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Mar 18 2024
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Movies

Classic Movie Review – Glengarry Glen Ross

A – Always

B – Be

C – Closing

Always Be Closing, 3.5 readers.

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.

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Mar 13 2024
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Movie Review – Ricky Stanicky (2024)

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.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy.

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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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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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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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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 08 2024
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Movie Review – Wonka (2023)

Oompa loompa doopitty doo – BQB here with a review for you.

I avoided this movie for awhile. Why? I admit I suffer from woke movie PTSD. Also, lame movie PTSD. I have seen so many of my favorite franchises get the woke streaming treatment, where Hollywood takes the bare bones of the film, cuts out anything good, adds a few random lesbians fighting the patriarchy and a nonsensical filler plot that goes nowhere that I just assumed they would do that here.

But I was wrong and when you watch a movie expecting it to stink only for it to turn out good, it’s a nice surprise.

This is a prequel to the 1970s film and/or the 2005 re-do based on the book by Roald Dahl. Here, a young Wonka played by Timothee Chalamet is orphaned by the death of his choclatier mother, but inspired to carry on her passion by sailing to Europe and starting his very own chocolate shop at the Galeries Gourmet, a land where only the most savvy candy lovers congregate.

Naive, dim witted and poor, Wonka is tricked into signing his life away to the evil Mrs. Scrubitt, forever doomed to join a cast of downtrodden folk sentenced to a lifetime of washing laundry. He befriends another orphan, Noodle and together they inspire Mrs. Scrubitt’s captives to make a break for it in the name of finding a better life as employees of Wonka’s future chocolate shop.

Ah, but there’s the rub. To establish a chocolate shop, Wonka must take on the infamous chocolate cartel, comprised of three comically evil chocolate robber barons who employ the chief of police (Keegan Michael Key) to take out any and all competition to their chocolate monopoly.

I always saw Chalamet as an overrated, weaselly little doofus who somehow wandered into Hollywood by accident and everyone just shrugged and allowed him to stay, but he really wowed me here. This was the role he was born to play and he does the role justice with all of Wonka’s eccentric imagination and whimsy.

Meanwhile, Hugh Grant steals the show as an oompa loompa hot on Wonka’s tail, looking for revenge as Wonka inadvertently ruined his life when he unwittingly stole the cocoa beans under his watch.

So yes, it is possible to sometimes teach an old dog new tricks. And yes, it is possible for Hollywood to dust off an old property without making it all about lesbians fighting the patriarchy. Who knew? I sure didn’t but this flick proved me wrong.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy.

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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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