I mentioned before how former Forbes movie critic Scott Mendelson was complaining about people not supporting movie theaters and how much of a hassle I think movie theaters are. It was interesting then when NPR linked to this PBS piece about local theaters in suburban Philly that have managed to thrive in the post-pandemic world.
A couple of things stood out to me, the first being that these are not the huge, impersonal multiplexes like your AMC theaters or other huge chains. These are renovated old movie houses with just one screen or so. There's no stadium seating or "IMAX" or probably even 3D. I don't think it says what their sound system is but probably not top-of-the-line Dolby whatever.
What also stood out is there's an emphasis on community. Besides movies there are events like book signings and birthday parties. The theaters have donors to help foot their bills. Since these are smaller towns, people probably know each other better than a big suburban theater.
Thinking back to when I was talking about the comeback of Barnes & Noble, part of that was using a more personal touch by having people who knew about books and could be helpful answering questions or making recommendations. Clearing out some of the toys and other junk also made it more welcoming for book lovers.
Maybe in this age of online shopping and streaming services the way to survive is to focus on the personal touch. Maybe it's not about having the biggest screen, fanciest chairs, or latest sound system. Maybe people will make more of an effort to see "Just a movie" if it feels more like going to a small town theater than a stadium.
That is probably the same for other things like department stores, supermarkets, or restaurants. Maybe people would enjoy going to those places (and spending a little more) if there were more of a small-town vibe instead of sullen employees, computer kiosks, and harsh fluorescent lighting. And maybe people wouldn't be in such a goddamned hurry and on their phones all the time.
Of course that means places need to motivate employees to try harder--or at all. One night I went to Wendy's and the order was $5.30. I handed the cashier what I thought was $20.30 but then a couple of minutes later she tries to hand me this wad of bills and coins because apparently I gave her only $20.21. Why didn't you just ask me about it before getting all that stuff out? I could have just given you the dime that I apparently didn't grab. But no, that would require actual thought and initiative. It's easier to just be a human automaton and punch the numbers in and grab the change to thrust at me. "Service" like that makes people prefer to use apps and kiosks because if the humans are going to act like machines, then why not just use the machine? That's what happened with self-checkouts at grocery stores. Cashiers stopped bagging your items or in some cases wouldn't bother to reach more than a couple of inches to grab your stuff to swipe. And just act all sullen and rude, like you're interrupting their day. So it's no wonder people accepted machines so readily.
A lot of it is up to management though to make employees actually want to come to work and not be sullen a-holes or act like human robots. Which would mean paying employees a living wage, providing benefits, and not overworking them so they can have a decent work-home balance. Which is pretty much the opposite of what managers have done since...ever. Which maybe didn't seem so important but in a future where computers, "AI," robots, 3D printing, etc can do just about everything, the personal touch is about the only competitive advantage humans have.
But I suppose there are times where you don't want as much personal service. Like if you're getting your morning coffee before work you probably just want to get your damned coffee so you can get to work and don't want to chit-chat and stuff. Or at the gas station or convenience store you probably just want to get your stuff and go.
I'm just saying that maybe more places should take note of those theaters' success and try to focus more on providing a great customer experience instead of making things bigger and more impersonal.
Here's what I watched in late March and through April. There's a lot of it. Some is new, some is a little bit old, and a few are really, really old.
Since I know no one will actually read the whole entry (or probably skim more than a couple of entries) I included a handy scorecard at the bottom that lists all the movies and how I rated them. It's even organized by score/title so you can easily see what was good and what sucked.
Oppenheimer: I missed out on "Barbenheimer" and waited until almost April to finally just buckle down and stream it on Peacock. And overall it's a good movie and a long movie that starts to feel long when with about an hour left it turns from the creation of the bomb to the political machinations of Admiral Lewis Strauss (Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr).
There's actually a framing device within a framing device for the movie. In black-and-white we have Strauss and his assistant ("Han Solo" from Solo) as he's undergoing confirmation for Secretary of Commerce in Eisenhower's second term. His treatment of Oppenheimer (Oscar winner Cillian Murphy) is a big hurdle to really what shouldn't that big of a deal. I mean, before the 2000s when everything was so overly politicized when was the last time anyone cared about who was Commerce Secretary? Most Americans (myself included) probably have no idea who the current Commerce Secretary is or even what the department actually does. Within this framing device is another one in like 1954 or 1955 where Oppenheimer's security clearance has been revoked and he went to DC to defend himself.
Only then do we get to him going to Cambridge and nearly poisoning his jerk professor before Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) tells him to go to Europe proper to learn about quantum physics and such. Eventually he goes back to the States to start a quantum physics program at Berkeley (Emma Earl's alma mater!) and meets some other scientists like Josh Hartnett (remember him!?) who have communist leanings. He also meets a woman named Jean (Florence Pugh) who hooks up with him but doesn't want to marry him. Later he goes to New Mexico and meets another woman named Kitty (Emily Blunt) who has been married a few times. They dump their first kid on some other guy when he's a baby because he's annoying.
Then comes the war and a colonel (Matt Damon) reluctantly puts him in charge of the Manhattan Project. While Oppenheimer didn't do a ton of the actual science, he facilitates a lot of the project, allowing the US to get ahead of the Germans. One scientist conceives of the H-bomb but Oppenheimer rejects going down that road yet.
So eventually it gets to the test of the first bomb and he says those famous words, "Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds." And then there's the dropping of the bombs on Japan. Like I said from there we have an hour or so of political stuff and basically courtroom scenes and it's hard not to keep looking at the clock. For as much conflict as there seems to be between Strauss and Oppenheimer, there's no climactic confrontation between them. All this stuff is supposed to raise the stakes but I'm not sure it really does. Again, Department of Commerce. And Oppenheimer losing his security clearance probably didn't really hurt him all that much. By then he wasn't shaping policy anyway.
While it's well-crafted because of all this focus on Strauss v Oppenheimer we don't learn much about Oppenheimer's childhood or his kids. His brother is shown a few times, but I'm not sure why they have a ranch outside Santa Fe. It does give some consideration to his moral issues about the program and aftermath. Like a lot of biopics though if you want to know more about the actual history of the man and the Manhattan Project you're probably better off watching/reading something non-fiction. (4/5) (Fun Fact: There were so many familiar faces that I had to bring up the IMDB page to look up everyone. Though some like Gary Oldman as Truman were pretty unrecognizable. The bench was so deep that American Dad/The Orville star Scott Grimes was a background actor in the black-and-white scenes. Lower Decks/The Boys star Jack Quaid also has a small role as one of the project people. Matthew Modine! Dane DeHaan! Casey Affleck! And so on! Sad Fact: This was the whitest, most male-centric movie of the year, so what does giving it the Oscar over American Fiction or Barbie say? It's not a moral issue on par with the atomic bomb and yet not maybe the best look for an organization frequently criticized for ignoring diversity.)
Road House (2024): Infamously Amazon refused to release this in theaters, which pissed off director Doug Liman. I think given the weak market this January and February, this movie probably could have made some money in theaters. But I wouldn't have wanted to pay to see it and for good reason.
Like most remakes of "cult classic" properties from the 80s and 90s, this really doesn't capture the magic of the original. I think most disappointing is Dalton himself. The Patrick Swayze version was an expert "cooler" who was brought in to tame the Double Deuce outside Kansas City. Swayze's Dalton had a Zen philosophy with rules like "be nice" and "take it outside" and slogans like, "Pain don't hurt." He also made sweeping changes to the bar to eliminate employees who would cause trouble. By contrast Jake Gyllenhaal's Dalton is a former UFC fighter who got tossed for killing a dude in the octagon. When we first see him he enters a fight contest but the other guy quits upon seeing him, so he literally gets money for nothing. When he goes to "The Road House" in Glass Keys, Florida (actually the Dominican Republic) he's kind of a Jack Reacher-Lite--the Amazon Reacher not Tom Cruise Reacher. He smiles and sorta follows the other Dalton's rules but he never articulates them and everyone working in the bar is already nice and not corrupt so there's little to do but try to stop a gang right out of a rerun of The A-Team or Knight Rider. By the end, Dalton turns into a cold psychopathic killer, which doesn't really make you want to root for him to win.
There's the token love interest who's a doctor, but the relationship is never built up enough so that when she's in danger it doesn't really matter. None of The Road House staff really matter. Real UFC champion Conor McGregor is a crazy fighter sent to destroy Dalton, which gets to be a long, drawn-out thing that could have been solved pretty quick if anyone had a gun. Instead of monster truck-driving businessman Brad Wesley there's Ben Brandt, a spoiled young man who inherited his father's crumbling "empire" and is desperate to have The Road House. He has a boat instead of a monster truck but like Brad Wesley isn't really a physical threat to Dalton, sort of like how the Joker isn't really a physical threat to Batman.
Anyway, if you're not really a huge fan of the original (and I'm not) then this is a competent enough movie. It's slightly better than most of those cheap straight-to-streaming/Redbox movies I watch because it does have better actors and direction, though the CGI effects when needed aren't great. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: They should have dubbed Conor McGregor because he does not sound menacing at all; maybe it's from getting punched or kicked in the balls too many times. There's a restaurant called the "Double Deuce" though no one ever goes inside of it. The owner of The Road House claims Ernest Hemingway drank there but later says her uncle opened the place in the 60s. Hemingway died in 1961 in Idaho and stopped living in the Keys in 1939, so it seems kinda unlikely he would have ever been there.)
Bottoms: Someone's blog mentioned this and it sounded interesting, though I couldn't watch it right away because it was on MGM+. Then Amazon moved it to Prime and I watched it before my Prime canceled. The basic idea was to be like a teenage girl Fight Club. Two lesbian girls start the "self-defense club" hoping to get hot girls there and hook up with them. But things go tits-up when the football team doesn't approve. But then the girls have to stop a rival football team from killing the star quarterback.
This is the kind of story that could have been good but wasn't. The lesbian romance parts aren't bad. It's the football stuff that is just so over-the-top goofball that it's ridiculous. Starting with something small: the quarterback's number is "01" when sports jerseys are almost always single digits so it'd be "1." The way they run the school, complete with a lunch room table that looks like "The Last Supper" is again pretty over-the-top and silly. And why is there no security at the Homecoming game when players have been murdered in the past? Aren't there any cops in that town? I just think if they had toned down the football player stuff it would have made the rest of the story work better. And hiring a real actor for their faculty advisor instead of former NFL star Marshawn Lynch. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: Someone asked me who I'd cast for Stacey Chance when she's a part Chinese, part white woman and the actress playing Isabel would actually be perfect.)
Poor Things: I wanted to like this but I didn't. I had the problem I've had with movies like Being John Malkovich where even with the kind of stories I write, sometimes the Puritanical Midwesterner who went to Lutheran school until junior high takes over and thinks, "Did you have to go there?"
My problem when watching BJM and some other movies is there's a scenario that could be fun and quirky but instead goes straight to the creepy sex stuff. It's like when video stores existed someone might run right by the New Releases and stuff and head straight to the "Adult" section behind the curtain to look at the porn. That's basically what this does. You can spout feminism or socialism or whatever, but we know what's really on your mind, because you took us there almost straight off. It maybe takes a little longer to get there than BJM as "Bella" (Oscar winner Emma Stone) has the mind of a child and the body of an adult. But every day she learns more and her mental age starts to catch up with her body.
This leads to her sticking things between her legs. And then a lawyer (Mark Ruffalo) pretty much molests her before they go off to Europe and do "furious jumping" for a while before she starts working in a French whorehouse to get money. It got to the point where I thought the best way to describe it was "if Wes Anderson directed a fairy tale written by Marquis de Sade." Because you have all this quirky scenery and once it gets to colors there's a bright palette with pastels and stuff but the story is pretty much straight-up de Sade with a virginal girl being involved with increasing debauchery. Only I guess we're supposed to feel there's female empowerment because she increases her vocabulary and knowledge along the way and rebels against traditional gender roles.
But by the last act with her body's former husband, I reached the point of just wanting it to be over. I can't deny Stone and Ruffalo and others did a great job, but the story making straight for the erotica section just bummed me out. Isn't it ironic? Don't you think? (2.5/5)
Anatomy of a Fall: This won the Oscar for original screenplay this year and plenty of others had praised it. I honestly don't see what the buzz is about. I've watched Matlock episodes that were more exciting. Basically there's a chateau in France where a guy falls from an attic. He's found by his legally blind son. Did the guy fall by accident, commit suicide, or was he murdered by his wife? Obviously the cops think the latter.
Most of it then is a trial where the prosecution has a pretty thin case considering no one saw anything and there's not much forensic evidence to prove she did anything. There's some mention of marital problems and you have to wonder if she did it. I don't think it really conclusively says anything. Basically her kid helps to get her off. So I guess she won't be grounding him anytime soon.
Even though a lot of it is in French with subtitles that wasn't the problem for me. The problem was there just wasn't much to it. The twists were really mild and the lead actress just never really did anything to make me like or dislike her. There just wasn't enough there for me to really care about it. It's so determined not to take a point of view that it never really provides any kind of insight. Maybe it's just I've watched/read so many courtroom dramas and crime thrillers that I never really felt she was in any danger of conviction with how weak the prosecution's case was. I mean all they had was a "splatter expert" and a recorded argument. Big whoop. If they had found a murder weapon or if there had been some kind of recording of the incident (like someone flying a drone nearby) then maybe I could have felt she was in trouble. One blogger talked about this showing a life "under the microscope" but I don't think so. She's never Casey Anthony or one of those others who's basically tried in the court of public opinion. There's no Nancy Grace persecuting her or big crowds following her around to make her life miserable.
I can't really explain all the buzz for a murder mystery that never solves the mystery and a courtroom drama without much drama. Maybe someday I could waste another 2 1/2 hours watching it again. I doubt it. (2/5)
The Menu: This black comedy is for "foodies" or people who really hate foodies and all those cooking shows on TV. A group of people are taken to an exclusive restaurant on a tropical island run by head chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). It's soon clear the place is basically a cult in the fashion of Wicker Man or Midsommar. Which gives you an idea of what's going to happen to these visitors. Among the visitors are a foodie (Nicholas Hoult), his new "girlfriend" (Anya Taylor-Joy), a food critic, her editor, three tech bros, an old couple (Judith Light of Who's the Boss fame plays the female half), a "movie star" (John Leguizamo), his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, and Slowik's alcoholic mom.
There's a reason that everyone has been chosen that becomes clearer as "the menu" gets underway. Being that it's a fancy restaurant there are 9 courses and while it starts normal, it soon starts to get weird. Anya Taylor-Joy's character is the rogue element in the mix since she wasn't supposed to be there. Ralph Fiennes as Slowik gives a really nuanced performance that never turns to mustache-twirling or maniacal screaming or anything like that. Like Hannibal Lecter or Grand Admiral Thrawn his calm is what's most unnerving. The interactions of Taylor-Joy and Fiennes are the most brilliant parts, especially when she manages to turn the tables on him. While not always laugh out loud funny (though there are some of those parts) it is a good black comedy. (4/5) (Fun Fact: Will Ferrell is a producer on the movie and I kinda wish he'd been the "movie star" just so I could have watched him in the end.)
Zoe: This 2018 sci-fi mumblecore film is like if Ex Machina had been a love story instead of a thriller. In the not-too-distant future Cole (Ewan McGregor) creates Zoe, a robot who looks like a normal woman. For the first few months or so of her life, she doesn't know she's a robot. She wants to have a relationship with Cole, but the compatibility models where she works say they have a 0% rating. When she confronts him, he confesses she's a robot that he built and put her into the world to let her "evolve."
Then as they explore her fake memories, they do start to fall in love. That is until a tragic accident separates them. They have to determine then whether their feelings were real or not. Thrown into the mix is a drug that can make people feel like they're in love for a short time. If two people drink it, they'll be "in love" for hours. But repeated use can create a dependency, which only muddles things more for Cole when he starts abusing it.
Overall I really enjoyed this. It's obviously not the kind of sci-fi movie with spaceships, laser swords, magic powers, or weird aliens like people are used to seeing Ewan McGregor in. It's about relationships and what makes us human. It's a lot quieter and subtler and yet still engaging and engrossing. There's not a lot I can fault with it except some might find it too slow. Unlike Poor Things, this doesn't run straight to the porn section; it takes some time before Zoe has sex. And since it's not filmed like a Wes Anderson movie it's less jarring when it does happen.
Really I think a lot of its ideas are spot-on, like how we'd almost instantly use "synthetics" for brothels and abuse love pills that were naively intended for couples who wanted to put the spark back in their marriage. It is kinda depressing and yet haven't we turned a lot of good ideas (like, say, the Internet) into something poisonous? Yeah, exactly.
Yet the movie itself doesn't get too depressing. Unlike Ex Machina there is actually a happy ending that maybe will bring you to tears. (4/5) (Fun Facts: Christina Aguilera plays Jewels, a robot prostitute who like Zoe is at first a big deal but then gets used up. She's kind of like the Asian robot in Ex Machina that didn't really talk, a sluttier earlier draft of the final product. Rashida Jones from Parks & Recreation takes a dramatic turn as Cole's ex-wife as well.)
This "song" from the terrible 70s movie Swamp of the Ravens featured on Rifftrax could have been remade for this movie since Zoe is Cole's own robot and his own lady:
The Autopsy of Jane Doe: Another blogger mentioned this and it sounded interesting so I added it to my Hulu cue. The movie is from 2016, so pre-Succession for Brian Cox. He's a coroner and his son (Emile Hirsch) is his assistant. They're given the body of a young brunette who was found in the cellar of a house where everyone died. As they start to examine the body, there are a host of weird things about it. It soon becomes clear that this is no ordinary body. Then a lot of strange things start happening around the lab. The power goes out on the elevator and a tree falls over the only door to escape, leaving them trapped.
It's pretty creepy and I did not see the big twist coming. It's the kind of movie that's sort of like a play in that there aren't a ton of locations or actors. Most of it takes place in the lab and there are only about ten actors in the credits--including the cat. So it's not a big movie, but a good one. It's not all jump scares, though there are some of those. The location and what they're doing makes for a pretty creepy atmosphere. Really all they needed was for it to be Halloween. (4/5) (Fun Fact: Olwen Kelly, who plays Jane Doe, would have made a good Stacey Chance, though by now I guess she'd be too old.)
Automata: This 2014 movie stars Antonio Banderas as an insurance agent named Jacq Vaucan in a dystopian future where most of humanity is dead from solar storms. To aid those left, there are primitive robots with 2 rules: don't kill anything living and don't try to improve themselves. Jacq investigates claims of robots going haywire and finds one shot by a cop when it seemed to be repairing itself. This soon leads him to find more who are trying to fix themselves. His bosses want the robots destroyed but as he spends time with the robots, he starts to have a change of heart.
The movie is a lot like if Philip K Dick had written I, Robot or similar stories instead of Isaac Asimov. Because it is a lot more grim-and-gritty 70s or 80s style than the gleaming worlds of rockets and jetpacks and flying cars of the 50s and 60s. Most of the movie was shot in Bulgaria and the budget according to IMDB was only $7M--which it didn't quite make back. With a larger budget it would have been a little better but it's still a good movie if you liked Blade Runner or the Will Smith I, Robot or stuff like that. (3/5) (Fun Facts: Melanie Griffith plays a robot doctor in a few scenes; this was apparently the year before her and Banderas divorced. Javier Bardem voices the "Blue Robot" who is the leader of the rebelling robots, though I'm not sure why he's the "blue robot" since he is like 99% white and like 0% blue.)
Lisa Frankenstein: If I'd listened to Scott Mendelson I would have tromped out to some theater and paid $15 or so to watch this. Fortunately I just waited another six weeks for it to be on Peacock. The premise is basically like if 80s Tim Burton had tried to make a teen sex comedy like Porky's or something.
Lisa Swallows (ha.) is a teenage girl whose mother was butchered by an ax-wielding maniac. Six months later her father married Nurse Ratched wanna-be Janet (Carla Gugino) who has a gorgeous cheerleader daughter who seems to be half-Asian or Hawaiian or something that's never explained since her father died in Vietnam. Anyway, Lisa visits an old cemetery and in particular some dead young guy's grave. One night at a party she drinks spiked punch, nearly gets raped by her lab partner, and stumbles home. Lightning hits the young guy's grave and brings the boy to life--sort of. Though he died like 150 years ago he's still largely intact, though a hand is missing and an ear and he can't talk.
After "the Creature" kills Janet thinking she was going to hurt Lisa, they inadvertently find out that they can attach new skin and pieces to the Creature and give him a shock in a defective tanning bed to make the transplants live. The problem for me is sort of like with Poor Things. Not so much sexual content since there really isn't much actual sex, just talk of sex. The problem is how quickly they embrace the idea of murdering people to add parts to the Creature. Lisa seems to barely question the morality of it. Like Ahh-nold in True Lies she handwaves it by saying, "Yes, but they were all bad." I mean Janet was going to institutionalize her and one boy was going to rape her so it's cool to kill them and harvest parts, right? Uh-huh.
Diablo Cody's script wants to be something like Edward Scissorhands, but it lacks the heart--literally perhaps--of that movie. The relationship of Lisa and the Creature is more Bonnie and Clyde than Johnny Depp and Winona Rider or even Edward and Bella of Twilight. Lisa knows almost nothing about the Creature before he died; when he plays the piano she has no idea he was a composer. Him not being able to talk or write limits their ability to establish any kind of real relationship, so it's unconvincing that she's almost instantly ready to kill for this undead Creature she barely knows anything about. There's really not a lot that's funny, more just macabre. It's not a bad movie, but it's not particularly good either. Making Lisa a little less ghoulish and maybe trying to find another way to harvest parts without murdering people would have made it go down easier. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: I wondered if her father had killed her mother with the ax given how quickly he remarried but it's never said who did it.)
Drive-Away Dykes Dolls: Another Scott Mendelson Special I'm glad I didn't waste time watching in theaters and waited until it was on Peacock. This was directed and co-written by Ethan Coen of the Coen Brothers. Maybe he shouldn't work solo because this attempt at a LGBT sex comedy really falls flat. In Philly in 1999 (for...reasons) Pedro Pascal is in some crummy bar (for also...reasons) with a valuable McGuffin. A bartender kills him and I guess gives the McGuffin to someone who gives it to a "drive-away" car rental place run by a bald guy named Curlie. A "drive-away" car rental place means someone rents the car to drive it one-way to a destination. In this case that's Tallahassee.
Meanwhile Marian is burnt out at work...somewhere and her horny friend Jamie has just broken up with her chubby female cop friend. So they go to the drive-away place. And wouldn't you know it, they want to go to Tallahassee? And they arrive like 2 seconds after Curlie hangs up the phone to take the order for a car going to Tallahassee? Uh-huh. So they get the car and set out. Then two incompetent gangsters and their boss show up. The two incompetent gangsters head out in pursuit.
Meanwhile, Jamie insists they stop at lesbian clubs and there's lots of lesbian kissing and touching, though they can't go full beaver. Like Poor Things it starts rankling me. Maybe it's professional jealousy because I was literally writing a lesbian sex scene like 10 minutes before I put this on. Jamie especially is so horny that it's like, "The kids in American Pie think she's too horny." I guess we're supposed to be happy her and Marian hook up, though I'm not sure why. The character work is pretty shallow to fit in more kissing and touching because I don't know, I guess that gets Ethan Coen off.
It would have been better if the jokes were funny but it's pretty low-brow and stale. It's a lot more like a Farrelly Brothers movie than a Coen Brothers movie. The whole thing just doesn't work unless you really like soft-core lesbian porn. (2/5) (Fun Fact: Matt Damon has a cameo as a Republican senator after the McGuffin.)
Maggie Moore(s): Speaking of the Coens, this is an imitation Coen Brothers movie like Fargo, but it's a really good imitation of a Coen Brothers movie! And actually better than the half-Coen Brothers movie above. In a small New Mexico town, Maggie Moore finds out her husband is funneling envelopes of kiddy porn to a sleazy food delivery truck guy who sells her husband expired meat, cheese, and bread to save money on supplies for his sub shop. The food truck guy offers to hire a "deaf" hitman to scare Maggie into not talking. He kills her instead. To throw the sheriff (Jon Hamm) off the scent, they kill another woman named Maggie Moore who the sub shop guy finds out about because his wife's pharmacy discount card is linked with the other Maggie Moore. So now there are two murder victims with the same name. Meanwhile the sub shop guy's neighbor (Tina Fey) gets into a relationship with Jon Hamm when he interviews her about the first murder.
From there we have twists and turns and people hooking up and people ending up dead. Most of it is pretty light and fun--or as fun as it can be given the circumstances--until the last act when suddenly someone is shot in the head and shit gets real. Like I said, this is a good imitation of a Coen Brothers movie so if you liked Fargo then you'd probably like this. (3.5/5) (Fun Fact: Jon Hamm plays a sheriff in the current season of Fargo on FX.)
BlackBerry: One of those rare movies I kinda wish had been a miniseries because this barely scratches the surface on the rise and fall of Research in Motion, the company that created the BlackBerry--the world's first smartphone. The company was founded by a nerdy guy named Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel with a bad hairpiece) and his friend Doug. It was pretty much a clubhouse for nerds until Mike and Doug go to the company Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) works for and make a bad pitch for an all-in-one phone. After Balsillie is fired, he goes to work with RIM and takes over the business and accounting stuff.
As we see, Mike and Jim have completely different leadership styles. Mike is the one who's friends with everyone and doesn't want to be tough on anyone. Whereas Jim just marches in and shouts and throws things until he gets his way. At this point you might think that this is going to be one of those stories like Apple or Microsoft where the more alpha guy is going to force the beta guy out and hog the credit. But they remain co-CEOs for about 12 years. A presentation with Bell Atlantic (who I guess became Verizon) emphasizes how they manage to work. Jim tries to do the presentation by himself but his lack of knowledge about the technical side leaves him floundering. Mike comes in and explains all the technical stuff but as we'd already seen, the business stuff wasn't really his bag. So they're much better as a team than either could do individually.
The movie hits some of the company's highlights. 1996 is the founding of the BlackBerry with Mike and Jim teaming up to get it started. Then it jumps to 2003 as the company faces a hostile takeover by PalmPilot and a sales crunch as crappy cell phone networks can only handle 500,000 phones. To sell more phones they need better programmers, so Jim poaches guys from Google, Microsoft, etc. To pay them millions he doesn't have, he does a little stock fraud. Meanwhile Mike is starting to lose touch with his nerds as the pressures to get new and better product mount.
Then it jumps to 2007 as the company is blindsided by the iPhone. By then Mike has largely turned into Jim with more hair and Jim is distracted by trying to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins and move them to Hamilton, Ontario. As they face stiff competition from the iPhone, that stock fraud also comes back to bite them in the rear.
Overall it was an enjoyable movie though of course much of it is probably not "true" in the strictest sense. Jim Balsillie is on record as saying he's nothing like the character in the movie. Sure. The problem is with only about 2 hours there's not enough time to really get into the home lives and background of Mike and Jim. So we really don't know a lot about them. Were they ever married? Or from the young male assistant Jim hires, was he gay? Why did he like hockey so much? Did Mike ever do anything besides work? So like I said it would have been better to do this in a miniseries format where in 4-6 episodes they could have really fleshed things out more. Still, if you remember early phones from the 90s-2000s it's pretty interesting to sort of see how we got where we are. (3.5/5) (Fun Facts: The venerable Michael Ironside plays a grumpy old man Jim hires when he sees him being a drill sergeant to employees at Google or Microsoft or one of those places. It's hard to recognize him at first because he's old and fat but pretty fun when he goes in and makes the nerds put their toys away and get to work. Throughout the movie, Mike resists building anything in China because stuff made in China generally sucks and I have to agree with him on that. I mean when you're basically using slave labor what you get might be cheaper and quicker but is generally inferior to what you might get where people are actually paid a decent wage and maybe give a crap about what they do.)
Rise of the Planet of the Apes: I had watched the other reboot Ape movies but not the first one for whatever reason. I finally saw it on Hulu and gave it a watch. It is surprisingly good. The CGI apes always look a little weird but the story is well done. You can feel for Caesar as he grows up with a human scientist (James Franco) and his father with Alzheimer's (John Lithgow) until he's taken away for attacking a neighbor who's pushing around the dad for accidentally wrecking his car. From there Caesar is taken to a "refuge" run by a corrupt owner (Brian Cox) and his sadistic son. Caesar starts to learn then about how bad humans can be and starts to integrate into his own kind. Using some "smart gas" James Franco's company is developing, Caesar makes the apes smarter and then using some good strategy frees the apes from human control. At the same time, the gas that makes apes smart also kills humans, which in large part sets up the sequel.
It's not a perfect movie in that the love interest is kind of shallow and I still can't tell you her name. Like I said, the apes look a little weird and fake most of the time, though obviously not as fake as the ones in the original movies. But really it's better than a lot of popcorn movies. With the latest movie coming out next week, it might be good to revisit these. (3.5/5) (Fun Facts: Tyler Labine of Tucker & Dale, Voltron Legendary Defender, and Reaper is a chimp handler who is the first to contract the "ape flu" that kills much of humanity. News headlines mention a mission to Mars that winds up missing, which is probably a reference to the ship from the original movie that wound up crashing in the future.)
Men in Black International: I missed this (well, not missed it) when it came out in theaters and since it's Sony it probably didn't go to a streaming service I had until it was on Hulu. And months and months later I finally watched it. The verdict? Meh.
It's a pretty blah continuation of the Men in Black series. Is it a reboot? A revival? I'm not really sure. More of a revival since the events of at least the first movie are still canon. This focuses on the London office and a new alien enemy called "the Hive." Chris Hemsworth is H, who's basically the Sterling Archer of the MIBs. He gets the job done but recklessly and with plenty of collateral damage. Two years earlier he and High T (Liam Neeson) stopped the Hive in Paris.
There's also a new agent called Mary Sue (Tessa Thompson) who as a kid saw an alien and wasn't neuralyzed and eventually found the MIBs. O (Emma Thompson) lets her join on a probationary basis. And then stuff eventually starts happening. While MIB 1 was a brisk 98 minutes and MIB 2 was a brief 88 minutes, MIBI is the longest in the series at 115 minutes and yet most of it isn't really that interesting. Most of it just feels like reheated bits from previous MIB movies or rejected footage from Bond movies. There are some twists and turns that are mostly predictable--or might be if I cared. Hemsworth and Thompson worked together in Thor Ragnarok and succeeding Marvel movies but there's really nothing going on here. Like everything else they're just so bland and uninteresting.
It is crafted decently with more reliance on CGI than the first movie but not poorly-done like some movies--see Road House. There are some new aliens and some old ones but nothing that really got me going, "Whoa, cool!" There are more and bigger laser guns and the neuralyzers. And a flying car with a red button. Still, it just doesn't do much for me and I imagine I'll have forgotten about most of it soon enough. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: There are no cookie scenes during the credits, which kinda tells you how much confidence the studio had in it.)
Butcher's Crossing: This was probably pitched as "The Revenant meets The Perfect Storm!" With a lower budget than either of those. In 1874 a kid drops out of Harvard to go to Kansas for adventure. He agrees to fund an expedition into the Rocky Mountains to kill a bunch of buffalo. Nicolas Cage is the leader of the expedition. There's also an old guy named Charlie who's the cook and a skinner named Fred who's obviously an a-hole. After almost running out of water, they get into the mountains and find their buffalo only for a blizzard to sock them in for months. The rest sort of plays out like The Perfect Storm only a couple of them live. Hooray? It's made well enough and the cast does a decent job. There's some gross stuff with buffalo being skinned and such so if you're an animal lover it's not really for you. (3/5) (Fun Facts: What I would have really liked is a remake of Buffalo Rider on Rifftrax. Could you imagine Nic Cage riding a buffalo around? It'd be epic! The movie includes a bunch of "wranglers" for the animals and also something called a "Mule Swamper.")
The Baker: A lot of standard tropes in this cheap action movie filmed in the Caymans. A limo driver is waiting for someone in a parking garage when he witnesses a drug deal gone wrong. Everyone dies and so the limo driver figures he'll take the goods. He grabs his mute 8-year-old daughter and goes to his estranged father's bakery. He leaves the kid with the Baker (Ron Perlman) before foolishly going back home, where he's killed. So the Baker and mute girl try to get revenge. The Baker is of course a guy who has a particular set of skills who retired from the business a while ago but now is drawn back in for one last hurrah. Between that and the mute kid who speaks at the end to show how comfortable she's gotten with him there are a lot of tropes that have been used in other movies, some better and some worse. Still, for what it is it's not bad and Ron Perlman is usually enjoyable, especially when you pair him with a kid. So it's not original but it's fun. (3/5) (Fun Fact: Harvey Keitel plays the big boss and in a cookie scene he's shot by...someone. The movie doesn't say who. I doubt there'd be a sequel so I'm not sure why they did that.)
The Last Victim: This movie also features Ron Perlman and a bait-and-switch. The description says modern outlaws are pursued by a sheriff (Perlman) but that's not entirely true. Mostly it's about these "outlaws" who shoot up a BBQ place to kill some guy for some reason. Later a woman and her husband see them trying to hide the bodies and so are pursued by the bad guys. The husband dies right away, leaving the woman (Ali Larter of Final Destination and Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back from the start of the millennium) to turn the tables on the bad guy. Honestly I got so bored that I left it on while I took a shit. I don't think I missed much. It was a total waste of Ron Perlman. I hope he at least got a good paycheck. (1/5) (Fun Facts: the bad guy in this was the bad guy in To Catch a Killer farther down the list. A Rian Johnson co-produced this, but not THAT Rian Johnson; this one is apparently Rian Danielle Johnson.)
In this case Jessica Chastain plays the titular assassin--I like writing "Jessica Chastain" and "titular" in the same sentence. She was a soldier who became a drunk and addict but cleaned up her act with the help of her mentor played by John Malkovich--the same one mentioned above. But when his boss (Colin Farrell) realizes that Ava is talking to her victims to find out what they did and a job in Riyadh is botched, he decides to have her eliminated. Meanwhile she goes home to Boston, where her mother (Geena Davis) had angina and her sister's boyfriend (Common) is in deep with a local gangster. So while killing assassins trying to kill her, she tries to reconcile with her family and help her sister's boyfriend, who was also her ex.
If this hadn't been done so many times before it would have been much better. Instead it's well-made and has a good cast, but it's not really anything new. (3/5) (Fun Fact: Ava kills the Mr. Fantastic from the 2005/2007 movies in the opening; he's actually dead before his name even comes up in the credits.)
Since the movie features Colin Farrell, I knew Laplume would have a review to compare it to. Obviously I didn't do it earlier in my comparison blog entry, so here you go:
Ava
rating: ****
review: I keep mentioning in these capsules how critics are inexplicably undervaluing major talent, and Jessica Chastain is a favorite victim of this. Here she's combining her penchant for human drama with the needs of action films. Another supporting spotlight for Colin Farrell. He had a banger year for those.
Self Reliance: Jake Johnson (Jurassic World, Safety Not Guaranteed, New Girl, etc.) stars in, writes, produces, and directs this Hulu Original. From the description I thought it'd be more of a frenetic action movie like Smokin' Aces or Boss Level. The idea is that Tom is a lonely bachelor with a crappy job who's picked up by Andy Samberg (as himself) and taken to a warehouse where he's offered $1,000,000 if he can survive 30 days. The caveat is "the hunters" can't kill him if someone is within like 3 feet. So all he has to do is not be alone for 30 days, right? Easy, right?
But when his family doesn't want to spend every moment with him, he hires a homeless guy he calls James. And then he meets another player named Maddy (Anna Kendrick) so you might think it'll turn into a romantic action comedy or something. But that kinda fizzles. And there are really no worthwhile action scenes. Most of it is people questioning whether Tom is imagining this "game" or not.
So it definitely wasn't the movie I thought it'd be but it was still pretty entertaining. It would have been better with more Kendrick and more involving the hunters who had costumes like a cowboy, sumo wrestler, samurai, giant (from those Goldfish crackers ad) dressed as Michael Jackson, a Sinbad impersonator, and an Ellen DeGeneres impersonator. And making it less than 30 days might have helped. Anyway, if you have Hulu it's a fun 90-minute diversion. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: Early last year I used a similar concept in three Eric Filler stories only where a guy is gender swapped and faces a challenge that's filmed for the Dark Web while people gamble on it.)
Ride the Eagle: Jake Johnson (the same one) stars in, co-writes, and produces this mumblecore comedy that's like a copy of a Duplass Brothers movie, but a good copy of a Duplass Brothers movie! Johnson is kind of a loser who lives in a tiny cabin on some other guy's property and plays bongos in a presumably crappy band. Then a woman tells him his mother (Susan Sarandon) died he will get her huge cabin upstate if he completes a list of tasks. So he goes up to the cabin and finds her cabin is stuffed full of pot and bad paintings. Then he has to do some tasks that aren't really exciting or pie-throwing funny. He has to break into a guy's house across the lake, call up an ex to apologize, try to catch a fish with his bare hands, and then the final task. The guy whose house he breaks into makes a threatening phone call and then comes over when Johnson thinks he stole his dog. There's not a lot of mayhem ensuing but there are funny parts and tender parts and it's good as long as you're not expecting an Adam Sandler movie--not one of the good ones either. A sort of plot hole is no one actually monitors him, so really he probably could have just not broken into the guy's house or called an ex or tried to catch a fish and no one would have known. The last one someone could have found out if he'd done it or not as it involves finding something; it just seems like someone should have monitored his progress at some point. One thing I feel is really true is when Johnson's resolve finally breaks and he cries at something unexpected. Sometimes it can be something completely unexpected that can finally break your resolve when grieving--like watching Titanic almost a year later. I'm just saying. (3/5) (Fun Facts: Though Susan Sarandon is only shown on a somewhat blurry VCR tape, she needed a personal hairdresser and makeup artist. Or maybe it was just that she was filmed at a different time? That's the charitable explanation. JK Simmons plays the guy across the lake and was in both the original and MCU Spider-Man series as J Jonah Jameson while Jake Johnson voices Peter B Parker (the middle-aged one with a kid in the second one) in the animated Spider-Verse movies.)
Results: This is a somewhat meandering romantic comedy from 2015. Guy Pearce plays an Australian guy (big stretch) who owns a gym in Austin, Texas and hopes to expand. One of his trainers is Cobie Smulders whom Guy Pearce had a fling with a couple years ago but now they're "just friends" or whatever. Then a rich guy (Kevin Corrigan) joins the gym and when Cobie Smulders goes to his rented mansion to help him train, he hits on her and she lets him down hard. So then he decides to try to get her back together with Guy Pearce as I don't know, a way to apologize or something.
Like I said, it's a bit meandering. While it's a romantic comedy it's not a lot of silly gags and bits. It's all kinda restrained and adult. The cast is really good for a fairly low-budget movie like this. Besides two actors from the MCU there's also Giovani Ribisi and Anthony Michael Hall in guest roles. Overall there are some funny parts and as long as you're not expecting something like an Adam Sandler movie you should be fine. (3/5)
A Little White Lie: This is not quite as meandering as Results but similarly a romantic comedy that isn't like something with Meg Ryan or Sandra Bullock or Reese Witherspoon. There's a literary bent to it as it's about a book festival at a California college. The festival is on the verge of being canceled so Dr. Cleary (Kate Hudson) decides to swing for the fences. She tries to get reclusive writer CR Shriver to come. Most of her letters are returned but one of them is returned with an acceptance scribbled at the bottom.
Michael Shannon takes a break from playing villainous characters to play Shriver. He's an alcoholic super of a crappy apartment building. He and his friend Lenny (Mark Boone Junior) figure that while he's not the right Shriver, he can at least get something from the college. So he goes to the college and meets Cleary, a lesbian poet who hates him, a fat black woman who's a fan of Shiver, and Professor Wasserman (Don Johnson) who rides a horse because his license was taken away.
The twist isn't really that surprising: as he pretends to be Shriver, the impostor starts to remember things. And he reads some of Cleary's books and starts to find a love of literature--and her. You can probably see where this is going, but it's still pretty good with some fun parts and sexy parts and literary references. Unlike some other movies, I don't think it gets a lot wrong about the writing world. For not a big-budget movie there's a good cast that includes Zach Braff as the "real" Shriver. (3/5) (Fun Fact: The college used in the movie is mostly Redlands College in Southern California. They used to have a female bulldog mascot named Adelaide who was the "girlfriend" of Butler Blue III, aka Trip, who passed away last month. Addy stopped being the mascot before this movie filmed and the new bulldog they have is kind of ugly. Irony: M Emmett Walsh plays an elderly professor who keeps saying they should invite writers who have died. Walsh himself passed away this year.)
The Stranger: This is a fairly new TV movie on Hulu. A ride share driver named Dorothy who's from Kansas has come to LA with her little dog to start a new life. But then she picks up a creep called Carl E (Dane DeHaan) who tries to stab her. She escapes but he continues to stalk her all over LA. She gets the help of a convenience store clerk called JJ but somehow "Carl" remains a step ahead of them. There are a lot of twists and turns so the 98 minute runtime starts to seem a bit long.
Since Carl first promised Dorothy she could go free if she told him a story, I wondered if the whole thing would turn out to be a meta story that she was telling him. But it's not. With a couple fewer twists it probably would have been better but it's still not bad. (3/5) (Fun Fact: Since they probably didn't have a lot of money, DeHaan's screentime is fairly limited. He's mostly menacing Dorothy and JJ offscreen. At least there is a final confrontation that they probably spent a lot of the budget on.)
Office Christmas Party: I wouldn't usually watch a Christmas movie in April but I got this as part of a 4-movie bundle from Big Lots and I hadn't watched it before, so I wanted to see if I'd keep it or give it away. I decided to keep it, though it's definitely in that lower-tier of Christmas movies that I might watch when I'm done with classics.
Basically this is about a tech company that is going to be shut down by their mean new boss (Jennifer Aniston, who was one of the Horrible Bosses) and to try to woo a big client, the company managers (that guy from Silicon Valley & Deadpool and Jason Bateman) decide to have a blowout bash for Christmas.
From there some mayhem ensues but for me it wasn't great. The problem is there are a lot of characters but none I really care about. Olivia Munn is a computer hacker working on some program you know will be needed and you also know she's gonna hook up with Jason Bateman though he's really too old for her. Kate McKinnon is the stuffy HR manager you know is going to get the stick out of her butt. The taxi driver from Deadpool is an IT guy who hires a hooker to be his escort, but gets more than he bargained for. Randall Park (Jimmy Woo in the MCU) is a new hire who is kind of a perv. Rob Cordry is the crusty customer service rep who's just kind of around. The token black guy doubles as a DJ for the party. And there's some redheaded single mom who seems to be looking for love in all the wrong places.
So there are a lot of characters; too many characters really. Because as always, there's only so much screen time and thus it's hard to make characters I could care about. I suppose the basic premise makes it hard because if it's about a big party, how do you narrow your focus enough to have worthwhile characters? Seth Rogen/Joseph Gordon-Leavitt/Anthony Mackie's The Night Before does a better job by saving the party for near the end so there's time to get to know the main characters ahead of time. As it is, there are some fun bits, but not really enough to sustain a whole movie. (2.5/5)
How to Blow Up a Pipeline: I watched this on Earth Day because it seemed appropriate since it's about would-be ecoterrorists blowing up an oil pipeline in West Texas--actually New Mexico. A bunch of people--mostly college-age kids--from around the country plan to blow up the pipeline and then do it, but of course there are complications. It's not an extremely expensive production. I mean there are no recognizable actors and not really a need for a lot of effects. But it's pretty competent. Really I think if it had fewer characters in the gang it might have been better so I could keep things straight better. There were a few twists, which were nice. Overall not bad and also not very subtle. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: I don't recall seeing a disclaimer telling you that you should not actually, you know, blow up pipelines. But unless you want to go to jail or die, don't do it.)
Vendetta: A cheap action movie as generic as its title. Bruce Willis is a small time gangster whose younger son goes to a small town to kill a random girl. The girl's father then kills the guy and his family kills his wife and then they try to kill each other. Thomas Jane shows up midway through as an arms dealer and Mike Tyson as someone who works with him. It's all pretty dull despite the body count. (1/5)
To Catch A Killer: Generic title, generic-feeling movie for the most part. But it's better made than movies like Vendetta and the main cast in Shailene Woodley and Ben Mendelsohn are much more spry. On New Year's Eve in Baltimore a sniper kills 29 random people. Woodley is a beat cop who's quick to the scene, where she meets Mendelsohn, an FBI agent put in charge. He recruits her as a liaison to help with the investigation. But there's a lot of political pressure to wrap things up. Eventually Woodley and Mendelsohn are on their own to find the killer. It was OK but at 2 hours it drags a bit. Like I said it doesn't really feel like much new, except that Mendelsohn's character is married to another guy. I guess that's something. (2.5/5) (Sad Fact: Since this was supposed to be Baltimore I kept looking for that bridge that got smashed by the ship but I'm not sure it was really in this.)
Transfusion: This was a pretty frustrating movie in that I kept waiting for something to happen. In the end not a whole lot really did. Sam Worthington (remember him? that guy who kinda disappeared after Clash of the Titans 2 until Avatar 2?) is an Australian soldier who's stationed in Iraq or something--it's not important. After he gets home, his young son and pregnant wife are in a car crash and only the boy lives. You might think, well, maybe Sam is going to kick their butts, right? Or do something soldiery? No. It jumps 8 years later when the kid is in court after doing something that isn't important. He's basically on his last strike. His dad gets a job but gets fired for threatening a jerk. Then an old army buddy gives him a job. So it's going to be like The Contractor now? Not really. The movie just kinda ambles around for a while. There are some fights but not much.
The description on Hulu is really generic, saying, "Ex-special forces operative Ryan Logan has a sharply honed set of survival skills that have allowed him to walk the line between courage and fear." Um, OK. It's listed until the Thriller and Action categories so forgive me for thinking this was going to be heavier on the action than limp drama. It's not poorly made or acted; it's just long and dull.(2/5)
Zombie Town: This was adapted from an RL Stine novel, so it's pretty light and kid-friendly. The plot is a bit complicated and nonsensical. There's a horror movie director named Carver (Dan Aykroyd) who is so loved in his hometown that they named it Carverville for him. But 30 years ago he stopped making movies--until now he's ready to do another one. But when the projectionist Mike plays it for the girl he likes, it somehow turns everyone else except Carver into "zombies." They don't work like traditional zombies though; they don't bite or eat anyone. Instead they kind of suck someone's soul and then that person is also a zombie. The only way to stop them is for the two teens to find Carver and then for him to help them. It's all pretty bland entertainment that is probably only scary for younger viewers. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: The cast includes Chevy Chase in a small part and Henry Czerny of the first Mission: Impossible movie. And a bunch of Disney Channel-level actors.)
Evilspeak: Another blog mentioned this movie. It's a 1981 horror movie starring Clint Howard, who uses those old Apple IIe computers kids in the 80s played Oregon Trail on to translate a Satanic book to summon the Devil. That's the kind of description that definitely gets me interested. The movie itself is a bit disappointing. Howard is a student at a military academy and about 80% of the movie is just him being bullied and humiliated while trying figure out how to summon the Devil. The military school is exceedingly weird. About as weird as the school in Bottoms. There's a basement where a creepy maintenance guy lives, beneath that is basically a Satanic temple, and for some reason they have a bunch of nasty pigs. I could understand why they had horses being a military school, but why pigs? They need fresh bacon or something? The pigs come into play at the end of the movie as Clint Howard's Satanic minions. Overall it's sort of like Carrie only not nearly as good. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: The stuffed sows living on my couch really enjoyed the gratuitous shots of pig balls. For humans there are gratuitous shots of breasts and male butts--though fortunately not Clint Howard's. Night Court's Richard Moll plays Father Esteban, a Spanish priest who turned to the devil and founded the school.)
Feeders 3: The first two movies from 1996-1998 were on the Rifftrax app a few years ago. They were probably popular enough that a crappy third movie was made. There is no riffing so I had to endure it alone. Basically it's in many ways even worse than the movies from 27 years ago. The crappy clay puppets are even crappier somehow. How did they even manage that? For some reason there are all these erotic shots of an old fat cop: in a hot tub, eating ice cream, and shirtless in bed. Like no boobs but we have to see this guy's moobs? Ugh.
Attempts at meta humor are pretty lame too. The story never really goes anywhere. Feeders eventually show up and slowly start killing people and some kinda sleeper agents are revealed and then...nothing really. I guess that could unfortunately set up a Feeders 4. Nooooo! (0/5)
Hound of the Baskervilles (1939): This was Basil Rathbone's first appearance as Sherlock Holmes. But unlike the ones I saw on Rifftrax, this was made by Fox and takes place in the 19th Century instead of being made by Universal and taking place in the "present" of the 1940s. Anyway, there's a country estate owned by the Baskerville family and it's said a hound will murder the Baskerville who currently owns it. When the latest one is killed a new one from Canada takes over, Holmes is called in to find out what happened. Holmes is not around for a big chunk in the middle, leaving the story to the Baskerville guy and Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce) until Holmes shows up in disguise and then of course exposes the killer. If I ever read the book it was a while ago so I don't really know how it lines up. Anyway, it's a little longer than the later movies and maybe a slight bit more quality. A pretty good movie for a light mystery. (3/5) (Fun Fact: In this one Holmes wears the famous deerstalker and plaid jacket thing.)
Sherlock Holmes in the Voice of Death: Roku Channel advertised one of the Basil Rathbone Holmes movies from the 40s I hadn't seen on Rifftrax. There were also a couple of other ones too. This is the first one made by Universal. It's in black-and-white and like The Secret Weapon takes place during World War II. A Nazi radio personality calling itself the "Voice of Terror" calls out agents to sabotage British facilities and then the attacks happen. Holmes is finally brought in with Watson (Nigel Bruce) to find out who's behind it. This one is a little grittier than some of the later ones with some violence between Nazi agents and British dock workers. Holmes stays above most of that as the Rathbone one doesn't know kung-fu. There are a few ingenious turns before Holmes finds the solution. These are pretty short B-movies but they're not bad if you like a light mystery. (3/5) (Fun Fact: At one point Holmes is going to put on the famous deerstalker hat and Watson says, "You promised not to wear that anymore." So he puts on a more normal hat.)
Sherlock Holmes in Washington: Another wartime Holmes mystery with Rathbone back as Sherlock and Bruce back as Watson. This time they go to "America" to find some microfilm Nazis are desperate to find. It doesn't take Holmes long to deduce what the film is hidden in, but actually finding it is more difficult. A little less gritty than the previous one. Not really much violence and definitely no sex since it was 1942. Another good light mystery. (3/5) (Fun Facts: Of course all the "American" scenery in DC is just stock footage. Unlike most of these movies there's actually a black man in this: a porter named George. D'OH! But he mentions his son is going to fly planes in the Army--see Redtails--so that's pretty cool.)
Sherlock Holmes Faces Death: During WWII, Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce) is working at a home for traumatized soldiers. Nowadays we'd call it PTSD. Then a doctor is attacked and the head of the family that owns the property is murdered. Watson brings Holmes into it and they start to investigate. Unlike some other things, Holmes never goes undercover as a mental patient or anything. Besides the body count it's pretty typical of the Rathbone Holmes movies. It's another OK light mystery if you want something not soaked with blood or sex or bad language or anything. (3/5) (Fun Fact: A key component of the solution to the mystery involves a human chess game. Sad Fact: At the end Holmes tells Watson that we're entering an age where greed will end and people will consider others more. Instead greed and narcissism are rampant. D'OH!)
As promised, here's the scorecard to summarize everything I reviewed:
Maybe you'll want to go back and get more in-depth commentary. Probably not.
So now the A to Z Challenge is done and I suppose a lot of people are doing the IWSG non-challenge today. Anyway, I mentioned in this entry that I followed former Forbes film critic Scott Mendelson's Substack but I didn't want to pay to subscribe because I don't have the money or inclination to pay for what are essentially blog entries.
About the middle of March I decided to finally unsubscribe. Why? Because he wasn't offering anything for free anymore. Pretty much every post was for paid subscribers so I could only read the headline and first few sentences. I figured I could do that just as well on BlueSky so why bother with getting emails I couldn't even read?
What this really brings up to me is the issue of how much authors and other content creators should offer for free. I have a few books for free on Kindle and Amazon reports make it kind of annoying when I see I have 15 "sales" and 13 are just free books because I don't get paid for them and thus don't really care. I also have a couple of other free books on "Prolific Works," including one that you can also get if you subscribe to my newsletter--which is free to read since it's just advertising new books and stuff.
The point being that I have some stuff for free but far more is paid content. Of course a lot of people would prefer that everything was free. But then the author makes no money, so the hell with that. At the same time, when everything costs money, it's harder to lure readers in because they might not want to spend money on an unknown quantity.
It's kind of a balancing act then where you need some things for free and some things to charge money for. How much in large part probably depends on how much content you have. I have a lot of Eric Filler books, so it's easy to keep a few of them free. I have enough PT Dilloway books that it doesn't hurt to keep Chance of a Lifetime free and it does occasionally spark a few sales of the sequels. If you only have one or two books then you probably don't want to offer a whole one for free. You could just do a sample. Or maybe write a short story in that world as a prequel or involving a different character or something. Something that can give people a taste of your writing and the world of your story so maybe they'll want to dive in.
That's baiting the hook, which is just one of the first hurdles. Of course then the next problem is if they take the bait, you need to reel them in. Unfortunately a lot of people just want to gobble up the bait and then swim away. Or to use a better example, they're like those people who go into Costco or wherever and eat all the samples and leave without buying anything. That is unfortunately probably 95-99% of the "customers" who download free stuff.
With books a large part of that is these people who download free stuff aren't necessarily reading it right away--or ever. They've probably hoarded hundreds or thousands of free books and will never actually read most of them. Still others might simply decide they don't like your book and don't want to read anything else. And some of them will be vocal with bad reviews or less vocal with bad ratings, which I usually think is a bit tacky for something you got for free. If you're lucky they'll just slink away without a bad rating/review.
Here's a good example of the typical "reader" of free books:
This Karen Kathy is mad because she got a paperback ARC (all ARCs are paperback, BTW) and doesn't want to have to give a review of it. In other words she wanted the most expensive format for free with no strings attached. And of course hasn't read the paperback yet. "Where did I go wrong?" Let me count the ways. But that's the sort of freeloader you're going to get with most free books given away. They range from useless to a liability for authors.
The point being, if your fish doesn't like your bait then it's just going to let it go and swim off. That is literally where the idea of "hooking" readers comes from.
So you need some free content, but not everything should be free or you make no money. But also your content needs to be good enough that readers will want more. The second part is a lot harder.
Now you can unsubscribe from my blog.
(BTW, the other reason I unsubscribed from Mendelson's Substack is it just wasn't that interesting. Some of that is not his fault as he picked kind of a shitty time to do this. I mean with the strikes over and everything getting "back to normal" there just hasn't been that much going on in the movie biz. January-February the box office was pretty weak, so about all he could talk about was how we should go to the movies to support movies that really weren't that good anyway. Maybe there will be more stuff to talk about once some bigger movies hit theaters, though this year there aren't a lot.)
As the last A to Z Challenge entry for this year I'm going with an obscure little game I got for free from Origin like Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 called Zuma's Revenge. Besides Frogger, it might be the second-most popular video game featuring a frog that isn't Kermit.
The main character of the game is a frog who has to battle some kind of Tiki god thing on a Polynesian island. Basically there are different maps with balls (or stones) of different colors forming chains around the maps. Your goal is to shoot colored balls at the balls on the screen to match the colors. When you get 3 or more of a color, that part of the chain disappears. You have to destroy all the balls before any of them reach the skull at the end of the level. Make sense? No? Good!
For a silly game there is of course a lot of difficulty to it. First is that you get different balls at random in the frog's mouth. You can select between two different ones but that's it. So if there's no chain on the screen with the color in your mouth, you have to shoot it to the end or another spot and hope you can take care of it later. But the chains get longer and move faster to make it harder and harder. Like Tetris you can end up with a chain-reaction that quickly leads to defeat. In some later levels you get two different chains and if a ball from either one touches a skull, you're done. In some of those levels you get two rocks to shoot from so you have to keep hopping from one to the other in order to get everything.
Besides just the balls of red, green, yellow, blue, and maybe other colors, there are sometimes different power-up balls that you can shoot that will explode a bunch or explode a certain color or things like that. When you blow up part of the chain in the middle, it'll separate it into two (or more) pieces. The front will stop but the back will keep moving until everything is reunited. That can buy you some time to destroy everything. When the game says, "Zuma!" that means there are no new balls being added to chain and you only have to deal with what's left.
There is a campaign (or adventure) mode that I beat a couple of times on the easier level. The adventure mode features a boss battle at the end of every group of levels. There are also some challenges that I never completed.
Like a lot of silly games, it was pretty fun to while away some time when I didn't feel like doing anything else. On Retrogames there's a Nintendo DS version and on Amazon (probably other retailers) you can buy XBox 360 and Windows versions, many bundled with other games.
That concludes the A to Z Challenge...until May 15th when I scheduled the Reflections entry. Thanks to everyone who commented--double thanks if you actually read something!
I've said before that I liked to use The Sims 3 & later 4 to design characters from stories I was working on or had worked on. At some point in the mid-2010s, EA decreed that you had to have their Origin platform in order to play.
While Origin was usually annoying in that it was often slow and at least once some asshole in Russia hacked my account, sometimes they'd offer you freebies. One of the freebies they offered was Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 and its expansion pack: Yuri's Revenge. Since there aren't really any Y games I ever played (I didn't really play Yar's Revenge for the 2600 or the Yoshi games for the Nintendo systems) I'm going to slot it in here.
Command & Conquer was a strategy game for the PC that was like a more full-featured version of Conflict or an early, military-focused version of Age of Empires. After a couple of sequels, Westwood Studios made Red Alert, which was supposed to be a prequel to their original games.
The game takes place in an alternate timeline. After Adolf Hitler is erased by Einstein in 1924, the Nazis never come to power. Instead, the Soviet Union expands to take over China and much of Europe. The first Red Alert game is basically an alternate version of World War II.
The sequel continues this alternate history. In 1972, the Soviets suddenly invade America Red Dawn style. If you play the Allied side, you have to blunt the invasion and eventually capture the Soviet leader to make them stand down. If you play the Soviets, you have to finish crushing the Allies to essentially take over the world.
Since it's an alternate timeline, you get things that didn't exist in our 1972. There are robot tanks and "Tesla coils" that shoot lightning and are used to defend installations. You get foot soldiers, tanks, planes, and ships and like Age of Empires, you have to build facilities to make these as well as walls, watchtowers, and anti-personnel/anti-aircraft defenses. Unlike AOE, you also have to build power plants so you can run all your stuff. Also like AOE, you have to gather resources like minerals and oil to fund and create your army. Instead of "villagers" you get engineers or something like that.
Both sides also get like a secret agent type person. The Allies get Tanya who is played by a real actor in the cut scenes. I forget who the Soviets get, but it's some dude. There is a mission or two where you have to help the secret agent get into and out of some enemy facility to destroy a power station or get secret files or whatever. They can also help you destroy or sabotage stuff in battles.
The expansion Yuri's Revenge focuses on Yuri (big surprise) who's a Rasputin-like dude with psychic abilities. He creates a machine to let him control the whole world with his psychic powers, but the Allies for their campaign are able to stop him from taking over San Francisco and from there use a time machine to go back and save the day. As the Soviets you do something similar as both campaigns focus on destroying Yuri. You can also play missions as Yuri's side, which has a lot of Soviet stuff but also psychic slaves and whatever. Like the priests in AOE, Yuri and his minions can use their powers to convert units to his cause.
I keep mentioning Age of Empires because I played that game a lot and they came out in the same era and have a lot of similar features. It's a good point of reference for me. And it has a lot of the same problems. In a lot of missions or just in single-player scenarios, the trouble can be building up your forces quickly enough to be able to destroy the enemy. If the enemy starts hitting you when you're still trying to build up, you will likely get your butt kicked. Also, the AI controlling your units is pretty dumb, so if you can't micro-manage everything on multiple fronts, things will probably go wrong.
So like AOE or other similar games it can be fun but also sometimes very frustrating.
While I got those two games for free from Origin, when they had a sale, I bought a bundle that had pretty much all the C&C games for only $10 or so. I tried the first couple but the graphics and gameplay weren't that great; not really what I was used to. C&C 3 was one I played all the way through. In the world of that game there's this new mineral called Tiberium that has tremendous value. You have the Allies and the ruthless terrorist organization the Brotherhood of Nod led by the mysterious Kane. The gameplay was largely the same as Red Alert 2 but with a few different things and obviously different units as this took place years after the other games.
I tried to play C&C 4 that came in the bundle, but there were some rules changes that didn't make it as fun as the previous game. I also played C&C Red Alert 3. That game also had some rule changes and introduced an Asian enemy, the leader of which was played by Star Trek's George Takei in the cut scenes--and was less humiliating than his appearances in the two Oblivion movies on Rifftrax. I also played C&C: Generals which was not part of the original or Red Alert series. It was more like a real-world thing where you have the Allies, China, and Middle East terrorists. You have different scenarios for each side. The most fun thing with China was to raise money you could create "hackers" who literally sit around with laptops stealing money for you. So you could "build" a whole swarm of them and they'd each be getting you up to$5 a second or so. It doesn't seem like a lot but it starts to add up. And it's often easier than mining or whatever else you had to do.
The other game I played all the way through was C&C Renegade which wasn't a strategy game at all but a first-person shooter game. Or I guess you could use third-person too. Unlike the original Wolfenstein or Doom games, you could actually drive vehicles around, though not usually inside buildings. Like a lot of first-person shooter type games there was often that problem of trying to figure out where the hell to go, to the point that sometimes I had to watch a YouTube walkthrough to find out what I was missing.
When I was using the RetroGames site, I saw there were C&C games for like the PS1 and N64, but they were kind of annoying to play versus on the PC. Keyboard commands or the mouse work a lot better for that kind of game than a joystick or gamepad. At least I think so.
I haven't played any of these games for a few years because Origin was so annoying on my old PC and then I think they phased it out and I haven't really done much with whatever new thing EA has now. C&CRA2 is still my favorite and Generals and C&C3 were decent, but the rest were kinda meh.
Usually with these things I wind up fudging the X entry because there's so little that actually goes with it. But thankfully this year I have not one but 2 Atari 7800 games that start with X!
Game over, man, game over!
Xenophobe was kind of a forerunner to the first-person shooters like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. The basic premise of the game was kind of like Doom, where you have to go around a station and kill monsters, only there are various ships and stations you explore. The other difference is the monsters were more like cut-rate versions of those in Aliens. Along the way you find different weapons. Like Wolfenstein and Doom, you start with a puny pistol. There's also a laser gun, a rifle that shoots lightning, and a thing that shoots puffs of poison or something and you also get grenades that you can chuck at the monsters.
The game was side-scrolling and what was neat was you could have two-players working together to explore the map. The top half of the screen would show Player 1 and the bottom would show Player 2. Like I said, you could split up to explore different parts of the level and find stuff easier. So my brother and I would do that sometimes. To finish the level you have to clear all the aliens or after a certain amount of time it will self-destruct and you beam out.
It was a pretty neat game for its time. I'm not sure if they made it for the NES or not; I haven't seen it on my knockoff Gameboy or console.
The other X game is Xevious. It was more of a front-scrolling game. Or top-scrolling? Basically you pilot a little ship and fly from the bottom of the screen towards the top and shoot bad guys and find power-ups and all that. You have to try to shoot enemy fighters and bomb targets and if you take even one hit, you die. Meanwhile the screen keeps moving forward the whole time, so you can't double back if you miss something. I think the screen will freeze if you get to a boss fight though.
Like a lot of early video games there wasn't really an ending to it; you would basically keep going until you die. I think once or twice me or my brother got pretty far in it, though I'm sure not as far as some players got.
This one I think was in arcades and there's a version on my knockoff Gameboy so it was for the NES as well as the 7800. Hooray!
Back in 2010 I had one of my brilliant holiday ideas: I was going to joke gift everyone in my family a Snuggie! I got like 5 of them and then sent them to my mom's house, figuring it'd be easier to do that than to try to fit them in my Focus along with the real gifts.
My genius plan for mischief was ruined when of course my sisters snooped in the box. With the joke ruined, I decided to do a 180 and get them a really good gift instead. So I got them a Nintendo Wii. The Wii had been out for a couple of years, being that gift everyone wanted but stores didn't have in the holiday season a couple of years earlier. But by now they were available and cheaper.
So after hooking the thing up to my mom's living room TV, we put in the game that came with it: Wii Sports. The game that comes with a system is usually one that's supposed to give you an idea of what the machine can do, like Combat for the Atari 2600 or Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt for the NES. In this case, maybe Wii Sports was too good at its job.
As you'd expect, Wii Sports features sports. There was tennis, baseball, golfing, bowling, and boxing. None of these games were really complicated and all of them took advantage of the Wii's motion-capture thing. That was where you moved and the character on the screen would do the same thing--supposedly. Sometimes it could be a little wonky.
The games were almost all really fun. We had such a good time--even my mom who probably never played a video game in her life--that when I got home, I decided to get a Wii for myself. I think the one I got came with Wii Sports and one of its sequels: Wii Sports Resort which had basketball, fencing, water skiing, new golf and bowling games, and some other things. It was OK, though Wii Sports was still the gold standard.
But while the games are fun, the novelty starts to wear off after a little while. All of the games are basically mini-games. You can't play a season of baseball or basketball or any of those. You can't really play a lot of different courses or courts with the golf or tennis. So it's pretty easy for it to get boring after a little while.
As I've said a few times before, the problem then became that a lot of the other games for the Wii didn't really take advantage of the motion capture stuff. Especially the non-Nintendo ones distributed to multiple platforms, it seemed the companies didn't want to take the time to program something especially for that technology and so the controls would be clumsy or downright terrible or just not really use the motion stuff at all. Some like NBA Jam or Super Mario Bros you could actually use a "classic" controller, ie just play them like a regular game.
I spent plenty of money on Wii games and accessories I thought might take advantage of it like the Wii Fit platform thing that would supposedly let you walk. But again, there were few games that really used that and it didn't really work great for a fat guy like me--it actually said I was underweight! I got one of those dancing games with the mat but found it was made for people with tiny feet. Not that my feet are huge either. Within a year or so most of that stuff I traded in to Amazon or other sites and mostly I used the Wii like a Roku to play Netflix movies or whatever. Eventually I sold the Wii itself along with Wii Sports.
In the end, it's a fun game, but one fun game (or two really with Wii Sports Resorts) isn't really enough to sustain a whole console.
I could have put this in the "N" entry but I wanted to talk about my NHL teams. So since I couldn't think of a good "V" game I actually played, I'm going to talk about Need for Speed: Most Wanted. While there were some Need for Speed games before this one, I didn't ever play those. Though some dick in Russia used my Origin account to download one. And then changed my account's default language to Russian so I had to use Google Translate to change it back.
Anyway, I got this game free on Origin. It was pretty fun to drive a bunch of different cars around. You get everything from super-exotic sports cars to an F-150 Raptor pickup and a Land Rover SUV to actual F1 race cars. There's even a Ford Focus, though it's a higher-end sportier model than either of mine.
The game is somewhat open-world in that you can just drive around grabbing the different cars where you find them and dodging cops. There are also different races you can partake in that take you around whatever city. There are different difficulties to the races and some you only do one lap while others you have to do a few laps. It can be really difficult. It's more difficult when you have to use the keyboard controls because you don't have a controller that works with Origin for the game.
There's a "heat meter" on your screen that lets you know if the cops are after you or not. The heat meter goes up when you steal a car or when you hit another car or hit a pole or something. If you go speeding past a cop, just like in real life they might come after you. And if you hit one with your car, they'll definitely come after you. Then cops will keep chasing you until you can lose them and the heat meter goes down. A good way to lose them is to get in a different car when they aren't close by.
Unlike The Godfather or Simpsons Hit & Run or other games, you can't take just any old car and drive it around. There are only certain cars at certain points. Some of the higher-end cars aren't unlocked until you beat them in a race. There are in particular 10 elite sports cars to race and once you beat them, you get them.
Real 2014 Porsche 918 Spyder, not actual gameplay
My favorite car to drive around was the Porsche 918 Spyder. It was a two-seat roadster that was fast but I always thought more maneuverable than some of the high-end sports cars. I mean some of the really fancy ones were like steering the rocket car in the Simpsons game when you really get them up to speed. When you're doing races, especially the kind with laps, you need to be able to make turns and veer around objects, not just go flat-out fast.
Actual gameplay
The picture above I posted on Facebook and it came up as one of my "Memories" which is cool. I think this is the roof of a building where I was hiding out from the cops. In some spots there are ramps you can use to get to roofs to hide from the cops and to find hidden cars that you can drive.
I did, through much difficulty, get all of the cars in the game at some point. Then I stopped playing for a little while and when I tried to play again, the screen kept jumping and flickering so I had to stop. I haven't seen if I could play it on my newer PC yet.
Besides the Spyder, it was often fun to get in the F150 and basically use it like a tank against other cars--especially the cops. You couldn't really lose the cops in the F150 because it's slower, but you could push them around a lot better than in a Bugatti or F1 race car--or Focus.
For whatever reason there are no people in the game. You can't run over pedestrians or anything like that. Maybe that would have made it too mature or something.
I think through Origin you could buy extra cars and upgrades and things like that but I never spent any money on the game and still did most of it. There were also I think expansion packs to let you access more of the city like the airport and things like that. The game would just stop you and make you turn around when you got to the edge of one of those areas.
It was a fun game but I never tried getting any of the sequels or the ones before. I did watch the movie with Aaron Paul, though it wasn't really that good.
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