"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Being the Ricardos

BEING THE RICARDOS is a straight-to-Amazon movie, the latest from playwright turned TV show creator turned screenwriter turned director Aaron Sorkin. It tells the story of one week in the lives of ‘50s sitcom icons Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, when a radio show had reported on Ball registering to vote as a communist in 1936, and they went ahead preparing an episode of I Love Lucy thinking their careers might be over.

Because this is Sorkin, and a movie, it’s about how a beloved American icon could’ve been taken down by the red scare, but it’s also about the nature of comedy genius, the struggle for artistic freedom, workplace dynamics, and marital strife. Sorkin piles on the separate events of Lucy telling the network she’s pregnant and of discovering Desi’s infidelity, leading to the end of their glorified-on-television marriage. I spent the whole movie thinking “These couldn’t possibly have happened in the same week, could they?” and of course no, they did not. (He also changed which episode was being filmed.) (read the rest of this shit…)

January 5th, 2022 | 43 Comments »

Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins

I had been pretty excited for SNAKE EYES: G.I. JOE ORIGINS, but I was skeptical about director Robert Schwentke (R.I.P.D.) so when it came out and everybody said the action scenes were unwatchable I put off seeing it. I don’t know if the tempering of expectations helped, but catching up with it on video I found it was pretty much the enjoyable studio b-movie I had been hoping for.

Maybe there’s a better word for that, but it’s a category I appreciate: mainstream studio theatrical releases with huge budgets compared to the DTV stuff we love, but without any expectations of either being giant hits or critical successes. Unpretentious, crassly commercial movies, sometimes seemingly out of touch with what is considered cool at the moment, all generally seen as lowbrow also-rans, whether or not their creators had higher aspirations. Stuff like non-FAST Vin Diesel movies, most of the video game and/or Milla Jovovich movies, fantasy sword guy movies, Rob Cohen and P.W.S. Anderson movies. I know not to hold them to my normally stringent artistic standards and just hope for a satisfying mix of pretty cool, kinda stupid, hopefully excessive in some goofy way, maybe in some ways better than most people were gonna give them credit for. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 4th, 2022 | 32 Comments »

Escape From Alcatraz

On January 1, 2013 I reviewed the movie TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE, and made up a superstition that it’s good luck for movie critics to start a year with a Clint Eastwood review. So then I ended up kicking off 2014 writing about A PERFECT WORLD, 2015 with THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES, 2016 with KELLY’S HEROES, 2017 with PINK CADILLAC, 2018 with TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA, 2019 with THE MULE, 2020 with WHITE HUNTER BLACK HEART and 2021 with THE GAUNTLET.

It would be hard to argue that any “good luck” panned out in some of those years, and yet I will stubbornly continue the tradition. ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ is from 1979 and it was the last of Clint’s five movies directed by Don Siegel, because they had a falling out over which one of them got to produce it. (Siegel’s only subsequent movies were ROUGH CUT starring Burt Reynolds and JINXED! starring Bette Midler.)

It’s based on the true story of the only maybe successful escape from the notorious island prison. Three guys got out, they may very well have drowned, but they were never found. I remember going on a tour of that place as a kid and hearing the story. Man, prison tours are fucked up. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 3rd, 2022 | 25 Comments »

The Matrix Resurrections

“I’m sorry. How could I know this would happen?”
“We didn’t understand all of it back then. No more than we do now.”

(you have entered THE SPOILERTRIX)

When I saw the first trailer for THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS, it wasn’t what I expected. That is to say that it seemed like the sort of thing you would expect from a normal 2020s “legacy sequel” to an old series: bringing back some of the original stars, addressing that they are older now, stripping away some of the excesses of previous sequels, visually and otherwise referencing famous scenes specifically from the first movie. Which is all fine and good, but I figured they must be hiding something, because I didn’t believe Lana Wachowski (working without Lilly, who wanted to take time away from the industry) would come back to THE MATRIX after 18 years just to do something normal. I was betting on her having come up with some weird approach that even if I didn’t like it very much I would respect, as was the case with CLOUD ATLAS and JUPITER ASCENDING.

RESURRECTIONS might be the most accessible movie a Wachowski has made since the original MATRIX, but I don’t think I was wrong. This is a filmmaker making the movie she wants to and not what she thinks anyone else wants, therefore ending up with something no one else would’ve made. And I’m happy to say that I more than respected it. I kind of loved it. Though I wasn’t sure at first. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 29th, 2021 | 68 Comments »

To All a Goodnight

Programming note: This will most likely be my last review until some time after Christmas. My MATRIX RESURRECTIONS review is in-progress but I don’t want to rush it and I’m hoping I can get in a second viewing soon. For now please enjoy this perhaps overly detailed assessment of a lesser known killer Santa movie. Happy holidays, friends!

 

David Hess was a singer and songwriter in the 1950s. Under the stage name David Hill he recorded a version of “All Shook Up” before Elvis did, and later wrote some lesser known Presley songs including “Come Along” (from the movie FRANKIE AND JOHNNY) and “Sand Castles” (from PARADISE, HAWAIIAN STYLE). He also penned songs for Pat Boone and Sal Mineo.

In 1972, like The King before him, Hess took his talents to the big screen, starring in a movie and recording the soundtrack for it. But this was pretty different from LOVE ME TENDER; it was Wes Craven’s LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, and he played the despicable villain Krug. It kicked off an acting career in American and Italian exploitation, episodes of Knight Rider, The A-Team, etc., often, I’m afraid, playing criminals and rapists. He was in THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE PARK, Craven’s SWAMP THING, and even Mark L. Lester’s John Candy movie ARMED AND DANGEROUS (as Gunman #4). Since he was reportedly a Method actor, I’m sure he was fun to be around.

And he directed exactly one feature, the Christmas slasher movie TO ALL A GOODNIGHT, given a limited release in January of 1980 before going to video in ’83. (Yes, it’s surprising that a Christmas movie didn’t catch on a month after Christmas.) (read the rest of this shit…)

December 23rd, 2021 | 13 Comments »

Spider-Man: No Way Home

Contains explicit spoilers. Reader discretion advised.


SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME is a gimmicky MCU multiverse extravaganza, pulling out all the stops, all the comical riffs and all the ideas from the brainstorming session to achieve a rough live action equivalent to in my opinion the best Spider-Man picture by far, INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE. It inevitably lacks the newness and artistic precision of the animated version (not to mention the multi-culturalism) but it is its own type of ambitious fan-pleasing accomplishment. If you haven’t heard, it treats the two previous Spider-Man movie series – Sam Raimi’s SPIDER-MAN 1-3 (2002-2007) and Mark Webb’s THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 1-2 (2012-2014) – as alternate dimensions, and pulls those two Spider-Men and five of their villains into the Marvel Corporate Unification to bounce off the current Spider-Man (played by Tom Holland, voice of “Eddie,” LOCKE) and his adult wizard friend Dr. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch, WAR HORSE), compare web-shooters, etc. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 22nd, 2021 | 70 Comments »

Make It Happen

As you know, I sometimes enjoy the dance movies. So when I was preparing my review for KATE a while back and realized there was one starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, I knew I had to see it.

It’s called MAKE IT HAPPEN and it’s about a young lady who tries to make it happen. It came out in 2008, when Winstead had just done DEATH PROOF and LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD and was about to do SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD. She plays Lauryn Kirk, a small town Indiana dancer who dreams of going to a prestigious dance school in Chicago. It’s the standard “Ever since Mom and Dad died…” situation: her and her older brother Joel (John Reardon, WHITE CHICKS, FALLEN, later “Young Kevin Flynn / Clu [body double]” in TRON LEGACY) only had each other and are very close and he’s overly protective of her. They run their dad’s garage, with her working as bookkeeper, but she’s going to Chicago to audition for the school, and he’s in denial that she might really be leaving.

Of course, the auditions are hard, and she fails to impress the openly snobbish admissions guy (Gordon Tanner, HOME ALONE: THE HOLIDAY HEIST). To be fair, her standard hip hop moves don’t seem impressive, but he really should be more friendly when giving her the terrible advice to be “softer, more sensual and feminine.” (read the rest of this shit…)

December 21st, 2021 | 2 Comments »

Copshop

COPSHOP is the latest smart-alecky, artfully lowbrow violencefest from director Joe Carnahan (rewriting a script credited to Canadian financial advisor Kurt McLeod, story by Mark Williams [HONEST THIEF]). I tend to like Carnahan’s work more than dislike it, and I like that he seems to have settled on Frank Grillo (THE GREY) as his main guy and gotten a little better grip on the collar of that SMOKIN’ ACES chaos he likes to set loose. In both this and last year’s time-loop movie BOSS LEVEL Carnahan has found a good balance between the macho rowdiness, the cleverness and touches of sentimentality, and given Grillo a good sleazy-likable-asshole-antihero-fuckup to play.

I guess he’s more anti and less hero in this one. It’s clearly a modern western, and if it’s THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY he sure ain’t the good. But his main motivation throughout the movie is to warn his ex-wife and daughter that they’re in danger, so how could we completely hate him? He plays Teddy Murretto, a Vegas (or Reno?) fixer on the run with a bag of something valuable. On foot with time running out, enemies closing in and nowhere to go, he punches a random cop so that he can hide out in a jail cell. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 20th, 2021 | 15 Comments »

The Matrix Revolutions

When the second half of the 2-part MATRIX sequel begins, our hero Neo and antagonist Agent Smith are both displaced from their regular realities. Smith has somehow transferred his computer-program-consciousness into the organic human body of Bane, only survivor of the destroyed Nebuchadnezzar, now in the sick bay of the Hammer next to comatose Neo, whose mind is trapped in a purgatorial subway station in a virtual world separate from The Matrix.

Yeah, the sequels get complicated. We learn that programs inside The Matrix are regularly deleted, but some try to escape that fate. The subway is a black market means of smuggling exile programs in and out of the Matrix or the Machine City (01?) mainframe. This is all overseen by the Merovingian, with the subway itself operated by his employee The Trainman, a scary dude played by Bruce Spence, a.k.a. the Gyro Captain in THE ROAD WARRIOR and Jedediah in MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 16th, 2021 | 20 Comments »

The Matrix Reloaded

THE MATRIX RELOADED may have been the most highly anticipated but immediately rejected sequel of my lifetime. I’m not just excluding PHANTOM MENACE for being a prequel – whatever happened in the rest of the world, I honestly didn’t experience many people hating it until months later, at least. With RELOADED it was pretty instant.

It was the only MATRIX movie I reviewed upon release, so you can click here to see my kinda dumb, mostly still applicable 2003 thoughts on the matter. I seemed to be fielding a backlash against the original MATRIX movie as well as people hating RELOADED, but it was only the latter I found myself feeling I had to defend over the years.

I do think I partly understand why people were disappointed. THE MATRIX ends on a perfect note of letting us imagine what’s next in the “world where anything is possible.” Any definitive answer of what happens next has a hard time competing with the electric feeling of not knowing. Especially when part 1 was a carefully constructed machine of concept, explanation and payoff, while part 2 kind of wanders through a labyrinth of tangential notions and questions before it gets to the battle it’s been promising. And it cuts off in a cliffhanger well before said battle. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 15th, 2021 | 31 Comments »

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