Bookshelf Battle

Can you smell what this review is cookin’ 3.5 readers?

BQB here with a review of The Iron Claw.

Professional wrestling. We tend to look at it as a joke. Giant, musclebound men in spandex shorts shouting hilarious barbs at each other. They all have their own elaborate costumes, backstories, moves, etc. They pretend like its real but we all know its fake, right? I mean surely, a “sport” where dudes get on TV wearing feather boas and silly hats and threaten to tear each other apart and hit each other with chairs has to be fake.

Ah, but this film invites the viewer behind the scenes of professional wrestling to understand two core concepts:

#1 – Even though the storylines are fake, the pain is real. It’s impossible for dudes to throw each other around like this and not suffer terrible injuries, both mental and physical.

#2 – The best showmen, i.e. those most loved by the crowd, benefit with better fake storylines that move them up in the ranks, get them more fights, more time in the ring and ultimately more money and fame. Ergo, despite the fakeness of it all, there’s still motivation to train and push themselves harder, which comes at a cost.

Enter the world of the allegedly cursed Von Ehrich family, a multi-generational wrestling clan who, unless there’s a historian who knows better, probably suffered more than anyone else in the name of a fake sport.

Father Fritz (Holt McCallany) takes his family on tour in a trailer, living a poor life as he chases fame and the hope of bringing home the big title belt, but alas, in his eyes, is always screwed out of it by the National Wrestling Association, the company that he dedicates his life, blood, sweat and tears too.

He pledges his family won’t always live like this and fast forward years later, they don’t. They live on a big Texas ranch where mother Doris (Maura Tierney) makes breakfast every day. Adult sons Kevin and David (Zac Efron and Harris Dickinson) have carried on the family tradition, making big names for themselves in pro-wrestling.

For awhile, it seems like a good life, a family that has made a good living dedicating themselves to a sport and it has paid off, but alas, there is a price to be paid and boy do they ever pay it. Fritz is simply obsessed with bringing home that belt, the same belt he felt he was cheated out of, so living vicariously through his sons, he pushes all of them to get into wrestling, even those who probably shouldn’t.

When President Carter pulls America out of the Olympics in the late 1970s, the third brother Kerry (Jeremy Allen White of the Bear fame), an Olympic shotputter, loses his chance to compete for gold. Fritz pushes him into the ring and though Kerry is athletic, the pain is something he just isn’t used to. He turns to steroids and alcohol to keep up and suffers a downward spiral.

Meanwhile, youngest brother Mike (Stanley Simons) is a skinny weakling, a nerdy music protege who would be a source of pride for his ability to carry a tune in any other family but is considered the black sheep in this one for his lack of natural talent when it comes to pummeling giant, sweaty men. He gives up his love of music for the ring to please the old man and as often happens in such films (and in life) there’s what Dad thinks is best and what son thinks is best and when son goes through the motions of pleasing Dad it usually doesn’t end well.

I won’t go into further detail and spoil the movie other than to say the first hour is a high of the family achieving a lot of success and you really root for them, thinking anything is possible in this great country, that isn’t it wonderful they all came together to find such success where dudes act like dum dums in the ring for a crowd’s amusement.

The second hour is a emotional rollercoaster that keeps going down, down, down, leaving you in a great depression as you wonder just how much pain can one family endure as the tragedies never cease. In fact, the family experienced so much heartache that the film wasn’t able to fit it all in and there were further stories of suffering left on the cutting room floor. So much was there suffering that the writers apparently made an excecutive decision to leave some of it out lest the audience not want to commit hari kari. I admit by the end I was feeling pretty low and wondering why I even bothered going to see this movie in the first place, though it well written, well acted, serves as the first Oscar bait of the season and is a cautionary tale against, I don’t know what exactly. Ignoring your health in the name of success? Pushing your children too hard to catch the dreams that passed you by?

As for the acting, it’s superb. Zac Efron is barely recognizable having put on a ton of muscle. Holt McCallany has earn a rep playing hard nosed pricks with perfect diction and does it again. This might be his chance at winning an oscar for doing so, as it also might be Efron’s. Dickinson and Simons I never heard of before but both play their parts well. I haven’t seen Maura Tierney in a movie in a long time but she plays the long suffering mother who puts up with too much with grace and dignity and never complains despite having every reason to well. Lilly James rounds out the cast as Pam, the wife who saves Kevin (Efron’s) life with love and support.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy.

You read that right, 3.5 readers.

At some point, I may write a longer post about this with all the things I’ve gone through this year. The short version is I have struggled with my weight my entire life and have sadly ignored health problems for so long that they became too terrible to ignore, so last Christmas I set out to lose weight and I did though I still have a lot to go. Healthwise, I’m sorry to say things aren’t looking great and I fear there may come a time when I won’t be able to entertain all 3.5 of you anymore but all I can say for now is I am taking things day by day and as far as I know, that won’t be today.

Merry Christmas.

Oy, what a wacky talking lizard.

BQB here with a review of Netflix’s latest kids movie.

Leo, voiced by Adam Sandler in the guise of an elderly, grumpy old Jewish man in the form of a lizard, has lived the life of a classroom terrarium pet for over seven decades. He’s lived through quite a bit of history, albeit from the confines of a glass tank in the back of a room full of snotty, bratty little kids. Teachers have come and gone, passing him down from one generation to the next. He’s even seen tank roommates come and go. He currently rooms with Squirtle, a turtle voiced by perpetually pissed off Bostonian Bill Burr.

One fateful day, Leo learns a duo of sad facts that a) his species of lizard typically lives to age 75 and b) that he is 74. He becomes horribly depressed, fearing that he has wasted his life in a tank when he could have been outside, living it up in a swamp. He hopes to escape, and when a new grumpy substitute assigns the children to take the pets home for the weekend (past teachers did this dirty work), Leo sees these dumb kids as easily bamboozled, and he should be able to bust out into the great outdoors in no time.

Ah, but alas, trouble is afoot for the best laid plans of mice, men and lizards. As it turns out, kids were always able to hear Leo speak. He just never had any time alone with them in 74 years to find that out. And his many years of observing kids and all their problems has given him tremendous insight, thus each weekend, a new kid takes him home and by the end of the weekend, Leo has given the kid a dose of free psychiatry and told him or her everything they need to know to improve their little lives.

Plentiful escape opportunities abound, but Leo wrestles with his desire to be free vs. whether he might have found his true calling in whipping all these stupid little chump kids into shape. He does want to get out into the swamp and chase bugs, yet now that all the kids have come to know and love him, he fears they’ll be heartbroken if they look into the tank one day and find him gone. Decisions, decisions. What is a lizard to do?

STATUS: Shelf-worthy. All I can say is Disney needs to get its act together because even Netflix is getting into the kids’ movie game is this one is pretty solid.

Hold onto your giblets, 3.5 readers. BQB here with a review of what I think will be this year’s surprise hit.

I love it when I go into a film thinking it’s going to be total drek, only to come out pleasantly surprised.

“But BQB,” you might say. “Why would you go to a movie if you think it’s going to be drek in the first place?”

Simple answer. I was bored af.

IMO, the promos didn’t look good. A pilgrim chopping up the residents of Plymouth, MA, home of the first Thanksgiving dinner, with an axe? No thanks.

But it turns out this is one twisted, outrageous dark comedy, a satire that sends up everything we know and love about our favorite holiday dedicated to gluttony as well as the slasher genre itself. I can tell you on a personal level, I can’t remember the last time I sat in a theater and heard an audience laugh and gasp in terror so if you can get out to your local cinema, it’s worth it.

The story centers around a group of dopey teenagers who, on one fateful Thanksgiving night, stop by a big box Walmart type store to shop before they go to a movie. A Black Friday mob has assembled and as shoppers push and shove their way toward the front of the store, things get ugly. Alas, the kids engage in some childish antics that inspire a riotous stampede, though in their defense, they’re stupid kids and how could they have known? As you might expect, many a shopper is killed in the fracas, often in sad, silly, and OK, yes, hilarious ways. This is an Eli Roth picture and if you know his work then that’s all you need to know.

Flash forward a year later and the town of Plymouth is still recovering from the box store melee. Many residents lost a loved one. The high school kids are all depressed over what happened. But as the next Turkey Day approaches, some maniac in a John Carver mask (as in John Carver, the pilgrim and governor of the original Plymouth Colony but the name takes on a new meaning as the murderer is literally carving victims up with an ax) targets the kids, picking them off one by one. He even goes outside the group, hacking up any town resident who displayed bad behavior during the riot – i.e. an idiot who filmed the massacre on his cell phone and streamed it rather than help people, an evil lady who physically attacked people just to save a buck on a waffle iron and so on.

It’s up to the kids to solve the mystery as they run down a list of townsfolk, each with their own motive, each who lost something or someone to the box store riot a year earlier. Patrick Dempsey headlines an otherwise talented cast of unknown young up and comers, playing the town sheriff tasked with unmasking the axe wielding lunatic. Since it takes place in MA, you can imagine the Boston accents are laid on thick and heavy by most of the actors involved, Dempsey included.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy. It’s a surprise winner, in my book, bound to become a guilty pleasure people will break out every Thanksgiving. It’s funny. It’s original. Though it has a predominantly young cast of late teen, early-twenty somethings, it doesn’t get bogged down in PC wokesterism as so many flicks catered to that age group do. It knows it has one job – to make you laugh and make you disgusted. It does both well, though a word of warning, at times, it does the latter too well. Do keep in mind, the killer is quite literally turning his victims into his own personal Thanksgiving dinner, with all the gore that entails, so if you’re squeamish, this one probably isn’t for you.

BONUS POINTS: Gina Gershon has a great early cameo and I’m too lazy to surf around to find out who he is, but the kid who played the gun nut “McCarty,” who supplies the gang with all their weapons to fight the baddie was funny and is someone to watch.