So much of TV is drek nowadays. There are very few shows that leave me wanting to watch more than one episode, even less that make me want to watch one episode right after another. The ones that make me want to watch it all twice are rare and this is one of them.
For those who don’t remember, Squid Game Season 1 was a surprise hit in the fall of 2021. It had a lot going against it, mainly because it was a South Korean show that Americans would have to watch either with subtitles or with English voices dubbed over. Most English speaking viewers will give a hard pass to a show like that, but the content was something to be hold.
There’s no way around it. It’s violence porn. The body count is substantial and downright disgusting. And yet, there’s also a metaphor for the game of life, how every day we wake up and play a game within our own little world. If we screw up badly, catastrophic events unfold. We lose our jobs, our families, our livelihoods, all that and more can happen with a single error in judgment.
True, it’s unlikely that an error will get you instantly shot (although sadly that often does happen) but as Squid Game players are turned into cannon fodder over insignificant errors while playing kids’ games (i.e. drop a marble and you’re dead) the message is clear – life is a game and if you screw up, you lose big time.
I thought the first season would be a one and done. The game was presented as so vile and treacherous, the villains as so ruthless and cunning, than anyone, such as the protagonist Gi-Hun, who manages to escape with his life and a big bag of money would run as far away from the game as possible, never to return.
But darned if they didn’t find a way to make the new season interesting and watchable. Here, Gi-Hun has gone from pathetic doofus in S1 to hardened tough guy in S2. Surviving the Squid Game will do that to you. He has used his winnings to recruit a legion of mob flunkies to search for “the recruiter,” that ne’er-do-well who tricks unsuspecting rubes into joining the game.
Gi-Hun manages to connive his way back into the latest iteration of the game, hoping to take it down from the inside. But along the way, he will have to play, and with a new cast of players, including an old friend, a mom/son duo, a trans ex-soldier, an evil rapper, an expecting mom to be, a crypto coin fraudster and more.
Detective Hwang is back, still leading the chase to bring down his brother, the evil “Front Man” behind the games.
If I tell you much more, I’ll spoil it all. But I’ve watched it twice and even went back to watch the first season, all since S2 dropped the day after Christmas. To get that much attention from me is something.
Hold onto your cash, 3.5 readers. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
In my humble opinion, Netflix puts out a lot of crap, and I mean a lot. Most of it is unwatchable. One wonders why I even subscribe, but that’s a whole other conversation for another day.
At least once, maybe in a blue moon twice, a year, they put out one really good movie. For me, last year’s was Reptile. This year, they were due, and Rebel Ridge is it. Again, that’s my opinion. Maybe you think this is trash and another one of their offerings that I thought was trash you enjoyed. It’s all subjective.
This movie reminds me of Rambo, not the international warrior from Rambo 2 and 3, but the ex soldier in 1, who was just taking a walk, minding his own business, when a jerk cop hassled him, it escalated and a small town turned into a war zone.
In this case, Aaron Pierre plays Terry Richmond, a man with a simple mission. He’s visiting a small town with a large stash of cash in his backpack to bail out his cousin. Alas, he is quite rudely stopped by the local police, who perform an impromptu civil forfeiture of Terry’s cash on ridiculous, trumped up charges. The cops explain to Terry that he’s free to fight the move in civil court, but to do so will take years, cost him more than he lost, plus if he does, they’ll file one bogus criminal charge on him or another.
For most people, this terrible experience would just be a painful and very expensive learning lesson. Do not walk around with that much cash.
But Terry is in a real bind. His cousin, Mike, ratted on some bad dudes in the past. Bail for his current offense would just mean he is released and likely to just get light sentence, but if he isn’t bailed out, he’ll be transported to county jail, where friends of sad bad dudes ratted upon reside, and well you know how that will play out.
And so, the local cops learn the hard way that Terry was the wrong hombre to mess with. He’s actually a soldier who trains other soldiers how to fight. And boy is he ever in for a big brawl because this corrupt force isn’t lying down easy.
You see, noble reader, the true villain of the movie is (try not to yawn) civil forfeiture law. It’s been in the news the past few years with countless stories about how people’s money, homes and livelihoods are snatched up by the government with reckless abandon, all based on a suspicion, and it takes years and oodles of more money to fight it to get the confiscated property back, if that ever even happens. As the flick explains, the po po only take the allegedly illicit property to court so rare is the case where a judge actually hears the owner’s side of the story.
And a super corrupt police chief played by Don Johnson has gone in deep with civil forfeiture, such that he’s funded his own private little fiefdom. Anna Sophia Robb tags along as a plucky court clerk/law student who explains the whole ins and outs of civil forfeiture to us dumb audience folk and occasionally get into peril and needs to be rescued by Terry.
SIDENOTE: When I saw her I immediately said, “That’s the kid from Bridge to Terabithia!” Yep. But all grown up now. Time is an MFer.
The good? There’s a lot of action and really did remind me of the first Rambo film.
The bad? It all seems to escalate unnecessarily. There are times when it seems like a no brainer that both sides would just give up and walk away. I know this is a film so that can’t happen, but there are a lot of contrived happenings to explain why Terry and the cops keep going at it.
My ultimate complaint, this, Bad Boys and Axel F were the best action movies of the year and they all depicted corrupt cops as the villains. Does it happen? Sure. Does it happen as often as Hollywood would like us to believe? Hardly. It just feels like Hollywood is so afraid of offending any other possible group that when it comes to action flicks, they’re only willing to cast cops as the bad guys.
BQB here with a review of ::: checks notes::: the latest sequel where one of our 1980s hero characters is brought back as a senior citizen to ride again.
You know, 3.5 readers, Hollywood sure has been keeping a lot of properties born in the 1980s artificially alive well into the 2020s, well past their prime, if you ask me. I liken it to burying your dead cat in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. You miss your kitty, so off you go to the cursed burial ground. You put your furry pal in, hoping he’ll live again, but what you get back is nothing like your fuzzy BFF. Instead, its a gross, disgusting, pathetic simulation, a terrible horror, frankly a crime against God and humanity that all you want to do is look away, beat it to death with a shovel and curse yourself for wanting it to live again.
That’s because, like your deceased kitty kat, these movies and franchises were products of their time. Star Wars was hot in the 1970s and 80s because the special effects were unlike anything movie goers had ever seen, and it had themes of defeating an evil empire and keeping the world in the light and from descending into darkness – like America had just defeated an evil empire in Nazi Germany thirty years earlier, and was trying to defeat an evil empire in Russia at the time and would eventually do so. Forty years later, art imitates life, so Star Wars has descended into nonsense about lesbian space witches, but I digress.
I could discuss why many films belong in the 80s and shouldn’t be resurrected for a time that doesn’t understand them, but we’re here to talk about the Beverly Hills Cop Franchise, which IMO jumped way over the shark when Axel investigated an evil amusement park in the third installment in the 1990s such that I’m surprised Hollywood decided to do a fourth now but as Yogurt from Spaceballs reminds us, there’s always a quest for more money.
So, my first question is why did Paramount hand this off to Netflix? Paramount has its own Paramount Plus streaming platform and I feel like this would have attracted a lot of viewers. I had a sub for a year and enjoyed watching a lot of Paramount stuff, like the old Star Trek movies, and Yellowstone, Maverick, the Fatal Attraction series (another dead cat in the Pet Sematary if you will) and so on.
I let my sub lapse but I would have renewed it to watch this because I like Eddie Murphy that much. So who knows? Netflix made the best deal I suppose.
In this installment, Axel heads to Beverly Hills where his estranged daughter Jane is a lawyer, under fire for representing a man falsely accused of a drug related murder. When his old pal Billy Rosewood calls Axel to let him know his daughter is in hot water, Axel is on the first plane to Beverly Hills, his old stomping grounds where he previously upset the status quo in this fancy schmancy uber rich town twice and/or three times if you count part three while dragging around his local cop buddies Rosewood and Taggart (John Ashton who honestly, I thought he died long ago so I was pleasantly surprised to see him still alive.)
Along the way, Axel teams up with Jane’s cop ex boyfriend Bobby (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt) to take down a cabal of corrupt cops led by the top corrupt cop (Kevin Bacon). Don’t forget, Axel is from Detroit, so an opening scene checks in with his old cop buddy Friedman (Paul Reiser.)
So, whats the good? This movie has a lot of action. A lot. 1980s style action. A lot of car chases and crashes. Gun fights. Even a helicopter chase.
Eddie Murphy is remarkably well preserved. Whereas other 1980s icons bringing their stuff back in modern times (Harrison Ford, Sly Stallone) look like they are ready for the nursing home, Eddie, IMO, for an old timer, looks not that far from his younger self. It just doesn’t feel like you’re watching a geriatric running around, although I suppose you are.
The bad? Sadly, everyone else looks like they’re 1000. To the film’s credit, all the supporting characters are either in upper police management or moved on. They’d be happily spending their golden years waxing a desk chair with their butts if Axel hadn’t dragged them back into the shit. Friedman and Taggart are upper management in Detroit and Beverly Hills while Rosewood has left the force to become a private investigator.
The funny trio of Axel, Rosewood and Taggart was what made the first two films smash comedy hits. Taggart was a grizzled old prick who never wanted to deviate from procedure. Rosewood was young and trying to follow Taggart’s lead, but had a comical bloodlust such that once he got hold of a little firepower, turned into Rambo and started wildly shooting at the bad guys with any big, bad guns he could get his hands on with reckless disregard to his safety. Axel would drag these two nerds kicking and screaming into the breach.
And of course, Axel would rely on Eddie’s comedian skills to bluff his way into places he shouldn’t be, taking on all manner of silly accents and roleplays, conning his way behind closed doors.
While Taggart and Rosewood have key roles, they are, alas too old to be at the center of the action so the movie fails to recreate that fun 1980s buddy cop vibe they once had. They try by pairing Axel with Leavitt’s Bobby and they have some good moments but it isn’t the same.
Here’s my number one complaint. Apparently, all of our beloved 1980s heroes, when they are dragged back into modern times, have to be old trainwrecks, estranged from their wives and children. They did it with Han and Indy and Luke and now, Axel is divorced (he wasn’t married in the originals if I recall correctly) and his daughter hates him for letting his job come between him and his family. And by hate him I mean really hate him. Axel and Jane work the case and she is kvetching at him the entire movie and can’t give the guy a break for a second. Like seriously, the guns are blazing. The bullets are flying overhead and this chick is like, “Waah, you were never there for me, Dad, waaah.” WTF.
Look, I get that from a writing perspective, an older character being washed up can create great drama. I just wonder why Hollywood writers couldnt have said, hey we’ve done this so many times with so many other resurrected 80s characters that why can’t we give Axel a wife and a kid that actually like him? Would that be terrible? I don’t think so.
Bronson Pinchot returns as his classic Serge character but its 2024 so of course, Serge gets a lecture on how his Serge-ness might be considered offensive. I guess that was the price of allowing Bronson to be grandfathered in on doing a character with a foreign accent.
And whereas Axel fought criminals and crooks in the earlier films, today he takes on corrupt cops because, cops are evil right? The movie goes out of its way to reflect the current climate where cops aren’t too popular but Hollywood would do well to remember that cops aren’t despised everywhere in America and you know, criminals still exist so I don’t know why Axel couldn’t have been sent after some legit villains here.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. I’ll give it credit in that its better than a lot of other sequels that breathed fresh life into old stuff but sometimes I wonder why Hollywood doesn’t look at what makes these movies great and rather than say “we can grandfather it in because its an old franchise” just apply it to new stuff. The car chases are awesome. The action is awesome. The gunfights are awesome. Just put more of that in new movies with younger actors. You don’t need Eddie and Arnie and Sly and Harrison to carry your water forever.
Holy smokes, 3.5 readers, have I been holding my water on this one a long time.
So much so that I’m ready to pee my pants.
In the wake of the pandemic, when I became addicted to online food delivery because it was verboten to go shopping yourself, I wrote a novel based on some of the wacky hijinx I experienced as a customer. (Order a pastrami sandwich on rye and they deliver you a Velvet Elvis painting? WTF?)
Anyway, last summer, your favorite proprietor of a blog with only 3.5 readers was contacted by a representative of a website with 3.5 bazillion viewers. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Yes, that’s right. Pornhub. No, just kidding. Netflix.
Initial e-mail exchanges went like this:
NETFLIX GUY: “Hi I work for Netflix. Are you Bookshelf Q. Battler? I know you write under a pen name but I’d like to talk to you about your book, Shop Buddy. I really enjoyed it.”
ME: “Ah, so you’re the one.”
NETFLIX GUY: “Ha ha. I’d like to talk more. Can we speak on the phone?”
ME: “How do I know you’re a real Netflix guy and not some weirdo trying to steal the rights to my book?”
NETFLIX GUY: “How do I know you’re the real Bookshelf Q. Battler and not a chump posing as BQB?”
So after a long round of emails and phone calls where we sufficiently verified each other’s credentials, we were off to the races, and as scary as it was, I, as in the “man behind the curtain” of BQB very nervously identified my true self to people who gained my trust that they wouldn’t reveal my identity and discussions began.
Initial negotiations were over video conference calls and that was surreal. They were nice enough to understand I was a true novice to the industry and suggested I get an agent before things continue. That did slow things down as I had to seek out an agent and I got turned down a lot until I was savvy enough to start mentioning I have a potential Netflix deal.
Frankly I was little skeeved by the whole agent hiring process. It felt like I’d already done the work of landing the tuna in my boat but after several interviews with different potential agents, I found one I liked and as she explained (I used the tuna in the boat analogy with all of them), she was wise enough to point out that that yes, I’d landed the tuna but she would be the one to knock it out, skin it, and fry it up with lemon pepper and basil.
Mmm. Lemon pepper fish. Rich in omega 3s.
Anyway that slowed things down till January, but then the really nitty gritty stuff began. Hooray for Hollywood! Yours truly actually got on a plane and flew out to Tinsel Town. I met my agent. I met with Netflix people. I met crackheads on Hollywood Boulevard but that’s irrelevant.
To my great surprise, I did things that only a person with balls would do, so apparently I am a baller now. I said to my agent. “Should we shop around? Should we see if Hulu wants to be in the Shop Buddy bidness? What about the fine people over at HBO Max? Can I get a meeting with the good people at Amazon Prime and rub Jeff Bezos’ bald head for good luck?”
Agent agreed. We shopped. No interest from Hulu or HBO. Amazon had enough interest for a meeting but not enough to invite Jeff so I would not get to rub Jeff’s head which is a shame. I deserve to as my books have made him upwards of 17 entire cents. I made the point in the meeting that, you know, my book is hot right now because I self-published it on Amazon so if you guys let someone else snap it up, they’ll be significant egg on your faces. I worded it nicer than that but you get the drift. Frankly, I couldn’t believe I was able to say such things to such important people. They nodded graciously and saw the point but thought the whole thing was too weird. A book written by a guy with a weird pen name? Too weird.
So ultimately, that’s why I went with the Flix to the Net. They really understood my vision and the cool thing is they agreed to go along with the whole Bookshelf Q. Battler mystique. In fact, we’re in development in on a BQB’s Twisted Shorts series and we’re all in agreement that there’s more free publicity, fanfare and, well yes, cold hard cash-o-la to be made if the man behind the curtain remains a mystery for now and people are left wondering who the heck wrote all this schlock? Who is he? What’s his deal? Why so mysterious?
How would a BQB series work? We’re a little vague on that but basically someone would play me and introduce each story in the anthology with some quips and one liners. We all agreed I’m too gross and disgusting to play myself. I agreed. They were nicer about it. Various euphemisms were employed to avoid telling me I’m too gross and disgusting to do the job myself and that a handsome person must be hired to play me so I appreciate that. BTW this is all theoretical at this point so I should mention no deal on BQB’s Twisted Shorts has been made at this time though it is in the works. They liked my short stories and think they could sell with the tag line “Black Mirror meets Monty Python.” Sounds about right.
But I digress. The point is Netflix will a) give me money and b) keep my ID a secret. Personally, I’m fine with that because you know, this could all be a flash in the pan and if so, I’d just rather keep my little old life as is. What Netflix offered for the movie deal was generous, but not life changing. Perhaps in time we’ll get there but all good things come to wait.
Look at me rambling. So, back to the main point. The movie! Finn Wolfhard! Yes, Finn Wolfhard of Stranger Things fame has signed on to play Steve Anderson, the titular Shop Buddy, who, post-college, can’t find a job to save his life so has to go through the indignity of slinging grocery bags for an online shopping service. In doing so, he has to deliver a lot of strange, questionable items to a disturbing old man, all while a series of high-profile kidnappings is putting his town in the news.
I gotta tell you, the funny thing about life is, it’s weird how you think a thing will impress people and it doesn’t, but then something else will. I have only shared this info about a potential Netflix deal with a very small handful of close friends and family the past year. Having kept this info close to the vest, I assumed not too many people knew but holy crap, once it got out that the Finnster was involved, it came to my attention that the BQB friends and fam network has more leaky holes than a siv, because I am, quite literally, no word of a lie, getting damn calls like the one below every day. No one in my small social circle was impressed I had a movie deal under way, but once it came out that this famous ferret faced kid was involved, it was like I became the second coming. (It’s ok, I got permission to call him a ferret face. “We like the cut of your jib, BQB,” they said. “Do your thing,” they said. We’ll see how long that lasts.)
SIDENOTE: OK I’m sorry I called you a ferret face, Finn, but it’s this blog, so everyone gets made fun of here with me being the biggest butt of all the jokes, pun intended.
RANDOM DUDE: “BQB! Hi! This is So and So. Remember me?”
ME: Who?
Dude: So and so! You know! I sat behind you in third grade. I ate all my boogers and stole your lunch money. We were thick as thieves!
Me: WTF?
Dude: Ah, BQB you old kidder. Anyhoo, I made the mistake of mentioning I was in third grade with a guy that knows Finn Wolfhard.
ME: I don’t know him. Never met him.
Dude: Even so, my daughters wont shut up about it. Any chance you could get them a meeting? Maybe he could pose for some selfies and sign some autographs?
ME: Dude, sign my ass. :Click:
OK, I never was that rude. I let everyone down gently by reminding them, hello, I have never met this freaking kid. Yes, I’m even nice to the bullies who used to throw spitballs at the back of my head in school and now pretend like that never happened and that we were best of friends because they want me to intro their kids to Finn F’N Wolfhard.
And yes, God help me, ex-girlfriends including the literal one I thought I would marry only for her to tell me to drop dead and never contact me again, they tracked me down, found my number, call me up to ask if I can arrange a meeting between their kids and Finn.
Actually, they start high. Can I arrange a meeting between their kids, Finn and all of the freaking Stranger Things kids plus Winona Ryder and David Harbour but if that’s not possible then just Finn is ok. Oh, really? Just Finn is OK? Thanks Ex-Girlfriend Who Dumped Me Over Nonsense 20 years ago and left my life a shambles. That’s really nice of you to say that Just Finn would be ok to meet your ugly mutant offspring.
Sigh. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called her kids mutants. They’re blameless in all this. Ugly? Well, facts are facts. Oh, alright. Fine. They’re not ugly…that I know of. They could be. I mean, they share genetic material with their mother so there’s a statistical probability that…you know what? I’ll shut up.
“BQB write one of your patented, non-sensical, rambling blog posts to tell everyone about the movie,” the Netflix suits said.
Mission accomplished.
Anyway, without further ado, see below for what you’re all waiting for. Finn’s early test screenings where he reads his lines which, well, they’re my lines! I wrote them and it’s pretty cool. My agent tells me that Finn’s agent tells her that this has the potential to be a good project for Finn, that though he’s already super famous between Stranger Things and Ghostbusters, this will give him a starring vehicle where he gets a lot of screen time to be himself outside of a science-fiction role, so whodathunk a schmuck like me could make that happen?
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.
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.
Get ready to pucker your butts in terror, 3.5 readers.
SPOILER ALERT: This is less of a review and more of a discussion, so if you haven’t seen it yet, go watch it, then come back and discuss, although trigger warning, this is probably the scariest, twisted episodes of the series.
Are some scabs better off left unpicked?
You’d think so. The gavel comes down. The suspect is judged guilty. The high-profile case is over and all the TV cameras leave town. Years later, the horrific crime that rocked a community becomes but an eerie footnote in local history.
But with the rise of streaming media, there’s an overwhelming demand for true crime podcasts and documentaries, especially since everyone is trying to be the next Sarah Koenig, she the mother of all true crime podcasts, Serial. Over the past decade, Netflix has become home to a seemingly endless supply of true crime docs. You could pop them on and never watch them all in your lifetime. Well, maybe you could if you never had to work, drink, eat or poop, but you get the gist.
Enter Davis and Pia. They’re film students from London, he a Scottsman and she an African-American living abroad. (Samuel Blenkin and Myha’la Herrold). They’ve returned to Davis’ hometown of Loch Henry to produce a documentary about an egg collector. Pretty bland stuff but hey, at least they can practice their camera work and score an easy A.
Or so they thought. Whilst visiting Davis’ friend, barkeep Stuart (Daniel Portman in his best role since Game of Thrones’ Podrick), Pia inquires why such a beautiful town, full of picturesque landscapes isn’t rife with tourism.
Much to Davis’ dismay, loudmouth Stuart spills the beans. Once upon a time, the town was indeed a tourist spot, that is until the late 1990s when town scumbag Ian Nadair was discovered to be a maniacal serial killer who kidnapped tourists, then dragged them to a secret lair where he tortured and murdered them.
Davis even has a personal connection to this sad tale. His father, Ken, was shot in the shoulder while attempting to arrest Ian. While Davis is proud his father is a hero who brought a madman to justice, he is sad the wound, while not immediately fatal, led to an infection that killed his old man, leaving him without a dad at a young age. So sad was he that he never told Pia this story.
Pia meets Davis mother, Janet, an old woman who is the epitome of sweetness, going out of her way to welcome the couple with homecooked meals. Though she is overly pleasant, there is a clear pallor of sadness and at times, she laments how the vile madman ruined her life by taking her husband from her, leaving her to raise a young son all on her own and now leaving her alone in old age.
Blah blah blah. Against Davis’ protestations, Pia declares that THIS is the story they should be telling, so screw that egg guy. Advised by a streaming media exec to find new dirt on this story long considered old news, the trio go about town digging (Pia and Davis for their film project and Stuart because the greedy little bastard hopes renewed interest in the town will bring paying drinkers to his long dormant pub.)
And boy howdy, do they ever find new dirt. There are some fake outs, some twists and turns, an occasional insinuation that Stuart’s crusty old father Richard (John Hannah) might have been involved, but one night, while Pia is editing tape (she prefers the grainy look of old video cassettes to digital media), she finds, to her shock and horror, an old camcorder recording of Davis’ parents, Ken and Janet, torturing a young couple that had been reported in the news long ago as missing.
I can tell you, I felt that disgusted feeling as I saw a young Janet dawn a creepy mask and saunter into the room in a skintight outfit, dancing about and wielding a drill, spinning the bit menacingly at the tied up hostages. And I gotta be honest, 1990s rap group’s K7 old party in the club standard, “Come Baby Come” will always freak me the eff out whenever I hear it, because now I associate it with Davis’ parents dancing around to it on grainy home movie footage while they torture people.
I’ll leave the plot there. More horrors ensue. In the end, Davis loses his girlfriend and mother (Pia dies by accident while running away from now elderly Janet, while Janet, fearing discovery, hangs herself, but not before leaving out a stockpile of new evidence for Davis to find.) The poor lad does get an award, but as the show closes, we can’t help but think he would have been so much happier if he’d just made his silly little egg collector movie. He’d still have a mother. He’d still have a girlfriend. He’d still bask in ignorant bliss, believing his father was a hero cop who took down a serial killer (not a scumbag who shot his accomplice to pin it all on him before he could tell on his accomplices) and his mother as the strong old gal who put on a brave face for her son’s sake all these years.
Critics have complained this episode, as well as a few others in season 6 have little to nothing to do ith the horrors of technology, as is the show’s theme. However, I’d argue that streaming media did indeed lead to an increase in public interest in true crime documentaries, and any schmuck who aspires to become a story teller can simply grab a camera and a mic, interview townsfolk who remember a creepy case, pierce it together with old news footage and voila, a documentary is born.
But will these documentarians be repulsed by the new dirt they dig up? Is it better to let sleeping dogs lie?
STATUS: Shelf-worthy though I have to say, I felt so dirty after watching this one. I do like John Hannah, always have since he played Evie’s con man layabout brother in the late 1990s Mummy movies starring Brendan Fraser, so I’m glad his character wasn’t the killer after all.
Kudos to Netflix. Between episode 1 Joan is Awful and this one, the streaming service really was a good sport about letting Black Mirror kick the crap out of them this season.
It’s the Twilight Zone style show for the social media age and it’s finally back after a long hiatus.
BQB here with a review of episode 1 of the long awaited sixth season.
SPOILER ALERT: This isn’t so much of a review as it is a discussion so if you haven’t seen this yet, go watch it then come back and talk.
3.5 readers, if you’re reading this then chances are, you’re a nobody. Don’t feel bad. Most of us are and the good news is there’s a lot of safety in anonymity. Unlike the rich and famous, we can get away with a lot because no one cares about what we do.
But what if your favorite streaming service were to suddenly decide that your hum-drum life makes for good TV? Such is the case for Joan (Annie Murphy) a middle-manager at a tech company. Like all of us, she had dreams once, but now she just spends her days doing her corporate board’s dirty work, firing beloved employees for no cause just to increase profits. She feels dirty about it but finds no solace in her fiance, who she views as bland. Yet, she feels damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t, for she also has an ex wild man boyfriend who she enjoyed but ultimately understands that he’ll bring disaster back into her life.
And so, poor Joan feels trapped in the mundane when one day, she turns on Streamberry, a thinly veiled Netflix replacement, to discover a show about her life with the great Salma Hayek playing her with all of her dirty laundry hung out to dry. All of her indiscretions, infidelities and immoralities are laid bare for the world to see and oddly, in record time. The show churns out episodes so fast that it seems like no sooner does Joan do some inappropriate act that she thought no one saw that sure enough, that inappropriate act is streaming for the world to see.
After her lawyer investigates, Joan discovers that part of the terms and conditions of the long contract she signed when she signed up for the streaming service was to give the company all rights to make a show about her life. Through AI, the company is picking subscribers at random, following their lives via their cell phones and home cameras and creating computer generated shows about them. No writers or actors are needed. AI just takes scenes from subscribers’ real lives and provides dramatic flourishes, while actors have signed away their CGI rights for profit.
That’s right. Salma Hayek isn’t playing Joan. CGI Salma is and real Salma thought it would a quick buck to sign those rights away. In the hopes of grabbing Hayek’s attention and getting her to put the kibosh on the show, the real Joan starts doing horrendous, unspeakable, darkly comical things to the point where the real Salma doesn’t want her likeness associated with such depravity.
Shenanigans ensue as the real Joan and real Salma team up for a clandestine attack on Streamberry’s AI computer server and I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.
This is a rare light-hearted episode of black mirror. Usually, the show is quite dark and gut punching, as characters suffer irreparable damage and loss, forever doomed to experience terrible consequences. This one is actually quite funny.
“Absurd” I thought. CGI replacing real actors? That’ll never happen. Then I went to see The Flash last night and a CGI Henry Cavill did a brief cameo as did a CGI younger version of Nicolas Cage. CGI past versions of actors from DC superhero films from long ago also stopped by. So apparently, yes, Hollywood is looking for ways to make content with computers at a cheaper rate than what they have to pay real live humans.
And low and behold there’s a writer’s strike underway, with one of the chief complaints being that human writers are worried about being replaced by CGI writers. Could a CGI writer write better fart jokes than a human writer? Time will tell.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Credit to Netflix as with this episode, they basically admit that they invented the model of churning out unenriched crap at a rapid pace, content for the sake of content, just give viewers a neverending stream of new stuff to watch without worrying if its any good.
BQB here with a review of the Terminator’s foray into Netflix television.
Every man has a soft spot in their hearts for the top action hero of his childhood. I love Arnold Schwarzenegger just as my father loved John Wayne before me.
I always thought Arnold made a big mistake when he ran for governor of Cal-ee-for-ya. First of all, he wasn’t much of a governor and second, he missed the chance to reinvent himself in the 2000s, as his old frenemy Sly did.
But better late than never in this, Gov-a-nator’s first TV series. Seems blasphemous. Anything not a movie is surely below our favorite commando.
The premise? Luke Brunner (Arnie) is on the verge of retirement, both in his covert and overt lives. That’s right. He pretends to co-own a fitness equipment supply business with his BFF Barry (Milan Carter) while in reality, Luke is a veteran, globe-trotting CIA agent and Barry is his handler/computer expert.
His ex-wife Tally (Fabiana Udenio) and daughter Emma (Monica Barbaro) have long grown accustomed to Luke never being there for the important events in life. In fact, it’s starting to feel like Emma is following in her father’s footsteps as her relationship with boyfriend Carter (Jay Beruchel) is growing rocky due to her globetrotting job for a charity that brings water systems to third world countries.
When their paths cross on one last assignment, Luke realizes he has more in common with his daughter than he thought. Yup. The water job is just a cover for the fact that Emma is also in the CIA. The two have been CIA agents, lying to each other and believing each other’s false covers for years.
Ironically, the plot is pretty close to True Lies, one of the last great action films that Arnold ever made in his prime. Network TV just put out a True Lies TV show reboot that fizzled, so one wonders had that not happened, maybe Netflix could have ponied up the cash to reunite Arnold with Jamie Lee Curtis and Eliza Dushku so we can see what the Tasker family is up to these days.
Oh right. Netflix wouldn’t pony up THAT much money. But hey, at least Tom Arnold, who played Arnie’s BFF in True Lies, stops by in a cameo. IMO, True Lies and this part are the Tom Arnold’s funniest roles.
Rounding out the cast are two spies that work for Luke – Aldon and Roo (Travis Van Winkle and Fortune, he a stereotypical hunky studmuffin self-absorbed pretty boy type and she an out and proud lesbian with a mouth that delivers a quip a minute. The odd couple so odd it works friendship between these two is a highlight of the show.
As you might expect, Luke and Emma put their shock at discovering the other’s lies behind them quick and join forces to take down an international villain, with Luke’s team playing back up. The series moves about, from international adventures to shenanigans as father and daughter struggle to keep their lies straight with family.
Structurally, the show reminds me a lot of NCIS, where there’s an intrepid tough guy Gibbs, surrounded with comic relief underlings like Abby and McGee…except Arnold pumps a lot of comedic iron himself. An episode where he must force himself to look away as his daughter “honeypots” herself i.e. dances the wild mambo with a villain to get some world saving information is particularly funny. Another scene where a CIA shrink forces father and daughter to communicate with puppets that are replicas of themselves is funnier.
Sure, there are plotholes galore. It’s hard to believe a father and daughter would be able to learn the other has been lying to them for so long and be able to instantly get over it, but we don’t have time for them to go to a few years of therapy. Strangely, some of Luke’s CIA counterparts were always aware of Emma’s CIA status but never told him and he isn’t pissed at them either.
Special effects wise, its typical Netflix fare. Better than your average network show but not good enough to be a major motion picture.
At first, Barbaro comes across as one of many standard issue Netflix actresses – hot and gets the job done but you’ll forget her next year – except, she shines here with a few raunchy one liners you wouldn’t expect to come out of the mouth of a classy babe. Fun fact, she was the fly-girl in last year’s Top Gun: Maverick.
Meanwhile, Fortune Feimster gets her long awaited moment in the sun as Roo. She has long stolen the show with minor parts where she does the funny lesbian who says obnoxious, rude statements with oodles of misguided confidence. I’m not sure I totally buy her as CIA agent material because, you know, she’s fat but then again, it’s a solid, linebacker fat. She could really clothesline a dude and walk away no worse for wear.
Perhaps one criticism is that while the show is very funny, there are times when the humor makes it hard to believe these people are CIA agents. Everyone other than Luke and Emma seem to exist for comic relief and surely there needs to be a few more serious people on a CIA spy team.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. I agree with Luke that all these damn kids these days just assume everyone born before 1992 is an idiot.
BQB here with a review of Netflix’s A Futile and Stupid Gesture.
Brace yourself, noble reader.
What if I were to tell you that the man most responsible for the modern state of comedy is a man you most likely have never heard of?
Heck, I’m a comedy lover from way back and I had never heard of the late, great Doug Kenney. As a 1980s kid, I had a vague notion that National Lampoon was a company that made funny movies like Chevy Chase’s Vacation series but until I saw this film I had very little knowledge about how National Lampoon really started it all.
It’s the tale of Doug (Will Forte, perhaps in a role he was born to play) and Henry Beard (Domhnall Gleeson), two 1960s Harvard buddies who had a lot of fun when they were writers/editors for the Harvard Lampoon, Harvard University’s long-running comedy magazine.
When graduation threatens to tear the dynamic duo apart, wacky Doug talks straightlaced Henry into ditching law school (he has been accepted at several top schools) to run to New York to start a comedy magazine, “The National Lampoon” (done by leasing the name rights from Harvard.)
Numerous publishers tell the duo to eat dirt and/or pound sand but all it took was one yes and away they went. After struggling to get the publication off the ground, soon anyone interested in comedy is knocking on their door and their office becomes a veritable who’s who of the 1970s comedy scene, with pretty much every big name you can think of from that era getting their start in those hallowed halls.
Bill Murray. Chevy Chase. Gilda Radner. John Belushi. Christopher Guest. PJ O’Rourke. Harold Ramis. Anne Beatts. Michael O’Donaghue. The list goes on and on, many you have heard of, others you might not have but who were instrumental behind the comedic scenes. All got their start, not at Saturday Night Live as you (and even I) always thought but at National Lampoon.
Doug and Henry become big time successful dudes. While Henry maintains a level-head and handles the business side of things (sadly might be why you might not have heard of him until this movie and don’t worry I hadn’t either), Doug cracks under the pressure. All the deadlines, the demands from the publishing company, having to deal with the talent, working on a magazine and a radio show plus the need to continuously top his last project (always be funnier than your last project or else you lose fans) lead to Doug becoming an emotional wreck.
Alas, Doug falls victim to the twin vices of cocaine and women. He indulges in the white powder liberally, stuffing enough up his nose to kill a horse throughout the film. Though lucky to have a wonderful wife, Alex, he can’t control himself around women. Technically, most men can’t but most men never get the temptation. A comedy all star raking in the dough on the other hand? Too many babes to count. He loses his wife through cheating. He finds a loving girlfriend and just when you think he might have learned the error of his ways, alas, more cheating.
While Doug’s personal life is a wreck, his comedy success is non-stop. Becoming a millionaire from writing jokes would satisfy most people, but Doug is understandably irked when legendary comedy producer Lorne Michaels hires away all of his talent – his writers, his actors, pretty much everyone, to staff a new show you might have heard of, Saturday Night Live, Doug is bummed. To be fair, the movie claims that NBC pitched the idea of a National Lampoon comedy TV show to Doug’s publisher first and said publisher turned it down without Doug’s knowledge.
At any rate, Doug is forlorn from missing out his own opportunity to create TV gold and worse, that someone else spun gold from his yarn. While many would take their money and run at this point, Doug is motivated to go Hollywood and produces Animal House, what was at that time the highest grossing comedy movie ever made, ushering in a new era of raunchy comedy – all basically Doug’s revenge for SNL hiring his talent away.
I could go on but to do so would be a spoiler. Needless to say, the drugs wreck his brain. The loneliness of the cheating on and losing good women lifestyle takes its toll. Ultimately, he is his own worst enemy. While he has plenty to be proud of, he feels constant pressure to always top his last project. If his next project isn’t as funny, then he feels he has failed. Sadly, some family trauma from his youth comes into play, as he strives to be a success in the eyes of his parents but feels he can never please them.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy and I’m surprised it has taken me this long to see it. The film is mostly an homage to Kenny, but also a love letter from today’s comedians to the 1970s heavy hitters who started it all. Various comedic actors play those 1970s legends but to be honest, the film doesn’t really go out of its way to hire actors who look like those legends or at least try to make them up so they look like them. The film makes fun of this and of itself often. The story of an underdog who took a very unlikely project, turned it into a multi-million dollar empire, become filthy rich before he hit 30, got screwed by a greedy corporation only to come out on top with a hit movie of his own, all while dealing with drug and sex addiction…this is the stuff that Oscar films are made of and while the cast does great, I can’t help but think that if Netflix had invested a bit more money into this, they might have won some gold statues and been able to give Doug more of the recognition he deserved.
BONUS POINTS: Doug also made Caddyshack, which he thought was a lackluster sell-out movie, which is sad because I always thought it was very funny. Joel McHale, who starred alongside Chevy Chase in Community, does a decent Chevy Chase impression, though none of the actors really go out of their way to mimic their alter egos and you just have to pay attention to when the movie says who they are.
Bookshelf Battle 