BQB here with a review of one of the best raunchy comedies I’ve seen in a long time.
If video killed the radio star, then streaming definitely put a bunch of nails in the coffin of the R rated comedy. The last nail hasn’t been hammered yet, and flicks like this one might stave that off for now. At any rate, movie theater released movies tend to be made with young audiences in mind, as the kids tend to go to the movies while adults stay in and stream.
This movie reminded me of the good old naughty comedies of years gone by like The Hangover, American Pie, Something About Mary and so on. Mind you, this movie comes nowhere close to those greats, but its main goal is to produce an honest effort at making you laugh. There are moments that are heartfelt and touching, but there’s definitely no wokeness crammed down your throat or avoidance of problematic subject matter that seems to be the calling card of so many flicks the streaming services try to pass off as comedy these days.
Jennifer Lawrence, one of the funnier leading ladies in recent years, lets her comedy chops shine as Maddie, a bartender from the seaside vacation town of Montauk. About to lose the house her late mother left her due to high property taxes caused by an influx of rich NYC city folk who only spend their summers there, she answers a rather conveniently timed Craigslist ad placed by helicopter parents Laird and Allison, promising to sign over a used Buick to a woman willing to “date” (in quotation marks) their 19 year old son, Percy. Maddie needs the car so she can drive for Uber and pay off her taxes.
Percy, as his parents explain during a job interview of sorts, is brilliant and talented but very awkward and shy, a gifted musician who refuses to perform live due to his social anxiety. Unpopular and depressed, the lad just stays in his room and Mom and Dad fear the kid will just do the same when he gets to college if um, well, you know the rest.
Fearing she’ll let her late mother down if she allows the family homestead to be repossessed, Maddie takes the job, only to find that Percy is so epically clueless when it comes to women that he’s literally unable to be seduced. Hilarious gags ensue where Maddie’s advances are met with fear, shyness, attempts to call 911 and yes, as seen in the trailer, mace.
Indeed, the movie does adopt many tropes from films/sitcoms where one half of a couple is in it for the money while the other half is unaware, and yet, romance blooms along the way and the fear the other will be crushed when they discover the profit motive was once at play.
And truly, the film illustrates a big time double standard when it comes to men and women. Flip the script and have this movie be about an older man trying to seduce a younger woman and it would be downright creepy as hell. Here, 32 year old J-Law is so remarkably well preserved that she looks, at least to my old eyes, as though she could be one of Percy’s classmates, even though there are jokes about the couple’s age difference throughout the movie. At any rate, do I wish my 19 year old self had befriended a 32 year old JLaw type willing to teach me the ins and outs of love before going out into the real world? Yes. Would I call the police if a 32 year old man tried to do the same to one of my 19 year old female relatives? Also yes.
Long story short, blah blah blah, the relationship becomes less about money and more about companionship as the two enjoy spending time together, learning from one another and helping each other follow their dreams and so on.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Come for the laughs. SPOILER ALERT: Stay for the naked J-Law!
Somewhere beyond the sea, a review is waiting for thee, 3.5 readers.
SPOILER ALERT: This is less of a review and more of a discussion, so if you haven’t seen it yet, go watch then come back and discuss.
It’s an alternate version of the 1960s, one where the technology for people to control robot replicas of themselves with their minds while their real bodies are asleep is possible. Astronauts David and Cliff (Josh Hartnett and Aaron Paul) are on a six year mission aboard a space station, so they use their replicas to carry on their lives back home on earth with their families.
The co-workers couldn’t be any more different. David loves culture and conversation, living in California with his family, he reads heavily, draws, paints, and goes to movies where he holds himself out as a hero to passersby who recognize him from the news.
Cliff is quiet and reserved, prefers the great outdoors, having moved his wife, Lana (Kate Mara) to a remote home in the wilderness. Chopping firewood and physical labor, tending to the property are his pursuits.
From time to time, the duo return to their physical bodies aboard the space station to take care of space business. During one such return, a Manson-like cult lead by Kieran Culkin in a scary bit of acting, breaks into David’s home and murders his family, payback they said for embracing the unnatural, i.e. allowing the robot version of David to be part of their lives.
Aboard the space station, the real life David is horribly broken, mentally and physically, forever psychologically damaged by the crime. He witnessed it through his robot body and even lost it during the murders, so now he is stuck in space, unable to return to earth via robot replica.
Feeling bad for their friend, Cliff and Lana agree to allow David to spend some time on earth using Cliff’s replica. At first, this is a welcome delight for David as he’s happy to just be on solid ground again, to see nature, to talk to people, to do anything outdoors really.
Ah but trouble ensues when David talks Cliff into allowing regular visits to earth via robot Cliff. Dave, while in Cliff’s bot body, starts falling for Lana. Lana is cultured, loves reading and the arts, and David pleads with her, pointing out that they have much more in common than she ever could with Cliff.
For a while, it seems as though David and Lana might fall for each other, and they might very well run off, leaving the real Cliff to suffer alone on the space station. As mentioned often, running the station is a two man job, so anyone left their on their lonesome will perish.
But Lana remains loyal. In fact, she’s outraged that David would abuse the trust they gave him when they allowed him to borrow Cliff’s double. She gives him a piece of her mind, and aboard the station, Cliff gives him another verbal tongue lashing. No more Cliff replica visits to earth for you, David.
SPOILER ALERT
The mission continues in space for awhile, until one day, David manages to swipe Cliff’s double while the real Cliff is busy. He does so briefly, but long enough to murder Lana and the couple’s young son. Real Cliff discovers this when he returns home in his double to find blood soaked walls.
Back aboard the station, David sits at a table, seemingly unremorseful by what he has done. He kicks out a chair, inviting a visibly angry Cliff to sit and talk. The implication is that David got his revenge for being rejected and chewed out, and knows he has Cliff painted into a corner because if Cliff kills David, he essentially kills himself for as we know, running the station is a two man job.
It’s up to us to imagine what happens next. Maybe Cliff is stuck working on the station for four more years with a psycho he despises or maybe he loses control, doesn’t care, avenges his family by killing David.
What lessons do we suss out? A) Sometimes the right thing is the unkind thing. Don’t trust people. Don’t let them into your life. Don’t let them borrow important stuff, especially your robot body. You think you’re being kind but you’re inviting trouble. Feel sad for someone who has been hurt, but save yourself.
B) Tech can put us in unnatural states to be avoided. You can’t be in two places at once and expect to take care of both parts of your life successfully.
C) Appreciate what you have. There are times when it feels like Cliff didn’t quite appreciate what he had with his family but sadly, knew what he lost when he lost it. Cherish your loved ones and go out of your way to protect them.
Other thoughts:
#1 – I thought it was unlikely that David would do what he did, given he went through the horrible murder of his family, felt bad about it so wouldn’t want to bring that pain to someone else. Then again one might say he was so broken that he was driven to do it by insanity. In the end, Black Mirror always brings a scary, horrific ending.
#2 – Aaron Paul does his best acting since Breaking Bad. Cliff seems like his usual moody, sullen guy baseline, but in the moments where he’s David, he captures David’s artsy pretentious mannerisms well.
Get ready to pucker your butts in terror, 3.5 readers.
SPOILER ALERT: This is less of a review and more of a discussion, so if you haven’t seen it yet, go watch it, then come back and discuss, although trigger warning, this is probably the scariest, twisted episodes of the series.
Are some scabs better off left unpicked?
You’d think so. The gavel comes down. The suspect is judged guilty. The high-profile case is over and all the TV cameras leave town. Years later, the horrific crime that rocked a community becomes but an eerie footnote in local history.
But with the rise of streaming media, there’s an overwhelming demand for true crime podcasts and documentaries, especially since everyone is trying to be the next Sarah Koenig, she the mother of all true crime podcasts, Serial. Over the past decade, Netflix has become home to a seemingly endless supply of true crime docs. You could pop them on and never watch them all in your lifetime. Well, maybe you could if you never had to work, drink, eat or poop, but you get the gist.
Enter Davis and Pia. They’re film students from London, he a Scottsman and she an African-American living abroad. (Samuel Blenkin and Myha’la Herrold). They’ve returned to Davis’ hometown of Loch Henry to produce a documentary about an egg collector. Pretty bland stuff but hey, at least they can practice their camera work and score an easy A.
Or so they thought. Whilst visiting Davis’ friend, barkeep Stuart (Daniel Portman in his best role since Game of Thrones’ Podrick), Pia inquires why such a beautiful town, full of picturesque landscapes isn’t rife with tourism.
Much to Davis’ dismay, loudmouth Stuart spills the beans. Once upon a time, the town was indeed a tourist spot, that is until the late 1990s when town scumbag Ian Nadair was discovered to be a maniacal serial killer who kidnapped tourists, then dragged them to a secret lair where he tortured and murdered them.
Davis even has a personal connection to this sad tale. His father, Ken, was shot in the shoulder while attempting to arrest Ian. While Davis is proud his father is a hero who brought a madman to justice, he is sad the wound, while not immediately fatal, led to an infection that killed his old man, leaving him without a dad at a young age. So sad was he that he never told Pia this story.
Pia meets Davis mother, Janet, an old woman who is the epitome of sweetness, going out of her way to welcome the couple with homecooked meals. Though she is overly pleasant, there is a clear pallor of sadness and at times, she laments how the vile madman ruined her life by taking her husband from her, leaving her to raise a young son all on her own and now leaving her alone in old age.
Blah blah blah. Against Davis’ protestations, Pia declares that THIS is the story they should be telling, so screw that egg guy. Advised by a streaming media exec to find new dirt on this story long considered old news, the trio go about town digging (Pia and Davis for their film project and Stuart because the greedy little bastard hopes renewed interest in the town will bring paying drinkers to his long dormant pub.)
And boy howdy, do they ever find new dirt. There are some fake outs, some twists and turns, an occasional insinuation that Stuart’s crusty old father Richard (John Hannah) might have been involved, but one night, while Pia is editing tape (she prefers the grainy look of old video cassettes to digital media), she finds, to her shock and horror, an old camcorder recording of Davis’ parents, Ken and Janet, torturing a young couple that had been reported in the news long ago as missing.
I can tell you, I felt that disgusted feeling as I saw a young Janet dawn a creepy mask and saunter into the room in a skintight outfit, dancing about and wielding a drill, spinning the bit menacingly at the tied up hostages. And I gotta be honest, 1990s rap group’s K7 old party in the club standard, “Come Baby Come” will always freak me the eff out whenever I hear it, because now I associate it with Davis’ parents dancing around to it on grainy home movie footage while they torture people.
I’ll leave the plot there. More horrors ensue. In the end, Davis loses his girlfriend and mother (Pia dies by accident while running away from now elderly Janet, while Janet, fearing discovery, hangs herself, but not before leaving out a stockpile of new evidence for Davis to find.) The poor lad does get an award, but as the show closes, we can’t help but think he would have been so much happier if he’d just made his silly little egg collector movie. He’d still have a mother. He’d still have a girlfriend. He’d still bask in ignorant bliss, believing his father was a hero cop who took down a serial killer (not a scumbag who shot his accomplice to pin it all on him before he could tell on his accomplices) and his mother as the strong old gal who put on a brave face for her son’s sake all these years.
Critics have complained this episode, as well as a few others in season 6 have little to nothing to do ith the horrors of technology, as is the show’s theme. However, I’d argue that streaming media did indeed lead to an increase in public interest in true crime documentaries, and any schmuck who aspires to become a story teller can simply grab a camera and a mic, interview townsfolk who remember a creepy case, pierce it together with old news footage and voila, a documentary is born.
But will these documentarians be repulsed by the new dirt they dig up? Is it better to let sleeping dogs lie?
STATUS: Shelf-worthy though I have to say, I felt so dirty after watching this one. I do like John Hannah, always have since he played Evie’s con man layabout brother in the late 1990s Mummy movies starring Brendan Fraser, so I’m glad his character wasn’t the killer after all.
Kudos to Netflix. Between episode 1 Joan is Awful and this one, the streaming service really was a good sport about letting Black Mirror kick the crap out of them this season.
This review is more than meets the eye, 3.5 readers.
The first live-action Transformers film from 2007 was pretty awesome, just as a showcase of what modern CGI can do. The franchise churned out several more Michael Bay helmed flicks after that, and they always lacked something that was hard to put a finger on. The 1980s cartoon show had heart, which may sound silly about a story about giant robots who turn into cars and planes and beat each other up, but there you go.
2018’s Bumblebee managed to capture some of that heart and we find it a bit more in this film, which is part prequel yet oddly enough, a reboot of sorts. FUN SPOILER ALERT: the movie opens the door for a future flick in which the Transformers team up with that other popular 1980s franchise, GI Joe.
Not gonna lie. Me 35 years ago would have soiled my tighty whities at the idea of such a film but today I already more or less know that Hollywood will get it wrong. Maybe they might surprise me but part of the problem is that these properties worked best during a long ago time, a time when people still believed in things like American exceptionalism, good vs. evil, doing the right thing, etc.
Anyway, the Maximals (robots who turn into animals) from the 1990s Transformers: Beast Wars cartoon get their turn to shine on the big screen. I was well into my teens then and more interested in Jenny McCarthy and Carmen Electra by then, so I missed out on the maximal craze.
One complaint might be the movie is called “Rise of the Beasts” yet the beast only show up at the beginning, a bit in the middle, then have their chance to shine at the end. This is still a flick largely about that old stalwart fan favorite Optimus Prime and his BFFs like Bumbleebee and Mirage. Also, there’s a girl bot named RC which is cool though I’ll leave it to you to think about how gender works when it comes to sentient robots sans genitalia.
Perhaps one of the greatest complaints about past Transformer films is that the humans add little to nothing but filler and useless blah blah blahing that delays the next robot fight scene. Here, the human friends to the bots include Noah (Anthony Ramos) and Elena (Dominque Fishback). Noah is an ex-soldier looking for work to support his sick younger brother. Desperate for cash to fund a life saving medical procedure, he steals a car that turns out to be Mirage, which I think the franchise has done the whole “a human thinks this is a car only to discover its a robot” routine a lot but WTF it’s Transformers so of course we’ll do it again. Meanwhile, Elena is a museum intern, knowledgeable in the ways of old artifacts and her knowledge of how the MacGuffin artifact the bots are fighting over comes in handy.
Plenty of celebrity talent in the bot voices. Pete Davidson is pretty great as Mirage, such that I didn’t even know it was Pete Davidson until I read it in another review. Pete Davidson usually just shows up in most of his roles and is like, “Hi. I’m Pete Davidson” and then he just acts like Pete Davidson.
Ron Pearlman voices Optimus Primal, the robot gorilla leader of the Maximals, Michelle Yeoh lowers herself to play a talking robot bird, fan favorite Peter Cullen returns to do his John Wayne-esque Optimus Prime voice, and Peter Dinklage voices scourge, the lead henchman sent to do the dirty work of the planet chomping Unicron.
SIDENOTE: I mean, the danger is that if the MacGuffin isn’t recovered, Earth will be chomped by a hungry giant planet eating robot but you never quite become afraid of that terrible fate because of all the action on screen vying for your attention.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. At the end of the day, it’s cartoony schtick meant for kids and for that audience, it’s certainly a crowd pleaser. I’m not sure any modern Transformers movie will be able to recapture the heart of the old 1980s franchise, but the good news is it seems the people behind the latest efforts are trying.
Oh! Hey by the way, did I mention this movie is set in 1994? So if you want to kick it to a bangin’ soundtrack filled with more 1990s rap than you can shake a stick at (Wu Tang Clan is the true star of this movie) then this flick is your jam.
It’s the Twilight Zone style show for the social media age and it’s finally back after a long hiatus.
BQB here with a review of episode 1 of the long awaited sixth season.
SPOILER ALERT: This isn’t so much of a review as it is a discussion so if you haven’t seen this yet, go watch it then come back and talk.
3.5 readers, if you’re reading this then chances are, you’re a nobody. Don’t feel bad. Most of us are and the good news is there’s a lot of safety in anonymity. Unlike the rich and famous, we can get away with a lot because no one cares about what we do.
But what if your favorite streaming service were to suddenly decide that your hum-drum life makes for good TV? Such is the case for Joan (Annie Murphy) a middle-manager at a tech company. Like all of us, she had dreams once, but now she just spends her days doing her corporate board’s dirty work, firing beloved employees for no cause just to increase profits. She feels dirty about it but finds no solace in her fiance, who she views as bland. Yet, she feels damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t, for she also has an ex wild man boyfriend who she enjoyed but ultimately understands that he’ll bring disaster back into her life.
And so, poor Joan feels trapped in the mundane when one day, she turns on Streamberry, a thinly veiled Netflix replacement, to discover a show about her life with the great Salma Hayek playing her with all of her dirty laundry hung out to dry. All of her indiscretions, infidelities and immoralities are laid bare for the world to see and oddly, in record time. The show churns out episodes so fast that it seems like no sooner does Joan do some inappropriate act that she thought no one saw that sure enough, that inappropriate act is streaming for the world to see.
After her lawyer investigates, Joan discovers that part of the terms and conditions of the long contract she signed when she signed up for the streaming service was to give the company all rights to make a show about her life. Through AI, the company is picking subscribers at random, following their lives via their cell phones and home cameras and creating computer generated shows about them. No writers or actors are needed. AI just takes scenes from subscribers’ real lives and provides dramatic flourishes, while actors have signed away their CGI rights for profit.
That’s right. Salma Hayek isn’t playing Joan. CGI Salma is and real Salma thought it would a quick buck to sign those rights away. In the hopes of grabbing Hayek’s attention and getting her to put the kibosh on the show, the real Joan starts doing horrendous, unspeakable, darkly comical things to the point where the real Salma doesn’t want her likeness associated with such depravity.
Shenanigans ensue as the real Joan and real Salma team up for a clandestine attack on Streamberry’s AI computer server and I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.
This is a rare light-hearted episode of black mirror. Usually, the show is quite dark and gut punching, as characters suffer irreparable damage and loss, forever doomed to experience terrible consequences. This one is actually quite funny.
“Absurd” I thought. CGI replacing real actors? That’ll never happen. Then I went to see The Flash last night and a CGI Henry Cavill did a brief cameo as did a CGI younger version of Nicolas Cage. CGI past versions of actors from DC superhero films from long ago also stopped by. So apparently, yes, Hollywood is looking for ways to make content with computers at a cheaper rate than what they have to pay real live humans.
And low and behold there’s a writer’s strike underway, with one of the chief complaints being that human writers are worried about being replaced by CGI writers. Could a CGI writer write better fart jokes than a human writer? Time will tell.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Credit to Netflix as with this episode, they basically admit that they invented the model of churning out unenriched crap at a rapid pace, content for the sake of content, just give viewers a neverending stream of new stuff to watch without worrying if its any good.
BQB here with a review of the Flash’s standalone movie.
3.5 readers, I’m going to separate this review into three parts: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Not to be confused with the Clint Eastwood film of the same name.
THE GOOD:
Overall, this is a good film. Worth your money and your time, enjoyable to see on the big screen.
The premise? Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) aka The Flash entered the criminal forensic profession as a young lad with the hope of proving his imprisoned father’s innocence and overturn his conviction for murdering his mother.
Alas, this plan is not going well. In fact, it’s going rather badly. So bad, in fact, that the Flash angry runs so fast that he discovers the ability to run through time. Ignoring everything he learned from Back to the Future, Flashy Boy tries to save his mother’s life but in so doing, enters an alternate world, similar to his own but in many ways different.
The Justice League as he knows it never formed, so instead, to foil an attack by General Zod (Michael Shannon), he teams up with Supergirl (Sasha Calle), Batman, but the elderly form of the 1989 film version (Michael Keaton) and a younger version of himself, obviously also played by Ezra Miller.
The film’s got a lot of heart, great special effects, and its good meditation on choosing to live in the present and make good decisions going forward, rather than dwell on past mistakes and tragedies. The scars from our past, painful as they may, made us who we are and one little change would throw everything off balance.
Fans of the 1989 Batman film will rejoice as their are many fun callbacks to that film, as well as to other old movies set in the DC universe.
THE BAD
While a fun movie, there are times when it feels like it’s not the best movie Warner Brothers could have made but rather, the best movie Warner Brothers is willing to pay for.
Gal Gadot, Ben Affleck and Jason Mamoa all reprise their Wonder Woman, Batman (the middle aged version from our timeline) and Aquaman roles from the Justice League film, but in brief cameos to help The Flash on his adventure. One wonders if WB would just drum up a great script and part with boku cash, they might be able to get the band back together for another go around.
But since they don’t want to, you get the Flash – and an alternate Justice League based in an alternate reality including Supergirl instead of Superman and 1989 Batman instead of Modern Batman, presumably because Calle and Keaton are cheaper than Henry Cavil and Ben Affleck.
THE UGLY
Ezra Miller has a lot of disturbing pervy allegations against him, so much so that it’s hard to believe this movie wouldn’t have been shelved if they’d been levied against a straight actor. The public will forgive WB for releasing the film this go around, though let’s face it, we’re all such lemmings we’d probably sit through anything released on a Friday night at our local cineplex. At any rate, WB spent big bucks making this movie and needed to get a profit by releasing it. However, in today’s “metoo” environment, I just can’t see WB allowing Miller to continue on as the Flash in a Flash sequel or any other DC movies.
A lot of squandered talent here because Miller really does play the role well. While we’ve seen many versions of Batman and Superman and we all have our favorites, I think Miller really captured the essence of the character as a spazzed out nerd, overworked and underappreciated, constantly dealing with the stress of superlife while suffering from anxiety and panic like the rest of us would in such a situation.
STATUS: Shelfworthy, though I get the impression that DC execs must have watched the last Spiderman movie where three film versions of Spidey teamed up and said “We need to do that!” There are times when the cameos of past DC film characters are a fun walk down memory lane and other times when you wonder why a studio gets to render CGI versions of long deceased actors into perpetuity.
Then again, there are a few CGI cameos from the likenesses of actors who are still alive and young enough to act but IDK why they’re digital except it cost less than it would to pay them to come to the set I suppose. I could be wrong but this might be the first film to capitalize on that.
SIDENOTE: 1989 Batman came out 34 years ago, but I remember being a little kid in the theater watching it with a sense of wonder like it was yesterday. Then I blinked and now I’m a middle aged geezer watching a film that’s partly an homage to it. Boy, this life went far too fast but I’d point out while movies today tend to be reboots, rehashes, and homages to older films, I wonder if 34 years from now, there will be many rehashes of films from today, when they rely so heavily on the nostalgia of past films now?
The bad news is that the DCU cinematic is in a sorry state of affairs. Warner Brothers, IMO, screwed the pooch, opting to rush flicks out in a frenzied attempt to compete with Marvel, rather than go the slow route and build a coherent universe where all the films connect to one another, as Marvel made. They might have lost profits by going slow in the beginning but now, as the Marvel universe begins to slow down and fizzle out, DCU would be hitting its stride.
Where DCU has done its best is with characters that heretofore never had much in the way of movie fanfare. Thus Wonder Woman and Aquaman have been knocking it out of the park. Meanwhile, Shazam, who is, one might argue, DC’s joke character (like how Antman is Marvel’s joke character), is also great. You would think old standards like Batman and Superman would be best but they’ve been done so much that apparently no one knows how to weave them into this world.
For those of you who don’t remember the first Shazam, Billy Badsen is a foster kid, very sad and lonely when a wizard bestows upon him god-like superpowers. By saying “Shazam!” he turns from wayward boy to adult champion (Asher Angel plays young Billy while Zachary Levi plays Shazam Billy.)
The cool part of a sequel is it gets to build the universe. You already learned the rules from the first film so now the writers can waste no time inviting you to play in the sandbox. Billy and his foster family of siblings all have Shazam powers now and they use them to save Philadelphia from catastrophe and villainy. Alas, they are often unappreciated as the populace wonders who appointed them to watch over the city and the news media focuses on their mistakes rather than all the lives they save.
Enter into this mix Hespera and Kalypso (Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu), daughters of the titan Atlas, who have a bone to pick with the Shazam family or Shazamily for an inadvertent mistake they made in the first film. The world, of course, is at stake and the sisters have all kinds of ghastly powers from being able to make people go insane to conjuring up dragons and monsters.
It’s up to the Shazamily to save the day and they’ll do so while navigating the pitfalls of growing up. When you have a movie about kids who sometimes operate in adult bodies, there’s always a line that has to be straddled about what is and is not appropriate, and the writers and actors walk it well with various jokes where the kids in adult bodies and adult actors playing those kids come across as naive and not understanding of various situations where an actual adult would know better.
Djimon Hounsou reprises his role as the Wizard who gave the kids their powers, at times glad and disappointed he did, depending on how well the battles are going.
Perhaps you might remember there was a Superman from the neck down cameo in the last film and at that time I opined it kinda sucked that WB/DC isn’t able to bring all their talent together in the way Marvel/Disney did. There’s a cameo from another top hero, this time from the neck up, indicating Shazam has convinced the execs that such appearances are worth the money. Still, while it’s a good movie, I just think DC missed an opportunity to really build a world the way Marvel did.
I have been avoiding this show for a while. I love comedy and I have long believed that comedians are the unsung heroes of Hollywood. Laughter is an involuntary response, you can’t hold it back when the humor floodgates call, so anyone who can make it happen has a gift.
One such gifted person is Bill Hader, who I would argue is perhaps one of, if not the best celebrity impressionists of his generation. Like Dana Carvey, who I admired as a kid, Hader was SNL’s go to guy for mocking the famous. He just has that uncanny ability to change his face, to change his voice, to mimic another person, make you think he’s them for awhile, then make you laugh as he does funny things as that person.
But Dana Carvey, the great SNL impressionist of a previous generation, made cinematic forays outside of SNL and flopped, with the exception of his Garth character in Wayne’s World. Sometimes comedic actors go the dramatic route with great success, as Adam Sandler did in Punch Drunk Love or Uncut Gems, then again their dramatic efforts flop, like Adam Sandler in Spanglish.
All of this is my longwinded way of explaining why I avoided this show for years because I felt like by trying to do drama, Hader was like Michael Jordan who could have given us a few more seasons of his great NBA career, but decided to fizzle as a baseball player instead. Surely, Bill should do his own sketch comedy show and keep capitalizing on his comedy gift rather than do something different.
But honestly, this show works and I’m glad I finally started watching it. Alas, I started watching it a few weeks ago only to discover it ended this year. I’m half way through so if you know how it ends, don’t tell me.
The premise? Hader’s protagonist Barry is a battle-hardened Afghanistan war veteran, having seen and done some awful things that haunt him to this day. He is emotionally crippled, distant and depressed, yearning for a happier life but happiness is an emotion that eludes him. From the start, I wondered if this character choice was on purpose, as it allows Hader to play a dramatic role without having to display a range of emotion as usually the best comedians can only play a funny person but struggle when they have to play someone who is up, down or in the middle. Make no mistake that throughout the series, Barry experiences a range of emotion, but in such a frazzled way that you can tell he’s such a depressed guy that we should all just applaud him for getting out of bed in the morning.
The show rests that on that old Hollywood cliche that war veterans can’t function in a civilian job that doesn’t require killing. I would argue that there are cops, firefighters, security guards, veterans working in paramilitary jobs and doing well but ok, Barry doesn’t have their mental stability. Got it.
And so, at the start of the show, we learn that Barry is a hitman in the employ of his handler/father figure Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root, another veteran character actor you might know as the voice of Bill on King of the Hill).
To the show’s credit, the life of a hitman is not sugar coated. There are so many hitman shows/movies where the hitman is very suave and sophisticated and conveniently only dispatches bad people so that the audience doesn’t dislike him. All the people who ever get killed are very bad, usually criminals and killers themselves.
Sure, Barry deep-sixes plenty of baddies, but as a murderer for hire, he kills plenty of people who arguably don’t deserve it. Spouses who want revenge on a cheating spouse or the spouse’s lover, people who would stand to benefit if someone else was out of the picture, bottomline if you want someone dead and you know how to reach Fuches, and you’re willing to pay, then Barry will kill that problem person in your life, zero morality questions asked.
Oh, and if there’s a witness, just some poor schmuck who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, Barry will shuffle that person off their mortal coil as well. We even get a look into the sad lives of family members of those whose loved ones were taken from them by Barry. Their suffering is very real.
All in all, this isn’t your standard hit man show. The real consequences of a death for cash biz are seen.
Then how, you might ask, is this show funny? Truth be told, it is a very dark comedy.
As our show begins, Barry tracks a target to LA, only to discover the dude he’s been hired to snuff is an aspiring actor. He stalks said target to an acting class run by the wacky Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler in literally his best role since Fonzi.)
As he sits back and watches the fledgling thespians work on their craft, Barry instantly falls in love with the acting profession, seeing it as a way to work through his own emotional problems as what is acting other than humans trying to understand and recreate emotions?
And thus our anti-hero’s journey begins. Much to Fuches’ dismay, Barry dives into the world of acting, going to acting classes, trying out for parts in plays and movies, the works. Not the best move for a man who has committed multiple heinous crimes because you know, the more famous you get, the more people will sniff around your past.
Somehow, Barry must learn to juggle his acting work with his hitman work. It’s not a profession that is easily quit. Fuches keeps dragging him back in, as does NoHo Hank, Anthony Carrigan in a show stealing role as a Chechen mobster who is a fan of Barry’s murderous skills and won’t take no for an answer when it comes to dispatching his rivals. The humor in this character comes from a guy with an outlandish Russian accent saying very silly American things. The best description I can give is if Dan Akroyd and Steve Martin’s hard partying, East European accented “wild and crazy guys” from 70s SNL had a grown up son.
As if he didn’t have enough to hide, Barry finds a love interest in Sally (Sarah Goldberg), a fellow struggling actor from Cousineau’s class. If you divide the show into two halves, one part is about Barry’s murderous secret life and the other part is about Barry and Sally navigating the ins and outs of Hollywood, from those early years where they struggle to get any part, to those later years when they find success but have to deal with schmuck executives who want to water down their success in the name of profits. And of course, Barry is always murdering people between auditions and then going to great lengths to cover it up.
The true show stealer here is our beloved Fonz. Cousineau is portrayed as one of the most despised and reviled actors in Hollywood, his behavior so boorish that he was blackballed from ever getting a part again and subsists on his own personal acting studio where he overcharges young naive wannabes for copies of his lousy book, his lessons and other products unlikely to get them anywhere. “No refunds” is his constant refrain.
As the show progresses, occasional real-life actors playing themselves stop by just to dump on Cousineau and relay to the audience the horrors of what this self-absorbed prick has done to them. People who work behind the scenes also have tales to tell. One producer humorously recounts a story about how as a young production assistant, Cousineau threw an omelette at him, plate and all, because he forgot the chives.
But like Barry, Gene is on his own journey toward growth and change, trying to make amends for the wrongs he did in his youth and convince the industry that he offended to give him one last shot as an old man. Barry becomes torn between dueling father figures, the handler that wants him to keep killing for money, the acting coach who wants him to be a success, and of course, the girlfriend/love of his life who would be horrified if she knew about his night job.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Again, don’t tell me what happens if you know, but I’m wagering the ending is not happy. While I can’t say the show is realistic (I don’t think anyone could kill as many people as Barry has without being caught in the first season) it doesn’t sugar coat things and it recognizes that bad deeds lead to bad consequences so those who do bad eventually get theirs.
My one criticism would be the episodes are a half hour and the whole series feels like it could all be just one season. It all centers around Barry trying to be an actor and being with Sally but getting pulled back into crime by Fuches and Hank and if the show had been given more seasons, who knows what villains Barry might have encountered by day while he scores those big parts by day.
Watch on HBO Max, which is now just Max. How pretentious. Bonus that some of Hader’s past SNL friends stop by once in a while.
BQB here with a review of the Terminator’s foray into Netflix television.
Every man has a soft spot in their hearts for the top action hero of his childhood. I love Arnold Schwarzenegger just as my father loved John Wayne before me.
I always thought Arnold made a big mistake when he ran for governor of Cal-ee-for-ya. First of all, he wasn’t much of a governor and second, he missed the chance to reinvent himself in the 2000s, as his old frenemy Sly did.
But better late than never in this, Gov-a-nator’s first TV series. Seems blasphemous. Anything not a movie is surely below our favorite commando.
The premise? Luke Brunner (Arnie) is on the verge of retirement, both in his covert and overt lives. That’s right. He pretends to co-own a fitness equipment supply business with his BFF Barry (Milan Carter) while in reality, Luke is a veteran, globe-trotting CIA agent and Barry is his handler/computer expert.
His ex-wife Tally (Fabiana Udenio) and daughter Emma (Monica Barbaro) have long grown accustomed to Luke never being there for the important events in life. In fact, it’s starting to feel like Emma is following in her father’s footsteps as her relationship with boyfriend Carter (Jay Beruchel) is growing rocky due to her globetrotting job for a charity that brings water systems to third world countries.
When their paths cross on one last assignment, Luke realizes he has more in common with his daughter than he thought. Yup. The water job is just a cover for the fact that Emma is also in the CIA. The two have been CIA agents, lying to each other and believing each other’s false covers for years.
Ironically, the plot is pretty close to True Lies, one of the last great action films that Arnold ever made in his prime. Network TV just put out a True Lies TV show reboot that fizzled, so one wonders had that not happened, maybe Netflix could have ponied up the cash to reunite Arnold with Jamie Lee Curtis and Eliza Dushku so we can see what the Tasker family is up to these days.
Oh right. Netflix wouldn’t pony up THAT much money. But hey, at least Tom Arnold, who played Arnie’s BFF in True Lies, stops by in a cameo. IMO, True Lies and this part are the Tom Arnold’s funniest roles.
Rounding out the cast are two spies that work for Luke – Aldon and Roo (Travis Van Winkle and Fortune, he a stereotypical hunky studmuffin self-absorbed pretty boy type and she an out and proud lesbian with a mouth that delivers a quip a minute. The odd couple so odd it works friendship between these two is a highlight of the show.
As you might expect, Luke and Emma put their shock at discovering the other’s lies behind them quick and join forces to take down an international villain, with Luke’s team playing back up. The series moves about, from international adventures to shenanigans as father and daughter struggle to keep their lies straight with family.
Structurally, the show reminds me a lot of NCIS, where there’s an intrepid tough guy Gibbs, surrounded with comic relief underlings like Abby and McGee…except Arnold pumps a lot of comedic iron himself. An episode where he must force himself to look away as his daughter “honeypots” herself i.e. dances the wild mambo with a villain to get some world saving information is particularly funny. Another scene where a CIA shrink forces father and daughter to communicate with puppets that are replicas of themselves is funnier.
Sure, there are plotholes galore. It’s hard to believe a father and daughter would be able to learn the other has been lying to them for so long and be able to instantly get over it, but we don’t have time for them to go to a few years of therapy. Strangely, some of Luke’s CIA counterparts were always aware of Emma’s CIA status but never told him and he isn’t pissed at them either.
Special effects wise, its typical Netflix fare. Better than your average network show but not good enough to be a major motion picture.
At first, Barbaro comes across as one of many standard issue Netflix actresses – hot and gets the job done but you’ll forget her next year – except, she shines here with a few raunchy one liners you wouldn’t expect to come out of the mouth of a classy babe. Fun fact, she was the fly-girl in last year’s Top Gun: Maverick.
Meanwhile, Fortune Feimster gets her long awaited moment in the sun as Roo. She has long stolen the show with minor parts where she does the funny lesbian who says obnoxious, rude statements with oodles of misguided confidence. I’m not sure I totally buy her as CIA agent material because, you know, she’s fat but then again, it’s a solid, linebacker fat. She could really clothesline a dude and walk away no worse for wear.
Perhaps one criticism is that while the show is very funny, there are times when the humor makes it hard to believe these people are CIA agents. Everyone other than Luke and Emma seem to exist for comic relief and surely there needs to be a few more serious people on a CIA spy team.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. I agree with Luke that all these damn kids these days just assume everyone born before 1992 is an idiot.
Bookshelf Battle 