Morbius – I have definite worries about this new piece of the Sony Pictures part of the Marvel cinematic universe and it’s not just because of the length of time it took for it to finally be released because that is all pandemic related. My trepidation comes from the lacklustre trailers that seem totally corny and uninspired, the shoehorning of Michael Keaton’s Spider-Man: Homecoming character into said preview or the fact that we get a glimpse of a villainous Matt Smit to go against Jared Leto’s Dr. Michael Morbius but zero motivation to why. The story follows the brilliant biochemist as he tries to cure himself of a rare blood disease but he inadvertently infects himself with a form of vampirism instead. I was never really on board with any of these unconnected MCU Sony films like Venom but both of those films kind of subverted my expectations so that’s how I will head into this film, will the bar set low. I will say that director Daniel Espinosa is usually pretty solid, with films like Safe House and Life, but the studio meddling may have dampened his style. hopefully, I’m wrong but the advance word is not great.
Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood – One of my favourite filmmakers of the last thirty years, Richard Linklater, is dipping into his past successes a little bit as well as into his own childhood for a delightful new movie that feels like more of a self-imposed passion project that a full-on linear story and at the end of it I was more than okay with that. The film seems to borrow from the growing-up drama that was the inventive and unseen before ten-year journey that was Boyhood and combines it with his digitally filmed but animated over top of gems like A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life. Narrated by Jack Black, this is a coming-of-age story set in the suburbs of Houston, Texas in the summer of 1969, centred around the historic Apollo 11 moon landing and most notably a ten-year-old boy who is picked by NASA to be shot into space to make up for a space capsule that was made too small. The second part of this is obviously fantasy but the narration brings us through the time period and daily life that was Texas in the late sixties, the pop culture and world-shaping events that transpired and their effect on the youth. Linklater seems to be exploring his own familial relationships in this film, a story that more feels like a catharsis for him and may not be broad enough for a large audience. I personally loved this film and found myself enthralled with its inventiveness and the subtle comedy of it.
The Bubble – It feels like so long ago when I was looking forward to Judd Apatow’s movies. Since Knocked Up I was totally into Funny People and Trainwreck, two very decisive films with audiences but nestled in there was the quasi-sequel to that Seth Rogan movie This Is 40 and The King Of Statin Island that left me a little off with its unevenness. Now he has a new quarantine made movie that features a good cast with Karen Gillan, David Duchovny, Keegan Michael Key and even his own daughter Iris that follows a group of actors and actresses stuck inside a pandemic bubble at a hotel attempts to complete the next piece of their fan favourite franchise. With this film, I can say that Apatow has made something so disjointed and unsatisfying that it makes me question his drive for narrative films anymore. The guy crushes it with documentaries like the Garry Shandling one and I have hopes for the upcoming George Carlin documentary but this movie is just plain not funny aside from one drug-fueled moment. I want to love Judd forever but I don’t want to force it and to give this any sort of a good review and not letting him feel the wrath would just plain be wrong.
Blu-Ray:
Sing 2 – It may be my lack of emotion for musicals or my need for a deeper story but neither of these Illumination Entertainment-produced music-driven animated features has done anything for me or remain memorable in my mind at all but I will say that my kid adores them. The voice cast should have roped me in, with Matthew McCoughnahey, Reese Witherspoon, Scarlett Johansson and more but it just feels like a loose plot and popular music to sing along to. This sequel has Buster Moon and his theatre full of performers in financial trouble again, pushing them to persuade reclusive rock star Clay Calloway, voiced by a debuting Bono, to join them for the opening of a new show. It is all paint by numbers stuff and, I have to throw some shade here, but Bono is incredibly wooden in a speaking role and it feels so weirdly distracting. I also feel like him voicing a lion was a weird stretch that he did not fit at all. This movie is total kid’s fluff so it should be regarded as such.
Pursuit – John Cusack is having a rough time movie-wise, much like a lot of former A-list stars who start to coast down to the B-level direct to video market and, hey, Morgan Freeman has done it lots as well so maybe it’s the lull before the renaissance. The good news is that Emile Hirsch is along for the ride as well in this thriller and he always brings it no matter how bad the script may be. The story has actor Jake Manley as a detective named Breslin who crosses paths with Calloway, a ruthless hacker who’s trying to save his kidnapped wife from a drug cartel. When Calloway escapes from police custody, Breslin joins forces with a no-nonsense cop to reclaim his prisoner. This is the bargain basement of action thriller filmmaking with terribly constructed sequences and the corny bad guy and tough-guy bravado. It feels needlessly convoluted, to the point of ridiculousness, and doesn’t have any sort of payoff for trying to go so deep. I guess it was a paycheck for a lot of these guys but I honestly feel robbed of my time.
The Requin – Giant shark horror films, yay! Am I the only one cheering for this? C’mon, friends, the allure of Jaws is a forever thing now and we always clamour for more that’s why we allowed the Jason Statham action flick The Meg to be somewhat of a hit. This movie has the added nineties nostalgia of starring Clueless actress Alicia Silverstone, and that’s the film she was in not the demeanour of the person. In the second of two films she features this week (the other being the much better Last Survivors), she co-stars with Big Little Lies actor James Tupper in a film that follows a couple on a romantic getaway who find themselves stranded at sea when a tropical storm sweeps away their villa. In order to survive, they are forced to fight the elements, while sharks circle below and it immediately springs to mind the thriller Open Water which I will say right here right now was a better movie. This film consistently suffers from not capitalizing on good opportunities horror-wise while also not giving us enough monster thrills with the sharks. I don’t know if it was the budget but I don’t need to squint through CGI fog for an hour and a half, please.
The Wonderful World Of The Brothers Grimm – The first of two Warner Archive titles this week, the new edition of this film fascinates me because it is rumoured that it could never be “restored” because the original three-panel Cinerama camera negatives were heavily water damaged. While we don’t have the capability to screen three-panel Cinerama anymore, no matter how much they tried, the rumours proved to be untrue and we get a special edition of this Lawrence Harvey fairy tale epic. Simply put, this film is set in the early nineteenth century, following the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm who are commissioned to write a family history for a local Duke which is shown in the reenactments of three of their stories including “The Dancing Princess”, “The Cobbler and the Elves” and “The Singing Bone”. Later nominated for four Academy Awards and won one for Best Costume Design, I feel like this film is largely remembered for the gimmick in which it was shown as well as the huge cast. As a Twin Peaks fan, I’m drawn to the fact that Russ Tamblyn is in it.
A Star Is Born – When Lady Gaga took her first big-screen movie role in the long gestated remake of this film a few years ago it elevated the original films into the spotlight again but probably more so the Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson version. Well, this isn’t that on, nor is it the Judy Garland one that came before it but instead it’s the one before THAT from 1937 starring Janet Gaynor and Frederic March. In the simplest version of the story, the story is removed from the music artist’s skewed tale and instead follows a young woman who comes to Hollywood with dreams of stardom, and achieves them only with the help of an alcoholic leading man whose best days are behind him. Just like the remakes to follow, this movie was also an Oscar darling that pulled in eight Oscar nominations and netted them two which included best Original Screenplay. Obviously, the approach to this movie is dated but the bones of a classic Hollywood story are very neat to see exhumed and there has to be a reason that this particular character tale is so popular.
Steve’s Blu-Ray Geek Outs:
Surf Nazis Must Die – I got my first Troma Entertainment review copy so I had to bring it out this section if not just to show it off to the people in the know. For those who aren’t, Troma is an independent film production company and distributor that makes the schlockiest and most ridiculous horror-comedies known to film, all under the eye of the great Lloyd Kaufman, known to his fans as Uncle Lloydie. With the ridiculous title that this film has, you know it’s going to be crazy and follows a tough gun-wielding woman who is sent on a path of revenge when her son is brutally murdered by neo-Nazi surf punks in a post-apocalyptic future. One by one she hunts each of them down to dispatch them in the goriest ways possible and this late eighties film comes through brilliantly on this newly restored Blu-ray edition. Is it in bad taste? Oh, most definitely but that is how Troma rose to be the indie darling it is and has spawned filmmakers like Eli Roth, James Gunn and Trey Parker and Matt Stone from South Park. The fans of this are savvy to everything this studio has to offer and this landmark release will be a big hit.
The Flag Of Iron – 88 Films has gifted me not one but two great classic Shaw Brothers classics from their extensive vault of martial arts stories. The cool thing about both of these is that they were made in the early eighties, a very different era for the Asian film company. This one was released in 1980 and was made more as a proof of concept film as it came from a burst of inspiration when director Chang Chen had found new talent and blood with his “The Five Venoms” actors, a movie he had made a couple of years prior, most of which were trained in the highly acrobatic Chinese opera and well versed with exotic martial arts weapons. This created a new spark for Chen as he started to write with the use of these bizarre weapons as the focal point in his films. The revamp of the picture for blu-ray is stunning as the colours pop off the screen, the special features are great and the packaging is everything a collector dreams of. This even includes posters which makes me very happy.
Legendary Weapons Of China – The second 88 Films and Shaw Brothers co-release comes from a couple of years later but this time from the legendary Chia-Liang Liu, a filmmaker that gave us movies like The Legend Of Drunken Master and the Wu Tang Clan inspiring, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Liu was less about experimental filmmaking and more about what had worked previously and it always translated well to screen. That is evident with this action drama with a side of comedy that focuses on a band of killers from an ailing kung fu and magic society who are sent on a manhunt for a former member of the society whose bad mouthing threatens its existence. I absolutely loved the credits for this movie that does each actor’s credit with them fighting against a colour backdrop, a trope that would be used a lot in martial arts movies. Again the presentation of the blu-ray is exquisite and the cover of it may be my favourite that I’ve received from 88 Films.
Liar’s Moon – A cool thing about being hooked up with MVD Visual, besides all of the Shaw Brothers films and now Troma releases that I just talked about, is this collector’s series side of their releasing that sheds a spotlight on films I’ve never heard of with now big and prominent Hollywood stars. This one caught my attention because it has Matt Dillon and a couple of years before the cool one we got to see in the S.E Hinton adaptations of The Outsiders, Rumble Fish and Tex and just after his dorky appearance in My Bodyguard. The film is about a romance between class levels that blossoms in East Texas during the summer between the daughter of a rich banker and a working teen on his way to blue-collar career. Although he wasn’t at the time that this came out, Dillon is the most recognizable star in this film, just a young lad, but classic actor Broderick Crawford also appeared in this in his final performance after a forty five year career that included All The King’s Men and Born Yesterday.
The Stand – I felt like I’ve been waiting since the mid-nineties for someone to tackle this epic Stephen King novel and the timing is really weird for a story about an uncontrollable virus that decimates the earth’s population to be released but, when it was released mid pandemic, well, it was what it was. Let it be known that this is probably my favourite book of all time and under The Fault In Our Stars filmmaker Josh Green, the potential is huge. The story exists in the mass destruction caused by a manmade virus called “Captain Trips” with a false messiah emerging to gather his like-minded survivors, possessing incredible powers and hellbent to rule the remaining human society. It’s up to a group of people to journey the post-apocalyptic wasteland to stop him and his army or perish in the attempt. With a killer cast, including James Marsden, Whoopi Goldberg, Alexander Skarsgård and many more, the unrated platform of CBS All Access was supposed to be a perfect way to convey this story if they had decided to do it correctly, instead of just cherry-picking everything they wanted out of the book and essentially throwing the rest into a tire fire. I was so angry with what I was seeing and I felt like it was completely toothless by the end, a forgettable piece of fluff never to be thought of again. Between this and the treatment of The Dark Tower, I’ve been upset with the handling of the Master Of Horror’s works largely.
Television:
Moon Knight (Disney+) – The new arrival in Marvel Cinematic Universe television has arrived so you know exactly what to tune into for the next six Wednesdays on Disney+, something that has been missing since the end of The Book Of Boba Fett. What I find really cool about this is that one of my favorite directing duos, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead, the minds behind The Endless and their last release Synchronic, are the showrunners on this show that is a little inaccessible to a mainstream audience. Oscar Isaac takes the lead in a story that follows a former U.S. Marine who is struggling with dissociative identity disorder, flipping back and forth between himself, Marc Spector and a museum giftshop employee named Stephen Grant. Spector knows that within him he is granted the powers of an Egyptian moon god but his dormant counterpart is not and quickly finds out that these newfound powers can be both a blessing and a curse to his troubled life and may cause the downfall of the world within the wrong hands. Isaac is brilliant as usual, playing between Grant and Spector so well and Ethan Hawkes shines so well in his villain role as the former host of the powers that Moon Knight possesses and one that will eat everyone’s soul to regain it. The show starts off strange and gets even stranger but the pay offs are so cool and the dual looks of Moon Knight are totally awesome. I’ve loved everything I’ve watched so far and can’t wait for more.
The Lost City – Sandra Bullock has a good penchant for picking good co-stars to feature in her comedies which is a genre she fits in best because, well, Sandy is always charming. I feel like her characters are always just a millimetre away from the true lady. While the movies aren’t exactly ones that stick in your memory, like The Proposal with Ryan Reynolds, they are always entertaining at the time and I expect the same from this new film with Channing Tatum in the co-pilot seat. Bullock plays an adventure romance writer who is kidnapped by a young and ruthless treasure hunter played by Daniel Radcliffe. This prompts the cover model of her books to prove that he is a real-life hero to her and heads into the jungle to rescue her. The trailers for this honestly look pretty funny, relying on the two stars’ onscreen chemistry and proven acting chops to get the audience a satisfying film that will remind us of the Michel Douglas and Kathleen Turner film Romancing The Stone and the sequel Jewel Of The Nile. Also, I have to mention that Brad Pitt is in this too and looks hilarious in a long hair action hero spoof role.
Everything Everywhere All At Once – After the insanity and soulful beauty that was Swiss Army Man, a must-see film for any arthouse fan, I’ve been waiting for the next collaboration between the two-headed creation team which is Daniels. Always idiosyncratic and entirely on their own path, the films that they created separately have been wildly original as well so they are seemingly on a constant hot streak in my opinion. For their new mind-bender, they’ve enlisted Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Lee Curtis and former child star Ke Huy Quan for this story about an aging Chinese immigrant who is swept up in an insane adventure, where she alone can save the world by exploring other universes connecting with the lives she could have led. Yes, it might be reminiscent of the sci-fi action flick The One with Jet Li from the early 2000s but I know that Daniels is going to give this story a whole new spin. The trailer makes my draw drop to the floor and I can’t even begin to consolidate my expectations which, at this point, are set from here to the moon. I can not wait and it may be on my best-of list at the end of the year.
Gold – Zac Efron’s most recent adventures were documented in his Netflix docuseries Down To Earth which had him travelling around the world with wellness expert Darin Olien in search of healthy, sustainable ways to live but it must have also been to help prepare him for this new survival thriller because it really seemed to pay off. Interestingly enough, he almost died making the reality show so it’s even more fitting that this film takes place in one of the most deadly places on the planet as well. The film is set in the not-too-distant future and follows Efron as a drifter travelling through the desert who discovers the largest gold nugget ever found with his driver who is reluctantly escorting him through the harsh terrain. While his new business partner treks off to find an excavator to dig up their find, the drifter is left to his own devices to guard it against thieves amid harsh conditions and wild dogs while waiting for his meal ticket to return. Beautifully shot but dour and depressing, this movie is as harsh as they come and shows, without any flinching, a man whose body is torn apart by the elements he faces. Efron is put through the absolute wringer in this film and I felt captivated the whole time. The viewer takes a beat, albeit far less than the character on screen, but it is quite the journey.
Moonshot – Cole Sprouse has left all of that Zack and Cody Suite Life stuff behind him as he has been in this new emo phase of his career ever since the fan loved Archie reimagining on The CW, Riverdale. The fans will certainly be following him over to the Crave streaming service via the conduit of HBO Max for this new romantic drama and I’m digging that it has a bit of a sci-fi edge to it plus it has Zach Braff so that guarantees it getting my time. Co-starring Lana Condor from Alita: Battle Angel, the film is set in a future where Mars is terraformed and colonized by the best humanity has to offer and two very different college students wind up joining forces to sneak onboard a space shuttle to the red planet in order to be united with their significant others. The film comes from filmmaker Christopher Winterbauer whose first feature Wyrm invoked comparisons to other nuanced directors like Yorgos Lanthimos and Todd Solondz which just adds to the pile of things that fascinate me about this film. I enjoy the weirdness in cinema, as evident from a lot of the recommendations I’ve given so I see this as being no different.
You Are Not My Mother – There is something about British, Irish, Scottish or Welsh-made films that automatically makes me gravitate towards them but the horror side of things really gets my attention because they are always so incredibly crafted. Last year had the Welsh mind twister Censor and the British chiller Caveat and it’s right in between those great films where this simple and slightly monstrous horror tells its compelling tale. Not featuring any cast members that are known on a global scale, this film is set in a North Dublin housing estate where a young teen named Char’s mother goes missing. When she returns Char is determined to uncover the truth of her disappearance and unearth the dark secrets of her family as she starts to see weird behaviours in her mother that she has never seen before and her grandmother seems both wary and knowledgeable about the whole situation. This film is immensely satisfying in its incredible atmosphere that draws you in deeper and deeper into the mystery that surrounds Char and her family with subtle little flashes of pure terror that will get under your skin. What I love about horror is it can be made for relatively nothing and still be effective with every frame, as this film shows off with class.
Run Woman Run – Immediately when I saw the premise for this new film I was reminded of the Jillian Bell comedy-drama Brittany Runs A Marathon which has the simple basis of a woman wanting to try the simple thing of running every day and it slowly starts to change her life. This one has a very loose similarity but I’m excited to talk about it as it is another piece of filmmaking from the indigenous community and it features Lorne Cardinal from Corner Gas. The Story follows Beck, a single mother who learns how to reclaim her dreams, family and honour her life, all thanks to an unlikely coach who forces her on the path to a better life. The film has already been screened for First Nations communities across Canada to great acclaim and it will be cool to see what the rest of Canada thinks now that it is in a wider release. It was written and directed by Zoe Leigh Hopkins who is fast becoming a rising storyteller n Canada and I look forward to what she’s coming out with next.
Blu-Ray:
Nightmare Alley – It feels like it’s been a long time since we’ve gotten a Guillermo del Toro film because it has been four years since his Best Picture-winning The Shape Of Water divided audiences. Full disclosure here, it’s a fantastic film. One of the greatest cinema masters today, he returns with a remake of a classic film noir and it’s a timepiece of a film that speaks out from the exact era that it is voicing with a knowledgable tone. The film stars Bradley Cooper as an ambitious carny with a talent for manipulating people with a few well-chosen words who hooks up with a female psychiatrist, played by Cate Blanchett, who is even more dangerous than he is. Featuring a supporting cast of Toni Collette, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, Willem Dafoe and Ron Perlman, this movie is a phenomenal character ride that drips with that del Toro style that just leaps off the screen thanks to the work of his many time collaborator and stalwart cinematographer Dan Laustsen. I really would love to see this film released in the same black and white style that the original film was made in because I think it would play really well, just like Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist did.
Fortress – Now for the periodically fun portion of this blog sometimes maybe, it’s time to look at the latest direct-to-video entry from Bruce Willis and a glimpse of what he’s lazily lining his pockets with. This sounds very harsh but it is only because I’ve been driven to this point by again and again being subjected to his mediocrity. The film has Willis as Robert, an ex-CIA agent, who lives in a hidden woodland resort that serves as a retirement community for former spies. His estranged son Paul is a cryptocurrency entrepreneur who has run into trouble and needs to ask his old man for help but, unfortunately, Paul’s plans aren’t as secret as his father’s location which leads a group of criminals hellbent on revenge to Robert’s doorstep. The film co-stars Chad Michael Murray and Jesse Bradford, two actors who have worked with Willis on a direct to video film here and there and is directed by James Cullen Bressack, a super nice guy on Twitter but, woof, is this movie ever bad. I think the issue is Willis who seemingly couldn’t give an ounce of energy to any line reading to save his life or the plot’s integrity. Just ho-hum level of delivery on everything. He’s now pathetic.
Ted Bundy: American Psycho – Really, another Ted Bundy story? Unfortunately, we can’t leave this serial killer story alone it seems and Chad Michael Murray makes his second appearance in a row but it is just as bad as the first one, sadly. Also known as the “American Boogeyman”, a terrible title, the film follows FBI agents Kathleen McChesney and Robert Ressler as they organize one of the largest manhunts in history to apprehend America’s most infamous serial killer, Ted Bundy, played by the former One Tree Hill star. I don’t know who this movie was made for because even the most season serial killer movie fans have seen this Bundy story played out over and over again and remarkably better so as well. This movie is hobbled from the get-go, playing hard into schlocky tropes with little to no pay off and the acting is truly dreadful on all levels. I know that the horror genre isn’t usually where one would go for some good line deliveries but there has to be a bar set and this film doesn’t even come close to even meeting it.
Come Drink With Me – Arrow Video is going back to their seemingly neverending well of Japanese cinema that carved a huge path for itself, creating impressions and inspirations on many of the Japanese filmmakers today. I’m loving all of these new collector’s editions because many of these films never made it to North America in any sort of a wide release until now. This one is a crime-action story that follows a ruthless band of thugs who kidnaps a young official to exchange for their leader who has been captured by the opposing organization. Golden Swallow is sent to take on the thugs and free the prisoner who also happens to be her brother and, though she is able to handle the overwhelming odds, she is hit by a poison dart and gets help from a beggar who is really a kung-fu master in disguise. With his help, she forms a plan to get her brother back in some really killer action sequences. The film was made by King Hu, a major piece in the Shaw Brothers releasing studio with films like A Touch Of Zen. Interestingly, this film is rumoured to be an early appearance of Jackie Chan as one of the child singers near the beginning of it although lead actress Pei-Pei Cheng denied this in the audio commentary to the Hong Kong DVD release of the film. Still, the film is listed among Chan’s acting credits on his official website and autobiography.
The Godfather Trilogy 4K – One of the greatest series of films of all time get their 4K release is coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the adaptation of the first Mario Puzo written novel. Yes, I do concede that the third movie is pretty bad and only improved to a good movie through the recently mad Coda version but it definitely has the greatest sequel ever made with The Godfather Part II. Of course, for those who don’t know, this is the saga of the Corleone family through the eyes of Don Vito and then through Michael, the reluctant heir to the throne who descends down the path that eventually destroys him. Nestled in there is the brilliant origin of young Vito played by Robert De Niro which is, in my opinion, one of the greatest performances of all time. There is so much to love about this Francis Ford Coppola-directed trilogy and I’m so happy that I now own it in the best possible format other than having the original reels themselves.
Captains Of The Clouds – Warner Archive swooped in this week and gifted me with a brand new throwback edition of something from Golden Age Hollywood and it brings us to the era of the early forties, a few years before World War II ended. It features a giant of the times, the iconic James Cagney, not opting to play a gangster or a cop this time around but instead he does the hero thing. Set in a time that had the Ally Canadian nation inspired by Churchill’s Dunkirk speech, the film follows brash, undisciplined bush pilot Brian MacLean and three of his friends who enlist in the RCAF but are deemed too old to be fliers and that’s just the beginning of the story. Yes, that’s right, this is a Canadian story about the Royal Canadian Air Force, some national pride flavour from a classic movie era. The film was also made by director Michael Curtiz, one of the most sought after filmmakers of the time, responsible for films like The Adventures Of Robin Hood, Casablanca, which came out the same year, and White Christmas which came later but adds a whole new sense of credibility to this classic war story..
Dexter: New Blood – The Sopranos used their chance to satisfy their fans who were let down by the infamous fade to black that angered many but I really loved with a prequel movie that kind of disappointed more people. Dexter gets to do the same thing now by kind of retconning the last terrible season of the acclaimed series or, who knows, maybe they keep it in place as a “screw you, we did it” sort of thing. The series is set ten years after Dexter Morgan went missing in the eye of Hurricane Laura at the end of the final season and he is now living under an assumed name in Upstate New York, Iron Lake, far from his original home in Miami. We definitely should assume his “dark passenger” is still along for the ride but what is his son Harrison like now and does he have his own darkness to satiate? Also, Jennifer Carpenter, who played his sister Deb, is in this revival as well and, given her fate in the series, what role does she play now? There are so many questions swirling around this new revisit to an old friend and I’m definitely excited to check it out.
Steve’s Blu-Ray Geek-Outs:
23rd Century Giants: The Story Of Renaldo & The Loaf – When I get weird stuff after street date I always relegate them to this part of the weekly blog and that’s why this is the sole entry this week but it’s a decidedly weird one as well which gives me a little excitement. Even better than that, this film is one of those music documentaries that I cherish so much and about a couple of artists I have never heard of before. The film lays out a decades-long friendship that drives an architect and a biomedical scientist to make the weirdest music you’ve ever heard in your life, and thanks to the Internet, they became more popular than they could ever dream of. Brian Poole and David Janssen, aka Renaldo and the Loaf, are an avant-garde duo who have been creating strange and captivating music together since the ’70s and this documentary dives deep with interviews with the duo and virtually every key figure in their musical lives, unseen photos, unheard music, and comedic cutout animations that make this film embody the weirdness of its subject. After just learning about Sparks last year, I feel like these guys are my big discovery this year.
Television:
Halo (Paramount+) – It’s been a long and rocky road for the video game adaptation to find any sort of footing in Hollywood. At first, it was going to be executive produced by Peter Jackson, the mind behind everything J.R.R. Tolkein on the big screen, written by Alex Garland, the filmmaker behind Ex Machina, Annihilation and Dredd albeit afterwards and director Neill Blomkamp, the eyes behind District 9 and Elysium. At one point even the great Guillermo Del Toro, was mentioned for the second time this week, but the point is that many were gunning for this to happen. Well, Showtime actually went ahead and made the series but got cold feet and Steven Spielberg and Amblin Entertainment took over and here it is, living big on Paramount+. The series really has ll you want from it if you are a Halo fan. Master Chief is there, the Covenant are launching their universal attack, Cortana is referenced, all of that good stuff. Now is where we see if that goodness is sustainable and I will say that some of the CGI with the Spartans is a bit dodgy but I’m having fun with it.
Bridgerton: Season 2 (Netflix) – Shondaland is bringing back the horny again this week because the famed production company has landed on Netflix with the second season of its randy little bodice ripper that can’t wait to show partial nudity and get swearing immediately. Created by one of Shonda Rhimes’ main dudes Chris Van Dusen, this series is set in the backdrop of Regency era England as seen through the eyes of the powerful Bridgerton family in their follies of wealth, lust, and, of course, betrayal. The young cast is young, attractive and relatively unknown, aside from Jonathan Bailey from Broadchurch, Nicola Coughlan from Derry Girls and Freddie Stroma, AKA Vigilante from the fantastic HBO Max and DC Comics series Peacemaker but it’s veteran inclusions like Rome’s Polly Walker and the legendary actress Julie Andrews that gives this one any weight. You’ll know quickly if this show is for you and I say that over the first season it had me and lost me multiple times but I do understand its appeal.
Parallels (Disney+) – Since the Netflix success of original shows like Stranger Things and picking up the Danish made series Dark which blew the minds of many who discovered it ad shepherded it on by word of mouth, I know all the streaming services are looking for their own pre-teen thrillers and Disney+ seems to have netted their own with this show that was a hit in it’s native France. The show dabbles in sci-fi more than it does in the horror genre but I love these types of shows so it is no bother to me. The main story follows four teenage friends, on the French-Swiss border, whose lives are turned upside down by an experiment of the LHC, the world’s biggest particle collider. Torn from their reality and deposited into four different alternate worlds, each of them must do everything possible to understand what exactly happened and look for a way to return to their original homeworld. The special effects in this look very cool and it seems to be a series that the whole family can enjoy, almost like a new type of Sliders and I’m not talking about those mini-burgers. The only thing it’s missing is Jerry O’Connell but, even though I’m bummed about that, I doubt he knows how to speak French fluently enough for a good role in this.
Atlanta: Season 3 (FX) – It’s been a long time since Donald Glover, Brian Tyree Henry and Lakeith Stanfield have reprised their characters on this hit FX series and, seriously, a lot has happened since the end of the second season almost four years ago. Glover’s Childish Gambino is one of the hottest acts on the planet, Henry is now a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Stanfield is an Academy Award-nominated actor for Judas And The Black Messiah but they all found time to come back for this season and the subsequent fourth one which will be its final one. For those who have never had the pleasure of seeing it, the show follows Earn and his cousin Alfred as they try to make their way in the world through the rap scene. Along the way, they come face to face with social and economic issues touching on race, relationships, poverty, status, and parenthood all to varying degrees of comedy and harsh realities. This is easily one of the best shows of the past twenty years and I think it will be talked about years after it ends.
Deep Water – It has to be frustrating for an actor to put all of his efforts into a film only for it to be shelved for a long period of time because the studio can’t find a spot for it in its release schedule then it gets relegated to being an almost home release and put of Prime Video. That is exactly what happened to Ben Affleck and his new film and to make matters worse he made it with his now ex-girlfriend Ana De Armas and subsequently has to do press with her for this film. Don’t feel too bad for Ben as he’s back with JLo so all well that ends well. This new mystery thriller follows Affleck as a well-to-do husband who allows his wife to have affairs in order to avoid a divorce but becomes a prime suspect in the disappearance of her multiple lovers. What excites me more than De Armas and Affleck being in this, because I do adore Anan, is that it was made by the legendary Adran Lyne who was responsible for thrillers like Jacob’s Ladder, Fatal Attraction and Unfaithful, a total master of his class especially when it comes to adultery and murderous jealousy. Based on a novel by acclaimed author Patricia Highsmith, the reviews are good and the screenplay was written by Euphoria creator Sam Levinson so it is blisteringly hot right now given the success of that show, now in its second season.
Windfall – Here’s another late to the game filmmaker for me as I really didn’t know about writer and director Charlie McDowell as a mumblecore filmmaker until years after his mysterious little drama The One I Love starring Mark Duplass and Elisabeth Moss had been long gone from movie screens and on-demand platforms but I am in the know now and with great timing as this new film debuts on Netflix this week. Once again, he has paired himself with greatness as the always bankable Jesse Plemons stars, with the lovely Lily Collins playing his wife, and usual comedic actor Jason Segal dips back into the drama field again, something he is so damn good at which is evident in The End Of The Tour and Our Friend recently. This film has Segal playing a man who breaks into a tech billionaire’s empty vacation home with no real intent other than to see how he lives but things go sideways when the arrogant mogul and his wife arrive for a last-minute getaway and the intruder’s intent pivots to extortion with a potential to explode into violence. This movie operates as a film noir in a Hitchcockian eye and pulls you in deeper and deeper with just these three actors as your moving parts. I was also really drawn to the cinematography and rightfully so as it. is Isiah Donte Lee, who also shot the great Netflix original Burning Sands as well as some solid J. Cole music videos. This isn’t really a broad appeal movie but mumblecore fans will eat it up.
The Outfit – Mark Rylance is an Academy Award winner who always gives his best in every film he does but a lot of people still don’t know who he is or know his face but not his name. Well, he might get some eyes on him now as he’s in this brand new crime thriller that has him front and center and the target of some pretty bad guys. The story has him as Leonard, a master English tailor who’s ended up in Chicago and operates a corner tailor shop with his assistant, played by the great Zoey Deutch, where he makes beautiful clothes for the only people around who can afford them, a family of vicious gangsters. One night, two killers, played by Dylan O’Brien and Johnny Flynn, knock on his door in need of a favour and Leonard is thrust onto the board in a deadly game of deception and murder as a result. This film is the debut as a director for writer Graham Moore who won an Academy Award for his screenplay for The Imitation Game and not to sound like a cliche when it comes to a film about a tailor but this looks so slick and stylish that it has me salivating to check it out. I also geek out that this was shot by cinematographer Dick Pope who has done incredible work in his career, especially his films with Edgar Wright.
X – Ti West is a voice in horror I’ve always loved, a writer and director with old-school American horror in his blood. Debuting with the throwback slasher horror House Of The Devil, he has always found a way to hook me in with his stories and when I saw his new trailer with the A24 studio card ahead of it I got really excited. Set in 1979, the story follows a group of young filmmakers who set out to make an adult film in rural Texas but when their reclusive, elderly hosts catch them in the act, the cast finds themselves fighting for their lives in a very Texas Chainsaw Massacre inspired tale of terror. Pardon my pun here but this film has a killer young cast including Scream’s Jenny Ortega, High Life’s Mia Goth, Brittany Snow from the Pitch Perfect franchise and rapper turned actor Kid Cudi and is just oozing with all of that style and substance that Tobe Hooper brought when he unleashed his brand of violence in the seventies. I also find it fascinating that they filmed this in New Zealand yet it looks so much like a dusty Texan setting. The power of movies, people!
Black Crab – I have been a fan of Swedish actress Noomi Repace ever since I saw her in the original adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. She has since been in huge Hollywood feature films like Sherlock Holmes and Prometheus but has decided to go back and make something Scandanavian again after returning home to make the stellar but totally weird drama Lamb. This movie hits the sci-fi button, following six soldiers on a covert mission in a post-apocalyptic world who must transport a mysterious package across a frozen archipelago. The look of the film is gritty and bleak which plays right into my wheelhouse as I eat that atmospheric stuff up and director Adam Berg certainly has big ideas contained within that. My issue is that it all seems too big for just one movie and the setup was never going to satisfy its conclusion and I really don’t see another production coming from it. That said, as far as debut feature films go, this is solid and betrays his inexperience greatly.
Umma – More horror to get inside your heads this week but this falls far from the path of slasher scares and gets spooky through family history and lineage. It has the added draw of lead star Sandra Oh who is in the forefront right now with the latest season of her hit series Killing Eve as well as the voice of the mom in the infinitely cute and heartwarming Pixar film Turning Red. Well, this one is aiming far away from that audience base as she plays a mother named Amanda who is living a quiet life on an American farm with her daughter. When the remains of her estranged mother arrive from South Korea, she becomes increasingly aware that she is turning into that person she feared with each passing day and their dark past is thrust into the light. The film is the narrative debut of writer and director Iris K. Shim, who earned a lot of acclaim with her documentary The House of Suh, and now turns to a genre that I love so deeply in my heart, much to the chagrin of our illustrious host. Shot by Gareth Evans cinematographer Matt Flannery, the eyes behind The Raid: Redemption, The Raid 2 and Apostle, I can not wait to get my eyes on the delicious camera work of this horror that may get that slow burn word of mouth by fans across North America.
Alice – We get some blaxploitation-derived revenge thriller for our eyeballs this week at it has the added bonus of starring the wonderful Keke Palmer in the lead role who has shifted from a solid child actress to a commanding leading woman in seemingly the blink of an eye. The fact that rapper turned actor Common is the co-star in this film isn’t too shabby either as well as a villainous Jonny Lee Miller who I have adored since the mid-nineties film Hackers but I’m losing the focus here. Palmer plays Alice, a woman who yearns for freedom as an enslaved person on a rural Georgia plantation under its brutal and disturbed owner Paul. After a violent clash with Paul, she flees through the neighbouring woods and stumbles onto the unfamiliar sight of a highway, soon discovering the year is actually 1973. Rescued on the roadside by a disillusioned political activist named Frank, Alice quickly comprehends the lies that have kept her in bondage and the promise of Black liberation. Inspired by true events, Alice is a modern empowerment story tracing Alice’s journey through the post-Civil Rights Era American South. Palmer is without a doubt the strongest thing in a thriller that loses its footing narratively when she isn’t present. It’s a bold debut from writer and director Krystin Ver Linden but the inexperience does shine through more often than not, that being said, this is a help of a crash course to start and I look forward to what comes next. It is also a hell of a lot better than that Janelle Monae thriller Antebellum so it wins in that department.
Master – Race and true psychological and spiritual horror come to a head in this new Prime Video original film and just looking at the synopsis I know that it will be divisive, relevant and utterly terrifying and I am here for all of it. Featuring a super-effective trailer that gets into your bones, this is yet another debut this week in a feature form, this time for writer and director Mariama Diallo, a short filmmaker up until this point but one with a lot of promise. The film follows two African American women who begin to share disturbing experiences at a predominantly white college in New England which was built on the site of a Salem-era gallows hill. Navigating politics and privilege, they encounter increasingly terrifying manifestations of the school’s haunted past and struggle to not become a footnote in its menacing present times. Starring Regina Hall, this film immediately springs to mind the limited series Them, which is also available on Prime Video, so hopefully, the inevitable success of it will lead people to check that one out, one of my favourite new shows of 2021.
Rescued By Ruby – With The Flash’s Barry Allen leading your film, the charming Grant Gustin, a cutesy little dog movie will always win at least a little spot in your heart just on substance alone no matter how terrible it might actually be. This movie has the added cushion of being directed and written by Katt Shea, a veteran filmmaker who has brought us movies like Poison Ivy, Streets and The Rage: Carrie 2 so it can’t all be bad, right. Well, maybe scratch that last one. This film has Gustin playing Daniel, a state trooper chasing his dream to join an elite K-9 unit who partners with a fellow underdog, a clever but naughty shelter pup named Ruby. Surrendered to the Rhode Island Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals by her original owners, Ruby was deemed unmanageable due to her overabundance of energy but found her real home with Daniel. Probably not a lot of depth to this kids film but it does have a cute dog and former heartthrob from Party Of Five, Scott Wolf, in a supporting role. If anything this is an easy Sunday afternoon watch with the family that won’t offend anyone.
Tollbooth – I feel like it is in my blood to love crime comedies ever since I fell in love with the works of Guy Ritchie who kicked off the new releases this week with something big and bold. His beginning wasn’t as big but was bold as Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels formed my love for the British gangster film and it’s a bucket of love that could never be emptied. I think that’s why I gravitated to this one, though it is vastly different at its core. Starring the great Michael Smiley, this darkly comic thriller follows Brendan, a man who works solo shifts in the quietest toll booth in Wales, hiding from a criminal past where nobody would ever look. When he finally gets outed, word of his whereabouts gets to his enemies and they head west for revenge. Meanwhile, local traffic cop Catrin’s investigation into a simple robbery finds her heading for the booth at exactly the wrong time, setting up a cataclysmic finale for the guy who really just wanted to lay low for the rest of his existence. Co-starring Iwan Rheon, who people may remember as the sadistic Ramsey Bolton from Game Of Thrones, this film hit all the right notes for me and I found myself loving the writing style and whirlwind directing from Ryan Andrew Hopper who is yet another first-time feature filmmaker on this list. I will gladly follow him into more crime stories if he has them to give.
Moon Manor – On the outside, this film looks like an odd sort of drama about an old man coming to grips with his own mortality and the losing of the memories that he holds close to him, something great to pair up with the new AppleTV+ series The Last Days Of Ptolemy Gray from last week. On closer inspection, this is more a fantastical flight through the fleeting memories of an Alzheimer’s patient as he prepares for the next step. The film follows Jimmy, an ailing old man who is given the prognosis of having only one last day on the planet. He quickly decides to waste no time and to die like he lived, with intention, humour and zest, and show his funeral guests that the art of living may actually be the art of dying. This is definitely an odd duck of a movie that doesn’t really have a set audience but I really like its weird nature and it stars MadTV alum Debra Wilson, busy character actor Richard Riehle and Lou Taylor Pucci and I felt myself pretty engrossed with it. This is not to undersell lead actor James Carrazo who makes you root for Jimmy pretty much from the get go. As someone who has seen a couple of grandparents go to this horrible disease, I feel like it celebrated life more than it focused on death and I really appreciated that.
Tin Can – Some indie sci-fi slides into limited theatres this week which could mean a surprise hit that will earn the slow burn of word of mouth, a cheesy mess that needed millions of dollars to work or a forgotten film that will be on the woodpile of 2022 to burn at the end of the year. The cool thing and the reason I want to celebrate this movie is it comes from Nova Scotian filmmaker Seth A. Smith, a storyteller that surprised me with his film Lowlife in 2012 and then The Crescent in 2017. This film is set, ironically, in a world that faces a deadly plague, following a front-lines parasitologist who is imprisoned in a life-suspension chamber and to escape from this created tomb she must destroy the last of her kind. It’s cool that Michael Ironside co-stars in this movie, a classic actor. He now lends his time to being in smaller sci-fi and horror films like Turbo Kid and Bloodthirsty, almost like a return to what made him cult famous in legendary films like Scanners and Visiting Hours. This movie’s greatness is not just a success because of his involvement though, as it used the limits of the COVID isolation to a positive result. in a story that carves a new and fresh swath out of the path that David Cronenberg laid before it. Effective and well-acted, Tin Can makes a mark on you even if the name sounds a little dumb.
Dear Mr. Brody – Immediately the thing that upset me most about this movie was that I didn’t know who Michael Brody Jr. was beforehand nor had I ever even heard an inkling of his story which seems crazy. You would think that with how wild this story is and for how big it got that it would be a cautionary tale of either ignoring those powerful speakers who can make a difference in this world or not believing in false leaders but I’m getting ahead of myself. This documentary is about the titular Mr. Brody, a twenty-one-year-old hippie millionaire who, in 1970, promised to give away his $25M inheritance in an effort to usher in a new era of world peace. What resulted was a nationwide push to impress upon Brody the usefulness of his money to the causes of thousands of people that wrote him letters. The producers. of the film meticulously went through all of the unopened letters as a backdrop against the unfurling true story of who Michael Brody Jr. was by the people who know him intimately at this time is compiled interviews. This film is engrossing in its place in history plus the dreams and ideas that we’re flushed out of the American people when the possible benefactor or conman put his call out into the world. I live for mysterious documentaries like this and it satisfied my cravings on all levels.
The White Fortress – It’s not often or really ever that I get to talk about a foreign film out of Bosnia but that’s the greatest thing about being a reviewer that has many studio public relations contacts is that it sort of becomes a cultural melting pot in your emails. With all of the current global happenings on the conflict front, it is hard to watch an Eastern European war-related story but this one was too interesting to pass up and the war in Sarajevo isn’t a usual movie subject, aside from the incredibly must-see Quo Vadis, Aida?. This film is certainly not for the faint of heart but focuses on two teens from opposing sides in the Bosnian war who find love across a vicious divide. This film has all of those Romeo and Juliet star-crossed lover things going for it, with families that are volatile adversaries and a total class differential but still manages to be original and, at times, totally shocking. This one will certainly get lost in the global shuffle of cinema but I really enjoyed it.
Blu-ray:
West Side Story – Steven Spielberg’s long gestated passion project has finally made its way to the big screen to Disney+ for streaming and now on glorious 4K blu-ray and, impressively, during one of the toughest times to make a huge film, a global pandemic. While Scorsese’s passion project was a brutal film about missionaries bringing the word of God to Japan in Silence, Spielberg wanted to do the big musical with Maria, the Jets, back alley finger-snapping brawls and a very Romeo and Juliet plotline. For those who don’t know, this is an adaptation of the 1957 musical which explores forbidden love and the rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks, two teenage street gangs of different ethnic backgrounds. This film is an absolutely glowing piece of cinema but that isn’t a huge surprise when it comes to one of the best filmmakers in the game ever since he debuted. Spielberg got me into film, like many of us, and even though I don’t like musicals, I’m fascinated by his take on them and I thought this movie was gripping from the opening shot that needs to be seen to be believed as it is a treasure trove of the things we love about Spielberg. The story captivates, the cast and choreography leap off of the screen and it’s always evident why this story, even set when it is, will always be timeless when seen through a celluloid lens.
Red Rocket – Sean Baker, a writer and director who frequents Vancouver and has met a bunch of my friends, is one of the most important filmmakers of our time to me, telling the stories of real people and microcosms in our would the predominantly make up the majority. With his films Tangerine and The Florida Project, he exuded this and it came to a point in the latter that it broke me down into tears in theatres. Now he teams with actor Simon Rexx for this Trump-era comedy-drama that follows Mikey Saber, a washed-up porn star who returns to his small Texas hometown that has no interest in having him back. Rexx gave the performance of 2021 and I was hoping that this was the year that Baker’s work elevates him to the top of the game as he has deserved for a long time but, alas, he was only truly appreciated in the independent circuit as Rexx did get an Independent Spirit trophy for Best Actor. I dare say he’s one of my absolute favourites today and I also venture that if you watch this film you will never hear NSYNC’s Bye Bye Bye the same again.
Project Gemini – When I get these new releases from Well Go USA, most of the time I have no knowledge about them unless it’s a bigger international targeted film but sometimes I have seen a trailer for it on a previous release that sticks in my head. This is definitely one of those films as the preview is massively intriguing and could possibly be all of a ruse just to get you to watch it, as most trailers are, but I had a good feeling about this Russian thriller. The story follows a crew of space explorers sent on a mission sent to terraform a distant planet to ensure the survival of the human race. However, the mission encounters something unknown that has its own plan for the planet and it suddenly becomes a battle for survival with all o mankind at stake. This movie is a lot of fun and has some cool effects throughout while featuring great twists and turns to keep you guessing. There is a certain amount of frenetic filmmaking that is the norm when it comes to Russian filmmaking that could turn some viewers off but I really enjoyed it. I know it’s taboo at these times to praise anything Russian but I have to give this movie its due because the creators absolutely deserve it.
A Tale Of Two Guns – Bad western stories have made it to blu-ray release again this week and when your two lead stars are Casper Van Dien and Tom Berenger, both of who have had their great times in the sun before, you know you have made a wrong turn because those days are behind them. It’s a real bummer because I love a solid western but believe me, this is anything but. Obviously, this takes place in the lawless West, following The Cowboys, a notorious brotherhood of killers and thieves who reigned over the land with brutal fists and fast guns. Fate had finally caught up with them and now the merciless gang has but a single surviving member. When a deputized gunslinger takes up the call to hunt down the last Cowboy, the chase is on and the bullets fly and only one of these hardened men can survive. Corny and badly constructed, this movie sputters constantly with contrived moments and sequences that were done with much more spirit in far better films. I don’t see this one hitting in a big way on demand but if it does, just let it blow away like a bad tumbleweed. I’m doing you a favour, partner.
John And The Hole – At forty years old I feel like I’m still too immature to say this title without giggling like a schoolgirl but there’s just something about it that is inherently funny and I place the blame directly on the producers and creators. Laugh-inducing title aside, I was definitely unprepared for how good the film was that I was about to see and the fact that it has Dexter star Michael C. Hall in it is just a cherry on the sundae. The film is a coming-of-age psychological thriller that plays out the unsettling reality of a kid who holds his family captive in a hole in the ground. It’s really just as simple as that and, through satisfying twists and turns, it never becomes a story that feels familiar at all or predictable which serves to constantly keep you on the edge of your seat, wondering what’s next. Along with Hall, the film also features Taissa Farmiga who is fast becoming a favourite of mine, just like her mother Vera, and it is usually in a horror setting that she impresses. This may not be everyone’s cup of tea but the horror-like atmosphere and the traped isolation is so well done.
The Boy Behind The Door – When I saw the one location creature feature The Djinn starring young Ezra Dewey I remembered thinking that both the star and the minds behind the film, David Charbonier and Justin Powell, had massive futures ahead of them. For this reason, I was excited to receive this new thriller which takes the accelerator off of the supernatural stuff for something more grounded, and this was made before The Djinn, technically being their first feature film. The story follows best friends Bobby and Kevin who are kidnapped after their baseball game, separated from each other, locked in two different rooms. Bobby manages to escape but hears Kevin’s screams for help and realizes he can’t leave his friend behind and decides to steel himself for a showdown with his captor, a fight that only one of them will make it out of. Dewey again delivers a really fantastic performance as Kevin and newcomer Lonnie Chavis as young Bobby is put through the absolute wringer in his role and does it damn well. It was also great to see True Blood star Kristin Bauer Von Stratten appear in this one but I’ll keep quiet on her role to avoid spoilers. Sold thrills, chilling violence and kid actor that are not annoying definitely work in this movie’s favour and you don’t have to be a horror fan to enjoy it. It helps but you don’t have to be one, trust me.
Shooter4K – Mark Wahlberg spent a lot of time in New Westminster during the filming of this Antoine Fuqua adaptation of the popular Steven Hunter book series and I think about the locations every time I watch it. The good news now is that the Bob Lee Swagger movie is now on beautiful 4K in an even cooler steelbook, which is something we collector’s totally geek out on. For those who didn’t get a chance to check this one out, it follows Wahlberg as Swagger, a marksman living in exile who is coaxed back into action after learning of a plot to kill the President. After being double-crossed and pinned with the assassination attempt, he is on the run and on a collision course with the real killer and the truth in a flick that features awesome action sequences and a great cast around Wahlberg, like Michael Pena, Danny Glover and Elias Koteas. They ended up making a television series around this film in 2016 with Ryan Phillippe but nothing holds a candle to what they did with this film and it was a missed opportunity that they didn’t make more, like Jack Reher, unfortunately, did with Never Go Back, an ill-advised movie.
An American Werewolf In London4K – One of the greatest horror of all times with some of the best dark comedy beats that hold up to this day, I have a deep love for this John Landis classic. The title really gives you all the exposition almost immediately, a couple of American college students, played by David Naughton and Griffin Dunne, go on a trip to London where they are attacked by a werewolf, leading to one of our guys turning into one in the most iconic transformation film ever put on screen. Seriously, that scene is a work of art. The new Arrow Video special edition is gorgeous now that they’ve moved it to a 4K Collector’s release, with a brand new transfer of the film, a commentary track with Naughton and Dunne, many brand new featurettes and an interview with John Landis. This is a killer edition but there is only a limited amount of copies so if you love this stuff like I do then I would get on it immediately.
Steve’s Blu-Ray Geek Outs:
Ghostriders – My first thought when I saw this fun-looking release from MVD Visual was “hey, this doesn’t look like any Marvel release that I know of” and that’s because it isn’t and it’s very far removed from one as well. Made thirty-five years ago now, this one is a fun and definitely a dumb release that plays in a subgenre that is not often explored, the horror western. That’s right, this film follows the descendants of a group of cowboy lawmen who are targetted by the ghosts of an outlaw gang that were hanged by their ancestors. It’s a crazy storyline just in its simplicity and I would honestly love to see it get remade today because the film is a hell of a lot of fun to watch. I will admit that the pacing is at a snail’s pace in getting going but once the villains are introduced it gets pretty wild on a noticeably low budget. None of the actors are notable, the director hasn’t done anything else that would elevate him over cult status and it has been largely forgotten until this release but somehow it worked with me. I definitely can’t say it’s recommendable unless you like cult films though.
Deadly Games – Yes, I have to admit that my geek-outs this week are centralized in horror subgenres but these two were too good to pass up on a campy level cult double feature for this section. This one brings us back five years before the previous entry on the list and, again, doesn’t feature a cast you would recognize or a writer and editor who did anything notable afterwards as it loos like Scott Manfield’s follow up to this one, Imps, outright murdered his feature film career. The film is one of those classic exploitation flicks from the seventies and eighties, set in a town being terrorized by a masked killer who is murdering women. A young woman is attacked by the killer but escapes but with a bit of pertinent information as she believes the killer to be either the town’s policeman or the manager of the local theatre and she devises a plan to find out which is the actual killer. I wasn’t fully truthful when I said that this doesn’t feature any notable actors in it as Chicago Bears legend Dick Butkus appears in this mystery horror although I don’t think I can regard anything he does in it as “acting”. That really isn’t the point of this almost grindhouse style feature film as, just like the film on this list previously, its good old campy fun without any substance to it whatsoever.
Television:
Cheaper By The Dozen (Disney+) – Now that Disney owns Fox it’s time to capitalize on all of the properties that they owned under the Fox family film banner and that definitely includes this title which had two films that starred Steve Martin. Martin isn’t back for this one, nor is Bonnie Hunt who played his wife in it, but I think we have some solid lead actors in Gabrielle Union and, my personal favourite, Zach Braff. For those who didn’t get to see these movies in the early 2000s, this series follows the rambunctious exploits of a blended family of twelve, the Bakers, as they navigate a hectic home life while simultaneously managing their family business as well. Braff has incredible comedic timing as I am a huge fan of his show Scrubs which I’ve watched time and time again, something that is also on Disney+. I’m excited that this is a series that I can watch with my kids, the audience it is geared to because, well, Scrubs is definitely not family-friendly. I’m really hoping that there is a Donald Faison cameo that would set my nerd heart on fire.
DMZ (Crave) – One of my favourite graphic novels of all time, brilliantly written by Brian Wood and illustrated by Riccardo Burchielli, has finally made its series adaptation at, really, the best possible time to tell the story in a live-action format but I can’t help being scared that it will meet the same fate as another adapted favourite, Y The Last Man’ and get cancelled far before it’s time. Shepherded to the screen by producer and directors Ava Duvernay and Ernest R. Dickerson, this gritty post-fall of society story has a hell of a cast in it too with Rosario Dawson, Benjamin Bratt and Canadian star Agam Darshi and a storyline that I hope people see the depth in. Set in a near-future America, fractured by a Second Civil War, the story focuses on the titular DMZ, or the demilitarized zone, which is a ravaged Manhattan Island. No one goes in, no one comes out. But for medic Alma, who is desperate to find her missing son, it all comes down to her becoming a symbol of hope for the occupants trapped inside the DMZ. The future and the truth to the masses rests in her hands. I have no idea what to expect from this series but given the work that Duvernay and Dickerson have done before and the societal consciousness they have enacted, I can’t see them taking the teeth out of this biting world commentary that Wood created. I want more Wood adaptations if this does well because he has a bunch of really great stories ready to hit the small or big screen.
Human Resources (Netflix) – After the five seasons of Big Mouth I think the continuing story of the pubescent teens has hit the endgame and the resolutions have been met so Nick Kroll and his crew are moving on to spinoff with an integral piece of it, the hormone monsters and all the other psyche related creatures that make up the human mind. The spin-off pulls back the curtain on the daily lives of the creatures Hormone Monsters, Depression Kitties, Shame Wizards and many more that help humans journey through every aspect of life from puberty to childbirth to the twilight years. I’ve always said that the monsters were my favourite piece of the original series, especially Maury and Connie, and I’m glad my Netflix account was listening to me and whipping this up for us. I will say that this is not for everyone and is completely offensive but if you made it through all five seasons of Bog Mouth you are pretty much desensitized and if the show turned you off before that then the scars you have earned for life won’t let you watch this. It’s a win-win situation.
Minx (Crave) – I feel like a little precedence was set for this new show by the HBO series The Deuce which focused on the porn industry in the seventies because this HBO Max made show pull a little bit of the subject matter from that but leans into the comedy aspect a bit more. If that doesn’t sell you at all the casting of New Girl star Jake Johnson should help a bit and it is led by Ophelia Lovibond who MCU fans may remember as the assistant to The Collector who meets an unfortunate demise in Guardians Of The Galaxy. Like The Deuce, this show is set in the seventies as well and follows an earnest young feminist who joins forces with a low-rent publisher to create the first erotic magazine for women. The advance reviews are really good for it as it pushes the comedy but is also racy and raunchy in the exact ways you think it would be. I’m not hugely knowledgeable on creator and showrunner Ellen Rapoport but I do know the work of Rachel Lee Goldenberg who directs all of the episodes as she also directed the film Unpregnant, an absolute must-see film.
Life & Beth (Disney+) – Amy Schumer makes her return to the television series format with this new scripted series from Hulu and separates herself from the sketch comedy stylings that made up her first series, Inside Amy Schumer. She comes to this one with a bit more acting chops as well after starring in the fantastic dramatic film The Humans which had her on-screen with the always fantasy Richard Jenkins, Steven Yuen, Beanie Feldstein and June Squibb and something has to rub off in that company. The series follows Beth, who after an unexpected incident starts having flashbacks to her teen self and learns how she became who she is and who she wants to become. The show is getting a lot of praise and not just for its comedy but the depth of character to it as well. Much of it plays for a longer game in the plot and, although rough at times, Schumer’s character work shines through and the rest of the cast, including Michael Rapaport and stand-up comedian Gary Gulman, add a lot to it as well.
The Adam Project – Those ones there that think the fun and smile-driven success of the action flick Free Guy was just a fluke, well, leading man Ryan Reynolds and director Shawn Levy are back with a new blockbuster to prove that their hit-making combo isn’t a one-time thing. Not only that, as they did with their video game action-comedy, they are tapping into some big-screen nostalgia that is reminiscent of things like Flight Of The Navigator and The Last Starfighter in tone and I ate it all up happily. The film follows Reynolds as a time-travelling pilot who teams up with his twelve-year-old self after accidentally crash-landing in 2022. The mission is to destroy the time travel technology that was created by his father who passed away the year before he arrives. This film was awesome, featuring killer special effects, exhilarating action sequences and another charming performance from Reynolds as well as Catherine Keener and Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo in a 13 Going On 30 reunion. The stand-out is young Walker Scobell who has all of that sarcastic swagger of the guy he’s emulating the junior version of and then some. This is a fantastic film that will satisfy the audiences and give you that Spielberg and Zemeckis feeling you are craving but don’t even know it.
Turning Red – Another Pixar release had been given the direct route to Disney+ this week and, again after Luca, I feel for the people behind this beautiful production because it would have played so wonderfully on the big screen. Even more a bummer, this film is distinctly Canadian as it is a fully Asian story that feels so fresh and original. The story follows a thirteen-year-old girl named Mei Lee who turns into a giant red panda whenever she gets too excited which, as it turns out, is a family tradition she was not informed of. The movie is put together by writer and director Domee Shi who did the Pixar short Bao, a little story that literally brought me to tears in theatres. There are many beautiful moments that will make you well up in this and that third act is gargantuan in stature and in heart as well. The kids will love this one but so will the adults.
Donkeyhead – Family drama is always traumatic in some sense but when a film can’t seem to find the line for being fully dramatic or a comedy, it all gets a bit muddled and confused which is what we have right here. I want to be totally positive about this week’s batch of movies because it largely features Canadian productions but in the interest of transparency I have to be honest and start this by saying I’m on the fence here. The story mainly follows Mona, a failed writer, who carves out a life of isolation while caring for her ailing Sikh father. When he has a debilitating stroke, her three successful siblings show up on her doorstep determined to take control of the situation and start the proceedings to sell the house and prepare his estate for the next step which throws her life into disarray. This story could be triggering for a lot of people, me included having just lost two grandparents but the film can’t seem to find a pulse that doesn’t falter on a dramedy beat. What fascinates me is the different personalities within the Sikh culture but Mona seems so Canadianized that it loses its voice with her. This isn’t to say that this is a bad movie but it certainly feels a bit misguided.
The Wolf & The Lion – Canada is definitely the theme this week and this co-production with France had something even more rooted in our great nation as it also features Graham Greene who just showed up in the hilarious Last One Laughing Canada recently. The film comes from a story idea from director and writer Gilles de Maistre who has a penchant for lions as his last film Mia And The White Lion did some mind-blowing work with the majestic animals that left my jaw on the floor. The film follows a young woman named Alma who decides to go back to her childhood home, after the death of her grandfather, to a little island in the heart of the majestic Canadian forest. While there, she rescues two helpless cubs, a wolf and a lion, and they forge an inseparable bond but their world soon collapses as the forest ranger discovers the animals and takes them away. The two cub brothers must now embark on a treacherous journey across Canada to be reunited with one another and Alma once more. If you love animal movies then this movie will play to all of your sensibilities and once again de Maistre is able to put these wild animals so closely with the human actors, totally baffling me to the process one more time. The drama side and performances from the actual cast are not fantastic but I don’t think that’s where the draw of it lies.
Wildhood – This Canadian-made drama was only really on my radar because of the involvement of actor Michael Greyeyes who I really enjoyed in the zombie survival horror Blood Quantum and now also his upcoming turn in the Firestarter remake from Blumhouse. Not knowing anything about this film, I had no idea of the resonance and identity it has in our current landscape of cultural awareness. The story follows rebellious teenagers who run away from their abusive foster care in search of their identity, to find the eldest, Link’s, mother and heritage as a part of the Mi’kmaw people. As well as being an indigenous story of young people that have been failed by a terrible system, it also acts as an allied voice in the caring and understanding of the LGBTQA+ community and through a lens of not understanding his feelings, as Link displays in the film. This movie did really well at the Toronto International Film Festival and for good reason.
A Grand Romantic Gesture – Romantic comedies are pretty dicey as they largely feel contrived and unoriginal leading me to get a solid orbital workout of rolling my eyes almost constantly. It’s easy to say that the bar is set high and it takes a lot to squeak by my scrutiny and sadly this movie is definitely not it. To be honest, if this was a French film starring Isabelle Huppert I would be all over it because it works to that international degree. The film follows a woman who is encouraged by her husband and daughter to take up a class like cooking when she unexpectedly loses her job. Not quite gelling with the culinary world, she ends up taking a drama class where she falls head over heels for the leading man in the room and creates chaos in her home life. The film stars Gina McKee, a British actress who has done great work in films like Phantom Thread and Atonement, but this movie is pretty much just fluff with no substance in it. She deserves better than this bare-bones rom-com.
Scarborough – Another Canadian entry this week, which could easily be deduced by the title, I didn’t expect this movie to grip me as much as it did but deep character films involving kids do that and we have had two significant ones this week. The film comes from the triple threat of directors Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson and writer Catherine Hernandez who make a hell of a narrative film debut together and I have to say that it comes from their background in documentary filmmaking. Set in Scarborough, Ontario, the story follows three children who become friends while living in a low-income neighbourhood and strive to exist and grow in a system that has forgotten them and, in one case, a horribly abusive father who is destined to lead his daughter to more financial ruin and, worse, possible starvation. This movie hits like an emotional hammer more often than not and it has to be attributed to the life on the street style cinematography that puts you in the classroom, on the streets and in the low-income housing with the characters. Not a lot of people will check this one out as it isn’t really advertised at all but those who do will find a deeply emotional reward.
The Exorcism Of God – The title is terrible and the production levels aren’t great but a well-constructed trailer can do wonders for you and this movie has, possibly, one of the leading ad campaigns to get people’s eyes on this and it would have gotten me for sure if I didn’t already have to watch this for review. The film starts out with an American priest working in Mexico who is possessed during an exorcism and ends up committing a terrible act. Eighteen years later, the consequences of his sin come back to haunt him, unleashing the greatest battle within which turns out to be a more pointed critique on religion and gross-out brutal horror violence. I found myself wondering if it was more intent on being digested as a sort of satire than it was horror in a straightforward manner. It was hard to process what to take seriously.
Ella And The Little Sorcerer – Foreign animated films getting their North American revamps don’t always work out that well box office wise and I really can’t see this new one getting any sort of acclaim either. There isn’t any sort of big actor draw to it at all, It is low budget in its design and it is bafflingly trying to dispel the fact that it is a Cinderella story at its heart which is a family story that has been beaten to death, far past being a dead horse. Simply told, the story follows Ella and her friends who set off on a journey to find the magic potion ingredients to save Prince Alex when is trapped in the body of a mouse. Of course, friendship is the magic as the Little Ponies have always tough us, so of course, you can telegraph that moral but it might just be better to put the film on for the kids and walk away because there’s absolutely no adult merit to this film whatsoever and the target market is glaringly obvious.
Tzouhalem – Getting back to Canadian filmmaking, and specifically documentary storytelling, this is another special one as it is another voice in the indigenous community to shed light on. What I really love about films that come out of these great creators is that they are telling a history that was never shown in school or beyond and feature voices that have largely been silenced in the mainstream. Through interviews and creative re-enactments, this documentary examines the near-mythic figure of Cowichan Chief Tzouhalem, the account of his life from both historians and First Nations Elders, the folkloric tales concerning him, his impact on the modern relationship between the Crown and First Nations, and how his legend remains alive to this day, examining critically how his story has been told and passed down to us. Being First Nations myself, this one hits very close to home as the Cowichan people are tied to my own ancestry with the Shimshan and Haida so this film felt like a little bit of self-discovery as well, something that I have wanted since embracing my heritage through my mother. I’m not sure how broad all of it will be with a regular audience but I really enjoyed it.
Blu-Ray:
The Matrix Resurrections – Even though the last two movies in the original Matrix trilogy are not great, to say the least, the anticipation for his new restart to the franchise was at a fever pitch and the expectations, at least in my eyes, are kind of endless. Did we even know where this could lead or where the jumping point is? Did we know if this is set up for more to come? It was all speculation until we got our eyeballs on this visual feast and, for me, it was all worth it. Loosely speaking on its synopsis we return to a world of two realities, one which is everyday life and the other, the one that lies behind it. To find out if his reality is a construct, to truly know himself, Mr. Anderson will once again have to choose to follow the white rabbit once more. Keanu and Carrie Anne Moss are really the only returning stars from the first films aside from a small role from Jada Pinkett-Smith but it looks just as dazzling as we remember those films to be with slight tweaks to the fight sequences as there was a different choreographer for it. With only Lana directing this film, it has a slightly different feel to it but plays in its own meta-universe to a gleeful degree. I’m so happy that I have this one on blu-ray now as I really think it demands multiple viewings.
A Journal For Jordan – Denzel Washington made two appearances in cinemas around Christmas but this one had him behind the camera for his fourth feature film and one that puts one of the hottest actors today, Michael B. Jordan, in the driver’s seat. What I’m most surprised to see is that this film got slaughtered by critics which is a definite first for any Denzel project, whether he starred in it or directed it. The story follows Jordan as First Sergeant Charles Monroe King who authors a journal for his son, before he is killed in action in Baghdad, intending to tell him how to live a decent life despite growing up without a father. Back at home, senior New York Times editor Dana Canedy (Chanté Adams) revisits the story of her unlikely, life-altering relationship with King and his enduring devotion to her and their child. What I’m seeing online is that the melodrama in the film is so heavy that it almost feels like a made-for-TV drama and far less than the calibre of the star and its director would lend. This is so disappointing but at least we got Denzel and a Coen brother on AppleTV+ to dispel some of that downtrodden feeling.
Redeeming Love – Faith-based melodrama rears its head this week, an inevitability every few weeks but this one is trying to be more progressive, almost to a fault. The big thing that Christian entertainment news outlets are pushing is that this film is one of the few or any religious dramas to have a full-on sex scene in it. More than that, apparently the main characters are actually having sex on the poster but fully clothed and in a lush field of grass and flowers as I’m sure they do every time. Based on the novel by Francine Rivers, this is a powerful story of a young couple’s relationship that clashes with the harsh realities of the California Gold Rush of 1850. It could have been a well-told period piece against the backdrop of a developing America but, like most of the faith-based filmmaking, it is more driven in giving its messages and morals than telling a compelling and well-rounded story. It is also terribly dull and predictable and leaves you looking for the remote to fast forward to more completely clothed sex. Just as God intended.
Coming 2 America – I’m kind of disappointed in the film world for the simple fact that Eddie Murphy’s grand return in the biopic Dolemite Is My Name wasn’t as celebrated as it should have been, a total crowd pleaser and the brilliant role he needed to put himself back on top and for awards accolades to roll in. None of that happened but what we did get is him reteaming with the director, Craig Brewer, to bring us the long-awaited follow-up to a classic John Landis comedy that is still hilarious. The film brings us back to the lush and fictional royal country of Zamunda with newly-crowned King Akeem and his trusted confidante Semmi, played once again by Murphy’s pal Arsenio Hall embarking on an all-new adventure that has them traversing the globe from their great African nation to the borough of Queens, New York, back to where all of his worldly escapades began. Both Murphy and Hall once again don multiple characters in a film that sadly feels like a diminishing return that forgot the heart of the original story, goes for easy gags and jokes and, at times, becomes a muddled mess of morally questionable moments and lacklustre filmmaking from a guy I always praise. I even defended Craig Brewer on Footloose. Yes, I enjoyed that one.
One Shot – Scott Adkins is always going to be that underrated action hero that people will only remember for the small roles in things like The Expendables 2, Doctor Strange and Zero Dark Thirty but the guy has some range and should be utilized on a grander scale. This is definitely not one of the movies to showcase his acting chops as the action thrills are the draw as well as supporting performances from Ryan Phillippe and Ashley Greene. Adkins plays the leader of an elite squad of Navy SEALs who are sent on a covert mission to transport a prisoner off a CIA black site island prison but are quickly and efficiently trapped when insurgents attack while trying to rescue the same prisoner. The action is fast and furious with all of the Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six-style tactical scenes you could want but is warned that the film is incredibly bleak and all bets are off for who survives at the end. To be honest, everyone felt like fodder around Adkins who commands the screen as a good action hero does. To think that this dude was almost Batman at one point is pretty cool.
Silent Night – Camille Griffin gifted the world with a talented son who gave us the loveable character of Jojo Rabbit a couple of years back and now that she has done that the gloves are coming off with her narrative debut that she wrote and directed. The timing of the film might be a perfect storm for how heavy this story lands and how dark some of the comedy comes off but I think it all blends into how great the foundation is of it to start. The film follows Keira Knightley and Matthew Goode as a couple of parents who have invited their closest friends to join their family for Christmas dinner at their idyllic home in the English countryside. As the group comes together, it feels like old times but behind all of the laughter and merriment, something is not quite right as the world outside is facing impending doom, and no amount of gifts, games or Prosecco can make mankind’s imminent destruction go away. Now entering the endemic part of the crisis that affected us for the last couple of years, there are things in this movie that ring so blood chillingly true and conversations about vaccination, isolation and societal decisions start to blur the line between fantasy and unfortunate reality. I don’t want to delve deeper as it enters spoiler territory but I think the review scores are too low on this and it should be widely watched by a bigger audience.
The Legend Of La Llorona – The title here may be misleading for two reasons as the ghostly legend of La Llorona has been used a couple of times already, once by The Conjuring universe in the Curse Of La Llorona and then with the Guatemalan horror La Llorona. The first film was a pretty sizable letdown, even with the great Linda Cardellini as the lead, but the second one was absolutely amazing and a total must-see so my expectations with this were up there. The story follows a young family who is terrorized by a malevolent spirit while on vacation in Mexico. Staying in an isolated hacienda, the family is warned about the entity’s thirst for children’s souls and do everything in their power to escape with their lives in a movie that I should have known was going to be lacklustre when I saw Autumn Reeser and Danny Trejo were the top names. Not to say that they are bad or anything but they do such a huge body of work yearly and the ratio generally doesn’t work out in their favour. That said, this film was a dud that is unenthusiastic in almost every single way.
American Siege – To go along with the regular intervals of faith-based Christian films every few weeks, it seems that every other week we are getting new Bruce Willis action films that film me with just as much excitement as I do for Redeeming Love. I’m assuming that Bruce shares my same lack of enthusiasm as he exhibits it every time he does one of these direct to video productions and he even brings down lead star and former Sons Of Anarchy villain Timothy Murphy in this. Willis plays a washed-up sheriff who guards the secrets of the wealthy residents of a small Georgia town. When three outlaws take a prominent town doctor hostage in search of a missing woman, he is called in to handle the situation before the FBI arrives and in a race against time, the mayor pressures Sheriff Watts to launch an assault on the hostage-takers and to eliminate all witnesses. When the Sheriff realizes he may be a pawn in a larger scheme, he must carve a bloody warpath to expose the truth behind the town’s dark secrets. It’s crazy the amount of sleepwalking through scenes that the former John McClane actor can do and still earn a paycheck as I’m guessing all the good he did in his career was just so he could coast as he ages. It sounds like I’m critiquing him as a person, which is sort of what I’m doing, but I’m definitely jealous as well. I deviated from talking about this terrible movie here but just know it’s bad with no reason for anyone to watch it.
The Nowhere Inn – Music group St. Vincent and their pal Carrie Brownstein have collaborated for a new horror film and I had no clue it even existed but I’m really glad it does. Even better, the movie is a mockumentary that has all three of these talented ladies playing heightened versions of themselves in a Christopher Guest-like way. The story has the indie darling setting out to make a documentary about her music, but when she hires a close friend to direct, notions of reality, identity, and authenticity grow increasingly distorted and bizarre, which is where the ethereal horror starts to set in. I love it because the creators behind this as well as Ms. Annie Clark are such students of the indie scene and obviously know their horror tropes as well which blend to make a really engrossing little feature. There’s something about this film that makes it so oddly original yet it has a broadness that will engage viewers who want something a little unpredictable but still grounded.
National Champions – Sports movies can be a multiple-choice answer when you watch them. It can be a dime a dozen affair where you can predict all the dramatic beats, a well-acted and dynamic story that keeps you on the edge of your seat or a badly cast and put-together film that has you looking for the exit. This film is a mixed bag of all three, following a star quarterback who ignites a player’s strike hours before the biggest game of the year in order to fight for fair compensation, equality and respect for the student-athletes. What kept my focus in the film is the phenomenal cast assembled around lead star Stephan James including J.K. Simmons, Timothy Olyphant and Tim Blake Nelson but seems to pull the rug out from under it at all the worst times with a cringe-worthy script. It takes a lot for Simmons to come off like a cheeseball and director Ric Roman Waugh does it multiple times. It’s sad because his last film Greenland was such a pleasant surprise by being good and utterly depressing too.
Supergirl: Season 6 – Melissa Benoist and cast bid farewell to their little vision of National City as this Lower Mainland filmed part of the DC Comics television universe comes to an end. This show has had its bumpy points but I really enjoyed it for the most part and it has to come down to the casting of Benoist as the title character, David Harewood, who would eventually be revealed as the Martian Manhunter and the stunt casting of Jon Cryer as Lex Luthor which is such a great in-joke to the original Superman movie franchise. For those who haven’t had the pleasure of seeing any of this series, it follows National City’s new hero, Supergirl, who takes on the responsibility of keeping the people safe. Going on adventures filled with action, hope and love, she is determined to make a difference by bringing not only her superpowers, but her heart to the table as well. I’m being a bit biased here but the best episodes of the show were the ones made by Kevin Smith who has put his fingerprints all over this show from season two on, as well as on The Flash, and as a comic book guy who knows his stuff, it resonates it what he created in his pieces and their resonance through to the end. As a guy slowly but surely collecting all of these pieces, this was a welcomed addition.
Adventure Time: Distant Lands – Almost two years after the ending of the original series, a fan favorite that drew a crowd of all ages, we get more adventures with Finn The Human, Jake The Dog and all of their friends but with a little bit of a twist. The new show is more hyper focused on the side stories of characters like BMO, Princess Bubblegum and Marceline the Vampire Queen on their own solo exploits doing heroic things. I’m being vague but I now this will also become a massive success with the fan base because Pendleton Ward has always delivered, including the series The Midnight Gospel on Netflix with Duncan Trussell.
Yellowstone: Season 4 – Kevin Costner takes the lead in this series that has taken audiences across North America in a big bad way and it’s because it is a damn good series both in writing from Hell Or High Water and Sicario’s Taylor Sheridan and a well-rounded cast around Costner including Kelly Reilly, Cole Hauser and Wes Bentley to get things started.. The show follows the Dutton family, led by John Dutton played by Costner, who controls the largest contiguous ranch in the United States, under constant attack by those it borders, such as land developers, a nearby Indian reservation and the keepers of America’s first National Park. It is an intense study of a violent world far from media scrutiny, where land grabs make developers billions, politicians are bought and sold by the world’s largest oil and lumber corporations, where drinking water is poisoned by fracking wells and unsolved murders are not news. I was severely late to the game and am currently immersed near the end of the third season and am really enjoying it, a good series for those who like crime series like Sons Of Anarchy or The Sopranos.
Steve’s Blu-Ray & DVD Geekouts:
Marionette Land – I feel like this is a documentary that is destined to creep not just me out but a myriad of people that find marionettes and old antique dolls utterly unnerving. That’s probably a seemingly harsh attitude to take and I am who I am and can’t stop that but I don’t want it to diminish the incredible work of the man at the heart of this film. The film is an intimate portrait of the world of Robert Brock, a man who lives above his own magical marionette theatre with his mother, Mary Lou. Brock creates and performs classic marionette shows for families as well as grown-up shows where he straps on his heels to become famous Hollywood divas of the past but new personal and professional challenges emerge as Robert and Mary Lou struggle to keep the marionette theatre open while preparing to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary. The film goes into directions that I didn’t really expect and for Brock to be able to live in his own identity and to pursue his passion is heartwarming but the struggle is something we can all relate to with any of our own interests. As far as character-focused documentaries go, this is a well-done film that puts you on Robert’s shoulders and I found it fascinating. The dolls still creep me out though.
Alice In Wonderland – In a continuing bid to own everything Tim Burton has made, for better or for worse, I bring this Disney-fied take on the classic Lewis Carroll book that I believe is just a dose of acid for kids. That said, this movie is so Burton-y but colourful it is just weird and Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter straight up looks like Madonna but I totally digress. For those who don’t know the classic literature, the story follows a nineteen-year-old Alice who returns to the magical world from her childhood adventure, where she reunites with her old friends and learns of her true destiny which is to end the Red Queen’s reign of terror. Of course, being a Tim Burton film, Helena Bonham Carter was your villainous queen and Christopher Lee appears but it is the voice of the always loved and long-missed Alan Rickman that keeps me coming back to this film. I feel like now, six years after his passing, I will always put on something he’s a part of just to hear that iconic voice.
The Wolfman – This Universal monster remake got a raw deal I feel and if only they had released this Blu-ray version, the director’s cut, I think audiences would have received it better. Made by an exhilarating director in Joe Johnston and starring a great cast with Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins and Emily Blunt, I guess it was just destined to fall into the underrated and underappreciated column. Del Toro plays Lawrence Talbot, a nobleman who returns to his ancestral home in Victorian-era England to search for his missing brother Ben, only to fall under a terrible curse that causes him to experience an unsettling transformation. Talbot soon discovers that a ravenous beast is on the loose and he must protect the woman he loves from its clutches as well as discover the true nature of his newfound affliction. The transformation scenes in this film are fantastic and, when we constantly hold it up to the greatest werewolf transformation ever, An American Werewolf In London, I think it passes the test. Johnston gives this film a solid pace as well that keeps you engaged with the mystery of it all. I’m still unsure why this movie bombed and wasn’t used as the template for a new Universal monsters franchise.
High Life – In the last few years, especially with season movie lovers, this title gets brought up and we immediately think of the Claire Denis sci-fi tale starring Robert Pattinson that is memorable for more than a few reasons that I don’t want to discuss here but this Canadian made bank heist comedy-drama came first and almost ten years prior. It has its charm in the top star of Timothy Olyphant but this is definitely not the dreamy leading man you know or the tough guy from Justified but a dirtier and drug-addled version. The story is set in the early eighties and follows a hopeless junkie named Dick who gets an unwelcome visit from the past, his seriously sleazy former cellmate, Bug, a violent man with a hair-trigger temper. Bug requires a crash course in the eighties with the different music, different drugs, and machines in walls that dispense money. Explaining the latter development gives Dick an idea and the two enlist some help into knocking off some ATMs to secure their futures… or a weekend worth of drugs. This film is purely character-driven and is almost a comedy of errors in a bank heist format that descends into some dangerous territory really fast. Olyphant is great as usual, as are co-stars Joe Anderson and Rossif Sutherland who I always enjoy but the breakthrough is the guy Bug himself, played by Steven Eric McIntyre who steals the show. I really don’t know him from anything prior or since so I guess this was a one-off. Still a solid discovery.
Television:
Letterkenny: International Women’s Day (Crave) – The boys of Letterkenny are back in one of their focused holiday specials in the perfect vein of this rural comedy and all of its hijinx. Lots of comparisons are made to Trailer Park Boys for this show but I firmly believe those comments are made by people who have never seen it. For those who are new to it, the series showcases the antics of the residents of Letterkenny, a small rural community in Canada. Siblings Wayne and Katy run a small farm and produce stand, with Wayne’s friends Daryl and “Squirrely” Dan helping out. Many of the town’s inhabitants fall into one of several groups, which include the farmers, or “hicks,” the out-of-towners on the local hockey team, the local drug addicts and the “natives,” who are members of the local First Nation. The sophistication in the writing of this series is on a whole other level and I always laugh until my sides hurt every episode. It’s really kicking me in the funny bone that they have focused on International Women’s Day with this special and I can’t wait to see what they do with it because, it may not look like it, but this series is massively progressive in its morals and attitudes which the fans of the show know and love already.
Upload: Season 2 (Prime Video) – After the surprise hit success of the first season which capitalized on everyone being on lockdown and needing something to watch, Amazon Prime has gone for a new batch of episodes of this sci-fi series from Greg Daniels, the creator of the American version of The Office and Parks And Recreation. Starring Robbie Amell, this ten-episode second season follows a man who gets to electronically pick the new world he inhabits after his untimely death. This is a show that has been long in development for Daniels as he started writing it right after the series finale for The Office and I really loved a lot about the first season including Amell’s brash sarcasm that really ropes you in as a lead character. I also really love the satire on humanity’s future as well as it trying to capitalize and make money off of the afterlife. It’s really smart, funny and the right kind of comedy for the world right now.
Shining Vale (Crave) – The main thing that brought me into this new Starz original was Courtney Cox, an actress I have loved since Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and one who is fresh in my mind after Scream in January. Oddly enough, it’s kind of hard to find a tone in this new half-hour series but I think that’s the draw to it as well. Is it a comedy, a ghost story or a drama about infidelity and depression? Who knows! I do know that it follows a family that moves to a small town into a house in which terrible atrocities have taken place but no one seems to notice except for Pat, Cox’s character, who’s convinced she’s either depressed or possessed and, as it turns out, the symptoms are exactly the same. Episode one lays out the groundwork for a mysterious series quite well and with the first two immediately available, it could gather a fevered audience pretty quickly. It also has Greg Kinnear as her emotionally damaged but stunted husband and in this way, he works so well.
Winning Time: The Rise Of The Lakers Dynasty (Crave) – Adam MacKay just had the critical fence riding comedy Don’t Look Up on Netflix that let him get some vitriol out while also resulting in him getting lambasted by half the audience online but he’s back to tell some basketball history. Sadly, this was also the project that broke the friendship of MacKay and longtime pal and collaborator Will Ferrell as he wasn’t approached to star in it but it looks to be an alright consolation prize for not getting a Stepbrothers sequel. The series is a comedy-drama that centers on the professional and personal lives of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers, one of sports’ most revered, dominant dynasties and a team that defined an era, both on and off the court. The swagger of the eighties style is all there, we have Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird as well as one-time majority shareholder Jerry Buss played by John C. Reilly in another team up with him and Adam. I’m loving episode one a lot and I can’t wait to burn through more of this
The Last Days Of Ptolemy Grey (AppleTV+) – Samuel L. Jackson and AppleTV+ are here to bring something trippy but totally heady and philosophical and what piqued my interest right away is the filmmaker who is heading u the who project. Featuring director Ramin Bahrani of 88 Homes among many other great films, the legendary Debbie Allen, and Guillermo Del Toro’s longtime cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, this show is definitely like no other and it is most definitely a limited series. The story follows Jackson as the title character, a ninety-year-old man forgotten by his family, by his friends and even by himself. On the brink of sinking even deeper into lonely dementia, Ptolemy experiences a seismic shift when he’s given the tremendous opportunity to briefly regain his memories and uses this precious and fleeting lucidity to solve his nephew’s death and come to terms with his past. There is probably a limited audience for this show but I feel like the built-in viewer just wants to see something different and that’s what I love about AppleTV+ and the chances they take with their content.
The Batman – This is the first highly anticipated release of the year for me as I’m sure it is for a lot of Batman fans out there and I really hope it squashes the conversation of Robert Pattinson only being a sparkly vampire for good. Yes, there was a lot of anger at the casting of the Tenet and Good Times star but I think he’s going to absolutely crush it as a younger Bruce Wayne and Caped Crusader. The film follows Batman as he is forced to investigate the city’s hidden corruption and question his family’s involvement when the Riddler, a sadistic serial killer, begins murdering key political figures in Gotham. The film is directed by Matt Reeves who has a perfect filmmaking record which includes Planet Of The Apes sequels and a remake of an incredible Swedish vampire masterpiece so I really have the utmost respect for him as a storyteller and from what I can see in the trailers, he totally nailed this. My excitement is at a fever pitch right now.
After Yang – Colin Farrell is getting a double shot of releases this week, not only playing The Penguin in the biggest film of this week but also co-starring in this critically-lauded drama. The film was made by writer and director Kogonada in his follow up to the phenomenal Columbus from almost five years ago and features Jodie Turner-Smith who blew me away in Queen & Slim last year. The film is set in a near-future where humans are dependant on androids to do their bidding and one family’s struggles with questions of love, connection, and loss after their A.I. helper unexpectedly breaks down. Kogonada plumbs some incredible depths of human emotion in his last film so I’m really excited to see what he does with this sci-fi twinged setting and I really love sombre Colin Farrell character work as in the Yorgos Lanthimos films The Killing Of A Sacred Deer and The Lobster. This might be a low-key best film of 2022 I think.
Drive My Car – With Academy Awards nominations and critical acclaim from so many renowned film reviewers around the world, the bar has been set pretty high for this Japanese drama. This is no flinching matter for writer and director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi who to only netted the Best Foreign Oscar nomination but the Best Adapted Screenplay one as well which puts him in the arena against favourites like Jane Campion, Denis Villeneuve and Maggie Gyllenhaal but I don’t think he’s worried because his film is that good. The story follows Yusuke Kafuku, a renowned stage actor and director, who receives an offer to direct a production of Uncle Vanya at a theatre festival in Hiroshima just shortly after the tragic passing of his wife. There, he meets Misaki Watari, a taciturn young woman assigned by the festival to chauffeur him in his beloved red Saab 900. As the production’s premiere approaches, tensions mount amongst the cast and crew, not least between Yusuke and Koshi Takatsuki, a handsome TV star who shares an unwelcome connection to Yusuke’s late wife. Forced to confront painful truths raised from his past, Yusuke begins, with the help of his driver, to face the haunting mysteries his wife left behind. This film is made with such rich performances and a beautiful scope that reminded me of the serene qualities of a Hikaru Korreda film, a dramatic director who prefers stories about quiet solitude. I don’t want to give too much of this movie away but it is a real crowd-pleaser that will be remembered long afterwards.
Fresh – I haven’t been a part of it for well over a decade now but the dating pool seems like a cutthroat and devious game now, much more than it was before, and this little thriller with a darkly comedic edge is definitely exploring that a bit. This is a tricky film to talk about as I have to skirt around huge story reveals but just know that Sebastian Stan is in this and incredible as usual but it’s the leading power of newcomer Daisy Edgar-Jones that does an incredible job of the heavy lifting. She plays Noa, a single girl playing the Tinder market with one disastrous date after another until she meets Steve in the produce section of her local grocery store and the two quickly hit off. A whirlwind romance ensues and the couple starts to make deeper plans with each other, starting out with a visit to Steve’s secluded country house that looks like a sombre little dream. This is where the other shoe drops and Steve’s intentions are revealed and we are drawn into a hell of a rollercoaster ride that I can’t even begin to describe. If you love a good but albeit violent thriller you will dig the hell out of this movie.
Jockey – Clifton Collins Jr. is a name you might not know by just hearing it but you know his face and he’s been making your favourite films better with his supporting work for decades now. He gets his chance to absolutely shine in this new horse racing-driven character drama and shares the screen with an equally game Moises Arias from The Kings Of Summer. Collins plays an aging jockey who is still hoping to bring home another championship for his longtime trainer but injuries have thrown the whole arrangement into question. Throw in a new young rider who claims to be his son, and whom he takes under his wing, to further complicate the path to fulfilling his dream of going out at the top. Beautifully written and directed by Clint Bentley in his feature film debut and shot by Adolpho Veloso, whose work is new to me but I look forward to what he does next. The final shot of this movie is such a lingering triumph that it made me smile. I love character films like this one.
The Souvenir: Part II – Following the first film that is a sort of autobiographical tale from writer and director Joanna Hogg and starring Honor Swinton Byrne and her real-life mother Tilda, I didn’t expect this follow up but I’m really glad we got it. Executive produced by the great Martin Scorsese, this film is a real look into how life trauma can lead to the burgeoning of a creative whirlwind with good and bad results. The first movie focuses on Julia Harte, a young film school student who gets wrapped up in a romance with a self-centred and totally divisive man and now this story picks up with the aftermath of ending that relationship and the catharsis or trying to construct something out of the shards that fell. Honour is sombre and totally relatable in this film but it’s the third act where the presence of it really comes out with the unveiling of her graduation project. As a big cinema nerd, this movie got me hooked, line and sinker but I think it would be less accessible for a mainstream viewer.
Against The Ice – Nikolaj Coster Waldau is mostly known in our minds as Jamie Lannister in Game Of Thrones and, sadly, to a large international audience he hasn’t made anything to propel him above that so far but not for lack of trying. The wheelhouse that he is generally running in is the mystery thriller market and so far he hasn’t had one that exceeded mediocrity yet but this Netflix release definitely sounds promising. Co-written by the star himself, this story is set in 1909 and follows two explorers who fight to survive against the elements after they’re left behind while on a Denmark expedition in ice-covered Greenland. The film co-stars Joe Cole, who has been so impressive in his role on the audience’s favourite Peaky Blinders, and I would say that the two series stars’ presence is enough to bring you into this story. I’m also a sucker for survival dramas, especially if they are done right.
The Weekend Away – Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester is dipping her toe back into the horror-thriller pool and, if anything, it will be a vast improvement over her last time out in this genre, the terrible and cheesy The Roommate. This one is a different sort of thriller that plays on the stranger in a strange land premise which is an international fear I believe. The story follows two best friends, Kate and Orla who have overcome personal setbacks and no matter what life throws at them, they always look forward to their annual weekend away. This year they are on a trip to Lisbon, and everything is perfect until Orla wakes up to find Kate missing. With only a fuzzy memory of the previous night and the police not helping, her frantic search uncovers devastating secrets closer to home. Adapted from a novel by author Sarah Alderson, this film rests on the pedigree of Australian director Kim Farrant who has definitely done some work in the dour drama department with her Nicole Kidman and Joseph Fiennes film Strangeland which was absolutely depressing so she is not averse to a downer ending which honestly sells this a little more for me. Not being a huge fan of Meester’s work, this is where I put my dependence on this film.
Lucy And Desi – Months after the Aaron Sorkin written and directed biopic Being The Ricardos which has earned a bunch of unearned accolades and Academy Award nominations, Amy Poehler has stepped behind the camera for a documentary approach to a telling of the most influential couple in comedy history’s story. This film will explore the rise of comedian icon Lucille Ball, her relationship with Desi Arnaz, and how their groundbreaking sitcom I Love Lucy forever changed Hollywood, cementing her legacy long after her death in 1989. Poehler has a great series of talent for the interviews including Bette Midler, Charo, Carol Burnett and Norman Lear as well as direct family members like Lucie Arnaz and, honestly, I think this will be a far better watch than to endure the two-hour mess that is that Sorkin film. I’m still pretty angry about that one and I hope it doesn’t win a single award. Okay, rant over.
Nightride – After one-shot masterpieces like Birdman and 1917, a device uses like the thriller Locke and impressive but dull and drawn out foreign flicks like Victoria, this storytelling technique is never not impressive. This is the method used in this new Irish crime drama that relies heavily on actor Moe Dunford from the History Channel series Vikings to keep it all on the rails. The film is a wry, real-time one-shot thriller set on the midnight streets of Belfast. It places us in the driver’s seat with smalltime dealer Budge as he tries to pull one last deal with cash borrowed from a dangerous loan shark but when the handover goes catastrophically wrong, he finds himself in a race against time to find his missing product and get a new buyer before the loan shark tracks him down. The intensity is ramped up and effect as you can almost feel Budge’s time ticking down without actually seeing it on the screen as an episode of 24 with Keifer Sutherland. At a quick pace of an hour and a half, there are no lull moments to the story as each barricade in Budge’s night feels like it could be the one to end him. The title is totally correct as this certainly is a night ride into uncertainty.
The Scary Of Sixty-First – An addition to the weird movies I’ve watched in 2021, this is one I never saw coming and I don’t know how anyone could, Coming from writer and director Dasha Nekrasova, who also stars in a supporting role that shifts to the main one, this mumblecore horror with a slightly comedic edge definitely wouldn’t have worked too well in a conventional pitch room. The film follows friends Addie and Noelle who are doing something city dwellers know is truly horrifying, apartment hunting. Everything changes for both women when an unnamed stranger knocks on their door off their new sweet deal abode and tells Noelle that she believes they’re living in a place that has seen untold horrors as one of the apartments in which Jeffrey Epstein used to traffic and abuse girls. Before you know it, they have tumbled down the rabbit hole into a world of conspiracy theories about Epstein and his apartments while Addie starts to become possessed by… something. This is like a long Jeffrey Epstein joke without the benefit of a punchline and a third act that I’m still trying to unpack I honestly don’t know who the audience is for this.
Blu-Ray:
Belfast – Kenneth Branaugh returns to work behind the camera with what is one of the most heartwarming masterpieces in years set against a backdrop of lower-class struggle and I honestly couldn’t get enough of its charm and cinematic brilliance. Filmed beautifully in black and white, the cast really had me too as it has Dame Judi Dench, Jamie Dornan and Ciaran Hinds just to name a few, stars who, in their native British Isles, always deliver in one way or another. The story is semi-autobiographical and chronicles the life of a working-class family and their young son’s childhood during the tumult of the late 1960s in the Northern Ireland capital. Everything about this film cries winner and hopefully a future Best Picture winner and it is really a great feeling to have a true masterpiece as Branagh has delivered. Maybe it was his closeness to the story but the atmosphere of it is immediately special and so many aspects about it I will carry with me as a movie lover for a long time to come.
Demonic – Neill Blomkamp is a filmmaker who I adored with his first film but has honestly had a series of films afterwards that signified a few diminishing returns creatively. The South African writer and director who is based in Vancouver now debuted with District 9, moved on to the Matt Damon sci-fi action Elysium before his Die Antwoord Short Circuit-like story Chappie and now moves to the horror genre for this tech-heavy exorcism movie that has everything aesthetically going for it. Not featuring any big stars, unless you’re Canadian and love Carly Pope, the story follows a young woman who unleashes terrifying demons when supernatural forces at the root of a decades-old rift between mother and daughter are ruthlessly revealed. I really wanted to like this movie a lot but it feels like a better idea within the concept and maybe realized as a short film but a fully pieced feature film just ran out of steam slowly but surely. I can see why this movie was retooled to be a smaller release because it just isn’t to the calibre of the big boys. That said, I still yearn for Blomkamp’s success.
Run & Gun – You know, I’ll be really honest here and say that you can drag me in with a small inkling that your film is going to play with a seventies exploitation style, it is that totally simple. That’s how this little flick landed on my lap and it also has the added bonus of starring bad ass martial artist Marc Dacascos, most recently seen as the big bad in John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum, and Angela Sarafyan from Westworld. It follows the main character Ray, played by British actor Ben Milliken, a good guy who has reformed after leaving a life of crime and violence and now enjoying a quiet family life in the ‘burbs. When his past is discovered, Ray is blackmailed into one last job to collect a mysterious package and, after a deadly double-cross, he finds himself wounded and on the run from ruthless assassins who will stop at nothing to get what he has. Now, with the lives of his loved ones hanging in the balance and danger at every turn, Ray’s only hope is to draw upon his violent past to survive. You can tell that this film has a pretty low budget but they manage to make an entertaining story out of it, even with some pretty glaring cliches along the way. Milliken also feels a little out of his depth with some of the other actors who are clearly more experienced but it is some great groundwork in the end for a character actor.
The Pilot – I got an email on the day that this new blu-ray from Well Go USA hit shelves that they would be halting the promotion of this film due to the conflict in the Ukraine so I’ll be pretty brief about it. IT’s understandable that the distribution company would want to shy away from it as it was made by Russians and glorified one of their war heroes but I felt, for posterity and full coverage I would mention it anyways. The story follows pilot Nikolai Komlev who was shot down during World War II and managed to bring his plane down in a remote forest clearing, but far from friendly territory and then faced a relentless test of physical and mental endurance to survive. Unfortunately, with it being a Russian production that pro-military propaganda is fully on display but there is an entertaining story at its heart but the truth of it, I’m sure, is debatable.
The Batman: Complete Series – With The Batman hitting theatres right now, of course, it is the perfect time for Warner Bros. to repackage and restore this great cartoon series into the format of blu-ray with this new set that includes all six seasons. I owned all of these already on DVD but it was super cool to get this new revision and show it off to the next generation, also known as my daughter, to keep the love for animated Batman shows going. This animated adventure series, much like the Animated Series but less revered, follows the life of Bruce Wayne, billionaire by day, crime fighter by night, who starts as Wayne balances life as a free-wheeling bachelor, with his role as the Caped Crusader. He’s joined on occasion by Robin and Batgirl to take on Black Mask, Killer Moth, the Everywhere Man, and a brand-new Clayface who join The Joker, Penguin, and The Riddler in ceaselessly tormenting Gotham City. This show was so much pure fun and is just as good on a second time, third time or infinite time watch. Batman is timeless and in the animated form, it just seems to leap off the screen.
Steve’s Blu-Ray Geek Outs:
Lost Highway – Almost five years after going incredibly dark for the prequel to cult hit and one of the great television series ever made, Twin Peaks, with Fire Walk With Me, it seemed that David Lynch wasn’t finished with his darkness and made a film that I believe is very much a mystery horror. Yes, twenty-five years ago this week this Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette led masterpiece that features an incredible soundtrack produced by Nine Inch Nails creator Trent Reznor and Lynch himself and the creepiest of co-stars in the form of now-convicted murderer Robert Blake hit theatres and it still lingers in my brain a lot. The story follows Pullman as Fred Madison, a saxophonist who is accused under mysterious circumstances of murdering his wife Renee. On death row, he inexplicably morphs into a young man named Pete Dayton, leading a completely different life. When Pete is released, his and Fred’s paths begin to cross in a surreal, suspenseful web of intrigue, orchestrated by a shady gangster boss named Dick Laurent. This movie is awesome but only for people who like to experience something totally weird and idiosyncratic. I feel like those who know and love this movie share a Lynchian bond that means we can be best friends and talk about how Mulholland Drive is a spiritual sequel to Twin Peaks that was supposed to be a series. I digress greatly but you see what I mean.
Black Snake Moan – Craig Brewer is a filmmaker that came out of the gate hot and heavy with his Atlanta rap saga Hustle And Flow which ended up garnering so much awards attention and had people singing “it’s hard out here for a pimp”. Sadly, his second film didn’t earn as much acclaim even though I say it might be as good, if not better. The story has Samuel L. Jackson as a God-fearing bluesman who takes to a wild young woman played by a fearless Christina Ricci who, as a victim of childhood sexual abuse, looks everywhere for love, never quite finding it. Hoping to cure her of her sexual demons, our man Lazarus chains her to the radiator in his Tennessee home in a darkly comedic drama that needs to be seen to be believed. How Brewer, Jackson and Ricci didn’t get boasted during awards season is a total crime as I always recommended this film when it had just been released and have mentioned it more than a few times on Twitter. People need to rediscover this movie right now, it may be Brewer’s greatest work.
Zodiac – With The Batman getting so many comparisons to this brilliant David Fincher-directed slice of serial killer cinema, it’s only right that I bring it to the geek-outs as it is also celebrating its fifteenth anniversary. The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and a pre-Iron Man Robert Downey Jr. who, at the time, wasn’t such a media darling but delivers a hell of a performance in this. Set between 1968 and 1983, the story follows a San Francisco cartoonist who becomes an amateur detective obsessed with tracking down the Zodiac Killer, an unidentified individual who terrorized Northern California with an infamous killing spree. Fincher and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth create a mesmerizing tale of mystery that was such a treat to see in theatres but still keeps those jaw-dropping beats across multiple viewing as this movie fails to tarnish anytime I see it. The film is a genuine cinematic goldmine that I still think about often. It might be an all-time favourite for me.
Television:
Pieces Of Her (Netflix) – There is a general rule in this household and that is the simple truth that Toni Collette is one of the greatest actresses on the planet, never phones in a performance and could be the sole reason anything she is in is good. This is exactly why this new series was immediately on my radar and, to be honest, Netflix has been good to her already with her solid mystery drama Unbelievable from a few years ago. This new series treads in the same sort of waters, a mystery thriller that follows a woman that must piece together her mother’s dark history after a violent attack in their small town brings hidden threats and deadly secrets to light. The show is based on a popular book by author Karin Slaughter, who may have one of my favorite names ever, and was spearheaded by The Plot Against America director Minkie Spiro but the B-movie quality of the production is a little hard to swallow sometimes and takes the wind out of some pretty big plot twists. That aside, if you’re only watching this for Toni’s involvement in it you will not be disappointed because even in bad things she is still so utterly incredible.
The Dropout (Disney+) – Just a few weeks after the Disney+ and Hulu debut of the true story of Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson’s sex tape, the same two collaborating streaming services are delving into more true story territory with this series about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. These adaptations have been working well for this hybrid releasing system, with Dopesick being another solid hit, and I’m liking this Amanda Seyfried-led series so far. She plays Holmes in a story about her beginnings from the ground up and her attempt to revolutionize the healthcare industry after dropping out of college and starting a technology company. The show was developed by Taylor Dunn, Rebecca Jarvis and Victoria Thompson, the same three people who spearheaded the podcast of the same name that served as the backbone to a series that will surely get Seyfried some awards attention this year and if it continues down the solid path I’ve been watching it will be the breakout hit of March. Disney+ is fast becoming a contender that the other streaming services will want to watch out for.
Our Flag Means Death (Crave) – Taika Waititi is gold every time he writes, directs or stars in anything. He is so much so that I am totally willing to forgive his trespasses in the terrible Green Lantern movie but it was before he was Hollywood famous anyways. Teaming with Flight Of The Conchords great Rhys Darby, he is once again headed to genre television, much like he did with What We Do In The Shadows. For this show, he gets pirate-y in the year 1717, following a wealthy landowner named Stede Bonnet who has a midlife crisis and decides to blow up his cushy life to become a pirate and obviously it does not go well. My favourite thing is right off the bat it is based on a true story. The show also features Waititi on screen as the dastardly pirate Blackbeard but definitely played with his own proclivities and if you’ve seen Jojo Rabbit and his interpretation of Adolf Hitler, well, all bets are off. This has the potential to be one of my favourite shows of the year and I really can’t wait for it.
The Boys Presents: Diabolical (Prime Video) – The anticipation of the new season of The Boys is seriously high right now, as it is based on my favourite comic series ever, and that little teaser trailer, however brilliant it was, is just not enough to keep me satiated right now. Luckily, Prime Video has released this brand new animated accompanying piece to take off the sting a little bit and I am grateful. Done in a dastardly evil Looney Tunes sort of way, the series has Antony Starr voicing Homelander along with the rest of the recurring cast for a quick eight-episode series of fifteen-minute episodes. What is it all about? Well, that stuff is being held close to the chest right now by the creators and producers but I have a feeling it might have to do with the superpowered babies that shoot lasers out of their eyes but that’s just my inkling. Either way, I’m going to watch the hell out of it.
Super Pumped (Crave) – When it comes to biopics and shows set in the tech world, we seem to really love an anti-hero character or someone who really isn’t that likeable on a cellular level. It worked for Mark Zuckerberg and The Social Network and the Steve Jobs film from director Danny Boyle and now we’re getting a look at the rise of the ride-sharing company, Uber. More than that, we get an inside look at the man behind the idea, Travis Kalanick, played by the usually likeable Joseph Gordon Levitt. More to the point, this is the story of douchebag tech bros, their rise to power and the subsequent ousting of Travis, or TK to his fairweather friends, from his own company once his usefulness has come to pass. Not to say that Kalanick didn’t deserve what was coming but it’s hard to pinpoint a good guy in this show. After one episode, I’m totally hooked and I’m loving the supporting cast which includes Kyle Chandler, Elisabeth Shue and Richard Schiff, who I have loved since The West Wing. I know I’m early in this show so far but I’m really into it.
Cyrano – The story of Cyrano De Bergerac has been told many times with many different actors taking the role like Gerard Depardieu and Jose Ferrer being the notables but when I saw Game Of Thrones star Peter Dinklage and Atonement filmmaker Joe Wright attached to this, I got immediately interested. What turns me off of it a little bit is that it is a musical but I’m willing to push that aside for a well-made movie. The story follows the title character, a man ahead of his time who impresses everyone with ferocious wordplay at a verbal joust or with brilliant swordplay in a duel but, convinced that his appearance renders him unworthy of the love of a devoted friend, the luminous Roxanne, Cyrano has yet to declare his feelings for her and Roxanne has fallen in love, at first sight, with Christian. The film is getting fantastic reviews and most of them praise Dinklage’s performance which this rests solely on in a lot of places but the help of supporting roles from Haley Bennett, Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Ben Mendelsohn definitely elevate it as well. It was also shot by Seamus McGarvey who makes absolute gold with Wright time after time.
Big Gold Brick – With the cast boasted in this new weirdo crime fantasy I was really heading into it expecting what the title suggested, a big gold brick. Led by Brooklyn’s Emory Cohen and co-starring Andy Garcia, Megan Fox, Lucy Hale and even Oscar Isaac, the expectations climbed every time I read someone new on the cast list. The film recounts the story of fledgling writer Samuel Liston and his experiences with Floyd Deveraux, the enigmatic, middle-aged father of two who enlists Samuel to write his biography. The circumstances that lead up to this arrangement in the first place are quite astonishing, as Floyd basically runs Samuel over on a dark night,-and efforts to write the biography are quickly stymied by ensuing chaos as Floyd was already into some bad business that will quickly end the two’s newfound partnership. As high as my expectations were, it was never ready for this mess of a movie that was badly written from the start and features an almost nonsensical performance from Cohen that grated on my nerves every time he spoke. This brings me to Oscar who is utilized for a five-minute scene that goes absolutely nowhere. I appreciate where these filmmakers were coming from but they failed in every conceivable way.
Tyler Perry’s A Madea Homecoming – Tyler Perry is digging back into his bag of tricks that never seems to die as we get yet another installment in his popular character Madea’s ever-growing story. This time it comes with a new addition as well as it ropes in the Brendan O’Carroll creation of Agnes Brown who is known to many as the matriarch in the long-running series Mrs. Brown’s Boys. This film centers around Madea’s great-grandson’s college graduation, though the celebratory moment hits a halt as hidden secrets and family drama threaten to destroy the happy homecoming as it usually does and always ends up being resolved at the church or in the church or headed to the church. The point is, Perry’s messages are usually pointed and very faith-based, probably the biggest money-making vehicle ever attached to a faith-based film property. The film is going to find its own audience, especially after so many movies that are prefaced with “Tyler Perry Presents”.
No Exit – Disney+ and Hulu acquired this snowy little mystery thriller and decided to put it straight onto the streaming service, rather than do any theatrical release for it and I kind of get it. The film doesn’t really have any big actors, save for former President Palmer on 24, Dennis Haysbert, but it’s the story and the facelessness behind the evil that really garners the interest. The plot follows a college student, on her way home from visiting her mother, who gets stuck with a group of people at a mountain rest stop during a blizzard. Things take a turn for the worse when the young woman discovers a kidnapped child in a car belonging to one of the people inside, putting the group in a terrifying life-or-death situation as they struggle to escape while trying to discover who among them is the kidnapper. I love whodunnit stories like this and I think, for the most part, it pulls it off but the inexperience of director Damien Power shows through as this is only his second feature. I also wanted a little something more from the cinematography, especially with the snow blind locale they had to work with. Still pretty solid for a Disney and Hulu co-production through the conduit of what used to be Fox Searchlight.
Charli XCX: Alone Together – I have said before that I’m a bit leery about films coming out of the pandemic and using that traumatizing period to make content but with documentaries, I think it’s a little bit different. This is one of those films I would let skate by because it delves into interesting territory during this global event that sort of united us in a weird way plus it is a music-driven film which is a weakness of mine in this type of filmmaking. The film is a first-hand account of global pop star Charli XCX who, seeking solace in music during the COVID-19 pandemic, asks her fans to help her make an album while quarantined at home. Charli embarks on a creative and emotional journey as she confronts mental health issues, rekindles her relationship with her boyfriend, connects with her fans, and ultimately produces the music for how she is feeling now. The creative process is interesting to watch, even though I only knew a little bit of her music heading in and one of them was a collaboration with Iggy Azalea. Beyond just being a film about an album creation, this is more a story of an artist’s connection with her fans and not just what it means to them but what it means to her and her ability to create against an impending deadline as well as a very uncertain future.
Hellbender – Shudder is always the best place to find great original horror films that you wouldn’t find elsewhere and usually, for horror fans, Thursday is the day of bountiful gifts so this week I’m giving you the heads up. Witchcraft is always a fun little niche within the genre that really got its popular surge in the nineties with The Craft but its faithful storytelling within its origins get me. That’s what this new film is, following a mother and her daughter who live a life almost in seclusion in a mountainous area of the United States. The adolescent Izzy only has as a friend, her mother, a woman full of secrets with whom she shares a primitive rock band. The mother does not want people to come near her daughter but Izzy manages to escape to the city several times where she will soon discover that her family has a past related to witchcraft. This film pulls you in slowly to its slow-burn storyline while delivering a coming-of-age tale that descends to unfathomably sinister darkness. The direction is artfully powerful and the performance from young Zelda Adams as our protagonist Izzy is totally unforgettable. I feel like Adams has a huge future ahead of her as so many casting directors will snap her up after seeing this.
Wharf Rats – This was a weird one to receive as it is a fully Canadian production and sent to me as a movie but if you look it up anywhere it is listed as a limited television series so I guess it was all stapled together to make a feature-length film. A production that is now two years old, it seems this packaging was the best way to get it to a broader audience although the simplicity of its nature and the fact that, even in its native Canada, no recognizable stars headline this, it’s probably a hard sell. The show follows Hughie, the son of a local legend and beloved fisherman who hasn’t lived up to the family name at all. Frustrated that his uncle is about to sell the family company but too familiar with cheating his way through life to do anything about it legally, Hughie forms a misguided plan to pretend that a simple-minded man is his long-lost brother, the key to his father’s will. Filmed on location in Prince Edward Island, this feels so instilled in the Maritimer way and probably has a limited reach of engagement once the dialogue starts flowing and I doubt it will make a dent out here on the West Coast where I am. It’s simple, a bit daft here and there but it has a bit of a charm under the surface. If only it had the charisma to go with it we might have a little bit of a Canadian hit here.
Blu-Ray:
House Of Gucci – There’s something about this movie that looking at good reviews for it just didn’t ring true in my mind and it might be all stemming from a poster that looked like a Saturday Night Live sketch. It may also be my wavering belief in Ridley Scott’s films these days that set the bar very low but the film had been praised for Jared Leto and Lady Gaga’s performances in this scandalous fashion biopic. The film follows “The Gaga” as Patrizia Reggiani, an outsider from humble beginnings that marries into the Gucci family and her unbridled ambition begins to unravel their legacy and triggers a reckless spiral of betrayal, decadence, revenge, and ultimately murder. The cast features Adam Driver, Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons in supporting roles and it is interesting to note that Martin Scorsese was originally lined up to direct with Robert De Niro possibly involved. Coming off of Ridley’s last film, the deceptively fantastic The Last Duel, I wasn’t sure what I was in store for with this but it is a definite character actor’s film with performances delivered to the rafters, especially from the aforementioned Gaga and Leto. Sometimes it falls into ridiculous stereotypes but it oddly fits in the context of the story Ridley’s trying to tell. In the end, I really thought it was pretty great, the soundtrack absolutely rules too but Duel is still the superior movie.
The King’s Man – Another pandemic hold out, we were supposed to get this Kingsman prequel last Christmas and we finally got to experience it for this past holiday season in theatres. I will say at the top of this that I love these movies so much, a brash emergence into a 007 dominated world that has biting comedy and satire, great characters and phenomenal action. That said, with this being an origin story for the organization, we get a whole new group of characters introduced but with Matthew Vaughn leading the way again, in his incredibly stylish way. The story is set in the early years of the twentieth century, as the Kingsman agency is formed to stand against a cabal plotting a war to wipe out millions. The cast has Ralph Fiennes, George Mackay, Djimon Hounsou, Gemma Arterton and Rhys Ifans and has all of the charm and style but feels really messy in its execution which took me out of it from time to time. Without the Taron Egerton character of Eggsy, the film goes down a far less crass route than its predecessors but it also seems to lift a bit of the comedy out of it while getting decidedly weird in other parts. The action is still exhilarating and awesome but the returns have been diminishing since the first film and this is definitely the weakest in the franchise and may have stopped it dead in its tracks.
The 355 – The beginning of January is where studios slot in the films that they are unsure of the market for and that feels very fitting that this new all ladies espionage action film that boasts a pretty good cast got its debut to the masses. Even with Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o, Diane Kruger, Bing Bing Fan and Penelope Cruz, everything about it is a painful retread of tropes we’ve seen time and time again. The story follows a wild card CIA agent who joins forces with three international agents when a top-secret weapon falls into mercenary hands and sets out on a lethal mission to retrieve it while staying a step ahead of a mysterious woman who’s tracking their every move. The film comes from director Simon Kinberg whose only other feature film is the dreadfully awful X-Men: Dark Phoenix so that should tell you almost all you need to know about it. Terrible and lazy dots connecting action scenes, hackneyed editing and deplorable continuity gaffs and a totally wasted cast that limps through each scene of an egregious long action bore. I was almost spitting angry by the time the credits hit but my relief it was over was enough to quell my fury. Don’t watch this, just don’t.
American Underdog – Faith-based drama is hidden by a big NFL legend biopic which would have totally pissed me off if it weren’t for the casting of the charming and charismatic Zachary Levi in the lead role. I’m not a football guy at all but I know who the man is at the centre of this film and, although I didn’t peg Levi for leaning so far into the PureFlix type of films that are usually awful, I was willing to give this a chance. Co-starring Canadian actress and True Blood star Anna Paquin, this is the story of NFL MVP and Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner, who went from stocking shelves at a supermarket to becoming an American Football star. Of course, with the production company behind it, the film focuses mostly on how his faith guided him to become a massive star in football on a global stage but it still manages to still to the truth of Warner’s career and I actually found myself enjoying it for the most part. If this is the closest I’ll get to enjoy one of these very divisive films, I’ll take it.
Black Friday – A couple of cult horror favourites anchor this new creature feature that I think missed the boat by a couple weeks, landing on DVD just after the Christmas season in which it takes place. That said, the immortal Bruce Campbell and Canadian nineties heartthrob Devon Sawa feature big in a film that also boasts the international cred of Pan’s Labyrinth star Ivana Baquero, who I haven’t seen since that masterpiece. From the title, the film is pretty self-explanatory, following a toy department store and the employees who must work the overnight of Thanksgiving into Black Friday, dealing with the relentless customers. Even worse, a meteor crash-landed nearby and is turning the people into flesh-hungry parasitic monsters bent on the destruction of everything. I will say that the effects are pretty fun in a Troma sort of schlock sense and the gore is pretty cool but the story is formulaic and, despite all best efforts from the cast, it is utterly forgettable. Workplace and holiday horror will always have a place in my heart but there is a certain calibre that needs to be delivered to make the rewatch list and this one doesn’t have it.
Shattered – Sometimes a good cast in a film can be absolutely misleading and this one is one of those exact ones. With Frank Grillo, who I always love, Shameless actor Cameron Monaghan and the always commanding John Malkovich everything seems to lead towards being a solid time watching a movie but it all can be steered awry with bad directing and bad writing. The plot follows Monaghan as a rich divorcee named Chris who falls in love with a mysterious woman named Sky who suffers an injury and relies on her new beau to take care of her. Sky’s increasingly odd behaviour starts to make Chris suspect that she has more sinister intentions, especially when Sky’s roommate is found dead from mysterious causes, which is the tipping point to a situation that even puts his ex-wife and child in harm’s way. A convoluted Fatal Attraction style plot is also a tipping point for a terrible plot that starts sliding into mediocrity with each twist as if the storyline can’t really sustain itself. It’s really cheesy but is self-aware of this quality and many times hits a point like it’s not even trying to entertain you. Honestly, this was such a waste of time.
Edge Of Darkness – This is an interesting one as I’ve already brought a Warner Bros. release in my blu-ray geek outs that has this same title but starred Mel Gibson in a remake of a BBC series from Martin Campbell but this one is completely different but it does come from the Warner Archive collection. Made in the early 1940s, a couple of years before World War II ended, and starring the huge talent of Errol Flynn, this film went on to be included on the American Film Institute’s list of the Most Heart-Pounding American Movies. The film is set in a small Norwegian village during an occupation by Nazi forces who rise up to fight their oppressors when British forces sneak a cache of weapons into the nearby woods. The star was under deep scrutiny during this period, on trial on charges of rape during the production. Warner Brothers studio chief Jack L. Warner rushed his previous movie, Gentleman Jim into release, and even hired Flynn a lawyer and he was eventually acquitted of all charges. Also, this movie was apparently banned in Argentina when it was initially released with the government denying an exhibition permit for this movie, stating that it could compromise that country’s political neutrality. Lots of politics behind war movies made at this totally dicey time in history.
Escape From L.A.4K – Look, it’s not the best movie by any capacity but to get another collector’s edition and one in the glorious format of 4K for a film directed by the Master Of Horror John Carpenter and it features one of my favourite badass characters of all time, Snake Plissken, well, this is just a steal for a guy like me. The story follows Snake as he is coerced again by the United States government to do some world-saving merc work by recovering a doomsday device that is in Los Angeles, now a floating penal colony for the riff-raff of the country. The movie is definitely cheesy and very rough around the edges but little things shine through like Kurt Russell’s gruff character work, Steve Buscemi chewing the scenery and a great scene with Bruce Cambell as the torturous “Surgeon General”. I guess I have a bit of a soft spot in my heart for this one.
Lies And Deceit: Five Films By Claude Chabrol – A new box set from Arrow Video hits shelves this week and it’s one that gives collectors the distinct feeling that these releases are the closest to a Criterion Collection treatment without having the C brandished on the cover. Five films are featured here from filmmaker Claude Chabrol, a creator largely known in international cinema as the French Hitchcock or the Balzac of Cinema, though I’m unsure of what that last one means. Lies And Deceit features some of the director’s best works including Inspector Lavardin, a classic drama mystery, the steamy bodice ripper drama Madame Bovary and the mystery thriller Cop Au Vin which ended up earning a Palme D’or nomination at that year’s Cannes Film Festival. Again, through Arrow Video I get more of a film education and exposure to a filmmaker that I wouldn’t have otherwise and I’m grateful because Chabrol’s work is fascinating and definitely influential.
Steve’s Blu-Ray Geek-Outs:
The Toolbox Murders4K – A classic slasher film showed up in my mailbox a few days ago, a few weeks after the release date, but I couldn’t help but want to bring it as my geek out this week as it is a new 4K release that has been totally restored and one that would later be remade by horror legend Tobe Hooper and, again, wouldn’t get the love it deserved. Sleaziness, blood and violence against women are at the forefront of this late seventies horror film and it’s obvious that because of these reasons and the sheer amount of gratuitous nudity made it a shunned production. The plot follows a lunatic who runs around an apartment complex, apparently home only to attractive flight attendants with a tendency towards exhibitionism. While there, the lunatic tries to kill all the tenants with the contents of a toolbox and it’s based, probably quite loosely, on a true story. Interestingly enough, the film, even with its crazy content, was never banned anywhere except for the United Kingdom as part of the “video nasties” controversy even though there is a full-on masturbation scene with one of the female victims which was definitely not the norm for the time. There was also a sequel planned in the mid-eighties that was never fully realized but now we get to experience this whole thing in the glory of high definition.
Television:
Vikings: Valhalla (Netflix) – It was quite the get for Netflix when they acquired the streaming rights for the History Channel’s first scripted series which became a go-to for Sons Of Anarchy fans once that series had run its course. Now that the show has ended and all the seasons have been available, Netflix has this new self-produced spinoff that will hopefully pull that fanbase in for more bloody violence perpetrated by Norsemen. Set one hundred years after the original series, this story focuses on the adventures of Leif Erikson, Freydis, Harald Hardrada and the Norman King William the Conqueror who blaze a path as they fight for survival in the ever-changing and evolving world. Created by legendary screenwriter Jeb Stuart, the man behind Die Hard and the movie version of The Fugitive, this series has an interesting cast to it as well, on the heels of great leads like Travis Fimmel and Alexander Ludwig, with The Walking Dead’s Pollyanna McIntosh and Game Of Thrones alumnus Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson and looks to be just as brutal as it’s predecessor. Maybe we’ll get six seasons out of this show as well.
The Proud Family: Louder And Prouder (Disney+) – Disney has been doing its damndest to resurrect all of its great animated shows from the nineties and 2000s, giving it the modern update and this one was definitely a huge hit in its time although it was in a period that was a bit of a blind spot for me. Bringing back most of the original cast, the show follows Penny Proud, a fourteen-year-old girl and her family, as they navigate their lives in the 2020s. Trudy, Penny’s mom, has new career highs, Oscar, Penny’s dad, has wild dreams, and Penny faces a myriad of challenges while her Suga Mama returns, as does Michael, Dijonay, Zoey, and LaCienega. New kids Maya and KG, who are raised by two dads, try to adapt to life in Smithville. The show is once again helmed by the original creators Ralph Farquhar and Bruce W. Smith and hasn’t seemed to miss a step. Farquhar is responsible for so much black-led television including Moesha and The Parkers so the return of this series to the zeitgeist is a big win for the community and many can introduce this show to their kids and have it infused with a time that they know. The voice casting is also still hilarious and the adult jokes all land very well.
Snowfall: Season 5 (FX) – For fans of shows like Narcos on Netflix and the spinoff series to follow as well as the recent Hulu and Disney+ released Dopesick, this series that is now neck-deep in its storyline might be a hidden gem that hasn’t crossed their vision yet. The good thing is that if you have the Disney+ platform you can now straight binge the first four seasons of this well-done series and be caught up for the new episodes that will hit weekly. Told through multiple perspectives, this is a drama set against the infancy of the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles and its ultimate radical impact on the culture as we know it, following numerous characters on a violent collision course, including Franklin Saint, a young street entrepreneur on a quest for power, Gustavo “El Oso” Zapata, a Mexican wrestler caught up in a power struggle within a crime family, Teddy McDonald, a CIA operative running from a dark past who begins an off-book operation to fund the Nicaraguan Contras and Lucia Villanueva, the self-possessed daughter of a Mexican crime lord. Starting out in 1984 Los Angeles, the series is fascinating in its gritty approach and no holds barred attitude as the f-bombs fly. I’m one of those people who is late to this show but I have to say that the pilot grips you from the get-go and doesn’t let up at all.
Uncharted – I feel like the rights for this video game property from developer Naughty Dog were optioned by Sony so long ago with multiple stars attached at some point or another but I guess it just took their golden boy Tom Holland’s influence to get the film going finally. Mark Wahlberg had been attached to the lead role for a long time and had director David O. Russell behind the camera but now steps into the supporting role to Holland’s Nathan Drake and Venom director Ruben Fleisher at the helm. The story follows a young version of the street smart character as he is recruited by seasoned treasure hunter Victor “Sully” Sullivan to recover a fortune amassed by Ferdinand Magellan and lost 500 years ago by the House of Moncada. The film has the formidable Antonio Banderas in the lead role and looks to be an action-packed and fun ride with some really cool-looking sequences, just the sort of thing I’m looking for right now. There may become a time when we tire of Tom and his leading roles but it’s not here yet.
Ambulance – Looking to blow things up in the biggest ways possible with the story usually being a secondary motion, Michael Bay is back on the scene with this new action thriller that only has my attention because of the lead stars of Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul Mateen III who are always incredible on screen. I used to be into the “Bay-hem” of this action pioneer but have been dulled down by too many Transformers films and the cacophonous noise of his style but maybe the low bar will work out in my favour. The film follows two desperate men who pair for the biggest bank heist in Los Angeles history with a take of $32 million. Of course, things go wrong and they hijack an ambulance with a wounded cop clinging to life and an ace EMT on board, played by Baby Driver’s Eiza Gonzalez. With it being a Michael Bay film, besides explosions, it will be full of insane camera twirling, sunkissed shots of the Los Angeles cityscape and more of his trademarks but I’m hoping that the acting elevates this one because he has some heavyweights. The movie is also a remake of a 2005 thriller out of Denmark as was Gyllenhaal’s previous film, The Guilty, which is fantastic and on Netflix right now.
Dog – Channing Tatum knows who he is and knows that the women and men will flock to the theatres because he oozes sexuality and charm. As gross as it was for me to say ooze there, I know this is the case and I really also enjoy him as an actor but to bring a dog along for your new film in the co-star seat seems a bit like stacking the deck I think. Co-directing this film as well with the Magic Mike franchise writer Reid Carolin, he plays one of two former Army Rangers who are paired against their will on the road trip of a lifetime, the other one just happens to be a Belgian Malinois named Lulu. Together they buckle into a 1984 Ford Bronco and race down the Pacific Coast in hopes of making it to a fellow soldier’s funeral on time while pushing each other’s buttons, breaking a small handful of laws and narrowly avoiding death along the way. I’m intrigued to see what Tatum is capable of as a director and I usually have a soft spot for road trip films, especially as this one is shot by Newton Thomas Sigel, the guy behind The Usual Suspects, Drive and most recently Da 5 Bloods. This might be a sleeper heartwarmer for audiences heading into spring.
The Cursed – When I was working at a video store I came across an indie film from a young Irish filmmaker named Sean Ellis called Cashback and I’ve been hooked ever since. His movies come across as creepy and fantastical but always play in a different pool of the mystery-thriller genre but for his new film he goes full-on gothic monster horror and it’s pretty awesome. Originally called Eight For Silver, the story is set in rural 19th-century France as a mysterious and possibly supernatural menace threatens a small village causing John McBride, a pathologist, to come to town to investigate the danger and exorcise some of his own demons in the process. The gore is immediately present and the darkness of this almost Lovecraftian levels of despair, this was quickly my type of movie about fifteen minutes in. Not to give any spoilers but there is a scene in this film that was so bold in its heightened horror that it caught me off guard and it reminded me of the great body scares John Carpenter brought to his The Thing remake. This movie will only appeal to a certain part of the horror community but those who are into it will love it immensely.
Ted K – Movies about serial killers have a certain hotness to them which extends beyond horror fans and I understand how gross that was to read as it was equally bad to write. It seems the same serial killers get the movie treatment over and over again like Ted Bundy or even the influence like Ed Gein for Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Jeffrey Dahmer for you Hannibal Lector like characters but the Una Bomber has been left untouched until now. The film has the great character actor Sharlto Copley in the lead role in an exploration of Ted Kaczynski’s life in Lincoln, Montana in the years leading up to his arrest as the infamous mailbox bomber. Copley is such a chameleon of a performer and I had the opportunity to chat with him after making the action flick Hardcore Henry and see what process he takes to get into anyone he is playing’s head. His dedication is always present which is why I have the utmost faith that he pulls this film off.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre – The new hotness in horror franchises is to ignore the subsequent sequels that have been released and just pick up after the original movies in a sort of retconning. It worked for Halloween which was worked into a finale trilogy and now The Evil Dead and Don’t Breathe director Fede Alvarez is giving the same treatment to Tobe Hooper’s blisteringly iconic southern terror fest. Yes, after nearly fifty years of hiding, Leatherface returns to terrorize a group of idealistic young friends who accidentally disrupt his carefully shielded world in a remote Texas town. Even better, the group that descends on this ghost down to meet their grisly demise are a bunch of social media influencers which will give the audience a bit of glee when they are dispatched. This is by far the highest body count this franchise has ever seen and the gore is flying from the get-go which makes this movie an insane amount of fun to watch. I also really loved that there are no hero moments in this film and it gets almost comical. This is obviously geared at a certain audience and you already know who you are.
Streamline – Another film hitting me in my weak spot, there is a brand new Australian melodrama on the books this week and it also happens to have Jason Isaacs in a very background supporting role but still one that shows off his gravitas. The film also features young actor Levi Miller in the main role who was supposed to be a huge star after the blockbuster Pan which basically was a glittery bowl of diarrhea with no coherence behind it and I really hadn’t seen him in anything until now. This film is inspired by a true story and has Miller playing a gifted 15-year-old swimmer who is on the brink of the biggest swim meet of his life that could allow him to qualify for the Olympics. Pushed by his ruthless coach, and his mother Kim, it’s unclear if he actually wants the life he’s seemingly being forced to chase but when his estranged father is released from jail, his fight to escape his past to Olympic glory becomes even more dangerous. The movie is a first-time feature from writer and director Tyler Wade Johnson who has such a great command of dramatic performances that feel a little rough around the edges which really adds to the realism of the story. Miller is absolutely jacked now, really leaning into the swimmer’s body build, which might have been helped along by Aussie Olympic hero Ian Thorpe, also known as the Thorpedo, who was the executive producer of this movie. This is a solid film that sadly won’t get a lot of attention I think.
President – With all the post-election events in the United States since the 2020 results and frankly the attacks on our own current government in Canada over the last few weeks, there’s something about this new documentary that just hit harder. Playing very much in a compiled real-time with no narrator and a few subtitle cards to help you along the way, this documentary became a quasi horror film that saw the slaughter of democracy in an African country. The film follows a young and charismatic leader named Nelson Chamisa who takes on the corrupt ruling party in Zimbabwe’s 2018 presidential election. Early on and with no blatant hiding of the corruption, he sees the delay in the tabulating of votes by the Zimbabwe Elections council and the writing is on the wall from pretty much the beginning. While the end results are far darker and less hopeful than the start, to see the fight in the streets from the people of Zimbabwe is equal parts inspiring and heartbreaking and director Camilla Nielsson catches it all like a fly on the wall. I felt at the beginning that it felt a bit dry in its approach but as the ball gets rolling it all becomes a fascinating education in how our first world corruption bleeds into all other nations.
The Beatles And India – Months ago I brought a documentary about the Fab Four’s trip to India and the spiritual awakening they found there but it turned into a more lopsided affair of being about the effect it had on the filmmaker to experience this alongside them but this documentary is far more straightforward. Debuting on the Britbox streaming platform, In the debut feature from two brand new filmmakers, this is a unique historical chronicle of the enduring love affair between The Beatles and India that started more than half a century ago. Rare archival footage, photographs and eye-witness accounts, along with location shoots across India, bring alive the fascinating journey of George, John, Paul and Ringo from their high-octane celebrity lives in the West to a remote Himalayan ashram in search of spiritual bliss, a time that inspired an unprecedented burst of creative songwriting. This is the first serious exploration of how India helped shape the evolution of the iconic band, and how they helped bridge two vastly different cultures. As a huge fan of this band and their effect, not just on music but the entire zeitgeist, I’m always interested in seeing all I can about them. This time I wasn’t duped into experiencing someone else’s journey along the way.
Fistful Of Vengeance – We get a couple gifts from the martial arts movie gods this week and one of them comes through the conduit of a Netflix release but, be warned, it’s not on the same level of a film like The Night Comes For Us, and if you haven’t seen that yet, fix that now. This one does feature the genre cred of having The Raid star Iko Uwais who always delivers jaw-dropping fight scenes so that is the draw immediately. Also starring Mortal Kombat star Lewis Tan, the story follows Uwais as Kai Jin, a young Chinatown chef in present-day San Francisco, who becomes entangled with the Chinese Triad’s pursuit of deadly ancient powers known as the “Wu Xing. Interestingly, the film doesn’t come from any martial arts director but the man they got is a bit action-heavy as Netherlands born filmmaker Roel Reiné has done episodic television like Black Sails and Wu Assassins as well as a string of direct to video action sequels like The Condemned 2, 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded and The Man With The Iron Fists 2. Not to say any of those are great or even good but keep in mind that this is our chance to check him out before his episodes of Halo air later this year.
Too Cool To Kill – The second martial arts film of the week has quite the title to live up to but has no bankable stars in it so it really is an attempt from the ground up. The film is made by first-time filmmaker Xing Wenxiong who manages to make a comedy-infused fight-action-heavy production that Jackie Chan would smile at knowingly. It follows Wei Chenggong, a normal dude with a dream of becoming a comedian that receives an invitation from famous actress Milan to play her leading man, “Killer Karl.” However, unknown to Mr. Wei, the new gig has landed him directly in the middle of a dangerous conspiracy and, as the brutal truth inches closer and closer, he is left to rely on only his good luck and (somewhat questionable) acting skills to survive. The creator of this film obviously has some deep love for all the action tropes that got the genre there as it feels, at times, like a satire on indie flicks like Robert Rodriguez’s debut film El Mariachi as well as a lot of John Woo homages, the master of high octane Hong Kong action thrillers. I was very surprised by this movie but I think it won’t land with a lot of people in theatres.
Blu-Ray:
Eternals – It’s sad to say that this ambitiously made origin story of a new hero group in a hugely stacked Marvel Cinematic Universe got some of the worst reviews that have come out of this franchise in its over ten-year run but here we are. I have to say that I don’t really agree with it and many of them are frustratingly based on its inclusion of LGBTQ+ characters but it comes from Academy Award-winning director Chloe Zhao and, if anything, all of her films have something deeply fascinating about them and are always so beautifully shot. The film directly follows the events of Avengers: Endgame when an unexpected tragedy forces the Eternals, ancient aliens who have been living on Earth in secret for thousands of years, out of the shadows to reunite against mankind’s most ancient enemy, the Deviants. The cast of this movie is damn solid with two Game Of Thrones cast members in Richard Madden and Kit Harrington, who really only bookends the film, Atlanta’s Bryan Tyree Henry, the brilliant Barry Keoghan, the now totally jacked Kumail Nanjiani and the iconic Angelina Jolie and that’s definitely not everyone. I will definitely concede that there are aspects that drag in this film and it does seem quite bloated in its run time but the things that it sets up, the charisma of some of the stars and the sweeping vision of Zhao keep me coming back to the positives of this big and pivotal MCU story piece.
Wolf – It’s insane to think that actor George MacKay isn’t already a huge megastar like Timothee Chalamet or Tom Holland because the guy knocks it out of the park every time, like his performances in the Viggo Mortensen drama Captain Fantastic or the one-shot World War I epic 1917 but this arthouse film likely won’t get his name at the poster just due to its niche quality. That said, writer and director Nathalie Biancheri’s sophomore feature gives MacKay a new complexity to work with and he totally runs with it. He plays Jacob, a young man who fully believes he is a wolf trapped in a human body and eats, sleeps, and lives like one, much to the shock of his family. When he’s sent to an experimental clinic, Jacob and his animal-bound peers are forced to undergo increasingly extreme forms of ‘curative’ therapies. However once he meets the mysterious Wildcat, played by Lily-Rose Depp, their friendship blossoms into an undeniable infatuation and he is faced with the decision to renounce his true self for love or to give himself fully over to his baser nature. This movie is beautifully shot but all hinges on the performances of MacKay and Depp as well as their oppressor, the cold and surgical Zookeeper played by Paddy Considine. I was absolutely astounded by this film.
Monday – Sebastian Stan is on a lot of people’s minds right now due to his current series Pam & Tommy running on Disney+ right now but this little film that slipped under the radar in theatres might do well on Blu-ray and video on demand. As far as mainstream marketing goes, he is the big draw here as co-star Denise Gough hasn’t quite landed internationally, at least until the Star Wars spinoff Andor debuts, and writer and director Argyris Papadimitropoulos hasn’t hit it big international but he really knows how to film his home country of Greece beautifully. The story follows two Americans in their mid-thirties living in Athens, who meet in the heat of summer one whirlwind weekend. When Chloe’s time in Greece is drawing to a close, she decides to give up her high-flying job back home and explore whether one weekend’s passion can stand the reality of the inevitable Monday. Stan is absolutely incredible in this film, as is Gough who makes a memorable turn in this, but the characters are written very inconsistently and the payoff is nowhere near as good as the setup. The film is a little bogged with diminishing returns on viewer investment and, as gorgeous as everything looks, the romantic chemistry feels really strained for a large stretch of the movie. It’s almost like they knew it was a one-weekend stand before the audience did. a bit disappointing.
Seobok: Project Clone – If you follow these write-ups regularly, you know my deep love for South Korean cinema so when Well Go USA hooked me up with a brand new one I was pretty giddy about it. Even better, it is a dramatic sci-fi story involving clones so it’s going to be overly stylish, overly emotional and definitely unpredictable. The story follows ex-intelligence agent Ki Heon who is tasked with safely transporting Seo Bok, the first-ever human clone, who holds the secret of eternal life. Several forces try to take control of Seo Bok to serve their own agendas because the robotic clone holds the secret to immortality. I found this movie deeply fascinating because it refuses to be held down by the genre pitfalls and actually has something to say beyond the bare plot and even gets a bit philosophical from time to time. Writer and director Lee Yong-Ju is a new voice to me in South Korean film and I really can’t wait to see what he has in store next. Again, hook me up Well Go USA!
The Three Musketeers – Time for some classic Warner Archive this week as I was given their sole release and it is even more classic and iconic in a literary sense because it is also an early adaptation of the most famous work of Alexandre Dumas. Yes, D’Artagnan and his musketeers ride high in a blockbuster of the late forties featuring a renowned cast including Gene Kelly, Lana Turner, June Allyson, Angela Lansbury and, a personal favourite, Vincent Price as the villain. For those who don’t know the Musketeers and their story, it follows the hectic adventures of D’Artagnan, a young provincial noble who came to Paris to become a Musketeer and forms the indestructible friendship with the three other Musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis as they thwart the plans of Cardinal Richelieu to usurp King Louis XIII’s power. This was a big thing for these actors at the time as it went on to be Kelly’s favourite non-musical performance as well as Turner’s first time in a colourized film but it was also the first time that the Dumas novel was adapted in its entirety rather than just cherry-picking snippets from it. Of course, we would get some great Musketeer adaptations that all stem from this cinematic first and we, as movie lovers, are grateful for it. On the other hand, we did get 2001’s The Musketeer and the 3D debacle of Paul W.S. Anderson’s version so there is a rough trade-off there.
Steve’s Blu-Ray Geekouts:
Over The Top – Sylvester Stallone takes his son on a road trip across America, wrestling people for money and the love of a truck and it was directed by the man behind Cannon Films, a guy that spent way too much movie on movies that turned out to be garbage. This all sounds like a made-up farce of a tale but this one is a real movie and it is celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary this week and I’m ashamed to say that I watched this one a lot when I was growing up and had my mom rent it numerous times and that for which I am very sorry today. Even Stallone didn’t want to do this movie, even though he wrote it, but Menahem Golan, the director, kept offering more and more money until Sly couldn’t fathom turning it down. Man, the eighties must have been an insane time fueled by cocaine and bad decisions and looking back at this trainwreck now I can’t even imagine what about it was appealing. At best, this is a fun movie to mock alongside your friends and if you don’t believe me there is a fantastic episode of How Did This Get Made that commands to be listened to.
Factory Girl – This movie and the subject herself, Edie Sedgewick, both suffer from the same malady of not being appreciated at the time of their peak and even worse Sienna Miller gives a career performance that absolutely flew under the radar of the mainstream. Playing Sedgewick, the one-time muse of artist and pop culture icon Andy Warhol, this film tells the story of her rise to socialite level and the sad decline into drug addiction as all those friends around her slowly abandoned her. As good as Miller is in this movie, Guy Pearce gives an incredible turn as Warhol, a role that has so many eyes of the idiosyncrasy of that very real character. The film was directed by George Hickenlooper, a filmmaker with a really original eye that sadly passed away just a few years after the film’s release. I think he would have been one of the top a-list filmmakers today and that this was merely just a jumping point. As far as biopics go, this is a real gem.
Super Troopers – Broken Lizard arrived on the scene with this pretty simple concept comedy and quickly cemented themselves as the new comedy troupe on the block and one to take note of and then we just sort of abandoned them on their next feature, Club Dread, which I think is just as good if not better but I digress. Twenty years ago this week five Vermont state troopers hit the big screen to terrorize those on the road for their own enjoyment, give us new catchphrases but most of all introduce us to a group of great and dedicated comedy character actors. The story is an easy lay-up, a station house that is forced to save their jobs and outdo the local police department by solving a crime, something they’ve never managed to do. This movie still holds up comedy-wise today and still has me almost on the floor with laughter
Television:
LOL: Last One Laughing Canada (Prime Video) – This one feels like the reason it is on this list is that it is hosted by my friend Jay Baruchel but there is more to it than that because I think the concept is really great and it’s already been done internationally, gotten great reactions and now we get our own Canadian version of it. This six-part competition series pits ten of the best comedic talents against each other in a showdown where anything can happen and this cast is a mind-blowing mix of the best Canadian funny people alive like Colin Mochrie, Tom Green, Jon Lajoie, Debra DiGiovanni, K. Trevor Wilson and so many more. I’m usually not into reality competition shows but this one seems to be playing directly into things that I love. It could prove me wrong and not come through with the hype but I doubt it.
Space Force: Season 2 (Netflix) – Who knew that a joke created from a very real announcement and creation of an outer space military by a buffoon of a president should gain so much weight but this Steve Carell and Greg Daniels created comedy series survived it’s debut season and now gets its follow up. Carell stars in the lead amidst a great cast including John Malkovich, Ben Schwartz, Tawny Newsome, Jimmy O. Yang and more and, to be honest, it hits as much as it misses sometimes. The show follows Carell as General Mark Naird, a disgraced lifelong military man who is given one last chance to achieve legendary status to his peers by commanding the Space Force, a sect in the defensive forces that is aimless at best. I think I dedicated to watching the first season to see the final performance of Fred Willard, who plays Carell’s dad in this, as when the first season came out he had just passed away. Now that he isn’t in it anymore I hope that the second season can play a bit better than the first did because if you are expecting The Office calibur writing you will be sorely disappointed.
Severance (AppleTV+) – For the people that love quirky and weird storytelling, like all my fellow Twin Peaks fans out there, it looks like Ben Stiller and lead star and producer Adam Scott have a little gift for you on AppleTV+. From the mind of new showrunner Dan Erickson, this series is unlike any I’ve seen and it makes me appreciate the streaming platform even more as they seem to be giving ideas chances that would never exist anywhere else. The plot follows Mark, an employee for the mysterious Lumen that leads a team of office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work and personal lives. When a mysterious colleague appears outside of work, it begins a journey to discover the truth about their jobs and if they can escape the disgruntled feelings they have while they’re in the workplace to reconcile them in the real world. I don’t want to give any more away about it than that but the first episode is a wild ride of reveals hurtling towards a cliffhanger that will keep you on the edge of your seat. I’m unsure if this is a limited series or part of something bigger but I loved every second of it.
jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy (Netflix) – As much as I don’t want to celebrate this very smart and gifted artist that is going through a massive mental health crisis that goes unchecked, unmedicated and totally unbalanced day after day but there is a morbid curiosity about it that I can’t shake. The guy definitely has kept himself in the public light with his very front page divorce from Kim Kardashian, his social media attacks on her new boyfriend Pete Davidson and his other weird feuds that he’s trying to start with Billie Eilish and Kid Cudi so the fact that he has a Netflix docu-series isn’t that surprising. Obviously told in three episodes, the show follows the life of Kanye West in an intimate portrait as he builds his way from singer to businessman and becomes a global brand. Kanye gives a crazy amount of access to the filmmakers on this but I think it may also guard the viewer against his more obsessive tendencies so it doesn’t really tell the whole story. Even still, it is a fascinating and totally engrossing watch and the series is done before you know it and your evening’s gone.
The Marvelous Ms. Maisel: Season 4 (Prime Video) – After crashing through the first three seasons in quick fashion, both my wife and I have been not so patiently waiting for the new season to debut. We have such a huge cliffhanger at the end of the last season with a massive falling out between Midge and her friend, boss and popular recording artist Shy Baldwin that may affect her rising comedienne status. For those who have yet to jump on board to one of the crown jewels on Prime Video, this show is an award-winning story about a wife, mother and busy New Yorker who has a dream to be on the stand-up stage in the 1950s. Created by Gilmore Girls Amy Sherman Palladino and Daniel Palladino, the show is well cast with Rachel Brosnahan, Tony Shalhoub, Alex Borstein, Michael Zegers and more but also has a script that flies so fast that you’re just recovering from one great laugh and the next one hits you. Sometimes the hyped shows don’t live up to the word of mouth but this one is a rare exception. Friday can’t come soon enough!
Death On The Nile – Agatha Christie is something of a forgotten era of filmmaking but Kenneth Branagh seemed to pull it off well with his remake of Murder On The Orient Express and why shouldn’t he be successful? this is the guy who did a multitude of Shakespeare adaptations. Now he is returning with another Christie mystery and slipping back into the role of master detective Hercule Poirot. This film follows the Belgian sleuth vacationing aboard a glamorous river steamer when it turns into a terrifying search for a murderer after a picture-perfect couple’s idyllic honeymoon is tragically cut short. Set against an epic landscape of sweeping Egyptian desert vistas and the majestic Giza pyramids, this mystery has a killer cast in it including Gal Gadot, Annette Bening, Russell Brand and more and I have a good feeling for it to be a fun flick, especially for a totally classic whodunit being retold.
Blacklight – Liam Neeson has a death grip on these geriatric action films and while I really feel bad for calling it one and now feel that Neeson has put me on his mental shitlist to fight at a later date, he did say he was retiring from them unless I made that up in my brain. It would be acceptable if the action movies he was making beyond this fake retirement were any good but most of them don’t resonate beyond the end credits and feel like constant retreads. This one has him playing Travis Block, a government operative coming to terms with his shadowy past when he discovers a plot targeting U.S. citizens and now finds himself in the crosshairs of the FBI director he once helped protect. The film comes from writer and director Mark Williams who has apparently found his action-thriller comfort zone is constantly working with the Taken action hero as he has had a hand in three of Neeson’s films since 2020 with this one included. I enjoy that former nineties heartthrob Aidan Quinn is the formidable foe for Liam to fight but nothing about the trailer or story seems like any new territory for audiences to discover.
Marry Me – I feel like this movie is just an elaborate ruse to release a new JLo single because the premise is totally ridiculous and campy and I can’t see anyone putting down money to go see this in theatres. The worst part of it all is they dragged the charming and befuddled Owen Wilson along for the ride and I hope it was against his will. The story follows music superstar Kat Valdez who is planning to get married to her fiance Bastian, another recording star in a huge concert venue in front of a global audience of fans. But when Kat learns, seconds before her vows, that Bastian has been unfaithful, she decides to marry Charlie, played by Wilson, a stranger in the crowd, instead and drags him into her bigger than life world and, obviously, they fall in love for real because these movies are so damn predictable. I get it that with the timing this movie is poised to earn all the Valentine’s Day box office but there has to be something better than this which feels like the lowest of hanging fruit. Heck, even JLo should feel that she’s better than this garbage unless, as I said, it’s all a vehicle for a new single.
I Want You Back – Charlie Day is a guy who I discovered through his involvement in films like Horrible Bosses rather than his long-running comedy series It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia which I am really late to the game on but has amassed a huge following with its fans over the last decade and a half. That said, I love the guy and when I saw that Amazon Prime had this new romantic comedy with the equally funny Jenny Slate I was pretty much over the moon about it. The film has the pair as Peter and Emma, newly dumped thirty-somethings who team up to sabotage their exes’ new relationships and hopefully win them back for good, hence the title of the movie. With a great supporting cast including Scott Eastwood, Gina Rodriguez and The Good Place’s Manny Jacinto, I’m interested to see what director Jason Orley does with the premise as it does seem. a little been there done that. He had a low-key hit with his debut Big Time Adolescence starring Pete Davidson so he is on the good side of it all plus it comes from the writers of Love Simon so I feel that the heart will be in the right place.
Kimi – With The Batman less than a month away, Zoe Kravitz is preparing to have a big year of being the new Selina Kyle and Catwoman but she’s getting the year started with this drama thriller courtesy of HBO Max and the incredible Steven Soderbergh who directs it. As usual, all of the actors line up to work with this must-see filmmaker and the cast rounds out with Erika Christensen, Rita Wilson, Robin Givens and more But it’s the reliability at its heart in this pandemic age that hooks your eyes. Set during that aforementioned COVID-19 outbreak, the story follows an agoraphobic tech worker who discovers evidence of a violent crime while reviewing a data stream and is met with resistance and bureaucracy when she tries reporting it to her company. To get involved, she realizes she must face her greatest fear by venturing out of her apartment and into the city streets, which are filled with protestors after the city council passes a law restricting the movements of the homeless population. Soderbergh does so well with these really contained thrillers, as was on display with the Claire Foy film Unsane all shot on his iPhone and I expect no less from this movie. I know all the pandemic thrillers are a little triggering and we could kind of do without them at this point but this man is one of the masters and the way it was used for the story looks so very compelling.
The Sky Is Everywhere – To be honest, this movie had me at the mere mention of Jason Segal but the dreamlike filter which it was shot gets me all sorts of indie film feelings even if the story is a bit sad. I’m also very intrigued by the fact that it’s the new film from director Josephine Decker who puzzled me with her sleepy thriller Madeline’s Madeline but totally won me over with her creepy little biopic drama Shirley. An adaptation of the novel by author Jandy Nelson, the story of this film follows Lennie, a shy teenage musician whose life is shaken by the death of her talented older sister and finds herself torn between the seductive Toby, her sister’s boyfriend who shares her grief, and Joe, the new boy in town who bursts with life. Each offers Lennie something she desperately needs and the character renaissance truly lies in the performance of Grace Kaufman who leaves that crappy CBS sitcom Man With A Plan starring Matt Leblanc in the dust. It was big shoes marketing-wise for her to fill as the role was originally Selena Gomez’s who remained on the production as an executive producer. Playing on AppleTV+, hopefully, this gets a lot of attention as CODA did, now an Oscar-nominated movie.
The In Between – An actress I have been seeing in movies and television from a young age, actress Joey King has consistently been making all of the right moves as she transitions into adulthood, even getting huge praise for her based on a true story series The Act with Patricia Arquette. Now she has this new sci-fi-themed romantic drama that features Kyle Allen, the star of the surprisingly great The Map of Tiny Perfect Things which debuted on Amazon Prime last year. The film is a supernatural love story that centers on a teenage girl, Tessa, , who, after bouncing around in foster homes for most of her childhood, doesn’t believe she deserves her own love story. Everything changes after she has a chance encounter with Skylar, a senior from a neighbouring town who’s a true romantic. As her heart begins to open, tragedy strikes when a car accident takes Skylar’s life, while Tessa survives. As Tessa searches for answers in the aftermath of the accident, she soon believes Skylar is attempting to reconnect with her from the afterworld. With the help of her best friend and a newfound belief that love never dies, Tessa attempts to contact Skylar one last time, in order to give their love story the epic ending it deserves. The movie was made by director Arie Posin, who made a really promising debut with his drama The Chumscrubber in 2005, another teen drama, and I hope he channels some of that feeling for this outing. I also like that the film has supporting work from John Ortiz and Kim Dickens who are always great character actors and deliver every time they are brought out.
National Champions – Sports movies can be a multiple-choice answer when you watch them. It can be a dime a dozen affair where you can predict all the dramatic beats, a well-acted and dynamic story that keeps you on the edge of your seat or a badly cast and put-together film that has you looking for the exit. This film is a mixed bag of all three, following a star quarterback who ignites a player’s strike hours before the biggest game of the year in order to fight for fair compensation, equality and respect for the student-athletes. What kept my focus in the film is the phenomenal cast assembled around lead star Stephan James including J.K. Simmons, Timothy Olyphant and Tim Blake Nelson but seems to pull the rug out from under it at all the worst times with a cringe-worthy script. It takes a lot for Simmons to come off like a cheeseball and director Ric Roman Waugh does it multiple times. It’s sad because his last film Greenland was such a pleasant surprise by being good and utterly depressing too.
Parallel Mothers – Pedro Almodovar makes cinema with every flourish of his being. It may not be relatable or something in your particular wheelhouse but it is evident that he comes from the school of the greatest international auteurs and he also has that classic loyalty to his stars like Penelope Cruz who leads this film as well. Co-starring the incredibly stunning Rossy de Palma, the story sets out with two women, Janis and Ana, connecting in a hospital room where they are going to give birth. Both are single and became pregnant by accident with Janis, a middle-aged who doesn’t regret it and is excited for the journey and the other, Ana, an adolescent who is scared, repentant and traumatized by the whole experience. Janis tries to encourage her while they move like sleepwalkers along the hospital corridors and with only a few words exchanged between them in these hours, it will create a very close link between the two, which by chance develops and complicates, and changes their lives in a decisive way. The film is always vibrant and colourful but it is the eyes of both women that get a focus that pulls you into the drama of the situation as well as the dread felt when secrets and revelations come to light but aren’t immediately spoken. The film fills an international niche that might be widely sought but the fans of this style will eat it up like a well-prepared meal.
The Worst Person In The World – Fresh off getting a Best Foreign Academy Award nomination, one of my studio publicist contacts emailed me about this new well-received drama, the next masterpiece from writer and director Joachim Trier who has not only not mad a sub-par film but has yet to make one that was any less than amazing. All over film Twitter, people have been going crazy for this movie and I can now say that I agree with them. The film is a modern dramedy about the quest for love and meaning in contemporary Oslo, chronicling four years in the life of Julie, a young woman who navigates the troubled waters of her love life and struggles to find her career path, leading her to take a realistic look at who she really is and make decisions that could paint her to others as a horrendous human being. Lead actress Renate Reinsve is absolutely electric in this movie, giving her journey resonance and purpose, putting us on an odyssey of finding her perfect center which includes a mind-bending mushroom hallucination that could be one of my favourite scenes I’ve seen this year. This is a special movie and, damn the subtitles, people need to watch it.
Big Bug – I’m a sucker for French films big time but it’s the director of this movie, Jean Pierre Jeunet that really got the ball rolling for me big time, creating my favourite romantic film of all time, A Very Long Engagement as well as many other weirdo and eccentric projects like Delicatessen. This new film leans harder into the weird side of his filmography and I’m totally here for every second. Once again featuring actor Dominique Pinon, a staple of all of his films, this one goes for the sci-fi comedy vein, following a group of arguing suburbanites who find themselves stuck together when an android uprising, causing their well-intentioned household robots to lock them in for their own safety. With an exploding colour palate, incredible idiosyncratic cinematography and an unpredictable plot, Jeunet has carved into his own niche for another delightfully odd story that will become instantly loved by his fans like me. Film after film, this guy just gets me right in my cinematic sensibilities.
Compartment Number 6 – Conversational movies are a really hard sell to most mainstream audiences at best but when it is a foreign film with a whole bunch of subtitles, it can be worse. I’m a guy who cut his teeth on films like Singles and Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy so when a film like this comes out it feels like it is directly in my wheelhouse. The film follows a young Finnish woman who escapes an enigmatic love affair in Moscow by boarding a train to the Arctic port of Murmansk. Forced to share the long ride and a tiny sleeping car with a Russian miner, the unexpected encounter leads the occupants of Compartment number six to face the truth about their own yearning for human connection and the real feelings of loneliness that have clouded them for longer than they can remember. The fascinating thing about this film is the archetypes which it deals with because, in a focused European way, they seem cliched but this is only on the surface. Laura is an introvert yearning to be a bubbly and outgoing person which could cure her ennui while Ljoha is a brash Russian who replaces anger with vulnerability but also has a soft spot for love stories like Titanic. Most won’t have the patience to see the glow within this movie but those who can will feel totally rewarded.
A Week In Paradise – Malin Ackerman is an actress I really enjoy and have since I saw her for the first time In Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle, but it’s someone that probably should take some more caution in her role choosing. I was duped last year by her fight club comedy Chick Fight that felt so horrendously underwritten and dude logic heavy and I will say that everything about her new film turns me off as a viewer. The film co-stars Connie Nielsen and Phillip Winchester and follows an international film star whose world collapses when her film director husband is outed by the paparazzi as having a baby with his new young leading lady causing her to seek a break from it all at a Caribbean boutique hotel resort. The film comes from filmmaker Philippe Martinez who is mostly known for doing direct to DVD action flicks with Jean Claude Van Damme or Steven Seagal so this feels a bit out of left field or that he wanted to make a movie predominantly set at a vacation destination. Either way, Malin and Connie are not enough to keep me engaged watching her get her groove back or live under a Tuscan sun or even eat, pray or love… again.
Catch The Fair One – At a quick breakneck speed, this less than an hour and a half of intense redemption got me hooked right away and I knew absolutely nothing about it when I pressed play. It feels like I’m jumping into descriptors on this film early but that is to sell how out of nowhere great this movie was and how compelling its newcomer lead star is, Kali Reis, who also wrote the story. The story follows a former champion indigenous boxer battling her demons of addiction and family estrangement that embarks on the fight of her life when she goes in search of her missing sister, to bring her home to her mother and earn some sort of redemption. The grit of this movie shakes off in every scene as Reis’s portrayal feels real and the inexperience of her character drives the inexperience and, above all, the reckless abandon of her objective. The violence is explosive but the emotion is just as palpable leading to a third act that delivers an ending that will sit with you for more than a moment.
Cosmic Dawn – Just looking at the poster for this new alien-centric sci-fi thriller filled me with so much wonder and speculation, a beautiful colour burst that reminded me of a SpectreVision film like Mandy. On closer inspection, the film almost operated like a forgotten child of that production company and, with the limited reach of its marketing, will probably find a good home with the after-release cult status. The story follows Aurora, a woman who dealt with the abduction of her mother by aliens when she was a child by joining an alien worshipping cult. Now moved on from the cult, Aurora is forced to confront her past and pursue the ultimate truth about The Cosmic Dawn, and the effect that cult has left on her. The film earns its creepy factor right away and while steering a bit towards the horror genre it never gets to that level of terror so it’s kind of safe from people who hate scary movies. Actress Camilla Rowe, a kick-ass presence in the indie world, delivers a hell of a performance in this through the studious work of writer and director Jefferson Moneo who is only two feature films deep but is already operating on a veteran level.
A Cops And Robbers Story – This is one of those crazy stories that I had only heard briefly on the internet but in the metropolis of New York City it was massive news. Largely involving the NYPD, this film is definitely under a microscope now given all the Black Lives Matter protests in the last few years as well as the push on police reform but this one brings it back the other way a bit, more fuel to the fire of blatant racism in the organization. The documentary tells the story of Cory Pegues, a man embroiled in a life of crime as a member of New York City’s infamous Supreme Team gang in the 1980s. After a near-death gang confrontation, Pegues flees the city, only to return years later as a rising star in the NYPD. When Pegues speaks publicly in support of police reform, he becomes a target within the department and details of his former life are thrust into the spotlight. The discotomy better gang banger and supposed protector of the streets are so interesting s is the way that Pegues is described by his peers and the media before and after his past life has come to light is absolutely fascinating and Romanian filmmaker Ilinca Calugareanu frames it all just perfectly with in-depth interviews and a catalogue of video that puts everything in a clear perspective. It all begs the question can a person be defined only by the way the path started or where it ended up? The astounding good that Pegues had done in his policing tenure seems to outweigh the bad in reality but sadly, with racism in America being what it is, it all comes off as inconsequential.
Flee – Some. of the most important filmmaking out there has to be the documentary, a style much maligned for being boring or dull but they continue to push the boundaries of exploration, information and ideas. The other interesting thing about them is how subversive they can be and how they can blend into almost every genre as this new critically-lauded film does. Animated beautifully, the film tells the extraordinary true story of a man named Amin who, on the verge of marriage, is compelled to reveal his hidden past for the first time. What results is the first-hand account of a refugee’s story with no flinches away from the darkness and harrowing experience contained within as well as the trauma that comes through later in life? This film is truly special and is reminiscent of a film like Waltz With Bashir, which has now done some Academy Award history for itself by earning a Best Animated nomination as well as a Best Documentary one as well.
Blu-Ray:
Encanto – Disney has arrived again with a movie to replace the songs and dialogue of Moana for parents who have had to endure it over and over again, if not give them a bit of a reprieve and of course, it is once again thanks to Lin Manuel Miranda and his songwriting skills. The film tells the tale of an extraordinary family, the Madrigals, who live hidden in the mountains of Colombia, in a magical house in a wondrous place called an Encanto. The magic of the Encanto has blessed every child in the family with a unique gift from super strength to the power to heal every child except one, Mirabel. When Mirabel discovers that the magic surrounding the Encanto is in danger, she decides that she, the only ordinary Madrigal, might just be her family’s saviour. The voice cast is a great line-up of Latino stars including Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Stephanie Beatriz, the veteran and always welcome John Leguizamo and many more and the story is just as vibrant as the visuals you are seeing on screen and “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” will constantly be sung in your household and not just by the kids because the song is so damn catchy. Miranda has to be one of the most gifted creators out there and he is always showing that off.
King Richard – Will Smith might be coming to join the Oscar race this year because he has given a performance that is just career rejuvenating and I have to say it has been a long time since we have even considered this notion, which I gauge to be 2006’s The Pursuit Of Happyness. He has the Academy on his side as this is a biopic of Richard Williams, the father of tennis phenoms Venus and Serena Williams and the voting board eats those up. The film follows Richard as he nurtures his young daughters’ burgeoning talent, taking unconventional avenues to bring them to superstardom and against all the adversity they face for being young poor black Americans. The film has a great line where Richard says he has not one but two of the next Michael Jordans. It makes me chuckle every time but the way the story is able to break away from being about the father to the struggle and strife of his daughters just adds to a film that is already fascinating from the get-go. Don’t sleep on this movie, it is worth every moment of its runtime.
Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City – When the first adaptation of Resident Evil hit theatres in 2002 I have to admit I was definitely a fan but I did feel like it wasn’t a close enough realization to the video game which is something I would love to see. I do see that it was more made as a vehicle for Milla Jovovich to have her own action franchise but I wanted something more faithful and we now have it with a film that explores not just the first game but the second as well. This one is set in 1998 and explores the secrets of the mysterious Spencer Mansion and the ill-fated Raccoon City which was once the booming home of pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corporation. Now a dying Midwestern town, the company’s exodus left the city a wasteland with great evil brewing below the surface and when that evil is unleashed, the townspeople are forever changed into bloodthirsty creatures and a small group of survivors must work together to uncover the truth behind Umbrella and make it through the night. The film features Crawl’s Kaya Scodelaerio, Code 9’s Robbie Amell and Ant-Man And The Wasp’s Hannah John-Kamen as franchise favorite players and the mood, aesthetic and set pieces that look pitch-perfect but as a horror movie, it all falls flat. Nothing is scary, everything feels telegraphed and before you know it you’re in a rushed third act and a lacklustre finish. I feel so conflicted on this one and am still waiting for it to be done properly I guess.
The Beatles: Get Back – Master filmmaker Peter Jackson is known for a plethora of reasons in the film world. At first, he was an originator in schlock horror, making splatter films in New Zealand for years. Then he was the Tolkein guy, adapting both the Lord Of The Rings trilogy and The Hobbit and also did a great job of King Kong in my opinion. Finally, he pivoted to documentary filmmaking with a hell of a World War I film called They Shall Not Grow Old. Now he’s made a Beatles fan like me overjoyed with this three-part docu-series that follows the Fab Four as they regroup to record and rehearse fourteen new songs that would become the album Let It Be and prepare for their unforgettable rooftop concert at London’s Savile Row, their first live performance in two years. As a person that holds this group so close to his heart, as does the rest of my family, this series is so special and it’s jaw-dropping to see this footage restored to look like it was recorded yesterday. I’m grateful to Jackson and his team and I feel like other Beatles fans will be as well.
The Hating Game – Romantic comedies have a lot to overcome to get me on board and I probably have to credit all the bad Kate Hudson, Katherine Heigl and numerous other actresses’ streak of making these films as the catalyst. The Hating Game is a fitting description of my feelings on the genre but I sat down to get punished by yet another one, expecting absolutely nothing. The story follows Lucy Hale as, well, Lucy, an ambitious go-getter who embarks on a ruthless game of one-upmanship against cold and efficient nemesis Joshua but tries to do it while achieving professional success without compromising her ethics. Of course, the rivalry gets complicated when she starts to have feelings for him because it wouldn’t be a rom-com without it. As familiar as this movie feels, I will say that Hale is a charming actress and gives some of these lines a great levity that translates well. On the other hand, Austin Stowell is someone I felt was a bit wooden and I was really wanting more of a Robbie Amell type who I think would have fit this role beautifully. All in all, I felt a bit of a surprise with this one but the genre’s pitfalls are a little too much to overcome.
Out Of Death – This week seems like a bad Bruce Willis movie Christmas and it all comes down as fitting as well because the Razzies have made a category for the “in it for a paycheck” actor and both films I’m talking about are on the nominee breakdown. All of them are so incredibly formulaic, badly written and reek of a Willis phoned in performance but even that level of terrible becomes an art form within itself. This one, complete with a terrible title, ropes in the beautiful Jaime King unfortunately and follows her as part of a corrupt Sheriff’s department in a rural mountain town that comes undone when an unintended witness, played by Willis, throws a wrench into their shady operation. Everything the former Die Hard actor does in this hamfisted action thriller makes him seem like he’s absolutely exhausted and ready to retire and, as the viewer, I felt the same. Time to hang it up, McClane, or get a better agent. Oh well, let’s move on to the next one.
Apex – The next one is Willis doing boredom again but this time in a hi-tech setting and he’s dragging along Neal McDonaogh for the ride and, sadly, for him, the bad movies are a little more common for such a great character actor who does a hell of a villain role. The constant here is Bruce is totally checked out. In a play on Surviving The Game, this film has six elite hunters who pay to hunt down a man on a deserted island, only to find themselves being picked off one by one courtesy of the guy they were supposed to bag. What an obvious twist! This one might be the cream of the crap because as fun as you can make this premise, it never rises above a dull roar and even becomes tedious in many spots. They definitely aren’t paying Bruce for his enthusiasm because the guy is devoid of it and apparently has been for a while. Man, this stuff is so sad.
Catwoman: Hunted – Brand new DC Comics animated films make Steve a nerdy and happy boy and this one gets super female-centric with not just the titular character of Catwoman but the badassery of Batwoman and her flaming red hair to add to the mix. Also, as a Brooklyn Nine-Nine fan who sourly misses that series with all of his heart, hearing Stephanie Beatriz’s voice in this just warmed my heart. Always clocking in at just an hour and fifteen minutes, this short adventure follows Catwoman in an attempt to steal a priceless jewel which puts her squarely in the crosshairs of both a powerful consortium of villains, Interpol and Batwoman. I think this one is especially cool for the former Rosa Diaz as Beatriz openly campaigned for the live-action role of Batwoman when Ruby Rose stepped away from the CW series so the fact that she gets to do the Kate Kane role in some capacity is a bit of a full-circle moment. All that and these films are always so much fun for a comic book nerd and chocked full of references that we devour.
Ailey – This was a midnight hour addition to the releases this week that was so close to not getting on this blog but I love my PR person at Elevation and wanted to make her happy. This one’s for you, Kate! I’m really glad I did get this one as it comes from Neon, a company I really love and is an incredibly immersive and beautiful-looking movie that I did not know heading in. The film is a portrait of Alvin Ailey, a visionary artist who found his own personal salvation through dance. Told in his own words through the creation of a new commission inspired by his life, evocative archival footage and interviews with those who intimately knew him, this is a documentary that centers on the Black American experience with grace, strength, and unparalleled beauty. Sometimes a movie lands in your lap and it feels like a gift from the movie gods and this was my happy piece of that this week.
The Year Of The Everlasting Storm – Over the last couple of years we have all been going through a shared trauma due to pandemic measures, fear of getting sick and now a renewed fear of the general public but that last one may just be me. I have been hoping that the whole thing wouldn’t be fodder for bad storytelling but some of the documentaries that have come out of it have been fascinating and this is definitely one at the top of the pile. Featuring seven stories from seven auteurs from around the world, the film chronicles this unprecedented moment in time and is a true love letter to the power of cinema and its storytellers which plays directly into my heart. This film beautifully shows how uncontained the human spirit can be even if we have to isolate it for a while and was constructed by some of the greatest filmmakers in current cinema-like Jafar Panahi and David Lowery, you know, the director of the greatest film from last year, The Green Knight, which just got snubbed by the Academy! Okay, the serenity this movie gave me has now dissipated.
Little Girl – A character story made in the microcosm of a secular documentary is always a fascinating thing to behold but when it comes through the filter of an eight-year-old’s naivete it becomes something different and special. That was the goal of French writer and director Sébastien Lifshitz. He isn’t a stranger to these life-in-a-bottle style documentary stories as he did Adolescents a couple of years ago, a film that focuses on two teen best friends but this one is boiled down to little Sasha, the only way we see her billed. The film is the touching portrait of eight-year-old Sasha, a girl who questions her gender and in doing so, evokes the sometimes disturbing reactions of a society that is still invested in a biological boy-girl way of thinking, something that feels like a daily fight on social media and must be hell for anyone going through this struggle. What I find most incredible about it is that we hear all the venom and vitriol and the pleading for acceptance but never on the level of discovery like this. It is played with a sweet innocence but also attempts to frame the negativity and hostility as well. It served to make what I thought to be an important film about gender identity.
Gold Diggers Of 1933 – A little bit of Warner Archive arrives this week and we’re going further back than we have for a while as the year of this film is in the title, the actors are really unknown to me but all that said it did end up earning an Academy Award nomination out of the dead, as it got a technical nod for best sound which may have just been a novelty back in those times. This movie was a really big deal at the time though and one of the neon-outlined violins used in the Shadow Waltz number is on display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. The story follows Carol, a struggling woman with her fellow showgirls who try to navigate the Great Depression when it closes all the Broadway shows. Wealthy songwriter Brad saves the day by funding a new Depression-themed musical for the girls to star in, but when his stuffy high-society brother finds out and threatens to disown Brad, Carol and her gold-digging friend’s scheme to keep the show going, hooking a couple of millionaires along the way. I will admit that the era this was made and the scope in which it’s filmed makes it very hard to get into and it really can only be appreciated as being history by a viewer like me but the beginnings of big Broadway cinema are here and it’s really neat to see the effect of a catastrophe like the Great Depression. There was also the classic infighting of Hollywood creators and producers that marred the end result a bit too but it all rolls into that classic cinema history that we marvel at now.
Stargirl: Season 2 – After the rollout of the first season of this bit of a left-field character for the average comic fan, I found myself really satisfied with the outcome of that first batch and have been really looking forward to this follow-up. The show is about a teenage girl named Courtney Whitmore who discovers the cosmic staff and becomes the inspiration for a new generation of superheroes who eventually become the Justice Society Of America and the potential for this series’ expansion is so big just knowing that Arrowverse creator Greg Berlanti and comic legend Geoff Johns are the showrunners for this. With the DC Universe really needing something to keep it afloat, their television department could really do some cool things for them in the way that they can finally obtain that Marvel Studios-like prestige they’ve been wanting for so long. I also really like that there is a bit of a horror theme that runs through these new episodes with the DC Frankenstein-like character of Solomon Grundy showing up to make his big bad mark.
Steve’s Blu-Ray Geekouts:
The Collector – I bought some horror for myself so I had to bring it along as it comes from the guys who did the killer monster flicks Feast as well as took over the Saw franchise and added their grizzly tidbits once James Wan and Leigh Whannel had moved on and Darren Lynn Bousman was looking for new ideas. This is a slasher movie on a grand scale that follows an ex-con who plots a heist at his new employer’s country home, desperate to repay his debt to his ex-wife, but is unaware that a second criminal has also targeted the property, and rigged it with a series of deadly traps. This movie is sadistic, viscerally gory and unrelenting in its violence, sometimes to a shocking degree. It had originally been planned as a trilogy, had a second film coming out called The Collection but it had its third film abruptly cancelled during filming which is a massive bummer. I love these movies and wish more people shared my passion for them.
Billy Connolly: Journey To The Edge Of The World – Scottish comedian Billy Connolly will go down in history as one of my favourite funnymen to grace the stage and it’s a place in my heart that will never change as he has since retired, sadly due to a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. That said, this series, while containing some comedy, was more about Connolly being a tour guide for his viewers and a fantastic one at that. Released in 2009, Connolly braves the elements in this adventurous journey from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, via the legendary Northwest Passage on a custom-made trike-style motorcycle that will absolutely blow your mind. Complete with his warm and endearing sense of humour, Connolly will make you wish that he was in more nature and travel shows because his charisma just leaps off the screen.
The Messenger – With the Academy Award nominations just being in the entertainment news this week, I thought I would talk about this film from 2009 I picked up, one that was half ignored by the Oscar voting body even though it featured two of the best performances of that year in the form of Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson and only the latter got the recognition. Let’s face it, both of these guys give their all everytime they walk out but this one had something special to it. Foster plays a soldier injured in Irag who returns home to finish the rest of his tour of duty in the Army’s Casualty Notification service. He is paired with veteran officer Tony Stone, played by Harrelson, and tries to come to terms with his own pain while dealing with the cold realities of his new mission which opens new wounds and exposes him to more trauma of loss. Written and directed by Oren Moverman, this movie has me in tears so many times with the soulful performance from Foster that slowly bleeds out over the duration as well as Harrelson’s portrayal of Stone and his coping mechanisms. I could never stomach the responsibilities these men had to handle and it is emotionally gripping to see them do it.
Television:
Raised By Wolves: Season 2 (Crave) – This is a new series produced by Ridley Scott for HBO Max that I think a lot of people slept on for the first season but they will pay attention now that the second season is making it’s debut. It has massive intrigue surrounding it and I have a Westworld feeling that it may really catch on through word of mouth and, honestly, if you just gave episode one a good go you’d probably be hooked, faithful reader, especially if you’re a deep sci-fi fan. The show stars Vikings’ former leading man Travis Fimmel and takes place on a mysterious plant where androids are tasked with raising human children when they crash land, fleeing the oppressive human race who have reverted back to commanding with the force of religion. There’s a lot to unpack here but it was created by The Red Road’s showrunner Aaron Guzikowski and the ten-episode first season had an incredible imagination and stunning imagery to it and gives a fascinating look into the scope of artificial intelligence against the backdrop of belief and faith. I will warn you that when the violence kicks off it gets decidedly gory but you know me, I loved it.
Dollface: Season 2 (Disney+ and Crave) – Kat Dennings is a forever dreamgirl to me, from the first time I saw her, and I’m married now and she’s engaged to rocker Andrew W.K. but she’s a cutie and my crush still stands. That said, I really disliked her sitcom, 2 Broke Girls, a laugh track driven sitcom that ran for years but the good news is that is over and when she’s not popping up in the MCU on WandaVision she’s doing this comedy series for Hulu and I adore it. She plays a woman that reconnects with her old clic of girlfriends when she is brutally dumped by her long-time boyfriend. Her social awkwardness and naivete about dating, club and etiquette in the single world as well as her trying to relearn what being a close friend is feels adorable and relatable and Dennings nails everything about it to the wall in a fantastic lampooning. The show is a first-time creation from Jordan Weiss and features a really great cast around Kat like former Disney girl Brenda Song and the hysterically Esther Povitsky just to name a few. I hope it gets renewed for a third season, it’s just so damn good.
Disenchantment: Part 4 (Netflix) – Matt Groening’s third original series and his first with Netflix enters into its the fourth piece of its story, following Princess Tiabeanie or ‘Bean’, voiced by Broad City’s Abby Jacobsen, a royal in a world of fantasy that wants desperately to shed the shackles of what a princess is supposed to be, yearning for action and adventure. After meeting Luci, a demon, and Elfo, an elf, she gets more than she wished for in a series that is honestly a bit hard to get into through the first four episodes. Towards the end of the first season the show kind of finds its footing so I really hope that this new season builds on that from the get-go because, honestly, it feels slow and we are talking about an animated series here. That said, the supporting voices of Eric Andre and Matt Berry are what keep me coming back to this one for more.
Inventing Anna (Netflix) – Julia Garner is on a hot streak after becoming a fan favourite character in Ozark and now, as the series brings itself to a close with a two-parter season, she is on the look for a new project and she may have found it in Shondaland. Yes, Garner is the enigmatic focus of this new Shondra Rimes created series that actually is taking a true story and embellishing a bit in her own way. The series focuses on former My Girl and Veep star Anna Chlumsky as a journalist trying to recover from a career blunder who investigates the case of Anna Delvey, the Instagram-legendary German heiress who stole the hearts of New York’s social scene as well as a lot of money and unearned prestige. The show has the gloss of a Grey’s Anatomy or Scandal-like primetime show but it’s the supporting cast in Chlumsky’s journalist clic that gets me with Oz’s Terry Kinney, veteran character actors Jeff Perry and Anna Devere Smith and even Workaholics’ Anders Holm that keeps me engaged. The mystery is there too but I feel like the guts of it are more than a few episodes in. Hopefully, she knows how to end it eventually because isn’t Grey’s on like season fifteen or something?
Rick And Morty: Season 5 (Adult Swim) – It’s been a crash course in a cartoon that I was way late to the game for but I will say that I was onboard so quickly because the writing is so good I get euphoric with its brilliant complexities. So, in that spirit, let’s renew a celebration of Rick And Morty Day, an acknowledgement of one of the more fucked up paternal relationships that probably changed young Morty for the worse and possibly made him a monster. Wait, is this the sentiment I’m going for? The show, now available in a season one to four box set as well as individually, is set to debut its fifth season tonight on Adult Swim and fans are drooling for it with creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon wringing their hands in excitement. The best news is that there are another fifty episodes commissioned beyond this and the show seems like it will continue indefinitely. Even better news, and don’t hate me for this, but I’m kind of new to the show and am still in season one so I am discovering all the “schwifty”, Szechuan sauce and Pickle Rick references beyond the times that they’ve become viral memes across the internet. Soon, I will be caught up and still kind of behind all the references. The point is, I’m receiving the Adult Swim education and goddamn is Chris Parnell great, right?
Jackass Forever – I’m going to get the ball rolling here and call this one a must anticipated sequel which may sound weird coming from a forty-year-old dude like me but, to be honest, I grew up into my adulthood with Jackass the series, the movies and the CKY or Camp Kill Yourself videos that came before it. I am a longtime fan that even wore a wristband from the second film until it all but deteriorated off my body. Now having proven my fandom, we welcome this new and final film that brings back all but Ryan Dunn, who sadly passed away and Bam Margera who has been going through some notable drug and alcohol issues as well as severe mental health ones. What to expect from this one? Well, what do you usually go into these gross-out and low-bar series of stunts and practical jokes? Just go in with the brainpan closed off to any smarts and laugh your jackass off. That’s what I’m doing!
Book Of Love – Sam Claflin is becoming the low-key dependable leading man for romantic comedies and dramas and Amazon Prime is getting in on that action first hand with this new Mexico set rom-com. The film is the next English language film from writer and director Analeine Cal y Mayor whose last widely released film was the unfortunately named The Boy Who Smells Like Fish but this one has a higher platform and will probably be better received. The film has Claflin as young, uptight and unsuccessful English writer Henry whose flop of a novel becomes a big hit in Mexico. His publicist insists he travel there on a promotional tour and when he arrives he finds out the reason it was so popular as Mexican translator Maria has rewritten his dull book as a steamy erotic novel. With Henry furious and Maria reluctant, they must now travel together on a book tour across Mexico and as tempers flare and sparks begin to fly, the two begin to find love and lust despite themselves. Pretty standard rom-com stuff and Claflin has the comedic chops to keep it afloat. I am new to leading actress Verónica Echegui so hopefully, they have some onscreen chemistry together.
The Long Night – Some occult horror hits the screens this week with the scream queen of Scout Taylor Compton, an actress that was given her start with Rob Zombie in his remake of Halloween. Beautifully shot and with some insanely insidious imagery, the film would be a perfect fit for a company like SpectreVision, nestled against other movies like Mandy and Color Out Of Space. The story follows Compton as New York transplant Grace who returns to her childhood southern stomping grounds with her boyfriend, searching for the parents she’s never known and following a promising lead on her family’s whereabouts. Upon arrival, the couple’s weekend takes a bizarre, terrifying turn as a nightmarish cult and their maniacal leader terrorize the pair en route to fulfilling a twisted ancient apocalyptic prophecy. So many creepy animal skull masks but surprisingly low on the gore angle. It still does have its fair share of blood but the scares come from the atmosphere of it all and the creepy drone to the musical score. I also have to hand it to the director by doing a full-on intro that mirrors the opening of Kubrick’s The Shining and I think it even uses the same music which is probably public domain now.
Clerk. – I am a Kevin Smith guy, through and through. I have loved everything from the man, seen him live multiple times and wouldn’t be a podcaster if it weren’t for the effect that he had on my life. One of my most anticipated upcoming films is his follow up to Clerks II more than fifteen years afterwards and while we’ll be waiting a little bit longer for that to hit theatres, his friend, director of Drawing Flies and Small Town Gay Bar and Canadian Malcolm Ingram, has something to tide us fans over. Simply put, this is a retrospective documentary that outlines the life and career of the indie filmmaking icon like only a close friend could and features interviews with friends, family, filmmaking peers, and fellow icons of the film, comedy and comic worlds while teasing the forthcoming movie. Kev screened this in Vancouver at the Rio, following it with a Q & A that I sadly missed but this is the next best thing and thanks to my pal Mark, I got it!
Gamestop: Rise of the Players – With all the murder stories or even cautionary tales of being screwed over for money, which even appears on this list further down, it’s neat to see a documentary where the everyman gets a little bit of a windfall. That is kind of what this new film is about, examining. a crazy phenomenon that kind of took the internet by storm for a bit. From the makers of the must-see film Console Wars, this is the origin story of the Gamestop stock market happening, featuring exclusive access to the original players who lit the fuse on a historic amateur investor uprising. Spotlighting the human side of a sensational business drama, Gamestop: Rise of the Players is a David vs Goliath tale about ordinary people waking up to the power they have in numbers. When this was transpiring I remember thinking that I’d love to see it broken down into a layman’s terms from the beginning, to see what can be learned from it and how an ordinary person could try and manipulate stocks for his or her own gain. It is definitely way too intriguing of thought for me not to be evil with.
Who We Are: A Chronicle Of Racism In America – With the daily events of the world, it is clear that we all still need a deep education into the understanding of race relations, the inequality and prejudices but the history of how we got there as well. In Canada, the indigenous plight and the atrocities that the white man has put them through must be shown in the spotlight to reveal everything but that is a conversation for another movie as this one focuses on the black experience in America, as told by civil rights lawyer Jeffrey Robinson. Through interweaving his lecture in front of an audience, personal anecdotes, interviews, and shocking revelations, he is able to draw a stark timeline of anti-Black racism in the United States, from slavery to the modern myth of a post-racial America. The film presents the facts with Robinson trying to steer away from personal commentary as much as he can unless it’s pertinent. I was fascinated by the things I didn’t know, the things that aren’t taught in school and the genocides buried from the American eye like the Tulsa Massacre in the 1920s. I felt like this movie was required watching the deeper I got into it and at the end, I feel like people must watch it to be fully educated on what’s important.
Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliche – As a huge fan of music documentaries, I get really excited every time one comes up on the schedule and when I haven’t heard of the artist involved I get even more curious because it could be more new music in my library to discover as I did with Sparks last summer. This one also happened to be a bit tied into the White Riot documentary I saw last year which followed the Rock Against Racism movement that was created in 1976 in the United Kingdom and Poly Styrene was a part of that. This film is a biopic on her, from the point of view of the daughter of punk icon and X-Ray Spex frontwoman Poly Styrene who put herself on a journey through her mother’s archives after the outspoken icon’s death in this very intimate documentary. Reconciling Both the cultural resonance, the music, the writing and her mental illness, of it collided with her feelings about her mother as a parent and when she took away from the experience, good and bad. As a music documentary, this is fascinating but as a human character study, it is absolutely engrossing.
The Other Me – This is a weird one as it takes an all-time favourite of mine, the brilliant and totally eclectic David Lynch, and pairs him with the leading star of Across The Universe’s Jim Sturgess for a new mystery feature film. Granted, Lynch is only serving as an executive producer but anything he puts his name on has to have a distinctive mark, which sort of earns the project its trust for me. The story follows an architect who is diagnosed with a rare eye disease, entering him into a surreal reality in which he sees people’s true motives. As the visions become intolerable, he falls for a mysterious woman and confronts the truth about his own identity in a film that is a pretty well-constructed brain twister shepherded to the screen a documentary short film director Giga Agladze in his feature debut. This is definitely a film off the beaten path that won’t get a lot of recognition as it doesn’t even appear on Rotten Tomatoes at all but I think it deserves some clout I think.
The Tinder Swindler – As I understand it, dating in itself is a field of soul-crushing landmines that can set you back emotionally for years. This was definitely my experience before I met my wife and I was dealing with the archaic nature of Plenty Of Fish at the time but just imagine not only getting a bad date experience but also getting bilked out of your cash as well. That’s the focus of this new documentary which tells the sordid tale of a con man who attracts women using the popular dating app Tinder and tricked them out of millions of dollars. The cool thing this that this isn’t just the story of many victims but also the closure of being a revenge tale in the final act which careens it off that sob-ridden road of being cautionary. Obviously, things here and there will be exaggerated and embellished but the bones and structure are all there, just portrayed through a Netflix filter.
Torn – The National Geographic side of the Disney+ streaming service was already full of some of the most compelling documentaries and it has just grown in the two years it has been around for. The film The Rescue recently has been picking up a lot of notice and bringing subscription numbers up, as has the harrowing film Free Solo which gave me some serious anxiety and this week they roll out this new one. We head back into the perilous mountains for this new documentary that follows the tragedy of climber Alex Lowe’s ill-fated final climb but then it continues into his son’s arduous journey to return to the spot where his father perished. This looks to be a fascinating film about the child of a huge legacy and him coming to terms with a man that he lost before he even became a teenager. There’s a lot to unpack here and reconcile and Max Lowe takes the entire production load on his shoulders for his debut feature film and one that the viewers will resonate with afterwards.
Blu-Ray:
Ghostbusters: Afterlife – The Ghostbusters have had a dicey ride through the reboot or continuation prism as the film from 2016 wasn’t well-received at all, with many fans deriding it as destroying their childhoods and other such lame opinions. Now, the son of original director Ivan Reitman, Jason Reitman has continued the family legacy by making a film that looks like it continues and celebrates the franchise in all the best ways. This film follows a single mom and her two kids who arrive in a small town and begin to discover their connection to the original Ghostbusters and the secret legacy their grandfather left behind as a Doomsday level paranormal event starts to form under their feet. The film has an interesting cast to it that features the ever loveable and Sexiest Man Alive, Paul Rudd, The Nest’s phenomenal lead Carrie Coon and Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard and I felt the love and adoration for the foundation in which these beloved movies came from. The audience seems a little divided on this but I really had a lot of fun with it, Mckenna Grace damn near steals the whole film and there’s a scene at the climax of the film that had me in total fanboy tears. Yes, I’m a big fan of this one.
Clifford The Big Red Dog – A film that has been, to be totally pun-filled, dogged by the pandemic, this adaptation of a beloved kid’s book has been constantly rescheduled, shelved and moved into what the studio thought would be a more profitable position. The fact that Paramount Pictures thought that this was going to be a runaway hit is a little telling in the smarts department because I didn’t think it would be and it wasn’t but they protected themselves a bit by debuting it on Paramount+ as well. The film is exactly as you know it if you got to read these books in school, following a girl and her family that adopt a little red dog who doesn’t stay little for long and grows to an enormous size and hijinx definitely ensue. The expectations are that the kids will love it and the parents will have a break for an hour and a half. I do like that British comedian Jack Whitehall is getting more work after Jungle Cruise, play the dad here, but director Walt Becker has made nothing but crap since his debut with Van Wilder.
Zeros And Ones – Auteur visionary storyteller Abel Ferrara isn’t a man that lets anything slow him down. This is a guy who did Bad Lieutenant, Ms. 45 and Driller Killer in the rise of making his name and has made many films that cusp on biographical with Willem Dafoe in the most recent of his catalogue. At over seventy years old, he’s not going to let a pandemic slow him down either as he did this new terrorist thriller with Ethan Hawke that was created within the whole ongoing COVID disaster. The film has Hawke in dual roles, first off as an American soldier stationed in Rome who embarks on a hero’s journey to uncover and defend against an unknown enemy threatening the entire world when the Vatican is blown up, spurred on by ideals from his revolutionary brother. Ferrara’s style of lingering on almost still moments is definitely at play here but what is more fascinating is his use of the empty streets of Italy to illustrate the times and his leaning into using drone technology to get some gorgeous cinematography in from Good Time shooter Sean Price Williams. This is an odd one because I’ve never seen a film bookended by the real actor explaining the process and, in the end, almost evaluating it but Abel has done it and I thought it worked.
The Spine Of Night – It’s clear that the brilliant works of animator Ralph Bakshi and the expanded world of creator Frank Frazetta still make impressions on filmmakers and storytellers today as this new animated feature is an absolute indicator of that. Done in a classic rotoscope animation style that brings back the feelings of game-changers like Wizards, Heavy Metal or the original adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings, filmmakers Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King have collaborated to make something both fantastical and not for the weak of heart. An ultra-violent and epic fantasy set in a land of magic, it follows heroes from different eras and cultures battling against a malevolent force when ancient, dark magic falls into sinister hands. The film is a bit splintered in its plotting which may throw the casual viewer off, I thought the film was a crazily gory thrill ride that does leaps and bounds to make itself a standout original in the animation field while being something that the foundations of the art form would be proud of. I must stress how much this movie is not for everyone and is a little hard to even recommend.
Deadlock – Bruce Willis is at it again in yet another direct to blu-ray action thriller release where he puts half the effort in for a full paycheck and it’s super frustrating. This time he co-leads with former soap actor star Patrick Muldoon who, for me, is most memorable for being in Starship Troopers and having his brain sucked out by a giant worm but I digress. This film has Willis changing it up for the villain role as Muldoon plays Mack, an ex-military man working at a Georgia power plant who has to rely on his old training to prevent disaster when a group of rogue soldiers gain control of the plant and take the employees hostage. This movie is really frustratingly constructed with a terrible script full of nonsensical motivations, lazy cinematography and fight choreography and a score that feels like it was lifted from another better film that is still terrible in calibre. This just seems like another notch of work for the former John McLane who seems to be pumping these out like crazy but as the guy who has to take them all in, I’m exhausted.
Superhost – If you are a horror fan and have not yet gotten yourself a Shudder subscription then you are seriously missing out on some of the best that the genre has to offer and beyond all that the streaming services has acquired, the documentaries and shows as well, are the films that they have helped produce themselves. So many are little goldmines and this one is another to add to the list and I have to give it to actress Gracie Gillam for making it such a must-see. The film’s plotting has a foundation of the extreme reality of YouTube influencers as the story follows travel vloggers Teddy and Claire who try to combat a dwindling follower count by pivoting to creating viral content around their most recent AirBnB owner or “superhost,” Rebecca, who wants more from the duo than a great review and set them up for a weekend of survival against a person that is bloodthirsty and unhinged. Writer and director Brandon Christensen sets you up with a character expose of these two characters first before their host is introduced and lets it marinate a bit before throwing them in the deep end. The film also features horror icon Barbara Crampton who is always an incredible joy to see onscreen even if she is eventually covered in blood.
Wayne’s World: 30th Anniversary Edition – One of the greatest comedies of all time is hitting the three-decade mark in February so Paramount has hooked the fans up with a beautiful new steelbook edition to fawn over and it is really worth that reaction, friends. This is a movie that has been quotable since its release and I think it is the most successful film ever made that was based on a Saturday Night Live sketch. For those who have bafflingly never heard of this movie, it follows two friends, Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar, who think they’ve hit the big time when their cable access show is picked up by a major network by a sleazy producer. This is a movie I have seen countless times and will always stop and watch if I pass it on television. To get the upgrade to Blu-ray is an absolute treat and one I will treasure in my collection. I have a feeling that this will be a solid seller for Paramount all over again but, please, we really don’t need any more sequels or a reboot.
Steve’s Blu-Ray Geekouts:
Red Angel – I’m bringing a double shot of late arrival Arrow Video releases this week and I’m kicking it all off with some classic Japanese cinema from the mid-sixties that haven’t ever made their way to a mainstream North American audience. This one is based on a famous novel from author Yoriyoshi Arima and contains some gruesome sequences of surgery without anesthetic and the removal of limbs with saws, which made it extremely controversial at its time and still a bit today. The film is set during the Sino-Japanese War and follows a young army nurse who gives selfless sympathy to all her patients and finds herself falling in love with an impotent doctor who’s addicted to morphine. It was brought to the big screen by director Yasuzô Masumura who isn’t a stranger on my blog at all as I covered a box set that Arrow Video released of his last year. He was a very progressive creator and storyteller that pushed boundaries and more often than not, found himself at odds with producers and executives in Japan. It’s sad that decades after his death he is now celebrated because he really wasn’t when he was around to appreciate it.
Shock – In addition to some absolutely niche Japanese cinema, Arrow Video is coming through with some classic Italian horror from a couple of the masters, Mario and Lamberto Bava, and one that would sadly be his final feature film as he passed away three years after it’s release in 1977. That aside, this one has even more cool Italian horror credibility to it as well with Daria Nicolodi starring in the lead role. She plays Dora Baldini, a woman who, after a stay in a psychiatric institution, moves back to her old memory-ridden house with her young son Marco and her new husband Bruno. It’s been seven years already since her first husband’s gruesome death, and now an eerie supernatural presence emerges which starts affecting innocent Marco as well as sending violently-vivid hallucinations to torment Dora, sending her to the brink of insanity. Americans got the raw deal of this film being released as Beyond The Door II with zero connection to the original film but now we get it all restored to the originally intended version from 1977. Honestly, the U.S. distributors had no idea what to do with some of these great Italian chillers.
Television:
Raising Dion: Season 2 (Netflix) – This is a show that I really only found out about the week of its first season but it turned out to be pretty interesting and something that is just PG and watchable with the whole family. The show is about a widowed young mother whose life is thrown into disarray when she discovers that her son has superpowers and tries to figure out how to raise him safely and responsibly. The special effects are a little noticeable on a high def television and the score gets really cheesy at times, as does the acting, but it is cool to see Dion discover and evolve his powers in an origin style story that definitely has a hell of a lot of nods to comic stories. There is one recognizable star in a very supporting role as Michael B. Jordan plays Dion’s dad who mostly appears in flashbacks but also serves as the show’s executive producer. Now that Lost In Space has finished its run and people are looking for some family-friendly sci-fi to watch, I think this one may pick up some attention.
Pam & Tommy (Disney+) – I feel like this new limited series will speak two a few specific generations but I know where I reside in that microcosm, the burgeoning teenager that was coming to age as the lovely Ladysmith born Pamela Anderson was in her “it girl” prominence. Even more focused, it was also the time of her and at the time husband Tommy Lee had their private sex tape stolen, released by a porn company and paraded in front of the whole world. Co-starring Seth Rogen and produced by his Point Grey film company, this series has Sebastian Stan and Lily James impeccably playing the title roles of Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson in two performances that will need to be brought up during the next television awards season. The series is a brash and unflinching telling of their notorious relationship, going back to the whirlwind romance that started with them marrying after only knowing each other for 96 hours in 1995. The series has rock star antics, seedy and nefarious deals both brokered and broken, gratuitous nudity and even a full-on talking penis. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I started it but I really was unaware that I could be watching the best new show of the year.
Murderville (Netflix) – At this point, Will Arnett has to be regarded as the king of Netflix. He had Bojack Horseman, Flaked and Arrested Development, the series that a lot of us were introduced to his brilliance, got its revival on the streaming service as well. Now he has a brand new series that has a really great twist to it as he plays a bumbling homicide detective who has a hard time keeping partners so he enlists a new celebrity every week to tag along but they have no script, have to improve everything along the way then implicate the killer each episode. It is hilariously well done and features Ken Jeong, Kumail Nanjiani, Marshawn Lynch and more and kicks off with a hilarious episode with Conan O’Brien. I can not undersell how great this show is and I will say that six episodes is really nowhere close to enough. I require more, immediately.
We Need To Talk About Cosby (Crave) – Comedian W. Kamau Bell is tackling the heart of an issue that I think we’ve all been skirting and just making jokes about, the change from beloved father of America to rapist monster that Bill Cosby went through when the spotlight was placed on the evil that he has perpetuated for decades. At first, the documentary was a straightforward one that Bell assembled many interviews for with friends and colleagues coming to terms with the monster that one of their inspirations was revealed to be. Then, after all the interviews were completed, the game was changed when Cosby was released from prison back into society with no change to his demeanour. I think this caused the documentary movie to be splintered into a docu-series with a wider scope to it and, after episode one, I have to say it is a fascinating watch. To see all the warning signs in the disgraced comedian’s history examined as well as the way the rest of pop culture seemed to brush it off, I really can’t wait for the rest of the series to get released. Engrossing stuff and it will make you feel all kinds of ick at the same time.
Reacher: Season 1 (Amazon Prime) – Tom Crusie was way too short to play Jack Reacher. We knew this but we accepted it because, let’s face it, the first movie really rocks. The second film, on the other hand, was a formulaic bore-fest that was predictable and wasted the star’s talent but it paved the way for this Lee Child adaptation to get a new life as an Amazon series. Former Ninja Turtle Alan Ritchson gets a crack at the character, a dude very formidable in stature, following the character as he battles for his life to remain outside of a military prison after being accused of murder. The show was made by some new show writers and execs but it looks to have some promise to it and at least will have all the bone-crunching action sequences that Christopher McQuarrie and Cruise champion through both of their big-screen versions. I didn’t realize how popular this book series was until all the attention this show got online. I know my father-in-law loves the books.
The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild – Of any of the characters from the Ice Age films, I never would have thought Buck Wild would get his own spin-off series for Disney+ but given that he was voiced by Simon Pegg in the movies it warms my heart to get a show of his own. The good news is that Pegg returned to reprise his role as the scruffy eyepatched adventurer but sadly we don’t get Seann William Scott and Josh Peck as Crash and Eddie which is such a bummer as Peck was in the recently cancelled Turner And Hooch remake. This series serves to continue the escapades of those possum brothers as they set out to find a place of their own after the events of Collision Course, the last movie. Together with the one-eyed weasel, Buck Wild, they face the dinosaurs who inhabit the Lost World with Wild serving as a sort of bodyguard. Pegg is always entertaining as a voice and serves to keep the adult’s interest because the kids will already be feverishly in tune with all the animated mayhem on screen. I enjoyed all the movies to a certain extent and the series plays with that same spirit in tow.
Home Team – Seeing Kevin James topline a film based on a true story produced by Adam Sandler does not fill me with a large amount of confidence but I’m a little compelled by what story they’re trying to tell so I’m partially on board due to that. I”m not an NFL guy by any stretch of the imagination but I do know notable players as well as the coaches and that’s where this fits in. The film tells the story of New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton and him deciding to coach his son’s sixth-grade football team when he was famously suspended for the entire 2012 season as a result of his role in the Saints’ Bountygate scandal. I really hope the film doesn’t play into any sort of unearned redemption story as the real Payton hasn’t done much for the world to give him one. This is such an odd turn for Sandler and his production company to produce through Netflix that I’m finding it difficult to comprehend why they would take a real story like this and aim for low sports comedies. I have a feeling, even though I think it could be terrible, this will land as a top streamer for Netflix no matter what the reviews are.
The Fallout – HBO Max has a bunch of smaller little films in the tank for this year and this is one of the first out of the gate and the advance word is very good. With really high marks on Meta score, I’m mostly happy with the lead star Maddie Ziegler getting the stink of Sia’s Music off her resume with a solid performance that is getting lauded by critics. The film follows Jenny Ortega as high schooler Vada who is trying to navigate the emotional fallout she experiences in the wake of a school tragedy with the relationships with her family, friends and view of the world being forever altered. Violence in American schools is rampant at an all-time high and the media and creators seem to largely cast an ambivalent eye on it so it’s really great to see that writer and director Megan Park isn’t muting her voice at all on the subject. A Canadian actress largely known for the ABC Family television series The Secret Life of the American Teenager, Park constructed a well scripted and empathically acted film that aims for the heart of trauma through a focus on three teens that resonates long after the credits have rolled. I also think that Ortega may have turned the corner from a child actress to a commanding adult lead within this film.
Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Only Read My Mind – I love a good music documentary and this week we get the renewed exposure of one that did have a tiny release during the pandemic and now gets a bigger platform to shine on. This one focuses on the legendary Gordon Lightfoot, an artist said to be Canada’s greatest songwriter and I really have no argument against it. His songs are iconic and if you think you’ve never heard one I assure you that you are wrong. This film portrait shows the man for better or worse and with all his scars on display and the truth of this movie is something I absolutely loved about it. This is a special film and one important to all Canadiana plus there is a great story about the meeting of two legends, Lightfoot and the great Anne Murray, which went horribly due to Gordon’s studio drive and focus when making a record. Still made for a hilarious anecdote that would be a great Canadian Heritage Moment.
Two Deaths Of Henry Baker – Dusty southern small-town gothic noir is a tight little niche within itself and when it’s executed right it is very engaging and gives a lot of actors some time to shine and scenery to chew on. That is exactly what this film is going for which is interesting to be a middle southern American tale because it is a US production with a largely Canadian cast and crew. The film surrounds the release of famous outlaw Henry Baker after twenty-five years and the old friends and enemies waiting for him on the outside like the son he left behind, entrusted to watch over his ill-gotten riches, a bearded vagrant with a pistol and a decades-old bullet scar in his stomach, an alcohol-soaked deputy with half an ear on one side and a burned-out street hustler with a sick mother and a festering vendetta. They trail Henry to a dilapidated hotel where he plans to reunite with his son and the secret bag of gold he left behind until all hell breaks loose at once. This movie really engaged me in a tragedy drama sort of way and while none of the characters will really grow on you, seeing them decent into their volatile nature is very compelling.
One Shot – Scott Adkins is always going to be that underrated action hero that people will only remember for the small roles in things like The Expendables 2, Doctor Strange and Zero Dark Thirty but the guy has some range and should be utilized on a grander scale. This is definitely not one of the movies to showcase his acting chops as the action thrills are the draw as well as supporting performances from Ryan Phillippe and Ashley Greene. Adkins plays the leader of an elite squad of Navy SEALs who are sent on a covert mission to transport a prisoner off of a CIA black site island prison but are quickly and efficiently trapped when insurgents attack while trying to rescue the same prisoner. The action is fast and furious with all of the Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six-style tactical scenes you could want but be warned that the film is incredibly bleak and all bets are off for who survives at the end. To be honest, everyone felt like fodder around Adkins who commands the screen like a good action hero does. To think that this dude was almost Batman at one point is pretty cool.
Blu-Ray:
Moffie – This movie out of South Africa got a huge amount of buzz from both the festival circuit as well as the LGBTQ+ community and, I will warn you now, it’s not for the faint of heart and hits levels of real brutality that I wasn’t ready for. The film follows the story of Nicholas van der Swart who, from a very young age, realized he is different but, try as he may, he cannot live up to the macho image expected of him by his family, by his heritage. So, at the age of 19, he is conscripted into the South African army and finds his every sensibility offended by a system close to its demise, and yet still in full force. Set during the South African border war against communism, this is a harsh tale about the emotional and physical suffering endured by countless young men, brilliantly put together by writer and director Oliver Hermanus who adapted this from André Carl van der Merwe’s book of the same name which actually is a derogatory Afrikaans term for a gay man. This movie is like a cold slap to the face and never relents until the credits hit.
Birds Like Us – Animated films that we have never heard of will be bled off here and there due to the duration of the pandemic and this one is no different as I have honestly never heard of it nor can I get any PR company to send me any information let alone a screener for it. The weirdest thing is the film features the voices of three Academy Award winners in Alicia Vikander, Jeremy Irons and Jim Broadbent but is made by a couple inexperienced filmmakers and doesn’t have much to it aside from the star power. The movie seems to be a pretty deep world set within a bird-composed society in which the citizens of Birdabad accept the egg-eating tyranny of Kondor and his carrion crew as the price of safety in a world tormented by something called the Horror. With some of the deeper themes found in its synopsis, I wonder who the film was made for as it doesn’t look like a cheery thing you could throw on for the kids after they’ve exhausted watching Encanto over and over again. The situations are dire, the consequences are dark and even the way in which the characters are compelled on their journey seems a bit child traumatizing. I guess we’ll have to play. wait and see until we know what the effect of this film is but my guess is that no one will see it.
Tom & Jerry: Cowboy Up – More direct-to-video cartoon features for the kids featuring an intellectual property that probably doesn’t appeal to them anymore. To be honest, I felt like the failure of the rebooting of Tom & Jerry with the live-action film starring Chloe Grace Moretz was enough to indicate that the audience doesn’t care for this schtick anymore but maybe because it was just a bad movie. This one puts them back in animated form and follows them to a ranch in the wild west to help a cowgirl and her brother save their home from a greedy landowner. There probably isn’t anything too deep to be said about this movie but the really young kids will probably still feel the draw to these characters as it really is the same old same old cat and mouse antics that we’ve known about for decades.
Stage Fright – I love when I get all of these Warner Archive films landing on my doorstep and this one is very special because it is a rare Alfred Hitchcock film and all cinephiles should have at least one of his films in their collection. This film is a pivotal one in the Master of Suspense’s career too as it was the final British production he did for over two decades aside from completing the final scene of The Man Who Knew Too Much in London in 1956. This one is an early slasher origin story and follows a struggling actress who tries to help a friend prove his innocence after he’s accused of murdering the husband of a high society entertainer. The film features Marlene Dietrich in the lead role, who actually had a huge amount of creative control on it, something rare for any Hitchcock production. She knew what lights worked best for her, the camera angles and filters, heck, this was probably why Hitch wanted to work with her so often. All that in mind, this movie is a total classic that should be in the Hitchcock best of conversation more.
Sleep – Arrow Video came through with a late arrival this week that almost didn’t make it to the write-up but here it is under the wire. It really felt like something was missing so far this week and until this one slide in I didn’t realize it was devoid of horror. Well, fret no more because this German thriller looks to chill audiences to the bone with a story that follows Marlene, a woman plagued by horrific dreams, who suffers a breakdown in a remote village. As her daughter Mona follows, she comes upon a well-kept family secret and an old curse that ultimately threatens her life, a never-ending nightmare threatening to destroy her reality. My immediate draw to the film is actress Sandra Hüller who starred in the comedy-drama Toni Erdmann, one of my favourite films of all time, and the recent arrivals of Munich: The Edge Of War and I’m Your Man. The film feels like a blend of some of my favourite thriller elements coupled with some absolute mind-melting twists and turns in an almost Lovecraftian fight against the pit of despair. Really cool stuff that people wouldn’t get a chance to have access to if it weren’t for Arrow Video.
Steve’s Blu-Ray Geekouts:
Disciples Of Shaolin – This week’s focus is deviating from the anniversary releases I have been posting and instead I’m heading down a path of classic martial arts flicks, all starting with this special edition. The main connection here between the two entries is that they are both celebrations of the Shaw Brothers productions, films that have a lasting effect today. This film follows an impetuous young martial arts master named Kuan who takes a job at a textile factory where another disciple of the revered Shaolin discipline warns him about the rival Manchu clan, who runs another nearby mill. This is that classic sort of small setup to big fights that the genre was forged from and grew to be one of the favourite genres in the world. This was one of the hundred films that writer and director Cheh Chang made over his long and storied career that would influence filmmakers like John Woo who would change the industry again with his work. This is definitely a special film.
Shawscope: Volume One – Now for the box set portion of the martial arts love fest this week with a collection of films that revolutionized martial arts movies, brought them to the general public in a huge way and made the Shaw Brothers a household name for action fans. This set features twelve films, all action packed and definitely a favorite of Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright, John Woo or other filmmakers currently making the best films in Hollywood. Just to point out a few, King Boxer follows two martial arts schools as they prepare for an important tournament, The Mighty Peking Man is essentially a King Kong story that goes to India for a bit of Chop Socky and The Five Venoms is about the final student of a dying martial arts master that is instructed to locate the previous five students and defeat any evil ones among them. This set is just brimming with classic entertainment and would be a great binge watch for any action flick fan and I’m sure the homages just bleed through in them.
Mystery Team – Before Childish Gambino or even Troy and Abed In The Morning on Community, Donald Glover was known for being one of the members of the Upright Citizen’s Brigade and the founder of the YouTube channel Derrick Comedy. Along with Dominic Dierks and D.C Pierson, they created hilarious and irreverent sketches together which culminated in this feature film. In the goofiest of comedies, they play three clueless high school nerds, best friends for years, who call themselves the “Mystery Team” and solve neighbourhood crimes, such as who poked a finger in a pie cooling on a window ledge. It’s all cute at seven but foolish at eighteen but, one morning, a young girl pays them a dime to find out who murdered her parents the night before and took her grandmother’s ring and things get adult fast. Using inept methods, the team lucks onto the trail of the bad guys they might bumble their way to success and a renewed reputation but they’ll get a crash course in coming of age along the way. This movie makes me laugh until my sides hurt and it’s all within the chemistry and scripting these guys can create between them. It was also a very early role for Aubrey Plaza who has become a favourite of mine after Parks And Recreation.
Song Of The Thin Man – I think I must have all of these Thin Man films by this point, a serious indicator of what was popular in the era of the 1940s because it can pretty much be considered the franchise of the time. Starring the beloved couple of Myrna Loy and William Powell, the question on everyone’s minds when these films got released was “when is the next one?” so I feel like we’ve always been primed for sequel fever long before we were born. Song proved to be the finale of six movies and followed the heroes of Nick and Nora Charles onto a gambling boat when, of course, someone is murdered. The two main suspects are at large and come to Nick for help and he turns them in to the police but then sets out to figure out the mystery behind the crime. Unhappy with the final result, the ending of the franchise left a bad taste in Loy’s mouth who even stated in her autobiography that the lacklustre finish was one of the biggest regrets in her career and it tainted the fourteen films that she made with Powell. This is classic Hollywood stuff right here and a pretty cool indicator of what the landscape of film would be in the decades after.
Television:
The Woman In The House Across The Street From The Girl In The Window (Netflix) – Kristen Bell seems to be everywhere these days, mostly in a comedic format, but this one is. bit different and pulls on the strings of mystery which she isn’t a stranger to with the success of Veronica Mars. Yes, the name is ridiculously long and will get paraphrased by everyone who utters it but I find it fascinating that the show is created by a trio mostly known for Robot Chicken and Mike Tyson Mysteries episodes which bring an interesting flavour to this little thriller. Bell stars as Anna, a heartbroken woman dealing with the loss of her family by drowning her sorrows in a glass of wine every day until a new neighbour moves in across the street and gives her a light at the end of the tunnel. This all takes a dangerous swerve when she witnesses a brutal murder that may or may not be a figment of her imagination. I enjoy the ethereal quality of the storytelling in this series that leads me to believe that Anna’s existence may be in her own mind and that her inclusiveness has irreparably damaged her psyche. It may all turn to garbage episodes but so far this half-hour episode mystery has me compelled to continue the journey.
The Gilded Age (Crave) – There has definitely been a void existing in the last few years that Downton Abbey has been off the air for and the movie, although very welcome and successful, really wasn’t enough to satisfy those fan appetites. Creator Julian Fellowes felt that collective pain it seems and has teamed with the powerhouse of HBO to give a new story set in the late 1800s but this time it is across the pond in the supposed “Land of Opportunity”. This new series follows the wide-eyed young niece of a conservative family who embarks on a mission to prove the doubts about her enterprising abilities and infiltrate the wealthy neighbouring clan dominated by ruthless railroad tycoon George Russell, his rakish son, Larry, and his ambitious wife, Bertha. The cast is fantastic, featuring veterans like Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski, young talents like Tassia Farmiga and one of my favourite character actresses today, Carrie Coon. After inhaling the first episode, I was so impressed about the layered setup to each character and the establishment of hierarchies and how they can crumble over the course of the series. The only hope now is that it has the longevity of Downton and the power of Gosford Park.
In From The Cold (Netflix) – If you’ve been waiting for a new spy series since the finale of the absolutely thrilling FX show The Americans then Netflix might be coming through with a suitable genre binge but I am very aware of the bar set by that Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys piece of television brilliance. What draws me into this show is lead actress Margarita Levieva who has always gotten the great supporting roles, like in the HBO shows The Deuce and How To Make It In America as well as the Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart comedy Adventureland but now she gets to shine in the lead role. The plot has her as an American single mom who is exposed as a Russian spy and now must juggle family life and unique shape-shifting skills in a battle against an enemy from her past looking to destroy her and everything she cares about. The show is the debut of writer Adam Glass as showrunner but he cut his teeth in television on Supernatural, so I have some hope that it will all pan out as I think it could progress beyond just one season.
The After Party (AppleTV+) – Christopher Miller and Phil Lord being attached to anything, whether directing, writing or producing, should be an indicator of quality especially when it comes to comedy. This is why my anticipation was high when I saw that they were doing a new mystery-comedy for AppleTV+ with an insanely killer CST including Sam Richardson, Ben Schwartz, Ike Barinholtz, Tiffany Haddish, Dave Franco and so many more. The series picks up after the high school reunion’s afterparty ends in death and everyone at the party is a suspect. A detective grills the former classmates one by one, uncovering potential motives as each tells their version of the story which culminates in the shocking truth and hilarious circumstances. I love this show already for telling each person’s account of the evening in a different genre or style. No chance for a second season as this is just a limited one-off series but I really feel like it could be a huge draw for this streaming service that is basically skating by on just Ted Lasso to a large audience.
Steve Stebbing 