May Movies

 Probably not as long as last month's entry because it's not covering as much time.  I'll still do a scorecard so you don't have to actually read anything.  I mean, who actually comes to a blog to read, right?

Resident Alien, S3:  I watched the first two seasons of this Syfy dramedy on Peacock a while back and a month or so ago season 3 finished dropping so I decided to watch it.  The show is about an alien who adopts the body of a small town doctor named Harry (Alan Tudyk).  He was supposed to destroy the planet but didn't and at the end of the last season learned some "Grays" (those little gray aliens with the big heads and black eyes) had sinister plans on Earth.

The overall plot then is to find out what the Grays are doing and stop them.  But like the previous season there's a lot of other stuff thrown in there to fill out the eight episodes.  I'm sure not all of it really needed to be included.  Still, it is overall a fun show, even with probably too many characters and subplots.  Tudyk is still the best thing about it with his goofy, sociopathic alien.  The end of the last episode sets up season 4 with an imposter Harry who's even worse. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  The producers might have to make a decision on what to do with Max, the kid who's the only one who can see Harry's alien form, as it's pretty clear the actor is getting close to puberty and might be there by next season.  I'm not sure how old the character is supposed to be in the context of the show.)

Animal Control, S2:  This Fox comedy was pretty good last year though not really anything great.  Joel McHale of Community, The Soup, Stargirl, etc stars as Frank Shaw, a grizzled animal control worker in Seattle.  He gets a young new partner called "Shred" who was an X Games snowboarding champion.  There's also an Indian-American family guy, a woman from New Zealand, and their boss who's younger than Frank and kinda touchy-feely.  

The second season continues the show and is a slight improvement.  The writers made sure to give the characters a story that would last most of the season.  Frank finds out about a ring to import exotic animals.  His boss finds out and Frank is forced to let her "help."  Meanwhile the Kiwi woman faces deportation and has to pass the citizenship test.  Shred and the Indian-American guy buy a house to flip, which of course gets complicated.

The weakest part of the show are the retro 90s will they-won't they romance parts with Shred, the boss, and her boyfriend, who used to be the boss of the station until he got maimed by an animal and retired.  That stuff isn't fun or funny and just brings the atmosphere down.  They add in a bad girl Shred meets at a country club and tries to track down to make it more of a love quadrangle, but no matter how many sides you add, it still sucks.

Though the weakest episode is the one with Ken Jeong as a cut-rate Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer.  It just seemed really dated as that guy has been around for almost 20 years now.  There were some fun bits with his rivalry with Frank and how the Kiwi woman swoons over him, but still it mostly just felt stale.

Overall though there's more to like than to dislike.  It's not a great show but better than a lot of crap out there.  It's not a bad way to kill 30 minutes on Hulu and by now you can binge it in a couple of hours. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Last season there was a chubby redheaded office manager who was prominent early, disappeared for a few episodes, reappeared again, and then vanishes without a trace this season.  She's replaced by a fat black receptionist for the boss.  The actress playing her was on Fox's Welcome to Flatch, which this show pretty much replaced on the schedule.  Question:  In the first season it seemed the Kiwi lady was a lesbian or bi-sexual but they really don't do anything with her romantically this season.  Which begs the question if that "offended" too many people and so the writers dropped it?)

Lights Out:  A fairly generic action movie on Hulu though not quite as generic as I thought.  Frank Grillo is a former Army guy turned drifter who gets recruited for a fight club by Mekhi Phifer to make money.  They go to LA where Phifer's sister is being hassled by corrupt cops who are trying to find some money her sleazy ex-boyfriend had hidden away.

I thought from the description that this would be Grillo getting pressed into a fighting ring and having to free himself.  Instead Grillo and Phifer have to find a way to stop the corrupt cops.  In the meantime, Grillo fights a few guys for money.  It was an OK action movie overall.  The actors are better than a lot of these and the filmmakers are pretty competent.  It could have been more original but it's fine if you just want some entertainment for 90 minutes or so. (2.5/5) (Fun Facts:  Scott Adkins, who has starred in plenty of these, has a small part near the end as Grillo's old army buddy.  Which also entitled him to an EP credit.  Jaime King, who plays the lead corrupt cop, has curly blonde hair most of the movie.  But one scene before the final act, she suddenly has straight hair.  Then it goes back to curly again.  So the one scene was probably shot later--or earlier.)

One Day As A Lion:  I saw this on Amazon a while back but it wasn't on Prime so I just bookmarked it.  It still hadn't been on Prime when mine expired.  I forgot about it until weeks later I saw it on Tubi so I watched it free with ads--which is about what it's worth.

The movie stars and is written/produced by Scott Caan--the son of the late James Caan of The Godfather--and between the inexperience of Caan and the probably fairly low budget, it turns into one of those meh cheap action movies that probably doesn't deserve a better cast including Frank Grillo and Oscar winner JK Simmons.  

The plot is a sort of faded copy of a Coen Brothers movie.  A former boxer named Jackie (Caan) has a young son in juvie and wants to hire a lawyer to get him out.  So he agrees to kill a rancher (Simmons) who owes a lot of money to a gangster (Grillo) but when Jackie can't do it at a diner, the rancher escapes and Jackie ineptly takes a waitress hostage.  Then there's a lot of moving pieces around as Jackie and the waitress try to get money while the gangster tries to get the rancher.

Some of it is pretty good and overall it rises to the level of "not bad" but definitely not great either.  In better hands it probably could have worked like Maggie Moore(s) I watched a couple of months ago on Hulu where as I said it was a copy of a Coen Bros movie but it was a really good copy--which this isn't.  There are some extraneous details like about the waitress's mom whose husbands all died within a year of marrying her.  Did she kill them?  It doesn't matter.  A black cook at the diner is presumably killed by Jackie in the beginning and yet Jackie faces no consequences and the audience is I guess supposed to still root for him because he has a kid in trouble.  During the last confrontation, the music seems better suited for when you're on hold than during a tense standoff.  Just things like that could have been done better and the movie would have been stronger. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  It's a little confusing after the credits when there's a scene that seems like one taking place earlier only there was a different actor as Grillo's henchman.  I'm not sure what the point was in showing it.)

Knight & Day:  This 2010 action-romantic comedy involves a premise that's been used a few times before and since:  a spy named Roy (Tom Cruise) saves a woman named June (Cameron Diaz) and then they trek across the world trying to avoid bad guys.  The McGuffin is a battery called Zephyr that never runs out of power without radiation or anything like that.

Mostly it's a fun, harmless movie with plenty of action and decent enough chemistry with the leads.  Cruise doesn't do a parody of his Mission:  Impossible character Ethan Hunt so much as he just softens Hunt a little.  And while there are some stunts, there's nothing quite as intense as the last 4 MI movies when Cruise really started risking his life to do these crazy stunts so people would watch the movie.

A lot of the movie focuses on June who is often confused but usually not too hysterical and manages to be capable a few times.  So she's not entirely a damsel in distress.  One thing I didn't like though is a few times they're in some impossible situation and then Roy drugs her and she'll wake up somewhere else.  It's basically handwaving away their escape from these situations.

While it's not a great movie it's a fine popcorn movie for about 2 hours.  There's a pretty deep cast including Paul Dano, Viola Davis, and Peter Sarsgaard.  It's also directed by James Mangold who went on to make his name with The Wolverine and Logan and more recently Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.  So viewers are in good hands. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Dano, Davis, and Sarsgaard have all appeared recently in DC movies--Dano and Sarsgaard in The Batman--and Gal Gadot, aka Wonder Woman, also has a small part in this movie.)

Anna:  This is Luc Besson (the guy behind the Taken movies) trying--and somewhat failing--to do a John le Carre-style spy thriller.  The biggest problem for me is I had no idea when this was supposed to be taking place.  It starts in 1985 when the KGB kills a bunch of CIA agents and mails their heads to their handler Leonard Miller (recent Oscar winner Cillian Murphy).  Then it says it jumps 5 years, so it'd be 1990?  1991?  But the cell phones and laptops seem a little too advanced (and why would a poor Russian girl have a laptop to fill out an application to the navy?) and one guy refers to "St. Petersburg," which was "Leningrad" until 1991 so maybe it could work but it's a close thing.  There are Soviet flags in all the offices but the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 so it'd have to be before that.

Anyway, Anna is a girl in Moscow who's recruited as a model in France because this is a Besson movie.  But then we jump back to see her getting recruited by the KGB.  Then we go back to her killing someone.  It keeps going in this nonlinear fashion all the way to the end as Anna plays the KGB and CIA while trying to gain her freedom.  It's a little confusing and annoying at times to keep going ahead an then back.  The idea was to create surprise but there were probably better ways.

There are some really good fight sequences.  Anna's training mission rivals the scene in Kingsman where Colin Firth kills an entire church full of people--only it's a bar in Moscow.  There's also some sex--both hetero and lesbian.  So like Knight and Day it's not boring, but unlike that it tries to take on too much serious material.  They probably should have just made a Black Widow ripoff. (3/5)

Detective Pikachu:  I was too old to really get into the whole Pokemon thing when it started in the 90s.  I did at least know of Pikachu, who is like the Spider-Man or Batman of Pokemon in that he's the most popular poster boy for some reason.  Though maybe we should compare him to Deadpool who also gained popularity in the 90s and also is played by Ryan Reynolds.

The movie focuses on Tim, whose father is a detective in Ryte City, where humans and Pokemon live together.  The Pokemon are mostly helpers to the humans.  Tim's father Harry is killed while uncovering secrets of an evil corporation headed by Bill Nighy and his son.  Tim goes to the city and meets Pikachu who unlike other Pokemon can actually talk, but only to Tim.  Together they start looking into what happened to Tim's father who was Pikachu's partner.

I probably would have cared more about this movie if I cared about Pokemon.  Still, I will admit it's well-made and there are some decent twists that change things up with seemingly bad guys turning out to be good and seemingly good guys turning out to be bad.  If you like Pokemon it's probably even better.  There are a few Pokemon "Trainer" battles thrown in probably for fans though they do have something to do with the plot. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  The cab driver from the Deadpool movies appears early in the movie as Tim's friend Jack.  Spoiler:  In flashbacks and footage of Tim's father, we never really see him.  I thought maybe they were too cheap to hire an actual actor.  But it's really because he's Ryan Reynolds, which would have given things away too easily.)

Striptease:  I had heard of this when it came out but never watched it.  Then I read some Carl Hiaasen books and realized this was one of his, though not one I'd read yet.

For most people in 1997 the big selling point is Demi Moore mostly nekkid!  Unlike, say, Jennifer Aniston in We're the Millers, Moore does get naked except for between her legs.  She plays a stripper who was a secretary for the FBI until her no account husband (Robert Patrick) got her fired because he's a criminal and yet because of his football glory days he gets custody of their daughter--Rumer Willis, aka Moore's real daughter.  To get her kid back, a fan offers to blackmail a congressman (Burt Reynolds) but instead is murdered.  The body washes up in front of the cabin of a cop (Armand Assante) who starts looking into it.

Soon more people are dead while Moore continues struggling to get her kid back and finally just kidnaps her.  There are some very Hiaasen-type bits like with the Florida politics and a stripper who has a python as part of her act.  There's just probably not enough humor to keep it interesting.  And since Moore starts stripping pretty early on, the stripping actually starts to get dull later on.  It'd probably help if she changed it up a little instead of the same Annie Lennox song.  Overall it's OK but not really as good as it could have been. (2.5/5)

Savage Salvation:  Another of those generic action movies on Hulu.  The plot was all pretty obvious.  There's a guy and his girl who are on heroin or whatever but she decides they should get clean when her appearance freaks out a couple of Girl Scouts.  After a few weeks they get clean and decide to start putting together a wedding.  Then you know that their old dealer is going to kill her so our hero has to go on a rampage.  Guess what?  That.  They might as well have stuffed her into a fridge to make it more obvious.

And you know who the ultimate bad guy is going to be because there are two well-known old guys on the payroll.  Robert de Niro is the sheriff tracking down the hero.  So obviously John Malkovich is going to be the big boss.  It's that Family Guy Law & Order logic where the most famous one who hasn't been used yet has to be the guy.  Anyway, it's not a terrible movie but it's just pretty generic. (2/5)

Homegrown:  I had not heard of this 1998 movie despite that it has a pretty deep cast:  Billy Bob Thornton, Hank Azaria, and Ryan Philippe as the leads with John Lithgow, Jamie Lee Curtis, Judge Reinhold, and Ted Danson popping up in cameos.  And also Jon Bon Jovi for some reason.  How could it go wrong?  I don't really know but it never really has enough humor and the crime parts don't really even rise to a decent Coen Brothers knockoff.

When Malcolm (Lithgow) is murdered, his three pot growers--Thornton, Azaria, Philippe--first take some pot to sell and make a pretty good profit.  Then they get greedy and seeing no one has got the rest of the pot crop yet, they try to harvest it and sell that too.  But Malcolm's dirty business comes back to bite them in the butt.

There are a lot of moving pieces and in the end it doesn't add up to a lot.  In fact it seems our guys are left in a perilous situation.  It would have been nice to get some resolution.  And the script should have leaned on Thornton more than Azaria.  I mean one has been in Oscar-winning movies and the other is mostly known for The Simpsons.  Seems pretty obvious.  Anyway, it wasn't terrible, but like a lot of these it just never came together that well. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The movie is directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal and both of his kids--Jake and Maggie--have parts in the movie.  Nepotism!) 

Minus Man:  Another late 90s movie with a good cast I hadn't really heard of.  I'd actually put it on my Tubi queue a long, long time ago but never thought to watch it.  Then I saw it expired in 2 days (though it'd probably come back) so I finally got to watching it.

When you think of Hollywood actors you'd want to play a serial killer, Owen Wilson would probably be pretty far down that list.  But that's the premise here as Wilson roams the west almost randomly killing people, starting with a junkie played by Sheryl Crow.  Then he goes to a small town and meets a couple renting a room out (Brian Cox and Mercedes Ruehl) and soon he's making himself at home and getting a job at the post office thanks to Cox.  A clerk there (Janeane Garofalo) gets a crush on him but he doesn't really know what to do with that.  He kills the star football player and a few other people until it seems the walls might be closing in.

And then...not much.  For a serial killer movie it's pretty slow.  Almost as slow and dull as Psycho II only without the gratifying shovel to the head at the end.  Sometimes what seems like a bad idea actually is a bad idea. (2.5/5) (Fun Facts:  Besides Sheryl Crow, Dwight Yoakam also appears along with Dennis Haysbert as ghost cops who taunt Owen Wilson for a while.  Wilson and Garofalo have both been involved in Ben Stiller comedies like Mystery Men and Zoolander, so this is a bit of a departure for both of them.)

Angel:  Someone mentioned this on a blog and I remembered Pigeon (Norm MacDonald) talking about it in an episode of Mike Tyson Mysteries.  He asks Tyson's adopted daughter if she ever heard of it and explains in the mid-80s the movie was often repeated on HBO.  Since my family didn't have cable until the 90s I hadn't ever heard of it until then.

The movie involves Molly "Angel" Stewart who is a private school student by day and works as a hooker at night.  Though we really don't see her actually hooking up with anyone, maybe because she's underage.  She is friendly with some other hookers, a transvestite called Mae, and an old cowboy named Kit Carson played by that great actor known for standing and walking--Rory Calhoun.

Someone is killing hookers and it's not long until Angel's friends start falling one-by-one.  A cop named Andrews starts looking into the killings, which brings him into contact with Angel.  He starts to unravel her secrets, as do some of her schoolmates.

While the premise is supposed to be sexy there's not much sexual content.  There are a few bare boobs and even a bush that was probably pretty sexy for HBO in 1984.  Today you can see more explicit stuff on an episode of Game of Thrones.  The killer is revealed pretty early so it's one of those Columbo things where you just have to wonder how they catch him, which is sorta by accident.  It wasn't a terrible movie but not really great either. (2.5/5)

Venus & Vegas:  I saw this on Tubi and thought it had some actors from decent TV shows like Donald Faison of Scrubs, Jaime Pressly of My Name is Earl, Abe Benrubi of ER, Paul Ben-Victor of Syfy's Invisible Man,  Eddie Kaye Thomas of American Dad, and even Florence Henderson doing a Betty White turn by playing against type as the bad grandma.  (And there's also Joe Rogan.)  The movie itself despite the relative talent is pretty disappointing.    Three buddies--Faison, Thomas, and writer/producer Eddie Guerra--rip off a bunch of fake casino chips from a mobster played by the late Jon Polito.  Meanwhile they've got some other stuff going on with relationships and stuff.

A lot of the humor is the kind of homophobic and sexist stuff comedians would bitch they can't do today because of "wokeness."  Stuff like stereotypically impersonating gay guys to escape a robbery, shoving a cell phone in a condom up a horse's butt so it would go faster to win races, and Joe Rogan's whole rant about marriage isn't really as funny as Guerra thinks it is.  Most of it is pretty lame and I just started tuning out after a while. (1/5)

Here's the scorecard that I pretty much half-assed at the last minute: