Greetings! Have you ever wondered if a movie's worth blowing the money on to see at the theater or what to add next to your NetFlix queue? Then you've come to the right place! Enjoy!
It's New Year's Eve and the missus wanted to watch this to cap off a positively miserable year which included her mother passing in February. I've previously reviewed it here and score is unchanged.
In the intervening years it has been re-released by the Criterion Collection adding a director's commentary and some interviews. Since she's not interested in that stuff, I won't be getting it for her, but figured I'd mention it for those who want even more from this superfans-only experience.
Onward to 2026!
Score: 6/10. Skip it if you're a casual Bowie listener; catch it on cable if you're a more in-depth fan; buy it if you're a mega-fan.
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.
Since the missus didn't have her Blu-ray of Vertical Suckage Limit here at Xanadu to pair with Cliffhanger (oh darn) I finally was able to get her to watch the 4K of 1994's Speed which was Keanu Reeves action peak following Point Break before he'd go into another career lull broken by The Matrix. As the "Die Hard on a bus" entry in the long line of Die Hard-inspired action flicks, it also kicked Sandra Bullock up to the A-list.
Reeves stars as LAPD Officer Jack Traven whom we meet in the opening set piece working with his partner Harry Temple (Jeff Daniels) rescuing an elevator full of hostages trapped by a madman, Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper), and held for ransom. Jack suspects the bomber is somewhere in the building and is correct as they find him, though Payne takes Harry hostage. After shooting Harry to get Payne to let him go, Payne appears to blow himself up with the suicide vest he was wearing. Movie over.
Oh wait, there's still another 100 minutes to fill. Some time later, Jack is getting his morning coffee when a bus explodes, killing the driver (and occupants?)? A pay phone rings, Jack answers it and is told by the not-dead Payne that he has rigged another bus with a bomb that will activate when the bus goes faster than 50 mph and explode if it drops below that mark. If any of the passengers try to leave the bus, he'll blow it up. The city has a couple of hours to deliver $3.7 million in ransom or kaboom.
We then meet our plucky heroine, Annie (Bullock), who has a suspended driver's license (for speeding), and the passengers including visiting tourist Doug (Alan Ruck). Jack manages to catch up to the bus and board it, but when a guy with a gun freaks out that Jack will arrest him, the driver is shot in the struggle and Annie has to take the wheel. Hijinks ensue.
Speed was Jan de Bont's directorial debut (he would follow it up with Twister) after a lengthy run as a cinematographer for films by John McTiernan (Die Hard, The Hunt For Red October), Ridley Scott (Black Rain), Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct), and Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon 3) and he clearly paid attention on how to stage an effective action movie. While sharp-eyed viewers can spot that often the bus is travelling well under the boom-triggering 50 mph - they really should've made it something more realistic, while still challenging, like 35-40 mph - de Bont's capably keeps the tension simmering even as impossible moments like the bus jump occur.
The last act where Payne is able to grab Annie and hold her hostage is a bit of a stretch and a bit of a comedown after the bus trip ends, feeling like a second ending. This was Graham Yost's first screenplay which would be followed by John Woo's Broken Arrow and nothing else exceptional, but he'd do far better in television creating Justified and Silo, the latter I'm eagerly awaiting its return for its 3rd season.
The iTunes presentation includes 4K Dolby Vision and while there are some bright sparks and nice orange explosions, the generally silver/gray color palette and naturalistic daytime cinematography doesn't serve as very good demo material. On the extras front, there are two commentaries (which I haven't listened to) and a smattering of making-of and deleted scenes presented in standard-def.
I can't recall how the 2006 Blu-ray looked and if you're not a AV fiend, it may suffice if you're just a fan of the movie. If you want to bump up on a budget, it's frequently available on iTunes for $5, but you must have an iDevice or an Apple TV 4K to access extras/commentaries. The Apple TV app only plays the movie.
It's early-Ninties action movie night at Xanadu and kicking things off is Renny Harlin's best film, 1993's Cliffhanger, which was more or less "Die Hard on a mountain." It's been 8-1/2 years(!) since we've watched it on Blu-ray (never posted a review) and a few days shy of 15 years(!!) since watching it on a so-so DVD along with the missus's fave, Vertical Limit, as a New Year's Day double feature which got reviewed here. I bought it on iTunes in 4K 6-1/2 years ago, so it's time to give it a look and listen.
For those unfamiliar with the plot, Sylvester Stallone plays Gabe, a mountain ranger haunted by a harrowing accident which resulted in the death of the girlfriend of his best friend and fellow ranger, Hal (Michael Rooker). He quits the job, but comes back all mopey and emo to try and convince his girlfriend, Jessie (a luscious Janine Turner), a rescue chopper pilot, to leave the park to come with him to Denver.
Meanwhile, in the skies over the park a daring midair hijacking of $100 million in uncirculated bills in three big suitcases being transported from the Denver Mint to San Francisco has gone awry with the jet being flown by the robbers crashing into the park and the cases scattered across the mountains. The gang's leader, Qualen (John Lithgow), has a tracking device to locate the cases, but needs a guide to lead the gang to them, so they make a bogus distress call about hikers lost in the storm with one going into insulin shock.
The weather is too poor for Jessie to fly the chopper, so Hal sets out to find the "hikers." Gabe wants no part of climbing anymore, protesting he doesn't have the touch, but Jessie convinces him to assist even though Hal hates Gabe for the accident. When the pair find the airplane, they also discover what's really happening: They're being used to find the money cases after which they'll obviously be eliminated. Naturally, Gabe is able to escape the group and the rest of the movie is him and Jessie racing to find the money before Qualen's gang, picking off members, while also trying to keep Hal alive.
Cliffhanger works because Harlin keeps his foot on the gas the whole time, only letting up for brief breathers. Filmed in Italy's Dolomites (standing in for the Rockies) with big practical stunts and explosions including the Guinness World Record for the most paid a stuntman ($1M) to perform the midair plane transfer gag, it gives the action a heft that's often missing these days.
It also benefits from a solid script rewritten by Stallone to set up the characters of Gabe, Hal, and Jessie in the aftermath of the accident. Gabe blames himself for not being able to save Hal's girlfriend, but as Jessie tries to remind him she wasn't experienced enough for the climb Hal took her on. Hal blames Gabe, but has to know he perpetuated the situation that ended in tragedy.
But while the script beefs up the motivations on the good guy side, the villains remain cartoons especially Lithgow's Qualen who sports an accent miles away from the coast of England in the ocean somewhere. If he was hoping for a Hans Gruber moment, it didn't happen. Thankfully, it doesn't fall into the endless quippy mode of lesser James Bond and especially Ahnuld action flicks. The biggest laugh is when Gabe is burning the money to keep Jessie and him warm in a cave, "It costs a fortune to heat this place." Zing!
While the action is mostly practical, it's not always realistic like the boots they're wearing aren't what climbers wear (except in the opening scene), the bolt gun not being a real thing, and how Gabe doesn't die of hypothermia despite sometimes being down to a t-shirt in the cold. Yes, he is really shivering in one scene, but let's be real. Minor technical quibble: Digital wire removal was in its infancy so there are a few shots where Stallone is hanging off cliffs (heh) and above him is a distractingly obvious blurry line where they attempted to hide the safety line.
I faulted the old DVD's image quality and frankly can't recall how good the Blu-ray is, but the iTunes 4K presentation is very nice with good detail - I noticed for the first time in a shot where the baddies are hiking atop a cliff face that Gabe and Jessie were directly beneath them on the face (you won't see that on your phones, kids) - and the boost from Dolby Vision enhanced the lighting in some shots like "God rays" from the Sun in one stunning vista I'd never noticed before as well.
Shot anamorphically on film there is some softness at times due to the format and lens and the snowy gray mountains limit the color palette, but splashes of color like explosions, the red-orange of helicopter, and green trees pop nicely. The Dolby Atmos audio gets your height speakers going with helicopters, jets and explosions.
Unfortunately, there are no extras included when the Blu-ray had two commentary tracks (one with Harlen and Stallone), deleted scenes, and other featurettes, so this isn't a one-and-done purchase for completionists. You'll need to keep your old disc if you care about that stuff, so hold for a $5 sale to buy this.
The Nineties were a peak time for action movies but for some reason Cliffhanger gets overlooked in favor of titles like Speed or even Under Seige, but it's top shelf fun and barring the paucity of extras, it's worth getting in 4K.
Let's get this over with: Five Nights At Freddy's 2 is the sequel to 2023's surprise smash hit Five Nights At Freddy's, which grossed nearly $300M from fans of the videogame series which began in 2014, but as a gamer have never played. I didn't write up a review for the first one, but gave it a 5/10 - catch on cable/streaming score. I vaguely remember it having some interesting elements, but had to look up a synopsis to try and remember what happened and it was so convoluted I stopped caring since I'm not getting paid to write these reviews.
Anyway, that which is rewarded gets repeated so we're back with the original brain trust of director Emma Tammi and screenwriter Scott Cawthon (who is also the creator of the games) guiding returning stars Josh Hutcherson and Piper Rubio as siblings Mike and Abby Schmidt, Elizabeth Lail as local cop and daughter of evil serial killer Vanessa Shelly, and Matthew Lillard as William Afton, her child-killing father and founder of the Freddy Fazbear's Pizza chain whose animatronic mascots were powered by the souls of murdered children and, no, I'm not making that up.
It's some time after the events of the first movie and Abby misses her murderbot pals which may be why she insanely believes she can pull off a hairstyle that's part bob and has bangs, something most women struggle to pull off just one of those. She has an jerk teacher (Wayne Knight) who won't let her participate in the science fair.
Meanwhile, a team of ghost hunters investigate the original Freddy Fazbear's Pizza location and get murdered by the various spirit robots or something, led by the Marionette, a new monster who harbors the soul of a little girl murdered by Afton in the prologue and whose father is played by Skeet Ulrich who seems to be here solely to be able to say the original killers from Scream were together again in a movie though they never meet.
So, anyway some bloodless PG-13 mayhem transpires predictably - one kill sequence I called right before it happened, it was so telegraphed - and it ends up setting up the inevitable sequel which I will not be watching after only having watched this because the missus wanted to see it. (I made her watch Speed later, which is hardly payback since that's good.)
While the first one was no great shakes, the decline in quality across the board while it still grossed over $200M doesn't bode well for the future of horror cinema.
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)
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.
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.
I saw some animal on TwiX sneering that 2003's Elf wasn't a good movie and people only liked it because they were kids when they fell in love with it and don't want to admit it sucks. Yeah, his inner child is on a metaphysical milk carton somewhere. Coincidentally, I was able to snag the 4K disc for only $5 so even though I already have it on Blu-ray and HD digital, I upgraded. How is it? Read on...
For those avoiding Christmas movies for the past 22 years, here's the quick recap: Will Ferrell plays Buddy, a human baby who crawled into Santa Claus's (Ed Asner) sack when Ol' St. Nick was delivering to the orphanage he was at. When discovered at the North Pole, an elf looked at the brand of diaper - Lil' Buddy - and just as Marty McFly's mother thought he was named Calvin Klein from his underwear, Buddy became known as Buddy and was given to the childless Papa Elf (Bob Newhart) to raise.
No one explained to Buddy why he was so large as he grew into Will Ferrell, so when he finally overhears other elves discussing how he was too dumb to realize he's not an elf, his world is shattered. Papa Elf explains that his father was a man named Walter Hobbs (James Caan) who'd knocked up his girlfriend but didn't know and that his mother had given him up for adoption then died like this was a Disney movie without Walter ever knowing of Buddy's existence.
Armed with this information and a snow globe of New York City, he travels to the Big Apple to find Walter at his Empire State Building office where he publishes defective children's books to be on Santa's Naughty List. Walter has no idea who this large weirdo in the elf costume is, but when it's confirmed Buddy is his son, he takes him home to stay with his wife, Emily (Mary Steenburgen), and son, Michael (Daniel Tay). Buddy briefly gets a job at Gimbels department store (a real store chain that went out of business in 1986) where he meets Jovie (Zooey Deschanel), a jaded coworker whom he takes a liking to.
The bulk of the plot involves Buddy wearing everyone down with his relentless, guileless enthusiasm. The script by David Berenbaum as directed by Jon Favreau is cute without being cloying, refreshingly uncynical except for the cynical characters, and actually safe for kids with a PG rating. And the ending involving New Yorkers pulling together to express enough Christmas cheer to make Santa's sleigh fly seems so quaint considering they just installed a radical Ugandan Islamist Communist who's never held a real job in his life as Mayor and is now promising to divide and punish the disfavored folks. Elf was made on location in the wake of 9/11, but NYC just surrendered to the forces that brought down the Twin Towers.
I can see why some may be adverse to Ferrell's crazy-eyed performance, but he plays it straight instead of making Buddy seem dumb instead of sheltered. Caan probably had no effing idea what was happening, but that older style works. This was also probably Peter Dinklage's best-known role before he became Shorty Lannister on Throne Games and his one scene is a classic. Deschanel is cute but nearly unrecognizable as a blonde without her trademark bangs. She also shows off her pipes with two renditions of "Baby It's Cold Outside" which made her later She & Him musical project not the usual actor side foolery, but actually quality retro pop.
As for the new disc, they've made a new scan and grade in the correct 1.85:1 aspect ratio, correcting the previous Blu-ray's matted 1.78:1 AR. (Unfortunately, the included BD disc is the old one, not a 1080p disc of this new master. Booooooo to cheapness!) The cinematography and visuals aren't particularly flashy so the fact the disc's HDR10 grade (no Dolby Vision) seems capped to 613 nits isn't a major flaw. What it does deliver is solid primary colors and surprising detail in the costumes which makes the felt look like it could be felt. They used forced perspective camera tricks to make Ferrell seem enormous and the higher resolution slightly exposes where the seams are if you know what to look for.
Unlike what the Scrooge on the Internet says, Elf is a sweet family movie and Christmas classic. The two commentaries - one by Favreau that sounds informative from the bit I sampled and the other by Ferrell (didn't check) - and over an hour of making-of featurettes are all recycled from the old release, so they only new thing is the 4K feature. If you want the best possible visual presentation and you can get it cheap on sale, this is a no-brainer. If you're not so picky, but want a better version if you don't want to go the disc route, look for a sale on the 4K digital version for $5. It's a Movies Anywhere title so there are a lot of purchase and playback options.
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:
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.
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)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
