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!
The opening of Tony, the biopic about a young Anthony Bourdain - the famous chef, author, and TV host who decided a life of globe-trotting, meeting interesting foods and eating exotic peoples, plus banging Asia Argento, wasn't enough to keep living for in 2018 - is a title card with this quote from his book, Kitchen Confidential: “I was a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” It's a fitting apéritif for what follows, the depiction of young man stumbling into a new vocation while being somewhat the ass in the process.
Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) stars as Bourdain, going by "Tony" as a 19-year-old Vassar freshman with dreams of being a writer. He applies for a writing fellowship which would take him to New York and lies to his family that he got it when in reality someone else got it. Caught out, he decides to go to Provincetown, MA (at the tip of Cape Cod) to chase after Nancy (Emilia Jones, CODA), a girl he's got a crush on since high school who's a year older and told him she'd be staying for the summer.
When he gets there, he discovers she appears attached to another guy at the pizza place she's working. He goes to a seafood place called The Flagship and gets drunk and when he's rude to Mary (Monica Raymund, Chicago Fire), the barmaid, he's thrown out and beaten up, then later robbed by Sal (Leo Woodall, Tuner), a worker in the kitchen. The owner, Chef (Antonio Banderas, Desperado), takes Tony home and puts him in the hammock on the porch of his small beach house.
Broke, Tony apologizes to Chef and begs for a job at Flagship and to keep sleeping on the hammock. Chef, believing Tony when he claims to have kitchen experience, brings him on as a dishwasher, eventually advancing him to oyster shucking and more all while continuing to wake him up with water dumped on him. While he's interested in the cooking stuff, Tony still sees himself as a writer and persists in lying to Nancy and himself as to what his destiny is.
It is to the credit of director/co-writer Matt Johnson (lasts seen starring and directing Nirvanna The Band The Song The Movie) in approaching this part of Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential memoir that he doesn't lay on too thick the idea that a lightning bolt struck Tony to make him realize cooking was going to be his path to becoming an author. It's just a summer in a confused young man's life where he's still sorting out who he even is when he's not fronting what he wishes he was.
During my traditional post-biopic fact checking, I found it was fairly true to the fictionalized references in Kitchen Confidential, though in order to create a more dramatic impetus to the plot it fudged the fact that Tony and Nancy had already dated for a few years before their planned mutual trip to Provincetown and that they eventually married about a decade later before divorcing 20 years after that. Tony wasn't chasing no skirt, yo!
In my review of The Holdovers I faulted Sessa's performance as the weak link, presumably due it being his first film role. Well, in the intervening few years he's really stepped up his game because here he balances the competing impulses of Tony while hinting at his future without obviously mimicking Bourdain's distinct style. Well done. It's also good to see Antonio Banderas getting some room to work as Chef instead of being wasted as he was in last year's Babygirl. (In a meta bit of IYKYK casting, when Tony applies to the Culinary Institute of America at the end, the main instructor is played by chef Eric Ripert, Bourdain's bestie and traveling companion who got to find his friend's body.)
While small-scale and slightly fibby, Tony is a decent coming-of-age biopic about someone whose talents are sorely missed. (The missus was so angry at his suicide she got rid of all his books and avoids his shows.)
Apple TV is not immune from having so-so "movie show content" despite some prestigious "TV show content" and thus we have Mayday, the latest from writer-director tag team John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein whose last movie was the well-regarded but underseen Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (which I haven't gotten around to watching yet). Now they're taking on a Cold War period buddy action dramedy with Ryan Reynolds (Van Wilder) and Kenneth Branagh (lots of Shakespeare stuff) as a US pilot and former KGB agent, respectively.
It's 1987 and Reynolds' Naval Lt. Troy "Assassin" Kelly is assigned to an SR-71 spy mission over the Soviet Union after an opening sequence totally copied from Top Gun's opening. When the mission goes sideways resulting in the pilot being killed and Troy forced to eject behind enemy lines, injured when he lands in a forest, he is found and patched up by Nikolai "Call me Nik" Ustinov (Branagh), who has retired from the spy game and harbors a dark secret: He's fascinated by America, especially his favorite movie, a bootleg tape of Top Gun.
2000 kilometers from the closest border with Finland, his original suggestion is that Troy just stay with him until the Cold War ends, but that becomes really impractical when current KGB General Alexander Volkov (Marcin Dorociński, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One) arrives at Nik's isolated cabin searching for the surviving American pilot from the crash. While Nik manages to hide Troy well enough, he knows this was a temporary win so decides to help get Troy to the US Embassy in Moscow. He hopes that he and his estranged daughter, Anna (Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), will be able to defect and gain asylum as a reward for helping Troy escape.
What follows is your standard Odd Couple buddy road trip/action hybrid plot where Nik proves to be quite the badass fighter, taking out multiple opponents in bars, train cars, etc. But since this is a modern movie it gets laden with current Hollyweird ideological baggage that America is a malign entity against its own service people and in some ways no better than the Evil Empire and that "The best way to stand for your country is to stand up against it." Can't have America live up to Top Gun's image, now can we? Also, there's the obligatory LGB subplot to make Nik seem more progressive than the typical Ruskie.
While Reynolds turns in his usual Ryan Reynolds quippy performance, Branagh seems more committed to his bit as a complex man in a oppressive country where he was once the oppressor. Let's not kid ourselves, Mayday isn't remotely deep, but it is sporadically amusing when it's not trying to pontificate about America's ills.
Irish director John Carney occupies a very specific niche making movies about musicians that never really feel realistic. Best known for 2007's Once, whose signature song "Falling Slowly" won the Best Original Song Oscar and catapulted the Swell Season into NPR fame. Subsequently, 2016's Sing Street about a high school band in Dublin garnered a Golden Globe nomination. While I scored it a 6/10, the never-written review was going to call out the insanity of a band in Dublin in 1985 not being fans of U2 which would be like making a movie about a soul singer in 1960s Detroit without mentioning Motown.
Carney's latest is Power Ballad, a slight dramedy starring Paul Rudd as Rick Power (get it?), an American who gave up his fleeting chance at rock fame years before to settle down with his wife and teenage daughter in Ireland. While playing a wedding gig at a castle with his band The Bride & the Groove (punny) where an old friend of the couple of honor is former boy band star Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas of Jonas Brothers boy band fame). They ask the band if Danny could sit in for a tune and they rock out Stevie Wonder's "I Wish." (Also famous for being the main loop for Will Smith's Wild Wild West theme.) Video of the jam goes viral.
After the festivities wind down Rick strolls the grounds of the castle and encounters Danny who invites him into his suite which is loaded with recording equipment and instruments. The pair spend the evening hanging out and playing songs while drinking and smoking. One of the songs Rick plays is called "How to Write a Song (Without You)" which lacks a bridge, but has verses and a chorus. In the morning, as the band is heading home, a worker from the castle brings Rick a guitar case with a $6300 Gibson J-200 acoustic with a thank you note for the jam session.
We then see Danny's life with a huge mansion that is very beautiful, but sterile and cold-feeling compared to Rick's small and cluttered home in Ireland. His label and manager, Mac (Jack Reynor, Sing Street), feel his latest tunes are generic and his career expiration date approaches. Struggling, he plays "How to Write a Song (Without You)" and his girlfriend, Marcia (Havana Rose Liu), overhears him and tells him it's great and he should record it.
Six months later, Rick is at the mall and overhears a very familiar melody wafting from the mall's sound system. He hunts it down and discovers Danny has finished the song, released it as his, and his having a career Renaissance as a result as the song tops the charts, gets awards nominations, and gets Danny playing arenas. Rick struggles to contact Mac who blows him off especially when Rick admits he can't prove he wrote the song with any demos or performances anyone can vouch for.
Even his wife, Rachel (Marcella Plunkett) and daughter, Aja (Beth Fallon), doubt him and combined with guests at weddings asking for the Danny's song to be played, Rick spirals, wrecks the van which his family in it and gets fired from the band. After Rachel kicks him out, he ends up at the door of Sandy (Peter McDonald, who also co-write the movie with Carney), the band's guitarist with a not-great idea: Fly to Los Angeles and confront Danny at his concert. This and the pair's crashing of the afterparty at Danny's mansion goes pretty much as expected.
As he approaches 60 years of age, Rudd if finally looking like he's in his forties. He's charming and funny as usual, but also presents Rick's undercurrent of resentment at having traded music for family only to have his song stolen to elevate another whom he only showed fellowship to. Jonas is OK as well, though he's got the heel role as someone who steals another writer's work, but while he clearly feeling guilty, his desire to get back on top trumps his guilt.
For someone who loves semi-musical stories, he simply can't get the sonics right. It was especially bad in Sing Street as the band of novice high schoolers sounded like a slickly polished studio recording when they played and it's the same here for the wedding band. It's not impossible to get the vibe right - Light of Day and especially Breaking Glass nailed the live dive bar sonics - but Carney clearly doesn't care. Danny's arena performance is also staged weirdly with the stage way to tall for an arena (it's more stadium sized) with no stage design, video wall backdrop, etc. It looks like a rehearsal stage, not a full fat concert by a Big Star.
Having the movie end with a drunken, depressed Rick killing himself was unexpected.....KIDDING!!! JUST KIDDING!!! The movie wraps up succinctly with justice done and shown by inference instead of explicitly which denies the viewer some satisfaction in Danny getting his comeuppance, but overall Power Ballad manages to hum a passably entertaining story tune.
Tonight we settle into a double-feature of 2006's The Devil Wears Prada and its 2026 sequel which tacked a 2 on the end. What follows is my IGN DVD review from 2006 after which I will update whether I had any new thoughts upon viewing this again for the first time in almost 20 years.
When Lauren Weisberger's novel The Devil Wears Prada became a best-seller in 2003, it was widely viewed as a roman a clef about Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue magazine, for whom Weisberger served as an assistant. Full of gossipy tidbits about the behind-the-scenes business of high fashion, it was a "chick lit" hit and an obvious candidate for translation to the big screen.
Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) is a plucky Midwestern college grad living in New York City looking for a writing career, having edited the Northwestern newspaper. After interviewing with the publishing conglomerate Elias-Clark, she's offered menial work at either Auto Universe or a second assistant gig at Runway magazine, working for the imperious editor, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep).
Miranda is a "boss from Hell" - demanding, dismissive, cruel, and capricious - who has driven many an assistant screaming from her presence, despite the job supposedly being one that "a million girls will kill for." Despite Andy's frumpy college prep appearance and utter lack of knowledge of the fashion world - she has to ask how to spell "Gabbana" - Miranda keeps her on and Andy tries to stick it out because she knows that if she stays a year, she'll have a good resume item that will allow her to write her own ticket to more rewarding work.
As time goes on, Andy gradually gets the hang of the job and routine, earning the grudging respect of Miranda's #1 assistant, Emily (Emily Blunt). It also helps when Nigel (Stanley Tucci), the photo editor, decides to take mercy on the fashion-challenged Andy and takes her into the magazine's "closet", the storeroom where all the clothes that are provided by designers for the magazine (and rarely returned) are kept. After finding something that the size 6 Andy could wear - one of the film's premises is that the just fine Hathaway is too bovine for the fashion world - and a trip to the salon, she begins to at least look the part of the "clackers" (named for the clacking of their stiletto heels on the marble floors) indigenous to Runway. (In a merciful twist, we're spared the obligatory Pretty Woman transformation montage; she just comes into the next scene with her new look and duds.)
With her increasing responsibilities at Runway, at Miranda's constant beck and call, Andy starts to have problems with her sous chef boyfriend, Nate (Adrian Grenier) and her art-gallery-manager friend Lilly (Tracie Thoms). Also showing an interest in Andy is Christian Thompson (Simon Baker), an author whom Andy is impressed by and could be helpful to her writing career. One sequence revolves around obtaining a copy of the unpublished next Harry Potter novel for Miranda's twins - a request slightly less feasible than obtaining a Bible autographed by God - and when he comes through, it clumsily introduces the possibility of romance.
I hadn't read the novel - hey, I'm a manly man, OK? - but as a film, The Devil Wears Prada fumbles being an effective update of prior workplace comedies like 9 to 5 and Working Girl by being too bland and toothless about its story and characters. This impression was solidified after checking out a synopsis of the novel, revealing a lot of angles that got cut in the process of Aline Brosh McKenna's script homogenizing the story into a popular hit. Considering it grossed $311 million worldwide, the producers surely aren't losing sleep over these changes.
The first problem is Andy and her career goals. In Working Girl, Tess (Melanie Griffith) had to combat workplace sexism in order to be taken seriously as something more than a secretary. Andy isn't being held down by anyone and no one is forcing her to become Miranda's on-call drone and it's not really explained how surviving a year of running errands is supposed to advance a serious journalistic career. Tess wanted to work in business; Andy could have waited tables and done freelance writing for all it matters.
Secondly, Andy's lousy friends are thinly written and hypocritical. When she bestows thousands of dollars worth of swag upon them that she's obtained from work, they're appreciative, but then they turn around and attack her for spending more time on her job than with them. Nate is an ungrateful tool - it doesn't matter when a dish like Hathaway comes home as long as she comes home, you mook - and Lilly is so underwritten that it was a surprise when a line revealed that they've been longtime friends and not just new acquaintances in the city.
Finally, the problem with Miranda is that in humanizing her by giving her a younger nemesis, Jacqueline (Stephanie Szostak), and an unhappy husband, Stephen (James Naughton), it dulls the boss-from-Hell aspects. Mr. Hart (Dabney Coleman) in 9 to 5 wasn't anything but a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot, but Miranda is painted as someone who both demands the impossible, but is also a victim of ageism and sexism and we're treated to the hoary trope that if she was a man she'd be thought as merely driven, which was boring back when it may have meant something. Because she's not a total monster 24/7, it makes her more outrageous requests less threatening, as if the fact that she allowed a total fashion naif to work for her more than 15 seconds doesn't stretch the limits of credulity.
While the story really doesn't amount to much, The Devil Wears Prada is still fairly entertaining to watch thanks to its glossy look (directed by Sex and the City vet David Frankel), dazzling array of fashions on parade, some genuine funny dialogue that doesn't smack of sitcom-grade contrivance, and the performances of the leads.
Streep doesn't have much of a reputation as a comedic actress, but she's simply sublime as Miranda, even though her skill at fleshing out what could've been a one-note character ultimately weakens her as a negative force in Andy's life. One scene has her explaining to Andy how people like those who run Runway determined the color of the lumpy sweater she is wearing years before and it's a stellar mix of sneering condescension and motherly education. Thanks to Streep, we feel for Miranda, even though I don't think Miranda was meant to be so sympathetic in the beginning.
Also excellent is Tucci as the flamboyant and bitchy, yet not campy or clichéd, Nigel. I wouldn't be surprised if he garnered a supporting Oscar nomination for a performance that could've emphasized the "fairy" in Fairy Godmother but thankfully doesn't. Hathaway is lovely with her big brown eyes, but she's somewhat hemmed in by the safe script and doesn't really get the material to shine like the others. She's very appealing, but not very compelling. Blunt is also funny as the harried and offended Emily. Thoms and Grenier are wasted with non-characters to play.
While The Devil Wears Prada feels particularly flat and predictable in its third act and ends on kind of a muddled note, it's still a decent trifle worth watching even though it's ultimately a triumph of style over substance. (Watch it while wearing some comfy sweats for added irony.) Too gentle in its satire and too pedestrian in its plot, it shows that when it came to balancing on its Manolos, the devil was in the missing details. ========== OK, 2026 Dirk here and I reread this review before watching and I must say I pretty much nailed it like a carpenter with OCD. On second viewing I noticed more business like how people scrambled to get out of Miranda's path when she strode the office halls. Considering how all the main stars have had massive award-winning careers over the past two decades and still look great, it's still wild to see Blunt so good in only her second feature role and just how luscious Hathaway looks, appearing to be made of cream and kittens' dreams. (At some point I dubbed her "Yummy Girl" and even as she's proven to be certifiably woketarded in real life, I still call her that and credit her for being the only non-terrible things in Christopher Nolan's craptacular The Dark Knight Reloaded and Intersuckular where she somehow manages to deliver the lines about love being the 5th dimension without bursting out laughing.)
When I reviewed it originally I scored it a 6/10, but on second glance it's worthy of a succeeded-at-what-it-was-trying-for...
The improbably late-life transformation of Bob Odenkirk into an action star even less plausible than Liam Neeson continues with Normal, an even less memorable title than his previous actioners - 2011's Nobody (unreviewed, 6/10) and 2025's Nobody 2 (5/10) - which probably accounted for it's bombing at the box office despite being the best of the trio of films, all penned by Derek Kolstad, the creator of the John Wick franchise. It's too bad because it's a little blast of a flick.
Odenkirk plays Sheriff Ulysses, the temporary Sheriff for the fictional town of Normal, MN. The previous Sheriff accidentally died of hypothermia and Ulysses is there to fill in until they can elect a new Sheriff in a couple of months. He's staying in a motel and leaving expositionary voicemails with his estranged wife to keep us filled in.
Being a small town, everyone knows everyone and it's all very cute but he senses something off about things like how they were able to raise millions of dollars in a fundraising drive and why one of the deputies chases off Alex (Jess McLeod), the daughter of the deceased Sheriff, from attending the memorial. The town's Mayor (Henry Winkler) suggests Ulysses considering staying on permanently because he's low key style of policing - he leaves a note under the windshield of a car parked too close to a fire hydrant reading, "Park better." - he demurs.
One day an alarm sounds at the police station that the bank is being robbed. The couple robbing the bank (Reena Jolly & Brendan Fletcher) crossed paths with Ulysses the day before and when he sees they're inside attempting to do CPR on a customer who collapsed from the stress, he decides to holster his weapon and go in. What happens next flips everything on its head, causing some very unlikely alliances to form in response to the situation.
What follows is a often humorously grisly sequence of bloody events which the trailer manages nicely to hint at while not completely blowing the plot. What Kolstad and Odenkirk (who collaborated on the story) have created plays like a mashup of Nobody and Evil Dead 2 (without the Deadites) with the violence sparking laughs instead of screams. I haven't seen director Ben Wheatly's Free Fire (the time we tried to watch it, the missus tapped out in about five minutes, before it had gotten going), though I've heard good things; however, Meg 2: The Trench was awful (unreviewed; 3/10 skip it score), but Normal rocks.
Part of the fun is how the first act blatantly sets up all sorts of details which you KNOW are going to come into play by the end. Clever movies often reveal they were setting things up upon a rewatch, but Normal makes darn sure that we know "this is going to be important later"like when the hardware store owner mentions he has "stump removers" locked up or (in the trailer) the old lady at the knitting shop has a police scanner. (If Kolstad had come up with the trope of Chekov's Gun, he would've had the gun with a sign proclaiming, "THIS GETS FIRED LATER!")
Clocking in at a lean 91 minutes, Normal spends a bit too much time in its first act setting up all the dominos, but when they start falling along with the snow in the blizzard, it's worth the wait. It didn't need a sequel, but it should've have bombed like it did. Show it some love now.
For the first 10 minutes or so of They Will Kill You I was wondering what the heck was going on? It opens with a woman, Asia (Zazie Beetz, Joker, Deadpool 2), her younger sister on a stormy night where their father is chasing them, culminating with her shooting him and running away as the cops arrive. Then it's 10 years later on another pouring night as Asia arrives at The Virgil, an exclusive co-op apartment building in NYC.
She's met by Lilith (Patricia Arquette, Roseanna's sister), the Irish superintendent of The Virgil, who wonders why Asia sounds different than she did on the phone when she interviewed her (Asia says she was getting over a cold), but brings her in, introducing her to a few of the residents while taking her to her room on the staff floor where the other maids live.
That night, Asia is attacked by hooded, masked figures who enter her room from the air vent and a hole in the wall behind the refrigerator. She surprises them with impressive fighting skills and weaponry like a large sword and sawed-off shotgun. After a brief, bloody battle where she beheads, dismembers, and generally messes the heck out of the assailants, she runs into the hall where she confronts Lilith, demanding to know the whereabouts of her sister, Maria (Myha'la, Industry), who had come to work at The Virgil as a maid.
This confrontation is interrupted by Asia's attackers emerging from her room, carrying their detached limbs and heads. As Asia watches in shock, they reattach them to their bodies and they're as good as new. Turns out The Virgil is a Satanic Temple and the residents and some of the staff are immortal due to their allegiance to Satan. (Membership has its privileges.)
The rest of the movie is a wild Grand Guignol exercise in cartoonish violence (e.g. watery blood sprays like a sprinkler - think: O-Ren Ishii beheading the guy in Kill Bill Pt. 1) as heads are blown off leaving the bodies crawling around and bumping into walls or a disembodied eyeball rolls along to spy on Asia. The action choreography is good and one sequence involving cultists being killed with a flaming axe, igniting their temporarily inert bodies, standing out.
But it wears thin quickly as the immortality of cult means killing is temporary until Asia finds a way to disable their power. The relationship with her estranged sister and where her allegiances lie is also handled sloppily with a bit of a cheat at the end. The roles played by Tom Felton (Harry Potter series) and Heather Graham (Boogie Nights) could've been played by anyone because they aren't characters but just more immortal cultists, albeit played by recognizable faces.
While there are some enjoyable bonkers moments (most of which are in the trailer below) the overall effect by director/co-writer Kirill Sokolov feels like he watched Evil Dead 2 and Old Boy while blasting Wu-Tang Clan on loop while taking ALL of the drugs. It's all surface with little depth and not really worth the time.
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.
In the past two decades, Michigan's own Sam Raimi, who started with low budget cult classics like Evil Dead 2, Army of Darkness, and Darkman has made a trio of bloated muddled sequels - the franchise-killing Spider-Man 3, the Temu Tim Burtonesque Oz the Great & Powerful, and the messy Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness - far removed from his scrappy roots. However, his latest, Send Help, is thematically and spiritually akin to his 2009's horror effort Drag Me To Hell and the move downscale suits him.
Rachel McAdams stars as Linda Liddle, an awkward, dorky corporate strategist who is reminiscent of Brendan Fraser's Elliot in Bedazzled - a sad tryhard who has no friends and annoys her co-workers. But she's a brilliant worker and was going to be promoted to a vice president slot at her firm except the CEO and founder of the firm has died, his clueless frat boy son, Bradley (Dylan O'Brien), has assumed control of the firm and given the job to one of his frat brothers.
After Linda storms his office protesting the snub, Bradley explains that her off-putting manner and appearance is why he passed her over, but offers her a chance to prove herself by coming along on the corporate plane to Bangkok to help finalize a merger. During the flight, the jerk who got her veep gig shows an audition video she'd submitted to Survivor to be a contestant. We'd seen survivalist books in her apartment, but the video is pretty cringey stuff. The laughter of the boys club is cut off by the plane crashing in a storm after half of them are sucked out of a breach in the cabin.
Linda washes ashore onto an island along with Bradley, who is unconscious with a badly injured leg. Good thing she knows survival skills as she rapidly builds shelter, and sets about gathering food and fresh water from rainfall and waterfalls. She even hunts a boar in a hilariously bloody scene. (This IS a Sam Raimi movie, after all. Evil Dead 2 fans will dig it.)
Not appreciating her efforts is Bradley who is belittling of Liddle (heh), mocking her survival skills which have kept him alive. So she leaves him alone for a couple of days until he's very hungry and thirsty to the point he's apologizing. But is he becoming a better, less sexist pig, or is he just trying to stay alive? And how does Linda's sudden alpha dog status spark changes in her, especially when early on she spots a possible rescue boat but instead hides because it's "too soon" to head back?
Since there's really only about one-and-a-half possible outcomes to this scenario (she lives or they both survive), Send Help rests on the performances and execution of the premise. O'Brien has the short-end of the stick in that the script by Damian Shannon & Mark Swift (Freddy vs. Jason, Baywatch) paints him as barely a two-dimensional cartoon out of a 1980s women-struggling-in-the-workplace comedy like 9 to 5 or Working Girl. It's just hard to imagine such an unreformed male chauvinist pig could exist in 2025 with today's woke pressures on corporations.
On the other hand, McAdams really elevates the material by delivering a layered performance which starts off also cartoonishly broad but the deepens showing her rising to her survival challenges then having to wrestle with the boss problem. It's a long way from Mean Girls and The Notebook.
Raimi is in fine form as well, tossing in some nice throwback Grand Guignol gore and some camera moves longtime fans will enjoy. More cheap thrillers from you, sir.
If you like your dramedy lean and especially mean, Send Help is a curdled Castaway.
People complain that movies are just sequels, remakes/reboots, and formulaic twaddle, but all too often when something truly unique makes it to theaters, they stay home, it fails, then they complain that Hollyweird only churns out endless rehashes of what makes money. (Gee, ya think?) The latest victim of audience abandonment is Gore Verbinski's (director of the Pirates of the Carribean trilogy) Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die which didn't even gross half its miniscule $20M budget.
Sam Rockwell stars as a nameless man from the future (let's call him Sam) or so he says when he walks into a Los Angeles Norms diner (think Denny's, non-LA readers) looking like a bearded homeless lunatic in a transparent raincoat over a bunch of mechanisms which may be a bomb. He claims he has traveled back in time 117 times trying to prevent the end of the world from a technological threat, only to fail the previous 116 attempts. He is trying to assemble the correct mix of diner customers for his mission and seems to know details about how useful (or mostly not) the diners are to the team.
Threatening to blow up the restaurant when when the cops arrive (as they always do), he gathers a group including Susan (Juno Temple), a grieving mother who seems to have more useful knowledge from an unlikely source; school teachers Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz) who are frustrated by their students addiction to their phones and were attacked by them; a young woman, Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), who is allergic to technology and gets nosebleeds from it; and a trio of people who I don't recognize, don't get flashbacks, and thus don't have plot armor. (Spoiler alert!)
As they set off on the quest, Sam explains that they need to get to a house where a nine-year-old prodigy is about to finish an AI that will make Skynet seem like a Speak & Spell unless they get to his computer and insert a flash drive Sam has to install safety protocols to limit the AI's power.
Along the way we get flashbacks for the familiar actors' characters backstories and eventually get Sam's story of how his mother had tried to protect him from the AI Apocalypse but his youthful curiosity had tragic results. The party also has to avoid phone zombies, weird mercenaries hunting them, and deal with a monster that I won't describe lest it spoil the bonkers moment it arrives.
The screenplay by Matthew Robinson (Love and Monsters) has a lot of interesting ideas about our addiction to technology to the detriment of humanity. It's a world where kids doomscroll so quickly through social media slop that they're not even watching what is already abbreviated content. They're just tapping for the next dopamine hit after a second. It's a world where teachers are so blasé about school shootings that it's a nuisance more than a danger. And the way the aftermath of shootings is dealt with isn't far removed from actual proposals to keep deceased people active on social media. (Don't worry, the movie doesn't soapbox on the subject demanding mass disarmament.)
The ending is a tad anti-climatic as the revelation of what's behind all this and the results of the party's quest aren't as satisfying as it could've been, but that's also somewhat the point: Not everything should be perfectly tailored to satisfy your every desire.
Rockwell's performance is solid, balancing the notes he's got to hit, and Richardson reminded me of the snarky tart 1990s Janeane Garofalo before her daddy issues drove her mad and she just wanted to scream about Republicans. Peña and Beetz are hampered by thinner roles and when did Temple become old enough for mom roles?
While Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die doesn't quite stick its landing it definitely provides a wild ride with some deep thoughts to go with the crazy, prompting more contemplation about our overly-wired and increasingly AI slopified world. It's ironic that a movie intended to warn against becoming hermits connected jacked into the Matrix failed because people prefer to stay home to consume content and it's on their TVs and phones they may finally see this.
Band On The Run popped on my radar because it was filmed in the Metro Detroit area and was getting hyped up on FaceSpace after its landing on streaming. As a musician, the plot about a scrappy indie band going to play the then-relevant SXSW music festival in Austin, TX in 1999 (just ahead of the garage band explosion spearheaded by The White Stripes which had labels making their way to Motown the way they pillaged Seattle a decade before) piqued my interest because as a Detroiter I had a front-row seat to this time.
Jesse (Matthew Perl) works at an ad agency by day and plays drums for Hot Freaks with his two bandmates. They dream of being selected to showcase at SXSW where they're sure they'll be discovered, but that honor seems reserved for rival band Bull Roar, a press darling band fronted by J.J. (Landon Tavenier), whose gimmick is a "magic mike stand" with a head that allows the microphone to spin around, presumably for a Leslie effect, and has Hipster Records rumored to be coming to sign them.
He lives with his parents including his wheelchair-bound, chronically-ill father, Thomas (Larry Bagby), who's angry demeanor prompts his wife to leave him after one too many arguments. This proves to be a major problem when Jesse discovers the band has been invited to showcase at SXSE after finding the envelope hidden away. With no one to care for Thomas, the decision is made to take him on the trip to Austin. So, the quartet pile into a rusty van of questionable maintenance status and hit the highway.
A coincidental pit stop at a gas station where Bull Roar is gives them an opportunity to swipe J.J.'s precious mic stand and their magnetic band sign after which they proceed to post photos to message boards of the stand being defiled. But much of the time is occupied by Jesse at first being disgusted by his father before beginning to learn about his life and what they share in common without his somehow ever knowing.
I know I'm expected to grade Band On The Run on a heavy curve because it's a scrappy no budget indie effort from my hometown, but I can't quite get there and it's not a critic's job to hand out As for effort. Starting with the positives, Bagby's - the one "real" actor in the cast with numerous film and TV credits - performance is very good because Thomas starts off as an insufferable a-hole whose rage is poorly explained but he manages to make him more sympathetic over time than despite the thin, cliched script.
It's also fun to hear clubs like The Gold Dollar (where the White Stripes debuted) and Lili's name-checked as well as how Jesse responds to co-workers asking to be put on the guest list for their shows, "It's only five dollars." (So true. Been there.)
But going down the list the plot halves don't really mesh. For a story about a band, we never see them play more than a few seconds and while a point is made about how they feature three-part harmonies there is only one microphone at their practice space and the final show. The family drama half is completely borrowed from a forgotten 1986 dramedy called Nothing In Common starring Tom Hanks as an advertising executive whose elderly parents split up leaving him to care for his cantankerous father with hidden health issues played by Jackie Gleason in his final role. (Ironically, the best movie about being in an up-and-coming band is That Thing You Do, written & directed by Tom Hanks.)
Finally, the rivalry with Bull Roar resolves so conveniently with everyone getting along and the stupid mike stand actually not being that important to J.J. that it begs the question what was any of that about? His remark of what their next gimmick would be is also a second veiled shot at the White Stripes the movie makes where the writers clearly diss the Motor City duo, but aren't brave/dumb enough to do so by name and alienate what little interest they'd have in town.
And while I'm kicking the makers - The Powers That Be (think they have matching hats that read this?) - while they're down, the movie's website is a mess with five paragraphs about the Garage Era in Detroit before getting around to mentioning the movie while saying nothing about it. The cast run down uses the cast's headshots and lists their credits like a theater program and doesn't really explain who their characters are. One cast member, whom I'm not even sure who he played (and I'm not about to sit through 2-1/2 minutes of Amazon Prime commercials to go check the movie again), has a link to his various links and his own link to "First Radio Performance" goes to a YouTube video from what appears to be a Brooklyn cable access thing where he cues it up to AFTER his segment, starting on some unrelated act. One could write it off to TPTB being better at filmmaking that website design, but they're all from the ADVERTISING business according to their bio!
Finally finally, co-writer & director Jeff Hupp chose to shoot this in 2.4:1 widescreen because "widescreen equals cinematic" but due to the cramped confines of the practical locations it means many instances of 80% of the frame being walls while the remainder shows the people in the next room. Just as Saltburn goofed on its aspect ratio by going 1.37:1 thus denying the grandeur of the estate's locale, this should've been done in perfectly cinematic 1.85:1.
While I've definitely been critical of Band On The Run, I'm not so down on it as to recommend skipping it completely. It has a bit of the low-fi DIY charm that Clerks had while lacking that classic's focus. There are some amusing and/or heartfelt moments and if you're knowledgeable about the Detroit music scene's history at the turn of the millennium there may be just enough to catch it. Oh, and despite the movie's claims, I've never heard SXSW referred to as "South by."
Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Amazon Prime Video)
Earlier this year Emma Stone was out on red carpets with a rather unflattering pixie cut. While some questioned her poor tonsorial judgement, when the trailer for her fourth collaboration with director Yorgos Lanthimos, Bugonia, dropped, the reason for her hairstyle became clear: She'd shaved her head for the role of a corporate CEO kidnapped by conspiracy theorists who believe she's an alien who can be tracked by her hair, so by shaving it off and slathering her skin with antihistamine cream to prevent her sending out a distress signal, they intend to force her to arrange a meeting with the Andromedan Emperor in four days during a lunar eclipse.
Her captors are Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis, making his film debut and is on the spectrum), who live in the country in a rundown house with bee hives out back. As the plot progresses, we're given hints as to their circumstances including bizarre flashbacks to Teddy's mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), who has a connection to the company Michelle Fuller (Stone) runs which is also Teddy's employer. Lurking around the perimeter is Sheriff's Deputy Casey (Stavros Halkias), who was Teddy's babysitter and is apologetic about something he did to Teddy back then.
The bulk of the film is the battle of wills and wits between Michelle and Teddy as she tries to win her freedom and he tries to get her to admit she's Andromedan. After she withstands a massive amount of electrical current while he tortures her, Teddy decides this means she's part of the Andromedan royalty and begins to treat her better. But that doesn't last long and when the 3rd act rolls around, to quote Ron Burgundy, "That escalated quickly."
While the missus really liked it, I found Bugonia somewhat flat and drawn out for what it does. The script by Will Tracy - who wrote the cruelly snubbed by Oscar film The Menu - adapts a 2003 South Korean film called Save the Green Planet!, but as good as The Menu was with its biting morality play over several dinner courses, Bugonia ultimately rests on the question of is Michelle an alien or not? (FWIW, I guessed the answer correctly really early on.) The ending is rather downbeat in a bad way as well.
I've been a fan of Stone's since Superbad though I didn't really catch onto how special she was until The Rocker. She's developed further into a bold, risk-taking actress as anyone who saw Poor Things can attest and she's her usual excellent here as well. As she's spewing corporate diversity speak it makes one wonder if she has a soul. It's strange to see Plemons slimmed down from his previous Philip Seymour Hoffman Jr.-esque plump physique, but he's good in a narrowly written role where he's set up as a sweaty kook.
After the constructed artifice of Poor Things, I looked at the limited settings of Bugonia - a country house, a CEO's luxury home, an office building - and figured Lanthimos wanted to make a smaller scale, lower budget film, but apparently this was the most expensive movie he's made with a $55 million budget which means its $35M gross made it a big flop. I can understand it having limited appeal, but can't fathom why they didn't keep the budget commensurate to its likely box office for a movie about a CEO kidnapped, head shaved, battle of wills with weirdos.
It always raises suspicion when a movie opens with a notice that it's "based on a true story" because so often dramatic license trumps reality, but judging from the end credits of Roofman, it seems like this one sticks fairly close to the details for its dramedic beats resulting in a pleasant story of a guy who can't stop making bad life choices.
Channing Tatum stars as Jeffrey Manchester, a divorced former Army veteran who struggles financially, leaving his young daughter disappointed in her (admittedly bad) birthday gift (the little gold digger). Using his talents of observation, he decides to improve his living situation by working hard and saving money. Whoops, sorry, what I meant to say is he robbed nearly four dozen McDonald's by breaking in through their roofs - thus earning him the nickname of "Roofman" (roll credits!) - and in one robbery, where he was surprised by the morning shift's arrival, coaxing them at gunpoint into the walk-in freezer, but giving his coat to the manager so he wouldn't freeze while awaiting rescue.
As kind as that gesture may've been, the gun and herding of people is considered armed robbery and kidnapping and he gets the book thrown at him resulting in a 45-year prison sentence and his ex cutting off all contact with his kids. After several years in slam, he devises a clever plan to escape from the prison, but with the cops staking out his place he ends up hiding in the ceiling of a Toys "R" Us bathroom. After the store closes he explores the store, finds the security camera system and disables recording so he can move freely at night.
He eventually sets up a hideaway behind the store's bicycle display, taking clothes from the donation bins, subsisting on candy, and using baby monitors to keep tabs on the staff and the store's Napoleon Complex manager, Mitch (Peter Dinklage). When Mitch refuses to work with single mom Leigh's (Kirsten Dunst) schedule request, Jeffrey gets into the stores computer and changes her schedule.
Wanting to meet her, he steals toys and takes them to the church where Leigh was running a toy drive, catching the eye of the pastor (Ben Mendelsohn) who makes Jeffrey participate with the members, leading to a dinner with the church's Singles Club and, of course, Leigh falling for this sensitive hunk of a man who claims to be "John Zorn", a government intelligence operative undercover from New York.
As Jeffrey and Leigh's romance blooms, even winning over her cynical older daughter, Lindsay (Lily Collias), especially when he helps her get a car and teaches her to drive. But a close call with Mitch while Jeffrey was washing up in the store's bathroom tells Jeffrey that he needs to get going before he gets caught. He contacts a fellow soldier (LaKeith Stanfield) who now makes fake IDs and when the price tag for the documents and passage out of the country is more than he has, he embarks on a final run of bad life choices.
During the end credits they do the typical thing of showing the real people we just saw dramatized by more attractive Hollywood folk, but they also show clips from news reports and you can tell co-writer and director Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine) didn't hype up the details excessively. That said, the idea that Jeffrey was eating so much peanut M&Ms that his teeth need a bunch of fillings but he still has Tatum's washboard six-pack abs is some hooey, gosh darn it!
Because the facts of the story preclude a Super Fun Hollywood Ending, Roofman closes on a bit of a downer, but due to solid performances across the board and Cianfrance's low-key direction, it's worth watching.
2021's Nobody was a sleeper hit continuing Bob Odenkirk's odd career trajectory from Funny Guy (SNL, Mr. Show) to Serious Actor Guy (Better Call Saul) to Aging Action Guy. As Hutch, the former assassin who forsook that life to be a suburban schlub dad, Odenkirk was the least likely action hero since Liam Neeson in the Taken series.
Well, Hollyweird being what it is and anything that makes money gets repeated even when no one really asked for more, along comes Nobody 2 which finds Hutch having trouble spending much family time with the wife and kids because he's constantly being sent on assignments by the Barber (Colin Salmon, The Lazarus Project) to pay back the $50 million in cash he burned in the last movie. With his wife, Becca (Connie Nielsen, Wonder Woman), getting frustrated and not seeing his kids, he decides it's time for a family vacation to Plummerville, a town with an amusement park his father, David (Christopher Lloyd, Taxi), took him as a child.
Of course, nothing goes easy for Hutch as when his son gets into an altercation with a townie boy which escalates into a situation where Hutch beats the tar out of an arcade worker, he finds that Plummerville is a place where everyone is crooked including the park operator, Wyatt (John Ortiz, American Fiction), to the the corrupt Sheriff, Abel (Colin Hanks, really looking like his old man these days). But they're just cogs in the machine as both work for crime boss Lendina (Sharon Stone in such a weird performance that the missus didn't recognize her).
As things escalate, Lendina and her soldiers head to town to kill Hutch, his family, and everyone else thus leading to some alliances with former foes and an ending at the park which gave me flashbacks to The A-Team (the old TV show, not the movie which no one remembers despite an A-list cast).
I didn't review the original Nobody, but scored it a 6/10, catch on cable, and while the action beats here have their moments, there's a general going-through-the-motions vibe about Nobody 2 that really makes it feel like there wasn't a burning need to tell more stories of Hutch's life, but someone figured they could make some money. With a higher budget and a insufficient box office gross, it looks like Nobody 2 should be the end of the franchise.
If you've watched everything else and are looking for something to have on while doomscrolling your phone, this is a movie suited for multitasking. Or just watch the trailer to get the gist of it.
In the wake of 1994's Pulp Fiction, Hollweird went into overdrive trying to make quirky crime movies leading to a lot of third-rate Tarantino imitators resulting in mediocre cult flicks like The Boondocks Saints or launching careers of overrated directors like Guy Ritchie with Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. So, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Five it's weird to see Darren Aronofsky (Requiem For A Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan) wading in these waters with a movie set in 1998 that tries to feel like a 1998 Pulp Fiction knockoff, Caught Stealing.
Austin Butler as Hank Thompson, a bartender living on NYC's Lower East Side who is tormented by nightmares reliving the auto accident which ended his professional baseball career before it started and killed his best friend. He's got a FWB situation going on with a cute paramedic, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), but his life isn't really going anywhere.
His British next door neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), needs return to London to tend to his ailing father and ropes Hank into watching his cat. One day, he hears pounding at Russ's door and when he goes to see what the hubbub's about, a pair of Russian thugs decide to savagely beat Hank, injuring him so badly he loses a kidney. The thugs eventually break into Russ's apartment and narcotics Det. Roman (Regina King) informs Hank that Russ was a drug dealer connected to a pair of Hasidic Jew brothers, Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully Drucker (Vincent D'Onofrio), who are warring with the Russians and their Puerto Rican associate, Colorado (Benito Martínez Ocasio, bka Bad Bunny).
If this sounds convoluted to you, it's even worse in practice as it devolves into various twists, double-and-triple-crosses, deaths, etc. to the point you don't even care to keep track of who's doing what to whom. Everyone is so "colorful" but the time where "colorful" was enough wore out its welcome around the time we got sick of hearing about the Y2K Bug.
I'm not sure what attracted Aronofsky to this project. His last film was 2022's The Whale which won Brendan Fraser an Oscar, rebounding from the flop which was 2017's Mother! (which I liked - 6/10 - and actually caught the Biblical allegory which escaped many), but he's not suited for the tonal tightrope you need to walk to make something like Caught Stealing work without becoming chaotic or drowning in cruelty.
I'm not going to lie; the major reason we watched Honey Don't! was for the lesbian sex scenes between Aubrey Plaza (Parks & Recreation) and Margaret Qualley (The Substance). The reviews were bad with even the more favorable ones complaining about the gratuitous nature of the sexuality. (Hey, I said we wanted to see it; you don't need to sell us.) So how was the rest of the movie? A mess and if you're just looking for the smut, that's why Lemmy invented the Internet.
Qualley is Honey O'Donahue, a private investigator whose potential client turns up dead in an wrecked car on the outskirts of Bakersfield, CA. The homicide detective who called her to the scene, Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day, Pacific Rim), hits on her and she has to remind him for the umpteenth time that she likes girls.
She gets the address of the dead woman's family and after interviewing them learns that she has been involved with Four-Way Temple, a church operated by the sketchy Rev. Drew Devlin (Chris Evans, Not Another Teen Movie). She finds the woman's church robe under her bed and out falls a leather & chains BDSM bikini. Hmmmm.
Rev. Drew is a piece of work, constantly banging ladies from his congregation while dumb henchmen from his drug trafficking side business walk in on his activities. Flanking his "altar" are huge portraits of himself looking like bad modeling head shots done at Sears Photo Studio, not Jesus. Evans is having a blast as the cheesy preacher who's more interested in how he looks than his partners feel.
There's also a side plot involving a drug mule of the Rev's having a deal go very sideways with the boyfriend of a client who'd hired Honey to see if he was cheating on him, but what you want to know about his the Good Stuff, right? Well, Plaza evidence cop, MG Falcone, is her usual tart sarcastic self, but this time she's gay and somewhat obsessed with Honey who is receptive to her interest beginning with a fine how do you do in a bar. It's not Bound and it's definitely not Blue Is The Warmest Color-grade lesbionics, but the Mr. Skin crowd will like it.
But that's only a couple of minutes and there's another 87 minutes to fill and co-writer/director Ethan Cohen and his co-writer wife Tricia Cooke (though according to this, "wife" seems inappropriately normative) go with a patchwork of pastiches from his better works with brother Joel like Fargo, Burn After Reading, and No Country For Old Men (which I hated and it sucked and FIGHT ME!) setting up a lot of quirky moments, but nothing cohesive or compelling.
The movie opens with a woman at the crash scene, pulling a signet ring for the Temple off the woman's body before being shown fully nude floating in a river, copying a scene with his sister-in-law, Frances McDormand (Nomadland) in the movie Nomadland, before riding off on her scooter. Who is this woman; I thought it was Honey and was confused by the next scene being her arrival at the crash. She's somewhat explained, but not really as references are meant to substitute for substance.
A side plot involving Honey's Goth niece (Talia Ryder, Do Revenge) disappearing after an encounter with an sad old man outside her burger joint job sets up a weird twist then plays into the out-of-left-field resolution of her fling with Falcone. And the way the scooter-riding femme fatale wraps things up is another head-scratcher in a movie full of them.
There are several good laughs - a runner about Honey having "book club" is one - and some potential for a quirky story, but they're not fleshed out in a movie that feels longer than its 89-minute run time would imply. But everyone is a cartoon when they're not just an insulting hick caricature.
And it's too bad because as Film Threat's Chris Gore said in his negative review, Honey is an interesting character stuck in a crappy movie. With her retro fashion and wise-cracking lines, Qualley manages to make Honey more than just a gender-flipped queer take on the hardboiled private dick trope even though the trite script doesn't really give her much to play.
Honey Don't! is the second of a "lesbian B-movie trilogy" Coen and Cooke are making which began with Drive-Away Dolls last year (a movie the missus turned off after 10 minutes) so, to say anticipation for the third installment is non-existent would be accurate. With a budget of $20M and a gross of only $6.7M it was a bomb, making a million less than Drive-Away Dolls - which the studio paid $20M for the privilege of trying to sell it because "a director of Fargo & No Country For Old Men" made it - so perhaps two failures are enough to prevent this conclusion from happening.
I've been a fan of Samara Weaving for a while now. Unfortunately, due to my inconsistent completing of reviews (i.e. sometimes not even logging more than a date and score, sorry), you'd be hard pressed to tell I'd seen any of her movies beyond Mayhem, but she's had a remarkably consistent streak of projects including Ready or Not, Guns Akimbo, and The Babysitter (which I never even logged). I've called her "Margot Robbie's slightly-less-attractive little sister," but on further inspections she's hotter, looking like a cross between Robbie and Heather Graham.
So, when the trailer dropped for the Hulu Original movie Eenie Meanie promising a tale of a former wheelwoman for criminal activities - Babe Driver, if you will (yes, I'm proud of that) - I was onboard. The trailer loudly promotes it was produced by the pair who'd co-written all the Deadpool movies, implying profane hijinks will ensure. Unfortunately, the actual result is a frustratingly misbegotten tonal misfire which wastes what should've been a breakout performance from Weaving and a good time for the audience.
We first meet 14-year-old Edie Meaney (Elle Graham) in a flashback to 2007 when she walks to the Cleveland bar to drive her drunk parents (Steve Zahn and Chelsea Crisp) home. The cops pull them over and the combination of Edie being underage and unlicensed and Mom having a bunch of cocaine in her possession, which would be a third strike, so Dad encourages her to make a run for it as he taught her. We don't see what happens next, but are eventually told by inference it didn't go great for everyone.
We jump to the present where grown-up Edie (Weaving) is working as a bank teller. When inept robbers hit her branch and she's knocked out, she's taken to the hospital where she's informed that while she doesn't have a concussion, she is pregnant by her ex-boyfriend, John (Karl Glusman, The Bikeriders), a terminal loser for whom making poor choices is his default setting. When she goes to tell him of her being embabied, she finds him about to be whacked by unknown gunmen and helps his buck naked ass escape with her superior wheelman skills. Why was he in peril? Who freaking cares.
I have to pause to say that at this point only a half-hour into the movie, I said to the missus, "If this movie ends with her back in love with him, I'm scoring it a zero." This guy isn't a loveable loser, he's a L-O-S-E-R and frankly, I'm disappointed in her that she was shtupping this doofus. (Was Pete Davidson unavailable?)
To get this over with, he's $3 million in hock to crime boss Nico (Andy Garcia), so to save his worthless life Edie will need to be the wheelgirl for an audacious heist of a Dodge Charger with $3M in cash in the trunk being given as the prize for a poker tournament at the Hollywood Casino in Toledo. (Meaningless Factoid: I've driven past this place once, I think.) They have all the right connections on the inside and it's going to be a piece of cake, right? Well, not really, because betrayal, double crosses, blah-blah-woof-woof and Johnny being an effing psycho at the end.
As with all bad movies, the trouble begins with the schizophrenic script by writer-director Shawn Simmons (co-creator of the John Wick prequel series The Continental) which apparently the Deadpool writers who produced this didn't flag as ruinous. This mess rivals Alex Garland for face-planting in the third act, but the problems shoot through the entire length.
For example, we're desperately trying to understand WHY Edie is so stuck on Johnny and finally, well into the plot she explains that they met when he intervened to save her from being pimped out by her foster father when she was 15. Icky stuff, but OK, I get that. But why was she in foster care? Because as a visit to her father implies, that opening scene where she runs from the cops resulted in her mother being killed and her father paralyzed and wheelchair-bound. Yikes.
He'd allowed her to go into the system because he couldn't have cared for her, but when we visit him he has remarried and appears to have a young daughter Edie was unaware of meaning in the ensuing 17 years he restarted his life and never reached out to his first daughter. But he seems to know who Johnny is, so....ummmmm, whut?
The heist itself is laughable because one moment she's being chased by tons of cop cars, then it's as if they completely gave up and never attempted to pursue and capture the thief of $3M. It's harder to shake off a two-star wanted level in Grand Theft Auto than it is to get away with a casino robbery. No one has her on security cameras IN A CASINO, not to mention the eyewitnesses who saw her behind the wheel - how many hot blonde getaway drivers are there in Ohio? - so she gets away clean?
The way Eenie Meanie careens into a ditch is a shame because there are several genuinely laugh out loud moments and lines and if Simmons had just stayed in the comedic lane where colorful characters like a competing wheelman with an amusing backstory for his burns is appropriate. Or he could've gone gritty and dark. Pick a lane and stay in it because when most of the movie is amusing, the whammies at the end wipe out all the goodwill the movie had scraped together.
But the biggest victim is Weaving who really hits all the notes the Simmons asks her to only for it to not matter in the end. There's a sequel to Ready or Not coming next year and she'll be in a couple more upcoming movies which may be good. She deserves to be known as more than looking a lot like Margot Robbie, a role she played in Damien Chazelle's bloated misfire Babylon.
Despite Weaving and some decent practical car chases and laughs, the messy ending makes Eenie Meanie one to miss.
Following last week's spin of The Linguini Incident, the missus & I decided a trilogy of 1980s Rosanna Arquette movies was required and thus our second stop was 1985's Desperately Seeking Susan, a shaggy dramady most notable for being then-megahot pop star Madonna's Big Movie Debut as the titular (in both meanings) Susan and its inclusion of her hit "Into The Groove."
Arquette plays Roberta Glass, a young New Jersey housewife married to Gary (Mark Blum, Mozart in the Jungle) who sells bathtub spas, saunas and hot tubs. She's obsessed with personal ads in the paper headlined "Desperately Seeking Susan" (roll credits!) to arrange meets between Susan and her boyfriend Jimmy (Robert Joy, CSI:NY).
Meanwhile we meet Susan in a hotel room where she's been shacked up with some guy not Jimmy who's passed out after a long night of getting into the groove, if you follow. She orders room service, steals the silverware and towels, and a pair of big earrings. As she leaves the room, she passes a creepy guy, Wayne (Will Patton, Armageddon), who's heading for the room. She arrives at the Port Authority bus terminal, stashes her drum case-turned-suitcase in a locker by jimmying the lock, to avoid paying. She puts on one of the earrings and leaves the other in the case.
When Susan meets up with Jimmy in Battery Park, Roberta is watching and after Jimmy has to take off with his band for a gig in Buffalo she follows Susan around the city and when she trades her distinctive jacket for some boots, Roberta buys the jacket and discovers the key. Wanting to return it, Roberta runs her own Desperately Seeking Susan ad to set up a meeting, signing it "A Stranger," which concerns Jimmy because who's trying to meet his girl who was banging a guy who fell out of a hotel window the day before and some priceless Egyptian earrings were involved.
Jimmy calls his friend Dez (Aidan Quinn, Reckless), a movie projectionist, and asks if he'd go to the meet to make sure Susan's OK, describing her as a blonde with a distinctive jacket. (Getting where this is going yet?) One thing leads to another, identities are mistaken and things are complicated by Roberta getting lightly bonked on the head, losing her purse and her memory, and with Dez calling her "Susan," assumes that's who she is. Hijinks ensue.
Whereas The Linguini Incident was a haphazard attempt at a screwball comedy, Desperately Seeking Susan is a lackluster, tonally off mess with a patchy screenplay and unlikable characters. I know this is heresy for older Gen Xers who are nostalgic about it because they aped Madonna's thrift store trampy style of mesh tops, exposed bras, rubber bracelets, etc., but the truth is the script by Leora Barish (making her screenwriting debut here and whose only other script of note was her last, 2006's Basic Insinct 2, so hackery was the constant) both relies on viewers overlooking the gaping plot holes and logic gaps, but also have no knowledge of how human beings behave.
The problems start with Susan herself. I don't think I've seen DSS since the 1980s and pretty much all I could I remember about it was Susan was a jerk and, yep, she still is. She's a thief, a tramp, and a sociopath, but because she looks and acts like Madonna, we're supposed to be smitten with Susan. Yeah, no. I was a teenager who thought Madge was hot while having a squeaky voice and bought both of the competing Playboy and Penthouse issues with her pre-fame nude modeling photos in them, but Susan still sucks.
Arquette is, well, Arquette. The fact Roberta ends up at one point as a magician's assistant ties neatly into her Houdini obsession in The Linguini Incident, but her character is as thin as her skull apparently is as she gets conked into forgetting who she is then rebooting back into her Roberta self later. While it's understandable that she'd boink Dez since he looks like Aiden Quinn, the fact he does her when he think's she's Susan, his bro's girl, and does so about five minutes after bailing her out of jail (where she'd somehow been busted for prostitution) was randomly abrupt and he's a bad bro.
It's more interesting spotting actors in early roles such as John Turturro, Richard Edson, and Giancarlo Esposito several years before they were in Do The Right Thing, Laurie Metcalf, Steven Wright, and a slew of art scene folks like Anne Carlisle, John Lurie, Richard Hell, and Ann Magnuson.
As a time capsule of mid-1980s New York with lots of big names before they were big names and Madonna totally loving herself, Desperately Seeking Susan may serve a purpose. But as a movie unable to decide what it's about and how it goes about it, it's less successful.
I didn't even realize that The Wedding Banquet was a remake of the 1993 Ang Lee film of the same name until the missus claimed we'd seen it at a local art house theater. I honestly don't recall seeing it, but if so it was 32 years ago, so let's see what this updated version has to offer. (Obviously, I can't compare it to the original.)
Kelly Marie Tran (Star Wars: The Last Jedi) stars as Angela Chen, a Seattle lesbian whose mother, May (Joan Chen, Twin Peaks), is such a performative ally with the local PFLAG chapter it's driving her crazy. Her partner, Lee (Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon), is struggling to have a baby and after their second attempt at IVF fails, there's a question of whether they have the finances to try again and whether Lee's body can handle it. Angela doesn't want to carry the baby due to her fraught relationship with her mother.
Living in their garage is Angela's bestie from college, Chris (Bowen Yang, SNL), with whom she had a one-off fling, and his boyfriend Min (Han Gi-chan in his film debut), an artist and fashion designer whom Chris is refusing to marry though his visa will soon expire requiring him to return to South Korea. Adding to the pressure is a call from Min's wealthy grandmother, Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung, Oscar winner for Minari), telling him it's time to come home and join the family business empire.
While marrying Chris would get Min a green card, Chris fears that since Min isn't out his intolerant grandfather will cut him off. Fed up, Min proposes to Angela with the added benefit that he will pay for Lily's next IVF treatment. During her bachelorette party, Angela and Chris manage to PO Lee and Min, making them leave the club, and after a lot of drinks they wake up together in the garage and you have one guess as to what happened and what the ramifications will be.
Things escalate when Min calls to say that Grandma has come to America and they have about 45 minutes to "de-gay" the house before they arrive. After a frantic scramble, Min arrives with Ja-Young, introduces her to his fiancé Angela, and within minutes Ja-Young calls BS on the whole charade proving she's old, not stupid. After explaining the truth, she agrees to cover for Min if they go through an elaborate wedding ceremony which will be publicized back home. Of course, everything goes wildly wrong and hijinks ensue.
What's refreshing about The Wedding Banquet is that rather than being the usual Hollyweird celebration of the cartoonish perfection of gay people, the characters are messy complicated people who happen to be gay. Too many movies with gay themes believe the only thing that matters is the sexuality and how perfect it is and how mean straight people oppress them. Here the story is about people who are gay, not GAY people and the difference makes all the difference. With some tinkering the story could've been about blacks and whites, different religions or nationalities because at its core it's about people and their foibles and fears whereas lesser GAY movies are all about the GAY all day, forgetting the people. (See my review of the horribly-titled Bottoms for similar observations.)
Poor Tran has had a hard career road since a-hole spudboy "Ruin" Johnson abused her in his vandalism of Star Wars by stuffing her in a formless jumpsuit costume with a bad haircut as Rose Tico in The Last Jedi. Johnson wanted to deconstruct attractive Asian characters in movies (along with destroying the most valuable IP in entertainment) and the fandom-hating media promulgated the smear that RAAAAAAAAACIST nerds bullied Tran off social media when the reality was that racist liberal media hacks were protecting pasty potato Johnson's travesty by using her as a human shield. Note that co-star John Boyega, whose Finn character was also mistreated, wasn't used even as Disney shrank him down on the posters for China because those audiences don't like black actors. (But it's Americans who are racists?)
But I digress. Anyway, Tran first resurfaced on my radar as a heavy on the final season of Netflix's Sweet Tooth and she's really good here as well, finally showing off some acting. Gladstone is good as well and Yang manages to get away from his usual "Gaysian" persona he's plied for years on SNL. Youn shows her Oscar wasn't a fluke with another sly savvy performance where she leverages her age and others presumptions of it against them.
Co-writer James Schamus - a frequent collaborator of Ang Lee's having written eight films for him including the original Wedding Banquet (which is sadly unavailable to stream anywhere at this time) - has updated his original story of a gay man who offers to marry a woman needing a green card to keep his boyfriend secret from his family (I skimmed the Wikipedia synopsis. Sue me.) changing Chinese to Korean and tweaking the genders. Since I can't compare with the original, I'll withhold judgement other than to wonder why this version of The Wedding Banquet doesn't include, well, a wedding banquet? It should've been retitled The Wedding Ceremony or something.
Heartfelt and amusing, The Wedding Banquet may be overlooked because of people's aversion to gay themes or dismissed as a remake, but it's not woke and actually quite traditional in the end, in a manner of speaking.
If you like your men behaving very badly and correctly believe Network is a documentary and American Psycho is a comedy, then the new HBO/Max Original film Mountainhead is here to reinforce your fears of gazillionaire tech bros and the generative AI deepfake world we're plummeting into.
Hugo "Souper" Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman, Rushmore) has invited his three besties - collectively known as the "Brewsters" for never-explained reasons - to his new 21,000 sq ft, 7-bedroom mountain mansion outside of Park City, UT called Mountainhead (roll credits!) for a no stress, no deals, brofest weekend. Coming are Venis "Ven" Paris (Cory Michael Smith, May December), the owner of a web company called Traam (think Hooli if you're a Silicon Valley fan) and the Richest Man in the World; Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef, Ramy), owner of AI company Bilter; and Randall Garrett (Steve Carell, Anchorman), a venture capitalist who helped the other startups in addition to running a company that sounds patterned after Peter Thiel's Palantir.
Hugo's nickname "Souper" is because at only a half-billion dollars net worth (approximately 1/460th of Ven's tally) coming from a meditation app makes him the "poorest" and thus closest to needing alms from a soup kitchen and the not-so-subtle hazing of the shortest member of the quartet begins as they diss Mountainhead with slights like, "Is that supposed to be like The Fountainhead? Who was your decorator, Ayn BLAND?" They snowmobile and hike to a mountain peak where they write their net worth on their chests, don hats symbolizing their rank - Ven (crown), Randall (captain's hat), Jeff (sailor hat), Hugo (soup ladle on a chain) - then shout their wishes into the void.
The casual intentions of weekend are interrupted by constant news alerts on their phones about the unrest sweeping the world as generative AI tools released by Traam are being used to create fake videos of atrocities which are then sparking very real and lethal reprisals as tribal groups seeking payback respond to the fake videos. As death tolls rise, Ven doesn't seem particularly bothered by the fallout, saying that it's just a rough patch and that good content will drown out the bad. (As Tony Stark said, "Not a great plan.")
However, a solution exists as Jeff's AI tools could be used to detect and expose the deepfake videos being used to propagandize and radicalize people to violence. Ven wants to buy Bilter to integrate its fact-checking AI tools so he doesn't have to roll back the new features (nor take responsibility for what it's wrought), but Jeff doesn't want his creation subsumed into Traam. Unknown to the others, Randall wants the merger to happen because he's been given a terminal cancer diagnosis and believes that Ven is on the cusp of launching a transhumanist epoch where he will be able to be uploaded and live forever in The Matrix, so to speak.
As the world's governments begin to falter, the three who aren't Jeff decide this would be a perfect time to overthrown the Old World Order and install themselves as the oligarchs of a global technocracy powered up their tech companies endless reach into governments, militaries, power grids, etc. Realizing that taking over the world at once may be too much, they decide to start small with Randall launches a rolling brownout in Belgium and Zoom conferences with Argentina to discuss being taken over by them beginning.
While this goes on Jeff is worried about his girlfriend Hester (Hadley Robinson, Little Women) who has gone on to Mexico for what he calls "a sex party" but she retorts isn't that but "a party where people have sex." While he's troubled by the chaos, he still won't sell to Ven and when Randall fears his life as the Lawnmower Man is at risk, he proposes to the others that they kill Jeff because he's messing up their plans. Because morality doesn't exist in this dojo, they all agree, but because being a megawealthy tech broligarch doesn't necessarily come with competent murder skills, it devolves into farce.
If this all feels ripped from the headlines it's because writer-director Jesse Armstrong (creator of Succession) only began writing the script in January 2025, filming for five weeks in March, and getting it finished and on HBO Max by May 31, 2025. However, it's to his great credit that he doesn't indulge in what 99% of Hollyweird would've done in their current rage state over the peasants voting incorrectly and make it into an obvious bash of Elon Musk and the Bad Orange Man.
While there are some similarities to real people if you know who's who in the techocratic elite space, Armstrong chooses to craft a more general tale of wealthy male fear (a la David Mamet's Glengarry Glenn Ross) and ego, the risks of unchecked AI, the self-anointed regard techno bros have over the rabble, while leavening it with farcical attempts at violence and how even when your best friends try to murder you, you can move past it if there's a buck to be made. His dialog doesn't stop to Basil Exposition anything for the non-nerds so you either keep up with the rapid-fire or get left behind. He trusts the audience to follow enough to understand the base emotions fueling the characters.
The performances are all strong from deft comic performers, especially Carell who's Randall could be seen as a brother to his role in The Big Short which was criminally denied an Oscar nomination. I'm not familiar with Youssef or Smith (though he was Chevy Chase in Saturday Night), but they're good as well. Schwartzman, of course, can play these weasels in his sleep.
Perhaps a more deliberately developed (read: not filmed shortly after writing) script could've honed Mountainhead's intentions to a finer, deeper-cutting edge though the rapidly evolving capabilities of generative AI may've left whatever more time in scripting in the dust. Just last month Google unveiled their new Gemini AI video tool powered by Veo3 and it's capable of producing video with audio, sound effects, camera movement, etc. like this:
Sure, it has some jankiness like the text on the signs at the rally being gibberish, BUT what happens in 2028 when a video showing "[Disfavored Politician] BUSTED Drowning Puppies While Shouting 'I LOVE NICKELBACK!'" pops up on teh Intartoobz a month before the Election and it's amplified by corrupt legacy media outlets who eagerly covered up the last President's senility & family corruption. How will we be able to trust what we're shown anymore and who is going to get even richer and more powerful while having fun running the corps which will generate and disseminate these fabrications? While Mountainhead doesn't have those answers, it is willing to posit the question, albeit in the guise of a bro comic farce.
For their first movie since 2019's MCU mediocrity Captain Marvel, tag-team filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are back with Freaky Tales, a period anthology dramedy that manages to be even more mediocre. Consisting of four tangentially related short stories set in the same time frame of June 1987 in Oakland, CA they manage to add up to a overall story less than their parts.
The first segment - "Strength in Numbers: The Gilman Strikes Back" - is set at the infamous punk club which spawned Green Day as Nazi thugs storm the club during an Operation Ivy show, destroying equipment and beating up fans. The next day the punks decide to defend themselves and when the Nazis return for round 2, they're are beaten in a stylized ultraviolent rumble. That's it.
The next segment - "Don't Fight the Feeling" - centers on a pair of female rappers, Entice (Normani from girl group Fifth Harmony) and Barbie (Dominique Thorne, the upcoming Ironheart), who are invited to a club date for local rap icon Too Short (rapper Demario "Symba" Driver) to participate in a rap battle. They win. That's it.
The third segment - "Born to Mack" - is longer and darker in tone as we meet Clint (Pedro Pascal, AGAIN), an underworld enforcer who is seeking to get out of the game as he does "one last job" collecting from a deadbeat at a poker game in the back of a video store. In the one inspired moment of the whole movie, he gets stuck in a discussion of movies with the store's owner, played by the least expected actor. (I shant spoil the surprise in case you still want to watch this.) Tragedy befalls Clint as his pregnant wife is shot to death, but even then his gang won't let him go.
The final segment - "The Legend of Sleepy Floyd" - brings back their Nazis and their leader's father, The Guy (Ben Mendelsohn, a frequent Boden/Fleck collaborator), as he is orchestrating multiple robberies of Golden State Warriors players during a NBA Championship game. Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis), an actual Warriors player who was on that year's All-Star Team, has a record-setting night, but because his mother wasn't feeling well and had left the game early with his girlfriend and another, arriving at Sleepy's home and surprising the burglars, who then shoot them, it's not a great evening to remember.
A pair of punks from Gilman Street happened to overhear Clint discuss the crimes at a restaurant and tell Floyd about the connection to the Nazis, so Floyd does what any grieving man would do: Straps up with all sorts of ninja weapons and kills everyone with the power of meditation and kung fu.
There's a charming lo-fi retro vibe to the cinematography - the first segment is shot in 4:3 before going widescreen for the rest - and there are moments where you can tell they're paying homage to Eighties cult movies like Repo Man with a bit of Pulp Fiction thrown in, but the conceit of the stories being interconnect is too tenuous.
The first two segments are so superfluous to the rest it's questionable as to why they're included. It feels like Boden/Fleck had four scraps of ideas they couldn't make into full movies, so tossed them together. As I'm writing this, it occurred to me that if they had intercut the stories together it may've hidden the sparseness of the weaker segments. Frankly, if the first two disappeared and the last two, which are more interrelated, were one story, it'd be best, though not particularly good.
It also relies too much on Easter eggs like recognizing that The Guy's cop partner is the real Too Short (who also narrates the movie) and that the bearded bald guy who gives a testimonial for Sleepy Floyd's meditation course is Tim Armstrong of Operation Ivy and Rancid. Get it? They were the punk band in the first part! Awesome! Ahem...
Boden/Fleck have been critic's darlings for two decades with their first movies, Half Nelson (which starred Ryan Gosling) and Sugar, getting lots of flowers. But nothing else they've done has landed commercially except for Captain Marvel which allows Boden to claim the title of First Woman To Direct a Live Action Movie That Grossed $1 Billion as if she didn't have a male co-director and the plum release date a month before Avengers: Endgame with the hype that this was a must-see movie to prep for that. (If you held a rabid badger against the privates of even fairly nerdy MCU fans and demanded they name who directed Captain Marvel, you'd have a lot of sad fans and overfed badgers as "some art house team" wasn't sufficient an answer.)
While there are a few moments in Freaky Tales that almost make it a so-so watch, it really didn't do much for me, barely avoiding a Skip It recommendation.
