sharks grabbing a limb and ripping them off while a fifth shark swallows the torso, but apparently I'm more creative than the FOUR credited screenwriters.)
You can also tell this was a Chinese co-production because of the prominent casting of Chinese actors and the fact a small Chinese fishing boat rescues the survivors after the American helicopter crashes in a ridiculous sequence. China always saves the day in multinational productions. (Ironic that Simmons would be flogging this considering his love for the USA.)
2026 will probably go down as the year YouTube surpassed film schools for turning out wildly successful new filmmakers. The warning shot came in January with Iron Lung by YouTuber Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach which he directed, wrote, edited, and starred in, self-funding the $3M production and grossing a (then) stunning $51 million.
But the earthquakes came in May as a tag-team of original horror movies completely upended the natural order of things with Backrooms - an adaptation of a series of YouTube shorts helmed by their creator, 20-year-old Kane Parsons, raking in $350M off a $10M budget, making it A24's highest-grossing movie ever - coming two weeks after the word-of-mouth phenomenon Obsession blew Hollywood's collective mind by surpassing its projected opening weekend gross then increasing it's take the following two weekends; the first film since (I think) E.T. - The Extraterrestrial to accomplish this feat and that was by Steven Spielberg, director of Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, not a 27-year-old YouTuber. Produced for a rounding error for Hollyweird $750,000, as of this writing it has grossed $407 million worldwide and turned its star into a early Oscar nomination shoo-in.
How much of a word-of-mouth hit was it? We met up with a friend about a month after it'd opened and almost right off without prompting he asked if we'd seen it, raving that it actually lived up to the hype. We didn't get a chance to see it in the theaters, but now that it's streaming we checked it out and, yep, believe the hype.
The premise is so simple it could've been inspired by a Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons where they parodied The Monkey's Paw short story. (It was!) Bear (Michael Johnston) has a major crush on his coworker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) at the music store they work with their friends Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless), the daughter of the owner, Carter (Andy Richter). The movie opens with Bear attempting to rehearse telling Nikki his feelings with the others, but he's such a sweaty dork they advise against it.
Bear's cat dies from eating oxycodone pills that his late grandma, whose house he now lives in, took. (This is the least realistic detail in the movie. Every try to give a cat a pill? Exactly. It should've been a dog; they eat anything.) While talking to Nikki on the phone she mentions dropping her tiger's eye necklace down the drain, so being the simp he is, he goes to a shop to buy her a replacement, but instead buys her a One Wish Willow, a novelty that promises to give the person who breaks it one wish. (Duh.)
He ends up not giving it to her when he drives her home after the pals hang out. When she confronts him whether he has feelings for her, he chickens out and denies he does, not that she hasn't already clearly friendzoned him so hard it's visible from orbit. Disgusted with himself, he opens the One Wish Willow and wishes that Nikki loved him more than anyone in the world. *SNAP*
Big. Mistake.
She immediately begins to throw herself at him, but it's weird as she seems to snap in and out of being in love with him and seeming confused as to what's going on. Things settle into a comfy couplehood and he gets to enjoy plenty of the benefits of being a friend with benefits, but things begin to veer into somewhat concerning to downright horrifying territory as Nikki's obssessive love for Bear begins to manifest in increasingly harmful ways.
While it'd be easy to be reductive and dumbly claim Obsession is a commentary about toxic men wanting dominion over women's bodies (as many feminists Karens squawked because everything is about being a victim), but it's really just a simple morality tale about unintended consequences. While Bear has entranced Nikki into loving him, he's quickly gnawed at by the understanding that this is wrong and tries to figure out how to free her even when it's supposedly everything he wanted.
Director-writer-editor Curry Barker's script actually fleshes out Ian and Sarah and their relationships with Bear and Nikki so that they're part of this crazy situation especially during a group party scene where a game of Truth or Dare Jenga gets out of hand. They have their own goals and cares, so their fates aren't just superfluous window dressing for the main couple.
The lions share of praise has rightfully gone to Navarrette as she conveys the various states of Nikki's deterioration as her true self tries to break free from the spell the willow has placed on her. She's a very cute actress - she's like a darker, sexier Anna Kendrick - but throws herself fully into the complicated role. After Amy Madigan's Best Supporting Actress win for Weapons, a far less demanding role than Nikki, it appears the Academy is loosening up in its bias against genre movies and Navarrette is already talked up for a Best Actress slot. Considering the success of Obsession rests primarily on her shoulders and ability to make the audience connect with this poor young woman, she'd darn well better get a nom.
Other than quibbles about the handling of the cat, Obsession is a rare horror movie that elevates the form with a sharp script and performances. If we'd seen it at the show, I would've given it the highest "Pay full price" when to see it rating, but now that it's streaming (it should eventually land on Peacock soon), I give it the score below and my highest recommendation.
In my review of Fountain of Youth (5/10) I noted that I'd assayed the checkered and heavily mediocre career of Guy Richie in my The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (5.5/10) review so rather than re-rehash things go read those after you get done with this latest loaf of even-less-barely-passable mediocrity, In The Grey, written and directed by Ritchie so this is all his fault.
Eiza González stars as Rachel Wild, a lawyer who specializes in collecting debts for wealthy interests. After Bobby Sheen's (Rosamund Pike) last negotiator was murdered after making a deal to recover $1 billion loaned to Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem - raise your hand if this is the first time you've heard of Javier's older brother being an actor) by her firm, Spencer Goldstein, she brings in Rachel to take a run at Salazar.
Rachel's play is to use lawfare combined with extralegal shenanigans conducted by her associates Sid (Henry Cavill) and Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal) along with various redshirts who lack plot armor, if you know what I mean. What follows is a rapid-fire sequence of tactical moves which result in Salazar's projects and assets being frozen and seized. Figuring he'll try to retaliate, elaborate escape plans are exhaustively made and rehearsed, but come on, we all know something will go wrong, right?
Even by the play-it-loose-and-look-cool low standards of recent Guy Ritchie movies, this is a low effort effort. Everything works flawlessly and Rachel seems to be able to stroll into court at will to get a judge to bless her requests instantly. When Salazar sends a squad to kill her, the team effortlessly counteracts them with lethality.
While there are a few throwaway laughs and stars are attractive, there is no there there and In The Grey ends up just another instantly forgotten trifle from the Guy Ritchie slop mills.
Any doubts that Michael Jackson remained the King of Pop 17 years after his shocking death in 2009 at age 50 were erased as Michael, the rote musical biopic checklisting his life events from 1968 thru 1988, grossed $992 million, making it the highest-grossing biopic ever, surpassing the equally sanitized yet popular Bohemian Rhapsody. People wanted their Michael Jackson fix and this waxworks museum movie apparently delivered the goods for the undemanding masses.
Opening in 1966, we're introduced to the Jackson family in their home in Gary, IN. Domineering patriarch Joe Jackson (Colman Domingo, who's become the black Pedro Pascal, appearing in everything, but we're not sick of seeing him so far) is drilling his sons, the Jackson 5, fronted by eight-year-old Michael (Juliano Valdi), in their musical chops. Failure to live up to his standards means he's taking off his belt.
Two years later they're spotted by a Motown scout and signed. As they group rockets up the charts, the family moves to a massive mansion in Encino, CA. In 1978, Michael (now played by Jaafar Jackson, a nephew of Michael's, his father is Jermaine Jackson) signs a solo deal with Epic to be produced by Quincy Jones and Joe is not happy for he considers the Jackson 5/Jacksons to be the primary project for which he is owed all the credit. When meeting with lawyers, Michael chooses a long-haired younger associate, John Branca (Miles Teller), and has him fire Joe as his first duty.
The movie then races through a series of bullet points: See Michael humming and scatting to create a hit song for his debut, Off The Wall; see Michael get Bubbles (earlier than he actually did); see Michael get a nose job; see Michael hold a meeting with Bloods and Crips gang members to teach them the dance finale to the "Beat It" video (a reality-defying scene though kudos for casting spot-on doppelgangers for the lead gang members); see Michael making the "Thriller" video; see Michael moonwalk at the Motown 25 special then got burned filming a Pepsi commercial then forced to go on the Victory Tour with his brothers then announce this is the final Jacksons show on stage then starting his Bad Tour in 1988. It's a video Wikipedia entry with less character development than the Bob Dylan Wikipedia musical biopic A Complete Unknown.
What don't you see other than the controversies about the allegations of doing bad things to young boys which caused the third act of the already finished movie to be scrapped and replaced with an extended series of concert performances which clearly excited audiences but grew tedious? (If I want to watch a bunch if Michael Jackson performances, I'l go watch the real deal, not his nephew's imitation.) For starters, sister Janet (who declined to participate), a couple more brothers, or any real insight as to why Jacko was the way he was.
Jaafar does an adequate job portraying his uncle, conveying his terminal childlike persona and how he chafes under Joe's domineering and bullying actions, but we never really understand who Michael was and how he came up with his record-setting series of hits. Songwriting is a hard thing to translate to film because it's like a magic trick the writer is inventing fresh every time. Movies about painters or sculptors can show them applying paint to canvas or chipping away at stone. Songwriting is just above writing in visually dull activities. Watching someone fumble through chords or trying to find words doesn't get you inside the musicians head and I say this as a songwriting musician. I can't explain how it works.
Jaafar doesn't really look like Michael, but he has the rail thin physique and ably pulls off the dance moves. But because the script by John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator, Penny Dreadful) is hemmed in by legal considerations and the Jackson family's control, it's all surface and superficial. Domingo is his usual excellent, blending Joe's power lust and control freakishness with his pride in his star son. Nia Long as mother Katherine doesn't have much to do. The "That was HIM?!?" award for stunt-casting goes to Mike Meyers who portrays CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff in a wild, almost factual, scene where he blackmails MTV into playing the "Billie Jean" video when MTV wasn't to keen on playing black artists. While watching it there was something familiar about the actor, but he's so buried under makeup it didn't click.
Music biopics are so formulaic that Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story was a sarcastic commentary of the formula as well as a wacky parody and Michael lives down to the modest demands of the form. While most criticisms hit it for cutting out the scandals - a sequel is in the works and who knows what they'll do? - I'm happy to ding it for being just "Michaelmania" - a simulation, not an insightful representation of the HIStory of the King of Pop.
The improbably late-life transformation of Bob Odenkirk into an action star even less plausible than Liam Neeson continues with Normal, an even less memorable title than his previous actioners - 2011's Nobody (unreviewed, 6/10) and 2025's Nobody 2 (5/10) - which probably accounted for it's bombing at the box office despite being the best of the trio of films, all penned by Derek Kolstad, the creator of the John Wick franchise. It's too bad because it's a little blast of a flick.
Odenkirk plays Sheriff Ulysses, the temporary Sheriff for the fictional town of Normal, MN. The previous Sheriff accidentally died of hypothermia and Ulysses is there to fill in until they can elect a new Sheriff in a couple of months. He's staying in a motel and leaving expositionary voicemails with his estranged wife to keep us filled in.
Being a small town, everyone knows everyone and it's all very cute but he senses something off about things like how they were able to raise millions of dollars in a fundraising drive and why one of the deputies chases off Alex (Jess McLeod), the daughter of the deceased Sheriff, from attending the memorial. The town's Mayor (Henry Winkler) suggests Ulysses considering staying on permanently because he's low key style of policing - he leaves a note under the windshield of a car parked too close to a fire hydrant reading, "Park better." - he demurs.
One day an alarm sounds at the police station that the bank is being robbed. The couple robbing the bank (Reena Jolly & Brendan Fletcher) crossed paths with Ulysses the day before and when he sees they're inside attempting to do CPR on a customer who collapsed from the stress, he decides to holster his weapon and go in. What happens next flips everything on its head, causing some very unlikely alliances to form in response to the situation.
What follows is a often humorously grisly sequence of bloody events which the trailer manages nicely to hint at while not completely blowing the plot. What Kolstad and Odenkirk (who collaborated on the story) have created plays like a mashup of Nobody and Evil Dead 2 (without the Deadites) with the violence sparking laughs instead of screams. I haven't seen director Ben Wheatly's Free Fire (the time we tried to watch it, the missus tapped out in about five minutes, before it had gotten going), though I've heard good things; however, Meg 2: The Trench was awful (unreviewed; 3/10 skip it score), but Normal rocks.
Part of the fun is how the first act blatantly sets up all sorts of details which you KNOW are going to come into play by the end. Clever movies often reveal they were setting things up upon a rewatch, but Normal makes darn sure that we know "this is going to be important later"like when the hardware store owner mentions he has "stump removers" locked up or (in the trailer) the old lady at the knitting shop has a police scanner. (If Kolstad had come up with the trope of Chekov's Gun, he would've had the gun with a sign proclaiming, "THIS GETS FIRED LATER!")
Clocking in at a lean 91 minutes, Normal spends a bit too much time in its first act setting up all the dominos, but when they start falling along with the snow in the blizzard, it's worth the wait. It didn't need a sequel, but it should've have bombed like it did. Show it some love now.
In 2022, on a pre-dawn morning in a suburb of Cleveland, OH, a Toyota Corolla traveling nearly 100 mph sailed through a T-intersection and into a building, tearing the car in half. Inside the wreckage, first responders found two dead young men - 20-year-old Dominic Russo and 19-year-old Davion Flanagan - as well as the driver, 17-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla, who was critically injured and was the girlfriend of Dominic. But the shock the residents of the town at this senseless loss of life was doubled when Shirilla was charged with murder of the boys on the basis of her never letting off the gas or touching the brakes before impact.
This is the story of The Crash, the new Netflix documentary recounting the investigation and her trial and conviction for murder. (Spoiler alert!) Interviewing her friends, her parents and those of the dead boys, and Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Tim Troup from the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office who assembled the case, along with copious video from her social media where she lived her best party girl life, we're given a portrait of a spoiled narcissistic brat who was enabled by parents who even now don't seem to feel their little princess did anything wrong. They didn't see a problem with her smoking Snoop Dogg amounts of weed or shacking up with Dom at only 17. At the sentencing, the judge admonished her mother for being so blithe about the deaths.
Apparently this case has been covered in a couple of other shows and I've seen some comments that details were left out here like she may've checked out the route she took indicating premeditation, not a spur of the moment impulsive decision. When she appears to make her claim that she didn't do it - she claims she blacked out from a medical condition - it's just as contrived and remorseless as how she acted after the accident. (And according to stories that are running after this doc's release, she's just as bad in slam as she comes off here.)
Perhaps the filmmaker's intent was to just let Mackenzie and her folks speak for themselves, but it feels like some more details could've been included like amplifying what exactly was Dom's sources of income beyond some vape selling and a desire to make a fashion line. The terminally online nature of youth is also appalling to this old Gen Xer. No wonder life is meaningless and worthless to the soulless brats of today.
There's been a glut of documentaries recently examining various comedic performers like Steve Martin and Mel Brooks (whose two-part documentaries on Apple TV and HBO Max, respectively, I didn't review because they were more TV miniseries; they're OK, but not as exceptional as the subjects), Eddie Murphy, John Candy, Stiller & Meara, and even SNL writing legend Jim Downey as well as SNL's creator Lorne Michaels (haven't seen that yet).
Following this parade comes director Lawrence Kasdan's (Body Heat, The Big Chill) Netflix Original documentary profile of Martin Short, Marty: Life Is Short. Short has been a comedic mainstay for over 45 years first rising to prominence in the brilliant SCTV, before doing a year on SNL, then branching into movies of varying regard, stage work (winning two Tony Awards for Broadway musicals), up to his current run on Hulu's hit Only Murders In The Building with his longtime collaborator Steve Martin.
As someone who has watched Short since SCTV there wasn't much career-wise shown that I was unaware of but for young'uns who may only know him from Only Murders it is too superficial in rattling off clips of some of his roles with little insight. Why anyone thought having a then 40-year-old Short playing a 10-year-old in Clifford is never discussed. It's just chalked up as another commercial disappointment to move past, which he did by branching into Broadway.
The parallel theme is his 38-year-long relationship with Nancy Dolman whom he'd met in 1972 when she was Short's then on/off-again girlfriend Gilda Radner's understudy for the infamous production of Godspell which also starred Victor Garber (Alias) as Jesus; Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, and Dave Thomas (all to go on to SCTV); as well as Paul Shaffer (musical director) and Howard Shore (saxophone) who'd go on to play on SNL with Shaffer moving on to become David Letterman's bandleader and sidekick and Shore moving into film scoring, winning three Oscars for his Lord of the Rings work. (Sorry for the digression; I just find this confluence of talent wild and want to share.)
Anyhoo, Short and Dolman were madly in love and when they couldn't get pregnant adopted three children. (The oldest daughter committed suicide earlier this year and the film is dedicated to her and Catherine O'Hara who also passed this year and is heavily featured.) They had a storybook romance as indicated by one interviewee relating that when she and her husband were in marriage counseling and were asked by the therapist if there was a couple whose relationship they wished theirs was more like, she said, "Marty and Nancy's," to which the therapist replied they weren't the first couple to reference them.
Chock full of home movies capturing their home life and festive parties filled with Hollywood A-listers like Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw - both of the couples had young families so all the kids would play together - as well as his SCTV co-stars, it's all very warm and wonderful and ultimately a bit dull.
Director Kasdan is longtime friend of Short's and just as when Rob Reiner did a recent documentary on his friend Albert Brooks, he's too friendly to the subject to be objective. I doubt Kasdan was covering up a history of meth-fueled hooker murders, but when everyone loves Martin and Nancy and was sad when she passed from ovarian cancer in 2010 after 30 years married and the only other really dark period was between 12 and 20 years of age when his eldest brother and parents died, the lack of career introspection leaves us at a remove when Short clearly isn't shying away from discussing anything. Kasdan simply doesn't care to dig in.
There is one hilarious home movie that Spielberg shot where Hanks and Short recreate the cliff jumping scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid but with them playing the parts as Forrest Gump and Ed Grimley. Spielberg is audibly laughing at the spectacle. There are also some clips of his Jiminy Glick character and it's clear where Zach Galifianakis got his Between Two Ferns premise from.
While it lacks depth, Marty: Life is Short has plenty of warmth as it casually recounts what appears to be a rare decent bloke in the entertainment biz's life.
On paper, Balls Up, the latest Amazon Prime Video Original has a solid comedic pedigree as it's written by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick (Zombieland & Deadpool series) and directed by Peter Farrelly of the Farrelly Brothers who ruled the 1990s with Dumb and Dumber, There's Something About Mary, and Shallow Hal and went on to direct 2018's Best Picture Oscar winner, Green Book. Big laughs guaranteed, right? Unfortunately, not enough of them.
Balls Up opens with Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser, if you've seen a movie with a schlubby fat guy who wasn't Jack Black in the past several years, that was him) stammering through a presentation rehearsal for a revolutionary condom he has designed which has extra material to also cover the berries in addition to the usual twig. He calls it The Testicle Sentinel.
The company boss, Burgess (SNL's Molly Shannon), tells him the pitch will be done by Brad (Marky Mark, "Good Vibrations", The Departed) from Sales and his pitch with the new name, Balls Up! (roll credits), wins over the head of the Brazilian Travel Ministry, Santos (Benjamin Bratt), who makes Balls Up! the official condom of the 2025 World Cup. However, the celebration gets wildly out of hand and Santos loses his position and the condom deal goes to a competitor. After this turn, Burgess fires Brad and Elijah along with other workers.
Three months later, a courier delivers a package to Brad containing a plane ticket and full VIP credentials to the World Cup Final. Apparently, despite the whole deal going sideways, the goodies weren't canceled for him and Elijah, whom he discovers is on the same flight. They decide to get along to attend the game, but after getting drunk, Elijah decides to attack the giant sausage mascot on the pitch. Brad chases after him to prevent trouble, but inadvertently interferes with what would've been Brazil's game-tying goal. Due to his interference, Brazil loses to arch-enemy neighbors Argentina.
They are arrested, but turned loose on the streets where they would surely be lynched by the takes-their-football-VERY-seriously mobs. They briefly appear to be saved, but are then captured by armed men and taken to the jungle compound of cartel warlord Pavio (Sacha Baron Cohen in a bonkers performance). Because he won money on the game thanks to Brad's head, he won't kill them but he won't let them go either. To stay in his graces they pitch him the idea of using their larger condom to provide more carrying capacity for cocaine trafficking leading to a typical Farrelly low humor scene involving swallowing these huge phallic coke loads. After escaping the cartel, the pair encounter a weird group of anti-poachers in the jungle as they try to make their way home.
Balls Up starts off hilariously, but then has many long stretches of dullness punctuated by explosive moments of laughter like a scene where they're forced to do karaoke. This happens a lot in comedies as the first act is polished to a diamond mirror shine and then the rest just floats after it which is why surprises like Bottoms and Pizza Movie are such treats.
Cohen is clearly having fun doing a weird voice in a long flowing wig that makes him look like rock singer Sebastian Bach. Hauser does his usual weird fat guy thing and Marky Mark does his usual adequate comedic thing. (He only really seems to spark in the Ted movies.)
I thought Amazon was paywalling all HDR 4K content behind their even more expensive ad-free tier, but this came up as Dolby Vision allowing for some bright colors, but the cinematography is the blah overly bright look that modern comedies adhere to.
While not a total loss that goes tits up, Balls Up is too uneven and too long (104 mins) to score many goals. But when it does get funny, it gets VERY funny, but it just makes the lengthy lulls more lully.
I am totally unfamiliar with the Canuckian web series Nirvanna the Band the Show which ran from 2007-2009 and only got hipped to Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie because a couple of YouTubers I follow reviewed it and it involved a pair of musicians trying to get a gig at Toronto's Rivoli nightclub.
I am very familiar with this club because for almost 20 years the missus and I would attend the North by Northeast (NXNE) music festival and the Rivoli was on a strip on Queen St. along with The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern, The 360 Club, The Black Bull, and Cameron House which allowed for us to park once and then hit multiple clubs per cycle, walking in, seeing if we dig what's on stage, then hitting the next one if it didn't grab us. In 2016, organizers completely scrapped the format and we haven't been back since 2015. It appears they're going back to the old tons of bands in lots of clubs format, but Canuckia is a totalitarian hellscape how under occupation. C'est la vie.
Anyhoo, Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol co-wrote and star as fictionalized versions of themselves who, 17 years after forming Nirvanna with hopes of playing the Rivoli, still haven't scored a gig there. Matt apparently is big on making elaborate plans and decides that they should do a publicity stunt where they parachute off the CN Tower into the adjacent SkyDome during a Toronto Blue Jays baseball game to promote the gig at the Rivoli they don't actually have.
They get on top of the CN Tower by buying tickets to the EdgeWalk, an actual experience where for $199 you get to walk outside 1,168 feet up attached to a harness. They cut themselves free of the safety line and jump, but due to an incoming lightning storm the SkyDome's roof was being closed and they don't make it inside.
Since this plan failed, Matt decides they should modify their RV to look like the DeLorean from Back to the Future and attempt to convince the Rivoli that they're time travelers so how about a gig. Fed up, Jay secretly calls a club in Ottawa to book a slot for an open mic night tomorrow. (The joke being it's 280 miles and a 4-1/2 hour drive between these cities and there surely have to be other open mics available in a city with a 3.3M population.)
The next morning, Jay hits the road unaware that Matt is sleeping in the back of the RV. When Matt wakes up, they argue while Jay drives and when the RV hits 88 kmh (heh) it suddenly travels back in time to 2008, though they don't immediately register what happened. (The way Matt discovers they're in the past by how a movie audience laughs at a now-forbidden word - no, it's not Blazing Saddles, but you're close - is clever.) Once they realize their predicament, they attempt to return to 2025, but Matt realizes that the time machine only worked because he spilled Orbitz - a novelty beverage that ceased production in 1999 - on the electronics. With the remaining contents lost when the bottle was broken, the only sure source would be their old apartment where they'll need to sneak in without encountering their younger selves.
Needless to say something goes wrong and when they return to the present the world has changed and Jay is now a major rock star and Matt is the drummer in a Jay McCarrol tribute band. Matt attempts to get to Jay to set things right, but Jay dismisses him until he finds himself wanted by the police and teams up with Matt to get the time machine working to undo the damage. With no Orbitz available, they copy the method used in Back to the Future in an absolutely impossible scheme to restore the timeline.
While time travel movies are generally logically suspect, they really play fast and loose with what happens and don't really try to make it make sense. Apparently the Jay we start with steps into the life of the alternative timeline Jay, but how does he know the Rock Star Jay's material without raising suspicions and what happens to that Jay when the fit hits the shan? Don't know.
The way Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie tells its story is via a pseudo-documentary shooting style where they filmed guerilla style on the streets of Toronto, interacting with people and even cops (who are doing a very bad job of protecting places), like Borat did, but referencing the guys running the cameras occasionally. They use old footage from their web series to create the interactions with their younger selves - no de-aging or old age makeup here, just a bunch of invisible VFX work all over the place elsewhere - and the way they stage things involving the CN Tower is pretty wild. (The way they utilized a real-life shooting at Drake's mansion to film scenes is another great behind-the-scenes detail.)
Because of my familiarity with Toronto's music clubs, the funniest detail is this obsession with the Rivoli when there are other far more famous venues like the El Mocambo, where Stevie Ray Vaughn and Elvis Costello cut live albums, or Lee's Palace, a setting for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World's bass battle between Michael Cera and Brandon Routh. Sneaky Dee's, The Silver Dollar, Bovine Sex Club, and the Horseshoe Tavern are all more prominent clubs, not that Rivoli is bad - it's just a smallish back room behind a restaurant and bar front - but unless you're from Toronto or a visitor or, I presume, a viewer of the web series, how would you appreciate this?
This isn't to say you might not find more laughs in this low key shaggy time travel pastiche. I was somewhat surprised how flat it left me; the missus liked it a lot FWIW. But I do credit it for being something different than the usual formula even though it plays a bit like Temu Lonely Island.
For the first 10 minutes or so of They Will Kill You I was wondering what the heck was going on? It opens with a woman, Asia (Zazie Beetz, Joker, Deadpool 2), her younger sister on a stormy night where their father is chasing them, culminating with her shooting him and running away as the cops arrive. Then it's 10 years later on another pouring night as Asia arrives at The Virgil, an exclusive co-op apartment building in NYC.
She's met by Lilith (Patricia Arquette, Roseanna's sister), the Irish superintendent of The Virgil, who wonders why Asia sounds different than she did on the phone when she interviewed her (Asia says she was getting over a cold), but brings her in, introducing her to a few of the residents while taking her to her room on the staff floor where the other maids live.
That night, Asia is attacked by hooded, masked figures who enter her room from the air vent and a hole in the wall behind the refrigerator. She surprises them with impressive fighting skills and weaponry like a large sword and sawed-off shotgun. After a brief, bloody battle where she beheads, dismembers, and generally messes the heck out of the assailants, she runs into the hall where she confronts Lilith, demanding to know the whereabouts of her sister, Maria (Myha'la, Industry), who had come to work at The Virgil as a maid.
This confrontation is interrupted by Asia's attackers emerging from her room, carrying their detached limbs and heads. As Asia watches in shock, they reattach them to their bodies and they're as good as new. Turns out The Virgil is a Satanic Temple and the residents and some of the staff are immortal due to their allegiance to Satan. (Membership has its privileges.)
The rest of the movie is a wild Grand Guignol exercise in cartoonish violence (e.g. watery blood sprays like a sprinkler - think: O-Ren Ishii beheading the guy in Kill Bill Pt. 1) as heads are blown off leaving the bodies crawling around and bumping into walls or a disembodied eyeball rolls along to spy on Asia. The action choreography is good and one sequence involving cultists being killed with a flaming axe, igniting their temporarily inert bodies, standing out.
But it wears thin quickly as the immortality of cult means killing is temporary until Asia finds a way to disable their power. The relationship with her estranged sister and where her allegiances lie is also handled sloppily with a bit of a cheat at the end. The roles played by Tom Felton (Harry Potter series) and Heather Graham (Boogie Nights) could've been played by anyone because they aren't characters but just more immortal cultists, albeit played by recognizable faces.
While there are some enjoyable bonkers moments (most of which are in the trailer below) the overall effect by director/co-writer Kirill Sokolov feels like he watched Evil Dead 2 and Old Boy while blasting Wu-Tang Clan on loop while taking ALL of the drugs. It's all surface with little depth and not really worth the time.
It's been 10-1/2 months since we've actually gone to the movies to see a movie (Ballerina) and considering I missed out on properly seeing Avatar: Fire & Ash in 3D at the show, it must be something special to get me out of the house. That would be Project Hail Mary, based on the novel of the same name by Andy Weir with a screenplay adapted by Drew Goddard, the tag team who filled the same roles for Ridley Scott's 2015 epic The Martian. (Somehow I never wrote a review when I saw it theatrically nor when I watched the Blu-Ray and Extended Cut 4K UHD Blu-ray, but it scored 8/10 Catch a matinee for the show, 8/10 Buy it for the Blu-ray, and 9/10 Buy it for 4K.) I even read the novel beforehand which for me is a rarity due to my crippling illiteracy.
So, having done the homework and being otherwise primed to have a great time, I ended up underwhelmed by this adaptation despite the Herculean work Ryan Gosling does with his performance as the only hope for mankind to save the world as long as he figures out what to do after remembering who his is in the first place.
The movie opens with Gosling's Dr. Ryland Grace waking up on a spaceship. He has long hair and beard and no memory of how he ended up there and why there are two dead bodies in the other beds. He frantically searches his confines to discover it's a spaceship and the star ahead isn't Earth's Sun.
He buries the others in space and begins to have flashback memories of his life beginning with his being a middle school science teacher who is recruited by Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall) to analyze a sample of astrophage, a single-cell organism that appears to be eating our Sun's energy then migrating to Venus. If the nature of the astrophage can't be understood and a means to counteract it isn't found within 30 years the Earth's climate will cool to the point where half the world's population would starve and the rest would live in a permanent state of war as nations fight over the remaining food. No big deal!
Grace figures out how the astrophage works and is immediately drafted into Project Hail Mary (roll credits!) where he is informed that the astrophage seems to be consuming many stars in our neighborhood of the galaxy except one, Tau Ceti, almost 12 light years away. The plan is for a ship powered by engines that leverage the properties of the astrophage to travel there, try and figure out what's made that star immune, then send probes back to Earth with their findings. Since they'll only have time to make enough fuel to get the ship and crew there, it will be a one-way ticket, a suicide mission. Grace's job is to prep the science and train the crew. So why is he there?
These questions are interrupted by the arrival of Blip A (as the Hail Mary's computer labels the radar ping), a huge alien ship that an understandably panicked Grace tries to flee from, finally giving up and coming to a halt. With the Hail Mary stationary, radar detects Blip B, an object "tossed" from Blip A. He goes out and catches it and thus begins communication via models with the alien ship culminating in a tunnel being constructed by Blip A to connect the two ships.
This is when Grace makes first contact with intelligent alien life in the form of a five-legged creature that appears to be made of rock with no visible eyes or face, looking like a literal stone crab. He names this alien Rocky (because, you know...) and they begin to figure out how to communicate. Rocky "speaks" in cooing musical tones, so Grace cobbles together a translator program on a laptop, eventually giving it a voice (James Ortiz, who was also the lead puppeteer of Rocky) allowing for this odd couple of sole survivors - Rocky's crewmates died of radiation exposure due to their race, the Eridians, not even knowing about radiation while being able to build interstellar starships - to join forces to try and save their respective worlds.
The rest of the movie briskly races through their efforts to figure out how the astrophage can be stopped leading to them sciencing the sh*t out of the problem and encountering some hairy situations trying to gather samples and coping with fuel leaks that threaten to end their trips. It's a foregone conclusion that they'll figure something out because no one makes a movie which ends with failure and everyone dyin - yeah, yeah, Knowing, Don't Look Up, and Bugonia notwithstanding - so whether the movie succeeds or not is in the execution. Sadly, this is where the problems are found.
What Goddard brilliantly did in adapting The Martian (which I, miracle of miracles, also read) was to condense the novel's often excessive passages of sciencing the sh*t out of problems down understandable concepts explained by Mark Watney (Matt Damon, The Martian) via video logs which he presumes will be gathered by whomever picks up his body. The problem here is that either he overly simplified or directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller edited out so much of so many important details that the first thing I asked the missus in the car after the show was whether she was able to understand what was happening?
Thanks to having read the book, I understood what the passing references represented, but in practice many critical details are so quickly glided over I really wonder if non-bookies understood what was happening. For a movie that runs 2-1/2 hours and uses the vlog format more for comedic effect than a stealth exposition mechanism, this is a disappointing omission that leaves the non-booked viewers outside the drama. While overexplaining like the audience is stupid isn't good, fast-balling very important details past people just once is worse.
Another huge difference from The Martian is the very narrow point-of-view as we spend 85% of the time with Grace and Rocky and when we do flashback to Earth they oddly choose to do almost nothing to characterize the, um, characters. His deceased comrades (Ken Leung, Lost, and Milana Vayntrub, Amy from the AT&T commercials) get a few lines so their deaths mean nothing. The closest we get to a humanizing moment is when Stratt sings a Harry Styles song at karaoke to show Grace she's not just a humorless East German taskmaster. Compare that to The Martian where we bounced from Watney on Mars to his fellow crewmates dealing with what happened to the folks at NASA on Earth trying to figure out how to rescue him. Everyone got fairly fleshed out, even Donald Glover's weird autistic astrophysicist who comes up with the way to save Watney. Somehow, Goddard, Lord, and Miller made all the wrong cuts with an already thin cast.
It's a testament to Gosling's talents (which sometimes don't seem that apparent) that the fact we feel anything and how to relate to a rock monster is due to him carrying this movie on his back. Matt Damon was good in his role, but he wasn't the central load-bearing pillar the whole show rested upon. Gosling's performance deftly sets up the humdinger of a reveal of how he ended up on the mission; a detail that the missue was NOT at all happy about along with the final scenes even though they are what happened in the novel and were quite a shock in print as well.
The success of Project Hail Mary (currently grossing over $600M globally) is being pointed to by some as a rebuke to failed Lucasfilm vandal Kathleen Kennedy who fired the pair from Solo, bringing in Ron Howard to reshoot most of the movie, costing so much it was the only money-losing Star Wars movie (until perhaps The Mandalorian & Grogu coming soon). But I'm not totally sold on their direction because it feels like they cut a lot of plot meat in favor of less pertinent material. I saw a video of them showing what all the various premium large format (e.g. IMAX, 4DX, etc.) presentations would provide for epic viewing, but I saw it in regular plain old movie style and there is very little material that would benefit from a giant extended image.
I'd be interested in seeing a rumored extended cut of Project Hail Mary to see if they balance the plot better - the extended cut of The Martian was pretty good; more of good things - but I have to say that I went into the theater expecting to eventually buy this in 4K and now I'm not sure if I will. While not bad, it feels like it should've been and could've been so much better. To say it like Rocky would, "Disappoint. Disappoint. Disappoint."
Every so often you catch a movie that no one has heard of and has few expectations going for it but it somehow turns out to be a bonkers delight that's probably doomed for less-than-cult-classic status. Back in 2023 it was Bottoms the badly-titled, worse-promoted "queer teen Fight Club" movie which most people who may've liked it probably avoided because it was pitched as "not for straights" when the correct target market was "for people who like absurd humor and laughing."
Now we have Pizza Movie, a horrendously-titled streaming-only comedy (Hulu & Mouse+) whose miniscule synopsis fails to capture just how wild & crazy a comedic freakshow it actually is. It's a movie I wish I could force people to watch so they can see that as hard as the killjoys try, there's still comedy that's funny to be found.
It stars Gaten Matarazzo (Stranger Things) as Jack and Sean Giambrone (The Goldbergs) as Montgomery, two friends and college roommates who are suffering the typical travails of movie freshmen. Monty has the hots for cute girl Ashley (Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Andi Mack), so he races to clean out all the change machines at the laundromat on the day she goes, but being an awkward dork completely strikes out. Jack is constantly being attacked by students for "what he did to the football team." (It eventually gets explained and almost justifies the abuse.)
They're also harassed by upperclassmen led by Logan (Marcus Scribner, Black-ish), whose posse includes Lizzy (Lulu Wilson, Ouija: Origin of Evil), a former friend of theirs who avoids them now while trying to fit in with the cool kids even though Logan is just financially using her. After Logan & Co. break the bottle of booze they'd planned to drink that night, an alternate mind-altering option literally falls from above when an Altoids-like tin labeled "M.I.N.T.S." falls from the drop ceiling where it was secreted a decade before.
After the side effects of taking mystery pills begin manifesting, they Google for information and find the only result is a YouTube video where Frankie (Sarah Sherman, SNL) explains the six phases of effects culminating in something seriously not good. However, the side effects can be halted by eating pizza. Simple enough, right? Just order a pizza, eat it, and you don't have to amuse the baby, the first of the side effects which are so bonkers that I'm not going to spoil them. What could go wrong?
Well, everything. For starters, the pizza is delivered by a Snackatron 3000 robot (voiced by SNL's Bobby Moynihan), and because the dorm's elevator is out of service, it can't come up to their floor. Going down isn't an option either because the paramilitary RAs, led by Blake (Jack Martin, La Brea), are searching the rooms for contraband and control the stairways. Insane hijinks ensue.
Because so much of the fun comes from the absolutely bonkers situations the drugs effects cause, I can't really break down what makes Pizza Movie such a treat. If you like super offbeat random premise generator comedy movies like Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (not reviewed, but 7/10) then you should enjoy what the BriTANicK duo of Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher have written and directed.
Billy Idol was announced as an inductee to the grievously-misnamed Rock & Roll Hall of Fame along with fellow rockers Sade and Wu-Tang Clan, so it was a fine time to watch prolific music video director Jonas Åkerlund's recently-released documentary Billy Idol Should Be Dead.
Covering his life and career from childhood to founding Generation X in the wake of the Sex Pistols to going solo to having years of massive drug abuse issues, it combines archival footage, impressionistic animated sequences and interviews filmed in in the harshest, least flattering black & white ever to make everyone appear as old and haggard for some reason. While the film came out in 2026, it includes interviews with Billy's mother, Joan, who passed in 2020.
As an old Gen X and solo fan who once made a Billy Idol logo t-shirt in printing class, most of the early career material was fairly familiar to me and generally superficial. What I wasn't aware of was how deep his drug abuse was and his attempted forays into acting including a major project that collapsed when his manager, Bill Aucoin (who also managed KISS), who'd started smoking crack pulled it away from up and coming at the time producer Joel Silver and that he filmed a screentest to play the T-1000 in Terminator 2, only losing the part due to the lingering effects of his nearly fatal motorcycle crash (whose gnarly scars are shown) preventing him from running as would be needed.
Very little time is spent discussing his music, the 40+ year collaboration with guitarist Steve Stevens or the handful of albums he's put out since the misfire of 1993's Cyberpunk album which may've been ahead of its time. Åkerlund also weirdly edits the beginning starting with a 1984 heroin overdose, then going back to the beginning, then leaping forward to the OD, then going back to the timeline. Foreshadowing is one thing, but why the second preview? There's more time spent on his tempestuous relationship with baby mama Perri Lister and the two kids he fathered with groupies than his music process.
I saw Idol last year in concert and he still had it at 69 years old, delivering an even better show than he did in 2019, in the Before Times. It should be a good Rock Hall performance. While Billy Idol Should Be Dead, it's an adequate primer for those unfamiliar with the Prince of Punk (I made that title up now) or older fans needing a refresher as well as some drama.
Score: 6/10. Catch in on cable/streaming. (Viewed on Hulu.)
Due to the way Prime Video lays out their virtual shelves, it's easy to miss what's available like the Amazon Original Pretty Lethal (not to be confused with 2015's Barely Lethal which I didn't review, but logged as a 3/10 Skip It), a slight-but-adequate action comedy about ballerinas in peril.
The girls in question are a LA-based troupe of stereotypes led by Bones (Maddie Ziegler, Dance Moms), a tough girl who clashes with spoiled princess, Princess (Lana Condor, To All The Boys I've Loved Before). Rounding out the group is Grace (Avantika, Mean Girls - the 2024 musical), Zoe (nepo baby Iris Apatow) and her deaf sister Chloe (Millicent Simmonds, A Quiet Place). How does a deaf girl know when to dance to the music? Shut up, bigot!
The group and their teacher, Thorna (Lydia Leonard, The Crown), travel to Budapest, Hungary, but on the way to the competition their bus breaks down. Fearing missing their date, they set off on foot, getting caught in the rain, but arriving at a castle-like structure, the Teremok Inn, where they take shelter in hopes of getting a cab. Once inside they discover it's a bar and gathering place for local mobsters (think: Temu Continental) run by Devora Kasimer (Uma Thurman, Kill Bill), a former ballerina herself. She suggests the girls change out of their wet clothes into their tutus because sure, why not?
Thorna witnesses Devora torturing someone and tries to gather the girls to get out of there, but is accosted by Pasha Marcovic (Tamás Szabó Sipos, no idea) who makes drunken advances. She knees him in the junk and walks away, but he responds to the rejection by shooting her in the head. (Ron Burgundy, "Boy, that escalated quickly." GIF goes here). Princess threatens to call the cops, but Devora has the quartet locked in the basement and destroys their phones and passports. If you're noticing I used the word for four people, that's because Chloe has met and started making out with Devora's youngest son, Artyom (Krisztián Csákvári, also no idea), because deaf girls, amirite?
Facing death, the dancers have to get over their interpersonal issues and commit to Sparkle Motion, and using makeshift weapons like razors in their toe shoes and scissors, begin their fight to escape captivity.
It's a hoary trope about girls/women fighting men twice their size, but the "ballet fu" fight choreography by action choreographers 87North (The Fall Guy, Bullet Train) accounts for this by having the girls mob their foes and using speed and agility to take them down. That 3/5ths of the girls have dance backgrounds also helps sell the premise. When the guys do get hold of the girls, nature exerts itself painfully.
Thurman has fun camping it up with an imaginary Eastern European accent and Ziegler and Condor are fine in their narrowly crafted roles.
While nothing special, Pretty Lethal is an adequately entertaining action snack which does well enough with its "Ballerina but with ballerinas who aren't assassins" premise. Just switch off your critical thinking portion of your brain first.
The little-known formative years of the members of punk-funk-rap-rockers Red Hot Chili Peppers are given the documentary treatment in the Netflix doc The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel, with Hillel being the founding guitarist, Hillel Slovak, who played on the band's first three albums - The Red Hot Chili Peppers (1984), Freaky Styley (1985), and The Uplift Mofo Party Plan (1987) - before succumbing to a heroin overdose in June 1988, just two months after his 26th birthday.
Covering how the band came together with the meeting of bassist Flea (an immigrant from Australia), Slovak (from Israel), and drummer Jack Irons at LA's Fairfax High School where Irons and Slovak played in a band named Anthym led by Chile-born Alain Johannes (who's had a long, diverse career), adding Flea when Slovak taught him bass because they weren't happy with their existing bassist. Vocalist Anthony Kiedis was a fan whom Slovak met after a show and invited to hang out and they all became fast friends, hanging out, taking drugs, being young and dumb.
What was new to me, a casual RHCP fan, was that the Peppers were considered a side project to Irons and Slovak as Anthym, renamed to What Is This (somehow an even worse name than Anthym), had a record deal. Flea came and went a couple of times to play with LA punks Fear and Kiedis's involvement was more of a joke than a serious thing at first.
As the band got more notoriety they eventually got signed and Irons and Slovak played on the debut album, but were also sticking with What Is This until RHCP got big enough to dominate their attention. As the years passed, the drug use of Kiedis and Slovak crossed beyond heavy recreational to debilitating junkie levels culminating in producer Michael Bienhorn firing Kiedis during the Uplift Mofo sessions because he finally showed up with no lyrics written. Kiedis went through detox, got clear, and became productive, but of course when it came time to celebrate completing the album, he and Slovak got wasted.
With interviews with all surviving members, Slovak's brother and girlfriend, and other contemporaries along with lots of archive footage, The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel is an interesting overview of the band's origins and struggles with success and substances.
While the members are candid about their drug habits and how they contributed to the environment that claimed their brother, the doc completely omits the irony that Slovak's replacement, John Frusciante, who speaks about how he devoted himself to transforming his playing style to mirror Slovak's, also picked up his crippling heroin addiction habit which led him to quit the band after their Blood Sugar Sex Magik album made them too popular for his taste. (He would come and go several times since.)
The first album with Frusciante, Mother's Milk, which also marked the debut of drummer Chad Smith (from Detroit and who taught at the music store I took guitar lessons from a member of Sponge at) is completely Memory Holed with no mention of Smith even though Irons left the band upon Slovak's death. Weird.
On the A/V front, I didn't notice anything particularly special about the Dolby Vision and Atmos presentation. Netflix has announced they're jacking up the Premium Tier rate to a whopping $27 and that's my tapout point. I'm cutting back to the Standard Tier with only HD streaming for a still too much $20. Jerks.
If I had to pick a favorite Beatle it'd be Paul McCartney because he was the most pop sensible member of the Fab Four. While not a Beatlemaniac by any means, I was interested in Morgan Neville's (last seen doing the Lego Pharrell doc, Piece By Piece) Amazon Prime documentary Paul McCartney: Man on the Run which covers the decade between Paul's leaving of The Beatles, releasing his first solo albums then assembling Wings. A bigger fan friend of mine was raving about it, so I stepped up to check it out. Sadly, it wasn't particularly engaging.
Comprised of oodles of home movies, rehearsal videos, live footage, etc. supplemented by voiceover only remarks by Macca and others like members of Wings, musical contemporaries like Chrissie Hynde and Elton John, extended family like Sean Ono Lennon, etc. it marches through Paul's post-Beatles career as he tried to figure out who he was without the others. With many fits, starts, missteps, and misadventures, it took him longer to get his band on the run (heh, me clever) than I'd thought, but it never really digs into things because it's covering so much.
The fact I was listening more than watching as I played solitaire on my iPad says it all. While you can say, "You didn't like it because you weren't paying attention," the fact that I felt I could split my attention was strictly due to Neville's presentation not grabbing me. I'm not the Netflix viewer whom they feel the need to dumb down writing so that people on their phones can still follow the plot. I focus on the movies exclusively and if something comes up on my phone needed immediate attention, I pause playback. That Man on the Run lost exclusivity is on it, not me. Frankly, the fact I finished the movie was only because I was doing something else.
Your mileage may vary, but Man on the Run never took wing for me. (Again heh.)
Score: 5/10. Catch it on Prime Video if you're a fan, otherwise Skip It.
There aren't as many Hulu Original movies as Netflix churns out - the last one I reviewed was the disappointing Samara Weaving caper flick Eenie Meanie - so it's noteworthy when one comes along and this week's arrival is the odd scifi-crime-dramedy Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice which sounds like a confusing bisexual swingers movie.
Vince Vaughn stars as Nick, a mobster attending the party celebrating the release of the son of boss Sosa (Keith David), Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro), after six years in prison. Sosa announces to the attendees that he has learned who the snitch that sent Jimmy Boy to prison is and that retribution is coming. A woman, Alice (Eiza González), has a chilly conversation with Nick and leaves the party.
Waiting at a swanky hotel room for her is Quick Draw Mike (James Marsden), a trigger man for Sosa's mob who has had enough of the murdering life and plans on leaving the organization. Nick calls Mike to do a job for him and while Mike tries to dodge the gig, ends up riding with Nick to a house where he's given chloroform and the order to knock on the door and use the chloroform to knock out the man who answers the door. Mike does so and to his surprise, the man of the house is Nick! Whaaaaaaaa????
After a massive brawl due to expired chloroform, this second Nick escapes in the first Nick's car. Nick and Mike eventually catch up to Nick at a gas station and capture him. They then call Alice to warn her to get out of the hotel room because a cannibal hitman called The Barron (a blink and miss it stunt casting choice I shant spoil) is coming looking for Mike.
We finally find out what the heck is going on: The Nick who takes Mike to the house is from six months in the future and the Nick at the party and the house is Present Nick who has framed Mike for being the rat who sent Jimmy Boy up the river as payback for his sleeping with Alice. Future Nick had stumbled over the time machine when trying to collect on the load Sosa made to finance its construction and when he came back in time to the current day, he accidentally killed its builder, Symon (Ben Schwartz), and destroyed the machine.
Since we're working on Looper time travel rules (where anything that happens to Present Nick will impact Future Nick as tested by Alice stabbing Present Nick) and the machine and creator are destroyed, there is only one chance at getting this right. Future Nick is remorseful for setting up Mike, but knows Present Nick will still try to kill him and the fact no one knows what The Barron looks like complicates matters.
As confusing as I'm sure the last to paragraphs probably sound, it's not as complicated to follow as I make it sound because some plot spoilers I'm omitting are included and it makes sense. The stakes are clear and the scenarios suitably ridiculous leading to some quality action scenes.
Where writer-director BenDavid Grabinski (who created & co-wrote the Netflix Scott Pilgrim Takes Off anime series which brought back the entire Scott Pilgrim vs. the World movie cast for a somewhat divisive story) bobbles the ball is in having the best parts being extraneous conversations about non-plot things. Present Nick gets into a heated debate with a gas station clerk over sugar-free candies; there's a running gag about Jimmy Boy having impotence issues; Sosa explains to Jimmy why he's not black; and everyone seems to be a Gilmore Girls fan with almost as much time spent discussing that as Bullet Train wasted nattering on about Thomas the Tank Engine. And the weird choices in musical needle drops becomes it's own thing from the very beginning as we have to watch Symon sing along with a song from the 1988 animated dog movie Oliver & Company.
While the script wanders at times, Vaughn is surprisingly rooted in the dual role, frankly doing a better job of playing the same man at two points in his life than Michael B. Jordan did playing twins in Sinners, earning a Best Actor Oscar. While he does his trademarked Vince Vaughn schtick, he also portrays how the night's events change and changed Nick to drive Future Nick's actions.
Despite the messy script, there's enough entertainment in Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice to merit the watch. While allegedly in 4K HDR, the nighttime setting and generally dim lighting moots the benefits of the format. It seems that only Apple TV bothers to exploit the range of HDR, so don't feel bad if you don't have an awesome TV watching this.
In the past two decades, Michigan's own Sam Raimi, who started with low budget cult classics like Evil Dead 2, Army of Darkness, and Darkman has made a trio of bloated muddled sequels - the franchise-killing Spider-Man 3, the Temu Tim Burtonesque Oz the Great & Powerful, and the messy Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness - far removed from his scrappy roots. However, his latest, Send Help, is thematically and spiritually akin to his 2009's horror effort Drag Me To Hell and the move downscale suits him.
Rachel McAdams stars as Linda Liddle, an awkward, dorky corporate strategist who is reminiscent of Brendan Fraser's Elliot in Bedazzled - a sad tryhard who has no friends and annoys her co-workers. But she's a brilliant worker and was going to be promoted to a vice president slot at her firm except the CEO and founder of the firm has died, his clueless frat boy son, Bradley (Dylan O'Brien), has assumed control of the firm and given the job to one of his frat brothers.
After Linda storms his office protesting the snub, Bradley explains that her off-putting manner and appearance is why he passed her over, but offers her a chance to prove herself by coming along on the corporate plane to Bangkok to help finalize a merger. During the flight, the jerk who got her veep gig shows an audition video she'd submitted to Survivor to be a contestant. We'd seen survivalist books in her apartment, but the video is pretty cringey stuff. The laughter of the boys club is cut off by the plane crashing in a storm after half of them are sucked out of a breach in the cabin.
Linda washes ashore onto an island along with Bradley, who is unconscious with a badly injured leg. Good thing she knows survival skills as she rapidly builds shelter, and sets about gathering food and fresh water from rainfall and waterfalls. She even hunts a boar in a hilariously bloody scene. (This IS a Sam Raimi movie, after all. Evil Dead 2 fans will dig it.)
Not appreciating her efforts is Bradley who is belittling of Liddle (heh), mocking her survival skills which have kept him alive. So she leaves him alone for a couple of days until he's very hungry and thirsty to the point he's apologizing. But is he becoming a better, less sexist pig, or is he just trying to stay alive? And how does Linda's sudden alpha dog status spark changes in her, especially when early on she spots a possible rescue boat but instead hides because it's "too soon" to head back?
Since there's really only about one-and-a-half possible outcomes to this scenario (she lives or they both survive), Send Help rests on the performances and execution of the premise. O'Brien has the short-end of the stick in that the script by Damian Shannon & Mark Swift (Freddy vs. Jason, Baywatch) paints him as barely a two-dimensional cartoon out of a 1980s women-struggling-in-the-workplace comedy like 9 to 5 or Working Girl. It's just hard to imagine such an unreformed male chauvinist pig could exist in 2025 with today's woke pressures on corporations.
On the other hand, McAdams really elevates the material by delivering a layered performance which starts off also cartoonishly broad but the deepens showing her rising to her survival challenges then having to wrestle with the boss problem. It's a long way from Mean Girls and The Notebook.
Raimi is in fine form as well, tossing in some nice throwback Grand Guignol gore and some camera moves longtime fans will enjoy. More cheap thrillers from you, sir.
If you like your dramedy lean and especially mean, Send Help is a curdled Castaway.
It's weird to realize that fans of the original 1996 Scream could be grandparents with grandchildren almost old enough to watch these movies. While the series peaked with its subversive meta original outing with it's shocking twist opening scene and characters who knew the rules of horror movies, the sequels, while not as good - I scored the first four movies 7/10, 5/10, 6/10, and 7/10 (theatrical in 2011) or 6/10 (Blu-ray in 2021) - they were adequate entertainments.
Even the fifth-in-series 2022 "requel" (reboot+sequel) - confusingly titled Scream while it's follow-up was Scream VI (because we're doing Roman numerals now) - were both 6/10s, the strain of trying to connect the new stories to the old ones was beginning to get ridiculous as it straddled the generations.
Series Final Girl Neve Campbell sat out the requels, but after the main stars of them - Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera - left the planned 7th film for reasons like supporting Jewish genocide (Barrera) and deciding not to work with Jewish genocide fans when they had a hit TV series (Ortega) and then the director slated to replace the requels directors also bolted, producers must've backed the money truck up to Campbell's home because she was back for Scream 7. (Oh, were doing Arabic numbers again.)
Adding to the mix was the return of Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter of Scream 1, 2 & 4, not only co-writing but directing for the first time since 1999's critical and box office flop Teaching Mrs. Tingle. Sadly, he delivers the worst installment of the franchise he originated, but perversely it was the highest-grossing installment, raking in $194M, over four times its budget, and ensuring that Scream 8 is inevitable. Yay.
This time around the cold open scene is a young couple visiting the home of Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) which was the setting for the original film's finale and memorialized in the in-universe Stab film series. It's been turned into an Airbnb with taped outlines and fake blood to recreate the scenes from the movie. The superfan man says there's a rumor Stu survived having a TV dropped on his head. (Foreshadowing!) Of course, another Ghostface is there, killing them (spoiler alert!) and setting the house ablaze.
We then catch up to Sidney Prescott-Evans (Campbell), who is living in Pine Grove, IN, married to the town police chief, Mark (Joel McHale with a weird voice that makes him almost unrecognizable), and the mother of Rebellious Teenage Daughter Tatum (Isabel May) and two(?) younger children who are conveniently visiting Grandma unseen. Sidney runs a coffee shop and life is wonderful until she receives a Facetime call from Stu Macher, face scarred but still alive. He claims he's outside Tatum's school auditorium and going to kill her, but by the time Sidney and the cops arrive, Ghostface has killed two of Tatum's friends including bestie Hannah (Mckenna Grace).
At home, Mark's officers sweep the house but conveniently overlook the attic providing the perfect hiding place for Ghostface who emerges, takes Tatum hostage, stuff happens, he runs out of the house and is promptly run over by Sidney's frenemy Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) and her assistants, twin siblings Chad (Mason Gooding) and Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown), holdovers from the past two movies. Ghostface is unmasked and identified as a patient from a nearby mental asylum. They team up to find out if Stu is actually still alive. People die. People look like they've been killed, but somehow survive. And another murderer(s) with ridiculously strained connections to Sidney are revealed.
The Scream series has always been verging on self-parody almost immediately with the sequels, but have served as adequate movies for slasher fans despite, but Scream 7 is the first one to pretty much bore me from end to end. The tropes of setting up red herrings and having "Wait, who? What?" villain reveals are so formulaic that it's pointless to even bother trying to guess. May as well just stare at the blankness and wait for it to be over.
That Williamson would type up such a lackluster story for the series he created is baffling. It feels like novice attempting a Scream knock-off. When the scariest thing in the movie is Cox's heavily-Botoxed and fillered face (Campbell is aging naturally), you're failing at horroring. That such a lackluster entry became the most successful really speaks ill of the moviegoing public.
People complain that movies are just sequels, remakes/reboots, and formulaic twaddle, but all too often when something truly unique makes it to theaters, they stay home, it fails, then they complain that Hollyweird only churns out endless rehashes of what makes money. (Gee, ya think?) The latest victim of audience abandonment is Gore Verbinski's (director of the Pirates of the Carribean trilogy) Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die which didn't even gross half its miniscule $20M budget.
Sam Rockwell stars as a nameless man from the future (let's call him Sam) or so he says when he walks into a Los Angeles Norms diner (think Denny's, non-LA readers) looking like a bearded homeless lunatic in a transparent raincoat over a bunch of mechanisms which may be a bomb. He claims he has traveled back in time 117 times trying to prevent the end of the world from a technological threat, only to fail the previous 116 attempts. He is trying to assemble the correct mix of diner customers for his mission and seems to know details about how useful (or mostly not) the diners are to the team.
Threatening to blow up the restaurant when when the cops arrive (as they always do), he gathers a group including Susan (Juno Temple), a grieving mother who seems to have more useful knowledge from an unlikely source; school teachers Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz) who are frustrated by their students addiction to their phones and were attacked by them; a young woman, Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), who is allergic to technology and gets nosebleeds from it; and a trio of people who I don't recognize, don't get flashbacks, and thus don't have plot armor. (Spoiler alert!)
As they set off on the quest, Sam explains that they need to get to a house where a nine-year-old prodigy is about to finish an AI that will make Skynet seem like a Speak & Spell unless they get to his computer and insert a flash drive Sam has to install safety protocols to limit the AI's power.
Along the way we get flashbacks for the familiar actors' characters backstories and eventually get Sam's story of how his mother had tried to protect him from the AI Apocalypse but his youthful curiosity had tragic results. The party also has to avoid phone zombies, weird mercenaries hunting them, and deal with a monster that I won't describe lest it spoil the bonkers moment it arrives.
The screenplay by Matthew Robinson (Love and Monsters) has a lot of interesting ideas about our addiction to technology to the detriment of humanity. It's a world where kids doomscroll so quickly through social media slop that they're not even watching what is already abbreviated content. They're just tapping for the next dopamine hit after a second. It's a world where teachers are so blasé about school shootings that it's a nuisance more than a danger. And the way the aftermath of shootings is dealt with isn't far removed from actual proposals to keep deceased people active on social media. (Don't worry, the movie doesn't soapbox on the subject demanding mass disarmament.)
The ending is a tad anti-climatic as the revelation of what's behind all this and the results of the party's quest aren't as satisfying as it could've been, but that's also somewhat the point: Not everything should be perfectly tailored to satisfy your every desire.
Rockwell's performance is solid, balancing the notes he's got to hit, and Richardson reminded me of the snarky tart 1990s Janeane Garofalo before her daddy issues drove her mad and she just wanted to scream about Republicans. Peña and Beetz are hampered by thinner roles and when did Temple become old enough for mom roles?
While Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die doesn't quite stick its landing it definitely provides a wild ride with some deep thoughts to go with the crazy, prompting more contemplation about our overly-wired and increasingly AI slopified world. It's ironic that a movie intended to warn against becoming hermits connected jacked into the Matrix failed because people prefer to stay home to consume content and it's on their TVs and phones they may finally see this.
