"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

The Arrival

THE ARRIVAL is a mid-budget summer of ’96 sci-fi movie written and directed by David Twohy, who already had writing credits on CRITTERS 2: THE MAIN COURSE, WARLOCK, THE FUGITIVE (no big deal), TERMINAL VELOCITY and WATERWORLD, but had only directed TIMESCAPE (1992) starring Jeff Daniels. He wrote this specifically for Charlie Sheen (GRIZZLY II: REVENGE, NEVER ON TUESDAY, DEADFALL), who plays sort of against type as Zane Zaminsky, SETI researcher. I mean, he’s 99% regular Charlie Sheen, but I think he’s trying to throw some nerd into the mix. He has horn-rimmed glasses and perfectly spiked hair like D-FENS from FALLING DOWN, but he completes the look with a precisely sculpted goatee.

This was from a period between SPECIES (1995) and CONTACT (1997) when sci-fi movies were really interested in the brave scientific heroes who sit patiently at those giant satellite dish things listening for messages from space. Just in case. TWISTER’s hot shot storm chasers would give them the Dawn Wiener treatment, but they are important in their own way, and also think they’re cool because they like to howl like wolves and they’re good at rolling their office chairs back and forth between different computers.

(read the rest of this shit…)

June 4th, 2026 | 4 Comments »

Dragonheart

May 31, 1996

DRAGONHEART is directed by Rob Cohen. I have enjoyed several of Cohen’s movies, especially the one before this (DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY), and I’ve had fun joking about his specific brand of weirdo hackiness over the years, but since he has been accused of sexual assault by at least three people including his daughter I won’t joke about him or talk about him anymore. But I will talk about DRAGONHEART.

Sir Bowen (Dennis Quaid, JAWS 3-D, WYATT EARP) is a knight who mentors the Saxon Prince Einon (Lee Oakes), the little shit son of King Freyne (stuntman Peter Hric), who also has another right hand man called Brok (Brian Thompson, ALIEN NATION, MIRACLE MILE, LIFE STINKS). Brok calls Bowen “nursemaid” when he commands him to bring the prince to witness his father’s “noble victory” over rebelling peasants. Bowen tries to teach the kid “the Old Code” so he won’t be a massacring bastard like his no good father, but it really doesn’t take.

During the massacre the dumbass king wanders away from his army to personally set fire to a village he assumes is empty, then the peasants mob him and start to beat the shit out of him but for no reason their leader (Terry O’Neill, CONAN THE DESTROYER) says, “Stop! The battle is out there!” and then everybody leaves? What the fuck. So the prince may have a window to heroically save his father, but instead he pries the giant crown off of his head and slinks away just in time to be clumsily bumped by the peasant leader’s daughter Kara (Sandra Kovacicova), causing a wound that will slowly kill him.

Queen Aislinn (Julie Christie, NASHVILLE) comes up with a plan: carry the little twit to a dragon. They go to a cave to find a dragon who will later be called Draco (voice of Sean Connery between FIRST KNIGHT and THE ROCK). Einon has to swear to “live and rule with mercy” and come to the dragon to “learn the Once-ways.” Then Draco does some kind of magic to give half of his heart to the prince, healing him. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 3rd, 2026 | 14 Comments »

Welcome to the Dollhouse

May 24, 1996

WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE was a big deal at the time. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance with its brutally relatable, darkly funny portrait of the cruelty of children and the pain of not fitting in. It became a surprise hit and introduced moviegoers to an exciting new voice, writer/director Todd Solondz. Luckily nobody knew about his more Woody-Allen-like 1989 debut FEAR, ANXIETY & DEPRESSION, in which he starred as a neurotic playwright.

This is the story of Dawn Wiener (rookie Heather Matarazzo), a friendless seventh grader in suburban New Jersey. I love the opening scene, which vividly captures the terror of being an awkward kid in a noisy middle school cafeteria trying to find somewhere to sit. There’s a diabolical spin on a trope because she finds gloomy burnout Lolita (Victoria Davis) all alone and joins her, though their interaction is cold. When a group of giggly cheerleaders come over to ask, “Hi Dawn, sorry to bother you but we were just wondering, are you a lesbian?” we know in our bones that this freak is supposed to defend this geek. She’d rather stay out of it but she feels bad enough for Dawn or just has enough disdain for the cheerleaders to step in, tell off the bullies and become Dawn’s unlikely friend and protector. And it will be so moving. Except that doesn’t happen at all. Lolita joins in with the taunting and goes on to become Dawn’s worst bully. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 1st, 2026 | 12 Comments »

The Mandalorian and Grogu

THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU is kind of a different approach to a Star Wars picture: a small, standalone adventure. The fate of the galaxy is not at stake, there is no chosen one, no prophecy. It’s not even a prequel or an origin story. Coming from the popular Disney+ series The Mandalorian has given people the impression that it requires homework, but I assure you there is nothing at all you need to know that’s not there in the movie. It’s just one story about the titular bounty hunters on a mission, and not the mission that changed it all. Just a mission. To misquote M. Bison, it’s not the most important day of your life. It’s just Tuesday.

So it’s in the same world I love visiting in that epic space opera, but truly it’s a western or a samurai movie. That’s what I like about the show too, and I was skeptical about turning it into a movie instead of doing another season, but it turns out it’s fun to see these guys in one contained story with movie level production values. It’s light on the force, but high on some of the other things I love in Star Wars: a bunch of fantastical settings, outlandish creatures and robots, lots of them animated, some puppets, even some stop motion by Phil Tippet Studios. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 28th, 2026 | 32 Comments »

Spy Hard

May 24, 1996

I’m not saying this as a complaint, this is not why I didn’t like the movie, but I was kinda surprised to watch SPY HARD thirty years later and find out that it was not in any way a parody of DIE HARD. I mean obviously it’s a spoof of spy movies, and also a few action movies, and also a few random other things pulled out of a box with a blindfold. But the only thing Inoticed that made me think of DIE HARD was a shot of plummeting much like the death of Hans Grueber. But this isn’t the villain at the end, it’s the hero’s lady in a prologue.

You all remember how it went down. Leslie Nielsen was a veteran actor going back to the ‘50s, then the Zucker Brothers put him in AIRPLANE! and found out how fun it was to see him acting serious about ridiculous things. So they made him the star of their tv show Police Squad!, which moved to the big screen as NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD!, which then got two sequels, and now many of us mainly knew Nielsen as a comedy guy. So then directors unaffiliated with Zucker-Abrams proceeded to use him in less successful (both artistically and financially) spoofs, and they either weren’t nearly as good at this style of comedy or just got to the party too late and we were already sick of this type of shit. In the case of SPY HARD I’d say it was both. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 28th, 2026 | 21 Comments »

Mission: Impossible (30th anniversary revisit)

May 22, 1996

By my count, there are ten summer of ’96 movies that turned out to be the first of a series. Usually only a series of two, though. THE CRAFT, TWISTER, THE ARRIVAL, ERASER, THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, THE NUTTY PROFESSOR, INDEPENDENCE DAY, and TRAINSPOTTING each got one sequel. Five of those were decades later, three were direct-to-video. DRAGONHEART had surprising longevity, with its fourth DTV sequel released in 2020. But only MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, which reached its 30th anniversary last week, got seven theatrical sequels, all with Tom Cruise and Ving Rhames returning, all good in my opinion. Most of them very good. So it’s arguably the best summer of ’96 movie and the most consequential.

I have reviewed it before, eleven years ago, so consider this a companion review, because I stand by what I wrote then. I still think MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE is a prime example of a blockbuster done right, because yes, “it’s a big movie star vehicle, based on an existing ‘property,’ climaxes in a noisy special effects-laden action spectacle, did end up becoming a franchise,” but “it is a Brian De Palma movie, it doesn’t feel like he had to compromise anything. He got to take his style and his interests and experiment with them on a little larger canvas than usual.” It’s still something I get excited for when it happens – a visionary director getting a budget to put their stamp on some familiar piece of pop culture – but the franchise machinery has gotten so much stronger. They’re better at keeping somebody like that under control, plugging them into an existing thing, letting them kind of make it theirs, but not entirely. That would be reckless. They’d have to disavow them. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 26th, 2026 | 25 Comments »

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 | 8 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 | 9 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 »

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