Eminem's 2000 album The Marshall Mathers LP contained one of his biggest tracks, "Stan", which told the story of an obsessed stalker fan (thus the portmanteau of "stan") writing him fan letters that become more and more unhinged until it results in the fan killing himself and his pregnant girlfriend because Em never wrote back. The last verse is Em replying to the notes, trying to chill the guy out before ultimately realizing that a news story he'd seen was about Stan.
As both a portrayal of how fans can feel they have personal relationships with celebrities and how it feels to be on the receiving end of such unnerving fan mail, it was Mathers stepping up on his sophomore release to show he was capable of rapping about subjects more nuanced than the cartoonish violence showcased on his debut, The Slim Shady LP.
It also provides the title for the documentary Stans, which is partially a very superficial recap of Mathers' early career and mostly a platform for a lot of his stans to talk about how they love him and how much his music means to them. They identify with what he talks about and find strength in his bravado and vulnerability. While the initial read on them made me wonder if they were handed their own restraining order while signing the release forms, most seem to understand that they're obsessed and aren't looking to harm him though the woman who has the Guinness Book of World Records record for most tattoos of single person (22!) needs to have posters and photos explained to her.
Occasionally, Mathers chimes in with how this feels to him, but there's a dissonance about how detached from reality some fans can get while giving them a platform because they're superfans. They make the pilgrimage to Detroit to visit important sites from his life like Gilbert's Lodge, a restaurant a couple miles from the Detroit border he used to busboy at (that I coincidentally drive past an average of once a day because it's a mile from my home) as if he may be hanging around.
If he wants to temper their hopes up for meeting them, it doesn't help that one fan relates how after a show in 2013, Em's car stopped and a security guy summoned him to get in to meet Mathers and snap a picture. So, he's saying there's a chance? How did Mathers know who this fan was? Don't know.
And that's the core problem with Stans, it doesn't really delve deeply enough into the subject of Mathers or his fans enough to make this critical viewing. At least they put the dates of when things happen so one can realize that the period between his first album dropping and his Oscar-winning movie 8 Mile premiering was less than four years and he'd dropped three albums.
The missus loves the Dino Park (as I call the Jurassic Park/World series) movies. We've seen the first six in theaters and seeing that midnight showing of the first one on my birthday in 1993 made such an impression that I called into my work on my day off to rave about it. The series has been uneven - Dino Park 1 is a GOAT, DP 2 & 4 are pretty good, DP 3 & 6 are OK, DP 5 aka Jurassic Mansion: Pointless Sequel was pants - but she was gung ho to see the latest installment, but due to various reasons of business and pretty bad reviews, for the first time we did not trek to the theater to see the dinosaurs. We just waited five weeks for Dino Park 7: Oh Look, There's Another Previously Unknown Island with Dinosaurs or as you probably know it as, Jurassic World Rebirth, to hit streaming and here it is and good thing I didn't drive to a theater to see this lackluster entry into the getting-overly-milked franchise.
This time around the world has grown bored of dinosaurs because shut up this is the plot. They've also been dying out because it's not warm enough in the areas where people live (so much for the ManBearPig hoax) and they're most living near the equator because warm and more oxygen? (Not going to bother Googling that.)
Sleazy Pharma Bro (Rupert Friend, A Simple Favor) believes his company could make trillions of dollars selling medicines developed from DNA harvested from live dinosaurs. Since they're living in an area off-limits to humans, he hires Merc Babe (ScarJo, Lucy) to get him and Dino Scientist (Jonathan Bailey, Wicked) to anotherInGen facility island which had been abandoned after an accident 17 years previously because a Snickers wrapper can apparently fry the security systems of a secret dino breeding lab.
After picking up Merc Bro (Mahershala Ali, Blade, LOL) and some obvious Red Shirts (including one recognizable B-list star who the trailer spoils his fate), they head off to the Forbidden Zone to harvest blood from a fishosaur, landosaur, and aerosaur. Elsewhere on the ocean, a father and his two daughters - one young and likely to find a cute dino pal, the other teenaged and bringing her stoner dumbass boyfriend along - are sailing when their sailboat is capsized by a big fishosaur. (I'm not bothering listing the actors for their privacy.)
Their mayday call is received by merc boat and they are rescued, but as they approach the island, more fishosaurs attack the boat, causing some to die, some to fall overboard, and the rest to crash onto the shore where some are eaten. The family regroups and heads for where the village is supposed to be and the mercs, Pharma Bro and Dino Scientist collect samples and try not to get eaten, which is easy for anyone who has an Oscar or nomination or needs to stay alive until they can be eaten by the Final Boss Uggosaur in a completely unexpected and OK, I totally called how they were going to get offed.
If you think I'm leaving out a lot of details, I'm not. There's nothing of interest here, nothing that surprises or delights. Sure, the action is well directed by Gareth Edwards (The Creator, Rogue One) and the visual effects are seamless & spectacular, but we were able to predict the fates of pretty much every character, the plot armor was so obvious as were the red herring intended to make you think anyone could get killed. I was even calling out lines seconds ahead of the movie. It's that predictable.
Much was made of the detail that David Koepp, who'd adapted Michael Crichton's novel for the first movie, wrote Dino Park 7, but if you've followed his work, it's been roughly two decades since he's written A-tier material and what he's done since pales what the first half of his IMDB lists. Here he's just typing, not writing. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if he just prompted ChatGPT to "write a Jurassic Park movie in the style of David Koepp." The talking and stuff between set pieces only serves to prevent the movie from being 30 minutes long.
While not the worst Dino Park movie, it's down there in the way F9: The Fast Saga is blocked from the bottom slot by 2 Fast 2 Furious. None of the performances are demanding of our getting-paid stars and they don't even try to explain how a 5'3" woman becomes a first-call mercenary. (At least Charlize Theron is 5'10" and Uma Thurman is 5'11", not that it made The Old Guard 2 any less bad.)
Jurassic World Rebirth made enough money that Dino Park 8 is a sure thing, but it's not as if its likely to tell a compelling story from the looks of things.
While it's tempting to suggest that the body horror genre pretty much begins and ends with the work of David Cronenberg (Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Crash, Crimes of the Future, to name a few) there are other practitioners such as Michael Shanks who makes his directorial debut with Together, which asks the question, how close is too close to be with someone?
Real-life married couple Allison Brie (GLOW, Community) and Dave Franco (Now You See Me, James' little brother) star as Millie and Tim, a young couple leaving New York City for her to start a job at an unnamed upstate elementary school. They've been dating for years, but never married and when she attempts to propose at their going away party in front of their friends, he freezes on answering, causing major embarrassment. He's struggling with having to functionally give up on his music career to follow her to the sticks, but he's going nowhere though accepts a touring guitarist gig with a friend's band.
While trying to get acclimated to the area, they go for a hike, get lost in a rainstorm, and fall into a cavern in the woods. With night falling, they decide to stay and lacking water, Tim drinks from a pool in the cave; a pool we saw a pair of dogs drink from in a prologue and suffer horrific effects. When they wake up, they find their calves stuck together which he attributes to mildew.
Afterwards, he begins to experience weird dreams and an overwhelming attraction to Millie (yes, Brie is attractive but not with the bad bangs hairstyle she's sporting here) and contact between them results in more things sticking together. Soon, she's being drawn to him leading to a scene where they're sleepcrawling towards each other, awaking in time to partially succeed in not getting totally stuck on each other, though a sabre saw is required to, well, you get the idea.
The reason for their fusing and a mysterious New Agey church/cult centered on the cavern, which was the chapel before sinking into the earth isn't really explained and it begs a lot of questions about just how close you really need to be to your partner. The ending - which I unfortunately had spoiled - could be a shark-jumping moment for some, like the horror fan missus who flipped from kinda liking it to "What the hell was that?"-ing it in the end.
I don't think it adds up to much despite grazing on some interesting ideas about relationships. The house they're living in seems waaaaaay too large for a teacher to afford and more space than they need. If feels like Shanks wanted to make a movie about a couple sticking together, literally, then sprinkled some details around it to make it seem more substantive without quite succeeding.
Even if you know more about the Akron, Ohio's favorite spud boys, Devo, than their Big Hit from 1980 "Whip It", you probably aren't prepared for what you'll learn watching DEVO, the 2024 Sundance hit documentary which has finally arrived on Netflix to coincide with the band's 50th anniversary tour with The B-52's.
Director Chris Smith applies the style from his excellent WHAM! documentary to let the subjects - new interviews with Mark Mothersbaugh, Jerry Casale, and Bob Mothersbaugh as well as archive footage of deceased members Bob Casale and Alan Myers - tell their story rather than having various dinosaur critics from Rolling Stone or one of the dreaded doc trio of Henry Rollins, Dave Grohl and/or Questlove.
Their story starts with Mothersbaugh and Casale attending Kent State and having two of their friends killed in that infamous incident in 1970. Both were artists and had been active in protesting the Vietnam War, but underlying their Leftist ideology was a deep cynicism about the world and its promises and that rather than becoming a better place, society and humanity itself was sliding down the slope to devolution - de-evolving into primitives - thus the name Devo.
Their art provocateur antics didn't go over great with the townies of The Rubber City, but a short film they'd made won a film festival which got them invited to play in LA for a label. While that didn't result in a deal, it gave them a leg up on trying the Big Apple where they rapidly found celebrities like John Lennon and Jack Nicholson in the crowd. David Bowie even introduced them for one show and offered to produce them.
After signing to Warner Bros., Bowie kept being too busy to produce them, but handed them off to Brian Eno for some contentious sessions. When the album was complete, the label's marketing team suggested making life-size cardboard cutouts of the band to stand in record stores. The band asked for that money instead to make a video for their cover of "Satisfaction." This was several years before MTV (a cable channel that used to play music videos long ago) launched, so the label was baffled, but agreed.
A high-profile appearance on Saturday Night Live ahead of their tour put them in the spotlight, but eventually their sophomore album flopped and the ultimatum was given: Your next album better have a hit or else hit the bricks. They took it to heart and turned in their Freedom of Choice album and when the label's pick for leadoff single, "Girl U Want," flopped, the second was the band's choice: "Whip It" and the rest was one-hit wonder history.
Because MTV was starved for content in the beginning and the band had produced several videos, they were ubiquitous in those early days. Ironically, as everyone got in on the act, MTV suddenly got picky about showing Devo's videos, pointing the the charts as an excuse for not playing them because lack of promotion leading to poor charts isn't a self-fulfilling prophecy or anything.
Eventually, Warners would tire of declining sales and drop the band and when they tried another label, Enigma, it was just before it would fold. At which point the band packed it in with Mothersbaugh and "the Bobs" starting a scoring company doing movies for Wes Anderson movies and Pee-Wee's Playhouse and Casale becoming a commercial and music video director.
Running throughout DEVO is a constant frustration they had in getting their philosophical, ideological, and political points across when everyone just saw the goofy costumes and weird videos. While their clear Leftist bent is referenced, the movie doesn't harp on the subject beyond the typical Boomer hippie whining about Ronald Reagan beating Jimmy Carter and the obligatory atheist snark against religion. (i.e. the current resident of the White House is never evoked)
That they've occasionally reunited to tour - I saw them at NXNE in Toronto in 2011 - goes unmentioned and the beginning dwells quite a while on Kent State before moving to the band proper, so DEVO doesn't quite hit the mark between those who know little and big fans needs. I was never that into them, but I had no idea about their early years and political underpinnings. However, as they covered their commercial misfortunes, especially the banned-by-MTV video for "That's Good", I was familiar with much of what they discussed.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on Netflix.
For some reason there is no trailer for this. Weird.
I've been a fan of Samara Weaving for a while now. Unfortunately, due to my inconsistent completing of reviews (i.e. sometimes not even logging more than a date and score, sorry), you'd be hard pressed to tell I'd seen any of her movies beyond Mayhem, but she's had a remarkably consistent streak of projects including Ready or Not, Guns Akimbo, and The Babysitter (which I never even logged). I've called her "Margot Robbie's slightly-less-attractive little sister," but on further inspections she's hotter, looking like a cross between Robbie and Heather Graham.
So, when the trailer dropped for the Hulu Original movie Eenie Meanie promising a tale of a former wheelwoman for criminal activities - Babe Driver, if you will (yes, I'm proud of that) - I was onboard. The trailer loudly promotes it was produced by the pair who'd co-written all the Deadpool movies, implying profane hijinks will ensure. Unfortunately, the actual result is a frustratingly misbegotten tonal misfire which wastes what should've been a breakout performance from Weaving and a good time for the audience.
We first meet 14-year-old Edie Meaney (Elle Graham) in a flashback to 2007 when she walks to the Cleveland bar to drive her drunk parents (Steve Zahn and Chelsea Crisp) home. The cops pull them over and the combination of Edie being underage and unlicensed and Mom having a bunch of cocaine in her possession, which would be a third strike, so Dad encourages her to make a run for it as he taught her. We don't see what happens next, but are eventually told by inference it didn't go great for everyone.
We jump to the present where grown-up Edie (Weaving) is working as a bank teller. When inept robbers hit her branch and she's knocked out, she's taken to the hospital where she's informed that while she doesn't have a concussion, she is pregnant by her ex-boyfriend, John (Karl Glusman, The Bikeriders), a terminal loser for whom making poor choices is his default setting. When she goes to tell him of her being embabied, she finds him about to be whacked by unknown gunmen and helps his buck naked ass escape with her superior wheelman skills. Why was he in peril? Who freaking cares.
I have to pause to say that at this point only a half-hour into the movie, I said to the missus, "If this movie ends with her back in love with him, I'm scoring it a zero." This guy isn't a loveable loser, he's a L-O-S-E-R and frankly, I'm disappointed in her that she was shtupping this doofus. (Was Pete Davidson unavailable?)
To get this over with, he's $3 million in hock to crime boss Nico (Andy Garcia), so to save his worthless life Edie will need to be the wheelgirl for an audacious heist of a Dodge Charger with $3M in cash in the trunk being given as the prize for a poker tournament at the Hollywood Casino in Toledo. (Meaningless Factoid: I've driven past this place once, I think.) They have all the right connections on the inside and it's going to be a piece of cake, right? Well, not really, because betrayal, double crosses, blah-blah-woof-woof and Johnny being an effing psycho at the end.
As with all bad movies, the trouble begins with the schizophrenic script by writer-director Shawn Simmons (co-creator of the John Wick prequel series The Continental) which apparently the Deadpool writers who produced this didn't flag as ruinous. This mess rivals Alex Garland for face-planting in the third act, but the problems shoot through the entire length.
For example, we're desperately trying to understand WHY Edie is so stuck on Johnny and finally, well into the plot she explains that they met when he intervened to save her from being pimped out by her foster father when she was 15. Icky stuff, but OK, I get that. But why was she in foster care? Because as a visit to her father implies, that opening scene where she runs from the cops resulted in her mother being killed and her father paralyzed and wheelchair-bound. Yikes.
He'd allowed her to go into the system because he couldn't have cared for her, but when we visit him he has remarried and appears to have a young daughter Edie was unaware of meaning in the ensuing 17 years he restarted his life and never reached out to his first daughter. But he seems to know who Johnny is, so....ummmmm, whut?
The heist itself is laughable because one moment she's being chased by tons of cop cars, then it's as if they completely gave up and never attempted to pursue and capture the thief of $3M. It's harder to shake off a two-star wanted level in Grand Theft Auto than it is to get away with a casino robbery. No one has her on security cameras IN A CASINO, not to mention the eyewitnesses who saw her behind the wheel - how many hot blonde getaway drivers are there in Ohio? - so she gets away clean?
The way Eenie Meanie careens into a ditch is a shame because there are several genuinely laugh out loud moments and lines and if Simmons had just stayed in the comedic lane where colorful characters like a competing wheelman with an amusing backstory for his burns is appropriate. Or he could've gone gritty and dark. Pick a lane and stay in it because when most of the movie is amusing, the whammies at the end wipe out all the goodwill the movie had scraped together.
But the biggest victim is Weaving who really hits all the notes the Simmons asks her to only for it to not matter in the end. There's a sequel to Ready or Not coming next year and she'll be in a couple more upcoming movies which may be good. She deserves to be known as more than looking a lot like Margot Robbie, a role she played in Damien Chazelle's bloated misfire Babylon.
Despite Weaving and some decent practical car chases and laughs, the messy ending makes Eenie Meanie one to miss.
In the current trend of sequels arriving waaaaaaaaaaay after they would've been useful comes 28 Years Later, the third installment in the series of Danny Boyle & Alex Garland's series which began with 2002's 28 Days Later and 2007's 28 Weeks Later. While not technically a zombie series - the Rage virus infects and changes its victims into monsters within seconds - it's the source of the abominable fast-running zombie species which populated Zak Snyder's 2004 breakout remake of Dawn of the Dead.
After a prologue that seems utterly superfluous until the last minute, 28 Years Later is the story of Spike (Alfie Williams), a 12-year-old boy living on a small island off the coast of England with his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kick-Ass), and mother, Isla (Jodie Comer, Killing Eve). The entirety of England is quarantined and left to fend for themselves while the rest of the world apparently goes on as if animal rights lunatics hadn't unleashed a plague in their countries. The island is connected to the mainland via a causeway which is impassible any time other than low tide which helps in defending the small, but thriving community there.
Jamie decides it's time for Spike to make his first trip to the mainland and hopefully get his first zombie kill, a major rite of passage. The village elder doesn't approve because boys are usually 14 or 15 years-old when they make their first jaunt, but allows it after explaining the rules that anyone who goes out is on their own, no one will come to their rescue if anything happens.
The hunt goes OK until a pack of infected led by a larger, smarter Alpha chases them into the ruin of a house where they're stuck for the night due to the tide being in covering the causeway. From his perch in the attic, Spike sees a quarantine patrol ship & a fire off in the distance. He asks Jamie what it is, but dad demurs. When the house collapses, they barely make it back to their gate as the Alpha gains on them.
The town throws a celebration for Spike popping his zombie hunting cherry, but Jamie keeps exaggerating Spike's bravery & killing skills when he missed most shots and almost got them both killed. Disgusted, he leaves the party and spots dad getting super friendly with a townswoman not his wife. While it's somewhat understandable because Isla is racked by delirium & disorientation, mistaking days, people, referring to Spike as her father, Spike just sees his mother being cheated on.
When he gets home, he tells the family friend watching Isla about the fire and is told it may be the place of Dr. Kelson, a former general practitioner whose abode he'd approached some time after the plague and what he saw scared him from ever returning. But Spike hears "doctor" and believes his mother may be helped, so he bundles this infirm & not-totally-with-it woman up for a road trip farther than he barely survived before.
I've had a major problem with Garland's scripts for almost every movie he's written because he nearly invariably manages to crash a working movie in the third act or finale, but here he outdoes himself by making the plot lose me barely halfway through. The idea that this kid, who barely survived his first trip to the mainland is going to successfully shepherd his mother to find the doctor just didn't work. The sidebar of a military squad getting wiped out by infected is poorly premised. That there are now supersmart Alphas and families of zombies that look like giant waterlogged babies after 28 years is a huh? That there is a pregnant zombie is a double huh?
It all caps off with Spike choosing to stay on the mainland and almost get killed until he's saved by a weird group led by someone the audience probably forgot about and as soon as they're introduced the movie ends. WTF?!? Turns out a sequel, 28 Weeks Later: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DiCosta (last seen making the all-time biggest box office bomb of the MCU, The Marvels) from a Garland script, is coming in January. Oh, lovely.
Williams is very good as Spike, only annoying because the script writes him that way. He could have a future after this series. Taylor-Johnson and Comer are equally reigned in by the script, but do with it what they can. Fiennes is also good, but his character is just a weird caricature.
I've never been a huge fan of the 28 Days/Weeks series, especially the first one's third act. Part of the knock on 28 Years Later was that it's not more of the same, and while that could've been a good thing because it's unlikely conditions would be exactly the same after three decades, what Garland comes up with is just dumb. Why didn't the world try to evacuate people from the island? Symptoms manifest within seconds so you just put evacuees into a holding pen for a couple of minutes and everyone who wasn't trying to eat the rest gets to board a boat to safety.
The 4K HDR presentation results in some occasionally brilliant photography with hyperreal colors. The hyped bullet time effect created by using an array of iPhones around the subject is a gimmick that doesn't really land and there are some shots that appear shot on phone which gives a member berry for the low-fi original movie's look.
I'm sure we'll eventually catch the sequel when it hits video, but I'm not expecting much better than what 28 Years Later sets up.