Tag Archives: netflix

Jun 19 2021
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TV Review – Manifest (2018 – Apparently Cancelled)

Hey 3.5 readers.

This show’s cancellation is as mysterious as a missing plane.

BQB here with a review.

Remember a few years ago when there was a missing plane, no trace of it found and all the cable news channels talked about it ad nauseum for hours and hours on end? (Not that it wasn’t a tragedy but it was to the point where you’d wake up in the morning and there’d be a guy on TV talk about the missing plane, then you’d go to bed and someone was still talking about a missing plane.)

Well NBC made an entire show about just that, only the passenger and crew survive. They take off in 2013, get struck by lightning and then miraculously land five years later in 2018. Ironically, while this show began in 2018, news of its existence took three years to reach my brain, with Netflix delivering said news.

The rest of the world has moved on without them…hard since for the passengers, no time has passed. Yet in those five years, friends and family have gotten older, some have even passed away. Spouses have found other romantic partners. Kids have grown up, leaving siblings on the plane behind.

I have to admit, I generally despise network television. It’s all very bland, formulaic and predictable. It’s that way so that Joe Blow McNoCable can tune in on any episode, pick up what’s going on instantly and then keep watching without bothering to go back and watch the earlier episodes.

But I like this one and I would have never heard of it if it hadn’t shown up on my Netflix radar. Frankly, it’s odd that NBC decided to cancel it as it has gained a lot of fans on the streaming platform.

I’m five episodes in and debating whether or not to keep watching. The overall question of the show is how did this plane land five years into the future? The individual episodes have mini mysteries, i.e. the passengers develop special powers they use to help people, thus the secondary question of how did the plane’s travel through time give them special powers? The mini mysteries are fun, though if the show is cancelled, I doubt we’ll get answers to the big questions.

To that end, it is somewhat reminiscent of Lost. I never bothered with that one but it was about a plane crash and a mysterious island. Plenty of threads let out and then fans tell me they never got any answers. (SIDENOTE: The show also reminds me of early 2000s’ The 4400, about 4,400 survivors of alien abduction who are suddenly returned to earth…so who knows? Maybe the plane’s passengers were abducted by aliens.

And there’s the rub. Whenever I discover a network show I like, I eventually do stop watching, rarely finishing it to the end if an end is even allowed. Years ago, I was into NBC’s The Blacklist and Fox’s Sleepy Hollow. Both followed the same formats, i.e. the sweeping question solved a bit in each episode, while each episode follows on a singular premise. But alas, the networks just keep pulling those strings without ever really tying them up. You can only follow bread crumbs for so long before you either find a gingerbread house or grow sick of bread crumbs.

I’ll probably watch a few more episodes and who knows? Maybe Netflix will order some more seasons since it’s high on their top ten list this weekend.

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Jun 03 2021
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Movie Review – The Woman in the Window (2021)

Ugh. I wish this woman would get out of my window and off of my TV screen already.

Hollywood, what’s going on?

BQB here with a review of another stinker.

My 3.5 readers are aware I rarely give out the terrible “not shelf worthy” rating because as much as a movie might suck, it usually has some redeeming value and high, in the end, any movie that has been made is 100 percent better than the movie I didn’t make but some movies have little value and some are better off not made. The two films I watched the past weekend, Wrath of Man and The Woman in the Window, fit the bill.

BTW, this is a movie meant for people who have seen this film and the film it is based on, the classic Rear Window with Jimmy Stewart. If you haven’t seen either, look away, for SPOILERS ABOUND.

This isn’t a reboot of Rear Window but more of an homage. Rear Window is as close to perfect as a film can get and even by modern standards, the set design (which includes the construction of a whole host of apartments for the recovering Stewart to peep into) is fascinating.

Stewart’s character is a peeper but he has some redemptive qualities. He’s a famous photographer, laid up with a broken leg courtesy of a shoot gone wrong on his latest globetrotting adventure. He’s an older, gray haired man in this, but young Grace Kelly digs him because this was the time when Hollywood was like, “Yeah, young chicks like successful famous old dudes with money” whereas today they’d take like a 70 year old actor and slap hair dye on his plugs and try to make it look some young babe isn’t repulsed by him.

Sorry, I’m getting off on a tangent. Bottomline, Stewart while practicing his photography spies some odd doings with his neighbor that don’t quite up and the crux of the film is whether or not a heinous crime has been committed or if Stewart is just engaging in gossip and speculation over a lot of nothing.

I’m not sure why anyone would try to make a Diet Coke version of this film (I’m not sure why Universal (Hitchcock;s old stomping ground) didn’t sue either. It be like me making a movie about a farm boy turned space pilot who blows up the Bleth Blar and calling it Blar Blores but whatever.

The movie seems to go out of its way to set itself apart from Rear Window and maybe this is where it messes up. Here we have Amy Adams as child psychologist Anna Fox, an agoraphobic who, for reasons to be revealed later, is afraid to leave her house.

Anna spends her days watching old movies and peeping on her neighbors across the street. On one fateful night, she sees her neighbor’s wife, played by Julianne Moore get stabbed, cries “J’accuse!” at the husband, an evil Gary Oldham, only for the cops to be all like, hey pipe down crazy lady because the dude’s wife is here and alive – enter Jennifer Jason Leigh as the woman claiming to be the real wife who is A OK sans stabby wounds.

Look, I’m not a detective. I never went to the police academy or anything but I’m pretty sure even the most inept cop, upon hearing a neighbor say “I saw my neighbor’s wife get stabbed” wouldn’t stop at “but hey the wife is here.” You might, you know (SPOILER) ask around to see if there are any past wives, girlfriends, other women in the man’s life that the neighbor might have confused for a wife and find out if any of them are missing?

But ok. Sometimes movies require us to suspend disbelief.

SPOILER ALERT – the neighbor’s mentally ill son did it and I don’t know, I thought Hollywood was done with demonizing the mentally ill? While the big slasher flicks of long ago would feature a killer who went nutsy cuckoo, I’ve noticed slasher flicks in recent years usually have the slasher motivated by greed, money or what have you – i.e they’re sane and they are purposely killing to enrich themselves.

And hey, look, sometimes there might be a position where a cuckoo bird (sorry, is that PC? I’m old so I don’t know) flies off the handle and though it is sad that they experienced emotional trauma that turned them into a wack-a-doodle, sometimes it is either the main character or the goofball and you can’t blame the main character for defending themselves now and then we can all sit around and think about what tragic actions happened to make the killer a killer and how to keep them happening in the future so people get the help they need and don’t become killers.

Wow that was a long run on sentence.

Ultimately, the film is about a woman who is a child psychologist who spends half the film touting her child psychology credentials and then ends with a child psychologist throwing a teenager to his death through a skylight.

I don’t know. I mean, look, I know I’m not the most PC person in the world but even I thought like, hey, either have her use her child psychology skills to talk the kid into dropping the weapon and turning himself in so he can get the help he needs, or just make the bad guy Oldham and that it was all about money or whatever.

And then the movie just has threads that are pulled and never sewn back together. Like for awhile it looks like Oldham is the killer because in the last city he lived in, his assistant fell to her death back at his old job and he tranferred to a job in a new city after that. Suspicious…maybe this guy has a habit of killing the women in his life. It is never answered if that was an accident or a killing.

Plus Oldham is arrested in the end and it is never fully explained why. One might assume he helped the son cover up the murder and that’s a terrible thing to do so ok, book him…but if he didn’t know the son did it…I don’t know. They could have expanded and explained what exactly happened there.

STATUS: Not shelf-worthy and I worry maybe COVID is really causing Hollywood to make a lot of stinkers. Plus, I worry about movie quality if movie theaters go bust because a lot of these streaming films are crap now.

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May 24 2021
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Movie Review – Army of the Dead (2021)

Zombies! Run!

BQB here with a review of Army of Darkness.

This is the first instance I can remember where a movie tricked me into thinking it was going to be good, only to end up bad.

The first 5-10 minutes are pretty great. We see Vegas become overrun by zombies. Set against Elvis’ classic gambler’s anthem, Viva Las Vegas, we see impersonators of various Vegas icons, from Elvis to Liberace, getting trapped in the brain biting melee.

We see slot machine junkies become dinner for the undead.

We even see boobs! Do you have any idea how long it has been since I’ve seen an honest to god boob in a motion picture release? I didn’t even think boobs were allowed on screen anymore but there they were. The zombie showgirls were set loose, free to feast on gray matter.

It all sets the scene for what should be an awesome Vegas themed horror flick. America’s pleasure city is overrun by the undead and a rich casino owner has hired a team of mercs led by Dave Bautista to infiltrate the damned city (it’s closed off and due for a nuke to protect the rest of the country from being overrun) and recover the 200 million in his vault.

Vegas heist film with zombies. Got it. Sounds cool.

Then the plot meanders, as Zack Snyder films so often do. Suddenly, its not so much about the heist. It’s about Dave Bautista’s character’s relationship with his estranged daughter. The daughter has a friend she was to save. Except, suddenly the movie isn’t about that. It’s about the Army of the Dead who have taken over the city. Apparently, there are super smart zombies who boss around the dumb zombies and they rule. Alright, so now its about defeating the leaders of this evil army.

Wait, its also about this character you get to know for five minutes whose name you won’t remember and this character you get to know for five minutes whose name you won’t…you know what? Forget it. Zack Snyder doesn’t believe in tying up loose threads, so if you see a trail of bread crumbs, don’t expect it to lead anywhere except to more bread crumbs…either that or it just stops and there is no more bread.

Comedienne Tig Notaro offers bits of needed comic relief as a fast talking helicopter pilot but other than that…this is a movie that could have been good and just…wasn’t. Maybe zombies have been done to death (pun intended) or maybe this movie could have settled on one plot. When you have zombies in vegas plus a heist you don’t really need that much more.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy but just remember you’re coming for a diversion, not to really experience anything. I worry about a world where movie theaters go out of business and streaming services like Netflix take over, because you might get an occasional good film, but you’ll also get a lot of schlocky filler. Bad writing. Non-existent character development. I mean, if you spend two and a half hours watching a movie, you should be able to remember one character’s name, right? I can’t remember any of them, who they are, what they want. The whole time it’s just oh that guy. Yeah that guy, and that gal and oh we saw them before, now they’re back. OK.

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Feb 28 2021
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Movie Review – I Care a Lot (2020)

Killer lawyers! Bilked old people!

BQB here with a review of Netflix’s latest movie, I Care A Lot.

Lately, I’ve had misgivings about Netflix. IMO, there’s a few good series and a lot of schlocky filler. They tend to do movies wrong, putting a lot of star power into flicks with scripts that sound like they were written in crayon by hobos on the back of an old piece of cardboard.

But this one was pretty good.

Rosamund Pike wowed us in Gone Girl, but has apparently been typecast as evil women now. Here, she stars as an evil lawyer with her own corrupt guardianship business. The court appoints her to run the lives of elderly people who have no one to look after them. To the casual observer, it appears she is doing a good deed by managing the assets of the elderly, using them to pay for their care in nursing homes and making tough decisions about their health care.

But she’s also profiting big time, seeing old folks as marks, even going so far as to have Jennifer Peterson, a robust old wealthy retired businesswoman who gets along just fine and has all of her wits about her, declared bonkers just so she can put the old woman’s moolah into her pocket.

Ahh, but while so many old folks have fallen victim to Marla’s scam before with no recourse available (she works with a corrupt nursing home to make sure her old charges are kept like prisoners, unable to complain to anyone about their ill treatment and/or that they are being robbed blind), Peterson’s son is a powerful gangster in the form of Peter Dinklage.

And thus, a war breaks out, with Pike and Dinklage trying to one up each other, going to extreme lengths to bring one another down, all in the name of ill gotten loot.

The movie is confusing in that it is hard to find a hero to root for and ultimately, there isn’t one. Pike’s character has a schtick about how people who play by the rules are suckers and getting rich means having to do bad things. That seems rather jaded and surely all rich people aren’t corrupt…right? Right? IDK. Perhaps it feels that way in the decade since Madoff and all the corporate scandals of the late 2000s that led to negative effects for the economy.

Personally, I found myself rooting for Dinklage. He does play a bad person who does bad for a living, but at the same time, it’s kind of glorious that after a lifetime spent bilking old folks out of their money, Marla messes with the wrong old person, someone with a loved one capable of messing back.

The film does give the viewer pause about the guardianship industry. On the one hand, surely not all guardians are corrupt…right? Right? IDK. Surely, many if not most are just good attorneys who manage the assets and affairs of people who can’t do it themselves. Even so, the system, any kind of system, sucks and be it the healthcare system, the legal system, the justice system, or what have you, it’s best to stay out of it for as long as you can because once you’re in it, you’re just a statistic that is passed around blindly, subjected to a vast sea of bureaucracy and rarely treated as an individual. Maybe it’s never too early to set up a plan and spell out legally who takes care of you when you can’t take care of yourself…and also eat your Wheaties because you’re the only one you can truly trust to take care of yourself.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy.

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Jan 30 2021
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Movies

Movie Review – The Vanished (2020)

Keep an eye on your kids at all times, 3.5 readers.

BQB here with the new Netflix film, “The Vanished.”

It all starts out happily enough. Mom and Dad (Anne Heche and Thomas Jane, both a little long in the tooth to have a young kid but I assume they were big gets for Netflix so just go with it) pull into an RV park with their young daughter, ready for a fun vacation of camping and fishing.

Alas, Dad takes his eyes off his kid for one minute to oggle the wife half of the young couple in the RV parked next door and daughter goes missing.

Twists and turns ensue, and as Mom and Dad go nuts, they make the situation so much worse.

Jason Patric stars as the noble yet troubled sheriff, looking chubbier and unrecognizable from his Speed 2 days. Not knocking the guy. Happens to all of us.

Definitely a lot of random plot points stuffed in a blender, but the film rests on fakeouts – i.e. it introduces to a host of weirdoes, makes us think each weirdo did it, lets the weirdo off the hook, then moves on to the next weirdo. Even weirder, people who are seemingly norms will be discovered as weirdos and it just goes to show that you should suspect everyone of being weirdoes, whether they show outward signs of weirdo-ness or not.

BTW I always confuse Thomas Jane with Christopher Lambert of Highlander fame and always expect him to start speaking in that Lambertian French accent. He never does because he is not Chris Lambert, but I think there should be a movie about how they were twin brothers separated at birth.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy.

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Nov 23 2020
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Black Mirror Review – San Junipero

Oooh, heaven is a place on earth, 3.5 readers.

SPOILER ALERT! This is an episode where you can’t dive too deep without giving away spoilers so if you haven’t seen it, you should join the rest of the web surfing public and not read this blog.

OK, now that the people who have seen it or don’t care about spoilers are present, let’s discuss.

The first half of this episode seems like a simple friendship story. Two young women, Yorky and Kelly, meet in a seaside tourist town, San Junipero, in the 1980s. Their friendship grows into love, i.e. the romantic variety but sours as Kelly avoids commitment.

SPOILER – by the second half, we realize San Junipero is a simulation. Everyone is either dead or dying in real life. The dying get a free, limited trial to see if an afterlife in the sim is what they want, while the dead have already signed on.

Ultimately, the love story becomes a will they or won’t they as they meet again and again during their free trials. They want to and yet their are issues in their real lives that hold them back.

The main takeaways. It would be great if some kind of simulation like this would be invented. Though as we see, it doesn’t take away from all of life’s problems, but it could give us that piece of mind we need to know that life doesn’t end at death and all our learning, struggling, working, growing…all that experience isn’t lost when we go.

Perhaps the most realistic thought is to enjoy youth while you have it and try your best to extend it. Eat your veggies. Exercise. Stay off the bad food and alcohol and cigarettes because when the body goes, it goes. The contrast between the real life oldsters and their simulated young bodies is something else, and it truly is sad what time does to the human body.

The good news? If you don’t dwell on all the complications, this episode has a rare happy ending for Black Mirror.

The bad news? If you’re like me, this episode will make you feel super old. I was a boy in the 1980s, a teenager in the 1990s, and a young adult in the 2000s and apparently, each time period are now considered as nostalgic places for the elderly and dying to visit in simulated space.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy.

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Nov 22 2020
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Black Mirror Review – Hated in the Nation

Couldn’t find a Netflix trailer so see this Ending Explained video instead.

Spoiler alert. If you haven’t seen it, look away. It’s ok, I have a total of 3.5 readers so I can lose up to 2.5 and still have a full reader. It’s just hard to talk about this episode without delving into spoilers.

Death has become a hashtag. Whenever the Internet folk post a name along with the hashtag #deathto they are voting for that person to be killed under mysterious circumstances, with the name that receives the most votes becoming the victim of the day.

Two days and two victims – a journalist who wrote a scathing, unkind op ed about a handicapped rights’ advocate and a rapper who mocked a young fan’s tribute dance to him, dashing the kid’s dreams on live television.

Detective Karin Parke (of Boardwalk Empire fame) has seen it all and is breaking in her young partner, Blue Coulson (Faye Marsay). Along the way, they team up with British government agent Shaun Li (Benedict Wong of Doctor Strange fame.)

At first, the episode is a slow burn and feels a bit like an episode of Law and Order set in England. As we learn the killer’s method, it picks up the pace.

Spoiler – robot bees! Yes, it’s the future and robot bees have replaced the usual kind, apparently due to a lack of hot and steamy bee on bee intercourse. An entire company has emerged to produce robot bees, setting them to work on the UK’s pollination needs, each robo-bee buzzing from one flower to the next, deliver the special yellow dust along the way.

SIDENOTE: Listen people. We need to save the bees to save the plants and save the world. If you know any bees, please encourage them to engage in a lot of indiscriminate bee on bee fornication to prevent a nightmare world where robo-bees take over.

Like Alfred Hitchcock’s birds, Black Mirror’s robot bees take on a life of their own, buzzing and stalking the prey programmed into their little bee minds by the killer. Many harrowing scenes of people narrowly escaping bee attacks ensue.

Overall, the robo bee concept is interesting and sadly, may be needed one day if all these male bees can’t build up their confidence and start hitting on all these lady bees. Wait, there’s just one Queen Bee right? All the male bees go to work and then return to the hive to service the Queen Bee’s needs? Yikes.

Also, it’s a meditation on when Internet anger goes too far. People are stupid. They do dumb things. They say dumb things. Much of this stupidity went unnoticed back in the day but now that the Internet preserves everything, people often engage in a social media pile on, spewing all kinds of vitriol toward someone who they believe has crossed a line. Sadly, this leaves no room for a person to apologize and seek redemption.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy, mostly because of the bees. I do remember enjoying Boardwalk Empire back in the day and thought it was cool to see Nucky’s GF in the present day.

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Nov 22 2020
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Black Mirror Review – Bandersnatch

I’m not sure why I wasn’t impressed with this, other than because I did Netflix’s Interactive Kimmy Schmidt episode long before trying this one. Had I tried this first I might have been impressed with the overall ambition of this project. This is Netflix’s first “choose your own adventure style” film after all.

The year is 1984 and young computer programmer Stefan has snagged his dream gig, developing a video game based on the novel “Bandersnatch” by an author who went insane and murdered his wife. OK, so the developing the video game is the good part of that gig and the other part, obviously not so much.

With your controller in hand, you guide Stefan through a series of choices, ultimately sending him down a rabbit hole of conspiracy fact and fiction, questioning whether concepts like time and reality even exist as the young lad gets driven further and further into madness.

The story relies on some meta snark in that like a choose your own adventure novel, one where you can just flip back to the beginning if you screw up, it too can flip you back, sometimes to the last choice, sometimes to the start and the underlying answer as to how Stefan can wake up and get a do over is that time is not as real a concept as we think it is.

If you’re looking for overall answers to the plot’s questions, you’ll be disappointed, unless you want to do it all over and over again and maybe there’s a good ending. I never found one. I know Black Mirror is dark so an unhappy ending is to be expected but I thought I’d get an ending that at least tries to explain how all this nonsense is possible. You get various answers at various times and none seem to jive with each other.

So…it’s ok. Maybe something to do when you aren’t busy and if it went over my head, then so be it. I came, I saw, I tried and I felt it was a lot of build up that just doesn’t go anywhere no matter how hard you try unless there’s a special combo of moves I missed.

SIDENOTE: The option where you can choose to explain to Stefan that you are a person from the future controlling his moves through Netflix is funny, particularly when you choose the option to try to explain to a 1980’s person what Netflix is.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy (moderately.)

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Nov 21 2020
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Black Mirror Review – Black Museum

BQB here with another review of this creepy tech anthology series.

Black Museum contains three vignettes, each warning of the dangers of futuristic medical technology. IMO, each one could have been a stand alone episode but I can see why they boxed them together.

Rolo Haynes (Douglas Hodge) was once a cutting edge (perhaps too cutting) inventor of medical technology. Forced out of the biz for going too far, he now owns a roadside “Black Museum” which features artifacts used in all sorts of high profile crimes. Fans of the episode will note Easter eggs i.e. items used by baddies in previous Black Mirror episodes.

Ironically, some of Rolo’s inventions are now on display, for his tech has been declared illegal, though he was able to skirt any liability in the nick of time.

Nish (Letitia Wright of Black Panther fame) stops to charge her car after a long drive one day, only to visit the museum as a distraction.

Rolo, having not seen a customer in some time, is happy to give her the grand tour and share his stories, which include a) an implant that a doctor used to feel the pain of his patients. At first, he becomes adept at diagnosing and curing his charges but over time, he develops a crazed addiction to pain (he feels it but does not suffer the physical effects) that can’t be satiated.

Story B is about a couple who live a happy life until the wife is struck by a car and left in a coma. Rolo offers up another invention, this one allowing wife’s brain to be downloaded into husband’s brain. At first, when husband is able to communicate with wife again, the reunion brings great joy. However, over time, the wife inside husband’s head becomes an unrelenting backseat driver, nag nag nagging all the time.

Story C is about a death row inmate who signed a deal with Rolo for his digital persona to be brought to life in his museum as a hologram, giving tourists the “joy” of flipping a switch that zaps said convict over and over again.

Is there any correlation to these stories? You have to watch to find out. Without giving too much away, I will say story B does have a bit of a biting commentary about how we tend to throw away loved ones once they get too be too much work.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy.

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Nov 20 2020
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Black Mirror Review – Crocodile

Memories, like the corners of my mind…is that how the song goes? Paging Streisand.

BQB here with yet another Black Mirror review.

Many years ago, Mia’s then boyfriend Rob did a horrible thing. Rather than go to the police, she assisted him in covering it up, making her an accomplice.

The years pass and Mia marries another man, has a child, a nice house and a great career, having managed to push the memories of that dark day to the corners of her mind. Alas, it all comes back when a guilt ridden Rob shows up at her door, telling Mia he won’t be able to live with himself unless he pens an anonymous confession.

And so, the vicious cycle of cover ups upon cover ups ensues as Mia does something terrible to cover up the cover up. As she is doing so, she witnesses a self-driving pizza truck hit a pedestrian (SIDENOTE: self driving pizza trucks sound like a good idea but only if a) they can be made to not hit people and b) if we can find alternate employment routes for the pizza delivery man and woman lobby)

Insurance investigator Shazia thinks the victim (he lives) of the pizza truck’s case is pretty cut and dry, but goes about her investigation with the assistance of a device that can record memories. She interviews various witnesses, recording the images they have in their minds of the accident, eventually realizing that Mia, according to witness recollection, had the best view of the incident.

Thus opens the proverbial can of worms for Mia. If she declines Shazia’s request to search her memories of the accident, the police will get involved. But if she helps, will she be able to bury her memories of evil doing and so that the machine will pick up only the memories of the pizza truck accident?

Overall, an interesting meditation on the power of memory, what we remember and what we forget and how there can be power in forgetting. When it comes to memory, can we ever be sure they are real?

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