As someone with a lot of dietary conditions and digestive problems, I have to be pretty careful anymore about things I eat and drink. The problem though is so many food products make decisions for people based on how the company thinks something should taste. For people like me, those decisions can be just annoying or they can be dangerous.
Take something simple: ginger tea. I like to get ginger tea to help with digestion. But the thing is, most of the "ginger" tea you can get from your local supermarket is not really ginger tea because some company decided you don't really want ginger tea that tastes like ginger. No, we have to cut it with "sweet orange oil" (Walmart "organic" ginger tea) or with lemongrass, licorice root, peppermint, and a few other things (Yogi "Ginger" tea). So what you get is bland to sweet with absolutely no ginger taste. I got some organic ginger from Amazon Vine that was 100% ginger and I could definitely taste the difference between it and the crap in the supermarkets.
Similarly companies that make breakfast sandwiches or burritos will decide that turkey sausage needs to be spicier than pork/beef sausage. Why? I guess they figure it won't have enough "flavor" otherwise. Just like if you buy canned peas, a lot of brands will add sugar because "sweet peas" have to be sweet, right? I bought a chicken patty TV dinner that didn't say it was spicy but when I bit into one of the patties it was a little spicy.
The thing is, these decisions are basically irreversible. I mean, I can't really unsweeten the ginger tea if you put sweet orange oil in it. I can't extract the lemongrass and whatever else if you mix it up with the ginger. I can't make the turkey sausage or chicken patty un-spicy after you make it spicy. I can't filter out the sugar you add to sweet peas.
By contrast, if I wanted my ginger tea to have less ginger kick, I could easily add sweetener or mix it with another tea. If I wanted my turkey sausage sandwich to be spicy, I can just add some sriracha or salsa or some damned thing. If I want my peas sweet, I can add my own sugar.
The problem with this food fascism is if I have diabetes, I don't want peas with sugar. I really don't want tea with sweet orange oil either. If I have acid reflux problems, I don't want some company unilaterally deciding to make turkey sausage spicy. At best that's annoying and at worst it can give me serious problems.
Then you get things like where a frozen pizza will be fine until some fascists decide they need to make the sauce "zesty" and add a bunch of spices. Or where they just blatantly lie and call their coffee creamer "sugar free" by replacing sugar with a bunch of corn syrup--which is worse for diabetics than sugar.
Really, I'm an adult; I should be able to make decisions for myself whether something is spicy or sweet. Some company shouldn't be dictating to me that ginger tea can't taste like ginger or peas can't taste like peas.
And the problem is sometimes you can't really tell how spicy something might be just from reading a label. Or there's just so much added crap that you might not even notice some spicy ingredient. Or it might be something generic like "added spices" or something. One brand of turkey sausage might have virtually the same "ingredients" and taste spicier than another.
It's the same when ordering fast food. One pizza place's wings might not be spicy at all if you get them "naked" or they might still have some residual spice. The same for chicken tenders where some plain ones might still be a little spicy. Or also for chicken patties in sandwiches. There's no real indication of how spicy it is and a little can still be enough to create problems because some company decided to add more "flavor" to the recipe.
(As an aside I've always thought spiciness is the laziest way to add "flavor." It's really easy to just throw some hot peppers or sriracha or something in there and make something spicy. And then it usually overpowers anything else, so really who needs any actual flavors? Just make it hot and people won't notice anything else. Yawn.)
You can virtue signal by saying, "I make all my food myself." Hey, awesome. But I don't always have time (especially in the morning) to make everything from scratch. So it'd be nice if I could trust that prepackaged foods aren't going to be unnecessarily sweet or spicy. Isn't there enough to worry about already?
With the many, many video games that have existed since the 70s there have been some truly great ones but also some stinkers. So let me mention a few that wound up pretty bad.
ET The Video Game
This one became infamous for not only its terrible gameplay but selling so poorly that thousands of units wound up being hauled to a dump in Alamogordo, New Mexico for internment. I watched a documentary on that a few years ago where they actually dug up some of the old cartridges for the Atari 2600.
There are plenty of clickbait articles that will probably call this the worst game of all time. After the success of the ET movie, it was rushed into production. The programmer basically had about 5 weeks to make a game so it could be on shelves for Christmas. As you'd expect, the finished product was not very good. Instead of replicating the movie (at all) you jumped into holes to look for stuff so ET could phone home. A Federal agent would chase him, I guess. It was weird and confusing and any kid who got that for Christmas probably wanted to take it back on Boxing Day.
With junk like that, the video game industry soon had a near-fatal crash until the NES came along.
Speaking of...
Friday the 13th
I never tried to play this when I was a kid but it was on one of those fake Gameboy or SNES machines I got from Vine. This game came out before games like Doom and Mortal Kombat with blood and ripping out spines and stuff. NES games were pretty bloodless so a game about a serial killer who murders teenagers seems like a pretty bad idea from the start.
The gameplay is more like Legend of Zelda than a fighting game. You walk around and look for stuff and basically waste a lot of time not murdering people. You play as some kids and complete important tasks like lighting fireplaces. The "gameplay" is so ridiculously repetitive, as is the soundtrack, which also for some reason periodically features loud beeps. Basically you walk down paths and about every two inches zombie things pop up that you throw crap at. You can go into buildings and blunder around and find Jason, who's wearing a purple tracksuit or something.
While not as infamous as ET, it was still pretty bad. Though weirdly none of these "worst of" lists mention it, though most were written by Millennials or Gen Zers who weren't even born when games like this came out. It was, like ET, a really lame attempt to cash in on a property.
Speaking of...
Superman 64
This N64 game was based on the animated Superman series--supposedly. It is on pretty much every list of terrible video games. Basically the gameplay was difficult and confusing and the graphics were murky, which was explained away with "Kryptonite fog" or that it was a virtual reality simulation. No matter what, it wound up being pretty awful.
I tried playing it for a few minutes on Retrogames and the controls to make Supes fly were so confusing that I gave up pretty quick. Of course I didn't have a manual, which might have helped a little bit. But probably only a little bit.
This wasn't the last time a Superman game disappointed. The tie-in game for Superman Returns was delayed so it couldn't come out until the fall of 2006, after the movie had already pretty much flopped in theaters. Was it worth the wait? Um, no.
Custer's Revenge
My parents wisely never bought this one for the 2600. This off-brand game features a naked George Custer navigating a battlefield so he can fuck a Native American woman tied to a post. That was probably cringey back in 1982, let alone in 2024.
Yes, someone really made this and sold it.
Reading a few articles there are some common entries I haven't heard much of:
Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust
I think we had the first of these games on the old IBM PC. It was pretty great for teenagers in the early 90s. This eighth title in the series is apparently notoriously bad. It's basically like that old guy who still wears a leisure suit and gold chains and stuff and tries to hit on young women at a bar. The humor and graphics are dated and the story is pretty lame.
Shaq Fu
This 1994 game features Shaquille O'Neal but has nothing to do with basketball. Instead, it's a fighting game. Shaq is beamed into another dimension and has to fight his way to a kid and return. It's a pretty vanilla fighting game with a story that makes little sense. Just in case you thought Steel or Kazam was the worst thing he ever did.
Plumbers Don't Wear Ties
This 1993 game was made for the short-lived 3DO system. Apparently this "interactive comedy" just used still photos and bad voice-acting as a plumber tries to get laid. Kind of explains why this system didn't last.
Big Rigs Over the Road Racing
There have been tons of racing games but apparently this is the worst. You're supposed to haul cargo without getting caught by cops and beat a rival truck, except apparently nothing works except your truck just drives around in vague scenery.
Aliens: Colonial Marines
This game was a victim of its own hype. Apparently the demos were really great but the finished product was not. The graphics weren't as good and the gameplay was filled with glitches--or bugs. Interestingly, a random user examined the code a couple years later and found a typo in the code that caused some of the problems with the alien AI.
#
In my A to Z entries I mentioned some games I didn't really like such as Age of Empires II, Super Conflict, or NHL 2005. Generally I don't think there are a lot of them I bought that I really hated, except maybe if they were in a bundle of other stuff. Because games are expensive, I couldn't really throw my money at every dumb tie-in game that came out or every hyped-up new game to hit the market. Mostly I think when I was trying to find something for the Wii other than the Wii Sports games was really when I bought/rented the most stuff that wasn't great. Like I said, there was just a lot of stuff that didn't really take advantage of the system. Most I rented but I bought a couple and resold them later.
So I don't think I really had a lot of duds in my library. Although I did buy my sisters a couple of cheesy Burger King XBox games. Those were pretty stupid but then they weren't supposed to be real high-class games.
I guess you're supposed to answer a bunch of questions for the official Reflections entry. Whatever. A few people commented trying to get me to comment on their blog, but they were blogs I had no interest in. Like advertising anything, if you advertise your blog on my blog it should be something I might be interested in, not plants or crafting or whatever. People like that would do better to focus their efforts on more similar blogs.
Of course no one commented on all 26 entries. I think my brother probably had the most comments. Generally it seems like people can't be bothered to muster the effort to follow more than a few entries. So really 26 entries is about 23 too many for most people.
Meanwhile no I didn't really go to a bunch of other blogs or even try to look through the list. I'm about as lazy as the rest of you when it comes to that. So sue me.
Anyway, now that that unpleasantness is over, here's a little supplementary entry.
Someone could have made the generic comment, "You sure play a lot of video games." Which is patently false. For a poor like me, video games were always expensive, thus my family and me separately never owned a lot of them. If you look up all the games on RetroGames or something like that there are literally tens of thousands of them, though a lot on that site are different foreign versions of the same game. Still, I probably never even played 1% of Atari, NES, and SNES games and none for Sega Genesis, GameBoy, or any console after the SNES except the PS2 and again probably not even 1% of the games for the PS2 and maybe 0.00001% of PC games.
Because games were so expensive and we didn't have a lot of them, usually I'd play them quite a few times instead of taking a "one and done" approach. A lot of Atari and NES games especially I never actually beat because I'm not sure you really could beat them. Others, like sports games, I'd play through seasons even if there wasn't a dynasty mode. That was getting more value for my money.
Anyway, the A to Z format makes it hard to fit everything in I might want to talk about. So here are some that didn't make the cut.
RealSports Baseball (Atari 2600)
The original Atari baseball game was called Home Run and we had that for our 2600 in the early 80s. It was a pretty silly thing where there was a batter and pitcher and maybe like 3 fielders. It was not a very accurate game. RealSports Baseball we got I want to say from Odd Lots (what was later Big Lots, though not in the same location) for not very much. It was a far more accurate game in that you had the right number of players, though of course they were just pink blobby guys and yellow blobby guys. Or whatever.
My brother and I would make lineups on notebook paper with players named after old stuffed toys or just stupid made up names like "Ty Lenol." We'd keep score on the paper and all that, though in reality all of the players in the game were exactly the same. The game itself wasn't great but we made it more fun than it should have been.
There was a similar game for the Atari 7800 that had better graphics but I don't think we played that one quite as much.
Ninja Golf
This game for the Atari 7800 is exactly what the title suggests: you're a ninja playing golf! You start each level teeing off and as you run to where your ball lands, you have to fight ninjas and groundhogs or something that throw mud.
When you get to the green, you have to chuck throwing stars at a dragon thingy.
It behooves you to hit the ball well so you have fewer ninjas to deal with.
It's a silly game and yet pretty fun too. It's the kind of thing I'd love to see in real life. Then I might actually watch golf.
Super Empire Strikes Back
As you'd expect there are a lot of Star Wars games for the various consoles, starting I think with Empire Strikes Back for the 2600 where you flew a snowspeeder and tried to kill AT-ATs though eventually they'd overwhelm you and destroy the shield generator.
The Empire game for the SNES I played a bunch of times for no real reason other than it's my favorite movie and I was bored. You play through pretty much the whole movie, mostly as Luke. It's mostly running and jumping in Luke's pilot suit with his pistol and lightsaber (see picture above), which you get to select between. In the opening Hoth levels you sometimes get the Tauntaun to ride. You can jump on things that give you different Force powers and health and whatever as well. There are levels to pilot the snowspeeder and probably the Millennium Falcon. Of course you have to fight Vader in the epic duel, which was awesome when I won. I tried the games for the other two movies but didn't really like them as much.
Bully
The people behind the Grand Theft Auto games basically translated that experience to prep school, which sounds weird and yet was still pretty fun. You play as Jimmy Gates, a tough kid who's sent to a boarding school. At first you run around the school and you can pick fights and go to classes and do other stuff. Later you can go outside the gates and even into the nearby town, where you can steal bikes to get around.
Instead of guns, you have a slingshot and for your BFG you get a potato gun. There is some kind of campaign but I forget exactly what it is right now. Like The Godfather, Simpsons Hit & Run, Need for Speed, or even Spider-Man 2 you can do the missions or just fuck around if you want. It's a pretty fun game, especially if all the violence and drugs and whatever in GTA is too much for you.
Rocky Legends
For fans of the Rocky movies, even those who came late to it like me when AMC used to show those all the time, this game is pretty awesome. It has pretty much every boxer in the Rocky universe from the eponymous Rocky to Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang, Ivan Drago, Tommy Gunn, Spider Rico, and you can even unlock a younger version of Rocky's trainer/manager Mick! There are also some characters just made up to fill the ranks.
You can do random bouts or there's like a campaign mode where you try to move your boxer up the ladder to become heavyweight champion of the world. While it is Rocky Legends you can be Apollo or Clubber Lang or Ivan Drago or Tommy Gunn or whoever, though I don't think there was a Create-A-Character generator, which would have been cool. At first you fight crappy boxers in crappy arenas--even makeshift ones on the docks or in prison if you're Clubber--and eventually you get to fight in big sports arenas against major opponents. You have to train to increase your stats and master combos and all that stuff. It was pretty neat.
F-15 Strike Eagle
My brother and I had fun with this one when we rented it a couple of times for SNES. While I think there is a one-player mode we did it more realistically by sharing the workload. My brother would pilot and I'd drop the bombs and stuff--which is how they did it in real life. I don't think we ever bought the game, just rented it a few times. I forget what the missions were but basically your F-15E Strike Eagle would have to go bomb stuff and dogfight enemy fighters. By itself of course, unlike in real life.
My brother was more into the flight simulators both the more realistic ones and sci-fi ones like X-Wing and TIE Fighter and their various spinoffs. I tried those but wasn't all that good at them.
Fury3
This was one sorta-flight simulator I played. I got a demo somewhere that let you play the first 3 levels. I thought it was fun so eventually I bought the whole game. I think I got the control stick to go with it too.
The game was made by Microsoft for Windows 95 and has you fly around in a ship to blow up alien bad guys. I don't really remember that much about it and I don't think I still have a copy, but I did rip an MP3 of the theme song that came with the game. I still have that on various MP3 players and discs.
Star Fox
Another sorta-flight simulator that at the time was revolutionary for its 3D graphics on the SNES. You play as Fox McCloud, who is obviously a fox, and a few other anthropomorphized animals like a falcon, rabbit, and frog. You have to blow up bad guys on the ground and go through rings and stuff. I think my brother and I beat it or at least came pretty close to it at some point.
This seems ripe to have a movie or TV show or something made for it though maybe it's not the most popular property in the Nintendo empire. There were I guess a few sequels for the N64 and GameBoy and whatever but I never played those.
Sim City
Long before The Sims in the 2000s there was Sim City. You simulate a city, hence the name. You got squares of Residential, Commercial, and Industrial zones along with power plants, police stations, and fire departments. You also had to build roads, railroad tracks, and power lines. And manage pollution, crime, taxes, and other issues like the occasional tornado or Bowser attack.
Your assistant is this green-haired Groucho Marx-Troll guy who'd tell you about problems or congratulate you on doing an awesome job--usually the former. The goal was to go from a village or whatever to a metropolis and stay there. But that's really hard to do because you only have so much land and you'll need more and more power and if you use coal plants that creates pollution while nuclear plants can melt down. And residential zones near power plants and industrial areas won't amount to much.
Far more fun was to build your city a little and then rain down all the disasters at once: fire, flood, tornado, plane crash, and the aforementioned Bowser who is the bad guy from Super Mario Bros standing in for Godzilla. The disasters would leave your neat square zones all ragged and stuff. Or if the disasters aren't working, you can just bulldoze shit yourself.
If you try to play normally it's pretty annoying in that you'll probably run out of money fast. The Catch-22 is you need money and you can basically only get it from taxes. But if you raise taxes over 7% people and businesses leave. If you lower taxes you get more people and business but you won't have the money to maintain your roads/tracks, power lines, and emergency services.
Like Age of Empires, I always liked using the cheat that gives you $999,999 which is the maximum amount you can have. It's a little complicated but I found it on Google. Anyway, with that you can then lower your taxes to 0% and your city will grow a lot faster. The problem then is like Monopoly it starts to get boring once you develop most of the land. There's not a lot then to do except watch stuff grow--or not--and usually it'll get stuck around 150,000 people because the rent is too damned high and there's too much pollution and you really have no way to deal with any of it. At that point, I'd usually start triggering disasters to tear it all down.
One neat little thing is as your city grows, the music changes. At first it's this really sleepy New Age type stuff. By the time you get to a metropolis, it's this hard-driving synth track because your city is so busy and stuff, right?
We had this for SNES but there was also a PC version and probably other platforms. They made Sim City 2000 which was a more futuristic version and then some other Sim games, but I never really played those until The Sims on PS2 and The Sims 2-4 on PC. I think you know all about those. lol
Roller Coaster Tycoon
This was similar to a Sim game only it's focused entirely on a theme park. You have to put in rides, booths for games/food, and facilities like bathrooms. You can design roller coasters. Like a Sim game you have to keep your customers happy and keep the park growing. And while you can't trigger disasters like a Bowser attack or tornado, you can take bits out of the roller coasters so people will fall off or pick people up to drop them into water or something. Like a Sim game that can become more fun once the park is about as developed as you can get it and the game plateaus. We had this for PC but it might have been for consoles too.
Donkey Kong Country
I think I only rented this a couple of times, but it was a really fun game. It was similar to the Super Mario World only you play as Donkey Kong on a jungle island. While originally Donkey Kong was a villain, in this game he's the hero. I forget what exactly your end goal was but you had to go through different worlds. You jump on things and over things and swing from vines and stuff. Instead of coins there were bananas because monkeys and bananas, right?
Instead of Luigi you had Diddy Kong who is sort of the Robin to Donkey's Batman. You could play single-player with both characters and basically tap one in or out sort of like tag team wrestling. Donkey was obviously stronger but Diddy was faster and more agile so sometimes you might want him.
Another neat feature was you could ride animals like a rhino that would knock bad guys and other stuff out of the way. There were other animals that might let you swim or fly or whatever.
Like the Mario games there were also minigames at some point. You could talk to other characters like Grampy Kong or whoever. In levels there were hidden letter blocks to spell "KONG" or something; if you got the whole word you'd get an extra life. I tried playing it on Retrogames but didn't get too far. I've never been great at those reflex games where you're always jumping or punching or whatever.
There was a sequel where Donkey Kong is captured and you have to play as Diddy Kong and Dixie Kong to rescue him. I don't think I rented that as much but it was good too.
Some of the stuff from these games made it into the 2023 Mario Bros movie.
Robocop vs The Terminator
This is another SNES game I rented once or twice. The idea would actually be a pretty cool crossover movie that could revive both franchises. The story of the game is that in the future, the resistance finds out that Robocop's mind becomes merged with SkyNet and that's how it creates Terminators and stuff like that. So the resistance sends a human named Flo back to Detroit to kill Robocop. But of course she doesn't and eventually Robocop finds out what's going on and gets sent to the future to destroy SkyNet.
The game itself is just a basic side-scroller where you walk and jump as Robocop and use a variety of weapons to kill punks and eventually Terminators. And fight ED-209 and stuff. I played it a little on Retrogames and was stuck on the first level until I found out this weird trick where if you climb a ladder and hold down X & A as you go, you can climb up, up, and away! Basically into the sky. So then you can jump off the ladder and get above a lot of what's going on. It didn't work so well in the next level when I accidentally got stuck in a crevice and had to restart.
Anyway, I like the story of the game better than the actual game itself. There was a four-issue tie-in comic book that I haven't read and is probably only available in paper. I suppose the timeline of Robocop and timeline of the original Terminator movies wouldn't really work since Robocop is supposed to be "the near future" and "Judgment Day" was supposed to be 1997. Though with all the crap they've done with Terminator since the second one it probably wouldn't matter anymore. If they could solve the licensing issues and such it could be pretty awesome.
Grand Slam Tennis
Probably my most favorite Wii game after the Wii Sports one. It's the game that helped me (sorta) understand tennis. Basically you can make a player and play in the grand slam tournaments: French Open, Wimbledon, US Open, and Australian Open--I think. I made one male player (Spot Mutt II) and one female player (Emma Earl) and I think maybe the female one did better.
I actually did pretty well in the Australian Open with Emma I think. The caveat was I had to use the simplified mode where the computer did the running so I didn't need to use the stupid "nunchuk" which I never really got used to.
Popstar
This was a goofy little DOS game on the PC. It was only text, though like a Sims-type game. You could enter a name and then some song names and you'd try to conquer the world of music. Sometimes you might have a hit song and be top of the charts and other times you'd pretty much be in the gutter and have to try to fight your way back up. You also had to manage your dude's health because if you tour and/or record too much he/she would get ill. There were things where you could go to a rest home for a few weeks or to "Froggyland" the amusement park. I don't think you could do some stuff real popstars do like drugs or screwing groupies. For a silly little DOS game it was pretty fun.
Friday we'll get into the other end of the spectrum with some Dishonorable Mentions.
Here was an idea I had for next year's A to Z: Greatest Hits! Not the music type. I mean from my A to Z Challenges over the years. Then I thought it'd maybe be better to just focus on the toy ones I did because they're the most similar. Maybe call it "The Toys That Made Me" or something.
I made a crude ballot on Google Forms. One vote per letter! The numbers correspond to 2017, 2018, 2021-2023 as follows
Transformers
GI Joe
Star Wars Black Series
Marvel Legends
DC Multiverse
So there we go, the complete list. Some of those are pretty lame and some would be a hard choice. I was thinking if there's a tie or maybe just for the hell of it I might mix up a couple of entries. Like I could have Bats vs Boba Fett or Wolverine vs Wonder Woman or something like that.
It's a silly way to waste a little time anyhow. Vote for your favorites. If the form doesn't work, vote in the comments.
That book, written in 1999-2000 or so, was about a struggling midlist author who ghostwrites a book for a famous author who's blocked. And then mayhem ensues. One point I made in my blog post was that the struggling author was in part struggling because publishers didn't want to waste resources backing a loser so they'd pretty much just back their biggest clients. "Midlist" authors or smaller fish had to find ways to do the marketing themselves.
In other words, this isn't a new phenomenon. It's something that's been happening at least 25 years now and probably longer. Then I wondered why this might be. This was obviously long before "AI," smartphones, and even blogs. The answer is pretty simple though: in the 80s and 90s big conglomerates were buying publishers and larger publishers were merging to make even larger publishing conglomerates.
The thing is when you're part of a big conglomerate or just a big company on your own, you're going to have executives who probably don't really care about the creative stuff. They care about the bottom line. And with mergers and stuff you're going to have managers wanting to show how efficient they can make things so they can get promotions and bonuses--or at least not get fired. (The latter is sort of the topic of another Westlake book from around the same time called The Ax where a guy gets laid off and starts murdering people he thinks are ahead of him for a job. In case you're wondering why middle managers might want to keep their jobs or get promoted.)
The unfortunate side effect of all this "efficiency" and cost-cutting is that the marketing departments are going to focus on the winners. They're going to focus on the big-time authors like Stephen King, James Patterson, John Grisham, Dean Koontz, or whoever else was big back at the start of the new millennium. That means that A) midlist and smaller authors are basically set adrift and B) It leads to this system where the rich get richer and most everyone else gets screwed.
There are still ways around it of course. One way I actually talked about in Where You Belong back in 2008: get your book on Oprah! (Or Today or wherever these days.) Frost Devereaux edits the book of an African writer and when the book is chosen for Oprah's book club, it becomes a smash hit. Meanwhile, Frost's books that aren't featured on TV talk shows do OK but not well enough where he's going to be independently wealthy.
Another obvious way is if you can win a major award like the Pulitzer, National Book Award, or Booker Prize in the UK. Then the publisher might want to put some money behind your book just for the prestige.
Bringing up another path to success: Hollywood! A lot of adaptations get stuck in "development hell" or fail but if your book gets made into a big-time movie or streaming miniseries then you'll probably sell a bunch of copies and probably get on the talk shows and such. And obviously the publisher will want to put out a new edition with a sticker proclaiming it's "Now A Major Motion Picture" or streaming series.
Of course the chances that most authors can do any of that is pretty remote. You can always try to do what Eric Filler did: find a niche in somewhat the right time and exploit the hell out of it. You won't win awards or get on talk shows, but you might make more than most indie books.
The 2002 Lawrence Block book Small Town has another way to succeed without a lot of marketing: get accused of a crime! When an author (kind of a Block surrogate, I assume) is accused of murdering a woman, he ends up getting a publishing contract worth over $3M! You don't want to actually commit a crime, but remember what they say: There's no such thing as bad publicity. Maybe people think you're a murderer, but at least they're thinking of you! And a sharp publisher will take advantage of that to get your books on shelves.
Those are ways to succeed if you're not good at marketing. You might be good at marketing though. If you can be an "influencer" and get on "Book Tok" and all that, these days you really don't hardly need a publisher. You can do just about everything yourself and keep most of the money. But the obvious problem is the reason a lot of authors are authors is that they're not perky and cute and thus not suited for the Book Tok crowd. Which is why most authors are screwed.
Not to sound too perky or cute, but something to remember is perseverance. A lot of authors didn't succeed on their first book. It took four books until my hero John Irving found success with The World According to Garp. John Grisham had a couple of books before The Firm was a success. Michael Crichton wrote a bunch of books (some under pseudonyms) before Jurassic Park made him a superstar author. And so on. Point being, maybe your first book doesn't hit right away, but you plug along and get one success and people might start looking into what else you have available. So don't get too discouraged right away...wait a few books and then get discouraged.
Anyway, I think it all goes back to corporatizing the publishing business. It's unfortunate but really it's not much different from movies, TV, or music. For most creators then it winds up being a Catch-22 where they need to promote themselves but how can they promote themselves when they don't have any money because they can't sell any books/movies/episodes/songs without decent marketing? You have to hope the piddly low-cost marketing options available to you (newsletters, social media, websites, review sites, etc) will do something. Or you luck into one of those scenarios above. Or maybe you'll win the lottery and can pay for it with that. The odds are about as good.
Next week is A to Z Challenge Follow-Up Week with 2 "Reflection" entries and how YOU can help decide next year's posts!
Way back in March I read the middling reviews for the new Ghostbusters movie and finally watched Men in Black International and thought, "You know, not everything needs to be a franchise." Both of those "franchises" started with one good movie and then a crappy sequel. In MIB's case there was an OK second sequel while Ghostbusters had a reboot people didn't care for and I never watched. Then they did revival movies that were...meh. Only Ghostbusters got a sequel to its revival that from the reviews is also meh.
So really they could have each just made one movie and people wouldn't have missed a lot. Then I got thinking about other revivals like Star Wars Episodes VII-IX. I actually liked Force Awakens when it came out as a palate cleanser to the lame prequels and because I thought it would set up something better. But then thanks to Rian Johnson and the panicky studio the whole thing imploded.
Other revivals like Scream 4-6, Halloween-Halloween Ends, Terminator Dark Fate, Indiana Jones 4-5, Blade Runner 2049, and the ones mentioned above didn't do much for me either. I'm not sure there really has been a big franchise revival I actually liked. Maybe I'll think of one before this posts.
Meanwhile, prequels also don't have a great track record to me. Star Wars Episodes I-III really got the prequel train running--and it almost instantly derailed. Yet studios haven't stopped trying with crap like X-Men Origins Wolverine, GI Joe Origins Snake-Eyes, Terminator Salvation, Prometheus, and a slew of horror ones like the recent First Omen. About the only "prequels" that weren't terrible were X-Men First Class-Dark Phoenix, though by the end it was hard to even call those prequels since there was no way in hell they could actually connect to the original 2000 movie. Fox's Planet of the Apes movies from Rise to the current Kingdom are also good prequels though similarly I'm not sure at this point how much they really line up to the original movies. Besides Episodes I-III, Solo was meh but Rogue One was OK--especially the end when Vader brings the pain.
To my surprise, it turns out reboots actually have a better track record. The Nolan Batman movies were great and I liked The Batman too. The Spider-Man reboots were OK, though the second Garfield one got sidetracked by the studio wanting to jam too much in. Similarly, Man of Steel was an OK reboot but the studio got greedy and the franchise lost its way. I'm not a fan of the Roger Moore James Bond but On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Living Daylights, and Goldeneye were good reboots and the Daniel Craig ones weren't awful, especially Skyfall and No Time to Die. The 2014 Ninja Turtles movie surprised me by not being utterly terrible and the recent Mutant Mayhem wasn't bad. There have been less good reboots like Terminator Genisys, Nightmare on Elm Street, or the recent Road House. Some like the 2019 Hellboy or Rob Zombie's Halloween are basically a push. I didn't like the first two Star Trek reboot movies but other people did. Beyond was decent though not as many people watched it.
Anyway, I think if you look at the averages, reboots have a better track record than prequels and revivals. So why do studios keep doing prequels and revivals? Prequels I suppose it's when they've run out of ideas for sequels and in the case of The First Omen it'd be really hard to do a revival since it was so long ago. Or like with the Star Wars ones I doubt Lucas could have gotten all the original actors to do a sequel even if he'd wanted to in 1997.
Revivals I think there's this idea that having familiar names involved will be comforting to people and get them to watch the movie. The problem though is if you say Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher are in a Star Wars movie, I really don't want these geriatric versions who can hardly do anything. Same for Ghostbusters: I don't want old Bill Murray who's obviously just cashing a paycheck; I want the original, good version. The problem is until deepfake gets better or someone invents a time machine where you could scoop those actors out of the 80s to make a new movie, it ends up not being very satisfying. The "legacy" stars are too old to do much most of the time and the new characters wind up being underdeveloped so they end up not being memorable.
I guess the good thing with reboots is the directors/writers have more of a blank canvas. That gives them more freedom to create characters. They don't have to shove a bunch of old-timers in while making sure they don't tax the geezers too much. They also don't have to line up to events that have already happened or have that weird thing where stuff looks better in the past than in the original movies. If you're doing a Batman, Spider-Man, or Bond reboot there are of course certain things you have to do, but still as we've seen there are different ways to do it.
So really, while making actual new stuff would be best, of the three alternatives, reboots are the best. And I don't think it's even that close, but maybe you disagree. What are your favorite prequels, revivals, and reboots?
I mentioned before how former Forbes movie critic Scott Mendelson was complaining about people not supporting movie theaters and how much of a hassle I think movie theaters are. It was interesting then when NPR linked to this PBS piece about local theaters in suburban Philly that have managed to thrive in the post-pandemic world.
A couple of things stood out to me, the first being that these are not the huge, impersonal multiplexes like your AMC theaters or other huge chains. These are renovated old movie houses with just one screen or so. There's no stadium seating or "IMAX" or probably even 3D. I don't think it says what their sound system is but probably not top-of-the-line Dolby whatever.
What also stood out is there's an emphasis on community. Besides movies there are events like book signings and birthday parties. The theaters have donors to help foot their bills. Since these are smaller towns, people probably know each other better than a big suburban theater.
Thinking back to when I was talking about the comeback of Barnes & Noble, part of that was using a more personal touch by having people who knew about books and could be helpful answering questions or making recommendations. Clearing out some of the toys and other junk also made it more welcoming for book lovers.
Maybe in this age of online shopping and streaming services the way to survive is to focus on the personal touch. Maybe it's not about having the biggest screen, fanciest chairs, or latest sound system. Maybe people will make more of an effort to see "Just a movie" if it feels more like going to a small town theater than a stadium.
That is probably the same for other things like department stores, supermarkets, or restaurants. Maybe people would enjoy going to those places (and spending a little more) if there were more of a small-town vibe instead of sullen employees, computer kiosks, and harsh fluorescent lighting. And maybe people wouldn't be in such a goddamned hurry and on their phones all the time.
Of course that means places need to motivate employees to try harder--or at all. One night I went to Wendy's and the order was $5.30. I handed the cashier what I thought was $20.30 but then a couple of minutes later she tries to hand me this wad of bills and coins because apparently I gave her only $20.21. Why didn't you just ask me about it before getting all that stuff out? I could have just given you the dime that I apparently didn't grab. But no, that would require actual thought and initiative. It's easier to just be a human automaton and punch the numbers in and grab the change to thrust at me. "Service" like that makes people prefer to use apps and kiosks because if the humans are going to act like machines, then why not just use the machine? That's what happened with self-checkouts at grocery stores. Cashiers stopped bagging your items or in some cases wouldn't bother to reach more than a couple of inches to grab your stuff to swipe. And just act all sullen and rude, like you're interrupting their day. So it's no wonder people accepted machines so readily.
A lot of it is up to management though to make employees actually want to come to work and not be sullen a-holes or act like human robots. Which would mean paying employees a living wage, providing benefits, and not overworking them so they can have a decent work-home balance. Which is pretty much the opposite of what managers have done since...ever. Which maybe didn't seem so important but in a future where computers, "AI," robots, 3D printing, etc can do just about everything, the personal touch is about the only competitive advantage humans have.
But I suppose there are times where you don't want as much personal service. Like if you're getting your morning coffee before work you probably just want to get your damned coffee so you can get to work and don't want to chit-chat and stuff. Or at the gas station or convenience store you probably just want to get your stuff and go.
I'm just saying that maybe more places should take note of those theaters' success and try to focus more on providing a great customer experience instead of making things bigger and more impersonal.
Here's what I watched in late March and through April. There's a lot of it. Some is new, some is a little bit old, and a few are really, really old.
Since I know no one will actually read the whole entry (or probably skim more than a couple of entries) I included a handy scorecard at the bottom that lists all the movies and how I rated them. It's even organized by score/title so you can easily see what was good and what sucked.
Oppenheimer: I missed out on "Barbenheimer" and waited until almost April to finally just buckle down and stream it on Peacock. And overall it's a good movie and a long movie that starts to feel long when with about an hour left it turns from the creation of the bomb to the political machinations of Admiral Lewis Strauss (Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr).
There's actually a framing device within a framing device for the movie. In black-and-white we have Strauss and his assistant ("Han Solo" from Solo) as he's undergoing confirmation for Secretary of Commerce in Eisenhower's second term. His treatment of Oppenheimer (Oscar winner Cillian Murphy) is a big hurdle to really what shouldn't that big of a deal. I mean, before the 2000s when everything was so overly politicized when was the last time anyone cared about who was Commerce Secretary? Most Americans (myself included) probably have no idea who the current Commerce Secretary is or even what the department actually does. Within this framing device is another one in like 1954 or 1955 where Oppenheimer's security clearance has been revoked and he went to DC to defend himself.
Only then do we get to him going to Cambridge and nearly poisoning his jerk professor before Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) tells him to go to Europe proper to learn about quantum physics and such. Eventually he goes back to the States to start a quantum physics program at Berkeley (Emma Earl's alma mater!) and meets some other scientists like Josh Hartnett (remember him!?) who have communist leanings. He also meets a woman named Jean (Florence Pugh) who hooks up with him but doesn't want to marry him. Later he goes to New Mexico and meets another woman named Kitty (Emily Blunt) who has been married a few times. They dump their first kid on some other guy when he's a baby because he's annoying.
Then comes the war and a colonel (Matt Damon) reluctantly puts him in charge of the Manhattan Project. While Oppenheimer didn't do a ton of the actual science, he facilitates a lot of the project, allowing the US to get ahead of the Germans. One scientist conceives of the H-bomb but Oppenheimer rejects going down that road yet.
So eventually it gets to the test of the first bomb and he says those famous words, "Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds." And then there's the dropping of the bombs on Japan. Like I said from there we have an hour or so of political stuff and basically courtroom scenes and it's hard not to keep looking at the clock. For as much conflict as there seems to be between Strauss and Oppenheimer, there's no climactic confrontation between them. All this stuff is supposed to raise the stakes but I'm not sure it really does. Again, Department of Commerce. And Oppenheimer losing his security clearance probably didn't really hurt him all that much. By then he wasn't shaping policy anyway.
While it's well-crafted because of all this focus on Strauss v Oppenheimer we don't learn much about Oppenheimer's childhood or his kids. His brother is shown a few times, but I'm not sure why they have a ranch outside Santa Fe. It does give some consideration to his moral issues about the program and aftermath. Like a lot of biopics though if you want to know more about the actual history of the man and the Manhattan Project you're probably better off watching/reading something non-fiction. (4/5) (Fun Fact: There were so many familiar faces that I had to bring up the IMDB page to look up everyone. Though some like Gary Oldman as Truman were pretty unrecognizable. The bench was so deep that American Dad/The Orville star Scott Grimes was a background actor in the black-and-white scenes. Lower Decks/The Boys star Jack Quaid also has a small role as one of the project people. Matthew Modine! Dane DeHaan! Casey Affleck! And so on! Sad Fact: This was the whitest, most male-centric movie of the year, so what does giving it the Oscar over American Fiction or Barbie say? It's not a moral issue on par with the atomic bomb and yet not maybe the best look for an organization frequently criticized for ignoring diversity.)
Road House (2024): Infamously Amazon refused to release this in theaters, which pissed off director Doug Liman. I think given the weak market this January and February, this movie probably could have made some money in theaters. But I wouldn't have wanted to pay to see it and for good reason.
Like most remakes of "cult classic" properties from the 80s and 90s, this really doesn't capture the magic of the original. I think most disappointing is Dalton himself. The Patrick Swayze version was an expert "cooler" who was brought in to tame the Double Deuce outside Kansas City. Swayze's Dalton had a Zen philosophy with rules like "be nice" and "take it outside" and slogans like, "Pain don't hurt." He also made sweeping changes to the bar to eliminate employees who would cause trouble. By contrast Jake Gyllenhaal's Dalton is a former UFC fighter who got tossed for killing a dude in the octagon. When we first see him he enters a fight contest but the other guy quits upon seeing him, so he literally gets money for nothing. When he goes to "The Road House" in Glass Keys, Florida (actually the Dominican Republic) he's kind of a Jack Reacher-Lite--the Amazon Reacher not Tom Cruise Reacher. He smiles and sorta follows the other Dalton's rules but he never articulates them and everyone working in the bar is already nice and not corrupt so there's little to do but try to stop a gang right out of a rerun of The A-Team or Knight Rider. By the end, Dalton turns into a cold psychopathic killer, which doesn't really make you want to root for him to win.
There's the token love interest who's a doctor, but the relationship is never built up enough so that when she's in danger it doesn't really matter. None of The Road House staff really matter. Real UFC champion Conor McGregor is a crazy fighter sent to destroy Dalton, which gets to be a long, drawn-out thing that could have been solved pretty quick if anyone had a gun. Instead of monster truck-driving businessman Brad Wesley there's Ben Brandt, a spoiled young man who inherited his father's crumbling "empire" and is desperate to have The Road House. He has a boat instead of a monster truck but like Brad Wesley isn't really a physical threat to Dalton, sort of like how the Joker isn't really a physical threat to Batman.
Anyway, if you're not really a huge fan of the original (and I'm not) then this is a competent enough movie. It's slightly better than most of those cheap straight-to-streaming/Redbox movies I watch because it does have better actors and direction, though the CGI effects when needed aren't great. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: They should have dubbed Conor McGregor because he does not sound menacing at all; maybe it's from getting punched or kicked in the balls too many times. There's a restaurant called the "Double Deuce" though no one ever goes inside of it. The owner of The Road House claims Ernest Hemingway drank there but later says her uncle opened the place in the 60s. Hemingway died in 1961 in Idaho and stopped living in the Keys in 1939, so it seems kinda unlikely he would have ever been there.)
Bottoms: Someone's blog mentioned this and it sounded interesting, though I couldn't watch it right away because it was on MGM+. Then Amazon moved it to Prime and I watched it before my Prime canceled. The basic idea was to be like a teenage girl Fight Club. Two lesbian girls start the "self-defense club" hoping to get hot girls there and hook up with them. But things go tits-up when the football team doesn't approve. But then the girls have to stop a rival football team from killing the star quarterback.
This is the kind of story that could have been good but wasn't. The lesbian romance parts aren't bad. It's the football stuff that is just so over-the-top goofball that it's ridiculous. Starting with something small: the quarterback's number is "01" when sports jerseys are almost always single digits so it'd be "1." The way they run the school, complete with a lunch room table that looks like "The Last Supper" is again pretty over-the-top and silly. And why is there no security at the Homecoming game when players have been murdered in the past? Aren't there any cops in that town? I just think if they had toned down the football player stuff it would have made the rest of the story work better. And hiring a real actor for their faculty advisor instead of former NFL star Marshawn Lynch. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: Someone asked me who I'd cast for Stacey Chance when she's a part Chinese, part white woman and the actress playing Isabel would actually be perfect.)
Poor Things: I wanted to like this but I didn't. I had the problem I've had with movies like Being John Malkovich where even with the kind of stories I write, sometimes the Puritanical Midwesterner who went to Lutheran school until junior high takes over and thinks, "Did you have to go there?"
My problem when watching BJM and some other movies is there's a scenario that could be fun and quirky but instead goes straight to the creepy sex stuff. It's like when video stores existed someone might run right by the New Releases and stuff and head straight to the "Adult" section behind the curtain to look at the porn. That's basically what this does. You can spout feminism or socialism or whatever, but we know what's really on your mind, because you took us there almost straight off. It maybe takes a little longer to get there than BJM as "Bella" (Oscar winner Emma Stone) has the mind of a child and the body of an adult. But every day she learns more and her mental age starts to catch up with her body.
This leads to her sticking things between her legs. And then a lawyer (Mark Ruffalo) pretty much molests her before they go off to Europe and do "furious jumping" for a while before she starts working in a French whorehouse to get money. It got to the point where I thought the best way to describe it was "if Wes Anderson directed a fairy tale written by Marquis de Sade." Because you have all this quirky scenery and once it gets to colors there's a bright palette with pastels and stuff but the story is pretty much straight-up de Sade with a virginal girl being involved with increasing debauchery. Only I guess we're supposed to feel there's female empowerment because she increases her vocabulary and knowledge along the way and rebels against traditional gender roles.
But by the last act with her body's former husband, I reached the point of just wanting it to be over. I can't deny Stone and Ruffalo and others did a great job, but the story making straight for the erotica section just bummed me out. Isn't it ironic? Don't you think? (2.5/5)
Anatomy of a Fall: This won the Oscar for original screenplay this year and plenty of others had praised it. I honestly don't see what the buzz is about. I've watched Matlock episodes that were more exciting. Basically there's a chateau in France where a guy falls from an attic. He's found by his legally blind son. Did the guy fall by accident, commit suicide, or was he murdered by his wife? Obviously the cops think the latter.
Most of it then is a trial where the prosecution has a pretty thin case considering no one saw anything and there's not much forensic evidence to prove she did anything. There's some mention of marital problems and you have to wonder if she did it. I don't think it really conclusively says anything. Basically her kid helps to get her off. So I guess she won't be grounding him anytime soon.
Even though a lot of it is in French with subtitles that wasn't the problem for me. The problem was there just wasn't much to it. The twists were really mild and the lead actress just never really did anything to make me like or dislike her. There just wasn't enough there for me to really care about it. It's so determined not to take a point of view that it never really provides any kind of insight. Maybe it's just I've watched/read so many courtroom dramas and crime thrillers that I never really felt she was in any danger of conviction with how weak the prosecution's case was. I mean all they had was a "splatter expert" and a recorded argument. Big whoop. If they had found a murder weapon or if there had been some kind of recording of the incident (like someone flying a drone nearby) then maybe I could have felt she was in trouble. One blogger talked about this showing a life "under the microscope" but I don't think so. She's never Casey Anthony or one of those others who's basically tried in the court of public opinion. There's no Nancy Grace persecuting her or big crowds following her around to make her life miserable.
I can't really explain all the buzz for a murder mystery that never solves the mystery and a courtroom drama without much drama. Maybe someday I could waste another 2 1/2 hours watching it again. I doubt it. (2/5)
The Menu: This black comedy is for "foodies" or people who really hate foodies and all those cooking shows on TV. A group of people are taken to an exclusive restaurant on a tropical island run by head chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). It's soon clear the place is basically a cult in the fashion of Wicker Man or Midsommar. Which gives you an idea of what's going to happen to these visitors. Among the visitors are a foodie (Nicholas Hoult), his new "girlfriend" (Anya Taylor-Joy), a food critic, her editor, three tech bros, an old couple (Judith Light of Who's the Boss fame plays the female half), a "movie star" (John Leguizamo), his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, and Slowik's alcoholic mom.
There's a reason that everyone has been chosen that becomes clearer as "the menu" gets underway. Being that it's a fancy restaurant there are 9 courses and while it starts normal, it soon starts to get weird. Anya Taylor-Joy's character is the rogue element in the mix since she wasn't supposed to be there. Ralph Fiennes as Slowik gives a really nuanced performance that never turns to mustache-twirling or maniacal screaming or anything like that. Like Hannibal Lecter or Grand Admiral Thrawn his calm is what's most unnerving. The interactions of Taylor-Joy and Fiennes are the most brilliant parts, especially when she manages to turn the tables on him. While not always laugh out loud funny (though there are some of those parts) it is a good black comedy. (4/5) (Fun Fact: Will Ferrell is a producer on the movie and I kinda wish he'd been the "movie star" just so I could have watched him in the end.)
Zoe: This 2018 sci-fi mumblecore film is like if Ex Machina had been a love story instead of a thriller. In the not-too-distant future Cole (Ewan McGregor) creates Zoe, a robot who looks like a normal woman. For the first few months or so of her life, she doesn't know she's a robot. She wants to have a relationship with Cole, but the compatibility models where she works say they have a 0% rating. When she confronts him, he confesses she's a robot that he built and put her into the world to let her "evolve."
Then as they explore her fake memories, they do start to fall in love. That is until a tragic accident separates them. They have to determine then whether their feelings were real or not. Thrown into the mix is a drug that can make people feel like they're in love for a short time. If two people drink it, they'll be "in love" for hours. But repeated use can create a dependency, which only muddles things more for Cole when he starts abusing it.
Overall I really enjoyed this. It's obviously not the kind of sci-fi movie with spaceships, laser swords, magic powers, or weird aliens like people are used to seeing Ewan McGregor in. It's about relationships and what makes us human. It's a lot quieter and subtler and yet still engaging and engrossing. There's not a lot I can fault with it except some might find it too slow. Unlike Poor Things, this doesn't run straight to the porn section; it takes some time before Zoe has sex. And since it's not filmed like a Wes Anderson movie it's less jarring when it does happen.
Really I think a lot of its ideas are spot-on, like how we'd almost instantly use "synthetics" for brothels and abuse love pills that were naively intended for couples who wanted to put the spark back in their marriage. It is kinda depressing and yet haven't we turned a lot of good ideas (like, say, the Internet) into something poisonous? Yeah, exactly.
Yet the movie itself doesn't get too depressing. Unlike Ex Machina there is actually a happy ending that maybe will bring you to tears. (4/5) (Fun Facts: Christina Aguilera plays Jewels, a robot prostitute who like Zoe is at first a big deal but then gets used up. She's kind of like the Asian robot in Ex Machina that didn't really talk, a sluttier earlier draft of the final product. Rashida Jones from Parks & Recreation takes a dramatic turn as Cole's ex-wife as well.)
This "song" from the terrible 70s movie Swamp of the Ravens featured on Rifftrax could have been remade for this movie since Zoe is Cole's own robot and his own lady:
The Autopsy of Jane Doe: Another blogger mentioned this and it sounded interesting so I added it to my Hulu cue. The movie is from 2016, so pre-Succession for Brian Cox. He's a coroner and his son (Emile Hirsch) is his assistant. They're given the body of a young brunette who was found in the cellar of a house where everyone died. As they start to examine the body, there are a host of weird things about it. It soon becomes clear that this is no ordinary body. Then a lot of strange things start happening around the lab. The power goes out on the elevator and a tree falls over the only door to escape, leaving them trapped.
It's pretty creepy and I did not see the big twist coming. It's the kind of movie that's sort of like a play in that there aren't a ton of locations or actors. Most of it takes place in the lab and there are only about ten actors in the credits--including the cat. So it's not a big movie, but a good one. It's not all jump scares, though there are some of those. The location and what they're doing makes for a pretty creepy atmosphere. Really all they needed was for it to be Halloween. (4/5) (Fun Fact: Olwen Kelly, who plays Jane Doe, would have made a good Stacey Chance, though by now I guess she'd be too old.)
Automata: This 2014 movie stars Antonio Banderas as an insurance agent named Jacq Vaucan in a dystopian future where most of humanity is dead from solar storms. To aid those left, there are primitive robots with 2 rules: don't kill anything living and don't try to improve themselves. Jacq investigates claims of robots going haywire and finds one shot by a cop when it seemed to be repairing itself. This soon leads him to find more who are trying to fix themselves. His bosses want the robots destroyed but as he spends time with the robots, he starts to have a change of heart.
The movie is a lot like if Philip K Dick had written I, Robot or similar stories instead of Isaac Asimov. Because it is a lot more grim-and-gritty 70s or 80s style than the gleaming worlds of rockets and jetpacks and flying cars of the 50s and 60s. Most of the movie was shot in Bulgaria and the budget according to IMDB was only $7M--which it didn't quite make back. With a larger budget it would have been a little better but it's still a good movie if you liked Blade Runner or the Will Smith I, Robot or stuff like that. (3/5) (Fun Facts: Melanie Griffith plays a robot doctor in a few scenes; this was apparently the year before her and Banderas divorced. Javier Bardem voices the "Blue Robot" who is the leader of the rebelling robots, though I'm not sure why he's the "blue robot" since he is like 99% white and like 0% blue.)
Lisa Frankenstein: If I'd listened to Scott Mendelson I would have tromped out to some theater and paid $15 or so to watch this. Fortunately I just waited another six weeks for it to be on Peacock. The premise is basically like if 80s Tim Burton had tried to make a teen sex comedy like Porky's or something.
Lisa Swallows (ha.) is a teenage girl whose mother was butchered by an ax-wielding maniac. Six months later her father married Nurse Ratched wanna-be Janet (Carla Gugino) who has a gorgeous cheerleader daughter who seems to be half-Asian or Hawaiian or something that's never explained since her father died in Vietnam. Anyway, Lisa visits an old cemetery and in particular some dead young guy's grave. One night at a party she drinks spiked punch, nearly gets raped by her lab partner, and stumbles home. Lightning hits the young guy's grave and brings the boy to life--sort of. Though he died like 150 years ago he's still largely intact, though a hand is missing and an ear and he can't talk.
After "the Creature" kills Janet thinking she was going to hurt Lisa, they inadvertently find out that they can attach new skin and pieces to the Creature and give him a shock in a defective tanning bed to make the transplants live. The problem for me is sort of like with Poor Things. Not so much sexual content since there really isn't much actual sex, just talk of sex. The problem is how quickly they embrace the idea of murdering people to add parts to the Creature. Lisa seems to barely question the morality of it. Like Ahh-nold in True Lies she handwaves it by saying, "Yes, but they were all bad." I mean Janet was going to institutionalize her and one boy was going to rape her so it's cool to kill them and harvest parts, right? Uh-huh.
Diablo Cody's script wants to be something like Edward Scissorhands, but it lacks the heart--literally perhaps--of that movie. The relationship of Lisa and the Creature is more Bonnie and Clyde than Johnny Depp and Winona Rider or even Edward and Bella of Twilight. Lisa knows almost nothing about the Creature before he died; when he plays the piano she has no idea he was a composer. Him not being able to talk or write limits their ability to establish any kind of real relationship, so it's unconvincing that she's almost instantly ready to kill for this undead Creature she barely knows anything about. There's really not a lot that's funny, more just macabre. It's not a bad movie, but it's not particularly good either. Making Lisa a little less ghoulish and maybe trying to find another way to harvest parts without murdering people would have made it go down easier. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: I wondered if her father had killed her mother with the ax given how quickly he remarried but it's never said who did it.)
Drive-Away Dykes Dolls: Another Scott Mendelson Special I'm glad I didn't waste time watching in theaters and waited until it was on Peacock. This was directed and co-written by Ethan Coen of the Coen Brothers. Maybe he shouldn't work solo because this attempt at a LGBT sex comedy really falls flat. In Philly in 1999 (for...reasons) Pedro Pascal is in some crummy bar (for also...reasons) with a valuable McGuffin. A bartender kills him and I guess gives the McGuffin to someone who gives it to a "drive-away" car rental place run by a bald guy named Curlie. A "drive-away" car rental place means someone rents the car to drive it one-way to a destination. In this case that's Tallahassee.
Meanwhile Marian is burnt out at work...somewhere and her horny friend Jamie has just broken up with her chubby female cop friend. So they go to the drive-away place. And wouldn't you know it, they want to go to Tallahassee? And they arrive like 2 seconds after Curlie hangs up the phone to take the order for a car going to Tallahassee? Uh-huh. So they get the car and set out. Then two incompetent gangsters and their boss show up. The two incompetent gangsters head out in pursuit.
Meanwhile, Jamie insists they stop at lesbian clubs and there's lots of lesbian kissing and touching, though they can't go full beaver. Like Poor Things it starts rankling me. Maybe it's professional jealousy because I was literally writing a lesbian sex scene like 10 minutes before I put this on. Jamie especially is so horny that it's like, "The kids in American Pie think she's too horny." I guess we're supposed to be happy her and Marian hook up, though I'm not sure why. The character work is pretty shallow to fit in more kissing and touching because I don't know, I guess that gets Ethan Coen off.
It would have been better if the jokes were funny but it's pretty low-brow and stale. It's a lot more like a Farrelly Brothers movie than a Coen Brothers movie. The whole thing just doesn't work unless you really like soft-core lesbian porn. (2/5) (Fun Fact: Matt Damon has a cameo as a Republican senator after the McGuffin.)
Maggie Moore(s): Speaking of the Coens, this is an imitation Coen Brothers movie like Fargo, but it's a really good imitation of a Coen Brothers movie! And actually better than the half-Coen Brothers movie above. In a small New Mexico town, Maggie Moore finds out her husband is funneling envelopes of kiddy porn to a sleazy food delivery truck guy who sells her husband expired meat, cheese, and bread to save money on supplies for his sub shop. The food truck guy offers to hire a "deaf" hitman to scare Maggie into not talking. He kills her instead. To throw the sheriff (Jon Hamm) off the scent, they kill another woman named Maggie Moore who the sub shop guy finds out about because his wife's pharmacy discount card is linked with the other Maggie Moore. So now there are two murder victims with the same name. Meanwhile the sub shop guy's neighbor (Tina Fey) gets into a relationship with Jon Hamm when he interviews her about the first murder.
From there we have twists and turns and people hooking up and people ending up dead. Most of it is pretty light and fun--or as fun as it can be given the circumstances--until the last act when suddenly someone is shot in the head and shit gets real. Like I said, this is a good imitation of a Coen Brothers movie so if you liked Fargo then you'd probably like this. (3.5/5) (Fun Fact: Jon Hamm plays a sheriff in the current season of Fargo on FX.)
BlackBerry: One of those rare movies I kinda wish had been a miniseries because this barely scratches the surface on the rise and fall of Research in Motion, the company that created the BlackBerry--the world's first smartphone. The company was founded by a nerdy guy named Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel with a bad hairpiece) and his friend Doug. It was pretty much a clubhouse for nerds until Mike and Doug go to the company Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) works for and make a bad pitch for an all-in-one phone. After Balsillie is fired, he goes to work with RIM and takes over the business and accounting stuff.
As we see, Mike and Jim have completely different leadership styles. Mike is the one who's friends with everyone and doesn't want to be tough on anyone. Whereas Jim just marches in and shouts and throws things until he gets his way. At this point you might think that this is going to be one of those stories like Apple or Microsoft where the more alpha guy is going to force the beta guy out and hog the credit. But they remain co-CEOs for about 12 years. A presentation with Bell Atlantic (who I guess became Verizon) emphasizes how they manage to work. Jim tries to do the presentation by himself but his lack of knowledge about the technical side leaves him floundering. Mike comes in and explains all the technical stuff but as we'd already seen, the business stuff wasn't really his bag. So they're much better as a team than either could do individually.
The movie hits some of the company's highlights. 1996 is the founding of the BlackBerry with Mike and Jim teaming up to get it started. Then it jumps to 2003 as the company faces a hostile takeover by PalmPilot and a sales crunch as crappy cell phone networks can only handle 500,000 phones. To sell more phones they need better programmers, so Jim poaches guys from Google, Microsoft, etc. To pay them millions he doesn't have, he does a little stock fraud. Meanwhile Mike is starting to lose touch with his nerds as the pressures to get new and better product mount.
Then it jumps to 2007 as the company is blindsided by the iPhone. By then Mike has largely turned into Jim with more hair and Jim is distracted by trying to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins and move them to Hamilton, Ontario. As they face stiff competition from the iPhone, that stock fraud also comes back to bite them in the rear.
Overall it was an enjoyable movie though of course much of it is probably not "true" in the strictest sense. Jim Balsillie is on record as saying he's nothing like the character in the movie. Sure. The problem is with only about 2 hours there's not enough time to really get into the home lives and background of Mike and Jim. So we really don't know a lot about them. Were they ever married? Or from the young male assistant Jim hires, was he gay? Why did he like hockey so much? Did Mike ever do anything besides work? So like I said it would have been better to do this in a miniseries format where in 4-6 episodes they could have really fleshed things out more. Still, if you remember early phones from the 90s-2000s it's pretty interesting to sort of see how we got where we are. (3.5/5) (Fun Facts: The venerable Michael Ironside plays a grumpy old man Jim hires when he sees him being a drill sergeant to employees at Google or Microsoft or one of those places. It's hard to recognize him at first because he's old and fat but pretty fun when he goes in and makes the nerds put their toys away and get to work. Throughout the movie, Mike resists building anything in China because stuff made in China generally sucks and I have to agree with him on that. I mean when you're basically using slave labor what you get might be cheaper and quicker but is generally inferior to what you might get where people are actually paid a decent wage and maybe give a crap about what they do.)
Rise of the Planet of the Apes: I had watched the other reboot Ape movies but not the first one for whatever reason. I finally saw it on Hulu and gave it a watch. It is surprisingly good. The CGI apes always look a little weird but the story is well done. You can feel for Caesar as he grows up with a human scientist (James Franco) and his father with Alzheimer's (John Lithgow) until he's taken away for attacking a neighbor who's pushing around the dad for accidentally wrecking his car. From there Caesar is taken to a "refuge" run by a corrupt owner (Brian Cox) and his sadistic son. Caesar starts to learn then about how bad humans can be and starts to integrate into his own kind. Using some "smart gas" James Franco's company is developing, Caesar makes the apes smarter and then using some good strategy frees the apes from human control. At the same time, the gas that makes apes smart also kills humans, which in large part sets up the sequel.
It's not a perfect movie in that the love interest is kind of shallow and I still can't tell you her name. Like I said, the apes look a little weird and fake most of the time, though obviously not as fake as the ones in the original movies. But really it's better than a lot of popcorn movies. With the latest movie coming out next week, it might be good to revisit these. (3.5/5) (Fun Facts: Tyler Labine of Tucker & Dale, Voltron Legendary Defender, and Reaper is a chimp handler who is the first to contract the "ape flu" that kills much of humanity. News headlines mention a mission to Mars that winds up missing, which is probably a reference to the ship from the original movie that wound up crashing in the future.)
Men in Black International: I missed this (well, not missed it) when it came out in theaters and since it's Sony it probably didn't go to a streaming service I had until it was on Hulu. And months and months later I finally watched it. The verdict? Meh.
It's a pretty blah continuation of the Men in Black series. Is it a reboot? A revival? I'm not really sure. More of a revival since the events of at least the first movie are still canon. This focuses on the London office and a new alien enemy called "the Hive." Chris Hemsworth is H, who's basically the Sterling Archer of the MIBs. He gets the job done but recklessly and with plenty of collateral damage. Two years earlier he and High T (Liam Neeson) stopped the Hive in Paris.
There's also a new agent called Mary Sue (Tessa Thompson) who as a kid saw an alien and wasn't neuralyzed and eventually found the MIBs. O (Emma Thompson) lets her join on a probationary basis. And then stuff eventually starts happening. While MIB 1 was a brisk 98 minutes and MIB 2 was a brief 88 minutes, MIBI is the longest in the series at 115 minutes and yet most of it isn't really that interesting. Most of it just feels like reheated bits from previous MIB movies or rejected footage from Bond movies. There are some twists and turns that are mostly predictable--or might be if I cared. Hemsworth and Thompson worked together in Thor Ragnarok and succeeding Marvel movies but there's really nothing going on here. Like everything else they're just so bland and uninteresting.
It is crafted decently with more reliance on CGI than the first movie but not poorly-done like some movies--see Road House. There are some new aliens and some old ones but nothing that really got me going, "Whoa, cool!" There are more and bigger laser guns and the neuralyzers. And a flying car with a red button. Still, it just doesn't do much for me and I imagine I'll have forgotten about most of it soon enough. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: There are no cookie scenes during the credits, which kinda tells you how much confidence the studio had in it.)
Butcher's Crossing: This was probably pitched as "The Revenant meets The Perfect Storm!" With a lower budget than either of those. In 1874 a kid drops out of Harvard to go to Kansas for adventure. He agrees to fund an expedition into the Rocky Mountains to kill a bunch of buffalo. Nicolas Cage is the leader of the expedition. There's also an old guy named Charlie who's the cook and a skinner named Fred who's obviously an a-hole. After almost running out of water, they get into the mountains and find their buffalo only for a blizzard to sock them in for months. The rest sort of plays out like The Perfect Storm only a couple of them live. Hooray? It's made well enough and the cast does a decent job. There's some gross stuff with buffalo being skinned and such so if you're an animal lover it's not really for you. (3/5) (Fun Facts: What I would have really liked is a remake of Buffalo Rider on Rifftrax. Could you imagine Nic Cage riding a buffalo around? It'd be epic! The movie includes a bunch of "wranglers" for the animals and also something called a "Mule Swamper.")
The Baker: A lot of standard tropes in this cheap action movie filmed in the Caymans. A limo driver is waiting for someone in a parking garage when he witnesses a drug deal gone wrong. Everyone dies and so the limo driver figures he'll take the goods. He grabs his mute 8-year-old daughter and goes to his estranged father's bakery. He leaves the kid with the Baker (Ron Perlman) before foolishly going back home, where he's killed. So the Baker and mute girl try to get revenge. The Baker is of course a guy who has a particular set of skills who retired from the business a while ago but now is drawn back in for one last hurrah. Between that and the mute kid who speaks at the end to show how comfortable she's gotten with him there are a lot of tropes that have been used in other movies, some better and some worse. Still, for what it is it's not bad and Ron Perlman is usually enjoyable, especially when you pair him with a kid. So it's not original but it's fun. (3/5) (Fun Fact: Harvey Keitel plays the big boss and in a cookie scene he's shot by...someone. The movie doesn't say who. I doubt there'd be a sequel so I'm not sure why they did that.)
The Last Victim: This movie also features Ron Perlman and a bait-and-switch. The description says modern outlaws are pursued by a sheriff (Perlman) but that's not entirely true. Mostly it's about these "outlaws" who shoot up a BBQ place to kill some guy for some reason. Later a woman and her husband see them trying to hide the bodies and so are pursued by the bad guys. The husband dies right away, leaving the woman (Ali Larter of Final Destination and Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back from the start of the millennium) to turn the tables on the bad guy. Honestly I got so bored that I left it on while I took a shit. I don't think I missed much. It was a total waste of Ron Perlman. I hope he at least got a good paycheck. (1/5) (Fun Facts: the bad guy in this was the bad guy in To Catch a Killer farther down the list. A Rian Johnson co-produced this, but not THAT Rian Johnson; this one is apparently Rian Danielle Johnson.)
In this case Jessica Chastain plays the titular assassin--I like writing "Jessica Chastain" and "titular" in the same sentence. She was a soldier who became a drunk and addict but cleaned up her act with the help of her mentor played by John Malkovich--the same one mentioned above. But when his boss (Colin Farrell) realizes that Ava is talking to her victims to find out what they did and a job in Riyadh is botched, he decides to have her eliminated. Meanwhile she goes home to Boston, where her mother (Geena Davis) had angina and her sister's boyfriend (Common) is in deep with a local gangster. So while killing assassins trying to kill her, she tries to reconcile with her family and help her sister's boyfriend, who was also her ex.
If this hadn't been done so many times before it would have been much better. Instead it's well-made and has a good cast, but it's not really anything new. (3/5) (Fun Fact: Ava kills the Mr. Fantastic from the 2005/2007 movies in the opening; he's actually dead before his name even comes up in the credits.)
Since the movie features Colin Farrell, I knew Laplume would have a review to compare it to. Obviously I didn't do it earlier in my comparison blog entry, so here you go:
Ava
rating: ****
review: I keep mentioning in these capsules how critics are inexplicably undervaluing major talent, and Jessica Chastain is a favorite victim of this. Here she's combining her penchant for human drama with the needs of action films. Another supporting spotlight for Colin Farrell. He had a banger year for those.
Self Reliance: Jake Johnson (Jurassic World, Safety Not Guaranteed, New Girl, etc.) stars in, writes, produces, and directs this Hulu Original. From the description I thought it'd be more of a frenetic action movie like Smokin' Aces or Boss Level. The idea is that Tom is a lonely bachelor with a crappy job who's picked up by Andy Samberg (as himself) and taken to a warehouse where he's offered $1,000,000 if he can survive 30 days. The caveat is "the hunters" can't kill him if someone is within like 3 feet. So all he has to do is not be alone for 30 days, right? Easy, right?
But when his family doesn't want to spend every moment with him, he hires a homeless guy he calls James. And then he meets another player named Maddy (Anna Kendrick) so you might think it'll turn into a romantic action comedy or something. But that kinda fizzles. And there are really no worthwhile action scenes. Most of it is people questioning whether Tom is imagining this "game" or not.
So it definitely wasn't the movie I thought it'd be but it was still pretty entertaining. It would have been better with more Kendrick and more involving the hunters who had costumes like a cowboy, sumo wrestler, samurai, giant (from those Goldfish crackers ad) dressed as Michael Jackson, a Sinbad impersonator, and an Ellen DeGeneres impersonator. And making it less than 30 days might have helped. Anyway, if you have Hulu it's a fun 90-minute diversion. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: Early last year I used a similar concept in three Eric Filler stories only where a guy is gender swapped and faces a challenge that's filmed for the Dark Web while people gamble on it.)
Ride the Eagle: Jake Johnson (the same one) stars in, co-writes, and produces this mumblecore comedy that's like a copy of a Duplass Brothers movie, but a good copy of a Duplass Brothers movie! Johnson is kind of a loser who lives in a tiny cabin on some other guy's property and plays bongos in a presumably crappy band. Then a woman tells him his mother (Susan Sarandon) died he will get her huge cabin upstate if he completes a list of tasks. So he goes up to the cabin and finds her cabin is stuffed full of pot and bad paintings. Then he has to do some tasks that aren't really exciting or pie-throwing funny. He has to break into a guy's house across the lake, call up an ex to apologize, try to catch a fish with his bare hands, and then the final task. The guy whose house he breaks into makes a threatening phone call and then comes over when Johnson thinks he stole his dog. There's not a lot of mayhem ensuing but there are funny parts and tender parts and it's good as long as you're not expecting an Adam Sandler movie--not one of the good ones either. A sort of plot hole is no one actually monitors him, so really he probably could have just not broken into the guy's house or called an ex or tried to catch a fish and no one would have known. The last one someone could have found out if he'd done it or not as it involves finding something; it just seems like someone should have monitored his progress at some point. One thing I feel is really true is when Johnson's resolve finally breaks and he cries at something unexpected. Sometimes it can be something completely unexpected that can finally break your resolve when grieving--like watching Titanic almost a year later. I'm just saying. (3/5) (Fun Facts: Though Susan Sarandon is only shown on a somewhat blurry VCR tape, she needed a personal hairdresser and makeup artist. Or maybe it was just that she was filmed at a different time? That's the charitable explanation. JK Simmons plays the guy across the lake and was in both the original and MCU Spider-Man series as J Jonah Jameson while Jake Johnson voices Peter B Parker (the middle-aged one with a kid in the second one) in the animated Spider-Verse movies.)
Results: This is a somewhat meandering romantic comedy from 2015. Guy Pearce plays an Australian guy (big stretch) who owns a gym in Austin, Texas and hopes to expand. One of his trainers is Cobie Smulders whom Guy Pearce had a fling with a couple years ago but now they're "just friends" or whatever. Then a rich guy (Kevin Corrigan) joins the gym and when Cobie Smulders goes to his rented mansion to help him train, he hits on her and she lets him down hard. So then he decides to try to get her back together with Guy Pearce as I don't know, a way to apologize or something.
Like I said, it's a bit meandering. While it's a romantic comedy it's not a lot of silly gags and bits. It's all kinda restrained and adult. The cast is really good for a fairly low-budget movie like this. Besides two actors from the MCU there's also Giovani Ribisi and Anthony Michael Hall in guest roles. Overall there are some funny parts and as long as you're not expecting something like an Adam Sandler movie you should be fine. (3/5)
A Little White Lie: This is not quite as meandering as Results but similarly a romantic comedy that isn't like something with Meg Ryan or Sandra Bullock or Reese Witherspoon. There's a literary bent to it as it's about a book festival at a California college. The festival is on the verge of being canceled so Dr. Cleary (Kate Hudson) decides to swing for the fences. She tries to get reclusive writer CR Shriver to come. Most of her letters are returned but one of them is returned with an acceptance scribbled at the bottom.
Michael Shannon takes a break from playing villainous characters to play Shriver. He's an alcoholic super of a crappy apartment building. He and his friend Lenny (Mark Boone Junior) figure that while he's not the right Shriver, he can at least get something from the college. So he goes to the college and meets Cleary, a lesbian poet who hates him, a fat black woman who's a fan of Shiver, and Professor Wasserman (Don Johnson) who rides a horse because his license was taken away.
The twist isn't really that surprising: as he pretends to be Shriver, the impostor starts to remember things. And he reads some of Cleary's books and starts to find a love of literature--and her. You can probably see where this is going, but it's still pretty good with some fun parts and sexy parts and literary references. Unlike some other movies, I don't think it gets a lot wrong about the writing world. For not a big-budget movie there's a good cast that includes Zach Braff as the "real" Shriver. (3/5) (Fun Fact: The college used in the movie is mostly Redlands College in Southern California. They used to have a female bulldog mascot named Adelaide who was the "girlfriend" of Butler Blue III, aka Trip, who passed away last month. Addy stopped being the mascot before this movie filmed and the new bulldog they have is kind of ugly. Irony: M Emmett Walsh plays an elderly professor who keeps saying they should invite writers who have died. Walsh himself passed away this year.)
The Stranger: This is a fairly new TV movie on Hulu. A ride share driver named Dorothy who's from Kansas has come to LA with her little dog to start a new life. But then she picks up a creep called Carl E (Dane DeHaan) who tries to stab her. She escapes but he continues to stalk her all over LA. She gets the help of a convenience store clerk called JJ but somehow "Carl" remains a step ahead of them. There are a lot of twists and turns so the 98 minute runtime starts to seem a bit long.
Since Carl first promised Dorothy she could go free if she told him a story, I wondered if the whole thing would turn out to be a meta story that she was telling him. But it's not. With a couple fewer twists it probably would have been better but it's still not bad. (3/5) (Fun Fact: Since they probably didn't have a lot of money, DeHaan's screentime is fairly limited. He's mostly menacing Dorothy and JJ offscreen. At least there is a final confrontation that they probably spent a lot of the budget on.)
Office Christmas Party: I wouldn't usually watch a Christmas movie in April but I got this as part of a 4-movie bundle from Big Lots and I hadn't watched it before, so I wanted to see if I'd keep it or give it away. I decided to keep it, though it's definitely in that lower-tier of Christmas movies that I might watch when I'm done with classics.
Basically this is about a tech company that is going to be shut down by their mean new boss (Jennifer Aniston, who was one of the Horrible Bosses) and to try to woo a big client, the company managers (that guy from Silicon Valley & Deadpool and Jason Bateman) decide to have a blowout bash for Christmas.
From there some mayhem ensues but for me it wasn't great. The problem is there are a lot of characters but none I really care about. Olivia Munn is a computer hacker working on some program you know will be needed and you also know she's gonna hook up with Jason Bateman though he's really too old for her. Kate McKinnon is the stuffy HR manager you know is going to get the stick out of her butt. The taxi driver from Deadpool is an IT guy who hires a hooker to be his escort, but gets more than he bargained for. Randall Park (Jimmy Woo in the MCU) is a new hire who is kind of a perv. Rob Cordry is the crusty customer service rep who's just kind of around. The token black guy doubles as a DJ for the party. And there's some redheaded single mom who seems to be looking for love in all the wrong places.
So there are a lot of characters; too many characters really. Because as always, there's only so much screen time and thus it's hard to make characters I could care about. I suppose the basic premise makes it hard because if it's about a big party, how do you narrow your focus enough to have worthwhile characters? Seth Rogen/Joseph Gordon-Leavitt/Anthony Mackie's The Night Before does a better job by saving the party for near the end so there's time to get to know the main characters ahead of time. As it is, there are some fun bits, but not really enough to sustain a whole movie. (2.5/5)
How to Blow Up a Pipeline: I watched this on Earth Day because it seemed appropriate since it's about would-be ecoterrorists blowing up an oil pipeline in West Texas--actually New Mexico. A bunch of people--mostly college-age kids--from around the country plan to blow up the pipeline and then do it, but of course there are complications. It's not an extremely expensive production. I mean there are no recognizable actors and not really a need for a lot of effects. But it's pretty competent. Really I think if it had fewer characters in the gang it might have been better so I could keep things straight better. There were a few twists, which were nice. Overall not bad and also not very subtle. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: I don't recall seeing a disclaimer telling you that you should not actually, you know, blow up pipelines. But unless you want to go to jail or die, don't do it.)
Vendetta: A cheap action movie as generic as its title. Bruce Willis is a small time gangster whose younger son goes to a small town to kill a random girl. The girl's father then kills the guy and his family kills his wife and then they try to kill each other. Thomas Jane shows up midway through as an arms dealer and Mike Tyson as someone who works with him. It's all pretty dull despite the body count. (1/5)
To Catch A Killer: Generic title, generic-feeling movie for the most part. But it's better made than movies like Vendetta and the main cast in Shailene Woodley and Ben Mendelsohn are much more spry. On New Year's Eve in Baltimore a sniper kills 29 random people. Woodley is a beat cop who's quick to the scene, where she meets Mendelsohn, an FBI agent put in charge. He recruits her as a liaison to help with the investigation. But there's a lot of political pressure to wrap things up. Eventually Woodley and Mendelsohn are on their own to find the killer. It was OK but at 2 hours it drags a bit. Like I said it doesn't really feel like much new, except that Mendelsohn's character is married to another guy. I guess that's something. (2.5/5) (Sad Fact: Since this was supposed to be Baltimore I kept looking for that bridge that got smashed by the ship but I'm not sure it was really in this.)
Transfusion: This was a pretty frustrating movie in that I kept waiting for something to happen. In the end not a whole lot really did. Sam Worthington (remember him? that guy who kinda disappeared after Clash of the Titans 2 until Avatar 2?) is an Australian soldier who's stationed in Iraq or something--it's not important. After he gets home, his young son and pregnant wife are in a car crash and only the boy lives. You might think, well, maybe Sam is going to kick their butts, right? Or do something soldiery? No. It jumps 8 years later when the kid is in court after doing something that isn't important. He's basically on his last strike. His dad gets a job but gets fired for threatening a jerk. Then an old army buddy gives him a job. So it's going to be like The Contractor now? Not really. The movie just kinda ambles around for a while. There are some fights but not much.
The description on Hulu is really generic, saying, "Ex-special forces operative Ryan Logan has a sharply honed set of survival skills that have allowed him to walk the line between courage and fear." Um, OK. It's listed until the Thriller and Action categories so forgive me for thinking this was going to be heavier on the action than limp drama. It's not poorly made or acted; it's just long and dull.(2/5)
Zombie Town: This was adapted from an RL Stine novel, so it's pretty light and kid-friendly. The plot is a bit complicated and nonsensical. There's a horror movie director named Carver (Dan Aykroyd) who is so loved in his hometown that they named it Carverville for him. But 30 years ago he stopped making movies--until now he's ready to do another one. But when the projectionist Mike plays it for the girl he likes, it somehow turns everyone else except Carver into "zombies." They don't work like traditional zombies though; they don't bite or eat anyone. Instead they kind of suck someone's soul and then that person is also a zombie. The only way to stop them is for the two teens to find Carver and then for him to help them. It's all pretty bland entertainment that is probably only scary for younger viewers. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: The cast includes Chevy Chase in a small part and Henry Czerny of the first Mission: Impossible movie. And a bunch of Disney Channel-level actors.)
Evilspeak: Another blog mentioned this movie. It's a 1981 horror movie starring Clint Howard, who uses those old Apple IIe computers kids in the 80s played Oregon Trail on to translate a Satanic book to summon the Devil. That's the kind of description that definitely gets me interested. The movie itself is a bit disappointing. Howard is a student at a military academy and about 80% of the movie is just him being bullied and humiliated while trying figure out how to summon the Devil. The military school is exceedingly weird. About as weird as the school in Bottoms. There's a basement where a creepy maintenance guy lives, beneath that is basically a Satanic temple, and for some reason they have a bunch of nasty pigs. I could understand why they had horses being a military school, but why pigs? They need fresh bacon or something? The pigs come into play at the end of the movie as Clint Howard's Satanic minions. Overall it's sort of like Carrie only not nearly as good. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: The stuffed sows living on my couch really enjoyed the gratuitous shots of pig balls. For humans there are gratuitous shots of breasts and male butts--though fortunately not Clint Howard's. Night Court's Richard Moll plays Father Esteban, a Spanish priest who turned to the devil and founded the school.)
Feeders 3: The first two movies from 1996-1998 were on the Rifftrax app a few years ago. They were probably popular enough that a crappy third movie was made. There is no riffing so I had to endure it alone. Basically it's in many ways even worse than the movies from 27 years ago. The crappy clay puppets are even crappier somehow. How did they even manage that? For some reason there are all these erotic shots of an old fat cop: in a hot tub, eating ice cream, and shirtless in bed. Like no boobs but we have to see this guy's moobs? Ugh.
Attempts at meta humor are pretty lame too. The story never really goes anywhere. Feeders eventually show up and slowly start killing people and some kinda sleeper agents are revealed and then...nothing really. I guess that could unfortunately set up a Feeders 4. Nooooo! (0/5)
Hound of the Baskervilles (1939): This was Basil Rathbone's first appearance as Sherlock Holmes. But unlike the ones I saw on Rifftrax, this was made by Fox and takes place in the 19th Century instead of being made by Universal and taking place in the "present" of the 1940s. Anyway, there's a country estate owned by the Baskerville family and it's said a hound will murder the Baskerville who currently owns it. When the latest one is killed a new one from Canada takes over, Holmes is called in to find out what happened. Holmes is not around for a big chunk in the middle, leaving the story to the Baskerville guy and Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce) until Holmes shows up in disguise and then of course exposes the killer. If I ever read the book it was a while ago so I don't really know how it lines up. Anyway, it's a little longer than the later movies and maybe a slight bit more quality. A pretty good movie for a light mystery. (3/5) (Fun Fact: In this one Holmes wears the famous deerstalker and plaid jacket thing.)
Sherlock Holmes in the Voice of Death: Roku Channel advertised one of the Basil Rathbone Holmes movies from the 40s I hadn't seen on Rifftrax. There were also a couple of other ones too. This is the first one made by Universal. It's in black-and-white and like The Secret Weapon takes place during World War II. A Nazi radio personality calling itself the "Voice of Terror" calls out agents to sabotage British facilities and then the attacks happen. Holmes is finally brought in with Watson (Nigel Bruce) to find out who's behind it. This one is a little grittier than some of the later ones with some violence between Nazi agents and British dock workers. Holmes stays above most of that as the Rathbone one doesn't know kung-fu. There are a few ingenious turns before Holmes finds the solution. These are pretty short B-movies but they're not bad if you like a light mystery. (3/5) (Fun Fact: At one point Holmes is going to put on the famous deerstalker hat and Watson says, "You promised not to wear that anymore." So he puts on a more normal hat.)
Sherlock Holmes in Washington: Another wartime Holmes mystery with Rathbone back as Sherlock and Bruce back as Watson. This time they go to "America" to find some microfilm Nazis are desperate to find. It doesn't take Holmes long to deduce what the film is hidden in, but actually finding it is more difficult. A little less gritty than the previous one. Not really much violence and definitely no sex since it was 1942. Another good light mystery. (3/5) (Fun Facts: Of course all the "American" scenery in DC is just stock footage. Unlike most of these movies there's actually a black man in this: a porter named George. D'OH! But he mentions his son is going to fly planes in the Army--see Redtails--so that's pretty cool.)
Sherlock Holmes Faces Death: During WWII, Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce) is working at a home for traumatized soldiers. Nowadays we'd call it PTSD. Then a doctor is attacked and the head of the family that owns the property is murdered. Watson brings Holmes into it and they start to investigate. Unlike some other things, Holmes never goes undercover as a mental patient or anything. Besides the body count it's pretty typical of the Rathbone Holmes movies. It's another OK light mystery if you want something not soaked with blood or sex or bad language or anything. (3/5) (Fun Fact: A key component of the solution to the mystery involves a human chess game. Sad Fact: At the end Holmes tells Watson that we're entering an age where greed will end and people will consider others more. Instead greed and narcissism are rampant. D'OH!)
As promised, here's the scorecard to summarize everything I reviewed:
Maybe you'll want to go back and get more in-depth commentary. Probably not.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
