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a while and a dozen intervening movies, I couldn't remember enough specifics to properly review them, so they remained unpublished.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. ;-)
James Cameron's 1986 magnum opus Aliens was his announcement to the universe that The Terminator wasn't a fluke and he was going to be a cinematic force to be reckoned with. I remember seeing it at the show then telling my then-girlfriend that "It was like being shoved through a screen door...without the door breaking." (Even as a young lad I had a way with words. May not have been a good way, but it was a way.)
Back in the good old days of the Aughts when DVDs came with massive special features packages, the 2003 Alien Quadrilogy box set of the (then) four Alien movies included Superior Firepower: Making Aliens, a 190-minute long documentary by Charles de Lauzirika which combined behind-the-scenes footage shot during the filming with interviews taped about 17 years later with the participants. It's been ages since I watched it (probably in 2003 when I got the set), but de Lauzirika is renowned for his production documentaries including Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner which accompanied Blade Runner: The Final Cut and I recall it was good (I've started rewatching it) and comprehensive.
But director Ian Nathan felt there was more to be told so, backed by a massive crowdfunding campaign, he has made 2024's Aliens Expanded, clocking in at a daunting 4 hours, 42 minutes (hough the actual content is 4h 15m and the rest a credits roll of the legions of donors with brief testimonials that I'm guessing higher tier donations purchased) and features the participation of pretty much the entire living cast and key filmmakers including Cameron, producer Gale Ann Hurd, various production personnel, as well as numerous superfans, novelists, scientists, and pop culture experts to comment on the legacy of Aliens after nearly four decades. (Also participating is Charles de Lauzirika, upping the Inception quotient!)
If you're already a superfan of the film, there will be a lot of familiar material like how Hicks was originally played by James Remar until early in production he made the poor life choice of buying a speedball (cocaine & heroin) from an undercover cop, necessitating Hurd to scramble to get Remar deported rather than end up in slam for years. But there are a lot of new details like Cameron's dustup with the tea cart lady and tidbits from the cast like how the initials on the Colonial Marines' monitors were the actors first initial (e.g. Vasquez is "Vasquez J" for actress Jeanette Goldstein).
While the running time seems excessive, it's actually quite manageable by a chapter structure where the movie is gone through sequentially with sidebars "transmissions" for related subjects like the connection to Joseph Campbell (both Alien's Nostromo and Aliens' Sulaco came from Campbell books) and a nice tribute to Bill Paxton whose Hudson had so many quotable lines. ("Game over, man! Game over!") I watched a few chapters per session, nibbling through it over a couple of weeks.
It's a testament to Aliens Expanded's editing and focus that there's nothing that I thought was too extraneous or unnecessary. Having every bit player whose names you probably didn't even remember sounding off could've been a drag, but their comments and insights tie together nicely. And with nearly 40 years of the film's legacy to assay, the perspectives of what the movie meant beyond its own story are interesting.
And I'd really like to commend Nathan for heading off one of my biggest pet peeves about most documentaries by putting up title cards for every person EVERY time they are shown. Most documentaries introduce speakers once and then the viewer has to remember who they are. With over three dozen cast members, podcasters, commentators, etc. participating it could've been confusing as to who that non-cast member person is, but Nathan just puts up a friendly reminder every. Single. Time. Huzzah!
In length and comprehensiveness, Aliens Expanded reminded me of another four-plus hour documentary, RoboDoc: The Creation of RoboCop, which also interviewed everyone - and I mean EVERYONE down to the woman being assaulted whom RoboCop shoots the guy's crotch through her skirt and the bimbos at Bob Morton's house that Boddicker dismisses ("Bitches, leave.") - including director Paul Verhoeven and stars Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, etc. about that seminal cult classic's production. I didn't review it because they broke it up into four hourish-long episodes, but it's definitely worth watching for fans of RoboCop just as Aliens Expanded joins Superior Firepower to form a tag-team 7-1/2 hour making-of fest.
Score: 9/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Viewed on AMC+)
I don't know why Sigourney Weaver isn't shown in the trailer, but she's in the movie plenty. Odd.
Depending on whether you want to love or hate Paul Feig, he's either the creator of the cult fave TV series Freaks & Geeks (which launched the careers of Linda Cardellini, James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Martin Starr, Busy Phillips and more) or the director of the divisive, fanbaiting disaster Ghostbusters: Answer The Call (more accurately Lady Ghostbusters). But for the most part he has specialized in female-fronted comedies like Bridesmaids, The Heat and a trash favorite of ours, A Simple Favor (and it's less great sequel, Another Simple Favor).
So, the news that he was making a movie of one of those trashy novels popular with wine moms starring current vavoom It Girl Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria, Anyone But You) and former curvy light comedy performer (Mean Girls, Mamma Mia) turned ingenue (In Time, Chloe) now Oscar-nominated (Mank) and Golden Globe-winning (The Dropout) Amanda Seyfried, hopes were high for another kicky, kinky, trash-camp funfest like A Simple Favor. While it doesn't hit those heights, it's because it's another beast entirely.
Sweeney stars as Millie Calloway, a young woman on parole for a crime not immediately explained, but it'd been ten years off the job market for her. She's living in her car and desperate for employment to satisfy her parole officer when she interviews with Nina Winchester (Seyfried), a wealthy Long Island woman with a husband, Andrew (Brandon Sklenar, Drop), and daughter, Cece (Indiana Elle). It's a gorgeous showplace mansion home complete with creepy Italian groundskeeper, Enzo (Michele Morrone, Another Simple Favor) and a concerning attic bedroom for Millie as it's a live-in position, checking off the box for her parole.
She gets the job, but when she returns the next day to begin work, the previously spotless, Architectural Digest-worthy home is trashed, with dishes in the sink, clothes all over, etc. Nina is working on a PTA speech and the next day accuses Millie of having stolen it. Millie overhears other PTA mothers whispering about her and another nanny at Cece's ballet class has more tidbits on the backstory of the Winchester family.
The erratic behavior culminates in Nina asking Millie to get theater tickets and a hotel suite for her and Andrew the following weekend, but when they arrive, freaks out and demands Millie explain why she'd spend all that money when she knew they were taking the kid to arts camp that weekend and the spending would come out of her pay, which Millie can't afford. Andrew reassures her that she won't have to pay, but the situation is growing untenable.
When Nina decides to take Cece herself, Millie suggests Andrew should go to the show and he counters with why don't you come with me and wear the nice clothes Nina gifted you? To the shock of no one the trip to the city for dinner and a show and separate rooms at the hotel results in a longer trip to Poundtown. And to even less surprise, Nina knows about it, accuses Millie of stealing the clothes and her car and threatens to have her sent back to prison.
It's at this point the plot pulls a Gone Girl switcheroo and changes POV to recast everything we've seen and what it meant. While the weirdness of certain behaviors like Andrew's obsession with Nina's roots (as in hair, not her being descended from slaves) were waving red flags, what transpires after the switch is sometimes hard to believe like why would you want to disfigure someone you planned on keeping around?
Fortunately, Feig keeps the tonal train on the track though the overall running time could've been trimmed 10-20 minutes. Sweeney is good (exceptional of we're grading on cleavage), but the true star of the show is Seyfried as her performance has to capture a lot of different personas, though the way the script presents things has some large plot holes she has to leap over. And the way they set up an obvious sequel - which has already been greenlit as the film grossed over $350M globally on a $35M budget - raises questions of what the plot will be.
While The Housemaid isn't quite the top shelf trash it aspires to be, it's still respectable enough trash to merit a watch, preferably while heckling at home with a wingman.
I've never seen the original 1997 Anaconda so I had no nostalgia or foreknowledge of whatever meta humor the 2025 reboot/reimagining/parody(?) also titled Anaconda was going to deliver. I have the original in my digital library (probably came with a bundle of Sony/Columbia titles I'd bought), but it's remained unseen. Whatever charms the J.Lo/Ice Cube/Jon Voight original has are currently lost on me.
For this go-around we have Jack Black as Doug, a wedding videographer who wants to do more creative work than the field allows, and Paul Rudd as Griff, a bit part actor who once appeared on four episodes of S.W.A.T, but is currently too dumb to understand that as Doctor #3 on a medical TV show, his bad attempts at doing accents or wild readings are not appreciated, leading to him being sacked.
He was also Doug's childhood best friend and as kids they'd made a home movie called Quatch (short for Sasquatch aka Bigfoot) which Griff brings over to a surprised birthday party thrown by Doug's wife, Malie (Ione Skye). Watching their little epic at the party brings back the dreams they'd had of going to LA to make movies together.
After the party, Griff tells Doug that he's obtained the rights to Anaconda from the author of the original movie's source material and suggests they make a reboot/requel/reimaging of it, making it on a shoestring (because the bank countered their ask for a couple of million dollars with an approval for $9400) with their pal Kenny (Steve Zahn) as the cameraman and Griff's recently divorced ex-girlfriend Claire (Thandiwe Newton) as the ingenue.
Arriving in the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil, they meet up with Carlos (Selton Mello), the handler of the large anaconda they'll be using for the shoot. They also meet Ana (Daniela Melchior), who claims to be the daughter of the man whose riverboat they'd rented to take them out to shoot in the jungle, but is actually someone we've seen chased by men and who stole the boat's keys from the passed out captain in a bar.
The filming goes well until it comes time to shoot a scene with the snake where Griff panics, flinging the snake off him into the water, where it is killed by the boat's propeller. (Why the boat was under power makes no sense. It seemed anchored and there was no engine noise. Because movie, I suppose.) That night, Griff and Carlos go into the jungle looking for another snake unaware that the giant titular CGI anaconda is out there.
As shooting continues, Doug adds Ana to the film and Griff begins to get bitter about the spotlight being usurped. Of course things escalate as the true nature of Ana and Griff's holding of the rights are exposed, leading to a big finale with obligatory meta cameos.
Anaconda's co-writer and director is Tom Gormican whose last two movies were 2022's weird meta Nicolas Cage film The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent which featured "Nic Cage" being hassled by a younger Nic Cage circa Wild At Heart, and 2024's Netflix flick Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (both unreviewed, but getting 6.5/10 and 7/10, catch on streaming/cable scores) so you'd think he'd be able to handle both a long-delayed sequel/reboot with meta overtones well. And if you thought that, you'd be wrong.
It starts off promisingly enough, setting up the premise of middle-aged guys from Buffalo whose lives are stable and adequate, but pine for the dreams of their youth to come true and have to decide how hard they want to chase them. But that instinct is bumping against the needs of a broad Christmas Day comedy release needing action and trailer moments. While there are a few big laughs, there are way more stretches where the proceeding lag in between set pieces giving the viewer plenty of time to ponder where all the food and drinks this floating resort has come from when the captain couldn't stay sober enough to stay conscious or at least put the boat's keys in his pocket rather than laying on the bar.
With a weak script, it doesn't really matter how the performances are. Black is his usual noisy self; Rudd is more tightly wired and finally beginning to age; Zahn is also his usual dumb guy; with the sort of revelation in Newtown playing a somewhat dowdy middle-aged American woman reconnecting with an old flame.
The Dolby Vision presentation has good color and black levels for the night scenes, but the overall visual style is unremarkable.
Anaconda openly cops to its creative bankruptcy, but doesn't do enough to prevent succumbing to the mediocrity which is standard in too many movies these days. If only they'd really leaned into the goof instead of trying, and failing, to squeeze the premise into new shapes.
In conjunction with the 10th Anniversary of David Bowie's return to his homeworld, Britain's Channel 4 has produced Bowie: The Final Act which primarily focuses on his life from the late-1980s when he was in a post- Let's Dance career slump and started his band project Tin Machine, through his joining the infinite just two days after releasing his final album, Blackstar, on his 69th birthday.
The theme of the doc is that Bowie was a great friend or collaborator until he didn't need you anymore and it's told by jumping back and forth in his career timeline contrasting the way he dispatched Tin Machine after two unloved albums - one brutal UK press review made him cry - and the way he sprung on the Spiders From Mars during their tour finale for the Ziggy Stardust that he was packing in the band or how he played the first Glastonbury Festival in 1971 at an ungodly 5 am slot to his career reigniting set at the 2000 festival which almost didn't happen at several steps along the way.
Using interviews with friends and collaborators from his earliest days to the engineer for his last two albums, including guitarists Reeves Gabrels, Earl Slick, keyboardist Michael Garson, producer Tony Visconti, his tour manager, various UK press and radio/video presenters, etc.
Previous documentaries David Bowie: Five Years (which covered the span following the end of Ziggy Stardust era through his Berlin Trilogy) which came out shortly after his death and David Bowie: The Last Five Years (which covers his last two albums and the Lazarus stage show) the following year were quite comprehensive for those periods and Bowie: The Final Act works to fill in a chunk of the time in between. By no means comprehensive - His Earthling album gets some time as does Reality, due to it being his last tour when he had a heart attack and retired for 9 years, but he had four other albums which are Memory Holed even though Outside was followed by a legendary tour with Nine Inch Nails - it's still a tidy worthy watch.
Bowie: The Final Act is currently available to watch on Channel 4's website, but only for residents of the UK and Ireland. Even alternate means of obtaining content are sparse as what was out there disappeared forcing new sources to be located.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently unavailable outside the UK)
It's the stuff of urban legend: Someone built a secret apartment in a shopping mall in Rhode Island. Except it's not a myth, but a stranger than fiction tale of a bunch of artists who collaborated on something more than a prank, but less than the name implies. Thus we have Secret Mall Apartment, a documentary by Jeremy Workman that recently popped up on Netflix.
The Providence Place Mall was built and opened in 1999 to revitalize the depressed former industrial areas of Providence, RI. As part of this gentrification a neighboring block of tenements and artist spaces were condemned, displacing artists, musicians, etc. in order to open a shopping center near the mall.
One of those artists was Michael Townsend, who had a penchant for art in odd places like an elaborate statue installation underneath railway bridges and in tunnels where no one would find them without being informed how to locate it. While exploring areas inside the mall in 2003, he and friends came across a space that was in a sort of void between parts of the mall left due to the odd shapes of the building on the oddly-shaped parcel.
Intrigued, they decided to convert this space into an ersatz apartment, buying furniture from the Salvation Army and lugging up a steep staircase to where the area was. A couch, table, china cabinet(??), a Playstation and TV, it was set up as spot to discuss their artistic endeavors. They'd use the food court for food and use the mall's bathrooms. Realizing that the area was open for anyway to stumble over, they decide to enclose it with a cinder block wall and a locked door.
Throughout they documented what they did with a tiny point-and-shoot camera that had rudimentary video capability and could be concealed in an Altoid's tin and their footage raises serious questions as to how terrible the mall's security was? They would move huge pieces of furniture through a door that's alarm would go off when opened and they even got stopped by a mobile unit patrolling the parking structure while they were offloading cinder blocks for their wall.
While most of modern "art" is rubbish, what's interesting about this group - all of whom escaped accountability when Michael was ultimately caught, but come forward for the first time for the documentary, including Townsend's ex-wife - is that they focused on projects like tape art, using masking tape to create murals in hospitals as well as memorials for 9/11 and Oklahoma City bombing victims. The apartment was their clubhouse and they weren't looking to cause harm or rob the stores.
While Secret Mall Apartment goes a bit long on the art project stuff, the group come off as bright and likeable, probably because their art was positive and not the usual nihilistic agitprop that's pawned off as "art" these days.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Netflix)
Bryan Fuller's name is associated with a string of beloved, borderline cult classic TV series such as Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, American Gods, and Hannibal which he created over the past two decades, but it is only now that he crosses over in to movies with his directorial debut, Dust Bunny, a bonkers fantasy horror movie that completely tanked at the box office with less than $1M grossed, but will probably become a minor word-of-mouth cult classic when it hits streaming.
Aurora (Sophie Sloan) is a young girl who takes the whole "the floor is lava" thing to the extreme, pushing herself around the apartment on a large metal hippopotamus statue on wheels with a broom like an oar. She parkours on the furniture to get to her bed and sleeps on the fire escape outside her window because she's convinced there is a monster living under the floorboards that will eat her. She repeatedly tells her parents to stay off the floor and while they assure her there's nothing under the bed, one night there are horrible sounds and she awakes to an empty, trashed apartment, her parents gone. She seems oddly calm about it though.
One night while on the fire escape she noticed a neighbor - listed as Intriguing Neighbor on IMDB and 5B (as in the apartment number) on Wikipedia, played by Mads Mikkelsen - down the hall leaving and going off into the night, so the next night she follows him into Chinatown where she sees him kill a dragon. (Actually, a Chinese dragon parade thing with Triad soldiers inside it.) After her parents disappear, she steals a church collection plate to get money to hire 5B to kill the monster under her bed.
Naturally, he thinks this is ludicrous, but when a pair of assassins show up to kill the girl and are apparently eaten by something, he begins to wonder what's going on? He meets a woman, Laverne (Sigourney Weaver acting like Parker Posey), at a Chinese restaurant with a giant fish tank with a large shark in it and it's revealed she's involved and there are more killers on the way.
It's hard to synopsize Dust Bunny because it's less about the plot and mostly about the wild visual style. Before we started a user review on the screen stated, "A Roald Dahl story, written by a bag of cocaine, directed by Wes Anderson," and they're not far off. Others have evoked Tim Burton or described it as a mashup of Luc Besson's Leon: The Professional and Where the Wild Things Are.
The production design of Jeremy Reed combines with Nicole Hirsch Whitaker's lush, moody cinematography - filmed in an unheard of 3:1 aspect ratio, even wider than that of epics like Ben-Hur or Quentin Taratino's The Hateful Eight which were shot in 2.76:1 - is the big selling point here. Fuller has always had an eye for visuals (Pushing Daisies' sunflowers get a callout at the end), but the story itself and its too-familiar elements like Mikkelsen's very quiet hitman echoing Jean Reno's Leon caused me to drift off in spots even though I wanted to study the visuals. In addition to the gorgeous visuals, the audio track is great for annoying your neighbors with your subwoofer as the titular bunny rumbles hard.
I've seen debate as to whether this is a kid-friendly horror film. There's no blood and the kills are more stylized than graphic and I don't recall anything that made it R-rating worthy (perhaps a few F-bombs too many), but I guess younger children who worry about monsters under their beds wouldn't benefit from watching a monster under a bed eating people.
I'm also not sure what the overall point was supposed to be; whether the bunny was a metaphorical or metaphysical monster. The final shot (not counting a brief mid-credits gag) also raises a question as to what the bunny is. There's also a weird moment where 5B states who the child welfare officer really is before she admits it herself that doesn't make sense how he'd know this.
But don't let my quibbles deter you from checking out Dust Bunny, a movie with far more going for it than its opaque and clearly difficult to marker title. Good performances and great style overcome the slight plot.
This will be quick: Saw Colombiana in August 2011 and didn't like it and somehow haven't watched it since. It hasn't improved. And after rewatching the mediocre Point of No Return again less than a week ago, the formulaic cookie cutter repetition of Luc Besson's 2nd-tier works really becomes obvious.
All the issues I had in my original review stand, but it was interesting how much I'd forgotten beginning with how almost the first half-hour is dedicated to Amandala Stenberg's young Cataleya and how she was a blank-faced wooden actress long before she stunk up The Acolyte. The Point of No Return rehash comes when Sensitive Artist Booty Call Boyfriend turns down Happy Fun Time to pester her with details about her life, just like how Sensitive Photographer Boyfriend gets snippy about how American Nikita keeps secrets after they've been shacked up already.
But to really show how slapdash the script is, it opens in 1992 and her father gives the crime lord a pack of floppy diskettes with cartel info on them. Later, figuring the cartel is about to kill him, he gives Cataleya a SmartMedia card to swallow to keep the info from the cartel. Later on she's seen looking at a Xena: Warrior Princess comic book. Being a nerd, the sudden appearance of the memory card sent me looking for info and I found that both the short-lived flash memory format and Xena weere introduced in 1995, three years later.
This is compounded by the title card "15 YEARS LATER" which would be 2007. The movie came out in 2011, so why in blue blazes did they not simply set the prologue in 1996 when both SmartMedia and Xena existed? Yes, this is petty stuff, but considering all the work that's done to source props, etc. did no one point this out? So lazy like everything else about this.
As for the Blu-ray, the picture and sound as fine. Not going to go into detail because we're not doing the "Green Lantern is a great demo disc" nonsense in this dojo where we buy bad movies to show off the home theater when there are good movies which are demo-worthy. There's also about an hour's worth of extras and - speaking of Green Lantern - there's always some ironic pleasure in watching people talking about all the hard work they did in bringing the characters to life and their nuanced takes on them when the final product turned out just plain bad. (The extras on Wonder Woman 1984 made me feel sorry for everyone to be so disconnected from the reality they live in.)
Unless all you want is to see a sweaty Zoe Saldana in skimpy figure-hugging clothes, give Colombiana a miss.
Usually the weekly Netflix Original movies are forgettable piffles that are watched then forgotten in the maw of content which is Netflix, but occasionally they produce something that they should've put in theaters to make money before parking them online. Even though it was bad, The Electric State looked like something that should be seen on a big screen; while I wasn't a huge fan, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein would've made bank; K-Pop Demon Hunters is such a phenomenon that it made $19M when released for a one-off weekend two months AFTER it began running on Netflix. This is why there is much consternation over Netflix's bid to buy Warner Bros. because they will likely kill off movie theaters by only doing a couple of weeks theatrically before sending it to streaming limbo.
The reason for the preamble is that this week's offering, The Rip, is the kind of lean and mean crime thriller which used to be standard star-driven theatrical fare before the movie business bifurcated into now-burned-out comic book movies, horror flicks, and stuff no one sees by gets awards.
It opens with Miami Police Captain Jackie Velez (Lina Esco) on the phone with an informant. After she parks, she comes under fire by two masked assailants. Wounded, she frantically texts something to someone before being executed. We then meet the rest of her Tactical Narcotics Team (TNT) unit as they're interrogated by Internal Affairs with lots of innuendo about crooked cops and scandals in the department.
Later, her second-in-command, Lt. Dane Dumars (Matt Damon), is shown looking at a text message about a big cartel stash in neighboring Hialeah and he rounds up the TNT unit's detectives - Sergeant JD Byrne (Ben Affleck), Mike Ro (Steven Yeun), Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor), Lolo Salazar (Catalina Sandino Moreno) - telling them they got a Crimestoppers tip.
When they reach the location on a cul de sac, they cajole the young woman who answers the door, Desi (Sasha Calle), into letting them search the house. She says it was her grandmother's who passed away a few months earlier and it appears to be packed with lots of old junk, but the money-sniffing dog (which is a real thing despite the missus disbelieving) goes nuts at the trapdoor to the attic. There they find a pristine empty room with a little shrine on the end. They quickly discover that behind the shrine wall are a bunch of buckets packed with bundles of cash. A quick guesstimate figures the "rip" to be $20 million.
Dane immediately confiscates everyone's phones and orders that no one radio in to report the find. They will count the money there at the site before bringing it in. This immediately sparks concerns as everyone starts acting squirrely, suspecting each other's motives. Things begin to escalate when a local police car pulls up acting suspiciously, one of the team is using a secreted burner phone to contact someone, and then someone calls the house warning that they have 30 minutes to take what they want and vacate the scene or else people will start dying.
Directed and co-written by Joe Carnahan (Narc, The Grey), it plays into his reputation for crackling characterizations and gunplay. He ratchets the tension up by giving us reasons to suspect people like how Dane told everyone on the team a different amount the tip reported and how he had medical bills from his young son dying of cancer. JD was in a relationship with Jackie. Lolo and Numa are counting the money and joking about taking just a small bundle. Then the bullets begin to fly and they don't know who's shooting at them.
When the big reveals come, it makes sense but then the last 10 minutes are oddly flat and beg questions like shouldn't they be getting treated for those gunshot wounds and being debriefed for many hours as to what just happened instead of watching the sunrise?
Usually the A/V presentation on Netflix movies isn't much to write home about even though almost all content is in 4K Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos sound, albeit restricted to those paying for the highest-priced (currently $25/mo) tier, but The Rip makes the spend worth it. Mostly set at night, the HDR makes gun muzzle flashes, flashlights, headlights, lights in general pop very brightly on a good TV. The Atmos height channels are use to terrific effect in the scene where they're interrogation X while the team is sledgehammering in the attic above them. I have a 5.2.4 Atmos setup and this is an excellent showcase for the effect.
While not perfect, The Rip is a well-above-average movie which stands above much of what Netflix puts out. If you're paying for the top price tier and have a capable home theater setup, it's even better.
As we're beginning to run out of Nineties action flicks to watch, the missus decided it's time to switch to kickass chick action flicks starting with Bridget Fonda's take on the Nikita story, Point of No Return.
I've already reviewed this disc in 2021 and 2012 with slightly different coverage, but the same bottom line: So-so movie and disc. Please read those because there's some funny cracks in them.
The Nineties Action Fest plows on with Michael Bay's second film, 1996's The Rock. The final collaboration between uber-producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson (who passed away during production), it's the movie that made Nicolas Cage a capital-M, capital-S Movie Star which he'd follow the next year with the tag team of Con Air and Face/Off and was one of Sean Connery's last top tier roles.
The opening credits play over a montage of Marine Brigadier General Francis "Frank" X. Hummel (Ed Harris) putting on his dress uniform and visiting his wife's grave to apologize for what he's about to do. What would that be? To lead a heist of 15 rockets armed with VX nerve gas from a munitions depot, take them to Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay and take over 80 tourists visiting the prison hostage. His demands? $100 million from a secret CIA slush fund to be disbursed to the families of soldiers killed during black ops whose deaths were covered up, no medals conferred, not benefits to the families. The rest is to pay his crew of mercenaries and turncoats. If not paid within 40 hours, he'll kill hostages and start firing rockets which could exterminate all life in the Bay Area.
Backed against the wall, FBI Director James Womack (John Spencer) reluctantly agrees to bring imprisoned former SAS agent John Mason (Connery) out of the hole they'd put him in without trial after they'd caught him with a trove of state secrets because he is the only man to have escaped from The Rock. Womack offers Mason a pardon if he'll help lead a SEAL team onto the island, through the maze of subterranean tunnels, to recapture the rockets and poison gas.
Along for the ride is Cage's Dr. Stanley Goodspeed, a FBI chemical weapons expert who's just learned his girlfriend, Carla (Vanessa Marcil), is embabied. He'd told her to come out and meet him in San Francisco, but when he found out what he was there for he tried to dissuade her from coming without letting slip why. Naturally, she comes anyway and he's got that on his mind as well.
Things get off to a good start until the SEAL team trips an alarm alerting Hummel and his men and the entire team, lead by Michael Biehn without plot armor, is wiped out in a turkey shoot, leaving only the elderly Mason and the not-a-fighter Goodspeed left to take on an island of trained soldiers to save the world.
The Rock is where Bay's penchant for the bombastic "Bayhem" style really flowered with big set pieces like the car chase through the streets of San Francisco when Mason escapes to meet his daughter whom he'd fathered when he'd knocked up her mother after meeting at a Led Zeppelin concert during a previous prison break.
But for all the noise, he allows for some character moments to prevent the characters from just being cartoons. Mason and Goodspeed's antagonism eventually becomes a grudging mutual respect and Hummel isn't a simple villain seeking money for his own enrichment, but a rightfully wronged man who chooses the really wrong way of pursuing redress for his grievances. Bay manages to balance the tricky tones at times and speaks on the commentary track about how that took time to sort out through test screenings.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of goofy action details like the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom mine cart chase and a sequence where Mason has to carefully time his rolling through a ludicrous tunnel of gears and flame bursts like a Mario game in order to open the door for the SEALs. As I recently saw a reel on FaceSpace from the Confused Breakfast podcast, why would Mason have needed to go through the fire tunnel when escaping when the door has the handle on the inside? These are the things you don't think about.
This wasn't Cage's Big Cash-In After Winning An Oscar play either for Leaving Las Vegas, for which he won the Best Actor Oscar, came out while shooting The Rock. He hadn't become as exaggerated as he would in his next two blockbusters, so it's a restrained goofiness. Connery was in his own post-Oscar emeritus years headlining various so-so movies that no one remembers like Rising Sun, Just Cause, and Medicine Man, but he steps up with a grizzled authority and charm as Mason.
Moving on to the A/V presentation, while there were a few DVD releases of The Rock including a Criterion Collection(!) edition, albeit with a non-anamorphic transfer(!!), same as with the Criterion release of Armageddon(!!!!!!) - Fun Fact: I have both of those - this has been the only Blu-ray release and you can tell it was early in the format's run (released in 2008) because it includes an uncompressed LPCM 5.1 audio track, but defaults to Dolby Digital 5.1 (there are also French and Spanish DD tracks), because not all receivers could handle PCM for some reason. Nowadays, it's a piece of cake and the best option offering a clear, punchy audio track with good booms. On the video side, it's a very good transfer which maintains the filmic look of the source and Bay's preference for steely blues and blacks at night, but bright primary colors like the yellow Ferrari in daylight. Since this is owned by Disney, it's unlikely to get a 4K release, but this is fine.
The big selling point for collectors was that all the extras from the Criterion release were ported over allowing us to get a Criterion experience without the price tag. Leading off is an excellent commentary track with Bay, Bruckheimer, Cage, Harris and technical advisor Harry Humphries. The speakers were recorded separately and then edited together and it works much better than you'd think, especially when jumping between people discussing the same details. Cage goes at length about how he worked to insert his ideas into the dialog and Harris talks about the challenge of making Hummel more than a monster. Make sure to listen all the way through the credits for a wild story Bay tells about Simpson showing up in the edit room for Bad Boys with an Armani suit that encounters ice cream.
The features are in 480i, but watchable. Navy SEALs on the Range has a couple of the actual SEALS who appeared in the film on a training range operated by Humphries. Hollywood: Humphries and Teague has them explaining why common gun handling tropes in movies like the "gangster grip" (holding the pistol sideways) or the "Wyatt Earp" are terrible for accuracy, then showing the proper techniques. Special Effects for Dive shows the elaborate miniature puppets and rigs they created for a few shots of the SEALs insertion on the island and Action Effects: Movie Magic shows the climatic jet attack and how the airplanes were CGI but the explosion was done with an actual fireball filled from 170 feet up against a bluescreen background.
Secrets of Alcratraz discusses the history of the island as a trading post, then an Army fort, then a prison. An actual inmate shows how he and his compatriots futilely tried to escape and the actual escape that was portrayed in the 1979 Clint Eastwood flick Escape From Alcatraz which happened due to budget cuts that left gaps in security is detailed.
There is an interesting interview with Bruckheimer where he recaps his early life in Detroit - Fun Fact: he graduated from Detroit's Mumford High School as memorialized by Axel Foley's sweatshirt in Beverly Hills Cop - and how he transitioned from working in advertising to film producing, teaming up with Simpson to make films like Flashdance and Top Gun.
The Rock World Premiere, Outtakes (mostly Ed Harris blowing lines and swearing; didn't watch it all), and an assortment of trailers and TV spots wrap up the extras.
The Rock is one of the premium A-tier Nineties action flicks and this Blu-ray is currently the best way to collect it if you're a fan with a good video and audio presentation and a respectable batch of extras.
1975 was one of those pivotal years in movie history with serious Oscar-winners like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and contenders like Dog Day Afternoon, thrillers like Three Days of the Condor, Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, freakout musical adaptation of The Who's Tommy, the ur midnight movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the ur summer blockbuster which put an end to much of serious adult movies, Jaws.
With that in mind, Netflix's documentary Breakdown: 1975 was advertised as being about the movies that came out that year against the backdrop of the Vietnam War's end and the post-Watergate as commentary on the times. Unfortunately, the actual doc is a Boomer therapy session where Nixon was bad, Vietnam was bad, Nixon was bad, the CIA was bad, Nixon was bad, and also Nixon was bad. I'm sensing a theme here.
Narrated by Jodie Foster, the warning signs cropped up early as they showed Network (which came out in 1976) and other movies not from 1975 like Chinatown (1974). As it slogged on, it started just randomly jumping into genres like Blackploitation with examples from the early-70s. Commenting were various female and black chin-stroking professors types as well as Martin Scorsese (director of Taxi Driver), Patton Oswalt (who was six years old in 1975), and Seth Rogen (who was born in 1982).
As they intercut footage to create scenes of Travis Bickle (from Taxi Driver) watching Howard Beale's "Mad As Hell" monologue from Network, I lost interest in whatever this was supposed to be that wasn't what was advertised. I'm genuinely surprised Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom) directed this mess.
George Clinton is one of the pioneers of funk and hip-hop who evolved from being part of a New Jersey-based doo wop group called The Parliaments to founding Parliament-Funkadelic to ride the rising psychedelic tide of the Sixties as well as double-dip on record deals to a solo artist whose biggest hit, "Atomic Dog", has been sampled plenty of times along with much of P-Funk's grooves.
Director/editor/narrator Bobby P. Brown's 2015 documentary Tear the Roof Off: The Untold Story of Parliament Funkadelic is a brief (57 mins) no-budget attempt at an oral history of what it was like working with and eventually surviving the maelstrom that Clinton orchestrated. With interviews with many of the many more musicians who made up the various projects and side projects, the picture of Clinton being a hustler trying to maximize revenues by loading bills with his sub-acts is drawn.
But eventually his greed and escalating drug use tore everything apart as members accused him of not paying them, forging signatures to steal their publishing rights on hit songs, disbanding projects or thwarting promotion so no one outshined him. He'd pay band members in drugs then bill them for the drugs. After everyone quit and/or was fired, the recording of "Atomic Dog" is a trip as he showed up to the studio so messed up he had to be held up in front of the microphone and from that the song was built by others.
While it's an interesting subject, the cheap production and amateurish camera work (most interviews are shot in extreme close-up with poor lighting, but mercifully adequate sound) as well as no rebuttals from Clinton leave an incomplete picture of both his legacy and whether he was a total dirtbag on top of being a mad genius. Also, the "where are they now" coda isn't much use as this movie was made in 2015, so even more of gap in knowledge occurs. In fact, when looking up his age on Wikipedia, I discovered he had worked as a staff songwriter for Motown, a fact totally omitted by the documentary.
While incomplete and one-sided, there is some merit in perusing Tear the Roof Off: The Untold Story of Parliament Funkadelic. However, the subject deserves a fuller appraisal by someone like Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom).
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Viewed on Amazon Prime Video. Also on YouTube, see below)
