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!
For the first 10 minutes or so of They Will Kill You I was wondering what the heck was going on? It opens with a woman, Asia (Zazie Beetz, Joker, Deadpool 2), her younger sister on a stormy night where their father is chasing them, culminating with her shooting him and running away as the cops arrive. Then it's 10 years later on another pouring night as Asia arrives at The Virgil, an exclusive co-op apartment building in NYC.
She's met by Lilith (Patricia Arquette, Roseanna's sister), the Irish superintendent of The Virgil, who wonders why Asia sounds different than she did on the phone when she interviewed her (Asia says she was getting over a cold), but brings her in, introducing her to a few of the residents while taking her to her room on the staff floor where the other maids live.
That night, Asia is attacked by hooded, masked figures who enter her room from the air vent and a hole in the wall behind the refrigerator. She surprises them with impressive fighting skills and weaponry like a large sword and sawed-off shotgun. After a brief, bloody battle where she beheads, dismembers, and generally messes the heck out of the assailants, she runs into the hall where she confronts Lilith, demanding to know the whereabouts of her sister, Maria (Myha'la, Industry), who had come to work at The Virgil as a maid.
This confrontation is interrupted by Asia's attackers emerging from her room, carrying their detached limbs and heads. As Asia watches in shock, they reattach them to their bodies and they're as good as new. Turns out The Virgil is a Satanic Temple and the residents and some of the staff are immortal due to their allegiance to Satan. (Membership has its privileges.)
The rest of the movie is a wild Grand Guignol exercise in cartoonish violence (e.g. watery blood sprays like a sprinkler - think: O-Ren Ishii beheading the guy in Kill Bill Pt. 1) as heads are blown off leaving the bodies crawling around and bumping into walls or a disembodied eyeball rolls along to spy on Asia. The action choreography is good and one sequence involving cultists being killed with a flaming axe, igniting their temporarily inert bodies, standing out.
But it wears thin quickly as the immortality of cult means killing is temporary until Asia finds a way to disable their power. The relationship with her estranged sister and where her allegiances lie is also handled sloppily with a bit of a cheat at the end. The roles played by Tom Felton (Harry Potter series) and Heather Graham (Boogie Nights) could've been played by anyone because they aren't characters but just more immortal cultists, albeit played by recognizable faces.
While there are some enjoyable bonkers moments (most of which are in the trailer below) the overall effect by director/co-writer Kirill Sokolov feels like he watched Evil Dead 2 and Old Boy while blasting Wu-Tang Clan on loop while taking ALL of the drugs. It's all surface with little depth and not really worth the time.
It's been 10-1/2 months since we've actually gone to the movies to see a movie (Ballerina) and considering I missed out on properly seeing Avatar: Fire & Ash in 3D at the show, it must be something special to get me out of the house. That would be Project Hail Mary, based on the novel of the same name by Andy Weir with a screenplay adapted by Drew Goddard, the tag team who filled the same roles for Ridley Scott's 2015 epic The Martian. (Somehow I never wrote a review when I saw it theatrically nor when I watched the Blu-Ray and Extended Cut 4K UHD Blu-ray, but it scored 8/10 Catch a matinee for the show, 8/10 Buy it for the Blu-ray, and 9/10 Buy it for 4K.) I even read the novel beforehand which for me is a rarity due to my crippling illiteracy.
So, having done the homework and being otherwise primed to have a great time, I ended up underwhelmed by this adaptation despite the Herculean work Ryan Gosling does with his performance as the only hope for mankind to save the world as long as he figures out what to do after remembering who his is in the first place.
The movie opens with Gosling's Dr. Ryland Grace waking up on a spaceship. He has long hair and beard and no memory of how he ended up there and why there are two dead bodies in the other beds. He frantically searches his confines to discover it's a spaceship and the star ahead isn't Earth's Sun.
He buries the others in space and begins to have flashback memories of his life beginning with his being a middle school science teacher who is recruited by Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall) to analyze a sample of astrophage, a single-cell organism that appears to be eating our Sun's energy then migrating to Venus. If the nature of the astrophage can't be understood and a means to counteract it isn't found within 30 years the Earth's climate will cool to the point where half the world's population would starve and the rest would live in a permanent state of war as nations fight over the remaining food. No big deal!
Grace figures out how the astrophage works and is immediately drafted into Project Hail Mary (roll credits!) where he is informed that the astrophage seems to be consuming many stars in our neighborhood of the galaxy except one, Tau Ceti, almost 12 light years away. The plan is for a ship powered by engines that leverage the properties of the astrophage to travel there, try and figure out what's made that star immune, then send probes back to Earth with their findings. Since they'll only have time to make enough fuel to get the ship and crew there, it will be a one-way ticket, a suicide mission. Grace's job is to prep the science and train the crew. So why is he there?
These questions are interrupted by the arrival of Blip A (as the Hail Mary's computer labels the radar ping), a huge alien ship that an understandably panicked Grace tries to flee from, finally giving up and coming to a halt. With the Hail Mary stationary, radar detects Blip B, an object "tossed" from Blip A. He goes out and catches it and thus begins communication via models with the alien ship culminating in a tunnel being constructed by Blip A to connect the two ships.
This is when Grace makes first contact with intelligent alien life in the form of a five-legged creature that appears to be made of rock with no visible eyes or face, looking like a literal stone crab. He names this alien Rocky (because, you know...) and they begin to figure out how to communicate. Rocky "speaks" in cooing musical tones, so Grace cobbles together a translator program on a laptop, eventually giving it a voice (James Ortiz, who was also the lead puppeteer of Rocky) allowing for this odd couple of sole survivors - Rocky's crewmates died of radiation exposure due to their race, the Eridians, not even knowing about radiation while being able to build interstellar starships - to join forces to try and save their respective worlds.
The rest of the movie briskly races through their efforts to figure out how the astrophage can be stopped leading to them sciencing the sh*t out of the problem and encountering some hairy situations trying to gather samples and coping with fuel leaks that threaten to end their trips. It's a foregone conclusion that they'll figure something out because no one makes a movie which ends with failure and everyone dyin - yeah, yeah, Knowing, Don't Look Up, and Bugonia notwithstanding - so whether the movie succeeds or not is in the execution. Sadly, this is where the problems are found.
What Goddard brilliantly did in adapting The Martian (which I, miracle of miracles, also read) was to condense the novel's often excessive passages of sciencing the sh*t out of problems down understandable concepts explained by Mark Watney (Matt Damon, The Martian) via video logs which he presumes will be gathered by whomever picks up his body. The problem here is that either he overly simplified or directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller edited out so much of so many important details that the first thing I asked the missus in the car after the show was whether she was able to understand what was happening?
Thanks to having read the book, I understood what the passing references represented, but in practice many critical details are so quickly glided over I really wonder if non-bookies understood what was happening. For a movie that runs 2-1/2 hours and uses the vlog format more for comedic effect than a stealth exposition mechanism, this is a disappointing omission that leaves the non-booked viewers outside the drama. While overexplaining like the audience is stupid isn't good, fast-balling very important details past people just once is worse.
Another huge difference from The Martian is the very narrow point-of-view as we spend 85% of the time with Grace and Rocky and when we do flashback to Earth they oddly choose to do almost nothing to characterize the, um, characters. His deceased comrades (Ken Leung, Lost, and Milana Vayntrub, Amy from the AT&T commercials) get a few lines so their deaths mean nothing. The closest we get to a humanizing moment is when Stratt sings a Harry Styles song at karaoke to show Grace she's not just a humorless East German taskmaster. Compare that to The Martian where we bounced from Watney on Mars to his fellow crewmates dealing with what happened to the folks at NASA on Earth trying to figure out how to rescue him. Everyone got fairly fleshed out, even Donald Glover's weird autistic astrophysicist who comes up with the way to save Watney. Somehow, Goddard, Lord, and Miller made all the wrong cuts with an already thin cast.
It's a testament to Gosling's talents (which sometimes don't seem that apparent) that the fact we feel anything and how to relate to a rock monster is due to him carrying this movie on his back. Matt Damon was good in his role, but he wasn't the central load-bearing pillar the whole show rested upon. Gosling's performance deftly sets up the humdinger of a reveal of how he ended up on the mission; a detail that the missue was NOT at all happy about along with the final scenes even though they are what happened in the novel and were quite a shock in print as well.
The success of Project Hail Mary (currently grossing over $600M globally) is being pointed to by some as a rebuke to failed Lucasfilm vandal Kathleen Kennedy who fired the pair from Solo, bringing in Ron Howard to reshoot most of the movie, costing so much it was the only money-losing Star Wars movie (until perhaps The Mandalorian & Grogu coming soon). But I'm not totally sold on their direction because it feels like they cut a lot of plot meat in favor of less pertinent material. I saw a video of them showing what all the various premium large format (e.g. IMAX, 4DX, etc.) presentations would provide for epic viewing, but I saw it in regular plain old movie style and there is very little material that would benefit from a giant extended image.
I'd be interested in seeing a rumored extended cut of Project Hail Mary to see if they balance the plot better - the extended cut of The Martian was pretty good; more of good things - but I have to say that I went into the theater expecting to eventually buy this in 4K and now I'm not sure if I will. While not bad, it feels like it should've been and could've been so much better. To say it like Rocky would, "Disappoint. Disappoint. Disappoint."
Billy Idol was announced as an inductee to the grievously-misnamed Rock & Roll Hall of Fame along with fellow rockers Sade and Wu-Tang Clan, so it was a fine time to watch prolific music video director Jonas Åkerlund's recently-released documentary Billy Idol Should Be Dead.
Covering his life and career from childhood to founding Generation X in the wake of the Sex Pistols to going solo to having years of massive drug abuse issues, it combines archival footage, impressionistic animated sequences and interviews filmed in in the harshest, least flattering black & white ever to make everyone appear as old and haggard for some reason. While the film came out in 2026, it includes interviews with Billy's mother, Joan, who passed in 2020.
As an old Gen X and solo fan who once made a Billy Idol logo t-shirt in printing class, most of the early career material was fairly familiar to me and generally superficial. What I wasn't aware of was how deep his drug abuse was and his attempted forays into acting including a major project that collapsed when his manager, Bill Aucoin (who also managed KISS), who'd started smoking crack pulled it away from up and coming at the time producer Joel Silver and that he filmed a screentest to play the T-1000 in Terminator 2, only losing the part due to the lingering effects of his nearly fatal motorcycle crash (whose gnarly scars are shown) preventing him from running as would be needed.
Very little time is spent discussing his music, the 40+ year collaboration with guitarist Steve Stevens or the handful of albums he's put out since the misfire of 1993's Cyberpunk album which may've been ahead of its time. Åkerlund also weirdly edits the beginning starting with a 1984 heroin overdose, then going back to the beginning, then leaping forward to the OD, then going back to the timeline. Foreshadowing is one thing, but why the second preview? There's more time spent on his tempestuous relationship with baby mama Perri Lister and the two kids he fathered with groupies than his music process.
I saw Idol last year in concert and he still had it at 69 years old, delivering an even better show than he did in 2019, in the Before Times. It should be a good Rock Hall performance. While Billy Idol Should Be Dead, it's an adequate primer for those unfamiliar with the Prince of Punk (I made that title up now) or older fans needing a refresher as well as some drama.
Score: 6/10. Catch in on cable/streaming. (Viewed on Hulu.)
Due to the way Prime Video lays out their virtual shelves, it's easy to miss what's available like the Amazon Original Pretty Lethal (not to be confused with 2015's Barely Lethal which I didn't review, but logged as a 3/10 Skip It), a slight-but-adequate action comedy about ballerinas in peril.
The girls in question are a LA-based troupe of stereotypes led by Bones (Maddie Ziegler, Dance Moms), a tough girl who clashes with spoiled princess, Princess (Lana Condor, To All The Boys I've Loved Before). Rounding out the group is Grace (Avantika, Mean Girls - the 2024 musical), Zoe (nepo baby Iris Apatow) and her deaf sister Chloe (Millicent Simmonds, A Quiet Place). How does a deaf girl know when to dance to the music? Shut up, bigot!
The group and their teacher, Thorna (Lydia Leonard, The Crown), travel to Budapest, Hungary, but on the way to the competition their bus breaks down. Fearing missing their date, they set off on foot, getting caught in the rain, but arriving at a castle-like structure, the Teremok Inn, where they take shelter in hopes of getting a cab. Once inside they discover it's a bar and gathering place for local mobsters (think: Temu Continental) run by Devora Kasimer (Uma Thurman, Kill Bill), a former ballerina herself. She suggests the girls change out of their wet clothes into their tutus because sure, why not?
Thorna witnesses Devora torturing someone and tries to gather the girls to get out of there, but is accosted by Pasha Marcovic (Tamás Szabó Sipos, no idea) who makes drunken advances. She knees him in the junk and walks away, but he responds to the rejection by shooting her in the head. (Ron Burgundy, "Boy, that escalated quickly." GIF goes here). Princess threatens to call the cops, but Devora has the quartet locked in the basement and destroys their phones and passports. If you're noticing I used the word for four people, that's because Chloe has met and started making out with Devora's youngest son, Artyom (Krisztián Csákvári, also no idea), because deaf girls, amirite?
Facing death, the dancers have to get over their interpersonal issues and commit to Sparkle Motion, and using makeshift weapons like razors in their toe shoes and scissors, begin their fight to escape captivity.
It's a hoary trope about girls/women fighting men twice their size, but the "ballet fu" fight choreography by action choreographers 87North (The Fall Guy, Bullet Train) accounts for this by having the girls mob their foes and using speed and agility to take them down. That 3/5ths of the girls have dance backgrounds also helps sell the premise. When the guys do get hold of the girls, nature exerts itself painfully.
Thurman has fun camping it up with an imaginary Eastern European accent and Ziegler and Condor are fine in their narrowly crafted roles.
While nothing special, Pretty Lethal is an adequately entertaining action snack which does well enough with its "Ballerina but with ballerinas who aren't assassins" premise. Just switch off your critical thinking portion of your brain first.
The little-known formative years of the members of punk-funk-rap-rockers Red Hot Chili Peppers are given the documentary treatment in the Netflix doc The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel, with Hillel being the founding guitarist, Hillel Slovak, who played on the band's first three albums - The Red Hot Chili Peppers (1984), Freaky Styley (1985), and The Uplift Mofo Party Plan (1987) - before succumbing to a heroin overdose in June 1988, just two months after his 26th birthday.
Covering how the band came together with the meeting of bassist Flea (an immigrant from Australia), Slovak (from Israel), and drummer Jack Irons at LA's Fairfax High School where Irons and Slovak played in a band named Anthym led by Chile-born Alain Johannes (who's had a long, diverse career), adding Flea when Slovak taught him bass because they weren't happy with their existing bassist. Vocalist Anthony Kiedis was a fan whom Slovak met after a show and invited to hang out and they all became fast friends, hanging out, taking drugs, being young and dumb.
What was new to me, a casual RHCP fan, was that the Peppers were considered a side project to Irons and Slovak as Anthym, renamed to What Is This (somehow an even worse name than Anthym), had a record deal. Flea came and went a couple of times to play with LA punks Fear and Kiedis's involvement was more of a joke than a serious thing at first.
As the band got more notoriety they eventually got signed and Irons and Slovak played on the debut album, but were also sticking with What Is This until RHCP got big enough to dominate their attention. As the years passed, the drug use of Kiedis and Slovak crossed beyond heavy recreational to debilitating junkie levels culminating in producer Michael Bienhorn firing Kiedis during the Uplift Mofo sessions because he finally showed up with no lyrics written. Kiedis went through detox, got clear, and became productive, but of course when it came time to celebrate completing the album, he and Slovak got wasted.
With interviews with all surviving members, Slovak's brother and girlfriend, and other contemporaries along with lots of archive footage, The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel is an interesting overview of the band's origins and struggles with success and substances.
While the members are candid about their drug habits and how they contributed to the environment that claimed their brother, the doc completely omits the irony that Slovak's replacement, John Frusciante, who speaks about how he devoted himself to transforming his playing style to mirror Slovak's, also picked up his crippling heroin addiction habit which led him to quit the band after their Blood Sugar Sex Magik album made them too popular for his taste. (He would come and go several times since.)
The first album with Frusciante, Mother's Milk, which also marked the debut of drummer Chad Smith (from Detroit and who taught at the music store I took guitar lessons from a member of Sponge at) is completely Memory Holed with no mention of Smith even though Irons left the band upon Slovak's death. Weird.
On the A/V front, I didn't notice anything particularly special about the Dolby Vision and Atmos presentation. Netflix has announced they're jacking up the Premium Tier rate to a whopping $27 and that's my tapout point. I'm cutting back to the Standard Tier with only HD streaming for a still too much $20. Jerks.
If I had to pick a favorite Beatle it'd be Paul McCartney because he was the most pop sensible member of the Fab Four. While not a Beatlemaniac by any means, I was interested in Morgan Neville's (last seen doing the Lego Pharrell doc, Piece By Piece) Amazon Prime documentary Paul McCartney: Man on the Run which covers the decade between Paul's leaving of The Beatles, releasing his first solo albums then assembling Wings. A bigger fan friend of mine was raving about it, so I stepped up to check it out. Sadly, it wasn't particularly engaging.
Comprised of oodles of home movies, rehearsal videos, live footage, etc. supplemented by voiceover only remarks by Macca and others like members of Wings, musical contemporaries like Chrissie Hynde and Elton John, extended family like Sean Ono Lennon, etc. it marches through Paul's post-Beatles career as he tried to figure out who he was without the others. With many fits, starts, missteps, and misadventures, it took him longer to get his band on the run (heh, me clever) than I'd thought, but it never really digs into things because it's covering so much.
The fact I was listening more than watching as I played solitaire on my iPad says it all. While you can say, "You didn't like it because you weren't paying attention," the fact that I felt I could split my attention was strictly due to Neville's presentation not grabbing me. I'm not the Netflix viewer whom they feel the need to dumb down writing so that people on their phones can still follow the plot. I focus on the movies exclusively and if something comes up on my phone needed immediate attention, I pause playback. That Man on the Run lost exclusivity is on it, not me. Frankly, the fact I finished the movie was only because I was doing something else.
Your mileage may vary, but Man on the Run never took wing for me. (Again heh.)
Score: 5/10. Catch it on Prime Video if you're a fan, otherwise Skip It.
