Category Archives: Movies

Mar 12 2024
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Movies

Classic Movie Review – The Irishman (2019)

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.

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Mar 07 2024
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Movies

Classic Movie Review – Jackie Brown (1997)

Across 110th street, I’m bringing this review to my 3.5 readers.

This oldie but goodie popped up on Netflix and I couldn’t help but watch it. IMO, it’s one of Quentin Tarantino’s best though in history, it tends to be forgotten when ranked up against the likes of his more popular works like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs.

The plot? I’ll be honest, I’ve seen this movie a few times since it first came out in the late 1990s and it still confuses me but my best description is its like The Sting but at a shopping mall and with shopping bags instead of briefcases. Money is changing hands and you’ve got to follow where it’s going.

Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) is a mid-forties stewardess for an airline that flies between Mexico and California. She makes low-pay and subsidizes her $16,000 a year salary by running cash for illegal gun runner Oddell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson.) Robbie keeps his cash stored in safety deposit boxes at a bank in Mexico to keep it from being confiscated in case he is ever arrested. He brings it up as needed from time to time with Brown’s help and her stewardess gig is the perfect cover.

Or so they thought. ATF agent Ray Nicollette (Michael Keaton) is onto the scam and pinches Jackie on a money run. When Brown is bailed out by grumpy yet kindly, middle-aged bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster), Nicollette gives her an option – she can either go to jail for a long time or she can help with a sting operation and catch Odell in the act of accepting the illicit cash.

The problem? Jackie could dummy up and do her time but Odell has a bad habit of bailing out past accomplices who have been pinched through Cherry and killing them before they can testify. Cherry sees the pattern and fears he’s being used. Brown sees the pattern and fears she’ll end up DOA like ex-Odell accomplice Beaumont (Chris Tucker).

And so, a crazy, convoluted plot begins, one in which Jackie and Max conspire to bring in the cash, keep it for themselves, yet still somehow con Odell into thinking Jackie is on his side and con the Feds into thinking she’s on their side, fulfill the requirements of the Feds’ sting and get off the hook while evading Odell’s tendency to murder potential witnesses.

Robert DeNiro and Bridget Fonda round out the cast as Odell’s henchman and girlfriend.

So, where to begin?

Pam Grier was at the height of her career in the 1970s with several funky blacksploitation films. Go check out some of those films and she is truly a foxy mama. However, the 1970s was an era of low standards in Hollywood. Many 70s flicks, when looked at through today’s eyes, come across as glorified student films with all kinds of crazy, nonsensical things going on.

Tarantino loved those films dearly and brought 70s nostalgia to his 90s filmmaking and gave Grier a film made with modern techniques that she so greatly deserved. Though she’ll be remembered for classics like Foxy Brown and Coffy, this movie is a love letter to those films lone gone by. She’s absolutely beautiful in this, a tragic figure, someone who is smart but obviously had some bad breaks, wishes she had achieved more and is finally given a chance to run off with a score that will change everything late in life if everything goes off without a hitch.

Cherry’s character is the same. He’s spent his life running down crooks and is tired of it. He wants out of the bond game and could use a cash infusion. My one criticism is it’s implied early in the film that he’s going to retire after the scam but doesn’t. I can see why he doesn’t but I don’t want to say here so as to not give it away. At least I assume he doesn’t retire. It looks like he doesn’t at the end of the film. The romance between Cherry and Brown is touching and understated, much different than say, the young love you see on film. Young love, the stakes aren’t that high. If it doesn’t work out, they’ll find someone else but Cherry and Brown, you want them to end up together yet understand there are many obstacles in their path. At the same time, they are at an age where this is their last chance for love.

Quite literally, this may be the best movie for all the actors involved. Jackson is legendary but he’s Jackson in every film. He’s Jackson here too but Tarantino creates a menacing character in the form of a man who has spent his whole life amassing a fortune through evil deeds and isn’t about to lose it lying down.

SIDENOTE: Jackson wears a different Kangol hat in every scene in this flick. When I saw it as a young man, I thought those hats were so awesome that I bought a couple, wore them often, then eventually realized I was the only white guy I knew wearing them, felt a bit pretentious and self-conscious and stopped. Alas, I never made them look cool, but Jackson surely did. I’ll be honest though, looking at this movie through modern eyes, I realize, yeah, Kangol probably gave Tarantino a boat load of money to turn this movie into a commercial. In one scene, Jackie and Odell both wear Kangols and its like, come on, even back then no one was wearing that many Kangols.

Tarantino was the great resurrectionist of 70s careers. He did it with Travolta in Pulp Fiction and did it again with Grier and Forster, who was a 70s tough guy. Sadly, I don’t recall Grier going on to do too many things though I think she was in a few more 90s flicks after this. Forster went on to do a ton of movies after this up until his recent passing.

Keaton’s career had cooled in the 90s so this movie was good for him though I’d say his rehash happened more recently.

DeNiro is also legendary but like Jackson, he just plays DeNiro, except he’s different here. He really comes across as a dumb guy who is easily miffed and annoyed by little things. I won’t say how that feeds into the plot.

And then there’s Bridget Fonda. Ahh Bridget. I think this will be the part she is long remembered for. She’s so beautiful and naughty in this. She had a lot of parts in the 90s and then went away and I was sorry to see online that she got fat. Hey, I can’t complain. I’m fat myself. Time is a real SOB. At least she had this movie though. What did I have?

I think this is the first or maybe one of the first movies I saw Chris Tucker in too.

STATUS: Shelf -worthy. God, it feels like I saw this movie yesterday.

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Mar 05 2024
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Movies

Movie Review – Dune: Part Two (2024)

3.5 readers, I’m going to make this review short.

I like Dune but I don’t understand it.

Dune, to me, is like dating a really hot woman. I like being in her presence but honestly, it’s so much work to please her that eventually I just zone out and stare at all the pretty shapes and forget about making sense of it all.

I had no idea what was going on in Dune: Part One and have even less idea what’s happening in Dune: Part Two. There are space politics afoot. The fighting involves space business. Space romance blooms and space religion intersects with space magic and space powers. All I know for sure is George Lucas definitely bogarted some of this shit and if I represented the late Frank Herbert’s estate, I’d demand some money. Then again, George’s defense would be that he took all of Frank’s heady shit and dumbed it down for us general movie going slack jawed yokels.

So, the good news is that the movie is really good and if you understand what is going on, more power to you. I did not but I enjoyed it anyway. I admit I could have enjoyed it had I felt like expending the mental energy to care about the space politics, space religion and space business and so on, but I don’t. I can barely figure out my life so I don’t have time to figure out the lives of people in a fictional space saga.

Have you ever since that Amadeus movie from the 1980s? I’m like Salieri. I can tell you this movie is good. I just can’t tell you why it is good. Or maybe Salieri could tell you why music was good. He just could not write music as well as Mozart could and it drove him mad. I wish I could write something as good as Dune but then again, it seems a bit busy. But it’s good. I swear its good.

If anything else, go see it on the big screen for the part where they ride the sandworms.

“BQB what is the plot?”

My best attempt at an explanation is Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet), the hero from the first film, is on the run from the villainous Harkonnen Clan. He is recognized as a prophet by the desert dwelling Fremen but maybe he’ll take this newfound power too far his girlfriend Zendaya’s liking. I’m sorry. I don’t remember Zendaya’s character’s name.

Christopher Walken is in it, so that’s cool.

That’s about it. It’s Star Wars for intellectuals, basically. Enjoy, unless you’re stupid, then you probably won’t, because you’re too stupid, unless you’re like me, and be just smart enough to know you’re too stupid to get this but its ok because its still fun.

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Feb 25 2024
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Movies

Movie Review – Drive-Away Dolls (2024)

Love may be a sleigh ride to hell, 3.5 readers, but this movie is a one-way ticket to crap town.

BQB here with a review and boy did I ever take a bullet so you don’t have to.

How could one half of the legendary Coen Brothers duo let me down? I was on the fence but when I noticed a Coen was involved (Ethan in the director’s chair here sans bro Joel) I figured, why not but now I’m wondering if Joel hasn’t been the brains of the whole operation the entire time and has been dragging Ethan on his back. OK that was probably too harsh but it’s not like anyone other than 3.5 people read this blog anyway.

The plot? It’s 1999 and lesbian BFFS (they’re friends who are lesbians but not lesbians lezzing out together) Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) embark on a road trip that ends up in a comedy of errors. Jamie is a fast talking, care-free Texan and Qualley’s ability to say funny things with a deep Southern accent may be the film’s only saving grace. Marian is a very straight-laced, uptight office drone who avoids fun but desperately needs some. She decides to visit her aunt for a vacation in Tallahassee and Jamie, fresh off a breakup from her latest lesbian lover (she cheats on her cunnilingus partners often) tags along rather than face the music from her ex, Sukie (Beanie Feldstein).

They snag a drive-away car, which apparently is a thing? I’ve never heard of it before but apparently they arrange to be drivers of a car that needs to be transported to Tallahassee anyway. Alas, there’s a mix-up because the car they pick up contains hot cargo that is wanted by villainous ne’er-do-wells. Don’t ask why gangsters wouldn’t just drive the cargo where it needed to go without involving a drive-away car service to begin with. That one baffled me.

For half the movie, Jamie and Marian tour the countryside, in search of lesbian hijinx, going to make-out parties, looking for meaning in gay bars and smooching other women and what have you. Two inept hit men are hot on their tail but always seem to bungle things up along the way.

To be honest, the whole thing seems like a lot of filler. It struck me as it might have worked as an SNL sketch but somehow they needed to stretch it out to meet a movie length runtime so they added some extra stuff in the middle that goes nowhere. I’ll admit there were a couple of jokes that made me laugh out loud and the last twenty minutes, where the contents of the cargo and the backstory of how it got there is revealed made me chuckle but boy howdy, did they ever make me work for it.

Big criticism 1 – The movie is set in 1999 yet despite occasional 90s references, you’d hardly know it. You’d think since it’s set in the 90s there would be a bangin’ 90s soundtrack but for some odd reason, it utilizes 60s music instead. My first thought was this movie must have been made by young people who don’t know the difference between the 60s and the 90s but it was made by a Coen brother who obviously does. There are some weird psychadelic, groovy type 1960s transition scenes that seem out of place though when you learn about the plot they make a little more sense but even so I just don’t get all the focus on 60s culture in a late 90s movie. Seems like a missed opportunity to capitalize on late 90s nostalgia.

Big criticism 2 – There are flashback scenes where Young Marian, played by a child actor, spies on her nude sunbathing neighbor through a peephole in a fence and I assume the takeaway is this is when Marian first realized she was a lesbian. I know the child actor was probably taped staring through a peephole and never saw a naked woman but I just didn’t like this at all, the idea of a scene where a kid is drooling over a naked adult’s body. Creepy. Weird. Scenes like this just put Hollywood on the path to normalizing pedo behavior if you ask me.

Other than the last 20 minutes, the comedy rests largely on wacky cameos. Dermot Mulroney, Pedro Pascal, Matt Damon, and Miley Cyrus all stop by and the joke seems to be you’ll never believe what this celeb is doing.

STATUS: Not shelf-worthy but I’ll give it credit for serving as a star vehicle for Qualley, the daughter of Andi MacDowell, who will likely go on to do big things in her own right. It’s funny now that I saw her in a leading role in this film, I suddenly recognize her from smaller yet significant roles in films for the past several years.

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Feb 24 2024
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Movies

Movie Review – Queenpins (2021)

Coupon crime!

BQB here with a half-off review.

This is a 2021 movie that flubbed at the box office in 2021 yet found a new life on Netflix this year and has been going strong as of late. So yes, once in a while, Netflix does a good deed because this one is worth a watch.

The plot? Connie Kaminsky (Kristen Bell) is, like so many people of the millennial generation, someone who did all the right things, yet landed flat on her face. She’s a retired Olympic racing walker (yes, apparently that’s really an event) but never found fame nor fortune. Her husband, Rick is such a dick that a) he works for the IRS and b) he’s played by Joel McHale, the go-to guy whenever Hollywood needs an actor to play a dick in a comedy.

Even worse, Connie’s plagued by outrageous debt, the result of multiple IVF treatments that didn’t work. In her late thirties, she desperately wants a baby yet for all her effort, all she has to show for it is a humongous bill that never goes away.

In the hopes of cutting that bill down, Connie takes up the art of couponing. She becomes a whiz at saving money, scouring fliers for savings and is the bane of the existence of her local A and G Food Mart cashier.

She teams up with her neighbor JoJo (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) a wannabe social media influencer who lives with her mom because of debt she incurred when a fraudster stole her identity. Together, Connie and JoJo develop quite the local reputation as coupon queens. So adept are they at spotting deals that they even share their free stuff with others in the community.

Alas, they get quite greedy. Connie and JoJo track down a factory in Mexico responsible for printing and shipping most of the coupons throughout the U.S. They persuade a corrupt employee couple (husband and wife team) to send illicit coupons for free stuff their way, which the duo then, in turn, sells at a lower price over the internet.

Confused? Say a product costs 10 bucks. Just buy one of Connie’s coupons for 5 bucks and save 5 bucks. Got it now? Good.

The coupon queens make big buckaroos and are living large until A and G food market loss prevention officer Ken Miller (Paul Walter Hauser) gets wise to the scam. Noticing that his store chain is losing a lot of money to this fraudulence, he teams with U.S. Postal Inspector Simon Kilmurry (Vince Vaughn) to hunt the ladies down.

From there on, you’re not sure who to root for because Connie and JoJo are two women who did everything right only to get crapped on their entire lives and finally they give up and start breaking the rules to get ahead and who can blame them when following the rules got them nowhere? Yet, Ken is great as his job but everyone hates him because his job largely involves being the dick that has to tell old ladies that their coupon for half-off roid cream is invalid and they have to pay full price for their butt itch relief medicine. He dreams of busting a huge case wide open and this is his chance. Vaughn is funny as he has to remind Ken that yes, he indeed, is a real cop who just happens to work for the post office. He has a badge and gun and if necessary, can shoot people.

The good? It’s funny and the scam (based on a real life case) is inventive. It’s interesting how it all unfolds and I know I wanted to see it through to the end to find out how it was all going to go down.

The bad? Given the film’s subject matter, i.e. couponing and shopping, I feel like this movie’s number one target audience would be moms, grandmas, those ladies of the house in charge of doing all the family’s shopping who know how to wield a coupon like an Old West Sheriff wields a six-shooter. Thus, I think the film errs in using bad language that will likely turn a lot of these moms off and doesn’t really add anything to the plot or the comedy yet gives it an R rating that will probably cause a lot of women who would have otherwise been into it to pass it by.

But that’s just my two cents.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy.

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Feb 18 2024
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Movie Reviews, Movies

Movie Review – Bob Marley: One Love (2023)

Jah, 3.5 readers. We jammin, we jammin, and I hope you like this review.

BQB here with a review of the Bob Marley movie.

Most musician biopics follow a pretty standard cradle to grave structure. We first see our favorite singer as a kid, maybe they test their pipes out at a family gathering or a church social. Next thing you know, they’re a rebellious teenager starting a band. Blah, blah, blah, they sign a record deal. They fall in love. There’s some turmoil. They have a falling out with their band and their significant other. Hopefully they reconcile and find great success only to die a tragic death before they have a chance to sit back, relax and enjoy the fruits of their labors.

SIDENOTE: Why the heck do so many musicians fall into this pattern? Being a musician is a tough life.

Anyway, this movie ditches the linear path and chooses a zig-zag structure, starting with the most turbulent moment of Marley’s life, then moving forward to his super stardom and flashbacks to his youth to explain how he got there.

The story begins in the mid-1970s, a time of great strife in Jamaica. A turbulent election is underway and two warring factions are engaging in violence in the streets, almost to the point of all out civil war. Reggae musician Bob Marley, Jamaica’s number one celebrity known for his songs about rastafarianism, overcoming poverty, strife, yearning for peace, equality, ending racial injustice and so on, organizes a peace concert. His goal is to bring both sides together, bid them to lay down their arms for an evening and enjoy some music but alas, one of the factions misunderstands his intentions.

Under the mistaken assumption that Marley is throwing the concert to lend support to their enemy, one of the factions sends assassins to his compound to strike. Fortunately, the assassins prove to be quite incompetent. Marley and wife, Rita, his lead back-up singer are shot but survive while their manager, Don Taylor, gets shot six times, miraculously survives, yet becomes bitter and takes this tragedy as an excuse to later rob Bob.

Finding Jamaica unsafe, Marley goes into exile in the UK and there he puts out his best album, Exodus, which propels him into super stardom, giving birth to songs that you know and love today (and alas have been absconded with by the Carnival cruise line.)

The good? The movie doesn’t spoon feed anything to us. It goes with the show, don’t tell structure, which is important for quality writing. It brings us into the world of 1970s Rastafarian Jamaican singers and if we don’t understand it, that’s our problem. And when I say we don’t understand it, I mean, A) as Westerners, a lot of us won’t understand the ins and outs of the Rasta lifestyle but also B) the Rasta accents are pretty thick and heavy. Get ready for a lot of “Jah mon ya bombaclot” for an hour and 47 minutes. I’m not knocking it. I wouldn’t want an inauthentic Rasta movie where everyone talks like they’re from America. To the film’s credit, there’s a joke where Bob meets a white American. They converse and the guy blinks and is like, yeah, you’re going to have to say that to me again. Irony is, Bob is speaking English, just a form of English we Americans are not used to.

The movie doesn’t pull any punches either. It doesn’t sugarcoat anything. It shows a lot of the good Bob did, being a worldwide ambassador for Jamaica, Rastafarianism, peace, unity, ending racial strife, shining a light on the plight of the poor and downtrodden. But it doesn’t give Bob a pass for the bad, namely all the affairs despite having a wife who had his back from childhood and walked through all sorts of fire for him. We do see Marley had a lot of kids, both with his wife and through affairs. It doesn’t get too deep into him being an absentee father though as a viewer you can put two and two together and wonder who is being a Dad to all these kids when he’s busy making music and going on tour.

The bad? While the show, don’t tell is a plus, it’s a minus in some ways. This movie is probably the biggest commercial Rastafarianism will ever get and they probably could have spoon fed a little more to the average Western viewer who doesn’t know anything more about this religion other than Rasta dudes wear funny, colorful hats and smoke a lot of weeds. You still do learn a lot but the religion is central to the plot and I had to google a lot when I got home to figure some things out.

They probably could have fleshed out a little more about the civil strife in Jamaica, what everyone was fighting about, and they might have fleshed out “the wailers” i.e. Bob’s band. Bob’s bandmates are pretty one dimensional other than they’re presented as pretty loyal to him all throughout his youth well into his fame.

For a biopic, it’s short and I suppose if it had been longer, we’d be complaining about it, but I don’t know. If they could have fleshed out some more details, I wouldn’t have minded an extra half hour. All in all, a decent movie though.

Kingsley Ben-Adir plays Marley well and it must have been a challenge to match his funky dance moves on stage. Lashana Lynch plays Rita, Bob’s long suffering wife who eventually becomes so sick of Bob’s cheating that she does some cheating of her own. Sopranos fans will be pleased to see Michael Gandolfini in a small part as a record producer.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy, mon.

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Feb 04 2024
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Movie Review – Argylle (2024)

Spies fly off the page and into action, 3.5 readers. BQB here with a review.

At the outset, let me say I give this movie a solid C +. It passed the minimum standards required for me to not demand a ticket refund but it didn’t razzle dazzle me either. It had cute, funny moments but ultimately, I’ll never watch it again and won’t think of it much a year from now. It was made by Apple and had all the earmarks of a streaming movie, so much so that I wondered why I didn’t just wait two weeks until I could stream it in the comfort of my own home.

Sidenote – A couple of weeks ago I noticed the Beekeeper was made by Amazon and this week this movie is made by Apple. Alas, when I was a kid I thought the movie business was out of my reach. If only someone had told me that I just need to learn how to code. Oh well. Moving on.

This is one of those films where the trailer is better than the movie. On paper, the idea is pretty solid. A spy novelist (Bryce Dallas Howard) pens the fabulous adventures of Agent Argyle (Henry Cavill) who, with the help of his handler (John Cena) and tech specialist (Ariana DeBose) fights the evil femme fatale LaGrange (Dua Lipa).

In reality, the novelist’s life is quite bland and mousy indeed. She’s scared of everyone and everything, her only friend her cat Alfie who she takes everywhere in a special backpack with ventilation holes. Alfie is the best part of an otherwise paint by numbers movie.

One day while on a train ride to visit her mother (Catherine O’Hara), novelist Ellie is attacked by mysterious assailants in a scene straight out of one of her bestsellers. Real life undercover spy Aiden (Sam Rockwell) comes to the rescue, and he’s far from the buff, studly, sophisticated Argylle but he gets the job done.

It turns out that Ellie is such a great writer that somehow, she has managed to predict with stunning accuracy in her novels what an actual spy agency is up to in her books, and they want her deep-sixed before she keeps blabbing away to her readers. Far-fetched? Yes. I could go into further detail but I’d ruin the movie for you and well, it does a good enough job of doing that on its own.

It’s a star studded cast. Samuel L. Jackson and Bryan Cranston stop by. Bryce, daughter of Ron “Opie” Howard, gets a chance to shine in her own vehicle. She does a better job in the first half as a mousy character but falls a little flat when she’s asked to be a bad ass. I’m not sure if it’s her or the written material she was given. Probably the latter.

Cut scenes throughout the first half of the movie refer to Ellie’s spy novels in which Cavill and Cena fight Dua Lipa and I couldn’t help but think how much more awesome the movie would have been if it had just been about Cavill and Cena fighting Dua Lipa than about Bryce Dallas Howard being in trouble for writing about Cavil and Cena fighting Dua Lipa. In true streaming movie fashion, it’s a lot of star power in that everyone was probably paid big bucks to show up for five minutes yet the trailer hoodwinks you into thinking they’ll be a huge part of the movie throughout.

So maybe just skip it and watch the trailer instead. Or wait until it streams on Apple Plus. It’s not a bad movie. It’s just not a good movie. It’s a C Plus movie. If you compare it to a term paper, its not the A plus paper that the honors kid stayed up every night for a month writing. It’s the paper the goof off kid wrote on the bus ride to school ten minutes before it was due. It got the job done but you can’t help but thing there was some wasted potential.

Sidenote. I hate to say this because I’ve whined extensively about my own weight problems on this fine blog, so I’m going to say this in a positive way. Bryce Dallas Howard is pleasantly plump and…you know what? She really isn’t. She just is for movies. She’s normal size for everywhere else. Most women in film, nay, most men in film for that matter, look like they eat three almonds a day and maybe, just maybe, if they’re good, they’re allowed one cup of spinach if they run a five mile marathon after. For example, I bet Dua Lipa only ate three celery sticks last year so she could film that cool scene where John Cena plucks her off her motorcycle that they put in the trailer that makes you want to buy a ticket to this otherwise lackluster film. But the Bryce-meister has a little bit of chub going on which works when she’s mousy novelist Ellie and a little surprising later as she tackles the a tougher kick ass role.

I’m not knocking it. I like curvy babes. It was nice to see a woman on screen who isn’t afraid of a sandwich. And I noticed the female lead in the beekeeper looked like she never shied away from the BK drive-through. There seems to be a trend in Hollywood as of late to put chubby chicks front and center and I applaud it. I’m just saying, where are the fat dudes? Where’s Special Agent Wayne Knight (Newman from Seinfeld) chasing down the bad guys? I’m not sure we’ll ever get equal time for portly dudes on screen, but there seems to be a cabal of chubby chicks who are doing a PR offensive to get husky babes on screen. Large dudes need their own PR team. All I’m saying.

Again. I’m fat. I applaud it. To an extent. Don’t get too fat, people. You don’t want the health problems that come with it. Trust me.

But Bryce is far from that. She and her cat are tres adorbs.

STATUS: Moderately shelf-worthy.

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Jan 28 2024
2 Comments
Movies

Movie Review – Poor Things (2023)

Brain surgery and world travel, 3.5 readers. That’s the stuff this Oscar contender is made of.

Your old pal BQB here, dodging dog ducks and goat chickens with a review.

I rarely say this about a movie, but if this one doesn’t win the Best Picture Oscar, then all 3.5 of you should write a sternly worded complaint letter to the Academy. It’s that good and if it doesn’t sweep all categories, especially of the acting variety, I’ll eat my hat.

Why? Because it’s that different. It’s that strange. It’s that unique. In a world of prequels, sequels and reboots, director Yorgos Lanithmos has brought us something that we’ve never seen before. He has a history of making strange, bizarre dark comedies such as “The Favourite,” another past Oscar contender starring Emma Stone in which two lesbians fight for a 1700s Queen of England’s affections and all the power that comes with it.

Here, Yorgos and Stone renew their creative partnership to bring you a feminist Frankenstein that is bold, message laden, yet not too preachy and laugh out loud funny, yet morbid, sick and twisted. Every actor involved – Stone, Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo appear as you’ve never seen them before, frankly as no one as seen anyone before and while Stone’s and Ruffalo’s noms are deserved, I feel like Dafoe was quite cheated as he was passed over as a potential gold statute winner this year and wrongfully so.

The plot? Mad scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is horribly deformed, his mangled face and body the result of years of bizarre experiments performed by his own mad scientist father. He explains his various deformities in terms of his father’s mad science findings i.e. “when he removed that he discovered we need that” and so on.

Dr. Baxter discovers the body of a woman who has just committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. When he finds the body washed up on shore, he discovers the very much dead woman is carrying a living child in her womb so naturally he, ok this is where you would think he would write off the deceased mother and save the live baby but no, he cracks open the dead mother’s skull and swaps out the live baby’s brain for the dead mother’s brain, bringing mother back to life with a baby brain and essentially making her her own daughter and mother.

To Godwin, this makes perfect sense. To everyone else he tells this story to, they think he is quite mad indeed. Such is the life of a mad scientist.

Godwin names his new creation Bella (Emma Stone) and though she has an adult’s body, she has the mind of a baby. Throughout the movie, we see Bella, despite her adult form, progress in mental state from infancy to toddler-hood, to childhood, rebellious teenager and finally, full blown adult hood, all in a relatively short time span, and Stone’s ability to pull off these various stages make her very deserving of the Best Actress Oscar. Extra credit for having to run around with those caterpillar eyebrows and crazy, frilly, big shouldered, Victorian outfits.

Of course, a baby’s brain in an adult body yields all sorts of hijinx. For the first part of the film, Bella walks and talks like a toddler and throws temper tantrums like one when she doesn’t get her way. Perhaps we’ve all dealt with a precocious tyke who screams and throw things when they are upset but when a 30 something old woman acts like this, definitely hide the sharp objects.

Dr. Baxter takes on a teaching assistant, Max McCandles (Ramy Youseff) who is given the task of observing Bella and taking notes vis a vis her mental growth. Her exploits as she learns basic things and discusses them matter of factly are quite humorous indeed. Bella and Max fall for one another and are engaged to be wed. Dr. Baxter calls in nefarious cad/lawyer Duncan Wedderburn to draw up a marriage contract only for the perverse Wedderburn to take advantage of Bella’s naivete and lead her astray.

Off they go on a worldwide adventure, and as Bella’s mind expands she becomes increasingly more difficult for Wedderburn to control (comically so), the underlying message being the smarter a woman is the less likely she’ll be controlled by men but this is done with a lot of laughs rather than rammed down your throat.

Perverts who have the hots for Stone will be glad to know she’s naked and having hardcore sex for literally half the movie. Bella refers to this as “furious jumping” and enjoys the fun of it, doing it indiscriminately with anyone interested and unaware of all the potential negative ramifications, thus taken advantage of quite a bit.

Ruffalo, who usually plays a typical straight man, is fun as the lecherous rake who seduces Bella into a life of debauchery, only to go mad when Bella becomes an expert hedonist and engages in transgressions that send Wedderburn into a frenzy.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy. It would surprise me if this doesn’t win several Oscars including Best Picture. It is rare for a comedy to win Best Picture, but its that good. Visually, it’s at times pleasing and shocking, like a trainwreck you don’t want to look away from what with all of Dr. Baxter’s twisted experiments brought to life on screen. Superb acting from all involved. Original in a time that lacks originality.

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Jan 14 2024
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Movies

Movie Review – The Beekeeper (2024)

He keeps bees and kicks ass, 3.5 readers.

BQB here with a review of this awesome action flick.

There was something strangely satisfying when Jason Statham straps a sleazy cyber scam artist to the bumper of a pickup truck. The fraudster, responsible for conning countless people out of their money, including his beloved landlady Mrs. Parker (Phylicia Rashad), promises Statham’s Adam Clay a fortune in NFTs and crypto if he’d just let him go, but Clay prefers vengeance to riches and rigs his truck so that he can hit the gas without being in it, sending truck with attached fraudster flying off the side of a bridge.

Yup. It’s THAT kind of movie. Think Deathwish for the modern age, if Charles Bronson were called back into action to mow down the trashier side of Silicon Valley, no obviously not the tech gurus that bring us all kinds of neat gadgets but rather, the ones who pray on the innocent and swipe their loot. TBH, in real life I’m not sure how closely related those fraudsters are to the legit technosphere, though this film imagines them working hand in hand as secretive wing that finances the otherwise legit wing of a tech wunderkind’s empire (he played by Josh Hutcherson).

Jeremy Irons and Minnie Driver lend star credit to the film and while it is full of plotholes and has a B movie vibe (no pun intended), it is, IMO one of the best action flicks I’ve seen in awhile, though I’m not sure if that is saying much as Hollywood hasn’t done well with the genre in a long time.

Statham stars as Clay, who at first appears to be a humble keeper of bees, renting a barn on the property of retired schoolteacher Mrs. Huxtable, I’m sorry, Mrs. Parker and BTW it’s cool to see Phylicia Rashad in a movie. When she is conned into losing all her money to online fraudsters, she commits suicide. Unfortunately for the fraudsters, Clay is no ordinary Beekeeper but rather, a member of a secret organization called “the Beekeepers” and there’s a whole schtick about how they “maintain the hive” and “smoke out hornets” and TBH all of that seems a bit silly and unnecessary but it works as a device to explain how Statham’s character got to be so kick ass and how these chumps chose the wrong lady to mess with given her friendship with a badass hombre.

Clay is hunted by FBI Agent Verona Parker, the daughter of the late Mrs. Parker, who at first suspects Clay in her mother’s death, then starts rooting for him, but then as Clay’s carnage starts taking out scores of bad guys and numerous exploding buildings, realizes this mayhem can’t continue and he has to be stopped. It does seem a little silly that a daughter wouldn’t just sit back and relax while an ex clandestine agent cooks her mother’s tormentors in one great big weenie roast but there needed to be some drama to the film.

I have long been a Jason Statham fan but it has saddened me that in recent years his films, IMO, have been lacking. His best years seemed to be behind him as Hollywood didn’t know what to do with him, perhaps just because his brand of action went out of style and the poor guy seemed like a pit bull who would gladly attack if his handlers would just let him off the chain.

Well, he’s let off and then some and it’s classic Statham you haven’t seen since he’s early Transporter days, where he’s fighting multiple dudes at the same time and kicking ass, taking names, rattling off one liners, making the bad guys crap their pants with fear. Irons and Driver build up the suspense – it’s a bit hokey as they launch into this whole routine of “Oh, you’ve incurred the wrath of a beekeeper, you’re done for” but it works.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy. I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun watching a movie in January.

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Jul 04 2023
4 Comments
Movies

Movie Review – Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

Da da da da…da da da!

Grab your hats and whips, 3.5 readers. It’s time for a review of Indy 5. SPOILERS ABOUND!

Hype is weird, noble readers. This movie got a lot of it. Bad hype. Hate hype. All the social media comments and online reviews, youtube videos etc – it all gave me the impression that this flick had taken a big huge steamy corn infested dump all over the legacy of America’s favorite fictional archaeologist.

Indy turned into a pathetic old man! Indy bossed around by a mouthy dame the whole picture! Four decades of a beloved franchise flushed down the toilet in the name of radical feminism.

I only bought a ticket with the intention of hate watching it and writing a scathing review for all 7 of your eyes, but to my surprise, I ended up liking it. It wasn’t that bad a movie at all.

Now don’t get me wrong. The original trilogy was fabulous with a perfect ending that wrapped it all up nicely, so other than the profit motive, I’m not sure Hollywood wants to keep tinkering with it. Well, the answer is because Disney bought the Indy franchise when it bought Star Wars and the rest of Lucasfilm’s IP, and I can’t blame them for wanting a return on investment.

The story begins at the end of World War 2 with a CGI de-aged Indiana Jones infiltrating a train full of Nazis making a run for it before the Allies arrive. They’ve packed the train with a buttload of stolen artifacts, all the relics and artwork they need to sell and fund their post war exile abroad.

With colleague Basil Shaw in tow, the duo is on the hunt for the famed Spear of Destiny, the spear said to have pierced Christ’s flesh when he was crucified. Truth be told, the legend of this spear and how it was passed about through various European rulers and how their downfall often coincided with when they lost control of the spear would, in and of itself, make for a great flick, but its only a premise for our heroes to discover an entirely new MacGuffin, namely that the train is carrying Archimedes’ Dial, an Ancient Greek device that Shaw has been obsessed with for years, due to claims that it can be used to travel through time.

Preposterous, surmises Young Indy, and dutiful suspenders of disbelief that we are, we’re totally supposed to forget that Indy has seen the Ark of the Covenant melt people who looked at it, went mano y mano with a voo doo priest who rips the hearts from people’s chests and turns them into mindless zombies and oh yeah, there was that time he met a still-alive ancient knight who was guarding the holy grail, which he used to cure his father’s bullet wound.

SIDENOTE: I gotta say, this beginning scene felt like it could have been from a lost cut of an old Indy movie. The effects are modern, but the CGI is brilliant, such that it looks and sounds like a young Harrison Ford. One wonders if we aren’t only a few years away from new Indy movies where Ford lends his voice and likeness and lets Disney techs work their magic to bring us new tales set in Indy’s golden age of the 1930s and 40s.

But I suppose that involves a debate of whether or not CGI actors are a good thing. That’s a whole other kettle of fish.

Flash forward to 1969 and Indiana Jones is very old, sad and lonely. It’s his retirement day as a college professor. He’s bummed for without his job he has little to look forward to. Marion, who he married in his 60s according to the Crystal Skull, truly the shittiest of the Indy movies with the exception that at least it left Indy in the happy situation of having a wife and newly discovered son, has left him, because of course she has. I get the online criticism here to an extent. I mean, they don’t ALWAYS have to leave our heroes sad and lonely but other than suffering the woes of old age, Indy proves he still has some piss and vinegar left, as does Harrison Ford.

Indy’s sidekick in this film is Phoebe Waller-Bridge, a woman so excessively British that she probably had relatives who spit shined King Arthur’s codpiece and her blood type is fish and chips. She speaks English throughout the film, but you know, Englishy English. I’m trying to say I have no idea what she’s saying half the time because she’s absurdly British.

Her character, Helena Shaw, to put it simply, is a total asshole. She is Indy’s goddaughter as her father and Indy were once BFFS. She approaches Indy under the guise of being a grad student researching Archimedes’ Dial, but this is just a pretense to steal it and sell it to the highest bidder. Throughout the film she insults and betrays our fearless hero, and I think that online critics didn’t quite get the point that the intention was that her character was written specifically so that she’d come across as a dick. Indy, however, isn’t that pathetic, and goes tit for tat with her throughout the flick.

My complaint is the writers never offer an explanation as to why Helena is such an unscrupulous d-bag. We see her father was a very nice, moral man. We see she was nice as a child. If there was an event, a tragedy, a something or other than turned her into a money hungry scumbag willing to screw over a close family friend in the name of cold hard cash, we weren’t told about it.

But Indy and Helena become frenemies as their larger goal is to keep the dial out of the hands of the villainous Jurgen Voller, a Nazi scientist who dreams of using the dial to rewrite history and turn the Nazi’s defeat in 1945 into a permanent, never-ending world tour.

There’s some great car chases. Incorporation of history. Thrills and chills. Twists and turns. Fun cameos. All in all, a decent flick. Does it outshine the trilogy? No. As good as the trilogy? No. Does it make up for the doody fest that was the Crystal Skull? IMO, yes. It’s a good movie, a fun time, and its far from the crapfest the internet tongue waggers are making it out to be.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Worth a trip to the big screen.

My thoughts on the future of the Indy Franchise:

#1 – Key Huy Quan, who played Short Round in Temple of Doom, just had a major career comeback, winning an Oscar at 50. Maybe it’s time to see what Shorty’s doing as an adult.

#2 – If done right, I wouldn’t be against a Disney Plus animated series where Ford lends his voice and likeness to Indy cartoons of Indy’s younger days.

#3 – CGI actors are getting better and better so before you know it, we might actually see Young Indy movies where he looks as spry as he did in the trilogy.

#4 – There’s talk of Indy passing the torch. Maybe, but the thing is, the franchise is called “Indiana Jones.” If another character becomes an adventurer, they might be inspired by Indy but they aren’t Indy. They might make movies where a younger actor plays Indy in his prime, but the role is so much all about Ford.

#5 – But ultimately, this IP is worth big bucks. Disney bought it, so they’ll want to make bank off it. Let’s hope Harrison eats his wheaties.

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