"Promising Young Woman" Review

 Once upon a time, about 30 years ago, there was a young man who had always been sort of a dorky loser. He had had girlfriends, so it wasn't like he was radioactive, but he was never a ladies man. Then in the wake of a devastating breakup, he lost weight (he called it the Sudden Stess & Heartache Diet) and combined with not getting a haircut for a couple of years his look had transformed into what he'd later refer to as his "Discount Chris Cornell" days, after the hirsute lead yeowler for the grunge band Soundgarden. 

 Due to what had to have been a concurrent glitch in The Matrix, the lad suddenly found himself to be, as his oldest friend (a female) from high school teased, "a bitch magnet," as, bizarrely, women at clubs would gravitate toward him on the dance floor and ask him he he'd ever been told he looked like Chris Cornell? (Narrator: "Yes, he had. From the last woman he ended up shagging who opened with, 'Has anyone told you that you look like...'")  As he would later joke, "I was such a stud that I was in constant danger of having drywall nailed to me." It was an extremely weird year for him, but eventually someone rebooted The Matrix and he resumed his previous status of a guy who didn't seem to get many glances from women. Business as usual.

 During his dance hall days, there was one young woman he became acquainted with due to being a regular at his local haunt. She had a sarcastic demeanor and looked like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, but fortunately without the bunny boiling crazy part. Nothing remotely carnal occurred between them, though he thought she was attractive in that Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction way. 

One night at the end of an evening dancing it was obvious she was in no condition to drive safely, so the young man offered to take her home. She lived in a neighboring, much higher rent, suburb about 15 minutes away. Arriving at her family's home, he had to support her walking and use her keys to open the door. While trying to juggle her and the keys and the lock, she started to try and kiss the chivalrous lad. Now, he was interested in her, but not under these circumstances so he tipped his head away and told her to have a good night and call if she needed a ride back in the morning to retrieve her car. She had someone else take her and the incident was never mentioned again. Shortly after, he settled down in a very long term relationship with someone more brunette and lived happily ever after. 

The End.

 The reason for this fairy tale preamble is because according to the cynical, dishonest, reprehensibly toxic, misandrist and totally garbage Promising Young Woman - appallingly nominated for five Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actress, and Editing) in these meaningless asterisk Feel Bad Awards for the lost year of 2020 - there aren't any men who would pass up the opportunity to impose themselves on a sloppy drunk woman. None. 

According to writer-director Emerald Fennell (best known to most for playing Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown; known to writing nerds as writer-showrunner for the second season of Killing Eve) every man in a sexist pig predator who preys on women without conscience, mercy, nor remorse. Every. Single. One. #YesAllMen And as a result, Promising Young Woman is probably the most culturally poisonous movie since Crash. It's worse than just a bad movie because it's a profoundly evil movie by design, wrapping a mindbogglingly hateful premise in a bright candy-coated shell intended to beguile the undiscerning into sharing its illusion of meaning and hope.

I used to think that Paul Haggis was the most dishonest screenwriter in Hollyweird due to his craven stacking of decks (e.g. Hillary Swank's family is such trash in Million Dollar Baby that of course suicide is preferable; the wealthy guilty white liberal racism fantasia that was 2004's "Best Picture" Crash), but Fennell really gives him a run for his money and has reaped the rewards as a symbol of feminist empowerment in the way all power is garnered these days: By claiming eternal victimhood from the oppressive Patriarchy, which is an odd flex for a successful actress and filmmaker.

 It's difficult to explain just how malicious this movie is without spoiling much of the plot except that while the trailer (below) does a nice job not spelling out the reasons Carey Mulligan's character is doing what she does, if you've read anything about it, you probably know what drives this revenge tale and knowing this sucks much of the impact out of how Fennell doles out the details.

However the trailer does give a taste of the premise as they summarize the opening sequences of the story where Mulligan feigns being blotto drunk at the bar and inevitably some irredeemable garbage man swoops in to take her back to his place for some fully unconsensual sexual activity, only to have her snap to, fully sober, presumably to scold them for being uncouth and presumptuous. We're never shown what happened to distinguish between the different colored marks she makes in her copiously marked log book. The men are portrayed as sexist pigs talking about her before taking advantage of her. OK, so men are pigs. Bold original concept rarely seen except for Thelma & Louise and countless other movies where men are pigs and killing them the only proper remedy.

When not trolling the bars for marks - I just realized that the massively overrated Hustlers, where strippers drugged men and robbed them, had a more favorable view of men - she lives at home with her parents at age 30 and works at a coffee shop owned by Laverne Cox.  One day, a guy comes in (Bo Burnham, who is like if they cloned Matthew Modine and removed all the a-hole genes that give him a punchable face) who attended medical school with her. He's now a pediatric surgeon, but why is she slinging java drinks? He's sweet on her and seems to be a Nice Guy, but as Fennell has clearly established, ALL men are predatory rapists, so it's just a matter of time before he's going to turn on her, right?

Even though this movie certainly doesn't deserve a shred of protection and I've spoiled movies worthy of being torched - witness my Country Strong review from 10 years and two weeks ago - I'm going to be merciful to this movie unworthy of mercy by nuking it below the trailer. 

Suffice to say, I completely LOATHED this movie. To quote wholesale from Roger Ebert's infamous review for North:

"I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it."

 But let me pause DIRK SMASH! mode for a moment to praise a few things about Promising Young Woman. Mulligan's performance is quite good and worthy of nomination as she manages to make Fennell's cartoon of her character feel tangible in her grief and rage. Fennell's direction has some nice style to it for her feature directorial debut. (She only directed a short a couple years back.)

We now return to our beatdown in progress...

But all of the above is for naught because Fennell the director is stuck directing Fennell the writer's egregiously dishonest script. The quality of screenwriting has been in precipitous decline in recent years with barely above-average material reaping wild award praise, but the dominant plague of wokeness and virtue signaling which has plagued entertainment these days, replacing reason and entertainment with screeds and tracts, that what is little more than a two-hour-long 3rd wave feminism lecture consisting of two words repeated (i.e. "Men BAD!") would be hailed as a empowering feminist story is its own indictment. 

As previous stated, every single man in this movie is garbage and pretty much most of the women are, too. Mulligan has plenty of righteous grievance and motivation for her actions, but Fennell doesn't trust the audience to be capable of discerning nuance; no, she gets a giant highway billboard, emblazons the Big Message (i.e. "Men BAD!") upon it, and then proceeds to hammer the view in the head with it for two hours so they get the point. Even that One Good Guy turns out to be no different from the rest. (SPOILER ALERT!) 

Everyone is either a perpetrator or complicit in this world. Everyone has an excuse or a justification for their behavior. Even the mother of her best friend whose fate inspires Mulligan's acts tells her to move on. There is a corrosive cynicism which I've noticed underpins the work of Millennial writers like Damien Chazelle, who is about the same age as Fennell. Chazelle's Whiplash and La La Land screenplays were both sabotaged by Millennial cynicism, especially the latter film which had the most effervescent opening 17 minutes since Chicago then implode into Ryan Gosling's whiny bitching. There's a difference between having a low opinion of humanity and the nihilistic black hole perspective Fennell cast her milieu in. 

With the exception of one guilt-destroyed man who begs forgiveness for his life of sins against women, making him merely a repentant monster, everyone is selfish and irredeemable and this is supposed to make Mulligan a righteous avenging angel, striking a blow against the mythical Patriarchy and despicable males. (Can't really call these pigs "men", can we?) But it's so fragile a construct that not a single instance where a guy puts her in a cab to get her home can be shown? There can't be a moment where her methods are questioned?

But not content with stacking the deck so overwhelmingly even the aforementioned Paul Haggis would say, "Come on. Really?" Fennell then suckerpunches the audience with a plot twist that if I hadn't already been accidentally spoiled by, thus overshadowing the entire experience watching the movie knowing where it's going, I may've turned the movie off there. That she then follows that up with some more nihilistic evil of men and then ends with what is meant to be the crowd-pleasing finale which demands the viewer approve of how the worst case of vigilante justice ever was served. 

Right before watching this cinematic war crime, I saw a friend soliciting suggestions for movies to watch and I saw a woman chirp, "Promising Young Woman!" Seriously, if you have seen this movie and thought that ending was happy, you really need to have your head examined to see if your flipping marbles haven't fallen out somewhere.

The greatest shame of Promising Young Woman is that if Fennell could've somehow overcome her generation's insipid nihilism - I'm Generation X, which is turning out to be the Second Greatest Generation to whom the destruction of the Boomers and the brats younger than us shall fall - and not rigged the game so baldly that the cards are obviosuly pouring out of her sleeves, it could've been the edgy black dramedy it wrongly imagines itself being. Mulligan's performance is in service of nothing but lies and it's such a waste. 

If you want the full ugly details, find them below.

Score: 0/10. Kill it with fire. Also, SKIP IT!

************* SPOILERS AHEAD!! ************** 

 

 

 

 

 

************* NOT KIDDING! TURN BACK NOW!!! **********

Here is the full story:

 

Mulligan's lifelong best friend Nina attended medical school with her. One night, Nina got drunk and raped by a classmate which some of his pals watched. The school did nothing about it, treating it as a he said, she said case where she clearly was to blame for getting drunk and vulnerable. Distraught, Nina dropped out and Mulligan followed to support her, but Nina eventually kills herself. So she's filled the next seven years trolling the bars, doing.....we never know. She's clearly not killing these guys represented by the colored hash marks otherwise there'd be hundreds of bodies and that would certainly attract attention from 5-0. 

Since she has chosen to make baiting disgusting men her life's work, it's natural she'd be suspicious of any man, including the former classmate who pursues her with puppy dog charm and a harmless air that you'd correctly suspect will be torn away. The bubble bursts when another classmate (Allison Brie) whom Mulligan sets up for what appears to be her own drunken encounter gives her a phone with a video of the rape that was passed around because that's what irredeemable trash people do on this Earth-like planet. On the video is Doctor Nice Guy observing and not interceding. 

Threatening to expose his complicity, she gets him to tell her where the bachelor party of the rapist is being held. Dressed as a naughty nurse (see the trailer), she drugs the entire party except for the rapist groom-to-be and handcuffs him to a bed. She reveals who she is and prepares to carve Nina's name into his body with a scalpel, but he breaks one hand free and then proceeds to smother her with a pillow.

That's right, folks: The rapist who destroyed her friend's life murders her.

Now that you've picked your jaw off the floor....the next morning the best man, who had shot and shared the video, comes in and discovers his bro and the dead body and does what any man on this planet would do: Takes her corpse out into a field and burns it. Because men are amoral scum. In case you missed the previous parts of the movie.

But Mulligan gets the last laugh as she has sent the phone to a lawyer (an uncredited Alfred Molina) whose firm made a fortune getting evil rapey men to dodge consquences until the guilt and shame broke him. The accompanying note explains that she was going to the bachelor party and if anything happens, give the phone to the cops and tells when the wedding is.

This leads to the crowd-pleasing finale where the cops arrive after the vows and the groom is hauled away for murder and a scheduled text to Dr. Nice Guy Who Wasn't Nice taunts him from beyond the grave. Womp womp! Feel bad, bro! She showed you guys, didn't she? #JusticeForNina

Sure, she's DEAD and Nina's dead and presumably Dr. Raper will have high-dollar legal counsel get him off light because it WAS self-defense against some psycho hose beast chick who was planning on carving her vendetta into his flesh instead of straight-up killing him and getting away. Nope, she had to die because women are helpless victims who can only get justice at the cost of their lives.

Drive home safely, everyone! Grrrl Powah!

I'll wait while you chug some bleach to purge this story from your mind. OK, back now? Let's proceed...

I mentioned Thelma & Louise above and while that 1991 movie has a hefty dose of "men are pigs" animating the plot from Thelma's crappy husband, the attempted rapist Louise kills, and the gross gas tanker driver whose rig they shoot and blow up (which could never happen in reality that way), there are also some decent men like Louise's boyfriend and the cop played by Harvey Keitel who sympathizes with their plight and tries to get them to surrender. But in a trope-setting ending which devolved into Fennell's even grimmer view, the pair choose suicide over prison because it's a man's world, baby, and ain't no way for women to survive in it. 

While there's no denying that there are too many guys who do not qualify as "men", to pretend that the percentage of guys being as terribad as movies portray them approaches 100% is a damnable lie. Real men are not predators, they're protectors; protectors of their families, their friends, even strangers. They're coded in their genes to protect the weak. Even if you've had the misfortune to suffer at the hands of one of these rat bastards, you know that they are a small minority. I simply refuse to believe that I, the guy in the opening fairy tale (in case you didn't figure that out), am some sort of magical unicorn exception to the rule because I didn't capitalize on my drunk acquaintance's actions that night. When a culture presents an insane portrait of a world where one half are inherently evil and the other half oppressed victims for whom suicidal vengeance is the only escape, that leads nowhere good.

Maybe I am since during that brief period of inexplicable desirability I never made a first move on any woman, merely responded to those who approached me first. I never kidded myself that I was all that and just rode the rogue wave until it faded. Most likely, it's because I was raised by a single mother who worked her butt off to provide for me and thus strong women - genuinely strong, not the fake "stunning and brave" victimhood-mongers hailed as role models nowadays - are to be revered for their self-reliance. 

This is what's pernicious and corrosive about Fennell's movie. Despite her having an active acting career for a decade now, then swinging into writing and producing a popular TV series, and now garnering three Oscar nominations for her debut feature, it's impossible to square the squalid illusion of "Men BAD! Women VICTIMS!" with her own life. It's the central sickness of our time that a woman can write, produce, and direct a major motion picture with the message that women have no opportunities and will end up used, abused, raped, discarded, and killed by men who have total dominion over the world. Ummmmm, whut?

There is something ironic and perverse that Fennell's big breaks came from her friend Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the tart actress and writer who created, wrote and starred in the brilliant Amazon Prime series Fleabag and adapted and created Killing Eve, handing the reins over to Fennell. I find Waller-Bridge quite interesting because her characters are complicated, messy, and filled with agency. If any of her women are victims, they're more victims of their own bad choices than a world set against them. She doesn't write saintly women and demonic men, she writes three-dimensional people with foibles and strengths and weaknesses. As I've belabored, Fennell here writes in only two colors: black and really really black, like Spinal Tap none-more-black black. But because Mulligan brings down the evil men who destroyed her in the end we're supposed to feel great about the lecture and the fact it means nothing?

No.

"White Boy" Review

In the annals of famous criminals, one that people outside of the Detroit area have likely heard of is White Boy Rick, the street nickname of Richard Wershe Jr. who was infamous for being a teenage drug dealer AND FBI informant who ended up sentenced to life in prison without parole for cocaine trafficking despite his youth (17 years old) and being a non-violent offender. He eventually became the longest-serving non-violent juvenile offender in history. 

Name-checked by Kid Rock, the subject of a mediocre 2018 biopic starring Matthew McConaughey as his father, even the stage name of a local rapper I knew who went by "White Boy Ric", White Boy Rick attained a level of cultural fame usually reserved for Mafiosos. But lesser known are the details of how he became this legend and the complete screw job he received at the hands of a corrupt JUST US system which was protecting the deeply corrupt power structure of Detroit, all of which is laid out in jaw-dropping detail in the documentary White Boy.

Packed with interviews with lawyers, FBI agents, police officers, reporters (including Chris Hansen, who started in Detroit before going national and busting pedophile predators), lawyers, family, Curry and hit man Nathaniel Kraft (who confessed to 30 murders), and Wershe by telephone and archive footage, White Boy paints a stunning picture of how the FBI recruited the 14-year-old Wershe to infiltrate and inform the drug trade of Detroit's East Side.

I've been a metro Detroit resident almost my whole life and in the 1980s the various drug gangs running in Detroit like Young Boys Inc. and Best Friends filled the newspapers and newscasts. Naturally, White Boy Rick, the white teenager who was rolling deep with an almost exclusively black-controlled drug trade, was a standout simply because of his novelty, and the local media, not he or his street pals, gave him the nickname. (He was like the Eminem of drug dealing.) But even I was blown away by the depths of corruption that enabled this deadly trade which further destroyed a city already mortally wounded by the 1967 Riots and 20 years of Coleman Young, the extremely dirty Mayor of Detroit. 

How dirty was Young? His niece was married to Johnny Curry, head of the Curry Brothers drug gang, and as such the gang operated with near impunity from law enforcement as they were protected by the boss's uncle and his crooked cop minions. (One Detroit Free Press reporter featured laughably asserts that he didn't think Young was crooked, but perhaps some around him were. I immediately started ignoring whatever he said afterwards.) 

Even more shocking are the revelations that the head of the Detroit Police Department's Homicide department, Gil Hill - famous for playing Eddie Murphy's angry Captain in the Beverly Hills Cop franchise, subsequently riding that fame to become President of the Detroit City Council - was corrupt to the point of ordering hits on certain people, including White Boy Rick.

After assisting in at least 20 successful prosecutions, he was cut loose by the FBI at age 16. Continuing in the drug game, a year later, after a very suspicious bust and having his legal counsel which was connected to Young tank his defense, he was sentenced to life without parole in 1987. When the state's mandatory life for 650 grams of narcotics law was ruled unconstitutional in 1998 and modified to allow parole, Wershe was still denied parole in the one hearing he was allowed in 2003. 

For some reason, certain factions were extremely opposed to Wershe every being released. Despite being a model prisoner and most of those involved with his judgement not objecting to his parole, the Wayne County Prosecutors Office blistered him as a menace to society who would cause great harm if released. In 2003, the County Prosecuter was Mike Duggan, who is now the Mayor of Detroit, and he didn't object to parole, but two weeks later, a second letter vehemently opposing release, as if Wershe were Scarface and Capone combined, came in with Duggan's signature, sinking his chances. However, Duggan claims he doesn't recall the second letter (despite his signature), though his top deputy was one of lawyers who railroaded him. Even as late as 2015, when Wershe was the longest-serving non-violent offender in history, an attempt to resentence him was crushed by current Prosecutor Kym Worthy. 

Throughout White Boy is an overwhelming sense of injustice perpetrated by the law enforcers who basically turned Wershe into a felon and then threw him in prison for life as his reward because he was too close to implicating dirty cops and politicians. While he escaped assassination, he was still left to rot long after murderers and actual drug kingpins like Johnny Curry had been released. In one final shocking twist, director Shawn Rech illustrates just how unjust Wershe's sentence is compared to another's through an extremely clever misdirection he used until then.

Another detail to Rech's credit is his identifying who the talking heads shown are every time they appear throughout the movie. So often documentary's fail to provide basic information like what year events occur or identify speakers once and then leave the viewer trying to remember who is who later. 

While Wershe was eventually paroled in 2017, he was promptly thrown into a Florida prison for another three years on a separate charge whose sentence was shockingly set to run consecutively, not concurrently. He ultimately regained his freedom in 2020 after spending 33 years incarcerated. (So much for white privilege.)

Score: 9/10. Catch it on cable. (Currently on Netflix.)

"The Legend of Cocaine Island" Review

 Someone says early in the beginning of Netflix's bizarre documentary The Legend of Cocaine Island that "the difference between Northern fairy tales and Southern fairy tales is that Northern ones begin, 'Once upon a time,' while Southern ones begin, 'Y'all ain't gonna believe this sh*t.'" And that aptly describes the Southern fairy tale that is told in this documentary.

 We are introduced to Rodney Hyden, a beefy fellow living his best life as a general contractor in Florida running a successful firm with 80 employees, doing big projects. He had a giant McMansion in the best neighborhood (which pleased his status-obsessed wife), a pool, a Harley, all the big boy toys the good life provides. Then the 2008 Crash wiped him out. With a million dollars in debt, the firm went under, they lost the house, etc. and ended up moving to a far less affluent patch of land where they lived in a double-wide trailer for quite some time as they tried to rebuild their lives. (A major failure of this film, like too many documentaries, is we never know what years events take place.)

 One of his new neighbors is an aging local hippie named Julian who has told a story to everyone in the area over the years about the time he was walking on a beach on a Puerto Rican island and discovered a duffel bag floating in the ocean stuffed with 70 lbs. of cocaine, eventually burying it. With a street value of over $2 million, it sure would be a windfall to whomever could find it, dig it up, get it back to the mainland, and traffic it and Rodney figures it should be him.

So he teams up with a stupid junkie named Andy (who appears as himself wearing a big cowboy had and sunglasses to disguise himself and comes off like a dumber version of Steve Zahn's character in Out of Sight) and a drug dealer named Dee (who wears a cap and skull bandana), the latter who hooks him up with Carlos (played by an actor) who runs a plane service and can transport the stash to Florida for a cut. 

The first trip down is a comedy of errors as Andy forgets his methadone and spends the whole time puking in the room and Rodney didn't even have a shovel and couldn't figure out where to buy one, the lack of Walmarts making that too difficult. A second trip with medicated Andy and a shovel is stymied by rock-hard soil which thwarts the obese guy and junkie. Figuring there was no way to make it happen, Rodney gives up until Carlos offers to retrieve it for a larger cut. All Rodney needs to do is give him the treasure map he'd put together with Julian's help. Rodney is naturally leery of getting ripped off, but what they heck, it's not like he was going to be able to get it himself.

It would be spoiling to say whether they are able to find the cocaine or not, but suffice to say things get extremely crazy and the clear naivete of Rodney comes back to bite his ample ass good and hard. Some serious questions are raised about what certain parties may have done (see below trailer for mine) in this caper, but it all somewhat works out in the end.

 Shot in a semi-docudrama format with some of the real people reenacting their stories mixed with talking head bits, The Legend of Cocaine Island gets a little drawn out and stylistically precious for its own good in spots - why do we need moodily-lit slow-motion footage of Rodney's daughter's marching band if it's not a Zach Snyder movie? - but the shaggy dog story is compelling enough to make the wander worthwhile.

Score: 8/10. Catch it on Netflix. 

SPOILER ZONE!

 

 

Turn back if you don't want to be spoiled!

 

 

OK, when the issue is raised about whether the drugs were even found and the poor photo showing it vs. what was admitted as evidence, the anonymous DEA (or HSA) guy waves it away claiming that when they dug it up, they didn't have good cameras with them, they're just cops, so they used camera phones. However, if this was a DEA sting operation the whole time, why would they need to go out at night to dig it up. It was near a U.S. wildlife preserve and they were the Feds, so why not go out in daylight with heavy equipment and dig it up? 

 Perhaps Andy is being paranoid in positing that they fabricated the whole case and didn't even find the buried bag, but something definitely feels off and kudos to the judge to find a way to keep Rodney's dumb ass out of prison for a decade for a crime he couldn't even have been charged with if the government hadn't done all the work for him.

"Biggie: I Got A Story To Tell" Review

 Unlike my excessively long review of 69: The Saga of Daniel Hernandez, this review of the new Netflix documentary on The Notorious B.I.G., Biggie: I Got A Story To Tell, will be much more concise due to the fact I got my annoyance at pop music out in the other piece and I don't have any major animus towards the subject. 

I was never a Biggie fan because he came out in the mid-1990s when I was starting to get bored by the listless G-Funk weed-out rap of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg after the bright ferocious rhymes of Public Enemy and N.W.A. I didn't care for his fat-tongued wheezy sound for the same reason Beastie Boys MCA (Adam Yauch) bothered me with his raspy growling style: I listen to rap to hear the words and diction is the most important thing. Chuck D, Ice Cube, LL Cool J, Ice-T, Run-DMC, etc. came out of the Eighties when making sure the message was heard; that seemed to become less important in the Nineties and beyond. Most current rap is unlistenable because it's unintelligible to me.

 So despite my benign apathy toward the subject, I found Biggie: I Got A Story To Tell an interesting primer on the earliest days of his rise into a legend of hip-hop. The big selling point is the wealth of video recorded by Big's best friend Damion "D-Roc" Butler. Flanked by interviews with his mother Voletta Wallace, widow Faith Evans, record label impresario Sean "Puff Daddy/P. Diddy" Combs, and others, we see how young Christopher Wallace came up on the streets of Brooklyn, participating in street corner rap battle and slinging crack, whatever makes him money.

 The doc goes into how neighborhood jazz musicians and trips to his mother's native Jamaica exposed him to musical influences which informed his musical styles. It barely touches on his major releases because that material has been covered extensively elsewhere, so this is more for the fans seeking rare footage than those needing a complete biography. The beef between him and Tupac Shakur is confusingly presented because it seemed like they weren't enemies, then it was more a WWE style act, then something more deadly serious, leading to both their deaths; Tupac's in September 1996 at age 25 followed by Big's in March 1997 at age 24, just two weeks before the release of his final album.

To be honest, I don't get the big deal about Biggie and his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2020 off two RAP albums is dubious to me. I mean, N.W.A. his also in and while their ONE meaningful album, Straight Outta Compton, one of the most seminal albums in any genre, let's be real, please. But I'm not going to knock this documentary for that. If you're a fan, check it out; if you want to learn a bit about him, it's OK, but there may be better primers out there.

 Score: 6/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"Iron Fists and Kung Fu Kicks" Review

The first thing you see when watching Blade Runner is the studio logo header (only one of them compared to the half-dozen today's patchwork-financed films have) for The Ladd Company and underneath it added, "in association with Sir Run Run Shaw." I always thought it was an odd name, though much later learned that Run Run was one of the Shaw Brothers, purveyors of a massive quantity of the movies that came out of Hong Kong up thru the mid-1980s. The culture-changing output of the Shaw Brothers and others is covered in Iron Fists and Kung Fu Kicks, a fast-paced, informative, but somewhat incomplete documentary on the rise and cultural impact of kung fu cinema.

 Illustrated with countless clips (perhaps too many edited too quickly) from their output, IFaKFK begins with the Shaw Brothers, who cranked out a movie per week from their studio system which had cast members and crews living in company dormitories and working on as many as a half-dozen pictures simultaneously. Looking to bolster their box office, they begin to branch into more violent and bloody martial arts fare, finding much success.

However, for all that success, Run Run had some serious blind spots including passing on signing Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, leaving them free to go to competitor studio Golden Harvest which had been formed by a bunch of Shaw Brothers executives who bridled at the boss's iron-fisted control. 

Naturally, Bruce Lee gets substantial coverage as the first breakout international Kung Fu star. Disgusted at being passed over for the lead in Kung Fu (in favor of David Carradine due to network's concerns over Lee's Elmer Fudd-ish accent), he returned to Hong Kong, signed with Golden Harvest, and became a legend before suddenly dying at only 32 years of age. The "Bruceploitation" films that were rushed out afterwards are covered as well. 

Moving along to the arrival of Jackie Chan (also signed to Golden Harvest) and his stunt-driven comedic films and the influences on the nascent hip-hop culture of the last-Seventies/early-Eighties with moves from the films being translated into breakdance moves, IFaKFK really packs a lot of content, but begins to rapidly glide over the turn-of-the-Millennium resurgence in interest in Asian cinema prompted by the massive success of The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. 

Despite having the director of the Ip Man films and the cinematographer of Hero as talking heads, neither film is showcased. There's no sign of Jet Li, bare acknowledgement of Michelle Yeoh, no acknowledgement of Quentin Tarantino's massive homages to 5 Fingers of Death and Game of Death in his Kill Bill films. In the last few minutes they spotlight new countries making breakout movies like Indonesia (The Raid - Redemption) and Thailand (Ong-Bak), but the more time is given to Americans Cynthia Rothrock and Billy Blanks - who went on to invent the Tae Bo fitness system and had the highest-selling videotape ever - at the expense of the past 25-30 years.

 While glaringly incomplete in areas, Iron Fists and Kung Fu Kicks is still a good primer on the history and cultural influence of chop-socky movies.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable. (Currently on Netflix.)

"Some Kind of Wonderful" Review

 I really need to stop watching movies from the late-Eighties that I remember as being OK-to-pretty good because they are not turning out remotely as good as I'd remembered. Previously it was Coming to America, and now it's the John Hughes-written, Howard Deutch-directed 1987 revision of their 1986 team-up Pretty in Pink with the correct ending, Some Kind of Wonderful. 

As King of the Teen Movies, Hughes had an epic run with Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off on his scorecard, but also had Pretty in Pink mixed in, starring his muse Molly Ringwald, but directed by Deutch because Hughes was busy with the other films. For those familiar with the movie, the original ending had Andie (Ringwald) ending up with Duckie (Jon Cryer) at the prom. But test audiences didn't like that she didn't choose the Human Loaf of Wonder Bread Andrew McCarthy, so they changed the ending to the baffling conclusion we got.

 It must've stuck in Hughes' craw, because Some Kind of Wonderful seems to be a dashed-off do-over swapping in Eric Stoltz as the Ringwald's character, Mary Stuart Masterson as Cryer's, Lea Thompson as McCarthy, and Craig Sheffer as James Spader's rich d-bag character and (SPOILER ALERT!) having the protagonist reject the shallow pretty girl (Thompson) for the tomboy (Masterson) who always loved him. Justice is served for the non-conformists! Right? Not really.

Since I've spoiled the ending, here's why Some Kind of Wonderful is all sorts of terrible. For starters, almost every character is a paper-thin two-dimensional cartoon representing a trope, not a human being. Stoltz's Keith is a Sensitive Artistic Type; Masterson's Watts is Tomboy Rebel Outcast who wears mens underwear, drives a right-hand drive beater Mini Cooper (if they remade it today, she'd be transgendered; which way, I don't know); Thompson's Amanda Jones (named so The Rolling Stones tune can be used twice) is the Vapid Pretty Girl; and Sheffer's Hardy is the Rich A-Hole Misogynist who refers to Amanda as "his property." Hughes' script never misses an opportunity to NOT provide and depth or context to this cutouts. The only one who gets character revelation is Elias Koteas' Skinhead (according to the credits, but referred to as Duncan in the movie) who turns out to have artistic leanings under his rough exterior. 

 That all the actors but Masterson were 25-27 years-old, older than college grad students, playing high schoolers adds to the disconnect. Older actors playing younger is common for work rules reasons - Matthew Broderick was 23 and Alan Ruck was 30(!) in Ferris Bueller -  but Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall were 15 in Sixteen Candles and that made a difference in verisimilitude.

 So our ancient cartoons are here for this plot: Keith is a middle-class kid who works in a garage and whose father (John Ashton) is pressuring him to go to college. While Andie was clearly poor, making her own clothes, living with only her drunk father (Harry Dean Stanton), Keith has both parents and two younger sisters. His best friend Watts (whose accent seems to hail from the Brooklyn part of Los Angeles), is taunted by classmates as a lesbian for her short hair and butch manner, but she clearly has the hots for him. He doesn't notice because he's pining for Amanda, a girl from their neighborhood who is dating Hardy, who comes from the high rent district, drives a Corvette convertible, openly flirts and nuzzles other girls in front of her, but she sticks with him because reasons never fully explained. 

One night, while stalking her conveniently being nearby when Hardy gets caught dealing on another girl. Keith gets the opportunity to ask Amanda out and she accepts. Sure, she just did it in the heat of the moment and rapidly worries about losing her position with her mean girl peers, but she decides to stick it out. The rest of the movie is Keith going fully insane prepping for this date, cashing out his college fund to buy diamond earrings for her while his Dad rightfully loses it and Watts fears she's going to lose the love of her life to the princess. (The locker room comparison scene where Amanda poses in skimpy lingerie while Watts wears formless mens underwear prompted me to snark to the missus, "You know, you could just buy some skimpy panties, too.")

The third act date itself is even more maddening as Keith and Amanda and Watts take turns amping up the passive-aggression. There's no getting to know each other or having them explain their feelings; it's more like illustrating that they're not really suited for each other. I kept waiting for someone to make a speech explaining themselves or their feelings and motivations, but nope. It's genuinely bizarre. Oh, Amanda accepts the earrings after berating Keith for painting a portrait of her and hanging it in a public art gallery for their after-hours visit. 

The rushed final scene, where they end up at Hardy's party knowing he and his pals plan to ambush and clobber him, is a rushed cliched mess of macho posturing and the super-convenient arrival of Duncan's gang keeps the peace. (One of Amanda's friends makes googoo eyes at him because rich snobby girls who disown their friends for associating with the poors secretly want some gutter punk action, I suppose.) Outside, Watts storms off; Amanda decides she wants to be a better person and gives Keith the earrings back, and he catches up to her, discovers he loves her and gives her the earrings, leading to one of the worst final lines ever: "You look good wearing my future." Gag me with a spoon!

I can't recall when I last saw SKoW; surely at least once since its release. I own the DVD, but that doesn't mean I've watched it. But throughout watching it on Hulu, I kept wondering how I failed to notice just how bad it was before. Perhaps it was because I wasn't as perceptive about screenwriting and storytelling or just liked it because I was 19 when it came out and Thompson was real purdy and Masterson reminded me of Go-Go's drummer Gina Schock (who was my favorite Go-Go and whom I remained in willful denial of her orientation until 2020 when it was explicitly stated in their documentary). But as a cranky middle-aged man, it's just dumb and needlessly so.

 I've seen PiP more recently (but not within past 10 years as I see no Dirkflix entry for it), so don't want to go out on a limb and say it's clearly better, but I recall it handling the class and cliques details better and that my major beef was the sellout ending. While Hughes meant SKoW to be a gender-swapped remake of PiP, it ditched all the characters and class that made the first movie resonnate. There were plenty of spots where Hughes could've addressed what the characters were feeling, but passed on all of them, leaving a thin gruel of warmed-over teen rom-com emptiness.

 Molly Ringwald was offered the role of Amanda, but refused because she wanted to move on to more adult roles (yeah, that happened) and apparently that broke her friendship with Hughes and they never worked together again. But why should she have? She'd already made this movie before it was reshot, but it was a hit. It would've been weird to make a lesser version just to correct a mistake audiences didn't care about, if box office take is to judge.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.  

"The Last Blockbuuster" Review

If you're Generation X (the age cohort, not Billy Idol's original band), you witnessed the invention, rise, fall, and near extinction of the home video rental industry within a span of less than four decades. What used to be a weekly ritual of going to get the new releases or just wandering the aisles and picking something with a cool cover and making sure to return those tapes (memorialized as a running gag in American Psycho) to avoid late fees has been replaced with scrolling through the rows of numerous streaming service interfaces looking for something to watch. (Old Busted: "Make it a Blockbuster night!" New Hotness: Netflix and chill.")

 Once the kingpin of video rentals with 9000 stores worldwide in 2004, within a decade Blockbuster was completely gone other than a handful of franchises, three in Alaska and one in Bend, Oregon (a cute inland town home to 94,000 people) and when the Alaska trio shuttered in 2019, Bend's store was officially The Last Blockbuster and now the subject of a documentary which is ironically streaming on Netflix.

 Part history lesson relating the birth of the video rental industry and the rise of the chain; part reminiscence of going there with celebrities including Jamie Kennedy (who got an early career break as part of The Blockbuster Gang), Samm Levine, Adam Brody, Ione Syke); the anchor of the doc is Sandi Harding, the general manager of the Bend store and  "Blockbuster Mom" (because she's hired so many teens as employees over the 17 years she's managed the place) who keeps the blue and yellow flame alive. There's a hanging question whether Dish Network, who owns the trademark, will renew the store's licensing agreement for another year, but as Kevin Smith observes, what would the upside of the firestorm of negative publicity Dish would spark if they killed the store? (Spoiler: They get renewed.)

While it's a breezy and informative documentary which knocks down the misconception that Netflix killed them - while competition didn't help, it was the capital crunch after the 2008 Great Crash which really sank them - it's somewhat padded feeling with a long segment dedicated to comedian Doug Benson (Super-High Me) visiting the store and trolling friend Kumail Nanjiani with a photo of the DVD of his movie The Big Sick there. They could've trimmed it down to a tidy hour.

Score: 6/10.  Catch it on cable. (Currently on Netflix.)

"Triggered" Review

 Taking a break from Oscar bait and epic superheroics, tonight's movie was something the girlfriend spotted on Hulu, a low-budget high-concept South African B-movie called Triggered, a quick and dirty movie which will now receive a quick and dirty review.

Nine high school friends (though that's a loose term for it) are having a five-year reunion (though judging from how old the actors look, it should be more like ten years) out in the woods 30 miles from the nearest town, which is booked solid for a big soccer game. Why the reunion? No idea. So the movie can happen.

After getting to know our gang of characters played by unknown actors - I just thought of them as Smart Girl, Drummer Guy, Much Older Guy, Hot Chick, Mousey Likely Final Girl, Slutty Girl, Those Bro Guys - and rapidly deciding I was cool with all of them dying for being vapid and annoying, the plot kicks in as they are all gassed (how?) and wake up with explosive vests with countdown timers strapped onto them. (Whut?)

Who did this? Their high school science teacher who blames them for the death of his son, a friend of theirs, who had a heart attack at a party they attended. The vests are interconnected and when time runs out, KABOOM! Last one will time on their clock gets to live at which point he kills himself. With their phones gathered and smashed, and times ranging from 35-45 minutes on their clocks, panic rapidly sets in. 

The stakes are ramped up when they discover that if someone dies before exploding, their remaining time transfer to the player closest to the decedent meaning that if they start killing each other, they can gain enough time to win. As they begin to square off against each other and try to unravel why their teacher thought they were to blame, inevitably details parse out which exposes the truth of what happened back at that party. 

And that's the movie. Blood, screaming, murder and death. Fun for the whole family, if you're the Manson Family perhaps. And it's not bad. Oh, it's not exactly good, but it's quick-paced, inventive, and delivers what it lists on the tin: Anonymous young people getting blowed up real good (though more kills are from edged weapons). Elevating things are some genuinely brilliant lines of dialog like when one couple is listening to another couple rutting like rabid minks in a nearby tent, "I can't tell if they're having sex or performing an exorcism." 

Frankly, after slogging through overhyped Oscar bait this week, this was the junk food I needed to cleanse my palette. It is what it is. Enjoy. 

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable. (Currently on Hulu)

"The Trial of the Chicago 7" Review

 Oscar slog continues with The Trial of the Chicago 7, the latest directorial effort by uber-scribe Aaron Sorkin. Loaded with Oscar-winners/nominees and written by Sorkin, it was one of Netflix's power plays for Oscar love this year and scored five noms for Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Supporting Actor, Cinematography, and Editing. The problem is that the film is shockingly mediocre and muddled.

 For those younger than the Baby Boom generation, the Chicago 7 were actually eight radical group leaders who where charged with inciting a riot at the 1968 Democrat National Convention in Chicago. Next to Woodstock, the '68 DNC is one of those events Boomers nostalgically cling to with a death grip in their narcissistic and revisionist historical view that "We changed the world, man, and ended the Vietnam War, man, like wow, man." (Never mind that the war actually ended in 1973 and the American victory was undone by Democrats in the post-Watergate time of 1975 throwing South Vietnam to the North Vietnamese Communist wolves.) So it's natural that any telling of this tale will tickle the fancies of the Academy with their woke mania.

If you're familiar with Sixties radicals - and it's hard not to be considering how the Boomer-run media constantly heralded these guys as icons - you recognize the names of "Yippie" leaders Abbie Hoffman (nominated Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong), Students For A Democratic Society leaders Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp), and National Black Panther leader Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who was Black Manta in Aquaman). There were three other defendants, but these were the rock stars. 

The movie opens in early 1969 with the incoming Nixon Administration's Attorney General, John Mitchell (John Doman), wanting to press Federal charges for inciting the riot which state and the Johnson Administration passed on. He appoints a pair of prosecutors including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who has qualms about the endeavor, to lead the fight. The defense is led by William Kunstler (Mark Rylance, who should've been nominated over Cohen).

 Using a flashback structure within the trial, which is a complete clown show due to an judge of dubious mental faculty, Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella), the movie jumps between the incredibly long trial (it lasted five months) and the events in question. But despite Sorkin's first play and movie being the courtroom drama A Few Good Men and his Oscar-winning The Social Network leaping back and forth from depositions to the creation of FaceSpace (what I call it), The Trial of the Chicago 7 lacks the coherence, focus, and overall Sorkin quality he's typically known for.

The troubles manifest early as the scene depicting the first day of the trail drags on interminably to establish what a mess Judge Hoffman is, interrupting opening arguments repeatedly with specious interjections like wanting to make clear to the jury that he is not related to Abbie Hoffman. Ideas are introduced and never followed up upon like Kunstler wanting psychological experts to observe the judge to see if he can be removed for incompetence, but nothing comes of it. Seale's attorney is missing at the beginning of the trial due to a medical emergency and he continually refuses to allow Kunstler to represent him, but it's never explained why he won't do that or why, as the trial drags on, he doesn't retain other counsel.

The performances range from good (Rylance) to adequate (Cohen) to bad (Redmayne, who really didn't deserve his Oscar for The Theory of Everything and always seems pained and mannered). I suspect Cohen's Supporting Actor nomination is because the Academy liked the Borat sequel, but couldn't nominate him for that despite nomination his co-star. 

Sorkin's debut directorial effort, Molly's Game, showed that he was a better writer than director. Here his directorial skills have improved while his writing has plummeted. The mawkish, supposedly crowd-pleasing ending is something he'd spoof, not do seriously. Even his trademark quippy, quotable dialog is absent, with the only memorable line coming as it's revealed how many police and FBI informants were close to the Chicago 7 in the run-up to the riot, "Is it possible there were only 10 actual protesters and 5000 undercover cops?" 

In an article discussing how mediocre this year's Oscar contenders are, someone noted that in any other year, The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a movie that would've been made for HBO and forgotten six months later. They had a typo; it was six minutes. 

Score: 5/10. Catch it on Netflix.  

"Nomadland" Review

 With the announcement of the 2021 Oscar nominations this week, thus begins the annual slog to see as many of the nominated films and performances as possible. Having already seen only the appallingly-nominated Sound of Metal so far, I decided to begin with one of the top favorites, Nomadland, which received nominations for Best Picture, Director, Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Editing, and Cinematography, four(!) of those nominations going to director-writer-editor Chole Zhao, whose next film will be the year-delayed Marvel Eternals slated for release in Nov. 2021.

 Starring Oscar-nominated Frances McDormand, Nomadland, tells the story of Fern, a widow from Empire, Nevada, a gypsum mining company town that shut down and became a ghost town in 2011. When the company-owned home she and her husband shared was taken from her (as it was for all employees), she stored her possession and moved into a van. We meet her as she parks in RV camp and begins doing seasonal work at an Amazon fulfillment center. (This is a real thing, part of what Amazon calls CamperForce at several of their sites nationwide for the past decade.)

When the work ends after the New Year, she is invited by co-worker and RVer Linda May (nearly all roles are played by real-life nomads as fictionalized versions of themselves) to come to a camp in Arizona where nomad lifestyle guru Bob Wells will be speaking and teaching the ways of the open road. Fern initially demurs, but after one too many cold nights in the van, decides to head south.

 While there, she makes the acquaintance of David (David Straithairn, who by being a recognizable face amongst the civilians telegraphs his importance), who is sweet on her, and Swankie ("herself") as a veteran nomad who thinks Fern needs to learn up on self-sufficiency. Swankie reveals she has terminal cancer and is planning on heading to Alaska to kayak and experience as many good moments as she can before dying.

From there the film follows Fern as she drifts from one area to another, picking up work as she goes - from working as a campground host in the Badlands to a sugar beet harvest elsewhere. She keeps running into David and eventually lets him hook her up with work at infamous South Dakota tourist trap Wall Drug where his son (Tay Straithairn, David's real-life son) appears, begging his father to come home and meet his grandson and stay with them. 

Through it all Fern seems isolated from those around her. While there are moments of community, there is generally incredible loneliness. During a visit to her sister's, we finally get some insight into her personality, that she left home as soon as she could, and when offered a chance to stay with David's family, she bolts, but we never really get what's making her tick. She's not a misanthrope; she was married a long time, but never had children; we mostly learn who she is by others talking about her, not by anything she reveals beyond her actions. 

It's only due to McDormand's quiet, restrained performance that Fern seems tangible despite there not really being a character there. With her self-cut hair and hard mien, we presume things about Fern that aren't otherwise explicit. Frankly, the only surprise about her character was that there was no surprise coming like an Act 3 sucker punch that she's dying of something. 

The fundamental weakness of the film, though, is that it attempts to transform the non-fiction source book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder, about how seniors displaced by the 2008 Great Recession adopted nomadic lifestyles seeking seasonal work, which had already been made into a documentary short called CamperForce, into a dramatic feature film, but using almost exclusively real nomads as the cast around a cypher of a protagonist. Put bluntly, this should've been a documentary or a fully fictionalized film, as the hybrid mix of fascinating real people with weathered faces and genuinely lived experiences clashes with the somewhat rote fictional passages. People like the nomads are a fresh experience in movies; we've seen the drama before. 

Some have tried to impose a political message upon Nomadland, that it's a critique of the exploitation of disposable workers by cruel capitalists, but no one in the movie seems to share this view and many view those punching the clock year after year to pay off mortgages and dying without having lived for themselves as the victims. I think the complaints are just people who want to see things they want to see seeing things.

 While the entire frame of the story itself didn't really gel, what's indisputable is the gorgeous cinematography by Joshua James Richards, who is a relative newcomer, having collaborated with Zhao on two previous films, but should be catapulted into the top ranks with his lush naturalistic photography. Zhao has wisely chosen a ultra-widescreen aspect ratio and Richards fills the frame with creamy "magic hour" light - the soft warm light found at and slightly before/after sunrise/sunset - which bring the truly alien landscapes shown to life and lend to the pseudo-documentary feel of the film. (Look at the trailer to see for yourself.)

Zhao's direction and editing are fine as well. The nomad performers are so natural and at ease that the only real tipoff that they're not actors is that no one who looks like these people are actors. (That's why Straithairn is so jarring when he arrives.) The isolation amidst desolate barren landscapes is well-conveyed in her shots. 

It's a shame that her four nominations (for writing, producing, directing, and editing) are being touted as diversity trophies for a Chinese woman as if what's on the screen isn't simply talent, but something more special because it wasn't a white American male doing it. It's patronizing and divisive, but sadly what our cultural overlords are currently obsessed with. 

While the story itself didn't connect with me, it's not badly told, and I'm definitely intrigued to see what Zhao will do with a giant comic book movie starring Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek. 

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

"69: The Saga of Daniel Hernandez" Review

I don't know when exactly I lost touch with current popular music, but as a musician and music fan who was alive when hip-hop was invented - I first heard turntable scratching on Malcolm McClaren's Duck Rock album in January 1983 when Herbie Hancock's Future Shock album with "Rockit" came out 7 months later and turntablists who cite seeing the performance on the February 1985 Grammys ceremony as their "Beatles on Ed Sullivan" moment; I first heard the Beastie Boys "Rock Hard" in 1984 when Licensed To Ill dropped in November 1986; I heard "Bring the Noise" before Anthrax covered it; and when Rodney King got clobbered in 1991, it illustrated what N.W.A. was rapping about on "F*ck tha Police" in 1989 - I suddenly realized I had no idea who most of the rap/hip-hop artists were. (Or even the other genres as well.)

Before I stopped watching Saturday Night Live recently there were more and more weeks the musical act was "Who? What's a Migos?" I'd long wondered when rap stopped being "ghetto CNN" (as Public Enemy's Chuck D described rap discussing social issues) to "ghetto Robb Report" recounting the bottles and rims and grillz and hoes and stacks and bling, but little substance. (Of course this is when Donald Trump was name-checked as an icon of aspirational wealth by dozens of rappers before June 2015 when he mysteriously ceased being the guy who mentored Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons and everyone suddenly noticed for the first time that this 69-year-old man who had been in the public eye since the late-1970s was a virulent white supremacist and Nazi simply by changing his party affiliation. Weird how that worked.)

Part of it was that that frankly pop music sucks these days. No, I'm not one of those grumpy old men who isn't hip to what the whippersnappers get their twerk on to and shares the memes on FaceSpace comparing "Bohemian Rhapsody" being written by one person, Freddie Mercury, to "Anonymous Club Banga" written by a committee of six or more people with names like Q-Trawn and lyrics which are just a few words chanted repeatedly because stripper pole anthems don't exactly require Bob Dylan's touch. Every generation feels the younger generation's music sucks, but we've hit a canyon in popular culture where it's not an opinion, but scientifically confirmed objective fact that pop music today is garbage.

I've always been a fan of well-done pop music; there is no harder achievement than writing a memorable tune that earworms people forever. When the Spice Girls came out in 1996, I said they were better than Pearl Jam and I wasn't being ironic as that band had disappeared up Eddie Vedder's ass halfway through their Vitalogy album. (They peaked with "Go" on Vs. I will fight anyone who doesn't think that song blazes.) Music snobs felt the early-Aughts garage band boom of definitive article-named bands (i.e. THE White Stripes/Strokes/Hives/Libertines/Vines/Von Bondies/Black Keys/Walkmen/Blah/Woof) "saved rock & roll" from late-Millennium boy bands and Mousekabimbos, but the reality is that Britney Spears and N*Sync saved music from the miserable wasteland that Nirvana created which fundamentally killed rock & roll. 

But something has gone haywire since the mid-Aughts as the pop magic has bled out of pop music. I adored Katy Perry's 2008 album One of the Boys and while I didn't care as much for her 2010 follow-up, Teenage Dream, I can understand why it was popular. But each subsequent album, which have taken 3-4 years to make has been less and less tuneful and more and more generic monotonous "club bangaz" dreck that sounds like the background music for movie scenes set in strip clubs. Somewhere the fundamentals of verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus-chorus got replaced with monotonous "16-bar MPC loop repeated ad infinitum." It's good we've got computers to play these endless loops because humans would fall asleep from boredom if they didn't lose track of where they were with the same progression first.

So with those 600+ words of grousing preamble out of the way to set the stage, we come to 69: The Saga of Daniel Hernandez, the documentary on Hulu - not to be confused with a concurrent Showtime docu-series which appears to cover the same ground - about megastar Soundcloud rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine, a tattooed kid who somehow rode controversial YouTube videos and social media clout-mongering to become a massive star for a few years before it all crashed down and he flipped on his gang member posse to avoid a 47-year stint in the Crowbar Hotel for numerous felonies. Due to his asthma and Hot Fad Plague 2020, he was sprung from jail and finished his sentence at home (while desperate business owners who defied shutdowns were tossed into the pokey). After his release, his snitching has made him a pariah. 

Using interviews with his girlfriend/baby mama (whom he frequently cheated and beat on), his musical associates (whom he betrayed when he outgrew them), and gang pals (whom he snitched on), and quick clips of his videos which have racked up hundreds of millions of views, we learn about Hernandez's hard knock life, growing up without his birth father who left the family, having his stepfather murdered, but hustling first as a fashion designer, then a rapper at the encouragement of a neighborhood rapper who thought the rainbow-haired, tattooed kid behind the bodega counter looked like a rapper. 

Riding the popularity of his videos, he really blew up when he went to Slovakia(!) and got signed to the charmingly-named FCK THEM label and really started making waves. However his propensity for shock value uber alles got him in repeated legal scrapes like when an underage girl was shown performing sex acts in a video, eventually escalating to his robbery and murder conspiracy beefs which made him a singer for the state against his Nine Trey Bloods friends. 

The problem with 69: The Saga of Daniel Hernandez isn't solely that 69's music is.....let's go with not my cup of tea (Narrator: "Dirk thinks it's garbage and his using the N-word every 3-5 words will lose him his Food Network show or New York Times gig."), but that we never really get to HEAR much of his musical output. Most of the time, director Vikram Gandhi shows clips while interviewees talk over them. While writing this review, I went to YouTube to watch "Gummo", his breakout hit (which completely sucks), and it was really the first time I was able to tell that it completely sucked. I'm currently watching the Netflix documentary on The Notorious B.I.G. Biggie: I Got A Story To Tell and it features a lot of videotape recorded by his best friend of Biggie participating in street battles and on stage as he was coming up and you get to appreciate his skills, which 69 doesn't even come close to and I'm saying this as someone who never really got into Big. 

There's also no discussion of how the money works in this Soundcloud age. I know I'm old and out of touch with the new style and that no one buys pieces of plastic with music stamped into it, but some accounting for the economics of hundreds of millions of streams to put phat chedda stacks of Benjis - I know the lingo, fellow kids! - would've been useful.

Since Hernadez's fame may already be past, leaving him washed-up at 24 and with face tattoos that preclude gainful employment in most fields - ya hear that, Post Malone? - I'm unclear why this kid merited two tellings of his story? His music is insanely popular, but not good. He seems dumber than a rock band drummer. I simply don't get it and 69: The Saga of Daniel Hernandez does little to help this cranky old man get hippenwiddet with the jive those new cats are meowing, man. It's somewhat worth watching if only as a window on how debased and pathetic our culture has become. Perhaps that's why I don't know what's going on: There's nothing to know about.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Hulu.

"Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art" Review

To paraphrase the Blur album title, modern art is rubbish. Post-modernism's war against truth and beauty has led to mountains of junk called "art" by elitist snobs where more effort goes into the titling and description card that hangs next to this claptrap explaining why some mess that could have been made by a brain-damaged wallaby on a meth jag represents abuse or systemic racism or the evils of late-stage capitalism. It's a scam and ugly. Go to a museum and look at works painted prior to the 20th Century when skill and technique were required and compare to current nonsense.

In fact, let me help you. This is Caravaggio's "The Calling of Saint Matthew":

And this is Robert Motherwell's "Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 70":

QED

Now that we've established that I have a rightfully low opinion of modern art, let's talk about Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art, a fast-paced documentary about how a bunch of super-wealthy elites paid millions for forged Abstract Expressionist (AbEx to the art snobs) paintings supposedly from Jackson "Expensive Drop Cloths My Specialty" Pollock and Mark "Rectangles Are Me" Rothko among other creators of sloppy claptrap that snooty doofuses chin-stroke over the energy of all that oily-black paint splattered all over a canvas. (Something about fools and money applies here.)

The tale starts in 1995 at New York City's oldest art shop, the Knoedler Gallery, which was in operation well prior to the Civil War, and the arrival of a woman named Glafir Rosales who claimed to represent an anonymous Mexican art collector who had come to America in the 1950s and bought tons of AbEx pieces on the cheap from the artists, but was looking to sell them. Starting with a Rothko (the rectangles guy) bought by the gallery's director, Ann Freedman, for the fire sale price of $750,000, eventually auctioning for $5.5 million. 

While the painting and the dozens more Rosales brought in over the next decade lacked the usual provenances, they were examined by numerous experts who deemed them authentic works of their respective artists. Eventually suspicions over the sheer quantity of supposedly unknown works - some of these artists like Pollock were extensively documented at work, yet none of these painting showed up lurking in the backgrounds of their studios - led to closer examination of the paintings and their eventual exposure which led to Freedman's resignation in disgrace ahead of the gallery's closing in 2011.

Beyond the absurd amounts of money for ugly paintings, the central question is how could such a scandal have occurred. Why didn't Freedman realize that how unlikely it is for so many paintings to come out of nowhere? One, two, even a dozen, perhaps; but over 60 works which sold for over $70M passed through her hands with her buying wildly below their auction value and flipping at great profit. As one talking head says, “Either she was complicit in it, or she was one of the stupidest people to have worked at an art gallery.” While it may seem judgemental, it's a question begging asking. Eventually one well-heeled victim sued and it went to trial forcing those who had authenticated the forgeries to explain how they'd blown it. The doc also hints that the trafficking was known to the gallery's owner, Michael Hammer (father of actor and cannibal wannabe Armie), who used the proceeds to keep the gallery solvent.

 As for where Rosales and her Spanish grifter boyfriend who used her as the face of the scam got the paintings, the answer is a Chinese national math professor who lived modestly in Queens. He'd come to America to pursue an art career, but when that didn't work out, he took to making fakes for his own amusement. In China, art reproduction is considered legit work and we're shown operations cranking out duplicates. When the scandal broke, he fled back to China (where he wouldn't be extradited), and refused to participate in the doc. While he's probably the least culpable in this fraud, it would've been nice to hear his story.

 Made You Look is of a piece with previous art docs like Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock? (about a lower-class woman who found a Pollock painting in a thrift store, but the snooty art world refused to accept it) and My Kid Could Paint That (4-year-old girl becomes art world phenom until it's learned her father is the actual painter) - both of which my DVD reviews have disappeared online, darn it - where the hype and sophistry surrounding modern "art" makes one question whether the art itself is the point or it's just a elite intellectual class thing?

Score: 7/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"Monster Hunter" 4K Review

 I've been calling for an end to Christopher Nolan's career for some time now. It doesn't matter that up through Inception everything he made was very good to excellent (scores in the 7-9/10 range); in the ensuing decade he has made four stinkers - The Dark Knight Reloaded (4/10), Intersuckular (2/10), Dumbkirk (4/10), and simply abysmal Tenet (1/10) - and you can only grade on a curve because The Dark Knight rocked for so long. He's become too insulated from reality and, no, that Dumbkirk was Oscar nominated and the movies make money doesn't change the objective fact that they're bad movies and Nolan has lost the plot.

But at least for the first half of his career he made a string of quality movies. (He's like Rob Reiner, who racked up a string of top-flight films, then made North - which Roger Ebert infamously said in his review, "I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it." - then never made another good movie again.) Maybe he'll come back like M. Night Shyamalan did for a moment before disappearing up his ass again. I'm not confident. 

But what explains the continuing career of Paul W.S. Anderson (not to be confused with the overrated Paul Thomas Anderson of Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood)? He's directed 13 films and with a few scattered exceptions - the flawed-but-very good Event Horizon; perhaps the first Resident Evil; the 2008 Death Race was kinda fun; I know there's affection for his 1995 Mortal Kombat take - he has made some gawdawful trash, pretty much wrecking the career of his wife and frequent star Milla Jovovich. (In comparison, Hollywood only allowed Renny Harlin and Geena Davis to pair up twice, but The Long Kiss Goodnight was good. Come on, Milla, you used to be married to Luc Besson. Can't you tell the difference?)

 Despite cratering the Resident Evil franchise with the increasingly bad final three entries, Anderson is back wrecking another Capcom video game franchise with his adaptation of Monster Hunter, which is about...wait for it....hunting monsters. Yeah. It's deep.

Jovovich stars as Capt. Artemis - which anyone who saw Ready Player One recognizes as the Goddess of the Hunt which immediately alerts us as to how profound this movie is going to be (i.e. not profound) - who is in an unnamed desert with her squad of red shirts searching for a missing squad whose tracks simply end. When a big CGI storm swoops in like a discount version of Mad Max: Fury Road, they attempt to flee but when passing some stones with ancient markings on them, lightning strikes and they are transported to another desert of white dunes. They rapidly realize they're not in desert Kansas anymore when a big monster which can swim through the sand attacks their vehicles.

The survivors manage to make it to a rocky area with caves preventing it from following them, but are immediately beset upon by giant crab-spider looking things who manage to kill everyone in the squad except Artemis because they weren't married to the director. Womp womp! Soon she meets the Hunter (Tony Jaa), whom she initially fights because they can't communicate, but eventually forges an alliance with because he appears to know how to fight these monsters and she's only alive because it's been a day and she's married to the director. 

After the obligatory training montage to teach her how to use this world's weapons, they tag-team the monster - called a Diablos because even trying for a slightly original name would've been too much work (if it's from the game, hold your comments; don't care) - and then set off for a dark tower on the horizon (similar to the dark tower from the Dark Tower movie) which may have the means to return her home. Along the way they encounter an oasis with the sailing ship (reminiscent of Soul, but not a ripoff) we saw the Hunter fall off of in the prologue, captained by Ron Perlman, sporting a wig that makes him look like a grown-up Feral Kid from The Road Warrior, and speaking English because he decided to study the people being sucked through the portal stones, because that's how you learn English when there's no TV, I suppose.

 The rushed third act consists of Artemis and her new pals fighting to get her into one of the unstable portals to transport her back. Do any monsters follow her through and attack the military which comes to rescue her instantly? (Duh, it's in the trailer.) Luckily, Jaa and Perlman show up in time to help her and protect our world because SEQUEL, amirite? Pffft. 

I didn't go into Monster Hunter with any expectations of quality. The last chapter of the RE series, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, was terrible even by the sinking standards of its predecessors, with spastic choppy editing that turned action scenes into incoherent noise. Anderson deploys the same meth addict aesthetic here as well, even during quiet scenes. At one point they encounter a mass of wrecked ships in the desert which was clearly practically built as a real set, but rather than allowing the viewer to appreciate the effort during a break in the action, it's cut-cut-cut-cut-cut-cut like Michael Bay at triple-speed.

 There's little else to discuss here. There are no characters - Artemis is a tough chick who has a wedding ring engraved "Forever" in a tin box in her pocket that we never learn about; the Hunter prays to a pair of small totems representing a dead wife and child; Perlman is Perlman - the action is adequate, the visual effects are mostly sufficient. There are monsters that are hunting and hunted....Monster Hunter.

The 4K presentation is bland. There aren't many colors that benefit and the dynamic range is OK, but nothing you'd demo your home theater with, much less watch a second time.

Score: 2/10. Skip it.

"Coming To America" Review

 The trend of incredibly belated sequels like Blade Runner 2049 (which came out 35 years after the original) continues next month with the release of Coming 2 America, the sequel to 1988 Eddie Murphy vehicle Coming To America, on Amazon Prime after its theatrical release was nuked by Hot Fad Plague 2020-21. I haven't seen the original entirely since it was in theaters, but a former co-worker (who suddenly passed away a year ago; I miss him) and I used to quote bits of the movie, especially the old Jewish man (also played by Murphy under Rick Baker's Oscar-nominated makeup) who hung out at the barbershop. 

Since the missus hadn't seen it and it had been 33 years for me, we decided to catch up on the original. She quickly fell asleep because, as I'm finding distressingly often lately, this comedy "classic" simply doesn't hold up beyond the parts people remember so fondly. It's similar to Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, which was never a great movie, but is really thin stuff now. (That it's sequels actually were significantly better bucks trends.) 

For the kids out there, Coming To America was the story of Akeem (Murphy), the crown prince of Zamunda (the fictional African country that's not Wakanda), who lives a life of ridiculous luxury, having even the most intimate personal hygiene performed by servants. On his 21st birthday, he is presented the woman whom it has been arranged for him to marry by his father, King Jaffe (James Earl Jones. Bored and disenchanted with his pampered life and not interested in marrying a woman who has no will of her own, having been raised to only serve her future husband, he begs his father to allow him to travel to America for 40 days. King, thinking it's just a Rumspringa-style break to "sow his Royal oats," approves.

Accompanied by his best friend and aide Semmi (Arsenio Hall), Akeem decides the best place to find a Queen of his own would be Queens, New York City. He requests the cab driver take him to the most common area of the borough and ends up in a rough neighborhood where their mountain of luggage is promptly stolen by the locals the moment their backs are turned. Posing as students, they move into a squalid apartment with a shared bathroom for the floor and set out to meet women. 

After an unsatisfactory (but amusing) tour of the clubs, Akeem and Semmi attend a local rally where Akeem spots Lisa McDowell (Shari Headley), a bright, independent woman when she gives a speech. Wanting to meet her, he and Semmi take jobs at her father's McDonald's knockoff, McDowell's. Concealing his true identity and reveling in doing manual labor, something Semmi does not share Akeem's enthusiasm for, he tries to get to know Lisa, who is dating Daryl (ER's Eric La Salle), a snotty heir to the Soul Glo hair relaxer fortune, which makes him prime husband material to her father (John Amos) to the extent that he announces Daryl's engagement to Lisa at a party without bothering to let Lisa know first. 

Taken by Akeem's polite charm, Lisa starts falling for him, but the usual spanners get thrown into the works when Semmi's telegram home requesting more money sparks an intervention by King Joffe and his wife (Madge Sinclair) as they rush to America to retrieve their wayward son, blowing his cover, and causing a rift between the lovers. Don't worry, it all works out in the end; no Romeo & Juliet double suicide ending here. 

What was so surprising about revisiting Coming To America was how dreadfully dull and slow-paced it is and how completely forgettable the core plot was. What has propped it up as a "comedy classic" is all the superfluous bits involving Murphy and Hall playing alternate characters disguised under Baker's makeup from the old barbers and Jewish man at the barbershop to a reverend and mediocre R&B singer fronting the band Sexual Chocolate. That the goofy sideshow material is what endures in the collective memory is a testament to the rote story. 

The core problem with the story, beyond its shallow familiarity, is the complete lack of a character arc for Akeem. He starts the movie bored with his life and seeking to break free of tradition and then does just that. Other than changing scenery, he doesn't evolve. If he had been a spoiled brat (like the Daryl character) and angered his father who then sent him to America to learn some humility amongst the poor folks, that would've been something. Instead he's always decent and good and just needs to get a like-minded decent girl to like him, too. Murphy is charming as Akeem, but only really unleashes his talents as the makeup characters. 

Beyond the script, most of the blame lands on director John Landis' shoulders. After a streak of genuine classics - he did The Kentucky Fried Movie, Animal House, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, and Trading Places - he never had another critical or commercial hit after the tragic accident which occurred while filming his segment of the Twilight Zone movie other than Coming To America. (While Trading Places filmed after the accident, something clearly broke in Landis and the CTA gig was a charity offering from Murphy and they butted heads during filming.) Clocking in at nearly two hours, everything drags and lacks energy. 

The sequel was directed by Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow) who last teamed with Murphy for the very entertaining Netflix biopic My Name Is Dolomite. While the premise is a head-scratcher (Akeem finds out he has a son in America, but since he never has sex with anyone in the first movie, um, whut?) and they're bringing back the barbershop guys (who looked to be at least in their 60s, so shouldn't they be dead by now?), there's not much of a bar to clear to be an improvement over the original. We'll see.

Score: 4/10. Skip it and watch the barbershop (note Cuba Gooding Jr. as the customer), Sexual Chocolate, and robbery (with Samuel L. Jackson!) scenes on YouTube.

"Romeo Is Bleeding" DVD Review

I couldn't remember much about the 1993 noir crime drama Romeo Is Bleeding other than one shot (which is one of the great foreshadowing bits in movies), that co-star Lena Olin was hot, and that it was a pretty good movie. After revisiting it for the first time in easily 20-plus years, only the first two points hold up.

 Update 5/14/2024: I finally reviewed the movie here. Different score and recommendation.

 As for DVD quality, can't recall and DVD is like VHS to me, so pass on that. Watched it in HD and that was fine looking.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"Climax" Review

Unlike fellow art house film provocateur Lars Von Trier, France-based Argentinian Gaspar Noé is lesser known to all but the most left-of-the-dial cinephiles, having made only five feature films in 20 years. The only one of his films I've seen is Irreversible, his 2002 sophomore effort which most people know due to its Memento-style structure (where it begins at the end of the story and each successive scene happens chronologically before) and the notorious scenes where a man is graphically murdered with a fire extinguisher in the opening scene and where Monica Bellucci is raped in an excruciatingly long single take. It's a good movie, but rather rough stuff. 

Prior to Climax, Noé's previous film was Love, which was on Netflix at the same time as Judd Apatow's series of the same name, which surely led to some people who were looking for a light rom-com co-starring Gillian Jacobs (Brita from Community) to be confronted with a dimly-lit opening scene of unsimulated sexual activity. HBO it wasn't! (And it was theatrically presented in 3D!)

So with the introduction of who would make such a movie as Climax out of the way, here is what happens in a movie which has this as its IMDB synopsis: "French dancers gather in a remote, empty school building to rehearse on a wintry night. The all-night celebration morphs into a hallucinatory nightmare when they learn their sangria is laced with LSD."

• A woman is seen from high above staggering through the snow before collapsing.
• We then see a bunch of videos of people talking about their dance career aspirations filmed on a old TV screen.
• The end credits roll in reverse off the top of the screen.
• In an unbroken shot, all the dancers who were interviewed do a loosely-choreographed dance sequence like a line up at a rave. Lots of krumping and flailing about.
• Afterwards they drink sangria and we get fragments of obviously improvised dialog where pairs of dancers discuss who they want to have sex with and other banal topics.
• Then the cast members names flash on the screen in wildly formatted fonts - Noé's name appears several times - and we get another dance number shot from above which renders the spastic motions boring because all dimension is missing. Busby Berkeley this ain't!
• Then the drugs kick in and everyone proceeds to freak out, accusing each other of being the culprit, throwing one person out in the cold, leading to people having sex or trying to kill each other, with plenty of screaming from everyone.
• The next morning, those who aren't dead are cuddled up with whomever they paired off with.

There is actually less plot to it than the bullet points may suggest. There's some dancing, a lot of talking, then it becomes a nightmare shown in (what I've read is) a 43-minute uncut shot. (Usually there are points where you can tell they've stitch segments together (like in 1917), but here it could actually have gone down as one bonkers Steadicam move through murkily-lit hallways bathed in lurid reds and sickly greens.

The only familiar face in the cast of unknowns is Sofia Boutella (The Mummy, Atomic Blonde) who used to be a professional dancer who toured with Madonna and Rihanna before starting in movies as the knife-legged chick in Kingsman: The Secret Service. While not really the lead, she gets slightly more screentime, but is limited to mostly screaming, flailing about, and screaming some more. What a waste of an exotic beauty.

I watched this on Amazon Prime Video in four or five chunks over a couple of weeks, despite being only 90 minutes long, because there was so little point to any of it, but I still wanted to see where the heck this mess was going, which ultimately turned out to be in circles and nowhere. Even as an experimental film, it's still a self-indulgent mess. 

Score: 2/10. Skip it.

"American Animals" Review

Considering how many movies have the word "American" in their titles - American Sniper, American Splendor, American Pastoral, American Made, American Assassin, American Pie in the past two decades alone - it would be understandable to glide right past American Animals (a reference to Charles Darwin's Origins of the Species) because it doesn't even hint at what it's about, but here's why you should check it out: It's an interesting hybrid of a docudrama, caper heist flick, AND documentary.

Based on an actual incident in 2004, it's the story of art student Spencer Reinhard (Barry Keoghan, Dunkirk), who takes a tour of his college's (Transylvania University, which is in Lexington, KY, not Dracula's neck of Eastern Europe), rare book collection which includes some impressive items including first editions of John James Audubon's The Birds of America and Origin of the Species. Bored and seeking excitement and/or inspiration, he enlists childhood pal Warren Lipka (Evan Peters, American Horror Story, Quicksilver in the later X-Men movies) in developing a plan to heist the books and fence them in Amsterdam. 

Since the book collection is on the second floor of the university library in a secured room and can only be accessed by appointment with an employee present, they realize they will need more hands and they loop in friends Chas (Blake Jenner, Glee) and Eric (Jared Abrahamson, nothing you've heard of) as wheelman and lookout, respectively. After extensive planning, they make an attempt at the heist in old man makeup and clothes that look like an AARP-endorsed version of the Beastie Boys "Sabotage" video, aborting when there are too many people in the book room. However, they make a second run the next day which goes.....well, you'll see. 

Despite trying to take care in their planning, their sheer incompetence and general lack of killer criminal instincts become their undoing. Apparently it took the FBI weeks to apprehend this gang who couldn't steal straight, but it really should've taken them a couple of days if they actually left so many loaves of bread for law enforcement to follow back to those who dropped them.

Where American Animals elevates the caper flick game is the integration of the real perpetrators (and to a lesser extent their families) in documentary talking head interviews. At one point, when there are differing recollections of how an event transpired, a real person is placed on screen next to their re-enactor which also introduces an element of unreliable narration as the gang have Roshomon-like differences in what went down ranging from what color a scarf was to whether one member actually did what he claimed to have done.

While using actors to dramatize events is a standard move for everything from America's Most Wanted to documentaries including writer-director Bart Layton's previous film, The Imposter (about a con man who convinced a Texas family he was their long-lost son despite looking nothing like the missing boy, being much older, and having a French accent which is worth watching, too), American Animals inverts the ratio to make the real people commentators on the recreation. What could've been a cheesy gimmick works quite well and frankly could've been used more because they're charismatic and appealing fellows despite being felons. (In another odd wrinkle, the real people are actually mostly more attractive than their actors.)

 The pace gets a bit slack towards the end, but overall American Animals proves truth can be stranger than fiction and that sometimes fictionalizing true events is best served by having the real people narrating. For that alone, it's worth checking out.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable. (Currently available on Amazon Prime Video and Hulu.)

"MI-5" Blu-ray Review

 This was a looting pickup from a closing Family Video, chosen because it starred Jon Snow (aka Kit Harrington) and looked like a spy action flick and cost 75 cents. While the movie somewhat delivers on its billing, it has a crucial detail which made it extremely unsatisfying to engage with: It's a spinoff film from a British TV series I'd never heard of called Spooks which ran for 10 series (86 episodes) from 2002-2012 (and was called MI-5 in the USA) with this film coming out in 2015 under the title Spooks: The Greater Good. Watching this would be like watching a 24 spinoff without knowing the show and its hero, Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland). 

Here is the synopsis of MI-5: The Motion: "When a terrorist escapes custody during a routine handover, Will Holloway (Harrington) must team with disgraced MI5 Intelligence Chief Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) to track him down before an imminent terrorist attack on London."

That's pretty much the movie. Pearce was the main character in the series and I guess if you were a fan of the show, what happens to him and what he does would carry more resonance, but since I wasn't, it didn't. It was fairly easy to spot some of the twists with the others being totally out of left field. It was more entertaining looking up the couple of familiar faces from American TV shows and discovering they were actually British including David Harewood (Martian Manhunter on Supergirl) and Eleanor Matsuura (Yumiko on The Walking Dead and Baron Chau on Into The Badlands). 

Because it relied on familiarity with the Spooks cast other than new additions Harrington and Jennifer Ehle (who's a ringer for Miranda Otto), I just couldn't work up much enthusiasm for a fairly beige spy thriller. If you're a fan of the show, have at it. Otherwise...

Score: 3/10. Skip it.