Welcome To DirkFlix!

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

A: Yes, yes, and why not?

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

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a while and a dozen intervening movies, I couldn't remember enough specifics to properly review them, so they remained unpublished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Another Simple Favor" 4K Review

 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.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on Prime Video.