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a while and a dozen intervening movies, I couldn't remember enough specifics to properly review them, so they remained unpublished.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. ;-)
Considering Hollyweird is (usually) all about making money and horror films are the most consistently profitable genre because they are typically inexpensive to make due to no big stars, low budgets, and decent box office, it's odd to realize that it's been 14 years since the last Final Destination movie - Final Destination 5 - which ended the run of five movies between 2000 and 2011 which featured an unstoppable "villain" in the form of Death itself and sometimes absolutely bonkers Rube Goldberg machine death scenes. (No one who's seen Final Destination 2 will ever drive behind a log hauler.) Well, Death is back from holiday with Final Destination Bloodlines, which takes the familiar dog and teaches it a few new tricks.
It opens with the traditional elaborate disaster premonition scene set in 1968 at the opening of the Sky View restaurant atop a tower which is meant to evoke Seattle's Space Needle. We meet young Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger, Stargirl), who has been brought there by her boyfriend as a surprise and also to propose. No thanks to a bratty kid tossing the unluckiest penny ever off the open air observation deck, a wild chain reaction of events leads to the explosion and collapse of the tower, killing everyone including Iris.
Usually in the series, the person who foresees disaster then intervenes to halt things, but here we jump to Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) as she wakes up screaming in her college math class. Unable to sleep for the past two months as she's constantly tormented by the visions of the Sky View disaster, her grades have suffered to the point she's on academic probation, at risk of losing her scholarship. She believes the visions are related to her grandmother, so goes home to ask her father, Marty (Tinpo Lee), about grandma.
It's a sore point for him because his wife, Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), Stefani and her brother Charlie's (Teo Briones) mother, had left the family when Stefani was 10 because of how Iris had raised her and Stefani's uncle Howard (Alex Zahara) and he forbids her to seek Grandma out. So she tries Uncle Howard who always waves her off because of how his mother had seemingly gone nuts over this premonition. However her aunt tips her as to where she could locate Iris.
Stefani goes to her place in the woods and finds it's a walled fortress that makes Laurie Strode's place in Halloween (2018, unreviewed, 5/10 - catch on cable/streaming) look like a city park. Old Iris (Gabrielle Rose), has been cheating Death by staying locked in there, never stepping outside, for years. She explains her premonition and we then see the usual prevention of disaster, but explains that Death will not be denied and not only has it been killing all the people who should've died that night, but also their descendants who never would've been born.
She's compiled a book full of scrawled notes and clippings documenting the past six decades of carnage, but Stefani refuses to believe the crazy until Iris, who now has terminal cancer, demonstrates by stepping out of her cabin and is promptly killed in spectacularly gory fashion. NOW Stefani believes! But when she tries to explain the theory to her family - that Death has been systematically reaping the survivors and descendants in order of when they died in the premonition then by order of birth, and that Uncle Howard and his four kids would be next followed by Darlene, Stefani and Charlie (spouses are exempt) - they think she's caught a case of the crazies until Howard is killed in a bizarre gardening accident.
When Darlene rolls into town in her Winnebago, her home now, for her brother's funeral, Stefani is naturally chilly to bad mom, but allows her to join the kids' ersatz Scooby Gang as they try to use Iris's book of clues to find a way to beat Death which leads them to recurring franchise character William Bludworth (Tony Todd, in his last performance before passing in December 2024, less than a year after filming) who is also dying of cancer. He explains that the only way to stop Death is to either kill and take the remaining years of the victim or die and they get revived. Attempts to do the latter go about as well as you'd expect.
I've been a casual fan of the Final Destination series since the beginning, really appreciating the whole Death conceit as an invisible force orchestrating ridiculous accidents as opposed to a Freddie or Jason or Leatherface with metal claws/machete/chainsaw. (No one cosplays as "Death from Final Destination.") But by the third entry, I found the setups too obviously telegraphed, and I think I skipped the 4th installment (The Final Destination). But the fifth film with its epic North Bay Bridge collapse sequence and the closing whammy revealing it was a pseudo-prequel to the first was a winner.
Though I own the other movies on Blu-ray, we didn't rewatch them ahead of Bloodlines, so I'd forgotten about some of the rules (like the kill to steal time one), but it's not important for this soft relaunch of the series. Overall, it's an OK entry in the series with a good amount of "OOOOOH!!!!" kill moments which if we're being honest is why we watch these movies. The unfamiliarity wish most of the cast helps keep the tension up because no one has the plot armor of being the Big Star.
The writers are an eclectic mix with Jon Watts, director of the MCU Spider-Man films, contributing to the story and Guy Busick, who's co-written the Scream series reboots as well as the above-average Ready Or Not (7/10) and Abigail (7/10), but it's not as elevated as those movies. Directorial team Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein step into the Big Leagues here and do well staging the action. Some of the visual effects are a bit obvious, but they're mostly good.
Final Destination Bloodlines grossed $280M on a $50M budget, so it's highly likely a sequel will be forthcoming sooner than 2039. As long as they can keep the quality up - storywise as well as inventive kills - Death is welcome to do his thing.
The short, weird life of weird "anti-comic" comedian(?) Andy Kaufman is explored superficially in Thank You Very Much, which was the signature line of his Foreign Man character which he parlayed into the role of Latka Gravas on Taxi for five seasons between 1978 thru 1983, ending a year before his shocking death of lung cancer at age 35; shocking because he didn't smoke or drink, was a vegetarian, and practiced Transcendental Meditation.
With loads of archival footage, the documentary recaps his outlandish shtick where he always seemed to be "on" and constantly riding the line between amusing and bemusing as he'd read from The Great Gatsby for HOURS during his performances. His unsuccessful audition for Saturday Night Live is shown and while he didn't make the cast, he was invited to perform bits from his act throughout the show's first season including the debut show where he did the Mighty Mouse theme bit where he stands there playing the record, only moving to lipsynch along with the "Here I come to save the day!" chorus.
Interspersed with the footage are reminiscences from admirers like Steve Martin (a fellow anti-comedian who didn't tell jokes per se); contemporaries like SNL boss Lorne Michaels; Taxi cast mates Danny DeVito and Marilu Henner; his girlfriend and other friends including performance artist Laurie Anderson, who spoke of her times with Kaufman in a piece on her The Ugly One with the Jewels album; and most importantly, yet frustratingly, his best friend and writer, Bob Zmuda, who'd be an accomplice in some of his put-on bits.
The frustration comes from fact that Zmuda never goes into discussing how they came up with Kaufman's stunts. Want a theory about how his parents lying about his grandfather's death traumatized him so much that it warped his entire pysche? Thank You Very Much has you covered. Want to hear about how he developed the grotesque Vegas lounge lizard character Tony Clifton or how Zmuda would collaborate in confusing whether Kaufman was Clifton under all the prosthetic makeup by donning the Clifton guise so he and Andy would be seen together? Nope.
While his foray into being a wrestling heel, challenging women to fight him, culminating in pro wrestler Jerry Lawler slapping him out of his chair on Late Night with David Letterman, they don't reveal that the altercation was staged. With Kaufman dead over 40 years now....or is he?.....what's the point of keeping the secrets? I shouldn't know more about a documentary subject simply by virtue of being old enough to have lived through his brief heyday.
While Thank You Very Much is a tidy primer on Andy Kaufman's brief and idiosyncratic life which will clue in those too young to remember him or wish to use it as an addendum to the 1999 Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon or the 2017 Netflix documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond which covered how Jim Carrey drove everyone crazy being full metal Method in his channeling of Kaufman for Man on the Moon. But those seeking deep insight or tales of how and or why he did what he did will have to settle for Lucy Van Pelt-grade psychoanalysis of what may've been an unknowable man.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Hoopla.)
If you like your men behaving very badly and correctly believe Network is a documentary and American Psycho is a comedy, then the new HBO/Max Original film Mountainhead is here to reinforce your fears of gazillionaire tech bros and the generative AI deepfake world we're plummeting into.
Hugo "Souper" Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman, Rushmore) has invited his three besties - collectively known as the "Brewsters" for never-explained reasons - to his new 21,000 sq ft, 7-bedroom mountain mansion outside of Park City, UT called Mountainhead (roll credits!) for a no stress, no deals, brofest weekend. Coming are Venis "Ven" Paris (Cory Michael Smith, May December), the owner of a web company called Traam (think Hooli if you're a Silicon Valley fan) and the Richest Man in the World; Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef, Ramy), owner of AI company Bilter; and Randall Garrett (Steve Carell, Anchorman), a venture capitalist who helped the other startups in addition to running a company that sounds patterned after Peter Thiel's Palantir.
Hugo's nickname "Souper" is because at only a half-billion dollars net worth (approximately 1/460th of Ven's tally) coming from a meditation app makes him the "poorest" and thus closest to needing alms from a soup kitchen and the not-so-subtle hazing of the shortest member of the quartet begins as they diss Mountainhead with slights like, "Is that supposed to be like The Fountainhead? Who was your decorator, Ayn BLAND?" They snowmobile and hike to a mountain peak where they write their net worth on their chests, don hats symbolizing their rank - Ven (crown), Randall (captain's hat), Jeff (sailor hat), Hugo (soup ladle on a chain) - then shout their wishes into the void.
The casual intentions of weekend are interrupted by constant news alerts on their phones about the unrest sweeping the world as generative AI tools released by Traam are being used to create fake videos of atrocities which are then sparking very real and lethal reprisals as tribal groups seeking payback respond to the fake videos. As death tolls rise, Ven doesn't seem particularly bothered by the fallout, saying that it's just a rough patch and that good content will drown out the bad. (As Tony Stark said, "Not a great plan.")
However, a solution exists as Jeff's AI tools could be used to detect and expose the deepfake videos being used to propagandize and radicalize people to violence. Ven wants to buy Bilter to integrate its fact-checking AI tools so he doesn't have to roll back the new features (nor take responsibility for what it's wrought), but Jeff doesn't want his creation subsumed into Traam. Unknown to the others, Randall wants the merger to happen because he's been given a terminal cancer diagnosis and believes that Ven is on the cusp of launching a transhumanist epoch where he will be able to be uploaded and live forever in The Matrix, so to speak.
As the world's governments begin to falter, the three who aren't Jeff decide this would be a perfect time to overthrown the Old World Order and install themselves as the oligarchs of a global technocracy powered up their tech companies endless reach into governments, militaries, power grids, etc. Realizing that taking over the world at once may be too much, they decide to start small with Randall launches a rolling brownout in Belgium and Zoom conferences with Argentina to discuss being taken over by them beginning.
While this goes on Jeff is worried about his girlfriend Hester (Hadley Robinson, Little Women) who has gone on to Mexico for what he calls "a sex party" but she retorts isn't that but "a party where people have sex." While he's troubled by the chaos, he still won't sell to Ven and when Randall fears his life as the Lawnmower Man is at risk, he proposes to the others that they kill Jeff because he's messing up their plans. Because morality doesn't exist in this dojo, they all agree, but because being a megawealthy tech broligarch doesn't necessarily come with competent murder skills, it devolves into farce.
If this all feels ripped from the headlines it's because writer-director Jesse Armstrong (creator of Succession) only began writing the script in January 2025, filming for five weeks in March, and getting it finished and on HBO Max by May 31, 2025. However, it's to his great credit that he doesn't indulge in what 99% of Hollyweird would've done in their current rage state over the peasants voting incorrectly and make it into an obvious bash of Elon Musk and the Bad Orange Man.
While there are some similarities to real people if you know who's who in the techocratic elite space, Armstrong chooses to craft a more general tale of wealthy male fear (a la David Mamet's Glengarry Glenn Ross) and ego, the risks of unchecked AI, the self-anointed regard techno bros have over the rabble, while leavening it with farcical attempts at violence and how even when your best friends try to murder you, you can move past it if there's a buck to be made. His dialog doesn't stop to Basil Exposition anything for the non-nerds so you either keep up with the rapid-fire or get left behind. He trusts the audience to follow enough to understand the base emotions fueling the characters.
The performances are all strong from deft comic performers, especially Carell who's Randall could be seen as a brother to his role in The Big Short which was criminally denied an Oscar nomination. I'm not familiar with Youssef or Smith (though he was Chevy Chase in Saturday Night), but they're good as well. Schwartzman, of course, can play these weasels in his sleep.
Perhaps a more deliberately developed (read: not filmed shortly after writing) script could've honed Mountainhead's intentions to a finer, deeper-cutting edge though the rapidly evolving capabilities of generative AI may've left whatever more time in scripting in the dust. Just last month Google unveiled their new Gemini AI video tool powered by Veo3 and it's capable of producing video with audio, sound effects, camera movement, etc. like this:
Sure, it has some jankiness like the text on the signs at the rally being gibberish, BUT what happens in 2028 when a video showing "[Disfavored Politician] BUSTED Drowning Puppies While Shouting 'I LOVE NICKELBACK!'" pops up on teh Intartoobz a month before the Election and it's amplified by corrupt legacy media outlets who eagerly covered up the last President's senility & family corruption. How will we be able to trust what we're shown anymore and who is going to get even richer and more powerful while having fun running the corps which will generate and disseminate these fabrications? While Mountainhead doesn't have those answers, it is willing to posit the question, albeit in the guise of a bro comic farce.
I love the John Wick franchise. Love it. Even the lesser installments blow the doors off of pretty much everything else in the action genre. Sure, the mythology has grown a bit ridiculous at times, but the action continually breaks ground and I ding movies who still traffic in the pre-John Wick era shaky-cam and edit-fu shenanigans when the paradigm has shifted to long take clear coverage. I've been sloppy about getting them all reviewed despite all the times I've watched them, but here is the one other review I posted for John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum. Even the scores tend to have gone up on subsequent viewings with the series averaging 8/10. The fact I've bought all four movies on 4K UHD Blu-ray after getting two on digital 4K says a lot.
So it was with great anticipation I've waited for Ballerina - or as the posters have it, From the World of John Wick: Ballerina - because Ballerina on its own isn't a super memorable title. And waited. And waited some more. From when it was announced in April 2022, there's been enough time that a Netflix Original, a South Korean import also entitled Ballerina arrived in October 2023 to presumably steal some attention from people thinking it was the John Wick spinoff. (I never wrote the review, but it scored a 4/10, Skip it.) Then it was announced its 2024 release date was being pushed back a full year so that John Wick director Chad Stahelski could shoot some additional action scenes to kick it up a notch. (So long ago this began filming, Lance Reddick makes his final screen appearance as Charon, the concierge at the Continental, when he passed away in March 2023, just a week before John Wick 4 came out, making his on-screen death even more poignant.)
Some claim that most of the film was reshot over 2-3 months, which is denied by Stahelski and credited director Len Wiseman - making his first feature since 2012's Total Recall remake which looked terrific, but lacked Mars for some reason - who insist it was just a couple of weeks of additional work. Whatever the facts, it's here and has been blessed with the honor of getting the missus and I to actually go to a theater to see it; our first theatrical visit since Deadpool & Wolverine in August 2024. (Coincidentally, the previous time we went to a show was in April 2023 for John Wick: Chapter 4, one of only seven times I've gone to the movies since the world ended in March 2020.)
If you wondered what the deal was with the tattooed ballerinas glimpsed in John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum when John went to the Director (Angelica Huston) of the Ruska Roma to get passage out of New York City after becoming excommunicado, you're in luck because Ballerina overlaps with the events of that movie.
After an opening scene where a young Eve Macarro (Victoria Comte) witnesses her father (David Castañeda, The Umbrella Academy) murdered by men led by the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne, The Usual Suspects), the orphaned girl is taken by Winston Scott (Ian McShane), manager of the NYC Continental hotel for assassins, to meet the Director to see if she has a place to grow and train.
Of course she does and 12 years later she's Ana de Armas, doing an extended training montage of getting better at dancing and fighting like a girl to compensate for the natural size and strength advantages men have over 5'6" women. She graduates into becoming a Kikimora assassin/bodyguard after completing a protection assignment, barely. She then goes into the murder-for-hire business and after completing a gig, she is attacked by a member of the Cult which the Chancellor leads, indicated by an X brand on their wrist.
Eve demands the Director tell her where the Cult is hiding, but the Director refuses to permit her vendetta. So Eve goes rogue, traveling to Austria on the hunt for the Cult's location in the Austrian Alps town of Hallstatt. Along the way, she makes a pit stop at the Vienna Continental where she stumbles into a situation involving a Cult member, Daniel Pine (Norman Reedus, The Walking Dead), who is attempting to escape with his daughter, which echos Eve's situation with her own father.
As she closes in, the Chancellor contacts the Director to demand she leash her attack kitten or else it will be war between the Cult and Ruska Roma. Who do you send after a woman on a mission? Why the Baba Yaga himself, John Wick (Keanu Reeves, the Bill & Ted series)! Does he stop her? Does she stop him? Does the action ever stop? The answers to all three are various meanings of "Duh!"
While the production may or may not have been troubled, if you didn't know the inside baseball of it there's little to indicate problems. I have routinely praised Stahelski for doing with the John Wick series what his co-director on the first film, David Leitch, has struggled to manage, namely balancing the tone of his films, especially action comedies like Bullet Train (3.5/10, Skip it) and The Fall Guy (5/10, Catch on cable/streaming) and in the latter's review I run down his career, literally. But the credited director Wiseman is no slouch having helmed the first two hot kickass vampire chick flicks of the Underworld series, Live Free or Die Hard (the 4th one where John McClane becomes a superhero at times), and even the flawed Total Recall had clear and kinetic action sequences. Perhaps I could pick out which scenes each shot, but that's just flyspecking.
The bigger problem is the thinness of the script. I'm not demanding Shakespeare from my Unstoppable Killing Machine Revenge Flick or even a fraction of mythos of the Wick world - the first one's logline could've been, "Guy kills a retired assassin's puppy and the assassin murders everyone in return" - but whereas the Wick films deftly sketch the world in brilliant show-don't-tell detail (e.g. what is the deal with the call center with the tattooed Fifties-style women and primitive tech handling the contracts?!?), Ballerina relies on familiarity with the series to understand most of the references & callbacks to the world like the Chapter 3 moments or Chapter 2's "sommelier" weapons dealer scene.
"Young woman becomes assassin to avenge her father's murder" is succinct, but the script by Shay Hatten - who I see wrote it as a spec which Lionsgate bought in 2017 and led to his becoming a co-writer on Chapters 3 & 4 - doesn't really flesh it out with much of a character arc for Eve. (He also co-wrote Zak Snyder's recent tear of bad Netflix movies including Army of the Dead and the catastrophically terribad Rebel Moon movies, soooooooooo make of that what you will.)
Sadly lacking as well is de Armas. I've liked her since she first appeared on my radar in Knock Knock (5/10. Cable/streaming; co-starring Keanu Reeves!) and subsequent appearances in Blade Runner 2049 and others and I was hoping she'd join the elite ranks of beautiful, talented actresses who are also plausible action heroines like Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron and, to a lesser extent, Halle Berry or Milla Jovovich - I omit Scarlet Johansson because her stunt doubles do so much of her action - but while she fights well, her performance lacks the simmering fury that would fuel her revenge quest. I heard someone say that if this was made 10 years ago it would've starred Theron and she would've killed it and that's about right. Amazingly, at age 35 when filmed, she looks about 22 and plays it about the same. It's not bad, but it doesn't quite work.
Reeve's Wick is more of an extended cameo, but it's good though it does raise questions as to why he'd be called in by the tribe who wanted nothing to do with him earlier in the movie?
So the script is thin and the star is disappointing. How's the action then? A: BONKERS! It is a John Wick movie after all and the fight choreographer and stunt performers pull off a variety of unique combat scenarios culminating in a flamethrower fight that had me laughing out loud at how ridonkulous it was in a good way. However, there are a few kills with hand grenades that should've blowed her up real good as well or had her much more banged up. Even when stabbed and beaten, the worst injury she shows is a dainty facial cut with a little blood. Compared to Atomic Blonde (which we watched when we got home) where Theron gets whupped down hard and has black eyes and bruises all over to show for it, this is Disney.
While Ballerina is clearly a step down from the top shelf John Wick films, it does an OK job at not damaging the franchise's reputation, unlike the so-so The Continental TV series which never really caught fire. If you're a fan, it's worth catching a matinee at the theater for the heavy sound - we saw it in Laser Ultra (a Dolby Cinema knockoff) with Atmos sound - but for more causal fans, it can wait for streaming.
Score: 6.5/10. Catch a matinee if you're a big John Wick fan, otherwise catch it on cable/streaming.
For their first movie since 2019's MCU mediocrity Captain Marvel, tag-team filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are back with Freaky Tales, a period anthology dramedy that manages to be even more mediocre. Consisting of four tangentially related short stories set in the same time frame of June 1987 in Oakland, CA they manage to add up to a overall story less than their parts.
The first segment - "Strength in Numbers: The Gilman Strikes Back" - is set at the infamous punk club which spawned Green Day as Nazi thugs storm the club during an Operation Ivy show, destroying equipment and beating up fans. The next day the punks decide to defend themselves and when the Nazis return for round 2, they're are beaten in a stylized ultraviolent rumble. That's it.
The next segment - "Don't Fight the Feeling" - centers on a pair of female rappers, Entice (Normani from girl group Fifth Harmony) and Barbie (Dominique Thorne, the upcoming Ironheart), who are invited to a club date for local rap icon Too Short (rapper Demario "Symba" Driver) to participate in a rap battle. They win. That's it.
The third segment - "Born to Mack" - is longer and darker in tone as we meet Clint (Pedro Pascal, AGAIN), an underworld enforcer who is seeking to get out of the game as he does "one last job" collecting from a deadbeat at a poker game in the back of a video store. In the one inspired moment of the whole movie, he gets stuck in a discussion of movies with the store's owner, played by the least expected actor. (I shant spoil the surprise in case you still want to watch this.) Tragedy befalls Clint as his pregnant wife is shot to death, but even then his gang won't let him go.
The final segment - "The Legend of Sleepy Floyd" - brings back their Nazis and their leader's father, The Guy (Ben Mendelsohn, a frequent Boden/Fleck collaborator), as he is orchestrating multiple robberies of Golden State Warriors players during a NBA Championship game. Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis), an actual Warriors player who was on that year's All-Star Team, has a record-setting night, but because his mother wasn't feeling well and had left the game early with his girlfriend and another, arriving at Sleepy's home and surprising the burglars, who then shoot them, it's not a great evening to remember.
A pair of punks from Gilman Street happened to overhear Clint discuss the crimes at a restaurant and tell Floyd about the connection to the Nazis, so Floyd does what any grieving man would do: Straps up with all sorts of ninja weapons and kills everyone with the power of meditation and kung fu.
There's a charming lo-fi retro vibe to the cinematography - the first segment is shot in 4:3 before going widescreen for the rest - and there are moments where you can tell they're paying homage to Eighties cult movies like Repo Man with a bit of Pulp Fiction thrown in, but the conceit of the stories being interconnect is too tenuous.
The first two segments are so superfluous to the rest it's questionable as to why they're included. It feels like Boden/Fleck had four scraps of ideas they couldn't make into full movies, so tossed them together. As I'm writing this, it occurred to me that if they had intercut the stories together it may've hidden the sparseness of the weaker segments. Frankly, if the first two disappeared and the last two, which are more interrelated, were one story, it'd be best, though not particularly good.
It also relies too much on Easter eggs like recognizing that The Guy's cop partner is the real Too Short (who also narrates the movie) and that the bearded bald guy who gives a testimonial for Sleepy Floyd's meditation course is Tim Armstrong of Operation Ivy and Rancid. Get it? They were the punk band in the first part! Awesome! Ahem...
Boden/Fleck have been critic's darlings for two decades with their first movies, Half Nelson (which starred Ryan Gosling) and Sugar, getting lots of flowers. But nothing else they've done has landed commercially except for Captain Marvel which allows Boden to claim the title of First Woman To Direct a Live Action Movie That Grossed $1 Billion as if she didn't have a male co-director and the plum release date a month before Avengers: Endgame with the hype that this was a must-see movie to prep for that. (If you held a rabid badger against the privates of even fairly nerdy MCU fans and demanded they name who directed Captain Marvel, you'd have a lot of sad fans and overfed badgers as "some art house team" wasn't sufficient an answer.)
While there are a few moments in Freaky Tales that almost make it a so-so watch, it really didn't do much for me, barely avoiding a Skip It recommendation.
A sleeper hit earlier this year was Ryan Coogler's (Creed, Black Panther) Sinners, a Depression-era story mashing up of Deep South Jim Crow business, blues music, Hoodoo, and vampires, because why not? Coogler muse Michael B. Jordan stars in a dual role playing Elijah "Smoke" Moore & his twin Elias "Stack" Moore, collectively referred to as the "Smokestack Twins."
It's 1932 in Clarksdale, Mississippi and the Twins are back after several years working up in Chicago for Mafia families. They've returned with a stack of cash stolen from the Mob and looking to open a juke joint for the local black sharecroppers and laborers who aren't permitted to patronize the white folks establishment.
They buy a former sawmill from Hogwood (David Maldonado), who insists they won't have any trouble from the Klan (spoiler: he's the local Grand Dragon), and then split up to prepare for the opening that night. Smoke goes to town to contract food from the Chinese shopkeeper Bo Chow (Yao) and his wife Grace (Li Jun Li) and to have his estranged wife, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku, Loki), a Hoodoo practitioner. Stack takes their cousin Sammie "Preacher Boy" Moore (newcomer Miles Caton), an aspiring blues guitarist (something his preacher father isn't cool with) with him as he looks to round up talent including Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo, Get Shorty), and Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a married singer whom Sammie is sweet on. Stack also runs into his ex-girlfriend Mary (Hallie Steinfeld, Hawkeye), a "passing" black woman.
Elsewhere, a man whose skin is smoking runs up to a shack and pounds at the door, begging to be left in. This is Remmick (Jack O'Connell), who tells the wary couple - Bert (Peter Dreimanis) and Joan (Lola Kirke) - he is being chased by Indians for some misunderstanding. They let him in and when the group of Lakota show up asking if they'd seen anyone coming through, deny they have. Next thing, they're vampires, too.
The opening night of the juke seems to be going well except the brothers realize early on that due to the amount of company scrip (currency paid to sharecroppers that's only spendable in company stores) they're accepting, they're not making as much real cash as they need to succeed. Problems escalate when three white folk show up asking to be let in, claiming they'd heard the music and just wanted to join in the festivities as they're musicians too. Mary goes to investigate them and at first sympathizes, then decides they need to be kept out. Unfortunately, she doesn't see Remmick take flight behind her as she walks away, Ruh-roh. Long story short, a vampire gets in, the party breaks up, then a whole lot of vampires want to get in at the few remaining humans inside.
I'm somewhat mystified as to the acclaim and success of Sinners because on one hand it's heavily...let's say "influenced" by the 1996 Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez collaboration From Dusk Till Dawn - which started off as a gritty bank robbers on the run crime film before flipping into a bonkers vampires in a Mexican strip club flick - and on the other it's hobbled by a couple of suspense-breaking storytelling choices which kill most of the suspense.
The first mistake is literally the first scene where we see an injured Sammie arrive at his father's church during a service, clutching the broken remains of a guitar neck, clearly suffering injuries, before jumping back 24 hours in a Scriptnotes Stuart Special. As with all movies told in flashback (e.g. Atomic Blonde, Haywire), if they're present before the flashback, it means they survive whatever happens next.
But the more damaging choice was to show Remmick arrive at Bert's shack and reveal what he. Without that sequence, when the trio arrive at the juke and ask to be invited in, the audience would be suspicious because why are these white folk so eager to hang out with the black folk in the 1932 Jim Crow South? Are they trying to entrap the Smokestack Twins and bring in the Klan? Or are they just friendly Irish musicians seeking to jam? Since we KNOW what they are and why they're casually asking to be invited in, it becomes just a waiting game to see who gets turned when they go out and they gets back in.
As if that's not enough, there is a lengthy coda set 50 years later as a mid-credit scene so if you turn it off when it appears the movies over, you'll miss something important.
As lukewarm as I am in general to Sinners, there is one sequence which stands out and that's when the music is playing and a narration that played over the beginning is recalled about how some musicians have an ability to piece the veil between life and death, the present, past, and future and as Sunnie plays, figures ranging from ancient African tribal musicians and dancers appear as well as what appears to be P-Funk guitarist Jimi Hazel and hip-hop DJs and break dancers as the camera swirls around the scene. Good stuff.
Jordan's performance is OK but suffers from both brothers looking the same other than different colored suits and having generally similar personalities. I couldn't remember who was Smoke and who was Stack and it didn't really matter. Part of my difficulty stems from remembering how Tatiana Maslany created over a dozen different clones for Orphan Black, even playing one imitating another so deftly you felt you were watching an imitation, not just the actor switching to the other characterization. (To be fair, though, if you asked me which Winklevoss twin was which as played by Armie Hammer in The Social Network, I couldn't really tell you when they were more differentiated than Coogler's script defines them.)
Caton is more layered in his performance as the conflicted young bluesman; it will be interesting to see what he does next. Lindo almost steals every scene he's in and it's good to see him again after somehow missing everything he's done the past 20 years. (This scene in Get Shorty when he discusses screenwriting is gold.) I didn't recognize Mosaku because of how different she looked from her TVA Agent role in Loki and it was good to see her doing something more involving.
The cinematography by Autumn Durald Arkapaw (Wakanda Forever, The Last Showgirl) is rich, but for home viewing the original IMAX scenes (which only a tiny handful of theaters were able to present) is altered from the original 1.43:1 to the 1.78:1 (16:9) ratio of TVs, alternating from the 2.39:1 widescreen of the majority. Sometimes the transitions are abrupt cuts (a la The Dark Knight), though I spotted at least one slow diminishing of the black bars as used in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (when Katniss enters the arena) and Mission: Impossible - Fallout (the HALO jump and another spot that escapes me now). Compared to the widescreen bulk, the clarity and frame size of the IMAX parts made he wish the whole film was done in fullscreen.
While Sinners has its moments and strengths, particularly in the performances, I was left with too many questions like how in the segregated South did Chinese people had a general store? Perhaps such things happened, but against the backdrop of Jim Crow it's distracting. But as detailed above, the structural choices Coogler made work against whatever points he wanted to make. Clip out the Remmick scene (or use it as a flashback after the vampire twist happens; perhaps have the Indians show up to save the day) and the racial tensions subtext could've worked more allegorically.
If there is a forgotten red-headed (or green-skinned) stepchild of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) it's 2008's The Incredible Hulk. Opening just six weeks after Iron Man, but five years after Ang Lee's unloved 2003 take on the Jade Giant, Hulk (Hulk Dogs, anyone?), it's been seemingly Memory Holed because the role of Bruce Banner was recast by Joss Whedon for 2012's The Avengers with Mark Ruffalo replacing Edward Norton and going on to appear in or voice over a dozen more MCU films and TV shows while Norton hangs out with Terrence Howard, the original Rhodey.
It's also not that great a movie and as the only solo Hulk film (due to distribution rights being held by Universal though Marvel could use the character in as many other projects as they wanted to), but with the villain of the 35th MCU film, Captain America: Brave New World, being someone from the MCU's 2nd film, it was time to revisit the stepchild footnote in case I ever felt like watching CA:BNW - something that considering I've only seen two of the 13 Phase 4 & 5 movies in the theater and haven't even bothered watching a couple, so precipitous has the quality dropoff been for Kevin Feige's woketarded M-She-U, which remains a coin toss. Mostly it was because I'd used Google Opinion Rewards credits to buy it 5-1/2 years ago on digital 4K and never watched it and probably haven't seen it since getting the Blu-ray in 2008.
After recapping the Hulk's gamma radiation experiment origin story during the opening credits - note to Batman movie makers: We don't need to see Bruce Wayne's parents' murder portrayed ever again; we know what happened - we join Norton's Banner hiding out in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, where he works under-the-table at a soft drink bottling plant. It's been five months since he's had an "incident" (i.e. gotten all green and ragey), but he remains on the lam after injuring Gen. Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross (William Hurt in his first of five MCU appearances before passing away in 2022 & Harrison Ford assuming the role in CA:BNW) and his daughter, also Bruce's girlfriend, Betty Ross (Liv Tyler), five years earlier. He's learning techniques to control his anger & response to stress and communicating via secure satellite with someone called "Mr. Blue" who may be able to help develop a cure for Hulkness.
After an accident causes a bottle of pop to be contaminated with his blood, afflicting an old man in the USA (Stan The Man Lee in one of his many cameos), Ross traces the pop back to its source and sends a team led by Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) to capture him. Naturally, it goes sideways with Banner Hulking out and escaping, waking up in Guatemala. (How did he travel over 4000 miles through a half-dozen countries including the Amazonian jungle? Hey, shut up.) He then hikes up through Mexico to get back home where he hopes to retrieve the data from his experiments to send to Mr. Blue.
Despite his efforts to stay hidden from Betty, she spots him and chases him down. While she's moved on and is dating Ty Burrell from Modern Family (playing the Bill Pullman role, IYKYK), she clearly still loves Bruce. Fortunately, she saved the data he's looking for when Daddy Thunderbolt was packing up their lab after the accident. Unfortunately, when Bruce sends the data to Mr. Blue, the email is picked up by S.H.I.E.L.D.'s surveillance nets and Ross plans another attempt to trap Bruce.
This time his sleeve ace is intended to be Blonsky, who has been dosed with a version of Captain America's Super Soldier serum that they attempted to recreate the lost formula. When the mission fails again, almost killing Betty and Blonsky, the serum is the only reason he survives the blow Hulk deals him. If a little serum worked somewhat, then surely pumping a ton of it into him will make him stronger, right? Nope, as the flawed formula transmogrifies Blonsky into Abomination, a monster so strong and violent that Ross has to allow Bruce to Hulk out to fight him in the climatic battle.
It's interesting seeing how humble the MCU's earliest efforts were - if not for the Nick Fury and Tony Stark end credits cameos and the passing references to Stark Industries or S.H.I.E.L.D. there'd be no hints Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk were connected - when Marvel Studios was simply trying to independently produce their own films with the characters they hadn't licensed to Fox (X-Men, Fantastic 4, Daredevil, etc.) or Sony (Spider-Man).
We forget that Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Captain America were considered second-string characters compared to Spidey and Wolverine and that The Avengers wasn't a sure thing to happen, much less succeed, when the first Iron Man hit theaters in 2008. Sandwiched between Iron Man in May and The Dark Knight in July, The Incredible Hulk was in meaningfulness trouble even before the change in casting.
Director Louis Leterrier was coming off a trio of Luc Besson-penned actioners - the first two Transporter flicks & the underrated Jet Li showcase Unleashed - and he does a good job taking the job seriously when most early-Aughts comic book movies still treated them as trifles; something that'd change with the one-two punch of Iron Man and The Dark Knight which cast top-shelf actors and took the stories seriously. The first act plays more like a monster movie, especially in the first Hulk sequence which keeps him in the shadows or obscured by smoke, as he snatches the soldiers and tosses them like dolls. The aftermath of Bruce's Hulk-outs is shown as leaving him weakened, begging for alms, vulnerable. Norton's occasionally twitchy performance is leavened here. (As annoying as he is in real life, Ruffalo was a big upgrade.)
The problem is the script by Zak Penn (Elektra, X-Men: The Last Stand) is subpar and one-note, begging lots of questions like how did Bruce connect with Mr. Blue, whom he finally meets and learns is Samuel Sterns, who after exposure to Bruce's blood is shown having his head swell in a quick shot setting up a payoff that wouldn't come for another 17 years and 33 movies, returning as CA:BNW's villian, The Leader. (As bad as that seems, Blonsky didn't reappear until the woeful Mouse+ series She-Hulk in 2022 as a joke character.) What does Betty do other than look limpid, though that's due to Liv Tyler's minimal thespian skills?
Another stumbling point is the visual effects. The 2003 Hulk suffered from poor VFX, especially the shade of green on Hulk - reportedly it looked great in black & white and for a time they considered doing the comics' Gray Hulk - and rubbery Gumby physics, but while the effects here are an improvement they still look plasticky and weightless like a videogame cutscene, especially the final battle with Abomination. Just a year-and-a-half later Avatar would nail realistic-looking skin complexion and by 2012's The Avengers and the Ruffalo-based Hulk, the quibbles about how it looks were gone.
One arguably better aspect is the moody, intentional cinematography. Recent VFX-laden films are often criticized for flat, washed-out color palettes. This often gets blamed on the predominance of digital cameras, but it's more often due to so much of the frame being filled with pixels added months later, live elements are shot in manner mimicking bright overcast with minimal shadows and flat contrast so they can composite in the backgrounds. The downside is that it looks and feels artificial.
Because so much of the film is film practically on locations - hilariously, Yonge Street in downtown Toronto is used to represent Harlem by hanging an Apollo Theater marquee off a building next to famed Toronto strip club Zanzibar (which inspired the club in Flashdance!); it's also the same block in the first Suicide Squad where Joker and Harley are driving the purple Lamborghini - with extras and wreckage and explosions, only having Hulk and Abomination added, the 4K HDR10 presentation has really deep contrast and rich colors, at times bordering on noirish. Night scenes look better than daylight, especially the Hulk battle against the army at the college where daylight doesn't do the CGI many favors.
Audio wise, in addition to no Dolby Vision there is no Dolby Atmos audio, but the DD+ track has good bass extension to lend a whallop to the gunfire and Hulk smashing. For some reason there are zero extras included with this release. I checked both iTunes and Movies Anywhere and all the commentary, deleted scenes, BTS content, etc. that came on the Blu-ray is omitted here.
While I'm lukewarm on The Incredible Hulk as a movie, it's a very good digital 4K release. However, the deeper color and HDR comes at the expense of a barebones movie-only release. Frankly, I'd recommend the Blu-ray over this if you can get it for the same price under $10 because of the better audio physical has over streaming and extras.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on streaming/cable.
The first scene in the trailer isn't even in the movie.
In my review of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare I recapped Guy Ritchie's wildly inconsistent and of late dull cinematic output, so I shant recapitulate it here, but suffice to say he's continuing his streak of bland, tonally incorrect content creation with his direct-to-Apple TV+ effort for Memorial Day, Fountain of Youth, which fancies itself as a globe-trotting version of National Treasure. (International Treasure?)
John Krasinski (The Office) stars as Luke Purdue, whom we meet in an extended chase scene through Bangkok, Thailand, as he is pursued by various forces intent on recovering a painting he's stolen from their boss. While on a train, he encounters a Esme (Eiza González, last seen in Ash), whom he seems to have a history with (which is never really explained), who also wants the painting back. He manages to give everyone the slip.
His next stop is at a London museum where he surprises his sister, Charlotte (Natalie Portman, Star Wars: Episode One - The Phantom Menace), a curator who is somewhat estranged from him. Their father was an archeologist and the siblings used to go along on his adventures, but she settled down into an unhappy failing marriage with a precious musical prodigy child, Thomas (Benjamin Chivers), who turns out to be so magical that I was surprised they didn't make him autistic. In order to get her on board with his LAteST crusade (hint hint) he steals a painting from the museum and gets her fired.
Luke then clues her into what's going on: He's looking for the Fountain of Youth (roll credits! *ding*), which their father had sought as well, and he's being funded by billionaire Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson, Star Wars: Episodes VII-IX), who is terminally ill and hopes to save his life with the healing waters. While a secret society called the Protectors of the Path (was Knights Templar not available?), of which Esme is a member, was dedicated to keeping the Fountain hidden, a group who disagreed with that mission hid clues in a half-dozen master artists' works to indicate where it is. (Spoiler: Under the Great Pyramid of Giza.)
The painting turns out to be a fake, but Charlotte knows where the real one should be. Unfortunately, that would be in a safe in the Lusitania, sunk by the Germans in 1915. Fortunately, Carver is super rich and the ship laid in *only* 300 feet of water a dozen miles off the coast of Ireland, so they're able to send robots down to saw free the part of the ship the safe was located and float it to the surface to be looted. Unfortunately, Esme shows up with armed goons to take the painting. Fortunately, the siblings escape with their lives and the painting.
Further complicating matters is an Interpol inspector, Abbas (Arian Moayed, Succession), who is also chasing them because stealing art is a crime, mmmkay? The race to find the Fountain or prevent it takes them to Vienna, then Cairo, with various red shirts getting killed culminating in the final act taking place in Egypt at the Pyramids where the filmmakers made damn sure that it's blindingly obvious they copied every beat of the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and if you've seen that, you'll be able to predict pretty much everything that happens and why. And yes, the kid is the smartest of them all.
As with The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Ritchie simply cannot manage the tonal balance here. On one hand it's played as a light comic romp, but on the other there are red shirts being killed and la de da, it's all so fun. Pick a lane, bro. Is finding the Fountain of Youth serious business or just a trifle-slash-sibling bonding exercise?
Another problem is Krasinsk's performance. He's a fine actor (and should've been Reed Richards in The Fantastic Four: First Steps), but Ritchie has him playing every scene as if it's a light comedy and he doesn't have a trace if Indiana Jones bravado or the underlying compulsion to follow in their father's adventuring footsteps. Portman doesn't fare much better, though she got the one laugh out of me with a funny line reading.
The ending clearly tries to set up sequels, but I'm not sure how much money Apple wants to burn producing slick, globe-trotting adventure movies that clearly aren't cheap to make (reported budget: $180M) then don't generate a dollar of box office revenue - unlike other forays such as Ridley Scott's Napoleon or the upcoming Brad Pitt-starring F1 which received big theatrical releases - especially when they're not that good.
While not offensively bad, Fountain of Youth isn't particularly good, which makes it all-too-typical for Hollyweird entertainment content product these days. You won't hate yourself for watching it that much, but you probably won't feel any positive emotions either. It's just another "may as well watch since I'm paying for the service" movies.
Opening with one of the most played-out tropes in movies and videogames - the protagonist waking up in a situation where everyone is dead and they have no memory of what happened or who they are - Ash is a dumb, dull sci-fi-horror flick which makes pulpy throwback B-movies disreputable again.
Eiza González (Three Body Problem) is Amnesia Girl Riya Ortiz who awakes in a structure filled with several dead people who died violently as evidenced by the smashed heads and knives protruding from their bodies. The lights are flickering, a computer voice is announcing system failure, it's basically the aftermath of a Diddy freakout party. (Hiyo!) She wanders out of the structure and finds herself on the surface of an alien world with a kaleidoscopic sky. She begins to choke on the atmosphere and barely manages to make it back to the structure. She doesn't realize you need an space suit to go outside.
She begins to stabilize the base functions and experiences flashback jump scares of the violence that occurred as well as calmer times where she and the box-checkingly diverse crew joked about their mission. Then there's an alert that someone is in the airlock. She lays in wait and when the intruder enters she pounces. This is Brion (Aaron Paul, Breaking Bad) and he claims to be the astronaut who was in orbit and came down when contact was lost.
As Riya tries to piece together what's real and what's not, it becomes a guessing game for the audience as well because it's one thing to have an unreliable narrator, but the movie keeps showing contradictory versions of what happened to the point I stopped caring because it felt as if the script by Jonni Remmler was just making things up as it went along with no consistent narrative logic then director Flying Lotus just slathered John Carpenter stylistic tributes all over the mess. I pretty much figured out the main twists in the first half-hour, leaving another hour for them to play out plus the random spins they attempted.
If not for the presence of the main stars, if you'd told me this movie was made in the early-1980s I'd almost believe you but for the presence of flat-screen displays. The lighting is mostly lurid reds and blues, reminiscent of Creepshow though that was mimicking EC Comics pulp style.
The production design has that cheap movie look with bizarre set decorations like the freaking upright piano sits in the common area. Wait, what? A PIANO?!? A critical mission with the future of humanity hanging in the balance and they ship hundreds of pounds of wood & metal furniture? Not a lightweight electronic keyboard, but a full piano? We see a character playing a trumpet (silently) in a flashback memory, but never is the piano but decoration. That's the level of dumb Ash is operating at along with the Alien inspired space suits with helmet glass so fragile a single punch from a woman cracks them.
González is OK in her performance considering the role gives her little to do but be confused and sad. Paul is equally adrift with nothing to do. The rest of the cast is just there to appear in flashbacks and die.
As a Shudder title, it will eventually show up on that service, but don't bother. Watch Event Horizon instead.
As the back half of tonight's High Concept Double Feature (ooooh-ooooh-ooooh) which began with Drop we watched a movie I'd never heard of despite its cast until it popped up on the high seas, the taut 1-1/2-hander Locked.
Bill Skarsgård (IT, the terrible remake of The Crow) stars as Eddie Barrish, a scuzzy lowlife and deadbeat dad who we meet trying to get his van from the mechanic's, but he's as with most things in his life, he's short on what he owes. While walking around the rundown parts of his city, looking for things to steal, he happens upon an unlocked luxury SUV in parking lot. After climbing in and rummaging around, he discovers he can't get out as the doors are locked. Ruh-roh.
The entertainment system's phone rings and after realizing that ignoring it isn't an option, he answers and makes the acquaintance of the vehicle's owner, William (two-time Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins?!?), who informs Eddie that this is a very special car with armored panels, soundproofing, and bulletproof glass which proves itself when Eddie tries to shoot it and the bullet ricochets into his leg. There are hidden cameras, electric prods which can shock him if he swears or annoys William and the climate control can be cranked up to sweltering heat & bone-chilling cold. And the stereo can play yodeling music at deafening volume.
After passing out from his wounds, Eddie wakes up to find them bandaged. Turns out William is a doctor and isn't about to let his captive escape this bizarre form of honey trap justice that easily. Over several days, this standoff proceeds as William explains why he's doing this while Eddie tries to negotiate his way out so he can see his daughter again.
A remake of a 2019 Argentinian film called 4x4 the direction by David Yarovesky (2019's Brightburn, the "what if Superman was a pyscho kid" flick produced by James Gunn) manages to keep the story exciting despite the literal bottle episode nature of the setting. (It's reminiscent of Joel Schumacher's Phone Booth where Colin Ferrel was stuck in a you know on the phone with Keifer Sutherland.)
I'd really like to see a making-of feature about how they executed some of the shots like an early lengthy one where the camera keeps orbiting around Eddie as he tries to find a way out of the car and it occurred to me that the camera had to be outside the bounds of the car's interior. (It's similar to this scene from Spielberg's War of the Worlds.)
While Skarsgård seems to be in every movie Pedro Pascal isn't in, he does a good job with his unsympathetic character as he makes clear that he may be a lowlife, he's not a monster. It seems odd that Hopkins would seem to be slumming in a mostly voiceover role, but he still shows up to play and classes up the joint.
While the ending was a bit anticlimactic, overall Locked is a solid chamber thriller that manages to properly fill its 95-minute runtime.
Tonight brings a double-feature of short high concept thrillers: Locked and the lead-off hitter, Drop, directed by Christoper Landon (Freaky) from a script by Jillian Jacobs & Chris Roach (the Lucy "Sex Muppet" Hale-starring Fantasy Island and Truth Or Dare).
Meghann Fahy (The Bold Type) stars as Violet Gates, a therapist who specializes in abuse survivors owing to her status as a widowed single mother as hinted at in the uncomfortable prologue where her husband is savagely beating her.
But now it's five years later and it's time to start dating. She leaves her myopic son Toby (Jacob Robinson) in the care of her younger sister Jen (Violett Beane, CW's The Flash) who comes over and advises her to go for a sexier look for the big date.
Violet arrives ahead of her date at the ritzy top floor restaurant, Palate, and while waiting at the bar she is approached by Richard (Reed Diamond, Dollhouse) asking if she was his blind date. Since she isn't, they chat briefly until his date does arrive and we can tell it's not going to go well for him. We also meet Cara (Gabrielle Ryan, Power Book IV: Force), who seems more of an intuitive therapist than the therapist.
Her date, Henry (Brandon Sklenar, It Ends With Us) arrives toting his camera bag because he didn't want to leave it in the car in Chicago. He's one of those guys who seems so perfect that it's hard to believe he needed a dating app what with all the women throwing panties at him on the street. But she finds it hard to get lost in his dreamy eyes because her phone keeps blowing up (figuratively) with Digi-Drops, a fictitious social media game where people in close proximity can send memes and messages.
At first it's merely distracting, but then it gets serious when a message tells her she needs to kill her date. When she pushes back, she is told check her home security cameras where she sees a masked man in her kitchen, staring at the camera there, holding up a silenced pistol. Ruh-roh! She tries various ways to let someone know, but the mystery messenger has microphones conveniently planted everywhere and seems to be ahead of her every move. Due to the range of the drop app, the culprit has to be in the restaurant, but with everyone on their phones all the time, it's hard to tell which one it is. Hijinks ensue.
The premise of Drop is pretty cool, but the execution is wanting because there are single points of failure in the scheme beginning with the first demand of Violet that she swipe the memory card from the camera and destroy it. If Henry hadn't brought his camera bag, the scheme fails; if he took the card out and put it in his pocket, the scheme fails; if he swapped the card out and put in a fresh card, you get the picture. (I'm a photographer and whenever I've done events, I've always had multiple cards prepared so I could shoot each night on its own card and not risk losing everything. I also don't format the cards until I've transferred and made backups of photos.)
Then there's the matter of how weird she's acting. Most guys would've run for the hills, no matter how hot the woman is and while Fahy is actress attractive, she's not Don't Care How Crazy, Must Smash hawt, though she manages to keep Snaps McDreamy around long enough for the plot to happen. However, the finale begins to test the limits of going along with it as it jettisons what remaining scraps of realism it barely possessed.
I have somehow failed to ever post a full review of 2018's snappy camp-trash classic A Simple Favor any of the three times we've watched it - first at the theater, then twice more on 4K digital - but it's one of our faves and each time I've logged it it crept up in its score, starting at 7.5/10 and currently at 8.5/10. It's a blast and made us reevaluate Blake Lively after years of clowning on her in Gossip Girl. (She was also good in the Girl vs Shark movie The Shallows.) So when word that a sequel was coming, great joy happened in Xanadu. So how does Another Simple Favor, sent straight to streaming on Amazon Prime Video because studios hate money, fare? It's OK.
We open with what listeners of the terrific Scriptnotes podcast will recognize as a Stuart Special with mommy vlogger/true crime solver Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick, A Simple Favor) streaming from her hotel room in Capri, proclaiming her innocence from killing frenemy Emily Nelson's new husband. Ruh-roh.
We then flashback a few days to get caught up on where we are five years after the events of the first film. Stephanie has written a book about those events and built a large following with her amateur sleuthing. At a book reading she is shocked by the arrival of Emily (Blake Lively, A Simple Favor), sprung from prison pending appeal by the powerful lawyers of her new fiance, Dante Versano (Michele Morrone, Subservience), an old Italian boyfriend. Emily is there to ask Stephanie to be her maid of honor and if she doesn't there will be lawsuits, etc. So it's off to Capri she goes, accompanied by Vicky (Alex Newell, Glee), her literary agent whose hoping for another book to come from it.
Stephanie is on edge because she feels Emily wants to kill her for wrecking her life, shagging her husband Sean (Henry Golding, A Simple Favor), leaving her son Nicky (Ian Ho, A Simple Favor) without a mother, etc. Emily's mercurial nature doesn't put her at ease even as she somewhat reassures her.
At the rehearsal luncheon, the surprises continue as it appears Dante's family business is in the vein of The Godfather with another family, the Bartolos, being antagonists and Dante's mother, Portia (Elena Sofia Ricci, all Italian movies), none to happy with this blonde interloper so she ups the ante by springing that he'd brought Emily's estranged borderline senile mother, Margaret (Elizabeth Perkins, Big, taking over from Jean Smart, A Simple Favor), and her aunt Linda (Allison Janney, The West Wing), to the party, much to Emily's consternation.
After much snarky banter, the story shifts into a darker gear as the men in Emily's life begin getting dead and for some reason Stephanie is the prime suspect to the local police and they place her under house arrest. Fortunately, she has a FBI agent (Taylor Ortega, The Four Seasons) following her to protect her. Too bad she's very incompetent and not on the case very long. (Nudge wink.) It all leads to some twisty-turny hijinks that require more suspension of disbelief than how Emily's wardrobe manages to cover her naughty bits like the beads on the Na'vi in the Avatar movies.
While I enjoyed Another Simple Favor overall, the screenplay by Jessica Sharzer (co-writer of A Simple Favor) and Laeta Kalogridis (Terminator: Genisys, Alita: Battle Angel) is simultaneously overstuffed and undercooked with too many scenes and/or characters which could've been trimmed or eliminated completely. It feels like 15-20 minutes more material got trimmed out when it should've been either left in, the overall runtime cut back from 120 minutes, or different choices made; the FBI and literary agents could've been omitted entirely.
The tone also gets too dark in spots; we don't need to see a beloved character's grisly demise so graphically portrayed and then a family member seemingly totally unaffected mere hours later. And the denouement relies on something being used that there is absolutely zero way it could've been present; deus ex machinas don't get more deusy than this even when it is so foreshadowed that I called it at about the 20-minute mark. And the supposed big twist wasn't much of a surprise, though I'll admit another twist was news, though it also raises questions the movie isn't interested in answering; just go with it.
That said, if you're here for some sparky, bitchy back-and-forth between Kendrick & Lively, Another Simple Favor delivers enough of the goods to carry the day. There is a stretch where Lively is offscreen and she's missed. Perkins is a poor substitute for Smart, playing Margaret's dementia too broadly. (I'm guessing Smart was too busy filming Hacks to come back.) Morrone has little charisma, same as in Subservience, so I'm not sure why Hollywood is trying to hard to give him the Cam Gigandet treatment.
Amazon's 4K HDR10 presentation is nicely bright, capturing the luxurious details of the Capri setting like a tourism board commercial. Why so many movies refuse to use contrast and color these days sucks, but this isn't a disappointment.
The end of Another Simple Favor hints at a sequel and I am here for it. Ignore the haters who are "Team Justin" are are review bombing the movie online because they're jealous bitches envious of Lively's life or the film critics who didn't see the first one, don't understand the humor, and called it the worst movie of the year (as if it was a threat to film, ahem) and settle in for a messy, but still entertaining visit with the pair whose ideal of "family relations" gets pretty twisted at times. If you haven't seen the first one, it's currently on Netflix and MUST be seen before this to appreciate it properly.
I'm embarrassed to say that I've not yet seen either The Raid: Redemption nor The Raid 2, Gareth Edwards seminal action cult classics despite having bought both on Blu-ray on Jan. 29, 2017, 8-1/4 years ago. (Hey, I've been busy!) So it was with great interest that I looked forward to this Netflix original written and directed by Evans so I could see what the hype was about. Sadly, I'm still waiting.
Havoc opens with a wild, obviously mostly CGI chase sequence where the police are chasing a semi truck, culminating in the two who were in the trailer heaving a washing machine out the back where it smashes through the windshield of a cop car, gravely injuring the driver. Later, the quartet deliver the cocaine to a Triad boss, but while the two wait in the car, the other two - Charlie (Justin Cornwel) and Mia (Quelin Sepulveda) - are inside when a trio of masked men armed with machine guns arrive and kill everyone, while the pair barely escape.
Homicide detective Patrick Walker (Tom Hardy) and his uniform partner, Ellie (Jessie Mei Li), investigate and security camera footage show Charlie and Mia's escape which could be inconvenient because Charlies father is Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker), a real estate developer who is running for mayor of this unnamed fictitious city. Walker is on Beaumont's payroll, so he's tasked with finding Charlie and protecting him from the law and the Triad gangs and Walker's fellow dirty cops led by Vincent (Timothy Olyphant).
I'm not even going to try and continue recapping the plot because even with the Wikipedia synopsis to refer back to it's so convoluted and confused, I'm still unclear of half of what happened other than everyone seems corrupt, everyone is screwing over everyone else, and pretty much everyone gets dead by the end. Evans' script feels like it was written by someone who overheard people talking about various action/crime/gangster movies and then tried to cobble those impressions into a new plot with "Pew pew pew pew!!!" as half of the words. It's confusing and the subplot about Walker's daughter is trite and tropey. Also, if a rich, powerful businessman running for office were to be kidnapped as depicted, someone would notice.
I hate to have to keep carping on this in so many action movie reviews, but John Wick changed the game in 2014 and shakycam/edit fu action filmmaking isn't acceptable anymore. When The Raid: Redemption came out in 2012, it was a high water mark for that style of filmmaking, but now it seems contrived. While there are some kicky moments and "Oooooooh!" kills, there are also people firing so many rounds without reloading or having so much lead hurled at them the fact that they're not turned into pencils much less not dead that it becomes distractingly cartoonish. I'm not asking for total realism; John Wick's entire skeleton should be crumbs most of the time, but when people are being either shot 20 times or not hit at all after hundreds of rounds incoming, it's silly.
Hardy's performance is ehn, probably because I'm concurrently watching the Paramount+ series Mobland in which he plays a very similar character - a compromised fixer who fixes things with violence. The rest of the characters are such cartoons that you can't grade for the performances, though Li as the seemingly only honest cop in the city is appealing in a movie filled with characters there's little point in caring about.
The production design is interesting in that this nameless city seems to be mashed up from areas ranging from New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Hong Kong, etc. which makes the fact it was shot in Wales (with heavy VFX enhancement) more surprising. (However, I was shocked to see one shot definitely filmed in Detroit proper though I could find nothing anywhere about it.)
For those paying Netflix's top price, the Dolby Vision presentation has some moments where neon lights pop brightly, but it's mostly grimy, gritty darkness. The Atmos audio is enveloping, but not particularly distinctive.
While a misfire, Havoc does make me want to fnailly watch the Raid movies. Maybe within the next eight years.
Just a year after the sleeper hit of The Beekeeper, director David Ayer and star Jason Statham are back with A Working Man, based on Levon's Trade, one of a series of novels by comic book writer Chuck Dixon. While The Beekeeper was a bonkers mess while being entertaining, this time we're given a bog-standard revenge flick which while it knocked off Disney's disastrous Sand Brown Snow White in the box office in its second week, it won't be remembered in Statham's Pantheon of action classics.
Statham plays Levon Cade, a grumpy ex-Royal Marines commando working as a construction foreman for Joe Garcia (Michael Peña) in Chicago. He has a young daughter, Merry (Isla Gie), who lives with her grandfather, Dr. Jordan Roth (Richard Heap), who blames Levon for his daughter unaliving herself after a lifelong battle with depression. He is seeking to further restrict Levon's limited visitation time because he has PTSD & is a violent killer, though that's what soldiers do in war.
During an evening of clubbing with friends, Joe's daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) is kidnapped. Joe begs Levon to help, offering $70,000, but Levon demurs saying he's not that person anymore. But after about five minutes and a visit to a blind war buddy, Gunny (David Harbour), he changes his mind and embarks on the quest to find Jenny, working his way through Russian mobsters and various underworld lowlifes.
If you've seen any Unstoppable Killing Machine On A Revenge Mission movies, you can pretty much guess how A Working Man goes on its discount Taken plotline. The problem is that the script by Ayer and Sylvester Stallone (whose producer credit indicates he was developing this for himself) is in need of heavy editing and streamlining to pick up the pace. We are separated from Jenny for so long at times we almost forget what Levon is after.
The way he tries to pick up the trail by dealing with biker meth dealers slows the pace. He calls another war buddy who works at the DEA for some info and we never hear from him again. An opening scene where armed thugs rough up a worker at the construction site and Levon steps in to deal the hurt has zero ramifications. And the ending seems like it wants to set up a sequel of some sorts when there's little left to this story. Even the introduction of the grandfather dressed like a Jamiroquai cosplayer isn't explained and how that allows him to look down on Levon.
Statham is Statham in pretty much every Statham movie - grumpy bald Brit with hints of a soft center under his iron fists. At 57, he's beginning to slow down - he was 34 when he shot The Transporter and his peak heyday was in the Aughts. It doesn't help that Ayer covers the action with too close framing and reliance on shakycam. After John Wick revolutionized action coverage, there's no excuse for poor fight work.
To be punny, A Working Man is a workmanlike movie. Not bad, but not as good as it could've been with substantial tightening and a sharper focus. With a dozen novels so far in the Levon Cade series, they'd clearly like to make a franchise of this, but they'll have to get better quickly to succeed.
People complain that there aren't any original movies which aren't sequels or based on IPs, but when different, original movies do come out, they don't go see them. I suspect it's because the expense of going to the movies makes taking risks on new ideas, well, risky, but if Hollyweird doesn't see a return on the investments, can you blame them for just churning out more sequels and IP-based flicks?
One victim of this conundrum is Jack Quaid, nepo baby (parents are Dennis Quaid & Meg Ryan) star of The Boys who somehow managed to dodge both parents aesthetic genetics. (Someone has to be a Gene Hackman type. RIP) Earlier this year his sexbot-gone-murderbot movie Companion (7/10) opened to good reviews and poor box office and now we have Novocaine, a kicky high-concept action dramedy which also disappointed commercially and was on streaming in a few weeks.
Quaid is Nathan "Novocaine" Caine, a timid San Diego assistant bank manager with a congenital condition which makes him incapable of feeling pain or temperature which we're given hints by a stop on his shower valve to prevent it getting too hot and burning him, tennis balls on the corners of desks and counters, and drinking coffee from a mug filled with ice. He doesn't even eat solid food because he's afraid of biting his tongue off. He stays home playing videogames with his only "friend", Roscoe (Jacob Batalon, Ned from the MCU Spider-Man movies), whom he's never even met in real life.
A cute teller at his bank, Sherry (Amber Midthunder, Prey), hits on him, inviting him to lunch and then to an art show and due to the power of boners, he's willing to risk going out. They connect over the course of the evening, ending up getting quite cozy after she introduces him to the joy of pie. Cherry pie. (As in the baked dessert, you pervs.) They also run into an old school bully who had called him Novocaine back in the day, leading to the worst round of shots ever for one of them.
The next morning is Christmas Eve and things take a turn when Nathan's bank is robbed by three men dressed as Santa lead by Simon (Ray Nicholson, Jack's nepo baby who makes Christian Slater's Jack act look respectable). After the manager is killed for refusing to open the vault, they threaten to kill Sherry and to save her Simon opens the vault. The cops show up and they take her hostage as they exit the bank, leading to a big gunfight and casualties among the cops. After using his belt to tourniquet one cop's wounds, he takes his gun and cop car and chases after the robbers.
As Nathan attempts to find Sherry, two police detectives - Langston (Betty Gabriel, Get Out) and Duffy ( Matt Walsh, Veep) - believe he was an inside man because he opened the vault and stole a police car to follow them, but Langston isn't so sure because she spots Nathan's belt which he used as a tourniquet to save the cop whose car he borroowed's life. If a guy with no record, not even a traffic ticket, is a bank robber, why would he stop to help a cop?
As Nathan continues his quest, he begins to take more and more damage. While he doesn't feel pain, he's not Deadpool or Wolverine with the ability to instantly heal. Getting beaten up, slammed into walls, tortured, shoot by an arrow and/or grabbing a gun out of a deep fryer takes its toll and the damage gets pretty graphic, though it's played for laughs most of the time a la Evil Dead 2.
The script by Lars Jacobson actually takes the time to set up the characters and the underlying theme of people not being who they appear or claim to be which leads to a couple of twists, only one of which I saw coming. The time spent setting up Nathan and Sherry's damaged backstories adds more depth than the premise would usually consider necessary. Directorial team Dan Berk and Robert Olsen manage the action well, mostly staying on the humorous side of the giggly/grisly line, but towards the end things begin to drag out and veer into cruelty. And the ultimate resolution seems a tad pat, but doesn't sink it at the finish line.
If you watch the trailer for Black Bag below, it implies that it is a taut spy thriller about married spooks Mr. & Mrs. Smith George (Michael Fassbender, Prometheus) and Kathryn (Cate Blanchett, Tar) from the director of Traffic, Steven Soderbergh, and the writer of Jurassic Park, David Koepp. There's a traitor and it may be George's wife. Dun-dun-DUHN!! Sadly, it's a sluggish, talky, drawn-out slog where you the struggle to stay awake for the sparse moments of interests within.
Opening with British SIS (formerly MI-6) agent George meeting a contact at a London club. He's given a list of five names, including his wife's, and the warning that if something called Severus is used, thousands of people could die. He has a week to find out who the bad guy is.
To this end he invites the other names on the list, all co-workers, to his and Kathryn's swanky townhouse for dinner and I'm just going to copypasta the synopsis from Wikipedia here to save time:
[S]atellite imagery specialist Clarissa (Marisa Abela, Industry), her boyfriend and managing agent Freddie (Tom Burke, Furiosa), agency psychiatrist Zoe (Naomie Harris, Skyfall), and her boyfriend and managing agent James (Regé-Jean Page, Bridgerton). At dinner, George drugs their food to lower their inhibitions. In an effort to learn more about the guests, George engages them in a psychological game. Amongst other things, it is revealed that Freddie has been cheating on Clarissa; in response to which Clarissa angrily stabs Freddie in the hand with a steak knife.
But a lot of convenient clues are pointing at Kathryn from ticket stubs in the trash to a movie she claims to have not seen to a cover identity she'd used tied to millions of dollars deposited in a Swiss bank account. While attempting to see why she was in Zurich, George has Clarissa redirect a spy satellite off the books for a few minutes at which point a suspected Russian agent in possession of Severus is able to escape.
Enraged, their boss Stieglitz (Pierce Brosnan, Mrs. Doubtfire) orders George, Freddie and James to find the traitor. George is sweating because he's been acting in a way which looks like he's letting his marriage interfere with national, if not global, security. Of course, there's a lot of red herrings and twists and turns are reveals because spy movie.
But it's handled so quietly that it's easy to doze off like the missus did. In discussing why everyone seems to fraternize at work, one talks about how operational secrecy precludes discussing one's work with civilians, but it's hard to trust your romantic partners because even with everyone being a spy, you still can't talk about what your specific missions are and the catch-all term "black bag" (roll credits!) can be used to protect state secrets or your nooners at hotel with someone else from the office you're shagging.
As for George and Kathryn, they seem to be the perfect couple, but he clearly states that he can't stand liars, but something is clearly up with her. Can she be trusted or is she using his love and trust to do dastardly deeds?
The performances are fine and when Koepp actually writes something interesting Soderbergh stages the scenes well enough (he also does his own cinematography and editing under pseudonyms), but even at 94 minutes it feels padded and slow. He and Koepp have done several movies together lately, all in the 90-minute range in defiance of the length-over-depth ethos weighing Hollyweird down with 3-1/2 hour marathons like The Brutalist and Killers of the Flower Moon, but their Max original Kimi was much better (score: 7.5/10, no written review) even with a much less pedigreed cast.
Black Bag narrowly avoids falling into the 4/10 Skip It range by virtue of Fassbender's performance and the occasional sparks of interest, but this isn't the heartiest recommendation.
Nicole Kidman's career is running on two tracks: One is her television work on series like Lioness and The Perfect Couple which has been pretty good and the other is her movie work which has been less qualitative with her last film, Babygirl (3/10), being a ridiculous mess and her latest, the Amazon original Holland, being a bland, weird disappointment which I only watched because it is set in Holland, MI, the quaint Dutch town renowned for its annual tulip festival which is on the west side of my home state.
Kidman stars as Nancy Vandergroot, a high school Home Ec teacher married to Fred (Matthew Macfadyen, Succession), an optometrist. They have a 13-year-old son, Harry (Jude Hill, Belfast), who helps his father work on the massive toy train diorama they have in the garage. They have an idyllic life where the worst thing that happens is she wrongly suspects and accuses the babysitter (Rachel Sennott in a 20-second "Why did they cast a big name?" role) of stealing an earring.
Fred frequently travels for conferences and when she discovers a receipt for a place in a town she wasn't aware he was in, she begins to suspect something. When she finds packs of Polaroid film in his toolbox, suspicion rises because they don't have a Polaroid camera. She enlists the school's woodshop teacher, Dave Delgado (Gael García Bernal, Old), in helping her snoop in his office where she finds a book full of Polaroids, but they're of house details, not kinky sex stuff. Also, these houses that are in his train diorama. Not satisfied, the pair follow Fred when he goes to another conference hoping to catch him in the act.
Now there are a couple obvious paths this story can follow and the "she's imagining things" one is where I thought it'd lead, but where Holland ultimately goes is somewhat bonkers, leading to a spiral of a conclusion where it feels like they made it up the night before they shot it. It's so out of left field & unrealistic that whatever tone they were going for before gets pitched out the window.
The script by Andrew Sodorski also lacks cohesion as Bernal's character is implied, not specified. He tells Nancy he has a past and at one point digs up a gun buried in his backyard, but he never says what his deal is or why he's in Holland. He eats alone in the staff cafeteria and there's a subplot involving a fired abusive alcoholic bus driver and his abused son making a racist attack on him, but what's that about? Even Nancy's flirting with Dave seems unearned.
Kidman can play these icy Stepford Wife types in her sleep and while she doesn't sleepwalk through her performance, it's mannered and too familiar. She's a producer here, so she imagined something in the material that didn't make it to the screen.
While Michigangsters may enjoy the opportunities to do the Leo DiCaprio pointing meme at the references to Zingerman's and Zehnder's, Holland remains best visited for Tulip Time, but not as a movie.
The HDR10 presentation is colorful and has some bright highlights in spots that remind it's a HDR format, but it's nothing to show off as demo material.
