G20 is not a DIE-HARD-on-a-______ movie – it’s an AIR-FORCE-ONE-in-a-hotel. Presidential offshoots of DIE HARD are pretty much a sub-subgenre now with WHITE HOUSE DOWN and OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN and this in the books. But this is the type where the president is ex-military and is the indisputable action lead, and the only one where she’s played by Academy Award winner Viola Davis. THE WOMAN KING showed us Davis could have moves, everything else showed us she has the gravitas to play a formidable world leader, and it’s fun to watch her do both of those things at the same time.
Though this went straight to the Amazon Product Supply Corporation’s television buffering service it’s one of the ones they do every once in a while where they advertise it as if hoping a bunch of people will know it exists. It has good production values, seems like a professionally made movie, could probly be released in theaters, but luckily it wasn’t because it is about exactly good enough to mildly enjoy while on your couch and almost completely forget before you can figure out how to get it to continue playing the credits instead of showing you a bunch of other shit that you don’t want to see. Not that you really need to experience the credits but you’re not a savage, you would leave them on if the fucking thing would let you. (read the rest of this shit…)

MEMOIR OF A SNAIL is a stop motion movie, not trying to be edgy but not appropriate for (most) kids, kind of like a pretty dark indie comedy, except done with clay figures. I haven’t seen MARY AND MAX, the previous feature from writer/director Adam Elliot, so I don’t know how similar or dissimilar they are, but from my experience this is a very unique use of the medium, constantly narrated, and full of quirky novelistic detail and digressions.
Y2K is a 2024 horror comedy that’s the directorial debut of Kyle Mooney. You may or may not know Mooney as a Saturday Night Live cast member from 2013 to 2022, but he also co-wrote and starred in a weird movie called BRIGSBY BEAR (2017) and I would highly recommend Saturday Morning All Star Hits! (S.M.A.S.H.!), an eight episode parody of ‘90s children’s programming he co-created in 2021. This shares with those a surface appearance of millennial nostalgia but with such specific pop cultural observations and such weird comedy ideas that it never feels like “Hey, remember that!?” in a bad way. The joke isn’t ha, we used to have VHS, it’s that an evil VCR kills somebody by ejecting a dubbed and hand-labelled VARSITY BLUES at their head.
Watching
JADE is a 2025 indie action movie that’s pretty derivative and very messy but kinda fun. It’s clearly made by a bunch of stunt people having a good time and not taking themselves too seriously, so it’s hard to be mad at. It’s a vehicle for Shaina West, who was in
THE APPRENTICE is a well-made movie that’s a good explanation of and well deserved middle finger to the historic moment we find ourselves in. It’s also a movie I was dreading watching and that I don’t even necessarily recommend because one could hardly blame you for not wanting to spend another second thinking about or watching even a simulation of that miserable fucking worthless prick asshole ratfucker Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan,
LOVE HURTS is a trifle, a truffle, a little treat meant to be devoured quickly and forgotten. But that’s much better than I’d heard (one critic called it “nearly unwatchable,” I remember), so I feel kinda guilty that I listened to the conventional wisdom and skipped it in theaters. Ke Huy Quan got his 87North-produced action vehicle, an even greater honor than his Academy Award if you ask me, and I waited for video. For that I apologize.
You know Reality Winner? The young translator who was working as an NSA contractor and got busted for leaking an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 election? She got sick of hearing Glenn Greenwald in particular say it was a hoax when she had proof sitting right there, so she mailed it to The Intercept, who published unredacted scans of the documents, “accidentally” leading the feds to the exact printer they came out of. She pled guilty and was sentenced to 5 years and 3 months in prison under the Espionage Act of 1917, the longest sentence ever imposed for leaking classified information to the media.
I don’t want to fairy-tale-reimagining-sequel you guys out, but the truth is right after I watched 



















