Welcome To DirkFlix!

UPDATED 4/1/2025: Completely revised the When To See scale to reflect the extinction of rental stores and 2nd run dollar show theaters in today's streaming world. The original version of this can be visited here.
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Oh, fercryingoutloud! ANOTHER movie review blog?!? Another guy who thinks his opinion matters and wishes to inflict it on the overloaded Information Superhighway? (What ever happened to that buzzword? Haven't heard it in ages.) Why should we care?

A: Yes, yes, and why not?

The purpose of this blog when started after seeing Avatar in 2009 was to allow me to get back into the habit of reviewing movies and DVDs like I used to between 2004-2008 for IGN and The Digital Bits before life stuff and editorial differences ended those associations.

 Initially intended to not be 1000-2000 word chin-stroking epics, but mostly a few paragraphs about what I've been watching and whether they might be of interest to you, I unfortunately got slack about actually writing anything. While I logged and scored everything I've seen, I didn't write reviews in a timely manner and after a while and a dozen intervening movies, I couldn't remember enough specifics to properly review them, so they remained unpublished.

Since fixing hundreds of unwritten reviews is impossible, I've dedicated myself to knuckling down this year (2025), and as of this revised update only a few reviews need to be finished off out of over 40 this year. I may also go back and start publishing older reviews, even if they're just scores; perhaps adding a sentence or two. Use the hashtag options and search box to see if I saw something in particular.

With movies even more outrageously expensive and even an all-you-can eat service like Netflix and Amazon Prime can still cost you time (which is worth more than money because you can't make more of it), I give movies a numerical score (wow! original!) and how urgently it is for you to see it. Since the Hot Fad Plague of 2020-2022 completely upended going to the movies and everyone and their dog started subscription streaming services (as well as good old cable for Boomers), I have radically revised the When To See scale from six to basically three points:

 1. Pay full/matinee price to see it at a theater. Pretty self-explanatory. The rare times I now go see a movie theatrically, I'll rate whether it's worth going to the show and how much you should pay.

2. Catch it on cable/streaming. This is the most common recommendation now because I see the overwhelming majority of movies at home, but also not every movie needs the theatrical experience. Whether you choose to wait for it to come to your streamer/cable channel of choice, rent or buy it digitally, or hoist the black flag to obtain it, is up to your budget and/or morals. Movies with this ranking are worth your time.

3. Skip it. Even for free, life's too short to waste on bad movies.

For Blu-ray/DVD reviews, I'll recommend whether they're worth buying since there's no rental options anymore now that Redbox has joined Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, Family Video in oblivion. The quantity and quality of extras or the audio-visual quality factor heavily here.

As always, these reviews are just one lifelong movie fans opinions, except that unlike other critics & fans, mine is the only opinion that matters and all reviews are 100% correct in their judgements. If you disagree, that's fine, but understand that you are incorrect in your opinion. ;-)

 Enough of my yakking, let's review some movies!

"Dennis and Lois" Review

The titular Dennis and Lois are a couple of music superfans from Brooklyn, NYC who've been together over 40 years without bothering to get married and are pals with bands as varied as the Ramones (whom they used to sell their merch for in the CBGB's days), The Mekons (which is their vanity plate after getting tired of their RAMONES plate being stolen constantly; no one has nicked the MEKONS plate, womp womp), Joy Division, Happy Mondays, etc., some of whom crashed at their place when first touring NYC.

They figure they've attended over 10,000 shows, but as this documentary shows, it's getting harder as they get up in years as health problems begin to impede. Testimonials from Budgie (Siouxsie & the Banshees), Peter Hook (New Order) are intercut with footage of the couple on the road following some band called The Vaccines around. Everyone loves Dennis and Lois to the point that in gratitude for them FedExing some weed to Happy Mondays in California for their recording sessions, they wrote a song entitled "Dennis and Lois" on their Pills 'N' Thrills and Bellyaches album. We also see their home which is so packed with various music, comic book and movie memorabilia it's almost a hoarder situation except it's well organized and displayed.

 The problem with the documentary is that while it's nice they're loved and they love music and helping musicians, director Chris Cassidy doesn't organize it all very well and omits a lot of basic details leaving many questions unanswered beginning with how the heck are they funding their lifestyle which includes two or three trips to England annually (they're very fond of Manchester, home of Oasis, Happy Mondays, The Smiths, Joy Division, etc.) and all these road trips. Lois worked as the manager of the copy room at an architectural design firm until her health got too bad, but they drive a Mercedes crossover, mention giving tenants a rent reduction for Christmas, and simply seem to be living outside their means. (I joked to the missus whether they were slinging crack to the neighborhood kids?) Unless I missed it, Dennis doesn't work and I only know (I think) his last name - Anderson - because I finally found it on a FaceSpace post. What's Lois's? /shrug emoji

 Then there's the matter of when was this filmed? The end of their stint with The Vaccines coincided with her birthday and the band wishes her a happy 65th birthday. While visiting Johnny Ramone's grave in Hollywood, she mentions he was born in the same year as her, 1948, so that birthday would've been in 2013. However, there is video of them attending a show by Frank Sidebottom - an act which would be memorialized in the 2014 film Frank starring Michael Fassbender - followed by them learning of the passing of Chris Sievey, who played Frank with a large paper mache head on, which was in 2010. The documentary is dated 2018, but we're never told when events are happening.

While there should be an interesting story about a unique pair, sadly Dennis and Lois does a lackluster job telling it. 

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

"This Is Gwar" Review

 If there's a band many people know of, but have never heard, it would be Gwar, the shock rock heavy metal band whose members - with names like Oderus Urungus, Flattus Maximus, and Beefcake the Mighty - dress up in wild sci-fi/fantasy costumes and whose shows are packed with monsters and all sorts of simulated bodily fluids soaking the crowd like a Grand Guignol Gallagher show. They are every parents nightmare and every kid who wants to piss of their folks' dream.

But who and/or what is behind this wildly long-running freakshow? That's what This Is Gwar does a pretty good job in recapping starting from their surprising origin in Richmond, VA when a pair of Virginia Commonwealth University students named Hunter Jackson (who would go on to become Techno Destructo) and Chuck Varga (Sexecutioner) set up what they called The Slave Pit as a production space in an artist collective set up in an old dairy bottling plant to make a movie called Scumdogs of the Universe.

A neighbor in the complex was a band called Death Piggy fronted by singer Dave Brockie asked to borrow the costumes from they'd made so that Death Piggy could masquerade as their opening band, Gwaaarrrgghhlllgh, barbarians which hailed from Antarctica. When Death Piggy realized people were coming for the opening joke band then leaving before they played, they phased out Death Piggy and committed to Gwar.

They built a following for their outlandish stage shows, but the musical direction was in flux. We're they serious metal, were they seriously goofy, were they something in between and beyond imagination? A self-released videotape called Phallus in Wonderland earned them a Grammy nomination for Long-Form Video and they signed to Metal Blade Records in the early-1990s, but promptly wrecked the label's chances for distribution with Warner Bros. because they wouldn't tone down some of the more extreme lyrics.

Band members also came and went with replacements donning the costumes leading to a real Band of Theseus situation where now there are no original members left after the death of Brockie in 2014 of a heroin overdose. The creative tensions between artistry and commerce also clawed at the band as well as crazy incidents like a guitarist being shot (in an incident the movie makes sound like he was shot by cops, but I can't find any confirmation for) and another dying of a blood clot in his tour bus bunk with the band only missing one show, choosing to grieve by soldiering on. 

Jackson and Brockie seriously clashed with Jackson either quitting or being fired (depending on who's telling the story) and the animosity was so strong that after Brockie's death he refused to attend the funeral because he was afraid he'd say what he really thought of the deceased. (He would eventually join the band onstage years later.)

 Ironically, as the band's music got more accomplished, their shock value declined though part of that may've been that what's shocking had shifted in no small part due to Gwar's shifting the Overton Window. (To paraphrase Elvis Costello, what used to disgust us now amuses us.) With over 100 people having played in or participated on the periphery of Gwar, portraying the "slaves" and operating the elaborate props there's obviously going to be picking and choosing as to what's featured, but in reading other reviews I've learned that there was a brief post-Brockie attempt to have a female singer (Vulvatron) that is glossed over in favor of the return of the OG Beefcake the Mighty, Mike Bishop, to front the band as Blöthar the Berserker. (To be fair, she was only there for a year whereas Toledo native Todd Evans, who was Beefcake for five years is relegated to a mass roster title card at the end).

 While not exhaustively complete, This Is Gwar, is a good primer on a band more known-of than known with a more colorful backstory than the surface joke implies. 

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Viewed on AMC+; also on Shudder)

"Simple Minds: Everything Is Possible" Review

 Over the summer the missus and I saw Simple Minds for the first time. They were touring on the 40th Anniversary of their signature hit, "Don't You Forget About Me", from The Breakfast Club (which they ironically didn't want to record because they didn't write it). It was a good show and made us want to hunt down this 2023 BBC documentary about the band.

After finally finding it on the high seas (it may be available thru the BBC iPlayer app, but we don't do that here in the former Colonies), Simple Minds: Everything Is Possible is merely an adequate 20,000 foot overview of the band's history beginning with singer Jim Kerr and guitarist Charlie Burchill meeting as young boys on a construction site sand pile in 1967 Glasgow, Scotland.

The sole consistent members of the band, the doc zips through their forming a band in 1978, getting and losing record deals as they struggled to find their sound, but gradually finding success, appearing on Top of the Pops, becoming a successful band everywhere but America, then launching into superstardom thanks to John Hughes the same way The Psychedelic Furs were boosted by Pretty In Pink (which Hughes copped the title from them). Eventually rock star excesses started peeling away members of the band and by the early-1990s they were burned out from 15 years of constant activity.

 The intervening years are given short shrift as Kerr apparently moved to Italy and sponsored the local soccer team. We spend some time with him wandering the pitch, but what does this have to do with Simple Minds? They makers also bafflingly omit the roles of the musicians interviewed, presumably presuming the audience already knows so-and-so was the kazoo player? Various producers and presenters are tagged, but there is one woman whom I have no idea is.

Simple Minds: Everything Is Possible falls in between being useful for people who know nothing about their history and those who are familiar, but want more. Basic details like just how much older Kerr's wife, The Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde, was than him (A: nine years) aren't spelled out though mentioned. While passingly informative, it falls short for both audiences.

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

"The Running Man (2025)" 4K Review

 I've been increasingly down on Edgar Wright's work over the ensuing 15 years since his peak with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (which I've grown to love more as I figured out what Michael Cera's Scott was supposed to be about and how Ramona didn't suck as much as I thought). The World's End was Wright beginning to coast; Baby Driver showed he can't write as well as he directs; Last Night in Soho was stylish, but again underbaked (though the missus loved it). Even so, I was interested in the rumors that he'd be helming an updated take on Barbarella starring hot vavoom queen Sydney Sweeney. Sadly, after enduring his remake - or more accurately, readaptation of Stephen King's 1982 novel The Running Man - I'm no longer as sanguine about its prospects.

Glenn Powell stars as Ben Richards, a man whose daughter is sick with the flu. Due to his inability to let injustices against coworkers go unopposed, he has been blacklisted from pretty much all employment and he and his wife live in the slums of Co-Op City. Desperate for money, he goes down to Network's TV tower apply to go on one of their less dangerous game shows to earn some money for medicine. Instead he gets selected to go on the Network's #1 show, The Running Man (roll credits!), where contestants win $1 billion New Dollars if they can survive 30 days being hunted by the show's executioners while everyone in the nation can win money by spotting and calling in his location to the show. No one has ever survived the full 30 days, but Ben just hopes to earn enough to get his family out of the slums.

Allowed a 12 hour head start and some seed money, he visits a friend (William H. Macy) who supplies him with disguises and fake IDs, then tries to stay out of sight while sending in the required daily videotaped diaries. Sometimes this is a problem because people loitering around the mailboxes (which fly away after the tape is deposited, which doesn't seem very efficient) may spot him. He also discovers that Network is editing what he's submitting, censoring politically verboten topics and deepfaking incendiary rhetoric in its place in order to keep the audience riled up.

Along the way he is aided by rebels - Bradley (Daniel Ezra) and Elton (Michael Cera) - who try to shepherd him to safety, but the deck is massively stacked against him as it becomes clear that Network head honcho Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) can cheat at will and is manipulating events for maximum ratings and audience enervation.

The original 1987 take starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was no great shakes, only lightly following the books gritty premise and directed with TV movie style by Paul Michael Glaser, best known for playing Starsky on Starsky & Hutch. But despite a big upgrade in budget and having Michael Bacall, his co-writer on Scott Pilgrim, sharing the adaptation duties Wright seems to have had no idea what kind of movie he was making and what to say with it.

While I knew I was hoping against hope they would keep the book's ending (where Ben crashes an airplane into the Network tower while flipping off Killian; though they almost tease they will), referring to the Wikipedia synopsis (I read it back when Reagan was President, so I don't remember specifics) shows they hit almost every story beat (except the ending, dammit) but managed to whiff on telling a focused story. It looks good with plenty of CGI-enhanced cityscapes, but doesn't know if it's a campy satire of reality game shows (one reminded me of Ow, My Balls! from Idiocracy), a dystopian anti-capitalist screed (so edgy for a $110M budget movie), or something in between.

Core to this tonal dissonance is Powell's smirky performance which Wright allowed. From my first noticing him on the Scream Queens TV series through his appearances in Top Gun: Maverick, Hit Man, and Twisters (haven't seen Anyone But You yet despite Sydney Sweeney being in it, too), he's always played the smirking, cocksure, handsome guy. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But here when he's trying to play Desperate Father Trying To Save Family (and Take Down the System) and he's whipsawing between Anguished Father Mode to Profane Rabblerouser Mode without landing on an effective medium. Wikipedia says Wright initially planned to have Chris Evans as the lead and if the script had picked a lane he probably would've been excellent as he can do snarky a-hole (as in Scott Pilgrim) or deadly serious (his Captain America) without one bleeding into the other. 

Brolin just has to play corpo sleaze, but does it well. The standout of understanding the assignment is Colman Domingo who amps up the camp for Bobby T., the host of the show. I'm not sure why Lee Pace (Foundation) was cast for his anonymous (until the last act) role and Emilia Jones (CODA) just kinda shows up to be a hostage at the end who learns that the system is rigged.

Back to bitching about the ending, while I guess I can understand why they didn't go with the book's, the happy ending they cobbled together feels cheap, not earned, definitely not satisfying.

If you approach The Running Man just seeking empty, mindless action, then it's somewhat OK and Powell's smirky take may fit, but why can't movies try to be a little be more betterer written?

The 4K Dolby Vision presentation wasn't bad with some good neon highlights in the darkness, but nothing shouts demo material. SDR is fine.

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

"The Thief Collector" Review

 It's True Crime Documentary Time and tonight's entry is 2022's The Thief Collector which tells the story of a stolen modern art masterpiece found in the most unlikely of places, apparently stolen by the least likely of thieves.

 In 2017, an estate sales dealer in rural New Mexico was contacted to sell off the contents of a home of deceased couple Jerry and Rita Alter. Packed with all sorts of odd knick knacks gathered from the couple's world travels, the walls were lined with amateurish paintings which the dealers felt would have little market. However, in the couple's bedroom, hanging behind the door so it would only be visible inside the room with the door closed was one painting that clearly didn't match the rest, though it's aesthetic merit was debatable. (If you're like me and find much of what's called abstract Expressionist "art" to be garbage, you'll agree that this painting doesn't scream, "Good!")

They took it to their shop and almost immediately a customer spotted it, asked if was "a de Kooning" and offered $200,000 for it on the spot. That got their attention and they rapidly determined this painting appeared to be a mid-Century work by Willem de Kooning called Woman-Ochre which had been stolen from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson in 1985 on the day after Thanksgiving after being cut from its frame. A couple who visited the museum were suspects, but obviously the case was ice cold, the work believed stolen under contract for some wealthy collector's secret stash. (At the time it was recovered, it's estimated selling price was $160 million, though the conditions of its donation to the museum was that it could never be sold.)

 That the Alters were almost certainly the culprits is rapidly determined, especially when the fact they spent Thanksgiving in Tucson with relatives, they resembled the police sketches, had a car and clothes similar to the suspects, and the odd lack of entries in the diaries Rita meticulously maintained listing everything and everywhere they did and went as if to not have a written record of being in the city where they pulled off the heist. Not to mention the whole it was hanging in their bedroom thing!

 Filling out the rest of the documentary is a lot of speculation about how the couple managed a globe-trotting adventurers lifestyle on a single income. They weren't just doing the usual London-Paris-Rome tourism thing, but would go to exotic places where they'd pay someone to sneak them into the neighboring country one couldn't visit directly or they'd live in a hut somewhere for a month. They'd do these expeditions a few times per year.

Adding to the intrigue is a self-published book of lurid short stories written by Jerry which some believe are tantamount to confessions to untold crimes including possibly murdering an itinerant Mexican laborer who may have gotten too friendly with Rita and dumping the body in the septic tank.

Director Allison Otto uses cute, deliberately cheesy reenactments, of the heist and other speculations as to what the Alters were up to, but ultimately nothing comes of it as no other reportedly stolen items were found in their home, though there was a bunch of valuable things that sold at auction for a tidy sum that no one knows how they came into their possession.

If you watch your crime docs to have a complete story told, The Thief Collector isn't for you because even the obviously closed case is only circumstantially resolved. While the speculation is interesting, the lack of resolution moots its relevance. But if you like having more questions than answers, The Thief Collector is for you.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Viewed on Amazon Prime Video)

It's viewable for free with ads on YouTube as well:

"Sisu: Road To Revenge" 4K Review

 One of the surprises of 2022 was Sisu, a kicky, brutal action flick from Finland starring Jorma Tommila as Aatami Korpi, a former one-man walking genocide soldier turned prospector, as he killed many many MANY Nazis at the end of WWII after they stole the gold he'd mined. Seemingly invincible, the old guy made John Wick look like a beta soy bitch as he withstood massive physical abuse while dishing out much worse.

Since that which is rewarded gets repeated, it's not much surprise as writer-director Jalmari Helander has returned to the well for Sisu: Road to Revenge which takes place a couple years after the events of the fist film. After WWII, Finland gave up a chunk of their Eastern border to the Soviet Union causing hundreds of thousands of Finns to migrate Westward. Korpi's family home was in the territory forfeited, so we open with him crossing into the USSR with a truck to dismantle the house, stack it up, and take it back to Finland.

As he's doing this, we jump to Siberia where Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang, Avatar) is imprisoned. He's hauled out of his cell and told Korpi has entered Soviet territory and since he murdered Korpi's wife and two young sons, hacking them to pieces with shovels - "We were saving ammunition," explains Draganov - and Korpi then killed over 300 Ruskies in response, he'll get a pardon if he cleans up his mess.

The rest of the film, each chapter titled like videogame levels, consists of Draganov dispatching forces to kill the seemingly unkillable Korpi who turns the tables in increasingly cartoonish manner. (Don't watch the trailer because it gives away almost everything.) But even after suspending disbelief from a crane atop Mt. Everest some of the scenarios really test credulity considering at the end of the first movie Korpi survives a plane crash a black box wouldn't have.

More annoyingly is that at the beginning of the pursuit the antagonists face off and while Korpi murderizes everyone else, he doesn't kill Draganov because the movie would be over. While Sisu: Road to Revenge shares the same ~90 minute runtime, it feels padded out and could've been tightened at least 15 minutes.

Tommila portrays the grieving rage of Korpi as well as he did last time with one less line of dialog than in Sisu which if you were keeping score was only one line of dialog. That's right, he doesn't say anything this time. Lang plays Draganov the way he's played everything since Avatar, meaning Quaritch with a Boris Badenov accent. While it's fun to watch the pair whose combined ages are 139 years throw down (or more likely their stuntmen), the movie works too hard to make it happen.

The 4K Dolby Vision presentation captures cinematographer Mika Orasmaa's (taking over from Kjell Lagerroos) moody widescreen vistas well. The movie is heavy on practical explosions which give the sound system a workout as well with good positional surround audio. 

While Sisu: Road to Revenge is a step down from the original, fans of the original wanting more of the same should be satisfied. But for me this should be the old guy's last adventure.

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

"Band On The Run" Review

Band On The Run popped on my radar because it was filmed in the Metro Detroit area and was getting hyped up on FaceSpace after its landing on streaming. As a musician, the plot about a scrappy indie band going to play the then-relevant SXSW music festival in Austin, TX in 1999 (just ahead of the garage band explosion spearheaded by The White Stripes which had labels making their way to Motown the way they pillaged Seattle a decade before) piqued my interest because as a Detroiter I had a front-row seat to this time.

Jesse (Matthew Perl) works at an ad agency by day and plays drums for Hot Freaks with his two bandmates. They dream of being selected to showcase at SXSW where they're sure they'll be discovered, but that honor seems reserved for rival band Bull Roar, a press darling band fronted by J.J. (Landon Tavenier), whose gimmick is a "magic mike stand" with a head that allows the microphone to spin around, presumably for a Leslie effect, and has Hipster Records rumored to be coming to sign them.

He lives with his parents including his wheelchair-bound, chronically-ill father, Thomas (Larry Bagby), who's angry demeanor prompts his wife to leave him after one too many arguments. This proves to be a major problem when Jesse discovers the band has been invited to showcase at SXSE after finding the envelope hidden away. With no one to care for Thomas, the decision is made to take him on the trip to Austin. So, the quartet pile into a rusty van of questionable maintenance status and hit the highway.

A coincidental pit stop at a gas station where Bull Roar is gives them an opportunity to swipe J.J.'s precious mic stand and their magnetic band sign after which they proceed to post photos to message boards of the stand being defiled. But much of the time is occupied by Jesse at first being disgusted by his father before beginning to learn about his life and what they share in common without his somehow ever knowing.

I know I'm expected to grade Band On The Run on a heavy curve because it's a scrappy no budget indie effort from my hometown, but I can't quite get there and it's not a critic's job to hand out As for effort. Starting with the positives, Bagby's - the one "real" actor in the cast with numerous film and TV credits - performance is very good because Thomas starts off as an insufferable a-hole whose rage is poorly explained but he manages to make him more sympathetic over time than despite the thin, cliched script.

It's also fun to hear clubs like The Gold Dollar (where the White Stripes debuted) and Lili's name-checked as well as how Jesse responds to co-workers asking to be put on the guest list for their shows, "It's only five dollars." (So true. Been there.)

But going down the list the plot halves don't really mesh. For a story about a band, we never see them play more than a few seconds and while a point is made about how they feature three-part harmonies there is only one microphone at their practice space and the final show. The family drama half is completely borrowed from a forgotten 1986 dramedy called Nothing In Common starring Tom Hanks as an advertising executive whose elderly parents split up leaving him to care for his cantankerous father with hidden health issues played by Jackie Gleason in his final role. (Ironically, the best movie about being in an up-and-coming band is That Thing You Do, written & directed by Tom Hanks.)

Finally, the rivalry with Bull Roar resolves so conveniently with everyone getting along and the stupid mike stand actually not being that important to J.J. that it begs the question what was any of that about? His remark of what their next gimmick would be is also a second veiled shot at the White Stripes the movie makes where the writers clearly diss the Motor City duo, but aren't brave/dumb enough to do so by name and alienate what little interest they'd have in town.

And while I'm kicking the makers - The Powers That Be (think they have matching hats that read this?) - while they're down, the movie's website is a mess with five paragraphs about the Garage Era in Detroit before getting around to mentioning the movie while saying nothing about it. The cast run down uses the cast's headshots and lists their credits like a theater program and doesn't really explain who their characters are. One cast member, whom I'm not even sure who he played (and I'm not about to sit through 2-1/2 minutes of Amazon Prime commercials to go check the movie again), has a link to his various links and his own link to "First Radio Performance" goes to a YouTube video from what appears to be a Brooklyn cable access thing where he cues it up to AFTER his segment, starting on some unrelated act. One could write it off to TPTB being better at filmmaking that website design, but they're all from the ADVERTISING business according to their bio!

Finally finally, co-writer & director Jeff Hupp chose to shoot this in 2.4:1 widescreen because "widescreen equals cinematic" but due to the cramped confines of the practical locations it means many instances of 80% of the frame being walls while the remainder shows the people in the next room. Just as Saltburn goofed on its aspect ratio by going 1.37:1 thus denying the grandeur of the estate's locale, this should've been done in perfectly cinematic 1.85:1. 

While I've definitely been critical of Band On The Run, I'm not so down on it as to recommend skipping it completely. It has a bit of the low-fi DIY charm that Clerks had while lacking that classic's focus. There are some amusing and/or heartfelt moments and if you're knowledgeable about the Detroit music scene's history at the turn of the millennium there may be just enough to catch it. Oh, and despite the movie's claims, I've never heard SXSW referred to as "South by."

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Amazon Prime Video)

"The Net" Review

 In 1995 a pair of movies came out starring Sandra Bullock, fresh off her appearance in the previous year's Speed, which caused me to coin the term "Sandra Bullock Syndrome" which is when a move expects the audience to believe a perfectly attractive woman can't seem to attract the attention of a man. (I've seen others use this term on teh Intartoobz meaning great minds think alike or something, but I made it up.) One was While You Were Sleeping where Bullock pined for Peter Gallagher while ignoring THE archetypical Decent Guy Who Has No Real Flaws But Is A Little Dull So Women Ignore Him For The Bad Boy Bill Pullman. The other was tonight's movie, The Net, which along with Hackers the same year were many Normies introduction to the existence of the recently invented World Wide Web. Unlike the latter Angelina Jolie flick, the representation of tech in The Net is fairly rooted in reality. Unfortunately, the movie itself is a slow-paced slog.

Bullock stars as Angela Bennett, a freelance computer analyst living in Venice, CA. She rebuffs attempts to meet people in real life, orders pizza online from Pizza-dot-net (which amazingly isn't a real site now, not even cybersquatted), and visiting her Alzheimer's-stricken mother who doesn't remember her. She doesn't even have a cat. (Wha??)

A tech colleague mails her a floppy disc - 'memba those? - that has a hidden feature which appears to give hackers access to government servers, airlines, power grid controls, all sorts of things you don't want malicious actors to have access to, but when he flies his Cessna to meet her to discuss it, his plane's navigation malfunctions and he crashes to death.

Angela goes on vacation to Mexico and attracts the attention of a British man, Jack Devlin (Jeremy Northham), who also takes a fancy laptop to the beach. While she's shy at first, she succumbs to his vanilla charms so that the movie could happen beginning with his staging a purse snatching then, after boinking her on his boat, attempting to murder kill her for the disc. Ruh-roh! She manages to escape on the boat's dinghy, but wrecks and is knocked unconscious for three days.

When she goes to the Embassy to get a temporary visa to get home, since her documents were stolen, she's presented a form with the name Ruth Marx on it. They ignore her protestations that she was Angela Bennett, so she signs the wrong name to get home. Except when she gets to her house, she finds it empty except for the real estate agent selling it. The cops are called when the neighbors can't vouch for her since they never interacted with her and while she's trying to explain who she is, Jack hacks the police database to add a criminal record to "Ruth's" file making her a felon fugitive.

She escapes the cops and is on the run to reclaim her life, turning to a former lover, her therapist Dr. Alan Champion (a woefully miscast Dennis Miller). Hijinks ensure as she tries to reclaim her life and stop the conspiracy Jack's masters, the Praetorians, are perpetrated to gain control over everything.

While a few of the specifics of the tech of the mid-1990s are BS, a lot of what The Net portrays is actually reasonably plausible with her using a Macintosh, not something running MovieOS. But it's weird revisiting one of these conspiracy thrillers that were so common in the Nineties, especially in the slooooooooow pacing where it takes about a half-hour to get the plot going, stuff that would've been chopped down to a tight 10 minutes nowadays.

Director Irwin Winkler is better known for his long career as a producer - he was nominated for Best Picture for Raging Bull, The Right Stuff, and Goodfellas, winning for Rocky (over Network, booooo!!!) - than as a director and The Net is a good example of why some people should just hire competent people to make their movies.

Screenwriters John Brancato & Michael Ferris would follow this bland story with the wildly overrated The Game (which has one of the worst endings ever, but is given a pass because David Fincher directed and until it faceplants it was an OK movie) then real winners like Catwoman. The irony is that the kernel of an idea at the core - that all our information is online and unless we secure it bad things will happen - is sound, even prescient, but the tepid potwarmer of a plot doesn't land.

At the center of this mediocrity is poor Bullock, trying her best with weak material and direction, eking out some sympathy because she's just so darn cute. But there are other, far better, movies with Nineties Bullock in them like Demolition Man, Speed, and Miss Congeniality. 

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"Bugonia" Review

 Earlier this year Emma Stone was out on red carpets with a rather unflattering pixie cut. While some questioned her poor tonsorial judgement, when the trailer for her fourth collaboration with director Yorgos Lanthimos, Bugonia, dropped, the reason for her hairstyle became clear: She'd shaved her head for the role of a corporate CEO kidnapped by conspiracy theorists who believe she's an alien who can be tracked by her hair, so by shaving it off and slathering her skin with antihistamine cream to prevent her sending out a distress signal, they intend to force her to arrange a meeting with the Andromedan Emperor in four days during a lunar eclipse.

Her captors are Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis, making his film debut and is on the spectrum), who live in the country in a rundown house with bee hives out back. As the plot progresses, we're given hints as to their circumstances including bizarre flashbacks to Teddy's mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), who has a connection to the company Michelle Fuller (Stone) runs which is also Teddy's employer. Lurking around the perimeter is Sheriff's Deputy Casey (Stavros Halkias), who was Teddy's babysitter and is apologetic about something he did to Teddy back then.

The bulk of the film is the battle of wills and wits between Michelle and Teddy as she tries to win her freedom and he tries to get her to admit she's Andromedan. After she withstands a massive amount of electrical current while he tortures her, Teddy decides this means she's part of the Andromedan royalty and begins to treat her better. But that doesn't last long and when the 3rd act rolls around, to quote Ron Burgundy, "That escalated quickly."

While the missus really liked it, I found Bugonia somewhat flat and drawn out for what it does. The script by Will Tracy - who wrote the cruelly snubbed by Oscar film The Menu - adapts a 2003 South Korean film called Save the Green Planet!, but as good as The Menu was with its biting morality play over several dinner courses, Bugonia ultimately rests on the question of is Michelle an alien or not? (FWIW, I guessed the answer correctly really early on.) The ending is rather downbeat in a bad way as well.

I've been a fan of Stone's since Superbad though I didn't really catch onto how special she was until The Rocker. She's developed further into a bold, risk-taking actress as anyone who saw Poor Things can attest and she's her usual excellent here as well. As she's spewing corporate diversity speak it makes one wonder if she has a soul. It's strange to see Plemons slimmed down from his previous Philip Seymour Hoffman Jr.-esque plump physique, but he's good in a narrowly written role where he's set up as a sweaty kook. 

After the constructed artifice of Poor Things, I looked at the limited settings of Bugonia - a country house, a CEO's luxury home, an office building - and figured Lanthimos wanted to make a smaller scale, lower budget film, but apparently this was the most expensive movie he's made with a $55 million budget which means its $35M gross made it a big flop. I can understand it having limited appeal, but can't fathom why they didn't keep the budget commensurate to its likely box office for a movie about a CEO kidnapped, head shaved, battle of wills with weirdos.

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

"Nobu" Review

 You know you've made it to the top tiers of culture when you're referred to by just your first name and everyone knows who is being referred to like Madonna, Cher, Oprah, Woody, Bruce, and Nobu. Wait, No WHO? Oh, you're not familiar with Nobu Matsuhisa, the proprietor of Matsuhisa restaurant in LA and partner with Robert De Niro and others in a globe-spanning empire of restaurants and hotels which bear his name: Nobu? Well, if you watch the slick documentary Nobu, you will know a bit more about him.

Starting in his post-war childhood in Japan, the doc briskly recaps his life, how he got into making sushi and how being sent to Peru to open a restaurant exposed him to local flavors and ingredients that he integrated into his food to create a new fusion. His early years were fraught with disappointments and disaster, such as when the restaurant he'd partnered on in Alaska burned down, an event which would turn out to be the best thing that could've happened.

Relocating to Los Angeles, he opened a small (only 38 seats) Matsuhisa where he quickly developed a following in the elite LA celebrity foodie scene. In 1988, De Niro first came there, brought by The Killing Fields director Roland Joffee, and after more visits when he was in town, broached the subject of opening a spot in NYC's Tribeca District where De Niro had opened the Tribeca Grill. Nobu demurred because he wanted to focus on securing his home base. But when De Niro asked again four years later, he felt the time was right and signed onto the partnership which launched Nobu in NYC and has since expanded to over 56 restaurants, hotel and other ventures as it became a luxury brand as much as a restaurant.

In fact, much of Nobu feels like propaganda for Nobu Hospitality, the corporation, rather than a documentary about Nobu the man himself. It would be easy to write off the whole exercise except for a few segments. One shows him visiting one of his locations and repeatedly ordering a chef to remake a dish because if fails to meet his precise standards. Another shows De Niro quite exasperated that his partners have signed deals for new outposts that seem more intended to make a quick buck than thoughtfully serve the brand ideals. (While De Niro has been mostly phoning in his acting for years and his Trump Derangement Syndrome is at Stage 12, he comes off as a savvy businessman while Nobu is mostly silent.) 

Finally, there is a heartbreaking passage when relates that when he returned to his Japanese home for his traditional month's stay and he called his best friend who seems troubled, he didn't press the issue. When he called back the next day he reached his friend's wife who informed Nobu he'd committed suicide the previous night. Nobu's guilt at not noticing his friend's state has prevented him from visiting his grave until he does so in the movie.

It's natural to compare Nobu to the far better Jiro Dreams of Sushi, but there was more insight into the latter's subject than we get here. It's interesting, but too slick and promotional to really fill the viewer up.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Prime Video)

"Being Eddie" 4K Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"The Perfect Neighbor" 4K Review

Documentaries used to be a fairly bland genre in which the subject matter was documented (thus the name) and the viewer was reasonably safe in presuming what they were viewing to be the truth, more or less. But with the success of slovenly, lying, fat bastard Michael Moore's dishonest agitprop works masquerading as documentaries winning an Oscar for staged scenes of banks giving away guns and raking in millions with the lies that 9/11 was an inside job, and Al Gore's ManBearPig fantasy film also winning Oscar, the documentary has been mostly a tool of Leftists to push agendas under the guise of honest filmmaking.

Into this environment comes the Sundance hit The Perfect Neighbor, Netflix's doc about the killing of Ajike "AJ" Owens by Susan Lorincz in June 2023 by Geeta Gandbhir. Comprised mostly of bodycam footage, we witness the escalating tensions between Lorincz and her neighbors in Ocala, FL as she repeatedly calls the Sheriff's Department over a period of 16 months about the boisterous children in the neighborhood she claims are initially trespassing on her property then becoming more provocative in taunting - or threatening according to Lorincz - "the Karen", as they call her.

The dispute arises because the owner of the open lot adjoining Lorincz's rental duplex, who lives on the other side, has given his permission for the kids to play on his lot, and kids being kids they're loud and annoying. It comes to a head when Owens knocked on Lorincz's door and the latter fired a shot through the door, mortally wounding Owens. Lorincz claims Owens was pounding on the door so hard she feared for her life, but details in the investigation raise questions about her version of events.

What The Perfect Neighbor does well is show the mutual antagonism on both sides of the tension. As the saying goes, it takes two to tango and while nothing justifies busting caps over disturbing the peace, you can sense that the kids with the support of their parents aren't trying to deescalate matters. As deputies are called back, they're familiar with Lorincz's constant calls and trying to chill her out, but she's clearly frustrated; not that this excuses her poor choices.

But where Gandbhir crosses the line into propaganda is an ending title decrying "stand your ground" laws which entitle people being threatened to defend themselves without having to run away until trapped. The card suggests that (paraphrasing) "...white assailants get away with killing Black victims..." with the woke capitalization of black in keeping with the current black supremacist zeitgeist in the wake of St. George Floyd's overdose death near a cop in 2020 which set race relations in America back 60 years.

The reason the inflammatory end title is such dirty pool is because under the end credits we're shown footage from Lorincz's trial for manslaughter which ended in her conviction and sentencing to 25 years in prison, which for a then 60-year-old is effective life in slam. That she had no previous criminal record and a history of childhood sexual trauma didn't get her any mercy in a time where black criminals with dozens of arrests walk free while white convicts are punished severely. Also not disclosed is the factoid found in the movie's Wikipedia page that Gandhir's sister-in-law was Owens best friend and began documenting the case with the expectation the white woman would get away with it.

What such poisonous tactics obscure is the core tragedy of this incidents. While some excessive form of "justice" may've been served, there are no winners. A woman who really should've moved's life is over because of a rash choice she made - somehow left out was that Owen's 10-year-old child was next to her when the shot was fired - and four kids are now without a mother because they chose to antagonize "the Karen" rather than try and coexist. By trying to make it another race war example doesn't cool temperatures, but agenda-driven filmmakers aren't seeking to back off the steam when the money is in stoking outrage.

While in 4K and Dolby Vision, the source material doesn't lend itself to the benefits of the format and paying for Netflix's top tier.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"F1: The Movie" 4K Review

 In the post-Hot Fad Plague world that Hollyweird helped create in 2020, huge crowd-pleasing blockbusters have become harder to come by. One exception was 2022's Top Gun: Maverick which grossed $1.5 billion and showed that audiences would come back to theaters for simple crowd-pleasing movies. With that success, the creators - producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Joseph Kosinski, and writer Ehren Kruger - have reteamed with another aging yet seemingly ageless star, Brad Pitt, to make another popcorn munching crowd pleaser about men in fast vehicles, this time Formula One race cars for F1: The Movie. Currently #7 in the 2025 global box office rankings with $631 million grossed, it was the only non-IP, non-sequel movie in the top 10. While it *only* grossed 41% of Top Gun: Maverick's haul, it's still a decent take though how much profit it made depends on whether the budget was on the lower end of the reported $200M-$300M scale.

Pitt stars as Sonny Hayes, a once-promising F1 racer whose career was cut short after a nearly fatal crash during a race 30 years previously. Since then, he's been a driver-for-hire picking up work wherever he can like when we're introduced to him living in his van awaiting his shift in the 24 Hours of Daytona race. Even though he gets the team into position to win, he doesn't seem interested in the trappings of the victory as he heads off looking for his next race in the Baja 1000.

While on the road, he is located and approached by Rubén Cervantes (Javier Bardem), Sonny's former teammate back in the day and now the owner of a struggling F1 team, APXGP (read: Apex GP). Rubén offers Sonny a job as the #2 driver to try and improve their fortunes and to mentor his #1, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). Joshua is talented, but undisciplined, and unless the team wins a race before the end of the season, the F1 bosses and investors may force a sale of the team. Sonny says he isn't interested, but naturally still shows up in London so the movie can happen.

Naturally, Joshua doesn't care for the old guy stepping to him with his old-fashioned ways. While he runs on a treadmill with a breathing apparatus to gather biometrics and uses computerized reaction timing devices to train, Sonny merely jogs around the tracks and bounces tennis balls to keep his eye-hand coordination up. Joshua is all about posing for cameras, being on social media, getting sponsors, so how dare this old man tell him how to drive and win?

Needless to say, things get off to a bumpy start - literally - as they crash into each other, taking the team out of the first race. While Sonny manipulates things to give his teammate an advantage, everyone seems puzzled as to what he's doing. He suggests a combat-oriented strategy where they tweak the cars' aerodynamics to allow for more speed in crowded curves and aggressively hold position to make it harder for others to pass, within the limits of safety and F1 rules. But Joshua continues to buck the advice which leads to a horrific accident. Will be be able to come back and will the team be able to save itself from being sold off? Are you really wondering like it's in doubt?

To say that F1 is predictable almost understates how by-the-numbers it is. At times I was saying dialog ahead of the characters. A scene involving a poker game between Sonny and Joshua to determine who is the #1 driver of the team has a twist so obvious they should've had Joshua catch on to what was happening. Care to guess whether Sonny and Kerry Condon's team technical director hook up? It's that kind of easy crowd-pleasing movie.

Brad Pitt was just shy of 60 when filming began and he's definitely straddling the boyish charm/older Robert Redford line that comes from good genetics and a (likely) deal with Satan. He's charming and laid back which is a weird vibe for a guy who wants to win. If there's a fault, it's that he's basically replaying his Oscar-winning Cliff Booth character from Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood. I guess if it worked once, why not work it some more. I've been seeing a bunch of clips from Moneyball and The Big Short lately so perhaps I wish he did more, not that the by-the-numbers script demands it.

I haven't seen Idris in anything before, but he's good in his equally narrow role. It's easy to dislike his cocky demeanor when he - in the words of Morrissey - hasn't earned it yet, baby. And it's downright weird in today's times when Hollyweird seems to want to cram THE MESSAGE into everything that the friction between the drivers has absolutely no hint of racial component, just young vs. old. Helps that Joshua is British and even more so that the producers wanted to invite all audiences in rather than drive them away preening their wokeness to their fellow wokesters.

The race sequences are good, but I felt the scenes in Ford vs. Ferrari were more exciting. A friend saw F1 at IMAX and was raving about it due to the huge screen and deafening sound. Granted, my THX-compliant viewing distance home theater can't boom like IMAX, the action in Top Gun: Maverick came across fine. They used tiny cameras on remote heads to get driver's eye view shots and be able to show the stars driving the cars, but it still feels a tad static.

At 2h 35m (with credits) long, I went into F1: The Movie with a bit of dread because movies these days are just too padded out, but to risk punning, the time raced by due to the streamlined formulaic script which was probably timed out with a Save The Cat beat sheet. The missus really liked it, not just because Brad Pitt gets her tingly in the nethers, but because it was just a fun, entertaining movie that delivered what was advertised on the tin. I wanted a bit more, but this probably isn't the movie for more.

The 4K Dolby Vision presentation was sharp and colorful. They filmed with a mix of Sony Venice and DJI Ronin 4D cameras and they intercut seamlessly. The audio mix was enveloping and while I'm sure IMAX really sold the experience, my 5.2.4 Atmos setup did OK.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Coming exclusively to Apple TV in mid-December.)

"Downey Wrote That" Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Score: 8/10. Catch it on Peacock.

"John Candy: I Like Me" 4K Review

 Older Gen Xers grew up in a Golden Age of televised comedy as tag team of Saturday Night Live and it's lesser-known syndicated cousin SCTV introduced a Murderer's Row of comedic titans from Canuckia to audiences, most of whom not only are household names, but many are still working today especially from the SCTV crew as Martin Short (Only Murders In The Building), Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy (Schitt's Creek), Andrea Martin (The Gilded Age), and even Rick Moranis ending a nearly three-decade long absence from performing to appear in Spaceballs 2.

But one of those lost along the way like SNL's John Belushi and Gilda Radner was SCTV's John Candy who died of a heart attack at only 43 years of age in 1994. The creator of wild characters such as Johnny LaRue, horror movie host Dr. Tongue, Gil Fisher the Fishin' Musician, William B. Williams, Mayor Tommy Shanks and many more on SCTV, he left his mark in big screen comedy as well appearing in The Blues Brothers, Stripes, Splash, Spaceballs, Volunteers, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles which also showcased his dramatic depth.

Taking its title from his big scene in the last, John Candy: I Like Me is an interesting rundown of his too-brief life from his boyhood in Canada where his father died at only 35 when Candy was 6, a trauma that haunted his entire life. Charismatic, but at times desperate to please, the regard he is held in by his peers, collaborators and family is summed up by Bill Murray's early sardonic wish that the documentary may finally "dig up some dirt" on Candy because for all his foibles, being a terrible person didn't seem to be one of them. In fact, Murray's "negative" story boils down to a staged reading of something in which Candy "milked" during one part to the annoyance of director Sydney Pollack. That's it, he "milked it."

Director Colin Hanks interviews Candy's widow, children, SCTV co-stars (minus Joe Flaherty, who is dead, and Rick Moranis, who is absent perhaps due to his retirement from show biz until very recently), movie co-stars Steve Martin and Colin's father, Tom, who worked with Candy on Splash and Volunteers. There are interesting tidbits like how Candy tried to enlist with the US Army to fight in Vietnam and his late-in-life co-ownership of the Toronto Argonauts Canadian Football League team along with the occasionally melancholy recapitulation of his inability and/or unwillingness to reign in his excesses of food and drink which ultimately did him in. 

While one can quibble that Hanks (along with producer Ryan Reynolds) could've spent more time on one thing or another, overall John Candy: I Like Me is worth watching especially for those who grew up on his performances.

While it's presented in 4K HDR10+ (for those who didn't pay extra for ad-free Prime Video and get Dolby Vision), it's not a showcase for the format due to the nature of the film and material.

Score: 8/10. Catch it on Amazon Prime.

"Roofman" Review

It always raises suspicion when a movie opens with a notice that it's "based on a true story" because so often dramatic license trumps reality, but judging from the end credits of Roofman, it seems like this one sticks fairly close to the details for its dramedic beats resulting in a pleasant story of a guy who can't stop making bad life choices.

Channing Tatum stars as Jeffrey Manchester, a divorced former Army veteran who struggles financially, leaving his young daughter disappointed in her (admittedly bad) birthday gift (the little gold digger). Using his talents of observation, he decides to improve his living situation by working hard and saving money. Whoops, sorry, what I meant to say is he robbed nearly four dozen McDonald's by breaking in through their roofs - thus earning him the nickname of "Roofman" (roll credits!) - and in one robbery, where he was surprised by the morning shift's arrival, coaxing them at gunpoint into the walk-in freezer, but giving his coat to the manager so he wouldn't freeze while awaiting rescue.

As kind as that gesture may've been, the gun and herding of people is considered armed robbery and kidnapping and he gets the book thrown at him resulting in a 45-year prison sentence and his ex cutting off all contact with his kids. After several years in slam, he devises a clever plan to escape from the prison, but with the cops staking out his place he ends up hiding in the ceiling of a Toys "R" Us bathroom. After the store closes he explores the store, finds the security camera system and disables recording so he can move freely at night.

He eventually sets up a hideaway behind the store's bicycle display, taking clothes from the donation bins, subsisting on candy, and using baby monitors to keep tabs on the staff and the store's Napoleon Complex manager, Mitch (Peter Dinklage). When Mitch refuses to work with single mom Leigh's (Kirsten Dunst) schedule request, Jeffrey gets into the stores computer and changes her schedule.

Wanting to meet her, he steals toys and takes them to the church where Leigh was running a toy drive, catching the eye of the pastor (Ben Mendelsohn) who makes Jeffrey participate with the members, leading to a dinner with the church's Singles Club and, of course, Leigh falling for this sensitive hunk of a man who claims to be "John Zorn", a government intelligence operative undercover from New York.

As Jeffrey and Leigh's romance blooms, even winning over her cynical older daughter, Lindsay (Lily Collias), especially when he helps her get a car and teaches her to drive. But a close call with Mitch while Jeffrey was washing up in the store's bathroom tells Jeffrey that he needs to get going before he gets caught. He contacts a fellow soldier (LaKeith Stanfield) who now makes fake IDs and when the price tag for the documents and passage out of the country is more than he has, he embarks on a final run of bad life choices.

During the end credits they do the typical thing of showing the real people we just saw dramatized by more attractive Hollywood folk, but they also show clips from news reports and you can tell co-writer and director Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine) didn't hype up the details excessively. That said, the idea that Jeffrey was eating so much peanut M&Ms that his teeth need a bunch of fillings but he still has Tatum's washboard six-pack abs is some hooey, gosh darn it!

Because the facts of the story preclude a Super Fun Hollywood Ending, Roofman closes on a bit of a downer, but due to solid performances across the board and Cianfrance's low-key direction, it's worth watching.

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

"Bedazzled" Blu-ray Review

Previously reviewed here.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable. 

"Good Fortune" Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Primative War" Review

The trailer for Primitive War almost seems like something cheesy "mockbuster" studio The Asylum (makers of Snakes on a Train, Transmorphers, The Da Vinci Treasure, and motherf***ing Sharknado, baybee!) would make: It's 1968 during the Vietnam War and soldiers are fighting dinosaurs in the jungle. That's it. That's the movie.

 Ryan Kwanten (True Blood) stars as Sergeant First Class Ryan Baker, the leader of long-range recon patrol Vulture Squad which has been dispatched by Colonel Jericho (Jeremy Piven, Entourage) to find out what happened to a unit of Green Berets he'd sent on a classified mission then disappeared. We know from the cold open that they were wiped out by dinosaurs, a storytelling mistake too many movies make. (More on that in a bit.)

 It doesn't take long for Vulture Squad to be attacked themselves then separated with Baker and a sidekick whose name really doesn't matter rescued by Sofia Wagner (Tricia Helfer, Battlestar Galactica), the sole survivior of a Russian research team who were responsible for accidentally bring dinosaurs to modern times. She's also a morphine addict because characterization. Baker makes her help find his squad then they go after the secret project that caused this weirdness and could destroy the world. Hijinks ensue.

 On the plus side, Primitive War - a movie with a reported $7-$8 million budget - joins reportedly $15M Godzilla Minus 1 in shaming megabudget extravaganzas with shoddy visual effects like Thor: Love & Thunder with impressive VFX that even Corridor Crew gave props to. Several species of dinos have feathers which even ILM & Weta hadn't done and almost all the dino shots look very good, so it's weird how the helicopters are so clearly fake when solid body objects are generally the easiest to render. The action scenes are appropriately chaotic without becoming incomprehensible.

But on the down side, the Vietnam War tropes - when I become Emperor of the Universe I will ban the use of CCR's "Fortunate Son" and The Chambers Brothers "Time" in Vietnam-era movies - & cliched dialog made me ponder whether this was supposed to be a parody of war movie soldier speak or whether the makers thought this would sound tough. The 2-1/4 hour running time doesn't help flesh the characters out beyond their cartoon outlines. Helfer still looks hot at the half-century mark, but her Natasha Fatale accent is distracting.

Multi-hyphenate Luke Sparke - who seems to be the Australian Robert Rodriguez having directed, co-written, co-produced, edited, and supervised the VFX - shows definite talent in stretching the budget beyond belief, but would benefit from a better screenwriter and an editor who knows how to whittle things down to a lean & mean 100 minutes.

Coincidentally, before I wrapped up writing this review Corridor Crew did an episode focusing on The Asylum, so what Sparke accomplishes is even more impressive, albeit flawed and overlong.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost" 4K Review

 The names Stiller & Meara don't ring many bells with people younger than Boomers or old Gen Xers, but they were a prominent comedy duo akin to Mike Nichols and Elaine May who were their predecessors in the early-1960s before splitting to focus on their own careers as writers and directors (he directed The Graduate, Catch-22, and Working Girl, among others; she wrote Heaven Can Wait and The Birdcage, but also directed notorious flop Ishtar). To most people Jerry Stiller is best known for playing George Costanza's yelling father on Seinfeld and Anne Meara is less-remembered for her role on Archie Bunker's Place, the sequel/spin-off of All in the Family. 

But their best known co-production is their younger child, Ben Stiller, and he memorializes his parents and indulges in a family therapy session on our time with the Apple TV+ original documentary Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost. Filmed in the wake of Stiller's death in 2020 (Meara passed in 2015), Ben and his sister Anne are sifting through their parent's Upper West Side apartment in preparation of selling. (Bought in 1953 for $11,000, it sold in 2021 for $5.9 million.) Because the elder Stiller seemingly tape-recorded everything from routine rehearsals to conversations along with filming Super 8 home movies, there is copious candid insight material available along with the dozens of Ed Sullivan Show and talk show clips.

Unfortunately for those seeking a thorough documentary of the couple, son Ben uses the project to also work out his personal issues with his life growing up in a home where it wasn't clear if Mom & Dad were yelling at each other because they were working out a routine or arguing and how he almost almost wrecked his marriage to Christine Taylor because he was spending so much time working and being away from his family including a son and daughter, same as his parents had done.

While it's nice that the Fauci Flu Scamdemic helped repair his marriage and he and his sister were able to process their parents lives, it comes at the expense of us outsiders who don't really care. He doesn't make clear when certain events are happening or brings up something like Meara's alcoholism becoming an issue, but then letting it drop until she finally gets sober much later in life after making it seem she'd dried out earlier.

While Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost manages to get some of the parents story across, if feels like more could've been included if Ben had remembered this wasn't about him.

Like all Apple TV+ originals, it's presented in 4K Dolby Vision and Atmos audio, but neither are really noticeable and these sorts of content (documentaries) don't require it.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Apple TV+.

"Freakier Friday" Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"This Is Spinal Tap II: The End Continues" Review

"Hello, Cleveland!" "[Boston] isn't a big college town." "Dubly." "It was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf." "What's wrong with being sexy? Sex-IST." "None more black." And of course, "These go to 11." If you recognize those quotes, then you're obviously clued into - even if you haven't actually seen - the legendary 1984 mockumentary (mock documentary) This Is Spinal Tap. While not the first mockumentary, TIST blew the format wide open paving the way for co-star/co-writer Christopher Guest's mocks like A Mighty Wind, Best In Show, and Waiting For Guffman and even TV series like The Office and Parks & Recreation. The sorely overlooked rap mockumentary Fear of a Black Hat (due to hang-ups in distribution leading to Chris Rock's merely OK CB4 to beat it to theaters and mindshare) rivals TIST for sheer faux verisimilitude.

Co-written and directed by Rob Reiner making his directorial debut, Guest along with co-stars and co-writers Harry Shearer and Michael McKean told the story of faltering rock band Spinal Tap as they attempted to promote their latest album, Smell the Glove. As tensions between guitarists and boyhood friends Nigel Tufnel (Guest in a Jeff Beck shag haircut) and David St. Hubbins (McKean) grow, shows get canceled and venue sizes shrink - or as the band's manager Ian Faith (Tony Hendra) puts it, "Their appeal is becoming more selective." - the band teeters on implosion before pulling it together at the end.

While Spinal Tap in real life put out two subsequent albums in 1992 and 2009 and made occasional festival and charity concert appearances, what fans really wanted was a sequel. Finally, a whopping 41 years later we got Spinal Tap 2: The End Continues and while it's not a bad movie, it's a perfectly adequate and unnecessary stroll through the nostalgia bogs where the Member Berries are grown.

The hook for ST2 is that Ian Faith has died and his daughter, Hope (Kerry Godliman), has inherited his effects including dad's contract with Tap where she discovers the band was obligated to perform one more show. Unfortunately, the band had broken up 15 years previously due to some unknown beef between Nigel and David and the members had gone on to other pursuits. Nigel and his girlfriend are running a cheese and guitar shop; David is doing scores for true crime podcasts and hold music, and bassist Derek Smalls (Shearer) has opened a glue museum.

Reluctantly they reconvene in New Orleans to rehearse for the gig with their keyboardist, Caucasian Jeff (C. J. Vanston, who is the band's real life producer and keyboardist since 1989), while trying to find a drummer who can play and isn't afraid of the band's poor luck with keeping them alive, finally ending up with Didi Crockett (actually pro drummer Valerie Franco).

From there we're treated to an amiable sequence of scenes and schticks plus cameos from real life musicians including Paul McCartney, Questlove, Elton John and a pair of drummers who I shant spoil who turn down the gig while pushing the other with the clear implication that they expect the drummer curse to get the other. Overhanging everything is whatever drove David and Nigel apart and frankly when that thread is paid off, it's not that great or funny a reason.

The actors are now in their late-70s, early-80s and while I've recently seen several concerts with septuagenarian performers like Devo, B-52's, Lene Lovich, Alice Cooper and Rob Halford from Judas Priest who absolutely rocked it, the Tapsters are distractingly aged and the overall energy is on the mild side.

All the callbacks to the first movie and it's soundtrack (with a couple of brief references to songs from their Break Like The Wind album) weigh things down because it's all Member Berries ("You 'member? I 'member.") That McCartney's scene where he points out a weak part of a new song David is working up being followed by David complaining where does SIR PAUL McCARTNEY get off dissing his song and being "toxic" is predictable even when it's mildly amusing. The cameos from Paul Schafer and Fran Drescher (as label reps Artie Fufkin and Bobbie Flekman, respectively) are perfunctory.

The utter ruination of the music business by file sharing then rapacious streaming services like Spotify isn't mentioned nor the rise of K-Pop, artists being signed off Tik Tok, and many other modern issues afflicting those seeking careers in music aren't mined for humor belying the Boomer-centric viewpoints of the creators. Their idea of biting satire is a somewhat toothless addition of Simon Howler (Chris Addison) - a cross between Pop Idol and American Idol creator Simon Fuller and the latter's snarky t-shirt model judge Simon Cowell - as a concert promoter incapable of processing music whose bright idea is for at least one of the band members to die during the show. Har-har, music biz suits are dumb.

I chalk up the general flatness of Spinal Tap 2: The End Continues to age and entitlement. When they made the first one, there were no expectations because the makers were basically nobodies. Reiner was Meathead from All in the Family; Guest was connected to various National Lampoon stage and recording projects; McKean was Lenny on Laverne & Shirley; and Shearer was a featured player on Saturday Night Live. 

Post-TIST everyone's career took off with Reiner posting a phenomenal run of all-time classics including Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, A Few Good Men, and Misery before imploding with North, a movie so bad that when i came home from the dollar show and woke my mother up because I needed to talk to someone to process the horror I'd just survived. But that was 1992 and Reiner hasn't made a good movie since (reminds me of how Robert Zemekis was never good after winning Oscars for Forrest Gump) and while advancing to "OK" level is an improvement, it's also a bit of a grasp for past glories.

As for the rest, comfort breeds complacency and the hunger that fueled the original just isn't there. While it's not depressing and cringe seeing these geezers attempt to recapture that Spinal Tap spark, this is a movie fans of the OG will watch once then return to their new Criterion 4Ks of TIST. Half as good, Spinal Tap 2: The End Continues doesn't go to 11, it goes to...

Score: 5.5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

And no, I didn't score it that way to make the joke. I just realized 5.5 was half of 11.