We’ve got a coup. We’ve got an impending civil war. We’ve got dragons!
SPOILERS ABOUND!
GRRM and the show writers a) have a way of making things happen but not in the way you’d expect and b) good become bad and bad become good.
The king has died. Alicent shares her mistaken belief that on his deathbed, Viserys wished for Aegon to be named heir. Turns out, this never mattered, because Otto and his flunkies had long planned in secret to install Aegon as king anyway, so this news just strengthens what they were going to do no matter what. Perhaps though if Alicent had not misunderstood Viserys’ last words, she might not have gone through with the coup.
We see a mini civil war between Alicent and Otto and their respective flunkies in a race to find an undercover Aegon in King’s Landing and bring him back from a night of debauchery. Both hope to find him first and be the first one to talk him into agreeing or not agreeing to have Rhae killed. Unfortunately, Alicent doesn’t quite understand the depths of what she’s getting herself into. Otto might be wrong morally but correct in plan execution, in that if you’re going to pull a coup, you can’t try to warn Rhae or negotiate for peace or just put her in jail. You have to, sad as it is, kill her and all challengers before they and their supporters even have a chance to fight back, before they even know there is a reason to.
Aegon is an unscrupulous pervert who even admits himself is unfit for the crown, though once he gets a taste of a cheering crowd, it’s clear he wants it. Aemond is jealous for he has trained to rule his entire life but will not get to do so.
Cole goes to the darkest of dark sides when he kills Lord Beesbury, the elderly coin master and only member of the small council to stand up for Rhae and declare and his colleagues traitors.
The White Worm uses her power to stand up for the poor, abused and exploited children of Flea Bottom.
Oh, and we learn Larys and Alicent have a deal where she lets him spank the monkey while staring at her naked feet in exchange for him giving her information about her enemies…which frankly, tons of internet memes about the creepy relationship between this duo already called that Larys was a degenerate foot sniffer.
The coup de grace final scene is when Rhaenys crashes through the coronation on dragon back, having just broken her pet and bff dragon Melys out of dragon jail. She could have stopped a civil war before it started by burning up the entire Hightower side of the royal family, but declines to do so, the theories being that a) she had a heart b) didn’t think it was her place to do so and wasn’t going to fight Rhae’s for her and frankly neither side of the fam has done her right so she’s best not taking either side c) has a soft spot for mothers and women in power and Alicent standing in front of Aegon moved her but any rate she sends them the message that she could have cooked those fools if she wanted to. Alas, all the peasants crumpled under her dragon’s feet were not so lucky. Neither side really gives a crap about the peasants.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Another episode that got me to watch it at the moment it aired.
I did something Sunday night that I haven’t done in a long time. I sat down at the time when a show aired and watched on the first airing, rather than just wait until I was ready to stream it. Such has been my growing interest in this show and I haven’t done any appointment TV viewing since its predecessor, Game of Thrones, was on the air.
SPOILERS abound, so look away if you don’t want any.
My thoughts:
#1 – Paddy Considine really nailed this sendoff episode where his character, King Viserys dies. The king suffers from leprosy and old age, though more the former. I found out later he is only supposed to be in his 50s but being in your 50s and having leprosy were both dangerous things in ancient times. Yes, I know leprosy is bad think to have now but we’ve pretty much gotten rid of it with modern medicine and hygiene haven’t we?
The King spends his last day of life trying to protect his family and bring them together to avoid an all-out war, not to mention a family conflict that would tear the house apart. Addled by opium, he foregoes this ancient pain med to keep his mind as clear as possible. In one of the greatest underdog wins the day scenes on television in recent years, the down and out king surprises everyone when he staggers, clearly in pain, into the king’s chamber and up to the throne, thus thwarting an attempt by his hand/chief advisor and his queen to undermine his daughter, who he has named his successor, a dangerous move in olden times, for in those days, the people really preferred their leaders to have ding dongs and were willing to go to war to make that happen.
Paddy Considine deserves an Emmy for his performance. Online debate abounds as to whether Viserys was a bad king, a weak king, maybe too kind for the job, or perhaps the time period just handed him a great big lump of crap and he did the best he could with it. To be honest, I think he did the best with the info he had and made the best choices out of a series of options that weren’t the best.
Appoint your daughter the next queen and risk a civil war or name your unscrupulous, wife murdering brother who has shown signs he might be a tyrant if crowned?
#2 – In true GOT style, no one is completely wrong or right and GRRM shows us how bad people turn good and good turn bad. Ultimately, any quest for power is a dangerous game.
#3 – Vaemond lost his head! You know, Corlys just got a bad fever and suddenly, everyone starts fighting over his stuff. They didn’t even wait to see if he’d pull through. I suspect he will and will a) be pissed his bro tried to subvert his wishes but b) that was still his bro and he’s not going to take to him being beheaded lying down.
That was quite a scene, wasn’t it? Vaemond really, really leaned into shouting that Rhae’s children were “BASTARDS!” and their mother was a “WHORE.” Treasonous language that he had to have known was going to end badly for him, but in that moment, the second son of Driftmark went full on IDGAF and you could tell this was building inside him for years that it was a total catharsis for him to say it just before he lost his dome.
Note the king was only going to cut out his tongue though. Losing your tongue is apparently the remedy for slander in the GOT-verse so Corlys, if he pulls through, may likely think Daemon went way too far.
Bottomline: I think a lot of people assumed this show was going to stink. So many prequels and sequels and cinematic universe/in the same ballpark shows end up being silly fan fiction, explaining things no one cared about in the first place. This one really builds a world and characters (albeit the world was already built) but like its original, has us fans back online, spinning our wacky theories and debating the issues of the realm once more.
I saw this movie last night and was shocked to read the reviews today. The critics hate it, calling it the worst movie of the year thus far, a hot, meandering, chaotic mess. Strange, because I walked out of it thinking it was the first Oscar contender of the year. I found it charming, part-mystery and part-comedy that gave me some of the first legitimate laughs in a movie theater in…I can’t even remember.
How could I, your humble blog host and the professional movie watchers be so divergent in our view? Hold that thought. I’ll speculate on it later.
In 1910’s France, toward the end of World War I, misfits Dr. Burt Berendson (Christian Bale), Harold Woodman (John David Washington) and Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie), meet and become fast friends. Valerie is an art-loving nurse who treats Burt and Harold for their war wounds, while they defend her from local French folk disgusted by her penchant for digging shrapnel (metal scraps) from soldiers and forging it into art.
After peace breaks out in Europe, the trio take a detour on their way home to America, finding peace and acceptance in Amsterdam, a sweet sense of bliss they never found in their homeland of the United States. Each has their own personal war waiting for them at home. Burt is half-Jewish, half-Catholic and (SPOILER ALERT) as he laments in a line that had me slapping my knee, openly guffawing, “I think my in-laws sent me to war to get rid of me.” He is estranged from his wife, who defers to her high society parents and their open hatred of her husband, who they consider to be of a low pedigree.
Valerie is a free spirit who lives for creating masterpieces through the brush and photography. In other words, she’s at risk for being stamped “crazy” with a crazy stamp on her forehead and treated that way, free-spirited women being considered bonkers at the time.
Harold is the most level-headed of the trio, but he’s black, and well, we all know the history of how black people were treated in the early 1900s.
Alas, all good things must come to an end. The trio eventually closes their Amsterdam vacation and return to the states, where they go their separate ways, yet they forever see their time in Amsterdam as a state of mind, a yearning to just be themselves without guilt, remorse, or trying to please all the unpleasable people in their lives.
Flash forward to the 1930s. Harold is now a lawyer, fighting for the civil rights of African Americans, poor veterans, and downtrodden folk at large. Burt does this in his own way, starting a practice where he treats the less fortunate who are scoffed at elsewhere and charging little. The dynamic duo come together at the behest of Liz Meekins (Taylor Swift) to investigate the untimely demise of their old Army general, who his daughter theorizes was the victim of foul play.
And so, down the rabbit hole of mystery the friends go, searching for clues and unraveling a far flung, worldwide conspiracy involving fascism, dictators, ornithology scandals, a wacko hitman, and well, if I tick off the other boxes, I’d give the rest of the story away.
Christian Bale, who rivals Daniel Day Lewis in his ability to transform into someone else, does it again here. His character, Burt, is a doctor of the people with a heavy Brooklyn accent. He laments his lot in life, feeling like he can do no right in the eyes of his family, yet soldiers on anyway, caring his injured fellow veterans. He is partly the comic relief and partly the heart of the movie, inventing new drugs, which he argues, the world needs but the medical community is unwilling to develop. He may be right, but he constantly falls flat on his face mid-sentence, the result of being his own test subject. The glass eye he received to replace the one lost in the war is forever popping out only to be found again. I almost want to say the character is reminiscent of Seinfeld’s Kramer, if Kramer had a medical license.
John David Washington excels as the straight man, the brains of the bunch who keeps the trio focused on the case and away from devolving into too much tomfoolery. It’s clear his character would have gone further in life had he not been born in such an openly racist time, yet he refuses to be defined or denigrated by those who dislike him simply because of the color of his skin.
Robbie is a delight, her smile can really warm up a movie theater. She’s not crazy, but suffers the false allegations of craziness with a stiff upper lip.
Who are the stars? Literally everyone. Anya Taylor Joy. Mike Myers. Michael Shannon. Timothy Olyphant. Rami Malek. Chris Rock. Robert DeNiro. That’s all I could think of in one sitting. There are more. It’s as if everyone in Hollywood stopped by the set to get their five minutes in this flick.
Which brings me back to the start of this review. Everyone in Tinsel Town apparently believed in this flick enough to be in it, so why did the critics give it ye olde raspberry?
Admittedly, the plot is convoluted and meandering. As often happens in so many mysteries, the characters pull a thread that leads to another thread, that sometimes leads to four or five separate threads. At some point, you the audience member are left to decide whether you want to whip out a pen and jot notes, maybe even a flow chart on the back of your popcorn bag, or if you just want to shrug your shoulders and assume the writers know what they’re doing and you can look up any questions you were stumped on online later.
It has a lot of heart. The friendship between the three main characters is very sweet. Three people who were not accepted at home find acceptance abroad. I wonder if early 1900s Amsterdam really was that much of an accepting place, or if it was just a matter of the trio going to a new place where no one knew their past and this allowed them to reinvent themselves. There is a romance between Harold and Valerie, but it’s genuine, not tawdry. There’s no titillating sex scene, rather you can tell they legitimately enjoy each other’s company, and by extension, the company of their BFF Burt. Relationships built on sex, money, social standing etc., never last. In life, you’re lucky if you find maybe a handful of friends who accept you as you are, warts and all, and love you all the more for it.
Strangely, unconditional love is the message of the movie. Love the veterans who fought for their country only to be disposed of like garbage when the time came for the country they fought for to pay for their medical bills. Love the African Americans who are just looking for their piece of the pie. Love the women who want to be free-spirited and don’t drug them up under false allegations of being a crazy dame. Love the schmucks who don’t seem to fit in anywhere but who keep showing up anyway, even when their glass eyes fall out.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. The critics are wrong here. This film is a throwback to Oscar winners of the past, large, ambitious, far-flung historic pieces. Comedy ensues, though most of the jokes shine a light on the mistreatment the downtrodden faced during a terrible time in history where if you weren’t a rich white man then society just treated you as being in the way. Admittedly, you could take away the mystery as it basically just serves as a framework for so many actors to meet and riff of one another, but then again, aren’t most films about the search for the elusive MacGuffin? I would like to see Hollywood make more movies like this, though I fear the critics have grown so accustomed to the streaming bologna sandwich schlock served up by streaming services that they have no idea what to do when a steak of a film like this is set before them.
Let’s admit it, GOT fans. We all thought House of the Dragon was going to be a stinkburger.
So many of these sequels and prequels are absurd fan fiction. The Many Saints of Newark gave us the life story of Tony’s uncle, as if we were clamoring for it. Disney is going all out, telling us the tale of an obscure Rebel spy in Andor, a character in a prequel that itself was based entirely off a brief line in the first Star Wars film about a bunch of rebels who stole the Death Star plans. In short, Hollywood couldn’t finish these series properly so they hire new writers to take little details and spin them into, well, something.
But this House of the Dragon has been great thus far. I believe this is largely due to it being based on just one book by George RR Martin. Unfortunately, the original GOT started to suffer when the plot expanded past the last book in GRRM’s unfinished book series.
The time jumps are difficult and often leave plot holes. However, HBO is learning from past mistakes. They don’t have the time, money or patience to tell the story forever, so they need to make time leaps and at least give us some semblance of a complete story from beginning to end rather than focus on the beginning in great detail and then shrug off the end in true, “Meh, I guess Bran can be king” style.
HotD takes us 172 years before GOT, in super woke times for a medieval age. Irony is where the wokeness is often heavy handed in most shows, this one works it into the plot well. King Viserys (Paddy Constantine) lacks a male heir, so to quell bickering amongst the various scheming lords, names his daughter, Rhaenyra, his heir. Alas, things get complicated when he marries Rhae’s BFF, Alicent and has a son, Aegon. Double alas, the show is set in a time when men would rather burn the country down then bend the knee to a queen.
Civil war looms when, after a long time jump, we see that Rhae is popping out kids a plenty, none of which look like her half-black husband (I’d say half African American but Africa and America don’t exist in this fictional world). BTW, while this world is unwoke when it comes to women being in charge, it is hella woke when it comes to interracial marriage and people of color being in charge. It’s nice to think that maybe, when you look up at the sky and see the perhaps infinite number of other worlds that could exist, maybe one of them had people who, at the beginning of their world, shrugged and said, “Eh, what does color matter? Let’s all just be friends.”
Ultimately, former friends Alicent and Rhae become bitter enemies. While Rhae is boldly indiscrete about her out of marriage dalliances (a move that can cause civil war in a country where the monarchy’s secession depends on parentage), one wonders if Alicent’s challenge is motivated by her simply trying to protect her children or if she sees her former friend defying convention and rules and is angry she didn’t. (She was pretty much forced to become the king’s second wife and what young girl wants to be married off to an old geezer?)
Disgust abounds on this show. Lords and ladies openly talk of betrothing (making a marriage engagement) between adults and children, cousins with cousins, uncles with nieces, brothers with sisters and so on. Perhaps the most fictional part of a show (where people ride dragons) is that the children that are the product of these incestuous and gross relationships end up beautiful and healthy. See the paintings of outlandishly deformed European royals who were the products of inbreeding for the non fictional version.
Anyway, never has there been a fictional drawing of battle lines like this since the 2000s Team Jacob vs. Team Edward. Which side are you on, 3.5 readers?
I have noticed the internet seems largely pro-Rhae. I have been Team Alicent because I felt Rhae was very indiscrete, practically begging the world to challenge the legitimacy of her kids, but then again it seems as of late that Alicent is the only one making that challenge publicly. Everyone else seems to be going along with it, at least for now.
You decide. BQB here with Rob Zombie’s modern take on the monster family classic.
This movie is unlike anything I have ever seen. It’s an almost 2-hour long sitcom episode. Hacky, 1960s-esque jokes, puns and quips abound. Suddenly, I appreciate the concept of the laugh track, that old trick of piping in canned laughter (or in studio audience laughter) to let us know which lines are intended to be funny and which are meant to be serious. Humor, after all, is in the eye of the beholder, or perhaps the ear of the listener.
It reminds me of Elvira, or any of a plethora of old timey monster movie shows where the flick would be interspersed between commercials as well as a wacky, poorly produced host dumping on the movie while dealing with creatures of his or her own.
Ultimately, I have no idea what to make of it. Part of me loves it, because if it’s one thing I always complain about, it’s when reboots completely ignore the source material. This one practically worships the original, to the point where I wonder if the writers and producers of the original fell into a time warp and served as Rob Zombie’s consultants. Sure, the Munsters could have just been shoved into modern times, forced to deal with any number of pop cultural happenings and political trends with a few celebrities stopping by for a silly cameo. Then again, the Addams Family has done that again and again.
Part of me hates it because the joke a minute pace in which all pithy remarks seem like they fell straight out of a book entitled “The Undead Dad’s Joke Book.” We’re talking humor that isn’t just on the nose, but way up, such that you can see the boogers and all. Why would I hate this? Because darn it, that’s the kind of humor I use in my poorly sold books, leaving me to wonder if I’m no better than the lesser (or more-er, depending on your POV) of America’s top two sitcom based freaky families.
The plot? (Yes, there is one.) Mad scientist Dr. Henry Augustus Wolfgang (Richard Blake) and his flunky Floop (Jorge Garcia) seek to bring dead flesh to life in the form of their very own Frankenstein-esque monster. The doc seeks the brain of recently deceased super genius, Shelley von Rathbone, but alas, the incompetent Floop swipes the brain of Shelley’s dimwitted, poorly reviewed, hacky stand-up comic brother Schecky, who quite coincidentally, died the same day, leaving both bodies at rest in the same funeral parlor.
The result is, well, you know him, you love him – Herman Munster (Jeff Daniel Phillips), who uses the late Schecky’s brain to become a more popular entertainer than Schecky ever was. He sings. He dances. He jokes. He becomes the toast of Transylvania, where this tale takes place. He even captures the undead heart of vampiress, Lilly (Sheri Moon Zombie), who lives a hum-drum life in the castle of her schticky father, The Count (Daniel Roebuck.)
The good news? Herman and Lilly fall madly in love and get married. The bad news? Dimwitted Herman is tricked by his new wolfman brother-in-law Lester (Tomas Boykin) into signing the castle over to evil fortune teller Zoya (Catherine Schell), all part of a revenge plot as Zoya is one of the Count’s many ex-wives who claims the fanged one done her wrong.
It all culminates in the spooky family moving to America and I assume Netflix and Zombie will be collaborating to bring us more Munster flicks in the future, perhaps with a furry bundle of joy on the way. We know The Count better as Grandpa, after all.
I gotta be honest. I’ve never been a big horror fan and have never been a Rob Zombie film fan, as he really does lean into the genre. The occasional scary movie? Fine. But scary movies with blood and gore and frights so twisted you want to poop your pants? Hey, it’s a free country, and anyone else can feel free to have at it, but I’ll pass.
But RZ got me on this one and I wonder if maybe Rob grew up on a steady diet of such sitcom schlock as he handles it with love, or whatever qualifies as love in a world where a Frankenstein can marry a vampire and produce a werewolf baby.
Kudos to the cast. They walk a fine line between doing an impression of the original cast. Jeff Phillips provides a voice of his own while still delivering homages to the late, great Fred Gwynne. Meanwhile, Sherri Moon Zombie (isn’t that kinda cool when you create a fictional last name and your wife takes your fictional last name?) deviates from Yvone De Carlo’s femme fatale style Lilly and gives us a sickeningly sweet Lilly, undead and evil yet somewhat naive, kind and lovable, like the vampire girl next door you’d want to introduce to your mother if you weren’t sure she’d bite her.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. I’m still shaking my head, not sure what to make of it, but I’ll give it this. By giving us more of what it was, it stands out in a crowd of everything that currently is.
Murder! Cannibalism! BQB here with a review of Netflix’s latest true crime series.
If you were alive in the early 1990s, then you may recall a time when the news was all Dahmer all the time. You couldn’t turn on the TV without learning something new about the prolific, psychotic serial killer who was caught when one of his victims escaped and led police back to his Milwaukee, Wisconsin apartment which contained bones, skulls, heads, photos of dead bodies and body parts, some preserved and some left to dissolve in a barrel of acid. Yup, Old Jeffy was doing that long before Jesse botched it in his bathtub on Breaking Bad.
Speaking of botching things, Netflix tends to do that with a lot of its movies and shows, but they handle a very gruesome story here and they do it well, such that if you have a sensitive stomach or just ate lunch, you might not want to watch. Otherwise, they bring the viewer in and provide a lot of history, parts of the story that either weren’t well publicized or maybe I just missed it at the time because I was just a kid.
It’s weird how certain things happen that affect a person’s life. But for a certain incident or even several strung together, someone might have been an entirely different person and lived an entirely different life. At any rate, the chain of events in Jeffrey Dahmer’s young life were such that it’s almost as if he were given a master class on how to become a serial killer at a young age and could not have become anything else.
SPOILERS ABOUND!
The story moves around a lot, starting when Dahmer gets caught. He openly confesses to police and from there the story shifts back and forth in time, from Dahmer’s childhood, teen years, early twenties back to the height of his murder spree in his late twenties and early thirties up until his arrest.
As a child, Little Jeff saw a lot of things that kids just shouldn’t see. His mother Shari (an almost unrecognizable Penelope Ann Miller) has mental problems, such that she attempts suicide often and Lil’ Jeff sees her in a drugged up state of near death. She constantly screams and hollers at husband Lionel (Richard Jenkins), pulling a knife on him at one point for Lil Jeff to see. Also, she’s obsessed with UFOs. She really believes little green men are after her, to the point that she’s ready to cut you if you disagree.
In turn, Lionel’s response to the situation isn’t great. Though it’s understandable he doesn’t want to stick around his crazy, alien obsessed wife while she’s yelling at him and pulling sharp cutlery on him, the solution wasn’t to just run away, leaving the kids with her alone for days at a time. The solution was to get her some help and get the kids out of the house.
Overall, I’m confused on what happened with his parents. On one hand, the series treats Shari as a woman who late in life, it is revealed by more modern medicine that she suffered from postpartum depression, and perhaps if 1960s doctors had been more up to snuff, they would have been able to help her and not just treat her as a wacko lady suffering from lady delusions. On the other hand, she does pull knives on her hubby and I doubt if the situation were reversed, we’d have much sympathy for a man who pulls a knife on his wife, bats in his belfry be damned.
At any rate, the couple divorces but a lack of communication leads to each assuming the other is taking care of Jeff during his senior year. Mom leaves the house with younger son David, telling 17 year old Jeff to go live with his father. Dad runs off with a new love interest and assumes Jeff was staying with his ex-wife. In a total not-parents of the year move, neither bothers to check on the lad until Dad finally does and realizes the kid has been living by himself for three months (who the eff was paying all the house bills?)
During this unsupervised time, the Jeffster makes his first kill and its a road to horror from there. Then again, the boy was always obsessed with death. Watching his father remove a dead possum from under the house catches his interest. Lionel, a scientist, mistakenly assumes this means his young son has an interest in anatomy, so the duo develop a hobby of collecting roadkill and dissecting dead animals in the garage together.
I could go on and on, but overall, it’s a story of how a kid can grow up to be messed up if a) he’s exposed to messed up things and b) there isn’t an adult who gives the kid the proper guidance as well as c) the police, government, teachers and other members of the system miss the warning signs.
One wonders how many lives might have been saved if Lionel had told his son, “No son. Dissecting roadkill is creepy and everyone will think you’re a creepy little shit if you do it. Stop doing creepy shit.”
What if Shari’s doctors had caught her problem early so she wasn’t always being mental in front of Lil Jeff? What if the police had arrested him at 18 when he had human remains in the back seat? What if the police had listened to good samaritans who found a drugged up boy with a head injury and pleaded with police to look into this rather than just assume it was a lover’s spat gone wrong?
To be certain, there is much non-wokeness in Jeff’s life and Netflix doesn’t ignore it or try to spin it for modern times. It takes places from the 1960s to the 1990s, not exactly a good time for wokeness. Rather than sugarcoat it, Netflix lets things that were considered fine in that day happen on screen for us to cringe at with modern eyes. Lionel and Shari’s doctor talking about Shari as if she wasn’t there, scolding her for interrupting. Cops who couldn’t get out of Dahmer’s apartment fast enough, concerned they might catch gay germs. Grandma who urges the young man to come to church and pray the gay away. (Although I don’t want to knock Granny too much as she seems like the only relative the kid had who had any patience for him.) A socially isolated Jeff who makes fun of kids with cerebal palsy for laughs, just because he’s starved for any kind of attention.
Context is largely dead in modern TV, but Netflix trusts us to look at these olden times, warts and all, that we won’t think the bad things that were acceptable in that era were cool but rather, that we can see how they led someone like Dahmer to do bad things.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Great acting from Miller and Jenkins (Molly Ringwald also as Lionel’s second wife Shari) as well as Evan Peters, he of X-Men Quicksilver fame who plays Dahmer. Don’t forget Niecy Nash who plays Dahmer’s long suffering next door neighbor Glenda. Speaking of what ifs, one wonders how many lives might have been saved if police had taken her calls about her neighbor’s smelly apartment, scary sounds coming from her neighbor’s apartment, holy shit will you guys come check out my neighbor’s freak show apartment already?
Spies! Lies! Something else that rhymes with -ies!
BQB here with a review of the first three episodes of Andor, Disney Plus’ new Star Wars series.
I’m just going to say it up front. It’s OK. It didn’t wow me, but it didn’t zow me either. I’ll keep watching it, but like the recent Obi-Wan, it didn’t blow much wind up my proverbial skirt.
The series is a prequel to Rogue One (ironically, the best and arguably most unsung Star Wars creation amidst a slew of Disney’s SW duds the past decade.) As you may recall, in that film, Diego Luna played Cassian Andor, a rebel spy so committed to the cause that he is willing to commit almost any heartless act, up to and including straight up murder, to further the rebel cause.
How did he get that way? This series aims to tell that story.
At first, the idea of this series seems silly. Aren’t there more popular, longer running characters we’d like to know more about? Where are the Lando Chronicles? The Leia Adventures? Skywalker: A Life?
Ah, but Disney has dipped its toe into those waters. A film where a younger actor played a younger Han Solo didn’t go over well (irony is I liked it). CGI Skywalker is interesting for a brief moment until you wonder how long it will be before all movies are just CGI renderings and actors are out of a job (feel free to discuss whether that would be a good thing.)
An interesting part of Rogue One is it showed a more vicious side of the Rebel Alliance than we are used to. In any rebellion, rebels must ask themselves if the victory they seek is worth the loss of life that must occur to achieve it. So OK, I’ll buy into the story of how one rebel was so angered by the Empire that he became a badass intergalactic spy.
All that said, the whole thing seems adulty. Not as in naughty, for this is still Disney, but as in a plot only adults might be interested in. Three episodes in, there are no light sabers or space battles. It’s light on the aliens. There is a silly droid. Most of the action comes in the form of a shootout in the end of episode three.
The plot? Cassian Andor was once Kassa, a member of an indigenous tribe of the planet Kenari. When his family discovers a crashed Empire ship that was up to no good (illegal mining apparently), the Empire kills the tribe sans Kassa, who is saved in the nick of time by scavenger Maarva (Fiona Shaw), who whisks the lad away to Ferrix, where she raises him as his adoptive mother.
Years later, an adult Cassian searches for his sister, who he believes escaped Empire forces. He checks a brothel where he believes she might be, um, you know, working, but has no luck. Alas, he gets into a spat with a couple of security company goons. Said goons picked the wrong fight with the wrong guy, leading Cassian to go on the run, right into the hands of Luthen Rael (Stellan Skaarsgaard), a clandestine spy recruiter for the Rebel Alliance.
It’s all very interesting. However, I think it might suffer from the fact that the plot might be too heady for kids, yet the subject matter might be too silly for adults.
SIDENOTE: The inclusion of a brothel in the first scene raised my eyebrow. True, no sex is shown. No debauchery is shown. It was part of the script that it was an off night and few customers were there. Still, it seemed out of place for a Disney show.
When George Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney years ago, I thought maybe did so in order to keep Hollywood from doing nasty things to it, i.e. to not make an X rated flick with wookies having wookie sex or Jedis snorting space coke or what have you. Then again, I remembered that Lucas was the one who stuffed Leia into that Slave Leia outfit so he probably doesn’t have a lot of moral authority to stand on.
So, I guess my complaint is less about Disney bringing down Star Wars and more about Star Wars bringing down Disney. The deeper we get into Star Wars, the more inevitable it becomes that we see characters engaged in depraved activities. “Spice” has already been used as a code for drugs in prior Disney SW productions. Meanwhile, while characters have appeared in scantily clad outfits going back to the early films, this is the confirmation that beings in the SW universe not only do it but pay to do it.
IDK. I just think Disney needs to remember it is first and foremost a producer of entertainment for children. I know adults love SW too, but we have to think of the kids first and have plots that are suitable for the younguns. Ergo, no space brothels, even if it’s dark and deserted and the business of said space brothel is only alluded to.
We already saw Disney wrestle with a darker plot line and fail miserably in The Book of Boba Fett. Freaking Boba Fett fights a war to become the head gangster of Tatooine, only to be against all crime, which is a great example to set for the kids but doesn’t bode well for a show about a space criminal.
Maybe Disney needs to just stick with family friendly Star Wars base crimes. Smuggling, but only done to help the rebels, for example.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. I think we are at a point where we have to realize Star Wars in its infancy was more about awesome special effects, and that Vader carried most of it. The further we get from those early films, the less interesting it all becomes. Perhaps some genius will figure out a way to make it interesting again. To Disney’s credit, the Mando series was a winner.
Always remember these three important rules of life, 3.5 readers:
#1 – Don’t trust Whitey.
#2 – The Lord loves a working man.
#3 – See a doctor and get rid of it.
BQB here with a review of this classic comedy of Steve Martin’s most hilarious film.
NOTE: This is a review for people who have seen the movie. Ergo, if you want no SPOILERS, look away. Go watch then come back.
I saw this movie on a list of films that couldn’t be remade today. I instantly remembered how much it made me laugh back in the day and had to rewatch it again. I’m not sure what that list was talking about because I would argue this is a rare comedy that has stood the test of time, 43 years in fact.
The premise? Steve Martin, in his first major film role, plays Navin Johnson, the white son of African American sharecroppers in Mississippi. He loves his family and they love him, but on one fateful birthday, he, to his shock, discovers that he is white (yes, even though he is well into his thirties.)
Navin’s mother explains that the family adopted him when he was left on their doorstep as a baby and raised him as one of their own. Realizing that he isn’t getting younger, Navin decides he must venture forth from the family homestead and out into the world, seeking to find fame and fortune of his very own.
From there, the flick is a string of skits and gags, all surrounding Navin’s adventure into the great unknown, with cameos by various stars of the day helping or hindering him as the case may be.
Back in the day, Roger Ebert gave this film 2 stars. You can read that review here:
Now, here’s the thing. I admire Ebert because he built a great career doing what I love, namely, watching and picking apart movies. He’s the Mike Tyson of movie critics. So far be it from me to criticize him, but I think he got this one wrong.
As Ebert argues, comedy is subjective (so if he didn’t find it funny then I suppose in his view he wasn’t wrong). He goes on to explain there is funny for the sake of funny and situational funny. He goes on to say sometimes a character wears a funny hat and that’s the joke and sometimes there’s a silly situation that requires the character to wear a funny hat. The latter, according to Ebert, is way funnier.
Thus, to our veteran critic, Martin is all hat and no cattle, just a doofus doing doofusy things. Truly, he did and one might say he’s a pioneer of screwball comedy, making silly faces long before Jim Carrey.
However, what I believe Ebert missed is this film is one great big allegory for the fallout that occurs when youthful (or even not so youthful), naive optimism crashes into cold, hard reality. Forget Dr. Seus’s “Oh, the Places You Will Go!” Every high school graduate should get a copy of The Jerk.
Think about it. The high school grad thinks they’ve got the world by the horns when they head off to college. They think they know everything. Then they encounter the lousy roommate, the demanding professor, the first boss who dresses them down over a mistake. The student loan payments are due and the job interviews are going nowhere. I did all this studying to be a barista? You’ve got to be kidding me.
Compare this with Navin’s mistake filled journey. Navin is full of uninformed assumptions that blow up in his face due to his lack of experience. Navin thinks he’ll easily hitchhike across the USA, only to stand in front of his family’s home all day, well into the night. Navin gets a job at a gas station and thinks he’s hoodwinked a crook by tying said fraudster’s car to a church, only for the ne’er-do-well to take off down the drown dragging half the church, guests at a wedding still inside, behind him.
Navin is overjoyed when he is listed in the phone book, only for a homicidal maniac to pick his name at random and go on a murderous rampage against him. Navin joins a carnival, meets Patty the slovenly, over-sexed motorbiked stuntwoman and assumes he has found a ticket to free, no strings attached sex, only to discover that Patty is so attached she’s willing to commit violence to keep him.
The Navester comes on too strong with love interest Marie and she bolts. He invents the opti-grab grip eyeglass attachment that makes him a billionaire, only to be bankrupted by a lawsuit from irate customers when the product makes them go cross-eyed.
Bottomline – In life, mistakes are guaranteed. You think you won’t make them, but it’s not a matter of if you’ll make them but when. You’ll make assumptions. You’ll make decisions. Your actions will blow up in your face. You can fall apart and give up, or you can learn from your mistakes, vow not to repeat them and do better.
Had Navin not been such a dum-dum, he might have seen many lessons in his mistakes. He should have walked out to a main road to hitchhike, or heck, earned some money to buy a bus ticket. He should have left to crook to the cops. Not all publicity is good. Don’t have sex with someone you don’t want to commit to lest you hurt their feelings. If you sell a product, make sure you test it first.
Yes, wide-eyed, unbridled optism will surely always crash against the hard wall of reality, but all you can do is pick yourself up, dust yourself off, figure out what you did wrong and not do it again.
In the end, the only lesson Navin learned is home is where the heart is. Sometimes, the greatness we seek is right in our own backyard, coming to us in the form of the people who love us the most, that we love in return. When Navin hits Skid Row, it’s his sharecropper family who find him, clean him up, and bring him back to the place he thrived the most, and an ending credit scene where he dances while his family sings shows us he couldn’t be happier.
Two cringeworthy things that don’t fit today’s modern wokeness. 1 Is when a group of mafiosos use the N word, Navin defends his family’s honor in perhaps the funniest bit of the film when he says, “Sir, you are talking to an n-word!” then magically channels the spirit of a kung-fu warrior as he kicks the asses of all the racist single handed (with the exception of Iron Balls McGinty.)
I would argue this joke gets a pass due to context. Navin loves his family so much. His love for them is the sweetest part of the movie and perhaps the most redeeming quality of an otherwise dimwitted dullard. The n word is only used to pave the way for a bit in which a man who loves his family kung-fus a bunch of racists into thinking twice about saying such nasty slurs. But ok, context is a dead concept when it comes to humor now, so this joke doesn’t hold up.
Second, the family at the end sings “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” a song that references slavery days. All are so happy as the family sings and plays instruments while Navin dances joyously to celebrate his return home for good. In context, one might remember that in slavery times, slaves sang such songs to keep their spirits up when forced against their will to do punishing labor. In 1979, there were no slaves alive but it is possible that Navin’s father, given the time period, might have, as a child, known an old person or two who lived with slavery times or even was a slave. I assume the point of the film was the family is singing a song that was passed down through the generations of their family though yeah, it surely would have been better if the family had sung a happier, less racially charged song.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. When I was a kid, I just thought Steve Martin was a doofus doing doofy things in this film. As an adult, I see it as a silly growing up tale, teaching young as well as old that whenever they take on a new encounter, they will inevitably make mistakes, fall on their face, have to pick themselves up and try, try again. In the end, the only real losers are those who keep making the same mistake over and over.
I do think this is a rare old comedy that holds up in modern times, save for two scenes that don’t keep with modern woke standards. I’m not saying “give it a pass” but if you consider context and intent, the scenes were meant to show a white man who loves his black family so much, more than anything in the world, and ultimately it is this love that is the best part of him.
Bonus points for a cameo by Jackie Mason who plays Navin’s first boss, the gas station owner. As a kid, I was a fan of all kinds of comedy and wonder if I was the only kid who would repeat Mason’s Yiddishisms. I dare say the man did more to popularize the use of words like oy vey, fakakta, and schmuck than anyone.
Double bonus points for Steve Martin. So many comedians rise up the ladder as anyone does in any profession. They get a small part here or there, many a medium sized role that leads to a big break. Martin had already been a popular SNL host and a comedian who sold out shows in major venues. He also wrote for Smothers Brothers. So by the time this, his first movie, came around, he was a veritable PHD in funny holder. Even though Martin was a Great Bambino level comic by the time this film came along, it is still rare for a comedian to knock their first movie out of the park.
I think we have a contender for the Razzie Award for Worst Film of 2022. When I first saw the trailer, I wanted to like it. The premise is pretty simple yet scary. A father takes his young daughters on a photo safari of remote African wilderness. Alas, various problems ensue and the family ends up stuck in an immobile car, about to become lion chow if they venture too far outside for too long. In other words, it’s Cujo but with a lion instead of a rabid dog.
The film has a lot when it comes to special effects. Flicks are using CGI animals more and more, the good news being that real animals no longer have to be treated like furry, feathery clowns for our amusement. (They never did but that’s a longer convo.) The downside is that filmmakers need to learn to use restraint when it comes to having CGI animals do ridiculous things a real animal would never do. While I understand that every film requires a certain suspension of disbelief, an early scene where two CGI enormous adult lions hug and romp with Sharlto Copley, embracing him like friendly housecats rather than rip him to shreds is absurd.
The problem is there is very little plot to back the film up. What little plot there is, is very contrived and not enough to flesh out the film’s short run time of 90 minutes. Essentially, Idris Elba plays Dr. Nate Samuels, a medical doctor whose wife Amahle recently died after a period of estrangement between the couple.
Nate brings his daughters Meredith and Norah (Iyana Halley and Leah Jeffries) on a trip to their mother’s homeland, hoping to find, I don’t know. Spiritual enlightenment. Reconnection with their lost matriarch. A chance to get away from it all. Typical movie brat Meredith treats her old man like garbage, blaming her father for quote unquote “not being there” in typical fashion of a young person who hasn’t been knocked around by the world enough times to realize that expectations never quite match up to reality and bottomline, if Mom didn’t want Dad to be there, then he couldn’t have been there. The reason for the separation is never given other than a vague idea that the couple wasn’t getting along.
The Samuels family’s tour guide of Africa is Martin Battles, played by none other than white South African actor Sharlto Copley. There’s a bit of irony in this casting choice. Given today’s uber woke world, one can’t help but scratch their head at the idea of a white man acting as the protector of a black family during their trip to Africa. However, Copley has been an actor and filmmaker for years, much of his work devoted to a love of the land he grew up in and ultimately, putting issues of race aside, the Samuels family are a bunch of city slickers from New York while Battles is an expert when it comes to African wildlife, having put in years of helping to conserve native species.
In other words, one might look at the premise through a different type of woke lens, that being race doesn’t automatically make one an expert in one subject or another. The Samuels are New Yorkers who know little of the Savannah, but Dr. Samuels is a practiced medicine man called upon to save lives at various parts in the film. Battles is white, but grew up in the area and through experience, learned all about fighting poachers, speaking native languages, keeping one step ahead of hungry lions.
But yeah, I get why viewers of African descent might roll their eyes at that early scene where the lions hug and romp with Sharlto as if he’s a modern-day White Lion King, Tamer and Friend to all African Wildlife he surveys.
At any rate, once the crappy plot is out of the way, the Samuels must survive the attack of a lion on the prowl for revenge after his pride is shot by poachers. An even earlier scene tells us this is no ordinary lion as it slashes through a pack of poachers with a vengeance. There’s one strange part where one poacher gets caught in a snag wire only to become lion food and I can only assume the idea is that he was hoisted on his own petard, i.e. he forgot where his pals laid the wire. Yeah, not gonna lie for a minute I had to pause it, scratch my head and think, “Did that lion lay that trip wire?”
If you can suspend, and I mean really suspend disbelief, then this flick is a nice brief diversion. I wouldn’t bother renting it. Wait for streaming. Though there are some scary scenes, there are also eyerolling scenes where Idris Elba somehow magically uses, I don’t know, father’s love strength to kick the ass of this killer cat rather than become lion food, as we all would, because it is a damn lion.
STATUS: Not shelf-worthy. With a little more flushing out of the plot, this might have been better. I’m not sure if Elba had to be in this movie or if it was just a payday, but he’s too good for such drek. Frankly, Copley is too good for this drek. Even the young actresses playing the daughters were too good for this drek. Dang it, even the CGI lion was too good for this drek.
SIDENOTE: I think the nuclear proliferation of streaming services is turning films into drek. When I saw this trailer, I immediately predicted it would be drek because I had a hunch the filmmakers wouldn’t take it seriously but rather, would throw together a haphazard plot then make the movie largely dependent on some scares courtesy of a CGI lion. One of the girls wears a Jurassic Park shirt, perhaps a tribute to another film where kids ran and hid from CGI beasts, but at least there was some substance, some intrigue to the madness. In other words, give us more. Maybe the family gets tricked into entering the lion reserve or something. I don’t know. Ultimately, streaming media = Hollywood feels the need to churn out the schlock at a rapid pace and the substance is lost. There were good actors and actresses here. There were good special effects here. It just needed a better script, and perhaps more time and money to back that script up.
Bookshelf Battle 