"Star Trek: Section 31" 4K Review

 Matching Star Wars for sheer IP self-destruction has been Star Trek. After dwindling quality & box office returns of the J.J. Abrams' so-called "Kelvin Timeline", there have been several bad streaming series on Paramount+ starting with Star Trek: Discovery (never has an abbreviation - STD - been so appropriate) which was so bad I bailed out after just a few episodes of the 2nd season.

The Picard series was even worse as it took the best Enterprise Captain and made him a sad, broken old man for two seasons before streaming Trek boss Alex Kurtzman (one of the Bad Robot hacks famed for typing Transformers movies) wandered away and left a third and final season in the hands of the actually talented Terry Metalas who made it a very good Star Trek: The Next Generation bonus season which somehow prompted Will Riker actor Jonathan Frakes to deliver a performance I'd never would've believed possible.

 Strange New Worlds has been a mixed bag, but not the crapfest of STD. I don't watch the kid-oriented Prodigy or animated Lower Decks. 

So what of Star Trek: Section 31, the former TV series converted into a short feature film starring the awesome Michelle Yeoh - make that ACADEMY AWARD WINNER FOR BEST ACTRESS MICHELLE FREAKING YEOH! - as a member of a secret Starfleet Intelligence black ops group? The reviews were bad and the Trek purists were debating whether Section 31 violated Gene Roddenberry's Utopian vision of the future. But I was just looking for some sci-fi fun with Yeoh being hot and badass. I was willing to give it some slack because I'm not a purist. So how is it?

To quote The Critic's Jay Sherman, "It stinks!"

How bad does it stink? It's I turned it off after 20 minutes because life is too short to waste on clearly subpar entertainment stinky.

 Yeoh stars as the Phillipa Georgiou brought over from the Mirror Universe toward the end of STD's first season to replace the Discovery Captain who died in the second episode. Why she was brought over, I can't recall and I don't care enough to look up, but this Georgiou was Emperor of the Terran Empire and a Very Bad Person. But in a post-credit scene of the season finale, someone invited her to join Section 31, leaving her a snazzy black Starfleet badge.

It was meant to be a prelude to a Section 31 series but in the SEVEN YEARS between that epilogue and the arrival of this movie, they couldn't figure out how to write the series and, more critically, Yeoh had experienced a career Renaissance with her role in Crazy Rich Asians leading to her Oscar-winning turn in Everything Everywhere All At Once. It's hard to get someone at that level to commit to a streaming TV show and they gave up and converted it into a feature. They shouldn't have bothered.

 It opens with a flashback with a young Georgiou (Miku Martineau, Netflix's Kate) returning to her family after participating in what sounds like The Hunger Games to determine who gets to be Emperor. The final test for her turns out to be having to poison her entire family, parents and siblings. Whoa. Then the boy she had teamed up with (sound familiar) is beamed down, defeated because he couldn't kill his family (wuss) and she burns his face with a sword and is hailed as Emperor. (Why an Emperor is chosen this way isn't explained, but it sure makes strange women in ponds distributing swords seem like a reasonable system.)

After that grimdark opening, we're given a slapdash info dump for the majority of those who didn't watch STD as to who Georgiou is, her taste for genocidal atrocities, before closing with the clanger, "This dog bites." (Wut? Was "This kitten has claws" deemed too casual?) We're told that she is at some space casino outside Federation space, so Section 31 needs to go and entice her back into the fold to help locate some Very Bad Tech which could cause Very Bad Things to happen.

She is approached by Alok (Omari Hardwick, Starz's Power), a purported Bad Guy who is offering a deal to her. But in a moment that will seem familiar to those who've seen Vin Diesel's xXx movies, she immediately spots that he's Section 31 as are the rest of his squad who failed to blend into the crowd at the casino. Womp womp!

We are then introduced to the team and it was at that point I punched out. Everyone was Very Colorful and spoke in wisecracks while Yeoh camped it up like an Asian Mae West. This is a former genocidal Emperor who murdered her family for power in a game show? The fact they started with such a dark opening then switched to broad comedy indicated they had no idea what sort of tone they were going for and that you can't have everyone be a smart-ass.

I was about to slag credited screenwriter Craig Sweeny, mostly known as a TV writer on The 4400, Medium, and Elementary, but I also see he developed the TV series version of Limitless which was a really clever & fun continuation of the 2011 Bradley Cooper film of the same name that was one of my faves of that year, if not the fave. I fell off watching Elementary in the third season or so for no specific reason other I don't watch a lot of television, but Sweeny wrote a lot of episodes when I was watching. So he's not a total hack, but the reports of Development Hell suggests that he may have been more the loser of a credit hot potato contest to see who gets to be the scapegoat.

Obviously, I can't pass further judgement of Section 31 because I simply gave up, but that's judgement enough and I saw this as someone who watched every episode of Batwoman.

Score: DNF/10. SKIP IT!

"Anora" Review

 With the announcement of the 2025 Oscar nominees last week, thus begins the Oscars Death March, my annual slog attempting to see as many of the nominated films and performances as possible before the Oscars are handed out so I can determine whether the Academy got it right or not. (Last year's Death March recap & my Oscar votes are here.)

Having only seen two of the ten Best Picture contenders so far - Dune: Part 2 and The Substance - there's a lot to catch up with so tonight we kick the March off with Anora, nominated for six Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actress, Supporting Actor, and Editing) and winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2024.

Mikey Madison stars as Anora "Ani" Mikheeva, a stripper at a high-end NYC strip club. One night, because she can speak some Russian, she's tapped to entertain Ivan "Vanya" Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), the spoiled brat son of a Russian oligarch. Liking what he's getting at the club, he asks if she does anything outside of work which leads her to visit Ivan's family mansion in Brooklyn where he pays her for sex.

After several visits he asks if he could rent her companionship for a full week, offering $10,000. She counters with $15,000 and the deal is sealed. (Time for some Pretty Woman hijinx, right?) She accompanies him and a couple of his buddies to Vegas for high roller partying.

Concerned that he's going to have to go back to Russia as his visa is running out (wait, people actually heed those?) he proposes to her so he can get a green card and she agrees. So off to a Vegas wedding chapel and then a shopping spree (not set to "Pretty Woman" lest people catch on) with a big rock ring. And they lived happily ever after. 

Psyche! No, what actually happens is word has made it back to his parents in Russia, so Toros (Karren Karagulian), an Armenian who is the family's man in town, is commanded to get to the bottom of the things and he dispatches Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (nominated Yura Borisov) to pay Ivan a visit. 

When they arrive, Ivan bolts the scene and Ani makes it very difficult for them to subdue her. When Toros arrives, he is horrified by the situation especially due to Ivan's parents being en route for a meeting at noon the next day expecting that the marriage be annulled by then. But they need Ivan present which means finding him, so they set off on a bonkers quest to find her wayward husband. 

While Anora is modestly entertaining overall, it is yet again another movie showered with praise when there is little substance to it, like, say, The Substance. The Palme d'Or is Cannes' Best Picture award and frankly I am mystified why such a thin movie was bestowed with the highest praise.

To cut to the core of the script's key deficiency, here is everything we learn about Ani in over two hours of movie:

• She's 23 years old.
• She lives with her sister.
• Her mother lives with "her man" in Miami.
  

That's it. Why is she a sex worker? Don't know. Why does she instantly fall for this scrawny twerp who would rather play videogames than boink the woman he's paid for and why does she believe this is a fairy tale romance destined to last forever? Ya got me. She has no agency and everything flows from other people's decisions. If Ivan hadn't asked her to turn extracurricular tricks, she never would've seen him again. If he didn't need a green card he never would've proposed and she's back giving lap dances and turning tricks.

Let's compare her to another famous movie hooker, Jamie Lee Curtis's Ophelia in Trading Places who delivers this monologue to Dan Aykroyd's Winthrop when she brings him home because he's homeless due to the plot:

Look, I'm 24 years old. I'm from a small, miserable, little mining town you probably never heard of. The only thing I got going for me in this whole big, wide world, is this body, this face, and [points to head] what I got up here. I don't do drugs. And I don't have a pimp. This place is a dump. But it's cheap, it's clean and it's all mine. I've saved 42 grand and it's in T-Bills earning interest. I figure I got three more years on my back. I'll have enough to retire on.

 There is more character detail in that paragraph than the entirety of Anora. We know where Ophelia is coming from, where she is, and where she plans to be eventually. 

Or let's look at Pretty Woman, which Anora clearly aspires to be a hard-R tribute to. I'm not going to lie, I had to refresh myself on the plot because it's been decades since I've seen it, but the romance between Richard Gere and Julia Roberts grew from each character's effects on each other beyond the initial transactional nature of their relationship. Also not going to lie when I say I want to visit the alternate universe where the original story, titled 3000 (for the number of dollars she got paid for the week), was made with Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin (reprising their Sea of Love team-up) and ended with her junkie hooker being sent back to the streets at the end. Bleak.

Quadruple-threat Sean Baker - nominated here for producing, directing, writing, and editing - brings the naturalistic, pseudo-documentary style with mostly unfamiliar casts here as he did in 2017's The Florida Project where only Willem Dafoe (who received an Oscar nomination) was a recognizable face. While Madison was in Scream V and Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood, I don't recall her and I never saw the FX series she was on for five seasons either. As for the rest of the cast, zip, zero, zilch. And that helps the situations go down because the lack of celebrity means you have no idea what's going to happen (presuming famous = plot armor).

Madison is appealing and spunky, but as noted has nothing to play but Ani's delusional fantasy of love. (And kudos for not being an actress who plays strippers as if they were Amish.) Eydelshteyn is OK as well, but his character is such a one-note sack of manure, you spend most of the time hoping his family tosses him out of their private jet over the Atlantic Ocean.

Borisov has the sleeper role as the quieter of the henchmen tasked with keeping Ani under control and as the only one who doesn't seem to be a total scumbag. His general decency leads to the final scene which almost burned the goodwill I'd extended this slight film.

Without spoiling the ending, Ani seems utterly incapable of relating to men any way but transactionally. Because Baker didn't bother to give her a backstory, we don't know if she ever had a boyfriend or why she views sex as just something men pay for and the only way she knows how to reciprocate kindness is with sex. She is a sad empty young woman, but because we're not supposed to judge anyone - especially the holy "sex workers" - we're expected to applaud her moxie and fighting spirit even though she's fighting for nothing worth fighting for.

Baker is know for his movies about the people on the fringes of acceptable society like the poor folks living in motels in Orlando in The Florida Project or the trans prostitute in Tangerine. But by making Ani off-limits from judgement and a cypher as an individual, then she is reduced to just a body to leer at, use and discard when finished with. This is the nasty secret that "sex-positive feminism" hides in encouraging women to exploit themselves on Only Fans or as strippers and prostitutes: Women are only worth what men are willing to pay them for their bodies. Who cares about their minds or souls? So doesn't that make feminism a scam to serve men?

If there's an upside to Anora's tale of sex work, Armenian goons serving Russian oligarchs, it's that it could've been a whole lot meaner and violent. But if it had been, the comedic moments would've clashed. It's all played as a goof here, but without characters we can even know, much less relate to, it's just a couple of hours looking, but not touching anything emotionally tangible.

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

"They Live" 4K Review

Memory is a funny thing, especially with movies from the 1980s. Revisiting movies from that time too frequently makes one question how one could've thought it was pretty good when on second glance, it's quite not so good. Such as it was with Coming to America for me several years ago and once again with tonight's feature, the 1988 (same as Coming to America!) John Carpenter cult classic They Live.

WWF (now WWE) wrestler Roddy Piper stars as Nada (something I just learned from the credits as he's never referred to by name), a drifter newly arrived in Los Angeles from Denver, seeking work. After snagging a job doing construction, a co-worker, Frank (Keith David), takes him to a shanty town where he can stay. (So the homeless problem isn't a recent phenomenon?) While watching TV, the broadcast is interrupted by a hack where the speaker warns that humanity is cattle and a signal must be shut off at the source.

The next day Nada notices leaders from the camp going to a church across the street. He's told the church lets them use their kitchen to feed the shanty folk, but when he goes to check the place out he finds the church choir heard practicing is a tape and there's a lab and boxes of sunglasses. After the church is raided by the police and the shanty town bulldozed that night (why at night?), he goes back and finds a box of sunglasses hidden away.

Later, while walking downtown, he puts them on and discovers they reveal subliminal messages emblazoned across every magazine and billboard commanding people to "OBEY" or "CONSUME"; money says, "THIS IS YOUR GOD." More concerning is that the glasses also reveal that amidst the normal folk in the city are bug-eyed aliens who look like skinned people. Soon, the aliens realized Nada can see them and he's on the run.

After convincing Frank to try the glasses after the film's signature brawl scene, they go to ground & eventually locate a resistance cell who made the sunglasses and think they have a plan to end the aliens' control of humanity.

They Live is one of those movies whose key bits have seeped into the collective memory of culture so that even people who haven't seen it are familiar with lines like Nada's signature, ""I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass....and I'm all out of bubblegum," or understand that "They Live glasses" means being able to see the truth hidden from others, or the extended brawl (a tribute to the throwdown in John Wayne's The Quiet Man) which was itself the basis for the Cripple Fight scene on South Park, these nuggets have lent the movie a stature that it sadly doesn't merit.

The pace is extremely slow and the drama is hampered by Piper's amazingly inert performance. As Rowdy Roddy Piper, he was one of the top names in pro wrestling in its first big heyday along with Hulk Hogan, Macho Man Savage, Jake "the Snake" Roberts, etc. with a larger-than-life persona and in interviews he's a charming fellow, but his Nada lives down to the name as every cutaway to his blank, gormless mien makes one wonder what he's thinking. When "acting" across from David, the gulf between talent and whatever this is yawns wider. (If you doubt the talents of Dwayne Johnson or Jon Cena, watch this and reevaluate.)

The plot only really picks up in the last act when the Carpenter's themes (he wrote the screenplay under the nom de plume of Frank Armitage, adapting a short story and comic book as well as other sources) of control and collaboration are explicitly stated. The power of media or the promise of riches to induce humans to collaborate with these invaders are valid & resonate even now, if not more so.

 The manipulation of society with social media apps which algorithmically groom users into specific attitudes and beliefs echoes the subliminal images portrayed here. Even The Matrix touched upon it with the character of Cypher colluding with the Machines to destroy humanity as long as they plug him back in so he can be comfortable believing he's eating steak.

But the script is too thin everywhere else and so forgettable that beyond what I've mentioned, I didn't remember any of it. Perhaps a smarter updated remake would work, transferring the themes to apps, AI, and algorithms which seemingly brainwashed sheeple to sleep via doom scrolling.

Technically, the 4K HDR transfer is nothing special. The print is clean and colors are good, allowing for the low budget production, but there's little visual pizzazz and the HDR grading looked like a bright SDR picture. Audio is mediocre with little surround activity, but true to the source.

 I was surprised at how mediocre They Live is compared to how I remembered it. Too slow, too thin, and generally muddled, it buries the memorable bits and interesting premise under a slack script, slow direction, and weak lead performance.

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

Spoilerific trailer which lays out the whole plot and showcases the best bits.

"Electrified: The Guitar Revolution" Review

While perusing the All Movies list on Paramount+ I spotted a Smithsonian Channel episode from 2010 titled Electrified: The Guitar Revolution which looked to be an overview of the development of the electric guitar. It was and being a guitarist with a small arsenal of axes and a fairly broad knowledge of the history of the instrument combined with its concise 46-minute length, figured I'd see if I'd learn something.

I didn't learn much I didn't already know, but if you're a rock fan with curiosity as to how the iconic instruments slung by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eddie Van Halen and others evolved through the 20th Century, Electrified is a decent primer if somewhat superficial.

Combining talking head Smithsonian historians, luthier Paul Reed Smith (whose eponymously-named company is said to be the third largest guitar maker in America behind the Coke and Pepsi of Gibson and Fender), and demos of each evolutionary step by former Saturday Night Live bandleader G.E. Smith, we're given a history of the necessities for guitarists that became the mothers of invention (not the Frank Zappa band) for the technology.

 Beginning with the need to amplify guitars so they could be heard over big bands to the development of solid body guitars to tame the howling feedback amplified acoustics were prone to, familiar names like Rickenbacker, Les Paul, and Leo Fender are discussed and their contributions to the form. The one big surprise was that the first commercially sold solid body electric may've predated Fender's Telecaster by decades as Slingerland briefly marketed a guitar and amp combo that then disappeared from cultural memory as the brand shifted to it's claim to fame, drums.

 By ending in the 1960s with effects pedals, especially fuzz, which fueled Hendrix's freakout stylings, they omit advancements like locking vibrato systems like Floyd Roses which allowed for Van Halen's dive-bomb pyrotechnics while remaining in tune (I own 17 electrics and all but four have locking systems), active electronics like EMG or Fishman pickups, synth guitars from Roland, or how amplifiers have shifted from tubes to transistors to digital modeling where one unit can mimic dozens of amps, speaker cabinets, and stomp boxes (to be fair, the real movement in that field post-dates this show), or the wild shapes that sprang up in the 1980s for heavy metal bands courtesy of brands like B.C. Rich, Charvel/Jackson et al.

But those quibbles borne of my own pre-knowledge of the subject aside, Electrified: The Guitar Revolution is a concise and fairly comprehensive trip down the six-string highway of history and may be of interest even to players who never studied the lore.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Paramount+)

No trailer available, but here's an version of the closing history of guitar jam with extra voiceovers.

"The Contractor" Review

 This one was a bit of a random find. After deciding there was nothing good to watch across all the services, I came across The Contractor in my Plex library. Released in April 2022, I didn't recognize it, but after watching the trailer figured we'd settle in for some formulaic private soldier hijinx.

Chris Pine stars as Harper, a decorated Green Beret whose use of illegal steroids to cope with a wrecked knee from numerous combat tours earns him a involuntary discharge from the Army by the new CO who's a hard ass on the subject. While given an honorable discharge, they strip him of his pension and benefits. (This doesn't make sense. Why not a medical discharge? Why strip his pension? To make the plot happen, that's why.)

With a wife (Gillian Jacobs in a nothing role) and young son and mounting bills and lots of debt collector calls, Harper needs a job. He's been contacted by various private military contractor outfits, but is reluctant to become a mercenary of sorts. While hanging out with a former service buddy, Mike (Ben Foster, Pine's co-star in Hell or High Water), who has a very nice house for his family, including a special needs son in a wheelchair, Harper is willing to take a meeting with the boss of the outfit he works for.

 This is Rusty (Keifer Sutherland), who appeals to Harper's patriotism and sense of being thrown away by the government after he gave his body in service by offering him a position where he'd do low-risk black bag ops for the government under covert intelligence direction. The pay is excellent and he's even given a $50,000 check as a signing bonus which bails the family out.

His first mission is to surveil a virus researcher, Salim (Fares Fares), in Berlin. While he works for a legitimate research lab, Rusty says the funding is coming from a Middle Eastern terrorism financier so the order is given to get Salim's research. Harper, Mike and two others raid the facility and secure the laptop, but Rusty gives the order to kill Salim, which Harper does despite Salim begging him not to kill him and trying to explain his research is for the good of humanity.

While exfiltrating, the squad runs into German police responding to the lab being set ablaze and the red shirts are killed and Mike is wounded. Harper gets him into hiding and gives him a transfusion that stabilizes him. While Mike is ready to move, Harper's knee gives out so it's agreed that Mike will return the laptop to Berlin and Harper will catch up.

Eventually, Harper gets back to Berlin and contacts Rusty for pickup, but when he goes to the rendezvous point he smells a trap and barely escapes from the kill team awaiting him. Rusty has betrayed him! Dun-dun-DUHN!!! How will he get back home to his family and what happened to Mike?

The trailer makes The Contractor look like a familiar plot of Evil Corporate Shenanigans and Double-Crosses and for the most part if you've seen a few of these espionage thrillers like The Bourne Identity then you'll be able to predict what happens most of the time.

What sets The Contractor slightly above its formulaic brethren is in the little details and restrained performances. The movie opens with Harper's family attending church where service men are being recognized by the congregation. It's a sad commentary about Hollyweird movies that showing people attending services or saying grace before eating is so rarely done and even more so that it's not done so condescendingly.

It also refrains from portraying everyone as a saint or villain (other than Rusty, who goes black hat pretty hard). Even the people trying to kill Harper are just doing the job Rusty gave them and they're as morally troubled as Harper is. One who Harper overcomes gives him an info dump to help him get away then asks for the photo of his family back so he can see them as he dies. He's as much a victim as Harper and Mike are.

But overhanging these quiet moments and performances is the overarching plot of Evil Corporations Killing To Prevent Big Pharma Profits Taking A Hit which we've seen a zillion times before. It's a rough fit between the story of how our veterans aren't treated properly and corpo greed murder death kill stuff.

Pine is an underrated actor because he's so damn handsome, but he's good here, showing graying hair (he was 39 when this was filmed) and a stoic "got to provide for my family" earthiness. He's not a super soldier like Rambo, but a well-trained and disciplined soldier coping with a failing body and desperate circumstances.

If you're looking for a solidly done lower-key action drama, The Contractor delivers fairly satisfactory results.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable. (Though it was an Amazon Original, Prime Video says it's on Paramount+, but they didn't have it. Weird.)

"Venom: The Last Dance" 4K Review

Sony has had a pretty bad run managing their sole Marvel character license, Spider-Man, with the high points like the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse and Across the Spiderverse weighed down by the lackluster Amazing Spider-Man pair of movies. It got so dire that they relented to allow Spidey to join the MCU in Captain America: Civil War and basically outsourced production of solo movies to Marvel resulting in Homecoming/Far From Home/No Way Home trilogy which augmented Tom Holland's Peter Parker with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), and Doctor Strange (Bernadette Cumberbund) and appearances in the last two Avengers movies.

But the license also gave Sony the rights to make movies with Spider-Man adjacent villains and anti-heroes which has led to a trio of absolute disasters - Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter - but also a mysteriously successful run of movies featuring Spidey's symbiote nemesis Venom. Beginning with 2018's Venom, which was OK, and continuing with 2021's noisy & bad Venom: Let There Be Carnage, the trilogy concludes with Venom: The Last Dance which is slightly better than its title and substantially better than the last entry.

After a bewildering cold-open info dump which sets up this movie's Big Bad, Knull (Andy Serkis), and the gobbledygook MacGuffin called the Codex (super original name there) which would free him to destroy the Universe (because no one just wants to rule the Upper East Side), we catch up with Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) who is temporarily hanging out in our Earth-616 universe thanks to Doctor Strange's spell in No Way Home. Tossed back into his correct universe, he finds he is internationally and wrongly wanted for murder related to events in the last movie.

While literally hitching a ride on the outside of a jet airliner, Eddie/Venom attract an attack by a Xenophage sent by Knull to get the Codex which is formed and acts like a homing beacon when they go into full Venom form. When it's just tentacles or a head popping from Eddie's body, fine; but when he's Venom, ruh roh. And the only way to destroy the Codex is for Eddie or Venom to die.

After escaping the plane encounter, they are beset upon by an the forces of Gen. Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor, this character was written as a white guy, wasn't he?) who is trying to eradicate the symbiotes. Only when the Xenophage eats the soldiers are they able to escape again, which makes them even less popular with Strickland.

Trekking though the Nevada wilderness they encounter a hippie family traveling in a VW van (what else?) headed by Martin Moon (Rhys Ifans) who are heading to Area 51 to see it before it gets decommissioned and offers to drop Eddie off in Las Vegas where the conveniently encounter Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu), the convenience store owner from the first two movies, who is such a high roller they've comped her a suite where they can go and dance to ABBA's "Dancing Queen" while Venom attracts the Xenophage and Strickland's forces to capture them and wait, what the heck is going on here?!? Why did they go full metal Venom when they know it attracts bad monsters with bad goals?

It all ends up in your typical third act VFX overload with lots of monsters and mayhem and a very predictable ending which was foreshadowed from the first moments at Area 51. Writer Kelly Marcel, who came up with the story with Hardy and also steps into the director's chair after co-writing the first and solo writing the second movies, has come up with a lumpy, disjointed string of scenes and events which never really gels into a coherent story. Details are focused on which either set up obvious payoffs or never amount to anything, feeling like there's a lot of footage that got cut to bring it down to a manageable 109 minutes. And Knull is a terrible Big Bad because he comes from nowhere in the series mythology & is just Serkis doing his Snoke voice again.

 Hardy is his usual twitchy self as Eddie who never really seems at peace with his co-pilot, but it's his gonzo vocal performance as Venom (he actually does the voice with audio processing to make it sound more alien) and the only thing that kept me engaged with the story was Venom's running commentary as when Martin hands Eddie a tray of vegan food, saying that "nothing died on this plate," and Eddie hurls it away while Venom barks (internally), "HARD PASS!" - the only thing that spares the movie from getting a similar review.

On the audio-visual front, the 4K HDR grade is above average with bright, punchy colors and good detail. The audio track is also good with the rumbling symbiote and Knull voices having a meaty low-end. 

The Venom series has always been lower second tier comic book fare, but compared to the mess of most of Sony's Spiderverse efforts have been, it's the tallest pygmy in Borneo.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable. 

"Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary" Review

 In conjunction with the 20th Anniversary of the release of the legendary game Half-Life 2 in November 2024 comes the....ummmmm.....documentary Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary on develiper Valve's YouTube which in the words of the description, "To celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2, we've gotten members of the HL2 team back to talk about the game's development, how we almost ran out of money, what it was like when we were hacked, what happened when we were sued by our publisher, the birthplace of Steam, and much more."

That sums everything up tidily as well as redundantly. As the description says, it's a lot of white dudes (and ONE white chick) talking about how they developed the game, iterating and playtesting to refine the game. Plenty of in-progress developmental test footage illustrates things and they show the local residents of their Washington town who were photographed to populate the game as NPCs. Fun Fact: The face of Dr. Eli Vance was a homeless fellow who some of the devs would pass by on their commute and thought he had a good look. So they brought him in and paid him $200 (the rate everyone got) to immortalize him across three games.

The lawfare they were subjected to by the publisher of the first Half-Life was brutal and intended to bankrupt both the company and co-founder Gabe Newell personally as he tapped his savings and even put his house up to keep the lights on. The irony is that a maneuver by the publisher to bog them down with a mountain of documents in Korean backfired as a Korean-speaking intern a Valve discovered a smoking gun email which blew the case up.

But what is sorely lacking is any candor about how Newell is a fat f*cking liar who lied about the condition of the game in the months ahead of it's originally scheduled Sept. 30, 2003 release date. Newell - "Lord GabeN" to his herds of retarded admirers - announced the release date in an exclusive cover reveal in PC Gamer six months prior, firmly stating that the game was being announced then because they were in final stages of making it and it'd be ready to go on schedule. But then a hack - covered in the doc - stole the game code and put it on the Internet and what it showed that it was nowhere close to being ready. (This is fleetingly referenced in the doc.)

Newell's deceit extended to holding a splashy launch event on Alcatraz in conjunction with terminal videocard also-rans ATI (now AMD) which as this report from the Planet Half-Life site detailed lacked the actual game. Because I loved the first game and was naive enough to believe Valve when they said the game would ship when promised, I built a new computer in August 2003 just to be ready for Half-Life 2 the next month. By the time it arrived 14 months later, I'd already upgraded the videocard.

Add on the failure to complete the promised trilogy of Episodes and the fact there are legions of drooling gamers slurping GabeN's grease-and-Cheeto-dust encrusted junk is even more appalling. The loyalty this charlatan inspires is ugh. The Orange Box, which shipped on Oct. 9, 2007, included Half-Life 2: Episode Two which ended on a cliffhanger. As of this writing it has been 6304 days since The Orange Box came out - 17 years, 3 months, 2 days, but who's counting? - and Episode Three never happened. In fact, they never officially cancelled it, preferring to just pretend it was never promised. 

 If they had simply announced that they didn't feel they could make a concluding episode that was up to their standards, it would've been disappointing, but would've been better than just going radio silent. Concept sketches from the scrapped Episode are shown and work had been done, but they diverted the team to work on Left 4 Dead and by the time they got done with that, it was too late. So they did nothing.

Yes, I am still mad about it.

But even allowing for my antipathy for the fat f*cking liar, Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary suffers from being too broad and general while papering over the inconvenient aspects of their operation. Even speed-watching at 2X speed (a feature I wish every streaming service offered on my home theater's apps like they do on web or mobile like Netflix's 1.5X speed), it's a lot of stuff only of interest to the most completionist fans of the game. Even as a big behind-the-scenes making-of, there's too much filler larding out the killer. It could've been half the length.

And Gabe Newell is a still slightly-less-fat f*cking liar.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on YouTube if you're a fan; otherwise Skip it.

Watch the whole movie here:

"Norman's Rare Guitars Documentary" Review

 If ever a movie title didn't hide the ball as to what it is, it would be Norman's Rare Guitars Documentary, the docume....well, obviously. A fixture of the LA music scene for over 50 years, founder Norman Harris and his mecca of vintage instruments has been (guitar) dealer to stars, both rock and movie, as evidenced by the rapid parade of snapshots and video clips showcasing the Who's Who of Music who have patronized his establishment.

After tracing his early days as a musician and finder of cool instruments in Miami, he relocated to LA and rapidly became the go-to source for cool instruments. As word of mouth spread, he finally moved his operation out of his crammed apartment to a series of ever-larger stores. But even his current location isn't enough as he has a warehouse worthy of the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark filled with crates filled with cases full of guitars.

Even though I'm a guitarist with a nice assortment of axes, I've never been particularly interested in the whole vintage guitar thing, mostly because they easily run in price to about what a NEW car used to cost. If I ever ended up in LA, I doubt I'd go to Norm's because there's no way I could afford or justify what he's peddling. It's like going to a Victoria's Secret show and not being able to buy the models. 

But Norman's Rare Guitars Documentary also does a mediocre job of even explaining what the big deal is. There's a saying that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but no one really explains what it is about these guitars or the need to amass great collections that keeps them coming back. Executive Keifer Sutherland talks about how he had 100 guitars and realized he'd never play them all - it's true, every guitarist has a fave or two and the rest are just inventory - so he sold off nearly 3/4 of his stash and if he buys a new one, he sells an old one. Cool, but why 100 guitars in the first place or 400+ like Joe Bonamasa cops to?

The doc also drags on with segments about how they showcase new artists on their social media and YouTube channel and his charitable works. While expanding Norm's reputation as a mensch, it also bloats the runtime about a half-hour longer than necessary.

Playing mostly as a feature-length commercial for a music store whose clientele would already know of its existence, Norman's Rare Guitars Documentary doesn't really succeed at much more than raising the question of what will happen to this institution when Norm finally retires or passes on as evidenced when he had major health issues in 2022. Lacking in guitar pr0n for guitarists or really much insights from celebrity interviewees, it's probably too specific AND general for most viewers.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Netflix.)

"Heretic" Review

One of the more frustrating experiences in movie viewing is when a story has an intriguing setup, but when it comes time to pay it off, it's at best anticlimatic and more likely annoying to infuriating. Such as it is with Heretic, art house darling studio A24's latest horror film which has disappointment in common with releases like Y2K (just viewed a few nights ago) and MaXXXine from last summer.

 Heretic follows Mormon missionaries Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher, Yellowjackets) and Sister Barnes (Chloe East, The Fabelmans) as they struggle to make converts. When not being rebuffed by people walking by, they're being pranked by cruel teenagers. As they approach their last lead, it begins to rain. Answering the door is Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), who invites them in. They initially demur because it's required for a female to be present, but he assures them his wife is home baking blueberry pie. He also asks if they have a problem with there being metal in the walls and ceiling. Ruh-roh.

Initially, Reed seems like a very interested customer as he already has a heavily annotated copy of the Book of Mormon (the Mormon Bible, not the Broadway musical), but as the referenced Mrs. Reed never appears, the girls begin to get more concerned. This concern rises to mild panic as they realize the front door is locked and they have no cell signal due to the Faraday cage construction he mentioned. And the smell of blueberry pie? It was a scented candle. (Not a spoiler; it's in the trailer.)

Venturing further into the house, they find Reed waiting in a large room with a vaguely churchish vibe. Here's where things kick into gear as he challenges the claims of religions to be the "One True Faith" by analogizing various editions of Monopoly & the similarity between The Hollies' "The Air That I Breathe" with Radiohead's "Creep" and Lana Del Rey's "Get Free" with the point being all religions are just ripping off each other. He then tells them they are free to go, but must choose between doors labeled "Belief" and "Disbelief."

What happens when they make their choice comprises the back half of Heretic and it's where things begin to fall apart storywise as co-writers/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (whose last film was the forgettable Adam Driver vs. dinosaurs sci-fi flick 65) find themselves unable to deliver on the heady premise and it spirals into more far-fetched situations which raise more questions as to what is the One True Religion. (Which everyone who watches The Simpsons knows is a mix of voodoo and Presbyterian.)

The more I thought about the last act, the madder I got to the point where I'd docked a point from its initial 7/10 score before going to bed then knocking off another while eating breakfast. Many movies require some suspension of disbelief, but Heretic requires leaps of faith that Evel Knievel couldn't clear beginning with the entire premise resting on Reed constructing this test of faith & rigged house with timed locks and signal-blocking construction seemingly in preparation for these two girls to arrive. What would've happened if two male Elders knocked on his door? How did he get elements for his scheme without anyone noticing?

That a movie about faith literally ends with a deus ex machina is stock horror movie stuff, but divorced from the premise that drew us in. The final shot is also another one of those "What does it really mean? things which bugged me the other night with Juror #2.

It's too bad because the thesis is interesting and the performances are uniformly solid beginning with Grant's calibrated descent from charming to threatening, but he's undercut by the screenplay's tropes. Anyone really surprised by Grant's later career moves must not have seen him in 2012's Cloud Atlas where he played a half-dozen wildly different characters.

Even while the overall story falters on horror tropes and contrivances, it's too its credit that it doesn't play the Sisters as total naifs as they both call BS on Reed's arguments and never succumb to helpless damseling. However, a detail about Barne's again raises questions about what she's doing in her free time.

In my 65 review linked above, I called into question Beck and Woods' writing skills as their script seemed vastly inferior to their A Quiet Place script which must have been vastly rewritten by director and star John Krasinski and my doubts continue here. While they stage their tale with good visual style, aided by Chung Chung-hoon's shadowy cinematography, the writing lets things down.

While Heretic avoids the Skip It judgement of Y2K and MaXXXine, it's still a letdown which doesn't live up to its premise.

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

"Music By John Williams" Review

 There are few things pretty much all movie fans will agree on, but this is one of them: John Williams is the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) of movie score composers. Sure, there may be a few who disagree, but they're morons & probably Commie alien robots.

 With 54 Oscar nominations (only Walt Disney has more) and five wins (ONLY FIVE?!?) and a legacy including nine Star Wars, five Indiana Jones, three Harry Potter and so many more memorable scores - Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jurassic Park, Superman (admit it, you were humming the themes from everything I've listed) - there is no one who has cast such a transformative shadow across music for films. He is a rock star in what was a staid and underappreciated field. Film maven Robert Meyer Burnett said that if you only looked at the 29(!) scores he's composed for Steven Spielberg alone he would be the GOAT.

 So is the premise of Music by John Williams, a fascinating and informative documentary which is unfortunately on the godforsaken Mouse+ hellhole service. (There are ways around this, ahem.) Director Laurent Bouzereau - who if you've even watched the making-of behind-the-scenes supplements on a major film's DVD/Blu-ray probably directed it - pays loving tribute to the long and surprisingly varied career of Williams.

Beginning life as the son of a jazz drummer who played with Benny Goodman and others before moving the family to Hollywood where he played in studio orchestras on films you've heard of, Williams was destined for a life in music, but he thought he'd just be a pianist. Beginning in high school through his service in the Air Force, he stumbled into opportunities to learn skills in arranging and composing which led to his own career playing on scores, ultimately beginning to score countless television shows of many genres, further expanding his versatility.

Spielberg had become smitten with Williams work after hearing his score for The Reivers, swearing that if he would ever get to make a feature he'd have Williams do the music. Soon he was meeting with Williams to discuss scoring 1974's The Sugarland Express and their collaboration has continued through current times when Williams became the oldest Oscar nominee ever in 2022 at age 91 for his score to The Fabelmans. It was Spielberg who pitched George Lucas on using Williams after Jaws, when Lucas just knew him as a jazz artist.

Which is where Music by John Williams really steps up to touch upon his career before becoming Mr. Blockbuster Movie Score Guy to Gen X as a musician on scores to movies you've heard of to his personal classical compositions for various instruments which attracted some of the greatest players in the field. 

 Interestingly, he has never adopted technology in his process, still scoring by hand with pencil and paper vs. computerized methods where what you play gets automatically converted into notation. He also remains steadfast in using full orchestras to record his scores rather than using synthesizers/samplers like many do as a cost saving or speed method. (Looking at you, Hans Zimmer.) While he has brought in synths as augments (e.g. Munich) and I remember when I realized there was electric guitar during the assassin droid chase scene from Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, he has remained a Luddite in those regards, though he admits auto-transcription would be useful for faster complicated passages.

One of the wildest factoids was delivered by his daughter who mentioned her brother was the singer of Toto (in their post Toto IV phase in the 1980s for a few years). Oddly, his sons don't appear.

I've seen some grousing that this is more of a tribute than a documentary because it doesn't compare him to other contemporary composers, but so what? This is picky nattering like a theologian whining that a documentary about God doesn't talk about Apollo, Zeus & Vishnu half the time. It's not about the others, it's about John Williams. While Coldplay's Chris Martin speaks on how Williams' scores evoke emotions and Branford Marsalis notes how the cantina band number in Star Wars and the score to Catch Me If You Can prove Williams' jazz legitimacy, no other film composers are featured, just his film & classical collaborators.

 Williams will be turning 93 in a month and sadly no one lives forever, so there will eventually be a time when we won't be blessed with the new music of John Williams. But we will always have the millions of notes he has composed to not only be the soundtrack of the movies, but the soundtrack of our lives. Anyone interested in music or movies (which is why you're here, right?) should make a point of watching Music by John Williams.

Score: 8.5/10. Catch it on Disney+ (or your favorite black flag high seas method).

"Juror #2" Review

 It's a new year, but tonight's first movie of the new year is a throwback to a time when mature filmmakers made well-acted, small-scale tales which didn't involve the fate of the Universe as much as the fate of a few people's souls and moral compasses. Such as it is with Juror #2, a film unfairly burdened with historical importance due to it possibly being the last film by 94-year-old Clint Eastwood.

The titular juror is Justin (Nicholas Hoult), a writer in Georgia who has been called for jury duty in late-October 2022. He tries to beg off because his wife, Allison (Zoey Deutch), is nearly due with a high-risk pregnancy, but is denied and made to sit for the trial of James Sythe (Gabriel Basso, who played incoming Vice President JD Vance in the film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy) who is accused of murdering his girlfriend, Kendall (Francesca Eastwood, one guess as to who dad is), and throwing her body into a creek.

Immediately as the trial begins, Justin realizes that the night of alleged murder and location of her body coincided with the night he thought he had hit a deer on that dark and stormy night. He realizes he was at the bar the couple were at where they'd publicly spatted. Did he hit Kendall?

Justin goes to his AA sponsor, Larry (Kiefer Sutherland), and pays him a dollar (for attorney-client confidentiality) for advice for what to do about his situation and possible involvement. Larry points out that with his record of drunk driving and presence in a bar before the accident, no one will believe he wasn't drunk even though Justin swears he didn't drink the drink he'd ordered. To come forward to save an innocent man with a troubled past would likely destroy his family.

When the trial goes into deliberations, Justin is horrified that everyone just wants to convict James and get back to their lives. They aren't happy with this holdout and his vague comments about needing to look at the evidence, but soon he has an ally in former homicide detective, Harold (J.K. Simmons), who initially believes James should've taken the plea, but begins to agree that something seems off about the case and James doesn't seem like the killer type.

When Harold's attempt to investigate things puts him afoul of the rules, he is dismissed from the jury, but approaches the assistant DA conducting the trial, Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), and puts the bug in her ear that perhaps the case wasn't properly investigated by the police who had immediately set their sights on the victim's boyfriend and built the case around nailing him to the exclusion of other possibilities.

Where Juror #2 steps up is in the above-average script by first-time screenwriter Jonathan A. Abrams which takes the time to set up the characters to give them understandable, if sometimes unreasonable, motivations. Eastwood's spare direction also relies on viewers to notice crucial details with minimal reiteration like what the date in question meant which would trigger Justin to have a crisis of sobriety.

Abrams script also avoid the lazy tropes of too many movies. Killebrew is running for District Attorney and to win a conviction in this notorious trial would definitely help her, but she's not railroading a man who knows she's innocent. After Harold suggests the investigation may've been myopic, she actually does the work of running down the angle Harold dug up.

The 12 Annoyed Diverse Jurors are eventually willing to consider the thinness of the circumstantial evidence though one juror (Cedric Yarbrough) has an axe to grind against past behavior of the defendant that he'll never change his vote. Another (Chikako Fukuyama) notices a detail that really should've been caught by both the medical examiner and the public defender, Resnick (Chris Messina), so when the verdict is abruptly rendered, we're left wondering what had changed.

Which leads to the least satisfying and sketchiest part, the film's coda where Justin and Killebrew have an oblique conversation where they convey they know what actually happened, but he tells her to deliver actual justice would be too devastating to them. This seems out of character with what he'd tried to do during deliberations, though the final moment may imply both are about to reverse course. It feels like Abrams didn't quite know how to explicate things better and just called it close enough for government work.

Eastwood, for all his notable films in a directorial career spanning over 50 years back to 1971's Play Misty For Me, has never really been a flashy director, focusing more on straightforward storytelling without visual flourishes, and he doesn't start cribbing from Michael Bay here. But across the board the performances are solid, even with tertiary roles. (As an actor, he knows how to direct actors and famously doesn't like to shoot a lot of takes, unlike those like David Fincher who will shoot 100 takes as if anyone would know the difference if he stopped after 50.)

The controversy over Juror #2 is whether a legendary director like Eastwood's potential final film should've been dumped to streaming and denied a theatrical release, but it was always intended to be a Max Original. Frankly, how much of an audience for a quiet legal drama is going to want to schlep to the theater to see a movie like this regardless of quality? Maybe in 1998 we would've, but now any movies that don't beg for BIG SCREEN VIEWING beyond what our nice home theater delivers get caught when they're streaming. We would never have gone out now to see Juror #2, but definitely would've watched it later. So should you.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on MAX.)