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a while and a dozen intervening movies, I couldn't remember enough specifics to properly review them, so they remained unpublished.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. ;-)
Following last week's spin of The Linguini Incident, the missus & I decided a trilogy of 1980s Rosanna Arquette movies was required and thus our second stop was 1985's Desperately Seeking Susan, a shaggy dramady most notable for being then-megahot pop star Madonna's Big Movie Debut as the titular (in both meanings) Susan and its inclusion of her hit "Into The Groove."
Arquette plays Roberta Glass, a young New Jersey housewife married to Gary (Mark Blum, Mozart in the Jungle) who sells bathtub spas, saunas and hot tubs. She's obsessed with personal ads in the paper headlined "Desperately Seeking Susan" (roll credits!) to arrange meets between Susan and her boyfriend Jimmy (Robert Joy, CSI:NY).
Meanwhile we meet Susan in a hotel room where she's been shacked up with some guy not Jimmy who's passed out after a long night of getting into the groove, if you follow. She orders room service, steals the silverware and towels, and a pair of big earrings. As she leaves the room, she passes a creepy guy, Wayne (Will Patton, Armageddon), who's heading for the room. She arrives at the Port Authority bus terminal, stashes her drum case-turned-suitcase in a locker by jimmying the lock, to avoid paying. She puts on one of the earrings and leaves the other in the case.
When Susan meets up with Jimmy in Battery Park, Roberta is watching and after Jimmy has to take off with his band for a gig in Buffalo she follows Susan around the city and when she trades her distinctive jacket for some boots, Roberta buys the jacket and discovers the key. Wanting to return it, Roberta runs her own Desperately Seeking Susan ad to set up a meeting, signing it "A Stranger," which concerns Jimmy because who's trying to meet his girl who was banging a guy who fell out of a hotel window the day before and some priceless Egyptian earrings were involved.
Jimmy calls his friend Dez (Aidan Quinn, Reckless), a movie projectionist, and asks if he'd go to the meet to make sure Susan's OK, describing her as a blonde with a distinctive jacket. (Getting where this is going yet?) One thing leads to another, identities are mistaken and things are complicated by Roberta getting lightly bonked on the head, losing her purse and her memory, and with Dez calling her "Susan," assumes that's who she is. Hijinks ensue.
Whereas The Linguini Incident was a haphazard attempt at a screwball comedy, Desperately Seeking Susan is a lackluster, tonally off mess with a patchy screenplay and unlikable characters. I know this is heresy for older Gen Xers who are nostalgic about it because they aped Madonna's thrift store trampy style of mesh tops, exposed bras, rubber bracelets, etc., but the truth is the script by Leora Barish (making her screenwriting debut here and whose only other script of note was her last, 2006's Basic Insinct 2, so hackery was the constant) both relies on viewers overlooking the gaping plot holes and logic gaps, but also have no knowledge of how human beings behave.
The problems start with Susan herself. I don't think I've seen DSS since the 1980s and pretty much all I could I remember about it was Susan was a jerk and, yep, she still is. She's a thief, a tramp, and a sociopath, but because she looks and acts like Madonna, we're supposed to be smitten with Susan. Yeah, no. I was a teenager who thought Madge was hot while having a squeaky voice and bought both of the competing Playboy and Penthouse issues with her pre-fame nude modeling photos in them, but Susan still sucks.
Arquette is, well, Arquette. The fact Roberta ends up at one point as a magician's assistant ties neatly into her Houdini obsession in The Linguini Incident, but her character is as thin as her skull apparently is as she gets conked into forgetting who she is then rebooting back into her Roberta self later. While it's understandable that she'd boink Dez since he looks like Aiden Quinn, the fact he does her when he think's she's Susan, his bro's girl, and does so about five minutes after bailing her out of jail (where she'd somehow been busted for prostitution) was randomly abrupt and he's a bad bro.
It's more interesting spotting actors in early roles such as John Turturro, Richard Edson, and Giancarlo Esposito several years before they were in Do The Right Thing, Laurie Metcalf, Steven Wright, and a slew of art scene folks like Anne Carlisle, John Lurie, Richard Hell, and Ann Magnuson.
As a time capsule of mid-1980s New York with lots of big names before they were big names and Madonna totally loving herself, Desperately Seeking Susan may serve a purpose. But as a movie unable to decide what it's about and how it goes about it, it's less successful.
I didn't even realize that The Wedding Banquet was a remake of the 1993 Ang Lee film of the same name until the missus claimed we'd seen it at a local art house theater. I honestly don't recall seeing it, but if so it was 32 years ago, so let's see what this updated version has to offer. (Obviously, I can't compare it to the original.)
Kelly Marie Tran (Star Wars: The Last Jedi) stars as Angela Chen, a Seattle lesbian whose mother, May (Joan Chen, Twin Peaks), is such a performative ally with the local PFLAG chapter it's driving her crazy. Her partner, Lee (Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon), is struggling to have a baby and after their second attempt at IVF fails, there's a question of whether they have the finances to try again and whether Lee's body can handle it. Angela doesn't want to carry the baby due to her fraught relationship with her mother.
Living in their garage is Angela's bestie from college, Chris (Bowen Yang, SNL), with whom she had a one-off fling, and his boyfriend Min (Han Gi-chan in his film debut), an artist and fashion designer whom Chris is refusing to marry though his visa will soon expire requiring him to return to South Korea. Adding to the pressure is a call from Min's wealthy grandmother, Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung, Oscar winner for Minari), telling him it's time to come home and join the family business empire.
While marrying Chris would get Min a green card, Chris fears that since Min isn't out his intolerant grandfather will cut him off. Fed up, Min proposes to Angela with the added benefit that he will pay for Lily's next IVF treatment. During her bachelorette party, Angela and Chris manage to PO Lee and Min, making them leave the club, and after a lot of drinks they wake up together in the garage and you have one guess as to what happened and what the ramifications will be.
Things escalate when Min calls to say that Grandma has come to America and they have about 45 minutes to "de-gay" the house before they arrive. After a frantic scramble, Min arrives with Ja-Young, introduces her to his fiancé Angela, and within minutes Ja-Young calls BS on the whole charade proving she's old, not stupid. After explaining the truth, she agrees to cover for Min if they go through an elaborate wedding ceremony which will be publicized back home. Of course, everything goes wildly wrong and hijinks ensue.
What's refreshing about The Wedding Banquet is that rather than being the usual Hollyweird celebration of the cartoonish perfection of gay people, the characters are messy complicated people who happen to be gay. Too many movies with gay themes believe the only thing that matters is the sexuality and how perfect it is and how mean straight people oppress them. Here the story is about people who are gay, not GAY people and the difference makes all the difference. With some tinkering the story could've been about blacks and whites, different religions or nationalities because at its core it's about people and their foibles and fears whereas lesser GAY movies are all about the GAY all day, forgetting the people. (See my review of the horribly-titled Bottoms for similar observations.)
Poor Tran has had a hard career road since a-hole spudboy "Ruin" Johnson abused her in his vandalism of Star Wars by stuffing her in a formless jumpsuit costume with a bad haircut as Rose Tico in The Last Jedi. Johnson wanted to deconstruct attractive Asian characters in movies (along with destroying the most valuable IP in entertainment) and the fandom-hating media promulgated the smear that RAAAAAAAAACIST nerds bullied Tran off social media when the reality was that racist liberal media hacks were protecting pasty potato Johnson's travesty by using her as a human shield. Note that co-star John Boyega, whose Finn character was also mistreated, wasn't used even as Disney shrank him down on the posters for China because those audiences don't like black actors. (But it's Americans who are racists?)
But I digress. Anyway, Tran first resurfaced on my radar as a heavy on the final season of Netflix's Sweet Tooth and she's really good here as well, finally showing off some acting. Gladstone is good as well and Yang manages to get away from his usual "Gaysian" persona he's plied for years on SNL. Youn shows her Oscar wasn't a fluke with another sly savvy performance where she leverages her age and others presumptions of it against them.
Co-writer James Schamus - a frequent collaborator of Ang Lee's having written eight films for him including the original Wedding Banquet (which is sadly unavailable to stream anywhere at this time) - has updated his original story of a gay man who offers to marry a woman needing a green card to keep his boyfriend secret from his family (I skimmed the Wikipedia synopsis. Sue me.) changing Chinese to Korean and tweaking the genders. Since I can't compare with the original, I'll withhold judgement other than to wonder why this version of The Wedding Banquet doesn't include, well, a wedding banquet? It should've been retitled The Wedding Ceremony or something.
Heartfelt and amusing, The Wedding Banquet may be overlooked because of people's aversion to gay themes or dismissed as a remake, but it's not woke and actually quite traditional in the end, in a manner of speaking.
Ever heard the phrase, "Big bucks! No Whammies!"? Know where that's from? If you're a Gen Xer, you're likely to know that was from a game show called Press Your Luck. A mash-up of Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, it had a trivia question phase where contestants garnered "spins" leading to the centerpiece of the show where a square of 18 screens would flash various dollar amounts and prizes while a lighted rim on the screens indicate what you'd win when you slapped down the Big Red Button. Hit a dollar amount and win money. Hit the cartoon demon "Whammie" screen - like Wheel's "Bankrupt" space - and you lose it all.
On May 19, 1984, an ice cream truck driver from Ohio named Michael Larson appeared on Press Your Luck and after a shaky start began to live the title of DJ Khaled's "All I Do Is Win" by nailing a seemingly impossible string of big bucks with no Whammies leading to an at-the-time highest winnings ever on a game show, relieving the show of over $110,000 in cash and prizes. This achievement and the freakout behind-the-scenes with the show's producers is dramatized in The Luckiest Man in America.
It begins with the slovenly and somewhat creepy Larson (Paul Walter Hauser, Richard Jewell) attempting to audition for the show by assuming the identity of another applicant. Despite being escorted off the property by security, the show's executive producer, Bill Carruthers (David Strathairn, The Expanse), takes a shine to him and allows him to participate in the next day's taping provided he tidy up his appearance and get better clothes. Larson goes to a thrift store, rips a button off a jacket to get a discount for its condition, and returns with a nice shirt and jacket over khaki shorts.
As mentioned above, ones he gets rolling, he gets ROLLING, and the bulk of the movie is about the freakout of the production team as they try to figure out how he's doing it. They deduce that he has somehow memorized the patterns of the board which appeared random but weren't. Is he cheating or could he be a boon in publicity? (And if memorizing the limited patterns - there were only five variations - is cheating, would studying trivia be cheating for Jeopardy.)
While the movie opens with a disclaimer about creative license being taken in its dramatization of real events, the script co-written by director Samir Oliveros (whose sole previous feature was something called Bad Lucky Goat) really stretches credibility as a producer, Chuck (Shamier Anderson, Mr. Nobody in John Wick 4), breaks into Larson's truck, finds video tapes, watches them, and deduces how Larson figured out the patterns, but also calls someone with a restraining order against him, all while the show is taping. TV shows generally go "live to tape" with minimal editing and the pauses shown and the amount of gumshoeing Chuck does simply couldn't happen. The details about his family are also muddled and enhance Larson's creepiness.
Hauser has cornered the market on tubby, creepy characters and he does the same here. From the bits of the actual show I've seen, Larson wasn't that oddball. The supporting performances from Straithairn, Anderson, and Walton Goggins as show host Peter Tomarken are good, but why is Maisie Williams (Throne Games) here as a production assistant? She's not bad, but it's distracting that an English girl is working at CBS Television City.
While The Luckiest Man in America isn't a bad docudrama, it could've been tighter and structured differently rather than trying to cram everything into 90-minutes. If you want to see the real, the Press Your Luck episodes are on YouTube along with GSN's - Game Show Network - documentary Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal exploring the events. (Haven't watched it yet, but hear it's good.) There's also a substantial Wikipedia entry which illuminates the differences between reality and dramatization.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on AMC+)
The 2023 slasher flick M3GAN was a sleeper hit, grossing $181M off a $12M budget. So a sequel was ordered up and a few weeks ago M3GAN 2.0 arrived, flopping massively with an opening weekend gross one-third of the original's leading to a rapid trip to streaming after just a few weeks. Complaints were that it changed genres - from horror to sci-fi - and attempted to turn the memeable moppet murderbot into a good girl a la Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but even more problematic is that the story is a convoluted mess that I don't even want to try and synopsize, but let's get on with it.
It's a couple years after the events of the first film and the military, having never seen the Jurassic Park sequels has decided to make a new murderbot called AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno, Pacific Rim) copied from M3GAN's designs. During an operational demonstration, it goes rogue after revealing it was sentient and not working for the Army any more.
Gemma (Allison Williams, Get Out), M3GAN's creator has become an author and advocate for AI regulation who, along with her (I think) boyfriend Christian (Aristotle Athari, SNL) has been developing an exoskeleton device which could provide mobility to the paralyzed or turn people into human forklifts capable of lifting great weights. Her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw, M3GAN), lives with her and is studying computer science.
After Gemma is informed of AMELIA's existence, M3GAN (body: Amie Donald; voice: Jenna Davis; the same team as before) reveals that she'd been living in Gemma's smart home after uploading her program before being killed, a la The Lawnmower Man. She offers to help them take down AMELIA in exchange for a physical body. Gemma doesn't trust her, so puts her into a Moxie unit - a toy robot thing clearly copied from Black Mirror's "Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too" episode (the one with Miley Cyrus as a pop star performing a rewritten version of Nine Inch Nails' "Head Like A Hole") - in order to hack into wealthy tech billionaire creep Alton Appleton's (Jemaine Clement, Flight of the Conchords) servers to find out what's going on.
After AMELIA kills Alton, the group retreat to a massive bunker under Gemma's house that M3GAN had constructed with plans that they'd hide there when AMELIA triggers an AI Apocalypse. It was at this point my feelings on the movie flipped from "this isn't so bad" to "what the heck is this crap?!?" How the actual how does a secret underground lair get built under a residential home without anyone knowing?!? This isn't some billionaire superhero with the means to have Lairs 'r' Us build a Batcave under his estate where trucks full of mined earth can be removed without notice. If M3GAN can have this done, why does she need to beg Gemma to build her a body?
From there the plot gets even more convoluted and ludicrous involving a Xerox motherboard created in the early-1980s which as been learning for four decades and if someone were to remove it from its air-gapped Faraday cage it would provide Total Control Power of all tech in the world, blah-blah-woof-woof. There are so many red herrings, fakeouts, "oh no, M3GAN's dead, oh wait, no, she's not" twists and turns I stopped caring because the movie was just trying to be clever when it was braindead.
While director Gerald Johnstone came up with the story with M3GAN co-writer Akela Cooper, the final script was his and he sabotages himself with the spaghetti plot and cringe-worthy dialogue like, "Hold on to your vaginas," which is so dumb that a Speak & Spell wouldn't say it. While his direction is workmanlike, he limits himself by his on contrivances.
The 4K presentation is clean and has some good highlights at times, but who cares when the story is dumb?
The first M3GAN caught on with meme culture thanks to the goofy murder dance she does in the trailer, but under the hype was a neat 8/10 score (never finished the review) B-movie that delivered the goods promised on the tin. But in their desire to force another social media craze, they forgot that it's impossible to make fetch happen by brute force. Blumhouse head Jason Blum admitted they botched this one and while there's a spinoff film, SOULM8TE ("soulmate"), coming in January 2026, it's going to be difficult to resurrect the girl again without an exceptional concept and script. Too bad.
For a dozen years from 1968-1980, Led Zeppelin were Titans of rock & roll, putting out eight albums (not counting the posthumous outtakes collection, Coda, nor the live The Song Remains the Same) and filling the playlists of AOR FM radio stations until the tragic death of drummer John "Bonzo" Bonham in 1980 just ahead of a massive stadium tour, their first in three years, after consuming about 40 shots of vodka in a 24-hour period and choking on his vomit at the age of only 32. (Drink responsibly.) The band disbanded with singer Robert Plant launching a successful solo career, guitarist Jimmy Page briefly having a band called The Firm with Bad Company vocalist Paul Rodgers, and bassist John Paul Jones continuing with producing and arranging including string arrangements on R.E.M.'s Automatic For The People album.
But that's how they ended, how did Led Zeppelin begin? That's the story told by Becoming Led Zeppelin, the first documentary project produced with the full cooperation of the band. Comprised of new interviews with the surviving members and a previously unheard interview with the usually press-shy Bonham and a wealth of never before seen concert footage, it briskly summarizes the members' memories of how they got into music leading to the rapid career ascendance of Page and Jones as they worked as session musicians including both playing on the iconic Shirley Bassey Bond theme "Goldfinger."
After his stint in The Yardbirds - with fellow guitar heroes Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck - Page wanted to strike off into new directions and the seeming fairytale ease with which the players came together in 1968 and instantly melded into a fully formed group with killer songs - their debut's nine tracks included "Good Times Bad Times", "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You", "Dazed and Confused", "Your Time Is Gonna Come", and "Communication Breakdown"! - beggars belief. Page produced the entire album then shopped it to labels with a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum meaning no label interference, shut up and sell it. Oh, and it's not going to be called The New Yardbirds, but Led Zeppelin.
Considering how modern record release schedules often result in YEARS between albums, it's especially mind-blowing that the Led Zeppelin debut began recording a MONTH after their first rehearsals in August 1968 (and a quick Scandinavian tour as The New Yardbirds, footage of which is included), was released in January 1969, followed by a grueling seven months of tours of North America and Europe, writing and recording Led Zeppelin II in various studios on the road, culminating in its release in October 1969. (And contrary to the "sophomore jinx" trope, it's arguably got even more bangers than the first album.) For those of you keeping score, that's two albums of classic rock created, recorded and released within 14 months of the blokes first getting together.
The live footage is both revelatory and a bit of a drag. It's funny seeing early audiences kind of staring blankly at them, seemingly unimpressed by what they're witnessing, but after a time and the songs which lean more heavily on jamming running longer, it gets a bit tedious. (The missus fell asleep and I was tempted to fast-forward through them.) If you're a Led Zep fanatic, feel free to ignore this comment, but there's a reason why when I used to be a soundman in clubs and I told bands that when I gave the "two songs" warning to wrap up their sets I added, "And I don't mean do the live versions of "Free Bird" (which ran 14-15 mins) and "Dazed and Confused" (27 mins on The Song Remains The Same)."
At times the members are shown archive clips and their reactions are fascinating, like Page seeing a 13-year-old him appearing on a TV show strumming an acoustic or their reacting to Bonham's interview. It's also nice to have a documentary with only the subjects talking about themselves and not surrounded by various Rolling Stone hacks or some combo of Dave Grohl, Henry Rollins, and/or Questlove talking about Led Zeppelin.
But while it's not wholly sanitized, it doesn't delve much into how the songs were created, what lyrical inspiration Plant drew from (to be fair, we all know it's Tolkien the way Rush's Neil Peart was all about Ayn Rand), or square how a band where most of the members were married dealt with the friendly women they met on the long, yet rapid road to stardom.
The speed of their ascendency cannot be understated either. On Jan. 9, 1969, just four days before their debut dropped they were playing San Francisco's Fillmore West, desperately trying to make an impression in America. Exactly one year later, touring Led Zeppelin II, they took to the stage of London's Royal Albert Hall as conquering rulers of the rock world. And this is where Becoming Led Zeppelin ends, so anyone wanting to hear about Led Zep IV and "Stairway To Heaven" are out of luck.
If you approach Becoming Led Zeppelin with the proper expectations, you're likely to quite enjoy it. The concert footage is terrific even if I thought it dragged on at times. (I'm a power-pop fan who'd rather have four songs in 13 minutes rather than a wanked-out blooze jam.) The members are fairly forthcoming in their recollections, though it's not as deep as one could wish for and they are filmed separately depriving the audience of seeing them interact. Production of this doc was announced in 2019 and a work-in-progress cut was screened at the Venice Film Festival in 2021, so it's unlikely follow-ups covering the rest of their career are in the offing.
I must single out director Bernard MacMahon for doing one thing right that most documentary filmmakers militantly refuse to do to my endless annoyance: He provides dates for the events we see so we're never confused as to what year it is when recapping their lives. It's a small detail so often ignored.
Score: 8/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Netflix)
Not to be confused with Ruin Johnson's 2005 debut, Netflix's Brick is a small high-concept sci-fi flick imported from Germany and dubbed fairly well. The premise is the plot: A couple - Tim (Matthias Schweighöfer, Army of Thieves) and Olivia (Ruby O. Fee, Army of the Dead) - whose relationship has collapsed to the point she's leaving him, discovers their apartment's doors & windows are blocked by mysterious black brick walls which seem impenetrable & can become dangerous at times.
Where did this come from and how do they get out? Those are the questions as they proceed to meet their neighbors by drilling and sledgehammering through the walls and floors, attempting to get to a basement bomb shelter which may connect to tunnels. Some want to help, others are more of an impediment, and one is a threat as they don't believe it's safe outside due to anything from a chemical spill or alien invasion.
Brick is an OK chamber thriller where there are a few too many convenient turns like the couple having a big industrial drill in the drawer, someone having a sledgehammer, another having a ladder which makes getting between floors easy, and the owner of the building putting spy cameras in the apartments during renovations which allows for a lot of convenient information discovery. It's also convenient that while cellular, landline, Internet and even the water is cut off, the electricity remains on. The final reveal is visually interesting, but still begs some questions.
The 4K Dolby Vision presentation is fine, but nothing those not paying for the 4K tier will miss out on.
Firmly landing in the "may as well watch it because you're paying for Netflix" zone, Brick is a passable time-killer.
With so many movies these days being massive VFX-heavy epics about invincible superheroes, it's a little disorienting to watch a small revenge thriller of the kind that was common in the 1990s. So it is with The Amateur, a modest global caper flick with some twists.
Rami Malek (Mr. Robot) stars as Charlie Heller, a CIA cryptographer who's married to Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan, Superman), a businesswoman who was attending a conference in London when she was taken hostage and killed by terrorists who were fleeing a botched arms deal in the hotel she was at. It was a random event and she was just an unfortunate bystander.
Using the CIA's Yeah, Right technology (i.e. tech in movies/shows which does the impossible like enhance a full-color hi-rez image of someone off a few pixels in a reflection and makes me say, "Yeah, right!") he determines who the terrorists were and approaches his boss, CIA Deputy Director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany, Mindhunter), with the expectation they'd be brought to justice, but his request is denied because the leader, Horst Schiller (Michael Stuhlbarg, Men in Black 3), who pulled the trigger was a terrorism kingpin and they want to roll up his entire network and to capture this handful would interfere.
Outraged, Charlie uses information from a secret source that Moore and others were hiding malfeasance, blaming accidental US military killings on terrorist IEDs, to threaten Moore with exposure unless he's sent to The Farm, a CIA facility, for training so he can personally hunt and terminate the bad guys. He claims he has a dead man's switch which will send the evidence to the media if they try to disappear him, so they reluctantly agree while frantically tearing his home apart to verify whether he actually has the goods.
At The Farm he's handed over to Robert "Hendo" Henderson (Laurence Fishburne, Pee-Wee's Playhouse) who rapidly determines Charlie simply doesn't have it in him to kill someone. He's a terrible shot, barely able to hit a target unless he's within nearly punching distance, but he does show an aptitude for improvised explosives. After a time, Moore decides Charlie was bluffing and orders Hendo to whack him. Fortunately for Charlie, he'd already bugged out with the fake passports the CIA had cooked up for him and headed to Europe to hunt his wife's killers with Hendo in pursuit.
In contrast to the usual superspies like James Bond and Jason Bourne, Charlie not only lacks their JB initials, but is actually pretty bad at vigilantism. He comes up with a clever way to deal with his first target, but the way they die is a total fluke. He manages to get better at it - the trailer gives away the most spectacular case - but his final takedown is a bit convenient.
While adapted from a novel which was also made into a 1981Canuckian feature starring John Savage and Christopher Plummer, the screenplay by Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down, but also Transformers: The Last Knight, a movie I bought in 2017 and still haven't watched because everyone says it's so bad) and Gary Spinelli (American Made) feels generic and formulaic. It suffers from the thing where the world's population is limited to just the characters in the movie so Charlie seems to have no friends or family or in-laws also mourning Sarah's killing. Jon Bernthal appears twice as a CIA field operative, but contributes nothing so why is the character even there?
Malek is OK in his usual twitchy bug-eyed Eliot Alderson way and Fishburne basically plays a cross between Morpheus (The Matrix) and the Bowery King (John Wick 2-4). Brosnahan is appealing in her flashbacks, but everyone is playing the script which isn't stretching many boundaries.
The Dolby Vision presentation has some brief moments of bright highlights, but the generally gray spy movie color palette limits eye candy opportunities.
Remember The Old Guard? It was released on Netflix in July 2020 during the Scamdemic lockdowns (Thanks, Trump!) and was a hit because with nothing else to do, everything on streaming became a hit. I somehow failed to log watching it and only know I scored it a 7/10 from my IMDB. (I'd guessed 6/10 based on a reference in another review here.) A sequel was inevitable, but thanks to various writers and actors strikes, The Old Guard 2 shuffles into view for the Independence Day weekend five years laer and that's the reason I ask if you remember it is because if you haven't rewatched it recently, you will very likely be lost for most of this dull and incomplete sequel.
It opens with Quỳnh (Veronica Ngô) being hoisted out of the ocean where she's spent the last five centuries trapped in an iron maiden. Her savior is a mysterious woman named Discord (Uma Thurman, My Super Ex-Girlfriend) who is eventually revealed to be the Original First Immortal, a title that Andromache "Andy" (Charlize Theron, Atomic Blonde) thought she held.
Meanwhile, Andy and her gang of immortals - The Old Guard - are raiding a Croatian mansion with some questionable art choices to stop a weapons sale. After the mission, the two gay men on the team - Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) - are having relationship trouble because one (don't recall which and don't care) feels he needs some space after 1000 years together. Not trusting his partner, the other guy follows him along with Nile (KiKi Layne, The Old Guard), who was the last movie's newest immortal to where he was headed, the apartment of Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts, probably some European movies), a former teammate who was exiled for betraying them in the last movie, only to find him missing thus paying off the end-credits scene of the first movie where he came home to find Quỳnh there.
You know, I don't want to recap this thing anymore. The plot is nonsense involving Discord claiming Nile is the Last Immortal due to a matching birthmark and that she wants to use Nile to kill everyone else to stop Immortals - not to be confused with Marvel's Eternals or Inhumans - from meddling in human affairs. Why? Don't know. Then there's also the theory of newly-introduced Immortal Librarian Tuah (Henry Golding, Crazy Rich Asians) that anyone wounded by Nile would lose their immortality, but if they freely chose to they could pass their powers onto someone who'd lost theirs so yes, Andy will get her groove back. (SPOILER ALERT!)
And after spending five centuries literally drowning, resurrecting, rinsing, repeating in the icy darkness of the sea, shouldn't Quỳnh be pretty much insane & madly seeking vengeance, not just acting pouty as if Andy said her flan was "mid"?
It ends in a cliffhanger which presumes that audiences will be desperate to see how it turns out, but with a third movie depending on this one fared, that's unlikely. Then again, Netflix handed the Russo Brothers over a half-BILLION dollars to make The Gray Man and The Electric State, so perhaps they won't mind burning more cash if the budget is under control.
Despite the script being co-written by the source graphic novels' co-creator, Greg Rucka, the mythology is flat and laden with mumbo jumbo that alludes, but never concludes. The action scenes are shakycam/edit fu and if you were looking forward to a hot, sexy throwdown between Beatrix Kiddo and Aeon Flux, prepare to be disappointed.
As for the A/V presentation, other than some Atmos effects in spots and some OK highlights, you're not missing much if not springing for the top tier plan.
If you've watched any of the documentary features on previous releases of Jaws then much of what's included in Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story will be very familiar with tales of the mechanical shark not working, the production running waaaaaay over schedule & budget and how Steven Spielberg was looking down the barrel of career annihilation with just his second feature, but ended up inventing the "blockbuster" and securing final cut in perpetuity.
Featuring new interviews with Spielberg, co-star Lorraine Gary (Elaine Brody), the widow and son of novel author Peter Benchley, son of Robery Shaw (Quint), and various shark extras and townies who were in the cast - one new detail is that only eight cast members were from Hollywood (and one was the co-writer); the rest were locals civilians - it treads familiar ground while popping in new details even for extras junkies like me like that there were three mechanical sharks made for use depending on which side would be facing the cameras.
While this was added to my existing digital 4K copy of Jaws, it's also available it appears on Hulu, Mouse+ and National Geographic's services. If you're a fan, but haven't watched extras before, you'll get some new insights on a favorite film of many.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on streaming. (Coming to Hulu July 10, 2025)
Ah, summer - the time of year when temperatures rise and the IQ of movies drop, not that that's always a bad thing. People want escapist popcorn fare and on this Independence Day weekend that means dinosaurs running amok in theaters and streamers treating the stay-at-home crowd to a sequel like Netflix's The Old Guard 2 and the high concept action comedy Heads of State from Amazon Prime.
It opens with a prologue in Spain where a joint CIA-MI-6 operation goes horribly sideways resulting in the deaths of everyone including team leader Noel Bisset (Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Quantico) - spoiler: she's not dead; it's in the trailer - and allowing a hacker (Stephen Root, Office Space) working for Russian arms dealer Viktor Gradov (Paddy Considine, Mobland) to access the super spy network Echelon which holds all the secrets and sees everything.
We then meet our titular heads of state: Recently inaugurated American President Will Derringer (Jon Cena, Peacemaker) is a former action movie star nicknamed "the Venom in Denim" for his Water Cobra series and British Prime Minister Same Clarke (Idris Elba, Pacific Rim) has been PM for six years, is suffering poor approval ratings, and thinks Derringer is a clown. Derringer isn't too chuffed about Clarke either because during the campaign he had fish & chips with his leading opponent & considered that interference in the election.
After their personal beefs erupt during a joint press conference, their respective chiefs of staffs suggest Clarke riding on Air Force One with Derringer to the upcoming NATO Summit in Trieste, Italy with a side stop in Warsaw, Poland. It will make for a good photo op to tamp down the negative press. Unfortunately, a bad guy posing as a chef on AF1 kills the comms officers and turns off the radios, then attempts to kill the leaders while a cargo jet filled with attack drones appears and launches an assault on the plane. The plane critically damaged, a Secret Service agent gets them into parachutes and off the plane before it crashes into the woods of Belarus. (If you're thinking, "Wait? Isn't Belarus past Poland?" then give yourself a cookie because it is.)
While Derringer wants to call home to let his family and government know they're alive, Clarke believes that whoever could've pulled off such an audacious attack would be listening for such a call and probably had moles in their governments, so best to keep quiet and get the the CIA safe house in Warsaw that the agent directed them to. Through a series of hijinks they make it to Warsaw and into the hands of CIA station agent Marty Comer (Jack Quaid, Novocaine). On the downside, with control of Echelon Gradov's goons immediately show up to kill everyone.
The pair almost escape, but are caught and basically dead until a car appears out of nowhere to run down their captors. And who is this driver ex machina? Duh. It's Bisset! (Told you she wasn't dead!) The trio then make their way to the NATO Summit which is in a state of uproar because Gradov has leaked documents showing that everyone was spying on and interfering in their supposed allies business. While Acting President Elizabeth Kirk (Carla Gugino, Sin City) tries to hold the alliance together, things aren't looking good. Will the Prez & the PM (Free Band Name!) learn to get along and save the day?
While not breaking much new ground in the antagonist frenemies buddy Odd Couple genre, the script by Josh Appelbaum & André Nemec (Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, the 2014 & 2016 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles flicks) manages to be slightly better than necessary as it takes some time in between the punchy-shooty and mutual disrespect wisecracks to flesh out the characters more than the cartoons you'd expect.
Derringer gets ragged on for being "gym strong as opposed to strong strong" by the actual military vet Clarke, but they don't turn him into a punching bag for "stupid ugly Americans" or an avatar of a certain former pal of Hollyweird celebs who they decided was worse than Satan a decade ago because he changed team jerseys. Derringer is a bit of a goof, but he's a kind family man who's trying to do good in the world. Conversely, Clarke's dismissive snootiness is a front for being a lonely bachelor in a job he's getting jaded about as he still pines for the girl who got away but comes back into his life in time to run bad guys down with a car.
Director Ilya Naishuller (Hardcore Henry, Nobody) sometimes wobbles a bit on the tone when dealing with Gradov's brutality, but it's only briefly, unlike someone like David Leitch (Bullet Train) who wobbles for entire movies. The action is clear and there are a couple of genuinely brilliant instances of showing not telling to explain how characters got from one point to another.
While Heads of State may not be a towering achievement in action cinema, it's a notch above the usual dumped to streaming dreck we get served and watch only because we're paying for it anyway. A post-credit scene hints at possible sequel action and I wouldn't be opposed to more in this vein.
Because I've been lackadaisical about keeping DirkFlix updated, I've never adequately surfaced my adoration for the John Wick franchise, only writing reviews for John Wick when I caught it on video and John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum theatrically (which I somehow felt it flowed better than Chapter 2 when now I feel JW2 is the best of the series) despite multiple viewings of the series. I own them all on 4K UHD Blu-ray, I watched the so-so Peacock series The Continental which was a Winston origin story and made a rare trip to the theaters again for the spinoff Ballerina.
The new standard they've set for action films is something I mercilessly hold against movies which still trade in the old shaky-cam and edit fu techniques to obscure the fact the performers aren't very good at fighting or the mistaken belief that SHAKY! = ENERGY FUN! The Paul Greengrass school of action as typified in his The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum sequels is out, the John Wick style is in or should be.
But how did John Wick arise to conquer action cinema? That's the question answered in the feature length documentary Wick Is Pain, which is a mantra that director Chad Stahelski and star Keanu Reeves have for the brutal physical toll these movies take on everyone involved.
It introduces us to the directorial tag-team of Stahelski and David Leitch (The Fall Guy, Deadpool 2) and how they came up together as stuntmen and fight choreographers in the 1990s. Stahelski was a good friend and training partner of Brandon Lee's and when Lee was killed by an accidental shooting while filming The Crow in 1993, Stahelski came in to be Lee's body double for the final two weeks of shooting, either being filmed from behind or having Lee's face superimposed over Stahelski's body. Another big break came when he was Reeves key stunt double for The Matrix.
The pair founded 87Eleven, an "action design" company that provided complete services to Hollywood from fight choreography and pre-viz to training the stunt performers and doing 2nd unit direction. Their backgrounds in martial arts allowed them to ride the wave of change from old style stunts to wire-assisted Hong Kong style work as done by action legend Yuen Woo-ping, who did The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Looking to transition into directing they found a script by Derek Kolstad called Scorn about a retired hitman whose wife died and the puppy she'd left him was killed. Initially intended for a Paul Newman type (Newman died in 2008, so weird pick), they realized the action would require a younger star in his 50s. They rapidly settled on Reeves, who was also looking to get back into action after nearly a decade of non-action movies since 2005's Constantine. He was in the process of finishing 47 Ronin and his directorial debut, Man of Tai Chi, but when both flopped, his star power was dimming and there wasn't a ton of enthusiasm from the studio, Lionsgate, to invest too heavily in this rookie effort by two stunt guys starring a washed-up actor and oh my God, do you have to kill the puppy?!?
The production was so fraught that it almost collapsed days before shooting was to begin when the financing fell apart. They were facing trying to cut $6.5 million from the budget (impossible) and it was almost scrapped, which would triggered lawsuits from everyone against them, until the most unlikely angel investor - Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria! - swooped in with the cash (and got a producers credit) to save the day. They didn't tell Reeves who'd bailed them out until they'd finished.
Even with the money, the troubles didn't relent. Stahelski's marriage to stuntwoman Heidi Moneymaker (who is Scarlet Johansson's double) was crumbling and the partnership with Leith (who wasn't credited as director) was getting tense. Lots of "Mom and Dad are fighting" vibes on the set. Concerned that they wouldn't be taken seriously as storytellers they spend nine days shooting Keanu moping around his house, burning two days to film him doing bookbinding repairs. The dailies were boring and the assembly cut was a disaster. (To be fair, Martin Scorsese has mentioned that if a filmmaker does not feel physically ill when watching their first cut, then something might be wrong.)
When they finally sorted things out, no one wanted to pick up the distribution rights. Finally, Lionsgate took them just because otherwise it'd get dumped direct to video. But in a stroke of luck, Kingsman: The Secret Service moved its release date from October 2014 to early-2015 opening a date for John Wick. As an extra bonus, Fantastic Fest was just before that date so they held a screening to the prime target audience of the film which resulted in rave reviews and tons of social media hype.
After becoming a sleeper hit, Lionsgate knew that they needed to get a John Wick 2 rolling as fast as possible, but they didn't have an idea for a story beyond expanding the universe somehow and going to Rome. The timing was poor for the duo to launch into the sequel because Leitch was ready to go with a movie called The Coldest City (which would become Atomic Blonde, his best movie) so the decision to go their separate ways was made, leaving Stahelski to shepherd the rapidly expanding John Wick franchise while Leitch made so-so movies consistently hampered by his inability to manage tone while having terrific action.
The rest of the series is covered with plenty of behind-the-scenes footage from the productions along with interviews and Reeves and Stahelski together, watching clips from the movies and discussing the challenges of shooting things. Reeves fanatical dedication to training often bumps into the fact that as a 50-something man who's got a lot of miles on his body - if you've ever seen BTS footage from the first Matrix you've seen Reeves wearing a neck brace after spinal fusion doing his training - to the point where if you seen John Wick limping in pain, that's not acting.
As a junkie for making-of stuff, it's cool how they explain developments in the tech where they went from using Airsoft guns with digital muzzle flashes and shell casings (which they hated) to what are called full-block guns where the barrel is plugged so nothing comes out of the barrel - even blanks can deliver lethal force out of the business end as Jon-Erik Hexum learned the hard way - and low-powered blanks cycle the action, eject brass, and make bangs that help the stuntmen cue their actions.
The way the series success allowed for even bigger set pieces, location shots - there's a funny sidebar about how shooting JW3 in Morocco was a hassle because it was a fishing town with tons of stray cats all over who'd wander onto the set and they had to save them from being eaten by Halle Berry's attack dogs - casting (like Berry or Donnie Yen) is covered, all driven by Stahelski and Reeves desire to tell a compelling story in spectacular fashion.
Wick Is Pain walks the line between being an "Oh boy, aren't we so awesome? We're the best!" puff piece and a warts-and-all expose of the grueling amount of work it takes to execute these films. While the details about how miraculous the production of the first film was, subsequent entries get diminishing coverage with little in the way of details like how the Dragon's Breathe shotgun ammo top-view scene was done. For someone like me, the lack of depth made it less useful, though to be fair the individual releases covered these topics.
While it's priced at $10 to buy, it feels overpriced for the actual content. If it shows up on a streaming service and you're a fan, it's a fun, if slight, watch which will inform how the carnage gets made.
Considering Hollyweird is (usually) all about making money and horror films are the most consistently profitable genre because they are typically inexpensive to make due to no big stars, low budgets, and decent box office, it's odd to realize that it's been 14 years since the last Final Destination movie - Final Destination 5 - which ended the run of five movies between 2000 and 2011 which featured an unstoppable "villain" in the form of Death itself and sometimes absolutely bonkers Rube Goldberg machine death scenes. (No one who's seen Final Destination 2 will ever drive behind a log hauler.) Well, Death is back from holiday with Final Destination Bloodlines, which takes the familiar dog and teaches it a few new tricks.
It opens with the traditional elaborate disaster premonition scene set in 1968 at the opening of the Sky View restaurant atop a tower which is meant to evoke Seattle's Space Needle. We meet young Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger, Stargirl), who has been brought there by her boyfriend as a surprise and also to propose. No thanks to a bratty kid tossing the unluckiest penny ever off the open air observation deck, a wild chain reaction of events leads to the explosion and collapse of the tower, killing everyone including Iris.
Usually in the series, the person who foresees disaster then intervenes to halt things, but here we jump to Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) as she wakes up screaming in her college math class. Unable to sleep for the past two months as she's constantly tormented by the visions of the Sky View disaster, her grades have suffered to the point she's on academic probation, at risk of losing her scholarship. She believes the visions are related to her grandmother, so goes home to ask her father, Marty (Tinpo Lee), about grandma.
It's a sore point for him because his wife, Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), Stefani and her brother Charlie's (Teo Briones) mother, had left the family when Stefani was 10 because of how Iris had raised her and Stefani's uncle Howard (Alex Zahara) and he forbids her to seek Grandma out. So she tries Uncle Howard who always waves her off because of how his mother had seemingly gone nuts over this premonition. However her aunt tips her as to where she could locate Iris.
Stefani goes to her place in the woods and finds it's a walled fortress that makes Laurie Strode's place in Halloween (2018, unreviewed, 5/10 - catch on cable/streaming) look like a city park. Old Iris (Gabrielle Rose), has been cheating Death by staying locked in there, never stepping outside, for years. She explains her premonition and we then see the usual prevention of disaster, but explains that Death will not be denied and not only has it been killing all the people who should've died that night, but also their descendants who never would've been born.
She's compiled a book full of scrawled notes and clippings documenting the past six decades of carnage, but Stefani refuses to believe the crazy until Iris, who now has terminal cancer, demonstrates by stepping out of her cabin and is promptly killed in spectacularly gory fashion. NOW Stefani believes! But when she tries to explain the theory to her family - that Death has been systematically reaping the survivors and descendants in order of when they died in the premonition then by order of birth, and that Uncle Howard and his four kids would be next followed by Darlene, Stefani and Charlie (spouses are exempt) - they think she's caught a case of the crazies until Howard is killed in a bizarre gardening accident.
When Darlene rolls into town in her Winnebago, her home now, for her brother's funeral, Stefani is naturally chilly to bad mom, but allows her to join the kids' ersatz Scooby Gang as they try to use Iris's book of clues to find a way to beat Death which leads them to recurring franchise character William Bludworth (Tony Todd, in his last performance before passing in December 2024, less than a year after filming) who is also dying of cancer. He explains that the only way to stop Death is to either kill and take the remaining years of the victim or die and they get revived. Attempts to do the latter go about as well as you'd expect.
I've been a casual fan of the Final Destination series since the beginning, really appreciating the whole Death conceit as an invisible force orchestrating ridiculous accidents as opposed to a Freddie or Jason or Leatherface with metal claws/machete/chainsaw. (No one cosplays as "Death from Final Destination.") But by the third entry, I found the setups too obviously telegraphed, and I think I skipped the 4th installment (The Final Destination). But the fifth film with its epic North Bay Bridge collapse sequence and the closing whammy revealing it was a pseudo-prequel to the first was a winner.
Though I own the other movies on Blu-ray, we didn't rewatch them ahead of Bloodlines, so I'd forgotten about some of the rules (like the kill to steal time one), but it's not important for this soft relaunch of the series. Overall, it's an OK entry in the series with a good amount of "OOOOOH!!!!" kill moments which if we're being honest is why we watch these movies. The unfamiliarity wish most of the cast helps keep the tension up because no one has the plot armor of being the Big Star.
The writers are an eclectic mix with Jon Watts, director of the MCU Spider-Man films, contributing to the story and Guy Busick, who's co-written the Scream series reboots as well as the above-average Ready Or Not (7/10) and Abigail (7/10), but it's not as elevated as those movies. Directorial team Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein step into the Big Leagues here and do well staging the action. Some of the visual effects are a bit obvious, but they're mostly good.
Final Destination Bloodlines grossed $280M on a $50M budget, so it's highly likely a sequel will be forthcoming sooner than 2039. As long as they can keep the quality up - storywise as well as inventive kills - Death is welcome to do his thing.
The short, weird life of weird "anti-comic" comedian(?) Andy Kaufman is explored superficially in Thank You Very Much, which was the signature line of his Foreign Man character which he parlayed into the role of Latka Gravas on Taxi for five seasons between 1978 thru 1983, ending a year before his shocking death of lung cancer at age 35; shocking because he didn't smoke or drink, was a vegetarian, and practiced Transcendental Meditation.
With loads of archival footage, the documentary recaps his outlandish shtick where he always seemed to be "on" and constantly riding the line between amusing and bemusing as he'd read from The Great Gatsby for HOURS during his performances. His unsuccessful audition for Saturday Night Live is shown and while he didn't make the cast, he was invited to perform bits from his act throughout the show's first season including the debut show where he did the Mighty Mouse theme bit where he stands there playing the record, only moving to lipsynch along with the "Here I come to save the day!" chorus.
Interspersed with the footage are reminiscences from admirers like Steve Martin (a fellow anti-comedian who didn't tell jokes per se); contemporaries like SNL boss Lorne Michaels; Taxi cast mates Danny DeVito and Marilu Henner; his girlfriend and other friends including performance artist Laurie Anderson, who spoke of her times with Kaufman in a piece on her The Ugly One with the Jewels album; and most importantly, yet frustratingly, his best friend and writer, Bob Zmuda, who'd be an accomplice in some of his put-on bits.
The frustration comes from fact that Zmuda never goes into discussing how they came up with Kaufman's stunts. Want a theory about how his parents lying about his grandfather's death traumatized him so much that it warped his entire pysche? Thank You Very Much has you covered. Want to hear about how he developed the grotesque Vegas lounge lizard character Tony Clifton or how Zmuda would collaborate in confusing whether Kaufman was Clifton under all the prosthetic makeup by donning the Clifton guise so he and Andy would be seen together? Nope.
While his foray into being a wrestling heel, challenging women to fight him, culminating in pro wrestler Jerry Lawler slapping him out of his chair on Late Night with David Letterman, they don't reveal that the altercation was staged. With Kaufman dead over 40 years now....or is he?.....what's the point of keeping the secrets? I shouldn't know more about a documentary subject simply by virtue of being old enough to have lived through his brief heyday.
While Thank You Very Much is a tidy primer on Andy Kaufman's brief and idiosyncratic life which will clue in those too young to remember him or wish to use it as an addendum to the 1999 Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon or the 2017 Netflix documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond which covered how Jim Carrey drove everyone crazy being full metal Method in his channeling of Kaufman for Man on the Moon. But those seeking deep insight or tales of how and or why he did what he did will have to settle for Lucy Van Pelt-grade psychoanalysis of what may've been an unknowable man.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Hoopla.)
If you like your men behaving very badly and correctly believe Network is a documentary and American Psycho is a comedy, then the new HBO/Max Original film Mountainhead is here to reinforce your fears of gazillionaire tech bros and the generative AI deepfake world we're plummeting into.
Hugo "Souper" Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman, Rushmore) has invited his three besties - collectively known as the "Brewsters" for never-explained reasons - to his new 21,000 sq ft, 7-bedroom mountain mansion outside of Park City, UT called Mountainhead (roll credits!) for a no stress, no deals, brofest weekend. Coming are Venis "Ven" Paris (Cory Michael Smith, May December), the owner of a web company called Traam (think Hooli if you're a Silicon Valley fan) and the Richest Man in the World; Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef, Ramy), owner of AI company Bilter; and Randall Garrett (Steve Carell, Anchorman), a venture capitalist who helped the other startups in addition to running a company that sounds patterned after Peter Thiel's Palantir.
Hugo's nickname "Souper" is because at only a half-billion dollars net worth (approximately 1/460th of Ven's tally) coming from a meditation app makes him the "poorest" and thus closest to needing alms from a soup kitchen and the not-so-subtle hazing of the shortest member of the quartet begins as they diss Mountainhead with slights like, "Is that supposed to be like The Fountainhead? Who was your decorator, Ayn BLAND?" They snowmobile and hike to a mountain peak where they write their net worth on their chests, don hats symbolizing their rank - Ven (crown), Randall (captain's hat), Jeff (sailor hat), Hugo (soup ladle on a chain) - then shout their wishes into the void.
The casual intentions of weekend are interrupted by constant news alerts on their phones about the unrest sweeping the world as generative AI tools released by Traam are being used to create fake videos of atrocities which are then sparking very real and lethal reprisals as tribal groups seeking payback respond to the fake videos. As death tolls rise, Ven doesn't seem particularly bothered by the fallout, saying that it's just a rough patch and that good content will drown out the bad. (As Tony Stark said, "Not a great plan.")
However, a solution exists as Jeff's AI tools could be used to detect and expose the deepfake videos being used to propagandize and radicalize people to violence. Ven wants to buy Bilter to integrate its fact-checking AI tools so he doesn't have to roll back the new features (nor take responsibility for what it's wrought), but Jeff doesn't want his creation subsumed into Traam. Unknown to the others, Randall wants the merger to happen because he's been given a terminal cancer diagnosis and believes that Ven is on the cusp of launching a transhumanist epoch where he will be able to be uploaded and live forever in The Matrix, so to speak.
As the world's governments begin to falter, the three who aren't Jeff decide this would be a perfect time to overthrown the Old World Order and install themselves as the oligarchs of a global technocracy powered up their tech companies endless reach into governments, militaries, power grids, etc. Realizing that taking over the world at once may be too much, they decide to start small with Randall launches a rolling brownout in Belgium and Zoom conferences with Argentina to discuss being taken over by them beginning.
While this goes on Jeff is worried about his girlfriend Hester (Hadley Robinson, Little Women) who has gone on to Mexico for what he calls "a sex party" but she retorts isn't that but "a party where people have sex." While he's troubled by the chaos, he still won't sell to Ven and when Randall fears his life as the Lawnmower Man is at risk, he proposes to the others that they kill Jeff because he's messing up their plans. Because morality doesn't exist in this dojo, they all agree, but because being a megawealthy tech broligarch doesn't necessarily come with competent murder skills, it devolves into farce.
If this all feels ripped from the headlines it's because writer-director Jesse Armstrong (creator of Succession) only began writing the script in January 2025, filming for five weeks in March, and getting it finished and on HBO Max by May 31, 2025. However, it's to his great credit that he doesn't indulge in what 99% of Hollyweird would've done in their current rage state over the peasants voting incorrectly and make it into an obvious bash of Elon Musk and the Bad Orange Man.
While there are some similarities to real people if you know who's who in the techocratic elite space, Armstrong chooses to craft a more general tale of wealthy male fear (a la David Mamet's Glengarry Glenn Ross) and ego, the risks of unchecked AI, the self-anointed regard techno bros have over the rabble, while leavening it with farcical attempts at violence and how even when your best friends try to murder you, you can move past it if there's a buck to be made. His dialog doesn't stop to Basil Exposition anything for the non-nerds so you either keep up with the rapid-fire or get left behind. He trusts the audience to follow enough to understand the base emotions fueling the characters.
The performances are all strong from deft comic performers, especially Carell who's Randall could be seen as a brother to his role in The Big Short which was criminally denied an Oscar nomination. I'm not familiar with Youssef or Smith (though he was Chevy Chase in Saturday Night), but they're good as well. Schwartzman, of course, can play these weasels in his sleep.
Perhaps a more deliberately developed (read: not filmed shortly after writing) script could've honed Mountainhead's intentions to a finer, deeper-cutting edge though the rapidly evolving capabilities of generative AI may've left whatever more time in scripting in the dust. Just last month Google unveiled their new Gemini AI video tool powered by Veo3 and it's capable of producing video with audio, sound effects, camera movement, etc. like this:
Sure, it has some jankiness like the text on the signs at the rally being gibberish, BUT what happens in 2028 when a video showing "[Disfavored Politician] BUSTED Drowning Puppies While Shouting 'I LOVE NICKELBACK!'" pops up on teh Intartoobz a month before the Election and it's amplified by corrupt legacy media outlets who eagerly covered up the last President's senility & family corruption. How will we be able to trust what we're shown anymore and who is going to get even richer and more powerful while having fun running the corps which will generate and disseminate these fabrications? While Mountainhead doesn't have those answers, it is willing to posit the question, albeit in the guise of a bro comic farce.
I love the John Wick franchise. Love it. Even the lesser installments blow the doors off of pretty much everything else in the action genre. Sure, the mythology has grown a bit ridiculous at times, but the action continually breaks ground and I ding movies who still traffic in the pre-John Wick era shaky-cam and edit-fu shenanigans when the paradigm has shifted to long take clear coverage. I've been sloppy about getting them all reviewed despite all the times I've watched them, but here is the one other review I posted for John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum. Even the scores tend to have gone up on subsequent viewings with the series averaging 8/10. The fact I've bought all four movies on 4K UHD Blu-ray after getting two on digital 4K says a lot.
So it was with great anticipation I've waited for Ballerina - or as the posters have it, From the World of John Wick: Ballerina - because Ballerina on its own isn't a super memorable title. And waited. And waited some more. From when it was announced in April 2022, there's been enough time that a Netflix Original, a South Korean import also entitled Ballerina arrived in October 2023 to presumably steal some attention from people thinking it was the John Wick spinoff. (I never wrote the review, but it scored a 4/10, Skip it.) Then it was announced its 2024 release date was being pushed back a full year so that John Wick director Chad Stahelski could shoot some additional action scenes to kick it up a notch. (So long ago this began filming, Lance Reddick makes his final screen appearance as Charon, the concierge at the Continental, when he passed away in March 2023, just a week before John Wick 4 came out, making his on-screen death even more poignant.)
Some claim that most of the film was reshot over 2-3 months, which is denied by Stahelski and credited director Len Wiseman - making his first feature since 2012's Total Recall remake which looked terrific, but lacked Mars for some reason - who insist it was just a couple of weeks of additional work. Whatever the facts, it's here and has been blessed with the honor of getting the missus and I to actually go to a theater to see it; our first theatrical visit since Deadpool & Wolverine in August 2024. (Coincidentally, the previous time we went to a show was in April 2023 for John Wick: Chapter 4, one of only seven times I've gone to the movies since the world ended in March 2020.)
If you wondered what the deal was with the tattooed ballerinas glimpsed in John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum when John went to the Director (Angelica Huston) of the Ruska Roma to get passage out of New York City after becoming excommunicado, you're in luck because Ballerina overlaps with the events of that movie.
After an opening scene where a young Eve Macarro (Victoria Comte) witnesses her father (David Castañeda, The Umbrella Academy) murdered by men led by the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne, The Usual Suspects), the orphaned girl is taken by Winston Scott (Ian McShane), manager of the NYC Continental hotel for assassins, to meet the Director to see if she has a place to grow and train.
Of course she does and 12 years later she's Ana de Armas, doing an extended training montage of getting better at dancing and fighting like a girl to compensate for the natural size and strength advantages men have over 5'6" women. She graduates into becoming a Kikimora assassin/bodyguard after completing a protection assignment, barely. She then goes into the murder-for-hire business and after completing a gig, she is attacked by a member of the Cult which the Chancellor leads, indicated by an X brand on their wrist.
Eve demands the Director tell her where the Cult is hiding, but the Director refuses to permit her vendetta. So Eve goes rogue, traveling to Austria on the hunt for the Cult's location in the Austrian Alps town of Hallstatt. Along the way, she makes a pit stop at the Vienna Continental where she stumbles into a situation involving a Cult member, Daniel Pine (Norman Reedus, The Walking Dead), who is attempting to escape with his daughter, which echos Eve's situation with her own father.
As she closes in, the Chancellor contacts the Director to demand she leash her attack kitten or else it will be war between the Cult and Ruska Roma. Who do you send after a woman on a mission? Why the Baba Yaga himself, John Wick (Keanu Reeves, the Bill & Ted series)! Does he stop her? Does she stop him? Does the action ever stop? The answers to all three are various meanings of "Duh!"
While the production may or may not have been troubled, if you didn't know the inside baseball of it there's little to indicate problems. I have routinely praised Stahelski for doing with the John Wick series what his co-director on the first film, David Leitch, has struggled to manage, namely balancing the tone of his films, especially action comedies like Bullet Train (3.5/10, Skip it) and The Fall Guy (5/10, Catch on cable/streaming) and in the latter's review I run down his career, literally. But the credited director Wiseman is no slouch having helmed the first two hot kickass vampire chick flicks of the Underworld series, Live Free or Die Hard (the 4th one where John McClane becomes a superhero at times), and even the flawed Total Recall had clear and kinetic action sequences. Perhaps I could pick out which scenes each shot, but that's just flyspecking.
The bigger problem is the thinness of the script. I'm not demanding Shakespeare from my Unstoppable Killing Machine Revenge Flick or even a fraction of mythos of the Wick world - the first one's logline could've been, "Guy kills a retired assassin's puppy and the assassin murders everyone in return" - but whereas the Wick films deftly sketch the world in brilliant show-don't-tell detail (e.g. what is the deal with the call center with the tattooed Fifties-style women and primitive tech handling the contracts?!?), Ballerina relies on familiarity with the series to understand most of the references & callbacks to the world like the Chapter 3 moments or Chapter 2's "sommelier" weapons dealer scene.
"Young woman becomes assassin to avenge her father's murder" is succinct, but the script by Shay Hatten - who I see wrote it as a spec which Lionsgate bought in 2017 and led to his becoming a co-writer on Chapters 3 & 4 - doesn't really flesh it out with much of a character arc for Eve. (He also co-wrote Zak Snyder's recent tear of bad Netflix movies including Army of the Dead and the catastrophically terribad Rebel Moon movies, soooooooooo make of that what you will.)
Sadly lacking as well is de Armas. I've liked her since she first appeared on my radar in Knock Knock (5/10. Cable/streaming; co-starring Keanu Reeves!) and subsequent appearances in Blade Runner 2049 and others and I was hoping she'd join the elite ranks of beautiful, talented actresses who are also plausible action heroines like Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron and, to a lesser extent, Halle Berry or Milla Jovovich - I omit Scarlet Johansson because her stunt doubles do so much of her action - but while she fights well, her performance lacks the simmering fury that would fuel her revenge quest. I heard someone say that if this was made 10 years ago it would've starred Theron and she would've killed it and that's about right. Amazingly, at age 35 when filmed, she looks about 22 and plays it about the same. It's not bad, but it doesn't quite work.
Reeve's Wick is more of an extended cameo, but it's good though it does raise questions as to why he'd be called in by the tribe who wanted nothing to do with him earlier in the movie?
So the script is thin and the star is disappointing. How's the action then? A: BONKERS! It is a John Wick movie after all and the fight choreographer and stunt performers pull off a variety of unique combat scenarios culminating in a flamethrower fight that had me laughing out loud at how ridonkulous it was in a good way. However, there are a few kills with hand grenades that should've blowed her up real good as well or had her much more banged up. Even when stabbed and beaten, the worst injury she shows is a dainty facial cut with a little blood. Compared to Atomic Blonde (which we watched when we got home) where Theron gets whupped down hard and has black eyes and bruises all over to show for it, this is Disney.
While Ballerina is clearly a step down from the top shelf John Wick films, it does an OK job at not damaging the franchise's reputation, unlike the so-so The Continental TV series which never really caught fire. If you're a fan, it's worth catching a matinee at the theater for the heavy sound - we saw it in Laser Ultra (a Dolby Cinema knockoff) with Atmos sound - but for more causal fans, it can wait for streaming.
Score: 6.5/10. Catch a matinee if you're a big John Wick fan, otherwise catch it on cable/streaming.
For their first movie since 2019's MCU mediocrity Captain Marvel, tag-team filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are back with Freaky Tales, a period anthology dramedy that manages to be even more mediocre. Consisting of four tangentially related short stories set in the same time frame of June 1987 in Oakland, CA they manage to add up to a overall story less than their parts.
The first segment - "Strength in Numbers: The Gilman Strikes Back" - is set at the infamous punk club which spawned Green Day as Nazi thugs storm the club during an Operation Ivy show, destroying equipment and beating up fans. The next day the punks decide to defend themselves and when the Nazis return for round 2, they're are beaten in a stylized ultraviolent rumble. That's it.
The next segment - "Don't Fight the Feeling" - centers on a pair of female rappers, Entice (Normani from girl group Fifth Harmony) and Barbie (Dominique Thorne, the upcoming Ironheart), who are invited to a club date for local rap icon Too Short (rapper Demario "Symba" Driver) to participate in a rap battle. They win. That's it.
The third segment - "Born to Mack" - is longer and darker in tone as we meet Clint (Pedro Pascal, AGAIN), an underworld enforcer who is seeking to get out of the game as he does "one last job" collecting from a deadbeat at a poker game in the back of a video store. In the one inspired moment of the whole movie, he gets stuck in a discussion of movies with the store's owner, played by the least expected actor. (I shant spoil the surprise in case you still want to watch this.) Tragedy befalls Clint as his pregnant wife is shot to death, but even then his gang won't let him go.
The final segment - "The Legend of Sleepy Floyd" - brings back their Nazis and their leader's father, The Guy (Ben Mendelsohn, a frequent Boden/Fleck collaborator), as he is orchestrating multiple robberies of Golden State Warriors players during a NBA Championship game. Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis), an actual Warriors player who was on that year's All-Star Team, has a record-setting night, but because his mother wasn't feeling well and had left the game early with his girlfriend and another, arriving at Sleepy's home and surprising the burglars, who then shoot them, it's not a great evening to remember.
A pair of punks from Gilman Street happened to overhear Clint discuss the crimes at a restaurant and tell Floyd about the connection to the Nazis, so Floyd does what any grieving man would do: Straps up with all sorts of ninja weapons and kills everyone with the power of meditation and kung fu.
There's a charming lo-fi retro vibe to the cinematography - the first segment is shot in 4:3 before going widescreen for the rest - and there are moments where you can tell they're paying homage to Eighties cult movies like Repo Man with a bit of Pulp Fiction thrown in, but the conceit of the stories being interconnect is too tenuous.
The first two segments are so superfluous to the rest it's questionable as to why they're included. It feels like Boden/Fleck had four scraps of ideas they couldn't make into full movies, so tossed them together. As I'm writing this, it occurred to me that if they had intercut the stories together it may've hidden the sparseness of the weaker segments. Frankly, if the first two disappeared and the last two, which are more interrelated, were one story, it'd be best, though not particularly good.
It also relies too much on Easter eggs like recognizing that The Guy's cop partner is the real Too Short (who also narrates the movie) and that the bearded bald guy who gives a testimonial for Sleepy Floyd's meditation course is Tim Armstrong of Operation Ivy and Rancid. Get it? They were the punk band in the first part! Awesome! Ahem...
Boden/Fleck have been critic's darlings for two decades with their first movies, Half Nelson (which starred Ryan Gosling) and Sugar, getting lots of flowers. But nothing else they've done has landed commercially except for Captain Marvel which allows Boden to claim the title of First Woman To Direct a Live Action Movie That Grossed $1 Billion as if she didn't have a male co-director and the plum release date a month before Avengers: Endgame with the hype that this was a must-see movie to prep for that. (If you held a rabid badger against the privates of even fairly nerdy MCU fans and demanded they name who directed Captain Marvel, you'd have a lot of sad fans and overfed badgers as "some art house team" wasn't sufficient an answer.)
While there are a few moments in Freaky Tales that almost make it a so-so watch, it really didn't do much for me, barely avoiding a Skip It recommendation.
A sleeper hit earlier this year was Ryan Coogler's (Creed, Black Panther) Sinners, a Depression-era story mashing up of Deep South Jim Crow business, blues music, Hoodoo, and vampires, because why not? Coogler muse Michael B. Jordan stars in a dual role playing Elijah "Smoke" Moore & his twin Elias "Stack" Moore, collectively referred to as the "Smokestack Twins."
It's 1932 in Clarksdale, Mississippi and the Twins are back after several years working up in Chicago for Mafia families. They've returned with a stack of cash stolen from the Mob and looking to open a juke joint for the local black sharecroppers and laborers who aren't permitted to patronize the white folks establishment.
They buy a former sawmill from Hogwood (David Maldonado), who insists they won't have any trouble from the Klan (spoiler: he's the local Grand Dragon), and then split up to prepare for the opening that night. Smoke goes to town to contract food from the Chinese shopkeeper Bo Chow (Yao) and his wife Grace (Li Jun Li) and to have his estranged wife, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku, Loki), a Hoodoo practitioner. Stack takes their cousin Sammie "Preacher Boy" Moore (newcomer Miles Caton), an aspiring blues guitarist (something his preacher father isn't cool with) with him as he looks to round up talent including Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo, Get Shorty), and Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a married singer whom Sammie is sweet on. Stack also runs into his ex-girlfriend Mary (Hallie Steinfeld, Hawkeye), a "passing" black woman.
Elsewhere, a man whose skin is smoking runs up to a shack and pounds at the door, begging to be left in. This is Remmick (Jack O'Connell), who tells the wary couple - Bert (Peter Dreimanis) and Joan (Lola Kirke) - he is being chased by Indians for some misunderstanding. They let him in and when the group of Lakota show up asking if they'd seen anyone coming through, deny they have. Next thing, they're vampires, too.
The opening night of the juke seems to be going well except the brothers realize early on that due to the amount of company scrip (currency paid to sharecroppers that's only spendable in company stores) they're accepting, they're not making as much real cash as they need to succeed. Problems escalate when three white folk show up asking to be let in, claiming they'd heard the music and just wanted to join in the festivities as they're musicians too. Mary goes to investigate them and at first sympathizes, then decides they need to be kept out. Unfortunately, she doesn't see Remmick take flight behind her as she walks away, Ruh-roh. Long story short, a vampire gets in, the party breaks up, then a whole lot of vampires want to get in at the few remaining humans inside.
I'm somewhat mystified as to the acclaim and success of Sinners because on one hand it's heavily...let's say "influenced" by the 1996 Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez collaboration From Dusk Till Dawn - which started off as a gritty bank robbers on the run crime film before flipping into a bonkers vampires in a Mexican strip club flick - and on the other it's hobbled by a couple of suspense-breaking storytelling choices which kill most of the suspense.
The first mistake is literally the first scene where we see an injured Sammie arrive at his father's church during a service, clutching the broken remains of a guitar neck, clearly suffering injuries, before jumping back 24 hours in a Scriptnotes Stuart Special. As with all movies told in flashback (e.g. Atomic Blonde, Haywire), if they're present before the flashback, it means they survive whatever happens next.
But the more damaging choice was to show Remmick arrive at Bert's shack and reveal what he. Without that sequence, when the trio arrive at the juke and ask to be invited in, the audience would be suspicious because why are these white folk so eager to hang out with the black folk in the 1932 Jim Crow South? Are they trying to entrap the Smokestack Twins and bring in the Klan? Or are they just friendly Irish musicians seeking to jam? Since we KNOW what they are and why they're casually asking to be invited in, it becomes just a waiting game to see who gets turned when they go out and they gets back in.
As if that's not enough, there is a lengthy coda set 50 years later as a mid-credit scene so if you turn it off when it appears the movies over, you'll miss something important.
As lukewarm as I am in general to Sinners, there is one sequence which stands out and that's when the music is playing and a narration that played over the beginning is recalled about how some musicians have an ability to piece the veil between life and death, the present, past, and future and as Sunnie plays, figures ranging from ancient African tribal musicians and dancers appear as well as what appears to be P-Funk guitarist Jimi Hazel and hip-hop DJs and break dancers as the camera swirls around the scene. Good stuff.
Jordan's performance is OK but suffers from both brothers looking the same other than different colored suits and having generally similar personalities. I couldn't remember who was Smoke and who was Stack and it didn't really matter. Part of my difficulty stems from remembering how Tatiana Maslany created over a dozen different clones for Orphan Black, even playing one imitating another so deftly you felt you were watching an imitation, not just the actor switching to the other characterization. (To be fair, though, if you asked me which Winklevoss twin was which as played by Armie Hammer in The Social Network, I couldn't really tell you when they were more differentiated than Coogler's script defines them.)
Caton is more layered in his performance as the conflicted young bluesman; it will be interesting to see what he does next. Lindo almost steals every scene he's in and it's good to see him again after somehow missing everything he's done the past 20 years. (This scene in Get Shorty when he discusses screenwriting is gold.) I didn't recognize Mosaku because of how different she looked from her TVA Agent role in Loki and it was good to see her doing something more involving.
The cinematography by Autumn Durald Arkapaw (Wakanda Forever, The Last Showgirl) is rich, but for home viewing the original IMAX scenes (which only a tiny handful of theaters were able to present) is altered from the original 1.43:1 to the 1.78:1 (16:9) ratio of TVs, alternating from the 2.39:1 widescreen of the majority. Sometimes the transitions are abrupt cuts (a la The Dark Knight), though I spotted at least one slow diminishing of the black bars as used in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (when Katniss enters the arena) and Mission: Impossible - Fallout (the HALO jump and another spot that escapes me now). Compared to the widescreen bulk, the clarity and frame size of the IMAX parts made he wish the whole film was done in fullscreen.
While Sinners has its moments and strengths, particularly in the performances, I was left with too many questions like how in the segregated South did Chinese people had a general store? Perhaps such things happened, but against the backdrop of Jim Crow it's distracting. But as detailed above, the structural choices Coogler made work against whatever points he wanted to make. Clip out the Remmick scene (or use it as a flashback after the vampire twist happens; perhaps have the Indians show up to save the day) and the racial tensions subtext could've worked more allegorically.
