This month's Internet Writing Support Group was about a writing rule learned in school that messed you up. This blog had an interesting answer:
I guess if there was something that messed me up, it was how supportive everyone was. Parents, teachers, classmates, everyone were always full of encouragement: You're a great writer! You should get your stories published! You could be an author!
Ha.
Ha.
Ha.
This answer reminded me of my own experience back in junior high. In 7th grade I'd started writing stories first in English class and then on my own. It probably started in notebooks but my school also had a whole lab of Apple IIe and IIGS computers with Magic Slate and Appleworks word processors. Wow, the future is here!
Anyway, I wrote more in 8th grade and made the mistake of letting my teacher see it. And she was all, "This is great! You should get this published!"
I'm sure she was just trying to be supportive. I mean, why not nurture the fat, shy kid with no friends' "gift" right? Seems like a great idea. And really doesn't cost her anything.
The problem is I was like 14 at the time and dumb and naive to take this seriously. So I think, Hey, I should get this published! And it should be totally easy, right? I mean in TV and movies you just put your manuscript in a box or envelope, mail it to a publisher in New York, and you're on your way.
But like an old insurance ad said, "That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works!" In 1992 or so you can't just do that. And, more importantly, my writing may be great for 8th grade in Midland, MI but it's dogshit compared to professionals who have been doing this for years or college graduates from the Iowa Writer's Workshop and so forth. I'd have had a better chance taking on Mike Tyson for the heavyweight boxing title.
Rejections then were pretty much the same thing, only by snail mail if at all, but it probably stung worse back then. I mean, my teacher said it was great, so why wouldn't they want to publish it? But I'm stubborn and stupid so I think I might have actually tried a couple more times.
Anyway, the point is encouragement, no matter how well-meaning it is, can sometimes be a bad thing. In cases like mine and the other blogger's, someone needed to dial it back a little and temper it with a little realism. It'd be better to say, "This is great! You have real potential!" Or a little more backhand compliment, "This is great for a beginner!" And then maybe provide the student with resources like books on writing, publishing, or just regular books to provide more perspective. But that would require more effort than just a compliment, right?
Of course these days I might like more effusive praise than a 5-star "rating" on Amazon or Goodreads. I'm just saying.
One day I was watching some Rifftrax on streaming and it started showing these commercials about how "Kamala Harris let out some illegal alien who tried to kill me. She doesn't care about white women!" They kept referencing an LA Times article from about 15 years ago. Since the commercial was made by "Make America Great Again," I thought maybe I should do a little research.
So I go to the LA Times. Paywall. I go to newspapers.com that promises they have millions of clips. "Start Your Free Trial Today." And then I just sighed and thought that in the old days you could just go to the library and use a microfiche reader to read old articles. They probably would have had a national paper like the LA Times as well as local papers. While it would have been bulkier and more time-consuming, it would have been pretty much free except however much you spent on gas--which in the 90s wouldn't be much.
Now that it's football season it kinda pisses me off that I can only get CBS and ABC on my TV with my digital antenna. What was it, 20 years ago when the government strong-armed everyone into using these digital antennas for TV? But they suck. I mean maybe if you're in a rural environment or own your own place they can work better, but I live in an apartment that's surrounded by other buildings so the signal I get is shit; all I get are two channels in Lansing plus some PBS.
In the old days with regular antennas you just put a big antenna on the roof. Sure it might blow off in a storm, but you'd be likely to get more stuff with it. I mean when I was a kid we'd get stations from Flint, which is like 30-40 miles away. So, really, it'd probably work better if my building just had a big antenna on the roof that everyone could tap into. But then we couldn't get whatever benefit there is from digital!
The only alternatives suck pretty hard too. The cable company charges $30 per month or more just for local channels. Sling, Fubo, Hulu, etc want $40-$70 per month for packages that include local channels. There's a local Fox app but that only shows you news, not actual shows; NBC probably has something similar. With NBC at least I have Peacock so I can see some stuff but not everything on NBC is also on Peacock, which is kind of annoying. ESPN is kind of the same thing. I used to have Hulu/Disney/ESPN+ but the problem was that ESPN+ doesn't let you see the main ESPN stuff so I couldn't watch most Monday Night Football games--though last year I lucked out; thanks to the strikes they put some of the games on ABC--and the big college football games like the college playoff so I couldn't even watch the Michigan game. But I could watch Ivy League football games and also volleyball, hockey, and lacrosse for a lot of teams. Hooray!
And with all the streaming services it can be annoying when they move stuff around so on August 31st you might be able to watch a movie free on one service but September 1st it moves to another service you don't subscribe to. Am I going to waste time signing up for a free trial or enrolling for a month--and hope I don't forget to cancel? Probably not.
On Fandango's app I used to have a bunch of movies I used digital codes for. A lot of them were DC superhero movies like Man of Steel or BvS but I also had for instance a free copy of Stripes. There was a menu on my Roku where I could find the stuff if I felt like watching it--which wasn't often. One day I went to find it and the menu on the Roku was gone! I went to Fandango's site, but nothing would come up there either. I think when they took over Vudu they probably fucked things up so all the stuff I had with Fandango got vaporized. I could probably contact their "help" but that would just take a while and accomplish nothing.
As I mentioned a while back with Amazon Music, they suddenly made it so unless you subscribed to Music Unlimited you were forced to listen in shuffle mode--even if it was something you already bought from their site on MP3. Spotify is the same way except I don't think you can actually buy things on MP3. Anyway, so if I wanted to listen to the stuff I own, I'd be better off using an old copy of Winamp on my PC or on an MP3 player.
Just to make things worse, some of these short-sighted companies are also destroying old stuff. Paramount recently erased the entire archive of MTV News. Maybe not a huge loss, but it shows how vulnerable online content is.
Anyway, the point being that thanks to corporate greed, stupidity, and short-sightedness it's getting to the point where you're better off going back to old analog ways to do things. I've probably said this before, but if there's a movie/TV show, album, or book you really like, get a physical copy of it. Then if it moves to some other streaming service or it gets erased you can still watch it when you want to. Just make sure to have something that plays that format. Maybe we should just bring back microfiche and analog antennas and stuff like that since the alternatives have become too expensive or just aren't that good.
And of course for all the writers, make sure you back up your stuff to somewhere other than "the Cloud" or OneDrive. You never know when they'll decide to start charging some astronomical amount or want to use your material for "AI" training or just erase it because some dumbass pushes the wrong button or they get hacked or whatever. I think I said before you should probably print out anything you really want to keep and then put it in a fireproof strongbox. Or copy it onto clay or ceramic tablets--those seem to last a good long time.
It sucks to have to think this way but more and more I see the immediate future isn't going to be peace and light and happiness. It's going to be shit thanks to greed and stupidity. You might as well start preparing yourself now. Sorry to end on a downer, but it is a downer subject.
It's this again. Like I said last month, try to do better on comments than "I haven't seen these."
Mayor of Kingstown, S3: The third season seemed in jeopardy when star Jeremy Renner was in an accident with a snow plow. But since he made a miraculous recovery, the show could return for another season. The show is about Kingstown, MI, where the #1 industry is prisons and the #2 industry is selling drugs and other comforts to the prisoners. Mike McClusky (Renner) is the "mayor" who tries to maintain the balance between the black Crips, the racist Aryans, and the Latinos.
At the end of season 2, Mike's mother was shot and season 3 begins with her funeral, where someone tries to kill Mike and his family with a car bomb. Meanwhile, with the evil Milo out of the way, there's a new head of the Russian gang, who is also a friend of a prostitute/Mike's sometime girlfriend Iris. And a former Aryan leader, who was a mentor to Mike when he was in prison years ago, returns to Kingstown to take over the Aryan gang. Bunny Washington, the head of the Crips, is meanwhile planning to expand his operations.
From there it's a lot of Mike bouncing around from one crisis to another as the various gangs are jockeying for position. When all is said and done, the Russians are mostly wiped out and the Crips have taken some casualties and the Aryans have lost a lot of their leadership. I'm not sure who's really going to come out on top. Meanwhile, Mike's brother is arrested and Iris is possibly dead, but at least this time we can be pretty sure that Milo is finally dead.
Like the previous seasons, this really makes little attempt at being realistic. I just find it intriguing for all the various alliances and crooked deals and so forth. There is of course plenty of violence and some gross stuff like a baby left in a dumpster with its dead mom--and a bunch of rats. And later a bus full of young Russian girls coming into America from Canada (the border Trump and his ilk don't talk about) is pushed off a bridge and the girls all drowned.
It's definitely not a show for the faint of heart. Or those who want a really coherent police drama where everything is wrapped up in 45 minutes. There are still loose ends out there for a fourth season, though as my brother said, with this Paramount merger, who really knows what might survive, though being part of Taylor Sheridan's empire on the network, it has a better chance than some. (3/5)
Wind River: I'd heard of this but hadn't streamed it. Then another blog reviewed it and reminded me that maybe I should get around to watching it. So I did on Freevee, though by now it might be somewhere else.
The movie is directed by Taylor Sheridan and plays like other Western noir movies/TV shows of his, the most notable being Yellowstone that gave him his own empire on Paramount. In Wyoming, a young Native American is found frozen in the snow by fish and game warden Cory (Jeremy Renner) so he calls for backup, which includes the local tribal PD and a young FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) who happened to be the closest agent to the scene.
They start looking around and asking questions of the girl's parents, her ne'er-do-well brother, and some of his drug dealing friends. Eventually, though, all the questions lead to somewhere else close by.
Overall this wasn't a bad movie, especially if you're into Sheridan's oeuvre. If you're not really into his modern day Western/noir vibe then you probably wouldn't like it as much. Renner is OK as the lead, though as a different blog wondered, maybe someone else would have been better, though I'm not sure who. One of the Chrises? (Hemsworth and Pine at the top of that list.) Matthew McConaughey? Denzel Washington? Anyway, Olsen's character could have used some more background so we'd know more than she's from Ft. Lauderdale. Maybe the bad guy(s) could have been revealed a little earlier so we'd get more catharsis when they get what's coming. Or not. (3/5) (Fun Fact: As noted above, Jeremy Renner stars in Mayor of Kingstown, which was created by Taylor Sheridan and Hugh Dillon, who has a small part near the end. Maybe they hatched the idea for the show on the set or something. And of course Renner and Olsen have both been part of the MCU, though Olsen is "dead" and Renner is basically retired.)
Monkey Man: This is a movie that was probably done a disservice by the trailers showing Dev Patel in a black suit and beating the crap out of dudes. That's the kind of thing that got everyone thinking this was an Indian John Wick, but it's not except in the broadest sense.
Bobby (Dev Patel, who also writes/directs/produces) is out for revenge after a corrupt cop brutally killed his mother when he was a child. To do this he actually employs a lot of subtlety. He infiltrates a rich madam's establishment, where he starts working with a short guy who does deliveries and stuff. He also does cage fights while wearing a monkey mask, though he doesn't seem to win a lot. He does get money to buy a gun that he practices shooting against a movie poster painted on some crappy building. He meets a beautiful hooker and feeds a dog, but I don't think a lot happens with either.
His first attempt to get revenge goes badly, though, when he struggles to pull the trigger. He's badly wounded but escapes the cops to end up in some haven for transgender people--I guess. There's a training montage as Bobby prepares for Round 2. But then there's a lot of politics and religious stuff and if you're not from India it probably won't make a lot of sense.
Only then does it get to the John Wick-looking parts that were probably featured prominently in the trailer. Overall I didn't think it was a bad movie, just not great. There are extraneous bits like the love interest and the dog. I'm not sure why he bleaches the monkey mask near the end when he doesn't even seem to wear it--at least not long. And again all the political and religious stuff didn't make a lot of sense. In a movie like this, just showing the bad guys are bad is enough without a bunch of social background. (3/5) (Fun Facts: While this is supposed to be all about India, the movie was actually filmed in Indonesia. Sharlto Copley basically is the token white guy as the owner of the cage fighting ring.)
The Bikeriders: This is based on a photo book about a biker gang in Chicagoland from 1965-1973. Annnnd...not much else. Other than another attempt to Keep Boomer Culture Relevant, there's really not much to this. There's a tough, loudmouthed young woman who gets involved with a biker named Benny (Austin Butler) who has as much emotional depth as a sheet of paper. There's the head of the gang named Johnny (Tom Hardy) who got the idea when he saw the much-better movie, The Wild One.
The closest to a story is really about how the gang called the Vandals changes over the years. They start out racing the bikes and then mostly drink beer in the bar that's their clubhouse and sometimes in a park or something. They really don't have much agenda. But somehow it expands into Milwaukee and then other Midwest cities. And over time there are new members who are a lot more aggressive and prone to troublemaking.
But really the movie can't seem to decide what story it wants to make the main one, so it kind of just does nothing and drifts along to the end. It just would have been nice if the leads had had some chemistry better than Anakin and Padme in Episode II. And it might have been nice if the movie had done more than show some old TV shows and mention Vietnam a few times to actually depict the tumultuous time period.
You can say it's well-filmed and most of the actors do their jobs capably to decently. The problem isn't the technical parts, just the lack of a coherent, compelling story. (2.5/5) (Fun Facts: Near the end, Norman Reedus shows up as a biker from California; he has(had?) a show on AMC or wherever about motorcycles. The band Lucero does the end theme song written specifically for the movie; I have a few albums of theirs that are good if you like alt-country with more emphasis maybe on the alt. The lead singer also did a whole album dedicated to the characters in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.)
There you go, one of my favorite tracks.
Henry's Crime: This is one of those movies that slipped beneath my radar even though it has a good cast. But then I saw it on Tubi and decided to watch it. The basic plot is Henry (Keanu Reeves) is wrongly convicted of helping to rob a local Buffalo bank and when he gets out about 18 months later, he decides to rob it for real.
At the start, Henry is a toll worker who is shown working the graveyard shift when there are hardly any cars. He's married to Deb (Julie Greer) who wants kids, though he's less enthused. Then a high school acquaintance Eddie (Fisher Stevens) shows up with a sick friend. Eddie tells Henry he needs someone to drive to softball and even though it's November and about 8am, Henry drives him to the bank, where Eddie claims he needs beer money from the ATM. A security guard comes out of the coffee shop next door and stops Henry. He's sent to jail, where his cellmate is Max (James Caan) who is a former "confidence man" who's really comfortable in prison. And like I said, 18 months later, Henry gets out and decides that since he did the time, why not do the crime? This in part comes to him when he sees an article posted on a bathroom wall about how there used to be a tunnel between the bank and a theater next door.
Henry goes to his house to find his wife has moved on with Eddie's sick friend. So Henry gets an apartment or motel or something to begin his plotting. While bumbling across the road, he's hit by Julia (Vera Farmiga) who is an actress stuck doing local commercials and plays like Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard being directed by Derek (Peter Stormare) in the theater. With Max's encouragement, Henry steals a part in the show so his dressing room can be used as a base while they dig out the tunnel to get to the bank vault.
This is one of those dark comedies or dramadies or whatever you want to call it that's not really serious but not really too overtly funny. Like how people talk about Tom Cruise just playing Tom Cruise, you can say that mostly Keanu just plays Keanu, a pretty mellow guy who mostly goes with the flow, except there's the one thing he decides he really wants (the bank) and he just sometimes by intent and sometimes by accident accumulates people to help him--like Julia. The romance plot is pretty well done, including the end where the play starts taking on a life of its own. Overall it's pretty fun as a little bit heist movie and a little bit light drama/comedy/romance of people wanting to get out of Buffalo--and who can blame them? (3.5/5) (Fun Fact: You have Keanu as a toll booth worker and James Caan, who was famously murdered in a toll booth plaza. I don't think the movie has any winks or nods to that though.)
Chaos Theory: This dramedy from 2007 stars Ryan Reynolds, but any potential viewers should be cautioned this isn't Deadpool, Van Wilder, or Waiting Reynolds. This is a little more subtle and mature than those. But still not extremely serious or mature.
For whatever reason there's a framing device where Frank Allen (Reynolds) tries to calm the fiance of his daughter before the wedding by telling him a story. So then it skips back to the present of 2007 (I assume, because it taking place in like 1990 would make no sense) when Frank is an "efficiency expert" who has this whole thing built around lists. He has a book he's doing a presentation on and at a reception afterwards he meets a woman (Sarah Chalke) who asks to use the bathroom in his hotel room. He agrees, but when she inevitably comes out of the bathroom in only lingerie, he freaks out and runs away.
He starts driving home, only to get run off the road by a pregnant woman who is in labor. He takes her to the hospital and stupidly puts his name on the forms when the pregnant woman ducks out. The hospital later calls his wife (Emily Mortimer) who becomes suspicious and so Frank gets a test to prove the baby isn't his. But in the process he gets some bad news involving his daughter.
The bad news plunges him into a mid-life crisis of sorts. He buys a motorcycle, takes up smoking, gets into a fight (that he wins), and streaks at a hockey game (which isn't shown). Instead of using lists to organize everything, now he's just letting chaos reign. Meanwhile his wife wants him back, but can't convince him.
I liked this more than I thought I might. While not typical Ryan Reynolds comedy, it was still funny in places and serious in places. Things pretty much end Happily Ever After, but not so much so that the whole cast should gather to sing a happy, sappy song. The way I thought of it was it's like they wrote this for Zach Braff but then he couldn't be in it so they cast Reynolds instead. And by that I mean if you like Scrubs or Garden State then you'd probably like this. And, hey, I do like those things! (At least the first couple of seasons of Scrubs.) So obviously I liked this. (4/5) (Fun Fact: It's a little weird with the framing device because Reynolds is about my age so he was only around 30 when this was released and yet he has a twenty-something daughter in the framing device. It's good they didn't do the whole movie like that or it would have been really weird.)
Gunless: It's a Western (Canada) comedy. After surviving an incompetent hanging, the Montana Kid (former Due South star Paul Gross) ends up in a small town in Canada. It's pretty predictable then as at first he doesn't like the town and wants to leave, but he can't for a couple of days, so he starts getting to know the townspeople, especially an opinionated widow. When some American bounty hunters show up looking for him, it's pretty obvious what the Montana Kid is going to do.
But while it's predictable it's still fun for a low-budget Canadian movie. More fun and shorter than A Million Ways to Die in the West, but obviously not as good as Blazing Saddles. (3.5/5) (Fun Facts: Paul Gross's co-star in the 3rd season of Due South was Callum Keith Rennie, who plays the head of the bounty hunters after the Montana Kid. Gross played a Mountie in Due South and a contingent of Mounties show up to beat him up in this.)
Heist (2000?): Behind the generic title is a bevy of talent: David Mamet writing/directing and Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito, Delroy Lindo, Sam Rockwell, and Ricky Jay starring. Annnnd...meh. It's not terrible but there are a lot better heist movies out there. Plenty that have more clever schemes, more charismatic thieves, and definitely better romantic plots.
At the beginning, Joe (Hackman) and his crew (Lindo, Jay, and Joe's much younger wife played by Rachel Pidgeon) poison some coffees for people working in a jewelry store and then plan to rob the place. One woman doesn't drink her coffee and so Joe gets caught on camera without a mask. They still get away with the loot, but Joe decides he's done.
His fence, DeVito of course, has One Last Job for him: steal Nazi Swiss gold from a cargo plane in Massachusetts. Joe doesn't want to do it, but he has no choice. To help make sure it happens, DeVito sends along his nephew (Rockwell) to be part of the crew. But of course he's a dumbass who has no idea what he's doing. From there they plan the job and carry it out at the airport and then there are twists and turns involving the loot and who gets what.
Like I said, it's OK but Hollywood has made a ton of these so there are plenty of better ones you could watch: Ocean's 11 (either), Thomas Crowne (either), The Italian Job (either), The Score starring Robert DeNiro and Edward Norton that came out near this same time, and more I can't think of right now. You could even put the Die Hard movies or Ronin on the list as there are usually heists involved. Mostly I think this needed some better character work for Hackman, Pidgeon, and Lindo especially so we knew more about them and what was going on. Still, it's not bad overall. (3/5) (Fun Fact: You have a real Legion of Doom in this with Hackman (Lex Luthor), DeVito (Penguin), and Rockwell (Justin Hammer). Plus Lindo as the evil Mr. Rose in The Cider House Rules. "I'm in the knife business! You don't want to get into no knife business with me!")
A Family Man: This movie probably wants to be serious drama but rises only a little above a Hallmark movie by the end. The opening premise is pretty interesting: Dane Jensen (Gerard Butler) is an upper-class douche in Chicago who works at a recruiting farm, mostly for engineers. He calls around and wheels and deals so his team can bring in the contract. His boss Ed (Willem Dafoe, cashing a paycheck so he'd have time for weirder stuff like The Lighthouse and Poor Things) is going to retire and so whichever team leader has more money by the end of the year will get his job.
Dane puts in so much time at work that he barely has time for his hot wife (Gretchen Mol) or his three kids. He does make time to berate his oldest son Ryan about his weight and take him running, during which Ryan almost passes out. Later we see Ryan has a mysterious bruise on his leg. Can you see the problem here? Not long after Halloween, Ryan is diagnosed with leukemia and checked into a children's hospital. So now Dane is finding it hard to balance still doing his work and spending time with Ryan.
There are some good moments then as Dane takes his son to some of the architectural landmarks of Chicago. We can see he's becoming a little more human, though he's still trying to compete for the big job.
The problem is at the end everything works out too neatly, too Happily Ever After. (Spoilers!) Dane loses the big job because he gives away a contract he's long been working on; Lou, the engineer he's been stringing along (Alfred Molina cashing a paycheck), is 59 and so no one really wants him until Dane offers to eat the usual fee if the company hires him. For that he gets fired, but Ed tears up the usual non-compete contract so Dane can start his own business in his basement or something; he gets his first client when Lou calls and says his new company needs some engineers. And guess what happens with Ryan's leukemia? Of course it goes into remission. Now let's all sing a happy, sappy song!
It's not that I wanted the kid to die, but the movie really didn't need to go so overwhelmingly happy. Dane has been a pretty big asshole for a while, but because he helped one guy he gets off without any real consequences? That's bullshit.
Anyway, it's a well-made movie technically and you've got a decent cast, so I suppose there are worse ways to spend about 2 hours. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: Dafoe and Molina were both Maguire-era Spider-Man villains who would reunite about 5 years later in Spider-Man No Way Home.)
Central Intelligence: Another team-up between Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart. I haven't looked up how many times they've been together but there's at least four with this, the Jumanji movies, and the Superpets movie. Anyway, this time around 20 years ago, Johnson was a fat nerd and Hart a top athlete, class president, and Most Likely to Succeed. When Johnson is dragged naked into the gym during a pep rally, Hart shows kindness by giving him a jacket to cover himself.
Then 20 years later of course things have changed. Hart is stuck in a dead-end forensic accounting job, the days of glory long gone. Then he gets a Facebook request from "Bob Stone" and approves it and is soon invited to have drinks that night. That's when Hart finds out "Bob Stone" is the naked kid from high school. Only now while he's kinda weird, he can also kick a lot of ass.
Eventually it gets to the point that Johnson is in the CIA but is on the run from agents who think he's a bad guy called "The Black Badger." He wants Hart to help decipher a computer code that will let him find the real Badger.
I try not to get too mad at movies that deliver what they promise. That's what this does. You have Johnson being goofy but also beating people up and you have Hart shouting and doing his whole less-angry Chris Rock thing. If you want more than that, then you picked the wrong movie. So, yeah, you can easily say, "It is what it is." Because that's the best way to describe it. There are some funny parts and some violence and car chases and stuff. I was just surprised they didn't use the class reunion as the setting for the final act, but that does come into play for "Bob Stone" to get a little payback. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: Besides Johnson and Hart there are appearances by Jason Bateman, Melissa McCarthy, and Aaron Paul.)
Quicksand: Another of those I hadn't heard of despite a couple of big stars in it. Michael Keaton is a banker who gets a warning of a big, suspicion transaction at a movie company in Nice, France. He goes to France only to get framed for shooting the local police chief. Then it's kind of a discount The Fugitive as he goes on the run. He teams up with a female executive at the movie company and an aging actor (Michael Caine) to take on the bad guys.
Overall it's not a bad movie. It's not a great movie either. While it's exciting and I can't really complain about the film quality or anything, I think my biggest complaint is Keaton's character is pretty good at taking care of himself for a banker. I mean almost right away he's dodging evil henchmen, corrupt cops, and soldiers. It's not very believable unless he was in the military or something, which the movie doesn't say. Anyway, that aside it's still a decent thriller. (3/5) (Fun Fact: Keaton was in the first two Batman movies as the titular hero while Caine was in the Nolan movies as Alfred. So you have a Batman and Alfred, just not from the same versions of the franchise.)
Wild Target: This is a British action-comedy from about 2010. Bill Nighy is an assassin named Victor whose parents were also both assassins; he's now the same age his father was when he died. His mother lives in a rest home with a scrapbook of his kills.
His life is all neat and orderly until he meets Emily Blunt, a young woman who just sold a fake Rembrandt for nearly a million pounds. The buyer employs Victor to kill her, but he doesn't find the right opportunity right away and basically decides he doesn't want to kill her. In a parking lot they're both ambushed by a couple of bad guys; a loser named Tony (Rupert Grint) inadvertently helps them.
Victor and the two younger people go on the run, which he soon finds pretty annoying. Emily Blunt is pretty reckless while Tony is clueless about everything except shooting, where he has a natural talent Victor starts to nurture. The guy who bought the fake painting then hires another assassin (Martin Freeman) to track down the trio. Which of course will lead to some mayhem.
There are some fun parts, some deadpan British humor, and of course some action parts, but it started to lag a little for me. It was that point where I went in the kitchen to putter around for a few minutes. So it's another of those things where maybe I hadn't heard of it despite the cast because it just wasn't that great. Though not bad. (3/5)
Damaged: It's not one with a bunch of recognizable stars, but it does star Samuel L Jackson as a Chicago detective investigating a series of murders of young women who are hacked up, their torsos taken and other parts arranged like crosses. When someone is killed in a similar fashion in Scotland, he goes there to investigate. He's teamed with a Scottish investigator whose son died a year ago, which really doesn't have much to do with the plot but is a distraction.
From there it's pretty standard as you have some red herrings, a couple of chases, and a little gun play. Then there's a twist that sort of makes sense. Overall it's all right--"aggressively OK" as another blogger once said. If you like mysteries you could do better--and worse. (2.5/5)
The Doorman: The basic premise is: what if Die Hard took place in the apartment building from Only Murders in the Building? Only it's not nearly as good as that might be.
Ali Gorski (Ruby Rose) is a former Army soldier who barely survived an attack on a diplomatic convoy in Romania. (Don't waste time wondering who the people in the convoy were or what they were doing or who killed them, because none of it comes back later.) She's back in New York with PTSD and a presumably honorable discharge. She needs a job so her uncle gets her a job at the old Carrington building as a doorman. She soon finds out that her brother-in-law (Rupert Evans) is living in the building with his two kids. It's not fleshed out really well but they were apparently an item until he wound up marrying Ali's sister instead.
Easter weekend most of the building will be empty for renovations and stuff--sure, why not? Except for one inhabited by an old handicapped guy and his wife. The head doorman and a bunch of goons go to their place. Their boss is The Professional himself, Jean Reno. He wants some paintings the old guy stole when he was in Germany a while back. They're supposedly hidden in the walls, but there's one problem: it's the wrong apartment! The old people moved after he had a stroke and guess whose apartment they used to live in? Yup, the one Ali's family and her are in.
When the bad guys break in there, then it starts the Die Hard stuff with Ali and sometimes her teenage nephew sneaking around the building to take out bad guys. It doesn't have the wit of Die Hard or Only Murders, but there's plenty of action and while it's fairly predictable, it's not a bad way to waste a little more than 90 minutes. (3/5) (Fun Fact: Reno is basically in the Bruce Willis role and this was 2020 when Willis was still active, but I tend to think he didn't want to go to Bucharest to film. Maybe then Reno is Europe's Bruce Willis now?)
Batman The Caped Crusader, Ep 1: The first episode of this new Amazon Prime series was free on Freevee, so I watched it. The idea is it's kind of like Batman the Animated Series in the early 90s only it takes place about when comic book Batman started in 1939-1940.
The plot is pretty simple: a female Penguin is taking down some of the mob rackets from her base on a yacht called the Iceberg Club. Bruce Wayne investigates during a party on the yacht and Batman takes down the Penguin and her dumb sons. But Bruce then sees the problem in that by taking down the Penguin, other mobsters will eat up her territory. (Fun Fact: I talked about this in the Scarlet Knight books in that one of the things Emma fears is that if she takes down the evil gangster Don Vendetta--who is a woman, so take that retro Batman--her lieutenants will fight over her turf and other elements might move in.)
I really like BTAS, especially the earlier episodes, but this didn't do a lot for me. Like a lot of the "Elseworld" comics it felt kinda uncreative. I mean in a lot of those it felt like the writer/artist just pitched it like, "OK, it's Batman but it's in like the 1920s! [Or 1910s or Middle Ages or whenever.]" It is basically just Batman set in the late 30s/early 40s like the original comics. What is it that I'm supposed to get excited about? His lock pick? His Batcave with a glass board and file cabinets? I guess you can say it's more realistic--in some ways. To me it just felt like I'd pretty much seen everything before.
Of course it was just a first episode so maybe if I can ever watch the rest it'll get better. (2.5/5) (Facts: Besides Penguin the episode also introduces Harvey Dent, so I suppose at some point he'll have to become Two-Face. Oooh, original. More original is Barbara Gordon as a defense lawyer; she and her father the commissioner are both black, so take that haters--sigh. When does the review bombing begin? sigh. What would have been cool is if she was a librarian and up in a tower of the building she has a perch to monitor activities in the city and pass messages between her and a network of spies that are then relayed to the cops and/or Batman--and maybe a couple of those spies could be a young Tim Drake and/or Jason Todd. Basically it'd be like a 1939-1940 version of Oracle, you know?)
Batman (1949): Speaking of retro Batman, this is the 1949 15-part serial that was shown in theaters. I've seen episode 3 quite a few times on Rifftrax, but one day I saw it on the Roku Channel and decided to start watching. And it is...crap. I mean, you pretty much expect that from the low, low budget. The Batsuit looks like something a mom might make from one of those patterns sold in stores--especially the ridiculous ears. Robin is an adult with a black cape, probably because "yellow" looks crappy in black-and-white.
And which of Batman's many notorious foes is he fighting? The Joker? Penguin? Two-Face? Catwoman? Exactly NONE of those! Instead his enemy is "the Wizard," a dude in a black hood and cape who has glowing eyes. With a bunch of bulky equipment he can make cars and other stuff go off course. Yay? His henchmen are all guys in suits and fedoras--including Floyd the Barber from Andy Griffith! Bruce Wayne's girlfriend Vicki Vale is around to get captured or let her dumbass brother go free after he's captured for helping the Wizard. There's also Alfred (who's not a badass) and Commissioner Gordon (who's not black) and some radio broadcaster who keeps obviously tipping the Wizard off in his broadcasts, but no one really seems to do much about it.
It's 15 parts, each about 20 minutes, which if my math is right means the whole thing is about 5 hours long, or equivalent to about 2 of the Nolan movies. If you were a kid going to the theater every Saturday to watch, it was probably fine, but streaming it all at once gets to be really repetitive and boring. It needed another villain or two, some character work for Batman and/or Robin, and some higher stakes. I mean the whole big deal was the Wizard's machine could...make stuff go spinny. And somehow it could be converted to stable energy, which is bad for...reasons. Why does any of it matter?!
Maybe you'd want to check it out just for the historical value or something, but after a couple of episodes you'd probably be checking out. (2/5) (Fun Fact: All the people who bitched about the back of Robin's cape being black in TV and comics in the 90s should have watched this. Suck it, haters, it was already part of the "source material." I'm just saying.)
Cosmic Sin: A cheap, dumb knockoff of HALO starring Bruce Willis and Frank Grillo. It spends the first five minutes giving us the history of "The Alliance" to tell us it's the 26th Century--and yet while there are quantum gates and spaceships and colonies and laser guns, everyone still drives regular cars on roads. That's how cheap it is. It's the kind of thing where I just sort of lost interest in it. (1/5) (Fact: Writer/Director Edward Drake has also done a bunch of other cheap action movies with Bruce Willis including the three "Detective Knight" movies; I'm not sure what he's going to do now with Willis retired.)
