"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.  

"The Little Things" Review

All too often you see movies where at the end you're left wondering if anyone involved with the project actually read the script and recognized how illogical and unsatisfying it would be. Such is the case with John Lee Hancock's (The Blind Side) latest film - which is getting the simultaneous theatrical/HBO Max release treatment Wonder Woman 1984 and the entire 2021 Warner Bros slate is getting - which wastes the talents and time of its all-Oscar-winning lead cast.

Denzel Washington stars as Joe Deacon, a rural California county sheriff's deputy who is sent to Los Angeles to retrieve evidence for a local case. He is highly reluctant to go because he used to be a detective for the L.A. Country Sheriff's and left five years before under circumstances the film doles out slowly throughout. 

While there he meets his spiritual successor, a young hotshot detective, Jimmy Baxter (Rami Malek), who is lead investigator for a series of unsolved murders involving young women which are reminiscent of a case that wrecked Deacon's life, health, marriage, and career. After some obligatory turf-warring, they join forces to try and crack the case with Deacon's old dog teaching Baxter's pup some new tricks. 

Their hunt rapidly focuses on Albert Sparma (Jared Leto - whose name alone may as well be Murdery McMurderer), an exceedingly greasy and hinky character who is so obviously the killer that he can't possibly be the killer. While he taunts the detectives, he once made a false confession to a murder years previously, so what's his deal?

Set in oddly-specific-for-no-reason October 1990 (probably to remove ubiquitous cell phones from the mix and make communications harder) The Little Things presents itself as low-key mystery thriller, but if not for the overpowered cast, the plot would barely qualify as a Law & Order episode plot. Hancock - who apparently wrote the script in the 1990s and couldn't make it until now, which is never a great sign for a story -  drips out Deacon's backstory and literally haunts him with the women whose murders he couldn't solve, but the farther along the plot progresses, he begins to conceal more than he reveals in order to maintain a mystery that's only sustained through narrative chicanery. 

Things really go off the rails in the third act when characters suddenly get very stupid and seemingly change personalities in order for the events to transpire. This leads to a denouement that is both inconclusive and unsatisfying, raising more questions than it answers. Considering Hancock's track record of entertaining, if lightweight, movies like The Rookie, The Blind Side, and The Founder (dude has a thing for definite articles, doesn't he?), that The Little Things ends up so drab and forgettable and troubling is an unwelcome departure from form. 

Performance-wise, Denzel is Denzel, but subdued. Carrying more weight than usual, he embodies the broken, haunted man Deacon has become. Occasionally there are the typical flashes of Denzel charisma (which his son, John David Washington of BlackKklansman and Tenet most certainly hasn't inherited), but not distractingly. Malek never really registers. Either his character is written too flat or he doesn't know how to make him three-dimensional. The MVP is Leto, who gives a flamboyant, but not cartoonish, performance as Sparma which makes the viewer question whether he's the killer or not, but is ultimately let down by the inconclusive script. 

Despite its pedigree, the fact The Little Things was slated for late-January release and not Oscar season, even allowing for the havoc wreaked by Hot Fad Plague 2020-21, shows the studio knew it wasn't much of an awards prospect. I wasn't even aware this movie existed until a few days before its release. Frankly, if not for the stars, it would be an ignored TV movie or something that showed up on Netflix with no fanfare. Even with the stars and the option to not have to leave the house to watch it on HBO Max, it's the not-so-little-thing called the weak script that make it not worth the time.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart" Review

 What do you think of when you hear the name or music of the Bee Gees? Falsettos, white polyester, disco, and Saturday Night Fever, right? For right or wrong, their association with the top-selling movie soundtrack album in history is going to be what goes on their tombstones, but even if you're middle-aged you may be unaware of the long, repeated Lazarus act career of the Brothers Gibb (get it, BGs?) prior to the apex of disco fever.

Filling in and expanding the legacy of the Bee Gees is the mission of The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart, the new documentary exclusive on HBO Max. Using archive interview footage of fraternal twins Robin and Maurice Gibb (who died in 2012 and 2003, respectively) and sole surviving eldest brother Barry along with family and musicians including Justin Timberlake (whose participating in the SNL "Barry Gibb Talk Show" sketches with Jimmy Fallon are NOT referenced), Oasis' Noel Gallagher, and several members of their live band over the eras, the doc recounts the brothers earliest days as Brits who'd moved to Australia then returned to England after feeling constrained by Oz's small market.

 Their father/manager sent tapes to The Beatles' impresario Brian Epstein who then passed them to his protege Robert Stigwood who recognized their talent and signed them in early 1967. Within a few months they had their first two smash hits with "New York Mining Disaster 1941" and "To Love Somebody." But with the sudden success - Robin had SIX Rolls Royces before he was 21! - the brothers began to drift apart, finally breaking up in 1969. 

But in what would become a phoenix-like pattern, they reunited a couple years later and shortly were atop the charts again with tunes including "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart" but were eventually back in a slump and on the verge of being dropped. Taking the suggestion of Eric Clapton, who had just kicked years of addiction, they moved to Miami and moved into the house Clapton had stayed while recording his comeback album entitled with the address, 461 Ocean Boulevard. 

Working with Atlantic Records producer Arif Mardin, whose suggestion for Barry to try some high-pitched overdubs on "Nights On Broadway" revealed what would become their trademark falsettos and powered that and "Jive Talkin'" as hits. Their two Miami-recorded albums, Main Course and Children of the World, which included "You Should Be Dancing" made them Kings of Disco. Naturally, this led to their being included in the soundtrack of the movie Stigwood was producing starring a fresh young TV star named John Travolta and the rest was infamy. 

When the backlash to the ubiquity of disco hit in 1979, the Bee Gees bore the brunt of it since they were the biggest names in the game. Disco was dead and anyone associated with it had to be expunged from polite society. The irony is that while Saturday Night Fever is considered to have blown disco into the mainstream, it was actual the thing that prolonged a dying genre's lifespan a couple more years; it had already become played out when the movie hit. 

But as they'd done before, the brothers shifted from being performers to songwriters for hire and proceeded to rack up hits for Barbara Streisand ("Guilty"), Dionne Warwick ("Heartbreaker") and Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton ("Islands In The Stream"). They gradually were able to record hits, mostly outside the USA, later in the 1980s and were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, which only seems odd if you only knew them from their disco days.

At its best, The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart is a very informative overview of a group which had a career that spanned decades, but almost all of it was obliterated from the public consciousness for their association with Saturday Night Fever which is but two years of their lives. (No one just things of The Wall when thinking of Pink Floyd, do they?)

But where the doc falls short is in the total omission of their involvement in the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie - which co-starred fellow rocker-turned-simpy-pop-idol Peter Frampton - and the egregious journey into revisionist history which has been attempted against the notorious Disco Demolition Night riot in Chicago on July 12, 1979 which is considered the death knell of disco. 

The facts of that event are that Chicago shock jock and not-disco-fan Steve Dahl staged the event where anyone who brought a disco record to Comiskey Park could get a ticket to the double-header between the Detroit Tigers and Chicago White Sox for 98 cents. The bin of records was blown up during the intermission between the games and when the fans stormed the field and tore the place up, that was it for baseball game and the Sox forfeited the second game.

However, in recent years as social justice warrior wokeness has spread to suck every bit of joy from life, Disco Demolition Night has been falsely portrayed as a racist backlash by white straight male bigots to the music made and enjoyed by gays and people of color. The documentary features a black man who worked as an usher at the game who reports seeing Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye albums being turned in and since those aren't disco records, there could be no explanation other than white supremacy and racism in his or the film's eyes. (The idea that a bunch of rowdy rockers looking for a cheap night at the ballgame grabbed whatever disco-looking LP they could find to get the deal while lacking any racist intent isn't possible; no, it's RAAAAAAAAAAAAACISM!!!!)

Disco Demolition Night got extra play in my memory because being a Detroiter meant it happened on my local sportball team's time. There was also as similar anti-disco movement happening the Motor City with AOR station WRIF operating a group called D.R.E.A.D. (Detroit Rockers Engaged In The Abolition of Disco) where membership cards could be flashed at merchants for discounts. It was a marketing stunt, not a hate movement and it's especially hard to claim Detroit was a hotbed of seething white racism considering it's biggest non-automotive export was the music of Motown. 

Contemporaneous with the backlash against disco was the backlash against boring rock music in the form of punk/New Wave, but you don't see anyone claiming pasty white kids were being racist against tanned California rockers like The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, do you? In 1991, grunge blew up as the backlash to hair metal and slick Eighties pop. Then the turn of the Millennium brought a round of boy bands and Mousekabimbos to backlash against the miserable whining of grunge. That sparked the garage band days of the White Stripes et al and so on and on and on. When any generation gets bored of what corporate music pimps are cramming down their throats, they want something else, but for some reason the wokesters have decided that disco needs an oppression myth and Disco Demolition Night is their vehicle.

/rant

With the above caveats, The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart is still a worthy primer on a talented and ultimately tragic family act - the youngest brother, Andy, who had his own massive pop star career, died only five days after his 30th birthday from years of substance abuse in 1988 - that had several mini-careers in their lives. Even if you don't want to forgive them for their disco crimes against music or aren't fond of their schmaltzy pop stylings, it's still an enlightening musical journey worth taking.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on HBO Max. 

"The Social Network" Blu-ray Review

A favorite of mine as David Fincher's 2010 mythologized telling of the invention of Facebook (which I call FaceSpace) simply crackles from Aaron Sorkin's Oscar-winning adapted screenplay (I still want to know if the mic-drop, engrave the trophy line, "If your clients had invented Facebook, they would've invented Facebook." was an actual deposition quote or a brilliant invention), plus Oscar-winning editing and score, the latter by Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who most recently scored Pixar's Soul. In retropect, that it lost for Best Picture and Direction to the forgotten Oscar-bait historical biopic The King's Speech is just another in a long list of shameful Academy missteps.

It's interesting revisiting The Social Network now because it came out only six years after FaceSpace's founding and it was still somewhat of a scrappy little upstart. As the closing text informs us, it was worth $25 billion, which seems like a heck of a lot of money until you realize that as if this writing its market cap is $782 billion. They've also swelled from about 600 million users - as the brilliant tagline said, "You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies." - to about 2.6 BILLION users, with over 1.7B of them visiting the site daily.                                                 

What the movie doesn't even hint at what would become of the social network as it became a Big Tech monopoly power fueled by billions of dopamine-addicted, affirmation-craving users who would rely on it and their closed circles of like-minded "friends" for their information (and misinformation) and how to feel about it. The movie focuses on the money being made, but not what the site actually did. 

As we saw during the lockdowns from Hot Fad Plague 2020 (which left people with little to do but tribe up and fight each other) and the run-up to the 2020 Elections (and the ensuing Big Tech censorship crackdown that occurred once Democrats had seized total control of the Federal government), Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter's Jack Dorsey, Apple's Tim Cook, Google Sundar Pichai, and Amazon's Jeff Bezos, comprising a small cabal of oligarchs in total control of the platforms, what information is allowed to be spread, throttling or outright deplatforming "wrongthought", would convert what may've been intended as a means for freedom of speech and a way to facilitate associations into a censorious police state where the end game may be their acting as an intelligence-gathering arm of government. (Sounds paranoid, but when truthful news is blocked and speaking facts that the Big Tech bosses don't like gets you unpersoned, how much of a stretch is it to find a "national security" pretense to see who's posting "anti-government" speech? Exactly.)

On the technical side, the transfer is clean since it's digitally sourced from RED camera. Fincher likes flat contrast, short lighting (where the light comes from behind the subjects), and drab colors, so there's little flash to look at. On the audio side though, the superiority of physical media over streaming is displayed by a booming DTS-HD soundtrack which really puts the boom in the room from the musical score. (Streaming is bitrate-limited Dolby Digital+ at best.) The opening scene in the bar is concerning as the dialog has to fight the environmental sound, but that's a (dubious) artistic choice as the rest of the movie is clearly understandable. 

Another plus for physical is the Blu-ray set comes with a raft of extras. I haven't listened to the two commentary tracks, one my Fincher and the other by Sorkin with the cast, but there's an entire second disc including a hour-and-a-half documentary making-of plus several other craft-specific featurettes which I've watched in the past and recall are quite informative. (I miss bunches of extras, another casualty of the shift to streaming for everything.)

While there are substantial fictionalizations in the telling of The Social Network, it's still truthful enough and most importantly entertaining enough to merit watching and collecting. The irony is that there's no way a movie like this which even cast the least bit of shade on oligarchs like Zuckerberg could be made today. Worth over $100 billion, he now has the power to topple a President and ban him from his site, so who would be able to portray him as a mildly sociopathic jerk of a nerd? Exactly.

Score: 9/10. Buy it. 

"Sound of Metal" Review

UPDATE: This movie garnered an appalling six Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Actor, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Sound, and Editing. The problematic ones are Picture and Screenplay. 2020 was a bad year and the Oscar nominations reflect it.

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The most devastating thing that can happen to most musicians not related to physical infirmities like losing your hands would be losing your hearing. Other than Beethoven, there's not a lot of musicians known for performing while stone deaf and even good ol' Ludwig van was a composer and they can tell what music sounds like from reading the score. In general, "deaf musician" is as workable as "blind sniper." As a musician myself, it was with some interest that I approached Sound of Metal, the story of a drummer (and thus not a musician, hiyo!) whose life is upended when he suddenly goes deaf. Unfortunately, it's a woefully told tale.

 Riz Ahmed (The Night Of, Star Wars: Rogue One) stars as Ruben, the drummer in a two-man band with his girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke, Ready Player One) which is like a gender-flipped White Stripes except not good. While on tour, Ruben begins to experience profound hearing loss. Advised by a doctor that he may be able to salvage what remains of his hearing if he avoids loud noises (kind of difficult in his line of work), he naturally ignores the advice and blows out what remains. 

As a former junkie, Lou is worried that he'll relapse and gets the name of a program, a facility in a rural area for the deaf run by a deaf, recovering alcoholic, Vietnam veteran named Joe (Paul Raci). In meeting him, he lays down the strict rules of the place to Ruben, no contact with the outside world, everyone works, focusing on adapting to their condition. Lou has to go and Ruben initially rebels.

 Eventually he gets with the program, but is sneaking looks on a computer to see what Lou is doing, as she eventually starts doing music on her own. He sells his gear and the RV they lived and toured in to fund cochlear implants to restore his hearing, ultimately getting the surgery done. But because Joe and his group believe deafness isn't a handicap, Ruben is expelled from the group.

He  goes to Lou's father's house where we learn a whole bunch of backstory about her family; her mother committed suicide and her father is a wealthy French musician. Their reunion is strained and they end up parting.

 I only spell out the entire plot because there is so little to it and it ends up going nowhere slow. Why the sudden heavy stuff at the end? Why does Joe, knowing Ruben is a junkie and, rejected and cast out, likely to relapse, pretty much condemned to die for not adhering to the "we are not broken" mentality without care for how Ruben wants to live? That the cochlear implants don't sound right implies he wasn't counseled as to expectations beforehand or calibrated over time afterwards; it's not like getting a tooth filled. Also, the leap between Ruben resisting learning sign language and being shown as fluent is literally a hard cut to the next scene without as much as a "Six Months Later" or learning montage. It's as if a reel was missing.

The performances from Ahmed and Raci are very good, though Ruben being thinly-written means the Ahmed has to inflate the character himself. Press materials claimed he studied the drums for six months in order to appear credible playing, but that's laughable as all we ever see the band doing is bashing the finale chords of songs. Anyone could sit down and do what's shown. Tara Reid plays drums more credibly in Josie and the Pussycats and she's hit-and-miss in her accuracy. (Miles Teller in Whiplash fakes it really well.)

Raci is fine, but he is in real life not hearing impaired, but the child of deaf parents. This means he speaks perfectly clearly and not with the voice modulation issues that deaf people like Marlee Matlin (who won an Oscar for Children of a Lesser God) exhibit and this makes it hard to believe he is deaf. While those who go deaf as adults manifest less of the warble, they still have it; just record yourself talking with your ears plugged to see. 

One thing the movie really does well at is capture the sound of hearing impairment, muffling frequencies to get us in Ruben's head. (A Quiet Place did this as well with the daughter.) 

Despite a promising premise and good performances, Sound of Metal simply doesn't understand what it's trying to say as well as it imagines and ends up frustratingly inert.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.