BQB here with a review of this heartwarming kids’ movie.
I wasn’t going to see this, but happened to be around a movie theater tonight with nothing else to do so thought, what the heck. Glad I did. While it’s not the typical type of movie I’m into, it has heart and if you’re looking for something the whole family can enjoy, then you can’t go wrong here.
The plot? 12-year-old Bea (Cailey Fleming) has suffered too much in her young life. Visits to her grandmother (Fiona Shaw) ‘s apartment in NYC can only mean one thing – one of her parents is in the hospital. She spent some time there as a little girl while her mother was dying from cancer and now, as a tween, she’s back, staying in the city while her father (John Krakinski) undergoes heart surgery.
Alas, poor Bea fears she may be on the verge of losing another parent when new wild and wacky friends come into her life. She discovers she is one of very few people who can still see imaginary friends long past the little kid stage of life.
Another such person is Cal (Ryan Reynolds) who lives in an apartment on the next floor in Bea’s grandmother’s building. While Bea finds her ability to see “IFs” amusing, Cal has long considered it a curse, because these weirdoes won’t leave him alone! Since he’s the only adult who can see them, he has a duty to help them find new kids to be BFFs with, seeing as how their previous kids grew up and forgot all about them.
Cal runs a placement agency for the IFs out of his apartment but it isn’t going well. He has the knowledge, but the IFs drive him nuts. Bea is young and inexperienced, but she has patience and easily establishes a rapport with the imaginary creatures.
And so, a partnership is created as Cal and Bea set out to place every last forgotten imaginary friend with a new kid who needs a BFF. Said IFs range from a big blue furry monster, a British bug girl, a talking glass of water, a talking banana (well, they all talk), a robot, a superhero raccoon, a pink alligator, a unicorn, a Shakespeare reciting ghost, a noir-style private detective and more.
The understated and/or unstated theme of the movie seems to be that kids are savvier than ever these days, so getting them to believe in the non-existent is difficult, ergo finding kids to pair the imaginary friends with is quite a chore. The movie gets a little schizophrenic as the writers can’t quite seem to decide whether the goal is to pair the IFs with new kids or to reunite them with their old kids who forgot them, who are all now adults and sadly, as we see, many of those adults are going through hard times and could use reminders of their happier childhood days.
Steve Carrell lends his voice to the big fluffy monster Blue, while the late, great Louis Gossett Jr. delivers what I believe is his final performance (unless another movie buff knows better) as the wise old teddy bear Lewis.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. I’m not sure this one will go down in the annals of children’s movie classic history, but I give it a solid A. You’ll love it. Your kids will love it. It has a good message about finding little bits of joy amidst the endless stream of sorrows that life provides. Never too early to teach your kids that life is one great big pile of shit and they need to dull the pain with imaginary fantasies of wonders that will never, ever be. OK I’m not entirely sure that’s what the movie was trying to say but that’s what I got out of it.
BQB here with a review of the latest monkey movie.
I told myself I wasn’t going to watch this one, largely because I thought the last installment, 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes, was a bit of a stinkfest. And frankly, they’ve made a lot of these movies over the past decade and IMO, none of them have been very memorable. The main characters are CGI apes, after all, so the films are low on human actors with performances that will stick in your mind, and yet though animated, don’t have the same heart as say, a full-on Disney type cartoon feature. So, you’re just left with a lot of animated monkeys without a lot of feeling.
But I’m a movie buff and I was bored so I went and while I think this one will come and go like its predecessors without a lot of fanfare, I have to admit its a lot better than the last few installments. A better story and better character development go a long way.
Past modern ape films (as opposed to the 1960s originals) showed us “The Planet of the Apes” in its infancy. Humans experimenting with a virus that goes awry, causing monkeys to get smarter and take over and other films saw the early years where humans and apes fought for control of the planet.
This film takes place many years in the future, long after the death of Caesar, an ape leader from previous films who managed to keep the peace between humans and apes. Now the apes reign supreme and humans have become subordinate. The same virus that made monkeys smart made humans dumb, so the few humans that survive just wander the countryside, foraging and rooting around in the dirt like dumb animals. Most of them do, anyway. A handful of smart humans unaffected by the virus remain.
Noah (Owen Teague) is a young ape from the peaceful bird clan, apes who appreciate nature and study falconry, bonding apes with birds who obey their commands. Alas, one day while in search of his own bird to train, evil apes under the command of super evil ape King Proximus (Kevin Durand) burn his village, kill most of the apes and take the few survivors hostage, including his friends and mother.
Swearing to avenge his slain father and rescue his mother and friends, Owen goes on a long hero’s journey to…dun dun dun “The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” a forbidden place his father had long warned him to stay away from, for it is ruled by evil apes who kidnap and enslave other apes for nefarious purposes.
Along the way, Owen is joined on his quest by the wise scholar orangutan Roca (Peter Macon) who is a gay ape, because why wouldn’t he be? It’s 2024, after all. He becomes a mentor to the young monkey, educating about the world he has largely been sheltered from his whole life.
He’s also joined by Mae (Freya Allan), one of the last few humans capable of intelligent thought and speech. She wants to rescue her fellow humans just as badly as Owen wants to rescue his fellow chimps, so they’ll have to work together. She’s also one of very few human actors in the entire movie (William H. Macy makes a welcome guest appearance half way through) so you will have to accept that this flick is pretty much one great big glorified cartoon.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. I still think these modern monkey movies have been for the most part a pile of drek, but this one had some heart as it followed a hero’s journey structure, a young being forced to grow up quick and find himself and overcome adversity so you can’t go wrong there.
BQB here with a review of…um…checks notes…a polyamorous tennis movie.
Has there ever been a really, really good tennis movie? Like a really memorable one? I had to google it and OK, Battle of the Sexes came to mind, but only after the google. I believe that years from now, this might go down as perhaps the first memorable tennis movie, because while you come (no pun intended) for the 3-way, you stay for the tennis.
“Do we really stay for the tennis, BQB?”
Yes. Somehow they found a way to make tennis that intriguing, and it’s not ALL about the 3-way. OK it’s mostly about the three way but at any rate, I never thought a movie about tennis could keep me on the edge of my seat.
The plot? In non linear fashion, the story jumps back and forth over the course of 20 years, telling the story of tennis pro power couple Artie and Tashi Donaldson (Mike Faist and Zendaya) and their once friend and lover, Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor.)
Zweig and Artie are childhood friends and longtime tennis buddies when they meet Tashi at a regional tournament in high school in the 2000s. The trio hit it off so well that the become inseparable and by that I mean, you can’t separate them when they’re between the sheets. 1 chick and 2…well, you get the drift. Zendaya gets spit-roasted! OK she actually doesn’t on film but you can imagine that her character probably did, early and often.
“BQB, what is it mean to get spit-roasted?”
OK, 3.5 readers, you know how when you go to the grocery store and they have those rotisserie chickens warming on those 2 metal poles that turn them round and round so they stay nice and warm under the heat lamp? Never you mind.
Time passes. By the start of the film which, in Tarantino fashion, is the ending, Artie and Tashi are an old, middle-aged pro couple. Artie is a world famous player. Tashi is famous in her own right, though her career was short lived due to an injury. However, she manages her husband’s career and managed him to the tippy top of tennis stardom.
But alas, as of late, Artie is on a losing streak, so Tashi has a suggestion. Take on a sure thing to boost his confidence. A petty ante, seemingly low stakes regional game. A slump buster, if you will. It’s kinda like how some dudes will, after striking out with hot chicks for awhile, will go ahead and boink an ugly chick just to boost their confidence so they come across as more desirable to the hot chicks for having some stank on their hang low.
What? Yes, I swear this is a tennis movie.
Meanwhile, by sure coincidence, Zweig, the Donaldsons’ former menage-a-trois partner and beloved friend now turned enemy due to reasons I won’t get into for SPOILER purposes, ends up being that slump buster, having qualified to compete in said slump busting match.
Zweig is getting older. He’s poor and living in his car. He’s swirling the bottom of the drain of the tennis circuit. He can barely make ends meet. He resents the Donaldsons, for it could have just had easily been him earning the big cash if Artie hadn’t snatched Tashi away, so now he’s hungry and angry and mean and RAARGH does he ever want payback.
What does this all boil down to? It’s the ultimate fight against cuckery. Tennis is Tashi’s life. Managing and being married to a winner is all she had to dull the pain of losing out on her own career. If Artie loses to a man she once danced the horizontal mambo with, he will forever be an uber cuck in Tashi’s eyes and their marriage and idyllic life will be over.
Yet if Patrick loses, he’ll be a homeless bum on the streets forever, so everyone has a lot riding on this and really, you want everyone to win and no one to lose.
Oddly, it’s clear the writers/producers/director knew a lot about tennis, for the story is quite detailed about the sport, to the point where I wondered if this was actually a true story and did I just miss a story in the news about three tennis players having a three way? Turns out it is indeed fictional though screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes in interviews has said he based the story on a tense Williams sisters match (the match seemed so cinematic that his creative juices began flowing.) (See Glamour magazine for more info but I’m too lazy to link to it.)
The real star of this film? Zendaya’s butt. Damn. I always thought she was quite skinny but that thing defies all laws physics. No, you don’t get to see it in all its glory, but just enough through the panties and for considerable time. Her butt should get its own independent credit in the film because it is enough reason to see it on the big screen. Truly breath taking, really.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Does it sound ridiculous? Yes, but as the film flashed backward, it strung me along, making me wonder how a once friendly three-way broke up into 2 thirds of the three way despising the other third and as it flashed forward, I needed to know who was going to win this battle royale, this fight to not be a cuck in Zendaya’s eyes.
SIDENOTE: Men, I realized way too late in life that if you’re ever in a position where you feel you need to fight to keep your woman from not thinking of you as a cuck, then you’re already a cuck and need to dump her and find another woman who won’t cuck you. Stand strong against cuckery.
DOUBLE SIDENOTE: All props to Zendaya’s keister aside, this movie really allowed her to flex her acting chops. Prior to this, I saw her as a frivolous starlet but she really comes into her own in this picture. (Pun not intended.)
SPOILERS ABOUND!!! Go watch it first if you don’t want SPOILERS.
3.5 readers, we’ve reached a crisis with movies lately. The new ones, on the whole, are so dumb, lame, and boring, completely made for the paint by numbers, cookie cutter world of streaming, that I rarely rent a film. If it got me to put my butt into a movie theater seat then usually it was worth it (though sometimes it wasn’t) but if it didn’t get me to go to the theater, then usually it is a waste of my time to rent it.
I have tried and more often than not, I usually end up checking my watch 10-20 minutes in, I pause it and check my tweets, I’m so bored I do anything else but watch it and before I know it, a day or two has gone by and I missed my rental window and who cares? I do because I’m out 20 bucks but otherwise that’s a movie I won’t bother with again.
But I’m glad I broke my no-rental rule for this one because I was on the edge of my seat the entire time and if you like horror, crime with just a very light tinge of dark comedy, I’d say it’s worth your time too.
The plot? A bunch of crooks have gotten together to kidnap the 12 year old daughter of a rich man and hold her for 50 million dollars ransom. They break into her father’s luxurious mansion right after she returns from ballerina practice, still in her costume.
At first, this seems like it will be an easy job, but soon the predators are turned into prey when they realize they have been locked into a safe house with…dun dun dun…a tiny vampire ballerina! As the lights dim and the sound track to Swan Lake plays, this tiny terror pirouettes and dances about as she sucks the blood of her tormentors.
PRO: It’s very original. Sure, there have been other movies in the past where crooks messed with the wrong guy or in this case, gal. But to my knowledge, none have done it with a vampire and done it this well so kudos.
CON: Understandably, movie trailers have to package and promote a snippet of what the flick is about. So I remember the trailers for this one going around earlier this year. I recall it being billed as group of people stuck in house with vampire ballerina and thought it was weird. Sometimes I wonder if group of people stuck in mystery house where bad unexplained things would be a good way to promote it and then let the audience enjoy the mystery and the big reveal.
For the first hour, the crew is picked off one by one and they are terrified as they try to figure out what is going on. Little bread crumbs are revealed. Possible red herrings as thrown, making the crooks think they have different, natural, human opponents until the big reveal comes when they realize their captor has pointy teeth and supernatural strength and powers. Without the trailers revealing their opponent was a vampire ballerina, it would have been quite a surprise but then again, the vampire ballerina is the movie’s big draw so of course they have to promote her.
One more complaint. I’ve ranted a lot on this blog about how, for the past 10 years or so, Hollywood has, IMO, crossed the line when it comes to kid actors, putting them into adult situations for the sake of petty entertainment. Here, young actress Alisha Weir is covered with blood and given creepy eyes and terrifying teeth, allowed to feast on victims and commit heinous acts of murder. That’s a lot for a kid but I suppose it’s been done before. We know its ridiculous and not really real. What I didn’t like was a scene earlier in the film where in the beginning, where we think Abigail is just a kid and not a vamp, one of the crooks puts a gun to her hand and she cries. I just didn’t think that was necessary and I didn’t want to see violence like that perpetrated against a kid on film even if it is make believe. get they are trying to establish these are bad people, but we already knew. They had stooped low enough to kidnap a child, after all.
The cast? A lot of newcomers I didn’t recognize as well as movie regulars like Giancarlo Esposito and Dan Stevens who it seems is in everything these days. Kevin Durand, who usually plays psychos and weirdos, doesn’t disappoint. Melissa Barrera plays the crook with a heart of gold.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. If anything else, you’ll hear the sound track to Swan Lake more times than you can possibly shake a stick at.
HEY! I have a complaint about THE ENDING and IT CONTAINS SPOILERS so LOOK AWAY if you don’t want it SPOILED. If you did watch it already, then check it out.
So, we learn that Abigail is not just any old 12 year old but was actually frozen in time due to her vampirism several hundred years ago. Though she has lived for hundreds of years, she is forever trapped in a child’s body. Vampire flicks have explored this horror of horrors before, with Kirsten Dunst in Interview with a Vampire being a prime example. We learn Abigail’s “father” did this to her though we aren’t sure if her father is her actual father or her vampire father i.e did she have another biological father and her vampire father is the one who turned her into a vamp? Are they the same? Who knows?
At any rate, Abigail’s vamp father has been running an evil crime syndicate for centuries and posing as different crime bosses along the way and Abigail has taken the guise as his top enforcer, spreading the rumor that a monstrous hitman carries out the boss’ whims while in fact, his tiny vamp daughter does the murders.
Throughout the flick, Abigail revels in the murderous mayhem yet at the end, she seems to bond with Barrera’s character, Joey. You wonder maybe, for a brief moment, if Abigail wouldn’t like to be saved from this vile life of being a vamp mobster’s vamp hitman and maybe Joey could be her…I don’t know…aunt? Mother figure? Big sister?
So should the film have ended with Joey defeating Abigail’s vamp dad and saving Abigail? Ehh, maybe but then again, I got the impression maybe Joey thought about it, maybe even Abigail thought about it, and they just realized vamp dad would be a fight they couldn’t win and they had to go back where they belong, Joey to the human world, Abigail to the vamp crime world.
BQB here with a review of the first blockbuster movie of the summer season.
Or at least, it should be. I loved it and yet to my surprise, attendance at my local theater was sparse, though I don’t know if that’s a reflection of public interest in the film or public interest in cinema in general, given that most movies will be released to your TV within 2 weeks to a month tops now.
Anyway, in a sea of neverending reboots, Hollywood found a reboot loophole here. The reboot of a property so obscure in the public eye that it’s almost, ALMOST, as if they came up with something completely original. Eighties kids like myself will remember the original version of the Fall Guy with Lee Majors playing a Hollywood stunt man who, by day, recorded himself getting abused on film just to make pansy actors look good and by night, used his brawlin, car chasin, ability to take all manner of physical abuse and keep on tickin’ skills to fight crime. His pick-up truck was so cool it might as well have been given a mention in the ending credits. Heather Thomas played his love interest and fellow stunt woman.
But alas, while many 80s shows have been cemented into pop culture history due to memorable gimmicks (who can forget Magnum PI’s mustache or Mr. T’s tomahawk and gold chains), The Fall Guy, though an awesome show at the time (I remember enjoying it as a kid), faded into a place where it was remembered but only true 80s enthusiasts like the proprietor of this blog.
Frankly, over the years, I worked on my little writing projects that went nowhere and wondered if Hollywood ever one day liked my writing so much that they turned one of my self-published novels into a movie, what reboot would I pitch if I ever wanted to get into the reboot game? I always thought The Fall Guy was a ripe property to be mined because it had a good plot, could invite awesome action given today’s modern special effects, and didn’t have such a devoted fan base that they’d kick and scream over a reboot. (But forgive me for deluding myself into thinking Hollywood wants anything to do with me given my blog is only read by 3.5 readers.)
I digress. Onto the review.
Ryan Gosling stars as Colt Seavers, the titular Fall Guy, living the dream in Hollywood as a successful stunt man with the bonus of a budding relationship with camerawoman Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt.) Alas, an on-set accident leaves him with a broken back, a 2-year recovery, and an ego so bruised that he wants out of the stunt game for kid and even breaks it off with Jody for he’s embarrassed that he has sunk from the heights of movie stunt man to the lowly depths of parking cars for a restaurant valet service.
Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, Colt catches a big break to re-enter the stunt game when raging diet coke addict Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) talks Colt into performing stunts for pretentious a-hole actor Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who Colt is a dead ringer look alike for. Matters are complicated when it turns out that Jody has been promoted to director and is in charge of the film, that Tom, due to a history of bad behavior, has gone missing, and its up to Colt to solve the mystery of Tom’s disappearance with the added pressure that the love of his life’s big shot at movie director stardom will be ruined if he doesn’t deliver. He’ll have to use his stunt man skills to fight all manner of villains, go on crazy car chases and take all sorts of physical abuse. Winston Duke of Black Panther fame lends a hand and some punches as a stunt coordinator who gets Colt’s back.
Criticism? There are a few points in the movie where the love story drags a bit. Don’t get me wrong. The chemistry between Gosling and Blunt is there and it is sweet but it lingers a lot when we are waiting for the next crash and bash.
Kudos? You might criticize it in that it is a movie about an actor who plays a stuntman who has suffers all manner of indignities as he is smashed, bashed, and crunched just so pretty actors can stay pretty and spoiled audiences can watch a cool scene for 5 seconds then forget about it. The irony is that while the movie is an ode to unsung stuntmen who do all the dangerous work while pretty boy actors take all the glory (in the end, even though the stuntmen get tossed around the audience thinks the unscathed actor took all the abuse), unsung stuntmen did Gosling’s stunts as he pretended to be an unsung stuntman.
How meta. But to the movie’s credit, during the ending credits, a behind the scenes montage of some of the film’s most dangerous stunts plays, cluing us in to how those stunts were pulled off and we get to see the stunt men in action, and that Gosling himself even performed a few stunts of his own and isn’t just the pretty boy face we assumed. Or that I assumed. I don’t know what you assumed.
If you do see it, do be sure to stay through the entire credits because there’s a pretty fun cameo with Lee Majors and Heather Thomas, the original Fall Guy and Fall Gal at the end. BTW, in today’s hyper woke age where you see movies with five foot tall, 100 pound women taking out 300 pound goons with a pinky finger, I find it refreshing that Hollywood had a chance with the original source material having a stunt woman girlfriend and they rewrote it to behind the scenes girlfriend. And she wasn’t a damsel in distress. She just assisted her BF with her brains and movie magic know-how. It was more believable than trying to convince us that Emily Blunt can pile drive a bodybuilder.
STATUS – Shelf-worthy. Worth a trip to your theater.
First, let me hand it to this franchise. At a time when brick and mortar movie theaters are dying on the vine, these flicks put butts in seats. My local cinema, usually sparse on any other night, was packed to the rafters tonight, with nerds of all ages dressed in Ghostbusting outfits, ready to enjoy the show. That’s not bad for a 40 year old movie series.
I went into this expecting great disappointment, but I was pleasantly surprised. IMO, it’s very good and I advise all 3.5 of you that it is worth your time.
Why did I think it would be poopy? A) The last two installments weren’t so hot – i.e. Lady Ghostbusters of 2016 and Ghostbusters: Afterlife of 2021. Actually, I thought 75 percent of Afterlife was a decent movie with the late Egon Spengler’s grandkids, daughter and her BF coming together with friends to solve the mystery of Egon’s last ghost hunting case only to SPOILER ALERT just copy the ending of the original film in the last 25 percent of the movie. Lame.
B) The reviews of this installment were awful. All the critics warned their readers that they’d basically seen piles of poop with more charisma. I was surprised the reviews were that bad – I mean, surely it had some redeeming qualities, right? But no. The critics hate this movie.
So, for some reason, boredom, or just loyalty to a franchise I have loved since my youth, I went to see a movie I was sure would suck but to my surprise, it was really, really good, so those critics can go lick Slimer’s greasy green taint for all I care. Was that too much? Sorry. That felt like too much.
The plot? The Spengler family from the last film has moved to NYC to take over ghostbusting operations out of the famous firehouse their patriarch Egon and his BFFS once operated out of. The fam includes Mom/Callie (Carrie Coon), step-dad Gary (Paul Rudd), daughter Phoebe (McKenna Grace) and son, Trevor (Finn Wolfhard).
Ex-EPA dickless pencilneck from the original film Walter Peck (William Atherton) is now, horror of horrors, the Mayor of NYC and continues his anti-Ghostbusters hard-on, using his office to make the lives of our favorite proton pack wielders harder than ever.
Meanwhile, all the superfluous kid friends of the Spengler fam have come to NYC in various capacities, either working for Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) in his well-funded, super-high tech ghostbusting operation, or with Ray Stantz (Dan Akyroyd) on his YouTube show about paranormal activity.
Double meanwhile, the ecto-containment unit aka ghost prison where the ghostbusters have been depositing ghosts for 40 years is full to capacity and Winston needs to put his top nerds on the case before the ghosts make a break for it.
Triple meanwhile, creepy weirdo Nadeem (Kumail Nanjiani) sells an old relic he finds in his dead granny’s belongings to Ray’s occult shop, thus starting a chain of events that leads to an ancient demon with the power to scare humans so bad that they literally freeze to death, being busted loose.
It’s up to the Spenglers to save the day, with assistance of some old familiar faces. Akroyd and Hudson get a great deal of screentime and fans will be happy to know that their roles are pretty integral to the plot. Bill Murray is briefly in it in the middle, and then briefly in it at the end. Critics say he phoned his lines in but honestly, I don’t think those critics understand his deadpan sarcasm as his perfectly time one-liners brought down the house with the audience I watched it with. Annie Potts reprises her role as Jeanine Melnitz, the Ghostbusters’ secretary, but she gets to suit up this time.
You know, my complaint about Ghostbuster sequels has always been that the success of the original had very little to do with ghosts. The original was less about things that go bump in the night and more about four guys who saw a need that desperately needed to be met, developed new technology to meet that need and against all odds, started a business to provide a valuable public service. Along the way, they deal with naysayers, bureaucratic red tape, and the fact that the science they are dealing with is very theoretical and could blow themselves the eff up at any time. This all led to good comedy as well as to the audience rooting for the underdog.
Ghostbusters 2 managed to capture some of that underdog vibe but the last two modern sequels didn’t really capture it. They tried to focus more on the ghosts and on villains working with the ghosts but the problem is, and sure this sounds silly for a film called “Ghostbusters” but the original’s popularity just had very little to do with ghosts.
But here they managed to get some things right. They created a villain that was very scary and made stakes that were quite high. They captured some of that underdog charisma by having Peck breathe down the heroes’ necks again. They brought back the old guard ghostbusters and treated them with respect. Sure, we would have loved to have seen more of Murray but all three out of still living Ghostbusters plus their office worker got their turn to shine.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. If they can make more like this, the franchise might have a future yet.
Put on your dress and run from the mob, 3.5 readers. BQB here with a review of this classic film.
SPOILER WARNING! SPOILERS ABOUND. If you haven’t seen it yet, and you’ve only had 65 years to do so, I’d suggest seeing it first, then come back here to read and discuss.
I’ve been meaning to watch this flick for awhile now. Why? Because YouTube of all places has been telling me to. I’ve developed an interest in Broadway shows as of late and there’s a new one based on this classic film. Watching showtune clips gave way to clips of this flick that left me in hysterics and finally, I got around to watching the whole shebang on HBO Max. You can too if you have it.
The set-up? In 1929 Prohibition Era Chicago, an illegal speakeasy (i.e. a club where banned alcohol flows freely) is raided thanks to a tip by police informant Toothpick Charlie. Spats Colombo (George Raft) doesn’t take kindly to rats in his outfit, so he and his boys rub TC and his boys out.
Alas, down on their luck jazz musicians Joe and Jerry (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) were in the wrong place in the wrong time and accidentally witnessed the entire tommy gun session. They swear they won’t tell anyone but Spats doesn’t like to leave loose ends and so a hot pursuit begins.
The Jazzsters need to get out of town and fast. The only way out? Donning wigs, makeup and dresses and joining an all-female big band on a train trip to Florida. Hilarity ensues as Joe is very uncomfortable with the get-up, opting to keep it simple and going with “Josephine” so as to not stray too far from his real name, Joe. Meanwhile, Jerry gets comically too comfortable with the situation, lets his imagination run wild and while Joe thought Jerry would call himself Geraldine (thus keeping it simple), Jerry calls himself Daphne and gets way too elaborate.
On the ride, the dudes are on sensory overload. As he ogles all the women in their underwear, Jerry remarks to Joe that he feels like his childhood dream of being a kid locked overnight in a candy store, free to feast on all the sweets without repercussion. Joe, a bit more sensible, reminds Jerry to “go on a diet” lest they get discovered, have to come out of hiding and Spats gives them a bad case of lead poisoning.
The lads meet Sugar Kane (the one and only Marilyn Monroe), a ukulele player and singer in the band. Joe is smitten but Sugar relates that her whole life, she’s has nothing but trouble dating lousy bum saxophone players. Joe as Josephine listens to Sugar’s tale and sympathizes but secretly is miffed that his true self, Joe, doesn’t stand a chance, seeing as how Sugar has sworn off bum musicians and has pledged that once she gets to Florida, she’ll only date well-respected millionaires.
Further hi-jinx ensue in sunny Florida. “Daphne” i.e. Jack Lemmon in drag, is relentlessly pursued by pervy millionaire Osgood Fielding (Joe E. Brown), who won’t take no for answer. At first, no is Daphne’s only answer until Osgood proposes and Daphne/Jerry falls in love, obviously not with Osgood but with Osgood’s money, fantasizing about bilking the old perv for a big settlement and fat alimony checks once Osgood realizes he’s been duped into marrying a dude and demands a divorce. Joe reminds Jerry that, you know, there are laws against that sort of thing. Hey, it’s a movie made in 1959 about 1929 after all.
Double meanwhile, Joe disguises himself as an eccentric billionaire, claiming to be the heir to the Shell Oil company fortune, and only referring to himself as “Shell Oil Jr.” He dons a yachtsman’s outfit complete with the hat and speaks with a phony Cary Grant accent, all to impress Sugar.
The fun climaxes when it turns out the mafia has a yearly Florida retreat under the guise of “Friends of the Italian Opera.” Jerry and Joe spot Spats and manage to hide just in time to avoid being rubbed out. Alas, the big boss of all American organized crime, Little Bonaparte (Nehemiah Persoff doing an impression of Mussolini as a mobster) thinks Spats went too far and draw too much heat on the organization when he rubbed out Toothpick Charlie back in Chicago, so he has his men rub Spats and Spats’ goons out.
And…boy, Joe and Jerry and the mob need to stop meeting like this because they just witnessed another murder! So off on the lam they go again. Jerry as Daphne accepts Osgood’s proposal just to get safe passage aboard his yacht and get the heck out of Florida. He convinces Osgood to bring Joe and Sugar along as bridesmaids.
At some earlier point, Sugar discovered Joe was a fraud but has since forgiven him, realizing that deep down he’s not such a bad guy. You do have to suspend disbelief and you know, forget the part about how he pretended to be a billionaire just to get into her pants. But anyway, the truth is out and they’re in love now and all is forgiven.
Safe on the launch boat and on the way to the yacht, Daphne/Jerry has a heart and realizes he doesn’t really want to defraud Osgood for his cash. He comes up with a series of excuses as to why he and Osgood can’t get married, hoping that Osgood will dump him/her and be the bad guy. I smoke, I’ve been living with a saxophone player, I can never have children, the list of excuses goes on and on while Osgood, each time, says he doesn’t care and will accept Daphne.
Finally, Jerry removes his wig, drops the girl voice and says in his regular voice, “I’m a man” and Osgood ends the film on a humdinger of a line – “Nobody’s perfect.”
It’s funny on so many levels, especially when you consider this movie was released in 1959. It’s funny if you’ve ever been in a situation where you want out of a relationship, but you want to let the other person down easily, so you come up with all these criticisms of yourself, but they won’t take the bait, and Osgood’s that hard up that he won’t let Daphne go even upon realizing that she is a he.
But then when you REALLY think about it, yeah, it becomes obvious that Osgood knew Daphne was a dude all along and was totally into it. The movie ends with a befuddled Jack Lemmon mumbling to himself in confusion, trying to make sense of what is happening, trying to figure out why this dude won’t let him go even after learning that he is a dude and being shocked to realize that, you know, this probably means that Osgood is totally gay.
Big for 1959. I’m surprised they got away with it.
So, there you have it. I gave the whole movie away but in my defense, I did give a spoiler warning.
Tony Curtis is great as the brains of the duo, the guy that keeps reminding his partner to commit to character lest they get shot by pursuing mafiosos. Jack Lemmon, who was nominated for an academy award for this role, is hilarious as he commits way too much, at times forgetting that he’s a dude. The scene where he dances about the hotel room, periodically stopping to shake a pair of maracas (he’d just come in from a long night of salsa dancing) and tells Joe about his plan to marry and divorce Osgood for a pile of money had test audiences laughing so hard that they stuck the maracas in so Lemmon could shake them for a few beats between lines to give everyone a chance to laugh as he moved from line to line (so I read online).
And Marilyn? What can we say about dear, sweet Marilyn. How sad she died so soon. I have to believe she was chosen for this film because there was some underlying message that while some dudes might like to dress up like ladies, nothing beats the real thing. As Jerry fumbles about in a dress and in heels, he constantly complains about the draft on his undercarriage, how he feels like he’s constantly about to fall over – how do women put up with it all? How do they do it? Women move “like jello on springs” i.e. there’s a gracefully sashaying to it all that men can’t replicate. Add to that Jerry/Daphne gets unwanted gropes and advancements and complains about having to fend off Osgood’s undesired perversions and you’d think this movie was made in 2024 with how it puts men in women’s shoes and asks them to sympathize with what the fairer sex has to go through.
Marilyn really was more than a dumb, blonde bimbo. She was the heart of this picture and really brought it home. The underlying theme is Joe and Jerry put on dresses and wigs and sort of got a glimpse about what its like to be a woman, but Sugar has to live with it daily – all the hopes, dreams, disappointments that go along with it. It was woke before anyone knew what woke was.
I have yet to see the Broadway remake so I’ll reserve judgment. I can already tell based on previews that at least one of the dudes comes to embrace drag as in “Oh wow having to put on this dress because the mafia was chasing me helped me to discover I was really a chick in a dude’s body all along.” I guess its 2024 so the showrunners feel they have to do that but I don’t know…there’s a lot of humor in the original with Joe and Jerry not really wanting to dress up like chicks at all. Yes, true, Jerry got a little too comfortable with it but no, he never wanted to bang Osgood. He just wanted his money, but then had a heart and decided not to put the old coot through that.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. This movie has inspired me to start watching other Marilyn Monroe movies, so I’ll let you 3.5 readers know how this goes. And I’m not sure what praise from this blog is worth, but praise to Billy Wilder who made this and several comedies like this in that era.
SIDENOTE: As I watched this, I couldn’t help but see it as an early roadmap to many of the zany comedies we know and love today. Many a comedic film finds the protagonists having to embrace some ridiculous premise. From Weekend at Bernie’s, where the dudes had to pretend like their dead boss was alive, to Me, Myself and Irene where Renee Zellwegger had to go on the run with schizophrenic Jim Carrey – humor is found when characters have to put up with something comically stupid but there’s no way out but through so they just keep putting up with X absurd premise until its conclusion. I don’t know that Some Like It Hot was the first comedic film to do this but it was definitely an early adopter that paved the way and made it popular.
Double sidenote – After watching this movie and googling, I learned Tony Curtis is Jamie Lee Curtis’ father. IDK how I was a movie fan all these years and didn’t know that.
BQB here with a review of this early 90s flick that it has taken me 32 years to see.
The 1990s were an exceptional time for movies and I was a film buff even as a young lad, so it surprised me to no end when in the 2010s, parody after parody of Alec Baldwin’s “Always Be Closing” speech began surfacing on YouTube.
Really? There was a movie in the early 90s starring Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, Al Pacino, Ed Harris and Alan Alda about a bunch angry, depressed, sociopathic, high-strung, stressed-out junk real estate salesmen and I’m just finding out about it now?
Alas, it took me at least another decade to get around to watching it until this weekend but boy, am I ever glad I did. There’s not a lot to the story. It’s more of a mood caught on camera than a film per se. Like I said, I didn’t even know it existed until 20 years later and only watched it 30 years later, but it may very well be the greatest performances given by all of the actors above. Well, to be honest, though Spacey is good in it (and forgive me for complimenting him but this came out long before the alleged perversions) his role is palpable yet not as prominent as the others.
So, what’s it all about?
On a dark and stormy night, a man simply called Blake (Alec Baldwin) is sent from the corporate office to Premiere Properties, a seedy boiler room in New York City where washed up sales-jerks while away the hours, living off commissions earned by duping morons into buying useless properties in Arizona. You’d almost feel sorry for these chumps if you weren’t constantly reminded that their job is to bilk other chumps.
Blake informs the salesmen that they suck so bad at their jobs that they’re all fired but they’re in luck, if you can call it that. They have one week to redeem themselves and prove themselves worthy of being rehired by logging in boku sales numbers. Winner gets a Caddy. Second place? Box of steak knives. Third place. Go home. You’re fired. Don’t like it? Eff you. Go home and cry to your wife and kids. You know how the speech goes.
The sales-dudes are irate to be spoken to this way. Have you ever suffered through any sort of humiliation at work? We all have at some point. Even if you can honestly say you’ve put in 20 or 30 years of relatively good service and been rewarded with good management, I’m sure at some point you suffered through a boss looking to make a name for himself, who barked non-sensical orders at you, who expected you to deliver everything while giving you absolutely nothing to work with, who demanded you volunteer free overtime, working late into the night but don’t you dare be late the next morning and so on.
Sometimes, these bosses have the working stiff by the balls and when they know it and the squeeze too hard, its enough to make a man go berserk. Three out of four do just that. Shelley “the Machine” Levine (Jack Lemmon), Dave Moss (Ed Harris) and George Aaronow (Alan Arkin) all flip their lids in their own way.
Moss and Aaronow are middle aged with families while Levine is elderly with a wife in the hospital and mounting bills as a result. None can afford to lose a job and all fear they’d never be able to compete with youngsters in the job market.
Levine, once a veteran salesman but now has hit a slump, pledges to get out there and kick ass. Lemmon was infamous in his youth in the 1960s but this role really brought him into the modern era. The old guy is just so sad and desperate that he reeks of it and he deserves an Oscar for the way he composes himself, going from weepy sad sack to composing himself on the phone so that he can pretend to be a high-falutin’ big shot, quoting facts and figures to chumps he’s trying to reel in, even going so far as to pretend to talk to a non-existent secretary in the background, asking her to book flights to all sorts of great places because, you know, he’s such a successful salesman, after all and hasn’t steered a client wrong yet.
Meanwhile, Moss vows revenge and plots to steal the highly coveted, so-called Glengarry leads. These are leads the company has bought because apparently, long before the internet made it easier to separate a chump from his cash, sales companies would pay other sales companies for a list of their marks. It’s a running issue throughout the film that the sales-jerks are irate with the company for holding out on the leads, that they won’t give them the names of people who have a strong likelihood of buying, but the company’s philosophy is these guys are losers who can’t even hoodwink elderly pensioners into buying so they’d probably just screw it up if they company turned over names they paid top dollar for.
I don’t know. I’m not in sales. In a way it makes sense but then again, if no one is calling these big fish and trying then why bother paying to know who they are in the first place? The main complaint of the sales-chumps is that it was uncalled for for Blake to chew them out like they’re a bunch of idiots because they’re doing the best with the lousy leads they have and if the company would just turn over the good Glengarry leads they would call them and make the sales but the company won’t do it. It’s confusing so I guess imagine a construction company that won’t buy its workers any hammers or nails or tools of any kind but still says, “Build a house by Friday, idiots, or you’re fired and by the way, we have a whole warehouse filled with tools we just think you’re too stupid to use them so figure out how to build a house with dirt.”
Aaronow is angry and repulsed by all of this, made to worry even more that Moss told him about his plan to steal the leads. He wants no part of it but Moss tells him it’s too late. He’s already a part of it. He listened to Moss talk about it and if he isn’t going to the boss to tell, then he’s an accessory, even if he does nothing, which worries George sick.
Pacino’s character, Richard Roma, has the best philosophy for making it through life and tough times at work and I dare say one scene in a Chinese restaurant where he’s explaining it all is better than his entire body of work in the Godfather. It sounds too simple to be true, but to dumb it down, Roma essentially tells one of his clients, James Lingk (Jonathan Pryce) not to sweat it. Life is just a big series of stuff that happens to you. Some of it you want to happen. Some of it you don’t. Some of it you’re glad happened. Some of it you wish hadn’t happened. Just stop worrying about it. Much of it is out of your control. Forget about what you can’t control and focus on what you can control. Let go of the past and focus on today and tomorrow.
And thus, while all the other salesmen spend the whole movie running around like their heads are on fire, trying to either meet Alec Baldwin’s outrageous sales demands or to get revenge on him, Roma takes a screw it all attitude. Life is just a bunch of stuff that happens, so he’ll do some stuff and see what happens. He’ll keep his cool. He’ll make some calls. He’ll try to make some sales. If he makes some, that’ll be great. If he doesn’t, whatever. He’ll find another job. Or he won’t. Life is so uncontrollable and unpredictable you’ll worry yourself into oblivion if you try to figure it all out.
Pacino scores one of the more memorable lines of the movie outside of Baldwin’s rant. Irate over a screw-up, he tells office manager John Williamson (Kevin Spacey) that his job is to support the sales staff and to not sabotage them, to work with them and not against them. Truthfully, throughout the film, and especially with the act of holding back the leads, it feels Williamson is working against his team, even though he’s following orders from his corporate overlords.
If you’ve ever had a boss who demands results, yet ties your hands behind your back, tells you to perform but you better not do A, B, or C or X, Y or Z and don’t think about asking for help with this or that…I’d say show them a clip of Pacino’s speech in this movie but they wouldn’t know what to do with it.
Ultimately, there’s no happy ending here. There’s certainly no romance. There’s no women. There’s no traditional Hollywood story. If it were a traditional story, one of the sales-jerks would find a way to meet the quota and save the day while simultaneously exposing the outfit for the fraud that it is but no, everyone starts out mired in purgatory and everyone ends up mired in deeper purgatory. Such is how it goes for those stuck in gigs they despise, especially in the :::shudder:::: dreaded private sector.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Note it’s based on a David Mamet play and essentially is like a play put on film. Watch on netflix.
Don’t you love it when a movie you expect to be poop turns out to be gold?
Well, ok, silver. Alright, bronze. Still worth a watch though.
BQB here with a review.
When I read the premise of Amazon’s “Ricky Stanicky,” I thought it sounded very stupid indeed. Three young friends in the late 1990s blame all of their mischief on an imaginary friend named Ricky Stanicky. Teachers. Cops. Parents. Angry neighbors. Whenever the boys are in trouble, the boys simply tell them that Ricky Stanicky did whatever rotten deed just transpired and even worse, he just ran that-away. The adults have a scapegoat to blame and the boys are off the hook, scot-free. The rouse works so well that they continue their fake friendship with “Ricky” well into their adulthood, imagining wild and crazy stories of stupid things that Ricky did to explain to their wives, families, co-workers and bosses why they can’t do something, be somewhere, or take part in some dumb thing they really don’t want to do. “Oh sorry, I’d really love to go to your boring thing but you’ll never believe what that jackass Stanicky roped me into.” Works like a charm.
Alas, the jig is up when the friends overplay their hand in adulthood. Friends Dean (Zac Efron), JT (Andrew Santino) and Wes (Jermaine Fowler) claim Ricky is desperately clinging onto life due to a raging case of testicular cancer and needs his bros to fly to their side. In reality, they’re flying to Atlantic City to party hearty rather than attend JT’s wife’s baby shower.
When Mrs. JT goes into labor early, Wes cracks under pressure and almost confesses to the lie but Dean saves the day and explains that Ricky made the whole ball cancer thing up just to get the bros to come visit him to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the removal of his previous ball, also from ball cancer, and apparently the boys invent lies about Ricky’s gonads to get out of doing stuff a lot. Now non-existent Ricky is in the doghouse and Dean and JT’s wives want to give the prick a piece of their minds. Thus, they demand the friends produce Ricky in the flesh at once so they can chew his ass out and rip him a new one.
This is a tall order since Ricky is imaginary, but leave it to sleazy lounge singer Rod Rimestead (John Cena) to save the day. The bro-heims hire Rod to pose as the Rickster and take the fall.
All seems well except Rod’s personal life sucks so bad that he actually enjoys being Ricky so much that he fully embraces the imaginary life the boys have built for Ricky over the course of several years, wielding these lies to get a big time job, make lots of money and friends, completely invade their world and refuse to go away. This might sound far-fetched, but in today’s social media age, maybe it isn’t, for the lads have spent years building Ricky a robust social media presence full of tales of impressive globe trotting adventures, which Rod (as Ricky) uses to woo and impress his way to the top.
Thus the boys are left with a conundrum – how to extricate this poser from their lives without confessing to their own complicity in the fraud?
As I watched this film, I felt a certain sense of familiarity. The completely ridiculous premise that the film sticks to like glue, no matter how absurd it gets. The potty humor. The Providence, RI setting. “Boy, this sure feels a lot like one of those old Farrelly Bros comedies from the late 90s and early 2000s that I used to know and love.”
Sure enough, it was. Turns out that Prime gave on of the Bros a deal and said bro still walks the walk of old school gross out comedy, no easy task in today’s hyper woke age. Older folks like me who remember when comedy films used to be funny will enjoy this one.
True, it’s silly. It won’t go down in history. It will be forgotten in 6 months but its pretty solid with some decent gut busting laughs. Its worth your time.
Did you know Jimmy Hoffa could be hiding in this blog, 3.5 readers? That’s right. He could be somewhere in this website all along and no one would know because only 3.5 people ever read this damn thing.
BQB here with a review.
5 years. 5 long…actually not so long years it took me before I got around to watching this flick. If you told me as a young man I’d wait five years to watch a Scorcese movie starring Pacino and DeNiro, I’d say your out of your mind, but at three and a half hours, who has that kind of time?
Finally, I decided I would never have that long to devote to a movie in one sitting (I nearly wanted to write a stern complaint letter to Marty when I sat down for what I thought would be two hours of Flower Moon only to find I’d unwittingly signed up for a four hour marathon), I set out to watch this movie in 10-20 minute bites over the course of a week, with a watch of the final hour this weekend.
Does it lend as much gravitas to watch it in bits? Maybe not but that’s the only way I could ever get through this thing. Marty is a light touch with the editing scissors in his old age.
But while the more recent Flower Moon could have been easily reduced by half to two hours, this film does contain a lot of interesting snippets of history intermixed with theories (of the conspiracy variety?) vis a vis the death of the infamous union leader.
To be fair, Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) did a lot of good in his life, promoting the union movement and convincing companies to put worker safety, retirement, benefits and futures ahead of bottomlines. But there was also some bad, as he did go to jail for fraud.
SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!
But the movie isn’t so much about Hoffa as the man this flick alleges did him in. Now, I should say up front, no one really knows who killed Hoffa. Technically, no one knows for sure that he died. Officially, we just know he went missing in 1975 and was legally declared dead in 1982 after not being seen for 7 years.
After years of going to war with the Kennedys and sparring with various mafiosos, could he have decided to just run off to the mountains and live out the remainder of his days? Sure, but probably not. He had a pesky habit of publicly challenging his enemies to bring it on and he ain’t goin’ nowhere so he doesn’t really fit the profile of a runner.
So chances are, he was probably forced to take an eternal dirtnap by one goon or another. Do we know that goon whodunnit was Frank Sheeran (Robert DeNiro)? No, so we have to keep that in mind as we watch this long, long absurdly long film.
The tale is an epic, spanning from the 1940s to the 1990s. Sheeran is a young truck driver with a wife and family, looking to make a little extra money on the side when mobster Russell Buffalino (Joe Pesci) recruits him to do odd illicit jobs. Sheeran eventually moves up the food chain, becomes a close friend of Jimmy Hoffa, graduates from hitman to union leader himself but keeps doing wetwork on the side. I want to say allegedly because WTF do I know but hey, that’s what this movie says, not me, so don’t come after me, Sheeran Estate.
Sheeran is eventually torn between his two close friends, each who had a part in making him a success (or at least rich – if you call being a mobster goon a success). In his old age, Hoffa has stepped on too many toes and many a wiseguy wants him to go, with Russell being the main advocate for his removal (on ice). But Hoffa wants to stay and has the ultimate IDGAF attitude, threats be damned.
Alas, Sheeran will have to make a decision. And I guess I already told you what decision he made (my lawyer says I have to tell you according to this movie) so you don’t have to watch it for three and a half hours, unless you want to. Hey I did say spoiler alert.
The good? I have to hand it to DeNiro and Pacino. Both are men of advanced age yet they still got it. Pesci’s not bad either. You learn a lot about history as Sheeran is presented as sort of the Forrest Gump of the mafia – his alleged hits (hey, I said alleged!) turn the course of many a historical tide while he goes largely unnoticed, which I guess, if you’re a mafioso trying to stay out of a can, is a good thing.
BONUS: Sopranos fans will be happy to see many of the old gang back at it. Forgive me for forgetting the actors names, but I’ll just refer to them by their Sopranos characters – Charmaine, Beansie, Eugene Pontecorvo, Gerry “The Hairdo” Torciano. Apparently, there were some more, so forgive me for not getting to them all and there were some who didn’t make it to the screen but were involved behind the scenes.
Plus if you like Everybody Loves Raymond, Ray Romano has a pretty prominent role.
Also, there are a lot of big name actors who are in it just in supporting roles. For example, Anna Paquin of Sookie Stackhouse fame plays Sheeran’s perpetually shy daughter, and she barely says a word because her character is perpetually shy.
The bad? Even with all the de-aging techniques, from CGI to makeup, it’s very difficult to suspend disbelief and see a 75 year old DeNiro as a young family man early in the film. I’m not sure what could have been done differently. Younger actors could have been cast but we would have been robbed of Pacino and DeNiro starring together. And the challenge of the film is that it covers a 50, almost 60 year period, so even the younger actors are outfitted in bald caps and gray wigs by the end. There was probably no way really to avoid aging and/or de-aging the talent. To that end, the film deserves a lot of credit in the make-up department.
Also, Pacino and DeNiro are two of the most famous Italian-American actors of all time, but they are playing Irish characters. That’s fine by me. I don’t really care about the cultural appropriation hullabaloo, but there are times when Pacino is playing Hoffa, saying things like “I don’t care if those guineas come and get me” and “Don’t Italians name their kids anything but Tony?” that seems silly for one of Hollywood’s most famous Italians to be saying.
If you like history, you’ll love this movie. My only concern is that, you know, no one really knows for sure who killed Hoffa except Hoffa and whoever killed Hoffa. Hoffa obviously can’t tell us and at this late stage, whoever killed Hoffa is probably gone too, whacked by Father Time if his mafia friends and/or rivals didn’t get him (or her I hate to be sexist but it was most likely a him). So it’s an awfully big claim to say that Sheeran killed Hoffa and movies have a tendency to become fact in the minds of the masses and yet how can we ever really know for sure? If he didn’t do it, then this movie is pretty slanderous.
But I suppose we’ll never know for sure what happened and whodunnit unless an unlikely 100 year old witness steps forward with the evidence.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. I’ll hand it to Pesci, DeNiro and Pacino. They’re twice my age and more active than I’ll ever be.
SIDNOTE: I might have been Hoffa in my past life because it feels like everyone’s purpose in life is to constantly annoys me, I take these annoyances very personally, I tell them to eff off yet the come back anyway, I hate bad manners and also I love ice cream.
Bookshelf Battle 