The Final Stuff I Watched For the Year!

This entry will probably be shorter because it's only been not quite 2 months since the last one.  But with the holidays and such I probably won't do another one until next year--hooray!  Have at thee then!

Thor Love & Thunder:  As someone who did not like Thor Ragnarok (not for "woke" reasons but because it was just stupid) I didn't expect to like this.  And I didn't!  I didn't hate it as much as I thought I might either.  Mostly it was just meh.  In typical Marvel fashion Thor went with the Guardians of the Galaxy at the end of Endgame, so now we have to dispose of them quickly because we can't afford to have Chris Pratt and company in the whole movie.  So they're soon gone and Thor is off to find the "God Butcher" who's Christian Bale looking like Sybok's henchman in Star Trek V, only paler.  He has a sword that lets him kill gods and Asgardians are next, so he kidnaps a bunch of kids in "New Asgard" to lure Thor out.  But then there's another Thor who's his old girlfriend, Natalie Portman--and not just previous footage of her like last time.  And some trite bullshit about her battle with cancer, which is why she has Thor's old hammer that somehow reassembled itself.  And Russell Crowe embarrasses himself by looking chubby and doing a bad Italian accent for a Greek god.  And there's a lot of Guns n Roses which to this point I actually enjoyed.  Blah, blah, blah, shit happens.  Maybe someone can explain to me why Christian Bale deserves a happy-ish ending after he murdered tons of people and kidnapped a bunch of kids.  But on the plus side it was nice to see Idris Elba in the final cookie scene.  In the first cookie scene the guy they got as Hercules only has one line and it sucked, so please maybe work on that, Marvel?  I hope the fact this faded from the box office pretty quick will persuade them they don't need to jam another sequel into their busy schedule.  Or that they need to ruin any more of their decent comic book stories with shitty, half-assed adaptations. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  This was the first Thor movie not to feature Loki, just Matt Damon again playing him in a play.)

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent:  I rented this for $3 when it was on sale during Amazon Prime Day II since I don't think it had been streaming "free" anywhere.  Anyway, Nic Cage stars as Nick Cage in this movie.  He's invited to a birthday party in Spain and since he needs money, he goes.  The guy throwing the party, Javi, (Pedro Pascal) is a huge fan and wants Nick to do a screenplay he wrote.  Meanwhile, a president's daughter has been kidnapped and the CIA thinks Javi did it, so they recruit Nick to help them find the girl.  Mayhem ensues!  It's kind of like Birdman meets Last Action Hero and Hot Fuzz as by the end Nick is basically parodying his own movies.  The beginning is kind of slow but the end is better as things get up to full speed.  I think it was a little disappointing in that while we know it's not the real Nic Cage, they didn't really lean into how we think of Nic Cage as the crazy dude who married Lisa Marie Presley and burned through millions of dollars on stupid shit.  The wife and kid thing is faker than the shootouts and stuff.  I mean there's only so much suspension of disbelief.  (2.5/5) 

The Outfit:  I'm pretty sure one of Donald Westlake's Parker novels had this title, but this is not that.  This is about an English tailor (Mark Rylance) who comes to Chicago in the 1950s and almost immediately his shop becomes a drop for one of the local mobs.  It's kind of similar then to The Drop with James Gandolfini and Tom Hardy, only not in modern day or in New York.  The head gangster's son is screwing the tailor's receptionist and then comes to the shop.  There's a tape (something pretty new at the time) that becomes like the McGuffin along with the son himself and people die.  Then there are twists and turns.  I thought maybe a couple more twists than were necessary, but the last couple help to explain why a simple tailor can do what he does.  Since everything takes place in the tailor's shop (or slightly outside) this really has the feel of a play more than a film, so you're not missing much if you didn't see it the week or so it might have been in theaters.  Still, it was tense and well-acted, and with the twists you never quite knew what was coming.  I watched it on Prime Video, but by now it might not be "free" there, though I'm sure it's streaming to rent other places.  (4/5) (Fun Fact:  in movies especially there's this "rule" about if you show a gun early you have to use it later.  When they early on talked about the tailor's shears, I knew they would be of use later--and they were.  So call them Chekhov's Shears.)

Ambulance:  Also on Prime Video, this long, long, loooooooong and very dull movie by Michael Bay.  It's like a very, very pale imitation of Speed and Heat and probably a few other movies.  Black Manta from Aquaman and Jake Gyllenhaal (two guys with names I hate trying to spell!) are brothers Will and Danny.  Will joined the Army and got married and had a kid and now his wife has cancer and needs surgery the insurance won't cover.  So he goes to Danny, who robs banks, and just happens to right then have a job he could use help for.  But then things go wrong and they wind up hijacking an ambulance with a female paramedic and a rookie cop who's dying from a gunshot wound.  Then they drive around LA while trying to keep the cop alive, because if he dies they'll go to jail for life...as if the bank robbery, assault, kidnapping, grand theft auto, fleeing the cops, etc wouldn't already land them in prison for a very, very long time.  It's 137 minutes but it felt more like 317 minutes.  Can a movie that's 2/3 a car chase get boring?  Yes.  Yes, it can.  And it does. (1/5) (Fun Fact:  Quoting one of your previous movies--The Rock--in your current movie is not meta; it's just narcissism.  It's not even a well-known quote or anything.)

Werewolf By Night:  This Marvel "TV Special" on Disney+ clocks in at a brisk 55 minutes.  Somewhere the Bloodstone family uses the aptly named Bloodstone to fight monsters.  The patriarch of the family has died and his daughter disappeared many years ago, so hunters are called from all over the world to participate in a ceremonial monster hunt to determine who will be the next wielder of the Bloodstone.  Except the prodigal daughter returns and one hunter is not what he seems.  The thing is mostly in black-and-white (except for the Bloodstone) and the werewolf is the traditional 30s-40s kind instead of wolfier ones made with CGI.  It was a fun little movie, especially the relationship between one hunter and "Ted" who has another name in Marvel Comics.  While it says "The End" at the end and there are no cookie scenes, I hope they might have some kind of sequel for next Halloween.  I do wish they had made this more of a movie and built on the characters and stuff a little more to pad it out to 90 minutes, but oh well. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  The film was directed by Michael Giacchino, who does the music as well.  To this point he's mostly been a composer for movies like Wonder Woman, The Batman, and other movies where they couldn't get Hans Zimmer.)

Memory:  Liam Neeson is a hitman with Alzheimer's and Guy Pearce is an FBI agent in El Paso looking into trafficking...or something.  And their paths cross and I wasn't really interested at all.  I kinda lost track of who was dying and why, but there's a pretty high body count.  It wasn't necessarily a bad movie but both stars and director Martin Campbell have done much better work and mostly it makes me sad they're doing cheap straight-to-streaming stuff. (2/5)

Gold:  This is a 2021 movie starring Zac Efron as "Man 1."  In the not-too-distant future, things are kinda like Mad Max--and this was filmed in Australia.  Man 1 hires a grizzled old guy (the director, who's known as "Man 2") to drive him to some camp.  But the truck breaks down and while resting, Zac Efron finds a huge nugget of gold pretty much just sitting on the ground.  Then while Man 2 goes to get something to dig the gold up, Zac Efron stays in the desert to guard the gold.  He has to fight dehydration, a sandstorm, and wild dogs.  It's a pretty slow and depressing movie.  Not really as exciting as a Mad Max movie but probably more realistic.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  One of the many producers was Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, but this really doesn't seem like their kind of thing.  Maybe they figured after you watched this you'd go buy a Chicken Soup book.)

The Pizzagate Massacre:  This is a low-budget movie that's not a mockumentary really though it does have a fake news host at the beginning and end.  Basically there's a Fox "News" type who starts talking about Lizard People in the basement of a pizzeria in Austin.  A young black woman who was briefly an intern on the show recruits a militiaman to help her get to Austin to investigate.  And mayhem ensues!  Obviously it's not a Hollywood A-list cast but not a super low-rent Rifftrax-worthy production either.  I thought it'd be funny but it's really not that much.  Kind of sad people do actually think there are Lizard People and Democrats hiding kids in basements of pizza places.  (3/5)

Grand Theft Parsons:  I watched this on the Movie House app and was surprised to find it was actually a real indie movie from 2003 with people I'd actually heard of like Johnny Knoxville, Michael Shannon, Christina Applegate, and Robert Forster.  Based very loosely on a true story it's about how musician Gram Parsons dies and his road manager (Knoxville) recruits a goofy hippie (Shannon) to steal the body and put it in the hippie's yellow hearse.  Then they take it to Joshua Tree National Park to "set his soul free" by burning the body.  But besides just the cops looking for them there's also Parsons's ex-wife (Applegate) who wants to get his money and Parsons's father (Forster) who wants to take his son to New Orleans for a real funeral.  It was mostly fun and somewhat poignant at the end. (3/5) (Fun Facts:  According to IMDB, the real life road manager Phil Kaufman gave Knoxville the denim vest he actually wore when Parsons was cremated to wear in the movie.  Kaufman appears at the very end of the movie being arrested for the crime.  In the text that pops up at the end, Kaufman and his accomplice were not convicted of stealing the body because the body had no intrinsic value, but they were fined for stealing the coffin.  So apparently it's OK to steal dead bodies--but not coffins.  Something to keep in mind for Halloween.)

3 Days With Dad:  I also watched this on The Movie House app.  It's kind of a poignant dramedy about a family in Maryland dealing with their ailing father (Brian Dennehy) and his subsequent death--which isn't a spoiler since it starts at the funeral.  I think anyone who's gone through a similar situation with a relative would understand this.  The problem is while you have some well-known actors like Dennehy, Tom Arnold, and JK Simmons, most of the focus is on writer/director Larry Clarke as one of the sons who has to deal with some issues.  It probably would have been a better movie with a better actor in that role. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  While JK Simmons is listed first since this was after his Oscar win, he's only in the movie for about 10 minutes as a funeral home employee.)

Taking Liberty:  I also watched this "mockumentary" on the Movie House.  This really is a Rifftrax-worthy thing with a lot of bad actors taking turns shrieking and/or stammering at the camera.  Some dufus who should probably have just stuck to being a nonspeaking extra in a Sopranos episode plans to steal the Statue of Liberty because he thinks it's overpriced.  This was just mind-numbingly awful.  A real chore to even get through it. (1/5)

Lazer-Us:  I watched this "sci-fi" movie on the Movie House in a few bits and pieces.  I put the beginning on a few times but it took a few tries before I actually watched the whole thing.  It's a weird Canadian movie about a guy (who sorta looks like young Brendan Fraser, but not) going by the name Jimmy Lazer who gets a cursed guitar in exchange for fame and fortune by promising the demon his first-born.  He figured, "I'll just not have kids.  Sucker!"  Except he already had a kid that he didn't know about.  So he never uses the guitar and just kinda disappeared but never ages.  Many years later, his daughter is almost the same age and he goes on a quest to save her from demonic forces.  Or something.  There are a lot of "chapters" and comic book-type graphics and stuff like that but the actual plot doesn't make a ton of sense to me.  Near the middle one guy in Jimmy's old band says he'll only join if they take the hyphen out of the "Lazer-Us" name and only then did I realize that the title is a bastardization of Lazarus.  But what Lazarus really has to do with this, I don't really know.  The end was kind of nice though and it was pretty much professionally made, so that's something.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The movie was shot on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls mostly and I'm pretty sure one place they show was the setting used for the store in the short-lived Fox series Wonderfalls.)

Archer Season 13:  This was the first season without Jessica Walter as Mallory Archer since she died last year and was written out at the end of the previous season.  Predictably the show does not take picking up the pieces after her departure too seriously.  The first episode was decent as Sterling Archer and Lana compete in sort of a Spy Olympics to try to impress their new boss.  The second episode though felt like a bad fanfic a la The Last Jedi as everyone acted really dumb.  Why would you take a secretary, HR person, lab scientist, and accountant on a dangerous mission to infiltrate some rebel compound or whatever?  I mean it was like they'd completely forgotten how to do spy stuff.  Fortunately there was a bounce-back episode involving Archer and Lana's daughter.  And then a few more decent episodes before a season finale that actually didn't suck as it didn't put anyone into a coma or have them screw up a mission.  Lana taking over for Mallory was actually referenced a couple of times in early seasons.  The only thing I wondered later:  what happened to Lana and Archer's daughter?  She was with them when they were going to South America but then she wasn't in the last episode, so did they drop her off somewhere?  I don't think they even mentioned it.  Weird.  (3/5)

Lower Decks, Season 3:  While the first episode was funny, it kind of annoyed me that the cliffhanger was resolved offscreen.  I get that the point is they aren't the big heroes and all that, but it still felt like Ocean's Twelve when there was all this stuff and then at the end they tell you they'd actually done the heist a long time ago.  But with that disposed of it got back to normal and then starts to introduce some plot/character developments.  The DS9 episode was brilliant as not only did they use the theme song to great comedic effect but it brought back Kira and Quark and was pretty consistent with their characterization.  I didn't think they needed a whole episode about a rogue ExoComp, but the episode about a holodeck movie was pretty awesome in mocking the Abrams movies, Star Trek V, and Generations.  And it had a cameo from Sulu, which was neat.  The twist of the penultimate(?) episode was pretty good and somewhat poignant as while everyone thought Mariner was the dumbass, she turns out to be the only one who wasn't.  A good season overall. (4/5)

Andor:  The first (and only?) season isn't probably over yet, but it did not start out great.  I heard all these rave reviews and watched the first two episodes--and was almost bored to tears.  It starts out all right with Andor looking for his sister who maybe was a stripper somewhere and then he kills a couple of nosy cops.  After that it just hits the brakes and introduces a bunch of characters who we probably don't need to care about before the end of the third episode that's kind of a soft reboot as Andor is drafted by Stellan Skarsgard but then the next episode slows things down again as he's thrust into some kind of caper.  I guess since this is twice the number of episodes as Obi-Wan Kenobi or Book of Boba Fett they figured they had a lot more time to mess around and get into all this stuff that doesn't probably matter like Imperial Security Bureau politics and Mon Mothma's marriage.  But maybe it'll get better.  At this point it's like Rebels without Jedi, Mandalorians, Twi'leks, funny droids, big funny purple dudes, the camaraderie that developed between all of them, or even a cool ship...so basically everything that made Rebels great. (2/5)

AP Bio, Season 4:  When I got a "Smart" TV, I found out eventually that I had Peacock Premium free as an XFinity customer.  So then I could finally watch the final season of AP Bio.  Like The Orville this was a show that had promise but they never fixed anything to make it better, so not surprisingly it petered out.  And like Letterkenny a big problem is we have to spend 2/3 of every episode with really unfunny characters.  Main character Jack Griffin and his students are usually pretty funny, especially when they would come up with some scheme to take revenge on Jack's enemies.  Then we have the principal and his secretary and the teachers who almost always have some awful bit going on to distract from the good story.  It was especially annoying in the episode when Jack's father (played by Bruce Campbell) shows up and Jack is showing rare vulnerability in trying to derail his father's wedding to a "witch" as in a practitioner of Wicca.  But just as things are getting good we have to waste a bunch of time with the other characters and their unfunny crap. The first episode was pretty funny as most of it involves the AP Bio students concocting fan fiction involving the teachers; a lot of it "shipped" Jack and the principal.  That episode unfortunately also got rid of the cute redhead in the accounting department who had been Jack's girlfriend the previous two seasons.  Then he goes out with some black substitute for two episodes before the series was over, so what was the point of changing?  I suppose this show was another hindered by its premise in that it was hard for them to focus on the kids, who are funny, because they were paying the principal and teachers (who were not funny) and had them in the credits, so they had to actually do something. They should do a movie on Peacock though where they can let the kids graduate and stuff.  Kind of put a bow on it.  But why would they bother, right?  (2/5)

Puppet Master 1, 2, 4, & 5:  I've watched the Rifftrax of Retro Puppet Master a bunch of times but I never watched the original movie series that started in 1989 from the studio that brought you other great movies like Oblivion, Oblivion 2, Tourist Trap, Shrunken Heads, and Demonic Toys.  Not surprisingly, Retro Puppet Master, which is supposed to be a prequel does not line up with this at all.  And even the movies of this series don't line up with each other despite that the stories are all pretty much conceived and produced by Charles Band.  Case in point, in the original movie, puppet master Andre Toulon kills himself to avoid capture by Nazis in 1939 in California.  But Retro Puppet Master starts in 1944 near the Swiss border and Toulon is alive and well.  Toulon and the puppets like a Godzilla or Gamera movie alternate between good and evil in different movies.  In the original Toulon is fairly good and so are the puppets until they're corrupted by a jerk in 1989.  But in the second one Toulon's corpse is reanimated and goes around looking like The Invisible Man, commanding the puppets to murder people and steal parts of their brains so he can create a new body for himself and his dead wife.  I couldn't watch the third one, which I guess was a prequel about how Toulon's wife died.  In the fourth and fifth entries, Toulon is good and so are the puppets as they help a dorky guy battle the evil mini-minions of the Egyptian god Sutek.  In Retro Puppet Master the puppets have the spirits of people murdered by Sutek in them to avenge themselves in extremely awkward fashion, so I guess there was a little consistency by then.  The inconsistent stories and tone as well as mediocre actors and effects make this not really a great horror movie series. (2/5) 

Demonic Toys:  So after the relative "success" of the first Puppet Master movies, Charles Band and company thought, "What other small items can we bring to life to murder people?"  The answer is of course:  toys!  And then there's a convoluted story about the toys trying to capture a pregnant cop so the devil's spirit can enter her and be born on Earth.  It's basically the same shtick, which is probably why there were only two of these--and later a crossover with Puppet Master.  Sadly (not) I can't watch the second one for "free" on Freevee or Prime Video. Somehow I will have to live with the disappointment. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  the movie was written by David S Goyer who went on to work in better movies like the Blade ones and the Nolan Batman movies.  By comparison this obviously isn't his best work.)

Dollman:  So after Puppet Master and Demonic Toys, Charles Band and company at Full Moon Entertainment thought, "What else can we do with tiny-sized things against regular-sized people?"  So someone had the idea for this movie.  Basically a hard-boiled cop from an alien planet crashes on Earth only to find he's 1/6 the size of the average inhabitant.  Which if you think of movies like Honey I Shrunk the Kids or Ant-Man could have worked.  Buuuut, those movies had the advantage of Disney money and effects.  This had not even 1/6 of that.  And it was in 1991.  So they really couldn't pull it off in anything like a convincing fashion.  Besides Tim Thomerson as the titular character, you have Jackie Earle Haley as a bad guy terrorizing some low-cost location masquerading as the Bronx.  Meanwhile a bad guy the Dollman chased to Earth teams up with Jackie Earle Haley to use some kind of fusion bomb and blah, blah, blah, very shitty-looking mayhem ensues.  With a Disney-sized budget and better actors maybe it could have worked as passable entertainment, but without anything at all, it's pretty awful.  I mean, imagine a movie where the main characters really can't interact with each other because there's no practical way to put them on the screen at the same time?  Yeah, pretty lame.  (1/5)

Dollman vs. Demonic Toys:  Before Alien vs. Predator, Freddy vs. Jason, or Batman v Superman, there was this bad attempt at a crossover.  For...reasons the demonic toys are reanimated and the cop from that movie teams with the Dollman to stop them.  The Dollman brings along his girlfriend, Nurse Ginger, who was shrunk by an alien in the movie Bad Channels to make her almost the same size as him. It's a real cinematic universe!  Only worse than even DC and Sony's fumbling attempts.  At only an hour, maybe 50 minutes of which is actually original footage, this barely even qualifies as a movie. But since most of it involves Dollman and the toys, who are on the same scale, it looks better than the Dollman movie.  (1.5/5)  (Fun Fact:  Legendary voice actor Frank Welker does the voice of the evil Oopsie-Daisy doll and probably some others too.)