Stuff I Watched Before the Trumpocalypse

 Before all hell breaks loose tomorrow, here's some stuff I watched:

Deadpool & Wolverine:  I said on Facebook that fans of the previous Deadpool movies and Fox's Marvel movies would probably enjoy this.  Everyone else would probably find it mystifyingly stupid.  Even though it's made by Disney now, the movie goes out of its way to cuss, spread gore, rack up a huge body count, and do a ton of sexual innuendo.  Being a Disney movie the only thing they can't do is have overt gay content, so Negasonic and her girlfriend have to keep it platonic.

A lot of the story takes cues from the second movie.  Years after that, Deadpool is trying to sell cars with a wig stapled to his head.  Meanwhile he's on the outs with his former girlfriend Vanessa.  Then the TVA from Loki abducts him and some British guy explains that when Logan died in Logan, it began the slow, steady destruction of Deadpool's whole "Branch" on the timeline.

Having never really been a "save the world" type hero like the Avengers, Deadpool decides he needs to save his timeline.  He figures to achieve this by finding a Wolverine from another timeline and placing him in Deadpool's universe.  This begins a montage where we see a bunch of different Wolverines like one from Age of Apocalypse, one where he's fighting the Hulk, one where he's a bouncer or something named "Patch" because he only has one eye, and even one where he's played by Henry Cavill.  Finally he finds one who isn't going to kill him right away, the "worst Wolverine" who's hanging out in a bar after the X-Men were all killed while he wasn't there to help. (And for some reason normal humans think this is bad.)  He's become a pariah and doesn't really want to help Deadpool, who of course refuses to take no for an answer.

But the TVA arrests them and sends them to "the Void," a sort of Mad Max-type dump at the end of the timeline where the TVA sends the worst of the worst *see Loki, Season 1--Paraphrasing PT.  There they meet Chris Evans, but not the character we all know him for; rather it's the first Marvel character he played.  Bad guys capture him, Deadpool, and Wolverine to take them to Cassandra Nova, a twin sister of Charles Xavier who in one timeline at least killed him in the womb.  She has really powerful telekinesis and psychic powers, though it's gross that to read someone's mind she has to literally stick her fingers inside of them.

Deadpool and Wolverine escape to find "the resistance" in the Void that turns out to be a bunch of old Fox Marvel movie stars--and one whose movie was oft-rumored but never made.  They come up with a rudimentary plan to defeat Cassandra.  Of course everything goes wrong--but still goes right.  Deadpool and Wolverine get back to Deadpool's universe only to find the TVA deploying a weapon that will destroy the whole universe much faster.  They have to take down a whole bunch of Deadpools and the TVA and Cassandra Nova in order to get to it.

And then...well, it is a Disney movie so don't expect anything too grim.

This was better to me than some other multiverse movies like Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness or The Flash in that a lot of it wasn't just "look here, it's [whoever]!"  There was some of that but for the most part there was a story--such as it was--and while there was a lot of violence, gore, sexual innuendo, and so forth there was also some heart to it as Deadpool, in his own way, tries to save his universe.  And the "worst Wolverine" gets a second chance to be the hero he was supposed to be.  So it works if you can tolerate all the normal, annoying Deadpool stuff.  Real comic book nerds would of course get a lot more from the various cameos than I would, but I got a lot of it.  Anyway, it was a good time and I hope they're not done with the character yet. (3.5/5)

After the Fall:  this 2014 movie stars Wes Bentley (American Beauty, Yellowstone) as a father and husband named Bill who tries to be a good man as an example--and because his father wasn't.  Ironically, he gets fired from his insurance company for not being dishonest enough.  But he hasn't told his family he's been fired and tries to keep up appearances.

One day at the end of his rope, he's stumbling around the desert with his father's old police revolver when he gets thirsty and wanders into the model home of a housing development.  The water isn't on but he does find two people fucking.  They see his gun and offer up their cash.  The light bulb goes on over his head and so Bill starts robbing people in motels, convenience stores, and other penny ante stuff.  At least he's finally making some money, though not enough for his mortgage payment.

His wife starts to get suspicious at his weird comings-and-goings and so forth.  She finally calls him at work only for someone else to pick up.  Meanwhile, Bill makes friends with a cop (Jason Isaac) who has already lost his family but not his job.  They hang out and the cop even goes to his home.  But after a botched attempt to rob a supermarket where Bill startles an old man into a heart attack, the cop sees some reports that he realizes are about Bill.  He doesn't snitch on Bill; he just tells him to knock it off.

The end seems to drag on longer than Lord of the Rings, but in the end, everyone is pretty well off--except the guy who robbed a gas station and then got Bill's crimes tacked on.  That guy is fucked.  So after trying to be a "good man," it ends with Bill pretty much completely compromised morally.  Hooray?  Other than this being a little slow to the point it could have lost about 30 minutes, it's not a bad movie. (3/5) (Fun Facts:  This was shot in Albuquerque the year after Breaking Bad ended and it's a story about a guy breaking bad.  Also the wife looks kinda like Skylar.  Hmmm.  You can understand why this is a slow movie when it thanks  Terrence Malick in the credits. lol)

Into the Electric Mist:  This is some Southern Gothic noir stuff starring Tommy Lee Jones as a local deputy.  He's investigating the murder of a young prostitute named Cherry who might have been involved with a local gangster named Baby Feets (John Goodman) or she might have had a pimp somewhere else.  Meanwhile a movie star named Eldon (Peter Sarsgaard) and his also famous girlfriend Kelly Drummond (Kelly MacDonald) are making a movie nearby and Eldon spotted a corpse that turns out to be that of a black man lynched in 1965 with no shoes and a chain wrapped around his chest.

I guess these two things intersect at some point.  There's a lot of stuff happening and it would be really hard to explain everything.  If they had simplified the plot a little it could have been shorter and a little better.  Also, Tommy Lee keeps seeing the ghost of a Confederate general and they have little talks like they're best friends.  It's kind of gross.  But if you like Southern Gothic noir stuff with some famous names, it's a decent movie. (3/5) (Fun Facts:  Tommy Lee Jones and Kelly MacDonald were both in No Country for Old Men a couple of years before this.  At one point Baby Feets tells Tommy Lee that he's going to finance a baseball movie and maybe Tommy Lee wants to star in it; Tommy Lee Jones starred as the eponymous Cobb back in the 90s while John Goodman was Babe Ruth in The Babe a few years earlier.)

The Dirty South:  Kind of a lighter version of the previous entry as they both take place in Louisiana and have murders and stuff.  But instead of Tommy Lee Jones, John Goodman, Peter Sarsgaard, and so forth we get Willa Holland, Dominic West, and Dermot Mulroney, so it's sort of like a CW or Lifetime version of the other.

There's a bartender named Sue (Holland formerly of Arrow) whose father owns the bar but he's a drunk and addict and so she does everything.  But he's squandered some money and the bar is going to be taken over by the local rich jerk Jeb (Mulroney), whose son Sue had a thing for a while back but they never hooked up.  

Then Sue meets a drifter named Dion (West) who helps her acquire some money to bail out the bar, except, oops, her dad spends it to spring her mom, who almost immediately runs off to parts unknown.  D'OH!  Meanwhile, Dion gets beaten up by some locals, so Sue takes it upon herself to steal a tractor.

Of course in the end things end pretty happily ever after except for the couple of dead guys who get thrown to the wild hogs.  It's OK for a light, light drama though it probably could have been a little shorter. (2.5/5)

Running Scared:  Pretty standard mid-80s buddy cop movie.  This one is set in Chicago and stars Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal.  I mean who's more Chicagoan than Billy Crystal, right?  I'm not sure why they didn't just set it in New York but I guess it was cheaper.

Anyway, these two cops see a drug dealer named Julio (Jimmy Smits) they thought was in jail.  They capture one of his lieutenants named Snake (Joe Pantoliano) and try to set up a sting but everything goes wrong and Julio gets away.  So their angry captain (Dan Hedaya) sends them to Florida, where they decide to buy a bar and retire.

But first they return to Chicago to get Julio.  This of course requires some chasing on foot and in a car driving on the "El" railroad tracks.  In the end Julio takes Crystal's ex-wife hostage to get the cops to retrieve some cocaine from the evidence room.

Like I said it's pretty standard stuff but entertaining enough with Crystal doing his shtick and Hines backing him up.  They didn't bother to give Hines even one dancing scene, tap dancing being his other specialty besides acting.  But he does get two sex scenes, so there.  If you want something way better than Samurai Cop but not quite as good as Lethal Weapon, this fits the bill. (3/5)

Night Shift:  Probably one of Ron Howard/Brian Grazer's first efforts together, this is an early-80s comedy with some light sexual content.  Howard gets his buddy Henry Winkler to star as Chuck, who works in the New York City morgue.  Unlike TV's the Fonz, Chuck is pretty much a wimpy dork who's content with his little rut in life until he's moved to the night shift and assigned a new employee named Billy Blaze (Michael Keaton).  Billy seems to have ADHD or something and is almost always in motion and talking into a tape recorder with terrible ideas like tuna that already comes mixed.

One day Chuck meets his neighbor Belinda (Shelly Long) who's a prostitute whose pimp was recently murdered by Richard Belzer of Homicide and Law & Order and a black guy.  Billy actually has a sort of good idea to help Belinda:  become her sorta pimp!  Chuck and Billy turn the morgue into a staging area to dispatch prostitutes to guys who call in or Billy picks up on the street.

Things are going good for a while, but Chuck is skeptical of how long they can get away with it.  Meanwhile he's falling in love with Belinda, which only grows when his fiancee returns home to Indiana after a disastrous Thanksgiving.  Billy is spending money on a flashy car and clothes and stuff, making it only more likely they'll be caught.

Of course things come to a head involving cops and Richard Belzer and his partner, who obviously don't want competition.  Does Chuck then go back to his life before all this craziness or does he allow himself to change?

It feels a little long and slow to really get going, but mostly it's a fun movie for what it is.  Winkler does a decent job acting against type, Keaton shows some of the manic energy that would be on display later in Beetlejuice, and Long gets to be more blue collar than on Cheers.  There's some nudity but not tons of it, this being 1982 or so.  It's obviously a little dated though still fun for the most part. (3/5) (Fun Facts:  I think one of those nostalgia posts I often get on Facebook said originally Winkler and Keaton were to play the opposite roles but then switched--and I think it turned out better.  This being directed by Ron Howard, there is of course a Clint Howard cameo; it's pretty gross too as he's half-naked and having sex in one of the corpse drawers of the morgue.)

Crisis:  This yearns to be one of those big multi-story issue movies with a bunch of big stars like Traffic or Babel.  But it lands short of that.  It's a little too obvious in its depiction of the war on Oxycontin and Fentanyl.   The movie features three stories, two of which intersect:

First, in Detroit and then Montreal we have a Federal cop (Armie Hammer--ick) who has been setting up a sting to nail a bunch of Oxy pushers and suppliers.  When one of the teenage boys used as a mule is caught near the border, it leaves the cop with only two weeks to try to wrap everything up.

Second, in Detroit we have a mom (Evangeline Lilly--slightly less ick) who was hooked on Oxy but has stayed off it for a while now.  Her sister is coming over for dinner and she asks her son to stop at Whole Foods on his way home to get some tortillas.  But he never shows up and later the cops show up to say he died of an apparent Oxy overdose.  Not wanting to take that for an answer, the mom starts looking into it and an expert she hires says he did not OD on the Oxy.  Eventually she finds out that her son was tied to some of the mules ferrying Oxy across the border--like the one in the first story--through a hockey camp.  She goes to Montreal and meets the cop.

Finally, in Detroit or somewhere close by there's a college professor (Gary Oldman--not a lot of ick) who also has a little lab to study drugs.  There's a new "non-addictive" painkiller about to get FDA approval and hit the market, but the professor's staff has run tests that show the painkiller actually is addictive and killed all the mice they tested it on.  When he goes to the company with the results, they of course are not happy.  They try to bribe him with a big donation and when that doesn't work, enlist the university president (Greg Kinnear) to gin up a bogus sexual harassment claim against him.  But will he give in or stick to his guns?

So stuff happens with all three stories but like I said, it's a little too obvious and melodramatic.  Which is always the problem with "issue" movies like this.  It kinda needed to dial it back a little and make the characters feel more real than archetypes or pawns. (3/5)

Thin Ice:  This had the potential to be a decent indie comedy or dramedy.  I mean you have two cast members from Little Miss Sunshine (Greg Kinnear and Alan Arkin), Billy Crudup, and David Harbour before Stranger Things.  So you have some good actors and the story starts out pretty well:  Kinnear is Mickey, a down-on-his-luck insurance agent in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  At a convention he meets Bob Egan (Harbour) who's kind of a Ned Flanders type and convinces Egan to join his team.

Egan is really good at getting new clients and gives Mickey a lead about a weird old farmer (Arkin) who is looking for insurance.  The farmer insists Mickey fix his TV--which is easy since he just has to plug it in--and then asks him to come back a couple of other times.  During one of those times, Mickey finds out the farmer has a valuable violin that could help him solve his money problems.

Then it starts getting more and more complicated as Mickey tries to steal the violin from the farmer, at one point replacing it with a fake.  Then the farmer decides to put in a security system and hires a fairly crazy guy (Crudup) to do it.  But the security system guy kills someone and blackmails Mickey into helping him dispose of the body.

It snowballs from there until it gets to the big twist that (Spoiler) it's all a con!  The farmer isn't a farmer and Crudup isn't crazy and Egan isn't really an insurance salesman and the dead guy isn't dead.  They just wanted to get Mickey to submit an insurance claim on the violin so they could make a lot of money.  But it seemed to me that if they'd just given him a cut, Mickey wouldn't have batted an eyelash at submitting a fake insurance claim.  If you're in the con game you should know your mark better, but I guess this way he basically did it for free.

I liked the start but it just kept getting too complicated and really not that funny.  The twist didn't really help either.  I was hoping for better. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The movie also features Lea Thompson in a couple of scenes as Mickey's ex-wife, whom he hooks up with once before he loses her for good.)

King of Thieves:  Last month I watched a movie on the big Hatton Gardens robbery in London back in the 2010s.  Four old guys and an unnamed young guy robbed a vault full of gold, cash, and jewelry over Easter weekend.  The old guys were caught but the young guy (never identified) got away.

So this is also about that robbery, only it features a better cast of old guys (Michael Caine, Jim Broadbent, and Ray Winstone) and a young guy who also played a superhero (Charlie Cox of Daredevil).  In this version the young guy is code-named B.A.S.I.L for "Best Alarm Specialist In London" though he still has no actual name.  

The movie I watched last month focused more on the job while this one focuses more on the old guys after the robbery.  While Basil was smart and took off with some of the better loot to parts unknown, the old guys stayed behind, where the net inevitably closed in on them.  Which movie is better probably depends on whether you care more about the robbery than what happens to the old guys.  If I'm watching a heist movie I do care more about the job really. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  I am 95% certain I watched this before.)

The Benzonians:  This is one of those where I feel like the thin description lied to me.  It said something about Greeks working out of a club in North London.  And it has Vinnie Jones, which should mean we have some action, right?  Um...not as much.

There's a LOT of talking, mostly voiceover by this guy Plato who runs the eponymous Benzonians club for Greeks in North London.  He sells some pot and sometimes people gamble, but otherwise it's pretty tame.  The talking then goes on and on and on about all the different people who hang out there like local hero Achilles who hardly says anything but who is a great fighter and womanizer.  A mentally challenged guy named Anthony worships him almost literally and is often tagging around with him.  And so on.  It wasn't very interesting and I literally fell asleep for about an hour, waking up in almost the middle of Layer Cake, which is a better movie, so I finished watching it.  Then I came back to see what I missed--not much!

Plato hosts a poker game but a woman named Lola cleans him out--plus $50,000.  He doesn't have the money so she sends Vinnie Jones to kick his ass.  But the bar patrons fight back to stop him, one dying in the process.  Hooray!

Anyway, this was not the movie I was hoping for, which is partially my fault and partially the fault of a misleading description.  But also it was just too talky with too much voiceover.  And I couldn't feel much sympathy for Plato considering he had made a bet with Lola and was basically trying to welsh on it.  I definitely wouldn't recommend it. (1/5) (Fun Fact:  Plato's wife is played by Marina Sirtis, aka Counselor Troi of Star Trek TNG.)

Columbus Day:  Appropriately I watched this on Columbus Day.  It's a neat little movie starring Val Kilmer as a thief named John.  He's just stolen some big McGuffin, but then gets stranded in LA's Echo Park.  He uses a payphone and cell phone to call friends, family, and associates to try to get out of there.  Also he hits on his ex-wife and tries to convince his daughter he's not a terrible person.  There's also a black kid named Antoine who keeps pestering him, but also shows him some interesting things--like a trapdoor that leads to a back way out of the park.

As time goes on, John gets increasingly desperate and so makes a deal with a really bad guy to sell the McGuffin.  Will he be able to get the money and escape?  And what about Antoine?

There's a little gun play and a little blood, but mostly this is pretty tame.  It's really about John reconnecting with his ex-wife and daughter and bonding with Antoine.  Besides Kilmer and Wilmer Valderrama as a sort of agent for John, there are no recognizable names, but the acting is good enough for a small movie and mostly having one location helped to keep the budget down.  As long as you're not expecting a Fast & Furious or James Bond movie it's a fun indie film. (3.5/5) (Fun Fact:  the McGuffin really is one since they never show it or say what it is.  John refers to it as the "Fountain of Youth" and "El Dorado" but that's about it.)

The Sweeney:  The eponymous "Sweeney" is a "Flying Squadron" in the London police.  What does that mean?  They're basically an elite unit led by Jack Regan (Ray Winstone) who has a protege named Carter and is banging Nancy (Hayley Atwell) who is married to the head of Internal Affairs--but any day now they'll divorce. (Ha.)  As you might expect, the Sweeneys play by their own rules, which includes Jack taking a little gold for himself from a heist they break up.  For that and other reasons, Nancy's husband is looking to shut them down.

Then an old enemy from Eastern Europe shows up and Jack goes hard after him, but things get messed up and people die and the unit is disbanded.  Can Jack still find a way to stop the bad guys in time?

As an action-y movie this was pretty good.  Not great.  There are some gun fights and a couple of car chases if you like those (with Jack in a Ford Focus no less!) and other stuff to keep it interesting.  There's some character work, though not a lot on the secondary characters.  Jack and Carter are the main focus for most of the movie.  I'd recommend it if you like that sort of thing. (3/5)

All is Lost:  My sarcastic blurb:  "I slept through less of it than I thought I would!"  Seriously this movie stars Robert Redford--and only Robert Redford.  There's almost no dialogue then so it can get kinda boring.

Redford is sailing near the straits of Sumatra for...reasons when a rogue container of sneakers collides with his boat.  (What are the odds of that?)  Even worse is the container hits right where Redford has all his electronics like the radio to call for help.  Saltwater and electronics don't go real well together.  He's able to get the container away and patch the boat to try to get help with no electronics, radio, satellite phone, or anything like that.

But then there's a storm!  It fucks up his repairs and so he has to transfer to a rubber life raft--this is where I was dozing off for 15-20 minutes or so.  Things don't go much better as he runs out of fresh water and when he catches a fish, a shark eats it!  (Again, what are the odds?)  He sees a couple of container ships, but they're too big and probably have too few crew on board to see him.  So eventually, all seems lost.  Is it, though?

For the most part it's a good story of survival.  The problems are first we don't know the guy's name or why he's out there or who he dictates a letter to at the beginning of the movie.  And second, with no one to talk to, sometimes I really have no idea what he's doing or why.  As the song says, "Yo no soy marinero..." (I am not a sailor.)  There is (thankfully) no nudity and only one f-bomb that gives it a PG-13 rating. (3.5/5) (Fun Facts:  I literally had this on my Tubi queue for years and finally decided to just say fuck it and watch it.  Redford starred in the movie Sneakers back in the 90s and he gets hit with a container of sneakers.  Coincidence?  Probably.)

A Hologram for the King:  Another where I didn't sleep through it as much as I thought.  I slept through the beginning, but from what I gather a salesman named Alan (Tom Hanks) has to lead a team of tech people from Boston to Saudi Arabia.  They're going to pitch hologram technology to the king.  Of course there's lots of culture shock then with not being able to get alcohol legally and women all covered up and stuff like that.

Alan employs a a wacky driver with a crappy 80s Caprice or Impala that he checks daily to make sure there's no bomb rigged to go off.  When Alan tries to remove a cyst on his back by himself, he also meets a female doctor, which as you'd expect is very rare.  Alan starts to fall for the doctor, but that's obviously complicated.

Eventually his team makes the presentation, the wacky driver goes to live in his home village to escape people who want to kill him, and Alan and the female doctor start emailing each other.  There is a mostly nice ending that drags a little bit.

For the most part Hanks does his nice guy bit and the other actors--no real recognizable names except Tom Skerritt as Alan's boss, presumably in the part I slept through--do what needs done.  You could make some complaints about how this doesn't tackle a lot of issues about Saudi Arabia (like that prince who had a journalist's head cut off a few years ago) but that would be too heavy for a movie like this. (3/5) 

The Berlin Job:  Mickey and Ray are two well-off drug dealers in London.  But Ray wants out of the business to go in on a golf resort with some other people.  To get the money, the brothers wind up overextending themselves on a deal with some Russians.  But then the drugs are lost in the North Sea, leaving Mickey and Ray owing over 20M pounds to the Russians.

The first two acts go into all this, which gets a little tedious.  Finally it gets to the eponymous job in Berlin, where they plan to heist some diamonds during a big football (soccer) match between England and Germany.  With so many English in town, the brothers and their companions fit in better.  But the problem is one of their number is a snitch--or "grass" as they call it for whatever reason.  So they have to find the snitch and pull off the job.

It's a little slow and the mumbling voiceover from Mickey starts to get annoying after a while.  But it's not badly done, so there's that.  There are obviously better heist movies, so I wouldn't recommend this unless--like me--you're kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Charles Dance of Last Action Hero, Game of Thrones, etc plays a family friend and mentor to Mickey and Ray who helps to keep the Russians at bay.)

Brown's Requiem:  This late 90s movie stars Michael Rooker (Mary Poppins, y'all!) as Felix Brown, a car repoman who is also a private investigator.  You can basically throw out the repo angle after the first fifteen minutes as it has nothing to do with the rest of the story.

Most PI stories start with a dame walking into his office, but this has a fat caddy nicknamed "Fat Dog" instead.  His sister Jane (Selma Blair) has taken up with Solly, an old Jewish businessman, and Fat Dog wants Felix to look into what they're doing to make sure she's not being harmed.  Since Fat Dog has a fat wad of cash, Felix agrees.

He soon finds out that Solly is up to something shady that involves Cathcart, the Internal Affairs guy who bounced Felix from the LAPD years ago.  As these things usually do, it starts to snowball with people ending up dead and Felix facing death a few times and even being wounded.  And in the end things don't work out perfect, though it's pretty nice for Felix. If you like neo-noir movies then you'd enjoy this as it's done pretty well. (3.5/5) (Fun Facts:  Jennifer Coolidge has a small part as the foster mom to Fat Dog and Jane about 15 years earlier.  Whoever transferred this to digital didn't do a great job as the picture is a bit fuzzy.  At least on Tubi; I haven't checked anywhere else it might be streaming.)

Color of Fear or Giallo:  The listing on Tubi calls this Color of Fear but when you turn the movie on it just says Giallo.  The interesting thing about "giallo" is that it's the Italian word for yellow but it's also a whole genre of mostly Italian movies that combine traditional detective stories with the blood and gore and stuff of horror movies.  For an American example maybe think of a movie like Seven.

Dario Argento is a big name in giallo movies and directs this one.  There's a killer who has a taxi and his skin is yellowy (the other giallo) because of a liver problem causing jaundice.  He uses the taxi to abduct women and then tortures and kills them for...reasons.

The latest woman taken is a model whose sister is visiting.  The sister goes to the cops and meets an inspector named Enzo (Adrien Brody) who's actually from New York.  Enzo has been working the case for a while but isn't that close until the body of a Japanese girl is found.  Her dying words help to provide a clue.

It actually seems pretty easy for Enzo and the sister to track down the killer.  It felt a little lazy to me how quickly they're able to find him and kill him.  I expected a few more twists and turns, but maybe by 2009 Argento was getting too old for this shit. As noted above, there is some blood and gore and gross stuff, so if you have a weak stomach, maybe avoid this.  (2.5/5)

Criminal Informant:  I really have no idea what was going on in this movie.  For one thing my mom called and I had trouble paying much attention to this.  Also it just pretty much sucked.  From what I could gather, two cops (Dominic Purcell and Nick Stahl) are trying to get some drug dealer while Internal Affairs is on their asses.  Purcell's wife is played by Kate Bosworth and a higher-up cop is played by Mel Gibson, so you have at least 4 actors who were in better things slumming in this.

As I like to say, mayhem ensues.  One cop is killed for...reasons and Internal Affairs keeps bugging the other guy about it.  It all felt really cheap and stupid, maybe because they were trying to use Las Cruces, NM for New York.  I mean I've been to Las Cruces and it's definitely not like New York.  I guess they couldn't afford to at least shoot it in Albuquerque. Anyway, definitely avoid this. (1/5)

Hard Cash:  This early 2000s movie stars Christian Slater as a thief who sacrifices himself for his crew on a bad job and gets put in jail for a year.  Once he gets out, he's soon up to his old tricks again.  He and a few others rob a horse racing track.  But the money they get is marked by two FBI agents (Val Kilmer and Peter Woodward) so Slater has to try to launder it through a Cuban dry cleaner. 

Then mayhem ensues as the dry cleaner, FBI guys, and Slater's own crew are all after him about the money.  It's a decent movie, though not a great one.  Like some of Donald Westlake's Parker or Dortmunder books it's a little disappointing in how it turns out for Slater's character; it's always more fun when the thief really wins. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  One member of Slater's crew is the late Vern Troyer, the little person who played Dr. Evil's "mini-me" in the last two Austin Powers movies.)

Played:  Another 2000s "movie" and what struck me right away is that the picture quality looks as if it was filmed with a video camera from the 80s.  There's some guy who eight years earlier got framed or something and wound up in prison.  So he gets out to take revenge on Vinnie Jones and others who wronged him or something.  I don't know, I didn't follow it very well.  The cast also includes Gabriel Byrne as an assassin and Val Kilmer in a wig as...some guy who is in the opening scene and I'm not sure ever appears again.  I guess if I'd paid better attention it might have been better. (2/5)

Strange Brew:  You might already be familiar with Bob & Doug McKenzie, two stereotypical Canadian hosers played by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas in the 70s-80s.  Mostly my exposure was I have their version of "The 12 Days of Christmas" on MP3. 

Anyway, in 1983 they made a movie.  As you'd expect, it's pretty silly.  While trying to score some free beer, the McKenzies wind up working at the Elsinore beer company.  The owner recently died and his daughter has taken over.  Meanwhile the new brewmeister (Max "I'll Be In Anything Just Show Me the Check" von Syndow) is experimenting on inmates of a nearby asylum to make a beer that will allow him to control people's minds.

And silly over-the-top mayhem ensues!  It's not as good as The Blues Brothers or probably even Cheech & Chong movies of that era but there are some laughs to be had, especially if you're familiar with stereotypical Canadian culture. (3/5)

2:22:  This is another one that looks like it was filmed with a TV camera instead of film.  In Canada (Ottawa maybe?) on New Year's Eve night, four guys take over a really small, fancy hotel called the Grange.  For some reason this hotel has a bunch of safe deposit boxes like a bank.  (Do hotels really have that?)  The guys open the boxes to take the loot while trying to keep anyone from getting suspicious.  But there's a problem when one guy takes some cocaine and money from one of the guests who is a drug dealer.

They get away with the loot, but the drug dealer starts looking for them and so mayhem ensues.  It's not terrible, just a pretty low-budget experience.  With more money for better actors and cameras, it would have been decent. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Val Kilmer appears again, this time as a jewelry appraiser who also reshapes some of the stolen goods so they can be moved.)

Deadfall:  This 1993 movie is directed by Christopher Coppola and so you have a couple of Coppola-related actors in it.  Nic Cage is a henchman named Eddie and Talia Shire is...someone.  And maybe there were more.  But the actual star is Michael Biehn of Aliens & Terminator as a con man whose father is killed during a job.  His father's last words were to find his brother (James Coburn) down in Florida.

And wouldn't you know the brother has a job of his own that he wants Biehn to help him with?  Meanwhile, the brother has Eddie the henchman show Biehn's character around, though he starts to get jealous of the attention Biehn is getting.  And of course there's a girl that he falls in love with, but can he trust her?  It's a good movie with some twists and turns and surprises. (3.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Val Kilmer is not in this movie.)

The Entitled:  In this 2011 movie, a college graduate named Paul is fed up with the system.  His mother is sick and he and his father can hardly afford the medicine.  Meanwhile, Paul has graduated college but can't find a real job.  Seeing some rich douchebags on campus, he gets the idea to kidnap a couple of them.

He teams up with a couple of other disaffected kids on campus (one of whom is Tatiana Maslany, aka She-Hulk) and one night they take three rich boys and a girl hostage.  They call the rich parents to get money put into a Swiss account or something like that.  The rich dads are played by Ray Liotta, Victor Garber, and Stephen McHattie, who looks like a younger, more in shape Lance Henriksen. There are of course some wrinkles, especially when two of the hostages escape.

Then there's a twist at the end that actually is pretty great and allows Paul to get away scot-free.  So it winds up Paul 1, System 0.  Take that!  The production values and acting are decent enough, basically along the lines of a low-level horror movie.  I think it's worth a watch, especially if you're a little disgruntled about the system. (3.5/5)

Spirit Halloween:  In the history of cinema there have been plenty of product placement movies like Copper Mountain (Club Med Colorado), The Wizard (Nintendo), Cool as Ice (Vanilla Ice), or Viva Knievel (Evel Knivel).  And so someone at Spirit Halloween thought it'd be a good idea to make their own movie.  But really it's not as bad as those others I listed; it's more like something you'd see on Nickelodeon without too much overt branding.

There are 3 8th grade boys who every Halloween have done something together but now forces are pulling them apart.  One wants to go to a high school party while another wants to keep their traditions alive and the third is just caught in the middle.  They reach a compromise after going inside the Spirit Halloween store:  they'll sneak in before close and then wait until the employees are gone to pop out and mess around in the store.

The plan seemingly goes off without a hitch, but then an evil spirit voiced by Christopher Lloyd shows up.  Long ago a witch or whatever killed him for trying to foreclose on her property.  Halloween is the only night he can try to get a new body by occupying someone who is unconscious.  He can take over unliving things like a stuffed bear or various other decorations in the store.

Meanwhile, one boy's sister goes looking for him and breaks into the store, so now there are four of them trying to find a way out.  But will they?  Take a guess.  I mean this isn't a real gritty movie.  Mostly it's pretty tame with some mild scares for younger viewers.  But it's still kind of fun with Christopher Lloyd's kind of bumbling villain against the plucky kids.  As for the branding, like I said earlier, it's not too overt.  I mean they show the sign over the door and labels on the product boxes but there's no one gushing about how awesome the place is and everyone should go there and whatever.   It's obviously not something you'd want to watch for a real scare but maybe it'd be fun for the kids. (3/5)

The Rundown:  This is an early movie in the career of The Rock--when he was still called "The Rock" even.  My sister liked this for some reason but I'd never watched it.  It's an OK action comedy overall.

The Rock is a debt collector for a racist jerk.  To get out from under what he owes the guy (and to open the restaurant he dreams of) he undertakes a special mission:  fetch the racist jerk's son from South America. Of course he thinks it'll be easy, but it isn't.

This was long enough ago that instead of Kevin Hart, you have Seann William Scott as the Rock's comic foil.  Scott is a discount Indiana Jones looking for a valuable artifact:  the Gato del Diablo or whatever that basically means Satan's cat.  He's already enlisted the help of a local bartender (Rosario Dawson) to help him get to the artifact.

So after the Rock apprehends him, Scott manages to escape and go to find the artifact.  Which of course he does.  Getting it out of the jungle is complicated by a bunch of mercenaries working for Christopher Walken, who runs a strip mining operation using the native people basically as slaves.

And so mayhem ensues!  There's plenty of action and some humor.  Some of it is pretty predictable, but it's not a bad movie.  Like I said, it's OK.  It's made well enough and the Rock does a decent enough job for someone who hadn't been in a lot of movies then. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Arnold Schwarzenegger has a pointless cameo at the beginning where he greets the Rock when he's going into some club.)

Human Capital:  This is one of those things like Crash (2005) where there are people's lives overlapping.  In this case in an upscale New York suburb we have two families.  One is middle-class but with some problems.  The father Drew (Liev Schreiber) has a real estate business that's floundering.  His wife Ronnie is a therapist who finds out she's pregnant, though she's had problems before.  Schreiber's daughter Shannon (Maya Hawke) is kind of rebellious and going out with Jamie, the son of a rich guy.

The rich guy Quint (Peter Sarsgaard) invites Drew to fill in for tennis and then Drew decides to invest in Quint's hedge fund that seems so great.  He doesn't have the money so he borrows some, necessitating lying on SEC forms.  Quint is married to Carrie (Marisa Tomei), who is bored and convinces her husband to buy an old theater.  Jamie and Shannon left some big high school party drunk and his Jeep Wrangler hit a Latino waiter on a bike.

The structure of the movie gets to feel like a Mobius strip as it kind of follows each character before the night the waiter is killed.  Meanwhile it seems like everyone's life is unraveling.  Overall it's an OK drama.  There are plenty of talented actors and the direction and camera work seem professional enough.  The Mobius strip structure gets kind of annoying to follow, but eventually it finally goes forward. (3/5)

Hotel Artemis:  I remember hearing about this but didn't really care to watch it.  I finally watched it on Tubi.  In the not-too-distant future (2028) there are riots in LA.  A pair of bank robbers (Sterling K Brown and Bryan Henry Tyree) take shelter in the eponymous hotel, which is a special, secret place where criminals can get medical care from Nurse Thomas (Jodie Foster) so long as they don't bring in weapons or cause problems.  The nurse was traumatized after son died and has developed agoraphobia that keeps her inside the hotel all the time.  Since they get the "Waikiki Suite" Brown is referred to by Waikiki.  The nurse patches up his brother, but they need time for him to heal.  Meanwhile there's an annoying prick played by Charlie Day called Acapulco and an assassin (Sofia Boutella) codenamed Nice (as in the city in France).  

A problem comes up when the nurse sees a cop outside whom she knew before she started the hotel.  She has her orderly and Jack-of-all-trades Everest (Dave Bautista) bring the cop in.  Shit's really going to hit the fan though because the top criminal in the city Wolfking (Jeff Goldblum) is injured and on his way to the hotel.  If his people see a cop, all hell will break loose.

This is a decent action movie with some touches of drama.  Jodie Foster gives it a little gravitas while Brown and Boutella are steely, deadly killers and Day is just kind of annoying and unnecessary.  Goldblum dials it back a little from some of his more recent movies to not be a total caricature.  Obviously you could want more from this, but it provides at least the minimum of action and blood that genre fans would want. (3/5)

Cash Out:  Mason (John Travolta) is the head of a gang of thieves until his girlfriend (Kristin Davis) reveals she is part of the FBI and the whole gang is nearly captured.  They escape and Mason retires for a couple of games, until Mason's dumb brother shows with a "foolproof" job.  Which of course it isn't.  They're supposed to take over a bank and open a security deposit box that has millions in crypto inside.  What could go wrong?

Someone has tipped the cops, so Mason and the others have to take everyone hostage.  A black guy named Anton and a Latino named Hector babysit the hostages while Mason and his brother go downstairs to the boxes.  And there's the stereotypical hacker named Link who does all the stereotypical hacker stuff.  

What they find is the box has nothing in it that could have crypto in it.  Meanwhile Mason has to deal with his ex as she's the FBI agent in charge.  Then the hacker finds something surprising about the crypto and who it belongs to.  But finding that out puts them all in even more danger.  

Overall it's a decent low-budget heist movie.  There are twists and turns as I might have indicated and Travolta is engaged enough that it doesn't seem like he's just cashing a paycheck. (3/5)

Stuff I Watched In September

I should probably repeat my rant back in August; it seems like there was some backsliding last month.  Maybe people think they're clever but it's pretty obvious some of you just scrolled to the end because those were the only ones mentioned.  It really defeats the purpose of all my work. 

Anyway...

7500:  This Amazon movie from 2019 was on Tubi and for no real reason I watched it.  Joseph Gordon-Leavitt is Tobias, a co-pilot on a plane that's going from Berlin to Paris.  One of the stewardesses is his girlfriend and they have a son together.  

Once the flight is airborne, some terrorists break into the cockpit with glass shivs.  Tobias and the captain manage to push them out of the cockpit except for one knocked unconscious.  But Tobias is cut on the arm and the captain is killed.  Tobias calls the tower who recommend going to Hanover.  On the way, the terrorists start threatening to kill hostages--including his girlfriend.

The problem with the movie is its claustrophobic setting.  It's the kind of movie that could basically have been a  play.  It takes place only in the cockpit while we only catch glimpses of the rest of the airplane through a tiny, black-and-white screen.  So when hostages die and the passengers fight back at Tobias' encouragement, we barely see anything at all.  That stuff might have been good to see to know what's going on with the rest of the plane. 

Still, Gordon-Leavitt does a good job in a role that basically calls for him to be on screen the whole time and to mix English with German.  There aren't any other recognizable names to me but there's a young guy playing one of the terrorists who also gets a lot of screen time and does pretty well.  If you don't have Amazon Prime now might be a good time to catch up on this and other titles Tubi has like All the Old Knives and The Tender Bar. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  7500 is the radio code for a hijacking.)

Bent:  This 2018 movie stars Karl Urban of Star Trek and The Boys as a cop named Dan Gallagher who along with his partner is making a drug deal to catch some bad guys.  At least that's how he thinks it's supposed to work.  But somehow the bad guys have gotten wind of it and kill Gallagher's partner while he's shot.  He's arrested and put in prison for corruption, finding out that his partner had been keeping money, some earmarked for him.

Three years later he's let out of prison and starts looking into things.  He uncovers a shadowy government organization with Sofia Vergara in it and they join forces--outside and in the bedroom.  Ultimately he has to get to the root of things with some gunplay and car chases and all that.  Besides Urban and Vergara, there's also Andy Garcia as a bookie who's a father figure to Gallagher.  Overall it was OK but could have used more of a budget for some better supporting actors and effects and stuff. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  One of those low budget things:  the prison Gallagher is put into is called only "State Prison.")

Kill the Irishman:  This 2011 movie is a "true story" set from 1960 to the late 70s about Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson) who starts as a low-level employee shoveling grain out of freighters on Cleveland's waterfront.  When one of his coworkers passes out from the heat, Greene takes on the Mafia-backed president of the union and eventually wins.  For the next few years, things are great for Greene as he expands his business and makes friends with local Mafia boss John Nardi (Vincent D'Onfrio) and even gets married and has kids.  But then the Feds bust him and he loses it all. He does a little jail time but not much by volunteering to be a snitch for the Feds.

When he gets out, he calls Nardi, who gets him a job as a debt collector for a Jewish loan shark played by Christopher Walken.  Of course this is the kind of debt collector who doesn't call you on the phone;  this is the kind that breaks your thumbs or kneecaps.  Along the way, Danny makes friends with a garbageman and he and Nardi come up with a plan to create a union for the garbagemen, which puts them at odds with the other Mafia in town and his garbageman friend.

But things really go sour when he asks Walken for some money to build an Irish-themed restaurant.  Walken sends a courier to New York to get the money only for the courier to use it on drugs instead.  Greene and Walken have a falling out, with a $25,000 price tag put on Greene's head.

There's more to it, a lot more.  The movie is almost 2 hours and drags a little here and there.  Besides the names I mentioned, there's Val Kilmer as a cop who grew up in the same neighborhood as Greene and...really doesn't do a lot.  You also have some other recognizable names/faces in Robert Davi, Vinnie Jones, and Paul Sorvino.  While Stevenson is better known for action roles like Punisher War Zone, Accident Man, and Ahsoka, he does a good job in a more dramatic role as a guy who wants to help his neighbors but probably goes about it the wrong way. (3/5)

Cash:  This was one of those weird things where I put this on my Tubi queue a long time ago and forgot about it.  So it disappeared for a while and then eventually I saw it again on Tubi and decided to watch it this time before it could get away.

This movie is from 2010, just before the careers of the two main stars (Sean Bean & Chris Hemsworth) exploded a year later with Game of Thrones & Thor.  Bean is a criminal with a twin brother (also Sean Bean) in a prison outside Chicago.  For some reason I didn't really pay attention to, he has a suitcase of cash totaling about $630,000.  Maybe he was going to use it to get his brother out?  Whatever.  Anyway, some cops chase his car and he throws the suitcase out, where it hits Hemsworth's old station wagon to bounce off to the side of the road.  Hemsworth gets curious and looks inside to see money.

When he gets home, he and his wife decide to do what most of us would do--shut up virtue signalers--and buy a new Range Rover, a new TV, and basically a houseful of new furniture.  About a third of it they give to one of their moms to hold onto, though I'm not sure they actually told her about it.  They quit their jobs and plan to buy into a chicken franchise.

Meanwhile, Bean has escaped the cops and goes to the DMV to look up cars recently bought with cash, figuring anyone who found the money would buy a new car.  It's a little too lucky of a guess; I mean for all he knew, whoever found it could have gone and bought tons of lottery tickets, gambled it at the track, or just spent it all at the nearest crack house.  But whatever.  He starts tracking the names down and on the third try--that they show anyway--he finds Hemsworth.

From there, Bean takes Hemsworth and his wife hostage to get his money back.  There's a surprising amount of math involved in this as he keeps adding up how much money there is and subtracting how much they're still short.  Basically he's not going to leave them until he has every cent back.  They trade the car back for much less than it cost, take out a refinancing loan at the bank, and get the money back from the mother.  Then Bean kicks it up a notch by having them rob convenience stores, gas stations, and even a bank.

Overall it's a decent movie, though not a great one.  Besides the two big names there's not a lot of depth to the cast, though the actress playing the wife was good at providing some spunk against Bean's bullying.  I didn't see much point to the twin thing, though I guess from a sort of cookie scene it could have set up a sequel, though it was pretty obvious a year later that wasn't going to happen.  It could have been about 20 minutes shorter to be a little tighter  But whatever. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  One of the car buyers Bean talks to is played by veteran character actor Mike Starr.  He was also a Mafia guy in Kill the Irishman.  His brother Beau was in Due South and Halloween 4.)

The Stepfather:  Another blog mentioned this thriller from 1987 and what intrigued me was when he mentioned it was co-written by Donald E Westlake, one of my favorite authors over the last few years, who wrote the Parker series under a pseudonym, the Dortmunder series, and dozens of other books.  Since it was "free" on Peacock, why not check it out?

The gist is that a man (Terry O'Quinn of Lost, The Cutting Edge, and Resident Alien) goes around suburban Seattle, marrying women and becoming part of the family until someone gets too close to the truth or just pisses him off.  Then he murders them and moves on.  This time his new family is a mom (Shelly Hack) and a 16-year-old daughter named Stephanie.  Stephanie doesn't really like him and is having trouble with the death of her real father, to the point she's been expelled from school for fighting.

Everything seems fine enough until Stephanie sees the guy raging in the basement during a party.  Then she starts to get worried about him, but she of course has no proof.  Meanwhile, some other guy is looking into Terry O'Quinn and getting closer and closer to finding him.

Overall it's taut and the main characters are drawn pretty well.  For something that could have been just cheap schlock, it's actually made pretty well.  Coming in at under 90 minutes, it would have been nice if they'd had the chance to stretch it a little to give a little more background to Terry O'Quinn's character.  Still, it works. (3.5/5) (Fun Facts:  The movie was directed by Nick Castle, who played the original "Shape," aka Michael Myers in Halloween.  Blu Mankuma of Transformers Beast Wars and Robocop the Series has a small role as a police lieutenant.)

One Last Heist:  Based (loosely, I'd assume) on a true story, this is about a heist in London's Hatton Gardens neighborhood that houses a bunch of jewelry stores.  A thief (Matthew Goode of Watchmen) gets out of prison and is recruited by a Hungarian mobster (Joely Richardson) to rob the vault under the jewelry stores.  She'll give him all the codes to get into the building; he basically has to figure out how to get into the vault.

Instead of recruiting young guys, he recruits some old geezers to do it "old school."  From there it's a fun little heist story as the thief has to not only figure out how to knock over the vault and carry it out, but also deal with the problems of the old people, like one has emphysema and another has other problems and one is just cranky.

Like I said, it's fun, sort of a low budget version of The Bank Job starring Jason Statham.  And it's not very long, so you don't have to sacrifice a whole afternoon or anything. (3.5/5) (Fun Fact:  This is one of those movies where the main character's name is never used, so in the credits they refer to him as XXX which is funny since there was that Vin Diesel series by that name.)

The Con is On:  I've mentioned before movies that have a good--or at least well-known--cast that for some reason go under the radar.  This one could have stayed under my radar.  

A couple in England (Uma Thurman and Tim Roth) are in trouble after stealing money from a "Russian" gangster Irina played by Asian actress Maggie Q (which is maybe supposed to be funny?) and using it all on poker and drugs.  They get enough money to fly to LA, where Thurman plans to steal a valuable ring from an actress (Alice Eve) whose husband (Crispin Glover) is a director up for an Oscar but secretly in love with his star (Sofia Vergara already mentioned in Bent).  Meanwhile Parker Posey is in love with Crispin Glover but he doesn't seem to notice or care no matter how many scenes she makes.  There's also Stephen Fry as a pervy priest with a pet Asian boy and a drug business on the side.

The whole thing becomes this sort of soap opera with some action as Irina and her goons show up.  Thurman gamely tries to make it work while Roth stumbles around most of the time. Fry does a good job being gross.  Eve, Parker, and Vergara act like they're in a Mexican telenovella for the most part.  Glover is strangely the most normal one of the bunch.  And Maggie Q doesn't even get to kick anyone.  It all becomes pretty tiresome and as far as "cons" go it is pretty lame. (2/5)

Mob Town:  In 1957 the small town of Appalacia, New York was briefly home to about 60 mobsters.  This inspired-by-a-true-story movie is about how a state trooper named Ed (David Arquette) manages to bust them.

The basic setup is that a gangster (Robert Davi already mentioned in Kill the Irishman as a gangster) has returned from exile in Italy and now wants to return to the seat of power.  He wants a meeting of all the big gangsters in some quiet, out-of-the-way place.  One of his lieutenants suggests Appalacia, where there's a small-time gangster named Joe Barbera running things.  Sergeant Ed has tried to get Barbera a few times but of course the gangster always finds a way to get out of it.

Ed starts to notice strange things as Barbera is buying up all the steak, fish, and pork chops for the big to-do.  Ed is also making time with a widow who has two kids.  The day finally comes, and Ed has a plan to trap all the gangsters.

It's not a bad movie but it's the type that needs a bigger budget for more and better actors, sets, and a slightly longer run time.  That would have made it feel a little closer to A-list than C-list. (3/5) (Spoiler:  The end has a card to say what happened after.  Of course none of the gangsters went to jail and most weren't even arrested.  But the long-term impact was it forced Hoover and the FBI to acknowledge the Mafia did exist and led to new laws like the RICO Act.  Ed went on to be on various committees in Washington trying to fix the organized crime problem while his son became a New York state trooper.)

Our Kind of Traitor:  Even if you didn't watch the opening credits, you could probably figure out this is based on a John le Carre novel.  It's a story of espionage but it's a lot slower than a James Bond movie.

In Morocco, an English professor named Perry (Ewan McGregor) and his wife Gail, a barrister (Naomie Harris), are on vacation.  One night they're in a bar when they meet a bunch of loud Russians.  Dima, the head of these (Stellan Sarsgaard), invites the couple back to his compound.  From there Perry and Dima form a friendship, largely built on straight-arrow Perry being impressed with Dima's war stories, gang tattoos, and so on while his wife is less impressed.  Dima has some valuable information that British Intelligence wants, but getting it out of the country and to Britain could be dangerous--to everyone.

Like I said, this is much more of a slow burn than a Bond movie.  There's a lot more focus on the characters.  McGregor and Sarsgaard have decent chemistry and everyone else is up to the task.  If you like the more realistic type of spy thriller, then this is a good pick. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  McGregor and Sarsgaard were both recently in Star Wars series on Disney+, though not together.)

Rain Fall:  It would have been nice if someone had mentioned that about 75% of this would be in Japanese with subtitles.  Basically this is like a Japanese version of a Bourne movie.  Only instead of Jason Bourne, there's John Rain, who has about as much charisma as a rice cake.  He has possession of some memory stick that's important--I guess.

Like a Bourne movie there's a CIA command center with lots of screens to try to bring up CCTV footage and junk like that.  Instead of Chris Cooper, Brian Cox, etc you have Gary Oldman, who mostly screams at people to find Rain.  As Rain rampages through Tokyo, he meets some woman who the CIA is also after and tries to get her to safety.

I wasn't really into most of the Bourne movies or reading a lot of subtitles so this didn't do a lot for me.  There's a twist at the end that's kind of clever, so that's something at least.  Besides the subtitles, a more charismatic lead would really have helped. (2.5/5)

Johnny Skidmarks:  This is another movie that really wants to be a Coen Brothers movie.  But it doesn't quite rise to that level.  Still, it's not too far off the mark.

The eponymous Johnny Scardelli Skidmarks (Peter Gallagher) is a crime scene photographer who also moonlights by taking blackmail photos of his hooker girlfriend's johns.  He gives these photos to some other guys who shake down people. 

But then one day he goes to a crime scene only to find one of his blackmail crew is the victim.  And then his hooker girlfriend.  And then another guy.  It seems pretty obvious that Johnny is next.  Meanwhile he meets a woman named Alice (Coen Brothers favorite Frances McDormand) at the fast food restaurant run by his former brother-in-law Jerry (Jack Black).  Can he find who's after him before he needs a crime scene photographer to take pictures of him?

It's not really a bad movie and there's a decent cast that also includes John Lithgow as a cop.  It could have used a little more zaniness to match something like Fargo, but it's not bad.  There is some gross stuff so if you have a weak stomach you might need to turn away. (3/5)

Black Butterfly:  This is the kind of movie that's ruined by too many twists.  At the beginning, the story is about Paul (Antonio Banderas) who is a struggling, reclusive writer in Colorado.  Things are getting desperate enough that he's trying to sell his house out in the mountains via a rookie realtor (Piper Peekabo) but things aren't going well.

One day Paul is going into town when a truck is driving like a jerk, driving slow and not letting him pass.  He finally gets around the guy to go to a local diner.  The truck driver shows up there to pick a fight.  A drifter named Jack (John Rhys Myers) jumps in to defend Paul before leaving.  On his way home, Paul sees Jack walking and gives him a ride to his house.  

From there it becomes sort of like Misery as Jack takes over the house and basically takes Paul captive.  Jack claims to be trying to help Paul get his writing on track, but it soon spirals out of control.

Then there's the first twist that wasn't really bad.  It turns everything on its head.  If it had ended there it wouldn't have been too bad.

But then there's twist #2, which is the worst kind of twist.  SPOILER!  It's all a dream!  Paul dreamed the whole thing with Jack because his subconscious was telling him what to write or something.  Look, I've been writing for a while and I've NEVER had long, complicated, lucid dreams that tell me stories to write.  I rarely get any story ideas from my dreams; it usually happened when I was wide awake.  So to me the whole idea this could all have been a dream to solve his writer's block is just completely asinine.  Like I said, this is the worst kind of twist because it really just negates the whole story so why did I bother watching it?  It makes me feel like a chump. (2/5)

Adverse:  This was one of those annoying bait-and-switch deals.  The description calls it a "taut urban thriller" where a rideshare driver a short time out of prison finds out a gangster (Mickey Rourke) is leaning on the rideshare guy's sister.

Then the reality sets in.  It's a dull slog as the rideshare guy tries to get his sister off drugs and hanging out with bad people, loses his gig job, and does some driving for Rourke's goons.  By the time there's some gunplay and violence, I was too bored to care.  I guess when they said "taut urban thriller" I was thinking more car chases, gunplay, and fighting instead of a mopey PSA against drugs and peer pressure and shit. (1/5) (Fun Fact:  Sean Astin has a small part as the head of the local branch of the rideshare; he's in like two scenes so that definitely qualifies as cashing a paycheck.)

Rumble Through the Dark:  It's kind of like if Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade were a bare knuckle boxer.  Jack Boucher (Aaron Eckhart) is trying to get money to pay off the local gangster "Big Mama" and buy back his adopted mom's house from the bank.  He does some bare knuckle fights and then goes to a casino where he actually makes some money.  But some dude who works for Big Mama sees the money and so they go after him.

And mayhem ensues.  It's almost 2 hours long and I stopped really paying attention much after the first hour or so.  In the end he's got to fight some big dude for the money he needs.  Guess what happens?  Eckhart gives it his all but there's really no other talent that's comparable.  I wouldn't really recommend it. (2/5)

Hunting Ground:  This is a Tubi Original, which I suspect was just a cheap action movie that had trouble with distribution or had been sitting on the shelf and they just bought it for "original" content.  In the beginning there's some bad guy who steals money from a plane and jumps out, landing somewhere in Washington state before dying.

Nearby, it's the opening of hunting season and some guy finds the money and then some other guy with some goons starts chasing him.  The only actors you might have heard of are Danny Trejo as the sheriff who barely seems to do anything and Bruce Dern, the bad guy leader who only appears a couple of times through a tablet screen that was probably filmed in his house.  So it's a lot of unknowns and cheap effects and so on.  It didn't really hold my interest long after I finished my dinner.  The good guy should have had a kid--especially good if it's a sick kid--so we'd care more about him getting the money.  Just wanting not to be a lumberjack in a small town isn't really a great reason, especially when we don't know what else he might do. I'm just saying. (2/5)

Accelerate:  Pretty standard cheapo action movie.  A woman's son is kidnapped and apparently she's some kind of assassin or whatever and to get her son back, the kidnapper (Dolph Lundgren) wants her to drive around LA getting stuff.

It's basically a video game-style plot where she goes from one level to the next, fighting henchmen and bosses like former UFC fighter Chuck Liddell and Danny Trejo.  It gets pretty boring but I suppose it makes OK background noise. (1/5)

MI5: Greater Good:  I think the listing said this was based on a TV show.  If this were a TV show I wouldn't stream more episodes.  It's just a bland spy "Thriller" about a rogue agent and someone else who gets framed for it.

Basically MI5 fucks up the transfer of a terrorist named Qasim to the the CIA.  Qasim gets away and someone needs blamed so the blame is ready to fell on a higher-up in the agency, who disappears before anyone can arrest him.  An old protoge of his (Kit Harrington) is recruited to go after him.  Meanwhile Qasim is launching attacks on London.

There are some OK twists and turns, but it's not especially interesting. (2.5/5)

Confidence:  This 2003 movie stars Ed Burns (who's like the less charismatic Ben Affleck) as leader of a crew of con artists.  His right-hand man is Paul Giamatti and there's another guy who drives and stuff.  Their last job they stole some money from "the King," who's a big shot crime boss played by Dustin Hoffman.  To get the king off their backs, they have to take on another job trying to double-cash business checks in Belize.

Of course everything gets complicated because one of the King's guys named Lupus joins the team to watch them and also a woman (Rachel Weisz) joins too and and Ed Burns get a thing going.  It's pretty good for this sort of movie with some good twists that make you wonder if they'll get away with it.  It's just a little annoying how it gets skipping ahead to the supposed end that wants you think Ed Burns is dead. (3/5)

We Still Steal the Old Way:  This is about 3 old British guys who stage a bank robbery.  Only it's not "one last job" for them because they get caught.  But that's actually the real job so they can break someone out of the prison as his wife is dying.

The potential breakout gets harder when an old rival gets himself transferred to the prison.  He starts recruiting an army and lays the ground with the warden (or governor as they say there) to start making and selling drugs.  The bad guy pretty much has everyone on his side but the good guys have a plan of their own.  It's decent overall even if it doesn't have any familiar faces.  Not a heist movie so much as a prison movie. (3/5)

6 Ways to Die:  "John Doe" (Vinnie Jones) manipulates a bunch of other people to help destroy drug kingpin Sunny Garcia.  He offers them a lot of money in order to slowly destroy the drug lord.  This includes his wife betraying him.  There are a number of interesting twists as we wait to see how everything connects.  I think there's a twist at the end that was pretty silly but otherwise it's good if you like an action drama with a twisty plot.  I'd say more but it's kind of hard to avoid spoiling things. (3/5)

The Assignment:  The first problem is that this movie decides to be broken up nonlinearly.  The second is that the plot makes no sense.  Basically there's a hitman named Frank who kills a doctor's brother.  So the doctor (Sigourney Weaver) uses her skills to make the hitman a woman.

Now maybe you'd think with all the Eric Filler books I'd be down with that but it's pretty stupid.  I mean to do a full, flawless sex change would take a while.  So it's pretty implausible.  

Anyway the hit woman (Michelle Rodriguez) escapes and starts doing stuff while the doctor has been committed to a mental hospital, where she's telling the story to her doctor (Tony Shaloub).  And, you know, mayhem ensues or whatever.  I just wonder how much Tubi offered up to get Weaver, Shalhoub, and Rodriguez to do this crap.) (1/5)

Prom Night (1980):  I watched this for story research and no other reason.  It's not a very good movie.  They rope Jamie Lee Curtis into this but it's obvious she doesn't want to be there.  The rest of the characters are as thin as the paper the script was printed on.  The story itself is boring and predictable. 

In 1974, some young kids are in an old school and one girl dies.  Her twin brother doesn't.  So, hmmm, who's the killer years later?  Yeah, really hard to guess.  

Meanwhile there's a prom featuring a bunch of disco.  Actual disco.  Ugh.  Then the killer, wearing all black with a sparkly black ski mask, starts offing random losers.  I don't think Jamie Lee really gets naked or anything but there is a little sex.  Not enough to make it interesting.  No clever twists.  Just nothing really. (1/5)

Prom Night (2008):  This was about the time where the only big horror franchises running were Saw and Hostel movies.  Rob Zombie's Halloween had done pretty well so of course studios started trying to reinvigorate other old franchises like Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th.  Someone decided to pick up more obscure ones from the early 80s like April Fool's Day and Prom Night.

Saying this is better isn't hard.  It's basically a McDonald's cheeseburger vs something you find on the pavement.  It's bland and basic but it is edible.  It's not really that different than a late 90s horror movie, without the style of Scream.  The killer ends up pretty predictable too.  Years ago a girl's family was attacked by a stalkery teacher.  Years later her and her friends (mostly just a bunch of CW archetypes) are going to prom at a hotel.  And, hmm, the teacher escapes prison a couple days earlier.  Hmm.

But the plot is a bit more fun with more kills, more gore, and a little more sex.  The killer does a couple of clever things to escape the cop (Idris Elba) who was involved with the previous killings.  And no disco music!  That's always welcome.  If you want a metaphor for this movie, it's the kind of movie that uses a second-tier 2000s band like Rock Kills Kid for the end theme than a more popular band like Coldplay, Death Cab for Cutie, or the Shins. (3/5)

Ready or Not:  I think this was on Hulu for a while but I never got around to it.  And it was about to expire on Tubi.  So what the hell.  

A newlywed woman (Samara Weaving, NOT Margot Robbie as you'd think) and her husband are at the estate of his rich family.  The family has this weird tradition where a new member of the family has to play a sadistic game and be sacrificed by sunup or the family will all die.  Rich people, right?

The family includes a bunch of snobs, losers, and a creepy old lady.  They're probably not creepy and nutty enough to compete with The Addams Family or Knives Out or something.  They include Henry Czerny (Mission: Impossible 1, ?, and 7), Andie McDowell (Groundhog Day), and Adam Brody (Shazam).  At first the bride thinks it's all a joke but is soon disabused of that notion.

From there she has to avoid the family and shifting allegiances.  And also no one but maybe the butler is much good at using weapons.  Of course everything comes down to the last second.  It's fun but maybe not as much fun as it could be.  There's plenty of gore and gross stuff.  A little sex.  A few twists.  I'd say to watch it in Spooky Season if you can. (3/5)

Taffin:  This late 80s Irish movie stars Pierce Brosnan as the titular character.  Around his small Irish town he's kind of a fixer, collecting for people and helping a band get a van after they were sold a lemon the first time.  But then there's that favorite 80s plotline of a bunch of big city developers showing up to build a chemical plant.

The townspeople recruit Taffin to stop them.  There are dirty tricks by both sides before it's all over.  By then Taffin is a pariah.  Meanwhile the developers make a final attack on Taffin.  Strangely they never think to kidnap his girlfriend.

It's a decent movie considering there are no stars after Brosnan.  It's more fun at the start when he's using his skills to help people around town.  Once it gets to the main plot it becomes a little slow.  I guess this is what Brosnan had to do since he couldn't do the rebooted Bond movie that went to Timothy Dalton instead. (3/5)

Employee of the Month:  This isn't that comedy with Dane Cook, though it came out around the same time.  Anyway, Matt Dillon is David, a guy who has it all:  a fiancee (Christina Applegate), a house, a car, and a decent job.  But then his shithead boss fires him.  And his fiancee finds a stripper's underwear in his jacket pocket.  So he's out on his ass.  He buys a gun, some beer, and ice and heads up to a motel to commiserate with his friend (Steve Zahn).

That's basically the first 2/3 of the movie somehow.  I mean it just keeps creeping towards some kind of point.  We started the movie showing him riding the bus looking downtrodden and seemingly going to shoot up the bank.  To actually get there takes a frustratingly long time.  And then he finally does go to the bank but just beats up his boss.  Outside is a bank robbery!  Coincidence?

From there you have twists and twists on twists.  The problem is like with that other one I mentioned is it goes too far, until the twists make no sense.  The idea that he was using this thing at work so he could stage a robbery is a good twist but then having his fiancee and friend and a bunch of other people in on it too was a bit ridiculous.  I mean how did his flaky friend keep that secret for like two years?  And if David is such a stone cold killer why was he having a relationship with his fiancee and so devastated when she dumped him?  (Especially since she's a lesbian.)  And really, no one should need two years for what amounted to a pretty simple robbery.  One twist or maybe two is probably all you need most of the time.

All of the twists really bring things down; it definitely needed to end a little bit sooner.  (2.5/5) (Fun Facts:  All the loose ends--by which I mean the characters--are wrapped up in the end credit scenes--by which I mean they die one-by-one.  Dave Foley has a small role as a dentist who was someone involved with the plot.)

The Heavy:  Mitchell "Boots" Mason is freed from prison and tries to resume his old life of beating up people for money and so forth.  Then he's given an assignment to find some girl while his politician brother reveals he's dying.  There's also a cop (Vinnie Jones) with an old score to settle with Boots.

It has some twists but it's mostly pretty bland.  Boots, played by Gary Stretch, has no real charisma while Vinnie Jones and Christopher Lee are mostly wasted.  It's basically a "good enough" movie and not anything more. (2.5/5)

Blood and Wine:  I didn't pick this to watch; I had fallen asleep and Tubi just started it.  Seeing Jack Nicholson and Michael Caine, though, I decided to watch the rest.  From what I gather, Jack and his wife (Judith Davis of The Ref) had a wine shop that went under--in large part because of Jack's mistresses.  But he and Caine have a stolen necklace that should put Jack in the black.  

Except when Jack is packing, his wife tumbles onto the plane tickets indicating he's taking along his latest mistress--a young Cuban girl played by J-Lo.  They have a fight and it seems she kills Jack, so she grabs a bunch of stuff--including the necklace hidden in the suitcase--and takes off to find her son--Stephen Dorff.  They hit the road to go down to Key Largo while of course Jack isn't dead.  He and Michael Caine go off in pursuit of the necklace.

From there it's a series of successes and reversals for Jack as he and his son tangle over the necklace.  In the end, only one can survive.  In the oeuvre of Jack Nicholson it's probably pretty far down the list, but this is still a decent neo-noir thriller that's like a Carl Hiaasen novel without the charm.  But still pretty fun and a great cast for the mid-90s. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  When I watched Rescue Me (1991) on Rifftrax one time I said Stephen Dorff would have made a good Peter Parker and five years later with this movie that's still true.  But this was only a year or so from when he starred in Blade and some would say, started the MCU.)

Too Much of a Good Thing

 This month's Internet Writing Support Group was about a writing rule learned in school that messed you up.  This blog had an interesting answer:

I guess if there was something that messed me up, it was how supportive everyone was. Parents, teachers, classmates, everyone were always full of encouragement: You're a great writer! You should get your stories published! You could be an author!

Ha.

Ha.

Ha.

This answer reminded me of my own experience back in junior high.  In 7th grade I'd started writing stories first in English class and then on my own.  It probably started in notebooks but my school also had a whole lab of Apple IIe and IIGS computers with Magic Slate and Appleworks word processors.  Wow, the future is here!

Anyway, I wrote more in 8th grade and made the mistake of letting my teacher see it.  And she was all, "This is great!  You should get this published!"

I'm sure she was just trying to be supportive.  I mean, why not nurture the fat, shy kid with no friends' "gift" right?  Seems like a great idea.  And really doesn't cost her anything.

The problem is I was like 14 at the time and dumb and naive to take this seriously.  So I think, Hey, I should get this published!  And it should be totally easy, right?  I mean in TV and movies you just put your manuscript in a box or envelope, mail it to a publisher in New York, and you're on your way.

But like an old insurance ad said, "That's not how this works.  That's not how any of this works!"  In 1992 or so you can't just do that.  And, more importantly, my writing may be great for 8th grade in Midland, MI but it's dogshit compared to professionals who have been doing this for years or college graduates from the Iowa Writer's Workshop and so forth.  I'd have had a better chance taking on Mike Tyson for the heavyweight boxing title.

Rejections then were pretty much the same thing, only by snail mail if at all, but it probably stung worse back then.  I mean, my teacher said it was great, so why wouldn't they want to publish it?  But I'm stubborn and stupid so I think I might have actually tried a couple more times.

Anyway, the point is encouragement, no matter how well-meaning it is, can sometimes be a bad thing.  In cases like mine and the other blogger's, someone needed to dial it back a little and temper it with a little realism.  It'd be better to say, "This is great!  You have real potential!"  Or a little more backhand compliment, "This is great for a beginner!"  And then maybe provide the student with resources like books on writing, publishing, or just regular books to provide more perspective.  But that would require more effort than just a compliment, right?

Of course these days I might like more effusive praise than a 5-star "rating" on Amazon or Goodreads.  I'm just saying.

Back to the Future!

 One day I was watching some Rifftrax on streaming and it started showing these commercials about how "Kamala Harris let out some illegal alien who tried to kill me.  She doesn't care about white women!"  They kept referencing an LA Times article from about 15 years ago.  Since the commercial was made by "Make America Great Again," I thought maybe I should do a little research.

So I go to the LA Times.  Paywall.  I go to newspapers.com that promises they have millions of clips.  "Start Your Free Trial Today."  And then I just sighed and thought that in the old days you could just go to the library and use a microfiche reader to read old articles.  They probably would have had a national paper like the LA Times as well as local papers.  While it would have been bulkier and more time-consuming, it would have been pretty much free except however much you spent on gas--which in the 90s wouldn't be much.

Now that it's football season it kinda pisses me off that I can only get CBS and ABC on my TV with my digital antenna.  What was it, 20 years ago when the government strong-armed everyone into using these digital antennas for TV?  But they suck.  I mean maybe if you're in a rural environment or own your own place they can work better, but I live in an apartment that's surrounded by other buildings so the signal I get is shit; all I get are two channels in Lansing plus some PBS.

In the old days with regular antennas you just put a big antenna on the roof.  Sure it might blow off in a storm, but you'd be likely to get more stuff with it.  I mean when I was a kid we'd get stations from Flint, which is like 30-40 miles away.  So, really, it'd probably work better if my building just had a big antenna on the roof that everyone could tap into.  But then we couldn't get whatever benefit there is from digital!

The only alternatives suck pretty hard too.  The cable company charges $30 per month or more just for local channels.  Sling, Fubo, Hulu, etc want $40-$70 per month for packages that include local channels.  There's a local Fox app but that only shows you news, not actual shows; NBC probably has something similar.  With NBC at least I have Peacock so I can see some stuff but not everything on NBC is also on Peacock, which is kind of annoying.  ESPN is kind of the same thing.  I used to have Hulu/Disney/ESPN+ but the problem was that ESPN+ doesn't let you see the main ESPN stuff so I couldn't watch most Monday Night Football games--though last year I lucked out; thanks to the strikes they put some of the games on ABC--and the big college football games like the college playoff so I couldn't even watch the Michigan game.  But I could watch Ivy League football games and also volleyball, hockey, and lacrosse for a lot of teams.  Hooray!

And with all the streaming services it can be annoying when they move stuff around so on August 31st you might be able to watch a movie free on one service but September 1st it moves to another service you don't subscribe to.  Am I going to waste time signing up for a free trial or enrolling for a month--and hope I don't forget to cancel?  Probably not. 

On Fandango's app I used to have a bunch of movies I used digital codes for.  A lot of them were DC superhero movies like Man of Steel or BvS but I also had for instance a free copy of Stripes.  There was a menu on my Roku where I could find the stuff if I felt like watching it--which wasn't often.  One day I went to find it and the menu on the Roku was gone!  I went to Fandango's site, but nothing would come up there either.  I think when they took over Vudu they probably fucked things up so all the stuff I had with Fandango got vaporized.  I could probably contact their "help" but that would just take a while and accomplish nothing.

As I mentioned a while back with Amazon Music, they suddenly made it so unless you subscribed to Music Unlimited you were forced to listen in shuffle mode--even if it was something you already bought from their site on MP3.  Spotify is the same way except I don't think you can actually buy things on MP3.  Anyway, so if I wanted to listen to the stuff I own, I'd be better off using an old copy of Winamp on my PC or on an MP3 player.

Just to make things worse, some of these short-sighted companies are also destroying old stuff.  Paramount recently erased the entire archive of MTV News.  Maybe not a huge loss, but it shows how vulnerable online content is.

Anyway, the point being that thanks to corporate greed, stupidity, and short-sightedness it's getting to the point where you're better off going back to old analog ways to do things.  I've probably said this before, but if there's a movie/TV show, album, or book you really like, get a physical copy of it.  Then if it moves to some other streaming service or it gets erased you can still watch it when you want to.  Just make sure to have something that plays that format.  Maybe we should just bring back microfiche and analog antennas and stuff like that since the alternatives have become too expensive or just aren't that good.

And of course for all the writers, make sure you back up your stuff to somewhere other than "the Cloud" or OneDrive.  You never know when they'll decide to start charging some astronomical amount or want to use your material for "AI" training or just erase it because some dumbass pushes the wrong button or they get hacked or whatever.  I think I said before you should probably print out anything you really want to keep and then put it in a fireproof strongbox.  Or copy it onto clay or ceramic tablets--those seem to last a good long time.

It sucks to have to think this way but more and more I see the immediate future isn't going to be peace and light and happiness.  It's going to be shit thanks to greed and stupidity.  You might as well start preparing yourself now.  Sorry to end on a downer, but it is a downer subject.

August TV & Movies

 It's this again.  Like I said last month, try to do better on comments than "I haven't seen these."

Mayor of Kingstown, S3:  The third season seemed in jeopardy when star Jeremy Renner was in an accident with a snow plow.  But since he made a miraculous recovery, the show could return for another season.  The show is about Kingstown, MI, where the #1 industry is prisons and the #2 industry is selling drugs and other comforts to the prisoners.  Mike McClusky (Renner) is the "mayor" who tries to maintain the balance between the black Crips, the racist Aryans, and the Latinos.

At the end of season 2, Mike's mother was shot and season 3 begins with her funeral, where someone tries to kill Mike and his family with a car bomb.  Meanwhile, with the evil Milo out of the way, there's a new head of the Russian gang, who is also a friend of a prostitute/Mike's sometime girlfriend Iris.  And a former Aryan leader, who  was a mentor to Mike when he was in prison years ago, returns to Kingstown to take over the Aryan gang.  Bunny Washington, the head of the Crips, is meanwhile planning to expand his operations.

From there it's a lot of Mike bouncing around from one crisis to another as the various gangs are jockeying for position.  When all is said and done, the Russians are mostly wiped out and the Crips have taken some casualties and the Aryans have lost a lot of their leadership.  I'm not sure who's really going to come out on top.  Meanwhile, Mike's brother is arrested and Iris is possibly dead, but at least this time we can be pretty sure that Milo is finally dead.

Like the previous seasons, this really makes little attempt at being realistic.  I just find it intriguing for all the various alliances and crooked deals and so forth.  There is of course plenty of violence and some gross stuff like a baby left in a dumpster with its dead mom--and a bunch of rats.  And later a bus full of young Russian girls coming into America from Canada (the border Trump and his ilk don't talk about) is pushed off a bridge and the girls all drowned.

It's definitely not a show for the faint of heart.  Or those who want a really coherent police drama where everything is wrapped up in 45 minutes.  There are still loose ends out there for a fourth season, though as my brother said, with this Paramount merger, who really knows what might survive, though being part of Taylor Sheridan's empire on the network, it has a better chance than some. (3/5)

Wind River:  I'd heard of this but hadn't streamed it.  Then another blog reviewed it and reminded me that maybe I should get around to watching it.  So I did on Freevee, though by now it might be somewhere else.  

The movie is directed by Taylor Sheridan and plays like other Western noir movies/TV shows of his, the most notable being Yellowstone that gave him his own empire on Paramount.  In Wyoming, a young Native American is found frozen in the snow by fish and game warden Cory (Jeremy Renner) so he calls for backup, which includes the local tribal PD and a young FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) who happened to be the closest agent to the scene.

They start looking around and asking questions of the girl's parents, her ne'er-do-well brother, and some of his drug dealing friends.  Eventually, though, all the questions lead to somewhere else close by.

Overall this wasn't a bad movie, especially if you're into Sheridan's oeuvre.  If you're not really into his modern day Western/noir vibe then you probably wouldn't like it as much.  Renner is OK as the lead, though as a different blog wondered, maybe someone else would have been better, though I'm not sure who.  One of the Chrises? (Hemsworth and Pine at the top of that list.)  Matthew McConaughey?  Denzel Washington?  Anyway, Olsen's character could have used some more background so we'd know more than she's from Ft. Lauderdale.  Maybe the bad guy(s) could have been revealed a little earlier so we'd get more catharsis when they get what's coming.  Or not. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  As noted above, Jeremy Renner stars in Mayor of Kingstown, which was created by Taylor Sheridan and Hugh Dillon, who has a small part near the end.  Maybe they hatched the idea for the show on the set or something.  And of course Renner and Olsen have both been part of the MCU, though Olsen is "dead" and Renner is basically retired.)

Monkey Man:  This is a movie that was probably done a disservice by the trailers showing Dev Patel in a black suit and beating the crap out of dudes.  That's the kind of thing that got everyone thinking this was an Indian John Wick, but it's not except in the broadest sense.

Bobby (Dev Patel, who also writes/directs/produces) is out for revenge after a corrupt cop brutally killed his mother when he was a child.  To do this he actually employs a lot of subtlety.  He infiltrates a rich madam's establishment, where he starts working with a short guy who does deliveries and stuff.  He also does cage fights while wearing a monkey mask, though he doesn't seem to win a lot.  He does get money to buy a gun that he practices shooting against a movie poster painted on some crappy building.  He meets a beautiful hooker and feeds a dog, but I don't think a lot happens with either.

His first attempt to get revenge goes badly, though, when he struggles to pull the trigger.  He's badly wounded but escapes the cops to end up in some haven for transgender people--I guess.  There's a training montage as Bobby prepares for Round 2.  But then there's a lot of politics and religious stuff and if you're not from India it probably won't make a lot of sense.

Only then does it get to the John Wick-looking parts that were probably featured prominently in the trailer.  Overall I didn't think it was a bad movie, just not great.  There are extraneous bits like the love interest and the dog.  I'm not sure why he bleaches the monkey mask near the end when he doesn't even seem to wear it--at least not long.  And again all the political and religious stuff didn't make a lot of sense.  In a movie like this, just showing the bad guys are bad is enough without a bunch of social background. (3/5) (Fun Facts:  While this is supposed to be all about India, the movie was actually filmed in Indonesia.  Sharlto Copley basically is the token white guy as the owner of the cage fighting ring.)

The Bikeriders:  This is based on a photo book about a biker gang in Chicagoland from 1965-1973.  Annnnd...not much else.  Other than another attempt to Keep Boomer Culture Relevant, there's really not much to this.  There's a tough, loudmouthed young woman who gets involved with a biker named Benny (Austin Butler) who has as much emotional depth as a sheet of paper.  There's the head of the gang named Johnny (Tom Hardy) who got the idea when he saw the much-better movie, The Wild One.

The closest to a story is really about how the gang called the Vandals changes over the years.  They start out racing the bikes and then mostly drink beer in the bar that's their clubhouse and sometimes in a park or something.  They really don't have much agenda.  But somehow it expands into Milwaukee and then other Midwest cities.  And over time there are new members who are a lot more aggressive and prone to troublemaking.

But really the movie can't seem to decide what story it wants to make the main one, so it kind of just does nothing and drifts along to the end.  It just would have been nice if the leads had had some chemistry better than Anakin and Padme in Episode II.  And it might have been nice if the movie had done more than show some old TV shows and mention Vietnam a few times to actually depict the tumultuous time period.

You can say it's well-filmed and most of the actors do their jobs capably to decently.  The problem isn't the technical parts, just the lack of a coherent, compelling story. (2.5/5) (Fun Facts:  Near the end, Norman Reedus shows up as a biker from California; he has(had?) a show on AMC or wherever about motorcycles.  The band Lucero does the end theme song written specifically for the movie; I have a few albums of theirs that are good if you like alt-country with more emphasis maybe on the alt.  The lead singer also did a whole album dedicated to the characters in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.)

There you go, one of my favorite tracks.

Henry's Crime:  This is one of those movies that slipped beneath my radar even though it has a good cast.  But then I saw it on Tubi and decided to watch it.  The basic plot is Henry (Keanu Reeves) is wrongly convicted of helping to rob a local Buffalo bank and when he gets out about 18 months later, he decides to rob it for real.

At the start, Henry is a toll worker who is shown working the graveyard shift when there are hardly any cars.  He's married to Deb (Julie Greer) who wants kids, though he's less enthused.  Then a high school acquaintance Eddie (Fisher Stevens) shows up with a sick friend.  Eddie tells Henry he needs someone to drive to softball and even though it's November and about 8am, Henry drives him to the bank, where Eddie claims he needs beer money from the ATM.  A security guard comes out of the coffee shop next door and stops Henry.  He's sent to jail, where his cellmate is Max (James Caan) who is a former "confidence man" who's really comfortable in prison.  And like I said, 18 months later, Henry gets out and decides that since he did the time, why not do the crime?  This in part comes to him when he sees an article posted on a bathroom wall about how there used to be a tunnel between the bank and a theater next door.

Henry goes to his house to find his wife has moved on with Eddie's sick friend.  So Henry gets an apartment or motel or something to begin his plotting.  While bumbling across the road, he's hit by Julia (Vera Farmiga) who is an actress stuck doing local commercials and plays like Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard being directed by Derek (Peter Stormare) in the theater.  With Max's encouragement, Henry steals a part in the show so his dressing room can be used as a base while they dig out the tunnel to get to the bank vault.

This is one of those dark comedies or dramadies or whatever you want to call it that's not really serious but not really too overtly funny.  Like how people talk about Tom Cruise just playing Tom Cruise, you can say that mostly Keanu just plays Keanu, a pretty mellow guy who mostly goes with the flow, except there's the one thing he decides he really wants (the bank) and he just sometimes by intent and sometimes by accident accumulates people to help him--like Julia.  The romance plot is pretty well done, including the end where the play starts taking on a life of its own.  Overall it's pretty fun as a little bit heist movie and a little bit light drama/comedy/romance of people wanting to get out of Buffalo--and who can blame them? (3.5/5) (Fun Fact:  You have Keanu as a toll booth worker and James Caan, who was famously murdered in a toll booth plaza.  I don't think the movie has any winks or nods to that though.)

Chaos Theory:  This dramedy from 2007 stars Ryan Reynolds, but any potential viewers should be cautioned this isn't Deadpool, Van Wilder, or Waiting Reynolds.  This is a little more subtle and mature than those.  But still not extremely serious or mature. 

For whatever reason there's a framing device where Frank Allen (Reynolds) tries to calm the fiance of his daughter before the wedding by telling him a story.  So then it skips back to the present of 2007 (I assume, because it taking place in like 1990 would make no sense) when Frank is an "efficiency expert" who has this whole thing built around lists.  He has a book he's doing a presentation on and at a reception afterwards he meets a woman (Sarah Chalke) who asks to use the bathroom in his hotel room.  He agrees, but when she inevitably comes out of the bathroom in only lingerie, he freaks out and runs away.

He starts driving home, only to get run off the road by a pregnant woman who is in labor.  He takes her to the hospital and stupidly puts his name on the forms when the pregnant woman ducks out.  The hospital later calls his wife (Emily Mortimer) who becomes suspicious and so Frank gets a test to prove the baby isn't his.  But in the process he gets some bad news involving his daughter.

The bad news plunges him into a mid-life crisis of sorts.  He buys a motorcycle, takes up smoking, gets into a fight (that he wins), and streaks at a hockey game (which isn't shown).  Instead of using lists to organize everything, now he's just letting chaos reign.  Meanwhile his wife wants him back, but can't convince him.

I liked this more than I thought I might.  While not typical Ryan Reynolds comedy, it was still funny in places and serious in places.  Things pretty much end Happily Ever After, but not so much so that the whole cast should gather to sing a happy, sappy song.  The way I thought of it was it's like they wrote this for Zach Braff but then he couldn't be in it so they cast Reynolds instead.  And by that I mean if you like Scrubs or Garden State then you'd probably like this.  And, hey, I do like those things!  (At least the first couple of seasons of Scrubs.)  So obviously I liked this. (4/5) (Fun Fact:  It's a little weird with the framing device because Reynolds is about my age so he was only around 30 when this was released and yet he has a twenty-something daughter in the framing device.  It's good they didn't do the whole movie like that or it would have been really weird.)

Gunless:  It's a Western (Canada) comedy.  After surviving an incompetent hanging, the Montana Kid (former Due South star Paul Gross) ends up in a small town in Canada.  It's pretty predictable then as at first he doesn't like the town and wants to leave, but he can't for a couple of days, so he starts getting to know the townspeople, especially an opinionated widow.  When some American bounty hunters show up looking for him, it's pretty obvious what the Montana Kid is going to do.  

But while it's predictable it's still fun for a low-budget Canadian movie.  More fun and shorter than A Million Ways to Die in the West, but obviously not as good as Blazing Saddles. (3.5/5) (Fun Facts:  Paul Gross's co-star in the 3rd season of Due South was Callum Keith Rennie, who plays the head of the bounty hunters after the Montana Kid.  Gross played a Mountie in Due South and a contingent of Mounties show up to beat him up in this.)

Heist (2000?):  Behind the generic title is a bevy of talent:  David Mamet writing/directing and Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito, Delroy Lindo, Sam Rockwell, and Ricky Jay starring.  Annnnd...meh.  It's not terrible but there are a lot better heist movies out there.  Plenty that have more clever schemes, more charismatic thieves, and definitely better romantic plots. 

At the beginning, Joe (Hackman) and his crew (Lindo, Jay, and Joe's much younger wife played by Rachel Pidgeon) poison some coffees for people working in a jewelry store and then plan to rob the place.  One woman doesn't drink her coffee and so Joe gets caught on camera without a mask.  They still get away with the loot, but Joe decides he's done.

His fence, DeVito of course, has One Last Job for him:  steal Nazi Swiss gold from a cargo plane in Massachusetts.  Joe doesn't want to do it, but he has no choice.  To help make sure it happens, DeVito sends along his nephew (Rockwell) to be part of the crew.  But of course he's a dumbass who has no idea what he's doing.  From there they plan the job and carry it out at the airport and then there are twists and turns involving the loot and who gets what.

Like I said, it's OK but Hollywood has made a ton of these so there are plenty of better ones you could watch:  Ocean's 11 (either), Thomas Crowne (either), The Italian Job (either), The Score starring Robert DeNiro and Edward Norton that came out near this same time, and more I can't think of right now.  You could even put the Die Hard movies or Ronin on the list as there are usually heists involved.  Mostly I think this needed some better character work for Hackman, Pidgeon, and Lindo especially so we knew more about them and what was going on.  Still, it's not bad overall. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  You have a real Legion of Doom in this with Hackman (Lex Luthor), DeVito (Penguin), and Rockwell (Justin Hammer).  Plus Lindo as the evil Mr. Rose in The Cider House Rules.  "I'm in the knife business!  You don't want to get into no knife business with me!")

A Family Man:  This movie probably wants to be serious drama but rises only a little above a Hallmark movie by the end.  The opening premise is pretty interesting:  Dane Jensen (Gerard Butler) is an upper-class douche in Chicago who works at a recruiting farm, mostly for engineers.  He calls around and wheels and deals so his team can bring in the contract.  His boss Ed (Willem Dafoe, cashing a paycheck so he'd have time for weirder stuff like The Lighthouse and Poor Things) is going to retire and so whichever team leader has more money by the end of the year will get his job.

Dane puts in so much time at work that he barely has time for his hot wife (Gretchen Mol) or his three kids.  He does make time to berate his oldest son Ryan about his weight and take him running, during which Ryan almost passes out.  Later we see Ryan has a mysterious bruise on his leg.  Can you see the problem here?  Not long after Halloween, Ryan is diagnosed with leukemia and checked into a children's hospital.  So now Dane is finding it hard to balance still doing his work and spending time with Ryan.

There are some good moments then as Dane takes his son to some of the architectural landmarks of Chicago.  We can see he's becoming a little more human, though he's still trying to compete for the big job.

The problem is at the end everything works out too neatly, too Happily Ever After.  (Spoilers!)  Dane loses the big job because he gives away a contract he's long been working on; Lou, the engineer he's been stringing along (Alfred Molina cashing a paycheck), is 59 and so no one really wants him until Dane offers to eat the usual fee if the company hires him.  For that he gets fired, but Ed tears up the usual non-compete contract so Dane can start his own business in his basement or something; he gets his first client when Lou calls and says his new company needs some engineers.  And guess what happens with Ryan's leukemia?  Of course it goes into remission.  Now let's all sing a happy, sappy song!

It's not that I wanted the kid to die, but the movie really didn't need to go so overwhelmingly happy.  Dane has been a pretty big asshole for a while, but because he helped one guy he gets off without any real consequences?  That's bullshit.

Anyway, it's a well-made movie technically and you've got a decent cast, so I suppose there are worse ways to spend about 2 hours. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: Dafoe and Molina were both Maguire-era Spider-Man villains who would reunite about 5 years later in Spider-Man No Way Home.)

Central Intelligence:  Another team-up between Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart.  I haven't looked up how many times they've been together but there's at least four with this, the Jumanji movies, and the Superpets movie.  Anyway, this time around 20 years ago, Johnson was a fat nerd and Hart a top athlete, class president, and Most Likely to Succeed.  When Johnson is dragged naked into the gym during a pep rally, Hart shows kindness by giving him a jacket to cover himself.

Then 20 years later of course things have changed.  Hart is stuck in a dead-end forensic accounting job, the days of glory long gone.  Then he gets a Facebook request from "Bob Stone" and approves it and is soon invited to have drinks that night.  That's when Hart finds out "Bob Stone" is the naked kid from high school.  Only now while he's kinda weird, he can also kick a lot of ass.

Eventually it gets to the point that Johnson is in the CIA but is on the run from agents who think he's a bad guy called "The Black Badger."  He wants Hart to help decipher a computer code that will let him find the real Badger.

I try not to get too mad at movies that deliver what they promise.  That's what this does.  You have Johnson being goofy but also beating people up and you have Hart shouting and doing his whole less-angry Chris Rock thing.  If you want more than that, then you picked the wrong movie.  So, yeah, you can easily say, "It is what it is."  Because that's the best way to describe it.  There are some funny parts and some violence and car chases and stuff.  I was just surprised they didn't use the class reunion as the setting for the final act, but that does come into play for "Bob Stone" to get a little payback. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Besides Johnson and Hart there are appearances by Jason Bateman, Melissa McCarthy, and Aaron Paul.)

Quicksand:  Another of those I hadn't heard of despite a couple of big stars in it.  Michael Keaton is a banker who gets a warning of a big, suspicion transaction at a movie company in Nice, France.  He goes to France only to get framed for shooting the local police chief.  Then it's kind of a discount The Fugitive as he goes on the run.  He teams up with a female executive at the movie company and an aging actor (Michael Caine) to take on the bad guys.

Overall it's not a bad movie.  It's not a great movie either.  While it's exciting and I can't really complain about the film quality or anything, I think my biggest complaint is Keaton's character is pretty good at taking care of himself for a banker.  I mean almost right away he's dodging evil henchmen, corrupt cops, and soldiers.  It's not very believable unless he was in the military or something, which the movie doesn't say.  Anyway, that aside it's still a decent thriller. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Keaton was in the first two Batman movies as the titular hero while Caine was in the Nolan movies as Alfred.  So you have a Batman and Alfred, just not from the same versions of the franchise.)

Wild Target:  This is a British action-comedy from about 2010.  Bill Nighy is an assassin named Victor whose parents were also both assassins; he's now the same age his father was when he died.  His mother lives in a rest home with a scrapbook of his kills.

His life is all neat and orderly until he meets Emily Blunt, a young woman who just sold a fake Rembrandt for nearly a million pounds.  The buyer employs Victor to kill her, but he doesn't find the right opportunity right away and basically decides he doesn't want to kill her.  In a parking lot they're both ambushed by a couple of bad guys; a loser named Tony (Rupert Grint) inadvertently helps them.  

Victor and the two younger people go on the run, which he soon finds pretty annoying.  Emily Blunt is pretty reckless while Tony is clueless about everything except shooting, where he has a natural talent Victor starts to nurture.  The guy who bought the fake painting then hires another assassin (Martin Freeman) to track down the trio.  Which of course will lead to some mayhem.

There are some fun parts, some deadpan British humor, and of course some action parts, but it started to lag a little for me.  It was that point where I went in the kitchen to putter around for a few minutes.  So it's another of those things where maybe I hadn't heard of it despite the cast because it just wasn't that great.  Though not bad. (3/5)

Damaged:  It's not one with a bunch of recognizable stars, but it does star Samuel L Jackson as a Chicago detective investigating a series of murders of young women who are hacked up, their torsos taken and other parts arranged like crosses.  When someone is killed in a similar fashion in Scotland, he goes there to investigate.  He's teamed with a Scottish investigator whose son died a year ago, which really doesn't have much to do with the plot but is a distraction. 

From there it's pretty standard as you have some red herrings, a couple of chases, and a little gun play.  Then there's a twist that sort of makes sense.  Overall it's all right--"aggressively OK" as another blogger once said.  If you like mysteries you could do better--and worse. (2.5/5) 

The Doorman:  The basic premise is:  what if Die Hard took place in the apartment building from Only Murders in the Building?  Only it's not nearly as good as that might be.

Ali Gorski (Ruby Rose) is a former Army soldier who barely survived an attack on a diplomatic convoy in Romania.  (Don't waste time wondering who the people in the convoy were or what they were doing or who killed them, because none of it comes back later.)  She's back in New York with PTSD and a presumably honorable discharge.  She needs a job so her uncle gets her a job at the old Carrington building as a doorman.  She soon finds out that her brother-in-law (Rupert Evans) is living in the building with his two kids.  It's not fleshed out really well but they were apparently an item until he wound up marrying Ali's sister instead.

Easter weekend most of the building will be empty for renovations and stuff--sure, why not?  Except for one inhabited by an old handicapped guy and his wife.  The head doorman and a bunch of goons go to their place.  Their boss is The Professional himself, Jean Reno.  He wants some paintings the old guy stole when he was in Germany a while back.  They're supposedly hidden in the walls, but there's one problem:  it's the wrong apartment!  The old people moved after he had a stroke and guess whose apartment they used to live in?  Yup, the one Ali's family and her are in.

When the bad guys break in there, then it starts the Die Hard stuff with Ali and sometimes her teenage nephew sneaking around the building to take out bad guys.  It doesn't have the wit of Die Hard or Only Murders, but there's plenty of action and while it's fairly predictable, it's not a bad way to waste a little more than 90 minutes. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Reno is basically in the Bruce Willis role and this was 2020 when Willis was still active, but I tend to think he didn't want to go to Bucharest to film.  Maybe then Reno is Europe's Bruce Willis now?)

Batman The Caped Crusader, Ep 1:  The first episode of this new Amazon Prime series was free on Freevee, so I watched it.  The idea is it's kind of like Batman the Animated Series in the early 90s only it takes place about when comic book Batman started in 1939-1940.

The plot is pretty simple:  a female Penguin is taking down some of the mob rackets from her base on a yacht called the Iceberg Club.  Bruce Wayne investigates during a party on the yacht and Batman takes down the Penguin and her dumb sons.  But Bruce then sees the problem in that by taking down the Penguin, other mobsters will eat up her territory. (Fun Fact:  I talked about this in the Scarlet Knight books in that one of the things Emma fears is that if she takes down the evil gangster Don Vendetta--who is a woman, so take that retro Batman--her lieutenants will fight over her turf and other elements might move in.)

I really like BTAS, especially the earlier episodes, but this didn't do a lot for me.  Like a lot of the "Elseworld" comics it felt kinda uncreative.  I mean in a lot of those it felt like the writer/artist just pitched it like, "OK, it's Batman but it's in like the 1920s!  [Or 1910s or Middle Ages or whenever.]"  It is basically just Batman set in the late 30s/early 40s like the original comics.  What is it that I'm supposed to get excited about?  His lock pick?  His Batcave with a glass board and file cabinets?  I guess you can say it's more realistic--in some ways.  To me it just felt like I'd pretty much seen everything before.

Of course it was just a first episode so maybe if I can ever watch the rest it'll get better. (2.5/5) (Facts:  Besides Penguin the episode also introduces Harvey Dent, so I suppose at some point he'll have to become Two-Face.  Oooh, original.  More original is Barbara Gordon as a defense lawyer; she and her father the commissioner are both black, so take that haters--sigh.  When does the review bombing begin? sigh.  What would have been cool is if she was a librarian and up in a tower of the building she has a perch to monitor activities in the city and pass messages between her and a network of spies that are then relayed to the cops and/or Batman--and maybe a couple of those spies could be a young Tim Drake and/or Jason Todd.  Basically it'd be like a 1939-1940 version of Oracle, you know?)

Batman (1949):  Speaking of retro Batman, this is the 1949 15-part serial that was shown in theaters.  I've seen episode 3 quite a few times on Rifftrax, but one day I saw it on the Roku Channel and decided to start watching.  And it is...crap.  I mean, you pretty much expect that from the low, low budget.  The Batsuit looks like something a mom might make from one of those patterns sold in stores--especially the ridiculous ears.  Robin is an adult with a black cape, probably because "yellow" looks crappy in black-and-white.

And which of Batman's many notorious foes is he fighting?  The Joker?  Penguin?  Two-Face?  Catwoman?  Exactly NONE of those!  Instead his enemy is "the Wizard," a dude in a black hood and cape who has glowing eyes.  With a bunch of bulky equipment he can make cars and other stuff go off course.  Yay?  His henchmen are all guys in suits and fedoras--including Floyd the Barber from Andy Griffith!  Bruce Wayne's girlfriend Vicki Vale is around to get captured or let her dumbass brother go free after he's captured for helping the Wizard.  There's also Alfred (who's not a badass) and Commissioner Gordon (who's not black) and some radio broadcaster who keeps obviously tipping the Wizard off in his broadcasts, but no one really seems to do much about it.

It's 15 parts, each about 20 minutes, which if my math is right means the whole thing is about 5 hours long, or equivalent to about 2 of the Nolan movies.  If you were a kid going to the theater every Saturday to watch, it was probably fine, but streaming it all at once gets to be really repetitive and boring.  It needed another villain or two, some character work for Batman and/or Robin, and some higher stakes.  I mean the whole big deal was the Wizard's machine could...make stuff go spinny.  And somehow it could be converted to stable energy, which is bad for...reasons.  Why does any of it matter?!

Maybe you'd want to check it out just for the historical value or something, but after a couple of episodes you'd probably be checking out. (2/5) (Fun Fact: All the people who bitched about the back of Robin's cape being black in TV and comics in the 90s should have watched this.  Suck it, haters, it was already part of the "source material."  I'm just saying.)

Cosmic Sin:  A cheap, dumb knockoff of HALO starring Bruce Willis and Frank Grillo.  It spends the first five minutes giving us the history of "The Alliance" to tell us it's the 26th Century--and yet while there are quantum gates and spaceships and colonies and laser guns, everyone still drives regular cars on roads.  That's how cheap it is.  It's the kind of thing where I just sort of lost interest in it. (1/5) (Fact:  Writer/Director Edward Drake has also done a bunch of other cheap action movies with Bruce Willis including the three "Detective Knight" movies; I'm not sure what he's going to do now with Willis retired.)