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!
Filmed over a nine year period from 2017 to 2026 (which is why Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, who passed away in 2022, briefly appears), Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear profiles the life and drama of the Blink-182 drummer. From his childhood where his mother died when he was 15 through his rapid ascent in bands due to this monster chops and subsequent descent into such heavy drug use that when he survived a plane crash in 2008 with burns over 2/3rds of his body, doctors had difficulty managing his pain due to his elevated tolerance due to all the drugs he'd taken. In the aftermath of the crash he refused to fly, resorting to taking the Queen Mary to get to Europe for gigs. Most recently, he's best known to non-music fans as Khloe Kardashian's latest husband/baby daddy.
While I'm not a fan of Blink's juvenile mall punk music, I know Barker's regard amongst drummers. I didn't know what all he was doing beyond Blink and how bad his injuries were from the crash, though I knew his fellow crash survivor, DJ AM, struggled with survivor's guilt and fell off the wagon, eventually ODing less than a year later. I had no idea the stylized F logo with a star in it was for his Famous Stars & Straps clothing line. I'd ignored the Kardashian relationship because that entire family is a cancer on society and it's insane that they all got wealthy off Kim banging Brandy's brother on tape.
For some reason the doc makes it sound like he's still angry about his childhood when he patched up his relationship with his father, has established an enduring musical career, has wonderful children and even began flying again. Little, if anything, is wrong with his life.
While not particularly essential, Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear is a decent basic primer for those unfamiliar with the subject.
As far as true crime documentary premises go, My Grandfather Charles Manson has a heck of a hook: The father of filmmaker Sophia Maddox (who co-directs with Alexandra Orton), Daniel Arguelles, who never knew who his father was, discovers via a half-brother who finds him via Ancestry.com that their father is Charles Manson, thus Sophia is Manson's granddaughter. (Free Band Name!) Wondering whether this connection explains her father's moods or her creativity, she embarks on a quest to research the origins of the notorious cult leader upon whose orders seven people, including actress Sharon Tate, were murdered in 1969.
Using her genetic relationship, he travels to Indiana, Manson's childhood home and where his life as a career inmate in reform schools and prisons, subjected to brutal corporal punishment as well as rape - both as victim and perpetrator - began twisting him into the infamous figure he became. This also begins to hint at forming an apologist case for Manson, that he's a victim of the system so it's really the system to blame. Uhhhhhhhh... She also interviews former members of the Manson Family along with a surviving prosecutor of the case and an author who met Manson hundreds of times and wrote about him.
While some of the backstory stuff is illuminating, the bulk of the film consists of Sophia crying while talking to an unseen therapist as she "processes her feelings" and navel-gazes about What It All Means. Dad, who had no idea his mother had hooked up with Manson in the late-1950s for a one/two-night stand or why she was beating him with a lamp cord when Manson and Fam were arrested, reacts especially badly to what she's doing, storming out of an interview he sat in on and cutting off his daughter, blocking her phone number, prompting more crying.
I've always had an aversion to documentarians who put themselves in front of the camera as if they're the subject (e.g. Michael Moore's slovenly obese presence in his fabricated scenarios) but considering Sophia is as much of the subject as Manson, it's inescapable. But it's also meaningless when it's not being annoying. Where's her mother in her backstory? What's the deal with the footage of dad screaming at her in the backseat which initially appears to be part of the current drama but then seems to be from her teenage years?
Most baffling is how after 1-3/4 hours of crying and obsessing over how she will be perceived as Manson's granddaughter, she decides to reclaim her identity by changing her surname from Arguelles, which was the name of Daniel's adoptive father, to Maddox, which was Manson's mother's maiden name (Manson was his stepfather). That's right - after agonizing about what it means to he the descending of a monster, she ditches her father's name for her grandmother's. What a self-absorbed brat.
Could My Grandfather Charles Manson been better if it had been directed solo by Orton so that Sophia's constantly being the center of things been more understandable and potentially better contextualized? Perhaps. But as it stands, like most self-obsessed Zoomer twits, Sophia mistakes her feels for her importance.
Every so often you catch a movie that no one has heard of and has few expectations going for it but it somehow turns out to be a bonkers delight that's probably doomed for less-than-cult-classic status. Back in 2023 it was Bottoms the badly-titled, worse-promoted "queer teen Fight Club" movie which most people who may've liked it probably avoided because it was pitched as "not for straights" when the correct target market was "for people who like absurd humor and laughing."
Now we have Pizza Movie, a horrendously-titled streaming-only comedy (Hulu & Mouse+) whose miniscule synopsis fails to capture just how wild & crazy a comedic freakshow it actually is. It's a movie I wish I could force people to watch so they can see that as hard as the killjoys try, there's still comedy that's funny to be found.
It stars Gaten Matarazzo (Stranger Things) as Jack and Sean Giambrone (The Goldbergs) as Montgomery, two friends and college roommates who are suffering the typical travails of movie freshmen. Monty has the hots for cute girl Ashley (Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Andi Mack), so he races to clean out all the change machines at the laundromat on the day she goes, but being an awkward dork completely strikes out. Jack is constantly being attacked by students for "what he did to the football team." (It eventually gets explained and almost justifies the abuse.)
They're also harassed by upperclassmen led by Logan (Marcus Scribner, Black-ish), whose posse includes Lizzy (Lulu Wilson, Ouija: Origin of Evil), a former friend of theirs who avoids them now while trying to fit in with the cool kids even though Logan is just financially using her. After Logan & Co. break the bottle of booze they'd planned to drink that night, an alternate mind-altering option literally falls from above when an Altoids-like tin labeled "M.I.N.T.S." falls from the drop ceiling where it was secreted a decade before.
After the side effects of taking mystery pills begin manifesting, they Google for information and find the only result is a YouTube video where Frankie (Sarah Sherman, SNL) explains the six phases of effects culminating in something seriously not good. However, the side effects can be halted by eating pizza. Simple enough, right? Just order a pizza, eat it, and you don't have to amuse the baby, the first of the side effects which are so bonkers that I'm not going to spoil them. What could go wrong?
Well, everything. For starters, the pizza is delivered by a Snackatron 3000 robot (voiced by SNL's Bobby Moynihan), and because the dorm's elevator is out of service, it can't come up to their floor. Going down isn't an option either because the paramilitary RAs, led by Blake (Jack Martin, La Brea), are searching the rooms for contraband and control the stairways. Insane hijinks ensue.
Because so much of the fun comes from the absolutely bonkers situations the drugs effects cause, I can't really break down what makes Pizza Movie such a treat. If you like super offbeat random premise generator comedy movies like Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (not reviewed, but 7/10) then you should enjoy what the BriTANicK duo of Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher have written and directed.
There aren't as many Hulu Original movies as Netflix churns out - the last one I reviewed was the disappointing Samara Weaving caper flick Eenie Meanie - so it's noteworthy when one comes along and this week's arrival is the odd scifi-crime-dramedy Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice which sounds like a confusing bisexual swingers movie.
Vince Vaughn stars as Nick, a mobster attending the party celebrating the release of the son of boss Sosa (Keith David), Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro), after six years in prison. Sosa announces to the attendees that he has learned who the snitch that sent Jimmy Boy to prison is and that retribution is coming. A woman, Alice (Eiza González), has a chilly conversation with Nick and leaves the party.
Waiting at a swanky hotel room for her is Quick Draw Mike (James Marsden), a trigger man for Sosa's mob who has had enough of the murdering life and plans on leaving the organization. Nick calls Mike to do a job for him and while Mike tries to dodge the gig, ends up riding with Nick to a house where he's given chloroform and the order to knock on the door and use the chloroform to knock out the man who answers the door. Mike does so and to his surprise, the man of the house is Nick! Whaaaaaaaa????
After a massive brawl due to expired chloroform, this second Nick escapes in the first Nick's car. Nick and Mike eventually catch up to Nick at a gas station and capture him. They then call Alice to warn her to get out of the hotel room because a cannibal hitman called The Barron (a blink and miss it stunt casting choice I shant spoil) is coming looking for Mike.
We finally find out what the heck is going on: The Nick who takes Mike to the house is from six months in the future and the Nick at the party and the house is Present Nick who has framed Mike for being the rat who sent Jimmy Boy up the river as payback for his sleeping with Alice. Future Nick had stumbled over the time machine when trying to collect on the load Sosa made to finance its construction and when he came back in time to the current day, he accidentally killed its builder, Symon (Ben Schwartz), and destroyed the machine.
Since we're working on Looper time travel rules (where anything that happens to Present Nick will impact Future Nick as tested by Alice stabbing Present Nick) and the machine and creator are destroyed, there is only one chance at getting this right. Future Nick is remorseful for setting up Mike, but knows Present Nick will still try to kill him and the fact no one knows what The Barron looks like complicates matters.
As confusing as I'm sure the last to paragraphs probably sound, it's not as complicated to follow as I make it sound because some plot spoilers I'm omitting are included and it makes sense. The stakes are clear and the scenarios suitably ridiculous leading to some quality action scenes.
Where writer-director BenDavid Grabinski (who created & co-wrote the Netflix Scott Pilgrim Takes Off anime series which brought back the entire Scott Pilgrim vs. the World movie cast for a somewhat divisive story) bobbles the ball is in having the best parts being extraneous conversations about non-plot things. Present Nick gets into a heated debate with a gas station clerk over sugar-free candies; there's a running gag about Jimmy Boy having impotence issues; Sosa explains to Jimmy why he's not black; and everyone seems to be a Gilmore Girls fan with almost as much time spent discussing that as Bullet Train wasted nattering on about Thomas the Tank Engine. And the weird choices in musical needle drops becomes it's own thing from the very beginning as we have to watch Symon sing along with a song from the 1988 animated dog movie Oliver & Company.
While the script wanders at times, Vaughn is surprisingly rooted in the dual role, frankly doing a better job of playing the same man at two points in his life than Michael B. Jordan did playing twins in Sinners, earning a Best Actor Oscar. While he does his trademarked Vince Vaughn schtick, he also portrays how the night's events change and changed Nick to drive Future Nick's actions.
Despite the messy script, there's enough entertainment in Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice to merit the watch. While allegedly in 4K HDR, the nighttime setting and generally dim lighting moots the benefits of the format. It seems that only Apple TV bothers to exploit the range of HDR, so don't feel bad if you don't have an awesome TV watching this.
Lost in the commotion of Will Smith's slapping of Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony was that Rock was presenting the Best Documentary Feature Oscar which was won by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson (producer & drummer for The Roots, which is The Tonight Show's house band) for Summer of Soul (which I haven't seen yet). Now Questlove is back with Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius about the rise, fall and legacy of Sylvester Stewart, bka Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone who played Woodstock and influenced legions of other artists with his blending of rock, funk, soul, and pop flavors.
Tracing his early career as a San Francisco radio DJ and record producer in the mid-Sixties (he produced the original version of "Someone To Love" for Grace Slick's pre-Jefferson Airplane band, The Great Society?!) to the formation of the band, SatFS were a unique mix of male, female, black, and white members - including his brother on guitar and sister on keys and vocals - and their sound straddled genres with Top 10 hits like such as "Dance to the Music", "Everyday People", and "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)." (The last of which served up the riff that drive Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation.")
But over time Sly fell prey to drugs and poor peer groups and began to show up late for shows when he bothered to show up at all. By the early-Seventies, the group's popularity plummeted as those inspired by them became competition and members began leaving because he was such a mess and he was recording the music himself.
With interviews with musicians like Andre 3000 (Outkast), D'Angelo, Chaka Khan, Q-Tip (A Tribe Called Quest), Vernon Reid (Living Colour), Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (The Time and Janet Jackson's producers), George Clinton (Parliament/Funkadelic), as well as biographers and others, Questlove weaves a fast-moving and impressive recapitulation of Sly's career and legacy for the first half, but loses some speed when it shifts to Sly's self-destruction because how do you make a guy's life after he'd chosen to be a crackhead with Clinton and was almost a no-show to the group's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction interesting?
While the title hints at some woke posturing, it's interesting that many of the interviewees shy away from the "black genius" tag. One makes a valid point that there was no prior black Elvis or black Beatles for him to ask how to navigate such fame and the pressures he got from all sides, especially militants like the Black Panthers who wanted him to lean harder into racial division. While the 1971 album There's A Riot Going On (meant as a reply to Marvin Gaye's earlier-that-year title What's Going On?) was more political, he was still trying to stay above the divide.
Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius ends with Sly's rediscovery by hip-hop with samples powering songs like the aforementioned "Rhythm Nation" as well as LL Cool J's "Mama's Said Knock You Out" and Beastie Boys "Shadrach" and the revelation of his three children and their comments about their famous, mostly absent father. He's still alive at age 82, but didn't participate in this film.
I found Sly Lives! to be a solid and informative documentary with some surprising information for me, a musician who never really gave him and the band their due. Now I'll definitely get to watching Summer of Soul as well.
On October 21, 2021, Ukraine-born cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was accidentally shot and killed by Alec Baldwin on the set of the movie Rust when a prop gun in which a live round had been loaded discharged. The film's writer & director, Joel Souza, was also wounded when the bullet struck him after passing through Hutchins. It spawned a media firestorm of interest and speculation for the following year-and-a-half as there were multiple lawsuits and criminal trials resulting in one conviction (of armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed), one guilty plea (1st assistant director David Halls), and Baldwin skating free of judgement thanks to slick lawyering.
Now the events and aftermath are the subject of Hulu's original documentary, Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna, directed by her friend and filmmaker Rachel Mason. Using bodycam footage from first responders, tapes of the interviews at the sheriff's station, plus new interviews with Souza, cast members, and crew, a more comprehensive picture of what happened leading up to the accident and the aftermath then what was generally hyped up in the media and online chatter.
A picture of a stressed, chaotic production with not enough money and too much corner cutting emerges where safety concerns weren't addressed to the point where a good chunk of the camera crew quit. It was this short-handed situation which directly led to Hutchins and Souza being in the line of fire as there were no remote monitors - the "video village" most productions have where the director et al would look at what the camera is seeing - and thus were forced to use the monitor on the Steadicam to line up the shot. If they had video village, the bullet would've gone elsewhere, probably into a wall, not two humans.
The obvious culprit was Gutierrez, a then-24-year-old nepo baby (her stepfather is Thell Reed, a champion shooter and trainer of actors in cool gun use for movies) who was in charge of the guns and looks overwhelmed in the behind-the-scenes footage with her yellow and green hair. (It's amusing to see her post-accident in brown hair as her lawyer obviously told her to get a normal human hair color instead of looking like a Hot Topic clerk who shouldn't have been dealing with weapons.) But we learn that in addition to her armorer duties, she was working as a props assistant and getting pressure from producers that she's spending too much time on the guns and not these other duties. However, as messed up as that was, she barely registers any remorse as most Zoomer gen brats are trained to never be responsible.
As much as Baldwin has spent much of the past couple of decades being an absolute a-hole with clear rage issues, you can't help but feel his shock and horror when informed that Hutchins had died, captured on tape. If you were unsympathetic to his plight because of the way he did interviews to disavow any responsibility for the shooting, this shows he did have a human reaction. At first. Then when you see how he was able to get his case tossed on an irrelevant technicality, feel free to think poorly of him.
Eventually, after the trials, production on Rust resumed with a new cinematographer. Reaction to this was typical with online yakkers accusing the producers of ghoulish greed, but the case is made that the best way to honor Hutchins would be to get her final work seen. Her mother back in Ukraine is interviewed and supported this decision. It was screened last year at a Polish cinematography conference that Hutchins frequently attended and the glimpse we get show she was making some beautiful images and her loss to movies was great. (As of now, Rust still doesn't have distribution.)
While the title - Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna - implies more details about Hutchins' life, it's mostly about her tragic end. While more detail about how the producers penny-pinching led to crew mutinies and death would've been appreciated, overall Mason does a good job laying out what happened and what it means.
One poor choice, though, was the foolish decision to not credit people with their full names. At first when actors were being listed as "Josh" or "Devon", it seemed like they may've been extras or bit players, but when "Frances" is recognizably Frances Fisher (Unforgiven, Titanic) the silliness of this snapped into focus.
The greatest lesson taught by Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna - other than don't hire stupid young women to manage gun safety; in fact, one guy in another role here rattles off a very long list of background qualifications that had me literally yelling, "Why wasn't HE the armoror?!?" - is that just because the "news" media reports endlessly and breathlessly about a story, it doesn't mean you're getting all the details one needs to form an informed opinion.
Identity theft is a nightmare for those it happens to. But what if you're a semi-famous musician who discovers someone (or someones) has been impersonating you to your fans, leading them to believe they have been Close Personal Friends with you? This is the situation Tegan Quin - half of the musical group Tegan & Sara (probably mostly known to Normies who've even heard of them as "those identical twin lesbians") - found herself in over a decade ago and now recounted in the sparse documentary, Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan & Sara.
Opening with a quick recap of their career, starting as 18-year-olds in Calgary, Alberta, Canuckia, their early adoption of social media and close bonds with their fans - coming out to greet them outside venues in line, going to the merch table after the show, posing for all the photos requested - also laid the foundation for who (or whoms, plural, it develops) became know as "Fake Tegan" or "Fegan" to begin building years-long relationships with fans, leading them to believe they were actually pals with Tegan.
This erupted in 2011 when Fegan sent a fan named Julie a link to a drive containing their passport photos, info about their band members, and very personal details like their mother battling breast cancer. Sensing something off about this escalation, Julie contacted their management and was told in reply Tegan had no idea who Julie was. As management put the word out to fan boards that anyone interacting with Fegan was being had, more reports of fans having been suckered by the catfisher came in, some even believing they were in line for some up close & personal happy fun times with Tegan, if you follow.
The distress over this hit the fans hard, leaving them embarrassed or hurt, especially a Vancouver musician named JT who lashed out publicly against Tegan (the real one), whom she'd had a real world friendship, after feeling dissed by Fegan. But on the band's side, the question of how tightly secured song demos and items like the passport photos got released led to paranoia about their friends and employees. Who was using their access to then harm the fans. While no one lost money, they lost more: Their sense of privacy, trust, and security. Some said they couldn't listen to T&S's music anymore because of the feelings of betrayal or embarrassment.
So, who was this perpetrator? Well, that's the problem because Fanatical never finds out. Several suspects were identified, including a woman named "Tara" located in Maine who the director, Erin Lee Carr (Britney vs. Spears), traveled to interview only to get stood up. Ultimately, Tara takes a conference call with Carr and Tegan where she denies being Fegan, but is actually another hurt fan who only reached out to others to have her feelings validated. In a post-call discussion, Carr and Tegan decide to believe her.
With no resolution, Fanatical overall lacks much of a purpose. Many of the incidents occurred over a decade ago and even Tegan had relegated the experience to background noise. They had never publicized it during its peak, so what's the benefit of dredging it up now when there is no resolution other than a long therapy session for her and the fans whom she communicates over Zoom calls? The reunion of JT and her is poignant, but the imbalance of their statuses hangs over the meeting.
The line between being a really big fan and a danger to the objects of their adoration is touched on. They had to stop mingling with fans before or after the show, resorting to VIP meet & greets where they know who's coming in. "The barricades and security are there for a reason. We've had people rush the stage and bearhug us." and these are just fans wanting to show their love, not dangerous psychos like the lunatic who assassinated Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell on stage at a Damageplan gig. But the added level of invasion of privacy with these catfishings must suck even more of the joy out of the art.
Without a resolution and so far removed from events discussed, Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan & Sara ends up feeling like a video of Tegan's group therapy sessions with those who were deceived.
In June 1985, New York magazine ran a profile of the stars of the upcoming movie St. Elmo's Fire entitled "Hollywood's Brat Pack" - a riff on the old Rat Pack clique which featured Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., et al - which in a instant tagged, tarred and/or tarnished everyone in the movie and adjacent films with the shorthand that they were unserious, spoiled and/or untalented, well, brats. This had lingering effects on many of their careers even after the Eighties ended and though some soldiered on in their careers, others felt permanently damaged.
In the latter camp is clearly Andrew McCarthy - star of Pretty In Pink, St. Elmo's Fire, Less Than Zero and director of the documentary Brats (not to be confused with the slutty Bratz doll movies), which is based on his 2021 memoir Brat: An '80s Story. After musing to the camera in a precious manner about how the article messed up his career, he proceeds to call all his costars to talk about it, some whom he hasn't spoken with in over 30 years. (But he has their phone numbers?)
So off he goes for interviews with Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore (all from St. Elmo's Fire) as well as Lea Thompson and Jon Cryer from Pretty In Pink as well as its director (and Thompson's husband) Howard Deutch, and Timothy Hutton, winner of a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Ordinary People in 1981, for some reason.
Things get off very awkwardly with his interview with Estevez who looks at him with a mix of fear, pity, and embarrassment for him which prompted me to say the missus, "This movie is going to be Andrew working out his shit on everyone else, isn't it?" For the most part it is, though stars like Moore and Lowe who are still working and wealthy seemed quite relaxed about it. Money makes old hurts fade. Notably, Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald declined to participate,
presumably because they want to move forward with their lives unless
McCarthy.
Interspersed with his therapy sessions, he sidebars into an interesting discussion with Lauren Schuler Donner, producer of Pretty In Pink and St. Elmo's Fire, and some casting directors about how the early-1980s represented a major sea change in movies as the works of John Hughes (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller's Day Off) as well as movies like Risky Business and Fast Times At Ridgemont High changed the focus from the Seventies serious auteur era of Coppola and Scorsese, then the blockbuster era of Lucas and Spielberg, to movies focusing on teenagers stories starring teens and near teens.
Towards the end, a big surprise is his sitting down with David Blum, the author of the article that ruined his life. Blum explains the origins of the Brat Pack moniker and that it wasn't even intended as an attack, but was the doing of a 29-year-old writer trying to be clever. (I've seen it mentioned that McCarthy is only mentioned once in the article and that's via a castmate making a crack about him, so all this angst is over what?)
As someone who went through high school at this time when Fast Times and Breakfast Club somewhat bookended my tenure, Brats was interesting as a reflection upon that phase of Hollywood and young people's lives starring and watching these movies. It's nice to see how the rest of the gang seemed far more able to cope with a headline than McCarthy was, but you'll have to wade through some self-pitying cringiness in the process. The way the scenes are filmed with multiple cameras wandering into frame is distracting as well.
So much of what is meant to be entertainment these days is so lackluster, formulaic, or just plain bad that it's more than a pleasant surprise when you get something unexpectedly good in spite of how it's being sold. Recently it was the weird "queer Fight Club" comedy with an all-time worst title, Bottoms, and now it's the Hulu Original Quiz Lady, which turned out to not only be better than expected, it was much better than it needed to be.
Awkwafina stars as Anne, a drab 30-something accountant who lives alone with her old dog, Mr. Linguini, next door to a crabby old woman, Francine (Holland Taylor), who's always hectoring her for packages being left in front of her duplex door. The sole joy in Anne's life is a game show called Can't Stop The Quiz, a pseudo-Jeopardy type thing hosted by kindly Terry McTeer (Will Ferrell) that airs live and was her solace as a child of a broken home.
One day the nursing home caring for her mother calls to inform her that her mother was gone. Not dead, gone, as in took off with her boyfriend for Macau. Fed up with her rules-breaking, the home isn't going to let her come back and tells Anne to take mom's stuff with her. While handling this, her estranged older sister Jenny (Sandra Oh) shows up at the nursing home and when it's realized she's been living in her car, Anne reluctantly allows her to stay with her. Jenny was always flighty and self-centered, so they're not close.
One night, Jenny secretly tapes Anne playing along with Can't Stop The Quiz, capturing her answering everything faster than the current obnoxious champion, Ron (Jason Schwartzman), and posts it online causing her to become an overnight viral sensation, the "Quiz Lady." (Roll credits!) Unfortunately, the attention also puts Anne on the radar of mom's loan shark, Ken (Jon "Dumbfoundead" Park), who is owed $80,000 and he dognaps Mr. Linguini as collateral.
Since they don't have the money, Jenny suggests they road trip to Can't Stop The Quiz's open auditions in Philadelphia where all Anne needs to do is overcome her crippling shyness to win the game and earn the cash to ransom her dog. Road trip hijinks ensue with the odd couple sisters learning about each other and their secrets and all that heartwarming stuff. Any guesses as to how the game show goes?
If the broad outline of the plot sounds a bit formulaic and predictable, it's because it's meant to be. By not wasting much effort on the skeleton of the plot, screenwriter Jen D'Angelo (Hocus Pocus 2, Totally Killer) goes berserk with so many little details & throwaway bits that a second viewing seems necessary to catch them all. Things like Anne's accounting employer being called "CPYay!", the headlines about her being a viral sensation and why not liking her is racist, but liking her may be more racist, and a preposterously extended runner involving a Ben Franklin-themed B&B and its employees. The only times the story lags is when it pulls over to hit the obligatory story beats of this genre, but those are brief.
Awkwafina seems to annoy a lot of people with her usual persona (I'm fine with her), but she's a much more restrained, repressed character here which leaves Oh as the surprise to those who only know her from Grey's Anatomy or Killing Eve as her Jenny is a brash hustler who refuses to dress or act her age. (Also, if you saw her hilarious turn as Tischy on this SNL sketch, you know she can do bonkers comedy.) Ferrell is also good channeling Alex Trebeck and Mr. Rogers for McTeer, deepening what initially seems to be a caricatured performance in a touching scene where he soothes Anne while discussing what various bowties represent to him.
The only thing preventing a recommendation of Quiz Lady as a "fun for the family romp" is the preponderance of F-bombs which give it its R-rating. As a salty talker myself, it wasn't offensive, but it was unnecessary. Just be aware if you're sensitive to bad words. Otherwise, Quiz Lady is a sweet and unexpectedly funny film which doesn't get gross to deliver big laughs. Cherkitert!
When is a Predator movie not a Predator movie? Don't know, because while it lacks the official Predator branding that the six other Predator movies have had (four Predator, two Alien vs Predator), Prey is most definitely a Predator movie which makes one wonder why they didn't tag it as such? Is it because other than the seminal original the sequels have been varying levels of mediocre to sucktastic and the brand is viewed with the same respect as Sharknado movies?
And the fact this is getting dumped straight to Hulu long after movie theaters have returned to doing good business after two years of the Hot Fad Plague can't be a good sign, can it? Surprisingly though, Prey is a respectable although flawed entry into the series.
Set in 1719 on the Northern Plains of what will become America,Prey is the story of Naru (Amber Midthunder, The Ice Road), a young Comanche woman who wants to be taken seriously by her tribe as a hunter, but isn't because, you know, the patriarchy and stuff. While hunting with the boys, she is knocked out after an encounter with a mountain lion. Undaunted, she heads out by herself to explore the source of the flashing lights she saw during her lion showdown which may be connected to the "thunderbird" she saw obscured by clouds the day before.
Of course what she doesn't know is that it was the spaceship dropping off a Predator (Dane DiLiegro, a 6' 9" former NCAA basketball star) and that the big bear chasing her isn't the worst of her problems. Eventually the boys from the tribe show up as well as boorish caricatured French trappers setting the stage for battle between flint-tipped spears and arrows, primitive muskets, and a giant alien with heat vision, all sorts of shields, blades, and laser-guided projectiles, who can turn invisible for good measure. Will Naru and her canine companion be able to survive this hunt? Duh.
Mercifully, the plague of wokeness that has ruined entertainment in recent years doesn't trip up Prey. While I joked about the patriarchy above, the dismissiveness of the male warriors is practical; when you're hunting things that can hunt you back, strength matters. But the script cleverly sets up how Naru's smarts make up for her size, especially her knowledge of "medicine" and how it helps level the playing field against the Predator's tech. Astute viewers will predict how it will end based on previous scenes, but it's better than just pulling abilities and tactics out of a hat. Even the one-note portrayal of the French isn't too grating especially when you see what they've been doing - they're grade-A a-holes.
While the scenery of Alberta is beautifully captured by cinematographer Jeff Cutter (who previously shot co-writer/director Dan Trachtenberg's 10 Cloverfield Lane) and Trachtenberg stages the action clearly enough, Prey makes a fundamental storytelling mistake that the original classic did in letting on that there's a monster loose.
If you haven't seen the OG Predator in a while, the very first shot of the movie is a spaceship approaching Earth and dropping something from orbit. Once in the jungle and the story is building, we see POV shots of "PredatorVision" and hints something is out there, but if not for that spoiler out of the gate, we wouldn't have known. How cool would that reveal have been? Same with Prey: We're constantly cutting away from Naru to show Big P hunting various wildlife, meaning we're just waiting for the inevitable crossing of paths (which the trailer spoils).
Still, it's surprising that they didn't try to put this out in the theaters to make a little money. It's definitely a Major Motion Picture grade production, not a made-for-TV cheapie. Midthunder is a spunky, appealing protagonist (she's like Native American Aubrey Plaza) and some of the kills are ouchy enough, so think of it as catching it after missing it at the show.
When it comes to directors who had a massive influence on the look and style of Eighties movies was Adrian Lyne. Specializing in wildly successful, erotically-charged, MTV-ready stories and visuals (i.e. so much atmospheric haze that you wondered why OSHA didn't shut the productions down), he made between 1983 and 1993 Flashdance, 9-1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction, Jacob's Ladder, and Indecent Proposal. His last film was 2002's equally sweaty Unfaithful which reinvigorated Diane Lane's career as a sexy older woman though she was only 36(!) at the time. (That's an older woman?!?)
Now at the age of 81, Lyne is back with another steamy erotic thriller, the Hulu Original (meaning it's being dumped there after numerous delays from its original November 2020 theatrical release due to Hot Fad Plague) Deep Water starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas as, well, here's the IMDB blurb: A
well-to-do husband who allows his wife to have affairs in order to
avoid a divorce becomes a prime suspect in the disappearance of her
lovers. That's more than we knew going into our viewing of it and barely captures just how weird and ultimately stupid the story is.
For the first 45 minutes or so we were wondering what the actual what was going on. Affleck is a wealthy retired tech guy who "invented a chip used in military drones" who spends his days riding his mountain bike around his small Louisiana town and tending to his snail collection in the basement. He's married to de Armas and they have one of those trademark borderline annoying moppet daughters (think Fatal Attraction) who keeps having Alexa play "Old MacDonald" to the parents annoyance.
She seems to be flaunting affairs with younger lovers openly in front of their friends at the lavish day-drinking parties they have and while Affleck passive-aggressively menaces them, casually mentioning that he may've murdered a missing man, some take the hint and others don't. But then for all of her hanky-panky, they're having rough cinematic sex, but also seems to be sleeping separately. It's all disorienting and we kept wondering when things would make sense.
When one of her lovers ends up drowned in the swimming pool at one of these party's, she accuses him to the cops, but evidence is scant; everyone was drunk and it could've been accidentally. However, a writer friend of theirs begins to investigate, sniffing a new book idea while catching a killer. As silly and implausible as this tale from a weird alternate universe where such antics aren't that scandalous for some reason is, everything goes off the rails in the last act where there simply isn't a crane strong enough to suspend disbelief sufficiently to not laugh at it.
The core failing of Deep Water is that we never understand why this couple simply doesn't get divorced. Yes, they have a young child who seems clued into the whispers about daddy, but how is staying together in a broken marriage where alcoholic mommy is bringing boyfriends home for dinner (when she comes home at all) doing the kid any favors? While da Armas is hot, it's not like Affleck is Danny DeVito and incapable of finding a less cheaty companion considering he's rich and looks like Batman. None of their friends seem to disapprove very much beyond sympathy for his being inexplicably bound to her?
And what's with all the snails? For all the scenes and allusions to the snails and how they must be prepared for eating lest they be toxic, nothing comes of it and one final detail is so ridiculously stupid that viewing Deep Water as even camp trash became untenable. It's as if no one bothered to read the last 15 pages of the script and noticed that it was underthought. Based on a 1957 novel by Patricia Highsmith, who wrote Strangers on a Train and the Thomas Ripley books which have had many adaptations, perhaps their unwillingness to divorce is of its time, but simply doesn't work in a contemporary setting.
What's most disappointing about Deep Water is that despite our culture having become ever more pornographic and sexually depraved since Lyne's Reagan era heyday, it doesn't bother to take advantage of it to really push boundaries to explore what their toxic relationship entails. For all the rampant sex on HBO shows like Euphoria, movies these days are gripped by a neo-Puritan timidity which precludes getting really crazy with the cuckoldry.
I don't know when exactly I lost touch with current popular music, but as a musician and music fan who was alive when hip-hop was invented - I first heard turntable scratching on Malcolm McClaren's Duck Rock album in January 1983 when Herbie Hancock's Future Shock album with "Rockit" came out 7 months later and turntablists who cite seeing the performance on the February 1985 Grammys ceremony as their "Beatles on Ed Sullivan" moment; I first heard the Beastie Boys "Rock Hard" in 1984 when Licensed To Ill dropped in November 1986; I heard "Bring the Noise" before Anthrax covered it; and when Rodney King got clobbered in 1991, it illustrated what N.W.A. was rapping about on "F*ck tha Police" in 1989 - I suddenly realized I had no idea who most of the rap/hip-hop artists were. (Or even the other genres as well.)
Before I stopped watching Saturday Night Live recently there were more and more weeks the musical act was "Who? What's a Migos?" I'd long wondered when rap stopped being "ghetto CNN" (as Public Enemy's Chuck D described rap discussing social issues) to "ghetto Robb Report" recounting the bottles and rims and grillz and hoes and stacks and bling, but little substance. (Of course this is when Donald Trump was name-checked as an icon of aspirational wealth by dozens of rappers before June 2015 when he mysteriously ceased being the guy who mentored Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons and everyone suddenly noticed for the first time that this 69-year-old man who had been in the public eye since the late-1970s was a virulent white supremacist and Nazi simply by changing his party affiliation. Weird how that worked.)
Part of it was that that frankly pop music sucks these days. No, I'm not one of those grumpy old men who isn't hip to what the whippersnappers get their twerk on to and shares the memes on FaceSpace comparing "Bohemian Rhapsody" being written by one person, Freddie Mercury, to "Anonymous Club Banga" written by a committee of six or more people with names like Q-Trawn and lyrics which are just a few words chanted repeatedly because stripper pole anthems don't exactly require Bob Dylan's touch. Every generation feels the younger generation's music sucks, but we've hit a canyon in popular culture where it's not an opinion, but scientifically confirmed objective fact that pop music today is garbage.
I've always been a fan of well-done pop music; there is no harder achievement than writing a memorable tune that earworms people forever. When the Spice Girls came out in 1996, I said they were better than Pearl Jam and I wasn't being ironic as that band had disappeared up Eddie Vedder's ass halfway through their Vitalogy album. (They peaked with "Go" on Vs. I will fight anyone who doesn't think that song blazes.) Music snobs felt the early-Aughts garage band boom of definitive article-named bands (i.e. THE White Stripes/Strokes/Hives/Libertines/Vines/Von Bondies/Black Keys/Walkmen/Blah/Woof) "saved rock & roll" from late-Millennium boy bands and Mousekabimbos, but the reality is that Britney Spears and N*Sync saved music from the miserable wasteland that Nirvana created which fundamentally killed rock & roll.
But something has gone haywire since the mid-Aughts as the pop magic has bled out of pop music. I adored Katy Perry's 2008 album One of the Boys and while I didn't care as much for her 2010 follow-up, Teenage Dream, I can understand why it was popular. But each subsequent album, which have taken 3-4 years to make has been less and less tuneful and more and more generic monotonous "club bangaz" dreck that sounds like the background music for movie scenes set in strip clubs. Somewhere the fundamentals of verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus-chorus got replaced with monotonous "16-bar MPC loop repeated ad infinitum." It's good we've got computers to play these endless loops because humans would fall asleep from boredom if they didn't lose track of where they were with the same progression first.
So with those 600+ words of grousing preamble out of the way to set the stage, we come to 69: The Saga of Daniel Hernandez, the documentary on Hulu - not to be confused with a concurrent Showtime docu-series which appears to cover the same ground - about megastar Soundcloud rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine, a tattooed kid who somehow rode controversial YouTube videos and social media clout-mongering to become a massive star for a few years before it all crashed down and he flipped on his gang member posse to avoid a 47-year stint in the Crowbar Hotel for numerous felonies. Due to his asthma and Hot Fad Plague 2020, he was sprung from jail and finished his sentence at home (while desperate business owners who defied shutdowns were tossed into the pokey). After his release, his snitching has made him a pariah.
Using interviews with his girlfriend/baby mama (whom he frequently cheated and beat on), his musical associates (whom he betrayed when he outgrew them), and gang pals (whom he snitched on), and quick clips of his videos which have racked up hundreds of millions of views, we learn about Hernandez's hard knock life, growing up without his birth father who left the family, having his stepfather murdered, but hustling first as a fashion designer, then a rapper at the encouragement of a neighborhood rapper who thought the rainbow-haired, tattooed kid behind the bodega counter looked like a rapper.
Riding the popularity of his videos, he really blew up when he went to Slovakia(!) and got signed to the charmingly-named FCK THEM label and really started making waves. However his propensity for shock value uber alles got him in repeated legal scrapes like when an underage girl was shown performing sex acts in a video, eventually escalating to his robbery and murder conspiracy beefs which made him a singer for the state against his Nine Trey Bloods friends.
The problem with 69: The Saga of Daniel Hernandez isn't solely that 69's music is.....let's go with not my cup of tea (Narrator: "Dirk thinks it's garbage and his using the N-word every 3-5 words will lose him his Food Network show or New York Times gig."), but that we never really get to HEAR much of his musical output. Most of the time, director Vikram Gandhi shows clips while interviewees talk over them. While writing this review, I went to YouTube to watch "Gummo", his breakout hit (which completely sucks), and it was really the first time I was able to tell that it completely sucked. I'm currently watching the Netflix documentary on The Notorious B.I.G. Biggie: I Got A Story To Tell and it features a lot of videotape recorded by his best friend of Biggie participating in street battles and on stage as he was coming up and you get to appreciate his skills, which 69 doesn't even come close to and I'm saying this as someone who never really got into Big.
There's also no discussion of how the money works in this Soundcloud age. I know I'm old and out of touch with the new style and that no one buys pieces of plastic with music stamped into it, but some accounting for the economics of hundreds of millions of streams to put phat chedda stacks of Benjis - I know the lingo, fellow kids! - would've been useful.
Since Hernadez's fame may already be past, leaving him washed-up at 24 and with face tattoos that preclude gainful employment in most fields - ya hear that, Post Malone? - I'm unclear why this kid merited two tellings of his story? His music is insanely popular, but not good. He seems dumber than a rock band drummer. I simply don't get it and 69: The Saga of Daniel Hernandez does little to help this cranky old man get hippenwiddet with the jive those new cats are meowing, man. It's somewhat worth watching if only as a window on how debased and pathetic our culture has become. Perhaps that's why I don't know what's going on: There's nothing to know about.
How often have you seen sports teams stacked with talent fail to make the playoffs or movies made by talented people with proven track records just fall on their faces? Plenty, probably. Even with that in mind, in retrospect it seems impossible that the short-lived The Dana Carvey Show couldn't have been anything other than a smashing success though as the Hulu Original documentary Too Funny To Fail: The Life & Death of the Dana Carvey Show aptly shows, talent, verve, and boldness wasn't enough and everyone involved realizes that they pretty much did it to themselves.
In 1995 Dana Carvey was a hot property. Between a brilliant run during Saturday Night Live's 2nd Renaissance where he created iconic, still-quoted characters as the Church Lady, Hans & Franz, Grumpy Old Man, defining impressions of George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot and saw him alongside Phil Hartman, Kevin Nealon, Dennis Miller, Jan Hooks and Victoria Jackson, later pairing up with Mike Myers as Garth to Myer's Wayne which led to two Wayne's World movies, he was The Man.
So when he and SNL writer Robert Smigel (who also created/performs Triumph the Insult Comedy Dog) were shopping a prime-time comedy sketch show, it's easy to understand why ABC eagerly agreed to air it and gifted it a golden time slot after the #1 show Home Improvement. They then went out and gathered a Murderers' Row of performers and writers including Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Louis C.K, Charlie Kaufman (writer of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), Dino Stamatopoulos (Star-Burns on Community), and Robert Carlock (showrunner on 30 Rock co-creator of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) to bring the party to life with a bold and innovative sketch comedy show.
Or at least that was the plan which exploded within minutes of the first episode's opening sketch which featured Carvey as Bill Clinton breast-feeding a baby (fake), puppies and kittens (real) after having eight functioning breasts added to his body. ABC thought they were getting Church Lady; they got....something else. Panic struck and sponsors bailed. While they tried to right the self-torpedoed ship, they were doomed.
With interviews with the biggest names involved - oddly, Carvey gets less screen time than Carell and Colbert - and lots of brief clips from the show, Too Funny To Fail memorializes the trainwreck. While it would be tempting to blame a timid network or the show being too ahead of its time, the participants freely cop to not understanding the environment they were airing in. (Smigel hadn't even seen Home Improvement until they'd been on a month and when he finally watched the show he realized just how catastrophically they'd erred and created an audience-banishing mismatch.)
If it had been on late at night or on cable, it probably would've lasted longer. As it was, it was impressive enough to those who saw it - a teen-aged Bill Hader bought a VCR just to tape it - that it launched Carell's and Colbert's careers with The Daily Show because producers loved a sketch they'd performed. Carvey himself is sanguine about the experience as it freed him to go back to his first love of standup and raise his two sons.
