Page to Screen: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Recently Amazon had Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs on sale so I downloaded that.  And the movie was recently on HBO so it seemed like a good time to read the book and watch the movie and compare the two.  There are a lot of similarities--at least until the final act of the book vs movie.  Spoilers ahead!

The book is told in first person from the point of view of sixteen-year-old Jake.  He lives in Florida with rich parents and for most of his life he's grown up with his grandfather's stories of fantastic children like a girl who could fly, a girl who can conjure fire, a boy who spews bees from his mouth, and more all led by Miss Peregrine, the headmistress who turns into a peregrine falcon. Jake used to believe those stories, but as he got older he started to think of them just as tall tales.

Then one night he comes home to find his grandpa dead.  Jake thinks he sees a monster running from the scene.  Traumatized by nightmares he goes to see a shrink.  In the book the shrink is a man while in the movie it's a woman played by Allison Janney.

In the book Jake's grandpa gave him some cryptic final words that led him to looking up the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson before he receives an Emerson book from his aunt.  In the book the book contains a letter while in the movie it's a postcard and Jake receiving the book is more streamlined.  Anyway, the letter is from Miss Peregrine only a few years earlier.  The address leads Jake to an island off the coast of Wales.  His father accompanies him to do some birdwatching for an ever-gestating book.

When Jake gets some kids to lead him to Miss Peregrine's house, he finds it a bombed-out wreck.  An old man tells him that the house was bombed by Nazis in 1940 (1943 in the movie) and there was only one survivor--Jake's grandpa.  (In the movie no one is supposed to have survived, Jake's grandpa having left earlier.)  After a few days Jake finds a trunk of pictures and drops it to the basement, where he soon finds himself back in 1940 when the house was good as new.  (This was streamlined in the movie.)

Jake meets all the children his grandpa told him about and Miss Peregrine, their caretaker.  They're called "peculiars" and like X-Men's mutants or Marvel's Inhumans they all have a natural ability that they're born with.  Miss Peregrine can turn into a bird but her real talent is for controlling time--something only birds can do.  For her and her children it's always September 3rd 1940/1943.  They live in a "loop" created by Miss Peregrine that resets every night just before the bomb hits.  The kids and Miss Peregrine don't age but they do know what's happening while the normal people on the island do not.  It's sort of like Groundhog Day with all the kids and Miss Peregrine as Bill Murray.

For some reason the movie changes Emma, the girl who dated Jake's grandpa and is thus attracted to him, from the girl who controls fire to the girl who floats unless she wears lead shoes.  I'm not sure why they made this change; maybe they thought the fire thing had been done too much already with Johnny Storm, Selma Blair in Hellboy, and Pyro in the X-Men movies.  But either way Jake and Emma become sort of a couple.

But the monsters that killed Jake grandpa's are soon coming for Jake and the peculiar children.  The monsters called "hollows" and their masters called "whites" (for their white eyes) feed on peculiars to try to regain their humanity.  They also want to kidnap Miss Peregrine to use her time abilities in an attempt to give them eternal life.  Jake, like his grandpa, is the only one who can see the monsters--his peculiar talent.

It's about this point that the book and movie really diverge.  In the book Jake and Emma spend some time together and go home to find the monsters have taken Miss Peregrine and another bird.  They gather up some other kids to track the monsters to a lighthouse, where they manage to free Miss Peregrine but not the other bird.  The monsters take off in a U-Boat while Jake, the children, and Miss Peregrine in bird form go in hot pursuit.  That's where the book ends, though I assume the chase is picked up in the next two books.

In the movie Jake goes back to town in the present and finds that the old man who told him about the bombing is dead.  He goes back to "the loop" but is followed by a tourist who reveals that he's a white--and also Jake's shrink.  (In the book the white was also Jake's bus driver in 8th grade and a couple of other people watching him.)  Jake takes the white to Miss Peregrine's where she volunteers to go with the white, turning into her bird form and letting him put her in a cage.  The children fight a hollow and then travel to another loop, this one in England in January 2016 on a boardwalk.  Using snow and cotton candy the children make the hollows visible and take them down before then using their powers on the whites to free Miss Peregrine.  The kids and Miss Peregrine return to the past, though they're no longer part of "the loop" and will live normally.

Kind of have to question whether the movie producers decided they were only going to adapt the first one and thus didn't want to end on a cliffhanger.  Which was probably pretty true since I don't think the movie did that well financially, though it can be hard to tell these days with foreign markets, Redbox rentals, digital downloads, and all that.

Maybe since I read the book first I actually liked it a lot better.  Much of the time when I compare a book or movie if the movie is similar enough to the book I say to just watch the movie since it's less time-consuming.  Since the movie is so different, especially in the last act, I actually think reading the book is better.  And actually it's probably better to read it in paperback or hardcover since there are a lot of old-timey photos included that really I couldn't appreciate all that well on the Kindle.  The writing is OK but there's maybe a little too much telling instead of showing and at least in the version I read a typo--"just deserts" instead of "just desserts."  But I think the book does a better job than the movie in setting up the background about Jake and his family and the island.  That all seems rushed in the movie, maybe so they could have the much longer ending.

I don't think the movie is bad, it's just not as good.  This seemed like the perfect project for Tim Burton, but like Charlie & the Chocolate Factory and Planet of the Apes he seems to phone this one in.  Miss Peregrine seemed like a perfect role for his wife Helena Bonham Carter but instead the part went to Eva Green (until the credits came up I honestly didn't realize this; I just assumed since Bonham Carter, like Johnny Depp, is in pretty much every Tim Burton movie she would naturally be in this), so maybe that's part of the reason the movie might be quirky but just seems lifeless.  And while I guess it's nice to have a more concrete ending, it is a significant change from the book.

Because You (Didn't) Demand It: Stuff I Watched

I thought of not doing these entries anymore since hardly anyone seems to care, but I still get a kick out of them and it's my blog so fuck it.

The LEGO Batman Movie:  A spin-off of The LEGO Movie, this pits Will Arnett's boastful, blustering LEGO Batman against all his familiar foes like the Joker, Bane, Riddler, etc. and also against Voldemort, King Kong, Godzilla, and the Wicked Witch of the West.  This is after the Joker releases all the worst of the worst from the Phantom Zone.  Like its predecessor, the movie has plenty of fun bits with kid and adult-oriented jokes.  There are a few things I didn't like.  Most of the Batman villains don't do a whole lot, getting maybe a line or two.  Not just lame ones like Egghead but iconic ones like Penguin, Catwoman, and Mr. Freeze barely get any time at all.  Also not sure why they made Barbara Gordon the commissioner instead of commissioner's daughter; Batman lusting after her is just kind of weird when you think of the comics/TV shows.  Since it's a kid's movie they had to soften mentions of Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson's parents dying; the latter they don't really say how they died.  A plot hole I wondered about:  the Phantom Zone is introduced with a news segment talking about Superman putting Zod in there...so why isn't Zod part of the bad guys who gets loose?  And why doesn't Superman go looking for his Phantom Zone Projector?  And why doesn't the Justice League show up when everything is going to hell in Gotham?  None of them have a smart phone or anything to alert them to a huge threat?  And if you cast Ralph Fiennes as Alfred, why have someone else do the voice for Voldemort, which was the character Fiennes portrayed in the live action movies?  I'm overthinking it I suppose. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Director Chris McKay cut his teeth on this sort of project for years on Adult Swim's Robot Chicken.  That show's co-creator Seth Green voices King Kong as well.)

American Pastoral:  This is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from Philip Roth.  After a clunky framing device at a class reunion with David Stathairn as the stand-in for Philip Roth, we begin the story of Seymour "Swede" Levov (Ewan McGregor), who seemed to have it all:  a beautiful former beauty queen wife (Jennifer Connelly) and a young daughter Merry (Dakota Fanning).  They live on a farm outside of Newark, New Jersey, where the Swede runs his father's glove factory.  Everything is pretty much going swimmingly (except Merry has a stutter) until the 60s come along.  There are race riots in Newark and Merry joins the anti-war movement.  When she blows up the local post office and goes on the lam, the Swede's idyllic life is destroyed.  Of course the Swede is a metaphor for American innocence, postwar.  The tragedy of the Swede is he's a guy who did all the things you were supposed to do after the war and it all went to hell on him.  He was a man betrayed by the times he lived in, promises made by the system that it couldn't keep.  As many of us have found out since then, the "American Dream" is just that--a Dream.  This was a well-made, well-acted movie so I'm not sure why this didn't seem to get any awards consideration last year. (4/5)  (Fun Fact:  There's a bit of irony in that it's American Pastoral and it's starring and directed by Ewan McGregor, a Scotsman.)

Captain Fantastic:  Viggo Mortensen stars as a dad who is raising his six kids in a remote compound.  They hunt and forage all their food, make their own clothes, and are taught literature, science, math, and so forth far beyond what kids their age know.  Then their mother kills herself in a hospital and her body is taken to New Mexico so road trip!  They pile into their converted school bus and get on the highway.  Naturally there's a lot of culture shock.  While the kids are book smart and have survival skills their social skills are fairly lacking.  The oldest boy meets a girl and proposes marriage like 2 hours later--awkward!  But while they might not have social skills, their way of life certainly has some advantages.  They're amazed by how fat people in the outside world are and the 8 year old kid knows more about history and politics than two normal teenagers.  Really it would be great if we could adapt some of that into raising all our children in America.  Maybe not the kids running around with knives and bows and eating the hearts of deer but the exercise and nutrition and book learning are far better than what most parents do for their kids, just feeding them processed slop and putting them in front of the TV.  There is I'm sure a happy middle ground.  The movie lags a little in the third act, but otherwise it was a great dramedy.  (4/5)

Spilt Milk:  This low budget indie comedy features no one you've ever heard of in the story of a grocery store manager who along with two other employees and a few customers is held up by his former best friend.  Since the safe won't open until  5am he keeps everyone captive and in the process they all start to bond, especially when some real hardcore thieves turn up.  It was a fun movie for the most part.  I had to wonder whether they filmed it in an actual grocery store if they like took over an abandoned space for the shoot.  Would have been annoying to have to stock all that stuff. (3/5)

Walter:  After his father dies, young Walter starts to believe he's the son of God with the ability to judge whether people will go to Heaven or Hell.  He works at a movie theater because clearly that's the best place, right?  But then he's haunted by a ghost who demands he be sent one way or the other.  The ghost also has a connection to Walter's past.  It was a fairly good dramedy for the most part. (2.5/5)

Nerve:  This was based on a novel I guess but really it's like an extra-long episode of Netflix's Black Mirror.  A girl's friend is in this online game called Nerve where people accept dares for money while "Watchers" pay to watch them.  The girl then starts to pplay to show up her friend and takes on increasingly dangerous dares with a strange boy.  Mayhem ensues.  It's OK but like I said you can just watch Black Mirror on Netflix and it's shorter. (2.5/5)

Popstar:  A boy band member goes solo and becomes an overly entitled ass until his career faces a downturn and he starts to wake up.  It's a fairly amusing look at the music industry. (2/5)

Doomed:  This documentary deals with the Roger Corman-produced Fantastic Four from the early 90s.  In those days Marvel movies were crap and basically sold to the lowest bidder, in this case Corman and a German.  They set out to make the movie for under a million bucks.  As you might expect, this meant cutting a lot of corners:  no name actors, no name director, and cheap effects.  But when it was done filming, the producers basically went silent.  The director, editor, and others continued working to finish the film and the actors went to ComicCon and other places to promote it.  They were supposed to have a big screening at the Mall of America when the plug got pulled.  Why that is remains a mystery.  Some say it was never really going to be made to start with, that it was just to hold on to the rights.  Marvel chief Avi Arad claims he paid to keep it from seeing the light of day.  It would be nice if this documentary could get to the truth, but it doesn't.  They really needed to go Michael Moore on Corman, Arad, and Stan Lee, but they settle for just raising the questions without answering them.  Naturally the film has seen the light of day through bootlegs; it just never got a real release.  Had it been released it's unlikely it would have been a huge hit and really since the first big studio version wasn't until 2005 they could have easily released this and then released the big studio version and no one would have cared.  The movie has actually gotten a lot more notoriety than it ever would have thanks to not releasing it, because people always want what they can't have. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The director kept a sign in list for actors who auditioned.  One was Mark Ruffalo, who almost 20 years later would become Bruce Banner in The Avengers.)

The Goods:  Jeremy Piven is a car salesman who takes a freelance gig to sell an entire lot of cars over a 4th of July weekend.  They do this through a variety of sleazy means.  It's fun though fairly amusing.  The cast also includes Ving Rhames, Will Farrell, Ed Helms, Ken Jeong, and TJ Miller in a small role.  (2.5/5)

23 Palms:  Mashup of David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino as in a weird small desert town a bunch of bad people are fighting over a McGuffin black bag.  I kind of tuned out of most of it. (2/5)

The Signal:  Three college kids try to track down a hacker and end up in the Nevada desert.  Then they wake up to find alien limbs and superpowers.  They're then hunted by government agents led by Laurence Fishburne, who basically reheats Morpheus from The Matrix.  The grim and gritty style reminded me of the 2015 Fantastic 4 reboot that came a year later.  That's not really good thing. (2/5)

A.C.O.D.:  Park & Recreation's Adam Scott stars as an Adult Child of Divorce whose parents made his life about as bad as it can be without actual physical abuse.  Now as his younger brother gets married, his parents are suddenly getting back together and he can't deal with it.  It has some funny moments but the end skips forward a year to a wedding for...someone.  All that happens is the father tells a rambling story about Portuguese whores.  So who was getting married? WTF, movie, throw me a fricking bone! (2/5) (Fun Fact:  I watched part of this in May 2015 when I went with my brother to Louisville, but until a couple weeks ago I hadn't watched the whole thing.)

Beyond Re-Animator:  This long-gestating sequel takes place in a prison (a prison in Spain IRL) about 15 years later.  The evil Dr. West is still futzing around with reanimating dead stuff and is helped by the prison's new doctor.  When a reporter who looked more like a cocktail waitress is killed in a riot, they reanimate her and a rat and some other people and it was all pretty boring.  (1/5)  (Fun Fact:  If Dr. West seems familiar (especially his voice) it's because Jeffrey Combs has played numerous characters in various Star Trek franchises like Weyoun the Vorta in DS9 and the Andorrian in Enterprise.)

Chopping Mall:  Imagine if Short Circuit happened in a mall and instead of being goofy "Johnny 5" went on a killing spree?  That's basically this movie, where security guard robots run amok after hours, murdering mall staff. The movie is only 76 minutes with credits and I think half of that is just screaming.  Pretty lame, forgettable horror movie.  Good thing we went back to just having pudgy losers or ghetto kids as our security guards. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  If this happened today there wouldn't be nearly as many places for the kids to draw weapons from as 60% of the stores in the mall would be empty.  The same for a Dawn of the Dead situation.)

Rampage: President Down:  From legendary schlock filmmaker Uwe Boll comes this movie about a guy who improbably kills the president, vice president, and secretary of defense with a sniper rifle from over a mile away.  But you don't actually see that so you have to take the word of some of the worst fake newscasts ever.  The killer is like a really militant Occupy Wall Street kind of guy living in a Unabomber-style shack.  As you'd expect from Boll, it's all pretty stupid, to the point he makes Michael Bay look like Woody Allen.  One of the lame reporters tries to interview an FBI agent with what looks like a duster.  It's like someone just went to the dollar store and bought a duster and painted it black and handed it to the actress for a microphone.  Couldn't they have found a toy one and spray painted it silver or something? The laziness doesn't stop there.  After the president and vice-president are killed the "nation affairs secretary" takes over.  What the fuck is "Nation Affairs?"  Apparently Boll couldn't use his phone to go on Wikipedia and look up the actual line of succession.  It was so stupid that I just quit. (0/5) (Fun Fact:  But I did agree with some of the things the killer guy was saying on his blog, like how parents naively hope their kids will have things better when most likely they won't.  Just the whole murdering people you don't agree with wasn't the best way to go about it.)

Bad Ass 2:  Bad Asses:  Danny Trejo and Danny Glover go on a rampage in LA to avenge...someone for...reasons.  Does it really matter?  It's just a dumb action movie in the Death Wish style only instead of Charles Brosnan you have Danny Trejo looking like Fidel Castro with a ponytail. (2/5)

Pod People:  This lame early 80s movie features a boy who finds an egg that hatches into a weird Alf-looking alien he names Trumpy (for Donald Trump?) whose identical twin meanwhile goes on a killing spree.  The awful effects and cringe-worthy acting are why it ended up on MST3K in 1991. (1/5)

Wizards of the Lost Kingdom:  This is part of the MST3K revival series on Netflix.  According to IMDB the lengthy intro to the movie uses footage from an entirely different movie, probably to save money.  The real movie is about a boy in a lavender leotard and tights who has magic powers and with the help of a drunken warrior and a Wampa-type thing that looks like it was made with white shag carpeting the kid takes on an evil wizard who looked like he could have been Oscar Isaac's father.  The fight scenes only needed the POW! and BLAM! cards to be on par with Batman '66.  It was pretty awful. (1/5)

What could be worse than that?  Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II!  Also on the MST3K revival series, there was a sequel of sorts.  None of the same characters are in it, though.  As the riffers suggest, they probably just took some lame fantasy movie and slapped a new title on it to take advantage of the first movie's massive popularity...sarcasm noted.  Anyway, an old Santa-looking guy has to train a bratty teen who's the most annoying Chosen One since Anakin in the Star Wars prequels.  Then there are some even worse choreographed fights against 3 wizards with the help of David Carradine.  The only good thing is this was so awful the series didn't become a trilogy. (1/5)

The Boy Who Cried Werewolf:  This was on the MeTV late night show Svengoolie, not MST3K or Rifftrax.  Anyway, it's a crappy werewolf movie where a guy gets bitten by a werewolf and then turns into one on a weekend up in the country with his kid and ex-wife.  Besides the acting and special effects, the worst part is there was this cult of annoying hippies and the fucking werewolf doesn't eat any of them!  Come on, it's not like they're real people; they're just obnoxious hippies!  No one will miss them!  In fact eating them is for the public good.  What kind of shitty horror movie wastes the opportunity to slaughter perfectly good hippies?  (0/5)

At the Earth's Core:  Another one from the MST3K revival.  Peter Cushing (Tarkin from Star Wars and zombie Tarkin in Rogue One) and a former student build a giant drill called the Iron Mole (I am Iron Mole duh duh duh duh duh...) and end up underground where there are people (who know English--maybe they had the same tutor as the Amazons in Wonder Woman) being enslaved by pig-like dudes who are controlled by rubber standing pteradon things and have to overthrow them.  Pretty cheesy effects and lame acting.  I really have no idea how faithful it is to the Edgar Rice Burroughs story it's based on.  Did that come before or after Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth?  It is I think largely the same premise.  Hurm. (1/5)  (Fun Fact:  This came out in 1976, the year before Star Wars.)

Future Force:  In the future of 1991, the police have been replaced with a bunch of slimy bounty hunters.  One of these is played by David Carradine, who despite also being a producer gives negative a trillion fucks about anything that's going on.  There's a hilarious moment during a low speed chase in LA when the bad guys go off a cliff.  A cliff in Los Angeles.  WTF?!  Also David Carradine has this Power Glove thing that runs on a remote...a remote with two buttons; despite that he keeps hitting the same button, the glove does different stuff.  Just awful all the way around. (1/5)

Megaforce:  Ironically (or not) this came out in 1982 at about the same time as Hasbro was releasing its new line of GI JOE toys.  Megaforce was basically a cut-rate GI JOE team with special vehicles and members from different nations with code names, though Megaforce has far more sparkling gold jumpsuits and a way lamer enemy who doesn't have a shiny facemask or even a cool name.  Basically the plot revolves around Megaforce trying to capture some general guy for...reasons so they invade his country by landing a bunch of armed motorcycles and go karts.  But then the UN or whoever the old British guy from Knight Rider represents gets cold feet and abandons Megaforce.  So then like Dunkirk their great victory is escaping with their lives, though not with their equipment, so the bad guy not only survives, he also has a bunch of neat new motorcycles and go karts.  Yet the head of Megaforce still thinks this was a big win.  As you can guess the plot is pretty stupid, the vehicles lame, and costumes lamer still.  The bald lady from Star Trek the Motion Picture is in this but contributes nothing to the final battle so I have no idea why she was even in the story other than the story isn't very good. (1/5) (Fun Fact:  I watched the Rifftrax version on Amazon but I think there was also an MST3K version back in the day, though it's not on Netflix.)

Alien Outlaws:  This incoherent, utterly inept production has aliens travel across the galaxy to land on Earth and steal some antique revolvers to randomly shoot people and vandalize stuff until a lady in a Pocahontas getup stops them.  Because all of that makes sense, right?  But then again no. (1/5)

To Catch a Yeti:  An utterly obnoxious early 90s kids movie where a guy inadvertently smuggles a "yeti" from Nepal to his home in upstate New York.  The weird little Furby-looking thing pals around with the guy's daughter while being chased by Meat Loaf in a terrible fur coat.  Bad effects, annoying characters, and a barely coherent plot make this pretty unwatchable except for mockery. (1/5)

Attack From Space:  This crappy 60s Japanese sci-fi movie features "Starman" trying to stop "Sapphirians" and their "Death Star."  Two of those terms would later be used in other, better properties. (1/5)

Buffalo Rider:  This is like a bad nature documentary only fiction.  It spends the first 10 minutes lecturing on the history of the buffalo hunting industry.  Then we finally get to a guy who finds a wounded buffalo, nurses it to health, and decides that he's going to ride it around for...reasons.  Riding a buffalo is pretty ridiculous as the animal doesn't steer all that well.  Another 10 minutes of the movie are spent on the adventures of a raccoon named Bandit as she escapes from a cougar and keeps her two sons out of trouble.  What did this have to do with anything?  Absolutely nothing!  Eventually the buffalo rider finds a murdered couple and takes their baby to its aunt and then kills the killers.  Most of it is narrated by some Waylon Jennings wanna-be while the shots are so ineptly set up and the acting poorer than health class videos. (1/5)

Death Promise:  This lame mid-70s karate movie is about a guy whose father is killed by the henchmen of a slum lord.  So he goes to train with some guy and then comes back for vengeance, though his friend (who didn't train with any master) probably does as much if not more.  The dumbest thing is OK he kills all these slumlords, but in the end he's still going to lose his home most likely.  I mean he didn't force the bad guys to sign the building's deed over to him so either some relative of the slum lords will own it or the government and either way they probably aren't going to keep a mostly-vacant tenement around when they could bulldoze it for something more profitable.  What a useless quest for vengeance!  That's probably more thought than the "writer" and "director" put into it. (1/5)

Reefer Madness:  I think this might have been a remake not the original.  It was in color at least.  Anyway, smoking dope leads a kid to murder and otherwise ruining his life.  It's really, really not subtle at all.  Much of it is a lame court setting and some humorless jerk lecturing people at a town council meeting.  This is after the movie opens with a crawl that goes on for like 5 minutes.  (1/5)

Invasion USA:  One of Golan-Globus's early attempts to enter American cinema, Soviet-backed terrorists invade Miami and go around blowing up houses with a rocket launcher that has an inexhaustible supply of rockets, shoot people at random, and attempt to blow up a mall.  But they never counted on alligator-wrestling Chuck Norris.  Maybe Trump should just name Chuck Norris head of Homeland Security?  It was pretty dumb even for an action movie.  (1/5)

The Stoned Age:  This low-budget 1994 movie features two teenage boys into heavy metal, booze, pot, and chicks.  They're like a more real and unpleasant Beavis and Butthead.  Though this movie is about as funny as the earliest episodes of that show, which mostly focused on the boys terrorizing their neighbors and wildlife, which is to say it wasn't very funny at all. (1/5)

Black Mirror: The Twilight Zone for the 21st Century

People had been telling me to watch Netflix's Black Mirror.  My brother really liked it and I think Offutt liked it too.  I finally got around to it and was mostly impressed.  Like the title says, it's The Twilight Zone (or Outer Limits) for the 21st Century.

Like those shows it's an anthology series so each episode is a different story with different characters, mostly focusing on how technology screws up our lives.  Like The Outer Limits or 4th season of The Twilight Zone the stories are about 45-60 minutes long.

I'm going to do something different and bore the shit out of anyone who actually reads this by talking in brief about all 13 episodes.  Here we go!

The first episode is called "The National Anthem" and has an interesting premise:  a "terrorist" is holding a popular duchess hostage and will kill her at 4pm unless...wait for it...the UK's prime minister fucks a pig on live television.  Yeah, they'll kill her not for money or freeing prisoners or anything like that but for something really gross and embarrassing.

The first question is:  would you fuck a pig to save a celebrity's life?  I suppose it'd depend on the celebrity.  If it were Kim Kardashian, no thank you.  Hmmm, now I have to make a list of celebrities that are pig-fuckable.

The second question is:  would you watch?  The UK government makes it a crime to record or distribute the event, but of course plenty of people are going to do that anyway.  They even have a long air horn-type sound before the broadcast to try to shoo people away.  Of course that doesn't work.  People love trash TV and your state leader fucking a pig is pretty much the ultimate incarnation of that--which is what the terrorist was hoping for.  Me, I think I might watch for a few second and then turn the TV off.

Anyway, even if the concept seems kind of silly, it is thought-provoking.  As far as pilots go it was really good.  And really if you think that was far-fetched the British prime minister at the time of the episode's airing reportedly did fuck a pig as a college frat prank.  Why didn't anyone think to videotape it?

The second episode "15 Million Merits" is by far my favorite episode of the first two seasons and probably second favorite overall.  In a future dystopian world, people live in tiny cubes covered in video screens, where they're subjected to ads almost constantly.  Their jobs are to pedal bikes while watching more screens.  For all the time they ride they get "merits" which is like mining Bitcoins.  The title comes from the amount of merits needed to buy a ticket to audition for an America's Got Talent-type show.

The guy at the center of the story has 15 million merits, which allows him to live in almost luxury.  He can buy the food he wants from the vending machines and skip ads if he wants.  Then he hears a brunette singing in the toilet and convinces her to take his 15 million merits to try out for the show.  She does so and he goes to the audition with her.  The judges are like parodies of the original American Idol judges except the Randy Jackson one is a pimp with his own porno network.  While the girl's singing is good, they say, it's not good enough to win, but she's pretty enough to get a job on the porno network.

When she agrees to that, her would-be boyfriend is enraged and hatches a plan for revenge.  But like pretty much every other episode of this show, things don't go as planned.  The show's judges quell his insurrection with a bribe:  his own show that he'll be handsomely paid for.  In other words, he sells out while the girl is still stuck doing pornos.

What I really liked was how well the episode conveyed the claustrophobia of this world.  The room the guy lives in is literally a mattress and a bunch of video screens.  Even prisons have windows.  I think one day of that and I'd start cracking up.  But then fat guys like me end up cleaning floors or going on an embarrassing game show.  Anyway, it really reminded me of Ready Player One where the main character infiltrates this big gaming company that basically uses indentured servants to mine data.  This was pretty much the same thing.  I'm just not sure what the bikes were for; generating electricity maybe?  Like I said though it was great.

The last episode of the first season was kind of boring.  "A History of You" stars the guy who played Dr. Doom in the lame Fantastic Four reboot.  Basically in this world everyone has these ocular implants that let you store all your memories from birth.  He becomes obsessed with his wife and some friend of hers so he starts playing memories over and over and making her play memories and then going to the guy's house.  Like I said it wasn't all that interesting.  The concept was neat but the whole overly jealous husband thing has been done before.

The second season has 4 episodes, starting with "Be Right Back" starring Hayley Atwell of Captain America/Agent Carter and that ginger guy from Ex Machina and Force Awakens.  Basically ginger guy dies and Hayley Atwell brings him back in a manner of speaking first as a phone app and then an actual body.

Except the android or whatever you'd call it is not exactly like the genuine article.  As time goes by, the more obvious the flaws become.  It was a pretty good episode.  The concept isn't all that unique, but it was done well.

The next episode "White Bear" has a woman with no memory being stalked by a dude in a ski mask, another dude with a club, and a woman with an electric bread knife.  Almost all the people she encounters just stand by taking pictures with their phones.  She meets a woman and man who are also being hunted.  The man is soon "killed" by the two women head south to blow up a TV station that's supposedly controlling everyone's minds.

The twist is actually all of this is sort of a show.  It turns out the woman with no memory was an accomplice to the murder of a little girl.  She taped the girl being killed on her phone and so the UK justice system created this elaborate game where every day she wakes up with no memory and everyone records her as she's being stalked and potentially killed.  The idea being to give her a taste of her own medicine and for the public it's a bit of fun.

It actually reminded me of a story I wrote in 2004 called Tartarus where an assassin would relive the murder of his family every day.  No matter what he tried, they would always die one way or another.  This episode was kind of like that mixed with The Running Man.  I liked the episode for the most part, though not really in my favorites.

The next episode was kind of prescient for the 2016 election.  On a news parody show there's a computer generated cartoon bear named Waldo who starts out mocking a politician.  When it becomes a bit of a scandal, Waldo ends up running against the politician and a female politician whom Waldo's controller falls for.  The public becomes so enamored with the foul-mouthed Waldo that he actually gets 2nd place.

His controller, though, starts to feel guilty and tries to convince the public not to cynically vote for the "None of the Above" candidate because that's not really going to change anything for the better.  We're seeing now where voting for someone unqualified because he "speaks his mind" is getting us.  Like in the US or UK in 2016 no one listens and so in a flashforward Waldo's (now former) controller is homeless while Waldo has become the symbolic head of a fascist government.  It's a good reminder that as citizens we should take the voting process seriously.  It might be funny to vote for Papa Smurf or Harambe or Jill Stein but it can have dangerous consequences.

So that was a good episode and pretty entertaining too.

The last episode for Season 2 "White Christmas" ostensibly features two guys in a station in the Arctic or Antarctic or whatever.  One guy is Jon Hamm and the other is a British guy.  Jon Hamm convinces the British guy to sit down and have a Christmas dinner with him.  He then relates how he used to be the leader of a club where they would coach a nerd on picking up women by video remote.  Except one rendezvous went horribly wrong.  And then he talks about his job, which was kind of weird.  Basically you could pay to have a digital version of your brain (a "cookie") put in a little egg-looking thing to work like an Amazon Echo or Google Home.  So his job was to train the cookies to stop freaking out about being trapped in an egg and do their job of maintaining the house.  Which seems a bit unnecessary, but it was kind of a plot device that pays off later in the episode.

Finally the British guy talks about how his wife got pregnant but didn't want the baby.  He got mad at her and she walked out.  Not only did she leave, she "blocked him" so his ocular implant thing would only show her as a blur and muffle any sound.  Eventually he found out she had a baby but it too was blocked from him.  Only when she died in a train crash could he see the child and find out he's...not the father!  Because the kid was Asian and he and his ex-wife were both white.  So then he realizes his ex-wife was cheating on him with this Asian guy they were friends with.  D'OH!

The British guy goes nuts and winds up killing the kid's grandpa and leaving her in the house during a snowstorm.  Guess what happens to her?  Yeah, not good.

The twist then is all this isn't really happening in real time.  The British guy is just a "cookie" not the real guy and Jon Hamm was just coaxing him into a confession.  Then the double twist, for the club Jon Hamm was leading and the murder he didn't report they put him on a sex offender list that blocks everyone from his sight--and him from them.  I'm not sure how you're supposed to function then if you can't see or talk to anyone.  How would you buy food?  And it seemed like an unnecessary dick move by the cops since he helped them get the confession.  Shouldn't he get immunity for that?

Something interesting was the various Easter eggs in the episode.  The ocular devices were like the ones from "A History of You."  One of the screen names for the guys in Jon Hamm's club is "I am Waldo" like the bear in the previous episode.  A pregnancy test is the same model Hayley Atwell used in the first episode of the season.  At a karaoke bar the British guy's wife sings the song the girl sung on the talent show in "15 Million Merits."  It was kind of fun how they tied things together in a way.  It was a good episode, though like I said it kind of ended on an unnecessary down note.

My big complaint going into the third season was that all of these stories are kind of downers.  I know it's Black Mirror, but even The Twilight Zone had some fun and schmaltzy episodes to mix it up a little.

The first episode of the third season, "Nosedive," kind of remedies this.  It's about a world where everyone is constantly being rated 1-5 stars by everyone else.  The higher your rating, the more things open up for you while if you have less than 3 stars you're a bottom-feeder.

Bryce Dallas Howard is on 4.2 stars by consistently being a huge phony--along with most everyone else.  But to get an awesome new condo she really needs a 4.5 star rating.  Her chance to boost her rating comes when an old "friend" who has a higher rating is getting married and invites her to be the maid of honor.

But when her flight is cancelled, she begins a quixotic quest to reach the wedding that soon becomes like a suicide mission.  She drops a couple of f-bombs and the airport security drops her rating a whole star and any down votes will be doubled for 24 hours.  Because of that she can only rent a shitty Czech car that runs out of power and doesn't have the right adapter to charge.  She gets picked up by a trucker who only has a 1.4 rating because she stopped giving a fuck when her husband died of cancer because his rating was slightly too low for treatment.

When the trucker drops her off Bryce Dallas Howard hitches a ride with a bunch of cosplayers of a Star Trek-like show, but after getting thrown off for admitting she's never seen the show, she borrows someone's ATV to ride the rest of the way to the wedding, which is in progress.  By the time she gets there, she's dirty, drunk, and has like a 1-star rating.  She breaks in to make her speech, which is pretty hilarious.  She ends up in a jail cell, where she and the guy across from her start to engage in insult comedy because neither has a rating anymore so what the hell.

This was probably the lightest episode, which after bingeing the other two seasons was a little overdue.  In a world like that I'm sure I'd have a 0 rating after about a day.  Maybe at some point though popularity will become our currency.  What a terrifying prospect because even if you are popular, maintaining that popularity is a real bitch.

The second episode of the season, "Playtest" gets into some Inception-type ground.  A guy backpacking around the world runs out of money and so is convinced to take a job testing some video game.  It's supposed to be some kind of virtual reality thing but soon things go off the rails.

Then like a better version of Inception you wonder what's real.  It goes through one ending and then another ending and then another ending before we finally have the real ending.  It got to be a little annoying then as you wait for the real ending.  Otherwise it was a decent episode, though not the best.

The third episode, "Shut Up and Dance" is kind of similar in that someone is being used for a game.  In this case a young guy's sister steals his computer and gets it locked up with a virus.  He downloads some anti-malware program but it starts spying on him through the computer's camera, including when he jerks off.

Then they threaten to reveal the video to everyone he knows if he doesn't do what they want.  First they have him ride to a parking garage and get a cake from someone.  Then he has to go to a motel to give the cake to Bron from Game of Thrones.  Together they have to get the keys from a car and drive to a bank, where the kid has to use a gun hidden in the cake to rob the bank.  And then take the money somewhere.  Except then he has to fight some guy to the death while a drone records everything.

And...of course they screw everyone over and post all the blackmail anyway.  I guess they were just doing it for kicks.  Or maybe page views or something.  It never really says who's doing it or why.

It says the reason the young guy was so scared was that he was looking at kids.  They never really specify so I'm not sure how disgusted I'm supposed to be about it.  I mean looking at a "kid" of 16 or 17 is different from 5 or 6, especially since the guy was probably late teens or early 20s.  Like I said, I'm not sure exactly how disgusted I should be.  A little better indication would have helped.

The concept itself isn't very original.  There was a Richard Matheson story and movie of it called "The Box" where a mysterious box shows up on a couple's door and if they push the button in the box they get a million dollars--and some random person dies.  There was also a show on Crackle called Chosen where some random person would receive a gun and picture in the mail and have to kill that person or they'd become a target..  And movies like Speed and Die Hard With a Vengeance have a bad guy playing sadistic games like this with people.   So it's a decent episode but not extremely clever.

The fourth episode, "San Jupinero" is a deviation in that it's a love story.  In "1987" a gawky redhead named Yorkie goes to the eponymous town.  She meets a young black girl named Kelly.  And eventually they make out and then go to bed together--though of course they don't show much because except for language this show is pretty PG-13.  A week later Yorkie is looking for Kelly but she's disappeared.

You start wondering what the hook is and then she goes to this kind of heavy metal bar called the Quagmire and another friend of Kelly's says to look for her in 1996 or 2002.  Oh, so they're time travelers?  Is that the deal?  Before the time skips weren't hugely noticeable unless you're a music and TV historian to get all the references but when it shows a poster of Scream and play Alanis Morrissette and stuff you know it's definitely not 1987.  In "2002" Yorkie finally finds Kelly again.

So now we get to the actual deal:  the town is kind of like a holodeck.  Old people go into it for a few hours once a week to kind of relive their youth.  Which for Yorkie is good because in real life she was crippled from age 21--about the age she is in the holodeck.  When people die, their minds are uploaded into the simulation forever if they want.  Which Yorkie does.  Then it becomes: will Kelly join her?

At this point I'm thinking, "Come on, just let them have a happy ending.  Don't fucking ruin it!"  And of course they make you wait until the credits to find out.  It was a really well-done episode that really sold the love story.  I was glad they didn't piss all over it with some downer twist ending.  Sometimes Happily Ever After is all you want.

BTW, the girl playing Yorkie would make a great Emma Earl in a Tales of the Scarlet Knight movie.  I'm just saying.  Someone get her agent on the phone!

The next episode, "Men Against Fire" really could have been called "Rose Colored Glasses" since that's kind of the concept.  A new recruit and his platoon are in Denmark to hunt "roaches" so your first thought is giant bugs like Starship Troopers.  But soon you realize the roaches are people.  To the soldiers they look like zombies more or less. When the new recruit gets a glitch in his ocular implant (yes we're going back to that well, which is kind of disappointing) he realizes that they aren't zombies; they're actual people.

A psycho member of his platoon takes him captive, where he meets with Doug from House of Cards, who explains to him that the implant makes the enemy look like monsters so the soldiers won't have a problem killing them.  It also censors sounds and even smells to avoid traumatizing the soldiers.  The goal is a sort of eugenics, killing people whose DNA is deemed "inferior" so future generations will be "pure."

He's presented with two options:  either let them fix the implant or they'll use it to show him the true horror of the "roaches" he killed.  So he gives in.  Then later he goes home and sees an idyllic scene with a beautiful woman when really it's an empty wreck.

It was an OK episode, but again not the greatest.

The last episode "Hated in the Nation" was unnecessarily expanded to 90 minutes.  It seemed to drag a little because of that.  It's kind of like a super-sized episode of The X-Files more than anything.  There's a veteran detective (Kelly MacDonald of Brave and No Country for Old Men who uses her native Scottish accent) and her new partner who's a computer nerd who used to work in forensics.

Basically a columnist who mocked a handicapped woman is found dead, but that's only the beginning.  The next day a rapper who mocked a little fan is also killed.  The common thread is they both had a social media hashtag #Deathto and their name that went viral.  The murder weapon turns out to be mechanical bees that are being used to replace real bees for pollinating plants.

As they try to find out who's controlling the bees, they take the next potential victim to a "safehouse" in the country--because there are totally no bees in the country, right?  Eventually the bees get to her.  Working with the company who makes the bees they track down a former employee whose girlfriend was targeted on social media.  So this is his revenge.

Except that's not all he has planned.  When they try to shut down the bees, he has them attack everyone who played the hashtag game.  Which is millions of people probably.  In the end the former forensics nerd goes rogue and tracks down the hacker, though they don't tell you if she kills him or anything.  It was OK but really, it was all just some former employee out for revenge?  That's pretty cliche.  I thought the bees were becoming sentient or something.  Also kind of cliche I suppose.

Like the very first episode, this one poses the question, Would you play the hashtag game?  Even if you knew it could potentially kill someone in real life?  I think a lot of us would because it's all just fun and games--until it comes around back on you.  Social media can do some good things, but it can also be used for petty squabbles and bullying that drive real people to attempt suicide.  I guess in a way then it was like an antibullying PSA.  Only 90 minutes long.

Not a great finish for an otherwise great show.  That's all there is--for now.  If you're still reading then thanks and sorry to spoil it for you.  (OK, I'm not really sorry.)

Stuff I Watched Returns!

It's all the stuff I watched since the last time, which was way back on March 24th.

Live By Night:  Ben Affleck stars in, wrote, produced, and directed this gangster movie.  Affleck is a stick-up man who gets put in jail but thanks to his cop father (Brendan Gleeson) is out in three years.  He takes a job for an Italian gangster to take over the rum racket in Tampa.  There he meets Zoe Saldana and they fall in love but the police chief's wayward daughter (Elle Fanning) makes things difficult by making the shut down of a proposed casino a big religious thing.  The film feels overly long, sagging in the middle and lingering too long at the end.  There's not really much you haven't already seen in The Godfather, The Untouchables, so on and so forth.  It's probably just as well that Affleck stepped aside from directing his Batman solo movie because you can see what happens when one guy is wearing too many hats. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Leonardo DiCaprio also produced the movie though he doesn't appear in it.)

The Founder:  Michael Keaton stars as Ray Kroc, the man who didn't create McDonald's but turned it into a household name.  He starts as a struggling milkshake machine salesman.  When McDonald's orders a bunch of the machines, he goes to San Bernadino to find people queued up for a block.  Dick and Mac McDonald show off their innovating process for serving burgers in 30 seconds or less.  Kroc then franchises McDonald's restaurants around the country, starting in his native Midwest, but the punitive contract he signed with the McDonald brothers makes it hard for him to turn a profit, until a lawyer gives him the idea to buy the land for the restaurants and lease it to franchisees.  It starts off as pretty light drama and then gets darker as he turns on the McDonald brothers and his wife, but Michael Keaton manages to keep the character likable even as he's being a total asshole.  Like most biopics I'm sure there's plenty of poetic license, but probably not as much as an Aaron Sorkin screenplay.  The funniest line of the movie is when Dick McDonald (Nick Offerman) says in response to Kroc wanting Coke to sponsor menu boards, "McDonald's isn't about crass commercialism."  I assume that was written for its irony.  (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Jeremy Renner produced the movie though he doesn't appear in it.)

Allied:  It starts off like a riff on Casablanca as Brad Pitt parachutes into French Morocco in 1942 and meets up with a member of the French Resistance (Marion Cottillon) who poses as his wife.  They get close as they set up an operation to assassinate the German ambassador.  After that operation they get married for real and go to England, where she gives birth to their daughter during an air raid in London.  But as D-Day approaches, Allied Command believes Brad Pitt's wife might be a German agent and want him to help smoke her out, but he's more interested in trying to prove her innocence.  Overall it's well-made and well-acted and the end wasn't too obvious.  Though that the end largely hinged on an airplane not starting like a car in a bad horror movie was kind of annoying.  (3/5)  (Fun Fact:  This was directed by Robert Zemeckis of Back to the Future and Forrest Gump fame.  He also directed Brad Pitt's second ex-wife in Beowulf.)

Nocturnal Animals:  I ended up watching this twice because I forgot the Redbox disc at home and so if I were going to pay for 2 days I might as well watch it twice.  That was probably for the best as it helped to straighten things out because there's a movie within the movie and then flashbacks mixed in so you kinda need to pay attention to things.  Basically in grad school Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal got married but then got divorced a short time later when she ragged on his writing and aborted his child before running off with Armie Hammer.  20 years later Jake Gyllenhaal mails her a manuscript he's written.  This is the movie-in-the-movie where Jake Gyllenhaal plays a father whose wife and daughter are taken by some hoods on a West Texas highway and then later raped and murdered.  Michael Shannon is the cop who helps him track down those responsible.  Back in reality, Amy Adams is kind of freaked out by the book but she arranges to meet Jake Gyllenhaal, except he blows her off.  The End.  So yeah once you unravel the plot it's not all that great.  The Amy Adams parts tend to move at a glacial pace.  The movie starts by showing all these grotesquely overweight women dancing naked or in lurid poses; it turns out that they're installations for some art show, but it is just the worst way to start a movie.  Makes me glad I didn't watch this in the theater where I didn't have a fast forward button. (3/5)  (Fun Fact:  In the movie-in-the-movie the Amy Adams part is played by Isla Fisher, which makes sense since I always mix them up.)

Masterminds:  This is "based on a true story" but I assume very loosely based.  It's directed by the director of Napoleon Dynamite so it's not exactly a crime drama.  It's mostly a slapstick comedy about a dumb guy in North Carolina who works for Loomis Fargo in 1997 and steals $17 million from their armored truck warehouse.  Then he goes on the run in Mexico while the "mastermind" of the scheme lives high on the hog back in Carolina.  There are some funny parts but it drags a little after the robbery.  Zach Galifinakis...or however you spell it--the guy from The Hangover--is the robber and Owen Wilson the "mastermind" but when they show the photos of the real life guys they really should have switched roles.  The cast also includes all of the female Ghostbusters except Melissa McCarthy. Jason Sudekis plays a hitman who is sent to kill the Hangover guy but doesn't because they share the same name--except the Hangover guy's I thought was just an alias. (2.5/5)  (Fun Fact:  Owen Wilson's wife in the movie is played by "The Waitress" from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  Her character actually gets a name in the movie.)

Legion:  I never really read the comic books this show is very loosely based off of, though I do know Legion is the son of Charles Xavier, the leader of the good mutants in the X-Men movies.  He's never mentioned by name, nor do they talk about anything in those movies, though they do make some references to his father that definitely sound like Professor X.  Anyway, David Haller hears voices and so he's in a mental hospital for schizophrenia, but really he's a powerful telepath like his father.  Except there's a weird entity called the "Shadow King"  latching onto him, trying to control him.  He's taken in by a place called Summerland where they try to teach him to use his powers.  Along with him is a woman named Sydney who has the power to temporarily swap bodies with people; David escapes the mental hospital when she touches him and he becomes her for a little while.  There are also bad guys known as Division 3 trying to kill them.  There's a lot of trippy stuff.  I was kind of annoyed when for two episodes near the end everyone was in the mental hospital being told nothing was real because I'd just watched the same thing in Ash vs Evil Dead Season 2 a few days earlier and remembered that same thing on DS9 in the 90s.  The cookie scene in the last episode sets up a mystery going into season 2.  Overall it was an interesting show.  It'd be good if they tied it more to the X-Men universe.  Maybe when they get some other shows they can start doing like the CW and crossing them over. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Dan Stevens plays the main character and his voice always sounds like Hugh Laurie's as Dr. House.  If I closed my eyes and you played clips of both I doubt I could tell them apart.)

Ash vs Evil Dead Season 2:  I watched the first season of this show last year during Comcast's Watchathon and so this year I watched the second season during the Watchathon week.  It was maybe a little improvement over Season 1.  At the end of that season Ash (Bruce Campbell) left the evil Necronomicon in the hands of Ruby (Lucy Lawless) and retired to Jacksonville to hang out and drink with his two younger buddies Kelly and Pablo.  But eventually some of Ruby's minions turn on her and she needs Ash's help, which draws him back to his hometown in "Michigan" (aka New Zealand, because they're totally the same, except for the mountains, ocean, hobbits, etc...) where he meets some old friends and his dad, played by Lee Majors.  It's pretty good.  Basically it maintains the Evil Dead schtick of mixing a lot of violence and gore with slapstick humor.  For fans there are also a lot of Easter eggs, like going back to the house from the first two movies and the appearance of Ted Raimi as Ash's buddy Chet; Ted Raimi is the brother of Evil Dead creator Sam Raimi and like Bruce Campbell usually shows up in Sam Raimi's movies like Darkman, the three Spider-Man movies, etc.  They even make a few references to Army of Darkness, the third movie they didn't really seem to mention in Season 1.  For non-fans like me it's pretty good, but like the movies can get tiresome.  The chainsaw duel near the end was pretty neat, though.  (2.5/5)

Superstore Season 2:  I watched the first season on Hulu last year and thought it was OK.  The second season I watched during Comcast's Watchathon was also OK.  It's still not as good as Parks & Recreation or Community but it's not terrible either.  I still think the mistake they make is having too much of the comedy driven by the employees instead of the customers.  That's fine for an office setting but in a retail setting there are so many weirdos out there.  I mean have you ever gone to Wal-Mart?  None of the characters really stands out all that much and I really wish they'd get a better boss character, someone who could be as good as Ron Swanson or Michael from The Office.  Still at least it's better than the laugh track dreck over on CBS. (2.5/5)

Super Mansion Season 2:  This stop motion superhero series from the creative team of Robot Chicken first aired on Crackle back in 2015 and then later on Cartoon Network.  The second season began airing this year and is a step up.  The plotting is tighter and more focused.  There are some big reveals, epic battles, and new characters to spice things up.  Most of the season revolves around Titanium Rex (voiced by Bryan Cranston) and an invasion of people from his home of Subtopia deep within the Earth.  It becomes kind of like Superman II or Man of Steel then as he and the League of Freedom have to take on a bunch of superpowered beings.  It's just a shame there are only 10 episodes. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Community's Yvette Nicole Brown joined the cast in Season 2 as Portia Jones, an Oprah-like talk show host who also could become the goddess Zenith...who pretty much disappeared halfway through the season.  The rest of the season Zenith was unable to come out because of "trouble in the god's realm" which was kind of lame.)

The Unusuals:  This sounds like the title for a superhero show but it's actually a cop show that's kind of like a mix of gritty procedural like Law & Order or NYPD Blue and a cop comedy like Brooklyn 9-9 or Angie Tribeca.  It stars a pre-Hurt Locker Jeremy Renner as a detective who gets a new partner when his old one is murdered.  The new partner (Amber Tamblyn) is a rich, reformed party girl who became a cop.  Another cop is suffering from a brain tumor and his partner wears a bulletproof vest all the time because he's deathly afraid he'll die at 42 like his father and grandfather.  It's kind of an interesting show even as it mixes tone. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  In the second episode a bank robber is played by a young Miles Teller of Whiplash and Fant4stic.  The creator of this show also created FX's Legion)

Action:  This Fox series from 1999-2000 was ahead of its time for network TV.  There was plenty of bad language and sex with no laugh track like most comedies of the time.  Jay Mohr starred as movie producer Peter Dragon, whose latest big-budget movie flops.  Facing becoming a has-been, he has to make his next project work.  Then he meets a hooker who used to be a child star (Illeana Douglass, who I often confuse with Allison Janney) who helps him find the perfect script.  But that's about the only thing that goes right.  From there it's a series of disasters with a star who's a struggling addict and another who has body issues, a neurotic writer, and a director who dies.  Watching this would have been better if Crackle hadn't mixed up the order of the episodes.  This is the kind of series where you need to watch them in order to really understand what's going on.  Fox not surprisingly cancelled the show after 8 episodes.  As sort of a screw you to the audience they ended with Peter "dying" of a heart attack so viewers thought that's how the series actually ended.  They dumped the remaining 5 on FX later.  Anyway, some of the references are dated now, but it's otherwise a good show. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Originally this was going to be on HBO but Fox outbid them.  In hindsight HBO probably would have been a better home for it as they could have really gone all-out and they would have had less pressure ratings-wise than a major network.)

Mystery Science Theater 3000 The Return:  This Kickstartered Netflix series is a reboot of the old 80s/90s series.  It's basically a guy and mostly two robots making fun of a bad old movie.  The plot device is that a mad scientist (the daughter of the original mad scientist) is trying to continue her father's work on an unsuspecting spaceship pilot.  The effects are suitably cheesy.  Like any of the old series or Rifftrax or anything similar some jokes hit and some miss.  There are more hits than misses I'd say.  The first episode features a really cheesy Danish kaiju movie called "Reptilicus."  The monster is obviously a model and a part where he eats a guy looks like it was done with a cartoon.  There are about 20 episodes, which at 90 minutes apiece make bingeing a bit of a chore. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Original creator Joel Hodgson produced and co-directed the first episode.)

Powerless:  I watched the pilot of this and wasn't really very impressed.  It's supposed to be an office comedy set in the DC Universe.  Of course no major characters appear, but God knows they mentioned Bruce Wayne enough.  Which like in Supergirl where they kept mentioning "her cousin" it gets to be irritating because you know Ben Affleck isn't going to appear so unless they set it in a parallel universe and hire someone else they're just going to keep mentioning him without showing him.  None of the characters shown really seemed all that interesting and Vanessa Hudgens especially wasn't very good as the perky would-be Leslie Knope of the office.  Pilots can be pretty shaky, so maybe it'll come together later, but I don't really feel like finding out. (1/5)

The Road Warrior:  I think now I finally watched all of the Mad Max movies, though none of them really impressed me.  The plot for this one is pretty much the same as the two movies that came after it.  Max gets involved with a group of people and winds up helping them escape from a bad guy to go start life anew.  In this case he hooks up a big rig to a tank of fuel so a group of people can escape from "Humungus" (who looked like a bare-chested Jason Voorheis) and his minions.  There's a lot of car chases and not much dialogue, which is I guess what you expect.  Meh. (2/5)

The Man With X Ray Eyes:  This 60s Roger Corman film follows a pretty familiar formula:  scientist experiments on himself and things go to shit.  In this case the guy invents eye drops that let him see in other spectrums.  Somehow he kills his partner and has to go on the lam in a sideshow run by Don Rickles.  When Don Rickles is going to rat on him, though, he decides to go to Vegas and use his powers to cheat at cards.  Except he makes it painfully obvious he's cheating and so he gets run out of there, chased by cops, and ends up in a revival where his eyes explode or something.  Better effects and less cliche storytelling would have made this better but you can say that Corman is at least usually competent. (2/5)

Novocaine:  Steve Martin stars in this dark comedy about a dentist who gets involved with a drug addict and then is framed for murder by his assistant.  I didn't pay all that attention to most of it.  The end hinges upon Martin ripping out all the teeth in his mouth and leaving them in his dead brother's mouth before burning the place down so cops will think he's dead.  That's implausible for a number of reasons.  Even with Novocaine, it's hard to pull one tooth out let alone all 32 of them.  And the blood loss would probably kill you or make you faint before you could get out the door.   Even more implausible is that he writes a book under an assumed name and sells it for enough money for a chateau in France.  Ha.  We should all be so lucky. (2/5)

The Hollow Point:  In an Arizona border town (actually Utah) Mexican cartels are having rednecks smuggle bullets across the border.  When a deal goes sour, new sheriff Patrick Wilson has to find out who did what...and then gets his right hand cut off by a machete-wielding John Leguizamo.  Yeah, that's kinda unexpected.  I mean Leguizamo as the stone-faced, machete-packing tough guy?  Really?  Somehow Patrick Wilson is out of the hospital the same day to go and find Leguizamo and his conspirators, including a bloated Jim Belushi.  It's an OK action movie though it's hard to take it as seriously as it would like you to. (2.5/5)

The Beaver:  This was supposed to be Mel Gibson's big comeback film--at least on the screen.  It didn't really turn out that way.  And almost a decade later he still hasn't made that comeback as an actor, though Hacksaw Ridge bought him some credibility as a director.  Anyway, this is like a creepier, less slapstick version of Mrs. Doubtfire.  Mel Gibson is a depressed toy company exec who gets thrown out by his wife (Jodie Foster, who also directed the movie) and finds a beaver puppet that he starts to use as a surrogate.  The device works for a little while as he connects with his younger son and much creepier fucks his wife in the shower with the beaver still on his hand--though turned away.    The movie also features the late Anton Yelchin as Gibson's teenage son who makes a lot of money writing papers for other students and who gets paid to write the valedictorian speech of a pretty, popular girl played by Jennifer Lawrence.  Drama ensues and some Twilight Zone-type weirdness where the puppet becomes more and more its own entity.  It's OK but not great.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Netflix captioning says the puppet uses a Cockney accent though I think it's more like the Australian accent Gibson had in Mad Max and other earlier films.)

Cold is the Night:  Alice Eve (that chick who ran around in her underwear in the second Star Trek reboot movie) is the manager of a dumpy motel.  Then Bryan Cranston and the Penguin from that crappy Gotham show check in, presumably to rest for a few hours but Penguin guy buys a hooker who then kills him.  His car is confiscated with a bunch of drug money in it so Bryan Cranston takes Alice Eve captive to get her help.  Cranston plays the role with a Russian accent and sunglasses because he's legally blind, which could be like a sequel to the Maragaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin:  The Legally Blind Assassin.  Anyway, it was OK but really Cranston's character goes out like a bitch, which was underwhelming.  In the end Alice Eve smuggles out some money in a turtle tank so she doesn't have to live in a dumpy motel anymore.  Yay! (2.5/5)

Come and Find Me:  Another Breaking Bad alum, Aaron Paul, stars in this thriller.  Aaron Paul and his girlfriend move into an old house and then one day he wakes up and she's a gone girl.  After more than a year a "friend" of hers comes over and starts knocking holes in walls to look for something.  Later Aaron Paul finds some photos she took that show Russian(?) gangsters and other people.  Long story short, she was working for the government.  It's OK, not really as messed up as Gone Girl.   The end is a bit cryptic.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The movie was written and directed by Zack Whedon, the sibling of Joss I assume anyway.)

Midnight Meat Train:  Bradley Cooper is a photographer in New York who sees a woman disappear on a train.  Investigating this, he finds that a big, weird guy (Vinnie Jones) is murdering people on the train and literally butchering them, hanging them like sacks of meat and stuff.  He and his girlfriend work on different angles then to try to stop Vinnie Jones.  And eventually the find out that the train is run by a secret society to feed CHUDs or Mole People or some goddamned stupid thing like that.  It's based on a Clive Barker story so there's lots of blood and gore and of course not a happy ending. (2/5)  (Fun Fact:  Ted Raimi from Ash vs Evil Dead--see above--is one of the victims.)

Animal Kingdom:  A boy's druggie mom overdoses and so he goes to live with his grandma and three ne'er do well uncles in Sydney.  They press him into the family business but when one of the uncles (Joel Edgerton) dies the kid is torn between his family and a cop played by Guy Pearce with a cheesy mustache.  But after one uncle (Rogue One's Ben Mendelssohn) kills the kid's girlfriend, he decides to take justice into his own hands.  It was interesting but I fell asleep in the middle of it and had to go back and watch the rest later, which isn't a ringing endorsement. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: The kid should have choked Ben Mendelssohn to death since he's been choked out by both Darth Vader and Bane.  I'm just saying.)

The Guard:  Sort of a buddy cop movie about a local Irish cop (the Garda as they're known) played by Brendan Gleeson of Live By Night--see above--who gets help from an American FBI agent played by Don Cheadle.  They don't really have chemistry like Danny Glover and Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies but it is a fun pairing of small town street smarts and American technological analysis.  They have to work together to spoil a big drug deal led by Mark Strong (Kingsman, Green Lantern) and Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones) that has also led to a couple of murders around the town.  Overall it's pretty good, like Lethal Weapon meets Hot Fuzz, though the ending is a bit cryptic as to weather one main character survives or not. (3/5)

Extras:  I'm not sure if there was an American version too, but this was the original BBC show.  Ricky Gervais is a struggling actor who along with his female friend gets work as an extra.  His epic quest is to get a line.  Each episode has a famous guest star including Ben Stiller, Kate Winslet, Samuel L Jackson, and Sir Patrick Stewart, who uses his connections to get Gervais's sitcom script a pilot on BBC.  In a way it's like a British version of the Seinfeld because a lot of the humor is from Gervais and his friend consciously and unconsciously offending people and digging themselves only deeper into social awkwardness.  As you might expect there's less slapstick humor and more subtlety than most American sitcoms. (4/5) (Fun Fact:  In the overly long Christmas Special Gervais plays an alien slug on Doctor Who and gets bested by David Tennant with a salt shaker.)

Hard Eight:  I had to watch this on YouTube years ago because Netflix, Blockbuster, etc didn't have it in stock.  It's the directorial debut of Paul Thomas Anderson, who went on to make movies like Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood.  Many of the actors in this later appear in those movies like Phillip Baker Hall, John C Reilly, and the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman.  The premise is that Hall finds Reilly outside a restaurant and takes him under his wing as a gambler/con man in Reno.  But then Reilly falls in love with Gwyneth Paltrow but things fall apart when she has sex with a guy who refuses to pay and they beat him up.  It's a decent movie, especially for a first film, with a noirish feel.  It's not as slow and bloated as some of Anderson's recent efforts. (3.5/5)

My Cousin Vinny:  I had never actually watched this before.  It's a good fish-out-of-water story as two kids are going to college when they're arrested for murder in rural Alabama.  One guy's mom calls his cousin Vinny (Joe Pesci) who has a law license but has never actually tried a case before.  He stumble bumbles his way through the trial before finally proving the kids innocent with help from his fiancee Marissa Tomei, who won an Oscar probably for kissing and sleeping with Joe Pesci.  It has to take real acting chops to find him attractive. (3/5)

They Live:  It's amazing how prescient this movie from 1988 was.  Its focus on class warfare and our consumption economy is more relevant than ever.  WWF superstar "Rowdy" Roddy Piper is a drifter who finds a pair of sunglasses that let him see that aliens (or ghouls as they're called in the credits) are controlling our world through subliminal messages and bribing those in charge.  With the help of Keith David, Piper takes down the system to let everyone see the true face of evil.  It would be a better movie with a real actor in the starring role, but otherwise even after nearly 30 years the message isn't dated at all. (3/5)

4:3:2:1:  4 female friends in London have 4 converging adventures over a weekend.  One's parents are splitting up and she's bummed about an abortion.  One is essentially raped by a guy she thinks is someone she's been talking to on the Internet.  One fails a driving test and gets locked in a panic room with her lesbian lover.  And one stumbles on a diamond smuggling ring in the market where she works.  Eventually it all ties together and they seemingly live Happily Ever After...except one of the diamond smugglers is probably going to murder them.  Yay? (2.5/5)  (Fun Fact:  Kevin Smith has a small role as an overweight air traveler--get it?--and Alexander Siddig of DS9/Game of Thrones has a small role as one girl's dad and Mandy Patinkin has a small role as a piano teacher, but writer/director Noel Clarke gives himself the "And" credit.  Because he's done way more than those guys...um, maybe?)

The Big Kahuna:  This is the kind of movie that feels more like a play as it has only 3 actors (and some extras) and very few settings.  Kevin Spacey and Danny Devito are two veteran sales reps for industrial lubricants at a conference in Witchita.  They have a younger guy with them for the experience or whatever.  The title refers to some big CEO they're hoping to talk into a lucrative deal.  Except at the little get together they're throwing in a hotel suite the guy doesn't seem to show up.  But then they realize he was there and chatting with the young guy about religion and dogs for a while.  They dispatch the young guy to track the guy down and close the sale...except he's more interested in selling the guy on Jesus.  That's pretty much it.  Kevin Spacey dominates the movie with a lot of rapid fire snark and most of the movie Danny Devito is in the background, though he gets a nice soliloquy at the end.  It's OK but not really a whole lot going on. (2.5/5)

No Retreat, No Surrender:  In the mid-80s karate movies were en vogue and this shamelessly attempts to capitalize on that.  It starts in LA where some gangsters muscle a guy out of his karate dojo.  Because that seems like a sound business plan, right?  Maybe if you bulldoze the dojo for a Starbucks.  Anyway, the guy and his son Jason move to Seattle...which still looks like southern California.  Jason makes a black friend who has a jheri curl and since it was the mid-80s is into break dancing, another popular trend of the time.  And some fat kid takes an instant dislike to him.  Then Jason runs afoul of some kids at the local dojo because the most popular kid there's girl is into Jason.  What's funny is they mention that they know each other and met up at a pet shop in the mall and yet that's never shown on the screen, so I guess you take their word for it.  That's the level of filmmaking we're talking about here.  And then Jason calls on the spirit of Bruce Lee to teach him.  Some Asian guy who's supposed to be Bruce Lee then shows up at an abandoned house Jason turns into his clubhouse to run him through a bunch of drills.  These help him to defeat Jean-Claude van Damme, one of the gangsters who try to take over the Seattle dojo.  Another great investment, right?  This cheesy movie is made better by the Rifftrax treatment. (2/5) (Fun Facts:  The Bruce Springsteen song "No Surrender" features  the repeated lyrics:  "No retreat, baby, no surrender" which is probably where they got the movie title from, trying to capitalize on another popular trend.  I don't know if this is the secret origin of JCVD, but the director must have told him that he was a robot because he acts about as woodenly as Dolph Lundgren as Drago in Rocky IV--and their characters are both named Ivan!  Real original.  BTW, amazingly there was a sequel to this piece of crap.)

More Stuff I Watched

You know the drill:  I post about stuff I watched and everyone ignores it and I get lost of views from the bots.

Iron Fist:  Another of Marvel's Netflix series leading up to The Defenders, this is yet another story of a white male billionaire who loses his parents and becomes a superhero, just like Batman, Green Arrow, Iron Man, and probably a few others.  To mix cliches the rich white boy is taken in by monks who train him in kung fu.  It feels kind of like Arrow mixed with Daredevil.  "The Hand" and their leader, the evil Yoda-ish Madame Gao, were already featured in the first two seasons of Daredevil.  Now they're trying to flood New York with synthetic heroin and are using Danny Rand's company, which is run by his two childhood friends, a brother and sister who are an incestuous fling away from the Lannisters on Game of Thrones.  Danny makes friends with a martial arts teacher named Colleen Wing, who helps him find the Hand and stop them.  The flashbacks in Arrow became grating after a couple of seasons but some more flashbacks in this show would have helped understand K'un L'un, but I guess it saved them from building more sets.  If you can put aside the racial issues, it's a decent show. (3/5)  (Fun Fact:  Claire Temple, the Night Nurse, shows up again in this show along with the other three.  Carrie Anne Moss reprises her role as attorney Jeri Hogarth from Jessica Jones, but there aren't any gratuitous lesbian scenes this time around.  Still, except when Luke Cage first appeared in Jessica Jones, the four Defenders have had little contact with each other and I really have no idea what is going to bring them together.)

Transformers Prime:  This isn't a continuation of the Bay movies but characters like Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, and Megatron look like their movie counterparts for the most part.  For some reason Transformers is so much better on the small screen and in comics than in those live action movies.  Probably because the focus in shows and comics is on the robots, making them more like real characters.  Though there are humans too.  The Autobots have set up base in Jasper, Nevada and inadvertently take in three teenagers who become their buddies.  Like the old series, the Autobots care so much for humans and don't want to endanger them...yet continue to endanger these kids a bunch of times.  Anyway, I really liked this series.  Like the Beast Wars series from about 20 years ago it uses computer animation and has stories that are not so goofy only little kids could enjoy it.  In fact, the violence and some of the stories might be a little too much on the grown up side for younger kids.  Besides the 65 episodes of the series, there's a standalone movie "Rise of the Predacons" that are all available on Netflix. (4/5) (Fun Facts:  Regarding the voice work, Optimus Prime and Megatron have the same voice actors as the old 80s series.  The human Agent Fowler is voiced by Ernie Hudson of Ghostbusters and The Crow.  In the third series Ultra Magnus is voiced by Michael Ironside of V, SeaQuest 2032, etc.  Star Trek's George Takei guest starred as Alpha Trion in a couple of episodes.  The voice actors for Bulkhead and Knock Out also do voices on Fox/TBS's American Dad as Principal Lewis and Stan's father/Krampus respectively.  In the first episode Duane "The Rock" Johnson provides the voice of Cliffjumper, who is quickly killed off; when he's in a flashback in a later episode someone else does his voice.  At least in the first season the voice director was Susan Blu, who voiced Arcee in the original show and also worked on Beast Wars.)

Transformers Robots in Disguise:  This follow-up to Transformers Prime is traditionally animated and a lot more kid-friendly.  It was a chore for me to get through one episode.  Probably a lot better for the little ones.  I'll take a pass. (2/5)

Snatch:  This is a new series on Crackle that takes its cue from the Guy Ritchie movie at the turn of the century that starred Brad Pitt.  After they lose a bunch of money from a boxing match that went against them, three friends in London decide to rob a van filled with a strip club's cash on a tip from the strip club owner's girlfriend.  Except the truck they rob is an identical one that's full of gold.  From there they go through a lot of mishaps while trying to sell the gold and collect their windfall.  It's a decent show; like the movie it's violent, dramatic, and funny in equal measures with some twists and turns. (3/5)  (Fun Fact:  One of the three friends is played by Ron Weasley from the Harry Potter movies I never watched.  A corrupt cop is played by Marc Warren, who played psychotic assassin Teatime [pronounced tee-uh-time-ee] in the TV movie version of the Discworld novel Hogfather.  Dougray Scott playes the father of one of the friends; he also starred in the Drew Barrymore Cinderella story Ever After.)

The Young Pope:  This HBO series stars Jude Law as a "young" (as in 47) new Pope who is kind of an asshole.  It's pretty boring, though not quite as boring as Crackle's The Art of More.  What it really needed was for Jude Law to break the fourth wall like Kevin Spacey in House of Cards.  Otherwise it's just a dull slog. (1/5)

Pumaman:  Now that Netflix is rebooting Mystery Science Theater 3000, they have a smattering of the old episodes, including Pumaman.  This 70s superhero movie features cheesy effects, a lot of bad acting, and a soundtrack that sounds like the demo mode of a Casio keyboard.  A doofus scientist embraces his destiny as Pumaman who has the power to fly awkwardly and bop people on the head.  He might be the only superhero to wear khakis.  The villain is played by Halloween and You Only Live Twice's Donald Pleasance, who pronounces the hero's name "P-you-ma-man" not "Pooh-ma-man."  The MST3K gang makes this abysmal movie somewhat tolerable. (2/5)

Caught in the Crossfire:  Boring, cliche-filled cop drama.  The description said it was supposed to be in "suburban Detroit" but it was actually filmed in Grand Rapids.  I suppose to a lot of people a city 150 miles away would be a suburb of Detroit. (1/5)

All American Bikini Car Wash:  I guess you can say it delivers what it promises:  lots of cheesecake shots of girls in bikinis washing cars.  Even so it was pretty lame.  For extra credit a college kid takes over his professor's car wash and he and his lunkhead friend, with help from their nerdy black friend, decide to make it a bikini car wash and employ a lot of hot girls.  A lot of it seemed to be apologizing for the sex industry, like where a girl says they're not really being exploited because they decided to work there and it's good money and fun and they make a lot of friends. [eye roll]  The bad acting and lack of any tension in the plot would be more acceptable in a full-on porno instead of a soft core like this. (1/5)

More Stuff I Watched 💪🙉

Yeah, this again...

The Legend of Tarzan (2016):  This was better than I thought it would be.  I'm not really a fan of Tarzan, though I did like the Disney version in 1999.  This is one of those soft reboots where it's not really starting over but it is kind of a start.  Basically Tarzan (John Claymore is his real name) and Jane have returned to England until he's contacted by the Belgian government to go back to Africa.  He refuses until a black American (Samuel L Jackson) convinces Tarzan to go back to Africa because the Belgians might be enslaving some of the natives.  The Belgians are trying to get some diamonds to pay for their colony in the Congo and need to bring Tarzan there so some natives can kill him.  Anyway, a lot of the CGI is obvious but the story is OK and it has an impressive cast including Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz, Samuel L Jackson, and Alexander Sarsgaard--the son of Stellan Sarsgaard, whom you might remember from the Thor and Avengers movies. (3/5)

Voltron Legendary Defender Season 2:  This season uses wastes the first two episodes to get the team back together after their narrow escape from the evil Zarkon at the end of last season.  I didn't really think this was necessary, but whatever.  Most of the season is spent with the team dodging Zarkon's forces, gaining new allies, and setting an elaborate trap for Zarkon.  The last episode features an intense battle that almost makes up for the lack of Voltron fights earlier in the season.  I mean the plotting is much better in the old series, but sometimes you just want a Robeast to show up, them to form Voltron, and chop the fucking thing in half like the old days.  There was a pretty funny episode where they go to a space shopping mall and find a store that's filled with all sorts of old Earth electronics like video game systems that were sorta like the Sega Genesis or SNES.  The last episode "kills" a member of the team but it wasn't a surprise because they'd telegraphed it all season and really, who's the one character in this version who wasn't in the previous version?  Yeah, really.  So maybe next year Princess Allura will finally get to fly a lion--probably the red one. (3/5)

Sausage Party:  Seth Rogen and friends make the anti-Pixar movie.  Food in a supermarket is alive and thinks humans are "gods" who take them to the "Great Beyond" to live happily ever after.  But then Rogen's sausage finds out the truth.  He and his friends have to unite to stop the gods from devouring them.  It's filled with sophomoric humor as you'd expect from Rogen and company but there are some decent jokes.  The anti-religion message is pretty obvious.  Still wondering what a "lavash" is. (2.5/5)

Green Room:  A garage punk band traveling around in a van and siphoning gas to make ends meet gets a gig in what turns out to be a white supremacist compound.  They play their gig but when Pat (the late Anton Yelchin) goes back for his friend's phone, he sees a woman murdered in the "green room" for the bands.  The band then takes shelter in the green room while the supremacists, led by Patrick Stewart looking like an older British Nazi version of Walter White (complete with drug making!) plot to break into the green room and kill them.  Mayhem ensues.  It's oftentimes gross but sometimes funny and mostly tense. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  The casting crosses Star Trek streams as you have Captain Picard and the reboot Chekov.)

Ratchet & Clank:  I never played the video games so I don't really know how accurate this is to the source material, but as far as video game movies go it was good.  Like Luke Skywalker, Ratchet is on a small desert planet dreaming of adventure.  The main difference is that Ratchet is some kind of meerkat-looking thing.  A defective warbot crashes on the planet and warns Ratchet that the evil Drek is going to kill the heroic Galactic Rangers.  When they inadvertently save the Rangers, Ratchet and Clank become part of the Rangers to stop Drek from carving up planets to make his "ultimate planet."  Which mashing parts of planets wouldn't really work in real life, but whatever.  It's light sci-fi adventure that's pretty funny in parts.  I guess not every video game movie is a stinker. (3/5)

The Confirmation:  A boy spends the weekend with his alcoholic father (Clive Owen) and they learn valuable lessons and bond and stuff.  Mostly they look for some valuable old tools stolen from the dad that he needs for a job starting on Monday.  It's a good movie with enough action and humor to keep things moving.  (3.5/5)

Beyond the Reach:  Michael Douglas is a wealthy businessman (when isn't he?) who employs a guide to take him to the desert area called "the reach" to hunt bighorn sheep.  When he accidentally kills some dude instead of a sheep, Michael Douglas decides to stalk and try to kill his guide, though he has ample opportunities to do so.  I didn't really pay much attention to it and really, why didn't he just kill the guide right off?  Pulling a total Dr. Evil there. (2/5)

Stark Raving Mad:  It's like a D-list Ocean's Eleven as Seann William Scott assembles a team of idiots to steal a priceless artifact and stuff.  As cover for the robbery, he throws a rave downstairs in a club.  Then complications ensue.  And so forth.  I didn't really care. (2/5)  (Fun Fact:  If you get cornered by a lion, you should charge at it according to this movie.  Don't quote me on that though if you really do get cornered by a lion.)

Knock Knock:  This is like one of those Penthouse letters:  a middle-aged guy (Keanu Reeves) is home alone and two hot chicks show up in the rain.  He lets them in and they ask to take of their clothes to dry them and then ask to use the shower.  And then they suck his cock.  But then the next morning they start acting like a couple of rejects from The Purge, terrorizing him just for the hell of it.  Mayhem ensues!  Some of it sexy mayhem. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  This was directed by Eli Roth, the guy behind those Hostel torture movies, so yeah it's not surprising that again we have a torture scenario.)

The Last Heist:  A safe deposit company is closing down and so some robbers decide to go in and steal some drug money.  Their scheme is foiled by a guy in the bank.  Not an off-duty cop like Bruce Willis but a serial killer (Henry Rollins) who likes to cut people's eyes out because he thinks it saves their souls.  So that creates a lot of mayhem.  It's otherwise not really anything you haven't seen before in a heist movie.  I guess the "last" part refers to the bank going out of business.

Humans vs Zombies:  The movie is as generic as the title!  I mean it's just a bunch of standard zombie movie shit you've seen done better on The Walking Dead or movies like Dawn of the Dead and even Shaun of the Dead.  Basically a virus escapes and starts infecting kids on a college campus and mayhem ensues.  At the end for the "cookie scene" they use the Dawn of the Dead remake trick of using camcorder-looking footage to show the last people being eaten in case you had any hope.  Lame. (1/5) (Unfun Fact:  A couple of times they joke about this one girl having a "lesbian haircut" because she has curly hair to almost her shoulders.  No, Mr. Director, that's not a "lesbian haircut."  Rachel Maddow has a lesbian haircut.  Ellen Degeneres has a lesbian haircut.  If you're going to make homophobic jokes, do it right!)

St. Elmo's Fire:  This 1985 movie co-written and directed by Joel Schumacher had an all-star young 80s cast:  Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estavez, and Andrew McCarthy!  They're a bunch of whiny yuppies in training who have graduated or flunked out of college and are moving on to that next phase of their lives.  And sleeping with each other and stuff.  Honestly it was better when I saw the beginning, fell asleep, and woke up for the end because then I missed all the boring soap opera stuff.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The AM station my brother and I used to listen to for Tigers games would use the "Love Theme" from this movie as filler when they had a couple of minutes left between the end of a song or Tigers broadcast or whatever and the news at the top of the hour.)

The Magic Sword:  This cheesy 60s fantasy movie makes the original Clash of the Titans seem like Lord of the Rings.  Some dude goes to find a princess with a magic sword and help from his mommy the witch.  What a wussy "hero."  The Rifftrax gang makes it more fun but there's only so much they can do. (1/5)

The Art of More Season 2:  I jokingly called the first season "The Art of Snore" because I never stayed awake for an entire episode.  And guess what?  I didn't stay awake through the second season either.  It's good to help put me to sleep because try as they might, there are really almost no stakes in this feeble drama.  Oh no, someone's taking over the auction house and putting Kate Bosworth out of business!  She'll have to get like a real job now I guess.  And oh no the billionaire guy's modern art museum might not get built on time!  Ooooh.  Heavy stuff man. (1/5)

Narcoleptic Theater:  One night I started out watching Money Train, fell asleep, woke up for part of the middle of The Motorcycle Diaries, fell asleep, and then woke up for the end of Animal House.  Now there you go, put those together into one movie:  Money Motorcycle House or Train Motorcycle Animal or something.  To rob a train full of money to pay their tuition, some college frat boys hop on motorcycles to stage a daring robbery!  Or something like that.