"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Phoenix Jones: The Rise and Fall of a Real Life Superhero

PHOENIX JONES: THE RISE AND FALL OF A REAL LIFE SUPERHERO is a new documentary I saw at the Seattle International Film Festival last weekend. I didn’t want to miss it because it’s a local topic so I didn’t know if it would ever get a real release, but I guess it premiered at South By Southwest, and now that I’ve seen how legit it is I expect it will get out there.

If you’re not familiar, Phoenix Jones was the moniker of a guy in Seattle who, around 15 years ago, regularly patrolled the streets in a superhero costume, attempting to fight crime. People say he became a folk hero, and that description will have to do, but I don’t think it was a “crime is out of control and finally someone is doing something about it” type reaction like you see in the movies. We were proud of our city spawning a strange phenomenon, but we didn’t necessarily think it was useful. I think people were fascinated with the question of what kind of a nut and/or dork would do this, and what would happen to him.

The last question was partially answered in real time by the livefeeds of Phoenix’s bodycam and his videographer Ryan Mcnamee (who provided his footage and is interviewed in the movie, but died before it was completed). I remember being particularly fascinated by the video where a guy challenges Phoenix to a fight and Phoenix claims (without disagreement from a police officer called to the scene) that in Seattle we have a “mutual combat law” so you can legally consent to a duel. Phoenix dances around, kicks the guy on the leg a couple times, knocks him to the sidewalk and it’s over. (The guy probly didn’t know about Phoenix’s amateur MMA record of 15 wins and 2 losses.) (read the rest of this shit…)

May 21st, 2026 | 6 Comments »

Flipper (1996)

FLIPPER is a nice PG-rated movie about a teen named Sandy Ricks (Elijah Wood, NORTH) sent to spend the summer in the Florida Keys with his wildman uncle Porter (Paul Hogan a decade after CROCODILE DUNDEE, half a decade before CROCODILE DUNDEE IN LOS ANGELES). It’s a picturesque little island with nature and beauty and shit but this kid’s not into it. He shows up with round sunglassses, baggy jeans and a flannel tied around his waist, and his focus is on trying to arrange a boat to get him to a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert in Orlando that he somehow has two all access passes for.

Porter is an eccentric goof who has his a beat i[ p;dfishing trawler, feeds beer to a pelican, makes his toast with the aid of two nails and a welding torch, and mostly lives off of Spaghetti-Os because he bought a pallet of them for cheap from enterprising cruise ship employees. In his house we see bongos, a framed ENDLESS SUMMER poster, and a bunch of surfing trophies, and we first see him waterskiing with two babes while smoking a cigar. He is maybe dating a neighbor named Cathy (Chelsea Field, flight attendant from COMMANDO, Teela from the original MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE), whose son Marvin (Jason Fuchs, who grew up to become the screenwriter of PAN and ARGYLLE) seems to be neuro-divergent, and thankfully Sandy is nice to him. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 19th, 2026 | 13 Comments »

Heaven’s Prisoners

HEAVEN’S PRISONERS is a new-to-me ’96 joint. I was vaguely aware that it’s based on a book, and I think somebody recommended it to me at some point in my life, though it seems to have gotten terrible reviews and was also a flop. Alec Baldwin (THE SHADOW) plays Dave Robicheaux, a recovering alcoholic former New Orleans homicide detective, now living “back on the bayou selling worms and all that jazz.” One day he and his wife Annie (Kelly Lynch, ROAD HOUSE) are on their boat, about to get out the air mattress to fuck on, when a small plane swoops down and crashes in the water right next to them.

They heroically leap into action to try to rescue the passengers, but the only survivor is a little girl from El Salvador (Samantha Lagpacan), who they assume is “an illegal” and “immigration is gonna send her right back” so they decide to off-the-books adopt her and name her Alafair after his mother. She doesn’t speak English, they only speak a tiny bit of Spanish, and don’t make much of an effort to change this, so the subject of didn’t she already have a name she could be using never does come up. I feel like she probly had a name she’d been using up to that point though. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 18th, 2026 | 8 Comments »

Mortal Kombat II

I have not revisited MORTAL KOMBAT (2021) since at-home-viewing during pre-vaccine COVID times. My review opens by calling it “a perfectly okay movie,” and that’s my memory of it. Good cast, some fun fatalities, but it was a movie I’d anticipated for some time and it was sadly middle of the road. Its attempt to MCU-ify the Mortal Kombat mythology was not terrible, but not nearly as fun as the brazen, brain-damaged approach of Paul Wonder Stuff Anderson’s 1995 version.

MORTAL KOMBAT II comes from the same director (Simon McQuoid) but a different screenwriter (Jeremy Slater, FANTASTIC FOUR 2015, GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE), and it’s one of those sequels that’s being made with the understanding that nobody liked the first one very much and they gotta convince everyone this is gonna be different. (How many of those are there, even? Off the top of my head I’m only coming up with GI JOE: RETALIATION.)

They were pretty much required by law to center this one on the titular tournament that strangely didn’t get around to happening during part 1. They also made the two most popular game characters not featured last time into the leads, while the previous non-game audience identification dude becomes just a guy who’s on the team already when they get there. You’d never guess from this that part 1 was all about Cole Young (Lewis Tan, FISTFUL OF VENGEANCE) unless you pick up on the line that’s there to explain that his wife and kid won’t be in the movie. I like Tan and feel bad he got sidelined, but what they do to his character (SPOILER: squash his head with a giant hammer like he’s one of Gallagher’s watermelons) is really fuckin funny. He takes one for the team. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 14th, 2026 | 15 Comments »

Dead Man

May 10, 1996

I don’t remember it seeming weird at the time for Jim Jarmusch to do a western. It just felt natural, somehow, for him to move the deadpan absurdity, casual pace and odd characterization of his previous five indie features into a different time period and genre template. The combination gives DEAD MAN an aura of existential contemplation that seems to me to have made it soar above the other Jarmusch films in the film buff popular imagination, or at least bring him to a different crowd.

It’s the story of William Blake (Johnny Depp between DON JUAN DEMARCO and NICK OF TIME), not the poet, but a Cleveland accountant who’s never heard of the poet when he takes the risk of going west for a job at Dickinson’s Metalworks in the town of Machine. He received an offer by post from one John Dickinson (Robert Mitchum in not quite his last film, though he died in ’97), but things will not work out for William as hoped. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 13th, 2026 | 9 Comments »

Original Gangstas

May 10, 1996

I don’t remember ORIGINAL GANGSTAS playing in a theater near me, but it apparently opened on 474 screens, enough to make it into the top 10 (at #9, below JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH, which had been out a whole month already). I was excited for it because it was basically a Blaxploitation family reunion. It stars Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree and Ron O’Neal, it was back when you actually had to have them all on set together to make that work, and director Larry Cohen (BLACK CAESAR, HELL UP IN HARLEM) did manage to get a shot of them all in a row firing guns in front of an exploding car. In the dark, though. But I think it’s them.

Unfortunately the script by Aubrey K. Rattan (HIT LIST) doesn’t do anything beyond trudging through the most basic tropes you expect, and Cohen doesn’t manage to find much energy, momentum or style in it (much less humor). Unsurprisingly, but crucially, the score by Vladimir Horunzhy (ELVES) could not hold a candle to the worst and most generic of ‘70s studio musician jams, and the modern songs we hear bits of don’t do much even though they got Ice-T, Geto Boys and MC Ren to contribute. This movie has the most famous faces of the genre, but not a single drop of the juice. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 12th, 2026 | 5 Comments »

Twister

May 10, 1996

They’re scientists, but they’re cowboys. And they follow the wind. When they get the call they strut and they smile at each other knowingly as they hop into their Jeeps and trucks, slam on the gas and hurtle toward the danger, thinking nothing of it except ha ha, what a fun time we’re having here. They playfully exchange lingo-filled banter over the CB as they look up to the sky or down to the dots on their computer screens. They each have their own quirks and their own styles of musical accompaniment and their own ways of yelling “WAHOO!” in the face of God’s mighty wrath.

They are the wildpeople of weather, the maniacs of meteorology, the tornado terrorists, the thunder jockeys, the Doppler demons, the Hell’s Angels of nerds. They are the storm chasers, and they absolutely will not stop, ever, until they deploy their new device designed to release hundreds of small floating sensors into a tornado to measure it from the inside and obtain data that could potentially help improve early storm warning systems in the future.

(read the rest of this shit…)

May 11th, 2026 | 24 Comments »

One Spoon of Chocolate

ONE SPOON OF CHOCOLATE, the new movie written and directed by The RZA, is a little bit deranged. I say that in a neutral way. I kind of like that it’s crazy, but I don’t overall think it’s a movie that works. When I describe what it’s about to you it’s going to sound like a pulpy exploitation movie, a ’70s style revenge thriller with a modern GET OUT type edge, something that could’ve been branded as part of a GRINDHOUSE double feature if those had become an ongoing concern like V*H*S. (In fact it has a “Quentin Tarantino Presents” credit and an appearance by Red Apple Cigarettes.) But most of the time the tone is very earnest, kinda dour, sometimes feeling like a PSA. And when the hero finally gets to fight the lead villain the score (by Tyler Bates and The RZA) chooses not to hype us up like it’s the big pay off, but just give us some synth textures, like it’s sad. It’s kind of a downer. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 7th, 2026 | 2 Comments »

The Pallbearer

May 3, 1996

THE PALLBEARER is not a movie I was interested in in 1996, because it was, as far as I could tell, a romcom starring David Schwimmer. I didn’t even watch Friends, why would I branch into his cinematic efforts? But 30 years later I was curious because it turns out this is the directorial debut of one Matt Reeves, whose subsequent works have been the following: CLOVERFIELD, LET ME IN, DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES, and THE BATMAN. Apparently he also created and directed 5 episodes of a television show called Felicity and it would be interesting to know if this kind of has a similar feel in many ways, including the way it integrates the score by Stewart Copeland (FRESH), but you’d have to asks someone else for that information. I only know that I liked all of those movies he directed, as well as his one credit prior to this – UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY, which he co-wrote with Richard Hatem.

Reeves’ debut here is produced by his pal J.J. Abrams (credited as Jeffrey Abrams) and written with Jason Katims, a story editor from My So-Called Life who later developed Roswell and worked on Friday Night Lights. With its ugly poster and DVD cover I always pictured THE PALLBEARER as some shitty, uncinematic comedy Reeves would be embarrassed of, but actually it’s a good looking indie type of movie, shot on location in New York by motherfuckin Robert Elswit, who had already done HARD EIGHT and would go on to not only shoot most of Paul Thomas Anderson’s other movies but also MICHAEL CLAYTON, REDBELT, THE TOWN, NIGHTCRAWLER and many other fine films. The guy seems to know camera stuff pretty good in my opinion, so it looks like a real movie. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 6th, 2026 | 18 Comments »

The Craft: Legacy

THE CRAFT: LEGACY is, in my opinion, a remaquel. It technically takes place after the events of the 1996 film, with new characters, but the basic setup is intentionally a repeat, and the sequel part plays like it was meant to be a surprise at the very end. I believe that if they cut that scene and the subtitle then everyone would’ve accepted this as just a remake with some nice twists and changes in details.

Whatever you want to call it, it works best as a companion piece, a compare-and-contrast exercise, and there’s quite a bit that lines up. Once again we have a new girl moving to town with her single parent, she befriends the three outsider girls who are in need of a fourth person for their witch’s circle, they successfully cast some spells on their tormenters, including a mean jock boy who she causes to start following her around being nice to her. A small difference is that it’s not a Catholic school this time, so they get to be straight up goth without taking liberties with the school uniform. A bigger difference is that the newcomer’s family is central to the story. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 5th, 2026 | 4 Comments »

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