"Skywalkers: A Love Story" 4K Review

 If you watched Free Solo - the Oscar-winning documentary about the attempt to climb Yosemite's El Capitan for the first time without any additional ropes and gear - and thought, "Nope to all that!" then you'll be equally noping through the Netflix documentary Skywalkers: A Love Story.

 Telling the story of fellow Russian "rooftoppers" - daredevils who climb buildings, cranes, radio towers, etc. for the thrills and fame - Angela Nikolau and Vanya Beerkus, who became soulmates and collaborators after Angela, the daughter of circus performers and sole female rooftopper in Russia, connects with Vanya, a popular presence on social media. While he was more of the daredevil, she brought an artistic flair, posing in glamorous outfits in extremely dangerous locations for striking photographs.

As a team they had sponsors for their adventures until the tag team of the global scamdemic shut down the world and then Russia's invasion of Ukraine made their country a pariah state which limited money-making opportunities. They try to make money selling NFTs (remember when they were the fad for 15 seconds?), but cracks begin to form in their relationship including trust issues which for their line of art is a potentially lethal flaw.

Vanya decides they need to go out with a big splashy climb, attempting to scale the Merdeka 118 tower under construction in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Topped by a spire soaring to 2,227 feet, it will be the second-tallest building in the world only behind the Burj Khalifa in Dubai of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol fame. (For reference, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were "only" 1,355 feet tall.)

With the assistance of contacts in the area with drones to surveil the area, Vanya develops a plan to access the tower by climbing up onto an adjoining sports arena, then cross an intervening shopping mall, then climbing the tower's stairwells to access the spires under the presumption that the security camera coverage may be incomplete and the guards will be distracted by the World Cup Final match that night. More than usual, not getting caught is a big deal because Asian countries don't play with such shenanigans and if busted, they could face years in slam.

Adding to the complexity is his decision to snag a piece of scaffolding, lug it to the top of the hollow spire and lay it across to make a narrow shaky platform to perform a swan pose which consists of Vanya lifting Angela above him in the big Dirty Dancing move used by Ryan Gosling in Crazy Stupid Love. We see them struggle to pull this move off on the ground (clever editing, no doubt) so the prospect of doing it nearly a half-mile above the ground where failure would be fatal. And if that's not enough, Angela suffers an injury while preparing which prevents her from using an arm for weeks leading to the climb which has to happen on World Cup Final night or their cover would be lost.

The last act of the film consists of their attempt filmed with GoPros and drones and without spoiling the conclusion, it's a tense and fraught experience when unexpected workers force them into hiding for nearly a day and with limited food and water due to needing to carry extra batteries for the gizmos and the expectation it was going to be a one-night hit-and-run, when they finally get their chance at the spire, they're in rough shape and the overall bad ideaness of this caper is off the charts.

While packed with stunning footage of their exploits, we never really get inside the heads of the couple, especially Vanya who doesn't do much narration of his feelings. The stresses of fame, ambition, and making a living weigh down on them and as they realize many of their rooftopping community friends are leaving the scene due to terminal encounters with gravity (i.e. they're falling down and going splat), the "We can't do this forever," aspect calls into question whether they have anything in common beyond their half-mile high club adventures?

While ultimately superficial, Skywalkers: A Love Story has plenty of thrills and tension for those who'd never in a million years put themselves where these two do for love and fame.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"The Trigger Effect" Review

 For some reason the missus got the bug to watch The Trigger Effect, the 1996 feature directorial debut of screenwriter David Koepp who at this point had hits like Jurassic Park, Death Becomes Her, Carlito's Way and the first Mission: Impossible movie on his resume. Not streaming free on any services at this writing, it was a trip to the high seas for a HD copy as I wasn't in the mood for my DVD.

 Opening with a long tracking shot through a Los Angeles mall showing people suffering various indignities and rude behavior, it settles on our lead couple, Matthew and Annie (Kyle MacLachlan and Elizabeth Shue), who are having a hard time watching their movie due to a pair of loud-talking black moviegoers including Raymond (Richard T. Jones). Their attempts to shush the talkers goes about as well as you'd expect, so they leave the theater to go home to their infant daughter (who's with a sitter, duh) and suffering from an earache which is making her cry constantly.

In the night there is a city-wide power which triggers a rapid breakdown in society. Matthew's attempts to get medicine for the baby are thwarted due to phone lines being down and the pharmacist refuses to dispense it without the script leading Matthew to steal the medicine. Adding to the stress between the couple is the arrival of their friend Joe (Dermot Mulroney) who stays with them. Matthew's not too happy about his arrival and there are hints of Annie's wild past and some relationship with Joe alluded to.

When a burglar robs the house and ends up shot by a neighbor, things really go farther off the rails leading the trio to decide to make a road trip to her parents' place in Colorado. This leads to further peril as they again cross paths with Raymond at a diner (though they don't seem to recognize each other) and another traveler accosting patrons asking for some gas, Gary (Michael Rooker doing his Michel Rooker thing). Not a lot of trust at the end of the world, is there?

If this all seems familiar, it's because it's a similar premise as 2023's Netflix Original Leave The World Behind where I criticized:

But the biggest problem is that pretty much the entire scenario was told in two whole fewer hours in a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone entitled "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" (S1E22) which is about a cul-de-sac which experiences a power and communication outage and after a kid says he read in a comic book that aliens may be behind the event and that they send advance scouts who look human to blend into the neighborhood, everyone immediately goes DEFCON 1 and suspects each other with disastrous consequences. It's a very memorable episode and it only takes 25 minutes to tell its tale. (It's on Amazon Freevee if you'd like to watch it.)

 According to the Wikipedia page for The Trigger Effect, Koepp was partially inspired by this episode as well due to his uncle, actor Claude Akin, starring in it. (Shouldn't Rod Serling be getting a royalty?) As a result the instant rush to anarchy requires a bit of a leap this time. But that's not to say the premise is too much of a stretch. Just look at how people lose their minds if they can't log into FaceSpace or what happened recently with the CrowdStrike computer bug which grounded most air traffic and kept Delta down for days.

However, it should be noted that when it was filmed in 1995, the Internet as we know and take for granted barely existed. The World Wide Web was invented in 1989 and the software was released to the public domain in 1993. At the time of filming there were perhaps 20,000 web sites. The collapse of society depicted is strictly analog, but also presumes that everyone will pretty much become their worst selves.

This would be more effective if not for Koepp's flimsy characters & decision to allude to much more than he explains. There's time for hinting, but also needs to a point where things are explained. I don't go for the "it's up to the audience to decide what it all means" posturing. (Looking at you, Anatomy of a Fall.) The reliance on coincidence becomes reality-breaking by the end with a pat kumbayah resolution.

 Performances are OK considering the one-note characters everyone is stuck playing. Shue was following acclaimed turn in Leaving Las Vegas which broke her previous frothy ingenue image from movies like Adventures in Babysitting and the Back to the Future sequels, but was also her career peak because she never really appeared in anything substantial after 2000's Hollow Man. Doubt that? She's been in 20(!) features since then - name two of them. Name one. No, her role in the first season of The Boys in 2019 doesn't count. 

There's a visceral potency to the premise of what happens to a society when the lights go out, but for some reason no one really seems to be getting it right. The Trigger Effect is just a middling stab at it.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Not currently on any services, but available to rent/buy.)

"Beverly Hills Cop" 4K Review

 With the Netflix Original Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F hitting streaming, it's time to revisit the series which I've owned for quite a while after buying the trilogy in 4K from iTunes for $10. Before starting, I've seen the first one several times, I think I've only seen the sequel once and only remember that it was very mean-spirited, and don't think I've seen the third one, but have heard it's pretty terrible. Let's find out!

Kicking off is the OG Beverly Hills Cop from 1984 (my senior year in high school), the movie that blew Eddie Murphy up into superstar status after his first two movies, 48 Hours and Trading Places. And he was only 23 at the time.

For those unfamiliar with the movie (I'll keep spoilers for a 40-year-old movie to a minimum) somehow, Murphy plays Detroit Police Detective Axel Foley, a young hotshot we're introduced to as an attempted undercover sting involving cigarettes results in a mayhem-causing chase through Detroit's downtown streets. The aftermath has him on thin ice with his boss, Inspector Todd (real-life Detroit cop Gil Hill, who the documentary White Boy Ric alleges may've been dirty), who warns Axel that if he screws up again, he's out of a job.

Matters are complicated when Axel comes home to find an old friend, Mikey (James Russo), has broken into his apartment after getting out of jail. In his possession he has a paper bag filled with German bearer bonds. After hitting a bar and reminiscing over how they stole cars in high school and how it was odd that Axel became a cop, they return to his apartment only to be ambushed by two assailants who knock Axel out and then execute Mikey, taking the bag of bonds. 

Put on vacation by a fed-up Todd, Axel drives to Beverly Hills to find answers by checking in with art gallery manager Jenny (Lisa Eilbacher), an old friend of his and Mikey's from Detroit, who had gotten Mikey the security job at the warehouse of Very Wealthy & Obvious Bad Guy Victor Maitland (Steven Berkoff). When he goes to Maitland's office to accost him, he's bum-rushed by a half-dozen security men and hurled through a plate glass window and arrested by Beverly Hills PD.

We now meet Detectives Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and John Taggart (John Ashton) and their boss, Lt. Bogomil (Ronny Cox). They are by-the-book professionals who have no use for Axel's rogue antics and he repeatedly gives them the slip or tricks them into situations because of course the hip guy is going to get over on the squares, can you dig it? Many hijinx ensue.

Revisiting Beverly Hills Cop now is instant flashback to the era. The soundtrack was so ubiquitous with hits like Glenn Fry's opening theme "The Heat Is On", Pointer Sisters' "Neutron Dance" (during the opening heist chase), and the omnipresent "Axel F Theme" by Harold Faltermeyer which for music store keyboard department employees was the tag-team partner to Van Halen's "Jump" for needing a sign forbidding their playing the way guitar departments have a "NO STAIRWAY!" sign.

Murphy is in full control here as he BSes his way into situation - several scenes were improvised by Murphy, which would bite the sequels in the butt as "Eddie does something funny" is not a substitute for writing - and throwing race cards at will (though without the malice you'd get nowadays). But it's not all razzle-dazzle bluster; there are moments of quiet drama where Murphy shows that he wasn't just a young buck comic, but had acting chops as well. (I still believe that he would've won an Oscar for Dreamgirls if they hadn't released Norbit while Oscar voting was still happening. If they had just waited a week, his career the past nearly 20 years would've been far different.)

Credit for holding this wacky comedy-gritty crime movie together goes to director Martin Brest who manages to balance the competing tones nicely, allowing Murphy room to cut loose without it becoming overly indulgent & obnoxious. (Which the sequel illustrates when tone is handled incorrectly.) Brest had directed the charming geezers-robbing-a-bank movie Going In Style before and would go on to direct the well-regarded Midnight Run before blowing up his career with the tag team of Meet Joe Black and the Bennifer debacle Gigli, but here he nails what the material needs.

The tropes of hip vs. square, urban street smarts vs. urbane procedure following, West Coast vs. Motown which would become stock items on the buddy cop crime comedy checklist began here and when you see how poorly things go when the balance isn't maintained, you appreciate even more what Beverly Hills Cop accomplished. It's also fun to see co-stars Paul Reiser and Bronson Pinchot (both in their second film roles ever and Pinchot pretty much converted mincing art gallery employee Serge into Cousin Balki on the Perfect Strangers sitcom) and Damon Wayans make his debut in a bit part as Banana Man.

As for the presentation, the 4K Dolby Vision is good and clear, but nothing you'd show off to demo your home theater. This is due to the look of the film being deliberately drab in Detroit before getting bright in Beverly Hills. Audio is basic 5.1, clear and dated, typical of the era.

Score: 8/10. Buy it for $5 or less.

"Pearl" 4K & "X" Reviews

 Doing something different this time in that this double-feature are directly related movies which we watched in reverse order than they were released. But first some background for those not familiar with the gimmick.

In March 2022, snooty film snobs favorite studio, A24 (the 21st Century's Miramax), released an art house slasher movie titled X about a ill-fated group making a porno film on a rural Texas farm owned by an elderly couple in 1979. It was quite buzzy because it was an A24 joint and who the killers were. But where it got interesting was when it was announced that they had already filmed a prequel about the origins of the old woman, Pearl, in X titled Pearl which would be released in September 2022, just six months later, and that a sequel, MaXXXine, would be coming in 2024 continuing the story of (spoiler alert) the survivor of X. 

The final film of the trilogy opened this weekend meaning it'll be on video in a matter of weeks and since I was interested in that one, I figured it was time to catch the first two. I'm not a big horror movie fan, but the missus is and she'd seen X and Pearl, but suggested we watch them in reverse order because she thought it wouldn't change the story and wanted to see how it'd play. So that's what we did and thus this tag-team review.

 Set in 1918, Pearl introduces us to the titular character (Mia Goth) in a subversive manner by introducing this farm girl as she feeds the animals in the barn while 1940s style credits play before she impales a goose on a pitchfork then takes it down to the lake to feed to an alligator. Swell girl!

Her husband, Howard (Alistair Sewell), is off fighting the Great War, and she's under the thumb of her strict dour German immigrant mother, Ruth (Tandi Wright), and caring for her invalid father (Matthew Sunderland). Pearl dreams of being a dancer and sneaks off to the picture show where she makes the acquaintance of the projectionist (David Corenswet, the new Superman in James Gunn's upcoming reboot). This angers her mother and leads to lethal family drama.

 Since I hand't seen X I had no context as to what Pearl was supposed to be about other than as a small story about a sad bad seed farm girl. But what is interesting is how director Ti West filmed and color-graded the picture like a Technicolor Douglas Sirk melodrama. Usually movies set in old times go for a muted nostalgic tone like the Kansas scenes of The Wizard of Oz, so it's a jolt to see it look more like the Oz part of the film. Presented in 4K HDR on Amazon Prime, the colors are so hot, bright, saturated and amped up it looked like the garish Vivid picture mode on TVs that only lunatics prefer. Skin tones are flushed and primary colors like red and green are searing. It doesn't look like genuine Technicolor, which was a three-strip process that resulted in a very specific color tone, but it's definitely a look.

 The story, co-written by Goth with West, is fairly simplistic, more designed as a showcase for Goth with a couple of standout scenes like her confession to her kind, wealthy sister-in-law, Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro), of the very bad things she's done filmed in a long take without the obligatory cutaways to Mitsy's reaction which makes the eventual reaction shot an interesting choice. The final shot almost borders on camp, though.

 With that down, it was time for the next chronological entry in the series, X, which leaps forward six decades with Goth playing the double-role of elderly Pearl (unrecognizable under makeup which took 6-8 hours to apply) and Maxine Minx, one of the performers in The Farmer's Daughter which the producer/strip club owner Wayne (Martin Henderson) hopes to be bigger than Debbie Does Dallas. 

Along for the production are fellow performers Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) and Jackson Hole (Scott Mescudi, bka hip-hop artist Kid Cudi), director/cameraman RJ (Owen Campbell), and his girlfriend/sound recordist Lorraine (Jenna Ortega). Things get off to a rocky start when Pearl's husband Howard (now played by Stephen Ure) greets Wayne with a shotgun because he forgot he had rented the farm's bunkhouse to him though he is unaware of the plans to film a porno movie there.

 Filming gets off to an uneventful start, but take a turn in the evening when Lorraine decides she wants to film a scene much to the consternation of RJ. Upset in the aftermath, he attempts to leave in the group's van only to find the driveway blocked by Pearl. He attempts to assist her back inside, but she has other ideas about his immediate life expectancy - not really a spoiler because the movie opens with the Sheriff's department on the scene with lots of bodies covered in sheets before doing the "24 Hours Earlier" thing - so we're off to the races as Porn Makers vs. Psycho Octogenarians begins. Who will survive? (Hint: The one who has another movie set in the 1980s opening this weekend.)

The whole hook for X is the unique killer(s) which changes up the usual Giant Supernatural Unkillable Monster formula. We've seen a bazillion slasher films, but outside of Mrs. Vorhees in the original Friday the 13th, how many have been older villains, much less really old? As opposed to the gaudy colors of Pearl, West (who also wrote and edited) goes for a grimy Seventies grindhouse vibe and it's a trip seeing the bright pristine red barn and yellow house all run down and grungy with age. It's also fun to spot the callbacks (or in this case foreshadowings) in shots and the lake gator.

The performances are all good with the cast fleshing out the stock characters nicely, albeit laying on the Texas accents a tad thick. Goth is so hidden under the Pearl makeup as to raise a legitimate question as to why not simply cast an older or different actress, but West felt that it was important to have a link between Pearl and Maxine. (It does raise the question why Maxine doesn't notice young Pearl could've been her twin.)

Taken as a package, X and Pearl, are an adequate horror movies with a couple of good gimmicks. Both could be a shorter and Pearl is the slightly weaker film because like the flop Furiosa, it's an unnecessary origin story that doesn't add much to the original for those not curious about everyone's backstory.

Scores: Pearl 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently in 4K HDR on Amazon Prime)

 X: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on no services, but available to rent/buy)