Welcome To DirkFlix!

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

A: Yes, yes, and why not?

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

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a while and a dozen intervening movies, I couldn't remember enough specifics to properly review them, so they remained unpublished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Being Eddie" 4K Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"The Perfect Neighbor" 4K Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"Downey Wrote That" Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Score: 8/10. Catch it on Peacock.

"John Candy: I Like Me" 4K Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Roofman" Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Bedazzled" Blu-ray Review

Previously reviewed here.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable. 

"Primative War" Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Apple TV+.

"Freakier Friday" Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Woman In Cabin 10" 4K Review

 Since I'm functionally illiterate I don't read much and because I'm a man I don't follow the best-selling books that women snap up then get made into movies like It Ends With Us or The Woman on the Train, but there's got to be a section in bookstores called "Trashy Beach Reads," right? RIGHT?!? Because that's where the novel which shares the title of this week's Netflix Original The Woman in Cabin 10 would've been shelved.

Keira Knightley (Natalie Portman's Queen Amadala decoy in Star Wars - Episode One - The Phantom Menace) stars as Laura "Lo" Blacklock, an investigative journalist for The Guardian who is traumatized by her last story and thus accepts an invitation for what should be a puff piece where she will ride on the superyacht of billionaire Richard Bullmer (Guy Pearce, LA Confidential) from England to Norway where he will be announcing a foundation dedicated to curing cancer because his wife, Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli), has Stage 4 leukemia.

Also on the yacht are a select handful of fellow Very Rich Folk and influencers (whose characters are so stock generic that "she's on Ted Lasso" is a distinguishing characteristic) as well as Lo's ex-boyfriend, Ben (David Ajala, Star Trek: Discovery), a photographer in Bullmer's employ. He's trying to charm her back, but she's not having it.

After setting sail, she is summoned by Anne to advise her on a speech she intends to give at the party announcing that all the money would be given to an independent group, effectively cutting Richard off. Anne knows she's nearing the end and has stopped taking the medications. Because she easily tires, they agree to reconvene the next day.

While returning to her room, Lo doges Ben by ducking into Cabin 10 (roll credits!) next to hers (convenient how the doors don't lock) where she encounters a young blonde woman (Gitte Witt) in a hoodie coming from the bathroom. After an awkward moment, Lo leaves and goes to her cabin.

That night, she's awakened by a disturbance next door, raised voices & sounds of violence, culminating with a splash in the water. Rushing onto her balcony, she sees a woman in the water and raises the alarm, causing the crew to rush to investigate, but they find nothing and start giving her the side eye, blaming her PTSD over a subject of her last story drowning to trigger a nightmare. Also, Cabin 10 is supposed to be empty, so clearly Lo is imagining things.

As Lo tries to figure out who this woman was, Anne seems different as well, complaining of how fatigued the drugs are making her and forgetting that she was supposed to meet with Lo about her speech. 

To say the movie's clue breadcrumbs are the size of bread loaves would be an understatement, though when the Big Twist is revealed halfway through, I didn't see it coming. But it then turns the rest of the movie into how will Lo expose the plot versus how will the villain(s?) get away with it. The denouement is absolutely bonkers, raising the question of how the villain thought they were going to carry on after what transpired.

Running a tidy 95-minutes, The Woman in Cabin 10 doesn't overstay its welcome or pretend to matter more than it does. It's a trashy beach read without the sand getting everywhere.

The Dolby Vision and Atmos presentation is fine, but unexceptional due to the most steely gray color palette and predominance of darker scenes. There are a few moments of bright specular highlights or overt heigh channel usage, but not so much that those not paying the top tier freight to Netflix will miss it.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"Nobody 2" Review

 2021's Nobody was a sleeper hit continuing Bob Odenkirk's odd career trajectory from Funny Guy (SNL, Mr. Show) to Serious Actor Guy (Better Call Saul) to Aging Action Guy. As Hutch, the former assassin who forsook that life to be a suburban schlub dad, Odenkirk was the least likely action hero since Liam Neeson in the Taken series.

Well, Hollyweird being what it is and anything that makes money gets repeated even when no one really asked for more, along comes Nobody 2 which finds Hutch having trouble spending much family time with the wife and kids because he's constantly being sent on assignments by the Barber (Colin Salmon, The Lazarus Project) to pay back the $50 million in cash he burned in the last movie. With his wife, Becca (Connie Nielsen, Wonder Woman), getting frustrated and not seeing his kids, he decides it's time for a family vacation to Plummerville, a town with an amusement park his father, David (Christopher Lloyd, Taxi), took him as a child.

Of course, nothing goes easy for Hutch as when his son gets into an altercation with a townie boy which escalates into a situation where Hutch beats the tar out of an arcade worker, he finds that Plummerville is a place where everyone is crooked including the park operator, Wyatt (John Ortiz, American Fiction), to the the corrupt Sheriff, Abel (Colin Hanks, really looking like his old man these days). But they're just cogs in the machine as both work for crime boss Lendina (Sharon Stone in such a weird performance that the missus didn't recognize her).

As things escalate, Lendina and her soldiers head to town to kill Hutch, his family, and everyone else thus leading to some alliances with former foes and an ending at the park which gave me flashbacks to The A-Team (the old TV show, not the movie which no one remembers despite an A-list cast).

I didn't review the original Nobody, but scored it a 6/10, catch on cable, and while the action beats here have their moments, there's a general going-through-the-motions vibe about Nobody 2 that really makes it feel like there wasn't a burning need to tell more stories of Hutch's life, but someone figured they could make some money. With a higher budget and a insufficient box office gross, it looks like Nobody 2 should be the end of the franchise.

If you've watched everything else and are looking for something to have on while doomscrolling your phone, this is a movie suited for multitasking. Or just watch the trailer to get the gist of it.

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

"Caught Stealing" Review

In the wake of 1994's Pulp Fiction, Hollweird went into overdrive trying to make quirky crime movies leading to a lot of third-rate Tarantino imitators resulting in mediocre cult flicks like The Boondocks Saints or launching careers of overrated directors like Guy Ritchie with Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. So, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Five it's weird to see Darren Aronofsky (Requiem For A Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan) wading in these waters with a movie set in 1998 that tries to feel like a 1998 Pulp Fiction knockoff, Caught Stealing.

Austin Butler as Hank Thompson, a bartender living on NYC's Lower East Side who is tormented by nightmares reliving the auto accident which ended his professional baseball career before it started and killed his best friend. He's got a FWB situation going on with a cute paramedic, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), but his life isn't really going anywhere.

His British next door neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), needs return to London to tend to his ailing father and ropes Hank into watching his cat. One day, he hears pounding at Russ's door and when he goes to see what the hubbub's about, a pair of Russian thugs decide to savagely beat Hank, injuring him so badly he loses a kidney. The thugs eventually break into Russ's apartment and narcotics Det. Roman (Regina King) informs Hank that Russ was a drug dealer connected to a pair of Hasidic Jew brothers, Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully Drucker (Vincent D'Onofrio), who are warring with the Russians and their Puerto Rican associate, Colorado (Benito Martínez Ocasio, bka Bad Bunny).

If this sounds convoluted to you, it's even worse in practice as it devolves into various twists, double-and-triple-crosses, deaths, etc. to the point you don't even care to keep track of who's doing what to whom. Everyone is so "colorful" but the time where "colorful" was enough wore out its welcome around the time we got sick of hearing about the Y2K Bug.

I'm not sure what attracted Aronofsky to this project. His last film was 2022's The Whale which won Brendan Fraser an Oscar, rebounding from the flop which was 2017's Mother! (which I liked - 6/10 - and actually caught the Biblical allegory which escaped many), but he's not suited for the tonal tightrope you need to walk to make something like Caught Stealing work without becoming chaotic or drowning in cruelty.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"The Lost Bus" 4K Review

California wildfires are as common as bottles of baby oil at a Diddy party and one of the largest, costliest, and deadliest was the 2018 Camp Fire where 85 people died, nearly $17 billion in damage was done, over 55,000 people were displaced as several towns and cities were burned to the ground. In the midst of this rapidly spreading firestorm was The Lost Bus, now a heavily-fictionalized docudrama by Paul Greengrass (Captain Phillips, United 93, three Jason Bourne sequels) about the school bus full of kids trying to get to safety.

Matthew McConaughey stars as Kevin McKay, a school bus driver with so many problems I suspected the most dishonest screenwriter in Hollyweird, Paul Haggis, was involved. He's a divorced dad whose estranged father recently died bringing him back home to Paradise, CA where his invalid mother (played by McConaughey's real mother) and surly son (played by his real son, Levi) live. He has to put his cancer-ridden dog down and his bus driving job seems on shaky ground due to his screwups which put him on the wrong side of the dispatcher, Ruby (Ashlie Atkinson, The Gilded Age).

On the morning of November 8, 2018, poorly maintained power lines spark in the high winds and set the tinder-dry undergrowth ablaze. Kevin is trying to balance getting his charges delivered to school while trying to get medicine back home to his sick son while Ruby is hectoring him to get the bus in for maintenance. As the blaze spreads, evacuation orders go out and 22 children at a school whose parents aren't able to come get them need a ride. Kevin is the only one in the area so he volunteers to pick them up in hopes it will earn some points with Ruby.

The class and their teacher, Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera, Ugly Barbie), get on board and of course things rapidly begin to fall apart as the roads are jammed with evacuees, communication with Ruby falters then fails, and the roaring blazes close in around them. It doesn't help that their first destination was closed and evacuated without their knowledge due to lost communication, so they're scrambling to find an alternate route to what seems to be safety.

Of course, they find time for Kevin and Mary to discuss their lives and disappointments while waiting for the blaze to consume them and as with the opening scenes, they ring false as Hollywood inventions to pad the run time and provide a respite between the thrilling action sequences. The problem with those is that apparently they never really happened and pretty much everything other than Kevin and Mary being real people and a bus full of kids needing to flee is invention including the "lost" aspect; they were stuck in traffic, but in constant contact.

But bolstering the fiction is the portrayal of the firefighters led by Ray Martinez (Yul Vazquez, Petey on Severance) and their doomed attempts to fight the fire culminating in their realizing there was nothing to be done but evacuate the population. Vazquez is so believable I wondered if Greengrass had cast real participants; I'm sure a lot of the extras are real firefighters; they look like real people.

I knocked a point off the score for The Lost Bus because of its overly-fictionalized plot and forced melodrama, but it's still a worthy watch as an action adventure flick. Perhaps they should've just gone fully fictional so the changes weren't so jarring.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on Apple TV+

"Weapons" 4K Review

While Hollyweird seems mostly interested in rehashing the same old ideas, there have been a few more original sleeper hits this year in the horror genre, first with the OK-but-overrated Sinners and now the weird Weapons. The story of how all but one of a third grade classroom's students disappeared without a trace is the sophomore effort by writer-director-co-scorer Zach Cregger whose previous feature Barbarians (which I didn't see, but the missus did and didn't like) made him a buzzy name in town and sparked a fast and furious bidding war for this script.

Weapons starts simply enough with a child's voiceover setting the stage: Two years before, 17 children in Justine Gandy's (Julia Garner, Ozark) third grade classroom simultaneously got up at 2:17 am and ran out of their homes into the night never to be seen again. Security cameras captured some of their flights, but little more.

After several weeks, it's decided that school needs to continue, but at a meeting between school officials and parents, blame is cast upon Justine with Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), voicing his displeasure at the lack of progress to the school principal, Marcus (Benedict Wong, The Martian), and a police captain (Toby Huss).

With an alluded-to checkered past and passions running high, Marcus puts Justine on leave and she falls into a spiral of drinking, leading to a hook-up with her ex-boyfriend, a cop named Paul (Alden Ehrenreich, Solo), whose wife is none to pleased with that development.

Cregger tells his story through various point-of-view segments following Justine, Archer, Paul, a crackhead lowlife that Paul encounters (Austin Abrams, Euphoria), Marcus, and finally Alex (Cary Christopher, making his major debut), the sole child not to disappear and whose Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan, Field of Dreams) is shaping up to be a popular Halloween costume.

Cregger does a few jump scares and the gore is icky, but fleeting, but overall he succeeds in ratcheting up the tension and keeping us tantalized with the mystery. There's always a risk of when what's going on is revealed and explained that it won't resolve things satisfactorily and if you think about what you're told, you'll be left with several "For why?" questions that could've been better addressed. (e.g. What's the deal with the giant floating AR-15 hovering over the house during a dream?) But those will come after the big payoff bonkers ending which shows Cregger shows he knows sending the audience off entertained papers over any gaps in logic until the drive home.

The performances are solid across the board though the characters are thinly-drawn with Cregger choosing allusion to specificity when erring hair the other way would've helped. The MVP is Madigan whose Gladys is a ballsy creation for an actress to portray, leveraging the truism that people begin to look like their spouses when she's been married 42 years to Ed Harris.

The 4K Dolby Vision presentation doesn't offer much in the way of nit-blasting highlights, but helps keep the many dark, gloomy scenes from dissolving in black crush.

While it could've been deeper, Weapons manages to creep you out then release the tension effectively. Recommended for those not super-picky about plotting.

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

"Honey Don't!" Review

 I'm not going to lie; the major reason we watched Honey Don't! was for the lesbian sex scenes between Aubrey Plaza (Parks & Recreation) and Margaret Qualley (The Substance). The reviews were bad with even the more favorable ones complaining about the gratuitous nature of the sexuality. (Hey, I said we wanted to see it; you don't need to sell us.) So how was the rest of the movie? A mess and if you're just looking for the smut, that's why Lemmy invented the Internet.

Qualley is Honey O'Donahue, a private investigator whose potential client turns up dead in an wrecked car on the outskirts of Bakersfield, CA. The homicide detective who called her to the scene, Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day, Pacific Rim), hits on her and she has to remind him for the umpteenth time that she likes girls.

She gets the address of the dead woman's family and after interviewing them learns that she has been involved with Four-Way Temple, a church operated by the sketchy Rev. Drew Devlin (Chris Evans, Not Another Teen Movie). She finds the woman's church robe under her bed and out falls a leather & chains BDSM bikini. Hmmmm.

Rev. Drew is a piece of work, constantly banging ladies from his congregation while dumb henchmen from his drug trafficking side business walk in on his activities. Flanking his "altar" are huge portraits of himself looking like bad modeling head shots done at Sears Photo Studio, not Jesus. Evans is having a blast as the cheesy preacher who's more interested in how he looks than his partners feel.

There's also a side plot involving a drug mule of the Rev's having a deal go very sideways with the boyfriend of a client who'd hired Honey to see if he was cheating on him, but what you want to know about his the Good Stuff, right? Well, Plaza evidence cop, MG Falcone, is her usual tart sarcastic self, but this time she's gay and somewhat obsessed with Honey who is receptive to her interest beginning with a fine how do you do in a bar. It's not Bound and it's definitely not Blue Is The Warmest Color-grade lesbionics, but the Mr. Skin crowd will like it.

But that's only a couple of minutes and there's another 87 minutes to fill and co-writer/director Ethan Cohen and his co-writer wife Tricia Cooke (though according to this, "wife" seems inappropriately normative) go with a patchwork of pastiches from his better works with brother Joel like Fargo, Burn After Reading, and No Country For Old Men (which I hated and it sucked and FIGHT ME!) setting up a lot of quirky moments, but nothing cohesive or compelling.

The movie opens with a woman at the crash scene, pulling a signet ring for the Temple off the woman's body before being shown fully nude floating in a river, copying a scene with his sister-in-law, Frances McDormand (Nomadland) in the movie Nomadland, before riding off on her scooter. Who is this woman; I thought it was Honey and was confused by the next scene being her arrival at the crash. She's somewhat explained, but not really as references are meant to substitute for substance.

A side plot involving Honey's Goth niece (Talia Ryder, Do Revenge) disappearing after an encounter with an sad old man outside her burger joint job sets up a weird twist then plays into the out-of-left-field resolution of her fling with Falcone. And the way the scooter-riding femme fatale wraps things up is another head-scratcher in a movie full of them.

There are several good laughs - a runner about Honey having "book club" is one - and some potential for a quirky story, but they're not fleshed out in a movie that feels longer than its 89-minute run time would imply. But everyone is a cartoon when they're not just an insulting hick caricature.

And it's too bad because as Film Threat's Chris Gore said in his negative review, Honey is an interesting character stuck in a crappy movie. With her retro fashion and wise-cracking lines, Qualley manages to make Honey more than just a gender-flipped queer take on the hardboiled private dick trope even though the trite script doesn't really give her much to play. 

Honey Don't! is the second of a "lesbian B-movie trilogy" Coen and Cooke are making which began with Drive-Away Dolls last year (a movie the missus turned off after 10 minutes) so, to say anticipation for the third installment is non-existent would be accurate. With a budget of $20M and a gross of only $6.7M it was a bomb, making a million less than Drive-Away Dolls - which the studio paid $20M for the privilege of trying to sell it because "a director of Fargo & No Country For Old Men" made it - so perhaps two failures are enough to prevent this conclusion from happening.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"Stans" Review

 Eminem's 2000 album The Marshall Mathers LP contained one of his biggest tracks, "Stan", which told the story of an obsessed stalker fan (thus the portmanteau of "stan") writing him fan letters that become more and more unhinged until it results in the fan killing himself and his pregnant girlfriend because Em never wrote back. The last verse is Em replying to the notes, trying to chill the guy out before ultimately realizing that a news story he'd seen was about Stan.

As both a portrayal of how fans can feel they have personal relationships with celebrities and how it feels to be on the receiving end of such unnerving fan mail, it was Mathers stepping up on his sophomore release to show he was capable of rapping about subjects more nuanced than the cartoonish violence showcased on his debut, The Slim Shady LP.

It also provides the title for the documentary Stans, which is partially a very superficial recap of Mathers' early career and mostly a platform for a lot of his stans to talk about how they love him and how much his music means to them. They identify with what he talks about and find strength in his bravado and vulnerability. While the initial read on them made me wonder if they were handed their own restraining order while signing the release forms, most seem to understand that they're obsessed and aren't looking to harm him though the woman who has the Guinness Book of World Records record for most tattoos of single person (22!) needs to have posters and photos explained to her.

Occasionally, Mathers chimes in with how this feels to him, but there's a dissonance about how detached from reality some fans can get while giving them a platform because they're superfans. They make the pilgrimage to Detroit to visit important sites from his life like Gilbert's Lodge, a restaurant a couple miles from the Detroit border he used to busboy at (that I coincidentally drive past an average of once a day because it's a mile from my home) as if he may be hanging around.

If he wants to temper their hopes up for meeting them, it doesn't help that one fan relates how after a show in 2013, Em's car stopped and a security guy summoned him to get in to meet Mathers and snap a picture. So, he's saying there's a chance? How did Mathers know who this fan was? Don't know.

And that's the core problem with Stans, it doesn't really delve deeply enough into the subject of Mathers or his fans enough to make this critical viewing. At least they put the dates of when things happen so one can realize that the period between his first album dropping and his Oscar-winning movie 8 Mile premiering was less than four years and he'd dropped three albums.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Paramount+.

"Jurassic World Rebirth" 4K Review

 The missus loves the Dino Park (as I call the Jurassic Park/World series) movies. We've seen the first six in theaters and seeing that midnight showing of the first one on my birthday in 1993 made such an impression that I called into my work on my day off to rave about it. The series has been uneven - Dino Park 1 is a GOAT, DP 2 & 4 are pretty good, DP 3 & 6 are OK, DP 5 aka Jurassic Mansion: Pointless Sequel was pants - but she was gung ho to see the latest installment, but due to various reasons of business and pretty bad reviews, for the first time we did not trek to the theater to see the dinosaurs. We just waited five weeks for Dino Park 7: Oh Look, There's Another Previously Unknown Island with Dinosaurs or as you probably know it as, Jurassic World Rebirth, to hit streaming and here it is and good thing I didn't drive to a theater to see this lackluster entry into the getting-overly-milked franchise.

This time around the world has grown bored of dinosaurs because shut up this is the plot. They've also been dying out because it's not warm enough in the areas where people live (so much for the ManBearPig hoax) and they're most living near the equator because warm and more oxygen? (Not going to bother Googling that.)

Sleazy Pharma Bro (Rupert Friend, A Simple Favor) believes his company could make trillions of dollars selling medicines developed from DNA harvested from live dinosaurs. Since they're living in an area off-limits to humans, he hires Merc Babe (ScarJo, Lucy) to get him and Dino Scientist (Jonathan Bailey, Wicked) to another InGen facility island which had been abandoned after an accident 17 years previously because a Snickers wrapper can apparently fry the security systems of a secret dino breeding lab.

After picking up Merc Bro (Mahershala Ali, Blade, LOL) and some obvious Red Shirts (including one recognizable B-list star who the trailer spoils his fate), they head off to the Forbidden Zone to harvest blood from a fishosaur, landosaur, and aerosaur. Elsewhere on the ocean, a father and his two daughters - one young and likely to find a cute dino pal, the other teenaged and bringing her stoner dumbass boyfriend along - are sailing when their sailboat is capsized by a big fishosaur. (I'm not bothering listing the actors for their privacy.)

Their mayday call is received by merc boat and they are rescued, but as they approach the island, more fishosaurs attack the boat, causing some to die, some to fall overboard, and the rest to crash onto the shore where some are eaten. The family regroups and heads for where the village is supposed to be and the mercs, Pharma Bro and Dino Scientist collect samples and try not to get eaten, which is easy for anyone who has an Oscar or nomination or needs to stay alive until they can be eaten by the Final Boss Uggosaur in a completely unexpected and OK, I totally called how they were going to get offed.

If you think I'm leaving out a lot of details, I'm not. There's nothing of interest here, nothing that surprises or delights. Sure, the action is well directed by Gareth Edwards (The Creator, Rogue One) and the visual effects are seamless & spectacular, but we were able to predict the fates of pretty much every character, the plot armor was so obvious as were the red herring intended to make you think anyone could get killed. I was even calling out lines seconds ahead of the movie. It's that predictable.

Much was made of the detail that David Koepp, who'd adapted Michael Crichton's novel for the first movie, wrote Dino Park 7, but if you've followed his work, it's been roughly two decades since he's written A-tier material and what he's done since pales what the first half of his IMDB lists. Here he's just typing, not writing. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if he just prompted ChatGPT to "write a Jurassic Park movie in the style of David Koepp." The talking and stuff between set pieces only serves to prevent the movie from being 30 minutes long.

While not the worst Dino Park movie, it's down there in the way F9: The Fast Saga is blocked from the bottom slot by 2 Fast 2 Furious. None of the performances are demanding of our getting-paid stars and they don't even try to explain how a 5'3" woman becomes a first-call mercenary. (At least Charlize Theron is 5'10" and Uma Thurman is 5'11", not that it made The Old Guard 2 any less bad.)

Jurassic World Rebirth made enough money that Dino Park 8 is a sure thing, but it's not as if its likely to tell a compelling story from the looks of things.

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

"Together" Review

While it's tempting to suggest that the body horror genre pretty much begins and ends with the work of David Cronenberg (Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Crash, Crimes of the Future, to name a few) there are other practitioners such as Michael Shanks who makes his directorial debut with Together, which asks the question, how close is too close to be with someone?

Real-life married couple Allison Brie (GLOW, Community) and Dave Franco (Now You See Me, James' little brother) star as Millie and Tim, a young couple leaving New York City for her to start a job at an unnamed upstate elementary school. They've been dating for years, but never married and when she attempts to propose at their going away party in front of their friends, he freezes on answering, causing major embarrassment. He's struggling with having to functionally give up on his music career to follow her to the sticks, but he's going nowhere though accepts a touring guitarist gig with a friend's band.

While trying to get acclimated to the area, they go for a hike, get lost in a rainstorm, and fall into a cavern in the woods. With night falling, they decide to stay and lacking water, Tim drinks from a pool in the cave; a pool we saw a pair of dogs drink from in a prologue and suffer horrific effects. When they wake up, they find their calves stuck together which he attributes to mildew.

Afterwards, he begins to experience weird dreams and an overwhelming attraction to Millie (yes, Brie is attractive but not with the bad bangs hairstyle she's sporting here) and contact between them results in more things sticking together. Soon, she's being drawn to him leading to a scene where they're sleepcrawling towards each other, awaking in time to partially succeed in not getting totally stuck on each other, though a sabre saw is required to, well, you get the idea.

The reason for their fusing and a mysterious New Agey church/cult centered on the cavern, which was the chapel before sinking into the earth isn't really explained and it begs a lot of questions about just how close you really need to be to your partner. The ending - which I unfortunately had spoiled - could be a shark-jumping moment for some, like the horror fan missus who flipped from kinda liking it to "What the hell was that?"-ing it in the end.

I don't think it adds up to much despite grazing on some interesting ideas about relationships. The house they're living in seems waaaaaay too large for a teacher to afford and more space than they need. If feels like Shanks wanted to make a movie about a couple sticking together, literally, then sprinkled some details around it to make it seem more substantive without quite succeeding.

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

"DEVO" Review

 Even if you know more about the Akron, Ohio's favorite spud boys, Devo, than their Big Hit from 1980 "Whip It", you probably aren't prepared for what you'll learn watching DEVO, the 2024 Sundance hit documentary which has finally arrived on Netflix to coincide with the band's 50th anniversary tour with The B-52's.

Director Chris Smith applies the style from his excellent WHAM! documentary to let the subjects - new interviews with Mark Mothersbaugh, Jerry Casale, and Bob Mothersbaugh as well as archive footage of deceased members Bob Casale and Alan Myers - tell their story rather than having various dinosaur critics from Rolling Stone or one of the dreaded doc trio of Henry Rollins, Dave Grohl and/or Questlove.

Their story starts with Mothersbaugh and Casale attending Kent State and having two of their friends killed in that infamous incident in 1970. Both were artists and had been active in protesting the Vietnam War, but underlying their Leftist ideology was a deep cynicism about the world and its promises and that rather than becoming a better place, society and humanity itself was sliding down the slope to devolution - de-evolving into primitives - thus the name Devo.

Their art provocateur antics didn't go over great with the townies of The Rubber City, but a short film they'd made won a film festival which got them invited to play in LA for a label. While that didn't result in a deal, it gave them a leg up on trying the Big Apple where they rapidly found celebrities like John Lennon and Jack Nicholson in the crowd. David Bowie even introduced them for one show and offered to produce them.

After signing to Warner Bros., Bowie kept being too busy to produce them, but handed them off to Brian Eno for some contentious sessions. When the album was complete, the label's marketing team suggested making life-size cardboard cutouts of the band to stand in record stores. The band asked for that money instead to make a video for their cover of "Satisfaction." This was several years before MTV (a cable channel that used to play music videos long ago) launched, so the label was baffled, but agreed.

A high-profile appearance on Saturday Night Live ahead of their tour put them in the spotlight, but eventually their sophomore album flopped and the ultimatum was given: Your next album better have a hit or else hit the bricks. They took it to heart and turned in their Freedom of Choice album and when the label's pick for leadoff single, "Girl U Want," flopped, the second was the band's choice: "Whip It" and the rest was one-hit wonder history.

Because MTV was starved for content in the beginning and the band had produced several videos, they were ubiquitous in those early days. Ironically, as everyone got in on the act, MTV suddenly got picky about showing Devo's videos, pointing the the charts as an excuse for not playing them because lack of promotion leading to poor charts isn't a self-fulfilling prophecy or anything.

Eventually, Warners would tire of declining sales and drop the band and when they tried another label, Enigma, it was just before it would fold. At which point the band packed it in with Mothersbaugh and "the Bobs" starting a scoring company doing movies for Wes Anderson movies and Pee-Wee's Playhouse and Casale becoming a commercial and music video director.

Running throughout DEVO is a constant frustration they had in getting their philosophical, ideological, and political points across when everyone just saw the goofy costumes and weird videos. While their clear Leftist bent is referenced, the movie doesn't harp on the subject beyond the typical Boomer hippie whining about Ronald Reagan beating Jimmy Carter and the obligatory atheist snark against religion. (i.e. the current resident of the White House is never evoked)

That they've occasionally reunited to tour - I saw them at NXNE in Toronto in 2011 - goes unmentioned and the beginning dwells quite a while on Kent State before moving to the band proper, so DEVO doesn't quite hit the mark between those who know little and big fans needs. I was never that into them, but I had no idea about their early years and political underpinnings. However, as they covered their commercial misfortunes, especially the banned-by-MTV video for "That's Good", I was familiar with much of what they discussed.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on Netflix.

For some reason there is no trailer for this. Weird.

"Eenie Meenie" Review

 I've been a fan of Samara Weaving for a while now. Unfortunately, due to my inconsistent completing of reviews (i.e. sometimes not even logging more than a date and score, sorry), you'd be hard pressed to tell I'd seen any of her movies beyond Mayhem, but she's had a remarkably consistent streak of projects including Ready or Not, Guns Akimbo, and The Babysitter (which I never even logged). I've called her "Margot Robbie's slightly-less-attractive little sister," but on further inspections she's hotter, looking like a cross between Robbie and Heather Graham.

So, when the trailer dropped for the Hulu Original movie Eenie Meanie promising a tale of a former wheelwoman for criminal activities - Babe Driver, if you will (yes, I'm proud of that) - I was onboard. The trailer loudly promotes it was produced by the pair who'd co-written all the Deadpool movies, implying profane hijinks will ensure. Unfortunately, the actual result is a frustratingly misbegotten tonal misfire which wastes what should've been a breakout performance from Weaving and a good time for the audience.

We first meet 14-year-old Edie Meaney (Elle Graham) in a flashback to 2007 when she walks to the Cleveland bar to drive her drunk parents (Steve Zahn and Chelsea Crisp) home. The cops pull them over and the combination of Edie being underage and unlicensed and Mom having a bunch of cocaine in her possession, which would be a third strike, so Dad encourages her to make a run for it as he taught her. We don't see what happens next, but are eventually told by inference it didn't go great for everyone.

We jump to the present where grown-up Edie (Weaving) is working as a bank teller. When inept robbers hit her branch and she's knocked out, she's taken to the hospital where she's informed that while she doesn't have a concussion, she is pregnant by her ex-boyfriend, John (Karl Glusman, The Bikeriders), a terminal loser for whom making poor choices is his default setting. When she goes to tell him of her being embabied, she finds him about to be whacked by unknown gunmen and helps his buck naked ass escape with her superior wheelman skills. Why was he in peril? Who freaking cares.

I have to pause to say that at this point only a half-hour into the movie, I said to the missus, "If this movie ends with her back in love with him, I'm scoring it a zero." This guy isn't a loveable loser, he's a L-O-S-E-R and frankly, I'm disappointed in her that she was shtupping this doofus. (Was Pete Davidson unavailable?)

To get this over with, he's $3 million in hock to crime boss Nico (Andy Garcia), so to save his worthless life Edie will need to be the wheelgirl for an audacious heist of a Dodge Charger with $3M in cash in the trunk being given as the prize for a poker tournament at the Hollywood Casino in Toledo. (Meaningless Factoid: I've driven past this place once, I think.) They have all the right connections on the inside and it's going to be a piece of cake, right? Well, not really, because betrayal, double crosses, blah-blah-woof-woof and Johnny being an effing psycho at the end.

As with all bad movies, the trouble begins with the schizophrenic script by writer-director Shawn Simmons (co-creator of the John Wick prequel series The Continental) which apparently the Deadpool writers who produced this didn't flag as ruinous. This mess rivals Alex Garland for face-planting in the third act, but the problems shoot through the entire length.

For example, we're desperately trying to understand WHY Edie is so stuck on Johnny and finally, well into the plot she explains that they met when he intervened to save her from being pimped out by her foster father when she was 15. Icky stuff, but OK, I get that. But why was she in foster care? Because as a visit to her father implies, that opening scene where she runs from the cops resulted in her mother being killed and her father paralyzed and wheelchair-bound. Yikes.

He'd allowed her to go into the system because he couldn't have cared for her, but when we visit him he has remarried and appears to have a young daughter Edie was unaware of meaning in the ensuing 17 years he restarted his life and never reached out to his first daughter. But he seems to know who Johnny is, so....ummmmm, whut?

The heist itself is laughable because one moment she's being chased by tons of cop cars, then it's as if they completely gave up and never attempted to pursue and capture the thief of $3M. It's harder to shake off a two-star wanted level in Grand Theft Auto than it is to get away with a casino robbery. No one has her on security cameras IN A CASINO, not to mention the eyewitnesses who saw her behind the wheel - how many hot blonde getaway drivers are there in Ohio? - so she gets away clean?

The way Eenie Meanie careens into a ditch is a shame because there are several genuinely laugh out loud moments and lines and if Simmons had just stayed in the comedic lane where colorful characters like a competing wheelman with an amusing backstory for his burns is appropriate. Or he could've gone gritty and dark. Pick a lane and stay in it because when most of the movie is amusing, the whammies at the end wipe out all the goodwill the movie had scraped together.

But the biggest victim is Weaving who really hits all the notes the Simmons asks her to only for it to not matter in the end. There's a sequel to Ready or Not coming next year and she'll be in a couple more upcoming movies which may be good. She deserves to be known as more than looking a lot like Margot Robbie, a role she played in Damien Chazelle's bloated misfire Babylon.

Despite Weaving and some decent practical car chases and laughs, the messy ending makes Eenie Meanie one to miss.

Score: 4/10. Skip it. 

"28 Years Later" 4K Review

In the current trend of sequels arriving waaaaaaaaaaay after they would've been useful comes 28 Years Later, the third installment in the series of Danny Boyle & Alex Garland's series which began with 2002's 28 Days Later and 2007's 28 Weeks Later. While not technically a zombie series - the Rage virus infects and changes its victims into monsters within seconds - it's the source of the abominable fast-running zombie species which populated Zak Snyder's 2004 breakout remake of Dawn of the Dead.

After a prologue that seems utterly superfluous until the last minute, 28 Years Later is the story of Spike (Alfie Williams), a 12-year-old boy living on a small island off the coast of England with his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kick-Ass), and mother, Isla (Jodie Comer, Killing Eve). The entirety of England is quarantined and left to fend for themselves while the rest of the world apparently goes on as if animal rights lunatics hadn't unleashed a plague in their countries. The island is connected to the mainland via a causeway which is impassible any time other than low tide which helps in defending the small, but thriving community there.

Jamie decides it's time for Spike to make his first trip to the mainland and hopefully get his first zombie kill, a major rite of passage. The village elder doesn't approve because boys are usually 14 or 15 years-old when they make their first jaunt, but allows it after explaining the rules that anyone who goes out is on their own, no one will come to their rescue if anything happens.

The hunt goes OK until a pack of infected led by a larger, smarter Alpha chases them into the ruin of a house where they're stuck for the night due to the tide being in covering the causeway. From his perch in the attic, Spike sees a quarantine patrol ship & a fire off in the distance. He asks Jamie what it is, but dad demurs. When the house collapses, they barely make it back to their gate as the Alpha gains on them.

The town throws a celebration for Spike popping his zombie hunting cherry, but Jamie keeps exaggerating Spike's bravery & killing skills when he missed most shots and almost got them both killed. Disgusted, he leaves the party and spots dad getting super friendly with a townswoman not his wife. While it's somewhat understandable because Isla is racked by delirium & disorientation, mistaking days, people, referring to Spike as her father, Spike just sees his mother being cheated on.

When he gets home, he tells the family friend watching Isla about the fire and is told it may be the place of Dr. Kelson, a former general practitioner whose abode he'd approached some time after the plague and what he saw scared him from ever returning. But Spike hears "doctor" and believes his mother may be helped, so he bundles this infirm & not-totally-with-it woman up for a road trip farther than he barely survived before.

I've had a major problem with Garland's scripts for almost every movie he's written because he nearly invariably manages to crash a working movie in the third act or finale, but here he outdoes himself by making the plot lose me barely halfway through. The idea that this kid, who barely survived his first trip to the mainland is going to successfully shepherd his mother to find the doctor just didn't work. The sidebar of a military squad getting wiped out by infected is poorly premised. That there are now supersmart Alphas and families of zombies that look like giant waterlogged babies after 28 years is a huh? That there is a pregnant zombie is a double huh?

It all caps off with Spike choosing to stay on the mainland and almost get killed until he's saved by a weird group led by someone the audience probably forgot about and as soon as they're introduced the movie ends. WTF?!? Turns out a sequel, 28 Weeks Later: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DiCosta (last seen making the all-time biggest box office bomb of the MCU, The Marvels) from a Garland script, is coming in January. Oh, lovely.

Williams is very good as Spike, only annoying because the script writes him that way. He could have a future after this series. Taylor-Johnson and Comer are equally reigned in by the script, but do with it what they can. Fiennes is also good, but his character is just a weird caricature. 

I've never been a huge fan of the 28 Days/Weeks series, especially the first one's third act. Part of the knock on 28 Years Later was that it's not more of the same, and while that could've been a good thing because it's unlikely conditions would be exactly the same after three decades, what Garland comes up with is just dumb. Why didn't the world try to evacuate people from the island? Symptoms manifest within seconds so you just put evacuees into a holding pen for a couple of minutes and everyone who wasn't trying to eat the rest gets to board a boat to safety.

The 4K HDR presentation results in some occasionally brilliant photography with hyperreal colors. The hyped bullet time effect created by using an array of iPhones around the subject is a gimmick that doesn't really land and there are some shots that appear shot on phone which gives a member berry for the low-fi original movie's look.

I'm sure we'll eventually catch the sequel when it hits video, but I'm not expecting much better than what 28 Years Later sets up. 

Score: 5/10. Skip it.