…and we thought ARMAGEDDON was devoid of science. MOONFALL is Roland Emmerich’s latest disaster– I mean, disaster movie. The Moon de-orbits toward Earth, and only a conspiracy theorist can save the day! Thanks for giving conspiracy asshats a platform, Roland! John Bradley is the conspiracy nut, KC, whose wildest theories about the Moon being a megastructure built by aliens are … Read More
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL
Casper The Frenzied Ghost. The one with the Burj Khalifa. By this fourth MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE film, all the adventures are jumbled together in our heads; the only way to tell them apart is by each film’s stunts. 1996’s MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE had the fish tank restaurant, the suspension gag and the helicopter-bullet-train climax; II had free-climbing, bike stunts and the knife-to-the-eye … Read More
MY OCTOPUS TEACHER
An Octopus’s Garden. In this time of world paranoia and pissant politics, anti-social media and overwhelming junk art, you can do nothing better than to extricate yourself from humanity and immerse your overextended senses in nature’s harmony and fluid balance. Put something off, be irresponsible, and sink into the wondrous world of MY OCTOPUS TEACHER, a documentary about a man … Read More
MARY POPPINS RETURNS
Return of The VVitch!! MARY POPPINS RETURNS is the sequel to 1964’s MARY POPPINS, where Julie Andrews played a witch who fell from the sky to nanny a British family during their hardship. In this new story, produced 54 years after the original (yet is set about 25 years after the original’s events), Emily Blunt plays the same Poppins witch, … Read More
MEMO FROM PURGATORY | THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR | S3 E10
Insipid take on an Ellison classic. MEMO FROM PURGATORY is a slice-of-life tale (from the 1961 Harlan Ellison novel Memos From Purgatory) about running with a savage Brooklyn street gang. Memos was written after Ellison actually infiltrated a gang called The Barons when he was 19 – for the research! – adopting the alias Phil Beldone, surviving their initiation, taking … Read More
THE MIDNIGHT SKY
Tragedy Insufferably Painted as Redemption. THE MIDNIGHT SKY is indecisive on whether to be a human drama set in space, or a science fiction film loaded with human drama. It ends up sacrificing both genres to George Clooney’s beard. A worldwide catastrophe has made the Earth’s surface uninhabitable – something to do with republiKKKans blocking climate change legislation, I’m guessing … Read More
MIDSOMMAR 2019
Ain’t no cure for the Sommartime Blues. MIDSOMMAR will break you. Five college kids travel to Sweden for a midsummer festival. Oops! It’s a pagan cult. A good way to get yourself killed. Or to break up with your boyfriend. – – – – S P O I L E R S – – – – – You have been … Read More
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
Far East becomes Old West. John Sturges remakes Akira Kurosawa’s SEVEN SAMURAI as a western, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. Katanas become guns, samurai become gunslingers, Far East becomes Old West. A small Mexican farming village, tired of being ransacked annually by a marauder and his henchmen, hire seven gunslingers to repel them. Soon enough, the villagers realize meeting violence with violence … Read More
MALICIOUS 2018
Para-psychosis, para-demons and para-actors. After a miscarriage, a woman and her husband have visions of that dead baby daughter, who appears to them at various ages, with malicious intent. MALICIOUS follows young couple Adam (blank-faced Josh Stewart) and heavily-pregnant Lisa (glorious Bojana Novakovic) as they move into their new home in the country (capacious and multi-storied, with a lack of … Read More
MALEVOLENT 2018
The ghosts ain’t the things to be afraid of… MALEVOLENT has one heart-wrenching scene that puts it above most other ghost-hunter thrillers: a young woman who can see ghosts of the dead has just escaped from a torture chamber, where she was locked with her brother. As they escape, they are separated. As she stumbles down the road, away from … Read More
THE MONSTER 2016
Tropes on a Forest Road. Mother and daughter on road trip. Breakdown on deserted road. Monster attack. That’s about it in THE MONSTER, an average thriller that ambitiously tries to be more than the B-movie it is. Zoe Kazan is a white trash alcoholic single mom, and Ella Ballentine is disenchanted teen daughter Lizzy. As if sensing the minimal substance … Read More
THE MULE 2018
Riches and Redemption on the Cocaine Superhighway. Family’s the most important thing. Don’t do what I did. I put work in front of family. I thought it was more important to be somebody out there, than the failure I was in my own home. I was a terrible father, a terrible husband. I blew my chance. I didn’t deserve forgiveness. … Read More
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT
People Shooting Other People from Offscreen. (ALTERNATE TITLE: Adventures Of The World’s Most Expensive Stuntman.) Tom Cruise skydives. Tom Cruise fights in a toilet. Tom Cruise rides a motorbike through Paris. Tom Cruise jumps across rooftops. Tom Cruise climbs a rope to a flying helicopter. Tom Cruise flies a helicopter while fighting. Tom Cruise dangles from a cliff… Y’know, I … Read More
MONEY FROM HOME
Martin and Lewis on the money! Honey-Talk Nelson (Dean Martin) is in deep to the mob. To make good on his debt, he is ordered to “fix” a horserace so that the favorite loses. He enlists the aid of his innocent veterinarian cousin Virgil (Jerry Lewis) to dope the favorite, but then falls for the horse’s owner, whilst Virgil falls … Read More
MY FRIEND IRMA GOES WEST
B-characters Bedazzle in B-movie. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis once again make a B-movie watchable. But only just. In MY FRIEND IRMA GOES WEST, the gang from the first IRMA aim for Hollywood, end up in Las Vegas, and are still barely watchable. Honestly, I don’t know why Paramount Studios insisted on a sequel to the execrable MY FRIEND IRMA … Read More
MY FRIEND IRMA
Big things have small beginnings… “and introducing Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis” Thus it begins; with an innocuous “and introducing” credit in MY FRIEND IRMA – the comet-across-the-skies film career of the comedy team known as Martin & Lewis. Dean Martin (born 1917; 32 years old at the time) and Jerry Lewis (born 1926; a strapping 23 years old, nine … Read More
MEET THE BLACKS
Purge-atory. If you haven’t seen the murderous 2013 thriller THE PURGE, then the premise of the screwball comedy MEET THE BLACKS will be even less funny than it already is. A nuveau-riche African-American family from the mean streets of Chicago moves into a snotty white neighborhood in Beverly Hills, just as the annual Purge takes place. THE PURGE – the … Read More
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE
Cruisin’ for a Contusion. Tom Cruise is espionage agent Ethan Hunt, in the big screen reboot of the 1966 television series, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, who has to go rogue against his own agency to weed out a mole. But the agency thinks it’s him! (I don’t blame them – with that insufferable smirk and that mole-ish snout of his.) Nonetheless, man-toy … Read More
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III
The Running Spy. Running. If you like running, you’ll love MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III. Because that’s all that Tom Cruise seems to be doing in it. Besides running, Cruise is also being IMF espionage agent Ethan Hunt. (When he tells someone that IMF stands for “Impossible Missions Force,” we realize how ridiculous it sounds, and why everybody’s trying to kill him). … Read More
MALEFICENT
Malevolent CGI and Magnificent Stupidity. MALEFICENT is the story of Sleeping Beauty. Told from the point of view of the evil fairy. And you know what? She’s not evil. First of all, I think this movie is trying to hurt our corneas. Does the CGI have to cover every single color in the visible light and ultraviolent spectrum so loudly? … Read More