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!
The names Stiller & Meara don't ring many bells with people younger than Boomers or old Gen Xers, but they were a prominent comedy duo akin to Mike Nichols and Elaine May who were their predecessors in the early-1960s before splitting to focus on their own careers as writers and directors (he directed The Graduate, Catch-22, and Working Girl, among others; she wrote Heaven Can Wait and The Birdcage, but also directed notorious flop Ishtar). To most people Jerry Stiller is best known for playing George Costanza's yelling father on Seinfeld and Anne Meara is less-remembered for her role on Archie Bunker's Place, the sequel/spin-off of All in the Family.
But their best known co-production is their younger child, Ben Stiller, and he memorializes his parents and indulges in a family therapy session on our time with the Apple TV+ original documentary Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost. Filmed in the wake of Stiller's death in 2020 (Meara passed in 2015), Ben and his sister Anne are sifting through their parent's Upper West Side apartment in preparation of selling. (Bought in 1953 for $11,000, it sold in 2021 for $5.9 million.) Because the elder Stiller seemingly tape-recorded everything from routine rehearsals to conversations along with filming Super 8 home movies, there is copious candid insight material available along with the dozens of Ed Sullivan Show and talk show clips.
Unfortunately for those seeking a thorough documentary of the couple, son Ben uses the project to also work out his personal issues with his life growing up in a home where it wasn't clear if Mom & Dad were yelling at each other because they were working out a routine or arguing and how he almost almost wrecked his marriage to Christine Taylor because he was spending so much time working and being away from his family including a son and daughter, same as his parents had done.
While it's nice that the Fauci Flu Scamdemic helped repair his marriage and he and his sister were able to process their parents lives, it comes at the expense of us outsiders who don't really care. He doesn't make clear when certain events are happening or brings up something like Meara's alcoholism becoming an issue, but then letting it drop until she finally gets sober much later in life after making it seem she'd dried out earlier.
While Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost manages to get some of the parents story across, if feels like more could've been included if Ben had remembered this wasn't about him.
Like all Apple TV+ originals, it's presented in 4K Dolby Vision and Atmos audio, but neither are really noticeable and these sorts of content (documentaries) don't require it.
Since our last movie was the waaaaaaaaaay overdue sequel, Spinal Tap 2: The End Continues, coming 41 years after its original film, it was time to check in with Freakier Friday, the 22 years later sequel to the 2003 Freaky Friday which itself was the second remake of 1976's Jodie Foster version. While Lindsey Lohan had garnered acclaim for her work in the 1997 remake of The Parent Trap (filmed when she only 11 years old), it was the tag team of Freaky Friday and Mean Girls the following year, along with a great hosting shot on SNL that rocketed her to mega-stardom. Which she then immediately squandered by hanging out with Paris Hilton, doing drugs, and becoming a nightmare to work and having a long string of bombs pretty much sending her to Career Purgatory. (I really laid into her in my 2011 Mean Girls Blu-ray review. Hit link for harshness.)
Now a 39-year-old mother who lives in Dubai with her Kuwaiti financier husband, she's back to collect a check from Disney's constant rehashing of their already remade and sequeled to death IPs with her co-star Jamie Lee Curtis, who's been on a career tear lately as she's added two more parts of her EGOT with an Emmy for her guest appearance on The Bear and an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once to go with her True Lies Golden Globe (which she should've been Oscar nommed).
The movie wastes no time infodumping the audience and raising questions beginning with who was the sperm donor for Anna Coleman's "choice to be a single mother" to her daughter Harper (Julia Butters), a rebellious teenager who loves to surf. Tess Coleman (Curtis) is a podcaster/author/therapist who's there to help raise Harper while Anna works as a music producer, having left her rock band dreams behind.
At school, Harper is annoyed by the snobby new student from England, Lily Reyes (Sophia Hammons), who's her lab partner and when an experiment blows up on them, their parents are summoned leading to Anna meeting Lily's father, Eric (Manny Jacinto), instantly falling in love with him and their becoming engaged six months later to the mutual horror of their daughters.
At Anna's bachelorette party, both Anna and Tess and Harper and Lily receive palm readings from a dodgy mystic, Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer), after which they all feel an earthquake that no one else does. (Ruh-roh.) The next morning, everyone wakes up to discover they've swapped bodies - Anna and Harper switch mother-daughter style like the last time and Tess and Lily switch with Lily traumatized by being in an old woman's body while Tess enjoys not aching and farting while moving around. (And the audience learns that accents are tied to bodies, not people as Tess keeps Lily's posh accent while Lily-in-Tess doesn't.)
Since they've gone through this before, Anna and Tess tell Harper and Lily to pretend to be them while they run around prepping for Anna's wedding and trying to keep Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), a pop artist Anna's working with on an even keel after being dumped by her pop star boyfriend. The daughters use their body time to try and split their parents up so the wedding doesn't happen. Will they succeed or will they learn to understand each other and get their bodies back? Duh.
I vaguely remember seeing the first Freaky Friday ages ago - I see I own the DVD, but never upgraded to Blu-ray - but can't remember much other than I liked it OK. I didn't revisit it before watching the sequel, so a lot of the callbacks like Anna's crush, Jake (Chad Michael Murray), having the hots for Tess (a duh thing when Curtis was ~42, but questionable at 64) and that Tess's husband, Ryan (Mark Harmon), was the wedding Anna was trying to break up, didn't land much with me.
The tone is really frenetic and silly, but as a PG-rated Disney flick, I guess that's what the kiddies want: By-choice single motherhood. Not to harp on this, but why not just kill off Harper's baby daddy or have them divorced so there's the irony of trying to bust up Anna's marriage when Harper comes from a broken home. Eric is a widower and Lily's feeling that Daddy is going to forget her mother hovers over things. Come on, Disney, either go all-in or stop fooling around.
As for the body swapped performances, with four people involved there's less time to develop the characters' behaviors. As mentioned previously, why does Tess in Lily's body have the accent but not vice versa? Tess suddenly having an English accent then trying to squelch that would've been amusing. The subplots about Ella the pop singer and misunderstanding what a song Anna wrote is about isn't very compelling and the final concert scene begs questions about why Ella seems like a guest at her own show?
While there are a few good laughs in Freakier Friday there is a lack of focus to the script and overly frenetic direction by Nisha Ganatra (nothing you've heard of) which makes it disposable. If fact, the next day I remembered that we'd watched some TV shows and SNL, but completely forgot we'd watched this beforehand.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming (probably Mouse+).
"Hello, Cleveland!" "[Boston] isn't a big college town." "Dubly." "It was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf." "What's wrong with being sexy? Sex-IST." "None more black." And of course, "These go to 11." If you recognize those quotes, then you're obviously clued into - even if you haven't actually seen - the legendary 1984 mockumentary (mock documentary) This Is Spinal Tap. While not the first mockumentary, TIST blew the format wide open paving the way for co-star/co-writer Christopher Guest's mocks like A Mighty Wind, Best In Show, and Waiting For Guffman and even TV series like The Office and Parks & Recreation. The sorely overlooked rap mockumentary Fear of a Black Hat (due to hang-ups in distribution leading to Chris Rock's merely OK CB4 to beat it to theaters and mindshare) rivals TIST for sheer faux verisimilitude.
Co-written and directed by Rob Reiner making his directorial debut, Guest along with co-stars and co-writers Harry Shearer and Michael McKean told the story of faltering rock band Spinal Tap as they attempted to promote their latest album, Smell the Glove. As tensions between guitarists and boyhood friends Nigel Tufnel (Guest in a Jeff Beck shag haircut) and David St. Hubbins (McKean) grow, shows get canceled and venue sizes shrink - or as the band's manager Ian Faith (Tony Hendra) puts it, "Their appeal is becoming more selective." - the band teeters on implosion before pulling it together at the end.
While Spinal Tap in real life put out two subsequent albums in 1992 and 2009 and made occasional festival and charity concert appearances, what fans really wanted was a sequel. Finally, a whopping 41 years later we got Spinal Tap 2: The End Continues and while it's not a bad movie, it's a perfectly adequate and unnecessary stroll through the nostalgia bogs where the Member Berries are grown.
The hook for ST2 is that Ian Faith has died and his daughter, Hope (Kerry Godliman), has inherited his effects including dad's contract with Tap where she discovers the band was obligated to perform one more show. Unfortunately, the band had broken up 15 years previously due to some unknown beef between Nigel and David and the members had gone on to other pursuits. Nigel and his girlfriend are running a cheese and guitar shop; David is doing scores for true crime podcasts and hold music, and bassist Derek Smalls (Shearer) has opened a glue museum.
Reluctantly they reconvene in New Orleans to rehearse for the gig with their keyboardist, Caucasian Jeff (C. J. Vanston, who is the band's real life producer and keyboardist since 1989), while trying to find a drummer who can play and isn't afraid of the band's poor luck with keeping them alive, finally ending up with Didi Crockett (actually pro drummer Valerie Franco).
From there we're treated to an amiable sequence of scenes and schticks plus cameos from real life musicians including Paul McCartney, Questlove, Elton John and a pair of drummers who I shant spoil who turn down the gig while pushing the other with the clear implication that they expect the drummer curse to get the other. Overhanging everything is whatever drove David and Nigel apart and frankly when that thread is paid off, it's not that great or funny a reason.
The actors are now in their late-70s, early-80s and while I've recently seen several concerts with septuagenarian performers like Devo, B-52's, Lene Lovich, Alice Cooper and Rob Halford from Judas Priest who absolutely rocked it, the Tapsters are distractingly aged and the overall energy is on the mild side.
All the callbacks to the first movie and it's soundtrack (with a couple of brief references to songs from their Break Like The Wind album) weigh things down because it's all Member Berries ("You 'member? I 'member.") That McCartney's scene where he points out a weak part of a new song David is working up being followed by David complaining where does SIR PAUL McCARTNEY get off dissing his song and being "toxic" is predictable even when it's mildly amusing. The cameos from Paul Schafer and Fran Drescher (as label reps Artie Fufkin and Bobbie Flekman, respectively) are perfunctory.
The utter ruination of the music business by file sharing then rapacious streaming services like Spotify isn't mentioned nor the rise of K-Pop, artists being signed off Tik Tok, and many other modern issues afflicting those seeking careers in music aren't mined for humor belying the Boomer-centric viewpoints of the creators. Their idea of biting satire is a somewhat toothless addition of Simon Howler (Chris Addison) - a cross between Pop Idol and American Idol creator Simon Fuller and the latter's snarky t-shirt model judge Simon Cowell - as a concert promoter incapable of processing music whose bright idea is for at least one of the band members to die during the show. Har-har, music biz suits are dumb.
I chalk up the general flatness of Spinal Tap 2: The End Continues to age and entitlement. When they made the first one, there were no expectations because the makers were basically nobodies. Reiner was Meathead from All in the Family; Guest was connected to various National Lampoon stage and recording projects; McKean was Lenny on Laverne & Shirley; and Shearer was a featured player on Saturday Night Live.
Post-TIST everyone's career took off with Reiner posting a phenomenal run of all-time classics including Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, A Few Good Men, and Misery before imploding with North, a movie so bad that when i came home from the dollar show and woke my mother up because I needed to talk to someone to process the horror I'd just survived. But that was 1992 and Reiner hasn't made a good movie since (reminds me of how Robert Zemekis was never good after winning Oscars for Forrest Gump) and while advancing to "OK" level is an improvement, it's also a bit of a grasp for past glories.
As for the rest, comfort breeds complacency and the hunger that fueled the original just isn't there. While it's not depressing and cringe seeing these geezers attempt to recapture that Spinal Tap spark, this is a movie fans of the OG will watch once then return to their new Criterion 4Ks of TIST. Half as good, Spinal Tap 2: The End Continues doesn't go to 11, it goes to...
Score: 5.5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.
And no, I didn't score it that way to make the joke. I just realized 5.5 was half of 11.
Since I'm functionally illiterate I don't read much and because I'm a man I don't follow the best-selling books that women snap up then get made into movies like It Ends With Us or The Woman on the Train, but there's got to be a section in bookstores called "Trashy Beach Reads," right? RIGHT?!? Because that's where the novel which shares the title of this week's Netflix Original The Woman in Cabin 10 would've been shelved.
Keira Knightley (Natalie Portman's Queen Amadala decoy in Star Wars - Episode One - The Phantom Menace) stars as Laura "Lo" Blacklock, an investigative journalist for The Guardian who is traumatized by her last story and thus accepts an invitation for what should be a puff piece where she will ride on the superyacht of billionaire Richard Bullmer (Guy Pearce, LA Confidential) from England to Norway where he will be announcing a foundation dedicated to curing cancer because his wife, Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli), has Stage 4 leukemia.
Also on the yacht are a select handful of fellow Very Rich Folk and influencers (whose characters are so stock generic that "she's on Ted Lasso" is a distinguishing characteristic) as well as Lo's ex-boyfriend, Ben (David Ajala, Star Trek: Discovery), a photographer in Bullmer's employ. He's trying to charm her back, but she's not having it.
After setting sail, she is summoned by Anne to advise her on a speech she intends to give at the party announcing that all the money would be given to an independent group, effectively cutting Richard off. Anne knows she's nearing the end and has stopped taking the medications. Because she easily tires, they agree to reconvene the next day.
While returning to her room, Lo doges Ben by ducking into Cabin 10 (roll credits!) next to hers (convenient how the doors don't lock) where she encounters a young blonde woman (Gitte Witt) in a hoodie coming from the bathroom. After an awkward moment, Lo leaves and goes to her cabin.
That night, she's awakened by a disturbance next door, raised voices & sounds of violence, culminating with a splash in the water. Rushing onto her balcony, she sees a woman in the water and raises the alarm, causing the crew to rush to investigate, but they find nothing and start giving her the side eye, blaming her PTSD over a subject of her last story drowning to trigger a nightmare. Also, Cabin 10 is supposed to be empty, so clearly Lo is imagining things.
As Lo tries to figure out who this woman was, Anne seems different as well, complaining of how fatigued the drugs are making her and forgetting that she was supposed to meet with Lo about her speech.
To say the movie's clue breadcrumbs are the size of bread loaves would be an understatement, though when the Big Twist is revealed halfway through, I didn't see it coming. But it then turns the rest of the movie into how will Lo expose the plot versus how will the villain(s?) get away with it. The denouement is absolutely bonkers, raising the question of how the villain thought they were going to carry on after what transpired.
Running a tidy 95-minutes, The Woman in Cabin 10 doesn't overstay its welcome or pretend to matter more than it does. It's a trashy beach read without the sand getting everywhere.
The Dolby Vision and Atmos presentation is fine, but unexceptional due to the most steely gray color palette and predominance of darker scenes. There are a few moments of bright specular highlights or overt heigh channel usage, but not so much that those not paying the top tier freight to Netflix will miss it.
2021's Nobody was a sleeper hit continuing Bob Odenkirk's odd career trajectory from Funny Guy (SNL, Mr. Show) to Serious Actor Guy (Better Call Saul) to Aging Action Guy. As Hutch, the former assassin who forsook that life to be a suburban schlub dad, Odenkirk was the least likely action hero since Liam Neeson in the Taken series.
Well, Hollyweird being what it is and anything that makes money gets repeated even when no one really asked for more, along comes Nobody 2 which finds Hutch having trouble spending much family time with the wife and kids because he's constantly being sent on assignments by the Barber (Colin Salmon, The Lazarus Project) to pay back the $50 million in cash he burned in the last movie. With his wife, Becca (Connie Nielsen, Wonder Woman), getting frustrated and not seeing his kids, he decides it's time for a family vacation to Plummerville, a town with an amusement park his father, David (Christopher Lloyd, Taxi), took him as a child.
Of course, nothing goes easy for Hutch as when his son gets into an altercation with a townie boy which escalates into a situation where Hutch beats the tar out of an arcade worker, he finds that Plummerville is a place where everyone is crooked including the park operator, Wyatt (John Ortiz, American Fiction), to the the corrupt Sheriff, Abel (Colin Hanks, really looking like his old man these days). But they're just cogs in the machine as both work for crime boss Lendina (Sharon Stone in such a weird performance that the missus didn't recognize her).
As things escalate, Lendina and her soldiers head to town to kill Hutch, his family, and everyone else thus leading to some alliances with former foes and an ending at the park which gave me flashbacks to The A-Team (the old TV show, not the movie which no one remembers despite an A-list cast).
I didn't review the original Nobody, but scored it a 6/10, catch on cable, and while the action beats here have their moments, there's a general going-through-the-motions vibe about Nobody 2 that really makes it feel like there wasn't a burning need to tell more stories of Hutch's life, but someone figured they could make some money. With a higher budget and a insufficient box office gross, it looks like Nobody 2 should be the end of the franchise.
If you've watched everything else and are looking for something to have on while doomscrolling your phone, this is a movie suited for multitasking. Or just watch the trailer to get the gist of it.
In the wake of 1994's Pulp Fiction, Hollweird went into overdrive trying to make quirky crime movies leading to a lot of third-rate Tarantino imitators resulting in mediocre cult flicks like The Boondocks Saints or launching careers of overrated directors like Guy Ritchie with Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. So, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Five it's weird to see Darren Aronofsky (Requiem For A Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan) wading in these waters with a movie set in 1998 that tries to feel like a 1998 Pulp Fiction knockoff, Caught Stealing.
Austin Butler as Hank Thompson, a bartender living on NYC's Lower East Side who is tormented by nightmares reliving the auto accident which ended his professional baseball career before it started and killed his best friend. He's got a FWB situation going on with a cute paramedic, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), but his life isn't really going anywhere.
His British next door neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), needs return to London to tend to his ailing father and ropes Hank into watching his cat. One day, he hears pounding at Russ's door and when he goes to see what the hubbub's about, a pair of Russian thugs decide to savagely beat Hank, injuring him so badly he loses a kidney. The thugs eventually break into Russ's apartment and narcotics Det. Roman (Regina King) informs Hank that Russ was a drug dealer connected to a pair of Hasidic Jew brothers, Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully Drucker (Vincent D'Onofrio), who are warring with the Russians and their Puerto Rican associate, Colorado (Benito Martínez Ocasio, bka Bad Bunny).
If this sounds convoluted to you, it's even worse in practice as it devolves into various twists, double-and-triple-crosses, deaths, etc. to the point you don't even care to keep track of who's doing what to whom. Everyone is so "colorful" but the time where "colorful" was enough wore out its welcome around the time we got sick of hearing about the Y2K Bug.
I'm not sure what attracted Aronofsky to this project. His last film was 2022's The Whale which won Brendan Fraser an Oscar, rebounding from the flop which was 2017's Mother! (which I liked - 6/10 - and actually caught the Biblical allegory which escaped many), but he's not suited for the tonal tightrope you need to walk to make something like Caught Stealing work without becoming chaotic or drowning in cruelty.
California wildfires are as common as bottles of baby oil at a Diddy party and one of the largest, costliest, and deadliest was the 2018 Camp Fire where 85 people died, nearly $17 billion in damage was done, over 55,000 people were displaced as several towns and cities were burned to the ground. In the midst of this rapidly spreading firestorm was The Lost Bus, now a heavily-fictionalized docudrama by Paul Greengrass (Captain Phillips, United 93, three Jason Bourne sequels) about the school bus full of kids trying to get to safety.
Matthew McConaughey stars as Kevin McKay, a school bus driver with so many problems I suspected the most dishonest screenwriter in Hollyweird, Paul Haggis, was involved. He's a divorced dad whose estranged father recently died bringing him back home to Paradise, CA where his invalid mother (played by McConaughey's real mother) and surly son (played by his real son, Levi) live. He has to put his cancer-ridden dog down and his bus driving job seems on shaky ground due to his screwups which put him on the wrong side of the dispatcher, Ruby (Ashlie Atkinson, The Gilded Age).
On the morning of November 8, 2018, poorly maintained power lines spark in the high winds and set the tinder-dry undergrowth ablaze. Kevin is trying to balance getting his charges delivered to school while trying to get medicine back home to his sick son while Ruby is hectoring him to get the bus in for maintenance. As the blaze spreads, evacuation orders go out and 22 children at a school whose parents aren't able to come get them need a ride. Kevin is the only one in the area so he volunteers to pick them up in hopes it will earn some points with Ruby.
The class and their teacher, Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera, Ugly Barbie), get on board and of course things rapidly begin to fall apart as the roads are jammed with evacuees, communication with Ruby falters then fails, and the roaring blazes close in around them. It doesn't help that their first destination was closed and evacuated without their knowledge due to lost communication, so they're scrambling to find an alternate route to what seems to be safety.
Of course, they find time for Kevin and Mary to discuss their lives and disappointments while waiting for the blaze to consume them and as with the opening scenes, they ring false as Hollywood inventions to pad the run time and provide a respite between the thrilling action sequences. The problem with those is that apparently they never really happened and pretty much everything other than Kevin and Mary being real people and a bus full of kids needing to flee is invention including the "lost" aspect; they were stuck in traffic, but in constant contact.
But bolstering the fiction is the portrayal of the firefighters led by Ray Martinez (Yul Vazquez, Petey on Severance) and their doomed attempts to fight the fire culminating in their realizing there was nothing to be done but evacuate the population. Vazquez is so believable I wondered if Greengrass had cast real participants; I'm sure a lot of the extras are real firefighters; they look like real people.
I knocked a point off the score for The Lost Bus because of its overly-fictionalized plot and forced melodrama, but it's still a worthy watch as an action adventure flick. Perhaps they should've just gone fully fictional so the changes weren't so jarring.
