"Nimrods" Review

 When you hear "Green Day movie" you'd probably think it'd be a biopic of the band or perhaps a concert film or maybe an adaptation of the surprisingly decent musical that was made of American Idiot. Farther down the possibilities list would be a movie produced with a story by Green Day where they also cameoed, but that's what Nimrods is, the titled both a description of the nimrod kids but also a play on their 1997 album, Nimrod.

Tommy (Mason Thames, The Black Phone) and Fred (Kylr Coffman, Outbreak) are obnoxious high school students who have a band with their nerdy friend Chad (Ryan Foust, Marry Me) called Analog Dogs. Tommy lives with his widowed mother, Jodie (Jenna Fischer, The Office), and his older brother, Wayne (Keen Ruffalo, Mark's son), in Kansas City.

Fans of Green Day, Tommy and Fred go to record store appearance and give the band (played by the band themselves in not particularly convincing performances) a demo tape with Tommy's phone number on it. While there, drummer Tré Cool calls Tommy's phone and goofs on their name, calling them "Anal OG Dogs." Afterwards, they tell Wayne about the encounter and show him the call log with Tré's number.

Later, mad at the pair stranding him on the roof where he was putting up Christmas decorations, Wayne and his friend Keith (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio, Primo) prank call the guys by claiming to be Tré Cool and loving their demo tape, wanting them to open for Green Day on New Years Eve at the Los Angeles Palladium theater. Falling for the ruse, Tommy asks his Jodie if she could drive them to the gig and when she's not able, decides to steal Wayne's car and head west despite not having a driver's license.

What follows is a typical string of hijinks and misadventures as their naivete and cluelessness makes their odds of even making it to LA unlikely. Along the way Tommy meets a cool girl, Olivia (Mckenna Grace, Ghostbusters: Afterlife), who invites the band to play at a gathering with other bands including hers. Chad's mother, Deborah (Jolene Blalock, Star Trek: Enterprise), catches up to the band and is about to drag them home when embarrassing mama's boy Chad decides to take the minivan and continue the journey to their date with destiny trying to get into the show.

Last year I wasn't impressed by a Detroit-made indie called Band On The Run which was about a band trying to play SXSW and Nimrods is only marginally better due to a bigger budget - Evil Empire Live Nation are producers - and better music including unreleased Green Day tracks serving as Analog Dogs material.

Tommy and Fred aren't very appealing protagonists, the situations they find themselves in aren't particularly unique, and the ending doesn't hit in the feels as much as intended. It also drags in the pacing especially during one extended sequence involving a scary motel operated by a weird Fred Arminen which could've been completely cut without anyone noticing and only included because Armisen was in a prior movie by writer-director Lee Kirk. Kirk and Green Day collaborated on the story after Armstrong starred in Kirk's 2016 effort Ordinary World. 

If you like Green Day's music and aren't to demanding on your movies stories, Nimrods will probably entertain you somewhat, but won't give you the time of your life.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not" Review

 I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not was the signature intro line to his Weekend Update segments on the very first season of Saturday Night Live as well as this CNN Films documentary about the comedic actor born Cornelius Crane Chase. Recounting his life as a student at Bard College in the Sixties to becoming a writer-performer of the seminal National Lampoon Lemmings stage show to his being hired as a writer for SNL before slipping into the last cast slot and creating Weekend Update, the doc speed-runs through his career and life.

I have to admit to being not much of a fan of Chase and his oeuvre. Whether playing angrily smug in movies like Fletch or hysterically dumb (Vacation movies), I've never worn the "he's a comic genius" goggles most view him with and this doc doesn't really offer much of a counterpoint. If you think he's an a-hole, he lives down to that impression especially when he tries poorly to spin cruel comments he allegedly made towards Terry Sweeney, the first openly-gay cast member of SNL. Other times he claims to have no memory of antics due to a major health crisis he suffered a decade or so ago which had as a side effect memory impairment. Convenient.

Probably the only bits of new info I took from I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not was that when he bailed from SNL after its first season (clearing the way for the much funnier and versatile Bill Murray to replace him) it was just because Hollywood was calling and he wasn't under contract (whoops!), though that was part of it, but rather his then-girlfriend wanted to live in California. (Flying out for the wedding, former colleagues were betting on how long it'd last; they'd divorce in under a year.) With two failed marriages under his belt, the third time was the charm as he met his missus while making 1981's Under The Rainbow and they're still together with three daughters.

If you're more of a fan of Chase's schtick, you may enjoy this somewhat superficial documentary more than I did. Have at it.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on HBO Max)

"Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass" Review

 After watching the box office flop, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, which grossed only $1.6M on a tiny $3.5M budget, I have to believe that part of its poor showing was the title which probably went on theater ticket boards as Gail Daughtry (which is like Michael Clayton or Jay Kelly) and not something snappy like Celebrity Sex Pass. It's too bad, because like Pizza Movie earlier this year, it's a bonkers, silly comedy treat.

Zoey Deutch stars as Gail Daughtry, a perky, chirpy hairdresser from Kansas who is engaged to her high school sweetheart, Tom (Michael Cassidy, The O.C.). They're due to be married in two weeks, but the long march down the aisle hits a snag when they go to a celebrity book reading - I'm not going to spoil who like the Plex blurb did and isn't in the trailer - and Tom decides to cash in his celebrity sex pass at that time, much to Gail's chagrin as she catches him in the act.

Upset, she agrees to tag along with her co-worker Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Smile 2) to LA where a hairstyling convention is going on. She also decides she will settle the score with Tom by finding and boinking her sex pass pick: Jon Hamm. In her quest she teams up with a wannabe talent agent, Caleb (Ben Wang, Karate Kid: Legends); a washed-up paparazzi whose "white whale" is Hamm, Vincent (Ken Marino, who also co-wrote the script); and John Slattery, Hamm's co-star from Mad Men, as they try to get to Hamm so Gail can ride that hog, so to speak.

Also complicating matters are a pair of thugs (Joe Lo Truglio & Mather Zickel) who mistakenly switched briefcases with Gail at the airport and whose boss, Ludovica (Sabrina Impacciatore, The White Lotus S2), really wants its contents back because she has big plans for them.

It's not too hard to pick up on the parallels with The Wizard of Oz - Gale was Dorothy's last name, Gail has sparkly red sneakers and is from Kansas, everyone she meets needs something to fill a hole in their lives and feel only Jon Hamm can provide them - but what elevates Celebrity Sex Pass (let's fix that title too late for them) is just the sheer goofy craziness and "Wait, who?" cameos which it's nice to see the trailer doesn't give away except for one.

Director/co-writer David Wain is probably best known for Wet Hot American Summer  (which I really didn't care for) and its two Netflix sequel series and as a co-founder of The State (never watched it), so fans of his should be an automatic for this and those familiar with his previous casts will know why they show up here. (Seriously, do NOT read the cast list before watching!) I've only seen Role Models of his, but whatever else he's done is irrelevant because he kills it here.

Deutch can be annoying - the missus can't stand her - and the most memorable line in Zombieland: Double Tap is when Emma Stone ask whether they can drop Deutch off at a no-kill shelter, but here she's appropriately adorable and guileless. You want her to go full ham on Hamm. The rest of the cast is fun though the stuff with the goons drags a tad.

Comedies have often been to scared of the woke crybullies to be funny lately, but Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a refreshingly raunchy rebuke to the killjoys and delivers the laughs in spades for those who like when things get randomly wild and crazy. 

Score: 8.5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"In The Grey" Review

 In my review of Fountain of Youth (5/10) I noted that I'd assayed the checkered and heavily mediocre career of Guy Richie in my The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (5.5/10) review so rather than re-rehash things go read those after you get done with this latest loaf of even-less-barely-passable mediocrity, In The Grey, written and directed by Ritchie so this is all his fault.

Eiza González stars as Rachel Wild, a lawyer who specializes in collecting debts for wealthy interests. After Bobby Sheen's (Rosamund Pike) last negotiator was murdered after making a deal to recover $1 billion loaned to Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem - raise your hand if this is the first time you've heard of Javier's older brother being an actor) by her firm, Spencer Goldstein, she brings in Rachel to take a run at Salazar.

Rachel's play is to use lawfare combined with extralegal shenanigans conducted by her associates Sid (Henry Cavill) and Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal) along with various redshirts who lack plot armor, if you know what I mean. What follows is a rapid-fire sequence of tactical moves which result in Salazar's projects and assets being frozen and seized. Figuring he'll try to retaliate, elaborate escape plans are exhaustively made and rehearsed, but come on, we all know something will go wrong, right?

Even by the play-it-loose-and-look-cool low standards of recent Guy Ritchie movies, this is a low effort effort. Everything works flawlessly and Rachel seems to be able to stroll into court at will to get a judge to bless her requests instantly. When Salazar sends a squad to kill her, the team effortlessly counteracts them with lethality.

While there are a few throwaway laughs and stars are attractive, there is no there there and In The Grey ends up just another instantly forgotten trifle from the Guy Ritchie slop mills.

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.

"Balls Up" Review

On paper, Balls Up, the latest Amazon Prime Video Original has a solid comedic pedigree as it's written by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick (Zombieland & Deadpool series) and directed by Peter Farrelly of the Farrelly Brothers who ruled the 1990s with Dumb and Dumber, There's Something About Mary, and Shallow Hal and went on to direct 2018's Best Picture Oscar winner, Green Book. Big laughs guaranteed, right? Unfortunately, not enough of them.

Balls Up opens with Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser, if you've seen a movie with a schlubby fat guy who wasn't Jack Black in the past several years, that was him) stammering through a presentation rehearsal for a revolutionary condom he has designed which has extra material to also cover the berries in addition to the usual twig. He calls it The Testicle Sentinel.

The company boss, Burgess (SNL's Molly Shannon), tells him the pitch will be done by Brad (Marky Mark, "Good Vibrations", The Departed) from Sales and his pitch with the new name, Balls Up! (roll credits), wins over the head of the Brazilian Travel Ministry, Santos (Benjamin Bratt), who makes Balls Up! the official condom of the 2025 World Cup. However, the celebration gets wildly out of hand and Santos loses his position and the condom deal goes to a competitor. After this turn, Burgess fires Brad and Elijah along with other workers.

Three months later, a courier delivers a package to Brad containing a plane ticket and full VIP credentials to the World Cup Final. Apparently, despite the whole deal going sideways, the goodies weren't canceled for him and Elijah, whom he discovers is on the same flight. They decide to get along to attend the game, but after getting drunk, Elijah decides to attack the giant sausage mascot on the pitch. Brad chases after him to prevent trouble, but inadvertently interferes with what would've been Brazil's game-tying goal. Due to his interference, Brazil loses to arch-enemy neighbors Argentina. 

They are arrested, but turned loose on the streets where they would surely be lynched by the takes-their-football-VERY-seriously mobs. They briefly appear to be saved, but are then captured by armed men and taken to the jungle compound of cartel warlord Pavio (Sacha Baron Cohen in a bonkers performance). Because he won money on the game thanks to Brad's head, he won't kill them but he won't let them go either. To stay in his graces they pitch him the idea of using their larger condom to provide more carrying capacity for cocaine trafficking leading to a typical Farrelly low humor scene involving swallowing these huge phallic coke loads. After escaping the cartel, the pair encounter a weird group of anti-poachers in the jungle as they try to make their way home.

Balls Up starts off hilariously, but then has many long stretches of dullness punctuated by explosive moments of laughter like a scene where they're forced to do karaoke. This happens a lot in comedies as the first act is polished to a diamond mirror shine and then the rest just floats after it which is why surprises like Bottoms and Pizza Movie are such treats.

Cohen is clearly having fun doing a weird voice in a long flowing wig that makes him look like rock singer Sebastian Bach. Hauser does his usual weird fat guy thing and Marky Mark does his usual adequate comedic thing. (He only really seems to spark in the Ted movies.)

I thought Amazon was paywalling all HDR 4K content behind their even more expensive ad-free tier, but this came up as Dolby Vision allowing for some bright colors, but the cinematography is the blah overly bright look that modern comedies adhere to.

While not a total loss that goes tits up, Balls Up is too uneven and too long (104 mins) to score many goals. But when it does get funny, it gets VERY funny, but it just makes the lengthy lulls more lully.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on Prime Video.

"Nirvanna The Band The Song The Movie" Review

 I am totally unfamiliar with the Canuckian web series Nirvanna the Band the Show which ran from 2007-2009 and only got hipped to Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie because a couple of YouTubers I follow reviewed it and it involved a pair of musicians trying to get a gig at Toronto's Rivoli nightclub.

I am very familiar with this club because for almost 20 years the missus and I would attend the North by Northeast (NXNE) music festival and the Rivoli was on a strip on Queen St. along with The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern, The 360 Club, The Black Bull, and Cameron House which allowed for us to park once and then hit multiple clubs per cycle, walking in, seeing if we dig what's on stage, then hitting the next one if it didn't grab us. In 2016, organizers completely scrapped the format and we haven't been back since 2015. It appears they're going back to the old tons of bands in lots of clubs format, but Canuckia is a totalitarian hellscape how under occupation. C'est la vie.

Anyhoo, Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol co-wrote and star as fictionalized versions of themselves who, 17 years after forming Nirvanna with hopes of playing the Rivoli, still haven't scored a gig there. Matt apparently is big on making elaborate plans and decides that they should do a publicity stunt where they parachute off the CN Tower into the adjacent SkyDome during a Toronto Blue Jays baseball game to promote the gig at the Rivoli they don't actually have.

They get on top of the CN Tower by buying tickets to the EdgeWalk, an actual experience where for $199 you get to walk outside 1,168 feet up attached to a harness. They cut themselves free of the safety line and jump, but due to an incoming lightning storm the SkyDome's roof was being closed and they don't make it inside.

Since this plan failed, Matt decides they should modify their RV to look like the DeLorean from Back to the Future and attempt to convince the Rivoli that they're time travelers so how about a gig. Fed up, Jay secretly calls a club in Ottawa to book a slot for an open mic night tomorrow. (The joke being it's 280 miles and a 4-1/2 hour drive between these cities and there surely have to be other open mics available in a city with a 3.3M population.)

The next morning, Jay hits the road unaware that Matt is sleeping in the back of the RV. When Matt wakes up, they argue while Jay drives and when the RV hits 88 kmh (heh) it suddenly travels back in time to 2008, though they don't immediately register what happened. (The way Matt discovers they're in the past by how a movie audience laughs at a now-forbidden word - no, it's not Blazing Saddles, but you're close - is clever.) Once they realize their predicament, they attempt to return to 2025, but Matt realizes that the time machine only worked because he spilled Orbitz - a novelty beverage that ceased production in 1999 - on the electronics. With the remaining contents lost when the bottle was broken, the only sure source would be their old apartment where they'll need to sneak in without encountering their younger selves.

Needless to say something goes wrong and when they return to the present the world has changed and Jay is now a major rock star and Matt is the drummer in a Jay McCarrol tribute band. Matt attempts to get to Jay to set things right, but Jay dismisses him until he finds himself wanted by the police and teams up with Matt to get the time machine working to undo the damage. With no Orbitz available, they copy the method used in Back to the Future in an absolutely impossible scheme to restore the timeline.

While time travel movies are generally logically suspect, they really play fast and loose with what happens and don't really try to make it make sense. Apparently the Jay we start with steps into the life of the alternative timeline Jay, but how does he know the Rock Star Jay's material without raising suspicions and what happens to that Jay when the fit hits the shan? Don't know.

The way Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie tells its story is via a pseudo-documentary shooting style where they filmed guerilla style on the streets of Toronto, interacting with people and even cops (who are doing a very bad job of protecting places), like Borat did, but referencing the guys running the cameras occasionally. They use old footage from their web series to create the interactions with their younger selves - no de-aging or old age makeup here, just a bunch of invisible VFX work all over the place elsewhere - and the way they stage things involving the CN Tower is pretty wild. (The way they utilized a  real-life shooting at Drake's mansion to film scenes is another great behind-the-scenes detail.)

Because of my familiarity with Toronto's music clubs, the funniest detail is this obsession with the Rivoli when there are other far more famous venues like the El Mocambo, where Stevie Ray Vaughn and Elvis Costello cut live albums, or Lee's Palace, a setting for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World's bass battle between Michael Cera and Brandon Routh. Sneaky Dee's, The Silver Dollar, Bovine Sex Club, and the Horseshoe Tavern are all more prominent clubs, not that Rivoli is bad - it's just a smallish back room behind a restaurant and bar front - but unless you're from Toronto or a visitor or, I presume, a viewer of the web series, how would you appreciate this?

This isn't to say you might not find more laughs in this low key shaggy time travel pastiche. I was somewhat surprised how flat it left me; the missus liked it a lot FWIW. But I do credit it for being something different than the usual formula even though it plays a bit like Temu Lonely Island.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Pizza Movie" Review

 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.

Score: 9/10. Catch it on Hulu.

"Anaconda (2025)" 4K Review

 I've never seen the original 1997 Anaconda so I had no nostalgia or foreknowledge of whatever meta humor the 2025 reboot/reimagining/parody(?) also titled Anaconda was going to deliver. I have the original in my digital library (probably came with a bundle of Sony/Columbia titles I'd bought), but it's remained unseen. Whatever charms the J.Lo/Ice Cube/Jon Voight original has are currently lost on me.

For this go-around we have Jack Black as Doug, a wedding videographer who wants to do more creative work than the field allows, and Paul Rudd as Griff, a bit part actor who once appeared on four episodes of S.W.A.T, but is currently too dumb to understand that as Doctor #3 on a medical TV show, his bad attempts at doing accents or wild readings are not appreciated, leading to him being sacked.

He was also Doug's childhood best friend and as kids they'd made a home movie called Quatch (short for Sasquatch aka Bigfoot) which Griff brings over to a surprised birthday party thrown by Doug's wife, Malie (Ione Skye). Watching their little epic at the party brings back the dreams they'd had of going to LA to make movies together.

After the party, Griff tells Doug that he's obtained the rights to Anaconda from the author of the original movie's source material and suggests they make a reboot/requel/reimaging of it, making it on a shoestring (because the bank countered their ask for a couple of million dollars with an approval for $9400) with their pal Kenny (Steve Zahn) as the cameraman and Griff's recently divorced ex-girlfriend Claire (Thandiwe Newton) as the ingenue.

Arriving in the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil, they meet up with Carlos (Selton Mello), the handler of the large anaconda they'll be using for the shoot. They also meet Ana (Daniela Melchior), who claims to be the daughter of the man whose riverboat they'd rented to take them out to shoot in the jungle, but is actually someone we've seen chased by men and who stole the boat's keys from the passed out captain in a bar.

The filming goes well until it comes time to shoot a scene with the snake where Griff panics, flinging the snake off him into the water, where it is killed by the boat's propeller. (Why the boat was under power makes no sense. It seemed anchored and there was no engine noise. Because movie, I suppose.) That night, Griff and Carlos go into the jungle looking for another snake unaware that the giant titular CGI anaconda is out there.

As shooting continues, Doug adds Ana to the film and Griff begins to get bitter about the spotlight being usurped. Of course things escalate as the true nature of Ana and Griff's holding of the rights are exposed, leading to a big finale with obligatory meta cameos.

Anaconda's co-writer and director is Tom Gormican whose last two movies were 2022's weird meta Nicolas Cage film The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent which featured "Nic Cage" being hassled by a younger Nic Cage circa Wild At Heart, and 2024's Netflix flick Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (both unreviewed, but getting 6.5/10 and 7/10, catch on streaming/cable scores) so you'd think he'd be able to handle both a long-delayed sequel/reboot with meta overtones well. And if you thought that, you'd be wrong.

It starts off promisingly enough, setting up the premise of middle-aged guys from Buffalo whose lives are stable and adequate, but pine for the dreams of their youth to come true and have to decide how hard they want to chase them. But that instinct is bumping against the needs of a broad Christmas Day comedy release needing action and trailer moments. While there are a few big laughs, there are way more stretches where the proceeding lag in between set pieces giving the viewer plenty of time to ponder where all the food and drinks this floating resort has come from when the captain couldn't stay sober enough to stay conscious or at least put the boat's keys in his pocket rather than laying on the bar.

With a weak script, it doesn't really matter how the performances are. Black is his usual noisy self; Rudd is more tightly wired and finally beginning to age; Zahn is also his usual dumb guy; with the sort of revelation in Newtown playing a somewhat dowdy middle-aged American woman reconnecting with an old flame.

The Dolby Vision presentation has good color and black levels for the night scenes, but the overall visual style is unremarkable.

Anaconda openly cops to its creative bankruptcy, but doesn't do enough to prevent succumbing to the mediocrity which is standard in too many movies these days. If only they'd really leaned into the goof instead of trying, and failing, to squeeze the premise into new shapes.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Elf" 4K UHD Blu-ray Review

 I saw some animal on TwiX sneering that 2003's Elf wasn't a good movie and people only liked it because they were kids when they fell in love with it and don't want to admit it sucks. Yeah, his inner child is on a metaphysical milk carton somewhere. Coincidentally, I was able to snag the 4K disc for only $5 so even though I already have it on Blu-ray and HD digital, I upgraded. How is it? Read on...

For those avoiding Christmas movies for the past 22 years, here's the quick recap: Will Ferrell plays Buddy, a human baby who crawled into Santa Claus's (Ed Asner) sack when Ol' St. Nick was delivering to the orphanage he was at. When discovered at the North Pole, an elf looked at the brand of diaper - Lil' Buddy - and just as Marty McFly's mother thought he was named Calvin Klein from his underwear, Buddy became known as Buddy and was given to the childless Papa Elf (Bob Newhart) to raise.

No one explained to Buddy why he was so large as he grew into Will Ferrell, so when he finally overhears other elves discussing how he was too dumb to realize he's not an elf, his world is shattered. Papa Elf explains that his father was a man named Walter Hobbs (James Caan) who'd knocked up his girlfriend but didn't know and that his mother had given him up for adoption then died like this was a Disney movie without Walter ever knowing of Buddy's existence.

Armed with this information and a snow globe of New York City, he travels to the Big Apple to find Walter at his Empire State Building office where he publishes defective children's books to be on Santa's Naughty List. Walter has no idea who this large weirdo in the elf costume is, but when it's confirmed Buddy is his son, he takes him home to stay with his wife, Emily (Mary Steenburgen), and son, Michael (Daniel Tay). Buddy briefly gets a job at Gimbels department store (a real store chain that went out of business in 1986) where he meets Jovie (Zooey Deschanel), a jaded coworker whom he takes a liking to.

The bulk of the plot involves Buddy wearing everyone down with his relentless, guileless enthusiasm. The script by David Berenbaum as directed by Jon Favreau is cute without being cloying, refreshingly uncynical except for the cynical characters, and actually safe for kids with a PG rating. And the ending involving New Yorkers pulling together to express enough Christmas cheer to make Santa's sleigh fly seems so quaint considering they just installed a radical Ugandan Islamist Communist who's never held a real job in his life as Mayor and is now promising to divide and punish the disfavored folks. Elf was made on location in the wake of 9/11, but NYC just surrendered to the forces that brought down the Twin Towers.

I can see why some may be adverse to Ferrell's crazy-eyed performance, but he plays it straight instead of making Buddy seem dumb instead of sheltered. Caan probably had no effing idea what was happening, but that older style works. This was also probably Peter Dinklage's best-known role before he became Shorty Lannister on Throne Games and his one scene is a classic. Deschanel is cute but nearly unrecognizable as a blonde without her trademark bangs. She also shows off her pipes with two renditions of "Baby It's Cold Outside" which made her later She & Him musical project not the usual actor side foolery, but actually quality retro pop.

As for the new disc, they've made a new scan and grade in the correct 1.85:1 aspect ratio, correcting the previous Blu-ray's matted 1.78:1 AR. (Unfortunately, the included BD disc is the old one, not a 1080p disc of this new master. Booooooo to cheapness!) The cinematography and visuals aren't particularly flashy so the fact the disc's HDR10 grade (no Dolby Vision) seems capped to 613 nits isn't a major flaw. What it does deliver is solid primary colors and surprising detail in the costumes which makes the felt look like it could be felt. They used forced perspective camera tricks to make Ferrell seem enormous and the higher resolution slightly exposes where the seams are if you know what to look for.

Unlike what the Scrooge on the Internet says, Elf is a sweet family movie and Christmas classic. The two commentaries - one by Favreau that sounds informative from the bit I sampled and the other by Ferrell (didn't check) - and over an hour of making-of featurettes are all recycled from the old release, so they only new thing is the 4K feature. If you want the best possible visual presentation and you can get it cheap on sale, this is a no-brainer. If you're not so picky, but want a better version if you don't want to go the disc route, look for a sale on the 4K digital version for $5. It's a Movies Anywhere title so there are a lot of purchase and playback options.

Score: 8.5/10. Buy it.

"Being Eddie" 4K Review

 Going into Being Eddie, the Netflix Original documentary about the life of Eddie Murphy, I was hoping for a bookend to John Candy: I Like Me which would tell the story of the Saturday Night Live phenom who effortlessly transitioned into being one of the biggest movie stars in the world as a counterpoint to Candy's smaller success, not to mention that Murphy is still alive and working while Candy died in 1994. Unfortunately, it ends up a sanitized and superficial exercise.

Just as with Candy, Eddie Murphy was a fixture of my Gen X teen years with his arrival on the first season of SNL after the original cast and Lorne Michaels left. While those early-Eighties seasons are rightfully scorned as a pale imitation of the original, there were still some bright lights and it's arguable that the 19-year-old Murphy may've saved the show in that fraught era with his characters like Mr. Robinson, Gumby, Velvet Jones, Buckwheat, and more.

He was such a bright light, Hollywood came calling and he launched his movie career with a hat trick of classics: 48 Hours, Trading Places, and Beverly Hills Cop which was groundbreaking because it proved a black lead could draw massive audiences globally. The fame allowed him to hook up with Rick James and score a pop hit with "Party All The Time."

When you're young and living history, you have no perspective of how unique a situation Murphy found himself in. As I went to his movies in high school, I didn't know this was a paradigm shift that would open doors as an inspiration to black comedians like Dave Chappelle, Tracy Morgan, Kevin Hart, and Chris Rock and film actors like Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington. Murphy was inspired by Muhammad Ali and in turn inspired others.

But while trying to make the point of Murphy being a Black Pioneer, they run into a weird self-own. While discussing the bit in BHC where Axel Foley is walking down the street and a pair of guys in leather Thriller-style jackets pass by him the other way and he starts laughing, film critic Elvis Mitchell (who briefly wrote for the Detroit Free Press and always sought to inject race politics & somehow has always lost jobs intended to be DEI spots for him) pontificates that this was Murphy mocking his own image. However, a bit later Murphy points out a friend of his in a magazine and explains that he was one of the pair in jackets and had made a face at Murphy as they passed and that cracked him up. (UPDATE: After posting this review, YouTube fed me this short with both clips.)

While owning the 1980s, the turn of the decade brought some box office comedowns which culminated in the flop of Vampire in Brooklyn and David Spade's vicious crack on SNL, "Look, kids, a falling star. Make a wish," while a photo of Murphy was shown. He was so incensed at the dig that he boycotted appearing on SNL except for a brief, non-performing appearance on the 40th Anniversary special, until he returned to host in 2019. The doc focuses at length on a bit where Rock, Chappelle, and Morgan appear during the monologue and how they tweak a joke, but at the expense of showing that almost 40 years after beginning his career in Studio 8H, he still had the fire & moves to deliver an ace performance.

But after Vampire in Brooklyn he bounced back with The Nutty Professor and Bowfinger while branching into family friendly fare owing to his having young children like Doctor Doolittle and Daddy Daycare before stepping up to the mic to voice Donkey in the Shrek series which probably paid for the palatial mansion we see him living in.

However, the new Millennium brought more flops like The Adventures of Pluto Nash and Meet Dave (of which Murphy advises, "Never play a spaceship.") and taking a break from movies. His big comeback, 2006's Dreamgirls, won him a Golden Globe and earned an Oscar nominations, but in a case of self-sabotage for the ages, as much as Murphy tries to downplay it, they released the critical and commercial flop Norbit while Oscar voting was still in progress.

All the promise of his dramatic turn was erased by a brash comedy that begged the question, is this what Oscar-worthy actors do? There are plenty of cases of Oscar winners debasing themselves AFTER they've won for a paycheck - helloooooooo, Nicolas Cage! - but one can only imagine the career he would've had if they'd simply held Norbit a few weeks longer. Murphy claims he was more upset about getting dressed up for nothing, but come on. It wouldn't be until 2019's Netflix movie, Dolemite Is My Name that he'd regain some respect, though he promptly squandered it on fluff like Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F which at least is the second best BHC movie of the four.

While there are some interesting insights and stories, Being Eddie is too polished and protective of its subject. Recent documentaries about Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were more candid about their lives, but here while Murphy goes on about how he does it all for his kids because they're so important to him, it omits the detail that his 10 kids came from five different baby mamas, two of which he was actually married to at the time.

It ends with heavy hints that perhaps he may return to stand-up comedy, something he walked away from after his 1987 concert film Eddie Murphy Raw. Is Being Eddie meant to be a trial balloon to gauge interest in a comeback? Because it falls short of presenting its subject in sufficient depth. While the promo for this hypes director Angus Wall's two Oscar wins, those were for editing The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, both for David Fincher (along with a nom for editing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, also for Fincher) and this is his first big directing gig and he shies away from digging into Murphy's soul.

Oddly, in the end credits where various stylists and makeup people for interviewees are listed, are credits for those assigned to "Mr. Piscopo" and "Mr. Pharoh", presumably being Joe Piscopo, who was in that cast with Murphy and was one of the other bright spots, and Jay Pharoh, who was an ace impressionist (his Denzel Washington makes it impossible to take Denzel seriously now) on SNL between 2010-2016 and now, come to think of it, was an odd omission. Why the credits for people who didn't make the final cut?

As with most Netflix 4K Dolby Vision products, it's not necessary to have the top tier to access the HDR visuals.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"Downey Wrote That" Review

While much credit for the enduring success of Saturday Night Live goes to the stars over the years, what made the show live and die throughout has been the quality of the writing. When the writing is good, the show soars; when it's bad, oooof. (It's why I DVR the show so I can skip bad musical acts and tedious sketches.) Now in its 51st season, the writing was deadly bad early on, but things have improved with more adventurous writing.

But while some writers like Al Franken and Tom Davis in the early days or Seth Meyers and Tina Fey have crossed over into general public consciousness, one who has been more of a legend to writing nerds who actually care about this stuff than to the rubes is Jim Downey, who joined SNL in 1976 (sharing an office with fellow rookie Bill Murray) then proceeded to work for 30 non-consecutive years before retiring in 2013 as the longest-running writer in show history. During an early break from the show when he left along with nearly everyone else when creator Lorne Michaels stepped away in 1980, he was the head writer for Late Night with David Letterman, helping form his subversive & influential brand of comedy.

Thus we have the Peacock Original documentary Downey Wrote That, which follows along the series of docs produced earlier this year in conjunction with the 50th Anniversary of SNL by gathering a bevy of past writers and cast members including Adam Sandler, David Spade, Maya Rudolph, Bob Odenkirk, Ben Stiller, Conan O'Brien, David Letterman, and Lorne Michaels to sing their praises of Downey's oddball & specific wit. They reminisce about how they'd line up outside his office to have their scripts appraised and how to have his blessing meant everything.

The amount of memorable sketches over the decades is amazing. Fred Garvin: Male Prostitute, Lord & Lady Douchebag, The Change Bank (in which he appeared as the bank spokesman), The People's Court with Satan, Colon Blow, the coining of the word "strategery" which people believe is something George W. Bush actually said (like how people believe Sarah Palin said, "I can see Russia from my house," because Tina Fey did it in a sketch), the legendary Chippendale's audition with Patrick Swayze versus Chris Farley, and so many more.

The time he focused solely on doing the Weekend Update segment when Norm MacDonald was the anchor gets its own segment and they include one of my two favorite Norm Update jokes, "And in music news, #1 on the college charts this summer was Better Than Ezra. And at #2...Ezra." Seth Meyers tells of, and we're shown, a joke about a birthday party for the world's richest girl, to which Meyers admits, "My favorite joke is one which didn't land but I still thing about 30 years later." The infamous way MacDonald & Downey were fired because they took NBC President Don Ohlmeyer's offense at their jokes about his best friend O.J. Simpson as a sign to quintuple down on the savagery towards Simpson. (Look up the compilations on YouTube sometime. It wasn't a few jokes. It was years of brutal stuff flat-out calling Simpson a murderer.)

His film appearances are also touched upon including his small role in There Will Be Blood and as the quiz host in Billy Madison who berates the stupid answer Billy gives - "We are all dumber for having listened to it" - which Sandler admits was all Downey's writing, becoming "the most quoted bit of the movie."

While the general interest in comedy writers may be debatable, if you're an fan of creativity and SNL and you happen to have Peacock, take 66 minutes and watch Downey Wrote That to see how many of your Gen X/Millennial laugh memories he's responsible for.

Score: 8/10. Catch it on Peacock.

"Bedazzled" Blu-ray Review

Previously reviewed here.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable. 

"Good Fortune" Review

 Comedian Aziz Ansari makes his feature directorial debut with Good Fortune, a sweet-natured comedy that he also wrote.

He stars as Arj, a wannabe documentarian stuck working gig economy jobs in LA. Also working a low-prestige job is Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), a guardian angel whose job is to protect people from texting while driving. One day, he takes an interest in Arj after saving him and follows his life, working at a big box hardware store (think Home Depot), doing gig work, while living in his car.

One day while delivering food to a mansion owned by Jeff (Seth Rogan), he notices the garage is cluttered and offers to organize it for some extra cash. He does such a good job that Jeff offers him a job as his assistant, giving him a company credit card for expenses.

When Arj has a date with Elena (Keke Palmer), a woman he works with at the hardware store, Jeff suggests he take her to a trendy restaurant and recommends menu items. Naturally, when the bill comes it's waaaay more than what Arj has on him, so he reluctantly uses Jeff's credit card to cover dinner. The next day, Jeff confronts Arj about it after being alerted by his accountant. Arj apologizes profusely and promises to pay him back, but Jeff fires him because all the good work he was doing mattered little compared to a few hundred dollar dinner bill and besides those $250,000 watches he collects don't pay for themselves.

Back on the street, forced from the motel he was able to stay at while working for Jeff, Arj discovers he has been banned from the gig app he was using due to poor reviews by ungrateful customers and has to sell plasma for money. When he dozes off in a Denny's, his car is towed for unpaid parking tickets. Seeing Arj's desperation and wanting to make more of a difference in humans lives than just babysitting texting drivers, Gabriel reveals himself to Arj to try and inspire him.

In order to convince him that wealth won't solve his problems, he switches Arj's and Jeff's lives making Arj the wealthy tech investor and Jeff his assistant. Unfortunately for his plan, Arj finds that money pretty much solves all his problems. Making matters worse, Gabriel's angel boss, Martha (Sandra Oh), takes his wings and some of his angel powers for his meddling in matters outside his brief. When Arj refuses to switch lives back, Gabriel gives Jeff his memories back revealing what had been taken from him.

From there things spiral as Arj gets into an auto accident because no angel was there to prevent him texting, ending up in a coma, then pretending to have lost his memory to prevent switching back. Fed up, Martha turns Gabriel human which leads to him having to find a job to buy food he now needs while he and Jeff struggle to scrape by in LA's brutal cost of living. And Raj's wealth doesn't impress Elena whose passion is unionizing the hardware store.

What Ansari wisely does is not make the struggles of gig workers versus mansion-dwelling elites into a ham-fisted screed about late-stage capitalism - other than one clanger line at the end - because no one wants to be lectured by a Hollywood celebrity. Instead he sketches things by showing Arj getting one-star from a client who was mad that the donut shop Arj waited in line for hours to purchase from ran out through no fault of his. (It's like stiffing your waitress on the tip because the kitchen made a bad plate.) Elena's quest to unionize the workers doesn't go as well as she'd hoped. Arj learns to move forward without money.

He also takes a more laid-back pace in his direction, letting scenes breathe to allow character moments either than hammering joke-joke-joke. Rogan pretty much plays his a-hole studio boss character from The Studio, but Ansari and Palmer are more toned down then their noisy comic personas. Reeves is an actor of, to be kind, limited range, but it works to his advantage here because he brings an earnest childlike innocence to Gabriel, especially when he's turned human and washing dishes at a restaurant. Human life is alien to him and he plays it straight.

While not a laugh riot, Good Fortune is a pleasant, often amusing, sweet comedy which doesn't just go for cheap cruel humor or spoil it with agitprop. It's too bad it flopped at the box office, but who goes to the movies for stuff like this anymore?

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Freakier Friday" Review

Since our last movie was the waaaaaaaaaay overdue sequel, Spinal Tap 2: The End Continues, coming 41 years after its original film, it was time to check in with Freakier Friday, the 22 years later sequel to the 2003 Freaky Friday which itself was the second remake of 1976's Jodie Foster version. While Lindsey Lohan had garnered acclaim for her work in the 1997 remake of The Parent Trap (filmed when she only 11 years old), it was the tag team of Freaky Friday and Mean Girls the following year, along with a great hosting shot on SNL that rocketed her to mega-stardom. Which she then immediately squandered by hanging out with Paris Hilton, doing drugs, and becoming a nightmare to work and having a long string of bombs pretty much sending her to Career Purgatory. (I really laid into her in my 2011 Mean Girls Blu-ray review. Hit link for harshness.)

Now a 39-year-old mother who lives in Dubai with her Kuwaiti financier husband, she's back to collect a check from Disney's constant rehashing of their already remade and sequeled to death IPs with her co-star Jamie Lee Curtis, who's been on a career tear lately as she's added two more parts of her EGOT with an Emmy for her guest appearance on The Bear and an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once to go with her True Lies Golden Globe (which she should've been Oscar nommed).

The movie wastes no time infodumping the audience and raising questions beginning with who was the sperm donor for Anna Coleman's "choice to be a single mother" to her daughter Harper (Julia Butters), a rebellious teenager who loves to surf. Tess Coleman (Curtis) is a podcaster/author/therapist who's there to help raise Harper while Anna works as a music producer, having left her rock band dreams behind.

At school, Harper is annoyed by the snobby new student from England, Lily Reyes (Sophia Hammons), who's her lab partner and when an experiment blows up on them, their parents are summoned leading to Anna meeting Lily's father, Eric (Manny Jacinto), instantly falling in love with him and their becoming engaged six months later to the mutual horror of their daughters.

At Anna's bachelorette party, both Anna and Tess and Harper and Lily receive palm readings from a dodgy mystic, Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer), after which they all feel an earthquake that no one else does. (Ruh-roh.) The next morning, everyone wakes up to discover they've swapped bodies - Anna and Harper switch mother-daughter style like the last time and Tess and Lily switch with Lily traumatized by being in an old woman's body while Tess enjoys not aching and farting while moving around. (And the audience learns that accents are tied to bodies, not people as Tess keeps Lily's posh accent while Lily-in-Tess doesn't.)

Since they've gone through this before, Anna and Tess tell Harper and Lily to pretend to be them while they run around prepping for Anna's wedding and trying to keep Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), a pop artist Anna's working with on an even keel after being dumped by her pop star boyfriend. The daughters use their body time to try and split their parents up so the wedding doesn't happen. Will they succeed or will they learn to understand each other and get their bodies back? Duh.

I vaguely remember seeing the first Freaky Friday ages ago - I see I own the DVD, but never upgraded to Blu-ray - but can't remember much other than I liked it OK. I didn't revisit it before watching the sequel, so a lot of the callbacks like Anna's crush, Jake (Chad Michael Murray), having the hots for Tess (a duh thing when Curtis was ~42, but questionable at 64) and that Tess's husband, Ryan (Mark Harmon), was the wedding Anna was trying to break up, didn't land much with me.

The tone is really frenetic and silly, but as a PG-rated Disney flick, I guess that's what the kiddies want: By-choice single motherhood. Not to harp on this, but why not just kill off Harper's baby daddy or have them divorced so there's the irony of trying to bust up Anna's marriage when Harper comes from a broken home. Eric is a widower and Lily's feeling that Daddy is going to forget her mother hovers over things. Come on, Disney, either go all-in or stop fooling around.

As for the body swapped performances, with four people involved there's less time to develop the characters' behaviors. As mentioned previously, why does Tess in Lily's body have the accent but not vice versa? Tess suddenly having an English accent then trying to squelch that would've been amusing. The subplots about Ella the pop singer and misunderstanding what a song Anna wrote is about isn't very compelling and the final concert scene begs questions about why Ella seems like a guest at her own show?

While there are a few good laughs in Freakier Friday there is a lack of focus to the script and overly frenetic direction by Nisha Ganatra (nothing you've heard of) which makes it disposable. If fact, the next day I remembered that we'd watched some TV shows and SNL, but completely forgot we'd watched this beforehand.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming (probably Mouse+).

"Heads of State" 4K Review

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. 

Score: 7/10. Catch it on Amazon Prime.

"Another Simple Favor" 4K Review

 I have somehow failed to ever post a full review of 2018's snappy camp-trash classic A Simple Favor any of the three times we've watched it - first at the theater, then twice more on 4K digital - but it's one of our faves and each time I've logged it it crept up in its score, starting at 7.5/10 and currently at 8.5/10. It's a blast and made us reevaluate Blake Lively after years of clowning on her in Gossip Girl. (She was also good in the Girl vs Shark movie The Shallows.) So when word that a sequel was coming, great joy happened in Xanadu. So how does Another Simple Favor, sent straight to streaming on Amazon Prime Video because studios hate money, fare? It's OK.

We open with what listeners of the terrific Scriptnotes podcast will recognize as a Stuart Special with mommy vlogger/true crime solver Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick, A Simple Favor) streaming from her hotel room in Capri, proclaiming her innocence from killing frenemy Emily Nelson's new husband. Ruh-roh.

We then flashback a few days to get caught up on where we are five years after the events of the first film. Stephanie has written a book about those events and built a large following with her amateur sleuthing. At a book reading she is shocked by the arrival of Emily (Blake Lively, A Simple Favor), sprung from prison pending appeal by the powerful lawyers of her new fiance, Dante Versano (Michele Morrone, Subservience), an old Italian boyfriend. Emily is there to ask Stephanie to be her maid of honor and if she doesn't there will be lawsuits, etc. So it's off to Capri she goes, accompanied by Vicky (Alex Newell, Glee), her literary agent whose hoping for another book to come from it.

Stephanie is on edge because she feels Emily wants to kill her for wrecking her life, shagging her husband Sean (Henry Golding, A Simple Favor), leaving her son Nicky (Ian Ho, A Simple Favor) without a mother, etc. Emily's mercurial nature doesn't put her at ease even as she somewhat reassures her.

At the rehearsal luncheon, the surprises continue as it appears Dante's family business is in the vein of The Godfather with another family, the Bartolos, being antagonists and Dante's mother, Portia (Elena Sofia Ricci, all Italian movies), none to happy with this blonde interloper so she ups the ante by springing that he'd brought Emily's estranged borderline senile mother, Margaret (Elizabeth Perkins, Big, taking over from Jean Smart, A Simple Favor), and her aunt Linda (Allison Janney, The West Wing), to the party, much to Emily's consternation.

After much snarky banter, the story shifts into a darker gear as the men in Emily's life begin getting dead and for some reason Stephanie is the prime suspect to the local police and they place her under house arrest. Fortunately, she has a FBI agent (Taylor Ortega, The Four Seasons) following her to protect her. Too bad she's very incompetent and not on the case very long. (Nudge wink.) It all leads to some twisty-turny hijinks that require more suspension of disbelief than how Emily's wardrobe manages to cover her naughty bits like the beads on the Na'vi in the Avatar movies.

 While I enjoyed Another Simple Favor overall, the screenplay by Jessica Sharzer (co-writer of A Simple Favor) and Laeta Kalogridis (Terminator: Genisys, Alita: Battle Angel) is simultaneously overstuffed and undercooked with too many scenes and/or characters which could've been trimmed or eliminated completely. It feels like 15-20 minutes more material got trimmed out when it should've been either left in, the overall runtime cut back from 120 minutes, or different choices made; the FBI and literary agents could've been omitted entirely.

 The tone also gets too dark in spots; we don't need to see a beloved character's grisly demise so graphically portrayed and then a family member seemingly totally unaffected mere hours later. And the denouement relies on something being used that there is absolutely zero way it could've been present; deus ex machinas don't get more deusy than this even when it is so foreshadowed that I called it at about the 20-minute mark. And the supposed big twist wasn't much of a surprise, though I'll admit another twist was news, though it also raises questions the movie isn't interested in answering; just go with it.

 That said, if you're here for some sparky, bitchy back-and-forth between Kendrick & Lively, Another Simple Favor delivers enough of the goods to carry the day. There is a stretch where Lively is offscreen and she's missed. Perkins is a poor substitute for Smart, playing Margaret's dementia too broadly. (I'm guessing Smart was too busy filming Hacks to come back.) Morrone has little charisma, same as in Subservience, so I'm not sure why Hollywood is trying so hard to give him the Cam Gigandet treatment.

Amazon's 4K HDR10 presentation is nicely bright, capturing the luxurious details of the Capri setting like a tourism board commercial. Why so many movies refuse to use contrast and color these days sucks, but this isn't a disappointment.

The end of Another Simple Favor hints at a sequel and I am here for it. Ignore the haters who are "Team Justin" are are review bombing the movie online because they're jealous bitches envious of Lively's life or the film critics who didn't see the first one, don't understand the humor, and called it the worst movie of the year (as if it was a threat to film, ahem) and settle in for a messy, but still entertaining visit with the pair whose ideal of "family relations" gets pretty twisted at times. If you haven't seen the first one, it's currently on Netflix and MUST be seen before this to appreciate it properly.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on Prime Video.

"Love Hurts" Review

 Is there a rule that once you win an Oscar your next career move should be to make a silly action movie? After Angelina Jolie won, she made Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, launching her into a solid action flick career in between her serious gigs, and after Alicia Vikander won, she also made the third Tomb Raider movie.

So it wasn't a huge surprise when the trailer dropped for Love Hurts which stars Cinderella story hero Ke Huy Quan, fresh off his career-resurrecting win for Everything Everywhere All At Once, and Ariana DeBose, the actress from West Side Story who didn't go on to lose Disney hundreds of millions of dollars with her dumb mouth. Serious Actors getting paid and having fun? What could go wrong? Turns out plenty.

Quan is Marvin Gable, a successful Milwaukee real estate agent with a dark secret past (shades of Nobody) whose new life is upended by the arrival back in town of Rose (DeBose), a woman he was supposed to kill because she stole from the crime organization headed by his brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu, Into the Badlands).

Marvin has no idea why she's back, but Knuckles sends a bunch of colorfully quirky hitmen after Marvin to find out including a hulking wannabe poet, Raven (Mustafa Shakir, the live action Cowboy Bebop); Otis (André Eriksen, Vikings), a guy trying to save his troubled marriage and his sidekick, King (pro football player Marshawn "Beastmode" Lynch), because everyone loved the guys in Bullet Train blathering about Thomas the Tank Engine characters. Meanwhile, Knuckles right hand man, Renny (Cam Gigandet, Burlesque), needs to find Rose for his own reasons related to why she why she was marked for deletion years before.

 There is so much quirkiness crammed into the brief 83-minute runtime that anything resembling a coherent plot gets jettisoned. Marvin has a depressed assistant, Ashley (Lio Tipton, formerly Analeigh - Crazy Stupid Love - who is now "queer and non-binary" but married to a man because "bisexual" is what old people were or something), who instantly falls in love with Raven, so we keep cutting back to those two. Same with Otis and King; who needs to understand Marvin and Rose when Otis needs to be seen beating up someone for a teddy bear to give his wife? Can't forget Knuckles and his love of boba tea either!

While all that superfluous drivel gets plenty of time, we never see why Marvin and Rose were in love. Frankly, it seems more like he was secretly pining for her, but the trio of inconsequential writers of no note focused on everything but the leads. Rose is barely a two-dimensional character, so we have no idea why Marvin swooned and defied his brother's kill order.

Compounding the derivative and thin script is the tone deaf direction by rookie helmer Jonathan Eusebio, a veteran stuntman with association with 87North Productions and who, like company co-founder David Leitch (Bullet Train, The Fall Guy, Deadpool 2), cannot balance tone and action to save his life. The action sequences are impressive and Quan does well in continuing Jackie Chan's signature style of using the environment's props in the fights, but they also get too brutal for a comedic film. The comic hijinks war with some dark undercurrents and in refusing to pick a lane, it rides the center line into oncoming traffic.

Sadly lost in the noise is Quan's performance where he somehow manages to imbue Marvin with waaaaaay more depth than the script provides, even making his return to being Knuckles' "monster" believable when he started as a goofy guy. (Quan's high-pitched accent is a problem for playing heavy drama at times.) During his hiatus from acting, he worked as a fight coordinator for the first X-Men movie as well as on Jet Li's The One, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised he has some fight moves.

Instead of watching this disappointing mess, I strongly recommend you seek out The Big Hit, starring Marky Mark as a hitman tasked with babysitting a young woman whose kidnapping he participated in. Everything Love Hurts does wrong with subplots and side characters works fabulously here and the chemistry between Marky and China Chow exists where DeBose just shows up and we're supposed to believe it. Seriously, watch The Big Hit. You're welcome.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"The Monkey" Review

 Hot on the heels of last year's cult horror fave Longlegs (unreviewed, 5/10 score), writer-director Osgood Perkins (son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins) is back with The Monkey, an adaptation of a Stephen King short story from his Skeleton Crew anthology about a cursed toy monkey that wreaks mayhem.

The tone is set immediately as an airline pilot played by Adam Scott (Severance) rushes into a pawn shop covered in blood seeking to get rid of a large toy monkey which bangs a drum triggering bad consequences as illustrated by the shop owner being killed by weird sequence of events. The pilot then disappears from his family's life.

 Left behind are his wife Lois (Tatiana Maslany, Orphan Black) and their twin sons, Hal and Bill (both played by Christian Convery, Sweet Tooth). Bill is three minutes older, so uses that to mercilessly bully Hal. They find the monkey in a box of their father's stuff and after turning the key, resulting in their babysitter being killed in a freak Japanese hibachi restaurant accident, Hal attempts to use it kill Bill, but instead his mother dies of an aneurysm. He dismembers the monkey and throws it away, but it reappears at the home of the aunt and uncle the twins were sent to. Bill tries to use the monkey to kill Hal, but their uncle dies. They then agree to throw it down a well where it can't harm anyone again.

25 years later, Hal (now played by Theo James, Divergent) is working as a store clerk and is estranged from Bill and his son, Petey (Colin O'Brien, Wonka), whom he only sees once a year to keep safe from the Monkey returning. During his annual visit, his ex-wife tells him her new husband, Ted (Elijah Wood, Sin City), plans on adopting Petey, cutting him completely from Hal's life.

When their aunt dies in a bizarre Final Destination-worthy manner, Bill reaches out to Hal and tells him that he needs to go to her house and check whether the Monkey has returned. The realtor tells Hal that there have been a rash of mysteriously weird deaths every day for the past week. That's right, someone's got the Monkey and is turning the key!

If you're a fan of over-the-top dark comedy-horror in the vein of Evil Dead II and it's sequels, then The Monkey is for you. The kills are so ridiculous that they prompt laughs more than ewwwws, but like Evil Dead movies/shows, not Terrifier movies. Final Destination kills are also a valid comparison.

I didn't really care for James' performance as the twins, but Convery is so good and the difference in appearance was enough that we were genuinely surprised it was one actor. (It probably helped that the Queen of Multiple Roles, Maslany, was his counterpart.)

Though a manageable 98-minutes long, the pacing does slack off noticeably in the last act as Perkins drags things out; trimming 15-20 minutes would've helped. This is a common issue with Perkins as his  Gretel & Hansel (5/10) was also empty and slow despite being visually sumptuous. He needs a co-writer and an editor to break out of his 5-6/10 rut.

 Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Companion" Review

 People complain that there aren't any original movies anymore - everything is a sequel or based on IPs like games - but when something different does come along, they don't seem to go see it. Such was the case with Better Man (which grossed ~$20M on a $110M budget) and now the modestly successful (though poorly marketed) Companion. Considering how generally mediocre movies are these days - especially the dreck being nominated for Oscars - it's nice to be able to recommend a good one for a change, though you should take my word for it and not watch the spoilerific trailer.

 It opens with Iris (Sophie Thatcher, Heretic) at a supermarket musing in voiceover that the two times in her life she was happiest were the day she met Josh (Jack Quaid, The Boys) and the day she killed him. (Well, that's a statement of purpose if there ever was one.) We watch them meet cute in the produce section as he causes an avalanche of oranges from the bin.

Then we see her waking up in their car as they head deep into the woods for a weekend with friends at what one described as a rustic little cabin which as Jack notes is none of those things as it's a modern mansion owned by Sergey (Rupert Friend, Homeland). Also attending are Sergey's mistress, Kat (Megan Suri, Never Have I Ever), Eli (Harvey Guillén, What We Do In The Shadows) and his partner Patrick (Lukas Gage, Fargo). Iris is worried that Kat hates her and Kat does throw shade, but in general everyone has a great time, getting drunk and dancing.

The next morning, Iris goes down to the lake and is joined by Sergey who proceeds to try and force himself on her. Back at the house, the others are waking up and then shocked to see Iris covered in blood, trying to explain what had happened. Jack commands her to go to sleep and her eyes cloud over and she freezes revealing (to those who didn't see the trailer) that she's a robot. Dun dun DUHN!!! Many hijinks ensue.

I'd known about the twist before watching it, so I was spotting all the tells about Iris and the remarks Kat and Sergey made toward her. But I was thankfully unaware of where the story was going and that made for a kicky fun ride. Sure, it's got elements borrowed from and reminiscent of Blade Runner, I, Robot, The Terminator, Her, Ex Machina, The Stepford Wives and the dreadful Subservience, but it mixes and matches the pieces into something fairly fresh if familiar.

Thatcher is a fresh up-and-comer with her roles here and Heretic as well as playing the young version of Juliette Lewis's character in Yellowjackets, whose voice Thatcher's sounds a lot like here while her look is what the missus described as "Goth Zooey Deschanel." (I went with a cross between Thora Birch's and Scarlet Johansson's characters in Ghost World.) Keep an eye on her starting here.

Writer-director Drew Hancock makes a smart feature debut here, investing the story with its own thoughts about the nature of love, control, identity and self-determination. Even when it's being a bit too familiar or tropey, he keeps things on the level. He was the co-creator and sole writer of a great little series that only ran 8 episodes called My Dead Ex (currently streaming on Paramount+) which you should check out.

Long story short, Companion is a tidy little black comedy with some cool twists and turns. Just don't watch the trailer to get maximum surprise value.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Y2K" Review

 It's New Year's Eve, so why not watch the new sci-fi/horror/comedy by former SNL alum Kyle Mooney, Y2K, which he directed and co-wrote (with Evan Winter)?

Jaeden Martell (IT) stars as Eli, an awkward high schooler whose only friend is Danny (Julian Dennison, not slimmed down in the least since Deadpool 2). He has a crush on Laura (Rachel Zegler, West Side Story), a beautiful classmate and secret tech nerd, but of course can't tell her how he feels about her and her cool kids clique are disgusted by the "Sticky Boys" (as they call themselves) because of course, this being a teen movie.

They decide to crash a New Year's Eve party being held at Laura's ex-boyfriend Soccer Chris's (Aussie rapper The Kid Laroi) house and it's your usual movie rager party until the clock strikes midnight, ushering in 2000 and the lights flicker out. After a few seconds, they come back on and it appears Y2K was a dud (as it was in reality), but then a toy jeep with other toys combined with it burns a kid's face to death with a makeshift flamethrower and other devices begin attacking and killing the partygoers including Danny.

Eli, Laura and a pair of local rap crew members who bullied Eli and Danny - CJ (Daniel Zolghadri, Eighth Grade) and Ash (Lachlan Watson, Glen/Glenda in the Chucky TV series) - then trek to find Laura's previous ex-boyfriend, an electrical engineering major named Jonas (Mason Gooding, Cuba Jr's son, Love, Victor) to see if he can help with these conglomerations of household electronics. Also in the mix is a stoner video store clerk, Garret, played by Mooney.

The problem with Y2K is that the script is a half-baked mishmash of other familiar movies. The Eli-Danny dynamic is so cribbed from Superbad that I wasn't surprised to see Jonah Hill has a producer here. The swing from teen buddy comedy to full splatter comedy a la Evil Dead II could've worked in the hands of a better director, but Mooney isn't up to the task.

The script feels like a barely hanging together first draft that needed more trips through development with the most cardboard of characters. How did the killer robots assemble themselves so quickly? Don't know. How did the virus spread when hardly anything was connected to the Internet and broadband was a novelty? Don't know. Why does there seem to be nobody else in the world than the immediate characters in the movie and why is everyone's favorite art house movie brand A24 watering down their reputation with such lackluster stuff? /shrug emoji

While the use of clever puppets and robot suits fabricated by Weta Workshop give a tactile lo-fi vibe, the cinematography by Bill Pope (three Edgar Wright, four Sam Raimi, and four Wachowskis movies including The Matrix trilogy) is too good for this project.

Frankly, if it looked worse and starred nobodies (think: Clerks) it's B-movie story would've worked better. When the best thing about your movie is the surprise cameo of a certain red-hatted nu-metal rocker who was huge in 1999 and is willing to take the piss out of himself for the last act of the movie, that's not a ringing endorsement of Mooney's effort. (FWIW, the missus liked it much more.)

Score: 4/10. Skip it.