URBAN VENGEANCE, not be confused with Seagal’s URBAN JUSTICE, is a D.I.Y. skateboard action movie I stumbled across on Tubi. The art looked old but the release year was listed as 2024, and I got curious. Sometimes these things you gotta watch for a bit to get an idea if they’re even gonna be watchable at all, but this one I knew pretty immediately I would keep watching because the hero, Jack Urban (Will Martin), is riding his skateboard through an L.A. River type cement ditch called “Skate River” when a guy wheelies in on a motorcycle firing an uzi at him. Jack ducks under a low tunnel, the motorcycle somehow explodes into a fireball behind him, there’s a distorted guitar strum, Jack turns to grimly survey the damage and then skates off into the title sequence powered by retro synth arpeggios (score by Derlis A. González). Off to a great start.
Jack is supposed to be a teenager, and Martin looks like he could actually be one, but he’s also the writer and director of the film. On his websight he calls the movie “an homage to cheesy skateboarding dramas of the ‘80s such as GLEAMING THE CUBE and THRASHIN’,” but thankfully there is no winking or parodying. It comes across as a serious attempt at a CLASS OF 1984 world-gone-insane youth movie, with a sprinkling of DEADBEAT AT DAWN rawness.
HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE (2022) is about a group of young people who have determined, quite reasonably, that the only voice they really have in stopping an oil company from poisoning their communities and exacerbating climate change is if they figure out how to sabotage their infrastructure enough to disrupt their business and make it less profitable. So that’s what they’re ready to do. They all rendezvous at a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, West Texas, some meeting for the first time, but they all know the plan, and they get to it.
G20 is not a DIE-HARD-on-a-______ movie – it’s an 
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.
